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Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, MD of Rubber Cheese.Download our free ebook The Ultimate Guide to Doubling Your Visitor NumbersIf you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcastIf you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this episode.Competition ends March 31st 2021. The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references:Podcast: www.conversationsworthmillions.comAgency: www.syntheticagency.coLinkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/roymurphy/Twitter: www.twitter.com/agencysynthetichttps://www.syntheticagency.co/10-simple-tips-on-bot-strategy-and-design/https://www.syntheticagency.co/oracle-chatbots/ ‘Songs for themeparks’ - 100 tunes for those who love + those who are terrifiedhttps://open.spotify.com/playlist/6SQ77ZYMDbdHBYPKkQKJ4V?si=XqTPtiTZSICe7Daeb4Mn4w Transcription:Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip The Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. Each episode I speak with industry experts from the attractions world. In today's episode, I speak with Roy Murphy from Synthetic, the chatbot and voice agency. We discuss the opportunity for exciting voice strategies for attractions, and also how attractions can derive maximum value from chatbots. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip The Queue. Kelly Molson: Roy, welcome to the Skip The Queue podcast, it's good to have you on today.Roy Murphy: Hello Kelly, looking forward to talking to you on the legendary Skip The Queue podcast. This will be a great conversation.Kelly Molson: You are very kind indeed. Now as you know, you've listened to a few of these episodes and you know that I start off with a few icebreaker questions, which you don't get to prep. Are you ready?Roy Murphy: As ready as I'll ever be. Kelly Molson: Okay. All right, what is the worst job that you've ever had?Roy Murphy: The worst job I've ever had is probably when I was very young on a Pitch and Putt golf course, not because the Pitch and Putt wasn't bad as a summer job, it was pretty cool, I quite enjoyed my job, but it was in a small hut in Wellington Island in Braze in South Dublin in Ireland many years ago, and the problem with the job was that it was in a small hut on the seafront outside a pub, and after the pub, everyone would come into the hut and kick it in and not only take the golf equipment out onto the kind of fairway in front of the promenade, then also do some not very nice things and use it as a toilet.Kelly Molson: Oh no, oh that's horrible.Roy Murphy: So for that reason, that is ... I've got a few other ones, but that's probably my top of the list I think.Kelly Molson: Oh God.Roy Murphy: Let's move on.Kelly Molson: So yeah let's ... shall we? Roy Murphy: Let's move on.Kelly Molson: Sorry.Roy Murphy: Anyway, I told you that, it's awful, isn't it?Kelly Molson: Sounds dreadful. Sorry, I'm just really having a chuckle, I feel bad that I'm laughing at your unfortunate job. Roy Murphy: It's all right.Kelly Molson: Okay.Roy Murphy: My hands are clean now though. My hands are clean now, it's fine. Kelly Molson: Good that, hygiene is very important.Roy Murphy: Yeah.Kelly Molson: Which cartoon character do you wish was real?Roy Murphy: Oh, Tasmanian Devil.Kelly Molson: Yeah.Roy Murphy: Just for the mayhem, I think. I just love ... I loved it as a kid, I'm not sure if it's appropriate now in terms of the name and so on, but just that whole kind of whirling dervish, and let it loose on various politicians.Kelly Molson: Yeah. If you had your own late-night talk show, who would be the first person that you'd invite on as a guest?Roy Murphy: Andrew Ridgeley. Kelly Molson: For what reason?Roy Murphy: I read his biography last year and I found it absolutely fascinating. I love those stories behind the fame, and actually, it came across that he was actually quite talented. You wouldn't have thought that from his public persona, but actually as a songwriter and a musician he gets kind of a bad rep, you know, George Michael, God bless, was so talented and popular, and I actually ... I think the stories behind the stories are sometimes more interesting, so I'd like to have him on and tell his side of the story face-to-face.Kelly Molson: That would be a great guest. I have to say that I was a massive Wham! fan so I would be watching that.Roy Murphy: Shows your age a bit.Kelly Molson: I know, I can't help it. Tell me something that is true that almost nobody agrees with you on, so your unpopular opinion.Roy Murphy: Oh, I've got lots of those. Kelly Molson: Oh, I'm intrigued.Roy Murphy: I like being contrary. So I pose it that winter doesn't exist. I have a theory.Kelly Molson: You need to explain this theory because it feels very wintery at the moment.Roy Murphy: Well, I'm not a flat-earther, but I have a theory. Let me run it past you. Typically there's four seasons in a year, I get that, and my own way of thinking is ... and I'm an optimist and I hate winter, by the way, just to set the groundwork. So summer doesn't end until September in my book, right? Because ultimately you always want an Indian summer, and September's still summer in my book. Autumn is October, November, and part of December because October, November are kind of autumn-ish, and December is a month of Fridays, right? So December isn't winter either. Roy Murphy: On the 21st of December, it's the winter equinox, and it gets lighter one minute per day, so therefore by the time you're into the 21st of December, forget about Christmas, that's always fun, by the time you get to first of January, the days are getting lighter every day by a minute, therefore winter doesn't exist. Discussed.Kelly Molson: I'm going to disagree, but I'm going to do it based ... I know where you're going, I understand where you're going with the equinox, but the winter ... the weather in January is horrendous and you could not associate that with any other month, other than winter. Roy Murphy: Disagree. Kelly Molson: Like it's always miserable, it's always really super cold, it normally snows.Roy Murphy: I see your point, but I'm an absolute optimist and I'm not having it. Winter is a construct, doesn't exist, and we're already into spring, so I'm skipping winter.Kelly Molson: I feel like we all need to do that this year.Roy Murphy: Every year.Kelly Molson: So maybe we should just all agree with you.Roy Murphy: Every year. This year in particular.Kelly Molson: January is my birthday month, which is really tough, nobody ever has any money, everyone's a bit miserable, the weather's rubbish, so maybe we should all just skip January and then I'll have a birthday later on in the summer.Roy Murphy: You'll thank me for it, Kelly, believe me.Kelly Molson: I'm with you. Thank you, Roy, for answering my questions. Roy, I want you to tell us about your agency that you run. So your agency is Synthetic, tell me what you do. Roy Murphy: So I run Synthetic, we are an emerging technology agency with a specialism in conversational AI, so what that means is we create conversations worth millions for our clients using chat, voice, messaging, all those AI-based concepts. I've been running it for about four years, got in quite early into the space, previously we were a mobile agency, but niched down into conversational AI because it's a really growing space, very interesting things happening across all those kind of areas from chat, voice, and messaging and so on.Roy Murphy: The platform is getting bigger, social's getting bigger, and customers and clients both are using these platforms every day, and therefore there's a massive opportunity for niche agencies in that space to help strategy, help to develop, and help to maintain those kinds of platforms and those kinds of activities.Kelly Molson: And what kind of ... like give me an example of something that you've worked on that we can reference. Roy Murphy: Sure, there's a couple of interesting ones, one on the kind of more entertainment side and maybe some more business-related ones. So one of the first ones and a very successful one we did a little while ago was a Robbie Williams virtual personality bot. So that was a fascinating project actually, so we actually got some time with the man himself and went through it with his record company and so on, and that was to promote ... I think about two albums ago, it was about 2016 we started that, that's still going actually, it's one of the longest-running ... certainly messenger chatbots, or successful ones, that's been around.Roy Murphy: So the idea being that you know, it's a virtual personality, he is not obviously there, but when we started it, it was quite early in the kind of chat space and area, there were so many messages coming through saying, "Is this you? Tell me where you are, I'm going to show you something," and it got quite personal actually-Kelly Molson: I can imagine.Roy Murphy: Not [crosstalk 00:07:09] yeah it did, but at one point we had ... I think we broke Facebook inbox it was so popular, and this was, you know, one of those kinds of small budget and small kind of time-spent projects that had a massive footprint.Kelly Molson: So it was a bit like ... as if you were messaging Robbie and you would get responses back from him?Roy Murphy: Yeah, exactly right, yeah. Since then obviously like lots has happened in that space around a kind of virtual assistants, a lot more sort or reality around augmented reality and kind of replicas of people and digital twins and so on, but that was kind of where it started, that was very successful and very popular, and still going actually. So a bit more up-to-date, we work with a number of large technology companies, one in particular, so we are doing a bunch of stuff with them around gamification and chat, so that's using the conversational piece to ... in the SaaS space actually along sort of [inaudible 00:08:01] and CX in that space, where we're doing things like virtual events on chat and we're doing some voice applications as well. Roy Murphy: Customers will come onto the website and using things like web chat to find out more about some of their products and then upselling from there, so chat and conversational AI with an ROI behind it.Kelly Molson: And that's kind of what I want to talk about today. So Roy and I are both members of an agency networking group, so we're both members of Agencynomics, and this is how we met, and I think Roy saw something that I posted about chatbots on LinkedIn, which spurred us to have a conversation about a few things. So some of you listening will have seen me speak at the Visitor Attractions Conference last year, and as part of our talk we were talking about things that could improve the guest's user journey and guest experience online, and one of the things that we suggested was using a chatbot.Kelly Molson: I mean chatbots are great, they can often give people information that they can't find that easily, or you know, if you have a chatbot you're freeing up someone else's time from having to kind of be on that and populating it themselves, and that's how we got talking, and I have to admit, after the talk in the Q&A session, I got a lot of questions about chatbots, and I thought, "Why don't I get Roy on to answer those questions? Because he is an expert in it and I am not." Hence why you're on Roy.Roy Murphy: That's useful.Kelly Molson: So I kind of want to talk about that kind of side of voice activation and voice kind of conversation around attractions, and I know that you have worked a little bit in that sector, and I wondered if you could give us your kind of ... well, your thoughts on them, and then maybe can we talk about how ... like how can attractions derive that kind of maximum value from using chatbots?Roy Murphy: Just to set the scene a little bit, quite important to mention I think, that you know, around the chat and conversational AI space we're still very early into it. I mean from our side it feels like it's been going on forever, we're almost five years into this kind of space, so the questions that we still get are often quite fundamental questions, you know, "Can I give my website, my product, over to an AI? What's going to happen? What if they start making ridiculous claims and comments? Will people be able to use them? Are we lying to people because they're not talking to people? Is there any kind of brand damage that might happen?Roy Murphy: You know we get a lot of these questions still quite a lot from the educational side, and that's, of course, every sector, not just visitor attractions, that's everything from finance to healthcare, wellness, education and so on. So the fundamentals still apply. So the first thing to say is, of course, we're still quite early into it, although we've been doing it for quite a while, so these questions do still apply, and then the second thing we often get as well is, you know, how do you get started? Is it very difficult and complicated and therefore expensive?Roy Murphy: And it really isn't. You know, of course, anything ... as a piece of string, can be ... you can be using very basic bots or very, very complex and integrated with the CRM systems, so in essence, we are early into it, there are lots of use-cases coming in that are ROI focused and kind of based in reality, which is great, but in terms of visitor attractions, you know, the very basics of a museum or an attraction using an FAQ bot is a great place or a great example to start with.Kelly Molson: Yeah.Roy Murphy: So in essence ... and that's very simple to do, so really these are not large projects, and most attractions and most businesses will have most of the information to hand anyway, which is often in their call centre scripts or on the FAQs or the questions being asked on their website, and indeed what's coming in on email, you know, whether it's the kind of ... you know, a more analogue process they have. So in the very basic version, it's not difficult for a site to spin up something on their current site based around their FAQs and then use that kind of data that comes back in to understand what people are asking for, because the beauty of those simple chatbot systems, of course, is that people are asking you actual questions, they're not ... you know you don't have to use eye-tracking software, you don't have to use Hotjar or something like that, you can actually get ... you know, people are actually asking you what they want, you know, what time you're open, will my discount vouchers still apply because of COVID? Roy Murphy: You know, are you COVID safe? You know, things that have really been kind of popular last year.Kelly Molson: In its simplistic form, you are gathering data about what people need to find out about your organization?Roy Murphy: It is ... in essence, it is really like having a conversation with a customer, and that can be automated, of course, so you don't have to have your call-centre staff on board, you don't have to have you, social team, if you're a small business as well with a single site attraction, this can all be automated very simply and very quickly, and that's a great place to start with this whole kind of AI space if you like because then you're going to get a load of data back which will inform you as you what you might do next.Roy Murphy: The classic what we call think like a startup, kill or continue, so if you're getting a whole bunch of questions back and you've already answered, okay, maybe that is what you need to spend your time on, but if people are often ... if your bot or if your site's failing on the certain questions of ... you know, maybe someone's asking a particular question all the time, are you open? How do I get to you? How much is it? How much are ticket costs? You can use that and you'll find that we've got loads of data around how people use conversation versus how they use a website, and they'll spend more time basically on chatbots, and they'll ask more questions, side-by-side apples with apples than they will on the website, we've seen that time and time again. Kelly Molson: So the time that they'll spend talking to a bot will be longer than a browse time?Roy Murphy: Yeah, often. Often there's caveats around that of course, but yeah, in essence, we see that a lot because if you've ... and again, you don't have to brand it particularly excitingly, although keep away from female named assistants, I've got a massive bugbear about that, let's get onto that later, but you know, if you're not ... you know, you don't have to spend huge amounts of time with developing new characters or new kind of personas for your bot, if you've got a friendly open museum visitor attraction park, whatever, just use that. Answer the basic questions, and use those questions to inform what you do next.Roy Murphy: And the other point of that is ... so the other important point is that of course if someone gets stuck or if they've got a major problem, or it's a high priority customer service question you can always hand over to a live agent anyway, so there's loads of nuances around how you would do that and when you would do it, but these things are all very possible and very easy to integrate with whatever you're currently using in terms of your live chat.Kelly Molson: Sounds really cool, doesn't it? Like it sounds like something that everybody should be using.Roy Murphy: I think people are often quite flummoxed by where to start and how easy it can be, because it seems like it's a great thing to do and everyone, of course, jumps in and goes, "Right, can we have a Robbie plus replica ... can we have someone in our ... can they be AR? Can they be this? And can they connect to all our systems?" And absolutely it can, but you don't necessarily have to start there. So you know ... and again, because the prevalence of chat and voice and all these technologies that are happening and your customers are using them, it's not a big jump for them, so really it's something you should be doing, you should be talking to your customers on the channels they're already using.Kelly Molson: And what would you say is the starting point? Because you talked a little bit about things to think about before you get started with this, like what should an organization be thinking about before they commit to something or before they come and speak to you for example?Roy Murphy: It's very simple really. I mean you've got to pick a use-case, so there's a bunch of things you could do, and a bunch of things you should do, but what you absolutely must do is, you know, set your KPI, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to, number one, reduce the amount of hours spent with your social team on answering questions that could be very simply answered by a bot? Are you number two, needing to increase sales by X percent and will this help us to do that? What do we do about? How do we get involved in that? Roy Murphy: So first thing you need to do, understand what it is you're trying to do in terms of the business KPIs, and then the second thing, of course, is that ... you know, leading on from that is describing it which is just a pre-post or after-sales type of scenario, or is it an engagement tool? So are we looking at conversational AI in this instance? Should we be ... are we using it for your website? So that's pre-buy, someone's looking at your information, it's top of the funnel, it's awareness, and that's one thing and that can be driven all the way through to the final ... to kind of booking.Roy Murphy: Or is it on the other side of the coin when someone gets to your park, your attraction, or your museum, whatever it might be, are you interacting more there with a character? Is it more things like treasure hunts? Is it something that's engaging in terms of dwell time? Are you upselling from there? So they're kind of separate things. Either can be started off very simply, but I think you need to ask yourself those simple kind of one-page answers and questions which are, what's the bot trying to do? What's the key audience? And what the success looked like, you know, very simple, basic questions you need to start with first.Kelly Molson: Yeah, one of the questions that came up ... well there was a couple, there was quite a few questions actually at the Visitor Attractions Conference, but one that sticks in my mind was around ... it was around social media, you know, was there a platform of some sort or something that would interact with people's social media, as well as people, being able to ask questions on the website as well? I guess if you're building something bespoke for an organization, you can make it do pretty much whatever you want it to.Roy Murphy: Yeah pretty much. I mean anything with API is integrable, basically. So, in essence, yeah, so whether you want to ingest your Twitter feeds ... or indeed a lot of the chats are actually social themselves, so they don't have to be ... and there's kind of ... there's open and closed systems of course, but you know, for instance, Facebook obviously everyone's aware of, and it would appear from all the things that we see that ... and not forgetting that Facebook own three of the biggest social platforms in the world, you know, not just Facebook, of course, they own Instagram, of course, they own WhatsApp, and who knows what else, and they are moving into a ... it feels like or it seems like an integrated system where you can now message, you can now use chatbots, to an extent, on Instagram. Roy Murphy: Messenger obviously is the platform for bots for Facebook, but again, WhatsApp being more private has had business beta on it, and it hasn't really broken in the Western countries as yet. It's massive in India mind you, WhatsApp. So all these things are all possible and all ... and you can build one system and one platform to interact on those as a single point of view, so yeah, it's all very possible from a social perspective, yeah.Kelly Molson: How about engaging with different demographics? So is there ... you know, in your experience, is there a certain age bracket that will interact more with a chatbot on a site? I guess ... again one of the questions was around kind of our grandparents that are booking a trip with their grandkids, are they going to use this chatbot? Is it going to be helpful for them?Roy Murphy: That is a very, very common question. That's a great question. Before I started in this whole space I had the same question, isn't this just for kids though? But actually, kids aren't using Facebook as you've probably noticed. I've got a 14-and-a-half year old going on 20 daughter, she hasn't touched Facebook in four years, or for that matter, Instagram and WhatsApp. If you're not on TikTok or some of the newer ones you're kind of toast really. So yeah, we've seen ... we've got a ream of data around this and you'll probably be quite surprised from the grandparent question that they're actually very capable and use Facebook, in particular, a lot, because that's how they communicate with their kids and grandkids. Roy Murphy: So we see a huge spread. We thought the same thing actually a couple of years ago, is this route for kids? And would anyone use it? And is it all ... opposite, if it's easy to use, that's a truism across any platform, if it's simple, you use and you're being upfront about what it is and how you use it, it really does cross ... there isn't a demographic we've seen that doesn't use it. So yeah, it's not skewed young in essence, no.Kelly Molson: Is it a case of if it's easy, anybody will use it? Or would an attraction have to put in any kind of work to get people to engage with it? Because I think that was something that people were a bit worried about, is committing to this and then it not being used, and would it need to be ... like would they need to put this huge kind of drive behind encouraging people to use it?Roy Murphy: So again, depending on what the use-case is. So in very simple terms for the kind of top-of-funnel awareness, and there is other ways of doing this, but your classic chatbot scenario is the bottom right circle, you know, on your website, which you select, and I think we're all pretty used to ... there's loads of different ones out there from some of the big names like Drift and Intercom and so on, and some of the other platforms. So that is really a tap of a button to ask questions into a kind of FAQ.Roy Murphy: So that is people are coming to your site anyway, or they're coming to your Facebook page, and that how you interact anyway, or they're Instagram now and possibly WhatsApp and so on, so that's all kind of intrinsically baked in. In terms of on-park or on-site, slightly different scenario. So yeah, I think it's fair to say that you need to surface it. So if you're in the aquarium or whatever it might be, or you know, a London Bridge experience or whatever, front-of-house, there's something there they haven't seen already, I think definitely. Roy Murphy: Parts of your marketing in terms of if you're using an app already and there's a nice part of it which might be chat-related or kind of something you would engage with through the experience, I think yeah, so it really depends. I think the key though is ultimately ... it's telling people about it, yes, but then making it really simple to use, and there's two things you want to do really, you know, you don't want to take away from the experience itself, right? The reason they're there is to see fantastic ocean animals or go on roller coaster rides.Roy Murphy: Yeah, I think it's fair to say that, you know, some train or some ... or at least an awareness from front-of-house staff would be important, if you know ... just to check in with people, "Have you seen X or Y? Have you seen we've got a new dipper," you know, for museum, you know, our new Dippy chat bot, interact with it, you can see ... find treasures, if you do the treasures you get a discount or an offer or something, you know, that kind of stuff is important I think, but again, not taking away from the experience is really important, because you know, let's face it, we, and our kids as well, spend enough time on screens, so it's got to add to the experience, and we're going through the experience of the attraction, and of course not all attractions are end-to-end and kind of, you know, linear, but understanding whether it's just using a QR code or something simple or being tripped by another kind of interactivity, is important, and making those