Podcasts about joe it

stories nfl pittsburgh eagles cook pittsburgh steelers ravens cardinals cookin kenny pickett sidney crosby mason rudolph footbal pittsburgh sports joe it

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 11, 2024 44:42

In this episode of the "Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots" podcast, host Victoria Guido delves into the intersection of technology, product development, and personal passions with her guests Henry Yin, Co-Founder and CTO of Merico, and Maxim Wheatley, the company's first employee and Community Leader. They are joined by Joe Ferris, CTO of thoughtbot, as a special guest co-host. The conversation begins with a casual exchange about rock climbing, revealing that both Henry and Victoria share this hobby, which provides a unique perspective on their professional roles in software development. Throughout the podcast, Henry and Maxim discuss the journey and evolution of Merico, a company specializing in data-driven tools for developers. They explore the early stages of Merico, highlighting the challenges and surprises encountered while seeking product-market fit and the strategic pivot from focusing on open-source funding allocation to developing a comprehensive engineering metric platform. This shift in focus led to the creation of Apache DevLake, an open-source project contributed to by Merico and later donated to the Apache Software Foundation, reflecting the company's commitment to transparency and community-driven development. The episode also touches on future challenges and opportunities in the field of software engineering, particularly the integration of AI and machine learning tools in the development process. Henry and Maxim emphasize the potential of AI to enhance developer productivity and the importance of data-driven insights in improving team collaboration and software delivery performance. Joe contributes to the discussion with his own experiences and perspectives, particularly on the importance of process over individual metrics in team management. Merico (https://www.merico.dev/) Follow Merico on GitHub (https://github.com/merico-dev), Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/company/merico-dev/), or X (https://twitter.com/MericoDev). Apache DevLake (https://devlake.apache.org/) Follow Henry Yin on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/henry-hezheng-yin-88116a52/). Follow Maxim Wheatley on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/maximwheatley/) or X (https://twitter.com/MaximWheatley). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Henry Yin, Co-Founder and CTO of Merico, and Maxim Wheatley, the first employee and Community Leader of Merico, creating data-driven developer tools for forward-thinking devs. Thank you for joining us. HENRY: Thanks for having us. MAXIM: Glad to be here, Victoria. Thank you. VICTORIA: And we also have a special guest co-host today, the CTO of thoughtbot, Joe Ferris. JOE: Hello. VICTORIA: Okay. All right. So, I met Henry and Maxim at the 7CTOs Conference in San Diego back in November. And I understand that Henry, you are also an avid rock climber. HENRY: Yes. I know you were also in Vegas during Thanksgiving. And I sort of have [inaudible 00:49] of a tradition to go to Vegas every Thanksgiving to Red Rock National Park. Yeah, I'd love to know more about how was your trip to Vegas this Thanksgiving. VICTORIA: Yes. I got to go to Vegas as well. We had a bit of rain, actually. So, we try not to climb on sandstone after the rain and ended up doing some sport climbing on limestone around the Blue Diamond Valley area; a little bit light on climbing for me, actually, but still beautiful out there. I loved being in Red Rock Canyon outside of Las Vegas. And I do find that there's just a lot of developers and engineers who have an affinity for climbing. I'm not sure what exactly that connection is. But I know, Joe, you also have a little bit of climbing and mountaineering experience, right? JOE: Yeah. I used to climb a good deal. I actually went climbing for the first time in, like, three years this past weekend, and it was truly pathetic. But you have to [laughs] start somewhere. VICTORIA: That's right. And, Henry, how long have you been climbing for? HENRY: For about five years. I like to spend my time in nature when I'm not working: hiking, climbing, skiing, scuba diving, all of the good outdoor activities. VICTORIA: That's great. And I understand you were bouldering in Vegas, right? Did you go to Kraft Boulders? HENRY: Yeah, we went to Kraft also Red Spring. It was a surprise for me. I was able to upgrade my outdoor bouldering grade to B7 this year at Red Spring and Monkey Wrench. There was always some surprises for me. When I went to Red Rock National Park last year, I met Alex Honnold there who was shooting a documentary, and he was really, really friendly. So, really enjoying every Thanksgiving trip to Vegas. VICTORIA: That's awesome. Yeah, well, congratulations on B7. That's great. It's always good to get a new grade. And I'm kind of in the same boat with Joe, where I'm just constantly restarting my climbing career. So [laughs], I haven't had a chance to push a grade like that in a little while. But that sounds like a lot of fun. HENRY: Yeah, it's really hard to be consistent on climbing when you have, like, a full-time job, and then there's so much going on in life. It's always a challenge. VICTORIA: Yeah. But a great way to like, connect with other people, and make friends, and spend time outdoors. So, I still really appreciate it, even if I'm not maybe progressing as much as I could be. That's wonderful. So, tell me, how did you and Maxim actually meet? Did you meet through climbing or the outdoors? MAXIM: We actually met through AngelList, which I really recommend to anyone who's really looking to get into startups. When Henry and I met, Merico was essentially just starting. I had this eagerness to explore something really early stage where I'd get to do all of the interesting kind of cross-functional things that come with that territory, touching on product and marketing, on fundraising, kind of being a bit of everything. And I was eager to look into something that was applying, you know, machine learning, data analytics in some really practical way. And I came across what Hezheng Henry and the team were doing in terms of just extracting useful insights from codebases. And we ended up connecting really well. And I think the previous experience I had was a good fit for the team, and the rest was history. And we've had a great time building together for the last five years. VICTORIA: Yeah. And tell me a little bit more about your background and what you've been bringing to the Merico team. MAXIM: I think, like a lot of people in startups, consider myself a member of the Island of Misfit Toys in the sense that no kind of clear-cut linear pathway through my journey but a really exciting and productive one nonetheless. So, I began studying neuroscience at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. I was about to go to medical school and, in my high school years had explored entrepreneurship in a really basic way. I think, like many people do, finding ways to monetize my hobbies and really kind of getting infected with that bug that I could create something, make money from it, and kind of be the master of my own destiny, for lack of less cliché terms. So, not long after graduating, I started my first job that recruited me into a seed-stage venture capital, and from there, I had the opportunity to help early-stage startups, invest in them. I was managing a startup accelerator out there. From there, produced a documentary that followed those startups. Not long after all of that, I ended up co-founding a consumer electronics company where I was leading product, so doing lots of mechanical, electrical, and a bit of software engineering. And without taking too long, those were certainly kind of two of the more formative things. But one way or another, I've spent my whole career now in startups and, especially early-stage ones. It was something I was eager to do was kind of take some of the high-level abstract science that I had learned in my undergraduate and kind of apply some of those frameworks to some of the things that I do today. VICTORIA: That's super interesting. And now I'm curious about you, Henry, and your background. And what led you to get the idea for Merico? HENRY: Yeah. My professional career is actually much simpler because Merico was my first company and my first job. Before Merico, I was a PhD student at UC Berkeley studying computer science. My research was an intersection of software engineering and machine learning. And back then, we were tackling this research problem of how do we fairly measure the developer contributions in a software project? And the reason we are interested in this project has to do with the open-source funding problem. So, let's say an open-source project gets 100k donations from Google. How does the maintainers can automatically distribute all of the donations to sometimes hundreds or thousands of contributors according to their varying level of contributions? So, that was the problem we were interested in. We did research on this for about a year. We published a paper. And later on, you know, we started the company with my, you know, co-authors. And that's how the story began for Merico. VICTORIA: I really love that. And maybe you could tell me just a little bit more about what Merico is and why a company may be interested in trying out your services. HENRY: The product we're currently offering actually is a little bit different from what we set out to build. At the very beginning, we were building this platform for open-source funding problem that we can give an open-source project. We can automatically, using algorithm, measure developer contributions and automatically distribute donations to all developers. But then we encountered some technical and business challenges. So, we took out the metrics component from the previous idea and launched this new product in the engineering metric space. And this time, we focus on helping engineering leaders better understand the health of their engineering work. So, this is the Merico analytics platform that we're currently offering to software engineering teams. JOE: It's interesting. I've seen some products that try to judge the health of a codebase, but it sounds like this is more trying to judge the health of the team. MAXIM: Yeah, I think that's generally fair to say. As we've evolved, we've certainly liked to describe ourselves as, you know, I think a lot of people are familiar with observability tools, which help ultimately ascertain, like, the performance of the technology, right? Like, it's assessing, visualizing, chopping up the machine-generated data. And we thought there would be a tremendous amount of value in being, essentially, observability for the human-generated data. And I think, ultimately, what we found on our journey is that there's a tremendous amount of frustration, especially in larger teams, not in looking to use a tool like that for any kind of, like, policing type thing, right? Like, no one's looking if they're doing it right, at least looking to figure out, like, oh, who's underperforming, or who do we need to yell at? But really trying to figure out, like, where are the strengths? Like, how can we improve our processes? How can we make sure we're delivering better software more reliably, more sustainably? Like how are we balancing that trade-off between new features, upgrades and managing tech debt and bugs? We've ultimately just worked tirelessly to, hopefully, fill in those blind spots for people. And so far, I'm pleased to say that the reception has been really positive. We've, I think, tapped into a somewhat subtle but nonetheless really important pain point for a lot of teams around the world. VICTORIA: Yeah. And, Henry, you said that you started it based on some of the research that you did at UC Berkeley. I also understand you leaned on the research from the DevOps research from DORA. Can you tell me a little bit more about that and what you found insightful from the research that was out there and already existed? MAXIM: So, I think what's really funny, and it really speaks to, I think, the importance in product development of just getting out there and speaking with your potential users or actual users, and despite all of the deep, deep research we had done on the topic of understanding engineering, we really hadn't touched on DORA too much. And this is probably going back about five years now. Henry and I were taking a customer meeting with an engineering leader at Yahoo out in the Bay Area. He kind of revealed this to us basically where he's like, "Oh, you guys should really look at incorporating DORA into this thing. Like, all of the metrics, all of the analytics you're building super cool, super interesting, but DORA really has this great framework, and you guys should look into it." And in hindsight, I think we can now [chuckles], honestly, admit to ourselves, even if it maybe was a bit embarrassing at the time where both Henry and I were like, "What? What is that? Like, what's Dora?" And we ended up looking into it and since then, have really become evangelists for the framework. And I'll pass it to Henry to talk about, like, what that journey has looked like. HENRY: Thanks, Maxim. I think what's cool about DORA is in terms of using metrics, there's always this challenge called Goodhart's Law, right? So, whenever a metric becomes a target, the metric cease to be a good metric because people are going to find ways to game the metric. So, I think what's cool about DORA is that it actually offers not just one metric but four key metrics that bring balance to covering both the stability and velocity. So, when you look at DORA metrics, you can't just optimize for velocity and sacrificing your stability. But you have to look at all four metrics at the same time, and that's harder to game. So, I think that's why it's become more and more popular in the industry as the starting point for using metrics for data-driven engineering. VICTORIA: Yeah. And I like how DORA also represents it as the metrics and how they apply to where you are in the lifecycle of your product. So, I'm curious: with Merico, what kind of insights do you think engineering leaders can gain from having this data that will unlock some of their team's potential? MAXIM: So, I think one of the most foundational things before we get into any detailed metrics is I think it's more important than ever, especially given that so many of us are remote, right? Where the general processes of software engineering are generally difficult to understand, right? They're nuanced. They tend to kind of happen in relative isolation until a PR is reviewed and merged. And it can be challenging, of course, to understand what's being done, how consistently, how well, like, where are the good parts, where are the bad parts. And I think that problem gets really exasperated, especially in a remote setting where no one is necessarily in the same place. So, on a foundational level, I think we've really worked hard to solve that challenge, where just being able to see, like, how are we doing? And to that point, I think what we've found before anyone even dives too deep into all of the insights that we can deliver, I think there's a tremendous amount of appetite for anyone who's looking to get into that practice of constant improvement and figuring out how to level up the work they're doing, just setting close benchmarks, figuring out, like, okay, when we talk about more nebulous or maybe subjective terms like speed, or quality, what does good look like? What does consistent look like? Being able to just tie those things to something that really kind of unifies the vocabulary is something I always like to say, where, okay, now, even if we're not focused on a specific metric, or we don't have a really particular goal in mind that we want to assess, now we're at least starting the conversation as a team from a place where when we talk about quality, we have something that's shared between us. We understand what we're referring to. And when we're talking about speed, we can also have something consistent to talk about there. And within all of that, I think one of the most powerful things is it helps to really kind of ground the conversations around the trade-offs, right? There's always that common saying: the triangle of trade-offs is where it's, like, you can have it cheap; you can have it fast, and you can have it good, but you can only have two. And I think with DORA, with all of these different frameworks with many metrics, it helps to really solidify what those trade-offs look like. And that's, for me at least, been one of the most impactful things to watch: is our global users have really started evolving their practices with it. HENRY: Yeah. And I want to add to Maxim's answer. But before that, I just want to quickly mention how our products are structured. So, Merico actually has an open-source component and a proprietary component. So, the open-source component is called Apache DevLake. It's an open-source project we created first within Merico and later on donated to Apache Software Foundation. And now, it's one of the most popular engineering metrics tool out there. And then, on top of that, we built a SaaS offering called DevInsight Cloud, which is powered by Apache DevLake. So, with DevLake, the open-source project, you can set up your data connections, connect DevLake to all of the dev tools you're using, and then we collect data. And then we provide many different flavors of dashboards for our users. And many of those dashboards are structured, and there are different questions engineering teams might want to ask. For example, like, how fast are we responding to our customer requirement? For that question, we will look at like, metrics like change lead time, or, like, for a question, how accurate is our planning for the sprint? In that case, the dashboard will show metrics relating to the percentage of issues we can deliver for every sprint for our plan. So, that's sort of, you know, based on the questions that the team wants to answer, we provide different dashboards that help them extract insights using the data from their DevOps tools. JOE: It's really interesting you donated it to Apache. And I feel like the hybrid SaaS open-source model is really common. And I've become more and more skeptical of it over the years as companies start out open source, and then once they start getting competitors, they change the license. But by donating it to Apache, you sort of sidestep that potential trust issue. MAXIM: Yeah, you've hit the nail on the head with that one because, in many ways, for us, engaging with Apache in the way that we have was, I think, ultimately born out of the observations we had about the shortcomings of other products in the space where, for one, very practical. We realized quickly that if we wanted to offer the most complete visibility possible, it would require connections to so many different products, right? I think anyone can look at their engineering toolchain and identify perhaps 7, 9, 10 different things they're using on a day-to-day basis. Oftentimes, those aren't shared between companies, too. So, I think part one was just figuring out like, okay, how do we build a framework that makes it easy for developers to build a plugin and contribute to the project if there's something they want to incorporate that isn't already supported? And I think that was kind of part one. Part two is, I think, much more important and far more profound, which is developer trust, right? Where we saw so many different products out there that claimed to deliver these insights but really had this kind of black-box approach, right? Where data goes in, something happens, insights come out. How's it doing that? How's it weighting things? What's it calculating? What variables are incorporated? All of that is a mystery. And that really leads to developers, rightfully, not having a basis to trust what's actually being shown to them. So, for us, it was this perspective of what's the maximum amount of transparency that we could possibly offer? Well, open source is probably the best answer to that question. We made sure the entirety of the codebase is something they can take a look at, they can modify. They can dive into the underlying queries and algorithms and how everything is working to gain a total sense of trust in how is this thing working? And if I need to modify something to account for some nuanced details of how our team works, we can also do that. And to your point, you know, I think it's definitely something I would agree with that one of the worst things we see in the open-source community is that companies will be kind of open source in name only, right? Where it's really more of marketing or kind of sales thing than anything, where it's like, oh, let's tap into the good faith of open source. But really, somehow or another, through bait and switch, through partial open source, through license changes, whatever it is, we're open source in name only but really, a proprietary, closed-source product. So, for us, donating the core of DevLake to the Apache Foundation was essentially our way of really, like, putting, you know, walking the talk, right? Where no one can doubt at this point, like, oh, is this thing suddenly going to have the license changed? Is this suddenly going to go closed-source? Like, the answer to that now is a definitive no because it is now part of that ecosystem. And I think with the aspirations we've had to build something that is not just a tool but, hopefully, long-term becomes, like, foundational technology, I think that gives people confidence and faith that this is something they can really invest in. They can really plumb into their processes in a deep and meaningful way with no concerns whatsoever that something is suddenly going to change that makes all of that work, you know, something that they didn't expect. JOE: I think a lot of companies guard their source code like it's their secret sauce, but my experience has been more that it's the secret shame [laughs]. HENRY: [laughs] MAXIM: There's no doubt in my role with, especially our open-source product driving our community we've really seen the magic of what a community-driven product can be. And open source, I think, is the most kind of a true expression of a community-driven product, where we have a Slack community with nearly 1,000 developers in it now. Naturally, right? Some of those developers are in there just to ask questions and answer questions. Some are intensely involved, right? They're suggesting improvements. They're suggesting new features. They're finding ways to refine things. And it really is that, like, fantastic culture that I'm really proud that we've cultivated where best idea ships, right? If you've got a good idea, throw it into a GitHub issue or a comment. Let's see how the community responds to it. Let's see if someone wants to pick it up. Let's see if someone wants to submit a PR. If it's good, it goes into production, and then the entire community benefits. And, for me, that's something I've found endlessly exciting. HENRY: Yeah. I think Joe made a really good point on the secret sauce part because I don't think the source code is our secret sauce. There's no rocket science in DevLake. If we break it down, it's really just some UI UX plus data pipelines. I think what's making DevLake successful is really the trust and collaboration that we're building with the open-source community. When it comes to trust, I think there are two aspects. First of all, trust on the metric accuracy, right? Because with a lot of proprietary software, you don't know how they are calculating the metrics. If people don't know how the metrics are calculated, they can't really trust it and use it. And secondly, is the trust that they can always use this software, and there's no vendor lock-in. And when it comes to collaboration, we were seeing many of our data sources and dashboards they were contributed not by our core developers but by the community. And the communities really, you know, bring in their insights and their use cases into DevLake and make DevLake, you know, more successful and more applicable to more teams in different areas of soft engineering. MID-ROLL AD: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you're tight on time and investment, which is why we've created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product's next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at tbot.io/entrepreneurs. VICTORIA: I understand you've taken some innovative approaches on using AI in your open-source repositories to respond to issues and questions from your developers. So, can you tell me a little bit more about that? HENRY: Absolutely. I self-identify as a builder. And one characteristic of builder is to always chase after the dream of building infinite things within the finite lifespan. So, I was always thinking about how we can be more productive, how we can, you know, get better at getting better. And so, this year, you know, AI is huge, and there are so many AI-powered tools that can help us achieve more in terms of delivering software. And then, internally, we had a hackathon, and there's one project, which is an AI-powered coding assistant coming out of it called DevChat. And we have made it public at devchat.ai. But we've been closely following, you know, what are the other AI-powered tools that can make, you know, software developers' or open-source maintainers' lives easier? And we've been observing that there are more and more open-source projects adopting AI chatbots to help them handle, you know, respond to GitHub issues. So, I recently did a case study on a pretty popular open-source project called LangChain. So, it's the hot kid right now in the AI space right now. And it's using a chatbot called Dosu to help respond to issues. I had some interesting findings from the case study. VICTORIA: In what ways was that chatbot really helpful, and in what ways did it not really work that well? HENRY: Yeah, I was thinking of how to measure the effectiveness of that chatbot. And I realized that there is a feature that's built in GitHub, which is the reaction to comment. So, how the chatbot works is whenever there is a new issue, the chatbot would basically retrieval-augmented generation pipeline and then using ORM to generate a response to the issue. And then there's people leave reactions to that comment by the chatbot, but mostly, it's thumbs up and thumbs down. So, what I did is I collect all of the issues from the LangChain repository and look at how many thumbs up and thumbs down Dosu chatbot got, you know, from all of the comments they left with the issues. So, what I found is that over across 2,600 issues that Dosu chatbot helped with, it got around 900 thumbs ups and 1,300 thumbs down. So, then it comes to how do we interpret this data, right? Because it got more thumbs down than thumbs up doesn't mean that it's actually not useful or harmful to the developers. So, to answer that question, I actually looked at some examples of thumbs-up and thumb-down comments. And what I found is the thumb down doesn't mean that the chatbot is harmful. It's mostly the developers are signaling to the open-source maintainers that your chatbot is not helping in this case, and we need human intervention. But with the thumbs up, the chatbot is actually helping a lot. There's one issue where people post a question, and the chatbot just wrote the code and then basically made a suggestion on how to resolve the issue. And the human response is, "Damn, it worked." And that was very surprising to me, and it made me consider, you know, adopting similar technology and AI-powered tools for our own open-source project. VICTORIA: That's very cool. Well, I want to go back to the beginning of Merico. And when you first got started, and you were trying to understand your customers and what they need, was there anything surprising in that early discovery process that made you change your strategy? HENRY: So, one challenge we faced when we first explored open-source funding allocation problem space is that our algorithm looks at the Git repository. But with software engineering, especially with open-source collaboration, there are so many activities that are happening outside of open-source repos on GitHub. For example, I might be an evangelist, and my day-to-day work might be, you know, engaging in community work, talking about the open-source project conference. And all of those things were not captured by our algorithm, which was only looking at the GitHub repository at the time. So, that was one of the technical challenge that we faced and led us to switch over to more of the system-driven metrics side. VICTORIA: Gotcha. Over the years, how has Merico grown? What has changed between when you first started and today? HENRY: So, one thing is the team size. When we just got started, we only have, you know, the three co-founders and Maxim. And now we have grown to a team of 70 team members, and we have a fully distributed team across multiple continents. So, that's pretty interesting dynamics to handle. And we learned a lot of how to build effective team and a cohesive team along the way. And in terms of product, DevLake now, you know, has more than 900 developers in our Slack community, and we track over 360 companies using DevLake. So, definitely, went a long way since we started the journey. And yeah, tomorrow we...actually, Maxim and I are going to host our end-of-year Apache DevLake Community Meetup and featuring Nathen Harvey, the Google's DORA team lead. Yeah, definitely made some progress since we've been working on Merico for four years. VICTORIA: Well, that's exciting. Well, say hi to Nathen for me. I helped takeover DevOps DC with some of the other organizers that he was running way back in the day, so [laughs] that's great. What challenges do you see on the horizon for Merico and DevLake? MAXIM: One of the challenges I think about a lot, and I think it's front of mind for many people, especially with software engineering, but at this point, nearly every profession, is what does AI mean for everything we're doing? What does the future look like where developers are maybe producing the majority of their code through prompt-based approaches versus code-based approaches, right? How do we start thinking about how we coherently assess that? Like, how do you maybe redefine what the value is when there's a scenario where perhaps all coders, you know, if we maybe fast forward a few years, like, what if the AI is so good that the code is essentially perfect? What does success look like then? How do you start thinking about what is a good team if everyone is shooting out 9 out of 10 PRs nearly every time because they're all using a unified framework supported by AI? So, I think that's certainly kind of one of the challenges I envision in the future. I think, really, practically, too, many startups have been contending with the macroclimate within the fundraising climates. You know, I think many of the companies out there, us included, had better conditions in 2019, 2020 to raise funds at more favorable valuations, perhaps more relaxed terms, given the climate of the public markets and, you know, monetary policy. I think that's, obviously, we're all experiencing and has tightened things up like revenue expectations or now higher kind of expectations on getting into a highly profitable place or, you know, the benchmark is set a lot higher there. So, I think it's not a challenge that's unique to us in any way at all. I think it's true for almost every company that's out there. It's now kind of thinking in a more disciplined way about how do you kind of meet the market demands without compromising on the product vision and without compromising on the roadmap and the strategies that you've put in place that are working but are maybe coming under a little bit more pressure, given kind of the new set of rules that have been laid out for all of us? VICTORIA: Yeah, that is going to be a challenge. And do you see the company and the product solving some of those challenges in a unique way? HENRY: I've been thinking about how AI can fulfill the promise of making developers 10x developer. I'm an early adopter and big fan of GitHub Copilot. I think it really helps with writing, like, the boilerplate code. But I think it's improving maybe my productivity by 20% to 30%. It's still pretty far away from 10x. So, I'm thinking how Merico's solutions can help fill the gap a little bit. In terms of Apache DevLake and its SaaS offering, I think we are helping with, like, the team collaboration and measuring, like, software delivery performance, how can the team improve as a whole. And then, recently, we had a spin-off, which is the AI-powered coding assistant DevChat. And that's sort of more on the empowering individual developers with, like, testing, refactoring these common workflows. And one big thing for us in the future is how we can combine these two components, you know, team collaboration and improvement tool, DevLake, with the individual coding assistant, DevChat, how they can be integrated together to empower developers. I think that's the big question for Merico ahead. JOE: Have you used Merico to judge the contributions of AI to a project? HENRY: [laughs] So, actually, after we pivot to engineering metrics, we focus now less on individual contribution because that sometimes can be counterproductive. Because whenever you visualize that, then people will sometimes become defensive and try to optimize for the metrics that measure individual contributions. So, we sort of...nowadays, we no longer offer that kind of metrics within DevLake, if that makes sense. MAXIM: And that kind of goes back to one of Victoria's earlier questions about, like, what surprised us in the journey. Early on, we had this very benevolent perspective, you know, I would want to kind of underline that, that we never sought to be judging individuals in a negative way. We were looking to find ways to make it useful, even to a point of finding ways...like, we explored different ways to give developers badges and different kind of accomplishment milestones, like, things to kind of signal their strengths and accomplishments. But I think what we've found in that journey is that...and I would really kind of say this strongly. I think the only way that metrics of any kind serve an organization is when they support a healthy culture. And to that end, what we found is that we always like to preach, like, it's processes, not people. It's figuring out if you're hiring correctly, if you're making smart decisions about who's on the team. I think you have to operate with a default assumption within reason that those people are doing their best work. They're trying to move the company forward. They're trying to make good decisions to better serve the customers, better serve the company and the product. With that in mind, what you're really looking to do is figure out what is happening within the underlying processes that get something from thought to production. And how do you clear the way for people? And I think that's really been a big kind of, you know, almost like a tectonic shift for our company over the years is really kind of fully transitioning to that. And I think, in some ways, DORA has represented kind of almost, like, a best practice for, like, processes over people, right? It's figuring out between quality and speed; how are you doing? Where are those trade-offs? And then, within the processes that account for those outcomes, how can you really be improving things? So, I would say, for us, that's, like, been kind of the number one thing there is figuring out, like, how do we keep doubling down on processes, not people? And how do we really make sure that we're not just telling people that we're on their side and we're taking a, you know, a very humanistic perspective on wanting to improve the lives of people but actually doing it with the product? HENRY: But putting the challenge on measuring individual contributions aside, I'm as curious as Joe about AI's role in software engineering. I expect to see more and more involvement of AI and gradually, you know, replacing low-level and medium-level and, in the future, even high-level tasks for humans so we can just focus on, like, the objective instead of the implementation. VICTORIA: I can imagine, especially if you're starting to integrate AI tools into your systems and if you're growing your company at scale, some of the ability to have a natural intuition about what's going on it really becomes a challenge, and the data that you can derive from some of these products could help you make better decisions and all different types of things. So, I'm kind of curious to hear from Joe; with your history of open-source contribution and being a part of many different development teams, what kind of information do you wish that you had to help you make decisions in your role? JOE: Yeah, that's an interesting question. I've used some tools that try to identify problem spots in the code. But it'd be interesting to see the results of tools that analyze problem spots in the process. Like, I'd like to learn more about how that works. HENRY: I'm curious; one question for Joe. What is your favorite non-AI-powered code scanning tool that you find useful for yourself or for your team? JOE: I think the most common static analysis tool I use is something to find the Git churn in a repository. Some of this probably is because I've worked mostly on projects these days with dynamic languages. So, there's kind of a limit to how much static analysis you can do of, you know, a Ruby or a Python codebase. But just by analyzing which parts of the application changed the most, help you find which parts are likely to be the buggiest and the most complex. I think every application tends to involve some central model. Like, if you're making an e-commerce site, then probably products are going to have a lot of the core logic, purchases will have a lot of the core logic. And identifying those centers of gravity just through the Git statistics has helped me find places that need to be reworked. HENRY: That's really interesting. Is it something like a hotspot analysis? And when you find a hotspot, then would you invest more resources in, like, refactoring the hotspot to make it more maintainable? JOE: Right, exactly. Like, you can use the statistics to see which files you should look at. And then, usually, when you actually go into the files, especially if you look at some of the changes to the files, it's pretty clear that it's become, you know, for example, a class has become too large, something has become too tightly coupled. HENRY: Gotcha. VICTORIA: Yeah. And so, if you could go back in time, five years ago and give yourself some advice when you first started along this journey, what advice would you give yourself? MAXIM: I'll answer the question in two ways: first for the company and then for myself personally. I think for the company, what I would say is, especially when you're in that kind of pre-product market fit space, and you're maybe struggling to figure out how to solve a challenge that really matters, I think you need to really think carefully about, like, how would you yourself be using your product? And if you're finding reasons, you wouldn't, like, really, really pay careful attention to those. And I think, for us, like, early on in our journey, we ultimately kind of found ourselves asking, we're like, okay, we're a smaller earlier stage team. Perhaps, like, small improvements in productivity or quality aren't going to necessarily move the needle. That's one of the reasons maybe we're not using this. Maybe our developers are already at bandwidth. So, it's not a question of unlocking more bandwidth or figuring out where there's kind of weak points or bottlenecks at that level, but maybe how can we dial in our own processes to let the whole team function more effectively. And I think, for us, like, the more we started thinking through that lens of, like, what's useful to us, like, what's solving a pain point for us, I think, in many ways, DevLake was born out of that exact thinking. And now DevLake is used by hundreds of companies around the world and has, you know, this near thousand developer community that supports it. And I think that's testament to the power of that. For me, personally, if I were to kind of go back five years, you know, I'm grateful to say there isn't a whole lot I would necessarily change. But I think if there's anything that I would, it would just to be consistently more brave in sharing ideas, right? I think Merico has done a great job, and it's something I'm so proud of for us as a team of really embracing new ideas and really kind of making sure, like, best idea ships, right? There isn't a title. There isn't a level of seniority that determines whether or not someone has a right to suggest something or improve something. And I think with that in mind, for me as a technical person but not a member of technical staff, so to speak, I think there was many occasions, for me personally, where I felt like, okay, maybe because of that, I shouldn't necessarily weigh in on certain things. And I think what I've found, and it's a trust-building thing as well, is, like, even if you're wrong, even if your suggestion may be misunderstands something or isn't quite on target, there's still a tremendous amount of value in just being able to share a perspective and share a recommendation and push it out there. And I think with that in mind, like, it's something I would encourage myself and encourage everybody else in a healthy company to feel comfortable to just keep sharing because, ultimately, it's an accuracy-by-volume game to a certain degree, right? Where if I come up with one idea, then I've got one swing at the bat. But if us as a collective come up with 100 ideas that we consider intelligently, we've got a much higher chance of maybe a handful of those really pushing us forward. So, for me, that would be advice I would give myself and to anybody else. HENRY: I'll follow the same structure, so I'll start by the advice in terms of company and advice to myself as an individual. So, for a company level, I think my advice would be fail fast because every company needs to go through this exploration phase trying to find their product-market fit, and then they will have to test, you know, a couple of ideas before they find the right fit for themselves, the same for us. And I wish that we actually had more in terms of structure in exploring these ideas and set deadlines, you know, set milestones for us to quickly test and filter out bad ideas and then accelerate the exploration process. So, fail fast would be my suggestion at the company level. From an individual level, I would say it's more adapting to my CTO role because when I started the company, I still had that, you know, graduate student hustle mindset. I love writing code myself. And it's okay if I spent 100% of my time writing code when the company was, you know, at five people, right? But it's not okay [chuckles] when we have, you know, a team of 40 engineers. So, I wish I had that realization earlier, and I transitioned to a real CTO role earlier, focusing more, like, on technical evangelism or building out the technical and non-technical infrastructure to help my engineering teams be successful. VICTORIA: Well, I really appreciate that. And is there anything else that you all would like to promote today? HENRY: So if you're, you know, engineering leaders who are looking to measure, you know, some metrics and adopt a more data-driven approach to improving your software delivery performance, check out Apache DevLake. It's open-source project, free to use, and it has some great dashboards, support, various data resources. And join our community. We have a pretty vibrant community on Slack. And there are a lot of developers and engineering leaders discussing how they can get more value out of data and metrics and improve software delivery performance. MAXIM: Yeah. And I think to add to that, something I think we've found consistently is there's plenty of data skeptics out there, rightfully so. I think a lot of analytics of every kind are really not very good, right? And so, I think people are rightfully frustrated or even traumatized by them. And for the data skeptics out there, I would invite them to dive into the DevLake community and pose your challenges, right? If you think this stuff doesn't make sense or you have concerns about it, come join the conversation because I think that's really where the most productive discussions end up coming from is not from people mutually high-fiving each other for a successful implementation of DORA. But the really exciting moments come from the people in the community who are challenging it and saying like, "You know what? Like, here's where I don't necessarily think something is useful or I think could be improved." And it's something that's not up to us as individuals to either bless or to deny. That's where the community gets really exciting is those discussions. So, I would say, if you're a data skeptic, come and dive in, and so long as you're respectful, challenge it. And by doing so, you'll hopefully not only help yourself but really help everybody, which is what I love about this stuff so much. JOE: I'm curious, does Merico use Merico? HENRY: Yes. We've been dogfooding ourself a lot. And a lot of the product improvement ideas actually come from our own dogfooding process. For example, there was one time that we look at a dashboard that has this issue change lead time. And then we found our issue, change lead time, you know, went up in the past few month. And then, we were trying to interpret whether that's a good thing or a bad thing because just looking at a single metric doesn't tell us the story behind the change in the metrics. So, we actually improved the dashboard to include some, you know, covariates of the metrics, some other related metrics to help explain the trend of the metric. So yeah, dogfooding is always useful in improving product. VICTORIA: That's great. Well, thank you all so much for joining. I really enjoyed our conversation. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

A Bob Pompeani Showdown and 5 Steelers Questions

The Cook & Joe Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 8, 2024 41:32

(Hour 3 with Cook and Joe) It is a Pomp Showdown! The question is posed: which is the worst collapse: The Philadelphia Eagels or the Jacksonville Jaguars? Ron thinks it is the Eagles while Starkey thinks it is the Jaguars because they completely missed the playoffs. What are the most compelling games of the weekend? Ron thinks it is the Chiefs/Dolphins while Joe thinks it is the Packers/Cowboys. Would you take the over for Najee Harris' projected rushing yards? Joe starts to ask 5 pertinent Steelers questions, such as who will be the best Steelers reciever on Sunday? How will the Steelers make up for the probable absence of TJ Watt? Ron suggests that the Steelers have been good at replacing players they have lost earlier in the year. He highlights the play of Myles Jack and Eric Rowe as players replacing starters who have thrived. Starkey suggests the Bills offensive line could be a weak link regardless of who the Steelers have healthy. Alex Highsmith and Nate Herbig could have massive roles in this game.

NFL Stories late in the season and What's Cookin?

The Cook & Joe Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 1, 2024 38:30

(Hour 4 with Cook and Joe) It seems to be every year at the end of the season quarterback stories take the NFL world by storm. This year is no different with Mason Rudolph vs Kenny Pickett. We open the phone lines again to get listener reactions to the benching of Kenny Pickett. What's Cookin'. What to expect with the Ravens this weekend? Do they start or sit their starters? Also Kyler Murray wore a Sidney Crosby jersey before the Cardinals game against the Eagles.

Morning Joe 11/21/23

Morning Joe

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 21, 2023 47:30

Joe: It's time fascism is called fascism and Americans know exactly what they're voting for

americans morning joe joe it

Ep 217: Discussions With A Six Year Old

The All Seeing Guys with Greg & Joe

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 31, 2023 91:36

Welcome to episode 217 of The All Seeing Guys Podcast with Greg and Joe It's half term, Greg is on dad duty and Uncle Joe is over as Greg's six-year-old daughter, Indiana joins us as a guest. Something we wanted to do, Indiana had been desperate to do, and had even been requested quite a bit from you listeners. Possibly the only family-friendly episode we've done but still bonkers and a lot of fun. Join Greg, Joe, and Indiana as they talk Halloween, movies, music, questionable jokes, unusual baby names, long arms in helicopters, the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott invigorated by Rosa Parkes, a bath full of Haribo, YouTube, dreams and so much more. With the eavesdropping segment, Geezedropping too. Enjoy

halloween indiana uncle joe haribo montgomery bus boycott joe it

497: Axiom with Seif Lotfy

Woodland Walks - The Woodland Trust Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 19, 2023 39:13

Victoria is joined by guest co-host Joe Ferris, CTO at thoughtbot, and Seif Lotfy, the CTO and Co-Founder of Axiom. Seif discusses the journey, challenges, and strategies behind his data analytics and observability platform. Seif, who has a background in robotics and was a 2008 Sony AIBO robotic soccer world champion, shares that Axiom pivoted from being a Datadog competitor to focusing on logs and event data. The company even built its own logs database to provide a cost-effective solution for large-scale analytics. Seif is driven by his passion for his team and the invaluable feedback from the community, emphasizing that sales validate the effectiveness of a product. The conversation also delves into Axiom's shift in focus towards developers to address their need for better and more affordable observability tools. On the business front, Seif reveals the company's challenges in scaling across multiple domains without compromising its core offerings. He discusses the importance of internal values like moving with urgency and high velocity to guide the company's future. Furthermore, he touches on the challenges and strategies of open-sourcing projects and advises avoiding platforms like Reddit and Hacker News to maintain focus. Axiom (https://axiom.co/) Follow Axiom on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/axiomhq/), X (https://twitter.com/AxiomFM), GitHub (https://github.com/axiomhq), or Discord (https://discord.com/invite/axiom-co). Follow Seif Lotfy on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/seiflotfy/) or X (https://twitter.com/seiflotfy). Visit his website at seif.codes (https://seif.codes/). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido, and with me today is Seif Lotfy, CTO and Co-Founder of Axiom, the best home for your event data. Seif, thank you for joining me. SEIF: Hey, everybody. Thanks for having me. This is awesome. I love the name of the podcast, given that I used to compete in robotics. VICTORIA: What? All right, we're going to have to talk about that. And I also want to introduce a guest co-host today. Since we're talking about cloud, and observability, and data, I invited Joe Ferris, thoughtbot CTO and Director of Development of our platform engineering team, Mission Control. Welcome, Joe. How are you? JOE: Good, thanks. Good to be back again. VICTORIA: Okay. I am excited to talk to you all about observability. But I need to go back to Seif's comment on competing with robots. Can you tell me a little bit more about what robots you've built in the past? SEIF: I didn't build robots; I used to program them. Remember the Sony AIBOs, where Sony made these dog robots? And we would make them compete. There was an international competition where we made them play soccer, and they had to be completely autonomous. They only communicate via Bluetooth or via wireless protocols. And you only have the camera as your sensor as well as...a chest sensor throws the ball near you, and then yeah, you make them play football against each other, four versus four with a goalkeeper and everything. Just look it up: RoboCup AIBO. Look it up on YouTube. And I...2008 world champion with the German team. VICTORIA: That sounds incredible. What kind of crowds are you drawing out for a robot soccer match? Is that a lot of people involved with that? SEIF: You would be surprised how big the RoboCup competition is. It's ridiculous. VICTORIA: I want to go. I'm ready. I want to, like, I'll look it up and find out when the next one is. SEIF: No more Sony robots but other robots. Now, there's two-legged robots. So, they make them play as two-legged robots, much slower than four-legged robots, but works. VICTORIA: Wait. So, the robots you were playing soccer with had four legs they were running around on? SEIF: Yeah, they were dogs [laughter]. VICTORIA: That's awesome. SEIF: We all get the same robot. It's just a competition on software, right? On a software level. And some other competitions within the RoboCup actually use...you build your own robot and stuff like that. But this one was...it's called the Standard League, where we all have a robot, and we have to program it. JOE: And the standard robot was a dog. SEIF: Yeah, I think back then...we're talking...it's been a long time. I think it started in 2001 or something. I think the competition started in 2001 or 2002. And I compete from 2006 to 2008. Robots back then were just, you know, simple. VICTORIA: Robots today are way too complicated [laughs]. SEIF: Even AI is more complicated. VICTORIA: That's right. Yeah, everything has gotten a lot more complicated [laughs]. I'm so curious how you went from being a world-champion robot dog soccer player [laughs] programmer [laughs] to where you are today with Axiom. Can you tell me a little bit more about your journey? SEIF: The journey is interesting because it came from open source. I used to do open source on the side a lot–part of the GNOME Project. That's where I met Neil and the rest of my team, Mikkel Kamstrup, the whole crowd, basically. We worked on GNOME. We worked on Ubuntu. Like, most of them were working professionally on it. I was working for another company, but we worked on the same project. We ended up at Xamarin, which was bought by Microsoft. And then we ended up doing Axiom. But we've been around each other professionally since 2009, most of us. It's like a little family. But how we ended up exactly in observability, I think it's just trying to fix pain points in my life. VICTORIA: Yeah, I was reading through the docs on Axiom. And there's an interesting point you make about organizations having to choose between how much data they have and how much they want to spend on it. So, maybe you can tell me a little bit more about that pain point and what you really found in the early stages that you wanted to solve. SEIF: So, the early stages of what we wanted to solve we were mainly dealing with...so, the early, early stage, we were actually trying to be a Datadog competitor, where we were going to be self-hosted. Eventually, we focused on logs because we found out that's what was a big problem for most people, just event data, not just metric but generally event data, so logs, traces, et cetera. We built out our own logs database completely from scratch. And one of the things we stumbled upon was; basically, you have three things when it comes to logging, which is low cost, low latency, and large scale. That's what everybody wants. But you can't get all three of them; you can only get two of them. And we opted...like, we chose large scale and low cost. And when it comes to latency, we say it should be just fast enough, right? And that's where we focused on, and this is how we started building it. And with that, this is how we managed to stand out by just having way lower cost than anybody else in the industry and dealing with large scale. VICTORIA: That's really interesting. And how did you approach making the ingestion pipeline for masses amount of data more efficient? SEIF: Just make it coordination-free as possible, right? And get rid of Kafka because Kafka just, you know, drains your...it's where you throw in money. Like maintaining Kafka...it's like back then Elasticsearch, right? Elasticsearch was the biggest part of your infrastructure that would cost money. Now, it's also Kafka. So, we found a way to have our own internal way of queueing things without having to rely on Kafka. As I said, we wrote everything from scratch to make it work. Like, every now and then, I think that we can spin this out of the company and make it a new product. But now, eyes on the prize, right? JOE: It's interesting to hear that somebody who spent so much time in the open-source community ended up rolling their own solution to so many problems. Do you feel like you had some lessons learned from open source that led you to reject solutions like Kafka, or how did that journey go? SEIF: I don't think I'm rejecting Kafka. The problem is how Kafka is built, right? Kafka is still...you have to set up all these servers. They have to communicate, et cetera, etcetera. They didn't build it in a way where it's stateless, and that's what we're trying to go to. We're trying to make things as stateless as possible. So, Kafka was never built for the cloud-native era. And you can't really rely on SQS or something like that because it won't deal with this high throughput. So, that's why I said, like, we will sacrifice some latency, but at least the cost is low. So, if messages show after half a second or a second, I'm good. It doesn't have to be real-time for me. So, I had to write a couple of these things. But also, it doesn't mean that we reject open source. Like, we actually do like open source. We open-source a couple of libraries. We contribute back to open source, right? We needed a solution back then for that problem, and we couldn't find any. And maybe one day, open source will have, right? JOE: Yeah. I was going to ask if you considered open-sourcing any of your high latency, high throughput solutions. SEIF: Not high latency. You make it sound bad. JOE: [laughs] SEIF: You make it sound bad. It's, like, fast enough, right? I'm not going to compete on milliseconds because, also, I'm competing with ClickHouse. I don't want to compete with ClickHouse. ClickHouse is low latency and large scale, right? But then the cost is, you know, off the charts a bit sometimes. I'm going the other route. Like, you know, it's fast enough. Like, how, you know, if it's under two, three seconds, everybody's happy, right? If the results come within two, three seconds, everybody is happy. If you're going to build a real-time trading system on top of it, I'll strongly advise against that. But if you're building, you know, you're looking at dashboards, you're more in the observability field, yeah, we're good. VICTORIA: Yeah, I'm curious what you found, like, which customer personas that market really resonated with. Like, is there a particular, like, industry type where you're noticing they really want to lower their cost, and they're okay with this just fast enough latency? SEIF: Honestly, with the current recession, everybody is okay with giving up some of the speed to reduce the money because I think it's not linear reduction. It's more exponential reduction at this point, right? You give up a second, and you're saving 30%. You give up two seconds, all of a sudden, you're saving 80%. So, I'd say in the beginning, everybody thought they need everything to be very, very fast. And now they're realizing, you know, with limitations you have around your budget and spending, you're like, okay, I'm okay with the speed. And, again, we're not slow. I'm just saying people realize they don't need everything under a second. They're okay with waiting for two seconds. VICTORIA: That totally resonates with me. And I'm curious if you can add maybe a non-technical or a real-life example of, like, how this impacts the operations of a company or organization, like, if you can give us, like, a business-y example of how this impacts how people work. SEIF: I don't know how, like, how do people work on that? Nothing changed, really. They're still doing the, like...really nothing because...and that aspect is you run a query, and, again, as I said, you're not getting the result in a second. You're just waiting two seconds or three seconds, and it's there. So, nothing really changed. I think people can wait three seconds. And we're still like–when I say this, we're still faster than most others. We're just not as fast as people who are trying to compete on a millisecond level. VICTORIA: Yeah, that's okay. Maybe I'll take it back even, like, a step further, right? Like, our audience is really sometimes just founders who almost have no formal technical training or background. So, when we talk about observability, sometimes people who work in DevOps and operations all understand it and kind of know why it's important [laughs] and what we're talking about. So, maybe you could, like, go back to -- SEIF: Oh, if you're asking about new types of people who've been using it -- VICTORIA: Yeah. Like, if you're going to explain to, like, a non-technical founder, like, why your product is important, or, like, how people in their organization might use it, what would you say? SEIF: Oh, okay, if you put it like that. It's more of if you have data, timestamp data, and you want to run analytics on top of it, so that could be transactions, that could be web vitals, rather than count every time somebody visits, you have a timestamp. So, you can count, like, how many visitors visited the website and what, you know, all these kinds of things. That's where you want to use something like Axiom. That's outside the DevOps space, of course. And in DevOps space, there's so many other things you use Axiom for, but that's outside the DevOps space. And we actually...we implemented as zero-config integration with Vercel that kind of went viral. And we were, for a while, the number one enterprise for self-integration because so many people were using it. So, Vercel users are usually not necessarily writing the most complex backends, but a lot of things are happening on the front-end side of things. And we would be giving them dashboards, automated dashboards about, you know, latencies, and how long a request took, and how long the response took, and the content type, and the status codes, et cetera, et cetera. And there's a huge user base around that. VICTORIA: I like that. And it's something, for me, you know, as a managing director of our platform engineering team, I want to talk more to founders about. It's great that you put this product and this app out into the world. But how do you know that people are actually using it? How do you know that people, like, maybe, are they all quitting after the first day and not coming back to your app? Or maybe, like, the page isn't loading or, like, it's not working as they expected it to. And, like, if you don't have anything observing what users are doing in your app, then it's going to be hard to show that you're getting any traction and know where you need to go in and make corrections and adjust. SEIF: We have two ways of doing this. Right now, internally, we use our own tools to see, like, who is sending us data. We have a deployment that's monitoring production deployment. And we're just, you know, seeing how people are using it, how much data they're sending every day, who stopped sending data, who spiked in sending data sets, et cetera. But we're using Mixpanel, and Dominic, our Head of Product, implemented a couple of key metrics to that for that specifically. So, we know, like, what's the average time until somebody starts going from building its own queries with the builder to writing APL, or how long it takes them from, you know, running two queries to five queries. And, you know, we just start measuring these things now. And it's been going...we've been growing healthy around that. So, we tend to measure user interaction, but also, we tend to measure how much data is being sent. Because let's keep in mind, usually, people go in and check for things if there's a problem. So, if there's no problem, the user won't interact with us much unless there's a notification that kicks off. We also just check, like, how much data is being sent to us the whole time. VICTORIA: That makes sense. Like, you can't just rely on, like, well, if it was broken, they would write a [chuckles], like, a question or something. So, how do you get those metrics and that data around their interactions? So, that's really interesting. So, I wonder if we can go back and talk about, you know, we already mentioned a little bit about, like, the early days of Axiom and how you got started. Was there anything that you found in the early discovery process that was surprising and made you pivot strategy? SEIF: A couple of things. Basically, people don't really care about the tech as much as they care [inaudible 12:51] and the packaging, so that's something that we had to learn. And number two, continuous feedback. Continuous feedback changed the way we worked completely, right? And, you know, after that, we had a Slack channel, then we opened a Discord channel. And, like, this continuous feedback coming in just helps with iterating, helps us with prioritizing, et cetera. And that changed the way we actually developed product. VICTORIA: You use Slack and Discord? SEIF: No. No Slack anymore. We had a community Slack. We had a community [inaudible 13:19] Slack. Now, there's no community Slack. We only have a community Discord. And the community Slack is...sorry, internally, we use Slack, but there's a community Discord for the community. JOE: But how do you keep that staffed? Is it, like, everybody is in the Discord during working hours? Is it somebody's job to watch out for community questions? SEIF: I think everybody gets involved now just...and you can see it. If you go on our Discord, you will just see it. Just everyone just gets involved. I think just people are passionate about what they're doing. At least most people are involved on Discord, right? Because there's, like, Discord the help sections, and people are just asking questions and other people answering. And now, we reached a point where people in the community start answering the questions for other people in the community. So, that's how we see it's starting to become a healthy community, et cetera. But that is one of my favorite things: when I see somebody from the community answering somebody else, that's a highlight for me. Actually, we hired somebody from that community because they were so active. JOE: Yeah, I think one of the biggest signs that a product is healthy is when there's a healthy ecosystem building up around it. SEIF: Yeah, and Discord reminds me of the old days of open sources like IRC, just with memes now. But because all of us come from the old IRC days, being on Discord and chatting around, et cetera, et cetera, just gives us this momentum back, gave us this momentum back, whereas Slack always felt a bit too businessy to me. JOE: Slack is like IRC with emoji. Discord is IRC with memes. SEIF: I would say Slack reminds me somehow of MSN Messenger, right? JOE: I feel like there's a huge slam on MSN Messenger here. SEIF: [laughs] What do you guys use internally, Slack or? I think you're using Slack, right? Or Teams. Don't tell me you're using Teams. JOE: No, we're using Slack. SEIF: Okay, good, because I shit talk. Like, there is this, I'll sh*t talk here–when I start talking about Teams, so...I remember that one thing Google did once, and that failed miserably. JOE: Google still has, like, seven active chat products. SEIF: Like, I think every department or every, like, group of engineers just uses one of them internally. I'm not sure. Never got to that point. But hey, who am I to judge? VICTORIA: I just feel like I end up using all of them, and then I'm just rotating between different tabs all day long. You maybe talked me into using Discord. I feel like I've been resisting it, but you got me with the memes. SEIF: Yeah, it's definitely worth it. It's more entertaining. More noise, but more entertaining. You feel it's alive, whereas Slack is...also because there's no, like, history is forever. So, you always go back, and you're like, oh my God, what the hell is this? VICTORIA: Yeah, I have, like, all of them. I'll do anything. SEIF: They should be using Axiom in the background. Just send data to Axiom; we can keep your chat history. VICTORIA: Yeah, maybe. I'm so curious because, you know, you mentioned something about how you realized that it didn't matter really how cool the tech was if the product packaging wasn't also appealing to people. Because you seem really excited about what you've built. So, I'm curious, so just tell us a little bit more about how you went about trying to, like, promote this thing you built. Or was, like, the continuous feedback really early on, or how did that all kind of come together? SEIF: The continuous feedback helped us with performance, but actually getting people to sign up and pay money it started early on. But with Vercel, it kind of skyrocketed, right? And that's mostly because we went with the whole zero-config approach where it's just literally two clicks. And all of a sudden, Vercel is sending your data to Axiom, and that's it. We will create [inaudible 16:33]. And we worked very closely with Vercel to do this, to make this happen, which was awesome. Like, yeah, hats off to them. They were fantastic. And just two clicks, three clicks away, and all of a sudden, we created Axiom organization for you, the data set for you. And then we're sending it...and the data from Vercel is being forwarded to it. I think that packaging was so simple that it made people try it out quickly. And then, the experience of actually using Axiom was sticky, so they continued using it. And then the price was so low because we give 500 gigs for free, right? You send us 500 gigs a month of logs for free, and we don't care. And you can start off here with one terabyte for 25 bucks. So, people just start signing up. Now, before that, it was five terabytes a month for $99, and then we changed the plan. But yeah, it was cheap enough, so people just start sending us more and more and more data eventually. They weren't thinking...we changed the way people start thinking of “what am I going to send to Axiom” or “what am I going to send to my logs provider or log storage?” To how much more can I send? And I think that's what we wanted to reach. We wanted people to think, how much more can I send? JOE: You mentioned latency and cost. I'm curious about...the other big challenge we've seen with observability platforms, including logs, is cardinality of labels. Was there anything you had to sacrifice upfront in terms of cardinality to manage either cost or volume? SEIF: No, not really. Because the way we designed it was that we should be able to deal with high cardinality from scratch, right? I mean, there's open-source ways of doing, like, if you look at how, like, a column store, if you look at a column store and every dimension is its own column, it's just that becomes, like, you can limit on the amount of columns you're creating, but you should never limit on the amount of different values in a column could be. So, if you're having something like stat tags, right? Let's say hosting, like, hostname should be a column, but then the different hostnames you have, we never limit that. So, the cardinality on a value is something that is unlimited for us, and we don't really see it in cost. It doesn't really hit us on cost. It reflects a bit on compression if you get into technical details of that because, you know, high cardinality means a lot of different data. So, compression is harder, but it's not repetitive. But then if you look at, you know, oh, I want to send a lot of different types of fields, not values with fields, so you have hostname, and latency, and whatnot, et cetera, et cetera, yeah, that's where limitation starts because then they have...it's like you're going to a wide range of...and a wider dimension. But even that, we, yeah, we can deal with thousands at this point. And we realize, like, most people will not need more than three or four. It's like a Postgres table. You don't need more than 3,000 to 4000 columns; else, you know, you're doing a lot. JOE: I think it's actually pretty compelling in terms of cost, though. Like, that's one of the things we've had to be most careful about in terms of containing cost for metrics and logs is, a lot of providers will...they'll either charge you based on the number of unique metric combinations or the performance suffers greatly. Like, we've used a lot of Prometheus-based solutions. And so, when we're working with developers, even though they don't need more than, you know, a few dozen metric combinations most of the time, it's hard for people to think of what they need upfront. It's much easier after you deploy it to be able to query your data and slice it retroactively based on what you're seeing. SEIF: That's the detail. When you say we're using Prometheus, a lot of the metrics tools out there are using, just like Prometheus, are using the Gorilla data structure. And the real data structure was never designed to deal with high cardinality labels. So, basically, to put it in a simple way, every combination of tags you send for metrics is its own file on disk. That's, like, the very simple way of explaining this. And then, when you're trying to search through everything, right? And you have a lot of these combinations. I actually have to get all these files from this conversion back together, you know, and then they're chunked, et cetera. So, it's a problem. Generally, how metrics are doing it...most metrics products are using it, even VictoriaMetrics, et cetera. What they're doing is they're using either the Prometheus TSDB data structure, which is based on Gorilla. Influx was doing the same thing. They pivoted to using more and more like the ones we use, and Honeycomb uses, right? So, we might not be as fast on metrics side as these highly optimized. But then when it comes to high [inaudible 20:49], once we start dealing with high cardinality, we will be faster than those solutions. And that's on a very technical level. JOE: That's pretty cool. I realize we're getting pretty technical here. Maybe it's worth defining cardinality for the audience. SEIF: Defining cardinality to the...I mean, we just did that, right? JOE: What do you think, Victoria? Do you know what cardinality is now? [laughs] VICTORIA: All right. Now I'm like, do I know? I was like, I think I know what it means. Cardinality is, like, let's say you have a piece of data like an event or a transaction. SEIF: It's like the distinct count on a property that gives you the cardinality of a property. VICTORIA: Right. It's like how many pieces of information you have about that one event, basically, yeah. JOE: But with some traditional metrics stores, it's easy to make mistakes. For example, you could have unbounded cardinality by including response time as one of the labels -- SEIF: Tags. JOE: And then it's just going to -- SEIF: Oh, no, no. Let me give you a better one. I put in timestamp at some point in my life. JOE: Yeah, I feel like everybody has done that one. [laughter] SEIF: I've put a system timestamp at some point in my life. There was the actual timestamp, and there was a system timestamp that I would put because I wanted to know when the...because I couldn't control the timestamp, and the only timestamp I had was a system timestamp. I would always add the actual timestamp of when that event actually happened into a metric, and yeah, that did not scale. MID-ROLL AD: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you're tight on time and investment, which is why we've created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product's next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at tbot.io/entrepreneurs. VICTORIA: Yeah. I wonder if you could maybe share, like, a story about when it's gone wrong, and you've suddenly charged a lot of money [laughs] just to get information about what's happening in the system. Any, like, personal experiences with observability that kind of informed what you did with Axiom? SEIF: Oof, I have a very bad one, like, a very, very bad one. I used to work for a company. We had to deploy Elasticsearch on Windows Servers, and it was US-East-1. So, just a combination of Elasticsearch back in 2013, 2014 together with Azure and Windows Server was not a good idea. So, you see where this is going, right? JOE: I see where it's going. SEIF: Eventually, we had, like, we get all these problems because we used Elasticsearch and Kibana as our, you know, observability platform to measure everything around the product we were building. And funny enough, it cost us more than actually maintaining the infrastructure of the product. But not just that, it also kept me up longer because most of the downtimes I would get were not because of the product going down. It's because my Elasticsearch cluster started going down, and there's reasons for that. Because back then, Microsoft Azure thought that it's okay for any VM to lose connection with the rest of the VMs for 30 seconds per day. And then, all of a sudden, you have Elasticsearch with a split-brain problem. And there was a phase where I started getting alerted so much that back then, my partner threatened to leave me. So I bought a...what I think was a shock bracelet or a shock collar via Bluetooth, and I connected it to phone for any notification. And I bought that off Alibaba, by the way. And I would charge it at night, put it on my wrist, and go to sleep. And then, when alert happens, it will fully discharge the battery on me every time. JOE: Okay, I have to admit, I did not see where that was going. SEIF: Yeah, did that for a while; definitely did not save my relationship either. But eventually, that was the point where, you know, we started looking into other observability tools like Datadog, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's where the actual journey began, where we moved away from Elasticsearch and Kibana to look for something, okay, that we don't have to maintain ourselves and we can use, et cetera. So, it's not about the costs as much; it was just pain. VICTORIA: Yeah, pain is a real pain point, actual physical [chuckles] and emotional pain point [laughter]. What, like, motivates you to keep going with Axiom and to keep, like, the wind in your sails to keep working on it? SEIF: There's a couple of things. I love working with my team. So, honestly, I just wake up, and I compliment my team. I just love working with them. They're a lot of fun to work with. And they challenge me, and I challenge them back. And I upset them a lot. And they can't upset me, but I upset them. But I love working with them, and I love working with that team. And the other thing is getting, like, having this constant feedback from customers just makes you want to do more and, you know, close sales, et cetera. It's interesting, like, how I'm a very technical person, and I'm more interested in sales because sales means your product works, the product, the technical parts, et cetera. Because if technically it's not working, you can't build a product on top of it. And if you're not selling it, then what's the point? You only sell when the product is good, more or less, unless you're Oracle. VICTORIA: I had someone ask me about Oracle recently, actually. They're like, "Are you considering going back to it?" And I'm maybe a little allergic to it from having a federal consulting background [laughs]. But maybe they'll come back around. I don't know. We'll see. SEIF: Did you sell your soul back then? VICTORIA: You know, I feel like I just grew up in a place where that's what everyone did was all. SEIF: It was Oracle, IBM, or HP back in the day. VICTORIA: Yeah. Well, basically, when you're working on applications that were built in, like, the '80s, Oracle was, like, this hot, new database technology [laughs] that they just got five years ago. So, that's just, yeah, interesting. SEIF: Although, from a database perspective, they did a lot of the innovations. A lot of first innovations could have come from Oracle. From a technical perspective, they're ridiculous. I'm not sure from a product perspective how good they are. But I know their sales team is so big, so huge. They don't care about the product anymore. They can still sell. VICTORIA: I think, you know, everything in tech is cyclical. So, you know, if they have the right strategy and they're making some interesting changes over there, there's always a chance [laughs]. Certain use cases, I mean, I think that's the interesting point about working in technology is that you know, every company is a tech company. And so, there's just a lot of different types of people, personas, and use cases for different types of products. So, I wonder, you know, you kind of mentioned earlier that, like, everyone is interested in Axiom. But, you know, I don't know, are you narrowing the market? Or, like, how are you trying to kind of focus your messaging and your sales for Axiom? SEIF: I'm trying to focus on developers. So, we're really trying to focus on developers because the experience around observability is crap. It's stupid expensive. Sorry for being straightforward, right? And that's what we're trying to change. And we're targeting developers mainly. We want developers to like us. And we'll find all these different types of developers who are using it, and that's the interesting thing. And because of them, we start adding more and more features, like, you know, we added tracing, and now that enables, like, billions of events pushed through for, you know, again, for almost no money, again, $25 a month for a terabyte of data. And we're doing this with metrics next. And that's just to address the developers who have been giving us feedback and the market demand. I will sum it up, again, like, the experience is crap, and it's stupid expensive. I think that's the [inaudible 28:07] of observability is just that's how I would sum it up. VICTORIA: If you could go back in time and talk to yourself when you were still a developer, now that you're CTO, what advice would you give yourself? JOE: Besides avoiding shock collars. VICTORIA: [laughs] Yes. SEIF: Get people's feedback quickly so you know you're on the right track. I think that's very, very, very, very important. Don't just work in the dark, or don't go too long into stealth mode because, eventually, people catch up. Also, ship when you're 80% ready because 100% is too late. I think it's the same thing here. JOE: Ship often and early. SEIF: Yeah, even if it's not fully ready, it's still feedback. VICTORIA: Ship often and early and talk to people [laughs]. Just, do you feel like, as a developer, did you have the skills you needed to be able to get the most out of those feedback and out of those conversations you were having with people around your product? SEIF: I still don't think I'm good enough. You're just constantly learning, right? I just accepted I'm part of a team, and I have my contributions. But as an individual, I still don't think I know enough. I think there's more I need to learn at this point. VICTORIA: I wonder, what questions do you have for me or Joe? SEIF: How did you start your podcast, and why the name? VICTORIA: Oh, man, I hope I can answer. So, the podcast was started...I think it's, like, we're actually about to be at our 500th Episode. So, I've only been a host for the last year. Maybe Joe even knows more than I do. But what I recall is that one person at thoughtbot thought it would be a great idea to start a podcast, and then they did it. And it seems like the whole company is obsessed with robots. I'm not really sure where that came from. There used to be a tiny robot in the office, is what I remember. And people started using that as, like, the mascot. And then, yeah, that's it, that's the whole thing. SEIF: Was the robot doing anything useful or just being cute? JOE: It was just cute, and it's hard to make a robot cute. SEIF: Was it a real robot, or was it like a -- JOE: No, there was, at one point, a toy robot. The name...I actually forget the origin–origin of the name, but the name Giant Robots comes from our blog. So, we named the podcast the same as the blog: Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots. SEIF: Yes, it's called transformers. VICTORIA: Yeah, I like it. It's, I mean, now I feel like -- SEIF: [laughs] VICTORIA: We got to get more, like, robot dogs involved [laughs] in the podcast. SEIF: Like, I wanted to add one thing when we talked about, you know, what gets me going. And I want to mention that I have a six-month-old son now. He definitely adds a lot of motivation for me to wake up in the morning and work. But he also makes me wake up regardless if I want to or not. VICTORIA: Yeah, you said you had invented an alarm clock that never turns off. Never snoozes [laughs]. SEIF: Yes, absolutely. VICTORIA: I have the same thing, but it's my dog. But he does snooze, actually. He'll just, like, get tired and go back to sleep [laughs]. SEIF: Oh, I have a question. Do dogs have a Tamagotchi phase? Because, like, my son, the first three months was like a Tamagotchi. It was easy to read him. VICTORIA: Oh yeah, uh-huh. SEIF: Noisy but easy. VICTORIA: Yes, yes. SEIF: Now, it's just like, yeah, I don't know, like, the last month he has opinions at six months. I think it's because I raised him in Europe. I should take him back to the Middle East [laughs]. No opinions. VICTORIA: No, dogs totally have, like, a communication style, you know, I pretty much know what he, I mean, I can read his mind, obviously [laughs]. SEIF: Sure, but that's when they grow a bit. But what when they were very...when the dog was very young? VICTORIA: Yeah, they, I mean, they also learn, like, your stuff, too. So, they, like, learn how to get you to do stuff or, like, I know she'll feed me if I'm sitting here [laughs]. SEIF: And how much is one dog year, seven years? VICTORIA: Seven years. SEIF: Seven years? VICTORIA: Yeah, seven years? SEIF: Yeah. So, basically, in one year, like, three months, he's already...in one month, he's, you know, seven months old. He's like, yeah. VICTORIA: Yeah. In a year, they're, like, teenagers. And then, in two years, they're, like, full adults. SEIF: Yeah. So, the first month is basically going through the first six months of a human being. So yeah, you pass...the first two days or three days are the Tamagotchi phase that I'm talking about. VICTORIA: [chuckles] I read this book, and it was, like, to understand dogs, it's like, they're just like humans that are trying to, like, maximize the number of positive experiences that they have. So, like, if you think about that framing around all your interactions about, like, maybe you're trying to get your son to do something, you can be like, okay, how do I, like, I don't know, train him that good things happen when he does the things I want him to do? [laughs] That's kind of maybe manipulative but effective. So, you're not learning baby sign language? You're just, like, going off facial expressions? SEIF: I started. I know how Mama looks like. I know how Dada looks like. I know how more looks like, slowly. And he already does this thing that I know that when he's uncomfortable, he starts opening and closing his hands. And when he's completely uncomfortable and basically that he needs to go sleep, he starts pulling his own hair. VICTORIA: [laughs] I do the same thing [laughs]. SEIF: You pull your own hair when you go to sleep? I don't have that. I don't have hair. VICTORIA: I think I do start, like, touching my head though, yeah [inaudible 33:04]. SEIF: Azure took the last bit of hair I had! Went away with Azure, Elasticsearch, and the shock collar. VICTORIA: [laughs] SEIF: I have none of them left. Absolutely nothing. I should sue Elasticsearch for this shit. VICTORIA: [laughs] Let me know how that goes. Maybe there's more people who could join your lawsuit, you know, with a class action. SEIF: [laughs] Yeah. Well, one thing I wanted to also just highlight is, right now, one of the things that also makes the company move forward is we realized that in a single domain, we proved ourselves very valuable to specific companies, right? So, that was a big, big thing, milestone for us. And now we're trying to move into a handful of domains and see which one of those work out the best for us. Does that make sense? VICTORIA: Yeah. And I'm curious: what are the biggest challenges or hurdles that you associate with that? SEIF: At this point, you don't want just feedback. You want constructive criticism. Like, you want to work with people who will criticize the applic...and you iterate with them based on this criticism, right? They're just not happy about you and trying to create design partners. So, for us, it was very important to have these small design partners who can work with us to actually prove ourselves as valuable in a single domain. Right now, we need to find a way to scale this across several domains. And how do you do that without sacrificing? Like, how do you open into other domains without sacrificing the original domain you came from? So, there's a lot of things [inaudible 34:28]. And we are in the middle of this. Honestly, I Forrest Gumped my way through half of this, right? Like, I didn't know what I was doing. I had ideas. I think it's more of luck at this point. And I had luck. No, we did work. We did work a lot. We did sleepless nights and everything. But I think, in the last three years, we became more mature and started thinking more about product. And as I said, like, our CEO, Neil, and Dominic, our head of product, are putting everything behind being a product-led organization, not just a tech-led organization. VICTORIA: That's super interesting. I love to hear that that's the way you're thinking about it. JOE: I was just curious what other domains you're looking at pushing into if you can say. SEIF: So, we are going to start moving into ETL a bit more. We're trying to see how we can fit in specific ML scenarios. I can't say more about the other, though. JOE: Do you think you'll take the same approaches in terms of value proposition, like, low cost, good enough latency? SEIF: Yes, that's definitely one thing. But there's also...so, this is the values we're bringing to the customer. But also, now, our internal values are different. Now it's more of move with urgency and high velocity, as we said before, right? Think big, work small. The values in terms of values we're going to take to the customers it's the same ones. And maybe we'll add some more, but it's still going to be low-cost and large-scale. And, internally, we're just becoming more, excuse my French, agile. I hate that word so much. Should be good with Scrum. VICTORIA: It's painful, but everyone knows what you're talking about [laughs], you know, like -- SEIF: See, I have opinions here about Scrum. I think Scrum should be only used in terms of iceScrum [inaudible 36:04], or something like that. VICTORIA: Oh no [laughter]. Well, it's a Rugby term, right? Like, that's where it should probably stay. SEIF: I did not know it's a rugby term. VICTORIA: Yeah, so it should stay there, but -- SEIF: Yes [laughs]. VICTORIA: Yeah, I think it's interesting. Yeah, I like the being flexible. I like the just, like, continuous feedback and how you all have set up to, like, talk with your customers. Because you mentioned earlier that, like, you might open source some of your projects. And I'm just curious, like, what goes into that decision for you when you're going to do that? Like, what makes you think this project would be good for open source or when you think, actually, we need to, like, keep it? SEIF: So, we open source libraries, right? We actually do that already. And some other big organizations use our libraries; even our competitors use our libraries, that we do. The whole product itself or at least a big part of the product, like database, I'm not sure we're going to open source that, at least not anytime soon. And if we open source, it's going to be at a point where the value-add it brings is nothing compared to how well our product is, right? So, if we can replace whatever's at the back with...the storage engine we have in the back with something else and the product doesn't get affected, that's when we open source it. VICTORIA: That's interesting. That makes sense to me. But yeah, thank you for clarifying that. I just wanted to make sure to circle back. Since you have this big history in open source, yeah, I'm curious if you see... SEIF: Burning me out? VICTORIA: Burning you out, yeah [laughter]. Oh, that's a good question. Yeah, like, because, you know, we're about to be in October here. Do you have any advice or strategies as a maintainer for not getting burned out during the next couple of weeks besides, like, hide in a cave and without internet access [laughs]? SEIF: Stay away from Reddit and Hacker News. That's my goal for October now because I'm always afraid of getting too attached to an idea, or too motivated, or excited by an idea that I drift away from what I am actually supposed to be doing. VICTORIA: Last question is, is there anything else you would like to promote? SEIF: Yeah, check out our website; I think it's at axiom.co. Check it out. Sign up. And comment on Discord and talk to me. I don't bite, sometimes grumpy, but that's just because of lack of sleep in the morning. But, you know, around midday, I'm good. And if you're ever in Berlin and you want to hang out, I'm more than willing to hang out. VICTORIA: Whoo, that's awesome. Yeah, Berlin is great. I was there a couple of years ago but no plans to go back anytime soon, but maybe I'll keep that in mind. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you could find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. And this podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions. Special Guests: Joe Ferris and Seif Lotfy.

Episode 170 – Unstoppable Employee and Entrepreneur Visionary with Robert Schott

Unstoppable Mindset

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 13, 2023 66:41

I rarely have met someone who, throughout his life, has been presented with so many challenges but always moves forward with strength, poise, and vision. Robert Schott and I first met 27 years ago when Karen and I moved to New Jersey for a job. Robert immediately took a liking to both of us as we were asked to help our church, also the church Robert and his wife Erica attended, design wheelchair access both for Karen and others. As I got to know Robert I recognized that he was quite a determined individual who worked hard to bring success to whatever endeavors he undertook. Robert's story both in the work he has done for others as well as his own inventing mindset is well worth hearing. In fact, as you will hear, he has designed a new toy currently looking for a manufacturing home, but that already has been described as the first invention creating a new way of play for children. If all of us ever encounter through these podcast episodes someone unstoppable it is Robert Schott. I hope his thoughts, life lessons and his enthusiastic mindset rubs off on all of us. His faith and his attitude really do show all of us that we can be more unstoppable than we think we can. About the Guest: Robert Schott has more than 40 years of business and employee communications design experience currently concentrated in employee benefits and retirement plans. With Charles Schwab Retirement Plan Services, Mr. Schott specializes in customizing people engagement strategies on financial literacy and to prepare his clients' employees for their future retirement income needs. Pensions & Investments magazine recognized two of his recent projects with First Place Eddy Awards for superior achievement in Retirement Readiness and Financial Wellness communications design. Mr. Schott help similar roles at Merrill Lynch Retirement Plan Services, J.P. Morgan/American Century Retirement Plan Services, J.P. Morgan Investment Management, and Coopers & Lybrand Human Resources Group. Additionally, Mr. Schott founded and owns Bopt Inc., a consumer product development and sales company featuring two notable inventions, WOWindow Posters® and SprawlyWalls™. WOWindow Posters are translucent posters designed for illuminating Halloween and Christmas images in windows simply by turning on the room lights. SprawlyWalls is a build, decorate, and play system for children ages 5 to 11 to create play spaces for their dolls and action figures. The Strong National Museum of Play/Toy Hall of Fame recently included SprawlyWalls in its in-museum Play Lab. Mr. Schott is a member of the Leadership Forum Community (LFC) which convenes to explore leadership challenges, develop conscious leaders, and create solutions that result in meaningful and equitable change in organizations, education, and society. He collaborated on the concept of ‘Conscious Dialogue' presented at the LFC Summit in July 2023. Notably, in 2019 and 2021, Mr. Schott participated in America in One Room, an experiment in Deliberative Democracy designed by social scientists at Stanford University to foster civil discourse on political themes by convening over 500 USA citizens for moderated discussions. In 2021, Mr. Schott's community, Cranford New Jersey, recognized him with the annual Kindness Award for bringing joy to others through his massive annual front yard snow sculptures. In June 2023, he joined an expedition in Newfoundland Canada to search for a missing French biplane that would have beat Charles Lindbergh in 1927 for the $50k prize money had it landed in front of the Statue of Liberty coming from Paris. Mr. Schott holds a bachelor of arts with honors in communication design from Rochester Institute of Technology. He completed a Mini-MBA certification program at Rutgers, Center for Management Development. He had previously held Series 7 and 66 licenses for his financial industry work. Ways to connect with Tony: https://www.facebook.com/robert.schott.33/ https://www.facebook.com/SprawlyWalls/ https://www.facebook.com/WOWindows/ https://www.instagram.com/sprawlywalls/ https://www.instagram.com/shotinthedarkguy/ Twitter: @wowindows About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog. Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards. https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/ accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/ Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below! Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app. Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. Transcription Notes Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us. Michael Hingson ** 01:21 Well, Hi, and welcome once again to unstoppable mindset. I am your host, Mike Hingson. And today, I get to really have a wonderful pleasure and honor to even introduce you to someone who I've known for a long time, Robert Schott lived fairly close to us when we lived in New Jersey, we lived in Westfield, New Jersey, but we both went to the same church, which is where we met, we met the shots and others became good friends. And Robert was a very good supporter of ours, especially helping Karen because if and when we started at the church, it was not very wheelchair accessible. And there were a lot of issues to try to make it more accessible. And Robert and others were really helpful in advocating and recognizing the value of that. So he's become a great friend. He's had associations with Rochester Institute of Technology and actually helped get me to do a speech there one. So Robert and I have known each other for a long time. Gosh, if we were to really go back and count, Robert, it's since what 1996. So that is what 27 years long. I know. Welcome to unstoppable mindset. Robert Schott ** 02:34 Well, thank you, Michael. And I appreciate the warm regard as friends that's top of mind and you create helped create a fascinating part of my life. And Erica's life, which we're grateful for. And we were sorry to see you move west. But I know that was all for good things Michael Hingson ** 02:53 are good things. But we still get to stay in touch. And yeah, and one of these days, I hope to be able to get back to New Jersey and spend some time with all of you, which would be good. So we'll have to figure that out at some point. But for now, let's let's talk about you a little bit. Why don't you tell us a little bit about as I love to do with the deepening of these things, the the early Robert growing up and all that sort of stuff and kind of what got you to where you are at least a little bit and then we can always go back and talk more about that. But yeah, love to hear some of the early Robert stories. Robert Schott ** 03:30 Yeah, and cut me off when we need to pivot but okay, I'm cutting you off now. Michael Hingson ** 03:33 Thanks. Robert Schott ** 03:36 You're funny, man. Yeah, go ahead. Well, in fact, I grew up in a town past Westfield, which was Fanwood nestled by Scotch Plains. I went to Scotch Plains Fanwood high school I was one of five children to two middle class English parents. My mom was the high school nurse where I was went to high school I had a hard time cutting class or calling out sick because she knew Michael Hingson ** 04:02 my dad told us no anyway. Robert Schott ** 04:05 Yeah, you know, my dad actually have pretty fascinating place to work. He was a lab technician on the brainiac floor at Bell Laboratories and Murray Hill that could go on and on about that but one little thing was the tech across the hall from him he had made the first transistor which set a whole lot of things in motion. But we we you know mom and dad were around dad would go down in the basement and do oil painting and I mentioned that for a reason I'll tell you what, we were very involved in our school and activities band, I was a big into Boy Scouts. And all along the way I would became very interested in art. And that was I mentioned that was a fine art oil painter became professional grade but he taught me how to oil paint when I was seven years old and always made sure I was supplied with tools and gear. You know from what caravita oil painting in watercolor. So that became a nice side thing for me to focus on, which kind of fizzled out as a creative arts. But by the time I went to college, where I shifted to Applied Arts and what that what I mean is graphic design was my major at Rochester Institute of Technology. It's interesting, I think about that decision. And when I was in junior high school, I made a proclamation to my family, I said, I don't like TV advertising, I'm going to go into advertising and change it, I'm going to change the world of advertising. And so when I was studying schools, Syracuse University was, you know, one of the two that I narrowed down or it was the other. And I got to Syracuse, I would have been in New House School of Communication, which was more advertising and media focused, whereas it was more graphics and artistic focus. But the decision which was relevant for 18 year old was the ice rink at RMIT was on the way from classes. And if I went to Syracuse, it would have been a two mile train. So we make our decisions. It all turns out, Michael Hingson ** 06:13 you my brother in law, is in Idaho, and for years was a master cabinet maker, he's now more of a general contractor, but his winters were all controlled and covered by skiing. And in fact, in the winter, for many years, he as an Certified International Ski guide, would take people to France and do off piste, skiing and so on. But I understand exactly what you're saying about the ice rink because he was all about skiing, and still likes to ski but he's a lot older and doesn't do the events. And he's also got work in the winter. So responsibilities change, but I know what you're saying. Robert Schott ** 06:57 Yeah, I was. I learned how to ice skate on my backyard after an ice storm in 11th grade and I began playing ice hockey pickup with some friends and I had two years to get ready before college and I I actually made I got cut from the junior varsity team. But I said to the coach, hey, listen, I really want to learn this game. Can I can I come to all the practices? Can I come to the games and carry everybody sticks in the water? He said sure. And so I didn't miss a practice and mid season. I guess enough guys got hurt or quit. Or I showed progress. He put me on in a game. He gave me the last minute of a game. And the only thing I was able to do was when I jumped over the boards the puck was coming by. And so as the opponent, I just put my hip out and I gave the guy a hip check. He went flying and the game was over. So he said, Yeah, you're qualified. We need you for the next game. Like I had, I had two goals and three assists and eight games. So I actually was a producer. Michael Hingson ** 07:55 Well, it's always better to be a producer than not needless to say. So what was your actual major then? Robert Schott ** 08:03 Well, it was called Communication Design. And it was focused on communicating through graphic arts, and largely the two dimensional realm of graphic arts. And I was a high achiever in my classes, mostly A's and what I did some standout work. It led to a summer job at a welding products company in the art department. And I remember getting rejected by Texas wiener hotdogs that summer. And then I went to this agency and as I was walking out the door, they because they said they had nothing for me, oh, here's something Oh, you have to know how to type. So I said, Holy cow. I know how to type. My mom made me take typing in eighth grade. So I ended up in the art department, you know, go figure and I was using an IBM Selectric components, not yet knocking out, you know, graphic text writing with that, that early typesetting machine. And so it was a great and that summer job. One of our one of our vendors would come in and pick up work and he ended up at the end of the summer saying come work for me when you graduated. I help you with your homework for the rest of the year. Michael Hingson ** 09:16 God does provide doesn't teach Oh, it's pretty funny. Yeah, there you go. So you graduated when did you graduate? Robert Schott ** 09:25 That was 1981. Okay, then I was really busy student you know, between a little bit of ice hockey and academic word, the artwork was very time consuming. And I also was a pretty high level student leader in on the campus and that led to some pretty fun things too. So I was pretty harried, you know, really had to burn the candle on both ends a lot of the time. But in 1981, I had that job offer, which I took and it was he they put me on the artboard to Do graphic arts and there was a small boutique, there was a dozen people doing business to business communications, which included business slides, industrial videos, other graphics and advertising materials. And it turned out I was, I was actually not very good as an artist on the board on demand, you know, I was a good student, but it didn't translate. And so getting into the thick of it, they went into computer graphics, there was a machine called jet graphics that allowed us to make business presentation slides, instead of using the old graphic art, code Iliff and other kind of build your slide business that way. And they put me in charge of them. And within three years, we had seven of these machines in two locations running around the clock, seven days a week. And it was a grind, if I may think I really, I discovered the limits of the physical limits of sleep deprivation, which is not a healthy thing, but I did it. And that's what was probably the first thing I ever became an expert at in the country may be further making these slides and supervising and training, you know, a team 24/7. Michael Hingson ** 11:21 So how long did you stay there? So this was after college? Right? Robert Schott ** 11:24 Yeah, so I was there for seven years. Wow. Okay. And I mentioned one thing about a large part of my career was in reflection, I'm trying to coach my own young adult children don't fall into the same trap. Maybe I didn't really have the aspirational goal in my mind, like when I did when I was in junior high school. But what I did do was accept the next job that somebody offered me. One because I was ready to leave and two was a good job offer. But it didn't. After doing that three or four times it didn't ever really align with where maybe the root of my skills or passions lay. So a lot of years went by just, you know, three, seven year stints to say, Yeah, I'll take that job and, you know, going to have children, I need a professional job, and I needed benefits. And, you know, I took my I took my eye off the market, what I was really maybe meant to be Michael Hingson ** 12:28 right. So you say you went off and you took other jobs. And so where did you end up? Robert Schott ** 12:36 So the sequence was I left? We were doing business slides for the Coopers and Lybrand can see accounting and consulting firm and I was making the earliest of its kind slide presentations for 401k plans in the middle early 80s. And from that, I got to work with Coopers and Lybrand. You know, my first job was working with Coopers and Lybrand. And they said, why don't you come over here, because they liked what I was doing producing the record on case stuff. So I learned how to be an A Communication Consultant, the full gamut it was writing and directing and strategy at Coopers for their human resource advisory group clients. And sure enough, in the 401k plan at Cooper's they had JP Morgan investment funds. And that when they brought those funds in, I got to know the funds. And we communicated to 20,000 people about those funds. And eventually, JP Morgan said, why don't you come work over here? There you go. So I went over there. And you know, each time I was still have a relationship, or I left, which was, you know, kind of unique. Michael Hingson ** 13:44 But good. She kept a positive relationship, Robert Schott ** 13:47 no burn bridges. It was natural for me to move on. And the Morgan thing was in your marketing grew up helping to communicate the value of these types of 401k plan funds that other companies would put into their 401 K plans. So it was kind of there that I moved into another role where they formed a partnership with a company called American century. And we formed a partnership in retirement plan servicing and I moved over to that side of the business. But things didn't really go very well, after a while and I was getting frustrated with the work environment and the work I was doing. That's what led to the spark of doing something different. Michael Hingson ** 14:36 So you, you decided you really needed to do something different than working in those kinds of environments. And did you have an idea of what you wanted to do and where you were going to go? Robert Schott ** 14:46 Well, it it's interesting, because, you know, there was no there was no real physical track to making Something happened that would put me in a new place. But there was a seed to have an invention idea I had to pursue. And that was really the mission. Can I take this idea? Get it further, far enough along? And then then from there, it was the idea, could I license it to a big manufacturing company? And so the inspiration was in a day of wallowing in my corporate anxiety, I went upstairs. And you remember my daughter, Carly, she was seven years old and 2000 2001, I think it was. And she was playing a certain way with her Barbie dolls. She was making rooms to play with her dolls across the floor with cardboard bricks. And I just went up to watch her play. That was my relief release. And I said, Hey, Carly, I wonder if a toy exists, where you can build walls. And you don't have to, you know, I can get something official that it was a Sunday afternoon. And I said, What, hey, let's go downstairs and draw what this toy could do. So seven year old, Carla and I went downstairs and we started drawing this idea of connecting walls to make dollhouse rooms. And I said to her right there, okay. This is all I need to know that this is something I have to pursue. And I'm going to work really hard to make this get this product made for you. And that's what kicked off the inventions probably was back then. Michael Hingson ** 16:30 So basically, though, were you working for someone else at the time? Or Did Jesus decide to do this full time? Or how did all that work? Robert Schott ** 16:37 Yeah. So initially, I was still working at JP Morgan investment. And at one point, I got laid off. Another fell out that they were rejiggering things. And of course that happens. But they gave me a generous severance package. And I said, Oh, holy cow, here's my moment. I'm going to go full blast on this toy idea. So I've been working on it for a year. Now I had this open time, with some, you know, compensation to cover my expenses, and then went hard at it. Now in the meantime, I was anxious. So I ended up pursuing five other part time things. I got a benefits consulting job, and I was dabbling with these other things that were really distracting and, frankly, the ability debilitating because I couldn't get anything to stick to make additional money. And and to have the free time to work on a toy. Michael Hingson ** 17:34 That totally Sarika doing. Robert Schott ** 17:37 She can. She's been working ever since you've known her in occupational therapy, Michael Hingson ** 17:42 since she continued to work. Yeah. So Robert Schott ** 17:46 yeah, I mean, I had the severance. So that was key. But I also didn't know if I was going to have another job at the end of it. So I had to continue thinking about how to make money if the toy thing doesn't, you know, come to Canada really fast. But in that period, I really refined the concept I filed for design and utility patents on the mechanical element of the walls, the way they would connect together. I created a logo and branding and I created a packaging design. I made prototypes, dope models for the kids to play with Ram focus groups with groups, a little kids, and all the proofs of this really cool thing we're coming through. And through. You know, a friend of mines likes to say it's, it's not serendipity or accident or luck, it's intentionality. And when you have really crisp intentions, some things kind of can just happen and out of the most unexpected places. And that that happened, I ended up getting a meeting with Hasbro, a college friend of mine, and it was like the Tom Hanks at Hasbro. He had a lab where he'd make stuff for the inventors. So I said he introduced me the creative guy. And they said, Yeah, if we really liked your idea, but it's not really for us, at least not at this time. And we back up a second when I was in the outplacement Center at Morgan, a former client then friend said hey, talk to this guy, John, John Harvey, and he'll coach you on your transition because he started a free coaching Transition Network out of Maplewood, New Jersey. So I called John and he said, what do you what do you really want to do? And I said, Oh, I really want to make this toy. He said to me, Hey, listen to this. Three months ago. I was at a think tank session. I might get the details fuzzy here, but it was the heads of innovation from Nike, somewhere else and Mattel and when you're ready, I'll introduce you to the head of innovation at Mattel. And so after my Hasbro meeting I called on Joe It said yeah. And he made the introduction and through another couple things. I got to make a meeting with the Creative Director for Barbie at Mattel, the biggest toy brand on Earth, and I got an hour. That's what I left the building that the young lady said, I know you got it in here because people like you don't. To Joe told you stuff about Barbie probably shouldn't have because, you know, it's proprietary, but he really liked what she came up with. And I'll share that walking out of that building was the singular highest moment, work moment of my life. And nothing is taught that yet. Even though the deals didn't turn out, just the sense that I made an impression to this big company, as a novice said, Man, I really ready to I'm really able to do something different. Michael Hingson ** 20:57 So you have When did you have the meeting with Mattel? Robert Schott ** 21:01 That was the late spring of 2003. Michael Hingson ** 21:05 Okay, so that was always ago that was 20 years ago? Yeah. 20 years. And but did you have a basic conceptual design? Or did you actually have a model at that point? Robert Schott ** 21:17 Oh, yeah, I had the prototypes, I had play models, you know, everything was, you know, in a condition that was acceptable from a toy inventor for a big company to take it on. And I didn't make any errors about what I anything beyond what I knew what I did. I didn't say I knew how to price it or manufacture it, or anything like that, which other toy inventors would have known more about. But, you know, no deals came through and I solicited all companies, you know, Lego and connects, and I went to FAO, Schwarz and Toys R Us and all in fact, the last meeting I had was with the head of brands at Toys R Us that was through an acquaintance, a friend of mine who I worked with in my first job out of out of school, he introduced me the head of brands, and I met there and Susan said, Oh, Robert, I really really liked your idea. I can't work with you. Because it's not real yet. You know, I need to be able to product to put on the shelves. But go back to Mattel tell them they're not they got their heads in the wrong place. Because this is what we need on the shelves. And I'll spare you the EXPLAIN of that. What was that? So, you know, here's another validation from the biggest toy distributor on earth without my concept. And crazily I just kind of got burnt out and I need to get a new job and I let it go. I just had to let it go for a while. Michael Hingson ** 22:41 So what did you do? Robert Schott ** 22:45 Well, two things happened. One, the realization that I knew I could do something different, I thought about what else I had made around my home. And in fact, it was in the year 2000. For Halloween I had made out of hardboard and red cellophane giant cutouts of cat eyes that I hung in the Windows upstairs. And with a room lights on they lit up like a giant cat was looking at. I thought, holy cow. There's an idea. Maybe i i figured i can get that done myself. I don't need to sell the idea. I'll just get after it. And so I worked on it for three quarters of a year. And then I talked to a friend. I remember you remember Brian Jenkins and Cindy Jenkins from the church. Brian was a printer by trade and I said Hey, Brian, what do you think of this idea. And in the same call, he said, Hey, I was just drawing a pumpkin that would light up to put in the window. And we agreed to go into business together. And it took us two more years to figure out how to make them. We ended up with a outfit in Green Bay, Wisconsin that agreed to work with us. And a little thing that I learned along that way was never, never, never admit your deficiencies on something always present yourself as confident and professional. And they this big company that served enterprises like Procter and Gamble allowed us to come into their space and dabble with manufacturing this printed window posts around big wide plastic sheets on 150 foot long printing press. And we pulled it off, you know we made a poster that that worked. So now I said there was two things. That's one track and I'll tell you more. But at the same time I needed to get back to day job with income and the fellow that I got laid off with from Morgan said, Hey Robert, I saw a posting for that's made for you and it was with Merrill Lynch and I put my resume into the black hole. And the next day I had a call that never happens. And three days later, I had an interview. And remember the second part of that interview that the hiring manager took me back to the first interviewee, or, as she said to the first, the second one, Hey, give this guy an offer yet. So it was a slam dunk, I got back to work, right at the end of my 15 month severance. So that all kind of worked out nice. Michael Hingson ** 25:29 But you did keep on dreaming, which is part of the whole story at first, which is great, but you did go back to work. And that works for a little while, at least while Merrill was around. Robert Schott ** 25:40 Yeah, well, kind of they never really went away. They took up, you know, partnered up. But I worked there for, I think, six years. And this is how you can do things sometimes in life that are, it's creative thinking. And I said to the boss, hey, look, I had a bunch of bad things happen with the poster business after we had a tremendous start, you know, we, we ended up in three years with a million and a half dollars of sales. And we were getting attention by the biggest enterprises in consumer, brick and mortar stores. But then, sadly, Brian passed away in 2009. And I had to take on the whole thing myself. And I approached my, my boss, I said, Look, I gotta leave, you know, I gotta work on this. And she said, Well, why don't go so fast. We need you here. How about if we give you a reduced hours, but still keep you on benefits? I said, that works. So I went from 70 hours a week to 40 kept my bike benefits. And then I worked another 40 a week on the Michael Hingson ** 26:44 poster business, back to sleep deprivation. Robert Schott ** 26:47 Yeah, well, that was easy street from earlier years. So I did that for another year. And finally, I said, No, this isn't going to work. And I cut out and I worked on the poster business full time for five years, which was had diminishing returns, the world was changing. And there's a lot of obstacles that I had overcome. Amazon was starting to come into play in the big box store, the big Oh, my wholesale accounts were drifting away, and it was just a mess. So I ended up going back again, through fellow I worked with at Merrill said, Hey, come work for us. And I won't get into that, because it's my current work. But that's, that's where I've been for seven, eight years. Now. It's the next corporate gig. Michael Hingson ** 27:41 Things that I react to. And the most significant to me is no matter what with all of the job changes. I don't know that I would say all of it's not like there were such a huge amount, compared to some people who can't hold a job, you moved from place to place. But one of the things that I find most striking is that you kept really wonderful relationships, wherever you went. And whenever you left, you continue to have relationships. And that's been very supportive for you, which I think is really cool. A lot of people don't do that and burn too many bridges, which is unfortunate. Robert Schott ** 28:21 Yeah, thanks for recognizing that I, I hold friendships or business acquaintances from all the roles I had. And I'm, you know, happy about reconnecting with people and reminiscing. But they've also come into play. Over time, what at different points, I'd reach out and say, hey, you know, I know you're doing this now. But that was, you know, there's a 40 year relationship from that first a few of them that I've been able to go back to currently and say, Hey, let's talk about this thing I'm working on. Michael Hingson ** 28:55 And there must be ways that you're obviously benefiting and helping them as well. Robert Schott ** 28:59 Oh, sure. Yeah, absolutely. Michael Hingson ** 29:03 Well, you know, clearly, by definition of what this podcast is all about, you are absolutely unstoppable. in mind, and so on. Give me a couple of examples in your own mind, or from your own perspective of how you've been on top of that, maybe a small one and a big one. Robert Schott ** 29:20 Yes, that's a good question. It was a couple of small ones that are more recent. I'll just stick to the more recent because it's shows I still have the ability to persevere, and it has a lot to do with a lesson my mom taught me was you always have to finish what you start. And I learned that you know, when I was five, six years old, you know, she wouldn't let us quit something at school because we were unhappy or didn't like it. We had to finish it. And so I got into for fun making big snow sculptures out in my front yard. And I've been doing in our town of Cranford for over 30 years and I did a MIT college and back in high school. Well, in 2020, it was 2021 There was a big blizzard. And I'd been waiting to do this particular snow sculpture of Abraham Lincoln, half scale. So half scale is for 15 feet tall. And I had gotten skilled enough to know how to prepare my drawings. And I built a wooden form to fill as the base. And we we had a convergence of things and I need one was a big snowstorm to it has to get warm afterwards because I mold and build. And I had to have the time. So this thing started on a Sunday afternoon. And as I got to do this, this, this is it. This is the moment of truth. And so from Sunday afternoon, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then some nights after my work job. And then all day Saturday, I worked on Abraham Lincoln. And I realized that it was probably over six tons of snow that we moved. I spent 435 hours sculpting carving, and I had a bunch of helpers. And it was magnificent. And it attracted national media attention. And the beautiful part was it landed right on Lincoln's birthday when I finished it. You have pictures? Yeah, I do. I have some good pictures of it. Michael Hingson ** 31:23 Once we have a picture or an article, loved it featured in the podcast notes. Robert Schott ** 31:27 Yeah, I absolutely send that. But here's the kicker. And I didn't tell a lot of people that week, that Sunday when I started, I had body aches and a fever. And I said, I have to do this. This is the moment of truth. Well, I didn't find out till Thursday that I had COVID. I was climbing ladders and lifting snow six hours a day changing clothes three times because I was sweating so much. And I just it was so hard to get up in the morning and get at this thing, but I did it. So there's, there's I guess that's a good example of a small thing. Getting it done. Michael Hingson ** 32:04 Not sure it's so small, but I hear you. And then once you said 14 feet tall, Robert Schott ** 32:08 14 feet tall. Yeah. of Abraham Lincoln, nestled in his chair looking out from the Lincoln Memorial. Right. So that's, that's an unstoppable, I'd say, you know, pursuing the window posters is an exciting things that I feel really proud of achievement, that I can look back on fondly and say I really got something good done there. And I think that, you know, the window posters I've been doing for, yeah, I've been working on it for 20 years 17 In business. And it's, it's been, it was wildly successful when we got going. And it's had a lot of setbacks, and been losing money for 10 years. So it's something that's kind of weird, because I can't even get out of it. You know, I couldn't sell the business, I couldn't sell the inventory. But I'm straddled with some debt from it. And from, you know, having things I just don't want to throw away. Every year, it's all online, and I sell them online, and I make make some money, just about is covering expenses now. So, back to unstoppable during the pandemic, I'll say I had the good fortune of being able to cut out three or four hours a day of commuting to New York City. And I said, Alright, I gotta get this toy made. And I picked up this volleyballs again, and I I got serious about pursuing it to the finish. And to the act of that, you know, fast forward. Last November, I got product in hand. You know, I took it from further engineering, prototyping, manufacture, testing, then you fracturing, packaging, patent filings marketing. I've been working on its sale since last November. So 20 years later, you know, or more. It's coming to fruition. Now, once Michael Hingson ** 34:06 Yeah, Robert Schott ** 34:08 let me add a point here. Because when I said I was gonna make the window posters, I said, Alright, I'm not giving up on the toy, but I'm going to make so much money from the window for posters, I can afford to make the toy pins some day. I just told you I was I've been losing money on the toy on the posters. But what I didn't, what finally occurred to me a year ago was holy cow. I got a I got the value and benefit of experience from learning how to make a product bring to market to make the toy. So the the, the outcome was, I didn't make a lot of money to make it but I earned a lifetime of experience to know how to make it. I think that's pretty cool. Michael Hingson ** 34:51 That's worth a lot. Robert Schott ** 34:53 Yeah. Yeah, let's How do you make a barcode? I don't know. Well, you have to figure it out. So every part of bringing your part like to mark it from scratch, has these learning hurdles, Michael Hingson ** 35:03 you know, you go to the bar and you make it home. Robert Schott ** 35:07 You go to the bar you drink, you talk to the guy next, know how to make barcodes. Or Michael Hingson ** 35:15 it seems easy to me. Well, Robert Schott ** 35:18 Michael, I was experimenting with making glow in the dark window posters. So I went to Green Bay to do a glow in the dark test. And just in my travels, I met three more people on the airplane in the airport and at lunch that day, who were in the glow in the dark business. So intentionality, you know, I talked about what I was doing. Oh, I do go to dark paint that will happen in one day. Michael Hingson ** 35:47 As you said a lifetime of experience, which is something that is priceless. Robert Schott ** 35:53 Yeah. I'll put a cap on that one. I'll say that, you know, maybe not financially. I haven't blown it out financially. But I'm really rich for the experience. Michael Hingson ** 36:03 Yeah, exactly what I'm saying. Yeah. Well, so what exactly is happening with sprawling walls then today? Robert Schott ** 36:11 Well, I had envisioned, pursuing direct consumer through E commerce only and using virtual communities to help create viral interest in the modern way of exposing a product. And that's not going like I envisioned this past nine months. It was disheartening to see one, even in a few years, how that realm has changed, and how much harder it is to get out, reach out and trade attention. And on a shoestring budget, you know, haven't been able to engage at a higher level where people, you know, for 50 grand, they could help make that happen. But in the meantime, I was working with a person who was critical of me spending time on the idea of networking. And I said I'm because he was helped me think through some of the marketing stuff. And so I've gone up to ra T, I was invited to go to the hockey game, I'll be in the President's booth at the arena at the campus. I'm going I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm gonna make the trip us up my time. And he said, Why are you gonna waste your time showing something that's not really ready for I'm going anyway, fella. So I went, and guess who was in the President's booth. But I mentioned I was a student leader and are at, and the Director of Student Affairs who I became very close to in a lifetime friend, and eventually become number two, at RMIT, as the Secretary to the institute. And he was in that booth with his wife. And it's like, holy cow. Well, of course, I brought my prototype. So I'm showing everybody in the President's booth, my toy idea. And then Fred pulls me aside and says, hey, hey, Robert, and if you know this, but I'm on the board of directors at the strong National Museum of Play, and Toy Hall of Fame. If you want, I can get your meeting there. Like it was the perfect storm for networking, and meeting. So here, I had an hour with the chief curator of the National Museum of Play, and he's been in this business for 35 years, who looked at what I was doing and said, Man, this is such a great story. And I think the trouble with you getting exposure with your product is because people don't know what to make of it yet. In fact, Robert, you've invented a new category of play. As well, that isn't that because he couldn't think of a comparable to what I've created. And furthermore, they said, we'd like to bring this product into our life play lab, we're in the side, the museum kids can come in and play with, you know, free play type of building toy systems and learn a lot from that. Yeah, so I think they're putting it in there in a few weeks, in reality, and they're also bringing my toy out in public outreach to children who have troubled circumstances, and may not have a environment where they live to be able to play. So they bring these children to places where they expose them to just pure play, just for the sake of playing in the creative collaboration that goes with that. So I'm grateful to be turning my product into something bigger than just me making a toy to sell but actually influencing young children. Michael Hingson ** 39:49 But hopefully it will turn into a real product that sells which is always a good thing. But you know, one of the things that I react to keep thinking back on is house Bro, then had no interest in it with things like GI Joe and so on, I would have thought they would have been very interested in sprawie forte, but I guess Robert Schott ** 40:08 it's you, you're spot on, you know, when I went to Hasbro, I didn't come with just the Girl doll system. Right. Michael Hingson ** 40:16 I understand. Robert Schott ** 40:17 I came with the Army system. So I brought my GI Joes and I had camouflage wall panels that connected together to make, you know, Fort scenes. But yeah, they didn't see it that what they said was Well, that's all good. And well, but, you know, boys like to build and destroy. So Michael Hingson ** 40:40 that was a funny line. Yeah, especially well, yeah. All the way around. Well, you know, clearly though, everything that you're doing, you continue to move forward. And you get sidelined along the way, sometimes from circumstances over which you have no control. But, but you still do, which I think is great. What puts you in keeps you in a mind frame of being unstoppable and just continuing to move forward? Because no matter what's happened, you've had a lot of things that have been setbacks, and a lot of people would just be held back by that. But you've continued to move forward. And you've done it very intentionally and in very positive way. How does that work? Robert Schott ** 41:27 Yeah, thanks, Michael. I'm gonna go back to the root of a painting I did when I was seven years old side by side with my dad. And it was an apple with a sugar jar on burlap. And he painted his version of paint in mind. And I remember getting it done and maybe didn't reflect on it back then. But I reflect on it now that I created a piece of art that I can look at and enjoy. And we got that done together. And through the pursuit of art, the creative arts, oil painting, sculpture, watercolor painting, and other things. I find the greatest joy for myself looking at, if I can look at something that I did, or that someone else did, and see joy in it, and continuous enjoyment and keep coming back to it like a good movie, like the Wizard of Oz, I can watch that every time. To me that describes what art is that it has this appeal that you can continue to enjoy. And you don't get there by not working at it. Right. So I think when I see something I want to do and get done, a need to see it finished, because I want to sit back and look at what I did it, you know, despite many obstacles, like with the window posters, you know, there was a storm that there was a hurricane that wiped out Halloween when winter and snow blizzard the next Halloween and then my warehouse got hit by lightning and all my product deliveries were late, my partner passed away and you know, all these things that just just bang on? Yeah, but you just got to keep going. So I think presently, like with what I'm pursuing, the side gig, if you will, I have this vision of what it would be. And there's something bigger than I realized last year. But it's so big that it overrides any doubt that I have or fear or even the skepticism of others. And even the regard for risking money on it, I come to realize that, you know, money saved isn't helping me create and invest in in my own pursuit. So I've let loose let go and I don't let it get me down. Like I would have, you know, 30 years ago. Michael Hingson ** 43:47 So how do you view money today? Or how is your attitude about the whole issue of money changed? Both from the standpoint of you personally, but you've obviously been in companies that specialize in that stuff. So you must have a lot of ways to to answer that. Robert Schott ** 44:02 Yeah. So it's kind of a little funny contradiction. I teach a lot about saving for retirement yet I'm spending a lot of my retirement savings. I'm investing in my future is what I'm doing. You know, I discovered I had a to really make it happen. I had to use what I have with the belief that it will work out and I'll be better off for it financially one day. Certainly, the cut three high end college educations at a time when I thought money was going to really be flowing from the window posters and my work. That was a drain as it is on anybody today, the way college expenses go. And then just trying to keep my head above water with the poster business. It's been technically losing money. You know, just I'm resolved that this is my way to pursue something bigger in my life. And I'll figure it out. I'll just keep Working I have, I'm so resourceful and I have so many ways that I could earn money for the next 20 years, if I have to that, I just, I don't like it that I'm in a spot. But I love that I feel hopeful and confident in my abilities. Michael Hingson ** 45:15 But you've made the commitment to do it. And if it means that you'd have to put some things on hold for a while and do more mundane or more things that are not directly in line with what you want to do. Right, you're going to get to do what you want to do. And you'll, you'll let some of the other stuff be a part of what you do to make that happen. Robert Schott ** 45:36 That's right. And I'll just finish off on the Toy Story, if you will, I have two big events coming up. In the next month. I was accepted to a when he call it up a media showcase. I'll be on Pier 60 in New York City on September 12. So by the time people see this, I might have been well past but the showcases of is for the best toys of 2023. And while I didn't make the cut as a best toy, they accepted me to be present, which is I think a nice credit to that I'm recognizing what I have to be in the presence of major media as well as social influencers. And then I was also accepted on the last day of this year's Toy Fair at the Javits Center in early October for Toy inventors day. So that didn't come easy, either. I had to qualify. And I'll be in front of major manufacturers to potentially come back to the idea of licensing the product. So I've got four tracks, I can sell direct to consumer, I can make the product and sell wholesale. I can pursue other avenues like homeschool and teaching networks and Montessori schools where play free play is the thing, or I could make a licensing deal. So all these are on the table right now and making some of those big opportunities happen. Michael Hingson ** 47:06 Have you thought of doing anything like trying to go on to Shark Tank and showing this to the world through that? Robert Schott ** 47:14 Oh, I've thought about it a lot. But I've also tried out for shark tank with the poster idea. And there's a lot of reasons I don't want to do that. A lot of reasons why I won't do that is I won't get into that. But I think I can pursue avenues through my own. Maybe I could put it this way. I've discovered how I can make tracks doing things. And I think maybe other people don't think that's their only avenue. Yeah. Success. And I don't believe that for me. So that's a there's a good answer. Well, Michael Hingson ** 47:51 and clearly in partisan businesses zine and you want to make it the way you want to make it. So it's just a question out of curiosity, but it makes sense. You know, to, to at least ask the question, and you thought about it. Not that answers it, which is great. Yeah. The you continue to be resilient, about pressing through and finishing whatever you start. I think you've hit on it some but why is it that you are so firm at being able to press through and continue to work? What, what, what keeps you going? And always moving forward like you do? Robert Schott ** 48:33 Well, you know, I think when you first introduced the idea of me being a guest, I had this theme in my head, which was real, that some bit of my career, I didn't feel very interesting anymore. Michael Hingson ** 48:49 What and I said you were interesting. Yeah, Robert Schott ** 48:52 I know. But I'd go on vacation with four other families and these other guys were all entrepreneur, for Nouriel, I had nothing to talk about in my work life that would be of any interest at the dinner table. So it's going to be interesting again, but anyway, I think it's there was lessons growing up about endurance and achieving things, you know, I was a boy scout, and we we camped every month of the year, whatever the weather was, wherever we went so, you know, five below zero in a tent with no floor and a summer sleeping bag. You have to somehow get through that night and learn where your limits are in pain points. I made Eagle Scout at college I was in academics and sports and and student leadership and you know, I actually the one and only time I sought professional help was at school, the counselor to say I'm falling apart, you know helped me put my pieces back together again and the coaching I got there it was really valuable. You know, encourage anybody who's feeling a bad spot to take it Then under the resources out there, and then that first job I had was 12 people. And it was all for one one for all, we were all the hats, you know, when when we move to a new building, they said, We're gonna come in Saturday and work on the wiring together and this new building. So the boss was running out around teaching us how to do wiring, it wasn't really legal, but that's what we did. So you learn how to solve little and big problems. And nothing is an obstacle when you have that frame of mind. And so when I get stuck on a business problem with my side gigs, I hunt down the answer. And I find people who know the answer, and I get coaching and make alliances. And so there's an answer to at all, it's just matter how you pursue that. And the other part of that is, you can set up a business plan and say, These are the steps we're gonna get done. But you can take yourself off of that anxiety by saying, I'm working on this thing to get done. And then the next thing or maybe three things at once, but I'm not going to worry about where it is two years from now, because I can't do that I have to work on what I can figure out today. And I've gotten really good at that. And, you know, setting the expectation, like I thought I would be blowing up my product by June. And yet, most of it's still sitting on the shelf. Alright, dial down my expectation, slow down, what I'm trying to get done, work on some bigger game things. And here's the bigger bigger game, Michael, I want to make sure I get in a year ago, I realized that invented this toy. But then I discovered this world called free play. And I've been studying the meaning of what free play is it's the definition is children given us a place to play and things to play with, that are non electronic. And without parental supervision. And sing alone or with a group or a friend's day will discover how to keep keep an afternoon going through trying and failing and trying and failing and trying and succeeding and solving each other's problems. And what I further learned is that there's incredible power in the development of a child through this kind of activity. And there's some important studies that Mattel and has done with Cardiff University and Melissa and Doug with Gallup, that are proving how children will mature with greater empathy and social skills, when time is devoted to free play versus playing by themselves or electronic play. And I realized I have a new direction that the bigger game is getting my toy out there. But helping children in their free play development Michael Hingson ** 52:37 is part of what the museum really referred to when they said you develop the whole new way to play. Robert Schott ** 52:44 Yeah, yeah, fits right in there with all of that. And so I'm becoming a student of that realm. I'm a novice. But I can see a third act for myself in pressing forward in becoming the leader or spokesperson in that model of play. Michael Hingson ** 53:02 Some Yeah. So writing about it and getting some other things to help enhance your credibility would mean sense writing about it, speaking about it, as you said, and then going to places and talking about it would make sense. And that takes away a little bit from the toy, but maybe not. Maybe certainly something to explore. Robert Schott ** 53:20 Yeah, I think it actually feeds the toy. Michael Hingson ** 53:23 It does feed the toy, I think. Yeah. Which makes sense to do. Well, so for you. You, you continue to, you know, to move forward for you. What do you think about your journey now, as opposed to 20? Or even 30 years ago? Do you think your journey has really changed as your mindset changed? Have you changed? Robert Schott ** 53:51 Well, you know, I've certainly learned a vast amount in pursuing nice things. And like you said, I've given up a lot of things to, you know, it's hard to stay inside on a gorgeous sunny weekend, you know, doing bookkeeping, and accounting and inventory management for for things. But I think my motivation has never been hired to see something come to fruition. And my understanding of how important it is to our society is feeding that and to also know that I'm getting the attention of important players. And what I'm pursuing is gives me great hope. So I'm going to continue with my corporate life. In fact, I'm actually trying to shift that a little bit more to around the realm of Community Oriented financial literacy. And I may have opportunities where I work now, to make that my work. To take all I've learned over 40 years in financial education, and actually be out in the communities leading programming that's a picture on anything for myself that could come around in a couple years where I am, but pursue the toy, pursue the Childhood Development theme. But personally, I'd like to free myself of the amount of work I'm doing, if I can make it financially viable. And get back to my basic artwork, I haven't finished an oil painting last year, that got recognized with a second place in the Union County art show here in New Jersey. And I started that 140 years ago, I finished it last year, I want to create new things now. So I need to find the time to get back to my arts, work on some of my athletic ambitions and other crazy adventures, I have room in my system for off the wall things. So that's, that's where I'm at mentally and emotionally, so Michael Hingson ** 55:52 well, and you continue to, to move forward, as I said before, which is, which is great, and you continue to clearly be as unstoppable as one can imagine. So what's ahead for you? Robert Schott ** 56:05 Well, immediately, it's just keep doing great work and my day job, is that what you mean? And then just keep chipping away at the toy, you know, manage my expectation on the toy, keep finding avenues, because I can't work on it full time. Just find out what I can get done. And but aim bigger, you know, I need to think for think for a while on what's the best bigger hits that I can get to make it come really to life. And in fact, this morning, I prove the banner I'm going to bring to the media and the toy vendor showcase that illustrates the future of the toy. And what I mean by as I've got five phases of development, that take it from a single size eight by 12 inch panel that connects with others, to 16 different sizes, and four different palettes of colors. And eventually, mechanical elements like pulleys and levers and drawing and graphic applications to the panels and maybe even LED lighting. So I'm paying you to picture the future so others can see it with me, you know, I, what I've got today isn't really describing what it could become. And I want to make sure people understand that. Michael Hingson ** 57:19 Yeah, and I think as I said a minute ago, doing some writing about it really composing some things and putting it out in places might very well be helpful and actually lend a lot to credibility, I think people need to be drawn into your vision and why you can only do so much of that with an actual model of the toy, writing, talking about it, speaking about it, having slides that show it in action, whatever, I think those are things that will help pull people in to realize what visionary ideas you have. And it'll be interesting to see what happens when it goes into the, to the free play area and the museum and how all that works. Yeah, and I because that's gonna lend a lot of support to what you're doing. Robert Schott ** 58:10 I completely agree on the visibility through my own initiatives, whether you know, certainly joining you, but other situations like this I'm going to pursue, we're going into a little higher gear on our social media, visibility of the product with examples and videos, and I've got social media influencers creating content. So I'm in a big content build phase, but I like the idea of the writing side. It's right now it could be you know, reflections of what I've learned about childhood development and, and free play. And even though I'm a novice, I have something to say and point people to where they can learn more. In fact, when I, when I go to the Showcase, I'm putting up something into the showcase gift bag for all the media is going to include a rolled up window poster, and then two sheets that describe both products. And there'll be QR codes that lead those who see my sheet, to the studies by Mattel, Melissa and Doug and a survey I've started on for parents to take to tell me about what their children's play patterns are today. It's an open survey and I'm encouraging all parents with children, four to 11 to complete it that helps inform me about what current children are doing and what they need next. Michael Hingson ** 59:34 When can you get some photos of kids actually playing with the toys? Robert Schott ** 59:38 I've got? I've got a bunch of photos new one came in today, but I probably have you know 50 or 60 photos and videos saying some videos putting some of that I would think past to be helped them Yeah, most importantly I want those that content from strangers. You know, I don't want you know Exactly right. And there's some beautiful things coming in Michael I, I did some street fairs in the spring. And I'm going to do one more in Cranford in October. And I set up a play space for the kids, I invite them to play. And the spirit of what I created shows up, you know, one kid joins in, and then three more come by, and then they're all playing together, and they're creating things. But there's surprises like, I think they can build walls. But all of a sudden, this kid takes all the sticks that hold the walls together and makes a sword out of it. And another kid takes the walls and built a ramp down off the table with a structure that he engineered to run his cars down it. There's all this innovation is what this is about. And the kids are showcasing it at the street fair. So I've got all those photos too. Michael Hingson ** 1:00:45 That's great well, and put them out. I mean, that's those are all cool things. I want to thank you for being here. And I'm excited for you. And I'm excited by what's going to happen. And I look forward to hearing more about it. So definitely keep us in your and on your email list. But one of these days, we'll get back there to visit. But I really hope that it all goes well for you and that this will catch on soon, and people will start to get really excited about what you're doing. And I agree, I think it's really interesting that although you intended it as walls on the house, kids are doing a lot more with it and so much the better that they do. Yeah, future engineers. Robert Schott ** 1:01:25 And you know, the, the key selling point about it, and a couple of them is that it integrates and connects to Lego. It connects with connects, you can put Avery removable papers that you run through your printer to make wallpapers and you can draw on it with Expo markers. And the best part is you can collapse it back down into the box in like no time flat. Parents love that you can put it away into a little box. Michael Hingson ** 1:01:52 That's not messy when you do that. No, just Robert Schott ** 1:01:55 don't think that the pick pick up the little clips because they hurt your feet just like little Lego. That's fair. Yeah, Michael, thanks. Michael Hingson ** 1:02:05 This has really been fun. Well, you're absolutely welcome. And this has been great. I really appreciate that we finally got a chance to do this. And you need to come back in a little while and let us know how it's going and tell us about the adventure because it clearly is an adventure. And I hope that you listening have enjoyed this. If people want to reach out to learn more about you what you're doing and so on. Robert, how do they do that? Robert Schott ** 1:02:28 Well, I just set up a new email address yesterday morning to Robert dot Schott S C H O T T at bopt Inc. It's B O P T inc.com. And little funny there Mike, I'll close with this. I named my company bopt because I was told it's how I spelled my name when I was four years old. There you go. From Robert to Bob to Bobt But two weeks ago, I was going through a folder my mom left for me my drawings from when I was five. Just two weeks ago I saw these for the first time and I discovered I actually spelled my name B O P P T and my sister said, well don't worry about it. Robert, you can just say Bobt is the nickname for the longer version B O P P T Michael Hingson ** 1:03:19 so it's Robert dot Schott or just Robert Schott. Robert dot Schott at S C H O T T at B O P T.com. Yeah, well, great. Well, please reach out to Robert. We've got some social media links and other things that are in the cover notes. Please send me a picture of Abraham Lincoln that will be fun to add in anything else that you want us to put in there. We definitely want to do and be supportive of you. And thank you for listening. I'd love to hear what you all think. Please feel free to email me Michaelhi at accessibe A C C E S S I B E. I can spell.com or go to our podcast page www dot Michael Hingson h i n g s o n.com/podcast. We'd love to hear from you. And Robert, for you and for you listening if you know anyone else who want to be a guest on unstoppable mindset. You've heard a lot of the stories that people tell you heard Robert today. We'd love to hear from you about people, you know, who ought to come on unstoppable mindset as well. So please let us know. Please give us introductions. We appreciate it. And so once more. Robert, I want to thank you for being here. And we really appreciate your time late in the evening in New Jersey. You get in the spring **Michael Hingson ** 1:04:43 You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite your friends to join us in the future. If you know of any one or any organization needing a speaker for an event, please email me at speaker at Michael hingson.com. I appreciate it very much. To learn more about the concept of blinded by fear, please visit www dot Michael hingson.

covid-19 christmas united states america tv american director amazon texas halloween canada president children success new york city english earth man technology france entrepreneur french new york times parents girl mit new jersey holy army wisconsin hospitals employees series blind lego ambassadors thunder stitcher idaho oz wizard windows secretary investments ebooks stanford university led tom hanks explain creative directors ram unstoppable shark tank expo toy story abraham lincoln gamble green bay visionary statue syracuse qr bro jp morgan boy scouts rutgers university rutgers gallup notably hasbro mattel syracuse university schwarz national museum toy montessori gi joe toys r us procter pensions american red cross merrill lynch financial wellness eagle scouts westfield student affairs fao cardiff university national federation lincoln memorial rmit schott rochester institute coopers charles lindbergh toy fair maplewood one room childhood development union county applied arts javits center cranford exxon mobile chief vision officer murray hill management development federal express scripps college sarika communication design john harvey retirement readiness deliberative democracy michael hingson communication consultant transition network lybrand iliff brian jenkins bell laboratories strong national museum mini mba joe it newfoundland canada accessibe american humane association scotch plains thunder dog nouriel fanwood hero dog awards cranford new jersey

