So, Here's My Story...: Recent Episodes
Eliot Wagonheim & Jodi Hume
So, Here's My Story... is the only business podcast that promises wildly useful lessons from the absurd, the poignant and the seemingly irrelevant. This project arose out of a burning hatred of bullet point blogs, canned solutions and highlight-reel business conversations that look nothing like the realities of leadership. Business is messy and unpredictable. Business has depth and nuance. Business is more than spreadsheets. Business is stories.
It’s our final episode, and we have a lot to say, including thank you so much for listening!
Why is that important for business?
We are sad (and grateful and excited and…) to announce this is our final episode. As we reminisce about some of our favourite memories – including our live event and the Stalking Face Cake – we also want to impart some final lessons from our decision to end the podcast here. And obviously, we want to thank everyone for listening and supporting us since we started this podcast.
It is our testament to having faith and trusting that if something is real to us, it will resonate with the right people. And like works of art, sometimes you have to say: “this canvas is complete”. There is an assumption sometimes that keeping going is inherently better than ending a thing. But stories can’t go on forever.
What story do you want to tell?
So, that's our story... now, we want to hear yours!
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Is your business in a rut? Is everyone showing up with “Non-Player Characters” energy? When you have an Organizational Depressive State, it can be hard to get out of it – or can it be as simple as one person, one change? Let’s discuss!
Why is that important for business?
When you walk into a business and feel like your life force begins to immediately drain – like everyone is walking around with NPC (Non-Player Character) energy, it can feel like it’s impossible (or at least exhausting) to fix. But if just one person showed up with different energy, would that reset the tone?
For someone to change things, they have to first notice they are being a Non-Player Character, and they have to care enough to make that change, which is part of the problem. It can feel like an Organizational Depressive State.
Of course, positive energy can be sucked out of someone by an organization stuck in a rut as well. If someone comes in with positive energy, there’s a race to see whether that person’s energy makes positive changes, or whether that person’s energy gets beaten out of them. It’s a race to see if the person or the place wins.
The energy you bring into a space can affect other people, and you can also be affected by other’s energy, if you allow it.
Other Resources Mentioned
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52578297-the-midnight-library
Free Guy (movie) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2m-08cOAbc
What We Do in the Shadows (tv show) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7908628/
What story do you want to tell?
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How do you strike the balance between keeping things that you might not ever need, and getting rid of things that you might regret not having?
Why is that important for business?
Having exactly what you need but nothing extra is a Nirvana that few can ever attain.
It might show up in the amount of stuff you have, in your processes, or even in your systems.
Even space can be hoarded – there is something about having more space that is associated with success, and something about downsizing (or right-sizing) space that feels like going backwards.
There is a trap of equating quantity of value and worrying you won’t have when you eventually need it. How do you decide what you keep and what you can get by without, and when does not having it become more of a problem than having it around?
Perhaps we need a spring cleaning in business, not just for our stuff, but for the processes and systems we have.
What story do you want to tell?
So, that's our story... now, we want to hear yours!
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Do you expect to be heard? Or do you just assume that how things are is how they have to be?
Why is that important for business?
Do you have a say or a voice? Do you expect to be heard? If your whole experience in life is being heard, then it is more likely that is your expectation. If you are systematically and systemically overlooked, it doesn’t build the confidence to speak with authority about things.
Where can you start using your voice where you currently think you have no power? How do you start acting as if you have the authority?
What story do you want to tell?
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Like all good lessons about asking for what you need in business, this lesson starts in a massage parlor.
Why is that important for business?
You need to be aware of your needs (in business and in life) and communicate them effectively. Sometimes, when you are staring at a blank page, you just need to figure out what the first sentence should be and start from there.
There is nothing about work and leading that doesn’t involve identifying what is needed and asking for what is needed.
In the book, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, we learn there are internalizers and externalizers. A lot of conflict in teams comes down to friction between internalizers (non-direct communicators) and externalizers (more direct).
A lot of conflict in teams comes down to the friction between internalizers and externalizers (or direct and indirect people) and how they handle things.
What story do you want to tell?
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When you find out you are riding with the descendent of a nationally acclaimed blind wrestler, you know you’re in for some stories. And it turns out, we can turn those stories into some business lessons!
Why is that important for business?
There are interesting challenges to being blind when pursuing a sport like wrestling – it can be harder to see what’s coming, but you become very skilled at dealing with what’s in front of you. An honest understanding of your strengths and weaknesses, whether it’s in sport or in business, can mean all the difference in how you perform.
There are also lessons to be learned in regards to hiring – what assumptions are you making about your needs – maybe in terms of education or experience – that aren’t actually necessary to find the best candidate.
In either case, whether hiring someone or dealing with your own perceived weaknesses, you need confidence to see the path that isn’t obvious to everyone. When you can see further than other people can, it can be frustrating to be underestimated or misunderstood. But if you want to forge a path that not every other person has plodded down, you’ll have to get used to being misunderstood and slowing down your thought process to explain things over and over again. There is a set of luggage that comes with being able to see things others can’t.
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We don't talk about endings enough, especially not ending things well, with as much celebration as we began them. And that is exactly what this episode is about.
Why is that important for business?
Consider ending your business, or a product line, or even a relationship with a client or a team member – are you putting in the same effort to make a beautiful ending as you did when you started? Instead of ending by tapering off into a fizzling nothingness, celebrate everything that was; end with as much joy as you started with. Just because something is ending, doesn’t mean it was a failure; endings aren’t inherently bad. That is the belief that allows people to hold onto things they shouldn’t.
In public speaking, there are two aspects of the talk of particular import: primacy and recency. Primacy is the first thing you say, and it is what will be remembered. But recency, the last thing you said, is equally as memorable. So when considering how you want to be remembered, or how you want your business to be remembered, consider both the beginning and the end.
It is also important to remember that quitting is an art. We often have weird hang-ups around ending things or quitting things. But we need to allow endings to be thinkable, to be okay. If the possibility of an ending is unthinkable, you shut down so many options. It doesn’t have to be sad or wrong to say “this is done”; it is important to know when the last brush stroke has been applied to the painting. But take just as much care with the final brush strokes as you did with the rest, or your work may be ruined.
This also applies to letting someone go.
“The time has come for us to help you succeed somewhere else.” Paul Ricks
When someone is not a right fit, love them enough to not let them stay somewhere they don’t shine. Help them find where they belong and let them leave as a valued member of the team. Put as much effort into that ending as you did with the onboarding.
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Whether it’s politics, sports or happy hour, sometimes your company culture can make others feel uncomfortable. At what point do you make changes to include people, and at what point is that watering down an important aspect of your culture?
Why is that important for business?
In the office, sometimes cultures develop that can be polarizing. How do you handle it when new people come into conflict with the existing culture? How does diversity of thought and perspective reconcile with not wanting to break what works?
There is a whole new social ritual happening now in offices, and it requires a new skill set of empathy.
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Your company culture, a new board game, and all the ways they relate.
Why is that important for business?
A new board game allows people to make choices that would benefit everyone. And more people were interested in taking that choice – to advance the game for everyone – instead of just progressing closer to the ultimate goal of winning. People who played the game chose collaboration over playing simply for the objective of winning. Which makes us think about company culture.
What are the other strategies and ways that you can create a company culture, realizing that your department can’t win at the expense of other people at the company?
If you aren’t aware of this, you can easily accidentally incentivize the wrong behaviors.
It’s also important that the rules – of the game or the culture – not be arbitrary and make natural sense. This requires a full understanding of the “if-then” – it requires a lot of transparency.
Other resources mentioned
Wingspan game: https://stonemaiergames.com/games/wingspan/
What story do you want to tell?
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Culture – whether in your business or in your family – isn’t just established in big picture planning. It is established in the little decisions that you make all the time about what’s important to you in the moment.
Why is that important for business?
Sometimes in business, we make lists of our values and try to establish a culture around that. But often it is the small moments – where we have to make decisions about what really matters in that moment – that create culture. What you prioritize doesn’t always exist on a big sheet of paper somewhere, but it shows up in the little decisions you make.
