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Creating High Performing Service Agents, with Alan Stein Jr.

Episode 74

Alan Stein Jr. is a coach, speaker, and author with an expertise in improving organizational performance, cohesion, and accountability. He spent more than 15 years working with highest-performing basketball players on the planet; including NBA superstar, Kevin Durant. Alan now travels the world teaching organizations how to utilize the same strategies in business that elite athletes use to perform at a world-class level. Alan has a brand-new book called Raise Your Game: High-Performance Secrets from the Best of the Best.

In this episode, Alan discusses the work he did with high-performing basketball players and how that’s translated to the work he does with worldwide organizations, how an experience with Kobe Bryant taught him about the importance of mastering basic skills no matter what industry you’re in, why building relationships are the foundation of successful athletes and businesses, the main basic skill that will help you improve any relationship, how to determine your identity as a business, the benefits of collectively creating standards as a group instead of passing down rules from the top of the organization, and more! Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

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Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  Today I have with me Alan Stein, Jr., who is a coach, speaker, and author with an expertise in improving organizational performance, cohesion and accountability.  He spent 15 plus years working with the highest performing basketball players on the planet, including NBA superstar, Kevin Durant, which I’m excited to hear about in a little bit.

He now travels the world teaching organizations how to utilize the same strategies in business that elite athletes use to perform at a world class level. Alan has a brand new book out called Raise Your Game: High-Performance Secrets from theBest of the Best.

 

Andrea: So good to have you on the podcast with me today, Alan.

Alan Stein Jr.:  Hey, I’m equally thrilled.  This is going to be fun.

Andrea: Alright, so now coming from a family who loves basketball, I have to ask you, what kind of work did you do with these highest performing basketball players in the world?

Alan Stein Jr.:  I was actually a performance coach, which most people would probably know as strength and conditioning coach.  So I’ve focused on helping players improve their athleticism, their mind-body connection, their movement efficiency; and help them bulletproof their bodies so they’d be resilient to injury.

And I did that mostly at the youth and high school level, but was able to work with some pretty good players that ended up being really, really excellent players as they got older.  So I really enjoyed working with, working alongside and serving the basketball community for almost two decades.

Andrea: Okay.  So what led you to write this particular book about Raising your Game and high performance strategies?   What kind of brought you to this point?

Alan Stein Jr.:  Sure.  Well, about two years ago I decided that I was ready to take everything that I was learning through the world’s best players and coaches of the things they were teaching me on leadership and team cohesion and accountability and winning mindsets and creating championship level culture.  And to take all of that, pivot and apply that to the business world and show folks in business how to utilize those same strategies and mindsets.

When I made that decision to kind of change my audience, I quickly came up with a professional bucket list item of writing a book and I did it for a couple of reasons.  One, I’ve always felt that I’ve had a book inside of me.  I’ve been a voracious reader for my entire adult life and I know I’ve read so many books, countless books that have had a really profound impact on me, in my life and in my perspective.  So the thought that I might be able to pen something that could offer that to someone else, you know, was something I was interested in pursuing.

But equally important as I entered the world of being a professional speaker in the business world, writing the book actually forced me to curate all of my content and look back over 20 years and really put pen to paper and write down all of the lessons I’d learned, you know, all of the stories that I’d seen and I’d heard, you know, action steps, everything and really organize that material.  And that’s what, you know, writing the book did for me.

Funny enough, I’m very proud of the book.  I’m excited to get it in the hands of some readers.  But even if I decided not to publish the book, the process of writing, it was still worth every ounce of effort because it really forced me to get organized and get clear on my message, which I use now as a professional speaker.

Andrea: Oh yeah, I can completely understand that.  So what would you say the core of your message really is?

Alan Stein Jr.:  Well, the core of my message whether I’m speaking or in the book is that the basics work, they always have and they always will.  And if you want to be elite in any area of your life, you have to commit to doing the basics and in understanding that just because something is basic, it doesn’t mean that it’s easy.  A lot of people think those are synonyms and they’re not.

You know, the principles in this book are incredibly basic.  However, implementing them with consistency in everything you do in your life is definitely not easy.  It’s not easy for me.  It’s not easy for you and it’s not easy for any of your listeners because if it was easy, we’d all already be doing that stuff.  So it’s making sure that people understand that there’s a difference between basic and easy.

And you know, the high performing basketball players that I’ve been around, they never get bored with the basics.  You know, they still take 10 to 15 to 20 minutes every single day to work on basic footwork and basic offensive moves and things that middle school age players do routinely because they know that the basics are the foundation and their fundamentals are the foundation of everything else that they do.

Andrea: You know, I know you tell this story about Kobe Bryant.  Could you share that just real quickly with us because I think it really applies to what you’re talking about right now?

Alan Stein Jr.:  Absolutely.  Well, it’s hard to believe it’s already been a decade.  But back in 2007, Nike flew me out to Los Angeles to be the performance coach for the first ever Kobe Bryant Skills Academy.  Nike brought in the top high school and college players from around the country for an intense 3-day mini camp with the best player in the world.

And I know you and your family follows basketball but if any of your listeners don’t, let me just tell you that in 2007, Kobe was the best player in the game. I mean, Michael Jordan knew everybody’s heard of.  He’d already retired a couple of times at that point.  And Lebron James was great, let’s not get it twisted, but he was still climbing that mountain.  I mean, Kobe was the best player.  And you know, I, like your family, have lived in a basketball bubble my entire life, so I had heard this urban legend of how insanely intense Kobe’s individual workouts were.

Well, now that I was on camp staff, you know, I figured this was my chance and this was my shot.  So at my earliest opportunity, I walked right up to Kobe and asked if I could watch one of his workouts.  And he was incredibly gracious and kind and said, “Sure man, no problem.  I’m going tomorrow at 4:00,” and I quickly got confused because the nerd that I am, I was studying the camp schedule and it said that the first workout with the kids was the next day at 3:30, and he noticed the confused look on my face and quickly clarified that with a wink and said, “Yeah, that’s 4:00 a.m.”

Andrea: That’s awesome!

Alan Stein Jr.:  Well, Andrea, I know as you can appreciate and so can your listeners, yeah.  There’s not really an excuse on why you can’t be somewhere at 4:00 in the morning, at least not an excuse that somebody like Kobe Bryant is going to accept.  So I basically committed myself to being there.  And I just figured, if I’m going to be there anyway, you know, I might as well try and impress Kobe.  I might as well leave my mark and show him how serious of a trainer I was.

So I made the plan to beat him to the gym.  So I set my alarm for 3:00 a.m.  When the alarm goes off, I jumped up, I quickly get myself together and I hopped in the cab.  Remember, this is 2007.  This is pre Uber and ore Lifts.  So I got in an old fashioned yellow taxi and I get out of the taxi, it was 3:30 in the morning.

Of course, it was pitch black outside, and yet from the parking lot I can see that the gym light is already on, and I can even hear a ball bouncing and sneakers squeaking.  I walked in the side door; Kobe was already in a full sweat.  He was going through an intense warm-up with his trainer before his scheduled workout started at 4:00.

Now, out of professional courtesy and because I was thankful to be there, I didn’t say anything to him and I didn’t say anything to his trainer, I just sat down to watch.  And for the first 45 minutes I was really surprised.  For the first 45 minutes I watched the best player in the world do the most basic footwork and offensive moves.  He was doing pivoting drills that I had done with middle school age players.

Now this is Kobe Bryant, so he was doing everything with an unparalleled level of focus and intensity and everything with surgical precision, but the stuff he was doing was very, very basic.  The whole workout lasted a couple of hours.  And again, when it was over, I didn’t say anything to him.  I didn’t say anything to his trainer, I quietly left. But my curiosity as a young coach got the best of me because later that day I had to know.

So I went up to him again and said politely, “Kobe, I don’t understand you’re the best player in the world, you know, why are you doing such basic drills?”  And that was again when he was incredibly gracious but said very seriously, “Why do you think I’m the best player in the world, because I never get bored with the basics.”  And that was a pivotal and for me a life-changing lesson and that was what I had said earlier, that just because something’s basic, it doesn’t mean that it’s easy.

You know, here you are, you’re talking about a multi-time all star, a champion, a multimillionaire many times over.  Somebody in the conversation is one of the greatest players ever.  And in NBA off season, he was still getting up incredibly early to go in and continue to master the basics.  And I think there’s an important lesson that if somebody that’s in the upper 10th of one percent and his craft can commit to the basics then all of us should be doing the same thing.

You know, in the world of sports, I actually find it a little bit comical, you know at the time of this recording, we’re in primetime NFL season and inevitably when an NFL team loses two or three games in a row at one of the post game press conferences, the coach will say something to the effect of, you know, “On Monday at practice we’re gonna get back to the basics.”

And I’m certainly not implying that I know anything more than an NFL head coach.  But I always laugh because I’m thinking, why did you ever leave them in the first place?  If your answer to solving your problem is to get back to the basics then, hey, don’t ever leave the basics.  Make them a foundational principle that you live by every day and that’s something in my own life, in my own business, you know, I certainly try to adhere too is never getting bored with the basics.

Andrea: Alan, why do you think that people do get bored, or why do they stray away from the basics?

Alan Stein Jr.:One, the basics are usually mundane and they’re routine and they’re monotonous and they’re boring.  But you have to fall in love with that process if you want to get the outcome that you desire.  The other thing and, you know, I’m not one of those guys that likes to blame technology.  I think technology can be an amazing tool for us, but I do think technology in general with social media and everything going on online, it makes it much easier for us to be distracted.

We get distracted by the things that are hot, flashy, sexy and new.  And we skip over the things that are tried and true that we know work and all of us, at some point, fall victim to that.  But I think if you can have the discipline to figure out whatever it is that you’re trying to improve, whether you’re trying to personally improve your level of fitness, you’re trying to grow your business, or you’re trying to lead others more effectively, whatever it is you’re trying to improve, actually look at what are the basics of that.  What are the foundational principles that are needed to improve this and then make sure that you’re working on those every day.

And like I said earlier, it doesn’t mean that Kobe has to be doing basic footwork for seven hours a day, he just needs to do it for 10, 15, 20 minutes a day, but it’s the consistency of doing it every single day that adds up over time.

Andrea: Do you feel like there’s a way to kind of generalize the basics?  So, you know somebody who’s in one area of business versus somebody who’s in another area of business.  You know, somebody who’s in customer service on the front lines versus an executive who is trying to determine the strategy of the customer service for example, do you see that there are similarities in the basics of what they need to focus on?  Are there a lot differences?  How do you kind of talk to that?

Alan Stein Jr.:  More often than not, there’ll be similarities and really in any area of business and even in sport, if you look at coaches and the teams, you know, relationships are the foundation of everything that we’re trying to build.  I mean, if you look at a business, for example, there’s two crucial relationships that determine how successful your business will be and how sustainable those results will be.

One relationship is with the folks that you work with, those of your colleagues and your coworkers.  You know all the way from the top to the bottom of the org chart, everybody that’s within the organization you’d want to consider a teammate.  And your relationship with each of the people in that group is vital to your success.  Then of course, the other relationship is with your customers or your clients, the people that you serve.  And clearly the more quality your relationship with those that you serve and those that you work with, the better your culture and the better your business will be. And I found that one of the foundational basics of improving any relationship is the ability to listen, to actively listen.

If you want to improve any relationship in your life immediately, whether you’re a parent and you want to improve the relationship with your children or your spouse or you’re in business and you want to improve your relationship with your customers and clients or coworkers and colleagues, all you have to do is improve your ability to actively listen.

Now, of course I say that in a very matter of fact tone, because improving the skill of listening is very basic, but doing so is definitely not easy.  It takes a ton of practice, but practicing the skill of active listening is one of the best investments you can make.  You know, if you want to be a great leader, actively listen.  If you want to be great at customer service, the best tool, the number one tool you have in customer service is the ability to listen and then ask insightful questions as a followup.

You know, most of the times, especially in customer service, people just want to be heard.  You know, if you allow them to vent their frustrations or whatever was bothering them or the issue they’re having, that in and of itself if you listen with an empathetic ear, usually you’ll start to inch towards a resolution.  And then if you can ask insightful questions and then you’re able to come up with a resolution by working with them instead of talking at them, then you’ve really created something special.  So active listening is something that all of us need to consider as one of the basics for whatever it is that we’re trying to do.

Andrea: Do you have an idea of a drill per se or a way to practice that particular basic of listening?

Alan Stein Jr.:  I do.  And it’s one that’s served me well over the years, because in full transparency many years ago I was a less than mediocre active listener and once that was brought to my attention…

Andrea: Less than mediocre is a pretty good description.

Alan Stein Jr.:Yeah.

Andrea: Not for you but just an interesting description.

Alan Stein Jr.:  Yeah, I was going to say crappy, but I just decided to go with less than mediocre.  And once that was brought to my attention then I realized there was something that I really needed to work on because the relationships in my life, you know, as a father, as a business owner, as a professional speaker, I mean these relationships are really important to me.  And once I knew that improving my ability to listen would actually nourish those relationships then it was something I took a lot of pride in improving.

And what I do and still continue to do, although now, it’s so much more natural.  In the beginning it was somewhat robotic enforced, which I think happens a lot when we’re trying to master a new skill, and it’s called a list back.  And when you list back, you when you wait for an appropriate break in the conversation because clearly if you interrupt someone while they’re talking then you’re not active listening.

When there’s an appropriate break, you list back in their words the exact way they said it what they just said.  And you do that for a couple of reasons.  One, to make sure that you have the correct information, to make sure that you heard them correctly.  It’s common for any of us in any conversation to get distracted or space out for 20 to 30 seconds.  Well, if the speaker shared something incredibly important in those 20 to 30 seconds, you missed it.  So a list back will help make sure that it’s more accurate.  But a list back also shows the person that you were actively listening and that unconsciously tells them that you care about them, that you value what they had to say, that they’re important to you.

So a perfect example would be something to the effect of, “Andrea, I want to make sure I heard you correctly; you said A B C and D, is that right?”  And then that’s your chance to either correct me and say, “No, Alan, I must have misspoke because I said A, B, C, and E.”  So either way I’m going to make sure I have the correct information or you’re going to say “Yes, Alan, that’s exactly what I said.”  And unconsciously you’re going to smile internally because you’re going to think, “Man, Alan really cares about me.  He’s listening to what I have to say.  He values what I have to say and he’s treating me as if I’m important.”  And that’s the glue that binds any relationship.  So by organically doing these list backs, you really improve your ability to actively listen.

Andrea: That’s great tip.  Okay, so let’s go in a little bit different direction right now.  One of the things that you say is that identity drives standards.  Standards need accountability.  Accountability creates culture and culture produces long term sustainable results.  I’d love to hear about how you get from identity to sustainable results, but let’s start with this.  What is identity?

Alan Stein Jr.:  Identity – and we could do this personally or we could do it organizationally, so let’s tackle it from a team standpoint.  Let’s tackle it from the business perspective.

Andrea: That’d be great.

Alan Stein Jr.:  It’s a series of these questions and there’s no right or wrong to these questions and this certainly isn’t a completely comprehensive list.  But ultimately you want to figure out why you’re is in existence as a business, like what do we do?  What problem do we solve?  Who do we solve it for?  Why does everyone on our team, why are they going to make personal sacrifices to pour into something bigger than themselves?  What’s their reason for doing that?  What is our purpose and vision as a business?  And once you can kind of collectively answer that, that is your identity.  This is who we are.  This is the problem we solve.  This is the target audience that we solve it for.  This is why we’re in business.  This is how we’re going to turn a profit, and that is your identity.

And it’s incredibly important to get clarity on that and to make sure that everyone in the organization from the founder and CEO all the way down to whoever would be considered the lowest on the org chart understands and can buy in and believe in to that identity.  And what I found is interesting, I mean if you have a, let’s say, you have a small business now that has 30 folks on the team and you ask every one of them those questions and get them to write it down, I guarantee you’ll see some differences.

You’ll see some people that believe your business is in existence for different reasons than other people do.  And it’s not about whether someone’s right or wrong or someone’s good or bad, but in order for a team to be successful, everybody’s got to be swimming in the same direction.  So if we have three people that think the business exists because of this and another five think it’s because of this, and you know, I’m the CEO and founder and I know it’s for this, that’s why I founded the company, we need everybody on the same page.  So it’s okay for people to have different perspectives and different advantage points and use different terminology, but everybody needs to know to their core what is the identity of this business.

Andrea: Have you found that when you talk to owners, for example, or founders, that if they have a different kind of identity that they’re seeing or mission or even if they’ve communicated it if it’s different than what the rest of the company or somebody else in the company is seeing, is there a way to kind of reconcile that?  Have you found a really good way to collaboratively come to consensus on that?

Alan Stein Jr.:  Yeah, your number one tool would be going back to actively listen because when you actively listen, you’re looking at life through an empathetic and humble lens that you’re willing to say, “You know, I may have started this company with this mission and this vision and this purpose in mind, but I’m still open to hearing the perspectives of everybody else.”  And this is where it’s really important to get the perspective of people in different departments.

You know, if you’re in the marketing department, you need to break down the barriers to talk to the folks in the customer service department or the folks in the sales department or the folks, you know, in R&D, like the more we can get everyone on the same page, the better.  And you need to be open to hearing their feedback, but it doesn’t mean that you have to go with it.

I mean, as a leader, you have to be decisive.  And if you feel adamantly that the identity of the business is this and yet everybody else feels that something else then your job as a leader is to get rid of the ambiguity and speak with great clarity on why you feel so strongly that this is what it is and get everybody on board and make sure that it’s explained with great clarity.  You know, lots of times that’s where the issue is, it’s the communication.  Like I know every morning when I wake up that I created this business for this.  But if I’m not consistently with great repetition, communicating that to everybody else then it’s going to get foggy.

So again, we don’t want to think in terms of right or wrong or good or bad.  We want to think in terms of let’s all agree on what the North Star is and then let’s get everybody moving in alignment and harmony towards that North Star.  And I’m a big believer that open, effective communication can resolve almost every problem within an organization

Andrea: And yet, it’s so common that we’re afraid of that open and honest communication.  Why do you think that is?

Alan Stein Jr.:  Well, again, it goes back to the difference between basic and easy.  I mean, you and I being open and honest and transparent and empathetic with each other is very, very basic.  But that’s not easy to do because we’re human beings we’re rot with emotions and tempers and all sorts of things.  You know, one, I think it comes down to terminology.  Most people have a negative connotation of the word confrontation that if I know that I have to confront you about something, that that’s going to be uncomfortable for me and it’s going to be uncomfortable for you.  And most human beings do everything they can to run from and resist discomfort.

Well, if we can kind of flip the switch on and say, well, confrontation is really nothing more than meeting the truth head on.  It’s two people that care enough about each other to speak openly and transparently with each other so that they can come to some type of resolution. And that takes a level of respect.  It takes professional courtesy and I think just being able to flip that where I say, “Hey, you know, I need to confront Andrea about something.”  This has nothing to do with whether or not I like her or not.  This has to do with there’s a certain behavior that I believe needs to change in our organization and we need to confront it head on and we need to discuss it.”  And we can do that in a very respectable and professional way.

So no one needs to raise their voice, no one needs to use foul language, we just simply need to be able to speak from the heart and talk about this issue and let’s both be committed regardless of which side of the fence we’re on, let’s both be committed to resolving this.  And if groups would be much more open to that, you’d see a lot of these problems go away. And really this is a way of describing accountability and I know we’re not at that level yet because we haven’t even talked about standards.  But accountability, we have to realize that it’s something that you do for someone, it’s not something you do to them.  That when you get everyone in the organization to realize when someone holds them accountable, that’s a good thing because it means that person cares then we’re in business.

Because usually people look at that the other way, they think if Andrea is holding me accountable, why is she always busting my chops?  Why is she always nitpicking?  Why does she care if I’m three minutes late?  Why does she care if I send out an email that’s grammatically incorrect?  Why don’t she just leave me alone and stay in her lane instead of saying, “Man, thank you Andrea.  You’re right, that email, I should have spelled check it before I send it out.  That was not a great representation of us or our business.  I appreciate you caring enough to call me on that.”

Andrea: Alright.  So you said that there was something in between identity and accountability and that standards, so let’s go back there and explain that briefly.

Alan Stein Jr.: Sure.  The old school level of leadership and management is top down, which means I’m the founder, I’m the CEO, I’m the top of the org chart; I’m going to come up with a list of rules and everybody below me is going to follow them and if they don’t, they will leave.  Instead of rules being passed from the top down, I like the idea of a group collectively creating standards and standards are basically the code which the organization will live by in order to uphold the identity that we already talked about.

So we would collectively discuss what standards do we need to live by every single day in order to make our identity come true.  And if you have a small business, you have 15, 20 people, you can literally put everybody in the same room and discuss and come up with your standards.  If you have a bigger organization, you have a thousand people that’s probably not doable. But that’s when you can get representation from each of the departments. Let me get someone from sales, someone from customer service, someone from marketing, someone from R&D and make sure that each group is represented and put those people in a room and say, “Okay, what are the standards that we need to live up to to make our identity happen?”

And I use being prompt just as an example because it’s one that people can easily visualize.  Let’s say that in this meeting, Andrea, you raise your hand and say, “Hey, I think it’s really important that everybody is on time for all of our company functions, meetings and events because being on time shows that you respect the other person.  So I think being on time should be one of our standards.”  And we all look around the room and, you know, “Does anyone think it’s not important to be on time?”  Nope, nobody says anything.  “Okay then being on time is one of our standards.”

And now, we have a standard that being prompt is important to us and we’ve all agreed that we’re going to live up to these standards, which means when we hold a company function or we have a Monday morning meeting and you show up 3 minutes late, it is crystal clear, it is in black and white that you just violated one of our standards.  You just violated one of the standards necessary for us to live out our identity. So you should actually expect now that someone is going to hold you accountable for that.

And again, once we’ve created this level of accountability where it’s not just vertical but it’s horizontal and everyone knows that if they violate any of the standards that we’ve all agreed to, that someone’s going to hold them accountable now you’ve got the makings of a winning culture.

Andrea: And then that culture then can produce those long term sustainable results that you’re talking about, right?

Alan Stein Jr.:  Absolutely, and culture is really how well your organization holds each other accountable to the standards that you created to uphold your identity.  That’s where the success flow comes together.  You know, people sometimes think culture is a variety of different things.  It’s kind of the window dressing.  You know, we have casual jeans Friday, and that’s part of our culture.  We put a ping pong table in the break room, that’s part of our culture.  We want to be young and hip.  That’s not culture.  Those are some nice accouterments that you can add if that’s what your people want.

Your culture is how well everybody holds each other accountable to the standards that you agreed upon to uphold your identity.  And what epitomizes your culture is how the organization behaves when the CEO or I say the head coach is not there.  How does the team behave when the manager is not there or when one of the directors or supervisors is not there?  If you have a winning culture, it’s business as usual.  Everybody’s in their role.  They’re fulfilling their role.  They’re starring in their role, you know there’s active communication and everybody’s holding each other accountable and everything’s fine.

If you have a dysfunctional culture, that’s when the whole house crumbles if the person in charge is not there, so that’s really what will determine your sustainable long term results is how well you’re able to thrive in this culture where you don’t have to have the head honcho there looking over everybody’s shoulder.  Everyone’s going to do what’s right all the time because that’s the way the company is built.

Andrea: Yeah, I love this, I guess you call it the success flow.  I really love that.  I love how it flows.  I love that it starts with identity because I’m absolutely in agreement with you on that.  You know, I wish that we had more time to dig even more into that book.  There’s so much to look at, but hopefully the listener will go ahead and purchase that book and possibly even have you come speak at their organization.  So tell us how can they get a hold of you or how can they find your book?

Alan Stein Jr.:  Oh, I appreciate that very much and I would love that as well.  If someone’s interested in the book, you can go to raiseyourgamebook.com.  And if they’re interested in my speaking or anything else I have going on or social media, I’m at Alan Stein, Jr.on Instagram and in Linkedin and alansteinjr.com is the website.

But, you know, I’m not trying to push a book or even promote my speaking, I just love sharing and connecting with people.  So if you heard this interview and something resonated, you know, drop me a line on Instagram or Linkedin, or shoot me a message, it would be great to connect.

Andrea: Well, thank you for your focused and intense Voice of Influence, Alan.  It’s  great to have you here today.

Alan Stein Jr.:  My pleasure!

 

 

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How to Ignite a Culture of Bold Innovation with Leena Patel

Episode 72

Leena Patel is the CEO of Global Impact Systems, founder of Sandbox2boardroom.com, and a leading expert on helping executive teams worldwide drive innovation and develop a culture of collaboration and inclusion. She draws from two decades of experience as a business owner to design and execute innovation initiatives that capitalize on new business opportunities and secure a strategic market position.

In this episode, Leena shares why leaders need to focus on helping their teams become better problem solvers, how her grandfather’s personal relationship with Gandhi had an impact on who she is today, the logic her Gamulation system that helps participants perform better in high-pressure situations, her personal mission to 4x the number of women CEO’s in Fortune 500 companies, and so much more!

