Podcasts about hey bob

Read along to practice your English and to learn the English phrases NOTHING MUCH and NOTHING REALLYIn this English lesson, I wanted to help you learn the English phrase, "nothing much." This is a phrase that we use to answer questions like this. Hey Bob, what are you doing this weekend? Nothing much. Hey Bob, what are you doing today? Nothing much. It simply means that you don't have a lot planned for the time that someone is asking about. What am I doing this summer? I would love to say nothing much, but I actually have a lot planned. And by the way, when you say this quickly, it ends up sounding like nothing much, okay? Hey Bob, what are you doing this weekend? Ah, nothing much, just hanging around at home. We might have a little campfire. So you're not doing anything important? No. There's nothing much going on this weekend.WANT FREE ENGLISH LESSONS? GO TO YOUTUBE AND SEARCH, "BOB THE CANADIAN"✅If you enjoy these lessons please consider supporting me at: http://www.patreon.com/bobthecanadianThe second phrase I wanted to teach you is the phrase, "nothing really." This is a very similar phrase. It means exactly the same thing. If you said to me, hey Bob, what are you doing this afternoon? I could say, ah, nothing really. I'm just sitting around doing nothing. By the way, none of that is true. I rarely respond to that question by saying nothing much or nothing really. Although they are accurate answers, I'm usually quite busy and I don't usually respond by saying, nothing much or nothing really.So to review, if someone says to you, hey, what are you doing this weekend? You can respond by saying nothing much, which means you're not up to a whole lot. You're not doing a lot of things. Or you could say, nothing really. I'm just kind of sitting around at home twiddling my thumbs. Anyways, let's look at a comment from a previous video. Did you know that phrase "twiddling your thumbs?" When you're doing nothing in English, we sometimes say you're twiddling your thumbs. You don't actually twiddle your thumbs. It's just a saying.This comment is from Eduardo. And Eduardo says, "Great phrases, Bob; thanks so much. By the way, do you practice basketball? I haven't seen the little basketball court before. Have a beautiful day. And my response is, "I try to help my son practice a few times a week. Mostly he takes shots and I run to get the ball."So thanks Eduardo for that comment. Yes, we do have a small basketball court over here. And I'll walk over there and I'll kind of describe how basketball practice goes at our house. My son likes taking shots. I like running and getting the ball and passing it to him. So he gets practice, shooting the basketball and I get to get a lot of exercise in. He gets the ball in a lot. When he first started practicing, he would miss quite a bit. But lately, he's been getting a lot better at it. Sorry, the new camera's a little heavy. So I'm kind of shaking around a little bit.So yes, over here, we have a basketball net. Hopefully you can see that. And then we even painted the free-throw line and we painted a three-point line as well, so that my son would be able to practice his shots from all three locations. Let me sit down here for a sec. It has been... There we go. It has been a lot of fun having a basketball net. When I was a kid, as I mentioned in another video, I practiced baseball a lot. I wasn't that into basketball, I was into baseball. So it's kind of fun to see my son take an interest in basketball. He practices a couple of times a day. He's super excited. He really hopes he can make the basketball team this fall at school. I hope there is a basketball team.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/bobthecanadian)