If you don’t like your culture, look at those decisions. Look at what values they transmit. It is in those moments that you are accidentally or intentionally creating culture.
What story do you want to tell?
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Feel like you’re languishing right now in these uncertain times? Let’s talk about reframing that experience a bit.
Why is that important for business?
There is a lot of uncertainty in the world and in business right now – lots of things are changing and many people feel unsettled and unmoored, or even like they are languishing.
A recent episode of Hidden Brain, featuring Anthony Burrow, focused on this experience:
“A lot of the identity contingencies – the way in which we think of ourselves - are interwoven into the everyday life experiences, and so the school relationships, the work relationships, close family, friends, etc, when those things end or are coming to an end, you might start to wonder: “who am I? What am I going to do today?” Languishing isn’t just a description, a sort of wallowing or a float in a pool. It is an attempt to describe a whole set of affective emotional, behavioural circumstances of simply not feeling engaged in one’s life. There’s a sort of disconnection. And so if you are in this sort of place, whereas I’ve experienced it, where you can’t fully make sense of up or down, heads or tails because you’re languishing, you can’t keep score of how to move forward and get more of what you want and less of what you don’t like. You’re sort of floating in the wind.”
Maybe being unsettled isn’t this terrible place to be. Perhaps it’s more like gears changing – in order to move up or down a gear, you have to hit the clutch to disengage. Only then can you re-engage in the new gear. Disconnection can be purposeful to help you get your gear shift into the right place, reconfigure and re-engage.
Of course, uncertain futures can be either something to dread, or something to feel hopeful about. Like Red did in Shawshank Redemption: “I think it's the excitement only a free man can feel. A free man at a start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain.” He was looking at what could be added to his life. But for many of us, it’s been a long time since we felt like our uncertain futures weren’t going to be taking away.
Regardless, it can be helpful to rewrite the story of languishing as some sort of depressive state, into a purposeful disconnection so that you can reorganize things in a direction that you really want them to be.
What story do you want to tell?
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There are a lot of logistics to consider in coming back to work, but one thing you might not be thinking about is the change to community. Does community still matter, and how will it look different in a post-COVID world?
Why is that important for business?
There are ripple effects to this isolation. The next phase of business evolution, post-COVID, will look different in terms of building community, and it’s worth considering what that will look like. We have been talking policy, but we haven’t considered what else might be missing. And it maybe won’t feel as “community-ish” as it once did. It might require us to work harder and look farther or deeper to fulfill that connection need. And there may be things we got used to during isolation that we don’t want to give up in order to gain that community.
We may have been perfectly fine when we thought of quarantine as temporary. But when we realize we don’t know what “normal is going to be, it can be a bit more disconcerting. Things begin to feel more permanent, like we might become a society that just doesn’t get together in person.
Maybe we just need espresso shots of community to take us through our time on screens.
This is an unfolding experience with more questions than answers.
Community is important. It matters because it creates a space for conversation or connections that don’t otherwise have a chance to be. But maybe, as Smokey Robinson said, “a taste of honey is worse than none at all”.
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What if trying new things was like football training camp, and you had an audience – and even media – present while you were trying to figure things out? Wish you had time to practice something new in private instead? Maybe it’s not as simple as one or the other.
Why is that important for business?
To be successful in business, we need to give people the freedom to try and fail and evolve. And it would be nice to be able to do that in private. But there is also the danger that you can get stuck in a “getting ready to be ready” place. So how do you practice in a lower stakes environment that still matters enough so that you can evolve?
You are not going to be able to own your new skill until you experience it. No words that can replace the feeling of doing stuff. But you also need to discern where it’s time to graduate and up your game. As Ira Glass talks about in this video, you know what good is, but when you start, you are aware that you aren’t that. You have to play through that gap. If you don’t recognize that that gap is supposed to be there, you might practice in that quiet place forever.
And while it’s perfectly acceptable to slowly get your feet wet instead of jumping directly into the deep end, you still have to build your confidence through action. Confidence can only come through action.
In business, it needs to be okay to fail. Some lessons can only be learned the hard way, and you need to expect that. If you don’t find ways to move forward, then you risk staying stuck exactly where you are.
The price that you pay to satisfy the need to get better is the risk of embarrassment.
What story do you want to tell?
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Ever have to muster the energy to do something you don’t want to do, but really should do? How do you change your energy? And how do you know when it’s a losing battle?
Why is that important for business?
What do you do when things just are not working? How far do you push a lack of energy?
Sometimes, when you have to make it work, changing your environment can totally shift your energy – it’s like layering other colours into the fabric.
You can also change the rules to match the energy - shuffle the deck for how you are going to accomplish the thing you can’t put off. Just start by asking, “what can I change about this?”
And sometimes, simply getting started helps,
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REPLAY OF EPISODE 75: Audience Q&As can quickly devolve. Someone wants to share a story instead of a question; someone else wants to demonstrate their own expertise and “teach from the seats”. No one seems to know how to ask a succinct and relevant question and you can feel the frustration from the group. As the leader – whether it be in front of a large audience or just at your staff meetings – you must consider the impact of these contributions on the room, and your goals.
This episode is about being clear on your objective and helping everyone make the best contributions possible. It’s also a little bit about Jodi’s terrible poker face.
Why is that important for business?
There are people who are always going to answer, regardless of the question, with the answer they want to give. It can feel like they are not taking responsibility for the care and feeding of the group, nor considering the impact to the group.
As the leader, it is important to frame the rules of contribution before asking people for their contributions. For example, instructing them that the first sentence should end in a question mark. Give the Processors in the group time to think about what they want to say, and how to frame it within the guidelines you have given them. Set the expectations early.
However, it is also important to recognize that there are things that can get stuck in people’s craw, things they need to be acknowledged before they can move on. You don’t have to let this get you off track, but you do have to deal with the pothole in the parking lot, or it will keep coming up all day long.
Leadership is key here, and will affect the happiness of your team, and retention. You need to be clear on your top priority in the moment. Is it to keep train on the track, or is it to surface new thoughts and ideas? Are you trying to assuage concerns or present information? Each priority needs a different style of leadership. And you need to periodically asses if your leadership is angling you towards the outcome you want.
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Have you ever found yourself saying “I’m going to regret this”, but doing it anyway? Let’s talk self-sabotage and the frustrating world of pregrets.
Why is that important for business?
Often, we think too much about the consequences of making a bad decision, and not nearly enough about the consequences of making no decision. The decisions made through indecision/lack of a decision have consequences that we often ignore – sometimes they set a precedent, or simply waste a lot of time and energy.
And then there’s the part of it that isn’t about the decision at all, but how you communicate the decision.
So why do we do this? Are we just broken, or is it a glitch in the human operating system? Some of it might be because we can fatigue the pre-frontal cortex, which assesses consequences and manages a lot of decision making. And then we find our Monday selves really hating our Friday selves.
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Opportunities, luck, and leaving room in your business life for what you actually enjoy – just a few of the things we need to talk about in this episode.
Why is that important for business?
“I skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.” Wayne Gretzky
Luck is not a cloud of magic that you walk into. Luck is opportunities realizing they are standing in the same room together. If you want to do something different than what you are doing, you have to let other people know that you are interested in a thing.
Otherwise, that’s how ruts get created – you only dig into the stuff you have already been doing. The value of how much you enjoy something is wildly overlooked.
“You are here to do what you can’t not do.” Lissa Boles.
Think of it like putting your taxicab light on.
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Can you build confidence directly, or do you have to come at it obliquely, through just being yourself? Let’s discuss.
Why is that important for business?
People often think of confidence in terms of external validation, but if that’s the case, it can easily be cannibalized because you get worried how people will react. But what if the most confident thing you can do is just be you?
This can look like put on a “CEO posture”, where you are filtering the perception of confidence through what you think people want to see vs being yourself and using your strengths. If you have to run confidence through a filter of the feedback you get, maybe it isn’t actually confidence.
When you look at it this way, you eliminate the fear of being good enough, because what you are going for is simply the truest expression of yourself. It isn’t about putting on blinders and doing what you want, but about not letting feedback or external opinions stop you from taking action.