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

 

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

Leena Patel Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

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

Today, I have with me, Leena Patel, who is the CEO of Global Impact Systems, founder of Sandbox2Boardroom.com, and a leading expert on helping executive teams worldwide drive innovation and develop a culture of collaboration and inclusion.  Very, very hot and important topics right now.

Leena draws from two decades of experience as a woman-owned business owner to design and execute on innovation initiatives that capitalize on new business opportunities and secure strategic market position.

Now, part of what Leena does that is really fascinating is Gamulation, which I’m excited to hear a little bit about that.  Hopefully that’ll come up in our conversation, Leena.  But Leena’s voice, this is so fun.  She is a powerful person and she’s got this amazing drive, I don’t know, like can really get to the point and can see through clutter.  I can tell she can just see through stuff and get right to what needs to be done or said.

Andrea:  And so I’m excited to have you on the podcast with us today, Leena.

Leena Patel:  I’m excited to be here, Andrea.  You know, you must be psychic, because I _____ you know, we haven’t had this conversation and I didn’t even know that you felt that way about me.  But one of my gifts that I’ve been told and I’ve known and felt it for decades now is this sort of ability to just get through the clutter, like be able to see exactly what somebody needs to take them to where they need to get to.  And it’s just this ability to connect dots.

I actually want share and talk about that today, but crazy psychic ability that you have there. It’s amazing.

Andrea:  Well, that’s awesome because, you know, I am kind of known for voice.  That’s sort of my thing, like I look for that in people and so I can tell that.  I just know that about you.  So I’m excited to have this conversation.  This will be fun.

So, Leena, what would you say is kind of the core message that really drives you in your business? I mean in your life?

Leena Patel: So, I’ve been on a journey that has evolved over the decades and the place I am right now is…let me kind of just sort of share what’s going on in the world right now.  The core message is to help organizations understand that leaders or the teams that they have…we really need to focus on up skilling everyone to become better problem solvers so that we can connect dots, do what I do, which is kind of help people get through the clutter and help them to do that, to be able to connect dots between different ideas, different roles, and different industries.

And the way that we do that is helping them unleash creativity in themselves and in others and teaching them to innovate but in a very, very strategic way.  I think that’s the way that businesses are going to win in the future.

And why, I mean why is that driving me?  In order to answer that part of the question; I grew up being mentored by my grandfather. I’m not sure if you knew this about me, but his mentor was Gandhi.  And the message that I got growing up from my grandfather was…

Andrea:  Excuse me, when you say his mentor was Gandhi, can you just briefly explain what you mean by that?  Because some of us would consider like authors or activists to be mentors without actually having relationships, so what do you mean by that?

Leena Patel:  So he met Gandhi at the age of 16.  He actually delivered a speech, a talk at his school, and his life changed.  Everything changed for him in that moment and he knew that this is somebody he wanted to follow and he wanted to learn from.  So they actually had a live, in person mentor-mentee relationship.  He was with him for 16 years.  He stayed in his house.

Andrea:  Wow!

Leena Patel:  He was part of India’s move towards creating independence. There’s a whole sort of back story between his relationships.  He was a spiritual activist.  He was a political activist and that was his mission and his purpose in life.  He was in his 30’s at some point.  Basically, the British government kind of forced him to leave India.  And so he moved to Kenya from there, which is where he met my grandmother and they got married and that’s kind of how I came into the world.

But those 16 years of his life were a huge part of who he was, what he stood for, how he showed up in the world, and consequently how he raised us; my mother, her brothers, and sisters.  And how we were raised because we grew up very close, you know, spending holidays, weekends, summers, and vacations together.

And sort of from the age of four, I had a very close relationship.  Two of my uncles committed suicide when I was 4 and 5 years old respectively.  The reason for that was they actually felt like they didn’t have a voice.  They wanted something in their life that they feel they couldn’t speak up for.  And because they didn’t know how to speak up, they didn’t know how to exercise their power and their voice, they took their own lives and that’s a really extreme thing to happen.

But it really kind of anchored into my mind at the age of four without being able to articulate it the way that I can now that I didn’t ever want to do that.  I don’t want to ever live my life that way, and I didn’t want other people to live their life in that way.

So that became the beginning of my relationship with my grandfather and him mentoring me because he helped me to understand these incidents and other incidents in my life in the context of, you know, sort of the bigger picture in what’s going on in the world.  And so leading change, driving change was a big…it’s just sort of felt like I grew up, it’s part of my DNA, you know.  So his lessons for me was to drive change where change is needed, to not be afraid to challenge the status quo, to do it respectfully, do it with kindness and understanding of where people are and meet people where they’re at.  But you and I, individually, and collectively _____ and so that’s been a driver for me in my life.

Whatever I’ve done, and just to sort of give you a little bit of a kind of back story of my professional background, I’ve got background in the arts and sports and entertainment. My first career was as a professional dancer.  That was over 20 years ago.

Andrea:  Which is fascinating though.  It’s fascinating.

Leena Patel:  But there’s a reason I’m sharing this with you because I moved then from the world of high performance into sports.  I started coaching athletes.  I worked with some Olympic level athletes.  I worked and trained with the artists of Cirque du Soleil for a number of years.  I worked with Celine Dion and personally worked with her for many years, over 15 years and her management team and her organization and then move from that world into the world of business.

I started training businesses on how they could bring this elite performance, high performance skill set into their business to drive performance within their team players. And so it’s been this evolution and I share all of this to kind of say that all of these experiences that we have in different areas of our life have led me to this moment of what I’m creating today.

And the realization for me at the time, you know, my whole life would be from sports, to arts, and to business.  I’d start learning about the digital marketing and I’ve learned about tax and accounting.  And I’d go in and learn about, you know, sustainability in the environment.

As I started evolving in business, I created Gamulation.  This is my innovation in instructional design because I realized that people in business weren’t learning the skills they needed to learn. So I came up with a new and more fun and playful way for them to integrate information so that they could up skill themselves quickly.

So the business was going through all this sort of evolution as new skills were being added as I was innovating to adapt to the marketplace.  And I was driving myself crazy, thinking, “Who does this?  Nobody does this.”  Our entire life was taught to zone in and niche and focus on one industry and one specialty, and these are the people that are rewarded.

Here I am learning all these different skills; one, because these opportunities are just coming to me; but two, because I’m genuinely interested in how people do things in different ways.  And I went to a mentor and he said “You know, don’t worry, you’ll figure it out. You’ll figure out how everything maps together.”

The turning point for me was realizing that all of this information wasn’t a limitation.  It wasn’t a shortfall.  It was my secret sauce.  And it’s the thing that leaders today need more than ever.  They’re solving their problems right now in isolation. Yeah, innovation is a hot topic right now in companies because they’re realizing that they have to adapt to new technology, artificial intelligence, things like that.

And so it’s top of mind for like 85 percent of CEO’s innovation right now but then they’re going ahead and bucketing things.  They’re now looking at gender and diversity and figuring out how to put more women in leadership positions and then they’re looking at their sales and marketing teams and figuring out how to help them perform better.  And they’re looking at big data and they’re bucketing all these different initiatives in their company and then sort of wondering why they’re not being successful.

So one of the things that I realized is that if I can actually teach them how to connect the dots between these different initiatives, I can actually draw from the 16 plus industries that I’ve now worked in over the last 20 years and help them to see _____ if they can implement what somebody’s doing over here in the tech space, you know, what somebody is doing in healthcare and in manufacturing, for example.

Now they’re innovating. That’s one level.  So we teach them actually how to connect the dots in a very systematic way to help them get exponential results.

Andrea:  Wow, I love that.  It’s interesting because I can understand the frustration with the idea of having to narrow down not being able to use all the curiosity that’s inside of you.  And yet, there is a way to use that curiosity and it kind of reminds me of Adam Grant’s book, Originals, and how people who are truly original, innovative and all that, that they really are able to draw from a lot of different sources and background and experience in order to bring all that to the problem that’s in hand.

And it sounds like that’s exactly what you’re doing and that’s what you’re teaching companies to do. I love that!  So what are some of the ways that you do that?  Could you maybe just share with us about Gamulation, this really cool training, or I’m not exactly sure what it is.  I kind of have an idea but I want you to tell us a little bit about it.

Leena Patel:  Sure!  I’ll give you two examples.  I’ll talk about Gamulation since you asked.  So we use that as a tool for actually helping leaders and teams understand or learn the skill they need to do.  So one of the ways that we want, we want people to actually learn faster.  We want them to retain information and we want them to go away and implement it.

Traditional ways of learning have not really served people in doing that.  It just sort of giving people a 10-step process, teaching somebody through a presentation whether sort of passively receiving that information. So Gamulation was really a combination of two different ideas, the gaming world which is so popular today and you know, women, men in their 20s, 30s, 40s utilize that as a pastime to activate and engage their brain.

So the gaming world that has really taken off and millennials, particularly, really connect with this.  I want to bring that environment of fun and learning through games and through play, but bringing it into a business environment so that it was highly relevant. It was highly structured and it helps people to actually retain information so that they could go in and implement it and actually get results.  They could actually get a return on their investment from investing in trainings.

 

So Gamulation is bringing together in the world of games, the fun and the playfulness that’s _____ and the world of simulation which has been around for a 100 years.  And simulations are known and utilized in healthcare and in the military for a long time because they understand that people learn best when you put them into an environment that resembles the environment they’re going to experience.  They’re going to be challenged in.

So the military are going to train in a sort of war zone environment so that when they’re on a battlefield they know immediately how they’re going to respond under pressure and they’re trained to do that.  And I wanted to train people in business in the same way to put them into environments where their skills were really tested and challenged so that they didn’t just sort of know on a surface level, “Here are the skills to be a great negotiator. Here are the skills to be a great innovator and here are the skills to be a great leader.”

But putting them into environments where their leadership skills would be challenged, where their negotiations skills would be challenged, and where they really have to negotiate.  But they have to do it and they’re dealing now with sort of international diplomacy and they’re dealing with contracts, and they’re dealing with time pressure. And putting all this pressure into them to help them see how they’re going to show up when the crap hits the fan, really.

Because it’s easy to be performing at a high level when things are going great, but we’re really going to be challenged and we’re going to make the worst decisions.  And I learned this, you know, this is how athletes trained.  This is how I trained, and this is how I trained other athletes is if you’re going to win a marathon, it’s great to just be like, “Hey, let’s have you running at a particular pace.”  Or you know, “These are the things that you need to be doing to train.”

But on training day, like on the day of the Olympics, on the day when you’re on stage, on a day when you’ve got that really big important meeting going on where the cameras are on you, people are going to be there, there are going to be interruptions, there are going to be audience, all of a sudden your adrenaline is lifted and loosening and you start making crazy mistakes.

So I would train people to operate under high pressure by throwing all these stimulus, distractions, and interruptions at them during the training process so that they learn how to focus even amidst all the craziness and so they wouldn’t be making those crazy mistakes.  And because they were training at that level, when they were put into those high pressure negotiation environments or they had to make difficult decisions or teams are falling apart, business deals are falling apart, they didn’t crumble under the pressure.  So they made sound business decisions that ended up saving their business, you know, sometimes millions of dollars of revenue depending on the organization.

Andrea:  Wow, that’s really interesting!  And then you said that you were going to talk about something else too.  What else is on your mind?

Leena Patel:  So yeah, that’s how I’ve used Gamulation as a tool to train leaders and teams.  And it’s simply a tool, a mechanism for helping them get to their goal faster. You’d asked what kind of example of how I’m sort of helping companies do this.  One of the things that’s really been huge for our business this year is helping leaders not only sort of innovate in terms of what they need to develop in terms of new product ideas or their processes internally, but as I particularly focused on the entertainment sector, the tech sector and those sort of big, big areas that I focus on.

And there’s a big conversation, I’m not sure if you’re aware of right now, but diversity is the big conversation that’s happening in these spaces where they’re really wanting to focus and bring more women into leadership.  There’s a recent initiative by the ex-governor of California where there has to be at least one woman on the board and three by 2021, I think it is. And so that companies and businesses are sort of scrambling to put women in leadership positions to “meet that quota.”

So the gap is that these women are not necessarily trained for leadership positions.  They haven’t been given a skill set and so what we kind of have them do is help them to really align.  We go into companies and say, “Instead of focusing on your innovation initiative in one bucket and then focus on growing women in leadership and growing your diversity team in another bucket, let’s bring them together.  Let’s actually help your women, your potential like women that you’re grooming to step into leadership positions.  Let’s really help them to understand your company’s long term goals and utilize and leverage their innate skills and abilities that they have as women, that they have coming from these diverse backgrounds to actually forward your company’s goals.”

So now they’re actually adding to the bottom line revenue of the company. Now, we’re also going and teaching these women not only like use your skills to help the company innovate and drive revenue, but we also are going to teach you actually how do you position it. Because women and men think quite differently as we teach them actually to how they make the business case for their ideas so that they’re speaking the language that men understand, right?

So now, they’re setting themselves up for success because they’re helping the businessmen.  They’re setting themselves up and positioning themselves for leadership skills and leadership positions.  They’re learning how to ask for the money that just they want and not that they’re owed.  I mean, they’re not just saying, “Hey, you know, what, let’s promote more women because it’s the right thing to do.”

So we’re moving beyond kind of tapping into people’s moral consciousness and saying, “Look, this is not only the right thing to do, this is helping us, this is helping you _____.

Andrea:  The strategic thing.

Leena Patel:  Strategic.  It’s really strategic.  So women are getting promoted.  They’re getting the money that they’re due, the respect that they’re due.  They were setting the business up for success.  It becomes a win for business, a win for the women and win for the cause, and so that’s an idea.

This is one example of how it really strongly bringing together two areas.  You know, bringing together the tech space, bringing together innovation which is needed in every industry right now in order to really be prepared for the future, and then bringing together this initiative to drive women in leadership and uniting it together so that it becomes a win, win, win.

Andrea:  Uh it’s fantastic.  Yeah, I was noticing that with some women.  I spoke at a conference recently with women and we were talking about portfolio building and building business case, just not exactly, but similar to what you’re talking about.

When I was doing some research around that before the talk, I kept hearing from other people that were in executive positions that women don’t come to the table to ask for more money as often as men do or they don’t ask for as much more money in their salaries as men do.  That’s just generally speaking of course.

But you know things like this that you’re talking about that I think across industries, women need this kind of training.  They need to know how to bring all those things together and think strategically and be able to communicate in that strategic way, yet bring all their empathy and ability to connect to the table.  It’s so huge right now.  I just think that’s a fantastic thing for you to be doing with companies.

Leena Patel:  Yeah.  Really, for me, it’s so exciting because I’m speaking literally like a couple of times a month.  I’ve been speaking at women’s conferences where I’ve been going into companies and sort of helping them to actually introduce this idea to them and actually how we can implement it within their company.

And I’m talking to these women and it’s amazing while these companies have women’s initiatives and women’s groups and employee resource groups within the company.  The very fact that they’re looking at their initiative separately and there’s not this sort of alignment and communication between the different business units and all the way sort of down from executive leadership, all the way down the company is massively hurting them.

I actually looked into this and I found that like the research and the data shows that literally just by making this one shift, they get their goals.  I think it was like 38 percent faster, like just because of this alignment and just by bringing two business units together, like sales and marketing.  Just by aligning people, their revenue jumps up 20 percent.  That’s one shift they need to make.

And so for me, it’s so exciting to go and talk to these women and really listen to what it is that they need.  You know, their self confidence has been really burned for a lot of women just being in that working environment.  So helping them build that up by teaching them that the natural skills that they have, like building great networks, building relationships, this ability to problem solve, or multitask; when they apply that strategically to the company’s goals and how to do that and put it together in a business case that really make sense for the company, makes sense for them, it shifts them in such a huge way.

So it’s super exciting for me to see that transformation.  My personal goal, my personal vision right now is to see more women in leadership right now in the Fortune 500 companies.  There are 25 CEO that are women and I want to get that to a 100, like that’s my personal goal and my mission by 2025 and that’s a pretty huge, pretty huge endeavor.

But to tap into those, those Fortune 500 companies and help them to actually not just make that number that women are in leadership, make it like, “Hey, I’m hitting my quota,” but no, this is the right thing to do because now we’re truly leveraging the value that they bring and we’re utilizing it to open up new market spaces and drive revenue to the company.

And by the way, people are feeling great because they’re being heard and acknowledged in the workplace and what a magical thing that you can make money.  And you know, you can serve your bottom line and your people are happier for it and you’re doing some good in the world at the same time.

Andrea:  Leena, can I just ask you a really blunt question?  I’m going to forewarn you.  I should’ve forewarned you but I am, what makes you think that you have the ability to get to 100 CEOs by 2025?  I want you to be honest because I’m excited to hear your answer.

Leena Patel:  So it’s 25 now.  There are 25 female CEOs in the Fortune 500 right now, and I want that number to be a 100. That means it’s got to like _____ in the next seven years.  So I’m speaking to a number of senior leaders in Fortune 100 companies right now. Actually, there are about four companies, if not five.  I’ve got two calls scheduled next week in the Fortune 20, in the top 20.

So I’m going out and we’ll be like making it my mission to talk to and make connections with the influencers because, you know, those companies like when they initiate these changes, it becomes a ripple effect.  And the other companies, the medium sized companies and the small businesses start to follow over time.  But they’re looking to these big companies, the influencers as kind of leaders and sort of paving the way.

So my decision was, I’m just going to go straight to the top.  I want to work with the people that are out there, driving change.  They’ve got incredible products and services, they’re offering to the world, and they want to be that _____ in the next 5 to 10 years.

The world is changing so quickly right now that they need to be on top of it.  They need to be on top of it in terms of how they’re innovating, how they’re connecting with their customers, the customer service that they’re offering, and the way they’re treating their people.  And they need to consider all of this and sort of put this on the table and then be strategic in putting a plan together so that they’re heading, they’re checking all these boxes.

Some of them are doing a great job, but a lot of them, the great companies right now that are doing so well are really struggling.  They make great products, but they’re really struggling, for example, right now to support their women.  They’re really struggling with understanding how do we work and drive this initiative forward without affecting their bottom line revenue.

And they haven’t cracked the code and part of it is because they’ve been in the tech space for so long. They’ve been in one mindset, which is what we’ve been talking about today and earlier.  So kind of going and saying, “Hey look, I’ve got this other perspective.  I’ve got this experience of being able to like draw knowledge from other industries and I can help you connect the dots so that now all your initiatives are aligned and you’re moving, your ship is moving in one direction and your people are behind you.”

So while I don’t see it as an easy task and, you know, for one minute I think I’m arrogant not to think I singlehandedly would be able to do this by myself.  I think it’s going to take a lot of people jumping on board with this idea and kind of recognizing it.

Our firm, personally, right now is really focused on reaching out to these companies and helping them to understand and we’re getting interest and movement and traction. So I’m really excited to see how this is going to sort of start to cascade over the next 12 months.  And, sorry, just what kind of vision is to bring other people onboard and help them to sort of say “This is what I’m doing, like if you want to help and you want to jump on board with this, let’s do this together because this is something the world needs.”

Andrea:  Well, it sounds like to me, it sounds like number one, you have confidence because you have lots of positive successful experiences.  They’ve built up overtime.  You’ve worked with tons of different kinds of people.  So number one, you have confidence.  And number two, you have purpose.  This thing that’s driving you and this is just me kind of my observation of what you’re talking about and why I think that you are going to make this happen, but also because you have this purpose.

You are so driven because you believe in the reason why it’s important and you care about it.  It’s something that you want to see happens and you care about voice, you care about, you know, all these things that have kind of happened to you in your life and this huge purpose is like backing you up to.

So it feels to me like you’re unstoppable.  It feels like you’re going to make it happen and not because you just think you’re all that, but because you care and you know it’s the right thing.  You know it’s going to be good for them and so you’re going after it.  And I just wanted to point that out because I love it and I think that it’s going to happen, yeah.

Leena Patel:  Thank you.  I appreciate that.  I know it’s a long journey and it’s taking action every day continuously reaching out, even when people don’t see the value in it or don’t see that it’s top of mind for them today, but continuously pointing out “Here’s where the world’s heading and you’re either going to jump onboard today and start strategically planning for the future or you’re going to be back peddling and catching up in five years time because your competitors have taken the leap.”

And you know, it’s so interesting for me that the people, the companies, specifically companies within the Fortune 50 that I’m talking to right now, the ones that are responding and wanting to initiate this conversation and learn more, are the ones that are actually already doing amazing things in this space and they want to push the needle. And it’s fascinating to me that the people that are already doing great or like the ones like “How can I be better, what can I do differently?”

And the ones that are kind of struggling in this space but they’ve got a multibillion dollar company, they’ve got something that’s really awesome and everyone is using and utilizing their product, they somehow think that because I’ve got this awesome product, they actually don’t need to innovate on their people.  They don’t need to change their culture.  They don’t need to, you know, kind of focus on taking care of things and they’re missing this whole thing.

And I’m like, “Wow, this is amazing that they’re operating in this way.”  And so my kind of goal is to just educate and maybe just to open the window and kind of what could be possible for them if they look at their business from a different perspective.  And if they see that a lot of these companies, some of them are goals driven and they understand that and a lot of them aren’t.

So, you know, part of being strategic is helping them to understand that this is actually going to have a positive bottom line effect.  But my end goal is to drive them towards understanding that it can be a win win. They can build a great company. They’re building a company and future proofing that company by thinking in this way.

But they’re also, eventually, using their influence and their power to create some good.  And creating that good in their workplace and the environment and the culture they’re building, creating some good in the community that they can now kind of impact, creating some good in a world by solving bigger problems in the world.  So that’s sort of my, you know, sneaky end goal is to sort of help them to use their power and influence for the better.  And I think that, you know, it kind of becomes a win win for everyone.

Andrea:  Yeah. What would you like the listener to take home with them today?  Of all the things that we were talking about so many important nuggets, but what’s something that you would want to leave with the listener today?

Leena Patel:  The number one takeaway, I want people to get as that now is the time to cultivate creativity amidst this chaos.  Now is the time to take action, to take risks, to up skill yourself, to up skill your people.  Gandhi said we need not wait to see what others do.  So taking those risks, even though it feels challenging, you know, to lead the way in your industry and lead the way for the future.  Take that action.

Andrea:  Hmm OK, so this has been great.  This has been fun to hear and inspiring for sure.  Leena, how can people connect with you, and is there anything in particular that that you would like to point them towards?

Leena Patel:  Sure, our company website is Sandbox2Boardrom.com and that’s Sandbox 2, the number two boardroom.com.  And you can definitely connect with me there.  I’d say that, you know, wherever you are in this innovation journey, whether you’re just starting to think about innovation or you already got an initiative in mind that you want to develop or that you’re developing, or even if you’re an expert and you want to be stretched and challenged so you can continue to push the boundaries and lead the way in your industry, you want to start by changing the way that you think.  You want to start by getting better at solving problems.

One of the ways that you can do that is by asking more powerful questions.  And I have a resource for you that will help you to identify the blind spots that your organization could be overlooking.  So no matter if you’re at that C-suite level or if you’re a senior leader or you’re an aspiring leader of rising star, just train your brain to be a better problem solver and think differently will kind of move you _____ along that journey.

So this resource, you can download from our website, it’s a free resource code 42 CEO Questions to Maximize Your Innovation Initiative, and it’s going to help you to just think about questions that you may have missed that will help you to move things forward, to think more strategically.  And you can access this free resource at Sandbox2Boardroom.com.  Again, Sandbox2Boardroom.com/gift and that’s for you as your resource to just start getting moving forward your initiative.

And then I invite those _____ sort of looking to be more, if you’ve got an initiative coming up in the next 60 to 90 days and you really sort of want to move things forward and strategize to connect with me directly, I’m happy to give you some ideas that can really kind of move that forward for you a little bit quicker.

Andrea:  Excellent! OK, I love that, the questions. This is going to be fun.  So, we’ll make sure to put all that in the show notes as well at voiceofinfluence.net.  Thank you so much, Leena, for being here today and for what you are and are going to do in the world.

Leena Patel:  Thank you for having me, Andrea!  It’s been such a pleasure speaking with you.

 

 

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Bridging Ideological Divides with Judy Brower

Episode 71

Judy Brower is a life and leadership coach. She also just so happens to be one of my mentors. Having learned deep respect for many people who hold opposing belief systems, Judy discovered that when full respect is given, full expression becomes welcome. Her passion is to unleash the potential of effective dialogue into our culture, workplaces, and homes through what she calls, “respectfullexpression.”

In this episode, Judy explains the core of her message, the five statements that will allow you to align your belief systems and truly respect others, why we need to replace judgement with curiosity, the moment she realized she had an agenda that attached her to the church and kept her apart from other outside the church,  the difference between tolerance, acceptance, and agreement, and so much more!

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

 

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

Transcript

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

Today, I have with me one of my mentors, Judy Brower.  I’m so excited to have you here, Judy.  Judy is a life and leadership coach who is crazy about Jesus’ life and people, not the least of which are her husband of 41 years, her three children, their spouses and our 10 grandkids.  10, that’s awesome.