Product descriptions may seem straightforward, but if done right they can significantly improve conversion rates. Today Jon explains why product descriptions are one of the most effective changes you can change to your website and how to write great product descriptions that will convert. The article Jon mentioned on how to write production descriptions that sell: https://thegood.com/insights/product-descriptions/ TRANSCRIPT: Announcer: You're listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better eCommerce growth engine, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. Ryan: Jon, you recently wrote an article that kind of put my head in a spin around product description. Jon: Sometimes that's too easy. Ryan: I know. Spinning my brain's not necessarily the most difficult thing to do if you're in the space, but you wrote an article about product descriptions and how they can significantly improve conversion rates. And that surprises me because I personally ignore those all the time and I focus on other aspects of marketing and driving traffic as per usual. But that for me, is kind of like a side, just put it in there. As long as it's in there and then we can manipulate it going into Google shopping, where it's going to have an impact on your traffic. Just get something in there, period. Obviously I was wrong on this in my opinion. And I'm probably not alone in that. I'm excited today, Jon's going to school us on product descriptions and what you should be doing as an eCommerce business to leverage that to improve conversion rates. Jon, kick us off, explain at a high level, of all the things you could be focusing on on your site, why product descriptions in your mind, are one of the top things you can be doing to improve conversion rates? Jon: Yeah well, I think you basically just said it best in your tee up here where a lot of people just don't pay attention to this. And I think it's really, really forgotten. And that's a challenge in that as you're optimizing websites, it's one of the first places we go because most people forget about it. But look, we've learned over a decade of running AB tests on hundreds of product detail pages that optimizing your product descriptions is just one of the highest return, lowest investment improvements that an eCommerce manager can make. And look, they're key part of your potential customer's decision making process. I think the stat that my team here at The Good always says is that 87% of consumers rate product content extremely or very important to deciding to buy. Ryan: Wow. Jon: 87%. Ryan: Way higher than I would've thought. Jon: Right. Well, that's exactly the problem is most people don't think about this. And so if you're not optimizing product descriptions, you're certainly leaving money on the table. That's why you should focus on this. Ryan: If we're going to improve it, if we just assume that for example, my product descriptions are just terrible because I didn't focus on them, what are the areas I need to be looking at as I'm staring at my product description? And where do I start? I guess would be the best question. Jon: Well, I think there's four main areas that everyone should be focusing on and we can chat about today, but we can break these down. But the first is the real job of a product description. Most people think the real job of the product description is something that it's not. And we'll dive into that a little bit. The second is that it's an effective product description template needs to be used, so we can talk about what goes into those and what items you need to check the box to really make it great. And then how to write one that converts. It's not just having the content, you need to also be thinking about how you're writing that content. And then we can really talk about frequently asked questions around the product descriptions that I get, because I get a lot of questions about it. Once we start optimizing, people start thinking about it, a lot more questions come up than you might imagine. Partly, that's why we're doing the show today, it makes your head spin a little bit. That means there's a lot of questions there and you're not alone in that really. Maybe we can just break those four down and discuss each pretty briefly. Ryan: Yeah, I'm excited for it. What's the real job of a description of a product? In my mind, it's to describe the product. It's a blue t-shirt, congratulations. Jon: Yeah, right, exactly. If you just said blue t-shirt, how many sales do you think you're going to get? Let's just poke a hole in the idea that the job of the eCommerce product description is just to describe the product. I think that that's not right. Given the name, it makes sense that most folks think this, but product descriptions aren't there to just describe what's on your eCommerce site. They're also there to qualify. Do they help your visitors quickly assess, is this for someone like me? Do they persuade? Is it a compelling description? Is it customer centered on the reasons they should be considering that product? And then it's also there to surface. And what I mean by that is to help people find the product. This is the third one on purpose because a lot of people will stuff keywords throughout in terms of search engine optimization in optimizing the product description, but look, SEO keywords and search terms, and if you use those in a natural way, you'll get the page to show up and you want it to show up in search engine or even Amazon results if you're talking about optimizing your product descriptions on Amazon, which should also be done. Here's really one way to really think about this, product descriptions are a bit like your 24/7 in store retail associate for your online store. We often talk about if you wouldn't do something in a retail store, don't do it on your website. Let's take that analogy a step further and say, "How would associate talk about the product?" If you walked into a store and said, "Hey, I'm looking for a t-shirt," what questions are they going to ask to help you find the right one in that store? As a virtual retail associate, the product description can have that same kind of impact. And if it does its job well, it's going to draw visitors to your goods and then increase the conversions on those. And if it's done poorly, it's just going to frustrate visitors and push them away and hurt sales. It's very, very similar. Ryan: I like that. I think a lot of people, at least in what I think through is I don't think about qualifying. I'm like, you got to my page, you click on my products from Google shopping, you saw the price, just go buy it. And then if I'm in the jar looking at the label in the wrong way, from that perspective and I step out, I realize, okay, well I know conversion rates on shopping traffic is generally lower than category page traffic and so I'm like, oh well, possibly because my category is doing a better job describing a product or qualifying that person coming in and I'm just leaving that there rather than pulling it through and looking at qualifying them. Jon: Yeah. You're not alone on that. A lot of brands look at a category page as an opportunity to convert. I look at a category page as an opportunity to help somebody to the next step in the funnel, which is get them to that product detail page. And that's where you can really convert and sell and make sure people are getting the right product for them. Ryan: Okay, I concur. Tell us then okay, once I decide that it's more than just describing a product, what's a template look like that's going to help me through creating this product description that is going to be more than just describing my product? Jon: I love when I can change minds. And I'm glad we're helping do that today. All right. Ryan: We are. Jon: Again, here. Ryan: I'm taking notes. Jon: There are a handful of bullet points of things that you want to ensure are included. First of all, you need a descriptive headline. Use a product title that's going to hook your audience. Bonus points if you can connect with them emotionally. We don't want blue t-shirt, we want the t-shirt that makes your dad bod look hot. Ryan: I'm getting those ads on Instagram, by the way. I'm like, no, this is terrible. Jon: Ryan's looking good today in his shirt, by the way. All right. Benefits focused paragraphs. Use a descriptive paragraph to explain why, and I mean exactly why the customer benefits from the product. Too many people talk about features and that's it, they're just bullet point features and then don't talk about the benefits. You know how I led with the t-shirt that's going to make your dad bod look hot? That's what we want to be talking about here. What's the benefit? Not that it's a blue t-shirt. Yeah, that might be in there, but what's the benefit of wearing that t-shirt? The other thing we want to have in here is a key benefits list. Follow that description with a bulleted list of product features and benefits and this is where you can get into those details that if somebody is just skimming, they're going to look at that list. You're really what you're doing here is you're providing the benefits in a paragraph, maybe even telling a little bit of a story could be really helpful there. Don't make it too long. But then if somebody really wants, just give me the details. I already know I want a blue t-shirt, I just am deciding between two or three different ones and they want to know the specs and the features, that's where they're going to go is the bullet list. Don't bury those in the paragraph. The paragraph should be, hey, here's the benefits to you. If you want to know the features and the details, look at the bullet list that comes next. And then the fourth thing is, add some additional motivations. Really what we're trying to do here is just minimize those remaining purchase hurdles. Will it fit? Do others like it? Do things like credibility, social proof, you can bake in product reviews or even urgency. And of course, make sure you have a clear call to action. So many brands, we talk to have four buttons to add to cart and it's like, oh, you can use quad pay, after pay. You could use Amazon checkout. You could use both. And it's like, just give them one button and then push that to the next step. Get them to commit and then ask them how you want to pay. Ryan: Because my brain goes in funny directions when you say urgency, can you explain what that means from you, your perspective? Because it's probably not the little popup thing on Shopify that says, "Hey Bob in New York just bought this and Suzie in Florida just bought. Jon: You know me well. Ryan: Because I guarantee you don't like that one because I don't like that one. Jon: Yeah, nobody likes that. Ryan: And I don't have as many dislikes as you. Jon: I call that one of those wildfire apps and I call it wildfire because they just spread without anyone knowing how it started or why it's spreading. Ryan: Yeah, my competitor's probably doing it so I did it, and that's the worst way. Jon: And you don't see those apps as much anymore, a couple years ago, it was really popular and then everyone installed it and they realized this isn't doing anything. And also half of the companies using it are aligned about who's purchasing what, they all had Bob from Waco, Texas and it was kind of like you see Bob from Waco, Texas. Ryan: That guy shops on every site and I've been on. Jon: Exactly. And you're kind of like, that's the default it gives you. Here's the other thing. I really think what you need to be thinking about here in urgency is stock levels. And I'm not talking about lying. I'm saying, okay, only a few left. And what I mean by few? Well, I have two or three and you'd better buy it right away or it's going to go out of stock. There's some great tools, especially if you're on platforms like Shopify that are great apps that will do dynamic badging around quantity left so it can pull your quantities and do a dynamic image overlay on your product images. It will put a badge up in the corner that says, "Two left, one left," whatever. That's what I'm talking about with urgency. Or something like, hey free shipping. You're doing an offer, not a discount. When I talk about urgency, I'm not talking discounts as you know quite well. There could be some offers. It could be, right now it's a buy one, get a free gift. There's a whole litany of offers you can do that are not discounting and so I think when I'm talking about urgency, I'm talking about those type of items. Ryan: And so generally if you're a brand that has just tons of inventory, you have to focus more on getting creative and incentivizing without discounting to get that purchase from the product page. Jon: Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Create urgency if it's necessary. The other thing we see perform really well in terms of urgency is if it's out of stock to sign up to get notified when it's in stock. We have a client we've worked with for years, that is a really well known Japanese outdoor brand, outdoor camping high end. And what we have done for them over the years is help refine their out of stock notifications. They have some products that never are in stock because as soon as they send out that out of stock notification, they burn through their stock again. And I'm not talking that they only get five or 10 in, no, they get thousands. But the thing about it is, is that consumers have all signed up for this list and they want these products. We say, "Hey, you want this product? Sign up to be notified." And then we send out on an email and that email goes out, "Back in stock, click here to buy it," adds it right to the cart and they're able to purchase. And then before it even ever hits the site and it changes the product detail pages show how much stock is left, it's gone within hours. Ryan: Geez. Yeah, I'm going to test pre-sale. I'm going to say, "Hey, this new blend from Joyful Dirt's coming out, we're going to start advertising it and pre-sell it on social so we can start demand, figuring what demand looks like, what our production runs need to look like." Jon: That's a great idea. Ryan: And hopefully there's a lot there, but if not, they were like, "Yeah, we're only going to produce a few hundred. We'll be fine." Okay, so what else do we need to be considering what's average eCom business owner not going to be thinking about that you know that they don't even know to ask? What don't I know that I should know. Jon: Well, I think there's some simple questions that need to be answered. Let's look at this as maybe I don't know, questions that somebody doing a natural deodorant product might have. You need to think about this, who's the customer? That's always the first one, who's the potential customer? When you're starting to write this, you need to be thinking about that first. Let's say here, it would be men and women who are fed up with chemical packed deodorants. Just being a normal deodorant and saying, "Hey, people who don't like to stink," that's not going to be good enough. What's your differentiating point? The second is, what problems does it solve? This is where you can get into it helps keep them stink free. The potential customer is not the problem, it's what pain are you solving for them that is a little bit deeper than the surface level? And then the problem it solves is really the high level okay, people buy deodorant for this main reason. But the differentiating point is what's going to define that potential customer. Then you get into what desires does it fulfill? For this theater and it would be something like feeling healthier, more responsible towards their bodies and the planet, maybe just feeling less dirty and smelly. They could be that generic. And maybe they've been fertilizing their garden all day with a Joyful Dirt and now they don't want to come back into the house and smell. And then you need to be thinking about what objections people have. And this is where it's like, hey, why are you using a natural deodorant? Or maybe other natural deodorants just don't seem to work or they lie about the ingredients. Those are all types of things you should really be thinking about there. The next question you really want to ask yourself is why you? Why your brand? Compared to the other guys, why does this deodorant actually work? And then last of all, definitely not least, but you really want to think about what words your consumers are using so you can mirror what they're looking for there. And this is great, this is where user research can really come in, just interviewing consumers, doing some user testing, for instance so when they talk about what words they use, things like natural, fresh, perhaps scent or confident, and those are words that you can bake into your product description. They're going to write it for you. And if you go and you answer all of these questions in an outline, kind of like I just did where I answered each question a little bit about deodorant, you'll have most of your product description written and then you can move on from there. Announcer: You're listening to Drive and Convert, the podcast focused on eCommerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with eCommerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay per click management, search engine optimization and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you. Ryan: I know though, pictures are worth more than words and so do you consider the images on the side of a product description as part of the description? Or is that different entirely? And that's a whole nother conversation around the images? Or do you use them together? Jon: I think it's a whole nother conversation, quite honestly. Although people say a picture's worth a thousand words, I think that's true. And that's why pictures, we should do a whole nother episode on that because I do think it matters. And I think that there's a lot of things out there that you could be doing. I think on model, off model, 360, in use, size comparison. You really got to be thinking about all the different types of images that you could be doing. And a lot of brands will focus on the words, because a lot of consumers will go to the words and with one good photo you can still get them to convert. But after that, you really need to dive in and start thinking about all the other photos that you could do. And that's a ripe opportunity for optimization as well for sure. Ryan: Got it. You've done a lot of obviously user testing and listen to a lot of people go through the process of buying, are there certain types of people that are only going to pay attention to image and some that only pay attention to the words and that's just is a personality or a person? Or is it everybody's taking all that information in together? Jon: I think that as humans we're visual, but there are some people who will, if you have a video, they're just going to watch the video and they're going to skim. This is really huge on B2B websites where you want to bake in video because what's going to happen, meaningful video, Telling you about the product and walking you through it, et cetera, because consumers are going to just scroll until they find video and then watch that video while they're doing something else like on a bus or in traffic or eating lunch. I just did that. I was evaluating some software for our business, for The Good, over lunch and I was eating lunch, watching product videos. I didn't want to read about it. I just wanted to sit there and watch the video. I just put it on one and a half speed and then go. And I think that's a lot of people will do that. And I think in terms of images, it's similar. A lot of people will get that content from the images, but they're not going to get all the features and benefits that way. They're really not. People still need the bullet point list to see all of the features. People who are going to be watching the video, looking at the images, that's where they're going to start and if you don't get it right there, they're not even going to go on to read the bullet list. It is important for a segment of the audience for sure. Ryan: I think of product descriptions kind of like I think of one on my website and I think of the one on the Amazon and I probably put more time into the Amazon one, but I have more volume on Amazon right now. And so, but Amazon has multiple areas for information. You get the top there's image and then a short description and then you go down and you have A plus content and the expanded descriptions. And now that I think about it, a lot of websites have that same type of feel built out around them. Are you seeing a lot of focus needing to be on the short snippet, kind of at the top, more than at the bottom? Because sometimes the descriptions I see, especially on B2B, all the spec tab that is really long and drawn out, you can tell people are just dumping information from an SEO perspective sometimes in there. Is there one area that's more important in all of that? Jon: Yes. I think in the concept of the description, this is what those towards the top of the page. Often you'll have images on the left and then all the product description content on the right. As you scroll down, you can take those bullet points we talked about earlier with the benefits and the specific features and that bullet list and break that down throughout the page. That's typically what I would recommend. Have the bullet point and if people want to dive into each one of those, so say you're talking about the deodorant as we talked about earlier and you want to look at the ingredients list. Well, you can say all natural ingredients as a bullet point. And then at the bottom you could start saying all natural ingredients and then you break out what those ingredients are and talk about the benefits of each and how it's truly all natural and it doesn't include, what is the big one? Aluminum or something that people don't like? I don't know. But I think, it's something like that where you would use the rest of the page to truly break it down. And that's where you can also inject some brand. And it's also where you should be injecting supporting content like blog articles. To me, too many brands put the blog on the homepage, so they have like this lineup of blog posts that nobody cares about on their homepage. The blog post is top of the funnel. It's great for getting people to your site. It's great for SEO for instance. But then if they're on product detail page and you send them back up the funnel, you need to make sure that it's done in a supporting fashion so that you're not just sending them right back to the top of the funnel for no good reason. What I mean by that is maybe you have a blog article all about those ingredients or a specific ingredient that you're using and you want to talk about why it's more superior and you need a 1,000 or 1,500 words. Well, that's not good for your product detail page, but it would be good to link to that and say, "Hey, want to learn more about this? Read this blog post about it." That's also going to help your SEO and Google find all of that content together. Ryan: Yeah, I think exactly zero times have I ever gone from a homepage trying to research a brand for a product and gone to the blog and be like, hmm, let me read some blogs. Jon: No, not going to happen. Ryan: Never happen. And I'm like, no, I'm here to buy a product or research the product, not read about how the product worked on X, Y, Z in these conditions. Jon: Yeah, but when you're on a product detail page and doing your research and you're far enough down that step, it might be relevant to some degree to know that it's there. Ryan: Awesome. No, obviously Jon you've broken down and torn apart a lot of product pages over your life. What are some of the questions that you've had clients ask you as they've gone through the process and tried to implement a lot of what you've talked about, even with your template? And are there any funny ones or when it makes sense that other people are probably going to be asking after they start doing this? Jon: Yeah. Yeah, you're right, I've probably broken down hundreds of thousands of these at this point. I don't know that might be exaggerating, but it is kind of like what's that movie with the kid where he's like, "I see dead people." That's me. I can't go down the internet and shop without seeing messed up product detail pages everywhere. It's just unfortunate side effect of my job. But I will say, I do love when we have a positive effect on those. And so I'm always happy to answer questions, but yeah, I do get some off the wall ones. I think the biggest one I get all the time is, can't I just copy my description from a competitor? It's working for them so why not? I hear that all the time. But I'm shocked I even have to answer this. But yeah, the short answer is no, you can't lift product descriptions from your competitors. Look, beyond the SEO challenges of that, meaning that it's going to be a challenge where Google sees the same as that content across two sites and then you're playing a really hard to win game because Google is going to pick one of them or when they do that, it's likely not going to be you because it knows that content has been on the other site longer and so that's what it considers the original source. Ryan: Now what about product descriptions from the supplier or the manufacturer? Especially if you've got a site with a 100,000 products on it. Jon: Well, you might want to evaluate why you have a site with a 100,000 products. Ryan: True. There's a lot of them out there. Jon: Yeah. I wonder how many of those are just dropped shipping, not doing that great. And that's why they're not doing that great. If you really want to be successful at something like that, you need to customize the heck out of it. And so you really do need to sit down and do this for all the products so it's not just the manufacturer description. Now you can base it on that manufacturer description, but don't copy and paste that because everyone else who's drop shipping that product is doing the same thing. Or on top of that, you're not really adding any additional value and I can promise you, most of those subscriptions are D level work. They're not even a passing grade in most cases. I think copying is a moral issue for me in addition to the SEO issue so it's two strikes you're out rule, really. Using the manufacturer, I think is the SEO role and ineffective. It's just a non-starter. Ryan: And I think that if you are in the eCommerce world and you are assuming something, you're going to lose. You never assume that this is working for a competitor because they're doing it and you think they're bigger than you. And you assume that somebody knows what they're doing. Obviously I have a wine and beer read business and you drink wine, if you read wine descriptions, those are generally written by somebody sitting at a desk at a winery that's coming up with weird terms. One of my friends owns a winery and I'm like, "Well, how'd you come up with your descriptions?" "Oh my wife and I started drinking wine and decided, let's start putting these things in there." You can't assume that, if it works it's on accident many times. Jon: I have a good friend who runs an agency that does nothing but branding and labels for wine and spirits brands and that is the number one challenge that they get from brands, their customers that they work with, is that those vineyards will send over the descriptions and they're like, this isn't going to fly, we got to help you optimize this. It's a challenge. It's not unique. They're like, you might as well just label it alcohol, alcohol from grapes. And that's always the joke. My friend is always just like, "You sent me this description. I'm just going to change it and say alcohol from grapes." Ryan: We're planting wine grapes right now. And I told my wife, it's like, "We're going to make some wine with it." She's like, "You think it's going to be good?" I'm like, "Probably not, but we're just going to call it Ryan's Yeast Juice. It's going to be great. It's going to sound like crap." Jon: When you gift me a bottle, I'll know. Ryan: Yeah, Ryan's Yeast Juice. That's actually why, I add grape juice with some yeast in it that sat in the bottle for too long, became alcoholic. Jon: Can't wait, can't wait. Ryan: I can't wait for my marketing to go, all the marketing energy I have, Ryan's Yeast Juice. I should probably trademark before it gets out. Jon: Yeah. Made with Ryan's fertilizer. How's that? Ryan: Yeah. Jon: Joyful Dirt line. Well yeah, I think the other question that I get a lot here is how long product descriptions should be. And I think it's not a one size fits all. It's long enough to be helpful, short enough to be digestible and depends on the product. A few quick sentences could work for your products or you may need to write 1,500 words, but I think it's something where you really need to understand your audience. Are they here quick? Are they deciding between a couple of things and want a feature list? Or should you put more effort into the story? Also, there's the brand aspect. There's a lot of brands who have a lot of fun with their product descriptions. And then there's a lot of brands who are just dry. That's just kind of their brand and you go from there. Ryan: Okay. Over the past, let's just keep it recent, three years, who would you say of companies you've at least seen their site, you don't have to work with them, probably did the best with their product descriptions? Jon: Yeah. Are you familiar with Chubbies? Ryan: I'm not. Jon: Ooh, okay. Chubbies is a men's, mostly men's clothing brand and they do some hilarious descriptions. They started out, I believe selling swim trunks. Ryan: Oh yeah. Yeah, now I remember. Jon: And it's now a bunch of other stuff, but they've always done some good work. I haven't looked at the site in a while, but they were pretty good one from back in the day. And I think, generally there's brands like OLIPOP and a few others like that who are new and are doing a really, really good job with it. I don't know if you've heard of OLIPOP. It's kind of like a new flavored seltzer brand. They do a really, really good job with it. I also think that there's a couple out there around more around eyeglasses, Felix Gray, things of that sort, that do a really, really good job. And I think that their biggest competitor is Warby Parker. And I think Warby Parker does a good job, but Felix Gray has really made their calling card being better content on the page. Ryan: Got it. Jon: The other one that I really like is Cards Against Humanity. I don't know if you've ever been to their site. Ryan: I love that game. It's the most inappropriate fairly game we've played with my in-laws. Jon: Okay, I was going to say, yeah, that could be awkward at best. Ryan: Oh it for sure is. Jon: They have a teenager version I've played with my cousins and I will tell you, that got awkward real quick too. But they have add on packs and all this other stuff and they do a great job with branding. And they have a couple of sentences, they'll say, "Hey, this is just," they'll be very quick. This is all about these topics. It's 300, but they'll inject some brand. They'll say, "All new absurd box contains 300 mind bending cards that came to us after taking peyote and wandering in the desert." And it's kind of like, that's funny and I know what I'm going to get is just weird random stuff. And then it's, they did in the bullet points. 300 brand new cards to mix into your game. This one's pretty weird. They're going to be weird, I get it. It's an expansion. It requires the main game. Now I'm like, okay, I get it. It's expansion pack. And you have nothing to lose, but your chains, I don't know what that even means, but that's what they're telling you. I think, it's on brand because it's super random. And I think that last bullet point is all meant to just demonstrate the randomness that you're going to get out of this pack. And then if you go down the page, they have a lot more info about and some samples and stuff, but that kind of gives you a good example there. Ryan: Thank you. That's awesome. Any parting words or places people need to be focusing and getting started on? Jon: Yeah, I think look, it's there's a simple formula that you can follow and too many brands don't even try to follow the formula. And if you go to The Good's website and on our insights or articles page, or just go to thegood.com/insights/product-descriptions, we have a really great article that breaks all of this down and more. Gives you ton of examples and it's a great way for you to just take the template we've got on there and start using that and applying it to your product descriptions and Ryan, it sounds like you may have some work to do, but it will get you a higher conversion. Ryan: I think I might. But thanks for the time, Jon. I appreciate it and educating me as always on how to make my site work better. Jon: All right. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing the results on that. Thanks for chatting today. Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com