Some things are obliquely arrived at – you can’t pursue happiness, but you can pursue meaning and get happiness as a by-product. Maybe you also can’t pursue confidence directly, but instead you arrive at confidence by the pursuit of grounded surety in what you want to create and who you are. Confidence comes through taking action, and anything that gets in the way of that action will stymy confidence.
Other resources mentioned
NPR interview, One Woman Band Joan Armatrading Releases 22nd Album: https://www.npr.org/2021/06/20/1008449139/one-woman-band-joan-armatrading-releases-22nd-album
What story do you want to tell?
So, that's our story... now, we want to hear yours!
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Where does your responsibility to keep your employees end, and their responsibility to speak up start? Let’s sort that out in the next 20 minutes or so!
Why is that important for business?
Trying to help an employee who seems unenthused find their spark for work can be important to help retain your staff. But maybe it’s not your job to fix something without even knowing if work is the problem.
Reading other people’s energy is a skillset, but at some point, you have to trust the person to communicate their own needs. If your spidey sense is going off, ask them. But you have to be able to trust what they do (or don’t) tell you. You have to let them handle their own business. Make it clear that you are available for the conversation, and then trust them to do with that what they want.
In the Blessing White Engagement Model, we see this often overlooked piece – role of the employee in their own engagement.
Like with parenting, it’s your job to expose them to things to see what lights a spark, but it is not your job to find what sparks for them. At some point, they have to pick up the mantle. They have to help co-design what comes next.
Other resources mentioned
Blessing White, Engagement Model: https://blessingwhite.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Employee_Engagement_Capabilities_Brochure_2019.pdf
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Where does your responsibility to keep your employees end, and their responsibility to speak up start? Let’s sort that out in the next 20 minutes or so!
Why is that important for business?
Trying to help an employee who seems unenthused find their spark for work can be important to help retain your staff. But maybe it’s not your job to fix something without even knowing if work is the problem.
Reading other people’s energy is a skillset, but at some point, you have to trust the person to communicate their own needs. If your spidey sense is going off, ask them. But you have to be able to trust what they do (or don’t) tell you. You have to let them handle their own business. Make it clear that you are available for the conversation, and then trust them to do with that what they want.
In the Blessing White Engagement Model, we see this often overlooked piece – role of the employee in their own engagement.
Like with parenting, it’s your job to expose them to things to see what lights a spark, but it is not your job to find what sparks for them. At some point, they have to pick up the mantle. They have to help co-design what comes next.
Other resources mentioned
Blessing White, Engagement Model: https://blessingwhite.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Employee_Engagement_Capabilities_Brochure_2019.pdf
What story do you want to tell?
So, that's our story... now, we want to hear yours!
Pull up a chair and join the conversation in our Facebook Group: bit.ly/shmsgroup
OR...
Shoot us an email: talktous@soheresmystory.com
Connect with @SHMSpodcast on Twitter: https://twitter.com/shmspodcast
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This is a rant about a bad experience at the bank, but it also ends up being an important lesson about a metric you’ve probably never heard about: apologies per hour.
Why is that important for business?
An interesting metric for a business to consider is how many apologies your people are issuing per hour. If you have that many apologies to make, then there’s a big problem. It’s demoralizing for your team, and probably indicates you have prioritized something else over customer care.
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Learning a new board game can be frustrating – it’s a lot of information to learn without any real context. And it might also reveal a lot about things in your business, like onboarding staff.
Why is that important for business?
Just as it is with learning how to do a new job, learning a new board game can mean a lot of new information that doesn’t have a lot of contextual meaning. But what if you change how you learn a new board game – a brief summary of the rules and goals of the game, and then an open round or hand where you can talk through strategy and decisions to help everyone understand the game better, before you play “for real”?
Or is there more value in jumping in immediately to play, and learning through the process of failure?
Some of this depends on learning styles, but the universal truth is that people can only take in so much information when they don’t have context of where to put it or why it matters. This is often revealed in the questions they ask: those questions often show how much they understand or misunderstand about the point or context. Ultimately, there are limitations to how much you can do in advance and how much you have to learn by doing.
And even if you have the most logical, well thought out onboarding process, it is not necessarily going to be accepted. Just as people can be resistant to a way of learning a board game they are unfamiliar with, new hires can be resistant to a way of training. And the reason they don’t accept it doesn’t have to be rooted in logic. Leaders must figure out if they are more attached to things being done a certain way or adjusting the learning as needed.
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When you get a chance to be among random groups of strangers, it can quickly become clear that there are always commonalities that bind us. And we can learn a lot about company culture by observing our common needs and behaviors.
Why is that important for business?
Experiencing the commonality of what everyone is going through can be very reassuring. It’s also what makes up company culture. Culture isn’t organized, catalyzed or sparked by a mission statement or a team building meeting. Culture is what happens in the interstitial moments of shared experiences.
And sometimes, in certain moments, what is required of leaders is not an overarching strategy, but simply about taking charge and finding certainty in that moment.
Figuring out how you are going to navigate the new rules of business post-COVID is going to be like going through a drawer in your house: you have to take it all out and decide if it matters and why it matters, and decide what goes back in. You need to ask yourself if you are actually solving the problems that you have, or if you are creating rules for rules’ sake.
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Leadership means making decisions for your company and everyone in it. And sometimes, especially when it comes to things like COVID and health, those decisions are extra challenging.
Why is that important for business?
When it comes to coming back to the office, there are more variables than ever to consider – who can work remotely, do you wear masks, is everyone vaccinated are just some of the more complicated problems leaders are dealing with right now.
When you are in charge of a large group of individuals, everything gets exponentially challenging.
You might be used to the thick skin necessary to brook dissension for unpopular decisions, but it’s harder to do this when the ramifications are about other people’s health, not just having a great quarter.
Right now, leaders have a heightened responsibility to check in with the pieces of your perspective and make sure they are built on a solid foundation. We need to be incredibly clear on the metrics we are using.
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What can we learn from a software used to ring up pastries, that ends up helping with cancer treatment? If this episode is any indication, a lot.
Why is that important for business?
In Tokyo, a pastry shop in a train station wanted to make it easier to ring up pastries without packaging. And it led to a big development in cancer treatment (you can read the story here).
So what can we learn from this?
There are lessons about perseverance. About connecting your people, culture, and company to something important. How having a sense a your work “mattering” can help with engagement. And how you can choose to connect to something that matters, even if you aren’t doing something that seems to deeply matter – as the Talmud says, “whoever saves a single life is considered by scripture to have saved the whole world.” You can still connect to a larger mission, even if you aren’t fulfilling your dreams. You just have to look at individual impact and think of ways to make things better just because you were there.
We imagine culture exists only on the macro level, but it is stitched together by the pieces of culture at the micro level.
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Have you ever thought you nailed an interview – maybe even had a standing ovation-level interview – but still ended up in second place? Maybe went out and celebrated and got yourself a giant celebratory hat? Let’s talk about that hat, and what it symbolizes.
Why is that important for business?
There is a critical excitement you feel at the beginning of a journey whose end is uncertain. Everyone is susceptible to that energy and even need to feed off of it sometimes. As an entrepreneur, you have to – to some degree - get excited about the chicken counting process. No, you shouldn’t base your psychological wellbeing on those unhatched chickens, but you can’t thrive in business without forecasting incredible futures from this thing you are labouring so hard to create. You have to put yourself out there.
Complacency takes energy out of the system. You have to know your hearts at risk and might get dashed against the rocks - there’s no other way to go about it.
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You can learn a lot about how to handle change (and seemingly never-ending not change) by taking two 20-hour train rides. Or you can just listen to Jodi’s story instead.
Why is that important for business?
Things feel like they are on the cusp of some sort of return to “normalcy”, in business and in life (as we talked about in episode 199, The Next New Normal). And we all have to sort through the stack of things that have changed because of COVID and consider what we are excited to bring back (and can); what we are excited to bring back (and can’t), and the buckets of things that we are now realizing we don’t want to bring back.
As we consider this next shift, it can help to give yourself a longer runway – having something to look forward to but keeping it far enough in the distance that you have time to prepare. And maintain compassion for yourself and others and avoid judging who is farther along on the track of normality.