Judy, grew up on a farm in Nebraska, raised her kids in southern California and went back to Nebraska for 10 adult years before moving to San Francisco five and half years ago having learned deep respect for many people who uphold opposing belief systems.

Judy discovered that when full respect is given, full expression becomes welcome.  Her passion is to unleash potential of effective dialogue into our culture, workplaces, and homes through what she calls respectFULLexpression.

Andrea:  Judy, it is great to have you with us on the Voice of Influence podcast!

Judy Brower:  Thank you Andrea.  I’m so excited to be here and love the way what’s been growing inside of me is so connected to your quest to unleash people’s voice for influence in the world.  Thanks for what you do and thanks for including me in it today.

Andrea:  Oh yeah, this is great!  There’s a lot of really great stuff that we have to talk about because I kind of have a sense of your main message and what you’re trying to accomplish or share with the world.  But would you share that with the audience right now, just what’s the kind of the core of what your main message is?

Judy Brower:  I guess the core of my main message and the desire behind bringing it to the world is that we would create a tribe of individuals who are gathered around the reality that we all belong by birth to the family of humanity.  And that all of us matter equally and when it comes right down to it together we’re creating culture.  And for better or worse, everyone’s presence matters.

So this form of us all of humanity lays a foundation for every other form of us that we enjoy.  And it creates the potential for all of those different forms of us to be healthy because they’re built on this foundation of all of us being equal human beings who mattered equally right where we are.

Andrea:  OK.  So why does it matter to you that we talk about and think of ourselves as equal to other people?  I mean, that’s kind of one of those things that, you know, it’s in the declaration of independence for the United States.  We’re all created equal and there’s a talk of that a lot, but why do you think that matters to you and who you’re trying to speak to?  What is the significance of that?

Judy Brower:  The significance really can be summed up in the reality that we talk about doing, showing respectful behavior toward one another.  We respect and accept one another in theory and believe that everyone has equal rights in theory, but we don’t see one another as equals.  And until we see one another as equals, we will never be with one another as equals.

So we’re trying to do something that really isn’t in alignment with what we deep down believe and that never works.  I think that’s a big part of the chaos and why hostilities arise between people of diverse opinions and lifestyles because respectful behavior without a heart of respect falls flat.  It’s condescending.

Andrea:  What’s the difference between respectful behavior and having a heart of respect?

Judy Brower:  Well, the way that I see us is not about anything that we do, but it’s a way of seeing and being with people.  It sort of summarized in five statements that allow us to actually get our deep down belief system aligned so that our hearts will be full of genuine respect instead of just our behavior.  Would it be helpful if I share those five statements with you?

Andrea:  Yeah definitely.

Judy Brower:   OK, so the first one is I accept you as an equal human being who matters, period.  Apart from anything you do, say, believe, or think; I accept you.  We’re both part of the human family.  It’s kind of that idea that we get to pick our friends but we’re stuck with our family and first and foremost, we’re a family of humanity.

And then it goes deeper with I respect your God-given ability to think, evaluate, reason, relate, work and create and your God gives you freedom to choose how you’re going to use it.  And it allows people to be part of a family but distinct from one another in a way that demands respect.

Feel free to ask questions of how I’m expressing this…

Andrea:  Yeah.  No, definitely, I’m curious about the second one.  I think it’s so important.  I feel like all of this is so important so I just want to make sure that I completely understand and that the listener does as well or that we think through this because this idea of saying that we respect somebody but not really respecting them…say the second one again.

Judy Brower:  OK.  The second one is I respect your God-given ability to do things that other created things can’t do; animals and the rest of our amazing world.  We’re set apart as humans and that we can think and evaluate reason, relate, work, create and love.  And we do it all by choice because God gave us the dignity of the freedom to choose how we use those abilities.

Andrea:  Yeah.

Judy Brower:  So I look over at another person and go, “Wow, you have incredible potential as a human being and I don’t get to control how you use it.”  That’s respect.

Andrea:  OK, cool.  Give us number three.

Judy Brower:  OK.  Number three is you have a uniquely amazing design and so do I and I choose to admire and enjoy who you are.  I’m not going to always understand who you are because you’re different than I am.  But you have unique magnificence to bring into the world and so do I.

You know, when you just stopped to look at the fact that we all have different fingerprints that speaks volumes about how unique we are as individuals and the beauty of what we have to offer each other if we’re willing to embrace and admire rather than compete with the diversity that’s built into our human design.

Andrea:  I really like this point, but at the same time I think it could be confusing.  How does somebody truly admire somebody that they don’t understand?

Judy Brower:  It has to do with being fascinated by them, stepping back and go, that’s fascinating.  You relate with life this way and I relate with life so differently because I have a different personality.  I’m wired differently than you are, “Hmmm that’s fascinating.”  If I want to continue to grow and expand as a person and my weaknesses become strengths then I can do that by actually really embracing to the point of admiring the ways that others are different.

Andrea:  Cool!  OK, what about number four?

Judy Brower:  Number four is I’m curious about your unique journey because you’re on a unique journey and I’m on a unique journey.  And because of our journey and all that we’ve experienced in the process that we’re in with life, we see things differently, we formed different opinions, we have different beliefs that we’ve adopted.  And because you’re on a unique journey, you have beliefs and opinions and lifestyle choices that don’t make sense to me and I have ones that don’t make sense to you.  If I embrace that as a good part, a real part of what it means to be on a human journey then we can walk our journey together and I can be curious about how your opinions formed and I can allow you to see how mine formed.  And in doing so, our journeys will speak into each other’s lives.

Andrea:  Yeah, being curious about somebody else instead of just judging them immediately.

Judy Brower:  And when we listen for understanding, we get it.  If we listen to change someone’s mind, we shoot our opportunity to inspire one another in the _____.

Andrea:  Yeah.

Judy Brower:   The fifth one just dovetails with that and it’s the idea that we’re in this together and we need each other, “I need you and you need me and we need us.”

Andrea:  If somebody doesn’t feel that way, you know like, I don’t need somebody that’s different than me.  I don’t understand them.  I don’t want to be around them.  I don’t need them.  In what way are you saying that we need each other?

Judy Brower:  Well, we’re stuck together so we’re going to co-create culture.  It’s to my advantage to bring out the best in you and to allow you to bring out the best in me.  Then we create a culture that’s healthy and where people’s minds and hearts are expanded.  It also has to do with the idea of synergy and it’s all over in our world, right?  The sum is greater than the individual parts.

So in my manifesto, I speak of a symphony in which the trombones can enjoy getting together and practicing the trombone and the beautiful music that comes from a trombone.  But how much more full and rich is it when the trombones come together with all of the other instruments and bring their part to the beauty and the fullness and the richness of the whole symphony under the direction of the conductor.  But it requires this humble confidence that my part matters but not more than anyone else’s.

Andrea:  I think something that you said here just a minute ago, I’m just taking some notes, you kind of mentioned at the beginning as well that we are co-creating culture.

Judy Brower:  Uh-hmm

Andrea:  And because we are co-creating culture, like you said, it is in our best interest to bring out the best in one another.  I think that is really powerful statement.  It might even be a great way for you to summarize this because you can’t just take over culture, you know, one group taking over culture from another or that sort of thing.  It just doesn’t happen like that.

And I think that’s the kind of, that we have these culture wars and we have all these problems that are coming up with huge dichotomies between beliefs like you’re talking about and this idea that “Look, we’re creating this one culture together.”  So we, obviously, aren’t going to be able to turn it into the thing that we all exactly want.  But if we bring out in one another then maybe there’s something to that and I think that’s really powerful, Judy.

Judy Brower:  It sort of gets at the heart of we’re better together.  It’s a phrase that we throw around, but until we really believe it deep down that the person I see outside my window right now doing things that I don’t agree with matters to me and is equal to me then that way of thinking can never be developed and we can never become actually better together.

Andrea:  OK say that again, if you’re seeing somebody outside your window that you’re disagreeing with but you’re thinking of them as equal, then what?

Judy Brower:  Then it opens the door to me believing that we’re better together in spite of our differences.

Andrea:  OK!

Judy Brower:  Because we’re a family and it’s in the best interest of the family to draw the best out of each other.  And we do that by appreciating the good that’s there and looking past what we don’t like that we see on the surface to actually believe that this person matters, is full of great potential and has all kinds of things to offer me and ways to speak in my journey that will cause me to expand as a human being.

Andrea:  I love all this.  Tell me though, where does this come from?  Where did your passion for the way of us come from?  How this _____ individually?

Judy Brower:  It’s fascinating because as I described myself in the bio, I am crazy about Jesus.  I’ve been a Jesus follower for 40 years and that’s been the most significant part of who I am.  But because I never gained an understanding that I am first a human being, that first God made me as a human and set my life in motion as part of the family of humanity to co-create culture along with my fellow human beings.

I attached myself to the church and separated myself from the rest of humanity without even realizing that’s what I was doing and I had an agenda for the rest of humanity.  So then I moved to San Francisco and I become overwhelmed by the beauty and the richness and the goodness of my fellow human beings, their potential and the way they’re living it out apart from Jesus.

And I’m like “Wait a minute; I didn’t have categories for this.  I didn’t have categories for being able to learn from you and being inspired by you and the beauty of bringing all of who I am to the table and receiving all that another person brings to the table and enjoying the dynamic potential of that relationship.”

Andrea:  OK, can you help me to kind of…you said before you had an agenda that attached you to the church and apart from other humanity, what made that agenda or what was the agenda and why was that so polarizing, I guess?

Judy Brower:  Oh that’s a great question.  Thanks for asking it.  I feel like a natural agenda developed in the heart of people who love Jesus out of a pure desire to spread the life-giving relationship that we have with Him.  We long for others to know it and to experience what we have.  That’s a beautiful thing.  That’s because we’re all human beings and we want to share what we have with others that’s good.  That’s part of what it means to co-create culture.

But what happens when we segregate together with other church people who believe that is we began to see ourselves as above our fellow human beings and the answer to other people’s needs and problems.  And it creates an agenda within us to persuade others that they need to see what we see and believe what we believe so that their life can be better now and they can be prepared for the possibility of what life after this life.

This urgency grows inside of us with this longing and we quickly transition into disrespecting the freewill and the dignity that God built into humanity.  And we violate human boundaries by attempting to come into people’s lives and tell them what they need to believe and how they need to change.

So what realized when I moved to San Francisco that really drove this home for me is that, what I believe, my evangelical faith is offensive to people for the simple reason that we’ve lived it out in violation of human dignity.  Does that make sense?

Andrea:  So we’ve lived it out in the violation of human dignity.  I know what you’re saying.  So it sounds like what you’re saying is “Because we cared so much about this, we lived it out but we were doing so in a way that made us feel like we were above everybody else.”  And then that made everybody else say, “Well then you obviously don’t matter to me then.”

Judy Brower:  Yes, and you have a God-given freedom and responsibility to use your thinking, your experience, your ability to reason, and evaluate and entertain different ways of making sense out of life according to your own free will.  And when I try to put my experience and my beliefs on you that’s when I’m violating your human dignity.

Andrea:  OK, so would you mind giving us a couple of examples?  I’m thinking like what’s the difference between the way that you pursued conversations with people that were different than you before versus how you pursue them now?  What are you actually saying that’s different?  What are you actually experiencing inside that’s different?

Judy Brower:  It’s a deep down respect for the value and worth of every human being, as a human being, along with valuing and respecting their unique design and their unique process.  And being willing to enter into that process in my own process, allow our processes, if that’s the word, to come together and speak into each other’s process from a place of mutuality.

Here’s an example that maybe will help you understand this.  After five and a half years of living in San Francisco and learning how to really value and respect people, I enrolled in a secular leadership program.  And in that leadership program, my tribe helped me understand the ways that I was violating human dignity without even realizing it.  So it came down to two things.  They told me that I fail to lead and make a difference in the world when I become persuasive or apologetic.

So here’s what I came to understand that I have a tendency, and I think we all do when we meet people, to evaluate ourselves against them.  And when I put myself slightly above someone, I’ll become slightly arrogant and want to persuade them that my way of seeing or being or living is the right one, it’s better.  And when I find myself coming in below them in any way shape or form, I become slightly insecure and then I become apologetic.

So I came to the city a bit arrogant thinking that I had something to offer the city that was better than what they had to offer me.  And then I became apologetic and began to wonder if people in the city even wanted me because my beliefs are so offensive.

So I entered into this leadership program either in a given moment, being persuasive or apologetic.  And they said “Stop it.”  Both of those things are ugly when you speak with conviction and no persuasion, I want to listen.  And when you have the confidence to speak your truth without apology, I want to listen.  But when you get persuasive or apologetic, I shut down.  And I went, “Oh my gosh, I’ve spent my whole life either being persuasive or apologetic.”

And what’s grown inside of me as a result of these changes, the way that I’ve learned to apply to them are these statements that I’ve developed that I’m now learning how to see people through them.  And as I do, I’m developing humble confidence, mutual relationships where I want to hear what you have to say because I value you and I want you to hear what I have to say because I value me and I value my message.

And it’s creating this ability to be in mutual relationships with people where FULL respect and FULL expression are both part of the equation and our relationships are effective and productive or sharing and exchanging of ideas is life-giving but never condescending or defensive.

Andrea:  Yeah.  When you said that, “What I have to offer you is better than what you have to offer me,” I think that there are a lot of people, who, like you were mentioning just being condescending and that’s obviously very condescending.  And yet, when you have a strong belief system which is something that we’re all really kind of encouraged to have, maybe not everybody but certainly in religious groups or sometimes just ideologies, it’s like we’re supposed to have this really strong opinions or strong belief systems.

But then it makes it difficult to have these conversations that are not condescending.  I think it has happened to me before, certainly, where it’s threatening to my ideology.  Because you’re different you’re threatening my ideology is you’re threatening my belief system.

So if I am going to actually respect you and actually have this conversation and really truly listen to you and dialogue with you and not be condescending and all those things then I end up feeling like, “Oh crap, maybe what I believed is not that strong belief that I thought it was.  Maybe it calls that into question.”

And I think that’s one of the hardest things, especially for Christians that I’ve seen but certainly other religious groups, I’m sure, and other people with strong ideology is that if we are going to actually have a conversation with somebody who’s different and not be condescending then it sort of makes us hold them out with open hands instead of hiding them tight behind our closed fists.  But man, it’s pretty hard to have a conversation if you don’t.

I think that this is really important.  So how can we sort of become comfortable with this idea of calling our own beliefs into question, or at least holding them out so that they could possibly be influenced by somebody who’s different than us and why is that so important?

Judy Brower:  So it’s really connected or a foundation is developed when you just choose to begin to look at people through the eyes of “We’re in this together.  We’re equal human beings and both of our voices matter.”  And then we build on that by recognizing the importance of process that every human being is in a process that begins when they’re born and ends when they die, and therefore it’s messy.

Everyone is an expert on their own opinion, their own experiences, and their own belief system.  So I can’t go into someone’s life saying “I’m the expert on your life but I am the expert on my life and my belief system.”  So if everyone is an expert, and I want to continue to grow as a human being and I know that I have to or die then I invite your expert thoughts and ideas and I also bring mine and it’s messy.  But if I value you as an expert then I can be an expert without making you feel defensive.

So I can learn from your expertise while holding on to mine and my beliefs will become more and more pure and more and more evolved and more and more engaging and I will have more and more influence and so will you.  And when everyone’s best is unleashed, everyone wins.

Andrea:  “When everyone’s best is unleashed, everyone wins.”  That’s significant.

Judy Brower:  So it’s a choice.  It’s a choice to stop protecting our beliefs except in our own heart.  I don’t want to change my beliefs but I do want to allow others beliefs to speak into mine.  And what I’ve learned is that people who have opposing beliefs has so much to offer mind and that their beliefs inform mine more fully and make mine more rich.

So I haven’t changed anything about what I believed in the last five and a half years, but I’m now free to learn from others and therefore my beliefs are more rich and more life-giving to me and have more potential to offer life to others.

Andrea:  Because you understand them better or because, why it’s potential to offer more to others?

Judy Brower:  Because people are willing to listen.  It turns out that when FULL respect is given then FULL expression is welcome.  I do get to share my expertise and I want to share my expertise.  It matters so much to me.  And 40 years of walking with Jesus has given me so much beautiful understanding that I want to share with the world.  I’m discovering that the same thing is true with another’s journey and therefore this mutuality can grow and my voice increases as I allow other people’s voices to increase.  And none of us are in competition with each other because we’re all unique and all of our voices matter to everyone.

Andrea:  So let me ask you another question.  I think people probably who are Christians or people who do have a strong belief system, I think there’s still probably sitting here going, “Okay, but don’t you still have an agenda?  Don’t you still want to offer your beliefs?  Don’t you still want to offer this wonderful relationship that changed your life with others?”  How would you answer that question?

Judy Brower:  What God has done to eliminate the agenda from my heart, literally, I find myself so free five and a half years after living here of agenda that I came that agenda brought me to San Francisco.  Now that agenda is gone but not the desire.  So what I’ve learned from God is that it’s His agenda.  He’s the only one whose heart is pure enough to have an agenda and He’s above us, humans, so He can have an agenda for us.  That’s great.  I’m not going to try to stop God from having an agenda on me, my life, or anyone else’s.

But because I’m an equal human being, if I have an agenda for you, I’m violating God and the dignity that He gave you and offers you every day to choose how you live your life even if it means rejecting Him.  So I leave the agenda to God and I don’t pretend to understand how it all works.  I play my part as a human being well and I take the love, the respect, the acceptance, the admiration, the fascination, and the mutuality that He has invited me to have with my fellow humans.

And the closest thing I have to an agenda is to offer that, not with the desire to change you, but with the desire to bring all of who I am and receive all of who you are and wonder what God’s doing with it and allow God to use it in the ways that He intends to, to expand, grow, and unify all of us.

Andrea:  So it’s this opportunity to dialogue, to have this respectful dialogue that you’re talking about without trying to persuade somebody without trying to be apologetic, but yet still having the conversation.  It sounds like you’re still having the conversation but with a totally different perspective and in terms of your heart and what you’re trying to accomplish per se.

So you’re not necessarily trying to accomplish that this person believe what you believe or do what you do, but you’re trying to accomplish the respectful dialogue.  You’re trying to accomplish this opportunity to have this connection.  So maybe that sparks curiosity, maybe it does get somebody to think more about what they believe or that sort of thing, but you’re saying that it’s not the end goal per se.

Judy Brower:  No.

Andrea:  Not for you.

Judy Brower:  Exactly.  Yeah, and it is incredibly freeing to be so engaged with people as my full and authentic self.  I know that I’m going to grow because I’m going to ask and be curious and learn from them.  And whether or not they do that with me, it’s completely up to them.  But I think because we were made to travel together and be in relationship with one another, it sparks a natural desire to reciprocate that mutuality.  It feels good.

And I’ve noticed that in a city that values tolerance, that tolerance is really sort of a shallow but good starting place if it leads us to acceptance.  Tolerance says you’d be over there and do what you want to do and I’ll just put up with it even though I hate it.  And acceptance says, I accept you and your thoughts and your ideas on your journey, your belief system, or your lifestyle.  I wonder what you see about life that I’ve missed.  I wonder what it feels like to be you.

Andrea:  Which sounds different than agreeing, it’s not accepting as different than agreeing.

Judy Brower:  It’s conversation for the sake of understanding and mutual inspiration.

Andrea:  Do you feel you’re living under less pressure now that you don’t have to have this agenda and that you’re not on the particular kind of mission that you thought you were on?

Judy Brower:  Yes, so much freedom, so much joy, and what’s beautiful for me as a Jesus follower is instead of loving people for Jesus, I’m loving people with Jesus.  He loves, dignifies, and values people.  Everyone is someone who matters to Him and that allows me to walk with people in the same way and love them and respect them with Him.

And my relationship with Jesus is more alive than it’s ever been and more rich and full and my life is as well.  My relationships are beyond anything I ever could have imagined.  I’ve lost all judgment and all agenda and it’s replaced with respect, acceptance, curiosity, and fascination because we’re equal and equally valuable human being.

Andrea:  Awesome!

Judy Brower:  What’s fun though is that my voice now has to come out of respectful expression.  So I’m getting in conversations with people even other believers, especially unbelievers, and it’s messy.  And I need to respect where they are on their journey and not expect them to be where I am on my journey and allow God to have them in a process that His hands on with all of us and none of us are going to be at the end of this journey of what it means to walk with Him and our fellow humans until the end.

So my need to have an agenda to change the minds of my fellow Christians is gone also.

Andrea:  Now that’s good.  That’s pretty hard when you’ve had a big huge change like this and then to be able to still turn around and apply it to the people that were just like you.

Judy Brower:  I’ve always felt free that I was free to judge people who judged others.  And I’ve come to realized that if everyone doesn’t matter equally regardless of their opinions or their lifestyles or their attitudes then no one does, not even me.  If everyone matters then everyone matters, and everyone matters.

It still takes my breath away to say that, it literally takes my breath away, because of how powerful it actually is to live from that place right there.

Andrea:  Judy, if you could have the listener do something or remember something in specifically from this interview, like what one thing do you want to challenge them or challenge them with or leave them with?

Judy Brower:  What are the possibilities of living as if everyone you look at matters, everyone you come in contact with matters equally?  And what if you just walk out into the world and began to see people that way?  How would it change the way that you relate with them?  How would it change you?  And maybe just experiment a little bit.

Of course, I’d be most delighted if you wanted to experiment with me.  If you want to become a part of a tribe that’s seeking to live this way and sharing the stories of the way that it’s impacting us, I would love for you to go to respectfullexpression.us and send me an email that would allow me to connect with you and where you are on this journey, whether you’re a believer in Jesus or not and how can we walk this road together and make this world that we live in a better place for everyone.

If there’s ever been a time that our world needs this, it’s right now in the middle of the political chaos because ultimately it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, if you’re a person of color or white, if you’re rich or poor, if you’re a part of one religion or another, ultimately that doesn’t matter.  First and foremost, we’re equal human beings.  All of the issues in our society would actually be resolved by this one choice to see the people around us, around the entire globe as part of a family that we’re committed to as a choice.

Andrea:  Alright.  Well, thank you so much for taking time to share your passion with us today, Judy.   And we’ll definitely include your website in the show notes and people can download your manifesto there, is that right?

Judy Brower:  Yes.  I would love for you to download it and read it and think on it.  And even if you just respond with your thoughts, any ideas, thoughts that you have or stories or desires that would expand my thinking and encourage my heart would be greatly appreciated.  I can’t be in this alone.  I don’t want to be in the alone.  None of us were made to be in this alone.  So anyway, in which you would want to join me, partner with me one time over the long haul, I’m open.

Andrea:  And when you talk about joining or partnering with you, you’re referring to a conversation, you’re referring to coaching, or referring to just any kind of way that you can be a part of each other’s journey?

Judy Brower:  Yes.  My main approach to all of this has been to engage people in 6-week discussions virtually so that we can gather from wherever we are in smaller groups.  Discuss these ideas and these statements and wander together at what it would look like to implement them, allowing their messy discussions because everybody comes where they are and everybody is met where they are.  But they’re profitable and that they allow us to enlarge our ways of living and relating with people.

So my greatest desire would be to have you connect in a 6-week discussion and you can ask for that as you email me as well.

Andrea:  OK, awesome!  Well, thank you so much, Judy. I hope that more and more people will adopt the idea of respectful expression and be able to dialogue with one another and live together and co-create a culture that is beautiful like a symphony.  Thank you so much!

Judy Brower:  Me too.  I wish that you could actually see the smile on my face and feel, maybe you can feel the smile that’s in my heart as I’m actually sitting here imagining every fascinating human being that might be listening to this podcast that you provide and that might connect more deeply with the voice of influence that we all long to have and the idea of respectFULLexpression.  So thank you for giving me the opportunity to connect with you and others.

Andrea:  Awesome!  Thanks Judy!

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How Small Shifts Lead to Big Transformation with Claudio Toyama

Episode 64

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

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

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

 

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

Claudio Toyama Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrea:  Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrea:  And you’re laughing because?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrea:  Yeah!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Claudio Toyama:  OK!

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

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

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

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

Andrea:  Uh-huh.

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

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

Andrea:  Hmmm that you’re reacting then.

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

Andrea:  Sure or a soft voice, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on

How to Make & Keep Your Message Relevant with Joe Calloway

Episode 58

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

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

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

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

 

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

Joe Calloway Voice of Influence Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

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

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

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

Joe, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

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

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

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

Andrea: Why is that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrea: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrea: I love this by the way.

Joe Calloway: Say that again?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrea: Oh definitely!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe Calloway: Sure!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe Calloway: Yeah, exactly!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe Calloway: Yeah.

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

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

Andrea: I love that.

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

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

 

 

END

 

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Stop Putting Yourself On the Backburner with Keri Stanley

Episode 57

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

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

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

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

 

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

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So when we can take our perspective for ourselves to understand that if we would take the time to fill back our tank, if we would take the time to do some maintenance, if we would take the time to _____ some of those things like we actually function on such a better state and can go further.  We just have been taught that we’re not supposed to.  We actually don’t even know what it feels like to truly be able to be fulfilled in a giving state.