18. Coppicing at Priory Grove, Monmouth

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 25, 2023 31:50

Discover the fascinating ancient art of coppicing as we visit Priory Grove in Wales' Wye Valley, where the technique is still practised on a small scale to benefit both people and wildlife. We meet site manager Rob and contractor Joe to learn more about the coppicing carried out here, and how this interaction between people and nature has enabled the two to develop and evolve in tandem. Also in this episode, find out how an unfortunate end for ash trees resulted in a fantastic sea of wild garlic, the team's efforts to encourage dormice, bats, pine martens and other wildlife and which tree to identify by likening the trunk to elephants' feet! Don't forget to rate us and subscribe! Learn more about the Woodland Trust at woodlandtrust.org.uk Transcript You are listening to Woodland Walks, a podcast for the Woodland Trust presented by Adam Shaw. We protect and plant trees for people, for wildlife. Adam: Well, today I am off to Priory Grove, which is next door really to the River Wye near Monmouth in Wales to meet the site manager Rob there who's gonna give me a bit of a tour. It's predominantly made up of ancient woodland and provides a wide range of habitats for wildlife. Things like roe, fallow deer, they're known to forage throughout the area, and a wide variety of bird species, including the tawny owl, sparrowhawk, and the great spotted woodpecker, which can all be seen on the wing here. All very exciting and I've just got to find it and find Rob. Rob: Hello, I'm Rob Davies, site manager, South East Wales. Adam: So tell me a little bit about where we are and why this is significant. Rob: This is Priory Grove woodland. It's quite a large site on the outskirts of Monmouth, but nobody really knows what its history is. It's it's called Priory Grove, presumably because it was attached to one of the monastic estates round here. And that probably accounts for its survival as one of the one of the largest ancient woodlands next to Monmouth. And it did retain a lot of its coppice woodland, which is quite important for biodiversity. Adam: Right. And what we're, I mean, we're standing by some felled, are these oak? Rob: These are oak. Yes, oak, oak in length. Adam: So why why have these been felled? Rob: This is part of the coppice restoration programme, so coppicing on this site has been a management tool that's been used for hundreds if not thousands of years in this area and it's used to produce products like this, this oak that will go into timber framing and furniture and all those good things. And also, firewood is part of the underwood and the the the hazel and the the the understory coppice. So products for people and in the past it was used for all kinds of things before we had plastic. But it's still very useful, and so because it didn't cease until recently on this site, the animals and plants and the fauna that relies upon this method that have evolved with it essentially in the last 10,000 years or so since we've been managing woods in this way, still are present here on this site or in the local area. So if you continue the cycle you continue this interaction with the wildlife and you can help to reverse the biodiversity declines. So it's very holistic, really this management technique. But it does mean that to make space for the coppice regrowth, because trees don't grow under trees, you know it needs the light. The light needs to be there for the coppice to come up again. You have to take out some of these mature oaks that were planted 150, 200 years ago, with the intention of being used in the future. So we're planting things and we're carrying out the plans, we're bringing them to fruition, what people enacted a couple of hundred years ago. Adam: It it's interesting, isn't it, because it it it is an ancient woodland, but that doesn't mean it's an untouched woodland, because for hundreds of years it's it's been managed. Man has had a hand in this and not only that, commerce has had a hand in that, so often I think we think of these things as a dichotomy. You have ancient woodland, nice, pristine sort of nature, and then you have sort of horrible invasive commerce. Actually, I think what's interesting about this site is that there isn't that dichotomy. They both work in tandem, is that fair? Rob: That's right, it's a false dichotomy. So the reason these woods have survived is because they were used for people, and because of the way they're managed, coppicing and thinning is quite a sensitive technique, it allows space for nature to be present and to develop and evolve in tandem, so they're not mutually exclusive. Adam: Yes. So tell me about coppicing is an important part of this site, tell me a little bit about what you're doing at the moment with that. Rob: Yeah, so we've had a grant actually from the Wye Valley AONB from, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, to to do some coppicing work on stands that were coppiced about 20 years ago. So we're continuing that cycle. And we've been working with a company called Wye Coppice Community Interest Company, Wye Coppice CIC, and they're quite developed in, in the Wye Valley area. And we formed a good relationship with them and through them we've been able to do half a hectare of coppicing up on the other slope higher up in the site there. If you like we can go up and meet Joe? Adam: That would be wonderful. Yeah. You you lead on I will follow. Well, you can hear from this I'm a bit out of breath, we've claimed, OK, I'll be embarrassed to say it's a hill, a small incline, but we've come across this stand of of felled trees. So just tell me a bit about what's going on here. Rob: Exactly. So all these stumps you can see scattered throughout the stand. This is the coppice, so it's cut down to just above base ground level there now and it will just regrow. So it's kind of a natural defence strategy that we're just exploiting. So it's it's been used to, it's, you know, since it evolved things like hazel especially, it‘s used to being browsed off by animals, the animals move on and then the tree just comes back. So it's like a phoenix strategy it comes back, back up again. We're just exploiting that. So we'll cut the tree to base and then we'll protect the regrowth from the browsing animals and then the tree will come again. Adam: Right, and this is the work done by Joe? Rob: Yeah, this yeah so this is the work done by Joe Weaver. Joe's just down the end there actually if you want to come and meet him. Adam: OK, let's go have it let's go meet him. Ohh I've got stuck. OK, so Joe, this is all your handiwork. Joe: It is, yes. Adam: Tell me a bit about what what it is you do then. Joe: So I run Wye Coppice CIC, we're a coppice contracting company and working with Woodland Trust, Natural Resource Wales and Wildlife Trusts throughout the Wye Valley and we're embarking on a project to restore areas of the Wye Valley to restore, do a coppice restoration project for for various organisations throughout the Wye Valley. The what you see, what you see here is about 1 1/2 acres of cut down trees with 7 or 8 standards. Adam: What are standards? Joe: The standards are the trees that we've left behind, so, so they're the large, they're the larger trees. Adam: Oh, I see right. So you wouldn't be coppicing, these are very well established big trees, you don't coppice trees like that, you coppice quite small trees, don't you? Joe: Yes, so all the small diameter understory trees we've cut down to ground level and and they will, they will resprout and grow back again. We can then come back in 10 years and recut them and have a healthy supply of continue, a continual healthy supply of pole wood. Adam: And yeah, so what you're trying to get with coppicing is sort of quite it's quite small diameter wood, is that correct? Joe: Yes, generally speaking, so this is a restoration project you can see this first cut is fairly large diameter. And so most of this will go to make charcoal but generally speaking after 10, maybe 15 years of growth, we'll have poles about sort of thumb size and maybe up to about 50 pence diameter. Adam: Right. And that's ideal size, is it? Joe: And that's a really good size for products like bean poles, hedging stakes and binders that go on the top of naturally laid hedging and then various other pole wood applications. Adam: And and when you see a coppiced tree, evidence that it's been coppiced, there's, I'm trying to look over there, is is this where you see lots of different branches actually coming out from the stump in the ground? That's evidence that's been coppiced, cause it not just one thing grows, lots of them? Joe: That's right. So you can, if you have one birch tree standing up, for example, you can cut that down to the ground, and when you come back in a few months' time, you'll notice about 5 or 6 shoots coming from that one stump at the bottom of the ground. So if we can protect that from deer browsing and rabbit browsing, then those stems, those five or six shoots will grow up into individual stems that we can then use use in pole wood products. Adam: It's odd, isn't it that that happens, though, that you chop down one sort of main stem and you get four or five coming back, that's sort of an odd natural thing to happen, isn't it? Joe: It is. I think it's the tree's response to the stress of being cut down. So it sort of puts out a lot of it puts a lot of energy into regrowing new growth to try to survive because essentially these broadleaf species, trees, they're they're forever growing, you can cut them down they'll regrow, cut them down again, they'll regrow again. So it's a constant cycle of of regrowth. Adam: Yeah it's it's like sort of, you know, thumbing their nose at you isn't it, going well, you cut me down well I'm gonna come back fivefold. You know, that's it's a sort of really funny response. Joe: Indeed. But we can reap the benefits of that. Adam: Yeah no, no, it's, I get, I get why that's good. And coppicing itself, that, and that's an ancient art, isn't it? Joe: It has, certainly here in the Wye Valley it was practised at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to produce charcoal to power the Industrial Revolution until coal was iintroduced and so it happened for hundreds and hundreds of years here. Adam: Right. So you think, do you think I mean there's no need for you to be an historical expert on the history of coppicing, but do you think that's the first big sign of it happening, sort of Industrial Revolution time? Joe: Certainly around here it is yeah, and there's some of the coupes that we've cut, some of the coppice areas that we've cut here, we've found evidence of charcoal hearths. So you can see flat areas with bits of charcoal sort of sliding down the bank. Adam: So that would be ancient sites in here, well, ancient, I mean, a few 100 years old of them actually making charcoal in this woodland? Joe: Yes, in this woodland, throughout the Wye Valley all the way throughout the Wye Valley here, yes. Adam: Amazing. Now so your company, it's not just a traditional sort of private business, it is a a different sort of form. Just explain how that works. Joe: So we run a community interest company and that allows us to access grant funding if we need to. Essentially, we're run as a private business, but we are able to do community outreach work as well and that's part of what we do is to try to educate people about sustainable woodland management. Adam: And how did you get involved in all of this then? Did you grow up as a boy going I want to chop down trees to make fences. Joe: No, I didn't. I was walking in the Dolomites, I saw two stoats fighting and thought woodland life is for me *laughs*. Adam: Ok, well, fantastic, never heard that, so inspired by the the battle between two stoats and the and and the Dolomites. That's fantastic, but a hard life, I would have thought to run a business to, I mean it's physical work anyway, but that's my perception from the outside, is it hard work? Joe: It it can be very difficult, it does have its benefits. Obviously it keeps you fit and it gets you outside but yes, it is a hard life and and you know it's it's quite a technical job as well and the training is expensive so we're trying to introduce a training programme as well through through our through our business Wye Coppice to try to get young people interested in woodland management. Adam: And do you find that people sometimes don't understand or or perhaps disagree with the fact that commerce and nature can be actually mutually beneficial? Do you find that an issue at all? Joe: Yes I do. Yes, and we're we're we're always willing to stop and talk to dog walkers especially. Shortly after COP26, we had two dog walkers come past and shout at us for chopping the trees down, after sitting down with them and having a cup of tea, they bought a bag of charcoal off us. Adam: Right ok very good there we are. You're bringing them round one by one, one by one, those customers are coming over. Well brilliant and we've had not a bad day. I thought I might have to put my wet weather gear on, but it's been it's been OK. Anyway well, that's brilliant thank you very much. That's been really interesting. Joe: Thank you. Adam: So we've got this stand of trees we're looking at Rob. A couple couple of oak. Did you say that was a lime? Rob: That's a lime yeah. Adam: That's the lime, that that one with lots of ridges in it is that the lime? Rob: That's it, yeah. Adam: That's the lime. So why have you left these trees? Is there particular reasons you didn't take these ones out? Rob: Yeah. So these as you can see, these are all mature trees and so you don't take these decisions lightly. So when we coppice this sort of half a football field area here, there were thirteen of these big mature trees, trees you can barely get your hands around as they're so large, taken a couple of hundred years to grow, so you've got to be quite careful and quite selective, although you need the light. There's an old adage about oak trees, it goes something like this that to fell an oak tree you need three things. You need a good eye, a sharp axe and a cold heart because these trees, you know they've been grown and nurtured and developed, and they're impressive life forms. And so it's not something you do without considering it very carefully so so you can see a couple of trees in here which are a couple of oaks, good size, but they're full of ivy, very dense ivy and that's very good for wintering bats. For hibernation, or for potentially summer roosting. Adam: So the bats would live just amongst the Ivy, they'd sleep amongst the ivy? Rob: Yeah when it gets as dense as this, when it's really all knotted, entwined, there's lots of gaps behind it. You could stick your hand in and find little cavities and several species of bat, especially pipistrelle, they they will hibernate over winter in this kind of growth. So you really don't want to be disturbing this. Adam: Right. And and what what's, is there something specific about lime that wildlife like is there any particular wildlife? Rob: Well, it's good for bees. It's good good good pollen. Adam: You get beehives in there? Oh I see, the pollen itself is good. Rob: They like the flowers. Yeah yeah it produces lots of the small leaved lime it produces lots of good flowers and and it will attract aphids which is actually a food source for for dormice in the summer. So they they feed on the feed on the lime sap, you know if you park your car under a lime tree, you'll get this very sticky kind of substance coming off it. Adam: Yes, yeah, yeah. Of course it does. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Rob: So that attracts aphids, attracts the dormice, it's good for insects who like nectar as well. So it's a it's a very valuable tree and and you know Adam: So interesting it's it's not valuable commercially, it's valuable for nature. Rob: Yeah, absolutely. And it's quite it's quite a special tree in the in the Wye Valley, it doesn't occur much outside this area naturally, and it's kind of an ancient woodland indicator in this part of the world, perhaps not officially, but it's a. Adam: OK. Any other trees we've got here? Rob: Yeah. The rest of the trees, then are beech. Adam: Right and you've kept those why? Rob: Yeah, because you can see if you look at this one here, it's got quite a few cavities in it at the base at the top, beech tends to do that. It tends to take, form little cavities, rot holes and ways in, and that's ways in for fungus and then they eat out and hollow the tree. So the potential for harbouring bats again is very high in these trees. Without sort of going into them, doing some invasive exploration, you can't tell, but it's it's very high potential for bats. So again, bats, all species of bats in this country are protected under law because they've had massive declines like a lot of woodland species. And so we'll do everything we can to retain that habitat. Adam: It's it's the Field of Dreams, philosophy. You you build it and they will come. Rob: Yeah, yeah. This as long as it stays there, it'll always be valuable as habitat and so at least then, there are future sort of veteran trees within this stand. Adam: It is interesting you you've already, I mean, we've only done a short part of this walk so far, but you talked about whoever was managing this woodland 100 years ago knew what they were talking about. And I think that's fascinating that we don't know who that person is or who who they, who those people were. And in 100 years time, people won't know who you were p.sumably, but the the evidence of your work will be here. They'll go yeah, that was a good bloke who did all this and left us with something. Rob: That's it, you you don't plant trees for yourself, you plant trees for the future generation so you know, I won't see the oaks I plant develop. I'll be dead long before they mature and it's the same for the person who did this. But you can see the ones we took out, the ones I took out and selected were tall and straight. And that means that the coppice is well managed, because there was enough light for the hazel in the understory to come up straight away. If you cut hazel to the ground and you protect it, in a couple of years, it'll be way above six, eight foot and it'll just continue to get higher and higher over the next few years. And what that does is it shades the stem of the oak and it prevents side branching. So you get this very tall initial first stem. And that's what you're looking for. And that's what these trees had. So this would have clearly been cared for and these trees have been selected, they were on a journey from the moment they were planted. Adam: OK. And just on my journey of education about trees, how do, what, they're beech, I wouldn't be able to spot that myself, what tells you they're beech? Rob: It's a smooth trunk. If you look at this one here now you can see I always think of them as sort of elephant legs. They're grey and they're tall and they're smooth and they quite often have sort of knobbly bits on the base like an elephant's foot. And if you go through a stand of pure beech, it looks like it looks like a stand of elephants' feet, really tall, grey stems and these big huge buttress roots. Adam: Fantastic. I am never going to forget that and I will always think of elephants when I look at a beech, a brilliant brilliant clue. Thank you. Right. So where we off to now? Rob: We'll walk around so you can see the top of the coupe and just see the extent of it and and then we'll walk back down perhaps and have a look at this oak. Adam: Brilliant. Well we've come to the, over the brow of the hill and along this path, there's a tiny little path for me to walk, and on either side there's a carpet of green. And I think I know what this carpet of green is. Rob, what is it tell me? Rob: This is wild garlic. Adam: Yeah. This is the time of year, is it? Rob: Yep, you can see the flower heads. Ramsons it's also called, it's just about coming into flower now. Adam: Sorry they're called what? Rob: Ramson. Adam: Ramson. Is that the flower itself is called ramson, or is that? Rob: Well, just the plant. Adam: We call it wild garlic but it's it's real name is ramson? Rob: Well some people call it ramson too. Adam: Right OK. And I never, I mean I have never picked and eaten anything from a forest because I am sure I will kill myself, but all of this, I mean, I've seen loads of people do that, pick wild garlic and it's, I mean there's there's acres of the stuff here. Rob: It can it can yeah any kind of wild plant comes with the caveats that you need to know what you're doing. Adam: Yes, which which I don't. Rob: Yeah, absolutely. It's funny yeah, this site is quite well known for its ramsons, for its wild garlic carpets. This this is in response to something here, quite a sad thing actually. We're right next, you can probably hear the road noise there, we're right next to the main road from Monmouth into the Forest of Dean, Staunton Road there, and unfortunately, a lot of the trees along the road edge were big, big, mature ash trees. And they all had dieback and they were all dropping limbs and about to crush a car. And so, you know, we take that very seriously in terms of health and safety so the trees just along the road edge, we left the ones in the wood, just the road edge trees we had to do something about them, so they've either been reduced or felled and what that's done in this woodland where in the last 60 years, you have had very little management, like most woods, post war, very little has happened. So it becomes very high, very closed canopy, very dense. And what's happened, because of the ash felling is, you've got this pocket of light here and the ramsons have immediately responded to that. So this wasn't here last year. This carpet like this. Adam: What so this is this is brand new? Rob: This is brand new. It was the odd plant coming up every year, patches of it. Adam: I'm shocked because this looks like something from the Wizard, if this was yellow, this would be we'd be in the middle of the Wizard of Oz set here, the yellow brick road. It just I mean it it's just a beautiful, winding, lush, dense path of wild garlic. It looks like it's been here forever. Rob: And in a sense it it was. It was just waiting for the opportunity, waiting for that temporary disturbance caused by the ash felling. And so like with the coppicing, that's what we're trying to recreate essentially, is these temporary pockets of disturbance where you you break up the canopy, you get this flush of greenery and then until the trees recover it and regrow again. So you don't want this homogeneous block of woodland really. You want, you want variation, because that's the key to success for, for wildlife and biodiversity, different niches, different ages. If you look closely, you can see it's not just the garlic either. You can see wood anemone, you can see greater wood vetch, you can see little violets. So, you know, quite quite a lot of species are now taking advantage of this temporary light that the ash felling's produced. Adam: It is a nice positive message, isn't it? Because ash dieback has been a real tragedy. But even in the midst of problems there are opportunities which nature comes back with, it's an optimistic sign. Rob: There is and so this as I say, you know these these trees would have coppiced without us because you know when animals browse them, they they they they come back after that so all we're doing is sort of recreating these natural processes through the management of the woodland. A once in a lifetime storm might have knocked these ash out or a hurricane, something like that, could have felled the whole area and then temporary open space, the plants capitalise and then the wood comes back again, so we're just just mimicking what nature does anyway. Adam: I'm going to take a photo of this, put it on my Twitter feed. It's fantastic. So we've just taken a little stop on this path of wild garlic. So over to the right is well, I thought it was a bird box, it's a large bird box. You tell me it's actually something very specific. Rob: Yeah, this is a pine marten nest box cause there was there has been a big release of pine marten. Pine martens are native to this country. It's kind of like a large weasel that lives in the trees. That's a really bad way of describing it, but it's a it's a mustelid. It's a large, impressive, intelligent animal and they were sort of pressed to persecute, to extinction, with persecution in the past. But they're very important in these woods for regulating, you know, the biodiversity, they, they prey on the grey squirrel especially, and they'll regulate bird numbers like any predator does. So it's it's great to see them coming back and it's a success story actually, because a couple of years ago now there was a release programme where captive animals were put into the Forest of Dean which is just over that direction. And so we put up some boxes and monitored them and pine martens are moving back into this area now. Whether they're using the boxes or not, we're not entirely sure, but they are moving in, so it's a, it's a really good story. So we'll do whatever we can to sort of encourage them because we've we've lost a lot of this old growth woodland that we're trying to protect and so they haven't got the nest cavities, so temporarily we'll provide this habitat. Adam: And over the other side of the little dip, there's another pathway and it looks like the bank has been cut away and it's very black so that it doesn't look quite natural. What's going on there? Rob: Well the the track that's been put in there is exposed, an earlier industry, so that's that's a charcoal platform. See what is it about five, five metres in diameter. Sort of sort of circular and very, very thick layer of charcoal. A huge fire has been there, but that's that's lots and lots of fires, one on top of the other. Adam: So this is this is not current, this is probably a couple of hundred years old? Rob: I think the last burn in this woodland would have been before the Second World War. Adam: Oh right, so not that old. Rob: Well, I mean, if they were still burning, they would have had the odd one, but this probably dates to sort of the the height of the the periods of the the late 19th century. So this here, it's been buried and forgotten about. But it shows you as Joe was saying earlier, at one point this was a managed wood and quite a few woods in Wales if you look on the maps you'll see things like coed poeth, which probably roughly translates as sort of hot wood or or burning woods, very roughly, probably, which gives you, may may give you an indication that these woods were worked and if you came here, you would have probably seen people living in the woods with the charcoal, tinner and charcoal workers, especially in the the 19th century, would have moved in in the summer to do the charcoal production with their families. Adam: Just living in a tent or something? Rob: Living in on site yeah, because then you know you don't want to move products, move things twice. You know, it's it's an economic, so you bring your family in, you produce your product, and then you come out with it at the end of the season so it's very peaceful here today. You can hear the birds. It's great for wildlife, but it would have been a managed landscape and we're trying to introduce a little bit of that. Obviously not people living in the woodlands anymore, but there's space for both here within this woodland, a bit a bit of coppicing a bit of management and reserve areas. Adam: And I mean, I I hadn't quite noticed it while we were walking, but now we're we're standing here on this green carpet, there is an overpowering smell of garlic, it's quite extraordinary. It's very fresh, you know, sometimes when you're in the kitchen and the garlic it's it's, it's not fresh, it's pungent, but this is, you know, it's mixed with the sort of cool air, it's a really lovely smell. Rob: It's making me hungry, actually. Adam: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. Well I was thinking whether I should pick some for dinner. Rob: Chop some up. Pasta sauce. It's lovely with that. Adam: Yeah, yeah, yeah, lovely. And and there's another one amongst this wild garlic, it's clock, what was it? Rob: Yeah, this one here, it's the town hall clock or moschatel as it's known. Adam: Town hall clock that's it. So just, what's the what's its proper name? Rob: Moschatel. Well, that, that's it's another acronym, ah pseudonym really it's moschatel. Adam: Moschatel. Rob: Or town hall clock. I forget the Latin actually, to my shame. Adam: Is moschatel the Welsh word for it, or it's not Rob: No, it's not. It's a general general word, just a colloquial local term. Adam: And why is it called the town hall clock? Rob: Look you can see these four, the flowers have four sides to them, like an old town hall clock would. Adam: Right, lovely. It's really quite, quite a rich path we're wandering down. Rob: You see the the bluebells are out look just now, if you look up into the wood there you can see them. In Welsh they're called clychau'r gog, which is the cuckoo bell. Adam: Wow. Cuckoo bell. Rob: Because it comes out when the cuckoo comes. Apparently, the grant paid for like a fence, contractors to fence off that, this boundary here, stop the deer coming in from the Dean. To stop the wild pigs actually, pigs are a Adam: You get wild pigs here? Rob: They're a nuisance round here, yeah. Adam: Wild pigs? Rob: They call them, they're not really boar, because a boar will produce like, I don't know, maybe a litter of six, and these pigs will do 22. Adam: Right. Blimey. And how big are they? Rob: They look like boar. Adam: So and boar can be quite violent, can't they, quite aggressive. Rob: Yeah, they're sort of half breed, half pig, half boar. They're big animals, got a cute little stripey piglets, just like a boar does. But they, you know, they're exponential in their reproduction, so they're Adam: And and they're around this wood? Rob: They're here. Adam: So do they cause a problem with eating or do they nibble on the new trees and stuff? Rob: Yeah, yeah, well, they sort of rootle, I mean you want boar, because they were here originally. You want boar, like the deer, you want them in sustainable numbers, they're all sleeping now. Adam: Do they come out at night? Rob: They only come out at night yeah. Adam: I'll have to return. Rob: Yeah. I mean you'd see them if you went up to the top path up there. Adam: We haven't done a night podcast. I think we should do some bats and. Rob: You can do bats, if you wait, while you're waiting for the badgers to come out, you can do the bats. There's a few sites around here where you can watch them. Adam: OK, well maybe Rob: I'm sure there's other Trust sites where people know. Adam: Maybe I'll come back. Rob: One summer when I was doing my bachelor's degree, I was working in Llanelli in like a, just a café just to get some money. I was working with the local girls there, I'd been out surfing in Llangennith on the Gower the day before and I was like just telling her how the seals came in because they chased the mackerel in just beyond the surf line and I was sitting there and the water just boiled with the stench of of fish and mackerel and I looked around and two seals popped up and they were driving the mackerel into the back of the waves to hunt them. I was telling her this and she was like, what, you're telling me there's seals in the water here, in Llanelli, where? I said just in the Gower. Seals? Like seals seals, like live in water? I said there's seals there, yeah, they've always been there, we just don't value what's around us. Adam: We don't notice it. Rob: We don't notice because you can't see it, you don't see it, yeah. Adam: It's interesting, isn't it, Attenborough has done a series recently on the UK and you go, you don't have to go to Africa or Latin America to see these things. Rob: There you go. I was in West Wales last week in Aberaeron, and you can see bottlenose dolphins. Increasingly under threat there's that number of point but yeah, but they're there. You can see the seals, you can see them all around us, yeah. This is doing well. Adam: Well, I'm going to have to leave our little trip down the Wye Valley with some rather unexpected chat about seals and bottlenose dolphins and a promise to return one dark night to meet some bats. Until next time, happy wandering. Thank you for listening to the Woodland Trust Woodland Walks with Adam Shaw. Join us next month, when Adam will be taking another walk in the company of Woodland Trust staff, partners and volunteers. Don't forget to subscribe to the series on iTunes or wherever you're listening to us and do give us a review and a rating. And why not send us a recording of your favourite woodland walk to be included in a future podcast? Keep it to a maximum of five minutes and please tell us what makes your woodland walk special or send us an e-mail with details of your favourite walk and what makes it special to you. Send any audio files to podcast@woodlandtrust.org.uk. We look forward to hearing from you.

trust uk man discover dreams africa field world war ii latin oz wales wizard latin america sort welsh pasta seals grove pine industrial revolution cuckoo monmouth gower dolomites attenborough priory blimey west wales woodland trust adam shaw llanelli rob davies joe it transcript you rob it heritage lottery fund adam it adam you rob you adamis adam yeah joe so adam so coppicing adam well adam oh rob well rob so rob there

489: CTO Lunches with Kendall Miller

Bill Oâ€™Reillyâ€™s No Spin News and Analysis

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 24, 2023 38:17

Kendall Miller is the Co-Founder and COO of CTO Lunches, a network of engineering leaders to get trusted advice and connections. The first half of the conversation with host Victoria Guido and special guest host, Joe Ferris, CTO of thoughtbot revolves around the use, adoption, and growth of Kubernetes within the technology industry. The discussion explores Kubernetes' history, influence, and its comparison with other platforms like Heroku and WordPress, emphasizing its adaptability and potential. The second half focuses on more practical aspects of Kubernetes, including its adoption and scalability. It centers on the appropriateness of adopting Kubernetes for different projects and how it can future-proof infrastructure. The importance of translating technical language into business speak is emphasized to influence executives and others in the decision-making process and Kendall also discuss communication and empathy in tech, particularly the skill of framing questions and understanding others' emotional states. __ CTO Lunches (http://ctolunches.com/) Follow CTO Lunches on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/ctolunches/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/cto_lunches). Follow Kendall Miller on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kendallamiller/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Kendall Miller, Co-Founder and COO of CTO Lunches, a network of engineering leaders to get trusted advice and connections. Kendall, thank you for joining me. KENDALL: Thanks for having me. I'm excited. VICTORIA: And today, we have a special guest host, Joe Ferris, CTO of thoughtbot. Joe, thank you for joining us. JOE: Hello there. Thank you for having me. KENDALL: Hi, Joe. Thanks for being here. It's exciting. VICTORIA: Yes. It's so exciting. I think this is going to be a great episode. So, Kendall, I met you at a San Diego CTO lunch recently, and I know that's not the only thing that you do. So, you're also an advisor, a board member, and CXO. So, maybe tell us a little bit more about your background. KENDALL: Gosh, my background is complicated. I've been involved in tech for a very long time. In college, I worked for a company that started Twitter about five years too soon, and then worked in the nonprofit space in China for ten years, then came back, got back involved in tech. Today, I'm usually the business guy. So, when technical founders start technical products and want help turning them into successful technical businesses, that's when they call me. So, I have the technical background. I have never been paid to write code, which is probably a good thing. But I can hang in the technical conversations for the most part, but I'm much more interested in the business side and the people leadership side of business. So that tends to be where I play. Every organization hires me to do something different. VICTORIA: Thank you for that. And I'm just curious about the CTO Lunches. Just tell me a little bit more about that. And what's the idea behind it that led you to co-found it? KENDALL: CTO Lunches has actually been around for about eight years. And I didn't start the initial incarnation of it. It was two people that got us started, and I was trying to hire one of them; one thing led to another. Actually, originally, they did not want me to join. I think, at the time, my title was COO at a company that I was working with. About six months later, I took over engineering as VP of engineering, and then they're like, you can join the group now. We're less strict about that [laughs] now. Although it is highly focused on senior engineering leaders, it's not exclusively CTOs. But the group's been in place for a very long time, just intended as a place to network, have conversation with people who are in that senior-most technical position at technical organization. So, the CTO role is a lonely role. CTOs get fired all the time. There's not a technical person at the company that doesn't think they can do the job better than them. So, the CTO is always getting feedback. You're doing this wrong. The trade-offs you're making are wrong. This isn't going where it should be going. We should automate that. Why haven't we automated that? We should switch to this other tool. I've used it before; it's 100 times better. Joe, let me know if I'm getting any of this wrong. But that's the experience that I've had. Having a place where people can get together and, you know, half the time just complain to each other, hey, this is hard, is really why the networking group exists. So, it's a listserv. And there are local lunches that started in Boulder, Colorado. It's gotten pretty global. About a year ago, a little over a year ago, I was talking with one of the people who'd gotten it started. I've been involved in the Denver chapter for most of those eight years. And I was suggesting to him that he change a few things about it, to monetize it so that he could invest in it further. And he came back a few months later and said, "I want to take your advice and do this, but I want you to come do it with me." So, we founded the company officially...I think in December is when paperwork went into place. And we started investing in it a little bit more heavily. I was living in Europe last year, so we went and put on lunches in Paris, and Lisbon, and London, and, gosh, all over the place. I'm sure I'm missing some, Amsterdam. But there's been chapters all over the U.S. and a couple of other parts of the world for a long time. VICTORIA: That reflects my experience attending a CTO lunch. It's just very casual, like, just get together and eat food and talk about what you've worked on recently, issues you're having, just get ideas and make some friends. So, I really appreciated the group, and I'm going to personally plug the San Diego Chapter has picked up again. And we're meeting next Friday down in Del Mar. And we're going to be meeting on the last Friday of every month through October. So, I'm super excited to be a part of the group. And Joe, yeah, I'm curious about your perspective. As a CTO with thoughtbot, just what are your thoughts about that kind of thing? KENDALL: Yeah. How right am I about how lonely you are, Joe? JOE: [laughs] You know, I've been lonelier since we went remote. I used to work in the office, and I was a CTO, but also, I had lunch with people, which was nice. So, I'm lonelier. But yeah, I think everybody needs a group like that, like, senior developer therapy just to talk about your woes together, drown your sorrows. KENDALL: Well, I think years ago, I heard that CTOs are the most fired C-level executive. JOE: You're making me nervous now. KENDALL: [laughs] You've been there a long time, Joe. I know you've been there a long time. If you haven't been fired yet, you probably got a little while longer in you. This will be really awkward if it's published and you've already been fired. VICTORIA: We can always edit that out afterwards. [laughter] KENDALL: Yeah, no, I think it is a particularly lonely position. And, again, I think a lot of it is the average engineer in a technical company doesn't look at the COO or the CFO or even the CEO and think I could do that. But they're all looking at the CTO and thinking, what does that person do that I can't do? It's ridiculous because most of them would make terrible CTOs because it does require some of the business sense. Or, you know, right out of the gate, they might make terrible CTOs. It actually is quite a skill to be the most technical person and speak the business language. I mean, am I right about that, Joe? Like, was that hard for you to learn? JOE: Yeah, I definitely think...so, my background is also technical. I have a background in consulting. So, I always did a lot of metaprogramming, if you will. But making that transition to thinking about organizations that way, thinking about how all the other pieces play into it, was a pretty big step for me, even before I became a CTO as a consultant. KENDALL: Well, because you can't just chase the newest, hottest technology. You have to make business trade-offs. And not everything can be resume-driven development, right? Even if that technology over there is newer or hotter, it doesn't mean you have a business model that supports it. And it doesn't mean that migrating to it can be done, right? JOE: Yeah. I mean, even beyond choosing technologies, just choosing where to invest in your software stack, like, what needs to be reworked, what doesn't, and trying to explain those trade-offs, I think, is a rare skill. Being able to explain why something would be harder than something else when you're working with the leadership to prioritize a backlog it's a puzzle. KENDALL: Well, and I think when I'm in an executive conversation, and the CTO says, "Here's the thing that I think is the best decision technically, and I think it's the wrong decision for the business because of X, Y, or Z," I'm always super impressed, right? Like, this is the right technical solution for what we want. However, we shouldn't pursue that for business reasons right now. Maybe we can in six months, but right now, we need to prioritize this other thing. I don't know, that's always when I feel like, oh, this person knows what they're doing. JOE: There's nothing more dangerous to software than a bored developer. [laughs] One nice thing about being a consultant is that I don't have to invent problems to solve with technology at my company because sooner or later, I'll run across a company that has those problems, and I'll get to use that technology. But I think a lot of people are mostly happy...they might be happy in their role. They might be happy with our team. But they're very interested in whatever is hot right now, like machine learning, AI. And so, suddenly, that surreptitiously makes its way into the tech stack. And then, years later, it's somebody's problem to maintain. KENDALL: [laughs] Well, I have a specific memory of a firm in New York City that was, you know, this is relevant to y'all as thoughtbot is that, you know, at least historically, it was, to me, the premier Ruby on Rails consulting shop. I think that's still largely y'alls focus. Am I right about that? JOE: We still do a ton of Rails, yeah. KENDALL: Okay. Well, so this organization was all Ruby on Rails. It was a big organization. They had a very large customer base. And they hired a new CTO who came in, told everybody in the company they were stupid, laid off 70% of the engineering organization, and told the CEO he was going to completely rewrite the product from scratch in .NET, and he could do it in three weeks. And I'm pretty sure the business went under about three months later [laughs] because that was just so outrageously nuts to me. JOE: It's too bad he laid everybody off beforehand. I've been in that situation where somebody tells me, "I'm going to rewrite this. It'll be ready in three weeks." And I could fight with them and try and convince them they're wrong. But I feel like somebody who's approaching that with that attitude they're missing all of the nuance and context that would make it possible to explain to them why it's not going to work. And so, it's easier to just say, "You know, take the three weeks. I'll talk to you in three weeks." But if you've already laid off your development team, that's hard [laughs] to recover from. KENDALL: That's exactly right. VICTORIA: There's got to be a name for that kind of CTO who just wants to come in and blow everything up [laughs]. Yeah, so you spend a lot of time talking to different CTOs and doing this social networking aspect. I'm wondering if there's, like, patterns that you see. You've mentioned already one about just, like, the most often getting fired. [laughs] But what are the patterns you see, like, in challenges, and then what makes someone successful in that CTO role? KENDALL: Well, oh gosh, I have so many thoughts about this. First of all, I run into a couple of different categories of CTOs. There's a lot of people who come to CTO Lunches who are small company CTOs. I mean, it makes sense that there's a lot more small company CTOs than there are big company CTOs. But the small company CTO who maybe it's their first gig in the role or they're a serial CTO. There's the fractional CTOs that come that are doing it across several different organizations at the same time, and then there's the big company CTO who shows up. And honestly, all of their problems are very different. The thing that they have in common is even at a very large organization, in that position, they can make a decision that causes the company to go under. So, there is a significant amount of volatility in the amount of power that they wield. So, what's interesting about that is not everybody understands that. And so, first of all, there's the kind of CTO that just doesn't get that, and that doesn't matter if they're fractional, or a small company CTO, or a big company CTO. If they don't understand that, they're going to cause significant problems, right? Like the person I just mentioned who said, "I can just re-platform this in three weeks in .NET." There's that. I mean, I think, as with any senior leadership position, the comfort with volatility, the ability to know what to communicate down versus across and versus up, and then the ability to speak the business language. For everybody, the CFO's job is to communicate the financial needs alongside of the business leads, right? If the CFO's sole goal is to cut costs or make sure we're running as lean as possible, they're a bad CFO. But they're not as good of a CFO as the CFO who can say, "Hey, we're underspending right here. And I can look at the numbers and know we should invest more there. How can we invest more there and invest it well?" And it's the same thing for a technology executive to be able to look at the business context and communicate it back. And there are so many CTOs that I've worked with who they're the most technical person in the room, and they know it. And as a result, they're just a jerk to everyone around them, like, everything you did here was wrong. You know, that's where they fail. And so, if they can communicate the business needs, navigate the volatility, and support a team that's going to make decisions that aren't always the same decision they're going to make, they're going to be successful. Honestly, there's very, very few CTOs that I've met like that. People who are excited to meet you at work, excited to see you succeed, excited to see that you went and built a thing is great. I mean, the reason I was VP of engineering is the CTO that I was working with at the time...it's a terrible story. There was an engineer who had seen something that we were doing on repeat all the time and, in his spare time, spent about 40 hours outside of work, not during work hours, automating this task that we were doing regularly. And it was related to standing up a whole bunch of things in our standard infrastructure. He brings it to the CTO and says, "Look what I built." And the CTO, instead of saying, "Hey, this is incredible. Thank you. This is going to save us a bunch of time. Let's iterate on it. Here's some things I'd like to tweak. Can we bring it in this direction? Can we..." you know, whatever, said, "Why is this in Python? It should be in Ansible," something like that. I can't remember. And the engineer literally burst into tears. [laughs] JOE: Oh my God. KENDALL: [laughs] Well, I mean, yeah, it was like; literally, that's why the CTO stopped managing people that day. There's a lot of examples that I have like that. Joe, I appreciate that your response is, "Oh my God." Because I think there's a lot of people who'd be like, wait, what was wrong with that? Shouldn't it have been in Ansible? JOE: [laughs] Yeah, I've seen CTOs come into primarily two groups. One is the CTO who just tells, you know, like, they make the decisions, and they tell everybody what to do. They obviously don't have all of the information because you can't be in every room all the time. And the other is the CTO, who just wants to be one of the team members and doesn't make any decisions and tries to get people to make decisions collectively on their own without any particular guidance or structure. And finding that middle spot of, like, not just saying, "Hey, everything's in Ansible," allowing for the creativity and initiative, but also coalescing the group into a single direction, I think, is what makes a good CTO. KENDALL: Well, yeah, because the CTO does have to say no, sometimes, right? Like, the best product, people say, "No." Good CTOs say, "No." There is some amount of, hey, I need you to come to me with trade-offs about this. Why are you going to make that decision? And I'm sorry, you still didn't convince me, right? Like, I mean, those are appropriate things to say. But yeah, I'm with you on that. You said they fall into two categories. But you really mean the third and that middle ground. Is it easy for you to walk that middle ground, Joe? JOE: I wouldn't say it's easy. [laughs] KENDALL: Yeah. Well, I'm always nervous to say something. I'm doing well because I know there's a report out there that can point at every time I failed at it, right? So... MID-ROLL AD: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you're tight on time and investment, which is why we've created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product's next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at: tbot.io/entrepreneurs. VICTORIA: Yeah, what I'm getting from what you're saying, too, is this communication ability and not just, like, to communicate clearly but with a high level of empathy. So, if you say like, "Well, why is it in Python and not Ansible?" is different than being like, "What makes Python the best solution here?" Like, it's a different way to frame the question that could put someone on the defensive that just really requires, like, a high level of emotional intelligence. And also, if they've just worked, like, an 80-hour week, [laughs] I probably would maybe choose a different time to bring those questions up and notice that they have been burning the candle at both ends and prioritize getting them some rest. So, speaking of, like, communication and getting prioritization for [inaudible 15:34], especially on, like, infrastructure teams, maybe we could talk a little bit about Kubernetes, like, when that comes up as an appropriate solution, and how you talk about it with the business. KENDALL: My background with Kubernetes is long because a company that I still work with, Fairwinds, used to be called ReactiveOps, has been in the Kubernetes space for a very long time. I think we were one of the very first companies working with Kubernetes. It was coming up that people were running into the limits of something like Heroku, right? And I think it's Kelsey Hightower who said every company wants a PaaS. They just want the Paas that they built themselves. And that's really accurate. And I think Kubernetes isn't quite a framework for building your own PaaS or isn't quite a foundation where I think of a foundation for a house. Instead, it's more like rebar and cement and somebody saying, "Good luck, buddy." You know, you still have to know how to put the rebar and cement together to even make the foundation, but it is the building blocks that help get you to a custom-built PaaS. And it's become something that a lot of people have landed on as, you know, the broadly accepted way to build cloud-native infrastructure. The reason I've been in the Kubernetes space and the space that I see Kubernetes still filling is we need to standardize on something. We can choose a cloud provider's PaaS. We can choose a third-party PaaS, or we can standardize on something like Kubernetes. And even though we're not going to migrate from AWS to Azure, the flexibility that Kubernetes gives us as a broadly adopted pattern is going to give us some ability to be future-proofed in our infrastructure in a way that previous stacks were not, you know, it was Puppet, and it was Ansible. And it was SaltStack. And it was all Terraform all the time. I'm not saying those things don't exist anymore. I'm saying Kubernetes kind of has won that battle. Joe, since you're here and I know y'all are doing some Kubernetes work now at thoughtbot, I'm curious if you agree with that characterization. JOE: Yeah, I think that's true. I think it's the center for people to coalesce around. Like, for an effort in the industry to move forward, there needs to be some common language, some common ground. And I think Kubernetes struck the right balance of being abstract. So, you can use it in different environments but still making some decisions, so you don't have to make them all. And so, like, all of the things you had to do with containers like figuring out what your data solution is going to be, what your networking solution is going to be, Kubernetes didn't even really make those decisions. [laughs] They just made a platform where those decisions can be made in a common way. And that allowed the community and the ecosystem to grow. KENDALL: I mean, I think of it a lot like WordPress; you know, WordPress is hated by many. When WordPress came out, it was hot, right? And it was PHP, which everybody was super excited about at the time. Kubernetes is going to reach a point where it's as long in the tooth and terrible as people think WordPress is, but it has become the standard. And the advantage of the standard is you can use the not standard. You can go build a website in Jekyll instead of WordPress, and there's going to be some things that are nicer about Jekyll. But because WordPress is so broadly adopted, there's a plugin for everything. And I think that's where Kubernetes sits is because it's become so widely adopted everybody's building for it. Everybody's adapting for it. If you run into a problem, you're going to find somebody else out there who has that problem. In fact, I think of one organization that I know that was on HashiCorp's Nomad. And they said, "Actually, we think Nomad has better technology through and through. But we think we're the only company at this size and scale using Nomad. And so, when we run into a problem, we can't Google for it. There's no such thing as a plugin that exists to solve this. Nobody has ever run into this before on Nomad. But there's 100 companies dealing with the same problem in Kubernetes, and there's ten solutions." And I think that's the power that it brings. VICTORIA: So, it's not just a trend that CTOs are moving towards, you think. KENDALL: I mean, I think it's already won the battle and the hockey stick of adoption. We're still right at the very bottom of that tick-up because it takes people a long time to adapt new technology like this, especially in their infrastructure. It's a big migration, to move. So, I don't think it's the widely adopted infrastructure technology even yet. I think a lot of the biggest organizations are still running on things that predate Kubernetes. But I think it has won the battle, and it is winning the battle and is going to be the thing going forward, so yeah. JOE: I think it also has a lot of room to grow still. Like, there are other technologies that I used previously, like Docker, and they were a big step up from some of the things I was doing at the time. But you quickly hit the ceiling, or it was, like, I don't know where to go with this next. I don't know what else is going to happen. Whereas with Kubernetes, there are so many directions it can go in. Like, the serverless Kubernetes offerings that are starting to pop up are extremely interesting, where, you know, you don't actually maintain a cluster or anything. You just deploy things to this ethereal cluster that always exists. And so, that sort of combination of platform as a service, function as a service, Kubernetes, as that evolves, I think there are a lot of exciting things that have yet to come in the Kubernetes space. KENDALL: Well, so say more about that, Joe, because I've been going to KubeCon for a very long time, maybe...I don't know if it's 2016 or so when I first went. And it felt for a number of years...maybe those first four-ish years it was always the people at KubeCon were the, like, big dreamers and thinkers and, like, we're here to change the future of cloud infrastructure. And this is going places, and we're excited to be here and be a part of it. And here's what I'm going to do that changes the next thing. And I feel like now if I go to KubeCon, it's a lot of people from, you know, IBM and some big bank that are, like, deep sigh, well, I have to adopt Kubernetes. I need to know what the vendors are. What do you guys do, and how does this work? Can you please teach it to me? Because I'm being told by my boss, I have to do it. I don't see that excitement around Kubernetes anymore. The excitement I see is all around further up the stack, you know, things like Wasm, WebAssembly, or eBPF, the networking things and tracing things that are possible. Maybe that's further down the stack. I guess it depends on how you think about it, but different part of the stack. So, I'm curious, touching on the serverless components of Kubernetes; sure, I get that. And I do think, increasingly, the PaaSs of the future are all going to be Kubernetes-based, whether that's exposed or not. But where are the places that you think it's still going to go? Because I feel like it's already gotten boring, maybe in a positive way. But I don't see the excitement around it like I saw a few years back. And I'm curious what else you think is going to happen. JOE: Yeah, I mean, I don't think I disagree. I think Kubernetes itself, the core concept, is, like, it's still changing. But you're right that the excitement about Kubernetes existing has gone down because it's been there for a while. But I feel like the ecosystem is still growing pretty rapidly. Like, the things you mentioned, like Wasm and Istio, and all the tools in that ecosystem that continue to grow, is where I think the interesting things will happen. Like, it's created this new lower-level layer of abstraction that makes it possible to build concepts and technology that could not have existed before. KENDALL: Yeah, well, and I'm, you know, talking to people who are working really hard at making short-run ephemeral workloads work better on things like GPUs for the sake of AI, right? Like, I mean, there is some really interesting things happening, and people are doing this in Kubernetes. So, I get that. I agree with that. It is interesting that Kubernetes has become sort of the stable thing, and now it's about who can build the interesting add-ons. It's almost like, okay, we've built Half-Life. What is Counter-Strike going to look like? You know. That's a terrible (I'm aging myself.) example. But still. VICTORIA: I think it's interesting, I mean, to look at the size of the market for platform engineering right now. In 2022, was 4.8 billion, and it's estimated to be in 10 years $41 billion. So, there is this emerging trend of different platform engineering products, different abstractions on top of Kubernetes. And I wonder what advice you would have for a technical founder who's looking to build and solve some of these interesting issues in Kubernetes and create a business around it. KENDALL: Well, okay, let me clarify that question. Are you thinking, I'm a startup, and I need to build my infrastructure, and I'm going to choose Kubernetes. What advice do I need? Or are you thinking, I am founder, and I want to go build on the Kubernetes ecosystem. What advice do you have? VICTORIA: Now I want to know the answer to both. But my question was the second one to start. KENDALL: One of the things that is hard about the Kubernetes ecosystem is there's not a ton of companies that have made a whole bunch of money in Kubernetes because, as I said, I still think we're actually really early in the adoption curve. The kinds of companies that have adopted Kubernetes are the kinds of companies that don't spend lots and lots of money on an infrastructure. [laughs] They're the kinds of companies that are fast-moving, early adopters, or, you know, those first followers, and so they're under $100 million companies for the most part. Where the JP Morgans and Chase are running Kubernetes somewhere in their stack, but they haven't adopted it across the stack to need the biggest, best tools about it. So, the first piece of advice that I'd give is, be a little wary. It's still very early to the market. Maybe now is the time to build the thing. When ReactiveOps pivoted to Kubernetes, I think it was six months of having conversations with companies who were just, like, so excited about it, and this is definitely what we want to do. But nobody was doing it yet. You know, it was, we have, like, six solid months of just excitement and nobody actually pulling the trigger. And, you know, we were a little too early to that market. And that was just the people adopting it. So, I think there is some nervousness that cloud-native solutions the only people who are really making money in Kubernetes are named Amazon, Google, and Microsoft because it's the cloud providers that are making a ton off of it. Now, there's Rancher. There is StackPointCloud. There's a few others that have had big exits in this space. But I don't think it's actually as big of a booming economy as a lot of people think, in part because EKS is an incredibly amazing product. Like, eight years ago, the thing people paid us the most to do at ReactiveOps was just stand up Kubernetes because it was so stinking hard to just get it up and working. And now you click some buttons. Anybody can go do that. So, it's changed a lot, right? And I think be wary when you're entering that ecosystem. And then, my advice to the founder that's not building on the ecosystem but just looking to adopt a technology that's going to be a future-proofed infrastructure is just adopt one of the cloud-native platforms. And there are a whole bunch of sort of default best-in-class add-ons out there that you need to throw in. Don't adopt too many because then you have to maintain them forever. That's the easiest way to get started. You can figure out all the rest of it later. But if you go use EKS, or GKE, AKS, you can get started pretty easily and build something that is going to be future-proofed. I don't know, Joe; I'm curious if you disagree with any of that. JOE: Well, I think it's interesting to think about who's making money in Kubernetes. Like, I think there might not be as many companies who are doing only Kubernetes and Kubernetes-focused products that are massively successful. But I think because it has had a good amount of adoption and because it's easier to work with something that's standardized, it has helped companies sell things that they wanted to sell anyway. Like, all the Datadog, all the Scalas, the logging companies, they all have Kubernetes add-ons. And now everybody is paying Datadog [laughs] to have a dashboard for their Kubernetes cluster. I think they're making more money than they would have been without targeting the market. And so, I think that's really...if you want to get into the market, it's not, like, I'm going to build a Kubernetes product. It's if I'm building operations and an infrastructure product, I should definitely have it work with Kubernetes, and people will want to click and install it. KENDALL: So, to be clear, you know, one of the companies that I work with is called Axiom, and they play in the same, you know, monitoring, observability space as Datadog does. And part of what makes Kubernetes interesting in that space is in a microservice environment; there's so much happening. Where are problems being caused? We don't live in a day where I can just run my code, and it tells me that there's an unexpected semicolon on line 23, right? Like, that still happens. You're still doing those things. But this microservice talking to that microservice is where things tend to break down. Did I communicate this correctly? What was sent? What was received? Where did it break down? What was the latency? And if you were doing things in the old way back when you were standing it up with, say, Ansible, or Puppet, or something like that, and you were orchestrating all of these cloud virtual machines, you had to really work hard to instrument the tracing and logging and everything involved in order to track what was going on. Whereas that's one of the magic things about Kubernetes is with a few of the add-ons or some of the things out of the box with Kubernetes, it's a couple of clicks to get so, so much of the data and have insight into where things are going and what's going wrong. And so, I 100% agree with that. Kubernetes is generating a tremendous amount of data. And if you're a data company, it's really nice to have all that come in, and it helps them make money, helps the user of Kubernetes in that situation understand where problems are happening and breaking down. Yeah, there's definitely some network effects of what Kubernetes is doing in that. I completely agree. JOE: I think there are also some interesting companies, like, where they make...Emissary, Ambassador, and they have that sort of dual -- KENDALL: Komodor, is that -- JOE: Yeah, maybe. They have open source, but then they have a product. KENDALL: You're thinking of Ambassador Labs. JOE: Yeah. Ambassador Labs, yeah. I guess I don't really know how much money they're making. But I think that's a really interesting concept as people who make open-source things then make a well-supported product built around it. KENDALL: Sure. What's interesting is, I think in the VC world, at least right now, and it may pick up again, but post-Silicon Valley Bank nearly caving in, I think that the VC tolerance for, yeah, just go get a billion open-source adopters, and we'll figure out how to monetize later I think that the tolerance for that is a lot lower than it was even six months ago. JOE: Yeah, I think you have to have a dual model right from the beginning now. KENDALL: Yeah. Agreed. VICTORIA: You got to figure out how to make money on Kubernetes before you can. [laughs] KENDALL: You know, minor detail. That's why I think services companies in this space still have a lot going for it. Because in order to even be able to sell software to a company using Kubernetes, you half the time have to go stand up Kubernetes for them because it is still that hard for so many people to really adopt it. VICTORIA: Yeah. And maybe, like, talking more about, like, when it is the right decision to start on Kubernetes because I think the question I get sometimes is just, is it overkill? Is it too much for what we're building? Especially, like, if you're building a brand-new product, you're not even sure if it's going to get adopted that widely. KENDALL: I mean, and I'm [laughs] curious your thought on this, Joe, but there's a good argument to be made that Heroku was enough for the vast majority of founders early on. But the thing is, Kubernetes isn't as hard as it used to be. Going and clicking a couple of buttons on GKE and deploying something into Kubernetes with GKE Autopilot running it's not as easy as Heroku, but it's not wildly far off. And it does substantially future-proof you. So, when is it too early? I'm not sure it's ever too early if you have an intention of scaling if you're planning on running some kind of legacy workload, like, things that are going to be stateful. Or maybe WordPress, for example, you don't probably need to deploy your WordPress blog onto Kubernetes. You can do that in your cPanel on Bluehost. I don't actually know if Bluehost even exists anymore, but I assume it's still a thing. I don't know, what would you say, Joe? JOE: I agree with that. I think it's a hard first pill to swallow. But I think the reality is that it's very easy to underestimate the infrastructure needs of even an early product. Like, it doesn't really matter what you're building. You're still going to have things like secrets management. You're still going to have to worry about networking. They just don't go away. There's no way you have a product without them. And so, rather than slowly solving all those problems from scratch on a platform that isn't designed for it, I think it's easier to just bite the bullet and use one of the managed solutions, especially, as you said, I think it's getting easier and easier. The activation energy from going from credit card to Kubernetes cluster is just getting lower. KENDALL: And so, the role of the CTO is just getting easier and easier because they can just adopt the one technology, and it's obviously Kubernetes. And it's obviously Rust, right? [laughter] Yeah, no, I'm with you. And I think if you find somebody who knows Kubernetes inside and out, it's really not going to take them long to get started. VICTORIA: Yeah, once again, change management is the biggest challenge for any new innovation coming into adoption. So, I'm curious to talk more about the influence that you need and how you influence others to come around to these types of ideas, like, in the executive suite and with the leadership of a company, especially on these types of topics, which can feel maybe a little abstract for people. KENDALL: How you influence them specifically to use Kubernetes, or just how you talk with them about technology adoption in general? Or what are you asking? VICTORIA: Yeah, like, how do I get people to not just turn their ears off when I say the word Kubernetes? [laughs] KENDALL: Yeah, I mean, I think...so I think that's where it's the technologist's job and the role of the CTO to translate these things into business speak. And that's why I'm using words like future-proofing your infrastructure is because there are companies that...I know one company that made a conscious decision that they were going to try to re-platform every single year, and that is not a good idea or sustainable for the vast majority [laughs] of companies. In fact, I can't think of a single situation where that makes sense. But if you can say to the CFO, "Hey, it's going to cost us a little bit more right now. It's going to save us substantially in the long term because this is the thing that's winning. And if we go standardize on Heroku right now, every company does eventually have to migrate off of Heroku. They either go out of business, or they get too big for it." That's the kind of thing that needs to be communicated in order to get people to adopt it. They don't care what the word is. They don't care if you're saying Kubernetes; you know, most CFOs understand it about as well as my mom does. My mom tries to bring it up in conversation because she's heard me use it. And she thinks it makes her sound smart, which maybe it does in the right climate. VICTORIA: My partner does the same thing. He says DevOps and Kubernetes all the time. I'm like; you don't know what you're talking about. [laughter] JOE: Those words do not come up in my house. KENDALL: One of my kids asked me to explain Kubernetes. And I do a whole talk, particularly at organizations where understanding Kubernetes is essential to the salespeople's role. And I give a whole talk about the background of how we got here from deploying on some servers in our back room. And, you know, what's different about the cloud, what containerization did, et cetera. And I have this long explanation. And I remember taking a deep breath and saying to my kids, "Do you really want to hear this?" And I had one son say, "Yes, absolutely." And my wife and three of the other kids all stood up and said, "No way," and left the room. So, when somebody asks me, "What do you do?" Actually, one of the key relationships I built with some of the early people at GCP when we were partnering closely with them was a person that I met, and I asked, "What do you do for a living?" And he said, "I can tell you, but it's not going to mean anything to you." And I was like, "That's what I say to people." And it turned out he was in charge of, you know, Kubernetes partnerships for Google. I can explain to you what it means and why it's important. But you're not going to be happy that I spent that time explaining it to you. VICTORIA: [laughs] That sounds awesome, though. It sounds like you built a server rack just to demo to your children what it was. KENDALL: No, no. I just talked back through the history of...that company that I mentioned that built Twitter about five years too early; we had a, you know, we had a server rack in the...literally physically in our closet that was serving up our product at the time. VICTORIA: Probably the best demo I ever saw was at Google headquarters in Herndon, and someone had built...They had 3D-printed a little mini server rack that they had put Raspberry Pis onto, and then they had Kubernetes deployed on it. And they did an automatic failover of a node to just demo how it works and had little lights that went with it. It was pretty fun. So maybe you should get one for yourself. [laughter] It's a fun project. KENDALL: They remember the things that it enables. They don't remember what it does. And so, when I say so, and so is a client that's using this technology, then they get real excited because they're like, "My dad makes that work." And I'm like, well, okay, that's kind of a stretch, but you get the idea. VICTORIA: Yeah, you got to lean into that kind of reputation in your house. KENDALL: That's right. VICTORIA: And you're like, yes, that's correct. KENDALL: That's right. [laughs] VICTORIA: I do make Kubernetes. I make all the clouds work, yeah. KENDALL: Actually, my most common explanation is Kubernetes is the plumbing of the internet. Unless you're a plumber, you don't care about the pipes. You just want your shit to flush when you use the toilet. You want the things to load when you click your buttons. You don't actually care what's going on behind the scenes, but this is what's orchestrating it increasingly across the internet. VICTORIA: So far, we've called Kubernetes WordPress or the toilet. [laughs] KENDALL: The plumbing. [laughter] VICTORIA: You are really good at selling it. [laughter] KENDALL: Hey, if you want to build a nice, clean city, you need good plumbing. You might not care what the pipes are made of, but you need good plumbing. [laughs] VICTORIA: Works for me. On that note -- [laughs] KENDALL: Yeah. Right? Right? VICTORIA: That's [inaudible 36:41] on a high note. Is there anything else that you'd like to promote? KENDALL: With regards to CTO Lunches, we have a free listserv. There are local lunches. If there isn't a local lunch where you are, it's very lightweight to start up a chapter. We often have folks who are willing to sponsor that first lunch to get you going. We do have a paid tier of CTO Lunches. If you want a small back room Slack channel of people to discuss, I think it's $99 a month. Yeah, if you're a CTO and/or a senior engineering leader and you want a community of people to process with, be it our free tier or our paid tier, we've got something for you. We're trying to invest in this to build community around it. And it's something we enjoy doing more than almost anything. Come take part. VICTORIA: You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Kendall Miller.

The Hunter Biden Fallout, Jeff Clark on Durham's Testimony, Disney's Latest Flop, America's Income Struggles, Bud Light Sales Continue to Drop, & More

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 22, 2023 45:28

Tonight's rundown: Talking Points Memo: Bill breaks down what is going on in the aftermath of Hunter Biden's plea bargain and what it means for the country. Former special counsel John Durham testifies on Capitol Hill. Former assistant U.S. attorney under former President Trump, Jeff Clark, joins the No Spin News to discuss Durham, his testimony, his report, and William Barr. America's income struggles. Bud Light continues to tank. This Day in History: Trump's Iran strike admission. Final Thought: Plan for today. In Case You Missed It: Read Bill's latest column, "Handicapping Don and Joe" It's the 'Summer Reading Special!' 'Killing the Killers,' Killing the Legends,' and 'Killing Crazy Horse' all for $32.95. We'll also give you a FREE 'Team Normal' hat. 'Team Normal!' gear is 15% for a limited time. Go to BillOReilly.com now and order! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hunter Biden's Plea Deal, President Biden's Controversial Campaigning, Trump's Fox News Interview, Mike Howell on the Lawsuit Against Alvin Bragg, & Colin Kaepernick a Communist

Bill Oâ€™Reillyâ€™s No Spin News and Analysis

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 21, 2023 45:21

Hey BillOReilly.com Premium and Concierge Members, welcome to the No Spin News for Tuesday, June 20, 2023. Stand Up for Your Country. Tonight's rundown: Talking Points Memo: Bill analyzes the announced Hunter Biden plea deal and its polarizing results. President Biden heads to California for a speech, but is it really just an excuse to campaign? Donald Trump is interviewed on Fox News The Heritage Foundation's Mike Howell joins the No Spin News to discuss the lawsuits facing Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg Colin Kaepernick reveals he's a communist This Day in History: 'Jaws' debuts Final Thought: The most patriotic state In Case You Missed It: Read Bill's latest column, "Handicapping Don and Joe" It's the 'Summer Reading Special!' 'Killing the Killers,' Killing the Legends,' and 'Killing Crazy Horse' all for $32.95. We'll also give you a FREE 'Team Normal' hat. 'Team Normal!' gear is 15% for a limited time. Go to BillOReilly.com now and order! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

257: Spirituality, Faith and Creating Deeper Meaning In Your Life and Work

Finding Brave

Play Episode Listen Later May 18, 2023 59:57

Humans are spiritual beings but unfortunately, because we are so influenced by external factors, many of us have become disconnected from our spiritual selves. This results in people making life and career choices that do not align with their core values or purpose, which is causing a great deal of suffering. Today's inspiring guest, Joseph Holt, is on a mission to help people make work (and life) decisions that allow them to live their lives in a way that is true to their core values, ideals and beliefs. Joe has held an amazingly diverse range of jobs throughout the course of his life, from gym teacher to Jesuit priest to stock broker to corporate attorney, to today where he is living out his calling as a professor at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business teaching spirituality, ethics, gender equity, and negotiations courses. In this episode, Joe delves into the 7 Recommended Practices for Being Your Spiritual Best Self at Work that he has developed, which include: Set yourself up for spiritual success Determine whether you need to see your current work differently or do different work Be alert for opportunities to be your spiritual best self Choose your work (and life) friends wisely Be as committed to your spiritual well-being as you are to your physical well-being Monitor your spiritual progress (or regress!) with special attention to impact Listen most of all to the quiet inner voice that guides you at your best. Joe shares that “Morality is the public face of your spirituality,” so tune in today to hear how you can strengthen the link between these two vitally important facets of your life and take new, enlivening steps to find long-lasting meaning and fulfillment in your work. Key Highlights From This Episode: • Introducing Joseph (Joe) Holt, former Jesuit priest and current professor at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business. [02:36] • The most common regret that people have at the end of their lives and how you can avoid being one of those people. [05:33] • Questions to ask yourself to set yourself up for spiritual success in the workplace. [15:12] • The value of learning to be at peace with not knowing exactly what you want to do with your life. [18:42] • Examples of how you can change your approach to your work to make it more meaningful to you. [21:18] • How your workplace can provide you with opportunities to be the best version of yourself. [24:45] • Why the people you surround yourself with are an influential part of your personal spiritual journey. [28:43] • The transformative power of incorporating spiritual practices (however this speaks to you) into your daily life. [36:25] • An exercise to strengthen the link between your morality (the way you conduct yourself in the world) and your spirituality (your belief system). [40:29] • How to connect with your inner voice. [48:33] For More Information: Joseph Holt on LinkedIn Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: Bronnie Ware's book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying The German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke William Deresiewicz's essay, Solitude and Leadership Resources from Joe It's not too late to take your professional life and leadership to the next level FAST! JOIN “THE MOST POWERFUL YOU” 8-WEEK COACHING AND TRAINING COURSE WITH KATHY! I'm thrilled to be offering a new Spring session of my 8-week coaching and training course The Most Powerful You which started May 10th (but we're happy to have you join us this week!)! In 8 powerhouse weeks together, I'll train all about the content of my book The Most Powerful You helping professional women address what I've seen are the 7 most damaging power and confidence gaps that block women from achieving their most exciting goals, and happiest highest potential and success. This includes imposter syndrome that impacts 75% of executive women today. The course offers: • 8 Weekly Zoom Coaching calls with me • 8 Video Training Modules • A Step-by-by process for boosting your Career, Confidence and Impact • Fantastic Additional Resources from over 30 of the nation's top experts • A Private Online Support Group for Members • And more Spots are very limited so sign up now at mostpowerfulyou.com. Register now and join us! I've delivered aspects of this training to over 50 organizations worldwide (including at a division of the United Nations) and participants have called it transformative and life-changing. I'm confident this course will move you forward fast. Hope to see you there! ———————- Calling all coaches! Do you run a coaching business that focuses on supporting professional women? If so, I've got some news. Right now, we've opened the enrollment window of my coach training program called The Amazing Career Coach Certification, which is a 17-week, hands-on training program that certifies female coaches in my proprietary 16-step career growth model, which is perfect for coaches who want a deeper dive into powerful, proven coaching frameworks, concepts, and skills that will help you become far more effective in working with women. And through the program, you'll get access to a powerful Small Business Acceleration program called The Rapid Growth Academy, delivered by my friend and colleague, award-winning business growth expert Matthew Pollard. Through Matthew's program, you'll be taught essential business and sales growth info that will help you grow your business success in the quickest way possible. In my view, there's nothing on the market like for coaches because it targets the two critical aspects of success: How to effectively support clients – who are mid- to high-level professional women – to rise, thrive and leverage their amazing talents and experience, and just as importantly, how to grow your own business to the next level. For more information, visit certification.amazingcareerproject.com and check out the details. Hope to work with you this Spring! ——————— Order Kathy's book The Most Powerful You today! In Australia and New Zealand, click here to order, elsewhere outside North America, click here, and in the UK, click here. If you enjoy the book, we'd so appreciate your giving the book a positive rating and review on Amazon! And check out Kathy's digital companion course The Most Powerful You, to help you close the 7 most damaging power gaps in the most effective way possible. Kathy's Power Gaps Survey, Support To Build Your LinkedIn Profile To Great Success & Other Free Resources Kathy's TEDx Talk, Time To Brave Up & Free Career Path Self-Assessment Kathy's Amazing Career Project video training course & 6 Dominant Action Styles Quiz ——————— Sponsor Highlight I'm thrilled that both Audible.com and Amazon Music are sponsors of Finding Brave! Take advantage of their great special offers and free trials today! Audible Offer Amazon Music Offer Quotes: “A lot of us are unduly influenced by outside messages, many of which are not helpful.” — Joe Holt [0:12:40] “When it comes to choosing work, am I choosing the work that is going to most engage and fulfill me or the work that is going most to impress others? Am I choosing the work that is going to be richest in meaning for me or the work that is going to pay the most?” — Joe Holt [0:16:31] “The German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, wrote a collection of letters to a young poet he was mentoring — and his advice was, ‘Be patient toward everything unresolved in your heart and learn to love the questions themselves.'” — Joe Holt [0:19:21] “Questions are your friend, questions are an ally. They're going to lead you to the place where you need to be.” — Joe Holt [0:20:02] “The best friends we have in life encourage us to be our best selves.” — Joe Holt [0:28:43] “When it comes to choosing what work you do or what friendships you're in, have you planted yourself in a garden in which you can blossom to full growth?” — Joe Holt [0:32:17] Watch our Finding Brave episodes on YouTube! Don't forget – you can experience each Finding Brave episode in both audio and video formats! Check out new and recent episodes on my YouTube channel at YouTube.com/kathycaprino. And please leave us a comment and a thumbs up if you like the show!

Joe Dulac '90 & Ely Bueno '98

Mission-Driven

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 10, 2023 51:03

This episode features a conversation between Joe Dulac from the class of 1990 and Ely Bueno from the class of 1998. Joe and Ely first met because they went through the New Hampshire Dartmouth Family Medicine Residency Program at Concord Hospital. They have stayed in touch since then, but reconnected in a meaningful way during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their conversation showcases how the mission of Holy Cross and the lessons learned during their time on the Hill helped to support them in living a life of meaning and purpose in service of others. Interview originally recorded in May 2022. --- Joe: We were going to just stay home during a pandemic or we were going to step up and figure out... Honestly, the choice was close down the practice and maybe we'll open up in a few months or we're going to figure out a way to reopen and serve our patients. Maura Sweeney: Welcome to Mission-Driven, where we speak with alumni who are leveraging their Holy Cross education to make a meaningful difference in the world around them. I'm your host, Maura Sweeney, from the class of 2007, Director of Alumni Career Development at Holy Cross. I'm delighted to welcome you to today's show. This episode features a conversation between Joe Dulac from the class of 1990 and Ely Bueno from the class of 1998. Joe and Ely first met because they went through the New Hampshire Dartmouth Family Medicine Residency Program at Concord Hospital. They have stayed in touch since then, but reconnected in a meaningful way during the COVID-19 pandemic. This conversation offered Ely a chance to ask Joe questions to learn more about his professional journey, which included the opportunity to open and build a practice from scratch. It also gave them a chance to reflect on their past, discover shared connections and process everything they went through over the past few years. In particular, they speak about the challenges that doctors faced during the pandemic and how they lifted each other up during difficult times. Their conversation showcases how the mission of Holy Cross and the lessons learned during their time on the Hill helped to support them in living a life of meaning and purpose in service of others. Ely: Joe, thanks so much for agreeing to do this interview in this format. It comes from a place of deep gratitude for your professional contact and your friendship over the several years that we've known each other. And so now we get to dive in. Joe: Great. This is a great opportunity to meet with you and try something new, right? Ely: Yeah, definitely. And now, did you ever go on the spiritual exercises in Holy Cross, Joe? Joe: Right. Did a lot of things at Holy Cross, and so did do the one-week silent retreat in Narragansett, Rhode Island, which... it was very powerful, of course. Ely: Yeah. Joe: Yeah. Quite an experience. Ely: Yeah. So I also attended, and I think as we start invoking that Ignatian spirit of really the deep sense of giving of ourselves for others in contemplation, in meeting God through story, this is really a great opportunity that Maura has for us as alumni to connect and tell our story. So I'm really eager to hear about yours. And so diving right in, tell me about how you got to where you are now from Holy Cross and beyond. Joe: Okay, sure. Certainly, I always talk about paths being not really straight. You think you're going to go on a straight path and then path kind of zigzags. So to get to Holy Cross, so I was Chelmsford High School and was very interested in sciences and was accepted into Holy Cross for chemistry pre-med. And obviously that was challenging and stimulating. And so I went through the process there with all the pre-meds and the basic science and chemistry. And there was a time where there was a choice between being a chem major, going to chem grad school or going to med school. And so there was a time where there was some uncertainty, the path that I might take. So a lot of the professors were very supportive, really of either path. But because I was a chem major, I think they were very supportive of the chemistry track. So I did do research in the summer with Holy Cross and with Dr. Ditzer, and enjoyed that, but still found myself interested in the pre-med track. So I applied and went through all the steps with the MCATs. Did have some struggles in my junior year, so I did have a little bit more of a crooked path after that. So I did a year of grad school. I was going to go into Georgetown, but found that Boston University had a program on medical sciences, and I got accepted from that program and into the med school there. And so my first year was doing a thesis, but I was able to take several medical school courses including gross anatomy and neurosciences and physiology. So that really helped solidify what I wanted to do in the path. And though I had a little bit of struggles in my junior year in grad school and in med school. Well, the first year of grad school, my professors had remarked that I had caught fire academically and kind of on a tear. So the path was kind of a little bit crooked there. But once I settled in at Boston University after Holy Cross, the medical sciences just kind of took over and it's kind of a labor of love, learning and staying up late and being on call and all that. So I was at the Boston Medical Center there in Boston University, which was really interesting time because they were building the new hospital. So halfway through training, they completed the hospital there and then they crushed it down to smithereens. But in one day we basically were in the old hospital and the next day we were in the new hospital. And so that was really great training through the basic sciences at Holy Cross and experiences there. And then I was looking into residencies and as would have it, I had applied to a lot in the New England area for residencies for family medicine. And I had gotten a scholarship in Lowell with the Mass Medical Society and John Janice and his family, one of the doctors in the family was starting the residency in Concord and Lebanon, New Hampshire. And he said, "Hey, I'm going to give you the scholarship, but maybe you should consider our program." And so I applied and matched. And so I ended up in Concord and mostly Concord and Lebanon for family medicine. And it was the very first year of the program, which probably better I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. The program was really good, but as a first kind of run through, what I didn't understand at the time was that though you're a resident, you're basically a faculty member because you're developing all the programs everywhere. Every program, every rotation was the first time they ever had a resident or any kind of training. So that was a different kind of experience as well. Ely: I have some questions about your residency challenges. How much did you do in the bigger hospital in Lebanon? Joe: I did several rotations up in Lebanon, which were great. So I did a lot of pediatrics there with Chad. So that was our big pediatric kind of connection. And then I actually did obstetrics in Augusta, Maine because at the time... I'm not sure if you're trained for OB as well, but they wanted us to be fully trained for OB, which I was. So I did an OB rotation. I made that happen in Augusta, Maine, which was really interesting, delivering babies out. It's the state capital, but it's still kind of rural actually. And then I did also make a OB rotation in Beverly, Mass. And that was very developmental because no one had ever been there before. And then I did sports medicine, I made some sports medicine rotations in Portland, Maine. So those were interesting. And then I did put together a holistic herbal experience with Ascutney mountain and the herbalist. So that was up near the Lebanon area, but for pediatrics, I think I did a few months at Chad. So it was great being up there at that hospital too. Yeah, the Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital is a really fantastic place to train. Ely: Yeah. I am very proud of our family medicine residency program. By the time that I had arrived in Concord, it was exclusively at Concord Hospital, so all rotations were there. And I did high risk OB rotation in Nashua, New Hampshire, and some of the main Dartmouth residents came to our program to do some rotations or came down to Nashua to do some rotations. So that kind of relationship with other hospitals in the area were nice to be able to have established from relationships that you guys forged. So that has always been a nice part about learning in community. Joe: Well, I know we had touched base about that, and I remember having mixed feelings about the training and starting a new program. I remember you mentioning to me one time how you felt that the program was really excellent and that you had gotten really well-trained there. I know the training was definitely good in terms of experiences because even though it's not necessarily big city, Concord is the state capital again of New Hampshire, but still a lot of it's rural, a lot of rural type of problems. At the time, at least, I don't know how it was by the time you got there, but still a lot of patients had hadn't had access to doctors in a long time. So most of the illness that we would see as residents were actually advanced and surprising, patients with really far along illnesses that you're kind of surprised that they could just still be walking around with that situation. Yeah. Ely: Yes, definitely. That kind of establishing disease management and identifying severe disease was really was an important part of training. And I think, yes, Concord is a catchment area for that area. And Concord Hospital's Family Health Center is a federally qualified health center, much like where you work in East Boston currently, but there were a lot of social workers that helped. So there was definitely this sense of team effort to help engage people's health and work together. So that was a really good part. That's what I really liked about the training is that I learned from our pharmacists, from our social workers and other community health workers. So that was a good part of the training there. And it sounds like that helped you establish your career with in Dracut because you started your clinic there. Joe: I think all experiences eventually helped you later on for sure. So you're right, in Concord starting the residency program, I guess to some degree I wasn't scared to start a practice. So I guess there's that component of it. But though after I finished with the residency program that you also attended, then I returned back to my hometown in Chelmsford. And so when I finished, I went and had physical make sure that I also checked on my health. And so at that time I had gotten a physical in Chelmsford, the doctor that there was working with some other doctors and offered me a job in their clinic. And I said, "well, I'm just here for a physical, I don't think I want-" Ely: You got a job. Joe: Yeah, "don't think I want a whole job, but my physical must have been good." Ely: God bless family medicine, we do it all. Joe: So I did work a couple years in my hometown in Chelmsford in Drum Hill with Dr. Gamasis. And then actually I went back into New Hampshire. So when Michelle and I were married, we moved up to New Hampshire and then I worked with Wentworth-Douglass Hospital doing family medicine. And at that time, certainly most of the career up until that point and even after was fall spectrum. So when I worked in Chelmsford, it was inpatient medicine, outpatient medicine, ICU care, the rehabs, home care. So it was a lot. And so we would admit patients to the hospital, we would follow them and also do ICU care, and that was very satisfying. But it's a different world than it certainly is now in terms of, I suppose, expectations, acuity, the length of stay. I don't think it's even possible to do both now, but we did. And so I did that up in Concord and then actually we put a hospitalist program in there, which was actually very controversial, and then we ended up just transitioning to outpatient medicine. So then in 2007, I actually came back down to the area of Merrimack Valley with Saints Medical Center. They were near and dear to my heart because I had still been on staff there and they were looking to open practices and they said, "hey, can you open one of practice for us in Dracut?" And I said, that sounds really exciting because for me as a physician, I've always enjoyed obviously seeing patients and being in different environments. But one thing that you may never have an opportunity to do is to start a practice. And as a physician, starting a practice means you can really put your own personality into it and you're not inheriting necessarily a practice that's already there, or maybe another doctor's patient with maybe their style of medicine. So that was really exciting for me to be able to do that. And so the cool part about that situation was they also wanted me to be involved in the design build of the practice, which was super exciting. I didn't know anything about architect work or designing anything. So that was really exciting. And then we opened the practice and we had no patients. Day one, no patients, which is different than a lot of scenarios. So that was exciting and scary at the same time. Ely: Well, the natural question now I have is how did you recruit patients? Joe: Gosh, that was exciting time too. So a couple things, you just never know how life's going to go. So while we were doing this project, it was supposed to start in 2007, but it was delayed. So I had left the job in New Hampshire, came down, and they said, okay, unfortunately it's going to take longer than we expected. We're going to put you at the walk-in clinic for the year that we're going to get all this project going. And that was in Lowell. So I had never done urgent care medicine, so it's a little different and exciting and somewhat scary too, actually at times. And so I did that for a year. And there was a doctor that Dr. Bousquet who was a really wonderful doctor and a friend, so he must have known his life path what it was going to be. So he basically introduced me to so many people, so many patients. Even though he was kind of retired, they would still come to the clinic and he'd do kind of a primary care situation for them and then he would introduce them to me. And so I wasn't even really kind of aware of that was what was happening. And then so when I opened the practice, I did have actually a core of patients, which was really nice. And then we just did a lot of different things. So we went to every possible event that they had. So we went to job fairs where they wanted medical people. We went to the old home day in Dracut. I went to the Dracut baseball night, the comedy night, the fundraisers, whatever just to meet people. So that summer was really interesting. So we had no patients and then we slowly developed patients. I just basically stayed on a call every day, which wasn't as bad as it sounds, but when you have a startup practice, it's kind of neat to be on call all the time because then you're connecting with the patients very, very well. And then we had excellent people. So basically, there were three of us. So the three of us basically started the start of the office. So it was kind of exciting times. Yeah. Ely: That is quite a journey and a lot of legwork goes into building a practice in terms of just building the relationships you had with Dr. Bousquet. And so I am curious though, just as much as you were really involved in the community, if you can talk about it, how did it impact the way you and your family were developing? How did that balance work with being on call all the time and having all these obligations with work? How did you- Joe: It worked out in some ways. So though at the time, and actually still now, so we live way up in almost near Portsmouth, New Hampshire, but the practice was in Dracut, but again, this is kind of how crooked lines work and nothing's ever kind of straightforward. So we're both from that area. So she's from Lowell, I'm from Chelmsford, so we have family there. So though it was challenging in some ways to be here and there, it also was doable because for instance, her mom lives there. Her mom lives right down the street. And then my parents live in Chelmsford, and then my brothers live in Nashua and Chelmsford. So I think if it was a different location, it probably wouldn't have worked, but I could check on her mom, I can check on my parents, I can see my brothers. So that was nice. And then we could stay there. We could stay there on the night or the weekend. So that worked out really well. And then starting a practice also meant that I had flexibility because I could tell patients to come at seven o'clock in the morning, they could call me. So there was a lot of flexibility and that allowed me to have time to coach baseball and soccer and flag football. And so I guess it just kind of worked out because I guess you wanted it to, if you wanted it to work out. There were times it was hard. So I coached a lot of baseball, and so I even started sometimes at 6:00 AM and then would try to complete by early afternoon and then kind of rush home and then run some baseball drills, run the practices or the games or whatever. So I guess it just eventually worked out. But I think having some creativity in it and then having it be my own entity was really exciting. You have a lot of ownership in it and you can make things work, I suppose. And I really enjoyed having a personal connection to the patients that allows them to tell me that the schedule doesn't work for them, for instance, and they need something, and I can say, well, why don't you just come in at 7:30 and I'll do your physical then, things like that, which is to me is very, very satisfying 'cause the patient obviously needs certain things and I can know what those are. And then having some flexibility allows you to meet that need and you feel like, okay, that's why I'm actually here. Ely: Yes. Joe: Yeah. Ely: Well... you did... you say... it's amaze... I love hearing about this story and it's just different than mine. I also had a zigzaggy kind of path to medicine. But what I really am getting the sense of, Joe, is that you worked really hard to create your network, your family, really, work family, and then you really worked hard with your wife to build a network and a team that supported both of you, all of you. And if we don't really have a supporting team around us, it just can't work. And that's really a wonderful thing that you had and have currently. But I can imagine the shift in the culture of medicine and the way it's been managed provides some challenges now too. How have the rules changed around you in terms of management? Joe: Those are really great questions. And I guess it's easy to just gloss over the past and think, okay, gosh, everything was just really rosy, but it's not, it's not always rosy. So currently I think I'm way more satisfied than probably I have been in maybe in a long time. And I think some of that is because, like you were mentioning about working with people or networking, I think a lot of it is because the other doctor in the practice and also another doctor that also is there, we worked together to create the systems. Again, not to maybe speak poorly about systems, but we were in systems thinking, this is not really kind of what we're thinking or this is not actually functioning how we want it to function. Oh, okay, so you're feeling the same way as me and you're feeling the same way. And then, okay, let's express that. So we actually met a lot. It's changed even over the COVID, but we met a lot as doctors to talk about what we thought about medicine, what we thought about and how things should go, and then why it was or wasn't at that point. So I think at some point we just became leaders of our own own destiny. Now that doesn't always come easy. Sometimes you got to fight for that and sometimes it just works out. Certainly to your point, and I've kind of learned this kind of the hard way over time, I think joining forces with people is way more effective than just being the only person that maybe is complaining about something or that wants something to change. If you have two or three people that you work well with and you talk about things and you actually make sense, it's going to go good places, right? Ely: Agreed. Joe: Hopefully. Ely: Yes. Joe: Hopefully. Ely: Well, collaboration always brings some good fruits. And I would have to say, I really felt like over COVID, as we progress in this age of COVID, I'll just say it's really the pandemic continues, let's remind each other, and- Joe: It is continuing. Ely: ... it continues. But I feel like throughout COVID, I would often send a little message out to you in a way that helped me process what was going on. And the confusion about how we were operating or guidelines, miscommunications or communications about certain guidelines that were changing daily and they still really are, but I felt like having someone to vent about stuff that was changing was very helpful. So I again want to thank you for that. And I think that it helped me just advocate for what was going around in my situation. So thank you for that. Joe: Yeah, I'm glad that we connected because though there were three doctors in my practice, there was a time where we were either not working in the office at all or we were all remote and not really even seeing each other. And then at some point, yeah, there was an isolation, even though the physicians and medical staff. And so I think though it feels like I helped you, you secretly helped me kind of realize that I was doing some of the right things or thinking of the right things or I wasn't kind of off base thinking about the same things that you were thinking. And I may have told you yeah, you're right. But I might have also been secretly questioning it too. So I think, like you said, kind of connecting is definitely powerful. And I can't even take credit for all of that because though I was doing the family medicine in Dracut, I was also blessed to be a part of the East Boston clinic and some of the doctors there are also very amazing and they do different things. And so one of the doctors I worked with there, he gets deployed for disasters. And so he had gotten actually deployed from our pediatric kind of practice there to the very, very first COVID response unit in California when they had the cruise ship and they had 300 patients and they had no place to put these people. Kim and his crew went out there. So he had already been in the thick of it. I think that was December maybe 2019 or something. So he had already been in the thick of it and he came back and then I just remember learning so much from him and then thinking, okay, you have to be organized, you do have to have protocols, and you do need certain things. You need PPE, you need testing, and whether you can get those things or not, or if people are going to support you, you actually do need it. So advocating for those things, super important. And maybe you couldn't get everything you wanted. We couldn't get any N95 masks, but the other doctor that was in the practice had had the forethought of buying them. So we actually bought our own. And they weren't that great really, but they worked. And then, strangely enough, we were able to repair them. So I actually did a lot of glue gunning for several months of the masks because I didn't have another one. So it's kind of exciting in some ways to make things work, right? Ely: Yes. And being in medicine during the pandemic really made us either just dig our heels in and say, we're staying, we've got this, we have to do this, we have to do something. Whether it is in actually facing COVID patients in the hospital or out in the field, so to speak, in outpatient field of we have to deliver care, whether that it was telemedicine or in office eventually, and how we're we going to be able to do that and getting those PPE, for those listening, personal protective equipment. I think now we probably know that that's probably colloquial more so than just a medical term, but yeah, we have come a long way. And then to really sit and talk with you now about, man, that was some tough times over the last couple of years specifically. I'm listening to your story. I'm really curious and very enthralled with your development of your practice, but also just knowing what we have shared together in our health system with what we went through in the last two years. That was a lot. And it's still really tough. So I'm glad we're, we're still going, but it is difficult. Are you feeling the same way about that? Joe: Well, it's very much a people profession and it's a caring profession, and I think we get energy off of each other. So your excitement, enthusiasm, and even your positive feedback helps to really motivate me and other people. And so I think that was one of the really exciting things about the pandemic. Sure, I could probably look back and have a lot of mixed feelings about different things, but I think one of the things that was really amazing was the administration kind of apparatus really froze up. And the clinical people, we basically had to rise up because it was either we were going to just stay home during the pandemic or we were going to step up and figure out... Honestly, the choice was close down the practice and maybe we'll open up in a few months or we're going to figure out a way to reopen and serve our patients. So that was the choice, and that was really the clinical leadership. A hundred percent. We even developed how we were going to screen patients and then for the limited testing initially what we were going to do. And then as testing became more available, what were we going to do, what questions we were going to ask patients, when were they going to be permitted in the office? All that stuff we had to figure out and then we just did it. So thought that was really exciting actually. So I guess to answer your question, compared to sometimes when you feel really just maybe you're not making a difference, this period has kind of felt like more like we're making a difference. So things do kind of get tiring, the electronic medical systems can get tiring and charting, and there are some mundane things. And I think also the other thing is the more that we're in charge, I think of the healthcare system, and even simple things like how we're going to do our schedule, it's really empowering. I guess that's some of the things that came out of it. Ely: Thank you for that perspective, because that learning by doing is precisely why I chose family medicine. And really the impetus for me to be just actively doing in medicine was why I then pursued a career in medicine. And so just to be reminded of that is exactly what we are doing. This is our calling to do it, and we are here to serve. And as difficult as it is, that's what we do and we do it the best. And yes, leadership comes in all form, including administration, and there's certainly guidelines and rules that we may admonish at times, but really it's an honor and our privilege to be able to help others and live out the dream we all had of becoming physicians and being able to realize that in the work that we do. So thanks. Joe: You're welcome. And it did really feel like patients really did need us. So for two years, there were times where we're running all kinds of tests for coronavirus, then helping patients with, are you going to be able to work? And for how long? And who's going to write those letters? And then when can you go back and well, maybe you're not actually doing all that well, so maybe we should run x-rays and labs and send you to the hospital and now working with some of these other therapeutics and whatnot. So yeah, I think there's a lot of components where the family medicine, you can really just jump right in. Yeah, you're right. And then you're also right too, where it's not all rosy. There are a lot of things that can get in between those things that we really want to do for patients and how we want to feel about our calling. Ely: It's not all rosy, but then again, really, I welcome the challenge. If I had to go back into where our education had formed us at Holy Cross, the challenges that we had in terms of asking the question, and this is really for me, formed from this first year program that is now the Montserrat program that I was part of. But this question of how then shall we live in this world of COVID there are constant changes and rules, how then shall we live and then dot, dot, dot as physicians, as humans, as a mother, as a father. So I think it really is a unique way of looking at where we are through the lens of having a Holy Cross Jesuit education. Joe: Absolutely. There are so many experiences during the time there that totally prepares you for a career in medicine, in family medicine, or even just caring for people. There's so many things. The list is just endless of events and experiences for sure. I had what they call a SPUD... suburban, I'm not sure of all the acronyms there. Ely: Program for Urban Development something. Joe: We had so much fun, we did so many different things. And I just remember taking him to the... I think it's the pub there where there's the bowling alley. We had a bowling alley on campus, we used to do that a lot and other fun events. But yeah, there was just a lot of good experiences. One of the things that I think was also really excellent too was I went for one of the breaks at the Appalachia Mountain. I don't know if that was going on when you were there. So I went to Kentucky Mountain Housing and that was I think about 10 days. And so that was really amazing experience. So not only were we serving others, and then we were building some houses up in Appalachia in Kentucky, but we had to work together as a team. So that was probably one of the early experiences of really team building. So we had several bands, I don't even know how many were in each band, 10 or 12 people in the band. And basically we were responsible for the budget and getting all our stuff and then getting there. So we had to meet in Virginia or something and then continue on. So I just remember we had to decide who was going to drive and when and what shifts, and then how we were going to do our meals and who was going to cook it and when and who was going to clean up, and then who was going to do what kind of jobs on the site there. So that was really amazing experience. And then of course, interacting with people in Appalachia and helping them build houses and learning about their life experiences was, I think that's obviously a really amazing experience. And it's very, very similar to being a physician, except not building a house typically, but you're interacting with people and connecting with them where they are. So that was definitely a formative experience and I'm really grateful I was able to do that. Ely: What I want to ask you, because now you're in a position of having one of your kids going to start at Holy Cross, do you have any certain expectations for her experience at Holy Cross? Joe: Yeah, no, thank you for mentioning that. Yeah, Olivia will be a freshman this fall, and she plans on the bio pre-med track or health professions track. And so yeah, super excited for her. I'm overjoyed. For both of my children, I often brought them to different Holy Cross events. And for Olivia, we did the move in together. Well, not her move in, but we helped the students move in about five years ago. And then we've done several Holy Cross cares days, and then we've gone to reunions or football games or things. So I was always hopeful that she would have an interest and since I've been there a million years ago, the campus, it changed so much. They've just added so many wonderful things and buildings and upgraded just everything. So I was more than excited for her to consider it. And I'm really hopeful that she has a lot of the experiences that I had or even more. And so what I had wanted for her is not just go someplace and just do science, just be in the lab, just doing science by yourself, with your head down. I really wanted for her to have a real well-rounded experience and really develop other parts of her person as well. And I really wanted that for her. So I'm really hopeful that she sees it that way too. And she's very interested in the science building there. So we had to go look during all of her tours, specifically at the science buildings, even though lots of campuses in the United States are nice, the science building may not be nice. It may not be where they focus. So we went there and the newly kind of renamed Fauci Center definitely looked like it had gotten a lot of attention and would be a good place to learn. So yeah, I'm just really hopeful that she may find experiences like I did, or even different ones, even different ones. I was on the campus ministry there. And I found that to be really amazing, the 10 o'clock masses. And I walked on the football team for two years and was in a great dorm and had a lot of great experiences and a lot of great memories and friendships. Yeah, so I was hoping that she would get a lot of those experiences. So can I ask you about your recent career situation? Ely: Oh, sure. Joe: Because you're making some changes. Ely: Yes. So I would have to say the challenges of COVID and the challenges of parenthood, specifically motherhood, have put my focus on how to best be at home and do the work that I do. So being in the office, in the clinic, taking care of patients is truly rewarding. And I wouldn't change the opportunity for the world. But moving forward, I think I needed to step out of that in clinic role. And so now I've chosen a path to do telemedicine, and I'm very excited about developing my role as a communicator on the phone or by video and listening to patients. And that role won't change, but how I listen and how I engage with patients will be a little bit different and I'll have to hone in those skills. So I am looking forward to it. And I have a few weeks off before then. Joe: Well, I'm excited for you. So we've almost followed the same pathway, but now you're going a different pathway, because we both went to Holy Cross and we both went to New Hampshire Dartmouth residency and we both were urgent care in Merrimack Valley and Primary Care. But now you're going a different paths. Ely: Yes. Well, the zigzags of our paths have crossed many times in one way or another, and I'm sure they'll continue to cross, and hopefully that will continue. Joe: No, I think it's good 'cause I think our energy kind of feeds off of each other and our experiences or even just sometimes questioning kind of feeds off each other. And I think it's really positive. And I find that as I'm getting older and I actually think about what makes me tick, I think interacting with doctors and nurse practitioners and physicians assistants in the course of doing your work is extremely rewarding. And I really enjoy it. And so I do a lot of work in East Boston and a lot of times in the emergency room, and there's several doctors or some doctors and nurse practitioners, and I never really can really put my finger on why I enjoyed it, but I just really enjoyed being together with four or five doctors. It's amazing. You can talk to someone who has major differences in their life experiences or the clinical experiences, and you can just talk to them like right there, hey, I'm doing this for this patient, and what do you do? It's just amazing wealth. It really can help to develop just your satisfaction. But I do want to mention something, and I don't really know how to say it, but I think you brought up and there are, I think, unique challenges to being a male physician and a female physician. And I think with COVID and the additional responsibilities, it's really complicated. You could speak to this more than I, but I think as a female physician or a female nurse, you're also expected to take care of your kids when they're sick, which they're sick a lot with the COVID or not COVID or finding out if they have COVID. So what I've also observed is that the intensity of the responsibility is huge for women in clinical positions, and COVID just has made that so much more apparent and intense. So I understand maybe why you're making some changes there, but obviously you know more than I how that all works. Ely: I really appreciate the acknowledgement of the role of mothers in medicine and fathers have equally distinct roles in managing family life. So for some reason, for me, it has fallen on me to really be at home when they are sick or in quarantine. And it's something that I don't obviously mind doing, I love my children, and I just want to be able to show up for my family, myself and my patients equally as strong. And in my most recent role, I wasn't always feeling like I could do that and for one way or another. And it's not the fault of the system or the role itself, it just happened to play out that way. However, I did find some agency in looking at other options and voila, COVID opened a lot of doors to telemedicine and other opportunities for physicians to practice. So that was a fringe benefit, if I could even say a benefit of the pandemic was some doors that opened. So I felt enough agency to be able to walk through that door, and that was not because I was suffering, that was because there was a lot of strength that came from learning from my colleagues in my previous role. So I have a lot of good feelings for where I came from and a lot of excitement for where I'm going. Joe: I know, I think it's really wonderful and fantastic, and I'm glad that you acknowledged the unique pressures or stresses that you've felt 'cause I don't think they're unique to yourself. And so I'm glad that you've articulated that. And what I always think is by the time you've become a doctor and you've done all the amazing steps to get there, and then you're connecting with patients, to feel like for some reason you can't do that work because of whatever, because of schedule, because you want to also be there for your family or whatever systems things, and to think that maybe someone might actually leave the career altogether, it's really upsetting to me because it's usually the people that are the most caring and connected because you've given out so much of your energy and you just realize it's not working out. So kudos to you to try to figure out a way to keep all that amazing energy, like caring for patients. So I'm glad that you've figured out a path. Ely: Thank you. Joe: Yeah, it's exciting. Yeah, because I know you'll be back doing family medicine at some point in person, that's why I'm saying that. Ely: Yes. Well, my roots in community are very strong. And so to really hear your story of community building, it restores my faith in the progress of medicine and in the intensity of how we serve each other. So again, I cannot say thank you enough. Joe: Well, thank you to you too. Ely: The way I would love to close the interview is to say one thing that you are really excited about the future of family medicine. And I think I'm excited about the continued relationship building and the connection with colleagues as well as patients because if we are stronger as providers, as physicians, then I think that really only encourages our patients to become stronger and to have their agency to take care of their health. And really healthy communities, healthy families are what the drive to family medicine is. And so I'm really excited about that, that relationship is going to continue and get even stronger. How about you? Joe: I think you're right about that. And in the perspective of my path is that training in Boston in the '90s, family medicine was not at all desirable. And so you had to actually leave the city at the time to even seek out the specialty. But in time now, family medicine's very important everywhere, including in the city, including at the academic centers. And with my family medicine background, working in the ER, I do work with the pediatric group in Boston. I do family medicine in the clinic. I've also done urgent care and I feel equally at home in all those settings. And that's really nice. And I think connecting with the patients, I do feel like they actually do need us to know about a lot of things there. There's so much more complexity to health, and it's good to be able to do that over a wide range of health. And the other thing I like too about family medicine is we don't always have to make health issues always necessarily bad. We can talk about them as things that are opportunities to improve and maybe even opportunities to work on holistic health maintenance. So yeah, I think there is a lot of positivity to the future. We're going through an electronic medical record transition to Epic, which was really challenging. But I've used Epic in other locations and I'm finding that it, to some level is restoring my joy of medicine because the system is very good and allows me to actually complete functions rather than having the functions kind of dictate my whole day. So I think that hopefully technology will also help, at least the technology part that should be in place to help us. So I'm optimistic hopefully. Ely: That's a wonderful place to be optimistic and also carries us into the future. Maura Sweeney: That's our show. I hope you enjoyed hearing about just one of the many ways that Holy Cross alumni have been inspired by the mission to be people for and with others. A special thanks to today's guests and everyone at Holy Cross who has contributed to making this podcast a reality. If you or someone would like to be featured on this podcast, then please send us an email at alumnicareers.holycross.edu. If you like what you hear, then please leave us a review. This podcast is brought to you by the Office of Alumni Relations at the College of the Holy Cross. You can subscribe for future episodes wherever you find your podcast. I'm your host, Maura Sweeney, and this is Mission-Driven. In the words of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, "Now go forth and set the world on fire." Theme music composed by Scott Holmes, courtesy of freemusicarchive.org.

Joe Mull -- Attracting and retaining talent in a changing job market

The Clarity Advisors Show

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 4, 2023 32:04

Changing expectations about the role of work can make it feel like it's harder than ever to find and keep dedicated employees. Today's guest, Joe Mull, has spent more than 15 years teaching leaders how to be better bosses and create thriving workplaces.On this episode of The Clarity Advisors Show, Joe and host Ken Trupke talk about how to turn your organization into a destination workplace and transform ordinary people into devoted employees.Timestamps(00:53): Joe's background(02:18): Hiring challenges and staffing shortages(04:11): Keeping employees from switching(05:31): The pandemic's legacy(07:10): Generational shifts(14:05): Work-life balance(16:28): The myth of the lazy(20:41): Becoming a destination workplace(23:50): Where wages fit in(27:18): Joe's upcoming book, “Employalty”(30:06): Connecting with JoeEpisode Quotes“I sort of nerd out a little bit on the social psychology behind what makes us tick and being able to translate that for people.” (Joe)“What's happening right now really isn't about quitting. It's about job switching. And more specifically, it's about upgrading.” (Joe)“If we are in the middle of a great resignation, it's not an event. It's an era.” (Joe)“There's this massive recalibration taking place and the employers who are reinventing what work is and how it fits into people's lives are the ones who are finding and keeping talent more easily.” (Joe)“We have known now for a couple of years that for millennials it was important for them to have more work-life balance. They've been telling us for years that they are not married to their jobs in the ways that others who have come before have been.” (Joe)“By 2025, 65 percent of employees on planet Earth are going to be either millennials or Gen Z. We have to recognize that what we've long thought of as the next generation has been here for a while and is bringing another generation in along behind it.” (Joe)“Now you're seeing the friction that's created by organizations who want to go back to the way things were (pre-pandemic), and a younger generation of workers who are saying we've proven we can do this in different ways.” (Joe)“If you took every unemployed person in the United States right now and put them into a job, we'd still have 4 million unfilled jobs. So, this is not an issue of no one wants to work. It's not an issue of lazy. We have to stop blaming people.” (Joe)“It turns out the three things that are probably the most important are three things we don't typically pay a lot of attention to: coaching, trust, and advocacy.” (Joe)Recommended Reading and ListeningBoss Better Now with Joe Mull (podcast)Employalty: How to Ignite Commitment and Keep Top Talent in the New Age of Work by Joe Mull (pre-order)No More Team Drama: Ending the Gossip, Cliques, & Other Crap That Damage Workplace Teams by Joe MullCure for the Common Leader: What Physicians & Managers Must Do to Engage & Inspire Healthcare Teams by Joe MullConnect with Joe MullJoeMull.comJoe Mull on LinkedInJoe Mull on YouTubeJoe Mull on Facebook

united states earth work connecting gen z hiring engage gossip generational new age attracting job market mull cliques retaining talent joe it keep top talent ignite commitment joe there joe now

Living Off Borrowed Time Podcast - Afterlyfe by Yeat

Living Off Borrowed Time Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 12, 2023 99:54

Your hosts this episode: OptimalAudio createdbyrejection leftlane (Joe) It's that time again as our host Caleb returns, with createdbyrejection and podcast friend Joe in tow, to discuss Yeat's newest album! Coming hot off the release of his major label debut with "2 Alive" Yeat a year later has arrived with "Afterlyfe" and the podcast is here to break it down and all the talking points around it. Including whether the lukewarm reception is due to its quality or its variety of angles it takes, it's album length being daunting to a TikTok-oriented crowd, whether this stands as one of Yeat's more solid releases that still lacks in a possible hit single, and why it still is just as quality and deceptively hard hitting in topics as Yeat's past material. Intro Music: Junclassic - "Borrowed Time (Instrumental)" Outro Music: Kankick - "Stagnated Pace" Edited / Produced by: Kittenpuke Find us on RYM through our provided Profile names! Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro / Where We're At with Yeat 16:30 - Afterlyfe Discussion 1:38:00 - Thanks & Outro

tiktok profile time podcast living off borrowed time yeat rym joe it

Joseph Roy Miller -- Building a Sales Team in the Remote Environment

The Clarity Advisors Show

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 20, 2022 27:07

Building teams is already a difficult task. Building a sales team is probably the most difficult.Today's guest, Joseph Roy Miller, spent 37 years as a sales professional. On this episode of The Clarity Advisors Show, he and host Ken Trupke talk about building sales teams and encouraging positive improvement as a leader. In today's remote work environment, additional challenges come up when building sales teams, and it's especially important to emphasize cohesion within the team. To be an effective remote leader, Joseph emphasizes the importance of self-improvement, creating a cohesive team environment, making tough decisions, and encouraging learning.Episode Highlights: Building a cohesive team is important, especially in the remote space.The best way to improve is to always be open to learning from mistakes.Tough decisions need to be made for the greater good.Timestamps:[00:55] Joseph's 37-year career.[03:14] How to transition well from being a salesperson to sales manager.[05:02] Important things that the sales team and sales manager need to be trained for.[06:15] Role-playing as an effective means of improving.[06:51] Humans will be humans, and things don't go the way we expect. Now what?[08:40] That time Joe fumbled, and how his sales leader got him back on track.[11:04] Remote work and helping teams navigate this environment.[13:44] That time Joe failed as a leader, and learning from that.[16:07] How it's different leading sales teams today.[18:09] Joe's advice to new leaders building teams in today's environment.[20:53] Joe's recommended resources.[22:46] Despite the many changes over time, there are some timeless truths of leading a sales team.Episode Quotes:“It's like anything else. If you keep doing it enough times, you're going to get better at it.” (Joe)“It's critical that humans be with humans.” (Joe)“Don't try to save the Titanic. It's going down.” (Joe)“The phone is still the best way to get in touch with people.” (Joe)“Don't be a stranger to your people.” (Joe)“It's your job as sales manager to know that your guys are trained properly in how you want them to sell.” (Joe)“People are still people.” (Joe)Episode Resources:Never Split the Difference, by Chris Voss. Alex HormoziFollow/Connect with Joseph Miller:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephroymillerPhone: 713-703-5574

learning leadership training building sales environment humans tough empowerment titanic remote team building sales teams chris voss cohesion joe it roy miller joe don

440: The LGBTQ+ Family Connections Center with Joe Barb

The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 15, 2022 20:49

Joe Barb is Executive Director and Founder of LGBTQ+ Family Connections Center. They have a mission to strengthen and empower all youth, however they identify, to overcome obstacles by providing housing, supportive counseling, community education, and advocacy. Victoria and Chad talk with Joe about identifying needs for the center, his own lived experience and connection to the LGBTQ+ community, and deciding what services to provide and evaluating which are most impactful. LGBTQ+ Family Connections Center (https://lgbtqfamilyconnectionscenter.net/) Follow the LGBTQ+ Family Connections Center on Twitter (https://twitter.com/center_lgbtq), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/lgbtqfamilyconnectionscenter/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/LGBTQFamilyConnectionCenter), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/lgbtq-family-connections-center/). Follow Joe on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-barb-978ba0204/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is The Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. VICTORIA: And I'm your other host, Victoria Guido. And with us today is Joe Barb, Executive Director and Founder of LGBTQ+ Family Connections Center, with a mission to strengthen and empower all youth however they identify to overcome obstacles by providing housing, supportive counseling, community education, and advocacy. Joe, thank you for joining us. JOE: Thank you. I appreciate it. VICTORIA: Wonderful. So you started the center over two years ago. If you could go back in time and give yourself advice to when you were first starting out, what would you tell yourself? JOE: Wow, very similar to for-profit companies, having the tenacity to keep knocking on doors, never accepting no for an answer, and understanding that tenacity is everything. Nothing happens without continuing the fight every day. VICTORIA: Great. And how did you first identify that need for the center? JOE: A million years ago, when I was a late teenager, my parents had a pastor in their church suggest to them that in order to bring me back to God and back to their church, that they should cut me off financially, you know, I was a young freshman in college prod me in that direction. So my parents took the advice, and I found myself in my second semester of college with no funding. The check for the second semester had been canceled from my family, and I didn't know what to do. So I called a friend in South Dakota that we had met on vacation. And she said, "You know what? I have an apartment building here. I just had an apartment become vacant. Why don't you move to South Dakota, and then we'll work on everything else?" So that lived experience kind of proded the whole thing. And then meeting the youth who had been displaced from home for being a trans youth caused the rest. CHAD: Well, I'm really sorry for that personal experience that you had. But it's pretty powerful and that you've gone on to help others in similar situations is really admirable. JOE: Yeah, it's been quite a journey. And my lived experience, honestly, I was with stability within 24 hours. The more I became comfortable and complacent in my life and then met somebody who wasn't; it brought me back to that. And then just looking at statistics, looking at how youth end up in a houseless situation created something in me that I had to address. VICTORIA: So you had your own lived experience and that connection to your community which helped you identify that need and start out on the center. Did you find there were a lot of resources for building nonprofits? JOE: There isn't. And it's really something that when you go into it, you believe that when you create a nonprofit and you finish that application, you send it into the IRS, and you get approval, that you put a great idea out there and that the community will respond and that everyone will immediately jump on it and say, "You know what? You're right. This is needed. We need housing. We need to make sure that youth are safe." And that's not the way it works. It doesn't work that way at all. It's a lot of connections and community and getting involved and putting the statistics and the numbers out there so that people are aware of it. But it's mostly connecting the stories. The more youth that I've met and worked with and connected them to a story and told their story, the more people respond. VICTORIA: Right. And so, what have you found to be the most impactful in sharing that story and in managing that content to get to the right people who can help you with this need? JOE: The most impactful part is people just aren't aware. We all know that there's a homeless population. No matter where you live, there's a homeless population, and it impacts communities. But what we aren't aware of is we all typically believe that the government is funding these things and it's being taken care of and that maybe those people just chose homelessness and don't realize that the resources are very limited. Until those resources are able to show a data of need, that person may not be counted that you saw on the corner. CHAD: You're pretty active socially online. I think where I first saw you was through a mutual connection on LinkedIn, and your posts started to be in my feed, and I liked and subscribed, I guess. How much of the awareness that you're putting out there is coming from social networks and online versus in-person and local communities? JOE: I'd say it's probably a good mixture of both. Locally, obviously, I'm deeply involved with other service providers, and I'm involved with local government. I'm on any kind of board that you can think of that impacts youth homelessness. So there's that within my community but having those LinkedIn...just this weekend, we had our pride, and at our pride, someone walked over to me, started talking at our booth. And he said, "Well, I know you from LinkedIn. CHAD: [chuckles] JOE: I noticed your picture with Sylvan Lake behind you from your LinkedIn, and I just had to come over to meet you and say hi." And I thought, how impactful is social media that someone who lives in Florida happened to be in South Dakota came to pride and recognized me from a picture? VICTORIA: Wow. Yeah, it makes our world feel a little smaller sometimes, doesn't it? JOE: Absolutely. VICTORIA: And the problem of youth homelessness and LGBTQ+ homelessness is very complex. And I think other nonprofit founders might be interested in how you decide what services you're going to provide and how you evaluate to see which ones are the most impactful. JOE: We did things kind of backwards. So I formed the board of directors, and typically what happens with the board of directors is they want to become your advisors. And I thought these people have great professional experience. We have doctors; we have PhDs, we have scientists literally on our board. And those people don't have the lived experience. So I thought, who do we go to to develop programming and support for people that are in need? And the answer was glaringly clear; it had to be the people who were in need. So I formed a Youth Action Board with the State Continuum of Care. And it comprises of youth ages 13 to 24 who have lived experience. We keep it at 66% have to have lived experience. And technically, most of them have even much more than that. But we connect with them through service providers who assist youth. And those were the people that we used to formulate what they needed, decide what was most beneficial to help them during vulnerable points, and then help them get out of situations. VICTORIA: Right. And I think that user experience, that experience bringing that into the products and services that you're creating, just makes a lot of sense for us, and that's what we bring into our design as well. JOE: Yeah, I mean, we do it in almost every industry. Whatever you create, whatever product you create, whether it's something tangible that you hold or whether it's a service, you bring in a test group. And that test group typically is people that you're seeking to utilize or buy your service or your product. And in doing that, we end up developing a better product. It's the same thing with a nonprofit. We had to get the voice of those who we would be serving in order to make sure that we were doing what they needed, not what we thought as professional people or personal opinions was the way forward. CHAD: Was there something as you were talking to people and learning that surprised you? JOE: Probably the same thing that everyone develops is an opinion of homelessness. We all think that people that experience homelessness it's typically through some self-inflicted issue; typically, drugs and alcohol come to mind and some type of cause that brought you there that you had influence on. And I've learned that most of the kids that we serve had no influence on their homelessness other than to be born where they were or to who they were born. A lot of our youth are coming from, oh, they've lived in shelters, or foster care, or aged out of foster care. It just changed my dichotomy of thinking that we would be serving people that had addiction problems or alcohol problems when in case of the youth...currently we're at, I think 68 youth served. I've only met one youth that had a previous addiction. CHAD: It's really just that lack of a safety net. And all it takes is your family not supporting you and not having a safety net. JOE: Absolutely. And that's just it. You said it very well. Most of us, when we have an incident in our life that we need some help because there's a vulnerability, we have people around us that we go back to. We have either family or close friends that we can say, "You know what? I lost my job. I need a little bit of help here," or "This medical incident happened, and could you assist us?" And we get a response from our family or friends that typically is supportive and helps us find a way. A lot of youth, especially youth that experience homelessness, don't have that connection to family. So that's where we need to bring in community to support them. VICTORIA: Right. And do you find there are unique challenges to supporting youth experiencing homelessness in the Midwest in South Dakota where you are versus in more urban areas? JOE: Absolutely. Carl Siciliano is my TA advisor. He created the Ali Forney Center in New York, which is the largest housing support for homeless youth for...they specifically only target LGBTQ youth in the United States. And in talking to him and in looking at our demographics, it was very different. For them, people in larger cities will just seek out their services. They learn about it word of mouth. They find out that there's a shelter in place. Here, our homeless population is much more hidden. And typically, what happens here is youth will gather together. And it'll be six or eight of them who will become friendly, and they will try to support each other by one of them will get a hotel, and then six or eight of them will live together. Or they're doubled up in one person's apartment, six or eight people live in somebody else's apartment, which truly isn't housed because it's not their place. And they try to support each other. So they're very hidden in our communities. CHAD: It's unfortunate there's a lot of stuff happening in the U.S. and worldwide with legislation being passed now anti-transgender. I think South Dakota was the first state in the country to pass an anti-transgender bill this year. Are there particular challenges to doing the work that you do in today's climate? JOE: Accessing mental health services, we had to overcome that obstacle by forming relationships with counseling services so that we could make sure that any youth, whether they were insured or underinsured, or uninsured, could immediately access mental health. And that took quite a bit of work on our part in order to make that happen. It should be easy. It should be easy to access mental health. And that's probably one of the biggest challenges because I can stabilize anyone tomorrow with either a hotel, or a house, or an apartment. But if you don't have mental health to help with what got you there, you're still living in trauma. If you're living in trauma, how can you focus on things like going back to school or having a career or what even tomorrow means for you? Because you're living in trauma today. So, absolutely, to answer your question, mental health. CHAD: And is that a matter of providers not wanting to provide services or not being able to pay for it? JOE: Not being able to pay for it. There are things that you can access if you're uninsured or underinsured if you meet the guidelines to get into mental health access. The problem with that is if you need to help today, that's a process. We wanted to skip the process. We wanted to make sure that if you walked into our drop-in center today that this afternoon I can have you with a therapist of your choice. MID-ROLL AD: Now that you have funding, it's time to design, build, and ship the most impactful MVP that wows customers now, and can scale in the future. thoughtbot Liftoff brings you the most reliable cross-functional team of product experts to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term success. As your trusted, experienced technical partner, we'll help launch your new product and guide you into a future-forward business that takes advantage of today's new technologies and agile best practices. Make the right decisions for tomorrow today. Get in touch at thoughtbot.com/liftoff. CHAD: You have a website. You collect donations online. And we definitely want to link all of that stuff in the show notes. It will be there, and I hope people contribute. But when it comes to the tactical stuff on the product and business side, are there particular tools or resources you were able to draw upon to put together online donations, the website, that kind of thing? JOE: As far as platforms, is that what you're asking? CHAD: Yeah. JOE: There are some great platforms that have been built specifically for nonprofits in order to help get the word out and help fundraise. That for us hasn't been the primary. In this type of nonprofit, typically, most of our donations are not donations or grants. They're things that we...like, I just spent two years on a grant that is quite substantial. But it was two years of work, literally 40 hours a week for two years. So there are those tools, there's the GoFundMe, and there are all kinds of tools for sharing on social media in order to get people to donate. They're great, but you have to have a large circle in order to utilize those. And you have to have people that are willing to do that as well. So I don't think we have the tool that's the best tool yet socially. CHAD: What would something that was better look like for you? JOE: It's more getting corporations and businesses and private companies involved in what a lot of companies are already doing. They will seek from their employees giving initiatives. And they will seek information to what does the company want to support as a community? Because that's what their employees care about. I think those things have a more sustainable development and a more sustainable footprint for nonprofits that when organizations get involved that are private and then offer to their employees a way to donate, that works best. CHAD: Yeah. For thoughtbot, to honor Pride Month, we collected a series of donations that we were going to make. And there was team suggestion...because we have teams all over the place, we wanted to have a local impact. And then when it came to actually doing those donations, I think we had 10 to 20 organizations that we wanted to donate, not a huge amount of money to each one but hopefully, it makes a difference. And the way that we needed to do that a person at thoughtbot needed to go and either find the donate link, the place to do it, and some of them didn't even have it. And we wanted to, you know, maybe it's a place in Brazil or something, and we need to get them the money somehow, wiring it or something. And so that was a fair amount of manual work to figure that out and then to make the payments. JOE: And I think because it goes along with we're learning as organizations that we have to take care of the social and emotional part of employees just as well as we do the work environment. It's part of the work environment. So I think that that kind of goes back to HR, which is my background. HR should look at those things in advance and find local nonprofits to support local ideas and then maybe some national ones as well. We all know of The Trevor Project and some of the great broader campaigns that do a lot of really good work. And have that ready so that when somebody joins your company you can show them and say, "Hey, by the way, these are some local organizations that we can do a payroll deduction for if you like, or we can buy annual contributions," and let the employees see that the company cares about the local area and also cares about things on a national platform that impact employees. VICTORIA: I love that. I think that's a great way to involve corporations in giving back and connecting employees to their local communities and the local groups that need support. Is there anything else that you want to tell our listeners in order to support the LGBTQ+ Center or in general? JOE: The majority of our youth are LGBTQ+. And that's because statistically, across the United States, the majority of youth seeking housing services unaccompanied are LGBTQ+, up to 40%. But we don't turn away any youth. It doesn't matter how they identify. It doesn't matter what their circumstances are. The only thing that we ask is if you're telling us you're homeless, then we're going to assist in that. We do have age criteria of 16 to 24 because that matches the federal guidelines for the programming that we're in through federal dollars. So other than that, I mean, we still would help anyone of any age, but that's the big thing to know is that we help any youth however they identify. And what could listeners do? Obviously, on our website or look into your community as well and see what is a support in your area and find something that you can contribute to. VICTORIA: That sounds great. Thank you so much. Do you have any questions for me or Chad? JOE: I think that what you're doing is great. I like that you are thinking of nonprofits as a company as well because a lot of people view it differently when it's actually a company. You have to figure out a way to sustain funding and bring money in just like any other organization in order to do the work. CHAD: Yeah, I think that's a common misconception that people have. And I'm sure it's not the case with you and your organization. But I like to remind people that nonprofit really just means that it can't show a profit. So there are lots of nonprofits out there that just end up spending all of the money that they have. That is really also technically what it means sometimes. JOE: And you bring up a great point. There's an IRS website to look up any nonprofit organization, and you can look at how they spend their money. I do that all the time before I make a donation. Because we've all heard those stories of CEOs, who make 30 million a year or whatever crazy number. You can always look up any organization and see how they spend their money. CHAD: Yeah, that's a really good tip for people to do before you get involved with an organization with donations or your time and really making sure it matches your values and that kind of thing. VICTORIA: Great. All right. I think we're about at time. So with that, I will wrap us up and let everyone know you can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. CHAD: If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter at @cpytel. VICTORIA: And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHAD: Thanks for listening and see you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success. Special Guest: Joe Barb.

On Generosity, Integrity, Raising the Goal, and Doing it NOW!

