Podcast appearances and mentions of jeff magee

“To be unforgettable, you must have calluses on your head and your hands.” So says Dr. Jeff Magee, one of the world's foremost leadership and marketing strategists. In a brutally honest conversation with Mark and Darren, Dr. Magee opens his treasure trove of wisdom and passionately reinforces the value of solid content.   SNIPPETS: • People pay for your wisdom   • Make sure your content stands up   • What are your calluses on your head and your hands?   • Play the student                                             • Ask: “How can I become better?”   • Knowledge isn't enough; learn the craft of rhetoric and speaking   • Your presentations come from your history; search your mind's archives   • How will your audience be different on Monday morning?                                             • Make time to think   • Provide content that meets people where they are mentally

Dr Jeffrey Magee is a Chief Culture and Learning Officer, Editor in Chief at Professional Performance Magazine, author of 31 books, he's also a speaker and board adviser. In this really inspiring show you can learn about: The importance of investing into Human Capital How to become part of the Top 1% high achievers Why settling for a “B” grade will stimulate mediocrity How to find your X Factor and trajectory Join our Tribe at https://leadership-hacker.com Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services Find out more about Jeffrey below: Jeffrey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjeffspeaks/ Jeffrey Magee Website: https://www.jeffreymagee.com Professional Performance Magazine: https://professionalperformancemagazine.com Jeffrey on Twitter: https://twitter.com/drjeffspeaks   Full Transcript Below ----more----   Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker. Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you Dr. Jeffrey McGee is a special guest on today's show. He's a human capital developer and chief culture and learning officer. He's also a multiple author and editor-in-chief at Professional Performance Magazine. But before we get a chance to meet with Jeff, it's The Leadership Hacker News. The Leadership Hacker News Steve Rush: In years in the news today, we explore some research completed by Boyden, a premier leadership and talent advisory firm, who's completed the study on talent led transformation in a post pandemic world. The global study explores the business outlook among CEOs, boards and other senior leaders, talent trends, priorities, and investment in the wake of the pandemic throughout 2022. Studies finding show that while seventy-seven percentage of respondents are extremely confident or confident in their organizations, growth potential just forty-seven percentage are extremely confident or confident in having the right talent to align to that strategy. Half of all respondents describe their business approach in 2022 as one of growth or expansion. And just over a quarter twenty-six percentage as a learning or transformation opportunity, this bullish approach versus a lack of talent alignment, jeopardizes post pandemic growth. And this lack of alignment goes up to board level with fifty-two percentage respondents saying that the different mix of skills is needed at the board. And despite this only thirty-eight percentage of respondents are likely to conduct a board assessment or review over the next two years. The findings do show that respondents are reinventing talent. Seventy-four percentage are extremely likely or likely to invest in leadership development for high potential employees, sixty-six percentage to hire new leadership talent and six five percentage to redeploy or retrain existing people. The research shows a number of trends that are looking at talent, and it reveals a lack of alignment across the leadership team, particularly around things like diversity, only forty-seven percentage of HR leaders think that it's extremely likely that their organization will hire talent into diversity roles. Sustainability, forty-two percentage of marketing leaders think is extremely likely or likely that their organization will hire talent into sustainability roles compared to thirty-one percentage of CEOs and supply chain. Thirty-seven percentage of finance leaders think is extremely likely their organization will hire talent into supply chain roles compared to twenty percentage of CEOs. In submarine attracting talent respondents consider the two top drivers to be a strong overall company's reputation, fifty-seven percentage and a purpose driven organization fifty-two percentage. Followed by the workplace of the future with a hybrid working arrangements come in at thirty-eight percentage. And the leadership lesson here is, however big organizational team is. There's never a wrong time to start reassessing how you go about nurturing and growing your talent. It's our future. That's been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any insights, news or stories? Get in touch. Start of Podcast   Steve Rush: Dr. Jeffrey McGee is a special guest on today's show. He's chief culture and learning officer, editor-in-chief at Professional Performance Magazine. He's the author of 31 books, a speaker, and a board advisor. Jeff, welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thanks for your time, Steven. Steve Rush: No worries. Listen, let's get into it, but before we do, it'd be really great for you to give a bit of a sense to our audience about your backstory and how you've arrived at being a multiple author and as well as a speaker and a board advisor. just give us that backstory if you could? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Great question, dangerous question. We could go on forever. So, I'll try to make it really concise. I grew up in the Midwest USA on a farm. Went to college on an athletic scholarship and journalism scholarships. Running and running, I've always been passions. And after college I spent some time in Midwest USA as a journalist doing broadcast news and print and kind of fixated in the area of business and found that to be fascinating area. But very quickly also became discouraged with the state of journalism in the eighties and nineties as a very negative caustic and toxic industry. It's obviously not that way today at all. And that caused me to kind of leave that the industry. And as I tell people in my audiences and just in conversations, if you're ever discouraged with what you're doing professionally or you're unemployed, there's always a job anywhere in the world, but especially in America. And it's called the sales job. Now, if you're not good at sales, you may not keep it, but there's always a hunger for the person who generates the revenue for an organization. So that took me into sales very quickly and in a trajectory, I had not planned on. And I had the opportunity to spend a little time with a fortune 100 company in the United States in sales. They introduced me to adult learning, which I didn't know existed as an industry where you would go, you know. To advance training or education at the college level or business development programs at a local hotel that might be a day or two-day long program. And I was doing that after hours and found that to be fascinating. To jump forward over the past thirty years, that evolved me into training and development, which led me into management roles and leadership roles into owning a business. And along the way, I started writing some books. Those books caught traction here in the U.S. and globally became a couple of bestsellers. And that led me to designing and creating a training and development company. While I worked with business leaders around the world from Berlin to Vermont wherever. Helping them to basically leverage their human capital as I have come to learn and even you and your business, I would believe you would agree. You can get a building, I can get a building, you can get equipment, I can get equipment, you can buy vehicles, I can buy vehicles. But the one thing that really makes us different at the day is the human equation. The people that work for you don't work for me and vice versa. And that's what led me to where I am today in terms of working with business owners and leaders, to accelerate their growth and success through leveraging their human capital and creating a culture and environment by which great want to come and be a part of you and stay with you. Steve Rush: Awesome. Now the interesting thing here, right, is the whole notion of human capital. It's something that's been recently reintroduced into our vernacular almost, but from your perspective, having worked with organizations where they are investing in their people, their human teams, is there a real return on investment to be had in your experience? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: It's a great question. So, one of the training companies, I was a part of for many years and sold my stake in here in the U.S. at least for our global listeners today, if you're a CPA in the financial accounting world, or you're an attorney in the legal world, you have to have ongoing educational credits every year to keep your license and certificate, to be able to professionally do your practice. And in that space, I started learning many years ago that we spent a tremendous amount of time in every business. White collar, blue collar, labor intense, automation, doesn't matter. Training and investing money into equipment and assets and tangibles and buildings where we typically say, okay, what's the ROI on that going to be? And then we do a lot of technician training, you know. How to work the machines? Or et cetera. And a lot of, you know. Return on that investment through efficiencies and productivity and profitability. One of the elements I have been using, even at the title on my business card for decades, even though you just made comment, it's come back and it's fashionable today, but people like you and I have known it for many years, and that is human capital. So, one, what is human capital? We spend a tremendous amount of time talking about that. Two, how do you develop that human capital on talent pathways, career expectations, market needs, business needs? And is there then an ROI on that? Absolutely yes. And I believe there's a greater and a more lasting ROI on human capital than any other capital you can have because almost any other measurement of capital, which is around tangibles depreciates very quickly. You buy a new car soon as you drive it off the lot there in London, or you drive it off the lot here in Las Vegas. It depreciates tremendously, as soon as you leave the parking lot. Human capital depreciates, if you don't challenge it. It depreciates if you don't hold it accountable. It depreciates if you're not growing and developing and feeding what individuals goals needs and purposes are. But if you can align all of that, the ROI is massive. Steve Rush: And you can see on the balance sheet as well, can't you? So, if you look at the organizations who do invest in their people and have strong engagement scores, low attrition, holding onto that talent, then there's a direct correlation of those businesses returns in real sense, too, isn't there? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Absolutely, you can see from the, you know. The boardroom conversations to the executive suite, to frontline, you know. Leads supervisors, managers, directors, whatever the title is that an organization may have for its first level, and then, you know. Sending upward of leadership, absolutely. And, individuals, you know. They come to an organization where they see an organization best in their people and provide multiple for development and growth and development of those people, not just in the job, but development of them in terms of promotability, sustainability, longevity, absolute, it's a massive recruitment tool as well as a retention tool. And then again, think about the turnover. There's a hard HR statistic that's used globally, and you can debate the number, but even if you debated it, doesn't change the output. And it says, basically, let's take an administrative job and a business, a white-collar job. I hate the labels, but it gives us some point of reference. And they talk about the amount of financial attached to the turnover. Let's say Steve's working in our business and an administrative role, white collar role, the amount of money attached to losing you, advertising, promoting, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding someone to get them up to baseline functionality of what Steven was doing is any work between one point five and three times what your annual paycheck was. So, it's very expensive. And then you add on additional, such as again, what are the relationships that Steve had before he left? And if those were good, both with vendors, suppliers, coworkers, colleagues, employees. It could take a long time to rebuild those relationships. So, can you start to put some numbers to it? Absolutely. The institutional knowledge that someone has to know how to finesse relationships or situations to be more productive and profitable, if I'm in a client relationship role, development role, again. Knowing how to cross sell, upsell. Knowing what a client's long-term goals are and how we can align those with our own organizational goals? Yeah, the conversations can just go on endlessly, but the finances attached to it are staggering. Steve Rush: Yes, there are some big numbers there, aren't there? And if you think, even small organizations, that's a massive number relative to the operating cycle of a business. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Absolutely. Steve Rush: Yeah, so you develop the principle and notion of Talentification, which is also you wrote book about, so what is Talentification? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Great question, so looking at the concept of talent, and you can finish that statement for our listeners today, a lot of ways, whether you call it talent management, talent development, talent acquisition, and I started recognizing working in this space over the last thirty years, both with fortune 100 global clients to individual industry, rockstar businesses that the common person on the street would never know the name of that business, unless you're in that space, whether it's agriculture or manufacturing or high-tech, or what have you. So, to me, Talentification that concept in the word deals with what I've identified to be the eleven elements to execution and achievement. I used the word achievement as capital letters. There's, you know? Those letters stand for each of the eleven phases of what talent life cycles are about. So, it's eleven elements of execution and achievement of the talent management model that I've identified for basically healthy and sustained and engage organizations. And how do you create that culture where everyone, not just the leaders, not just the talent management team understands what their role in stake is in health and wealth of an organization? Again, if you're my supervisor or you're my peer, you're my subordinate, doesn't matter. All of us have to understand when it comes to talent, what really are all those key aspects we're talking about? So that's what the book deals with, those eleven phases. It talks a little bit strategically, tactically about what each looks like from anyone in organizations perspective. And we can look at high growth organizations, again, just as you said, whether they're a small family business, a sole proprietor, or whether there are mid-size or large going concern, you know? Those eleven phases are critically important. And as you get people engaged at their capacities, eleven different areas, it also becomes a massive retention tool. Your entrepreneurial energy becomes organic to some of the questions you and I were just visiting around. Steve Rush: So, if I was a leader, listening to the eleven phases and thinking about my talent and my talent strategy, is there a, maybe a golden starting place or a golden end, is there maybe one place that you think that has to be part of my talent strategy? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Absolutely. So, you know? In the human relations world, HR Management. There are different models that are used. One of the models that kind of has grabbed the globe in the last decade is, using stars as a metaphor for your employees. And so, to answer that, let me share, teach a model real quickly, because I think it absolutely is explosive in answering your question. It also answers the questions of how you can guard against making sure you don't have a toxic cancerous person in your team that's going to be working actively or passive aggressively against you and take you down. So, to me, there's different sort of stars. You have a rock star in your company, rockstars are from an aptitude and a level very high on the scale and from an attitudinal level, very high on the scale. So, they're, you know? They know what they're doing. They're your subject matter experts, are always looking to grow and develop themselves, but they're always willing to push and achieve more. So, you have your rock stars, then you have developing stars. These are people that have good attitudes. They need knowledge and attitudinal growth, which could take time. And some people are not patient for the amount of time it may take to grow their brain in any sort of a job or vocation. You have, you know? Emerging stars, these are people that that know how to do the job, but they've got a chip on their shoulder, or they're not as motivated or they're somewhat discouraged. We have to know how to engage them. You have your problem players, which I call those, your crashing stars. You have employees that maybe you don't know very much about. Those would be your unknown stars. And then you've just got your work horses. You know? Basically, you're contributing stars. And lot of times contributing stars want to be a part of organization, but they don't really want to ascend upward into, you know? Any sort of job role with this lot of spotlights. They don't want to be a leader, a boss. So, you need the whole mix's. To answer your question. What I've recognized, you know? In working with global talents. also from my media company, Performance Professional Performance Magazine. Interviewing phenomenal people all over the planet, is that the real secret to your question is the rock star population, that rockstar demographic, knowing that if I've got a rock star at any job, sit down and do some character analysis and say, okay, what are the quantifiable that makes Stephen my rock star at job ABC? And when I can start to write down those characteristics of Stephen as a rockstar in his job, I now have a benchmark template. I can use the interview to find another rock star. I could use it and kind of put it up on a wall for anyone else who wants to become a rock star like Stephen and said, okay, these are the traits or characteristics or skills or behaviors or actions that you need to exhibit or master. And I think that's how you start to answer your question is to clearly focus on the rockstars. See the reason I go off on that tirade is that what we've done for the last twenty to thirty years, and we were not paying attention on the planet is, we actually started lowering the performance bar where mediocrity is actually seen as rock stars today in most places on the planet that I go.   Steve Rush: Right. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: And if mediocrity, as soon as the rock star, then you can see how pathetic and how bad it gets real quick. Here in the United States, Gallup Organization did a massive research project right before COVID. And so, it got lost in the noise. The challenge to the research project model, Steve is, I think the numbers are worse today than what they said before, but basically said this. They surveyed thousands of American and global businesses based in U.S. And they found that fifty-six percentage of the respondents. So, thousands of businesses mean tens, if not hundreds of thousands of individuals participated in the survey, but fifty-six percentage of responders said they're disengaged or complacent in the workplace, so fifty-six percentage basically saying, hey, I'm going through the motions. I realized I don't have to kill myself. So, it's kind of like, you know? If I'm doing some tough love here, what's the minimum I have to do for maximum paycheck? Then fifteen percentage identified as actively disengaged. These are people that wake up every morning, look for something new to complain about, which leaves you mathematically with twenty-nine percentage leftover that are engaged. So, let's call those engaged, you know? Some of the rock stars or developing stars or emerging stars. And that's what you realize. If you want to have a successful business, you build it around the star metaphor, but you build it around rock stars, because if Steven's a rock star and you hire me, then I know where the performance bar is set and I'm going to step up. And as consumers, you and I, and the listeners today can validate what I've just shared as consumers is, look at the places you go and ask yourself, are you really getting rockstar level service, or are you really getting mediocre service that people are calling rockstar level? And so that's a series of answers to your powerful question, Steve Rush: That's a great response too, and it's interesting that the whole mediocrity can be really cancerous in an organization, can't it? Because if you allow your average to be sub average, than your average, occasionally we'll just continue the slit versus your average should be your rock stars of now. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Absolutely. Steve Rush: It should be your average is in the future, right? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Yeah, I coach people that if you have, again, we can call them whatever you want. So, I don't want anybody to get hung up on labels here, but as a reference point, if you have a job description or a job profile that says I'm hiring Geoffrey McGee to do job ABC, I'm going to hire Steven to do job XYZ. So obviously we're both going to ask our boss the same question, which is, okay, great. What's this job responsible for? What do I do? What are the expectations? So, when you start to identify the work product and then how does it need to be accomplished or how often, or how much? We have clarity to our job and everything's built around it. But with that, what I coach is, if someone is doing one hundred percentage of the job you've hired them to do so, first thing I just said is 100 hundred percentage of the job you've been hired to do, then that means they're meeting expectations. Meeting expectations would be like, you're going to school and you're getting grades. And again, we use different scorecards around the globe. So, in the United States, if you're going to kindergarten to high school and into college. The grading system we use is A, B, C, D F. Well, I always tell people, if you want to get clarity, get rid of letter B for boy and get rid of letter D for dog. And all you should have is either an F, C, or an A, you're doing a hundred percent of the job expected. Then that's a C, you're meeting expectations, you're average, but that scares people. Therefore, any part of your job description, you're not doing, you have to get an F. I mean, we're not going to give any wiggle rooms for B's and D's. So, someone says, well, how do I get to be an A? Then I say go right back to your job description. And in any one of those areas that you exceed, that I, as the organization amount, obligated to give you an A in that area. So, if you take that metaphor and you use it to any sort of a job we have, I mean, everything has been degraded down. I mean, if you're a rock star player and you wake up tomorrow morning and you're not motivated, and you're just, you know? Not highly excited, we've all had those days. I tell people and ask people, well, what do you bring to the office? Do you bring you're A game and your B? Well, most of the answer is B. Well, if you go home within that day and reflect on, I brought my B game to the office and I'm still a rock star by a mile. Well, what do you bring back on the subsequent day? You can bring back you're A, or do you calibrate down to B? And most of us, we calibrate young to B, and then someday in the future, you wake up, not motivated. Do you bring your, A, B or C? Well, we know A is not in the game anymore. So, you bring your C and that's how we've done things, we make an exception. We elect people that are mediocre, and then we make excuses when they're pathetic. We hire people that are mediocre, and then we make excuses when they're pathetic. And that's, what's sad about the model, instead of all of us trying to be the best we can be and raised the bar, we've actually made it globally convenient to lower the bar. Steve Rush: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Spot on. I love the concept that you've applied to the kind of ACF, because it removes the opportunity to sit in some middle ground, doesn't it? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: You hit it dead center, and that's the element. I mean, if I am going to traditional college that are traditional age, we have all those wiggle grades, and it's amazing how we, our faculty, our parents, we justify those wiggled grades. But now, if you and I are business people, as we are here today and majority of our listeners, and you were paying out of your own pocket to go to a developmental program to get more education, so you can become better. It's amazing, we're paying it. We don't want the wiggle grade. We want the best grade possible. Well, imagine if the B and a Ds off the table, it either is your understanding the topic, so that's C. There's nothing wrong with that, where you're not understanding it. So, we're not going to pass you. You're going to get an F. I mean, you go in for brain surgery. Do you want your surgeon to be an F, an D, an C or an B surgeon for med school? Would you prefer they be an A? Steve Rush: Exactly, you don't want your brain surgeons to be a B on any type of surgery, do you? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Your parents, you're taking your child for heart surgery, I changed the model, and I say, a parent, you're taking your child and you want your surgeon to be an F, D, C or B or an A? I mean, so if you change the dynamic, everyone kind of like raised their eyebrows. Like it's obvious A, but then in other professions, we accept C's and D's and F's all day long. Steve Rush: And did this thinking set you on your trajectory? I'm going to use the word Jeff, to when you wrote your Trajectory Code. So, this is a book that you wrote around how to change your decisions, actions, and directions, and to become part of that top one percentage of high achievers, right? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Absolutely. Steve Rush: So, you've got within that, your mental DNA, just tell us a little bit about what that is and how we could get into that top one percent? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Great question. So, a couple of models, it's a really easy book. I tell people it's not going to be difficult. I spent two years in first grade as a child. So, nothing I do is hard. It's pretty simple, but what I identified of the thirty-one books, I've written, twenty-one languages, four bestsellers, and four graduate management textbooks. Your Trajectory Code is the only book, so people can buy it online, or they can buy the audio book. The only book I've written, it's about personal success. And it primarily draws upon one business model I've used for years called the trajectory code, the trajectory code models, like a letter V for victory. And that that diagram helps us to recognize what actions, behaviors, and mindsets take you to derailment and failure. And what are the actions, mindset, and behaviors that take us to success. Within that, there's a concept called your mental DNA, and it plays off of a formula. So, it's chapter five in the book that talks about your player capability index. And so, I'm a formula kind of a person. So, what I recognize, if I look at Stephen and Stephen comes to Jeff Magee and said, I like you to be my performance coach and helped me to accelerate my successes. Here's the goal of where I want to go. Well, I'm going to have to do some diagnostics, whether it's an online platform or just you and I are visiting via video call. Because I prefer video calls versus to telephone that way, we can see each other. Because a lot of visual communication takes place. It's very insightful. But what I've recognized in that formula, Stephen, is that there's very specific variables that make up a human being such as knowledge.   So that's one of the letters in the formula. So, whether it's formal or informal education, technical, non-technical, certification, non-certification. Another part of it, it's going to be our life experiences. How does one life experience build and set the stage for the next? And how do we leverage those to be better? You know, the next time we do something. How about the culture we were raised in, or the cultures we've been a part of or, you know? Ebbed and flowed in and out of. That influences how our thinking styles and belief systems and confidential, we lack thereof. So, there's a lot more to the formula and it's very easy to read and understand, but that becomes the DNA. So, if I want to grow someone in, let's say between today and in the future, we don't know what the future date is, to be the new CEO of a business. Family owned a global international business, a local mom and pop shop. Then I would first, okay. So, to be a great executive, I use the same DNA model and you and I, or whoever the appropriate stakeholders would be, we would sit down and say okay. For us to have a great CEO, what would we like them to possess in terms of knowledge or skills or education or degrees or certifications? You know, some, none, what are they? What sort of attitude, mindsets? What sort of passion? What sort of experiences do we want them to have? What sort of a relationships? People that we want them to have interacted with, grown with? Network with or known? So, this formula also gives us a great DNA chart to scope out how do you build a great leader. Leader of nations, leader of communities, leaders of business, leaders of our ourselves. So, the DNA concept has multiple applications, personal development, career development of someone, creating, you know? Job descriptions that client says, hey, I need something, listen to what the client says they need. They'll tell you exactly where you need to go. But the last way of answering your question is that part of this model, Steve is very objective and that's the real power behind it. It gives you the objective template to assess yourself or someone else and pull all of the emotion and ego and personalization out of it to see exactly what we need to do to be smart at the end of the day, Steve Rush: Laser focus. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: You got it. Steve Rush: Yeah, and in the book also, you talk about having the opportunity to understand your X factor when you're on your trajectory. Does that form part of this? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: It is exactly. So, the X factor is the first side of this equation. I know I'm talking to a global audience here and we have, you know? fortyish percent of your listeners are in the U.S. and forty to forty five percent might be in the UK and the others are global. So, this X factor concept is not like the entertainment show from the great British businessman, Simon Cowell.   Steve Rush: He has a lot of answer for X-Factor now, doesn't he? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Exactly, so I've been using my X-Factor longer than he as, of course, he's richer than both of us, bam, he wins. Steve Rush: Exactly. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: But the X-Factor represents any thing you're measuring is what X represents in this formula. So, if we're measuring, you know? How fast can you run? That's an X-Factor or how fast can you compute some mathematical questions? That's an X-Factor, you know? How good are you at wood crafting? I mean, so whatever it is you're measuring, that's X. So, to answer, let me use this example. So, let's say we go on to any school campus around the world of, you know? Kindergarten, to primary, to high school grade. And you were to say on that campus, there's a range of athletic sports that are offered. Well, the varsity sport, the highest level of proficiency that high school, I'd say. Of a hundred percent of the kids on that campus. If we're measuring athletics as our X-Factor, of a hundred percent of the kids on any campus, X percent would actually be good enough to make the varsity team of any sport. So, if you ask that question to a group of people, it's always going to be a small number. Of a hundred percent of kids on the campus. You might hear someone say twenty percent, or ten percent or five percent, then I said, okay, so let's track it two more times. Of a hundred percent, then of those high school, varsity athletes, X percent would be good enough to go play it at a collegiate level, at a college level. Get a scholarship to go to the advanced level, what percent? And it's always a smaller number that migrates and said, okay, so final question. So, we started with a hundred percent mass at a high school, and we saw that how many kids are were good enough to be on the varsity sport at a high school level, smaller number, go play at the college collegiate level, smaller number. So, what percentage would be drafted from a college level to go play at the professional ranks? Whether it's, you know? Football, rugby, whether it's, you know? Basketball, football, hockey, whatever, it's always a really small number. So, get people to recognize whatever you're tracking is an X-Factor and whatever that smallest finite number you just came up with using athletics is what we tracked. We're all professionals, so if you really want to see where you should be focusing your energy or how to grow and develop yourself, what are you really proficient in as an X-Factor? So, let's do the math. Let's say high school is twenty percent, would be at the high school team. How many go to college? Let's say it's five percent. How many go on and play at the pros? Point zero, zero, zero, whatever percent. Oh, okay. So that point zero, zero, zero, that's you and I, as professionals, we're not competing on a planet about the twenty percentiles, because this is not high school.   Real life is not high school. It's not college, it's pros. So, if you really want to be successful, then you've got to identify, what is your X-Factor. For me, growing up in primary school from kindergarten to high school, I was not a great writer. I thought I was, I mean, teachers were very critical of my writing. Well, maybe it's because I wanted to be a writer and they were giving me additional attention. I didn't really like to read books in high school or college. So, it's fascinating, you know? Forty years later, I love to read, I love to write, I love to do research. And all of that forms a basis of my ability to coach executives and businesses to be in hyper-growth faster, quicker And sustained. Steve Rush: It's a really, yeah, lovely way of thinking about it, this whole kind of one percent or zero, zero, zero, point one percent of professionals. I wonder how many people actually can even associate that in their profession today, they're already there? And that's a lot to do with mindset, I suspect. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Absolutely, you know? It is. And there's actually some quantifiable ways to answer that because you've posed a great question. Someone says, okay, how do I know if I'm in the top percentage of my industry? Or how do I know if I'm starting to rest on my morals and accomplishments? Or how do I push myself? So, I always tell people, in your job and your profession, is there another formal educational degree you could achieve? And if yes, then you're not at the top of the list, pull yourself down at least one notch on any scale, because there's something there you can quantify that you could go after that you're not, or are there certifications in your industry? And if that's a yes and you don't have them, then bring yourself down another notch, you know? Have you written any papers or are you asked to speak on this? Are you asked to be the trainer in your business on these topics? So that's a great question. You've posed for our listeners. How do you know when you're at the top of the game? There are ways of knowing it. And if you study another way of looking at this one percent factors, I've interviewed, you know? World leaders from your country, Tony Blair, to Richard Branson, Richard Branson, I've written three books together, whatever you look at incredibly successful people. What you'll recognize is that they associate with and typically hang out with, from their view, their vision, other phenomenally successful people, whether it's in their industry or not, you don't see a great athlete typically hanging out with losers. I mean, there might be, you know? A phenomenal singer. It might be a phenomenal artist and maybe a phenomenal business leader. You know? So again, successful people typically associate with other successful people. Because that's one of the ways they benchmark themselves to always be being pushed because great successful people in any capacity can call you out on whether or not you're truly working or you're coasting.   