So yes, once you get grounded _____ and to be able to give then that process allows you to give in a way that is truly heart centered.  We talked about this idea that am I giving to give or am I giving to get?  At some point, you’re expecting or wanting somebody to say something to you like a thank you or something and that’s actually giving to get but that’s the state that we get into.  Once we realize that if we are constantly in a filled upstate or we understand how we can fill our cup back up that we actually don’t need those things and it doesn’t have to take this really long time.

I mean, I was just _____ in San Diego last week and in 24 hours there was a group of us, that even in our off hours of a training that we were in, we ran a project and we raised over $14,000 in less than 12 hours essentially overnight in the off hours and fed over 325 homeless people on the streets.  And actually deeply connected with them on the streets and gave them flowers and gave them food and heard their stories and gave them love and gave them hugs and literally just connected with them, you know talk about you’re not your circumstances, really just connected with them as human beings, because how often _____ at something?

So you can create that giving experience from a fulfilled state very quickly once you learn how to do it, it just that most people don’t even remember, like it’s been so long that they’ve given themselves as a break.  It’s been so long since they’ve allowed themselves.  There’s a lot of guilt that comes from “if I take time for myself.”  But once you realize, “I’m a better mom.  I’m a better caregiver, I’m a better physician.  I’m a better administrator.  I’m just a better person in the world,” and that makes the difference in everything.

Andrea:  I think it’s huge and it also…you know all that energy that we waste on that angst, on that desire to control and that grip that we try to have on life that we can even really ever really grip.  It’s such a waste of time and energy and when you’re not doing that, gosh you have so much more.  I think we forget how much we actually really have because of that, so I love that.  I love what you’re doing.

OK, so what would something that you would want the influencer listening to remember about themselves and their own influence in the world?  What something that you can give them to take home and say, “I’m gonna remember this this week.”

Keri Stanley:  So they always say on a plane to put your oxygen mask on yourself first.  Most of us in life don’t actually understand that concept nor do we do that, but if we don’t save ourselves, and we have a choice in life to save ourselves and actually choose living, ____ exist.  But once you choose living and you choose to save yourself, you actually get the opportunity to make a difference in so many more lives than you ever would if you choose not to give yourself that oxygen.

Andrea:  Hmmm yeah.  OK so what’s the challenge?  What challenge do you leave us with then Keri?

Keri Stanley:  My challenge to you is for all of you listening is find one thing.  It’s so common that I’ll ask my clients and those who come my retreat, I will ask them what’s one thing that truly makes you happy that you really love to do.  And most people have forgotten, they’re like “I don’t even know what that means anymore.”  So my challenge to you is find one thing that maybe you’ve enjoyed as a kid or find one thing that truly is something that just makes you feel excited about life again.

Maybe you love to dance, maybe you love to play tennis, or maybe you love to be in a drama like you love to doing the acting piece, whatever it is.  There’s something out there that you forgotten that you love to do and allow yourself to step back into that and even feel like a little kid again because that child in you still exists and that when you tune into there is where the magic happens.

Andrea:  Hmmm love it.  OK Keri, how can people find you?  What should they do to find you, your program or you as a coach, whatever?  Where should they find you?

Keri Stanley:  You can find me on Facebook that’s probably where I’ve been most active.  I do video every single morning and it’s Keri Stanley and Keri Stanley Coaching that I’m on there for both pages.  So either one, you can find me.  I’m extremely active on there and always giving tips every single day and my retreat and everything on there as well.  You can also find me, my website is www.keristanley.com and all of my retreats are on there.

I’ve got the next, Ground, Grow, & Give is coming up in September and October and then there’s a ____ specifically for women in Costa Rica in November so those are the two big ones that are coming up.  My challenge is just to continue taking care of yourself and enjoying every day because each and every day is a miracle.

Andrea:  Thank you so much, Keri!  Thank you for your voice of influence in the world and the way that you’re impacting people.  I appreciate it!

Keri Stanley:  Awesome!  Thank you so much for having me, Andrea, I truly enjoyed _____.

Andrea:  And I’ll be sure to link everything in the show notes.  Alright, thank you so much!

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How to Use Adversity to Accelerate Growth with Dr. Colby Jubenville

Episode 51

Colby Jubenville, PhD is an accomplished author, international speaker, professor, business advisor, entrepreneur, and inventor who holds an academic appointment at Middle Tennessee State University as Special Assistant to the Dean for Student Success and Strategic Partnerships in the College of Behavioral and Health Sciences.

Due to various experiences throughout Dr. Jubenville’s life, including being born with a condition that negatively impacted his vision, he’s figured out how to use adversity to accelerate growth in both his personal and professional lives.

In this episode, we talk about some of those adversities and how he was able to overcome them, why we need to rethink the process of how we change, why we can’t be lazy with language, the importance of trust when it comes to influencing people, the phrase we should replace the word goals with in our vocabulary, and so much more!

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

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 Colby Jubenville on the line, and he is an accomplished author, international speaker, professor, business adviser, entrepreneur, and inventor. He holds an academic appointment at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) as Special Assistant to the Dean for Student Success and Strategic Partnerships in the College of Behavioral and Health Sciences.

So I’m really, really excited about talking to Colby today. Welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast, Colby!

Colby Jubenville: Well, Andrea, hey, thanks for let me being with you today. Thanks for letting me share some ideas that hopefully will be valuable for you and for your audience. I appreciate of being with you today.

Andrea: Yeah, alright. So Colby, can you tell us a little bit about what you do at the college. What do you do in MTSU and how does that all fit into your overall career?

Colby Jubenville: Yeah. I run a Center for Student Coaching and Success at Middle Tennessee State University because I came to the simple conclusion that students come to higher education, come to some kind of formal education for one reason and that’s gainful employment.

When you ask students why they come to college, they can’t give you that answer. The very first thing that I teach them is employment straight income for money, and gainful employment is where you get some kind of meaning and purpose and contribution from the work that you do. Once you understand that you’re there for gainful employment then every decision that you make in terms of your education needs to go to that filter.

Andrea: Hmmm, yeah, go ahead.

So, I’ve been in education my whole life. I was born to two educators that taught me the way you take on the world is to become an educator and educate other people. That works all the way up till you get these things called lifestyle and freedom. Then you’ve got to figure out how to get paid for your value and not paid simply for your time.

So, there’s an old joke about college professors, you know the joke, they say “Those who can do, and those who can’t, finish your point.” That’s okay. I can handle it.

Andrea: Teach.

Colby Jubenville: Those who can’t, teach.

Andrea: Oh yeah, I was a teacher too.

Colby Jubenville: And those who can’t teach; teach PE. That’s the old Woody Allen joke.

Andrea: Oh no!

Colby Jubenville: I thought about that for a long time early in my career and what I said to myself is “If you can do anything and you get paid for your value and not your time.” So John Floyd is in Rutherford County in Murfreesboro and he runs Ole South, he owns Ole South, and he started Ole South. It’s the largest independent homebuilder in the State of Tennessee.

We workout every morning together and, while working out, he makes fun of me and says “You know, you _____ professors up there, you know, collecting a government’s check and not doing anything.”

So I decided to drift the success that we had. And then I had, specifically, with individual students throughout my time in MTSU, and along the way, he hired me as a consultant at a crossroads in his life and his business life. He said something to me that I’ll never forget. He said “Colby, if you can help me get this thing back on track, we can all prosper together.”

So we did get it back on track and survived the economic downturn. He is the largest independent home builder in the State of Tennessee, and he committed a seven-figure gift to the center because of the work that I’m doing, and the work is really simple.

So John Floyd, he was the president and founder of Ole South Properties, is a good friend of mine. We’d workout together every morning in about a decade ago. I helped him with his company during the economic downturn. I’ll never forget what he said to me, he said “Colby, if you can help me get this thing back on track, we can all prosper together.”

So we did get it back on track. He’s now the largest independent home builder in the State of Tennessee and we do prosper together. He committed a seven-figure gift to the Center for Student Success and Coaching in MTSU and it’s been incredible to watch the transformation that has taken place.

If you think about gainful employment and you think that that’s why kids are on college campus then you start to ask yourself “What ultimately would put them in a position to become gainfully employed prior to walking and cross the stage in graduation and that’s the vision for our center.

So here’s the simple conclusion that I’ve come to through this process and I think it might be the first big takeaway for your audience that the students, people, adults; they don’t necessarily want personal development as much as they want personal change.

So I think that personal development has become this extensive broad term that nobody really understands anymore. But when you talk about personal change and people start to nod and shake their head and say yes, then the question becomes “What is it that you’re trying to change?”

Here’s what we’re trying to change. For me to help you, Andrea, the very first thing that I have to understand is your narrative. There was a narrative that has been written for her or by her and if I don’t know what that narrative is then I can’t help her change. But we use narrative based coaching sessions. We use a personal assessment, _____ assessment which measures behavior versus personality. You can’t change somebody’s personality but you can change your behavior.

So we use an assessment and then the narrative based coaching templates to draw up change and create a new narrative for the students. The change is the narrative and we help them uncover that narrative through that process so that they can write a new story about the life they want to create for themselves.

It’s ultimately about becoming the person you’re supposed to become in order to live the life you’re supposed to live. So we use six foundational coaching sessions based on the personal assessment and that personal coaching to create personal change.

Andrea: Hmmm that’s exciting because I know that a lot of students when they’re going to college really don’t know any of this. They don’t know how to move forward or not sure exactly, even sometimes, how this relates to what choices their making for their major and where they’re going to apply after school.

I know that this is really important. I’m sure it helps retention at your school as well.

Colby Jubenville: Well, we’re just in the beginning phases of tracking the students that come to the center. But every piece of feedback that we get is there’s nothing like this in my college experience. It was more valuable than any other piece of my college experience.

Here’s a thing that people don’t understand and this probably the second big takeaway in terms of thought leadership, change does not happen _____. Change happens incrementally and do feel _____. If you change what you do, it would change the way you feel about what you do. That would change the way you think about what you can accomplish. So the coaching, it’s broken into two key pieces. What is the greatest conclusion that you’ve come to and what is greatest realization that you’ve come to.

So there’s an a-ha moment and there’s an end, and then based on those, what are the three activities that you’re committed to doing? We track that in 30-day windows, and the cool thing about helping 20s is you don’t really have to help him a lot to get him started. At the end of the day, _____ said it best, he said “Don’t let start stop you,” and that’s really what most…they don’t know how to transition off the campus and get out into the game.

Andrea: Yeah.

Colby Jubenville: So it’s been powerful. I build version one and version one was clunky. It was overwhelming. It was cumbersome. Version two is just very elegant and simple, and it’s personal assessment, personal coaching, and personal change.

Andrea: You know, you were talking about the narrative driving change and driving the person. Tell us a little bit about your narrative because in researching for our interview today, I was really struck by your childhood and some of the struggles that you had.

Colby Jubenville: Yeah.

Andrea: Yeah, how you came to where you are? Would you mind sharing a little bit about that?

Colby Jubenville: So just pour my heart out to the audience and be very vulnerable.

Andrea: Pretty much yeah. That’s pretty much what we do here.

Colby Jubenville: I really wonder if I chose this or it chose me. I was born to those two educators and one of them is my stepdad but usually my dad. His name is Wayne Williams, and we joke now but I tell people I went to the school for better living and better people by Wayne Williams. He’s from Citronelle, Alabama. His father served for Patton and he was the most kind, compassionate, loving father than anyone could ever have.

My mother who made a huge investment in me and never gave up was told early on that the best I could ever do was be some kind of functional literate working at a McDonald’s because I was born with something called remnants of the papillary membrane. It’s basically a protective coating that melts off your eyes when you’re born. Well, mine didn’t melt off away.

So from first through sixth grade, I had this really bad headaches and I never forget you know, I would just go back to my room and just really fall apart. My mom would pick me up and put me in a bathtub with my clothes on to calm me down because that was the only what that I could make that pain go away.

So I eventually taught myself to see through those cobwebs, through those remnants of the papillary membrane. And then along the way, through all the struggles, I learned how to use adversity to accelerate growth. And along the way, because I went to Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, I fell in love with learning.

I became a student in the process and played football there for _____ and he taught me some new lessons along the way and part of that whole process was the general theme. If I look back on it now, the general theme was how to use adversity to accelerate growth.

So being born to those two teachers who really believe in self-reliance, you know, I never forget my dad said to me, he said to me early on, “Son, you got one or two choices,” this is probably from 7th or 8th grade, he said “You can either work for me for free or you can find a job this summer. I don’t care what you do.” I didn’t believe him and my dad was meticulous.

He knocked on the door that first day of summer and he had note cards that said inside and outside painting, you know landscape. And he said, “When you get down with these, _____ when you’re done with these let me know, I’ll give you the next set of things to do.” I got up on my bike that day and drove up to downtown _____ and knocked on all the doors and started the grass cutting business.

So my first hard skill in my life was knocking on doors and cutting grass. I realized I like knocking on doors a whole lot more than cutting grass. So I got _____ to cut the grass. He just told me the value of being self-corrected. He taught me the value of “If you want something in life, nobody can do it expect for you.”

So because I have a handful of loving people that cared enough about me to make an investment in me, and I think everybody that listens to this podcast at some point had probably decided to give up on themselves or give up on life, and so this is it for me.

At one point, I was a straggler that said “The success is for the rich and strong and the powerful but not for me.” And before that I was a reactor that said “Well, I am here because mom and dad, you put me here.” I went to St. Paul’s with these kids that drove BMW’s and Mercedes and you’re making me drive a 1972 Ford Thunderbird with a rust on its bottom where I had to find a piece of plywood to put on the bottom of the car so I wouldn’t get wet when _____ when it rained.

But upon looking back on all those things, it was that great, that resilience, that adversity to accelerate growth that gave me a competitive advantage when I decided to ultimately go to Millsaps.

Nobody ever told me that you have to go through all comprehensive exams under grad. I was never going to Millsaps. But I didn’t ask because I didn’t know because I wasn’t really invested in my life. And then I get to the end and they say “Have you signed up these all comprehensive exams? And I said “What are you talking about? I’m not taking that.” And they said “Oh no, you have to to graduate.”

So I didn’t prepare and this is just a really great story of using adversity to accelerate growth. But I didn’t prepare and I said “I made _____ this class because I played football. I was a pretty good football player. I play _____ through here. They’re gonna let me let me out this place.”

Sure enough, I went in there and I’ll never forget, it was this cold room and there’s four guys staring at you and they’re the four most expert in the world in areas like _____, the old south, the new south and the Great Depression and they just start firing out questions of which I had no answers too because I had not prepared myself.

So they said “Could you talk about the whiskey tax and colonization? Could you talk about the Whiskey Rebellion?” So all these questions were about whisky and I think it’s because they know I was over the fraternity house hanging out and drinking beer after the football game, so I failed. They called me back in after about four or five hours and they said “We think you would benefit by retaking these exams. I’m not saying you failed, we think you would benefit.”

At that point in your life, you can only call one person and that was my mom. I called her and I said “Look, I’m coming home over to South Alabama and I’m gonna finish up there.” And my mom said “You were absolutely _____. You’ve paid the money, you made the investment and you would figure out how to work through this.” I said “What should I do?”

She said, “Well, if you were me, I’d do two things. First of all, you learn a very valuable lesson here, son. If you gonna do it, show up prepared and then the second is, I go back in front of one professor that believes in you that thinks that you can do this and ask them, build a relationship with them and ask them what you need to do to successfully complete the _____.”

I go back to this one guy, and he said “You know, Colby, you got all the confidence in the world in the football field but you have no confidence in the classroom. So I’m gonna give you the first question, I’m gonna give you the answer and I hope that gives you enough to get you started. Now, go get yourself prepared.”

So while everybody else was graduating, going on their way and going on to the next stage of their life, Colby was over at the Café Seagulls reading all the books that I was supposed to read over that four-year period. And I went back in there and another four hours and Robert _____, I’ll never forget, he said “Colby, you obviously come here prepared this time and we appreciate that you took the time to do that. I’ve got one last question for you and if you get this right then I’ll pass you.”

So he said “Can you tell me how this is the foremost expert of Great Depression?” He said “Can you tell me how the _____ and the Great Depression _____?” And in that moment, in that classroom, he unlock something for me that changed my life because he taught me one of the key concepts of entrepreneurs which is taking patterns from one place and moving them over to another place and understanding how these different patterns work.

And so I said “Yeah, I can tell you. I’ll start saying that California is the _____.” And he said “I like it, continue on.” So I get through and talked about all these different analogies that are related to that. And so I passed and I walked out and I said “One day, I’m gonna be a college professor and I’m going to teach other people how to be prepared so they don’t end up where I did.”

It was because of that defining moment because I was looking for that defining moment and I had that defining moment that ultimately unlocked for me. And I think that’s what has to happen for people. I think that all of us have to have that struggle in order to find your voice, which to me is the intersection of talent, passion, and conscience and need in the world.

He unlocked it for me that day and it led me to Southern Miss and ultimately to starting a football team in Jackson, Mississippi and Eastern Kentucky University where a comedian says, when the world ends, he should be in Kentucky because they won’t find out about it until 20 years later. Then down to MTSU where I was lucky enough to catch a university and a president that had a vision.

And Sidney McPhee has built that university into what I consider to be one of the top universities in the country, and I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of it and be a part of Murfreesboro and be a part of John Floyd’s life and success and just been very fortunate.

Andrea: You know, you just mentioned the concept of voice and I’d like to go back there. I was wanting you to touch on this, but what is your thought on what it means then to have a voice of influence?

Colby Jubenville: Well, you can’t be lazy in language. People are making decisions about your value based on what you say to them and how you present it to them. I think you need to be really careful and think about what is it that you want to say. If persuasion is the key centerpiece of business activity then what is it that you want to say to them and how can you say it in a way that will connect with them?

One of the things that I figured out is that when you speak in emotional ways, it will allow you to connect with people in ways that most people cannot. So I’ll go back to Heath and Heath in Made to Stick, and they have that really simple framework and frameworks help us create predictability structure and efficiency. But what the framework was was a success framework. It’s simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, and emotional stories.

So if you want to build a voice of influence, the way I did it, initially was I watched _____, the movie. After he made it big, he went back to the New York night clubs and struggled. And it showed you just how hard it was to continue to be somebody that can engage the audience in ways that he’s one of the best.

One of the things that he did that I saw in the movie was that he had a piece of paper and he wrote down 10 words, 10 stories. I watched that technique and how he unpacked that. So that’s how initially I got started. So what are the 10 defining moments in my life and how can I tell a simple, unexpected, concrete, credible emotional story that connects with people in ways that nobody else can.

 

 

That led me to really where…I think my space is where I want to own is the intersection of personal brand and personal relationships. So the intersection of personal brand and personal relationships to me is trust. What is the foundation of trust? If we say “Hey Andrea, it’s Colby. You gotta trust me. I gotta trust you. We gotta trust the process. We gotta trust each other.” What’s the foundation of trust?

Well, to me the foundation of trust and to build influence is safety. And safety is, am I known, am I heard, am I valued, and I important? Does my opinion matter? If you want to influence other people and say “Hey listen, I’m gonna build a relationship. It’s going to be founded in trust. The foundation of trust is safety. I want you to know that when you walk through here, we’re gonna build a container of trust together.”

The container of trust looks like this, am I known, am I heard, am I valued, am I important? Does my opinion matter? I am the leader and leaders go first and good leaders make good followers. In this container, four things are going to happen, you have to believe that as the leader, “I’m confident.” You have to believe that as a leader that I have good intentions for you. You have to be vulnerable and show me that so that we can connect. And then whatever we agreed to, whatever we agreed to, if you do not live up to that agreement or I don’t live up to that agreement then swift action must be taken. That’s how you build influence with people, about building a container of trust.

Andrea: Yeah. I like that a lot. Respectful dialogue and definitely making sure that we hold space for other people that have and share their voice is such a huge piece of what we talked about here.

I want to go back a little bit. Did you always feel super confident in your own voice? I mean, when you started out after college, when you started sharing your ideas and putting yourself out there, were you always confident? Where did the confidence come from?

Colby Jubenville: Oh God no! No, I wasn’t confident; I wasn’t going to make it at a high school.

Andrea: Yeah. I hear yah.

Colby Jubenville: I wasn’t confident; I wasn’t going to make it at Millsaps. You know, I want to read and I have not put this to memory but I want to read a quote and I want to see if I can find it. It comes from a book called Hillbilly Elegy. Have you heard of it?

Andrea: No, I haven’t.

Colby Jubenville: Now, listen to this because you asked me a very specific question about where did this confidence come from. Listen to this, “I want people to know what it feels like to never give up on yourself and why you might do it.” That’s the first place of where my confidence came from. I know what it feels like to never give up on yourself and I know why you do it.

“I want people to understand what happens in the lives of the poor and the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children. I want people to understand the dream as my family encountered it. I want people to understand how upward mobility really feels, and I want people to understand something that I learned only recently that for those of us lucky enough to live the American dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us.”

So my confidence is not from my IQ, my confidence is from my circumstance of being a middle child that was born with a brother that he looked up and idolized and he was better in every facet of life. I chased him my entire life to be better than him and he knew it. So that’s a piece of where my confidence comes from.

As a middle child, my older brother did it first. My younger brother did it better and I was constantly stuck in the middle trying to say “Hey, if I do this, didn’t I’m getting enough? Hey, if I do this, didn’t I’m getting enough?” Here’s the difficult part about that. So it’s not IQ for me, it’s circumstance that gave me my confidence.

Here’s the difficult part that it comes with a cost. When you start trying to build your life based on fear of failure and scarcity versus abundance then that comes with an emotional cost. That certainly something and that part of my story was that my mother said from a very early age, she said, “Colby, people just don’t know what to do with you.” And I had somebody recently tell me that. In fact, Warren Brent who is a mentor to me and really started the next phase of all these things that I’m talking about with container of trust and agreed reality and agreed upon the future, he has a background in therapy and divinity.

We had about a two-hour meeting. We met somewhere. We met at a New Year’s Day party. My good friend, John Byers, we met at a New Year’s Day party and we’re sitting, watching football. And I could feel him trying to pry to my soul, I didn’t like it. I know when people trying to pry to my soul because I do get it all the time. So he kept trying to pry to my soul, and I got in the car and I said to my wife, at the time I said, “You know, I really didn’t like that guy.”

About six months later, we had this meeting and it was one of the most incredible meetings that I’ve ever had. And he starts talking about all these ideas and then he just stands up and Warren is about 6’8” or 6’7”, he just stands up. He sticks his hand out and he shakes my hand, he said “Alright, Colby, I’ll talk to you later.” And I said “That’s _____ young man.” He goes, “I have no idea what to do with you.” And I’ll never forget, I walked out of that meeting and I was like “What do you mean?” He doesn’t know what to do with me.

So, Warren used his therapy skills to help me really looked inside of myself to get in touch with those emotions that I had over the years that were part of the collateral damage of trying to find success out of fear of failure versus abundance. So my confidence comes from those handful of people that knew how to pull it out of me, my parents.

If I look back at my life, these coaches that I had, great coaches did three things for me. They made me have conversations I didn’t want to have. They made me try to do things I didn’t think that I could do to ultimately become something I didn’t think I could become. So if I look back on my life, it says coaches have the greatest impact on me and helped develop that confidence; Charlie Miller, Bob Rutledge, Scott Atkins, _____ and Tommy Ranager. All those folks invested in me in ways that…you can’t really invest on people. Today, they call it child abuse. That’s a joke by the way.

Andrea: I was assuming so.

Colby Jubenville: How do you use adversity to accelerate growth? What is its trying to teach me? Once you understand that and can frame it up for other people in ways that help them make sense with their own lives, which is what that quote from Hillbilly Elegy does. I want people to know what it feels like to nearly give up on yourself and why you would do it.

I’ve been right there. At Southern Miss., I decided I was not good enough to get a PhD. I went in and out started managing a fine dining restaurant in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. After six months of doing some of the most emotionally exhausting work of my life, I said to myself “I going back and I’m going to get that PhD come hell or high water, whatever I have to do, I will do it,” and I did it.

Andrea: Yeah. The prevailing way that people handle the stuff though is that we try to keep people from experiencing that moment of almost giving up. We’re trying to talk people out of it.

Colby Jubenville: Yeah, absolutely! The other goals and some of the most overused and unrenowned words in America, we set goals and the minute we don’t achieve, we _____. So I get people to think about dominant focus versus goals. What’s that one thing you want to accomplish? What’s that one thing? And for me, it’s always been the coaching and teaching on ever increasing stage.

The reason that I’m interested in sitting down and having this podcast with you is because it is part of my dominant focus. I get to spend 45 minutes with you, coaching and teaching on the stage that has a national audience, which is what I love to do. Not goals, not goals dominant focus. What’s that one thing?

