Podcasts about jm it

About Our Guest: A seasoned entrepreneur and visionary leader, JM Ryerson has successfully sold three businesses and brings over two decades of experience to the table. As the co-founder and CEO of Let's Go Win, JM is dedicated to uplifting leadership and transforming team dynamics. He's also an international speaker, the voice of the "Let's Go Win" podcast, and the author of the best-selling book Let's Go Win: The Keys To Living Your Best Life. Committed to helping leaders embrace authenticity and effectiveness, JM currently resides in Boca Raton, Florida with his family, ready to equip you with the tools to conquer self-doubt. Episode Summary: This episode is powered by The Move to Millions Live After Party When I was a little girl, my inquisitive nature got me in a lot of trouble. Well, let's say that it created lots of moment for me to “get somewhere and sit down.”  As an entrepreneur with goals and dreams of hitting your next level, there will be times on the journey where deep moments of reflection will be required to REST – reflect, evaluate, surrender and trust.  The importance of resting is what will give you the courage, confidence and consistency to win at your next level. Any entrepreneur who's been in the game for a while will tell you that “winning” is less about what happens externally and completely about the shifts you learn, leverage and lead from internally. In just 15 minutes a day, you can position yourself to BE the version of yourself that welcomes everything you desire. In this powerful episode, my guest, JM Ryerson offers us a recipe for performing at your peak by taking the time to sit, reflect, express gratitude and deepen our connection to ourselves and our Creator. Following a very impact filled Move to Millions Live 2024, this conversation will be right on time for attendees, and it will set those joining us for our After Party on a trajectory to get proximate to millions. Positioned at the intersection of introspection and transformation, JM shares invaluable insights from his personal journey of struggle and triumph, offering a roadmap for those aiming to break generational curses and redefine their financial destinies. As you tune in, brace yourself for a paradigm shift. So, if you're ready to sit with yourself so that you discover who God created you to be and get the power to walk into it, grab your pen and Move to Millions Podcast Notebook and listen in to discover: The morning routine that truly changes the game Why attempting to pour from an empty cup is a recipe for disaster The significance of self-care How to stop being a public success and a private mess And so much more   Powerful Quotes from The Episode: “What you're grateful for expands.” JM Take care of your mind, body and soul before you do anything else.” JM “My why is clear.” JM “Relationships are better when they are simple.” JM “I sat with myself. How can you heal if you don't?” JM "Gratitude and openness to life's challenges determine our journey through tough times." JM "It's a conscious choice to be grateful, even in the face of adversity." JM "Feed your mind, move your body, and nurture your soul daily." JM "Simplicity, clarity, and self-improvement pave the road to success." JM Move to Millions Wisdom Questions: Book: Man's Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl Favorite Quote: “Whether you think you can or can't you're right.” Henry Ford Tool JM Swears By: Breath Work, Journal, Meditation   How to Connect with JM Ryerson: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/letsgowin365 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/letsgowin365 Website: https://www.letsgowin.com Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jm-ryerson   Incredible One Enterprises, LLC is not responsible for the content and information delivered during the podcast interview by any guest. As always, we suggest that you conduct your own due diligence regarding any proclamations by podcast guests.  Incredible One Enterprises, LLC is providing the podcast for informational purposes only.   Want more of Darnyelle? Partner With Us To Scale Your Company Join the Move to Millions Facebook Group   Social Media Links: http://www.instagram.com/darnyellejerveyharmon http://www.facebook.com/darnyellejerveyharmon http://www.twitter.com/darnyellejervey http://www.linkedin.com/in/darnyellejerveyharmon Subscribe to the Move to Millions Podcast: Listen on iTunes Listen on Google Play Listen on Stitcher Listen on iHeartRadio Listen on Pandora   Leave us a review Are you subscribed to my podcast? If you're not, I want to encourage you to do that today. I don't want you to miss an episode. I'm adding a bunch of bonus episodes to the mix and if you're not subscribed there's a good chance you'll miss out on those. Now if you're feeling extra loving, I would be really grateful if you left me a review over on iTunes, too. Those reviews help other people find my podcast and they're also fun for me to go in and read. Just click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” and let me know what your favorite part of the podcast is. Thank you!