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Ever struggle between what’s best for your client, and what’s best for the culture of your organization? Both are critical to your long-term success, so let’s talk about how to navigate those decisions.
Why is that important for business?
In your business, you have to take the long view. Culture works on trust, and if you allow bad behaviour among your team, you can be indicating that clients are more important than culture.
As a leader, this is the balance you have to navigate. You are balancing a three-legged stool - competency of service, fiscal responsibility, and culture – and all are equally important. You can’t short-change any of the legs or the stool won’t stand up for long.
Part of this is controlling emotional responses. If you want to be a leader, you have to learn to manage your emotional reactions to other people.
And, at the same time, you can’t exist in a pressure cooker without a release valve. You need to be able to communicate, either directly or to a third-party, about inevitable conflict.
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Have you ever thought about a scammer, “you are very bad at your job?” What if, instead, it’s an issue of leadership at Scam Headquarters? What if scammers could use business coaches too?
Why is that important for business?
A scam is essentially a business, and because of this, flawed leadership and personnel issues can plague them just as they can your business. Some even have customer service lines to help you process your extortion payments or send fruit baskets for participating. So, if a company running a scam can learn about business, what can we learn about business from a company running a scam?
Giving your employees directives can be helpful in getting them to do exactly what you want. But if they don’t understand the larger picture – if they don’t have general guidelines to create an internal GPS of what their job is – they won’t know how to react to situations or come up with solutions on their own.
In our 2nd episode, we talked about the importance of making things easy. And while confused minds say no, creating confusion can also benefit a scam. But one thing must never be confused – you cannot be confusing about the path you want people to walk. There must be one clear door out.
While we don’t want to give advice on how to scam better, there is something about business we can all learn from companies that scam.
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What are you excited to return to, post-pandemic, and what parts do you plan to bring into your “new normal”? Sometimes, a meme can spark some really interesting conversations.
Why is that important for business?
We didn’t get a lot of choice when this pandemic hit – we had to adapt, and we had to adapt fast. And now, as it finally feels like we might get some semblance of “normal” back, there are a lot of things we are excited about doing again. But there are also things we have experienced from the pandemic that we want to hold onto. And we need to start thinking about those things now.
We are going to be experiencing a next new “normal” and we need to consciously consider how navigate it and negotiate for what we want. If we don’t ask these questions and get clarity now, we’re all going to accidentally go back to a reality that we might not actually want.
We need to acknowledge the legitimacy of all the ways people have been making it work and look for intersection points in our business where it also works for us (instead of making people build their way of doing things around your business’ structure.)
But this isn’t a one-shot deal on conversation. We all have the capacity to help design this next normal and help surface the things that were easily glossed over before.
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REPLAY OF EPISODE 69: When illness befell the Hume household, Jodi learned an important lesson about empathy, and how bad we can be at empathizing if we haven’t experienced something for ourselves. It turns out, empathy involves more than emotional intelligence.
Why is that important for business?
So often in business, we jump to conclusions about the motivations, experiences and decisions of others. Sometimes, this lack of empathy is a matter of needing to develop some emotional intelligence. But perhaps more often, it is simply a lack of knowledge or a need to ask more questions.
Lack of empathy is often a lack of curiosity. We think we know what we are looking at and don’t take the time to do additional diagnostics. In the moment when you want to be frustrated with a behaviour, there is power in being willing to ask a couple of questions.
In this way, empathy in general is more like a shared understanding as opposed to an emotional response. If you don’t understand why someone has a problem with something, maybe it’s because you don’t understand the problem enough.
This lack of empathy often lives in a blind spot and usually isn’t a conscious choice we make. It is important to pay attention when our inner dialogue is dismissive – and where we are making assumptions about other people – if we want to develop our ability to share understanding with other people.
Resources Mentioned
Empathy Exams, by Leslie Jamison. http://www.lesliejamison.com/the-book/
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How do you pick a mentor? What is necessary to being a good mentor? And do you still need a Sherpa if you have already summited the mountain?
Why is that important for business?
Mentors or NA sponsors are something that successful people use to succeed in business and sobriety. But once you’ve “made it”, do you still need on?
A mentor isn’t someone that gives you the answers. A good mentor or sponsor is there to help you avoid falling into your usual traps, and keep you focused on the line of thinking that got you to the summit in the first place. They need to know and understand you so they can help you evolve. There is a weight and gravity that comes with the title, and they need you to be able to not figure out if something is a good idea, but if it is a good idea for you. They need to know you well enough not to necessarily answer, but to help you re-orient you back to yourself.
Once you are reoriented, you often know what the next thing is. And they need to be able to recognize what a valuable failure for you is, as well as invalid (or not good for you right now) success. Mentorship is getting them back to who they are so they can make whatever decision is right for them. Even if a mentor thought they had all the right answers for themself, they should be insightful enough to see that they don’t have all the answers for someone else.
And this isn’t (just) about accountability. Sometimes, what people need is to be nudged into action, but sometimes what they need is to let their own processes unfold. There is an art to knowing the difference. Accountability is only valuable if it is action in the right direction.
You need a mentor who gets who you are so their feedback is you-shaped.
Other resources mentioned
Dismantling the Myth of the Self-Reliant CEO: https://www.fastcompany.com/3060235/dismantling-the-myth-of-the-self-reliant-ceo
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It turns out, you can train a dog to stop barking if you train him to retrieve throw cushions instead. Let’s find out how that trick can work with humans.
Why is that important for business?
When you see a behaviour you don’t like – barking at the door, for instance – you may have better luck stopping it by introducing a new replacement behaviour – fetching pillows - than by focusing on the barking. It can be much more effective to train a dog to do something instead of training them not to do something.
And it just might be the same for those of us on two legs.
But it is important to not step over the part where the dogs had training. “Do this instead” works best when the “instead” is clearly communicated and sufficient or necessary training occurs. Like here.
Be aware that in every interaction you have, you are training people how best to interact with you and how to get what they want from you. If you respond to an email immediately, for instance, you are teaching someone that that is a fast and efficient way to get what they need from you. When you notice that subconscious training is happening all of the time, you can direct it to encourage the behaviour you want more of.
But beware – the conversation is important. Though often people can figure out things on their own through reinforcement “training”, you may need a Care and Feeding conversation to make the behaviour stick. And before you do that, you need to recognize not only what isn’t working, but what behaviour you would like instead.
That frustration, of seeing what you don’t want, and turning it into an opportunity (what you do want), is what being an entrepreneur is about. If you act like an internal entrepreneur in your own company, you can look for the frustrations and find an opportunity to change things for the better.
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A lot of car ads discuss the importance of going from zero to 100, but rarely they talk about how well they go from 100 to zero. And it turns out, neither do businesses.
Why is that important for business?
Business owners focus a lot on growth, scalability and everything to do with speed, power and velocity. But safety, or measured initiatives, aren’t as sexy. Sometimes, to go fast, you need to build your brakes up so you don’t spin out on the curves.
Braking is an art in and of itself.
We have to learn to ebb as hard as we flow.
Look at the meme below, and consider honouring all of the parts of endurance, including the pausing. Leaning back is often accompanied by guilt or the need to justify. But what if you asked yourself, “what do I need to do right now to do my best work? Is it pushing forward or leaning back?”
When you take the guilt out of the conversation, and consider that – on a racetrack and in business too - knowing when and how to brake is part of completing the race.
There is a large Venn diagram overlap between break and brake, but only one involves guilt. Maybe there is a brain hack there – tell yourself you are using your brakes, not taking a break. And how much do I need to brake/break before it has served its purpose? There is an art in applying just enough brake to maintain speed.
Other resources mentioned
“Winning with Accountability: the Secret Language of High-Performing Organizations” Henry J Evans https://dynamicresults.com/winning-with-accountability/?fbclid=IwAR1vpKExjUby8RE7iVnoqpjfGr7zhRYjc8b8e6Zbpi-Qt5FIBkiEvGVo9O0
Dr. Hallowell: https://drhallowell.com/
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When you see a business opportunity, it’s natural to focus on the potential return on investment, and the consequences if it doesn’t work. But it’s important to remember another key question: what happens if it does work?