things short and sweet I think is important as well, those interactions.Kelly Molson: This was going to be like my kind of final round-up question to you because what we've focused on quite a bit is what I think is that kind of pre-attraction journey using chatbots, so people are asking questions about you know, are you open? How much is the ticket price? I can't find this thing to be able to book, but actually, there's a lot that can be done in terms of voice strategies for attractions once you're at the attraction as well. Kelly Molson: Like what kind of things could potentially attractions be looking at for that? I guess this is endless, endless opportunities?Roy Murphy: Yeah absolutely. I mean you know, depending on the attraction, like I say, I mentioned the kind of Dippy scenario where ... you know, are we looking through the museum at bones or artifacts or using a voice to give hints around where to find things, more like an interactive treasure hunt scenario, I think is definitely useful. Making it engaging as well, because you know, obviously moving into a post ... hopefully a post-COVID world soon where things are back open again, hopefully sooner rather than later, you're able to touch things, but maybe people don't want to, so I think it's going to be quite important that that kind of touchless experience is probably more part of the experience going forward than it has been.Kelly Molson: Really good point.Roy Murphy: So then that's going to be important. There's tons of things you can do, like you say, create new characters, use some new technology like AR to kind enhance, I've seen some great stuff around museum attractions around selfies, you know, putting yourself into pictures and really engaging and immersing yourself in whatever you're looking around. I mean my own personal favourite which doesn't exist, I'm so disappointed that they stopped doing it, was in Audley End, you know, the national heritage-Kelly Molson: I live right near Audley End-Roy Murphy: Oh okay. Kelly Molson: Yeah, we live in Saffron Walden.Roy Murphy: I love it.Kelly Molson: It's a great place.Roy Murphy: I love Audley End, they used to have a Victorian sing-along at Christmas, I don't know if you ever went to it-Kelly Molson: No, we moved here a couple of years ago so-Roy Murphy: Right, I think they stopped it about three or four years ago, every time I go there I'm so disappointed they don't do it, because you got a chance to go into the house and there were some people dressed up in Victorian ... I thought, "Wow that's what I want, I want a Victorian granddad bot, that's what they're missing," right?Kelly Molson: Yes.Roy Murphy: I honestly do, I might just go and do it anyway because it's a fantastic idea, but that kind of interactive and engagement, these things, these character-driven kind of experiences around AI are again ... they can be quite complex. It's not that difficult to start, but again, it just adds to the kind of fun, doesn't it? And again, the important point I think is, is not just to have that on the park, so there's any kind of brand and merchandise extensions that are possible in terms of licensing et cetera, so if you're ... I know Dippy's a good example, or maybe Audley End's a bad example, but there's certainly plenty of character-driven attractions where you could extend that more and you could have more engagement from people outside of visiting the attraction.Roy Murphy: And again, it could just be that you have a conversation starter and you are able to talk to people and engage, and that might be, "Did you know we're open? Why don't you come along and have a two-for-one offer?" And these are you know, digitally printed tickets, they can go into an existing app they've got, they can go onto social, go onto the bot itself, so lots of opportunities I think, commercially speaking, that aren't really being utilized that well because ... because we're quite early into it, and again, I'm going to put a stake in the ground and say I think that in the visitor attraction kind of space there's huge opportunities because ... for people to steal a march on the competitors to be honest.Roy Murphy: Because not many people are doing it and doing it well, so there's a massive opportunity. The audience is definitely there, we know that, we're going to reopen again soon, and even before reopening it's a brilliant way to engage people and not particularly ... I wouldn't say cost-neutral, but it's not particularly expensive to get these things started if you go in with an MVP think like the startup mindset.Kelly Molson: Yeah, totally agree with that. There is endless possibilities and huge opportunities at the moment. I love what you talked about ... the Audley End example is a really great example actually because it is about ... you know, it's about putting you into that experience, isn't it? It's about ... it's complementary to it, it enhances the experience, it doesn't take away from it or distract you from what's actually happening there at the same time. Roy Murphy: Yeah, I think that's really important. I was also just thinking about audio as well, and again, this is just simple things, and this isn't necessarily around conversational, but you know, just ahead of us having a chat, just thinking about things like some of the more ride-based attractions, and whether this has been done or not, I'm using ... audio is massive obviously, podcasts are massive, audio content's massive, Alexa and Google and so on are massive, and you know, just simple things like those additional engagements of those ... for instance Spotify or Alexa playlists of ... you know, you're going to Alton Towers in a month's time, you're really excited about it, here's the Terror List list with ride on time and songs from TerrorVision and Screamadelica, why aren't we doing that? This is not difficult to do. Roy Murphy: You know, and you can do corporate audio and AI and conversation to all these things, and there's so many good opportunities I think for this, and I think there's a ... you know, I think the brands that jump on this and attractions that jump on this will ... they'll put themselves in a good spot I think.Kelly Molson: That's such a great idea, what is your attraction's playlist? That's what I want everyone to tweet me, what would be on your attraction's playlist? Roy Murphy: You can't use Screamadelica, I've used that. Try and get an example that's under 30 years old, I tried to think of one earlier, I couldn't. Kelly Molson: Well this one's not under 30 years ... well ... yeah no, it is, but I always think about ... there's the Rock 'n' Roller Coaster at Disney and it plays Aerosmith, and it's such a great song, Dude (Looks like a lady), and I just have got such great memories, and every time I hear that song I instantly get transported back to that attraction. It would be really cool wouldn't it, to have like your playlist from your favourite attractions?Roy Murphy: It'd be great, just on a personal note, I'm a heavy ... well my family, we are heavy attraction users, I was talking to my wife earlier and I think we count ... even though we're on COVID, I think we counted up about 30 attractions last year we did.Kelly Molson: Nice.Roy Murphy: And we generally do around 40 plus, and that's everything from you know, the obvious big ones, you know, the Alton Towers and so on, to ... we went to Portsmouth into the Mary Rose and the dockyards we did [inaudible 00:27:53] Tower, we did Woburn Safari, Stratford-upon-Avon, the Shakespeare Museums, and I did one interestingly, like just before Christmas, the Silverstone Experience, don't know if you've done it, which is-Kelly Molson: Oh no, I haven't yet. I should because it's not that far from where we are.Roy Murphy: It was actually really good. You know, I'm not a huge Formula 1 fan, but I know lots of people are, but I took the kids out there and my wife came as well, and you get to drive on the track, and now it's very slow, but they've got little lights on, it's fantastic actually.Kelly Molson: That's cool.Roy Murphy: And there was a Silverstone radio station which you could turn on and they play some tunes, but I thought they were missing a huge trick around interactivity, they should have had a very simple point and click where they are, which you can do very easily now. You're all going very slowly up the grid, why they didn't have sounds popping and people revving their engines like Lewis Hamilton on the grid is beyond me.Kelly Molson: Yeah, really build that atmosphere a bit, yeah.Roy Murphy: Exactly. Roll your phone over the ... traffic lights are, you know, they're red, amber, green, and then show it off and then you could have James [inaudible 00:28:46] it just missed the big trick there, and none of this is difficult, whether you could just point your thing at the stands and you can have the voice of Murray Walker or whatever it is for the F1 fans. These interactivity things, again, are not difficult.Kelly Molson: Well I mean they might be listening Roy, so-Roy Murphy: They should. Call us.Kelly Molson: You could get a call. Call Roy. Roy Murphy: Call us. Call Kelly.Kelly Molson: On that note, if you do want to know a bit more about Roy and what he does at Synthetic, then there's loads of places you can look. So you've got loads of really great articles on your website, syntehticagency.co, now there's a couple of really specific articles that are really useful to this conversation, so you've got 10 simple tips on bot strategy and design, and you've got a case study around Oracle chatbots as well, and there's just some really, really useful information if you want to carry this conversation on, that's the best place to go. Kelly Molson: And actually Roy you've got a podcast as well, haven't you?Roy Murphy: It is called Conversations Worth Millions.Kelly Molson: Love it.Roy Murphy: So in essence, conversationsworthmillions.com is the URL, but if you ... because I'm amazing at SEO as well, if you type in conversations worth millions into Google, every result on the home pace will be my podcast, if it isn't, my OCD's going to go mental.Kelly Molson: Okay, well let's test this, so yeah, if you want to listen to a bit more about this topic, then Conversations Worth Millions is what you type into Google and as Roy said, you should find everything that you need. One last question for you, I always ask all of our guests to recommend a book, and it can be a book that you love, just you love it personally, or it could be a book that's kind of helped shape your career on some way, so have you got a recommendation for us today?Roy Murphy: Can I just make one small comment before I tell you what book it is? My second unpopular opinion is that you can't read too much.Kelly Molson: Okay, yeah.Roy Murphy: I'm a doer, don't ... my final parting shot on that is don't just consume, create. I'll leave it there, however-Kelly Molson: Yeah, no do you know what? I agree, and don't just read self-help books, I think there's a lot of people who consume self-help business book one after the other, go read some fiction as well, and mix it up.Roy Murphy: Speaking of self-help, I've got one for you. Kelly Molson: Good.Roy Murphy: You'll like this. Okay so this one has got ... it's a bit of a mouthful for a name, it's brand new, don't know if you've seen it, so this is the Almanack of Naval Ravikant, have you seen it?Kelly Molson: No, I haven't.Roy Murphy: Okay, so I'll give you a quick pre-see of what it says on the back cover. So it says getting rich is not just about luck, happiness is not just a trait we are born with. So in essence what this is, is Naval is very famous on Twitter, he's a VC and a bit of a lifestyle guru and so on, and a tech guru too, he wrote quite a ... again, famous tweet about a year-and-a-half ago on why getting rich isn't just about money, it was a massive Twitter thread of maybe, I don't know, 15 tweets. Someone took those tweets and turned them into a book, which I thought for a couple of reasons was fantastic.Roy Murphy: First of all, to be able to spin a book out of 15 tweets is really interesting, and actually the lessons in it I think are actually quite powerful, so that's my recommendation. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. Kelly Molson: Great. Good. That is a good choice. As ever, if you would like to win a copy of this book, we offer it as a prize, so all you need to do is head over to our Twitter account which is Skip The Queue if you just search for that on Twitter, and then if you retweet this episode announcement with the words, "I want Roy's books," then you will be put into a prize draw to potentially win it. Kelly Molson: Roy thank you, I've really enjoyed this chat. Thanks for coming on and for sharing your knowledge about this topic. Please, everyone, go and subscribe to Roy's podcast the Conversations Worth Millions. If you are interested in what we've been talking about today, it's a wealth of knowledge there, and I would definitely check out Roy's website too. Thanks for coming on.Roy Murphy: Thanks a lot, Kelly, it's been a pleasure. Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip The Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five-star review, it really helps others find us, and remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.

A Sixth Taste? With Dr. Nicole Garneau From an early age I loved both science and entertaining. I did stand up comedy in my 4th grade talent show, and played the lead Andrew Sister in a high school production about the 1940s. And yet, I also learned the fungi (fun-guy) joke in 6th grade, won my share of science fairs, and by my sophomore year, had declared to my folks that I was going to be a geneticist. See, dreams do come true! I’m now doing what I love most, talking science and inspiration, and making people laugh full time. Following high school, I loved my time on the banks of the old Raritan, completing my BA in Genetics at Rutgers College. I then took off a gap year to gain a sense of self, before going full force into my PhD in microbiology at Colorado State University. This led to a business internship with CSU Ventures, volunteering for the Colorado BioScience Association, and eventually a ten-year career as the curator and chair of the Health Sciences Department at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. And now, I’m honored to be recognized as one of the top 5 most influential young professionals in Colorado, a 2020 CiviCO Governors Fellow, and a serial entrepreneur. I live with my husband and daughter in Denver, and delight in immersing myself in nature when I’m not immersed in designing and customizing presentations and trainings for my corporate and nonprofit clients www.drnicolegarneau.com nicole@drnolegarneau.com www.feednigfatty.com info@feedingfatty.com Full Transcript  Roy - Feeding Fatty (00:03): Hello, and welcome to another episode of feeding fatty I'm Roy and I'm Terry. And of course, this podcast just Chronicles our journey, my journey, Terry supporting, helping me through the weight loss, getting healthy, getting exercise, and, you know, we are up and down and all over the place. And so, uh, you know, we have guests on from time to time to come in, help us with different perspectives, their opinion, some are going through what we are going through as well today. Uh, actually you are our first repeat guests. So that is, uh, uh, an award, I guess, that we'll have to hand out first repeat. Yes, she is our scientists next door, Dr. Nicole Garn new. Now she is recognized as one of the top five influential young professionals in Colorado and a 20, 20 Civico governor's fellow and serial entrepreneur. So, Nicole, thanks again for taking time out of your day. Roy - Feeding Fatty (01:03): It's, uh, it's really a good story. We met a long time. I mean, a long time, few months ago, talk the original, uh, the original message we wanted to have you on was for this, but we, after talking, we decided to go with the mindset and mindfulness and the five, uh, tips to your mental health fitness. And so, um, wanted to have you back. So today we're going to talk about, there are, I guess, five identified taste and you think that you have uncovered the six one. And so we're going to talk a little bit about that, but I do know you were the curator of a museum, and so you can tell us a little bit about your history and your research on this topic. Dr. Nicole (01:50): That sounds great. Thank you for having me back. I will take the, a word that sounds great. Yeah, either that, or you're a glutton. Carrie will take me with her to Hawaii. I will do it. Come on. That's right. I would never come home if I let y'all go down there together. That's true. I spent the last 10 years I having left, well, I guess left the museum a year ago, but I was there for 10 years with Denver museum of nature and science. And I was the curator and chair of the health sciences department. And for folks who aren't quite as familiar with science museums, just like art museums, they have curators. And those curators in science museums are responsible for doing research and having these collections. They usually come from their research in order to hold for the public. Good. And so it's a little unusual for a natural history museum to have someone who studies modern human biology. Dr. Nicole (02:46): And that is what I did there. And I specifically studied, um, taste and how taste, how taste is really a function, just like all of our senses are of, and evolution of the human species. Okay. So it was a really great way for us to think about the humans are not separate from nature. We are part of nature and just like all the other animals and species we have evolved as well. And so I specifically studied human house humans experience taste. Okay. Okay. So, so the five, 10, five tastes are sweet, sweet sour, salty learn and new mama. So those are the, so I joke around, I joke around that. It's kind of like, um, for golf fans out there, it's kind of like getting the green jacket, but those are the ones that have like they're, they're the masters. Everyone accepts them. They're great. Dr. Nicole (03:41): And then there's a lot of other really cool, possible tastes out there that, um, is starting to gain a lot more scientific evidence that it actually exist. So I think it might be worth me talking about how it tastes for the most part gets defined as a taste. Okay. Okay. And, and part of this is because a lot of times people confuse, tastes and smell different senses, different sensory organs. So tongue and soft palate have these receptors, which are like locking keys. Um, for the most part that are for taste versus smell, which is in your olfactory cavity, basically in your olfactory bulbs. Again, you have those receptors, those locks and keys, but for there for molecules that are aerosolized and are going to go to different parts of the brain. So this is really important. So that's one of the things we need to understand in our senses. Dr. Nicole (04:31): And particularly when thinking about tastes one, when you have that in your mouth, do you perceive it? Is there something that you're proceeding? Okay. Okay, too. So that's like the first one that's like sour, everyone agrees sour has a green jacket. Sour is a taste it's been around forever. Everyone agrees. Yeah. You know, you're tasting something so perception. And then from there you have to start digging in deeper. Um, molecular biologists want to understand cell biologists want to understand, do we know this, the cells in the sensory organ that hosts and are the homes of those lock and key receptors? Okay. So now we're starting to get into process. Dr. Nicole (05:16): And those receptors are those locks and keys. The shape of them matters. And the shape of them comes from our genetics. So our genetics is just our, our human genome is just a cookbook for our body. Cookbook has recipes, the human genome cookbook has genes and they do the same thing. The recipe tells you how to make something. The gene tells you how to make something. And just like maybe Roy, your mom's recipe for maybe chocolate cake is a little bit different than someone else's. Same thing. Our genes are a little bit different. So we all have the same genes, all of a sudden the same genes about 25,000 genes or recipes in our cookbook. Wow. Okay. Okay. Let's say any changes and these little like 0.1% differences, percent differences that, um, make us unique in ways we can see in ways we can't see. Dr. Nicole (06:09): And one of the ways we can't see as taste, so it changes the shape of that receptor. Okay. So let's bring it back. You put something in your mouth, right? All right. Listeners, you're eating something. You're perceiving it. Why am I perceiving that? That's cool. I'm proceeding it down at the tiny, tiny level. Those little tiny food molecules are breaking up and are interacting with your tongue by kind of being like a LA key that's coming in and unlocking that lock. And when that happens, a signal goes to the brain and the brain is perceiving it. And the brain makes the decision. You want to eat more of it or do you not want to eat more of it? Okay. All right. So we're, so for sour, we know you have a perception and excuse me, and we don't really know the genes. Really. We have an idea about what this, this receptor looks like, but we don't really know, but guess what? Dr. Nicole (07:06): Sour gets a green jacket. Okay. Salty, same thing. We're like close, but we don't quite understand totally how salt is working in humans. It's got a green jacket who mommy, which is savory tastes a protein speed, which we're all familiar with is the taste of sugar. We can all agree on that. We know that one bitter bitter, which is a taste of a particular molecules that usually associate more with, um, historically poison. Although we know there's a lot of things that are bitter, that aren't poisonous, that are very good for us. Like cruciferous vegetables. We understand the genetics of that. So we understand the recipe or the gene. We understand what it makes and what it looks like. And we understand how that connects in those tastes cells and how the taste cells then connect to the brain. We know where it goes in the brain. Okay. So those ones are like the standards. So we're like, okay, those guys, they got it. So on incomes, new guys. So if we had to throw it out there and I wonder what your listeners would think right now, what are some things that people are like, well, why isn't that a taste? Is that a taste? What about this? Is that a taste? So what kind of things would you guys think about the could be tastes Tery - Feeding Fatty (08:18): Fat, fat? What else? I don't know. Sugar and salt are the tea for me. I have them all. They fall sugar salty or no goods. Dr. Nicole (08:35): Well, there's some preliminary evidence that's growing for a couple other ones, certain minerals like calcium, the pure taste of water, which would have helped us evolutionarily. For sure. Although you're alive, then you become as a devoid of something and therefore it's pure or is it your taste appear? So there's less evidence for, and then fat. And that's the one that I worked on for a few years as part of my tenure at the Denver museum of nature and science. And that was through a partnership with Purdue university. And I worked with, um, a scientist there, Rick Madis. And he has been working on fat tastes for 30 plus years. Wow. And there's a few other folks in the industry in terms of the field of tastes research, who have also been trying so hard to get forth enough evidence that the taste of fat be considered the six tastes. So that's what I thought we could dive into today or about that. Roy - Feeding Fatty (09:32): Okay. Before we get too far off, but just a couple of questions that I had thought about while you're talking, number one is, um, can your taste or your smell throw the other one off? If something smells like something and then you get into your mouth, not what you thought. But then the other thing is, um, our, our tastes genetically pre-programmed. Are they learned or is it some combination of those? Because some people like sweet. Some people like, you know, prefer sweet, prefer salty. Cause the other weird thing is we've had this conversation many times, like, uh, uh, the big pickles that are sour. Okay. And she loves them. She even puts, she puts some pickle juice in something we were drinking and it made me think like, okay, so back when we were kids, after you played a baseball game, you got a free snack. Well, the pattern I noticed even then is, you know, the boys would get the snow cone or a piece of bubble gum or something like that. Girls always got those sour pickles and I just never could stand the taste. So I know that's a whole lot of information, but yeah, it, it almost seemed like there were some genetic, uh, some genetic line that was drawn there. Roy - Feeding Fatty (10:52): Give me a deal, pickle, meet snow cone with a little bit a Lima. Oh my goodness. I am in heaven. Dr. Nicole (11:01): See Terry, we got to go Hawaii. Roy - Feeding Fatty (11:03): Oh, come on. Dr. Nicole (11:07): All right. So let's bring it back. Okay. Right out of the gate. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm like we would probably put the cart before the horse because we started diving directly into a deep dive of how tastes works. But I think we want to bring it back to how humans perceive flavor as a whole. Okay. Let's break it down from there because some of the questions you just asked for are going to be answered when we look at it from that perspective. Okay. So the first thing is flavor in the brain flavor is just a perception of reality and that perception leads to a behavior. So let's think about it from that point of view. So now where's the brain getting its clues to have this perception of reality right out of the gate. We know that it's going to be coming from the census. Dr. Nicole (11:55): So our five senses plays a huge role, of course, in figuring out how our brain is perceiving the flavor of something we're eating or drinking. Okay. And that's everything from before you even put something in your mouth, you're seeing it, you're smelling it. And it's called ortho nasal olfaction. So through the nostrils, you might be hearing something sizzle or hearing the pop of a can that plays in and you're touching it usually with your, with your fingers, you're touching something. And you're getting an idea of what the texture is. Your brain is already said in real time, integrating that information before it even goes into your mouth and saying, Hmm, have I, is this new? Have I seen this before? Did I have an adverse reaction to this before? Okay. Did you drink too much? And for up to now, you don't eat a certain food. Dr. Nicole (12:42): Right? Nobody loves it. Or do I have some sort of learned predilection? Like last time I ate this, um, you know, I got, I was able to do all this work. Okay. Caffeine, I think is one of the most bitter molecules known to man. Did you guys have caffeine this morning and wake, you brought up two and a half cups today. Okay. Right. So bitter, you should not like coffee. We love it because we've learned like, okay, yes, this is going to lead me to wake my butt up and get things done. I need to get done. Especially during the dark season when it's like, it doesn't wake us up. Right. So it's taking it all this tension. And then it's pulling in other things like, Hmm, what's my hunger level. What's my salt level right now. What's my so nest is where some of the cravings come in. Dr. Nicole (13:29): And boy, were you talking about? And then finally, you're going to start bringing in some of the things, the things that scientists really have a hard time studying, which is the human element. How does your cultural background bring it to this nostalgia memories? Things like the food hasn't even gone in your mouth yet. Right? So now what's in your mouth. You have the sense of taste, which is the sweet sour, salty, bitter, umami, possibly fatty acids. And possibly some of these other guys you're getting retro nasal olfaction, which retro means behind olfaction of course, is the nose. So retro nasal. So it's basically, as you chew food, you're warming it up. It's getting aerosolized and it goes up the back of your throat to your olfactory bulbs. Okay. So for someone who's like, I don't understand what you're saying. Dr. Nicole, did you ever laugh so hard that root beer or milk came out your notes? That's the pattern. Okay. Roy - Feeding Fatty (14:29): Well, I'll tell you the other one that I, then I always think about when you say that is, um, we've Sabi. Cause if you get so much, it will, it seemed like it will burn all the way. The back. You throw them back up into your nose. Dr. Nicole (14:42): Yes. Which it's almost like we've met each other before. Last thing that happens in your mouth, which is melts field, which is the sense touch, it's still part of your touch system. So part of the five senses, but it's going to be pain, which is what's going on with those Sabi. You're actually, nociceptors nociceptors are your pain receptors in your body, which is why your face gets red. Your nose starts running because your capillaries are starting to open. And so your everything just starts going haywire depending on how sensitive you are. Um, so it's pain, temperature and texture is, is, um, the sense of mouth feel in your mouth, the sense of touch. Okay? So then your brain is still integrating and it's like, cool. Now I have these new clues again, are they new? Are they old? Are they what's going on? And then your brain is going to your brain is going to decide, do you eat it? Do you spit it out? Do you eat more and so on and so forth? So the questions around is this genetically determined, taste preferences are inmate at birth babies. I always joke babies. Don't like IPA's Speaker 4 (15:53): Yeah. Dr. Nicole (15:53): Okay. Babies. Don't like bitter. So you were born, not liking bitter, not liking salt and sour. Some are in the middle. And we talked a little bit about this. When we, uh, in our, the last episode we did together on the mental health fitness steps, but then umami and sweet. Those guys, you have a predilection for right out of the gate. So in the womb, these are forming. So there's a genetic basis of these. That's very different than no smells are learned. There was no believe it or not, there is no one smell that everyone in the world says, that's we all agree. That's pleasant. And there's no one smell. There's some exceptions possibly. I won't get into them. That for the most part, humans, all agree is not pleasant. And so smell is learned. Now we're talking about not the ability to smell. We're talking about liking. So this is a big difference. There's your ability to detect something and that's genetic. And then if you like it, and at what level you like it for taste right out of the gate, you're born with it for smell. You learn it over the years and, and really you learn it in the wound first. And you also, it looks like there's some evidence that you learned to appreciate a good spicy food, or have a tolerance for spicy food in the world as well. Speaker 4 (17:19): Okay. The dogs are protesting. The dogs are saying they are so mad. They're, they're kind of shut up in a room. And, uh, they don't like that. Dr. Nicole (17:32): I feel like, you know, I know I had my, I had to take the kid and the dog looked professional. Speaker 4 (17:41): Um, Dr. Nicole (17:42): So Roy, there's not a connection in terms of the genetics. So, um, X, Y which versus X, X, X, Y makes the guy gal in terms of the genetic sex of a baby, it doesn't, there's not these genes aren't on those genes. So there's some, maybe some other connection that's going on that that could be explored about why ladies were choosing the salty sour product. And, um, there's a variety of things that could go into that. Going back to hunger level and macro micronutrients. Typically this stuff is going to be picked when you sweat a lot, or you need to do something to balance homeostasis. So that's why a lot of people drink athletes, drink pickle juice to replenish their electrolytes. Roy - Feeding Fatty (18:26): Oh, okay. Never heard of that order after their sports practice. Right. Exactly. Concentrate. Yeah. They were smarter. I can tell you that for sure. They still are. Dr. Nicole (18:38): Can we answered the pickle question? And we talked about it from the genetic perspective. There was one other one that I think you asked that I can't remember if he answered Roy - Feeding Fatty (18:45): The, uh, the one was just the confusion between, uh, you know, as you're bringing it up, the smell may signal one way or the other where your taste is actually something different. Dr. Nicole (18:58): Yeah. So we're beginning to really understand what's called, um, crossmodal sensory interactions, which is how does one sense either literally affect physically or cognitively in the brain affect the perception of something else? So let me give you an example of that. And this is, um, these are some of the things that when I work with food companies, they like to know which is, for example, in the U S we associate vanilla cinnamon and strawberry, and the color red, Mrs. Sweet. So I can give you a drink that has no sugar in it and make it smell like strawberry and make it red. And you're going to tell me, this is sweet. Wow. Interesting cultural it's learn. So that's cognitive. So that's happening in the brain. So other things that can happen is that that can happen. That's more physical is for example, spicy. When you have spicy food, there's evidence to show that when you activate mouthfeel and that pain reception in your mouth, it does something to increase. Dr. Nicole (20:09): I don't know if it's your awareness or is the actually the, the, the taste cells sending signals to the brain. We don't know where taste and smell perception goes up, which is why you can use spicy food, add more spices as you're decreasing salt and sugar and things, and still get that same reward. So yes, there's interactions between all of the sensory systems and there's even interactions within sensory systems. So chefs know this very well. You add a little bit of salt, it picks up the sweet, and it makes an, it decreases the bitter sweet and bitter D uh, our antagonist. They decrease each other. So not only are your senses interacting in some way, shape or form, and your brain is integrating it, which is wild. Even within one sense, like the sense of taste you're having these interactions that are occurring. That almost don't make sense because you're like, no, I know I have this much self, and I know I have this much sweet, but I'm getting actually this feeling of it. Right. Roy - Feeding Fatty (21:11): And that's a, it's a good one to talk about for just a minute too, because there's, um, a major fast food chain that along the way they figured that out is that if they would soak their French fries in sugar water, then it becomes addictive. And it does. I mean, it's hard if you know that and you taste it, you can kind of pick that up. But for years and years, you really, I never picked up that sweetness of them. Now, I understand why they are so addictive, not only the salt, but the sugar, that's it. Dr. Nicole (21:50): Because now you're having now, it's kind of like, you're being for lack of a better word, kind of tricked because it's high. It's not high enough that you're cognitively perceiving it only because there's a lot of other things going on. Usually if it's drive through or something like that, you're eating in the car. So your brain's paying attention to other things. You've got the salt. So you're not really being like, these are sweet French fries, and yet you're having a physiological reaction that says, Oh, that was energy. Yeah. And it used to be really hard to find. So he was like eating sugar, even when you don't even realize it. Roy - Feeding Fatty (22:23): Yeah. Oh yeah. And the other thing, I guess the converse of that is, uh, when we, when me personally, I will say, when I cut my sugar, when I'm watching my intake only, maybe eating more natural sugars, like, uh, you know, fruit and stuff, then all the sudden that the sweet, the natural sweetness of foods is very, very amplified. All of a sudden you'll eat something, one thing. And I think it's carrots that are very noticeable, but you eat them. You're like, wow, that was just like almost eating a candy bar. It was so sweet. Dr. Nicole (22:59): Yes. And I have many, a friends who study what's going on with dopamine in the brain and the reward system that is part of when you have intake of sugar. And, and it's true there, that reward system, you basically need to go higher and higher at that hit. So when you start decreasing, your perception is going to change with it. Especially if you're doing it mindfully, it's going to change your behavior, which is your perception and so on and so forth because it's beauty, it's either a beautiful cycle or a negative feedback loop of perception and mindfulness and what you're doing, changes behavior and behavior changes, perception, and so on and so forth. And I've noticed the same thing, um, with, with tracking, we talked about this quite a bit. Um, last time with tracking food, I'm like, Oh, wow, that has that in it. And it's making, when I do decide to do it, not out of habit, not reaching for things out of habit. When I decide to eat that peanut butter, I don't even know if it was peanut butter, chocolate, something from Coldstone. Speaker 4 (24:00): Well, that's good Dr. Nicole (24:03): Allergies. Oh my gosh. But when I decide to do that, because it's special because I was out with my five-year-old and we went to sushi together, and then we were going to go see a movie. The reward I got from that was out of control. Whereas before I used to just eat those all the time and be like, Oh, no big deal. So their behavior can change. Perception can change behavior in a very positive feedback loop when you're mindful of it. And those decreasing of taking in both salt and sugar, both of those things, your body then recognizes that and realizes that, um, you, you don't need the same concentration in order to get that same hit. And probably, I wonder, I wonder why two for salt for me, things too, if I go, if I get takeout food now is he's so salty to me. Right? Speaker 4 (24:47): Exactly. Yes. Anything pack all that package stuff. It's just, so it just tastes so different now that now that we know everything that's in it Roy - Feeding Fatty (24:56): And she bought some, uh, I don't know what they're called. They're like more they're blue, natural chips, I guess maybe it's yeah. Maybe a marketing gimmick, but supposedly they're a little better for you on carbs than regular. But, uh, when we had a bag of those, it was like, wow, that was like eating a block of salt is exactly what I thought, you know, because we had been watching our salt intake so closely that, and it really wasn't that much when we looked at the label, but just, just a little bit of elevation in the intake really wasn't. Speaker 4 (25:31): Yeah. And they were even, I think they were even, there were some that were cell-free I've gotten both, you know, that had just lightly salted, but the cell-free ones were good too. It was just the current we needed the crunch. Yeah. Roy - Feeding Fatty (25:42): I don't want to deteriorate too far off the subject. Just one more thing while we're talking about this is that, uh, you know, when I, a couple years ago, when I was diagnosed with, um, diabetes, I kind of goofed around with not really understanding the impacts of carbs and how much you ate when you ate them, all that. So, you know, after a couple months I went back to the doctor and he's like, what are you doing? He's like, yeah, if you haven't fixed or changed anything, I'm like, yeah. So anyway, he told me, that's when he told me, he's like, stay between this level of carbs, which was pretty low. So, um, he did that on like a Wednesday or Thursday. And then Saturday, I was out in the yard and I thought, I really thought I was done. I thought my blood pressure was so high. Roy - Feeding Fatty (26:27): And I felt like my head was fixing the top of my head was going to blow off and went up and got my blood pressure checked. I mean, I was scared. So I made an appointment, went in Monday and he was just laughing. He's like, you know, carbs are like drugs. He said, they are addictive and you just coming down off of them. Oh my God. But it was the worst feeling. But, you know, that's, that's, I guess that's what gets some of us like me in trouble, because you become addicted to, you know, that salt, that sugar, and then you need more and more and more until you just do too much. Oh yeah. Dr. Nicole (27:04): Yup. And then, like we talked about it's there there's starts with what's going on in the genetics and how you're even detecting it. And then from there, it's the things that you've taught your brain. Yeah. And sometimes we teach our brain is not the right things that we should be. Yep. Yeah. In fact, there's some really cool research I found fascinating, which was, and I can't remember the researcher's name now. I think it was at a Florida where they looked at how much somebody's anticipated the reward of a milkshake. And they were looking at it from lean, overweight and obese as a point of taking in carbohydrates and then how much reward they got from it. And it was this terrible cycle of that. The obesity was leading to a higher thought of reward, anticipation of reward, and then not hitting it when you ate it and then needing, and then wanting more. And it was, and it was a study that was done with, um, teenage girls, which was really fascinating. And I just thought, Oh my gosh. And then there was another study they did where you can call the same thing, healthy or treat same exact thing. And your is going to be like, and I don't want one that's healthy. That's the safe milkshake. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So some really easy neuroscience that, that I feel like the more you know about, you're like, Oh no, I'm going to retrain my brain. Roy - Feeding Fatty (28:40): Pay more attention, be more mindful. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. Dr. Nicole (28:43): And that's what you're onto is the mindfulness, not only in what and why you want it and when, and making that as decision and not out of habit, but also then the mindfulness while you're eating and really letting your brain be like, wow. Yeah, this is really good for what it is and not, and not, um, not having it go down so quick that you're not even paying attention. Roy - Feeding Fatty (29:04): Yeah. That's another good thing to kind of hit on too, is as I am an extremely fast or was a fast eater, I've learned to slow down, but you know, I grew up with, you know, there's a bunch of guys that we, we rodeo together and went down the road. And so whenever, you know, there'd be eight or 10 guys. And if you, if there was a bite left on your plate, if they would, if they got through first, they would eat it. And so you're like, yeah, it was self preservation. You know, you just had to eat as fast as you possibly could to get it, get your meal down. And, uh, that stuck with me over the years. It's and sometimes I catch myself as how I'm eating, but I think that helps us to slow down and mindfully taste the food, the texture, you know, the what is it? Is it salty? Is it sweet and try to, um, uh, enjoy it, I guess, is that why I get the stink-eye sometimes when we're finished and have dinner? Dr. Nicole (30:04): Oh my goodness. One of the things that comes up too, is the slower, the slower, more mindful you eat. It's not just about what's in feeling it in the mouth and the taste, but you're actually having better air flow between your mouth and your nose. So you get a lot more perception of a Romo's, which makes things more complicated, which, you know, complex in your brain, right. Which leads to higher levels of safety. So Roy - Feeding Fatty (30:27): There's a little bit of delay too, from, from the, I guess the receptors that tell you you're full. So, you know, what else I've heard is if you eat the slower you eat, you give that time to catch up and sing the sin signal, where if you eat fast, you just kinda eat past it and you get the signal somewhere down the road that, Hey, I'm full. But that was about 15 minutes ago. Dr. Nicole (30:51): Yep. Yep. I think you're totally right with all of that. And that was the hardest thing that I had when I started working with a nutrition coach. The hardest thing that I have is understanding portion controls because I would eat so fast and I realized that exactly what you said, boy, when I slowed down, I don't have seconds cause I'm actually already fall. Right. Roy - Feeding Fatty (31:11): Yeah. And it's just, I've, I've learned to it's even if I can eat the right amount of food, if I eat it off the same time or eat it later in the evening, so we have to be mindful of the quantity and portion size as well. But so how can we take these, um, the taste and how can we, I guess, use that to our advantage to try to eat right? And, or maybe even look at how we could not fall into the trap of eating, eating wrong or too much, but none of the knowledge of what we know Dr. Nicole (31:45): Yeah. From the taste perspective, I think the biggest thing that helps us a starting point is just recognizing and not judging how many tablespoons of sugar do you take in a day? Like just really understanding. And I'm not talking like, you know, nobody eats a tablespoon of sure. Okay. Maybe we'll do, I don't know. Most people don't yet, but understanding the sugar that's in what you eat and just starting there. Same thing for salt. Although salt is so, so much harder. I've had a much easier time limiting sugar than I've been able to limit salt, but they both are just get a feel for it. Like, okay, what am I taking in? And from there recognizing what is the, the not only filling but fulfilling for you. And usually the way that can work is by, by doing it mindfully, which we've talked about, you're going to get more of the hits of the more fulfilling, like protein. Dr. Nicole (32:40): So making sure you're getting that protein, but doing it in a way where your, whatever, your protein sources, you're doing it a little in a dry Browning situation so that you get that Brown crust. Okay. Okay. That's called the mired reaction and that's an interaction with some of the sugars and that's going on with, with some of the fat and a love of water content that is going to give you a huge hit of umami. And that umami hit is you tells your brain, Oh, this is the good stuff. Like this is high density, high, high, good caloric protein. So you want to pay attention more to those things and create your meals more around that big thick, wonderful, juicy, savory umami flavor, maybe a little bit of sugar, maybe a little bit of salt, and then really play on the spices in order to, to bring in, um, aromatics. Dr. Nicole (33:38): You really want to get the complex and complexity of the smells and then the textures. So textures play a big role in you figuring out like, Oh, does this feel full or not? Which is part of the reason why, even though I'm trying to get a hundred grams of protein a day, sometimes I can't get it and I'll do a protein shake. The non chewing means I'm not sending those six to my brain and my stomach that these things are coming and it can have a feedback that means you're not going to feel it. Not only is it not filling, but not, it's not fulfilling. Right. Right. Well, so that's how we can think of it from a taste perspective is how can you kick up the mommies? This is going to be for savory dishes, kick up the umami for non savory dishes. Like thinking more breakfast, the creamier a non-fat dairy product is for example, your brain will think it's sweeter. Dr. Nicole (34:31): Hmm. Okay. So, um, really want to go for, if you get, if you get like the non-fat European style yogurts that are like, you can just pour them, your brain's like, what is that? Right. If you get the Greek one, it's 0% fat, your brain is like, wow, that tastes sweeter. That is more fulfilling that. Yeah. So it's, it's tricking your brain in a lot of ways kind of like food companies do, but you're going to do it for good reasons. Yeah. But you're doing it in order to have your brain and your body say this is filling and fulfilling. And there's ways that you could trigger by doing that. I do want to mention that we talked about the taste of fat and there's a lot of confusion about the taste of fat. So when you think of fat, what foods come to mind? Like what fatty foods, Speaker 4 (35:23): Steak, chocolate, steak, fat, steak, fat, and stock that I don't know. Well, I'm getting really hungry are talking about this big doozy. Dr. Nicole (35:32): So all of those things that were just that we just talked about, and this is what the Americans will think about fats. Those are saturated fats. There isn't a lot of evidence that there is a taste for saturated fats. The taste of fat that has been studied for 30 plus years is unsaturated fats. Okay. And it's really interesting because by themselves they don't taste great. And they have the ability to go rancid pretty quickly, which you might've noticed. Like if you open a bar like olive oil or some of these other better fats, you're like, Whoa, like they tell you, keep it in the fridge. Not the oil is hard, but so they go bad pretty quickly. So the taste of fat that we have evidence for is unsaturated, fatty acids. And when you can taste it, it's usually an indication that it's gone bad. Dr. Nicole (36:24): So originally we thought, of course, you would need to taste this. These are good fats. Your body needs them. You can't make them. And it turns out that they are so often incorporated with other things. The only time that you can taste them really is if they've gone bad and it's an indication to you to not to eat it cause it's rancid. So that's our, you agree about why we've evolved to taste that in a survival perspective. Um, and it's totally mind blowing because normally you would think, no, that's something we need. So we should like the taste of it. Right. But when you taste it in your food, the particular molecule is the actual fatty acid molecules. So I'm not talking about like the case of avocado when you have avocado oil or the taste of macadamia, not when you have macadamia nut oils. Like those, those are the main flavors that are incorporated there. I'm actually talking to the pure taste of the fatty acids, like linolenic acid or leic acid. For the most part, it looks like we evolved to only taste them when they're not good anymore. So don't eat something that's been hanging out for a long time and get sick and die. Roy - Feeding Fatty (37:33): Yeah. And I guess that's part of assume that ha why the taste evolved or we had some to begin with and why they've evolved is that survival. I mean, we needed the, I guess the meat had to be cured. So it was salty to let us know it was probably good to eat. And then the, Dr. Nicole (37:51): Well, it would be wave before that. Right. So our developers are developing taste. The salt would have been long before humans were curing things with salt. Oh, Oh it wasn't. Yeah. So it wasn't, um, an easel easy to get in in that time for that. Yeah. So it was really interesting to think about that. When you think about our teams from the perspective of survival and evolution, you can really think to yourself, it's doing one of two things. It's either driving me towards something that I need to survive in a harsh environment, which we do no longer live in, or it's protecting me from something that could potentially hurt me, which also doesn't serve us because there's so many vegetables that are better, for example, that aren't poisonous and yeah. And you know, thinking about unsaturated fats, it's a big mystery for us to understand why it's an adversive taste. And when we know we need it, but it's because it had to do more with a complex food potentially going bad. Yeah. Yeah. So, and then again, salt and sour, these weird things in the middle that it depends on the concentration about whether it depends on the concentration of if you detect it at what concentration and then at what concentration do you like it the best. Yeah. Well, interesting. Speaker 4 (39:11): Yeah. Now I'm on brain overload now. Sensory overload. Oh my goodness. Roy - Feeding Fatty (39:21): Yeah. And that's what I've got to figure out is how, you know, to turn these vegetables into something that I like, because it's just, I cannot make myself like them. I just, it's hard. And I have to give Terry credit, you know, she does a lot of, uh, seasoning and a lot of things to try to make them more. But you know, some of it, like you said, it's that texture, some of it is the knowing, you know, sometimes she won't tell me what we're fixing to have, but it's, you know, there's a lot of stuff that goes into this eating, besides just the, you know, the actual taste of the food that doesn't hurt it. But there's, you know, I think the psychological part about just vegetables and herbs, I agree. Yeah. Speaker 4 (40:05): And he's still, he still will eat it. You know, he still says, Oh, this is the best thing I've ever had before I take the first bite, you know? Dr. Nicole (40:13): Yeah. And that brings us back to what we talked about right. At the beginning, Roy, you are basically saying, I am in charge of my behaviors. I'm making these choices and it's a long slog. It feels like, but those choices that you make in your behaviors are gonna eventually start retraining your brain and that perception will change. And you'll get to the point where all of a sudden you realize, Oh my gosh, I guess, do we, I don't even put salt on that anymore. I don't add sugar down. Yup. Um, Roy - Feeding Fatty (40:42): Now I was the worst about that. You know, salt went on everything before we even tasted it salt, pepper, but now, um, uh, very rarely, you know, we do while we're cooking, but not at once. It's been plated, no more putting salt on it, but yeah, Speaker 4 (40:56): Not as much, I mean just a little bit now, but when we first started this, you know, so many months, I don't even know how many months it seems like forever. Um, but uh, when we first started, he w you know, we'd cut out all salt and just tried to flavor it with, but you have to have a little bit, huh? Dr. Nicole (41:18): Yup. And that's what I'm finding now, now that I've been really patient with myself and I've, and I've worked on understanding and being mindful of, you know, what it is, I'm putting my body and enjoying it at that moment. I'm realizing yes. I can add a little Brown sugar to my oatmeal. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That's fine. I can add a little salt here. Yeah. Um, yeah, I think, you know, the real take home is that our brains are these amazing machines and flavors in the brain, and you have the ability to do this, to stop it being habit and, and start started being that you're making these active choices that will then retrain your brain. And I think that's good. I really do think that's the big take home of understanding the flavors in the brain and how all the senses play in and all the five plus tastes fit in. Yeah. Roy - Feeding Fatty (42:02): So like a regular habit, they will say 21 days to retrain your brain. Do you feel that the same goes with food, but you know, something that we do every day, you know, we may not eat, uh, broccoli cooked the same way three times a day, all day, every day for 21 days. So we suspect that it may take our, take us longer to retrain for taste. Dr. Nicole (42:28): I do for two reasons. One, because like you said, um, humans crave variety in what we eat. And so this isn't something where you can train yourself to drink a glass of water every morning, as soon as you wake up and you're going to be good. Right. Which is also a good habit. And also because you're fighting against hundreds of thousands of years of operation, so that doesn't turn off without you really being intentional about it and help you get there. Like that. It's just not going to happen. Yeah. Roy - Feeding Fatty (42:59): Well, Dr. Nicole, again, it's been such a pleasure visiting and uh, every time we talk, I feel that you and Terry must be Ken at some level. And just, we do need to go on a trip. I'm telling you, I, if I could suck you away, my suitcase, I certainly would, uh, Dr. Nicole (43:18): Well leave the dogs and the kids with Roy and stuff. Roy - Feeding Fatty (43:21): Oh my God. That's right. Yeah. I was asking her, who are you more worried about surviving this two weeks? Me, you know, me or the dogs. I'm not the one I hope we can all make it, but well, tell everybody how they can reach out and get a hold of you and what you can do. I know that you do a lot of speaking. I know you do a lot of working with a food company, so just let everybody know how they could reach out. Dr. Nicole (43:44): All right. Um, folks can find me on Instagram at dot Garneau, doc G a R N E U. And then from there is where I do lots of different postings and same hash, same handle on Facebook too. And my Facebook stuff, as Terry knows, is kind of the more personal vulnerable side of doc Garneau, where I do a lot more around, um, food and speaking and consulting on my Instagram. Roy - Feeding Fatty (44:08): Okay, great. So what is something we asked you this last time, but I it's been a couple of days, so I've kind of forgot, but what is a tool, habit ritual? What is something that you do every day, either in your business life or personal life that you don't feel that you could do without? Dr. Nicole (44:26): I can't believe I'm gonna say this because I was so scared to start working out again. I will never put working out second. I do it. I always say that the do the hardest thing first. And when I was, you know, more in my corporate land, that was very different, right? Like writing reports or doing something that you were dreading. Right. And now it's not that it makes it any easier, but I feel like I have somehow more mental confidence in myself and I'm showing up. And so I do my workout first thing, and don't get me wrong. The days that I rest days, I'm like, Oh, hallelujah. But I can't even let me say that because it just, that's not been my thing. And it still is the hardest thing I need to do. But when I do that, everything else is icing on the cake after the day. Yeah. Roy - Feeding Fatty (45:14): Yeah. And there's been a lot of talk about that, you know, between us and some of our other guests lately is just that taking the time for yourself to get out. Even if it's just a walk, clear your head. It's so good for not only ruined well, it's good for your health. It's good to reduce stress. And it's also good for your creativity. That's when, uh, that's I think that's when we take a brain break and just do something like that. That's a little mindless that's when we have some of our better ideas. Dr. Nicole (45:45): Absolutely. Yep. So I'm continuing to do the hard thing first, but that keeps evolving as my life changes and right now it's working out. Yeah. Roy - Feeding Fatty (45:52): That's good. That's awesome. All right. Well, thanks again. We look forward to talking to you again soon. So hope you'll come back and join us again. But, uh, again, this is feeding fatty. You can find us at www dot feeding, fatty.com. We're on all the major platforms, iTunes, uh, Google, Google play Spotify, uh, Pandora. If we're not on your major platform that you listen to, please reach out. Let us know. Also, if you have a good story about weight loss, getting healthy, we'd love to hear from you. Or if you're a professional that works with people, helping them out, love to hear from you as well. Also, you can find us on the normal places, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and also YouTube we have now started. I don't advertise that enough, but we've now started putting recordings of our tapings up live. So go check us out there until next time. Take care of each other. I'm Roy Dr. Nicole (46:50): I'm Terry. Thank you, Dr. Nicole. Great to see you. www.feedingfatty.com

dbaileygroup, llc is a full-service marketing and public relations firm offering clients a wide range of solutions to ensure their needs and objectives are met. Whether your needs are to identify and secure new clients, deepen your current client relationships, or your need to stand-out from your competition, we will listen to you and partner with you to define your needs and objectives, then strive to develop solutions that don’t just reach these goals, but exceed them. Our experience in marketing research, traditional and digital marketing, public relations and graphic design solutions will be the foundation for your success. Because the true measure of our success lies not in the recognition and awards we receive, but in the effectiveness of our solutions for your specific needs and, your continued satisfaction. “Professionals today need to define their target audience and present an enhanced presence and detailed strategy - and they need it done in a timely, cost-effective way. That’s where I come in. Whether my clients need support for their existing marketing departments or an entirely “off-site” marketing team; I’m here to bring a wide range of resources and years of expertise to the table. Ours is a customized - not an off-the-shelf - marketing strategy that never fails to exceed expectations.” Denice Bailey, Principal and Senior Account Executive, has over 30 years of extensive marketing and public relations experience. Prior to founding dbaileygroup, she worked as manager/director in marketing for a number of different companies including Zachry Associates, the Abilene Reporter-News, The Business Press of Fort Worth, and Morren+Barkin. Her previous client list has included such names as Aviall, Inc., The Associates Financial Services, Fort Worth Symphony, St. Joseph’s Hospital, Abilene Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Physicians Reliance Network. Denice is involved in many civic and community organizations and activities. www.dbaileygroup.com www.seniorlivingsalesandmarketing.com Full Transcript Below Roy (00:03): Hello, and welcome to another episode of senior living sales and marketing. I'm Roy. Uh, we're going to have with us today as a guest, Denise Bailey with the D Bailey group, we're going to be talking about a few different topics, uh, kind of on the sales side, more sales than marketing, but it's going to be all, uh, kind of all encompassing. So Denise, how are you doing today? Denice (00:27): And then I Roy (00:28): Am good. Good. Got the dogs stowed away. So I'm getting much better now. Anyway. Well, let's just jump right into it. Um, you know, the first thing that we talked about is that the sales process, especially at the community level is such a team effort. And, um, you know, as you visit communities, you realize that the receptionist is generally the very first impression that you get. If you didn't, you know, if you haven't called ahead, if you just are walk-in, so it's important to get them, um, especially, but also the, um, all the staff on board learning how to greet visitors and just, um, you know, kind of learning those different techniques of, I guess, how we need to act in front of somebody that's in our community for the first time. Denice (01:26): You know, I agree, Roy, I can't echo your sentiment enough. And part of that I believe, and I think you might agree with me as well, but I believe that is a culture and it comes down from the top and if the top assures that their entire team, and it doesn't matter who on the team within the organization or within the home does not feel empowered or part of the team. And they need to understand and respect and realize how their actions in their interactions could make a huge difference for the home. Roy (02:05): Exactly. Yeah. And, and, you know, I fault us as managers because we, we don't, um, in our orientation, in our own boarding, we don't really go into how key that certain positions are because of that. And, you know, I've, I've mystery shopped a lot of communities and come in and find somebody reading a book that, you know, it's like their heads in a book and they just pop their eyes over. They really can't even take the time to give you the attention to find out why you've even walked into their community that day. So, Denice (02:40): Oh, you know, you, you have shared with me a fabulous example and I've obviously I remembered it because I'm going to bring it up again about how our community, how our community there wasn't, you know, the marketing manager wasn't there, the administrator wasn't there and it ended up being someone in the kitchen that gave the tour and it was a fabulous tour. Didn't you share that with me? Yeah. Roy (03:07): Yes, I did. I was, uh, I was out of town traveling and went, you know, went to a community. And like you said, well, first off marketing manager was busy. They didn't have a receptionist. The, uh, executive director was out of pocket and they had a businessman. I don't know. There was like a business manager, the head nurse. I mean, we got like five or six deep, but the kitchen manager came out of the kitchen, all smiles and said, Hey, you know what? Everybody's tied up. I'd be glad to walk you around. And it was a fabulous tour. I mean, it was very personable. The young man knew the community left and right. Which, you know, somebody had to give him some direction to know that he didn't just walk in knowing that, which I thought was fabulous because I've been on the other side of the coin to walk in and then say, sorry, there's nobody here that can help you. Maybe it can come back and, you know, and, and in any business Roy (04:13): Exactly. Now that's, that's what it is. Like, you know, it's manna from heaven when somebody walks into your business, no matter what kind of business it is, you have to have a plan. I mean, you have to have an, a, B, C, and D plan to make sure that they are taken care of when they walk in. So yeah, it was a, it was something else. And then just the behavior. Cause the other thing that I've encountered is walk in and receptionist is, uh, you know, grap into their coworker about how somebody took too long for lunch or didn't do this. And the last thing I want to do, if I'm going to put my loved one into, uh, your community is, you know, that we're already, uh, you know, the infighting and griping and things like that. And not saying it doesn't happen, but it doesn't need to take place right out where everybody can see, Denice (04:59): No, it doesn't need to be, it doesn't need to be broadcast. It's like family business, you know, it needs to stay within the organization. Roy (05:08): Exactly. Yeah. That or you call in and the receptionist, you know, they think that they're doing the right thing by eating, uh, you know, being on their desk and eat. And, but they answer the phone with a big bite in her mouth. And you know, you can't understand them from chewing food, just little things like that, that, uh, something else, Oh, go ahead. Denice (05:28): One of my big gripes and it's not just within communities like this, I think it happens across all industries right now. Not just right now, but it seems kind of prevalent right now is me answer the phone and the person you're supposed to talk to, not the receptionist, but someone whose responsibility is to take care. Maybe it's billing, whatever. And it sounds like I woke him up and I have found myself saying, have I woken you from a Naprosyn today? No. And I said, well, maybe we could, like, you know, and I want to say, then why don't you put yourself in the best presentation that your company would appreciate. Right. You don't sound like I just woke you up from a nap, Roy (06:14): Little enthusiasm. If you're going to be on the phone, never hurts. Well, I was going to say kind of along that same lines is that if, uh, you know, if you have a spat with your spouse or if somebody upsets you sometimes it's okay just to say, you know what I need to be. I need to step away from this prospect facing for just a little bit while I gather myself up. And I think people, I think the leaders of the company would much rather see that than you, uh, you know, taking that out on them. And that's one thing I asked the lady that cuts my hair. And when I walk in and she's got some scissors up around my ears, I always ask her if she got a fight with their spouse or kids made her mad. Cause I sure don't want to lose an ear because of that. So yeah. You know, it's, it's a good thing too. Uh, but you know, here again, I think this is where we fail as managers, as we really don't set, take the time to sit down and explain all of these things to people. And uh, just how important that they Denice (07:13): Really are every single time. Roy (07:15): Right, exactly. Uh, yeah. You know, the other thing we had on our list is, um, I think it's a great ideal to use professionals to bring them in, to speak not only to your residents, but take that as an opportunity to invite prospects back in. I mean, if somebody, even if they've not come in, but if they've come in, they've toured, you kind of gave them a little bit of a sales nudge and they still haven't made a decision, um, inviting them calm in a non threatening manner to come back is an awesome idea. Denice (07:56): Oh, I agree. And it's it. The rewards are, are tenfold on how that can happen, you know? And oftentimes you find you're professionals, be it the attorney or the estate planner or whomever, it might be oftentimes I've seen that them, that they, the attorney or the estate planner or whomever say, listen, I have a few customers or a few clients that would like to hear this. Do you mind if I invited them? So I think it would be well-served for the community who is that who's hosting the professional, say, listen, Roy, if you have any customers that you feel would be beneficial to hear this, I'd welcome them to come and join us when you're here on Tuesday or whatever. Right. Roy (08:48): That yeah. Asking for that referral, especially in a group like a group kind of rate to get multiple people from the professional. We, you know, and I fall guilty. I fall, um, take blame or fall be guilty of this a lot. Is that just don't think about asking some people for that referral and referrals are such a cheap source to acquire a new customer of any kind, but especially, you know, in the senior living. Denice (09:20): Well, I, you know, I prefer the term cost-efficient than cheap, but referrals are very cost-efficient and a lot of times that referral is a hot that's the hottest lead you can get, right? You can't spot it, those hot, you can't even, even if you had the money or what would want to pay for it, you still can't buy those hot leads like that Roy (09:47): In, uh, you know, talking about referrals, the lawyers, the CPAs, the, uh, doctors, um, all those professionals are great sources because they are all authority figures to either the, uh, prospects or their family members who are helping them. And so they trust them a lot with their recommendations or, uh, any suggestions, but also, I think you enable that professional. If you've asked them to come out and share their wisdom, you know, people like to come out and some, sometimes they like to come out and help. Sometimes they like to come out and hear themselves talk, I guess it really doesn't matter if they can deliver some good information, then, you know, we want them, uh, that will kind of, uh, encourage them. Let's say that that would encourage them to make those referrals, even if they're not coming out to speak, you know, just, um, you know, maybe they come out once a quarter put on some kind of a, uh, seminar for everybody, but we kind of keep them engaged from visit to visit, to keep referring their clients as well. Denice (11:00): Yeah. I mean, you're stroking their ego. That's the best way to explain it. Roy (11:04): Exactly, exactly. So, um, Denice (11:08): You know what, I don't fault. I don't fault them. We all like to have, you know, we all like to be complimented either directly or indirectly like that on our expertise. So anytime any of us have the opportunity to showcase or feature our wisdom, we're all for it. Right. I'm a little guilty right now. Roy (11:30): Right? Exactly. No, we all are. And uh, but also it gives them an opportunity to pick up clients because then you may be introducing them to one of your residents or to another prospect. So it's, uh, it's reciprocal. And I think, you know, that is something I look for when people reach out to me and they want to, um, you know, see how we can help each. My experience is generally they want to reach out and see how I can help them. And so we have to, uh, really have a mindset of reciprocation. If we're going to ask somebody to do something for us, how can we help them out in return? Denice (12:09): It needs to be mutually beneficial. Exactly. Yeah. Roy (12:14): So let's talk about, um, phone calls converting to tours. You know, that's important. That's the bottom line is we want to, um, you know, get the family, get the prospect, whoever is going to be a decision maker. We want to reach out and get them into the community. For sure. And, um, I know I've listened to a lot of phone calls where we have a script that we feel like we've got to get through and we blow through some, um, what I'd call some, you know, maybe not buying cues, but some cues to say, let's just schedule this and move on. So have you got some tips on what can we do to position ourselves with phone calls, to, you know, turn them into tours more often? Denice (13:05): Well, I think you hit on it a little bit already right there. Roy is, and I think human nature is, and I read an article the other day on this is we are not, we like to think we are listeners, but human nature is we're not listening as we should be. Right too. We're too eager to we're listening enough just to respond. Right. And sometimes that's, that's an opportunity. Or let me rephrase that. Sometimes the disadvantage of that is we are missing opportunities because we're too focused on, Oh, I need to say this. I need to say this. And we don't hear that next thing. So I think we all, and I'm guilty of it too. Roy. I think we all have to just take a deep breath and listen and listen within and not listen to respond. Yeah, Roy (13:56): Yeah, no, go ahead. I'm sorry. Denice (14:00): You interrupted. But I think if we listen with intent and not listen to respond, you can take notes, you know, and you can listen, listen. And part of that, you have discovered opportunities. And so when somebody says something, as you listen, you can go back to that and say, you know, a minute ago, when I was listening to you talk about X, Y, and Z, you mentioned dining and how your loved one has not had a good dining experience. Roy, I'd like to have you out at dinner. I'd like for you to be my guest here for dinner one night and come see how our, our dining experience for our community is unparalleled to others that you may be considering this time. Roy (14:52): Yeah. That's an awesome idea. And that's what I was going to say is that, uh, a lot of times in the conversation, it's okay to say, can I take notes? Do you mind if I take notes, it helps me to be a better listener. Instead of trying to remember, you've said four things already that I would like to respond to or tell you more about. Now I've got to, I've got to try to hold onto these until you get through talking. And then I haven't really heard anything else because I'm so focused on remembering these things. So ask it. It's, uh, it's not a sign of weakness that you have to write something. Denice (15:27): I didn't ask that. I did it anyway. I didn't ask that I did it anyway. Right. I'm sorry. I didn't never, I should have asked. Roy (15:35): Yeah. When I'm in, when I, uh, on the phone, I do it. But you know, like if I'm in person, you know, I always like to put them at ease. I'm not taking secret notes on them or something like that, that this is just, you know, to help me remember what I want to talk about. And, you know, there's that old saying that, um, that's why God gave us, uh, two years and only one mouth, because maybe we're supposed to be listening twice as much as we're talking, which that's always good advice. Denice (16:05): You know what I have to do sometimes Roy. Yeah. If I'm on the phone at my office, in my office and I need to, I need to listen with intent and not listen to respond. I have some post-it notes. I don't have them here in front of me, but I have a post-it note. Each of them are this size and they spell out the word, listen, and I put them on my monitor. So every time I go to look up, I see it right there. Or even single L helps because again, that's human nature. I don't think any of us are, are born superior listeners. I think we all. And again, I'm talking to, I'm preaching to myself on this. I think we all have tremendous room for improvement with listening. And when you listen and can take notes, then you uncover tremendous opportunities. Right? Roy (17:03): The other thing that we're always doing too, I think when you take notes and when we listen, intently is, um, we are building in awesome follow up opportunities because, um, I don't know what the numbers are today, but typically it's what, between eight to 12 touches before you close somebody. So, um, you know, so if we're sitting down with somebody on that first, you know, where we're just fact finding, gathering information, unless their need is very, very high, we're probably not going to close them immediately. So instead of, um, you know, in three days from now, instead of just calling and saying, Hey, are you ready to buy yet? Are you ready to move in yet? You know, we can have that. Um, what I call thoughtful followup. If we learned that, that they like to paint, then we can, you know, call and say, Hey, you know, we're having a painting class or talk about painting, gardening, whatever their, um, whatever their hobbies are, whatever their interests are. It creates a good followup that we can start a conversation and they don't feel like that. They're just getting beat up every time they see you, your name come up on the phone, like, Oh, that guy's going to ask me if I'm ready again. I know he is. Denice (18:22): I love that idea. I love that idea. And I think, again, everyone wants to be invited. Everyone likes to be invited. And like you said, be a painting class, or maybe it's a wine tasting class or whatever the case may be to take those notes and listen with intent and then use that as part of your followup is, you know, you don't get a better opportunity to have a good touch if you will, right in the sales cycle then saying, listen, you know, you shared with me, your father enjoys painting. And you know, we have a guest artists coming in Thursday to do a painting class. Why don't you bring, why don't you come see, or if your father feels like he'd