"The starting point always has to be truth. How do we tell the truth about ourselves, and how do we do that in a compelling way?"Bob Sheard is the Founder and Co-Owner of FreshBritain, aka The Brand Vision Company. To characterise FreshBritain as just another Brand Design Agency or Creative Agency doesn’t really do them justice. FreshBritain are the absolute tip of the spear when it comes to redesigning and repositioning some of the wold's most iconic brands. I’ve likened Bob to the invisible hand behind the scenes...quietly controlling the narrative, nudging each brand he works with, back towards their true north. Over the last 20 years he’s worked with giant Private Equity Funds, celebrities like Bear Grylls and Al Gore, and countless iconic brands such as Nike, Levi’s, 2XU, Doc Martens, Ben Sherman, Converse, Renault, Arc’teryx, and New Balance, just to name a few. Bob has this masterful command of the English lexicon, mixed with a salt-of-the-earth Yorkshire accent that I find very pleasing on the ear and he is very funny to boot. All of which makes for an excellent podcast, and there are many great stories from his life and career here that anyone will find interesting, not only those working in advertising, branding or marketing. We discuss some of his favourite pieces of client work such as, the time he got a phone call from the President of Levi’s saying “Hey Bob, we need you to un-f**k Levi’s for us”. We also discuss why we respect Novak Djokovic but we love John McEnroe, how COVID has changed consumer behaviour and brand behaviour for good, and how we might think about re-designing a new world order. As always, we end the podcast by talking about habits, principles, and words to live by.LinksLinkedIn: Bob SheardFreshBritain WebsiteFreshBritain TestimonialsInstagram: @freshbritainHome of the podcastLinkedIn: @michaelxcampionInstagram: @michaelxcampionhttps://www.michaelxcampion.com/podcastTop Ten Public Speaking Tips + 'Thursday Thoughts' www.michaelxcampion.com/subscribe

If you were disappointed that RV Shows around the country were mostly canceled last year, I have bad news for you. There will be many that simply will not happen again. A leading RV industry expert says in-person RV shows may be a thing of the past. With RV sales booming like never before, RV dealers have discovered they can sell more units - and more efficiently - in their own showrooms. It's no secret that dealers have long complained about how much work RV shows are. But now, many feel they no longer need big shows. For despite the COVID shutdowns of 2020 that saw almost all in-person RV shows canceled,  RV sales were through the roof. And they are even stronger in 2021. As. result, Bob Zagami, the executive director of the New England RV Dealers Association, says in-person events at fairgrounds and convention centers may largely be a thing of the past, except for mega shows like Hershey every fall, and Tampa every January. Instead, look for more online-only shows, like the one Zagami is organizing for April 10-11 in place of the annual in-person Boston RV Show. It's a trend he suggests has already taken root in many places. Zagami is our interview of the week of Episode 338 of the RV Podcast. You can hear his interview in its entirety on your favorite podcast app or by clicking the arrow in the player below.' Keep scrolling for an edited transcript of our conversation. RV Shows are moving online Before we present the interview transcript, here are the details of the  New England RV and Camping Expo Event Name:  New England RV and Camping Expo Dates:  Saturday, April 10 and Sunday, April 11 Register and buy tickets at:  www.newenglandrvandcampingexpo.com Discount tickets are available on the event Facebook page:  www.facebook.com/newenglandrvandcampingexpo Here's the edited transcript: Bob Zagami Mike Wendland: Well joining us right now to talk about RV Shows is our friend Bob Zagami from NERVDA, the New England RV Dealers Association. Hey Bob, how are you? Bob Zagami: Hey Mike. Great. Thank you. Very good to be back with you again. Mike Wendland: I'm really curious about how online RV shows work. Tell us about it. Yours will be April 10th and 11th, right?  Bob Zagami: Saturday, April 10th, Sunday, April 11th. Mike Wendland: How's it going to work? Bob Zagami: Well if we take a step back, we did manage to get the 2020 Boston show and then COVID hit. As we come to 2021, we had it scheduled for January, rescheduled it for April, then realized we were not going to be able to do it. RV Dealers don't miss RV Shows A lot of the dealers, quite honestly, do not miss the in-person shows. The consumers are missing it because they want to touch them and feel them and talk to people and see all the different units. But there are some shows that are not going to survive. We came up with a unique platform through an event manager here in Boston, He has a program called Hopin that comes in out of the UK, He studied all of these other programs and several things were missing. But the primary thing missing from most of the commercial programs was the interactivity, the connection with the customer. They could watch a presentation, but they couldn't communicate very effectively. Then they also lost the networking, walking down the hall and seeing an old friend, catching up or going to the bar and having a drink with your competitor that you haven't seen for a year, those types of things. This platform does that. Will online replace in-person RV shows? We were very careful from the beginning to make note that this does not replace the Boston RV show. It doesn't replace any RV show. At RV shows, you touch, you feel, and you spend a lot of time looking at units. Online is more educational and information But we have RV dealers and we have campgrounds as exhibitors, but we put a lot of emphasis on the online video presentations and gearing it towards the man...

Read along to practice your English and to learn the English phrases DUE TO and IN DUE TIMEIn this English lesson I wanted to help you learn the English phrase due to. A little while ago, in a comment on a previous video a viewer named Hassane, asked me to talk about the word due. Due to means that you are doing something because of something. Due to the bright sun and the snow reflecting the light, I am wearing sunglasses and a hat with a brim. I'm doing that due to the fact that it's really, really bright out here. I'm doing that because it is really bright. So when you do something due to something else, it means because of. It's a direct replacement, pretty much. So, due to the very bright conditions out here, I am wearing sunglasses and a ball cap with a brim so that I can see. 'Cause otherwise I have to squint. Like it's really bright. The snow really reflects the sunlight and it's just really hard to see. So that's better. Anyways, due to means because of.WANT MORE ENGLISH LESSONS? GO TO YOUTUBE AND SEARCH, "BOB THE CANADIAN"#englishteacher #englishlessons #speakingenglish #bobthecanadianThe second phrase I wanted to teach you today is the phrase in due time. So another phrase for you Hassane with the word due in it, when something happens in due time, it happens at the correct time. So let's say students say to me, "When are you going to hand back that test that we did last week?" I would say in due time. What that means is that I'm going to take the right amount of time to grade the test and I'm going to hand it back, not late, not early, I'm going to hand it back in due time. I'm going to do a good job. I'm going to thoroughly look over the tests and I'll hand them back in due time.So to review when something happens due to something else, it means that it happens because of something else. And when something happens in due time, it means that it happens at the right time I think. Sometimes I think to myself, students want their tests back immediately, but then I would end up grading them really quickly, and I probably wouldn't do a good job. So it's best to hand them back in due time.Hey, let's look at a comment from a previous video. It's all crumpled up in my pocket, sorry. This is from Natalia Illusion. It's crumpled up due to the fact that I had it in my pocket. There, another good sentence for you. Natalia, hi Natalia. By the way, we should chat some time again Natalia. Natalia and I talked during the summer via Zoom. It was really fun. But I hope things are going well for you over there in Russia. Natalia says, "No one strikes up a conversation with Bob calling them, "Hey Bob, the Canadian. Because everyone around Bob knows English, so they probably don't subscribe to this channel and most importantly, they are Canadians too." And my response was, "That's true, most people in Canada don't have any idea that I have a YouTube channel. I like it that way." So, you know what's unique for me being a YouTuber is that most people in my town, most people in my area don't even know I have a YouTube channel. I would never claim to be famous, but I do have a few subscribers on my YouTube channel, on the bigger one, but people don't usually recognize me. And I kind of like that. I like the fact that the vast majority of my viewers are from other places in the world. Because I didn't start this YouTube channel to get millions of subscribers.I didn't start this YouTube channel so people would know who I am. In fact, I'm more comfortable with people not knowing who I am. I'm a very private person. When you describe someone in English as being private, they don't like being out in public.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/bobthecanadian)

Read along to practice your English and to learn the English phrases STRIKE UP and STRIKE ONEIn this English lesson, I wanted to help you learn the English phrase, strike up. We use this phrase mostly when we're talking about starting a conversation with someone. If I go somewhere and I see someone I know on the other side of the room, I might walk over and strike up a conversation with them. If I'm at a party and there's a person that I really want to talk to, at some point I might walk over and I might strike up a conversation with them. So again, when you strike up a conversation with someone, it means simply that you go and you start having a conversation with them. You go and you start talking to them. If I was in an airport and someone recognized me and said, "Bob, the Canadian," I would probably strike up a conversation with them. That would be really cool, by the way, if I ran into someone who knew who I was. That's never happened. Even though I have many, many subscribers on YouTube, no one has ever yelled out in public, "Hey Bob, the Canadian," and then struck up a conversation with me.WANT MORE ENGLISH LESSONS? GO TO YOUTUBE AND SEARCH, "BOB THE CANADIAN"#englishteacher #englishlessons #speakingenglish #bobthecanadianAnyways, the second phrase I wanna teach you today is the phrase, strike one, and also strike two and strike three. Baseball is a sport where you have a number of chances to hit the ball. But if you swing and miss it's strike one. We use this phrase when we're talking to people as well. I actually use it with my students when they're not behaving well in class. I'll say to a student, "Look, you really need to stop talking and you need to get your work done. And because I need to warn you that's strike one." Okay, then the student knows that if I catch them talking and not doing their work again, it will be strike two. And then when we get to strike three, I'll probably make them go and talk to the principal.So once again, to review, when you strike up a conversation, it means you start having a conversation with someone. And when you use the strike system, when you tell someone that, "That's strike one," you mean that they have been warned. They have two more chances and then something's going to happen that they probably won't like.Hey, let's look at a comment from a previous video. Sorry, I'm sitting out here sort of in the rain. I'm actually underneath the hatch of my van right now, because it's raining a little bit. So my camera's out of the rain, but I'm still kind of in it. But let's look at a comment from a previous video. This is from Padma and Padma says, "Hello, teacher Bob. When I see certain," sorry, "When I see certain titles of your videos, I always think these phrases are so unusual. But then on the TV show, "Friends," I hear many of them. And I say, "Oh, they are so common." And my response is this. "I'm happy to hear that. I get all of my phrases from everyday conversations. I'm always on the lookout for phrases that native English speakers use when I'm talking to them. And then I write them down quickly so that I can make a lesson about it. It has left me thinking that English is a bit of a strange language." So yeah, that one of the side-effects of teaching English is that as I study the English language, in order to teach it to you, I've been starting to realize that the language is kind of strange. Sorry, I forgot to thank Padma. Thanks Padma, for the comment.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/bobthecanadian)

Read along to practice your English and to learn the English phrases HAVE IN MIND and DO YOU MINDIn this English lesson, I wanted to help you learn the English phrase "have in mind." We usually use this phrase in two questions. You might hear the question, what do you have in mind? And you might hear the question, who do you have in mind? Here's an example. Let's say Jen says, "Hey, I think we should go out this Saturday night." I can say to her, "What do you have in mind?" What I'm asking is, what are you thinking we should do? Or what are you planning? What do you think would be fun for us to do? So I would say to her, "What do you have in mind?" Let's imagine another situation. Maybe Jen wants to hire someone to work on our flower farm. I could say, "Who do you have in mind?" And basically what I'm asking her is, who is the person you are thinking of hiring? So when you say to someone, "What do you have in mind?" It means, what are you thinking? And when you say to someone, "Who do you have in mind?" We're asking, who are you thinking about?WANT MORE ENGLISH LESSONS? GO TO YOUTUBE AND SEARCH, "BOB THE CANADIAN"The second phrase I wanted to teach you today is the phrase "Do you mind?" This is a polite way to ask someone if they can do something. Sometimes in my classroom, I'll say to a students, I'll say to a student, sorry, "Do you mind closing the window?" Or, "Do you mind opening the window?" It's just a polite way to ask someone to do something. Sometimes in the kitchen, Jen will say, "Hey Bob, do you mind handing me a fork?" Or, "While you're up, do you mind getting cups for all of the children?" So when you say to someone, "Do you mind?" and then you ask them to do something, it's just a polite way to ask them to do it. So to review, when you use the phrase, "Who do you have in mind?" or "What do you have in mind?" you're asking basically what the person is thinking about or who they are thinking about. And when you say to someone, "Do you mind?" and then you ask them to do something, it's just a really polite way to ask them to do something for you. So I always say things like this, "Do you mind clicking the thumbs up on this video?" Or actually I usually say, "Would you mind?" in that case, don't I? Yeah, interesting, 'cause you can use both. I could say to a student, "Would you mind opening the window?" And I could say, "Do you mind opening the window?" Both work.Hey, let's look at a comment from a previous video. This comment is from Aleksey and Aleksey says, "Thumbs up and only then watching the video over again. Listening to Bob's voice, reading the subtitles, and speaking aloud at the same time 'cause there's no time for farting around." Great use of the phrase, by the way. "Finally writing the comment. This is my simple plan for learning English which I follow step by step with my favorite teacher. Thank you very much." And my response to Aleksey is this, "This is an awesome plan. I'm glad you recognize the importance of combining different modes of learning. You've got reading, writing, listening, and speaking all happening from one video. Great job Aleksey." So I do wanna talk about that for a bit. Thanks for the comment, by the way, Aleksey. Aleksey, you've kinda keyed into what I think is a very important aspect of learning the English language and I'm going to sound a bit like a broken record here because I say this all the time, you really need to work on all the areas.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/bobthecanadian)

The best of the "Hey Bob...?" Skits from season one of the podcast --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/4-cents-a-podcast/support