Why is that important for business?
When examining a business opportunity, we need to look at what happens if it fails, but also, what happens if succeeds. If you were to imagine yourself celebrating everything working out from the opportunity exactly as designed, would you be happy or excited?
What kind of business joy would be inherent in the successful venture?
Especially during these COVID times, businesses have fought really hard to get to ask the question: is this the kind of work we want to do? But if you have that ability, it is important to consider the difference between work that you get to do and work that you have to do. It’s a discipline to ask those questions and remember that you can ask those questions. While turning down opportunities can feel like a luxury, sometimes you have to consider all of the costs (not just monetary) of that work. The more you take on things that bring your energy down, the more you are decreasing the chance of getting more of the work you want.
As a leader, you are always modeling what questions can be asked and should be asked. And just because a question is not being asked doesn’t make the need for the question go away.
Other resources mentioned
Brene Brown and Glennon Doyle podcast conversation: https://brenebrown.com/podcast/glennon-doyle-brene-on-untamed/
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Overwhelmed with all the plates you have to keep spinning as an entrepreneur? It might be time to examine some of those plates and see which ones you don’t actually need to be spinning.
Why is that important for business?
In business, you have a lot of decisions and things you need to be aware of, and all of them have a weight. But sometimes, you are worrying about things further down the decision tree that won’t actually come up if you make some of the more pressing decisions. It can help with overwhelm to examine all of the decisions you have weighing on your mind and consider which ones you actually need to make right now.
It might also be true, in pandemic times, that you have some degree of planning apathy because you can’t possibly know what’s coming at all. In that case, you might just need to examine what you do have some degree of control over and focus there.
It can be hard to see when you are stuck in either end of the continuum, though, which is why you need some outside help sometimes – it’s difficult to read the label from inside the bottle. What you need is clarity on what actions you can take, because paralysis (either from planning apathy or overwhelm) is rarely a valuable place to stay in. Even if the action you decide to take first is rest or intentional inaction.
It is important to find actionable clarity so that you aren’t stuck in paralysis.
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Whether you are responding to a college applicant or your insulin-dependent wife, sometimes it can be a thin line between building expectations and letting them build expectations in a vacuum.
Why is that important for business?
There are many times in business where you are going to be confronted with your own and your client’s uncertainty. And while it is usually important to share what you know early (and be okay not knowing much), you also don’t want to set people up for disappointment with early information that may not be accurate. And a lot of this might depend on the stakes being discussed.
In episode 158, we talked about the need to communicate, even without an answer. And it can be especially important to map out the client experience and find points of high anxiety where extra communication might be welcome. But it’s also critical to be aware of the expectations you can be setting up.
Some people need to calibrate their chances, with percentage likelihoods, for example.
The important thing to keep in mind is that you want to share what you do know in a way that is helpful, by answering the questions that are in your audience’s minds. Not addressing them at all is allowing them to fill in the vacuum with their fears. But tread carefully between building expectations and letting them build false expectations in a vacuum.
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Feedback is important, even (maybe even especially) if it is negative. But in the absence of something that tells you when you are getting warmer, it can be hard to find the right path.
Why is that important for business?
In business, whether it is among work colleagues, employers or clients, you need help to understand how to do a good job. If you only ever get expressions of dissatisfaction, without any inkling of what is working, it can make it nearly impossible to meet expectations. It’s like playing the “colder-warmer” seeking game – if you only ever get told you are “colder”, never “warmer”, you can’t find the spot. You need some kind of signal to navigate towards, not just away from.
You need some feedback as to where the value is.
This can’t be formulaic or prescriptive or it can backfire. But if you notice a good thing, you should mention the good thing. If you want to lead people to something, you have to add some “warmer”. This isn’t about compliments, which are usually about the person, but about positive feedback on the action.
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Referrals – they’re the lifeblood of business, so they say. But how do you make sure you keep your referral cred (much like street cred, but with referrals) when you can’t assess the quality of the work of the person to whom you are referring?
Why is that important for business?
When you are referring out, it is usually because that is not your area of expertise. So how do you know the person is good?
Making a referral is about trust. You have to assess whether you believe them to be generally competent, and whether or not you trust them. Look at the type of questions they ask, the way they take care of clients, and the way they make an effort to understand and address their client’s specific needs. You have to separate the process from the results, because you can’t always evaluate results objectively. What each person considers “good work” is different. There are objective aspects, but a lot of it is subjective, and those are the parts that you communicate when referring to a person. You have to manage expectations. Then you’ll have to trust people to make their own choices from that information.
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Business and life are full of moments of overwhelm and disorientation. And in those moments, we need to take a moment to identify what works to help us locate some grounding. We need to find our stomp, or our spit.
Why is that important for business?
We’ve all found ourselves spinning in circles, not knowing which way was up. Like if you are caught in an avalanche, the thing you need to do before you do anything else is orient yourself. And sometimes, that means spitting to find out which way gravity is pulling. Or when you’re dizzy, sometimes it is just stomping to reminding yourself of the one thing you know – where the floor is. You need to narrow your perception to that one thing, and there is where you get your bearings.
In work, it might be finding that thing amongst all of your work tasks that gets you in the flow (even if that is a spreadsheet).
That thing that reorients you often needs to be a very physical thing. There is no such thing as level without a physical reference point.
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How do you delineate when work ends and home life begins when both happen in the same space?
Why is that important for business?
There is something important to many people about the distinctions between work and home life, whether it be the commute (as we talked about in this previous episode) or having an office outside of the home. Having a physical or at least psychological separation between the two can be important. You need a work place, not just a place of work.
Having a distinct space can also influence the quality of our efforts, both at work and at home. The benefits of working out of the home, when possible, means there is no porous boundary and you can focus on the task at hand, instead of laundry and emptying the dishwasher, and any other thing that happens to catch your eye. Having everything you need to do in front of you at all times makes deciding what is most important a little more challenging.
It is important to at least think about ways to create a ritual or practice that acts to separate the beginning and end of the workday or work week. The absence of things to demarcate time causes everything to blur.
Other resources mentioned
The Power of Moments, by Chip and Dan Heath: https://heathbrothers.com/the-power-of-moments/
The Power of Full Engagement, by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/68985.The_Power_of_Full_Engagement
Life is not a Marathon http://psychologyofwellbeing.com/201410/life-is-not-a-marathon.html?fbclid=IwAR0kZ4hif-iXu2ksQIy6QPabdrQhwZIrrd8HD6gaWOxdY0LjxLkBajA58fw
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Do you ever get data that has historically proven accurate and helpful, but just ignored it because…you wanted to? How do you determine when to listen to recommendations, and when to follow your intuition?
Why is that important for business?
Business owners get a lot of information, and it can sometimes be interesting to simply say, “that’s interesting” and move on. But when we put effort into getting reliable metrics and then continuously ignore them, it might require closer inspection.
This past year has been all about uncertainty in business and demonstrating that perhaps we are capable of navigating without so much data and certainty.
And…if good data is telling you something that goes against what you think feels right, it’s worth considering.
As GPS demonstrates, sometimes even the best data has flaws and you’ll need to override the advice given. But when you find yourself consistently ignoring the suggestions given, it is worth considering if you really want any of that data at all. Sometimes you have to let go of the “should” that data represents. There is an art to knowing when to follow the data and guidance, and when to follow your gut (and when to ask more questions).
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How do you balance too many rules with too few? How about exceptions? And where do you fall on Methodists and Evil Kevin? Let’s talk about all of that (and more!)
Why is that important for business?
It is easy to overdo or underdo rules and regulations. It is easy to fall into the trap of assuming that your team does not need rules because they can be trusted. But your team won’t always be the same, both because situations in their lives will change, and your team will change over time. Assuming best intentions is wonderful, but you also have to ask, “what’s at risk?”
You might worry that rules assume everyone is bad or insinuate distrust. But they also protect your employees. And it warrants asking what the maximum level of threat is and if it warrants rules to protect you and the employee. There is a sweet spot in the middle where rules don’t inhibit the behaviour you do want, while not discouraging the behaviours you wish to see less of.