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 23, 2022 34:09

Joe Soltis, CEO, ChoiceLocal (Cleveland, OH) Joe Soltis is CEO at ChoiceLocal, which Joe describes as “the top performing franchise growth engine” with a “money back guarantee.” The agency offers a wide scope of services for franchisors and franchisees of over 50 brands, enabling them to provide “Fortune 500 level customer service, results, strategy, and ROI on the franchisee level” for a “small and medium size business price.” Large clients might be parent companies of franchise systems, franchisors owning 20 or more franchise systems where each system may have from 20 to 200 franchisees – and up to as many as 6,000 internal franchise units. Small franchise systems may have 10 units. For these smaller clients, the agency facilitates franchise development, consumer, new customer, location, company, and digital talent recruitment marketing. Joe says hiring is a challenge, especially in the franchise space. The agency needs to understand its client's hiring needs, the kind of candidates it desires, and the historical hire rates to know the number of applicants to target . . . then reverse engineer the hire rate/cost per quality candidate by channel and implement the most effective marketing strategy to ensure future growth. Joe says they use the same channels as they do for consumer marketing (in a different order), plus some that are recruitment specific. Joe notes that franchise operations need to beware . . . a lot of agencies will lock clients into proprietary technology solutions . . . that don't fit. ChoiceLocal strives to find the right tools for each client to build a “win-win” ecosystem where franchisor, franchisee, and the agency all win. He says it's important that the tool providers are companies sensitive to client needs, adaptable to a changing market, and willing to invest in “making sure that you can use their tool to provide the best in the world customer service to your end customers.” Joe started his career working his way up for 10 years in a company that grew to serve Fortune 500 companies. At a time of great personal loss, he changed the direction of his life. In his words, I always said I wanted to be successful so that I could help people, and that day it changed to “I don't want to just build something; I want to help people and I want to do it now. I don't want to be successful so that I can help people later. I want to do it now.” Joe started ChoiceLocal with the mission “to help others” – the agency's franchisor and franchisee partners, agency teammates (to make their dreams and aspirations reality), and people in the community. Joe structured the agency with the goal of having employees work their 40-hours, then “unplug and leave work at work.” With a teammate Net Promoter Score in the 70s (far exceeding the “good” score, which is in the 30s), the agency has been a Top Workplace in Northeast Ohio for the past five years. When Covid struck, the agency created a ChoiceLocal Economic Stimulus Package to help its customers “grow through the downturn,” an initiative that Joe estimates saved 30 franchisees from going out of business. Giving back to the community is “baked into” the agency's DNA, with 10% of profits dedicated to helping “kids in need.” Joe says the agency's “big hairy audacious goal is to help 10,000 kids a year.” As of this interview, the agency had already helped 6,000 kids in 2022 through such things as meal programs, partnering with Habitat for Humanity to provide a home for an in-need family, and through team members' personal volunteer work in the community. Joe says the next thing after achieving this goal would be to “raise the goal.” Recently, the agency spun off a dental franchise, Broadview Dental Group, which Joe targets to be “the largest provider of dental care in the United States within 10 years.” Expectations are that dentists following this franchise system “can have 4.5 times the profit of a typical dental practice and only have to work three days a week to do it.” In this franchise system, a dentist maintains 100% of the business's equity and, on retirement, can sell the franchise. Joe can be reached on his agency's website at choicelocal.com, by following ChoiceLocal on social media channels @ChoiceLocal, by following Joe on Twitter @helpothersjoe, or by connecting with him on LinkedIn. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Joe Soltis, CEO at ChoiceLocal based in Cleveland, Ohio. Welcome to the podcast, Joe. JOE: Rob, great to be with you today. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about ChoiceLocal? What is the firm's specialty? What is your superpower? What are you known for? Hit us with it. JOE: We're the top performing franchise growth engine. We work exclusively with franchisors and franchisees, and the reason we do that is we want to give Fortune 500 level customer service, results, strategy, and ROI, but we want to be able to do it when you look on the franchisee level at a small and medium size business price while delivering that. When we do that, we offer a money back guarantee. We're the first and only franchise marketing agency to offer that money back guarantee. We work with 50+ brands. We're one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S., members of the IFA, the whole nine yards. ROB: Wow, congratulations. There's a certain clarity to that that is certainly appreciated. Let's peel it back just a layer. When we think about franchise, I think some of us think about restaurants, but there are franchises of all stripes. There is plumbing. There are franchise marketing agencies, for that matter. So what does a typical customer look like? Is there a particular range of franchises, of locations? Because you could have two or two thousand. What's a typical engagement look like? JOE: We work with some franchise systems that are owned by what we would call a platform, like a parent company that owns franchise systems. There are some franchisors that we work with that actually own 20+ franchise systems, and within each of those franchise systems there can range anywhere between 20 franchisees on the small side and 200 on the large side. So, we're talking within these companies 2,000-unit franchise operations, and some franchise systems that we work with even have 6,000+ franchise units within them. Also, on the other end of the spectrum, there are franchise systems that we work with that are 10-unit franchise systems. We power them on franchise development, we power them on consumer marketing and new customer marketing for their franchisees as well as their company and locations, and we also power their talent recruitment through digital marketing to drive highly qualified applicants. Staffing is obviously a huge challenge in today's world, and particularly within the franchising space. ROB: That's a little bit of a wider scope of services than I think we often hear in local marketing, especially once you get into the recruitment side. So that's interesting. Is it the same channels for getting customers in and getting employees in? Is it different? What's the mix of touchpoints there? JOE: It is the same channels, used in a different order, plus there are additional channels that are recruiting specific. Obviously, there's different job boards that are highly important in the recruiting space, and then there's also a whole host of digital channels that can be activated, from geotargeted Google Ads to Facebook advertising. Each of them has their strengths and their weaknesses. Our job within these franchise systems is to understand what their hiring needs are, who they're looking to hire, what their historical hire rates are so we know how many applicants we need to drive, and then we can also reverse engineer the hire rate by channel, and then we can from there figure out their cost per quality applicant by channel and then develop a marketing mix that's going to allow them to continue to grow. ROB: There's a lot going on there. Over time we've seen different platforms that have tried to jump to the forefront to help, I think, organizations like ChoiceLocal, handle marketing for multilocation, for franchises. What's the state of the tool ecosystem for this? Has any tool that tries to help with this problem and actually create a library of content to push out to different locations worked? Or has it not worked and you end up building some of those solutions yourselves? How do you look at dozens of locations, different local needs, some shared content, that sort of thing? JOE: There are a lot of agencies that will come in and sell franchise systems, their own proprietary tech in order to bring that about. What we've generally found is when these marketing agencies bring in their proprietary tech, it's more in the agency's interest and less in the interest of the franchisor and the franchisee. Essentially, it's “Here, take this marketing solution. Take our proprietary tech, and then it's impossible for you to leave us.” That's how they set that up, and it can create some difficulty and a lot of angst within these different franchise systems. When working in the franchising space, what you need to do is build a win-win ecosystem where the franchisor wins, the franchisee wins, and as a byproduct of that, as the agency you win as well. There's a whole host of various tools in this, from Rallio to WebPunch to SOCi. There's a lot of others. Yext. These are all various powerful tools that can be used and deployed. There's other powerful tools in the call tracking space, too. You have companies like CallRail who do a really strong job with this, with call analytics and those types of things. The job of the agency is to find the right tools that are right for that franchise system while also using their agency buying power to leverage economies of scale and do what's in the best interest of their client partners. ROB: If I hear you correctly, there's not a one-size-fits-all best franchise management tool. It is a little bit of a best of breed, it's a what are the needs of your particular brand/set of stores, that kind of thing. Sometimes it is Yext, maybe sometimes you bring CallRail to the table. You're the experts, and you're prescribing the menu that you recommend. JOE: Yeah, that is right. One thing, too, as you follow these companies – depending on how much they're investing in R&D, how much they're willing to listen to their customer, how much they're willing to allow their agency partners to fuel their product roadmap and guide their product roadmap – that's really how you're going to pick your partners, in large part. There's a lot of these SaaS companies that are not very customer service minded. They're more like “Get in, sign up for a product, and then leave us alone” kind of deal, and as an agency, that's not the kind of partner you're looking for. You're looking for ones that will invest in making sure that you can use their tool to provide the best in the world customer service to your end customers. Why I say that is that's something to look out for in the beginning. And the other reason I say that is the companies that are willing to invest in their customer service also tend to invest in their product development, and you'll notice there's ebbs and flows of who's good and who's bad when they do this. And things change, so you've got to find a partner that's always looking to change and adapt with the market as it changes and evolves. ROB: It's interesting how the cast of characters has changed. When I google for this problem space, Hootsuite is out there, Content and Sprout are out there contending for just a small slice of that franchise deal. But you know they're chasing every other vertical in social as well. I can certainly appreciate – we're in Atlanta; CallRail is a neighbor company here. Do you know their roots a little bit? It's an interesting background on them. JOE: It's a really neat company. ROB: The founder started off with a site to help people with BMWs that were out of warranty to find a local repair shop. My understanding is if you have a BMW that's out of warranty, you need a local repair shop. That's what I've heard. So, he started off doing lead gen for these local shops and then built call tracking to help prove the value of his BMWershops.com website, and ended up building CallRail from it. JOE: What's neat about CallRail, too, is they really have come in – there's a lot of companies that historically have played in that place, and they really trounced them. Some of their advanced features and some of their call analytics, listening to calls, transcribing calls, turning them into qualified leads, or basically saying what's a qualified lead, what's a hot lead, what's not a lead, and how they built some of that technology – it's pretty cool stuff. ROB: Yeah, there's a tremendous customer focus there. I do want to shift gears for a moment; I want to get to the origin story of ChoiceLocal. What led you to create this firm? What led you to this point of focus, of all the areas you could have focused on helping and niches you could have served? JOE: I served at a company that served multibillion dollar companies. I was a Vice President of Operations of Product Development there. We served Fortune 500 companies – FedEx, CBS, other multibillion dollar publicly traded companies. That's where I spent my day and that's who I served. We built a team of 180 full-time digital marketers. Kind of a neat story. Started as employee #8, within a few years worked my way up to VP of Ops and Product Development and did that. It was cool. I learned a lot and I had some really great mentors while I was there. The owners there have done some really amazing things outside of agency, just building multimillion dollar companies and multibillion dollar companies and taking some of them public, like NCS Healthcare and others. So, I learned a ton while I was there over that 10-year period. Then in 2012, we had a pregnancy. Went into an ultrasound room with my wife and there was no heartbeat. So we lost our son, Ben, pretty late in the pregnancy. I always said I wanted to be successful so that I could help people, and that day it changed to “I don't want to just build something; I want to help people and I want to do it now. I don't want to be successful so that I can help people later. I want to do it now.” That's actually how ChoiceLocal got started. In its simple form, our mission always has been – our mission and our core values were written prior to even having a business plan – our mission is help others. We help our partners succeed, our franchisor and franchisee partners, help their dreams and aspirations become a reality. We help our teammates' dreams and aspirations become a reality. We've been a Top Workplace in Northeast Ohio five years running. We have a teammate Net Promoter Score in the 70s, which is unheard of high. You ask people, “What is a good employee Net Promoter Score?”, the answer is 30. We're hanging out in the 70s. So, we really work to live that mission and really care about others. Working in the agency space, a lot of agencies will bring in talent, they will work them like crazy for like five years until they burn out, and then they leave and they go in-house. Having experienced that and have friends who've experienced that in other companies, I wanted to do something fundamentally different. That's why we founded ChoiceLocal and built it the way that we have. But our mission of help others is also giving back. We take 10% of the profits out of the company and we use it to help kids in need. Our big hairy audacious goal is to help 10,000 kids a year. We created the Benjamin Isaac Foundation, named after our son, Ben. We just gave a home to a single mother with three kids. Her name is Brie; she's got three beautiful boys. We just had their house dedication two weekends ago, and that was through Habitat for Humanity. We were the sole sponsor for the home. Got to meet her beautiful boys. We helped them move in, had the housewarming and a dedication. It was so cool. It's just so cool. We do tons of other stuff like that. So far this year – it's now June, and we are at a little over 6,000 kids that we've helped through various charities that we partner with. ROB: Well, 4,000 more to go and then another goal. JOE: Yes, raise the goal. ROB: There's a depth in that origin story. I think something that is interesting to think through – when you have a team, when you're giving to causes, how do you connect the day-to-day of what the team is doing to the causes that the company is giving to and really ensure that there's an authentic connection there? I think it can be very disconnected sometimes. Here's the owner, here's the team, we're building this stuff, some money got shot out over here – to a good cause, but maybe it doesn't feel relevant to the day-to-day. So how do you think about connecting the team to the cause? JOE: That's a great question. It's a really great question. The first thing is we hire for people that have the core values that we have. Family, giving, integrity in all things. There's certain ways that you can interview people to make sure that they have those. And if you actually study some of the psychology behind it, if you study various hiring techniques that are used in books like Topgrading and WHO and those types of things, there's ways you can interview for those core values and competencies to screen people out that don't have that. So, you're hiring people that believe what you believe and then you're coming into a culture that celebrates those core values and celebrates those things. For example, we have a team meeting every single month where we update on everything that's happening in the agency, what's going on with business strategy. We're transparent on financials and performance and all of those things so everybody can see what's going on. We have a part where we talk about help others and core values. In core values, people nominate teammates and they celebrate how they live those core values out, and we tell those stories. A lot of those core values are how we help our partners and internally, but it's also how we give back. And then we tie in our financial performance. We then say, “Because we were able to do this, we were able to give Brie and her three boys this gift.” We make it very personal. Along those lines, we also have quarterly volunteering. We try to get every teammate to volunteer once a quarter so they can see, feel, and touch the work they're doing. My personal favorite is when we go to the Boys and Girls Club of America. Those kids need love, they need support, they need good mentors, and when you go there, you feel fantastic afterwards because you've been able to deliver some of that for them. So that's really powerful. And then we also do this BHAG walkthrough. BHAG stands for big hairy audacious goal. We have this roadmap, and then we say, “Here's three kids that were helped because of this. Here's 1,600 kids that were fed for a year in a place of education.” We did this charity giveaway through our annual thing at the International Franchise Association called the ChoiceLocal 10k Charity Giveaway. People enter a drawing giveaway. There's a really cool story – there's a woman who served as a board member of the International Franchise Association; today she owns about 20 Taco Johns franchises. Very successful businesswomen. She picked the Great Harvest Heartland as her charity, and she ended up winning. What I found out after she won is that as a kid, she was so poor that she needed to go to the foodbank to eat. So, it was a very personal gift for her. That's the type of stuff that really hits home, when you always tie it to that personal story. And then when you say, “Because you were able to do this specifically,” and you name the person, “it allowed us to be able to do this.” Sorry, I'm passionate about this – the last thing I'll add to it is helping the business owner. This particular franchisee is having a really hard time and they're on the verge of going out of business. We had a good amount of this through COVID. We announced the ChoiceLocal Economic Stimulus Package for our customers. We have this whole “grow through the downturn” quarterly priority and theme. We saved probably 30 franchisees from going out of business during COVID, and that was really cool. We celebrated each one of those as a company during the team meetings and made a really big deal out of it, because it's a huge deal. They put their life savings into the business. Together, we helped save their business. That's flipping awesome. It's really cool. ROB: What an opportunity. I hear a certain proximity that you're referring to within the team. Is all of your team right there, one office, one team? Is that your world, or are people in different places? JOE: It used to be that way, pre-COVID. We were in the office three days a week, and Monday/Friday work from home. COVID hit and we went 100% remote. Then we had highest teammate Net Promoter Score ever, highest client Net Promoter Score ever, highest revenue ever by far, highest profit dollars. We're like, this is working really well. So we surveyed our team and said, “What do you guys want to do?” and everybody said basically, work from home, come into the office once. So, we instituted that. What we then found is about 10-15% of our staff in a given week would come into the office, and they'd come in on different days, and when they came in there was like 3% of our staff there. It felt a little lonely, and some people like that connectedness. So I just met with our leadership team on this this past week; we're probably going to be instituting now – we do a lot of stuff on Slack. I know a lot of companies do. Basically, we're going to have ChoiceLocal In-Office Day. It's going to be completely optional, but everybody that's going to go is going to go into Slack, fill out this poll, and RSVP and say “Hey, I'm going to be in the office this day” and try to get other teammates to come in. And then they're going to have a group of probably 30-40% of the company in on that individual day, and they can hang out together. Plus we do all the fun stuff. We have team meets once a month. Those are in person. About half the company comes to those; the rest are virtual. We bring in catered food. We're in Cleveland, so we're going to watch a Cleveland Guardians, which used to be the Cleveland Indians, game. ROB: Yeah, that's an adjustment there as well. JOE: Stuff like that. We do Topgolf. We do a big Christmas party every year. Stuff like that. It's fun. It's so fun. ROB: It sounds like an adjustment, but it sounds like listening to the team, it sounds like adjusting well. When I think about folks I've known in the agency world in Cleveland, there's no shortage of opportunity to lose your team to the revolving door of brands. That seems like it's probably the way of life there – not to mention the regional opportunities with vendors. It really does take some work to keep them on the agency side, I think. JOE: Historically, at my prior agency that was definitely a continual challenge. We launched ChoiceLocal with the mission of help others, with the goal – we're not perfect at this; I don't want to sugarcoat it – but with the goal of being a fast-paced, high energy environment, but you work 40 hours, then you unplug and you leave work at work. We were able to build our systems so that's possible. We historically have had almost no turnover. Now, with that said, this year during COVID, our turnover rate has spiked a bit, but it's nothing like I was ever used to. In a year we would have maybe, out of 100 people, like 1 to 2 people leave that we didn't want to leave. Historically. This year that number is probably up to like 4 out of 100. ROB: Yeah, that's turnover, but it's not a high turnover rate. It is managing what it is. It sounds like you have learned a lot along the way. As you think about lessons you've learned building ChoiceLocal, are there particular things you think of that you would wish to go back and tell yourself to do differently if you were able to? JOE: There's a whole host of things. One of the things I have as an advantage is I was a political science major, and I learned absolutely nothing in college that is useful to me today. [laughs] ROB: A beginner's mindset is what you're saying. [laughs] JOE: Yeah, exactly. There's this book called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, and there's so much truth to that. I was raised treat others the way you want to be treated, and that's how I've always operated. I've always brought that to what I do because I thought it's the right thing to do. But I've actually found it's an amazingly sound business strategy. What I'm going to say now may be a little bit controversial, but there's so much stuff that you learn in business school, like when you're getting your MBA and those types of things, and so much of that you need to throw out and ignore because it's trash. For example, you're a service-based business, so a person is not a commodity. A person is not a tool to be used. A person is not a KPI. They are a person with dignity, a person who has a family, a person who deserves to be cared about, loved, and appreciated. If you just do that and focus on that first, the business results tend to take care of themselves. But at the same point, KPIs are important. Accountability is important. Ensuring that you have that is critical. Knowing that you hire right for core values first and for performance second, but also critically important – all of that integrates really well, and those are really important things. The last thing, from a mistake that I made, that I'll say is there's a book called Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Else Smarter, and basically the premise of the book – and this happens for a lot of folks in agencies, particularly in leadership positions – how did you get successful? You got successful by busting your butt and being pretty smart about the way you do things. That's how you were successful. The weakness that comes with that is as you get a bigger team, you need to shut up, you need to ask questions, and you need to be humble. That's the next level. And that book, for me, as I was evolving and growing as a leader, taught me those skills. It played a really important role, and now it's something I believe in so strongly. I met with a future VP of our organization who's probably going to get promoted to a VP very, very shortly, and I said, “Read this book. Take it to heart and do it.” Then I said, “Here's all the stupid things that I did, and here's how this book helped me.” ROB: You start to pull apart some pieces, many questions come to mind. I start to think about – clearly, when you talk about future VP, there's some planning there. There's still some awareness of individuals in your organization, even though at 100 people, it starts to get hard to know everyone. Especially when some people aren't even coming in one day a week, possibly. It's an interesting mix. I think this probably had to be intentional for you as well – building up the leadership team. What are the pieces you've put in place at different stages in the business to build around you to be your best, but also to help the company be its best, maybe where you aren't? JOE: Hire generous people, people that love helping other people be successful. If you have people on your leadership team that don't believe that, don't have them on your leadership team. And if you don't believe that, work on it. [laughs] It's so critical. You need to hire generous people, surround yourself with generous people. It's funny; I was like, we're the world's best at marketing for franchise systems, world's best at franchise development, consumer marketing for franchising; we're the world's best at recruiting for franchise systems. Why don't we just own a franchise system? So, we launched a separate franchise system, hired a guy who led another franchise system to $750 million in network revenue to be the CEO of it. And he believes what we believe. What attracted him to us first and foremost – and he's got an amazing track record in franchising – was our values. He's a generous person. He believes in integrity. He believes in accountability and performance at the same time. So, you've got to find people that believe that and have those competencies. The other thing I'll say is it's important, if you're hiring somebody to lead a business, that they understand that business. You can do it and you can be successful if you don't understand it inside and out, but it's way harder. If you can find people with the right values but also who have worked at different levels in that industry over the course of their career, they can understand the strengths and weaknesses of various decisions, and when you make a decision, how it affects people in different parts of the organization or what you're actually asking and what it entails to make it happen. Which tends to result in better decisions being made, better business performance, less mistakes. Those are the types of things that you really look for. ROB: What franchise business have you got yourself into, then, now? JOE: The name of it is Broadview Dental Group. Our vision is to be the largest provider of dental care in the United States within 10 years. We have some aggressive plans, but I am very confident that we're going to be able to pull it off. ROB: And I've heard that some different models of roll-up franchise operating groups – I've heard they're taking the dental world kind of by storm. The independent dentist is starting to dry up a little bit. Are you seeing that? Is that part of the move? JOE: Yes, it is, and it's sad. What's ended up happening – there actually is one other franchise system in the dental space. I wouldn't call it a real franchise system. That sounds arrogant. I don't mean it that way. But if you look at how franchise systems typically operate, where they basically have some sort of buy-in and then some sort of royalty, it's set up very different with the buy-in being extremely, extremely, extremely high. It's different. But if you look at most of them, they're called DSOs or DPOs, and what they basically do is a dentist is like “Hey, I want to get my practice to the next level.” Then these DSOs or DPOs, which are typically funded by venture capital – this isn't always the case, but typically with venture capital, they care about one thing, which is maximizing shareholder wealth. They'll say, “Okay, you want to take your business to the next level? Sign here. We get 70% equity in your business up to 90% over time, and we can fire you if we want to, and we'll help get your business to the next level.” When you're a dentist and you're passionate about helping others and you're passionate about your practice and your trade, you basically just need a really good business mentor, and most dentists really haven't had it. So what we're doing is giving them 100% equity in their own business, a way to get to the point where they can have 4.5 times the profit of a typical dental practice and only have to work three days a week to do it, and all they need to do is follow our system. And they own 100% of their business. They can sell it when they want to, and when they sell it, they'll sell it for a higher multiple because guess what? In franchising, when you sell your business when you're ready to retire, it's worth more because it's a franchise system and it's proven. There's less risk involved. ROB: Right, it's not (Your Name) Dentistry. It is part of an umbrella. There's brand equity there, there's a system. They don't have to figure it all out. One of my college roommates, his dad was in the dental world, and when you mentioned the high fee to buy in – he always told me dentists like to buy expensive things, so I guess the franchise must be one of those things, just priced for the market, I suppose. When we look ahead to what's next for ChoiceLocal, what's next for marketing in the franchising world, Joe, what are you seeing? What are you excited about for the firm, for what is going to be necessary for your clients to continue as the marketing world evolves? What are you seeing? JOE: There's so much exciting growth ahead. One of the things that I love about being an agency that focuses on ROI and provable results is every time there's an economic downturn, it's good for the agency growth and it's good for your customers. What happens is when there's an economic recession, which I believe we're headed into – we have horrible inflation and there's certain policies that have to be implemented to bring it under control, and the result of that is going to be a recession. What happens in those cases is companies tend to pull back in marketing. But if you're driving marketing where for every dollar they spend, you're giving them $18 in new customer revenue, it's stupid not to spend that. You can grow through the downturn. You can take market share. Imagine putting a dollar in the stock market and getting $18 back within a year. It's a brilliant investment. It's a simple investment. So, what's going to end up happening is that's going to accelerate growth within agencies that are ROI-focused as this economic recession hits, and for however long it hits for. That's exciting. But what I'm also excited about in the newer leading-edge things within agencies is the ability for big data backed with artificial intelligence to transform marketing, to transform business, and frankly to transform medicine. I was talking with the COO of ChoiceLocal, who serves a role with Broadview as well, and we're like, who ever thought that two internet marketers would fundamentally change healthcare and dental care in the U.S.? You'd be like, “Explain that.” It's the same thing you do in marketing with big data. If you have a massive amount of data in a HIPAA compliant way, you can anonymize it, data mine it, and find correlations and causations and literally, with that type of patient data pool, you can change medicine. Similarly, you can do the same thing with marketing, where you can data mine, you can find ways to micro-target ideal customers based on who current ideal customers are – and you may not even know what some of those things are – and then you can target them and measure the performance and lift. That's crazy cool stuff. And that's the newer leading-edge stuff that's really exciting, particularly when you're dealing with franchise systems and the volume that's behind that. ROB: Right. You've got volume there, you've got a growing scale in the business. To think about leveraging it for more than just “Hey, we're bigger” – lots of interesting things there. Joe, when people want to find and connect with you and with ChoiceLocal, where should they go to find you? JOE: They can go to choicelocal.com. Everything is there. They can follow ChoiceLocal on pretty much every social media channel that exists @ChoiceLocal. So they can do that. They can follow me personally on Twitter @helpothersjoe or connect with me on LinkedIn. I try to post a lot of content there that's specific to purpose-driven business, which is a huge passion of mine, as well as franchising and marketing as well. So yeah, @helpothersjoe on Twitter is for me personally. ROB: That's excellent. Joe, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for sharing your experiences. Congratulations on what you've built so far and why you're building it. I think everyone listening has enjoyed the depth in the origin of the business and the intentionality as you build it. JOE: Thanks, Rob. Thanks for all you've done and thanks for having me on today. It really is a great pleasure. Really appreciate you. ROB: All right, appreciate you. Take care. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Daddin' out & taking a hiatus with Joe Howard

Open Threads

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 20, 2022 24:33

Joe Howard joins me to talk all about Daddin' out & taking a hiatus“The reason I like got into startups was like, I wanted control over my own time. I never liked this idea of this job you like work eight hours a day.” - Joe HowardWatch this episode on YouTubeIn this conversation:Joe Howard:Joe's Company: Driftly AppJoe on Twitter: @JosephHHowardBrian Casel:Brian's company, ZipMessageBrian on Twitter: @casjamThanks to ZipMessageZipMessage (today's sponsor) is the video messaging tool that replaces live calls with asynchronous conversations. Use it for free or tune into the episode for an exclusive coupon for Open Threads listeners.Quotes from this episode:Quote 01:Joe: A lot of people are nervous to travel with a kid that young especially today when he is not vaccinated yet. And, you know, there's still the risk of COVID.Well, what we did was we traveled places and stayed for long periods.Yeah, we weren't on like a flight every week. We weren't going backpacking through Southeast Asia. You know, we're going to places with good health care, with good, you know, Internet access and staying there for enough time to get a home base there so we could get a little help with child care so that we could form our lives in a safe in the safest way as possible. Obviously, like in Mexico, we're flying down to Mexico. So, mask up the distance in the airport trying to go in family bathrooms where there aren't like a million toilets flushing. You know, it's like there are thingsthat you can do to minimize your risk. And then once we got there, honestly, like living our lives as same as we did in D.C.and being as safe as possible.Brian: That's great.Quote 02:Joe: Everyone is going to develop at a different stage, right? Every kid. Yup. At two, he was starting to like chatter, and now he's like, pronounce certain things correctly. Like, like, like a full sentence, like sentences.Brian: I remember there's a phase in the twos where they start to verbalize but there's good like six months there were only the parents can understand what, what they're saying and everyone else thinks.Joe: It's like, yeah, before I was a parent, I was like, that's such bullshit. Like that. You don't know what they're saying. Like, you do. Yeah, come on.Brian: The parents know every word, like, six months before everyone else can hear it.Joe: That's right. Like, all the time you hear these repeated words Yeah. It's funny because my wife and I were both so there are a couple of things, and he says, we're like, What? What are you talking about? Like, what is that?Quote 03:Joe: That idea of like taking six months off was always really appealing to me because like the last generations as they worked for 30 or 40 years and they took retirement at the end. Brian: Yeah, Joe: And people have heard this before. Like, that's just not I'm not into that. Like, I want to enjoy like right now, like, I need, I want to enjoy part of our retirement right now.Joe: Like, why would you why would I wait? Unless I really enjoyed working on what I was doing. Like, I'm like you. I would, I would probably keep working if I was really enjoying it. But and now I've found that in Driftly, right? So, like, now I'm on this path again. I'm like, here we go. I forgot to shower today.I must really be looking, but I'm working on it now, so I totally get that day-to-day. People ask me this all the time because I, like, listen to the starts, the rest of it all the time. It's like most people don't want to like, you know, hang out and just sit on a beach after they're done with, you know, a semi-successful venture.I'm at the beach right now. I've been at the beach for six months, so I do enjoy the beach I don't think there's anything, anything to do with that. But I filled up my day, did a lot of reading, and did a lot of listening to podcasts. I did a lot of cooking. I spent a lot of time not just with my family but like working on my like role in my family.

covid-19 interview internet entrepreneur mexico travel design lifestyle startups software saas southeast asia quotes hiatus bootstrapping joe it brian yeah joe howard

Bilingual Audition Challenge Winners Interview

VO BOSS Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 31, 2022 50:55

After holding the first ever #VOBOSS Bilingual Audition Challenge, Anne & Pilar welcome the winners onto the show. Joe Lewis, Milena Benefiel, and Ramesh Mahtani share the process behind their winning entry, what stood out to Anne & Pilar when judging the contest as well as what it means to be a bilingual voice talent in today's industry. Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Pilar: Hola, BOSS Voces. Bienvenidos al podcast con Anne Ganguzza y Pilar Uribe. Anne: Hey, hey. Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and today we have a very, very special episode planned for you. Not only am I here with my awesome special guest co-host Pilar Uribe -- woohoo Pilar! Pilar: Hi, Anne. Anne: Thanks for being here. We are so honored to be here with our VO BOSS bilingual audition challenge winners. So a huge welcome to our English audition winner, Joe Lewis. Yay! Joe: Hello. Ramesh: Hello, Joe. Anne: And our Spanish audition winner -- Pilar: Milena Benefiel. Anne: Yay! Hey Milena. Milena: Hi. Anne: And then our best English and Spanish audition, Ramesh Mahtani. Yay! So first of all, congratulations, everybody, on your wins. Joe: Thank you. Milena: Thank you, gracias. Ramesh: Gracias. Anne: It's very exciting. For those BOSSes that are just joining us and have not joined us before now, Pilar and I ran a bilingual audition challenge contest, which featured a Toyota commercial in both English and Spanish. And this was about, I'm gonna say, three to four weeks ago, and we had a number of submissions. I think it was over what, Pilar, like 130 or something like that? Pilar: Yeah. Anne: Or close to 130. Pilar: Yeah. Anne: And so first of all, everybody did a wonderful job, but we are so, so incredibly excited to have the winners with us today to talk about being bilingual in the industry today and what it takes. So let's start with our English winner, Mr. Joe Lewis. Yay, Joe. Joe, tell us a little bit about yourself and then I wanna play your winning audition. Joe: Okay. Well thank you for having me here. First of all, it's great to be with you all. I am a bilingual voiceover and voice actor, born in the US, Spanish father, American mother. And basically I've been back and forth in the States to Spain and from Spain to the States at different points of my life. And it's been a trip or several trips. You learn to adapt where you are and you do as the Romans do. And you learn a lot of stuff because you have to leverage two cultures, two languages. It's a thing. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, let's play your winning audition. And I wanna tell you a little bit about the specs. Our specs indicated that the voice should be confident, knowledgeable, optimistic, never take themselves too seriously, but at the same time, never come off as sarcastic either, warm human down to earth, playful spontaneous, conversational, relatable, and above all else, nothing that is typical commercial sounding, movie trailer, or announcery at all. So. Milena: All the things, all the things. Anne: All the things. Pilar: In other words, the kitchen sink. Anne: All the things. Totally. And I want to give a big shout out to the queen bee herself, Liz Atherton, and CastVoices for her sponsoring this contest and offering our winners a year pro membership to CastVoices. You guys, castvoices.com, go and get yourself an account. Liz is amazing and always has the voice talents' backs. I'll tell you what, she's amazing. So thank you Liz for that. So let's go ahead and play the warm, human, down to earth, playful, not typical commercial sounding, movie trailer or announcery English winning submission by Joe. Here we go. Joe: Beep. Beep. That is the sound of me signaling that this is a car commercial while being considerate of the fact that you may be on the road. It's exactly this kind of consideration that lets you know, you can trust Toyota and our all new 2022 Highlander SUV to get you where you need to be faster and more reliably. Beep beep beep beep beep. Oops. Sorry. I think my burrito's done. Anne: I love it. Joe: Thank you. Anne: I think that that really took every single spec into consideration. Joe, did you have any particular strategy when you were doing this audition or what is it that you do to prepare for an audition? Because we had so many submissions, but yours just kind of really stood out from the get-go. Joe: Well, thank you so much for that. I really appreciate it. As far as strategy, if it's automotive, I take it extra seriously because it's a big genre. So no matter what it is, even if it's a dealership, you know, it could turn into a long-term gig. So you take it seriously. It's always a challenge, uh, to see if it's a soft sell or if it's a harder sell, more promotional. At the same time, as you say, there's lot to consider in the styles or the trends that we work with today, uh, which are very different from 10, 15, 20 years ago. And that's as far as in general or as far as English. As far as Spanish, obviously my origin is of Castilian Spanish, uh, from Spain. So knowing that this would be for the American market, I tried to modulate that and go to a more neutral read and, and taking the specs into consideration as much as I could and have fun, have fun with it. Anne: Yeah. I think that's so important that you have fun with it. Pilar, comments about why we love Joe so much. Pilar: Listening to it again, I think what, what I really liked about it, this is probably not the right word. It wasn't folksy, but I really felt like I was listening to you, and I was listening to a real person rather than somebody reading it. Anne: Yeah, I agree. Pilar: Like, and just the small pauses, the little giggle -- there were some amazing entries, but what I found so interesting about yours was that you had this attitude from the beginning. You weren't serious, and then you went to the punchline. You had this sort of upbeat throughout the entire read. That's what really stood out for me. Anne: Yeah. Really, really warm smile, I think overall. Joe: Thank you so much. Anne: I just felt like. Pilar: Yeah, yeah. Anne: I felt like we were just longtime friends, which we are, but listening to, I felt like we were, and it really, really stood out from the beginning. So congratulations, Joe, again -- Joe: Thank you so much. Anne: -- on that. Joe: I appreciate it. Anne: So onto our winner in the Spanish division, Milena. Milena: Hi. Anne: Tell us a little bit about yourself and where you're located and your VO journey so far. Milena: All right. Well Saludos, hola, hi. Milena Benefiel. I am currently located in Orlando, well, near Orlando, Florida. I am the first generation born here in the US. Both of my parents came over from Cartagena, Colombia, woohoo and they insisted that I learned Spanish as a child, and I never understood why. Why would I ever need this other language? And look at me now, right? My background was actually in television. I worked part-time as a TV host for a Telemundo affiliate in Spanish and did a lot of commercial acting while also being an ER nurse and ICU nurse. I came from entrepreneurial parents who had multiple careers, multiple jobs, 'cause they had to, right, coming from another country. So I don't know how to not have too much on my plate. So this was kind of my side hustle. And after COVID I, I took it from part-time to full-time. I, I was kind of burnt out in the hospital, and yeah, I had the ability to go from sounding very middle America English, as you can hear in my, in my accent to speaking [Spanish] speaking in Spanish that's very neutral. It kind of like people are like, are you Colombian or Cuban or from where? So I've been very fortunate in that that I've been able to provide both sides for my clients. So it's been a really fun journey. Ramesh: Super. Anne: Yeah. Let's have a listen to the winning entry. Here we go. Milena: Bip bip. Ese es el sonido que uso para señalar que este es un comercial de autos mientras que usted podría estar conduciendo en la carretera. Este tipo de servicio es lo que le permite saber que puede confiar en Toyota y en nuestra nueva SUV Highlander 2022 para que se transporte de un lugar a otro de la manera más rápida y confiable. Bip bip bip bip bip. Vaya, lo siento, creo que mi burrito está listo. Yay! Ramesh: Super. Anne: Congratulations again, such a wonderful, warm sound. That's what I really got. And I love how, when we said have fun with this or somebody that doesn't take themselves too seriously, I really felt that in the places where you could -- it opened up to have fun, the more conversational like, "oops, I think my burrito's done." I love the way that you guys brought life to that and brought fun to that that wasn't even as expected. Pilar, your thoughts, Pilar: You had me from the beginning Milena. This was to me displayed so much warmth and reassurance. I felt like when I listen to it, you're taking me by the hand, and you're reassuring me as a consumer that it's gonna be okay. And it's like, oh yeah, I'll do whatever she says. Milena: Wow. PIlar: So that's what I got from this read. It was really, yeah, it was, it was really good read. You just, you got me. Milena: Oh my goodness. Thank you so much. I am so grateful for that feedback. That's kind of my MO when it comes to anything that I do in VO. I just, I, I wanna be warm and caring and reassuring. That's kind of my, my thing. So that you heard that feels so good because it makes me feel like, wow, okay. I'm, I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. So thank you so much. Anne: I wanna kind of tag on to what Pilar said. Like for me, I do not speak Spanish, but I could hear the story. If I listen, I could hear your story in there. And when we talk about trusting Toyota, I felt that, and I really felt that you took the words beyond just what was on the page, and really you were in the scene. And like I said, for me to not even speak Spanish but to listen and to be able to hear your storytelling, I thought that that was, that was just really wonderful. So yeah. Milena: Wow. Thank you so much. Such a huge compliment from two women that I admire very much. So this is a very surreal moment for me. So thank you so much. Anne: well deserved. Well deserved. Milena: Thank you. Anne: Okay. So onto our English Spanish combination winner. Ramesh Mahtani yay. Congratulations. Ramesh, tell us a little bit -- Ramesh: Well, thank you very much. Anne: Yeah. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey. Ramesh: Yeah, well, I suppose like most of us over here, very, very varied background. I mean, I was born in Karachi, Pakistan to Indian parents who perhaps were a bit disgruntled with the way things were going out over there, and they decided to move to the Canary Islands. Why, I have no idea, but that takes me back to when I was about four. So I came over here to the islands, speaking a combination of Sindi, of Hindi, of Urdu. Of course I had to learn Spanish rather quickly. And my parents always wanted me to speak English because they knew that English is the lingua franca, and you wouldn't get anywhere in the world without it. So I grew up in an American school over here in the canaries, and I was shipped off to a horrible concentration camp sort of boarding school in England, which was a nightmare. Um, I would spend four long miserable years there, which is I suppose, where I picked up the sort of vestige of an English accent. And then I went to America to do my university degree, which was a lot of fun. And I saw what the real world was like. And I didn't, I suppose, switch on to the American accent because wherever I spoke to were like, oh my God, your accent's so cool. Where are you from? Well, I'm originally from -- Oh my God. Keep on speaking. We just love your accent. So, um, no, I didn't pick up an American accent, I suppose. I just veered towards what, what I call international or neutral. So that's my story. And in voice, I I've always played around with my voice. I love switching accents between -- I speak to my parents with a bit of an -- well, my mom. My father passed away -- with an Indian accent. So it changes depending who I talk to, if it is very strong Indian community, well, it becomes Indian, otherwise it's what I speak now. And then of course, in Spanish and English and French and all these sort of, you know, weird voices going on in my head, it was but natural that I followed a voice over career. So that's what brings me here today, basically. Anne: Wow. Well now you did something interesting with your auditions. You did two takes for both English and Spanish. And so one of the things that stood out to Pilar and I were the fact that you did two different takes for each. And so let's go ahead and play now. Um, I'm gonna click on this one. I'm not sure if this is the English or the Spanish. So hang on one second because the name is, is long. So it's kind of running off my little table here. Ramesh: Sure. Anne: It could be either one. Let's put it that way. There we go. Ramesh: Beep. Beep. That is the sound of me signaling that this is a car commercial while being considerate of the fact that you may be on the road. It's exactly this kind of consideration that lets you know, you can trust Toyota and our all new 2022 Highlander SUV to get you where you need to be faster and more reliably. Beep beep beep beep beep. Oops. Sorry. I think my burrito's done. Beep. Beep. That is the sound of me signaling that this is a car commercial while being considerate of the fact that you may be on the road. It's exactly this kind of consideration that lets you know, you can trust Toyota and our all new 2022 Highlander SUV to get you where you need to be faster and more reliably. Beep beep beep beep beep. Oops. Sorry. I think my burrito's done. Anne: I love it. I wanna just make some comments before we played your Spanish entry. I thought, first of all, you had two completely different takes, and now I understand where the accent came from because you were living in the UK. So I get that now. I was not aware of that, but I really loved it because it really wasn't something that felt to me like it was obviously forced or something that wasn't natural to you. And the fact that you did completely different reads shows just some tremendous acting ability, which I think is any good casting director that can hear that knows immediately that they would be able to direct you to do anything really. And so that was, I thought was really strong about your English entry. And I also liked you had a different reaction and a different emotion about the burrito, which stood out to me, even though it was like a nuanced change. You're like, oh I think my burrito's done. Or Ooh, I think my burrito's done. It really lent a lot to the different reads and the different aspects and the showcasing of your acting abilities. Pilar. Pilar: Yeah. I felt like you were talking to two different people in the two different reads and that was really significant. And it's funny because I didn't realize it, but they were two different accents, and I was like, they sounds so different, and it's, it's like, oh yeah, duh, because he's so versatile. But that also colored the read because one was a little bit more business-like. The other one was a little bit sort of more off the cuff, more warm. And so it was really interesting to see them together, but they are very different reads, so yeah, that's great. Ramesh: Well, thank you. Thank you very much. I suppose one of the underlying elements is that I try and make sure that I'm not trying to sell in this case, sell the car, but just say, tell the story, uh, as something that we will often talk about in voiceover direction. As soon as it sounds sort of salesy, you know, you're going the wrong direction. So spice it up, you know, conjure up some magic, just make it sound as if as Pilar said, you know, you're just basically off the cuff having a conversation with someone, without sell, buy this car sort of thing, you know, which we definitely do not want to go there. Anne: And you know, I don't know if you guys noticed, but in the middle of that script, the sentences were a little bit long. You know how we always get a script and if it's a really lovely, wonderfully written script, we're like, oh yes, it's so easy to voice. We gave you something specifically that may not have been so easy to voice in navigating a long sentence. So. Ramesh: Ah, you did it purposely. Anne: Yeah. All of you handled that so well, so kudos on that. I mean, I'm used to doing that because you do a lot of long format narration and coaching my students, there's always unwieldy sentences. And to make it sound truly conversational and you know, as if you're talking to one person or talking to us, you gotta know your rhythm, you gotta kind of know, you gotta put yourself in the scene and understand where those pauses, where the commas are, even if they don't exist. Ramesh: Yeah. I realize, I thought, my gosh, who's written this, because it is, there was a part where it got really wordy and thought, you know, you have to navigate that. Pilar: Those were the traps and none of you fell into it. Anne: Yes. You know, we are teachers . Exactly. Yes. Always a teacher, just saying so, so congratulations. All right. So let's play, uh, the Spanish entry, which again, you did two reads, which were different. So here we go. Ramesh: Soy Ramesh Mahtani. Bip bip. Ese es el sonido que uso para señalar que este es un comercial de autos mientras que usted podría estar conduciendo en la carretera. Este tipo de servicio es lo que le permite saber que puede confiar en Toyota y en nuestra nueva SUV Highlander 2022 para que se transporte de un lugar a otro de la manera más rápida y confiable. Bip bip bip bip bip. Vaya, lo siento, creo que mi burrito está listo. Bip bip. Ese es el sonido que uso para señalar que este es un comercial de autos mientras que usted podría estar conduciendo en la carretera. Este tipo de servicio es lo que le permite saber que puede confiar en Toyota y en nuestra nueva SUV Highlander 2022 para que se transporte de un lugar a otro de la manera más rápida y confiable. Bip bip bip bip bip. Vaya, lo siento, creo que mi burrito está listo. Anne: Yay. Ramesh: I suppose I'll just caveat, uh, the accent there. I mean like Joe, I live in Spain and sometimes if my client's in mainland Spain, I would do a Castilian accent, but I put on a sort of neutral and general Latin American accent for those, which is similar to the Canarian accent. Anne: Yeah. I was gonna just ask you about that. And one thing that I wanted to point out, which I thought was super strategic, because you did the two takes, you immediately went into your second take to call the attention of like -- Pilar and I listened like, oh my gosh, I think it took us a weekend, right, at least, uh, one after the other one after the other. Pilar: Several times too. Anne: Exactly. And the fact that even though, I didn't know, you were having two takes immediately going into that second take was like brilliant because I didn't stop listening. You know, I was just getting ready. Okay. He's finished -- oh no, here he comes with the next one, which I thought was really strategic. And I think if I know you, Ramesh, that was on purpose Ramesh: Would it have been the alternative to have said, take one? Pilar: No. Most people leave a space. Anne: A lot of space. Yeah. Pilar: You don't let the listener down for a second. There's no lag time. Ramesh: Right. Pilar: And that is brilliant. I mean, I'm using that in my auditions now as well. Ramesh: Okay. I've I've always done it that way. Anne: That's smart. Ramesh: I, I seldom send off an audition unless I do two. Pilar: It's wonderful. Ramesh: I usually always do two takes. Anne: Yeah. Ramesh: And I just do them back to back. So as you said, so they don't have a chance to hit the next button. Yeah. Milena: I typically call it out in my slate if I'm going, do two takes, which -- Anne: And that's good too. Milena: -- for most auditions I would do two. Yeah. But I like this. You give them no choice. Give 'em no choice. Anne: Right, right. Just go right into it. I love it. And you went right into that second character too, which I thought was great for that. Now did you have a strategy English versus Spanish? I know you just mentioned that you did more of a neutral Spanish. What was your strategy for those two different reads? Ramesh: For the two Spanish reads? Anne: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Ramesh: Um, just, just variation really. Anne: Yeah. Ramesh: I mean, I just, I would loathe for them to sound similar so the director would've said, ah, you know, this guy's obviously reading the same thing twice in the same way. I, I just do not wanna fall in that trap. So whatever I could do to spice it up or color it to just make them sound different and believable, relatable and conversational, keeping away from the salesy. Anne: Sure. So then let me ask you what's happening in your brain? What's happening? What's the process? Are you putting yourself in a different scene maybe? Ramesh: I've got a different audience and I'm somebody else. Anne: Okay. Ramesh: So either I'm a young sort of rich, youthful sort of business dude, or I'm an older person just wanting to sort of have a nice car. So I, my whole persona changes, maybe it helps being a Gemini. I could switch from one, from one personality to the other, but yeah, definitely. I've gotta change the audience and change the speaker. Both of them. Anne: Oh good. That's a really good tip. I like that. I've always changed the scene, but not necessarily who I was, because I always wanna be conversational and, and tell this story and, and not be salesy as well, but I never thought about changing, let's say I'm a younger Anne, which that would be nice. I like that. Milena: Your voice can be as young as you wanna be. Anne: That's it. There you go. Yeah. I like that. Ramesh: I guess ever since I was a young kid and, and having been moved around so many different places, I perhaps, and this is for something very personal and intimate, and I, and now that it comes up in context, I don't mind sharing it, but I've, I've often struggled to have a proper identity as an -- sometimes I don't even know who I am because I've had to switch and I do often switch, you know, when I speak, as I said, I speak to my mom, I speak to in an Indian sort of way. I speak to the local Canarian dudes out in the street and become totalmente canario; it's a totally different accent. So I'm always switching, switching, switching, switching in the end, to think, you know, oh my gosh, existential crisis, you know, who am I? Anne: That's a, that's really an interesting point. Yeah. Joe: You're a chameleon, Ramesh. Ramesh: I'm a bit of a chameleon. Anne: Absolutely. Ramesh: I'm not Spanish and I'm not English, you know? So it's really weird. Anne: That's very interesting. I always equate that, and again, I'll get maybe a little into it, but I grew up with three brothers. And so being the only girl in the family, I didn't have to share necessarily, but I also didn't have like a sister to kind of like play dolls with or whatever I was gonna be doing. Milena: Same. Anne: So I got really good at my imagination. Ramesh: Yeah. Anne: And playing with my dolls and teaching and talking to them and really putting myself in different scenes with them. And I think that carries through the adulthood. Right, Milena, you mentioned the same thing? Milena: Oh yeah, absolutely. I didn't have a sister growing up. And I also just think like with my parents having the multiple jobs, they were both performers. My whole life has been a performance, and I kind of do the same in my two takes. I go into my lower register in that warm, buttery, soft, like my first take will be -- or exactly what the specs ask for, I'll give you in the first take, and then the next one, I'll kick it up to a little bit of a higher pitch, make myself a little bit younger and I'll be a little wackier, like a little more fun, a little more conversational, and just get a little more crazy with it. Just to add some adlibs and some different things too, just for range. Anne: I think that's great. Do you have more than two personas? I always have two in my pocket, but do you spend time developing, let's say, a third read or a third persona that can give you a different read? I think that's good for the artist in us. Joe: I mean, I, what captivated me about this piece was the invitation to do effects. You don't usually see that in copy, so I thought that was like, ooh, this is gonna be fun. Anne: Yeah. Joe: And then I tried to add layers, do several takes and sort of warm up and then listen to them and see if I can be sprinkling, uh, or adding something. But I do agree that when you kick into another language, it's another dimension of tools and, and tricks that you have. I wasn't privileged to have brothers or sisters. So being lucky enough to grow up with a, a parent of either side, you know, you, you kind of take it for granted when you're a kid, and then you, you grow up and you're like, wow, this is pretty powerful to switch on and off, switch the languages, you know, with all the cultural and the contextual things that come along with each particular one. Totally there with Ramesh on the strange dichotomy that happens and not really knowing who you are or when it's the, uh, what secret service did you say you worked for again? Pilar: No, comment. Milena: I love how he's silent. He's like -- Joe: He's a pro. Milena: If I tell you I'll have to kill you. Ramesh: Well, sorry. Did I, did I talk about a secret service? Joe: I was asking you what secret service you work for, my friend. Anne: I love it. Milena: Crickets, crickets. Anne: Crickets. Secret service. Pilar: Speaking of which, that was one of the things that really struck me about Ramesh's Spanish read is that I heard someone speaking in Spanish with the Spanish language rhythms rather than a translation. And that to me was so important because that not being your first language, and I think that that's really important because like Milena, I mean, I was born in this country, but my parents spoke to me for the first five years of my life in Spanish, but it's technically not the language that, you know, I speak English all the time. So there's something, there's always that strange sort of divide. Like who are you? Are you this? Are you that? And what I really liked about your read was that it was like, I was listening to a Spanish person speaking, not a translation. And that's so important. Everyone is always so concerned with the accent. That really kind of falls by the wayside. Because if you believe in what you're saying, and it has to do with acting, if you're really acting it, how well you speak or how much of an accent you have doesn't really matter. It all falls by the wayside. So that's what to me, what made a very successful bilingual audition. And that's why we picked you, one of the reasons why we picked you as the bilingual audition winner. Ramesh: Oh, thank you. I'm privileged. Thank you very much. Anne: And again, I'll just kind of tack onto what Pilar was saying is both of the Spanish versions of your audition, I could hear the story that you were telling. And again, I listened very carefully, especially in the unwieldy sentences, because that's what I do every day with my students. I'm working on these crazy, long format narration scripts that aren't always written well. And so I would really be listening carefully throughout all the entries for that navigation. And I still felt the story. I felt the rhythm, and I felt the words that needed to come be a little more present in my ear that were important, like the brand name, the fact that you trust Toyota on all of your reads. Believe it or not, listening to all of the entries, that was kind of a key I was listening for, to trust Toyota. And I wanna feel that trust as opposed to trust Toyota. And I really wanted to feel that little nuance of emotion or trust. And I think every single one of you in every one of your English and Spanish gave me that trust feeling and that warm feeling and that kind of having fun with it, especially at the end, and the beeps too. I mean, I like the fact that we gave this script out because of the beep beep and what people did with the beep beep was really telltale, especially in the beginning, if you did something that maybe wasn't a traditional beep beep or you had fun with it, or you just kind of smiled at yourself. I think Joe, you're, right off the bat, you're kind of chuckling a little bit and it just was so warm and I fell in love with that from the beginning and all of your interpretations of the beeping at the front end of that and the back end of that, I loved it. You know, you had fun with it like we asked in the specs. Joe: Well, I was just gonna say Road Runner, you know, I mean, it was irresistible to me. It was irresistible. Ramesh: Absolutely, absolutely. Milena: Yes, that's exactly what I pictured in my head too. Ramesh: Yeah. Milena: That's funny. Ramesh: I think after doing this for, I mean, you know, you're speaking to people who are super professionals. I have great respect for Joe and Milena and Pilar and yourself, Anne, of course. I mean, when you listen to somebody who's just started off and doesn't have much training, that's when you realize, oh my gosh, this is a poorly done audition. But after a while it just becomes intuitive, I think, plus the script lend itself, the beeps, the mic proximity that you can, the burrito whole thing. I mean, what does the burrito have to do with the car sale, for God's sake? So you can do so much with that. You know, you can just, as you said, have fun and the more imagination you have, and the more years of experience you have tucked under your belt, you can do crazy things within parameters, of course. I often don't overthink it because that's usually when it doesn't usually work. It's usually my first and my third take, which are good. Uh, the first one, because I'm just off the bat, I'm fresh and I'm just being really spontaneous. The second seems to be similar to the first ,and the third, usually I've had a bit more time to imagine nuances, and those come out quite magically. So, but yeah, the script was nice. It lent itself to, to having fun and being creative. Milena: I completely agree with that, the instincts, I know Anne, you had asked earlier, you know, what was your method? How did you attack this script? How did we look at the script? And I actually will do a read prior to even reading the specs, just to get my natural inclination of like, okay, I'm looking at the script without overthinking it. Let me just do a read. And then of course looking at the specs, and then kind of picking apart, you know, I listened back to my read and picking apart, what words do we wanna highlight? Like you said, trust, right? The brand, faster and safely, getting there fast and safely. Those are important things, right? Joe: Exactly. Milena: So then I go through with it, but I completely agree with Ramesh, it typically is my first read. And then maybe my third or my fourth. The second one always sounds like the first one, or it's like, so off the wall that it's like, why did I go totally left field on that one? But yeah. I completely agree with you, when you just go with those once you've been doing it for a while, when you try to be someone you're not, it's not authentic. Ramesh: Exactly. Milena: And you can hear it in your read. Joe: Yeah. By family tradition, my parents came from the academic and the publishing world. So script analysis, I put at the top of the list, you know, the top three, because the burrito for example was what invited me not to do it in Castilian. And that was my choice. I thought it was great that you did two takes of each, Ramesh. I, I shied away from the Castilian because I just wanted to have a burrito and, and that's Mexican, and I just -- and it's international by now., yes, but it's traditionally and originally Mexican. And I wanted, I wanted to go there. If you told any person in Spain, you know, burrito just stand alone, they might not get it. If it's contextual, they'll be, oh yeah, yeah, Taco Bell, you know, whatever, but, or Mexican restaurant, but that's, that's the reason I, I shied away from Castilian and I, I made an attempt at my best neutral Spanish. Milena: I had no choice. I don't do Castilian You don't wanna hear me trying to do Castilian accent. Anne: So that brings an interesting question, which I had asked of Pilar early on in our series, about when specs come in for Spanish, is there a strategy? Are specs clear? Do you sometimes have to say, well, is there a particular dialect that you're looking for? What do you guys do? Joe: First and foremost is the market. What market is it hitting? Because if it's a state, it's gonna be 99.9% neutral Spanish. It's very exceptional to do Castilian. I've spent many years living in Spain, and sometimes they call me to do Spanish and Catalan. And for many years they wanted an American accent, even though I don't really have one when I speak normally. So I, I had to kind of impose, impose an accent like this or something like that. You know, you know what I'm saying? Milena: I love it. Being in the US, I think it's kind of less of a question for me. I know Ramesh and Joe are overseas. For me here in the US, typically my specs are always gonna say either neutral Spanish or Latam Spanish, Latin American Spanish. That's 99%. I think I have gotten a couple auditions that have asked for Catalan or Castilian Spanish. And it's very rare, but I am pretty upfront with them that I'm like, you're not gonna be happy with my read, if you want me to try to pull one of those off. But yeah, I think for me over here in the States, it's almost always, it's gonna be neutral or, or Latin American Spanish, which is what I do. And I can put a little bit more of that Paisa, you know, Colombian accent on it, if they're asking specifically for Latin American, but yeah. Ramesh: I've had a very strange situation with many of my castings in Spanish. I've booked jobs. And then they come to me and say, you're not Spanish, are you? I said, they say, you sound very Spanish, but by your name, we had doubts. And a few times they're, they're brave enough to say that. Anne: Yeah. Ramesh: They're like, your name sounds Indian or Pakistani. I'm like, well, it is. What you want do about it? Milena: What you want? Ramesh: You bookedme. You, you booked me, you liked my audition, but are you just curious? You just wanna start a conversation over here? And, and I struggle with that. And the same thing with my English, like, oh, this guy's Indian. He probably, he doesn't have a proper English accent. I'm like, well, so I stopped trying to be very British at one point, and I said, well, I'm international English. I mean, what can I say? Yes, I'm Indian. I can't, I could change my name. And at one point I tried to go as Robert Martin, but I thought it just sucks. Joe: No, you should be Pepe Mahtani. Ramesh: Pepe Mahtani de las islas canarias... so, yeah. So that's another sort of strange one, but like Joe's, But I mean, I also do a lot of times they, they ask you to do a span with the English accent. So you have to do what they, what the client wants and you hope they're happy. Joe: You have to. You have to. Ramesh: You have to. Pilar: You have to. Ramesh: Yes. Milena: Oh my goodness. Ramesh: Without a doubt. Milena: Ramesh, that did strike me. Remember, our first conversation. That's what I said. I said, I'm completely blown away. As soon as I saw your name, I was like, well, he's not Spanish or American. [indistinct] Ramesh: No, I totally understandable, yeah. It's like, where are you from? [speaking Spanish] Milena: Cómo puede ser, pero no entiendo. [banter in Spanish] Joe: For me, it's the same, Joe Lewis. Right? You know, talking in Spanish, like, come on. This is -- Pilar: You could be José Luís. Joe: Ridiculous, ain't it? Milena: José Luís. Joe: José Luís, exacto. Ramesh: Whenever I speak to Joe, whenever I, the first thing I tell him, when we get on the phone is like, hello, Mr. Joe Lew-is. . Joe: I try to do my best Southeast Asian for Ramesh because I love him so much. Ramesh: Listen, all my white friends who try and do an Indian accent are just terrible at it. You guys suck big eggs because you cannot do an Indian accent. Even Mr. Peter Sellers, who I have great respect for in the movie "The Party," he also did not pull out a decent Indian accent. I'm sorry. It's crap. Joe: A thousand apologies. But I do -- I do this with, with love. I do this with love. I promise you. Ramesh: Joke around. Anne: Oh my goodness. Ramesh: You can joke around because we are good friends, but your Indian accent, I'm sorry, is not very convincing. Joe: Totally. Totally agreed. Anne: Oh my goodness. Well, you guys -- Milena: Friends don't let friends go around with terrible accents. Anne: There you go. There you go. Joe: Precisely. Anne: So I wanna ask each of you, what would be your best tip? Like how do you market yourself as -- like people that are coming in to the industry now, if they're bilingual, what best tips can you give us to market yourself as a bilingual voice talent? Joe: I've spent many years trying to equate both. I have them at the same level, both languages. It was a thing of responsibility. That's a big R word, responsibility. And this was instilled through my parents directly and indirectly. So I was very lucky with that. It all went astray when, uh, a number of years ago, I started to get requests from clients to do accents that are not my natural accents. Oh, I wait, are you sure? I'm like, yes, no, please. And then you do it and they love it. And like, Hmm, well, maybe there's something here. Maybe, maybe it's a thing. So you can never sleep in your laurels. You can never get too comfortable. You can never get too overconfident because it's like music. I come from music. It's ultimately unattainable. You're not gonna finish it. Just keep on pumping. That's what you can do. That's my best advice. Keep on pumping. Ramesh: 100%. Milena: I guess before this interview, we talked about this a little bit. I actually shied away from doing Spanish when I first started, despite me literally being on Telemundo, right? like having my own segment in Spanish. I always was a little bit insecure about my Spanish, and I would get requests to do things both English and Spanish, and producers kept telling me like, you've got something here. You've gotta do -- when you can offer both sides, it's more efficient. It's mutually beneficial for you and the client. You've really gotta push this. And I did. So I try to -- and I'm trying to get better at it -- I try to, when I'm posting things, say to social media, or, you know, whenever I'm doing things, I'm trying to do more showing the spots that I do in English and in Spanish so that people can see both sides, especially right now. There's this huge shift in the last few years here, that is this huge push for diversity, huge push for bilingualism, especially with Spanish in the US. And I don't know if you guys are seeing things over there too, or internationally, 'cause of course I just know here in the US, but there's this really big push. So I've been very, very fortunate in that everyone that I connect with, as soon as I mention that I'm bilingual, they then mention that to somebody else. So my biggest tip would be let people know. Don't do what I did for the first, you know, five years and shy away from that. Practice it. And if you don't feel as confident in that second language, which I didn't, start reading books out loud, watching movies, speaking -- I told my parents do not speak to me in English. We're speaking in Spanish, and I would read technical things so that it would be more difficult, you know, words that I didn't use in conversation, and just let people know, but plaster it everywhere and make sure everyone knows. Anytime I send an audition on say Voice 123, 'cause I do use that as a pay to play in addition to my agents and other things, anytime, even if it's an English audition only, I always, always, always write, hey, and if you ever think about hitting the Hispanic market, I also speak neutral Spanish. Please go to my website and here's my stuff. Even if it's only an English spot, I always let people know. And you know what? 50% of the time, they come back to me and say, you know what? We posted a separate for the Spanish. We'll just go with you for both of them. So whatever language that is that you're in, use it. And even if you don't think they'll ever use you in -- let people know, 'cause they're not gonna know unless you tell them, right? So that is my biggest piece of advice is just brag on yourself, man. Let 'em know. Joe: And if I may quote Jaco Pastorias, the great late bass player, it ain't bragging if you can back it up. Milena: Heyo. Ramesh: Absolutely. Anne: Ramesh, your thoughts? Ramesh: Yeah. Well, I think in my case, I was speaking to Joe about this actually a few, a few days back, it, it's very market specific. I mean I live in Spain and I don't really market myself to Spanish clients in Spanish, I suppose because I know there's, there's a whole plethora of Spanish voice artists here. Why would they necessarily go to me? So they come to me for English and as Milena said, once they come to me for English, then I'd bring out the Spanish. I'm like, here you go. I can do it in Spanish for you. Oh great. That saves us so much trouble and hassle finding somebody who can do it in Spanish. And likewise with international clients that I book in English, you know, I tell them I, I can do the Spanish, but I think you, as Milena said, you have to let it be known that you can do both and do whatever you're good at. If you're good at corporate, well, sell yourself at corporate and be even better at corporate, and then perhaps branch out to something that you may want to aspire to. If you wanted to do some animation in Spanish, you've never done that before, get coaching, but focus on your strengths and build your strengths and be really confident that my strong piece is this. And I can promote that openly and confidently, because confidence is, is 90% of the game. If they see that you say I can do Spanish for you as well. And you know, you don't have a belief in yourself, it's gonna seep through. I mean, I do French voicing, but I tell the clients, I'm not a native French speaker. I've got a very good accent, but it's not native. And I try and pull it off because I have confidence that I can do it. Joe: I totally agree. We don't read minds. And I, I was in a corporate multinational advertising agency for a while, and bilingualism in the States is a really important thing. I mean, I don't know what you think, Ramesh, if you agree with me, but for certain reasons, I think there's more of a bilingual ambient in the States than there is in Spain. 'Cause Spain is too busy with politics and they're busy with co-official languages. They're not dialects, they're official languages like Catalan, Gallego, or Galician and, and Basque. And the, the thing is that, uh, because of the way English is taught in Spain and, and because of dubbing, this is the reason why English is not a second nature, uh, language in Spain. So you always have to have client education in mind in the good sense to try to explain to them because they may not read your mind. They may not understand to what level you are in the other language. It's not easy. I mean, it's, we live in a world that is very multiplied because of social media. And you know, I see this from the musician standpoint, again, you know, the advent of pop star. You do a 3000 line casting. You, you get in, you're on TV, it's instant stardom. I mean, there's a lot of ways to get known really quickly and dramatically in this world. And a lot of people are strutting their stuff. So it's a complicated thing to market yourself effectively. It's not just marketing, and here I would like Anne to take over on the marketing thing because you're a master at this, but it's a really important question, what you ask. How do you market yourself in English and Spanish effectively and be taken seriously? You know? Anne: Well, I mean spoken by the guy who has the bilingualvoiceover guy.com, right? I mean me@thebilingualvoice -- so that I'll tell you, right in your URL, you're advertising, and you've got multiple URLs. And I know that, you know, all of you on your websites are focusing or you have the fact that you are bilingual. And I think that's number one, I mean, in this online world and Pilar, I know does an exorbitant amount of not just bilingual voiceover, but also dubbing. So Pilar, any specific, additional tips that we haven't talked about that maybe you could offer as advice to, let's say, bilingual voiceover talent that are coming into the industry now? Pilar: Um, well a lot has been said about it. When I first started in the industry, in voiceover, I was encouraged not to do a bilingual voiceover demo for example by a very, very well known coach here that Anne and I both know who shall remain nameless who said, absolutely. You never mesh the two together. Milena: I've been told that too. Pilar: You have Spanish on one side and English on the other. So I did, not with them. And so then I, I was like, okay. So I went with somebody else. I did it, Spanish, English, fine. And then I thought, no, I'm gonna go ahead and do a bilingual voiceover demo. And I did, and that is one that's booked me so many jobs. The other one is really good. The other two that I did, the Spanish and English and it, my agents prefer me separating them. So that's fine. But the Spanglish one is what has booked me so many jobs. And so for somebody starting out, I think it's just important to keep at it, just to keep putting yourself out there. And also you never know what the client's gonna ask. I just, I find it so hysterical that I get booked for something. We'll do it in English. We'll do it in Spanish. And then they'll say, well, can you just give us a little accent? I'm like, you're kidding, right? And I don't have an accent in either. I mean, in Spanish, I always think I do, but I don't. I know I don't, it's just, it's so minuscule, but they're like, can you just make it a little bit more for us? And then in English, can you just give us a little bit more, a little thicker? I'm like, okay, fine. If that's what the client wants, that's what the client gets. So I think that the key is to be elastic and to say, yes, I can do this. I can do this. Never say no. A lot of times I've come up against artists who sit there, and they say, oh, well, I passed on that because I can't do it. And I was like, well, why can't you do it? Well, I didn't, I didn't think I could. Well, if you don't think you can, then you're not gonna be able to. Right. Exactly. So always be available and let the person who is casting see if you're right for it or not. And you know, keep putting yourself out there, no matter what. Milena: I wanted to ask, 'cause this is the question that I have and I think maybe some that are coming in would appreciate an answer to this -- in the US, the majority of my buyers are speaking English, right, whether they want Spanish or not. Now I do work with buyers that speak Spanish, but the majority of them are in English. So I've struggled with the decision to make my website, do a Spanish website, all Spanish website, or just an all English website. So I've chosen to do an all English website that says I'm bilingual and I'm gonna have an about me page that's just in Spanish, just my about me page. And I just wanted to get your feedback on that, 'cause I think that's a question that a lot of people have coming in as well. Like do I need to have these two separate entities like I have for my demos? Or like I said, for me, the majority of my buyers speak English regardless whether their client is or they -- their primary language may be Spanish, but my buyers are usually in English. Pilar: So this might sound a little radical. Milena: I like it. Anne: Already. Pilar: I'm not thinking about who my buyers are. I'm thinking about me. And if I go, and I did this, 'cause I had two separate websites 'cause I actually followed what this person said to me at first, and I had an English website and I had a Spanish website. And all that does is dilute you. That does nothing for your SEO, does nothing for the persona. And if you're talking about branding, for me, this did not work. It might work for other people, but I just park everything in one place and I have different categories. That's just me. Milena: Perfect. I like it. Pilar: And that has worked better. I think it's worked better in consolidating everything because at one time I had like three different websites. It was just crazy. And it just diluted -- Milena: It's a lot to manage. Yeah. Pilar: Exactly. Joe: I mean, Milena, you could put a tab -- you could have your website in English and then put a little tab of in Spanish and then they can click, and then they'll, they'll go to that same site, and you'll have it all translated into Spanish. What I'm not an expert is an SEO and how it behaves looking at a, at a site in one language and if it can complement SEO ratings on the same site. So just because I could, I have the Bilingual Voiceover Guy, but I have both Voces Bilingue, and right now I'm redirecting them. But the idea is to have Voces Bilingue in Spanish and then have it linked to the English one. Anne: And then Joe, you have a page on your, the Bilingual Voiceover Guy, English that also is translated in Spanish, correct? Joe: Yes, because I hadn't had this thing that I just talked about yet. That, that, that was a sort of a patch in the meantime. And funny enough, that page is what's ranking. Anne: I was just gonna say that, if you have that page, if it's all in Spanish, because if somebody doesn't speak English, and they're typing a search term in Spanish, that would match your page, your landing page. And it still comes to your central, you know, I call it the central website, but you've just got another page. Yeah, a separate tab, a landing page. And I think that's a really good strategy that you'll be able to capture the best of both SEO worlds. Yeah. Pilar: Yeah. The tab is essential. Joe: Yeah. The tab, mm-hmm. Anyway, I mean, my thing is work in progress too, but the way I choose to think is that there's 2 billion English speakers, and there's 600,000 Spanish speakers. So that's a market of 2.6 billion. Anne: Yeah. Joe: For each one of us. And sky's the limit. Pilar: Absolutely. Anne: Ramesh, how do you work your website? Do you have a special page dedicated? Ramesh: I just have it in English actually. I think that's, that's definitely something I need to work on to see how I can, but I've -- to be absolutely honest, I'm quite happy with the level of work that I've got right now. So -- Milena: If it ain't broke. Ramesh: -- smooth sailing, I don't wanna sound arrogant, but I'm comfortable. So I, I could perhaps do all these lovely suggestions that you guys have come up with, but perhaps another time. Anne: Well, I don't have another language page, but I have literally four other genre specific pages like website, because I specialize in corporate narration or I specialize in e-learning. So I have the e-learningvoice.com. I have medical-narration.com, phone voice. And so even though I may not get a ton of activity on those sites, the words on those sites get indexed, and it contributes to my SEO. And each of those sites also maps back to my core site, which I think is my core brand of AnneGanguzza.com in addition to my VO BOSS and VO Peeps brands. So I handle probably 11 sites. Pilar: That's next level marketing. Go to AnneGanguzza.com for next level marketing, that's, that's that's our next, our next job. Anne: But yeah, it just helps to be found and it kind of just works on its own. And every once in a while I do have, as a matter of fact, I'm looking to refresh those pages just to make sure they keep generating people, pointing at my website. And again, it's a wonderful position to be in. If you have a, a good amount of work, I think that's amazing. Then things are working for you. And so that's why your advice and everything we're talking about today is so valuable for people that are coming into this industry. So we thank you, guys, so much for joining us. Milena: Thank you for this contest -- Joe: Thank you for having us. Milena: -- and this swag. Hello! Ramesh: Thank you for having us. Anne: I know. So yeah, I do wanna mention the swag. So not only did you guys get, uh, thank you again to Liz Atherton, but also you guys got BOSS swag, which Pilar and Milena are wearing right now. Ramesh: Yeah. Mine's on the way. It'll be here in about next -- Anne: Which it is on the way. As a matter of fact, I will tell you because you're on that little island there, Ramesh, it might take a little longer to get you. Milena: It's gonna come by carrier pigeon. Ramesh: Keep on looking at the skies to make sure the drones are dropping in. Anne: I can't wait to see pictures of you in that t-shirt. Ramesh: Oh, I will. Anne: And Joe with your mug. That's awesome. So. Ramesh: I love it. Super. Anne: You guys, amazing job. Thank you so much. It's been, this has been so wonderful, and we thank you for sharing your wisdom with us, and yeah, I wanna do this like now every six months. Milena: Down for it. Anne: Think we should -- Joe: -- amazing. Anne: You know, right? Ramesh: It would be pleasure. Anne: So what's been going on in six months in the bilingual world? So yeah. Awesome. Well guys, I'm gonna give a great big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You guys can connect and network like we have on ipDTL. Find out more at ipdtl.com. And also I will say that this was recorded today with Riverside. So I'm extremely happy to have given this a try, and thanks for the wonderful video and audio tracks that we're going to get. And one more sponsor, 100 Voices Who Care. If you want to use your voice to make an immediate difference and give back to the communities that give to you, find out more at 100voiceswhocare.org. Thanks, guys, so much for joining us again. It's been amazing and we'll see you next week. Ramesh: Thank you very much. Joe: It was lovely. Milena: Thank you. >> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voBOSS.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via ipDTL.

america god tv american english uk rock secret england voice british french practice spanish er romans spain indian boss mexican states colombia mine seo winners pakistan congratulations bienvenidos coast hispanic taco bell toyota cuban gemini icu latin american riverside colombian ese hindi audition bosses pakistani successes pilar vo bilingual southeast asian vaya beeps cartagena urls catalan telemundo basque roadrunner canary islands karachi urdu gallego spanglish bip peter sellers ramesh jos lu redistribution robert martin english spanish paisa joe lewis covid i galician sindi castilian joe it transcript it joe you anne ganguzza joe yeah castilian spanish latin american spanish joe well ipdtl canarian anne you joe for anne it voboss

Teflon Joe – An Interview With Joe Corrigan

Leader Manager Coach Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 29, 2022 56:58

Rob Interviews Joe Corrigan, who is an English former professional footballer who played as a goalkeeper in the Football League for Manchester City, Brighton & Hove Albion, Norwich City and Stoke City as well as the England national team. They talk about how joe started out, old style leadership, past England squads, his career and how he ended up in goalkeeping coaching. KEY TAKEAWAYS Joe started out as a kid wanting to be a goalkeeper. He never wanted to play any other position. Discipline used to be applied on the basis of what is best for the team rather than considering the needs of the individual. Players understood this and were tolerant of the old fashioned ‘rollicking'. Joe was fortunate to get picked for England in 1982. Joe feels the 82 squad was the best team sent the The World Cup. When Joe moved to Brighton and Hove Albion he unfortunately suffered an injury that finished his goalkeeping career. Joe has had a successful and specialised career in goalkeeping coaching since his career ended. BEST MOMENTS ‘I left grammar school and went to electrical engineering and while I was in there I was playing in the interdepartmental game, playing as a centre half again and I went in goal at half time, and just before we started to take the nets down a guy came round and he said to me “I used to play in the British Army. Would you like a trial for one of the big teams in Manchester?” - Joe ‘If we did anything that was wrong or unfavourable we had a dressing down or a good old fashioned ‘rollicking'' – Rob ‘The British players in that era were phenomenal. They all go on about the ones in the 90s but for me the 82 squad was amazing…you know..Keegan, Brooking, Mariner. Players like that were brilliant.' – Joe ‘It was just the start of the goalkeeping specialised coaching and goalkeeping was, for me, I wish I'd have had someone like me.' – Joe ‘It was all about minimum times. Fast reactions, muscles and so on, you know. I think the furthest we had to run was one and half kilometres and that was it whereas when I was at City we would do a 5 mile run come back to the track, do stretches…' - Joe ABOUT THE GUEST A legend of an English goalkeeper who made his debut in 1967. Known for his time with the enigmatic Manchester City in 1970s winning a UEFA Cup Winners Cup and two league cups over an amazing sixteen seasons as well as being capped by his country nine times. He has gone on to have a notable coaching career with many clubs including a ten year period at Liverpool as well as international roles. Joe currently performs an ambassadorial role for Manchester City. VALUABLE RESOURCES Leader Manager Coach Podcast ABOUT THE HOST Rob Ryles is a UEFA A licensed coach with a League Managers Association qualification and a science and medicine background. He has worked in the football industry in Europe, USA and Africa; at International, Premiership, League, Non-League and grassroots levels with both World Cup and European Championship experience Rob Ryles prides himself on having a forward thinking and progressive approach to the game built through his own experience as well as lessons learned from a number of highly successful managers and coaches. The Leader Manager Coach Podcast is where we take a deep dive examining knowledge, philosophies, wisdom and insight to help you lead, manage and coach in football, sport and life. CONTACT METHOD https://www.robryles.co.uk/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMPYDVzZVnA https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertryles/?originalSubdomain=uk Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/robryles See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Holiday Traditions

In The Garden

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 23, 2021 8:46

[00:00:20] Keith: good morning with black Friday, right around the corner we were trying to come up with ideas for our family just to create new traditions. And move away from commercialism. And it seems right now there's a backlog of products coming in and a shortage of this and that. [00:00:51] And when you stop and think about it, it's like half that stuff we really don't. [00:00:54] Joe: Yeah. I was thinking about that the other day. If all that stuff doesn't make it for Christmas. What's going [00:00:59] Keith: to happen, who's even going to want it. Exactly. I'm like, I'm really not going to buy a lot of gifts for people. [00:01:06] I'm going to do things for people I'm going to cook for them, or I'm going to plant a tree for him. Do an amaryllis bulb or something like that. Something that's, that's a little bit longer lasting and that one's more of a [00:01:17] Joe: memory. I like I have a woodshop in. Last year. I didn't get to do it much this year or two years ago, I built everybody in the family's gifts and it was a blast. [00:01:26] Keith: Exactly. , it means a whole lot more save any [00:01:29] Joe: money. No, you don't get [00:01:31] Keith: to save any money. You're not necessarily going to save any money, you go out and you buy a bunch of presents and a bunch of gifts or a bunch of toys for a kid. . You know what I mean? [00:01:39] They use them for what they, the kids going to find their favorite toy out of 25, and that's what they're going to play with. And the rest of them end up at Goodwill or pass down to other family members or neighbors or whatever. But if you plant a tree for a kid and you involve the kid in planting a tree, you've taught him something, you've spent time with the kid. [00:01:56], it's, there's just a whole lot more value there in my opinion. And that, my parents, planted a tree when I was born. Every time we went back by the house, it was, that tree was still growing in front of the house and it was always a topic of conversation. [00:02:07] So it was always a connection to that house. And it was a connection to what my parents had done for me when I was. [00:02:13] Joe: That's pretty common or I think it used to be people would plant a tree when they move into a house, so they could kind [00:02:18] Keith: of right. Track, watch it grow. Yeah. And, plant in a like a one-foot Japanese maple when your baby's born and seeing it grow to 12, 15 feet, as your child grows and it's something that's long-lived and it's, it's a great [00:02:32] Joe: memory and the kids probably that's my tree when they're out. [00:02:34] Keith: Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. It's. A friend of ours had, they've got four boys and they, they planted a tree for each one of the boys. They would argue over which one, their parents, they thought that parents liked this one more than the other one because the tree was better. [00:02:50] Joe: It was a better tree. [00:02:57] Exactly. [00:02:57] Keith: But there was much discussion over why they got that tree. So that was that's one thing you can do planting a tree or baking cookies with kids or that kind of thing, starting any kind of a tradition, but black Friday is always boggled my mind. [00:03:13] I've never participated in. It just seems like a rush to buy something that would have been discounted or this it's going out a date or that's last year's product. And it's not really necessarily a discount as it's marked down because it's last year's product. [00:03:29] Joe: I wonder if so it has less appeal to me now than it used to. [00:03:32] And I was younger because it was a family tradition. So what you're saying is we'd go out on good Friday and shop, and then Amazon came around, and then the family moved to. And I don't go good Friday shopping yet. [00:03:42] Keith: Yeah. I've literally never done it. And so it's a, it's interesting to me, but I, every year I'm like, maybe I should, maybe there's something I'm missing, but I don't think so. To me, I think it's almost like this year. To fix the supply chain and to revamp your viewpoint go out and buy something locally, shop at a local place, or go to a farmer's market or a small independent store and just skip the black Friday spending put that money in, invest that money or invested in the community and buy local. [00:04:10] My family, over Thanksgiving, we always my mom was in the florist business and so she always, we always make Rees and it's my uncles and aunts and cousins and we're all just clipping stuff out of the yard. And we make Christmas reads and it's just a creative thing to do. [00:04:26] And everybody's hands-on and it's. But any kind of crafting project or, something you can do with family and be able to, just to enjoy life and make memories more than buying more crap that it's going to end up in the dump. [00:04:40] Joe: Yeah. I like the idea of them having an experience. [00:04:43] It might seem like it's less cause it's not around as much, but at the same time they might be the things that your family members end up treasuring [00:04:49] Keith: the most. Something, take pictures while you're doing these projects or having an event. Our host to the hive is a way that I think a lot of people do gifting. [00:04:57] They'll a husband or a wife will buy host to the hive. For a spouse or a family member. But it's, it's a way that you're giving back to the environment. , you can participate in beekeeping and involve your kids in the whole nature of it. [00:05:09] And it's hands-on learning. You can get out and you can get into a hive and see the bees. Lauren all about bees and not have to own a high of yourself so that, doing something like that something that's pretty hands-on and, but the host diet program, [00:05:23] Joe: you [00:05:24] Keith: also get honey. Exactly. And there's a lot of host of hives out there. They range in price from $400 to about $2,000. And the interesting thing about our host to the hive is it's the cheapest. But we also instead of some of the hosts, the hives will be 1200, $1,400. And if you get honey in your hive, you get. [00:05:46] If you don't. And what we do is we average the honey out. We'll harvest the honey and everybody ends up with 10 jars of honey. You end up with 10 pounds of honey, which is more than most people would use in a year. So it gives you honey, that you could gift as well. [00:05:59] But it's a sure way of getting honey if you're a beekeeper there are years that you don't necessarily harvest honey. So we work really hard to make sure that the bees are, moved around and in areas that there are nectar flows and stuff like that. So it's a pretty successful way, to keep bees and actually make sure that you're getting honey every year. [00:06:19] And it's good local honey. So it's, it makes a difference in your health and your, the cold season or allergies or that type of thing. But the other thing that, that, on a list of things that people could do is, working, just working in the garden with kids getting them involved in the garden. [00:06:33] Hands-on, it's a good mental health thing to do. People are stressed out this time of year going into the holiday season and being able to just get out, put your hands in the dirt. It releases every time you touch the soil or releases serotonins, that kind of. [00:06:46] Make you relax. And most gardeners will, that just, they know that for a fact, they know when they go out and they start gardening that instantly they have a relaxed, calm feeling about it. Involving people that haven't done that and getting them in that Addicted to that kind of gardening and out and being out in nature and seeing green stuff. And one of those projects that you could do is pollinator gardens, either planting seeds is a really inexpensive way to do it. Get a packet of seeds and prep that soil. Yeah, and literally just scatter the seeds. [00:07:16], if you involved kids, they scattered the seeds and then they come back out and they get to see the seeds germinating and slowly growing on. And then, it's a long-term process. It's three or four, five months, six months a lifetime, of watching the seed grow and then the plant mature and then flowers come and then the pollinators start to land on those plants and hatch out new, young and whatnot. [00:07:38] The other thing that, what people can do it, and there's no, absolutely no cost to it is, prepping for the holiday season, getting family pictures and that kind of thing. Come into the garden center and bring your phone. One of our staff can take a picture have your family stand in front of the Christmas display or out in fall colors and snap, a few pictures, spend time with the family, just being out and about either a garden center or a farmer's market or. [00:08:04] Pumpkin patch, Christmas tree, lot, that kind of thing. It's a great way to spend that afternoon and get some good pictures in. I think back to the supply chain, I think if we just stopped spending for a minute maybe we could fix the supply chain, slow the slow, everything down and enjoy life. [00:08:21] And things might just come back to normal.

Females In Business with Rachel Edlich

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 26, 2021 58:58

Females In Business with Rachel Edlich In this episode, Rachel Edlich shares how she started as an entrepreneur, the influence her father had on her success today, her partnership with her sister, how she learned to be a successful product creator and marketer and so much more. Radical Skincare, the business she co-founded with her sister Liz Edlich, is a powerhouse skincare line that can be found in over 900 retail stores and in more than 17 countries. They also have a Brand Partner program that is empowering mostly women and some men, to be successful entrepreneurs in their own right. This was an enjoyable conversation with Rachel and I look forward to interviewing her again down the road at their next successful milestone. Also, check out their book "Get Radical: Secrets to Living a Life You Love": https://amzn.to/3jkyoFD As always, thanks so much for listening! Joe Rachel Edlich Co-founder - Radical Skincare Website: https://radicalskincare.com Discount Code: Costello10 Their Book "Get Radical: Secrets to Living a Life You Love" Our affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3jkyoFD Instagram: @radicalskincare Facebook: @RadicalSkincare YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/radicalskincare Twitter:@radicalskincare LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/radical-skincare Email: customercare@radicalskincare.com 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: Rachel, welcome to the show. I'm excited to have you. I thought I might also see this, but I guess Liz is not going to be here with us. So you're going to have to answer all the questions that I have. Rachel: That's great. I'm ready. I'm Joe: Ok, Rachel: Ready. Joe: Ok, OK. First off, the company's name is Radical Skincare. Is that correct? Rachel: That's right. Joe: Ok, this is really cool because I don't have a lot of women on the show as much as I would like to have more women, because I think there's a big separation in the amount of exposure to women that are running, businesses that are successful. So, first of all, thank you so much for coming on the show. Rachel: It's my pleasure, thank you so much for having me here. Joe: Yeah. Awesome. OK, so I always like to get a back story from my guests because I think it's really important that a lot of times podcast will just kick off and people either know the guest that they don't and they'll do a little reading on them and not saying me as the host, but people that might listen to it don't know who someone is. But more importantly, I think how you got to where you are today stems from all that happened before at this point. And I think so much of that is missed on a lot of podcasts. People all of a sudden they just start talking about what they're doing today. And the newest book that they have out and all this other stuff. So if you don't mind, I would love for you to give a little bit of history and you can go back as far as you want. I've had people go back to kindergarten, so I don't care. And and since Liz isn't here, you can also, if you want, put in a little bit about that whole, you know, how it happened with her and you and the connection of all of it. So now I will be quiet and let you click. Rachel: Ok, no problem, while I was going to say how much time do we have? Joe: Yes. Rachel: It's like if I go back to kindergarten. Yeah. So, you know, so for for us, we were raised in Virginia on an 18 acre farm, and our father was a very well known worldwide reconstructive surgeon who specialized in wound healing and skin rejuvenation. And he started the burn unit at University of Virginia. He invented stere strips. He invented dissolvable sutures. So, you know, his commitment was really to science and changing the world like that was my dad and my mom was a bit different. She was an actress on Broadway. She was in West Side Story. But, you know, she basically was just God kissed her and said, you will sing. And so she was in West Side Story, but then decided, hey, I'm going to I'm going to have kids. And then she met my dad. So we were really bookended by two very interesting people. And it was my sister, my brother and I. And growing up on a farm surrounded by my father's brilliance. And we were pretty much we'd go to the hospital with him, work in the lab. We did research with him if there was ever a problem. My dad was like, we'll invent it. See, my brother, my brother broke his clavicle and he's like, we're inventing the shoulder of the perfect shoulder pads. We did. Rachel: I've done I don't know how many research papers on lacrosse injuries because I was a lacrosse player or whatever. So it was like, you know, we we really were raised in that environment all the time. And we got a very, very strong work ethic, because imagine we were basically the ones running a farm as well. So from that, you know, I ended up wanting to really follow being able to help other people. I thought, gosh, I think I might become a therapist, that, you know, that's what I'm going to go and I'm going to I'm good at communicating with other people. I think I read situations really well. So I went to college. My sister went to we all went to actually we all went to the same college. And I got a counseling degree. And then I was like, OK, well, you know, if I really want to sit in a room all day and go through that process. So I ended up running a Boys and girls club for like 800 children. And I love working with kids and developing programs and drug prevention programs and all the different things that the Boys and Girls Club provided. But at the same time, I love to be able to give back that way. I also wanted to make money. Joe: This is. Rachel: I'm like, OK, you know, I love working with children and, you know, especially where a lot of them were in really tough situations. But I said I could do that as my volunteer time. So my sister was living in L.A. and we were always super close. And she's like, well, just come move out here. And it's like, I can't move without a job. You know, it's like having all these reasons why I can't. And I was like, you know what? I'm doing it. I was like, Liz, I can't come without a job. And she's like, well, you know, I just raised money for a company. She was in money management and venture capital, and she was like, and they actually need someone and to run their customer service department. And I was like, I can do that. So, you know, you're young. You Joe: Right. Rachel: Can make me make these big moves. So I packed up my dog in my house and I moved out to L.A. and Liz and I started working together and deciding we were going to start a company. Really wanted to always at the core of us is like it has to be driven with purpose. We have to have like we always need that passion. We're very entrepreneurial because we just can't help ourselves. It's like that's just our nature. So we got into the skincare business and in 1999 and doing, you know, product development, a lot of research, science, of course, you know, coming from a science background with my father, that was that like completely made sense to us. So we started creating products for celebrities, for retailers or QVC, Aitchison, a lot of brand development. So that was kind of our entree into working together. And I know everyone's like the big question is, how do you work with your sister? Joe: It's right, it's tough. Rachel: Everyone's like, how do you guys do it? And we're super blessed. I know we're rare. We're like or like a rare breed, but we're both different in our strengths. So we are able to really complement. Each other and I think there's the bond of our family and that we look after each other. And I mean, that's been probably one of the most special things about our relationship and being in business together, kind of coming into how Radical happened was we were doing our business. We were like at one hundred and fifty million dollars and sales. I mean, we were doing amazing, loving what we were doing. And then I had my second child and I developed rosacea. So, you know, life throws in like little things to move things around, make you start thinking. And I was like, wow, you know, I've always had good skin and my skin was red, splotchy, irritated. I tried putting makeup on. It made it worse. It was the first time where I had actually had this level of insecurity. Like I'd walk into a room and it's like my face walked in first and people I'm like, are they looking at me? Oh, my gosh. They can tell. And, you know, it's like this weird thing that you go through when you're when you're experiencing how you look on the outside matter so much. So you have to like say, OK, it's how you feel on the inside. It's a this is an inside job. You know, work life is not perfect. We don't we're not going to always look perfect. Right. Joe: Mm hmm. Rachel: So, you know, how we feel on the inside is felt by the world. And I went to the dermatologist. They basically said, you'll be on medication for the rest of your life. I'm like, are you joking about it? This is like a little quick fix. You know, you're going to Joe: Right. Rachel: Give me some cream and it's going to be gone and then I'm done. Poof, right. And they're like, no. I was like, oh, great. So I ended up trying on everything they gave me. And my skin was always more inflamed, burning. It was on fire. My face was on fire. And my sister, she's six years older. And since she's not with us, I can always like make her the older sister. Joe: Yes. Rachel: But she Joe: Yeah. Rachel: Is. Joe: There we go, I knew this was going to start sooner Rachel: Yeah, Joe: Or later. Rachel: Exactly. That's what happens when we're not together Joe: That's right. Rachel: On the Joe: That's Rachel: Podcast. Joe: What she gets for not being here. Rachel: Right. Joe: Right. Rachel: Right. So I'll make sure she listens to this. So she's like, Rachel, I'm older than you. It's going to be happening to you, too, but I'm looking in the mirror and gravity is really, truly real. Like this stuff is happening. My skin is just now bouncing back the way I used to, that I wanted it to. And I said, OK, Liz. Well, I guess this is the perfect storm. This is like between the two of us. And I said we have to create the strongest skin care for antiaging, but design for sensitive skin. So thank goodness we had the brilliance of my father and his ability for science and research. And then we got together with a team of chemists and we basically said we are going to put the best of the best in the bottle. We had no intentions of selling it. It wasn't like, oh, we need to be in another skin care business. Not at all. We were like, put the best of the best in the bottle. We didn't care about the cost. We weren't worried about the margins. We weren't worried. We're just like, let's just fix our face. So we got with the scientist, we really started to look at some of the leading reasons for aging skin coming up with solutions for that and coming up with a technology which was our TRALA cell technology, where we're able to deliver all the powerful ingredients to the skin without irritation. Rachel: And after my skin, after just three weeks, my skin completely transformed. I was able to get off all my medication. I'm telling you, it was like adversity brought complete opportunity for us in that moment. And my sister, people were noticing her skin changing. We gave it to friends and family and like little bottles that were like serum moisturizer, you know, it's like in the back of the lab, we're like, okay, here you go. You got a tray. And and people were like calling us like, what is this stuff? So listen, I looked at each other and we said, you know, that's pretty radical. And that's kind of where Radical was born. And we said, you know, our dad always said, if you have an asset sitting on the shelf that no one else knows about, it's not OK. You have to share with the world because there's other people going through what you're going through. You're not in this little world of just Rachel and rosacea. There's millions of people out there that are struggling with rosacea or problematic skin or sensitive skin. And the more research we did, it was like 80 percent of women believe they have sensitive skin. And so they're very particular about what they're putting on their skin and the irritation. So we really took a lot of time and developing our products to make sure they were consciously clean, that we were delivering radical results. Rachel: So we had science behind it. You know, we did clinical on our products because we like to prove out whatever we're going to say. We want to be there with confidence. So we launched in 17 different countries, in over 900 stores and just two years. And Liz and I hit the road and started to work with all the prestige retailers and training. And the interesting thing that we found is this yearning and hunger from all the associates and customers that we talked to about that feeling of were inner self meets. Outer beauty, which is so important to us, is, you know, how we feel on the inside is felt by the world. And we've been really blessed with working with Bob Proctor, who was very close to us and a lot of personal development work where we knew that there was a method to really getting amazing skincare science, to getting radical results. But also there is a technology for creating a life you love. And so we ended up really looking at that closely and listening to people really wanting more there or there are hungry for more purpose and passion in their lives. So that was like our aha moment. And we said when we came back to the states, we're a global so we have a global footprint where in Australia, Switzerland, the UK, all over the place. But in the US, we decided that we were going to buy our products back off of the shelf. Rachel: We we wrote our book, which is "Get Radical: Create Secrets to Creating a Life You Love." And then we said, we're going to buy all of our products back off the retail shelves, take the profit that we normally give to the retailers. Take our science. Take all of our from clinical to all the press that we've gotten over the 11 years and the investment of 20 million dollars into our brand and give that as a turnkey opportunity for others to be able to create passion, purpose, health and wealth. And that's when our brand partner program was born. And we did that. That was kind of like born out of. Covid and a lot of it and and that's just caught on fire because we have the selfcare element, that purpose element. We're a movement that matters. And we always know that if we stay close to our purpose and our passion, Liz and I, we've had moments, we've gotten off track where you're not waking up feeling passionate or purpose driven. Then it's like, OK, OK, I'm going to go do that today. And that was important to us. We wanted to we want to touch millions of people's lives. And we know through our brand partner program, we can touch more people than through any retail store ever. So that's kind of our journey to where we are today. Joe: Well, there's a lot to unpack here, Rachel: I know. Joe: Because any time you can correct me, but I would I would say that this is going to be a unique episode, because for the listeners are out there that are women. This will speak to them more than it will. Guys, I don't even know if you have any men in the brand partner program. Rachel: We do, actually, Joe: Ok, Rachel: We Joe: So Rachel: Do. Joe: See, that's why I wanted to ask you. Rachel: But Joe: Ok. Rachel: It's the majority, a majority of them are women. Yeah. Joe: Ok. And then the products that you have, are they mostly all women? Are there some men? And that's why you have a couple of men and the brand ambassador Rachel: Our Joe: For that. Rachel: Our brand is very unisex Joe: Ok. Rachel: From our packaging all the way through, it delivers amazing results. We do a lot of coaching, even with a lot of the women that are like, oh, what do we offer to the man? And it's like these core products that men just absolutely love. Like we were in Barneys, we were in the men's department there when we launched, and because we did so well and with the men as well. Joe: Ok, so here's the part where we're going to rewind, because Rachel: Ak. Joe: This is this is how I think your story and there's this story and this product and how you did all of this will really help the listeners and especially the women listeners. So you came from a background that was science based because of your father. It sounds like a brilliant man. Is he still with us or is Rachel: No. Joe: Not OK? Rachel: Yeah, my father had multiple sclerosis on top of everything else Joe: Yeah, Rachel: And Joe: I saw that, and Rachel: Yeah. Joe: So I was I was so I didn't know if he was still around, but Rachel: Would Joe: When Rachel: You Joe: You Rachel: Have. Joe: Started this process of wanting to do this with your sister, was he around to help with the initial part of it? Rachel: Yes, Joe: Ok. Rachel: My my dad basically, when I moved to or before I moved to L.A., was saying to my sister, you two need to work together. Like he he's like family. You need to work together. Joe: Right. Well, that's awesome. Okay, cool. So I'm going to put a pin in that one piece of it because I have to come back to that again, because there's more questions than if I Rachel: Sure. Joe: Was listening. I would be like, OK, there's one thing that was a plus for the both of you. Rachel: For sure. Joe: So I'll get to it. I'll explain where I'm going. And I'm sure you Rachel: Ok. Joe: Already understand. Your sister was a stockbroker, an investment banker, a stockbroker, whatever. She she took that route. And then I noticed that there was a company called One World Live. Is that Rachel: Mm Joe: Correct? Rachel: Hmm. That's Joe: Ok, Rachel: Right. Joe: So this is the company that she ended up creating, purchasing, investing, one of those. Right. Rachel: Well, it was actually a company prior to that that she invested money in, and I came out and I worked for that particular company. Joe: Ok. Rachel: But One World Life we created together, and that was really driven from product to we had a lot of celebrities with where we would do merchandising for them with their product. Yeah. So that was where we really got into product development, like the the whole process of making products, whether it was weight loss, whether it was jewelry, whether it was skincare. And that's where we actually had our first experience with skincare at that time. Joe: Ok, so if I was sitting and listening to this, I'd be like, OK, how do two women that are not in this world make this jump into this competitive marketing product delivery business? People usually have some sort of experience that they initially get in that and then they go, hey, I can do this, and then they go out on their own and start it. So explain to me how your system leaves doing the investment banking piece of this. You leave what you're doing and you move out and all of a sudden you're this powerhouse marketing team Rachel: Right. Joe: That has this company. And there's a there's a gap there that I want you to Rachel: Got Joe: Fill Rachel: It. Joe: Forms. Rachel: Ok, so my sister raised money for a company that had a weight loss product. That was the company that I started working for. And I started to learn about infomercials, commercials, direct mail catalog. That was kind of where I first learned like, oh, who was right when infomercials hit in 94, it was like all of a sudden it's like, what's this infomercial thing? And so we. Joe: But wait, there's more. Rachel: Yes, exactly. Hey, you know exactly what I'm talking about, Joe: Yeah. Rachel: And I'm so yeah, so we. I worked for that company and unfortunately the people that were running the company were not doing the right things with the finances. So I told my sister, hey, heads up, my check is bouncing. She's she has investors in the company. So she ended up having to go in and basically take over the company. And that's called like you're just thrown into the waters. You have no idea what you're doing. And it was crazy. She had to sue the company, a lot of the players, and she won, which was unbelievable and won the company. So then we all of a sudden inherited a weight loss company that was doing really, really well. But, you know, we didn't have a lot of experience at the time. So it was something that I do primarily and anything like all my businesses. If I don't know something, I get really smart really quick. And I talk to a lot of people that know a lot more than me. And so like no one Joe: Right. Rachel: Will find someone that knows more than you. Joe: Yeah. Rachel: And so that's what we did. And we worked with different individuals and started to understand the business more and how media spin worked. And I had to manage the media spend and I had to managed print campaigns and I had to buy inventory for all these products. I was like, buy what I like. All right, let's let's break open a spreadsheet and start getting organized. That was point one. But I actually realize I have a I'm super strong at doing those type of like I can operationally managing and dealing with a lot of moving parts and seeing how all the pieces fit together. So, listen, I basically kind of divided and conquered with that particular product. And then we did another weight loss product where we had investors involved in that. And then that launched. And then Liz decided that she was going to go back more into the investment banking. So I took the weight loss product and I went to another company and brought our product with us and had their infrastructure supports our product. But also, it was a great opportunity for me to learn side by side with other people that have been doing it for a long time. So it was for me like that part where we I worked with another company necessarily wasn't necessarily like my happiest time, to be really honest, because a little more entrepreneurial and. But I did that for two years and I was like, I'm going to get so good at all of this. I'm going to be so good. Like I'm going to just be a sponge. Rachel: I'm going to learn. I'm going to learn. I'm going to learn until I feel like I got my arms around this, all these tentacles that were flying around me and feeling proficient in that. And that was a really graceful time of firsts. Sometimes you're feeling and that feeling of uncertainty. And I'm sure everyone up there is gone through that feeling like lack of confidence, whatever it might be in that certain area. But again, I felt like one of the things that Liz and I had done is we surround ourselves with people that are mentors that can help teach and guide and trust me, you're going to pay it forward because there will be a time when someone's going to work for you that you can teach and you can guide. And so from that, I was Liz was doing her thing. So she started is a big thinker, a lot of creative ideas. And she she she and this other person decided we're going to start this company. And she called me up and she's like, rich, like, I can't do it without you. Like I need you. You know how to get it all done. You know, I had to make it all. I'll put all the wheels on the bus and make it go forward. And, you know, you've been in the business. And I actually haven't been in that part of the business. But we're going to kind of do that business again in a different way. And I was like, let's do it in our. So that's how one world was actually created. And. Joe: And what year was that? Rachel: That was in 19, I think it was 1999 is when one world was was created. I Joe: And Rachel: Actually. Joe: When did you when did you move out to L.A. from Virginia? Rachel: 94. Joe: Ok, so five years later is when Rachel: Yes. Joe: This happened, OK, Rachel: Yep. Joe: So you've had all that time. Rachel: Exactly. To Joe: It. OK. Rachel: Learn fast. Joe: Yeah. Have. Rachel: It was like a fire hose experience, like, OK, open Rachel, Joe: Yeah. Rachel: Insert all information. Yeah. So from there, that's when one world leader was born. And we did that for we still have that company. We still have a product line that we have on QVC. And so we had a. And we really had it was the that company was going to we were looking at it as a public, the public traded opportunity to do an IPO. And it was when the technology just fell, fell apart. And we ended up having to really pivot fast because a lot of money was raised for the company. And at that point, we had we had probably almost a hundred employees. We had a lot of VC and investors. And Liz, that was primarily her responsibility to deal with them. But at that point, they just weren't investing. And unless you were a true technology, you know, like you're an app or you're, you know, so we ended up really bringing back through our direct marketing, our direct response. We had we did infomercials the whole time. So we had a lot of things going on. And that's really when we got into the skincare business, it was an infomercial of skincare. And then I developed the whole line, which had about say about 30 skews. So I did all the product development, all the research, creative and just learned, learned a lot about science, working with manufacturers, working with the chemists. Of course, we were fortunate enough with our dad for hours. But the chemists, we started to really learn about product development ingredients, raw materials, clean, clean beauty. And that kind of took us on our journey to Radical. Joe: Ok, so here we go Rachel: Ok. Joe: Is I have to ask because it's I know that even if I was listening to this and I just reframed it to be something that a guy would do, I have ideas all the time. But we stop ourselves because of things that we think are going to be roadblocks. So my first question is, let's talk about your father and the science and all of that without that piece. Some of the audience listeners might be saying to themselves, well, that's that's a huge chunk like that help having that experience, having your father to lean on, having that around you, to be able to start the process of creating products. Because if you start thinking about it, it's like, OK, I'm not going to go in my kitchen and start putting all sorts of things in a little bowl and seeing it smells nice and it works nice and right. So Rachel: Right. Joe: What would you say to any of the women listening? They don't have that science background. They don't have that father with that Rachel: Mm Joe: Brain Rachel: Hmm. Joe: And that intelligence Rachel: Right. Joe: And background. BILLINA. Can they still accomplish this? Rachel: Absolutely. So, yes, we were very blessed, and we we understand that so much. But we also know, like when we were developing products for One World Lives, I was in product development all the time. But I lean on my manufacturers. I wasn't calling my dad saying, hey, dad, like what do you think about this? Because it wasn't personal then. It was just like, oh, I'm creating products for a client and this is what they want. Some of the benefits to be or I look at like what the story is like, what is it that they're trying to say about, you know, themselves and their skincare brand. So it makes like it's makes sense. And then I talk to my manufacturer, who has chemists on staff, and I go and I sit with them and I talk to raw material houses. There's shows that you can go to that have all the raw material houses that go there that are talking about a unique ingredients that they're using. But I find a lot I get a lot from the chemists that are from the manufacturers about what's new, what's hot, what's working, what's an alternative to like we have right now that we just launched are an alternative to a retinol cream, which outperforms retinol without all the side effects. I went I researched, I talked to my chemist. What's what is out there right now? It took us it's not an overnight experience, like, oh, poof, we we just developed a product because then you want to prove the results, right? So you want to have some science. So you have confidence that if you're saying any kind of a claim, that you can substantiate that. So the process for Radical, it was with our dad, but that was like the beginning of the ideas and the science footprint. But I leaned heavily on all of the chemists to really help direct and come up with formulations that we know were going to give radical results. Joe: Ok, great, so I appreciate that answer. Rachel: Yeah. Joe: The next thing that I put a pin in my own mental brain was the money portion of this. Right. None of this has to be divulged. I just but let's say your father was a successful reconstructive surgeon, potentially. He made a good living doing that. At the same time, I know when I read doing my own research that when M.S. came around, that was also a financial burden. Right. So. Rachel: Big Joe: So. Rachel: Time. Joe: Right. So we can just let's say we eliminate that fact that he could have helped you at all. But then you have you have Liz being this smart financial person. So potentially she made a decent amount of money in what she was doing to then be able to back this whole thing. So my second question. Oh, yeah. Well, it's easy when you have a lot of money. You have someone who's able to bring in voices and start out with a chunk of capital and all of that. So can you address that both in either how it helped you and how you still think people can do it without having all of that? Rachel: So a couple of things, I think absolutely you can do it without having all of all of that and the that that we had pretty much for one world. I went to a lot of overhead because we had so many people, because it was such it was the One World Live Web site was really like the hub of what that company was. And so there was a lot of big talent being thrown at that because the VCs wanted to see a certain thing. Right. So in product development, if you want to launch a product, I mean, it can be in skin care, whatever it may be. I know that I can go and create a product with a chemist. I can call packaging companies and get samples of what the packaging might be. And I can come up with a marketing plan. And you you can get small business loans to support you on your initial growth. And I am really believe in a grassroots approach. So Radical has like our new business, which is that our Brand Partners program where we're treating that as a brand new business. So just because our our retail business we have from a global that took us a lot of years to put together and create success that doesn't come into my brand partner like I really keep those separated because I want to have this sitting and standing on its own. We could have gone to raise money. We could have, you know, tried to find people that would invest in it. But for us, we actually didn't want to have to deal with investors. We've done that. There's there is a side to having investors in your company that is a lot of work. So there is something really cool about owning your own company and you owning your own company and not having to answer to five other people and tell them what you're doing and why you know that it's on you. So. Joe: I second that, amen, I Rachel: Yeah, Joe: Say that. Rachel: Trust me, we've we've done it, we've had it where it's been investors and we now we have it where it's our own and we much prefer it as our own. Joe: Mm hmm. Rachel: And we're not willing to bring in money to fund our brand partners program because we want that to be it can be done organically. It might not be as fast as the guy that has five million sitting next to me, but does it have the heart and soul that I have? Does it does it have the you know, the credibility that my brand has? Like there's so many different things and who my audience is. So there's always ways of getting into a business without needing lots and lots of money to do it. You just have to take it slow and bit by bit and grow, you know, have a plan in place that you're you're following into doing your own projections, giving yourself like, OK, you can you can go and get private label products, which sometimes is an interesting way of testing a concept where you don't you can buy 100. You can test it on a Web site. I mean, Joe: Mm Rachel: There's Joe: Hmm. Rachel: So many different ways that you can go through your social media, Bienen, you know, you can be your own influencer and whatever it is that your passion and dream might be. So there's definitely ways of starting your business and not being like, oh, gosh, you need millions and millions of dollars to do it. Joe: Ok, great. I love all these answers, because to me, it's encouraging to the audience. And I was hoping that I even though I backed you into a corner on these questions, I know that reading part of your story and empowering women, this is important. And so that's why I want to talk about it as much as I want to make sure that we talk about your business. And trust me, we'll get the word out about Radical. But I think it's important that what this business means to you. I can tell is coming through this interview. And that's what I think is even more important, because that is really what people are attracted to, people who care about people. Right. And there's something that you keep saying that's a great saying that I'm going to steal from you at some point, but I forget what it is. But you'll say it again, I'm sure. And Rachel: Ranchero. Joe: I'll be like, OK, I got to remember that. So quickly, explain to me then the the science part of it, where if you end up working with the chemist, let's say someone out there has an idea and they want to do something. How painful and how long is that process of tweaking and creating the product? And then do products that you sell have to get FDA approval? Rachel: Ok, so no so in skin care, you have ones that are considered like over the counter, which would be an SPF. So those have to go through certain testing in the United States for skin care in the U.S.. It's actually it's pretty loose. It's actually not very rigorous at all. So we are global, so we're EU compliant. So we have a compliance person in the EU that goes through all of our formulations. I make sure they're checking it against the list of all the ingredients that are not allowed on the market or about to not be allowed on the market. It goes down to the like the raw materials, make sure they're paraben free, that they're not using any preservative systems that to be able to make certain claims. Like I can say, I'm paraben free in the U.S. It's not as rigorous. It has some things. And you can literally like look them up online, but they're not regulated. Like people are not regulating your formulas to say what's in it is OK. And think about how many you have a lot of people that make up their own skincare and will sell it even locally that don't have, you know, strong preservative systems in it where, you know, you don't know really how long they can last and that they're good for. But I always encourage that when you're doing development and you're talking to your chemists to make sure that you're being as clean as possible, there's a list on like even on our website that shows all the ingredients that we do not have in under our consciously clean tab. So, Joe: I saw that, which I Rachel: Yeah. Joe: Thought was brilliant, that there's Rachel: Yeah. Joe: No you're not hiding anything, it's all right. There it was. Rachel: Exactly. Joe: It Rachel: So Joe: Was Rachel: It's Joe: Very Rachel: Actually Joe: Impressive. Rachel: It's a resource for other people, honestly, Joe: Yep, Rachel: So, Joe: Yep. Rachel: Which is great. You know, just knowing what you don't want to have going into your product, and the chemist usually have a pretty good handle on that if you're working with a good, good manufacturer. What is regulated is the FTC regulates claims. So you can't make a product and go on Instagram and say, my product reduces fine lines and wrinkles, 400 percent and then show before and after. That's not necessarily the right one or whatever. Like that's where you get in trouble in the U.S. So they regulate that really, really closely. So you do have to be with your marketing. You have to be accurate in your claims and making sure that you're not misleading a customer. Joe: Ok, let's talk about. So now I understand that you still have the global retail business that's still happening in over 900 stores, and I had a note down here in 17 countries, probably Berklee. Now it's 20. So this is amazing. What is the team that you have? So you said you kept you keep the two businesses separate. So what is the team that's running Radical as opposed to the team that's running the ambassador brand program? Rachel: Right. OK, so we used to have a team in London, an office in London, office in Paris, one in Hong Kong, and Liz and I, we're looking at each other saying this does not make sense. And this was when we started Radical. We had definitely some big players involved, which were more on the state lotor level. And so us being entrepreneurial or we're not like corporate girls at all. So put us into a corporate environment or like what do we do here? We're like, we have to clock in and clock out. We're like Joe: Yeah. Rachel: We work. We work 24/7 anyway. Joe: Right. Right. Rachel: That's being an owner of your own company. They wanted to have this really broad footprint. And Liz and I, they were the experts and prestige and we really weren't. So we really follow their lead. And we noticed that like we we built it. We had all the locations. But you really have to have boots on the ground everywhere. So, listen, I ended up saying, you know what, we're going to buy our company back and we're going to do this in a smart way where we have distributors internationally. So like, for instance, in Australia, we work with Mekka, who's the largest skincare or any cosmetics retailer there. It's like the Safar of the U.S. and but they handle everything. I don't have to put freelancer's in the store. I don't have to do anything. They own it and they do an amazing job. And then in the U.K., I have a distributor there, and in Switzerland I have a distributor there. So my international business is very much distributor driven. So they manage their own markets, they invest in their own markets. They have certain things that they're supposed to do in order to maintain their exclusivity there. But that operates pretty much separately. The U.S. it's I have a core team that works just on the brand partners program. And it's a small team because like I said, we're doing this in a very organic way and obviously bringing people that have the experience and building a peer to peer business. So that's been super exciting. And that's that's what's worked by just having a core team that works for only on brand partner business. Joe: Ok, can you talk more about the the brand the ambassador program, just so that we can get an understanding if someone is listening to this and saying, I love this, I love the idea. They go to your website and they look at all of this. They get hit up all the time with all these other programs to sell cosmetics and skin care. It's sometimes it's a hard sell for them. They end up dropping off or they just they can't figure out how to get into something like this. And I'd like to know what your program is about so they know and then why it's different. And obviously that the ingredients that you use that's really coming to the forefront these days is that you're not putting ingredients in that can harm someone. So that's another really important thing. So can you talk a little bit about that program? Rachel: Yes, absolutely. So we kind of what I talked about earlier is that we just started to recognize that our brand is so much more than skin deep, and it always has been. It's just been listen, I speak from the place of possibility all the time. And we with all of our brand partners were like invested in their future. That's like we are invested in their future. That's why we call them brand partners, like you are our partner in this. And that's a big shift in how you are within a company, because we've created such a turnkey solution and support to help you get to wherever it is that you want to go. And we are building a very, very strong core community. We have a our comp plan is very, very simple. We noticed and the different types of ambassador brand partner type programs where there's this exclusion element, if you don't do certain things and you are not a part and our part is you are included. We're like, you can participate with us, however it works for you. So we have people that just are more like influencers are on there. You know, they're selling through their social channels and they're making great money. Then we have people that are like, oh, my gosh, I've got like I want to build a business. Like I want to invest Radical like my new baby. And you guys have handed over the keys with science, clinical backing, credibility. You've been in prestige. You have press for over the past ten years, you know, steeped in science about a movement that matters. And our company is always listen, I only see things like it has to be larger than us. Like everything we do has to be larger than us. Rachel: It's not money. It's not it's like it has to be bigger than us. And so like our vision is and goal will be we're going to be a billion dollar company. And that means that we are we are making millions of dreams come true. Millions. And that is our number one goal is to do that. So and within our community, we have like our deep dive, which we just did on Monday, where we open that up to customers or brand partners, where we do a chapter in our book and we like unpack it and we talk about it. And it's always amazing because it speaks to people wherever they are, whatever they're going through. We have the opportunity to interact and communicate and share ideas. It's great. And then we have a lot of other activities where, you know, we'll be traveling some to meet different people. And we have a shared pool for company sales where you can earn into the share pool. That's three percent of our company. So we're taking profit for all of our brand partners to be able to participate and based on whatever their performance is. So it's like they are profiting. And we have a founder's club, which is a group of individuals that are just working super hard and achieving different levels. So it's it's really a straightforward program. And we have one of the best ladies on our team that really focuses on helping individuals figure out how to incorporate that into their life, understanding comp plans. And she's like the best cheerleader in town, like you want her behind you. You know what I'm saying? She's like, come on, you got Joe: Right. Rachel: This. You know, I call her like Joe: That's awesome. Rachel: So. Yeah, Joe: Ok, cool. Rachel: And it's super easy. You can go on to our website and it says, just become a brand partner. You just click on it and has a lot of information there. Joe: Great. OK. I don't. We're getting close to the end, and I want to keep you longer than I promise. So talk to me about the book, "Get Radical: Secrets to Living a Life You Love." Rachel: Yeah, yes. So that was a labor of love. It was definitely time consuming for the both of us. Like what? What an experience writing a book. Never did we think I mean, my father is like such a. He's like published like 3000 peer review articles. Written books. I mean, it's like that's like no, no problem for him. And Liz and I like we really want to put this to paper, like we want to share through the mentors that we have met. And just the stories, because we really know that there is a technology to getting a life that you love, whether, you know, really getting those fundamentals of goal setting visualization and then what gets in your way. So the fear of failing, you know, people get stuck in making decisions like paralysis. So we talk about a lot of that throughout the story. And we bring in different mentors that share stories that are super relatable, that you can be like, oh, my gosh, that's happened to me. Oh, yeah, I've been through that. Oh, I love that. And at the end of every chapter is really a Radical recap where it gives you back the ideas of like, OK, these are the things that you may want to focus on, the questions you may want to ask yourself some you know, some guided ideas of how to get where you want to go to creating that passion, purpose, health and wealth, you know, whatever that is for you. Joe: Yep. OK. That's awesome. A question I wanted to ask earlier that I forgot, which I think is important in any partnership, because I grew up observing my father in a family business. And it's really tough when you have your own family in the business. It's tough when you are in a partner relationship because a lot of them don't work out as we know, as entrepreneurs. We've heard the horror stories. So with you and Liz, you talked about it earlier, how you both have your strengths and weaknesses. Right. And you use those to conduct this business. Do you recommend or do you have a line in the sand that says, OK, Liz, you are handling all of the financial part of this and anything that comes out of this financial related, that's your baby. I'm doing all the product stuff or whatever. So I'm not putting words in your mouth, Rachel: Right, Joe: But I'm just Rachel: Right, Joe: Trying Rachel: Right. Joe: To give you an example of can you explain how that division works? Rachel: Gosh, I wish it was that clear cut. Joe: Yes. Rachel: Like I'm like, here, take that hat. Oh, wait, wait, I'll Joe: Right. Rachel: Wear Joe: Right. Rachel: This one today. Joe: Exactly. Rachel: That's Joe: Well, Rachel: Kind of. Joe: I think the fear is, is that with businesses and partnerships, it's stuff sometimes somebody say, wait, I thought you were handling that. It's one of those things or you did it, but you didn't do it as well as I would have done. You know, so I'm trying to make sure we get this out to explain that you really have to be honest with yourself and say, I'm really not any good at marketing, so I'm not doing it. And if you don't want to do it as my partner, then we need to get somebody who does. Rachel: Exactly. Joe: So. Rachel: Well, first off, I would always say really, you know, know your family dynamics like how you operate with whether it's a brother or a sister or a family business. And we been fortunate because we we both see things. We both have the same goals, right, so I always say like, know that first, do you do you are you in alignment on what your goals are for your company and what purpose you both have in that? Like make sure you're on the same page? Because if one person sees the company for something else and you see it, then it's always going to be like this. Right? So you have to be on the same page, an alignment on your goals and your vision for what it is that you want. So that's like the biggest thing I can say. Everything else for us. We both have a lot of creative ideas. So I would say that we take our creative ideas and then I do more a lot more on that implement and manage. She does a lot more in the network. And, you know, big picture of whatever it is that we might be be doing. So it's very we complement one another. So I think you do. I think if you can make some more clear boundaries, I wouldn't say we were maybe the perfect example. We're kind of a weird group because we can just kind of work together. Well, I don't know. Maybe since we've been doing it since 1994, I think my sister and I have had maybe two arguments in business, and they went for a good quality like ten minutes and it was over. But yeah, I think having a making sure your visions are in alignment really takes away a lot of the issues. Joe: Ok, so the website is radicalskincare.com. Rachel: Yes. Joe: There is the whole retail side of the business that if any of those people are listening, they can contact you for distributorship wholesale or whatever that might be. And then there's the whole brand ambassador side, Rachel: Yes. Joe: Which is really to empower mostly I think it leans towards women, and I think that's great. But obviously, we talked about earlier that men can get involved because you said that the products are Rachel: Unisex, Joe: What was the word, unisex, Rachel: Unisex. Joe: Right. Is there anything else that I missed that you wanted to talk about before I let you go? Rachel: No, I mean, I guess back to I always just feel like you want to be part of a movement that matters, like really having a movement that matters. And Joe: That's it, I think that's the saying, Rachel: That was Joe: You Rachel: That. Joe: Keep saying, that's Rachel: See, Joe: It. Rachel: I told you it was going to happen. Joe: I love it. Rachel: I Joe: I'm Rachel: Was going Joe: Still Rachel: To get it in right at the end for you. Joe: I'm stealing it. I'm stealing. Rachel: Yeah. So that's like really what we we stand for and being a part of something that's bigger than yourself. And that's what really Radical is all about. It is we're in herself meets outer beauty. And, you know, your purpose is our promise. And that's that's what we want, you know, surrounding yourself in life around like minded people. That's just a beautiful thing. And I think that's what we we want to be able to help others with, to really get to, you know, living a life that they love and dream and going above and beyond. And so we really appreciate you having me on today. And Joe: Yeah, Rachel: I was Joe: Absolutely. Rachel: Really I was happy to be able to distinguish that I'm the younger sister, Joe: Well, Rachel: Older Joe: That's how she Rachel: Man. Joe: Gets that, too. That's what Liz gets. And you can tell her that even though we've never talked, I'm no longer talking to her. Rachel: Right. Yes, OK, we're on the same page. Joe: And I want the I want the audience, the listeners, and then eventually the viewers. But right now, the listeners that listen to the podcast, your message, what you are accomplishing with this is very sincere. And the integrity is there. I hear it in your voice. I see it in your face. So when the viewers go to watch this episode on YouTube, they, too, will understand that this means a lot to you. This is not about making money. This is about empowering people to live the life that they love and to just do great things and feel good about themselves. And it's both with having potentially a small business of their own or a large business through this. It's about making some extra money on the side. It's it's about feeling good, both financially, physically, inside and outside. And I think it's awesome what you're doing. And I just I could tell. Like, I interview a lot of people and the comment maybe it's an L.A. thing, but the calmness in you is not this sales motivated conversation that we're having. It's a conversation from the heart that you love what you do. This is something you wanted to do to help us. And it comes across. So I wanted you to know that that I was hoping so much that it would be this and not be this powerful woman who is just like sell, sell, sell, sell. And if you get this and you come into our program and you can drive a Mercedes in a year Rachel: No, Joe: And Rachel: No, no, Joe: All Rachel: No. Joe: Of that stuff. So this was wonderful. I loved Rachel: Yeah. Joe: It. Rachel: Yeah, well, we're not those girls, Joe: Yeah, Rachel: We're we're definitely heart centered, so. Joe: Perfect. I will put in the show notes all the ways to get in contact with you, the website and all of that, if there unless there's any special spot that you like to communicate. If there's I don't know if your Instagram fan and that's where you like to do it, or just like people to contact through the company email. But now's your chance to tell me Rachel: Yeah, Joe: Or the audience. Rachel: Either way and I was also Joe: Ok. Rachel: Going to do a code, so people Joe: Beautiful. Rachel: That are listening that Joe: Yeah, that'd Rachel: They Joe: Be great. Rachel: Can they can get a 10 percent discount on our products, but also we can send them an eBook. Joe: Beautiful. Rachel: So, yeah, we'd love Joe: Ok. Rachel: To do that so we can do Castelo 10. Joe: Beautiful, I'm going to write it down because I'm old and I'll forget Rachel: There's the old. Joe: It. All right, Castelo, 10 is the code to get 10 percent off. I love Rachel: That's Joe: It. Rachel: Right. Joe: Ok. Beautiful. Rachel, thank you so much. I appreciate your time. This was really cool. It was an honor to speak with you. I love what you're doing. And again, please tell Liz to that. I don't know. I don't ever want to talk to her. Rachel: Ok, Joe: No, it can't. Rachel: I'll call her right now. Joe: Yeah. They say you had one chance to come on Rachel: You Joe: Joe Rachel: Know, Joe: Show Rachel: You had Joe: And you Rachel: It, Joe: And you blew it. Rachel: She Joe: And Rachel: Missed Joe: We. Rachel: You missed the best podcast ever. Joe: Well, we had so much fun and Rachel: We did Joe: Ok, Rachel: The clip. Joe: Thank you so much, and I wish you all the best and I look forward to seeing your progress with everything. And it was really an honor to talk with you. Rachel: Thank you. Thank you so much.