Steve Rush: It's interesting, as you were saying that Jeff, I was thinking about sports people. Perhaps are easy to quantify because they've got measures, personal bests, they've got fastest times, greatest passes. All of those things are quantifiable, but in business they're perhaps around us yet we don't spend as much time quantifying it. And I think that's a really key message for me. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Huge, you just said something massive for the listeners, thank you. A pro athletes live for quantifiable performance feedback in real time when they're practicing, they have videotapes. They can go back and study. They have coaches and sub coaches that are always, you know? Measuring them, pushing them, tracking them. And so, it's interesting in what I call the real business world where you and I live, it's amazing how the mindset of most people is, we resist performance feedbacks. We resist performance reviews. We don't like quantifiable data. Because sometimes, you know? It's misused against this instead of being used to help to grow us, we need to create that pro athlete mindset around performance execution, and then we'll become much more successful in any capacity. Steve Rush: Yeah, definitely so. So, in your experience Jeff, has human capital, the world of talent management changed over the last couple of craziest through COVID? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: It has, you know? And it's interesting. I find myself posing the question just this recent weekend. I was here in Las Vegas on the strip speaking to a large convention. And, I posed a question that, if you and I were sitting in a large business audience conference, whatever topic, doesn't matter, and it was January of 2020, and the person in front was asking the audience questions like how many of you have a business plan, a game plan for 2020, almost every hand would go up. You know? How many of you are optimistic for 2020? Everyone's hands probably would go up. From a sales standpoint, maybe the more specific question then. How many of you have a sales plan or strategy for 2020? Almost every hand would go up. What about your talent management, your human capital, you looking at your key employees in your organization? You feel comfortable with that team? A lot of hands would go up. Are you looking to hire hands would go up? Have you thought about flight risk and anyone leaving you? Probably hands wouldn't go up. No one thought that way. If we would have posed the last question in January, 2020 to a large business audience, you know? What about letting a lot of your employees work remotely or virtually, you know? How many of you are open to that idea? Very few hands would have went up, but if we would have had that same conversation in June, just three or four months into COVID. In June of 2020, I said, well, you know? How many of you are working remotely or have a lot of your employees working remotely or, you know, virtual? Tons of hands would have went up. So, we jumped into 2021. We're recording this here in, in August, September of 2021. And what I'm finding is that a massive number of businesses that have had to make massive changes in 2020 to stay sustainable, or that have actually been in thriving mode, have embraced looking at how they do their businesses differently. So COVID has pushed our business models easily ten years into the future, just in the past year. They've pushed businesses to actually operate the way that we were only considering a year ago. And so, from a human capital standpoint, it's also pushed us to recognize where are some of our hidden jewels that maybe we were smothering and didn't realize we had phenomenal talent before COVID that is actually stood up in shined. And it's caused us to recognize how do we keep people engaged? How do we maintain our culture? When we have pockets of people working together and some are distant. And how do we grow and develop our people to keep them at peak performance? So, has it changed in some ways? Absolutely, no. Because how to be successful in a position? A lot of similarities. The other way of answering it, has it changed? Absolutely, yes. I think, looking at how we are more mindful of our people equation, our human capital has really become more front and center today than where it was a year ago. So yes and no to that question Steve Rush: And many different rockstars now than perhaps two years ago. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Absolutely. Steve Rush: But equally as important of course, is to make sure that rewriting that DNA of what the rock star is today in today's world, right? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Exactly right. A hundred percent correct. Steve Rush: Love it. So, this is part of the show now where we get to flip the leadership lens on you. I'm going to hack into your great years of experience of leadership development and leading others. And ask you to try and distill down, if you can, your top three leadership hacks, what would they be Jeff? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: I think one, that we have actually touched on and that is to player capability and next model. Really recognizing what's the unique talent that you can possess, that I can possess that can allow me to be competitive with the market space of today and tomorrow. Anticipate where the market's going, so I can be not just competitive, but I can set the bar of what competition looks like. That's one, two is accountability. I've really have learned that people fall into very distinct camps when it comes to accountability and reliability and trustworthiness and integrity. And so, number two is not a very, a fashionable conversation. Going to make people feel uncomfortable, but the reality is, there are a lot of disingenuous people on the planet and you just have to be conscious of that and put your big, you know? Your big adult armor on. So, they don't penetrate you and kill you because everyone has an agenda and that'll be the third answer. And once you recognize everyone has an agenda and it's not necessarily right or wrong, just everyone has an agenda. Then the real mastery is to find ways to align your agenda, personally, your agenda professionally with others agendas. And when you can find places of alignment, then great success can happen forever everybody.   Steve Rush: Alignment is just massive, isn't it? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Absolutely. Steve Rush: Yeah, and it's really interesting. The whole accountability thing in my experience as a coach, when you use just simply use the word accountability, you can almost see people think that means I have to deliver on something. Yes, that's right. And that's no different, isn't it? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: It is. Steve Rush: To any other day of the week, but by just simply raising its awareness. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: And that's what scares people. And again, if an organization supports its people to be the best, they can be. Then within that are going to be layers of accountability, whether there, you know? Obvious or not obvious. And again, if people want to be the best they can be, then there's going to be accountability. And their businesses around the globe that really demonstrate, you know? Accountability. And so, when I look at successful businesses, I've identified accountability happens on five levels. And so, here's another teaching moment for our listeners and business leaders. You know? First of all, the way, you know? You have a truly engaged workforce organization that is going to be in survival mode on its worst day. And there'll be in thriving mode on almost every day, is accountability level one is self. People hold themselves accountable. So, if I'm looking to interview or hire someone, I should incorporate accountability questions to vet and find out, is this person hold themselves accountable? Yes or no. And again, you can still hire someone if they fail the first question, at least now, you know what you're in for. Accountability starts with self. Then it goes to number two is going to be systems, what systems or processes or checklists, or, you know? What do we have out there that we can put our arms around, they help to hold us accountable so that we can go back to default number one? So, one is self, two systems. Three is going to be peer. Do we have peer to peer accountability? Do we work in an environment where no one's trying to play I gotcha? No, one's trying to toss you under the bus. But it's, you know? We're all here because we all have skin in the game. We all want to help each other to be vessels or peer accountability. And then four is going to be an essence customer. If that's an external constituent, what mechanisms do we have in place? Our customers can give us feedback, help us to be more successful every day. And so, they hold us accountable. And if we ask for customer feedback, we really listened to it. And do we really respond to it? Or is it just a game we're playing? And you have these layers of accountability. So again, one is self, two is system, three is peer, fours is customer. You'll five is going to be boss. You know? Whatever you define boss to be. Supervisor, leader, executive team, ownership, the board of directors, mom, and dad at home. You know? The boss should always be last. So, in any organization where you have the paradigm flip, the other direction, where you have accountability, it's driven by bosses first. You're never going to have a culture that's going to allow people to be truly successful because there's going to be questions of, does the organization trust me? Do they believe in me? Do they support me? Will they empower me? If the boss is always having to be there with their thumb on everything? So, accountability is scary. And that's problem we have in the world, I mean, I grew up to be a journalist and I love to write articles on successful people in organizations and share that story. So, people could replicate success, but here in the us, I mean, those articles are settlement ever written. And that's why I love your podcast because it's always about success. Just like my magazine, Professional Performance Magazine. It's always evergreen content, and it's about success from other people's lenses. Steve Rush: Right. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: But journalism is, should be holding all political people accountable. Don't have an agenda in A and B playing favorites. Don't be a journalist and like one political party over the other because you're not doing your job of accountability. And that's what we see happening on the planet is, all of these mechanisms for accountability have been bastardized, polluted, degraded or just imploded. And that's why, you know? Sometimes when we find a great person or a business that blows our brain up. Because, oh my gosh, that's what success looks like. Steve Rush: Yeah. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: That should be norm. Steve Rush: Yeah, it's a great, great reframe, love it. So, the next part of the show, we call it Hack to Attack. So typically, this is where something in your life or your work hasn't worked out well, but as a result, you've got some learning from it. And you now use it as a positive in what you do, what would be your Hack to Attack? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Woo, there's a loaded question. So, I merged my business years ago with another business. It doesn't need to be named. And what I learned is that when you work with someone for a number of years and you decide to align yourself with them and go into business, it's a completely different mindset you take in that relationship. Then if Stephen and I, you're in the UK, I'm in United States of America, we know of each other. We don't really know each other. We've never really worked with each other. If you and I were to merge our businesses, we would ask a lot of forensic questions, not to be mean and rude and disrespectful. We'd ask a lot of forensic questions to make sure that this merger of human capital and minds and product and deliver and businesses make sense. And if it does, we would have a great relationship. So, what I learned is that whenever you're you go to work with someone, you need to look at it from an objective lens as if you've never met them and really do the discovery questions. So, it's like when I worked with an organization, if I have any prior knowledge of them. I've learned to not bring that to the table in the beginning, backup and ask all of the questions you should be asking if you didn't know them to really vet and find out, are you in alignment? Are you both being transparent? Does the data add up? Make sure you're not about to get scammed. And that probably has been my number one lesson learned for the past decade plus. Matter of fact, I wrote an executive article on it with thirteen questions I didn't know to ask that I learned afterwards and it was saved me a lot of pain so that the hack that really has caused me more success. And sometimes I'm still guilty of violating it because when you're romanced in your head and you like someone, or you like the thought of doing something, you sometimes are not as objective as you could be a need to be. So, I go back to those thirteen questions in an article I wrote years ago. So, it really is be more objective and you will have more success. Steve Rush: And I love that because most people, whether they own a business or whether they work for an organization often just have too much emotion in the game. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Absolutely. Steve Rush: And therefore, won't allow themselves to be as objective as they could be. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: You got it. Steve Rush: So that forensic look, I think it's really key. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: That's the way I lived. Steve Rush: Yeah. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Absolutely, it will save and your listeners, a lot of pain, grief and that loss of money. Let's say it that way. Steve Rush: Indeed. So that last bit the show Jeff, were we get to give you a chance to do some time travel and bump into yourself at twenty-one, toe to toe and give them some advice. What would your advice Jeff be at twenty-one? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Great question. And you have stolen a page right from me, Steve. I use that same question when I get a chance to interview phenomenal people for my magazine. So, I love that question. It's fair turnaround, right? Steve Rush: Yeah, absolutely. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: You know? At age fifty-seven today, I don't see myself at fifty-seven. I always thought that was an older person's number. Now that I'm there, it's like, oh my gosh, it's pretty doggone young. So, the question, if I went back to twenty-one, I would think I would share a couple of pieces of information. Number one, I might've shared, get serious and focused faster and find a way to do a career that twenty to twenty-five years from age twenty-one. You could retire out of and have a base income, base benefits to rest on for the rest of your life and use that first career to gain and learn as much as you can, that you could then leverage in your second career in your mid-forties to go on and have a phenomenal life. And I say that because as I look over the horizon and see people that have done just that, you know? The ability to be in your fifties and sixties and have a base retirement paycheck for the rest of your life and a base, you know? Health benefits to have for the rest of your life. It twenty-one, you don't understand the magnitude of what that means, but at fifty-seven, looking at that as massive, because now you could do your second career in a lot of ways and not have the stress of, I've got to make a paycheck, I have to, and you finish that have to in a zillion way. And one is, I would say get serious. I see a lot of successful people today. They're successful because they have that base set up. If you're in your mid-forties and you've changed jobs, many times, as a lot of your listeners have, and maybe you've not doubled down and really got a lot of good advanced education because you started your family and had jobs that you just didn't make the time happen. You really find yourself in a challenged position of having to work really hard next twenty years, if not the rest of your life. And that's the norm on the planet today. And that's also the norm I see with a lot of young people today in their twenties that are not hearing this advice that I'd give back to myself for your question you've posed. And they're setting themselves up thinking that they're magically going to be wealthy, whatever that means and not have to work the rest of their life, whatever that means. And I think they're setting themselves up for a massively rude awakening. Steve Rush: Yeah, here, here, I agreed. So, Jeff, listen, I always love chatting to you. You create some great content, both verbally through your talks and speeches, but also through your written work. How can we make sure our listeners can keep connected with you? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Great question, I appreciate it. There's three ways that we can stay connected. One, we should definitely be connected on LinkedIn. So go LinkedIn, again Jeffrey Magee, Dr. Jeff speaks, we need to be connected, follow me. I don't sell anything on LinkedIn, but in the spirit and thing of what we've just been visiting with here, I post on LinkedIn every day, some sort of mental piece of information, whether it's a quote, whether it's an article, whether it's a video, whether it's a blog to cause people to think at a higher, deeper, faster level. So that's one, if you want to find out more about, you know? Products, deliverables, how I do what I do, then obviously you can go to jeffreymagee.com, that's my website, jeffreymagee.com. It's J-E-F-F-R-E-Y. So, it's the non-British spelling and McGee is M-A-G-G-E and then my media company is professionalperformancemagazine.com. So those would be the three places, professional performance magazine.com, jeffreymagee.com or go to LinkedIn, and then we can stay connected and keep the brain going. Steve Rush: And we'll shoot those links into our show notes as well. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: You're awesome. Thank you so much, Steve. Thank you very much opportunity to share information ideas with your listeners and anything I can do for you and them, just let me know. Steve Rush: Jeff, it's been amazing to talk, take care of yourself and thanks being part of The Leadership Hacker community. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Thank you so much. Closing Steve Rush: I genuinely want to say heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in too. We do this in the service of helping others, and spreading the word of leadership. Without you listening in, there would be no show. So please subscribe now if you have not done so already. Share this podcast with your communities, network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers. Finally, if you would like me to work with your senior team, your leadership community, keynote an event, or you would like to sponsor an episode. Please connect with us, by our social media. And you can do that by following and liking our pages on Twitter and Facebook our handle there: @leadershiphacker. Instagram you can find us there @the_leadership_hacker and at YouTube, we are just Leadership Hacker, so that is me signing off. I am Steve Rush and I have been the leadership hacker.      

Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning podcast, episode #101, where we will review highlights from the past 100 episodes, that began in June 2019, with a behind the scenes lens, where we will take a look at the results created from this podcast, with the goal to inspire listeners to not just implement the ideas offered in each episode, but to think about what Horacio Sanchez from EPISODE #74 reminded me this week, of “the impact possible when you have an idea, nurture it, and watch it grow.” (Horacio Sanchez, EPISODE #74[i]).My name is Andrea Samadi, and if you haven’t met me yet, I’m a former educator who created this podcast to bring the most current neuroscience research, along with high performing experts who have risen to the top of their field, with specific strategies or ideas that you can implement immediately, whether you are an educator, or working in the corporate space, to take your results to the next level. Before we get to the episode, and the highlights learned from our guests, I want to share some of the unexpected results that have come as a byproduct of this podcast to perhaps light a spark under anyone who might be thinking of new ways to create brand awareness, or market their business in 2021. If you have been thinking of ways that you can extend your voice, message and reach, I highly recommend this mode of delivery. I also want to thank everyone who has supported us with this mission, come on as a guest, or downloaded an episode. We wouldn’t exist without the guests who offer their time, expertise, and strategies designed to help our listeners (in over 132 countries) who tune in on a regular basis and take the ideas offered to make an impact locally in their schools, communities, businesses and workplaces. I appreciate the feedback and messages received via social media and email and look forward to the next 100 episodes. As long as there is still growth, I will continue to produce new episodes.So Here are 3 Lessons Learned Looking Back at the 100 Episodes.LESSON 1: WHEN THERE’S A NEED, CAN YOU PUT A SPIN ON IT?I saw a serious need in the area of social and emotional learning that was being implemented in schools around the country and the world, and many educators didn’t know the best way to begin their implementation.  I thought it would be a good place to gather “best practices” from experts around the world to offer their ideas that we could all learn from and apply to our own lives.But I knew I needed a bigger idea than just a podcast about social emotional learning in our schools, or emotional intelligence training in our workplaces. Too many people were already doing this. But not that many people were teaching the basics of practical neuroscience as it relates to this topic. The idea to combine neuroscience and social/emotional learning came with the thought that “success in life, and in college and career specifically, relies on student’s cognitive, (the core skills your brain uses to think, read, remember, and pay attention) social and interpersonal skills, (including the ability to navigate through social situations, resolve conflicts, show respect towards others, self-advocate and learn how to work on a team with others) and emotional development (including the ability to recognize and manage one’s emotions, demonstrate empathy for others and cope with stress).” In the corporate world, these skills aren’t new, but they are “newly important” and of high urgency to develop in our future generations. I’ve mentioned this quote before but think it’s important enough to repeat. A recent survey showed that 58 percent of employers say college graduates aren’t adequately prepared for today’s workforce, and those employers noted a particular gap in social and emotional skills. This is where our goal with this podcast began—to close this gap by exploring six social and emotional learning competencies as a springboard for discussion and tie in how an understanding of our brain can facilitate these strategies. AHA! MOMENT with LESSON 1That’s really how I took the need, put a spin on it, and came up with the title Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning in 2016 (3 years before launching the podcast) when I first began presenting on this topic. This title drew the session on the introduction to practical neuroscience to fill up with standing room only, at the YRDSB Quest Conference, in Toronto, Canada. This was my first presentation on the topic, and I knew at that moment that there was a serious interest in this topic.Back then, I was working one on one with one of the leading neuroscience researchers in the country, Mark Robert Waldman, and he had just finished writing his book Neurowisdom: The New Brain Science of Money, Happiness and Success[ii], When he shared his research with me, I saw how practical neuroscience could help people to gain a deeper understanding of how to create change from the brain level and impact their social and emotional thinking and began to write the outline for the vision I saw. I also found Dr. Lori Desautels this year, who is now a good friend and supporter of our work.This was how we took a need and put a spin on it. The rest is history.LESSON 2: THINK IMPACT vs INCOME: GIVER’S GAINAfter the first few months of releasing episodes, I heard from so many people who wanted to know “how did you launch this idea,” and asked about some best practices as they began thinking of ways to replicate the results that inevitably come when you put in consistent daily effort that turns into weekly and then monthly effort until it’s no longer effort, but what you do every day, habitually. If you want to know if launching a podcast would work for you, message me and I can send you some ideas on how to get started, but my first tip would be that you should pick a topic that you love, something that you won’t mind putting in the time and effort to learn more about, as this is what you will be immersed in on a daily basis.I heard a few times “How do you make money with a podcast?” and that’s a great question and why I wanted the second lesson to focus on the impact you will have, not the income. When you have enough listeners, you can earn money from sponsorships and ads, but the key is to use the podcast as a tool to drive people to your programs and services. Doors will start to open for you in ways that you never imagined. I heard Max Lugavere (an American television personality and health and wellness writer) talking about these incredible types of results at about the 2-year mark of his podcast on Dhru Purohit’s Broken Brain Podcast[iii]. The income will come once you put your focus on service and helping others to achieve their goals.This is exactly the same concept as writing a book. Most people who dream of writing a book, think that it will take off like the Harry Potter Series, and they will be set, riding off into the sunset as a millionaire. The truth is that most authors never sell more than a few hundred copies of their books, and for it to become a best seller, it should reach 10,000 copies sold in a week. This is easier to do when selling larger volumes (like to schools or organizations that want your book) but not easy at all to do when selling books one at a time, relying on Amazon as your distribution service. Authors know that books, like a podcast, are just a tool to get your message out there. Since I have released content both ways, I can say from experience that putting your best content out into the world, for FREE, with the idea of helping people, will yield better results than thinking of selling your ideas before anyone even knows who you are.AHA! MOMENT with LESSON 2This podcast was actually originally going to be an educational course, written for a publisher, but a turn of events had me decide to release this content in the form of a podcast for FREE, to be used by anyone who needed these resources. What was interesting is that when I put a focus on the IMPACT I wanted to create, rather than the INCOME it would give me back in return, something magical happened. Max Lugavere mentioned it happened for him at the 2-year mark, and I would have to say it happened for me around the 100th episode mark after just a year and seven months. The opportunities came disguised as consistent, daily, effort and work.LESSON 3: MASTER PROLIFIC QUALITY OUTPUT (PQO).I heard this statement for years, until this experience made me finally understand it. Brendon Burchard, the author of the book High Performance Habits talks about how “High performers have mastered the art of prolific quality output (PQO). They produce more high-quality output than their peers over the long term, and that is how they become more effective, better known, more remembered. They aim their attention and consistent efforts toward PQO and minimize any distractions (including opportunities) that would steal them away from their craft” (Burchard, 2017[iv]).  Over the years, I never really understood what PQO meant. I listened to Brendon explain it a few times, and he would give the example of “Beyonce, who puts out hit after hit, or Ralph Lauren who creates luxury and designer product after product, or even Seth Godin who creates blog post after blog post.” There’s also the WakeUpIt’sDayOne Blog who explains PQO as it relates to athletes as “the type of things you typically don’t see an immediate reward with or have to repeat on a daily basis. Think about Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Lebron James, Tom Brady – the greatest athletes of all time. When you research them and understand how they became who they are today, all you ever read is that they focused on the fundamental things that improved their overall physical and mental skills[v]” their PQO—and I would add consistently, on a daily basis.AHA! MOMENT with LESSON 3Then I thought, what is my PQO? What is my output? What am I creating day in and day out? I’ve always been creating content, but it hit me after I had been producing episodes consistently for a year, that my PQO was the podcast episodes. I had created a certain standard with each episode that included the fact that each one had to be my best effort. If I wasn’t ready to interview someone, or had not researched enough, I would not produce the episode until it hit that standard.I also saw the importance of creating a video interview where I could edit in images and text to explain what the person I was interviewing was talking about. Many times, the concepts discussed are difficult to understand with words alone, so this became another standard. The final standard was that each interview had to be produced and released either that same day, or no longer than 2 days after. Waiting too long in production destroys the momentum created by the interview, so this meant many times that editing went into the night and researching early morning and weekends. Many content producers outsource their video or audio editing and production, but to date, each of the episodes have been produced and edited by yours truly. We will see what happens with this over the next 100 episodes.If you want to make an impact that goes beyond what your mind can imagine, a global impact, you need to have mastered Prolific Quality Output. Do YOU know what YOUR PQO is?Now that we have looked at some of the results created from this podcast, that really were unexpected, this episode will take a closer look at some lessons learned from the speakers along the way, as they relate to the 6 social and emotional competencies and how we tied in a connection to practical neuroscience for improved productivity and results.After each interview, I brainstormed the most important points learned with my husband, since he is also in the field of education. He always asks “what did you learn from this speaker” and there’s always 2-5 AHA points that definitely surprised me. I love making connections between the speakers and mapping out what each one says to other episodes. We really are connected, and what one person says, connects to what someone else will say in a later episode.  I’m always looking for ways to take knowledge and make it applicable for anyone who is willing to apply it and use it.Just a note: Even though I had a written outline for the podcast, it did take a turn towards health and wellness close to the end of 2020, which I think was important and necessary. I will pull out examples used from our speakers in the following areas:EXPERTS WHO:Demonstrate Practical Neuroscience to Improve ResultsDemonstrate the Social and Emotional Learning Competencies (Mindset, Self-Regulation, Self-Awareness, Social Awareness, Relationship Skills, and Decision-Making).Explain SEL in the EDUCATIONAL SETTINGAre Involved with PHYSICAL HEALTH, WELLNESS AND NUTRITIONLESSONS LEARNED FROM PRACTICAL NEUROSCIENCETHE POWER IN LEARNING ABOUT HOW OUR AMAZING BRAINS WORK: This area is where I spent the most time on the podcast, making sure we had a variety of experts, many who are well known with their books and research, to make a case for the importance of learning the basics of neuroscience to improve our productivity and results.Whether it was tips from 15-year-old Chloe Amen on how you can “Change Your Brain and Change Your Grades,” neuroscientist Friederike Fabritius on ways to “Achieve Peak Performance,” Dr. John Medina on his “Brain Rules” or Dr. Lori Desautels on the power of implementing neuroscience in today’s schools, the one person who tied everything together was Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang with her research that shows “The Brain Basis for Integrated Social, Emotional, and Academic Development.” Her work shows how emotions and social relationships drive learning, bringing the entire podcast full circle as Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning. I saw the importance of these 2 topics, and Mary Helen can prove why they are so important, with her work at the University of SCA in her Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education (CANDLE LAB).  We will continue to bring more lessons that tie practical neuroscience to social, emotional and academic development in our future episodes as this really is the future of education. What was interesting to note in this area was that EPISODE #68: Neuroscience of Personal Change with Stephen R Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” was the #1 most downloaded EPISODE with over 1100 downloads, showing me that people want to make this connection linking neuroscience to success and of the POWER IN LEARNING ABOUT HOW OUR AMAZING BRAINS WORK.LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE 6 SEL COMPETENCIES SEL COMPETENCY: MINDSET“A great attitude does more than turn on the lights in our worlds, it seems to magically connect us to all sorts of serendipitous opportunities that were somehow absent before the change.” Earl Nightingale, author of Think and Grow Rich Frank Shankwitz, from EPISODE #40 has modeled what happens when you keep a good mental mindset, for the course of his life. So much so, that they made a movie about his life, called Wish Man, that is based on Frank’s life story (he was a motorcycle cop in Arizona who was haunted by the traumatic separation from his father when he was a boy. After surviving a near-fatal accident, he finds hope with a terminally ill boy, who reunites him with his father. To honor this boy, Frank creates the Make a Wish Foundation, and continues to live a life of honor every day. Nothing can tear this man down. Follow him on social media and you will see for yourself of the importance of a “great mental attitude.” SEL COMPETENCY: SELF-REGULATION with PERSISTENCE and PERSEVERANCE“Success has to do with deliberate practice. Practice must be focused, determined, and in the environment where there’s feedback.” Malcolm GladwellDr. John Dunlosky from EPISODE #37 started this topic off with his years of research that showed that “deliberate practice” was one of the most effective learning strategies, vs cramming for a test. We’ve all heard this and know that knowledge will be retained and recalled more efficiently when it’s learned over a period of time.  Todd Woodcroft, the former assistant coach to the Winnipeg Jets, current Head Coach to the University of Vermont Catamounts[vi], from EPISODE #38 puts John Dunlosky’s theory into practice as he explained that the “daily grind in the NHL” begins with “hard work” being a baseline of what is expected of each player, and that to rise above this baseline, players must embrace certain daily habits, without complaining of the work, knowing that “things don’t get easier as you get better, they get harder” with the repetition of these important skills.Dalip Shekhawat further reinforced Dunlosky’s research with his interview detailing the preparation involved in climbing Mount Everest, and neuroscientist Stephanie Faye from EPISODE #39 shares why this spaced repetition is so important at the brain level when she explains how the neural pathways are formed with this daily, consistent practicing of skill. SEL COMPETENCY: SELF-AWARENESS with MENTAL HEALTH and WELL-BEING“When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.” Ralph EllisonMoving into the 3rd SEL competency, self-awareness, this was the area that received the most downloads. The second most downloaded episode was my interview with my mentor, Bob Proctor, that shares where this idea began over 20 years ago. The third most downloaded episode was my solo lesson with a deep dive into everything I learned working directly with Bob, in the seminar industry for 6 years.Many of the speakers interviewed in this area came from the connections made from these speakers that I met in the late 1990s. It was here that I first saw the power of these social and emotional learning skills with 12 young teens, who would inspire me to keep moving forward with this work.This section is full of speakers, leaders, entrepreneurs of all ages who have a vision, like I do, for change with our educational system.EPISODE #66 Bob Proctor #2 MOST DOWNLOADED EPISODE on “Social and Emotional Learning: Where it all Started for Andrea Samadi”EPISODE #67 “Expanding Your Awareness with a Deep Dive into the Most Important Concepts Learned from Bob Proctor Seminars” (Solo Lesson by Andrea Samadi)EPISODE #68 The Neuroscience of Personal Change with Stephen R. Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People” (Solo Lesson with Andrea Samadi)#1 MOST DOWNLOADED EPISODE with over 1100 downloads SOCIAL AWARENESS/RELATIONSHIPS/DECISION-MAKINGThese 3 SEL competencies are important with solo lessons for each topic. Greg Wolcott, the author of the book www.significant72.com was dominant in this area. I will mention an aha moment with his work in the next section.LESSONS LEARNED FROM EXPERTS IN SEL/EDUCATION TAKE ACTION, EVEN WHEN YOU AREN’T READY. My first guest speaker was my husband, Majid Samadi, who always is there to offer ideas, suggestions and support with all of my projects, so of course when I needed to interview someone to launch this idea, I asked him to be my first guest. If you go back to EPISODE #1 that covers “The Why Behind Launching an SEL or Emotional Intelligence Program in Your School or Workplace” you will hear me interview him on his thoughts, from the point of view of someone who spends most of his time, working in schools across the country, as the Regional Vice President of Sales for an Educational Publishing Company. This interview happened 5 minutes after he walked in the door after getting off a flight, I think from LA, and he put his suit jacket on my desk, and I handed him a sheet of questions and said “Answer these and talk into the mic.” I’m sure he had been working since early that morning, and it was well into the evening when we recorded this, but he did it, without rehearsing his answers, or spending time preparing. We launched the podcast when we weren’t 100% ready because if we didn’t, I’m sure I would still be spending my days planning. Take action, even when you aren’t ready.PAY ATTENTION TO EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE: SMALL DETAILS CAN LEAD TO BIG DISCOVERIES AND RELATIONSHIPS THAT LAST My second interview was with educator, Ron Hall, from Valley Day School (who I found from an article I saw through Linkedin, and reached out to him hoping he would say yes to being a guest on the show). He agreed, and we have remained in contact ever since. Something funny to mention is that I had just started using Zoom for these interviews, a year before everyone would be using Zoom, and I hadn’t mastered the audio yet. There was a setting on my end that I needed to fix, and finally figured it out, but I’ll never forget the stress of not being able to hear my first guest for a good 30 minutes (could have been longer) as he tried everything on his end to fix the audio, that we finally figured out was on my end. Once we figured it all out, Ron spoke about how he launched neuroscience into his school with one of his major influencers being an author and speaker named Horacio Sanchez. When I created the video for Ron’s interview, I added an image of Horacio as he explained his story. This became important a year later, when I was introduced to Horacio Sanchez from Corwin Press Publishers for Episode #74. With each person you meet, whether in your life, or work, it’s important to pay attention to small details that can lead to something important to you later on. Always develop and maintain relationships as you never know how that person could be of assistance to you, or you to them, at some point in the future.  I’m forever grateful for Ron Hall being my first guest, for staying in touch with me, and for the introduction to Horacio Sanchez, who I’m working with now on another project. GRATEFUL FOR BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS THAT LAST.KEEP LEARNING AND DON’T GET IN YOUR OWN WAY: One of my early interviews was with Greg Wolcott, and assistant superintendent from Chicago, and the author the book Significant 72[vii]. I had been following Greg’s work since I heard him on an SEL webinar in 2016, where he explained how he was building relationships in schools across the country. Greg quickly became an incredible supporter of the podcast after our interview and referred me to many other guests. We became friends, and kept in touch as each episode was released, he would let me know how useful the information was for the educators he was working with, as he brainstormed the ways that the episodes were helping him. This gave me belief in the content, as I saw it being applied, and made me realize that it was crazy that I was nervous interviewing Greg, who would become an incredible support, leading me to step out of my own way, and into a path of greater opportunity down the line. Reminding me to KEEP LEARNING AND DON’T GET IN YOUR OWN WAY!LESSONS LEARNED FROM HEALTH/NUTRITIONWhen I launched this podcast, I had no idea I was going to even go in the direction of health, wellbeing and nutrition. It just happened. Health is my #1 value, and something I put an incredible amount of time towards, so it wasn’t a surprise to me that when the Pandemic hit our world, I saw the importance of interviewing people who were putting a focus on their physical health as well as their mental health and well-being.I’ve always stayed close to my trainer, Kelly Schmidt, from episode #51, but when I watched a documentary on the health staples that were shown to prevent Alzheimer’s Disease, I decided that I needed to expand what I knew in this area. I took the 5 health staples and began looking for people I could contact who were experts in each of these areas. I met Luke DePron on Linkedin, who connected me to Dr. Stickler, and Momo Vuyisich. I reached out to Shane Creado from Dr. Daniel Amen’s Clinics, leading us to get our brain scans, learn more about the importance of sleep and finally, reached out to Jason Wittrock on Instagram, after his videos had inspired me to make changes with my diet a few years back.This set of interviews led me to moderate Podbean’s Wellness Week with Dr. Carolyn Leaf and John Kim, who you bet I am working on getting on the podcast for 2021.I hope you have enjoyed this review of our first 100 EPISODES. There is a lot of information to review, and many lessons that I plan on revisiting over the holidays as a review. I’ll definitely be reviewing EPISODE #66 The Neuroscience of Personal Change (our #1 episode) and will be planning Season 5. Please do send me a message via social media, or email andrea@achieveit360.com and let me know what episodes you have liked, so I can be sure that I am producing the best content I can for you.See you next year.Health Staple 1: Daily Exercise  (Luke DePron)Health Staple 2: Getting Good Quality Sleep (Dr. Shane Creado)Health Staple 3: Eating a Healthy Diet (Dr. Daniel Stickler).Health Staple 4: Optimizing our Microbiome (Momo Vuyisich)Health Staple 5: Intermittent Fasting (Jason Wittrock) EXPERTS WHO DEMONSTRATE PRACTICAL NEUROSCIENCE TO IMPROVE RESULTS:EPISODE #11: 15-year-old Chloe Amen on how to “Change Your Brain, Change Your Grades”EPISODE #17: Harvard Researcher Jenny Woo on “The Latest Research, Brain Facts, Myths, Growth Mindset, Memory and Cognitive Biases”EPISODE #26: Simple Strategies for Overcoming the Pitfalls of Your Brain(Solo Lesson by Andrea Samadi)  to Prepare for EPISODE #27EPISODE #27: Friederike Fabritius on “Achieving Peak Performance”EPISODE #28: Dr. Daniel Siegel on “Mindsight: The Basis of Social and Emotional Intelligence”EPISODE #30: Mark Robert Waldman on “12 Brain-Based Experiential Learning and Living Principles”EPISODE #35: How to Use Your Brain to Break Bad Habits (Solo Lesson by Andrea Samadi)EPISODE #42 Dr. John Medina on “Implementing Brain Rules in the Schools and Workplaces of the Future”EPISODE #43 Deep Dive into Dr. John Medina’s Brain Rules(Solo Lesson by Andrea Samadi)EPISODE #44 Andrea Samadi’s “12 Mind-Boggling Discoveries About the Brain”(Solo Lesson by Andrea Samadi)EPISODE #46: As Close to Mind Reading as Brain Science Gets “Developing and Using Theory of Mind in Your Daily Life”EPISODE #48: Brain Network Theory : Using Neuroscience to Stay Productive During Times of Change and Chaos  (Solo Lesson by Andrea Samadi)EPISODE #56: Dr. Lori Desautels on her new book “Connections Over Compliance: Rewiring Our Perceptions of DisciplineEPISODE #57: Taking Initiative: Your Brain and Change and Your Mentors(Solo Lesson by Andrea Samadi)EPISODE #58: James MacDiardmid and Natasha Davis on "The Wise Emotional Fitness Program" (Virtual Reality).EPISODE #59: Suzanne Gundersen on “Putting the Polyvagal Theory into Practice”EPISODE #60: The Science and Benefits of Dan Siegel’s “Wheel of Awareness Meditation” (Solo Lesson by Andrea Samadi)EPISODE #68: Neuroscience of Personal Change with Stephen R Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” (#1 EPISODE with over 1100 downloads)EPISODE #69: Ben Ampil on “Using Your Brain to Manage Your Behavior and Results”EPISODE #73: Chris Manning on "Using Neurowisdom to Improve Your Learning and Success in Life."EPISODE #78: David A Sousa on “How the Brain Learns”EPISODE #81 Critical Thinking and The Brain (Solo Lesson by Andrea Samadi)EPISODE #82 Doug Sutton “How a Brain Scan Changed My Life” PART 1EPISODE #83 What Exactly is a Brain Scan and Can it Change Your Life PART 2 (Solo Lesson with Andrea Samadi) EPISODE #84 Brain Scan Results PART 3 (Solo Lesson by Andrea Samadi)EPISODE #85: Dr. Sarah McKay on “High Performing Brain Health Strategies That We Should All Know and Implement”EPISODE #88: Dr. Andrew Newberg on “Neurotheology, Spect Scans and Strategies for the Aging Brain”EPISODE #97: Kirun Goy and Samuel Holston on “The Neuroscience Behind Our Habits, Addictions, Love and Fears.”EPISODE #98 Dr. Dawson Church on “The Science Behind Meditation: Rewiring Your Brain for Happiness”EPISODE #100: Mary Helen Immordino-Yang on “The Neuroscience of Social and Emotional Learning” EXPERTS WHO DEMONSTRATE THE 6 SEL COMPETENCIES: MINDSETEPISODE #20: Coaching a Growth Mindset: Strategies for Overcoming Obstacles and Cognitive Bias (Solo Lesson by Andrea Samadi)EPISODE #40 Frank Shankwitz on “Lessons from the Wishman Movie”EPISODE #49: Dr. Jeffrey Magee on “Managing Fear, Focus and Strategy During Challenging Times”EPISODE #52: “Igniting Your Personal Leadership to Build Resiliency”(Solo Lesson by Andrea Samadi—Inspired by Dr. Bruce Perry).  EPISODE #55: Torsten Nicolini on “Working Smart: How to Improve Productivity and Efficiency at Work”EPISODE #61 Maria Natapov on “Building Autonomy, Self-Confidence, Connection and Resiliency Within our Children”EPISODE #73 Chris Manning Ph. D on “Using Neurowisdom to Improve Your Learning and Success in Life”EPISODE #74 Horacio Sanchez who Addresses Race, Culture and How to Apply Brain Science to Improve Instruction and School Climate”EPISODE #86 University of Phoenix President Peter Cohen on “A Positive Vision for K-12 and Higher Ed Campuses”EPISODE #99 Irene Lyon on “The Science Behind Trauma and a Healthy Immune System” SELF-REGULATION with PERSISTENCE and PERSEVERANCEEPISODE #14: Self-Regulation: The Foundational Learning Skill for Future Success(Solo Lesson by Andrea Samadi)EPISODE #37: Dr. John Dunlosky on “Improving Student Success: Some Principles from Cognitive Science”EPISODE #38:  Former Assistant Coach to the Winnipeg Jets Todd Woodcroft on “The Daily Grind in the NHL”EPISODE #39 Stephanie Faye on “Using Neuroscience to Improve our Mindset, Self-Regulation and Self-Awareness”EPISODE #45: Dalip Shekhawit on “Life Lessons Learned from Summiting Mount Everest”EPISODE #53: Self-Regulation and Your Brain: How to Bounce Back Towards Resiliency (Solo Lesson by Andrea Samadi)EPISODE #70 Self-Regulation and Behavior Change-Andrea Samadi solo lesson on David R Hawkins’ “Power vs Force” (4th MOST DOWNLOADED EPISODE)CASE STUDIESEPISODE #13: Teen Artist Sam Roberts on “Winning a 4-Year Prestigious Leadership Scholarship at the University of AR Fort Smith.”EPISODE #68: Donte Dre Winrow on “Breaking into a Challenging Career Path”EPISODE #50: Shark Tank Season 1 Success Story Tiffany Krumins on “Life After Shark Tank”SELF-AWARENESS with MENTAL HEALTH and WELL-BEING EPISODE #6: Helen Maffini from the Mindful Peace Summits on “Launching Mindfulness and Meditation in Our Schools”EPISODE #8: 14- year-old Adam Avin on “Improving Well-Being and Mental Health in Our Schools”EPISODE #21: Spencer Taylor on his Educational Documentary “The Death of Recess”EPISODE #23: Understanding the Difference Between Your Mind and Your Brain(Solo Lesson by Andrea Samadi)EPISODE #25: Mindfulness and Meditation Expert Mick Neustadt on “How Meditation and Mindfulness Changes Your Life”EPISODE #29: How to Re-Wire Your Brain for Happiness and Well-BeingEPISODE #31: Nik Halik on “Overcoming Adversity to Create an Epic Life”EPISODE #32: John Assaraf on “Brain Training, The Power of Repetition, Resourcefulness and the Future”EPISODE #33: Kent Healy on “Managing Time, Our Greatest Asset”EPISODE #34: Chris Farrell on “Actionable Strategies for High Achievers to Improve Daily Results”EPISODE #65 Dr. Barbara Schwarck on “Using Energy Psychology and Emotional Intelligence to Improve Leadership in the Workplace”EPISODE #66 Bob Proctor on “Social and Emotional Learning: Where it all Started for Andrea Samadi” #2 MOST DOWNLOADED EPISODEEPISODE #67 “Expanding Your Awareness with a Deep Dive into the Most Important Concepts Learned from Bob Proctor Seminars” (Solo Lesson by Andrea Samadi)EPISODE #68 The Neuroscience of Personal Change with Stephen R. Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People” (Solo Lesson with Andrea Samadi) #1 MOST DOWNLOADED EPISODE with over 1100 downloadsEPISODE #80 Samantha Wettje on “Mitigating the Negative Effects of ACES with Her 16 Strong Project”EPISODE #92 Sarah Peyton on “Brain Network Theory, Default Mode Network, Anxiety and Emotion Regulation.”EPISODE #95 Dr. Sandy Gluckman on “Reversing Children’s Behavior and Mood Problems” SOCIAL AWARENESSEPISODE #5: Social Awareness: How to Change Your Social Brain (Solo Lesson with Andrea Samadi)RELATIONSHIP SKILLSEPISODE #7: Greg Wolcott on “Building Relationships in Today’s Schools”EPISODE #9: Using Your Brain to Build and Sustain Effective Relationships (Solo Lesson with Andrea Samadi)DECISION-MAKINGEPISODE #9: Using Your Brain to Build and Sustain Effective Relationships (Solo Lesson with Andrea Samadi)EXPERTS IN SEL AND EDUCATIONEPISODE #1: Majid and Andrea Samadi on “The Why Behind Implementing an SEL or Emotional Intelligence Training Program in Our Schools and Workplaces”EPISODE #2: Self-Awareness: Know Thyself (Solo Lesson with Andrea Samadi)EPISODE #3: Ron Hall from Valley Day School on “Launching Your Neuro-educational Program”EPISODE #4: Jennifer Miller on “Building Connections with Parents and Educators”EPISODE #12: Clark McKown on “SEL Assessments Made Simple”EPISODE #16: Dr. Lori Desautels and Michael McKnight on “The Future of Educational Neuroscience in Our Schools and Communities”EPISODE #18: Kenneth Kohutek, PhD on his new book “Chloe and Josh Learn Grit”EPISODE #19: Bob Jerus on “Emotional Intelligence Training and Suicide Prevention”EPISODE #22: Marc Brackett on his new book “Permission to Feel”EPISODE #24: Dr. Jeff Rose on “Leadership, Innovation and the Future”EPISODE #36: James Nottingham on “The Importance of Challenge with Learning”EPISODE #40: Erik Francis on “How to Use Questions to Promote Cognitive Rigor, Thinking and Learning”EPISODE #47: Erik Francis on “Transitioning Teaching and Learning in the Classroom to Home”EPISODE #54: David Adams on “ A New Vision for Education: Living Up to the Values We Want for Our Next Generation.”EPISODE #62: CEO of CASEL Karen Niemi on “Tools and Strategies to Enhance and Expand SEL in our Schools and Communities”EPISODE #63: Hans Appel on “Building an Award Winning Culture in Your School or Organization”EPISODE #64: Greg Wolcott on “Making Connections Between Neuroscience and SEL”EPISODE #75 Maurice J Elias on “Boosting Emotional Intelligence Through Sports, Academics and Character”EPISODE #76 Michael B Horn on “Using a Positive Lens to Explore Change and the Future of Education”EPISODE #77 Doug Fisher/Nancy Frey on “Developing and Delivering High Quality Distance Learning for Students”EPISODE #79 Eric Jensen on “Strategies for Reversing the Impact of Poverty and Stress on Student Learning:”EPISODE #91 Drs. Jessica and John Hannigan on “SEL From a Distance: Tools and Processes for Anytime, Anywhere.” EXPERTS IN PHYSICAL HEALTH, WELLNESS and NUTRITIONEPISODE #51: Kelly Schmidt on “Easy to Implement Fitness and Nutrition Tips”Jason Wittrock on “Nutrition, Intermittent Fasting and the Ketogenic Diet”EPISODE #71 Self-Regulation and Sleep with Dr. Shane Creado’s “ Peak Sleep Performance for Athletes” (Solo Lesson by Andrea Samadi)EPISODE #72 Dr. Shane Creado on “Sleep Strategies That Will Guarantee a Competitive Advantage”EPISODE #87 The Top 5 Brain Health and Alzheimer’s Prevention Strategies (Solo Lesson with Andrea Samadi)EPISODE #89 Dr. Erik Won on “Groundbreaking Technology That is Changing the Future of Mental Health”EPISODE #90 Luke DePron on “Neuroscience, Health, Fitness and Growth”EPISODE #93 Momo Viyisich on “Improving the Microbiome, Preventing and Reversing Chronic Disease”EPISODE #94 Jason Wittrock on “Nutrition, Intermittent Fasting and the Ketogenic Diet”EPISODE #96 Dr. Daniel Stickler on “Expanding Awareness for Limitless Peak Performance, Health, Longevity and Intelligence.”BONUS EPISODE: Top 5 Health Staples and Review of Season 1-4(Solo Episode by Andrea Samadi)EPISODE #82 "How a Brain Scan Changed My Life" With Doug Sutton PART 1EPISODE # 83 "What is a SPECT Scan and How Can it Change Your Life?" PART 2 (with Andrea Samadi)EPISODE #84  "Brain Scan Results" with Andrea Samadi PART 3 Each Season at a Glance:Season 1: Consists of 33 episodes that begin with introducing six the social and emotional competencies (building a growth mindset, making responsible decisions, becoming self-aware, increasing social-awareness, managing emotions and behavior and developing relationships) along with an introduction to cognitive skills that I call Neuroscience 101 where we introduce some of the most important cognitive strategies, or the core skills your brain uses to think, remember and pay attention. CONTENT: In this season, you will learn about understanding your mind vs your brain, mindfulness and meditation, the 3 parts of your brain, achieving peak performance, and improving awareness, mindsight, rewiring your brain for happiness, and experiential learning. We interviewed Ron Hall from Valley Day School who talked about how he launched his neuroeducation program into his school, Jennifer Miller on “Building Connections with Parents and Educators,” Helen Maffini on her Mindful Peace Summit and “Launching Mindfulness and Meditation in our Schools,” Greg Wolcott on “Building Relationships in Today’s Classrooms,” 14 year old Adam Avin on “Improving Our Mental Health in Our Schools,” Clark McKown from xSEL Labs on “SEL Assessments” and how we can actually measure these skills, Sam Roberts on her experience of “Winning a 4 Year Prestigious Scholarship” using these skills, Donte Winrow on “Breaking into a Challenging Career Path” with the application of these skills immediately after graduating from high school, Dr. Lori Desautels and Michael McKnight on “The Future of Educational Neuroscience in Today’s Schools,” Harvard researcher Jenny Woo on “The Latest Research, Brain Facts and Myths, Growth Mindset, Memory and Cognitive Biases,” Psychologist Dr. Kenneth Kohutek on his new book “Chloe and Josh Learn Grit,” Psychologist Bob Jerus on “Suicide Prevention and Emotional Intelligence Training,” Spencer Taylor on his “Death of Recess Educational Documentary” featuring Carol Dweck and Sir Ken Robinson, Marc Brackett on his powerful book “Permission to Feel,” former Superintendent Dr. Jeff Rose on “Leadership, Innovation and the Future,” Mick Neustadt on “How Meditation and Mindfulness Can Change Your Life,” Friederike Fabritius from Germany on “Achieving Peak Performance with the Brain in Mind,” Dr. Daniel Siegel on “Mindsight: The Basis for Social and Emotional Intelligence,” my mentor and neuroscience researcher Mark Robert Waldman on “12 Brain-Based Experiential Learning and Living Principles,” Nik Halik on “Overcoming Adversity to Create an Epic Life,” and John Assaraf on “Brain Training, the Power of Repetition, Resourcefulness and the Future.” Season 2: These 33 episodes build on the strategies from Season 1, with high level guests who tie in social, emotional, interpersonal and cognitive strategies to increase results in schools, sports and the workplace. You will learn about the power of repetition, challenge, creativity, using your brain to break bad habits, how the brain ties into mindset, self-regulation, and self-awareness, cognitive rigor, thinking, learning, brain rules for schools and the workplace, the theory of mind, brain network theory, personal leadership, taking initiative, resiliency, the science behind mindfulness/meditation and your values. CONTENT: You will hear from Chris Farrell on “Strategies for High Achievers,” James Nottingham on “The Importance of Challenge with Learning,” Dr. John Dunlosky on “Improving Student Success,” Todd Woodcroft on “The Daily Grind in the NHL,” Stefanie Faye on “Using Neuroscience to Improve our Mindset, Self-Regulation, and Self-Awareness,” the Co-Founder of the Make-A-Wish Foundation, Frank Shankwitz on “Lessons from the Wish Man Movie,” Erik Francis on “How to Use Questions to Promote Cognitive Rigor, Thinking and Learning,” Dr. John Medina on “Implementing Brain Rules in the Schools and Workplaces of the Future,” Dalip Shekhawat on “Life Lessons Learned from Summiting Mount Everest,” Dr. Jeff Magee on “Managing Fear, Focus and Strategy During Challenging Times,” Tiffany Krumins on “Life After Shark Tank,” Kelly Schmidt on Easy to Implement Fitness and Nutrition Tips,” David Adams on “A New Vision for Education,” Torsten Nicolini on “Working Smart,” Dr. Lori Desautels on her book “Connections Over Compliance,” The Wise Emotional Fitness Program delivered via virtual reality with James MacDiarmid and Natasha Davis all the way from Australia, Suzanne Gunderson on “Putting the Polyvagal Theory into Practice,” Maria Natapov on “Building Autonomy, Self-Confidence, Connection and Resiliency Within Our Children,” Casel President Karen Niemi on “Tools and Strategies to Enhance and Expand SEL in our Schools and Communities,” Hans Appel on “Building an Award Winning Culture in Your School or Organization,” Greg Wolcott on “Making Connections with Neuroscience and SEL,” Dr. Barbara Schwarck on “Using Energy Psychology and Emotional Intelligence to Improve Leadership in the Workplace,” and an Introduction to my first mentor, speaker, Bob Proctor on “Social and Emotional Learning: Where it All Started,” where I share how I began working with these skills over 20 years ago,  along with a deep dive into some of the lessons learned from Bob Proctor’s Seminars.Season 3: These 14 episodes tie in some of the top authors in the world who connect their work to these social, emotional and cognitive skills, with clear examples for improved results, well-being and achievement within each episode.CONTENT: You will learn about the neuroscience of personal change with a deep dive into Dr. Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” (that’s currently the most downloaded episode) Self-Regulation and Behavior Change with David R Hawkins’ “Power vs Force,” Self-Regulation and Sleep with Dr. Shane Creado’s “Peak Sleep Performance for Athletes,” Chris Manning on using “Neurowisdom” to Improve Learning and Success in Life, Horatio Sanchez on “Resilience,” Maurice J Elias on “Social and Emotional and Character Development,” Michael B Horn on “Disrupting Education” and the future of education, Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey on “High Quality Distance Learning.” David A Sousa on “How the Brain Learns,” Eric Jensen on “Reversing the Impact of Poverty and Stress on Student Learning” and Samantha Wettje from Harvard on “Mitigating the Negative Effect of ACES.” I conclude this season with a solo lesson from me, on critical thinking and the brain, after being asked to create an episode on this topic for the corporate space. Season 4:  These 18 episodes (82-100) that begin to tie in health, and mental health into the understanding of our brain, productivity and results. The shift to health on this podcast became apparent when we started to see how important our brain health is for our overall results. CONTENT: Everything that we do starts at the brain level, and we dive deep into this with our 3-part episodes on “How a Brain Scan Changed My Life” with a look at what we can learn from looking at our brain using a SPECT image brain scan. The interviews of this season mix in the power of education with an understanding of health and wellness. Dr. Sarah McKay agreed with Dr. Shane Creado (from Season 3) that sleep is one of the most important health strategies we can implement. It became apparent that there were 5 health staples that emerged as so powerful they were showing an impact on Alzheimer’s Prevention, so this season became a deep dive into these top 5 health staples (daily exercise, getting good quality and quantity sleep, eating a healthy diet, optimizing our microbiome and intermittent fasting). You will also hear from Dr. Andrew Newberg and his episode on Neurotheology, Dr. Erik Won and his ground -breaking technology that’s changing the future of mental health, Luke DePron, who is stretching the limits with neuroscience, health, fitness and growth, Sarah Peyton on “Brain Network Theory, Default Mode Network, Anxiety and Emotion Regulation,” Momo Vuyisich on “Preventing and Reversing Chronic Disease by Improving the Health of Your Microbiome,” Jason Wittrock on the Ketogentic Diet and Intermittent Fasting, and Dr. Sandy Gluckman on “Reversing Children’s Behavior and Mood Problems.” We also hear from behavior experts Drs. Jessica and John Hannigan on their new book “SEL From a Distance” that offers simple strategies for parents and educators who are working on implementing these SEL skills into their home or classroom, during the pandemic.When Season 4 took the direction of health, mental-health, and wellness, I began looking for guests to dive deeper into the Top 5 health staples that seemed to continue to emerge with each guest. Dr. Daniel Stickler came on with the topic of “Expanding Awareness for Limitless Peak Performance, Health, Longevity and Intelligence, Kirun Goy and Samuel Holston from the BrainTools Podcast on “The Neuroscience Behind our Habits, Addictions, Love/Fears,” Dr. Dawson Church on “The Science Behind Meditation: Rewiring Your Brain for Happiness,” Irene Lyon on “The Science Behind Trauma and a Healthy Immune System” and Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang on “The Neuroscience of Social and Emotional Learning.” REFERENCES:[i] Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning EPISODE #74 with Horacio Sanchez https://andreasamadi.podbean.com/e/leading-brain-science-and-resiliency-expert-horatio-sanchez-on-how-to-apply-brain-science-to-improve-instruction-and-school-climate/[ii] Mark Robert Waldman and Chris Manning, Ph.D. Published Jan.31, 2017  https://www.amazon.com/NeuroWisdom-Brain-Science-Happiness-Success/dp/1682303055[iii] Drhu Purohit’s Broken Brain Podcast with Max Lugavere on “Building a Personal Brand” https://shows.acast.com/broken-brain/episodes/behind-the-scenes-max-lugavere-on-building-a-personal-brand[iv] High Performance Habits by Brendon Burchard Published Sept.19, 2017  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072N6MQ5V/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1[v] WakeUpIt’sDayOne Blog https://wakeupitsdayone.com/2018/07/16/increase-productivity-habit-4-of-high-performers/[vi] Interview with Todd Woodcroft on Hockey Minds Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/hockey-minds-podcast/id1517330567#episodeGuid=https%3A%2F%2Fpinecast.com%2Fguid%2F7dcaf914-d44a-42e6-a9c5-bca89a40aff6[vii] Greg Wolcott www.significant72.com

Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning podcast, with a special episode, recorded for Podbean’s Wellness Week.When I first launched this podcast, in June 2019, using Podbean as my host, of course, it was a bit by chance, as I had just purchased a new template for my website that had a podcast theme, and the developer who helped me to build the site said “you can delete the podcast section if you don’t want to host a podcast” and I thought about it for a minute, and was already conducting interviews for the programs and services I was offering in my membership area, so I told him, “let’s just keep it” and I went over to Google and searched for “what is an RSS feed” and “how to launch a podcast.” I had no idea at that moment just how powerful that one decision would be, leading me to launch something that would connect me to leaders around the world, be downloaded in over 100 countries, become my biggest learning opportunity I’ve ever had,  and open up many doors, all from just one decision.I also started this podcast because I saw a serious need in the area of social and emotional learning that was being implemented in schools around the country and the world, but many educators didn’t know the best way to begin their implementation.  We all know that “success in life, and in college and career specifically, relies on student’s cognitive, (the core skills your brain uses to think, read, remember, and pay attention) social and interpersonal skills, (including the ability to navigate through social situations, resolve conflicts, show respect towards others, self-advocate and learn how to work on a team with others) and emotional development (including the ability to recognize and manage one’s emotions, demonstrate empathy for others and cope with stress)” but what are these skills, and what exactly is the best way to implement them?[i]In the corporate world, these skills aren’t new, but they are “newly important” and of high urgency to develop in our future generations. A recent survey showed that 58 percent of employers say college graduates aren’t adequately prepared for today’s workforce, and those employers noted a particular gap in social and emotional skills. This is where our goal with this podcast began—to close this gap by exploring six social and emotional learning competencies as a springboard for discussion and tie in how an understanding of our brain can facilitate these strategies. Hence the title of the podcast, Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning. If we want to improve our social, emotional and cognitive abilities, it all starts with an understanding of our brain. Season 1: Consists of 33 episodes that begin with introducing six the social and emotional competencies (building a growth mindset, making responsible decisions, becoming self-aware, increasing social-awareness, managing emotions and behavior and developing relationships) along with an introduction to cognitive skills that I call Neuroscience 101 where we introduce some of the most important cognitive strategies, or the core skills your brain uses to think, remember and pay attention.CONTENT: In this season, you will learn about understanding your mind vs your brain, mindfulness and meditation, the 3 parts of your brain, achieving peak performance, and improving awareness, mindsight, rewiring your brain for happiness, and experiential learning. We interviewed Ron Hall from Valley Day School who talked about how he launched his neuroeducation program into his school, Jennifer Miller on “Building Connections with Parents and Educators,” Helen Maffini on her Mindful Peace Summit and “Launching Mindfulness and Meditation in our Schools,” Greg Wolcott on “Building Relationships in Today’s Classrooms,” 14 year old Adam Avin on “Improving Our Mental Health in Our Schools,” Clark McKown from xSEL Labs on “SEL Assessments” and how we can actually measure these skills, Sam Roberts on her experience of “Winning a 4 Year Prestigious Scholarship” using these skills, Donte Winrow on “Breaking into a Challenging Career Path” with the application of these skills immediately after graduating from high school, Dr. Lori Desautels and Michael McKnight on “The Future of Educational Neuroscience in Today’s Schools,” Harvard researcher Jenny Woo on “The Latest Research, Brain Facts and Myths, Growth Mindset, Memory and Cognitive Biases,” Psychologist Dr. Kenneth Kohutek on his new book “Chloe and Josh Learn Grit,” Psychologist Bob Jerus on “Suicide Prevention and Emotional Intelligence Training,” Spencer Taylor on his “Death of Recess Educational Documentary” featuring Carol Dweck and Sir Ken Robinson, Marc Brackett on his powerful book “Permission to Feel,” former Superintendent Dr. Jeff Rose on “Leadership, Innovation and the Future,” Mick Neustadt on “How Meditation and Mindfulness Can Change Your Life,” Friederike Fabritius from Germany on “Achieving Peak Performance with the Brain in Mind,” Dr. Daniel Siegel on “Mindsight: The Basis for Social and Emotional Intelligence,” my mentor and neuroscience researcher Mark Robert Waldman on “12 Brain-Based Experiential Learning and Living Principles,” Nik Halik on “Overcoming Adversity to Create an Epic Life,” and John Assaraf on “Brain Training, the Power of Repetition, Resourcefulness and the Future.”Season 2: These 33 episodes build on the strategies from Season 1, with high level guests who tie in social, emotional, interpersonal and cognitive strategies to increase results in schools, sports and the workplace. You will learn about the power of repetition, challenge, creativity, using your brain to break bad habits, how the brain ties into mindset, self-regulation, and self-awareness, cognitive rigor, thinking, learning, brain rules for schools and the workplace, the theory of mind, brain network theory, personal leadership, taking initiative, resiliency, the science behind mindfulness/meditation and your values.CONTENT: You will hear from Chris Farrell on “Strategies for High Achievers,” James Nottingham on “The Importance of Challenge with Learning,” Dr. John Dunlosky on “Improving Student Success,” Todd Woodcroft on “The Daily Grind in the NHL,” Stefanie Faye on “Using Neuroscience to Improve our Mindset, Self-Regulation, and Self-Awareness,” the Co-Founder of the Make-A-Wish Foundation, Frank Shankwitz on “Lessons from the Wish Man Movie,” Erik Francis on “How to Use Questions to Promote Cognitive Rigor, Thinking and Learning,” Dr. John Medina on “Implementing Brain Rules in the Schools and Workplaces of the Future,” Dalip Shekhawat on “Life Lessons Learned from Summiting Mount Everest,” Dr. Jeff Magee on “Managing Fear, Focus and Strategy During Challenging Times,” Tiffany Krumins on “Life After Shark Tank,” Kelly Schmidt on Easy to Implement Fitness and Nutrition Tips,” David Adams on “A New Vision for Education,” Torsten Nicolini on “Working Smart,” Dr. Lori Desautels on her book “Connections Over Compliance,” The Wise Emotional Fitness Program delivered via virtual reality with James MacDiarmid and Natasha Davis all the way from Australia, Suzanne Gunderson on “Putting the Polyvagal Theory into Practice,” Maria Natapov on “Building Autonomy, Self-Confidence, Connection and Resiliency Within Our Children,” Casel President Karen Niemi on “Tools and Strategies to Enhance and Expand SEL in our Schools and Communities,” Hans Appel on “Building an Award Winning Culture in Your School or Organization,” Greg Wolcott on “Making Connections with Neuroscience and SEL,” Dr. Barbara Schwarck on “Using Energy Psychology and Emotional Intelligence to Improve Leadership in the Workplace,” and an Introduction to my first mentor, speaker, Bob Proctor on “Social and Emotional Learning: Where it All Started,” where I share how I began working with these skills over 20 years ago,  along with a deep dive into some of the lessons learned from Bob Proctor’s Seminars.Season 3: These 14 episodes tie in some of the top authors in the world who connect their work to these social, emotional and cognitive skills, with clear examples for improved results, well-being and achievement within each episode.CONTENT: You will learn about the neuroscience of personal change with a deep dive into Dr. Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” (that’s currently the most downloaded episode) Self-Regulation and Behavior Change with David R Hawkins’ “Power vs Force,” Self-Regulation and Sleep with Dr. Shane Creado’s “Peak Sleep Performance for Athletes,” Chris Manning on using “Neurowisdom” to Improve Learning and Success in Life, Horatio Sanchez on “Resilience,” Maurice J Elias on “Social and Emotional and Character Development,” Michael B Horn on “Disrupting Education” and the future of education, Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey on “High Quality Distance Learning.” David A Sousa on “How the Brain Learns,” Eric Jensen on “Reversing the Impact of Poverty and Stress on Student Learning” and Samantha Wettje from Harvard on “Mitigating the Negative Effect of ACES.” I conclude this season with a solo lesson from me, on critical thinking and the brain, after being asked to create an episode on this topic for the corporate space. Season 4:  These 14 episodes (82-96) that begin to tie in health, and mental health into the understanding of our brain, productivity and results. The shift to health on this podcast became apparent when we started to see how important our brain health is for our overall results.CONTENT: Everything that we do starts at the brain level, and we dive deep into this with our 3-part episodes on “How a Brain Scan Changed My Life” with a look at what we can learn from looking at our brain using a SPECT image brain scan. The interviews of this season mix in the power of education with an understanding of health and wellness. Dr. Sarah McKay agreed with Dr. Shane Creado (from Season 3) that sleep is one of the most important health strategies we can implement. It became apparent that there were 5 health staples that emerged as so powerful they were showing an impact on Alzheimer’s Prevention, so this season became a deep dive into these top 5 health staples (daily exercise, getting good quality and quantity sleep, eating a healthy diet, optimizing our microbiome and intermittent fasting). You will also hear from Dr. Andrew Newberg and his episode on Neurotheology, Dr. Erik Won and his ground -breaking technology that’s changing the future of mental health, Luke DePron, who is stretching the limits with neuroscience, health, fitness and growth, Sarah Peyton on “Brain Network Theory, Default Mode Network, Anxiety and Emotion Regulation,” Momo Vuyisich on “Preventing and Reversing Chronic Disease by Improving the Health of Your Microbiome,” Jason Wittrock on the Ketogentic Diet and Intermittent Fasting, and Dr. Sandy Gluckman on “Reversing Children’s Behavior and Mood Problems.” We also hear from behavior experts Drs. Jessica and John Hannigan on their new book “SEL From a Distance” that offers simple strategies for parents and educators who are working on implementing these SEL skills into their home or classroom, during the pandemic.When Season 4 took the direction of health, mental-health, and wellness, I began looking for guests to dive deeper into the Top 5 health staples that seemed to continue to emerge with each guest.Health Staple 1: Daily Exercise  (Luke DePron)Health Staple 2: Getting Good Quality Sleep (Dr. Shane Creado)Health Staple 3: Eating a Healthy Diet (Dr. Daniel Stickler).Health Staple 4: Optimizing our Microbiome (Momo Vuyisich)Health Staple 5: Intermittent Fasting (Jason Wittrock)On this episode, that we are releasing for Podbean’s Wellness Week, I’ll take the Top 5 Health Staples from EPISODE #87 and offer additional tips, strategies, and ideas based our most recent interviews, that you can implement immediately for improved health and well-being. You can see EPISODE #87[ii] on the “Top 5 Brain Health and Alzheimer’s Prevention Strategies” that I wrote after watching Dr. David Perlmutter’s Documentary: Alzheimer’s the Science of Prevention[iii], that inspired the change in direction for the podcast towards health and wellness in addition to social, emotional and cognitive strategies for improved results.The case is clear that in order to move the needle the most with our health, there are some important areas that we can come to a consensus that are crucial to pay attention to. We know that Alzheimer’s disease now affects “more than 5 million Americans and is the most common form of dementia, a term that describes a variety of diseases and conditions that develop when nerve cells in the brain die or no longer function normally.”[iv]I was interested in learning more on this topic, since it was one of the reasons, we did scan our brain in the first place. The pattern of Alzheimer’s can be seen in the brain years before signs and symptoms show up, so when I saw Dr. Perlmutter’s Alzheimer’s Prevention series, I watched every episode to learn what brain experts across the country are saying about the top ways to prevent this disease, that currently has no know or meaningful treatment but I was given some hope when I learned that “you can change the direction of your cognitive destiny” (From Max Lugavere,[v] a Health and Science Journalist and NYT Bestselling Author, Genius Foods). Here is how we can take control of our health and future, with the TOP 5 health staples that I think we should all know, how they play a role in Alzheimer’s prevention, with added TIPS from our most recent health interviews.Health Staple 1: Daily Exercise: This seems to be the solution for every single brain problem, so I think that this is the most important strategy, and the reason why I block out exercise time on my schedule as non-negotiable. If we can incorporate 30 minutes of brisk walking every day, we will be miles ahead with our brain health. It wasn’t until I started to measure my activity, that I started to see that 30 minutes of walking really did make a difference. I didn’t need to be running or working really hard (like I used to think I had to do) to notice a difference, but I did need to put in some effort to move the needle.  The benefits  of daily, consistent exercise “come directly from its ability to reduce insulin resistance, reduce inflammation, and stimulate the release of growth factors—chemicals in the brain that affect the health of brain cells, the growth of new blood vessels in the brain, and even the abundance and survival of new brain cells.”[vi]  If for some reason, this whole idea of exercising still doesn’t sound the least bit interesting to you, you might be surprised like I was, that household activities like vacuuming, or raking leaves, or anything that gets your heart rate up, like shoveling snow (something I haven’t done in years since I moved from Toronto)—but these activities can also fall into the category of moderate exercise. The idea is whatever you choose, that it remains consistent, so it eventually becomes something you do habitually.ALZHEIMER’S PREVENTION THOUGHT FOR DAILY EXERCISE:If exercise reduces insulin resistance and inflammation, it would make sense that it also reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s. Studies show that “people who are physically active, have a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, and possibly have improved thinking.”[vii]DEEPER DIVE with LUKE DEPRON:On episode #90, I interviewed Luke DePron on “Neuroscience, Fitness and Growth” Luke is a Men’s Health & Performance Coach[viii], and graduate of Exercise Science, Kinesiology. Luke has done everything from personal training with 100s of clients, to working alongside Drs of Chiropractic as a corrective exercise specialist, training Olympic level athletes, to performance work with world champion mixed martial arts fighters. Currently Luke works as a Men’s Online Health and Performance Coach—learn more at http://www.livegreatlifestyle.com/ where he helps men step into a lifestyle approach of exercise and nutrition to transform their physique, energy, and confidence. He’s also the Host of the Live Great Lifestyle Podcast[ix] where he’s interviewed former Navy Seals, Mixed Martial Arts world champions, New York Times best-selling authors, personal development speakers, and many more….LESSON LEARNED FROM LUKE ON DAILY EXERCISE: I learned from Luke that “most people start a fitness or nutrition journey with a physique goal in mind, but it’s how you feel at the end of it.” What’s inspiring Luke says “is to see someone who might not be in that great health to begin with, create daily and weekly habits or standards that they follow, that creates energy and confidence that comes along with these habits.” That’s what the journey is all about.Health Staple 2: Getting Good Quality Sleep: Making sure we are getting at least 7- 8 hours each night. I think that we have seen the importance of sleep with our interview with sleep expert Dr. Shane Creado, on episode #72[x] and with Dr. Sarah McKay on episode #85.[xi] It is clear that sleep deprivation causes poor health and performance because it’s not allowing enough time for the brain to wash and clean itself. With less than 7 hours of sleep each night, the “trash”[xii] builds up in our brain, that leads us farther away from health.  I learned from health expert Darin Olien from the Darin Olien Show[xiii] --he’s the one who did the Netflix Docuseries with Zac Efron called “Down to Earth with Zac Efron[xiv]” that studies show that “almost all neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, are created when protein waste accumulates in the brain, which in turn slowly suffocates and kills the brain’s neurons.”[xv]  We also know that the brain shows lower functioning to important areas when it’s sleep deprived.ALZHEIMER’S PREVENTION THOUGHT FOR THE IMPORTANCE OF SLEEP:Dr. David Perlmutter, on his Alzheimer’s Science of Prevention Series, made a clear case for the fact that “sleep deprivation is directly linked to developing Alzheimer’s disease” and that “sleep plays an important role…impacting our risk for developing this condition.” He went on to remind us that “from a medical perspective, we cannot afford a bad night’s sleep” and that “sleep is essential if we want to retain optimal function of our body and our brains.”[xvi]DEEPER DIVE WITH DR. SHANE CREADOOn episode #72 with sleep medicine physician, sports psychiatrist and author of the NEW book “Peak Sleep Performance for Athletes: The Cutting-Edge Sleep Science That Will Guarantee a Competitive Advantage”[xvii] Dr. Shane CreadoShane Creado[xviii] is a double board-certified sleep medicine doctor and psychiatrist. He practices functional sleep medicine, integrative psychiatry, and sports psychiatry, putting all those skills together to uncover underlying factors that sabotage the patients, comprehensively treat them, and help them achieve their goals.LESSON LEARNED FROM DR. CREADO ON SLEEP:Dr. Creado mentions that “Sleep is a key pillar of brain health and it’s modifiable, which is what’s beautiful about it. We can’t really change our DNA, well, we could talk about epigenetics and how the environment influences our DNA but sleep is something that it modifiable and we can correct it.” When working with a patient, Dr. Creado looks at the brain using SPECT image brain scans and based on what he sees, he determines the treatment plan. When Dr. Creado looked at my brain, he suggested that a change in my sleep pattern of adding just an additional half and hour to make 7 hours of sleep, would improve my results. He also reminded me that a 20 minute nap in the afternoon would boost my productivity and is not lazy, to incorporate this habit into my daily routine, and that Google and many high level corporate environments offer sleep pods to help their employees to gain the rest needed in the afternoon to boost productivity.Health Staple 3: Eating a Healthy Diet: Eliminating sugar and processed foods. We hear this all the time and know intuitively what feels good when we eat it, and what makes our body feel tired, lethargic and just plain bad. The goal is to eliminate “the brain robbers that steal our energy and do what helps it, not hurts it.”[xix]  There are two specific moments that I remember were life-changing when it came to my diet.The first was around 2005 when I was seeing a foot doctor, Dr. Richard Jacoby, for foot numbness after exercise, and he asked me to eliminate sugar completely from my diet.  I was looking for solutions to why I couldn’t feel the top of my foot during exercise, and I didn’t show any signs of diabetes, but this doctor was writing a book, that is now released called Sugar Crush: How to Reduce Inflammation, Reverse Nerve Damage and Reclaim Good Health[xx]  and he was convinced that sugar intake was at the root of most health problems. He suggested that I take fish oil, and learn to avoid higher glycemic foods, and the results that occurred were so impactful, that I wished I had done this sooner. The benefits of cutting out sugar from my diet only snowballed my health for the better down the road. When I was ready to have children, I was a bit worried that I would have some challenges here, as I was diagnosed with PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome) in my late 20s and told that I might need to take fertility drugs to conceive,  but surprisingly, after some tests, my doctor told me that I no longer had this condition, that it appears to have reversed, and she asked me what I had done. The only thing I did was exercise, take fish oil and cut out sugar.The second life-changing Aha Moment around diet was focused around intermittent fasting, that I talk about in point #5, but it was also eye opening when I started to follow Dave Asprey, the author of the NYT bestseller The Bulletproof Diet: Lose Up to a Pound a Day, Reclaim Focus, Upgrade Your Life[xxi] and creator of Bulletproof Coffee[xxii].  Who would ever have thought that putting butter, coconut oil or MCT oil in your coffee would help you to increase your energy and stay lean? I heard this idea first from bodybuilder and fitness expert Jason Wittrock[xxiii] from watching his YouTube channel where he explains exactly what goes into a keto coffee, and why it’s good for your energy levels. He explains the science behind the keto diet and was a great resource for me when I was learning that eating fats, won’t make me fat. Thomas DeLauer[xxiv] is also a great resource for anyone looking to learn more about intermittent fasting, or the ketogenic diet.ALZHEIMER’S PREVENTION THOUGHT FOR EATING A HEALTY DIET:Did you know that sugar in the brain “looks like Alzheimer’s” in the brain,  and that “60% of cognitive decline is related to how you handle blood sugar?”[xxv] There was a study that followed “5,189 people over 10 years and found that people with high blood sugar had a faster rate of cognitive decline than those with normal blood sugar—whether or not their blood-sugar level technically made them diabetic. In other words, the higher the blood sugar, the faster the cognitive decline.”[xxvi]Did you know that with Type 2 Diabetes, you have almost double the risk for Alzheimer’s Disease, that has no known treatment? If you have type 2 diabetes, your goal would be to do everything that you can to manage your blood sugar, by eating good carbs[xxvii] (complex carbs with fiber),  eat lower glycemic foods[xxviii] that balance your blood sugar levels, instead of throwing them off balance with high levels of sugar.Above is an image of a healthy brain, from Dr. Amen’s Clinics, showing even, symmetrical and smooth blood flow to all areas in the healthy brain, and the Alzheimer’s brain shows a drop of blood flow to the important parts of the brain.DEEPER DIVE WITH DR. DANIEL STICKLEROn episode #96 with Dr. Daniel Stickler, MD, a former vascular surgeon who concluded that traditional medicine is not the best route for ideal health. He is now the Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of The Apeiron Center for Human Potential (Apeiron meaning Limitless) and is the visionary pioneer behind systems-based precision lifestyle medicine, which is a new paradigm that redefines medicine from the old symptoms-based disease model to one of limitless peak performance. A few minutes of looking at Dr. Stickler’s work and your level of awareness will expand.LESSON LEARNED FROM DR. STICKLER ON NUTRITION:Dr. Stickler talks about a skill called interoception or the ability to listen to the signals within the body that we have spoken about in a few episodes on this podcast (whether it was with Dr. Dan Siegel and his Wheel of Awareness meditation[xxix] that strengthens this awareness) or personal trainer Jason Wittrock who talked about the importance of listening to your hunger cues to gain control over your eating habits.Dr. Stickler mentioned interoception as a skill used by pro athletes to achieve results with their athletic career, or with those in the special forces who must learn this skill since they are often faced with life vs death situations. If we can learn to listen to the cues our body tells us, whether it’s with the food we are eating, or when we are eating, we will be miles ahead with our well-being.Health Staple 4: Optimizing our Microbiome: Did you know that your gut is made up of trillions of bacteria, fungi and other microbes. This microbiome plays an important role in your health by helping to control digestion and benefitting your immune system. Taking a probiotic daily, remaining active, eating a healthy diet and avoiding foods that disrupt our microbiome[xxx] (processed fried foods, sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, and artificial sweeteners, are important for our gut/brain health.ALZHEIMER’S PREVENTION THOUGHT FOR OPTIMIZING YOUR MICROBIOME:There does appear to be a hidden relationship between Alzheimer’s disease and the microbiome in our gut and that “an imbalanced gut microbiome (dysbiosis) could lead to Alzheimer’s disease and wider neuroinflammation through the gut-brain-axis. Promoting ‘good bacteria’ relative to ‘bad bacteria’ in the gut may be important in maintaining good digestive, immune and neurological health.”[xxxi] This is still a developing field but taking prebiotics and probiotics[xxxii] are the best way to promote a healthy gut/brain balance.DEEPER DIVE WITH DR. VUYISICH Our recent episode #93 with Dr. Momo Vuyisich, the co-founder and chief science officer of Viome[xxxiii], a healthcare disruptor that’s using IA to analyze your gut microbiome to make personalized nutritional recommendations, we learn about the importance of the gut/brain connection and how we can take control of our own life and health by optimizing our gut microbiome with personalized nutritional recommendations using Viome testing. Dr. Vuyisich’s research focused on applying modern genomics to the areas of gut microbiomes, host-pathogen and microbial inter-species interactions, pathogen detection, cancer biology, toxicology, infectious diseases, and antibiotic resistance.LESSON LEARNED FROM DR. VUYISICHDr. Vuyisich believes that “Today we have 100% of the science and technology needed to cure every chronic disease and every cancer.” He urges everyone to learn more about ways to optimize their gut health by understanding what damages our gut health, and what is good for it. Since each person’s microbiome is different, his company offers microbiome testing, and the result is that people learn what foods they should avoid, minimize, enjoy and those that are superfoods for them. This has opened up a whole new world for him, and it begins with each person taking charge of their own health by understanding our gut/brain connection.Health Staple 5: Intermittent Fasting: Has many health benefits[xxxiv] that you might have heard of, like the fact it reduces belly fat. I started intermittent fasting around 3 years ago when I was looking to take my health to the next level, and was following some of the well-known body builders, to see what they were doing for their health and fitness. I started the 16-8 program where you fast for 16 hours, and only eat foods in an 8-hour window. I just picked 4 days a week (Sunday to Wednesday) to do this, to see what happened, and the results were obvious. I was able to quickly get down to my goal weight, where I was stuck, and not able to move the needle with exercise alone.ALZHEIMER’S PREVENTION THOUGHT FOR INTERMITTENT FASTING : Intermittent fasting has so many other health benefits tied to this practice, like the fact it “fights insulin resistance, lowering your risk of type-2 diabetes, reduces inflammation in the body, is beneficial for heart health, and may prevent cancer.”[xxxv] If it is fighting insulin resistance, then it is also fighting your risk of Alzheimer’s.DEEPER DIVE WITH FITNESS TRAINER AND MODEL JASON WITTROCKOn episode #94 with personal trainer and fitness model, Jason Wittrock we learn more about intermittent fasting and the ketogenic diet that go hand in hand.I first found Jason Wittrock late 2016/ 2017 when I was searching for answers with my diet. I was at a crossroads with my health, and knew I needed to do some things differently, I just didn’t know exactly what to do, and I had heard some friends in some of my online groups talking about how they were drinking keto coffee, and experiencing health benefits, like increased energy and weight loss.  So I went to YouTube, and typed in “how to make keto coffee” and Jason Wittrock’s video came up called “Keto Coffee”[xxxvi] and my journey began here, taking my health to a whole new level, and have never looked back. I’m sure there are thousands of stories just like mine.LESSON LEARNED FROM JASON WITTROCKJason says it just like it is. He talks about the fact that eating fats, won’t make you fat, which is a whole new paradigm for anyone who is used to counting calories.  He says “You can’t get mad at the butter for what the bread did” and is one of the leaders in the fitness industry who has built a career on helping people implement the ketogenic diet. Many people on this diet notice that they stay full for much longer, and intermittent fasting becomes easier to implement.REVIEW AND ACTION STEPS:Wherever you are with your current health, there is always a way to take your results to the next level. You also don’t need to get bogged down with implementing these ideas in a rush and stressing yourself out in the process.To get started, pick one area that you want to improve, and work on that one area for the next 90 days.Remember what Luke De Pron suggested, the end results should be how you “feel” not what you look like. How you feel will spill over to your confidence levels, helping to improve your daily productivity and results.WHERE TO BEGIN WITH DAILY EXERCISE:If you want to improve your daily exercise, but have no idea where to begin, I would start with walking.Beginners: I remember after a surgery I had that I could barely walk to the bottom of my driveway and remember thinking how frustrating that was. Listen to your body and start with short distances.  I would wake up early, at 4am (since I didn’t want the whole world watching me struggle to walk short distances) and I could walk from the bottom of my driveway to the end of the street. I did that every day for a week and then added a longer distance that lasted 15 minutes. After a few weeks, I was walking longer distances and longer amounts of time, showing me that progress is possible, with regular, consistent activity.Moderate to Advanced: If you have plateaued with your current exercise routine, have you tried working with a trainer? Many are available for zoom/video calls during this time if your gym is still closed, or if you don’t have one. The key is to do something that you have not done before, to get new and different results.WHERE TO BEGIN WITH GETTING A GOOD QUALITY SLEEPWatch the interview with sleep expert Dr. Shane Creado, on episode #72[xxxvii] and with Dr. Sarah McKay on episode #85?[xxxviii]If you are waking up and feel tired, or not rested, have you considered getting a sleep study to test the quality and quantity of your sleep?Take inventory of your sleep. Are you getting at least 7-8.5 hours/each night? Remember that Dr. Creado said that the beauty about sleep is that it is modifiable. How can you adjust your sleep to make improvements? Even just by adding an additional half an hour each night, along with an afternoon nap, can yield noticeable results.Have you ever used an app to measure your sleep? Dr. Stickler in episode #96 measures all of his clients sleep using a Garmin device, and he has noted that someone doing all the right things EXCEPT for sleeping enough, were able to lose weight only once they improved their sleep.WHERE TO BEGIN WITH EATING A HEALTHY DIETDo you avoid processed foods?Have you ever thought about cutting out sugar?Do you choose healthy carbs and fats?Do you choose whole foods vs processed foods?WHERE TO BEGIN WITH OPTIMIZING YOUR MICROBIOMEDo you take a probiotic? A prebiotic?Do you know what foods help/hurt or damage your microbiome?Have you considered microbiome testing like Dr. Vuyicish’s company offers so you can pinpoint the foods that you should avoid, minimize, maximize, or foods that are superfoods?WHERE TO BEGIN WITH INTERMITTENT FASTINGIf fasting for 16 hours with an 8 hour eating window seems too much, try 12 hours fasting and 12 hours eating to begin. Try it for a few days a week, and just see if you feel better fasting than when you eat like you normally would. If you feel better, you can always experiment with different fasting methods, and see where you feel best.Remember Jason Wittrock explaining that when you are eating a diet that is higher in fat, that you will not get hungry the same way you do eating a high carb diet.I hope you have found this episode helpful, and I that you did learn something new. Please do send me a message on social media and let me know what you think.  I really do believe that if we want to improve our social, emotional and cognitive abilities, it all starts with an understanding of our brain, and these TOP 5 strategies seem to move the needle the most, especially when it comes to preventing Alzheimer’s and other diseases that I know we all want to avoid.  I hope you have found the additional interviews helpful, and begin to make small changes in one area at a time. It’s these small, daily habits, that when repeated over and over again, yield outstanding results.See you next episode!REFERENCES:[i] (Integrating Social, Emotional and Academic Development: An Action Guide for School Leadership Teams) page 4[ii] Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning EPISODE #87 on the “Top 5 Brain Health and Alzheimer’s Prevention Strategies”[iii] Dr. David Perlmutter’s “Alzheimer’s: The Science of Prevention” https://scienceofprevention.com/[iv] 10 Early Alzheimer’s Symptoms That You Should Know https://www.amenclinics.com/blog/10-early-alzheimers-symptoms-that-you-should-know/[v] Max Lugavere, Health and Science Journalist and NYT Bestselling Author, Genius Foods. https://www.maxlugavere.com/[vi] Regular exercise changes the brain to improve memory, thinking skills by Heidi Goodman, April 2014  https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/regular-exercise-changes-brain-improve-memory-thinking-skills-201404097110[vii] Alzheimer’s Disease: Can Exercise Prevent Memory Loss April 2019  https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/alzheimers-disease/expert-answers/alzheimers-disease/faq-20057881[viii] http://www.livegreatlifestyle.com/[ix] Live Great Lifestyle Podcast with Luke DePron http://www.livegreatlifestyle.com/podcast/[x] Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast Episode #72 with Shane Creado on “Peak Sleep Performance for Athletes” https://www.achieveit360.com/self-regulation-and-sleep-with-a-deep-dive-into-dr-shane-creados-peak-sleep-performance-for-athletes/[xi] Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast Episode #85 with Neuroscientist Dr. Sarah McKay on “High Performing Brain Health Strategies That We Should All Know About.”[xii] Darin Olien “The Sleep Position to Detoxify Your Brain”  https://darinolien.com/detoxify-your-brain/[xiii] The Darin Olien Show https://darinolien.com/podcasts/[xiv] Down to Earth with Zac Efron (co-host Darin Olien)  https://www.netflix.com/title/80230601[xv] Darin Olien “The Sleep Position to Detoxify Your Brain”  https://darinolien.com/detoxify-your-brain/[xvi] Dr. David Perlmutter’s “Alzheimer’s: The Science of Prevention” EPISODE 10 on Sleep  https://scienceofprevention.com/[xvii] Dr. Shane Creado’s Peak Sleep Performance for Athletes: The Cutting-Edge Sleep Science That Will Guarantee a Competitive Advantage (March 15, 2020) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B085YFP9YW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1[xviii] www.shanecreado.com[xix] Dr. Daniel Amen “7 Simple Brain-Promoting Nutritonal Tips” https://www.creativityatwork.com/2011/01/10/dr-amen-seven-simple-brain-promoting-nutrition-tips/[xx] Sugar Crush: How to Reduce Inflammation, Reverse Nerve Damage and Reclaim Good Health by Dr. Richard Jacoby (April 2014)  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KPVB4OA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1[xxi] Dave Asprey The Bulletproof Diet https://www.amazon.com/Bulletproof-Diet-Reclaim-Energy-Upgrade-ebook/dp/B00K8DSTWU/ref=sr_1_2?crid=3EQ3XAEBNVQKS&dchild=1&keywords=dave+asprey&qid=1600893573&s=digital-text&sprefix=dave+asprey+the+%2Cdigital-text%2C210&sr=1-2[xxii] Bulletproof Coffee https://www.bulletproof.com/recipes/bulletproof-diet-recipes/bulletproof-coffee-recipe/[xxiii] Fitness expert Jason Wittrock on “What goes into Keto Coffee”   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzLwqBDMgGc[xxiv] Fitness and Health Expert Thomas DeLauer https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC70SrI3VkT1MXALRtf0pcHg[xxv] Dr. David Perlmutter’s “Alzheimer’s: The Science of Prevention” EPISODE 5  https://scienceofprevention.com/[xxvi] The Startling Link Between Sugar and Alzheimer’s by Olga Khazan Jan. 26, 2018 https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/01/the-startling-link-between-sugar-and-alzheimers/551528/[xxvii] Good Carbs vs Bad Carbs https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/good-carbs-bad-carbs[xxviii] Lower Glycemic Foods https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/low-glycemic-diet[xxix] Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning EPSIODE #60 “The Science Behind a Meditation Practice with a Deep Dive into Dr. Daniel Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness Meditation”  https://andreasamadi.podbean.com/e/the-science-behind-a-meditation-practice-with-a-deep-dive-into-dr-dan-siegel-s-wheel-of-awareness/[xxx] 11 Ways Your Life Can Disrupt the Gut Microbiome https://atlasbiomed.com/blog/11-ways-your-life-can-disrupt-the-gut-microbiome/[xxxi] Alzheimer’s Disease and the Microbiome by Oman Shabir  https://www.news-medical.net/health/Alzheimers-Disease-and-the-Microbiome.aspx[xxxii] What is the Difference Between a Prebiotic and a Probiotic https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323490[xxxiii] https://www.viome.com/[xxxiv] 11 Health Benefits of Intermittent Fasting  https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/10-health-benefits-of-intermittent-fasting#TOC_TITLE_HDR_2[xxxv] 11 Health Benefits of Intermittent Fasting  https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/10-health-benefits-of-intermittent-fasting#TOC_TITLE_HDR_2[xxxvi] Keto Coffee with Jason Wittrock Published August 2017 on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzLwqBDMgGc[xxxvii] Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast Episode #72 with Shane Creado on “Peak Sleep Performance for Athletes” https://www.achieveit360.com/self-regulation-and-sleep-with-a-deep-dive-into-dr-shane-creados-peak-sleep-performance-for-athletes/[xxxviii] Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast Episode #85 with Neuroscientist Dr. Sarah McKay on “High Performing Brain Health Strategies That We Should All Know About.” https://www.achieveit360.com/neuroscientist-dr-sarah-mckay-on-high-performing-brain-health-strategies-that-we-should-all-know-about-and-implement/ 

Don't Stop Networking, Just Do It Differently Interview with Dr. Ivan Misner Dr. Ivan Misner is the Founder & Chief Visionary Officer of BNI, the world's largest business networking organization.  Founded in 1985 the organization now has over 9,400 chapters throughout every populated continent of the world.  Last year alone, BNI generated almost 12.3 million referrals resulting in $16.7 billion dollars worth of business for its members. Dr. Misner's Ph.D. is from the University of Southern California.  He is a New York Times Bestselling author who has written 24 books including one of his latest books – Who's in Your Room? He is also a columnist for Entrepreneur.com and has been a university professor as well as a member of the Board of Trustees for the University of La Verne. Called the “Father of Modern Networking” by CNN and one of the “Top Networking Experts” by Forbes, Dr. Misner is considered to be one of the world's leading experts on business networking and has been a keynote speaker for major corporations and associations throughout the world.  He has been featured in the L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal, and New York. Times, as well as numerous TV and radio shows including CNN, the BBC and The Today Show on NBC. Among his many awards, he has been named “Humanitarian of the Year” by the Red Cross and was recently the recipient of the John C. Maxwell Leadership Award.  He is also proud to be the Co-Founder of the BNI Charitable Foundation.  He and his wife, Elisabeth, are now “empty nesters” with three adult children. Oh, and in his spare time, he is also an amateur magician and a black belt in karate. More information at: www.bni.com www.ivanmisner.com   Read the Interview Hugh Ballou: Greetings everyone. This is Hugh Ballou. Welcome back to a new episode of The Nonprofit Exchange, where we talk to leaders and get their secrets to success, what they found that's worked, what didn't work, what's their wisdom. Each week is a different person from a different place with a different experience, but they have a passion for excellence. Today's guest is the founder of a really neat networking group called BNI. I will let him tell you a little bit about BNI. I have been a member over the years, and I have done networking as a nonprofit leader, as a church professional, and as a business professional. I find out that networking is as misunderstood as leadership is. There are a whole lot more varieties of what people call networking, but Ivan Misner stands alone as a person who has developed a whole new system for networking. Ivan, welcome to The Nonprofit Exchange today. Ivan Misner: Hugh, thank you very much for having me here. You're right. I am the founder of BNI. We have now 9,500 groups in more than 70 countries around the world. But what you may not know about me is I have spent some time in the nonprofit world. My second management job was as an assistant to the president of a nonprofit transportation business in Los Angeles called Commuter Transportation Services, Inc., which was rideshare before there was Uber. It was computers bigger than this room to set up rideshares. It was funded mostly by the government and private corporations. I worked there for a while. I have been on the boards of nonprofit organizations for more than 30 years. Lot of experience in the nonprofit world. Hugh: You know some of the challenges that nonprofits are facing. Today, even more challenges. I like to say that, in the words of my co-publisher of our magazine and friend Jeff Magee, we suck at networking. Suck is halfway to success. Ivan: I like it. Hugh: I stole that from him, but I give him attribution. We go into a crowded room and say, “Hey, it looks like the stock market. We are trying to bid higher than the next person.” But I found my experience in BNI to be relationship-building and also the people I met there, I still know. I'm not active in that anymore. Life has taken me different places. I moved; I didn't get out purposefully. I found it is multi-dimensional. Let's go back. When did you found BNI, and why? Ivan: I started BNI in January of 1985. I was a management consultant. I helped companies with hiring, training, and evaluating employees. I got most of my business through referrals. I was looking for referrals. I went to a lot of networking groups, and the groups I went to were just playing mercenary. I'd go to these meetings, and I felt like I'd been slimed, and I needed to go home and get a shower. Everyone was trying to sell to me. Everyone was trying to sell. I didn't like that. I went to these other groups that were totally social; it was happy hour and hors d'oeuvres. Nobody was doing business. I didn't like either of those groups. I wanted the business, but I didn't want it to be mercenary. I wanted the social, but I wanted it to be relational. What I did was merge this concept of business and relational, and the glue that would hold it together is our principal core value of Givers Gain. This idea of that if I help you, you'll help me, and we'll all do better. Hugh, I'd like to tell you that I had this vision of an international organization, but I just wanted some referrals for my consulting practice. I wanted to help my friends. One thing led to another, and it turned into two, to 10, to 20 groups. By the time it hit 20 groups, I realized, and it happened in less than a year, that I had struck a chord in the business community. We don't teach this in colleges and universities, even in business. I get it. You're a nonprofit. You feel like you aren't prepared. But business isn't prepared either. We don't teach this in school. That's when it hit me that we needed to teach this and provide a platform for businesspeople. We now have 9,500 groups in more than 70 countries. Hugh: 9,500 groups. We have people from a couple countries here, Algeria and Texas. Ivan: Texas is its own country. Hugh: We are in the south. We think California is another country, but we are confused about Texas. Ivan: I grew up in California. It is another country. Hugh: It will fall off in the ocean someday. What my mission is is to help nonprofit leaders think out of their box to learn some really good business principles. Sometimes, in networking, we do the inverse. We don't want to ask anybody for anything. Or we come from a position of need. “Oh, I need this. Help us.” Tell me about the framing that nonprofit leaders, we have clergy, we have executive directors, we have board chairs, we have people in what we like to call the for-purpose, not for-profit, community. What is the mindset we need to have as we approach networking? Ivan: I think the first mindset, and it's something I teach everyone and I think applies in the nonprofit world just as much as in the for-profit, is the foundation of networking is something I call the VCP process: Visibility, Credibility, Profitability. You first have to be visible. People have to know who you are and what you do. Then you move from visibility to credibility. People know who you are, what you do, and that you're good at it. That takes a long time to go from visibility to credibility. But when you get to credibility, then you can move to profitability, where people know who you are, what you do, that you're good at it, and they are willing to refer people to you. They are willing to bring people to you, whether it be a for-profit enterprise or a nonprofit enterprise. They are willing to refer you, support you, help you. That takes time. Networking is much more about farming than it is about hunting. It's about cultivating relationships with other business professionals. I think this fits the nonprofit world well, but I don't think the nonprofit world knows that. They keep thinking they're different. The VCP process applies to both. Hugh: Absolutely. We have this brilliance we can offer. We feed people, we clothe people, we help people get jobs. We do all this philanthropic work. That is our mental capital. Over here, we want financial capital. There is a space in between where you do what you're talking about. It's relationship capital. Ivan: It's social capital, yeah. Hugh: We build that. It's relationship. It's trust. It's being social.  