And here’s a nice question once you know what’s the dominant focus is, can you do three things today, five weeks, or 16 months towards the dominant focus in your life? Once I do three things today towards my dominant focus, I don’t have to do anything else because I’ve done the three things that I want to do. If I do five that’s great, but if I do three, I’m keeping it all. They’re all what I need to do.

Andrea: Those little things that you do each day, they just continue to add up and built.

Colby Jubenville: Yeah. I value activities, which is where part of that confidence comes from. At one point, I was scared to death that you didn’t get all these things and then John Lee Dumas in EOFire, entrepreneuronfire.com. That was my support ever, and I was scared. I was shaking. When we got it done, he goes “Colby, you absolutely crashed it.” He said “Man, you need to have your own show.”

Now, I should have my own show, but I have ADD and I haven’t slowed down long enough to put the show together. But it would be good and it would be fun, but I’m just not there yet, maybe one day, I’ll get there so I can make people like you and have a lot of fun doing it.

Andrea: Yeah. Well, that’s going to lead me to another question that I was going to ask you, because you’ve done a number of different things. I mean, your bio even says that you’re an inventor. What did you invent?

Colby Jubenville:   Yes, it’s a big question. Coming back on an airplane, I was _____ yellow pad and I listen to other people in what they say and I call this the strengthening of weak thighs and so I just take notes. It’s people from different places saying different things with different perspectives about life and business. So I heard this conversation with this one person said “I’ve got 10 books to read and I don’t have time to read any of them.” And I thought to myself “Yeah. I know what that feels like.”

And the second person said “I never read books, I just want the best ideas.” The third person said “I read the books and I want the best ideas but I take notes in the margins and then I go back and look at those notes when I can’t read what I wrote.” And the last person said “I don’t need that. I just want a digital content. I want the information of podcast.”

So I drew up a self-content learning system that had big ideas, simple explanation and digital content and I called them “QR books,” Quick Read books. So the other side of that…what comes back with that is there are two questions that turn learning into action and I learn this from a VP of sales of a major medical company that said “You spend millions of dollars on the sales meeting, what’s the _____?”

He said, “Colby, here are two things we want to have happen. Here’s the number one. Did I get the information?” That’s number one. Number two, how they’re going to get that information to drive their business and life over? So why is the information important to me and how can I use it to drive my business and life forward? So that closes the gap and that was a self-content learning system that I built.

The sad part of the story is, I invested $12,000 in trying to pattern that and I didn’t get very far, but I didn’t mean it. So everybody here, take that or run! You got the simple explanation of digital content.

You know here’s the cool thing, so for example, I’m going to show you how I invented this. There’s a direct selling for a company called _____ and he wanted a simple, easy way to take this information and teach to other people and he saw one of these books and called me and said “You know, can I order 10,000 of these?” I said “Sure, yeah.” So I invented that. I got paid for it. I gave him the system and showed him how to do it, off and run.

Andrea: So you said, you’ve got ADD or whatever but I assumed that means that you have lots of ideas. You kind of move back and forth between them, do you have a hard time staying focused?

Colby Jubenville: Yes, can you help me?

Andrea: Well…

Colby Jubenville: Yes, I have a hard time staying focused but here’s the thing, I’m happiest when I have 10 things going on and all of them in progress. I am at my worst when I have zero things going on or five things going on and I’m stonewalled I get really upset and frustrated.

Andrea: Do you play into each other, like one thing that’s going kind of help inspire you to do something, another thing that’s going and they sort of have some synergy like that?

Colby Jubenville: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, I believe that progress is a natural motivator. So when you communicate progress, you’re communicating natural motivation. So yeah, they certainly play with each other for sure.

Andrea: So we shouldn’t be too afraid of having more than one thing going at a time. Even though you can have a dominant focus, that dominant focus is…how do those two things relate?

Colby Jubenville: OK, the dominant focus is one thing that you run the filter through. If my dominant focus is the coach and teach on ever increasing stage then every decision that I make should be based off that then you got to decide what activity or the highest value of the activities. What activities would create higher value in your life and then do this, focus on this.

Andrea: There you go. So when people say to me, they say “What should my next step be? Should I write a book next? Should I create a course, online course?” That sort of thing, what kind of advice would you give to emerging thought leaders, people who have a message about how to choose their next step?

Colby Jubenville: Well, I think the first thing you have to do is make sure the message is right where you want it to be. So I’ve spent many, many years honing ideas and deciding on what stories and what is the message that would resonate the most with the people that I want to try to impact and serve.

I’ll give you an example, whenever I write books, I turn on HBO and I listen to movies in the background and I listened to Jerry McGuire here recently. It’s my favorite movie, and of course the most famous line of Jerry McGuire is what?

Andrea: Ahhh you put me on the spot…

Colby Jubenville: “Show me the money.”

Andrea: Show me the money, OK.

Colby Jubenville: Yeah, and so that’s not the best line in the movie. The best line in the movie is when he _____ to write the mission statement. And the mission statement is “The Things We Think and Do Not Say: The Future of Our Business.” And I thought that was so powerful that…

Andrea: Could you say that again?

Colby Jubenville: Yeah. The things we think and do not say: The future of our business. That’s his mission statement and so he writes this stuff and my favorite line in that clip of that movie says “I became my father’s son again.” I became my father’s son again. And it took me back to walking at a football field or soccer field holding my dad’s hand and what that felt like and how that would be so important in how you build relationships and how you build a brand and how you communicate and articulate your value.

So I think you have to look for those big rocks, those messages and then what you decide what that message is. For me, that’s the thing we think and do not say the future of our business. Well, here’s the reason we don’t _____ because we don’t have the relationships because we have absence of trust that leads to fear of conflict, that leads to lack of accountability, that leads to status ____ versus collective results.

So if you want to get collective results, I mean look at the University of Alabama, all they have is some trophy winners these days. They did it for a long time. They just won national championships every year and their focus is on collective results, because they have a philosopher that runs their program, Nick Saban. Saban says things like “High achievers don’t like mediocre people and mediocre people don’t like high achievers.” And that’s OK but that’s his message.

He built a process where he said “Keep it simple. Surround yourself with _____.” Make wise investments in the future.” These basic things that manage the message, these basic things that everyone needs to understand on now to build culture and how you create culture as a competitive advantage in a workplace. All that starts with personal relationships and trust.

I mean, think about what Warren said, “Colby, I don’t know what to do with you.” Man, that is a powerful statement and now Warren, we get on the phone and “hey, I’m in a container of trust and I didn’t do something right. Guess who’s coming down on me.” “Colby, I love you but your ADD has gotten a way here. You’re not doing this the way that we agreed that you would do it.” “You’re right, Warren. I’ll get that corrected.” “Thank you, Colby.”

It’s seems a very powerful way to build relationships, and so you asked me what’s the next step? Well, I think the first step is to get the message right. You look in for those defining moments that when they give you the chance to stand in front of somebody…I’ll tell you who gets it right better than anybody on the planet in my humble opinion, my good friend, Joe Calloway. Do you know, Joe?

Andrea: I don’t.

Colby Jubenville: He needs to be on this podcast. Joe Calloway, his books are so good. I called him one day and said, Joe, your books are so good. And I don’t even have to read the book because the title is so good.   He goes, “I know, Colby, ain’t it cool?” I said, “Yes, but I’m cool when you’re cool.” But his books are…my favorite book is Be the Best to What Matters Most: The Only Strategy You Will Ever Need.

Think about that now. If you and I are sitting there, we’re going to build a business together or build a consultant group together, or we’re going to have clients together and you’ll hire me and I say “Hey, Andrea, listen to me. I need to know one thing, what matters the most? Won’t you tell me what that is? I’m gonna do everything to make sure that we deliver on that.”

So I know we’re running out of time here, but my favorite Calloway story…now, listen how good he is. He comes on stage, “I use Discount Tire.” I’ll say, “How many of you have used discount tires?” And everybody does in Middle, Tennessee. Everybody does in the southeast, discount tires, and I’ll say why, and somebody from the crowd screamed, “Because they run through your car. When you pull up, they run through your car.”

And I said “I know, whenever I’m feeling bad about myself, I don’t go home because when I go home, I walk through the door and nobody cares. I go to the Discount Tire because somebody runs through my car.” Well, I feel a whole lot better about myself and you just came running through the car.

Now here’s the takeaway. When Calloway tells a story, he goes “I would imagine that it came from the top. That there was a _____ that came from the top.” He said “I imagine three guys sitting around _____ about 22 years old. He’s working hard all day. They sit around and talk and the man would say “We sell tires. There’s a hole, there’s a round. There’s a good, better, and the best. How can we do it different?”

And he said “I don’t imagine that somebody is in the _____ he goes “These guys are sitting and talking, and this guy with grease on his face who has worked hard all day says “I don’t maybe we can run through the car or something. And he laughed and says “Am I running through the car?” And I’m demonstrating to you that in this moment that you are the most important thing to me.”

When I heard that, it makes me think about the relationships that I tried to have with my kids. Do I demonstrate to Mary Burke? Do I demonstrate to Jack that in the moment that they are the most important things to me.

Andrea: Yeah. Oh, gosh that’s beautiful! Thank you so much, Colby! Thank you for being with us today and for sharing your voice of influence to the world.

Colby Jubenville: Well, hey, I love it and as you can see, we could keep going for hours. So if you want to do another one at any point, you have sometimes, we can keep on going, absolutely!

Andrea: Thank you so much, Colby!

Colby Jubenville: Thank you, absolutely!

 

 

END

 

 

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Discover Your Design and Lead with Purpose

Episode 32 with Dr. Anthony J. Marchese

“Don’t you wish that babies came with owner’s manuals?!” We’ve all wish we could understand our kids, loved ones, friends and coworkers better at one time or another. But what about understanding ourselves? Maybe it’s self-awareness that can help us know what direction to go in life and how to communicate with others. In this interview, I talk with Dr. Anthony J. Marchese about how discovering our design helps us live a life of significance.

Dr. Anthony J. Marchese has over twenty years of leadership experience in corporations, universities, and churches. He is the author of DESIGN: An Owner’s Manual for Learning, Living, and Leading published by WestBow Press. Marchese is a corporate trainer, professor, and avid public communicator.

Find Dr. Marchese’s book here DESIGN: An Owner’s Manuel for Learning, Living, and Leading with Purpose

www.anthonyjmarchese.com

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


Interview Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Today, I have on the line, Dr. Tony Marchese. He has written a book, a fabulous book called Design: An Owner’s Manual for Learning, Living, and Leading with Purpose.

Andrea:   I’m so glad to have you on the podcast today, Tony!

Dr. Tony Marchese: Oh it’s great to be here, Andrea. Thank you very much for the invitation.

Andrea: Yeah, and it’s particularly fun because we have a mutual friend. I had Doug Walters on the podcast a few episodes ago and he and you are actually working together. Can you explain what’s your relationship is just briefly?

Dr. Tony Marchese: Sure. Several years ago, Doug and I worked for a university in Charleston, West Virginia. He was the Dean of Students and I was the Assistant Dean of Students and then I ended up going over to the academic side. But we remain friends, and for many years, we did some consulting together where we go into nonprofit organizations as well as small to medium sized corporations to assist them with anything from HR to organizational design, organizational assessment, and executive coaching. So I worked with him for a long time and he’s a very, very good friend.

Andrea: OK. So you wrote this book and I know that you have a doctor degree in organizational leadership. So tell us about what that is exactly first before we go on.

Dr. Tony Marchese: Sure! My PhD is organizational leadership and I was toying several years ago between going for a PhD in philosophy or PhD in organizational leadership. And I felt like since my bachelors and masters were in the humanities so I wanted to do something that was a little bit more practical. So my area of interest is in the science of human motivation as well as positive organizational psychology.

So rather than viewing organizations and people as problem to be solved, I look at them as opportunities where there’s immense potential and there are immense opportunities. And if we look at what’s essentially right about us, those things at service differentiators and we really learn how to identify those things and develop them and apply them strategically, I think that we can make a major difference not only in our lives but also in organizations.

So that’s what my doctorate was all about and my practice for the past many, many years in my work has been kind of pretty at well aligned with that philosophy I guess you’d say.

Andrea: So you’re using this positive psychology and the things that you’ve learned to help organizations and be able to man better leadership and to be able to communicate better. What would you say are some of the top priorities when you come in to work with people?

Dr. Tony Marchese: Well, I think that many people have an approach where it’s guided by a deficit-based world view. I think that rarely does kind of proliferate our cultures. We’re always trying to identify what is essentially wrong and learn how to compensate for those weaknesses and for me it’s all different disciplines.

Currently, I work for a large international consulting firm that’s based out at DC. I live in West Virginia. I’m the Director of Learning and Development, so I’m essentially a corporate trainer, and I create the leadership and management curriculum for all of our 6000 plus employees worldwide. In terms of the rest of my career, I’ve done a great deal of consulting in medium to large sized corporations. Again, in all of those areas, I just been very interested in helping people understand kind of the intricacies of the self and to really identify those things at serve as differentiators and to develop those and to really learn to channel those strategically in various ways where people want to achieve.

It doesn’t mean that we are unaware of areas where we fall short. But I just kind of have lived my life according to the idea that when we try to compensate for our weaknesses and that’s the chief aim of our professional life, we become adequate at much but excellent at nothing and so that’s really not the approach that I take. I try to help people understand what’s right about them and how to really use that to create a personal brand in one in which they’re able to flourish.

Andrea: Obviously, I really love everything that you’re saying. I’m curious though, in a corporate setting, do you come up against any oppositions to this idea that we should be focusing on what’s right? I recently talked to somebody who is a manager of a small business and they were working with somebody else who had the same kind focus, this strength based kind of focus. He said it was really hard to shift gears because he grew up and spent most of his career in that mindset of “You got to fix what’s wrong, you got to fix what’s wrong.” It feels a little bit like we’re not going to fix what’s wrong then if we don’t do that. So how do you talk to somebody like that? How do you explain this to them?

Dr.Tony Marchese: Well, I think that’s a very common perception that people have, especially initially, when you’re not really adept or familiar with kind of that assets-based approach. I think that the transcending kind of principle, the overarching principle behind all of this is the idea of being self-aware. That can either be from a personal perspective as an individual but also from an organizational perspective. What does that mean to be self-aware? That is the number one thing and when you’re self-aware, not only you’re aware of your strengths but you’re also aware of those areas where you kind of fall short.

But if you’re really good, if you’re self-aware, you understand your reason for existence. You understand why you exist. You understand your chief function. You understand your values and you’re able to leverage those in various ways. So the idea of having a strength-based approach to working or to living does not mean that we ignore what’s essentially wrong, but it’s really kind of future focused rather than dwelling upon those areas that we fall short, we can really, really supplicate within that mindset in living a life or working in a profession immersed in that approach. It’s about identifying what the desired future really looks like.

In positive psychology, there’s this idea of disputation where you reinforce the positive. And as a result of that, the theory goes that the negative, those areas of deficit, where they’re applicable diminish. So it’s not ignoring what’s wrong but it’s making sure that we’re moving in the right direction that our values, our identity, and our true function are all aligned in that particular direction and it’s focusing in what we need to get there.

Andrea: Yeah, I love that quote in your book, “self-awareness is intimately connected to a positively _____ impact and that awareness that you help people to achieve, what’s kind of things are you helping them to become aware of?

Dr. Tony Marchese: One of the things that I do a lot is I work with corporate executives’ kind of an international basis. And the thing that I know that regardless of individuals success, I mean how much money they make regardless of what domain that they may find themselves professionally that they all bring baggage to the work place, everyone of us do that. Some of these bring more baggage than the others or baggage that maybe more potentially harmful to others around us than others.

It’s really important to be aware of our own liabilities and to be cognizant of how those can impact others within the organization. One of the things that I do talk about in the book is a lot of bad behavior that happens among leaders within the workplace has its origin on the playground when the not-yet leader was bullied or pushed down or no one would pick that individual to be a part of their team. They didn’t get invited to play tag and they were kind of in the shadows.

For many people, there’s an injury that occurs very early in life. And for most of us, we don’t really find healing. There’s sort of scar that’s left. Not necessarily an open wound anymore but it’s still there and there’s still sting. As we advanced in our careers, we become smarter and enjoy a more lucrative lifestyle from our earlier years. Unless we actively engage in that process of becoming more self-aware and being aware not only of the good that we bring to the workplace but also those areas that could cause damage or inflict harm then it’s probably going to happen in some degree.

So one of the things that I really try to do is for people in order to be able to move forward, in order to really excel as a leader, you need to start with the basics. You need to understand who you are and in all of the complexities that make up your identity. That includes some of those areas that aren’t so nice. It sort of like Plato’s Cave allegory which I used in the book and it’s often used in many different ways 2500 years after its initial publication.

I think that it’s the idea of being a attentive to what’s above and recognizing the shadow with black and white cavernous existence is one that’s not going to allow us to flourish. And it’s only through the arduous climb out of that cave, facing ourselves, coming out into the light, and being able to look around and see things not just as they appear but as they truly are in color and in multi-dimensions and that type of thing that we’re really able to see things as they are. And to really address who we are and what we bring to the table and to be cognizant again of those areas that aren’t so good. So it’s about being truthful with ourselves I think is one of the main themes.

Andrea: You know that’s interesting because we’re just talking about positive psychology and everything and a lot of times people’s perception of that is that you don’t even pay attention to these things that you’re just talking about the harder things. They’re kind of different too. But bringing those two things together just standing in the truth of who you are and being honest about it that is a really hard thing for people to do.

I’m curious about your experience in facilitating that for other people as they’re going through this process with you. Do you find that people resists going there? How does authenticity and transparency, which are two different things I realized, how do these things play into this process as they’re working through it?

Dr. Tony Marchese: As I speak across the country and as I write articles in different things, especially when I’m speaking in public, a lot of times people will come up to me afterwards and you can see on their face a look of brokenness. Because from many of these individuals, and if someone look at their life, they’d say “Well, they have everything.” They have a nice car. They live in a grand house. They really have wants of really nothing, and yet, it’d come to a point in their lives where despite all those things, despite checking every box that our society would say makes an individual successful and happy and make them content in many, many ways, they’re languishing.

Languishing is not depression. It’s also not flourishing. It’s sort of what one writer calls being wooden, kind of feeling hollow inside and so part of moving forward, part of being honest with ourselves is asking a question, “Is my life worth what I really thought it was going to be?” “Am I really making a difference?” Because I believe that inherent within human nature is that need to really contribute in whatever way is relevant to us to the evolution of the human race. When we’re not doing that, when we’re just living life in a transactional way, I think that slowly our soul begins to atrophy and we find ourselves longing for something more.

When we’re at that place of authenticity, of being aware, and of looking at ourselves as though in a mirror, I think it’s at that point when we’re really in a position in an assuming a posture where we can really make some changes.

Andrea: Yes. OK so you just mentioned a comparison, why don’t you go ahead and do this for me compare what it’s like, what is that look like for somebody to live in a transactional kind of way versus living with purpose?

Dr. Tony Marchese: I think a transactional way is something that is really perpetuated by our culture. We live at a very consumptive lifestyle for the most part. We’re taught to always be seeking opportunities to make ourselves over to be focused on those areas of deficit. If you look at television, if you look at the commercials, if you look a lot of popular TV shows, if you read, or if you’re paying attention to the internet; there such a lot of things that are reminding us who we are in our present state is an adequate and reconstruct ourselves to correspond to whatever the latest trends of societal acceptability look like and so it’s idea of a transactional.

We expand effort of some sort and receive a return of some kind. I don’t think that that is how we were designed to live our lives because when our lives are no more than just here to basically perform a function, we become nothing more than a horse that’s been trained to pull a cart. I think that we are to live lives that are transformational in nature where we really pay close attention to those things that differentiate us from every other human on this planet.

As we look at what I call birthright gifts or what Aristotle called 2500 years ago, entelechies, when we pay attention to those differentiators, and we see what pattern they reveal, there’s a lot of information there about things that we may want to do. Things we may want to consider and things that can move us from that transactional way of thinking and living towards activities that we really were designed to do.

When we’re engaged in those types of things, it’s very similar to flow. It’s almost like a mystical experience. Some of the things that I noticed in my work as I’ve coached executives of different types over the years is that it’s often people that are in roles like teaching or an education of some sort that really kind of have that sense of destiny. They feel like their lives are lives of consequence.

It’s not just teachers but I noticed that especially with those people, they have a sense that they’re not living life as though they paid for their tank of gas at the gas station and requested a carwash. When they get that receipt with that code and they go up and they drive up to the carwash and they input the code and they gained access into the carwash, many people live their lives where they’re at the carwash and they’re just randomly inputting numbers hoping to gain access to what they’re feeling that they need but don’t really understand.

Andrea: Hmm, yeah. OK, I find it interesting that you’re talking about all of these things in relation to people’s personal brands. It sounds like a corporate setting, is that right?

Dr. Tony Marchese: A corporate setting in what sense? What I do?

Andrea: Yeah like what you’re doing.

Dr. Tony Marchese: Yeah. I’ll just say this, when I wrote Design, I wrote it out of the sense of obedience. It was one of those things where I felt like I just absolutely had to do it. That’s why it was written in three months, which kind of crazy. I would come home and it was almost… I was absolutely in a state of float. I think that one of the main things about this book was that it was written to be accessible to all types of people.

I’ve heard many, many stories of teenagers that are reading this book. I know many single parents or parents who have children that have recently left the nest and the parents are now wondering “OK, what am I supposed to do now?” I think I would say that in my day-to-day profession, while I don’t necessarily use the book, I think many of the principles are quite evident in a way that I approach management and leadership.

Because this is all based upon a promise that before we can really lead others effectively, we need to understand how to lead ourselves. If we don’t understand our design, if we don’t understand the intricacies that make us who we are, then we’re not really living the way that we probably want to. It’s probably going to be really hard to lead others.

It reminds me of a quote that Thomas Martin said; he said “How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man’s city?” And the one thing that I know about leadership is that a lot of the leadership and management materials, if you go in the business section of almost any major bookstore, there’s Tom after Tom after Tom promising that “If you do these five things then you’ll be successful like me.” I find that somewhat insulting because it’s so imitative rather than organic.

Design is written for, not to say ignore all these other voices out there, because there’s a lot of value and things like even Voice of Influence podcast, there’s a lot of value and perspective of other people and the wisdom that they bring. But at the same time, don’t deny all of those clues. Don’t deny those voices internally that are screaming for you to pay attention.

Andrea: I totally agree. The promise of this podcast is to help other people hear their own voice of influence. So yeah, I’m in full amen mood right here. You mentioned personal brand, so I’m very curious. How does finding your purpose and all of these things that you talked about in your book, the Design, how does relate to personal branding for you when you look at your own or when you look at helping other people?

Dr. Tony Marchese: Well, the subtitle of the book talks about the idea of an owner’s manual and this is really what the book is about. I started out talking about how this book came to be. Basically, I talked about waking up in the middle of the night and needing to get a drink of water because I was really thirsty. I walked into my kitchen and I looked around and got my water and I noticed a cell phone box on my table, when I remember that I purchased a cell phone the day before, and there was an owner’s manual that was sitting on it.

I never, ever, ever read an owner’s manual for electronics. I’m a techy kind of guy. I’m an early adopter. I ordered a new iPhone this morning at 3:00 a.m. When it came out, I started scheming through this owner’s manual. It was literally 3:00 in the morning when I had to get this drink and I had this weird thought that you’d only have at 3:00 a.m.

As I looked at this owner’s manual especially the table of content, I saw sections like Overview where there was an explanation of the purpose of the product. I saw section called Distinguishing Features, which was all about differentiators, things that differentiate this cell phone from another. There was a section that dealt with requirements for optimal functioning which were basically instructions in order for this to function at its best. There was a section on precautions, which was all about preventing harm. And the last section was Support. If things aren’t working the way they’re supposed to, this is where you go.

And I thought, you know, what if people had an owner’s manual? How might that impact the way that we think about our lives, the way that we plan our lives in terms of making those major decisions like what do I want do with my life professionally for example. I mentioned earlier the parents that maybe their children have left home “How do I know what am I supposed to do next?” Or that executive that has everything but yet feels as though they have nothing and they’re looking for answers.

If we were to really begin to identify those entelechies, which Aristotle said are innate within all living matter, those things that can pick something from a state of potentiality to actuality that can turn an acorn into an oak tree provided that it receives the right nurture and care, the right elements of water and soil and so forth. If we were to really begin to pay attention for those things and to create an owner’s manual based upon those where we understand our purpose, we understand what we need to be at our best, we understand how to prevent harm, we understand where we go for support, and we have that support system in place; I think that we’re going to do a lot less imitating.

I was talking about buying a book and then just going to do everything that it says to do and we’re going to make a lot more decisions based upon what that owner’s manual said about us. Because I believe, unlike some educators who believe in a concept of tabula rasa that humans are born as “blank slates,” I believe there’s great deal of information on every human being. And until we acknowledge that and we affirm those thing and we begin to develop them and strategically apply them in areas where we want to succeed then I think we are going to be languishing.