Jordan Montgomery Interview

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 18, 2021 45:42

How To Find A Business Coach Or Mentor with Jordan Montgomery. My discussion with Jordan involved learning about the various types of performance coaches, the styles, how can someone benefit from a coach and why you would need/want one. I enjoyed this honest conversation with Jordan, his ideas and how well he spoke and conveyed his ideas and message. There's a good chance a performance coach could really improve so many things in your life, that it's worth looking into for sure. Thanks for listening! Joe #thejoecostelloshow #montgomerycompanies #performancecoach Jordan Montgomery Owner - Montgomery Companies Website: https://www.montgomerycompanies.com/ Instagram: @jordanmmontgomery Facebook: @montgomerycompanies LinkedIn: @jordanmmontgomery 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 Jordan: Hey, Joe, thanks for having me, man. I've been following your work, and I want to say congratulations on all that you've built and continue to build. And it's an honor to have this conversation with you. Thanks. Joe: Hey, Jordan, welcome to the podcast. Man, I'm glad you're here. I'm excited to talk with you. Jordan: Well, Joe: Thanks Jordan: I appreciate Joe: For coming. Jordan: That question and I'll try to be succinct with my answer, but I grew up in southeast Iowa and a little town called Colonia in Kelowna is the smallest Joe: Thank you, man, I appreciate Jordan: One of the smallest Joe: It. Jordan: Towns Joe: So Jordan: In Washington Joe: I Jordan: County, Joe: Got fired Jordan: But it's Joe: Up Jordan: The Joe: When Jordan: Largest Joe: When they sent me your bio Jordan: Amish community Joe: And then I got to watch Jordan: West Joe: Your Jordan: Of the Mississippi. Joe: Inspirational videos. Jordan: So Joe: I Jordan: I grew Joe: Love Jordan: Up in Joe: That Jordan: Sort Joe: Stuff. Jordan: Of Amish Joe: I love Jordan: Country, Joe: The stuff that Jordan: A Joe: You're Jordan: One Joe: Doing Jordan: Stoplight Joe: With Jordan: Don't Joe: Iowa Jordan: Blink kind of Joe: Hawkeyes. Jordan: Town, Joe: So Jordan: Simple Joe: I saw Jordan: Life. Joe: That and Jordan: You Joe: I Jordan: Know, Joe: Was like, Jordan: My Joe: Oh, Jordan: Mom Joe: Man, Jordan: Was a teacher. Joe: I got Jordan: Dad Joe: To have Jordan: Was Joe: This Jordan: A blue Joe: Guy Jordan: Collar Joe: On. Jordan: Worker. Joe: This Jordan: But Joe: Is Jordan: My Joe: Awesome. Jordan: Dad taught Joe: But Jordan: Me the value Joe: So Jordan: Of hard Joe: Before Jordan: Work. Joe: We get into Jordan: And Joe: Any Jordan: I Joe: Of Jordan: Really Joe: That, Jordan: Learned Joe: You Jordan: Work Joe: Said you listen Jordan: Ethic Joe: To some Jordan: From Joe: Of my Jordan: My Joe: I guess Jordan: Father. Joe: You probably Jordan: He was an entrepreneur, Joe: Already know what Jordan: So Joe: I'm Jordan: He Joe: About Jordan: Owned Joe: To say, but Jordan: A small Joe: I Jordan: Painting Joe: Really Jordan: Business. Joe: Want to know about Jordan: And I always really Joe: You Jordan: Appreciated Joe: And how Jordan: The Joe: You Jordan: Fact Joe: Got Jordan: That my Joe: Started. Jordan: Dad Joe: And Jordan: Was at every Joe: This Jordan: One of my Joe: Is Jordan: Sporting Joe: The part Jordan: Events. Joe: Of the podcast where Jordan: He never Joe: It's Jordan: Missed Joe: Completely Jordan: An Joe: Up Jordan: Event Joe: To you, Jordan: In music. Joe: How far Jordan: He never Joe: Back Jordan: Missed Joe: You Jordan: A sporting Joe: Want to go. Jordan: Event. Joe: But for Jordan: You Joe: Me, Jordan: Just there Joe: When Jordan: For me. Joe: I Jordan: He Joe: Meet Jordan: Was ultra Joe: Someone like Jordan: Present Joe: You, even Jordan: As a Joe: If Jordan: Father. Joe: It's through the Internet Jordan: And Joe: Like Jordan: So Joe: This, Jordan: When I got out of college, Joe: I want to Jordan: I Joe: Know Jordan: Knew Joe: What you did to become Jordan: For sure, Joe: The person Jordan: Joe, Joe: You are Jordan: That Joe: Today. Jordan: I wanted to control Joe: What Jordan: My Joe: Was Jordan: Own Joe: The Jordan: Time. Joe: Path that steered Jordan: I just remember Joe: You in this Jordan: That Joe: Direction? Jordan: With my father's Joe: What Jordan: Example, Joe: Were the things Jordan: I thought, you Joe: That Jordan: Know, Joe: Happened Jordan: I just Joe: To Jordan: Want to Joe: You? Jordan: Make sure I can control Joe: Sometimes Jordan: My own time, Joe: It's as young Jordan: That Joe: As Jordan: Nobody Joe: You're in Jordan: Ever Joe: Elementary Jordan: Tells me where Joe: School. Jordan: I have Joe: And Jordan: To be Joe: Your Jordan: And Joe: Father Jordan: What I have to Joe: Was Jordan: Be there. Joe: The coach Jordan: And Joe: For Jordan: It's Joe: Certain Jordan: Not that I Joe: Sports Jordan: Had a problem Joe: Teams. Jordan: With following Joe: He got you Jordan: Instruction. Joe: Fired up or Jordan: I just Joe: And Jordan: Wanted to build Joe: You translated Jordan: My life by Joe: That into being Jordan: Design Joe: Also a business Jordan: And Joe: Coach. So Jordan: Really take control Joe: I'll stop Jordan: Of Joe: Talking. Jordan: My time Joe: And Jordan: And Joe: I want Jordan: Lead Joe: You to Jordan: My Joe: Just Jordan: Family Joe: Kind Jordan: Well Joe: Of give Jordan: In Joe: Us Jordan: The Joe: The Jordan: Same Joe: Back Jordan: Way that Joe: Story. Jordan: My dad Joe: So Jordan: Led me. Joe: When Jordan: So Joe: People listen Jordan: I Joe: To Jordan: Grew Joe: This Jordan: Up in Joe: And Jordan: Rural Joe: Then they Jordan: Iowa. Joe: Later watch Jordan: I went Joe: The YouTube Jordan: To the University Joe: Video, Jordan: Of Iowa. Joe: They could say, Jordan: I'm Joe: Oh, Jordan: Still a Joe: I Jordan: Very avid Joe: Get this, Jordan: Hockey Joe: This Jordan: Fan and Joe: This Jordan: We've had Joe: Was me. Jordan: The Joe: Or Jordan: Fortunate opportunity Joe: Now Jordan: To Joe: I Jordan: Work Joe: See Jordan: With some Joe: How Jordan: Of the sports Joe: He Jordan: Programs. Joe: Landed, where he did. Jordan: So Joe: So Jordan: I live in Iowa Joe: The stage Jordan: City, Joe: Is Jordan: Iowa, Joe: Yours. Jordan: Actually just outside of Iowa City and a little small town called Tiffin with my wife Ashley and our three daughters. My wife today runs the business. I run my mouth. We have a full scale coaching and consulting firm, Montgomery Companies. We have several coaching partners, and today we serve several thousand coaching clients. Those clients range from professional athletes to entrepreneurs and salespeople. We do work with some executive leaders at some larger firms. And I just have a blast getting to do what I do. And I meet some really interesting people. We get to help people think more deeply about who they are and where they're headed. And ultimately you get to help people live into who they were created to be. And it's a tremendous blessing. So I had a career in the financial services business, allowed me to pivot into this world pretty open about my professional journey. But at the end of the day, I graduated college 2010 and University of Iowa spent the last 11 years really building a skill set that's allowed us to build a business around coaching, consulting and leading people. So that's kind of the short version of my story. Obviously, there's a lot of twists and turns and gods provide a lot of grace. Jordan: Certainly I've been thankful to be around a lot of the right people. But if you're asking me the short version on how I got to where I'm at today, that's the the short version on Jordan Montgomery. Yeah, I think my dad, at the end of the day, my dad was a family man with a business, not a business man with a family. And I wanted to model that. I wanted to be a family man with a business, not a business man with a family. And I think as a driven type, a young man living in America, I kind of fight that every day. I mean, at the other day, like my wife and my kids are my top priority. But if I say they're my top priority, then that needs to show up in my calendar and that needs to be reflected in how I spend my time. And I want to be respected the most by people who know me the best. And that means that I'm a father first. I'm a husband first. I'm leading my family well. And if I lead inside the walls of my home, then I think I can lead in other areas of my life Joe: Cool. Jordan: As well. But Joe: So Jordan: I just didn't want to be Joe: First Jordan: The guy Joe: Of Jordan: That Joe: All, I love the part Jordan: Built Joe: Where you Jordan: Something Joe: Said Jordan: Professionally Joe: That because your father Jordan: But Joe: Was Jordan: Then Joe: Able Jordan: Sacrificed Joe: To make it, Jordan: Or Joe: You Jordan: Compromised Joe: Gravitated Jordan: In really other Joe: Towards Jordan: Important Joe: That Jordan: Areas Joe: Feeling Jordan: Of life. So Joe: And knowing Jordan: I appreciate Joe: That Jordan: Your pointing Joe: He was Jordan: Back Joe: Able Jordan: To Joe: To Jordan: My Joe: Do Jordan: Father's Joe: It because Jordan: Example. Joe: He owned Jordan: I Joe: His own Jordan: Probably Joe: Business Jordan: Still Joe: So Jordan: Underestimate Joe: Early on Jordan: The impact Joe: For Jordan: That that Joe: You Jordan: Had Joe: And Jordan: On Joe: For Jordan: Me Joe: The listeners, Jordan: As Joe: That Jordan: A young Joe: Triggered Jordan: Kid, but Joe: Something Jordan: He Joe: For you Jordan: Really Joe: That Jordan: Taught Joe: You Jordan: Me Joe: Were able Jordan: What Joe: To say. Jordan: Entrepreneurship Joe: I Jordan: Was Joe: Want Jordan: All about Joe: That for Jordan: In so many Joe: My Jordan: Ways. Joe: Own family and my own kids at some point when I have kids that I have that flexibility to do this. So that was really cool. Not a lot of people have said that in the past on the show when they when they said, oh, I became an entrepreneur because and it was all of these other reasons. But to actually associate it with your father sitting on the sidelines, watching you play sports and concert or whatever it might be, that was really cool. Jordan: Well, and I'll say this to Joe, because there are some entrepreneurs listening that maybe don't have that flexibility, like maybe you're truly in a situation where you've got a team or your businesses in an industry that requires you to work certain hours or whatever. So that's not a shame or guilt. Anyone who's working really hard to provide, because at the end of the day, entrepreneurs are called to work longer hours is just part of the deal. So if you're in that grind right now, here's what I'd encourage you with, is somebody that's going to change and the reason that you're doing what you're doing right now, the reason that you're working as hard as you're working right now is to have the flexibility and the autonomy. And, you know, I also wasn't there for my dad's early years. Like, I missed you know, I was born when my dad was eight to 10 years into being an entrepreneur. So he earned that flexibility. So let's just not forget that that flexibility is earned. And that looks different for every entrepreneur based on the industry Joe: Yeah, that Jordan: That Joe: Was Jordan: You're Joe: Really Jordan: In Joe: Cool, and I Jordan: And Joe: Came Jordan: This Joe: From Jordan: Stage Joe: An entrepreneurial Jordan: Of Joe: Family as well. Jordan: The business Joe: The Jordan: That Joe: Unfortunate Jordan: You're in. Joe: Thing for Jordan: So Joe: Me is that Jordan: I think Joe: My Jordan: That's Joe: Father Jordan: Important to Joe: Could Jordan: Underscore. Joe: Not attend most of my stuff. So when you said it, it kind of hit home and I hold nothing. He's passed on at this point. But I never held a grudge because he just he worked his butt off and and just to provide and create something great. So it never struck me the other way. It wasn't Jordan: Yeah. Joe: Like I was resentful over it. But I just love the way you framed that whole thing. That was really cool. Jordan: Well, yeah, you know, I just I fell in love with sports at a really early age. I just love competition. I loved competing. I love watching other people compete. I love the atmosphere. I love the energy that goes into a sports competition. I'm still the guy, Joe. Like, I will watch one shining moment at the end of the final four for those who are familiar with that show. I cry every year when I watch that one shining, but that little three minute clip. And I think part of the reason I get emotional about that as you watch young people get emotional over competition. And I just loved the rush of competition. I loved watching people give their all to a very specific activity, blood, sweat and tears. And Joe: Yeah, absolutely, Jordan: So Joe: I totally Jordan: I just fell Joe: Agree Jordan: In love with sports Joe: And Jordan: At a young Joe: I'm Jordan: Age. Joe: Still Jordan: I played Joe: Working Jordan: Sports Joe: Like Jordan: All the way Joe: Crazy, Jordan: Through high school. Joe: But Jordan: I did Joe: It's Jordan: Not compete Joe: Just Jordan: In college. Joe: Because Jordan: And Joe: I Jordan: It's something Joe: Don't Jordan: That's Joe: Say no Jordan: Kind Joe: And Jordan: Of Joe: I Jordan: Interesting Joe: Just keep Jordan: About Joe: Adding Jordan: My story Joe: More and more Jordan: And background. Joe: To my plate. Jordan: A lot of people Joe: So it's Jordan: Ask Joe: My Jordan: Me, well, Joe: Own fault. And Jordan: You must Joe: And, Jordan: Have played professional Joe: You Jordan: Sports Joe: Know, we're empty Jordan: Or at least Joe: Nesters. Jordan: Collegiate sports. Joe: I have no Jordan: You're going Joe: One Jordan: To Joe: To Jordan: Work Joe: Provide Jordan: With these professional Joe: For myself, but Jordan: Athletes Joe: I Jordan: And college Joe: Just can't Jordan: Athletes. Joe: Stop Jordan: And I'm just Joe: The Jordan: Very Joe: Train. Jordan: Open about that. Joe: So Jordan: A lot of what I learned Joe: It is what Jordan: As Joe: It is. Jordan: Applied Joe: So let's Jordan: And most Joe: Before Jordan: Of the athletes Joe: We get Jordan: We're working with, Joe: Into Jordan: We're working with in the areas Joe: All of what Jordan: Of Joe: You offer Jordan: Mindset and Joe: In Jordan: Leadership development. Joe: Montgomery Jordan: So Joe: Companies Jordan: I'm not teaching Joe: And Jordan: A basketball player how to shoot. Joe: Your team Jordan: You Joe: And Jordan: Know, Joe: The Jordan: I'm Joe: Different Jordan: Not helping Joe: Levels Jordan: The Joe: Of coaching Jordan: Football Joe: That you do, Jordan: Player with his footwork, Joe: Talk to me about Jordan: But Joe: You Jordan: We are helping Joe: And Jordan: Him with Joe: Sports. Jordan: Our mental game and Joe: Just Jordan: We're Joe: Because Jordan: Helping Joe: I Jordan: Them Joe: Want Jordan: With the Joe: To Jordan: Six Joe: Know, Jordan: Inches in between Joe: Was Jordan: Their ears Joe: There a correlation Jordan: And we're helping them with how Joe: Of Jordan: They see the world and their self Joe: You Jordan: Awareness Joe: Doing sports Jordan: And Joe: Young Jordan: Their externalisation Joe: Or sports in college Jordan: And optimization. Joe: Or to Jordan: You Joe: Me, Jordan: Know, Joe: You looked Jordan: At the Joe: Like Jordan: End of the Joe: You Jordan: Day, Joe: Were a football Jordan: I think Joe: Player. Jordan: It athletes Joe: I was like, maybe Jordan: In a really Joe: He played Jordan: Unique Joe: For Jordan: World Joe: The Hawkeyes. Jordan: Where they Joe: I Jordan: Give Joe: Don't Jordan: So Joe: Know. Jordan: Much of their time for such a really, really small window of competition. You know, you think a lot like the average NFL athlete will compete for less than two hours, whistle to whistle over the course of a season. But they can be literally all year round and they'll get paid, graded and evaluated for what they do inside of two hours. All year long, but it's kind of a metaphor for it for all of us, right, because the reality is each one of us is practicing for little moments, for small moments. Some of them we can predict, some of them we can't. But you get paid and your best to show you get paid really, really, really well to be prepared Joe: Hmm. Jordan: In small little windows of time. And so I developed the sort of fascination or obsession with helping athletes prepare and be at their best when that small window of opportunity presents itself and, you know, your clutch, your clutch when you can show up and do normal things. In an abnormal times, so like Derek Jeter, Kobe Bryant, you know, they're considered clutch because at the end of the day, they could show up normal. They could just be who they were because they had practiced so much in the most important windows of time. And it's a really interesting metaphor that we can apply to all of life. Yeah. Yeah, well, it's it's a pursuit of excellence, right, and you know, I'm reading a book right now by Tim Grover, The Unforgiving Race to Greatness, and it's called Winning. And, Joe: Yeah, it's Jordan: You know, there's Joe: And Jordan: So much of what Tim Joe: Again, Jordan: Grover preaches Joe: People Jordan: That I Joe: That Jordan: Really love. Joe: Maybe Jordan: I'm Joe: Just Jordan: Not Joe: Watch sports casually Jordan: Maybe not aligned Joe: Don't Jordan: With one Joe: Understand Jordan: Hundred percent of it, Joe: The Jordan: But Joe: Grueling Jordan: Winning has a price, Joe: Effort Jordan: You know, in Joe: In the lifelong Jordan: Pursuing your Joe: Commitment Jordan: Calling has a price Joe: To potentially Jordan: Regardless Joe: Never, Jordan: Of what you do, Joe: Ever Jordan: You know, sports or otherwise. Joe: Getting Jordan: If you're an Joe: That Jordan: Athlete, Joe: Chance Jordan: Great. But Joe: In Jordan: If Joe: The sports Jordan: You're an entrepreneur, Joe: World and Jordan: There's going to Joe: Used Jordan: Be a cost Joe: To have some really good friends Jordan: Associated Joe: On the Buffalo Jordan: With Joe: Bills Jordan: Your calling. Joe: Football team because Jordan: And Joe: I went to college Jordan: I Joe: Out Jordan: Think Joe: There Jordan: Sports is the epitome Joe: And Jordan: Of that. Joe: I was Jordan: But certainly Joe: A musician. Jordan: Entrepreneurship Joe: I was Jordan: Is Joe: In a band. Jordan: Is Joe: They Jordan: Right Joe: Loved Jordan: There Joe: Our band and they used Jordan: With being Joe: To come Jordan: With being Joe: And Jordan: An athlete Joe: Hang Jordan: In Joe: Out. Jordan: Terms Joe: We've got Jordan: Of Joe: The dinner with Jordan: Making Joe: Them and Jordan: Sacrifice. Joe: You would hear the stories. And it's just to live on the edge of not knowing if you're playing or you're sitting each day and who's who's looking for your spot and the work so hard and give up so much from a really young age all the way through. It's unbelievable. You know, and I watch certain friends here in Arizona, believe it or not, Arizona has got a very big hockey base. You know, like fans love hockey. And there's a lot of kids that come here, play hockey, play on the farm team of the coyotes or and we've had friends that had their kids just go through all in hockey. Moms and dads have the worst it's the worst schedule I've ever seen. And to go all the way to the very end and be on the farm team and never get called up. And I can't even imagine that it's just grueling. Jordan: Yeah, well, you know, there's there's a lot that goes into speaking, right, speaking as an art form, and in today's world, attention is currency. So something we think about a lot and the keynote speaking world is you've got Joe: Mm Jordan: To Joe: Hmm. Jordan: Keep people's attention. And if you can't, you're out, you're done. You'll never be the really high demand keynote speaker if you don't know how to keep somebody's attention. So there's multiple ways that we do that. One of the ways that we keep people's attention is through story. It's a story sell facts, tell. When you get really good Joe: Yeah, Jordan: At telling stories, Joe: Yeah, I Jordan: You keep Joe: Agree. Jordan: People's attention. Joe: Ok, Jordan: In Joe: So Jordan: Fact, Joe: Enough about sports. Jordan: If I Joe: I Jordan: Were to Joe: Watched Jordan: Tell you about Joe: The video Jordan: My business, Joe: Of Jordan: If Joe: You Jordan: I were Joe: Working Jordan: To say, well, Joe: With Jordan: You know, Joe, Joe: The Hawkeyes Jordan: These are the five Joe: And Jordan: Things that I do my Joe: I Jordan: Business, or Joe: Was watching as Jordan: If Joe: The Jordan: I said, hey, Joe: Camera Jordan: Joe, Joe: Went around the room, I Jordan: Let Joe: Was Jordan: Me tell Joe: Watching Jordan: You a story. Joe: To see how intently Jordan: The minute I said, I'll Joe: The Jordan: Tell Joe: Players Jordan: You a story, Joe: Were listening Jordan: I would actually Joe: To you. Jordan: Activate Joe: And Jordan: Your brain Joe: Like I was Jordan: At 12 Joe: Watching Jordan: Times Joe: Their eyes Jordan: The Joe: And Jordan: Capacity. Joe: Their expressions Jordan: So Joe: And they Jordan: There's Joe: Were Jordan: A Joe: All Jordan: Lot of neuroscience Joe: Incredibly Jordan: That supports Joe: Focused. Jordan: The fact that Joe: And Jordan: I've got Joe's Joe: I can Jordan: Attention Joe: Only imagine the coach going, hey, Jordan: At 12 Joe: Today we're Jordan: Times Joe: Having Jordan Jordan: The rate. Joe: Mcqueary come in today. He's Jordan: If Joe: Going Jordan: I Joe: To talk Jordan: Decide Joe: To Jordan: To Joe: Us Jordan: Allow Joe: About Jordan: My words Joe: The Jordan: To Joe: Six Jordan: Paint a picture, Joe: Inches Jordan: Draw Joe: Between Jordan: You Joe: Our Jordan: Into Joe: Ears. Jordan: A story Joe: I want you guys Jordan: That Joe: To pay Jordan: Actually Joe: Attention. Jordan: Activates Joe: I want you to Jordan: Your Joe: Be open to Jordan: Senses. Joe: What he says Jordan: So Joe: And whatever. Jordan: The first Joe: And Jordan: Thing is we try to Joe: It Jordan: Tell Joe: Feels Jordan: A lot Joe: Like when Jordan: Of stories Joe: Somebody Jordan: To drive Joe: Comes Jordan: A plan. Joe: Into the Jordan: We Joe: Classroom, Jordan: Don't use PowerPoint Joe: When you're in elementary Jordan: Slides Joe: School, Jordan: Or use Joe: You Jordan: Pictures Joe: Start Jordan: Or graphs. Joe: Throwing papers Jordan: I'm not Joe: At each other. And Jordan: I'm Joe: So Jordan: Not minimizing Joe: How do you deal with that Jordan: Anybody Joe: When you Jordan: Who does Joe: Speak? Jordan: Those Joe: Because Jordan: Things. Joe: You do all sorts Jordan: I just Joe: Of speaking Jordan: Think if you're going Joe: Engagements. Jordan: To be someone who keeps Joe: So Jordan: People's Joe: This was Jordan: Attention, Joe: Just one Jordan: You got Joe: Small Jordan: To be great Joe: Piece of it. Jordan: At Joe: But you Jordan: Stories. Joe: Do something to capture Jordan: I Joe: People. Jordan: Think eye Joe: When I Jordan: Contact Joe: Watched Jordan: And tonality Joe: Even Jordan: Is Joe: The speaking Jordan: Is another Joe: Engagements Jordan: Big one, right? There's Joe: At Jordan: A difference Joe: The corporations Jordan: Between communicating Joe: That you've Jordan: And Joe: Done, Jordan: Connecting. People Joe: You Jordan: Want to feel Joe: Have a really Jordan: Like you're Joe: Good flow. Jordan: Speaking to them Joe: You don't Jordan: Like, Joe: Use Jordan: Wow, Joe: All Jordan: This guy's Joe: Of the Jordan: Speaking directly Joe: Weird words Jordan: To me. Joe: That people use Jordan: And Joe: All the time. Jordan: It sounds Joe: Tell Jordan: So Joe: Me Jordan: Simple, Joe: How you do Jordan: But what's Joe: It. Jordan: Common sense is not always kind of practice. If you watch your average keynote speaker, their eyes will kind of drift all throughout the room to look down, look sideways. I think at the speaker, you want to keep constant eye contact. And then the other thing I think about is being really you centered in the message being you centered. So I'm going to use two people's names. I'm going to pick people out in the crowd. I'm going to touch people, maybe even on the shoulder or the arm as I'm speaking. And I'm going to move through the crowd. And so much of communication is nonverbal, right? 90 percent is nonverbal. It's not what you say, it's how you say it. And it's also not what you say. It's what people hear and it's what they remember. Maya Angelou famously said it's not what you say that people remember. It's how you make them feel. And so I try to stay really in tune with how I make people feel. A lot of that is my energy, my body language. It's you focus communication, it's telling stories, and it's the difference between connecting and communicating. So if you're listening and you're thinking about your communication style or maybe you want to develop your craft as a keynote speaker, those are a few things that you could consider. Jordan: And I'll say this to Joe. I'm a long way away from where I want to be. I got a long way to go. So those are things that I think about repetitiously. And I get obsessed with the practice of my craft. And I'm evaluating and observing high level keynote speakers. You know, how do they move? What do they say? What do they not say? You know, their pace, their tonality, the way that they tell stories, their presence. Yeah, those are all things that I'm paying attention to. So I appreciate your kind words. I think communication as an art form is no different than playing an instrument or doing a dance. And for anybody that's in sales, for any entrepreneur, if you're not taking that seriously as you develop and grow your business, that's something to really consider and think about. Because whether you're speaking to an audience of one hundred or a thousand or an audience of five or ten, you're in the human connection business before you're in the construction business or before you're in the marketing business or financial planning business or real estate business. We've got to remember that the human connection is at the center of everything that we do. Well, thank you. It's kind of you to say. I did and I went to school for interdepartmental studies, which is a fancy way to cover recreational management, so I literally wanted to go to school, have a great social experience, and then start a business and the fitness world. Jordan: That was kind of my dream. And so I took some entrepreneurial courses, got a degree in recreation management, fell into finance and in two things were true. I didn't want to have a boss, so I went to work for myself and I wanted to create my own schedule that that was it. I want to call my shots, create my own schedule. But I didn't have any money and I didn't have any experience. And so I fell into financial services because it allowed me to be in business for myself, but not by myself. So I had a great support system. It was kind of like a franchise model, had a lot of success in that world at an early stage, had a big event in my life in twenty fifteen that really have me thinking about my future in a deeper way. And then I decided to pivot into sort of the consulting and coaching world making financial planning, kind of our kind of our core client. And so in a very early stage in a coaching business, financial advisers were some of our first clients by way of my background in the financial planning world. Joe: Yeah, and you do it incredibly well, my friend. So thank you. So let's just backtrack really quickly so that I can get the progression from college into starting this company. So did you go to school for finance? Jordan: I think it's so true Joe: Ok. Jordan: In life and in business, definitely in entrepreneurship, where we're leading people, that more is caught than taught. Joe: Ok. Jordan: And so nobody really taught me how to coach. But I watched other people coach and I watched other people in my industry that do what I'm doing now, do it at a really high level. And again, I paid attention to quality of life. I paid attention to the relationships. I paid attention to the way that they manage their decisions and manage their time. And I thought, you know, I want to do that. I think I can do that. And I actually did it in tandem with my own financial planning. And so I started sort of coaching on the side and I had really been coaching all the while I was in financial planning and some aspect working with clients. But I also started getting asked to speak and do workshops. And so I sort of fell in love with that work, Joe. But the reality is I had a couple of mentors. I had some key people in my life that had done that work in a really high level. One of those people is a guy by the name of Ben Newman. Another guy is John Wright Senior. And they both had Joe: How did Jordan: Big Joe: Coaching Jordan: Coaching Joe: Catch your Jordan: Practices Joe: Eye, or Jordan: Working with Joe: Was it because Jordan: Professional Joe: You were Jordan: Athletes Joe: Just taking Jordan: And Fortune Joe: From Jordan: 500 Joe: Your Jordan: Executive Joe: Love of Jordan: Leaders. Joe: Sports Jordan: And Joe: Being a coach? Right. Jordan: I just Joe: I Jordan: Admired Joe: Mean, just Jordan: The work. Joe: Taking Jordan: I thought, Joe: That, Jordan: You know, Joe: But Jordan: I think Joe: Now Jordan: I Joe: Saying, Jordan: Can Joe: Ok, Jordan: Do that. Joe: Wait, Jordan: I got a lot to learn, Joe: I want Jordan: But Joe: To do a little Jordan: I'll Joe: Bit Jordan: Learn Joe: Of that Jordan: As I Joe: With Jordan: Go. Joe: Sports Jordan: And Joe: People. I want to do that with Jordan: Just Joe: Entrepreneurs. Jordan: Like you or any Joe: I want Jordan: Other Joe: To do Jordan: Entrepreneur, Joe: It with Jordan: You Joe: With Jordan: Kind Joe: Business Jordan: Of dive headfirst Joe: People. Jordan: And just Joe: I mean, Jordan: Hope Joe: What Jordan: It works Joe: Made Jordan: Out. Joe: You Jordan: So Joe: Wake up one day and Jordan: Our Joe: Say, Jordan: Business Joe: Yeah, Jordan: Grew Joe: I Jordan: Rapidly, Joe: Want to do coaching and Jordan: By Joe: I Jordan: God's Joe: Want to Jordan: Grace, Joe: Do it Jordan: Into Joe: In Jordan: The help Joe: This Jordan: Of a lot Joe: Form? Jordan: Of good people. And I woke up one day and I thought, you know what? I could leave my financial planning business based on what we built in the coaching business. And then we started to add more partners and multiply our efforts through other people. And that's when it really starts to get financed, when you can impact the world or you can impact the world around you through the people that work with you. So virtually everybody on our team right now, with the exception of maybe two to three people there in the coaching business, so their coaching partners, so they're leading, they're doing coaching and consulting work, either individual coaching group, coaching, keynote speaking, they're all contracted out. So some of them have five clients, some of them have 30 clients. We have a couple that have just a couple of clients and they're all sort of specialized. So we have some former professional athletes. We have some people that came from the ministry world. So they're actually pastors or they have been pastors. And then we have some people in the world of sales. We have some real estate agents and financial advisers. Some of them are very technical. Somebody might say a more motivational, but all of them are for hire as coaching partners. It's my job to lead them and make sure that they're getting what they need from a content standpoint and also just keeping them connected to to a vision and and keeping them connected to our company. But we're having a ton of fun. I mean, it's it's awesome to be on a team. It's fun to be a part of something that's bigger than just me. And, you know, each one of them is unique in terms of what they bring to the table. Joe: So that's a great segue because you do have a fairly Jordan: You Joe: Sizable Jordan: Know, what's Joe: Team. Jordan: Most important Joe: So Jordan: To us, Joe, Joe: What Jordan: Is that Joe: Do those Jordan: We all Joe: Team Jordan: Have Joe: Members Jordan: Similar Joe: Do Jordan: Values, Joe: For you? Jordan: So I want to give people the freedom and flexibility to be autonomous and how they work with clients. And so I've never told somebody, hey, here's the five step plan. Here's exactly what you have to do. Now, I'll make some general suggestions about the way that we lead people and care for people. But at the end of the day, most of the people that are on our coaching platform have been wildly successful in other arenas. And so they've been leading. They've been coaching. They've been training and developing people. So I think we're aligned in terms of our values. But beyond that, I want them to really operate in their true giftedness. And for some of them, that giftedness is in listening. You know, for some of them, it's in the world of neuroscience. You know, they just really understand how the brain works for others. They're just big on accountability, the kind like the bulldog that's in your face. It's really intense and motivational. So we want people to be who they are. We want them to have strong values, which for us means their faith filled and family oriented. And if they're faith filled, family oriented, others focus. They're usually a good fit for our coaching Joe: Did Jordan: Practice. Joe: They follow Jordan: And then, of course, Joe: A Jordan: There Joe: Certain Jordan: Are some other criteria Joe: Structure Jordan: That we want to Joe: That Jordan: Vet Joe: You Jordan: Out. Joe: Have Jordan: But Joe: Set up Jordan: That's Joe: So Jordan: A that's Joe: That Jordan: A good question. Joe: When someone hires one of those people, they know that if they're getting the quality of the Montgomery companies coach and there's a certain structure formula, something like that? The. Jordan: Yeah. Yeah, I would say that's that's very true of of our team, I think we're well positioned to help just about anybody in any industry with any problem. You know, there's a few that we would say, hey, we're not not licensed to do that. We're not going to dive into that space. But for the most part, if it is in the world of performance sales and driving results, there's somebody on our team that can handle the issue of the opportunity. Yes, so there's really two components to coaching for us and our business model, one is group coaching and one individual coaching, and those are obviously very separate. If I'm working with an individual client and we're talking about the phases of coaching or how I work with a client, first is discovery. So the answers you get are only as good as the questions that you ask. And people don't care how Joe: Cool. Jordan: Much you know Joe: Well, Jordan: Until Joe: I Jordan: They Joe: Just Jordan: Know that you care. Joe: It's important Jordan: And Joe: Because Jordan: To Joe: I Jordan: Us, Joe: When Jordan: It's Joe: I Jordan: A Joe: Went Jordan: Relationship. Joe: And looked at the website, I was like, Jordan: And Joe: This Jordan: So Joe: Is this Jordan: I Joe: Is Jordan: Always Joe: Cool. Jordan: Tell Joe: You Jordan: People, Joe: Have a Jordan: Hey, Joe: Really Jordan: I'm Joe: Cool team Jordan: A coach, Joe: Around Jordan: Which means Joe: You. And Jordan: I'm Joe: I Jordan: Going Joe: Wanted Jordan: To hold Joe: To Jordan: You Joe: Find Jordan: Accountable. Joe: Out if there Jordan: I'm Joe: Was Jordan: Going Joe: A variety Jordan: To share ideas Joe: In Jordan: Where to talk about Joe: What Jordan: Concepts Joe: They Jordan: And strategy, Joe: Coach on Jordan: Just Joe: Which Jordan: Like Joe: You Jordan: Any Joe: Answered Jordan: Coach Joe: That question. They Jordan: Would. Joe: Do. You have people that Jordan: The Joe: Specialize Jordan: Difference Joe: In Jordan: In Joe: All Jordan: Our Joe: Sorts Jordan: Approach, Joe: Of things. Jordan: I Joe: So Jordan: Think, is Joe: It's Jordan: That Joe: Great Jordan: I'm also Joe: That Jordan: A Joe: If Jordan: Strategic Joe: Someone Jordan: Partner. Joe: Loves working with you for all Jordan: And so Joe: The reasons Jordan: If I sign Joe: That Jordan: Up Joe: They Jordan: To work Joe: Love Jordan: With a client, Joe: To work with you, they Jordan: What Joe: Can Jordan: That means Joe: Get Jordan: Is Joe: Basically whatever Jordan: I'm going Joe: They Jordan: To advocate, Joe: Need under one roof, Jordan: I'm going Joe: Which Jordan: To support, Joe: Is cool. It's Jordan: I'm Joe: Not Jordan: Going Joe: Like Jordan: To connect Joe: You do. It's not one Jordan: And Joe: Dimensional Jordan: I'm going to highlight Joe: In any Jordan: And spotlight Joe: Any way, Jordan: Who Joe: Shape Jordan: You Joe: Or form. Jordan: Are and what you do. That means that my network is your network. It means if you want to speak engaged, we're going to help you with that. If you need marketing help or we're going to help you with that. If I need to get you connected to another leader, I'm going to help you with that. If we need help, you track down a client or prospect, I'm going to help you with that. So it's our approach is a little bit different that way. It's it's heavily based around relationship. The relationship has to start with Joe: All right, Jordan: Discovery. Joe: Cool. So let's talk about Jordan: One of my Joe: The Jordan: Other Joe: Coaching Jordan: Beliefs, Joe, is Joe: Part Jordan: That if Joe: Of it, Jordan: I'm working Joe: And Jordan: With a client, Joe: If Jordan: It's always Joe: You can go through Jordan: 100 percent Joe: And tell Jordan: Of the time, Joe: Me the Jordan: Their time, not Joe: Different Jordan: Mine. Joe: Types Jordan: Which Joe: Of Jordan: Means Joe: Services Jordan: I've got to Joe: That Jordan: Deal Joe: You Jordan: With Joe: Have Jordan: The issues, Joe: For the coaching Jordan: The Joe: Piece Jordan: Opportunities Joe: Of. Jordan: And the challenges that are most present for them right away before I try to drive my agenda. So if I show up to the call and I say, hey, Joe, here's three things I want to talk about today. Here's the here's the new approach to closing a sale or here's the new approach to the discovery process or whatever. And I find out that your dog just died or that you just lost the key employee or that your house just burned down. But I'm using really dramatic examples. But anyway, the point, is there something else on your mind? I'm missing it. I'm not know I've failed to connect with you, and candidly, I failed to lead you. So the first question I asked to all of our coaching clients and a coaching meeting, and they would tell you, this is not to say, hey, Joe, how do we create space to discuss and talk about the things that are most pressing, interesting and relevant for you today? I want to start there and then we'll recap and we'll talk about some of the stuff that we've talked about the past. I'm always, you know, forcing accountability. So we're we're bringing things to the forefront. Did you do X, Y and Z to do that or Yapp with that? But we addressed the issues that are most present. And then I'm always trying to share ideas and concepts that I feel like are relevant to them based on the seasonal life there in industry they're in or what they've said that they needed help with. Conversations tend to be fairly organic because, again, it's it's a relationship. And, you know, people open up to us about all kinds of stuff, their marriage, their finances, their friendships, their their problems that go way beyond their professional life. Jordan: So I appreciate the question. I don't know if I if I answered it exactly. But to give you a window into our world and how we work with people, that that's sort of our our process and style. You know, right now we work with such a wide range of people, Joe, so I'm not as concerned about like industry or niche. Here's what I what I'm really concerned with this character traits. So they've got to be values oriented, right? They got to care. They're going to be a decent person. In other words, if they just want to go make all the money in the world, they don't want to leave their family. I'm probably not a good fit. I'm going to challenge them on their values and lead in their family and growing in their faith. And that's part of who I am. But that's not for everybody. But so we're probably not a good fit if that's not part of who they are. And then the second thing that I would tell you is they got to be open minded. They have to be willing to learn. They have to be somebody that enjoys new information and new ways of thinking. A new perspective, fresh perspective. Right. Doesn't mean that I'm always right or my perspective is the right perspective. It just means that they're willing to listen right there. They're willing to hear and then they're willing to be challenged. So they want somebody to ask them the tough questions and share the truth and mix even said it best. You said average players want to be left alone. Good players want to be coached, great players want the truth. I want people that want the truth. I want people that really want to be challenged. Joe: Great. Jordan: They've Joe: So Jordan: Got Joe: Before Jordan: An open Joe: We Jordan: Mind Joe: Move to Jordan: And they have strong Joe: A Jordan: Values. Joe: Group coaching piece Jordan: And Joe: Of it, Jordan: If they've Joe: Because Jordan: Got those Joe: We just Jordan: Three Joe: Talked Jordan: Things, Joe: About the one on Jordan: They're Joe: One. Jordan: Usually a good fit for Joe: What's Jordan: Our coaching Joe: Your sweet Jordan: Practice. Joe: Spot? Who who are the people that you feel you work best with or can can help the best. Jordan: So the group coaches typically kind of a one hour session, we try to kind of meet people where they're at. So I work with organizations, as do our partners, to figure out, hey, what really do you need? What's the right time frame? What's the right size? I'd love to tell you that we've got, like, this specific program. It's cookie cutter. It's not. But that's by design. We really want to be a partner and meet people where they're at. So sometimes it's a small as is five people. I've got one group right now, 60, which I think is a little too big. What's important to us is that that's it's intimate or as intimate as it can be where people really feel like, you know, them. And and so we call on people. I try to get to know everybody by name and remember little facts about who they are and what's important to them. It's highly interactive. So I'm calling on people throughout the session. Usually I'm delivering 30 minutes of content or 30 minutes of discussion. We challenge challenge on the spot. I have other people challenge each other. I always say this in our group coaching program that where you sit determines what you see and you see something different than everybody else's and different is valuable. And so what that means is your voice matters because whether you're the most experienced person on the call are the least experienced person on the call, you see something that nobody else in the organization sees. And so we need your voice. We need your perspective, because you've got a different perspective than everybody else. So, Johnny, that sits at the front desk, that's the director of First Impressions, has some really valuable Joe: Awesome, Jordan: Perspective Joe: I Jordan: Because Joe: Love Jordan: Johnny Joe: That. OK, cool. Jordan: Sees Joe: So Jordan: Something Joe: The group Jordan: That Sarah, Joe: Coaching, Jordan: The CEO, Joe: What does that entail? Jordan: Doesn't see. And so we really just try to foster conversation, encourage people and empower people to share and speak up and then deliver content that's inclusive and relevant to the group. Yes, so much of our business is virtual, it just kind of always has been and most a lot of our clients aren't local. So they're you know, they're kind of spread out. We have people all over the US. I'm pretty used to Zoom calls and phone calls, and I speak a lot. Right. So keynote speaking is live often, but we still do virtual keynotes as well. So it's a good mixture, I would say, in so many ways covid changed our business. I was always willing to do things virtually, but I think a lot of companies weren't until they realized like, hey, we can do it this way. And so for me, as a person with a young family, it allowed me to stay at home and I didn't have to. I wasn't on a plane twice a week sleeping in a hotel. So so covid in some ways I'd be careful how I say this, because it was a really difficult time for a lot of people for our business. It actually affected my day to day rhythm or quality of life and I think a positive way and allowed me to be more present with my family. So it's a good mix of both. But I would say the pandemic certainly forced it to be more virtual. Joe: The coaching business, covid or not covid, were you doing live coaching up until that point and now a lot of Jordan: Yeah, Joe: It has shifted Jordan: I would say Joe: Onto Jordan: A good Joe: Like Zoom Jordan: Portion Joe: Calls and things Jordan: Of Joe: Like Jordan: Our Joe: That, Jordan: Clients Joe: Or Jordan: Are either Joe: How your Jordan: In Joe: Business Jordan: Sales or entrepreneurs, Joe: Today and what's Jordan: You know, Joe: The Jordan: So Joe: Mixture Jordan: There Joe: Of live Jordan: In fact, Joe: Versus Jordan: I would say it's Joe: Online? Jordan: Probably 80 percent of our business, either business owners or they're in sales and then there's maybe 20 percent that are in the world of executive leadership or sports. So that's kind of a mix of our business. When I say executive leadership, they're a leader in some sort of a corporate setting, but it's starting to change more every day. Like we work. I work right now with a group of physicians. We've got a gal that owns a very successful cosmetology clinic. So her whole thing is cosmetology Joe: Yep. Jordan: And she's been wildly successful and real estate agents and financial advisors and and college athletes and pro athletes. And so it's a it's a it's a wide range of people. Joe: Perfect out of the clients that you have, what is the percentage of general corporations, then entrepreneurs and then sports related? OK. Awesome. OK, we're closing in on the amount of time that I have you for, which is unfortunate because I love talking with you and I love your approach. I'm getting hit up left Jordan: Yeah, Joe: And right Jordan: Yeah, Joe: With Jordan: Yeah, so Joe: People that Jordan: Got Joe: Have coaching Jordan: Multiple Joe: Businesses Jordan: Answers to the question Joe: Are their personal Jordan: That you just ask, and Joe: Coaches Jordan: It's a great question, Joe: Or their life Jordan: By the Joe: Coaches Jordan: Way, Joe: Or whatever. Jordan: Tom Joe: And Jordan: Landry Joe: There's something Jordan: Probably Joe: About Jordan: Said Joe: Your approach Jordan: It best. Joe: That's Jordan: He said Joe: Just different that Jordan: Koshin Joe: Really I gravitated Jordan: Is Joe: Towards. Jordan: Allowing Joe: And I'm going Jordan: People Joe: To put Jordan: To Joe: You Jordan: Hear Joe: On the spot Jordan: What they Joe: Just Jordan: Don't Joe: Because Jordan: Want to hear, Joe: This is something that I Jordan: Helping Joe: Think people Jordan: People see what Joe: Will Jordan: They don't Joe: Ask Jordan: Want Joe: Themselves Jordan: To see Joe: In Jordan: So Joe: And Jordan: They can become Joe: They don't Jordan: The person Joe: Know the answer to. Jordan: They Joe: But Jordan: Always wanted to become. Joe: People would say, well, why do I need Jordan: That's Joe: A personal Jordan: That's what Joe: Coach? Jordan: Koshien Joe: Why Jordan: Is, Joe: Would that person Jordan: Right, Joe: Across Jordan: And Joe: From me, Jordan: The reality is we Joe: Whether it's Jordan: All Joe: In Jordan: Have Joe: Person Jordan: Blindspots, Joe: Or via Zoom Jordan: Myself Joe: Call, Jordan: Included. Joe: Know anything Jordan: So I've always Joe: More Jordan: Had Joe: About Jordan: A coach, Joe: Me Jordan: I got three Joe: Or my Jordan: Now. Joe: Business Jordan: I've always Joe: Or Jordan: Had Joe: Be Jordan: One. Joe: Able to help? Jordan: I had Joe: And Jordan: 10. Joe: I think Jordan: Over Joe: There's Jordan: The last Joe: There's Jordan: Five Joe: Definitely Jordan: Years, Joe: People that decided Jordan: The Joe: One Jordan: Average Joe: Day they will Jordan: Olympic Joe: Come, said, I'm going Jordan: Athlete Joe: To be a life coach. So Jordan: Has Joe: They Jordan: Seven Joe: Sort of Jordan: Different Joe: Created Jordan: Coaches. Joe: A Jordan: And Joe: Bad name Jordan: I Joe: For Jordan: Think as Joe: The people Jordan: You grow, Joe: That really Jordan: There's Joe: Do it Jordan: What Joe: Well. Jordan: Happens Joe: Right. Jordan: Is there's this paradox Joe: So Jordan: Of education. Joe: You're Jordan: The Joe: One Jordan: More Joe: Of the Jordan: You Joe: Few Jordan: Learn, Joe: People that I've had on where I could Jordan: The Joe: Ask Jordan: More you Joe: This Jordan: Realize Joe: Question, Jordan: You Joe: Too, Jordan: Don't Joe: And Jordan: Know. Joe: Say, OK, I know I'm going Jordan: It's Joe: To really Jordan: Always Joe: Get Jordan: Sort Joe: A Jordan: Of evolving Joe: Good, honest answer. Jordan: In our our Joe: And Jordan: Self Joe: So I'm Jordan: Awareness. Joe: Putting you on the spot for Jordan: But Joe: The Jordan: We Joe: Coaching Jordan: Don't have blind Joe: Community Jordan: Spots Joe: Because I Jordan: And Joe: It's something Jordan: We don't know Joe: That Jordan: What we don't know. Joe: I've never Jordan: And Joe: Had Jordan: So Joe: A Jordan: You Joe: Coach Jordan: Need Joe: And I probably Jordan: Somebody Joe: Could have Jordan: Else Joe: Used Jordan: To Joe: A coach. Jordan: Speak Joe: I probably Jordan: Truth Joe: Can use Jordan: And life Joe: A coach. Jordan: And Joe: That would Jordan: Give Joe: Be Jordan: You Joe: My Jordan: Feedback Joe: Question is like, well, Jordan, Jordan: And Joe: Why Jordan: Be real Joe: Do you know anything Jordan: And candid Joe: More about Jordan: And Joe: It? Jordan: Give Joe: Obviously, Jordan: It to Joe: You're Jordan: You Joe: Going Jordan: With Joe: To do Jordan: Love. Joe: A discovery, Jordan: Right. Joe: Right? Jordan: And Joe: We're going to Jordan: And Joe: Learn Jordan: With Joe: About Jordan: Care. Joe: Each other and you're going to learn Jordan: But Joe: What what I Jordan: What Joe: Do Jordan: I found Joe: On a daily basis Jordan: Is most Joe: And and Jordan: People Joe: Things. Jordan: Aren't Joe: And then Jordan: Receiving Joe: Looking Jordan: Enough Joe: At it from another Jordan: Feedback. Joe: Point of view, you can help. But Jordan: Even those Joe: I want Jordan: Who were Joe: You Jordan: At the Joe: To Jordan: Top Joe: Answer that Jordan: Of their Joe: Question Jordan: Game, I'll Joe: For Jordan: Give Joe: Me, Jordan: You an example Joe: Especially Jordan: Where this shows Joe: For the Jordan: Up, Joe: Listeners Jordan: Joe Joe: And entrepreneurs Jordan: Shows Joe: Out Jordan: Up Joe: There Jordan: In communication Joe: Going, Jordan: All Joe: Man, Jordan: The time. Joe: I'm alone every day Jordan: So Joe: In this business. I Jordan: None Joe: Don't Jordan: Of Joe: Have Jordan: Us are Joe: Anybody Jordan: Perfect. We Joe: Else Jordan: All have Joe: Helping Jordan: A lot to Joe: Me. Jordan: Learn when it Joe: Do Jordan: Comes Joe: I Jordan: To Joe: Need Jordan: Our communication Joe: A coach Jordan: Style, Joe: Or Dulli? Jordan: What we say, how our body moves, our tonality, our pace. So we test out salespeople all the time. So I'll get hired by a bigwig financial adviser. First of all, have 20 years of experience, a team of 20 people there doing tens of millions of dollars revenue, that they're very successful. And so they hire us. They hire me to come in and do coaching work with them. And every one of them has sort of a different set of needs. But one of the things that we always talk about, at least on some level, is our communication style. Right, because they're in sales and they're communicating all day, every day for a living. So I challenge this financial advisor. Usually within the first few meetings, I'll say, hey, I want you to send me your approach language, which is really their what they say to engage a client and conversation. So it's a first time meeting and this is the first five minutes of sort of the introductory meeting. And I can I can feel their energy when I when I challenge them and I say, I want you to send me that communication. Their energy is like at a negative to. Right, they're thinking you're going to bill me X for coaching, I've been doing this for 20 years, like what I don't need is help on the basics of what I say. And, you know, I can just feel that just not really excited about that. Jordan: But I challenge him. I say I think this is a really important part of our work together. It helps me understand who you are and how you're showing up for people. So send that over when you get some time. So they send it over and it's not going to have all the answers. But I'm willing to listen to it repeatedly. Our team listens to it repeatedly. And then we give them an analysis. We give them feedback. The energy level, when we give them feedback, goes from a negative two to a 10. Every single time. Because they do not know what they do not know. And I just had a guy the other day, I said, OK, so when the first two minutes of your communication, you said the word thirty seven times. Did you know that? You know, hey, the way that you show up, did you know that you use me focused conversation? Over and over, you are literally saying I my, me repeatedly. And you were doing it for 20 years and nobody has ever told you that you're doing it, and that's a shame because you would connect with people and a deeper and more meaningful way because you would be able to drive better results. You would have more purposeful conversation if you could just make that one small tweak. Jordan: You know, we could end the conversation at the cozy relationship right there, and the time that we had spent together would have been massively impactful. Again, not because I have all the answers, but because I'm willing to listen, give real feedback and press in on blind spots that we all have. And the last thing I'll say is people need to be encouraged. You know, people will go farther than they think they can when someone else thinks they can, period. And I don't care for the most successful person, the least successful person, the most experienced, the least experienced. I'm working with a guy the other day, Fortune 500, executive leader, big time leader of people. They had a record breaking year at the firm. Unbelievable year. This guy is in charge of literally hundreds of direct reports. And I asked him in a conversation, I just said, hey, how many people told you over this past fiscal year? So you just wrapped up the year. How many people told you? Good job. And he says, well, like, what do you mean? I said, you know what I mean? Like e-mails, texts, phone calls. Like how many people reached out to you said, hey, good job, great you. And he said, Zira. Zero people had picked up the phone and sent a text instead of an email, so the point is this job that I've worked with, this guy named John. Jordan: So the point is this, John, that you need to be encouraged. You need somebody to point out what you're doing. Well. You need somebody to touch your heart and remind you of who God made you to be and all of the natural God given giftedness that's inside of you. And I just want to share with you it's an honor to be able to do that for you and with you. But let me let me help you see what I see. Let's look back at the last 12 months. Here's what you've achieved. In that moment, I think I think when you step into somebody's life in that way, you're a lid lifter and you do it authentically and you help them see more and you help them see before. Man, I think you're in a position of strength relationally. And I think that person at that moment realizes that that relationship means more than they ever realized. So there's a lot that we can say about coaching. But I think, Joe, when you touch somebody's heart, when you appreciate people for who they are, when you point out their God given gift A. and when you deliver the truth and love and you point out the blindspots, you can be a world class coach and it has nothing to do with what you know, it's all about. Jordan: You show up and serve people. Well, that's just my answer. I don't know if it's the right answer by anybody else's standard, but in my world, it's the way that I try to live each and every day with the people that we serve. I love it. Yeah, so here's what I'd say, we do a lot of work through social media, so Instagram is probably where I'm most active. I'm Jordan and Montgomery on Instagram, so I would love it. If you want to get in touch to send a direct message, I'll communicate back with you. I would love to connect Montgomery Companies dot com is on our website. I'm also active on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and if anybody reaches out, I will gladly respond. If you got a question, if you're wrestling with an issue, an opportunity I'd love to talk to it with and be of service to anybody listening. And Joe, I want to say thank you for having me on your show. It's an honor. It's always an honor to share your great with the questions that, yes, it's very clear that you showed up prepared and you also had great energy. And so I just want to say thank you for your time and attention. Thanks for who you are and for what you're putting out into the world. It's making a difference. I. Right back at you, brother.

america god university conversations man nfl zoom arizona winning fortune iowa greatness moms mississippi kobe bryant montgomery first impressions unbelievable maya angelou jordan love derek jeter iowa city kelowna colonia jordan montgomery tim grover tiffin joe cool zira ben newman yapp joe talk joe it joe you joe get joe yeah joe well joe don joe how joe so joe there joe good joe do jordan it jordan you joe all joe for jordan is joe just jordan who

Results Coaching Model with Brian Lovegrove

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 12, 2021 75:03

Results Coaching Model with Brian Lovegrove Brian Lovegrove has been on his journey of personal growth and professional development since the age of 17. Inspired by Tony Robbins, he has created not only a catalyst but a unique approach and process to helping others, like you, achieve their goals. He believes in providing & building upon the knowledge most coaches provide by practicing these lessons and building a HABIT! Using his "5 Keys of Success" in his coaching, he is a firm believer that if these keys are used, failure is all but eliminated. In this episode, we learn about all the tactics Brian uses and has honed over the years of being a coach and we did into a few of these methods during our conversation. As always, thanks so much for listening! Joe Brian Lovegrove Leadership Developer and Results Coach Website: https://brianlovegrovecoaching.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brianslovegrove LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianlovegrove/ Live Masterclass: https://www.becomeunstoppable.info 5 Keys to Success Podcast: https://5-keys-of-success.simplecast.com/ Unleash Your Fear eBook: https://www.unleashyourfear.com/freebook Email: lovegrove@lovegroveltd.com 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: Hi Brian, welcome to the podcast. I'm looking forward to having you on so many things I have to ask you, because you hit a core thing here with training, personal development courses, all of these things that I read about. And it's going to be interesting to find out your answers to these burning questions I asked. Brian: All right, Joe, I'm looking forward to it. Let's get rocking and rolling here. Joe: Awesome. OK, so you have to bear with me, because I literally do this with every single person on my podcast, is that I think it's important for my audience, who I believe is mostly entrepreneurs, whether they're currently doing their thing or they want to do their thing or they're struggling, doing their thing or whatever it might be. I think it's important for them to know the back story of the person that is on, because it's important to understand the development of where you came from and how you got to where you are today. And I think a lot of those things that you talk about actually people listening, going, oh, yeah, I've been there. I did that. I remember that. So I always leave this open to saying you can go back as far as you want, because if something in elementary school created who you are today, I want the audience to know about it so you can start wherever you want. Brian: Well, people ask me how I got introduced to personal development in the first place, and I actually go back to junior high. My dad was a commercial real estate broker and I grew up in Montana. And any time we would leave town, we would go on a long trip. And so he would pull out these tapes from work. And this was, of course, back before the iPods. The noise canceling headphones in that great, wonderful device that many of us grew up with, the Sony Walkman, Joe: Near Brian: Whatever Joe: And dear to my Brian: He Joe: Heart. Brian: Put into that. Yes. Yes. And so I got stuck listening to whatever was in the tape deck. And so I got introduced to guys like Earl Nightingale, Jim Roan and my favorite Zig Ziglar. And listening to those guys, Dennis Wailea, on and on and on and on, they taught me what it was to be an entrepreneur. And I remember Ziggs saying, treat every job as if you were the owner of the business and those HAQQ series that I listened to through junior high and high school shaped me in my choices in college. I actually got a degree in professional sales because of a I was originally going for a management degree my first year. My sister was two years ahead of me and she told me after my freshman year and says, you know what, Brian, you might want to consider changing majors because the people that I know that are graduating with management degrees are struggling to find jobs. And I went back and that that prompted me to ask a really good deep question at all. I don't know, 18. I asked myself, what career, what major, what level of information do I need to get while you're at college that would regardless of what happens to the industry, because I knew, you know, it's going to be out here in the marketplace for over 50 years. What degree do I need to go get that will? Regardless of what's going to happen, the ups and downs of the industry, whether we end up in another recession, we end up in another depression, that I would always have an opportunity to have a job if I wanted one. Brian: And that always brought me back to the sales aspect that Zig always mentioned, because, again, he did a lot of his sales around the Depression area and that that aspect of life where it's like how do you survive? How do you keep going in those areas? And it's really the salespeople that make the world go round. And so that's what led me to a sales degree. The other decision that I made when I was 17 was I got introduced to a guy named Tony Robbins and I bought his first tape series. Imagine a freshman in college spending probably a month of his earnings on a tape series. And I bought Tony's unlimited power. I still have the tapes are used today, actually gone and bought a second set because I wore out one of those tapes so that because I listened to it so much and I followed Tony ever since, I actually helped promote and put on his seminars for one of his franchises. And along the way, I've always been doing personal development, personal growth, and, you know, a lot I loved it. I just ate it up. But one of the big challenges that I ran into, I turned 40. Brian: It was like, why am I not far enough along? I've been doing this for 20 years. Why am I just here? Because at the time I was struggling to pay the bills. I was struggling to get by. My wife was working. We had two small kids. And I thought by the time I turned 40, I would have been much farther along by now. And so in this process, I realized it wasn't until much later that learning is not enough to make lasting change. I was actively learning. I was seeking the puzzle pieces, the pieces of information that was missing in my life. And I figured once I learned that then life would be easy and I'd be making all this money. But that never happened because I never did. The one thing that I learned all the way back in the beginning from XG is you have to do it until you get good enough at it, till it becomes your new normal. And only then, once you've applied and implement those strategies in your life, will they actually work for you. And you've got to do it long enough to get good enough at it and then continue to stick with it to where you can actually allow the compounding effect to, you know, you slowly creep and then you kind of turn that corner and it goes straight up. And it took me 50 years to hit that. Joe: So I'm going to go back real quick because I want to know what triggered you to buy that Tony Robbins course. You know, I know you were listening to this stuff in the car with your father on the Walkman or whatever else you were doing it. I mean, a kid at 17 doesn't do that. So what triggered it? Brian: Well, I had read the book, his book had come out and I had read the book and I really loved he had such a different style and he was talking about different things and he was talking about the things in the mind and he was talking about he and the different aspects there. And a lot of that was like, oh, my gosh, this stuff makes so much sense. And I was applying some of those strategies and I was seeing specific results. And I was like, and that's really what made me buy in. In fact, that's probably one of the few programs that I really started implementing strategy on. One of the big strategies you talked about was marketing Meeri, and it was one that I specifically used as I got into my initial first jobs and sales career. But I used on a consistent basis to help me actually get as far as long as I did. Joe: Ok, I'm still going to ask the question, because I'm not sure if you answered it yet. Why would a 17 year old buy the book like 17 year olds don't don't get into this stuff. So and I think it's important to figure out what triggered it for you. Brian: Well, again, I think it has to do with that was the next step, I the company that was putting those out was Nightingale Conant Joe: Yeah. Brian: And my dad would get those and I probably was home. I don't remember where I was when I got it. I might have gone home for Thanksgiving or Christmas. And I grabbed the magazine I love looking at because again, I've been doing this for a number of years now. And I was like, what? What's the new stuff they got? You know, Wayne Dyer was there and you know, you know who who are who's the new people? And there was this new one from this guy named Tony Robbins. And I don't know, I guess it just resonated with me. And I think it was seventy five bucks. And it was like and to be honest with you, I really can't say what prompted me to go. I want that. Joe: Mm hmm. Brian: But I think it was more of the sales pitch in the description of what it promised me. Joe: Got it. Brian: More than anything, that's what I would say it was based upon the results that were promised, based upon the description of the tape series. Joe: Ok, so you've been around that sort of thing for a long time, right? And if correct me if I'm wrong at any point, because I want to make sure this is super clear to the listeners, is that from what I get of what we're going to go still back, I still have other stuff to do, but I want to kind of set the stage of your expertise or what you believe is, is how you can help people. As you said, you can buy all the courses and attend all the conferences and do all of this stuff. You've said it here. You set it on your website. The enthusiasm kind of goes away when life gets in the way. Right. It's basically that simple. You come back from the high of of being at a conference or are listening to something and then life literally just gets in the way and you don't get the things done that you promised yourself that you would. So my understanding is that you are basically this coach that is going to keep you on track. Whether life gets in the way or not, you're basically going to be this person that is going to bring people along through all of this and keep them accountable to what they promise themselves that they would do and make sure that they do all of the things that are needed without shelving anything because life got in the way. Is that fair? Brian: Right, it is because, again, you know, Tony is great if you've ever been to one of his big events, you P.W. he he can talk nine thousand people into walking across twelve hundred degree recalls in a day. Joe: Yeah. Brian: By the end of day one, he's got you walking across Coles. But again, how do you can't maintain that energy and that excitement and the momentum of that event for weeks, months, years to get to where you want to go? And Tony has admitted that this is an area that he struggles with, is how do I get people to keep going? Joe: Mm hmm. Brian: Which is one of the reasons why he has his coaching program that you can go and pay tens of thousands of dollars to get a coach for a year, and it's one of the reasons why he actually created the pyramids, Madonna's training group, to train people like me to be coaches that help people implement his strategies. And that's really what it comes down to, is how do you take the strategies that, you know, you need to be doing and implement them? One of the biggest challenges in society today is we don't teach people discipline for the most part. There's a few places that that happens. But outside of that, it's not encouraged. In fact, it's almost especially in today's society, you're not responsible, you know, being responsible for yourself, being accountable. That goes out the window. And yet that's how you are going to be successful. That's how you're going to get to where you want to go. Unfortunately, society is teaching people to be cheap and to live in mediocrity. That is not how you're going to get to where you want to go, because I'm assuming that most people here are entrepreneurs. Joe: Mm Brian: They're Joe: Hmm. Brian: Entrepreneurs for a reason because they are sick and tired of working for somebody else's dreams. And so they want to pursue their own dreams or they think they can do it better. And so they're out there trying to do it on their own. But there's a myth that goes with that is the fact that they have to do it on their own, they have to try to figure it out all by themselves. And some of my best clients are the people that have gone to school to learn how to do what they want to do, a chiropractor or a massage therapist, the tradesperson, they know how to either pound nails Turner Ranch, adjust somebody's back, but they don't necessarily know how to do this thing called run a business. And so there's certain aspects that come into play because my my ideal market is that small business owner, entrepreneur and professional who's out there wanting to make a difference in their world, in their communities and their lives to make a bigger impact. But they're struggling to do that because they're trying to deal with all of the distractions and all the stuff that's coming at us. And it's like, how do I get a hold of that? How do I how do I focus on those things that truly matter that are going to move the needle for me and my business? And that's really where I come alongside them. Brian: And I say that specifically because I can't take the journey for you, but I'm happy to take the journey with you. And see, that's where the big challenge is, is a lot of people feel like they go to the seminar, which is, OK, here's how you go climb a mountain. Here's the equipment you're going to need and what happens to the trainer. They get all loaded up. They load them up and they say, go have fun. And they go walking down the path. And the river that they were told was a small creek is now this raging river, the bridge that they were supposed to be able to go across was washed out. And it's not like, what the heck am I supposed to do now? They weren't prepared for what they're going to experience or they didn't get enough information. That's one of the things that I always felt in the training classes and seminars I went to. I always felt like there was a piece of information missing. And there's only so much that somebody can teach you. You actually have to go experience it for yourself in order to develop those nuances that are really going to make a difference for you. Joe: Yeah, and I think that there are very, very, very few people in the world that can and you hit it on the head, the discipline that they will actually take, what they've learned, whether it's in a chorus, it's at a seminar or whatever, and actually implement it and be accountable to themselves. I think that's a really, really small pool of people. And so Brian: It is. Joe: Because the Olympics just happened, if we even made an analogy of like you went to class to become a gymnast and you said in a week long seminar to learn all of the different moves and tricks and flips and things, and then you just don't go and show up and start doing that. You have a coach that's watching you Brian: Right. Joe: And and helping you understand all of those things and the mechanics of it. So to me, that's what you're that's really where you help, is that you are there to, like I said earlier, to to to to push them, keep them on track, assist them with when they Brian: The. Joe: Hit roadblocks. You're by their side throughout the whole process. Right. Brian: Right, and I think so many times we have this misunderstanding because we've been taught that learning is going and sitting in class. And that's not necessarily true, but unfortunately, the self development industry has taken this model of let's bring them in, sit them down, overwhelm them with information, make them feel like they're drinking from a firehose so they feel like we've given them a tremendous amount of value and then send them on their way. And so the more people we can pack into that room, the better we make more money that way. Yeah, we actually end up doing a disservice to the customer, to the client, because at the end there is no support. And so how do you make sure somebody has what they need in order to actually achieve the results they want? And that is challenging along the way. And we've created several ways for people to do that because, again, money gets in the way. I mean, if you have enough money, you can find somebody that's going to come alongside and help you get to where you want to go. Joe: Mm hmm. Brian: But we actually started one hundred bucks a month. We've got programs where you can get that at least some help along the way to get you to where you want to go. And we grow from there. But it comes down to this process of how do we get you to take the actions you know you need to take? How do we get you to move forward consistently? And it's just like the example you used is great. The one that I love to use is the example of going to get into shape. You don't go to the gym for three days straight and be done. That doesn't cut Joe: It's. Brian: It. You know, usually you go once for a few hours and you're like, oh my God, you wake Joe: Yeah. Brian: Up the next day and you can't move. And so it's like, why would you expect you to be able to do that in the other areas of your life? Joe: Yeah, I go to the gym five days a week and I still am like, why don't I look better? So you're really in a great position to do this, because how many years did you spend in that whole seminar course kind of world? And I know you're still involved in some of it, but you helped run Brian: Well, Joe: Some Brian: I Joe: Of these. Brian: Yeah, I help promote Joe: Yep. Brian: To put them on the grand scheme of things, I didn't do that a lot. I was probably with them for maybe about a year before the franchise partnership broke up and therefore the franchise collapsed. But it was a great opportunity and I learned a lot going through that process. Back in starting in 2003, I joined Toastmasters and worked myself up over the number of years to become a semi-professional speaker when I wrote my first book and got kind of started in that. But I never really got traction and got that off the ground in this process. One of the things that happened was I shifted from Toastmasters into a leadership role in nonprofit organizations, specifically to the Boy Scouts. But one of the things I saw was because, again, I was focusing on the teaching aspect because I love watching that light bulb go off. But what I didn't realize was because I didn't see it in my life at the moment, at the time yet was that, again, teaching them was good. But coaching them is better because, again, it's about growth and it's part of my all the exercises and things I've done. I mean, I have done it easily. Quarter of a million dollars on personal development. I have bookcases and bookcases of books and tape series that are, you know, this is the pretty self I have, you know, boxes on wooden shelves and storage units full of books and stuff that I've consumed. And it's actually one of my coaching partners mentioned to me and from one of the coaching programs I was in, he says she said, Brian, you have a vault of ideas and strategies to help somebody to move forward. Brian: And so when they need it, you can provide it for them. And so really, it's about getting people to move. It's not about trying to teach you something new. It's about how can I get you to move forward and understanding how to motivate somebody to move. And he talks about the pleasure and pain principles. We move away from pain a lot easier than we do towards pleasure. But many times we only use pleasure as the incentive for us to do something. And a lot of times I'm working with some basic activities with somebody. One of the things that you can see it here in the video, if you're watching it, is my incredible results, 928 Challenge Journal, which is basically spending about 20 minutes each evening documenting what happened today, well, as planning tomorrow. And the first challenge that people come up with is doing it every day. So far, nobody has done ninety one days straight. There's a few that have come close. But on average, it takes people a good month to get into the habit of consistently writing in their journal. And so, again, it's about understanding what it takes to get people to move in the direction they have said they want to go and using those two buttons and pushing them at the right point to get things to to happen. And again, once we start getting that ball rolling and we start developing momentum, that's when it gets fun. Joe: So we are in the age of so many, like self education, know so many programs and classes and courses and all of this stuff on the Internet, right. You can find it everywhere. So and you might even admit to this yourself, because based on what you just said about having a shelf full of tapes and all of this stuff, what would you say to the there are people out there that are professional seminar attendees right there, their professional course. So, Brian: We call them seminar junkies. Joe: Ok, so Brian: Yeah, Joe: We Brian: I've been there. Joe: Ok, so this is good because you're coming from the understanding that Brian: Oh, yeah. Joe: One more seminar, a one more class or one more course is not going to make the difference. It's that you have to start implementing what you've already learned and actually admit to yourself that you haven't done the work or this is the work you need to do and actually come up with a plan. Right. It's just like we hear it a million times. It's just so hard for people to understand, myself included. I'm not I'm not preaching from a soapbox here that, you know, you have to have a roadmap. Right. Because if you wanted to get hop in your car today and drive somewhere, you need to know where you're going. Right. You would get lost. Brian: Yes. Joe: It's no different Brian: Yes. Joe: With our life. Right. So what would you say to those people that are listening to that do continue to just think that that next breakthrough is around the corner by buying yet another course are going to some sort of seminar or conference? Brian: Put down the Kool-Aid because you have drunk the Kool-Aid, Joe: Right. Brian: What they're actually doing is they're pursuing the feeling, the positive feelings they get when they go to the seminar. They're enjoying that high and over time that wears off and they want to change the way they feel. They get frustrated and they go, oh, I want to feel better. Their subconscious then says, OK, well, how do we make ourselves feel? How we do that? Let's go to another seminar. I talk about this in the master class. That is, we get stuck on this learning loop and we go and we learn some information. We get all excited and we go try it and we fail. And usually when we fail once or twice, we quit. It gets hard. It gets uncomfortable. And we don't like to stay there. We don't like we don't we want to don't want to go through that process of learning how to do it and do it long enough to get good enough at it that we actually get to the other side of. OK, I got this. You know, it's like learning to ride a bike. You're going to fall and the only way to get better is to have somebody let go in and you fall down. You got to go through that process. You've got to learn to you have to make the mistakes. You have to, quote, fail, because, again, it depends on how you define the word failure, because at the end of the day, we get to choose what things mean. My definition of failure is different than most people's. My definition of failure is you only fail when you quit or give up. Joe: Hmm, agreed. Brian: Or you don't even try. Joe: Yeah, so it's almost better that if someone had that itch, they should stop for a moment and say, OK, let's do this, let's just try something completely different that we've never done before. Let's actually hire a coach and spend the same amount of money that we would have spent on a course. But we have a coach with us by our side for however many months or a year or whatever, however long that is. That same amount of money could be spread out to have someone keep you accountable and help you to come up with a plan and stay on track and implement all the ideas. Right. Brian: Absolutely. Joe: It would be worth a try for anybody who's one of these. You could Digicom junkies to seminar junkies. Brian: Yeah, the seminar junkies, Joe: Yeah, Brian: Yes. Joe: Right. So it would be a change? Brian: What's Joe: Of course Brian: The Joe: It would Brian: Right Joe: Be. Brian: If what's your outcome? What do you want? Why are you going to that seminar? And there were several times where people said, well, what are you what do you expect from this? What do you want to learn from this? And people are sitting there throwing out answers. And I would be sitting in the background going, I really don't know. I don't I don't have an answer for that. Joe: Mm hmm. Brian: And that was kind of the clue is like, wait a minute, why am I here? Because I want to learn. That's not good enough. I want you to know I started getting specifics is I want to learn how to do such and such and such, and I want to be able to, you know, be successful at doing that. And, you know, whether that was real estate investing or personal development becoming a coach, a lot of those things was, OK, how do you do it? Because, again, we're learning about doing and we learn through doing much more powerfully. There's a difference between head understanding and gut level understanding. And so, first off, a coach, if you haven't had a coach before. I'll share a good story with you, because this is how I got introduced to coaching was I actually bought the up sell of a seminar program that actually included six monthly coaching sessions with one of the coaches that's kind of designed to help you do it. And my experience was I actually got more done in those six months than I had in the previous five years. I did more stuff. I made more progress. And as I went back and analyzed the even deeper, I did more the week before that phone call that I had the previous three weeks combined because I knew I was going to have to get on the phone with him. And again, we're leveraging fear and that pain to our advantage. That's one of the reasons why I wrote my last book on Leisure Fear. One of the strategies that I teach is how to make your friend and how you make sure your friend, as you turn fear around, it's pulling you forward instead of holding you back. Brian: And one of the ways that we do that, as we make it more painful to stay where you are than where you want to go and having to get on the phone call with me or on the Zoom call with me. And we sit in there and says, OK, Joe, you said last week you were going to accomplish these three things. How how far did you get on number one, how far did you get on number two? How far did you get on number three? Now, I don't beat you up if you don't get them done. What I'm doing is I'm wanting to get under neath it and understand the root cause of what's holding you back, because when I when we're able to do that, you see hole that was fear of criticism. That's what prevented me from making those sales calls. I needed to make up for the fear of rejection or whatever it was. And we talk about that. And then we because again, we get to choose what things mean. And so what does it mean to make a cold call? Most people hate cold calls. What if you could turn things around to where you loved cold calls? Because, again, you get to choose what things mean. You can love cold calls. And so, again, it's basically going in there and playing in the mind and shifting away the what the beliefs are, because that's what it comes down to it. That's what our life is all about, is how we feel and what we believe. And when we understand that we do everything in life to change the way we feel. It's really interesting on where things go from there. Joe: Yeah, and I think either I think I read something from your website, I believe, but something you said, I think that's where it was, but it was something about the moment we actually tell the world what it is that we want to do. We're accountable for it. Right then we everyone that that was in earshot of that or reads it somewhere on our website that we're now responsible to do it. And that's why so many people don't actually put that out there, because then they're like, oh, crap, I actually have to do that now. I said it. Brian: Right, Joe: I told Brian: Yeah. Joe: Everyone I was going to do this. Brian: But you're right, it comes down to we are afraid to put ourselves out there Joe: Mm hmm. Brian: Because we're afraid of being criticized now, we do have different types of people in our lives. We have people that I refer to as Krabs, and they're usually in your left hand. For those people who haven't heard the story, I'm sure you have. Is it if you put a crab in a five gallon bucket without a lid on it, it'll crawl out right Joe: Mm hmm. Brian: Easily. But if you put two crabs into that five gallon bucket without a lid, they won't crawl out. The more actually, the more crabs that are in there, the less likelihood that the crab is going to get away, because as that crab, they're programming mental instinct programming that we have within us is that to stay part of the group to follow the herd. Joe: Mm hmm. Brian: And if somebody is trying to climb out, they're going away. And so the rest of the group will pull them back down. And if he continues to do that time and time again, they will actually kill him. Joe: Oh, I didn't know that part of the story. Brian: Yes, well, the same thing is true with other people in our lives. We have people that are on the same level that we are or below us and we're wanting to grow. Now, that doesn't mean that they have negative intentions. They're actually doing it for a positive reason because, one, they don't want you to leave them, but they also don't want to see you get hurt. This is where our family comes in. Parents say, oh, you just sit still, Johnny, because you're not ready for that yet, or they don't want you to go pursue this thing that they perceive as scary, risky, and you're likely to get hurt. And so they're going to try to talk you out of going in, pursuing your great dream. But then there's other people that, again, they're just going to knock you down, they're going to pull you down. And if you've ever listened to Lester Brown, he talks about that and his family, he'd show up for Thanksgiving. And his brother goes, Hey, Les, how's that seminar speaking gig going? And it was almost I'm getting there. I'm getting there. I'm getting there. But we also have people that want to support us and help us. And so it's who are you going to listen to and who are you going to spend time with? And so but it's also important to be in that group of people. Brian: Your support people are in your right hand, your crabs are in your left hand. It's important to know who the person you're across the table with and who you're talking with on the phone. Is this person a crab or is this a supporter and then interact with them appropriately? Because if you're talking with a crab, you stay in the shallow end. You don't talk about your dreams. You talk about the weather, you talk about sports, you talk about whatever that is dull and boring at the time and not really enlightening to us, but allows us to maintain the relationship because there's times in our life when, yes, we can eliminate some of those crabs because other times they're related to us and we can't get rid of them. And so what do you do? So in part of it is, one, you reduce the amount of time, and then two, you understand who you're having the conversation with and understand they're coming to you with a positive intent. They're trying to keep you safe. They're trying to they want you to be happy and they want you to stay well and they don't want you to get hurt. But the same thing is true with our subconscious, which is why our biggest enemy is right up here Joe: Yep. Brian: Is the robot that runs the show 80 to 90 percent of the time. And that's where I spend a lot of time, is helping people reprogram the robot, their subconscious, because unfortunately, it was a program with a lot of crappy code and trying to reprogram it is not as easy as copy, delete and then copy and paste. It's not that easy. It's like the biggest, ugliest ball of spaghetti you've ever seen and trying to figure out where that thing goes. And it's a mess. It's just a mess in there. And but we do have the ability to go in there and change it. And the more we actively pursue that and focus on that and pursue growth, the faster we can get to where we want to go. Joe: So we're going to talk about the services you offer, but you touched upon something that in a previous episode that I had put out, I got a lot of comments about it. And so I want to talk about it as it relates to you personally. And then we can talk about how you use it with your clients. But you spoke about journaling. And the more and more I hear, either I have guest on or I hear people talk about it, the more and more I feel like it's almost got the same benefits as when people talk about meditating, how you can quiet the mind. It was all this fufu stuff many years ago and now it's becoming more the norm. Right? It's something that you need that quiet time. So tell me more about what you think journaling does for people and the importance of journaling Brian: Ok, well, Joe: And Brian: Actually. Joe: Whether or not you actually do it nightly or daily or I'd be Brian: Yes, Joe: Interested to know. Brian: Yes, the the if you can see it there, it says, a life worth living as a life worth recording. And so, Tony, he's inspired me to consistently journal. I have journals from my first in fact, in my latest move, I was going through a lot of them. And I came across the journal that I had right after college. And I was actually really interested to go back and see the progress of my first sales job that I bombed out. I lasted like three months. My experience was the story I was telling myself was different than the story that I was reading. And so, one, it's a great way to document your journey in life. But the way that I teach people to journal No. One is it leverages the power of evaluated experience because you stop and think about it. You probably have heard that experience is the best teacher. Yes and no, because unless we learn the lessons from that experience, then it was pointless. If we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again, we keep doing the same thing and expect different results. We're not learning. We're not growing. And so journaling is a great way for you to document your journey, but also to stop and evaluate what happened today. What did I get done? Because many times we get to the end of the week, we get to the end of the month. Man, I feel like I didn't get anything done. And you can go back to the daily journal process and go, oh, yeah, well, I did that and I did that and I did that and I did that. Brian: But it also allows you to say, OK, what am I actually getting done? And is what I'm getting done, moving me in the direction I want to go? Because, again, we've talked about the journey that we're on. We have a goal we want to achieve. And in order to get there, we like you said, we have to have a plan. Many people don't put together the plan. In fact, many go study programs. And I listen to rarely was there any planning process involved. And so I actually stepped somebody through this. Exactly. And the incredible results on what they challenge is Ugo's. We set our big yearly goal and we break that down into what are we going to accomplish in the next ninety one days and then we break that down. This is OK. What's going to be month one? What's going to be month two? What's going to be month three? And then we break that down. OK, what's going to be week one of month one. What's going to be in week two. Week three, week four. Because again, the only way to get to complete the ninety one day journey is to each day make forward progress. And how do you make sure you're making forward progress if you never look at the map and compare your results, what you're getting to see if you're moving in the right direction. Brian: It's like a airplane taking off from New York to L.A. without a GPS system, without a method for them to course. Correct. You know, there's a reason why there's a compass in the airplane. There's a reason why there's a GPS in there that's consistently every moment checking in and saying, am I on track? Am I on track and making those little minor adjustments along the way? Because if you actually look at a slight wiggle from L.A. to New York, because there's turbulence up there, there's wind currents up there, lots of different things depending on which way you're flying. Are you flying with the jet stream or against the jet stream? All of these things are impacting that flight. The same thing is true in our life. How do we make sure we are on target? And journalese is one of the ways to do that. But we also encourage people. The way that the journal is set up is to do that evaluation experience where you document what you got done, you documents your lessons along the way, and you also document the changes that you want to make, the adjustments that are going to make tomorrow a better day. How can I be better tomorrow? And then you plan tomorrow. One of the biggest challenges we have is making sure we get the right stuff done. How do you make sure you make time to get those important but not urgent activities into your schedule? Because if you do not intentionally plan them and schedule them into your calendar, rarely, very rarely are they going to actually happen, which means you're never going to really make the progress you want to make, because stop and think about it, your goals require a lot of time and energy doing those things that are important but not urgent, which is another reason why having the accountability is a big factor in that. Brian: It's like, OK, it's it's not urgent, but oh, my coach is going to be asking about it. What do we just do? We created the needed urgency. Give you a perfect example. I had one of my clients. She wanted to raise her rates and so she'd been talking about it for months. And so we were working on the programming in her head so that she felt like she was worthy of that price increase, putting it off and putting it off. And this is OK, put and says, OK, what's the plan? And so we specifically detailed walk through the plan. OK, I need to put a sign up on the door and I need to send out a notification of my. People and I got an email and, you know, here's an opportunity for people to come in and sign up for a plan where they can lock in the current pricing. And I says, OK, when I come see you next week, I want to see the sign on the door. When you think you put the sign on the door right after that call, Joe: Ten minutes Brian: 15 Joe: Before Brian: Minutes Joe: You showed Brian: Before Joe: Up. Brian: I 15 minutes before I walked in the door. Exactly. And it wouldn't have happened if I had not pushed her to make that commitment. As a mom, what are we going to do? Are we just going to keep going down this road? Because that's one of things that we do, is we look at it, says, OK, what happens if you don't change? If you keep doing the same thing you're doing today over and over again, you're going to get the same results. Are you happy with that? Are you satisfied with it? If you're not, then what are you going to do differently tomorrow? That's going to change. The trajectory that you're going internally is a big piece of that is to help make sure that you are documenting your journey and you're evaluating the experiences that you're getting and making sure that they're taking you in the direction you want to go and if it's not making those adjustments along the way. Joe: Is the majority of the time it happens is at night, just before you go to bed sort of thing. Brian: One of the things that we designed the system to be very flexible. There's actually a place for people to write in their schedule and there's no numbers on it because I've got clients. It's wake up at five o'clock in the morning and then there's guys like me who don't start their day until seven, but I'm usually up till midnight. So, again, it just comes down to fitting it into your system. And that's actually one of the things we do within the group coaching calls is we're saying, how do I take this system that Brian has created and apply it to my life? How does this fit into my life? And we teach people how to do that. And I've got one client who does restoration work. So he's very much like a firefighter. The phone rings and it's like the alarm bell going off. He's got to go fix somebody's problem. So how does he schedule his day? And so we came up with a system on how to use the system because what happens if the alarm doesn't go off? What are you going to do? So we had a plan, a system and a Plan B system Joe: Mm Brian: For Joe: Hmm. Brian: It. We recommend the Evening Times for a couple of reasons. Number one, when you're planning tomorrow, you don't have to remember it. Actually, you get a better night's sleep. Joe: I get it off your brain. Brian: Right, and so your brain, is it trying to remember all the things you've got to do tomorrow? We also encourage now I have some people completed at their end of their workday. So at four thirty, when they go home at 5:00, I've got one woman who does it at three thirty before she go pick up her kid at school at 4:00 and she's basically document what did I get done? And she's also there's still some things potentially that she's going to do because we incorporate not just your business, but your life in the journal. And so it's like, OK, what am I going to be doing for all 16 hours? And I'm awake and relax and let go because so many times we struggle with constantly running. And there's a reason why there's a pad of paper and a pen on my bedside is because there's a lot of times I wake up in this ideas and I got to sit there and I get to write it down because I will not remember when I wake up in the morning. And so it just comes down. We try to get the system to fit the person, not the person to fit the system Joe: Mm hmm. Brian: Like so many of them do. But at the end of the day, it comes down to what works for you. We recommend in the evening because of the benefits there. There are some people that do it first thing in the morning. If that's the case, as long as you're doing the system, great. Joe: I just hear about it all the time, and I said I was going to start it after the last episode, that someone who was heavily into it, I even publicly said, all right, I got to start doing it and I still haven't done it. Brian: Well, let's have a conversation about that, Joe, because, again, at the end of the day, it's what is it going to take to get you to move? Joe: Yeah. Brian: And that's actually something that because, again, I've got numerous stories that I can tell you about people that because one of the one of the most common mistakes that people make when they're doing the journal is the fact that they only do it Monday through Friday. They don't do it Saturday, Sunday, because, again, like the woman who does it at the end of the workday, my question to them is, OK, that's good. But what are you going to do, come on Saturday, Sunday when you're not going to the office? What are you going to do then? And so we create a plan on how and then we got to you got to figure out how to make it work. And so I actually challenged several of the people to do it, says, OK, if you don't in. The other thing is, is not getting the journal done. The night before it was OK. If you don't do the journal the night before, you have to spend two minutes on a cold shower in the morning. I don't know about you, but yes, they talk about cold showers being this great, wonderful thing. But I don't want that in the morning. No, thank you. And so, again, we move away from paying much better than the the perceived pleasure. OK, and so it's creating the pain. So it was like, OK, you don't do the journal, not before you're going to take a cold shower or I mean, really what I would do is I give them a choice. I says you can either a take the cold shower or B, you have to text me that says I didn't do my journal last night. Which one do you think people chose? And I said, OK, those are your two choices. You have to choose the greater pain. Which one do you think they chose as the greater pain? Joe: I would think having the texture would be more of the pain. Brian: Yes, Joe: Yeah. Brian: Because that is admitting Joe: Yeah, Brian: That they failed, Joe: Yeah. Brian: Which just goes to show you the level of programming we have around failure. And so, again, it's using fear and pain to move you in the direction you want to go. Joe: All right, a lot to unpack there. So we only have a little bit of time left and I want to honor your time. So let's do this first. Let's talk about I have for services written down that you offer. And you might have added one. You might have taken one away. But I have your one on one coaching. I have the ninety one day challenge. I have the mastermind and then I have your weekly accountability coaching. And so can you just briefly give us an explanation of those. And if I missed one at it and if you're not doing one of them, take it away. Brian: Ok, well, as a coach, I need I don't know where you are, so I don't know which service to offer you or which one is the right fit for you, Joe: Mm hmm. Brian: You or your listener. And so I really start with what I refer to as a discovery session where we sit down and talk about where you are and where you want to go. And then based upon that conversation, we determine how to best help you. Now, where do people usually start? But most people start with the incredible results, starting with their challenge, because it is the one skill that helps people take the action they know they need to be taking that will help them reach their goals. And they see tremendous immediate results, positive results and benefits from participating in the program. And it's one that it's only one hundred and ninety seven dollars if somebody wanted to participate in it. But you got to come through me and do that discovery session in order to determine whether or not that's the good right fit for you. The other thing that is like rocket boosters on the on any one day challenge is the weekly accountability coaching calls and the incredible results. And what a challenge. We do a group coaching call where we are sitting down and we are we're talking how to help use the system, how to get the system to work and fit into your life, and how to help you consistently take action on it. But we also help you with your plan on accomplishing your ninety one day goal. So if your goal is to get 50 new clients, this is OK. What are you doing this week that's going to make you more clients? And we're talking about those different activities in those different ideas and strategies. Brian: So the problem is, is there's anywhere from five to 15 people on that call, depending on how many people are actually in the group at one time. And so it comes down to how do you get enough of my time to where we can truly focus on that programming piece that we've talked about, which is such a big, ugly mess that gets in the way all the time. That is where that one on one time comes in to, where we actually spend 30 minutes specifically talking. We it's a very specifically designed program, says, OK, here's what I'm going to do. Here's what I got done. Here's what I learned. And here's the changes I'm going to make so we can review that in eight to ten minutes pretty quickly. And then we spend the next twenty minutes digging into what got in the way. What's the challenge and struggle you're dealing with right now? That's either the bitch that you're in, the roadblock you're facing, or what's holding you back from moving forward. And that right there is tremendously powerful and makes the ninety one day challenge much more successful. And people who are participating in both their results that they get in and I know they challenge is heads and shoulders above the people that are just in the program by itself. Joe: Yep, and I have to ask this, because I'm sure if I was listening to this, it would be driving me nuts the entire time. It's like, why ninety one days? It's not 60, 30, 90, 120. Brian: It's seven times 13 is 91, seven days for 13 weeks. Joe: Steamworks got it. Brian: So because, again, one quarter is three months, which is four point three weeks, and so it's to get a full 13 weeks is ninety one days. Joe: Perfect. So we covered that and the Brian: Ok, Joe: Weekly accountability and then Brian: Right. Joe: The one on one coaching is. Brian: The one on one coaching I refer to I refer to as my general coaching, and that's where somebody is really wanting to grow and make changes. And a lot of times people will start off there. And again, they're wanting to do a lot of growth and unpacking and deal with the programming issues that are going on. And they're wanting to make some significant changes. Those are one hour sessions and those are usually each week as well where we're digging in and we're trying to figure out again, we're making some serious shifts in there. And then a lot of times it's like, OK, we got them straightened out and we got them on a path. We've created the plan. We've got the momentum going now and it's starting to move forward. And a lot of those people will roll into the accountability coaching so that they have the regular check ins that are getting done what they want to get done, but they don't need to necessarily. OK, let's dive in deep in there and start digging around. Those are wonderful sections. I love doing them, but they take a lot of energy on both myself as well as the person because we're going deep. Know, one of the things that you probably have learned by now listen to this is I don't like to play in the shallow end. I like to dive deep and I like to go under the covers. And if people aren't, that's the other thing is if you've got to be comfortable in playing in the deep end and there's a lot of times when my role as a coach is not to tell somebody what to do, I almost never do that because who's an expert on Joe and Joe's business, Joe is right. So my role is to ask you the questions that is going to help you come up with the answers and solutions to the problems that you're faced with that external perspective and to help you come up with the solution that is within yourself and that the mastermind is more Joe: That's Brian: At the upper Joe: Ok. Brian: Level Joe: Ok. Brian: And that right now is closed. So people are not available into that. And usually what happens is we start people off in the 90s when they challenge and there's those people are rolling up into that mastermind as they complete the 91 day challenge. Joe: Scott. Brian: But we start people off with where they are and what they can afford of what they need to do. And so we have programs that start, like I said, at one hundred dollars a month, up to twenty five to five thousand dollars a month, depending upon which program you're involved with. And there are other things that I do. I have mentioned Tony Robbins, but I have not mentioned John Maxwell, most certified coach, trainer and speaker of the John Maxwell team, which means for those people who are not familiar with John Maxwell, he's a world renowned leadership expert. And that was one of the big challenges that I saw was there was a lack of quality leadership in our world today. And because my target market is that small business owner, entrepreneur and professional, they have never really had much experience with leadership training. But again, I'm not a leadership trainer. I'm a leadership developer. And so we have leadership programs using John's world class material that over a period of 90 days, we teach you the strategies and you practice them for ninety one days so that you develop those skill sets along the way. And so, again, it depends upon where you are and what you need and what tool is necessary to help you fix the problem that you're up against. Because again, I use Stephen Covey, I use Joe Mitali. I will pick from anybody I need to and I will claim that everything that I share didn't originate with me. Brian: I'm standing on the shoulders of the giants that went before me as far as you know, all the way back to the Greeks, Aristotle and and some of those, because they had it first. They they mentioned it. And again, everybody since then is really just repackaging it from there. And if somebody wants to do a DIY version of it, pick a great book. Napoleon Hill's was probably the the godfather of personal development or at least modern person development with they can grow rich. And one of my mentors actually went and read the book and studied it over and over and over again. You probably have heard the suggestion that you should go read a book a week or so, go read 50 bucks a year. Right. I challenge you. That's not the right strategy if you're wanting to grow. It's a great way to learn information. But if you're wanting to make changes in your life. Yeah, one great book and read it 50 times, study it, do the exercises at the end of the chapter, implement the strategies. Another great one is Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. That that book still to date. That's one book I try to read at least once a year. And I'm usually listening to it because I'm taking advantage of the windshield time that I have. And it seems like there's always something more in there. Brian: That book is so deep and there's so many different levels that you can get into it as you grow. There's another level. There's another level. There's another level, which is how I spend a lot of my time. Yes, I have three different coaches and I'm constantly consuming more and more material. But there are there's about ten different books that I try to spend time reading consistently because they're the road maps, they're the foundational skills. And it's going to take for me to get to where I want to go. And it's only through consistently coming back to it. You don't become a master blackbelt by learning how to do the form and doing it perfectly. One time I believe it was Berklee that said, I don't fear the man that knows ten thousand ticks. I fear the man that is practiced one kick ten thousand times in the story that got you the story and the rest of the story was the example of that was he says will show me. And and basically what it was is because that person had practice that kicks so well. It doesn't matter if even if you know it's coming, you can't block it, you can't stop it. He has mastered how to do it regardless of what you do to counteract that. The only way to not get kicked is to not get into the fight. Joe: So. We're over a little bit, we have a few more minutes. Brian: Oh, yeah, I'm good. Joe: Ok, cool. So I want to ask you about because you mentioned since we're on the subject of books and you mentioned Joe Vitale and you were you are part of a book called The Abundance Factor. Brian: Yep. Joe: Can you tell me a little bit about that and how that came about and. Brian: Well, I was on the short list as Joe was looking to write his next compilation book, and I had been following him, been a fan of him, read a number of his books. I still practice one of one of the big things that sticks for me from Joe is the story of Hopital Pono. If you have not read the book Zero Factor, I highly recommend it. It's a very fascinating book. The mantra that that book teaches is something that actually helps me go to sleep at night because my brain has a hard time shutting down. And by saying that for phrase mantra helps my it's kind of a signal to my brain to stop thinking and go from into my head and into my body. And so it's really helpful there. And so I was on the short list of authors that Joe asked to help participate in that book. It's called The Abundance Factor. I knew the group of people that were pulling together. And so my chapter is called The Unpleasant Truth, because, again, there's a lot of people out there teaching because we're talking about the mindset of abundance, which is something that a lot of people struggle with. But it's hard for people to actually do it and practice it consistently. And that's really what my chapter was about. It was about taking the actions that the book is encouraging you to take. And so that's what my chapter is in that book. April of the year that it came out, we did hit the Amazon bestseller list with that book at the time. And it's been a great book. And I use it more of a as a calling card and as an introduction to myself when I'm meeting new people. Joe: And then you mentioned earlier about a book that you wrote that I did not actually see in my notes. So can you tell me about that? Right. Was Brian: Ok, Joe: There. Brian: I've written three books. Joe: Ok. Brian: The first book is called Ready, Set Succeed, which is a self published book. Again, it was another compilation with a series of different authors. And I've got several boxes of those still today that, again, I use them as is handouts. And it's, again, about taking action because again, that's what I saw people struggle with and implementation because again, at the end of the day, it's ready, set, succeed, go. You've got to get moving. And so we were all writing the chapter based upon that. It was a self published book. The only way that you can get that is to go through me to get that I'm aware of. And I actually did have a client come to me through that book for one of the other offers. They got it. They called me up and that chapter resonated with them. And it was an opportunity for me to help them out. Then we wrote The Abundance Factor, and then after that we wrote a book called Unleash Your Fear. And that book is available right now. You can go to unleash your fear dot com and get a copy of that. Right now, at this point in time, it is about a 40 page e-book. You can get a copy were actually read it to you for in about an hour. Brian: But that's one of our projects for the rest of this year, is to work on rewriting that book and expanding it to where it's around a hundred pages and we turn it into a physical book and using that as a methodology to share that message. Because as we've gone back and we've we've shared that message, we teach in a very powerful concept in that book about the relationship that people have with fear, because right now most people have a lousy relationship with fear. But fear is just a tool that's used by our subconscious. And our subconscious causes us problems because it's designed not to make us happy. It's not designed to make us successful. It's designed to make us survive. Problem is, when we do go out there, when we want to grow, when we want to succeed and we want more, it sees that as not surviving. That's risky. There's pain out there if we pursue those things. So how do we how do we change that? How do we work on that? That's what I've understood from the people that have read the book, that a lot of people enjoyed it and you can actually still get it for free for a little bit longer. Brian: We're in the process of getting that changed. You can go to unleash your fear Dotcom and get a copy of that book there. And once we get the expanded version, we will still be using that. You are all along the way. And so in this process, we've got a lot of great tools that are available to you. And we've talked about a lot. Joe, you're actually one of the longer podcasts that I've gone on and we've talked about a lot of different things. But one thing we haven't talked about is one of the foundations that I used for my coaching, which I refer to as the Five Keys of Success. And that's actually a podcast that I do called the Five Keys of Success podcast. And you can go out there to wherever you get your podcasts and Google five Keys successor Brian Lovegrove, and you'll be able to find it. And I talk about those five keys, because at the end of the day, because, again, I've been doing personal development for decades now. And so I boiled down all of that stuff to what is the true fundamental foundational skills and tools you need. And I came up with those five keys. You want to know what those five keys Joe: I Brian: Are? Joe: Do, I have actually you were not going to get off this podcast without talking about it, so I have them here. I still have other stuff. That's why I like that. Yes. So please, I totally want to these this is like one of the things that really triggered it. When I wanted to have you on as a guest, I'm like, man, I want to know what those are. Brian: Well, the five keys of success, the first key is clarity, and I refer to it as get clear because without clarity, you're lost, you're wandering around in a fog. If you don't have a destination, you're never going to be able to get there. And if you don't know where you are, how do you know how you're going to go from where you are to where you want to go? And we talked about the plan. If you are not clear on the plan on how to achieve your goal, you're not going to get there now. But there's some also challenges with that piece because, again, a lot of people may not necessarily know how to get to that point, but do you know how to get started? Because that's the key. Do you know what the next step is? How many people get bogged down with steps? Nine hundred and eighty seven through steps. Twelve hundred and eighty four. Well, what steps do you want? I'm on step five. What step six. I don't know. Focus on step six, seven, eight, nine. OK, focus on what's in front of you and these other steps you will figure out by the time you get to that point. The second key is commitment because without commitment we cave in to the fear. We don't have the motivation, the energy and the power to keep going when things get. And the analogy that I love to use is the story about Cortez. When he landed in The New World, he burned his boats. His men woke up the next morning and they went in. He addresses many gentlemen. There is no way home that we do not create for ourselves. And so his small band took on and conquered much larger nations and groups of people in South America because they were committed to making it happen because it was either do or die. Joe: I'm a big fan of burning the boats, by the way. Brian: Absolutely, that's one of the podcasts that we did, is, OK, how do you burn the boats? Joe: Yeah. Brian: And we kind of walk through that exercise and that's that can be a whole coaching process. My story around that was I used to weigh two hundred and sixty pounds and I went on a diet and I lost thirty five pounds in the first month and a half. It was a radical diet. And one of the things that I did on the back deck in the fire pit is I burn my fat jeans and I actually have a picture of you. It's it's at night. You can all you can really see the flames. You can barely make out the jeans as part of the picture. But I vividly remember that process. And I promised myself I would never buy that size pair of clothes ever again. Now, have I been able to keep off all the weight that I lost? No. But when my pants get tight, that option is not there. Joe: Yeah. Brian: It's like, OK, we got to do something, we got to turn this around because we are not buying a bigger sized pair of pants. And so, again, that's where that burning the boats actually comes in, which leads us to step three, which is get crankin or get busy taking action. Money talks about taking massive action. And, you know, how many times have I you know, I've tried everything. Really? How many times have you tried? What have you tried? A hundred things.

christmas god new york amazon money success thanksgiving google internet man olympic games zoom parents depression focus greek keys diy montana south america habit gps twelve tony robbins new world plan b quarter correct ipods aristotle boy scouts kool aid napoleon hill john maxwell coles highly effective people stephen covey cortez toastmasters wayne dyer zig ziglar dotcom walkman berklee seven habits zig joe vitale success podcast earl nightingale five keys xg five stars ugo ncm sony walkman live masterclass lovegrove coaching model haqq joe scott brian to'o results coaching brian it joe it meeri joe you brian yeah brian you joe love joe yeah lester brown brian so joe so brian well brian oh joe thanks joe there brian yes ziggs joe do brian right joe all

Dr. Shawn Dill and Dr. Lacey Book - the Black Diamond Club, The Specific and more...

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 5, 2021 58:31

Dr. Shawn Dill and Dr. Lacey Book talked with me about so many things happening in their lives. Amongst the many of subjects we discussed, we talked about their book "None of Your Business: A Winning Approach to Turn Service Providers into Entrepreneurs", their organization the Black Diamond Club and their franchise business, The Specific Chiropractic Centers. It was great to talk with such a power couple as I like to call them and learn how they navigate through both their business and professional lives. The Black Diamond club is about helping service providers learn all the necessary tools to be successful while offering a community of support and like minded individuals. Their book gives you the tool in hand, to do the same. The Specific is their chiropractic franchise organization that helps chiropractic offices use a proven formula for growth is their specific realm of expertise being knee, chest, upper cervical specific clinics. I had a great with with Shawn and Lacey and I hope you get as much out of this episode as I did. Thanks for listening, Joe Dr. Shawn Dill & Dr. Lacey Book Owners - The Specific Chiropractic Centers Website: https://thespecific.com/ Founders - Black Diamond Club Website: https://blackdiamondclub.com/ Their mutual website: https://shawnandlacey.com/ Lacey's Info: Website: https://laceybook.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drlaceybook/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drlaceybook/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laceybook/ Shawn's Info: Website: https://shawndill.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drshawndill/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thespecific/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dr-shawn-dill/ Emails: shawn@blackdiamondclub.com lacey@blackdiamondclub.com 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: Sean, Lacey, thanks for joining me on the podcast. I'm super excited after I went and looked at everything that you guys are doing. It's like I probably need a week with you on air. I'm exhausted, actually, from my research, but I'm excited about this. So welcome to the show. I appreciate it. Shawn & Lacey: Thank you so much. Boy, that's that's a I never heard that before, I don't think we hear stuff similar to that. I would say, though, it takes a little while, it takes a little while for us to explain what we do. Sometimes Joe: Yeah, Shawn & Lacey: I get that. Joe: There's a lot going on, so I'm going to jump right in, I might have a different approach than some podcasters. For me, it's really about the origin of where you came from, because I think that's missed a lot of times. And I like people that are listening to the podcast as either entrepreneurs that are in the throes of it and trying to figure stuff out or they're they're on their way up or people that are on the sidelines going mad. Do I really want to do this? I hear how hard it is to be an entrepreneur and and I'm one myself, so I know what it's like. And I would love to at least get your history first. And if you want, you can obviously you probably need to both do it separately because you you didn't all of a sudden disappear together as this good looking power couple that you are. And so I'd like to hear a little bit about each of your story and then the connection and then we'll go from there. And I promise I won't miss anything. I have a ton of notes so either of you can go first, whoever wants to. Shawn & Lacey: Well, Sean is a couple of years on me, so I'll let him go first chronological order, chronological order. Well, I'll accelerate through the early stages of my entrepreneurial development. Joe: Not too Shawn & Lacey: I Joe: Much, Shawn & Lacey: Graduated. Joe: Though, not too much, because it's I like to know who you were when you grew up, like it's Shawn & Lacey: Ok. Joe: Important because I think, you know, people just think all of a sudden, hey, Sean, at least he had a lucky. They they had rich parents and they grew up in an affluent neighborhood. And Sean's trajectory was to be a chiropractor the moment he was born. And and I think it's important for people to know that it's not that easy. And not everyone most of us don't come from that sort of direction Shawn & Lacey: Mm Joe: Early Shawn & Lacey: Hmm. Joe: On. Shawn & Lacey: Ok, well, my both of my parents worked nine to five job superimportant, and I would say we were sort of just middle class, maybe just above middle class. Not definitely not upper middle class. I distinctly remember for my age, wanting designer jeans, Jordache jeans, and I was allowed a pair of Jordache jeans. But my friends, they wore Jordache jeans every day. And so unless I wore the same jeans every day, I wasn't wearing designer jeans every day, hated to wear the lead jeans. I worked one of the things that super important as I worked during high school, shining shoes at a country club in Fort Wayne, Indiana. That was sort of my first real job making money. Of course, I mowed yards, but nothing like nothing super sexy from the entrepreneurial space. I was I had a job. But what I what I noticed was that the members at the country club, they were able to play golf on Wednesdays and Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays. And there I was shining their shoes every day and something sort of sparked in me that made me wonder how they had that lifestyle. I know that you've had conversations with Steve Sims, a similar thing. I think that people people have that sort of that moment when they question what makes you so different than me. Shawn & Lacey: So that was sort of my moment. I fell in love with this idea. I was like, I think that if you truly have made it in my life, you're 16 years old. I thought, like, well, then you could have a country club membership and you can play golf on Wednesdays and Fridays. That became something that was super important to me at a very early age. Now, I didn't play golf at that time. I was shining shoes, but then I went on. My cousin was a chiropractor. This was during the 80s. And the chiropractic space, the 1980s are known as the Mercedes 80s because insurance reimbursement was high. My cousin drove three BMW, so I think he had two BMW cars and he had a BMW motorcycle and his license plate was three BMW s three BMW. And I thought, well, that's really cool. You must really do well. If you if you're a chiropractor and a chiropractic experience, then my cousin really encouraged me to go to chiropractic college, go to chiropractic college. I'm very passionate about chiropractic. But what I realize is that just like culinary art school, when you go to culinary art school, you're being taught how to be a great chef and every great chef's dream is to own their own restaurant. Joe: Yeah. Shawn & Lacey: Well, the same thing in professional trade schools. If you go to become a dentist, a chiropractor, medical doctor, lawyer, they teach you how to be a great practitioner. And of course, every practitioner's dream is to own their own place. But I didn't really have the business education that would be necessary to be successful. I graduated chiropractic college at the age of twenty four. I knew everything there was to know in the world at twenty four. I mean you just Joe: Yes, Shawn & Lacey: That said, Joe: Absolutely. Shawn & Lacey: You know everything. So I moved from the United States to Costa Rica. I didn't speak any Spanish where Costa Rica. The primary language is Spanish. But you know, you figure that out later. And my first year in business was absolutely terrible. It was just it was terrible. I ended that year wondering if I made the right decision, one to be a chiropractor, to to be in business. And I had to make a decision to either, like, bite down hard and press forward or to throw in the towel. I could probably go back to the United States and get a job working for someone else. Thankfully for it, for my sake, I decided to press forward one more time. I caught a break. I was invited to be on a television show. My Spanish was still pretty terrible, so the show was pretty terrible. Imagine you're interviewing me and my English was so broken that you were trying to piece it together right like that. That's what we did. But then slowly I began to get my bearings with the language. I got better and my business blew up. We ended up having four chiropractic offices in Costa Rica. That was sort of my first taste of that magic called scale. I was like, wow, so we could do that, end up coming back to the United States. Shawn & Lacey: I have two daughters and wanted to get them into school here and then here I really that's when I got to the states. That was kind of why would accelerate that. But it is important to know where someone came from. That's really when that sort of entrepreneurial bug started to really develop. I opened up one office and had that bug to scale. We eventually created a chiropractic franchise called the Specific Chiropractic Center. We began consulting with chiropractors and then consulting outside of the chiropractic space. We've worked with some great many. Tours like Jay Abraham and David Meltzer, who began to encourage us to look at other verticals, so we started to get into the software space, we are in the digital marketing space. We do events, but they're all interrelates. It's not like a hodgepodge of things. They they're all sort of interconnected and that sort of then that acceleration on the on the backside, you know, we've just been super blessed. I think a lot of people that really have their game together did well during the pandemic. And so we were blessed through this through this year. And then, of course, you know, looking ahead, trying to prepare the business for what's to come. Joe: So all that was amazing, and I appreciate you doing that for me, and I think the audience will really appreciate it. The only question in the whole thing that I had, and I always hate interrupting, so I just kept quiet, was why Costa Rica? It seems like such a random thing to say. And even though I want to go there and I want to possibly live there, I get it now. But at twenty four y. Shawn & Lacey: I just told the story last night, and I remember we also have a podcast and I appreciate when podcast and they say I'm actually going to tell you the answer to that. The real answer, when I was in St. Louis at Chiropractic College, my roommate, he was dating a girl and eventually became a fiance. And her grandmother was the president of Nicaragua. And my roommate was like, we should go down and visit Nicaragua. I was like, yeah, let's do that. So we stayed. We ended up staying at her grandfather on the other side of the family at the grandfather's house. And we were invited to have a couple of meetings. We were exploring. I wanted to go to Nicaragua and we sat down with a guy and very nice. And he explained he talked to me and he said, Sean, you don't want to come to Nicaragua. Not safe, not good, not stable. If you like Nicaragua, for some reason, you should go to Costa Rica. And I was like, OK, well, that guy, his name was Popl tomorrow. And there's a book written. It's called Everybody Has His Own Gringo. Pulpo was Joe: Well. Shawn & Lacey: Oliver North's contact in this whole Iran Contra affair. I was sitting in his guy's office and he told me so Jamal told me, you don't want to come to Nicaragua, go to Costa Rica. I did. A couple of months later, I went to Costa Rica. Costa Rica was just absolutely beautiful. I was honestly, too, trying to escape something that's interesting from the health care space. I was trying to escape the advent of managed care. This was nineteen ninety five. Managed care was coming on the scene. People didn't really know what that was going to mean for the providers. And so I was like, look, I mean, again, I know everything. The best thing for me is to go to Costa Rica. First it was Nicaragua and then I was convinced by some very powerful people that I should go to Costa Rica instead. Joe: That's amazing. All right, well, and did you end up buying any property there because by now everyone wants to be there and everyone wants to own property. Shawn & Lacey: I did, but I sold that property when we moved back to the United States. That was the other thing is that I worked very hard. You know, we may dive into that at some point here in our discussion as an entrepreneur. So people always ask me, like, wow, you're in Costa Rica like, what's your favorite beach? And honestly, the answer is, I don't know. I was working like a given. We have a home in Florida, but if you're working, you're not at the beach. So just because you live in Florida doesn't mean you're like out renting jet skis or doing all of these things every day. Yeah. Joe: Yeah, well, great, well, that's awesome. Well, I appreciate you doing that, Lacey, it's your turn now. I want to hear about you. Shawn & Lacey: Wonderful, and I'll fill in some of the gaps that Joe: Perfect, Shawn & Lacey: John glossed Joe: Perfect. Shawn & Lacey: Over when the two of us came together, so for me, I grew up a little bit differently. I actually grew up in Silicon Valley in Northern California. And you think Silicon Valley and you think just that the tech capital of the United States and it really was like that. I remember when I grew up, I literally grew up around the corner from Netflix when it was in one little tiny office and I could walk there from my home. But that didn't mean that I grew up with a lot of money. And so majority of my life, we actually lived off of a single family income. My mother worked. My dad, my father was a lot older and so he retired pretty early on in my childhood. And so my mom was really solely responsible for the money in our household, which especially in California, didn't go very far. Joe: The. Shawn & Lacey: And so for me, I actually started working since the day I turned 14. We got some permission from the school and I worked at a really horrible but really fun second run movie theater, probably doing things that no kids should have done. But it taught me a lot, taught me a lot about customer service and really being able to take care of people. And honestly, I can say to this point, I've never stopped working since that day. I've always been a go getter, I think for me, because we didn't have a lot. I always just had this desire for more. And on top of that, I a lot of people out there may relate to this because I wanted more. I had a rebellious side of me. I always wanted to to to break the limits, break the mold. And so I thrived in almost every job I had when I went to undergrad. Since I paid for it myself, I worked three jobs and went to school to get it done. And so I always had that spirit in me, but I never had the knowledge or the intellect or know how. Shawn & Lacey: I don't know how to put it all together. And I ended up going to chiropractic school. And along that road is when I met Sean and just I was just as passionate about chiropractic as he was and ended up we ended up working together in that office that he started in California. And then from there, that's where the two of us started our relationship and started working together as well. And I remember at that time, I we want to talk about beginnings. We tell this story a lot because that was in two thousand and eleven and we were in a six hundred and twenty five square foot apartment. I had a ton of debt coming out of school. Like carpenters come out of school with around two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in debt. He had just come to the United States quite a few years before that, but was still, I mean, really starting from scratch. So we had the six hundred twenty five square foot apartment and we had the two girls that are two kids there as well. I Joe: Scott. Shawn & Lacey: Mean, it was teeny tiny. And we always tell the story of our green couch because at that time we had no money. We had to get a hand-me-down couch from another student that was at the school that moved away. And that's what our girls slept on. And so oftentimes I know and I love that you said that because people automatically think, well, maybe they maybe they had opportunity. I didn't maybe they were blessed. Maybe they grew up that way. Honestly, not only did not grow up that way, but in 2011, it was actually worse. Right. We didn't know what we were going to do with the our actually I didn't know I should say I was the one in the relationship that really struggled with a lack of mentality. Sean has always thought very abundantly. And so we really had to work that out in our relationship to make it work. But the other thing about us is not only were we passionate about chiropractic, we're passionate about helping other people. And so that's what allowed us to go on that trajectory of having our chiropractic franchise and then becoming consultants for people that are service based entrepreneurs and really growing to where we are at today. And that's how we end up sitting here before you. And so it was it was a lot of work, a lot of struggle, a lot of wrong decisions, but mostly just a desire and a tenacity to continue to reach more people and make an impact. Joe: Yeah, and it's so I understand why Sean got into it, because he saw his cousin with the three BMW, right. It made sense. What triggered you to take that path? Shawn & Lacey: You know, it's really interesting, I was actually thinking about when he was telling that story. It's funny because I've heard that story many times. But where I grew up, because because it was Silicon Valley, I was surrounded by money, surrounded by it. There was a lot of entrepreneurs. There are a lot of people in the tech world. The high school that I went to, I, I drove the Cruddas car in the whole parking lot like it was so bad that it was like of those felt ceilings. You remember Joe: Yes. Shawn & Lacey: When they had that and the glue had melted Joe: Yes, Shawn & Lacey: Off. So the Joe: The liner Shawn & Lacey: Felt Joe: The Shawn & Lacey: With Joe: Liner starts Shawn & Lacey: The liner, yeah, it would be bumping my head Joe: Right. Shawn & Lacey: And I would have to tack it up. And I think for me, I would I would boil it down to one word and it was contrast. I was able to see what those what that life could look like Joe: Mm hmm. Shawn & Lacey: In stark contrast to where I was. And so I always wanted to have the opportunity in my own life like I saw like that my that my friends had. And it wasn't that I grew up in a bad household. My parents were amazing and phenomenal. But it's just when you grow up around that, you go, how do I get that? What do I need to do? How hard do I need to work? And so I think that a lot of that came down to it for me. Joe: That's great. So, Sean, real quick, you you and I are probably close to the same age, I might even be older, but the we had parents from potentially the Depression era. Right. Or at least my mother Shawn & Lacey: Oh. Joe: Came from that. So it was always even though they were encouraging, my father was more encouraging for some reason, it was just in his DNA. My mother was like the safety thing. Like, No, you just got to get a good job, work hard, go to school, go to whatever. And every time I wanted to dip my toe in an entrepreneurial pool, she was always like, Are you sure about this? Even as I got older when I was literally being successful doing various companies that I opened. So Lacey said that her parents were very supportive. How about you and your your parents? Shawn & Lacey: You know, my parents, and it's not that her parents were not supportive, but probably my parents were more supportive of of of just sort of the idea of being an entrepreneur. However, right now, as we are speaking, my parents don't really know what we do. So I still ask all the time, what do you guys actually Joe: Hey, Shawn & Lacey: Do Joe: I Shawn & Lacey: Exactly? Joe: Can't I can't blame them, because if you look at the websites and the events that you guys are like, my head is spinning, so I get it. Shawn & Lacey: But I I also was lucky that and I just think there's about people I think if you have a conversation with somebody and you dive deep enough, superstars in life have superstar characteristics and they exhibit superstar characteristics early on, most people don't realize that they are they themselves are Joe: Yeah. Shawn & Lacey: Superstars. But if you look at people that are successful, they have sort of these sort of interesting ways that they were successful. So I suppose I excelled in academics. My mother told me as an adult that there were many times that she was like, hey, are you going to study for that test? And I was like, now? And that she she was like, it was a dilemma as a mother because she wanted me to fail so I would learn the lesson. Joe: Yeah. Shawn & Lacey: But I never did. And she's like, somehow you just kept getting through. And I got great grades and I was successful in music. And so they at least in the area of music, I when I left high school, I either wanted to be a professional soccer player or a professional musician playing the saxophone. I went to Indiana University, which has Joe: Great Shawn & Lacey: A very Joe: School, Shawn & Lacey: Good soccer Joe: Great, Shawn & Lacey: Team and a great music program, Joe: Great. Shawn & Lacey: And it took me less than a semester to figure out that I wasn't going to be able to do either one of those. And so then I had to kind of figure out. But they were always very supportive in the sense of do what you want. I think also to a contrast, I didn't have any school debt compared to Lacey's two hundred and fifty thousand. So my parents at least, you know, they were they were, though, of that mindset. Right. You know, buy a house, save money, pay for your kid's education. That was the mark of success. And I was I was the beneficiary of that. And they were also very, very supportive. I will say to I think actually I'm more like you, Joe. Yeah. Yeah, Joe: Oh, yeah. Shawn & Lacey: Actually, Joe: Ok. Shawn & Lacey: Yeah. My my father was born in nineteen twenty seven Joe: Oh, and my Shawn & Lacey: And Joe: Father Shawn & Lacey: So. Joe: Was born in nineteen twenty nine, so. Shawn & Lacey: Yeah, and so I actually grew up and my mother, my father, it was in his DNA to just to just to just love one on me and like just say you can do these things. My mother was actually the worrywart. Joe: Yeah, Shawn & Lacey: And Joe: Exactly. Shawn & Lacey: So I always say she was one of those people that could could find the worst case scenario and anything. Right. And and that and I don't know if you can relate to that, but I meet a lot of people that, yeah, I Joe: Gosh. Shawn & Lacey: Grew up that grew up with somebody. And so it would be like, OK, but if you do this, here's what could happen. Right. So it was a it was an interesting, I think, balance that the two of them played in my in my life and I was in the middle of it. And so for me, I wasn't like Sean. Like I instead I pushed back and try to do everything as independently as I could. Right. And so it was very different, I think, growing up. Joe: God, it's so nice to meet someone who had the same dichotomy of the father and the mother, and it was she was so protective and so fearful because Shawn & Lacey: Yes. Joe: She they they had an alcoholic father who left. They had just there. Shawn & Lacey: My mom, too. Joe: Yeah. They just scrounged for everything. It was just it was devastating for them when they were young. So she didn't want any of those. She didn't want me to take any chances at all. But I was the middle child. I was the one that just constantly bought the system. And she just Shawn & Lacey: Yep. Joe: My poor mother, I from God. Man, old Shawn & Lacey: I Joe: Man. Shawn & Lacey: Know I said I told my mom, too, I don't know how you how you did it with me, No. One. And then we fed into their worrying, Joe: Mm Shawn & Lacey: Right, Joe: Hmm. Shawn & Lacey: Because Joe: Yeah, Shawn & Lacey: We kept bucking back. Joe: Yeah, Shawn & Lacey: So, Joe: Yeah, well, Shawn & Lacey: You know. Joe: That's that's awesome. So, OK, so you meet and it's is it twenty eleven when you well you met before then but twenty eleven is when you kind of really started this relationship and partnership. Shawn & Lacey: Yep. Joe: Is that true Shawn & Lacey: Yeah, Joe: For Shawn & Lacey: We met in 2006, Joe: Ok. Shawn & Lacey: And then I think we started dating like end of 2010, yeah. Joe: Ok, and you had one chiropractic location out in California. Shawn & Lacey: Yes. Joe: Ok, so what is the conversation that happens that you say, OK, we can do more than this and we can open up either other offices of our own or we've created such a successful practice that we could actually duplicate this and franchise it? I don't know what came first or how, but I'm Shawn & Lacey: Let Joe: Interested Shawn & Lacey: Me give you an idea Joe: Because there's Shawn & Lacey: The Joe: Many Shawn & Lacey: Answer Joe: Business Shawn & Lacey: To Joe: Out Shawn & Lacey: That. Joe: There that, like, I have a entertainment booking agency and I have systems in place that if I got ran over by bus today, literally someone could walk in and everything goes in order Shawn & Lacey: It's Joe: And Shawn & Lacey: Great. Joe: It's all planned out and it's totally franchise able. If I ever wanted to do that, I'm probably too old to do something like that. So but how did you how did this conversation happen? Because I looked in all the locations you have in some of them, you have multiple one of the locations. You have four offices alone in it, right? Four. Shawn & Lacey: Mm hmm. Joe: So you guys really blew this up. And I'd love for the audience who has this maybe in the back of their mind. How does someone go about this conversation and then take those steps? And I know that's part of what you also do in your training. So we're going to get to all of that. But this interests Shawn & Lacey: Absolutely. Joe: Me as well. Shawn & Lacey: So I think even if someone is listening, we are two people, but anybody listening is probably had this conversation with themselves as if even if you're one person, sort of this, you know, white right shoulder, left shoulder, good angel, bad angel. However you want to configure it. I my role in that, that is that my mindset always has been one of superabundance. I'm one that is the opposite of the risk of, you know, this is all the bad things that can happen. My position is always like, yeah, but this is all the cool stuff that could happen if it went the other way. And that's sort of where my my focus goes. Lacey can share that hers is is different and how it's different. But I always thought that man, we could just figure this out and then really what that the desire was for me was to reach as many people as possible. That was one of my big lessons in Costa Rica. I remember I had four offices in Costa Rica. There's four million people in Costa Rica. And what I realized was that four million at that time. There's probably more now. But what I realized is that I wasn't even making a dent. I was like, we've got four when we were busy, like my office was seeing two hundred and fifty patient visits, patient transactions per day, Joe: Oh, my Shawn & Lacey: Five Joe: Gosh. Shawn & Lacey: And a half days a week. People were pouring in. And I'm like, and we're still not making it that we're not we're not getting close like we're not. We would need to have such an incredible infrastructure to really reach more people. And that was sort of a big transition for me. I think that people that want to scale in the sense of multiple units, franchising, etc., as you come to this realization that you're just one person, seven billion people on the planet, this podcast, the reason why we agree to come on it is because it amplifies our voice, the people that are listening to the podcast or the people that don't normally listen to us and vice versa. And so the effort is gaining leverage by being able to scale your message for me and being in the service world to reach more people. So that was always in the back of my mind. I wanted people I wanted to just reach more people. Now, then, your question. So that's the pre answer, because then your question is like, so what does the conversation look like? And that's not as easy, because if it were that easy, everybody would do it. I always say people that are in the service world that have a passion to reach a lot of people, that is the answer. Well, then why don't they do that? Because here's the scariest thing to do before he adds sort of what that transition look like is that in the service world, if we are if we really believe that we are impacting and changing people's lives fundamentally by whatever it is we do, whether you're a massage therapist or a hairstylist or whatever you do, like you feel like the person on the other side of the transaction, that their life is radically changed as a result of your doing it. Shawn & Lacey: Don't you actually have an obligation then to reach as many people as possible? And I'll add to that and scale, because this is the problem. If you were run over by a bus and you hadn't put the systems in place, then the entire thing stops with you. Even the people that you are currently serving, they just all of a sudden don't have a way to continue on. So that's always been in my mind. Now, going to lazy and saying, yeah, let's just open up a bunch of those with zero money that is not necessarily very well received. And so she can tell you. Yeah, and people ask us all the time where you guys work together, you do everything together, you live together. And so very early on, I mean, one of the reasons I fell in love with Sean is his his ability not just to be just a visionary, but his ability to be a strategic visionary, like to see so many moves ahead, because the way that I grew up, I was taught to look at the very thing in front of you. Shawn & Lacey: Right. And so it's a very different way of going about and doing business. Not to say that I'm not a risk taker, but I just do it differently. And so we were very lucky because people saw the model that Sean had created with that original office and fell in love with it. It was all cash, no insurance, a very specific type of technique that we do. And they said, I, I want in on that. I want you to teach me how to do that. But here's the problem. He was still working in the office seeing patients with me. And it doesn't matter if you're in a relationship with somebody working together or you're in a partnership with somebody working together. What we learned very quickly is that we were doing the work of one person as two people, super inefficient. And so he's like, we need to we need a scale. We need to grow. But I'm being selfish. And I wanted him to stay and work in the office with me. And so I had a life coach. She was Russian. So she was very straightforward. Joe: Yes. Shawn & Lacey: She and she said she she didn't have a filter. And she literally said to me one day, she said. I want you to know that what I'm feeling is that you're holding Sean back from being able to do the thing that he's good at. It's like so crazy. Why Joe: Not Shawn & Lacey: Would you say Joe: Me, Shawn & Lacey: Something Joe: Be Shawn & Lacey: Like that? Joe: Right. Shawn & Lacey: Come on. And luckily, I don't I'm not an individual takes things personally. And so I went home to Sean and I said, you know, Cachalia, my life coach, she said this crazy thing to me. She said, I'm holding you back. And he looked me dead in the face. And he said, You are. And so the very next day, that's when he started doing his thing. And he never came in the office again. And because I'm an executer and I'm really good at that and I'm great at systems and infrastructure, that's my superpower. And I recognize that. And I recognize that he's a strategic visionary by having that separation and allowing us to do what we were strongest at, I think, was the catapult to allow us to scale that business specifically. Joe: And that is such an important thing that you just said, and I think it's the biggest problem with partnerships and like you said, even though you're married and you're also partners in a business, I think I learned this from a couple of restaurant owners that I'm friends with that are no longer in the business together. But just because one of them retired was that they had very strategic like a line in the sand. And this is your side of the room and this is my side of the room. And one of them was all front of house and the other one was all the back and part of it. And it was they never crossed those lines. And I think that's important to maybe like you said, you make a list of your superpowers and you say, OK, here's all the things I'm good at. I'm going to take all of that on my shoulders as part of the business. And do you agree or disagree? These are all the things that you're really good at. You take all those. I think that's a recipe for success. And it's so important that you said that. I think that's missed a lot. Everyone they Shawn & Lacey: It Joe: All Shawn & Lacey: Is. Joe: It's just like this is a big pot of soup and everybody wants to stir and you Shawn & Lacey: Yeah, Joe: Can. Shawn & Lacey: Yeah, let me get some Joe: Yeah, Shawn & Lacey: Of that you don't know what you're getting, Joe: Yeah, Shawn & Lacey: Right, Joe: Yeah. Shawn & Lacey: And I'll tell you, Joe, the other thing that we did when we learned that lesson is we translated that into our are the personal side of our life. And so we created very clear lines and roles and things that we do in our household as well, because that that we want that to be just as successful as our businesses. So it's never a question of who's doing the laundry or the dishes or responsible for shopping or paying the bills. It's never like, did you do that? Why didn't you do that? We know who does what. And that helps actually in that personal side of things as well. And it was just a great lesson to adopt on both ends. Joe: See, I knew I loved you guys. This Shawn & Lacey: Gus. Joe: Is good looking power couple, just I mean, Joel and my life partner were the exact same way. We've been together for twenty two years. We we do Shawn & Lacey: All that. Joe: Stuff together and we just it's just a perfect situation. But it takes like anything. All the little stumbles along the way. But you figure it out. But it's I love that. That's awesome. And I bet you're the only person who has the run of the house is Dexter. Shawn & Lacey: Oh, Joe: You're Shawn & Lacey: My gosh, Joe: Right. Dexter Shawn & Lacey: Yes. Joe: Gets away with anything. Dexter is your Shawn & Lacey: Well, Joe: Right. Shawn & Lacey: How could you tell he's here, somebody somewhere Joe: There is. Shawn & Lacey: He was scratching at the door and I just had to tell texting our team, get the dog. Somebody needs to get the dog. Joe: That's Shawn & Lacey: Yes. Yes, he has the run of the house. I'm sure you could tell. Joe: Right. That's awesome. OK, so what's the time frame when you opened up the second office or you started the franchise, however that happened. Shawn & Lacey: I'm just going to clarify for you some of these questions, my sense of time, that is my weakness. So if if Laci said it was three years after or said it was three months after, I would agree with either answer. So I'm going to have to if you ask me, how long have you known Laci? I Joe: I Shawn & Lacey: Don't know. Joe: Am exactly the same way. When did you meet, like where? I don't remember. Sorry. Shawn & Lacey: Do you want to know how bad is actually at time that he he thought it was the most brilliant idea and somehow he talked me into it for us to get married on my birthday, which also happens to be New Year's Eve. So he will never forget the dates on any of those. Joe: That's Shawn & Lacey: Talk Joe: Not Shawn & Lacey: About a smart businessman. Joe: True and that's not fair. She gets ripped off on two other holidays. Shawn & Lacey: No, that's false, and it's the world's biggest party on her birthday Joe: Oh, Shawn & Lacey: And Joe: My Shawn & Lacey: On Joe: God. Shawn & Lacey: Our anniversary, it's the best. So Joe: Oh, God. Shawn & Lacey: So two thousand nine is when people started coming and saying, I want to get in on this model. Joe: And Shawn & Lacey: And Joe: I'm Shawn & Lacey: We had. Joe: Sorry and I hate to interrupt you, but when you say Shawn & Lacey: Yeah. Joe: People because you brought this up a couple of times Shawn & Lacey: Oh, Joe: Now, Shawn & Lacey: Yeah. Joe: I don't understand who those people would be. They wouldn't necessarily be patients. They would be people that are in the chiropractic industry. And they look at you as being, wow, you guys are killing and how do I do that? Shawn & Lacey: Yeah, and I should probably I think for context, I don't know if you said it in your in your intro, your story, but when Sean came back from Costa Rica, because literally he was starting over, the first thing he did was take a job at the chiropractic college. I don't know if we had mentioned Joe: No. Shawn & Lacey: That before. Joe: Ok, perfect. Shawn & Lacey: And so he was at the chiropractic school and he was teaching chiropractic philosophy. And then he was teaching like the one real business class that they had at the school. And so that gave him exposure to a lot of other chiropractic students, people that were graduating to see and understand the way that he viewed business and what we were trying to do with the specific chiropractic centers. So those are the individuals that said, I want to be part of this. I see the vision. I see where you're going. I love the model. And early on, we actually had it created as a licensing model. But that just gets a little bit sticky for anybody out there that's trying to scale in a licensing model. You really have to have ownership, I guess, and all of them. But a true franchise, it takes time, money, energy and a lot of good advice to to create, especially in health care. So we had about six offices that were under the licensing model and we went moved into a legitimate franchise and then grew from there in two thousand and sixteen. Joe: Ok, and so how many do you have now? Shawn & Lacey: 13. Joe: Wow, that's incredible. Shawn & Lacey: And they span from we have to in Hawaii and then they go all the way to Tennessee. So far, this Joe: That's Shawn & Lacey: One. Joe: Incredible. Shawn & Lacey: No. Joe: Yeah, you guys are killing it. I love this story, and that's why I said I was so excited to have you on and I was like, I'm going to need hours to interview these two. There's just like so many things. OK, so the most important thing, not the most important thing, but one thing I want to touch upon, because there's I'm sure the people that are listening to this and eventually watching the YouTube version of this are going to say, how do I learn more? That is not going to get covered in the short time that we have together. So you put out a book called None of Your Business in twenty nineteen. And it's a winning approach to turn service providers into entrepreneurs. And I love that because even when I listen to a little bit of your interview with Steve Sims, it Shawn & Lacey: You. Joe: Was it was like it's more than just providing a service. You are it's not transactional, right? It's more of like you're doing something you're passionate about. And the ultimate thing at the end is that, you know, you've helped somebody. It's Shawn & Lacey: Mm Joe: That Shawn & Lacey: Hmm. Joe: To me, that's what it is for me for sure. With everything that I do, it's like, how can I help did this? How can I help you, you know, those sort of things. So I feel like that's the approach that that I get from the both of you and what your book is about. So can you talk a little bit about the book? Shawn & Lacey: Yeah, the book definitely has more in depth, our story, plus the fundamentals that we teach from from marketing sales mindset, and we've had to do a ton of work together as a couple on mindset mindset. You can have all of the right instruction and do all of the right things, but your mindset could blow that. And part of that is exactly what you are talking about. Sometimes service providers shoot themselves in the foot because they want to help a lot of people. And that becomes overwhelming to the point that that desire to serve destroys the business. And so you have a business hand and a service hand. Basically, these two hands are coexisting, but they really can't meet because they they they are they are the antithesis to the business hands. Like, we have to make money. The service hands, like, well, we should just give it away for free. And so how do you reconcile that and be successful? And ultimately, you know, it all circles back to if you really do have this wonderful service that can change the world, the fuel that makes it go as a successful business in all businesses, every single business in the world, the sole reason for their existence is to make a profit, because if there is no profit in the business can exist and then people can't be serviced, can't be helped, can't be changed, can't be impacted. And so service providers really have a hard time with that. And so Joe: Oh, Shawn & Lacey: That's why Joe: Yeah. Shawn & Lacey: The book. Right. And fundamentally, before we wrote the book, the premise was, is that the world's greatest service providers in the world live in relative obscurity. We don't know, you know, and I'm not knocking him. I've had the opportunity to meet him. He's a phenomenal guy. But the world doesn't know what kind of doctor Dr. Oz is Joe: The. Shawn & Lacey: And whether he's good. But he's on TV and that makes him, in our eyes, have a degree of reverence for him or belief and credibility in him. But there are people that are phenomenal musicians and artists, practitioners, hairstyles and everything, but nobody knows who they are because they refuse to embrace the business concepts that would bring their message to more people. And so that's why we wrote the book. Joe: And you hit on another thing that even at my age, it took me forever to not feel like making money was this dirty thing. Right. And our mutual friend, David Meltzer, he talks about it in such great ways that he expresses how you've got to help yourself so you can then help others. Right. You have to make sure that you and then your family and it's just changing. That whole dynamic of making money is not an awful thing and not a dirty thing. And just it I don't know. It's it's such a it was such a struggle for so long. I just I felt like, yeah. Let's just give it away. Like, I'll do this for pennies. I just want you to be happy and I can't it's not sustainable. Shawn & Lacey: Yeah, you can't give what you don't have. Joe: Yeah. Shawn & Lacey: I mean, and that's a lesson that we've learned many times over. I mean, you can't you can't serve out of abundance if you don't have abundance. I mean, it's very difficult. And that's the best way to reach a lot of people and make a bigger impact as to be is to be financially stable or financially full because it allows you to go out there and do the things that you need to do in order to reach them. And so that's what we that's our passion is to help service entrepreneurs to really fall in love with that idea so that they can not only touch the people and help the people that they're trying to serve, but that so they can get out of it the life that they desire to Joe: Yeah, Shawn & Lacey: Write because Joe: Yeah, Shawn & Lacey: They deserve it. Joe: Yeah, Shawn & Lacey: So, Joe: Yeah, and Shawn & Lacey: Yeah. Joe: Yeah, that's it, they deserve it, it's people Shawn & Lacey: Yeah. Joe: Don't think they deserve to have this success and Shawn & Lacey: Right. Joe: Whether it's business or financial or family or whatever it might be, it's it's amazing. The specific dotcom is all about the chiropractic offices and all of this is the franchise piece of that. Is that Shawn & Lacey: The Joe: Correct? OK, great. Shawn & Lacey: Correct. Joe: So we've already talked about that. So then we have this is where it gets complicated. And this might just be because you had certain websites before the websites and then you kept so you have you have one in together, right. So you have Sean and Lacy Dotcom and Shawn & Lacey: Yeah. Joe: Then you have Sean del Dotcom. And then on top Shawn & Lacey: There's Joe: Of Shawn & Lacey: Also Joe: That. Shawn & Lacey: Makes it look like we need to Joe: Oh Shawn & Lacey: Clean all Joe: Yes. Shawn & Lacey: These up, no. Joe: So it's just so and at the end I'm going to do this and all the show notes and everybody will know where to find you everywhere. So it won't matter. But so is it important to talk about Sean and Lacey Dotcom and Sean Del Dotcom at this point, or is it better to talk about the Black Diamond Club dotcom? Shawn & Lacey: Like Diamond Club Dotcom. Joe: I mean, we could talk about it all, I just don't I Shawn & Lacey: Yeah, no. Joe: We only have a little bit more time, but I want to make sure we get through everything and I want to also make sure that we promote the August event coming up in Carmel, Indiana. So let's talk about Black Diamond Club, because that'll segway into what you're Shawn & Lacey: Hmm. Joe: Doing with that organization, the events that you have and all of that. Shawn & Lacey: Yes, a black diamond club is the place where service entrepreneurs go to receive instruction or marketing sales mindset. But I think more importantly, support and accountability. Six hundred and twenty plus service providers that are all there sharing best practices. One of the things that people always talk about that the fast food drive thru concept is not a restaurant concept. It's a banking concept. Banks really don't. Few banks have that little tube thing that goes back and forth. But they were the ones that introduced this banking from your car, the restaurant industry. It was a swipe and deploy like that's genius. Can we put it in our and McDonald's and then they don't have to get out of their car and come in. And I always say, like, think about how much you could learn if you weren't just surrounded by people in your industry like you. You found out what other industries were doing well. And then you actually thought about how can you apply that into your industry? And that's really what Black Diamond Club is about, is looking at what's working in the world. You know, e commerce. We don't sell things. Shawn & Lacey: We sell a service. But still, you know, people in e commerce, they really get social media, advertising, Legian, they get email, follow ups, they understand retention. So if you are looking at how can I improve that, maybe it would be worthwhile looking at things that they were doing. And that's what Black Diamond Club really, really is all about. It's a great place. Never will you be talked down to, never will you be looked down upon. But also, I think really important. It's a place where you can come and also say, hey, guys, I had my biggest month. I collected two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in revenue this month and everybody will celebrate you as well. That's part of that, too, is we don't know when you're saying, like, the mindset around money. Oftentimes we're afraid to tell people how well we're doing because we don't want to be shot down, especially by someone that we hold in high regard or that is close to us. So we've tried to create a community where we can foster that high energy and help service professionals to to go out and reach more people. Joe: Ok, so you have the specific and you have this chiropractic franchise and you're building this amazing business. When do you decide that? Wait a second. This is something that is goes well beyond chiropractic and chiropractic offices. You are building a model of success. So all of a sudden, one night you're sitting down at dinner and a glass of wine and you go, hey, wait a second. We're once again, we need to expand our mind and say, this is this is too narrow. Obviously, we're helping all of these chiropractors build successful businesses and being part of our franchise. But we can actually take this a step further. We can create a black diamond club that actually works with all forms of entrepreneurs. So is that sort of how this came about? Shawn & Lacey: Well, I wish it was that easy or simple, but I like the glass, I Joe: See how I put Shawn & Lacey: Use that Joe: I Shawn & Lacey: Now. Joe: Put Shawn & Lacey: Why Joe: All Shawn & Lacey: Didn't Joe: Those Shawn & Lacey: We Joe: Words Shawn & Lacey: Have wine? Joe: In? Shawn & Lacey: I think I think first and foremost, from very early on, like all of the business principles that Sean taught were not, you know, from the old ways of chiropractic thinking, it wasn't from our profession and from our industry. In fact, very early on in our relationship, when we were still struggling financially, he wanted to hire a business coach and he had been teaching out of Michael Sportsbook yourself solid book for many years to all of the chiropractic students in learning how to build community and really attract their ideal client. And so he came to me one time and again in my mentality, I was like, there's no way we're ever going to be able to afford that. We can't we can't handle that. And he said we'll figure it out. The money will come. And we figured it out. And Shawn was able to become a book yourself, solid certified coach. And that was kind of the first movement in going, man, this stuff that's outside of our profession, in our industry translates really well into what we do. But, hey, business concepts are business concepts and they actually translate into any profession. So we always had those thoughts. But really the story goes that there was another individual, another group in chiropractic that was very negative, that based on people that talked down to people that didn't support their individuals that were in the group. And one day Shawn was just like, we're just going to create the exact opposite of that, the exact opposite of that. And that's what we did. And that's how Black Diamond Club in a nutshell, got started. And we want it to be everything. That group was not so that people could have a place to go, where they could grow, reach more people, be supported and not be ashamed. Joe: That's great. When did you start, like nine o'clock? Shawn & Lacey: Twenty sixteen. Joe: Wow, so you're Shawn & Lacey: Hmm. Joe: Already busy and you just said, let's the heck with it, let's tax something else on the plate. Shawn & Lacey: It was a need and, you know, if you listen to the people, they'll tell you what they need Joe: Yeah. Shawn & Lacey: And if you have the skill set to fill that gap, then you should. And that's what we did. Joe: Perfect. How about tell us about the summercamp twenty twenty one that's coming up on the 13th and 14th of August in Carmel, Indiana. Shawn & Lacey: Well, this is edition number five of Summercamp, it was started by our good friend Tristan Qof. He had created this event separate from us that had nothing to do with us. And he wanted to create an event that brought together chiropractor's and expose them to entrepreneurs, which really fits our brand. But that was an idea that he had birthed. The very first edition was held in Las Vegas and the keynote speaker was Grant Kardon. And a Joe: Well. Shawn & Lacey: Lot of people were like, oh, wow, how did you get greencard on? The second edition had a stellar lineup. Brian Tracy was one of the keynotes, had multiple keynotes. Tom, Billu was there. I mean, it was it was an all star lineup. It was starting to grow. And Tristin at that point was a one man show. And so we saw his his his struggles in trying to run around and put on events of that caliber. And we were like, hey, Lacey really gets scale and process and organization and we could really help you. And so he was like, look, why don't you just acquire me? So we acquired the company and we kept Tristant on. And then we did audition number three in Miami with DJ Abraham. Roger Stone spoke Joe: Resum, Shawn & Lacey: At that one. Also, Roger Love, Joe: Yeah. Shawn & Lacey: Audition number four last year, right in the middle of the pandemic in person, we had Jordan Belfort and Eric Thomas headline. And then this year we're celebrating our fifth year. Carmel, Indiana's just north of Indianapolis, just just north of Indianapolis. We have David Meltzer. We have Patrick. But David, who's all over the news right now with this Trump and Obama debate, we have Steve Simms's speaking, Chris Winfield, Jen Gottlieb, John, ruling from Gift. This the super Joe: Well. Shawn & Lacey: Pac lineup. It is all about helping service providers. These are these are speakers that normally you would hear at an entrepreneurial Joe: Mm hmm. Shawn & Lacey: Conference. But it's it's helping expose service providers to these concepts and helping them understand how to apply them in their business so that they can reach even more people. Joe: That's incredible. I have no idea what the cost of this thing is, but just the fact that David Meltzer is there. Shawn & Lacey: I Joe: I Shawn & Lacey: Had. Joe: Had the opportunity to spend a full day with him in his office in California. Joellen and I went out and literally shadowed him from nine o'clock in the morning. And then later on, we had drinks that night and met his wife. And it was just the most incredible thing. And that the positivity that comes from him and Shawn & Lacey: Yes. Joe: It's just amazing. So that alone is I don't even know what what it cost, but that alone is worth the price of admission, just that alone. Shawn & Lacey: Well, I'm going to throw in there I don't I don't even have a link to this, but one of the things that we'll be putting out here in the back half of the year, so if people plug in with Laci and and social media, we are we are collaborating with David and we are putting on a two two day, three night mastermind on a private island in the Caribbean in December. So it'll be myself and Laci and David Meltzer trapped on a private island. So that's great. You'll have us locked there to be able to help you to ask any questions. I mean, probably Laci mostly just being having cocktails. I'm sure David will be happy for everybody's going to want so when he's there. But that's something we're super excited about, being able to collaborate with him. And he's just like you said, and one day imagine two days Joe: It's. Shawn & Lacey: And imagine, you know, your dinner is together. Yeah. You're doing everything together. So we're super excited about that. And we'll have information out about that very soon. Joe: That's cool, because we Joellen and I like to go away during the summer because we don't really have family here in Shawn & Lacey: Oh. Joe: Phoenix, Arizona, so, hey, Shawn & Lacey: Yeah. Joe: Maybe you'll get stuck with us for that trip. Shawn & Lacey: I would love Joe: All Shawn & Lacey: That Joe: Right, Shawn & Lacey: Would not Joe: Cool. Shawn & Lacey: Be a bad thing. Joe: No, not to be awesome. Yeah, I'm sorry. I actually missed you guys. You were here in Phoenix in March, right? Shawn & Lacey: Yep. Joe: You ran an event here. So you. Shawn & Lacey: That was our first time in Phoenix in a long time. Joe: Oh, Shawn & Lacey: Yeah, Joe: Yeah. Shawn & Lacey: We do we do three events a year. We do one on marketing, one on sales, and then one around money mindset. And we typically like to kind of move them throughout the country because we've got clients Joe: Sure. Shawn & Lacey: From coast to coast. So Phoenix, that's where we were doing our Money Mindset workshop. Joe: Now, let's Shawn & Lacey: And Joe: Call. Shawn & Lacey: We shout out to Phoenix, you guys really had it together. It wasn't super restrictive. We have been very pro keeping our events going during this time. And Phoenix was very cooperative. We had a really good time there. So Joe: Yeah, Shawn & Lacey: It really sounds like a great place to be. Joe: It is, but we they get in trouble because there they are a little overzealous when the data is said, take your mask off. And I went to the Shawn & Lacey: Well. Joe: Gym and I got a lifetime, literally. I walked in. Not one person that I'm Shawn & Lacey: Yes. Joe: Like, there's there's no on ramp, folks. What's going on? It was ridiculous. I was like, you're telling Shawn & Lacey: That's Joe: Me, Shawn & Lacey: Funny. Joe: Oh, is there anything else that I missed? What's the best place to get in touch with the both of you or the specific or Black Diamond Club? And again, I'll put it all in the show notes. But do either of you like people to reach out on Instagram, any of that stuff? What works for you? Shawn & Lacey: Social media is great, you can reach me and Sean Black Diamond Club dot com, that's my email. Yeah, basically we try to be here's one thing that I've learned is that as I've been around more successful people. You mentioned Joe: David Shawn & Lacey: David Meltzer. Joe: Is. Shawn & Lacey: I specifically asked him, I was like, you're giving your personal email out all the time, all over the place, national television. You don't care. How does that work? And I just found, like, super successful people are hyper responsive. That's why they're that's why they're successful. And so this is me getting over that. I'm giving my personal email shonen at Black Diamond Club dot com. Yeah. Hit me up. And if there's any way that I can provide value to your life, I will be more than happy to do that. I'm usually I usually like maybe once or twice a year, send out an email to just saying, you know, tell me what I can do for you if I can do it within reason and on this day I will comply. So likewise, if it's an within reason and I can get it done quickly, I can't take on a project, but if I can get it done quickly, make the ask, I'd be happy to help. And we're on all the social media platforms. Sean Delisi book. I bet you could guess my email address. COVID-19 Club dot com super easy. And if you want any more information, Black Diamond Club dot com is the best place to find about all the things we're doing. Joe: That's perfect. One question I didn't ask during the book conversation was I know authors when they write a book, they say it's a struggle like it's a hard thing to do. It's not as easy as people think. How how easy was it or hard with two of you writing the same book and and how did you figure out who's writing what? Or did you just sit down together? It's just something that came to my brain that I wanted to ask that question. Shawn & Lacey: I'm going to shameless plug, and if I can help you, although you're very well established, you don't need my help. Tucker Max from Scribe, Joe: Oh, yeah, I know, yeah. Shawn & Lacey: That's all. So that's how we do. The book is a chain of the chain of command on this was Abraham sat us down in his office and said, you need to write a book. And I was like, I was like, no, it sounds like a terrible idea. And he was like, well, there's a lot of ways to write a book. We were introduced to Tucker by Tristan Sharp, who I mentioned earlier. We hit it off. Tucker was like, let's just get this book done in the process with Scribe is painless. I mean, they really do have it down. People that read that book after knowing me, they say it's kind of you get to pick, but the book is written in my voice. And so people are like, yeah, I can hear you. It's we don't have an audio book. If we did, I would probably be the one that reads the book. But super simple. We just collaborate on our ideas. You meet with the scribe people, they get the thoughts out of your collector right out, Joe: Yeah. Shawn & Lacey: Put it on the paper and write it. I highly recommend if you have a book in, you use Scribe. Yeah, well worth the money because you'll just it just amplifies your voice again. Joe: Yeah, that's great. It's so funny, I know Tucker's program, and I actually I think I started doing it and I was like, do I really have a book? I mean, so who Shawn & Lacey: You Joe: Knows? Shawn & Lacey: Do you do an. Joe: Is there anything else that I missed that you wanted to speak about before I let you go? Shawn & Lacey: Not me, I think you did a great job, Harry. A lot Joe: All right, well, cool. Shawn & Lacey: A lot of real estate. Joe: I was it's you you are both very busy, so I was very nervous. I got so many things I want to ask and we'll probably have to do this again because there's there's Shawn & Lacey: Oh. Joe: There's more. But thank you. Thank you both so much. I really appreciate you being on the podcast. I want that event in August to have a bunch of my listeners hopefully show up. So thank you again. I really appreciate it. And I wish you both all the success in the world. Shawn & Lacey: Thank you. Thank you for having us. If your listeners show up, we promise that we will make them feel right at home. Joe: Perfect. Thank you so much.