Olivia Fuller: Hi, and welcome to Book Club, a Sales Enablement Pro podcast. I’m Olivia Fuller. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. In the post-pandemic business landscape with volatile economies, meeting customer expectations is increasingly complex and difficult for businesses to get right. This means that it’s more important than ever for business leaders to collaborate and operate with a growth mindset across the entire customer journey to achieve sustainable success. In her book Marketing For Dummies, Jeanette McMurtry talks about the critical role that marketing strategy plays in ensuring long-term success and how marketing, sales, and enablement can partner together to move businesses forward. I’m so excited to have Jeanette here to tell us a little bit more about her book. With that, Jeanette, I’d love for you to introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little bit more about your back. Jeanette McMurtry: Thank you. I’m really excited to be here and I’m quite honored for the invitation. A little bit about me, I’ve been a marketing consultant and a staff CMO on and off for many years, and I’ve really focused on helping brands create what I call psychological relevance. For years, I was able to travel the world and talk about the power of personalization. What I mean by personalization is seeing your name in the graphics, the copy of the direct mail letter is all about you, it’s not about some generic event. It’s all about your transactions and history with the given brand. Well, at some point, that became a commodity. I clearly decided I need to find a way to take personalization to a higher level so I started studying psychology to learn how to take personalization to the level of the human psyche and I really pondered and studied the psychology of choice. Why do we do what we do and why do we not do what we don’t do? Why do we choose one brand over another? It was the most fascinating thing I ever could have done for my career and for my approach to marketing, which has been very successful, by adding those elements. I studied Young, Freud, and Kahneman, all the psychologists from back then to the current day to really learn about what makes us think the way we think and then behave and purchase the way we do. I started applying these concepts to marketing campaigns for brands across different industries and I saw the results of the campaigns with psychological relevance beat those that did not have psychological relevance by 500 to 600% for revenue generated and response. That’s unheard of, so as a result, I have developed what I call psychology-based marketing, and I am very fortunate that I’ve had the opportunity to write books about this whole new concept in my discoveries along the way of how to apply psychology and how to create brands around psychological relevance. OF: That is fantastic and I’m so glad that you brought that up. Your approach is backed by psychology and backed by science. That’s something that really stood out to me even just from the introduction. In your book, you said that marketing is part science, part art, and part technology. I’d love to hear a little bit more about that. You mentioned the psychological aspect, but can you share a little bit more about the role that each of those parts plays in marketing, especially in the modern business world? JM: We’ll start with science. Science covers a lot of different things. It covers not just psychology, which I’ve just mentioned, but the psychology of science is really critical if you want to tap into consumer behavior and you really want to make a difference in building relationships and relevance for your brand. It’s also about the data. If you don’t have good data about your customers, about your market, about their behavior, about their transactions, about their personas, all the different things that data models help marketers understand so they can be extremely relevant with their marketing, you can’t succeed. You have to have a good data program. You have to have a good CRM system. You have to have commitment, and this is where sales and marketing, and sales enablement have to work together. There has to be a commitment to update those data fields. I have worked with so many brands that have Salesforce and HubSpot and other programs and they aren’t even coming close to optimizing the power of that science because nobody fills out the customer data fields. You have to monitor your conversations. You have to document their needs, their transactions, their disconnects, and their connections so that you can segment them accordingly and model your data and your marketing program. Art, art I would say is the most fun and exciting part of business, and why I love being in the marketing side of business because art is your creativity. It’s your imagination. It’s coming up with the iconology that’s relevant to the personas that you’re marketing to every generation, every customer segment, every person has a different way of looking at the world. Apple has an incredible job with their iconology and the way they’ve created impressions to simply just graphics. For a long time, their ads were simply just graphics, a silhouette of someone with an iPod, which iPod doesn’t even exist anymore, but you have seen a transition in their marketing that really is simply based on graphics and art and a lot of imagination. When brands can come up with the kind of art, they create a persona that creates an immediate pill, we tend to go towards people that are just like us. That’s where art comes in technology. We are so blessed to work at a time when marketing technology is so powerful. Technology is the fuel and the vehicle that gets us to the means that we need to get to. Technology changes every 10 minutes, if even faster. When I wrote Marketing for Dummies in 2017, the 5th Edition, there was a certain set of technologies that I focused on. When I wrote Marketing for Dummies 2022, much of the technology that I was writing about was not even invented for the 2017 version. In fact, a lot of the technology wasn’t even thought of, and this book has been out since December. It’s not really that long ago and there’s still new technology that we’re talking about in marketing circles that wasn’t even thought of when I wrote that book. That’s how fast technology changes. Marketing and sales teams, and anyone responsible for sales enablement especially, have got to understand the technology and which technology exists for what outcomes in order to drive those communications and relationships and experiences are so critical to success today. OF: That is fantastic. Technology evolves so quickly, I would love to just compare even what you talk about in the different editions of this book because I mean in five years it will change so drastically. Even companies that have a hallmark piece of technology, you mentioned, for example, an iPod that could be obsolete in another five years. It is so crazy to think about how that does really impact everything that marketers have to think about and also how sales enablement has to work very closely with marketing to keep the sales field on its toes. That’s fantastic. JM: I want to build on something you just said to keep the sales team on their toes. One thing that brands have to be really careful of, just because the technology exists doesn’t necessarily mean you should use it because it’s extremely expensive. The marketing stack is not cheap and a lot of CMOs are saying now, wow, I wasted so much money by trying to integrate everything as it came out. We don’t have time to keep up with it. As anyone is building their marketing technology, it’s important to focus on what you know. You can use what you know, you can discover how to master, and your team will execute regularly and consistently so you can get ROI. Just wanted to throw that in there. OF: Absolutely. Not just adopting technology for the sake of the technology, but really being thoughtful about the stack and what will actually unlock that productivity. In the book you cover both the fundamental marketing and sales strategies that can work in any economy, and also some things to consider in the post-pandemic world, which again, is something that has changed since 2017 and what we were all thinking about to 2022 and 2023. What are some of those foundational elements that are important for an effective marketing strategy regardless of the economy? JM: It’s actually one major element that you have to focus on, and that is a growth mindset. I don’t know how many people are familiar with Carol Dwyer. A few years ago she wrote a book called The Mindset, the Psychology to Success, and there she talks about a growth mindset and how important that is to succeed in any economy across any industry and for any brand. A few years after this, Harvard Business did a research study to discover how companies with growth mindsets come out of recessions or bad economic times versus those that don’t. It’s human nature when you see the storm coming to batter up the windows and hunker down. When you do that, you’re really setting your company up to fail. In an economy, you can’t hunker down. You have to brave the storm, eyes wide open, and go after it. You have to decide right now and do this before this storm arises. Of the companies that weathered these last few recessions that Harvard Business studied, only 9% came out ahead of their revenue status after the recessions were over. They compared three different recessions and only 9% did succeed, 17% failed altogether, and 80% of those companies they studied either came out of the recession below their revenue status or right at break even. They lost quite a bit of money and opportunity. What was the difference in that 9% that came out? They did lay staff off. Now, this is a really important thing to think about because we are watching more and more companies lay people off at record speeds that I’ve never seen before in my lifetime, and a lot of it’s the marketing team. They’re not laying staff off, which means they’re keeping morale. Employees that are not living in fear of being next. They’re producing, they’re innovating, they’re using their imagination. They’re confident, they’re excited to move forward. The other thing they did is they stayed committed to marketing. It’s amazing to me when companies get scared, the first thing they do is cut the marketing staff. Really now think about, okay, so while your competition continues to do marketing programs and build brand awareness and build relationships, you’re becoming invisible. What’s the sense in that? Those are the 80% of the companies that either came out of the recession less profitable than they were before, or they failed 17% of companies failing in bad economic times. That’s a pretty big number. Nobody wants to be of that mindset, yet you see the majority of companies today following the hunker-down mindset versus the growth mindset. It’s a fascinating study, and the case study that Harvard puts together is Office Depot versus Staples. I don’t know about your market, but Office Depot has closed every business, every building within a 60-mile radius of me. Staples is thriving because it took the growth mindset during the really hard times and invested in people, invested in marketing, and created customer experiences that created loyalty for good times and bad times. OF: That is some fantastic research and, really great points there. I love what you said about the difference between the hunker-down mindset and the growth mindset and in particular, maybe where some choices can be made in business that really do set the leaders and the people that are able to achieve that sustainable long-term success to the businesses that maybe won’t be able to weather the storm. Thank you for sharing that. I’m curious to learn, today in particular, what are some of the biggest changes that sales and marketing teams are experiencing in the current economic landscape, and what’s your advice for how companies can overcome some of those challenges? JM: Same thing. Focus on the growth mindset, but there’s another element of the growth mindset. It’s really important for marketers to think about, and that is moving from a USP to an ESP. You are not going to grow your business if you continue to promote a unique selling proposition because guess what? Nothing really is unique. If you do come up with something unique, It’s pretty much repetitive or duplicative within a minute by a bigger company you might compete with. Technology allows companies to narrow those gaps really quickly and copy anybody’s really good idea, so that is not going to make you sustainably competitive for very long, yet people are always trying to say there’s something unique about it. Well, first of all, nothing is unique about customer service because anybody can improve their customer service within a minute. You know, just, hey, tell your staff, give customers whatever they want, no questions asked. That doesn’t take a lot of time to make that change. That’s nothing, and everybody I know thinks that’s what sets them apart. First of all, let the customer decide if that’s what sets you apart, and if you ask them, you get into market research, which is covered in depth in chapter five of my book is a lot of different research technologies to find out what customers really think about you and your category. When companies do customer research, they often find out that they’re not really as good at that customer service advantage as they think they are, so they can’t focus on that. What you can focus on to weathering any storm, and even if it’s not about economic time, this should be your primary focus, and that is to move from a USP to an ESP. I don’t mean extrasensory, psychic voodoo kind of stuff, I mean emotional selling proposition. Everything we do is emotional. Going back to Harvard Research, there’s a former professor named Gerald Zaltman, and he did a lot of research on how consumers think, and that’s actually the name of this most popular book. In there he talks about his research that shows 90% of what we do is driven by our unconscious mind. That means we are driven by our emotions more than we are rational research that we might do about the best price, the best deal of the best quality. Those factors are thrown out by the unconscious mind, and we go towards brands and people and organizations that make us feel really good. They make us feel like we are invincible. We get those dopamine rushes that make us feel like we can conquer the world, or we get oxytocin that makes us feel like we’re belonging, we’re loved, connected, or valued. When those things happen, price, service, and convenience don’t matter. Brands need to look at the emotional fulfillment that they provide. Do you provide security? Do you help people relieve their fear of making a bad decision or help them get beyond FOMO, the fear of missing out? Do you help them create a sense of belonging through social proof? What are the emotions that you’re creating consciously and unconsciously? Once you create an emotional bond through ESP marketing, that bond is really hard for a competitor to break, and they’re most likely, if you keep it up through sales enablement and account-based marketing kinds of strategies and execution, if you keep those emotions strong and those bonds growing, no one’s gonna take that customer away from you for price or even convenience and that’s proven. A lot of research shows that. OF: That is so interesting. I love what you said also you can’t differentiate on customer service because it’s really about if your customers view your service as exceptional as well. Kind of along those lines in making sure that you’re staying on top of those preferences and the needs of your buyers, I’m curious what your advice is for how marketing leaders can stay on top of those changes, or at the very least, just understand what the preferences of their buyers are? JM: Going back to what I was mentioning about customer research, a lot of people think, oh, research is really expensive and no one is going to fill out my surveys anymore. Well, guess what? Going back to technology, there are a lot of ways to stay on top of your consumer’s attitudes and their thoughts about your brand, and there are a lot of affordable ways to do this. There’s really no excuse for not keeping in touch with your consumer’s attitudes and perceptions of your brand. If you don’t, then you’re gonna be in that bucket that I mentioned earlier of the brands that think they have great customer service, but their customers don’t agree with that. There’s a lot of research that shows that what brands think about their role in customers’ lives is very different from what customers think. If you’re one of those, it’s going to be really hard to succeed. So what are some of the customer research tools we can do? Well there’s no excuse for not asking the big famous NPS question, and that is the question for the net promoter score; how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague? That is a loaded question because it really is telling a brand if they’d be loyal to you because if you’re not gonna be loyal to a brand, you’re not going to recommend it to a friend because if you’re embarrassed by the quality of the experience your friend has, it makes you look bad. You’re putting skin in the game when you recommend anything to someone you care about. If you set someone up to lose money or have a bad experience, you will feel responsible for setting someone up for a bad experience at some level, and nobody wants to be in that situation. That helps really define loyalty at a very deeply emotional level. There are a lot of programs you can go on. SAT Metrics is the one who created that survey. You can download the survey platform, put it in an email, or you can put it on your website and you can collect data and you can see the different categories within that question that help you realize how committed your customers are to you and how and how likely they are to be loyal. There are also social listening tools. You can go out there and find programs, you can purchase them like a SaaS model to help you listen to the collective voice of consumers that you’re targeting. What are some of the things that persona or that generation or that customer segment, what are saying on social media? What kind of comments are being made on Instagram or TikTok or any of the platforms they use socially about a brand or category? If you use the right SaaS platform, you can even get down to hearing what individuals are saying about you on their social media pages and you can pinpoint one unhappy customer and you can mitigate that risk by reaching out to your sales enablement teams to solve the problem and give them what they’re looking for and what they need so they don’t continue to say bad things about your brand, but also so they’re more loyal. There are a lot of things you can do. You can do a one-minute quiz or a one-question survey on your website. You can do longer surveys with SurveyMonkey. It’s still a very good tool to use, but there are endless opportunities for survey tools and if you want to get even more current local community data, you can tag a survey onto a radio station in your community or a newspaper. You can pay a little bit of money and they’ll throw your question into a survey that they’re already doing and they’ll ask people that you would not normally be able to reach. They are also platforms that you can tap into that aren’t just like your local radio and TV stations or newspaper, but they’re huge platforms. They have a database of thousands of people willing to answer surveys in a given category, and you just send them your questions, ask their panels and get you back the data. There are so many ways to find out, but not doing any kind of research is setting yourself up to really be challenged to keep up with competition and keep up with trends, and as we’ve already discussed, things are changing very quickly in consumer markets and attitudes because of technology their expectations of brands are changing too. If you’re not talking to consumers and learning on a regular basis constantly, you’re going to fall behind once you’re behind. It’s really hard to catch up. OF: Absolutely. Thank you for sharing also those no-cost, low-cost models as well that you can use for customer research that’s very tangible and actionable for our audience. From your perspective, what role can enablement teams play in helping marketing teams effectively navigate changes in the market? JM: Sales and marketing need to work together hand in hand. They need to be really one unified team. The traditional business model is you have a VP of sales and a VP of marketing, and so you have these different silos that sometimes don’t like to work together because they like their independence, but if that’s how they operate you cannot succeed. They have to work together because you have to have a unified strategy for customer experience. One of the things that I discussed in great detail in the 6th edition of Marketing for Dummies is a customer touchpoint journey. Both marketing and sales enablement needs to understand the decision criteria, the decision processes, and the decision journeys that your target customers are taking to get to yes. This happens in retail. It happens in B2B. This is especially important in B2B because those complex decisions have a lot of repercussions for the people making those decisions. There’s usually a lot more at stake than buying a $5 widget at a store. What are the criteria that they are looking for to help them make wise, informed, and confident decisions that will help them further their career path and not look bad to their superiors if something goes wrong with the software system they’ve got? You need to understand that. Marketing needs to understand that and create messaging appeals to make them feel comfortable in engaging with your brand to learn more because again, you have that emotional relevance and the psychological relevance that you can fulfill the outcomes that they’re looking to fulfill physically, tangibly, and emotionally. Sales enablement needs to know how to carry those leads that marketing generates through the touchpoint journey by providing content that’s relevant for each step of their decision process checklist to help them know they’re making wise, informed decisions, and tell them objectively what they should be looking for in products. You can’t be a commercial appeal. These need to be touchpoint journeys with educational value and create a sense of partnership. Then, of course, what are the touchpoints for conversations and for meetings? What does a sales meeting look like? How is that first sales conversation built upon the promises that marketing is making? How is that pitch deck? How is that proposal? They all have to be built upon the same premises and promises that are being made at the beginning of a brand relationship because if you’re making promises in marketing or creating a sense of emotion that has not executed every level of that journey from introduction to the closing pattern to conversion, you become an inauthentic brand that nobody can trust and they don’t believe your marketing, so next time you have a great offer or a great promotion to get out there to the public, they’re going to move on to the next competitor because you burned that bridge. It’s really important that those departments work together on that journey from promises to deliverables. OF: Absolutely. I love that you described that as a journey. Something that you wrote in your book is that building a marketing strategy is really a journey with a specific destination in mind. I’m curious to learn maybe a little bit more about the advice that you would give to marketers and enablers to first identify that destination that aligns with core business objectives, and then measure progress toward that destination. JM: The destination of every single marketing event that you execute, whether it be a campaign or an event, your customer experiences, or your sales journeys needs to have one destination in mind. I don’t care what industry you’re in, and that destination needs to be a lifetime value. No company can afford to start over every three or six months, or even every year in building a profitable revenue stream through new customers. If that’s how you operate, you are not going to be in business very long. The only businesses that can succeed across any industry, B2B or B2C, are those that are able to retain their customers through the things we’ve been talking about and capture their loyalty. Loyalty is in different forms. Loyalty is always going to buy my product when you’re going to need it so I can count on those repeat purchases, but I also need to recount on referrals from you. If you have three referrals from every customer you have, think about your business growth. That’s a free sales team. You’re not paying commission and you’re not paying payroll, you’re not paying benefits to your customers that are bringing you three to five customers. That goes back to the MPS score. Ask that question, find out how likely they are to recommend, and then give them reasons and incentives to recommend other purchasers. Lifetime value is probably one of the most important things that somebody can learn how to calculate, so you need to take the time to calculate it for your industry, and for your business. What’s the life cycle of your clients? If you’re in a business where you’re likely to keep someone for 10 years or five years, figure that one out, and then you have to figure out how to take the elements and characteristics of your most loyal customers. Append that to your data models, by going back to the science we talked about earlier, and make sure you’re going after new customers that look a lot like your loyal customers. That cycle becomes a very successful approach, but again, if you’re looking at a destination for a short sales quota or just to meet the quarter’s revenue that you’re under pressure to meet, that’s not sustainable. You’re not going to be able to do that for very long and your competition that’s focusing on loyalty, they’re going to take ahead. There’s another thing to think about too. A lot of companies have contracts and when you get a client signed in the contract, I spent a lot of time in the SaaS and software world, so that’s how I think, you get those clients lined up in contracts for three to five years. That’s really something to think about because if you’re letting your competition get those customers or getting those prospects, they’re going to have the market locked up for three to five years. That’s why the customer experience is so important. When you set your destination for lifetime value, you have to understand the customer experience and the ESP that you’re going to deliver from every aspect of the marketing campaigns to the sales enablement execution, to closing and account management through ABM. If all those elements don’t come together, you’re never gonna get to that destination. OF: That is fantastic advice. Well, Jeanette, thank you so much for sharing all of this expertise with our audience. I learned so much from this conversation and I’m so excited for our listeners to hear this. So thank you again for taking the time. JM: Thank you. It’s an absolute honor to be here today and talk about my books. I feel very honored to have a voice and to be able to share some of my experiences throughout my career to help people be successful no matter what business they’re in. So thank you, Olivia. I really enjoyed our conversation today. OF: To our audience, we absolutely recommend picking up a copy of Marketing for Dummies. We will include a link to that in the transcript. Thank you so much for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro, and if there’s something you’d like to share or a topic that you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Olivia Fuller: Hi, and welcome to Book Club, a Sales Enablement Pro podcast. I’m Olivia Fuller. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. In the post-pandemic business landscape with volatile economies, meeting customer expectations is increasingly complex and difficult for businesses to get right. This means that it’s more important than ever for business leaders to collaborate and operate with a growth mindset across the entire customer journey to achieve sustainable success. In her book Marketing For Dummies, Jeanette McMurtry talks about the critical role that marketing strategy plays in ensuring long-term success and how marketing, sales, and enablement can partner together to move businesses forward. I’m so excited to have Jeanette here to tell us a little bit more about her book. With that, Jeanette, I’d love for you to introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little bit more about your back. Jeanette McMurtry: Thank you. I’m really excited to be here and I’m quite honored for the invitation. A little bit about me, I’ve been a marketing consultant and a staff CMO on and off for many years, and I’ve really focused on helping brands create what I call psychological relevance. For years, I was able to travel the world and talk about the power of personalization. What I mean by personalization is seeing your name in the graphics, the copy of the direct mail letter is all about you, it’s not about some generic event. It’s all about your transactions and history with the given brand. Well, at some point, that became a commodity. I clearly decided I need to find a way to take personalization to a higher level so I started studying psychology to learn how to take personalization to the level of the human psyche and I really pondered and studied the psychology of choice. Why do we do what we do and why do we not do what we don’t do? Why do we choose one brand over another? It was the most fascinating thing I ever could have done for my career and for my approach to marketing, which has been very successful, by adding those elements. I studied Young, Freud, and Kahneman, all the psychologists from back then to the current day to really learn about what makes us think the way we think and then behave and purchase the way we do. I started applying these concepts to marketing campaigns for brands across different industries and I saw the results of the campaigns with psychological relevance beat those that did not have psychological relevance by 500 to 600% for revenue generated and response. That’s unheard of, so as a result, I have developed what I call psychology-based marketing, and I am very fortunate that I’ve had the opportunity to write books about this whole new concept in my discoveries along the way of how to apply psychology and how to create brands around psychological relevance. OF: That is fantastic and I’m so glad that you brought that up. Your approach is backed by psychology and backed by science. That’s something that really stood out to me even just from the introduction. In your book, you said that marketing is part science, part art, and part technology. I’d love to hear a little bit more about that. You mentioned the psychological aspect, but can you share a little bit more about the role that each of those parts plays in marketing, especially in the modern business world? JM: We’ll start with science. Science covers a lot of different things. It covers not just psychology, which I’ve just mentioned, but the psychology of science is really critical if you want to tap into consumer behavior and you really want to make a difference in building relationships and relevance for your brand. It’s also about the data. If you don’t have good data about your customers, about your market, about their behavior, about their transactions, about their personas, all the different things that data models help marketers understand so they can be extremely relevant with their marketing, you can’t succeed. You have to have a good data program. You have to have a good CRM system. You have to have commitment, and this is where sales and marketing, and sales enablement have to work together. There has to be a commitment to update those data fields. I have worked with so many brands that have Salesforce and HubSpot and other programs and they aren’t even coming close to optimizing the power of that science because nobody fills out the customer data fields. You have to monitor your conversations. You have to document their needs, their transactions, their disconnects, and their connections so that you can segment them accordingly and model your data and your marketing program. Art, art I would say is the most fun and exciting part of business, and why I love being in the marketing side of business because art is your creativity. It’s your imagination. It’s coming up with the iconology that’s relevant to the personas that you’re marketing to every generation, every customer segment, every person has a different way of looking at the world. Apple has an incredible job with their iconology and the way they’ve created impressions to simply just graphics. For a long time, their ads were simply just graphics, a silhouette of someone with an iPod, which iPod doesn’t even exist anymore, but you have seen a transition in their marketing that really is simply based on graphics and art and a lot of imagination. When brands can come up with the kind of art, they create a persona that creates an immediate pill, we tend to go towards people that are just like us. That’s where art comes in technology. We are so blessed to work at a time when marketing technology is so powerful. Technology is the fuel and the vehicle that gets us to the means that we need to get to. Technology changes every 10 minutes, if even faster. When I wrote Marketing for Dummies in 2017, the 5th Edition, there was a certain set of technologies that I focused on. When I wrote Marketing for Dummies 2022, much of the technology that I was writing about was not even invented for the 2017 version. In fact, a lot of the technology wasn’t even thought of, and this book has been out since December. It’s not really that long ago and there’s still new technology that we’re talking about in marketing circles that wasn’t even thought of when I wrote that book. That’s how fast technology changes. Marketing and sales teams, and anyone responsible for sales enablement especially, have got to understand the technology and which technology exists for what outcomes in order to drive those communications and relationships and experiences are so critical to success today. OF: That is fantastic. Technology evolves so quickly, I would love to just compare even what you talk about in the different editions of this book because I mean in five years it will change so drastically. Even companies that have a hallmark piece of technology, you mentioned, for example, an iPod that could be obsolete in another five years. It is so crazy to think about how that does really impact everything that marketers have to think about and also how sales enablement has to work very closely with marketing to keep the sales field on its toes. That’s fantastic. JM: I want to build on something you just said to keep the sales team on their toes. One thing that brands have to be really careful of, just because the technology exists doesn’t necessarily mean you should use it because it’s extremely expensive. The marketing stack is not cheap and a lot of CMOs are saying now, wow, I wasted so much money by trying to integrate everything as it came out. We don’t have time to keep up with it. As anyone is building their marketing technology, it’s important to focus on what you know. You can use what you know, you can discover how to master, and your team will execute regularly and consistently so you can get ROI. Just wanted to throw that in there. OF: Absolutely. Not just adopting technology for the sake of the technology, but really being thoughtful about the stack and what will actually unlock that productivity. In the book you cover both the fundamental marketing and sales strategies that can work in any economy, and also some things to consider in the post-pandemic world, which again, is something that has changed since 2017 and what we were all thinking about to 2022 and 2023. What are some of those foundational elements that are important for an effective marketing strategy regardless of the economy? JM: It’s actually one major element that you have to focus on, and that is a growth mindset. I don’t know how many people are familiar with Carol Dwyer. A few years ago she wrote a book called The Mindset, the Psychology to Success, and there she talks about a growth mindset and how important that is to succeed in any economy across any industry and for any brand. A few years after this, Harvard Business did a research study to discover how companies with growth mindsets come out of recessions or bad economic times versus those that don’t. It’s human nature when you see the storm coming to batter up the windows and hunker down. When you do that, you’re really setting your company up to fail. In an economy, you can’t hunker down. You have to brave the storm, eyes wide open, and go after it. You have to decide right now and do this before this storm arises. Of the companies that weathered these last few recessions that Harvard Business studied, only 9% came out ahead of their revenue status after the recessions were over. They compared three different recessions and only 9% did succeed, 17% failed altogether, and 80% of those companies they studied either came out of the recession below their revenue status or right at break even. They lost quite a bit of money and opportunity. What was the difference in that 9% that came out? They did lay staff off. Now, this is a really important thing to think about because we are watching more and more companies lay people off at record speeds that I’ve never seen before in my lifetime, and a lot of it’s the marketing team. They’re not laying staff off, which means they’re keeping morale. Employees that are not living in fear of being next. They’re producing, they’re innovating, they’re using their imagination. They’re confident, they’re excited to move forward. The other thing they did is they stayed committed to marketing. It’s amazing to me when companies get scared, the first thing they do is cut the marketing staff. Really now think about, okay, so while your competition continues to do marketing programs and build brand awareness and build relationships, you’re becoming invisible. What’s the sense in that? Those are the 80% of the companies that either came out of the recession less profitable than they were before, or they failed 17% of companies failing in bad economic times. That’s a pretty big number. Nobody wants to be of that mindset, yet you see the majority of companies today following the hunker-down mindset versus the growth mindset. It’s a fascinating study, and the case study that Harvard puts together is Office Depot versus Staples. I don’t know about your market, but Office Depot has closed every business, every building within a 60-mile radius of me. Staples is thriving because it took the growth mindset during the really hard times and invested in people, invested in marketing, and created customer experiences that created loyalty for good times and bad times. OF: That is some fantastic research and, really great points there. I love what you said about the difference between the hunker-down mindset and the growth mindset and in particular, maybe where some choices can be made in business that really do set the leaders and the people that are able to achieve that sustainable long-term success to the businesses that maybe won’t be able to weather the storm. Thank you for sharing that. I’m curious to learn, today in particular, what are some of the biggest changes that sales and marketing teams are experiencing in the current economic landscape, and what’s your advice for how companies can overcome some of those challenges? JM: Same thing. Focus on the growth mindset, but there’s another element of the growth mindset. It’s really important for marketers to think about, and that is moving from a USP to an ESP. You are not going to grow your business if you continue to promote a unique selling proposition because guess what? Nothing really is unique. If you do come up with something unique, It’s pretty much repetitive or duplicative within a minute by a bigger company you might compete with. Technology allows companies to narrow those gaps really quickly and copy anybody’s really good idea, so that is not going to make you sustainably competitive for very long, yet people are always trying to say there’s something unique about it. Well, first of all, nothing is unique about customer service because anybody can improve their customer service within a minute. You know, just, hey, tell your staff, give customers whatever they want, no questions asked. That doesn’t take a lot of time to make that change. That’s nothing, and everybody I know thinks that’s what sets them apart. First of all, let the customer decide if that’s what sets you apart, and if you ask them, you get into market research, which is covered in depth in chapter five of my book is a lot of different research technologies to find out what customers really think about you and your category. When companies do customer research, they often find out that they’re not really as good at that customer service advantage as they think they are, so they can’t focus on that. What you can focus on to weathering any storm, and even if it’s not about economic time, this should be your primary focus, and that is to move from a USP to an ESP. I don’t mean extrasensory, psychic voodoo kind of stuff, I mean emotional selling proposition. Everything we do is emotional. Going back to Harvard Research, there’s a former professor named Gerald Zaltman, and he did a lot of research on how consumers think, and that’s actually the name of this most popular book. In there he talks about his research that shows 90% of what we do is driven by our unconscious mind. That means we are driven by our emotions more than we are rational research that we might do about the best price, the best deal of the best quality. Those factors are thrown out by the unconscious mind, and we go towards brands and people and organizations that make us feel really good. They make us feel like we are invincible. We get those dopamine rushes that make us feel like we can conquer the world, or we get oxytocin that makes us feel like we’re belonging, we’re loved, connected, or valued. When those things happen, price, service, and convenience don’t matter. Brands need to look at the emotional fulfillment that they provide. Do you provide security? Do you help people relieve their fear of making a bad decision or help them get beyond FOMO, the fear of missing out? Do you help them create a sense of belonging through social proof? What are the emotions that you’re creating consciously and unconsciously? Once you create an emotional bond through ESP marketing, that bond is really hard for a competitor to break, and they’re most likely, if you keep it up through sales enablement and account-based marketing kinds of strategies and execution, if you keep those emotions strong and those bonds growing, no one’s gonna take that customer away from you for price or even convenience and that’s proven. A lot of research shows that. OF: That is so interesting. I love what you said also you can’t differentiate on customer service because it’s really about if your customers view your service as exceptional as well. Kind of along those lines in making sure that you’re staying on top of those preferences and the needs of your buyers, I’m curious what your advice is for how marketing leaders can stay on top of those changes, or at the very least, just understand what the preferences of their buyers are? JM: Going back to what I was mentioning about customer research, a lot of people think, oh, research is really expensive and no one is going to fill out my surveys anymore. Well, guess what? Going back to technology, there are a lot of ways to stay on top of your consumer’s attitudes and their thoughts about your brand, and there are a lot of affordable ways to do this. There’s really no excuse for not keeping in touch with your consumer’s attitudes and perceptions of your brand. If you don’t, then you’re gonna be in that bucket that I mentioned earlier of the brands that think they have great customer service, but their customers don’t agree with that. There’s a lot of research that shows that what brands think about their role in customers’ lives is very different from what customers think. If you’re one of those, it’s going to be really hard to succeed. So what are some of the customer research tools we can do? Well there’s no excuse for not asking the big famous NPS question, and that is the question for the net promoter score; how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague? That is a loaded question because it really is telling a brand if they’d be loyal to you because if you’re not gonna be loyal to a brand, you’re not going to recommend it to a friend because if you’re embarrassed by the quality of the experience your friend has, it makes you look bad. You’re putting skin in the game when you recommend anything to someone you care about. If you set someone up to lose money or have a bad experience, you will feel responsible for setting someone up for a bad experience at some level, and nobody wants to be in that situation. That helps really define loyalty at a very deeply emotional level. There are a lot of programs you can go on. SAT Metrics is the one who created that survey. You can download the survey platform, put it in an email, or you can put it on your website and you can collect data and you can see the different categories within that question that help you realize how committed your customers are to you and how and how likely they are to be loyal. There are also social listening tools. You can go out there and find programs, you can purchase them like a SaaS model to help you listen to the collective voice of consumers that you’re targeting. What are some of the things that persona or that generation or that customer segment, what are saying on social media? What kind of comments are being made on Instagram or TikTok or any of the platforms they use socially about a brand or category? If you use the right SaaS platform, you can even get down to hearing what individuals are saying about you on their social media pages and you can pinpoint one unhappy customer and you can mitigate that risk by reaching out to your sales enablement teams to solve the problem and give them what they’re looking for and what they need so they don’t continue to say bad things about your brand, but also so they’re more loyal. There are a lot of things you can do. You can do a one-minute quiz or a one-question survey on your website. You can do longer surveys with SurveyMonkey. It’s still a very good tool to use, but there are endless opportunities for survey tools and if you want to get even more current local community data, you can tag a survey onto a radio station in your community or a newspaper. You can pay a little bit of money and they’ll throw your question into a survey that they’re already doing and they’ll ask people that you would not normally be able to reach. They are also platforms that you can tap into that aren’t just like your local radio and TV stations or newspaper, but they’re huge platforms. They have a database of thousands of people willing to answer surveys in a given category, and you just send them your questions, ask their panels and get you back the data. There are so many ways to find out, but not doing any kind of research is setting yourself up to really be challenged to keep up with competition and keep up with trends, and as we’ve already discussed, things are changing very quickly in consumer markets and attitudes because of technology their expectations of brands are changing too. If you’re not talking to consumers and learning on a regular basis constantly, you’re going to fall behind once you’re behind. It’s really hard to catch up. OF: Absolutely. Thank you for sharing also those no-cost, low-cost models as well that you can use for customer research that’s very tangible and actionable for our audience. From your perspective, what role can enablement teams play in helping marketing teams effectively navigate changes in the market? JM: Sales and marketing need to work together hand in hand. They need to be really one unified team. The traditional business model is you have a VP of sales and a VP of marketing, and so you have these different silos that sometimes don’t like to work together because they like their independence, but if that’s how they operate you cannot succeed. They have to work together because you have to have a unified strategy for customer experience. One of the things that I discussed in great detail in the 6th edition of Marketing for Dummies is a customer touchpoint journey. Both marketing and sales enablement needs to understand the decision criteria, the decision processes, and the decision journeys that your target customers are taking to get to yes. This happens in retail. It happens in B2B. This is especially important in B2B because those complex decisions have a lot of repercussions for the people making those decisions. There’s usually a lot more at stake than buying a $5 widget at a store. What are the criteria that they are looking for to help them make wise, informed, and confident decisions that will help them further their career path and not look bad to their superiors if something goes wrong with the software system they’ve got? You need to understand that. Marketing needs to understand that and create messaging appeals to make them feel comfortable in engaging with your brand to learn more because again, you have that emotional relevance and the psychological relevance that you can fulfill the outcomes that they’re looking to fulfill physically, tangibly, and emotionally. Sales enablement needs to know how to carry those leads that marketing generates through the touchpoint journey by providing content that’s relevant for each step of their decision process checklist to help them know they’re making wise, informed decisions, and tell them objectively what they should be looking for in products. You can’t be a commercial appeal. These need to be touchpoint journeys with educational value and create a sense of partnership. Then, of course, what are the touchpoints for conversations and for meetings? What does a sales meeting look like? How is that first sales conversation built upon the promises that marketing is making? How is that pitch deck? How is that proposal? They all have to be built upon the same premises and promises that are being made at the beginning of a brand relationship because if you’re making promises in marketing or creating a sense of emotion that has not executed every level of that journey from introduction to the closing pattern to conversion, you become an inauthentic brand that nobody can trust and they don’t believe your marketing, so next time you have a great offer or a great promotion to get out there to the public, they’re going to move on to the next competitor because you burned that bridge. It’s really important that those departments work together on that journey from promises to deliverables. OF: Absolutely. I love that you described that as a journey. Something that you wrote in your book is that building a marketing strategy is really a journey with a specific destination in mind. I’m curious to learn maybe a little bit more about the advice that you would give to marketers and enablers to first identify that destination that aligns with core business objectives, and then measure progress toward that destination. JM: The destination of every single marketing event that you execute, whether it be a campaign or an event, your customer experiences, or your sales journeys needs to have one destination in mind. I don’t care what industry you’re in, and that destination needs to be a lifetime value. No company can afford to start over every three or six months, or even every year in building a profitable revenue stream through new customers. If that’s how you operate, you are not going to be in business very long. The only businesses that can succeed across any industry, B2B or B2C, are those that are able to retain their customers through the things we’ve been talking about and capture their loyalty. Loyalty is in different forms. Loyalty is always going to buy my product when you’re going to need it so I can count on those repeat purchases, but I also need to recount on referrals from you. If you have three referrals from every customer you have, think about your business growth. That’s a free sales team. You’re not paying commission and you’re not paying payroll, you’re not paying benefits to your customers that are bringing you three to five customers. That goes back to the MPS score. Ask that question, find out how likely they are to recommend, and then give them reasons and incentives to recommend other purchasers. Lifetime value is probably one of the most important things that somebody can learn how to calculate, so you need to take the time to calculate it for your industry, and for your business. What’s the life cycle of your clients? If you’re in a business where you’re likely to keep someone for 10 years or five years, figure that one out, and then you have to figure out how to take the elements and characteristics of your most loyal customers. Append that to your data models, by going back to the science we talked about earlier, and make sure you’re going after new customers that look a lot like your loyal customers. That cycle becomes a very successful approach, but again, if you’re looking at a destination for a short sales quota or just to meet the quarter’s revenue that you’re under pressure to meet, that’s not sustainable. You’re not going to be able to do that for very long and your competition that’s focusing on loyalty, they’re going to take ahead. There’s another thing to think about too. A lot of companies have contracts and when you get a client signed in the contract, I spent a lot of time in the SaaS and software world, so that’s how I think, you get those clients lined up in contracts for three to five years. That’s really something to think about because if you’re letting your competition get those customers or getting those prospects, they’re going to have the market locked up for three to five years. That’s why the customer experience is so important. When you set your destination for lifetime value, you have to understand the customer experience and the ESP that you’re going to deliver from every aspect of the marketing campaigns to the sales enablement execution, to closing and account management through ABM. If all those elements don’t come together, you’re never gonna get to that destination. OF: That is fantastic advice. Well, Jeanette, thank you so much for sharing all of this expertise with our audience. I learned so much from this conversation and I’m so excited for our listeners to hear this. So thank you again for taking the time. JM: Thank you. It’s an absolute honor to be here today and talk about my books. I feel very honored to have a voice and to be able to share some of my experiences throughout my career to help people be successful no matter what business they’re in. So thank you, Olivia. I really enjoyed our conversation today. OF: To our audience, we absolutely recommend picking up a copy of Marketing for Dummies. We will include a link to that in the transcript. Thank you so much for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro, and if there’s something you’d like to share or a topic that you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Author Dan Miller and I recently visited the Wright Brothers National Monument in North Carolina. These are the ten lessons we learned as we reflected on our experience. Persistence, experimentation and asking for help are key to success. Many give up because they fear failure and competition. It doesn't matter how old you are; you still have more inside of you. The Wright brothers did something no one had done, took a small break and then did it again. They didn't let off the gas. You don't know what progress will come after you break a barrier. Get the right people in your corner. Innovation is contagious and births more innovation. The sharing of ideas is a powerful thing. The Wright brothers always wore suites. They were who they were, no matter where they were. Once you accomplish one thing, you can ask what else you can do. Innovation will always be built upon. Everyone has limits, and the next generation takes it to the next level. I am always amazed at the lessons you can learn about life and leadership. Often, they are in plain site. We just have to have eyes to see them. Connect with Dan Website Podcast Connect with Jody: www.jodymaberry.com Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/sugarjmaberry LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jodymaberry/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/sugarjmaberry/ Quotes: “We made it here, what's next?” JM “It takes a lifetime to build a reputation. In an instant people ruin it.” DM