So the idea of a brand for me is really about being attentive to who you really are. One of the things I say in my book is I say that the childhood is perhaps the most honest season of our lives. When we’re young, we have yet to yield the cacophony of voices competing for our attention. Parents, teachers, television, and connected culture present various compelling visions of our future selves with promises of acceptance, approval, prestige, beauty, and wealth.

We slowly yield our still emerging dreams and gifts not yet developed into talents to act to the expectations of others. Part of us is real self gradually back swaying to the shadows. Eventually, when we find ourselves in middle age enjoying all the benefits of personal and professional success, yet strangely looking for something more. I believe that our most authentic selves, our most authentic moments are as children.

As we grow older, so many factors or so many different types of stimuli that are encouraging us to grow up and to develop and to conform to whatever trends are out there at the time and I believe that we begin to lose ourselves. And so part of this process of identifying our brand is understanding what I call our birthright gifts.

I wrote this, I said “Birthright gifts reveal the depth and breadth of human diversity, and while we all share in common the presence of Design, the way our gifts manifest themselves is as unique to each of us as our DNA. Like discovering our place of origin, knowledge of our gifts serves as a stabilizing force as our identity and calling become clearer. Acknowledging and developing our gifts helps to reveal our place in a brilliant tapestry of human experience.”

Andrea: Hmm, totally. I love that. It’s really beautiful.

Dr. Tony Marchese: And so as I think about things that are in the news, one of the things that’s in the news right now a lot is this whole idea of bullying. It’s been for the past several years. When I was in school, I don’t really remember that being a really big thing. I remember a little bit conversation about it, but it’s really a very real thing and it’s really a horrible thing that happens.

As I think about this idea of Design, I think of a bully. I think of our world has a lot of stuff going on right now and there’s a lot of stuff that’s not so good. There are a lot of uncertainties and people have a lot of anxieties. And the thing about Design is I think is so powerful as we’re faced with all these things that are coming at us and creating all the anxieties. We’re kind of in the sea and it’s a very tempestuous sea.

I think that our design and awareness of our design really serves as a bully and keeps us from going under. And I think about the child that maybe bullied. How powerful it would be to know even in the midst of some of these bad stuffs that’s going on at school, you know, “This is who I am. I’m here and my life is a life of consequence and I’m here to do some very specific things.”

I don’t think as Design is something that’s just for older people, for those executives that we’re talking about before. I think that there’s a great deal of opportunity with even younger people as well.

Andrea: Definitely. I’m totally in agreement with that. I’ve had conversations with our kids about “If you end up feeling like somebody is trying to squash this part of you in some way, in your mind, acknowledge that maybe they just don’t understand. They don’t understand you and that’s OK and the idea that they might know, that they are created in a certain way that they’re designed that these things that might be driving other people crazy or might be really powerful things that needs some honing maybe, maybe they need to be channeled in a right direction but that’s such a power inside of them. I mean, I think it’s encouraging and empowering for those kids and the parents.

Dr. Tony Marchese: It makes me think about also one of the concepts that I write about in the book and that’s the concept of “dream stealers.” I tell you, as I go around the country and I talk about Design, I can’t think of any other story that I share from the book that resonates more than the story that I share of dream stealers in this whole concept. It’s almost like universal. Everyone can relate to at least one person in our life who acted in this way.

A dream stealer can be one of two types. It ultimately has this idea where they deplete our greatest desires rendering us pain and empty and sometimes feeling of lost. It can be a parent who urges their child to be realistic and responsible and a lot of times, it may come from a lack of experience on their part or it may be a fear of the unknown. The words might come from a parent who didn’t go to college and was successful and feels as though it’s not a necessary thing. It can come in a lot of different ways.

But one of the things that I know was handling your child’s destiny is a very, very delicate matter. I think other dream stealers have a far more sinister intention and a lot of times they target our clues to selfhood, our birthright gifts, our entelechies and can sometimes derail our entire professional trajectories any existing confidence that’s there in that person.

For me, I was a very averaged high school student. In my elementary school years, I spent several years in gifted program and in fact took classes at a high school in fifth and sixth grade for half a day. When I got into high school eventually, I wasn’t really engaged and I was taking classes like music theory and radio and television and public speaking, things like that wasn’t under the AP track, let’s put it that way. I think I had a 2.6 GPA, but I decided my senior year that I wanted to go to college and I wanted to go to the local community college.

So I remember towards the end of the year that I was going to be having what you basically call an exit interview with my guidance counselor and I was excited because I was going to let her know that I was going to go to college. I’ll never forget when I received the invitation to go upstairs and to see her.

I went out there and my heart was really pounding and I was really excited. I sat down and we had small talk and then the question, “So Tony, what are you gonna do after high school?” And I said “Well, I wanna go to the community college. I wanna become a teacher.” And I’ll never forget her looking at me dead in the eyes and she said “Tony, you’re not college material. You’d never make it in college.” I had a DJ business at the time and did very well. She said “The best thing you could do is just keep DJ’ing. You won’t make it in college.” I left there so depleted, so upset, and really, really injured.

Andrea: It’s crashing.

Dr. Tony Marchese: It was. And many years later as I walk the stage to receive my PhD, I had a flash of her face that went through my mind and I thought “You know, I’d love to go see her.” I ended up working with youth shortly after that period and I heard story after story of kids that either heard that same thing from her or from other people. We have to be so careful about the words that we say. Like I said a person’s destiny is a very delicate matter.

Andrea: Yes! Do you think that that was part of your motivation for pursuing continued education in this area and writing the book and all that?

Dr. Tony Marchese: I can only say this, I’ve always had a pretty strong sense of self and I’ve been pretty self confident. I’m here in the timeline of history for a reason and that really has driven me to make a lot of decisions that I have. I don’t like to hear people tell me you can’t do something. So I do think that it did act as a motivator. I really can’t fully explain it. I think that some people maybe are a little bit more resilient than others.

I know that other individuals may have heard those kinds of words and there’s nothing wrong with working in a blue color job. There’s nothing wrong doing a vocational or low tech type of thing at all. We need those professions but I know of so many individuals over the course of my 20-plus-year career who ended up choosing a different path that really wasn’t aligned with where they really were at and with what their birthright gifts or their entelechies said. For them in many cases, they do engage in a transactional approach to life and its life is lost, its joy or its magic I guess you could say, that wonder that I write about in the book.

Andrea: Yeah. It’s hard for me to see people not living into the fullness of who they are, not that it’s kind of idealistic but that is hard. It’s hard to see wasted human potential. It’s very painful almost.

Dr. Tony Marchese: Yeah, and I truly believe that the world suffers every time an individual lets that flame, that spark, get pushed down and smothered. Like I said, I don’t think that I’m unique at all in the sense that I’m in this timeline in history and in this place. I think everyone of this are here for a very, very specific purpose. And I think that when we just become consumers of life, we just become consumers of oxygen when we go to our jobs and we come home and really don’t have any sense of destiny, any sense of a purpose. We just kind of go to the motion.

It’s hard to know what kind of an impact that really has because I don’t think that our gifts, I don’t think that those things that captivated us as a child that we’re just kind of emerging but meant to be nurtured and cultivated to move that acorn towards that oak tree. It’s hard to really calculate, to quantify what that impact really has upon our role.

Andrea: I really appreciated the fact that at the end of your book, you gave so many exercises and things that people could actually do to write their own manual for themselves. I wonder if you would mind sharing a little bit about it with us that Creative Disruption exercise. I love it. Would you share that with us? Maybe some of us are stuck. Maybe some of us are feeling like we’re in a day-to-day grind and it’s just more comfortable there. Maybe there’s more for us.

Dr. Tony Marchese:   I’m happy to do that. Creative Disruption is the concept of really altering patterns of your life. There are certain patterns. I could go through all kinds of them that I have been following or engaging for probably 20 or 30 years. We all have those kinds of things. We have our routines. We have a way to go about things. The idea of Creative Disruption is an experiment basically and it’s the idea of picking something, choosing something one of those things in our routine.

So for example, one idea might be that you wake up in the working and you’re still in bed and the first thing you do is you turn on the news and you watch the news. Well, you might find later in the day that you really are sort of preoccupied with negativity. You’re really preoccupied with a sense of some just “Uh there’s just so much bad stuff in the world.” It really brings you down. I know that it does to me sometimes.

So you’ve been doing this for years and years and years, so the idea of Creative Disruption would be to maybe instead of doing that, maybe reverse that. And instead of lying in bed for half an hour watching the news, you get up and you go workout or you go for a walk. You do that for a week and just see if you learn something about yourself. See what kind of an impact that there has on your life. Another great thing is that some people absolutely have to have noise. They have to have noise all the time.

A great Creative Disruption exercise is to turn it off during a specific time and just see what it’s like to be alone with your own thoughts. It might be scary but you might come upon a great idea or strategy or a new awareness. Another one is that a lot of people don’t journal at all, and I think that there’s so much stuff that bombarding our senses every day and it can be absolutely overwhelming. I think that rather maybe watching that 30-minute show that you like to watch maybe have it recorded and watch it another time. But during that time when you normally watch it, spend 30 minutes and journal about your day.

I find that in the act of journaling for example, it’s a way of getting all that stuff that’s all bottled up within us and it’s just making us anxious. It gets out and it puts down on a paper where you can kind of step back and see what’s going on. A lot of times, I find that many people have epiphanies of sorts as they do that. It really is a very therapeutic exercise, so creative disruption can take on so many different forms but it’s in experiment, in changing your routine, disrupting the norm in very intentional ways to see if something emerges about yourself that could be helpful. At many times, people continue on of those that it becomes a new routine for a while.

Andrea: Yeah. That’s super powerful but I will say that like most people don’t want to change that kind of thing. They don’t want to try. It’s scary, so what do you say to that person? “I don’t wanna change. I don’t wanna change.” You know, they always say that.

Dr. Tony Marchese: Well, I say that the worst thing that I think you could do is to try to change everything all at once; you know. I think the idea is to identify little things and again things are somewhat safe, things that are disruptions, but aren’t a complete kind of a thing. The whole final chapter of my book, the chapter entitled Deciphering your Design is all about what that process looks like.

So yes, full of different activities. Several of those could happen within the context of a retreat which I talked about, you know, going on a personal retreat. Not many of us are able to do that with their lifestyles or the way they are, but maybe blackout 30 minutes a day or if you’re lucky an hour a day or a couple of hours a week in your calendar and you work on some of these things that are in that chapter. Do some of these activities that are there.

Some of them are just kind of thinking and throws some questions and to kind of really understand a lot of things from way back. Because again, I think that some of the greatest _____ ourselves in what would ultimately make us happy now when we go back 20, 30, 50, or 60 years depending how old you were. So this process of deciphering your design, it requires some concentration and it requires of being in an environment that’s kind of free from disruption where you can really think and process and reflect. But like I said, not everybody can literally go away for a week and do that.

Andrea: I do like the idea of a retreat though because I think it might be an easier way to then come back. If you go away and get a start on it in a different space that’s just make a huge difference. You don’t have your normal responsibilities and relationships maybe that you’re taking care of and you’re able to get out of that and start to think about it and then come back and do the creative disruptions, the other kind of creative disruptions. I think that’s a really great way to do it because you’re ready. You have to set your mind ahead of time and your heart ahead of time too “You know what; I don’t wanna change this one little thing and try it.”

I think it’s really hard for people to do it right in the middle of what they’re doing unless they’re already really hungry or in great deal of pain.

Dr. Tony Marchese: I think that’s true and in some cases, sometimes the people that I talk with at that place, they’re really kind of along the edge where they just had enough. But for others, it’s not quite to that point yet and that’s good and sometimes it’s more of a subtle process.

Andrea: Yeah. And I think if we were to view pain as the opportunity to make changes that need to be made, you know, that is a very motivating factor so maybe we don’t need to run away from pain and we don’t need to resist it so much as look at it and say “OK, what need to change? What do I want to change?”

Dr. Tony Marchese: Some of that pain you know, Andrea, is connected to our gifts. I mentioned earlier the idea of dream stealer and again I found almost everyone that I talked to can relate to that in some way whether they’re a parent, a coach, a teacher, or a boss. All of these probably have some experience of that type of person who really, really encouraged us to keep our feet on the ground. For some, they kind of dig a hole and bury yourself. In many ways, those words are targeted around that persons birthright gifts or their entelechies.

So that process of discovering, deciphering, or design is a lot of times painful because it forces us to go back and to kind of face that person. Maybe that person is no longer alive but it requires us to really consider the impact of their words and how harmful they were and how wrong they were. Ultimately were responsible for our own lives and we’re responsible for nurturing our gifts and trying to make a difference and I think for a very few people, it’s an easy process.

Andrea: Yeah. Yeah, don’t play the victim. You don’t have to be a victim.

Dr. Tony Marchese: No.

Andrea: Yeah, we are responsible. I love that.

Dr. Tony Marchese: You know and the idea of the other thing is that just as there are dream stealers, there are also dream starters. The dream starters are those individuals who don’t just see as we are but they see us as we could become, you know, they spot our entelechies.

Fred Rogers said “As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has – or ever will have – something inside that is unique at all time. It’s our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression.”

I just really think that we need to be aware of the words that we share with other people and maybe we’ve been a dream stealer to someone, maybe we’ve inadvertently causing individual not to pursue something that they probably were supposed to do. I just think that we just need to be very aware of that and to make sure that we’re being a dream starter in someone else’s life.

Andrea: That’s great! Yes, let’s be dream starters! Well, thank you so much for your time with us today and sharing all of your wisdom and all of the knowledge that you’ve gained over the years on this particular topic especially Design and your passion behind it. It’s very inspiring.

Dr. Tony Marchese: Well, thank you so much. It’s been a great opportunity and I really, really appreciate the chance to be on your podcast.

Andrea: Sure and where should I send the people? Where do you want people to come find you and your book?

Dr. Tony Marchese: Well my book is available online. I’m on Amazon, if they just do a search for Design: An Owner’s Manual to Learning, Living, and Leading with Purpose. Or search Design and Marchese. It’s available in all major online booksellers and they can also find out more about me at anthonyjmarchese.com.

Andrea: That’s great. Well, link to all of that in the show notes for listeners to get really easy for them. Well, thank you again and let’s go big dream starters.

Dr. Tony Marchese: Let’s do that. Well, have a great day. Thank you so much!

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How to Find People Who Will Challenge You to be Your Best

Episode 21 with Laurie Hock

Laurie Hock’s coaching credentials through Gallup and the John Maxwell Team define her specialization of helping people stop living life, and start leading it. Through her company, Growing Points, she creates and delivers individual and group growth experiences purposed to “set the caged bird free and empower those already flying to soar higher.

Laurie is a personal friend and one of the many powerful things we discuss on this episode is how we started and developed our own friendship to challenge and encourage one another to be our best.

Find Laurie at www.lauriehock.com and sign up for her monthly video series.

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 my friend, Laurie Hock on the line. And Laurie is somebody that is really into her calling and who she is kind of continuing to grow and develop her own self as well as the offerings that she makes the to the world.

 

Andrea: So Laurie, I’m so thrilled to have you on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Laurie: Thank you! It’s a total joy to be here with you!

Andrea: Well, Laurie and I have been friends for a couple of years. I don’t know how long have we been friends, maybe about three or four years?

Laurie: Yeah, probably around there.

Andrea: Something like that and she lives in North Platte where I live. A few years ago, we’re in the same bible study, small group kind of thing and Laurie took off on some trip and she came back and was like ready to go with this whole new purpose in her life and it was just amazing. And since then, she has really grown and she has really inspired me to look at what I offer as something that could be done as a business. I don’t know, we just had quite a little journey together, Laurie.

Laurie: That’s right. Yeah, it’s fun to think about as each of us grew individually; we also grew together as well. What a beautiful thing.

Andrea: Yeah. So Laurie, why don’t you tell the Influencers listening what it is that you do right now?

Laurie: Right now, I have found my true sweet spots and some of these will probably be described as our conversation continues, but moving from working with people one-on-one primarily to creating growth experiences. And I’m both a coach, speaker, facilitator; I’d feel probably describes me best as I get to come alongside people in their growth journey and help them really navigate their way from where they are to where they want to be and getting in touch with the core of their true self.

Being able to celebrate what’s great about them and really creating this kind of transformation in the context of community and relationship with others, which is what I think is one of the greatest and most significant aspects and elements of any growth. So I serve people locally. I serve people in different states as well. Much of what I do can be done virtually or in person, so there’s really no geographical limits and there are needs all over the world. It’s a wonderful, wonderful exciting privilege of watching other people really come alive and step into their greatness.

Andrea: And you have a couple of credentials really behind you. That credentials and also these influences tools that these things have offered you which would be like the John Maxwell Team and the Gallup StrengthsFinder. Do you want to tell us just briefly about those?

Laurie: Sure! Yeah, I’m very privileged to be able to be connected with really some of the global experts on the planet in the field of personal development and what really started this journey for me several years ago as becoming a coach and speaker with the John Maxwell Team. John is by far and has been for years the world expert on leadership. He is the number one leadership guru and I get to be affiliated with him. He really has been on a mission in his later years of his career of wanting to leverage his name and his influence to give other speakers and coaches a platform to open opportunities for them.

So he’s been a big influence in my life. I use some of his materials in what I do and his ideas have helped me shape my own ideas around what it means to be a leader. I continue to stay connected with the team on many levels. So there’s that and then also the privilege. The experience you mentioned in the introduction was when I went to Gallup to be trained as a Certified Strengths Coach and that’s really about leveraging their Clifton Strengths Assessment. To help people identify what they do best and their innate talents and strengths that really indicates where their greatest potential lies and how they can develop that to achieve the greatest results and sense of fulfillment and satisfaction and success in their lives.

So I have some really amazing tools that both of those affiliations gave me that the true joy in finding my voice of influence has been, not just in speaking from one of those lanes or the other, but allowing them to marinate and come together within me. And then speaking my truth of how those blend and how I find my own voice and make my own ideas from that foundation of how I can best serve and support clients, friends, peers, family, and all the people in my life.

Andrea: Hmm I love that idea of wanting these other influences and letting them saturate and become like really a synthesis and I guess to come out as your own voice. Yeah, that’s really cool!

Laurie: Yeah, exactly!

Andrea: I know that I you didn’t start out your career path with this particular thing in mind. If you want take us back to what you were doing that moment that you knew that you wanted to move in this direction of finding business and developing your voice of influence in the space where you can really utilize your own strengths and offer that to other people?

Laurie: Yes. I will give you a brief insight into my life in 2007 that’s really where this revelation started and then it’s been a process over the last 10 years. Oh actually, let me go farther back even than that. In sixth grade, I really set my sight and got very clear for some specific reasons that I wanted to be a dietitian, a nutritionist in terms of how I understood it then. So I pressed on with that in pursuing all my educational requirements to be a registered dietitian. And everything that I aspired to do in that, I now see the motivation underneath that is the same thing I am doing now. It was just going to be expressed toward helping people create positive changes in their health and developing healthy lifestyles. What wasn’t correct in that fate was the specific industry that I was applying that in.

And so as passionate as I was to help other people to create positive change, I felt a lot of limitations in that particular career path of being a dietitian that wasn’t going to allow me to do that the most fully and in a way that made me feel most alive and engaged. I had great coworkers and colleagues there but it felt like it wasn’t the right fit. And I came to that revelation in 2008 or so that I needed to really be willing to lay down that part of me and being able to create and new way forward.

That was a really huge identity crisis in every sense of everything I thought I was was no more in the sense that if I lay down that career path, I knew in my heart it wasn’t the right fit anymore. It would be a disservice to stay there knowing that just because I had all my educational investment and requirements met there, it would be a disservice to not only my own destiny but to the lives that my life is purposed to speak into. There were too many limitations and restrictions in that industry for my voice to be most heard.

And so I had to find out who is Laurie Hock without that career. Who’s Laurie on her own? Who’s Laurie without any sort of work-related attachments to it? And I think that’s a question very few people ask themselves and that begin a very deep soul searching journey for me because I didn’t have the answer to that. I knew different things I enjoy and was good at but I’d never thought just who I was at the core of my identity without anything else defining that.

So it took several years to come into that but the biggest decision and that turning point was making the intentional choice to create a new way forward that I could redefine myself. I could find my deeper truth that I didn’t have to stay with what it was or who I had been to that point, but that I could define who I was going to be outside of what I did.

Andrea: Hmmm. Laurie, was there anything in particular that helped you to realize that you didn’t have to stay there, that you could be something new? Do you remember?

Laurie: You know at that point, I didn’t have a lot of community. I didn’t have a coach I was working with. I was totally unaware of this whole personal development industry and all the opportunities of working with people that are experts at this. I remember I started going to the library. We were living in San Antonio at the time and I picked up a few John Maxwell’s books actually.

And I began to feel that there was something greater within me that was begging to be awakened. And through the practice of reading some of these leadership-related materials and paired with journaling to really get in touch with the deeper things going on inside me. This restlessness, this cry for more when I could sit and really allow those feelings from within to be exposed and surfaced and expressed in the form of my nightly journaling, wow, I just heard such a longing in me. That even if I didn’t know what it was and as risky as it felt to lay that other piece down, I knew it was far riskier to stay. And so it was just this light-bulb moment. It’s a combination of all those. Does that make sense?

Andrea: Sure! So really, I mean John Maxwell has a huge impact on you from the get-go.

Laurie: Yeah. I think this is true for all of us that there are certain voices that the spirit within us just clings to and it resonates with us so richly and so deeply even if it’s far beyond that we can’t understand in the moment. It speaks to us and it awakens something inside that knows it’s going to continue to unlock more of our potential and more opportunities for what’s ahead.

Andrea: Yeah that’s cool! Okay, so what happened after you kind of had this light-bulb moment like “Wait a second; I don’t have to go down this path that I was going down. I could choose this other path.”

Laurie: Yeah, it came with a lot of tears. I’ll be honest, I feel a lot of grieving and searching and then from just the decision to find a new way to create a new way, it probably took about five years actually. My husband had a job changed. We relocated back to Nebraska. I sensed heavily then that I wasn’t to look for a position here in North Platte as dietitian. I had left that in the past life and so I had some times. We started a family. I had some years with some kids all the while doing intensive searching within me and that’s a real discipline.

It takes time to truly find who we are but in that, the fruit of that is within over that compounding effort, the voice of influence we carry becomes clear. So yeah, I encourage everyone listening to this to give yourself the space, the time, and the freedom to enjoy the process. This cannot be manufactured overnight. It’s not an overnight success. It is something that really takes consistent commitment. And I believe we find our message when we first find ourselves.

Andrea: Yeah I like that. I really like that! We find our message when we find ourselves and we have to enjoy the process and kind of let it just set it in and keep moving. I love that. Yeah, because five years that’s a long time and it’s hard when you have little kids. That was definitely a struggle for me to try to understand who I was in the middle of having kids. But you were really processing all of that in the midst of that. At what point then did you decide it was time to move forward that you found yourself, you found your message?

Laurie: Yeah, I’d say the awakening really became clear, I was in some other leadership roles in our community but was feeling like in those situations, people were looking to me for the answers and I was wondering who can I look to for the answers. I know I was too young in my journey to have all the answers. I needed someone that could lead me so that I could lead them and that came through this incredible process of then discovering that John Maxwell had a team of people he was training and equipping and credentialing to be leadership coaches and speakers.

So I joined and made the investment in myself to join his team strictly for personal growth. That was back in 2013 with no intentions of it becoming anything more than just me growing as a leader so that I could feel this bigger call in my life, this leadership mandate. Even though I had no idea what’s that look like, I could sense it that I needed to be equipped and grow as a leader to be able to carry out my life’s mission.

So I found out that you can join the Maxwell Team. I did it for personal growth. I went to my first live event in 2014 with John in Orlando and it was rather unexpected but I really looked back at that moment and now see that I received my life calling there in the middle of one particular session.

It just became incredibly clear through a lot of just emotional eruption of joy and gladness and tears and all sorts of things that God was really calling me to make a business that would empower leaders and help them understand and recognize their true potential to be alongside in this journey and developing it. To call out who they really are so they can step forward more boldly and confidently and to fulfill their life’s purpose.

And it was just very clear that this is my time. This is my time and I didn’t have a clue that business was on my radar at all. It was so clear in that moment. Of course, I said yes immediately and everything shifted in that moment. Even before going to that event, I remember sitting out by the pool before the first session and I love to journal my thoughts before going in to some experience like that and just really putting out there “I’m expecting this to change my life. I’m coming to be transformed.”

And I remember just this _____ before going into that first day was that I wrote down in my journal “Your whole life has been leading up to this moment.” So I felt then like “This is my voice” and it’s been a process in the years since of finding what it looks like to do that and to be that but that day changed everything for me.

Andrea: Yeah. I remember you coming back from that experience and coming into this little small group of a number of basically stay-at-home moms and saying “I’m supposed to start a business.” Your joy, your excitement, it was such a clear picture of how affirmed you felt in that decision, in that call.