covid-19 united states god tv new year netflix california donald trump english man las vegas entrepreneur club miami arizona depression russian spanish dna tennessee barack obama hawaii indiana fall in love mcdonald silicon valley gift caribbean boy honestly costa rica oz banks indianapolis emails northern california bmw tours oftentimes nicaragua money mindset indiana university summer camp managed your business brian tracy roger stone dotcom scribe fort wayne dill david meltzer eric thomas laci jordan belfort black diamond steve sims jay abraham iran contra tucker max pulpo joe cool jen gottlieb roger love diamond club info website jordache chris winfield joe it chiropractic college joe you joe yeah joe well joe don my spanish joe so steve simms billu joe there joe all joe absolutely joe now

It's All a Projection

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 30, 2021 37:44

In today's episode, we will be taking a deeper look at projections. What exactly does that mean? The parts of ourselves that we cannot own — either good or bad — are what we project onto other people. The concept of projection is rooted in the idea that we create beliefs based on our past experiences. We carry these beliefs with us into the present, where they subconsciously shape our current reality."People think somebody who really sees through projections is really smart because they come up with really cool, unique, innovative ideas, or they act in a way that is seemingly not normal but yet it works. It is not so much really that they are smart or not smart. It is that they don't see the same level of limitation on everything that somebody who fully buys into the projections sees."Brett: Today we are going to talk about projections, so Joe, you have talked about projections a lot in our courses, this idea that from our past experience we create these beliefs that we carry into the present. This shapes our reality in the moment, and I would like to get into that a little bit further today. Joe, what are projections?Joe: It is such a complicated subject because the word “projection” is used for many things. There is the psychological projection, which somewhat stems from Young's work and some other psychologists. That is this idea that the parts of ourselves that we cannot own, the parts of ourselves that are either good or bad, but that we cannot have full ownership over. We project onto other people. This is something that happens when you are deeply triggered. An easy way to look at this just briefly is you look at most politicians, and if you see them really just accusing somebody else of something, you can see a way in which that is true about what they are doing as well. If you are dealing with somebody and they are like they are so arrogant, that comment in itself is arrogance. It is as if you can presume to know what their reality is. That's projecting the unknown parts of ourselves, and it can be positive things too, like oh my gosh, they are so smart. They understand everything, and I don't. That can also be unowned parts of ourselves, positive unowned parts of ourselves that we then project on to other people. There is that. That is what we will call psychological projection Then, there is this projection onto the world, and that's more about how we lived our first eight or nine years of life when we are theta brain waves and where we are basically learning what life is. We might learn that love is associated with shame or money is associated with lack. Authority is associated with anger. Then we go and recreate those projections in our life because we are like that's what we learned it is, and so you go into the world. You are in your 20s, 30s, your 40s, and you find out that everybody who you choose to have a romantic relationship with has a tendency to shame you, or you see money as something there is not enough of and then you are not able to have the money that you want or need. There is that kind of projection onto the world. Then there is the projection of self, and the projection of self, which is closely related to the next projection, but I want to make a distinction between the two, the projection of self is that we don't really see the world. We see ourselves, or we don't really see reality. We see ourselves in reality. That would be like if somebody is a thief, they see the world as a world of thieves. If somebody has a deep relationship of self-love, then they see the world as love. Even when they see the atrocities of the world, they see it as people trying to love themselves, and they are not capable. The way that we see ourselves and relate to ourselves then is how we interpret the world. That's another level of projection, the projection of self. The final projection that I see is the projection of I, which I am making a distinction here though there is not a real one, but I think it is useful to make the distinction. That's just the idea that there is a you that is separate. We have this identity. The way humans work is we have a sense of identity, and we don't know if other animals have that sense of identity. But we have a sense of identity. At the very core of that sense of identity is the idea that there is an I that exists as separate, and a tremendous amount of spiritual modalities. Ramana Maharashi is the most known example where a lot of the work is really to see the self not as something to be protected, not as the body, not as an emotional state, not as something that has existed for 45 years or whatever it is, but as illusionary in nature or to see the self as the awareness of all of those things. That's the last way that I think about projection. It is those four ways I think about projection. Brett: You have got psychological projection where you are projecting onto essentially someone else's psychology making assumptions about their intent or their experience. Joe: In that case, it is disowned parts of yourself, parts of yourself that you don't want to fully accept about yourself. Brett: These can be parts that you judge about yourself, but also parts that you judge about yourself not having. Joe: Correct. Brett: Like in the case of admiration towards somebody. Joe: Specifically, they can be things that you don't actually see in yourself. It is so disowned that you cannot even see it in yourself. If you see somebody as super brilliant, there is no person I have met that doesn't have their own level of brilliance in some capacity. If you see that, admire that, put that up on a pedestal, it is a strong indicator that you cannot see it in yourself. Similarly, if you are like that person is a thief, and you cannot see that you also have in that in you and in your actions, then that's the psychological projection. Brett: That's the psychological projection, and then you have got the projection onto the world, which is sort of your baked in assumptions about how the world works from your early childhood experience. Joe: Yes, right. Brett: You have got this projection of self. This isn't a projection onto yourself, but it is a projection of yourself onto the world, seeing the world the way you are internally organized. Joe: Correct. That's right. I use the example of the saying in love, but if you think that it is really important to be dressed and put together, then you are likely to think it is important for other people to be dressed and put together. That's the simple version of it. What's good or bad for you is good or bad for the world. The way that you see yourself and relate to yourself is the way that you relate to the world. Brett: If it is weak for you to cry, then it is weak for others to cry. Joe: Correct, great example. Brett: Then the last one is the projection of I, which is you are distinguishing from the projection of self as this one is more of a meta projection that you are a separate self from the world. Joe: That you have an identity. Brett: There is some boundary that is you. Joe: If you think about that, if I cut you in half. If you think you are your body and I cut you in half, which half is you?Brett: Or a [unclear] experiment where they cut the corpus callosum and people had basically two very separate identities, each controlling half of the body and at odds with each other. Joe: Exactly, or people think I am emotional. You were emotional, but what happens if that emotion just stops? Are you still emotional? Is it essentially you? What is essentially you is the question? Ramana Maharashi uses language like who am I. The deconstruction work of almost all spiritual traditions are getting to the basic underlying question of what you are essentially. What is that you are that you have always been? From the moment of birth to the moment of death, what is the unchangeable, immutable part of yourself?Brett: Which I suppose is just a process of seeing through projections of the self, which changes our experience of the world as we do that. So as you mention emotions, how do emotions play into projections? How do they interact? Joe: When we have big emotions, we learn differently. Part of how people brainwash folks is that they create big emotional experiences for them, and then that's what allows them to change habits. When we have big emotional experiences, it allows us to learn. If you want to redefine somebody's idea of themselves or idea of the world, basic training is an example of this. You create these big emotional experiences, and then they have a different sense of themselves at the end of it. Emotions are useful in that way. They are evolved to do that. If I get bit by a snake, and I have this big emotional experience and a big physical experience, I am less likely to be bitten by that snake in the future. What this does is it makes traumatic experiences really key definers of who we are. If we have had long-term abuse or we had a car accident or if we have been in a war, it starts to define us because it upends our learnings from those early days or maybe it even happens in those early days of life. They are really important that way. I think the nuance that people often don't quite get is that oftentimes people recognize when they have big emotions that they are out of control themselves. You could say they are acting in trauma, or you can say they recognize that when that big emotion takes control, they do stuff they don't want to do. The natural movement when they see that correlation is they assume causation, and in that assumption of causation, they say I need to manage my emotions so that I don't have big emotions, or I need to be in control of my emotions. What that path ultimately leads to is a level of disassociation. The emotions are still there. They are still moving us, but we disassociate from them. They become harder and harder to recognize. The other way to think of it is to assume correlation. These things are together, and my job isn't to control them or suppress them or push them down. It is to learn how to surf them and to love them and to accept them deeply and to find the joy in them or to not resist them. If we take that step, then what happens is the emotional currents of our life become vitalizing. We fall in love with them. There still isn't control, meaning that we don't find ourselves succumbed to these big emotional experiences because we start to see that that is just another level of resistance. But we don't disassociate from them, and we don't stop to see or recognize the massive impact that these emotional currents are having even if we have pushed them so far down that we don't feel them anymore. If we don't dissociate, we start to recognize that these big emotional currents in our lives are more like road signs rather than causation. Brett: It almost sounds like you are describing sort of chicken or egg thing with projections or emotions where the emotions we have in our early youth. Children are very emotional, and that correlates highly with their learning rate and how quickly they soak up information like a sponge. They create these projections, and then we carry these projections into our lives and tend to see the world as it was when we were kids, which will then tend to bring us back into those emotions we had when we were kids. If we let ourselves feel those emotions and process them, then being in this emotional state can allow us to shift our projections. Joe: That's exactly it. I would say it is not that we only see the world. We create the world. When we are living through a projection, it is not just that we see the evidence that it is true. But you also attract the same experiences. You also manipulate events to create the same experience. On an emotional level, what's happening is that emotion that wasn't allowed to be felt all the way through, that wasn't allowed to move all the way through you is looking to recreate circumstances so it can move all the way through you, and then the circumstances stop getting recreated. That's how it works on an emotional level. Brett: Then feeling the emotion completely allows the projection to shift into maybe some generalized form because it seems like a projection is a limiting perception on the world. Joe: Yeah, and that doesn't mean they are bad or good. They are just useful or more useful or less useful, meaning I project onto snakes that they are deadly. Now obviously all snakes aren't deadly, and I might find a snake and think it is deadly and jump away, but it is not deadly. The question is what the projections are that are useful, that create peace and joy, productivity, love in our lives, purpose, whatever it is that one thinks they are after. What are the projections that create the things that we are not after? When you are doing the deep work, the stuff that was programmed in the early days, like if you were lucky enough to have parents that just deeply loved you and were attuned to your emotional experience and wanted you to feel safe and protected and weren't emotionally trying to cajole you into certain emotions and not other emotions. Then, it is really easy for you to reproduce that kind of love in your life. But if you didn't get that, it is more challenging. It is those early projections because we have a rational conscious mind, we can say that is the world I want to live in. Do I want to live in a world where love is conditional, or love is shame or love is control? Do I want to live in a world where love can be different?We have the choice, and then the work is not just feeling the emotions but falling in love with them on an emotional level. Intellectually, to be able to just see them, to just identify them can be incredibly freeing, and then to work with them and say wow, I am in a projection. What if I take a contrary action? Intellectually, that is that way to work on them. Brett: It also sounds like falling in love with the projections is part of this path, too. I've definitely seen and experienced in the process of discovering that projections exist and that everybody is doing them, there can be a process of I've identified a projection. That's bad. Projections are bad, which is just another way of disowning yourself. The only way you can navigate a chaotic world is to create some kind of sense-making system of projections. Joe: I have never thought about it as falling in love with projections, but it is beautifully said. Fighting against your projections is only a way that increases their stability. Brett: I imagine going birdwatching, but you don't like birds. How many of them are you going to find? If you love finding a projection, it is like wow, I am projecting right now. That might be useful. Also, it might be useful to do it a little bit differently or experiment with it a little bit. Joe: That's great. When you say how many birds you will find, it is like proof. For instance, if you talk to somebody and you say tell me about a trauma that you had, and let's say their trauma was that when I was a kid, I had a dad who would always yell at me. The lesson that I learned was that I had to be quiet to not get yelled at. Let's just say. Let's keep it simple. That's the data they picked up. The data that they didn't pick up was the ways that they still asserted themselves even by not speaking up. They didn't learn that wow, I can survive a tyrant in my home, not that I have to, but I can. The information that they didn't pick up was that mom was actually loving me the whole time, or I didn't pick up the information that dad did love me from time to time. There was this love that was available. What's interesting is our brain is adapted to pay more attention to the negative things, and so oftentimes one of the ways we recreate these things is to only see the evidence that supports the pattern, the projection. Brett: What is the practice then of becoming more aware of these projections and reengineering them? Joe: I mean it is different for the different levels of projection. In the psychological projection, everywhere you are triggered, you are triggering an unknown part of yourself. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't be triggered. It doesn't mean that you are not right. It just means that you are also projecting it on to somebody else. Every time that you are triggered is a great example of how you are projecting a disowned part of yourself or anyway in which you idolize somebody, you are projecting a disowned part of yourself. That's a good way to work on the psychological projection. The projection on the world is just a really easy thing to do is just list out 10 things that are important to you, like money, love, authority, decision making, whatever they are. Then, ask yourself what the essential learning was you had from your childhood about money and love and authority, and notice how you are recreating those things and notice how you are manipulating the world into it. I'll give you an example in a second here. How you are attracting it and notice how you are proving it. An example of this is just like almost everybody at some point in their lives, you keep on dating the same person with different names. I used to attract or create this world in which I was going to be emotionally abandoned. One of the things that I did was I attracted people who were more likely to emotionally abandon me. I was attracted to them. The other thing I did was I manipulated the world to do that, so when I felt unheard, instead of saying ouch, I feel unheard and I would really like to be heard, I would get angry. You are not hearing me. Because I was in my trauma, and then that of course would push them away even further. Then I would look around the world and I would say that person emotionally abandoned me, and that person emotionally abandoned me, but I wasn't noticing all the people who weren't or who really wanted not to, and I wasn't allowing it. I was abandoning them. That's the way to look at it as far as that level of projection. Then on the projection of I, I mean the easiest thing to do is say what I am, and really sit in the question rather than to look for an answer. But there are other things you can do as well, which is just notice the part of yourself that has always been there or put your attention on to a tension. There are lots of things that help you see through the false sense of identity, the kernel of that identity being that you exist as a separate thing or as a non-separate thing even. The kernel of the identity is that I exist. Brett: Another area that I have heard this concept, kind of a metaphor, is something called object fixation or target fixation. If you are flying a parachute and you want to land in a field, but there is a tree in the field, if you look at the tree, you are probably going to hit the tree. Driving a motorcycle around a corner, if you look into the ditch, you are going to go into the ditch. Joe: That's a beautiful metaphor. I really like that metaphor. Brett: There have been lots of times in my life when I have seen some kind of disaster coming in business or in a relationship. I am like not wanting it, but I am scared of it, which makes me think of it more, which makes me see and look for the evidence of it more and not see the other paths available to me, and then the thing happens. I am then surprised for some reason. Joe: Right now, I got in touch with an old friend, and he is in a state of believing that he is bad and incapable. You can watch this reality that he is living in create itself. He needs to do something at his job, and he doesn't want to feel the anger of his boss, so he doesn't need to do the thing that he needs to do to make sure that job is done right because he is trying to avoid the anger. Then, by not doing the thing he needs to do, he has got more evidence that he is bad and incapable because he is trying to avoid the feeling of being bad and incapable by being yelled at by his boss. That's how the whole thing moves. It is like as we see ourselves as a certain way, subconsciously or consciously, we are recreating that over and over and over again. Brett: So that's how that ties into this projection of I being the base level projection of all of these really. Because the more you see yourself as any certain thing defined by any particular characteristics or identity, then that's going to set the context for the projections you are going to have in your relationships, in the world and upon yourself. Joe: That's right. Unfortunately, even if you see through the I, it doesn't really resolve the emotional stuff. You can have a lot of cognitive freedom. You can have a lot of intellectual freedom when you see through the personal I, when you have that kind of awakening, but it doesn't change the emotional experience of stuff. In fact, it can make the emotional experience harder to access because it starts operating at a more disassociated way or in a lower-level way harder to recognize way. The freedom of the intellect is great, but it is far more productive to meet it with the emotional freedom as well, with the loving of all of the emotional experiences that are happening. Brett: That's really interesting to me. I am very intellectual, heavily weighted on the intellectual, personally, and so the more I start to recognize some of my own projections, they can easily just become a way to be not good enough. I am still living in this. I don't know how to get out of this particular projection, but I see it. I am frustrated by it now. There is this layer of frustration as an emotion to feel on top of whatever emotion is driving that projection to begin with. Joe: That's one way it happens. Another way it happens is the emotional scenery becomes more and more in the background, but it is still driving you. I know we have talked about this. We cannot make decisions intellectually. All of our decision making is emotional. If you remove the emotional center of a brain, then a person ceases to make decisions even though their intellect, their IQ is still operating at the same level. The emotions are still moving us, but they have become so far in the background. There is this kind of way of saying nothing is real, nothing is true, there is no I, and yet all of these emotional decisions are still happening. Still there is this level of drama and chaos in life even if you go and move to a monastery. It is still there. Brett: What then is the way to take the information from this episode and understanding this existence of projection become more aware of them and use that as breadcrumbs into the emotional experience underlying them? Joe: On the intellectual level, I think the underlying problem that people experience when they start to recognize projections is they will be confronted with a reality that everything is a projection. There is nothing that we see or do that isn't a projection. If you want a direct experience of this, just look at a tree. It is better if you look at like a living thing and see it as a tree. This is a tree. I see it as a tree. Then, see it not as a tree. See it as this is just this thing that's in front of me, no label, no projection, no need to identify, classify, and just be in the presence of the tree. When people talk about deep presence, this is what they are talking about is to have a moment or two without the projection operating at full speed. Not that it is not always operating, not that it is not accessible to us at any time, but to really just be in what is in this moment without any of the labels and stuff. You can get that really direct sense of being more in projection and less in projection. The issue that arises, like I was at least trying to say, was that at some point you see the whole world as a projection, the whole thing. There is no thought you can fully trust. There is no emotional experience you can fully trust. There is no body sensation you can fully trust. It doesn't mean you can't trust, but it is literally like the world becomes a kaleidoscope. That's some scary shit. Because if you interpret it as I am in control, oh my God, it is a kaleidoscope, I don't know what to do, I am out of control, it can be very, very scary. It can be something you really, really want to avoid. The idea of projection itself is something that often people will accept and embrace very slowly because they have to confront this thing. If they do it really quickly, it is just really important. If you really can all of a sudden just see this whole world is a projection, it is really important to see that essentially that's not going to stop you from operating at any level at all. It just is what is, and there is this huge freedom to it. Oh wow, I don't have to take anything seriously, and yet I can still enjoy myself and yet I can still have purpose and yet I can still be productive. But I can take everything with this light-hearted joy that comes about. So that's the intellectual issue is that at some point you come across this idea that everything is a projection, and you are like crap. There is this fear. As far as the emotional part goes, it is kind of different for people who haven't had the kind of identity of self switched to awareness or to the infinite and those who have had that switch happen. If the switch hasn't happened, then leaning into your emotional states, loving your emotional states, inviting your emotional states, seeing the emotional states when they are out of control is just another form of resistance. Allowing them to move through your body, looking forward to them, that's the work. That's the really powerful work. If it is afterwards, that's the same work, but you have another step on top of it, a step for the before, which is to dig them out. It is to really deeply go in and look for the most nuanced little emotional shift and plumb the depths of that and almost magnify it. One of the people who taught me about this stuff, he used to work with monks. I think he worked with Trappist monks and Tibetan monks, all sorts of monks. He said when I do the work with them, it is like dragging them back into hell because they have to go back into the emotional experience they had pushed so far into the background. When that is happening, the thing is that you see people who have that peace but without the joy, when they have calmness, but they don't have the exuberance of life, like if they don't laugh easily, that's a pretty good indicator that the identity has shifted but the emotional experience has been suppressed. Brett: A lot of this conversation is reminding me of this psychological test that can be conducted. You think of an object, and then you have 10 minutes to write down how many uses for that object you can think of. Let's say for a brick. Your projection would be this is a brick. It is used for masonry, and you could build a wall with it. But the more you start to see the brick just as an object, as just something that it is not a brick, then you could start to see other purposes for it, like counterweight for an elevator or you could break into sand and make play doh out of it, or a million other uses. I think the same thing can be true for an emotion that a projection might come from. I am angry. That means somebody else has wronged me, and it is their fault. That's one projection of this emotion, but if I just go into the essence of the emotion and feel that, then what else might that mean for me. What other richness might there be in that experience?Joe: That's cool. First of all, never heard it explained that, and I am really digging that. Second of all, I thought you were talking about something different, which it also applies to. Let's start with the emotional experience. That anger could be an indication that I haven't drawn the boundary I need to draw. That anger could be an indication that I am not taking care of myself. That anger could be an indication that somebody has wronged me. You are right. All of that is levels of projection. The thing I thought you were talking about, which also seems like a really cool idea to me, which is the brick could be this, the brick could that, it is the same with projections. Oftentimes something that happens when people start seeing through their projections, they have a lot more opportunity in front of them. They see a lot more options. The array of possibilities opens up to them, and so a lot of times people think somebody who really sees through projections is really smart because they come up with really cool, unique, innovative ideas, or they act in a way that is seemingly not normal but yet it works. It is not so much really that they are smart or not smart. It is that they don't see the same level of limitation on everything that somebody who fully buys into the projections sees. Brett: Right, that is something that I meant by that as well. I went the emotion route, but really I think this applies everywhere. This is really kind of the core of how VIEW can change our lives because particularly impartiality and wonder but also vulnerability for other people to have this experience with you with getting more information and empathy, being curious about other people's experience and being with them in it. These characteristics or these traits lead us to have a more granular awareness of reality beyond the initial assumptions we might have had even though those initial assumptions still exist, and they still can guide our behavior and allow us to act quickly and effectively. The more we can become aware of them and the more we can see them for what they are, as projections, then the more granular our awareness of the world around us can be and the more we can start to see other possible interpretations of the world than the ones that we have started with. Joe: Again, that is the third time on this podcast. I have seen it that way, and it is such a beautiful articulation of it. It is such a great story to build around it because that's absolutely how it works when you look at it that way. Brett: Of course, that's also just a projection. Joe: Of course, that's also just a projection. That's the thing. That's another thing that's really cool about this work is I know you have seen this in my work, but I will go and pontificate on something because that is what I am asked to do. Then, they will say you are totally wrong about that. I will be like yeap, that's true. I can absolutely see the world in which everything I am saying is incorrect because I can see that there is some correctness in every point of view and some fallacy in every point of view. The fear for me when I was entering into that way of looking at the world was oh shit, I will never be able to act. How will I act if I don't know what's right and what's wrong? How will I be able to act if I know that everything is and isn't true and act the same way that you would if you were an animal or a dragonfly? Actions still exist, and you are still processing information. You are still having emotions, but what happens is you start choosing the projection that serves you best, the projection that allows for more freedom, that allows for more love, that allows for more joy. You start choosing it, but you can't stop seeing through it. You just realize at some point if all of it is true and not true, then I actually just get to be who I am, who I want to be. Brett: I think the more that you accept all of your projects rather than labeling some of them as good or some of them as bad, then the more all of them can kind of be present in each moment and your entire past experience can sort of average out to one statistically most likely scenario, one specific next step from each scenario that is likely to have the better outcome, but nothing is guaranteed. Joe: Yeah, and you don't really give a shit if it is guaranteed or not because whatever shows up in your field, it is not resisted and it is not labeled. If I was to choose, do I want to go to prison and love myself or do I want to stay out in the free world and hate myself? Consequences become less important than the actual freedom to see yourself in the world in a way that is enlivening, that is joyful. Brett: That seems like a great stopping point for this episode. Do you have any integration questions for us, Joe?Joe: One question that arises is if you write down four of the things that trigger you most in the world, in what ways are you judging or disowning that part of yourself. In what ways are you judging or disowning that part of yourself? Second question is, if you are looking deeply at who you admire or who you put on a pedestal, what are the parts of them that you admire and how do you not own that aspect of yourself? The last question is, what's looking out behind your eyes? Brett: That's a good one. Joe: I encourage you not to answer that question, just be in it. Brett: Wonderful. Thank you, Joe. Joe: Thank you, Brett. Brett: Thanks for listening to the Life in VIEW podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW or to take a course, visit view.life. References: Ramana Maharshi, www.sriramanamaharshi.org

Decluttering Tips For Hoarders with Tracy McCubbin

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 29, 2021 66:42

Decluttering Tips For Hoarders with Tracy McCubbin was my guest recently on my podcast, "The Joe Costello Show". She is a decluttering expert and she shared how she got started, what her business does and some tidbits that can really help you get started. Tracy's company has so many service to help people declutter their home, office, home office, etc. She also has other services such as closet audits, garage organization, moving services, senior downsizing, estate decluttering. Please go to https://dclutterfly.com/ and check out how she might be able to help. Tracy has also written a book called "Making Space, Clutter Free: The Last Book on Decluttering You'll Ever Need" which you can buy at Amazon or support this cool book website called BookShop.org. Here's the link to the book: Making Space, Clutter Free: The Last Book on Decluttering You'll Ever Need Also check out OneKidOneWorld which Tracy plays an important role in as the Co-Executive Director Thanks for listening! Joe Tracy McCubbin CEO & Owner of dClutterfly Website: https://dClutterfly.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dclutterfly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tracy_mccubbin Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thisistracymccubbin Private FB Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2036212949941199 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracy-mccubbin-566829b2/ One Kid One World: https://www.onekidoneworld.org/ Email: info@dClutterfly.com 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: Tracy, welcome. I'm glad to have you on the podcast. I've been waiting to have you because clutter is is just the worst thing in the world. So I'm excited to talk to you. So welcome to the show. Tracy: Thanks, Joe. I'm super excited to be here, and it's always interesting to meet people sort of who have different expertise and different focuses like everybody have in common everybody. Joe: Yup, Tracy: So Joe: Yup. Tracy: It it's just I love talking to different people about kind of how they can manage their clutter, get ahead of their clutter and live their best life. Joe: Well, I'm excited and I, I follow a pretty strict format in the sense that I really like to know the person and I think my audience likes to know the person. And I think that's how they connect with you. I just don't want the end of this podcast to come and say other this really great woman that was on who understands how to do clutter. I want to know how you got into this and more about you. So can you kind of give us the background leading up to when you started to clarify? Tracy: Yeah, it's a very interesting subject, I like to say that I'm one of those people who all I had a bunch of jobs that turned out to not be my passion, but everything I did along the way brought me here. So I was a personal assistant for a very long time to two different people. I was a bookkeeper for small businesses. I was an administrative assistant to lawyers. I had all these various I took care of my grandmother, helped her manage her finances. So I had all these various kind of office centric jobs. And then when I was working for one of the people I was a personal assistant for, he was a television director. So when he had downtime, friends of his or he for, say, the friends of his oh, my assistant, she can handle anything. So I started helping other people. Somebody's grandmother had passed away and they need to clean up the house. They had a big accounting mess and all of a sudden people started to tell other people and I would get phone calls. And at first I wasn't charging. And then I was charging a little bit. And a friend of mine said, I think you have a business. And I was like, no, I'm just helping people. This is. And he's like, no, that's what a business is. And so I I'm like, all right, let me just see. And I made a little website and I put the word out. And that's fourteen years later at eight employees later and thousands of jobs and everything I did in the past, from acting in commercials to doing bookkeeping to taking care of my grandmother, it all led me to creating this business. And then the big piece of the puzzle, which I didn't even realize when I first started the business and I had to have a client of mine point out I'm the child of a hoarder. Tracy: So my dad is an extreme hoarder. And I have lived my whole life watching him struggle with his relationship to his stuff. So very acutely aware of our relationship to stuff is emotional and but I'm not kidding. It was like ten years into my business when this client of mine, who is a psychiatrist was like, that's so interesting. Have you ever thought of the connection? I was like, what? No, what do you mean? And then you're like, oh. So watching what my father went through and still continues to go through gave me so much empathy to people's struggle and how for so many people there's all this shame around it. I'm messy and I'm disorganized. I'm a bad housekeeper. And my goal and what I realized through clients of my dad is that that's not the case, that there is this emotional attachment. And if you're not aware of that emotional attachment, you're going to keep repeating the same mistake. So it's getting to the root of why you're hanging on to all the stuff and changing your relationship so you can have the home you want to live. So I'm a I'm late to this business. I opened this business in my forties, so I'm also a really good poster child for like if you have something you want to do, don't get stuck in the age. Don't think like I and get this done. My success is all coming my fifty. So I'm um like if you have a passion follow. It doesn't matter where you are in your life. Joe: Yes, and that's what's great, because my audience, at least what I think is my audience is really entrepreneurs like that's most of what I like, because that's where I come from. My heart is in that. So I like that. You said all of what you just said. I encourage people out there that have an idea that having made the commitment to go forward with it. So that was awesome. And I read the part about I didn't know what family, what person it was in your family, but I read that you had a family member who was a hoarder. So I'm glad you brought that up. But I wanted to know, like, what your trajectory was when you started. Like, did you what Tracy: Oh, Joe: Did you want Tracy: This is Joe: To do? Like. Tracy: Oh, this is this is even better if you if this is your conversation, I call myself an accidental entrepreneur, right. That I, I just I had no idea what I was doing. I was like, oh, let me just start a business. That'll be fine. Oh, let me just charge X an hour. Like I just made up some number which was clearly too low. And then I think about a year into my business, I read a book called The MF. That Joe: Yeah, Tracy: Right. Am Joe: Oh, Tracy: I getting Joe: Yeah, Tracy: The name of that. Joe: Yeah, Tracy: Yeah. Joe: It's a great Tracy: And Joe: Book. Tracy: I and I did the math and I was like, wow, I'm working for four dollars an hour. When I when I realized how much time I was putting in and what I was charging and another like I like when I say I had no business, I'd always work for other people, I'd always put things together. But I didn't I didn't go in with this. I didn't have a business plan. And I learned so much along the way. And every misstep was a giant step forward. And the biggest change for me, too, was when somebody said to me, you know, you're not charging for your time, you're charging for your expertise. Joe: Mm hmm. Tracy: And that just switched anything because I had a lifetime of dealing with someone and their staffs. And that just turned the light bulb on like, oh, right. It doesn't matter that this business has only been open for a year. I have 40 some years of doing this. And when I thought that and then I started to read more and realize and I hired a business coach and I started to really shift things around, that's when the business took off. That's when I was like, oh, stepped into the role of being an entrepreneur. And then I started to hire employees. And then I became a boss. Right. Which is a whole other thing. Joe: Yes, Tracy: And how Joe: It Tracy: Do Joe: Is. Tracy: You take care? How do you take care of your employees and how do you serve your clients and how do you not work twenty four hours a day. And so I love being an entrepreneur, but it was it wasn't an easy journey. It's not like, oh, just open your own business. I would do it no other way. And Joe: Mm Tracy: I Joe: Hmm. Tracy: Had to stay really clear about because I fall a bit into the imposter syndrome, like who am I to open a business and who am I to do this? And if they want to know you've worked for work since I was 13. I've had job like I know how to do it. So I had to take all my past experiences and filter them in and realize that even though the path didn't look like a linear line, I didn't get an MBA, I didn't get venture capital. I didn't I have just as much experience, maybe more. So I always tell people, you know, in some ways you're not reinventing the wheel. A lot of people have done this. So gather information, listen to podcasts, read books. I'm a business coach if you need it. Like you can do it. If you have a great idea that know what it's done, you follow it through, follow it through. So Joe: So. Tracy: I feel I feel really I love it. I love running my own business. I love it. It's hard. Joe: Yes, Tracy: It's Joe: It is, Tracy: Hard, Joe: Yeah. Tracy: You know. And some days I really I, I, I just got a text from a client. We helped them with this fundraiser that they were doing and it was a very emotional cause. And my team went and we kind of helped them organize all their stuff for it. And it was just a very grateful text. And when I get those texts, it's like, oh yeah, this is why we do this. This Joe: Yeah. Tracy: Is why we do this. So, yeah, I have a very funny like I it was not a straight line, but all roads have led me here. Joe: So I'm going to just that's where you have to bear with me for a moment, because I want to know more about Tracy, so I want to Tracy: Ok. Joe: Know, like, where you and the kid like like what Tracy: Yeah, Joe: Did you do? Like Tracy: That's Joe: Like Tracy: The Joe: So Tracy: Idea. Joe: I want you to go back a little further. So, Tracy: Ok, Joe: Like, Tracy: Yes, Joe: Go back Tracy: Absolutely. Joe: As far as you want. But I just want to know I want I think it's important because where I am today, everything. And you are saying all the right things for all of the listeners that will listen to this is that everything that you've done in the past just adds to who you've become now? Right. And it'll continue that way. And so many people lose sight of that. And at one point I did I was like, oh, I wasted so much time. And then I look back and I go, wait, that helped. And that helped. And that helped. And I learned a lesson there. And so what did you like? What was what did you want to do? Tracy: Yeah, you know, it's funny, I I was a neat child, I wasn't crazy, crazy, crazy organized, but I had a pretty between my dad being a hoarder and my parents getting divorced. I had a pretty California in the 70s. Like I had a kind of chaotic childhood. There was everywhere. Parenting was being reinvented. School was being we lived in a van for a year, traveled through Joe: If. Tracy: Europe. So I definitely like to make order out of chaos. I definitely like to know, OK, this is my space and I can live in it this way. And I also grew up very close to both of my grandmothers and my grandfather, but they came from the Midwest and Fresno and we're farm farmers. They came from and one of my grandmothers was an immigrant from Scotland and they all lived through the Depression. So my generational experience, the sort of generational trauma of living through the Depression, living through World War Two, you saved every yogurt container. You saved Joe: Mm hmm. Tracy: Every rubberband, learning how my ground both my grandmothers were. You don't put it down, you put it away and you fix. And I learned how to sew and I learned how to change it. I can change the oil in my car and I can change a tire. And I had all these really practical things. And also for me, I think one of the big lessons that really served me in opening my own business when I started working, I started babysitting when I was 12, 13, and I started making my own money and I was like, oh, I can buy that blue, shiny satin hang tan jacket that I really want. No one can tell me, like I learned, especially as a young woman, that money equated freedom. Right. That this money that I made also could make mistakes with it, rack up some credit card debt, like I could do that. But if I work and money comes and I have power over this and my grandmother and I, we bought some stocks and she kind of helped me figure that out. And so it was a really that was one of those life lessons that they don't teach you in school, that this is making my own money. I want to take a trip, then I can do it. And that was and I'm a worker bee hardwired that way. I like to work. So I think it was I think a lot of my childhood was trying to make order out of chaos and having control and having power, you know, and I was very blessed. Like I got to I went to UC Santa Barbara. I went to a great college. I had a lot of opportunities. My family was very pro education. So I traveled the world. So again, it's all these things that at the time like, I don't know, I'm going to live in Italy for a year to study art. The smartest thing. Yeah, it turns out it was Joe: Oh, that's awesome. Tracy: You Joe: When Tracy: Know, Joe: Was Tracy: Turns Joe: That? Tracy: Out I did that my junior year of college, Joe: Wow, Tracy: So. Joe: That was that's awesome. And Tracy: Yeah. Joe: Was there Tracy: So. Joe: Were you was there something that you were wanting to become like? Did you aspire to be or Tracy: You know, Joe: Was? Tracy: Yeah, it was funny, I never I for a while, I thought I wanted to be an actress, and so I took acting classes and I did that. I had to moderate, moderate success, but I didn't like the business side of it. And then I was so for me, it was a lot of figuring out what I didn't want to do. Joe: Uh huh. Tracy: Like I was like, oh, you know, and because I'm a hard worker and I'm industrious, kind of whatever job I had before, like, we'll promote you to manager, we'll make it up. And it was a very much a series of like, oh, I don't want to do this. I don't want to spend the day doing this. And when this business started, it was the first thing that I was like, I want to do this every day, like the rhythm of it, the helping the clients, the feeling of satisfaction when it was done. It was the first I mean, I liked other things that I did, but Joe: Mm Tracy: It Joe: Hmm. Tracy: Wasn't I was like, oh, I want to do this all day, every day. Like, I you know, technically the joke is I would do it for free. Well, there was like a year I did do it for free. It's literally like that is a brutal I'll tell anybody, the entrepreneurs, people starting a business, track your hours, track what you're getting paid, do that math because it'll gut punch you and it'll make you rethink everything. Like Joe: Goup. Tracy: When you realize, oh, I'm working for four dollars an hour. No, no, no, no, no. That's an important lesson for everybody and it makes you really rethink things. So it really wasn't until this until this business started that I realized my purpose. Joe: Right, and if I remember reading correctly, it came out of you being this service assistant to this, right? And then. Tracy: Director Yahya. Joe: Yeah, and then everybody you were helping, everybody saw all the stuff you were doing and it just went from there and then you realized. Tracy: And I'd always been, you know, it always been of service and my grandmother was there, like my grandmother was the lady at the church who kind of did everybody's books and she was a secretary at the church. And we were forever if somebody was sick, I spent a lot of time with her, we would drive over to somebody's house and we'd take them to the post office. So for me, helping people in sort of an admin sense was just a being of service. That's just what we did. We were a nice person. You help your friends. So I never thought about monetizing it. I never thought that it was a service that people desperately needed desperately. I was like, Joe: Right. Tracy: Well, of course, you know how to move yourself. You just pack your boxes. Now, people don't know how to do that. So when I realized that there were so many people that either didn't have the time or the inclination and there was a way to offer the service, get paid, help them know that was the perfect marriage, that was like, oh, this is a something that's desperately needed. And I feel like for kind of where we are in the world, it's interesting. But I think as we get further away from making things ourselves, knowing how to sew, knowing how to cook, that there are more and more people that I mean, they can do things for themselves. They just it's I Joe: I know. Tracy: You know, it's just it's just really interesting. I'm a little worried and I have young nieces and nephews, and so I'm very worried about what they can do. And so I it's just it's interesting that this has become very desperately needed service. Joe: Yeah, OK, so the name of the business is dclutterfly, right, Tracy: Correct, yep, Joe: That Tracy: DClut Joe: It's Tracy: ter Joe: A Tracy: fly. Joe: Mouthful, the cutter Tracy: Oh, trust Joe: Fly. Tracy: Me. Oh, and trust me, here's another thing I'll say to aspiring entrepreneurs. When you name your business, say it out loud all day. So it would be easy to come off the time and then try and spell the website, because that's something else I didn't think about. So when I give people the email, they there's D.. C. There's no Joe: Yeah. Tracy: Easy people leave it up. So do a little bit of market research. Go. Joe: Yeah, Tracy: Can Joe: That Tracy: I, can Joe: It Tracy: I say this. Yeah. Joe: It's so funny, it's all those Tracy: Yeah. Joe: Little things you learn as you're doing it, you print your business cards and people, and especially you get older clients that want the help with some of these services that you have. And the prince too small and you're just like, oh, my God. Tracy: I went I went through that I rebranded the company about two, three years ago and the designers did a beautiful job and I was like, the font is too small and they're like white. And I'm like, oh, I'm like they're like we have like less tags, bigger font. Joe: Yes. Tracy: Like the bulk of my clients are over 50, like make it big. Joe: Right, right. That's awesome. Tracy: I, I just about a year ago I bought my first about a truck, a 17 foot truck because we're so busy and I got it wrapped and it's like my traveling billboard and I was like no bigger, bigger, Joe: Mm Tracy: Bigger Joe: Hmm. Tracy: Phone, no bigger. And the guy that the drug had the rapping place, like, are you sure? I'm like, bigger, bigger, Joe: That's Tracy: Bigger. Joe: Awesome. That's perfect. OK, so your your I know you have clients all over, but you're you're based out of California. Tracy: Yeah, and based in Los Angeles pre pandemic, we were I was in New York a lot traveling a lot post pandemic were starting to travel again. Joe: Mm hmm. Tracy: I'll go anywhere. But right now it's been the book is Los Angeles to New York. Joe: Ok, perfect. So I want to go through the services quick, because I want everyone Tracy: Yeah. Joe: To sort of understand. And so I want to start with the home, the home de cluttering and it also on on the website, his office as well. And that's that's an important piece for me. And I think the audience, because if there are entrepreneurs out there, like my desk was clean a couple of weeks ago and now I'm in the middle of doing a bunch of videos and I have research materials and now it's starting to become something that I can't look at. So. So Tracy: Yep. Joe: Let's start with that. The home deck fluttering, plus the office stuff. And and just a brief explanation of each so that at least we can get an idea Tracy: Yes, Joe: Of what that means. Tracy: That's great. Go home and office cluttering is if your space that you live in or work in is unmanageable. I always tell people the really good litmus test is if you can't tidy up a room and make it presentable where you have somebody else walk in in 20 minutes or less, you have too much stuff. So that services we come in, we help people sort through it. We help people figure out what they need to keep, what they need to let go of, and then creating systems for where it goes. So in an office, where do you keep your printer? Is it near the printer where you keep your paper? How much paper do you need to print out? Can we move you to digital? And if we move you to digital, how do you organize it? How do you find that is a really important thing in offices, in the whole home, but really in your offices, where do you put the things you need to keep so that you can access them when you need them, that you can go and buy? And don't tell me. I know there's people out there that are saying I know where everything is in my office. There's giant piles on their desk. I'm like, that doesn't count. You Joe: Right. Tracy: Can't point to a giant pile and say, oh, I know what's in there. First of all, you don't I'm talking about you won't be able to find it like, Joe: Right. Tracy: You know, creating filing systems or digital filing systems. And it's and again, the really underlying message is this isn't about creating a home that you can put on Instagram or Pinterest. You can if you want. It's about creating a space that works for you. And now if you are working from home pandemic, from home schooling, from home, all you got to make your space work. You just have to make your space work. They've done so many studies, they scientists about the effects of clutter and stress. It just this is all about that. It raises your cortisol so puts you in a fight or flight your brain. I'm sure you've probably talked about this on here, but decision fatigue, where you make so many decisions, your brain just shuts down. Joe: Mm hmm. Tracy: Will every piece of clutter in your house is a decision? Do I need it? Do I not need it? Where does it live? So the physical and mental effects of clutter are very real, very, very, very real. So my purpose isn't, again, to create I'm not saying be a minimalist. I'm not a minimalist. You know, it works for you. But is your home is your office working for you? Is it working for you? Chances are for a lot of people it's not. Joe: Right. Tracy: And that's OK. You may not we don't know what we don't know. Right. So if it's not working and if you have an issue with that or if if it's tough for you, you know, it it's like I always say, if you didn't know how to play the violin, you have beat yourself up like I wasn't born knowing how to play the violin. You might not have been born organized. You might have spatial issues. You might have added. There may be a bunch of things. So let's not beat yourself up for it. Let's educate and get it working for you. Joe: Yeah, you hit it on the head because cluttered just causes me angst, like I hate my garage, I hate walking in my garage, and so I understand it, Tracy: Can you even walk in your garage because only 20. Joe: But it's lucky I can. There's so many of our neighbors that have their cars in their driveway, in the hot sun here in Arizona because they have so much stuff in their garage. And that was like priority number one. My Tracy: Yeah. Joe: Car has to go in the garage. It's one hundred Tracy: Only, Joe: And thirteen outlets like. Tracy: Yeah, only twenty five percent of Americans can park their cars in their garage. Joe: Really? Tracy: Seventy five percent of Americans who have garages cannot park their cars Joe: That's Tracy: That. Joe: Amazing. Tracy: I know, I always say I always say we put our forty thousand fifty thousand dollar cars on the street where we fill our garage with trash. Joe: That's you know what, and you might I don't want to put you on the spot, but I can't imagine what the statistic is of people that have storage units and how many times they visit that unit a year. I just Tracy: It's Joe: I, I could Tracy: It's Joe: Never bring Tracy: A. Joe: Myself to have one. Tracy: This is where I get on my soapbox, this is the thing I get on my cell phone calls Joe: I Tracy: About Joe: Knew this was Tracy: And Joe: Going to kick Tracy: I Joe: Something Tracy: Yeah, Joe: Off here. Tracy: It's a billion dollar industry, a billion dollars. I have been in no exaggeration, hundreds of storage units, hundreds. I have had clients who because I make them do it, I've done the math of what they've spent on that storage unit. Twenty thousand thirty thousand a hundred thousand dollars. I have never once and I say it is no exaggeration, I have never once been in a storage unit or what's in there is worth more than what they paid to store it. It is a colossal waste of money. You will never go there if you have something in storage that you can't access. Why are you storing it? Joe: That's. Tracy: There is it is. I like till I'm blue in the face, I'm like, get rid of it, get rid of it, get rid. I have had clients crumble to their knees when they open it up and see what they've been saving. There's no there's like one or two slight somebody sometimes doing a remodel. There's a few Joe: Mm hmm. Tracy: Where I'm like, oh no, no, maybe. Joe: Yeah, Tracy: Let's Joe: It's. Tracy: See if we can find another way. It is, it is just take money and just burn it because Joe: Correct. Tracy: It is such a waste of money. Joe: Amen. I agree with Tracy: Yeah. Joe: You. I just it's so funny, and I just figured I'd throw that out because I, Tracy: Yeah, Joe: I knew that was going to trigger. Tracy: Yeah, I know, and it's people don't go there and they don't it's just really like if I can convince anything to anybody, just don't have it, don't Joe: Yeah, Tracy: Have it, don't Joe: Yeah. Tracy: Get it. Because once you get it, you're never going to empty. Joe: Ok, real quick on the on the topic of the home and office right now in your business, how much is home and how much is it? When I say office, I'm not talking about Home Office because I'm I would think because of covid home offices are on the rise because so many. Right. So Tracy: Yeah. Joe: But but do you actually go to commercial office spaces to help CEOs Tracy: I do, Joe: And. Tracy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean that in covid has just worn Joe: Hmm. Tracy: Down, Joe: Yep. Tracy: We haven't done any, but we have definitely we definitely will go in like work with big offices, like how do people use their space? How do people do that? I'm going to be really interesting to see if that. Comes back after covid, I Joe: Mm Tracy: Think Joe: Hmm. Tracy: We're going to get a lot of those calls, the way the business sort of shakes out now, I mean, right now we've just been trying to get everybody off. Does that how that was that was like how do you work from home? How do you go from home? That's been a big one, but it's probably it's probably a third of the business is senior downsizing. A third of the businesses are moving services and a third of the business is declaring Joe: Mm hmm. Tracy: Home declaring and then probably 20 percent that is office. I'm excited. I also think that when we go back, how offices work are going to change because everybody's like open floor plan. And now it's like, well, maybe not so much. So I'll be curious to see how that goes. I've also interestingly, too, I've had a couple calls lately about helping already offices, office companies that are moving small, 10 people, companies that are moving and setting up the office spaces before people even get in there. So that's a that's a thing that's starting to happen. And I think it's really how to keep people safe and covid and that kind of stuff. So that's that's always interesting to me. Joe: Perfect. OK, so let's go down the list here, so the next one that I have is closet audit. And Tracy: That's a good one. Joe: I Tracy: Yep. Joe: Know. Tracy: So, yeah, I have a couple of the people who work for me are like they can make it look like the Carrie Bradshaw perfect closet. So we come in, we help you figure out what you wear, what you don't wear. Get rid of the stuff that you don't wear. We donate everything. And then it's organizing like the like color coordinated matching hangers. Like it's really. And the thing first of all, it looks beautiful, but also your clothes are an armor that you go out into the world with. And if you have if you have a business where you have to meet with clients or you have to go in and pitch your services to another company, if you start your day off digging through the laundry basket to put something on, you're starting at a deficit. You're already starting stressed. I wear the same thing to work every day. I have 10 shirts from the same company, ten different colors. I have four pairs of jeans. I have my nice Nike shoes that are comfortable, but they're fashionable. I don't want to think about it. Joe: Yeah. Tracy: I want to get dressed. I wear a nice belt, I look presentable, but I look like I can roll my sleeves up. I figured out what works and I don't think about it. Joe: Mm Tracy: I Joe: Hmm. Tracy: Just don't think about it. And I start my day ready to go. It's not my morning isn't about like, oh, what am I going to wear? What am I. So people have to understand, if your closet is disorganized, it's not serving you right. You're already starting the day. Right? Where are my keys? I packed my lunch and what happens and what people don't understand is, OK, so you're taking your clothes out a laundry basket, you can't find your keys. You're running late. Oh, you didn't make yourself breakfast. So you're going to go through the drive thru. So you're going to eat Egg McMuffin and coffee like you've already set your day up so that you're not at your peak. Joe: He. Tracy: Right. You know, if you knew if your clothes were organized, you could get dressed, then you could make yourself that delicious smoothie that's healthy. You could start your day relaxed. And that's my whole I get out into the world ready to go, not frazzled. And especially if you've got kids like Model Man, those parents with the Zoom schooling like Joe: Oh, Tracy: To Joe: I know, Tracy: Have that, you Joe: Yeah. Tracy: Know, to have that extra to anywhere we can grab time. That's what the goal is. So if your closet's organized, you've just gained yourself fifteen minutes, right? Oh, those are my jeans are those are my shirts are great. Off Joe: Yeah, Tracy: We go. Joe: Yeah. Tracy: So that's a really closet. We love deposits. We love it. We love it. We love it. And we do the really big fancy lady those. But we love closet. Joe: Let me before we get off the closet audit subject are what you do with closets, do you ever get in a situation where you go and and they not only want you to organize, but they want you to actually help design a more efficient closet, and then you Tracy: Yeah, Joe: Have to bring in Tracy: Yeah. Joe: Like a company that does all of the shelving and Tracy: Yep, Joe: Ok. Tracy: Yep, it's it's great, we've I've really started in probably about in the last three or four years of service, I'll consult on construction. So clients that I've worked with for a long time are building new homes or remodeling their homes. So I'll come in in the design phase and meet with the architect and the contractor and say, OK, look, this is how many pairs of shoes they have. This is how long this is. So I love doing Joe: Oh, Tracy: That. Joe: Cool. Tracy: It's I love it. It's a constant fight because architects do not believe people have as much stuff as they have Joe: Mm hmm. Tracy: Contractors don't listen to forever, like the person that's like there's no broom closet, you know, and they're like, oh, you know, Joe: Yep, yep. Tracy: There's no broom closet. They're like, what do you need? A broom closet for it? Like, we need a broom closet. Joe: Right, Tracy: We need a real good bit. Joe: Right. Tracy: So that's been really fun. I have been pitching it. I'm working on my second book, but I have been pitching for a little while. I want to do a book, so I'll probably be down the road a bit. But I want to do a book between myself, an architect, an interior designer and a cabinet worker Joe: Mm hmm. Tracy: About how to remodel or build houses in the most efficient way. So that's Joe: Oh, Tracy: Super exciting. Joe: Yeah, Tracy: Yeah, it's super exciting. Joe: All right, cool. We've already touched upon this a little bit, but garage organizations, brutal. Tracy: Our favorite is Joe: Yeah. Tracy: Brutal, it's brutal. We we do it, we got we have packages one, two, three days a team goes in there. I'm at the point now where I don't do any more garages. Joe: Mm Tracy: I Joe: Hmm. Tracy: Never need to be in a sweaty garage Joe: Yeah, Tracy: Again. Joe: Yeah. Tracy: But my team's really good at it. It's a big and post covid this this one's been really people lots of people have been called in. They're like, we have so much toilet paper, we have so much canned goods. And that was one in terms of this is actually a great entrepreneurial point. This was one of the services that I realized. So one of the things I'm constantly balancing is how do I work on my business and in my business? Joe: Mm hmm. Tracy: In my business is a cult of personality. People want me. People will wait for me, people will pay for me. But I can only work so many hours so I couldn't grow the business if I'm doing it. So I had to find some of the services closets. I hired two people who are amazing at it. Garages are another way. It was a service that I could offer where people got the Tracy McCubbin experience, but I don't have to do it. So it Joe: So. Tracy: Was a way to go vertical. And that was a big learning like, oh right. This is something I can hand off, you know, get my team up to speed on it. And it's a good moneymaker for us and Joe: Yeah. Tracy: It's a really good moneymaker. So it's if you are starting a business and if you especially are sort of a consulting service, what are the services that somebody else can do? But your clients still feel like they're getting you. Joe: Yeah, man, you hit it on the head, it's so hard, they want they want you, you are the brand and it's such a hard thing to break away from and it's such a hard thing to hand over to trust other people. Tracy: Oh, yeah, Joe: Yeah, I get it. Tracy: It's Joe: I get it Tracy: You know, everybody Joe: Now. Tracy: Knows if, Joe: Yeah. Tracy: You know, you know, it's Joe: Yeah. Tracy: Really been in there and especially we were like, oh, wait, you're like it's a six week wait. And now, like, I don't care. And Joe: Yeah, Tracy: I was like, OK. Joe: Yeah, I know it's explain the moving services. Tracy: Yeah, that's been a big that's been our biggest thing during covid because we were essential workers, that we were able to do it and so I started when I started. This is another great entrepreneurial lesson. When I started, I just oversaw the move. So I would just take over, become the client, but the movers. And then we started offering de cluttering before people moved. So all the stuff you didn't want to take with you, let's get rid of it, not pack it up. Then we would unpack and organize into the new houses. So it was like, OK, we'd oversee. We get everything to the new house, we'd unpack and organize. And then I was like, wait, why? If we're doing the de cluttering and we're putting things in piles, why don't we just start doing the packing also? So it was another service that I could add that I didn't have to do. So we now did clutter pack, oversee the move and unpack into the new house. And we deal with very complicated situations like going to two houses or we do a lot after people, but people have passed away people's parents. So the grown kids have full time jobs. They can't be here for two weeks. So we'll empty the whole house, get everything shipped across the country. And so it's been a great. So that was another way to realize to go vertical. Right. Joe: Skep. Tracy: Here's another service I can offer. It doesn't take my time. It dovetails perfectly, we're declaring. So we might as well pack anyway. Know I bought a 17 foot truck. I hired a couple of expert packers and it's been a great part of the business. So I always invite people from my own experience to like, what's the what's the thing that you're outsourcing that could you move it in the house and make it part of your vertical? Joe: Yeah, yeah, it's such a great service because there's a huge gap there, there are great moving companies and they will provide Tracy: Oh. Joe: The services to pack stuff up, but it's just merely taking what's in a cabinet and putting it in a box and taping it up. There's no rhyme or reason. So when you get to the new property, you're like, where is this and where is it back? And you're moving Tracy: Yeah. Joe: A box from that landed in a bedroom that should have been in the kitchen and all. Tracy: And Joe: It's. Tracy: Look, I work with I work with moving companies all the time, I you know, they're amazing at what they do. Those teams work so hard. I have great relationship, about three or four moving local while I have about six and Joe: Mm Tracy: Everything. Joe: Hmm. Tracy: They're fantastic. But the story I always tell when people are like, well, why should I hire you as the movers? Joe: Mm hmm. Tracy: We're a little more expensive them and not much. Ten dollars an hour. And I tell the story of a client of mine who was a musician when on tour movers packed all our stuff up, put it in storage. We unpacked for her. And it was it was I unpacked a box and there were literally like a year old half-Eaten Sarcone and a Starbucks coffee. Joe: Oh. Tracy: And she was like she was like, oh, that's where that where the movers just pack everything Joe: Like, Tracy: In sight. Right? That's what they do there Joe: Yeah, Tracy: Based on time, their speed, Joe: Yeah. Tracy: They're doing it. So for us, we go in, we did clutter, we pack in an organized manner so that everything goes in room. So in a way, I tell people it feels like a more expensive service, but we actually save you on Joe: Mm Tracy: The other Joe: Hmm. Tracy: End Joe: Yeah. Tracy: Because it's super organized. We love it. It's one of my favorite favorite and especially the sounds so strange to say, but helping people after a family member has passed away Joe: Yeah. Tracy: Is it is one of my favorite services. It's so hard. It's so emotional. It's heartbreaking when the liquidation company comes in as your child is not worth saving your coffee cups, are they? They are. It's heart breaking. So to be able to honor the legacy of a family, deal with the, you know, not not pretty part. It's just it's one of my favorite things that we can do for people, Joe: Yeah, that's Tracy: Really, Joe: Really cool. Tracy: Is. Joe: So we can talk about that next sense, you kind of moved into that and then we'll get to the last one. So let's talk about the state. Kicklighter because Tracy: Yeah. Joe: That to me is that along with the other one, which is the senior downsizing, to me, those are both very, very sensitive type situations. Like you said, there's emotions that are involved in and these two things. So how do you deal with that? Tracy: You know, for me, it's I view it as such an important service. I know how difficult it is. I've had to do it for both. My grandparents like to I just know that it really providing a service that not many people do. And we my company is very special. There are a lot of organizing companies out there, but there's not I have been in this business longer than anybody. I, I know what's valuable. I know what's not valuable. I have the sensitivity. Everyone who has worked for me. We're all a little we're all a little damaged. We all have a little trauma in our childhood. We all have something to draw on. We've all been caregivers to family members. So we have so much respect. I just feel so honored that a family would trust us for this. And we just did a family. There were four children. Three of the children were on board. The parents lived into their 90s and it was taught it was time Joe: No. Tracy: For them to go. And there were three of the children were on the same page and one was an outlier and that that one person was making it very difficult for everybody else. And so to be able to step in and a little bit be the bad guy like these, these books aren't worth anything. Yes, they are. It is. It was like, OK, well, let's get the appraiser in. And then the appraisers, they're not worth anything. Joe: Right, Tracy: So being Joe: Right. Tracy: Able to sort of draw from my Rolodex and and my experience, like I've donated I've donated thousands of sets of China. It's not worth anything. I'm Joe: Yeah. Tracy: Sorry. I'm so sorry. It doesn't mean that your holidays when you were growing up weren't important. It doesn't mean that you have the memories that you have. And if you love that China and it brings back those memories, keep it. But if you are keeping it because you think it's the family fortune, then we're going to have a different conversation. Joe: Yeah. Tracy: So I just feel so honored to be a part of it. I've met such interesting people and when this steps into the senior downsizing, when we move seniors from lifelong homes into smaller places, a lot of what we're facing when we declare in these phases is our own mortality, right? Oh, right. We're going to die someday. You know, did my life matter if I don't have the staff? Did I make an impact? So it's very I just feel very, very, very lucky that I get to be a part of this process with people. I hear amazing stories. I met amazing people. We always approach it with love and laughter and humor and respect. And it's just a nobody. Nobody does this. Nobody does this. Joe: Yeah, Tracy: I Joe: Yeah, Tracy: Know Joe: It's Tracy: I Joe: A Tracy: Get Joe: Great Tracy: Phone calls Joe: Service, Tracy: All the time. Joe: Yeah, Tracy: Yeah, Joe: It's Tracy: It's Joe: So Tracy: It's. Joe: It's tricky, it's emotional and elderly people become a little bit they don't trust people. They don't know you're in their house Tracy: They Joe: Or. Tracy: Shouldn't, Joe: No. No. Right. Tracy: They Joe: Yeah, Tracy: Shouldn't, Joe: Right. And so Tracy: They shouldn't. Joe: That's a tricky balance. Tracy: We are one of our favorite things. We just did it last week. We've said we're now we've been working for so long, we're now helping parents of clients. Right. So kind of my mom died. I went to Nashville to help. I went to New York and doing that. But what we've been doing, a lot of which I love, is moving someone into an assisted living or community. So we like it. Like we feel like we're on a TV show. We're like, OK, we've got 12 hours until we get the apartment all set up so that when they're making the move, the drive from the old and they get to the new, their artwork is hung up. Joe: Oh, Tracy: The TV's Joe: That's cool, Tracy: Working, their bed is made Joe: Yeah, yeah. Tracy: So that they walk into this new experience with familiarity. And we love it. We're like running around sweating like they would do it, do Joe: Yeah, Tracy: It. But Joe: Yeah. Tracy: Then they walk in and they see their stuff and it's home. They're not stepping into boxes everywhere. Joe: Yeah. Tracy: So this is this is it's my favorite part of what we I mean, I love everything that we do, but this one's really that's really important. Joe: That's very cool, just the way you describe. That was awesome. A couple of questions out of the way of the business. And then I want to get into the book and then I want to get into Tracy: If. Joe: The chair, the organization, and we're running out of time because this is I love this, but Tracy: It's great, Joe: It's Tracy: It's great. Joe: So if somebody wants to work with your company and in a sense you're based in California, let's just say somebody here in Arizona, I wanted to hire you to come in and clean out my crotch. How does somebody work with you that is in like how do you work in other states with people? Tracy: Yeah, we do it know we pay our rates, they just cover travel costs so we can make it sometimes. Sometimes if I'm in other cities, like in New York, I have two women who I can subcontract to sometimes all subcontract. I'll go myself and maybe bring one of my people and then subcontract to try and use the local companies that do that. I have I'm getting a pretty good network. I mean, I'm very I have very high standards, Joe: Mm hmm. Tracy: So I'm pretty I need somebody to be tried and true. But I can I can make it work. But yeah, it's just it's the same rates. It's not more it's just the travel cost. So Joe: Perfect. Tracy: A lot of times when people they're realizing like, oh, it's actually, you know, the other thing I've started to do for clients to if they if they I got a client who had to go to Florida and they just didn't have a sister, their mom passed away. They didn't have the means to pay my travel costs. So I actually helped interview local people for him. So I'll do that for my clients. Like, let me let me make the first phone calls. Let me have the conversation. And I just because I'm I'm very mama bear about my client if I want Joe: The. Tracy: To and I want to just go to anybody. Joe: Perfect. All right. And you scared me for a moment because you almost sound like you're bleeding into my my last thing about the business, which is the virtual dcluttering. So how do you handle that? Tracy: Yeah, Joe: Is that like Tracy: You Joe: A Tracy: Know, Joe: Face time walking around with an iPad? Tracy: Yeah, Joe: Show me this Tracy: Yeah, Joe: Room. Tracy: Yeah, yeah, we do. So the virtual declaring, it's been a bit of an experiment to make it work. And what I've found is that we it's it's we have to set very specific goals. So oftentimes we break it up into half an hour sessions. One session is about right. Here's what you're going to get accomplished. Here's less paperwork. You have these four boxes of paperwork. What are you going to do with them? I don't as much sit there and sort of go through things with them. It's more about helping them come up with a work plan, what the traps are going to fall into, then a period of time, and then we come back and go over it and they ask me specific questions about what they got stuck at. So it's Joe: Got. Tracy: Really almost the virtual it almost becomes a little bit more time management focused help you come up with a work plan. How can you get it accomplished? I also have I have a private Facebook group called Concreter Clever with Tracy McCubbin. It's a free Facebook. I go live pretty much every Wednesday and people can that's a really great it's a very supportive community. Everybody's read my book. We're all so sometimes people would join their and the group will help them. So that's that's great. They're like, OK, it's Joe: Yeah. Tracy: A lot of accountability this weekend I'm going to tackle. And that's what the virtual turned out to be. Two is a lot of accountability. Joe: That's great. OK, cool. OK. The book came out in 2019 called "Making Space, Clutter Free" and you can get it on. I know you can get it on Amazon. I think I saw two other Tracy: Indie Joe: There was an Tracy: Bound. Joe: Indie Tracy: I think Joe: Band Tracy: It's indie band. Joe: Of. Tracy: Yeah, I send people to either Amazon, there's a really great website called Bookshop Dawg Joe: Ok. Tracy: And it connects all the independent booksellers. So you it's a clearinghouse. And so if you don't want to give the man who just went into space more of your money, bookshop dog is a great way. It's available on Kindle. It's available ebook. It's available as an audio book. I narrated Joe: Oh, great. Tracy: A lot of. Yeah, it was great. A lot of libraries have it. They did a really big push. So your local library has it and it's great. It's great. It's doing really well. It got to be an Amazon bestseller and it's an evergreen book. It is not going out of style, Joe: That's Tracy: So. Joe: Awesome, yeah. The reviews Tracy: Yeah, Joe: Are great. Tracy: Yeah. Joe: Yeah. Tracy: So making space clutter free. The nice thing about it is we really delve into the emotional part so very deep about the emotional part. And then there's an actual work plan, how you tackle the house room by room. So people are really it's just I'm very, very happy with that. And I'm in the process of writing the second book called Make Space for Happiness. And it's a it's about why we shop, why we overshot the holes in our lives that we're trying to fill by shopping. Joe: Mm Tracy: So Joe: Hmm, Tracy: It's a little Joe: That's called. Tracy: I love it. I love it. But it's going to be a little controversial. Joe: That's Tracy: I Joe: All right. Tracy: Feel like I feel like I feel like that man who just went into space is not going to like what I have to say. But, you know, Joe: Well, I like to think about Tracy: You. Joe: The closet that I saw one thing and one thing out, right? Tracy: Yeah, Joe: That's awesome. Tracy: It's very practical, it's very you know, there's a lot of oversimplified I think that part of the feedback I always get and I know from growing up with the parent that I did it. And also some people understand a lot of times reporting is generational. So Joe: He. Tracy: I my I had two other a great uncle. It's a genetic thing. It's a it's an anxiety disorder. I think it's a bit of an addiction. I think that people who hoard get a big dopamine hit when they find something. So there's just a lot of empathy. I'm not judging. I'm not shaming. I under I understand how hard it is. And Joe: Yet. Tracy: So people really respond to that. Joe: Yeah, OK, cool. One last question, I thought it was really cool you had the Clutter Block Quiz on your website and you talk about blocks, right? Clutter blocks. Tracy: Yep, Joe: Can you real Tracy: Yep, Joe: Quickly, can you just. Tracy: Sure, and this is the crux of the book. So basically a clutter block is an emotional story that we tell ourselves about why we can't let go of what we don't want or need. So it's so there are seven of them. And I witnessed this from working with clients for so long. I was like, this is that story again. This person is that same story. This is that. So it ranges everything from my stuff keeps me stuck in the past. Sentimental things that you can't let go of, the stuff I'm avoiding, which is your paperwork, which is me. That's my clutter block. I'm not worth my good stuff. So not using your nice things, saving Joe: Mm. Tracy: My fantasy stuff for my fantasy life. Oh, I'm going to become a rock climber. I'm going to knit, I'm going to buy all that stuff for this stuck with other people's stuff. And when in the book and in a Facebook group, I talk about it when you identify you're like, oh, this is a thing. The perfect example. Last Clutter Block No.7, the stuff I keep paying for, this is storage unit. You bought this stuff and now you're paying to store it. And when you see it that way, like, oh, I'm paying to store stuff I never use. Oh, it's like it's it's illuminated, you know, Joe: Yeah. Tracy: You're like, oh, this is why it's not I'm not a bad person. I'm not a bad person. This is just, you know, we're humans. We're meaning making machines. Right. We just rains on your wedding day that all that stuff. So we make all this meaning out of the stuff that's meaningless and it gets a hold on us. So the clutter blocks are really effective for people really, really affected, like, oh, this is real. This is you know, it's not just me. It's Joe: Yeah. Tracy: Not just me. Joe: Yeah. All right, awesome. Before we move off of your business to the organization you're part of, because I think it's really important to talk about real quick. You've made incredible headway in the press, like being on the shows that you're on. And for the entrepreneurs that are listening to this, you could have just been another de cluttering company in California, right? You've said it yourself, Tracy: Amy. Joe: But you obviously you have a unique approach with all the different services you're passionate about. It's very clear by talking with you and everyone will pick up on that. When they listen to this and when they watch the YouTube video, they're going to tell that, yeah, this is this woman is really has the integrity and really loves what she does and it speaks to her. How did you get the the press and all of the stuff that has catapulted you to be the expert in this field? I mean, it's it's amazing, Tracy: Yeah, Joe: The Tracy: Yeah, Joe: Shows Tracy: Yeah, Joe: You've been on and the podcast Tracy: It's Joe: And. Tracy: Yeah, it's great. So I think the thing the first thing that I got really clear about was a couple of things. One, people need content, TV shows need content. Morning news means content, podcasts meet. Everybody needs content. So even if you have a product or a service, you know, there's a mission statement behind it. There's a reason that you're doing it. So what's the what's the story that you can tell about why your service is going to help? Or how can you tell your mission statement and not even mention your product? If you can talk about the service or what you're offering, you know, how can you talk about it without even mentioning it, then that's the content and people need it. And I'll tell you, you say yes to everything. I have been I mean, my favorite story is like morning news show in Temecula, California, like sandwiched in between the October Fest dancers and the like kid who won the spelling bee, like I said, yes to everything. And I worked on my media training. I worked on the messaging. I really understood that you have to be able to communicate it. And so I just started saying yes. And then it I got a reputation for being good and delivering and I did. I have worked with when the book came out, I did work with a publicist. I found the best person who specializes in non-fiction authors. That's the other thing about PR. If you're going to pay for PR and you sometimes you have to and you're the two things you're paying for someone's Rolodex. So who can they call? Joe: Mm hmm. Tracy: Who do they have connections to? And also you need to find the person who understands what you do. Right? So let's say you have a company where you've invented a new kind of pool cover that will save children's lives, superimportant, Joe: Mm Tracy: Needed. Joe: Hmm. Tracy: Don't hire a publicist who works with beauty products. Joe: All right. Tracy: Right. Like really honed down on what you're offering and can that person help it? And sometimes you need to sometimes you need to pay a marketing person. Sometimes you need to pay a social media manager. We can't do it all. So it's really understanding, understanding how valuable those marketing and publicity dollars are. Right. Because they can get expensive Joe: Oh, Tracy: Fast. Joe: Yeah. Mm hmm. Tracy: You can turn around. And I mean, you people are out there and starting to look at that, you know, problems and say, oh, yeah, we have a ten thousand dollar per month retainer. You're like, oh, so what are their goals? What are their goals for you? How can you help? And I always say this. You can't for those kinds of positions. It's like if you have an agent, right? I have a literary agent. Help me with my book. She takes 10 percent of my money. She does ten percent of the work. Joe: Mm Tracy: I Joe: Hmm. Tracy: Still got to do the 90 percent. So you can't dump and run against. Oh, I have a publicist. I don't have to do it. Now you are working in conjunction with them. It's your product. No one's going to care more about your business than you are. So show up. Say yes to everything. You know, like be realistic. It's like I want to be on Good Morning America. OK, well, you start following the October 1st dancers. You just say yes, you say Joe: Yeah. Tracy: Because first of all, it gives you practice, Joe: At. Tracy: It gives you practice and you hone your message. And and this is where the Internet is fantastic. Reach out to podcasts, you know, get really clear about the content you have to offer. Just cold call people, cold email people. Here's what I want to say. Like people that you listen to where the message across, it's the biggest it's the least fun. The marketing and publicity is the least one part about running a business, I think. But the most important. Joe: Yeah, well, you've done great, it's amazing Tracy: No, Joe: And Tracy: Thank you. Joe: Yeah, it's absolutely awesome. Did I miss anything about the business that you would like to talk about before we move on to the organization? Tracy: The only thing I would say is that if you're out there and if you're struggling with your relationship to your staff, don't be afraid to find help locally. Joe: Love it. Tracy: There's lots of people who are opening this business. Reach out to me. I can give you some questions to ask. So don't be afraid to ask for help. Joe: Perfect. OK, one kid, one world. Tracy: Yeah. Joe: It's super cool. I went and I looked at the website, I watched the videos and can you explain what it does? You know, what what the the mission of it is? And then Tracy: Yeah, Joe: I Tracy: Yeah, Joe: Don't want to forget Tracy: So. Joe: After you do that. I want to understand when a volunteer goes, are they just volunteering their time and you get them there and you get them back or so let's start with Tracy: Sure, Joe: The organization Tracy: Yeah, yeah, Joe: First. Tracy: Yeah, so basically, quick story, my childhood friend of mine, our dads, went to law school together. He went to Darfor and he was in the volunteering in the refugee camps and he realized that the bulk of the people in the refugee camps were women and children and that they were setting up schools and setting up little shops, like trying to get normalise as much as possible and realizing, as we all know, that education is the key. So we ate on that trip. He met a Kenyan doctor, a nurse. They told him about this girl's school in Kenya that needed a science lab. The girls couldn't take their exams because they didn't have a science lab. So he said to me, it's twenty five thousand dollars. Want to help me raise that? Let's throw a party. You know, our our peers were all starting to make money and their careers were taking off. So we threw the party, raise the money. We're like, let's just go and see. Let's just go and see what this is. And we went and it was life changing. Joe: Mm Tracy: Here Joe: Hmm. Tracy: Were these girls. And in Kenya, most of them are orphans because HIV AIDS Joe: Mm hmm. Tracy: And the desire for education. And so there's a lot of organizations that are curriculum based and this and that. And what we were like were like they don't have desks to sit in. There are no there's no room. There's not. So we started focusing on capital improvements. We built buildings, we built dorms, we put desks, we put bookshelves, we pay teachers salaries. We put nurses in the school. We just do the things that they need to stay open. We never build a school from scratch ever. We know nothing about what the community needs. We get in partnership with a community where a school has already been established. We do not affect curriculum, not for us to say Joe: Mm hmm. Tracy: We try and work in schools that have at least a 50 percent girl population because girls education is much underfunded. A big part of what we do is we supplied feminine hygiene products to our girls school because that keeps girls out of school. So we're we work mostly in Kenya and then we have branched out to Central America of Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala. And, you know, it's an amazing it's amazing where we started the same year I started my business. So I did both of those. I think we're up to like twenty six schools we rebuilt. And part of our fundraising model is we do volunteer trips. So we go, for instance, to Central America. We fly for a long weekend. We rebuild a suite. We don't we do the big capital improvements before we get there. And then when we're there, we demolish bathrooms and paint murals and get very, very involved. And for us, what we found is that there's sort of two types of donors. There is the vicarious donors who your friend goes and see the work that the friends do and donate that way. And then there are the people who want to see where the money goes, really make a difference. So when you go on a trip with us, you you commit to raising a certain amount of money when you come back. And we always had our goals. We never operated a deficit. We don't ever take on projects that we can't finish. We're very lucky. Both Josh and I have other businesses that we work for free. We don't Joe: Mm Tracy: Take a Joe: Hmm. Tracy: Salary. So we're like we're at like ninety percent of every dollar we raise goes back. And not that, not that. I don't think that nonprofit workers should not be paid. They absolutely should be. But we choose for us. We choose not to. And it's been it's been great. It's been one of where a couple of years ago, our first round of girls started to go to college in nursing school and technical school. And it's it's really amazing. It's a really, really, really amazing covid has been really hard. We haven't been able to go. I think next spring will be our first trip if everything goes OK. Joe: Mm hmm. Tracy: But it's been a really amazing it's been an amazing thing to be a part of. It's been an amazing thing to be a part of. Joe: Yeah, it was really cool, I watched the video and I saw where there was a person taking Polaroids and then everyone and then the Polaroid was there was a square where the Polaroid would go on the piece of paper and each student had to say, I'm going to be a doctor Tracy: Yeah. Joe: There or I'm going to be a nurse, or it was a radical. Tracy: Well, one of the funny things I get I invented invented this exercise, I was realizing, talking to the girls in Kenya, that because they didn't have parents, so many of them, they didn't they never they didn't know how to make a business phone call. They didn't know how to apply for a job because it's like the teachers are teaching them. But there's not that. So I started to do this exercise where they would be the shop owner and I'd be like another volunteer. And I like I'd be the bad like I wouldn't say, you know, I'd say my name really quiet. I wouldn't shake a hand. And you just did these roleplaying exercises of how to apply for a job. When you realize, like, you have to learn that stuff, you don't know you don't know how to call someone and say, hey, here's my name or walk into a shop or say like, I'd like a job and walk in with confidence. And so now it's like day can't wait. Every time we go, we all line Joe: And Tracy: Up Joe: That's Tracy: And they Joe: Called. Tracy: All get to pretend. And, you know, it's such a it's such an amazing just right to have the self-confidence to get go in there and do that. And so it's very practical and we love it. We love Joe: That's Tracy: It. Joe: Awesome, Tracy: We love it. We can't wait to get back. So Joe: I'm Tracy: If anybody Joe: Sure. Tracy: Out there is listening and want to come on a trip with us, one kid, one world dog, tell me you heard me on here and would love to get. Joe: Awesome. OK, I've taken your time. I've gone over, I apologized, Tracy: It's Joe: But Tracy: All right, Joe. We're Joe: This Tracy: Having Joe: Is Tracy: A great conversation. Joe: This was awesome. So let's give everyone the and I'll put it in the show notes, but the website for your business did clarify. Tracy: Yep, yep, so the website is dClutterfly.com, so a d c l u t t e r f l y dot com. See, this is why you say it Joe: Yeah. Tracy: Out before you name your business. The clutter block places on there. You can sign up for my newsletter. It's a great place to find me. I'm very active on Instagram. So Tracy_McCubbin and then if you are looking for some extra love and support, the private Facebook group, which is called "Conquer Yo

Josh Carey - Co-founder of PodMAX.co

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 7, 2021 52:32

My conversation today is with Josh Carey, co-founder of PodMAX.co, an event that happens about every 6 weeks where business people and/or entrepreneurs are matched up with podcast hosts where they do 3 interviews in one day while also attending an event where there is networking, education and keynote speakers. Josh explains in this interview how this event that they hold quite frequently, is like speed dating for podcast guests and hosts alike. It's an efficient way for hosts to get 3 interviews in the can in one day and for business people and/or enterpreneurs,to get out there and promote themselves, their businesses and tell their story 3 times in one day on 3 different podcasts. This is an interesting interview with Josh as he shares his own journey to exposing himself and his talents and now helping others to do the same. As always, thanks for listening! Joe Get 30% off at The Healthy Place by using code "costello" Josh Carey Co-founder - PodMAX.co Website: https://podmax.co Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/onairbrands/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/onairbrandsLIVE/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/onairbrands/ Email: josh@podmax.co 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: Hey, Josh, welcome to the show. I'm very excited to have you. Josh: Likewise, Joe. Pleasure to be here. Thanks. Joe: Yeah, so this obviously as a podcast or this hits home for me, having someone unlike you that has this this business, if you will, called Pod Max. Right. I guess it's it's also an event. Right. So I need you're going to help me understand Josh: Yeah, Joe: It. Josh: I shall. Joe: I've watched a bunch of different videos and I watched the testimonial video, but I still want clarification. I think you hit it on the head when you said it's like speed dating for podcasters. And that was Josh: Hmm. Joe: That totally was a very clear thing for me. At least brought me to a point where I said, oh, this is really sort of different, but this is what I do with all my guests. So you'll have to you'll have to suffer through this part. Josh: I shall suffer. Joe: We because my audience is mainly entrepreneurs and it's it's me trying to help educate Josh: Mm hmm. Joe: Them as much as possible. I always like them to know the back story of my guests. I want to know Josh: Hmm. Joe: Where you came from, where you came from as far back as you want to go, because it doesn't Josh: Mm Joe: It Josh: Hmm. Joe: Doesn't matter to me. It's exciting to figure out the how you develop to who you are today and how you are doing what you're doing today and what was all in between to make this happen. And then from there, we'll get into the depths of tiebacks. Josh: I love it. I shall take you down that journey, then Joe: Perfect. Josh: We'll start we'll start with Current Day. Today, I'm known as the Hidden Entrepreneur, and that's because I spent 40 plus years of my life hiding. I literally showed up in every situation, hiding all of my true talent and ability. Everything that I was really capable of doing remained hidden because I was so desperate to seek the approval of others. Now, what really sucked about this is behind closed doors. I knew darn well what I was capable of doing. So this created a lot of anger, frustration, resentment, jealousy, all that stuff. And the bigger thing is that not only did I want to seek your approval, I was scared so much by the fact that if I were to come forward with something quite good, right. Impressive, even in any regard, you might feel so insecure about your accomplishments and talent and scale, what you may or may not be doing. Right, because we're all just a mirror and a reflection of each other that what it might make you a little upset by what you're seeing and then you might retaliate against me in some form. And I knew my whole life that I just didn't feel strong enough to stick up and stand up for myself. Josh: So all of that made for this recipe of living life that way cut to today. I'm the proud father of two adoring children. I have an eight year old daughter, a six year old son who are my absolute everything. I love playing the role of father. I love being their dad. And early on in their young lives, I realize that I see what's happening here. I'm the child in this circle and I'm the one who has work to do. So I said, guys, keep doing what you're doing. I get it. I can't continue to be this miserable kind of person and have them watch me that way their whole lives. It wouldn't end well. And fast forwarding to, you know, seeing an empty nester. Now, if I was 20 years down the road and they just grew up with that type of father, they'd naturally become that type of person. And in that scenario, there'd be nothing I can do and I wouldn't be able to live with myself. So I said, that's all I need to say. Right. I'm Joe: Yeah. Josh: Going to make them prouder. I'm going to make me proud or I'm going to do what needs to happen. And I started just taking inventory, replacing some of my bad non serving habits with slightly better ones and slowly but surely seeing the positive result in effect of that. And here we are. I just keep stacking those on each other and I've come a long way and still have a long way to go. But I'm very happy and proud with where I am today. Joe: And so what did you do in your past life, let's say that you're now doing what you do. I mean, what was your what was all these things you were doing while you're hiding from the world? Josh: So I got in in eighth grade, I got bit by the acting bug, right? I found that in there was a school audition taking place and I felt like I should audition to see what this was about. And I did. And it was a a drug awareness program, whatever it was. And I got a cast as the comic relief of all things. So I was bumbling around on stage and hundreds of my right, hundreds of my classmates were laughing at me from what I was doing on stage. Now, I knew that they were in fact laughing at me. Right. They weren't laughing with me, but I was I was OK with that because I was getting the attention I was so desperately seeking. So I thought, wow, I will continue to seek out this attention, hopefully thinking this is what I need to fill this emotional void. Right. This external approval is exactly what I need now. Doesn't work that way. It took me a few decades to realize that, but I set out on a path to become an actor and said, I'm going to dedicate my life to this because if I could just get this daily, my life sucked. So I pursued that dream. I wound up spending 15 years in New York as a working actor and filmmaker. Great credits, wonderful era of my life. But again, it didn't really, you know, fill the void. You know, when the curtain comes down, I'm still miserable and alone in the corner, often crying and trying to figure out where my life went so wrong. Josh: So I did that for a while. I had some, you know, day jobs to pay the bills. I taught myself webdesign to keep myself busy when the Internet started rising up in the nineties. And slowly but surely, I just became somewhat of an entrepreneur, not realizing at the time that that's what it was. But I was just trying to make ends meet while I was pursuing my passion. And then I found myself running my own digital marketing agency where I was building websites for an industry and all this stuff. Ten years later, this industry became just like any other toxic relationship we might find ourselves in personally. But this was my business and the industry taking full responsibility. It was on me because I was showing up that way, which is why I was attracting those very people. So I knew that something needed to change. This correlated with the time where me and my children had the talk, where I was the child, and I said, I get it. I know it has to be done. This relationship with the industry and my my work here, it can't continue. It's part of the problem. Let me rip the Band-Aid off. I said I don't know what's next, but I'm going to seek something. I'm going to figure it out. And just like if you're in a bad relationship, you don't necessarily wait until you have another relationship. Josh: You get out and figure it out. And that's what I did. I got out. I said, let me take a few months. Let me take some time, figure out what I want to do, where I want to go and be true to myself for one of the first times in my life. And I said podcasting. I think I felt that I would be good at it and I would enjoy it. And it would create opportunity and I would connect with people because, God, that's all I ever wanted in my life. I said, well, if I do it honestly and authentically, I might finally attract the right kind of people instead of attracting the miserable and getting what I don't want because you focus on it. So I created a brand called The Hidden Entrepreneur and then became that became the podcast. And I started interviewing people. And slowly but surely I started feeling good about it and getting a good response. And it just kept building the confidence. And I was told I was half decent and I certainly started feeling that way, still replacing a lot of my bad habits with better ones, trying to live wonderfully for my children. It all came together. And now here we are. I'm doing some some some really interesting things in the podcast space because of those moments that that got me here. Joe: Right. And that's what's important. That's why I wanted to ask, because, you know, as much as everyone can say, their life went on a certain path and certain things did not go right Josh: Uh. Joe: Or whatever, they all build the person you are today. And so I think probably whatever you're doing with Pod Max now, you're leaning on some of your marketing and, you know, Josh: Exactly. Joe: Your and all the stuff that you did earlier in Josh: All Joe: Your entrepreneurial Josh: Of it. Joe: Life. Right. So it's like you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. That's this. This is all created to help to create who you are now, to make this next portion of your life excel even more. Josh: Sometimes in the moment, we don't and can't recognize that a lot of acts in retrospect that the game is being able in real time when there's a little bit of a glitch or a detour that you're forced to take or something that's happening that you didn't quite see coming wasn't as you planned. You have to realize, wow, this is probably going to work out for the best. And as you're seeing everything I've spelled out, even my acting and film days to this very moment, I pull a lot from those days how to how to communicate, how to perform, how to create, how to talk on the mic, how to write. All of that is acting and film. And then, like you said, the marketing from the digital marketing, knowing what you don't want on a grand scale to know exactly what you do want. It's all relevant and quite perfect. Joe: Yeah, and it's funny, and you gave it away already, but I was going to ask you where you from? And I was like, he's got to be from New York. I can recognize and I'm from New York. So he's like, he's got to be from New York. And then you said it. You're like. Josh: What did I say, oh, that I spent time there Joe: Yeah, Josh: In New York. Joe: Yeah, and so did I and I and my background is I went to school for music and I Josh: Yeah. Joe: And I landed in New York. I lived two hours north of the city where I grew up. But then I landed Josh: Mayor. Joe: In New York as to be my big time career break Josh: As Joe: In. Josh: A drummer, Joe: Yeah, Josh: Yeah. Joe: Right. And so and at the same time, we all have to go find jobs. And then and then you sort of get steered off a path because you start making money and going, OK, how much do I want to suffer living in this one bedroom apartment and eating mac and cheese every night where Josh: True. Joe: It's just whatever, whatever developed over that time. But we had the same sort of path. So it's Josh: Yeah. Joe: Interesting to hear your story. Josh: Mm hmm. Joe: Ok, so you started podcasting and you have a podcast called The Hidden Entrepreneur. How did you make the jump from that to come to being the coach? When I heard you say you're actually a co-founder of God Macs. So where did this idea come from? How did we get to where we are today with that? Josh: In twenty eighteen is when I created The Hidden Entrepreneur Show, and it's still running strong today, over 200 episodes and I in the summer of 2019, I had the opportunity to record episodes of my show at an event. And one of the one of the people that I was interviewing didn't know him prior to this event was Eric Cabral, who's now my co founding partner in Pod Max. I interviewed him for my show and we hit it off and we connected. And after the interview, he said, you know, we're both from Jersey. I have. Which is where I live Joe: Mm Josh: Now. Joe: Hmm. Josh: He said, I have a I have a studio in in Jersey. Once you come out and check it out one day and, you know, we'll see we'll see what's possible. And I said, OK. And then it turns out I never left. Now, what I like to point out is that what what I did just, you know, basically, yes. By design, but subconsciously during that first interview where he was on my show when we didn't know each other prior, was I was already leaning into my full potential, which was quite different from what I did the first 40 plus years of my life, where I spoke about I showed up really small, didn't want to rock the boat, didn't want to make you feel insecure. So I just took a back seat. But then in twenty eighteen, I started figuring out how can I come to the table with the ability that again, I've always known darn well I'm more than capable of doing. And really I believe we're all in that same boat. We all know what we are capable of doing. We just adjust and alter that for so many reasons inappropriately, so more often than not. So I said, I'm going to just start coming out, you know, strongly with what I'm capable of and miraculously, quote unquote, I started attracting the very people who understood that, who liked it, who appreciated it, respected it. Ironically, all the things I wanted my whole life, Joe: Mm Josh: Just Joe: Hmm. Josh: Somebody to appreciate me. How can anybody appreciate when you're being, you know, a weak man, Joe: Yeah. Josh: Which I was. So I thought that if I were to come out powerfully doing what I'm capable of, everybody is going to retaliate against me. And oh, no, I don't even see those people. I only see people like you, like Eric, like people who are like, wow, you know, like attracts like, of Joe: Mm Josh: Course. Joe: Hmm. Josh: So that's that's the amazing thing. So all that to say, I was already able to do what I was doing to get in front of somebody like Eric, for him to recognize something within me because I had already appeared that way. So you have to sort of do the work first instead of like me hoping that somebody can see a glimmer of potential in me and then anoint me capable and relevant to the masses. You know, that doesn't happen. Joe: Right. Josh: So it only happens when you are first putting it out there to attract the good back. So Eric and I started talking and hanging out and we had a very similar vibe and connection, a lot of similar goals. He also came from the podcast space. He has and had his own show. And we just started talking about this idea Pod Max, which started in person in twenty nineteen. It started as a live in person event. We had the studio in North Jersey where we figured we do this one day kind of hybrid event where it's part conference, part workshop and part podcast recordings. So we set up makeshift like a dozen different studios like like little mini areas where hosts can record with guests. And we invited about a dozen show hosts in, sold tickets to the event to high level entrepreneurs and thought leaders who wanted to get their message out by recording on shows we would match them. Thus the speed dating for the podcast industry. And over the course of that day, each hour they would rotate into a new studio area and record as a guest on a different show. And in between those recordings, we would provide a catered lunch, we would provide networking, we would provide training and education, and we would provide a high level keynote. So we had the conference, the workshop feel the retreat and the podcast recordings. We did that a few times and then twenty twenty happened. So we're like, OK, well this is crazy because we're a live events company. What happens now? We had no idea, so he said, can this work virtually? There was only one way to find out. We took that agenda, that format. We sort of reworked what needed to be worked into a virtual format. And since May of 20, 20, which was our first pod, Max Virtual, we've never looked back. We're about to do our 14th 14th virtual event in August. And it's you know, it's one of those things that we we couldn't have seen that coming. Right. We wouldn't Joe: Yep, Josh: Have even looked virtual. Joe: Correct. Josh: So so now it's an eight hour event, which people who don't really know our style will say eight hours virtual. That's crazy. But we hear all the time that it flies by because we've sort of been able to really hone in on making all of those minutes per hour the best they can be. Joe: Right. Josh: And then the entrepreneurs get to record still on multiple shows. We have a keynote. We have training and education. So we know prior to the event we work with the thought leaders to help them further identify, practice and fine tune their message. So when they get to the recording, they feel confident and ready to go. Joe: It's so cool, so how many of these do you do? Josh: We do them about every six weeks. Joe: Wow, and how Josh: Yeah. Joe: Did you figure out the logistics, like I attended a couple virtual conferences and logistically it's very cool because you you don't really miss anything because a lot of stuff is is recorded to playback later and you're not wasting a lot of time on a showroom floor. You're going exactly what you want Josh: Exactly. Joe: Without having to walk around it. But how did you guys figure that out? Josh: Well, it came from the live, and then we we sort of transferred that virtually and we fill the eight hours, it's single track, right, to everybody's in the room going to the same places, Joe: Ok, Josh: Doing the same things. Joe: Ok, Josh: Yeah, Joe: And Josh: It. Joe: What's the number of attendees that you've gotten up to? Josh: We get about 50. Joe: That's amazing. Josh: Now. Joe: It's really cool, and I wasn't sure when so when when we talked about this being sort of like the speed dating for podcasting, there's a lot of podcasters out there who either are looking for gas or they want to be guest on podcast. And Josh: Mm hmm. Joe: I think they need to understand how iPod, Max, differs from those services that are out there, whether it's someone you get this connection with someone and they start feeding you gas or Josh: Yeah. Joe: You get this connection with someone and they keep putting you on different podcasts. Josh: Mm hmm. Joe: I think the important thing is that as a podcast for myself, I get I Josh: All Joe: Haven't Josh: The Joe: Been Josh: Time. Joe: On a podcast, which is kind of funny, but I haven't. Josh: Wow. Joe: But I get a lot of requests either from an agency that that Josh: Mm hmm. Joe: Said, hey, we want to work with you with really great guests or just people that find my podcasts and reach out and say, hey, I think you would really like this person. And I have to sort of filter through Josh: Yeah. Joe: What I think fits my audience. I'm not going to accept everyone because Josh: That's right. Joe: It's not fair to the listeners. Josh: Mm Joe: It's Josh: Hmm. Joe: A selfish endeavor for me. And you kind of hit upon it yourself. It makes it allows me to connect with people like you. It allows me to learn so much. But at the same time, I need to make sure that I'm servicing my audience and educating them on what they came here in the first place to see. Josh: That's right. Joe: So when you do iPod, Max, how do you do this matchmaking? How do you figure out that this guest is going to go and sit with this person and do recording and it fits the mold of their podcast or they're the right person? How does that all happen? Josh: Well, we've been lucky enough to do it for a while, and we have a lot turned out to be a core group of show hosts, like the vast majority of the show hosts return over and over again. Joe: Ok. Josh: Why? There's a lot of winwin. There's a lot of benefit. It's really cool for them to get to record three episodes in one day Joe: Mm hmm. Josh: In three different hours, which is a great thing. They also get to network with a lot of high level entrepreneurs and the other show hosts. They get to be right in the room with. We bring three now virtually we bring three keynotes in at a very high level of keynote. So they get to leverage that relationship off. Often they'll reach out to the keynote and then welcome them on their show. So it's just a really great vibe. There's a lot of a lot of personal growth and development built in to the day that you almost don't see coming until you're on the back end of it and you're like, oh, my gosh, it's just amazing. So they keep returning and through that then they become like family, right? Joe: Mm Josh: Like Joe: Hmm. Josh: At every event, the chats, everybody's just excited to see each other again. And it's sort of like old home week. So to answer your question, we've gotten to really know a good core group of the show hosts, knowing who they are, what their businesses are, what their shows are, what their goals are. And with that, we can then do our job. That takes a lot of the matching difficulty out because we know exactly who's coming through that they'd be perfectly matched for and because of the reputation where we've done such a good job prepping the entrepreneurs and attracting the right level of entrepreneurs and training them. Well, we hear all the time from the hosts that they don't even they don't even worry who they're going to be matched with. Joe: Right. Josh: You know, the week prior, you get you know, you get all the contact and bio information, but they're like, I don't even need to worry because I know whoever comes through, whoever you match me time and time again is going to be a home run. So then we we ask the entrepreneur coming through to fill out a somewhat detailed, extensive profile so we get to know them so we can properly match them. Then we just take the two sides and we have a few team members who are specifically dedicated to the matchmaking process because it's you know, it's got to be done right, takes a little bit of time, but we do it and then everybody seems to be happy on the other side of it. Joe: That's really cool, so when I saw on the website there was a apply to be a host, Josh: Mm hmm. Mm Joe: Correct? Josh: Hmm. Mm hmm. Joe: Is that the is that where the people that are going to do these interviews go to become part of TotEx? Josh: Correct, Joe: Ok. Josh: We're always, always open to meeting new potential show hosts for our event. Basically, you fill that out and the most important thing is we have to make sure because we we can't anticipate prior who's going to come through the event. But generally, our show hosts fill a category that can be broad enough in nature where it's an entrepreneur, it's a business show, it's about success, struggles, failures, life stories, growth mindset, that whole concept. A lot of categories fit into that. So as long as you're as long as you could, as long as you welcome guests that fit that, we could most likely start the conversation. And then we have a few other criteria just to make sure that you're relevant to to our whole brand and audience. Joe: So that was you actually hit upon one of my questions, which was what is the variety of hopes that you have at Cognex? Like, I would just give you an example off the top of my head. Would you Josh: Mm hmm. Joe: Ever have a. And it sounds like no, the answer is no based on what you just gave me, but that you at this moment there, it's more about entrepreneurial stuff. It's about success. It's about business. It's about things like that's not like you have one of these host who has a cooking podcast. Josh: It's so funny because Joe: Ok. Josh: To know well, yesterday, in fact, it's very strange you said cooking because yesterday a show we received an application from a potential new show host and it was, in fact, a cooking podcast. Joe: Unbelievable. Josh: That's the most yeah, it's the most amazing thing. But I think that to his credit, I think that there was an entrepreneurial spin. Like it's like he says like like I'll welcome chefs and cooks and entrepreneurs. I don't know. So Joe: Restaurant Josh: So there was Joe: Owners Josh: I mean. Joe: Were Josh: Yeah, Joe: Given Josh: Now Joe: A. Josh: Now something like that is going to be a little too niche for us because we can't fulfill. Right. Joe: Yeah. Josh: We don't get that kind of people, Joe: Now. Josh: But we are we do have the in the near future, we're going to start niching these out like pod max invest. Right. Joe: Oh, Josh: And then Joe: Cool. Josh: Every show is about investing in real estate and whatever. And then the people who come through or their pod max health and wellness. And then every show is that and then the audience supports that. But right now it's the first thing. It's entrepreneurial, it's business, it's growth, it's success. It's a life story. It's struggles, wins, failures, which we find a lot of people, even if they fit a specific niche, we help them extract. Let's get your life story out. And that's in. That's how we work with them prior to the event, to really fit a bigger a bigger audience here. Joe: Yeah, it's funny because my life partner, Joellen, and I have a YouTube channel that kind of morphed, we started it when covid hit and it sort of morphed over the year to now be really concentrated on travel. Our goal is to eventually have that the you know, Josh: A Joe: We're Josh: Travel log. Joe: Not young, so we're trying to inspire people of our age to go out and just do whatever you want to do and what's what's your excuse? Right. So we were talking about how some of these YouTube channels are lucky because they are they deal with things that are very current. So these guys that have these Krypto YouTube channels, they can't get out videos fast enough because that things Josh: Mm. Joe: Are changing so quickly. So it'd be interesting if you have a crypto pod, Max, someday and Josh: That's Joe: You could Josh: Right. Joe: Have like 12 crypto experts or I mean host Josh: Yeah. Joe: Having these people on because it's this new frontier. It's just crazy. But it's true that the things that are current, it's easy for those people. That's not so easy for people like us who are just in the trenches every day. Josh: Yes. Joe: But we're in New Jersey. Did you hold this just because. My own curiosity, because I live there as well. Josh: Trenton. Joe: Trenton OK, OK. I lived in Montclair, Upper Montclair, Josh: Oh. Joe: West Orange, even Newark, Josh: Of course, Joe: Even Newark Josh: One Joe: As Josh: Fifth Joe: It when it was starting Josh: Well. Joe: To grow. So. Yeah. Josh: 153 B, I went to Montclair State for a year. Joe: Oh, Josh: Yeah, Joe: That's so cool. Josh: You Joe: Yeah, Josh: Were by Joe: So, Josh: The campus, I imagine. Joe: Yeah, I was I was right there Josh: Yeah. Joe: Trumpet's the jazz club. You remember Josh: Yes, Joe: That? Yes. Josh: Of course, Joe: Ok, Josh: So funny Joe: I know. Josh: Jersey taqiyya. Joe: That's right. So talk to me about the people. So you have the application online for the host and you're obviously looking for those all the time to expand Josh: Mm Joe: Because Josh: Hmm. Joe: What is it? Each each host gets three interviews during that eight hour day. Josh: That's right. Joe: Ok, and then the people that want to attend Pod Max are potentially people that want to be guests be matched up with one or Josh: That's Joe: Two Josh: Right. Joe: Or any of Josh: Mm Joe: Those Josh: Hmm. Joe: Hosts. Josh: Three Joe: Three, three, three. Josh: Up to three Joe: Right, Josh: Up. Joe: Right. And then on the website I saw there was a button to buy. Is it is it to purchase a ticket for the next five max in August? Josh: That is correct. Joe: Ok. Josh: So the revenue and the and the tickets are from the entrepreneur side who want to be guests on the shows, Joe: Got Josh: They Joe: It. Josh: Come in, we train them, we work with them, we put them and match them on the show. So they record. We then, you know, they're in the room for the keynotes and the networking and everybody's happy. Joe: So explain to me, when you say we train them, what does that mean? Josh: We have so we when we first started virtual, we didn't have any sort of built in training, we just saw people coming to the event and the day the event happened and that was that. Then we had some people coming to us that said, you know what, I want to attend because they saw this as a great way to basically click a button, buy a ticket, and they'll be a guest on three shows. Right. How how else can that happen so quickly? And so guarantee that you're going to record in the course of a day and it's done now. You got three under your belt Joe: Mm hmm. Josh: More. We started getting people who in their own right were successful business people, six, seven, eight figure business people at everything from the C Suite on down. But they're coming to us saying, I've never been on a show before, but I want to or I've been on some. But I'm not that good. I need more confidence. I need more need more skill. And we thought, oh, my gosh, we're attracting a wide variety of successful business people who are now trying to break into podcasts, guesting. So we said, well, let's hold a prevent training where prior to the event, which is what we do now, we hold a 90 minute session with all the attendees prior to the event where we work with them in small groups. So they get one on one attention with Eric and me where we really get them going with their story, their message. We we listen to it, we prompt them, we give them feedback. We have them do it again. We give them notes. We say you're missing the bigger point. This is actually your sound bite. This is your message. This is what I'm hearing. And we just poke and prod until they're ready to go. And then they take the week prior to the event to get comfortable and practice and rehearse. And we do that kind of training. Joe: Well, that's very cool, and I think what I found as a as a host is I run into those people when they've written a book Josh: Mm Joe: And now Josh: Hmm. Joe: They want to promote the book. And Josh: Ok. Joe: They know that a really good way to promote the book is to get on as many podcasts as you can to get the message out Josh: Ok. Joe: That they've never been on one. So Josh: There you go. Joe: There you can see that they're a little awkward in having to talk to a camera and you know what I mean? So I find that that's that's a that's a big spot for me. When I get someone contacts me about, hey, we want to have so-and-so on. He's just written this great book and it's going to be released on Amazon in a month. And we'd like to get some sales. And Josh: Uh. Joe: And then you get that person and you can tell that they're just sort of wet behind Josh: Now. Joe: The ears in regards to being a guest. Josh: Yeah. Joe: So. Josh: Right, whether it's a host or a guest, you know, you said you have guests, but certainly, you know, as a host, it's not often as easy as it looks, right. Just because somebody is in front of a camera and has a mic, once you start doing it and then you put and then you're like, OK, this is a podcast. There's a lot of moving parts that you didn't anticipate. You have no clue what to do. And then there's so many things that you don't even know what you don't know until it's too late. And you're like, wait, what am I missing here? Same thing on the guest side. Everybody thinks like, no, I just talk to me, ask me some questions, I'll answer them. No way. Because there's two parts here. There's the technical and then the technique. Right. The technical is all this stuff, how you're framed, how you look, the lighting, the earphones, the microphone. Right. All very deliberate. And then there's the technique. What are your stories? How long are you answering? What's your energy and persona like? What are your sound bytes? Joe: Please, Josh: And we teach Joe: Please Josh: All that. Joe: Tell me that when you do some of this training with these new guests that you actually talk about equipment. Josh: Oh, my gosh, you have to, Joe: It's Josh: Of Joe: Just Josh: Course. Yeah, Joe: A. Josh: Thank you for observing that, because we don't want them showing up to the event because they're representing us and our brand. And it's all right. The next events that are better, they are they'll look good to the hosts and vice versa. Right. So we always require great professional level of host because we want a great host to represent the guests. And that's what makes it so well. So hosts nine times out of ten will already have, especially if they're working with us, they're professional. This is part of their business model and they're in it for the long run. They have a growth mindset. They get it. They're up and running guests. So you're right. Even like the ones that you would expect, like C suite level or quote unquote known famous company executives and employees, it's like they not ever you could assume, but they don't know. Joe: Yeah, Josh: A lot of them just don't know. So, Joe: That's. Josh: Yeah, we we do talk about that. Like you can't use your computer. Might stop with the window behind you, stop with that terrible green screen because half of your face is, you know, see through and it just doesn't work. Yeah. Joe: Yeah, I think the most brutal thing for me is when they have my voice coming out of their speaker and it keeps it keeps wiping out what right instead of it coming in headphones or in ears like I have, it just keeps Josh: Yeah, Joe: Hammering Josh: Uh. Joe: Over whatever when we're talking because it's the feet, it's the loop coming back through the mic. It's just Josh: Yeah, Joe: Brutal. Josh: Yeah, and even the angle, you got the perfect angle, you know, that that's, you know, are you too high, too low? It's it's all right. The technical and the technique, we cover it all. Joe: That's very cool. Well, that's that Josh: Thanks. Joe: Makes me so happy the more we can do that with guess, Josh: At. Joe: The better it will be. Josh: We're doing our part. Joe: So when is Permax? In August. Josh: August twenty seventh, we always have it on a Friday, it started that way and then we continued that way because one of the reasons it makes so much sense now to have it on a Friday, especially virtual, you spend eight hours from 9:00 to 5:00 Eastern again. Believe me, it will fly by. That's my promise. That's the way we make it happen. It's going to fly by no matter if you're a guest or a host. But you've still spent eight hours in the room absorbing everything and recording everything. So we just thought it was it was quite perfect to almost accidentally do it on a Friday, but then keep it it because let's take the weekend to sort of decompress and let it all process. Joe: Sure. Let me ask you the more of a personal question in regards to Josh: Sure. Joe: You with the hidden entrepreneur and you as a host and then as a guest, are you busy being a guest on other podcasts? And are you when you are a guest or are you talking about your show and what you've done as an entrepreneur? Are you talking more about, let's say, Pod Max and what you're doing with that? Josh: So I'm I'm a guest here and now in real time, Joe: Yeah. Josh: So you're so you're asking Joe: Do Josh: When Joe: You do a lot Josh: I'm Joe: Of these? Josh: Out. Joe: Do you do Josh: Oh yeah. Joe: You are you a guest? A lot on Josh: Yes, Joe: A lot of. Josh: Yeah, you ask a good question, though, what we what I do and really what we teach and promote is it's less about what you do and more about who you are, because that's what I think people are going to be attracted to. So I've spent time really honing in on and perfecting and continuing to perfect my story, my messaging, my communication, my positioning. A it's what I do on the business side. Right. So you sort of have to show that you can do what you're claiming to teach. Right. Which I think a lot of people Joe: Right, Josh: Don't Joe: What Josh: Do. Joe: You're asking others to do, right? Josh: Right. So if I can sort of show an example through me and be somewhat good at it, you're going to have more confidence coming along with what product or service I have. So it's in my best interest for a variety of reasons also because I still have some of that. I want the external validation right now. I don't need it, but it always feels good just as confirmation that you're doing something people value. Right. How else do you get that? But the feedback. So by doing something like this, it gives me feedback, my personal feedback and others. So I continue to hone and craft my story and message because it's what I teach and it'll help get my brand and message and story and business out there. Further, I, I talk about where I came from and my struggles, upbringing, and like we touched upon here, how I spent all the time hiding and all of those years led to creating what became the hidden entrepreneur, which then helped lead me into a career deep in the podcast space. But really it's about communication because you can apply it anywhere. You can apply it to your social media videos, to your emails, you know, to your sales calls, to all these stories and messaging still become relevant. So it's all encompassing. Joe: So for the entrepreneurs, again, that would be listening to my show, when you decided to do your podcast called The Hidden Entrepreneur. What was your main reasoning behind that? Josh: Great question, the reason out of the gate was I felt like I needed something to do right. I left that 10 year career running my own digital marketing agency, and I said, OK, what do I want to do with myself now? I didn't have all the answers. This is the important part. I didn't have all the answers. I just got the next answer, which I felt it clearly podcasting. And I said, I'm going to try it. I'm going to do it. I want to do it. I'm motivated to do it. And I think I'd be good at it. Meaning I think that I'll stick with it. And I think that this can really turn into something. I think that I can create this show and then around that show, parlay that into some sort of product or service in some regard that will put me on a path to success that I can live with and support myself with. That's really all I knew. And I knew that the show would give me confidence, right. Just by doing it and showing up each day, I knew that it would give me connection to each individual person. And lo and behold, it's it's it's literally has given me life. Joe: And the guests that you have on that show are entrepreneurs of all walks of life, but are Josh: Correct. Joe: So it's not that you are talking specifically to entrepreneurs who, like yourself, broke out of a shell and decided to do something. Josh: No, Joe: It's just Josh: No. Joe: It's just the name of it. It's something that speaks Josh: Correct? Joe: To your heart because that's Josh: Mm hmm. Joe: How you felt for a long time. And now it's just sort of like my show where we have great guests who are running their own businesses that have gone through the struggles are going through the struggles, have Josh: There Joe: Survived Josh: You go. Joe: 20, 20, all of those things. Josh: Absolutely, yes. Joe: Ok, cool, so then when let me ask you this question that when you are a guest, because I think all of this helps not only all the entrepreneurs that are listening, Josh: Mm hmm. Joe: That I don't have a podcast that don't go on podcasts that don't listen to whatever it might be, Josh: Right. Joe: Which is hard for you and I to understand, because, like, I was at the gym and I constantly having a podcast in my years. But when you are a guest, how do you figure out what your story is? Because you are this you led this life like I did, Josh: The. Joe: Right, with all of these things. And that's sort of like this is a selfish question, because I'm asking because Josh: Sure. Joe: If I was to be a guest on a podcast, Josh: Mm Joe: I'm Josh: Hmm. Joe: Not sure what Joe Costello would show up for that, because I don't there's so much that has happened. But it's not like I like I had Shaun Spawner on my show who summited all of the summits, like the they Josh: Right, Joe: Call Josh: Right, Joe: It the Josh: Right, Joe: I forget Josh: Right. Joe: What it's called anyhow. But he was amazing. He went to Everest, he went to the North Pole, South Pole, did all the summits. And so he has a story to tell and he has a short film that they did. There's people who come on and they have books. And so they've written a book on something very special. And Josh: Yeah, yeah. Joe: What's the story that you tell when you are on a show as a guest? Josh: The past forty six minutes will answer that. But in all seriousness, I I have over time you develop a library of stories that you have at the ready that encompass you and who you are, what you stand for, how you want to stand, why you want to stand for that, how you want to be perceived and positioned in your in your world. So I have a variety of stories that come about that I could explore based on the conversation I'm having. But they all wind up having an overarching theme, a core message, a core value, core stance that I deliver based on the hidden entrepeneur and where I've been and who I am and where I'm going. So you could learn about me so you can relate to me. So maybe you can like me enough to say, I want to I want to get to know this person more, see what else he does, Joe: Mm Josh: See Joe: Hmm. Josh: What he's about, and then we can explore each other's worlds together. So that takes a little bit of time to do, but that's sort of what we do. So if you're asking which I think you're asking, like, how would somebody like you who doesn't yet go on shows, where do you begin? Is that sort of what you're asking? Joe: Yeah, Josh: Like Joe: I mean, I Josh: Maybe Joe: Think. Josh: Right now? Everybody has a story where you you had a a life affirming or confirming incident that we can all write like I don't think I did necessarily, but I have enough of a story to make it interesting, relatable, compelling write. These are all things that are learnable skills, but they do start somewhere. Joe: All right. Josh: So you I read your website. So I know generally about you wanting growing up. You wanted to be a drummer, Joe: Mm hmm. Josh: Right, for the Stones or with the Stones. And so so broadly speaking, even if you started there with like a dream lost, never fulfilled yet, you know, where was the struggle there? I could spend five minutes and really dig into how painful did that get? What were some of the the turn how close did you get if if at all? What were some of those moments when you were behind closed doors in your own head? And then where are you today and how did it all go? Right. How did it all lead? OK, that could be a very compelling story that people can relate to. Of course, not everybody wanted to be a drummer for the Stones, but we all have our own version of that. So that's all you're tapping into, making it intriguing, making it compelling. And everybody has fascinating stories that they can put pieces together with and share them with the people who want to hear it. Joe: Yeah, that's great, I it's just that you think about it and you go and I think a lot of people feel this way, right? They're like, Josh: Nothing happened, right? Joe: My my story is not that interesting. Why should I tell it? And I don't necessarily feel that way. I've gone through a lot of iterations Josh: Right. Joe: And I have a lot of experience. And besides podcasting and our YouTube channel, you know, I run a seven figure booking agency here in Phoenix and Scottsdale. So I'm a successful entrepreneur. But again, this is the selfish thing for me is like I Josh: Yeah. Joe: Like meeting people like you and learning these kinds of things and sharing them before you. And I can help one entrepreneur out there with our show or what Josh: Yeah. Joe: You do with Cognex. That's a great thing, right? If it's just about and that's what I loved about this interview with you, is that you were very vulnerable and the way you spoke about yourself and it and it's refreshing to have someone to do that and not come and go. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, I ran I did this and I was running these huge corporations. And then I had all this money and I figured I didn't need any more money. So I decided to start a fight or whatever. I mean, it's just it's nice to hear that you and I went sort of through the same kind of thing Josh: Mm Joe: And Josh: Hmm. Joe: It was refreshing to hear. So I appreciate you doing that. I wanted to say thank you earlier when you were doing it, but the momentum was going. But it was very, very cool that Josh: Great. Joe: You were that real about all of that stuff. So thank you. Josh: You're very welcome. Joe. Joe: So what is the cost for the August next? Josh: We have three ticket levels that you could you could explore on the site generally there between under a thousand, up to two thousand. Joe: Ok, and. Josh: Depending on how you want the experience to go. Joe: Got it and all of that up there, they click on that button and they'll have those choices there. Josh: Mm hmm. Joe: Is there a deadline? Josh: Yes, one week prior to the event, tickets, clothes, whatever, whenever you're hearing this, if it's one week prior to the very next event, tickets, clothes, because that's when we have to do the match ups and get all the information out to the attendees. Joe: What's the date and August again? Josh: August 27. Joe: Twenty seven. OK, is there anything else that I missed that you wanted to touch upon? Josh: No, you've Joe: Wow, Josh: Been thoroughly thorough. Joe: That's beautiful. OK, great. So the links that you got work for you in order for people to either contact you in regards to the hidden entrepreneur, contact you in regards to Pod Max, what's the website, you URL, all of that stuff so we can make sure and then I'll have it all in the notes anyhow. But if anybody's listening, I want to I want Josh: Mm hmm. Joe: Them to hear it. Josh: That's great. Well, the business side is Pod Max Dot CEO, and then on the personal side, which will lead you to all kinds of forks in the road that you could explore. It's Josh Carey Dotcom. Joe: Perfect. OK, well, this is been great, man, I really appreciate it. I was excited to hear about Max. I will also check out The Hidden Entrepreneur. I appreciate you coming on here and sharing this with the audience. And hopefully we'll get a bunch of people that will attend and maybe some new host and guest will come out of all of this. But I appreciate your time today, and it's very, very nice to meet you and very interesting to hear what's going on with Max. Josh: Likewise, I appreciate it greatly. Thanks so much. Joe: Thank you, man. I'll talk to you soon.