In this episode, you will hear the surprising press conference where Winnipeg Mayoral candidate Jenny Motkaluk broadsided rival Glen Murray over his undisclosed unfinished business with Elections Canada. Murray did not meet the deadline for filing expense and donor documentation after his failed 2020 try at the federal Green Party helm; Motkaluk discovered the province-hopping career politician is in breach of the Canada Elections Act requirements for transparency by campaigns. She's asked the Elections Commissioner to investigate. Our coverage and analysis is the most complete reporting of this stunning revelation you will find in Winnipeg media. 1.55 Motkaluk tells the media her campaign learned required filings were not on the Elections Canada website and that EC confirmed that Glan Murray had not filed mandatory declarations originally due April 6, 2021 JM: "Full compliance with all election laws is expected of every candidate for office in this country" 4.45 Marty sorts out details about Murray's failure to follow the election rules and sets up the media scrum 6.30 The first 3 media questions played include Marty first asking why voters should care about this issue; two other questions got more details of possible explanations for why the filing is 16 months overdue JM: "It calls into question his integrity and whether or not he thinks the rules apply to him" 8.30 Marty recaps Motkaluk's answers and adds that it's now known a 2 month extension had been granted, then explains what Bartley Kives of CBC asks in the next audio clip from the scrum 1130 Two more questions from Kives and Motkaluk's reply about her campaign and plan to set out policy initiatives 13.00 Marty learned that yet another Green leadership candidate is in breach alongside Murray. He reviews the explanation Heather Mack gave CBC of why she couldn't file the returns for Murray: "She inferred some mysterious volunteer vapourized the records and there was no back-up? - who knew??" He analyzes how Murray blew past the extension by 13 months before entering the Mayoral race, and by not going to court to seek a further extension Murray kept his offence hidden. Also, why did EC not prosecute these Green leadership also-rans? 21.50 A listener heard the previous interview with Bev Pike of the South Osborne Residents Group and lamented the treatment of citizens standing up against City Hall. "It sure doesn't seem like anyone has the balls to try and make a change", he wrote. Listen to how Jenny Motkaluk responded to that comment, and explain why she supports Winnipeg residents who are scared to risk personal attacks if they stand up for their principles - citing the reaction of haters earlier this summer to her defence of celebrating Canada Day: JM: "Being a north end girl, I don't take to bullies and I'm not afraid of people calling me names." 23.38 Marty wraps up by noting Motkaluk will meet with Bev Pike on Wednesday to follow-up on the complaints we aired on the podcast; this is proof we make a difference and can get candidates to engage with our audience to earn their votes. Please -- Support our independent reporting today - Email Martygoldlive@gmail.com Donate via PayPal www.paypal.me/MartyGoldMedia * More election interviews coming soon! *

Sean: Our next question is from Erika. I want to resign from my current job to focus on my career, but my fear of failure is stopping me from doing so. What should I do? JM: It's very important for you to recognize why you're having that fear of failure. With your current job right now, do you want to resign because you really want to move forward and grow? Or do you want to resign because there are some things that you can't deal with in terms of your current job right now? So those are my questions for you because I think that's very important for you to recognize first why you want to resign from your job. Okay? Because whatever it is that is hindering you or is leaving you that fear of failure, wherever you go, whether you're going to stay in your current job or focus on a new career, that will really affect you and your performance. So make sure that you take some time first and think about what are the things that are giving you that fear of failure. So deal with that first, and then after that, think about whether you need to resign from your current job. Because right now it's also very hard to get a new job. So unless you have a new job that will really take care of your financial needs, then I think that's also a go, but otherwise, really think about it. Okay? Sean: Well, if you want to resign on to your current job to focus on your career, first, you have to know there are people relying on you and you are also relying on that job. Can you really afford to lose that job? Because if you can't, that's going to create financial problems. Were you able to build on your emergency fund, which is six months to a year worth of your salary? If you're able to do that, then you can take it a step further and finally think about that career you want to jump into. How big of an opportunity is that really going to be for you? If the opportunity is bigger than what you're doing now in your current job, then it is worth considering transferring to wherever it is that you want to go to. I don't think the fear of failure should stop you. Life is about taking risks. You know, when you're in your job, when you have a job, you're just outsourcing the risk to your boss. But your boss still holds your risk. Why? Because if the business fails, if your boss feels the business goes down, you will be affected as well. You're also going to lose that job. So where is your security really held? Where is your success really held? Why are we so afraid of failing? Life is about risks. So it's all about assessing if the opportunity is greater. And can I really afford to lose my job right now to shift into that opportunity? Those are going to be the questions that I'm going to be asking myself if I was faced with the same question. And if the answer is yes, the opportunity is great, I'm quite sure that it's going to be really good for me, and I am secure, I have my emergency fund settled in, it's not going to be a huge risk for me, then I am going to make the shift. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/leadershipstack Join our community and ask questions here: from.sean.si/discord Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leadershipstack