NO CARBS AFTER 6pm Let’s say Bob works a 9-5 job . He is in a hurry so he rushes off to McDonalds for breakfast. Has his bacon and egg mc muffin meal with a large cappuccino . He has lunch at 12pm which is usually a pie, focaccia or a burger from the local shop. If he packed his lunch it’s a can of tuna on crackers. . He finishes work at 5 gets home has dinner at 7pm then watches the block, the bachelorette, keeping up with the kardashians, the farmer wants a wife and listens to Chat With Matt while eating his favourite Kingston and Monty Carlo biscuits with his coffee . Just with dinner and his late night snacks his eating over 1500 calories . Then a co-worker says . “Hey Bob, my trainer recommended I follow his science based Cert III eating plan which is no carbs after 6” . Bob goes to work the next day, gets his usual McDonalds breakfast, has his usual focaccia lunch rushes home to eat cram in a quick dinner before it hits 6pm . He does this for 2 weeks he loses 5kg! . NOTHING SPECIAL HAPPENED HERE . The reason Bob lost weight is the fact that he has cut out all of that extra 1500 calories of snacking late at night, he simply ate less, therefore lowering their energy intake, which means he was in a calorie deficit, resulting in weight loss. If you got any value from the podcast subscribe and share with a friend! Join my Free Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/541693343223692

Read long to learn the English Phrases I DON'T HAVE THE FOGGIEST IDEA and FOG UP:So in this English lesson, I wanted to help you learn the English phrase "I don't have the foggiest idea." There's actually two forms of this phrase. You can say, "I don't have the foggiest," or "I don't have the foggiest idea," and it simply means that you don't know something. Let's imagine that Jen has lost her keys. She could say to me, "Hey Bob, have you seen my keys?" And I could say, "I don't have the foggiest idea "where your keys are." That sounded kind of mean, didn't it? I would try to say it nicer. "I don't, I'm sorry, Jen, "I don't have the foggiest idea where your keys are." So again, you can say, "I don't have the foggiest," you could just say, "Hey, I don't have the foggiest," or you can say, "I don't have the foggiest idea." You can also say, "I haven't the foggiest idea." Sorry, I just thought of that now, but the more common phrase in my area is to say, "I don't have the foggiest idea." So, if you don't know where something is, or if you don't know the answer, you can say, "I don't have the foggiest idea." The other phrase I wanted to teach you today is the phrase "fog up," because today, what's happening here, oh, my mask fell down here. Let me just grab that for a sec. So today at work, I needed to wear a mask, and as you know, sometimes I need to wear reading glasses. But sometimes, I don't know if you can see this, when you wear a mask and glasses, your glasses fog up. So right now I can't see out of my left eye because my glasses are fogging up, or, as you would say, "My glasses fog up when I wear a mask." So, if any of you have any suggestions, if any of you are people who are wearing glasses regularly, and you are wearing masks, and if you know how to prevent them from fogging up, if you could tell me how to stop my glasses from fogging up, I would really appreciate it.So to review, if you say, "I don't have the foggiest idea," or "I haven't the foggiest idea," it means you don't know the answer, and if something was to fog up, it means that it gets kind of some moisture on it, especially with glasses and you can't see out of it. Sometimes in the morning when you take a hot shower, the bathroom mirror will fog up, and sometimes when you get into a vehicle when the temperature outside is different than inside the vehicle, the windshield can fog up.So, do you know why I'm talking about fog? Because it's actually quite foggy right now. It's been quite foggy all over Ontario the last little bit. The weather is changing, so the ground is really warm, the river is really warm, but the air is really cool, and that starts to cause a lot more fog. So it's just been a lot foggier than normal.But hey, let's look at a comment. I've also lost that piece of paper. One moment. Everything, everything is blowing away today. Anyways, this comment is from Fahmida, and Fahmida says, "All the best, Teacher Bob. "Wish you good luck for your first day of school "in this pandemic." My reply was "Thanks, Fahmida." So yes, thank you very much for those, for wishing me well. That's very nice of you. Many of you in the comments the last little while have been wishing me well, knowing that I'm heading back to school.So again, yesterday was our first day of school, today, it's actually Wednesday evening right now, I just finished my second day of school, and it went really well. I feel quite comfortable being in school. You know, I have my mask, as I showed you. We have to wear these disposable masks. I have to wear two a day and then I need to throw them away at the end of the day, and the school provides them, thankfully, because I don't know if I could afford to keep buying maths every day, and I think it's gonna work.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/bobthecanadian)

Today, I am very happy to have with me a former client of mine and he’s very brave to be willing to talk about fear of flying in a straightforward manner!   John: Hi. This is Doctor John Dacey with my weekly podcast, New Solutions to the Anxiety Epidemic. Today, I am very happy to have with me a former client of mine and he’s very brave to be willing to talk about everything straightforward. His name is Bob and I’m really happy to have him in the studio today. Hey Bob, how are you? Bob: Good, John. Glad to be here. John: Now the major thing when I typically deal with former clients, is I ask them the 8 kinds of anxiety and have them talk about what it felt like and what they did to be successful, but in your particular case, it was very clear what you needed to deal with was fear of flying. Could you talk a little bit, Bob, about how you came to be a fearful flyer? You were flying to France and a whole lot of places and then all of a sudden something happened, isn’t that right? Bob: Yeah, I never had trouble flying before. I few all over to Europe and had no trouble in planes whatsoever, but I got married, and this was quite a long time ago. John: Where did you get married then? Bob: I got married in Finland. John: Oh Finland. Ok. Bob: Finland. My wife was Finnish, we met in Paris, and then she went back to Finland and I went back to join her and we got married after knowing each other for about 2 months or so. We had a honeymoon, by cruise, in the Mediterranean, and then we flew back to the United States from Milan. It was on the flight back that I had a totally unexpected panic attack. I can explain what it was like but looking back I realize, I was very ambivalent about the marriage. I was really of the feeling that maybe it was a mistake, that we knew each other for too short a time. John: Now let me just ask you a question there, Bob. So, you’re married, you had your honeymoon, etcetera, etcetera, and everything seems to be okay and then all of the sudden, something happened on this trip on the way back. Is that right? Bob: Right. I mean I did have my doubts, even going into the flight back. It wasn’t as if everything was totally hunky-dory and then completely out of the blue this happened, but I certainly didn’t expect—I had never had anything like this before. John: On the other hand, this is the first time she’s going to be meeting your parents, your relatives, your friends, is this correct? Bob: Well actually my parents had flown over for the wedding. John: Oh I see. Ok. Bob: But you know, this is the first time that she’s coming to the states. She was a very successful journalist and artist in Finland and she gave all that up to come over here with me. John: Can I interrupt you once again? I’m sorry to do that. You’re rather accomplished yourself. Would you tell us a little bit about your own educational background? Bob: Yeah. Well, I’m a biochemist. I have a Ph.D. in chemistry from Yale. I graduated Columbia Undergraduate and I had post oped in a couple of places, one of them which was Paris. We were coming back here where I was going to take up a position at Boston University in the Chemistry department. John: So you have pretty high standards I can imagine. Bob: Well you might say. You know, I was very excited about everything and looking forward to an academic career and my wife had, again, given up everything to come here with me so I felt quite a sense of responsibility for her. I had to really introduce her to the United States, how to go shopping in markets, and just ordinary everyday things. And also, to help her get a job over here. But on the plane, suddenly I felt very strong claustrophobia. I felt trapped in the plane, that I couldn’t get out. These were feelings that I had never really had before. John: Why would you want to get out, Bob? Bob: Yeah, I mean I wouldn’t want to get out. There’s absolutely no reason. In that sense, it made no sense, but looking back on it, I was also feeling trapped in this marriage even right at the beginning and that maybe played into this feeling of being trapped in the airplane. And it was pretty awful. It was a kind of panic attack. My breathing got sort of short and I didn’t feel I was going to die. I just felt I was in an impossible situation where I was trapped and couldn’t get out. John: So, naturally, you assumed that being on the airplane was part of this whole thing. Bob: Yeah, right. John: And that’s why after being a fearless flyer for a long time—this is what amazes people—in one experience, it went from being perfectly comfortable to perfectly terrifying. Bob: Exactly right. Exactly right. That was part of the problem because it was so unexpected and I had never had anything like this before. I was not an anxious person, I didn’t have these kinds of anxieties before. I had the normal anxieties, you know, like before a final exam or something like that, that everybody has, but I never had these kinds of feelings before. So, we got back to the states and I had a number of phobias I guess you’d call them, that were connected, I suppose, to this that I had never had before: a phobia of heights, a fear of elevators, being trapped in a subway if it’s stopped between stations. A whole bunch of phobias that were kind of connected to being trapped in some way. John: So I can understand this. You sort of transferred being psychologically trapped in the marriage to being physically trapped in these various situations, which in fact you were. If you go up in an elevator, for a short time you are trapped. Bob: Right. That’s what they all had in common. John: And for a long time on an airplane, especially in an intercontinental flight like that, you’re trapped for quite a while. Bob: That’s right. The next summer, we went back to Finland, to visit her family, and it was pretty awful for me because I knew how awful the flight would be and it was. And it’s a long flight. The flight there and back was pretty bad. That was the beginning of all of these. As I mentioned, I never had these anxieties before and it all sort of came crashing down. Meanwhile, I had to continue my work which I wanted to do as a biochemist and had students working with me and was teaching classes and meanwhile dealing with all this so it was quite difficult. John: Now as I said to you, we have a limited amount of time and I wonder if we can jump right into what you and I did. You came to see me about this, which was a brilliant plan on your part. I’m just kidding. However, what we did—tell us a little about what we did to deal with the flying. Bob: Well, we sort of worked in stages. We first spoke about what brought all this on, which I kind of summarized, in the first place. Then, we tried to imagine what it would be like in the plane, and then I worked with John on a simulator, a flight simulator that tried to give me an even stronger feeling than just talking about it, an actual visual feeling for being in the plane. Going up then landing, flying and then landing. Then we went out to the small private plane field and we looked around and gradually worked up where we first went on an airplane and it was a small Cessna and sat in the plane for a while to give my self a feeling for sitting in the plane. The next step we were in the plane and we just taxied around the field, we didn’t take off. John: By the way, we have a pilot with us, I remember, because even though I was with you, I’m also a student pilot so I couldn’t really take you up if I wanted to, but we did have an instructor and the company that did this with us was very understanding and really wanted to see you be able to fly again so they were perfectly willing to do these things like traveling around the airport. They got permission and they traveled around the airport on the ground at first to get you back to being used to it. Bob: Yeah, they were very supportive. John: And by the way, I think it’s important to add that the big difference in being on a super liner and this little pane is that you get 270 degrees of view from where you’re sitting up in the front, I was sitting in the back. Also, we had a pilot who if you say to him, “I have to go down right now,” he will do it. If you say that to a 747 pilot, they probably won’t do it. Bob: You’re in big trouble right. John: That’s right. Bob: The next time we actually took off and we circled around the airport and came down, and each time it git a little hard, but a little easier in a way. John: By the way, I want to add that I think we went out and did a little celebrating afterward, and it’s very important that you do celebrate, that you do have some really nice reward for doing this because that’s what cements the success feeling. Bob: Yes. Absolutely. Then we moved up to taking shorter flights on a regular commercial plane. We took Cape Air once to Hyannis and once I think it was to Provincetown. That worked out quite well. They’re small planes, but they’re commercial flights. John: Well you did a great job. You were very nervous and I believe that if you don’t mind me saying this, that you took one small tranquilizer just to help a little bit and we didn’t do that every time, but we did it in the beginning. Bob: Yes, and it really did help. I took some Ativan and that did help. John: Ativan is a great drug for that. Bob: Yes. And then after those, we really graduated, I did to commercial jets, we took a flight to New York. I think we took two flights to New York and then I did one with my girlfriend without John and then I went to visit a friend in Washington, DC, which was for me a real triumph. John: By yourself. Bob: That was the longest one. Yeah, it was by myself. John: I was so proud of you because that was a really big jump and you did wonderfully well. Bob: I was a little trepidatious but it worked out fine and that was the last flight and you know it’s been a few years, but I wouldn’t have any trouble taking those flights again and I’m still hoping to reach for the stars in a way, and get back to my beloved Paris. John: We’re going to get you back to Paris, Bob. That’s the plan. Well, I want to thank you so much for giving your testimony here today. I’m sure there’s a lot of listeners, we have over 6 thousand listeners now, I don’t know if I told you. It’s just wonderful and of course, we’re talking about the Corona Virus sometimes, but mostly it’s about stories like yours. You’re proud of yourself and I have to say, I’m very proud of you also. Bob: And I’ve enjoyed working with you so much, John. You’ve made all the difference to me. All the difference. John: Well thank you so much. Thanks a million. And I’ll talk to you folks next week.