like to come see, be our guest, come join the class. Even as a non-resident, you can come join our class. Roy (19:15): And while we're on the soap box, you know, follow up is definitely on my soap box because, um, you know, I think it's not just this industry. It's all over. We are. So, um, we want instant gratification, a lot that, you know, we reach out and if you don't buy, then I'm off to the next person. Instead of taking that time to drip, you know, in, in, in farm. And it's the, you know, we so cultivate and then we reap, we don't go from sewing to, uh, you know, reaping the harvest in that one step. And so trying to develop those opportunities. And another great question is how do you want me to follow up with you? People are pretty smart and intuitive. They know you're going to reach out to them one way or the other. Let's at least try to ask them what is their preferred method of contact? Roy (20:05): Just God forbid, somebody would text my mother. She might see it in a month from now, but that is not the best way to follow up with her. And, uh, you know, my, and my kids following up with them, uh, through voicemail, um, you can't even leave a voicemail because it's full. They just don't check them. And so, you know, trying to find out what everybody's a preferred method, it's, it's a must ask and it's not bad. I mean, it's not a surprise. Like, Oh my God, you mean you're going to follow up with me. Like, no, they knew they know you're going to stay after them. Denice (20:38): I agree. Yeah. And that's, I think that's a courtesy to anyone, the customer or prospective customer a colleague is, what is your preferred? How would you prefer me to, you know, keep in touch with you? You know, I just, um, there's and again, you know, we can talk about this at ad nauseum, but there are so many missed opportunities, you know, I have had even myself, I, um, via the, um, the professional social media platform, you know, I've received, you know, we do this, we do that. Would you be interested? And I say, yeah, let's schedule a demo. And I bet I could get on there and identify six people that they were, they had, they had me going to the next stage of the buying cycle and it was crickets crickets. Right? Roy (21:34): No, that's and that's me too, like, especially on the followup phone call, there's some times that somebody reached out, I'm like, yeah. And it's not a blow off, but it's like, something was going on. Right. That minute. I was like, yeah, if you could just get back with me, you know, when a couple of days when I have some time to think about it and talk about it, and then you just never hear from him again. So, but, um, I think sometimes we can take away from that too, is that how we're going to be treated? You know, if we were to become a customer. And so, you know, it's, again, it gets back to a company culture type thing is we need to, again, it starts at the top, but we need to express to our sales representatives. How do we want to be represented in the community? And it's, as a caring, loving, nurturing environment is usually what we want to be. Denice (22:26): I agree. Yeah. Oh, go ahead. No, I was just gonna say that, um, there are too many, too many businesses vying for the same customer, and I'm not saying all those businesses are doing it well, but just like what you said, you know, think about how you want to be treated right in and try to recip or try to replicate that. I had a sales manager once very early in my career said, if you go to McDonald's and you order a cheeseburger with no onions, just meat, cheese only, and you get that burger and it comes and it's loaded with everything onions and all, what's the first thing that you do. And I said, well, I take it back. No, I paid for it. I want it. Right. Well, you know, that's how we need to think about how we want our customers to feel. Not that they're getting a cheeseburger with onions when we asked for no onions and that cheeseburger, again, I'm showing my age here at McDonald's was probably only a buck 19 at the time, but it doesn't matter if it's a dollar 19 or a thousand or 19,000. You still want it. The, you still want to get what you're paying for and I'm not really talking more. So in terms of the price element of a process, I'm talking about taking care of it and assuring that their product is handwrite, right? Roy (23:57): Yeah. There's a great saying now that, uh, you know, we used to call it in the olden days, the golden rule treat people the way you want to be treated, but somebody finally figured out, it's like, well, why don't we treat people the way that they want to be treated, because we're all different in some respects. So again, asking those questions, it helps us uncover clues about what's important to people and how that they expect to be treated as we go through this process, because it is a process, unless you're just extremely lucky. And I've had a few of those where, um, you know, it's a, one-call close, but typically it is a process and we're just starting on the journey and we need to make that, you know, get it right in our minds that this is just the beginning. And so how do we, um, you know, how do we get through this? Denice (24:46): Yep. Yep. Roy (24:48): One more thing that we talked about or want to talk about is speaking to groups, um, kind of goes along with the, uh, I guess it's kind of goes along with a little bit of opposite of the professional referral and, and that would be us as the marketing or sales professionals getting out and talking to, um, you know, whoever your audience is, wherever your audience goes, but I'm thinking more like [inaudible], uh, you know, professional organizations, chambers of commerce, again, another chance to get your name out, I'm sorry, Denice (25:23): The rubber chicken circuit. Exactly. So Roy (25:28): What kind of tips can you give us on, you know, seeking out groups, talking to groups, I know you do a lot of that. So, um, Denice (25:38): Well, you know, I always tell my clients that, you know, they can do it one of two ways they can develop a database if you will, of those civic organizations, you know, and the best place to start with I find is going to your local chamber of commerce. And just asking if they have a, a civic organization list and most chamber of commerce is have that available. And what I suggest is to get that, obtain that list and then just go in and make sure it's up to date, you know, make sure you have the current president, the current program chair, all the relevant information. And when it's time, you know, when you find that you need to start again getting on that circuit and making those presentations just call. And it's as simple as, you know, I would be honored to come and speak to your members at your next lunch, or if you have, if you need to fill in, you know, holler, if you have someone canceled the last minute, if it works for my schedule, I'll be right there. Yeah. Roy (26:39): Always good to have something to take along with your name, something you can hand out, actually put, you know, in somebody's hand for them to walk out of the meeting with, because, um, you know, I've done that before. It's like, uh, somebody who's talking to me and it's not registering, don't really know anybody that I can't use. The service don't know anybody lo and behold, you walk out and get back to the office or next time you're at a friend's house. It's like th th you know, now I know who could use that. And so if I've got something on my desk or something, I took away from it, I can go back and find the contact information that it's, to me it's very important to, you know, be prepared, have not only business cards, but if you have like a one-sheeter about your community, your service things that you do, um, very helpful. Denice (27:30): And I like to take that a step further, Roy and I like to provide, you know, tips like tips on, you know, in this instance, what are the top 10 questions you must ask when visiting communities for a loved one and have some backs on there. So they, you know, again, your name and contact information may not be relevant immediately, like what you said, but these tips could be very relevant at the time, or someone else may find them relevant. And then at the bottom of it, again, is your contact information. So, you know, when some people use recipes, you know, I've seen them use, you know, family favorite recipes and, you know, they put it in the recipe box or stick it on the refrigerator. So there's, I think, again, I take it a step further, but I'm weird like that. I think there's some great, um, opportunities to assure that it doesn't get lost in the clutter or thrown away. Roy (28:25): Yeah. And that brings up a great point about the, um, um, the recipes. So here's a great story about followup is this has been about six years ago when I sold my house before I moved out to the Lake, the, um, uh, talked to five or six different real estate agents. And, uh, you know, I, I hadn't bought or sold a house in about 15 or 20 years. So I was like, I'm going to go over these. And I picked the younger, uh, she was an, she was my age of a woman, but she was new in the business. So she was, uh, she was excited. She had a lot of energy and I thought, well, this is going to do me the best, uh, the service for me to help me get the best press she was taking pictures and doing all this stuff. Roy (29:14): So then as we go through the process, all of a sudden, you know, she became the buyer's agent, not, not intentionally, but unintentionally about, well, you know, we need to do this and you should do this. And I'm like, Hey, you know, you, you need to remember you're on my side on this. You need to sell this property to them highlighting all the good stuff, not the bad stuff or me it, because if I'm gonna rebuild it, I'll probably end up staying here. Anyway, if I have to put a of money in it. So, uh, you know, after about five or six months, we finally parted ways. There was another one, another agent that I had originally interviewed every month, every month, like clockwork. She sent me a recipe in the mail, and this was hard in the snail mail, the old fashioned way. She sent me a recipe that was written out by hand, as well as the comps for my neighborhood, as well as just some other real estate related stuff. Roy (30:16): And, you know, she dripped on me for, you know, this five or six month period. And so, uh, after, after I partied with the initial one, I called her hired. Or if you can believe it, she sold the property for above what I was asking for it within a month. Oh, wow. Yeah, it was simple in this, this wasn't in this frenzy buying and selling likes going on now, it was a much quieter time, but I think the lesson for me was that if this lady was willing to continue to market to me and to reach out and follow up, I knew that she was probably doing that with buyers as well. So anyway, we just can't underestimate that staying in touch because, uh, you know, sometimes even if a person moves into another community, maybe they're unhappy or something, but if we are continually reaching out, then we would be the first person that they think about if they need to make a change or want to make a change. Denice (31:22): Yeah. I love drip campaigns and I, um, I have used them myself and continue to, and encourage anyone that's in a sales role to find what they would be most comfortable with in terms of keeping their name top of mind. Yeah. You know, recipes are a great example. They're fabulous example cook, but, Roy (31:50): Well, and that's, that's the important thing is keeping top of mind, because I like me, I remember who I've talked to last. And so if I haven't talked to you or heard from you, if I need your service may not be that I don't like you, or don't like your service. It may be that there's somebody else that's just fresher on my mind. And so that's the importance of, I think that drip campaign is just to stay out there and stay fresh. And there's so many tools. I mean, like this lady, she did it, the old fashioned way. She did it, pencil paper, put it in the mailbox, but there are a lot of tools to help automate that, to make it easier, to get our message out timely monthly and to, you know, a mass audience. So take advantage of that for sure. Yeah. But I think, you Denice (32:40): Know, I think the old fashioned snail snail mail way has tremendous value still from Linda's side. And you know, it's not the cheapest way to do it anymore. Certainly not the cheapest, but I think it, in some respects it can be more impactful. Roy (32:58): Yeah, no, you're right in there. I don't have them in front of me, but there, there were some studies that showed that, especially for senior living that snail mail was still one of the highest return rates because we're putting something in somebody's hand put, maybe they put it on the kitchen refrigerator. Uh, and a lot of people aren't doing it. So our mail is not as a cluttered. My mailbox is not nearly as cluttered as what it probably was five or six years ago. Denice (33:26): Well, I'm not saying that this is a good option for, uh, your senior community, um, audience, but look at this great, um, piece that I got in the mail. It's UPenn, yada, and it has candy in it. And there's the mailing label. Roy (33:43): Oh my gosh. That's awesome. Denice (33:46): Isn't it though. And I'll read it to you real quick. Roy says you shouldn't take candy from strangers. I guess that means if you want to eat what's inside of this pinata, we should get to know each other. Let's hop on a quick call. Roy (34:00): It was awesome. Yeah, it is. And it doesn't even have to be that intricate, but the message, the messaging in that is so creative and, you know, that's what we need to do is think outside the box and develop those creative methods. So Denice (34:16): That's what I'm here for a plug. Roy (34:20): Um, I guess we'll go ahead and wrap it up. Denise. Thanks. You know, one thing I want to do need to plan on is we need to have just one episode where we talk about nothing but tools that sales and marketers can use. There's so many out there and I get that question all the time, you know, what do you use for this or that? So, you know, anything from CRMs to the, uh, uh, newsletter, emailers, any, you know, all kinds of stuff like that. So we'll need to do that. Denice (34:51): Well, I want to offer your listeners something and again, you know, no commitment, no strings attached, but for your listeners who email you directly, I'd like to offer them the top 10 things to consider when looking at retirement communities for, for them to possibly hand out as another touch. Okay, great. And then they can brand it themselves. Okay. Roy (35:17): Yeah. And just send that email toRoy@seniorlivingsalesandmarketing.com. If you send that, I will pass it to Denise and we will get that in your hand. Denice (35:26): Yeah. I'd be honored to send that to your listeners. Roy (35:30): Well, tell everybody if they want to reach out to you directly, why don't you tell them how they can get ahold of you? Um, thanks Denice (35:38): Roy. Denise and it's D E N I C E Bailey B a I L E Y with D Bailey group it's deep Bailey group.com. And I can be reached at D as in Denise, B as in Bailey, at D Bailey group.com as well. Roy (35:55): Well, thanks again for taking time out of your day and joining us. Uh, it was a good talk. We cover a lot of subjects. If somebody wants to reach out to either one of us, we'd be glad to continue that conversation and, uh, be glad to help you out wherever we can. So until next time again, this is Roy at, uh, with senior living sales and marketing, and you can find us@wwwdotseniorlivingsalesandmarketing.com. We're on iTunes, Stitcher, Google play, and Spotify, as well as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter until next time. Thank you.  

Dr. Nicole Garneau Five Mental Health Fitness Tips   From an early age I loved both science and entertaining. I did stand up comedy in my 4th grade talent show, and played the lead Andrew Sister in a high school production about the 1940s. And yet, I also learned the fungi (fun-guy) joke in 6th grade, won my share of science fairs, and by my sophomore year, had declared to my folks that I was going to be a geneticist. See, dreams do come true! I’m now doing what I love most, talking science and inspiration, and making people laugh full time. Following high school, I loved my time on the banks of the old Raritan, completing my BA in Genetics at Rutgers College. I then took off a gap year to gain a sense of self, before going full force into my PhD in microbiology at Colorado State University. This led to a business internship with CSU Ventures, volunteering for the Colorado BioScience Association, and eventually a ten-year career as the curator and chair of the Health Sciences Department at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. And now, I’m honored to be recognized as one of the top 5 most influential young professionals in Colorado, a 2020 CiviCO Governors Fellow, and a serial entrepreneur. I live with my husband and daughter in Denver, and delight in immersing myself in nature when I’m not immersed in designing and customizing presentations and trainings for my corporate and nonprofit clients www.drnicolegarneau.com nicole@drnolegarneau.com www.feednigfatty.com info@feedingfatty.com Full Transcript  Roy (00:02): Hello, and welcome to the feeding fatty podcast. I'm Roy, I’m Terry. And, uh, you can find us at www.feeding fatty. Com. We do have, our podcasts uploaded. We just, uh, put a new one out there today. So please go check us out. Uh, as you know, most of the time we chronicle our journey about myself and Terry and her helping me, you know, get in shape and get healthier. But we do have guests along the way. And today we're very fortunate to have Nicole Nicole Garneau. She is our scientist next door. She provides consulting training and she's a keynote speaker. She likes to talk about how you can bring science to your table. She was, uh, recently, uh, acknowledged as one of the top five, top five, most influential young professionals in Colorado. And she is known for one of her keynote speaking, speak one of her keynote speeches, neuroscience of happiness. And I think that's what got our attention, uh, that, and she works a lot with tastes. But what we wanted to talk about is that you can make a lot of changes in your life and that still may not make you happy. You have to work on the mental aspect. And Nicole has been good enough to put together five tips for our mental fitness. And, uh, Nicole will go ahead and turn it over to you. Dr. Nicole (01:38): Wonderful. Thank you so much, Roy and Terry, I'm super psyched to be here, so to speak. I'm using my bunny ears on the podcast. Roy (01:47): Well, and you know, the, uh, we talked a little bit, you know, when we did our initial call, we talked a lot about that. You know, I've got to a point in life a few times that I've really thought that, you know, maybe about having the surgery, but what I always come around to is that if, if you don't get things fixed between your ears, then any kind of surgery surgery, or anything else that you can do to your body is not going to help you. Dr. Nicole (02:18): Yeah. And when we talked, I was really the thing that drew me to both of you all is that you're approaching this such an authentic way. And I think, um, health and fitness and nutrition, it has this kind of very intimidating persona. And a lot of it, doesn't always talk about the fact that you got to get right in the head. Like you said, you got to get in between the ears and that's really the foundation. If that is crumbling, all the rest of the stuff you're going to do is not gonna, it's not going to hold true. Right. So we started talking first about taste stuff, which is my equities, and then started getting into the neuroscience side. And it felt like a real good topic for us to bring to your list. Roy (02:54): Yeah. Because I, you know, I struggle with that and, you know, just, we try to be authentic. I think that's the main thing is we, we put it all out there, embarrassing or not embarrassing. And, uh, you know, we're going to have another me and Terry taught in, you know, at the end of this week probably. And that we struggle. I struggled last week. Uh, Terry's mother had gone into the hospital. And so she was taking care of her most of the time. And it, it blew my routine, which just totally, totally mess me up. And then that led to getting off a little bit on sleep. And that was one thing I've known that really shined a light on the last month or two is that if I have any disruption in my sleep patterns, I'm pretty much done. And so anyway, I just, I think that's one reason. And, uh, hopefully we're gonna be able to talk you back, talk you into coming back because we do want to touch on those. Uh, the five tastes, that was an enlightening thing again, that, you know, uh, have just really found out about him was interesting. But I think that this mental aspect probably needs to be the first thing that we talk about in order to set that up before even worry about anything else. Dr. Nicole (04:14): I like it. So should we get into it? Let's go. Let's do it. Okay. So my first tip, and this was one that I struggled with a lot, being someone who was raised first born and my parents divorced are young. So I would taking care of my siblings and, you know, not starting trouble, not getting in trouble, being the good kids blah-blah-blah is that you feel alone and you decide, well, I guess I am alone. And the first mental fitness kits for, um, for getting your body fitness, where it needs to be nutrition is you gotta own that. You're not alone. Um, and there's two things that I really want to point out for this one. You guys already mentioned, you have to inform, inform, inform the people around you, who can support you, and you just gotta put it all out there. Um, I know that you guys do that for each other. And the fact that when Terry was gone, where you were like, what am I gonna do? Dr. Nicole (05:10): Um, but like coming up, we have a, so there's a small group of couples who are going, all of us are going to Telluride together this weekend for a birthday. And we're all getting our Colby test ahead of time and rented a place. And, um, I wasn't barest to reach out to people planning cause they're planning all the food to friends of mine. And at first I was embarrassed to say, listen, I am putting my recipes in my fitness pal. I am looking at sodium and saturated fat and how much protein I get in the day. Should you share with me what you're cooking? So I can kind of pay attention to what I need to do, because I need to know that I can fill in the gaps with bringing oil bag or whatever I need to do to make it right. Um, and I was a little bit of a shame even though because of my best friend. Roy (05:53): Right? Right. Well, we had a recent encounter is maybe even I'll try to top you. One is that we, we went over to my mom's for breakfast. Then I had to actually correct her and say, Oh, watch out on putting that salt in those eggs that we don't need that. And I felt terrible. You know, it just kind of blurted out, but it's like, Hey, you know what? If we don't tell other people they're never going to know and no, you know, we have to, Dr. Nicole (06:21): You got to get comfortable with saying, you got to get comfortable with saying like, Hey, this is what I'm working. Here's my struggle, which also ties to the mental health. It's a really stigmatized thing as is, as is nutrition. Um, so that's, that was the first part of you're not alone. The second part is you're going to reach a part in your journey, no matter where you are, that you are going to need something besides your brain. And this was a very recent thing for me that I decided to bring coaches into my life. And I had been taught as that firstborn child to not ask for help and to not say no. And I carry that through almost all of my academic and professional career to museum when I was a curator there. And this is something I've had to overcome is to say, no, I am not equipped. Dr. Nicole (07:05): I am not a professional. I do not know how to do this anymore for my, what will be a 40 year old body, right? When I was 20, it was easy. You ate whatever you wanted. I maybe went for a run. I don't know when I was a size two. It just didn't matter. Nothing mattered what you did and you reach a point where you go, Holy heck, I can't do the things I used to rely on. So I had a brain injury and I have, uh, I hurt my knee and have a meniscus tear so I can just run and be like sweet. But in those jeans and I can't keep eating the way I was doing. And I didn't know how to change those things. I literally am not equipped. I do not have the expertise and it was life changing. When I bought in the coach. Dr. Nicole (07:46): Now I know not everyone can do that. It is expensive, but there are a lot of free online resources on Pinterest and a bunch of other places, YouTube. We can get free workouts for people with knee problems, cardio for people who can't, you know, can't run. Um, my coach, which is shift human performance. She, her Pinterest page has all these like one pan recipes that are the perfect balance of protein and micronutrients and so on. So there's free resources out there. So don't feel like you have to spend the money, but know that as soon as you make that decision, but universe is going to be like, okay, I got you. We're going to do this. Right. That's kind of where I feel right now. Roy (08:21): It's a big thing. And I'm being a firstborn too. I think you feel that, but also, you know, being a male. Um, and my generation, of course, you know, we were always kinda made to feel that, you know, that that's a sign of weakness. If you have to ask for help and can't handle it, but it's not. I mean, if you think about, we've got professional athletes that are very gifted from the moment they're born, but they work hard and they make millions of dollars. And guess what? They've got coaches all up and down the sideline that helped them with everything, from their calling, the plays to what the defense may be, to what, uh, and to their mental health and their mental aspect, you know, as well as weights and every, you know, they have coaches for everything. So why do we have such a stigma tied to that, that you know what we may