What does it mean to be woke? Has the word problematic become problematic? Lexicon Valley’s John McWhorter talks to Amna Khalid about the fraught vocabulary of modern censorship. * FULL TRANSCRIPT *AMNA KHALID: From Booksmart Studios, this is Banished. And I’m Amna Khalid.NEWSCASTER: Republicans are always denouncing so-called “cancel culture.”BBC GUEST 1: I think that nobody should lose their job because of what they believe in. I think that’s the issue—BBC GUEST 2: —but that’s what “cancel culture” is!POLITICIAN: “Cancel culture” is eroding the very foundation of who we are as an American people.NEWSCASTER 1: He’s woke.NEWSCASTER 2: I’m woke.NEWSCASTER 3: Now you’re woke but you’re like me woke!NEWSCASTER 2: I’m woke to the woke.FOX NEWS GUEST: So we’re woke, and we have to say woke.NEWSCASTER: Wait, so we’re both woke? You and I are both woke?FOX NEWS GUEST: Yeah, I think we’re woke!NEWSCASTER: Who’s the woker of the two, would you say?AK: “Woke” and “cancel culture” are now two terms that are now so much a part of our consciousness, that it feels like they’ve been around forever. But the reality is that they exploded only a few years ago. Like many of our most fraught cultural terms, they evolved over time, jumping from one community to another, shifting slightly in meaning or nuance. Along the way, they get weaponized, fall in and out of favor and even get canceled themselves — in other words, they are linguistically fascinating.Who better to dig into the lexicon of Banished, than John McWhorter, the host of Lexicon Valley here on Booksmart Studios, and an esteemed professor of linguistics at Columbia University. If you’ve never heard his show, it’s an endlessly entertaining deep-dive into everything that makes language so enthralling. I started our conversation by asking him about the word woke, which I first heard in hip-hop lyrics. JOHN McWHORTER: Well, woke actually goes back further than many people would think. It's actually first documented in the early 60s and it was a Black slang. What it meant was politically aware of certain realities that operate largely below the surface, but have a determinative effect on, for example, the Black American condition. And so you might think, if you were you or me, that woke is about 10 years old. But actually people were saying it on the Black street long before that. It did not leave the Black street. Then, in roughly the 2000-teens, it jumped the rails and started being used by a certain kind of politically aware white person on the left. And what it meant at first in the general culture was somebody who understands certain basic leftist analysises of the world. What it really was, was a substitute for a term that had worn out. It replaced politically correct, which, if you're just old enough now, you can remember was used without irony back in the late 70s and early 80s. And what it meant was that you have a basic understanding of liberal/leftist realities. Then it became PC. PCstarted being used as a slur to ridicule the kind of person who used that kind of ideology as a bludgeon in a smug kind of way. And so you couldn't say politically correct without making somebody laugh by, say, 2010. Really, you couldn't do it by about 1990. And so woke replaced that. As recently as 2018, I was on a TV show—STEPHEN COLBERT (crowd cheering): My next guest tonight is a professor at Columbia University, who hosts one of my favorite podcasts.JM: —talking about how woke was taking on a certain pejorative flavor.JM ON COLBERT: When I learned it, it was still just the coolest thing: You are woke to the complexities of society and how injustice really happens. It was cool — it smelled like, roughly, marijuana and lavender. It was that kind of word. And about two seconds later, a certain kind of person started sneering: Oh, is that person woke?People from a certain side of the political spectrum are throwing at other people the idea being that you’re a smug person who thinks that your views are the ones that come from on high. That has happened during the time, roughly, that a certain person has become president, and about six months before that. I’ve found it fascinating. Woke will be all but unusable in ten years.JM: Now, I would say that it has it. It's 2021, woke is now a word that is very much in quotation marks. Nobody would use woke in common parlance to mean that you understand the politics of Ta-Nahisi Coates. Now woke is used to make fun of people of a certain kind of leftist political persuasion who are beyond reasonable address. And so what's happened is that it has become a pejorative word, which happens to words all over the language, all over languages all the time. And so random example, reduce. Reduce used to mean to lead back to, and it could lead back to something good, something bad, something large, something small. You could reduce something to its former glory 500 years ago. That meant just take it back. Now, you could also reduce something to its former misery. It's the misery meaning that ended up taking over, that pejorative meaning. That happens a lot in language, more than what's called amelioration for reasons that we need not get into. But words tend to putrefy, essentially, and that is what happened with woke very quickly in this decade and the last one, partly because the internet makes these things come around and go around faster.AK: If I'm hearing this right, you're saying woke was part of the Black vernacular and it had a particular political valence which has been taken over and turned around, and now it's become a derogatory term almost to call someone woke.JM: Exactly.AK: Nobody would say I am woke as a matter of pride. Do you see a movement to reclaim it as a positive?JM: I can imagine doing kind of linguistic science fiction and writing about the reclaiming of the word, because that does happen with slurs. There's an example that I could give that I don't even need to. We all know. So pretend I talked about that for five minutes — but the term woke, I don't see that happening. For example, you didn't see people saying, yes, I'm a PC and I'm proud of it. People ran away from it and created something new. In 2021, it's too early to say what the new term is going to be, but I can guarantee you that by 2030 there'll be something else which starts meaning something very specific. It may emerge from Black culture and it will be generalized to mean that you've got the proper The Nation politics. I don't think it's going to happen with woke, partly because it's so imprinted now as a way of making fun of somebody. It's just at the point where if somebody said Yes, I am woke, it sounds trivial, it sounds like you don't have your own ideas and you're just looking for something to put on a T-shirt. So I think what we need to do is start listening for what the new term is going to be. These things emerge spontaneously. Nobody's going to create it on Madison Avenue, but it will certainly happen.AK: Is there a particular moment you can point to when you think woke started taking on a pejorative valence? Was it a very purposeful appropriation by the right to discredit a particular kind of social justice awareness or social consciousness, or did it emerge out of an organic movement?JM: Of course, the right started making fun of wokeness, and to me that's 2017, 2018. Where woke became a joke, and that was an unintentional rhyme, was last summer when even people on the left started ridiculing a particular kind of person. Wokebecame a joke in roughly June 2020. It was in the wake of the protests about George Floyd, during the quarantine at its worst, when a lot of people had very little to do and were very angry about it. It tended to focus these sorts of things. So yeah, I think we've seen that transition just over about the past year and change that woke is now unusable outside of quotation marks, just like a word like perky. You can't really say perky, you can only say perky in quotes.AK: There are words that are used by the Black community, if I can use that for a moment and make it a monolith, to communicate in ways that remains separate from and distinct from the use of language by white people. Of course, there's a history to this. There's the history of enslaved people using particular language to communicate, words to communicate, so that their masters, quote unquote, could not understand what was being said. To what extent do you think the fact that woke will not be reclaimed is actually a continuation of that trend where words that come from the Black vernacular, become mainstream, like cool, then subsequently get dropped by the Black community that almost prides itself on coming up with a new term that is exclusive.JM: We're not always aware of how subconscious the use of language generally is, especially when you're talking about at the level of a community. It's one thing to say that Black English represents the creativity of Black people and that when a term gets worn out, Black people make up a new term. That doesn't actually refer to a process that's been observed among human beings. The truth is that these terms tend to emerge spontaneously based on probabilistic processes. It isn't that, say, the teens are making up new slang to confuse their parents. I'm going to give you a term: diglossia. Most people in the world have two levels that they speak on, the high and the low. In America, it can be hard to quite imagine that unless you think about Black people. We’re a very boring country linguistically in many ways. But Black people have the high, the standard, the low, quote unquote, although there's nothing low about it, which is Black English. If something jumps from the low to the high, it's not that Black people think, well, now we must create something new. It's that the word no longer feels L, low, and all language is eternally creative in its own right. You need terms for things. And so next thing you know, a new term will be spontaneously invented because the old one wore out or it stopped being part of the L. It stopped feeling like us. And it's usually below the radar. Nobody could know that these things were going to happen. And then you wake up and you have some white guy playing hacky sack and using the term woke, who knew? But that means that it's no longer the guy in Chicago living in a Black neighborhood who uses that. He's going to have some other word he's using after a while.AK: So talk to me about cancel. Where does the term cancel come from and how has the meaning of that changed over time?JM: Well, cancel culture is a really messy term because it starts with the idea that a celebrity who produces some sort of product, writings or performance, recorded performance, is in bad odor and therefore they're going to be canceled like a TV show. And so that person's work is no longer going to be seen. They're no longer going to get hired. I think that the paradigm example would be Bill Cosby. He was cancellable. You can't hire him. You're no longer going to show the sitcom. It's no longer going to stream. I was at a store around when he was cancelled where they were literally giving away DVDs of the TV show for free. And I thought, wow, yeah, he's been canceled. And so that takes care of that. But terms are always generalizing in some way. They're ameliorating. They are pejorating. Something's going to happen to almost any term that's worth its salt. So now cancel culture is not so much about eliminating somebody from the public presence as just deciding that they are no longer fit for polite society, that we don't like them anymore. And so it's not that these people are going to go away. Our technology makes it so that it's pretty hard to cancel anybody completely anyway, but it just means that that person is a persona non grata, they are ostracized. So I think these days we're at this intermediate stage where somebody is determined as non grata, and spontaneously people say we're not trying to cancel you. And the question is, if they're not trying to cancel you, what are they doing? Because the cancelling no longer means that you don't exist. I'm not going to get specific, but about a year ago, it happened to me. I was canceled by a certain august body for, you know, reasons that people can guess. And I was told by the very nice person, we're not cancelling you. Well, of course not. You know, I've got all these writings out there, and it's not like I'm not going to be able to go to conferences and things like that. What I was subjected to was being told that I am unsavory in a very public way. That's the cancellation. So it no longer means what it means. But that's true of so much of language. Nobody’s being cancelled, but it just means that you are having a scarlet letter put upon you.AK: How is it different from censorship or censoring someone?JM: It's not. It's the same thing. Cancel culture is just a more vivid term. Censorship, you think more of the printed page. It doesn't sound as societal. So we say cancel culture because that sounds one, newer; two, meaner; three, less specific than censorship. I would call them different terms for the exact same thing.AK: So I’d push back over here a little bit and to my ear and from the way it's being used, I think about censorship as something that is associated — and I'm getting into the politics of these words now — it's associated with something that the right does.JM: Mm-hmm.AK: Whereas cancel culture is seen as something that is a product of this wokeperformative way of saying I adhere to certain social justice values. Am I correct in kind of thinking about it in this way? People ask me what Banished is about. They immediately assume it's about cancel culture and it is. But to my mind, I always jump in, then say and censorship, because it's not just about the kinds of eliminations that are coming from this left side of the spectrum. I'm interested in things that are being cut out left, right and center.JM: You're quite right. I hadn't thought about that. The person on the left who's accused of censorship is insulted. They feel like they're being accused of something that they're used to hurling at the other side. They often don't realize they're doing the same thing or they think that it's OK if the left does it because the left is right, correct basically. Yes, cancel culture is censorship from the left. Talk about subconscious. I never thought about this, and yet I've been using it in that way for a year.AK: Another term that I grew up in graduate school using quite regularly and without thinking of it as a “problem” is the term problematic. In fact, one of the ways in which you recognized someone was a graduate student over lunch was when they said I'd like to problematize that. So this is another term that has kind of migrated from a different area or different field into mainstream conversation and has come to mean something again politically. When did you first encounter the word, let's start there? And then when did you start noticing that it's beginning to take on a different meaning?JM: Problematic to me is exactly what you said. It's a graduate student in 1993 drinking their latte and talking about something that probably wouldn't interest most people who are not academics. It's the aughts where problematic becomes something someone's doing that the educated person is supposed to morally disapprove of. It seems to me that there's a certain euphemism in the word problematic, because what it usually is is a prelude to something being racist or sexist or fat shaming or something like that. But you start out calling it problematic with the implication that it's difficult, it's tricky, that you have to break something down — avoiding coming right out and being what used to be called a knee jerk liberal. Instead of just yelling it's racist, it’s sexist, I don't like it, you say, well, actually, it's kind of problematic because. I don't know who that person is, but I do, actually. And then, you know, the racism and the sexism is coming. Problematic now means blasphemous. Problematic means that you have sinned, that you're a heretic, that you should not have any Chardonnay and brie. But nobody wants to come right out and say that. We're too sophisticated to call people heretics. And so now often the way you call somebody a heretic is to say isn't he problematic? — that means that he's a witch.AK: OK, so now we're getting into really interesting territory where I'm beginning to think of the word blasphemy. I come from a country where blasphemy means what it literally means and has always meant and has consequences. Over here, blasphemy has taken on a different meaning. It's a way of ostracizing someone from any community and what the rules are specific to that community. What does that word mean today?JM: Well, to the extent that you have a certain kind of hyper woke person who has a religion, it's no longer an Abrahamic religion. It's not Christianity, it's not Judaism, it's not Islam. It's Electism. They have a sense that certain people are not to be tolerated for the same reason that a Christian or someone else would ban the heretic. That is what they call problematic, but really it's blasphemy. Today's blasphemy is not about God. Nobody thinks of it is taking the Lord's name in vain to say, oh, my God, anymore. That was old school blasphemy. But now I find the Middle Ages much easier to understand than I used to just, you know, going online and watching what happens to nice people all the time. That is today's blasphemy. I would almost teach a child blasphemy based on the sort of things that happened to Donald McNeil, Alison Roman, etc., as opposed to Galileo.AK: You've coined the term “the Elect” and we just referred to it. Who are you referring to as the Elect and how exactly are you, are you using that phrase?JM: The Elect is a term that I used to refer to a certain kind of person who has hard leftist views about the way things are supposed to go and feels that being mean to people is justifiable in the name of making the world safe for those views. And so it's not the woke, it's not the hyper woke, it's woke people who are mean, who are The Elect. It's the evangelical, prosecutorial woke. And so by The Elect, I mean the kinds of people who seek to get people fired, who support policies for Black people that hurt Black people but qualify as goodly because they are quote unquote anti-racist. For example, it is Elect to say if Black kids aren't good at standardized tests, then let's eliminate the test because it's racist rather than helping Black kids get better at tests, and that particular kind of thinking. The term is not original to me, but I find it very useful and I hope it settles in. The Elect.AK: I come from a society where freedom of expression is, doesn't exist. There are very strict parameters to what you can and cannot say.JM: You mean academia?AK (laughs): That is the society I inhabit now. That was good. I mean Pakistan. In fact, that's part of my disillusionment with academia. I didn't expect it, especially not in the West and not in the US where freedom of expression is supposedly enshrined in the Constitution. Censorship from the right is something that I'm familiar with. I can even understand those tendencies within the U.S. coming from a more authoritarian mindset, from the political right. To some degree I can get that. What I find troubling, deeply troubling, is that I'm finding that kind of censorship coming from the left. So, talk about cancel culture. And I've been playing around a lot with the notion of why this is the case. And I'm going to present to you a hypothesis and ask you to tell me what you think. After much contemplation, I thought, well, maybe it's a society that has had a lot of freedom, precisely because freedom of expression is enshrined as a constitutional right. When there is so much freedom, it must necessarily produce its own unfreedom to rail against. A concept cannot exist, similarly a practice cannot exist, if it doesn't have its antithesis or antichrist. I'm beginning to wrap my head around what I'm seeing happening, particularly in academia, as this is just freedom coming full circle.JM: Hm. I like that. I am inclined to think that there's something else involved and it's social media. I think if — it's impossible to imagine a world without it now — but if we really did go back to that time when there was just email and the whole world could not talk to itself, I think we wouldn't have this happening on the left because what it is, is a reign of terror. A lot of what goes on on the left in terms of these cancellations is based not on consensus, but on fear. People are really afraid of being called a dirty name. And so you don't speak against the minority of people who are coming over the hill with pitchforks. I think that has a lot to do with it. And what people are so afraid of really is being called a dirty thing on Twitter. It is mostly Twitter. It is mostly being called a racist. Nobody wants to be called a racist on Twitter, or Facebook or Instagram, but mostly Twitter. Fifteen years ago, if somebody didn't like something that I wrote or something that I said, they would write a letter and they would send it to my mailbox, or they would write an email to me. That's what people did, and you got used to it. Now that almost never happens. Almost nobody emails me and it's very easy to find my Columbia email. It barely ever happens because those same people, they feel the same way, they put it on Twitter where everybody can see it. That change happened in about 2012 and there's no going back from that. You can see that the impulse of a certain kind of person used to be: I wish I could tell the world that I hate this person, but instead I'm just going to send it to their email because that's the best I can do. That person now can write it in the sky and we're never going to be rid of that kind of person. So, yeah, you have a new era that started in the early 2000-teens.AK: OK, I'm going to turn the camera upon us as academics for a moment and say one of the problems that I have right now is the erosion of academic freedom on college campuses. And I think the people who are responsible for it at the end of the day are us. It's tenured professors. And I know you don't have tenure, but you're a person with enough authority.JM: Close enough.AK: Close enough, so forgive me for lumping you with us, but it's tenured professors who are not speaking up, both in terms of the excesses of the administration, which is increasingly bureaucratized and corporatized, and also in terms of the kind of wider trends of the adjunctification of the faculty itself, which is a deep threat to academic freedom. So I hold tenured academics responsible for that. And it's easy to bash social media for giving fillip to nasty trends. There are nasty people out there. There is a nastiness in all of us and perhaps we feel more comfortable airing it when we're not talking to someone face to face and we can put it out.JM: Exactly.AK: But there is also a niceness to all of us, or at least I desperately want to believe that, right? I really do, because if we don't, I feel like I begin to lose the will to live. What's the point, right? So why do we not use social media in a way that fights against the kind of natural tendencies that it brings out? To what degree can we repurpose that and fight cancel culture and fight this tendency to shut people up by actually reclaiming that space? Maybe we can't, but I'm interested in hearing what your thoughts are.JM: We have a moral duty as thinking people in this culture now. Fifty years ago, that duty was to understand that racism is not just calling dirty names, that sexism is not just calling dirty names, that you have to look inside of yourself. And I think practically everybody in this country learned how to do that through the 1970s to a degree that was stunning. And many people today would say that it wasn't important, but I think they either lack historical imagination or they're just not old enough to remember what things were like before. If you walked around in 1950 and talked to educated Americans about how they felt about women and how they felt about Black people, I think many people would be utterly stunned at the difference. Something happened between 1970 and 1980. Now, we have a similar thing that we need to do, which is to learn to not be so damned afraid of being called names on social media. A lot of people are clearly frightened to their socks of somebody saying something nasty to them and then being retweeted. And the truth is, it happens, it flares for a while and it goes away. And Twitter is not the world. Now, of course, some people feel that they don't want to risk their jobs, but I think for most people, it's just that they don't want to be called a dirty name and a dirty name today is you racist. And so they just hold back. And that means that the nasty guys in the schoolyard end up taking over. Even if you try to be nice on Twitter, there are some people — and they're not crazy, they're not trolls, they're not under a bridge; unfortunately, they're ordinary people who are probably very nice in real life — but people will be mean to you for being nice. You know, how dare you praise this? How dare you excuse that? That kind of person cannot be allowed to determine what Twitter is like, though. You just have to let them, you have to let them yell. And I really hope that part of the pendulum shift is that a critical mass of people will learn that you can be called a dirty name on social media, and you know the planet will keep spinning, your friends will keep liking you. It's hard to be yelled at. You get used to it. But I think we need to start learning how to get used to it more.AK: Where do you think the fear comes from? I understand the fear when it's coming from a threat to your livelihood.JM: Mm-hmm.AK: What is it? I'm trying to dig to the deep roots of what are we so bloody afraid of? I've been called many things in my life, sometimes been proud of the fact that I’ve been called many things in my life, which are not necessarily nice things. Being a — aterm that I absolutely detest, but I'll use at the moment — you know, a person of color, I say things that people don't expect a person of color to say. And so then I get labeled as someone who has false onsciousness or someone who's drunk the Kool-Aid and all kinds of things. What is it what is it that we're so scared of?JM: In a different world, you didn't want it to be said that you were godless. In this world, you don't want it to be said that you are a racist or that you are a sexist because that questions your very legitimacy as a human being. And I think you or me as people of color, we can say things about race and get called certain things. But there isn't as much of a sting, especially because, frankly, the charges are often so absurd. You know, like somebody telling me that I don't like myself. Frankly, yes, I do and everybody knows. You can tell. And I'm sure that you feel the same way. Whatever you're being called, it has nothing to do with you. But I will openly admit, I could not bear — and watch it happen now that I say this — I could not bear it getting around that I was a sexist. That's too much. If it got around that I had some sort of woman problem, that I didn't think women were men's equals, it would make me want to curl up in a corner and die. That would be more than I could risk, and I'm quite sure that I don't have that issue. But if somebody decided to start a campaign on Twitter and call me all sorts of things and distort things that I wrote, I would not be up for that. And so I can put myself in other people's place. They feel that way about race. They feel I just couldn't tolerate that. But, you know, if there were an epidemic of people being called sexist for no good reason, I would have to buck up, you know, if I had some skin in that game. And I think that's what has to happen with the racist charge within reason. You don't want to take advantage, but you can't let the people who spend their lives saying mean things on Twitter determine that entire forum because it could be used for such good. You're right. But everybody needs to get some, you see I want to say balls, but that's no good.THEME MUSIC UPAK: Well, I think this entire segment has to be edited out because otherwise you're going to be branded as sexist and we are going to have a campaign. And then you use the term balls, so you just gave …JM: Yeah, I’m, I’m gone.AK: You’re gone. (laughing)JM: Yeah.AK: Thank you John McWhorter for being with us today. This was a delightful conversation. It's always a pleasure to talk to you.JM: Thank you for having me Amna.AK: If you liked what you heard today, and want more exclusive content, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to Booksmart Studios. Subscribers get access to transcripts, extended interviews, and bonus segments.Before I sign off, I must remind you — I must implore you — to comment, rate, share what you've heard here today. And not just Banished, but the other Booksmart Studios shows like John McWhorter's Lexicon Valley and Bob Garfield’s Bully Pulpit. Both programs are stimulating and incisive in their analysis.So please share! The success of Booksmart, the impact of our work, depends as much on you as on us. Banished is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. I am Amna Khalid. So long. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Sean: Next question from LJ, how can a start up entrepreneur manage his or her cash flow? Cash flow is all about awareness. If you're aware that you're making more than you're spending, you have a positive cash flow. If you're aware that you're spending more than what you're making, you have a negative cash flow and we call that bleeding out. A business is likened to the human body. The managers or leaders, the C level executives, CEO, COO CFO, we call them the head. They are the heads of the company. The arms and legs are usually, these are the grassroots, team players. The heart would be the sales people. The mind would be the R&D or research and development. They're the brains. Why do we call the salespeople the heart? Because it's the one that pumps blood. Blood is cash flow. Whenever sales people make a sale, they inject positive cash flow in the business. And that's why we say if the cash flow is negative, meaning expenses are going to be greater than revenue, we say that the business is bleeding out. That's the term we use. And then we write it in the ledger with a red ballpen to, I don't know, make it look like blood or whatever. Right? So that's the analogy that we have for a business. You have to stop the bleeding because if it goes on, then what happens? It would die. The most important thing is having awareness. Are you positive or negative this month? If you're negative, how can you turn that to become positive? And I think the most important thing about managing a business is making sure you have positive cash flow month on month. JM: It's important that you really see it. So I think with someone who's just starting it, have an Excel sheet about everything. Right? The coming in and out of expenses. And you were saying awareness. So you won't be able to be aware of things unless you write them down or you record them. Sean: That is a very good answer. As simple as an Excel sheet, track it. Up to today, I actually use an Excel sheet. So that is one of the best answers about managing cash flow. Just use an Excel sheet, that works. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/leadershipstack Join our community and ask questions here: from.sean.si/discord Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leadershipstack

Sean: This is a very interesting question. This next one. And Erika asks, should my first business be a franchise? JM: It really entails a lot there for you to decide if your first business should be a franchise. You really need to study also if it's something that's going to benefit other people in terms of having it as a franchise. I'm not sure, Sean, because for me, I think there are a lot of elements that you need to research and study about it if your first business should be a franchise. Sean: For me, my opinion here is it would depend on your capital. If you have the capital to start a franchise and you want to learn the systems behind that franchise, I don't think you have any downside to that. The franchise says, do what they do and how they do it because they already kind of studied the system, the economy, the location, where you're going to be putting it up. They already have their hiring process, their logistics, making sure that the food and supply arrives in time, that it will not get easily spoiled or expire. So, if you want to learn how the franchises do it, maybe in hopes of starting your own business someday, I don't think there's a downside if you have the capital to pony up to buy a franchise. But if you don't, then you would have to start your own. That's really it. Also, I think there's an upside in starting your own business before you get into a franchise. And that is, knowing now what kind of franchise you want to be in, because you have more opinions about what kind of business you want to be in. I've known some entrepreneurs who started businesses which didn't actually fail, it's getting profits. But they found out, they weren't passionate about it. And then they realize what aspects of the business they weren't passionate about. For example, legal. They don't like doing that. Accounting, they don't like doing that. Sometimes it is hard to hear that you don't want to do accounting and you're a businessman, because that's your profit and loss statement. But not all people are passionate about accounting. I would say, I'm not passionate about accounting. My wife does our finances really well, and she knows the ins and outs. She's really good at it, so I let her do it. Looking at the financial sheet is not something that I like doing. I would rather close more deals, innovate about more products or services we can offer to the client, and spend more time with the clients we have. So again, it depends on if you would like to do that. You would find that out if you start your own business and then you would be able to choose a franchise better. So either way, works. It depends on where you are right now as an entrepreneur in life. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/leadershipstack Join our community and ask questions here: from.sean.si/discord Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leadershipstack

Sean: Tonight, we have a special guest, Miss JM, and I am very excited to answer your questions with her. Let me just put her on screen right now. There you go. Hi JM. How's your week, JM? JM: It's been hectic, but fun as well. Learning a lot of new stuff. What about you, Sean? Sean: Actually, this week was a pretty good week to start for me because we went to Batangas. Very refreshing vacation for me. For some reason I've been working like 12 to 16 hours for the past two months. And, oh man, it was taking a toll on me. I was grumpier and it was not good. It was not good. Like I was feeding my health going down. And I was on my way to get the flu. It was really bad. So that getaway did me a lot of good in the sense that I got to recharge, my body clock became normal. And yeah, it's time with family, which I really took for granted. Like I had a lot of time with my wife and my kids during that vacation. Although I still did a little bit of work, but I was consciously trying to avoid it. Yeah. So it was a very good vacation for me. JM: Thanks for sharing that. Sean: We need it. For some reason, this pandemic has taken off a lot of balance. I don't know if it's just me, but I feel like a lot of people feel that way. I saw some prominent speakers in other countries are, it's very timely, right? Because I'm also doing, I'm also running a project right now for a webinar. And the webinar is entitled, Grow and Balance Your Life. And then suddenly I see all of these speakers in other countries, also talking about balancing during the pandemic. So I feel like it might be a concern for a lot of people right now. Balancing. I don't know. How about you? What do you think about that? JM: Definitely. I think during this pandemic, that's very important because most of us were working from home. So it's really hard to have the right boundaries when it comes to work, family, and even having your own self-care. It's been really challenging for most people. So like you, Sean, I think I'm also in a season wherein I'm being reminded about the work life balance. And besides working, I also have to finish my studies and my graduation requirements. So that's taking a toll as well, like when it comes to my sleep. So it's important, you know, to all your followers and to your community, to be reminded about that. Especially nowadays that we really need to take time to be recharged. And to really, have that time, to really put in order the things that we need to prioritize. And have the right boundaries when it comes to your life and to your work as well. Sean: A hundred percent agree. You know, like there's a lot of time I find myself while working, I just like to switch between channels, waiting for someone to give me a problem to solve, which is super unhealthy by the way. Because that means I'm just completely attached and plugged in, my brain and my eyes are plugged in all the time. Even if I could take a break, I'm still not doing it. I'm just waiting for more work and, you know, to solve more problems. So that's something that I'm trying and at least I'm more aware of it. I'm more conscious of it. The first thing is awareness. If you're not aware you can't solve it. So that is super-duper important for me. JM: Actually, Sean, I have a check in on my journal as well. So I really see that I have categories there for spiritual, mental, emotional, financial, and then work as well. So if that will help some people who are listening right now, jot it down. And then make it a point to also check in every month where you are in this time and season and where you can also improve in the next days to come. Sean: That's really good. And then one of the tools that is also free out there for you guys to use is the Wheel of Life by Zig Ziglar. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/leadershipstack Join our community and ask questions here: from.sean.si/discord Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leadershipstack