I don't care if you're an introvert or not, and it takes energy away from you. It's still important for the leader and the board. Tell us about your board experience. Did you help them think about networking? Ivan: Let's talk for a moment about, before you asked about the board, you were talking about- The gray hair, things are slipping my mind. Yeah, I have been on a number of boards. I am an emeritus member of the board of directors for the Leroy Haynes Children's Center in the Los Angeles area. I was on their board for almost 20 years. I have been on the board of trustees for the University of La Verne. I am presently sitting on the board of directors for the Austin Boys and Girls Club. I started my own foundation, so obviously I am on the board of my own foundation. I have had a lot of work in the nonprofit world for a long time. The nonprofit world does a lot of really good work. Hugh: Yeah, I was talking about trust and having a conversation. It's a process to go from what we got to offer to people writing a check. Ivan: Yeah. Thank you. When you have that, there are a number of things that one can- You talked about introvert and extrovert. That is the thing I wanted to touch on. A lot of people assume you have to be an extrovert to be good at networking. That's not true. What's really funny- This is absolutely a true story, and I wrote about this about eight years ago on my blog at IvanMisner.com. I have more than 1,000 posts, and I have been blogging there for more than 13 years. One day, I was talking to my wife. We weren't quite empty nesters; our kids were in high school. They were at practice. It's just my wife and me. It was great. This is what it was going to be like. I said something to her, “You know me, honey, I'm an extrovert.” She was like, “No, you're not.” I said, “What do you mean I'm not? Of course I'm an extrovert. I run the world's largest business networking organization. I can't be an introvert.” I have been married 32 years. I don't know if you're married or not, but this is so husband/wife relationship. She's like, “Okay, honey, that's what you think. That's fine. You can be an extrovert.” “No, it's not what I think. I am a keynote speaker. You can't be an introvert.” “Whatever you think.” “Why do you think I'm an introvert?” She had been reading this book and telling me the differences between them. Then she said something that hit me, “Extroverts love to go out to recharge their batteries. Introverts want to hide and get away from everybody.“ “Okay, that definitely sounds like me.” But I am not an introvert. So I walk into my office at home in California, and I got on the Internet and found a test to take. I was going to show her that I am not an introvert. So I take this test. True story. I take this test, and it comes back with “Congratulations, Ivan. You are an introvert who is a situational extrovert.” I looked further, and it said, “When you are talking about something that you are very knowledgeable about, when you are in your wheelhouse, when you are with close friends, you come across as an extrovert. Otherwise, you are an introvert. So go apologize to your wife.” It didn't say that last part, but I did. I said, “Hey, I can't believe this, but you're right. I am an introvert.” Even before I discovered that, I told people introverts can be great at networking. The reason why they can be is that they're much more likely to listen than to speak. A good networker is like a good host, an interviewer. Hugh, you're asking me questions and letting me answer. That's what a good networker is. A good networker asks questions and lets the person speak. Extroverts love talking. What is their favorite subject? Themselves. So people assume that an extrovert is a great networker. That's not true. They are a great networker if they have learned to slow down and be an interviewer. Ask questions just like you are. Hugh: Take a note. Don't use your personality type as an excuse. Ivan: That's exactly right. Hugh: Sometimes, Myers-Briggs and many of those instruments, I am way over on E. When I am in a group where I am not the subject matter expert, I can flip over, and I am quiet. I am a situational introvert. That is a good term. It really is about our processing and our energy. I gain energy. I am a conductor. I finish a two-hour rehearsal, and I am raring to go. I have adrenaline. Other people have to go to bed after a social event. You're so true. When an introvert speaks, they have thought it out, and then, boom, it comes out as a complete thought. Extroverts just blurt it out. It's in process. Our assumption is we are going to have a conversation. The important thing that rose in your conversation to my attention was that we are talking to potential donors. The scenario you just described, we are networking. We want to listen to them. What are they interested in? We want to go up to the ATM, put in a card, and get some cash. Guess what? They don't want to be an ATM. They want to find out what they're interested in. That is a form of networking, isn't it? Ivan: It is. And sometimes you find out it's not a good fit, but you want to find people who it's a good fit. Their values and vision on the impact that they want to make in their community is congruent, resonant with yours. Where you can find those levers that you can pull that are resonant with their goals in life, the things they want to make a difference in, then you have the right person. You have to find out. You have to learn about that individual before you can start trying to pull money out of them. Hugh: Yes. In the social benefit world of churches and nonprofits, we receive money because we provide value. Ivan: Yes. But isn't that the same in business? Hugh: It's all the same. People buy from us because we give them value. There is a trust level there. There is a monetary exchange. It's an exchange of energy, trust. There is lots of ways to think of it. Having conversations, you're so right. It's 10% talking. When I studied coaching, they said, “Coaching is 90% listening. Most of the other 10% is listening.” I have had clients who solved great problems that they have given me credit for when I was a listener. Ivan: And asking questions as a coach. Hugh: Yes. Absolutely. Listening actively. We might already be nervous when approaching a donor or in front of a group or a new network of people. What is your advice to nonprofit leaders? We do have a mix of people on here. Some people have a nonprofit and a business. Some people have a church or synagogue and a business. Some people have only one or the other. What is your advice for people as they are approaching, let's say, a new group opportunity to network with other professionals? We have some anxiety or apprehension or concern about that. What is your advice to get the right mindset as we go into an opportunity to meet new people? Ivan: The right mindset is about building relationships with people. It's not as you said about transaction. It's about the relationship. In one of my books, I wrote something you might find interesting. In a book I wrote called Truth of Delusion, where I ask questions, I say, “Is this statement true, or is it false? Is it a delusion?” One of the statements we made in the book, “You can network anywhere, any time, any place, even at a funeral.” Is that truth or delusion? Of course, the overwhelming majority say, “No, you cannot network at a funeral.” Here is our answer. The answer is it's a truth. But here is the key. This is important. If you hear that answer, you have to hear this first sentence after that answer. You must always honor the event. You don't go to a funeral passing out your business card. That's completely inappropriate. But if networking, as I believe it is, is about building relationships with people, then there is no place that is inappropriate to build a relationship. Let me give you an example. I was at a church function years ago, one of those potluck things in the afternoon. Everybody brings in meals. Lot of fellowship. People are talking. I saw a business guy who I wanted to get to know. He was very successful in the area. I struck up a conversation with him. One of the questions that I suggest people ask, after you say, “Tell me about your business. Who are you? What kind of clients are you looking for?” all the normal stuff. A question I like to ask, but you can't start with this, is, “What are some of the challenges you run into in this business?” He gave me an answer I'd never heard before. He said, “Business is awesome right now. My biggest challenge is I want to give back to the community. But sometimes my years are up, and some years are not up as much. I am having good years one after another, but some are incredible. I don't want to give away all that money. But I am not big enough to create my own foundation. I don't know how to deal with that.” I said, “Have you ever heard of a community foundation?” He said, “No. What are those?” I said, “There are a lot in Southern California. There is the world's largest called the California Community Foundation. You can create a fund under the community foundation under your own name. John Doe Foundation. It's part of the California Community Foundation. There are restrictions on the kinds of things you can do, but they are pretty reasonable.” Back then, it only took $10,000 to open a fund. It may be more now. He said, “Oh my goodness. I have never heard of one of those. Hang on. Here's my card. Would you mind? Do you know anybody there?” “Yeah, I know the VP of Development.” “Would you introduce me?” “I'd love to introduce you.” That's what networking is. You can network anywhere, any time, any place, even in church, if you honor the event. To me, honoring the event is about making connections with people. If you can help someone in some way, then that's what networking is. He was in a business that wasn't relevant to BNI. If I had wanted to call him, if I had called him next week and said, “Hey, it was great talking to you.” By the way, I introduced him to the VP, and he opened up an account like that. If I had called him a week later and asked him to get together to learn more about what he did, do you think he would have taken my call and met with me? Yeah. Why? Because I made the beginning of a relationship. We stayed connected through church. We never did business together. That's what networking is. It's about helping people. It comes back around to you. Hugh: That is a great story. Givers Gain. What is that? That summarizes BNI. How did you arrive at that? We tend to use too many words. It's brilliant in its simplicity. Ivan: It's predicated on a theory in social capital called the law of reciprocity. The law of reciprocity basically is what goes around comes around. If you put things out to the world, it will come back to you. To me, that phrase was the simplest way of explaining what could be a somewhat complex concept. The concept of giving is actually more complicated than it sounds because when you really get to it, people start asking, “When do you know that you're giving too much and not getting anything in return? How do you ask? Do you give, give, give and never ask?” There are subtleties and complexities to the concept of Givers Gain. The bottom line is you have to give to people before you expect them to give you anything. Giving might be a referral to someone else, not selling your business, but giving them ideas, connections. Hugh: Law of reciprocity. Thank you, Napoleon Hill. The problem with common sense is it's not very common. Ivan: It's not commonly applied. Hugh: No. I've been doing this kind of work in the church for 40 years as a music director. People thought I was smart, so I served a 12,000-member church, so they asked me to come do board development and leadership development with them. I developed my third career out of that. I really struggle with how things have changed so dramatically. The work has gotten more and more important over those last 32 years I have been doing this work. It's more important now than ever before in history. In this changed world, in this new normal, it's up to us as leaders to set the bar for the new culture and the new engagement. What are your thoughts about how things have changed, and how networking is important in this new time? Ivan: Listen, networking has always been important. What I have done is codify it and organize it and structure it and explain it in a way that I think is useful. But it's always been important. In terms of leadership, there are a couple of concepts that I was taught by- I did my doctoral work at USC under Dr. Warren Bennis, which was in his day the world's leading expert on leadership. That mantle has been handed over to John C. Maxwell, who is an amazing man. I have had the opportunity to meet him on a number of occasions. Truly holds the crown of the expert on leadership today. But one of the things I learned from Warren when I studied with him was something that I think applies today and will apply 100 years from now in leadership. Two concepts. One is contextual intelligence. The second is adaptive capacity. Contextual intelligence. This is something I don't hear talked about much in leadership other than Warren. You really need to understand the context of the challenge. The context and the players will determine elements of how you address a particular challenge. So you really have to understand the context of this particular problem because the same problem in a different place might not have the same context. It might not play out exactly the same. I will give you an example. The second thing is adaptive capacity. One must have the ability to adapt to the changing contextual intelligence that you are confronted with. We talked about these concepts, and I understood them. I saw it come out and play out in the real world at the university where I was on the board. Warren was speaking. He did an event. I invited him to speak at an event at the University of La Verne. He spoke. It was right before the new president had taken office. He sat there in front of a big audience and said, “What do you guys think of the new president? She's amazing, isn't she?” Everyone thought she was fantastic. She hadn't started yet, but she had been on the campus off and on for more than a month. He said, “Is she prepared, or what?” “Yeah, she's completely prepared.” He said, “From day one, everything will come into place.” “Yeah!” He leaned into the microphone and said, “You're all crazy.” We were shocked. He said, “She's prepared, yeah. But the minute she walks in, there are going to be changes to the environment that nobody predicted. And so her ability to adapt will be critical in the success in her role in this university.” Within 30-60 days after she came in, the university lost its preliminary or interim accreditation for the bar association's law school. Yeah. She had nothing to do with it. She'd been there for only a month, less than two. There was an interim accreditation, and there was one more step to get to fully accredited. Lost it. Completely lost it. She had one year to regain interim accreditation, or it would be lost permanently. Well, you know that requires incredible adaptive capacity. It also requires contextual intelligence. The law school was on a track. It was doing fine. She had to understand the whole board. She had to see the entire chessboard of the university and see where things were going and what she thought was going to be okay actually wasn't. Understanding that a lot of resources had to go to that. A lot of adapting had to take place. That was all part of the leadership process that I think is something that 100 years from now will still be just as important, no matter what the technology or situation. Understanding the context and being able to adapt are key elements of a successful leader. By the way, the university is fully accredited as a law school now. Hugh: Three Feet from Gold, Greg Reid writes about how we don't give up. You're right there. Edison said, “Most people give up just before they succeed.” You and I were talking a bit as we were launching the live feed. We haven't been on airplanes in a while. One person said we're finding out now which meetings could really be held by email instead of having to be there. I haven't been too sad about cancelling some of my trips. It's a whole new world of working from home. I miss the interaction and the chemistry of being present, but I am just as busy as when I was traveling, maybe more. How do we network from home? How do we work from home? We are in the business, and we need to have positive cash flow to do our work. How do we function at home, especially now? Ivan: First of all, I think that we will go back to meeting people in person. That's not going to completely disappear. The genie is out of the bottle a little bit. What I foresee is some kind of hybrid where you will see a lot more done online and a lot done in person. As you know, with BNI, we are talking about 9,500 in-person meetings every week. We had to turn on a dime. We flipped within weeks to 9,500 online meetings. We now run online meetings. When we are out of this great pause (I like to call it that), I think there will be still some groups who may want to continue to meet online. But I think we will end up with some kind of hybrid system. In the meantime, while we are working at home, there are a number of things that are important to know. First of all, I started BNI out of my house. I have worked from home for most of the last 37 years. When I had the consulting business, I remember going to the city to get a business license. This was in 1983. They were like, “Where's your office?” I said, “I work from home.” “Yeah, you can't get a business license.” 1983, you could not get a business license. “That's not a business.” “Yeah, I'm a consultant. I don't need an office space.” “You can't have a license.” I could not get a business license from the city because I was working from home. Things have changed a lot since then. A couple years later, by the way, you were able to get a business license. I started BNI in my home, and I have been working off and on for the last 37 years. Now my office is in Charlotte, North Carolina, but I work here in Austin, Texas. This is my home office I am talking to you from. There are a number of things I could recommend. I hate the phrase “social distancing.” Hugh: Thank you. Ivan: I do. We need to be more social than ever. It's physical distancing. It's not social distancing. I believe we need to be more social than ever. You start with that. Then some of the things I talk about in working from home is you should have a dedicated workspace. I have a nice office. I didn't always have a separate office. Sometimes it was in the corner of the dining room or in a basement. I remember when I got kicked out of one bedroom because we were about to have a child, and I got kicked out of the second bedroom because we were going to have a second child, so I had to move out into an office. As we grew, then I had office space in my homes. I have worked from home most of the last 35 years. Have a dedicated workspace, even if it is a corner of the room. Were you going to say something? Hugh: No. I was just wondering how long it took you to figure out why you kept having children. Ivan: Yeah. I figured that out. It was planned. My wife was the most amazing woman to deal with the pregnancy. She loved being pregnant. It was quite an experience with her. Here's another one. Don't get distracted by bright, shiny objects. I keep this here by my desk because I am always talking to entrepreneurs, and they are always chasing bright, shiny objects. You want to be successful at whatever you're doing, whether it's for nonprofit or for-profit? Here's an important key. Do six things a thousand times, not a thousand things six times. It doesn't have to be six. It could be five or seven. Do six things a thousand times, not a thousand things six times. What I see businesspeople do is they constantly chase new things rather than really have a program and work it and work it and work it and work it until it becomes successful. If I have any superpower at all as a businessperson, it is that I am a dog with a bone. I am very persistent. I am good doing six things a thousand times. I think people who do that are much more likely to be successful. Here are a couple of other suggestions. No social media. Now, if it's business, if it's for your nonprofit organization, that's fine. But no cat videos during the middle of the day. They are forbidden. Something happens to the space/time continuum when you get on Facebook, and you end up on some YouTube video an hour later. How did I get here? Stay off of social media unless it's related to your organization. Right now, more than ever, micro-dose the news. Micro-dose the news. I see people who are overdosing on the news. Don't do that. It's so easy to do from home. Don't do it. All you see is doom and gloom and the end of the world. Don't get frozen by fear. Let fear focus you, not put you in a state of fear. Get focused by fear. Don't get frozen by fear. Hugh: As a performer, I had to learn that. When you get on stage, you have all of these people staring at you. You turn around with a baton and 75 musicians and 200 singers. It's like, Ooh. They are all looking at me. I have to tell you, when Berny had me speak on stage, it's a whole lot easier than conducting. But people are staring at you, so you have to have a whole different mindset. There is believing in self that is important, no matter what we are doing here. We have our core values and our guiding principles of how we use those values. We have something worthy, but working, like Jim Rohn used to say, work on yourself harder than you work on your business. I can't tell you how perfectly aligned everything you have talked about today is with what we teach at SynerVision. I have come to call what we are doing now anti-social distancing. I don't know what brilliant person came up with the term, but it is physical distancing. We are more social than we have been before. Ivan: Yeah, I think so. Hugh: I have a blog on that. I am in central western Virginia in the Appalachians. It's lovely this time of year. Ivan is in Austin, Texas. He has given us lots of bites of wisdom today. You could be listening to this during the isolation we have, semi-quarantine, whatever we call this. Ivan: The great pause. Hugh: It's like a music, you have a GP, a grand pause. I teach my leadership principles. One of them is value the rests, which makes everything else work. There are rests in music for a purpose. It's not absence of sound; it's a clarity place. I am finding this is a great time for clarity. You have that shiny thing. What is it? It's a jewel. Ivan: I don't remember where I got it. As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to have it. Hugh: You're under my control. Watch this. Nonprofit leaders are social entrepreneurs. We all ought to be social entrepreneurs because we have the triple bottom line: people, planet, and profit. People ask me, “Do all you entrepreneurs suffer from insanity?” I say, “Heck no. We enjoy it.” There is this certain possibility mindset that we have. We have this vision. It's important, and the stuff you talk about leadership, I quote John Maxwell and Bennis in my writings and books and online courses. Working at home is the new normal, and the new normal going forward is going to be a hybrid. Many of our for-purpose social benefit communities have to be out there feeding people. I am in Lynchburg, Virginia. We have the highest per-capita poverty in Virginia, like 25%, with 28 agencies who feed people. It's important for them to network amongst themselves, which they are not really doing. There is a space for us to learn about networking that is critical. It comes from leadership. Nothing happens without leadership. I quote John Maxwell a lot. There is network, a verb and a noun. Bob has a question. Let me let Bob talk. Bob Hopkins from Dallas, Texas. Why don't you ask your question in person? Bob Hopkins: Okay. Hi, Ivan. Bob Hopkins here. By the way, that picture you see was 40 years ago. I am an old man like you. I have white hair. Ivan: I'm just glad I have hair. I don't care that it's white. I'm just glad I still have it. Bob: I have lots of it, too. Thank you. I am a college professor. I teach in Dallas. I taught at UTA for about 10 years, and now I am teaching junior colleges. I teach speech communications, and I teach networking. Ivan: Let me clarify my statement. It's usually not full-time professors on these webinars. Let me clarify my statement. I only know of one university in the United States that has a core curriculum university course on business networking. That is the University of Michigan, taught by Dr. Wayne Baker. That is the only university in the United States. Do teachers talk about networking during class? I think they teach mostly the wrong stuff, not necessarily the right stuff. There are no courses on networking to speak of in the world. Bob: I know that. Because I think networking is so important, I couldn't have done what I have done or be where I am without who I knew. Of course, I tell my students, it's not what you know, it's who you know. Ivan: Wait. Let me add to that. I don't think it's what you know or who you know. It's how well you know each other that counts because the question is, do I know that person well enough that I could pick up the phone and call them? Would they take my call? If I asked them for a favor, would they be willing to do the favor? It's not just knowing somebody; it's knowing them well. That's the key. I'm sorry. I keep interrupting you. I'll stop. Bob: The rest of the story is I have them write 250 people that they know down, whittle it down to 25 who are in their circle of influence that they can rely on, and that they do know, and they consider their mentors and counselors and parents and grandparents, etc. They have to write them a letter. The letter is, “I love you so much. I want us to continue this. I want to have your back and you have mine, so I want you to know you are in my circle of influence.” What you said is true. I like what you said about how well do I know these people? That is the important thing. My question is: Why not? Why are we not teaching this? Why is the academia? Is it because they have never been in business and don't know the importance of it? Ivan: That is my answer. Are you a full-time professor or adjunct? Bob: I'm adjunct. Ivan: So you know. I was an adjunct professor for 16 years. You know that it's the full-time tenured professors who control the curriculum. Even the president of the university does not control it. When you are talking about business professors, it's the full-time tenured professors who determine the classes. I really get hate mail when I say this. Most full-time tenured professors in business have never run a business. Bob: I know. Ivan: That's why. You can get a Bachelor's in marketing and not know how to sell. We don't teach sales techniques. Most business professors, it's like heaven forbid I should get my hands dirty and make a sale. They love social media. They will teach social media. They love advertising because you don't have to get your hands dirty and sell. They don't teach sales, closing sales, business networking. It's because it's taught mostly by full-time tenured professors. Wayne Baker is the only exception I have ever seen in the last 30 years in Michigan. Bob: The reason I am here is because Hugh and I have connected because I ran nonprofit organizations for 35 years before I started teaching college. I have only been teaching for about 10 years. The nonprofit sector is something I also teach. I have a book called Philanthropy Misunderstood. I teach my students philanthropy. I was called by my dean at one of these universities who said to me, “Bob, nonprofits are not businesses. Why are you teaching nonprofits in your classroom?” Hugh: Oh my. Ivan, I don't know if you can see my screen. But this is Bob's book. It's a brilliant book. There are world-changing, life-changing nonprofits. He has had a long career. Ivan: Bob, I agree with you. I think the lessons learned in business and in nonprofits are oftentimes, at the very least, overlapping, if not the same. Bob: I was excited to know who you are and that you are the one who founded networking. Thank you. Ivan: Well, I founded BNI. Networking has been around for a long time. I organized it. Hugh: Bob, thank you for coming in. Let me prevail upon your secrecy there. Tell him the name of your horse before you leave. Bob: That horse there is not the one that I have now, but the one I have now is named Philanthropy. Ivan: I like it. Hugh: He's all in. Ivan: Bob, thanks for sharing your knowledge. Bob: I'm in Dallas. Once this settles down and the traffic isn't too bad, I will drive to Austin to meet you. Ivan: All right. You got it. Be well. Hugh: Bob is a peach of a guy. I went to Dallas. My wife is a clergy graduate of Perkins School of Theology. The week before the airlines quit taking us places. I had a guest who founded Barefoot Winery. They said, “You have to meet Bob,” and we have connected and have been doing amazing stuff since then. Ivan: That's networking. Hugh: Yes. They accidentally founded a winery. They were marketing people. Great story. I have had some wonderful people in six years on this show. You're giving us really useful, helpful nuggets. This is so good. To find out about BNI, go to BNI.com. And IvanMisner.com. Ivan: IvanMisner.com. I have 13 years of content up there. It's all free. Check it out. Hugh: Love it. Ivan is the man. He has been such an influencer over those many years. Let's talk about the difference between network as a verb and network as a noun. Ivan: How would you define it? Hugh: Having a network, those are people who you have done due diligence with. You know who they are. I spent 40 years in church ministry, music ministry. I never had lunch alone. I always met with somebody. I got the most useful information, and they got information because they asked me questions, “What do you do anyway? We see you an hour on Sunday. What do you do the rest of the week?” I realized the Ballou 10/90 rule. The 10% is what you see, and 90% is what you don't see that makes that 10% possible. Networking is an activity to connect and meet people and to share and to provide value for people. A network is the people who you know. What do you think? Ivan: That's a good definition. Both of them are really, if it's done right, are about relationship-building. It's about the relationships you create. Hugh: Absolutely. Leadership is based on relationship. Communication is founded in relationship. The flow of money is based on relationship. Ivan: Oftentimes. Hugh: Let's talk about something that is not money flow. Let's talk about boards. I am going off being the president of the Lynchburg Symphony Orchestra board. I was a guest conductor. They elected me when I wasn't looking to be president. I am going off, and they are doing this board nominating process. This is networking also. We don't know how to make the ask for money or for people. I love it when people ask, “Would you serve on this committee or this board? It's not a lot of work.” You know they're lying to you. How do we come forward? You've been on boards. It may be hard to get the right people on the board. How do we frame the conversation when we want to invite people to consider a board position? Ivan: The first thing you do is you go to them with someone who knows them really well. If that's you, that's great. Otherwise, I think the third party testimonial is incredibly powerful, and when you have somebody who says- Let's say Bob says to me, “Ivan, you really should be active in Hugh's organization. Hugh has done an amazing job. He has created this organization that has done this thing. That should resonate with you because you're interested-“ My emphasis in nonprofits tends to be children and education. I believe children represent about 20% of today's population, but they represent 100% of the future. It's about children and educating them. If he can make that linkage, then he has connected the two of us. Then we can have that dialogue about how I might be able to help you or you might be able to help me. The third-party endorsement process is the best way to get donors, board members, committee members. It's easier for me to say no to somebody I don't know, trust, or like, than it is to say no to someone I know, trust, or like. Hugh: Ah. Point well taken. That's sage advice. I can see why you've been very successful over the years. Starting a business, growing a business, and maintaining the viability of a business are three different things, aren't they? Ivan: Oh yeah. Very much so. An entrepreneur needs to figure out pretty quickly, or even in a nonprofit, when you're in that nonprofit in whatever role, if you want to be happy with what you do, it's very important that you work in your flame and not in your wax. Let me explain that. When you're working in your flame, you're excited, you're on fire, people can hear it in the way you speak, they can see it in the way you act. When you're working in your wax, it takes all your energy away, people can hear it in your voice, and they can see it in the way you act. Over time, the things that are your flame- Let me speak for myself. The things that were my flame when I started BNI are no longer my flame. Many of those things, I don't want to do them anymore. It's very important to learn the skillset of how to delegate effectively, how to select the right people, delegate effectively, put them in charge of that area so that you can continue to work in your flame and not in your wax. 90% of my time is in my flame. This is the fourth interview I've done today. I'm sort of the Colonel Sanders of BNI now. I am the spokesman for networking. Hugh: Love it. Tell us about your nonprofit that you founded. Ivan: I started the Misner Family Foundation and the BNI Foundation. Two different foundations we have created. Both focus on children and education. Misner Family Foundation is a private foundation for my family, supporting children and education. The BNI Foundation primarily supports children and education, and it's the charitable arm of what BNI does. We do both activities to help kids locally as well as funding grants and things like that locally. BNIFoundation.org, you can find the website for it. Hugh: BNIFoundation.org. Think about a closing thought or a tip or challenge you'd like to give people who are listening to this. It could be years from now. We have been doing these interviews for six years, Ivan. We've had some incredible people. *Sponsor message from EZCard* Ivan Misner, I don't know why you said yes to come on to my show today, but I'm glad you did. I wrote to you on LinkedIn, we had a short exchange, and you agreed. What thought or challenge or tip do you want to leave people with today? Ivan: We are living through challenging times. I don't know what our future holds, but I do know we can influence it. I do know we can make a difference in it. I also know that your mindset is so incredibly important. I think hope is much more powerful than fear. Fear paralyzes us. It freezes us. When we are afraid of what the future will hold or what will happen, we just freeze. What we need to do right now more than ever is focus, not freeze. That focus can come with hope. The only other thing you need to add to it is action. You have hope, and you take action. When you do those things, you can come out of times like this, and you can make it through times like this. Be creative. Be innovative. Think about what you can do. My nonprofit, the Austin Boys & Girls Club, that I am on the board of, they created something called Club on the Go, where you can come by and pick up food that they package so there is still that social distancing. Be creative. Have hope. And influence your future. That is my closing thought. Hugh: Ivan Misner, you are a gift to all of us. Thank you for being on The Nonprofit Exchange today.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cells that fire together wire together. Hebbian mechanisms of plasticity, summarized by that simple phrase, have dominated the field of learning and memory for decades. However, they present limitations when applied to many behavioral paradigms. On this episode Jeremy, Audrey, and Andre sit down with Dr. Jeff Magee, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, The Cullen Foundation Distinguished Endowed Chair at the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute, and Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine. They'll discuss how Dr. Magee's work looking at dendritic processes led him and his group to discover a new plasticity paradigm, in place field learning that breaks from traditional Hebbian rules. Hear also how Dr. Magee keeps active in the lab and his advice for young investigators.