need help and you need to reach out to somebody Dr. Nicole (09:17): That's right. And you need to have the bandwidth to keep this up, which ties to your sleep piece, which is why you need to learn to say no to things. If it's not speaking to you and it's not expansive, um, we have to look, we have to really be kind to ourselves, especially during a pandemic when our energy is being torn, a lot of directions with tension, you gotta preserve that energy for yourself as well. So that's, that's kind of the other tip of, of saying, you know, ask, asking for help and saying for no two things that we're really not taught to do, but tie to how mental health is, um, a big part of your physical health. Terry (09:51): Yeah. Saying no is a hard, it's such a hard thing. I mean, and I'm only, I'm a third born, but I still, but there were like five years in between myself and my oldest sister. So it was kind of like, we were two separate families, so it's kind of like, I'm a firstborn. Um, but it's hard. It I'm telling you, asking for help is not an easy thing to do. Roy (10:15): See. And I was debating this, I was debating this the other day is that, um, there was a book that somebody put out that, that said, say yes to everything for a year. And I'm like, ah, I just, while you want to be nice, I guess the, the, the mindset that I've taken as I've grown older, because I used to be much worse than I am now, but where I'm at now is like, time is the most precious resource or asset that I have. And if I don't protect it, nobody else will. And I mean, I'll give you a good example is, um, I'm bombarded on LinkedIn consistently every day. I probably get anywhere between 20 to 30 emails, some sometimes, or they're pushing, uh, you know, something that has nothing to do with me, but used to, I would take the time and try to answer and reach out to everybody and say, no, thank you, whatever. Roy (11:16): Then it turned into a conversation. Just let me, you know, just five minutes, let me get on a phone call with you. I can change your mind. And so anyway, if you take, if you take five minutes that it may take you to respond times 20 people, that that's a hundred minutes of your life in the day of totally unproductive time, because you've, you know, if you know, you don't need their service and there's really not a match for you to do networking, then it's totally wasted. So I I'm trying to practice that more, be better added. I still kinda have little soft spy every now and then, but I can't imagine that somebody that would take this mindset to say yes to everything anyway. Dr. Nicole (12:02): Yeah. I like to, I like to clarify it to say, so what I always teach my students and the people that I mentor say yes to the universe when the universe, when the universe puts something in front of you, that lights you up. Right. So that's where you can't let fear in saying yes to everything. I don't know. No, that would be so hard. Oh my gosh. It just wears you out. Maybe three children, maybe when I was like mid twenties and I had all the energy in the world. Um, that's right. So the next one is that, and this is a twist on a quote from Robert Holden that I sent you, which is a British, he's a British psychologist, um, is no I'm going to paraphrase it. No amount of self-improvement can replace self-acceptance. And this is where we have to really start digging into the root causes of why we have these triggers and habitual actions that are basically sabotaging our physical bodies. Um, and this is hard for people. Cause again, there's a lot of stigma around people don't want to talk about that. There's root issues to why they reach for that same Ben and Jerry's ice cream Sesame. Or why do you take the, you take the trip down to seven 11 at 10, 11 o'clock at night. [inaudible] Dr. Nicole (13:23): God you're killing me. So, so here's the deal. Sometimes you're not, you'll know when you're ready for therapy. And I, and I would say that that is the number one thing that has helped me through. Um, but there's other ways you can start working through this on your own if you're not comfortable with that stuff yet. And it's all there also free steps. You basically need to put it into the physical plane, which means the two ways that I did it and still do it in addition to therapy is I journal when I feel it, when you're getting that bluesy feeling or where you feel a trigger before you take action journal about what you're feeling, because you have to start getting aware and where you and I have talked about this, what are those triggers and why? Because if you don't know the triggers, you're, you know, you can lift weights and eat all the right things. But as soon as that trigger hits, you're down the spiral. Roy (14:07): Right? And that, that was me. That was me last week is, you know, with our routine being shaken up with having to, you know, think out of the box to prepare some food because, you know, I have to admit Terry takes very good care of me by making sure, you know, she cooks most evenings and even cooks a little extra for lunch the next day. And so, you know, now I'm out of my element over there, scrounging through the refrigerator, trying to find something and it's easier. And I didn't, but I thought about it, it's easier run up and have some Chick-fil-A and those nice fries that they have. And so that was always my first thought. And then I would have to say, you know what, I kind of take a step back and not do that. I just totally fall apart, you know, with this a little bit of adversity. Roy (14:56): And I think that's more what it is. It's just something that's different and a little bit tougher that you have to really think through. But I will tell you, you know, I had, I've got the midnight, you know, run into the cute, we, we have QuikTrips is kind of like our 7-11s around here. So, you know, running up to the QT at 9 or 10 o'clock at night, getting some cookies or this or that. So it doesn't do any good not to keep stuff in the house. If all you're going to do is just drive up to the grocery store and get it, get it when you want it. But the other, I think the big thing for me too, though, is there being time in between the trigger and the action to actually, um, to do the journaling or think about it and cause that's another thing I've noticed it's very impulsive and almost just like a natural reaction when you have that feeling just to do it and not think about it. Roy (15:53): And you know, I'm fortunate that I can talk to Terry. A lot of times I'm like, Hey, you know what, I'm feeling, uh, feeling some hunger coming on or wanting a candy bar or whatever, you know, and she can talk me down off the cliff, but if I'm here by myself, you know, good luck with that, I'm like heading out. So how, how do you, um, I guess you just have to be in touch with yourself, but I would like to know how do you kind of have that time in between the thought and the action to actually, you know, sit down and journal or how do you kind of make yourself slow down just a minute? Dr. Nicole (16:31): Yeah. So, so I want to come back to the resilience piece. I'm going to answer this question. I'm gonna tell you another tip around this. So I'm answering this piece is at first, I didn't even know I was doing it. So that's the first thing you just have to know you're doing it. So for me, my like dirty secret is like when it gets close at night and I'm just tired of all get out and I don't want to do with my kid and I don't want my husband judging me cause he's in super good shape and I'm not. And I go, when I sneak peanut butter and mini chocolate chips, literally with a spoon and it was so I've started tracking that I'm tracking my calories and my fitness pal. I put it in there cause you can't be lying in your coat. She's not going to be able to help you. Dr. Nicole (17:15): If you lie to your coach right therapist, it doesn't work. So I started putting it in there. So now I have less shame about it and I plan for it. So it comes down to if you're going to. So there's a pre-planning that helps me a lot. So I try to preplan usually a day or two in advance about where I'm going to put my calories, you know? And then you give yourself some flux room. Right? But the other thing, when it comes to the pods, the pods is super important because once I recognize I'm going to do it, my question is, am I really hungry? And surely the answer is no I'm frustrated. I'm tired. I feel I don't have any value. My self worth seems pretty low because I had a bad client call or somebody was mean on Facebook, which they always are. Dr. Nicole (17:58): People can be so mean. And so it's always something else. And once I realized that, I said, well, what do you really need right now? Do you need some protein? And so I'll eat hard, boiled egg whites. Do you, you know, is it really that you need protein? Probably because we do not get enough protein in the American diet, good protein that's lean and without saturated fat without sodium. So I just tried to take the pause and um, I also just try to plan it in advance. So I know where my calories are gonna be distributed. And you know, that type a little girl comes right back into play. I'm like, well, here's the plan. I'm going to stick to it. Oh my gosh. So that's the first thing. So then coming back to resilience, so something I want to task you with Roy, I want to give you homework. Dr. Nicole (18:41): And this is something that my husband and I recently went into last few weeks, did my friend and I, who was also going through some, some difficulty with her health because of breast cancer. She and I have the same coach and we decided that we were going to have operation, teach Amanda fish. I think Terry's really going to like this. Okay. And basically we, I first wanted to switch off weeks with my husband doing, not just cooking. Like don't just swoop in and cook. No, I want someone to plan. I want you to send me the rest of so I can log it and you need to go buy those damn groceries and you're going to cook and you're going to do the whole thing for me. And he basically said, it's really hard for his job. He's a financial planner and the markets are crazy and his clients are having, you know, things are crazy with money right now. Dr. Nicole (19:25): He said, how about if I do Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So I now do Monday through Thursday. He does Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And I Terry, here's the tip I am being so good about not all I say is just send me the recipes so I can log it. I don't give him advice. I don't tell him what to do. I don't tell him, Oh, we already have that in the closet to ask. He can look and see if we have garam masala okay. And operation teacher manifesto is about him building resilience in it as well in the household. And also gives me a much needed break because, um, I can't do it. I can't do a hundred percent of the cooking it with my business kicking up and me trying to keep my mental health. Right. It was too much of a burden. So Roy, you need to build resilience. Terry, you need to let him do that. Terry (20:10): Let him do that. You. Oh my gosh. And we do have garam masala by the way, Dr. Nicole (20:17): He had some doll the other night. That was four. Okay. And then the third tip, when you, if you're not ready for a therapist yet, I can't believe how much this helped me with, um, with understanding myself acceptance. And there's all kinds of prompts you can find online about asking yourself questions. I've recorded asking myself questions like a therapist would act. And then I listened to it and I took notes on myself. So I kind of play the role of my own therapist. And it was amazing what came out because you're not writing. If you write, sometimes you can edit when you're just talking into the ether and you're just recording it. You forget, it's kind of there. And you're just talking. And I kind of had the printed out the questions ahead of time. I wanted to ask myself. And, um, that was a big step for me, understanding some of the triggers, um, that was dealing with my physical health because my therapist has dealt a lot with my depression and abuse as a kid and some other things, right? Like there's a lot of root things there, but there was stuff that I still need to work on that I haven't quite got to her yet. And um, so I actually recommend that more than journaling because you'll be much more free flow, but then let's do it. Terry (21:22): Oh yeah. Because when I journal, when I journal, I edit myself as I'm journaling. So it's like, Oh my gosh, I can't even do this. I never thought about doing that. That sounds amazing. Dr. Nicole (21:33): So do that. So, so that kind of rounds out, the fact that you got to work on your self-acceptance and who you are and knowing who you are and when that gets stronger. So too, will your physical health, because you'll be building on such a strong foundation. Ooh, that's a big one. Wow. Three. So the third one is overcoming survival instincts. So there's a reason why we crave what we crave. Okay. There's a reason why I'm going for the peanut butter and chocolate chips. It hits all the major cravings. I got the salt, I got the fat, I've got the sweet, um, these are things that we don't really have an off switch for. It's super, super, super tough when you're eating. Um, so here's why, because it used, so I'm just gonna talk about the five teeth real quick. Okay. But when we think, when we think about it from a survival perspective, it used to be so hard to get salt and sugar. They weren't no cutesy. Right? Okay. They didn't exist. You were finding fruit on trees and thought was very difficult to find is a reason why salt was basically money for so long. Right. Um, and umami, can you repeat after me? Dr. Nicole (22:44): Umami, umami. Dr. Nicole (22:47): Umami has a savory face. The protein that is a Japanese term for protein. Um, and so as soon as you're born, you don't like bitter. You don't like sour because those it's usually indicates something that's poisonous or toxic. Uh, salt comes a little bit later in development in terms of liking it. And salt has to do when you do eventually get those cravings has to do with keeping your body in homeostasis. So keeping all of your little workings in balance, right? Like a machine and balance. And then mommy is going to tell you, you're getting your protein, your building blocks, right? I'm actually building the stuff you need and sugar is the energy. So you can imagine if we grew up, uh, you know, our ancestors and ancestors, ancestors had a very difficult time finding these things, selective pressure in terms of evolution meant that when you've got those things, they taste good. Dr. Nicole (23:36): We're all good. So good that we don't really have an off switch. So you're fighting against a millennium of survival instincts at nine o'clock at night when you're tired and frustrated and grumpy or whatever the case may be in your body. Yes. The body goes, I'm done. I'm going in survival mode. So this is something that I come back into the, the, the more that you know, that you're not alone and you have people to support you and hold you accountable. The more that you're working on your self-acceptance and worse, the less problems you will have with overcoming these survival instincts, um, that did us very well as humans for a long, long time. There's a reason why we've proliferated, but in the last 30 or so years, you know, basically since the industrial revolution and then coming into processes has not served us well. That's a little, Roy  (24:29): Yeah, because of what it, what it, what leads up to that. Like I was saying, you know, being tired is a trigger, but that's the survival. Like I've got to wake up to survive or, you know, being frustrated, being upset, whatever it is. So that, that makes perfect sense. I like that. Dr. Nicole (24:46): Good. I, I wanted to put a little bit of that neuroscience in there about evolution and survival because you can't turn it off, which leads me to number 4, which is whatever you are doing. Give it your undivided attention and role. I know you don't do this. I know what your work schedule looks like. Sometimes when you're working, when you're working, you're working, when you're eating, you're eating, when you're watching TV, go for it. I love me, my murder. She wrote, you are watching don't mix and match any of those. Okay. Like, so it really comes down to, what did you learn in kindergarten and kindergarten? My daughter who's five years old is super present in the moment, super immersed. And then when that thing's done, she moves on to the next. She does not multitask that doesn't serve her. Doesn't serve anybody and especially so when it comes to when you eat, so do not do any of those things at the same time and focus on it. Roy  (25:49): Well, and that's one thing our, uh, the dietician that we're working with, that was one of, well, two things that she told us, I guess, was number one, do not eat supper because we suffer in front of the TV watching the news. So she said, you cut that off. And the other thing with the sleep factor, she said, turn, you know, she said, I'd rather you not watch TV in bed at all. But number two, if you have to cut it off by nine, o'clock where you can read and kind of wind down. And so we've been better at that, you know, reading when we go to bed and not getting all excited with the TV turned on, but, um, we haven't been as good about not eating in front of the, you know, the evening news. No. Dr. Nicole (26:33): Okay. So I'm giving you guys a few tips. It's helped me a lot. We just said we're not doing it. And every once in a while, even my daughter, when she's five, you know, and people, every once in a while, I'll let her have like a mini picnic on the floor while she's watching whatever show, but we make sure she knows that special. That's not what we always do. We sit down for dinner, we sit down for breakfast, we sit down for lunch and we talk to each other and that's it. So, but it's the same thing for work. It's not fair for your work. You're not even paying attention, what you're eating, terrible. Yeah. Roy (27:04): Dude, that sometimes with breakfast, you know, I may, while I'm fixing it and I'm thinking I should be doing it. So I'll bring it over, sit down at the computer. And then I end up either eating really, really fast or just dragging it out so much that I don't even know that I'm eating so guilty, guilty on that one. Terry (27:24): Yeah. And IF I forget to eat, which is kind of crazy sounding. I know, but you know, I'll just, I'll try to just maybe take a bite of something and just go on. Next thing I know it's like five, six hours later and I'm like, Hey, wait a minute. Something's going on? And then I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm not bragging. I've never had that problem. I just get too busy. I just got so busy. Dr. Nicole (27:47): Terry. I love getting immersed in my work. I love my work. I love what I do. I love my clients when I'm working out. I love that. And all of a sudden I'll be like, Oh, you didn't, you didn't eat so well, here's what I'm going to say about that. It doesn't, I'm learning from, from my nutrition specialist that she's like that she's basically saying to me, I'm not going to tell you, you have to eat all the same time. Like, there's all these other tricks that you can get to. Eventually, you just need to develop the habit of taking your time and doing it and planning it ahead of time. That's it? Right. So I'm not great about eating breakfast. I have my coffee, I help my kids get to school. I then do my workout. I got to do it right away in the morning off. It does not happen. And at about 10, I'm like, okay, I'm ready to eat something. Now that doesn't work for everyone. So it really is trusting your body. And if you are like carrying you for Dicky, then you have to have those things ready to go and plan it ahead of time. It doesn't have to be at a specific time. You just can't let yourself get to running on empty because then it all falls apart. Roy (28:44): Right. Right. And I've gotten better about listening to my body in the morning, because used to, I was first thing in the morning, eat the breakfast and move on. But now there, there are days that I may not be hungry till, you know, nine 30 or 10, and I may eat a boiled egg or some oatmeal, something like that. But I don't feel like I've just got to get up and have that meal. So that's important just to listen, listen to your body and when you're hungry. But like you said, not go, cause I ha I do the opposite too. You know, sometimes you don't feel it coming on. And then all of a sudden it's all over you. And you're like, so starving. You could eat everything Terry (29:22): Or get past your starvation point. No, sorry. Dr. Nicole (29:28): Well, I got you. And the other thing too, to remember, and that I'm learning more and more as I research around aging, because there's something about hitting 40, that makes you go, Oh my God. And, um, that is that we have a, our, the way that our costs work and our circadian rhythms work, they do change, they evolve. And so, you know, I used to be the person who woke up hungry and would eat a farmer's breakfast. My dad was always thought he was like, you have a tape form. And, and uh, and now I don't, and it's just is what it is. So it's every single person is different. So that's kind of why when you get out there and you're trying to find advice, you, your number one thing to do is when you're mindful, trusting yourself, that's it like paying attention, doing undivided attention. What you're doing, your body cues are there. We've just learned to, we've just been conditioned to stop paying attention to them. Terry (30:21): Rehab. I mean, in all aspects, all aspects of everything. I mean, it's crazy. Dr. Nicole (30:27): Yep. Yep. Which brings us to our right. All right. This is the most important one because it brings them all together in a lot of ways. So again, just to recap, you're not alone. inform people what you're doing. Don't be ashamed of it. Say like, boom, I am watching my sodium intake or whatever the case may be, get some online resources. And if you can get a coach to no amount of self-improvement can replace self-acceptance, you've got to work on the root issues of why you have possibly unhealthy relationships and sabotaging yourself with food. Or as you said previously, in one of your episodes, medicating with food, um, three is overcoming those survival instincts is sure it's hard, but if you're mindful, you can do it. And understanding it is a big step for undivided attention to whatever you were doing in the moment, no mixing and matching, eating, and work and TV, and all the things do one thing at a time. And the last one is detaching from the outcome. So the most important thing is that you're doing what's right in front of you because you're enjoying what you're doing right now. And it's not because of achievement at the end. And this is the hardest thing that I've had to learn is that it's not about me fitting back into jeans, which I know I'm never going to, and finally gave him the Goodwill. Like that's just not going to, and if it does, I'm going to do here. Yeah. Terry (31:47): Wow. That's what I'm thinking. Exactly. That's my next thought I'm buying new jeans. Dr. Nicole (31:53): Like when I, he asked exactly the point is that's not the end goal. The end goal is not for me to fit into some idealized number or, you know, to look good on Instagram, which if you see my Facebook live stuff, you know, I don't care and it's a better life. Yeah. So you have to just whatever that process is right now, you got to love it, which means when you're working out, do something that you love and want to do when you're cooking, put on music, have fun, taste the spices before you put them in really start playing with your mind and be like, wow, this is an experiment. This is amazing when you're eating, savor it, enjoy it, enjoy the process for the process state, because there is only right now not to get all Eckrich totally on you, but there is really only right now. And so it's going to help out so much if you get away from this thing at the outset. Roy (32:46): Yeah. That's important because, uh, you know, one thing that I've tried to be a better helper in the kitchen, I'm not quite there yet. And, you know, kind of going back to what you said earlier that the, uh, you know, the planning for us is the hardest part. We've gotten good about putting everything in, but, but, um, you know, we need to work on planning, but the, uh, cooking together, cutting up stuff and just being in the kitchen, that's given us that quality time that we can talk. And then I think I've mentioned this many times before, but then it also gives us a, um, a perspective to sit down and talk about the food. What could we do thinking about new dishes that we could make with, if we did this and did that. So it really kind of plays into, um, you know, our quality time and experimenting because we've become much more, I would say risk takers. I think Terry's always been good at experimenting and coming up with stuff, but now we kind of work together to, Hey, you know, let's try that. The worst thing you can do is we won't do it again next time, but go ahead and take those chances. Terry (33:56): And he's so good about telling me, I mean, everything that I make is the best thing he's ever. He is very appreciative, but I know those. I tried to do some pork chops. They were horrible. And he was so happy that he had them. I mean, he's so good. Dr. Nicole (34:14): And this is the reason why I fell in love with you too, when we connected. And I listened to your stuff, because you're basically saying like, man, we're doing it. I think the thing that really hooks me right, is when you told me, or maybe it was on one of your podcasts, when you said, first time I had tofu and I was like, someone was saying like, like this, this is a weird product. And now you love it. And I think about how much inspiration you can bring to people who are like, ah, that whew, fruit, blue, whatever, natural health tofu, that's not me. Right. You were saying like my generation, I'm a man, blah, blah, blah. And you're saying, heck no, you gonna do a lot with tofu. Dr. Nicole (34:54): Oh. And he asked for it, Roy (34:57): You know, we got, we bought two big packages last time at