JM Ryerson is a Mindset & Performance Coach that provides top level virtual and in person Coaching on Mindset, Performance, Leadership, Business, Team Building & Career Development. He believes in a work life balance, providing athletes, teams, sales executives and individuals the tools that lead to success at work, at home and in life! You and your team will gain skills, tools, strategies, and practices that can be used for many years to come. Let's Go Win together!! I hope you enjoy this conversation with JM Ryerson and as always, thanks so much for listening! Sincerely, Joe JM Ryerson Top Level Coach and Keynote Speaker for Athletes & Executives Website: https://letsgowin.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/letsgowin365/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/letsgowin365 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/letsgowin365/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/jm_ryerson Email: lisa@letsgowin.com JM's Books: Let's Go Win: The Keys to Living Your Best Life - https://amzn.to/3eX0N2s Champion's Daily Playbook: https://amzn.to/3bDzwQv Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.libsyn.com Subscribe, Rate & Review: I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to: https://joecostelloglobal.lybsyn.com Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joecostello Transcript Joe: Everybody, thanks so much for joining me once again. I'm so honored that you're listening to the podcast today. I have a special guest. His name is J.M. Ryerson, and I'm very excited to speak with him about all that he does in the field of mindset and coaching and various other things and his books. We're going to get to it also. J.M., welcome. JM: Hey, thanks for having me, Joe, appreciate it. How are you doing, brother? Joe: I'm doing great, man. I'm excited to talk with you, I have a bunch of sort of casual questions to ask up front. You have your own podcast. And I was able to listen to a couple episodes in preparation of this. And the intro to your podcast was awesome. Is that you in your in your radio voice? JM: No, I wish I could do that. No, Joe: That was. JM: It's not me that is a gentleman with a very deep voice and he I don't know where they found him, but I thought he did a pretty nice job. Joe: That is it is so cool, when I heard that, I was like, wow, that's amazing, he can actually change his voice that much to do those intros. It's like I'm jealous about it. It was really cool. And it was funny because I happened to listen to the one where it's you and your wife. And she actually said, you have a really great radio voice which what you do. But she didn't say too much about you being on TV, so I'm not JM: You know, I think that the same way you did, I'm Joe: Ok. JM: Like, I'll take that as a compliment, I guess. Joe: Right. OK, good. I was wondering I just want to make sure it's even another sort of personal casual question. How tall are you? JM: I'm six five. Joe: Man, in the pictures, you're obviously, you know, your kids are in it and then your wife, but it feels like you're towering two feet over everybody. JM: Well, being that my wife is five, too, and maybe it's Joe: Ok. JM: Not even use five three when I married her, but regardless, you know, do smaller Asian gal and I'm a tall white dude. So it just kind of Joe: Yeah. JM: She always jokes, if you see the family photo of her side, one of these doesn't belong to the other because I do stand out pretty Joe: Yes, JM: Significantly. Joe: Yes, absolutely. I was like, oh, my gosh, how tall is this guy? OK, I would like to go back to the beginning as far back as you want to go, because I like setting the stage for people that might not know you yet. I like to give them a foundation of who we're speaking to and how you got to do what you're doing today. And I think it's important because even the work that you do, it's helped those people to say, OK, what was the transformation from whatever he started doing to where he landed today? Because I think that's helpful for the listeners. Most of my listeners, I think, are really startups, entrepreneurs, people that are there trying to figure out what their passion, their bliss, their purpose on the earth is. And so it's nice to hear how people land, where they are and what took place before that. JM: Sure, I mean, if we're talking professionally, I once I graduated college, I moved right to California, which is I'm a kid from Montana that I never thought I would leave Montana. I love Montana. But somehow I landed in California, went to work and went to work for a great company. But it wasn't corporate America wasn't my gig. And I kind of knew that. I guess it took me three and a half years, but I got a lot of great experience. And so I was looking to do something else and I was very fortunate. I met who ended up being my business partner for many years, almost 15 years, and I didn't know it at the time, but just I jumped into financial services and I, after one year, decided to start a company with the gentleman that had hired me. And we had an amazing run. We built three companies together and I just kind of became entrepreneurs. What I enjoyed well, along the way, I made a ton of mistakes and I made all the mistakes that I didn't want my kids to make. And so I finally decided, you know, there's something here that I should probably I want to write a book about. And it's not about me. It was more about the authors I had read, my parents, my grandparents, the mentors I had had. And so I literally decided, you know what, let's write this book. JM: And so I went through this process of writing in the galley, working with me at the time said I didn't think of you as a selfish person. I said I didn't think I was selfish either. What are you talking about? She said, if you share this book with only two human beings. So my two boys, Trystan and Tradin if you share it with only these two human beings, you're selfish. OK, lesson learned. Won't do that. So it just kind of started on the path of, you know, let's let's talk about what let's go win is all about. And that went into the company, which went into a podcast which dove into more coaching. And so I don't know that I planned it all out this way. It just kind of happened. And I'm so blessed that it did because I get fulfilled every single day. And I guess the last thing I'd say to her is, let's go win. The whole idea is not wins and losses. It's quite literally setting you up to win. But that doesn't guarantee success means that, look, we're going to do our very best to put our best foot forward. But that doesn't mean we're going to win. That means we could fail on. I fail every single day. I'm great at it. I'm a great failure. I fail all the time. Joe: So am I, so my. JM: There you go, so and so that's but the whole idea is to set people up for the greatest, you know, so that they can succeed. And so that was the whole idea of the book. And it's just been kind of a whirlwind, but it's been beautiful. I've met so many amazing people. I work with so many great people. So it's just been awesome. And I've loved the journey. Joe: So I want to go back even further because I feel that, again, I'm going to I'm going to reference your size that I have a feeling you are in sports. And I also read a small clip somewhere about how you were and like I am. And like many entrepreneurs and people that have that a type personality or whatever, that were really hard on ourselves. So I have a feeling that you were really good in sports. You were super competitive and you were super hard on yourself at an early age. And so the piece that I read was you sort of giving yourself grace as you got older saying, I need to I need to lighten up on myself. I need to lighten up on my family. I need to lighten up on the people around me. And and so I want to hear more about what that was like. Again, I'm making this assumption, I assume that you were athletic at a young age. So can you tell me more about that and how that had that transformed to where you are today? JM: Yeah, it's a fair assumption, and if you were to ask my parents, neither of which were super athletic, I my mom, she doesn't have a competitive bone in her body. My dad did play some athletics, but kind of threw his shoulder out early. So they were never pushing myself or my brother or my sister. And all of us were very, very athletic, very competitive. My sister swam in college. I played basketball. So that was something that we always did. But growing up, we played every sport. Joe: Mm JM: I mean, Joe: Hmm. JM: I played basketball, football, baseball, swimming, soccer. I mean, you name a sport. If it had a ball, I probably was chasing it or something. But to your point, I'm being hard on myself. There was a moment I was 10 or 12, I can't remember. And I was going for the state record for swimming and not one state record. I was going for eight, which I think at the time no one had ever broken more than five. And for whatever reason, I just got it my head. I'm going to break eight state records. I can do it. I see the races. I can do this so much so that at the point that I was getting out after the sixth record I broke, I couldn't move. And and imagine my dad is watching this kid get out of the pool. He can't walk because he is so physically exhausted and dehydrated. And my dad said, why are you doing this? Please stop. And I told my dad I I'm doing it because I can. And so it was always interesting. My folks never pushed me that way. They've just loved they they they just, you know, supported as best they could and said, you know, whatever you're going to do, you're going to do. But I was I was always hard on myself. I always wanted to perform at my very best, whether I did or I didn't. JM: And so the greatest part of that, I don't think the competitive drive has gone away. What I've what I've really learned is I guess it would be a growth mindset versus fixed. It's like, look, I I'm going to compete. I'm going to give my very best. But that's where it ends. That's you know, I'm not going to judge myself harshly. The only way I would judge myself harshly is if I didn't put my best foot forward, if I didn't play completely full out. And I will say, looking back, I always did. I always gave 100 percent effort, but I was hard on myself if I didn't succeed. Now, if I give 100 percent, even win, lose or draw, it doesn't matter to me. I can rest on my laurels, knowing I gave everything that I had to give in that moment and it's OK. And so I guess that has been the progression or maturity or whatever you want to call it, because it has shifted. But yes, athletics has been it's still an integral part of of my my life because both my boys are very competitive in what they do and I love it. But I'm kind of taking the role like my parents. I just want them to try their very best. I want to support them. I want to love them, and I'm not going to put additional pressure on them. Joe: The cool thing is, is that you have this knowledge now to share, like each generation, they used to be like old school, right? It's like, you know, you felt a lot of pressure to do to do well. And I think the cool thing about how things are shifting is parents and people in general are becoming more loving and caring and they're not putting that pressure on their kids. At least I hope, you know, the people I talked to seem to be going in that direction. I'm sure there's still that that little league that out there JM: But Joe: Just. JM: There's a lot of them, and typically what I found, Joe and I am totally generalizing, but my wife and I talk about those that are really pushing their kids hard, typically are they're living their sports dreams through their child. Joe: Yeah, yeah. JM: And I think it's awful. It's look, if you played any such level, whether it's college or even some pros, you notice they're pretty laid back. You know, they're like, whatever, man, give your best. And one of the things that has been interesting, I will say being a mindset coach and I work with athletes professionally, there are times with my son who plays very competitive tennis and I am his mindset coach. But there are times where I have to remind myself I'm just dad. I just want to give him a hug and tell him I love him. And that's all that's all that needs to be said. I don't need to talk to him about his mindset. That's been an interesting thing to learn for myself even recently, because, again, yes, I'm a mindset coach. Yes, that's what I do for a living. But in his eyes, I am dad first and foremost the way it should be. And so sometimes I have to do remind myself to just love them. And it doesn't matter that they didn't perform their best, even if they didn't give their 100 percent effort. They want to be accepted and loved. And so that has been kind of an interesting journey. Joe: And I wonder if just your behavior there's a an unspoken thing that you do that's just helping them, but you're not having to work at it as a mindset coach. It's just them observing you in life and hearing things that you talk about. And they just absorb that because. Right. Kids, their minds at this age are super absorbent. So they're probably getting a lot just from being around you and you're not having to be that person forcing ideas and things on them. So it's interesting that just letting them watch you and see what happens. So, JM: Yeah, it's one heck of a social experiment, isn't it, being Joe: Yeah. JM: Trying to give your very best. But, you know, I had my my son's baseball coach say he is an absolute pleasure to coach. He's a good human being. And that at the end of the day, that's what I care about the most. If he ends up playing to whatever level, I don't really care. But if he's a good human in this world, that's what we're looking for. Joe: Yep, yep, so can we while we're on the subject of sports, can we talk a little bit about and you don't have to name names, you can name names. I don't care. It's up to you. But I want to know the progression of you. Are you out of financial services altogether at this point? Is this your main being a mindset coach and an author and a speaker? Is that your main focus at this point? JM: I am juggling both balls in the air right Joe: Ok. JM: Now, so it's interesting because the mindset coach I've done for so long, I just didn't have a label on it. And just because I was in financial services, Joe, you probably know a heck of a lot more. You know what, 90 percent of your listeners know more about financial services than I do Joe: Yes. JM: In 18 years of in the industry. It's just it was never my focus. So to answer your question directly, I do both, Joe: Yep. JM: Really. I'm doing what I've always done and that's build teams and work with them on performance, whether it's in sales or leadership. Joe: Ok, now you mentioned you hinted at the fact that you've worked with some athletes, so can you talk a little bit about that and how you you've worked with them in the past, the ones you might be working with now and anything that you can tell us about that? Because it's interesting to me. JM: I can't tell you names specifically just because a lot of Joe: Yep. JM: It's just confidentiality, but what I can tell you is golfers, for whatever reason I've been thrust into that world, maybe it's because I'm passionate about golf. I truly love golf. I love to watch it. I love to play it. I love the whole idea of you're out there on your own. And and truly, it is a test of the mind Joe: Mrs.. JM: As much as any sport out there. Tennis. My wife played in college. Like I told you, my boy plays competitively. So so far it's been more on the individual sports that people have been referred to me, and that's the ones that I've taken on. But you know, which is interesting because, yes, I grew up playing both, you know, individual and team sports, but I'm more attracted to team sports than I am individuals. And here's the crazy part. There is not a sport out there that truly is individual. What I mean by that, yes, when a tennis player goes out there, typically, unless he's playing doubles, he is all by himself Joe: Uh. JM: Or golfers, certainly by himself. But the team that surrounds them is why it's so intriguing to me. They have a golf swing coach, they have a dietician, they have a mental coach mindset coach. They have a physician. Maybe they have a chiropractor and they have all of this is a team that is helping put their best effort out onto that field or golf course. And so that's been kind of an interesting thing to realize is, yes, it's an individual sport, but there's a whole team of people behind them. Joe: Yeah, it was funny because I was sitting in a buddy of mine, I just went skiing in Utah this past weekend, spring skiing. I have been skiing in twenty five plus years. And I went with my oldest, oldest friend from elementary school, junior high, high school. And we ski start skiing together at seven. And he was going out alone. He's like, come come on out with me as I called. And I was literally nervous all three days because, you know, I'm getting up there and the last thing I want to do is break something. And it's a pretty steep mountain. We went to Snowbird in Utah. I did great. I'm still alive. I have all my limbs, everything's working. But we were just talking about all of that sort of stuff and oh, F1 team sports. So he's looking so he doesn't know anything about F1 and I know very little about F1. But I was like, I think, Larry, they're like 80 people behind that driver JM: The. Joe: And it's just like all of his own stuff. Like you talked about his own physical things and all the things and then diet and then all of the engineers and then all of the pit crew. And it's just like this monstrous team of the most expensive sport in the world. And he's like, do they make any money? And I'm like, it's all bragging rights. I don't think anybody makes any money in that sport. But that's an example is a super extreme example. I wanted to ask you about how things have changed now with the fact that I grew up as an entrepreneur, my father owned businesses, and then I got into the corporate world a little bit after college and the whole world was essentially going to these office spaces. Right. We were all working in these corporate buildings as teams that you could see touch here at any moment, jump up from your desk and go and do whatever. So when you're working with companies now, there's a huge shift that people are working remotely. So how has that changed your business and your style of of coaching these, let's say when we go to the team part of this, you know, in a corporation says, hey, Jim, come in, we want you to work with the sales team. We want them to be more cohesive. How have you been affected by cope with the remote people working? JM: I mean, everybody is lacking in the same thing, and that's connection, I don't care, it's just the world needs that. We need it badly. We need to get it back. And so, yes, the world has shifted in terms of people are working from home. Far more good news. You're spending less on overhead, which means you can reinvest in your business. Your top line, you know, looks even better because now you're not spending maybe so much. But I will tell you this, having that cohesive unit, having that culture that has not gone away. And so what I think people have really had to get more clear on is how are we going to provide that same environment, that same feel, the same clarity that we had, but working remotely. And that has been an interesting challenge because, again, you and I are sitting here on a Zoom beautiful thing about it. We probably weren't doing it this way. I wasn't going to see Joe's face prior to it. But most Joe: Ok. JM: Of the time, right before you're in Arizona, I'm in Florida and we can do it. So that is a form of connection. However, the real piece of people being able to connect, because every time there's a layer in front of us, a computer screen, something in the way we lose that heart to heart connection. So I don't have a great answer for that specifically because you can't really replicate being in the same room. If you and I were sitting together, it would be a different conversation to a degree. We'd be having a cup of coffee or a glass of wine or whatever we were doing celebrating this moment where now, yes, we get to celebrate. And yes, it is a form, but it's just different. So I think everybody is adjusting to that. And that's been something I get to facilitate a live event on Thursday and Friday of this week. And I can't wait because it's walking through the door. It's actually getting the the ability to hug someone and say, you know what, I deeply care about you. That physical connection piece, I don't think that's ever going to stop. So I think what companies are starting to do as the world opens up, as more vaccines happen, as people are more comfortable, they're starting to adjust and say, look, you can work on your own, but we're going to have gatherings. And you know what? We are going to value those gatherings far more than we did before. It's not just another quarterly meeting. It's not just some boardroom meeting. This is a form of connection. This is our bond. This is our tribe. And let's respect that time. So I think there is some beauty in what's happening in that regard. It's taken what we took for granted. And we're Joe: Yeah. JM: Starting to say, wow, that was really unique. That was special. And, you know, unfortunately, as human beings, we have to have that perspective. Sometimes we have to have something, you know, happen to us for us to realize that was really cool when all of us were able to celebrate together, come up with these incredible ideas together before it was like, oh, I got to go to that quarterly meeting again. Well, at least will have a couple of free drinks Joe: That's JM: At the happy hour. Joe: Right. JM: I mean, I've heard people say this now people are clamoring to get together again. Joe: Yeah, and I think it's because, like you said, as humans, we we have to have that physical connection, right. It's important to us. And then the other thing is we give off this energy that it can't be translated through a screen. And so, like, you talking to going to do these live events, I don't know if you're a keynote speaker or you're giving you know, it's a meeting or whatever it is, but you're going to walk into the room and there's going to be an energy. Right, that you don't get now. And that's what's missing. And I think people are so over it and they so want to be out. It's like I have an entertainment booking agency here in Phoenix and I book all the entertainment for all the high end resorts and then all the big corporate events that come. And all the hotels are at 100 percent capacity. It's just because people want to get out and socialize with other people. So they're either coming into town, just stay, or they're doing suffocations, but they they just cannot stand it any longer. It's incredible. JM: Yeah, it's it's been an interesting ride, I mean, this this group that got together at the end of January, we actually were in Scottsdale and six people, including myself, went home and had covered Joe: Oh. JM: It. Now, here's what's interesting. And thank goodness everybody was healthy, everybody was fine. And this is not to get on that whole. You know, I respect where everybody feels on this. I do. But all six human beings that got it, they're all they can't wait to get back together again. Now, many people have been vaccinated and the world has shifted that much in literally, what, three, almost four months that now we can do this a little bit better. But to your point, Joe, people need this connection, man. People they we as human beings, the energy that is such a real thing. I wish I could know your energy that much better than just over a screen. You can feel it a little bit, but it is tangible. You don't have to say a word. If Joe walked through the door, I could feel, oh, that's really good energy. I'm not so sure. But there's always an energy. And that is something that you cannot replicate over these, you know, you know, doing it virtually. Joe: Yeah, so I want to talk about the books in order of how they release before we do that, how has this changed the way you do your work with these individuals, these corporations? I mean, you you know, we've all had, like, people come to me and say, hey, I want to do a virtual event and can I get and I really didn't jump on board to the virtual stuff because for me, entertainment has to be life. I can watch a magic show on TV and say, oh, that's cool. But there's nothing, nothing, nothing like being in an audience in a life situation. So I just I used my energy in other ways, you know, started a YouTube channel podcast of the things that filled my soul. So how have you had to shift your coaching business to deal with those questions that come up, for example? You know, maybe they need to help people stay more positive not being around people, you know, so they come to you and say, hey, Jim, you know, we want you to work with our team. And we think the biggest thing that's lacking is just it's just like motivation or their mindset because they've been alone for almost a year. JM: Yeah, this one was actually pretty easy, unfortunately, because so much of the content shifted and maybe it should have always been there. But the truth is what was happening is there was so much negativity. If you woke up and you turned on your TV, boom, it's right there. If you picked up your phone and social media boom, it was right there. So there was so much negativity being fed into most people's brain. So they weren't actually running their own agenda. It may have been CNBC, Fox or Facebook, Instagram, whatever platform. And again, this is not I don't care which one you watch or listen to. That's not the point. The point was people started losing who's running their agenda. And so that really was the focal point of what I worked on is, hey, you used to get up and you had a routine and you were whether you were meditating or working out or just hopping in the shower, brushing your teeth, it didn't matter. But it wasn't so in your face. His death and there's death everywhere that you're listening about, this amount of cases followed shortly by death. And so what was happening is so many people, whether they realize they're not their lens became extremely negative. JM: And so a big part of what I did is, hey, don't forget your routine. Let's make sure you run your agenda first. That doesn't mean barrier head in the sand. Absolutely not. Not be informed. You need to be you need to know what's going on in the world. I'm cool with that. However, let's not make it the first thing that you do in the morning. Let's not make it that you just haphazardly are just scrolling on your phone or watching TV for hours on end, because what was coming out is really cynical human beings seeing the world in such a negative way. And there was so much going on in the last year, not just covered other things that were creating some of this tension. And so a lot of my coaching just went to that. Who's running your agenda? And I probably should have been asking this question earlier than that, but it became so prevalent. And so in my face, I was like, who's running your agenda? And that's been the majority of my coaching with individual clients, with with teams, with companies. Who's running your agenda and is it serving you? Joe: Yeah, and it's like so many people that are in the same arena that you and I are in with being an entrepreneur and trying to help people just guide them on the knowledge that we've gained over our years and things that we've read and just trying to be helpful that we've heard so many times when the morning you win the day. Right. So it's that I don't know if people understand how important that is. And you can see so many people just will turn on the news while they're making their coffee and just it just like this downward spiral. And the funny thing is, I used to live in New Jersey, commuted on the bus through the Lincoln Tunnel because I had an office on 30th Street and Broadway. And that's when I own my own company. And all the people on the bus would get in, settle down and then open up their newspaper and just sit there. And so I get it, like a lot of these people were financial people down on Wall Street. So they they had to get caught up with the day. But I used to get to the office and feel so I felt like, OK, I have to do this to like all these smart business people and I have to, you know, get to the office and go, oh, God, that was the most depressing hour I just spent. And from that day forward, I never do. I don't watch the news. I don't read the newspaper. I do like I do me. I do what I can do in the world. And I don't know. Yeah, you have to stay somewhat informed, I guess. But I stay away from that like the plague, not just. JM: Well, as long as you're monitoring it, as long as you're making sure it's not running your agenda and you can do that with filters, one of the beautiful things about these devices, you can filter pretty much everything to just get, you know, the important news of the day and not have to scroll through everything. So there are ways to set it up. But to your point, when the morning when the day it's so true, that's never been more true than it is today. Joe: Yeah. JM: Absolutely. As a leader, in order for you to lead anyone else, you have to lead yourself first and take care of yourself. It is probably the biggest thing. And I'm going to generalize, especially with my female clients. I am like, you are not being selfish by taking care of yourself. You're being selfish. If you don't, you're being selfless by working out, taking care of your mind, your body and your soul every day, because then you can take care of your kids the way you want to show up as the mom, the sister, you know, all the hats that that they're wearing. I'm like, you have to take care of yourself first in order to serve all these people. Joe: Yeah, and it's so funny because I think the same thing I grew up with a feeling that wanting money, right. Was this greed thing and wanting to to maybe become wealthy. And it's the same thing with money as it is with health is like in order to take care of you, you have to make sure that you make the money. You need to take care of you and then your immediate family and then down on from there and then do whatever you can. So it's the same thing with health. Those two things are and I always put health first. I don't. For me, it's always been the main thing. I thank my lucky stars every day that I don't deal with any health issues or take any medication. But I worked at it. You know, I go to the gym pretty much every day and it's the only way for me to survive it. Actually, mentally, my mind shifts. If I don't on a day that I don't go, it's not only do I have this mental thing happening where I just it's like I'll you know, but I also think there's a little bit of guilt I put back on myself. Going I had to do is just plan it and do it. No one's running your own your life except for you. I don't you know, you have this feeling like someone still telling you where you need to be or you feel guilty about not doing something. And it's like you said, you have to plan this stuff out. So can you tell me what your routine looks like? JM: Absolutely, I wake up, the first thing I do is I say my daily affirmation, I say that in the evenings with my boys and I say it every morning. Then I set my intention for the day. What do I want to do today? I want to bring great energy. I want to be super productive. Whatever my intention is for that moment, then I will typically get into breath work about five to ten minutes. Depends on how long the exercise takes. Then I'm into meditation, then I'm doing my brain games. Then let me see here. Sorry, I usually have it all. Then I'm doing my exercise at some point. I'm reading my book journaling and then I'm off into the day. Now, what's been interesting with covid is it hasn't necessarily been as structured as it used to be. I used to wake up super early, get it all out of the way, then take the kids to school. Now, it's just been kind of haphazard in terms of I get them all done, but I might get two of them done. Then I'm dealing with kids, then I'm doing that, then I'm dealing with work. JM: So it's just been a little different, which has been interesting because I love my routine, but those are the basic things I take. I tell everybody to simplify it. If you take care of your mind, your body and your soul, it's the three things you have to do. Because you said something about about health. Health is wealth. I don't care how much money you have. If you don't have your health, you have nothing. And so you do need to plan that. And so those will be the three things I tell people, look, take care of your mind. What are you doing for your mind? Are you reading, doing the brain games? What are you doing for your health? Most people have that part down. I'm going to go workout, lift, run, whatever you do, it's it's up to you. And then ultimately, what do you do for your soul? For me, it's meditation. For some people it's reading the Bible. For some people it's taken on nature walk. Some people it's like, I don't care, but take care of those three things, fulfill those buckets and then go about your day. Joe: Yeah, and you know, what I think often happens is people feel they something happens maybe in the morning that that sets the morning off in the wrong way. And whether it's like you go out to your car and you want your tires is flat. And what they do is then they throw the baby out with the bathwater and they don't do anything they don't. So if you have those three buckets, you're supposed to take care of your health or meditation your mind or whatever. And you don't you can't get to one thing. They throw everything out. And so I have learned on days where I'm really tight on time, OK, I'm still going to go to the gym and I'm just going to jump on the treadmill. Normally it's cardio abs. I mean, it's it's weight lifting abs cardio. If I but I don't sit there and go, OK, I don't have time to do all three, so I'm not going to go do any I go and I jump on on a stair stepper and I still get the work done. So I think it's important to make set yourself up for success that you can get at least something done. Don't make it so hard that if you don't do all of it, you feel guilty. You know, it just ruins your day. And I think that's important to. JM: So that's a great point, Joe, because, look, I grew up an athlete, like you said, I played basketball in college. I was working out two hours a day in college, literally just lifting and playing ball and I mean, at least two hours every single day. Well, that's not how my world works today. So should I just do nothing? No, of course not. I changed my goals completely. I want to sweat once a day. That's literally my my workout goals this year. Sweat once a day. Sometimes that means lifting. Sometimes it means lifting and cardio. Sometimes it means playing. Pick a ball. That's actually the one I really prefer to do. But it it doesn't look the same as it did when I was 18, 28 or 38. It changes, but as long as you're taking care of that body one way or the other. And to your point, if it's not perfect, so what? Do something so. Joe: Yep, I agree. OK, keep promising about the book, but I still have one more question to ask you and it's probably going to tie into the book and it's probably going to tie even better into the new book. But I want to ask you about journalling. I want to know. I heard you on your podcast talk about I think you said or your wife said it's the cheapest form of therapy JM: It Joe: And JM: Is. Joe: It doesn't talk back to you and it doesn't judge you. JM: Right. Joe: But I have never journaled. And so many successful people that either know or talked to her had have on my I've had on the podcast like journaling such a big thing. And I'm like, well, why are you doing it? And what is it going to how many times are you going to hear it from somebody and not do it? So I would like to hear your perspective on it. JM: Well, you gave my my opinion is it is the cheapest form of therapy available to us all, whatever it costs for a couple cents and paper, let's say a dollar or so. But why is it beautiful as we have around 50000 thoughts go through our head a day? Some of those are crazy. They are nuts. Some are very negative. Some are very positive. The point is, is they're swirling around. And the reason I think journaling is so important, I'll give you I'll give you a story. So let's go win specific to the company. Back when I was 21 or 20, I don't know the exact time frame I had written about. Let's Go Win and had three circles, very similar to what my logo looks today. Now, I lost that journal. It got put in my memento box. I didn't think anything about it. And I was cleaning out the garage because we recently moved to Florida and I'm looking in and there's this journal. I'm flipping through it. Holy cow. There's let's go in. It's sitting right there. I had marinated on this idea for over twenty years now. The reason this is important, had I gone back through that journal, maybe I get to let's go in that much earlier. JM: Maybe maybe I don't. Regardless, it was a thought that I planted now or thought that was planted in my head that I then put on the paper. When you do that, there's something that happens. It allows you to get clarity. It allows you focus. It allows you to just have a brain dump. And so I don't know why people resist it, because to me, I love writing probably as much as, gosh, writing or reading. I'm not sure which one I love more, but they just fill my soul. And so I just like to write. I enjoyed the blogging part of it. I enjoy writing the books because it allows me to put all this stuff onto paper and some of it's crazy. I guess what the paper doesn't say, Jim, that's crazy. It just doesn't say anything. It's just literally captured what I've written. So anyway, if you haven't done it, it doesn't there's no judgment. Just try it and see how you feel. That's what I always tell all my clients. I'm like, just try it and then let me know how you feel. I've never had a client come back and say, that was terrible. Every time they're like, wow, that was kind of cool. Joe: Yeah. JM: Oh, you know what? I started I just was going to write like half a page and I wrote ten pages. And that's not uncommon because you have a lot going on up there and it's nice to get that stuff out. And again, no judgment. Maybe you don't even look at it again, but at least put it out there. Joe: So do you journal both in the morning and in the evening are only in the evening. JM: That's a good question. The specific journalling that that we're talking about just in the evening, but I write so much now from my occupation that I learned a lot in the mornings as well. So I don't know. I do my best writing times are about four a.m. I don't know why. Just as quiet as can be my brain. Actually, I do know 11:00 a.m. and four a.m. are the two times they say were the most creative. Not sure why that is, but I guess it's quiet. I guess our brains have officially, you know, opened up to that to that space. But to answer your question directly, typically I'm journaling in the Evening Times, unless I'm writing for work. Joe: So without giving anything personal, can you explain what it would look like if you sat down in journals tonight? Like what would somebody write? Like if I sat down, you sat down. How do you even start? How do you even know that you're journaling and not complaining or you're not starting a small book or your whatever? I don't know. Like, what do you what do you. Oh, I, I loved my lunch today. I don't know. What do you write. JM: Why not? That sounds great. So there's two main staples, I will tell you, I journal on two things frequently. I believe we are in complete charge and no one can affect these two things, our activity and our attitude. Now, I do write about that. It's in Champions Daily Playbook. That's why I ask people to do that, because I like to journal on how is my attitude. Today was an awesome did I show up and was I really someone bringing positivity to the world or did I suck today? And by the way, it happens both ways. Like I could have been better today and I just I'd write it down because what I'm really looking for is my patterns, my habits and what's really happening because of, let's say, seven days in a row, I had really crappy attitude. What's really going on? There's more to the story than just I had a flat tire. My girlfriend broke up with me. My dog ran away. You know, all the country song lyrics, something more is going on. And I don't like that. Nobody wants to show up and be miserable. People want to be happy. So to answer your question, I would write about whatever. But if you're looking for a guide, write about the two things you're in complete control of. How is my attitude? How is my activity? Because for my job, did I do a great job for my kids? Was I an active parent or was I slug on the couch watching, you know, looking at my phone? And by the way, we all do some of that at some point. There's no judgment. It's just talking to yourself to say, you know what, I showed up great today. Pat on the back. Great job, man. I up so good today. What can I do differently tomorrow? And that'll show you and really create some answers that can help you show up is the best version of yourself. Joe: How long have you been doing it? JM: Oh, man, I started after high school for some reason, I don't know why in college I studied abroad. So I remember I journaled a lot when I was in the Netherlands and on trains, I would read and learn reading journal. And then I did it all through my 20s and 30s. I just I've always written things down. Joe: Well. JM: I think mainly, though, is because I'm seeking answers just like anybody I want to show up. And in sometimes you don't have somebody that you can't talk to everyone about things without having some form of judgment. So instead, why don't you go to that piece of paper, just get it out there. I remember being really frustrated with a business partner had I set the vile things that came through my mind. Before I wrote it down and actually was smart about it, that would have probably cost a relationship, cost a business partnership, Joe: All right. JM: Instead I wrote it down and then I was like, whoa, that is crazy. But it was in my mind my mind had created something that wasn't even true. So anyway, to answer your question, I've been doing it since probably 18 or 19. Joe: North Korea, so, see, you're lucky because that's that's you know, you can see the value of it now and to be able to have started that long ago. So I'm jealous, but I'm going to take your I'm going to heed your words of advice and I'm going to do it. It might look really dumb at first, but I'll figure it out over time. And like you said, you hit it on the head. It was the perfect answer. Literally. You can't talk to anyone without some small amount of judgment. So to be able to just have you in that piece of paper has to be super helpful. So I'm definitely going to give it a try. JM: I've Joe: It's perfect. JM: Yet to hear how it goes, Joe. I'm excited. Joe: Yeah, absolutely. OK, so let's go in. That was your first book. When did that come out? JM: That came out. Oh, that's a good question, I should know that two years ago, I think Joe: Ok, JM: I really. Joe: I thought that's what it was, too, but I am fearful of always assuming what I read because I looked at so many pieces of data and I'm like, I don't want to say it. And I'd rather have you make the mistake then. JM: I think they did, but I think it was in the last two years, you know, it's almost like we lost a year with covid. So Joe: I know, JM: Was that five years ago or is that Joe: I know. JM: Last week? So I believe it's two years ago that that came out. Joe: Ok, so give us the overview of the you started to you hinted at early in this conversation about it, was you putting down your experiences in your knowledge and things that you thought were what you've read, things you've read, things you've studied just to share. Like, you know, we're hoping that everyone just shares what they can with the world to make it a better place. So give us an idea what that the initial idea behind that was. JM: Now, the idea was for my two boys, I wanted them to not skin their knees as much as their dad did growing up. And so the lessons I also wanted, the documented lessons that I learned from my parents and my grandparents so often get lost where they're no longer here. So these are I had the opportunity to ask the questions and my mentors and authors. And so imagine if you read, I don't know, 17 of 30 books a year and you can take some of that knowledge and hopefully make it really tangible, because for me to ask my kids to read that many books per year, that's probably impractical. But there's some really good nuggets that you can pull from some of these authors. And so the whole idea was to take all of that and put it into a very usable form. So where you could fly from L.A. to New York and by the time you land, you finish the book. I didn't want it to be overwhelming. I wanted it to be an easy read with tangible advice in each chapter. And so I broke it down that way. I just said, look, what are the 12 most important areas that I think people can really effectuate change? And that's how I started. And so it was the best six months of journaling I've ever done in my life was that process. Joe: And that was completely separate, that was you creating the the the outline of not the outline, but the the book coming to life you that was a separate journaling process that you did to create the book. JM: And Joe: Yeah. JM: I have somebody I worked with, and so when I would say an idea and talk about it, then we would talk back and forth and she would interview me. And it just became such a beautiful piece. I'm not saying it's the greatest thing written ever. I'm not saying that. But the way it reads, I want them to hear my voice. And I hope that it comes through that way, that it's it's not a judgment or anything. It's rather here's what I found. And I want my kids to know, like, hey, if dad got hit by a bus tomorrow, here's something that he can leave behind that hopefully, you know, helps them again, not not make as many errors, because just like any parent, I want my kids to to have the best opportunity. And so that was the whole idea. Joe: And I also think that it's the conduit, it's who's delivering the message sometimes that actually makes a difference to the person on the other end. So you could have written the same line in your book that was written in five previous books, and then those people actually read all of those five books. But the way in the context of the way you expressed it in your book with the surrounding text around it, all of a sudden it's an aha moment for someone. So I think it's it's that's why it's so important to share, because it might not make sense coming from the previous five people that they read it from. But somehow you've set them up for success in your book where all of a sudden they get to that one line that they know they've seen. They've heard it, they've read it five other times, never made sense. Now it makes sense. And so I think that's what's really cool about this sort of thing, is that, yeah, we you know, there's a lot of things that came before us. We're not inventing the wheel every day, but we are taking our experiences and our knowledge, putting them into a form that could actually help someone that they never got that help from earlier because it didn't make any sense to the. JM: And that's beautifully said, because there's a saying when when the student is ready, the teacher appears. And so that could be the case, right? Maybe my I don't know that my 11 year old has actually finished the entire book. And that's at some point he will and that'll be cool. And hopefully he will hear it and maybe he'll read it 20 years down the line and maybe he'll say, oh, yeah, I remember that. Joe: Yeah, OK, so then all of a sudden you just wrote the Champions League playbook, so I don't I haven't had the honor to to read these books yet. But I'm going to hear this is when I when I say I don't want to make assumptions about things, but but the gist by the title and where it's coming from, from the first book, it almost seems like it's more of an actionable book from what you originally did. So now you're given the overview and let's go win and you're giving all of the the different steps. But now it's kind of like you're holding people's feet to the fire and the second book and saying, if you follow through, here's all the things you need to do to really make all of this stuff happen. JM: Yeah, so I read a study that said less than 40 percent of the people you ever hand a book to will read Chapter one, and that was a pretty sobering statistic. So I thought, all right, why don't we create something that's one chapter long and the rest is literally a playbook. And I called it a playbook and not a workbook because I didn't want it to feel like work. For those of you that are feeling just like Joe, where you're like, how do I journal? I explain it, make it really easy. And the playbook, it's like ten bucks on Amazon. You know what? You've never journal before. Here you go. This is literally the the how to or you know, and it's not a journal necessarily, but it is it allows you that freedom to just say, OK, this this helps. I can do this. And it takes no more than like maybe five minutes in the morning. And usually it's far less than that and maybe five minutes a night. But again, if you go longer, cool. And so the whole idea is to literally something that you can do every single day to set yourself up to win, because I wish I had started doing this stuff earlier. I mean, I wish I had known this when I was my son's age, when I was 14 and 11. I wish I was doing these things, but I didn't know about all that. So my hope is that people can take it and apply it and say, wow, that was really helpful. Thank you. And when I get those, Joe, I'll man, it just makes you feel fantastic because you're able to help someone get that much further in life. And what what a unique feeling and so fulfilling because it's great if we do something cool ourselves. But how great of a gift. If you can have somebody else say, you know what, I did that, and it really worked. And you're like, that's amazing. I'm so glad. Thank you. Joe: So give us can you give us an an overview of of the latest book and what people will find in other you mentioned journalling. I would think there's a, you know, a bunch of things in there that are going to be super helpful. So can you give us an idea? JM: Sure. So I start the book off very simply with, you know, the basic setting goals because most people don't even write those down. Now you are 60 percent more likely to achieve a New Year's resolution a year later by simply writing it down. You're another 20 percent more likely to achieve it if you actually look at it every single day. So I said, well, I know the stats. Let's go ahead and put that in there. Then I put in four daily affirmations. Most people have never heard of a daily affirmation because they weren't taught to do that. And so my kids, since ev every day of their lives, they've said or heard the same thing. And that is. Are you a leader? Yes. How come? I'm confident, strong, intelligent, athletic, good looking, dynamic, popular talent and independent boy with a growth mindset. They have said that since they were 10 months old. Now, if I could go back in hindsight, I would have said Jamaica. I'm confident, strong and intelligent and leave it at that. But I didn't. And I created this long thing. But they love it. They won't go to bed without saying it to me. And, you know, he's 15 guys. He just turned 15. That's crazy. But anyway, they do that every single night. So that's the second thing is just doing a daily affirmation because the world's going to tell you you're not confident, you're not strong, you're not intelligent, you're not these things. JM: I want you to rewire your brain to say, yes, I am. Who gives a care what anybody else thinks? Yes, you are and you are. Whether you believe you are. You're not. You're right. So that's the second thing you're right is doing that setting that daily affirmation and then it's just a check in. Did you take care of the mind, the body and soul? Yes. OK, yes. No, whatever the answer is, then you have how's your attitude? How is your activity? Rank it, then you have a journaling section and that's pretty much the gist of it. But it's just laid out. And so for ninety days, if you can do this, because it takes the new study says sixty six days to create a habit. Well, if that's true, then let's let's say we miss a couple of days, we screw up. We forgot to let's try for those 90 days and let's just see what happens. What if we created for 90 days we followed this plan. How does my life look differently? Do I feel better? Am I showing up better? Is my business improved as my health improved? All these things should take place by just simply following that exercise. So that was my hope. I've had some amazing people say thank you, God, I'd never journal before. That was amazing. I'd never thought to do this. And that's what I'm hopeful for. Joe: That's great. So one last question, because I want to respect your time, and I know we're close, we have a choice every day when we wake up. Right. And the choice is that you can say to yourself and say out loud and whatever state of the world that I am thankful, I'm grateful, I'm happy, healthy. You know, even if you're not healthy, those words can almost change how you are. And so why is it and I listen, I am just as guilty or more than anybody on this Earth that for the longest time was like, woe is me. Like I bust my ass and I'm not getting the things that I expect to get. And things don't go my way and and always, always looking for the you know, I know I'm going to get there and there's going to be a long line at the store or I'm going to get to this place that I can't find a parking spot if that was me. And it's only shifted recently. And it's a completely different world. And it's it's like, why do we always choose the worst thing? Like we have literally have an equal down the middle. You can choose left, which is crap, or you can choose. Right, which is great. And we just seem to to always choose. And again, I'm not generalizing like the world. I'm just saying that when I see it now from being this other person that I've created over the past couple of months ago, we literally can wake up and just choose to have the most amazing, happy day. And we don't do that. And I it's just mind boggling. JM: Yeah, I don't know the answer why just you're right that many people do. There's an exercise everyone can do, take a piece of paper and draw a line right down the middle on one side, right victim, and then write out all the attributes associated with it on the other side. Write responsible, write all the attributes that go along with it. Now, we don't have time to do that today, but when you do this, you're going to find a couple of things. The reason people choose to be a victim is because you get empathy, you get sympathy. However, what else goes along with that is some really negative stuff. When you choose to be responsible, it's powerful, it's strong, it's in control. And there's a couple of negative, like you could be overwhelmed. You could be this. But the majority is it's very positive on one side and it's very negative on the other. The reason I have people do this exercise is for what you said and you said a beautiful word. I hope people heard it. You choose you get to choose to show up and have an incredible day. You get to choose to have, you know, the most beautiful sunrise. You get to choose that no one else gets to choose that. The moment you figured that out, Joe, now you're free. Joe: Mm hmm. JM: Because it is your choice, no one can make you feel any other way, only you get to choose that. I don't know how long or why or what it's going to take for people to understand that. But it is your choice. And when you do that, you have so much power and you start to create most people here manifest destination. You don't have to believe in it. I've witnessed it. You can read it and it is your choice. So I don't know, brother, I'm happy for you. That's amazing because you're right, you get to choose even having a mate. And I'm sure you have an incredible life before on top of that. But how much more beautiful is it now? Joe: It's it's insane and like you said, you know, I think the universe I literally do. I mean, it's like people might around me that know me now I have to hang with me, might get tired of me saying, yeah, the universe delivered again, but it did. And that's what I'm going to say. And that's just what it is. So sorry. It just it's. JM: The word energy early, rather, and that's I don't that is not where people look, the universe is full of energy. And so what you put out, it will it will reciprocate. If you're putting out nothing but negative, I promise you Joe: Yeah, JM: It is going to come back Joe: Yeah. JM: Because you're attracting that. You put out positive. You're going to recognize the positive. There's a crazy study in the UK where they had people walk down the street. Now, prior to that, they asked there was five and five. Five people said they're lucky. Five people said they were not. Four out of the five that said they were lucky saw the 20. It was 20 pound, not twenty pound note on the sidewalk, four out of the five that said they were lucky. One missed it. All five human beings that said they were unlucky did not see the 20 pound note on the cement. And they did this study again and again and again and kept coming back with the same statistics, so you don't have to believe it. But it is true. It is what's happening and you are creating that. So congrats show. That's amazing. Joe: Yeah, I'm right with you, I believe it. So, J.M., thank you so much, man. Did we miss anything? So the book. Both books I know are on Amazon. Is is there any particular way you would like people to connect with you? JM: Sure, they can go to letsgowin.com, I put out a blog that, you know, that's some of my journalling. Those are thoughts that you get you get to be a part of. There's a free work life balance on there that I take every month. So that's on the website letsgowin.com and then let's go in 365. Brother, any social media outlet, let's go in 365. I'd love for people to follow and check it out and I'd love to hear from them. Joe: And you have your podcast as well, right? JM: Do let's go. When is the podcast? It's so much fun, you guys, I think the the guests make the show. I love to hear their amazing stories, just like Joe did. And I think you did an incredible job. You'd listen. Well, you ask really awesome questions. I hope to do the same. But every time we're going to give it our all and we're going to have a great time. Joe: That's awesome. It was an honor. I love meeting people like you and I. I'm going to make this public promise to you that I'm going to start journaling because I betcha there's yet another step of magic there that I've been missing all this time. So I'm going to add it to my already awesome life to step it up another notch and and get all that stuff out of my head. JM: I love it, brother, I can't wait to hear about it. Thank Joe: All JM: You Joe: Right, man, JM: For having me. Joe: That. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on. And I look forward to doing more with you down the road. JM: You too, brother. Thank you. Joe: Thank you.