Airborne Receiver  Dennis Barela (4s): Alright, so today's Tuesday, and this is the first of the summer study sessions. We're doing something a little bit different this year, where, where we have get it right. That has volunteered to bring us 10 weeks of free training on high school rules and directed at, at our mechanics here in New Mexico. And like I said, my name is Dennis Barela. I'm official here in New Mexico, out of Albuquerque. Dennis Barela (37s): And I had met Barb or known last year at the front range camp out of Colorado. And he presented this software up there to the high school officials in the football camp in, and I just thought it was a great way to learn high school rules without having to get on the field and in front of players. And so here's the Bible for Bob. Dennis Barela (1m 11s): He started fishing in 2001 back. Judge had done many district and state champion ship games. He's been an instructor. He found get it right in 2012, the software's in 50 different States and 15 different countries. He's a game changer through an ASO and he is partner with Mike para and the battlefield cabal field since 2016. He also now recently a partner with the New Mexico athletics association and the MOA. Dennis Barela (1m 48s): And he's bringing us a lot of free training this summer. So what's that Bob? It's all yours. Bob Arnone (1m 57s): Okay. Thank you. I guess now need to be able to share my screen. Dennis Barela (2m 10s): Let me stop sharing. 0 (2m 13s): Okay. Dennis Barela (2m 16s): I need to pull this forward. We can see. Bob Arnone (2m 22s): All right. Tonight, we get to talk a little bit about the airborne receiver. This is an extension of the video that the Dennis in the crew published during their break, but I just need to step through a couple of things here, cause we're going to take it another couple of levels deeper than what that video had. Bob Arnone (2m 54s): So of course, by the Federation a catch, this is a player establishing possession of a light ball in flight, and then first contacting the ground inbounds while maintaining possession of the ball. So we have this animation here. We'll drop this down. Dennis Barela (3m 18s): Hey Bob, it's just showing one screen, a blank screen with Get it right on the bottom. Bob Arnone (3m 25s): Okay. Let me try to get into the, there you go. Okay. I've got the animation now. Good? Yep. Okay. So, so now we've got the animation laid up here. We'll, we'll looking at this at about field level. We're going to do a play through on this just so you can see it from start to finish as to what we need to look for, where it goes up, comes down. So the mechanics on something like this, especially in New Mexico, where you're doing four, man, you have to be pretty tough because of what you really need to watch for. Bob Arnone (4m 3s): I is making sure number one, he even has possession of the ball. And then if he does where's that first foot hit and right here, you can see it that first foot isn't bounce in that second foot very quickly lands out of bounds. So for me, and that becomes pretty tricky to catch. You may need the up higher to help you on that. But depending on how far down field that wing official can get that, that one might be a little bit of a trick for y'all on a comparison, what you're going to see on the right side. Bob Arnone (4m 41s): And I'll run this through a place through going to see that the fender pushed that received roundabouts while he's in the air. There's nothing illegal about that. As long as that contact is legal, A receiver has possession of the ball. The defender has taken a look at him. He shoves him while you're still in midair. So his first contact is on the sideline. So that makes that an incomplete pass for some of you veteran officials out there. Bob Arnone (5m 15s): I think it was maybe four or five years ago that the rule used to be in high school.... Support this podcast

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we are here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Bill Parry from Redwood Software join us. Bill, I’d love for you to just introduce yourself, your role, and your organization. Bill Parry: Well, thank you very much. I would be happy to. I am here at Redwood as the director of enablement of an amazing company that specializes in process automation and robotic software and some really fantastic stuff in the financial world. For me, I am just a poor kid from Northern New Hampshire living in Texas. The first half of my career, I started in the U.S. Coast Guard. I spent the majority of my time studying training, training development, process improvement, human performance, instructional design. My last three and a half/four years in the Coast Guard, I was working at a training center, a giant think tank. So, I developed a real passion and love for training and teaching and coaching and understanding the process behind it all. And then when I left the Coast Guard, I jumped into the sales world and I realized that there’s a great disparity between training and what actually happens out in the street. My first sales job, I go off to sales training, I’m fired up. I’m excited. I come back and the first thing my sales manager says to me, he says, “Bill, don’t about what they told you, I’m going to show you the right way to do it.” So, from where I came from, that was a big red flag. Then he goes on to say, “what I want you to do is I want you to hang out with Bob next week.” Okay. So, you just told me that training’s wrong and now you’re passing the buck to Bob. So, I go home, I go to Bob. “Hey Bob, I’m going to hang out with you this week.” Guess what you think Bob said? “Why me?” And that was the beginning of my passion for connecting training with real-world application. That is something that I see all the time. You have so many sales managers out there that have been promoted into a role they really don’t know how to do, and their only way of coaching and teaching is just do what I did. Just do what I did. You’re going to do it. You’re going to crush it, and that really doesn’t work or doesn’t help. In my career, I’ve either been in sales or I’ve been training. And that really gives me a unique perspective when I’m coaching and teaching a seller. Because I know what it’s like to have that quota over your head. I know what it’s like to be at the end of the quarter, end of the year, and you’ve got nothing, and how to get out of that so that you can be productive and be a consistent performer. SS: Well, I love it, Bill. I think that scenario is one that a lot of sales professionals encounter when they go into a new organization. And I think specifically that the kind of first interaction with an organization is really critical to getting a sales rep off on the right foot. You co-led a session at the Sales Enablement Society event on great onboarding. And I would love to understand from your perspective, what makes an onboarding program great and what are kind of the core components of a successful onboarding program? BP: Onboarding really has to be personalized and specific to the role that you are trying to coach and teach. Too often, we have HR that gets involved and HR has got their onboarding that we’ve got to do here. We’ve got these people, “Oh wait, what is a sales onboarding?” And we don’t understand that a seller, yes, they’ve got to do HR onboarding because they’ve got to learn how to get a paycheck and how to get healthcare and all that other stuff. But the seller has to learn the specific things about their role and how they can be successful and what do they need to know or be able to do in order to be successful in their role. Many times, people create an onboarding program by assembling the kitchen sink and just throwing it at the person and saying, “okay, there it is. Just go learn it.” And one of two things happen. They figure it out painfully or they say, “forget this, I’m out of here”. And that can be very exhausting and costly. So for me, for a really good onboarding program, there are four key elements that you’ve got to really focus on. First and foremost is the industry. What is the industry that the seller is going into? Show them how to be a student of their industry, show them where to learn about their customers and their competitors, and where do their customers meet? What networking groups do they participate in, what user groups they participate in? Where did their customers go to find help so that this seller can immerse themselves into and understand that the industry that they’re selling into and the pains and the frustrations of their customers so that when they do engage with a customer, they’re having an intelligent, businesslike conversation that hopefully elevates them to the level of a trusted advisor. Somebody that the customer wants to talk to, not just some knucklehead who’s trying to sell them something. So, the first bucket is they’ve got to be a student of their industry. The second is they’ve got to understand and know the systems that they’re going to be using and what resources are available to them in their job. Systems like Salesforce, Outlook, how to input an order. Those systems need to be second nature to them. So many sellers hesitate calling somebody because they don’t know how to input a lead or how to finish an order or how to insert frustrating process that we have created and they don’t know how to do it right. You’ve got the industry, you’ve got the systems and resources. Then the next thing is selling skills or selling process or selling methodology. Whatever you want to do. What do your sellers, or what does your company subscribe to to help your sellers do their job? It could be customer-centric. It could be solution selling. It could be Challenger sale, it could be insert methodology, but we need to have an understanding of the process. And then the last thing that they need to know is the product and what are the product solutions? What are the pains that we solve? Who are the competitors? What are my success stories? And I like to put them in those orders. I share with sellers that, the product is the last thing that you need to know. And so often new hires want to, like, “I just got to know the product and I want to go out there and sell.” Okay, cool. But you need to know why people are buying our product. You’ve got to know what problem our product is solving. You’ve got to know why we even created this and why is the industry in need of this. If you can understand the need and the business needs and the industry, the product is secondary, because that same person that’s begging for information on the product, what are my features benefit? That’s the first seller that’s going to drop price in order to close a deal and we don’t want to drop price. We want to provide solutions and we want to help the customer solve a pain problem. SS: Absolutely. I love those four buckets. I think what I’d love to understand from you are maybe some of the challenges that you’ve encountered when trying to design or implement these onboarding programs within a new organization? BP: Sure. There are a lot. There are many challenges. The first challenge that you have to do is you have to clearly identify what does the seller need to know or be able to do to successfully do their job well. Just simply identifying those key elements can make the process that much better. For example, sales really is simple. Who do I call? What do I say? And what are the next steps? Who do I call? We want to spend a lot of time clearly identifying who is the target customer that we’re going after. Teach your sellers how to identify the proper target, the proper prospective buyer. Show them how to get that information. If you can clearly identify what they need to know or be able to do, you can now bake out, how do they learn that, what resources are available to them? Who’s my subject matter expert on this? Where can this learn the seller learn this information? Too often a lot of organizations just kind of create things without thinking of the end in mind, they just kind of say, “okay, you just need to know this.” Well, yeah, I know I need to know how to close a deal, but before I know how to close a deal, I’ve got to learn where the hell is the guy? How do I find the guy? Okay, great. Now what do I say to the guy? How do we overcome this objection? What is my conversation starter? How do I engage with this customer? What is my demand creation process and methodology? And there are baby steps that you’ve have got to develop these things. Now, to help you understand that, you’ve got to be engaged with the senior leadership. I can’t emphasize the importance of this. The enablement process needs to be a top-down function, a top-down, cross-functional, synergistic process. They’ve all got to work together. If you don’t have that mutual buy-in, you’re not going to have any level of success. I’ve done it the wrong way and it doesn’t work where you work with just the sellers. Because any teaching that you do, the seller is going to be useless unless the leadership supports it. If you can get the leaders in one room and talk about it and clearly identify it and help them clearly identify what are the top five things that a seller needs to know in the first week, what are the top five things that the seller needs to know in the second week? By the end of the first month, what’s a reasonable expectation of our sellers? And the skills that they need to know or be able to do that. Just engaging with senior leadership and getting them in the process is key. One of the things that I really like to do is when I start building an onboarding program, or I’m building a pipeline generation program, or I’m building anything that engages the sellers, I want the sales leadership involved. And I tell them, “this is your process. This is for your team. I’m really good at this. I kind of understand it. I know how it all works, but unless you help me build this, and unless you support it, we’re not going to get anywhere with this. So, let’s do this together so that collectively we’re building a program for you and your team. It’s not my quota, it’s your quota.” SS: I think that’s a great approach. And you mentioned obviously sales, leadership, and also cross-functional alignment. So, from your perspective, obviously cross-functional alignment is critical, but why specifically for onboarding? Then, who beyond the sales leadership within the organization should enablement partner with to deliver great onboarding? BP: That’s a great question. Let me tell you a story to explain this. My first job after I graduated college, I went to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy and my first job was to drive a very large ship. My first duty station was in San Francisco. When I reported aboard, a young 24-year-old kid, do you think the captain said to me, “well, here you go, Mr. Parry. Take the keys. She’s all yours. Drive through the San Francisco Bay with all the traffic and work your way underneath the Harbor.” No, no, not at all. That would have been the stupidest thing for them to do. I was handed a binder and in that binder were specific skills and knowledge that I had to clearly demonstrate to subject matter experts that I knew how to do my job. For example, I had to go into the engine room and I had to trace oil lines and fuel lines and sewage lines, and I had to completely understand the insides of the engine so that when I was driving the ship and I said, “all ahead flank,” I knew what happened down below. I had to navigate the ship, I had to spend time with the cooks and the deckhands and I had to touch almost every single department on that ship. Why? Because on a cold January morning at one o’clock in the Alaskan ocean in a storm, our crew needed to know that I knew how to do my job so that they could sleep. I was engaged with everybody. Now, how does that apply to a sales world? How many sellers do you know that leave a wake of pissed off people because the seller just doesn’t give a rat’s ass about what happens? I’m just closing deals. We all know that person. They’re out there, and the reason why is because we don’t set up a system in their onboarding process and teach them what happens when you hit send. How long does it take to install your product? And when you do order the product, what is the process to get that? What is the implementation process? My onboarding is very similar to what I did with the ship. Granted, it’s not like a year and a half long, but I make sure that the sellers are engaged with sales operations, that they spend some time, even if it’s 10 minutes, here are the five things that I need you to go talk to finance about. I want you to go talk to Sue so that Sue knows that you know what you’re doing with your job. There’s an ecosystem, if you will, of everybody that that seller impacts. I want to make sure that that seller engages, shakes a hand, has a face-to-face and meets them. Not just the first week, because we all know the first week is pretty much a waste of time. In the first two weeks, nobody’s going to remember anything. So, I want my seller to engage with them in the first or second week and then come back in six weeks and reengage with them. Now that they have a better understanding of what the process is, when I hit send, when I do sell something, so that way there is cross-functional support. The people in finance no longer are thinking, “ah, those guys are just in sales. I don’t like them.” But it’s, “Hey, how can I help the sellers do more? I like John.” John knows what he’s doing so that when John picks up the phone and he calls Sue in finance, “Hey Sue, I need some help.” Sue wants to help because she knows that John knows how to do the job. Does that make sense? SS: Yes. I love that you are helping the sellers build out their ecosystem internally. that’s fantastic advice. I would actually, love to get some more advice from you, particularly around kind of being able to reinforce the knowledge learned during the onboarding program. As you mentioned, the first two weeks are kind of a wash. How do you ensure that what you’re teaching the sellers sticks long-term? BP: Years ago, I had a boss, wonderful human being, and he would always challenge us. “How do you know, Bill? How do you know?” Too often, managers send their sales guys off to a “sales training” or a certification program, and then when the seller gets back and they’re “certified”, we all hope and pray they can do their job because we don’t know. We’ve all heard the term inspect what you expect. So, with onboarding, I help the managers with a specific milestone checklist. This is the behavior that I want your sellers to demonstrate to you. And it’s usually taken from a QBR review, because every quarter you’re going to review these five things of your sellers. So, now with your new hires, I want you to inspect with them. And it literally is the manager. I’m going up to the guy or girl and saying, “Hey, demonstrate this to me. Show me how to do this”. Too often we can be very complacent. A manager will go up to the seller, “Hey, did you do that training that you’re supposed to do?” It’s like, “Oh yeah, yeah, I got it. I know how to do it. Yeah, it’s great. It’s easy.” Okay, cool. As opposed to, “Hey, show me what you learned. Walk me through this. Demonstrate to me that you know how to do this.” We don’t want to hurt their feelings. We don’t want to upset them. We don’t want to challenge them or embarrass them. Forget that dude. Show me that you know how to do your job. That key element is important. So, for a confirmation of learning, which is the technical demo, the technical term in instructional design, you can do a quiz, which really just means they just know how to take a quiz. They can demonstrate it to you. You can see them in action. What I like to do with onboarding is several levels of confirmation of learning. One, we’ll do a quiz. You went through this module, take this quiz, fantastic. But I’m also going to pair you up with a mentor, one of your teammates. Who you choose for a mentor is important. You want to make sure that you find young sellers that want to become leaders and want to become managers. You don’t want to just hand it off to somebody and say, “Hey, can you walk this guy through it?” You’re going to demonstrate to the mentor that you know how to do the job. But I also want to build the behavior and the comfort level that it’s okay to talk to your peers because I want a room full of sellers to coach each other. I want a seller to totally screw it up on the phone, hang up, and look to his peer go, “dude, what the hell did I just do wrong? Let’s walk through this. Can you look? Where did I blow it?” “Oh, Bob, I heard you, man. You really ran into that challenge. Why don’t we try this? We’ll do a quick role play.” If my onboarding is working correctly, you can walk through the sales floor and you can hear the sellers coaching each other. That allows the manager to go do other managerial things. So, I went on a couple of tangents here. For the confirmation, you want to do a quiz, you want a coach, a peer coach, you want a manager to do spot-checking. And then, another element that you can do, is you can have kind of like an informal session at the end of the onboarding. You can bring the new hire into a conference room and walk and go through their training, demonstrate and show it to us. Going back to my ship, when I had completed my entire program and I finished, I checked off all those boxes that I had to do and I spent all that time with subject matter experts. I still wasn’t qualified. I had to spend time, I had to sit in a room. With the captain of the ship and the second in command of the ship and my boss and the weapons officer and like two other people. It’s like this kind of magic. Imagine a conference room with VPs and the entire C-suite grilling you and asking you questions. If something happens, what do you do if this situation occurs? Walk me through it. If we’re in port, what happens here? So, you can do the same thing with a seller. You get a seller that goes through an onboarding and HR program. They’ve completed their eight weeks, whatever it is. Now, bring them into a room, bring the VP of sales in, bring a regional manager in, bring a sales manager in. Bring somebody from finance, bring somebody from sales operations, put them in a room and grill them. “Hey, demonstrate to me. How do you do your prospecting? Show me what your operating rhythm is, and demonstrate to me how you’re going to set up your weekly schedule. Walk me through what your quarterly reviews going to look like at the end of the quarter. Demonstrate to me where you find prospecting. Let’s do a quick role play.” That simple exercise can take 40 minutes, a half an hour, but imagine all the work and preparation that’s going into it. If you tell your sellers in week three, in four weeks, you’re going to be meeting with the VP of sales, these five people, and you’re going to demonstrate your clear understanding of this material. I’d be willing to bet their pucker factor goes up and they’re going to get really quick about learning it and being able to demonstrate it. SS: Absolutely, absolutely. I think sales can be a stressful role and that’s a situation they should be able to handle it, and it prepares them well for the field. So, we’ve talked a little bit about how you kind of measure, retention of the knowledge from onboarding within reps. How would you say you measure the success of onboarding as a whole back into your organization and particularly your stakeholders? BP: Yeah. In sales, it’s really easy. Are you selling? Are you closing deals? And in the past couple of years, I’ve really been thinking about this and I’m having some really fun and challenging conversations that usually involve alcohol and late nights. So often, I hear sales enablement people get all excited about time to the first deal. Let’s reduce the time to the first deal. Well, I’m going to throw the BS flag on that because I think that is a stupid marker. SS: Please do. BP: Because how many times do we hand things to new salespeople? How many times do we just say, “Oh, here, just try it. Close the deal. Let’s walk them through this.” That’s BS. Stop. I think the best marker of success is the time to pipeline. When you have reached X amount of quality pipeline, now you’ve got it, because the lifeblood of a seller’s process is not the deals that they close. It’s the pipeline that they generate. Quality pipeline. If you teach a seller how to get quality pipeline, they cannot fail, period. SS: I think that is an excellent metric to be tracking the success of an onboarding program. It sounds like you’re going to be very busy for the next year, Bill, so thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. BP: Absolutely, happy to. SS: To our audience, thank you for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, please visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you want to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Having survived a less-than-stellar trip to Berlin 1989 in the last episode of Films(trips), Andrew and Dave head to 1964 by way of 1996 with THAT THING YOU DO! What do the podcasting duo make of Tom Hanks' feature film directorial debut? Where does the film fit within the overall context of Hanks' career? Is Tom Everett Scott a clone of Tom Hanks, or some sort of life-like android programmed with the knowledge of Tom Hanks' comedy performances from the 1980s? Tune in and find out! Next Episode: "Hey Bob, it's Al! I'm playin' the devil for Taylor Hackford! Any tips?" All music by Andrew Kannegeisser. Editing by Dave Babbitt