god new york amazon internet co founders new jersey pleasure jersey mount everest stones ipods ironically c suite newark mm impressive scottsdale north pole band aids south pole montclair north jersey joe cool healthyplace podmax montclair state joe it joe you hidden entrepreneur joe get joe yeah josh it josh yeah josh you joe well joe so joe how josh no joe there josh well josh oh joe do cognex josh so joe all joe did josh don joe now

Tim O'Brien from The Healthy Place

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 30, 2021 56:01

Tim O'Brien along with his wife Becki, have created a unique vitamin, supplement and nutrition store that is more about helping people than it is about margins and commissions. As Tim says" Souls before sales!" It was a pleasure sitting down with Tim to learn more about The Healthy Place and what products and services they have to offer. After Tim educated me, I'm definitely going to lean on him and his team in the future, to help me make better and more educated decisions when it comes to my health. I hope you enjoy this episode and you walk away with at least one snippet that either helps you in your entrepreneurial journey or with you health in general. For 30% off, please use our affiliate link as it helps us to generate a little income to produce this podcast...thx so much! https://findyourhealthyplace.com/?rfsn=5901087.08b0f6 Thanks for listening! Joe Tim O'Brien Founder - The Healthy Place Website: https://findyourhealthyplace.com/ Website: https://livelyvitaminco.com/ Website: https://wildtheory.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/applewellness/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thehealthyplaceTHP YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYQVVKB58mGd_YgxAL0LMGA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/apple-wellness-the-healthy-place/about/ Email: tim@findyourhealthyplace.com 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 Tim: My guest today is Tim O'Brien, the founder of The Healthy Place, an e-commerce store for healthy products. They also have for brick and mortar locations, one in Madison, Wisconsin, one in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, one in Middleton, Wisconsin, and one in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Tim's passion is health and wellness, and he has spent the last decade sharing his passion with the world on a personal side. He is married to Becky and together they have three children. In this conversation with Tim, I expressed how much health and wellness is important to myself and how convoluted the marketplace is and very difficult to trust who you buy from and which products you buy. I was excited to have Tim on the show so that I could learn more about the difference in what the healthy place offers over buying products at other places like GNC, Walgreens, the vitamin shop and obviously Amazon.com. So sit back and listen to the education that we get from Tim on how to buy better and healthier products in the health and wellness space. Joe: Hey, Tim, welcome to the show. Tim: Hey, hey, how you doing, buddy? Joe: I'm doing great, man, happy, what is it? Wednesday, I lost track, I just got Tim: Yeah, Joe: Back into Tim: It's Joe: Town. Tim: Hump hump day of the week, man, and Joe: Beautiful. Tim: I'm doing this to say thank you for giving me a chance to be on your show. Man, this is cool. Joe: Yeah, no, that's my pleasure, as as I mentioned before, we actually started this that I have, you know, I know that literally health is everything. Like you can have everything in the world that you ever, ever wanted. And without your health, it's just, you know, it's it's unfortunate because I know people go through things that had nothing to do with them not being healthy. They just got delivered a bad hand, Tim: Yahav. Joe: You know, so that's a different story. But those of us Tim: Jerome. Joe: That can make sure we stay healthy, there are things that we can do. But before we get into all of that, and as a lot of my listeners for the podcast and the viewers of a YouTube channel, now, I'd like to get the back story because a lot of the people who listen to the show are my hope is that these entrepreneurial spirits that are trying to figure out what they want to do are there in the midst of doing it. And they they need ideas from people that are being successful doing it. So I would like to go back as far as you're willing to go back to allow myself and the viewers to understand how you got into what you're doing today. What Tim: I love Joe: For? Tim: To share that. Yeah. Joe: Yeah, like what triggered the fact that you're now in this world of, you know, Tim: Supplements, Joe: The health world Tim: Natural Joe: And. Tim: Alternatives, Joe: Yeah, Tim: Yeah. Joe: Yeah, yeah. So I'd love to hear that and then we'll get in, Tim: I'd love to. It's Joe: Ok. Tim: A cool story, I kind of like telling it because it's just cool to see how things can work together to sort of bring you to the place that you're at. And it's sort of confirmation in some different ways. So I love to share it, man. I'd be happy to do so when my when I was like five or six years old, my mom fought through thyroid cancer. And I remember her like going through the chemo radiation and losing the hair, like seeing her at the hospital. I have four siblings, so just a lot of fear in the home, worried about mom. And then I remember this time where she came home and she was sort of like excited and sort of like filled with a little bit of hope because she had gone into this health food store in a little town called Muskego, Wisconsin, just this tiny little town that had a health food store. And she talked to this guy named John for like an hour and a half. And John shared with her all these natural alternatives that had some good science and some good reason to believe that it could help her in her process recovery, treatment of the thyroid cancer. And so she would like go in there like once a week, whether it was a refill for some supplements or whether it was some more education, because there was a lot of literature that this guy handed out as well, like books that he gave her. Tim: And I would go with her. And through this whole process, she she was benefited quite a bit from these natural alternatives that helped her and her recovery process. So I remember hearing about that as a little guy. And through that process, she got a job as a manager at this health food store. And she was there all the time, 40, 50 hours a week kind of thing. And us kids were home schooled. So we would go with mom often sitting in this back room of this health food store, doing our math problems, doing our schoolwork. And I watched over the years these testimonies produced of people coming in with chronic pain, depression, sleep issues, other folks that battled cancer, that my mom held their hand through the process, educating them. And so that was like my whole upbringing. And it really got into my DNA that there is natural alternatives out there that work and the general population just doesn't know about them, because the way our medical system set up pharmaceutical medications, you know, we have some of the best doctors in the world. And, you know, you go to them, you get a prescription, you don't Joe: Mm Tim: Necessarily Joe: Hmm. Tim: Get a natural alternative recommendation. So I got a bit passionate about that in my late teen years. So I got a job at a GNC franchise and worked for the owner who invited me to move out to Madison, Wisconsin, to manage some of his GNC stores after a little while. So I was like, man, OK, my boss thinks I'm good at this. I really enjoy helping people, encouraging people. I just happen to like like people in general. So it was it was sort of a fit. Like I got this passion for this natural alternative thing. I feel like I'm helping people. I'm impacting the world. I want to make a difference. And I was managing these GNC franchises in Madison, Wisconsin. Well, there was a corporate takeover, dude, in twenty seven where everybody lost their jobs, like corporate took over these six franchises that my boss owned. And it was like, OMG, like, what am I going to do now? And so I determined, you know, hey, I want to do something. And that's natural alternative space. I have always been sort of passionate about business in general. I had like three paper routes when I was 11 and I hired my sisters for a quarter a day. I was making bank Joe: Right. Tim: And I was so I tried a network marketing business for a little while that was suppliments and that was brutal. Multi-level marketing can be really hard. And I was like, OK, I don't want to go that route. Maybe I should open my own health food store. And at that time I had just met dating, married Becky, my wife. So we're prayerfully like thinking through this. Should we do this, put the house on the line, open up our own health food store and risk everything. And we decided to take the plunge. So our first brick and mortar store, 2010, was in a town called Fitchburg, Wisconsin, which is right outside of Madison, Wisconsin. And then twenty fifteen, it was store number two in the Madison area and then twenty nineteen with stores three and four. So that was going well. We then moved towards ecommerce where like, hey, if we're making an impact and a difference here locally, which is really exciting, we really enjoy it together. We work as a team like let's let's hit the nation. That sounds fun. And so we started to see a little bit of success there, especially ones covid hit of last year because our in-store traffic took a hit. So our pivot as a company, like a lot of smart companies, was, let's focus on e-commerce. And so that really helped us talk about a blessing in disguise, really helped Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: Us figure out the e-commerce space a little bit. So really exciting. In December, January of this last year, we got our little warehouse. So now we have a warehouse in Madison and we're shipping packages out all over the United States. And that's the story. And the mission is about impacting, empowering and educating as many people as we can to just like, learn, grow and create a lifelong foundation of health and wellness. It's like a fanning a flame. You know, somebody already just has a little spark. You know, they're putting the cigarette out outside my store, throwing the McDonald's bag in the trash and like, I need something for my chronic pain all the way up to the health enthusiasts. And no matter what, to me, it's so encouraging to just fan the flame of someone's health and wellness. Because you said it earlier, life is a gift and people need to remember that. Joe: Yeah, and so have you always, based on the background of sitting in that store with your mother and seeing what the proper nutrition and supplements and things like that did for her? Did you always pretty much lead a healthy lifestyle? Tim: Funny is Joe: Don't Tim: No. Joe: Tell me you're a fast food junkie. Tim: No, I wasn't. Yeah, I was, and I always felt very bad if I was going through that fast food line, but my diet really didn't really take a huge impact until I married Becky. So for whatever reason, I would I knew a lot about supplements, really passionate about natural alternatives. But I was I was not the guy who is eating ultra clean, raw, organic, clean. I was like, OK, I'm going to eat a basic diet cleaner than most know what kind of excuses that. And then I'd lean on supplements for nutrition. And so when I met Vecchi, this is two thousand eight, she's like, wow, this doesn't even make sense. Like you can't go eat at pizza, frozen pizza, you know, and then go take your supplements. And so she really convicted me. And it's been a pretty cool team because that's always been her passion is very clean eating. And she didn't understand or know about the supplement natural alternative thing. And my passion has always been for my mom's story of natural alternatives and supplements can change a life. And so then getting married and working together as a team to educate Madison and our social media platforms and on YouTube, it's like there has to be a marriage between nutritional deficiencies, making sure we don't have them eating well, eating clean exercise. So we should work together. And I've improved since meeting, Becky. Joe: Wow, so are you actually telling me that she was already before you guys even met, she was interested in this sort of thing or she was she was Tim: Yeah. Joe: A healthy, clean eating person. Tim: Yes, she was Joe: Wow. Tim: A health enthusiast, yeah, I mean, just health, and that's part of what drew me to her is like, man, this girl's got discipline, like extreme self-control. For me, that's been an area of struggle, just like in general, like discipline waking up early. I'm the guy that would, before I met Becky, like stay up till one and then sleep till nine till I had to quit, get to work. And, you know, he's like, man, we got some work to do. But, yeah, she sure inspired me and a few of those areas. Joe: Ok, so without prying too deeply then, because now you're really piqued, my interest is the fact that you guys are lying so well. How did you meet? Tim: Yeah, so we there was like a young adults meeting through it, through church called Metro Believers Church in Madison, Wisconsin, you know, I'm a Christian, she's a Christian, and in my early twenties, it was like, hey, I really enjoyed finding people like minded. And I think in the back of my mind, I'm like, I'm searching for a life, you know? So I would go to a couple of these different churches, young adult ministry meetings, whatever, 20 something groups. And we just started hanging out. So it was like a group of like six or seven of us. And I was about six months in. I pulled her aside one day after church and said, I still laugh at what I said. I said, Hey, Becky, I've taken a shining to you and I'd like to continue on to marriage. And she's like, oh my gosh. Like, OK, I'm kind of like you, too. It was weird way to ask, but OK. Joe: It's also that's Tim: Yeah, Joe: Old school, Tim: I don't do it right. Oh, yeah. Joe: But also Tim: Oh. Joe: All right, cool, well, that's that's great. So how did you change or why did you change the name from Apple Wellness to the healthy place? Tim: Yeah, really good question, you know, Apple Wellness was a good name, you know, in the sense of like Apple a day keeps the doctor away and we just had too many people thinking we are the Mac Apple store. So I literally get calls, at least weekly, Joe: Wow, Tim: And Joe: That's so subtle. Tim: At least I know, and then I'd see my employee across the way and he'd be talking to somebody and he'd be like, well, try turning the phone off and then turn it back on, you know? Joe: Oh, my Tim: So Joe: God. Tim: Especially after he got the e commerce thing going, I started, Becky, as the graphic designer and kind of branding expert within our company for a long time. She's like the Apple word's taken. That's just gone. And I should have consulted with her a little bit more before we chose the name. Joe: Uh huh. Tim: And so she's always kind of wanted it changed. But then I found out that Apple, the company, has an Apple wellness program Joe: Oh, Tim: For employees Joe: Of. Tim: Like it's trademarked. I mean, so I figured it was just a matter of time before I end up getting some sort of litigation letter from Joe: Yeah, Tim: Apple. Joe: Yeah, well, OK, that's interesting. Tim: Yeah. Joe: So you stole one of my questions, but it was perfect because it was actually in line with what you were talking about. But I want to go back to it because Tim: Sure. Joe: It's important, again, for like the entrepreneurs that are listening to this and what we just went through with covid, you talked about shifting. They're not shifting, but literally adding to what you've already established. Right. So you were Tim: You. Joe: You were a retail store, people walking in foot traffic. That's what you counted on to make a living. Right. So when covid hit, obviously, everyone stayed home. So there goes all the foot traffic. So did you already have the e commerce portion of this set up before this happened when you said it was a blessing in disguise? Were you already ready to go the moment like that? Tim: Really Joe: The Tim: Good. Joe: You know, Tim: Yes, Joe: The doors. Tim: Yes and no, I Joe: Ok. Tim: Mean, it's like we had the website, we had the ability to set up ship products out. We had maybe three hundred out of the four thousand products that we have in our stores on the site. So we were ready in certain ways and then not ready for a lot of things. And we had no idea on the digital side of marketing, Google ads, Facebook ads, SEO optimization, email marketing. We hadn't done text messaging. We hadn't done very much of that, very basic and each one of those areas. So it was all of a sudden like pedal to the metal once March hit, where it was like, OK, we have some of these basic fundamentals. And I always tell a business owner like you, if you don't already, you have to have a website like I mean, covid showed us all that pretty quick, like Joe: Yeah. Tim: Have to have a website and you can get free ones are very inexpensive. Wick's dotcom. I'll tell business owners, like even if you're not a photographer, don't don't try to be don't don't get some real basic a white posterboard. Put the product right over it. Just take a picture by a window. Don't don't try to get real clever with it because Vecchi tells me that it can end up looking really bad if Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: You're trying to do so. Basic things like get a website, get a social media, you know, ask your grandkid if you don't know how to set one up sort of thing. So we had all the basics, but then for us it was like, OK. Let's get live chat on our website, because we are one of our difference makers, is consultations Joe: Huh? Tim: With we change lives because we ask questions and we figure out the best products and forms and brands for their specific issues, problems. So let's get a live chat on our website so we can have those conversations. Let's get free shipping. Let's make it really easy. Even if we lose money on maybe one out of five orders, let's just like make it easy, reduce friction in any way that we can. Let's get on Google ads and Facebook ads. So we hired a digital agency for that and it's pretty cool. A year later, we had 30 percent overnight of our foot traffic was just gone once we were able to stay open, thankfully. But that 30 percent in one year's time, we were able to build that on our e-commerce platforms. We were able to replace what was lost. So I'm still head spinning, so thankful for my team able to bring that together because it's quite the operation and it takes a lot of work. Joe: Yeah, did you did you keep the stores open themselves or did you? Tim: We did Joe: You did OK. Tim: Not. Joe: Ok, Tim: We Joe: And Tim: Were Joe: Was it. Tim: Scrambling in the beginning of if we could be classified as essential or not, and my belief is that the immune system is something that can really be strengthened. I'm more passionate about terrain versus the germs so we can strengthen our terrain, strengthen our immune systems, both defense and offense. I mean, there's incredible science behind simple nutrients like sand, mucus from elderberry. The University of Sydney showing the prevention which with elderberry prevention of viruses entering the cell. I mean, it's some pretty cool science. So at the beginning of the covid thing, it was like, OK, I'm not going to tell anybody I can cure or prevent Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: Whatever, but I'm sure as heck going to yell it from the rooftop that you can strengthen your immune system and a strong immune system. Strong health is the best defense against any disease, virus, sickness anywhere. So I got pretty passionate about that a year ago. Joe: Cool. Yeah, that's great. So I'm normally pretty good at not bouncing around, but in this case, I want to go back to when you decided to do this. You know, obviously when when someone gets released from a corporate environment and they're like, oh, my gosh, I don't have control over my own destiny because these people Tim: The. Joe: Just literally rip the rug out from underneath me, which is another thing that a lot of entrepreneurs know because this is how they got to where they are there that happen to them. Like I'm not letting someone else dictate how my life is going to turn out. Right. So Tim: Yeah. Joe: But what's really crazy is I don't know if it if in Wisconsin or the places where you have these stores, obviously we know that you already brought it up at GNC is a big brand around the country. There's also where we are. There's the vitamin store. Right. Are the stuff that one of those Tim: Yeah, Joe: Is a vitamin Tim: Yeah, Joe: Shopper. Tim: Yeah. Joe: So there's a lot of these places. So it's almost like you saying you and Becky going, oh, yeah, we're going to create the next pizza delivery like pizza Tim: Now, Joe: Delivery Tim: There's already Joe: Franchise. Tim: 10 right around Joe: Yeah, Tim: The corner, Joe: Right. Tim: So let's see number 11, yeah. Joe: Right. It's we're going to be the next Pizza Hut or Papa John's or whatever. It's just like that that industry Tim: Yes, Joe: That's it takes a lot Tim: It's Joe: Of guts. Tim: So competitive. Joe: Yeah. So when you thought about it, as all entrepreneurs, do, we always come up with these ideas and then we sometimes will kill our own ideas without our spouse or partner or someone will say they'll be the sensible one and say Tim: Right, Joe: That's Tim: Right, Joe: Never Tim: Yeah. Joe: Right. But then you have all these outside influences of of friends and things. And, you know, at any moment, if you would have said, hey, we're thinking of opening up a vitamin supplement, healthy sort of Tim: John. Joe: That people would look at you. But what about all of these major brands? So tell me about how you got over the hump to make to pull the trigger. Tim: Yeah, do that's such a good question and, you know, to identify and I had some friends who opened a coffee shop, you know, and a year later, you know, the coffee shops not doing so well is unfortunate with covid timing and everything. And it's like the supplement thing where you, like, hear this and you're like, oh, I don't know, you know, I wish him well, but I don't know if that's going to work because it's just like there's a hundred of them, you know. Joe: Right. Tim: So I think for me what happened was I worked for GNC for, I don't know, five years. And you start to see good stuff. You start to see bad stuff, you start to see their model. They were purchased by China a while back. So, OK, it's all sourced from China. Forms of nutrients are in their synthetic forms or not so absorbable forms. And you start to learn like, OK, a better product would help this person more than this form of curcumin that's not absorbing into their system from China or wherever, you know, so you start to see where you could make a difference and you sort of start to see your difference makers. So in the supplement world, there's two veins of supplement stores. There's the type of stores that are all about muscle gain and weight loss, you know, weight loss, thermogenic high caffeine, ephedra, and then trim and tracks Hydroxycut. And a lot of that isn't super healthy for Joe: Hmm. Tim: People to be taking steroids or pro hormones, you know, not super healthy. So that's like one vein of supplement stores. And then there's another vein of supplement stores that just they sourced from China. They use synthetic nutrients. It's a little bit more about margin and profit than it is about quality and making a difference. And so that is something I realized pretty early on. And there's not too many supplement health food stores that have a lot of knowledge where you walk in. And there's not just like a high schooler selling the huge jug of protein because it gets a two dollar commission on it, you know. Joe: Yes, I do know. Tim: Yeah, yeah. And there's just not a lot of those out there. So then all of a sudden starting to dream about, you know, originating from my mom's story where somebody really helped her out, where I can really make a difference, because if I open my own stores or store at the time, I can bring in some of the best brands in the world. And pretty quick, in any industry, you find out, good, better, best. And I want to be in that best category. And all of a sudden you're working with some of the best brands in the world and you have the knowledge to be a to guide somebody with Crohn's disease. Let's just Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: Talk over asthma on natural alternatives that really work. And if you impact them, if you help them, if you change their life a little bit for the better, now they're going to keep coming back forever. And they tell everybody they know because there's such a vacuum, such a desperate need in this day and age for knowledgeable resources in the natural alternative space. We have a ton of medical, we have a ton of pharmaceutical drugs. We just don't have information coming to the general public on natural alternatives that work. And I get to be that resource in Madison, Wisconsin. So I think that's why we have done well in our brick and mortar stores. And I think that's probably why our attention is higher for our e-commerce is because of that customer service, that knowledgeable resource, that going the extra mile to impact their lives. And I'll give you an example. A lady might hit our live chat from California and say, hey, I'm looking for a V12. Can you give me a recommendation? And then we might ask the question like, absolutely. Here's a couple of options. Do you mind if I ask while you're while you're taking V12? Oh, my doctor said because I have really low energy, I have nerve pain and my mental clarity and focus, I get like foggy brain all the time. So then all of a sudden we say, awesome, OK, I'm actually going to encourage the method in form of V12 because it absorbs much better than this sign form that I first sent you, because I really want you to feel the difference. And since you're feeling fatigued, a little brain fog, I'd love for you to consider this adrenal boost product that has adapted genic herbs in there, like Atul Gawande wrote Rodeo Mocca because ninety two percent of fatigue is related to your adrenal glands. So then you recommend that product. They get it. And this lady two months later goes, Oh my gosh, my energy is a little better, my focus is better, my stress is reduced, which I didn't even bring up. But that adrenal product helps with stress, too, I guess. Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: Then all of a sudden they're leaving a review like, wow, that wellness consultant, Ryan, he's one of our our wellness consultants. He really helped me out. And so it's a very different sort of dynamic than a typical GNC store, health food store, vitamin shop type experience. They're Joe: Huh? Tim: All great stores. I mean, I love Natural. Anywhere you can get them. So that was like our difference maker and that's why I thought I could make a go out of it. Joe: Ok, cool. I have so much to ask you now, because you keep opening up like Kansas. So. So before again, I, I want this stuff to be helpful for the entrepreneur. And then then we're going to help the consumers that listen to this. So how when you decided on doing this and said, OK, and let's pull the trigger, how did you figure out the place where you're going to open up store number one, that you do all that extensive, Tim: Oh, Joe: You know, Tim: Good question, yes. Joe: Traffic, you know, what's going to pop up around us? What Tim: You know, Joe: Is, you Tim: Find Joe: Know? Tim: Find a good broker, a real estate broker that can find you spaces. So I had a guy named Kent in Madison, Wisconsin, and he you don't have to pay these guys. You know, it's the landlord that pays them. Joe: Right. Tim: And so as a young entrepreneur about to, like, risk everything you had, that was really important for me to know. Like, I I still am shocked by that. Like, you can just call one of these guys, try to find a reputable one, find somebody that trusts that can make a good referral. And they do all this scouting for you. They send you all the reports and you don't pay a penny. You know, I am a bottom line at the end or something, but you don't pay a penny for this. They get paid from the landlord. So he was bringing me idea after idea after idea. And he had been in the industry for a long time. So he knew the city really, really well. And he was able to guide me through, hey, this has a really strong anchor. The anchor in Fitchburg was Joe: Yeah, Tim: Target. Joe: Yeah. Tim: It was a super, super target. So I was like, oh, learning about anchors are important, Joe: Yeah. Tim: Really important. So I tell you, if you're listening, like, look for some strong anchors, because that's really going to help you for traffic. Joe: And just for the listeners and the people that don't like it, like when they talk about like a small strip mall or a plaza or something like that or even in a in a mall small, an anchor is an anchor store. That is when they go in, there's a really good chance they're not going away like they are a big thing like Target or Wal-Mart Tim: Exactly. Joe: Or Nordstrom or whatever. So I just wanted to clear that up because I didn't know at one point. But I know when you're looking at retail space like that, you want to be surrounded by an anchor store that has been around forever and is not going away. Tim: Yes, and just to further drive that point home, we have for brick and mortar stores and the one that's doing like the worst is the one that doesn't have a strong anchor by it. So just get one with a strong anchor and then look at price points and definitely negotiate. So we had that broker that was able to help us out. He was able to negotiate tenant improvement. Our big deal when you're opening a store, because you you could use money towards the build out and you can ask landlords for that. So if, again, if you have a good broker and you tell them your story, what you're trying to build out, a lot of times you can get a number of things paid for by the landlord because they're about to ask you to sign a five year lease. Joe: Mm hmm. OK. So at this point, the four locations that you have, you are in a lease situation Tim: Yes, all for you Joe: At Tim: And I've Joe: Any Tim: Looked into purchasing. Joe: Ok, so there is yeah, that's my question. It's like when do you pull the trigger on saying, OK, I want to actually start to own some of these buildings are these spaces. And that's a huge job. That's that's really put your Tim: Yeah, Joe: Neck out. Right. Tim: So in all four, I looked at them and each one has a different story, the first one I looked into though, at the Fitchburg location, the buildings were not for sale. So I was like, all this is so cool. So I looked into it and it was seven million dollars for these two buildings because it's in a strong anchor, high traffic area. So it is difficult to buy the spot by the strong anchor Joe: Maha. Tim: Because it really it would have been risking I couldn't I couldn't do it. But then the idea next idea is like, well, maybe I should move locations now that my name is established, if I can buy a strip mall down the way or something like that. So that Joe: Te. Tim: Idea is in the back of my head. But then you move away from the strong anchors. That's Joe: Right. Tim: Been called me back. Joe: Right, cool. See, that was perfect because that was like all of the things that you have to consider and Tim: Right. Joe: It's yeah, that's a tough decision, man. That's a lot of money. Tim: It is, Joe: Yeah. Tim: Dude, I Joe: Yeah. Tim: Know and I have a buddy who owns a dentistry office and he Joe: We. Tim: Was able to purchase his location and it's awesome. He's about to pay it off after ten years. And I'm super excited. So Joe: Yeah. Tim: It is depends on the situation. Joe: Yeah, OK, so now let's get into what I consider in the world that you're in and I'm a huge fan of natural like I is, it's a there's a difference between naturopathic or is. Right. Is that pronounced correctly? Is that they say it Tim: Yeah, Joe: Now Tim: Naturopathic Joe: Or Tim: Medicine Joe: Or homoeopathic. Tim: Homoeopathy yupp homoeopathy Joe: Right. OK. Tim: And integrative medicine is kind of like medical and naturopathy together. Joe: Yep, yep, so Joel and my life partner went through a battle of breast cancer where she had some lymph nodes and luckily, you know, Tim: Giese. Joe: Through through chemo and radiation, she came out on the other side and everything's great. But Tim: Good. Joe: The big thing that she also had was she had a naturopathic doctor Tim: Hmm. Joe: That went that came from the cancer world. So the advantages is that he understood the treatment that was happening with the normal medicine and he knew what to give her to not take away from what she was doing with the chemo and radiation, but at the same time helped to keep her system built up and not offset any of that. So there was a perfect marriage between the two. And Tim: That's. Joe: I swear to this day, I feel like that was the reason that she was Tim: Wow. Joe: Fairly, fairly normal through the process, like we were doing 90 X and she was in the middle Tim: That's Joe: Of chemo Tim: All Joe: And radiation. Tim: Right. Joe: Yeah, it was ridiculous. So Tim: Dude, that's Joe: So Tim: Awesome. Joe: I'm a big fan of the naturopathic side of things and natural remedies and all of that. So Tim: Not the. Joe: So that's why this was a cool episode for me, because it's hard to talk with somebody that is in this niche that you're in without it being the big stores. And so my first question, because I got so many of them Tim: I Joe: First question and the first Tim: Love Joe: Question Tim: It. Joe: Is how do you become with all of the misinformation that's out Tim: The. Joe: In the world? Right. And this is what confuses all of us as consumers. You go to Amazon and you say, I need a B vitamin of Tim: Right Joe: Some B supplement. Tim: Now. Joe: And the habit is you you click on the five star rating, things that you want. You think that's going to be the best because people are taking their time to read it, which Tim: Yeah. Joe: I think there's enough Tim: What Joe: Conversation Tim: Did he. Joe: In the world that says that's not necessarily true. Tim: Right. Joe: And then you literally are just like throwing darts at a dartboard with Tim: I Joe: A blindfold Tim: Know that, Joe: On. So. Tim: I know. Joe: So how do you get through all the misinformation that you feel so confident enough that when you when you suggest something to a client that you haven't been taken advantage of by the misinformation, like Tim: Yeah, Joe: How do you get through Tim: Because. Joe: All of that stuff? Tim: A great question and even the reviews, if a company markets really well and they're incredible at marketing, they can get a billion, five star reviews and they can be like synthetic sourced from China, not NSF certification. So over the years, you start to be able to read between the lines and you start to be able to say, hey, this is B.S. over here. This is marketing. Only not met with quality. And like any industry, you start to learn the good, better and best. So there's a few things. So first and foremost, I think everybody needs somebody on their team. Like your wife has that naturopathic doctor now as a resource that she can probably shoot an email to or make an appointment with and ask these questions. I think everybody needs somebody on their team because most people have a medical doctor and beyond that and they might have a pharmacist. Right. And they're good to have on your team, but we need somebody with. Expertise, knowledge, history in the supplement space, because even a naturopathic doctor, they know way more than I do about the human body, about maybe. Yeah, just just how to treat maybe disease. Tim: Right. When you're in the supplement space, there is you get to deal with hundreds and hundreds of brands. And over the decades, which I think 18 years now, you start to find out what brands are good and trustworthy and which ones aren't because the FDA doesn't regulate all the supplements. So you can say whatever you want on the label about me, your romantic drink here, but you can say whatever you want and. FDA isn't going to necessarily nail you if you're lying, if your label is making false label claims and this happens, there was a clinic in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where not real clinical, but where they took products from a number of stores, GNC, Walgreens, Wal-Mart and Target. They took supplements from those four stores and then they had them tested at Chavannes and it was Chavannes Labs. And all four of them had discrepancies with what the label said and what was actually in the capsule. And one product was an Asia product, which is good for the immune system. And it had zero percent echinacea in there and a little bit of garlic like Joe: Oh, Tim: What Joe: My Tim: The H Joe: Gosh. Tim: Now? Yeah. So that exactly what you said. It's shooting in the dark. Is it marketing that's producing these reviews? Is it quality? Is it going to help me? Is it a waste of my money? Am I being sold. Right. So there's all those questions and the privilege that I'm so thankful for is just being submersed in the supplement world long enough. You learn a couple of things. So sourcing is vital. Where is it coming from? There is vitamin C that you can get our China, that there's some concerns there with chemicals, heavy metals, arsenic, or you can get vitamin C from Scallan, which happens to have a really rich ascorbic acid form of vitamin C clean, great place to source it from. So where a product is sourced from is really important. Number two is does the brand have NSF certification? So NZDF C, GMP grade facilities that they work with, which they're paying money to NSF to a third party test and ensure that they're having all of these practices that are healthy for supplements, they're sourcing their cleanliness. Has it been tested? Is it clean? Those questions? And NSF doesn't care about the company. They care about the reputation. So there sure as heck going to just that's a good certification is trusted in the supplement world to ensure that what's on the label is actually in the product. Tim: So sourcing No. One, NSF, GMP certification, number two and number three, which all of these take some sort of expertise or having somebody on your your team. You know, that's why I say to have somebody on your team first. But number three is the forms of nutrients. So E 12, which I gave the example earlier, Psion Kabalan and B 12 is synthetic. So your body has to convert it and you lose a lot of the content in that conversion versus a methyl form B 12, which is the natural form that your body absorbs really, really well. So four items, number one and two, saucing and NSF, you can have a very clean form of sign Kabalan and B 12 source, very clean. You could have NSF facility ensuring that you have that 50 micrograms of cyanide Kabalan B 12 in the B complex. But then it would take some expertise to know, like, OK, that's fine, that's good. But we would prefer a methyl form would be 12 because it absorbs so much better Joe: Mr.. Tim: And every single nutrient. This blows my mind because every single nutrient has good, better, best. You know, whether you're talking about vitamin C, ascorbic acid, sodium ascorbic calcium ascorbic B 12, which I'm talking about the six paroxetine hydrochloride versus toxified phosphate turmeric. You can get the the turmeric that colors your Indian curry orange and you can take that capsule and it's good for you. It just doesn't do very much for inflammation unless you extract the curcumin out and then even that doesn't have a good absorption rate. So blending it with the turmeric, essential oils and the sunflower lecithin launch the absorption where it's literally absorbing two hundred to five hundred times better than the turmeric Indian spice that you started with. And that's the form of ninety five. That's the form that Baylor University of Texas is using to literally treat cancer and chronic pain with incredible results. I mean, the cancer story is very cool. Inflammation is the root of the root system of cancer. Joe: Mm, huh. Tim: So that's an example where it's like oh man form so saucing, NZDF, GMP, great facility forms of nutrients. Those are the big three that you want to look at to know quality. Right. So that's what I always tell somebody, find somebody that you can trust. So for you guys, it might be your your doctor that your wife worked with for in Madison, Wisconsin. A lot of people trust the healthy place to help guide them, know we don't do commission so that we can just recommend what's best so Joe: Right. Tim: People can use that live chat feature on our website to just ask those questions. But find a health food store maybe that is trustworthy in your home town, that you do meet a job like my mom met John Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: Or find a store like mine that you can connect with and you can go to when health strikes, health problems strike because everybody has some conditions, some problem, something, even if it's something as simple as fatigue, you know. Ninety two percent of fatigue is related to your adrenal glands. You can strengthen your adrenal glands and you can have more vibrant energy every day. And people just don't know that. So they keep reaching for the coffee or the soda or the caffeine pills, what have you. So get somebody on your team that you can trust. Joe: So go. So you said at one point in this conversation that do you have over 4000 Tim: Products, yeah. Joe: Excuse now, right? OK, so let's just take that as an example. It's a full time job for someone like you to be the Tim: Yes. Joe: Gatekeeper Tim: Yeah. Joe: Of your of the healthy place. You have to be the gatekeeper to say, yes, this comes into our door and gets put on ourselves or in our e-commerce store or Tim: The. Joe: No, this doesn't meet the criteria. So to me, it feels like it's continuing education and literally a full time job for whoever that person. Let's just say it's you at the moment that Tim: Yeah. Joe: Is the person that says yay or nay on these products. So it's just mind boggling what is out there and what you have to do to sort of educate yourself to to say, yes, this makes the cut, not only doesn't make the cut, but it's in a product. It's not a product and not a C product, you Tim: Yeah, Joe: Know what I mean? Tim: You're Joe: So. Tim: Absolutely right. And it's like reading a book, though, you don't want to minimize what I do, it's like it's not hard for you to read English, you know, after you've learned it. But if you're learning a new language, it looks like totally confusing. Overwhelming can take me forever to learn this language. And it might take some years to learn it. Once you have that language mastered, it's just like reading a book, you know, Joe: Yeah. Tim: You just check the boxes, right. OK, where is the source from NSF? GMP, what's the forms of these nutrients? Because you start to learn and then you have experts that you follow. A lot of people smarter than me that I follow. Dr. X, Dr. While, Dr. Whitaker, Dr. Northrup. And you start Terry Lambrew and you start to follow these gurus in the southern industry that have been there for 40 years, that know so much more than you. And you're reading their literature, listening to their podcasts. They're the symposiums around the planet that are going on for this breakthrough, that breakthrough. You get the subscriptions right to the. So I just tell everyone, get plugged in at least where you're getting encouraged on a regular basis to own your health, build your terrane strength in your health and all the ways that you can inspire yourself on a regular basis and then get somebody on your team that you can trust to help guide you in the space, because it is a new language, right? Joe: It's nuts, it's just it's so frustrating. Did a three month vegan plan Tim: Nice. Joe: Because Tim: Yeah. Joe: I'm not vegan, but I loved it like it was good for me. But I Tim: Yeah. Joe: Actually I actually, in the process, lost a lot of muscle mass because I was also going always going to the gym. But all of a sudden I started to shrink both, Tim: Right, Joe: You Tim: Like, Joe: Know. Tim: No. Joe: So, yes, I'm like, I'm doing all this hard work. And it's just I needed to get on a B 12 vitamin of something. And it's funny because I don't even know what I'm taking, but it's something that I got from Amazon and Tim: Your Joe: I Tim: I can do it. I've been assigned to general Joe: I'm sure. Tim: Check that Joe: So Tim: After Joe: I'm going Tim: The program. Joe: To look when yeah. When we're done, I'm going to look and then I'm going to and then I'm going to say I need a direct line to Tim in Tim: There Joe: The Tim: We Joe: Chat Tim: Go. Joe: Room. Tim: Yeah. Joe: So have you ever thought of franchises? Tim: I have, I Joe: And Tim: Have. Joe: And I'm Tim: You Joe: Just interested you don't have to you don't have to Tim: Know, Joe: Say to. Tim: I'm so I am very interested and I have been kicking that ball around in my head for a long time because we are we specialize in education, right. So you got to find ways to duplicate yourself in a franchise. And so we created a three month curriculum that our wellness consultants have to go through. They have to pass quizzes and tests and they have to get certifications from this company, this company and MKB certification, all the enzyme certifications to understand the industry, know what questions to ask customers and how to make recommendations. So that's one of the hardest things that we've done that would make it more easy to duplicate the knowledge side of our company and our brand. And as I've talked to people who have created franchises, the the legal side to it is one hurdle and then enforcing them to actually maintain your model as representing the healthy place. What we have created is the two big unknowns for me as far as difficulty. So then the choice came, should we just keep adding brick and mortars in our own territory? Right, right. In the Madison area and then put all of our energy and focus into our brands that we've created and our website because there's infinite you can do in the business world and you kind Joe: Mm Tim: Of Joe: Hmm. Tim: Have to choose. Joe: Yeah. Tim: So we decided to park the franchise idea for now and really go after lively vitamin CO. This is one of the brands that have been borne out of our brick and mortar stores. So now we're selling that to other health food stores around the country. And the number two is build find your healthy place dotcom, because just like Amazon is a freakin mammoth, there's so much opportunity to impact and power and educate everything that I'm passionate about on that website. So currently with four kids, we are chilling on the franchise idea. But I think it's brilliant because there's not there's not the option out there, which is why it keeps coming back to me Joe: Yeah, Tim: Like Joe: Yeah. Tim: There's not that many health food stores out there that really care. Soulsby for sales. You know, as one of my Joe: Mm Tim: Saying Joe: Hmm. Tim: That, Joe: I Tim: I really Joe: Love that, by the way, I love that. Tim: Thank you. Thank you. There is a time I was praying and it was like not I it going to make my friggin mortgage. When I first opened the store, I was praying to God for sales and I was like, God to declare bankruptcy here is brutal. And it was like an arrow is like, do you care about their soul as much as you care about the sales? Joe: Yeah. Tim: And it was kind of striking. So, yeah, there's not that many stores out there that really care about the human that have knowledge to help guide them and a model that works to help people, you know. So it's still an idea that keeps coming back to me. So Joe: Right. Tim: We'll see. Joe: Yeah, well, good luck if it happens, I'm sure it'll be great. Tim: Thank you. You see one popping up next door, you'll know where to get your V12. Joe: There you go. So you hit upon this a moment ago with the whole franchising thing of how to actually create this template and create a strict thing where where the people that are talking to your customers are very educated and they're giving the right information and asking the right questions. So how have you done that with the people that are at your current stores and how have you done that with the people that are on the other end of the chat? When somebody files in to ask these questions, Tim: Yeah, so. Joe: How do you get something like when is somebody OK? You're ready to take a call, you're ready to be on the chat, you're ready to to advise a customer in the store, like, what's that process? Tim: Yeah, Joe: And you don't Tim: So. Joe: Have to go too deep. I just Tim: No, Joe: I Tim: No, Joe: But Tim: That. Joe: I'm sure somebody is going to say, like, hey, Tim, super educated on this. So every time I talk, like I just said, you know what I call him on the chat, I want him, you Tim: Right. Joe: Know. So Tim: Right. Joe: How to how do you duplicate Tim so that everyone that's coming in on the chat or walking in the store says this is just a clone of Tim like he may. He's already run them through the ringer, you know? Tim: Yeah, that's so the three month curriculum that we created is our pride and joy. I'm so thankful for that. It was brutal to create. So I created one hundred videos, having a five minute conversation where I'm explaining different parts of the world and explaining brands and what to look for and how to explain it. And then we'll go through they'll have to pass quizzes and tests based on each module. So there's nine different modules to this curriculum. They have to go through trainings with specific companies. They have to do a number of roleplaying activities with our managers where they pretend to be the customer Joe: Mm Tim: And Joe: Hmm. Tim: Coming in, hey, I'm looking for some CBDs. What do you got? And so they get tested there and they have to get these certifications from each of these brands, so they have to pass it. So there's one guy who got to the end and he is like, OK, dude, we got to rewind because you're not retaining this stuff. So either you did the last minute cramming for this quiz the night before. And like I didn't I did that in high school. Joe: Ok. Tim: And then you don't retain it, right. Joe: Yeah. Tim: So do you really care about this or not? So he had to start over. He had to go through it again. So it's a team. We have a leadership team of five. And so we have these nine modules, the quizzes, the tests. They have to pass them. They have to do the role playing. And then the leadership team of five will say, OK, this person's ready or they're really not ready. And there's still a couple of parts of our team where we're like, OK, where they can be a wellness consultant in the store, but we don't think they're ready to be on live chat. So then we'll wait maybe six months until they have a little bit more experience, because where our team learns the most is from the customers coming in asking the questions and they don't know the answers of how to treat colitis Joe: Mm Tim: With Joe: Hmm. Tim: Whatever. So then they have to go find out to get back to that customer and then they learn something. So right now, I'm proud to say our live chat feature on our website, if you go to find your other place, dotcom lower, right. You get that little live chat bubble, the seven different consultants that you might run into over there are, I wouldn't say clones of Tim because I think they're smarter than me, but they are really well equipped and able to match, kind of hit the mark of where they need to be. And they all know and are passionate enough about helping people to not. One of the first things that I'll tell them is, dude, never bullshit. Joe: Yeah, yeah. Tim: That's a real thing. And I came from a I won't say anything negative where it's just more about getting the sale, about getting that commission. And and that's part of why we don't do commissions. So it's a fun process for intense. Joe: Well, that's great, man. Yeah, so I want to respect your time. We're down to the wire. I want to make sure I didn't miss anything that you want to talk about. So you have four stores in Wisconsin. Tim: Madison, Joe: Correct. Tim: Wisconsin, the. Joe: Ok, and you have the website Tim: Find your healthy place, Dotcom. Joe: Buying your healthy place, Dotcom. Anything else that I missed that is important that we talk about? Tim: You know, dude, I mean, as I was thinking about this program and your followers, like what your mission is, you're trying to encourage entrepreneurs, trying to encourage people to be thankful for life. You don't Joe: Mm Tim: Take Joe: Hmm. Tim: To treat life like the gift it is, you Joe: Yep. Tim: Know? So I did want to offer your followers a coupon code. If they don't have you know, if you have a health food store in your own home town, that's great sport. Those guys, if you have somebody on your team, that's awesome. That's my main passion. And if you need a resource that you can trust, if you go to find your healthy place dotcom and you get something type in coupon code, Castelo, and that'll give 30 percent off the full price on anything on our whole website, we have thousands of products. So anything from V12 to something more intense. And regardless if you buy something or not, use that live chat feature to ask questions. You know, I've had people call my cell phone bill. Hey, Jim, you know, I'm in Wholefoods right now and I'm looking at three different multivitamins. Like which one do you think I should get? You know, and I get to tell them and it's fun and you can share the love. And so use that live chat feature as a resource, because more than ever, dude, we need natural alternatives. We need some education we at least need to know about, like Joel and your Joe: Yeah, Tim: Life partner. Dude, Joe: Yeah. Tim: What if she didn't have that naturopathic doctor that gave her some natural supplements through one of the most intensive crisis's that she ever faced in her life? Like, you know, in your gut that that helped her in a dramatic way because you watched her do P ninety three, the cancer experience. Joe: Yeah. Tim: I mean, that's a miracle, dude. And it took somebody reaching out and it took a resource being willing to respond to create that miracle, you know. And so that's what I want for people. Joe: Yeah, it's I can't stress it enough that Tim: Right. Joe: What I saw before my very eyes every single Tim: Right. Joe: Day and it would and then I see people that are going through cancer of some type and they're only being treated, Tim: As Joe: You know, Tim: A medical doctor, yeah. Joe: And they're their body is just being crushed. Tim: Yes. Joe: And there's and there's nothing, no nothing helping to offset the chemicals and all of the harshness Tim: Know. Joe: Of that treatment. And so. Tim: Right, and let me say, you know, you saw it with somebody you loved very much, I saw it with my mom when I was five or six. And since then, I'm getting goosebumps. I have seen it for thousands of people through the last 11 years that the healthy place has been a company, thousands of people, not always cancer, but but we're talking depression, chronic pain, Crohn's disease, asthma, like people suffering like megacorp. There's so much suffering going on Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: In the world and there is natural alternatives that people literally don't know about. They have nobody in their world telling them. So they just listen to whatever mainstream media or their medical doctor Joe: Yeah. Tim: Or their pharmacist. And there's a lot of good people with good intent in those areas. It's just there's not the voice of natural alternatives. So we need to know about this stuff. We've got to get the word out. Joe: Yeah, it's great, man, I love what you're doing, and this Tim: Think. Joe: Was exciting for me and and I think I actually have your personal email, so I'm just going Tim: That's Joe: To I'm Tim: Awesome. Joe: Going to go I'm going to go ten. I need Tim: You Joe: More Tim: Should. Joe: Energy, Tim. I think I think I have inflammation. And I'm going Tim: Yeah, Joe: To be like. Tim: I know you should, and if anyone's listening to and they because sometimes, you know, they just have a trust factor or whatever, Tim at Find Your Healthy Place Dotcom. I am happy to take emails. This what I get to do all day, dude, and it's just fun. It's so rewarding. You just get to point people in the right direction and help them out. So I love it. Joe: I wish you all the luck in the world, this is a Tim: Thank you. Joe: This is a great thing that you're doing. It's nice to have somebody who is, like you said, it's it's Soulsby before sales. It's a great it's a great way to do it. And I think Tim: Thank Joe: You'll be Tim: You. Joe: Rewarded continually be rewarded for doing Tim: Thank Joe: It that Tim: You. Joe: Way. I'll put everything in the show notes. Thank you for the coupon for the listeners Tim: Now. Joe: And I'll make sure I have all the correct links. So find your healthy place. Dotcom is the website. The company's name is the Healthy Place for locations in Madison, Wisconsin. You eventually might franchise someday, Tim: Yes, Joe: But Tim: And people on Facebook, you know, Joe: Yeah. Tim: The healthy people on Facebook, my wife's a genius as far as really caring for our community there. So you'll find a lot of good content and Instagram as well. So thank you, dear. This Joe: Yeah, Tim: Is. Joe: Tim, thanks so much, man, I really appreciate your time today and thanks for all the insight and I really do wish you the best of luck. Tim: Any time, brother, and wish the same to you. Joe: Thank you, Matt. Tim: I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I want to thank you for listening to my podcast. I know you have many options to listen to various podcasts, and I'm honored that you chose to listen to mine. I would love it if you were to rate my podcast Five Stars and write a nice review. It really helps to bring up the rankings of the podcast. Other listeners, once again, thank you so much for listening to the Joe Costello show. I appreciate you very much.

united states god university amazon california texas english google china apple man dna wisconsin indian target natural mcdonald kansas walmart seo cbd souls basic milwaukee fda kent expertise omg whole foods forms inflammation timo crohn overwhelming walgreens pizza hut middleton baylor university papa johns ninety wick whitaker dotcom nsf castelo atul gawande gnc five stars gmp vecchi northrup v12 mkb joe cool fitchburg tim apple tim talks sun prairie healthyplace chavannes mac apple muskego tim oh joe it tim it nzdf joe you tim you tim yeah joe love joe yeah joe well joe don tim no joe way joe so joe how tim there tim good joe there tim all tim is tim nice tim john tim so tim thank joe all tim right joe for tim for joe just tim at tim people

The Business Behind VIEW

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 4, 2021 28:44

People often think of business as something that's separate from life. They may say things like, “It's just business.” In today's episode, we explore the business side of VIEW and our integrative approach to business that serves as an extension of the values, mindset and strategies that we use in our everyday lives."To me, self-awareness is life. There is no difference. People think about business as something that's separate from life. I do that in business, or it's just business. To me, business is far more of an art form, and how you use it is far more important."If you've been listening for a while, you have heard Joe and I refer to the workshops and online courses that this podcast comes from. What's the deal with all of this? Why do we want you to join our mailing list? What's our intention? Are we trying to suck you into something? What's this going to cost you? Today I would like to bring some transparency into what exactly is going on with all this VIEW business. Joe, how did you get into the coaching business in the first place? Joe: By accident. When Tara and I decided to have a kid and a kid was on the way, I realized that I had to stop sitting in a room, meditating all the time and make a little money. I went into venture capital. One of the realizations I had early on was that if I didn't bring my self-awareness practice, if business wasn't a way for me to continue to develop and understand myself, that I would never succeed at business. Then as I started to invest, I realized the mentality of the people that I invested in was the biggest leverage for successful investments. I started sharing some of the knowledge that I had with them. That was successful in many cases. Then they started telling me that other people needed me, and I didn't have the time. I did a course, and then it just kind of happened. People, the line got long, and at some point I decided that this was far more my calling than investing and I was better at it, frankly. Brett: With a lot of self-development programs, there is this way that self-development turns out to be a tool for somebody to make a bunch of money and inflate their ego. What makes what you are doing different from that?Joe: Wow, I would love to say that I am different from that, but I am sure that is at play at the same time, meaning there is no way you can completely annihilate an ego. I think if you think you have completely annihilated it, that is ego in itself. I am sure my ego is at play, and making money, I enjoy making money. I definitely like it, but neither of them are the priority in my world. Creating the business is far more about an enjoyment process for me. Maybe two or three years ago, I would have said I really want to bring this out to people because it creates happiness and I want to change the world. That's really not alive in me anymore. It's far alive in me that this is something I really enjoy. I get off on. I like watching people have life changing experiences. I like being a part of that. I like building something beyond me. I like seeing the value through the success of a business. It's really a matter of enjoyment for me. Brett: You described your journey as you started out being interested in self-awareness and meditation, and you had a baby and realized you needed some money. You started to get into business and VC, and you wanted of course to bring your self-awareness practice with you and make that part of what you were doing in business. Then it became the business itself. How did you transition from being a venture capitalist and focusing on the quality of awareness of the people that you invested in into making VIEW a business on its own? Joe: I was really just following the demand. I was just following people's requests, for the most part. I have a vision for sure, but it is incredibly informed by what people have asked for and what they want. I feel like it's the same. When you are coaching somebody, you start with where they are. You don't tell them what you think their agenda should be. You follow their agenda. I think business is the same way. You don't ask people to be different. You don't give them an agenda. You find out what their agenda is, and if you can serve that, if you can be of service to that, and it is aligned internally, then by all means, go ahead. That's what happened here. It was just the best way I could be of service that was inspiring and enjoyable for me. Brett: Can you tell me more about what you are working on now inside and outside of the VIEW courses? What does that look like for you? Joe: Yeah, too much. I think I am working on too much. We have the podcast going. We have the VIEW course going. We have the AoA course going. I have a group of 12 executives I work with every year as a coach and then we have an occasional in-person workshop, particularly for those executives but sometimes for others. Then, there's the creation of content, which is what we are doing now, just generally spreading the word so that people, if it's right for people, they can find it. That's the work. Brett: When we first met, VIEW was only available through these small in-person workshops you just mentioned. What's so important to you about in-person work? What made you start exploring the online format?Joe: I was ignorant, I think. The in-person work, I had a limited thought that it could only be done in person, and then Coronavirus hit and people came to me and said hey, we need this, this and this. We need it online. I thought no, no, no. Luckily, I didn't need the money. Eventually, I was sitting in my hot tub one day. I have this hot tub that goes way too hot, and I got some engineer to mess with it. I am boiling my brain. I had this epiphany that the way I learned a lot of this stuff is very different from the way I teach it, and so I thought wow, I could potentially teach it online the way I learned it. That started the exploration, and only to find out there are ways that when it is done online, it is more powerful. It is stronger. There are some ways in which it is strong. It is stronger because it is more persistent. You have more time with it. You don't get the workshop high. It becomes an integrated part of life. There are some experiences that can happen in person that are bigger than the experiences that happen online overall, on average. There are some exercises you can only do online, and some you can only do in person. That discovery and just try to make it better and iterate, iterate, iterate, iterate, which is how I do it. I never try for perfection. I just keep on improving. It just turned out that people really dug it. We got great MPS scores, and people really liked it. Then I got really motivated because I realized it made me less involved, which is really a critical component for me in doing any of the work. If someone is teaching you math, you don't want them to have to be there every time you are doing math. That would be a pretty shitty teacher. I saw that the online version needed less of me, and that became really exciting for me. Then I got more and more inspired by the online work. Brett: What are you trying to accomplish by growing VIEW as a business?Joe: It is really just a matter of following my enjoyment. I think there is some freedom I have in the fact that I am not really trying to accomplish anything. It sounds kind of counter intuitive. You have to have business goals, and I do. You have to have a vision, and I do. But at the end of the day, I am really good with things not working because I am not attached to, tied to, my value isn't created from the business outcomes. The vision is wouldn't it be cool for a whole bunch of people to be able to communicate this way, to have breakthroughs, to have happier lives, and to enjoy themselves more, enjoy each other more, businesses to be more successful, particularly businesses where people are open to self-exploration. Wouldn't that be awesome? It would be. It is a super cool thing. That's more of a symptom. The core is my own enjoyment. The core is what turns me on. It sounds like that's a little bit hedonistic almost, but it's not quite that way in the fact that what I have learned over time is that when I am following the deeper call, there is more enjoyment in my life. It's not almost. It is an act of surrender. I am surrendering to the call, just like a baby surrenders to a cry. There's a movement that's happening. My enjoyment is a way for me to directly get in touch with that call, that thing that's pulling me, the gravity of my internal exploration, the gravity of divinity or oneness, whatever you want to call that thing, God. My enjoyment is the way that I get to gauge how deeply I am surrendering. Brett: I love the way you described the vision was a series of run-on questions. Joe: Shit, I didn't even notice. That totally makes sense. Brett: You mentioned that you are doing this for your enjoyment and you do have business goals and a vision. What are some of the business goals? What is the revenue model? How does this work?Joe: The first question that helps me answer the second question is what I want the money for, what the money is about. For me, money is just another tool in self-exploration. That's its highest purpose, and money is also as a secondary purpose a means of supporting people's energy. There's a definite need for a flow of money. Money stagnant is a destructive force in my conception of the world. The goals around money in particular are all about making sure the people who I work with are well paid, that they have good opportunities, that we get to do the stuff that we enjoy, and then the money towards the customer, the main purpose is if it supports the spiritual journey or not. One of the things I think is really important is that you create a slate of products that are accessible for anybody's journey. There's free content for people who aren't able to afford and then other content for people who can afford. The reason that's important is because that exchange of energy is really important, meaning I was in Nicaragua. There was this group of people who were there to deliver food and clothing to these folks in Nicaragua. I was sitting and talking to them. I was like I feel like it is a bit destructive what you are doing. They were, of course, taken aback. I said to me if you just give them stuff, it teaches them that they can't take care of themselves on some level. I far more believe in an exchange. They were like these guys have nothing to give. Sure, they do. For instance, there was a sea turtle shortage because they had been killed. The community could do a sea turtle rescue, or they could help with the restoration projects for the sea turtles in exchange for it. There are lots of ways. I think it is really important. A quote in a book called The Soul of Money, it sticks with me. It said, if you are here to help me, no thank you. If you are here to work together for our mutual freedom, let's get to work. I think the monetary exchange toward the customer needs to be there, and it needs to be something that's felt. If you are dealing with somebody who is a billionaire, to say I will do all this for $200 isn't an exchange of energy in the same it would be with someone who is working $10 an hour. It is really important that there is some way that that energy exchange can happen. Brett: It has been a common challenge, I guess, that really good coaching has been disproportionately available to executives or high-paid tech workers, and meanwhile, a lot of people who are really struggling and could use a lot of this work the most simply can't afford to pay for workshops. But now that you are creating online self-paced courses that don't require your time to administer, what makes you run those as a business when you could give them out for free?Joe: That's a question I have asked myself a lot when we were looking at the business model. Do we want to do this for free? The answer was that we didn't think that we would get as much completion and buy-in if it was free. That said, I do give it away for free often if the circumstances are right, if the approach is right. But just generally, the thought process is what's the way that the work does the best work inside of you, and that's how I think about everything. I think about it when we market something, for instance. I think about not how we get someone to buy a course. I think about how the marketing becomes the beginning of the course, how it becomes the beginning of self-exploration. Everything I am doing is serving the self-exploration, everything from the way I bill to how we build the courses to the teamwork that goes into building the courses to how we price it. It's our best guess, and I am sure we are wrong but it is our best guess at how we can best serve the people, how to get them through the course, how to make it meaningful enough for them to value it so they give it the right love and attention. Brett: That seems like a really difficult problem because you have some people for whom $300 is a throwaway and other people for whom $300 is the majority of a rent payment or their entire rent payment, and it could be argued that both need it equally or could use this work equally but just have completely different context for money. Joe: It is. It is a really difficult thing. Hopefully, we'll provide stuff. The other part of the model is the higher end stuff pays for the lower end stuff, so the work I do in companies where there is a higher dollar per hour can pay for lower priced courses. Our own sustainability is definitely a part of us, and like I said, it is to make sure everybody in the organization or anybody I contract with has the ability to thrive in their own life. Because if we are creating something from a poverty mentality, then we are going to be projecting that poverty mentality into our teachings. I think that's not going to work, but the idea for sure and a lot of the goals I have are about making it more and more available at different price points and different levels of commitment. I don't have a perfect solution by any stretch, and if anybody has one, please let us know. My experience of doing stuff completely for free has not been as successful as far as serving the population that I want to serve, the people who are interested. It just doesn't seem to work as well, and yet we still pull that level sometimes. I recently gave away the course to an organization that doesn't have the money but is doing great work in the world, and I assume will continue to do that. Brett: You were talking about sustainability. There are a lot of examples of organizations, like business built around some kind of work like this, that turn self-inquiry into a business at scale only to have things go south or blow up for a number of reasons related to their requirements for sustainability, like training facilitators and then gatekeeping those facilitators and trying to keep a cut and then creating paths that become somewhat manipulative and create dependence. People end up becoming financially dependent on a community or a particular organization and feeling trapped. How can you maximize the positive impact of this work and scale it without it becoming corrupted by the needs of a scaling business?Joe: I did an experiment on this before. I failed miserably on it. This one seems to be far more successful. I think to some degree I was making that mistake. I think it is the gift of the online component that's really showed me to some degree the mentality mess up. My perspective, I thought I was far more necessary than I was. The less necessary that I view myself to be in the work or that I view the organization to be or that our existence alone isn't necessary for the development of humanity, that we are just here to serve it, this kind of development of humanity, the less we have a risk of becoming one of those organizations. So I think the need to be special or the need to be needed or the need to save, any of those needs are what create those organizations. The inner work is really the most important thing, and that clarifies the way the art of this business is expressed. Everything that I do is all about pointing people back to themselves. The less involved I can be, the less involved the organization can be, the better so that we don't create an organization where people need us. Brett: What's your approach to intellectual property? You could say the way of being that VIEW points to is not new, and you didn't invent it. People have been discovering it through many different traditions. How do you consider VIEW to be in some sense your baby and something that you are stewarding and responsible for, and to what sense is it just out there for people to discover?Joe: This is one of the hardest questions I wrestle with. I am glad you brought it up because it is a place where I could still use some clarity. On one level, there is a part of me that wants everything I do to be completely open source and anybody could use it for anything. On another level, I have seen that be really dangerous and destructive. These tools modified slightly can be used for nefarious purposes or at least unconscious purposes. There is a fear that that will happen, and I've seen it happen not even through people having bad intentions. It is oftentimes someone is like I can use this tool to help a whole bunch of people. They haven't looked at their own shadow, and so their shadow completely takes over the work. I've seen that happen quite a few times. The iteration I am on now is that you ask permission to use any of the tools that are specific to us if you are going to go use them. We make sure that it feels right to us and that you have the right support to use those tools. I don't know if that's going to be scalable but that's what we do in our contracts with people who are taking the courses is basically you can't go and use this. I remember one of the talks I gave and I was giving people all these tools I had developed and that were a synergy of other tools. About 80% of what we do, I don't know anybody else who does them, and 20% of what we do are taken from traditions or neuroscience or something that's like 2,000 or 3,000 years old from esoteric texts that I have read, everything in between. But the stuff that's novel, it came from my consciousness and so to some degree I feel safe in using those tools. What I have noticed is when people use those tools but their consciousness didn't create it, it can become more dangerous because they don't fully have an understanding of the tool. More importantly, I created these tools from my consciousness and I want other people to create tools from theirs. Again, I want to be less involved and so as people create their own stuff from their consciousness, those are right tools for where they are and where the people near them are. It's just incredibly useful to have more of those tools out there rather than making them dependent on my tools. That's another reason that we basically have come up with a conclusion that you ask for permission to use the tools. Brett: One thing I have heard some people have objections when they first encounter this work, usually through somebody else, is that it seems selfish. There are some shades of that in this conversation where you are talking about doing this for your enjoyment, and it needs to be an energetic exchange. You hear a lot of people talk about energetic exchange and using that word to disown they are actually charging for something, and they want money. Joe: Yeah, I want your money. No doubt about it. I like making money. There's no doubt about that. But then again, that's selfish too. What's the answer I could give that isn't selfish? I have done a tremendous amount of non-profit work, and I can find the selfishness in that, too. There's incredible personal reward in being of service. I don't even know if the word selfish. I don't know if I even believe in it particularly. I feel like that's a word that some adult created to control their children. The levels of selfishness seem a good way to gauge where you are in your own personal development. Selfishness of like I want this now, and I don't want you to have it. That level of selfishness just means you are in a tremendous amount of misery compared to somebody whose level of selfishness is to be of service to people. I am sure the mentality of being of service to people is a form of misery compared to another level of selfishness. I don't buy into selfishness, but I think what you are pointing to outside of that, which is kind of a justification of narcissism through spirituality, is what I would call that. This idea that I am going to make myself special or big or I am going to get all of my ID needs met through the activities I am doing in the world, whether it be business or art or whatever. I am going to justify it with a whole bunch of spiritual talk, and things like I am going to listen to my truth, etc. I think it's a real risk. It's not to pretend it's not there. It's not even like the risk is that I need to see if it is there. The risk is that I need to find the more and more subtle versions of that in play in myself. The lucky part is that is misery. I can find those parts pretty easily if I am just paying attention to where I am not aligned, where I am in friction with myself. That's the work. That's the work. But from the outside point of view, there's really nothing I can say that somebody who is not being assertive with their own needs is going to hear that's going to make me sound anything but selfish. Brett: How much concern do you have about these tools getting out there in mass, tens, hundreds of thousands of people taking these courses in a decentralized way and bringing this into their lives with all of their shadows? What concern do you have that this could become weaponized in ways you don't expect and unintended ways?Joe: I hate this feeling. Now I am going to love this feeling. It is inevitable. I am going to say something that's a little risky here. There's an atrocity that occurs and it is through that atrocity that ten other atrocities are prevented. It's through the prevention of those atrocities that the next atrocity occurs. I don't see a way around good being corrupted into bad and bad creating the next good. It seems to be just the way of things. It breaks my heart that I know to some degree that this stuff has already been weaponized. I know on a small scale someone is going to bring the VIEW and they are going to say something like, you are not asking how/what questions to their wife. Their wife is going to be like fuck the VIEW. Brett: You are not in wonder enough. Joe: Right, you are not in wonder enough. Exactly! Then it is just going to become a new morality and somebody is going to feel oppressed by the morality. Then they are going to be like screw VIEW. That thing is just blah, blah, blah. I don't know anyway for that to be prevented. It breaks my heart, and it has been happening. Look at what people have done with the words of Christ or the words of Buddha. They oppress themselves and others with them all the time. It is going to happen here. It happens with the internet. Anything, anything of significance gets used to oppress people eventually. Even love gets used to oppress people. Brett: Or the idea of love. Joe: Yeah, exactly. Brett: Wrapping this episode up, what is your vision of a future five years from now where VIEW conversations are a thing that people just have all the time and it has become successful and just part of the social lexicon? What does that world look like to you?Joe: It's all happening, and I am somewhat blissfully unaware I think is my version of the best case scenario. The best scenario is one in which and in a weird way this is already happening, where the repercussions of the work are far beyond my capacity to see them. They have extended into other people's work, and now there are new and better tools out there that have built on these tools. On a personal note, it would be nice to be continuing to be excited about the business and continuing to be trying new projects and funneling whatever resources we create into bigger explorations of self-discovery and the world. I have done it all inside a balance where my children still feel loved and cared for, and they know deeply that they are the priority over the work. That would be my vision. Brett: Thank you very much, Joe. Joe: A pleasure. You got me crying, man. Thanks. Brett: Mission accomplished. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening to the Life in VIEW podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we encourage you to rate and review the show and share it with your friends. We want to hear from you, so send us your feedback, questions or suggestions for the topic of our next episode. To join our newsletter and learn more about the VIEW community and online courses or to find the show notes from today's episodes, visit view.life/podcasts. Links/resources:The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist: https://soulofmoney.org/

Money: Part II

relationships money business kids leadership entrepreneurship mom spirituality bitcoin ceos euro personal development head start joe it

Play Episode Listen Later May 7, 2021 27:24

In the second episode of this two-part series on money, we are going to address another common misconception that people have, which is that money is bad and the root of all evil. What if we did not have to see money as a game or a means to an end? What if we understood that we could transform our relationship to it by simply recognizing that money is not personal? By seeing ourselves as human beyond the money, money can start flowing very differently into our lives. "All that's required is to not have the money be personal, so you don't actually have to see it as a game. You don't actually have to see it as a means to an end. All that's really required is the money isn't personal. You just have to see yourself as human beyond the money, and then money has a way of flowing very differently in people's lives."Brett: Welcome back, everybody, to our topic on money. Now we are going to get the second half of this discussion on the belief that money is bad. Joe, what makes it that people develop this belief that money is bad or evil?Joe: What I typically notice is that money is bad comes because somebody felt that money hurt them. Maybe they had a parent who cared more about money. It felt like the parent cared more about money than they did about time with the kid, or that somebody with money did something bad or that somebody with wealth did something that made them feel less than. Also, there are certain people that have internal perspectives that when something makes them feel bad, they attack. That's the way their personality system works. Just observing great wealth and the way that great wealth moves can make people feel like, if they have that moment of insecurity or I'm not good enough, then their natural response might be to attack, the way their personality works. I think for all of those reasons people think money is bad. I mean you can see it all over our society. If you just start saying how people with a lot of money are bad, you will start getting a following. It's a fascinating thing. But it's often not just people with a lot of money. It's just money. The system sucks. What an asshole! He drives a $120,000 car. It's just like there's this whole set of judgment that comes along with money. I think they are usually some reflection or some sort of projection of our own relationship with money and/or ourselves or like I said earlier with our parents or authority figures or something like that. Brett: What you were saying there with the $120,000 car, money can point at glaring inequalities in all of the things money can be a surrogate for. You might see somebody with a lot of money, and they are getting a lot of affection from people and a lot of attention because they have money. Then that makes you feel your lack of affection and attention, and maybe in the opposite framing of what we were talking about in the first half, instead of buying into it and being like I need more money and then people will love me, you instead just say fuck that, I don't want to play that game. Then money becomes this lava that you don't want to touch. Joe: Let's take a look at a person in the $250,000 car. There's a person driving around in a $250,000 car. Some group of people are going to be like that guy is just a good person, cool. They've accomplished that. I like that. I like him or her. Some people are going to be like what a douchebag, a whole bunch of greedy, selfish. What happens to our system if we just see the person as a person? They are neither good nor bad. They are neither more insecure, less insecure than all of the rest of us. They are just a human being flawed like all of us, healthy like all of us. Do we know if the person has that car because that's what that job requires of them because they need to exude status? Are they doing it because they are trying to get their mom's love? Are they doing it because their passion is sports cars? Or their passion is just really well-made machinery or really complex machinery? We don't know. We don't even know what's happened for that person. It takes the humanity. Whatever perspective you have around money that takes the humanity out of the person, that's a prejudice, including that they are good or they are happy. I think that's the really interesting view to look at your own views around money. What are the daily judgments that you walk through the work with? How is it separating you from connection with yourself and other people?Brett: I'm curious about some of the things that money stands in for that we can have issues with, like authority and with power. How does that happen?Joe: I can't say neurologically exactly how it happens. I can point to some of it, but I can say how I've seen it work in me. What I've noticed is you get emotional patterns that happen. What I mean by that is when I had a green mohawk as a teenager, my parents worried 15% of the time. They worried over things like me, my haircut, if I was going to grow up right. Now my parents´ kids are fine, and they still worry about 15% of the time but now it is over if they are going to burn the chuck roast. We seem to get into these emotional patterns, and as kids, we get into very specific emotional patterns and we are in theta brain wave, which is like where you go in the subconscious. It is how we program ourselves or unprogram ourselves often is most effective in theta. Kids are mostly in theta from zero to seven or zero to eight years old. They get into certain kind of emotional patterns, and as they grow up, they are going to place those patterns on something and probably some of equivalent importance in their life. When dad leaves or mom leaves or they leave mom and dad, then that pattern needs to hit something else. Money is a great place for it to hit. It is a great place because you can project anything you want onto money. We were talking about it. You can project it is great. You can project it is bad. You can project it is neutral. There's evidence to show all of it. You can show how money created a society in which more people are able to thrive than any other society, and you can also look at how money creates all of the disenfranchisement in our society. You can just project anything you want onto money. Since it is such an important part of our lives, it determines so much for most people, how they spend their time, what they can do and what they can't do in their mind. That, of course, Mom and dad used to be that. Mom and dad used to be the thing that said what I could and couldn't do, and now money is. Now money is the thing that says what I could and couldn't do. It's just natural for the emotional process to lay itself on top of money. Brett: That emotional pattern could be about anything, and like what you were saying earlier, it's often about love. In society, money is just something that is so present that it's really easy for it to become about money. Joe: Yeah, it's easy for it to become about money just like it is easy for it to become about your boss. You see that all the time. People think it's their boss, and it's not. They are treating their boss like their dad or their mom or a teacher that had an impact on them. Brett: How does this show up in business? I have sort of examples here in my life with not asking for what I needed, feeling shame about asking to be paid more money for something and then finding myself in the position of not having my needs met enough to actually do great work or not having the needs of the project met enough for the project to work out really, really well because I was afraid to ask for money. This has happened over the course of my life in fractal ways, and so what's some other way you see this showing up commonly in business when people have this squeamish discomfort around money?Joe: I see it happen in business in many ways not even if they have squeamish discomfort. I see people who think money is the way you determine if you win and lose in business, and to some degree, that's true. If you don't have enough revenue, you can't stay in business so you lose if you think of it that way. But there are some people who think that the most money wins and that that's the currency for a good business is who made the most money rather than who had the best impact or who has the happiest employees. You see people who create fights and lose profit because they care about how the deal came out in a way of winning and losing instead of a way in winning and winning. You see that happen all the time. You see people avoid marketing and sales, whether they are CEOs avoiding it or employees avoiding it because sales and marketing is dirty because you are trying to convince somebody to do something for money. Then you see other companies say marketing is just education. We are just telling people we have a product we think is important, and we want to give them an opportunity to experience how important this product can be in their lives. That's a different way of looking at it. Some people get off on convincing people to do things that aren't good for them, and they feel powerful over it. Some people just can't do that with their lives. It doesn't feel good in their system, or they realize that the short-term power is not worth the long-term disconnection with themselves. I think there are all sorts of ways I see CEOs who feel bad for asking for money or they feel like they deserve money. Both of them are going to not get enough money probably for the needs of the company. There are all sorts of ways of looking at it. It seems like the people in the venture capital business who seem to do the best with money comparatively are people who see it as a game, as a means to an end or a game, a game meaning I don't take it personally, and a means to an end meaning my vision is to plant $10,000 trees. The money is the thing I have to do to get there. I think both of those two things depersonalize the money, and people who have depersonalized the money are more successful with it typically. Brett: There could also be a danger in that because depending on what the game is, the game might just be a game to maximize money for a particular milestone, like let's just bring a company public, dump it on the public and then walk away with the bags. That could be a game that can have really negative consequences. Joe: Correct, as is the other thing, having the money just be a means to an end and then to what. I think it all has a particular danger, and the good news is that all that's required is to not have the money be personal. You don't actually have to see it as a game. You don't actually have to see it as a means to an end. All that's really required is the money is impersonal. It's not a reflection of me. It's not a reflection of who I am. It's not a reflection of who other people are. You just have to see yourself as human beyond the money. Then money has a way of flowing very differently in people's lives. Brett: There's a way that it can be helpful that is impersonal, but also there's a way that it always is personal. I think something that happens often is that people insist the impersonality of it and then separate themselves from the connection of the people they are working with. Joe: The classic "it's just business". That basically is what you are saying, right?Brett: It's just business. Kind of avoiding it. Joe: That's totally personal. That's not taking it non-personally. That's taking it incredibly personally at least in the semantics in my head, so maybe I haven't explained it right. In fact, I can be confident that I haven't. Saying it's just business means that you have taken it personally. You have taken something personally. You have some level of shame or something to that effect, and you want to push that down. You want to push that emotional experience down. Just think of it this way. You are about to get fired, and you have a choice. The person who is about to fire you can say it in many different ways. One way they can say it is, "It's just business. We had to let you go. It's just business. It's nothing personal."Brett: Which is really personal because it's like I don't trust you to be able handle my telling you the real reason I am firing you. Joe: Correct. Perfectly said. Just feel how that would land, and then you can have, "I feel really sorry that we couldn't do it. We wanted to and we tried, and we weren't able to keep you here." There's that way of getting fired. Then there's the way of getting fired, which is like, "This was our expectation of what you were to do here. We made that really clear to you. Those expectations aren't being met. My experience is that you are either capable of doing that, the stuff we have asked you to do, in which case you are choosing not to do it, which means you know on some level this isn't the right job for you and you are making sure it doesn't last in your world. Or secondly, you are not capable of doing it, and therefore, you must always be feeling like I am not doing a good enough job, which also isn't a really great thing for your world. It's clearly not a match." How do we move forward if this job doesn't match? How do we help you? What do you need so that you can get to where you want to go in your life next? How can we be of service in that that's mutually beneficial? That's another way to fire somebody. To me, that's the least personal of those things. It's like this is the situation that we find ourselves in. Brett: It's taking it the least personally. It's the least care taking, the least avoiding. Joe: The thing we are avoiding is we actually feel bad for firing them, so we harden ourselves down and become assholes to fire somebody. If you have to harden yourself in any way, if you have to become defensive and build a wall between you and other people, you are taking it personally. That is a clear sign you are taking it personally. We somehow get it in our heads that if we take it personally, we are scared or we feel guilty or we are sad. But the clearer sign of taking something personally is that you have shut yourself off to your own emotional experience. Brett: Bringing this back to the money experience, the way we show up in the world with one another with all of our concepts and projections about money, there are many ways to take that personally and there are many ways not to. There are ways we can be successful, and then that will make other people feel shame. Then there are ways we can be unsuccessful by money standards, and people will still feel their shame somehow or something else. Joe: That's right. Your relationship with shame, exactly. Money is a projection. At some level, money is a projection. What if that were true for a moment? What if it were true that the money in your life, specifically to you, the money in your life is a projection? Maybe it's a projection of your value. Maybe it's a projection of your lack of value. Maybe it's a projection of your needs, of your lack of love. What if it was only that? At the beginning of the conversation, I said I don't really know what money is. I think the thing that I am pointing to is when I take all the projections of money away, it becomes something I can't name. Brett: When I do that exercise, letting go of money as a projection. Then there's this thing that immediately comes where it is like no, it is not just that. There are also environmental factors. There's the privilege that I was born or not born in. There was the luck I did or didn't have in my career and my business, or even just in my family relationship that patterned my relationship that's underneath money. My question is how you hold this concept where money is entirely a projection so that we can let that projection in, follow it and find out what's underneath it and love ourselves more, and also hold the truth that our entire relationship with money and our experience with money has also been influenced by external factors. Joe: I mean this is the question of life. How do we recognize the unity that we are and the self-interest that moves every one of our actions? That's really the question you are asking. Even that is a projection, meaning on some level if I really look at the essence of what I am, it's also very empty, very massive and very empty. At the same time, who I am is the person who is driving the car and polluting the atmosphere. The person who I am is the person who is hurting somebody with the hamburger I just bought. It's like this unbelievable concept. On one level, this unbelievable concept of both like the human side and this illusionary side coming together. This material side and the illusionary side of money coming together. How do you handle it? The answer that I found that creates the most freedom in me is with integrity. When I say integrity, I mean when I listen to my deep truth, when I am spending money or when I am receiving money, what does that require of me. What do I have to do to feel most aligned around my behavior with money? That's the question that I ask. It doesn't feel aligned to have no money, and it doesn't feel aligned to accumulate wealth for the sake of accumulating wealth. It doesn't feel aligned to try to use my money to save people, just like it doesn't feel aligned for me to use my money or my non-money, my anything to try to save somebody. But it feels really important for me to use my money to work with people for our mutual freedom, our mutual saving. There's this really interesting thing where it's like this moment to moment learning for me around money, where it is like how it feels right now, what this transaction feels like, how having a transaction feels compared to being in connection and having the money sort itself. This is the way I think that I want to live with money at this point. Brett: Thanks a lot for that. Joe: I notice I am nervous that people won't get to it because I realize as we are talking about money, there is so many. Really, it's like religion. There's no conversation about religion where you are probably not going to offend somebody. I think it's the same way around money. I don't think there's really a way for us to talk about money where somebody isn't going to feel like either we have poverty mentality or that we are part of the oppressive class. I think this is why people don't talk about money. This is why we don't talk about our credit card debt. It's why any conversation that's happening in the world around money is how to make it or what's wrong with it. There's no conversation of what it is. There's no conversation of what the relationship is that we want with it. There's a little bit of a conversation right now with electronic currencies of what the rules are to it, but I mean this is the perfect example. If you create a currency out there that has rules of money that don't have shortage of supply as a part of that rule, nobody has faith in the currency. Is it the money's problem? Is it what we put our faith into that's the problem? Humans naturally put their faith into things that have short supply, that they can hold on to, that have power, immediate power. That's where humans naturally put their faith, for a good reason. A spear is a good thing to put your faith in if you are a hunter, and it fulfills all those requirements. Brett: You are hunting a limited supply of game. Joe: Exactly. If you are making your own spears, there's somewhat of a limited supply. It requires effort because there's a limited supply. There's not just spears growing off trees. There's effort involved. This is what we put our faith in. If it's not money and we put our faith in something else, if it's not the US dollar, if it is not the Euro, and we put our faith in something else like Bitcoin, the question is what we are putting our faith in. If we ask ourselves deeply if we are willing to our faith into something that has abundance, that isn't limited, that anybody can have at all, and that doesn't have short term power, and I am going to rest my entire family's security on the faith in this thing, the way we do with money, how does that feel? Money isn't the issue at the core. The core issue is that. If every human being on the planet put their faith in something that was in utter abundance and it was clear that we have enough for everybody, and I can give freely, I can have faith in long term investment. If we all had that, what would happen to the problems of our world? That's a really difficult thing to ask. Brett: What would that be?Joe: I have no idea. But it's a difficult thing to even ask. You and I in this moment. Brett: It sounds like one thing that could be is investing in relationships, investing in trust. Joe: Which is what communities without money have. It's what they do. I remember when I was young, I was in my 20s and I worked in the Hayes Valley Project in Head Start. I went from that into international stock lending. I remember saying one has money, one has community. One relies on money for survival, and one relies on community for survival. One generally relies on money for happiness. One generally relies on community for happiness. Brett: Which were more successful?Joe: It depends on how you measure success. What I noticed is the people with the community wanted the money, and the people with the money didn't always want the community. Sometimes the community was heavy for them because whatever they were taught. But both of them had poverty in one way or another. Brett: Speaking of poverty, I have heard you say this a couple of times in some of the courses as well, using the term "poverty mentality". You were just saying earlier about feeling a little bit of fear in your system about how talking about money is like talking about religion, and everybody is going to be offended about something. I have something about this word, the poverty mentality, that. Joe: That offends you. Brett: It's not even so much that it offends me personally, but I think it might offend a lot of people because they maybe associate poverty mentality is a thing that keeps you from having money, so then poverty mentality is this thing that's holding you back. That's associated with poverty, which is something that people are born into and don't have a choice of starting there. I am curious if it's poverty or if it is like a scarcity mindset. Joe: That's a great question. For me, poverty mentality doesn't mean anything about money. I was born with a poverty mentality, but the poverty wasn't around cash though there was some of that as well. The poverty was around love, and the poverty was around attention. I wasn't getting enough attention. I wasn't getting enough love. I grew up into a life where I created a world where I didn't get enough love and I didn't get enough attention. It took a lot of work to switch that autopilot off in my life and in my system. That's what I am speaking to about poverty mentality. It's the false belief that we can't get what we need and what we want, generally, not specifically. We are not ever going to get everything we want, but that we can't have our needs met. Brett: Living and recreating that in whatever way, whether it is about money or anything else. Joe: Correct. That's what I am speaking to. I can see your point that just the word poverty could trigger, and it could speak to a class of people that didn't have a choice or a group of people who didn't have a choice around their financial situation. The term you used, I don't like using it for a different reason, which is scarcity mindset, because it feels ungrounded. It doesn't feel like it is as pertinent or real to me as the word "poverty", but I can see how that also is a bias. Brett: Maybe we will find a better word someday. Joe: Yeah, there's a flip side to every coin. Brett: Thank you, Joe. This has been a really great episode. I think we could do a couple more on money-related topics, but for now, this is great. Joe: Thank you so much for your time. Brett: Thank you. Take care. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening to the Life in VIEW podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we encourage you to rate and review the show and share it with your friends. We want to hear from you, so send us your feedback, questions or suggestions for the topic of our next episode. To join our newsletter and learn more about the VIEW community and online courses, or to find the show notes from today's episode, visit view.life/podcast.

Empower over Power — AoA Series #8

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 26, 2021 48:22

The accumulation of power seems like a good idea at first. Then we see how deeply insecure some billionaires and leaders of countries can be. What if no amount of power could ever make you feel safe? What if it was just another thing that could be taken away from you? What if being empowered is the key to the only security that truly sets you free?"Power is control over other people and empowered means that you are not looking for control of others. You are just being you despite the consequences."The accumulation of power seems like a good idea at first. Then we see how deeply insecure some billionaires and leaders of countries can be. What if no amount of power could ever make you feel safe? What if it was just another thing that could be taken away from you? What if being empowered is the key to the only security that truly sets you free? Brett: Joe, what makes this distinction so important?Joe: The empowered overpower distinction. I think there's a deep confusion in us as a people and internally between the two and that confusion is what creates the subjugation that we feel both in the relationship to ourselves and the relationship with the outside world. To clarify that confusion, to actually see that we are always a choice and that choice is always empowered, whether we want to admit it or not is a way to set us free from that subjugation.Brett: Power is real. There are people who really do have power over us and there are situations in which we have limited control. That must be partially responsible for our situation.Joe: Yes and no. The thing is, that we're all interdependent, everything is interdependent. It's like a gigantic machine if you will or a gigantic ecosystem. Who has the power, the ants or the mountain lion or the rabbits? If any of them go, the whole system changes. The whole system is dependent on all the other parts of the system. In that way, yes, there are things that have power over us. If you're a deer, deer ticks have power over you and mountain lions have power over you, but if you're a mountain lion, deer have power over you because if the deer disappear, you're screwed, you're not eating. There's a way of looking at it that says, "Oh, wow, everything that I'm interdependent on has power over me." You can look at it that way and it's absolutely true. The other way to look at it is that, our choice is ours. We get to choose and we might not like the consequences. We don't always have control over the consequences. I think when we don't have control over the consequences, that's when the mind wants to say, "Oh, somebody has power over me." But there's nobody on this planet that isn't dependent on somebody else or something else.Take the most powerful person in the world, if people stop buying their product or if people rebel against them or if the price of oil goes to $20 a barrel and all of a sudden, their money to control their society goes away. Everybody has something like that. It's something that I think about oftentimes when I'm thinking about CEOs and my experience in working with them is that they have more bosses than anybody. They have their key employees who they need to keep happy, their customers they need to keep happy, their shareholders they need to keep happy. They have Board of Directors they need to keep happy. There are so many people who they are dependent on or they need their approval or they need them to buy into their vision in some way. There's nobody in this system that isn't dependent on other people. There's nobody in this system that isn't scared to change the system because of consequences. As one person is sitting there and saying, "Hey, if I stand up for myself, I'll lose my job." There's a CEO that says, "Hey, if I don't give my quarterly numbers, I'll lose my job. If I don't get to the quarterly numbers, I'll lose my job." There's a billionaire that's like, "Wow, if I don't keep on finding more oil, I'm going to lose my fortune." There's something everywhere, everybody's got something. In that aspect, absolutely, everybody has somebody who has power over them. I think we often think about the people who diversified, like lots of customers or lots of people as more powerful, meaning that they're not dependent on one person. They're not dependent on one customer. They feel more powerful on our system but, everybody's dependent.Brett: It sounds like what you're pointing at in terms of power, when something has power over us, it's setting the constraints of our environment. If we have power over someone else, we have the power to set the constraints for the system in some way, but that doesn't tell the whole story. There's what we do within the constraints and which constraints we buy into or don't.Joe: That's it. Inside of the constraints, you're completely empowered. The way that you show up inside the constraints, the constraints have to adjust. Meaning, if you are scared of losing your job and you say, "Forget it, I'm going to show up the way that feels right for me and if I get fired, I get fired." You will change the system. There's no way for it not to change, even if you get fired. There's no way for the system not to change. There's no way that the way you interact with the system doesn't affect it.Brett: Even the structure of a company or even the interpersonal relations in your team will change if you're not being the same cog in the ecosystem that was existing before.Joe: That's right. You see this. Working with CEOs and working with billionaires, you see this all the time, that there's a whole bunch of things that they want to affect change on that they can't. They don't know how to or that nobody knows how to or it's just beyond their control. It's not like anybody in any situation doesn't have something that they're not able to affect the change on. There're billionaires that I know that if they could control everything, they would have more billions and there're billionaires I know, that if they could control everything, everybody would have social and economic equality but they can't, just like we can't, you can't, I can't, nobody can. As long as you need to control a situation to feel empowered, then you are subjugated.Brett: That's not real empowerment.Joe: That's right.Brett: Where does this come from? Where does this yearning for power arise from if not empowerment?Joe: Fear. If we're making the distinction between power and empowered and I think that even in our language, oftentimes, when someone says, "I feel powerful," they mean empowered. As far as the semantics we're going to use, that means empowered. Then some people are like, "I feel powerful, meaning I have control over you." People who want to feel powerful control over situations just fear. They are scared. On some level, we all are scared when we are looking to find power. Now, power might come to us and just because I have power doesn't mean I'm scared, but if I'm looking for it, then I'm scared.Brett: How does achieving some sense of power actually satiate or affect that fear, or does it?Joe: It doesn't. It's like any addiction. There's a short-term high that you get and then it's over. I remember when I was in one of my poorest times in my life when I had the least amount of resources and my attitude towards money and power was changing. I was driving in my car and I was thinking, "Oh, I don't have enough." As it turned out at that time, I knew several billionaires and I went through the list and I'm like, "Oh, they're driving around right now thinking they don't have enough either." Like, "Oh my God, I'm a billionaire." My situation, their situation is no different. They can affect some change in a way that I can't, but I can affect some change in the way that they can't.Brett: I could imagine a situation where a billionaire even feels more powerless, because they realize they have all this money and they're actually not able to change the world. So they don't get to believe that money would solve that problem for them.Joe: That's right. That's the thing is, one of the best investors I ever met said that if you see somebody who thinks that money is going to solve their problems, don't invest. They're dead right. Capitalization doesn't solve problems. It makes them bigger often.Brett: You throw money at problems and you end up with bigger problems that require money to sustain.Joe: Yes, that's right. It's like this illusion, once you have the power, then you got to worry about holding on to it. Another billionaire guy told me at one point, he said, “Everybody works, Joe. Everybody works.” If you have a billion dollars, you got to work to maintain it. Everybody works.Brett: If you're going for social capital, you have the billion dollars. You still have to work to maintain social capital and connections.Joe: Yes, or you've got $54 billion and you can't affect an election. One guy with maybe a billion dollars can beat another guy with 54 billion. Both of them can be beaten with somebody with less than a million. Power isn't accumulated by more power. It makes it easier in some forms of power, but sometimes having large amounts of power actually make it harder to accumulate power.Brett: In the current election cycle, trying to get elected as a billionaire takes you down a whole bunch of notches already.Joe: Right, or being a really big shot investor with a lot of power. On some level, there's some benefits to it and on other levels, a lot of people follow you, which creates complications as far as liquidity and other things. It's the same thing with somebody who has the power of leadership in a small community. On one level, there's certain things that they can affect change around that other people can't and in another level, there are certain things they can't.There's a certain balance that is struck in any leadership position and some things can be taken away from you more readily and some things you can't affect change on. It's something that I realized when I was in Boards of Directors. Sometimes in certain Boards of Directors, I had more power being off the board than I did being on the board. Being on the board, I was part of the dynamic and I couldn't help the leadership see through the dynamic. My capacity to help people see through the dynamic was more powerful than having a vote.Brett: Everything unseen and behind the curtain kind of thing.Joe: The way that I define power is, that power is the thing that can be taken away from you. Empowerment can't be taken away from you. Power is control over other people and empowered means that you're not looking for control of others. You're just being you despite the consequences. Power is looking to find safety. It's an expression of fear. Empowered is standing in the face of that fear and being truthful to yourself.If you think about every story that we've ever heard, it's always the story of the person who goes against the consequences for their truth. This is what we long for in ourselves is that, “I'm going to be empowered in a way that I will do the right thing despite the consequences whether I'm saving somebody from a burning building or whether I'm risking my job to be authentic.” That's what empowered is.Brett: Yes, burning building was a good example because, running into a burning building to save somebody, the fire has power over you. There's nothing anybody's going to do to change that, but you are going into the burning building to do your truth, to try to save somebody regardless of the consequences. You're willing to experience and feel the consequences of coming up against something with much greater power than you.Joe: Yes, that's right. There's the material power, like money or gun or fire and then there's also just the power of influence over you or other people. What I noticed is that when people act empowered, eight times out of 10, maybe seven times out of 10, the consequence that they're scared of doesn't come to pass. Even though the moment before they take that action, they're pretty sure it's inevitable. If I'm saying I'm going to be true to my wife even though I might lose her, eight times out of 10, I'm not going to lose her. If I'm saying I'm going to be true to myself even if I might get fired, eight out of 10 times, I don't get fired.If you're actually going into a burning building, I don't know what the odds are. It is not something that I have enough experience with. I will say, the other part of that is that even when you act empowered and things don't go the way you want them to go, they end up going the way you want them to go eventually. Meaning, yes, maybe your wife leaves you but eventually, you get in a relationship that works for you. Meaning that as you act empowered, as you act in your truth, the world that can handle your truth surrounds you and that becomes your reality bubble. We're all in these echo chambers. If I believe one political thing, I'm going to be in an echo chamber of verification of that. If I believe something else, I'll be in an echo chamber that verifies that. It's how our consciousness works and if we're true to ourselves, we end up in an echo chamber that is true to ourselves.Brett: It seems there's a difference between the actual constraints that our environment places on us and then the predictive constraints that we are simulating, that we are actually acting on, which are not exactly the real constraints of the environment. If we start operating in a way that doesn't fit the constraints of our immediate environment, we may end up losing a partnership, we may end up losing a job. If we stick with operating as though the world had the constraints that we want, eventually, we will only end up fitting into a system that fits those constraints.Joe: That's right. You see this in great leadership. I would say that one of the ways that you know that you're empowered is that you're acting in a way as if your reality is already true, that your vision is already true. If you're a civil rights leader, you're acting as if you are already equal and free. You're being that example for everybody to follow and you're assuming that everybody will treat you that way. It starts bending the world into that way of treating you. If you feel like you're less than, then your civil rights movement by its nature will have more friction in it. More people will treat you as you're less than.It's the same with anything-- if you're acting as a leader of a CEO and you're like, “Of course, we're going to be successful,” and you're acting like you're successful. When you're in the negotiations, you're acting like you're successful, then the world wants to bend towards that. It doesn't mean it bends towards it all the time, but it wants to bend towards that. That's what being a visionary is and that is, if you're empowered, then that visionary nature starts becoming more and more obvious to you. It just becomes something that starts happening.Brett: That brings up an interesting subtlety, the idea of acting as though you're already successful. It seems like there could be ways of performing success that are not beneficial, but the actual belief that you are successful. How would you distinguish between those two things?Joe: The way I would distinguish between those two things is, that there's a great story. It was an admiral in the Navy who got into a POW camp in Vietnam and he was asked who made it, who didn't make it? He said, “Well, who didn't make it was easy. That was the optimist.” The interviewer is like, “What do you mean optimist?” He said, “It means that they thought they were going to get out by Christmas or by the next season or whatever it was. They didn't make it, because when that came, that timetable came and left, they became defeated and they didn't make it.” He said, “Well, who did make it?” He said, “Well, that's clear, it's the people who thought that they would get out. The people who maintained that vision of their own freedom.”Brett: In that sense, if we find ourselves performing successfulness and then, signs of failure come, then that can just completely break down and we'll actually just believe our failure and that'll be the end, whereas realizing that this business can entirely fail and I still feel empowered as the person who can be successful.Joe: Correct and will be. It might be the next business. You see this all the time when people are transforming. When they're changing, they have this massive breakthrough and then they go, “Oh!” then, they feel disempowered because of the power of the pattern and they're like, "How do I keep it? How do I keep this breakthrough?" As soon as you see that, as soon as you see somebody start wrestling with how do I keep it, you know that it's going to be in flux. You know that it's going to pendulate back and forth for a while.But when the person sees it so clearly that they're like, "Of course, this is what's happening," then it's over. Even if it comes back a little bit, it's over. The whole process is quicker. If somebody has been getting angry a ton in their world and then all of a sudden they have this breakthrough of like, "Oh my gosh, it's not that I'm angry. It's that I'm hurt." They start crying and they see this new reality. They're like, "Yes." Of course, they don't need to hold on to it. Then you know that that change is going to be smooth and quick. If they are like, "Oh my God, I see it. How do I keep it?" Then you know that they're not fully empowered.Brett: That's a belief that's fragile then and that they don't really have it.Joe: Exactly. In that belief system, they still feel like this thing has power over them, this influence. What's interesting is, of course, it has power over you, of course and it's exactly that that you need to enter into. It's exactly that helplessness that helps us become empowered. What I mean by that specifically, because that can be incredibly confusing is, that going through the feeling of helplessness is what creates, oftentimes, that sense of empowerment.Brett: Yes, that's important, because what you were just saying earlier is that the power itself or the seeking of power as a deep expression of fear and it seems like that would be the fear of feeling the helplessness, the fear of being helpless. If you just move through that helplessness, then you end up on the other side feeling empowered.Joe: That's it. You just said it better than I could.Brett: Is there anything else you want to add to the definition of empowered?Joe: Yes. Empowered really is a feeling. It's a state. It's not a life condition. Meaning, you can be a billionaire and feel empowered and you can be in poverty and feel empowered. It's not really about how many resources you have. It's about your resourcefulness. It's knowing that you have the courage to do what's true for you. The other thing about empoweredness is that you can't really love without it. If you look at all the people who we see as beacons of love, there is a deep sense of empowerment to them. If you close your eyes and you go inside and you feel what it is to be unconditionally loving and then you feel what it is to be unconditionally empowered, you'll notice that they're two sides of the same mountain and you can't get to the peak without both sides of the mountain.Brett: I'm curious about what some of the different ways are that we allow ourselves to have power taking over us. What are some of the types of power? There can be economic power, there could be emotional power. I think a lot of this could allude to the victim-savior-bully stuff that we've discussed in some of the other episodes.Joe: When we're in fear, which is often when we're seeking power over another person, we're often in a victim, savior or a bully role. That is a good sign that you're in the power over. You can have power over somebody by being a bully. That role we know really well. Our society agrees with that one. They're like, "Oh yes, that person's a bully. They want power over." But you can get power over people as a victim too. I was watching a television show about magic and for whatever reason, they had this group of moms and they were all talking about guilt. They were all laughing and smiling over how guilt was a good way to control their kids. It's like, "Right, that is how people can control through the victim." Like, I'm so fragile that you can't tell me your truth. If there is somebody in your life that you can't tell your truth to because you're scared of hurting them, then you're being somebody who's controlling through victimhood. It's the same way with a savior. You can control people by saving them. You see this in very wealthy families all the time. They maintain control over their children by making sure that their money is there to save them. Or the Al-Anon saving the alcoholic. It happens all the time. There's all sorts of ways in which we are trying to have power over people. They mostly fit in the three categories, which is victim, savior and bully.Brett: The example with the rich people with the money doing the savior thing, I think there's many ways that that could apply to philanthropy as well.Joe: Yes, absolutely.Brett: Philanthropy can be done in a way that is entirely disempowering and that it can be done in a way that is empowering and I think a lot of that would come from the mindset of the people involved on all sides of it in the system.Joe: That's right. When I did a lot of philanthropy with schools and with kids, I would stay away from working with anybody who was coming from a place of guilt, that they were doing it because they felt guilty because their philanthropy just didn't work. If they were trying to help people, I would also stay away from it. If they were working with people so that both they and the people they were there to serve were being helped, then those were effective.Brett: What's an example of how that would work? Philanthropy failing, because it came from a place of guilt.Joe: I was in Nicaragua at one point and there was a group of Canadians there that had brought a whole bunch of clothing for this village. They all felt really great about themselves. When I asked them why they did it, they were all like, "Oh, I just feel bad that we have so much and I want to spread it." There's nothing wrong with it, but it just isn't successful. I remember sitting with them and saying, "Hey, there's all these turtles here that are going extinct." All these people could be saving the turtles. What if they earned their clothing by helping the turtles? How does that change this whole system?What it does change is, it makes people have an equal exchange and so they feel empowered. If somebody's just giving them stuff without an exchange, then it's actually quite disempowering because now you have power over them because they need you to give them stuff. In the '70s in Africa, you saw where food drops would happen. Then when the people who had the walkie talkies that helped the food drops happen went away, the native people tried to build fake walkie talkies and act like the person with the walkie talkies to get the food to drop.It's like you're not teaching that person how to fish. You're giving them fish. When people act out of guilt, that's usually how it works, because they feel like they have to give. Good philanthropy is an exchange. It's not a gift. It's a recognition that you're getting as much from it as you're giving.Brett: That segues to another interesting thing from earlier in the conversation about your empowerment is something that you have to give up. You choose to give up your empowerment. Let's talk a little more about that.Joe: There's a choice that you make and every time that you feel like you've been disempowered or that someone has power over you and you can't be true to yourself, then what's actually happening is that you are choosing to avoid a potential bad consequence. That's a choice that you're making. You have to choose that for it to be the case. Mandela had everything taken from him except his life. He was crushing rocks. He was beaten. It was not pretty for him and yet he stayed empowered. He continued to make choices and knew the choices that he was making despite the consequences.Brett: How does that work in daily life? Like with a job or perhaps with a receiver of philanthropy, trying to become empowered, but finding that the moment they become empowered, they stop receiving gifts and so, it's easier not to.Joe: Yes, it's really true. It's harder to raise money for something that's deeply empowered too, it's interesting that way. But then again, the people who truly feel empowered don't need to raise as much money. They have other ways of making things happen. Yes, it's a good question. How does it happen in daily life? One of the ways that I work with my clients on this often that makes it really acute is-- and I mentioned it a bit in the beginning, but I'll use a different example. It's like a husband that's deeply unhappy in his marriage. I'll ask the question, what if you act exactly how you want to act and see if they leave you, see if the divorce occurs. That's an empowered act. It's like, "Oh, I'm not going to compromise my authenticity, my truth to keep your love. I'm not going to compromise my authenticity and my truth to keep the job. I'm not going to compromise my authenticity and my truth to avoid the conflict and that's when people feel disempowered is, when they don't make that choice. That's when people complain about somebody having power over them.Brett: Right? Like believing that we're not going to be able to find another job, if we leave this job or believing we're never going to find another partner, if things don't work out with this one and we don't conform to this structure we're in.Joe: Yes. Then that becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly when you're dealing with one-on-one relationships, but then when it comes to being in a company or being in a country or being part of a geopolitical system, it becomes a little bit harder to see, because the change that you're creating is just less palpable. It's because it's a numbers game and so it becomes harder for people to see in that way.But that's an intellectual thing. On an emotional and a gut level, you feel it right away, you know it right away when you are acting empowered in those situations, say, "Oh, I'm going to be this way," and I see it all the time. It's like if you look at the people who are breaking the social norms in a way that is liberating for them, that are the front runners or the trailblazers, if you look at those folks, they are the ones who are not buying into the consequences.Brett: It's contagious then like, if you're looking for a social change, it requires empowerment on a population level. It might feel from a disempowered place that if you're the only person who becomes empowered, you're just going to get steamrolled by the system. Yet, you look at examples like MLK and it's, one person was empowered enough to have like a halo around them, creating more empowerment.Joe: Yes and he died. Right. There was somebody who had a gun and that's real power and it affected change. He had real power and it affected change. Both of the men who shot and the man who got shot in this particular case, both affected massive change in the world. The difference between the two is one felt empowered and one felt disempowered. The change that we affect when we feel disempowered usually doesn't serve ourselves or humanity.Brett: Yes, that reminds me of the archetype of the rebel, somebody who feeling what they think is power, ends up destroying their life and others in the name of their truth. Whoever shot MLK felt like they were following their truth and you see this all the time. Let's talk about that.Joe: Yes. It's really hard to see the difference sometimes, especially when you're in the middle of it and it's subtle until you see it and when you see it, it's clear. If you are in blame for another person or shame for yourself, then you are disempowered and you are trying to accumulate power. If you are not in blame or for others or shame for yourself, then that is empowered. That's the emotional way to know where you're at.Brett: Or guilt I guess, guilt and shame can be distinguished as well a little bit.Joe: Yes, guilt and shame. We'll put them together. Those are such-- semantically, that's a very interesting thing and it's very culturally based, but yes, guilt, shame, blame, all that stuff is a good indicator that you're disempowered.Brett: Earlier we were talking about the drama triangle with the bully and the victim and the savior and how that's based in fear. Can you relate that to blame and shame?Joe: Yes, so oftentimes, that fear is based on the sense of helplessness. That sense of helplessness is because we believe the story of blame and shame in our head. When you feel like someone else's making your life X, Y and Z way, then you're in blame and there's a helplessness and there's a fear that you will lose complete control and therefore, you need to have control over. Or, there's a shame, like, “I'm inherently bad.” There's no way out of that. It's a deep feeling of helplessness and we're scared of feeling that helplessness, so we then move into the drama triangle or the fear triangle. That's how it works. It's that helplessness is the feeling of that blame and shame felt all the way through, that we don't want to feel. That's the amazing thing about feeling helplessness. Feeling helplessness doesn't make you more helpless. Feeling helpless makes you more capable. It's so counterintuitive, but if you do it, you know it, right, because so much of our decision-making process is based on trying to avoid an emotional state. The emotional state of helplessness is one of the ones underlying most of our avoidance.Brett: What are some of the indicators for each of these particular roles? If all of them are fear state being set into place with blame and shame and we need to feel helplessness to get through them, what are some of the indicators for some of these particular roles of victim, bully and savior?Joe: The reason I don't call the drama triangle very often and I'm more prone to call it the fear triangle is because, the victim, bully and savior correspond with fight, flight or freeze, which are the states of fear. Fight is pretty obviously bully. Right? It's like, when I'm scared, I fight. When I'm scared, I freeze, that's more victim. When I'm scared, I fly, that's savior and that's the harder one to understand. But what happens is, I run away from myself in my own experience and I try to fix you, so that I can feel safe. If I can make it so you don't get drunk, I'll feel safe. If I can make it, that you're happy, then I'll feel safe.I'm running away from myself going into you to try to fix my issues and so, that's why I call it the fear triangle. There's a feeling for each one of them, right? It's kind of the indicator. The indicator is, if I am feeling all alone in it, that's the bully. If I feel obligation, that's the savior and if I feel stuck, that's the victim. In actuality, we'll feel all three of these things if you really slow it down for a minute and you'll notice that you'll feel all three of these things in a moment of fear. My wife comes home, she's in a horrible mood and I feel helpless that now my mood is going to be screwed up and the house is going to be screwed up and the kids are going to be screwed like, “I can't do anything.” I might feel alone, like, "Oh, God, I can't. I'm the only one who has to fix this thing." Then I feel, "Oh my God, I got to do something for her so that she feels better and then I'm stuck with this thing." It's like all three of them can happen slowly or quickly. But there's one that usually we dominate in situations that are dominating us in situations. Most people tend towards fight, flight or freeze most of the time.Brett: Yes, I personally tend towards the savior.Joe: Yes, I have tended towards both savior and bully. Those are the two places I'll go depending on the circumstance. Yes and often in quick succession.Brett: Let's talk a little bit more about how this works in companies and in teams.Joe: It works in a number of ways. The first is, you see this happening all the time in companies and teams, that somebody is acting like the victim or some group is acting like the victim. Some are acting as the savior. There's different ways that they're trying to create control. The less empowered the team feels, the more drama and that's a great-- as soon as you walk into a team, if it's super political, it's just like everybody feels disempowered. You just know it. Where everybody feels empowered and they feel like they can affect change, there's so little politics that are going on. It's a great litmus test.Brett: Right, because politics is a control mechanism.Joe: Correct. Yes, it's that fear. Drama. That's the thing that you see in politics everywhere. I don't mean politics as in people running countries. I mean politics. It might be people running countries.Brett: People being political. Joe: Being political, right. It's a deep expression of fear and people trying to capture power. Exactly. It's because everybody feels helpless and feels like they're not actually able to affect change in a way that's meaningful.Brett: How do you affect this kind of change in a company, whether you're leading the company or you're within the company or at the bottom of some ladder?Joe: Yes. Well, this is the tricky bit, because as a leader of a company, you want your people to be empowered. You also, often out of fear, want to limit their capacity to affect change. I don't want the new mail clerk to decide what my initial public offering price is going to be. It's this constant balance of people feeling empowered. You wanting people to feel empowered and at the same time, a fear of having that power runaway or this lack of control. This is the balance and the subtle war that's happening oftentimes with leaders.You'll hear it all the time because they'll say something like, "I wish everybody would act like the owner of the company." They mean that to a point, meaning they want everyone to take responsibility like that, but they don't want everybody to have all the benefits and they don't want everybody to have all the choice that they have. There's this very interesting balance that happens. What's happening in those companies is that the empowerment and the roles have gotten confused.If everybody can feel empowered in their role and their role is defined and how decisions are made is defined, then people feeling deeply empowered is incredibly good for a company. As soon as those roles aren't defined well, as soon as people don't know what they have to do to be successful, then a whole bunch of empowered people just creates a lot of mess. Brett: It sounds like there's a bit of a paradox here, where having well-defined roles and well-defined processes is structure and that could be something that people feel has power over them. Then also what you want is them to feel empowered to push back and change that structure or work fully within the structure and also perhaps challenge it. If you don't have structure like clear goals, criteria for success, loving accountability, transparency, then what happens there? There's a powerlessness in having no structure.Joe: That's right. Yes, if there's no way to affect change or make decisions, then what you'll have is this crazy politics with people trying to get power so that they can feel safe. Yes, you want to have some sort of structure that allows itself to change and a structure that doesn't change without very specific things happening, so that people can feel safe that they know what to do, that they know what success means. This doesn't matter if it's AA or Enron. In AA, there's a very particular structure that has to happen. There's 12 steps. There's the way that the meetings get run and that structure happens. It's important or people can't feel safe in those environments. In Uber, there's very particular structures in place. There's, "I'm going to rate you five stars or not," and there's another structure of making sure that drivers don't rip other people off by tracking them on maps. Those structures are really incredibly critical or people don't feel safe. Will those structures need to change over time? Absolutely. But, you need the structure for people to feel safe and know what their roles are. Then you need to be able to make room for people to grow and change their roles. The Constitution of the United States does a pretty good job of it, too.Brett: Yes, sets a structure. Joe: Yes. That's the balance that you're constantly looking for is, “How I create the amount of structure that makes people feel safe but also gives them autonomy and gives them the capacity to feel as empowered as possible.” Brett: Includes mechanisms for that structure itself to be updated to match reality.Joe: Absolutely. Right, that's it. That's how looking at company-- and what you see typically is, the more transparency and the less structure that creates safety, the more elegant the structure is that creates safety, then the more successful the company. Taxi cabs becoming Uber is an example of this, less structure, less infrastructure, but it creates actually more safety. It's the same thing that happened with GM and Toyota. Toyota became more decentralized than GM, which was at the time, the most centralized company. That decentralization, but still maintaining the structure, is what usually gives those companies a competitive advantage. The reason is, because it creates more empowerment with the employees.Brett: It seems like this would also promote scalability for a company, because if you have 100 empowered decision-makers instead of three, then more decisions can be made and more information can be processed.Joe: That's exactly right. Yes. You saw that there was a-- I can't remember, it was one of the Malcolm Gladwell books talked about, how in this war game that the Pentagon does, this small band of people beat the US Army, because their decision-making was happening at the bottom. There was some set of principles, some set of structure that they could all operate within. That's basically how you do it. It was in David and Goliath, was I think his book. You see that all the time and you see it in business books as well, like Reinventing Organizations, where the same principle is there. Brett: Yes, another war game example, just war example, would be when Rommel first encountered US troops in Northern Africa. He was like, "Oh, these guys are totally green and completely disorganized. It'll be a cinch." Then, not long after, he was writing letters back to Germany like, "Wait, don't underestimate these people. You can cut off an entire unit from their command and somehow, they'll still figure out how to fight."Joe: But this isn't just an external thing. This is an internal thing as well. When you become more empowered, you start operating on a set of principles and that set of principles, you're going to operate on whether it's comfortable or not. If I have a principle that basically says, "I am not going to work with assholes," and somebody says, "Here's a billion dollars to work with an asshole," I'm going to say, "No." It's a set of principles. I'm not going to operate any differently than that. If I have a set of principles and it's like, I'm going to be transparent with people and tell them my truth despite the consequences, that's my set of principles. I'm going to do it no matter what. That's when all the drama in me starts disappearing. That's when I feel empowered is, I've given myself a structure that it doesn't change very readily. It takes some time to change that set of principles, but I'm going to operate in that way no matter what. That helps me feel deeply empowered, which is strange. It's like a set of criteria that I live by that actually makes me feel empowered.Brett: Yes, as though this entire process of inquiry into values is to create a more and more consolidated, elegant structure by which we live our lives, so that we don't have to think about the complicated consequences and how the consequences are going to play out of, “What if I say this to my boss? Or speak my truth here or leave this job?” It's just, this is simply how I want to live and I'll accept the consequences if that's what it takes.Joe: That's exactly right. Yes, that set of principles is what frees us. If you look around at the people who you just saw like, “Holy crap, they didn't have resources, but they were empowered and they changed the world.” That's something else they all have in common. They were living by a set of principles internally and externally. Not perfectly, obviously. We're humans. We are not made perfect, but it's generally how one lives their life. When you see somebody who's living by a set of principles, you'll also notice that they never are blaming other folks. They're never worried about somebody's power over them. They're addressing it. Brett: That also will affect your opportunities as well. When I'm hiring, I'm much more interested in the resourcefulness and the ownership, the self-ownership of the person rather than the skills listed on their resume. People really detect that in any counterpart that they might work with.Joe: That's right, I'd rather pick the right mentality than the right skillset, for sure. I obviously like to pick both when I can, but yes, that's right. This is what happens internally, like I said, as well as externally, the drama internally goes away when we feel empowered internally, when we don't feel that we will make the choice even if it's uncomfortable. Even if I have to feel helpless, I'm going to make that choice. Even if I have to-- I'm not going to have power over somebody else or try to have power over myself. I will rather feel the discomfort of the fear and the helplessness. I'll rather enter into the shame. I would rather allow my own destruction as far as the destruction of my identity, my identity as one who's put upon or my identity as one who's valuable. I'd rather allow that to be destroyed, rather than move into fear and act from fear and try to have control over somebody. It's an internal and an external thing. When you figure it out internally, you have no choice but to act externally. If you feel like you are subjugated by something externally, then you also feel like you're subjugated by something internally.Brett: That sounds like a great point to wrap this up on. Thank you very much, Joe.Joe: Yes. Pleasure, Brett. Thank you very much.Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW, or to take a course, visit: artofaccomplishment.comResources:Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations, https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants

Authenticity over Improvement — AoA Series #7

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 19, 2021 50:14

When we consider how we want life to be in the future we often create a list of things that we have to improve about ourselves. Yet we rarely consider that we could succeed in “improving” every aspect of our lives, and by doing so, completely lose touch with who we are and what we want. What if learning who we are creates a future far better than what we think we want? What if it creates a future better than we could imagine?"I will watch people and if they are just following their intuition, they will just pick the next thing. This is what we do, when we are just following our nature. My nature, my authenticity improved me in ways I didn't even know were happening."When we consider how we want life to be in the future, we often create a list of things that we have to improve about ourselves. Yet, we rarely consider that we can succeed in improving every aspect of our lives and by doing so, completely lose touch with who we are and what we want. What if learning who we are creates a future far better than what we think we want? What if it creates a future better than what we could imagine? Today's episode is about valuing authenticity over improvement. Brett: Joe, let's talk about authenticity. What is authenticity?Joe: Authenticity is an endless spiral in one way and the fact that it's evolutionary by nature. We think that there is an authentic self and it is the solid thing, but it's not. It's as we discover ourselves, there's always more to discover. As we discover ourselves, we transform. Authenticity is really a path more than a destination. The way that you can identify when you're on that path of authenticity is, it's always about the process. It's never about the reward. It's never like a means to an end. It's like a river. It's very much like a river in the fact that there's a way that a river wants to run and that's the natural flow of the river.Next year, you'll come back and that river will run a different way. Authenticity is constantly changing, but there's just this natural flow to it. In Daoism, they call it the way. It's a very natural course. They call it self-discovery. They don't call it self-building. We're not building ourselves, we're discovering ourselves. That's why ultimately the path of authenticity is a path of self-realization. It is finding out the truth of who you are. Somehow, for some reason, the more we discover who we are, the more that we evolve, the more that we change, the more that we show up in a way that is far more gentle, or loving, competent, capable and strong.Brett: Can you talk a little bit more about self-realization?Joe: Yes, self-realization. There's a story of, I think it's in the Upanishads. I can't remember which tradition. So many times traditions have really similar parables. There's another parable very much like this about a tiger, but this one's about a musk deer. This musk deer is moving along one day. There's a smell and it's like, "What is that smell?" It just feels like a memory. It feels like a calling. It's like something gets opened up in this musk deer. His impulse is like, "I need to follow this thing. I need to follow it."It goes searching for the place where the scent emerges. It wants to find the origin of that scent. It looks and looks and looks and looks and it's almost upon its death, still looking for the scent and falls off of a cliff and punctures its stomach. It realizes, at that moment of death that, "Oh, the thing that I've been searching for comes from me. That scent emanates from me." That is the movement of self-realization. The thing that we're looking for in all the self-improvement, what we're actually looking for, is ourselves.Brett: How can you relate the story of the deer following its own scent to our path of self-realization? Joe: The search of the deer looking for the scent is the self-improvement. It's like, "Once I eat the right diet, then I'll be good enough, or I'll be awake, or then I'll be loved. Once I look pretty, then I'll be good enough and then I'll be loved. Once I lose enough weight, once I meditate enough, once I have no more negative thoughts, once I stop thinking," whatever it is that you think you have to do, become rich enough. Then you'll have it and you'll find the scent that you're looking for. The scent you're actually looking for is you, it is to understand yourself.It's the only thing that really solves the issue. It's why you see so many executives and I've worked with so many executives who are at the top of their game. They've made a successful billion-dollar company and they're miserable. They did everything that they thought they needed to do to improve themselves, so that they will be loved or that they would accept themselves and nothing's really changed. As soon as they start on that path of self-realization, as soon as they are looking for their own authenticity and they no longer are willing to sell that authenticity or bargain that authenticity for a result, when it stops becoming a means to an end-- it just is like, "This is my authentic expression." Then their life starts unfolding in happiness and joy.Brett: Let's talk a little bit more about that scent trail then. How would you define improvement?Joe: Yes. Improvement is basically, “If this, then this”, in terms of the self. It's like, "If I get sexy enough, then I will have the lover that I want. If I lose enough weight, then people will like me. If I have enough money, then I'll feel secure." Improvement is thinking that you're going to get a result from it. Authenticity is the opposite. It's, "This is what I'm going to do despite the consequences, because it's my authentic truth." That's basically what improvement comes. It comes from the idea of ways that we don't want to be who we are. The other way to look at all the ways we think we need to improve is all the ways that we don't love ourselves just as we are.Any point where you can't unconditionally love yourself, whether that is because you yell, because you don't work hard enough, because you're lazy, because you're a pessimist, whatever it is that you are telling yourself that you have to change, they're just ways that you're not loving yourself. They don't typically change. We just keep on telling ourselves that we don't love that about ourselves and we keep on telling ourselves that we have to improve it. When we actually accept our authenticity, those things just naturally move. They just shift.Brett: Reminds me of a quote that I've heard before, where somebody is speaking to somebody as though they were a child. They ask the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Instead of thinking to ask, "How do you want to be when you grow up?"Joe: I have never heard that. That's beautiful. How do you want to be when you grow up? The other way to think about self-realization I think it's a Pema Chödrön quote. It's basically to constantly offer yourself up to annihilation, so you can find out what's the part of you that can't be annihilated.Brett: What are we annihilating, these built up ideas of who we are?Joe: That's exactly it. The things that we think we are that we have to defend, you can tell them because you're defending them. It's like when someone's like, "You didn't do that very well," and you go, "er." Then you are defining yourself as somebody who's competent. You're not able to love the incompetent part of yourself. Authenticity is, "This is how I'm competent. This is how I'm incompetent." Being able to own that. Then in the owning of the lack of competence becomes more competence. It's this thing where, oftentimes, with executives, helplessness is this big thing where they feel it. Authentically, they feel helpless, but to allow themselves to feel helpless is incredibly difficult because the fear is, "If I allow myself to feel helpless, then I will become more helpless." But if they authentically own their helplessness, then they become less helpless. Brett: I think there's also a fear of being seen.Joe: Yes. That's right.Brett: Fearing that there will be consequences to that.Joe: Yes. That's how you know that part of yourself that needs, wants, to be destroyed. It's the part of yourself that doesn't want to be seen in that way, whatever that way is. "I don't want to be seen as blank, a hypocrite. I don't want to be seen as helpless. I don't want to be seen as greedy." Whatever it is that you don't want to be seen. "I don't want to be seen as weak." Brett: How would you separate improvement from growth? Even in this process of finding your authenticity, you can get better at it. What is that if not improvement? Don't we need some form of improvement, whether we're tracking our growth in some way to see where the trajectory is going?Joe: The question is, what would make you need it? What will happen if you don't have it? I think that's where the key is. Does growth happen? Absolutely. I always use this metaphor of an oak tree because when I look out my window, there is an oak tree. The oak tree grows. The growth happens. Does it need to? No. Is it looking to improve itself? No. It's nature. Another way to think of our authenticity is our nature. Our nature is to grow, our nature is to improve, our nature is to learn. If you take a little kid when they're babies, they can't even walk. One of the things that they smile most at is when a face comes at them sideways, not when a face comes at them straight up and down. Straight up and down face is the face that they see right before they feed. That doesn't make them smile as much as a sideways face, which means, "Oh, we're here to play." Play for a kid is learning and we have this natural desire to learn. It is authentic in us. We have a natural desire to grow. It's authentic in us. This just all happens very, very naturally, but it's when you think you have to improve to be good enough or when it's not just the nature of your life. You look at a six-year old kid, they're constantly wanting to learn and grow and it doesn't stop. It doesn't stop unless someone has kicked the love of learning out of us, it just keeps going. I don't think we have a need to do it. I think the thing is, that improvement is just happening naturally and that's authenticity. But if you are looking to improve yourself, then you are putting the brakes on the process and you're often going in the opposite direction of the river.Brett: How do we address that fear of becoming stagnant if we don't improve or just to be measuring? Measuring where we're at and then measuring that according to some scale of value that we've created.Joe: That's a great question. First of all, question your scale. That's the ultimate thing. It's easy to play a game when you have a measurement. It's hard to play a game when you don't. If your measurement for life is how much money I have in the bank, then you can play. If the measurement is how kind I am to people, then you can play. Then you have something to measure to. If you start really questioning those measurements, what do you mean by kind? Do you mean having the most positive impact? How do you measure positive impact? What's the difference between kind and nice? What if I was deeply truthful, but I wasn't kind? Why is kind more important than truth? These questions, as soon as you start really looking at the end, if you really deeply look at the end, then it gets really scary. That's when the stagnation fear really shows up and you're like, "Oh, all the progress that I thought I was making might not have been to the right end. Maybe there's no end." This fear sets in and it's almost like this fear, like it's going to be nihilistic or something like that. Even the idea that it's nihilistic is just another way of trying to create meaning out of a situation, but the nature of life doesn't really require meaning. There's no other part of life that requires meaning except for humans. Life wants to evolve, it wants to grow, it wants to improve. It seems, as it turns out, most humans, when they understand themselves more and more, there's a deeper and deeper compassion that shows up. There is a deeper, deeper amount of empowerment that shows up. What you find is, the things that you think are opposite, such as love and being empowered, they turn out to be the same thing. That the pinnacle of loving is empowerment, that the pinnacle of empowerment is loving. You can feel this. If you just stop for a second and close your eyes and you feel what it would be like to unconditionally love the world. You just let that settle in your body for a moment. Your love is so big and so great that it expands everywhere. It's not weak love, it's not love like I'm going to let people abuse me. It is the kind of love that a mother has, that's a great mother. They have boundaries. Then you let that go for a second and then feel what it's like to be completely empowered. Feel what it would be like to not have to worry at all about the future, to not have to prepare, to not have to plan, to just know that you are capable of handling any situation, to be like Superman on a mountaintop with no Kryptonite in the world, or Superwoman on the mountaintop with no Kryptonite in the world. Nothing can touch you. That feeling of empowerment. Then just feel the two next to each other. How are they different, if at all, this full empowerment, this full love? That's how it moves. The fear of stagnation, the fear of, "Oh, there's no meaning. There's no place to go and therefore I'll stop moving," it hits the human psyche for sure. It's definitely a part of this human psyche, at least in the modern world, but life doesn't require any of that stuff. Life can't stop moving. Try to not improve for a week. Take two weeks and do your best to not improve. Don't learn anything, don't grow, don't have any realizations, don't have any recognitions. Try that for two weeks. [laughs] I told someone to do that once and they were like, "Oh my God, so many recognitions, so much realization," because they stopped trying. We feel this all the time when we're on holiday. You have two weeks off and then you come back and you perform better. It's smoother. The whole thing works better. You make better calls because you weren't actively trying to improve for two weeks. It's just the nature of life. We, by our nature, learn and want to grow.Brett: Something that came up for me in the exercise that we just did, was that both in the unconditional loving the world state and the feeling fully-empowered state, there wasn't any fear. But the concern of stagnating is just fear. The fear of stagnating is the thing that I know for me, in my life, I have spent a lot of time in the fear of stagnation. That has constricted me in those times and led to-Joe: Stagnation. Brett: -stagnation.Joe: Exactly. That's how it works. We invite the things that we're scared of, that's our nature. Our nature is to invite. If we have a fear of something, we're inviting it in, because we want to. We want to learn and grow from that experience, we want to face that fear. The fear of stagnation invites stagnation, the fear of loss invites loss, the fear of abandonment invites abandonment.Brett: Let's try to bring this back into more concrete examples to make this real.Joe: Yes. I'll do a couple of them. One way to look at it, is kids and their learning. Kids, we were just talking about, their nature is to learn, they're curious, that's what they're genetically programmed to do. All humans are. Somehow or another, we can put them into a school system, tell them that they have to improve and get A's and then they stop wanting to learn. It actually happens to something like 47% of highly intelligent kids fail high school.Brett: Yes, I did really great in school up until I got an IQ test that told me I was smart and then I got my first B+. This was like fourth grade. Then it was just like, "Screw it."Joe: Yes, you stopped trying.Brett: To hell with this whole thing.Joe: There's a great psychological test on this, that basically if you tell a kid they're smart and then they try and they don't succeed, they'll stop trying because then they will prove that they're not smart. They'll just stop trying, so they can maintain the identity of smart. It's some fascinating work. That's an example of it. Now if you take kids who've been unschooled, I think it's called non-schooling or unschooling or something like that, where kids have been somewhat traumatized in their school situation, so their parents pull them out. They say, "You can't watch television. You can't do things that are destructive, but you can not do any work until you're ready."They often times don't do any work for three months or six months. Then all of a sudden, they're like, "I want to work." Those kids, when they want to learn math, they can learn basically fractions to calculus in something insane, like three months or five months or something like that. You can read the studies on it, because they want to learn, because it is their desire to learn in that direction and they want to do it and they will do it. It's like one is moving with the authenticity of the situation and one is telling the kids that they have to improve to be good enough. It's like a punishment and reward situation, so that's one aspect.Another way is a personal story from my life. I was in high school and I started smoking cigarettes. I was socially awkward at the time. I had issues. My upbringing had some turmoil in it. I was constantly telling myself I should improve by not smoking. I was constantly telling something that I needed to improve in. Then just by nature, I got drawn into hacky sacking. I just started to hacky sack all the time and I just really enjoyed hacky sacking. It just became this thing. Then about 10 years ago, I was with one of my daughters. My daughter's having some problems in school and this occupational therapist came to us. Then said like, "Your daughter has something called sensory processing disorder." It just basically means that the neurology isn't really melding the way it would with other kids and it makes you very sensitive to stimulus through your senses. I said, "How do we solve this thing?" She was like, "The way you solve it is through doing exercises across the midline that require coordination," et cetera, et cetera. Hacky sacking would have been a perfect example of that. If you look at me, before hacky sacking and after hacky sacking, I became socially more fluid. I became less sensitive.When you have sensory processing, it's a bit of like a nerd's disease, more likely to wear glasses, you're awkward and clumsy, you don't do as well socially, that kind of stuff. All that changed with me hacky sacking. My nature knew what I needed, knew what was needed next and did it without anybody telling me to, without anything happening. I watched this happen all the time with clients. I watched clients all the time. I know basically the dance steps of transformation. Everybody does them a little bit differently.Sometimes chapter three comes before chapter one or whatever, but I will watch people. If they're just following their intuition, man, they will just pick the next thing and I would be like, "Oh my God, they picked it perfectly again." This is what we do when we're just following our nature. Then smoking, for me, on the other hand lasted until I was in my 30's, as a perpetual habit into my 30's and that was all the ways I was supposed to improve. My nature, my authenticity improved me in ways that I didn't even know were happening.Brett: That's fascinating. I can think of a lot of experiences in my life that are a lot like that. One of them being joining a 18-month course where I felt like an intuition. It felt like a lot of money at the time. In retrospect, it was very little. It was just like, "Man, this seems like my kind of thing." I don't even know what it is and I didn't. When I got there, I was like, "Wait, this isn't really all that."Joe: Yet, it transformed your business too, which is the insane part. That's the other thing.Brett: Yes, but more than that in my life.Joe: Exactly. That's the insane part. That's a great example of it as well. It's when people come, because they often come to me, because they want to transform their business and we transform their life by them taking their natural steps and their business naturally transforms. If they would have just focused on their improvement, their business may or may not have transformed. In this way, the reason I use this methodology of working on personal stuff is because that always transforms the business. It has a hundred percent success rate as the person transforms their attitude towards, their business will transform and so will their business. Brett: Let's relate all this back into the concept you were talking earlier about self-realization and self-discovery.Joe: That's good. If you look back to my journey, let's hear it from my journey for a second. For the early part, I got really deeply into awakening, enlightenment in the non-dual sense of the word, not like woke culture. I'm talking about like the Christ consciousness or enlightenment, whatever religious tradition you have, has a word for it. At the beginning of that journey, I thought it was improvement that would get me there. Once I ate the right diet, or once I did the right exercises, or meditated hard enough or blah, blah, I would become enlightened. That was the improvement side of things. It's a slow, arduous, painful process. It luckily moved enough for me to realize that it wasn't about improvement. It was just about the recognition of who I am. When that happened, this question appeared to me, it was, "What am I?" I asked that question for 10 years, maybe 10 times a day, I would ask that question. That is really what transformed everything for me. Just being in that question for that long with that level of wonder transformed everything. It was funny. I was seeing a guy at the time. I was reading every non-dual teacher I could find. The only guy that I had met personally, who I thought, "Wow, this is a person I would want to learn from," was a guy named Adia Shantay. I got up and asked him a question once in front of this big auditorium of people. I said, I keep on asking this question, "What am I?" All I get is silence. Some dude in the back just started laughing and I was like, "That's not funny?" Adia smiled and I can't remember what else happened. I remember about three years later, I was at a meditation retreat when that question, what am I, faded away. The question never gets answered. It just expires and then it expires like a firecracker, but it expires. I was in the back and somebody got up in the front and asked the question, "What am I and nothing." I just started laughing hysterically, as if that nothing wasn't the answer and that's what it turns into. That recognition of self is something that just unfolds into nothingness. That nothingness is incredibly free and incredibly potent and capable.Brett: So, who are you now?Joe: [laughs] Yes, that question has expired. There's an exercise on this, just to go back and forth and ask somebody, "What are you?" Over and over again, "What are you? What are you? What are you?" See what happens as all your answers expire. But if I had to put, what am I, in words right now, which is an exciting thought process, I would say, "What am I? I am infinitely you. I am everything and nothing in the silent vastness that everything arises in and so are you."Brett: Then what happens once that question expires? It sounds like there could be a trap here in thinking that, "This question of who I am has expired. Now I don't have to prove myself and there's just nothing to do." What am I going to do to just stay in that cave and meditate until-- ?Joe: Yes, there's a thought that says that that might be the case. In fact, some people go through that for a while. I think it's because they're like those kids, who needed to be unschooled for a while, when they have that recognition of their essential self in that way, that there is this need to just sit there for a while and do nothing. It becomes a bit dissociative. Eventually, it's no longer satisfying. We just become more and more human. We like to play. We like to learn. We like to grow. It's our nature. It's our authenticity. Once we have been let out of school, we realize there's nothing that we have to do to improve ourselves, because our essence is unbelievably beautiful, miraculous, a dream that we never thought even possible coming true, that we couldn't even have thought of coming true. There's this natural desire to rest for a while, potentially. But eventually, you want to move, you want to dance, you want to play, you want to be alive. Then the journey turns into, "How do I be alive? How does my authenticity really want to be alive? How fully can I embrace this life?" There's a book called The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I don't even know what it's about, but the title is amazing. That's what it is. Life becomes, "How do I allow myself to be more and more vulnerable to the unbearable lightness of being?"Brett: I love that. Both of us are the kind of person who would recommend a book or reference a book that we haven't read just because of its title.Joe: [chuckles] The title. I highly recommend that title. Brett: [chuckles] The title.It seems like there could be another trap here where we have somewhere where we want to go and we're like, "Maybe improving myself along the particular metrics that I have in mind right now, maybe that's not the best way to get there, because authenticity is the best way to get there. If I just get more authentic, then I'll become this thing that I want to be and get to where I want to go."Joe: Yes, that's right. That is a real trap. It's like, you'll see this happen oftentime in tools. You get this tool that you start working with and in the realm of self discovery and you get this tool, it works really well for a while and then it stops working. Some of the times, it stops working, because you're using the tool to change yourself instead of loving yourself, so it stops working. Some of the time, that tool stops working, because you've co-opted it into improvement, instead of recognition. It's really the same thing, to improve yourself isn't to love yourself as you are. To find the authentic expression of you, is to love yourself as you are and to know that that authentic expression will naturally change you, just like the natural flow of a river changes the river.Brett: That could mean your goals will shift.Joe: Will shift. Yes. I've seen a lot of things not change as people go through this journey and I've seen a lot of things change, but I've never seen the goals of a person not change through the journey. That always changes. What's often interesting is, the goals that they used to have, just get met naturally without any effort or thought process, because they become just a step in what's necessary for them to evolve into their authenticity. I had a goal for years of having enough money to blah, blah blah. Somewhere along the line, I just didn't care at all about money. Then money just started rushing in. That's a really typical story. Not always, but it's a very, very typical story.Brett: We've talked about how wanting something is good. We just had a whole episode on what you want, how wanting itself is critical. Then we're just talking now about how wanting something from ourselves or wanting something in our future can lead towards this constant improvement process and away from our authenticity. What do you have to say about that?Joe: Wanting is critical, what you want is really inconsequential. What you want is directionally correct, but it is not the end all be all of anything. That wanting is what pulls you. That wanting is the natural pull of evolution, of authenticity. That's what it is. What you want is a strategy to get there. There's 10 or 20 strategies. What you want is inconsequential and there's no reason to attach to it. It is to follow your wanting and then to watch how you're wanting changes and watch how what you want changes. Brett: What happens if you're going through this process and the things that you want just change so rapidly that your life starts to feel disconnected or disorienting?Joe: You're very fortunate. You might feel disturbed depending on your personality type. Some folks will find that to be a beautiful free ride and some people will feel like-- there's that quote, that sometimes falling feels like flying for a little while. People will be like, "I'm flying, which means I must be falling." In actuality, as they say, the bad news is you're falling, the good news is there's no bottom. That is part of it. Rumi called it, a Sufi poet, he calls it a holy confusion, that not knowing. It's called the mystery for a reason.It's absolutely what happens and the goals shift and then the goals disappear. Then there's like no goals for a while. Then after there's no goals for a while, there's very specific goals and then there's just this movement that's like-- how did I describe it? The goal is to live principled, because you know, that living principled will make you happier than any goal that you could ever achieve. Brett: That's something that's entirely within your power too?Joe: Yes, it becomes choice-less at a point, it becomes outside of your power. At some point it's like, "I just can't not live with principled, because it's too damn painful."Brett: Give us another concrete example of how that works, when what you want is inconsequential, but the wanting itself isn't. Joe: I can give you a funny one. I'm sitting with my godson and his father and he has been a friend since high school. This story is going to be one of those stories that lets you know, maybe you don't want to have me as a friend. We're sitting there and we're having lunch together at this restaurant and my friend tells me about how his son stole $50 from him, bought a vape pen and was vaping in the classroom. I'm just listening. Son is in those teenage years. All of a sudden, five minutes later he's like, “The problem with my son is that he just doesn't have ambition. He just doesn't want to do anything.” I was like, “What? Of course he wants to do something. Do you know how hard it is to do what he did? Stealing $50, he planned that stuff out. That's ambition. Then he went and did it. Then with the knowledge that he could have gotten caught, which is totally ambition and then he figured out a way to go buy the vape pen. Then he had so much ambition to do it that he did it in a classroom and got caught. That is some CEO level ambition. What are you talking about?” [laughs]At this point my friend is just looking at me like, "Shut up, Joe, shut up." His son is looking at me like a smile, "Oh, wow, I didn't know. I should have visited my godfather more often." I was just saying, “There's clearly ambition, it's just that you want him to be ambitious in one way, but he's ambitious in another. Let's look at how he's ambitious.” I started talking to him. "What is it that you want to do?" He wants to play this particular sport that requires some money and you got to get these guns or whatever. It's like a laser tag type thing, the next version of a laser tag. He's telling me about it and I'm getting into it with him.Then I'm like, “How are you going to afford this?” He's like, “Maybe I have to get a job.” “What kind of job do you want to get? This kind? You don't make a lot of money.” Then, “How are you going to get there?” We just went through this whole thing and he was clearly eager to do all this stuff, so that he could do the thing that he wanted to do. I was like, “How can your dad help?” He is telling his father what his father can do, to help him be ambitious and get things done. That's the difference between, “You should improve”, to “What is the authentic expression?”The thing is, that we do that internally as well as externally, meaning we're usually like the father in that story, rather than the godfather in that story to ourselves. We're telling ourselves what we have to improve, what we need to do, blah, blah, blah, blah, instead of just paying attention to what the natural thing is. If we follow that thread far enough down, it has far better results and moves much quicker.Brett: It's fascinating. By that measure, I was extremely ambitious and barely passing any of my high school.Joe: Exactly. It's because it couldn't hook on to your authentic-- most schooling doesn't hook on to a child's authentic desire to learn.Brett: In my case, that presented a lot of different tracks and opportunities all of which just didn't quite hook.Joe: It's really hard to hook, when you're grading people and say you need to improve. That's not hook-worthy.Brett: It's like a culture of constant improvement.Joe: We don't listen to songs that tell us that we need to improve. "Wow, a triple platinum song by Jay-Z called, “Boy, You Better Workout More." It just doesn't happen.Brett: Let's talk a little bit more about how this works in companies and in a more general sense, in cultures of self-improvement or just not even self improvement, just cultures of everybody needs to improve to get better.Joe: The constant improvement culture. It's not assuming that people want to improve by nature is what happens here. A great example of this is in that book, Reinventing Organizations, there's a nursing company in there called Herzog. Basically what happened, it was in Holland, what happened is, there's these community nurses and they got privatized. It just became all about efficiency. It all became: improve, improve, improve, improve and it was like, "This is how long it should take you to get there, this is how long it should take you to administer the shot. This is how long it should take you to get back. That's how much time you have. That's how much payment you're going to get."Everybody was going for the improved nursing efficiency. This company came along and it did a lot of really cool things. One of the things it did is it said, "You know what, our job isn't to be as quick as possible. Our job is not to improve our process in that way. It's to make it, so that we help people become self-reliant." Through figuring out how to get to that home and make the person self-reliant, instead of administering the shot, they became 60% more efficient than their competition or something like that. Maybe it's 40%. I don't remember the numbers exactly, but it was a tremendous amount more efficient.One had that natural hook, because we naturally want to help people. That is part of our nature. All mammals, that are community-based mammals, have altruism as part of us. They hooked on to that natural thing and then that led to natural improvement, but they weren't trying to improve in some unnatural way. The interesting thing is, as soon as I say, it's our nature to be altruistic, somebody will say something like, "It's our nature to be self-interested." I say, "I agree, it is." It's our nature to be altruistic and it's our nature to be self-interested and it's our nature to want to be rewarded and it's our nature to want our team to win and it's in our nature for us to win. Companies that are really becoming the most efficient companies, are hooking on to all of that. If you think about that nursing company, their team won and they had individual reward for the performance. As it turned out, people got to decide their own reward. Also, they got to help. They're hooking onto all of these natural things in us.If you look at the great products of our day and the great nonprofits of our day, they hook into a natural, authentic desire in people. Sometimes it's drug-like, like Facebook or coffee and sometimes it is not drug-like. Sometimes it is just our nature to want to communicate. That's what it means. Not only does your product-- but your culture needs to--if you want to be highly efficient, it needs to hook into that nature of people, our authenticity.Brett: Another one of our ESF group was recently telling me about a company that they're applying for. It's a debt collections agency that operates on transparency. Instead of trying to be as efficient as they can, milking the most money from people as possible and buying the debt for the cheapest possible whatever, they're optimizing for really being in connection with people. They purchase debt and then they're transparent. They're like, "Hey, we bought your debt for this much. We have this much of it. We expect to get a certain percentage of it paid back from various places. What can we do to get this paid off?" With that transparency and working closer to their customers, their debtors, they actually get across this sense of actually caring. They're able to come up with much more creative solutions which actually results in-- this is a new company, but it seems like it's resulting in getting much better results for them. Also they're getting just swathes of testimonials from customers that are like, "Wow, I wish all of my debt had been bought by this company. This is amazing. They're actually people and they talk to me like a human."Joe: You can see this in sales processes are more effective, when there's a real relationship, real connection going on and that authenticity is there. People think they have to compartmentalize themselves to do business and that compartmentalization, that inauthenticity, it absolutely makes you less efficient. It might make things easier to do in the short-term, but absolutely harder to do in the long-term. It makes you less efficient, because you're basically asking anybody you interact with to compartmentalize themselves that same way. A debt collector compartmentalizes their heart and they go in hard. Then their customer compartmentalizes their heart and they respond hard, or they respond like a victim or whatever it is, but they're going to match that more on average.Brett: If we focus on finding the authentic movement, then--Joe: How do I collect debt in a way that feels good in my system? How do I nurse in a way that feels good in my system? How do I produce a social media app that feels good in my system? All of those will be a more efficient product.Brett: Then with that continual asking, "What am I?" Like, "What am I? Am I an efficient debt collector or am I a human?"Joe: That's right. "If I am them and they are me, then how do I want to behave here? If I feel my natural authenticity and my desire to learn and my desire to be of service to people, how do I collect debt in a way that's of service to people?" It feels horrible to not pay your debt. To help people feel that they are standing on their own two feet and have achieved paying off debt, that can be a real deep service for humans.Brett: I wonder how many other industries can be rethought that way.Joe: Every one of them. It's endless. It's just like there's always more money to be made. There's always a way to become more authentic and each one is an efficiency.Brett: It sounds like there's a lot of faith in this process because with each layer of authenticity you find, you really have to let go of what you valued or what you thought was important, entirely to find what's beneath it.Joe: Yes, that's true. It feels like faith, until you get used to reading the river in some way. It's the same faith that maybe a basketball player would have that's going into a game. It's like you can't plan out the whole game. You can't plan out everything. You're basically choosing, “I am going to plan out my entire basketball game”, or “I'm going to learn how to read a river” and “Learn how to read the field, learn how to read my opponents and so that I am competent in every situation where I'm in that basketball game.” Then you start having faith in your capacity to handle situations.You become excited, but you can't handle them, because it means you're getting to learn something and it makes you more capable next time. It's the same thing. It's like if you've learned to read a river to go down that river and get to the mouth of the river, it's not an act of faith anymore. It's just what you do. You're watching other people build canals and that makes them feel secure. Like, "I will just take a canal the whole way, but I have to build the whole canal." It's a lot more effort. It's very much like that. Once you start realizing, that your authenticity naturally brings you to the next level over and over again and that improving yourself is like building a canal. It's like this idea of safety, that it takes a tremendous amount of effort and is really not that safe, because lots of people die building canals. That's how it works. It feels constantly, like you're taking faith, that you're taking the risk. Then at some point, you're like, "Oh, no. It's more risky to do the other thing. It's more risky to be 60 years old and all my dreams have come true and I'm miserable," which is where that typically leads.Brett: I think we often over-index on the cost, the perceived cost of stopping doing things the way that we're doing them, but forget about the opportunity cost of continuing to do the same thing.Joe: What's interesting is, that's also part of our nature. It's also part of our nature to stay with something that feels safe.Brett: Predictable is safe.Joe: Yes, that's right. That's exactly right. Luckily, as authenticity matures us, as we evolve being authentic, we become more and more sensitive. That stuff becomes more and more painful, where we're naturally kicked out of those cycles because we just can't handle them anymore, because they're just too painful.Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW, or to take a course, visit: artofaccomplishment.comResources:Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations, https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/

Want over Should — AoA Series #6

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 15, 2021 41:53

If you look at all the bad habits that you've been trying to stop for a decade they all have one thing in common: They are all things you're telling yourself you SHOULD stop doing. What if thinking you “should” is what keeps you stuck? And what if getting in touch with your wants, in a deep way, is the quickest way to get you unstuck?"The want is that very simple impulse that is moving us, that moves us to have a closer relationship with our loved ones. It is a constant pull that leads us all the way down the developmental line. If we allow it, it will take us all the way to freedom."If you look at all of the bad habits you have been trying to stop for a decade, you will find they all have one thing in common. They are all things you are telling yourself you should stop doing. The same is likely true for the things you tell yourself you should be doing more of, finishing a project, going to the gym, calling your mom. What if thinking you should is what keeps you stuck? What if getting in touch with your wants in a deep way is the quickest way to get unstuck? Let's get to the bottom of this. Brett: Joe, I would think this is pretty obvious, but you usually have a unique definition of things. What exactly do you mean by should?Joe: Should is really a mechanism of shame. It is. There's a saying that says that shame is the locks that keep the chains of bad habits in place. Should is like a really bad management technique. Energetically, it's oppressive. Intellectually, it's control-based. Emotionally, it's rigidity and neurologically, it's a threat. If you say to somebody, "You should really do that," there is a threat in that. What's interesting is, that same energy really doesn't happen in certain cultures. When you see, particularly, more indigenous cultures that I've been a part of and seeing that whole should telling people thing just doesn't happen, at least energetically, it doesn't happen. When I mean energetically, I don't mean energetically in a spiritual new age way. I just literally mean the energy in which you are talking to the person. That's what I think it is. You're right. They are the things that keep your bad habits in place. Shoulds are just really ineffective. I'll tell you the story where I learned this. I was like 26 years old and I decided I was going to be brutally honest with myself. I wrote down a list of everything about myself that I didn't want to admit to myself. Then I folded it away and I put it away and I found it like six months, maybe a year later. I went through the list and I was like, "How many of these things have changed?" Remarkably, most of them had. I was like, "Wow, that's amazing. I did nothing and they just changed," just the recognition of them changed, awareness changed them.Then I looked through all the ones that hadn't changed and to a tee, each single one of them had a very heavy should attached to it. That's when I started to realize that this way of managing ourselves by telling ourselves we should do things is just really ineffective.Brett: To keep it simple around the definition of should, we're talking about the moment that we tell ourselves that we should do something.Joe: Well-- the voice in the head will tell you that you should do something and that's the most obvious thing, but there's also an energetic should that happens. It's almost a muscular response or a neurological response to something and it doesn't always have to have the verbal, "You should do this." You could just reach for the double flourless chocolate cake and you'll just feel that "er" inside of you and that is just a nonverbal should. I think it's really important to see it as both.Brett: What's wrong with controlling ourselves in this way? If these shoulds are pointing us towards the things that we want or don't want to be doing, what's causing that to get in the way?Joe: It's because you've put an extra layer on it. If you're just in the wants, it's an amazing fluid thing. Then when it gets into the shoulds, it creates the threat, like I said and a rigidity. As an example, if I try to control a two-year-old and I have that energy of like "rah", “You will do this, you should do this”. There's one of two responses that happen in any human. If I did it to you right now, "Hey, you should speak differently on this podcast." It immediately creates one of two things in you. Let's do it for the audience here. "You should be listening to this podcast better. You are not paying close enough attention."If I'm treating you like that, there's one of two responses. One of those responses is going to be rebellion. There's just something innate that's like "er". No response. That's not a really effective way to create anything. It's just creating no's. The other thing that it does is you're like, "Oh, you're right, I should." It's this submission. It's not surrender. It's submission. It's like, "I am weak and I will just do what you say." Then you've got a whole bunch of disempowered people and that doesn't really help much either. Especially if you're in a company, you want a company full of empowered people or you want a community full of empowered people, or you want yourself to feel empowered. Every time you're using the should, what's happening is that you are either creating your own internal rebellion, which is why you haven't done the things you've been telling yourself you should do for decades, because you're rebelling against it. Or you're creating a disempowered situation inside yourself. You're creating more of a victim mentality to this voice in your head that's being abusive.Brett: Interesting. What I notice about myself is, that when I think about not telling myself what I should do or shouldn't do anymore, there becomes this fear that I'll just become lazy or some couch potato and I just won't do the things that I should do as I use that word.Joe: [chuckles] Totally, exactly.Brett: What's your response to that? What happens if we stop doing the should, if we stop setting out a path for what we want from ourselves from a perspective of being conscious of the risks and the threats?Joe: Great questions. This is that inherent goodness thing that we've spoken about before, which is basically-- the idea is that you are a lazy slob, piece of shit, just going to pick your ass and live off of other people unless you tell yourself you should do something. You know what I mean? Could you imagine if you thought about somebody else that way? Unless I tell Joe that he should do a podcast, he's just never going to fricking do it. I got to tell him he should do it. It's a nonsensical thing to really think like, "Here I am doing this podcast. Nobody told me I should do it. I wanted to do it." If you think about kids from zero to eight years old, there's no internal should. They're doing all sorts, they're developing crazy amounts compared to any other time in life. They're learning all sorts of things. It's all just because they're following their wants. On one level, that's a really important thing to note. On the other hand, you actually may become a couch potato for a while, which sounds a little weird. The thing is, if you have been under threat for an extended period of time, there's going to be a need to relax. There's going to be a need to recover. If you're going cold turkey on your shoulds, you might actually just need to slow down for a bit. It's not going to be a couch potato. The couch potato thing happens when you burn out and then you tell yourself you shouldn't be burning out. You should stop playing video games. You should stop laying on the couch. You should stop. You should stop. You should stop. Then you really will go into full couch potato mode. If the natural burnout happens with the should, then it looks like depression. There might be a time where you need some more rest, where you need to recover. You see this happen in schools all the time, when there's this thing called unlearning or un-schooling or something like that, where kids are taken out of the school that have burnt out. They take like five or six months and do very little. Then all of a sudden, they learn three or four times as quickly as they were in school. There's lots of studies on this. You're basically saying, "If I don't put myself under threat of a should, if I don't tell myself that I'm bad if I don't, then I won't." It's just not my experience at all. My experience is that the people who are most generative in their life are people who want to do shit, not who feel like they should do.Brett: It sounds like it takes time to shift paradigms of thinking. This reminds me a little bit of a thought experiment--Joe: Hold on a second. That may be true. That may not be true. Don't assume that one though, at least for people listening. For me, turning off the shoulds in the voice in my head was very quick. It didn't take a tremendous amount of time. Once I really just understood, "Oh, this shit doesn't work." If you know that you have a screw gun and every time you use the screw gun it strips screws, you're pretty much not going to use that screw gun. It's not going to take a lot of time to figure that out. If you start telling yourself you should stop using shoulds, it could take years.Brett: That makes sense. This reminds me of the thought experiment of having the voice in your head be a roommate. If you were to go to talk to somebody like a roommate or a friend and they were the person that's just going to tell you what you should do, versus the kind of person that helps you find what you want, then you might either stop going to that person, because it doesn't feel like you're really getting helped, or you might become dependent on them telling what you should do.Joe: Most humans would just move out. Some of us are engineered or programmed to give up our own empowerment for a person like that. That's right. Most of us who had a boss who spoke to us like that should voice in our head, we would quit or we would be miserable. If that “should voice” in your head is really strong and really loud, there is a strong case that you're miserable, whether you see it or not.Brett: As we release ourselves from the oppression of these shoulds and we start listening to what we want and trusting that our wants are inherently good and healthy for us-- let's get into the wants side of this then. How would you define wants?Joe: The want is just that impulse that moves through you, that animates your actions. That is what the want is. The should is just this egoic layer on top of it that slows the whole thing down. Let me explain. You're sitting and you think to yourself, "I should exercise." What's actually happening is there's an impulse and a want to exercise and it shows up. Instead of just like, "Oh, cool," and doing 10 jumping jacks, you say to yourself, "I should go to the gym." Then that just destroys your chances of actually working out or at least very much lowers your chances of working out.The want is just that very simple impulse that's moving us, that moves that eight-year-old, that five-year-old, that three-year-old. It moves the toddler to walk better. It moves the crawler to toddle. It moves us to speak. It moves us to have a closer relationship with our loved ones. It is a constant pull that leads us all the way down the developmental line. If we allow it, it'll take us all the way to awakenings and freedom.Brett: What if I'm listening to my want and my want is to have a big piece of chocolate cake?Joe: That's a really good question. There's one other piece that I think is really important to explain. The thing is that wants are somatically expansive. They're intellectually empowering. The want is very different, if you attach to it or if you don't attach to it. If you attach to, let's say, having that girlfriend Jennifer, then you're in craving, which is different than want. The want is just that impulse. It's just that empowering expansive impulse. If you look at the cake and you're in that empowering expansive place, that's very different, than the way most people want a cake, what they think is wanting a cake, which either this struggle, "I want it, but I don't want it. I want it. I don't want it. I want it. I don't want it." That's not a clean want. There's still some refinement that needs to go there or there's just that unconscious shoving the cake in their mouth and calling it a want. The want is something that feels very expansive. If you look at something like a chocolate cake and it feels very expansive to sit and eat that thing, then yes, follow the want. Because the thing about the wants in general is that you have to follow them to deepen into them. What that means is you want to follow the chocolate cake because you want to have this sense of pleasure. Great, have the sense of pleasure. Then you start finding out what the deeper sense pleasures are.You follow that want home and you find out it has seven more beautiful siblings. If the want is clean, it doesn't matter if it's a short-term or a long-term-- healthy in your mind and your superego, it's far more about allowing that movement, so you can find the next step. You can't want to run unless you've wanted to learn how to walk. You have to actually get to the walking point to have an effective next level of want. That's how it works is that the wants move us. A toddler, they just want to walk and walk well. Maybe as a toddler, you want to run, but then you can want to play baseball and then you can want to play basketball and then you can want to play basketball really, really well.It's the same thing with our wants. When we start really getting in touch with our wants, then they really transform. For example, the want is, “I want a million dollars” and there's some shame with that and so it's not a clear impulse. Then we're like, "What is that clear impulse?" It's like, "Oh, I want to be empowered."Brett: That sounds very relevant to a career path as well. I heard a story recently from a friend who's a lawyer. Halfway through their first semester, they were like, "Okay, I'm not going to do this. I don't want to be a lawyer. This sucks." The experience was they were like, "These are all the things that I have to do to get to where this path is supposed to put me and it doesn't look fun at all." This person described that they simply stopped caring about what they were supposed to be doing and they started paying attention to what they actually wanted. They were like, "Actually, there's all things that I want to be doing that I could do if I was enabled with this law degree."They started just making it theirs. They took all the classes they wanted, that nobody else was taking and ended up on some trends that they were ahead of their game on or ahead of the trend on as a result of following the way they wanted to be a lawyer and they ended up really loving their career. Joe: That's exactly right. If you're doing your shoulds and you're basically following rigidity, you're following a tightness and you're going to have that kind of tight life. You're going to have a very rigid life. If you're following your wants, your life becomes much more expansive.Brett: I liked what you had been saying about craving as well. It sounds like craving is distinct from wants. Craving is a want that you don't want. It feels like a want, but you really don't want it.Joe: [laughs] Yes, there's a thing about the want. If you just take the want viscerally and you don't try to get there, you don't try to get to the end, if you just take the want viscerally, you can feel it. Let's do this for a second. If you close your eyes and you feel a really deep want inside of you, you have a deep one, not a superficial one, but a very deep one, maybe a want for a deeper form of intimacy or a want for a more expansive consciousness, or a want for more love in your life. You feel that want and you take it in and you don't worry about whether you can get it or not. You don't even think about how to get it. You just feel what it is to want.Wanting is just a feeling like anger or sadness. Just allow that feeling in your system without trying to get to the goal. That experience is really pleasant. It's really quite lovely. To me, the way it works in my system is, it is one of the closest feelings to love, to allow a desire deeply inside of you. I think it's why so many of the the Sufi poets, they talk about desire in this way that they just love desire. This longing-- because that longing is so close to love. It's so close to that expansive acceptance of everything. That's what wanting is. “Now I got to get it. How do I get it? Why can't I get it?” That's craving and that's painful as shit.Brett: This reminds me of a lot of different spiritual traditions that tell us, that craving is a hindrance to freedom. For example, Buddhism's principle of non-attachment or Christianity's warnings about the desires of the flesh. Is that what they mean?Joe: There's those spiritual traditions and then there's the tantric spiritual traditions. People think that they're at odds, but they're really not at odds at all. What's happening there is that people have been beaten out of their wants and so they start turning cravings into an excuse not to want to not allow themselves to want anymore. If you're really deeply closely looking into your own personal experience, the craving is the thing that they're talking about and the wanting, the desire that the Sufis are talking about, the tantric people are talking about, is, there are two different things that are happening inside of your system.Brett: It's interesting. The exercise that we just did about the wanting-- for myself, I was thinking about having a healthy body and being fit and having strength. In feeling the wanting, I was imagining moving my body and having range of motion, flexibility and strength. The moment I started trying to figure out how I was going to get there, then all of a sudden it turned into "Oh, but I'd have to work out." Suddenly, the working out feels like a chore. The actual wanting of being healthy, the way that I was imagining that was actually working out, was the equivalent of moving and using my body.Joe: Exactly. If you just stick with that as a daily practice, how do I want to be in my body right now? Thirty minutes of how do I want to be in my body right now would get you exactly where you want to be in your body. How much more appealing is that? I have to work out today or, “How do I want to be in my body for 30 minutes?” It seems like it's almost no different and it's like worlds and worlds apart.Brett: Let's get this into the context of business and achievement. A tremendous amount of successful executives are deeply attached to winning and succeeding and it seems to be working well for them in many regards. How would you factor that into this?Joe: There's people who tell themselves they should do stuff. Apparently they're pretty successful at it or they're deeply attached. They have a deep craving and they're successful at getting their cravings met. For me, it's pretty simple. There is the intention which is critical. I'm not suggesting to drop all intention in life. We have our intention, we have that want, we have the impulse and that's a really, really important thing. It gives us a north star. It gives us a heading that we move down. To hold that intention is absolutely completely important to getting stuff done in the world of accomplishing stuff in the world. Being attached to succeeding is absolutely a fine way to succeed. It's not the most efficient way to succeed. It is not the most enjoyable way to succeed, but it is absolutely a fine way to succeed. You can really, really get attached to something. You can work at it and you can get there. In fact, it's really important to have some of that if you're going to get anywhere in life and that's the intention. You can have that intention without that craving, without that deep attachment. If you don't have it, you're lucky to get anywhere. That intention is really quite important. If you're going to put attachment on top of that intention, on top of that want, then you are dragging. Then you are like throwing an anchor out and sailing across the ocean with your anchor out. It is not going to be the most effective. The real thing is that intention, like, "What is the context of it? What's the way that you make it most enjoyable? Let me give you an example. If I look at every single CEO that I know who has been very, very successful, their intention wasn't to make money. They weren't attached to making money. What they were attached to was being the best or beating their competition, or reducing carbon in the world, or being the best at customer service. They had some intention, that was past this intention of just succeeding. Their attachment was beyond succeeding. Because if you're just attached to the succeeding part, it's a lot more difficult. If succeeding is something that you have to do to get to the part that you're attached to, then it's easier. The attachment isn't the most efficient way to get to where you want to go, to have that strong attachment. It's definitely not the most enjoyable way to get to where you want to go, but the intention, absolutely critical. Does that make sense?Brett: Yes, totally. It seems like having the intention versus having the attachment to success, the intention makes it easier to pivot. If your intention is to build a company or build a product that reduces carbon in the world, there are many ways to do that. You could start out with one idea of doing it and discover that there's different ways of doing it. One of them just isn't working in the market. It seems like it would be easier to get out of the local optimum or maybe you just have to let go of what you are doing and start something new, which is just really common in any any business endeavor, this idea of pivoting and flowing with reality. If you're really attached to the particular success, then you might be more resistant to make changes, that seem in the short-term to lead away from your goal of success.Joe: That's right. You have your intention out there. That's where you know which way you're going. We'll call that like the goal or the want. That intention is what's moving you in the direction. Then you can have different attitudes towards that goal, towards that want. The attitude could become a should, the attitude could be, "I'm scared of getting to the goal. I'm angry that I don't haven't gotten to the goal. I have absolute faith that I will be there." All of those ways are different attitudes towards having that goal. You're not going to get there without the goal. The most efficient attitude to get to the goal is to be in the want of it, not the should of it. It is to be in the enjoyment of it, not the rigidity of it. That's the more efficient way to get there and to be beyond the goal itself. It's that the goal of succeeding is really just a necessary step to get to your deeper goal.Brett: Give me some more examples of holding an intention without the should.Joe: You're running a company and you have a revenue goal of $100 million. You can hold that as, "I should get to $100 million". You can hold that goal as, "I want to get to $100 million." You can hold that goal as, "I will get to $100 million." You can hold that goal as, "I can't wait until I get to $100 million." The way you hold that goal is going to affect how much energy you have. It's going to affect how rigid you are in it. It's going to affect your ability to be flexible. Then the second level of it is choosing that goal as far as whether you're going to make that the easy goal or the long-term goal. Are you saying, "I want to get a $100 million, just to get a $100 million?" Are you saying, "I want to get a $100 million, so that I can build a spaceship to get to Mars"? Are you saying, "I want to get a $100 million, so I can beat the competition"? All of those things are important. It's not the intention or the goal. It is how you approach the goal, how you attach to the goal, the relationship you have with the goal. That's the important piece for efficiency and enjoyment.Brett: Feeling like you should be doing this prescriptive path towards the goal is controlling yourself with threat, essentially.Joe: Correct, that's right. It could work short-term, but it's definitely not going to work long-term.Brett: What makes it that we don't see the inefficiency of our shoulds when we're in them? If it is the case that everything that we don't do in life that we want to do and everything that we do do that we want to stop doing is all locked in place by these shoulds, what makes it so opaque to us?Joe: It's a shame situation. The way that you can look at it is even if you take it up a level for a second, what's the important thing about having the intention? What's the important thing about having the goal? It tells you what questions to ask. If I say to you, "You need to start a company and that company needs to sell widgets to 10 people," then you're going to ask questions to get to that goal. But if I say, "You need to sell widgets to a hundred million people, you're going to ask different questions." You're going to say, "Maybe I have to think about venture capital. Maybe I have to think about private equity. Maybe I have to think about distribution at that scale," that you're not going to have to think about it if you're selling 10 widgets.The goal is important, because it very, very much helps us determine what questions to ask. That's why goals are so important, but what most people do is they put some shame into those goals, tell them they should reach the goals, not that they want to, not that they can, but that they should reach the goals and then all of a sudden those goals become a burden. They become like, "Oh, if I don't do that, I'm bad." That's what makes it hard for us to see the shoulds is, that it makes us think that we're bad. The should makes us think that we're bad and if we think that we're bad, it's very hard to see what actually motivates us. It's the same thing like in wars. If two countries are warring with each other and that whole war has to depend on people thinking the other side is bad. If people look up and say, "You know what, they're just people. We're just people. We're just both trying to get along," the war's going to stop. To have that internal war of should means that you have to think you're bad and that's what makes it so hard to see through the should, to see through the war. What's really strange about it is, that you can see it from a manager 10 miles away. You're sitting there and you see a manager like "You should, you should, you should." You're like, "Oh my God, that's not going to work." That's horribly ineffective. There's been hundreds of management books saying, "Don't do that because it doesn't fricking work," and psychological studies, but we'll do it to ourselves all fricking day long. We will recognize it outside, but we won't recognize it inside.Brett: It's as if the moment we say we should be doing something, the structure of that should is to flatten all of our wants to go do that one thing, because we've prioritized it. If we are routinely doing that thing where we're suppressing our wants to do the thing we should do, then we can't hear or feel our wants anymore.Joe: That's right. The wants, for many of us, are very scary. It's a very scary thing to have a want, because we were taught at a young age not to have wants. We don't have that want because mom won't be happy. You don't have that want because you won't be codependent with that. You don't have that want because blah, blah, blah. A lot of people are told to disassociate from their wants. They're not taught that their wants are amazingly beautiful things, that can guide them in their entire life.Brett: Let's talk more about that. What makes wanting so vilified in our society?Joe: My experience is, that there's a pain that we feel from being rejected in our wants. It's like a deep level of rejection. We're all kind of school kids that got deeply rejected when we asked someone out on a date and so we're hesitant to do it again. Because our wants are this deeply intimate thing, this very vulnerable thing. They are at the core of us. If they've been rejected, we don't want to feel that rejection again. I think that's the internal process. Externally, if you have a whole bunch of people who are codependent or a whole bunch of people, who were told that they were selfish as kids, which really, if you're told that you were selfish as a kid, that really just means that you weren't doing what your mom and dad wanted you to do. If you were told that, then having somebody own their wants is very uncomfortable for you. There's this external world that is uncomfortable with people owning their wants. There's also this external world of people who just can't wait for that person to be owning their wants some more. It's like rock and roll. Back in the day, rock and roll was there. There's these people who shut up and they're like, "I'm going to get whatever I want. I want to do this and do that." There was this group of people were like, "Yes." There was a group of people like, "Devil." That's how it works when you're really owning your wants, especially the earlier wants. The later wants start to refine and start to become more and more beautiful. Then it's a little bit less likely to happen. We all start with the early wants and to own them gets a certain level of rejection, because other people would have to feel their own wants. The thing about wants in general is that it's our human nature to want. You can play this game with friends and after every sentence, just say what it is that you wanted to get out of that sentence. You will find a want in every single sentence that you speak. Right now, I want to have you guys understand what I'm saying. Right now, I want you to taste the deep pleasure of wanting. There's always this conscious want behind almost every sentence we have, it's such a part of our human nature. We cannot get away from it. All we can do is own it or we can sublimate it. Should is just a way of sublimating it, which is why it doesn't work as effectively.Brett: I'm going to say something right now because I want to participate in this podcast and feel relevant.Joe: [laughs] I want to respond so that you know that I love you and I care for you.Brett: I want to end the pregnant pause. [both laugh] A lot of what you were saying about the societal aspect is that it's uncomfortable for people to feel their wants. Part of what it is, is people have a problem seeing other people want what they want, because that makes them feel the pain of their own wants. The pain of our own wants seems to be linked to something we've discussed on some other episodes, the consequences of wanting, the potential consequence. If I want something, I might not get it, I might have to feel disappointment. I might be judged. I might break this cozy structure of this job that I'm in or this relationship that I'm in, because my wants feel incongruent with that.Joe: The interesting thing about that in general is, that not getting our wants met is not actually as scary as we want or pop psychology would say that it is, because we all have a dozen wants that we haven't had met. It doesn't devastate us all the time. How many people listening to this podcast want to have $10 million more in the bank? it hasn't happened. Didn't devastate any of us. I think it's the exposure, the vulnerability of showing your want and having it rejected. That's the deeper scare.Brett: Admitting that you want $10 million in the bank and people judging you for that, greedy.Joe: Exactly. The amazing thing is when you totally own a want, oftentimes the want goes away almost immediately. I really want $10 million in the bank. If you fully feel that all the way and you're just like, "Oh, yes, $10 million," just feel that want. Oftentimes, it just starts shifting. It's just like, "Oh, what I want is security." Then it's like, "Oh, what I really want is to feel empowered in every situation." If you don't allow yourself to have the want, it can't move through you. It's just like, if you don't allow yourself to get angry, it can't move through you. If you don't allow yourself to get sad, it can't move through you. It's just another emotion that needs to move through you and is so pleasant when it does.Brett: It sounds like on one level, you're saying that it is an impulse and on another level, you're saying it's an emotion. Can you get into that distinction a little bit more?Joe: That's a great question. Let me feel inside for a moment and really see what the distinction is there. It seems like there's this impulse that moves. The way it's working in my system is, there's this impulse to move, to say these words, to be in front of my computer right now, to answer your question. There's this natural impulse. If that impulse meets any friction, then this emotional experience of wanting starts to occur. As this emotional experience of wanting starts to occur, that becomes the feeling. That's the feeling that's there.If I fully feel the feeling, the friction starts to fade. There's the impulse side of the wanting and then there's also the emotional side of the wanting. It's what distinguishes, “I'm just going to walk to the bathroom right now” and there's no experience of wanting in that process, because there's no friction met. As soon as that impulse meets any level of friction, then there's this experience of wanting. If you fully feel that experience, it turns deeply into a loving expansive experience and then that friction starts to go away.Brett: I want to hear one more story from you, a personal story relevant to how you arrived at all of this.Joe: I'd be happy to share a story, Brett. It's a story of shoulds and wants. When I was earlier in my venture capital career, I had this idea that I really should be making money. It was foreign to me because it wasn't something that was really ever important to me before. It was a combination of a feeling of indebtedness to the investors and also doing a good job and being valuable, but the shoulds started appearing in my life at that point. Then I was sitting in a hammock and I read this news at some point. I remember the time specifically. I read this news, that this company that was formed with almost no money sold for multi billions of dollars and it felt like just an absolute kick in my stomach, just like a whack in my stomach. I stopped and I went, "Oh, where did I feel that for the first time?" I traced it back, not intellectually, but like my entire body traced back that feeling to the first time I felt it. The first time I felt it was trying to please my father as a kid and it was like, "Oh," and it was not pleasable at that time. To please him, at least from my point of view, wasn't possible. I saw that this whole money making activity had nothing to do with actually making money and the should behind it had nothing to do with it. It was this very early should that I had of I should be pleasing my father. That was a very ingrained should. It was at that moment that I was like, "Okay, hold on a second. This doesn't have anything to do with money and it's a should. What do I want? What I really want to do here?" What I realized is, I just wanted to create great cultures for people. I want it to be a part of creating great cultures for people to work in. That changed everything. It changed my approach. It changed my ability to be effective. It just changed everything as soon as I just moved from the should that was driven by an early feeling to a want, which was very present and it was just very immediate. All of a sudden, everything started to open up and flourish in my life in a new way.Brett: Wow, thank you. How do you want to end this?Joe: I want to express a deep gratitude for everybody who's listening, who's dedicated to understanding themselves, who honors me by choosing to be here as part of this experience. My deepest want is a very deep bow to everybody who's listening and to say that I wouldn't be here without people who were bowing to me. I am grateful to be bowing to you. My deep hope is, that you will bow to the people who appear before you.Brett: Joe, thank you for taking the time to help all of us build our culture internally and in our companies.Joe: Thanks for doing the work, man. Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW, or to take a course, visit: artofaccomplishment.com

Feel over Figure — AoA Series #5

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 5, 2021 46:58

We often try to figure out solutions to our problems intellectually. But modern neuroscience tells us that, if you removed the emotional centers of your brain, you would be unable to make even the simplest decision regardless of how much intellect you had. What if there were emotional practices you could do to clarify every decision? What if emotions were the key to finding whole new kinds of solutions?"The reason that somebody gets angry at somebody else is because they haven't gotten angry by themselves. It takes a while to build that kind of anger, so go release your anger and then talk to the person. Go get really, really scared and then talk to your boss about the raise that you want. You have the emotional experience and then go and take the action."Brett: Joe, many of us are taught to manage our feelings and to be logical, especially when it comes to important or complex matters. What makes feelings so important?Joe: That is a great question. I think it was a 2012 book called Descartes' Error, a neuroscientists talks about what happens to people if they lose the emotional center of their brain. It's a little more complex than this, but just to simplify it, if I took the emotional center of your brain out, you would cease to make decisions. It would take you half an hour to decide what color pen to use. It would take you four hours to decide where to have lunch. Your IQ would maintain the same. In fact, in the book, there's somebody whose IQ remains the same, very high level IQ, so incredibly intelligent, but their business falls apart. Their marriage falls apart. Everything falls apart because they can't make decisions. What it indicates to us is that we are thinking we're making rational decisions, but there's really no such thing. There's only emotional decisions. You can think about this in terms of your own life. Really simply, just think about how many decisions of your life were made because you didn't want to feel like a failure or how many decisions were made so that you could feel loved. How many decisions were made so that you could feel like you were seen by your friends and how many decisions were made so that you wouldn't be rejected?It's like tremendous amounts, huge swaths of our decision making, you can immediately see, are very emotional. The intellect is really good at trying to figure out how to get to an end, but the end that you're trying to get to is always an emotional end. Clarity doesn't come from being logical, because it doesn't work. You can't do it in your decision making. It comes from being okay with whatever emotional state arises.If you all of a sudden are completely excited to deal with sadness and you're completely excited to deal with joy and you're completely excited to deal with anger. It's not even deal with it, it's like you get to live that, then all of a sudden, you have incredibly clear decision making. That's why it's important. If you're in those thoughts that are recursive and they're just coming in over and over and over and over again, guaranteed there's an emotional reality, that if you felt it, it would clear up.Brett: Can you give me an example of what you're talking about?Joe: Yes, absolutely. For instance, I work with a lot of married couples and what happens in a lot of marriages is that people stop being true to themselves because they're scared of some result that'll happen if they do and eventually the marriage becomes not palatable because they're not themselves in the marriage. What I tell people in that situation is, hey, go mourn the heck out of your marriage. Your marriage is over. Just assume it and go more in the heck out of it, like feel all the grief of being left, feel all the grief of 20 years down the tubes, feel all the grief that your kids are going to not have two parents, like go through all of that stuff. At the end of that, then let's find out what you need to do. What they do is they're basically living through the result that they don't want to feel so that they can act with clarity. It's that feeling of loss that they don't want to deal with and since they don't want to deal with it, they're not speaking their truth and therefore, they're not in a marriage that accepts their truth. Eighty percent of the time, they then speak their truth and the other person is like, great. Or they're like, what the hell and then three months later, they're like, great. Twenty percent of the time their partners, like, no, that's not what I want.They leave and they break up, but it's definitely a much higher chance of success, if somebody has already felt the thing they're trying to avoid because then their actions don't come from trying to avoid the feeling, their actions come from what they want. This is something that you learn in even like The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, the samurai did this, I think it was the Sufis who did this-- many traditions have done this thing, where they basically visualize their own death to get over the fear of death. They've lived that fear so many times that they no longer fear death. It's confronting the emotional reality that you don't want to handle, that you don't want to feel and then immediately your decision making can clear up.Brett: Recognizing that there is life on the other side of that emotion.Joe: Yes, exactly, or that emotion is a deep friend. There's no emotion I've run into that hasn't been a benefit to me.Brett: What do you mean by feeling these emotions? If something hasn't happened yet, for example, how do you actually feel the emotion associated with it to mourn the loss?Joe: The first thing you need to do is just recognize that there's always an emotional movement in your body, it is constant. There's no moment of consciousness where there isn't an emotional reality happening. We might not want to admit it. We might've been taught at a young age not to feel it, but it's constantly occurring and it's very muscular in nature. You can really feel it through constriction of muscles.If somebody has been told never to get angry, their body contorts. I can literally look at somebody and recognize if there's repressed anger. You can recognize and I'm not the only one there's tons of people who can. You can recognize who had the critical parent, who was beaten, who's holding back their authenticity all based on muscular structure. The muscles and the emotions are tightly, tightly correlated. That's the most important thing to know that it's constantly happening and that there's a muscular component to it. How do you feel these emotions? You're feeling them. The question isn't how do you, the question is how do you bring your awareness into it? Oftentimes what happens is we're feeling the emotion, but we're spending a lot of energy compressing that emotion. It's making it a different version of itself.The way I think about this is like, there's this emotionless called the emotion of anger and it's flowing like a garden hose. If you kink it one way, the anger looks like this, “No, I'm not angry.” If you kink another way, it looks like this, “That's fine”. If you're going to be a prick and if you kink another way, it sounds like this, “You son of blah, blah, blah, you goddamn blah, blah, blah.”All of those are kinks in the garden hose. When there's no kinks in that garden house, when it's fully allowed, there's no reason to resist the anger. It sounds like the anger of a Gandhi or Martin Luther King. It's clear. It's determined. We will not put up with this. We will be equal. That's also anger, but that's anger unresisted. The trick isn't to feel it in the way that it's like, you have to go and conjure it because it's there. It's really to stop restricting it. It's really to stop holding it down.Brett: It sounds like one of the things you were saying is that the first thing that people might feel is actually the resistance to the anger. This body tension, for example, might be the first thing you notice and be like, oh, I'm feeling a lot of tension in my body right now. Then maybe the secondary thing you might feel is like, I'm holding back this emotion.Joe: Right. It's the resistance that's actually painful. When people are like, “I don't want to feel sadness.” There's this way in which people talk about each of the emotions and there's this common fear of each of them to let them fully ride. If I allow my anger, I will destroy people. I will hurt myself. I will hurt others. If I allow my sadness, it will go on forever and I will be enveloped in sadness for the rest of my life. If I allow fear, I will be frozen and I won't be able to act. These are the traditional thought processes that people have about why these emotions aren't safe. The reason that they feel that way is because that's how the resistance is, when you're resisting anger, you do destroy shit. When you are resisting sadness, it does last forever. It looks like depression. When you're resisting fear, then you're anxious all the time and you are frozen. You're not doing stuff. People have confused the resistance with the emotion.Brett: Or with the feeling of being overtaken by the feelings.Joe: Exactly. You never are overtaken by the feelings, you're overtaken by the resistance to the feelings. If you're scared of an emotion, you are currently being overtaken by the resistance of the feeling.Brett: Right. Because the resistance is itself a feeling. It's like a secondary feeling that loops back and then fights the first feeling, which is just a massive waste of energy.Joe: Correct. It's really important to recognize that it is a waste of energy. It's also really important to recognize that in itself, it also isn't bad and it is there to be loved. I have a saying that says, “If you can't love the emotion, love the resistance to the emotion.” If you make the resistance the next evil thing that you have to overcome, that's another form of resistance. You are just adding a triple layer of resistance on it.Brett: Well, what about the danger of, if you have, for example, you have anger and it's deeply resisted and you remove the first layer of resistance and you start to let the anger through, but there's still enough resistance around it, that it comes out as an attack. It can be dangerous to be overtaken by-- to let ourselves be partially overtaken by a feeling and still have it constricted in that way, right?Joe: Yes, it absolutely can. You're playing a short game and a long game here. The short game is how do I start getting in touch with these emotions in a way that isn't destructive. Then there's a long game, which is, “If I don't do it now, then what am I going to do? Continue to constrict it for the rest of my life?” Like there's a risk involved. You have to risk a little destruction now to get to a place where the anger is clear and moves easily and is fluid and enjoyable.There's some tricks to it. The first trick is don't believe the emotion. Don't not believe it either. It's like when you're having the emotion, the important thing is to see yourself as an actor playing the part of you having an emotional experience. An actor always knows it's not their emotion. Even if they get caught up in it for a while, they know there's some part of their consciousness that knows that the story is a story. It's not true.It's about keeping that aspect of your awareness awake, so that you just know like, oh, this emotion is just moving through me. It's not personal. But it's also allowing that emotional experience in and that requires letting the emotion be garbly. Intellect speaks like this. It's like A plus B equals C and B equals D, therefore, A plus D equals C. That's how logic talks. The way anger talks is “ [makes sounds]...Oh, right. That's it. I got it.” That's how anger speaks.If you believe all the garbly gobbly glue of anger, like, “That person's an asshole and that person did this to me, blah, blah, blah, blah”, then you're never going to get to that clarity. If you don't allow all that garbly glue, you also won't get to the clarity. It's this interesting thing of listening to emotions in a different way than you listen to logic. If you start repressing it and say, “Well, I know it's really not them. It's really me. I know that they're trying their best”, or blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff doesn't allow the full expression of the emotion so you don't get to the clarity.The trick is, not to listen to the story, to see it as non-personal, to see yourself as an actor, just having it move through. It's like going to the bathroom. It's not a personal thing. It's just happening. Then the last part is to just not do it at anybody. This is the most critical thing is, don't do it at people. Most people think of anger like, don't get angry at the person. I'm speaking to that, but I'm also speaking to sadness. People get sad at people all the time, to try to create manipulation or guilt or whatever it is. I'm going to get sad at you, to make it so that you change your thing. You're never using your emotions to try to get someone else to change.Brett: Or afraid at people.Joe: Yes, exactly.Brett: This isn't safe.Joe: That's exactly it.Brett: You were speaking to feeling these emotions coming up within us and then viewing it as we are an actor, acting out the emotion that's coming up within us. It sounded like that could apply also interpersonally. Or if our partner is coming at us with a lot of anger, recognizing like, oh, they are playing the part of their anger right now and I don't need to take everything they say personally. I could actually hold space for this to occur so that they can find their clarity behind it.Joe: Absolutely. That's a lot easier if you are good with your anger. If you're like, “I love my anger. I can't wait for my anger to arise because every time it does, I find out some boundary that I haven't been drawing. I find out some way I haven't been being clear. I love my anger.” Then you see somebody else get angry. You're like, “Oh, I love that too.”When somebody sees you love their anger, man, that anger changes, they're like-- it happens with me and people are like, “Goddamnit, Joe, you da, da, da”, I'm like, “Oh yes, you're angry, come on. Tell me about it.” I want to hear this. I see that you feel alone and I see that you feel rejected and I don't want that. Let me hear what's going on with you. That changes their anger. It just changes it.Brett: You were speaking to the short and the long game that's being played. I think a lot of fear of letting our emotions fly is that we'll become worthless or unproductive or just the last straw will happen if we're deep in a relationship. We're just like, “Oh, man, one more outburst, then they're just done with me. I've got to suppress this.” What happens if we just let our emotions fly all the time?Joe: Again, just not at people, to put your emotion at somebody, to try to get them to change with your emotions subconsciously or consciously, it's emotional abuse. It's not healthy for them. If it's happening to you, draw a boundary and say, “I don't want that. I'm happy to listen to your emotions if I give you permission, but otherwise, I don't want the emotion at me.”I just say, don't do that without permission. If you are getting your emotions out by yourself or with a close friend and you're doing it, then they're not going to leak. The reason that somebody gets angry at somebody else's because they haven't gotten angry by themselves. It takes them a while to build that anger. There's lots of time before that, so you can release it. Go release your anger and then talk to the person. Go mourn and then talk to your wife about what you need from the relationship. Go get really, really scared and then talk to your boss about the raise that you want. Do the thing that you have the emotional experience and then go take the action.Brett: Just feel it. How do you recognize, in the moment, when you're in this like a spin cycle and you're like, “Oh God, this da, da, da,...This person did this or whatever? What should I do here? I don't know what to do!” How do you recognize that? What's the hook to get you out of that loop to remember this and to get into the emotions.Joe: Exactly what you said. If you are doing one of three things, you mentioned two of them. If you notice that you keep on looping on the same thought, it means there's an emotion that you're not feeling. If you are not clear about a decision you need to make, then there's emotion you're not feeling. If you are judgmental towards another person, there's an emotion you're not feeling.Brett: Can you dig into that one a little bit more?Joe: If I judge you for being angry, I don't want to feel out of control. Or if I judge you for being angry, it's because I don't want to feel the potential that I have to lose you, so loss. If I judge you for being uptight, it's because I don't want to feel controlled, or I don't want to feel rigid. Every time we have a judgement, it's just a way to suppress an emotion, which is what makes our decision making really screwed up because if you're judging, very different than discernment. Discernment is just a knowing of distinction. If it's judgment, then you're not clear. You're not looking at the data clearly. You have preconceived notions of the data and then you can't make great decisions.Brett: Or preconceived notions of intent on behalf of the other.Joe: Correct. That's right. Then the last one, another cool trick is, whenever you see your mind in binary thinking, "I either have to buy the car or not buy the car." Instead of, "I could buy that car. I could buy that car from 10 different people. I could buy that car with different packages. I can buy that car in different colors. I could buy that car in six months." Whenever you're in that binary black or white thinking, then you know that there's some fear there that's not being felt.Brett: Let's get into a little bit deeper. We've been talking a lot about the feeling side of this, what do you mean by figuring it out? What are some other ways that that can happen and that we can get caught in that loop?Joe: Figuring it out at its most essential is just your intellect. It's to strategize. It's to try to solve the puzzle. It's like, "This is the outcome that I want, how do I get there?" That is the intellect and it is really good at that. That's what it means when you're figuring, when you're intellectualizing. Some people say it's in your head. Some people call it being tactical and there's some really great uses for that. It's not a bad thing. It's just a lot better when you're not avoiding an emotion using it.Brett: It sounds like the purpose of the intellect here is to take a very narrowly framed context of assumptions and goals and then figure out the path from A to B, but then the emotions are what is creating those assumptions to begin with and the goals.Joe: Correct and the risk profile.Brett: Elaborate on that.Joe: If you really, really, really don't want to lose your girlfriend, then your risk tolerance is really low. If you're like, "I could do it under certain circumstances." Then you're more likely to be yourself, right? How madly you don't want to feel the emotion really affects your risk profile.Brett: Yes, that makes sense. We should figure some things out. Wouldn't it be silly to just shut that part of us off and never use that part of our intelligence?Joe: Absolutely. I wouldn't want to build a bridge without the intellect. I wouldn't want to have this conversation without the intellect. I would assume that would be horrible to listen to. Intellect is a beautiful, amazing thing. It's just recognizing its incompleteness. There's Girdle's theory of mathematical incompleteness, which is basically a logical proof that all sets of logic are either incomplete or they are based on a postulate. Basically it proves logic can't be logical. Brett: My favorite part of that is that he proved it with logic. He actually used logic to prove the incompleteness of logic and it couldn't have been done without logic.Joe: Right. Aristotle did it earlier in a different thing, but he didn't do it with the same logic without the math. It's a beautiful thing and our postulates are emotions. That's what our postulates are in our logical way of thinking. That's why people can logically justify absolute opposite things. It's not because their rationale is good or bad. It's because they have different postulates behind the rationale.Figuring stuff out is great and the intellect is beautiful. Even in the spiritual journey or the transformative journey, the intellect is beautiful. It's great for deconstructing itself, very good at hanging out in a way that allows you to describe what's happened. Usually after you've gone through it, right? What I notice is that it's not like, "Here's the description of it and now I go through it."It's more like "Here's a description of it that can give me some framework that I can rest on that I don't completely understand." Then I go through it. Then maybe like a month later, I can describe it. The intellect is really good for that as well. I love the intellect. I love watching great minds at work.Brett: At the same time, it can become the trap again too. You can have this major emotional movement or transformative experience or whatnot and then your intellect will step in and be like, "Okay, so what actually happened? Let me make sense of that." Like, "This was the childhood thing that happened to me and then that was what I felt in this meeting and then all that interacts and then this way." Then like, "Cool, now I have a model for understanding myself." Then once again, you've created this limited system that may be more useful than the previous one but then eventually will reach its limits of understanding and prediction.Joe: That's right. My words for that are every epiphany is the innocent beginning of a rut. Every epiphany-- it's so important to have these epiphanies, but what's really important about them is that it blows everything up. Then we reconstruct it and then a new constraint is found and we need to have that new epiphany to deconstruct or to destroy the old epiphany and the old rut. That's how transformation works. That's how evolution works. It's a beautiful thing and yes, there comes a point in this development where you can see that every single thought that you have is both true and not true. There comes a point in development where you can't believe any one of your thoughts.If you have emotional clarity when that development point hits, you become incredibly clear. If you don't have emotional clarity, you can use that same beauty of seeing both sides of every coin as a way to become indecisive, as a way to beat yourself up, as a way to limit yourself, as a way to continue to constrict emotions. Logic is a beautiful thing. It's just really important to know what it's good at and what it's not good at.Brett: Right. Now, what we've been talking about has been very much about the personal development journey, but I think we could actually apply this very easily to business, for example, product iterations. Every epiphany from your product research or your market research to come up with a new direction could easily become the new rut that you find yourself spending six months in $1 million investing in.Joe: Right. Or a government that had a great epiphany about a police force and then now that police force epiphany is a rut, that needs to be recreated and a new epiphany for is an example, right? There's a thousand examples of how the solution of yesterday is the rut of today. We villainize it and we make it bad, instead of just being like, "We need a new iteration. That's it."Brett: Okay, maybe we don't need one president with a lot of power.Joe: Right. Or maybe we need a financial democracy instead of a voting democracy. Thousands of new epiphanies.Brett: Somebody argued we already have that and it's a bad thing.Joe: Right, exactly. That's another one, right? It's like every one of our epiphanies, everything that locks us down was an epiphany at one point, was somebody's realization at one point.The CEO of Netflix, in his first business, he claims that he made everything idiot proof and then only idiots would come and work for him. In Netflix, he keeps a certain amount of chaos, a certain amount of creativity, a certain amount of risk involved, so that people who want smart challenges, people who want to be cutting edge, who want to have more freedom, show up and work for him. That's more important than having things idiot proof for him. It's that same thought process of, what's more important is, that we're constantly iterating that we are seeing through the logic that we used and relied on.Brett: That's a great example of how a leader's personal journey can then show up in their company, because for a CEO to get to the point where they can just say, “Hey, you know what? Let's just let some chaos happen.” They have to learn to feel that loss of control and welcome it.Joe: This is everything, right? Let me give a really sharp example. Almost every high powered CEO I know has an issue of, A, feeling alone and B, having this deep feeling of self-reliance that they need to rely on themselves. At the bottom of that emotional slide is this deep sense of helplessness that they didn't want to feel. You don't learn to be self-reliant unless there was a point when you had this deep sense of helplessness that you didn't want to feel.Maybe it was an alcoholic dad or maybe it was getting really poor, or whatever it was. That sense of helplessness and saying, I am not going to feel that again is what propels them into this incredible place in their life. It's also the thing that needs to be destroyed if they're going to be great leaders. They need to feel that helplessness, they need to go into that complete helplessness. I don't think it's any mistake that the CEO of Netflix had to go through the helplessness of losing a company to get to the place of allowing that feeling of helplessness all the time, because somewhere in that journey, he found out that that helplessness was just a feeling and it had an incredible intelligence behind it. It was trying to tell him something and it no longer needed to be avoided. It needed to be looked for and to be excited when it shows up.Brett: What's an example of that happening in your life?Joe: [laughs] I have children. Having children is like getting a deep tissue massage. If you resist, you are screwed, right? You have to constantly feel your own helplessness in your children. As an example of that, you have to feel that helplessness. For me, I think the first journey of it was abandonment. It was feeling emotionally abandoned. I was recreating that experience over and over again until I felt it, which is a really important part of this emotional journey. I'll use that as an example, I felt, for whatever reason in my childhood, emotionally abandoned and I didn't want to feel it. I created a whole world to not feel that, but in the way I created that whole world, like everybody, I reintroduced it over and over and over again. This is why we all have that friend who's been dating the same person six times in a row. It's not the same person as in-- it's like the same person in a different body with a different background, but wow. You just picked seven different men who all cheated on you. How did you ever do that? Right? I recreated people who would emotionally abandon me over and over again until I fell in love with the abandonment.Once I fell in love with it, my system didn't need to recreate it. I had found homeostasis. If there's an emotion that I wasn't allowed to feel, I recreate that feeling over and over again, until I fully allow that feeling and then I don't need to recreate it. The other way to say this is the things that we are most scared of are the things that we're subtly inviting into our life. If we're most scared of feeling helpless, we will invite helplessness unconsciously into our life so that we have that opportunity too.Brett: I've got a great example for that, growing up, I always felt I was being tightly controlled by school and society. That control made me feel helpless and I just didn't want to feel helpless anymore. I developed exactly what you described, that self-reliance complex and that self-reliance complex then made me feel like I had to be in control of everything that I was doing and made it difficult sometimes to cooperate or collaborate on something that I wasn't going to have the full reins over, which wouldn't often lead me to feel alone and helpless.Joe: That's right. That's exactly, beautiful. That's exactly how it works. Then once we're cool helplessness, then all of a sudden, we don't recreate the conditions, because our body has just found that homeostasis. It's like, okay, I'm back to balance.Brett: I think addiction has a lot to do with that as well, that feeling of avoiding helplessness, feeling like you can control something. For example, a gambling addiction, a lot of what I've heard about slot machine addiction is, it's not necessarily that those addicted think that they're going to be winning any money. They know they're not. They know the math. They're not stupid, but the feeling of just hitting the buttons and experiencing the spin occur, they're just in a very tight loop system, where the rules are almost like they're designed to look like they're almost figure outable, but they're not.Joe: I think there's definitely a lot of emotional avoidance in addiction. Oftentimes it's shame. I've heard a saying that says shame is the locks of the chains of bad habits. Shame seems to be a big part of an addiction cycle and there's others as well, but definitely, there's a big emotional component to addiction cycles. There's also some physical and neurological components as well, but emotional avoidance is a huge part of it. If you could just lift the shame out of people, then most of the addictions would fall away.Brett: As we move through our lives and start feeling more and more of these emotions that we've been repressing, what does that development look like?Joe: Emotional development looks pretty clearly the same way for different people, but the starting points are different. The earliest starting point that you can get to is just recognizing the emotions you have. It's just knowing that you are constantly in an emotional state as long as you're conscious. People think, some of them, especially if there's been more emotional abuse or emotional repression in the home, will have a very specific experience of not being able to feel their emotions.This is similar to somebody who's been physically abused. If you have been physically abused and I put a quarter in your hand or a key in your hand, you won't actually know which one you're holding, because you've learned to cut off your sensations of your body. Emotionally, you might also have learned how to cut off this sensation. The first thing is to feel that sensation and that is just to identify that the emotional experience is happening at every given moment, because the way that we feel right now is slightly different than the way we feel right now, which is slightly different than the way we feel right now.Identifying those emotions is a really good thing and it's a great epiphany. It will also become a rut later on, but it's a really great first stage. Then the second stage is an expression of that emotion. To really allow those emotions to be expressed through the body, through words, in a way that is not at anybody. It's just having that full expression of emotion.Then that moves into an emotional inquiry, which is how does it feel in your body? What color is it and where is it in my body and how dense is it? It's a literal-- what is the physicality of my emotions? Having a deep inquiry into that and then also having a deep inquiry of when I relate to my emotions differently, how do they work? When I'm angry at my emotions, what does that do? When I'm in love with my emotions, what does that do? When I am trying to get rid of my emotions, what does that do? When I am tickling my emotions, what does that do?You're literally playing with different relationships you can have with your emotions. Then there comes this place where you're just deeply in love with your emotions and then emotions become very fluid. It becomes just like this beautiful flow of life. It's so exciting and so pleasurable to feel your emotional fluidity. It allows for just very crisp decision-making and it allows for very decisive action to have that emotional flow.To give you a great example of this epiphany rut thing, I did not have a lot of emotional awareness when I started this work at all in my 20's and I got into this point where I realized, “Oh, I'm having emotions.” One day, I don't know, a decade later, or something I was saying to somebody, I'm like, “I'm feeling angry right now”. They said, “No, you're not.” I said, “Excuse me?” The person replied, “You're naming an emotion, so you don't have to feel it.” They were so right. I was like, son of a gun. Shit, I've named it so I don't have to feel it. The thing that was once freeing, to be able to see it and name it, had become the new constraint. Then I realized, oh, the feeling of it is a completely different thing. When you feel the emotion, it's all about letting the body just move. It's like dancing without being self-conscious. It's just your emotions know how to move your body. Your emotions know what to do. If they don't fake it and they'll figure it out. Don't judge them. Don't tell them how they're supposed to look. That's not crying. That's not fear. So many people who aren't good at crying when I see them cry for the first time, they think they're like that can't be real tears because it doesn't feel like that one time I cried, but there's 20 different ways of crying. You can cry of joy, you can cry of sadness, you can cry of grief, you can cry in a way like when you're yawning. There's so many different ways that sadness expresses and it's not your job to judge them. It's your job to just watch it like you would watch the Grand Canyon.Brett: Right. It seems each stage here is a meta awareness, a new level of meta awareness around our emotions. The first level being, just recognizing that there is emotions here and that we are not just a logical machine figuring things out and that there is always an emotional context that exists for us. Then we get deeper into that and we start to be in the emotional context, not just recognizing that one's there, but we flow in it and with it.Then another level seems to be the meta awareness around the emotion being wow, okay, as I'm letting this anger move through me, I'm actually clarifying my boundary. Or as I'm letting the sadness move through me, I'm grieving the loss of something tangible, or even just an idea. That this whole process of letting these emotions move through us is actually changing the assumptions, goals and the context and the risk profile of all of our future logical thoughts.Joe: Exactly. We are limited. Everybody talks about limited thoughts but in reality, the limited thoughts have a deep correlation with the way we limit our emotional reality.Brett: It's almost as though the thoughts are just the tip of the emotional iceberg. They are actually a part of the emotions. They are emotions that are most finally, the part of the emotion that is working in the finest detail.Joe: It depends on the perspective, which is the tip of the iceberg and which is the underside of the iceberg. What I do know is that they are in an intricate dance and when one side isn't working, the other side definitely helps.Brett: It sounds like what you've been saying all along is that the intellect is very useful and we do want to use it to figure stuff out, but first we want to get our emotional context right and allow our emotions to shift us into the place that is most aligned with our reality in our moment. Then in that space, figure stuff out.Joe: I wouldn't use the word right, but generally, directionally, that feels very right. [laughs] I would say it's when your emotions are blocked or when you're trying to deeply avoid an emotion, then your decision making can't be clear. It's just as simple as that. Feel the emotion whenever you can. That allows for clarity and it doesn't need to be any more complicated than that and see it as a process that maybe at the beginning, when you realize that you're not clear on something and there's emotion involved, it's going to take a while to get through it.Pretty soon as you get older in the journey, then the emotions flow so quickly. The recognition of it can just make the whole thing really, really clear, really quick. It's common for me on a daily basis to have a cry or shake or get angry. It's relieving of stress. It changes my neurochemistry. It clarifies my decision. It doesn't take but five minutes and it's just moves.Brett: It's almost like you could do a daily, emotional yoga.Joe: Indeed. I did for years. Indeed. I don't think I ever did it daily, but maybe like five times a week, I would take 20 to 30 minutes to do literally emotional yoga, where I would feel everything that I was not feeling and teach my body how to feel it and how to accept it and how to unlock. Because as the emotions start to be felt, then the musculature unlocks and then you can feel it deeper.Brett: Your cortisol levels will shift and your metabolism will update and start releasing an amount of energy into your body that is appropriate for the moment.Joe: That's right. The other thing to know is that each of these emotional streams that I talked about, like anger-- so there's anger that's constricted is constricted in a lot of ways and the unrestricted anger is that clarity and determination. The unrestricted sadness is a deep joy and the unconstricted fear is excitement, right? There's a saying that says, excitement is fear with the breath, or fear is excitement without the breath. It's from an acting school. Each of these things, when they're not resisted, become something very, very different.Brett: Right. Grief is a celebration of what you've had.Joe: Absolutely. Grief is this anger, sadness, fear altogether wrapped up in one. The feelings of these things coming through you when they're unresisted change deeply. You don't even-- can't even recognize them and they start blending all into one emotional state. It's like one stream that's happening. Brett: This all seems to really tie into something that we were working on a lot in your courses, which is this phenomenon where we can understand something intellectually, something about our story or about our traumas, or somebody could be listening to this podcast and understand it intellectually. We can still not get it all the way until we've had the emotional movement to consolidate it.Joe: This is really something that happens in coaching all the time. You get somebody who intellectually understands that, yes, okay. My boss is managing me and I'm angry, but I intellectually really, really understand that they're trying to get me to do my best work, but I'm feeling it as criticism. Intellectually, they understand that their boss wants the best for them, but emotionally it's just criticism. It's just what dad was doing, when the person I'm coaching was 13 or whatever it is. Then once they get it emotionally, when they grok it in their whole body, then all of a sudden it's like, thanks so much for the feedback. I appreciate it. I really appreciate you wanting me to do my best work here. It's on so many levels. It's even grokking complex ideas in your body completely, which has an emotional component to it.If somebody sees, here's this really complex marketing thought process and they don't fully understand it. They can intellectually get it, but it's not second nature. It's not just what they do. It means that there's some emotional component of that marketing. Some thing like, “Oh my God, I'm going to be asking people for stuff.” Or, “Oh my God, marketing is bad and dirty.” There's some emotional component of it that when that emotional component is fully felt, then it's understood. It might not be used. It might be used, but it can't even be fully understood until that emotional component has been felt.Brett: Until your emotions align with it. It reminds me of Einstein where for him, the theory of relativity was a spiritual experience to be working in. Many scientists, prominent scientists have said similar things. Simon, for example.Joe: Absolutely. You cannot have certain ideas without certain emotional clarity. You cannot have certain ideas or certain epiphanies without an experiential understanding of what's going on. You can't do the theory of relativity until you see through your own limited perception of time that society has taught you.Brett: Right. Or even your senses, your physical body has taught you.Joe: That's right.Brett: Right. How do we then stop resisting these emotions? What are some takeaways from all of this, that are some concrete practices? Joe: First of all, if you are resisting emotions and you try to stop, that's more resistance as we've already talked about. Love the resistance, that's the most important thing. Fake it till you make it. My personal story was I looked in a photo album when I was, I don't know what I was, like 20 something years old. I saw a picture of me crying and I realized that my parents were uncomfortable with the emotions I was having, because they were taught to be uncomfortable with their own emotions.One of the ways to make sure that I didn't make everybody uncomfortable was to tease me around my emotions. At one point, they took a picture of me and then they put it in the photo album. I found this picture. It was a picture of me crying. This picture you could see me crying and you could see me dumbfounded that I was having a picture taken of me. I was like, it's probably why I haven't cried in 14 years. I put a picture of it on my desk and I was okay, I'm going to learn how to cry but a year later, I hadn't cried. Then I was okay, I'm determined. I need to go and really give this thing a go and cry. I went out into the woods. I went to a faraway trail. Then I went off trail for three miles so that nobody could see me cry. I had that much shame around it. Then I would just fake crying. I did that for three months. I would just fake it. Then all of a sudden, it just happened. It started happening for real.When it happened, it was such a relief that I'd let it happen for four days. I could have stopped it, but I was crying when I was brushing my teeth. It's like my body was just like years of tension just evaporating in days. Then all of a sudden, I had a deeper access to my tears and then that led to deeper and deeper access to my tears. Then that led to, oh, every single heartbreak of mine increases my capacity to love. I cannot wait for more heartbreak. Even just saying that, just that in itself makes me want to cry, how blessed I am for loving heartbreak and for seeing how much freedom to love that gives me. Brett: That's beautiful. This has been a great episode. Thank you very much, Joe. We'll catch you again next week.Joe: Yes, man. What a pleasure to be with you.Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW, or to take a course, visit: artofaccomplishment.comResources: Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/297609/descartes-error-by-antonio-damasio/Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, https://sogyalrinpoche.org/about-sogyal-rinpoche/tibetan-book-of-living-and-dying

The Art of Accomplishment — AoA Series #1

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 13, 2021 47:41

The premise of The Art of Accomplishment is simple: it is our heart's capacity that determines our success and happiness in life. Emotional intelligence is the bottleneck to the change we want to see in ourselves and the world. Tapping into our heart's potential opens up the possibility of fulfilling our greatest ambitions without sacrificing our sense of joy and authenticity.We are taught early on that if we accomplish enough stuff we will have the life of our dreams, only to find it is a life that fails to make us happy and fulfill our hopes. In this 9-part series, you will discover that how you get things done is what makes your life far more fulfilling.Not only because you will enjoy the process of an authentic life but because enjoyment and self-awareness are critical tools in making what you accomplish more meaningful and effortless.The Art of Accomplishment podcast series accompanies the online course led by Joe Hudson. More more info, visit artofaccomplishment.com."When you're self aware, it means there is a full expression of you happening. It's why with the great artists, you see their full expression. And they can only get to that self expression, they can only get to that level of ease, by having more and more self awareness."Brett: A lot of people have a sense that self-development and accomplishment are mutually exclusive, that in order to be maximumly productive it's necessary to sacrifice parts of who we are, or to back-burner our own personal evolution. We focus on creating systems for setting and achieving goals. We imagine that by doing this, we'll somehow arrive at our fully developed self without examining where these goals came from in the first place. A question I often hear asked is how will self inquiry help me be productive and lead to more accomplishment?Joe: It's an amazing thing about the human brain, that we really like to create false distinctions. It's something that we do. I think it's because the brain in general its job is to create distinction, it likes to create false distinction. It's very much to me like the way it was in the 1970s when you could either be a businessman or you could be an environmentalist but you couldn't be both, that they were at odds.Then somewhere in the '90s, they figured out, "No, you can do both, that's possible." It's the same thing with this. In fact, they really drive each other. The personal development focus, that course if you will, gets tested in business and gets tested in projects, gets tested in getting things done. You get to learn a lot from where that rubber meets the road and vice-versa; that as you learn how to understand yourself better and other people better, which is the whole point of personal development.Then obviously you get better tools in business and you do better at getting things done. It's why I always use the phrase, art of accomplishment. It's speaking about the fact that accomplishing stuff is more about the how, than it is about what you get done. You can accomplish something and your focus could be like, my job is to earn a million dollars but in actuality you're going to be less likely to earn that million dollars, if you're not focused on the how you're going about it.I'll give you an example of this. My girlfriend in college, her name was Cate and she was a really good tennis player. With her coach, she would serve and try to hit like a basket, one of those baskets that you pick up the balls with. She was good, so she would hit it two or three out of five times. Then one day the coach took the basket off the ground and put a quarter right in the middle where that basket was sitting and said, "Serve and hit the quarter."She didn't hit the quarter once, but she would have hit the basket every single time if it was still sitting on top of that quarter. It's the thing that we see in business all the time which is focusing through the goal is one of the ways to make sure you accomplish your goals.Whether it be being the best company in the world, or whether it means beating the competition, or whether it means trying to change the world for the better through environmental solutions, or whether it means great customer service, whatever it is, having a goal that's beyond the goal that you have, makes the goal more likely to be gotten. It makes the goal more likely to be gotten.Brett: Tell me what makes this an art.Joe: You think about art. Think about it like this, there's accomplishment and accomplishment basically means that you've achieved something successfully. Successful is the first question that you have to ask. What does successfully mean? To me, it means that the task is done holistically. Is it an accomplishment to make $10? If that's my goal, if I also like sacrificed everything I love for that $10? That doesn't make any sense at all, that doesn't feel like accomplishment. It's a holistic success.It means that you're firing on all cylinders, that you're getting the whole thing done. Think about it like a building. Success isn't just getting the building erected. It's a quality building. It's a beautiful building. It's a useful building. That's what makes success. You're looking for the holistic thing. Then if you're thinking about it as far as an art form, then you have to move out of the tyranny of a checklist.Which is like, "I've written something down. Now I have to do it, or I'm going to beat myself up because I haven't done it." It's going to move into how you do it. How is it that I'm going about doing it? That's what makes it an art form. There's very specific things. If you think about art in general, what art does, the artistry of something, it means that you have more ease in doing it. It's a path of self-awareness and you recognize that your consciousness is the product. Brett: Let's get into those further. Tell me more about the ease. There's a lot of things that we want to do that are accomplishments, that just simply are not going to ever be easy, or so we think. Joe: Or so we think. There's a couple of ways that go at the ease part of it. One way to go at the ease part of it is to think about it like there's an old story about a prince coming to a butcher. He says to the butcher, "How often do you sharpen your knives?" The butcher says, "I never sharpen my knives." The Prince goes, "That's impossible. The best butchers in the world have to sharpen their knives at least once a month." The Butler says, "No, no, my blade finds the space between the meat and the bone."It's basically saying how you get things done is with the minimal amount of friction, that the master of a craft is doing it with the least moves. It's not about winning or losing anymore. They're far beyond the winning and losing of something. It's just, how do I do it with the least amount of effort? What's amazing in our society is that we think about effectiveness or efficiency in speed, as humans not as cars. Cars, it's really obvious.The fastest car doesn't mean it's the most efficient car, but we think that if we've gotten done something quickly, then we're very efficient, but efficiency isn't measured by speed. In the human condition, it's measured by enjoyment. We are efficient when we are enjoying ourselves. It means the least amount of effort is necessary. The least amount of fuel is necessary to make something happen. If you're accomplishing something with that kind of ease, when you're accomplishing something with enjoyment, which is how we measure that ease, then you're in the artistry of it. That's what I mean by ease.Brett: That makes a lot of sense, because the opposite of ease is that you are actually fighting yourself in some way. There's a part of you that doesn't want to do the thing, another part of you that does want to do the thing. There's dissonance there and a loss of efficiency. It's interesting to think of efficiency as ease or measured by ease.Joe: Exactly. Which is beautifully put, because what you're saying there is that the friction is mostly caused by the lack of self-awareness. When you understand what you are, when you are aware of how you work, there's a lot less friction. That's why the second part is so important. The artistry brings you closer to yourself.If you've ever met a great artist and there's a way, at least when they're working, at the very least when they're working, you see this self-awareness, this presence that occurs and that's what it means. That self-awareness, it brings you closer to yourself. It calls you into something deeper. It has to be a full expression of you. It's self-awareness. When you're self-aware, it means that there's a full expression of you happening. It's with the great artists, you see their full expression. They don't feel muted or stilted. They can only get to that self-expression, they can only get to that level of ease by having more and more self-awareness and the self-awareness of how they work.Brett: That sounds similar to what might happen if somebody's looking at a to-do list of things they want to get done and they think efficiency is efficiently knocking out all the boxes, but what might be actually more efficient is asking themselves why they want to get that list done in the first place. Maybe, if there's one question they could ask themselves that removes half of that list, that is actually an increase in efficiency.It sounds like this is the personal version of doing that, like, "Why is it that I want to be getting these things done? Why is it that I want to be successful? What does success actually bring to me?"Joe: That's a beautiful point. That's exactly right. When I look at my list every morning, I always think about what can I do that will make this whole list irrelevant or easier? It's the same thing with the medalist in life. There's a beautiful technique that you can use, which is, "Okay, if I get that done, am I happy then?" Then my mind will usually go, "No, I'll need this," and say, "Okay, well, if I get that done, will I be happy then?" It can just go on and on.Brett: It's like making the one decision that can eliminate 100 other decisions. Finding, perhaps in many of these cases, the one need within us that resolves 100 other secondary needs that we thought we needed to fill.Joe: That's exactly it and that's what self-awareness does just by its nature.Brett: Great. You mentioned that your consciousness is the product that you're working on in that case. Let's dig into that a little bit more.Joe: That's the last part of what makes it an art form, is that, if you're looking at a piece of art, there's a way in which you can feel like a painting, you can feel how the artist was when they were painting. When the artist acknowledges that, then what the artist can do is really understand that their consciousness is what is being consumed. It doesn't matter if it's Facebook, or Ford, or Van Gogh, we're feeling the consciousness of those people who made it.We're feeling that experience. If they were anxious and nervous, then we're perpetuating anxiousness and nervousness. If they were worried about not having enough, they're going to make sure that we are worried about not having enough, when we use that product or when we consume their consciousness.[crosstalk]Brett: That seems even more true these days, as a lot more consumers are thinking about products that they feel much more personally aligned with rather than just, "Oh, look, it's a jug of milk." It's like, "No, because this is a jug of milk that treats cows in the way that is more agreeable to me." Or, "This is the company that is working on making more fuel-efficient or electric cars and that's something that really speaks to me." What you're saying is that, even a company, even a product, is a piece of art and that the consciousness of its creators should come through in that.Joe: It does. You just can't help it. There's a great quote that my friend Steve used to say to me, he said, "At the peak of a poet's career, he is a businessman and the peak of a businessman's career, he is a poet," or she is a poet or she is a businessman. It is an absolute truth, that how we get something done affects what the end product of our doing is. It's as simple as if we rush to sweep the porch, or if we enjoy sweeping the porch. We're going to get two different jobs done and it's going to look different at the end of it.Our consciousness affects it and it's the acknowledgment that that's the case, that the real gift that we're giving to the world is in the product, that's tangible, it's the product of our consciousness that we're delivering. Acknowledging that the consciousness is part of the equation of the product, that it is in part the product that we are producing and that other people are consuming, is what makes it an art form, not just a doing.Brett: I think another great example of that would be in software development. Any software that's developed by a team that's frenetically running around trying to finish completing their backlog, product and engineering aren't communicating with each other very well. That product is going to end up having that consciousness writ large in its implementation in bugs and missed-- like features that don't make sense, et cetera.Joe: Exactly. That's right.Brett: Let's talk a little bit more about our consciousness as the product of this work. A lot of people would see that as odds with business because the focus is moving away from perhaps the business itself towards yourself. What would you say to them?Joe: Again, it's a lot like the '70s with the environmentalist. You can make money cutting down trees. You can make money planting trees. You can make money making all of your product artistic. You can make money making all of your product as cheap as possible. There's a thousand ways to make money. Just walk down the street of any city and everything you look at has got 7 or 8 or 10 people making money behind it.There's infinite ways of making money. The idea that how we are when we make the money isn't part of that equation is just silliness. It's something that happens when people don't want to feel their whole experience and they make the excuse that, "Oh, it's just business." Or they make the excuse that I had to do this because it's business. The craziest thing is, you look at incredibly successful businessmen who are just merciless in their desire for winning competition or for quality or for customer service. They will never allow a team to not deliver or allow a team to sacrifice the important things.Yet, as soon as the idea is like, "Oh, we can all be growing as humans," or that we can all be having full expression here comes up, they're like, "No, I can't do that." We can out-compete. We can build a billion-dollar company. We can out-compete over-resourced competition, but we can't also do it in such a way that we really enjoy ourselves. It's a ridiculous notion and it comes from an inner thought that they have that they can't be their full selves and be successful. That they had to cut off a part of themselves to be successful. That normally just comes from the fact that they had to cut out a part of themselves to make mom and dad happy. That's where it's really coming from. It's just very limited thinking.Brett: A belief that productivity and achievement requires sacrifice. If you're feeling sacrificed, that might mean you're on the right track to achievement.Joe: Let's take a look at that one for a second. Who sacrificed more, the men who created Google or the men who created Benelli Tires? Who worked harder? Who put their family at bigger risk? It's just nonsensical to think who worked harder. It's nonsensical to think that there is that level of sacrifice needed. There's people who make millions of dollars without it, millions of dollars with it. It's what do you enjoy? It's what do you love?If you love working 80 hours a week and you love that kind of productivity, don't tell everybody it's necessary. Just say it's what you did and you loved it. I listened to Elon Musk talk about this and he said, you have to work all the time and I thought to myself, "You had to work all the time when you had one company. Now you have three companies or four companies, or five companies and you're still working all the time, which really means that you only had to work 25% of the time to do the company that you originally did. You didn't have to work all the time. You're proving it."Brett: That's a really good point. A lot of people say that they have to get a paycheck and so all this art sounds great, but they're not in that position or maybe they're not running their own company. Maybe they're in some hierarchy in some organization or even if they do have their own company, they're just, "Well, I have to make money. I have to make money now. I have to make money with this particular runway. I just don't have time to make this an art."Joe: [laughs] I lived in Los Angeles for a while, I live next to this first generation from Central America family, just sweethearts. The son, when he decided it was time to go out to work, he was 18 years old and he worked at a subway. When he was working at the subway, he just did it with pizzazz. He did it with friendliness, he did it with joy. He did it with a bit of like a singing-- he was just one of those characters.You've had the experience, you've gone into someplace and there's somebody on the other side of the counter who's enjoying themselves and they're maybe singing or they got a little pizzazz, he was one of those people. He worked there I think for three weeks until somebody walked in and was like, "Hey, I have a restaurant and I need someone." Then within another six months, he was the Sous chef. Then he just kept on going.I don't know where he is now but that was the example to me, that it doesn't matter what you're doing. If you do it with artistry, you're creating the world that you want. The idea that you can't do that in any situation-- I mean, Mandela did it in a prison. How he wanted to be. The artistry that he was delivering to humanity was there when he was in a prison. To think that you can't do it because you're in a bureaucracy, it's just as limited of the thinking as a businessman saying, "We can't be whole humans and do business."The crazy thing about that that I think people don't recognize is if you think you can't do it because of your situation, then you're owning the position of a victim. It's like somebody whose life is oppressing them. If you have that position, there's only two people who really want to spend time with you, other victims and people who abuse you, because that's the only people who you have that value for.Other victims will be like, "Great, yes, we're oppressed. Let's all talk about how oppressed we are." The abusers are like, "Cool, you feel like you're oppressed? Great, I will oppress you. That's exactly what I need to get my world cranking." The mentality of that invites it, just like all of our mentalities invite the world that we see, to become real.Brett: Right. That could be an entire episode of its own and I'm sure it will be. How does a person get to this place then?Joe: There's three bits on how a person gets to seeing all of their accomplishment as art, to seeing that there's an art of accomplishment. The first is an intention. I don't call it a goal. I don't call it a mandate. It's just holding it in your consciousness that this is where I want to be. It's like looking at a map and saying Los Angeles is where I want to be, or San Francisco is where I want to be. It doesn't require any more weight than that.Brett: It's like an implementation agnostic goal.Joe: Yes, exactly. That's right. If you dig into that a little bit-- there's this story about an admiral. I can't remember his name, who it was, taken in the POW camps in Vietnam and he was asked, "Who got out of the camps?" He said, "That's easy. It was the people who knew they would get out." The interviewer asked then, “Who didn't get out of the camps?” He answered, "That's easy. It's the optimists."The interviewer was confused and said, "Optimist? What do you mean? How is that different than your first answer?" He said, "The optimists were the ones who thought they'd get out by Christmas, or by Easter, or by the rainy season. They were the ones that didn't make it." The intention is just holding that intention out there, knowing that you're going to arrive there. That's the first bit. The second bit is take it all as an iteration. There's no failure. There's no success.There's just I am learning by iterating and experimenting, iterating and experimenting, iterating and experimenting. I don't have to be hard on myself to learn lessons. I don't have to be hard on myself, because I had a certain timeframe. It's just a very gentle iteration, iteration, iteration, just the way you would think an artist would do after a 20-year career. They kept on playing, kept on trying and new and crazier things came out. Then the last part is to know that it's not really a doing.You asked, how does a person get there? It's not a doing, it's an undoing. We're just basically learning to undo a whole bunch of training and be in a natural state. I'll give you a great example of it. If you put your two hands together and put it like, let's say that the palms of your hands in front of your face and try as hard as you can to pull your hands apart.If your hands are apart right now, you're not trying, you're doing, so forget the doing and just go to the trying and try as hard as you can to pull your hands apart. Now without thinking about it, feel the exact opposite thing that you feel when you're trying. That's what it means to undo, you're undoing. That's what you do. To make all of your accomplishment artistry, to make life the art of accomplishment, then you're undoing.Brett: It's interesting. As I did that, during the trying, there's like a sense of planning going on throughout my entire system. Imagining which muscles I would move and how to move my hands apart. I can do all of that without actually moving at all. It feels like a good metaphor for beating myself up over a to-do list.Joe: Exactly. That's exactly it. Awesome. That's great.Brett: Then what are we undoing exactly and what does that help us accomplish, or how does that help us to accomplish things?Joe: The main thing that you're undoing is this misconception that you aren't inherently good. Basically, what we're undoing is a whole bunch of limiting beliefs. There's probably about seven main limiting beliefs, but they're all resting on one limiting belief. The one limiting belief is that you're not inherently good, that you have to put effort to make yourself good enough, of value, better, that it's not your natural place, that you're not there yet.If you think about an oak tree, when is an oak tree good enough? Is the oak tree good enough when it's an acorn or when it's 2 years old or when it's 150 years old or when it's collapsing, when it's becoming dirt, when is it good enough? When is it not inherently good? That's the thing that we think about ourselves is that we have someplace to be to get inherently good and or some way of being and what's actually preventing us from acting in an inherently good way is only the idea that we're not, it's only the idea that we've done something wrong--Brett: Right. I think that's a really good point, because there's a really big pitfall that I've experienced in personal development or trying to become more productive or work on my systems of accomplishment, where we start to see how everybody else is doing things and we're like, "Oh man. I need to get from where I am to where they are by somehow making myself better, because I'm not good enough. If only I had this person's system or that person's motivation and drive or that person's clarity. If I could get there, then I would be able to get things done," which just really does reinforce that, "Oh, I'm just not there yet. I just don't have it in me." Silently.Joe: Exactly, which just slows down the whole system. A baby doesn't think that they're bad, because they're crawling, they're going to walk. They don't need to think that they're bad, because they're crawling. It's just a natural part of the developmental cycle and there's that form of goodness and there's also the other form of goodness, which is every time you defend something in yourself, there's some way that you're believing that you're not inherently good, that you have to defend something about yourself.I don't mean defense like someone tries to throw a punch, you block it. I mean defense like someone accuses you of being bad and you think you have to justify something. What would make you need to justify something? If somebody came to you and said the sky is purple at noon, the sky is purple, would you really need to defend the fact that the sky was blue? There's some inherent belief system that there's something, that there's a shame, that there's something wrong with us and that's part of the inherent goodness that once you understand that that is your natural state, there's so much less to be doing, so much less.I'll give you an example for a second about how it works. Let's say one of the limiting beliefs that I see people do all the time is that perfection is more important than connection. They think that they need to be perfect because they think that they're not good enough or their thing needs to be perfect or their presentation needs to be perfect or their product needs to be perfect or the date needs to go perfect or whatever it is.They focus on that trying to make it perfect instead of how do I connect. They choose perfection over connection. If they choose connection, they're far more successful and they will choose it naturally if they don't think that they have to be perfect to be good enough or to be good. Specifically, how this works is, you can try to create the perfect product or you can try to create a product that's in connection with your customer and to stay in connection with your customer. The second is going to do much better than the perfect product. If you have a first date and you're trying to be perfect, that's not going to go so well.Even if they happen to have a second date for you, you've been trying to be perfect so they're not dating you, they're dating some idealized version of yourself and eventually that shit's going to go sideways. Whereas, if you just go for the connection, if you say, "Oh, how do I connect with this person? Let's see if it's a match." Then it's a far more productive stance. The place where it's most articulated is in meditation where people try to have the perfect experience of meditating instead of being in connection with themselves. It's the difference between torture and meditation. Meditation is connection. Managing yourself is torture.Brett: I spent a long time in meditation doing maybe an hour practice every day just because I was really stressed out about work and beating myself up over to-do list, the usual. I would meditate more and more and find that it would call my mind, but my goal in meditation was to call my mind not to feel what I needed to feel. That really just pulled me away from the emotions that were trying to help me update to my situation.Joe: I find that if you're trying to manage your experience, it's pulling you away from yourself instead of being with what you are and enjoying it.Brett: Tell me some more of those limiting beliefs.Joe: There's a couple others that I can think about. There is improvement instead of being authentic. That's the one that you mentioned earlier in the podcast, where you were talking about wanting to be better at this or better than that, instead of wanting to know what you actually are. I want to be enlightened instead of wanting to know what I am. Wanting to be enlightened path is a far slower path than wanting to know what I am.I want to work successfully 60 hours a week is far less effective than understanding what your natural rhythm is and what your natural way of being most productive is. It's that constant question of like trying to improve yourself instead of find out what your authenticity is.Brett: Or I want a hundred million users versus I want this to improve people's lives.Joe: Right. If it's authentic that you want a hundred million users, if that's really the thing that's going to charge you, then that might be your authenticity, but then the question is, what do you have to do that is authentic to you to get them, instead of how do I make my podcasts so great that they get them, that I get the users?Brett: What are some others?Joe: Other ones is shoulds before wants. I find people always are trying to motivate themselves with their shoulds instead of with their wants and wants are far more motivating and far more effective at getting us places. If you think about the first seven years of your life, you couldn't even have shoulds and then all of a sudden, shoulds show up and all your development slows down. You get more development in the first seven years of your life than you do pretty much at any other time of your life.It's when you stop following your wants and you start following your shoulds that everything gets slowed down. Again, like with both of these, the only way you would think, oh, I need to improve, instead of, I need to be authentic, is if you think that you're not inherently good. The only way you would think I should do that, instead of, I want to do that is because you think that you aren't inherently good.There's seven of them but the other one that's just coming to mind right now is the one we spoke about, defense versus love. That most of us immediately move to defend ourselves rather than love the person. The quintessential example of this is the boss tells you what you need to do to improve and most people get defensive, instead of saying to themselves, "Oh my goodness, my boss just took a social risk on me. Potentially risked our relationship, because he cared or she cared enough to help me be successful." We don't think, "Oh well, thanks. Thanks for taking the risk of telling me that."Brett: That's quite a flip on the usual script.Joe: Right, because we move from defense instead of love. These are all the ways and we only have to do that if we think we're not inherently good. That's what they are.Brett: How does seeing your inherent goodness tie into the art part of this art of accomplishment?Joe: If you see that you're inherently good, then obviously things become more enjoyable and more easy because there's less fight that you have with yourself. That's just simple. The more that you focus on your enjoyment, the more you stop having to fight with yourself. There is this quote that, "In a war with yourself, you're always going to lose." That enjoyment comes to a large degree because you're fighting with yourself has ceased or has slowed down. That happens when you see your inherent goodness. That's part of how that works.Then when you fully realize, that your consciousness is what is coming through whatever product you're creating, then the question is what's the consciousness that you want to give to other folks. If you're coming from a place of understanding your inherent goodness, then that's the product that you're going to be creating. It's one that ties people into their inherent goodness. It's not so limiting as one might think. Meaning, take a look at some of the great artists of our day. I'll use a comedian because it's the--Brett: For example?Joe: I'll give us an example because some people might not call him an artist but Jim Carrey. If you listen to his story and this is so much the case, it's like they were going about their career. It wasn't going so well. Then all of a sudden they just were like, "I am going all the way. I am not going to hold back. I am going to take the big risk of my full expression. I'm going to basically trust that if I just go all the way with myself, things are going to work out. I'm going to trust that goodness." All of a sudden, bolder and bolder things come out of the artist. Jim Carrey is an example of this.When we watch it, we think it's confidence. We're like, "Oh my God, that guy could do all that crazy stuff. How confident must he be?" It's really a confidence in something that's beyond them. It's a confidence in their inherent goodness. When you see that in people, we just naturally want to follow it. We just naturally want to be a part of that. It's why we see so much of that in some of the greatest movers and shakers of our time. People who've accomplished just amazing things in their lives is that full trust. I guess one of the ways to look at it, is to see it as it's like channeling. You can only channel if you trust what's coming through you.That channeling is what it starts to feel like when you're deeply in the art of accomplishment. A way to look at the art of accomplishment is like in some traditions they would call it channeling. They would call it cleaning out your tube so that you could have greater access to the thing that's moving through all of us. The animator of all life. Neurology would call it alpha waves but it's not flow state. Being in that flow state can only come when you can rely on your inherent goodness. If you're judging yourself, you're questioning yourself and you're in a fight with yourself, you can't be an alpha. You can't be in flow state.Brett: Another good way to describe that I think is just something, this idea of channeling is acting from something that's coming from outside of your identity of yourself. A lot of artists-- we were talking about artistry here. A lot of musicians have talked about how when they were in the flow and they were writing some of their biggest hits, they felt like it wasn't them doing the writing. It was just the words were coming through them. Joe: We've all had this experience. We've all had the experience of playing music without having to think about it or just channeling the emails and just knowing exactly what to write. We've all had the experience of being in that flow state and that only comes when we can trust our inherent goodness.Brett: I think that's the feeling people are trying to get at, when they're knocking out a to-do list, finding themselves in that flow. I think a lot of this is just it's not about the to-do list, it's about what it is that you actually want to be doing.Joe: It's about allowing the lack of fight to be in your system. Our system by nature doesn't want to fight with itself. To allow that to happen really allows the flow state to occur. The final bit is as I think you already mentioned it, it's the self-awareness, which is the only way that we're ever going to see that we're inherently good is for us to see what we inherently are. It requires us to drop the stories of ourselves and the ideas of ourselves and it requires us to love the ego right into oblivion.That self-awareness is what allows us to see that we're not just channeling it, we are it. That we thought we were small, but what we really are is part of everything. When we see ourselves as everything, when our identity switches from the little me to the whole, then the inherent goodness is all. Everything is in that inherent goodness. There's just a piece that comes with it. That's why, when you see those artists who have 50 years at the carving table and you see just this piece in them, the piece of artistry, of a deep artistry, that's where it comes from.Brett: As we start to view accomplishment more as an art, what is going to change about the way that we do things and how do we address that fear that might exist, that getting into this personal development stuff is going to make us even for a period of time, less productive? If we have a 18-hour Workday right now and that's the thing that we're doing and it just feels like the whole house of cards is going to collapse if we just take one day off from that, what's the step forward?Joe: That's a great question. They did this great study in the US Army. The study was that they took two tests that were the same test, but different reliable and whatnot. They took a group of soldiers in boot camp and they just worked them to death and had them sleep-deprived. Then they put them in front of the test and they did the test and then they let them rest for a couple of days, RNR and then they came back. They weren't sleep-deprived and they did the test.They asked the soldiers of these two tests, which one did you think you scored better at and which one do you think you did quicker? 80% of the people thought that they had done quicker work and more accurate work on the first test when they were sleep-deprived. In actuality, 100% of them did better when they had rest and they were not being rushed through the whole situation. It tells us that we have a mental illusion that happens, like an optical illusion. We think that when we're busy and we were sleep-deprived and we're running around checking off boxes, we think we're more efficient when in actuality we're not. Brett: The multitasking studies as well, where they proved that people really do not multitask. They just think they multitask, but their performance actually degrades.Joe: Exactly. It's exactly the same principle. The first thing is to acknowledge that situation. Then to start to disassociate the idea of ease with productivity. Some people, because they're only productive when they're in friction, they think that productivity is friction. To see, to really find real ways of measuring, "Are you getting the stuff done and not working as hard or enjoying yourself more?" They really find that out.It's interesting. This culture, it's, "You didn't work 60 hours, why are you lazy?" In other cultures that have been doing particularly Southern Europe, they're like, "You had to work 60 hours to get your job done? Why are you so incompetent?" It's just a completely different way to take a look at it. That's the first thing to know. The second part of your question is how do things change? Well, you get bigger things done. You get things that are more aligned in your system done. You don't sacrifice your well-being from the accomplishment of your career or your money but you don't sacrifice your career and your money, so that you can have better well-being.The dichotomy starts to go away and you see that your work is a means to an end of your well-being. That the well-being is a means and an end to your work. That they become the same thing. They stop becoming separate in your system. The nervous system starts to relax. You start doing things like, "Oh, I can move this lever here and I just have to wait for a couple of months and everything will fall into place." Or, "I could put two weeks in and I will have it done in one month instead of two."You start to see these little leverage points. You start to see the world more as a system. The way the artist talk about it is-- like carving artists, they'll talk about, that they see the work in the wood, before they even get started. It's not about, "I have an idea of what I want it to look like and I'm going to carve it into the wood." It's like the wood is telling me what it wants to be carved into. What it wants to be made into.That's the experience of life in general. Is that you're following. The Daoists talk about it as the way of water. Water doesn't require any effort to get to the ocean. It just follows. It just goes to the lowest point. It is effortless in its way. It is more powerful than any sword. Try to fight water with a sword and you'll know. That's the way that it starts to feel. That life starts to feel.Brett: So, what you were saying earlier, is that a lot of this work is actually an undoing. An undoing of the limiting misconceptions of self?Joe: If you look at the martial arts, they really subscribe a lot of the same theory to what I'm talking about. One of the ways is that your whole body is relaxed until the moment of impact. If I was going to tense the whole time and hit you, my punch is a lot less powerful than if I'm relaxed the whole time and then tense right before I hit you. It's conserving your energy and making you stronger at the same time. Making your movement have more impact. We somehow think walking around tense all the time is going to make us more effective. It's just ridiculous.Brett: Right. Also keep us narrowed and focused too. If we're walking around tense about all the things that we're thinking about getting done, we're not asking the bigger questions, that really help us find that one decision that can eliminate a hundred decisions. A lot of what you're talking about, this idea of breaking down these misconceptions of the self and trusting and leaning back into our inherent goodness. Letting go of the trying and just being in the doing.A lot of that allows us, our entire nervous system and our minds to relax and see outside of the boxes of any of the shorter-term tasks of thinking that we're doing which, really helps us to really guide our lives out of grander scale and then drive our businesses. Kids spend several months working on go, go, go. Getting one particular project done. Pushing one feature, that part way through the process we could have easily, if we had a big enough view, determined the landscape had changed and that this is becoming a waste of effort.Joe: It happens on fractal levels. It happens on, "Wow, I've just spent 20 years creating a life that I don't want." It happens on, "I just spent two months doing a project, that my boss really didn't give a shit if I did and I just spent the last two minutes worrying about something that I could have spent creating something."Brett: I think that's one of the things that makes this so counterintuitive is that often it's just much easier to think, "Oh, I'm almost there. I just need to do this, that and the other things, that are in line with my past 20 years of plan and that would get me there," which is a much easier thing to experience for many, than the recognition that maybe 20 years of my life has been spent further and further away from my authenticity.Joe: Right and getting me there is the crux. That's the bit, the idea that where you are right now isn't good enough. You see this all the time in business where you see somebody who's been successful talking to somebody who's trying to be successful. The person who's trying to be successful is like, "Well, you're able to be so confident, so being able to say yes or no to things, so nonchalant about opportunities, because you already have success." There's some truth to that. There's no doubt about it, but what I've seen is that the people who hold that position, invite the success, more than they get it.What I notice in my business is that the more that I became picky, the more that I decided it just wasn't worth it if I didn't do the thing that I wanted to do. I started rejecting clients, or I started rejecting investments, or I started rejecting really good deals, then all of a sudden, more and more good deals, more and more good clients started showing up. That comes when you aren't in that place of fear that you need to prove something. To be good enough, to be loved, it comes when you can trust your inherent goodness.Brett: I think that speaks a lot to this reciprocal nature of accomplishment versus personal development, where it seems that, many of us think that accomplishment is going to give us the confidence and so if we just go for accomplishment first, then we'll have the confidence. What you're saying is that we can build the confidence. We can build not just a false sense of confidence, but if we are confident in who we actually are, then that will lead to the accomplishment, which then can feedback-- because there is a little bit of feedback loop.Like you said, once you've been successful doing something, it definitely helps you feel that way. We can actually work on that personal side directly and everything else is downstream of there.Joe: I wouldn't even call it confidence. It's like the closest word that our society knows to put on it, because confidence feels like-- at least the way it's interpreted is "I'm good enough or da, da, da." It's not really I'm good enough. It's just, I know what I am. I just know what I am. I know what I like. I know what I want and I am committed to being a full expression of that.That's the key thing and that knowing who you are and really finding out, that's what the real cool part about the whole journey is, right? Because to do that, you have to see that you're inherently good. Then to do that, you have to see what you inherently are and then that requires us to drop these stories and our ideas of ourselves and it requires us to just allow the ego to be loved into oblivion. Brett: That transforms us into an artist.Joe: Yes and the artist transforms us into that. To see ourselves as everything, allows us to have that energy when we move in the world instead of to see ourselves as this limited thing.Brett: Great. Well, thanks again for your time.Joe: Thank you. A pleasure.Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW, or to take a course, visit: artofaccomplishment.com