This is episode #49 with someone who is one of today’s leading Leadership and Marketing Strategists and is also a long-time good friend, mentor and colleague of ours here at Achieveit360. Dr. Jeff Magee works with C-Suite, Business Leaders, Military Generals and the top CEOs across America. We first met Dr. Jeff Magee back in 2009 when we partnered with his Professional Performance Magazine and created the Teen Performance Magazine. You can watch the interview on YouTube here.  Jeff is the Author of more than 20 books, three college graduate management texts, four best sellers, and is the Publisher of PERFORMANCE/P360 Magazine,[i] former Co-Host of the national business entrepreneur program on Catalyst Business Radio,[ii] and a Human Capital Developer for more than twenty years. You can download a FREE version of the Teen Performance Magazine here.[iii] Welcome Dr. Jeff, it’s incredible to see you and sorry it’s been so long. You literally just popped into my head this morning on my hike and emailed you the minute I returned to my desk. This has been the fastest reply I’ve ever had, but I expect that of you. You don’t waste a second of your time. Thank you so for spending some time with me today.  Jeff, I was thinking--just a few hours ago and wondering what other high performers like you are doing to stay focused during these scary times. Can you share how maybe some of your experiences working with the Army National Guard and Military Generals have prepared you for this time, and what are you doing differently?I know that most of your training happens in live events or in person, so how have you pivoted your business the past few weeks?What about your mental mindset? I know in the past when I have been stuck with my business, and I’ve contacted you for ideas, I’ve come away with a list of 20 new ideas to help me to move forward. What are some ways that people can get past places they might be stuck? Perhaps thinking of people who are working from home and now have their children at home that they need to keep busy?What are you doing with your time to add new skills? How has your schedule been the past few weeks? How is it the same or different?What have your learned about yourself and your business the past few weeks? What are you taking away from this experience to improve what you do at JeffreyMagee.com?Any final thoughts, or something I might have missed that you think is important for us to think about as we prepare for the next few months?  Thank you so much for the quickest reply I have ever had! If anyone wants to learn more about you and your online training programs they can go to jeffreymagee.com[iv]  and find you on social media @drjeffmagee on Twitter. What’s the best way for people to reach you and learn more? REFERENCES:[i] https://www.professionalperformancemagazine.com/ [ii] http://www.catalystbusinessradio.com/index.php [iii] https://www.magcloud.com/browse/magazine/77535 [iv] https://www.jeffreymagee.com/ 

In this episode, Mitchell Levy and co-host Natalie Forest interviews Dr. Jeff Magee, owner/publisher at Professional Performance Magazine. He said that we can achieve our potential by using our intellectual properties and sharing them in a way that benefits other people. Dr. Jeffrey Magee has been called one of today’s leading Talent & Business Development Advisers in the areas of “Leadership & Sales.” He works with C-Suite, Business Leaders & Owners, Military Generals, Entrepreneurial Unicorns, CEO2CEO Peer Groups & YPO leaders globally. He's the author of more than 30-books, 4-college textbooks, 4-best sellers, and translated into 21-languages. Dr. Magee is also a Certified Management Consultant (CMC), Certified Board Executive (CBE), Certified Professional Direct Marketer (PDM) & Certified Speaking Professional (CSP). Connect to Jeff on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/drjeffspeaks or via email drjeffspeaks@aol.com. Natalie Forest, America’s Leading Expert in Personal Performance, is the Founder of Success Revolutions and Revolutionize Your Potential, a series of educational trainings for individuals and corporations across the globe. Natalie engages leaders, corporate teams, and entrepreneurs to identify consistencies for their success. Her engaging methods and techniques address Human Capital, Leadership, Diversity, and Change Management in business and personal situations leading to increases productivity, teamwork, retention, resulting in higher profitability, authentic fulfillment, and less stress. Connect to Natalie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalieforest/ or send her an email at natalie@life-transforming.com. Mitchell Levy is the Global Credibility Expert at AHAthat, the first APA leadership (Thought Leadership) platform on the market for thought leaders, experts and companies to unleash their genius to the world. His passion is helping entrepreneurs, business owners and C-Suite Executives get known as thought leaders & become best-selling authors with the AHA platform. He is an accomplished entrepreneur who has created 20 businesses in Silicon Valley including four publishing companies that have published over 800 books. Mitchell is an international best selling author with 60 business books, has provided strategic consulting to over 100 companies, has advised over 500 CEOs on critical business issues, and has been chairman of the board of a NASDAQ-listed company.  AHAthat.com/Author where you can also find a link to book a strategy call. Visit https://mitchelllevy.com/mitchelllevypresents/ for an archive of all the podcast episodes. Connect to Mitchell Levy on: LinkedIn: Linkedin.com/in/MitchellLevy Facebook: Facebook.com/HappyAbout Twitter: Twitter.com/HappyAbout Google+: Plus.Google.com/+MitchellLevy Pinterest: Pinterest.com/THiNKaha Instagram: Instagram.com/Mitchell.Levy/ AHAthat: AHAthat.com Speaking site: MitchellLevy.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In it's third year of publication, Nonprofit Performance 360 Magazine set' records for quality and inspiration. Dr. Todd Greer, editor shares his vision for starting this great resource and his vision for the future. Todd Greer holds a Ph.D. in organizational leadership with a major in human resource development from Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia; a Master of Science in ministerial leadership from Amridge University in Montgomery, Alabama; completed graduate work in communications studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan; and a Bachelor of Arts in communication studies from Defiance College in Defiance, Ohio. He has numerous publications to his credit, including journal articles and book chapters, and has presented at national conferences. He has served as lead instructor and board member with the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce's Innovation PortAL and instructor for the Chamber's Young Entrepreneurs Academy for high school students. He is a board member for United Way of Southwest Alabama and Springboard to Success Inc. which, with the Downtown Mobile Alliance, operates the Urban Emporium retail incubator. He is an advisory board member with Veterans Recovery Resources. He was an instructor with University of South Alabama's Minority Business Accelerator and an adjunct instructor at Spring Hill College. Previously, Greer was executive director of the SynerVision Leadership Foundation in Blacksburg, Virginia; minister of administration for Glen Allen Church of Christ in Glen Allen, Virginia; and head boys' volleyball coach at Highlight Springs High School and assistant women's volleyball coach at Virginia Union University, both in Richmond, Virginia.   Interview Transcript   Hugh: Greetings, and welcome to today's session of The Nonprofit Exchange. Today, we have a very special guest. Russell, it's the first time you've met Todd Greer. Dr. Greer was the one who started The Nonprofit Exchange. He is the founding and current editor of Nonprofit Performance Magazine. Todd, welcome. Todd: Thank you so much, Hugh. Great to be with you. Russell, I've heard such wonderful things about you, and it is great to at least virtually connect with you here. Russell: This is great. I've done my best to bring out your inner English teacher. Todd: It's important. Gaps. Hugh mentioned I was the editor as we started out. Hugh is definitely the publisher. He is not the editor. It is good to have other folks around like you, Russell, to help keep him in check. Russell: It takes a village. That is why there is more than one of us there. Todd: There you go. Absolutely. Hugh: The vision for The Nonprofit Exchange is to interview experts in different fields and to bring really good leadership principles into charities and churches and synagogues, often from business leaders. Todd, in addition to having your Ph. D in organizational leadership, you are ordained as a pastor, and now you are a dean at the University of Mobile. Am I correct? Todd: That is correct. It has been an interesting transition. Hugh and I met in 2014. Hugh had this wonderful vision. SynerVision Leadership Foundation had the vision for a magazine and a community of nonprofit thought leaders that could help to build capacity and to help build and move things forward. I think it's been a beautiful vision to see it come to light, to be something that I've been a part of and that has touched me deeply. Over the past two and a half years, I have been able to move down to Mobile from Virginia where he and I met, start a business down here, see that grow, and see a community of entrepreneurship really raise up. Now I have the opportunity to get in and engage with university students and to work to encourage them for the world that we're inventing each day. Hugh: We're glad to have the academic connection. Even though you have gone on to do some other great stuff, you're still shaping editorial policy. What we have done with the magazine is separate the commercial part from the editorial part. What I do is I'm the champion, and I bring people into the funnel that we set up so brilliantly and around the editorial policy that you shaped so that we keep it really clean and really valid journalism for leadership. Thank you for that contribution to humankind and to SynerVision. You launched The Nonprofit Exchange, which we are doing at 2 pm on Tuesdays EST, and the podcast. We are hitting about 15,000 listeners on this particular podcast, and I have 10,000 on Orchestrating Success. We share some interviews in common, but they are helping people think through their skillset and organizational development and personal skills for developing their teams. Talk about three years ago in September that we launched that first John Maxwell edition. As you were shaping out the vision for this magazine, talk about your thought process. What was important about how you laid down the tracks, and what does that look like? Todd: One of the things that we consistently saw as we were looking at the nonprofit space is that there is good research, and then there is speakers. Then there are some books that are written. But there is a gap in the middle. What we wanted to do was come in and give nonprofit leaders, whether they are board members, staff, or executives, the opportunity to be able to engage with deeper thoughts around a holistic idea. What we started from that day forward is to create these themes within our magazine so that you could look at what we could consider an evergreen concept, something that is not based upon a specific time. It's something that whether you are looking at it three years ago or today, the points are still valid, the theme is still important, it is something that drives home a needed opportunity in that space. We really worked to say, This is not an infomercial. This is not a chance to sell your book. This is not a chance to get yourself engaged in a speaking environment. This is really about bringing the best thought leadership from all over. We have worked with the athletic director of Virginia Tech. We have worked with bestselling authors. We have worked with professors from a number of top-notch schools across the country. We have worked with nonprofit facilitators. We have worked with people that do some speaking across the space. We have tried to engage and bring together for our listeners, for our audience, for our readers as many different engaging and unique perspectives that can help them move it forward. And the reality is we wanted a place that would challenge you. It's one of those things that oftentimes it is very easy for us to become stagnant or to reach a plateau. If we are engaged with new people all the time, it helps. The cornerstone of each issue, there are a couple things we wanted to lay out. One is we wanted to have that big name at that cover that you can look at. John Maxwell was quite a name to be able to start with. You see others that have gone on to head the cover of the magazine. They have done an amazing job. We have wanted to make sure that each magazine touched on board relations. Each magazine touched on that sense of funds attraction. Each magazine talked about a couple things. The second cornerstone of the magazine to me was the Nonprofits that Work Section. It's great to be able to think about these huge nonprofits that have great budgets and are extremely well-known. But how do we seed this idea, this theme exemplified in the life of a nonprofit that is probably going to be one you have never heard of before? We have been able to show these organizations all across the country who are doing exciting things around that theme. It's been one of those pieces where I have learned so many new amazing nonprofits to be able to point to them later on. In fact, there was one that we worked with not that long ago, The Mission Continues. Hugh, I don't know if you remember them from the work that we did with them, but it's exciting right now because Aaron Scheinberg, who we worked with from there, he is running for Congress in West Virginia. He was somebody that we worked with not that long ago on that article. The Mission Continues was a veteran organization to work to continue to engage vets as they come back stateside to continue in that mission, working in the nonprofit community that surrounded them to engage in different missions. You get to see those kinds of things. It's a beautiful thing to be able to engage and think about how all of the good ideas in nonprofit spaces don't come from just nonprofits. They come from all over. Hugh: Good principles are good principles. Part of your inspiration was to have a different theme for each edition. One of the real fun editions I remember was one with Frances Hesselbein on the cover, who is in her late nineties and is expert on millennials. We did this whole issue on millennials. You had an interest in it, as did I. I'm a boomer, you're a millennial. My article was about how we have similarities in core values and principles. You had this really good interview with Frances. Those are the top downloaded interviews on the Nonprofit Exchange podcast. Todd: Hugh, it's a beautiful thing. Frances has now just turned 100 or 101. She is still kicking. I have seen a couple pieces from her recently. I was telling my daughter this last evening. My daughter is a Girl Scout. Frances was for about a decade and a half the CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA. I was telling her, You have to understand the legacy of those that have gone. My daughter is a third grader. I was explaining to her that what Frances has done, and I use Frances a lot when I am speaking to students, to be able to understand what it looks like that she is engaging, to never stop learning, to always open doors for others in the sense of when you find trustworthy people who are passionate, give them an opportunity. Open the door for them. They may be young or different from you. Whatever it is, understand that everybody needs a door opened for them. Hugh: Absolutely. You have crafted our submissions page. When you go to Nonprofitperofrmance.org, it will forward the URL to SynerVision's magazine page. Then there is a submissions page so people who want to contribute can go there and submit articles. There is very clear guidelines for submissions. The boardroom issue is being designed now, and it will be printed and distributed before the end of this year. Since people are listening to podcasts maybe at any time, it's important that the material on this podcast and in the magazine is timeless. Solid principle. I am going to let Russ insert some questions. Russ, you have been a contributor for the magazine. As you look at the guidelines Todd has crafted, and specifically the identification of the theme- Russ is a very gifted writer. Russ is one of our WayFinders. I don't know if you know that. He has gone through the certification. He is the first certified WayFinder, but we have some more in the chute. He is the guy forging the trail out there. Russ, how do the guidelines for writing and the description of the theme help you as a writer shape your contribution for that article? Russell: It's important to have a clear message that is direct, to the point, that has a lot of punch, and that forces you to really put your best thoughts on paper without any extraneous information. Also, it forces you to up your game because when you are looking at some of the people like Dr. Jeff Magee for example that are sending material into this magazine, you don't want to send a piece in there that is less than your best. People turn to this because they want to know what sort of things they can do to really enhance their performance. What are some of the best practices out there? What are some things that you can take away from this article and actually make it actionable? When I send a piece in, I ask myself what I want people to know, feel, and do. There should be one piece of actionable. If there is more than one, that's better. Sometimes people can get confused. I am trying to either put a sequence of actions or sequence of things to look for or some sort of actionable piece that somebody can take and implement today. It's important to be able to access, understand, and use that information. I was just surfing the Web today, and I came across a list from an organization called Giving Confidence, which points you toward nonprofit resources. It's five podcasts nonprofit people should listen to. I opened that in anticipation of seeing The Nonprofit Exchange. We're not there yet. We're going to make that list. They talk about why people should listen to that. We'll just keep doing what we're doing. At some point, we're going to end up on that list. I think that's a worthy goal for us to shoot for. Hugh: I'm glad to know about that. Russell, you weren't on the journey as we have gone forward. We are on our third year of the magazine, and it is hard to believe that we haven't talked about it on the podcast. We have three years of podcasts. Lots of episodes out there. From an outside perspective catching up, what kind of questions do you want to pose to Todd about the history of the vision or the future? Russell: One of the things I am interested in seeing, because you are in that university space, I was curious as to how many younger people like yourself are moving in to the space because they want to do work that matters and how many are looking at programs that focus on nonprofits and philanthropy. Are you seeing an uptick in that? Todd: That is a great question. If you go back to the work that we did on millennials, that's a huge issue. I don't have the stats in front of me, but the vast majority of millennials say they want to be part of a company and work that makes an impact, and they will do business with a brand that makes an impact. We see a greater sense of social responsibility in this generation than any other generation in quite some time. There is still that struggle of a gap between what I want and what I'm willing to do. So we know that that's not always something where that gap is closed. But we know that there is a desire. We do see it among our students. We happen to be at a university that is a private Christian institution. We have that faith basis in our students where they do want to go make impact. Across the community here in the Mobile area and across the state and the country, we are hearing more and more about programs like social entrepreneurship coming up. We are seeing people including the Beet Corp and other groups where they are saying they think there is a blurring of the line coming before us between the typical business and the typical nonprofit or charity. They do want to engage. They want to do something. The key right now that we are dealing with is how we make sure we are building the right capacity. I think that's to your point. Historically, one of the things we have consistently seen is that the people who come in to the nonprofit space are people who are passionate about a cause. Passion is extremely important. Books upon books upon books have been written of the last decade or so just on passion and why you should pursue your passion. One of the things we are very mindful of—this has been part of the lynchpin for us for the beginning—passion without guidelines, passion without the right framework or strategy or understanding, can be very dangerous. We are asking questions here about how we cross the line between our school of business and our school of ministry, between our school of business and education, between our school of business and music. We are asking those questions. It's already happening a lot in a lot of places, but you are going to see an increase in those. Folks like Businesses Mission is a concept that has really come up over the last handful of years. You have schools that are developing these centers. They are getting out there and serving. We have a great opportunity. I think it means a lot to our communities. I think going back to that millennial piece, and even touching into our current issue that will be coming out here in December about the boardroom. One thing that is important for our nonprofits is to make sure that they are engaging millennials and thinking about what it looks like to have diversity from an age perspective on their board as well. I think the younger generations are incredibly excited about the potential to make impact in the world. Russell: This is important. I have been engaged with my own church here in doing envisioning. We have been basing that on good to great for the social sectors. One of our local guys, Jim Collins, he is just up the road in Boulder. We started envisioning on that. One of the things that was said verbally was we really want to get young people involved. I dove into this process with him. I created a system to work with the faith-based community and created a coding system. What they say and what scores, there is a bit of a disconnect. This is something that is worth exploring further. We want younger people involved, but where are our actions leading us? There is an underlying- This wasn't done to scale to any scientific scale or with the thought of statistical validity in it. There is a lot of open-ended stuff that is my own interpretation of it. It's really interesting. I would love to share some of those codes with you, some of the coding idea with it. The other thing I wanted to say is we have a very strong Businesses Mission chapter. As a matter of fact, I am going tomorrow morning to the monthly meeting. Todd: That's great. What you said is spot-on. There are two pieces that have really stuck out to me. I don't know who said one, but I do know who said the other. Somebody said to me, “You will get what you celebrate.” Step back and think about it. In an organization, whether it's a nonprofit or for-profit, you will get what you celebrate. You say you want something. If you don't celebrate it when it happens, you're not going to get it. That is the reinforcement. When you celebrate something, you are reinforcing that this is the culture we are working to establish. Then the other piece is Chris Argyris. Chris was a theory guy. I want to say he was at Harvard Business School. One piece he brought to light is there is espoused values or theories, and there are values in action. There is often a discrepancy. You think about how many organizations you have come through. You see those values on the wall. You looked at those values and thought, I don't see those organizations. Hugh, you're laughing because you have seen it countless times both in a religious environment and in other nonprofit organizations. It's a hard thing. We set these ideals up, but we often don't create a concrete way to establish those throughout the organization. Going back to the celebration, we often don't celebrate when those things happen. Hugh: We forget that, don't we? I see Russell taking some notes. Russell grabs some sound bites in these that are very astute. Russell, when you were talking about how you construct an article, that was really good information. What do you want people to do? Todd, back to you. As we were putting this together back in the old days, was that part of our thinking? What do we want people to take away? You have a better recollection of some of this than I do. Your focus was on this more. What were some of the takeaways, the impacts, the results that we wanted people to have because they had the magazine? Todd: There are a couple things that really stuck out in the early days we were doing it. Russell, I think you said it great: know, feel, and do. I want people to know, to feel, to do what I want. One of the pieces we said is leading in a nonprofit organization can be lonely. One of the things we wanted to establish is you're not alone. You're not alone in this journey. The things that you're feeling are being felt all across the country by organizations big and small, by religious and those that are community-oriented in the nonprofit space. That was a big key for us because a lot of times when you are doing this on your own, who do you have to talk to? Can you share with your board these challenges? Can you share with your staff these challenges? Who can you talk to? A lot of times you are even afraid to share with other executives because you don't want to feel like you're the idiot in the room and you're the one who is falling short when other people, at least what they present, seem so strong. We want to be very real. These are issues that we're facing. That's one of the things that comes up in each one of these themes. The acknowledgement that we are all facing them. We have challenges we are facing. We need a variety of voices to encourage us moving forward. That was a big piece. Next to that is the big piece of we wanted to say this is more than just from the seat of our pants kind of framework. This is about how we work to establish real strategy in our organizations. I think that's one of the pieces that often gets lost. We do without thinking of the strategy. You go back to Stephen Covey's four quadrants. In the nonprofit space, because we are dealing with not an abundance of resources and staff, we are just going so fast through the things that become urgent or the things that flare up in front of us. We take care of those things. We don't step back to create that holistic strategy. The magazine and podcast were intended to encourage us to really step back and think about our strategy around these types of subjects. When we talk about leadership, what's your leadership strategy? How do you build a leaderful organization? I am going to go back to Joe Raelin; he was one of our guests about two years ago from Northeastern University. How do you create leadership throughout your organization? We have talked about succession planning. How do you make sure that when you're gone, the organization not only continues, but also thrives after you're gone? That was a big piece to this. We want you to think about that sense of strategy. What's going on? What's working? What doesn't work? When we talked with Frances and Joan, we looked at Peter Drucker's five most important questions. A lot of what they do is they want you to make sure you are periodically having that review process. For some time in our country, the after-action review was a pretty typical thing in certain types of organizations. In nonprofits, we don't do enough of that now. What worked, what didn't, how would we change it for the next time, and how do we continue to grow that to make sure that it's better fitting our mission and our customer moving forward? I think that's a really key issue that's often missing. Hugh, when you step back and think of all the organizations you've worked with, how many times do you see- In the for-profit world, we are talking about continuous improvement. Did you see a lot of that? Hugh: No. Todd: It's something that I think we do. When the thing is done, we go, Whooo. That was long and that was tiring and I'm so glad that we can put that in a box for a year. The next year, we'll pull that box out and regurgitate the same thing. We don't think about, Hey, this is something. Heaven forbid we ask, Is this thing necessary anymore? Do I need to do this anymore? Are we just doing it because it's what we've always done? Hugh: Absolutely. I was thinking about Caesar when he lost his wreath. He got off his throne and there it was. He said, “I have been resting on my laurels.” We want to get there and rest. We want to think we've made a plateau and we can stop. That's a dangerous place to be. I find that continuous improvement is the jargon in corporate America. What we work on in SynerVision is continuing improvement and personal development. The journey is never over. Part of crafting the whole process and the whole design of the magazine is there is different categories. I forget what you call them, different categories. There is Member Engagement, Strategy, Point/Counterpoint, Executive Office, Grants Corner, Academic Desk, Design Corner, Nonprofits That Work, Board Relations, and Systems Thinking. Talk about why those categories. We have had something in those categories every single issue. Todd: Those are big ones. We wanted to be able to really narrow in. One of the things that I think is way too easy when you are starting a magazine or any kind of medium is to say, “I'll accept this” and have it in this vague space. We wanted to give people a way to look forward to new things that were coming. Some of the pieces we referenced before that featured personality in the Nonprofit Works and the Board Relations—one of the things that we wanted to engage in this is Design Corner. One of the things in the Design Corner was always that idea that all too often, we tend to forget that things can look good and they can come together. In the church, for a long time, we lost our artists. We lost our designers and their input and their value. I think we are starting to see them come back again. The same thing is true in nonprofits. Just because you are a nonprofit doesn't mean that your website has to be ugly or that your engagement with your members or your engagement with your community has to be lacking thought. We wanted to make sure that happens. What this does is it gives us a framework that when we are going out to seek contributors or contributors are coming to us, they know that this is the target I am seeking. We want to make sure that the people we have are experts. They really are bringing their game to the table, and it's somebody that you can trust as you are hearing from them. I think that's a really important piece for us. Hugh, I want to touch on as well: We talked a little bit about this issue that is getting ready to go to print. I know some people will listen to this at some time in the future. One thing we have coming up is social media. Obviously, we don't live in a world where social media is a might. I might do social media. Whatever your organization is, social media is really important. Going back to strategy, you have to have a strategy for it. My wife and I were talking last night while watching an old episode of Madam Secretary. There is good and bad obviously about where we are in social media. Sometimes social media has created this perception of reality that is so far from it. It also has allowed people to get a platform that some people should never have. There are things that are going on where you think you never should have a platform. But nonprofits have a great opportunity to engage with their community, with their members, with their public through a very intentional strategy in social media. We want to make sure people are really conscious in thinking about it. Another tendency is that we look at whomever is the youngest person on our staff and we say, “You're in charge of social media,” just like we say, “You're in charge of graphic design,” just like we used to say, “You're in charge of web design.” We can't just throw it on the youngest person. They may be good, but you have to have a real consistent strategy for you organization. What does this social media strategy look like throughout? What are organizations that are doing it really well? We always want to find those people who are exemplars in our field. How does that impact the board? What's the board's role in that? Do you expect your board members to tweet out everything that is happening from your Twitter account? Do you expect them to engage? What does that look like? What are the expectations that you have? That one is coming up here soon. Following that is what Russell and I were hinting at: this future of the public/private partnership. We are going to continue to see growth in that area. The moniker “charity” is something that really has a bad connotation in our society now. What a charity does is it comes without strategy and without fiscal strategy and they come and say, “Please give to me so that I can give to others.” We love to give. But we are asking the ROI question. Just like we asked return on investment, we are asking what the return is on my impact, on my giving in the nonprofit sector. We really want to make sure that we are thinking strategically not only about where we are at right now, but also about what is coming down the pipeline. How do we make sure that we build the right partnerships with the corporate entities in our environment? If we care about this issue and you care about this issue, how can we collaborate to be able to make real impact in our community? Hugh: That's a word that most of our charities don't understand. Russell, we are rounding out to the final nine minutes of our interview. I am going to give you some more air time. You have some good questions. Is there one brewing for Todd? Russell: When it comes to social media, it was interesting. I was at the Socratic café at the University of Denver. Me and a few other guys get together on Saturday nights to do that. We had an ongoing discussion for eight weeks about isolation. Social media came up, and one of them pointed out, “You seem to be very comfortable. I haven't seen anybody your age that is that comfortable with social media.” I don't know everything, but we talked about being isolated even though people are on social media. There were a lot of things, pro or con, that were raised with social media. There is a balance to be struck, and it's not totally evil or good. We want to be able to have these face-to-face interactions. There is nothing like face-to-face interaction. Social media is a tool. I think a lot of people view it as some sort of mysterious scale of people. After you turn 25, your brain oozes out of your ears, and you have no clue what to do. You have to find your children and your grandchildren. That is not the case. What sort of things have you heard people talk about when you're talking with them about using social media to engage? Is there some resistance? Is there some people who think it's the Holy Grail? What are you hearing people talk about? I think it's a great thing to devote a whole issue to. Todd: Let me touch real quickly on something you said, and then I will come back to the questions themselves. You talked about isolation. That is a very big reality because it wasn't until social media really crept up that we had this acronym FOMO: Fear of Missing Out. I think what it does is it drives us deeper into that sense of isolation because we don't feel like we're part of something, so we withdraw even more. Social media is amoral. It's not moral or immoral. It's amoral. It's a tool. It's a medium. It's a channel. Yes. The question is how do we use this? That's really important. Yours, what kind of feedback are we hearing? In smaller, more traditional nonprofits that typically are led by older executives, there is a fear. How do I do it? How do I engage? What kinds of media do I put out there? Do I do it for my personal social media channels? I might have Facebook. Do I post about the organization on my personal page? Do I do it in the groups? How do I build a following? All of those are big questions. It's not an easy thing. There is not really a one-size-fits-all response to that. One thing that is important—and I know Hugh has done a masterful job in building that social media following. Hugh created a platform where he said I am going to focus on leadership. I am going to focus on how we empower people around leadership. When you see his messages, they are consistent. He is consistently posting about leadership and organizations, and he has built a following around a theme. In your nonprofit, that is a key thing for you. You have to own the space that you are in. You have to be mindful. It's quick and easy to go chase the shiny object. We have talked about chasing money in nonprofits before. That is something that gets a lot of nonprofits off track. They go and chase money. The same thing is true with social media about chasing the shiny object. Not everybody has to have a perspective on every issue that comes up. When LeBron went to Miami, your nonprofit didn't have to talk about LeBron going to Miami unless LeBron was the spokesperson for you in Cleveland. Then you might have something to say. It's being mindful about putting your blinders on when you need to and knowing what you are good at and what you should be talking about. That is a big thing. Your following will come out when you are consistent in what you are talking about, when you have a definitive framing to your social media messaging. We live in a world where the social media algorithms are consistently changing. It used to be photos, and now it is video. Video is the hot piece. Having opportunities. Here we are live on Facebook right? That is a really important thing. Whether it's video chats or small snippets, you want to be able to create bite-size visual media because it is attractive. It will engage more people. It is more likely to be seen by folks than I ate nachos for dinner last night. Nobody really cares, unless you have a great picture of your artisan nachos with your tofu on it or whatever. Then people might care. But I think that is to make sure that when you do post something, you're harnessing all that is available to you. That is another piece. We will talk about it in the social media issue of the magazine. Something a lot of people don't realize is there are very tangible ways for you and your nonprofit to be able to have good visuals. I know Hugh is an Apple guy. Apple made it very available for people to cut and edit simple but good, clean video. You have those more recently in a design perspective. I am blanking on the name here. Canva.com is an organization that came out. One of the pieces they wanted to promote was the idea that not everybody is a graphic designer and can afford a graphic designer, but everybody needs good design. They created a very simple free platform or premium platform where anybody can go in and create good design to be able to make sure that is consistent with their organization in the top-notch perspective. Hugh: That's great. We are doing the wrap here. We have had a really good session, Todd. Thank you for watching this with your vision that is continuing. I hope we continue to execute it faithfully. As you are sitting in this academic seat, you are still editor at this magazine and shaping the editorial policy in a really helpful way. Are there some points you want to leave people with before we end this information session? I want to encourage people to go to nonprofitperformance.org and at least click on the virtual edition. 15,000 people read it every month. It's a Flip file. Go in there and sign in. You can read the archive editions, and you can subscribe and buy issues. It's very reasonable. If a nonprofit executive or pastor were to get issues for themselves and their whole board, then some people are on the same page, and it gives you something tangible to talk about, especially the board issue. Todd, as we are exiting and wrapping up on this interview, what are some things you want to leave people with? Todd: Hugh, when you go back to the initial vision, it's the idea. How do we make impact in our communities? We really wanted to do that. When you talk about some of the download numbers for the magazine and the podcast and the video series, we started at zero. We started without subscribers. We started without followers. We started without any of that. If we can do it, you can, too. It's really important to make sure you have a good message, that you have something people want to listen to, to follow, to read. But you can do it. You can make great impact in your community. You can do great things. You can build it if you want a platform. The key is that you just have to continue. What ends up happening is we see people in our community who start something and they're not resilient enough when the challenges happen. Hugh, you know. Our core team that we started with, we have all gone through significant challenges, life changes, but the key is to continue through it and continue to work together. Truthfully, if you don't like the people you're working with, you probably won't continue. We have had a great group of people, both our core team and folks who have come around us and great new faces like Russell who are able to invigorate and continue to move things forward. I think that's really important for any organization. Make sure that you continue to invite new people in as you continue to hone what your message is. Have fun. Life is too short not to enjoy what you're doing. Hugh: Good, wise words. Russell, you can do it. We have fun. Todd, thanks to you. Thank you so much. Todd: Thank you so much. 