**Warning - Listener Discretion is Advised **  This was one of the realest conversations for my podcast yet! Two moms talk straight and completely UNCENSORED. My guest today, Jennifer McDade, mastered life and had a flourishing career BEFORE marriage but was faced with the tough decision to set it all aside to start a family with the man of her dreams. And boy does some serious wisdom to share with us. Listen in as we chat about getting lost in the rat race of parenting and being a spouse, tailoring your parenting for each child, and what we're teaching our kids by what we model for them every day. This is an episode you won't want to miss! What we're talking about Prioritizing You! Tailoring Your Parenting For Each Child Teaching Our Kids By Our Actions Every Day   Getting Lost In the Rat Race As a new spouse, Jennifer decided to retire from teaching. It was a struggle, but a decision she wanted to make so they could have a family. It wasn't long before they had three children and she didn't recognize herself anymore. Then she had guilt about trying to find herself! Mom guilt is real, y'all. What we don't realize though, is that most of the time we unknowingly bring it on ourselves. We're talking about the slippery slope of doing so much for others that we lose ourselves, and how we have clawed our way back out of that habit, while becoming the best version of ourselves for our families.   Tailoring Your Parenting For Each Child As we talked about being authentic to ourselves, we dove into how each of our kids is so different from one another, and how parenting them all the same just doesn't work. Celebrating each of them for their individuality may seem more difficult on the surface, but, in reality, it makes our lives a bit calmer because each feels seen and recognized for who they truly are. It's an offshoot of the lesson of being authentic to yourself.   Teaching Our Kids By Our Actions Every Day We all want our children to somehow absorb all the things we expect of them and would like to teach them. But what we don't always realize is that we are teaching them more than we know by our own behavior and what we say. We are their teachers 24/7, whether we acknowledge it or not. Jennifer and I chatted more about not only being authentic for ourselves, but for our children. It's when we are the best version of ourselves that we can be the best spouse for our partner, the best parent for our children, and the best friend to others.  Are you being authentic with yourself and others?  TIMESTAMPS 9:10 -9:57 (47 sec JP & JM) To some degree people struggle with...me being authentic to myself. 13:53 - 14:25 (32 sec JM) You have to be who you are regardless...simple to say, but it really doesn't. 17:15 - 18:00 (45 sec JP & JM) One of the things that I try to do as much as possible...as opposed to celebrating who they are. 22:37 - 23:01 (24 sec JP) I had an entire meltdown in this house...where nobody had to think about anything. 27:47 - 28:22 (35 sec JP) My point is, for those of you that are listening...something else will always take that time. 28:50 - 29:16 (26 sec JM) My kids seem to enjoy when I'm enjoying myself...for whatever it is, I do that. QUOTES Being a mother is the hardest, and most rewarding job, that one can ever have. - JP People see the stay at home mom as the kept woman. - JM It's not how I say it. It's what I say. The content is not going to change. - JM You have to do what makes life good for you, and whatever that means, it has to be on your terms. You can't let society dictate that for you. - JM It's about, in each phase of your life, maximizing the joy in it. - JP If you always live your life trying to please people, you will be exhausted and very unhappy. - JP Be authentic to yourself. - JM We can define our children without knowing that's what we're doing. - JM Your children's accomplishments don't define you as a person. You can't use their accomplishments as validation. - JP I lost myself in the rat race of motherhood and being a spouse, and then I had the nerve to feel guilty for trying to find myself. - JM That mom guilt is really real. - JP Get those kids to help you! - JP I need to be the best version of me, so I can be the best mother, the best wife, the best daughter, etc., and it all starts with being the best me. - JM