Rules are there to put guardrails on things, but you can always step over the guardrail whenever you want. And like guardrails, they might exist only in places where the most danger exists.
To sum up: Good luck with rules. You should have them. Maybe. Probably. But you may not want to always enforce them. But make sure you don’t overdo them. Or underdo them. In short - good luck.
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Is there a generational divide in your business or place of work? Leaning into the differences – and the superpowers – of each generation can make your business stronger. For instance, how can you exploit the Gen X superpower of tolerating boredom? Let’s talk about that.
Why is that important for business?
Usually, we give a little too much credence and attention to the differences between the generations. But there are differences. In business especially, those differences can actually help, if you aren’t afraid to focus on the strengths and shape the role to fit those strengths. Whether people are primed for the world they will have to usher in, or are shaped by the changing world they occupy, each generation has different skill sets that, instead of mocked, can be incorporated to make them even better at their jobs.
How do you cater to the innate tendencies of each generation? How often do you roll your eyes instead of thinking how that generational trait might be a skill? And where do you need to make some adjustments in terms of setting up processes to get the outcomes you want instead of just setting up the process you want?
The oversimplification of generations segments it in a way that is less useful. But each does have its own superpower. And just like in superhero movies, each have their own thing that they bring. You want to leverage those superpowers, even if it requires some sort of accommodation.
Additional resources
Want to read all about Gen X and how suited to boredom (and pandemics) they are? Here is the article Jodi references in her story: It Took a Global Pandemic, But Generation X is Finally Getting Love
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Billy Joel and Hamilton sang about it, but what is your relationship with satisfaction? How can entrepreneurs, with their knack for always striving, develop a relationship with satisfaction, and is it even important to do that?
Why is that important for business?
Is there an incompatibility with entrepreneurship/business leadership and being satisfied? Is it a cardinal sin to say, “yeah I’m good”, or is that foolish?
Satisfaction lives on a spectrum, and even if it might not be necessary for an entrepreneur to find their way all the way to contentment, it might be important to develop the capacity to at least appreciate. One version of an unhealthy relationship with satisfaction is not even being able to notice the point where you achieve a goal. But it is also true that not a lot of entrepreneurs come at life with an abundance of satisfaction – the itch for striving might be a necessity for this kind of leadership.
So how do you cultivate a healthy relationship with satisfaction, and do you think it’s even important to do? It takes fuel to stay at the same altitude, and there is a danger in relaxing into satisfaction or contentment too much, but where does being “unsatisfiable” cheat you out of enjoying what is there and has been created?
Sometimes, it is important to look back and consider what parts you are satisfied with, where you simply maintain altitude.
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Ever been so focused on the planning that you don’t take into account the delivery method? Ah, the lessons we learn from a garbage bag full of salad, lobster-chip cookies, and acres of pizza.
Why is that important for business?
This issue – considering the delivery method – has come up a lot in business in 2020, largely because of remote working. When you have a way of doing something – launching a strategic plan before a holiday party, when everyone is together, for instance – and you don’t consider the change in delivery mechanism (i.e. you didn’t consider that it would be different to do this on Zoom), the outcome can suffer. And this change in delivery method can really get people tied up in knots about any kind of planning.
But we also need to be aware of where we are using COVID as an excuse to do nothing. Instead of just thinking about how it will be less in these circumstances, we need to focus on how it will just be different. When you struggle to see the possibilities, it can help to imagine yourself in the future, being interviewed on how you accomplished your goal in these exceptional times.
Working remotely can add a layer of challenge to certain organizational aspects of business, and you have to be sure you are still making decisions as part of the whole, not in isolation. And those conversations to make sure we are considering the whole – the purposefulness of this contact can feel like overkill, but without it, you might have a garbage bag full of salad.
Other resources mentioned
If you really want to watch the episode of Family Ties that Eliot mentions, it is Season 4, Episode 8
“The story I am making up is that…” exercise from Brene Brown http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/brene-brown-rising-strong-excerpt
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There is a big difference between how the haves and the have nots think and talk about money, access and resources. Those differences show up in your business, too, and we should talk about it.
Why is that important for business?
Just as rich people teach their kids different things about money than poor and middle-class parents, so to do these differences show up in businesses, especially in management teams and start-ups. There is a difference between approach and culture, and mindset about accessing resources and advice. It is practically the birthplace of “you don’t know what you don’t know”. Certain options never even occur to people who aren’t used to thinking of those options. When you don’t even know what is possible, it’s hard to know what questions to ask.
People who are accustomed to financial and business success have more access to resources, yes, but the bigger piece might be the mindset piece.
It can be seductive to want to feel like the smartest person in the room, but if you are, you are in the wrong room. The constant drive to not be the smartest person in the room is not only great for your own personal development, but also a great leadership skill to develop. You need to surround yourself with people who make you better.
Other resources mentioned
Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! By Robert Kiyosaki
Dismantling the Myth of the Self-Reliant CEO, https://www.fastcompany.com/3060235/dismantling-the-myth-of-the-self-reliant-ceo
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“Tell me the truth” – are there any four words more fraught with potential discord than those?
But if someone asks you a “tell me the truth” question, it’s important to consider that might not be the question you should be answering at all.
Why is that important for business?
If someone asks you a “tell me the truth” question in business, there is the potential to do a lot of damage, regardless how you answer. But almost always, there is an opportunity to ask more questions and gain more clarity, without ever answering the original question. Be curious and find out what they are really asking before you answer. When you ask the right questions, you can help bring them to the conclusion they want to reach, without risking the relationship. It can be the difference between “you’re right” and “that’s right”.
The honesty question is the wrong first question - the first question should be other questions. It might be the question laid on the table, but it is not the question that needs to be picked up. If you keep probing, you can usually find the right question. Because your answer isn’t going to be helpful if you aren’t answering the right questions.
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If you’ve ever seen a debate about student loan forgiveness, then you’ve heard some version of, “I had to pay my loan back, so should they.” But at what point does “fairness” become lack of leadership, and focusing on individuals cripple a system?
Why is that important for business?
To be successful, companies have to be nimble and not beholden to the past. At the same time, we have to be careful not to blithely dismiss or alienate those who have concerns – is there merit in the process (like a chick needing the struggle of hatching to develop) or is it merely an issue of “I suffered, so should you.”
If there is an opportunity to fix a systemic issue in your business that might be holding people back from exceling, personal experiences shouldn’t trump the needs of the company. It is the responsibility of a leader to help people grow in how they think about an organization. If senior people are too side-tracked by things remaining the same as they experienced, it is a signal that you have work to do. You will need to work to help your team build their muscle of seeing from an organizational wide perspective instead of as an individual contributor.
If you or someone on your team thinks people need grit or struggle to be better at their jobs, it’s worth asking: “is there a better way to build grit?”
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For a lot of companies, bonus season is coming up. Because this has been an especially strange year, it feels extra challenging to balance the desire to show your people they are valued, while still being responsible to the future needs of your business in uncertain times. Essentially, this episode is all about helping Eliot make decisions, but we get to come along for the ride.
Why is that important for business?
Considering how strange and unprecedented the events of 2020 have been, forecasting the cash reserve needs of 2021 feels extra daunting. And there has also been lots of opportunity for the best people on your team to show how very valuable they are this year. Saving for the unknown that is next year is responsible but can also make it more challenging to show staff they are valued. You want to be a bright spot for those that made this year better, and you want to make sure they have a job in the future.
It is important to recognize that the assumption that people won’t feel valued if they don’t get a monetary bonus might not be correct, and it might help to involve them in the conversation. Of course, if bonuses have become an expectation (as we talked about in this past episode), this decision becomes trickier. But for most people, expectations are well-tempered this year, and many are just grateful to have a job at all.
It’s important to ask some questions to challenge your assumptions, like: what’s the purpose of the bonuses? How do I want my people to feel when they get them? And can I accomplish that while still preserving most of our cash resources for the great unknown that is 2021?