It’s time to talk about EMDR, Brainspotting, Ego State Hypnosis, Age Regression Hypnosis, Feeling State Addiction Protocol, Gestalt, Forgiveness Hypnosis, DeTur-Eye Movement Desensitization, Informed Soul Hypnosis and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Of course, everyone knows all about this and frankly, I’m not even sure why we brought in an expert to explain all of these very common therapy methods and I’m pretty sure you were all discussing the benefits of each one of them yesterday at lunch. I can hear the conversation now. Hey Bob, how much do you like DeTur-Eye Movement Desensitization over Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or is Gestalt the way I should go with my therapist? Come on John… everyone knows that for the deep work you need do Age Regression Hypnosis with a splash of Brainspotting. DUH! This kind of buzz is filling lunch tables all over the world. Or is it? Of course, NOT! There are so many new and exciting therapy methods that are becoming mainstream today that it can be challenging for the average person to understand what they do, let alone pick the right one for them to tackle the trauma that has been pulling them into the same dark place over and over again. Instead of addressing the cause of the trauma head on, many people will white knuckle it for years with zero improvement. Sometimes this stubbornness is pride holding people back from getting help but many times it’s simply not understanding what to do. I don’t blame people for having a deer in the headlights reaction to hearing all these different therapy methods. I get that same feeling when my mechanic tells me what is wrong with my car. As far as I know, it’s pixie dust and unicorn smiles under my hood that make the car go….but I digress. That is why I found an expert to shine some light on this issue. After you finish this podcast, you’ll have a new appreciation for all these new therapy methods and hopefully, it will inspire you to find the strength within yourself to be the type of person that is brave enough to face your demons head on and defeat them. Haven’t you suffered enough? Our guest today, Scott Allen Smith, LPC, is an expert in a variety of approaches. He has worked in the mental health field since 1993 and his work is based on the eclectic principles of cognitive behavioral treatment, EMDR (Certified), Hypnosis, Brainspotting, EFT (Tapping), client-centered therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, object relations therapy, ego state therapy, and motivational interviewing. He pretty much does it all! Scott helps people that are suffering from anxiety, depression, feeling "stuck", childhood/family issues, couple's issues, adolescent adjustment, grief/bereavement, low self-esteem and confidence, trauma (flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive thoughts), anger management, assertiveness, offending treatment, substance abuse, past victimization (sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse), past traumatic events (P.T.S.D.), and so much more. Scott is the perfect expert to explain all of these different therapy methods and do it in a way that you’ll find very entertaining. Sit back and enjoy this amazing interview with Scott Allen Smith.

It’s time to talk about EMDR, Brainspotting, Ego State Hypnosis, Age Regression Hypnosis, Feeling State Addiction Protocol, Gestalt, Forgiveness Hypnosis, DeTur-Eye Movement Desensitization, Informed Soul Hypnosis and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Of course, everyone knows all about this and frankly, I’m not even sure why we brought in an expert to explain all of these very common therapy methods and I’m pretty sure you were all discussing the benefits of each one of them yesterday at lunch. I can hear the conversation now. Hey Bob, how much do you like DeTur-Eye Movement Desensitization over Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or is Gestalt the way I should go with my therapist? Come on John… everyone knows that for the deep work you need do Age Regression Hypnosis with a splash of Brainspotting. DUH! This kind of buzz is filling lunch tables all over the world. Or is it? Of course, NOT! There are so many new and exciting therapy methods that are becoming mainstream today that it can be challenging for the average person to understand what they do, let alone pick the right one for them to tackle the trauma that has been pulling them into the same dark place over and over again. Instead of addressing the cause of the trauma head on, many people will white knuckle it for years with zero improvement. Sometimes this stubbornness is pride holding people back from getting help but many times it’s simply not understanding what to do. I don’t blame people for having a deer in the headlights reaction to hearing all these different therapy methods. I get that same feeling when my mechanic tells me what is wrong with my car. As far as I know, it’s pixie dust and unicorn smiles under my hood that make the car go….but I digress. That is why I found an expert to shine some light on this issue. After you finish this podcast, you’ll have a new appreciation for all these new therapy methods and hopefully, it will inspire you to find the strength within yourself to be the type of person that is brave enough to face your demons head on and defeat them. Haven’t you suffered enough? Our guest today, Scott Allen Smith, LPC, is an expert in a variety of approaches. He has worked in the mental health field since 1993 and his work is based on the eclectic principles of cognitive behavioral treatment, EMDR (Certified), Hypnosis, Brainspotting, EFT (Tapping), client-centered therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, object relations therapy, ego state therapy, and motivational interviewing. He pretty much does it all! Scott helps people that are suffering from anxiety, depression, feeling "stuck", childhood/family issues, couple's issues, adolescent adjustment, grief/bereavement, low self-esteem and confidence, trauma (flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive thoughts), anger management, assertiveness, offending treatment, substance abuse, past victimization (sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse), past traumatic events (P.T.S.D.), and so much more. Scott is the perfect expert to explain all of these different therapy methods and do it in a way that you’ll find very entertaining. Sit back and enjoy this amazing interview with Scott Allen Smith.

Your Boy Blue: It’s been too long, HAS IT BEEN TOO LONG!? This is our destiny. Calls: Well, we’ve had some drinks and now we are calling pretending to Shaggy 2 Dope. Also looking up the Psychopathic Records forum to find the definition of a Jeffalo. It’s come to this Eating Popcorn: Ok, this might seem like a nitpick or a reach but THIS MOTHERFUCKER IS EATING POPCORN LIKE A WEIRDO! DO NOT SEEK THE TREASURE!, WAKE UP!, RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE!, O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU!, BIG DAN!, RIP NIP!, SMOKING IN THE TRANS ROOM!, WILLIAM SHATNER!, WOKE!, ZACK SNYDER JIM!, FUCKING HATERS!, FLASH!, GETS FUCKED!, JUSTICE LEAGUE!, THE BOY BLUE!, PICK ME UP!, CALL HIM!, JUFFALO!, JEFFALO!, COASTING!, THE BIG BOY BLUE!, DROPPED A DIME!, DRAMA!, JUGGALO!, FAMILY!, FURIOUS FRED FURY!, FLIP THE RAT!, PSYCHOPATHIC RECORDS FORUM!, JUGGALO STAN!, SHEEP!, LOVE FOR ALL!, WOKE JUGGALOS!, URBAN DICTIONARY!, FRIEND!, CLOUT!, TWIZTID JERSEY!, COUNSELOR!, SMOKE!, BREAK!, ROUTINE!, GO TO WORK!, VLOG PAGE!, FEARLESS FREDDIE BOY BLUE!, SKITTZ NASTY!, JAIL TIME!, PRISON!, SENTENCING!, HIT AND RUN!, DRUNK DRIVING!, WEED!, REEFER MADNESS!, PUCK FROM GLEE!, KIDDIE PORN!, DEAD!, SUICIDE!, SKATE DOWN THE HOOVER DAMN!, COMPLETE!, POINT BREAK!, PATRICK SWAYZE!, SPEED WOBBLES!, HEMP!, TREES!, PAPER!, LEGALIZE IT!, GATEWAY DRUG!, ESCAPE DRUG!, TECH N9NE!, INSTAGRAM TV!, DRINKING AND CHILLING!, HOUR PLUS STREAM!, POPCORN!, WEIRD!, SLOP!, FASCINATING!, FUCK EVERYBODY!, LIP SYNC!, ROCKING!, HEY BUB!, HEY BOB!, BRITISH! CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD JIM AND THEM #581 PART 2 RIGHT HERE!