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Hugh: Hey, this is Hugh Ballou. My guest today is Gaydon Leavitt. His friends call him G. G, I hope I can call you that. I am your friend, right? Gaydon: Absolutely. Hugh: I met G recently, and I was just blown away by the level of his expertise in marketing and the level of the programs he has to offer those of us who are social entrepreneurs. We are working in a vacuum sometimes, and we think everybody ought to clamor to our door. But we really have not developed a marketing strategy to attract those people to the value that we have. G, welcome today. Gaydon: Thank you for having me. Hugh: We have a very dedicated group of social entrepreneurs who are changing the world. We don't have a corporate job by choice because we have a value proposition that is just awesome. But we are stuck. Tell us a little more about your background. Why is it that you are qualified to talk to us about marketing? I know, but give us a little snapshot for people that are listening today. Gaydon: Marketing is the only thing I have ever done. There's that. I worked at Ford doing the digital agency movement. This was in 2004-2006; this was before social media if you can imagine. At that time, I was really in charge of building an Internet department, getting CRM up and running. That was back before CRM was common. Everyone knows what a CRM is these days usually. Hugh: Tell us what that stands for. Gaydon: Customer Relationship Management software. Hugh: Is that Ford Motor Company? Gaydon: Yeah. This was at a regional group of dealerships. I was working for them and basically getting infrastructure in place. The punchline is that I did that for long enough—CRM, website, search engines, all that stuff. I was at the forefront of that. Once I got it set up for them, I knew that everyone else needed it. I started a digital agency. Back then, it wasn't called a digital agency, but now it is. These days, digital agencies are really commonplace. A lot of companies do websites, search engine optimization, and social media. I was at the forefront of all that. Most people who know my background know that the real driver for what I'm doing is always being on the bleeding edge of the market, the innovation side of the market. When it comes to marketing, I am always looking for where it's going and try to steal ahead. Hugh: Let me get this straight. You do things that work in real life. This is not just theory? Gaydon: Not at all. To give you an idea, I started my company January 1, 2007. It was actually January 2 because the city office wasn't open January 1. The point is, 2007 was not the greatest year to start a business, it turns out. 2008 rolled in, the recession took its toll, but I grew our company 235% four years in a row. We did 700 client engagements, well over a million dollars. We were having a ball. We were having a good time. What happens was through the middle of a recession and growth, I became one of the top people in my field in the West, as it were, certainly in our state, which is the marketing capital of the universe. In 2012, I woke up. After having done strategy and digital services for 700 customers, I had really curated a case study. The 700-business case study. I knew what was going on because I was knee-deep in strategic marketing relationships with these 700 businesses. What I did was I compiled the data as it were. I put together the things that I knew were a problem. I knew people were missing. I did what I called root-cause analysis. This goes back to theory of constraints and other things I studied. I did a root-cause analysis to figure out what are the real problems in the SBM or small entrepreneurship space. What are they doing wrong? Who are they hiring? Why are they hiring them? Why are the engagements working? Why are they not working? What happened in 2012 was I wrote a plan to solve those problems. Between then and now, I have stopped those digital services and really dedicated myself to solving the problems I have found. Hugh: I do a one-day leadership empowerment symposium in one city every month. I am coming to your neighborhood, but I haven't put it on the schedule yet. But I find there are common things: leader burnout. They are doing way too much. They don't even have time to think about marketing. Their board is underfunctioning, their staff is not functioning at the level it should, and they are not making the revenue that they need to achieve their vision. You have done this real-life work, which matches with what I'm seeing. We are talking to the leaders of these movements. These people have great ideas. What is the leadership decision? Why shouldn't someone just hire someone to do marketing and then forget about it? What do leaders need to know about marketing in order to make an intelligent decision about getting someone like you engaged for their enterprise? Gaydon: The first thing they need to know is that hiring a marketing agency and then turning your back—in other words, outsourcing and allocating your responsibility to grow your organization—doesn't work. Nine times out of ten, it just does not work. The phrase we like to use is: You cannot outsource what you have given yourself the responsibility to do. The first question you need to ask is: Who is wearing the CRO or the CMO hat? CRO is Chief Revenue Officer. CMO is Chief Marketing Officer. The point is, somebody has that hat on right this second. Who has that hat? What I am saying in no uncertain terms is if you give that hat to someone who does not work at your company or is dedicated to that function and you give it to an outsource provider… I am not saying you can't bring in a part-time CMO or CRO that serves that purpose that is technically a 1099. That's fine; that can work. To hand it to an agency and think they will run the growth of your company the way you want it to is fallacious at best. So who wears the CRO hat? If that person is defined, the next question is: Do they have the skills to play the role? I like to follow that up with a little bit of philosophy. At the end of the day, Peter Truckers' quote rings in my ears, and it should ring in everyone's ears who is listening to this call. “The business enterprise has two and only two basic functions: marketing and innovation. All the rest are costs.” The spirit of what he is trying to say is the purpose of the enterprise is to gain a customer. Marketing's job is to gain a customer. I use customer loosely. We are talking customer, client, patient, donor, whatever it means. I'll use customer loosely. The point is that is the purpose of your enterprise. If you have a social enterprise and the purpose of it is not to make a profit, that's fine. This isn't capitalism necessarily for you. But you will never change the world with your social entrepreneurship if you can't make money. You can't accomplish your mission without the cash, and you can't get the cash without the marketing. We say marketing in academic terms. Marketing is the process by which we take what we have to the market. It's not advertising, it's not PR, and it's not sales. It's the holism of all of that. How are you going to get what you have to the audience you want to have it? The science of that is really the spirit of what I do. It's your responsibility unless you have given it to somebody else. In that case, we are talking to that person. But the conversation needs to have a place where the buck stops. Somebody is wearing the hat. That's where I start. Hugh: You have distinguished a number of different things. For 30 years, I have worked with charities doing my vision of strategic planning, which I call a solution map. Where do you want to be, and how are you going to get there? A traditional component is the same components for normal companies, but it is modified for charities. Part of it is realizing that nonprofit is a tax classification, not a philosophy. The other one is to build into this marketing strategy, which is not an area of my expertise. That is part of why we are talking today. I do have other collaborators in experts and sales and PR. People tend to confuse all of those things. You have distinguished what those are. You highlighted a really important leadership paradigm. It's the piece of delegation. People who are leaders think they know about delegation. Here, do this and they forget it. That's not delegation. There is a mentoring piece that goes with that. There is a championing piece. There is an accountability installation. There is a follow-up piece, which is way different than micro-managing. Whether you are hiring someone internally or externally, I would like to add that I agree with all of that. We still as leaders want to define the outcomes, and then we work with whomever it is for them to tell us what the metrics are and the tactics we are going to use to get there. We as a leader still nurture and approve that. If we are not engaged at any level as a leader, that is a problem. The trick is not to overfunction and to find someone gifted and to be engaged enough so that we can tweak it. Who knows more about our vision than us? Who understands the outcomes more than us? We as leaders are not clear on the outcomes, and we are not clear on how to delegate or manage a process. How do you feel about that? Gaydon: I totally agree. From the context of marketing, I see the problems that you are talking about but from the marketing angle. That's the lens that I view things from because that is my subject matter of expertise. Let me make this real tactical for you, Hugh. Once we define who that CRO/CMO is, and for those of you who are listening, you just felt a tremendous responsibility realizing that that hat is on your head. If that is the case, I want to relieve you because that is the first step: realizing that it is your responsibility. Once you know that, the good news is that the case study I was talking about, with 700 businesses, here is what we found. The CRO/CMO position should be a strategic one. Customer acquisition, donor acquisition, whatever you want to call it, marketing departments function best when there is a strategic person whose responsibility is strategy and high-level decision making. When there is someone who is not charge of strategy and is operational, they are in the weeds. The good news is if you are wearing the CMO hat today, you can do that responsibility with as little as 20-30 minutes a week. Hugh:  That's awesome. Gaydon: I have engineered a system for that. I am not saying it's easy. It took me a long time to build something. But the punchline is that you don't need to be overwhelmed by the responsibility. You just need to take it seriously. I have built what some people call the CMO's toolkit to enable that person who is playing the CMO role part-time as it were because they are wearing ten other hats to do that job well. The mistake people make in my world, and I don't know if it adapts itself to the other areas that you focus on, is they think of the CMO as the end-all be-all. They don't think of them as the strategic outlet. They think of them as strategy, execution, the kitchen sink. The CMO should not be in the weeds communicating with every single vendor, trying to figure out all the details, editing the site, writing all the copy. That is not what CMOs should be doing. The mistake people make is they think they need marketing, so they think they can hire a CMO. Maybe I can hire a marketing manager. That person inherently has skills. Marketing is too broad to give it to someone and expect them to do all of it. You have to get more intelligent about that hire, that function. Whether you are hiring or not is really irrelevant. The function of that role is really what we are talking about. Strategy versus implementation or management, those are two different things. When I am looking for a marketing manager, someone to work under a CMO, I look for an ops person, someone who is operationally savvy. This is someone who never lets anything fall through the cracks. They are super OCD. They never show up late. You know the type, right? They are not the person who you peg as a marketing person. They are more of an executive assistant who happens to understand the marketing strategy well enough to take it to execution. Those are the best marketing managers. The punchline is if you have one of those people, and it was your responsibility to be the CMO, all you have to do is a 30-minute-a-week meeting with a marketing manager who knows how to run marketing, who knows how to do all the tactics. I don't mean tactics from the perspective of a marketing manager as a copywriter or a programmer or a designer. Those are functions you need to hire out. Outsource those effectively to the right programmer, to the right price. Live with the consequence. Have the marketing manager do all of that. There is a system. It's almost like you were getting into human capital hierarchy. That is probably pretty similar to what you are talking about. Hugh: It is. I spent 40 years as a musical conductor, and the image on the podcast is me in my tails. It's Orchestrating Success. What you just defined is orchestrating success. I would hire the best players. I hired members of the Atlanta Symphony when I was in Atlanta who were very skilled. They were also union members. Downbeats when you start, and two hours later, you get paid for a two-hour gig, and they are either leaving or you are paying overtime. My job as a leader is to define the results and make the most out of them. You don't micro-manage them. You don't hire the best oboe player and tell him how to play the oboe. You do tell him what you want and you do shape the process. I bet most people haven't even thought about a CMO, that it hasn't even entered their consciousness. To have the best oboe player who knows how to play the oboe, well, they need the music. Maybe it's not music you wrote. Maybe there is a sketch or some improvisatory piece. It might be jazz. But we have a very rigid structure. We have a very clear outcome, and we know where we are going. It's my job as a leader. It's pool leadership; it's bringing the best out of all of these distinct players. Here is the barrier. “I can't afford that” is going to be the number one objection. How do you respond to a leader's comment of, “That sounds great, but I can't afford that”? Gaydon: It's interesting that you would say that because people call me a marketing scientist, and I get accused of being a mathematician because so much of what I do is the mathematics behind the customer acquisition system. In your world, it might be a client or a donor. It doesn't matter what the nomenclature is, but you need to know the mathematics of your business. If we think of nonprofits in a nonprofit sort of way, they don't really thrive. If we think of them as businesses, they can thrive. Business economics, venture capitalists call it unit economics, and for this purpose, I would call it acquisition economics. You need to know your acquisition economics. You need to know what a donor or a customer is worth to your business. When you know that number, you can reverse engineer yourself. To say you can't afford it is saying I got a blindfold on and don't know mathematics well enough to know what I can spend to acquire more donors and customers, etc. You have to take the blindfold off, expose yourself to the mathematics, and understand that this is a business and it is based on math and it's really simple. Dollars in, dollars out. In the marketing world, it's customers in, acquisition cost out. In other words, how much am I willing to pay to get a customer knowing how much they are going to pay me to be a customer? The multiple between what they are worth to you and what you are willing to pay to get them is where the magic is. That is where the private equity firms focus their energy. That is what venture capitalists want to know before they acquire a big company. In your world, it's probably not any different. You may just have not audited before. But you have an acquisition cost right now. You have a marketing budget right now. You have a CMO right now. You may just not have defined it that way. Hugh: The social entrepreneurs are the COE, the Chief of Everything. Part of that is their problem. They are trying to be experts in everything, and they are trying to pinch pennies. I am a recovering Scottish Presbyterian. I am just as guilty as anybody. We know how to bend a penny. But there is a practical side to this when we need to find really good people and get out of the way. The reason we don't have money to do that is because our marketing sucks. The client acquisition of the church or the synagogue would be members or community foundations. We want to have members. Those members are our local charities. They are members in mission. They are members in servant leaders in the community. I abolished the word “volunteer” when I worked with organizations like that because it is a different dumbing-down mindset. We are leaders in action. Reframing the thinking, even though we are a nonprofit—like I said, it is not a philosophy, it is a tax clarification—it is a tax-exempt charity, it is a social benefit organization. We don't treat our systems as important as our mission is. Our mission has got to make a huge difference. We dumb down on the money part. With charities, we want to save the whales; we don't care about money. Wait a minute. You are going to build a car, but you haven't learned to drive it, and you haven't put gas in it. How is it going to go anywhere? We need to be good stewards on all the resources, including the cash flow. We can't achieve our mission without the fuel in the car, which is your cash flow. Churches tend to backpedal on that. Sales is evangelism in the church. I told you I grew up as a Scottish Presbyterian. The old joke is when you cross a Presbyterian with a Jehovah's Witness, what you get is someone who knocks on the door with nothing to say. Most of us don't even knock on the door. I'm not cutting out any particular sect. But there is a pattern of knocking on the door and marketing your message, which is what they do in that denomination. But we don't do that very well. We are closed in on this enclave. We are not a cloister or a monastery. Rethinking how we do church and charities and enterprise as a small business owner is where I live. This series of recordings is about leadership paradigms. What you have just uncovered is a huge paradigm. It's taking it off my plate, finding someone competent, and working with them to let them do what we need to have done. Part of it is getting out of the way, and the other part of this is how to select a good marketing person. Part of my work is working with leaders selecting the right team, whether they are board members, staff, or people like you and me who provide goods and services for this organization. If somebody is selecting a marketing expert, even for a CMO or higher, what are the questions they should ask? Gaydon: The question I always ask: Who is in charge of growing the business? In a smaller organization, that is usually easy to answer, whomever that is. May I make two comments before I get to your question? Hugh: Absolutely. Gaydon: The question you have to ask yourself is this: Do you actually have a growth goal for the organization? Is that even the topic of conversation? Are we trying to grow membership at our church? That is an example. If that is the case, this is the next question you ask yourself: What would it mean if I were to hit that target? I don't know what that target is. That is on your plate. Did I hit that target last year? If I did, that's great. How much did you hope it would have grown last year? My guess is if I grew last year, it probably didn't grow as much as you wanted it to. If it didn't grow last year, are you willing to do anything to solve the problem? If you're not willing to do anything to solve that problem, there isn't really a lot of what we are talking about that it is going to be able to solve. So I'm going to say anecdotally that you want to grow membership 10%. For those of you who are listening carefully, you may want to think, “Man, what would it mean for me to grow membership by 10% this year? What would it mean for me to grow membership 10% this month?” I grow businesses up to 235% a year. I know what it means to grow the business over 10% per month. It's a big deal. You have to ask yourself whether that is actually a goal for you, a realistic target for you, and if you actually want to do it. But it does cost some money. The investment will be worth it. Hugh: Let me comment on your comment before you answer the question. May I? Gaydon: Please. Hugh: If somebody is going through my strategy process, somebody is going to go through my goals. We tend to run around and do a lot of stuff as entrepreneurs. We implement tactics in the absence of an overall strategy, which is what we do with marketing as well. We try this and try this and try this, and it didn't work. I say to people, “I tried to exercise one day last year and it didn't work, so I stopped.” There is this limited experiment that is also we are doing the tactic piece. What you are talking about is a very important leadership paradigm. Have a plan. Sorry, that is a commercial for me. If you do your strategy, you will know what your end goals are. That is a great question. I wanted to affirm that question. Let me stop interrupting you. Gaydon: I love it. I'll be honest. If you don't have a growth goal, or if growth is not at the top of your priority list, then they don't need me. They probably need you, but they don't need me. I'm the growth guy. I'm the profitable growth guy. If you do want growth, there is so much data that I have in doing this for 12 years in a case study environment as a marketing scientist figuring out all the reasons why it didn't work. I know why it didn't work, Hugh. That's the punchline. They could hand me that case study and say, “This is what I did. Tell me why it didn't work.” Within two minutes, I will know why it didn't work. A little golden nugget is if you have been in this space long enough, 90% of marketing activities that fail fail not because of the medium or the tactic of choice. What most people think is, “I tried radio. It didn't work. Radio must not work for me, my business, my industry, my geographics, whatever.” The reality is, the magic is never in the medium; it's always in the message. If you are writing something down, write that down: The magic is never in the medium; the magic is in the message. The message is an overly simplified way to say the magic is in your entire marketing infrastructure that leads to the message the person hears. I'm not saying go out and rewrite a message a million times. I'm saying the message is born of your audience itself. If you don't target the audience and segment it well enough, that is your first mistake that will come out in the message. Another thing is your drivers. What is your audience motivated by? What are their problems? What keeps them up at night staring at the ceiling wondering how they are going to solve this? What are their hot buttons? Knowing the audience, their desires, motivations, drivers, etc., really leaves you to say, “Okay, if I understand that audience, let's keep looking externally and figure out if there is anything about the industry, its competition, its solution alternatives, and other things at play that might affect my ability to speak to them on that level and get them to want to join me in my mission, my quest, and my social entrepreneurship in the purpose of my company.” There might be competitors at bay who can beat you on price and other things. You have to look at those. Once you define that audience, those industry drivers, those competitive drivers, you start to look internally. Who are we? How are we going to prove our viability to this particular audience? How are we going to position ourselves to that audience? Are we the Lexus in the market? Are we the Toyota in the market? Are we the Scion in the market? Are we the Smartcar in the market? Are we the Tesla in the market? Who are we? If it's a church and about membership, it's still relevant. Everybody is positioned. You are positioned relative to the competitors and the space, and you are positioned in relation to the things that differentiate you that you can message to. When you look at audience and drivers and competition and how that leads to positioning and differentiation, eventually, if you go through the whole process, that frankly I have codified, you get to the message. Nine times out of ten, the marketing activity fails because of that message. It's not because of the person who you hired to write the message is incompetent as a writer. It's usually because you are not competent as a strategist. Hugh: I love it. Of course I think you are brilliant. That's great. Say this again. It was profound. Gaydon: The reality is, the magic is in the message, not in the medium. The message is failing not because the writer who wrote it is incompetent, but because the strategist who was behind it is incompetent. Hugh: It would occur to me that if you got 700-something clients in the recession and you grew your business exponentially in the recession, that you understand marketing. You understand how this client acquisition thing works. Any of us in any of these institutions need critical mass to do what we are doing, and we need to continually grow it because we are growing our vision, which is usually way bigger than we can achieve. We are visionaries. Several people who are entrepreneurs say, “Do all of you suffer from insanity?” I say, “Heck no, we enjoy it.” It's a way of life. You are one of us, so I just put us in the same bucket. We are individuals; however, the very things that drive us are also the thorns in our side. Our assets are our liabilities. We don't want to participate in this corporate structure; however, we need the discipline of working within structure in order to let the full creativity of our vision materialize. We tend to poo-poo the discipline and system parts of it because we want the freedom of our entrepreneur. As a musician, I know this. Once we got the music, once we have rehearsed it, once we have done all the hard work, then we are free to be creative. There is a pathway to creating the strategy, which you so eloquently articulated. There is a discipline part of this. As you said earlier, there is work in this. There is no easy button. I tell people that there is no easy button in the work I do, but there is an easier button. When people try to do it themselves, it takes way longer and we make it way harder and they spend a whole lot of money, especially money they don't have, and they don't have time, so they have to go redo stuff. This is all great stuff. The question was: If somebody is going to hire a marketing specialist internally or externally to advise a plan to help them take their brand to the market, what are the questions they should ask? Gaydon: That's a hard question to answer because of the levels that we are talking about it on. In the context of you are the CMO/CRO, the person listening to this, the first question you need to ask… Hugh: The person listening is going to be the top leader in the organization, and they are going to be bringing in a marketing person. How do they qualify that person, whether it is internal, external, or using a service like yours? How do you know it's going to be the right fit for your organization? We are talking about smaller organizations here. Gaydon: I'm making the assumption, Hugh, that these are small enough organizations that we are talking about here that they are not going to hire that CMO. Correct me if I'm wrong. They are wearing the hat. Anecdotally, I have to help them wear that responsibility or hat well. I'm going to take the next five minutes to figure out how to do that better. They are not going to shell out the four, six, or eight thousand dollars a month to bring in the right marketing ninja, right? I hate to say ninja because samurais are probably more tough than ninjas, right? Hugh: I think the majority of people fit the category you've described. If you educate them on that piece, it would lead them to enough revenue to hire the person you've described. Gaydon: Exactly. The cadence of this usually looks like you are wearing the CMO hat because you haven't given it to anyone else yet. Once you grow the company to a certain point, you can, which is brilliant because you really want to be the leader, and you probably don't want to wear the CMO hat long-term. Under the guise of you are wearing the hat, and you are not about to give it to anyone else soon, the first question you need to ask yourself is: Do I know how to write a strategy? I codified a process by which you just use an iPad and peg-leg your way in. I will stop using pirate analogies. You really don't need to be a samurai. I don't mean this to be a commercial at all. If you ask yourself how do I write a marketing plan, and you don't have a step-by-step process, you will write a bad one. That is what this comes down to. It is just too complicated of a subject. Do you feel comfortable writing an enterprise-level strategy to grow a business if you don't have any training on the subject? That sounds ludicrous. That would be like me trying to train a dog. I know nothing about pets and animals. I chase mountain lions for fun in the back country in the hopes they will eat me. That is my preferred way to die; I want to get eaten by a mountain lion. The problem is, I can't find one, dang it. The point is: If you are wearing that hat, you have to know how to write a strategy. If you wrote a strategy that works, that is really engineered for profitable growth, that you are confident and clear on, now the next question you ask is really important. Now you want to say who can be in the weeds on this thing? Who can manage this strategy on a day-to-day perspective in terms of all the deliverables? You don't necessarily need to hire a full-time person to do that, but let's call that person the marketing manager. The first question I would ask is: Do you have the ability to hire a full-time or part-time marketing manager to do all the dirty work so that you can continue to be the leader, and you can put on your CMO hat for just 30 minutes a week? If you can do that, here is what I recommend you do in terms of asking questions around hiring a marketing manager. You basically put up a job description for an executive assistant. Sounds counter-intuitive. If you ask for a marketing person, here is what you are going to get. You are going to get a yellow personality that is a little bit ADD, super creative, will have a ton of ideas and no follow-through. That's what you want. Don't post a job anywhere that says “Hiring marketing…” People will hear that. What you want to do is post a job that says to the effect of, “Looking for an executive assistant,” and then say, “Skills need to include operational efficiencies, doing things on budget, doing things on time, not letting things fall through the cracks.” Then what you do is as you interview the executive assistants, you will find one or two that has a little bit of marketing experience. That is your golden goose. That person will say, “I'm really good at operational stuff, making sure nothing falls through the cracks. But actually I like marketing.” It's your perfect hire. If you don't want to do all that, we can talk later, and we can talk on another podcast where I can point them to part-time marketing managers who are certified marketing managers that you don't have to train or look for or hire. You can just turnkey, boom. A couple grand a month, and they are in your organization helping you out. Most of them work remotely. The point is you can outsource that function. You are really just hiring a 1099 person. That is the real possibility. The next level underneath this marketing manager who gets everything done is this specialist, the tactician, the copywriter, the designer, the programmer, the person who has that subject matter expertise that is so specific that you need to bring them in to do that specific job. A really common thing is someone to administer the CRM. Let's say we are using InfusionSoft or something like that. InfusionSoft is really complicated. You probably should not administer it yourself. Maybe your marketing manager will have those skills, but probably not. So it might make sense to find somebody who has very specific skills administering InfusionSoft that you can pay an hourly rate to whenever you need them. The same goes for your graphic designers, your logo people, your website people, your hosting people, your programming people, a data scientist, YouTube experts, LinkedIn experts, anything. What I am teaching you to do here is outsource effectively while insourcing effectively. What all your insourcing is is the responsibility you already have. It's that responsibility you haven't given anyone else yet. While not changing the scenario, you are changing the paradigm with which you look at it. But you can insource without adding a bunch of costs by just assuming the responsibility to write the strategy. You can definitely insource a marketing manager or hire a 1099. You can outsource effectively by finding specialists. What people do, Hugh, and I know you have seen this, is they get opportunistic. Think of a continuum. On one end is opportunist, and on the other end is strategist. The opposite of a strategist is an opportunist; the opposite of an opportunist is a strategist. The number one plague in small business is we get opportunistic. I know that resonates with you because you teach leadership. What an opportunist does outside of marketing is they say, “We need to grow. Let's go find someone to do that.” They hire an agency and turn over the car keys, the wallet, the house, and everything and say, “Run it for me.” It doesn't work. I can prove to you that it doesn't work. More than that, some of them will say, “I don't know if that's the right idea. We should hire a CMO.” Then they make the decision of thinking the CMO is some deity of marketing, and they can do the strategy, manage the execution, do the execution, do the reporting, report to themselves, and be accountable all at the same time. How opportunistic does that sound? Yet people do it all the time. I ask people, “Who is running point on marketing?” “Our CMO.” “What does he do?” “Everything.” “Wait, hold on, everything?” Then I interview the CMO, and the CMO says, “Gee, the reason why I don't dare tell this to the CEO, and the reason I can't do my job, is because I am writing copy, and I am doing design, and I am managing vendors, and I am looking for proposals, and I am managing our events, and I am writing the strategy, and I am editing the strategy, and I am doing the reports.” All you did by hiring that CMO is duplicating your problem of having too many hats on someone else. Hugh: Oh that is so spot-on. I talk to people every day that that fits. You have come back to a lot of the themes without even knowing that I teach. My whole paradigm is to reframe leadership as a pathway to profit. This series is converting a passion to profit. You have just tagged a lot of the major leadership decisions that lead organizations to generate recurrable income. Managing that becomes profit. Nonprofits need profit. It's not for profit; we don't distribute it individually. But we have to be in the black to achieve our vision and mission. I think we have given people a lot to chew on today. I think we can probably talk for hours on these topics. How do people find you and your company? Gaydon: I'm not terribly hard to find. My company is called Savavo. G Leavitt or Gaydon Leavitt. If they are really looking for something to take from here forward, I recommend we put up a freebie for your audience to go to marketingsequence.com/ballou. What I have there is a five-part video training course that essentially gives you the basics of how to start to formulate the strategy. If you go there, you will see the videos that will walk you through sequentially, and I think it will help your audience go on the right trajectory. Hugh: That's generous. Marketingsequence.com/ballou. G, you have demonstrated a much higher level of competency than other people I have spoken with. I think you hit a sore spot for 4-12 million companies that are stuck. I find that one very good leadership trait is making a decision to get out of your comfort zone and do something different with different results. Your marketing sucks. You have heard Jeff Magee that says, “SUC is halfway to success.” We don't get there because we suck. We don't get there because we are not getting out of our comfort zone and making intelligent leadership decisions that are going to lead us to that profit. That is a generous offer. As we pull this to a close, do you have a parting thought for the audience to think about? Gaydon: I'm glad you asked that because I think people tend to get hung up if they don't feel comfortable building a strategy or even spending a dollar to build a strategy. I think the best thing I could give them is the who we are platform. I'll illustrate this for you right now. This is a tool you can use to immediately improve your pitch, your messaging, and your ability to get a donor, a patient, or a customer immediately using a challenge you are already using. So I will give you mine in hopes you can model mine and create your own. I will give you the four or five steps that are part of this model. It goes something like this: I believe marketing is the reason businesses fail and the reason they succeed. I also believe it is the only way they will grow properly. At the rate at which a company or organization is growing is directly related to the marketing acumen, knowledge, or skills and the infrastructure that organization has. I also believe that marketing is a science, not an art, not a lottery, not a crapshoot. You are not at the casino. It's a process. If you know the process, you could have success with it. Do not think of it as a science. I believe it as a process. Because I believe all of these things, my mission and purpose as an organization, as an entrepreneur, as someone who is trying to provide value to the world, is to turn marketing into a science and into a predictable, followable, learnable, masterable process for people. We believe we are doing that. The benefit to that process is clarity, confidence, and ultimately return on investment. It creates ROI. It creates bigger companies, faster companies, and better companies. The question that I have for you is: How clear are you about how to turn your marketing into predictable, profitable process? Hugh: Gaydon Leavitt, very well-spoken. Thank you for sharing your intellectual property with my listeners today. Hope you have a great day. I look forward to the next conversation. Gaydon: Thank you so much. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hugh: Hey, this is Hugh Ballou. My guest today is Gaydon Leavitt. His friends call him G. G, I hope I can call you that. I am your friend, right? Gaydon: Absolutely. Hugh: I met G recently, and I was just blown away by the level of his expertise in marketing and the level of the programs he has to offer those of us who are social entrepreneurs. We are working in a vacuum sometimes, and we think everybody ought to clamor to our door. But we really have not developed a marketing strategy to attract those people to the value that we have. G, welcome today. Gaydon: Thank you for having me. Hugh: We have a very dedicated group of social entrepreneurs who are changing the world. We don’t have a corporate job by choice because we have a value proposition that is just awesome. But we are stuck. Tell us a little more about your background. Why is it that you are qualified to talk to us about marketing? I know, but give us a little snapshot for people that are listening today. Gaydon: Marketing is the only thing I have ever done. There’s that. I worked at Ford doing the digital agency movement. This was in 2004-2006; this was before social media if you can imagine. At that time, I was really in charge of building an Internet department, getting CRM up and running. That was back before CRM was common. Everyone knows what a CRM is these days usually. Hugh: Tell us what that stands for. Gaydon: Customer Relationship Management software. Hugh: Is that Ford Motor Company? Gaydon: Yeah. This was at a regional group of dealerships. I was working for them and basically getting infrastructure in place. The punchline is that I did that for long enough—CRM, website, search engines, all that stuff. I was at the forefront of that. Once I got it set up for them, I knew that everyone else needed it. I started a digital agency. Back then, it wasn’t called a digital agency, but now it is. These days, digital agencies are really commonplace. A lot of companies do websites, search engine optimization, and social media. I was at the forefront of all that. Most people who know my background know that the real driver for what I’m doing is always being on the bleeding edge of the market, the innovation side of the market. When it comes to marketing, I am always looking for where it’s going and try to steal ahead. Hugh: Let me get this straight. You do things that work in real life. This is not just theory? Gaydon: Not at all. To give you an idea, I started my company January 1, 2007. It was actually January 2 because the city office wasn’t open January 1. The point is, 2007 was not the greatest year to start a business, it turns out. 2008 rolled in, the recession took its toll, but I grew our company 235% four years in a row. We did 700 client engagements, well over a million dollars. We were having a ball. We were having a good time. What happens was through the middle of a recession and growth, I became one of the top people in my field in the West, as it were, certainly in our state, which is the marketing capital of the universe. In 2012, I woke up. After having done strategy and digital services for 700 customers, I had really curated a case study. The 700-business case study. I knew what was going on because I was knee-deep in strategic marketing relationships with these 700 businesses. What I did was I compiled the data as it were. I put together the things that I knew were a problem. I knew people were missing. I did what I called root-cause analysis. This goes back to theory of constraints and other things I studied. I did a root-cause analysis to figure out what are the real problems in the SBM or small entrepreneurship space. What are they doing wrong? Who are they hiring? Why are they hiring them? Why are the engagements working? Why are they not working? What happened in 2012 was I wrote a plan to solve those problems. Between then and now, I have stopped those digital services and really dedicated myself to solving the problems I have found. Hugh: I do a one-day leadership empowerment symposium in one city every month. I am coming to your neighborhood, but I haven’t put it on the schedule yet. But I find there are common things: leader burnout. They are doing way too much. They don’t even have time to think about marketing. Their board is underfunctioning, their staff is not functioning at the level it should, and they are not making the revenue that they need to achieve their vision. You have done this real-life work, which matches with what I’m seeing. We are talking to the leaders of these movements. These people have great ideas. What is the leadership decision? Why shouldn’t someone just hire someone to do marketing and then forget about it? What do leaders need to know about marketing in order to make an intelligent decision about getting someone like you engaged for their enterprise? Gaydon: The first thing they need to know is that hiring a marketing agency and then turning your back—in other words, outsourcing and allocating your responsibility to grow your organization—doesn’t work. Nine times out of ten, it just does not work. The phrase we like to use is: You cannot outsource what you have given yourself the responsibility to do. The first question you need to ask is: Who is wearing the CRO or the CMO hat? CRO is Chief Revenue Officer. CMO is Chief Marketing Officer. The point is, somebody has that hat on right this second. Who has that hat? What I am saying in no uncertain terms is if you give that hat to someone who does not work at your company or is dedicated to that function and you give it to an outsource provider… I am not saying you can’t bring in a part-time CMO or CRO that serves that purpose that is technically a 1099. That’s fine; that can work. To hand it to an agency and think they will run the growth of your company the way you want it to is fallacious at best. So who wears the CRO hat? If that person is defined, the next question is: Do they have the skills to play the role? I like to follow that up with a little bit of philosophy. At the end of the day, Peter Truckers’ quote rings in my ears, and it should ring in everyone’s ears who is listening to this call. “The business enterprise has two and only two basic functions: marketing and innovation. All the rest are costs.” The spirit of what he is trying to say is the purpose of the enterprise is to gain a customer. Marketing’s job is to gain a customer. I use customer loosely. We are talking customer, client, patient, donor, whatever it means. I’ll use customer loosely. The point is that is the purpose of your enterprise. If you have a social enterprise and the purpose of it is not to make a profit, that’s fine. This isn’t capitalism necessarily for you. But you will never change the world with your social entrepreneurship if you can’t make money. You can’t accomplish your mission without the cash, and you can’t get the cash without the marketing. We say marketing in academic terms. Marketing is the process by which we take what we have to the market. It’s not advertising, it’s not PR, and it’s not sales. It’s the holism of all of that. How are you going to get what you have to the audience you want to have it? The science of that is really the spirit of what I do. It’s your responsibility unless you have given it to somebody else. In that case, we are talking to that person. But the conversation needs to have a place where the buck stops. Somebody is wearing the hat. That’s where I start. Hugh: You have distinguished a number of different things. For 30 years, I have worked with charities doing my vision of strategic planning, which I call a solution map. Where do you want to be, and how are you going to get there? A traditional component is the same components for normal companies, but it is modified for charities. Part of it is realizing that nonprofit is a tax classification, not a philosophy. The other one is to build into this marketing strategy, which is not an area of my expertise. That is part of why we are talking today. I do have other collaborators in experts and sales and PR. People tend to confuse all of those things. You have distinguished what those are. You highlighted a really important leadership paradigm. It’s the piece of delegation. People who are leaders think they know about delegation. Here, do this and they forget it. That’s not delegation. There is a mentoring piece that goes with that. There is a championing piece. There is an accountability installation. There is a follow-up piece, which is way different than micro-managing. Whether you are hiring someone internally or externally, I would like to add that I agree with all of that. We still as leaders want to define the outcomes, and then we work with whomever it is for them to tell us what the metrics are and the tactics we are going to use to get there. We as a leader still nurture and approve that. If we are not engaged at any level as a leader, that is a problem. The trick is not to overfunction and to find someone gifted and to be engaged enough so that we can tweak it. Who knows more about our vision than us? Who understands the outcomes more than us? We as leaders are not clear on the outcomes, and we are not clear on how to delegate or manage a process. How do you feel about that? Gaydon: I totally agree. From the context of marketing, I see the problems that you are talking about but from the marketing angle. That’s the lens that I view things from because that is my subject matter of expertise. Let me make this real tactical for you, Hugh. Once we define who that CRO/CMO is, and for those of you who are listening, you just felt a tremendous responsibility realizing that that hat is on your head. If that is the case, I want to relieve you because that is the first step: realizing that it is your responsibility. Once you know that, the good news is that the case study I was talking about, with 700 businesses, here is what we found. The CRO/CMO position should be a strategic one. Customer acquisition, donor acquisition, whatever you want to call it, marketing departments function best when there is a strategic person whose responsibility is strategy and high-level decision making. When there is someone who is not charge of strategy and is operational, they are in the weeds. The good news is if you are wearing the CMO hat today, you can do that responsibility with as little as 20-30 minutes a week. Hugh: That’s awesome. Gaydon: I have engineered a system for that. I am not saying it’s easy. It took me a long time to build something. But the punchline is that you don’t need to be overwhelmed by the responsibility. You just need to take it seriously. I have built what some people call the CMO’s toolkit to enable that person who is playing the CMO role part-time as it were because they are wearing ten other hats to do that job well. The mistake people make in my world, and I don’t know if it adapts itself to the other areas that you focus on, is they think of the CMO as the end-all be-all. They don’t think of them as the strategic outlet. They think of them as strategy, execution, the kitchen sink. The CMO should not be in the weeds communicating with every single vendor, trying to figure out all the details, editing the site, writing all the copy. That is not what CMOs should be doing. The mistake people make is they think they need marketing, so they think they can hire a CMO. Maybe I can hire a marketing manager. That person inherently has skills. Marketing is too broad to give it to someone and expect them to do all of it. You have to get more intelligent about that hire, that function. Whether you are hiring or not is really irrelevant. The function of that role is really what we are talking about. Strategy versus implementation or management, those are two different things. When I am looking for a marketing manager, someone to work under a CMO, I look for an ops person, someone who is operationally savvy. This is someone who never lets anything fall through the cracks. They are super OCD. They never show up late. You know the type, right? They are not the person who you peg as a marketing person. They are more of an executive assistant who happens to understand the marketing strategy well enough to take it to execution. Those are the best marketing managers. The punchline is if you have one of those people, and it was your responsibility to be the CMO, all you have to do is a 30-minute-a-week meeting with a marketing manager who knows how to run marketing, who knows how to do all the tactics. I don’t mean tactics from the perspective of a marketing manager as a copywriter or a programmer or a designer. Those are functions you need to hire out. Outsource those effectively to the right programmer, to the right price. Live with the consequence. Have the marketing manager do all of that. There is a system. It’s almost like you were getting into human capital hierarchy. That is probably pretty similar to what you are talking about. Hugh: It is. I spent 40 years as a musical conductor, and the image on the podcast is me in my tails. It’s Orchestrating Success. What you just defined is orchestrating success. I would hire the best players. I hired members of the Atlanta Symphony when I was in Atlanta who were very skilled. They were also union members. Downbeats when you start, and two hours later, you get paid for a two-hour gig, and they are either leaving or you are paying overtime. My job as a leader is to define the results and make the most out of them. You don’t micro-manage them. You don’t hire the best oboe player and tell him how to play the oboe. You do tell him what you want and you do shape the process. I bet most people haven’t even thought about a CMO, that it hasn’t even entered their consciousness. To have the best oboe player who knows how to play the oboe, well, they need the music. Maybe it’s not music you wrote. Maybe there is a sketch or some improvisatory piece. It might be jazz. But we have a very rigid structure. We have a very clear outcome, and we know where we are going. It’s my job as a leader. It’s pool leadership; it’s bringing the best out of all of these distinct players. Here is the barrier. “I can’t afford that” is going to be the number one objection. How do you respond to a leader’s comment of, “That sounds great, but I can’t afford that”? Gaydon: It’s interesting that you would say that because people call me a marketing scientist, and I get accused of being a mathematician because so much of what I do is the mathematics behind the customer acquisition system. In your world, it might be a client or a donor. It doesn’t matter what the nomenclature is, but you need to know the mathematics of your business. If we think of nonprofits in a nonprofit sort of way, they don’t really thrive. If we think of them as businesses, they can thrive. Business economics, venture capitalists call it unit economics, and for this purpose, I would call it acquisition economics. You need to know your acquisition economics. You need to know what a donor or a customer is worth to your business. When you know that number, you can reverse engineer yourself. To say you can’t afford it is saying I got a blindfold on and don’t know mathematics well enough to know what I can spend to acquire more donors and customers, etc. You have to take the blindfold off, expose yourself to the mathematics, and understand that this is a business and it is based on math and it’s really simple. Dollars in, dollars out. In the marketing world, it’s customers in, acquisition cost out. In other words, how much am I willing to pay to get a customer knowing how much they are going to pay me to be a customer? The multiple between what they are worth to you and what you are willing to pay to get them is where the magic is. That is where the private equity firms focus their energy. That is what venture capitalists want to know before they acquire a big company. In your world, it’s probably not any different. You may just have not audited before. But you have an acquisition cost right now. You have a marketing budget right now. You have a CMO right now. You may just not have defined it that way. Hugh: The social entrepreneurs are the COE, the Chief of Everything. Part of that is their problem. They are trying to be experts in everything, and they are trying to pinch pennies. I am a recovering Scottish Presbyterian. I am just as guilty as anybody. We know how to bend a penny. But there is a practical side to this when we need to find really good people and get out of the way. The reason we don’t have money to do that is because our marketing sucks. The client acquisition of the church or the synagogue would be members or community foundations. We want to have members. Those members are our local charities. They are members in mission. They are members in servant leaders in the community. I abolished the word “volunteer” when I worked with organizations like that because it is a different dumbing-down mindset. We are leaders in action. Reframing the thinking, even though we are a nonprofit—like I said, it is not a philosophy, it is a tax clarification—it is a tax-exempt charity, it is a social benefit organization. We don’t treat our systems as important as our mission is. Our mission has got to make a huge difference. We dumb down on the money part. With charities, we want to save the whales; we don’t care about money. Wait a minute. You are going to build a car, but you haven’t learned to drive it, and you haven’t put gas in it. How is it going to go anywhere? We need to be good stewards on all the resources, including the cash flow. We can’t achieve our mission without the fuel in the car, which is your cash flow. Churches tend to backpedal on that. Sales is evangelism in the church. I told you I grew up as a Scottish Presbyterian. The old joke is when you cross a Presbyterian with a Jehovah’s Witness, what you get is someone who knocks on the door with nothing to say. Most of us don’t even knock on the door. I’m not cutting out any particular sect. But there is a pattern of knocking on the door and marketing your message, which is what they do in that denomination. But we don’t do that very well. We are closed in on this enclave. We are not a cloister or a monastery. Rethinking how we do church and charities and enterprise as a small business owner is where I live. This series of recordings is about leadership paradigms. What you have just uncovered is a huge paradigm. It’s taking it off my plate, finding someone competent, and working with them to let them do what we need to have done. Part of it is getting out of the way, and the other part of this is how to select a good marketing person. Part of my work is working with leaders selecting the right team, whether they are board members, staff, or people like you and me who provide goods and services for this organization. If somebody is selecting a marketing expert, even for a CMO or higher, what are the questions they should ask? Gaydon: The question I always ask: Who is in charge of growing the business? In a smaller organization, that is usually easy to answer, whomever that is. May I make two comments before I get to your question? Hugh: Absolutely. Gaydon: The question you have to ask yourself is this: Do you actually have a growth goal for the organization? Is that even the topic of conversation? Are we trying to grow membership at our church? That is an example. If that is the case, this is the next question you ask yourself: What would it mean if I were to hit that target? I don’t know what that target is. That is on your plate. Did I hit that target last year? If I did, that’s great. How much did you hope it would have grown last year? My guess is if I grew last year, it probably didn’t grow as much as you wanted it to. If it didn’t grow last year, are you willing to do anything to solve the problem? If you’re not willing to do anything to solve that problem, there isn’t really a lot of what we are talking about that it is going to be able to solve. So I’m going to say anecdotally that you want to grow membership 10%. For those of you who are listening carefully, you may want to think, “Man, what would it mean for me to grow membership by 10% this year? What would it mean for me to grow membership 10% this month?” I grow businesses up to 235% a year. I know what it means to grow the business over 10% per month. It’s a big deal. You have to ask yourself whether that is actually a goal for you, a realistic target for you, and if you actually want to do it. But it does cost some money. The investment will be worth it. Hugh: Let me comment on your comment before you answer the question. May I? Gaydon: Please. Hugh: If somebody is going through my strategy process, somebody is going to go through my goals. We tend to run around and do a lot of stuff as entrepreneurs. We implement tactics in the absence of an overall strategy, which is what we do with marketing as well. We try this and try this and try this, and it didn’t work. I say to people, “I tried to exercise one day last year and it didn’t work, so I stopped.” There is this limited experiment that is also we are doing the tactic piece. What you are talking about is a very important leadership paradigm. Have a plan. Sorry, that is a commercial for me. If you do your strategy, you will know what your end goals are. That is a great question. I wanted to affirm that question. Let me stop interrupting you. Gaydon: I love it. I’ll be honest. If you don’t have a growth goal, or if growth is not at the top of your priority list, then they don’t need me. They probably need you, but they don’t need me. I’m the growth guy. I’m the profitable growth guy. If you do want growth, there is so much data that I have in doing this for 12 years in a case study environment as a marketing scientist figuring out all the reasons why it didn’t work. I know why it didn’t work, Hugh. That’s the punchline. They could hand me that case study and say, “This is what I did. Tell me why it didn’t work.” Within two minutes, I will know why it didn’t work. A little golden nugget is if you have been in this space long enough, 90% of marketing activities that fail fail not because of the medium or the tactic of choice. What most people think is, “I tried radio. It didn’t work. Radio must not work for me, my business, my industry, my geographics, whatever.” The reality is, the magic is never in the medium; it’s always in the message. If you are writing something down, write that down: The magic is never in the medium; the magic is in the message. The message is an overly simplified way to say the magic is in your entire marketing infrastructure that leads to the message the person hears. I’m not saying go out and rewrite a message a million times. I’m saying the message is born of your audience itself. If you don’t target the audience and segment it well enough, that is your first mistake that will come out in the message. Another thing is your drivers. What is your audience motivated by? What are their problems? What keeps them up at night staring at the ceiling wondering how they are going to solve this? What are their hot buttons? Knowing the audience, their desires, motivations, drivers, etc., really leaves you to say, “Okay, if I understand that audience, let’s keep looking externally and figure out if there is anything about the industry, its competition, its solution alternatives, and other things at play that might affect my ability to speak to them on that level and get them to want to join me in my mission, my quest, and my social entrepreneurship in the purpose of my company.” There might be competitors at bay who can beat you on price and other things. You have to look at those. Once you define that audience, those industry drivers, those competitive drivers, you start to look internally. Who are we? How are we going to prove our viability to this particular audience? How are we going to position ourselves to that audience? Are we the Lexus in the market? Are we the Toyota in the market? Are we the Scion in the market? Are we the Smartcar in the market? Are we the Tesla in the market? Who are we? If it’s a church and about membership, it’s still relevant. Everybody is positioned. You are positioned relative to the competitors and the space, and you are positioned in relation to the things that differentiate you that you can message to. When you look at audience and drivers and competition and how that leads to positioning and differentiation, eventually, if you go through the whole process, that frankly I have codified, you get to the message. Nine times out of ten, the marketing activity fails because of that message. It’s not because of the person who you hired to write the message is incompetent as a writer. It’s usually because you are not competent as a strategist. Hugh: I love it. Of course I think you are brilliant. That’s great. Say this again. It was profound. Gaydon: The reality is, the magic is in the message, not in the medium. The message is failing not because the writer who wrote it is incompetent, but because the strategist who was behind it is incompetent. Hugh: It would occur to me that if you got 700-something clients in the recession and you grew your business exponentially in the recession, that you understand marketing. You understand how this client acquisition thing works. Any of us in any of these institutions need critical mass to do what we are doing, and we need to continually grow it because we are growing our vision, which is usually way bigger than we can achieve. We are visionaries. Several people who are entrepreneurs say, “Do all of you suffer from insanity?” I say, “Heck no, we enjoy it.” It’s a way of life. You are one of us, so I just put us in the same bucket. We are individuals; however, the very things that drive us are also the thorns in our side. Our assets are our liabilities. We don’t want to participate in this corporate structure; however, we need the discipline of working within structure in order to let the full creativity of our vision materialize. We tend to poo-poo the discipline and system parts of it because we want the freedom of our entrepreneur. As a musician, I know this. Once we got the music, once we have rehearsed it, once we have done all the hard work, then we are free to be creative. There is a pathway to creating the strategy, which you so eloquently articulated. There is a discipline part of this. As you said earlier, there is work in this. There is no easy button. I tell people that there is no easy button in the work I do, but there is an easier button. When people try to do it themselves, it takes way longer and we make it way harder and they spend a whole lot of money, especially money they don’t have, and they don’t have time, so they have to go redo stuff. This is all great stuff. The question was: If somebody is going to hire a marketing specialist internally or externally to advise a plan to help them take their brand to the market, what are the questions they should ask? Gaydon: That’s a hard question to answer because of the levels that we are talking about it on. In the context of you are the CMO/CRO, the person listening to this, the first question you need to ask… Hugh: The person listening is going to be the top leader in the organization, and they are going to be bringing in a marketing person. How do they qualify that person, whether it is internal, external, or using a service like yours? How do you know it’s going to be the right fit for your organization? We are talking about smaller organizations here. Gaydon: I’m making the assumption, Hugh, that these are small enough organizations that we are talking about here that they are not going to hire that CMO. Correct me if I’m wrong. They are wearing the hat. Anecdotally, I have to help them wear that responsibility or hat well. I’m going to take the next five minutes to figure out how to do that better. They are not going to shell out the four, six, or eight thousand dollars a month to bring in the right marketing ninja, right? I hate to say ninja because samurais are probably more tough than ninjas, right? Hugh: I think the majority of people fit the category you’ve described. If you educate them on that piece, it would lead them to enough revenue to hire the person you’ve described. Gaydon: Exactly. The cadence of this usually looks like you are wearing the CMO hat because you haven’t given it to anyone else yet. Once you grow the company to a certain point, you can, which is brilliant because you really want to be the leader, and you probably don’t want to wear the CMO hat long-term. Under the guise of you are wearing the hat, and you are not about to give it to anyone else soon, the first question you need to ask yourself is: Do I know how to write a strategy? I codified a process by which you just use an iPad and peg-leg your way in. I will stop using pirate analogies. You really don’t need to be a samurai. I don’t mean this to be a commercial at all. If you ask yourself how do I write a marketing plan, and you don’t have a step-by-step process, you will write a bad one. That is what this comes down to. It is just too complicated of a subject. Do you feel comfortable writing an enterprise-level strategy to grow a business if you don’t have any training on the subject? That sounds ludicrous. That would be like me trying to train a dog. I know nothing about pets and animals. I chase mountain lions for fun in the back country in the hopes they will eat me. That is my preferred way to die; I want to get eaten by a mountain lion. The problem is, I can’t find one, dang it. The point is: If you are wearing that hat, you have to know how to write a strategy. If you wrote a strategy that works, that is really engineered for profitable growth, that you are confident and clear on, now the next question you ask is really important. Now you want to say who can be in the weeds on this thing? Who can manage this strategy on a day-to-day perspective in terms of all the deliverables? You don’t necessarily need to hire a full-time person to do that, but let’s call that person the marketing manager. The first question I would ask is: Do you have the ability to hire a full-time or part-time marketing manager to do all the dirty work so that you can continue to be the leader, and you can put on your CMO hat for just 30 minutes a week? If you can do that, here is what I recommend you do in terms of asking questions around hiring a marketing manager. You basically put up a job description for an executive assistant. Sounds counter-intuitive. If you ask for a marketing person, here is what you are going to get. You are going to get a yellow personality that is a little bit ADD, super creative, will have a ton of ideas and no follow-through. That’s what you want. Don’t post a job anywhere that says “Hiring marketing…” People will hear that. What you want to do is post a job that says to the effect of, “Looking for an executive assistant,” and then say, “Skills need to include operational efficiencies, doing things on budget, doing things on time, not letting things fall through the cracks.” Then what you do is as you interview the executive assistants, you will find one or two that has a little bit of marketing experience. That is your golden goose. That person will say, “I’m really good at operational stuff, making sure nothing falls through the cracks. But actually I like marketing.” It’s your perfect hire. If you don’t want to do all that, we can talk later, and we can talk on another podcast where I can point them to part-time marketing managers who are certified marketing managers that you don’t have to train or look for or hire. You can just turnkey, boom. A couple grand a month, and they are in your organization helping you out. Most of them work remotely. The point is you can outsource that function. You are really just hiring a 1099 person. That is the real possibility. The next level underneath this marketing manager who gets everything done is this specialist, the tactician, the copywriter, the designer, the programmer, the person who has that subject matter expertise that is so specific that you need to bring them in to do that specific job. A really common thing is someone to administer the CRM. Let’s say we are using InfusionSoft or something like that. InfusionSoft is really complicated. You probably should not administer it yourself. Maybe your marketing manager will have those skills, but probably not. So it might make sense to find somebody who has very specific skills administering InfusionSoft that you can pay an hourly rate to whenever you need them. The same goes for your graphic designers, your logo people, your website people, your hosting people, your programming people, a data scientist, YouTube experts, LinkedIn experts, anything. What I am teaching you to do here is outsource effectively while insourcing effectively. What all your insourcing is is the responsibility you already have. It’s that responsibility you haven’t given anyone else yet. While not changing the scenario, you are changing the paradigm with which you look at it. But you can insource without adding a bunch of costs by just assuming the responsibility to write the strategy. You can definitely insource a marketing manager or hire a 1099. You can outsource effectively by finding specialists. What people do, Hugh, and I know you have seen this, is they get opportunistic. Think of a continuum. On one end is opportunist, and on the other end is strategist. The opposite of a strategist is an opportunist; the opposite of an opportunist is a strategist. The number one plague in small business is we get opportunistic. I know that resonates with you because you teach leadership. What an opportunist does outside of marketing is they say, “We need to grow. Let’s go find someone to do that.” They hire an agency and turn over the car keys, the wallet, the house, and everything and say, “Run it for me.” It doesn’t work. I can prove to you that it doesn’t work. More than that, some of them will say, “I don’t know if that’s the right idea. We should hire a CMO.” Then they make the decision of thinking the CMO is some deity of marketing, and they can do the strategy, manage the execution, do the execution, do the reporting, report to themselves, and be accountable all at the same time. How opportunistic does that sound? Yet people do it all the time. I ask people, “Who is running point on marketing?” “Our CMO.” “What does he do?” “Everything.” “Wait, hold on, everything?” Then I interview the CMO, and the CMO says, “Gee, the reason why I don’t dare tell this to the CEO, and the reason I can’t do my job, is because I am writing copy, and I am doing design, and I am managing vendors, and I am looking for proposals, and I am managing our events, and I am writing the strategy, and I am editing the strategy, and I am doing the reports.” All you did by hiring that CMO is duplicating your problem of having too many hats on someone else. Hugh: Oh that is so spot-on. I talk to people every day that that fits. You have come back to a lot of the themes without even knowing that I teach. My whole paradigm is to reframe leadership as a pathway to profit. This series is converting a passion to profit. You have just tagged a lot of the major leadership decisions that lead organizations to generate recurrable income. Managing that becomes profit. Nonprofits need profit. It’s not for profit; we don’t distribute it individually. But we have to be in the black to achieve our vision and mission. I think we have given people a lot to chew on today. I think we can probably talk for hours on these topics. How do people find you and your company? Gaydon: I’m not terribly hard to find. My company is called Savavo. G Leavitt or Gaydon Leavitt. If they are really looking for something to take from here forward, I recommend we put up a freebie for your audience to go to marketingsequence.com/ballou. What I have there is a five-part video training course that essentially gives you the basics of how to start to formulate the strategy. If you go there, you will see the videos that will walk you through sequentially, and I think it will help your audience go on the right trajectory. Hugh: That’s generous. Marketingsequence.com/ballou. G, you have demonstrated a much higher level of competency than other people I have spoken with. I think you hit a sore spot for 4-12 million companies that are stuck. I find that one very good leadership trait is making a decision to get out of your comfort zone and do something different with different results. Your marketing sucks. You have heard Jeff Magee that says, “SUC is halfway to success.” We don’t get there because we suck. We don’t get there because we are not getting out of our comfort zone and making intelligent leadership decisions that are going to lead us to that profit. That is a generous offer. As we pull this to a close, do you have a parting thought for the audience to think about? Gaydon: I’m glad you asked that because I think people tend to get hung up if they don’t feel comfortable building a strategy or even spending a dollar to build a strategy. I think the best thing I could give them is the who we are platform. I’ll illustrate this for you right now. This is a tool you can use to immediately improve your pitch, your messaging, and your ability to get a donor, a patient, or a customer immediately using a challenge you are already using. So I will give you mine in hopes you can model mine and create your own. I will give you the four or five steps that are part of this model. It goes something like this: I believe marketing is the reason businesses fail and the reason they succeed. I also believe it is the only way they will grow properly. At the rate at which a company or organization is growing is directly related to the marketing acumen, knowledge, or skills and the infrastructure that organization has. I also believe that marketing is a science, not an art, not a lottery, not a crapshoot. You are not at the casino. It’s a process. If you know the process, you could have success with it. Do not think of it as a science. I believe it as a process. Because I believe all of these things, my mission and purpose as an organization, as an entrepreneur, as someone who is trying to provide value to the world, is to turn marketing into a science and into a predictable, followable, learnable, masterable process for people. We believe we are doing that. The benefit to that process is clarity, confidence, and ultimately return on investment. It creates ROI. It creates bigger companies, faster companies, and better companies. The question that I have for you is: How clear are you about how to turn your marketing into predictable, profitable process? Hugh: Gaydon Leavitt, very well-spoken. Thank you for sharing your intellectual property with my listeners today. Hope you have a great day. I look forward to the next conversation. Gaydon: Thank you so much. Find out more at https://savavo.com  

Jeff Magee's credentials are significant. He is a Certified Speaking Professional, a Certified Management Consultant, and a Certified Professional Direct Marketer. He has been recognized as one of the "Ten Outstanding Young Americans" (TOYA) by the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce, and twice selected to represent the United States at the World Congress as a Leadership Speaker (Cannes, France and Vienna, Austria). A three-term President of the Oklahoma Speakers Association and twice awarded their Professional Speaker Member of the Year, today, the Chapter's outstanding member of the year is awarded the "Jeff Magee Member of the Year Award." Jeff served for four years as an appointed Civil Service Commissioner (Judge) for the City/County of Tulsa Oklahoma. Many of the Fortune 100 firms today use Jeff for Performance Execution® in the areas of managerial-leadership effectiveness, human capital performance, and sales training and coaching. He also been invited to keynote at many major associations in America and speak at West Point Military Academy on leadership.   Jeff is publisher of Professional Performance 360 Magazine and with Hugh Ballou is co-publisher of Nonprofit Professional Performance 360 Magazine.

Somethings Who is Dr. Jeffrey(Jeff) Magee Author, Leadership & Marketing Strategist, Performance Achievement Coach, Speaker, Human Capital Developer: PhD Organizational Psychology, CSP, CMC, PDM He has been called one of today’s leading “Leadership & Marketing Strategists.” Jeff is the Author of more than 20 books, two college text books, four best sellers, and is the Publisher of PERFORMANCE/P360 Magazine (www.ProfessionalPerformanceMagazine.com), former Co-Host of the national business entrepreneur program on Catalyst Business Radio (http://www.catalystbusinessradio.com/index.php), and Human Capital Developer for more than twenty years withwww.JeffreyMagee.com.. TO BOOK JEFF - Jeff can be scheduled for your next Conference, Convention, Retreat, and Consulting or for an On-Site high impact results driven development program by contacting: DrJeffSpeaks@aol.com

2 pm Central, 3 pm Eastern: "Positive Impact Radio," host Carol Wachniak Join Carol every week, to talk to people who are making a Positive Impact in the world! Building strategically stronger and tactically sharper leaders who are better prepared to win the contentious battles of business.Co Host Jim Egerton CEO - Business on the Board  Dr. Jeff Magee: 'Shift Happens' -- How To Make The 1 Degree Calibrations That Assure Your Success http://www.forbes.com/sites/cherylsnappconner/2014/01/05/dr-jeff-magee-shift-happens-how-to-make-the-1-degree-calibrations-that-assure-your-success/#6fea4191254d  

Monday 2 pm Central, 3 pm Eastern: "Positive Impact Radio," host Carol Wachniak   Today, Magee is the author of the nationally syndicated “Leadership” column, serves as the publisher of Professional Performance Magazine/PERFORMANCE360. Jeff is the author of more than 20 leadership, performance, that have been transcribed into multiple languages including four best-sellers. In fact, his text, Yield Management has been a #1 selling graduate management school textbook with CRC Press, while The Sales Training Handbook by McGraw-Hill . While his newest books it!, Performance Execution are currently best-sellers as well, and Your Trajectory Code released January 2015 by John Wiley,The Managerial-Leadership Bible his fourth college text book released also in 2015 by PEARSON EDUCATION, the world’s largest academic text book publisher is changing how people look at human capital development and engagement! His signature managerial-leadership engagement development series THE LEADERSHIP ACADEMY OF EXCELLENCE® is utilized by many of the Fortune 100 firms, the ARMY National Guard, Federal Reserve and Farm Credit Banks, as well as Entrepreneurial business owners today in the areas of managerial-leadership effectiveness, human capital performance and talent development management, and sales training and coaching. spoken atWest Point Military Academy on leadership. Magee was commissioned to work with theU.S. Army National Guard. For this he received the prestigious Commander’s Coin of Excellence.

Michael D. Butler Book Publisher at BEYONDPUBLISHING.co and Author Launch Expert at BookSellingSystem.com building the World’s Fastest Growing Community of Authors and Book Launch Experts on Facebook. Michael D. Butler has been called a Book Launch Expert and his clients have been seen on Fox News, CNN, Dr. Phil, Fox Business, Inc 500, Garnered 2 Movie Deals, Dallas Morning News, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle and many more “We help authors, speakers and entrepreneurs sell more books Online so they can charge more for speaking and consulting,” says Butler. Michael has delivered a thousand keynotes and seminars speaking topics include: I'm on Amazon Now What?; Creating and Leveraging Best Seller Status; and Author Marketing Best-Seller Strategies. He’s conducted interviews with or shared the stage with Brian Tracy, Governor Mary Fallin, Senator Orrin Hatch, Jill Lublin, Fox Business Contibutor- Judy Hoberman, Berny Dohrmann, Billy Joe Daughtery, Eric Lofholm, Cindy W. Morrison, Dr. Jeff Magee, Kenneth E. Hagin, Colleen J Payne, Lisa DeMayo, Olympian Jake Dalton, Mia Davies, Devin D. Thorpe and many more. Michael believes that communication is the key ingredient to any and all successful ventures. As a young boy, he was teased and bullied because of a stutter. He knows how difficult it is to know what you want to say, but don't have the tools or the means to deliver it. Michael harnessed the power of creativity through a strong devotion to success and hasn't looked back since. Well, that's really not fair... if you know Michael then you know he wouldn't turn his back on anyone, but you know what I'm getting at. Butler’s clients have been featured on: Fox News, CNN, Dr. Phil, Fox Business, Inc 500, Garnered 2 Movie Deals, Dallas Morning News, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle and many more. “We help authors, speakers and entrepreneurs sell more books Online so they can charge more for speaking and consulting,” says Butler. Michael D. Butler - The Interview As with any interview, I felt the nerves prior to interviewing Michael because I really wanted to do a good job. I was little nervous because of who he is and what he's accomplished. Any nerves or unease quickly faded away from the moment I started talking with Mr. Butler. While we had touched bases in the past here and there, I never had the chance to really talk with him. I am so glad he accepted my invitation. Not only did he deliver in a big way, he offered some amazing insight into the world of book publishing and marketing. Successful people tend to surround themselves with other successful people and that does hold true for Michael, but he also embraces people entering this market without the stories of success...yet. During the call, he offered to provide a 20-Minute FREE consultation to talk with Michael D. Butler himself. Not someone from his staff, but anyone who took the time to listen to this episode of the Stop Riding the Pine show, gets full access to Michael to ask any questions you want. I HIGHLY recommend taking advantage of this - all you have to do is send him an email to CEO@MichaelDButler.com and mention you heard Michael on the Stop Riding the Pine podcast show. We covered several topics, but one of the topics in particular was extraordinary and fascinating. He was involved in helping bring to market a book written about human trafficking. He worked with author Pamala Kennedy, a distant relative to the Kennedy family, to both publish and market her book. Due to the success of her book, in large part due to Micheal's efforts, Mrs. Kennedy was offered a movie deal. Here's an interview Mr. Butler gave on Fox News about human trafficking: What's Next for Michael? Michael Sr. has a lot of things coming down the pipe most of which are still secrets; however, I did manage to get him to talk about one event coming up. He is real excited about the distribution of Europe, Australia and South America.