the grocery store. And you know, we're trying to experiment more. And yeah, I hate to talk about the same old stuff over and over. But, uh, Terry made this tow food Chile the other night. That was fabulous. I mean, you wouldn't know it and you know, and that's part of it. I think we have to get over it. Dr. Nicole (35:19): We're all much better than like the fake meat products with the fake meat products, um, elbow, some of them I really liked, but for the most part, they have a lot of extra carbohydrates and extra weird fats and keep it as clean as possible. Keep it as clean as possible and you can't go wrong. So I just loved that. And I think that that's an inspiration people need to hear is there are real people on this journey who were trying TOEFL for the first time and they are here for you. I hope that I hope that your listeners, Roy (35:44): I think I'll say this to all the other dudes out there is that, you know, we need to get over ourselves that if I'm eating a piece of brisket or I meet some tofu, it doesn't change who I am. I mean, I mean, it kind of would Roy (35:58): Well, no, I mean, it's going say it kind of will be kind of will because it'll, it'll make me healthier in the end, but I'm just saying it doesn't, you know, I don't, uh, don't feel my manhood is threatened because I eat some tofu. It's just, yeah. Dr. Nicole (36:12): So all, all of this to say is make it fun and detach yourself from any, any aspect of achievement. This isn't about achievement, although you will have milestones, but this is a never ending journey for sure. And the quicker we can, the quicker we can get away from saying like, this is an end point. That's the only thing I care about. I mean, just that's too far away. It's just is, and you got to just say in the moment being like, I love this process. I think you would love it. You will change your habits. Roy (36:39): Yeah. And I think that gets to the slowing things down because that's, you know, I've always been very aggressive, like, okay, we're setting, you know, some crazy, you know, five pounds a week. That's what we're shooting for and we're going to do this and then you fall short and then it's like, yeah, I just give up. And, and this is the one time that I just said, look, this is just an ongoing process. We got to do the best we can do every day. And things will just work out in the end. That's that's all you can do. Dr. Nicole (37:08): And the more you surround yourself with people in a similar mission, which is what we are doing here today, I would say like, I'm going to rethink this conversation today. When I think I'm going to go get those many M and M's peanut butter, and we'd be like, Nope, I don't need to. Roy and Terry got my back. Yup. So those are my five, five mental fitness tips for physical fitness. Okay. You could pop some tofu instead. Tofu cubes are real quick. Roy (37:37): Well, she did. She made, um, they were, she cubed them and then put them in the oven to bake and they tasted like little potato bites. Anyway. It's, we'll have to do a whole tofu cooking show, right? Terry (37:51): Oh my gosh. Roy (37:56): Well, so what is one, um, you know, we talked a little bit about this, but what's one tool or one ritual or something. That's a part that you have made a part of your daily routine that you just, you can't do without Dr. Nicole (38:12): [inaudible], but okay. I gotta think about daily on the bigger end therapy I cannot do without continuing to work on my mental health. Um, it just, everything falls apart when, when, when my depression takes over. So, um, that's a, that's a big thing for me, um, on the daily, on the reg though, let's see. Um, Roy (38:36): Well, that's important to talk about, I guess that, you know, you know, it's kind of the same. I'm going to put it in the tofu class. It's one of these things that doesn't change who we are, because we tell somebody we're going to see a therapist. It's actually, it's kind of in line. It's empowering because I can't always unload all my burdens on Terry. She does a good job with carrying my own, but don’t use your friends and family. Terry (39:06): No, and I think I'm a therapist because I've actually had, you know, 25 years of therapy off and on here. And I feel like, you know, every time I read something or talk to somebody, somebody like you, I'm like, well, I don't know what I'm really putting into practice. All the things that I've learned or even some of the things that I've learned, you know? So, and then I go and read some books and I'm, Oh, I love Brene Brown. I mean, all these, you know, Dr. Nicole (39:33): Brene Brown, this is, I was researching hashtags to use as I build my Instagram. And this, this woman said research hashtags of people that you admire. So I went on to research Brown, guess what? Brene Brown doesn't even need to use hashtags because everybody knows who she is. Okay. Terry (39:48): That is so true. Oh my gosh, I cannot get enough of her. I really cannot. Dr. Nicole (39:55): So yes. So therapy has been a big deal. And, um, my dad put this really well. Uh, he said, when you, when, if you like crack your head open, are you going to ask your husband to fix you? And I said, Oh, hail. Now it's the same thing with your brain. Like your, your brain has things going on. And there are professionals who are there to help you. Don't burden your family. I mean, inform your family, but you can't expect friends and family to be your therapist. Right. And it also makes for terrible relationships. You've got to inform and talk, but do the real hard work and the inner work with someone who is equipped to deal with and doesn't have an in the fire to be perfectly honest. Exactly, exactly. Terry (40:35): And asking for, I mean, asking for help, you know, like we were talking about earlier, it's just such a hard thing to do, but you know, you're really strong if you do it because you know what your limitations are, you know, what, you know, what you need to work on and you do need the help because you're not the professional. Roy (40:52): And the other thing I would say on that is, uh, you know, for the audience, don't let cost stand in the way, because there are a lot of resources, even in every community. If you live in a rural environment, now we have telemedicine and things. So I just, you know, a note to anybody that is suspects that you needed is just reach out and ask for you. You really can't go wrong. Dr. Nicole (41:17): Yeah, exactly. And, and you can reach out to any professional therapist and say like, maybe I can't afford you. They have lists of resources. They can say, put you in touch with the County or put you in touch with the city and find out who's doing pro bono worker. Um, there's a lot of helplines now because of COVID right. You know that on one hand, but really good on the other hand for mental health. Roy (41:35): So that'll be our message for today. Yeah. Dr. Nicole (41:38): Oh, go ahead. I didn't answer on what I do daily on the reg. Terry (41:43): Okay. Avoiding, avoiding. Dr. Nicole (41:47): Yes. Um, I would just say music. I, I put on my music and I live in the city, so I'm sure my neighbors don't love it super loud. And I don't, I don't work out super early and that's when I, I just put it on, like, I pretend like I'm, you know, 19 again in college, I just black music and I get to work at that show. Good. And right now I can do it outside. So it feels great. I don't think I could live without music. Terry (42:12): Do you scream sing to it or do you just listen to it?   Dr. Nicole No, no, no, no, no. I just listened to it. No. Are you kidding? So out of shape that my workouts are like, I'm just barely breathing Terry (42:24): In your car. Oh. When I do it, when I listen to music in my car, I turn it up really loud and I scream sing so I can't hear myself, but it feels exhilerating, it is so, Oh my gosh. Dr. Nicole (42:37): Well, simple things, but there's a lot of neuroscience research that supports that what music can do to our brainwaves and bring down our stress. So if it can get drained down my stress and get me through my workout three, John. Yes. Roy (42:53): Well, Dr. Nicole, we certainly appreciate you taking time out of your day to talk with us. This has been awesome. And I'm gonna really keep after you to come back and talk to us about the, uh, the five tastes that we've, you know, hit a little bit on. I think that would be an, uh, it'd be awesome to have you back to talk about that. Dr. Nicole (43:13): It would be my pleasure. This has been amazing. Roy (43:16): So why don't you tell everybody, you know, I know that you do some consulting and training, but you may want to tell everybody, you know, kind of what your talk target client is, who that is. And then also, uh, all the ways in which they could get ahold of you to find out more. Dr. Nicole (43:33): Yeah, I appreciate that. Um, my current claim for consulting and training is typically small to medium size food companies and beverage companies, um, who are beginning on a growth stage. And so need some systems, someone who can come in and understand the sensory side of it, but also system side. So, um, I do that and then my keynotes fly all over the, all over the place, really, because it just depends. I mean, mental health is everywhere, so it, there's not really an audience for that, except for people who really want to step up and say being vulnerable is okay. And so I can kind of make depression funds in a little bit of ways and at least help people own it, like I've owned it. So those are the two places. And then on the interwebs, you can find me at doc G a R N E a U, which is at dot Garneau. So that's my handle on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, where I, I tried to go live every day with my docs daily downloads. Roy (44:28): Oh, okay. Awesome. Well, again, we want to thank you so much for being here and it's been a pleasure speaking with you. I've learned a lot. Uh, also want to just remind everybody, you can find us at www.feedingfatty.com on Twitter at feedingfattypod and Instagram at feedingfatty. If you're a professional in the space, or if you have an awesome success story, you'd like to share with us, please reach out@infoatfeedingfatty.com. We'd love to talk to you about being a potential guest for this time. I'm Roy, I’m Terry. Roy (45:08): Thank you.  

Marty Ramseck Talent Optimization Advisor Marty has cultivated 30 years of experience in hands-on sales management and double-digit growth in every one of his ventures. He has worked for companies such as Vintage Senior Living, LivHOME, Sunrise Senior Living, CORT, and Cigna. An expert, who helps organizations intentionally design and implement a people strategy, building powerful teams and cultures to match their business strategies.  He helps employees become more engaged, productive and satisfied by facilitating self-awareness and an understanding of an individual’s motivations and natural behaviors through the talent optimization discipline and Predictive Index® methodology. Marty’s primary focus is on partnering with Senior Leaders to build a talent strategy that maps to their business goals. In 2016 Marty joined PI Midlantic as a Talent Optimization Advisor to help companies and professionals to reach exceptional results. Marty earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from the University of Dayton. He lives in Southern California with his wife Nancy of 36 years. https://www.pimidlantic.com Full Transcriptit Roy (00:01): Hello, and welcome to another episode of senior living sales and marketing. I'm Roy, you can find us@wwwdotseniorlivingsalesandmarketing.com. You can also download the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google play, and Spotify. We are on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook as well. Hey, today we've got a great guest. Uh, this gentleman not only has a great product that I truly believe in, but he also, uh, has a wealth of experience in the sales and marketing, um, portion of senior living. So couldn't find a better guest we've talked before, but I did want to catch up with them again, just to kind of see what some changes are, uh, kind of what's new coming down the pike with the product. So let's give a warm welcome to Marty Ramsey. He is with PI Midlantic and, um, it, the PI is predictive index. And so what it is it's basically, um, and Marty, I'll let you jump in. Roy (01:04): It's basically an evaluation of a person's behaviors, I guess, you know, we want to clarify and I'll let you clarify. There's a difference between skillsets and behaviors. You explain it much more eloquently than I do, but, um, this is going to be something that we can use for a pre hires. And it's also something that can be used within the organization for making sure we got people in the right place, making sure if we are, uh, promoting that the temperament, the individual's temperament is a match for our position, but anyway, I'm gonna turn it over to you, Marty. Welcome to the program. Thank you so much for coming back and, um, I'll let you talk a little bit about the product. Marty (01:52): Okay, great. Thanks for, thanks for having me. And, um, thank you for the opportunity to speak today. Um, let's see, does is if you think about your employees, there's kind of three buckets that you're, that you look at, right? The first bucket is kind of what gets them in the door for, uh, for the interview, it's their skillsets, uh, their education, their knowledge, their experience, and that's what's on the resume that that's what gets them in for the interview. The tougher part is the second thing that you're looking for, I'm sure is their value system. Do they have the right values for your organization? Uh, are they, uh, uh, hardworking, integrity, honesty. And I was a VP of sales for 15 years in the senior, in the senior space. The one of the things I always look for myself, people will have passion for seniors and people that have that I thought customers could see right through them. Marty (02:45): So those are two things you think about why we choose those in life. We choose our skills. We choose our education. We choose our knowledge and we choose the values. You choose to work hard. You choose to treat people respectfully, she's have honesty. Your and the third thing that you look for every job has the behaviors you have to do to be successful. And with PI does, is looks at your behaviors to see is you have the right behaviors in that role to be successful. And unfortunately we don't choose our behaviors. Our behaviors kind of choose up. I tend to compare to your height, right? So those who have not met me, I stand five to 10. I was five to 10 at 18 I'm five to 10 today, 20 years from now, I'll probably be five foot eight, five to nine shrank. But no matter what I do, I can read every self help book on Amazon, my wife's and me. Marty (03:36): I'll never be six foot five. So PII helps you determine what behaviors that person brings to the, to the, to your organization. And with that, if you think about people who have not been successful in your, in your communities, in your organization, it's usually not. It's usually not what was on the resume that got them in trouble. It's usually what's what is on their behaviors. So he was in trouble. They didn't have good followup or they didn't communicate well. One of the teammate behaviors is what really gets you in trouble from that standpoint. So how does PCI work behavioral and you all have drives rides, great a need, uh, our behavior, our actual behavior is a response to those drivers. And those needs, for example, couldn't later in the day when we're doing this podcast and I'm sure Laura and I are gonna have in a few hours and a drive for hunger that will create a need for us to eat. Marty (04:32): And our behavior is a response to that drive and that need of eating dinner, eating dinner is a response to that. Drive that knee. If I only see the behavior, for example, I see somebody drinking coffee at a coffee house. I don't know why they're there, what's driving them there. What they could be there. She was in coffee because they got to get caffeine and energy for the day, or they could be there for socialization needs or they're there to meet a friend, or they can be there because they have a two year old screaming at home. So we could see the behavior, but we don't know what to strive with PCI. We're able to predict what that drive is. And from that from a PI, I can determine what type of needs that employees when have hasn't work and what, uh, how they're going to behave at work, but understanding their predictive index. Roy (05:20): Yeah. And I think that behavior is so important, especially when we move to the sales side. And, you know, I think that, um, you know, correct me if I'm wrong here, but this would, this will kind of separate those that are made for sales made for that, you know, human contact, those that are kind of, uh, you know, driven for the outreach versus, you know, more of an analyst type, somebody that wants to set out a desk, maybe look at spreadsheets and not that there's a right and a wrong, everybody wants to be comfortable in what they're doing. It's just the fact of it takes a very special type of an individual to be on the sales side of anything. But, you know, I think senior living sales is a, it's a much more tricky because we're not, it's not like I'm, you're taking an inanimate object and give it to somebody. I mean, the we're trying to convince maybe an adult child or a spouse that we are the rat people to take care of their loved one. And that's, that's a, to me it's an important distinction between an inanimate object taking your car in to get some service. Yeah. We want that to go fine, but it's really not a life or death situation versus, uh, you know, if it's our loved one, we really want to be convinced that the community is right and that the personnel is right to actually, uh, take good care of them. Marty (06:51): Yeah. And I think, you know, especially in sales with senior living, um, you know, we couldn't predict again what that behavior is. And I think, you know, senior living sales, which I have 20 clients alone that are either a assisted living, kind of like harmony Commonwealth and pestle and, uh, uh, senior care companies like home care assistance in, uh, a model to name a couple, um, they, um, you know, you can look at what they need and that sales all be successful. And one thing that I can tell by looking at a pie is how much a person is going to control the sales process. I think selling is a lot about control and controlling the next steps and getting people to, you know, recommend next steps. You know, saying things like what we need to do is get mom in for, uh, for launch. Marty (07:39): What we need to do is get you to sell the house. Here's how we're going to do it is controlling that next step. The second thing we can help determine a pie is I think is towards point is senior living is such an emotional sale, right? And you want somebody who naturally what their behaviors is going to connect to that emotion of that family, of connecting emotionally to this very, very emotional sales saying things like, you know, can you picture your mom sitting by this window on a fall afternoon as a lease change, watching reading her favorite James Patterson book versus having someone come in and say, you know, the room is 648 feet. It has a frigerator, a shower, and you're selling back and no, no emotion tied to that. Also by looking at a predictive index, I continue to tell that sales person's going to be resolved, focus, all active activity focus. Marty (08:29): But what I mean by that is at the end of the day, you asked that person, uh, how did your day go? The person results focused. They're going to say, I got three checks today, or I got to move today, or I got three lunch tours today. They're going to talk to you in terms of results or another type of behavior. You'll have a sales people is they'll talk to you. In terms of activity. I made a hundred calls. I sent out a hundred emails. So obviously you want that sales person to have that high drive, the need for results. And the last thing you could tell based upon a PIs, how a sales person would close. Some people see no as one step closer to getting a yes, some sales people will not go for the next step unless they totally feel in their mind. They got the next steps, uh, secured by, by looking at a pie. I can tell you how that person's going to close a sale. They can close more often or they're closed more appropriately, or they're going to wait, wait, wait until they feel they've got that next step very much to find. Roy (09:26): Yeah. And that's a great distinction. And, you know, I just have a little personal anecdote about that. We, um, you know, when I was a little younger, I worked for a brokerage house and, you know, when new representatives came in, that was kind of the first step for the first couple months is they just went into a, what we call the bullpen, sat down with the phone and back in this day, a phone book or a list that they had created. And, you know, they just pounded the phone all day. And to the, you know, to the point about whether it's results or activity, you know, we had a guy after about a month that hasn't, hadn't made any sales really hadn't didn't have anything in the pipeline, but he was proud that he was making a hundred calls a day every day. So back then we had a machine that we could actually see the numbers he was dialing. And so for, um, for his hundred calls every day, some are to his mother, some were to the seven 11 down the street. And, you know, some were to numbers that he knew that they weren't going to answer. And he just called them over and over because it showed up on the tally sheet that he got his hundred calls in. And so it's a huge distinction between the activity and the results. Marty (10:45): Yeah. It's they also that, you know, that, look it up here. I can say that person is going to hold you hostage on the activity. While you told me to make the a hundred calls, I did a hundred calls, but at the end of the day, I'm sure if you're a sales leader out there or ed or operations, you know, your health to obviously resolve you're the want somebody to know they're coming in every day, thinking results, thinking results, thinking results. Roy (11:07): Right. Right. Yeah. And you know, the reason that, uh, I guess our relationship got started years ago is I feel like this is an important part of, uh, you know, the retention process. Not only do we want to, you know, hire somebody that's going to come in and be a producer, but also if we don't hire that person, eventually either they're going to get discouraged and leave, or we're going to have to ask them to leave, which is a whole nother set of circumstances. So I feel like that, you know, the more work that we can do on the front end of the hiring process for sure. And then, uh, you know, I don't want to be so hyper focused on hiring process that we forget about if we're moving somebody within, uh, within the company from department to department or promotion, that it's also good to use the PI to make sure that that's going to be a good fit, but it can save us so much heartache and, um, uh, you know, having to deal with employee issues if we make the right hire to begin with. Marty (12:15): Yeah. I mean your people, especially, I think senior living, it's your biggest competitive advantage. Right? Right. And yeah. So Roy, to your point, obviously you want to make the right hire and you know, no one's ever tested the way to success. Right. You know, you want to get the right skill sets, education and knowledge. You want to get the right values. Of course. And then you want to get the behavior, right? You get all three, right. It doesn't hit out a park, but as important as out of hiring tool, if a full leadership tool is not a trait of that person on board, I've got to motivate them the way they want to be. One, when we've worked with that PI we don't believe in the golden rule, treat others like, you know, we go to be treated, we treat others the way they want to be treated. So if I, if I don't fire you effectively, they're going to leave anyway. So I want to make sure that I'm working with them the way they want to be worked with they're coming into work. What did you do? Great things every day. And I'm so more gasoline on that fire. Roy (13:05): Right. Right. So what is the time, um, let's just say from, uh, from phone call to you, I'll call you up. Hey, Marty, I'm interested in PI, uh, what is the process between me making the phone calling kind of getting this process up and running? You know, how long til I can actually use the, uh, the, um, evaluation in my organization. Marty (13:31): That's a great question. Um, you know, if you're familiar with PCI or, you know, you just changed companies and you know, the product, he said, Marty, I want to go with your, want to go with the PI program. You know, we send you out a DocuSign, you sign it and you will get access to the software within an hour of, uh, signing up, uh, with PI. And you'll be able to start sending and receiving ECI within an hour. Uh, we are in the knowledge transfer business, and we want people to be experts in FPI in your organization. Cause we want you to use it as a leadership tool, not just a hiring tool. So we do have a training program. All of our training programs are virtually virtual now, and it's a five, uh, to our sessions. As soon as we can get your key managers up and running, you'll be up and running with PI. Marty (14:15): And you could probably be up and running full fledged within a, within a week. If you're not familiar PI how the process generally works is, you know, you call me up, I'll tell you a little bit about the program. I'll have you do a PI I'll then you out a PI to do, to make sure you still accurately fucks your behaviors. Then I'll say this to a couple of people on your team to see if it accurately reflects their behaviors. And I'll do a presentation after when does the pie usually four or five other people. And then at that point, it's kind of, you know, you don't want to go with it or not. And that's how that's really his decision. So as long as we get, you know, we can get people up and running and totally new the pie within a, you know, a couple of days of them doing the pie and I'm revealing the