Join Lisa Ryan with Mike Domitrz discussing RESPECT in the Workplace. Find out specific approaches that are vitally important to integrating respect in the workplace. * You are invited to join our community and conversations about each episode on FaceBook at https://www.facebook.com/MutuallyAmazingPodcast and join us on Twitter @CenterRespect or visit our website at http://www.MutuallyAmazingPodcast.com**     Lisa Ryan BIO: Lisa Ryan helps organizations develop employee engagement strategies that keep their top talent and best customers from becoming someone else’s. Lisa is a gratitude expert, award-winning speaker and best-selling author of ten books, including “To Have and To Hold: 101 Smart Strategies to Engage Employees.” She is Past President of the National Speakers Association, Ohio Chapter, and received her MBA from Cleveland State University. Books Lisa Recommends: "Think & Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill "How To Win Friends & Influence People" by Dale Carnegie Social Media Links:   Website http://www.LisaRyanSpeaks.com Twitter https://www.twitter.com/grategy Facebook https://www.facebook.com/#!/LisaRyan14 LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/asklisaryan/ Pinterest https://www.pinterest.com/grategy Youtube http://youtube.com//user/mygrategy Blog http://grategy.com/category/lisa-blog/ FB Page https://www.facebook.com/LisaRyanSpeaker/?fref=ts Elite Experts http://eliteexpertsnetwork.com/lisa-ryan/   **IMPORTANT: This podcast episode was transcribed by a 3rd party service and so errors can occur throughout the following pages:READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW (or download the pdf):   Mike:                       Welcome to The RESPECT Podcast. I'm your host, Mike Domitrz from mikespeaks.com, where we help organizations of all sizes, educational institutions, and the US military create a culture of respect, and respect is exactly what we discuss on this show, so let's get started. Mike:                       This week's guest is Lisa Ryan. Lisa helps organizations develop employee engagements strategies that keep their top talent and best customers from becoming someone else's. She is a gratitude expert, award-winning speaker, and bestselling author of 10 books, including To Have and To Hold: 101 Smart Strategies to Engage Employees. She's also past president of the National Speakers Association Ohio Chapter, and received her MBA from Cleveland State University. Lisa, thanks for joining us on The RESPECT Podcast. Lisa:                         Well, thanks so much for having me. Mike:                       Absolutely. Let's get right into it. How does respect play in the workplace? Lisa:                         To have really good connections between people, they have to feel that you respect them. You don't necessarily have to like everyone, but to acknowledge them for the skills, the knowledge, the expertise that they bring to the workplace, that is critical in making those connections happen. Mike:                       And how do you get people to do that, to actually treat each other with respect in a workplace where they feel, "Hey, I'm here for my goals, they're here for their goals"? Lisa:                         Well, my company, which is called Grategy, stands for "gratitude strategy," so in my world, everything comes down to gratitude. It comes to looking for the good, and when you start with a gratitude practice that we could spend hours talking about, but you start to look for the good in people. So, say you have a person that, for whatever reason, you just get along with. It's like, what if I challenged you to find one good thing about that person, and it's like, "Lisa, there ain't nothing good about that person." All right, if you had to pick something about that person, what would it be? "Um, I don't know, she wore cute shoes yesterday." You start there, because when you start to acknowledge people, when you're able to look for the good, it starts to change the energy around that relationship, and over time, it does change the relationship. Mike:                       How does that ... So that's in the workplace. What about in our personal life? What about the neighbor next door? Lisa:                         The neighbor next door, it's the exact same thing. It all comes down to connection. Mother Teresa once said, "We're more starved for appreciation than we are for bread." So whether that works, and actually, with our neighbor, with our spouse, with our significant others, with our children, when we can go and find the good in those people, and let them know that, "Hey, I appreciate you," "Hey, I respect you," "Hey, I love you," and say the words that often we take for granted, working on that in our personal life then actually helps us to bring that better, less-stressed person into the workplace. So it really is part of a whole picture. Mike:                       Let's say a parent's at home, and they're having a rough day with their kids. The kids aren't listening. Let's say they only have one, and it's giving them an attitude. How do they even take a breath to ... Like, do you have an exercise to give them to take a breath and start with the breath? Because in that moment, they're in total frustration. Lisa:                         The breath definitely helps that person, and this is not a "press the easy button and everything's changed," because the thing is that when you're tired, when you're frustrated, that's probably the wrong time to start a new practice, so we're starting before that, of changing the conversation. Let's say little Johnny comes home from school. Instead of saying, "Well, Johnny, how was your day today?" and Johnny, of course, because we're wired for negativity, "Well, Billy was mean to me, [inaudible 00:03:58]," instead, "Johnny, tell me something good that happened today." Now, the first time you ask Johnny for something good, Johnny's going to look at you like you are insane, like, "What happened to you? Who are you?" But we just start to change the conversation. Lisa:                         Many people, and there's lots of research on gratitude, but it also works with children, that children that have some kind of gratitude practice, that are trained to look for the good, fare better than kids that don't. And in this immediate gratification society that we live in, when Mom and Dad take the time with the kids to say, "Okay, let's ..." We're sitting down to dinner, or we're getting ready for school in the morning. "Let's look at something good. Let's look for those things that we can be grateful for." And over time, it becomes that habit. Lisa:                         I had one of my clients that they started doing with their kids before going to bed, they would just do their gratitudes right before bed, and on the days the parents forget for whatever reason — you know, their plates are full — the kids are like, "How come we're not doing our gratitudes?" So, even at the beginning where they may be resentful, they may be, you know, "Oh, this is stupid, why are we doing this?" Over time, it becomes a practice, it becomes a habit, and it starts to change those relationships. Mike:                       How do you get someone in the workplace to even begin to attempt at home? How do you inspire them or give them a bit of a catalyst to do that, versus going, "I'm not messing with this"? Lisa:                         Well, one of my favorite ways is the 30-Day Gratitude Challenge, and this is every day for 30 days, look for five ways that you can be grateful. And there's actually five different ways ... You know, the gratitude journal, of course, is one, writing down five things that you're grateful for. There's the verbally thanking people, specifically looking for people and catch them in the act of doing something right, and being specific instead of just saying, "Hey, thanks." You know, "Thank you so much for putting in that extra effort on that report that I needed. Really appreciate your efforts, it helped a lot." Lisa:                         So first, writing them down, verbally, then we have the thank-you note and the letter of appreciation. In the world according to Lisa Ryan, the thank-you note is, you know, "Thank you for something." Thank you for dinner, thank you for the gift, thank you for something. The letter of appreciation is "Thank you for being you." Thank you because that you're in my life; this is the difference that you make. And then the fifth way is to reflect on or meditate on gratitude each day. Lisa:                         So, getting into the habit. I used to do — and actually, I've been asked to bring it back again — an official 30-Day Gratitude Challenge, where people would use the five thank-yous a day challenge, and then the funniest part was, after the 30 days were over, I was getting these emails of people saying, "I'm so sorry that the 30-Day Challenge is over, because I really liked keeping my gratitudes." I'm sitting there thinking, you know, that was part of my evil plan, that you get into the habit of doing it, and then you see the difference, and not only do you see the difference, but the people that associate with you also notice the difference. I had one guy who I interviewed after the gratitude challenge, and his wife came up to him and said, "What's going on with you? You're not nearly as grouchy as you used to be." So, whether or not you feel the difference, other people will also notice. Mike:                       Well, and it's important, and we notice what we're being grateful for. What I mean by that is the compliment, you know, telling somebody, "I'm grateful for this." In the workplace, when we're doing our program at corporations and associations, if you ask somebody to come up and say, "Say something nice to this person," they 99% of the time will go to appearance. Lisa:                         Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mike:                       And that's not going to the deep heart of gratitude, that's going for the easiest route out, and it doesn't connect with people. It's not that it doesn't connect at all, but it's in a different thing versus saying, "I see you talk about your kids; you clearly are a devoted parent." That is so much more meaningful than "Wow, nice top," you know, or "Nice jacket," or "Nice shoes," or ... And so you can start to say, "How can I see deeper to connect with this person on something that's meaningful?" You brought up a good example there on the project, to be grateful for the insights you brought to that project. To be that specific is a way more powerful form of gratitude and respect than "Hey, thanks for your help." Lisa:                         Exactly, yeah. Mike:                       So, to be the more specific and say, "That insight you shared right there, that was so brilliant, that helped me go down this path," and be that intentional with the gratitude, can really allow it to connect human beings. Lisa:                         Right, exactly, because really, what gets recognized gets repeated, so when you're telling that person, "Thank you, your insight, the relationship that you have with your family, the fact that you share," whatever it is, that we're looking at actions. Because I speak to a lot of manufacturing associations where there is mostly men in the audience, and when I use accepting a compliment, I do a whole thing on the ability to accept a compliment, but the thing is, because we focus on appearance, in the workplace, that can get a little hairy with all of this. So it's focusing on the actions that that person did, whether or not you like their dress or you like their ... Whatever they're wearing, when we're focusing on the physical attributes of a person, sometimes that can get us in trouble. Mike:                       Absolutely, and that's why we're brought in, is because people don't realize, they are naïve or ignorant, sometimes they just don't care — hopefully that's not the case — that those physical comments can be harming- Lisa:                         Right, exactly. Mike:                       ... especially with tone of voice, where you're looking when you're saying it. There's a million things that can cause harm there, whereas telling you what a great job you did on a project, there's very little chance of me causing harm without ... As long as I don't double-edged sword it, right? Like, "Unlike the last time ..." That, then, is not gratitude, that's like ... Well, it's gratitude with a slap at the same time. And so that's important, to let it be free of any "buts" or "and ifs." Lisa:                         Right, right. Well, and the thing, the other thing that you're doing when you're being specific and recognizing that colleague, and recognizing that employee, is they know that you're paying attention to them. You're not just going because, "Oh, I went to this program and Lisa Ryan said I needed to thank five people. Okay, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Check, done." Where instead, I'm specifically focusing, and now my employees know that I'm not only getting on them when something goes bad, but I'm also paying attention to what's going well. Lisa:                         I was at one of my programs, and a guy came up to me afterwards. He said, "You know, Lisa, when I do something wrong, I get recognized 100% of the time, and when I do something well, it's rare that I get acknowledge." And studies, I mean, there's lots of studies that are out there that show that a lot of times, it's about 42% of employees have been recognized for the good work that they've done by their manager in the past year. Year! That's insanity. We change the workplace when we start to look for people and catch our employees doing things well. That's when we can change the culture. Mike:                       Well, yeah, and we all know the research shows people don't leave jobs, they leave bosses. They leave poor leadership. And so the question becomes, if you're listening to this, "How can I be a positive leader? Even if there ... Maybe I'm on the ... You know, I'm the lowest rank in the situation, how can I still bring positive leadership to that environment? How can I show respect for those I work with?" And this becomes an important part. Now, someone will sit there and go, "Well, when it comes to companies and respect, it's all about the bottom dollar, it's all about profit." So, how do you help that person realize respect has a lot to do with profit, with the bottom line? Lisa:                         You know, when you ... Because I run into those same managers, you know, "Why should I thank my people for doing a job? Isn't that what a paycheck's for?" It's like, you know what? If you want your people to do exactly what you pay them for, if a paycheck is all it's about, they will do exactly enough work so that they don't get fired, because you're probably paying them exactly enough so that they don't quit. If you want that employee to give you their best efforts, to have that best friend at work that Gallup says is one of the points of an engaged employee, that brings their best, that gives you their blood, their sweat, their tears, then we look for ways to acknowledge our employees. Lisa:                         Then we look for ways, and it doesn't matter if you are at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to the corporate ladder; every single person in an organization can make a difference, and it's just in that language. It's "I appreciate you," it's "Thank you," it's "I respect you, I respect what you bring to this workplace." I'm catching you doing things right, and I'm looking for your strengths, instead of always trying to fix what's broken. If I'm always trying to fix what's broken, and I'm bringing that negative, toxic energy with me, my people are going to leave. They're going to go down the street for 50 cents more an hour. Why would they stay? Mike:                       Yeah, and I've seen the opposite, where somebody's in a work environment that they feel loved, they feel respected, and they have a gift and a talent, they really should be an entrepreneur. Everything about them says they should be on their own, and they would be incredibly successful, but they won't leave, because of the love and respect they have, and they don't want to leave that. That's when you've created a chemistry of ... Your best will just shine from within. Even when they're so good they could shine on their own, they'll stay. Because you can't buy that, you can't buy genuine respect and admiration and appreciation. Lisa:                         And what oftentimes will happen is that somebody will be working at an organization where they feel loved and connected, and then they believe that all companies must be like this, so they leave that company for a better opportunity, and then they realize that they're just another number, that they're being treated like crap, that they don't have the same thing. And then we have that boomerang effect, that now that employee that we love, that we trust, that we had this relationship, now they want to come back to us, and we have somebody that's already trained, that's already in the flow. And so, when we don't ... You know, we're always in that "grass is always greener," so if we have it and the grass is really green, we're going to think, "Hey, that's going to be better," and then we find out that it's not, because we're with a unique organization who is respecting us, who is treating us with gratitude, and it doesn't take a lot to do that. It just takes that sincere effort, and that's the key, it has to be sincere. Mike:                       Well, yeah, and I think of my friend Sam Silverstein. He wrote a book about Happy State Bank, and it's all about the company's core values, and how you live them. And this is the epitome of "Do you live with respect for your employees?" You know, for years, it was always "The customer comes first." Many organizations now are saying, "No, our employees come first, because if our employees come first, they'll make sure the customer is taken care of. They will genuinely show love and care and consideration." If we're saying "customer first," and I have miserable employees, what are the odds that customer feels like they're first, when they're in front of a miserable employee? So I think something for people to challenge themselves, to go, "What are your core values in your organization? Do they bleed respect and appreciation? Do they tell us that every day, we practice respect and appreciation?" In your home, do you have core values for your family, and do they bleed respect and gratitude for your family members? Lisa:                         Well, and you look at it, if you have a corporate mission statement, you know, that you and your leadership came, and you sat together, and you came up with this grand plan for "This is our organization, this is who we are," if I took that to your employees and I read your mission statement to your employees, would they laugh, "Yeah right," or would they say, "Yes, that is our core"? Is it like the Ritz-Carlton of "ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen," that they know that to the core of their being, or is it just words on a wall because it looks good? This is where we get the buy-in, when we live our mission, our values, when we demonstrate that, and when our employees are part of the process. Lisa:                         Because you're right, the numbers show that. When it comes to taking care of employees first, the happier your employees are, the more empowered they feel to take care of the customer instead of jumping through a lot of hoops, that you're trusting them, that you respect them and their ability to make good decisions. That's where the emphasis needs to be, because that's how you're going to then ... You're keeping your top talent from somebody else, from becoming someone else's, and that top talent's now going to help your customers from becoming someone else's as well. Mike:                       Yeah, and draw in more top talent, right? Lisa:                         Exactly. Mike:                       If you've got all rock stars, it's easy to get another rock star, because they want to be around rock stars. Lisa:                         Right. Mike:                       You see it in professional sports all the time, where this superstar takes less money to go win the title with the winning team. Why? Because they want to be around winners. People will take less, will give up, will sacrifice to be part of a winning experience. And winning doesn't have to mean more money, it means that I feel like this is something special that I'm part of here, and that is priceless. You're right, though, that if it's forced, it's a different ball game. In the military, when you're doing trainings, they'll say, "That briefs well." Now, "That briefs well" means nothing's going to actually happen after this brief is done. It sounds awesome during the briefing, but none of this is actually going to happen in real life. And I love that term, because ... Right? It's about only in the brief is this logical, nothing about this is outside of. And that's what I love about being able to have this conversation on the podcast, is how do you make all of this applicable? So how do we catch ourselves from losing sight of that? Lisa:                         Boy, there ... It really becomes a conscious effort, and that's why I always start with the personal practice of gratitude, or something that you're doing personally, so you start to see the benefits of it. But in the workplace, Marcial Losada did a study where he looked at high-performing teams, and he watched them communicate, and what he saw was a six-to-one positivity ratio. So basically, for every one negative thing that somebody on that team would hear, they would hear at least six positives. Now, this wasn't like, "Oh, yay, everything you do is so well," this is, "You know, that's a really great start of an idea. How can we expand on that?" Again, it goes back to respectful communication. Lisa:                         On an average-performing team, he found it was three to one. For every one negative, they heard three positives. He found that this was barely survival. This is your employees are doing enough work so that they don't get fired, you are paying them enough so that they don't quit, even balance. But on a low-performing team, it's .3 to one, so they're hearing three times more negatives. It's almost like that old poster back in the day, you know, "The beatings will continue until morale improves." It doesn't work. Lisa:                         We have to stop focusing on what's broken, so if you ... As far as starting this process, there's people that are already really good at it. If you're not, if this is new, one of the best things that you can do, I like to call the apology approach, where you're talking to your employees and saying, "You know what? I have not been letting you guys know how much I appreciate you, how this company runs as well as it does because of what you bring to it, and I take responsibility, and I'm going to make more of an effort." Because now, you've established a little bit of that vulnerability that your employees know why you're doing this, instead of that first time you're like, "Okay, Lisa said that I have to start thanking people," and you go up to an employee and you say, "Hey, thanks so much for doing a great job." They're going to look at you like, "Okay, what do you want? You've never thanked me in the 25 years I've been here. What is up with you?" Lisa:                         So we start with some kind of confession, something of taking that responsibility that this is important to me, and this is important to us as an organization, that I've been ... I really want to get better at it. And then, the thing is that you keep doing it, because gratitude, respect is not one-way. "Well, I said thank you to her, and she never says thank you back," or [inaudible 00:21:46]. It doesn't matter. You can't influence ... The only thing, the only person that you can influence is yourself, so you start to look for the good, you start to change. Lisa:                         I had one of my clients, he was ... I don't know if he owned a John Deere dealership; let's use that for an example. And every morning, he'd walk in and he'd see Bob, and he'd say, "Morning, Bob," and Bob would say, "What's so good about it?" "Morning, Bob." "What's so good about it?" "Morning, Bob." "Morning." "Morning, Bob." He never let Bob's attitude change his good morning, and even though it didn't seem like it, Bob heard him, and over time, his relationships changed. Because the thing is, we don't know what Bob's home life is like. We don't know if this guy, this manager was the only positive thing that Bob ever came into during the day. So that's what I'm saying: Each of us has the opportunity to make a positive influence. Whether or not we feel that that other person is hearing us, they are. Mike:                       Absolutely. And what's powerful about that — I love that Bob story, by the way, that's fantastic — is when you say to somebody, "Do you believe that we should treat all people with dignity and respect?" almost everyone says yes. "Okay, are you doing that for the one that you hate next to you at work?" "Well, no." "But you just said 'all people.'" "Well, not them." "Well, no, all people or all people?" Which means I ... Not only that, I could take it deeper. What if I treat you with love and compassion? So it starts with respect, and at the ultimate form of respect is to treat everyone with love and compassion. And so, what if I could treat you with that, so no matter how bad your day is, I'm compassionate because you've had a bad morning before that point, right? Lisa:                         Right. Mike:                       And that's not giving up on Bob, so that was a brilliant example. What do you think are the barriers that stop people from continuing, that make it so easy after the 30 Day Challenge to stop doing the gratitude exercises? Lisa:                         You know, gratitude's very easy to do; it's also easy not to do. We say that, "Oh, this is so basic, we should all know this," and there's a part of us that thinks that, "Oh, we don't really need to write it down," or "We don't need to do this." But it's making that over the long time. I mean, I've been keeping a gratitude journal since 2009. It's the one thing that I can attribute to everything in my life changing. It's just been an amazing practice, and there are times that even me, as a gratitude expert, get away from it. You know, I'm traveling, I'm tired, my schedule doesn't ... Whatever it is. And things don't go as well, and I'll be like, my mood's not as happy, it's like, "What's going on? Oh, I got away from the practice." Lisa:                         You forgive yourself, you move on, which is why I also recommend journals without dates in it, because if you forget a couple days, then you have to feel all guilty and go make up stuff for a couple days to fill it in. Oh, no. Just get a journal without dates, and start the practice, and if you get away from it, or a lot of times in my programs, I'll ask, "Who keeps a gratitude journal, show of hands?" And I get a lot of "Well, I used to. Boy, I should do that again." You know what? Forgive yourself, move on. Every single day, every interaction is a new interaction, so just because you got away from it, just because you had a couple bad days, doesn't mean that you can't start fresh and reconnect with that person. Mike:                       I love it. In addition to your 10 books, what would be an additional book that you haven't written that you thought had a powerful impact on that journey for you? Lisa:                         Wow, there's so many. Probably, as far as establishing relationships, my two books in my top five are Think and Grow Rich, because of course, that changes the way that you think, but Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, I mean, number one, taking my first Dale Carnegie class is what made me want to be a speaker back in the late '80s. But even the little reminders that Dale Carnegie gives you, of "The most precious sound to any person is the sound of their name," of just remembering those connections, and establishing that relationship with people. Lisa:                         Especially if you're in top leadership, and you're working in a plant, and you're walking through the plant, and you can say, "Hey Bob, hey Susie, hey Gary," these people are going, "Wow, the president knows who I am." It's these little things that make a huge difference, that build those connections. So again, doesn't take a lot of effort, doesn't take a lot of time, but if you make that conscious decision that I'm going to be the positive light. Lisa:                         Because the other thing that, you know, you may have that ... Our relationships come down to moments, and sometimes they're good moments, and sometimes they're bad moments. And just because you're having a bad day, "Well, she just needs to understand I'm having a day," no, you just created a moment that could destroy that relationship. We look to coming from respect, we look for coming to compassion. That old thing that Mom used to tell us, "Count to 10 before you lose your temper." You know, leave the email for 24 hours before you press send. Do something so that we never create a moment that is going to destroy the good that we've done to build that relationship. Mike:                       I love it. That's a powerful ending, Lisa. Thank you so much for joining us. Lisa:                         You are very welcome. Mike:                       For everyone listening, remember you can find Lisa at lisaryanspeaks.com. Thank you for joining us for this episode of The RESPECT Podcast, which was sponsored by The DATE SAFE Project at datesafeproject.org. And remember, you can always find me at mikespeaks.com.