Ep 039 | Finding Confidence in Your Closet with Jennifer Mackey-Mary   Jennifer Mackey-Mary isn't just a stylist, it's her business to make you feel confident in your clothes and to teach you how to do more with less. Jennifer admits that clothes aren't her passion, but seeing what she can do to help other women is definitely her purpose. She offers virtual styling sessions and amazing seasonal capsule wardrobe ebooks that not only show you what to wear but different ways to wear it and where you can find each piece. If you're ready to work on what you wear, then you don't want to miss this episode because you are going to learn exactly what you need to do to start finding confidence in your clothes.    It's not about the dress, it's about the life you live in the dress!   What we're talking about   Finding Confidence In Your Clothes What Is A Capsule Wardrobe? Don't Forget The Finishing Touches   Finding Confidence In Your Clothes   If you are wondering where to start when it comes to wardrobe styling, Jennifer's advice is to find a perfect pair of jeans and the right size bra. The right bra can make you look taller, leaner, younger and can take 10 lbs and 10 years off you instantly. Who wouldn't want that?! The truth is that you don't have to dress up to look stylish and polished, you can keep it casual as long as you find the right pieces in the right sizes.    What Is A Capsule Wardrobe?   Jennifer creates capsule wardrobes which are a collection of pieces that she then creates outfits out of. Her Winter capsule is 34 pieces that create 184 outfits, complete with tops, bottoms, dresses, shoes, jewelry, accessories and more. The trick that Jennifer teaches women is that you can absolutely do more with less and don't need hundreds or thousands of pieces of clothing in your closet.    Don't Forget The Finishing Touches   One thing Jennifer says many of us are missing these days is the finishing touches to our outfits. Some great tips Jennifer offers are to remember to wear a belt, add jewelry, roll up your sleeves and pop your collar. Not only do these things finish off an outfit, but they can also create slimming effects on your body which is always a good thing!  Let's get styled!    LINKS MENTIONED Jennifer's Website Jennifer's Instagram Jennifer's Facebook The Everyday Style School Podcast TIMESTAMPS 4:35 (34 sec JM) – I believe that we've gotten a little bit less narrow-minded about what fashion is and it's more about style and the fact it, there are just so many more options that are available to us, so when you look at even shopping, I don't know if you remember this, school shopping as a kid. You did it in August because that's when you bought your sweater and you wore sweaters to the 1st day of school and you just like were sweating the whole time. That sweater was there in August, got replenished in September and November all the way through the season. There were 4 seasons of fashion. Now there are 12. 18:41 (59 sec JM) – I create capsule wardrobe ebooks. It's a digital download that shows women how to put together a mix and match wardrobe every season. So I take 34 pieces, we combine them to track I think this is one that's coming out real soon for winter is like 184 outfits and we show them the tops, the bottoms, the dresses, the shoes, the jewelry, the accessories, everything they need. Then we give people shopping links where to buy them, in spend links, save links, petite and plus and then we show them all the outfit combinations. So you know, let's say you want to try a really trendy piece for the season, like a leopard midi skirt. I would love to put this in my wardrobe but I have no idea what to do with that. We have a page in the capsule guide that shows you like 20 different ways to style your leopard midi, so I really wanted women to put together every mix and match that's effortlessly stylish wardrobe, but it turns out stylish is not effortless.      QUOTES I love what clothes do for women. JM It's the ability to help women see in the mirror what we see in our own minds. JM I don't love clothes. I love what clothes can do for women. JM Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. Pablo Picasso Sizing is totally meaningless. JM The right bra makes you look taller, leaner, younger and can take 10lbs and 10 years off instantly. JM SOCIAL MEDIA TEXT TCC Facebook post Jennifer Mackey-Mary is a fashion stylist who is on a mission to show women how clothes can make you feel more confident and how you can do more with less. She's sharing her advice on the two things you can do today to find confidence in your clothes and how her capsule wardrobe ebooks are literally the solution to all of your clothing problems  on Ep 39 of The Confidence Crown!   Twitter Day of Jennifer Mackey-Mary is dishing how we can all find #confidence in our #clothing on EP39 of The Confidence Crown.  Jennifer Mackey-Mary is on a mission to help #women do more with less when it comes to what's in their #closet on EP39 of The Confidence Crown.   Next day reminder Jennifer Mackey-Mary is sharing how you can start finding confidence in your clothing today and how to do more with less.  Head over to Itunes to listen!   Show Notes/Post Record INTRO:  THE CONFIDENCE CROWN PODCAST NOTES: www.theconfidencecrown.com

I read an article this week that started me off on a tangent tackling workplace harassment and exploring the layers underlying Imposter Syndrome. Here is the article I mention in the episode, >Tulane Medical School Professor Says Top Male Doctors Created ‘Hostile’ Workplace For Women. Highlights include: 7:18 – JM: “Men’s tirades at work take advantage of women’s rape trauma past.” 8:48 – JM: “We (women) are all abused really young or are all aware that we might be and it’s to an extent that we respond differently than someone who is not in our group (for instance, a man). Then, throughout the course of our lives, men poke at this. And we respond with the fear of someone who’s actually being threatened at a very severe level because that is the reality. But then they get to say, “Oh, they’re overreacting, I didn’t do that,” as if it was a little thing. But they are specifically poking at it because they know it isn’t a little thing.” 10:55 – JM: “Sexual victimization teaches us not to believe ourselves. We’re taught that it’s our fault and, most importantly, we’re taught that our perceptions are completely wrong.” 12:25 – JM: “I think the reason women have so much doubt in their capabilities is because on a fundamental, personal level they are told that no matter what happens to them, it doesn’t count.” 12:47 – JM: “So how do you overcome that and believe you’re anything other than an imposter?” 13:12 – JM: “Instead of admitting when they’re blowing up at you in a closed office that they are throwing 2,000 years of rape culture at you and triggering your own personal rape history, they’re saying, ‘Oh well, I might have been a little stressed out and maybe I spoke too loudly.’ But that’s not what really happened in that room. That’s not what’s going on.” 14:44 – JM: “It’s amazing how, if you don’t say it right, that’s turned on you. Except what no one is saying, of course, is that there is no way to ‘say it right’. They don’t want to hear it. There is nothing you can do to say it right because they have already decided not to hear it.” 15:02 – JM: “When we talk about Imposter Syndrome, when we talk about women’s self-confidence, we make it sound like, ‘Oh, we’re just taught to be more deferential’ like it’s a little teeny icing on the cake of patriarchy. But it isn’t.” 15:25 – JM: “What is going on there is that these early traumas are being allowed to be retriggered to keep women quiet in the workplace. And to keep women from even advancing in their own minds, no matter how successful they are.” Leading with Health is the podcast where women dive into societal change through the lens of healthcare. Host Jennifer Michelle has a Master’s in Public Health and Epidemiology and is a certified EMT. As President of Michelle Marketing Strategies, Jennifer specializes in healthcare marketing. Jennifer is available to speak at conferences and also provides free marketing consultations. Contact her here.

What is the role of compassion in healthcare? That’s the question Dr. Emelia Sam addresses on this episode of Leading with Health. Dr. Emelia Sam is an unlikely combination of maxillofacial surgeon and personal development and spirituality blogger. With over two decades in the clinical arena, she is using her unique background on her mission to humanize healthcare. She blogs at emeliasam.com and is the author of Compassionate Competency: Healing the Heart of Healthcare. Highlights include: 3:28 – ES: “I always felt like the treatment we were giving was somehow incomplete.” 3:55 – ES: “There was this culture that tends to see people as cases and treat the case and not address the person.” 4:40 – ES: “I would tend to get caught up in the patient’s backstory, what happened before the trauma.” 7:05 – ES: “Something clicked and I realized that I get to be that happy. I deserve that, as well.” 7:16 – JM: “We’re so used to being told that it’s awful experiences that are wake-up calls so I love it when something that wonderful as ‘I get to be that happy is a wake-up call’.” 8:44 – ES: “I would have found the time for my writing. Even if it was just waking up half an hour earlier in the day. I needed to carve out that slot for my creativity.” 9:53 – JM: “A lot of people feel that they have to keep the more empathetic, warmer side of themselves out of the professional realm.” 10:27 – ES: “From the time that you start your training, there is this mentality of ‘suck it up and get it done.’ At any cost.” 10:46 – ES: “As a student and certainly as a resident, you learn to put your own needs on the backburner and only attend to not even the patient, but the case that is in front of you.” 12:11 – ES: “Once you cross-over the professional threshold, once you are in that environment, you are supposed to leave your true self at the door. That makes no sense when we are talking about care.” 17:26 – ES: “It’s all about having compassion for others and for ourselves.” 17:45 – ES: “Most of the curriculum is devoted to clinical competency. … And for quite a few years now we’ve also been talking about cultural competency. And it just occurred to me one day, what about compassionate competency? Why don’t we talk about the human connection?” 18:55 – JM: “It’s about being comfortable with your own experiences and also having support to learn about that.” 19:02 – JM: “With medical training, you’re often taking people who are still very young in their lives – still in their 20s – and throwing them into really difficult healthcare situations.” 19:03 – JM: “These are family dynamic issues and these are social support issues and it’s a big ask of someone young, without a lot of life experience, to throw them into these situations.” 21:40 – ES: “How are we actually communicating with our patients? How effective are we being? And how does that communication, the ways in which we communicate, affect us?” 24:33 – ES: “I would like to see Compassionate Competency adopted as a standard resource in healthcare training facilities across the board. I would love to see pre-professional students and professional students having this early on in their arsenal, if you will. I want to see Compassionate Competency as the standard.”