Embarking on the Journey — AoA Series #2

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 13, 2021 48:57

When we are ready to embark on the journey of self-transformation we want to make the most of our time in an effective and progressive way. For this, as with all journeys, it helps to have a compass and a clear map.A clear map tells us four things about the journey: the necessary conditions, the best approach, what to expect along the way, and impediments where we might get lost. The compass that keeps us on track—our constant reference along the path—is enjoyment."There is no way of getting it right. There is no complete. There is no finish line, no done, there is no “I'm going to get it.” There is just “What's the next experiment?” “What's the next adventure?” “What can I learn from what just happened?” There is just play."Brett: Today we're going to talk about everything you need to know about embarking on a personal transformative journey, conditions for transformation, what happens on the journey, what we can get excited about and what will get on our way. Joe, tell me what does someone need to know about embarking on a transformative journey?Joe: There's a way to look at it that we can dissect it into all the parts of it and let's do that. Before I even start there, the most important thing that someone should know about in deciding lik, "Hey, I want to do something that transforms my life," is that it's a process to be enjoyed. Not only is it a process to be enjoyed because that's nice, but it's because it's more effective.The only thing to tweak about that is that enjoying yourself is a little bit different than maybe how you're thinking of it. Most people think or a lot of people think, if someone says, "Hey, go enjoy yourself." They think, "What am I going to do?" For example, I'll go play golf or I'll go and have a conversation with a friend or I'll go get high on heroin, whatever their idea of enjoying themselves is. That's not what I'm speaking to. What I'm speaking to is how do you allow yourself more enjoyment in everything that you're doing. That's what I mean by enjoy yourself.If it means that you're in a satsang listening to a guru, how do you enjoy yourself in that? If it means that you are listening to this digital recording, even if you notice that you're criticizing yourself, how do you enjoy criticizing yourself? That's the question. The question isn't how do I do the things that I enjoy? The question is how do I enjoy the things that I'm doing. That's the golden mean of the journey, that's where you guide your footsteps by and then everything else is a technicality that revolves around that sun. It's like the gravitation, how do you enjoy yourself?As far as the details, I think you can clump them into four parts. One part is, what are the conditions that need to be set for transformation? There's an acupuncturist who once taught me this idea of conditions for healing. I was like, "What do you need to do just so that somebody can potentially heal if you're treating them."It's the conditions that need to be there for transformation to be possible. Then there's a question of approach, how do you approach it because at the end of the day, you're responsible and your approach is going to make a big difference in the alacrity, the enjoyment and the depth of transformation.Then I think you can also talk about what to expect on the journey, because when you really got to get into it there's certain things that happen over and over again and they can fool you and they can also, when you see them in a slightly different light, they can really propel you. Then I think then you can also talk about what gets in the way? What are the impediments of the journey? That's how I would break it down.Brett: Let's get started on it. What are the conditions that we would set in place for us to enjoy our transformation?Joe: The most important thing is you need to feel safe. And safe is misused often in today's world. We've got a lot of times people use safety as a way to control. Like, “I don't feel safe.” It's not actually a lack of safety, it's a way that they can control their environment, but you have to feel safe. Fear reduces your capacity to learn. Here's something that you've never seen before.You've never seen two people in a yelling match, where one person going, "You son of a pa-pa-pa-pa and you mother, ba-ba-ba-ba." The other person say, "Oh yes, you're right. You've got a point there." It doesn't happen because it's neurologically impossible. Feeling safe is really critical to being able to learn. That's important and it's really important also to understand the difference between whether you feel unsafe or whether you feel defensive.There's a great trick to doing that. Take a moment, pause this or whatever, but feel in your body what it feels like to feel unsafe. When you really felt like your life was threatened or that you were threatened and then feel what it's like when you were really defensive. Your body has two different signals for that defensiveness and safety and they get confused sometimes. To know the difference is really important.Brett: What are some examples of what that might feel like in the body? I remember early on going through your courses, a lot of the instruction were like: “How does that feel in your body?” A lot of times it would just be dissociation. I couldn't quite feel, like, "What do you mean in my body? I'm thinking. This is a thought.” Joe: [laughs] Oftentimes safety is felt more electrically in the body. It can be felt in the shoulders and in the belly often, but it's different for everybody and it's really based on, when you feel unsafe, if you go to fight, flight, or freeze. Your body's literally going to feel one of those ways. Defense is a hardening. It's usually like a more increased rigidity in some way.Brett: Muscles tightening.Joe: Tightening, yes. It doesn't always have to be that. It's very different for each person. Those are some of the signals to look for, such as how much electricity is moving through, what feels like electricity or energy is moving through your body. How rigid your body is, what part of your body lights up? These are the ways to know the difference for you between safety and resistance. Great question. Then, another thing that's the condition needs to be set, there needs to be trust. If you don't believe that you are going to transform, you are at a severe disadvantage.Trusting a teacher if you choose to have one is really important. Trusting yourself is so critical. Trust is a really important thing. The belief that it's possible to really know that that transformation is there-- there's this thing called the placebo effect. The interesting thing is, that it's always seen like it's a glitch of science. We can't really test it, because some people just think that they will get better and so they do. [chuckles] In this work, the placebo effect is a feature. It's not a glitch, it's not a bug. It's really important that you think that it's possible.I don't mean to do it in a namby-pamby kind of way. [chuckles] I'm talking about doing the research, do what you have to do to find out that it's possible. Talk to people who've been in the course or know that it's possible. The truth is we have a great success rate in our courses. We've had great studies done and we have a consistent shift that's measurable, but the main part is the belief that that's possible.The other thing to see is that some people don't change. Occasionally, you get someone who goes through who doesn't change. One of the things that you can always know about that person is they never came in with the confidence that they could change. They were resistant right from the start to the whole thing. If you're that, just don't do it. It's a waste of your time and it hurts the other people that you're on the journey with. That's really important.Another really important thing is seeing beyond your intellect and knowing that your thoughts are only part of the way the transformation happens. Do your research if you need to, to know that there are things like mirror neurons and mirror neurons don't register in the intellect of the brain. They're just some way in which we know that our body has an intelligence that if you move differently, your thoughts will be different.Research things like Sensory Processing Disorder where we know that kids who do not get to inhabit their body in a full way have a different brain function than kids who have inhabited their body in a full way, who have an understanding of where they are in space, they have appropriate perception issues. We know that the way that we move changes.Our body has an intelligence, our emotions have an intelligence, our intellect have an intelligence. If you are trying to do all of your change through the intellect, you're going to be screwed. It's going to be slow. You're going to be able to describe everything that's wrong with you, but very little is going to have changed.Brett: I've experienced that myself.[laughter]It took some time to realize that, while I could logically create a framework around everything that I was experiencing, I wasn't able to actually transform until I let the fuzzier logic of emotions and the body make movements that I didn't have to intellectually understand.Joe: Yes. For me the journey was similar. It was slightly different, I just deconstruct it. I spent almost 10 years deconstructing all my thoughts so that I could be free enough of them to trust the other ways of knowing. It's so apparent, it's just to ask somebody who's a great gymnast, how they did it and they're not going to give you an intellectual explanation. There's knowledge that happens that the intellect can't describe, muscle memories, examples like emotional memory.Brett: The endocrine system has its own memory.Joe: Exactly, hormone systems. Right. Exactly. Nervous system. All of that is very hard to describe. Another really important thing is vulnerability. It's really hard to have a transformational journey if you're like, "Yes, I got it. It's cool. I'm good. Yes. It's not that bad. Yes. There's some something that could be done there, but, it's not that big of a deal."If you're coming at it with that approach, you are not going to have that much transformation. It doesn't mean that you have to think there's something wrong with me either. It doesn't mean that you have to say, "I'm broken. Fix me. I'm broken. I have to fix myself. I need to be healed." You don't have to have that attitude either.Brett: You could create that entire model of yourself and stay in that for years too. [chuckles]Joe: Exactly, but if you can't explore the depths of your pain and your constriction and express it to other people, then you're not going to be able to approach it. You're not going to be able to do anything about it. You're not going to be able to understand it better. You know? It's like unless your attention can go to the discomfort, then your system can't do anything about the discomfort.A lot of people have learned how to just not go to the discomfort. Obviously, it builds up. Other things happen. It's a painful life. That's a really important thing. I'd say finally and I think I've stated it before which is just, if you're not willing to take full responsibility for your journey, if you start blaming the teacher, if you start blaming your wife, if you start blaming your mom and dad, you have to take full responsibility for the journey.It doesn't mean that you shame yourself, it doesn't mean that you blame yourself, but it just means you don't shame or blame anybody else. You have to just say something like, "I am exactly where I need to be. I am responsible for this." That is incredibly important in the journey, because every time you blame somebody else for where you are, including blaming yourself. Anytime you are blaming anything for where you are, you are slowing the process down tremendously.Brett: It seems like each of these is, there's a catch-22 because they're both conditions and also the effects. For example, with trust, many people might approach personal development, because starting with a position of that they don't trust themselves, they don't trust their own goodness or they don't trust teachers or they don't trust the process and that's something th at they're working with. What advice would you have for somebody who wants to embark on a personal transformation journey but is worried about being manipulated or controlled by a guru or ending up in some woo-woo backwater?Joe: I would say maybe two or three things there. The first thing is I get back to the first principle, right? It's enjoying yourself. If you are not trusting somebody, how do you enjoy that movement of non-trust? It's clear that if you feel safe, there's a deeper level of enjoyment. If you feel trust, there's a deeper enjoyment in being vulnerable than there is in being protected.Brett: Do you have any tips or exercises for anybody who's embarking on this and finding that they're having that difficulty with say, trust or vulnerability? Some way to help them just enjoy feeling what they're feeling rather than trying to change it?Joe: Yes. Let's say you are with a teacher and you're not trusting them or you know that you want to sign up for the course, but you know you're going to have trust issues; the best thing you can do is just go to the person and say, "I don't trust teachers and I want to. How can we work together so that this isn't a burden for you and this isn't a burden for me." That would be taking responsibility, being vulnerable and trusting.Even in saying that, you're trusting yourself, which is the more important thing than trusting the teacher. In saying all this to your teacher, you're giving them trust in that moment. If they react in a way that's just like, "Well, if you don't trust me, motherfucker," [laugh] then you pretty much know it's not the right teacher. Or if they go, "This is all about just letting go into my words," then you know you don't have a great teacher there and that maybe that you shouldn't be trusting them.Brett: It's a good litmus test. A teacher should be able to receive that mistrust. [chuckles]Joe: Yes, should be able to receive that mistrust, especially if you're taking ownership; and if you're not taking ownership and they point to the ownership, then also a teacher worth trusting. Yes. That's an easy way to look at it. Yes, you're right that to some degree, all of these things are the things you're working on as well as the things that you need to be successful at it, so then it's just an order of operations thing. It's make trust your first thing to work on. Don't make your mommy issues the first thing. Make trust the first thing. It's probably relates to your mom issues or your dad issues, but make trust the first thing and really focus there. Yes.Brett: Another feature of this is that it creates a positive feedback loop. The safety, trust and vulnerability and seeing beyond the intellect, maybe are the things that are initially holding you back, but then as you work on them more and more, the speed of your development increases.Joe: Yes, that's exactly right and it becomes more enjoyable, which is the speed, it becomes far less important than the enjoyment. If you enjoy your entire developmental journey deeply, who cares how fast you're going and who cares when you're going to get there, you know?Brett: Yes. You start to get to that point where you feel that restriction: "Oh, I'm interviewing Joe, I'm feeling restriction now." Then you're like, "Oh good. This is something to work on." Instead of, “No, I want to go away." [chuckles]Joe: Yes. That's a beautiful pointing. That's a great way to think about all of this stuff is, that there is a point in that path, where everything that's uncomfortable, you trust. That uncomfortable thing approaches and you say, "Oh, I can trust this thing because it's going to teach me something. I just have to be vulnerable in it and take full responsibility." Yes. Beautiful.Brett: Tell me more about how to approach this?Joe: How to approach [crosstalk]?Brett: How to first set those conditions and the spiritual path in general.Joe: Approaching the spiritual path-- what I mean by that is, what's the best way to be on the path, right? If those are the conditions that are important for you, make sure they are met before you even are packing your bag. That's the tent and the food stores. This is about, how do you walk down the path? When I say, "The approach to a path," that's what I mean. It's like, how do you walk down it? How you walk down the path is-- you know some of this stuff, because of the 18-month course you did, but I have it as to five principles of how to be on the path.One is loving accountability, which basically means that you're honest with who you are and what you've done without shame. It means that you can apologize to somebody, that you can take an honest inventory of yourself, without shame. That you can look at yourself directly and not feel like you have to be any different. That's loving accountability and it's approaching life in that same way. It's asking those around you to meet you in that place.An example of that would be to say to the teacher, "I'm having trust issues and I don't want to be having trust issues." It's kind of loving the accountability to say I have trust issues because that might be making them responsible. That full loving accountability is that I have trust issues and I don't want to have them. I want to be able to trust life, I want to be able to trust people. That's full loving accountability. Then embrace intensity is, it's not creating intensity, which I think some people mistake it far often, but it's embracing intensity.It's a business theory as well. It's like being a great CEO, one of the biggest things about it is just making sure the right amount of attention from the organization is going to the right parts of the organization. Are we being attentive to our problems? Are we being attentive to being proactive? Are we being attentive to our culture? Are we being attentive to our customer? How much attention is going where and the most--Brett: And where there's intensity, that's generally where that attention needs to go. [chuckles]Joe: Correct. That's right. Just like in the body, if there's pain, it's that pain is telling you, "Hey, this is where you pay attention." If you want to take care of yourself, pay attention to the pain. It's the same thing. I call it intensity because it's not all pain because it can be pleasure. Often what we avoid more than pain is pleasure. People have a hard time seeing that, until they see it and then they're: "Whoa." I always say it's subtle till you see it. In that moment when you actually notice: "Oh, it's more intense for me to be in deep pleasure than it is for me to be in pain," that's a moment. That's embracing intensity.The other principle is everything is an iteration. It just means that there's no way of getting it right, there's no complete, there's no finish line, there's no done, there's no I'm going to get it, there's just what's the next experiment? What's the next adventure? How do I learn? What can I learn from what just happened? There's no blame, there's no shame, there's just play.There's just moments of, "Let's do it this way, okay now let's do it this way." There's just a trust that you're going to keep on iterating and it's going to keep on getting better and you're going to learn and there's no need to think of anything that you've done as right or wrong." I can hear the brains out there already going, "But if you kill somebody that's wrong." I would agree that killing somebody is not how we want to behave.If there is a person out there, who has killed somebody and they're not going to be caught, my hope for them would be that their mindset is that of iteration. That their mindset is for example, "Okay, well that felt shitty in my body and I feel horrible and I'm still thinking about this thing and my guilt is creeping up on me and my life has gotten worse and it didn't make me any happier and it didn't solve my problems, so let's do a different iteration next time I have a problem with somebody." That's what I would hope that they would do. Brett: That brings up a great point because a lot of what happens and soldiers that come back from war with PTSD, a lot of the PTSD isn't around what happened to them personally but it's perhaps around the fact that they killed somebody and they did it in anger or rage in the intensity of the moment and that they actually enjoyed it or just something about having done it makes them feel like a monster. They think that that's just some core part of themselves that's unchangeable and makes them bad. Then holding that core belief, just causes so much more suffering and pain in their lives and the lives of those around them.Joe: Yes, that's right. That's exactly it. We are never finished. There is no moment of perfection; and we are reacting to an environment and we're iterating-- that same person-- never going to Iraq or Iran or wherever people are fighting these days, that same soldier, if they hadn't hit that environment, what would they be thinking about their core selves? It's a very iterative thing and I think it's really important to have that mindset and that change not only can happen, it's the only thing that you know will happen. Yes, so that's it.I would think being curious is really important as well, that's the other way of approaching the path that's really important is being curious. This is one of the most enjoyable ones. Let's take that person as an example who feels like, "I'm a bad person because I killed people." What if you're curious about that? What are the questions that actually come up? Instead of knowing that you're a bad person, what would be the most curious questions about it?Brett: What was I feeling, that led me to take that action?Joe: Yes. What makes me not want to kill everybody right now? If that's who I am, what's stopping that in me right now? If that's who I am, what's making me keep on beating myself up over it? What's the part of me that's beating myself up over it, if it's essentially who I am? If it's essentially who I am, what makes me not go to the grocery store and kill a whole bunch of people? There's just curiosity and it frees it up because your fear and curiosity can't exist at the same time.If you imagine yourself running from a tiger. Really, close your eyes for a moment. You're running from a tiger, this tiger is fast and it is hungry and you are running and feel the fear coursing through your system and you're moving as quick as you can and it's catching up on you and you can hear its breath and it's going to get you. You can feel that fear in your system and now wonder how much does the tiger weigh? [Brett chuckles] All the fear goes away. You can't operate from fear if you're curious.It doesn't just operate in the way that I can be curious if I'm not scared. It's why safety is so important from earlier right, because you can't learn, when you're scared. You can also just turn on curiosity and it just reduces fear, just like if you turn on fear it reduces curiosity. That's a cool one. Then the last one and I'd say the most important one is connection. That it's really important to stay in connection, in connection with each other, in connection with yourself, in connection with your body.Brett: What does that mean?Joe: It means being in contact with. It's being in contact. Like you were saying earlier that before when you're thinking about emotions, you're like, "Well, I don't know how to be in my body, all I have is disassociation." A contact means literally like touching. It's to have that point of contact.Can I just touch into the emotion? Can I just touch into the pain? Can I just touch into you? Can I just touch into me? Can I touch into that part of me that I don't want to see? Can I touch into that part of me I'm not proud of? Can I touch into that part of me that is proud?It's connection. It is what allows the tree to evolve, it's what allows us to evolve, is a connection.Brett: Tell me more about how embracing intensity or being curious about the lion that is about to eat you, how is that enjoying yourself? [chuckles] How does that help you get away from the lion?Joe: Yes, that's a great question. On the lion part. Obviously, I'm not suggesting that you should wonder how much a lion weighs or a tiger weighs if they're chasing you. Our system isn't curious when we're in fear for a reason. If you are in fear over something else, like what color of car you should buy or if you're going to get fired, yes, being curious is far more enjoyable than that. Being curious about being fired is far more enjoyable than worrying about being fired.The curiosity is-- you can just feel that in your system. If you just take a moment and you can pause here; and just feel what it's like to know shit and you say "I know, I know what you are, I know what I am," and then to be curious about who you are. You can just feel there's more enjoyment in the body.Embracing intensity is a little bit more complicated as far as enjoyment goes. It's the embrace part of it that makes it enjoyable. Intensity happens, you can't stop it. The Buddhists talk about it and they say, "Pain occurs, suffering is the choice." It's the embracing of the pain that prevents the suffering. The enjoyment is embracing something that you can't avoid or that if you avoid, it's less enjoyable.Meaning if you're a heroin addict, you can avoid the detoxes, you can avoid withdrawals, but it's not going to make an enjoyable life. At that moment, you want to embrace the intensity of the withdrawals. Part of it is the embracing of it when it needs to be done or when it's unavoidable or when it's just better to face the intensity than not, which is almost always. Sometimes we create intensity which is not necessary, but if we're not creating it in a conscious way, then embracing it is great. In fact, embracing intensity is one of the great ways to stop intensity from happening in our lives.Brett: Got it. In a way you let it move through you and change you. Then you learn the lesson in the intensity.Joe: Exactly. Yes, that's exactly it.Brett: Tell me more about what happens on this journey? What are some of the pitfalls, or some of the things that might be surprisingly enjoyable?Joe: Being on the journey, the pitfalls in my mind are slightly different but the being on the journey is there's just some things to know about it. One of the things to know about it is that the way human beings learn is a back and forth nature. It's a pendulation, is the word. I don't even know if it's a word, but it's the word I made up or I'm using depending on whether you can find it in a dictionary. There's a back and forth nature to it.If you look at a baby and a baby learns to walk, they don't just crawl, then one day stand up and walk and then never crawl again. That's not how we learn. We don't learn all at once. We learn by going back and forth. In fact, what they know is that when that back and forth doesn't happen, particularly in babies crawling, that their brain develops differently and it's not a good thing. If you pull a butterfly out of the cocoon, it won't be able to fly. What we think to be struggle or friction, that pendulation of going back and forth, is really a necessary part of the learning process.What you'd normally hear people talking about when they're on the journey, they say for example, "Man, it was doing so good and now it's all gone." Or something like, "Man, I was feeling so blissed out and now all that's gone. How do I get it back?" The other way to look at it is to say, "Oh, cool, that's gone. I'm in the learning process. This is how learning goes." There's a way of looking at it that says, "Oh, cool, it's gone away," which means that I am as much in the learning process as when it's there and I am getting closer; because it's gone, I'm getting closer to a life where that's fully understood and fully recognized. That's a really important thing.Brett: That relates to something else I've seen when somebody starts going through this journey and then all of a sudden they start feeling more emotions that they label as negative and they're like, "Oh, no, I had done all of this work and now all that work is undone and I'm a total mess." [laughter]Joe: Right, which is not. That's beautiful. It's not at all the case. One of the things that could be happening is they're just recognizing that they're having the emotions instead of just taking them out on people when they didn't recognize it before. That's common. The other thing is that they're able to handle them now. One of the things that I'll talk about often, is that we'll do a lot of exercises, where people really increase their love and you'll just notice this happiness.It's like when people can love themselves, then every part of themselves that was unlovable, comes to the surface to be loved, or the next wave of them. It's like shining a light in the water at night to attract cuttlefish. The more work we do, the more attuned we get. If I make an album, which I did in my 20s, I made a Rock 'n' Roll album, I can't listen to songs the same way before and after, I'm so much more sensitive to it, but that allows me to understand and enjoy music in deeper and deeper ways. That's the same thing. There's that sensitivity. That's a beautiful point.Another thing to understand is that when you have big jumps in development, when these big moments happen, there's a natural step that happens which is, things go from unclear to clear to being able to affect the change. Easy way to look at this is with kids. The first thing infants-- they don't even know it's their hand, it's hitting them, it's scratching them, they don't even know it's theirs, then they recognize it's theirs, but they can't control it and then they can control their hand.Piaget calls this primary, secondary and tertiary circular reaction I think is the terminology for it. That doesn't happen just for the use of our hands, it happens when people fully access for the first time, let's say, their emotional intelligence or their somatic intelligence or their awareness. If they're finding that moment of seeing that they are their awareness. Oftentimes, they can't even talk. They're say, "What's going on?" They try to reconstruct their life, because they're like, "Everything I believe is gone, what the hell is going on?" That's the way it works.It's as if they've walked into this new world that they can't control and they can't even identify the parts of. Slowly, you just hang out in the world and everything takes care of itself, just like it does with an infant. If you don't get scared about it, then you're just, "Okay, yes, I don't know anything and I don't have to reconstruct anything." Pretty soon you're talking from that place. That's another thing to know.Development moves like a corkscrew, that's really important. If you think about a corkscrew or stock market, you're moving up into the right, in human development, just like a stock market, you're moving ahead. It's like a corkscrew. Every time you're at the bottom of that corkscrew, it's like daddy issues and every time you're at the top, it's mommy issues. Then you can have abandonment issues or whatever.You have these core things going through your life and you're refining them and they're becoming more and more subtle and more and more different as you become more and more sensitive, that you can notice more and more of the pain and agitation that you're feeling. What people often say is, "I thought I dealt with all my dad issues." It's like before awakening dad issues, after awakening to dad issues.Brett: I was just going to say there's that one meme, where it's like before awakening and there's a child with a boot on his face. Then after awakening, it's the child with the boot on his face, but you can see it's zoomed out and he's holding the boot to his face.[laughter]Joe: I haven't seen that. That's funny.Brett: That's great.Joe: I would say after awakening, he's loving the fact that he's putting his own boot on his face.Brett: It's the unclear to clear part saying, "Oh, I'm putting the same boot on my face." Then the corkscrew is like, "Oh, these are all the different ways I put the boot on my face." It's the same way each time around, but I just keep finding more and more subtle ways to heal it.Joe: Yes, that's exactly--Brett: That comes back to that pendulation, which is, "Wait, I thought I dealt with all this before. How am I--" Sometimes you're just seeing a new spin, the new turn on the corkscrew. Joe: Right, a television show isn't enjoyable if it's just everybody's celebrating the whole show. If you can enjoy being in the not clear as well as the clear, if you can enjoy the corkscrew-- there's this great metaphor and truth, it's not a metaphor in a way. They know that if two people are on a roller coaster and they're going down, same exact experience and one of them is like, "Woohoo," and one of them is, "Oh my God, I'm so scared."You go into their neurochemistry, what they know is that the one, that is scared, is releasing carcinogenic chemicals into their body and the other one is releasing anti-carcinogenic chemicals into their body. The exact same experience can be used to destroy somebody or to heal somebody.Brett: It's the same as learning neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine.Joe: Yes, that's right. The cortisol is carcinogenic if I recall correctly. That's what it is. It's, you're going to be on the roller coaster ride. How do you enjoy it? That's the question. How do you allow enjoyment to happen? That's the real question. The last thing to think about on this is, that we have our three brains. We can call them the head, the heart and the gut, or the human, the mammalian and the reptilian, or the nervous system and the emotional and the intellectual. They limit each other.Even though they're really all one, if you're really developed on your intellectual side and you're not developed on your emotional side, it's like having three pencils attached by rubber bands. One can get only so high if one is so low. The most bang you're going to get for your buck is to move the low one higher because it gives everything else the most flexibility. It's just important to know that, if the path that you're working on has stopped working, you probably neglected one of the sides of yourself, one of the parts of yourself, so that's a really important thing to know.Brett: Tell me about enjoying those things? Because this process we've just discussed is that there's going to be pendulation, you're just going to go from, "Oh, I'm healed to I'm still a total wreck." Of course, going through the same problems over and over in different ways, spending a lot of time feeling unclear and then playing whack-a-mole with these three [chuckles] parts of our nervous system. How do we enjoy this process?Joe: A good story from my life was that there's this time when we got kicked out of the house for and at the time I felt like very unjust reasons in retrospect, it wasn't a match. It was a long time ago. Every time I saw the people involved or the house, it just like this knot in my stomach just was so there. It would come and go, as all emotions do, they come in waves. At some point, I'm: "Oh, cool. There's something there that I get to learn from."It got to the point where I would literally drive by the house to hope that that feeling would come back so I could be with it and I could love it and I could spend time with that, I get to attend to it. That's what I did. I learned how to enjoy the thing that I felt was uncomfortable. That's critical and that's what it is, it is to not buy in--Even this story is a way to help you enjoy it because if you buy into the pendulation that you've lost it, then it's very hard to enjoy. If you realize it's a learning process, then it's very easy to enjoy. If you are enjoying it, the learning happens quicker. It's like a virtuous loop. The more we enjoy it, the more we want to approach it and the easier the whole situation gets.Brett: A feedback loop that we were talking about earlier.Joe: Yes, that feedback there. Exactly. Clear to unclear is another great example of it. It's really easy to enjoy not knowing. [chuckles] It's really easy to enjoy being taken. Get in a car with somebody and ask them to drive you somewhere, but not to tell you where they're driving you and not to tell you how long and just see, that can be just as enjoyable, if not more enjoyable. It's really how do you let the enjoyment in, is the question in all of this stuff. That's really the key to preparing for the spiritual journey.Brett: That's great, something to be curious about the entire way.Joe: The entire time, yes.Brett: Now, before we run out of time, I would like to get back to touching on these impediments and pitfalls. What kind of things can happen that can block this whole process?Joe: There's so many little ones that I'm thinking about categorizing them in big ones. One of the pitfalls is thinking that you should do anything. That's a pitfall. It's like finding the wants behind your shoulds and letting your wants motivate you instead of your shoulds motivate you. In essence, the journey of self-development is the discovering of the self.It is self-realization, it is self-awareness and a should in its nature is saying that you need to be controlled, that who you are in general needs to be managed, controlled, modified. Your wants are there is a general trust in who you are. If you think about it in a developmental perspective, an infant from zero years old until seven, they don't have any shoulds, there is no should in their brain. I don't know for sure, but I bet there's a culture where there might not ever be shoulds ever.In that time period, they develop more than any other time period in life. They just follow their wants. Following your wants is really the most effective way to transform and following your shoulds is the least effective way and to make it a should is really just a doubt of trust of who you are.The other crazy thing about wants that I think is really important is you take a five-year-old and they want something, they shout, "No. No. Yes. No," and they throw a temper tantrum.Obviously, when we get older, we don't want to throw temper tantrums, so we say we shouldn't throw a temper tantrum instead of getting in touch with the fact that we don't want to throw-- we have iterated, we have evolved, we now want something different, but we turn that into a should, we change that natural impetus inside us into something that we should do.Resisting resistance is another big one. People don't embrace the resistance, they don't embrace that intensity of resistance. There's a great phrase that just says, "If you can't love it, love the resistance to not loving it." That's really an important thing, is that don't fight the resistance, that's just more resistance. Another one is--Brett: How do you not resist that resistance without creating a new resistance around that? [chuckles]Joe: Yes. Right, exactly. In a war with yourself, who's going to lose? Exactly, yes. There's no way to do it, but to drop it. You just have to just stop. It's the only way. I remember that, I think it was the first time, I was about 24 years old, I went out into the woods to fast. I was looking over this ridgeline and I was noticing that I was fighting myself. Then I was noticing that I was fighting myself to stop fighting myself. Then I was noticing I was fighting myself to stop fighting myself to stop fighting myself. I was just ending up saying, "Yes, this isn't going to work."[laughter]Joe: I just stopped. That was the first moment that I realized that it's not a matter of effort, it's a matter of acceptance, it's a matter of not efforting, it's the stopping of the trying, it is the trust. That's important. Another piece that's important is skepticism. There's two forms of skepticism. One is important, one sucks for the spiritual journey.The important one is, hey, if it's not true for you, you should know it's not true for you and you shouldn't think that it's true for you because some guru said it or because some Bible said it. If there is a truth, then that truth will be apparent in you and it will resonate in you and you will know it. Being skeptical of truth until you understand it and fully feel it, is important. Being skeptical prevents you from trying, preventing you from experimenting, preventing you from being open enough to see a truth, that level of skepticism, it's getting kneecapped. It's like getting your legs cut off in a race. Then spreading that to other people is violent. That's that. Another important one is just notice when you're future or past living.One of the biggest impediments is somebody who's either future living by state-seeking like, "Oh, I want to be in that experience of state again. Oh, I want to enjoy again. Oh, I want to be awakened." The opposite of that future living, which is, "This is going to be so hard. Oh, my God, I don't want to have to do this work. Oh, I have to feel my emotions again. This sucks." Like that. Oh, boy, both of those things, it's not enjoyable. [laughs] It is not enjoyable.Brett: Just having an idea of what you're going to look like, who you're going to be once you've transformed.Joe: Yes, exactly. Not enjoyable.Brett: Projecting your current self onto your future self, "Oh, if only I was perfect in all of the ways that I currently think I should be, then I'll be done." [chuckles]Joe: Yes, exactly. [chuckles] Not enjoyable. It is like the moment is far less enjoyable when you're thinking about how you're going to end up than [laughs] enjoying this moment. If you think about the moments that you've enjoyed yourself most, you probably weren't thinking about your conclusion. [chuckles] Some of the times we enjoy ourselves most is when the proposed conclusion just happened and so there's just nothing to strive for in that moment. Then, you come to the conclusion, "Ah," and then you create something to strive for and then you don't enjoy yourself anymore.Then there's the future and past living in the past. Comparative mind is a form of this, of who's better and who's worse, it's like that requires future and past living to be able to do that. Anything like that it's also, they're big pitfalls, they're stalls in the journey. Then, the last thing about the journey that I think is really important--This is the one that gets the most is that there's this natural cycle that happens that people go through and I'm sure you can recognize it. It's, you think to yourself, "Oh, I really want to--" I don't know, we'll pick anything. "I really want to stop smoking." We'll pick an easy one, "I really want to stop smoking." Then, "Okay, I got to do it. I got to really do it. You should do that. You should do that. You should do that. Why aren't you doing it? Why aren't you doing it? Okay, I'm good." Then, you do it.Then as soon as you do it you're like, "Oh, okay. I hope this lasts. I hope this lasts. I hope this lasts." Then it's, "Oh, it's already going away. I already noticed that I'm wanting cigarettes again. Oh, shit, I had a cigarette. Oh, it's all over, I'm going back into-- Oh, crap, fuck, now I'm smoking again. I got to quit smoking. I got to quit smoking." That's the routine.All of them rely on each other and you can cut it off at any other point but one of the easiest places to cut it off is when that moment when you actually have quit smoking or you have stopped yelling at your wife or you have stopped being a victim, is to appreciate it, is to actually just appreciate that moment and to keep on appreciating it. Instead of trying to hold on to it.Brett: Right.Joe: The idea that it's going to go away, it is the thing that creates it going away. The only thing that's really there to do is just to enjoy this moment. Enjoy that it's gone and the same thing can be said when you're smoking. If you're in the middle of smoking a pack a day, how do you enjoy each cigarette? How do you enjoy the hell out of yelling at your wife if you're going to do it? Because nobody really enjoys yelling at their wife. If you can really enjoy yelling at your wife, I bet the way you yell at your wife will change. It's not going away.Brett: That circles back to a lot of the goal isn't for things to go away, it's to just watch how they shift and how they change. What is the impulse behind the behavior? Trying to be, rather than what our resistance changes it into. All of these impediments that you've just listed, all seem like different forms of resistance and so to wrap this up, since we're running out of time, I just want to ask you, how can you enjoy resistance? [chuckles]Joe: You just pointed to something which is really great, which is if you want yourself to change, it slows down the process. Want is the wrong word. If you're getting angry and you are trying to change the fact that you get angry, that is a slower process, than if you love your anger and you invite your anger in and you welcome your anger. That is a far quicker process.Brett: How can we do that without hurting people?Joe: Wait. Unless you start doing it to try to make it go away, for example “I'm going to welcome my anger to make it go away”, then it doesn't work anymore. I'm not saying welcome your anger at people, I'm just saying welcome the experience of anger that one feels when they're angry. I'm not suggesting to go and be angry at people, but to welcome your anger, to accept it and to love it. To express it in a way that's safe, it doesn't create more shame.I just want to point that, what you said was brilliant and then I think your question was, how do you enjoy resistance? That goes back to that statement of, if you can't love the thing, if you can't love the anger, love your resistance to the anger. How do you enjoy resistance? How do you love your resistance? This is the whole question of the spiritual search and the whole way to prepare, is how do you enjoy this process?Brett: That's great. This has been amazing. I think we're running out of time now.Joe: What a pleasure.Brett: Yes, this has been amazing.Joe: Awesome. Well, I look forward to the next time and it was good talking to you. More to come.Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW, or to take a course, visit: artofaccomplishment.com

Connection over Perfection — AoA Series #3

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 13, 2021 51:08

We are taught from a very young age that doing things perfectly will get us where we want to go in life. But what if doing things in connection is far more effective? What if being in connection with your customers gets better results than trying to make a perfect product? Or being in connection with your spouse makes a better marriage than trying to make it perfect?"If you close your ideas and you think of the things that you feel are most perfect in the world, those are also things that are deeply connected. We think of a flower. We think of a scene. We think of God. We think of an amazing product. What the human population sees as perfection, they are all deep expressions of connection."What is perfectionism? If having clear goals can be so helpful in life, how could it be that the simple act of measuring ourselves up to them so often holds us back? Today we are going to explore why our quest for perfection never seems to satisfy us and often only slows or impedes productivity, while seeking connection tends to result in better output, better products and a better life. Brett: Joe, what makes this such an important topic? Joe: Oh man. That's a great question. There's so many reasons why it's important to me. The one that comes to mind right away is an experiment they did. It's the dried spaghetti experiment. It's basically you give a group of people 25 or so hard pieces of spaghetti and a marshmallow and some masking tape and you say, "Build the highest structure you can build."It turns out that kindergartners, a group of five kindergartners, will beat a group of five CEOs on a regular basis. The reason that the people who are doing the experiment say that that's the case is, because the young kids are iterating. They're just trying stuff out, trying stuff out, trying stuff out. Then when the time's up, they've tried like three or four models and they've got something. Whereas the CEO's are trying to make it absolutely perfect. Then they'll put that marshmallow on at the last minute, the whole thing will collapse. They didn't iterate. They didn't try. They tried to make it perfect and so it didn't work.One of the things about this experiment, which is so cool, is that if you get those same five CEOs and you add an administrative assistant, they will outperform the kindergarteners. Just somebody who can connect them together will immediately change it. On that level, that's a great example of how just connection, connecting with the tools that you have experimenting, iterating, that's a form of connection. Connecting with each other, like with the admin, all of that produces better results. That's one of the main reasons why it's so much more important. The other more important thing is that our neurochemicals do not propel us to be perfect. They propel us to connect. It's in our nature. Connection is in our nature. When you're working with humanity, prioritizing connection makes it better for you and everybody you're working with. That's part of the reason you get better results is that people don't want you to be perfect. The idea of you being perfect is going to be different from person to person. What they want is to feel connected with you. What you want is to feel connected to them.That's what we are genetically programmed to do, is to have this sense of connection. You get a deeper level of results and you get deeper satisfaction in your life. This is everywhere, even in the places where you don't expect it. For example, sales. There's one way of selling, which is the way most people sell. They try to write the perfect pitch and then present the perfect pitch in a perfect way. That just doesn't work as well as asking a whole bunch of questions, whether that's question-based selling or whether that's challenger-based selling. It's just asking a whole bunch of questions and talking to the person and finding out what's important to them. There's a great book on this called Ready, Fire, Aim. Is it Fire, Ready, Aim? Aim, Ready, Fire. It's basically saying that the job isn't to get a perfect product and put it out there. The job is to sell the thing before you build it so that you know what people will buy, which means that you're more connected with your customer.Brett: Then you're building what people will buy rather than what you planned or what you thought they would buy.Joe: That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is that you're prioritizing connection. You are saying, "I am going to connect with my customer and see what they really want, to see what it is that I can really serve them by providing," instead of, "I have this cool idea. What will make you buy it?"Brett: Let's define our terms here to discriminate between what is perfection and connection. Let's start by defining what is perfection.Joe: The critical parent's voice in your head is what it is for most people. We have this exercise in one of the workshops that I do, which is a triggering exercise, where people are to trigger one another and people hesitate to do it. We don't do it because we want to see people triggered. We do it, because we want people to figure out how to handle it when they are triggered. There's a group of people I can just walk up to and I can trigger people really easily because I can read what will trigger them pretty quickly. One of the things I can do is--Brett: Yes, you are great at that.Joe: [chuckles] One of the ways that I'll do it, I can just like, see who the perfectionist in the room is and I'll say, "You're a perfectionist." It'll trigger them because they're immediately in this headlock with themselves, because part of being perfect is to not be a perfectionist. It just messes with them all ways.The way I pick those people out is because I can see which ones of them had supercritical parents and you can see it in everything that they do. At some level, perfectionism is just trying to make the critical parent pleased. Since the critical parent could never really be pleased, it wasn't about you. It could be the critical teacher or the critical grandparent or whatever.Brett: How does that perfectionism show up? What do you see in people in their lives or the way they carry themselves, or even just briefly in a workshop when you've just met them?Joe: How do you see that? It's the amount of rigidity in the musculature, the amount of precision that they operate with, how much they're second-guessing themselves, how stunted their tones are, the way that they speak. Basically, all it really results to, is rigidity and hesitation inside the person when they're trying to be perfect.Brett: That hesitation part is really interesting. Because for me, I've always had identified or been diagnosed as ADD or ADHD. If I really pay attention to it, the moments where I get Teflon brain and it skips off of my task. If I really look at what happens often, it arises from a perfectionist pessimism.I sit down to write an email and I'm like, "Oh, I'm just never going to get this right. I'm not going to get it right. At least not right now, so why even bother?" Maybe some other time the conditions will be perfect and I'll know what to do. Let's go see what's in the fridge right now.Joe: They call it attention deficit disorder. The idea in the label is that your capacity to pay attention. If you reverse it a little bit, it's like how much attention was paid to you. It's the attention deficit disorder. Does that mean that you can't pay attention or does that mean that there was a limited amount of connection that you got? That's what actually creates it.I've noticed that. That's on the other side is that connection feeling, that the idea that you can do it perfectly is also just simply inane in the fact that what I think is perfect is different, than what you think is perfect. There's always someone thinking that you're not doing it perfectly, including you, always.The other thing you said, what is perfection? It's something that doesn't exist. It's just the point of view. If you are being absolutely perfect, somebody is seeing you as being rigid or imperfect or hesitant or whatever it is. That's how I describe it. If there's no such thing as that, the only way to describe it is trying to satisfy some critical voice in your head that is never and can never be satisfied.Brett: Having goals and vision and striving for perfection is good, right? It allows us to structure ourselves and structure our minds so that we can achieve something. How does that interact with this idea of perfectionism? Joe: Having goals and intentions, those are fantastic. Obviously, it allows us to focus. It allows us to decide which way we're going to walk. We have thousands of decisions to make a day. If we make them based on a goal, then we are far more coherent and unified, especially if that goal is coherent and unified.I don't know if that has anything to do with perfection. I don't see that as being perfect. None of our goals are perfect even. As long as you don't believe that there is some perfection you can get to, then the goals are really useful. As soon as you think there is a perfection that you can live up to, then the goals become less useful.To be specific about that, that doesn't mean that you're not 100% confident you're going to get to the goal. It's just the belief that there's some level of perfection at the end of the rainbow. That just doesn't happen. The other thing is that the best way to get to what we think is perfection-- I'd even say, if you close your eyes and you think of the things that you feel are most perfect in the world, those are also things that are deeply connected. We think of a flower. We think of a scene. We think of God. We think of an amazing product. We think of a person who inspires us. Then an ecosystem.Brett: An ecosystem, a metabolism. Joe: It's all also far more an expression of connection than it is a perfection. Even what the human population sees as perfection, they are all deep expressions of connection.Brett: It seems related to the idea of utopia being a dangerous idea. The idea of iterating towards better than what we have now is just the natural state.Joe: Which is the coolest thing too, because iteration is far more connected than perfection. If I'm just iterating and I'm learning and growing, that is a connected experience. That's what life does. It evolves. It doesn't evolve to a perfect end. If you see yourself as trying to evolve to a perfect end, then you're no longer in the flow of life. You're not using all the natural energy, all the natural ways of being that we were designed with to be productive.Brett: This is all reminding me of the book Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. Have you--?Joe: I haven't. What is it?Brett: It's a fascinating and quite short read actually. It's quite poetic. It just describes this one very broad concept across a bunch of different domains and short prose about how there are games that are finite, where you achieve something and you get the title. You get the diploma. You get the trophy. You get the money. Then there are games that they're not meant to be won. The goal is not to win and end the game, but the goal is just to keep playing.Joe: Yes, which is right. I think that's a beautiful way to describe why connection and perfection work the way they work in our systems is that life is the game that you just keep on playing. Therefore, connection is what works. When you have a game that has a finite end or you've created an imagined finite end to it, then perfection is there.That's the other thing about it, is that fear creates a finite end in people. The idea of perfection is really a fear-based idea. The idea that you have to be perfect, that you have a right answer, that there's the right way to do it, that's all fear-based. Fear does not make great decisions.Brett: That's interesting. A lot of ideals of perfection are this belief that we can get rid of everything bad and that we can reduce all error. There's a fear of like, "Oh my God, what if this happened? What if this still exists in the world? What if there's still imperfection? What if I still have to feel whatever this is that I don't want to feel? What if I could just cut all that out? That would be perfect."Joe: The CEO of Netflix has a great example of this where he talks about his first company. He basically made it idiot-proof so it couldn't be broken and then he only had idiots working for him as he describes it. Then they couldn't really adjust their company to the new times. In his company now--Brett: Rigidity.Joe: Exactly. He has a system that's in place to create a certain amount of chaos so that he can create an environment where smart people love to be and where it's far more flexible.Brett: Where flexible people like to be.Joe: Exactly. That's where connection happens. In one, he prioritized getting it right and perfecting. The other one he prioritized being connected with these people.Brett: Then let's get into the definition of connection then. How specifically would you define that as relative to this idea of perfection?Joe: It's a measure of capacity for you or for anybody, anything to meet and accept things as they are in the moment. If I'm connecting with you, I'm not asking you to be any different right now. The more I ask you to be different, the less connected we're going to feel. If I'm looking at a landscape and trying to adjust it, telling myself this is the good part and this is the bad part and comparing it to other landscapes, I am in less connection than if I am in just full acceptance of what the landscape is at this moment.Connection basically is like the surface area of our awareness. We take away surface area, when we start looking for things that can be better or things that are different or any way in which we're calculating creates distances to that connection. If you are a CEO and you want your customer to be different, you are not in connection. If you are a product manager trying to get a different answer from your customer, then you're not in connection. If you are a husband wanting your wife to not nag as much, or a wife wanting your husband to not nag as much, then you are not in connection. Connection is the acceptance of people and things as they are. That's what it is.Neurochemically, it is oxytocin and serotonin. Mostly it's oxytocin, which is the drug that is felt when we're in deep connection, mothers feel when they're breastfeeding and we feel it when we're hugging and we feel it during sex. That's oxytocin. Serotonin is more of a pride, proud of each other drug and something that you would feel like if you were watching a friend have a great moment. You had a lot of pride in what they just accomplished. Those are our connection neurochemicals. That's the other way to say what connection is.Brett: One thing just pried, it seems serotonin is also involved in meaning and satiety.Joe: Yes. That's right. Exactly. The way to think about our ability to have connection, it's really our ability to love ourselves and accept ourselves as we are. The more I can love every aspect of myself, the more I can love every person I come across as they are. You can hear there's somebody's mind out there listening to this right now and they're like, "If I accept myself as I am, I will be horrible. I will drink beer on the couch, or I'll just say the same as I am right now."What's interesting is, that doesn't actually happen. If you look at any system that is deeply connected and change is inherent, it's natural. Evolution is part of it. It's when people get rigid, when people try to do it perfectly, that change stops happening. It's just that you don't get to control the change. It's just that you have to trust the deeper intelligence in yourself, your deeper intelligence, your nonintellectual intelligence to drive the change.Brett: It seems like this comes up pretty frequently in so many other aspects of the work that you do, or that we've been doing. For example, the victim story that people have around client relationships. It's like, "Oh, man, all these clients, there's so much wrong with them. If only they would see things the way we see it, we'd be able to do great work."Joe: Yes, or fathers or mothers or girlfriends. Exactly. That's right. The way to think about it too, is just like think about the people who really make it so that you feel seen, that really make it so that you feel understood. Feel that. That is connection. Those people are seeing you for what you are. They're not trying to fix you or manage you. If you think about what's so important about connection, what makes it important is, think of what you would do for those people. Think of the people who make you feel most seen and most understood in this world. What would you do for them? What would you do for yourself, if you really saw and understood yourself deeply? If you really felt understood by yourself.There's people listening to this who haven't quit eating sugar or haven't quit smoking. What would you do? There's a way in which you're disconnected with yourself. If you felt deeply connected with yourself and you weren't trying to change yourself, the things that you would do for yourself are far more outstanding than things you're actually doing for yourself right now. You tell yourself you should do them, but you're not doing them.Brett: Yes. That brings me back to that ADD example I described earlier. It's like the difference between sitting down to write an email and being like, "Oh God, I'm just so procrastinating today. I'm just never going to get this done. Oh, I suck." That's telling myself how I should be. Then the connection version would be like, "Oh, wow. I really want to get this right because this is important to me. Oh, man. Whatever I do it's never going to be. There's always going to be something I could have done better. Wow. Okay."Joe: Yes. How about just be authentic, do it the way that I want to do it and then look at it and see if that works? Exactly. That connection is staying. I talk about what it means and I say that it's like accepting how things are in the moment. The moment changes. So you just keep on accepting, because it keeps on moving. It keeps on changing.Brett: Yes, because the moment you accept something, you can also then turn that acceptance into a new model of perfection. Joe: [laughs] Yes. I'm going to connect to you perfectly. It's so amazing. It's like, "Hey, I want to connect with you." You can just feel that in your system. "Hey, I want to connect with you. Hey, I want to connect with you perfectly." It just immediately takes the connection out.Brett: I've experienced that in relationships so many times, where suddenly I'll have a new idea of like, "Oh, wow, this is connection. I wasn't doing connection before. Now I know what connection is." Then suddenly that can become a new perfectionism, where I'm like, "Oh, man, I could call my brother and reach out and talk right now, but I haven't talked in so long and that's been-- Oh." Then just find ways to make it not okay somehow and then procrastinate it.Joe: Exactly. That's the amazing thing too, is that we have all these impulses inside of us that are just popping up like, "Oh, I want to work out or I want to exercise or I want to move my body." Then that impulse, which is the deep connection, immediately gets turned into a perfection of, "I should work out." Then it's completely unmotivating.Brett: Then here's my workout plan that I'm going to hold myself to and shame myself and judge myself when I miss a day.Joe: Exactly. You watch the little kids and they just follow that impulse and there's no idea of perfection. As they get older, the bigger the perfection, the more they're stilted, the more they're stunted. If you look at the people who have the deepest level of depression that feel most stagnant in life, their brain is telling them that they're not perfect and they need to be perfect all the time.Brett: Yes. They're just experiencing that delta between them and their model of what they want to be.Joe: Yes. I'll give you a little trick that I do with people. The most recent is with my guy who cuts my hair, a great guy. He's an artist and I love his art. It's good work. He was just having a hard time getting people to buy and represent him and everything that. I'm "Hey man, I've got a job for you. If you do it, if you do this job successfully, I'll give you whatever 1,000 bucks," or whatever it was. He's like, "Okay, well, what's the job?"And I said, "I need you to get 30 rejections. I need you to go out there and get 30 people to turn you down. If you can prove to me you've got 30 people to turn you down in a year, I'll give you 1,000 bucks." I came back two months later, I don't get my haircut that often, or I had one and we didn't talk about it. Then I was like, "How's it going? He's like, "I've got three representations and I've sold 12 pieces." It was the difference between trying to get sold and trying to get rejected because his mindset moved from perfection to connection.Brett: Speaking of moving that mindset, how can we consciously shift from a mindset of measuring ourselves up to some perfect ideal and rather focus on cultivating connection? What is the practice here?Joe: That question in itself implies perfectionism. It's like how do I perfect myself in this way? Even that question becomes a little bit less effective than another question. The other thing to say is that there's also no such thing as perfect connection. It's asymptotic, meaning that you get closer and closer, but you can never actually arrive.There's no place to get to, that you're going to ever get to. There's just proximity and feeling more and more and more and more and more, more connected. I think it's important to say that if you choose that, if you say, "Hey, what I'm after in life--" Every company has a bottom line. For most of them, it's the financial bottom line, but there's other kinds of bottom lines that people have.What I've noticed is when people change their life to having a bottom line of connection, they have incredibly happy and productive lives. If they can measure their level of connection on a daily basis and their job is just to feel more and more connected every day, that visceral sense of connection, it has a very, very deep effect on people. I just think it's really important to say that, but the trick is not to try to get there because trying to get there is a form of disconnection.Brett: There's no there to get. It's an iteration.Joe: Right. It's really more of an allowing. Connection is more of an allowing. If I'm not trying to change anything, if the definition of connection is not trying to change anything, not wanting-- It's not quite that. It's not wanting things to be different. You might want to change stuff. That's fine. It's important to change stuff, obviously. It's more about accepting it for what it is even if you are trying to change it.Brett: Which is in a sense allowing imperfection? Allowing the error signal, allowing the pain of things not being as good as you could imagine them being, which breaks through denial. Because what is denial other than just having this vision of how things are and no, it has to be perfect, so this information that is inconvenient?Joe: Yes. Also, it's your imagination. It's imaginary. Perfection is again. Yes, exactly. That's beautifully said. How do you have deeper levels of connection in your life and how do you, I would say, allow deeper levels of connection in your life? It's interesting. One of the things that's a really important principle behind it is, to go into difficulty is one of the ways that you get into-- when I say difficulty, I mean discomfort or vulnerability.That really creates a sense of connection in folks. If you've ever seen people who fought together in a war, it doesn't matter if they haven't seen each other in 20 years, their bond is ridiculous. It's such a strong level of connection and they've just gone through the shit together. I build my courses so that there's difficult moments so that people can start feeling bonded to one another.There's something about going through difficult things together that creates a bond. Same with yourself. If I have my little kids and I have them do tasks that are hard for them and challenging for them, they feel more connected with themselves and more connected with me. They talk about how to build self-esteem. One of the ways you build self-esteem is by giving hard things to do. Then that's how they build self-esteem. It's not to take that away from them or to try to make it so they're successful. It's the same thing internally and externally. Then the other main way that I talk about this is VIEW. I talk about something that I termed as VIEW, which is how we relate to ourselves and how we relate to other people. That's very operational, so that if you practice this state of mind, it just leads to deeper and deeper levels of connection internally and externally.Brett: Can you explain VIEW?Joe: Yes. The most important thing is, it is a state of mind. It's almost even beyond a state of mind. I think it is a state that's beneath all states of mind is another way to think about it.Brett: Metastate.Joe: Yes. It's a metastate. A stateless state, I've heard people call it. It's good for internal and external practices. It's basically V stands for vulnerability, I stands for impartiality, E stands for empathy and W stands for wonder. It's walking around the world willing and feeling vulnerable, impartial, empathetic and full of wonder.This is not just like how I interact with you. As you know, we have these conversations that are in VIEW and we do a lot of work in here. It's also meditative, like if you're sitting and being with yourself quietly, how can you be more vulnerable with yourself in that moment? How can you be more impartial with yourself? How can you have more empathy? How can you have more wonder?We're constantly telling ourselves, "I should lose weight," but we're never really going, "What is making it so that I've been saying that to myself for 20 years and nothing's happened?" We're constantly telling ourselves how we should feel or how we should not feel or how to avoid them, but we're not really actually just being empathetic with ourselves and being with the feeling.We're constantly telling ourselves how to do shit, what to do. We're editing ourselves all the time, but we're very rarely just ever being impartial with ourselves like, "What's actually happening? Let's just look at this thing with a watcher's eye, an observer's eye instead of a manager's eye."Impartiality is amazing because people often say, "If I don't manage it, it's not going to turn out right," which is clearly not true when you just think about most of the major decisions that have changed your life are not things that you decided. Like did you really decide to meet your wife on a Tuesday at a bar or did you really decide to even take that job or apply for that job or did you just apply for 20 jobs?The decisions that actually make our lives are often ones that we don't have any control over anyway. More importantly, it's like the best change agent for things is awareness. It's not management. Just being aware of stuff can change things dramatically. We put a whole bunch of management on it, thinking that that's necessary, but it usually slows down the progress.Brett: Relationships are a really great example, because you certainly can't connect the dots in advance how you're going to meet a person or a client, or you can try to arrange your life so that that thing happens with higher frequency. Really, there's a state of mind of being open to it, of allowing it, of allowing those synchronicities.Joe: The more that you recognize them and allow them, the more that they happen. I'm not in any way speaking out against, "Hey." Sometimes it's important to say, "We're going to get to this goal." I think goals are fantastic. I love them. The question is, can you hold that with an impartiality as well as a determination? It's incredibly easy to do when you look at nature, like an oak tree that grows to be 5 feet wide and 40 feet tall. That's determination and it's also very impartial. It's just in the flow of things.Impartiality is the hardest one for business people, particularly to really grok and understand. One of the metaphors I use for impartiality is you're on a boat going down a river. It's important to row the boat, but it is more important to read the river. If you are partial and reading the river, you're not reading the river. That's the impartiality part. Then vulnerability, obviously, is doing the things that are just a little bit scary, to let the little parts of yourself that you judge out into the world to find out that nobody else is judging them. They're just you.Brett: Or to find that they might be judged and that's okay.Joe: Yes and to find that they might be judged and that's okay, right. The thing is we don't really care what people are judging us. All the things that you're proud of about yourself, all those things that you think are just fricking awesome about yourself, I guarantee you there's people judging you for them. I guarantee you and you don't care. The things you care about are the things that you're judging yourself for. Exactly.Brett: We've got vulnerability, impartiality, empathy and wonder. We've talked about impartiality quite a bit. We've talked about vulnerability. Let's talk a little bit more about wonder. Joe: Wonder is curiosity without looking for a solution. Wonder is curiosity with awe. It has a certain level of awe to it. It has a certain amount of amazement to it and it is in the question. We think that being in the answer is more productive than being in the question. Being in the question is incredibly important. Just as an example, you can have three different questions arise. One question is, how do I have the perfect relationship? The second question could be, how do I have the most connected relationship? The third question could be, how do I have a relationship that lasts 40 years?Brett: Then ends exactly at 41.[both chuckle]Joe: Probably. Those are going to lead to three different relationships. What the question is, is far more important than what the answer is. Living in the question is an amazing experience, to be in the question without needing that resolution, to just be in the wonder of life. It just provides answer after answer after answer, but to be in the knowing, you only get one answer. I'd much rather have many answers than one.Brett: It's like seeing an animal be like, "Whoa, that's a giraffe. Cool, giraffe," or being like, "Whoa, look at the spots on that thing. How tall it is? The little eyelashes, Oh."Joe: What? It has the same amount of neck vertebrae as I do? What? What? How on earth? Exactly. It's that feeling of just question after question. Answer after answer. One thing about vulnerability that I'm not sure if I hit is, that everybody's vulnerability is different. It's like, I see people often say like, "Oh, that guy's not vulnerable." You have no idea if that person is being vulnerable or not because vulnerable for you and vulnerable for me is different. I could tell you all about my childhood and all the mishaps and drama and you'd be like, "Wow, man that was super vulnerable. Your dad did what? Your mom did huh?" I would be like, "Yes, that's not vulnerable."To me, I've said it 1000 times. I've been in rooms and Al-Anon meetings and groups for years of hashing through that stuff. There's nothing vulnerable about it for me. That's the path of vulnerability, is that you're constantly showing up with that thing, that's a little scary and all of a sudden, it's not scary anymore. Then you show up with the next thing and you show up with the next thing. Then it ends up leading you into authenticity, because all those vulnerabilities are really just ways that you're judging yourself and preventing yourself from being what you actually are.Brett: Vulnerability could even depend on role as well, like an overbearing manager screaming is like that's somebody not being vulnerable. An employee showing their anger to a manager that they've been hiding for so long and just resenting, there's something really vulnerable in that.Joe: I would say something vulnerable in both actually. Basically, the manager who's yelling and is basically saying, "I feel out of control. I feel alone. I feel out of control. I'm going to go and beat myself up for yelling in a couple minutes. I feel ashamed and I don't know what to do to actually fix this situation. I'm yelling, because I hope that it'll make me feel like I'm in control for 20 minutes."Brett: To a third party observer, as you were saying, like our idea of what is vulnerable is different. A third party observer might observe the manager as being invulnerable and their anger in the employees as being vulnerable. I see this in movies, for example. There's so many examples where finally that person stood up for themselves. That was such a vulnerable thing to do.Joe: The important part is, are you being consciously vulnerable? Yes, if you're getting angry all the time and yelling at people, obviously that level of vulnerability, though it's vulnerable for you, you probably don't recognize it. Other people don't recognize it. It's not really going to have the same effect as being vulnerable in a way of like, "Oh, I'm going to go stretch myself here." What is very useful is when somebody is yelling like that to see it as a vulnerability.Brett: Or, "I'm sorry. I keep yelling at you and I don't want to be yelling at you. I apologize."Joe: Yes. That's the vulnerability that the person yelling it's going to really benefit them. To see them as vulnerable when they're yelling just to be able to look at them and say, "Hey, you're not alone in this. This whole team wants to be successful with you." It will immediately change the yell. It just will, because if you can see it as vulnerability, that's great. For that person to have the benefit and this modality of VIEW, the important thing is that you're choosing vulnerability. You're choosing the thing that's vulnerable to you.I think that the one piece that we haven't quite talked about is empathy and I think it's an important thing. Empathy is just allowing yourself to feel the other person. It doesn't mean losing yourself in the other person. It doesn't mean going into the other person. It doesn't mean confusing your emotional state with their emotional state. It just means allowing yourself to be with the person while they are feeling stuff, to be there with them in it. That's just an important piece on the empathy. Brett: Again, vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, wonder, VIEW. How does one practice VIEW or cultivate this state of mind or meta state?Joe: You can do it internally and you can do it externally. If you're a meditator, if you just contemplate quietly, just do some experiments. See what it's like to be vulnerable with yourself and then see what it's like to be non vulnerable with yourself. See what it's like to be partial with yourself. Have a really strong agenda for yourself and see what it's like to be impartial with yourself.Brett: What about an agenda creeping into meditation? Like I'm going to meditate into this particular state of mind that I want to be in and that would be perfect.Joe: Exactly. That would be very partial and so would be saying I want to be impartial right now. This is the thing about true meditation is having no agenda, having no management. It's more like sitting on the beach and enjoying the wind across your face. Oftentimes, when I'm talking to people about how to meditate, I talk about, it's just non-management.The level of management is also asymptotic. It gets finer and finer and finer and finer. Maybe you start with just a simple agenda, which is to be agendaless. Maybe you start with a really simple agenda of being aware of your body. The idea is that eventually, the agenda goes away and you become the passenger. You are being taken for a ride. You're not driving.Brett: How do you bring that into your life when you're in a meeting or an argument or working on a podcast?Joe: That's actually a little bit easier for VIEW. Wonder means you're asking open-ended questions. If you're really curious, you're asking questions that are going to give you lots of data. How, what, where, when questions. Not can do, is questions and why questions are usually judgmental. Wonder is just asking questions. Empathy is not trying to fix people's emotional states, not trying to change their emotional state and to let them know that you're with them.Brett: That sounds like impartiality.Joe: It is and it's on the emotional level. They all are the same thing. When you start really getting into them, they're all the same thing. Impartiality, I use that more on the logical level and the empathy is more on the emotional level. It's to call it out because I think that most people don't recognize or it takes them a long time to recognize, that they are constantly wanting their emotional state to be different, that they're constantly trying to get to some state or trying to get away from another state.Brett: We've all been taught in some way or another that happy is good. Some parents are like, "Oh, I will love you if you're successful." Other parents are like, "I will love you if you're happy," and that's almost as just as bad in some cases.Joe: Yes. It's not loving them for what they are. It's not loving your kid for what they are. The crazy thing is, is this idea is like, "Hey, if I love you for throwing temper tantrums," and you're going to just keep on throwing temper tantrums, that's just not true. It's like once you love that part of yourself, it changes.Just like if you put awareness into something that changes. There's this principle in business, it says how do you fix a problem? The thing you do is you put attention towards it. Just the simple act of putting attention towards a change is the situation and creates a solution. It's the same thing that awareness just changes things and so does love. Love just changes. If you can love every emotional state that you have, they change. The friction of most emotional states is your resistance to them, not the state themselves. If you're resistant to bliss, which oddly most people are. Bliss is very overwhelming. There's this great quote that says fear is excitement without the breath.It's just saying that excitement, if you forget to breathe because you're resisting it, is fear. That's what empathy is all about. We're using different parts of the brain and empathy and impartiality too. One is mirror neurons and one is opening our heart. The feeling of opening a heart and the other one, impartiality is dropping the strategies, dropping the agenda.Brett: Another thing about fear and excitement, in base jumping through the phrase similar to this was just excitement is the other side of fear. Getting into it more subtly, fear is when you feel something is off and inauthentic and excitement is when you feel like you're ready for it. Whatever cliff you're about to jump off of, if you feel like your equipment is in line and your mindset is in the right place and the conditions are right, then it comes through as excitement.If there's a part of you that knows something's wrong, you know that you feel peer-pressured into this to be cool, or you know that the conditions are off but you're just avoiding hiking down because that would be annoying, then there's a constriction there that turns into fear. Listening to what kind of fear you're feeling can be a really good indicator.Joe: Yes. Absolutely, that's a beautiful thing. I think what it all requires, fear, excitement, breath, no breath, is to feel it. It's to actually feel which is what empathy is saying. It's to actually allow the emotional state to move through you and to flow without resistance, because you're never going to get the intelligence of the emotion while trying to control it. You're not going to get the intelligence of your people in a business if you're trying to control it.Brett: It seems like a form of being receptive to information rather than just drawing a conclusion.Joe: That's exactly right. That's the whole thing. That's the VIEW. If you're practicing it out in the world, it's like wonder is asking questions. Empathy is being with people's emotions. Impartiality is not trying to drive them to a place.We had this great experience, where we did these workshops, where it was these two day practicing VIEW. That's all we did. Just practice VIEW for two days. This is like deep stuff. People will call me two or three years later. I remember one guy and it's more than one guy. There's multiple people where this happened, where they basically at some point in the two days looked at me and said, "Wow, I've never asked an impartial question in my whole life." All my questions, everything I'm saying is trying to get somebody to do something.The people who are going to have that recognition the most are the people who are most disconnected, are the people who feel most lonely, who feel most disconnected is because they have this incredibly strong agenda for themselves or for others.Brett: Perfectionism.Joe: Yes, exactly. Vulnerability is just saying things that are vulnerable or asking vulnerable questions or asking the question that might get you fired or asking the question that might make your boss angry at you, but it's your truth. That's the thing about vulnerability.Vulnerability is you don't do the scary thing because it's scary, you do the scary thing because it's your truth. You ask the question because it's your truth or you say the thing. Even the work that I do, when people see me do one-on-one work, they're like, "Holy shit, how did you ask those questions?" It happens to me too. I'll feel it. I'll be like, "Oh my god, I'm going to ask that question. Oh shit." You've seen it happen. Those are usually the most powerful, most impactful questions are the ones that are really scary.Brett: That's when my sphincter is clenching hearing you start to ask the question.Joe: Exactly. Mine, too. It's like, "Whoo." That's when life just becomes really alive and opens up. That's where the most important stuff comes. Maybe some people are going to join you. Maybe some people aren't. That vulnerability really makes it so that you get the life that you want to live, because you're showing up as yourself in your truth, no matter the consequences, no matter what someone thinks.That just drives the people who want you for you into your life and drives the people who don't want you for you out of your life. It's a lot easier. Then we have this whole technique of asking questions and having how to have you VIEW question and answers and all that stuff will be explicit in other materials.There's all sorts of ways of using this to do sales and you're doing this to do management of people, or doing VIEW to do product development or doing VIEW to talk to your father who you haven't spoken to in 20 years. When you hear people have these conversations, it's amazing to see. We'd give these homework assignments and VIEW. They would in the VIEW course and they would go out and talk to their dad and then parents, siblings haven't spoken, getting back together. Husbands and wives realizing, that they have the same thing. All beautiful things happen. Bosses and employees changing the way that they work together. Co-workers changing the way they work together from 15-minute conversations, because you do this with executives.I do this with executives and typically the executive is like, "Wait. I need to be partial. That's how I've made my living and I can't be vulnerable." I'm like, "It's just an experiment. Let's do this for 15 minutes." Then at the end of the 15 minutes, I always say the same thing. I'm always like, "Hey, so have you ever had a more productive 15-minute conversation?" The answer is almost always no, because when you're that way, it's an incredible form of productivity, because you get to see and learn and grow so much. CEOs start to learn like, "Oh, I could--"There's this great in the book that I love Reinventing Organizations. There's this example of a CEO going to his people and say, "Hey, we just lost the biggest contract. We do not have enough money. Tell me what we should do." The whole organization said, "You know what, we're all going to take a pay cut and we're going to try to get another customer." The people who are trying to get the other customer, obviously, we're completely motivated because they saw everybody do this pay cut. They themselves had a pay cut and the CEO didn't dictate a pay cut, but people decided this is what we're going to do.That's an expression of vulnerability in a business and there's thousands of those expressions. There's a Harvard Business Review case of a woman who basically had no money. She had a company and she had no money to keep on going and her employees stayed with her. It was all about her vulnerability with the employees.It's so incredibly apparent when you get out of the mindset that people do things for money. Some people do things for money, for sure. We all do some things for money for sure, but most of what we do in life is not for money.Brett: Getting beyond carrots and sticks.Joe: Yes. Getting beyond carrots and sticks and having some faith that most people and the people that you should have hired and the people hopefully that you're married to, are people who want what's best for them. They want to contribute. They want to be a part of things. They're motivated. If there's no money, people wouldn't just all sit around and go, "Okay. I'm done. No more money. I'm finished." If everybody had food and shelter, then everyone's like, "I'm finished. I'm done."Brett: This example of the CEO reminds me of something that you've said before where the position of the CEO often feels like the most lonely position in the company.Joe: Yes, for sure.Brett: What would you have to say just to wrap this episode up neatly into a perfect conclusion, cherry on top? What would you have to say to that CEO that feels that distance and wants that connection but feels like, "No, no, everything would fall apart"?Joe: I would say, I know you had to be resourceful and you had to be self-reliant. You were alone as a kid but you're not alone now. If you're looking for evidence, look around at all the people who are trying to make you successful. They might not be able to live up to every one of your expectations, but it's probably impossible to find anybody who's not trying to live up to your expectations, who's not trying to make it work for you and for them. Take a look at that and then apologize to them for not recognizing it. That would be the vulnerable act. Then see how much more inspired they are to be there with you and to show up with you because they see your humaneness instead of being scared of you.Brett: Beautiful. Joe, thank you for a perfectly imperfect episode.Joe: That it was. Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW, or to take a course, visit: artofaccomplishment.comResources:Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations, https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games, https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Finite-and-Infinite-Games/James-Carse/9781476731711Michael Masterson, Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat, https://www.waterstones.com/book/ready-fire-aim/michael-masterson/9781119086857

Enjoy over Manage — AoA Series #4

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 13, 2021 46:16

The problem with getting good at managing your life is that you end up with a life that has to be managed. What would happen if you found out that focusing on enjoying your life could make you more productive and happier than managing your life? We know most of the greats enjoyed what they did. What if enjoyment is an essential part of what makes us great?"Imagine that you are on a boat and you are going down a river. Management is when you are fighting against the river, but when you are in that effortless flow of the river, there's an enjoyment to it. What you have to do is, you have to be listening to that river deeply. You have to be listening to that impulse."We're told all of our lives that if we want results, we have to manage ourselves and the world around us in order to get what we want. What if that isn't true? What if intention and determination are critical, but managing life gets in the way? What if the way to get the life we want is to focus on enjoying our life, not only by doing what we enjoy, but also by learning to enjoy whatever is happening? This is what Joe and I will be getting into today.Brett: Joe, what makes this an important topic for you?Joe: There's a personal story behind it. When I was really young in my career, I did international stock lending for a while. I was still sorting through so much of my personal issues at the time. I decided in my head what I really wanted was to have a creative career. That was something that I decided, which was far out there that I had to attain, instead of realizing that it was really available, if I had the right perspective. I quit this great job as far as money goes and as far as career path goes. I went for seven years trying to have a creative career. There was this place where I had basically reached it. I was working on this TV show and I had written something. I was being brought in to train, to direct the show. I did this two-week stint on the show and I realized it was the same thing that international stock lending was, meaning that everything that I had run away from in international stock lending, I was running to in this creative career. One person had all the power. Everybody was working long, hard hours. They were unhappy. I remember the actor of the TV show saying to me, "Every time I come into work, it's like having a piece of my soul ripped out." Everybody wanted to be doing something else and not the thing that they were doing. They had some dream of the next level of their career. Most people weren't leaving because of the money. I said, wow, that's exactly the thing I was running away from and running to. I had spent all these years of my life trying to manage this outcome. I had finally achieved it, but I didn't have any idea that it wasn't the thing that I wanted. At that moment, the revelation came on me and I said, "Wow, you know what I'm going to do instead, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to say yes to whatever shows up. If I enjoy it, I'll keep on saying yes. If I don't enjoy it, I'll say no."Then all of a sudden, there was more and more stuff to say yes to and so I got to keep on picking the things that were more enjoyable. As that happened, everything took off; my money, my happiness, my career, everything in ways that I couldn't even have expected. It was like I had surrendered and I allowed that surrender into my own enjoyment to lead my life. All of a sudden, I was surrounded by a life that I enjoyed.I neither enjoyed stock lending, nor did I enjoy trying to become an artist nor did I enjoy being the artist, but I ended up enjoying my life, not by managing it, but by focusing on the enjoyment. That's why it's important to me. I think why it's important to talk about in general is, because it's the biggest misconception that a lot of people have is they think that if they're going to manage their life, they're going to end up with a life that makes them happy. In actuality, if you learn to manage your life, you end up with a life that you need to manage and that is not happiness.Brett: What does it mean to manage your life in the way that you're describing?Joe: One way to think about it is, intellectually, you're trying to assure an outcome. When I was directing films, one of the things that I really realized in that process was that, if I had a very specific outcome in mind of how the actors were going to do their thing, it was horrible. The result was horrible. Everything was horrible. The process was horrible. If instead, I gave the actor's direction and then I just waited until it felt right and I just allowed that impulse to carry us and go, "That's it. That's going to work," without the idea specifically of how it was going to be, the results were far better.That's one way to think about the difference between management and non-management is that you're not holding really specific future outcomes. You're holding the intention of the scene is going to be great and it's going to be emotional. You're holding the intention. The actors are holding the intention of whatever it is for them, getting the person to say they love them and getting out of the room, whatever their intentions are. Everybody's holding their intentions, but the outcome is something that you are recognizing when it's right. It's not something that you're being specific and controlling about.There's this implicit feeling of trying that happens when you are doing management and trying is very different than doing. Doing is just the action. It's like in mental waves, you think about doing as alpha. There's this flow state that happens and it's just everything's happening and there's not a lot of tension in it. Managing life is when you feel like you have to bring tension into the process to get it your way.Another great example of this, I think, that's really palpable is I see this with clients all the time is they're thinking about a big conversation they have to have. Maybe it's with their husband, maybe it's with their boss, maybe it's with a good friend. They're trying to figure out how they're going to say it in such a way that they're going to get the outcome that they want, instead of thinking about, what's the authentic way for them to say, what's their deepest truth that they're trying to share and let the chips fall where they may. If they're in the first, then they're in management and if they're in the second, then they are not in management.Brett: I think that film example is actually a great one, because in filmmaking, in production, you often have an art department that's trying to make exactly the igloo that's in the treatment for the director, when maybe they could make any number of igloos that fit the theme and that would work great in the scene. Many other parts of the scene are likely to drift through the course of production from the treatment. There are ways to flow with that and there are ways to try to manage every single detail, which you just ended up having the entire crew fighting reality for a while.Joe: It's something that I've realized. When I'm running businesses and I want something a specific way where it's creative or someone's doing something creative, like copy editing or some visual aspect or building slides, I've realized that if I just give them three adjectives, just I want it to be reliable, grounded and empowering, then the results are far better than if I start thinking I know how to design something. I'm like, well, it should be a little more blue and turn this a little bit this way. That broad stroke thing. We know that people in general, in the management of people, respond a lot better and are a lot more motivated, if they feel like they have autonomy. That doesn't mean that they don't want direction. It means they don't want management in the way that I'm talking about management.Brett: Right. I see that a lot in design as well. Micromanagement of design is a great way to get terrible work from a good artist.Joe: Exactly. That's everything. There's a way of looking at every person's role as an artistry. You're going to get bad work out of everybody's artistry in that. The other way to look at it is to imagine that you're on a boat and you are going down a river. Management is when you're fighting against the river. When you are in the flow of the river, even if your paddle's in the water every once in a while and you're doing that stuff, but when you're in that effortless flow of the river, there's an enjoyment to it and there's a non-management. When you're fighting against the river, then you're in the management.For that to happen, you have to not be managing a river, which obviously never really works. What you have to do is, you have to be listening to that river deeply. You have to be listening to that impulse. When people are in management mode, they usually are not listening to their internal impulse, or the impulse of the people around them.Brett: It sounds like a distinction to be made here is, management is to try to fight reality to conform to your results and enjoyment in this concept is more combining your intention with the randomness of reality and seeing what happens.Joe: Yes, that's right. I work with a lot of executives and this is one of the hardest things for the executives to really catch on to because they have all made a living in being able to have this determination and drive to get the results. Many of them have used management to get there. That determination and drive, that utter unacceptance of a result that's different than the one that you want, is really critical, but you need to be very general about the result that you want. It can be general like I want a company that's super successful. I want a product that sells better than all the competition. That's great.When you start managing that process and want it to be this specific way. You want it to have this kind of sales technique. You want to have, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, then that's when it goes south. You have to keep all that determination. You have to keep all that fortitude. You have to keep all that utter unacceptance of a reality that you don't envision and there is also reading the river and letting the river flow and paying attention to that river and following it to get there.Brett: A lot of this seems to happen by buying in the moment like, "Oh, no, this has to happen because if this doesn't happen this particular way, then the entire plan is ruined." Without this 30,000-foot view that we're discussing right now, how would you know in the moment, if you are managing rather than following your intention? What are some ways to mindfully recognize this in the process?Joe: One of the things that I see managers do, since we're on management, specifically, one of the things that I see managers do is they don't ask this question. They don't say, "What speaks against that?" Let's say I come into a room and I say I want to sell in question-based selling and then we're talking to the sales team. I'm like, "Let's do question-based selling." I might try to convince everybody and push everybody into it, motivate everybody and give a good speech. Everybody's like, "Yes, let's do question-based selling."What is usually far more effective and that tells you that you're not in the management of that experience is to say, "Let me give a good case for question-based selling. Here it is. Now, tell me what speaks against it?" People will tell you, "Here are the things that we don't think will work about it." That tells you the things that you have to address. Then you address them and then you're in the flow of the situation. Then you're like, "Okay." Most likely, you're going to get a much better solution because the things that they want you to address are important to address. If you can't address them, then you don't have real buy-in. Without real buy-in, they're not going to do as good of work. Without real buy-in, it probably means that there's a better solution out there. That's one of the ways to know is, if you're trying to push people into a result instead of being eager to find out what speaks against it. When you're listening to what speaks against it, your results are going to be far better. That's one way to know it.Brett: There's a delicious irony there, the idea of trying to sell a sales team on a sales process about question-based selling without asking any questions.Joe: I hadn't thought of that in my example. Yes, exactly. That would be incredibly ironic. Yes, exactly. It's why question-based selling works is, because you're not managing the customer. You're actually empathizing with, following the customer. You're following the river instead of trying to manage the river. That's one way to know it.Other ways are, when you're more listening to the outcome than you are to the impulse. Right now if you listen for the impulse, as to what to say next, that's a very particular somatic experience. You can still have determination in this experience. You can still be feeling like, "Oh, we're going to get to a resolution and I can be listening," and waiting for the impulse to speak. That's all a very possible situation. But when I want your next sentence to be something or I want my sentence to do something to you, to get to a particular place, then I'm in management.Brett: That adds another filter in the process of what you're going to say when you have to think about how you think it's going to be received.Joe: Exactly.Brett: Which then builds in all of your projections into the conversation.Joe: Yes, totally. It also builds a tremendous amount of inefficiency. When you're managing stuff, what you are always doing is not looking at the root cause. As an example, which is a more enjoyable car to own? Is it an MG or is it a Lexus? Most people who don't like fixing cars would say a Lexus is a far more enjoyable car to own than an MG, because you know with an MG, every 500 miles, you have the thing up on blocks and you have to do something.When you are in management, you're just constantly trying to figure out how to fix the MG with the least amount of money and as quickly as possible. When you're in enjoyment, you're looking at the core issue. If you are looking at the core issue, everything becomes far more efficient. You're not trying to patch the boat as it's sinking. Instead, you're thinking, "What's the right boat to build?"Brett: Getting out of context to the bigger question.Joe: Exactly.Brett: We have learned to manage things for a reason, many would propose. Don't you have to manage some level of things for anything to get done? If so, where is that line?Joe: It's not where you think it is, that's for sure. What I mean to say is, if you ask the people at Hyatt, "Hey, man, do you have to manage your properties?" They'd say, absolutely. If you ask the people at Airbnb, "Do you have to manage your properties?" They'd say no. If you ask SK Telecom and all those telecom companies that tried apps before Apple, "Did you have to manage your apps, the building of the apps?" They'd say, "Yes, absolutely. We need to manage it," but Apple said, "No, we don't. As long as they hit a minimum requirement, they can be on the App Store." If you think about all your great employees, how much management do they actually require? It's the people that you're managing that are not usually your great employees.Brett: Maybe because you're managing them so hard.Joe: Indeed. Do you have to manage and what's the boundary? The answer is that the better your system is in place, the better you have the mechanism working, the less management is necessary. Every place that you are managing is basically a way to look at an inefficiency that you have. If you build a really good machine, say like an iPhone, you don't have to manage the iPhone. You and I have never said the word, "Well, I really had to manage my iPhone yesterday." It's because it works.Brett: We might have to manage our iPhone use and that arises from inefficiencies in our attention.Joe: Exactly. That's right. Even that, that's the self-management part, which is you can say, "I need to manage my cell phone use," or you can turn off all your notifications. You can turn your phone into black and white and don't allow for color usage on your phone. Or you can turn on the sleep mode. There's all things that you can do, so that you don't actually even have to manage your cell phone usage, so that it's all done systematically.Brett: Or I can find out what it is in my emotions that makes me want to go to Instagram and start scrolling.Joe: Yes, exactly. All different levels of it. Even managing your own state is ineffective. In fact, that's the thing about meditation generally, is that most people call sitting still and trying to manage your state of mind meditation. It's not meditation. It's torture. Enjoyment of sitting there is meditation. Yes, management is going to happen. This isn't something that you get upset about. Is it something that you're going to never have to do in your whole life? No, but every time you're managing something, you can absolutely see it as a chance to become more efficient and the way that you find that efficiency is through enjoyment.Brett: That's great.Joe: The other thing that happens here, oftentimes when people are talking about they're like, "Yes, but I got to manage my company. I got to tell people what to do." Then you look at other companies. There's this company called Valve. There's this Valve Handbook, which is just amazing. The way they manage what they do, is they figured out how to choose really good people. They have a whole thing about that and then when you get to Valve, you have a desk that's on wheels. Where you push your desk is what projects they do. There's not even somebody saying, "Okay, these are the projects we're going to do. Here's our big initiatives." They literally just have people roll their desks to what they want to do and those are the initiatives that get done in the company.If you look at our entire economy. We have four tools to manage our economy and we don't do it very well. There's just interest rates and how constraining the laws are for businesses, et cetera. Our whole economy doesn't have a manager and yet, we're the biggest economy in the world. So far, we have been the most resilient economy in the world. Is there really a need for management? Is there really a need for that level of centralization? There may be in certain circumstances but guaranteed there is a more efficient system out there and when somebody finds it, they will be the winner of that business and their life will be more enjoyable.Brett: It sounds like, if somebody wants to start experimenting with loosening management and finding more enjoyment, there seems to be a requirement for a certain amount of slack in the system. If you're running a company that's just barely making payroll month after month after month and you imagine that if you just stopped managing people in the way that you're currently managing them and you even have one or two hiccups then everything is all over. Or imagine in a life, where somebody's like, "Well, I'm working three jobs right now to make ends meet. If I just started focusing on enjoyments, then if I left one of those jobs, then I'm not going to feed my family." How would you respond to there being a feeling for a need for slack or people's fear that they don't have enough slack to try an experiment in this way?Joe: I would say that they're looking at enjoyment in a backwards way, meaning there's one way to look at enjoyment, which is, "Here are the things that my head says that I will enjoy when I do it, like me having a creative career." Your head doesn't really know what you're going to enjoy. You can try to organize a life where everything you do is enjoyable, meaning that you've chosen things to do that you enjoy, that you think you enjoy, or you can learn to enjoy the things that you're doing.I'll give you an example of this. When I was 27 years old or something like that, I did this experiment where I said, "I'm not going to do anything I don't enjoy for a month and see how that goes." After the first three or four days, it was everything that I enjoyed. I took a nap when I wanted to take a nap, I did everything I wanted, then the trash started smelling. I was like, "Well, I'm not enjoying living with no trash and I don't enjoy taking out the trash. What the hell am I going to do?" I learned, "Wow, how do I take out the trash and enjoy myself? How do I write emails and enjoy myself? How do I pay bills and enjoy myself." I don't enjoy not having bills unpaid or having a bad credit rating. That's not enjoyable for me.The only way to really get to a life that you enjoy is to not avoid the intensity. It's not to run away from difficult things. It's finding the pleasure in whatever you're doing. It has to be a major part of the equation. If you have three jobs and you need the three jobs to get by, then learn to enjoy the jobs that you have. Learn how to do them with more enjoyment and watch, when you do your job with more enjoyment, your job changes pretty darn quickly. People want to be around people who are enjoying themselves. People want to work with people who are enjoying themselves and people will be attracted to you, people will give you more opportunities.It's the same thing in your business. Maybe you don't have the ability to reinvent your organization, where the management is so low that people are deciding their own payroll and people on the bottom line of a company like the manufacturing line of a company are deciding what $3 million pieces of equipment to buy. Those are companies that are run like that and maybe you can't get there tomorrow. Maybe it's not even smart for your company to get there, but the question that you can always ask is, "What's making this so unenjoyable and how do I enjoy this process?" That is going to build efficiency in your company.The thing is that there's somebody in mind right now when they're listening to me and they're saying, "This isn't necessary. I can be successful without enjoying myself." That is so true. You can be successful financially. You can accumulate a lot of power. You can have a good looking mate on your side. You can have all the toys that you want and not enjoy yourself. That's absolutely 100% the case. They're not actually being correlated-- that success and enjoyment. There's a lot of people that are successful who don't enjoy themselves and there's a lot of people that are successful who do enjoy themselves. What I am saying is that you can have both. If you are having both, you're finding efficiencies.Brett: Yes. Let's define enjoyment then. A lot of people think of enjoyment as there is a sense of control. People have the freedom to do what they want to do, but a lot of what it seems like you're describing with enjoyment is that it doesn't really require freedom. For example, you could be working three jobs and be micromanaged and potentially find enjoyment in what you're doing. Can you talk a little bit more about that?Joe: Yes, absolutely I can. There are people in jail right now enjoying themselves. There are people on this earth right now, who are sitting in three by three cells who haven't lied down in two years, two months and a day who are doing it to learn how to enjoy themselves. That's part of the Lama tradition. The enjoyment is available to you right now. Right now I can say to everybody who's listening to this, "Hey, enjoy yourself just a little bit more right now. Just a little. Just allow a little more enjoyment in this moment."Brett: My entire body just relaxed a little bit.Joe: Right. Exactly. What did that take? Your conditions did not change at all. You're in the same space. You have the same bank account. You have the same girlfriend. Nothing has changed and you just enjoyed yourself a little bit more. Enjoyment doesn't cost anything. Enjoyment is just a perspective. It's just an allowing. It's just a receiving. It's visceral. It requires us to be a little more present. That's it. It requires us, maybe to be a little bit more in our body, but it's not something that is ever inaccessible to us.Brett: It sounds like this is definitely an internal thing as well. We've been talking a lot about enjoyment in our environment, in our circumstances, in our businesses, in our organizations. How does this management and enjoyment dynamic work internally in the way that we just experienced?Joe: Yes, it's a bit of a mystery exactly how it works. What I've seen is that, internally, there is a capacity to feel pleasure that is almost like a muscle. It's a nervous system thing, but it feels like it's a muscle in the fact that you can build it. You can build the capacity for this feeling of enjoyment in your life and this feeling of pleasure. There's a certain amount of overwhelm that happens when you feel too much of it. Your level of too much is going to be different than my level of too much, which is going to be different than person C's level of too much.Brett: What makes it be too much?Joe: I'll tell you what I think it is. If you put your hands together, put your hands like your thumb and your fingers all together and then intertwine your fingers. Now, intertwine your fingers in the opposite way so that your hand looks the same but your pinkies have switched positions. You'll notice that one of those ways is comfortable. The first way is comfortable and the second way is uncomfortable.Brett: Yes, interesting.Joe: Pleasure being too much is very much like that. It's just what you're used to. It's very much a level of comfort based on what you're used to and based on what your nervous system feels safe handling. If your nervous system had to be on high alert to feel safe as a child, then there's a low level of pleasure that you are going to allow yourself an enjoyment that you're going to allow yourself because you're going to feel unsafe. If you were deeply nurtured as a child, then that level of pleasure and enjoyment is going to be much higher. We can train our nervous systems to start accepting higher and higher levels of pleasure.Brett: It seems like there's an inverse relationship between enjoyment and letting our guard down. The more enjoyment we're experiencing, the more down our guard must be and there's some baseline level of guard that we must viscerally believe is required to be safe. Does that make sense?Joe: Yes, that's right. That's exactly right. What you're basically saying there is, that you have to believe that a certain level of defense is necessary, to be able to protect yourself, which also means that you don't believe that you can respond in the moment, that you have to be prepared. That is one of the main things that creates us not listening to our impulse, not watching the river, is that idea that we have to be prepared so we're not in the present moment handling the thing that's in front of us. Or that we're in the future in a way that's very hard. We're not in the future in a soft way.You can be in the future and be like, "I'm dreaming the future and have intentions in the future," but most of the time when we're in the future, we're trying to control the future. That's like the perfect example of management. We do this internally all the time. We're literally having conversations in our heads to control the future. Have you noticed that the conversations that you've had about how you want the future to go, they have never worked out specifically as you planned? You think about how you're going to have the conversation 10 different ways and it never happens that way. It always happens differently.We're thinking about our thoughts. We're trying to manage our future. It never works out and it's definitely not enjoyable. That's called spin. We're just spinning. Now, I imagine that you're in that conversation with that person and you're just listening to the impulse and focused on enjoying the conversation.Brett: Which results in a lot more listening to what they're saying as well.Joe: Exactly and it helps them feel connected with you. You feel more heard and they feel more heard. The conversation goes better. It's the same thing internally. Internally, we're trying to manage ourselves all the time. "Hey, lose weight. Hey, get more in shape. Hey, you should listen more. Hey, you should stop managing." Whatever it is that your brain is constantly telling yourself you should manage and it doesn't work very well. It's not the most efficient way by any stretch.We do this in meditation and we do this in yoga. Now, what is it like to meditate and focus on enjoyment? Not just doing something that you enjoy, but also enjoying what you're doing. Now, what is it like to do yoga and focus on enjoyment or crossfit for that matter? What's the internal thing that you do when you're managing and how effective is it compared to enjoyment?The amazing thing is, I could say to somebody, "Hey, look, whatever internal exercise you do, just focus on enjoyment. Just enjoy that exercise. That's your number one thing to do." Most people won't, because they're like, "Enjoyment is scary," subconsciously, but if they do it, what they notice is that they do it a lot more, because it's more enjoyable. If meditation isn't enjoyable, you don't keep on meditating. If working out isn't enjoyable, you don't keep on working out.The enjoyment propels the practice. Telling yourself you should do it and you really have to do it and you have to do better and stronger da-da-da, it's not very enjoyable and so you stop doing it. The other thing that's important here to say is, that the reason you think you have to manage yourself is, because you don't see that you're inherently good. You don't believe in your inherent goodness. You believe that you're like some lazy gluttonous asshole, if you were left to your own devices and that you need to be whipped into shape.If you believe that about yourself, then that's who you're going to end up being. If you believe that you are inherently good, you want what's best for you and for the people around you and that you want to have an active, enjoyable, fulfilling life, then why on earth would you need to be managed for? If you want that stuff, what would make it, that you wouldn't just naturally do it?Brett: It seems that that would also show up in the way that you manage or treat your employees or expect to be managed or treated by a boss.Joe: Yes. Any boss you've ever had who is a micromanager, I guarantee you they micromanage themselves horribly. If they're not depressed now, they will be. If they don't have major anger issues, they will have. Any boss that you have, that is constantly in fear of how you are behaving is constantly in fear about how they're behaving. It's just the nature of it. The self-development-work works so well in companies, is because you are projecting your internal relationship externally.Brett: Yes, let's dig into more about how this management enjoyment dynamic shows up in relationships.Joe: Yes. Here's the story that I think freaks everybody out and it's very apropos. I have two girls. I don't think there's any time I punish them and I don't think my wife ever punished them. We got angry from time to time. That absolutely happened. I'm sure they felt ashamed from time to time, though we did our very best not to ever shame them. The thought process then is that, well, your kids must be spoiled and that your kids must not do what they're told and your kids must not behave well.If you get into my home, what you find out is that my kids are amazing kids. It's so palpable that when people come they're like, "Wow, you have amazing children. How did you raise them?" That question gets asked all the time. Even after they see our kids, most people are dumbfounded that that's how we did it. We trusted that they wanted to be connected with us. We trusted that they wanted to be connected with themselves. When they were connected with themselves, they would show up thoughtfully and lovingly and with care. That's what they did. That's how it worked out. We never said to them, "Hey you're a bad person. Hey, you're naughty and we need to control that naughtiness." That never happened. They never believed that they were naughty. They just saw that we saw them as good and they ended up as good.Obviously, some adults, that would take years and years and years of treating them that way for them to act that way. I'm not suggesting that you go around and go into a maximum security prison and treat all of them like they're amazing people who are inherently good, because unless they believe that, there's going to be friction to get to that point. In general, that's the way that you walk around in a relationship. The way you walk around is that you find out what's motivating them, find out what's moving them, find out what they want to do and follow that flow instead of saying, "This is what I want you to do and do that."You see this happen all the time. One person convinces another person to join a project. If I'm hiring somebody for a project, I basically say, "What's your dream job?" If they're not really close to the job that I have in mind, it's not a good fit. I'd rather have somebody whose dream job it is, to do the job that I have in mind than to convince someone to do something because, eventually, I'm going to have to manage them. It's something that I learned in making investments. What I realized was that the amount of management that it took to make a deal happen was the same amount of management that I would have to consistently provide to make the deal work. Then that's really inefficient investing. I've learned that if I had to manage to get a deal done, I just would not do the deal. It was the deals that happened with a certain amount of flow and ease that then continued with that same amount of flow and ease. Obviously, there's ups and downs with everything, but generally, that flow and ease was far more likely.Brett: There's also that disempowering factor of managing. If you invest in somebody's company and then you manage them, you're really saying that you don't trust their idea, unless it's done the way you think it should be done.Joe: Yes, that's right.Brett: That brings me back to that prison example, as well. You could go to a maximum-security prison and yes, on one hand, you can't just relax all the restrictions and behave as though everybody knows their inherent goodness, but we could actually stop doing a lot of the things that we do that reinforce the, "I am bad belief." There's a lot of talk about how the system reinforces itself.Joe: Absolutely. You can go in and treat every single person in a maximum-security prison like they are good people. That absolutely will help them. There's a great video documentary called Being Human. If you look it up online, Leonard, Being Human, you will see an example of somebody who has killed a woman and her child. The grandmother of that woman and the child showed him a certain amount of love that changed his life and you can see it. It's absolutely doable and that's how it works in relationships.The other thing is when you're trying to be managing a relationship, you don't want to be in the damn relationship. There's some part of you, whether it is you are getting sold a car and the person is trying to manage you into buying the car, you don't want to be in the relationship. That salesperson isn't as successful. They know that the best car salesmen are the ones who focus on having a good relationship and that don't try to sell the car and they outperform the ones trying to sell the car, usually, four or five to one.It's the same thing we see in our love life; our husbands, our wives, our girlfriends/boyfriends, that when we are trying to manage the other person's mood, there is less love. When we are trying to manage the other person's reaction, there is less love, there's less enjoyment in the relationship. If you are enjoying the person, there's a lot less management. If you're enjoying the moment, there's a lot less management.Brett: In the prison example, you can have boundaries.Joe: You can have boundaries without having to manage anything. A boundary is following an impulse. That's a great point. Having a boundary is basically the deepest act of non management on some level. The reason it is is because what you're saying is, "Here's what I'm going to do," and then you allow the other person to do what they are going to do, which is like, "Hey, what I know is that interacting in this kind of relationship isn't working for me. If I'm going to continue to act in this relationship, then what I want is to not have a lot of yelling and I want it to be respectful and kind." Now, that person can leave and they might leave you. It's really non management. It's just saying, "This is what I'm game for, this is what I'm willing to do in this world." That's what non management is to a large degree. That's what creates an enjoyable life even if it's scary to get there.Brett: It sounds like what you've been saying would be also if a partner is going to leave you and then you're going to have a lot of uncomfortable feelings, because of that and sadness, then that is also something to be enjoyed.Joe: Absolutely.Brett: Or we're going to be trapped by it.Joe: Right, that's another way. Most of what we are trying to manage in our life is an emotional reality. We're trying to manage emotions, trying to not feel heartbreak when our lover leaves us, trying to not feel like a failure if our boss gets angry at us. The non management of those emotional states and when I say non management, I don't mean that now you're like a puddle on the floor throwing temper tantrums and throwing tennis rackets around your house.I'm not saying non management in that way. I'm saying allowing yourself to feel the emotions fully, not act out on them, but allowing the non management of emotions so that you can actually feel them fully and you're not trying to push them down and repress them and hold your muscles to not feel them or judge other people not to feel them. That is a far more productive way of changing patterns in your life, than all the management of telling yourself you should do this or do that. You even mentioned it at the beginning of the podcast. You talked about, “...or I could just look at emotionally what's happening when I scroll on Instagram and what I'm trying to avoid.”Brett: How can we cultivate the enjoyment of those feelings that we are trying to avoid by managing?Joe: Well, stop resisting them. Half of the lack of enjoyment is the management itself. Stop trying to manage them and they'll all of a sudden become a lot more enjoyable. Stop resisting them.A lot of the things about emotional states that we find out is that it is the resistance to them that's painful, not the actual emotion itself. It's the fear of them that's painful, not the actual emotion itself. All of it is a physical sensation in your body. It has different intensities, but once it's unresisted they change rapidly, the sensation of them changes rapidly. No one's ever really been killed by an emotion or maimed by an emotion internally. Maybe an angry person maimed somebody else, but if you internally are feeling your emotions, you're not going to be wounded.Brett: Through the process of managing and suppressing our emotions, we can slowly kill ourselves with stress. That's true and depression.Joe: Yes, that's exactly it. Generally, that's the thing about management, we think we need it. What it actually is, is just a constant signal that we can find a more efficient way and a more enjoyable way. Just dropping the management itself can be enjoyment. Just to say, it's just about taking your hand of control away from it slowly.Some people, after listening to this, are like, "Okay, I'm just not going to manage any of my employees ever again." Then everything goes to shit and then they'll be like, "Yes that's right. I needed to manage it and I've proven that. I do need to manage it." What I'm saying is, see what the next level of enjoyment is, see what the next level is, because you have to find the new ways of being without management.An example that's really critical is, you're sitting with a bunch of employees or people that you work with and you need a job done. Let's say you need the car cleaned. One way to do it is to say, "I need the car cleaned." That would be maybe the least amount of management. The least amount of management is to see if anybody cleans the car, which may happen. If they have the right to defined roles and everything like that, reinventing organization style, somebody might just come and clean the car because they see it needs to get done.There's, "Hey, I need the car cleaned". Then there's like, "I need to get the car cleaned in this way, this way, this way and then make sure you detail this and do this and dah, dah, dah." Then there's car cleans just like, "Hey, I need the car cleaned and I need it to look like it looks when you get off of a new car lot. I need it to be done for less than $150 and I need you to enjoy yourself doing it." Where you give people the parameters of what a good job is but you don't tell them how to do it. You just tell them how to win.You don't see a lot of people doing it that way. You don't see that interim step, the interim step of letting people discover how to do it in a way that lets them win. Most people want to know how to win. If you keep determination and you keep intention and you keep boundaries and you keep maintaining and mandating the results that you want, then how necessary is management? The management is just the fear, that you're not going to get there. The management is just the fear, that people are going to hurt you, that people aren't going to show up.Brett: What you have been saying then in this entire episode is that in order to stop managing, we need to be willing to feel and enjoy feeling these emotions that we're trying to avoid like fear. That sounds like a really interesting topic to get into on another episode.Joe: Yes, indeed. That is a great way to think about that which is, we often try to figure stuff out before we actually allow the feeling of stuff. If we really let that feeling happen and learn how to enjoy that feeling, then most of what we're trying to figure out doesn't need to be figured out anymore.Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW, or to take a course, visit: artofaccomplishment.comResources:Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations, https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Human, http://www.human-themovie.org/

Vulnerability — VIEW Series #5

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 10, 2020 47:35

Many of us have learned to associate vulnerability with weakness. We fear that being deeply vulnerable will open the door to being dominated or taken advantage of by others. What's the difference between vulnerability and timidness, and how can unprotected vulnerability be a sign of strength and courage?Vulnerability is the V in VIEW; and the topic of today's episode."In every moment, you can feel where your fear and your truth are together. And that's the vulnerable action."Welcome to the Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease.My name is Brett Kistler. I am an adventurer, entrepreneur and a self exploration enthusiast. I am here with my co-host, Joe Hudson. Joe is a business coach who has spent decades working with some of the world's top executives and teams developing a unique model of human patterns that underpin how we operate with ourselves, each other and the world. A good entry point into this model is a mindset called VIEW, vulnerability, impartiality, empathy and wonder. Through understanding and cultivation we learn to easefully drop into the VIEW state of mind, deepening self awareness and increasing our connection with the world around us. To learn more about this podcast or courses, visit artofaccomplishment.comBrett: Many of us have learned to associate vulnerability with weakness. We fear that being deeply vulnerable will open the door to being dominated or taken advantage of by others. What's the difference between vulnerability and timidness, and how can unprotected vulnerability be a sign of strength and courage? Vulnerability is the "V" in VIEW and the topic of today's episode. Joe, what do you mean when you use the word "vulnerable"?Joe: What do I mean by the word, when I use "vulnerable"? It means speaking your truth even when it's scary. That's what I mean by vulnerable. If it's not your truth, it's not vulnerable. If it's not scary to say it, it's not vulnerable.Brett: Semantically, how do we tell the difference between saying the scary thing and just saying something while scared?Joe: Wow. [chuckles] That's a great question. The difference for me semantically is that in one of them I'm embracing the fear, and in the other one I'm trying to get rid of the fear. If I'm saying the scary thing, then I'm embracing it. I'm saying, "Here's fear. I'm going to actually feel this in my body. I'm going to open up to this thing. I'm going to jump off this cliff, if you will, and I'm going to say the thing." It's not overcoming, but it's facing and feeling your fear, whereas if you're just saying something while you're scared, that's more like, "What do I say to get out of this situation?" In that one, you're trying to avoid the fear. You have it, but you're trying to get rid of it.Brett: This embracing of fear, of learning of the fear, that's the benefit of a vulnerability practice?Joe: It's one of them, yes. It's something that happens when we embrace the fear or we face it if we say, "Yes, I'm happy to feel this fear." One of the things that often happens is, it shifts to excitement, but also, it's a deeply empowering move. It's a deeply empowering move to say, "I can feel this, I don't have to cower to this emotional experience. I don't have to avoid it, and I don't have to push it away. I can actually embrace it. I'm powerful enough to embrace this emotion that most people want to reject." That's one of the benefits.Another one of the benefits is that, when you know this often when you start, especially when it comes to judgment, when you start being vulnerable about things that you judge yourself on, which is one of the ways that you can be vulnerable, you start realizing that most people aren't going to judge you for it. You're going to be like, "Oh, I'm lazy." and then you notice that most people don't maybe even think you're lazy. Then those who do, maybe they´re like, "Yes, that's part of who you are and I'm okay with it."The amount that we judge ourselves is far more, far greater than what other people judge us for, for the most part, and so every time we act vulnerably, we get to see that, we get to position what the voice in our head tells us is wrong with us compared to what the world tells us is wrong with us. That's another thing that's incredibly useful about a long term vulnerability practice.The main thing that a vulnerability practice gives us that's outside of those two things that we just talked about is, that it allows us to find our truth. You find out that as you speak your truth, even though it's vulnerable, your world starts aligning around your truth instead of your presentation of yourself. All of a sudden, it brings you closer to yourself. The more you're vulnerable, the more you're setting up the world to see you for what you are, to respond to you for what you are.Over time the world changes around you, because you're not going to accept certain things that you were when you weren't being yourself or you are willing to say things that you weren't willing to say when you weren't being yourself, then all of a sudden you can start understanding yourself more and more clearly, see yourself more clearly, because you're more in alignment and you're more aware of your subtle ways that you are not aligned. That's the biggest benefit of a vulnerability practice.Brett: What you said about finding that others won't judge us for the same things we judge ourselves for. That seems true, but it also must be true that people will judge us for some of the things we judge ourselves for, and even some things that we don't judge ourselves for. It can't always be true that everything about us will be accepted. What do you have to say to that?Joe: Yes, it's totally true. We're going to be judged all the time. I think there's a couple of things about it. The first thing that you notice is, that what people are judging you for is really not about you, it's about what they judge themselves for and that becomes pretty apparent if you allow yourself to open to their judgment. Oftentimes I work with people and they're like, "People are judging me," I'm like, "Yes, look around there's somebody here judging you, no doubt about it." Just allowing that in for people changes something. It's like, "Oh, I've been running away from this my whole life and it's happening all the time." There's some way in which allowing yourself to be open for the judgement helps, is one of the benefits of the vulnerability. The other thing is that there's kind of the current shame and past shame that happens, and oftentimes when you're being vulnerable past shame can be recognized and seen and people don't need to be ashamed of it.A great example of this is, there are a couple of movies out there, one is called The Work and one is called What I want my words to say to you. There are kind of group process work in prison and you are sitting there with these prisoners in this movie who are telling you their innermost work and you know they're killers. You know they've slashed people open and you're just sitting there like you have this empathy for them, you don't want them to feel ashamed. They are doing the work.There is a way in which that past shame, which is what is really not useful for us as people. It really helps resolve that and heal that, because generally a lot of people have some acceptance for that if you are being vulnerable about it. If you're being all harsh and hardcore about it, they may not, but current shame is the more likely place where people aren't going to immediately not judge you, like I'm stealing from your house at this exact moment.That's because current shame is actually quite useful. It's our signal that what we are doing right now isn't what we want to be doing. It's not in alignment with who we are. That's what current shame is for. Past shame is this idea that if I brutalize myself, then it will somehow change the way that I act in the future, which tons of studies show that that's just not true. It's not really useful and it's what really condemns us to repeat that pattern. It's a form of resistance and so that pattern persists. On one level, yes, people are definitely going to judge you and there's some benefit in that, because you get to see that they are really just judging themselves, especially in the past shame. Also, the other benefit is, it really helps you point out the current shame that's going on. The shame for what you're doing in this moment or in this day, so that's another way to look at it.Brett: This is interesting to me, because a lot of the expected reactions that for somebody that we might imagine, can receive criticism and can receive judgment, the expected response you think of from a strong person is just to let it roll off their back and that's not vulnerable. That's like they are protecting, so what is it really that makes you be able to-- What's the difference between letting judgment in a way that doesn't produce unnecessary shame or just trigger and bring up and dredge up past shame and bring into the present moment?Joe: It's letting it break your heart. If you're feeling your body any time that you're judging somebody, you can feel the discomfort of it. You can feel that it's an avoidance of feeling your own emotions or your own insecurity or your own deeper feelings. There's an exercise that we do, where people basically say what they are judging somebody for and then they identify the feelings underneath that judgment is holding at bay.What it is, is to actually feel your feelings, feel the judgment, is to let it in, and when you see somebody rolls it off their back, that seems like a strong thing for us. It's strong when it's natural. You're not like, "Okay, I'm going to let that roll off my back, whereas you just don't notice it." It's like that famous saying that, if you're trying to be patient, you're not patient. It's just as strong, if not stronger to lean into it and feel that judgment and let it break your heart.It doesn't mean that you have to grovel at the floor for the person, which is immediately what people's brains go to. Now you're just a groveling, weak, pathetic person which is incredibly far from the truth. One of the greatest strengths that most people don't have is the ability to actually just feel their emotions. They're just constantly trying to manage them because they're really scared shitless of their emotions.Then the other thing just to say is, that, if you think about vulnerability and you think about-- The Catholics have confession and AA has its version of making amends and talking about all the things that you did while you were drunk. This is a huge part of almost all healing work, vulnerably admitting to yourself to others what you've done and to see that you're not doomed for it, to see that there is salvation or repentance or whatever you want to call it. That you can still be loved despite this. If we don't share those things, there's no way that the shame can come out of the closet and be seen and be loved.Brett: One big facet then of vulnerability is, letting judgment in a way that breaks our heart open instead of sending us into a shame cycle, and also there is the vulnerability and feeling the pain behind the judgment that we have for others. What other kinds of vulnerability are there?Joe: Asking for what you want, that one is usually really vulnerable for people. Drawing boundaries can be incredibly vulnerable for people. Expressing yourself, singing, or sharing your poetry can be very vulnerable for people. I think the most vulnerable thing for almost all of us is letting the love in. It is really dropping our guard and dropping our wall of protection and really allowing love to come in. That's an incredibly vulnerable thing to do, especially if we've been taught, which most of us have, that love is criticism or love is abuse or love is rejection.Also, speaking of rejection, it's just allowing yourself to be rejected, like you said, with the judgment really. When you allow judgment in and you feel it all the way, it's the same thing as saying, I'm allowing myself to be rejected, and you let that break your heart open, and as you do let that heartbreak what happens-- This is the weird part about it, is that if you really let that heartbreak in and you really feel the pain of it, what happens is it just starts to not bother you.I had several experiences where there's been something where let's say, it's a lot like judgment, where I noticed that when people judge me, my defense goes up, my chest expands a little bit, and I'd maybe look down on them or something, and I'm like, "I don't want to do that anymore. I don't want to really let that break my heart." I did. For weeks, months, I'm trying to think. It's probably about six weeks, and I'd be crying in odd places and all that crazy stuff, and now when people judge me there's just no, very seldom a reaction.There's still sometimes a reaction when it's somebody who I deeply love and respect and they do it, and then I'll notice maybe I get defensive, or maybe my heart still breaks, but the tremendous amount of judgment that you get, particularly in a position like this. Tons of people have an opinion and want to judge what you're saying and doing, which is absolutely their right. It doesn't even cross my consciousness anymore, and that's what the heartbreak provides. It provides you the courage to love more deeply.Brett: Now, there seem to be good game-theoretic reasons to keep our fears and intentions closer to our chests sometimes. How do we speak our truth and share our internal world like this without being taken advantage of?Joe: Right. Well, the first thing to say is that, like I said, just a little bit earlier boundaries are vulnerable too. When you draw a boundary, you draw it in the way that I think about boundaries, which is not asking somebody else to be different, but saying what you're going to do differently. Like, "Hey, if you're going to yell at me, I'm going to leave." In that kind of a boundary, often what you're saying is, are you going to reject me for being myself? That's what the boundary is saying, and accepting that they might do that.It's incredibly vulnerable to draw that boundary and also when you're really capable of stepping into that vulnerability, you're less likely to be taken advantage of. Most people are taken advantage of, because there's something in them that says, "No, this isn't right. I know this isn't right, but if I say that, I might get rejected." The vulnerable thing is to say it and find out if you get rejected. Vulnerability actually protects you.One other way to look at this a little bit is, that most of the time when people are taking advantage of it's because they're avoiding their fear. "I might be poor my whole life and therefore I'll listen to this person or I'm scared that I'll procrastinate my whole life. I'll buy this thing from this guru or I want to make the money. I believe that my boss is going to promote me when they don't promote me." It's fear that allows us to be taken advantage of, not vulnerability.If you really vulnerably say, "Wow, I just noticed that I'm curious if I'm going to be taken advantage of here." Wow, the chances of you getting taken advantage of are a tremendous amount less. My experience is that people think about differently is, because when they were young, they loved unconditionally, and it hurt, and so they think that they're going to be hurt if they're loving, and vulnerability in the end of the day is an opening up to your love, to your openness, to your truth of who you are, and so people associate that with the pain, but it's actually the fear that drives the being taken advantage of far more.Brett: What makes this-- You touched on this just now, but let's dig into a little bit more about what makes this so counterintuitive to most of us. If vulnerability really is strength and vulnerability and embracing our fear is the way out of being taken advantage of, what makes so many of us have this block? It may have been the case when we were kids that something happened, but we've grown up now, what makes that persist?Joe: Yes, when we're kids, and we're not accepted for who we are as kids. Very few if any people get just fully accepted for who they are, "Don't have a temper tantrum, don't cry, don't get angry. Don't get sad. Don't be scared. Man up, lift up your chin." It's like what we are is not fully accepted. "Calm down, don't get so excited, blah, blah, blah."What that makes us feel is, it makes us feel helpless as kids. It's this deep, helpless feeling of, "This is who I am, and I'm not supposed to be this way and I am having love removed from me if I'm myself," which feels really bad to not be yourself and it feels really bad to get love removed from your parents where your entire biology is designed to get the love from your parents, and so you start to feel scared, and you also feel like you're wrong, and so that's the memory that lives with us, and it controls us. We don't want to feel that.As I think we've discussed before, there's different brainwaves. There's alpha and beta and theta. Theta is that dream state. It's where you go into hypnosis and kids from zero to seven, zero to eight, they're in theta all the time. This is the programming, the programming is, "Don't be yourself in these ways because if you do, you're going to feel really helpless. You're going to feel scared and you're going to feel wrong," and so when we start to be ourselves, that's the feeling that we have to move through. When you move through it two or three times, it's done. You just got to move through it three or four times, two or three times, you're finished. It's not very many times that you have to move through it, and then the system has changed itself. It's like muscle memory more than anything else.Brett: Right. This muscle memory, our relationship to vulnerability is imprinted on us when we're young by other people, and a lot of things seem like it's about other people and their effect on our imprint of vulnerability, but now when we're doing this work from the inside out, do we need somebody else around to be on the same page with us, to be vulnerable? How do we develop this vulnerability from the inside out when it was patterned on us from the outside in?Joe: Yes. One of the things that I've noticed is that, when people have really strong access to their emotions, they care less and less what other people think. People who have a really strong ability to feel their anger, have fluid anger and a fluid sadness and fluid fear, that they care less, and it's because they're incredibly related. The vulnerable thing to do when you're by yourself is to allow yourself to feel whatever you're feeling. Right now, in this moment, you can close your eyes and there's something in your system emotionally uncomfortable, and you can lean in and open to it, embrace it and welcome it, and that's the same feeling of vulnerability. If we got rejected as a kid, we've rejected it internally as well, and so allowing ourselves to feel it and embracing that intensity. It can be done in really, literally every moment of the day.That's showing yourself that these feelings that you have, this truth that you have, is acceptable. It's a great way to grok that like, "There is nothing wrong with me." The thing that we think is wrong with us is resisted emotion, emotion that we think we're not supposed to have. Internally, it's jumping off the same cliff, it's like, "Oh, I'm going to allow myself to feel this feeling." It's the same when you're being vulnerable and you're speaking your truth, you're like, "Oh, I might feel rejected. Oh, I might feel judged. Oh, I might feel abandoned," and it's allowing yourself to feel these feelings, whether it's internal or external.Brett: What's a specific example of one of these feelings, these uncomfortable feelings that we might find if we do this exercise, and then a vulnerable action that might come from embracing that feeling?Joe: The feelings are some of the ones I've mentioned, like rejection or abandonment or anger. It can be different for everybody, but what can be even more different is what the action is that's vulnerable. For me, it was very easy to move to fight if I felt attacked, and what was far harder, more vulnerable for me some years ago was to say "Ouch." to say "That hurt." to say "I'm sorry.", those were far more vulnerable actions, because I felt like I would be attacked if I did that, but there's some people who always say I'm sorry and they're more vulnerable action might be to stand up for themselves.It's really different. The vulnerability is not something that can be like-- It's not a morality. It's not like this is the place to be vulnerable. This is not. It's in every moment you can feel where your fear and your truth are together and that's the vulnerable action. It's really a very personal thing.Brett: You're talking about the fight part, how does vulnerability look in the face of outright direct hostility? Perhaps there's no physical danger that you're in, but you're in the face of strong aggression.Joe: Yes, again, that's different for everybody. The story goes, say Gandhi got shot, and he forgave the person before he died, that might be a great act of vulnerability, but it might not, that's the crazy part. That might have been second nature for Gandhi. It's really about seeing what your truth is. If you're in outright attack, the vulnerable thing might be to say, "I don't want to engage with you." That could be really like-- If you learned as a kid that walking away from somebody was something that was going to get you attacked, then that might be the really vulnerable thing, and you might do that five, six, seven times and find out, "Oh, I can do that now," and then now it's not vulnerable anymore and then now, now it's vulnerable. Now it's vulnerable, might be like, "Oh, my goodness, yes, please share all that, I see you're really angry at me. Please share that all with me."You might do that for five or six times, and all of a sudden that's not vulnerable anymore and then the vulnerable thing might be like, "I love you and it hurts that you're attacking me and I love you, I'm not going to stop loving you." You just can't determine what that is for a person. It's very much what it is for you. It's your truth, it's your fear, it's not anybody else's and it could be, stop it. It could be, I'm not going to accept this from you right now. It could be literally yelling back. It's very different for every person, but if you don't feel like you have the freedom to do all of those things, then you're not free. There's a saying that says, if your hand is always in a fist or if your hand is always in a receiving position, both of them are cripple. You really want that flexibility, and vulnerability gives you that.Brett: A lot of the examples you gave there wasn't really a clear– like it's really person-dependent. People could find themselves using-- I've seen this happen before, people will use vulnerability as a defense, or as a way to attract attention or manipulate a situation, and maybe it'll be a false vulnerability, or maybe they will truly feel that that's vulnerable for them, because it's just making them feel the fear that they're patterned to feel. What's going on with that?Joe: Yes, I've got a big smile on my face. This is again, this belief system that weakness is vulnerability. What's happening there often is that people are using-- they're saying, "Look, I'm weak." It's making you feel guilty or making you want to take care of them or making you feel like you've done something wrong. It's really not vulnerability at all. If you think about those moments when you've done it, when you've played weak to manipulate or-- we all have on some level played weak to get someone to help us. I think guilting people is one version of this. We're neither in our truth nor are we scared when we're doing that. It's just confusion over again that vulnerability and weakness are the same thing.Brett: How do you know if you're in one of those situations, how do you know if you are really being vulnerable or you are having bad boundaries or you are trying to control? What's the pointer to that?Joe: It's when you are in your truth and when you are embracing fear, and not feeling it, but embracing it. A good way to know when you're not being vulnerable is that there's guilt involved, because almost all the time when we're manipulating somebody, there's something that kind of feels dirty in us and that's like a guilt feeling. That's another way to know if you're doing this to control. You see this all the time nowadays where people control by saying, "I don't feel safe."They say, "I don't feel safe," and that's like, "You have to change for me." We can turn anything into control. We can turn boundaries into control. We can turn vulnerability into control, and you see people do this to where they were like, "I was vulnerable with them and they weren't vulnerable back," as if it's an exchange, it's as if we're keeping score, and that happened, you won, because you get to be vulnerable. If you're keeping score, if it's guilt, then you know that you're not in a vulnerable state.Brett: Got it. Vulnerability is already widely accepted as a directionally correct heuristic for personal relationships, notwithstanding the challenges and different relationships people have are the definitions of vulnerability, but what about in the workplace? What happens when we bring vulnerability to the workplace, where it often seems like vulnerability should be or is expected to be reduced in a workplace?Joe: What happens, you manage people better, you sell better, you build better products. That's what happens when you're vulnerable in a workplace. It's interesting to hear you say it, ask the question, because I know that so many corporate environments are built on a lack of vulnerability, but it doesn't matter what you look at. If you look at the people who are outstanding performers, that are really outstanding performers, there's a way in which they're vulnerable in their work. It's even-- I know it's kind of crazy to even say this, it's even in rap music.If you look at rap music, and all the belligerents and all fronting and saying how cool they are, and how they're going to get everybody else. The people who are most vulnerable in their raps are the most successful, the ones who actually show themselves like Eminem, whatever they are. They are kind of revealing a part of their psychology that would be hard for anybody else to reveal if it was in them. Those are often the most successful and it's just like that all the way around if you-- There's tons of stories, there's a woman in Brazil who had her company work without a paycheck for six months, because she was so vulnerable and let them know there's reinventing organizations. There's a story of a CEO of a company, they lost a third of their business and he vulnerably went to everybody and said, "I don't know what to do." The whole company was like, "Hey, let's reduce our salaries for a third until we can get another customer in," and they got a customer relatively quickly. There's just so many stories. They talk about brand authenticity. That's a vulnerable thing. I saw the head of the COO of Patagonia get up and speak one time and he said, "For brand authenticity, I want to tell you what we're not doing for the environment that we could be doing." He just listed it out. That's how he started. Immediately, everybody was just like, Oh, wow, you really do care about the environment. [laughs]Whereas other people are like, “This is everything I'm doing.” You know, like greenwashing. Vulnerability works. If you even think about the great presidential speeches and they're evoking a vulnerability of, I am responsible for this. After all, I'm the president. Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Those sentiments are all these vulnerable sentiments of opening up our humanity, because it's our humanity that creates connection. All businesses is connection. It's a connection to our thoughts. It's a connection to each other. It's a connection to our customers. The deeper we are in connection with ourselves, with our ideas, with our emotions, with our customers, with the product, those levels of connection, it just makes us better in business.Brett: What tends to happen if somebody who's embarking on this journey right now and bringing more and more of themselves and their vulnerability to their workplace, what can they expect? What's that going to look like?Joe: Probably a bumpy ride. [laughs] I would say that it's a bit of a bumpy ride at first, because one of the main reasons people fight is the question of who's in charge. If you've been acting like you know everything all the time and you start being vulnerable people might be like, oh, is he not in charge anymore? They might test that for a while until they realize that no, you're still strong. You still are determined. You're just also being real. You're just creating connection. Also, most of the time when people start being vulnerable, they oscillate between vulnerable and defended, and that creates a confusing signal for the company. It can be a little bit of a bumpy ride, but it definitely turns the corner relatively soon if you commit to it. What happens is, you know yourself better. There's a famous Drucker quote, which is basically, "You can't manage others if you can't manage yourself." Self-knowledge happens. People are more prone to trust you, because you're actually real with them. You create, like I said, deeper connections and people they follow authenticity. If you really look at who we pick as our leaders, they can be assholes. They can be kind. They can be saints. They can be incredibly intelligent, but the people that we pick are the people who are authentic. The less authentic say, a presidential candidate is, the more it feels like they're putting on a show, the less likely they are to get elected.Brett: I like that you pointed out the people that we pick as our leaders because, in the workplace, there's often an assumption that we didn't pick our boss, but we really did pick our job and pick who's going-- we did in a sense. Now as a leader, as a boss, and you had mentioned that as people show up to the workplace with more vulnerability, they go back and forth between clean vulnerability and then being messy and that can be really disorienting for people around them. As a leader, how can you create an environment that allows people that space, that slack for messiness as they show up and try to bring more vulnerability?Joe: That's a great question. A question that a lot of people never get to. I would say that the real way to do this is to have really clear boundaries. No emotions at people, you take accountability for the mess that you make. Those are the things that are most useful for the people who are there. Somebody says, I'm going to be vulnerable, and they are vulnerable and in a normal business, maybe they would say, that was unprofessional, we need you to be professional. Basically, take that part of yourself and stuff it. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it's just not the most efficient thing.If you're choosing to be vulnerable and somebody does that same really big mess, it's like, I really understand and again, at the end of the day, these are still your responsibilities and it's still your job to treat your employees or your peers with respect. How do we accept this part of you and still make sure that all the other expectations are met? I think a lot of the times when people start being vulnerable– It can allow people to get messy and too entwined in trying to save each other. If somebody is vulnerable with you and then you try to save them, it can get really quite messy.It's really the thing is, if someone's vulnerable with you, it's how do you empower them? How do you turn it around so that they see that there's actions that they can take responsibility for? As an example of this, I was recently working with somebody, I was very explicit, "Please do not do this. It will hurt a lot of our customers if you do it." They went ahead and did it. I basically said, "Oh, I noticed that I've lost trust and I don't want to work with anybody that I don't trust. The way that I could see rebuilding trust is that you identify what created that behavior in you and you tell me how you're addressing it so that I can be confident it's not going to happen again."It's just an incredibly clear boundary and holding them accountable, which is the deep form of empowerment and there was no anger. There was no shame. There is no you've been bad. There was no me trying to save them. There was just [laughs] I actually appreciated them for showing me some things in the conversation that we had prior. Where I was like, "Oh, I really appreciate that you showed me these things and these are ways that I can improve, and I still notice that I don't have trust in you."Brett: Something you got to a little earlier was, vulnerabilities seems to be contagious. If you show up to a relationship or a workplace becoming more vulnerable, it seems that often others will become more vulnerable too. You can just expect that to happen and that you can expect them to be messy. Maybe if you're doing it from the framework of VIEW in our course, you might have more theory to fall back on on how to let your messiness be and they might have less.It seems like as we are preparing ourselves to experience being more messy as we become vulnerable, we can just expect other messiness to show up around us and vulnerability. What´s your advice for that? Joe: Well, first of all, yes, messiness is going to show up, but it's not going to be more messy than what's happening now. It's just going to be added, it's just going to be raised to the surface. It's not that vulnerability just is going to make your world a mess for a while. It's just going to shine light into the corners you haven't swept. Every one of those messes if it's approached with more vulnerability and boundaries and that kind of thing, then the world gets more and more clean, and then there's less and less friction and then everything happens more and more smoothly.The question that you're asking though is still a good one, which is, “What do you do when you shine the light and see that there's a whole bunch of dirt?” The response is, you clean it out and VIEW conversations are a great way to do that. It's really working with each other and holding each other accountable with vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, and wonder.Brett: As we continue to practice vulnerability, how does the way that we express it change over time? Beyond this early shifting that seems like it might be higher magnitude, what then happens over a longer period?Joe: A deep authenticity shows up. I think about my wife all the time in this. Particularly other women, I watch them just sit in awe of my wife often, it's almost like they're watching a puppy. The same kind of awe that you see a puppy with. You've met her. You know. She's just so much of herself. She's just like, “Oh, tea, flowers.” She's so in her world of joy and everybody's like, “Oh, and that's what happens is that you're more yourself and more yourself means you're more in love. It means there's more joy in your life.”, and people want to be around that. People are fascinated with that and it creates awe in people.Think about it this way. Think about a friend that you have, that you like very much, you have a deep love for and there's just something that bothers you about them. You put that person in your mind and imagine if that thing that they bothered you with, they were just super vulnerable. They are like, “I noticed that I am constantly bragging and I'm really sorry for that. It's not how I want to be with you. I don't want to have to try to make myself feel good or make you feel bad.” That's one example. Just imagine you have a friend like that. What happens in your system if they're vulnerable like that with you? You immediately want to be around them more.Brett: You drop the defense. You drop the judgment.Joe: Exactly, and that's what happens. The more you're vulnerable, the more that happens. Sales is the same thing. There's good studies about people who care more about the relationship, who are actually really driven by serving the people through sales, and how much better they do performance-wise. It's not the only thing that makes a good salesperson for sure. There's definitely data that challenging people can make you a better salesperson, but challenging people is a form of care. Asking questions helps sales. We know that but asking questions actually shows a concern for them as well.In a weird way, if you look at all of the things that make great salespeople, they're all based on the fact that they're centered on the other person, that they're not about closing the deal. It's about building the relationship. It's about helping the person discover something. It's about entering into their world. In sales, it's the same thing. It's like all those things are very vulnerable moves. If you look at creating relationships generally, or you think about the people in business that you want to work with the next time you're in business. You're starting your company and you can handpick 10 people that you want to work with. How many of those are based on some level of connection that you feel with that person? It's probably something like 7 out of 10, and then the other three are highly competent in something. That's another way to look at it.Brett: A point you brought up about challenging people was interesting. There are vulnerable ways to challenge somebody and there're invulnerable ways to challenge somebody. Let's assume that you've done it in the most vulnerable way. Let's say, it's sales business, something relatively high stakes, and other people are depending on it. You are authentically vulnerable in a way that challenges somebody. What if that is received as an attack?Joe: Then you apologize. Then you say I'm so sorry I had no intention of attacking you. I was just hoping that we could discover something together. If you're challenging, asking scary questions is a huge part of VIEW and that is challenging. Almost always when that question is really scary, it's really challenging. If you do it with vulnerability, which is the scary part, the impartiality, empathy, and wonder, then it's far less likely to be seen as an attack. Still, it can be seen as an attack, and then you just go, “I'm sorry, I had no intention of attacking you.” Or you double down and you say, “What's making you defensive. I don't understand. What are you defending?” Which would be another scary question. If you're actually in wonder, not in judgment. If you're not trying to prove yourself right.Brett: That points back to the state of being that VIEW is, because you could say, “What makes you so defensive?” Or you could say, really, “What makes you defend against that?”Joe: Yes, exactly. Or you can say, “Oh, I see that I have offended you. I really don't want to offend you. Can you help me see what it is that I've attacked in what you're defending?” Because you must really care about it if you're defending it.Brett: We talked a lot about what vulnerability is and what it looks like. Let's talk a little bit more about the state of being that all of this points to. How we can know when we're in it and when we're not in it. What are some compass points that point towards this vulnerability, so that we can use as we walk away from this episode?Joe: That's great. Intellectually, like we said and probably several times now that you're inviting your fear and you're saying what's true to you. That's the intellectual. I guess part of that's emotional, inviting your fear. There's also a heart-opening– and the fear can often turn to excitement, if you fully embrace that vulnerability, or it does maybe through the process of saying the thing that you want to say. There's that heart openness that happens. From the guts perspective, it's very much like, yes let's do this. There might be a no in the nervous system but the gut is like, yes, this is true, this is it. That's what you can feel. Those are the ways to feel the vulnerability but the easiest is just to say, oh, what's the scary thing that's true for me right now?Brett: I think one of the things that's in both, the fear and the excitement of saying the vulnerable thing, is knowing that your idea or your authenticity is about to be tested. Knowing that the relationship you're about to find out how real it is for the other person, or how much connection there actually is here. Or you're about to find out if you're going to be rejected or not instead of continuing to wonder for a long time while you pretend to be somebody else.Joe: Yes, that's such a beautiful way of putting it. It's true. The interesting thing your mind does in these moments is, that what your mind does is, it seems like that's the end of it. Like, “Oh my God, I'm going to see if I get rejected, and then they reject you.” You can double down on vulnerability and you can be like, “Ouch. I was really hoping not to be rejected and I don't want to push you into not rejecting me.” Then they might go, “Wait, hold on. I'm not trying to reject you here. I just want to be seen in my truth. What am I missing?” It doesn't end.The thing is it just never ends, but the fear tells us that there's this cliff and it's over that cliff. Oh, we're going to be rejected. I can't tell you how many times–Today at lunch, there was an old babysitter of ours and her mother was sitting there and I saw them. I'd seen the babysitter maybe two or three years back, and she didn't look happy. I saw her today and she looked great. I said, "Wow, you look great." She said, "Oh, Thanks." I was like, "Yes, the last time I saw you, you looked like you're wilting a little bit and it's just great to see you look so good." I'm sitting at lunch with my daughter, 11-years-older and the mother comes over and chastises me for saying what I said to her daughter. I could feel rejected and I did for a moment. I was like, “Oh, ouch.”, and then I walked over and I looked at the daughter and I said, "I'm sorry, I had no intention of offending you and I'm sorry if I offended you." Then she said, "Oh, it's no problem. I just couldn't figure out a time recently where I've felt withered or whatever, felt bad." I was like, "I don't think I've seen you for two or three years." She was like, "Oh, okay." The mom was still twisted about whatever what was going on, but the daughter, she thanked me, "Oh, thank you for apologizing." I'm like, "Yes, no problem." There's no end. There's just when you want to stop. Sometimes it's really vulnerable to say, "I can't do this anymore."Brett: There's two directions I want to go with that. One that reminded me of a story from about 10 years ago, working on a commercial production job. The key actor who was a famous musician at the time showed up to set and just looked like death. Everybody on set tiptoed around that and just coddled and then he sits down, and the makeup girl walks up, and she's just like, "Wow, you look like shit." He was just like, all of a sudden all this tension just released. He's like, "Oh, my God. Yes, I just feel like crap. I've been having these personal issues and this and that and the sleep–" He just got to just let it all out.Joe: Yes, exactly. I don't know how many times I've said, "Wow, you're being an ass." But with just total joy and no judgment in the system and the person's like, "Oh, yes, I kind of I am, fuck." Then we have a real conversation. It feels vulnerable to say that though. Brett: Which brings another thing to be excited about with vulnerability, is the dropping of pretense. You're about to find out. This is probably where part of the fear comes in, that you're going to have to revise your model of reality because you're testing it.Joe: Yes, exactly. All the time. Yes, that's it. That's beautifully said. Brett: Well, this has been a great episode, Joe. Thank you so much for your time.Joe: A total pleasure. I look forward to the next one, Brett.Brett: Likewise. Take care.Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe & rate us in your podcast app. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach out to us, join our newsletter, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.Links/resources: The Work (2017): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cca5QWdSTMQWhat I Want My Words To Do To You: http://www.pbs.org/pov/watch/whatiwant/#:~:text=What%20I%20Want%20My%20Words%20To%20Do%20To%20You%20offers,whom%20were%20convicted%20of%20murder.Drucker: https://www.thinkleansixsigma.com/article/the-effective-executive#:~:text=You%20can't%20manage%20others,practices%20and%20five%20crucial%20habits.

Empathy — VIEW Series #4