results and leading our team members results. So it's a really quick process, a math mess ever. This is not a slow process at all, but again, the key is you have to look at this product as a leadership tool, not as a hiring tool. You want, you, you want people train, you want experts in the organization that are speaking the language, live in the language and using it from a full leadership, a leadership potential of what PIs. Roy (15:21): Yeah, I think that's an important part. A important, important point that you're making too is, uh, you know, we can give somebody the best tool that there is in the business, but if they don't use it or don't use it correctly, not going to have much of an impact on the business. And then I think the great thing about, about you, Marty is with, um, with your experience in the industry, from actually being on that sales and marketing side, I think you could probably help your clients, uh, refine the behaviors that they really need to be looking for. Maybe they may have a little bit different idea, but since you've been in the space and been doing this for a long time, you could really help them focus on what are the skills that are going to help you hire a successful individual. Marty (16:10): Yeah. And part of that is, yeah, I do have a lot of knowledge in the industry at PI. We have a couple of different assessments. One is what we were talking about, which is individual behavioral assessment. And the other thing that makes us unique, we're one of a few of the assessment companies that is validated for hiring. And we have another tool called a job assessment. And what that is is it's a group of three to five people who have skin in the game to make that hire. They go in and they fill out statements of what are you wanting in this particular role? Do we need somebody who is quick to connect with somebody or leading somebody with strong followup? And that group goes in, fills that out. And then once they're done, I helped them agree on what behavioral pattern, what behaviors you're looking for in that particular role, just like you would agree on what educational requirements you need, what skill requirements, what experience requirements, what's your value requirements that you have now we disagree on this is what we want a real behaviourally for that particular role. And you think about in that sales role in your buildings, you know, every one of those roles has behaviors that happen to be successful, or we getting the behavioral life for them to be successful in the world in that role. And again, I'll reiterate, I can give you skills. I even give you knowledge. I can't change your behavior. It's like I say, you say, I can do that. Well, make me six foot, five minutes. I would love the day of the basketball. Roy (17:34): So, um, and less focus on the hiring for just a minute. So, um, where do we want to, to use PI in the hiring process? Do we want to like narrow down to the top one or two candidates that we may have for the job and, uh, give them the evaluation or do we want to, uh, send it out to anybody that applies? What's the advice on that? Marty (18:02): A way we work is that we believe in better, better work, better work, right? If you're happier work, they'll be more engaged at home, more tuned to your family. So we want people to use our products. I Dan, part of how our agreements work is, uh, when you sign up with us, you'd get an unlimited number of PIs that you could send out, whether you just 30 or 300,000 and the price remains the same cause we want you to use it. So I recommend all my clients is you want to use PI earliest in the interview process as possible. So I not, you know, I got the resume. I, after skills, I got the knowledge, got their education in writing and the interview process in the interview process that I'm going to confirm that they have those. And then in the interview process, the harder part is, you know, my digging out and getting the right values. Marty (18:49): But then behaviorally, I want to know sooner than later, do they have the behaviors that I'm looking for, right? And if they do, they have those behaviors, I'm going to ask behavioral interview questions to confirm that if they don't, it's not a knockout, I'm knock out punch, but I want to see if they can be able to close the gap between the behaviors I need in that role to the behaviors are actually bringing, bring it to the company. And I'm going to do that sooner or later for two weeks, one, but my time management in terms of me, I spent time with the candidates that I feel is gonna be successful, but it's also fair to them. They don't have the right behaviors for that role and they're good chance they're gonna fail. You know, don't put them to several interviews. They're not going to be right. Let them, you know, you can find out right off the base right off the bat and they go look for other opportunities that behave really there, hopefully be more successful from that standpoint. So we want you to use it. It's like you're getting information on what resumes or calls we want to look at PEI in terms of, yes, everyone gets an opportunity to interview once they do the PI, but making sure by asking behavioral interview questions, that they have the behaviors to be successful in that role. Roy (19:55): Yeah. And, uh, you know, applicants can tweak, um, applicants can tweak resumes for positions, for companies, for jobs and, you know, kind of maybe look a little bit better on paper than what they may be. How hard is it to get over, uh, taken the PI evaluation if, uh, if, if, um, let's just, you know, focus on the sales end, if I'm, if I'm more analytical and want to read spreadsheets, but I'm applying for a sales job, am I going to be able to, uh, you know, fool the test or is it going to catch me? Marty (20:35): Yeah. So that's, that's um, that's a good question. Uh, you know, we've been validated over 350 times and we've got about 30 million assessments that we've done over our 65 years. So we didn't make the stuff in our basement, in our basement last year. It wasn't around for law, so wrong for a long, long time. So we have a group of scientists that, uh, scrubbed the data to make sure what we say we measure. We actually actually measure. So to your question, why number one is what a person comes in. They don't know what, um, what behaviors we're looking for in that particular one. So they don't know what pattern we're looking for in the role and part of the science and the PA in the pattern, how it chooses is really called free choice assessment, where you go in and you see a word, you say, I'm that word. Marty (21:26): If you don't, if you see a word, you say, I'm not that word, you don't choose it. And you just go through a free choice and saying, that word is me. That word is that me? And that's how the pattern is created. So the reason why I say that is the words you don't choose has as much effect under that pattern as the words they said as a, as you do choose. So they don't know the pattern you're looking for words, you don't choose also go into how that pattern will say if they had the right pattern for the wall. And the third one is through that zero, zero, zero, 1% as things they can escape the system, you always have behavior interview questions to confirm they have that behavior or not. But at, uh, you know, we have a team that that's our job to make sure people can't do that. And it's [inaudible] we remain validated. Okay. Roy (22:10): So in, uh, does, uh, did the results of the, um, analysis, does that lead into interview questions that you may want to ask particular candidates based on how they answered? Marty (22:27): Yeah. In our software, we create interview guides based upon what we're looking for in a role versus what that person's actual predictive index. So once we did, we created in our software, you'll get for every candidate interviewing questions that either confirm they have the behaviors shown on the predictive index. Or as I mentioned earlier, can they close the gap between what we're actually looking for in that role to the actual behavioral from that sample? So we provide you with behavioral interview questions out of our, out of our software. Roy (23:00): Yeah. That's, that's an awesome, uh, thing to have is, you know, depending on how the questions were answered, being able to have the right followup questions, not just the standard questions that a lot of, uh, you know, recruiters I ask in the interviews that are so general, that nobody really knows what the answer means. Nobody knows what the question really means or what the answer is. I mean, any way. So, uh, so, um, one thing we really haven't touched on is, uh, you know, the COVID environment that we're in now. So are there things that y'all have had to adjust either in the evaluations or working with the clients, you know, kinda what's going on with all? Marty (23:46): Yeah, we've done a couple of number one. Obviously the biggest change for us as consultants is all the training needs to be done face to face. Uh, and now obviously for safety, it's all done virtually, which the content has remained great. You know, the content is great people. We get been getting very great feedback on third positive feedback on the training. Yeah. The only thing you missed with that is you missed interaction during breaks or lunches and dinners, but the, you know, the content is what people are getting for the PI training has been, uh, fantastic. Uh, and other than that, it's just really helping our clients adjust their job targets based upon changes made and particular roles because of COBIT up, you know, decreased staff or asking people to do other things, to make sure we've got, we're getting that job right for them to diagnose and make sure we're getting it right based upon changes made because of the Cobra. Marty (24:39): And then really helping them understand that they do have people working remotely. We've done a lot of studies based on people's behaviors of who is struggling more, more in this environment who might not be struggling more, you know, some people are struggling because they can't control the meetings like it used to be able to control or especially a lot of, um, high social people, uh, high social people tend to read body language very well, tonality very well. And being on zoom calls, it's harder to do that. Cause you're only seeing the head versus the crossing, their arms in the presentation or presentation or housing. Sometimes you don't have the greatest quality. Uh, so those that were helping them with those types of things that help people as much get through that. And obviously, uh, to, to, to give them the tools and the playbook to be successful, uh, getting through this, uh, pandemic. Roy (25:27): Okay. Well, Marty, we appreciate your time. Uh, we're just going to try to wrap this up. Is there anything else, uh, any other information you feel would be important for the listeners to have? Marty (25:40): Yeah. Cut. Just one sec. One closes. I can give you my, my information. Uh, Roy, I think it's real important in senior living. So I'll just give you a bit of advice. I don't know. A lot of people kind of hire the other people that have experience in the industry and you're kind of hiring other people's headaches because people kind of bounce around from community communities. And I always thought that I was a great rep and senior living. Why would I leave a couple of them with our products? Should the top plans good? Why am I looking at that? I got the job master here. Right? So my advice to people is I always talk to senior living. I can teach somebody the product and I could teach somebody how to sell. Uh, so based upon that, I would make sure that I would get the behavior, right. Marty (26:22): I always look for getting the behavior, right. And then secondly, if a value system, right, in terms of work habits, honesty, integrity, passion for seniors. And then I would always look for a college degree cause they showed me they could search them, finish it. And they're smart enough to do that, but I would not look for skillsets. I would train them on sales training on the product knowledge and what happened for me. And it had a lot of success do it this way. Will you do it that way? Your people don't have a lot of loyalty to you. You know, they stick with you a lot more. Cause you're the ones that gave them a shot. You are the ones who gave the training. So I would recommend highly of looking at getting the Hazel. Right. And if I got the behavior, right, I could teach him so I could teach him, uh, uh, the product knowledge. So that would be my, uh, my recommendation. Roy (27:06): Yeah. That's very important. And I don't know, you may have just heard a jet fly over. Fortunately, I live, uh, not too far off of an air force base, so they've got some trainers out here training, but it's a, it's the sound of freedom. So that's a good thing. Sorry for the disruption. Uh, but I think I got it turned down in time, but yeah, that's an important, it's always, you know, we want to hire for the behaviors and we can train to the skills or the tasks that we need people to perform. Marty (27:39): Yeah. That it was out of Dallas. And again, you see a lot of people just bounced around the community cause he, and they last a year, you don't get the results you want, but you know, most important, most important after you got is your, is your talent, you know, PR is not the end all be all. We're not, you know, no one's ever tested of success, but you know, I got to experience after experience by getting you the Hazel, right. Getting your values. Right. I, I had an opportunity to create a lot of great sales people. They gave me a lot of success in my career in that industry. Roy (28:09): And I know you've told me before, but so what are some of the statistics around the, uh, you know, and this is kind of have to have the caveat that management has to use this tool the way it was intended, but what are some of the statistics around employee retention based on using it? Marty (28:30): Yeah. So, you know, again, you know, you have to do it right. Part of my job as a consultant is, you know, would you give, yeah, you also get me as your consultant. My, my job is to help you get the results you did, but, uh, you want to get by providing you the coaching on PEI, helping you learn PI, helping you make the right job targets. So throughout your journey at BI, I might share with you as your coach, as your consultant and that's, that's part of your agreement. That's not an extra charge that you're getting that I'm charging for. It just, I want you to have success with the program. Like I had have had it for 20 years. So based upon that, if you do it right, you fall the way we're doing it are our numbers show. And from our statistics that you're gonna have a 34% higher employee performance, 30% lower turnover of the top performers of HR is going to love you because you're a 31% less time with HR related issues, but at 16% higher strategic success rate. Marty (29:26): So, um, you know, they're, you know, you, it right, you are going to get, you know, hire better and, you know, retain, you know, the whole thing is, is all about results and how do you get the best results you hire the best people you hire better. And I keep them inspired. I, we came, but they're coming in to work, wanting to do great things every day. And I'm helping them do that versus having a bunch of people coming in and doing their job description, just doing enough to keep the job, not get fired or people that make the difference in your communities, in your organization and the people that want to do great things for you, for your customers, your internal customers. And that's what we try to help you do with PI is get people on that, on that, where they're wanting to do great things for you, but hiring great people and inspiring them to greatness. Roy (30:10): Yeah. And that's the, usually the worst start to the day you walk in at six 30 in the morning and there's the, uh, HR person is setting at, across your desk waiting to get in on Monday morning. Marty (30:23): Yes. I've been there done that. Roy (30:27): Definitely want to avoid those conversations. Marty (30:31): Thanks for the memory, Roy, Roy (30:35): If you wouldn't mind, uh, before you give us, uh, your contact information, uh, so what is one tool? Well, either a tool or maybe a ritual that you have during your day, uh, that you just don't think you could do without. Marty (30:51): Yeah. Great question. I, uh, I was UTI. I was number one, but yeah, I started this, this for the pandemic and Medina for several years now. I called my daily bread cheese. First thing I do when I get up is I write three things down that I'm grateful for. Uh, and it's not a big thing, obviously it's things like your health or your health and all those things are great. You know, that you want that, but it's more specific in terms of small things that happen that I'm grateful for. I had a great conversation with somebody I worked with before. One of my people that I've worked with before just got promoted or made my wife laugh three hard times yesterday, really, really hard. There's small things that you're grateful for. Cause when you're grateful, you can't be negative. And I think especially now with the pandemic, it's so easy to go into a negative town and pretty doubt about everything that's going on. Versus if you're grateful, it kind of gets me going in a positive direction for that day and gets me goals more positively or take today on ready attack the day versus sitting there worrying about, you know, the economy and everything that's going on and getting the virus, which was a healthy start today in a very positive way, stopped me from going down a negative town. Right? Roy (32:04): No, that's so important. Our gratitude and you know, the other thing is sometimes we're a little bit hard on ourselves. So, uh, you know, take some, uh, take some positive energy away from those small successes that we have every day. So, uh, well, Marty, it's been great talking to you as usual. I appreciate you taking time out of your day. And uh, if you don't mind just tell people, you know, how they can get a hold of you, uh, kind of who, um, I guess who in an organization that you typically work with and, uh, you know, anything else that feel is necessary. And I think everybody needs to remember is not only, you know, as PI, uh, it's a great evaluation, but you also get Marty with that. So with his years of experience in the senior living space, and then also his years, you know, as a talent advisor, uh, you just can't go wrong. So Marty tell them how they can get ahold of you. Marty (33:03): Yeah. So yeah. Uh, like, uh, so number one, you know, I was going to do a lot of work. She knew the street cause I know people there, but I know the industry, well not only sales, but I know, you know, what, what you need to have really with your nurses, maintenance caregivers. So I can help you all across the board in terms of, uh, what you need for each one of those positions. Because of my knowledge in that role and you know, customer for me as I I've that customer to started with me that had five people that they want, every hiring decision they wanted to make when they grew, they want to make, be successful and inspire people right off the bat to people who were thousand. So my customer is anybody that has a once a do great, get better results and wants to invest in the most important assets are people have people working for them. Marty (33:48): I'm a possible help for you when it comes to that. So you want better results and have people that are hires and more inspiration with your, uh, your team. Uh, I can, uh, that's, that's my, that's my customer wheelhouse. And that would be senior living because of my experience there. And then those who, um, who attended the podcast. If you want to have predictive in this, just kind of see what your behavioral traits are and what you bring to the party. You all bring it all of a sudden, there's no bad pie. We all bring something special. We all have special gifts that we're bringing to the party. The sin is putting people in a role that they're not going to be behaviorally successful for. So we'll all be some such a little party. As you want a periodic, please take five minutes. Now he's invested the time. Marty (34:29): Uh, it's a $250 value. I'll give it to you because he listened to the podcast for no charge and you take five minutes to complete it. Then I'll spend about a half an hour with you to go through the results. So as a gift to you is listen to the podcast. We'll do that. Or do you want to get ahold of me? My phone number is the up goals. School text me it's (949) 545-8121 (949) 545-8121. If I miss you, I'll call you right back. If you want to go email. My email is my first initial it's M my last name ramps are a M S E C K P I Ned, and my B Lantech, N T I c.com Emirate P I'm atlantic.com. And you're also free to I'm on LinkedIn, under Modi RAF sec. You're more than happy to connect with me on LinkedIn. And if he's in the message, they can give me a PSS with, to complete. I'm more happy to do it again. $250 value for no charge. Roy (35:29): Yeah. And be sure and take Marty up on that because it's interesting. Uh, you know, maybe just to learn more about yourself as well and what your needs are now, you know, other people view you so worth it. I will put all of his contact information into the show notes as well. So you can reach out. Thanks so much for taking time to listen to the senior living sales and marketing podcast. Again, you can find us@wwwdotseniorlivingsalesandmarketing.com, or also you can download the show on iTunes, Stitcher, Google, play, and Spotify, be sure and share. So your friends can certainly take advantage of this great offer. Marty's put out there until next time. This is Roy. Have a good day.  

In Episode 2 "It Ain't About the Money, It's About The Power" Roy and Cam sit down with Retired SEAC #3 John Wayne Troxell. John spent just shy of 38 years in the military and held the highest position in the military that an enlisted member can hold. The Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Joint Chief of Staff is an honor and a privilege. It also comes with a lot of knowledge! So Roy and Cam decided to pick some of that knowledge in order to share with you! They talk about why he joined, his time in the SEAC position, the skills he has been able to acquire from all services during his time, and how his transition went to the civilian sector. He talks about the things companies are looking for in their workers, and great ways to stay motivated. He also explains his philosophy to staying strong, PME Hard! Watch this episode and let us know what you think in the comments section!

Our country is divided. And technology is how we're going to solve problems and help peopleRep. Chip Roy (R-TX), the new US representative for the Texas 21st district, believes that problems are best solved “out here more than in DC, and my job is trying to figure out how to get more [innovation] back there.”Government does what it often does, which is force some of the tough questions to be dealt with. So Roy remains optimistic that we'll be able to do that. But, he told me, Washington needs a kick in the pants. And that's not an ideological statement. It needs to address the problems that need addressing. The thing that Roy likes about technology is the entrepreneurial spirit and the innovation that is going to solve the problems. That is happening in places like Austin and throughout the rest of the country, though usually not in Washington.

Avik Roy advised Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign on health care, ran the policy shop on Rick Perry’s 2016 campaign, and then worked for Marco Rubio after Perry dropped out. So Roy’s Republican credentials are pretty solid. But he’s aghast at the direction his party has taken in recent years. The question Roy asks of conservatives today is a profound one: what is it you’re seeking to conserve? Under Donald Trump, he fears Republicans are fighting to conserve the idea of America as a fundamentally white, Christian country. “Trump showed me that white identity politics was the dominant force driving the Republican grass roots,” Roy told the Atlantic.Roy, who recently founded The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, believes conservatism believes is bigger than that — and in this podcast, he explains why, even as he clearly details the difficulties the movement faces moving beyond white identity politics. We also go deep into healthcare, a subject Roy and I have been arguing about for years. A few other topics we cover:-What he thinks Trumpism represents as a phenomenon-How he feels he’s dealt with his identity as a conservative as opposed to as a Republican-How the aftermath of 9/11 led him to abandon a “colorblind” outlook on race-His hope for a new type of reform within the conservative movement that might result in  “diverso-cons”-How the innovator’s dilemma helps explain the GOP’s current problems-Why many conservatives don’t spend much time thinking about healthcare as an issue, and what they could learn from progressives who do-His thoughts on setting price controls for medical procedures and other costs to consumers-Why he thinks AI doctors might change medical practice and costs in the not-too-distant future-His criticism of how people on the left see nonprofit institutions as inherently more beneficial to society than for-profit companies, and the implications that has for healthcare-Whether Republicans are prepared to really offer an Obamacare replacement, and if so, what it might look likeBooks:-Leah Wright Rigueur’s The Loneliness of the Black Republican-Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind-Rationalism & Politics and Other Essays by Michael Oakeshott  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

England are out of Euro 2016. So Roy must realise the righteous wrath of James Buckley, Lloyd Griffith & Gordon Smart! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

So Roy's got super strength, but does this alone make him a hero? He needs the Arrow be his Sensai! What happens when the Bronze Tiger escapes from prison? We talk about all that and the developing events on the island on this episode of Arrow - On Target! Continue Reading →