Laurie: Yeah. It felt like everything had been leading up to that moment and what I thought was _____ so that I can grow others and it can go a pinnacle in receiving that calling and then coming home thinking “I’m doing this no matter what.” It’s so obvious to me even though it’s so unknown. It cannot be bought. It’s so clear and so unknown at the same time. I think so the big picture vision is so clear and how to get there is the unknown but we find that one day at a time.

Andrea: Yes, yes, so true! Yes, I love that because you knew it was ahead but you didn’t know exactly what steps to take, what does it mean to run a business, and all those things. But that vision you had seems to be really motivating you to be able to keep your nose to the grinding and keep figuring that out even if you don’t know what’s next.

Laurie: Because we know the why. See I got my why that day in Orlando. The how is negotiable. The how doesn’t matter in the big picture when we’re connected to that why that’s what drive us forward. That’s what’s drive our influence is the why, our why.

Andrea: Definitely! Then basically you started this business and it’s kind of turned into what it is today over the course of a few years. Do you want to say anything else about that transformation of your business?

Laurie: I think what has been really critical for me in that and this is truly a main message I would love to emphasize to your audience is that it really takes the help and support of other people for us to find our voice however that’s expressed. If it’s in terms of business or personal things in terms of your relationship and the influence you have with other people in your life. I believe we can’t find our voice on our own.

So when things begin to get really clear of what I’m best at and what my business is most effective at doing and how it can meet the needs of the people around me that my voice is called to reach. That clarity all came from the context of being in relationship and connection with other likeminded peers and experiencing the benefit of really feeling support, and I’ll define support in just a moment, for people to help me clarify my own value.

We don’t understand what we’re best at or where we really shine because it’s so familiar to us. The same work I do with strengths. People don’t recognize their strengths or that significant because they’ve always been there. They’re so normal to them. We don’t realize that it’s exceptional to others. And so in the context of me being a participant in several masterminds with my colleagues and peers that are in the same industry really allowed me to get clear on what my voice can best accomplish.

Andrea: So what is that look like for you in terms of finding those other voices, those other people in your life that could give you that kind of feedback?

Laurie: I know. Isn’t that powerful that in order to find our voice, we need the voice of others? I think that’s so perfect of how we’ve been designed to need and really have to depend on one another but it’s a _____ to depend on one another. So what is that look like to find people? I think what that’s really look like for me and what I would encourage your listeners to consider as well is really finding the people that are willing to challenge you. When I began to experience this environment of support, I discovered that supporting one another doesn’t mean agreeing with one another.

Andrea: Hmmm yes!

Laurie: When we think of “Oh I support you in that,” or when we think of people supporting us, we think of kind of people maybe standing and applauding with us or celebrating us in some way and really _____ in a way that means they’re probably agreeing with us, encouraging us, and behind us sort of thing in what we’re pursuing. But what I have found as the strongest support that I can both receive and that I can give is the support that means I stand for your best, I stand for you. I stand with you, for you, and your highest good no matter what it costs me or what it cost you and being willing to really play all in on behalf of the best interest of others.

The support that I found has been instrumental to me really owning my voice of influence is embracing my role as a challenger. I feel like that best describes it where the best way I can support others and I encourage you as you’re looking for what kind of voice that could speak into you and help you define your message and your sphere of influence and your life mission. Who’s going to be willing to disagree with you or to risk your approval to speak your higher truths and speak into you and show you your best assets, your blind spots, and some of the other things that we have to have that outside perspective to do for us.

When I began experiencing that through this peer connection, I begin to grow faster than I ever grown before. It was truly and epic exhilaration of explosive growth when I had people and it’s a handful. It’s not multitudes that are willing to speak with us and be with us in our journey like this; it’s a handful of a select few that are willing to walk that road for us.

But I think in your heart of hearts if you begin to look around and see who you’re naturally drawn to, who inspires you in some way and being able to kind of mind what it is that draws me to them and what I admire in them and show me something I need to grow in in my own life that’s what happened for me is that some people that I admired were exceptional setting boundaries and being very clear and very direct in a loving way.

But that was radically different from what I’ve experienced or really taking a strong stand in letting their voice be expressed no matter how it was received when given from that place of care. But I realized “Wow, I’m admiring that in him because I need more of that in me.”

Andrea: Yeah. This is making me think about how really when we hear, and I’ve seen this in my relationship with you and my relationship with other people but as you have expressed a certain kind of style or voice, tone, or challenge; when you see that in other people and you see that there’s something in you, it almost gives you permission or you start to realize that you can do that too.

It may not be the same as the other person but I’ve noticed that for myself for sure that as I’ve seen that in you and other people, it’s just different things, confidence, whatever it might be that “Gosh, you know what, I could step into my confidence too.” And I think that what you’re saying about being in a community like that in an environment where somebody would be willing to push you and challenge you most certainly I can see how that would help the actual leader that’s involved and that put themselves in that position that they would then get some of those attributes for themselves as well where it awaken those in them.

Laurie: Yes, exactly! I think we all have people in our lives that support us in the traditional sense of love and celebrate who we are and what we do. But the rare jewels are those that are willing to tell us what other people either can’t see or unwilling to say. Those of them are the most meaningful relationships in my life in helping shape my voice in a way that nothing else could of those ones that are really willing to say the hard things and stand with us through that.

Andrea: And you know when someone is in a position of leadership, which I know that you’re working with people who are in positions of leadership, when they’re in that position, it’s very uncommon for other people to feel like they can or want to or want to risk that idea of challenging that leader in any sort of way. I can see how that would be incredibly valuable for that person to find it outside of their normal environment. I guess, by coming to a group like yours or the sort of community that you seem to be talking about.

Laurie: Exactly. I have two distinct programs right now and that’s really the sole purpose that were gathered together to be a group for women, women rising above the lies that limits us and helping us overcome those things that are holding us back from speaking and being our true authentic self and being willing to challenge one another in that. And a group for company leaders called Catalyst where again it’s a community thing. But what I wanted to share just for a bit though is about the process.

I love how you said “we have to give ourselves permission to kind of go there with people.” And I think giving myself permission to really embrace my role as challenger took a while. That was months in the making. It just becomes really clear in the last year. It’s been unfolding over the past year actually of realizing I’d always seen myself and this relates to what I shared a few minutes ago about the traditional way where we understand support.

I’ve always seen myself as the cheerleader and this natural encourager that came so easily for me and people really seem to appreciate and be inspired by how I could really instill belief in them through the encouraging words that just very effortless for me to give but very sincere and genuine. But when I began to recognize that there was a deeper part of me that was waiting to be discovered in this challenge or piece, it felt very unsafe initially.

And I really had to wrestle through “But I’ve always been a cheerleader” like I’m not sure if it’s okay for me to really stand in that place of what seemed to me, to conflict with celebrating and honoring who they were. So I’d always limiting beliefs I had to work out which is true in most cases. That’s why I feel like I’ve gotten very good at identifying limiting beliefs in the people I work with because I’ve gone so much practice on myself. Being able to hear the ways by limiting beliefs and talking about the things that we’re believing either on the conscious or unconscious level, but how I define this are really beliefs that limit our present ability and restrict our future potential.

So this belief I had, “It’s not okay to be a challenger like I am cheerleader. I’m nice. I’m friendly. People call me smiley wherever I go and they have my whole life sort of thing.” This whole persona that I had wrapped around that but was not going to allow me to tap into this challenge or piece of me that’s really the challengers where my true voice of influence is.

Andrea: Oh Laurie that is really cool and I certainly see that. When you talk about a persona that’s the kind of thing that does not come down easily, a persona is something that you know we really construct around ourselves that is there for a reason and can often…I don’t know be really painful to let go of. Did you find that for yourself that it was hard to let go of the ones so that you could embrace the other?

Laurie: It took probably at least six months of working on myself and just a lot of reflection, a lot of writing and processing, and trying to figure out what always going within me. A lot of conversation with my peers and working with my coach, a lot of conversations and really examining how I was showing up in my life and what things indicated where limiting beliefs was hiding or holding me back. But what I realized in that was that I didn’t realize…I thought the smile was me and it is…hear me on that, it is. When I smile, it is sincere. It’s who I am. It’s the expression of my DNA and all that I am.

I didn’t realize how much I was hiding behind it as well that it was actually, yeah to some degree this a mask or this persona that there was deeper truths inside me. But because I felt I had to maintain this smiley demeanor because that was who I am, right? And that’s what people expected me to be that if not Laurie starts poking people from a place of love but still poking them in the sense of calling them to more and saying “I disagree with that. You’re making an excuse for yourself there. You’re lying to yourself. You’re putting below your means,” whatever that looks like.

Yeah, that took a lot of work, internal work I’m talking about to be able to say, you know it’s grounded in care when my voice comes from a stand of love and they can see my heart in that. I have the power. I have the authority. I have the commissioning, the call to speak into those things that my eyes have been gifted to see and call forth the things within them that they can’t see in themselves, to call out those limiting beliefs and help them discover the higher truth. To be able to identify those things and to create new life in them by challenging their perspective or their way of beings so that they can become more and who they’re designed to be.

When I began to see that my heart _____ in that of calling them to do their best and helping develop their potential, it doesn’t always look like nice. But I don’t think any of us want nice more than we want growth and to really sense that someone is willing to advocate for our best no matter what, that’s where the real value is. That’s what my clients experienced with me. They say that means more than anything else. That they don’t find that in other relationships in their lives because most people have too many insecurities to allow them to speak freely and directly and fiercely like that. But you got to hear me; it’s from the grounding of love that allows my true heart to come forth and for it to be able to be received in a place that others see as a gift not a threat.

Andrea: Yeah that’s like the surgeons’ merciful knife. It’s not malicious. It’s what the purpose of destroying of building up and yeah…

Laurie: Yeah, strengthening.

Andrea: And restoring yeah. That’s really refreshing to have somebody come in and say “Hold on a minute.

Laurie: Yes. I think we’re all starving for those voices in our lives whether we realize it or not and that’s why they were so meaningful when I begin to find a few challengers in my life to be able to really experience the value of that and that gave me the courage to really be able to take my stand and own that that’s what my voice says “I am the challenger.” And as terrifying as it felt at first, it feels so free now. I’ve never felt more at peace with myself and more powerful in the sense that this is my purpose.

Andrea: I’ve really appreciated our relationship. I feel like we should share a little bit about just the way that we have interacted a little bit because I think that it could be really beneficial to other people who are looking for other people that they could walk through this journey with. And while I think it’s really beneficial to have a coach, it’s also beneficial to have peers. And so how would you describe our relationship in the way that we have pursued this?

Laurie: You are a priceless gift to me, Andrea. You have brought so much value into my life by you being who you are and freely expressing and generously giving your gifts through our conversation has been really key to me sharpening my voice, my clarity, my stand that I wish that for everybody that they would be able to find a peer, a friend, a true support. And I believe it takes time because I’ve longed for a friendship like this for a long time and someone that could really get me and that could hold all of me.

And you’re big enough, you’re great enough, you’re grand enough and all of your power to be able to hold all of me because for all of these influencers here, man, we have a big call on our life, right? I believe everybody on the planet has unlimited potential but they’re not all accessing it. They’re not all engaging it. They’re not stepping forward in an intentional way to do something truly remarkable, globally remarkable for that matter.

But I believe that’s your thrive, Andrea. That’s the people you’re attracting of this incredible stellar global leaders and I would say, keep your eyes open and be persistent. I’ve had to try on several different relationships to explore and see what space that friendship would allow me to have and I think we all are aware that we have different levels of relationships, different flavors of relationships in our lives.

But for you and I, I think we’re we both come together anytime we’re in a conversation or in experience together. There’s just such mutual respect for one another, such clarity on the great things that are happening now and the bigger things that are to come. There’s not a sense of competition or comparison I think that can sabotage relationships very quickly, but just this expectation that both of us are creating our own unique journey. And it’s going to look so differently even though we’re called to such similar things.

The way it’s going play out, it’s going to be very unique and individualized to us being able to come together to celebrate that and to show each other what one of us can’t see. And being able to just provide both kind of equal measure encouragement and balance, I think that’s truly what makes the recipe for a very fruitful intentional friendship. And wow, being able to also stay consistently engaged with that that it not be something that we know is there but that we’re not intentionally continuing to nurture.

And as you and I tried to be as diligent with getting together and catching up and regrouping and speaking into one another on a regular basis because a lot of life happens in between a week or two or a month. And when we can lose sight on the intricacies of one another’s journey, we have less leveraged to really speak into them because we’re less aware of where they’re at. So yeah, I’ll pause here. What are your thoughts? I’d love to hear from you too.

Andrea: Yeah, that was such a great description and I want to highlight one of the things that you said the comparison and competition thing because when we first…well, first of all you were the one that initiated the relationship, I would say that. And I think what other people, an influencer listening, what you probably should take away from this is # 1 – you start out with figuring out what you have to offer somebody else because Laurie came to me and she said she had the strengths training that she was going through and she wanted to invite me to participate to take the assessment and to do a little bit of coaching with that and I was like “OK we’ll let’s try that.” So I feel like we’re really kind of started to take the turn, don’t you Laurie?

Laurie: I do and can I go back a little bit further than that?

Andrea: Sure!

Laurie: Sometimes, we really have to be diligent to pursue the people that we want bring into our life and be in relationship with. I observed you speaking at one of the Mocks meeting a few years, can you hear me?

Andrea: Yes!

Laurie: Prior to that, the message you gave spoke to me. And I thought “I need to meet this woman. She speaks my language. We are deep. We are likeminded. I could just feel, even though I probably don’t have all those words in that moment, but I just knew like “Hmm, there’s some rich connection here.” But you had a lot going on in your life and it was a matter of trying to kind of figure out, “How could I initiate some sort of friendship or some level of connection here?”

And it really required me coming to you, kind of on your terms, I guess might be the easiest way to say it. But then in the right time and in the right season, it truly blossomed. So don’t lose heart along the way. If there’s people you’re drawn to that you really feel or to be voice in your life and critical to you developing your voice, don’t lose heart. Keep engaging and yeah, I love how you said figure out what you can offer them instead of wondering what it could bring to you.

Andrea: You know, I remember you’re using that way to describe how you come into me in my terms before. You actually said that to me one time and I was like “What?” You know, I didn’t know what to do with that but basically what that meant was and practically speaking was that you joined my small group, those small groups that I was leading. And in that sense, it was like an opportunity to start cultivating that relationship and then came that moment when you were ready to offer…we had a relationship there but it just wasn’t the same as you know up to the notch, a few notches.

Laurie: Yes that’s true.

Andrea: And really, you came and started speaking into my life at the time when I really desperately needed it because I was in a frustrated mood of being because I knew and I felt that I had more to offer. But I did not know how exactly I was supposed to do that so you brought strength to me at that time and opened my eyes. Maybe the way that I thought that I was maybe wasn’t exactly who I am.

And so just as you found your challenging voice, I found my kind of strategic voice in learning about the StrengthsFinder and what I had to offer and thinking that I was supposed to be mostly empathetic and mostly helping to develop people when I started to realize that “Oh, I actually really able to see the big picture and know which way to head next. That was life changing for me and it also helped release in me the idea and challenge that limiting belief in your words that I couldn’t write. I really didn’t think I could.

You helped call that out of me and I could see that “Oh gosh, you know what, I do have what it takes to make a decision, to make a decision about what I’m going to write about and how to formulate arguments and whatever. I just need the time and space in my head to get it done.” So that was huge for me. I mean, that was the very pivotal time for me and we just kept going and going and going and going and going.

And another thing that really hit me about that was when we were first talking about this “What are we called to?” “What am I called to?” “What are you called to?” “How are we different?” Became one of the questions that I was really interested in answering because I felt like our messages were so similar, but yet I knew that we didn’t need to be competing with one another. So in my head, I knew that but at the same time there’s that like “What do we do with the fact that we’re so similar. What do we do with that?”

And so for me, one of the greatest benefits since then has been to really kind of dissect who we are and see that “Gosh, Laurie is so good at this and I’m good at that.” And the way that this message that’s very similar inside of us is coming out of us has so much to do with who we are in our gifting, in our strengths, in our personalities and that sort of thing, in our experiences and what we’re drawn to. It’s actually coming out in very different forms but yet so similar at the core so that has been super helpful for me.

Laurie: So there again in context of relationship and support of others, we get clear on who we are.

Andrea: Yes. Yes, yes, yes! OK so also practically speaking, I mean we get together maybe once every two or four weeks, I would venture to say. And when we do get together, it’s not for an hour.

Laurie: Yeah, a minimum of three hours.

Andrea: Yeah. And really, I think this is interesting too. We don’t talk a whole lot about our day-to-day lives. We don’t talk a whole lot about our families. We’re really concentrated focus on our personal growth and development of our messages, our voices, and our business which I think is interesting.

Laurie: Yes. It’s not the surface level day-to-day grind stuff. Yeah, I don’t think we really give any attention to that honestly. It’s the deeper things because that’s the rare gift we can give one another. Most other people in our lives don’t want to or unable to relate at that level.

Andrea: Uh-hmm. I think there’s so much value in both of them. I think about different people in my life who… gosh, we have such a different kind of relationship and I love them. I love them all but this is the kind of thing that when it comes to developing your voice of influence, if you’re wanting to do that, this is one of those relationships that you need to be looking for and pursuing like Laurie said and really intentionally pursuing it.

Laurie: Yeah. You can’t wait for it to happen to you. You need to go and create it.

Andrea: Yeah, so true! Do you have any other suggestions for people that are listening for how they could pursue other avenues that would give them those relationships like maybe they have a friend like you and I kind of have this relationship. Maybe they have something like that or maybe they don’t, but what other kinds of ways can people cultivate, find that support, and challenge in their lives?

Laurie: I think you need to enroll whoever is in your life currently with the fact that you want to grow and giving other people access to speak into you. If it’s a sibling, a spouse whatever that looks like or a boss for that matter, but when you can first make yourself available to being open and willing to receive that then you’re giving them permission to be their voice and inviting that to come into your freely.

As we look at our relationships, people probably, I don’t know what percentage of time there actually, honestly reflecting and expressing what’s going on inside of them with us. But if we take away those barriers of “What are they gonna think? Are they gonna upset with me?” Whatever that looks like even friends in a marriage if you’re able to say to your spouse “You know what, will help you see where I’m falling short?” Or “Will help you see the blind spot of where I can’t see that I’m getting in my own way?”

I just had an amazing conversation with my husband last night about that of sharing something I was struggling with and he said, “I tried to tell you that last week but you didn’t hear it you know.” And I said “Stay with me on this.” Sometimes, it’s such a blind spot. We can’t see it and it doesn’t resonate initially. But he persisted. He helped the course and now a week later, I had this incredible revelation that I really needed to be able to move me forward in a bigger way instead of holding myself back.

And so his persistence and then me celebrating that and saying “Keep doing this,” like even if it doesn’t seem in a moment like I get it or that I appreciate it or that it resonates. I mean that. I mean that and now I could see it. So I think we open a great door of opportunity for us and them. We’re open and willing and inviting it from whoever that looks like. Did that kind of answer your question?

Andrea: That was great! I mean, I was really expecting you to say something about finding a coach but that was so wise advice. I love it! You know, it reminded me about what you said earlier that when you went to the John Maxwell event that initial one, you were journaling ahead of time because what you like to do is you like to journal beforehand and expect something significant to happen in your life.

Really, it’s that opening up of your heart, that opening up of your spirit to say, “I’m ready to receive whatever it is that you have to offer,” and that is super powerful. Gosh, I just think that it’s a great way to wrap up what we’ve been discussing here because when you are open to receiving the challenge that somebody else has to offer, you have no idea until you experience it.

Even though it feels so terrifying because it might rock you at the core in the end, like Laurie said, she is standing more confident and free in who she is now more than ever before because she continually put herself in that position. I’m experiencing that as well. Oh man, so good. Love that. So Laurie, where can the listeners find you?

Laurie: My domain name is my name www.lauriehock.com and you can find me there. I am on Facebook as well. I have real joy realizing a great platform for my voice of influence in it’s infancy stage, but it still tons of fun, is making a monthly video where I share my latest class and insights of what’s growing and challenging me. But then I releases tools to be something significant that can challenge the growth in my email communities.

So you can go to my website and if you want to be a part of receiving those monthly videos, just enter your name and email address and I’ll include you in the emails that I sent out, the challenging messages _____ that would be appropriate. Yeah, I just want to celebrate and honor everybody on the line and be able to encourage you that in time you’ll find your voice. And it’s a lifelong process of developing it. I don’t think we ever end that quest. It continues to unfold and develop layers upon layers of more richness.

Andrea: Well, thank you Laurie for being here today. I will make sure that your website is in the show notes. You kind find those at voiceofinfluence.net or if you’re listening on iTunes, you should be able to just click right there in the show notes on iTunes. Remember that if you’re interested in continuing to listen to this podcast, please subscribe to wherever you listen to podcast. I also have an email list and you can subscribe there at voiceofinfluence.net.

I just want to encourage you that wherever you can find community. I tell you, I listen to podcast when I first started getting excited about growing my voice of influence. And for the past two and a half or three years that has been one of the biggest blessings for me and challenging me too. So I just encourage you to keep making your voice matter more.

 

END

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How to Facilitate Transformation in Students, Organizations and Teams

Episode 20 with Doug Walters

Douglas J. Walters has over 45 years of experience as an educator, administrator and consultant. Most recently, he is the president and founding partner of Transformation Specialists LP. Prior to that he served as a teacher & administrator for the Kanawha County Board of Education, adjunct professor at Marshall University, and Dean of Students at the University of Charleston and the College of the Marshall Islands. He is a widower, father of two sons and grandfather of four. Additionally he is an author of several journal articles & co-authored a book on civic engagement/deliberation and work in higher education.

Mentioned in this episode:

 

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Download the quick reference guide for the Volume 1 of the Voice of Influence podcast, including interviews with entrepreneurs, a NY Times Bestselling author, a film maker, educators and even my dad! 

Download it here.

Don’t forget, I’ll be back on Thursday with a new 5-10 minute Voice Studio episode where we’ll break down one aspect of this interview to help you make YOUR voice matter more.

 

Transcript

(approximate transcript)

“Students know when you care. Students know when you are sincere. Students know if you respect them and then they will rise to the occasion if they feel those three things are in place.”

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. I am thrilled to be on the line with Doug Walters today. He is somebody that I’ve known ever since I was in high school actually. And he was an instructor at this program called the Summer Honors Program, which was a local academic camp that I participated in and actually the place where I met my husband. So I had Doug for an instructor one year and just really enjoyed it in him and appreciated him. He did it for so many years at that program. It’s a really special thing so we’ll probably talk a little bit about that.

 

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

Doug: Well, thank you very much Andrea. I’m very glad to be with you today.

Andrea: So Doug, maybe we should start by telling the listeners just a little bit about SHP, the Summer Honors Program.

Doug: I’ll be very happy to.   Well, the program, Andrea, started in 1978 as an outgrowth of trying to provide academic stimulation for students in Nebraska especially South Central Nebraska. And I was very fortunate to have a friend of a friend who recommended me to be one of the instructors in this very intensive two-week program in 1978.

Andrea: And you weren’t living in Nebraska?

Doug: No, no. At that time in _____, at this point live in Charleston, West Virginia. So the program has grown in most tremendously over the last 40 years. In fact the summer program ended almost toward the end of June and the program celebrated its 40th anniversary, and I have been fortunate enough that my schedule and work life and family life was able to be there 33 out of the 40 years.

Andrea: Which is amazing, so you have seen a lot of life in Nebraska at this Summer Honors Program and how it changed and how students have changed over the years and all that sort of thing, which I do want to ask you about but maybe not quite yet.

Doug: OK

Andrea: So what was your role at Summer Honors Program because you retired this year is that right?

Doug: Yeah, I felt that it was time for me to sort of hang up my boots so to speak so that I will give other instructors the opportunity. I taught the social sciences, Andrea. Basically, _____ have to do primary and secondary research and the one thing that I had the great luxury with was that I was able to take and explore the various social sciences. So one year, it may focus on sociology, the next year it could have been psychology. Many times, it was on history whether it was a regional or American or world history. So I had a platform that afforded me great variety over the years. It’s a very tight as you well know having been a student in the process, a very tight two weeks of intensive academic focus.

The students are nominated and then they take entry exams to be admitted to the program. In fact, there are 10 academic areas in the entire SHP process. The number of students that I had in the program varies between about 10 to 14, which was perfect for small group discussion but yet doing teamwork. And so I was able to do that with great success in working with these wonderful, mostly rural, bright, articulate, and talented high school students. And for example this year, I focused on psychology and I like to get into that a little bit more later on in our discussion but one of the keys of the program was a very intense structure that I had students seven and half hours a day.

And for any educators, especially high school teachers that are out there listening to the podcast, you know that when we change classes every 45 to 55 minutes depending upon the type of schedule that the high school has, you have to start up and you have to _____ every day. And so once we get started in the program, we had a quality full seven to seven a half hours a day of concentrated work. So the contact hours are usually varied between 70 and 75 hours, and boy can you cover a lot of ground in that amount of time?