A well-intentioned mistake that leaders can make is stretching their business too far to make their people feel valued. If you overextend, you set yourself up for very tricky 2021. And you may be putting your people at risk. Getting creative with showing your appreciation without putting your business in danger is important.
And if you don’t know how to create that sense of value, you might need to rewind and learn more about your employees first.
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Remember snow days? Remember how exciting it was to have that found day? It’s important to find ways to incorporate these experiences into your lives, even when everything is virtual.
Why is that important for business?
It’s also important to create these experiences – these blips of normality or shared experience – in your business as well. We talk about the quantitative parts of business often, but the qualitative experience is just as important – how people feel is not something to be overlooked. Culture for companies is often talked about as an “other” thing that lives in its own room, when it is more like interstitial tissue woven through everything.
Sometimes, it is as simple as refusing to forfeit some of the joy that come with normality.
Especially as go into winter, with the weight of not having many things to look forward to and lacking spontaneous found joys that come with semi-quarantine, we have to be mindful about how to incorporate snow day energy into our businesses and our lives. We need more emphasis on seeing see people and interactions beyond the transactional. The interpersonal is a chance to create another texture to the conversation that is missing.
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What can a peach the size of your face teach you about expectations? Let’s discuss!
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How do you manage expectations to avoid disappointment, while avoiding complacency? How do you go from the perfect peach, to whatever it is that they sell at the grocery store.
These are the questions we tackle in this episode, and you can listen here.
hy is that important for business?
When you have the perfect peach as a child, every other peach will reliably be a disappointment. When you have an amazing first experience, you often have to contend with unmet expectations, so how do you manage those expectations, in life and business, so you aren’t perpetually disappointed.
“Satisfied” can sometimes feel like a dangerous word. How can you give conscious thought to creating an experience for our staff, for instance, so they are as happy with the decision they made on day 418 as they were on day 1? How do we balance desire and expectation with satisfaction, while avoiding disappointment? Satisfaction feels like it can easily dribble into inertia and complacency without a little hunger. If every single peach met the standard of that first one, it would just be a peach.
“Fine is something you pay, not something you get” – wisdom by Eliot.
From The Incredibles
Helen: Everyone's special, Dash.
Dash: Which is another way of saying no-one is.
As we talked about in Episode 149 Everything’s a Blur, we mark our time with individual blips and the punctuation of life, and sameness tends to cause life to blur. The answer to fear of unmet expectations isn’t to keep our expectations low, but to communicate about them. The problems with expectations happen when they haven’t been discussed, or when they are confused with certainty. And most importantly, expectations without truth are dangerous.
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This episode will be released on a pretty significant voting day in the U.S., which gets us thinking about how voting (and NOT voting) relates to business. How do you get people to tell you what they think, what they want, if they have lost faith that it will make a difference? And the biggest question of all – how can we use rats to tell this story?
Why is that important for business?
Voting is an act of hope. But if you don’t think your vote matters, or you don’t think anyone’s vote matters (because the people at the top will do what they want anyway), you can get disillusioned in the process. The same can happen in a business. Whether it’s customers or employees or anyone else involved in your business, if people think their voice doesn’t matter, you can miss vital information.
So how do you reach people who don’t vote, or speak up?
The most honest place to look – does their vote actually count? Do you really want to hear from them, or do you just want to feel good that you heard from everybody? If you actually want to encourage people to speak up, you have to be prepared to hear.
The opposite of love isn’t hate; it is disinterest. Do not imagine a silent voice is happy. Disengagement or lack of engagement is far worse than any amount of criticism. If someone is willing to give you feedback, even if it is negative, that means they are investing energy, and that they have hope things can be better. This doesn’t mean you always have to take the suggestions, but the people using their voice must believe they were at least heard, even if answer is no.
Of course, there is a significant difference between feedback in general and the concept of voting, which has higher level of expectation of outcome. But the core questions are similar– how do you get people to engage (or vote)? How do you create and sustain hope and why does hope matter?
As we learn from Jodi’s horrific rat study, when there is no line of sight to what matters or has value, or when everything seems closed in or without options, it is hard to breathe hope into a situation. We can go a great distance if we actually see a purpose, but if you deprive people of reason – or keep them figuratively in the dark – they lose hope sooner.
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Rant alert! In this episode, we talk about the frustrating ways that businesses make it hard for us to give them our money, and the importance of keeping things easy and keeping the customer in mind.
Why is that important for business?
When a company (even EEK your company) doesn’t seem to understand the problem that we are attempting to solve, nor how they are going to solve the problem, it makes it hard to give them our money.
And it’s an important reminder to make sure you look at your business from the client’s point of view. Are you repeatedly getting the same questions, or repeatedly having to explain the same things? That’s a clue that you need to look at that part of your process and make it easier.
Like we talked about in Episode 2, Rule #1: make it easy for people to do what you want them to do.
Anticipate what your customers need by seeing the experience as much as possible through their eyes. And where you can’t anticipate, respond to their struggles as something that isn’t about them, but an area that you can improve.
On the side of a frustrated customer is a person at that company who is frustrated that a customer isn’t doing what they want. It’s worth it to look for the path of least resistance and put your thing on that path. It’s worth it to put the sidewalks where the path is well worn.
Tl:dr - make it easy.
p.s. Have you checked out our updated website www.soheresmystory.com? You can get your own Podpages site here: https://www.soheresmystory.com/podpage
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We cheat on our own podcast for a story this week, as we talk about This American Life, North Korea’s former leader Kim Jong-il, creativity and risk.
Why is that important for business?
This episode references the This American Life podcast episode, Same Bed, Different Dreams https://www.thisamericanlife.org/718/same-bed-different-dreams
If, like Kim Jong-il, you are finding your people lack creativity, consider where you are making it unsafe to be creative. Perhaps there is too much structure, too little structure, or perhaps your people believe it is better to do something safe and crappy than to be sorry for taking a risk. And the risk doesn’t even have to seem dramatic – it doesn’t have to involve a single dictator to be a deterrent. But you do have to help your people embrace the risk of being sorry so they can push past crappy and safe.
While it might not be wise to create a culture that courts all kinds of failure, you need to encourage it in spaces that require creativity. You have to recognize and mine for the really good parts of failure that only arise because someone took a chance.
Keep in mind – this is often a blind spot for leaders. But when people aren’t acting the way you want them to, as a culture, there is a shockingly high probability that this is the reason.
Sometimes it is as easy as eliminating part of structure, so you create more breathing room for creativity.
Lastly, a great trick to look at the solution of opening up creativity is to access it as if you are giving advice instead of finding a solution from your current place within the problem. Imagine yourself being interviewed about your success – “how have you helped your team to work so creatively” – and imagine your answer.
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Ever written a whole story based on a flash of behaviour from someone else? In a twist of irony, in this episode, we explore the process of writing a story about someone else writing a story about us!
Why is that important for business?
So much of our miscommunications in business and in life are based on these imagined stories based on other people’s behaviours. It is much like how conspiracy theories are built – we emotionally organize things that don’t make sense. But when we respond this way, we are forgetting the question mark; we are forgetting to be curious. We skip past all of the unknowns and jump right to certainty. And often, we are filling in the storyline with our own fears.
When you lose the question mark, you lose a great deal of your ability to understand.
There is great power in writing your own story, but with that power comes great responsibility.
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Received some negative feedback? Before you react or internalize the feedback, we have a few things to say that may change your mind about what it means.
Why is that important for business?
In business, you are bound to get feedback, solicited or not. And some of it is bound to be negative. If you are someone who cares about delivering value and not disappointing people, your instinct might be to internalize that feedback and make changes to aspects of your business. But there are a few things you should consider first.
Are these outliers?
Determining whether the feedback, whether incredibly negative or incredibly positive, exist only on the margins is important context you need to give them. What percentage of the whole do they represent? Are you reacting to 6 reviews out of 50 as if they are the whole truth? The truth is nuanced and is not shaped just by people who have decided to speak up. Also, unless it is mandatory, you aren’t going to hear from the large middle of people who are satisfied. People give feedback when they have a strong emotional reaction to something, and that can skew perceptions.
Is this feedback about you?