Hey Bob and Matt are back! Bob has some stunning announcements which leads to the nickname “Macky Gilmore” + they explore the bizarre online bullying case between the Karlsson & Hoffman family. Also Michael Landsberg makes a surprise appearance and the guys weigh in on the World Cup coming to Canada.

Welcome everyone to episode 205 of the Everyone’s Agnostic podcast. I’m Cass Midgley. Today, Dr. Bob Pondillo  I interview Anne Marie Zanzal. Anne-Marie Zanzal has a Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School and a graduate certificate in Women's Leadership from Hartford Seminary.   She is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and has worked as a church pastor and as a chaplain in both hospitals and hospices. She is a Compassionate Bereavement Provider certified by the MISS Foundation. Anne-Marie is an informed and entertaining speaker and group leader about coming out late in life, end of life issues and hospice, and women and divorce.  You can find Anne-Marie at www.annemariezanal.com, on Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, or email her at revzanzal@gmail.com. We taped this conversation on May 12th, 2018. We interview people you don’t know, about a subject no one wants to talk about. We hope to encourage people in the process of deconstructing their faith and help curb the loneliness that accompanies it. We think the world is a better place when more people live by sight, not by faith. Please subscribe to our podcast, and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, we offer these podcasts freely. And your support truly makes a difference. You can support us monetarily in two easy ways: you can pledge a monthly donation through Patreon. that’s www.patreon.com/eapodcast,  or leave a lump-sum donation through PayPal at our website, www.everyonesagnostic.com. Credits: "Towering Mountain of Ignorance" intro by Hank Green https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3v3S82TuxU The music behind it is "Never Know" by Jack JohnsonThe segue music on this episode is "Release It" by Afro Celt Sound System, one of Raymond's favorite bands. Thanks for listening, and be a yes-sayer to what is. Ivan Coyote's "Hats Off" to Femmes If you've listened to this podcast, you know that Bob and I can very critical of bad religion, especially bad Christianity. We would like nothing more than for it to eliminated and something we look back on someday soon as the silly phase in human history where we believed that shit. However, in the meantime, we occasionally like to highlight when Christianity is done right. In the four years we've been on the air, we've had numerous brave Christian guests in here who have learned to navigate this faith that most commonly corrupts otherwise good people with its fear-ridden, insecurity-appealling dogma that brings out the worst in its adherents. But the Christians we've had on here, like David Dark, Tony Woodall, Stan Mitchell, George Cunningham, Mary and Julia in episodes 4 and 5, Jim Henderson, Benjamin Corey, Jennifer Crumpton, Becky Garrison, Geoff Little, Krista Tippet, Brian Quincy Newcomb, Angela Pancella, William Paul Young, Angela Cantorna, Charlie Smith, and many others who have retained portions of their previous held beliefs while rejecting others, they were willing to bring their stories in here and showed us that there are ways to practice Christianity that truly make the world a better place and don't turn them into assholes. That's certainly the case with our guest today, Anne Marie. In a small way, this is us adopting the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" mindset. As we oil the wheels of deconversion and #emptythepews, we also applaud those who, while practicing some form of faith, have not forfeited their intelligence and agency to a false, insecure, jealous, and small God. They celebrate rather than shame what it means to be human. Unlike the majority of their fellow Christians, they do not bury their heads in the sand, and they say yes to what is. Okay, I found a YouTube of someone reciting the poem to which Anne Marie just referred.  The voice here is apparently a lesbian that presents as masculine, perhaps even trans, it's not clear and I'm reluctant to presume but do so to give you a picture of what's happening because it is relevant. I highly value empathy and compassion, and often these virtues are best attained by putting one's self either in the shoes of those we don't understand or at least listening with an ear to learn. My understanding is that the poem is addressing the fact that some lesbians are butch and/or trans men and some are feminine. This is a world that I do not know. And so I insert here a recitation of the poem by Ivan Coyote titled "Hat's Off. Again, that's a poem called "Hats Off" by Ivan Coyote, a trans man, found in his book, "Missed Her."  And now we return to the tail end our talk with Anne Marie. We had some technical difficulty at the end and so it abruptly starts. So that's our talk with Anne Marie Zanzal. Bob and I enjoyed getting to know her. What a tough story. Lots of strength. Lots of courage. Lots of pain. Getting real, getting honest can be really hard work when we're trapped inside false narratives--strong, reinforced, lots of rebar type cemented narratives. Like Han Solo frozen in that giant ice cube and everyone around, also immobilized by self-denying, self-suppressing constraints, doing their best to ignore the cement or wanting everyone to remain incased in it, lest they upend the social construct. But good on you, Anne Marie, or Emery. Congratuations. You know, one thing that makes this so hard is, not only the personal pain, but the pain that getting honest is going to cause others--often those near and dear to us. In fact, while one is getting out of pain, others experience pain. But I think its important to keep in mind that the one getting free, getting honest DID NOT CAUSE THE PAIN. The false narratives cause the pain. Coming out gay or coming out atheist to your loved ones is only painful for them because of the beliefs to which they hold. And they hold them by their own volition...kinda. (that's debatable). But no matter how innocent they're indoctrination was, they are responsible to listen to THEIR own hearts and moral compasses, and ALSO have the courage to do their own breaking out of the lying concrete ideologies that demand allegiance at the price of betraying their own children or friends or siblings. When being a kind, loving person is mutualy exclusive to being faith to your creed, it's time to punt your fucking creed. This is not rocket science. Follow your heart, like Anne Marie is did, and is doing. It's NOT decietful. You're not wicked. You can and must trust yourself, especially more than you trust someone else's made up, over-confident, erection of certainty and projected image of a god to whom one must bow the knee and surrender their freedom and agency. Hell, the word Islam means surrender. The Christians sing "I Surrender All." Bullshit. Surrender nothing to imaginary narratives that are pure speculations derived from anecdotal personal experiences. Stick to evidence and the scientifc method of questioning everything. We are so prone to getting shit wrong that if we don't remain humble and teachable we are doomed to be encased, trapped, imprisoned in a lie to which we pledge allegience and devotion, all the while thinking we've attained the only truth and look down upon anyone who doesn't share in it. Doubly decieved. Doubly duped. and doubly paralyzed to do anything about it. Okay, that's my rant. One quick announcement, Bob only has two more shows with us, the last one of which I will feature your tributary comments and farewells. You can Love Bomb Bob by calling 1 (800) 685-1797 that's 1 (800) 685-1797. I'll repeat that again at the end. I’ve set up a voice mailbox for you to call in and give a toast or tribute to Bob as he’s leaving the show. You may want to write out what you want to say before calling or just wing it. Either way, try to keep it under 30 seconds, unless you really want to pile on the love and go longer, but the average message should be under 30 seconds. Address him in first person, like “Hey Bob (or Dr. Pondillo or Dr. Bob, whatever), I just want to say…” It can be silly or serious, or both, you can mimic him, try to sound like him, and/or share some of your favorite Bob-isms or quips. I reserve the right to edit your message. You can say your name or not. I’d like it if you would say where you’re calling from (at least the State). These messages will be part of a tribute episode to Bob sometime in July. Thanks for participating in this. Call (800) 685-1797. Have a good week everyone. I love you. Peace out.