Andrea: And it’s so interesting because the students, and once they get there, it’s so fun. It’s a totally different kind of environment than school. I think when you pick out those kids that are really interested in digging into a topic for a while; I mean it’s a different environment.

Doug: Yes, and it’s very intense. It’s really interesting, as you well know, students could go multiple years but most students don’t go more than two years. But when you get of what we call rookie when she or he comes along and they see the amount of work that’s going to be done, they’re somewhat intimidated the first day or so. But once we get into the rhythm of the process, we found, and not just myself but over the last 40 years, all of the instructors just really developed fine academic opportunities for these students. And in many cases, we didn’t always stay in the classroom, lots of field research and lots of fieldtrips built into the entire program. And in fact, I think your brother-in-law, Chris, had the opportunity to go with me when I took a group of students to Brazil in 1999.

Andrea: Yes and why did you take them to Brazil?

Doug: Well, part of life has been filled with a great deal of travel and it was the history and cultures around the world and I’ve been involved with an organization. We have about 40 years called the Partners of the Americas and West Virginia sister state is in a small state of Espiritu Santo, which is right north of Rio de Janeiro and we made arrangements. These students were my class for two years. We made a two-year commitment and so I was able, along with another teacher and the two of us, took them down for two full weeks and it was one of the best experiences I think I ever had and I think with students also did that.

Andrea: Wow that’s amazing. I mean, it really is amazing to think of taking students to another country for two whole weeks but you also did a lot of prep work the year before so that was just a deep kind of work, deep experience that I’m sure it’s just had life changing results.

Doug: Yeah, I think so. I mean, any time that I’ve ever travelled internationally with students which has been a number of times, I have found that once they had that kind of educational experience and had interactions with people from a different culture, it really changes who they are to their very core. And I’ve had lots of follow up with some of the students that was in that class in 1998 and 1999 and they would tell me that it still remains one of the highlights of their lives.

Andrea: Oh yeah, I’m sure. Well, I would say that the Summer Honors Program for me even though I never travelled anywhere, I was there four years, and man, it had a significant impact on me. Maybe part of that had to do with just the idea that you could, first of all, be around people who are also interested in going deep into one particular topic. Aaron and I very lovingly call it “nerd camp” and then you go to this place where there’s a lot of other people that are interested in digging in like you, and all of sudden it’s just fun. There was a lot less concern about popularity and that sort of thing. I mean I say fun even though it was a lot work but it felt like fun work because it’s not the same as just kind of memorization things like that.

Doug: Right. You know, one of my personal educational philosophies is what I call, making sure the students have an opportunity to do what I call enhanced hands-on learning. And because all of these was in many cases primary research, for example one year we did an analysis of all the elections trends in Nebraska over a hundred year period. And we took students into different county courthouses and back to the primary _____ records of people in different communities and looked at through the analysis that was obviously not in the classroom. And keep in mind, Andrea, most of the time that this program has been in place at least 30 of 40 years and was without internet, was without computers. And so the methodology that is used in the program has really changed over the last 40 summers.

Andrea: You know that leads me to one of the questions that came up when I asked, we have a Summer Honors Program alumni group and I just let those people know that I was interviewing you and I asked them if they had any questions, and one of the questions that came up was how do you, over the years, structures, restructures know what to keep and what to change? So obviously, the internet had something to do with that. Have the students changed over the years?

Doug: That’s a really good question because one of the things that happened over 40 years is that the students have not changed in the sense of the quality of their ability to work hard, good work ethic, interested in learning, and fascinated by new possibilities. There has been that consistency throughout the entire program. You know, in taking back, Andrea, over the 40 summers, I don’t think there was any dramatic change other than in technology equipment that came along for some of the classes for example in the summer of 1978, there would never had an opportunity for a class in filmmaking taken place because the technology in a portable way wouldn’t allow that.

And so one, students haven’t changed. Their interests are much broader than they were 40 years ago and I think that is the because of the increase of various types of technology and media. I have found that students, first of all they want to be there. It was a competitive process and they’re interested in the subject matter in which they found themselves whether it’s in creative writing or if it’s in science or geology you know whatever happens to be. So you don’t have to worry about motivating the students and so that is a tremendous help.

One of the things that I learned very early on was that their appetite for new knowledge, new range, new strategies, new methodologies for learning just right up over this entire time period. I have found that they’ve great flexibility in the way that you approach teaching class, for example, in this year’s class, after the first year in the program teaching, I learned very, very quickly that I had to be over prepared because the very first year I was there, I thought I had enough materials to teach for two solid weeks and by Wednesday of the first week, I was out of materials.

Andrea: Oh that’s hilarious!

Doug: And so I would rush home every night no matter where I was, I would rush home, prepare research keeping in mind no internet. And so after that, I’m always being over prepared and in many times, they even push the limits under that sort of circumstances because we’re talking about such a bright young group of young men and women. And then the other thing that did change was their awareness when they came into the class of the world around them was much more propelled and deep today than it was in the 80s, simply impulsive than exposed in ways that you know students and myself included who were not exposed to in the early days of the program.

Andrea: It’s really interesting. It’s sounding to me like a lot of time you hear this “kids these days” kind of comment about the younger generation and I’m not hearing that from you at all.

Doug: No, you will never find me saying that. First of all, students know when you care. Students know when you are sincere, students know if you respect them. And if you have those three elements introduced from the very beginning of the class, and I’m talking not just in this particular program but I think it’s still true today in most high schools for all students, and then they will rise to the occasion if they feel those three things are in place. And I never doubted anytime in my teaching in Nebraska that there was ever a student that didn’t want to be there.

Now that’s not to say that once you get to know the students especially about the second week, you can tell if something happened the day before and they were not on focus. And then because the program is so all encompassing with emotional and counseling support, we were able to do some interventions over the years with some students that would have fallen through the cracks had it been a regular academic year.

Andrea: And it’s a special place, there’s no doubt about it and they’re going to miss you I’m sure. So Doug, I’m curious about what you’re doing now and how you got to where you’re at now like what is the story arc of Doug’s career?

Doug: Well, if someone had told me that when I started teaching in 1965 that I would have walked of the hallowed halls of academia from K through doctoral programs or that I would be working in the corporate world as a leadership coach, I _____ crazy. And so I have been blessed, Andrea, with my path being fairly clear through most of my life and I’ve been very fortunate in that I’ve had opportunities that afforded me some diversion from what my original academic career would have been. I think teaching is a noble profession and everything aside in my life that I’ve done from a professional standpoint, the place where I have gotten the greatest joy and the greatest amount of satisfaction has been in teaching and I’ve had at all levels that you can teach in. And I’ve been blessed with students that were receptive.

But along the way, I was a classroom teacher then I was a school administrator for a number of years, and along the way embedded in that and even when I was in the administration, I was teaching in higher ed as an adjunct professor and then lead me to the central office at a large school system here in West Virginia where I was working with teachers as well as students in making sure that they were prepared for the test of the day. I retired early because I had an opportunity to become a dean of students at the University of Charleston here in West Virginia.

It was an unusual set of circumstances that I was called, I was still a fulltime employee and the president of the university at that time said, “We need you here at your alma mater to help us move forward.” I said “OK let’s talk.” And so I made the decision and it was a very difficult decision because I love my job, what I was doing. I had great opportunities at that particular point and I was a dean at two colleges or universities over a period of a little over 10 years. One at the University of Charleston, which was an immense joy in my life and once again, I got to work directly with students but in a different way of leading and teaching.

Andrea: I’m curious, you said that they called you and said we need you, why you think and why did they say that they needed you? What did you have to bring to that situation whatever it was that they would call you?

Doug: Well, it’s very interesting about my professional career and to some degree in my personal life. I’ve always been the person that had the skills set, God-given skill set to be able to bring people together to have conversations. And so therefore, they felt that they needed someone on campus that was going to help them grow and become a residential university and also to expand the university. It got themselves into a little bit I guess trouble with the community because the university wants to expand into the neighborhood and the neighborhood thought that they were being encroached upon.

And so the president called me and said “Can you help us do this?” And so I did. I came onboard. The community protested did not want anybody to build the change in campus. They wanted to keep it the same, but we also knew that we had to build new residence halls and we’re going to expand student body and become residential.

So over a period of about nine months, I have literally, and this is no exaggeration, sat in the living room, the kitchen, or the patio of every home that bordered the university. It took me six months to do that along with everything else that I had responsibility for. So I started in September to May, at the end of the academic year, I got the approval of the neighbors, the zoning board, and the city council and there were no negative votes.

Andrea: Wow!

Doug: I don’t want to be prideful here but I’ve always been able to get people to talk and to listen and to present both sides. And so that has followed me throughout my life, not only in that city but also when I was the dean of students in the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific for a couple of years, and able to do that with some organizations in which I’ve been part of the leadership. So it’s been a very interesting journey because I had that reputation and so I was able to do that and I feel very happy about that.

Andrea: I don’t think that’s prideful at all, I think it’s being able to own who you are and communicate that clearly, and obviously, it’s a gift that you have that you’ve been able to give others. And when they know what that is then they can utilize that gift of yours and I’m really interested in this because this is the Voice of Influence podcast, right?

Doug: Right.

Andrea: This is about voice. It’s about how we communicate and what is unique about our style of communication even that makes us fit for certain things. So the fact that they looked to you for that, it just makes so much sense. You know, you took the Fascinate Assessment which I invite guests to take and it’s just an indication of what your voice is and how to categorize the way that you communicate. You came out Innovation and Alert and I know that Passion applied for you as well because passion is about relationships, so obviously that makes sense.

But then Innovation being willing to take risks and see your way around obstacles and then Alert, you know, crossing every t and dotting the i’s making sure I guess it’s preventing problems with care. And so it makes so much sense that you would be the perfect person to come in and make sure that every single one of those, you know, to sit down everyone of those porches and have these conversations and make sure that there were no ‘no’ votes. I love it. It’s brilliant!

Doug: And one of the things if I may take that as a point, I helped co-author a book several years ago about the concept of deliberation in higher education along with a few other people. And I want to talk with you about one of the things that I’ve learned in that journey working, being innovative and thinking outside the box and yes I am a risk taker. I was not surprised by the results of the Fascinate, so one of the things that I feel very passionate about is the whole concept of deliberation and civic discourse conversations.

You know, it has a variety of names and one of the things that I’ve championed in my life and work especially now in my business, Transformation Specialist, working and coaching the CEO’s, leaders across a broad spectrum in education, in government, and in business in the nonprofit world and there are four things that I think make influence more powerful if you will, Andrea.

Andrea: Oh please that’d be great!

Doug: I called these the 4Ps of Leadership. The first P is called Plants. Basically, plant the idea, the seed and you had to tend to it and nurture it as needed. In other words in the context of learning in the classroom or working with the leader whose organization is in a little bit of trouble, you can’t plant something if you don’t tend to it and you don’t nurture it. And so that’s what many leaders do I think across the whole spectrum of leadership, not only in this culture because I’ve worked in the number of countries overseas and this is true there also, so the first P is Plant. The second P is Process. You’ve got to work to process of the idea giving it time.

I have found that in the corporate world in particular, you have leaders that understand process that they don’t give it time to sort of rise. If you’re making biscuits, we have to let the dough rise before you cut them and put them in the oven. So you’ve got plants and you’ve got process. The third P is what I call, you got to tamper your leadership with Patience as the idea, the seed takes root and develop. If you don’t have patience as a leader your influence either never there or it wanes overtime.

So we’ve got Plants, Process, Patience and then fourth one which for me is the easiest because of the kind of personality and style I have and that is you’ve got to model Personal Relationship for those responsible for developing implementing the new idea in seed. So it goes back to what we were saying at the beginning of the podcast and that is when a student knows the teacher respects them, the teacher likes them, the teachers respects them that personal process is there. These are my 4P’s and so when I’m coaching and working, this is one of the things that I talk with people about.

Andrea: Oh yeah that’s really good stuff. Is that in this book that you helped to co-author?

Doug: Yes.

Andrea: And what is the name of that book?

Doug: The name of the book is called, Deliberation and the Work of Higher Education. We wrote this book with a wonderful research foundation called the Kettering Foundation out of Dayton, Ohio and it has a 2008 date. You can call the Kettering Foundation.

Andrea: Well, I will. If there’s a link to that, I will definitely link that in the show notes so that people can go get that. Yeah, those 4P’s, I mean this idea of having good conversations that could result in change, it’s a hard thing to accomplish but we need people like you out there facilitating these conversations and helping us dialogue so that we can move forward together. So I’m just really glad that you’re out there talking about this sort of thing.

Doug: Well, I appreciate that. It’s been one of the mainstays, you know, I didn’t formalize the 4P’s until we started writing the book. It has become a cornerstone of my consulting work and it also God’s have taught also.

Andrea: Yeah. The deep need that people have to know that you care and that you’re sincere and that you respect them, I mean that just opens up hearts to be able to receive whatever it is that you’re wanting to offer.

Doug: Yes, very much so, very much so.

Andrea: So let’s say, you’re in the middle of talking about your work as a dean of students to a couple of universities and then where did you go from there?

Doug: Well, I retired the second time. I have formally retired twice. I thought, I would do some traveling and just relax with my family. I was beginning to have grandchildren and three months into the process, I knew I was going to serve. I lost my wife to breast cancer during this period and I know myself well enough that I had to have a goal. I had to have something that I did each day and so to that extent, I said I can do this. Then I had a couple of friends and I said to them, “You know, let’s see if anybody wants us.”

And so what we were able to do was we formed this company called Transformation Specialists, LP so about 10 years I live and doing consulting work. The other individuals have all fulltime jobs and do their own thing and I’m sort of like have the mobility to go out. So we work in higher ed. We work for profit business. We work with nonprofit business and we’d never advertise one time, Andrea. It’s all been word of mouth and so at any one time, we can manage the complexity of maybe four to six clients and then at the same time, I went back to the University of Charleston and helped teach in their MBA program.

Andrea: With Transformation Specialists, do you have a stated mission?

Doug: Yeah, it’s a very simple phrase. It says strengths-based strategies for success. And so we take the positive approach to working with an organization. We go in and we do lots of analysis. Usually, we start off with what is called an OHA, (Organizational, Health, Appraisal, or Audit) to find out what they’re successful with and then any challenges that may exist within the organization. And so over the last almost 10 years, we gone in and worked with organizations. We’ve had you know we’re with them for six months but we’d have some clients that we’ve been with for five years.

Andrea: OK, so your organizational health analysis and then you help them move toward organizational health?

Doug: Yes. What we do is go in and we do analysis of their services or products. We go in and look at efficiencies. We look at the landscape of the actual physical layout of the facilities. We’ve worked with some organizations that have multiple facilities and so we go in and we start off with the leadership team of determining of their social styles. We’ve got some instruments that we use to look at what are their strengths. And so we always approach it upfront not from the deficit standpoint but from a strengths standpoint because most organizations you’ll find, you know what’s wrong with you, let’s take it to the doctor and give you a physical from that standpoint and so we do the reverse of that. It’s almost like a preventive care management program if our medical world looks like that.

Andrea: Uh-hmm kind of positive psychology starting with strengths instead of weaknesses.

Doug: Yeah.

Andrea: And so do you use the StrengthsFinder in your…

Doug: Yes. It’s one of the best we use. We also use David Merrill Social Styles. We also use Maslach Burnout Inventory. One of the things that we have found in many, many case is that the individuals’ maybe burnout and sometimes we’ve gone into organizations and of course, we can only make recommendations. If the organization is not willing to listen to us, we make a very quick decision and we exit almost within the first three to five weeks of working with an organization and that’s only happen to us in all these years twice.

Andrea: How can you tell?

Doug: Well, when they don’t take your suggestions and your observations and there’s always a “but you don’t understand” or “but” this calls that to take place. And so it all starts with the CEO and the management team of the organization. So what we do is that we absolutely make sure that everybody in leadership capacity and down one or two tiers in management know what their strengths are, know what their social styles is.

And so what happens is we have found that if you have an organization, let’s be hypothetical here, let’s say an organization has six managers and four people that are the CEOs, COOs and CFOs and if all of them are drivers, guess what happens? They’ll kill each other and there are arguments. They don’t get along. They can’t figure out what it is if they’re all analytical. They’re always seeking to have more data, more information before any decisions are made.

So once we identify and everybody knows everybody else’s style and their strengths, you don’t have that. In fact, we got into an organization where we post them at the entrance, and their office or their cubicle. And so you would find out very quickly that I am for example and I’m using David Merrill’s work, I am an expressive which you probably would understand that. It is you know an expressive, someone who’s intuitive, thinks outside the box, and rebels a little bit and how you consider that and how you consider this.

And if you know, you got all four quadrants and all the potential strengths out of StrengthsFinders in your organization, you can then have a balance of leadership team creating and awareness of why you don’t necessarily get along with someone would be a driver may not get along with an analytical because the driver wants to process and get things done rather quickly. Analytical doesn’t want to do that. They always want more information or data and so we massage that and work with that. As I said, we have worked with and had great opportunities even in the corporate world and of course that was an interesting experience, transitional experience for us and that sometimes the table is not necessarily set the same way as it is in education in particular. Of course you know my foundation or work is from there.

And so what happens overtime is that we find out what your strengths are and how to balance that and we’ve got several organizations to make it part of their HR process. If for example you’re looking for and you’ve got five divisions in your organization and they’re all going really well, your division head retires or moves on to another position and you want to maintain balance in the style, in strengths of that person, you then look at that as a deciding factor if everything else is equal.

Andrea: So how do we fit together and finding the right fit.

Doug: How we fit together and then because going back to the whole concept of influence is that this absolutely helps influence the direction of the organization and we have found that we can make you healthy and we have found out overtime, in fact one of my co-boards in this a gentleman by the name of Anthony J. Marchese, PhD. and he has just written a book that I used in the program in SHP this summer and it’s called Design.

It is a book that plays upon our experiences and help how it really works because the full title of the book is called Design: An Owner’s Manual for Learning, Living, and Leading with Purpose. And so we have found that we each have a unique design and so we use that to create awareness, and I was able to do that this summer I think fairly successfully with students that I had in my class in Nebraska.

Andrea: So that awareness that were uniquely designed and even I assume finding out what that is, what that design is, what is that awareness do for people in your opinion or in your experience?

Doug: Well, I mean it’s really truly and Aha moment because of course the book was written not with high school students in mind to tell you the truth. It was written for the college level and people in career work of whatever level of the field that happen to be. And so what I wanted to see if it was applicable to high school students. And guess what, Andrea that it sure was and it was one of the great a-ha moments of my 40+ years in Nebraska. It was just absolutely wonderful and I’m still hearing from the students saying that “This has changed my life.” And I don’t think that there’s anything more rewarding for a teacher than to have a student say that to you.

Andrea: Why do you think they said that?

Doug: Well you know because we go back to how much time we were able to spend together?

Andrea: Yeah.

Doug: So we had the luxury of time in dissecting this book and doing exercises in different strategies and processes in the two weeks that allowed them to look at things. For example, one of the things that we talked about is the whole concept of wonder. The literature is very specific about wonder. We lose it generally by the ages of 10 to 11. And so when I presented the very first series of exercises which dealt with wonder, they all looked at me and said “What do you mean wonder?” I mean, they know what it meant and I said what would those things that absolutely excited you when you were 4 years old or 7 or 9 years old? And they had to do some thinking about it.

But eventually, remember the 4P’s, you know, it’s about process and patience and so what happened was there was almost like an acrobatic kind of exercise, catharsis for the students in which they said, “I did lose it. I didn’t do this. I don’t do that any longer.” So that was one thing that we did and then the other one was that the book talks about birthright gifts. We’re all born with birthright gifts but we have a tendency in our culture to play them down and when we get so old, at certain age and the book details some examples of that.

And I found out that with the 13 students that I had this summer, they fell into the same category. They had forgotten about some of their birthright gifts. Now I want you to listen to this. I had one wonderful young woman in the class and so in the introductory exercises we do the first morning at the first week, she said “Well, I speak four languages.” And I looked at her so did everybody else and she has self-taught herself; Ukrainian, German, Japanese, and she’s taking Spanish academically.

Andrea: Wow, besides speaking English?

Doug: Yeah, besides speaking English. I was stupefied. It was one of the few moments in working these students that it sort of made me stop and pause that “Oh wow, I couldn’t do that.” And so she discovered that she has the birthright gift of linguistics but no one had ever actually talked to her about that and so we did some research on that for her.

Andrea: That’s awesome! That’s a good stuff. Yeah, you know, I mean I just resonate with so much of what you’re talking about and I got a chance to look at the book last night and get a really good feel for it and I loved it. I love Design that book and the things that you’re talking about. I think that that something that really drives me as well is that the desire to see people to instead of trying to figure out where they fit in, figure out how they fit together.

Doug: Right.

Andrea: I think even for myself when I was younger for sure, there’s this tension inside of younger people I think especially between trying to figure out if it’s okay to be who they are and yet wanting everybody to be like them. And so it’s hard for them to know to be able to respect the fact that somebody else is different and that’s okay and there’s a good way that we can fit together and you know that whole concept is so important in our formation of our purpose and our identity and understanding how that _____ in our lives and how we can turn that into something that comes out as a voice and then it make a difference, a voice of influence. So man, I just love all of this. I love what you’re doing. And is there anything else that you had thought about ahead of time that you want to mention today.

Doug: Well, I just think that in closing from standpoint, I believe all of us have a capacity to continue to grow and to learn. You know, culture has a way of sometimes limiting what we can do because they say, “By this age you should have done that. You stop studying, go get a job have a family and live happily ever after.” And I think that we live, Andrea, an era in which learning now and opportunities for learning is at its richest point in the history of mankind. And I believe that if we can figure out ways of capturing that and redesigning our public schools to include some of the kinds of things that we have talked about today we can really make some changes; I believe that this is going to make a huge difference.

I will tell you what I’m getting ready to do this fall, I’m working with the school system in which they listened to me, and we’ve been working on this process for several years and they finally agreed for us to go into a school system with two high schools and three middle schools to begin to introduce the concept of understanding self in design as part of the regular curriculum. And so we’ve committed ourselves to a five years research study to be able to do this in the school system and so I will start training the core group of 24 teachers in these three high schools and three middle schools.

And so we’re identifying six teachers at each of those schools to be trained in knowing about strengths, about social styles, a little basic kinds of skill set to identify issues that may impact learning in the classroom. And we’re going to start off with a control group about 90 students and follow them and see if we’ll not only can improve their ability to learn but also enhancing decrease the dropout rate because the school system is in an area of West Virginia in which they opened it unfortunately epidemic and crisis is hitting hard and it’s in the cow fields. And we believe that we can make a change in those kinds of cultural settings that we can do it any place in the country.

Andrea: That’s so exciting! Those students are just so blessed that they’re going to get to be part of that.

Doug: I hope so.

Andrea: Yeah. Before you go, I do have one more question for you. This one really comes from one of your fellow instructors at the Summer Honors Program.

Doug: Okay.

Andrea: And I love this question and this is a great way to end I think. Doug, you have the most wonderful character, kind, out-of-you-way polite, humorous, generous, appreciative, and toughest nails when it comes to discipline and work, how much of your well recognized leadership skills would you attribute to character and how much to formal education?

Doug: Wow! I mean that is an unbelievably structured question and I appreciate the thoughts behind that. I believe that if you have a centered family, your character evolves in the first five to eight years of your life and if you have firm grounding principled parents and the family as a whole is nurturing and respectful of you that is somewhat like one of the cornerstones or part of the foundation of your potential as a human being.

One of the things that I believe, and I had to work at this because early on in my life, I was undisciplined in the sense that I wanted to be a little bit of everything for everybody. And I had to step back and figure out where do your strengths lie and this was long before StrengthsFinder or even some of the positive psychology research in the last 25 years and I said to myself “I’ve got to figure this out.” And so I was able to do that because I had strong support initially from my immediate growing up family and then I had it with my wife, my beautiful, wonderful Barbara.

And so, our marriage was a partnership and therefore we approach raising our sons in a partnership. And so we continued to do that but we had very, very high expectations of our boys and I’m proud to say that they’ve done very, very well and I’m just unbelievably blessed to have that. So I think you know, basically as combination of continued learning, I still was taking, Andrea, formal classes until three years ago and I’m 73. I started grade school when I was 5 and so I basically was in some kind of a formal or informal learning mode for 65 years of my life up until that point.

But you got to have people that believe in you also and if you got someone that believes in you and I think this goes by to the very first part of our conversation and that is the students know if you care for them and if your heart is there to help them do whatever they need to do and I think respect is part of it. But boy, they got to know that you have strong expectations.

Andrea: That’s a great way to end this conversation. Doug, thank you so much! Thank you for your voice of influence with students and on the world today and in organizations and for being here today on the podcast.

Doug: Well, thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure!

Andrea: Well, listeners, Influencers listening, you just got a lot of wisdom dropped on you and I’ll be definitely putting all the links to the things that Doug mentioned, the books that he mentioned and his own information in the show notes. I encourage you to go care, be sincere and respectful and make your voice matter more.

 

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