Discussions of social determinants of health center on social programs as if they are equally available to everyone. The truth is, access to healthcare and social services is based on a punitive model that intentionally limits availability. So that’s what I dive into in this episode – here are the resources I mention: $1,000 a Month, No Strings Attached For Trans Women Silicone Pumping Can Be a Blessing and a Curse UK Biobank Requires Earth’s Geneticists to Cooperate, Not Compete Highlights include: 3:42 – “’Pumping’ refers to a kind of underground plastic surgery. Pumping is often turned to when licensed medicine isn’t accessible — typically because of a combination of social, financial and discriminatory barriers in health care.” Source: For Trans Women Silicone Pumping Can Be a Blessing and a Curse 5:30 – “Being able to pass as cisgender can, in some cases, be a matter of life and death.” Source: For Trans Women Silicone Pumping Can Be a Blessing and a Curse 5:54 – “Society defines who is worthy of health care, who is worthy of culturally competent care, who is worthy of even having access to health insurance,” Ruby Corado says. “And if you conform to [those] standards … then your privilege is that you can go to a doctor and get treated.” Source: For Trans Women Silicone Pumping Can Be a Blessing and a Curse 6:15 – JM: “It’s just pure luck whether we fall into a group where we get access to care or not.” 7:20 – JM: “We decide that some people are worth more and some people aren’t. It’s not random – it’s based on one group saying they want all the goodies and leaving all the other groups to scramble.” 10:03 – JM: “These judgments are more about the people making them than about the people receiving them.” 10:10 – “A nonprofit organization was looking to give 20 African American single mothers living in public housing $1,000 each month for a year. They’d be able to use the money in any way they pleased. … For decades, Republicans and Democrats alike have tried to push families out of poverty by adding restrictions to government welfare programs. There were work mandates, time limits, benefit caps — rules aimed at pointing families toward what the government thinks are good choices. Now, there is increasing interest in trying out the reverse.” Source: $1,000 a Month, No Strings Attached 11:30 – JM: “Think about how you would like it if someone tried to tell you how to spend your money. Or tried to tell you whether you were worth having a place to live. Think about how punitive our entire social welfare approach is. It’s all about ‘Are you worthy?’ of whatever the benefit is – and the benefit is so meager.” 12:07 – JM: “Hierarchies want the top to flourish and everybody else not to.” 13:25 – ““At the end of six months, none of the women reported using an emergency lender. Nearly all said they had enough money to buy school supplies, when fewer than half had said that before. They reported cooking more balanced meals, visiting the doctor and attending church more often. … ‘The beauty of all of this has just been how folks are light,’ Nyandoro said. ‘They aren’t walking around with the heaviness of life that, unfortunately, so many times low-income folks have to carry.’” Source: $1,000 a Month, No Strings Attached 14:43 – JM: “What if, we every time we wanted to add restrictions, we considered removing them, instead?” 16:09 – UK Biobank Chief Executive Dr. Rory Collins says, “The idea is to democratize research so scientists who might struggle to get funding and other resources can also make important contributions, using this dataset.” Source: UK Biobank Requires Earth’s Geneticists to Cooperate, Not Compete 16:25 – “(UK Biobank Chief scientist Dr. Cathie Sudlow) expects collaboration, rather than traditional competition, will be what really drives medical science forward.” Source: UK Biobank Requires Earth’s Geneticists to Cooperate, Not Compete 18:28 – JM: “How much of our society would be able to flourish if we stopped the judgment and stopped the restrictions and said, ‘What if we just gave you what you needed?'” 20:30 – JM: “It’s about making sure that women never feel adequate. And the result is that there is a huge amount of emotional energy that, instead of going to something we want, winds up going to this impossible and unnecessary task of changing our physical form.” 21:15 – JM: “What if we just had freedom to be beautiful the way we are?” 21:54 – JM: “What if we shook off all this baggage that we have been given that says we’re not worthy of even the most basic things, like being considered attractive or having a place to live or having food or being worthy of being listened to.” 23:27 – JM: “There is a difference between setting a boundary on something that has happened and is not being respectful of the gift that you’re giving and just restricting everything so that you’re not even allowing the other person to have the life that they deserve.” Leading with Health is the podcast where women dive into societal change through the lens of healthcare. Host Jennifer Michelle has a Master’s in Public Health and Epidemiology and is a certified EMT. As President of Michelle Marketing Strategies, Jennifer specializes in healthcare marketing. Jennifer is available to speak at conferences and also provides free marketing consultations. Contact her here.

My husband wasn't in bed with me when I woke up that January morning. The mid-winter sky was bruised purple and yellow outside the window. I shut bleary eyes against light that glared and pounded. A second later I realized my toes weren't burrowing into the hollows behind Brendan's knees, that when I flung out my arm it didn't meet his wiry chest... -- Jenny Milchman, Cover of Snow Thriller author Jenny Milchman writes page-turning novels of women in jeopardy -- and the courage and resourcefulness they find inside of themselves in the face of danger. Check out Jenny's website for information on all of her books and to check out her blog. In addition to writing thrillers (all of which were chosen as Indie Next picks) Jenny is on the board of International Thriller Writers and interviews writers for the radio show, Next Steps with Jenny Milchman and ITW on Authors on the Air.  And if that weren't enough, you can find Jenny on Facebook, Twitter, and Patreon. Whew! Jenny gives shout-outs to two books: The Freedom Broker, by K.J. Howe -- a debut novel and the first of a series of high-octane thrillers -- and We Need to Talk About Kevin, a tense and intimate look at a family destroyed by violence, by Lionel Shriver.  Jenny's own books are all stand-alones: Cover of Snow Ruin Falls As Night Falls As always, if you'd rather read than listen, here is the transcript. Enjoy! -- Laura Transcript of Interview with Jenny Milchman Laura Brennan: Jenny Milchman is an award-winning, critically acclaimed novelist who writes un-put-downable thrillers. Her debut novel, Cover of Snow, won the Mary Higgins Clark Award for best suspense novel of 2013. All three of her novels published to date, including Rune Falls and As Night Falls, have been Indie Next picks. Jenny interviews thriller writers for the Next Steps radio show and I am delighted that she agreed to be on the other side of the microphone for this chat with me. Jenny, thank you for joining me. Jenny Milchman: Laura, thank you for having me on. LB: Before we get into your books, let's talk a little bit about you. I understand that your folks were a little worried about this whole writing gig. JM: Yes! More -- not even worried as much as, what would a writing gig even mean? I was always wanting to be a writer, that was kind of the goal from the beginning. And I loved reading, as most writers do. And it seemed a natural outgrowth of my childhood. But it wasn't even, "Should you do this? No." It was more, "What would this even mean?" And then when I was a sophomore in college, my parents got to that point where they had to ask what the point of this expensive degree was, I told them that I wanted to be a poet and live in the woods in a log cabin of my own making. And they pointed out that I had never really picked up a hammer, and our country is not that nice to its poets anyway. And they said, is there something else you can imagine doing? And since there was, we went with that. LB: And that thing was psychology. JM: It was. And I practiced for 10 years, yes, as a psychotherapist in a rural community mental health center. LB: It's so fascinating, because you're not the first or even the third author I've spoken to who has gone into psychology. What do you think is the connection? JM: I think there is a connection, I really do. And, to a certain extent -- I wanted to be a poet, I didn't have the kind of books that I wound up writing in mind when this whole desire to be a writer but put it aside thing happened. And it didn't reawaken until I was a psychotherapist practicing in this rural clinic, and I had this very scary case. And the case was a little, blonde, five-year-old, adorable cherub of a child whose mother had brought her in because she had just killed the family pet. And it was almost as if life was a suspense novel. And I sat down and just to deal with this overwhelming case,

Welcome to a new episode of On the Air with Palantir, a long-form podcast by palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s June 2016 and this is episode #5. In this episode Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by our client Justin McGregor from Rhodes College. Allison caught up with Justin at DrupalCon in New Orleans last month, and spoke with him about how his school has implemented Drupal, how we worked together, and how it’s been going since. We'll be back next Tuesday with another episode of the Secret Sauce and a new installment of our long-form interview podcast On the Air With Palantir next month, but for now subscribe to all of our episodes over on iTunes. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Welcome to On the Air with Palantir, a podcast by palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s June 2016 and this is episode #5. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager, and today my guest is a client of ours named Justin McGregor from Rhodes College. I caught Justin at DrupalCon in New Orleans last month, and spoke with him about how his school has implemented Drupal and how it’s been going. I am here with Justin McGregor from Rhodes College. How are you? Justin McGregor [JM]: Doing well, doing well.  AM: We’re in the last legs of DrupalCon 2016, and we’re in the busy lobby of the conference hall in New Orleans. So there’s a little bit of noise behind us, but we will plow through. So tell me a bit about Rhodes College. JM: Who we are and what we do? We are a small liberal arts college nestled right in the middle of Memphis, Tennessee. If you look at a map of Memphis from above, there’s a big ring road that runs at the side, and if you throw a pin in the middle, that’s us [laughs]. We are 2000 students, roughly, 300-odd employees, traditional liberal arts curriculum covering everything from pre-law, pre-med, that sort of thing, all the way down to the study of the classics. We have a Greek and Roman studies department, and right across the quad we have people that are doing pediatric oncology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. So it’s literally all over the map. And I get to support them all [laughs]. AM: Wow. So your college is on Drupal. How did you come to choose Drupal in the beginning?  JM: I’ve personally been an open-source advocate for a very long time. I’ve been in higher ed web work for going on 16 years now, and I’ve worked with a lot of different CMSs, none of which I could really ever evangelize for. They were really good for what they were, but, you know. At my last school I had evaluated Drupal 6 early on, but our CTO was very anti-open source. But I kind of fell in love with it then, and I’m like, one day I’m going to come back, I’m going to be in the right position at the right school to do this, Years elapsed and D7 had come to be a really mature solution, and I got the job at Rhodes. We were coming off of an aged open-text solution and also Sharepoint 2010 pointing internally. Both solutions were long in the tooth and needed to be replaced, and when I came on board, I’m like, yeah, cool, let’s do this thing, but one of my caveats was, we have to give serious consideration to open source and to Drupal specifically. And so during our CMS roadshow we looked at the two leading proprietary higher ed solutions and also to Drupal vendors for hosting and DevOps. And it became clear really early on that for our use case, Drupal was the only solution. AM: Well, great. Thank you for choosing Drupal! JM: I’m glad to be here, believe me. AM: So what does your internal team look like? What’s the composition? JM: It’s largely me. I am the only developer on staff. I work in the communications department, which actually reports to the dean of admission. So from a business perspective I work for our sales team. That being said, I do have an interactive technology manager, who is my liaison to our external services alumni and development departments. And while he’s not a Drupalist, he’s in the guts of the thing every day, doing work on the site in one capacity or another. I’m also lucky enough to have a handful of student workers, including one third-year computer science student, and while they’re contractually limited to only ten hours a week they are a massive help. And also I found out just before I left to come here that one of our vacant positions may be reclassified as a developer. If anyone’s looking for a Drupal development position in Memphis, Tennessee – just saying it’s a possibility [laughs]. AM: So you did hire Palantir, just to be transparent about things. You hired us for consulting a few times a week to support your team. What was it that you needed from us? What was it you needed to complete the project? JM: Okay, there were two projects. Let’s do them chronologically. The first one was, we’re relaunching our flagship .edu, and while I’ve been in web work for a long time, I was new to the practice of building a Drupal site. And so I knew what I wanted to accomplish, but I would go to Contrib and, here’s all the modules that are available, I could go do this by modifying a template file, or any number of things. But I needed best practices, I needed best solutions. And you can go watch training videos all day long, but they’re around the piece of technology or the specific use case that may or may not actually be the use case you’re dealing with at the time. So having somebody – the structure that I loved was, we would start the week with ‘here’s the problem of the week’. Here’s the piece of functionality that I’m going to be building. Let’s talk through all the possibilities for how this problem could be solved, and arrive at what the best practice is for this use case. And then I’d take a couple of days, get in there, work on it, build it out, and at the end of the week – nine times out of ten, it was done, but if it wasn’t, we could come back and say, here’s the specific problems I ran into, how do we work through that? The metaphor I kept using was, we ate the elephant one bite at a time [laughs]. I had six content types, a whole ton of media assets, and, ooh, I think we ended up moving about 7000 pages, a piece at a time. We took this fairly massive implementation over the course of a couple of months, and built out the framework to handle it all, and just started shovelling in the content. AM: And what was the second project? JM: So I said a minute ago that we had the open-text that was the CMS for the public-facing part of our site at the time, and also an internal SharePoint 2010 set of publishing sites. So support for that is going away, and we needed a solution, and I’m like, you know what, I’m not standing up another CMS for this, let’s just go multi-site and do it all in Drupal. But then we have the challenge of standing up branded sites in a hurry for every little department, grant, professor, whatever, that had had a SharePoint 2010 publishing site before this. And so what we worked through was, first of all, building a road-specific installation profile of Drupal, so that out of the box, all of my content types were there, all of the branding was there – there’s the branding they can change and the branding they can’t change, as a site owner. And also the mechanism for site ownership and how that’s going to work. And the second part of that was to automate a good chunk of the deployment, so I can do from the handful of things that I have to do in my DevOps environment to a functioning Drupal site. The last one I set up took me about five minutes, which is not a bad way to go. AM: I don’t know if I’ll have time to do that today, boss, it took me five whole minutes [laughs]. So what were your goals for your site? JM: To drive recruitment, more than anything. We need students. More than that, though, higher ed is generally in the position of having – as much as we say that the mantra of the site is to drive recruitment, and we say that over and over, we have parents, we have alumni, we have the colleagues of our tenured faculty, on and on. Researchers that are coming because of the disciplines we teach and the research that we do. Researchers from around the country want to come see the research that’s being done here, to be able to collaborate, all of this stuff. So ease of discoverability of whatever piece of content that’s relevant to that audience – now that we’ve been in Drupal and been in production for a year and change, we’re really starting to look seriously at personalization. It’s sort of the standard higher ed model to have the audience navigation across the top – you’re a parent, you’re an alumni, you’re a current student, yada yadda yadda. But once you’re in the guts of the site, that just starts to bleed away, you know? And so being able to contextualize information based on what we know about the person coming in is steadily going to become more and more important to us. Part of that to be handled through Drupal and part of that through CRM integrations, with both Salesforce and an admissions-specific product called Slate.  AM: So personalization is next down the road. Excellent. So what was your working relationship with Palantir? What did it look like on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis? JM: So both of the consulting setups were more or less the same. We identified an hour early in the week where we could, you know, bang around what this week’s problem was, and then an hour later in the week, how did it go, staging for next week’s problems, or if something didn’t get done because I had a roadblock or whatever. Both of the guys I worked with were fantastic. Even if we weren’t on a call I could send them an email any time I wanted to, and hear back pretty darn quickly. But a lot of times I would save stuff for the call because it’s just something you need to talk through, or screen share or something. It was nice to have somebody who’s done a lot of Drupal deployments, at the front of the week, to say ‘this is what, given your current level of expertise, you can reasonably expect to get done this week without just absolutely killing yourself’. And to do that knowledge transfer early in the week that says, okay, here’s what you’re going to need to know, if you’re not hip to this, go read this, go watch these YouTube videos, whatever. Then set to the task and we’ll wrap up on the back end. Having somebody who was really expert in these sorts of Drupal deployments helping set your agenda, because I know my goals, I know my organization, but I need to know what is really realistic to do in the product in a given span of time, you know? AM: All right, so let’s start with the bad stuff, the obstacles. What roadblocks did you run into during the course of the project, and how were we able to help you remove those roadblocks? JM: I’m not new to development, I’ve been doing web work for a while, but there are sort of Drupal-specific things that, when you read through the documentation, or at least when I read through the documentation, like the hook system – they seem to work fine in the documentation, but then when you get into the guts of the system, you think, that doesn’t seem like what I just read, or doesn’t behave in the expected way. I had done a lot of front-end development prior to coming to Rhodes, and the Drupal templating system is something wholly different from anything I’d encountered before. I knew how I needed the site to behave, I knew what I needed it to look like, I knew how I needed it to respond, and all of that, but figuring out, do I do this from stacking a bunch of modules in order to handle fences, for example, which I ended up relying on a lot, to sort of get the markup back down to something reasonable and something I can work with and go from there. Or do I just dive off into the PHP and let’s make template files for everything, and that way I’m programmatically controlling markup. We had to come up with a strategy pretty early on and say, okay, for the sake of anybody who ever has to follow in my footsteps, let’s find a solution we like, and move forward with, that’s how we’re going to work. AM: So what was the biggest win over the duration of the project? I don’t know if you have one win per project, or… JM: So many. Seriously, I say that about the theming as a roadblock, but overall, both of these projects from an institutional perspective have been a resounding success. For academics not to complain about something is actually fairly rare [laughs]. That’s not to say that there weren’t people who take exception to, say, font choices, or, is that really the institutional red, it needs to be a little richer – you know, that sort of nitpicky ‘I don’t like this element of the design so I don’t like all of the design’. Overall, oh gosh, as of last week I think we’re 16 sites in, that we’ve launched so far. And yeah, all the designers have been very very happy with the end product, with the authoring experience. I’ve had some requests for new features and I like that my users are passionate enough to say, hey, this is great but here’s how we could make it even better, and to work through these things with me. I’ve got a handful of new content types that people have suggested – as I’ve been rolling out these little multi-site instances, I think that every last one of them could be used across the enterprise. And it’s great to have people that are willing to work with me on this sort of stuff, to come up with these ideas – not just for them. Probably one of the nicer things about being in a small liberal arts college is that they are mindful of the impact any change can have all the way across the organization, because they eat lunch with these people every day, you know? [laughs] So they’ve all been really successful. AM: Fantastic. So the next step you’ve mentioned for yourself, because you don’t really have a team [laughs], moving forward is the personalization piece. Anything else? JM: Well, part of the reason we selected Drupal to begin with was that it allowed us the flexibility to not deploy a site and then sort of be stuck with it forever. I mean, unlike some of the proprietaries, you get the tools that come out of the box and that’s kind of the end of it. You take one of their templates, you skin it your way, and you’re done. We’re looking at some design improvements. We did a complete redesign, this wasn’t just a move of an old design, we started from scratch and rebuilt. So there were design elements that have really worked well for us, and some things that, to use the industry jargon, aren’t converting the way we’d like them to. We’re not getting the traffic draw for some of the elements that the real estate they’re on deserves. So we’re going to take some time with the design team this summer and look at redesigning certain elements, and – I love that my templating architecture is flexible enough that there’s going to be no problem to just drop in there and, it’s all the same entities, it’s all the same data, we’re just presenting it differently. It looks like it’s going to be a fairly painless process. Also, since we’re at DrupalCon, I’m going to mention this. I’ve been at several sessions about paragraphs over the course of the last couple of days, and when I was at DrupalCon LA I went to a session and I was like, hmm, neat idea, maybe when it matures a little bit more – well, apparently it has matured a lot over the course of the last year. Because some of the things I’ve seen people do with paragraphs here are really impressive. So I’m sort of starting to daydream about some of the tools that I may be able to give my content creators, to do a lot more complicated and a lot more interesting things than they are now. There are certain things, the demand of the site and the demand of the brand, that will require us to leave some things static, but I want to give them as much creativity and as much flexibility as I can, to really make their content sing.  AM: Are you going to be able to add to your staff? JM: We’re trying to get a position for another developer, which hopefully will allow me to pull out and do a little more high-level stuff. We’ve also been steadily training more and more of our communications staff to work directly in the CMS and not rely on me or Nick or the student workers to do the layouts and content for them. And again, so far that’s gone really well. Like I said, the reason that I liked what I was seeing of paragraphs and a few of the other sessions is that, as much as I’m worried about user experience for our audience, I’m also worried about user experience for my content creators. I want them to want to work in the CMS, you know? And anything I can do to improve that situation for them – out of the box Drupal’s a great CMS to work with, but there are always ways to make it better. I’m always on the lookout for tools to help make their work better. AM: Isn’t that the thing about the Web, though – you can always make it better. Tomorrow’s another day [laughs]. JM: Exactly. AM: Well, thank you, Justin. I appreciate you taking the time, I know you’re fried – we’re all fried on the last day of DrupalCon – and there’s been a lot of knowledge and alcohol shared [laughs]. So I know everyone’s ready to relax a bit. JM: Next stop for me is the streetcar, I’m going to go to the other end of the French Market and start tchotchke shopping for the kids and hit three or four bars on the way back to the hotel, that sort of thing [laughs]. AM: Well, hopefully you’ll join us tonight at trivia night, and then at sprints tomorrow. JM: Don’t know, I have family here in town so I have some obligations there. But I’d like to put in a hour or so at the sprints and see how it goes.  AM: Well, thank you so much. I appreciate the time. JM: Thank you! AM: Thank you so much for listening. If you want to hear more episodes of On the Air with Palantir, make sure to subscribe on our website at palantir.net. There you can also read our blog and see our work! Each of these episodes is also available on iTunes. And of course you can also follow us on twitter at @palantir. Thanks for listening!