Feedback always tells you more about the person giving the feedback than it does about your thing. There is a balance that has to be struck between a need to receive feedback, and the need to filter that feedback. Feedback requires discernment.
Is the feedback authentic or representative?
There is a difference between authentic feedback from individuals, and representative feedback of the whole. You need a sense of the representative in order to put the individual feedback in perspective.
Are you reacting?
Feedback is hard. It’s like a body blow, and you should wait to decide how to react until the sting is no longer present. Once you are more mentally prepared to react, you can see areas where you can better fulfill (or clarify) expectations, and you can also just help ensure people feel heard.
But before you change some aspect of your business in response to this feedback, consider it might be the audience that needs to change – you might be altering the wrong variable. It might be the perfect thing, unchanged, just for a different clientele. This is where discernment is again important.
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You get an email from a customer demanding you fire an employee for something you don’t think is wrong. How do you handle it?
Let’s talk about it.
Why is that important for business?
The line between private and business is increasingly blurring, and companies are being forced into taking stands. It is important, but it also makes business a lot more complicated. Personal views are not longer tidily kept in the background when it comes to business.
There is a distinction that needs to be made between a differing on viewpoints, and a differing on moral or ethical beliefs when you are deciding what positions you will be willing to lose customers over. But how ever you slice it, we are being forced into having these conversations, whether you think you want to or not.
Sooner or later, it will be incumbent on most leaders to figure out where their lines are and how they are going to react to the non-business side of life. It is harder and harder not to pick a side.
This collision of business and personal is not an “if” but a “when.”
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A tomato failing to ripen because it is stuck in a bramble of unpruned branches doesn’t sound like it would be an analogy that would relate to business as a whole, but it really does.
Why is that important for business?
There is so much valuable in narrowing down variables of what a plant – or a business – needs. Especially when things get complicated. But one of the things we must confront in both is the necessity of pruning.
This meme about being an inch away from striking gold is the opposite of pruning. The gold might not be there at all, or it might be very far away, and if you follow every path that you think might lead to gold without pruning, you will exhaust yourself.
There is an art to pruning – knowing when and where to make a decision to cut. We need to notice where there is overgrowth or pay attention not what is too much, and notice where pruning would be beneficial. Where are you getting exhausted mining for gold and when do you pull back? This meme only prioritizes getting to the gold, and doesn’t factor in the health or happiness of the person with the pickaxe. Even if you are only three whacks away from gold, those three whacks might not be worth it.
We think of pruning as cutting back, or stunting growth in a certain direction. But what it really is is a refocusing of energy and resources to the places we most want them. Like the art of bonsai sculpting, this is about shaping the tree to the vision we have, regardless of where the limbs want to go. This is about pruning as a net gain rather than a net loss.
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What can pro-dog Ohio teach us about expectations and how efforts to make things better can actually make things worse? Let’s find out!
Why is that important for business?
What is done to try to make things better can sometimes end up being viewed as a net negative because the positive wasn’t “positive enough”. In our life and in our business, we have to expect that there are times when not everyone will be happy with our decisions and that doesn’t necessarily mean it was the wrong thing to do. Once someone sees the beginning of something good, it’s almost human nature to only be able to see what could be better.
It’s also important to do what you can to make sure that you get the outcome you actually want, that aligns with the culture of your organization. By virtue of perspective, people are going to see things that you don’t, and that’s a good thing. Make sure you are really seeing the need you are trying to meet, but also accept that even if you see something as pure good or undebatable, it probably isn’t.
And, sometimes, no matter what you do, some people won’t be happy. Can you be okay with some discontent?
Other resources mentioned
Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference shorturl.at/bzO34
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How you define a win, for yourself and for your client, can determine what decisions you make. It’s important to take the time to remember what is actually important – what satisfies your Bruce Banner side may not satisfy your inner Hulk.
Why is that important for business?
A win will look very different to different people and at different times, and we have to make sure we are defining a win correctly for ourselves before we let “beating someone else” become our goal. As we talked about in episode 164, Meditation and The Art of Businessing in the Moment https://soheresmystory.libsyn.com/website/meditation-and-the-art-of-businessing-in-the-moment, we need to look from the right perspective and focus on your intent.
You also have to be mindful about what you are fearing. Just as 99% of bad childhood behaviour is trying to get need met and going about it in terrible way, so too is bad business behaviour. You need to step back and address the unmet need.
You have to stay focused not just on the goal, but the right goal. It is easy to be fixated on the means and the journey and confuse it with the end.
We need to be aware of what need we are feeding.
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Ever have a product or service’s description leave something out that didn’t quite make you want to complain, but falls into the category of “would have been nice to know”? Ever heard a bear described as a “carnivore danger floof”? Well, we have got a treat for you in this episode!
Why is that important for business?
When you are advertising a product or service and questioning how much to reveal (to both avoid disappointment and avoid scaring off potential customers), you want to make the disclosure factual but the wording emotional. You want people to have a reaction that aligns with what you have to offer.
When a business that has well defined-values, it allows people to decide whether they are aligned or not with that business (https://soheresmystory.com/ep123-sugar-spice-radiating-values/). This is much the same as truth in advertising – when you make it clear what is on offer, the right people will be able to self-select based on their priorities. You want to provide enough information against which someone can apply their priorities and see if it’s a fit.
And although it isn’t your job to foresee every scenario where someone might be disappointed, you should spend time understanding the most compelling reasons people are using your product/service, and make sure you are being clear about what is and isn’t going to match that expectation. Home in on the appeal and think about why someone is attracted to this offering, and what might affect that central appeal. It is incumbent upon you to reveal things that might make that central piece disappointing. Ask yourself: “what would make this go south for someone?” or “what would make someone so regret having entered into this agreement that they would wish they could turn back the clock and never do it.” Either answer those questions yourself about your product or service or give people enough information to answer them themselves.
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When do you talk to your leadership team about your business challenges? How about your spouse? When does leadership mean “this is my problem to solve”, and when do you wrap the rest of your organization in on your decisions? Let’s talk about it!
Why is that important for business?
Some businesses don’t rely on their leadership for much of anything, and think leadership is a matter of figuring out the solution and then sharing it with the rest of the team. On the other end of the spectrum, some tell their leadership everything, and it can affect morale and have negative repercussions on retention. When we don’t use our team, we miss out on other thinking, nor do we engage their talent fully. And if we don’t believe in their ability to contribute to the solution – that’s another problem altogether.
At the same time, we need to be conscious of our own emotional state before we infect the whole company with it, which is why it’s good to come to the table once we are ready for solutions, and not just panicking. Going to the leadership team with every little issue in an emotional state can create its own set of problems.
Which brings up another issue – when and how much do you share with a spouse?
This can really highlight the value of a business confidante, not to replace the leadership team, but to act as a sounding board when emotions are still high, or maybe when we have business depression. https://soheresmystory.com/ep80-ever-been-business-depressed-replay/ When we aren’t ready to lead or inspire people, but we don’t want to worry our spouses, a business confidante can be just what’s needed.
Beyond whether the leadership team can actually provide help, we should also question the vulnerability aspect of whether we are bringing them into the conversation when challenges present themselves. There is a pervasive idea that we should always have it together or have all of the answers as leaders that toxic and problematic. Being able to say, “here is a problem that I don’t have answers to right now, but let’s figure it out together” can relieve so much pressure, as long as we aren’t unnecessarily contributing to angst. People can only help with things they have a line of sight to.
We can also help build the skillset of thinking like owners and also provide the nutrients for growth and sense of engagement in the company by engaging the team on problems.
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When you are faced with a decision – whether it be about a job candidate, a summer cottage, or Thai food – it’s incredibly important to figure out the difference between a need and a want. This episode is all about indecision, second-guessing and a little bit of regret.
Why is that important for business?
Much like the Aesop fable about the dog with the bone (http://read.gov/aesop/026.html), we can get confused by too many options, and end up without what we really needed or wanted. The common denominator in these moments of indecision is that we aren’t figuring out our real priorities in terms of what we want vs need. Prioritizing what matters the most creates limiters that make the decision easier to make.
Something that fits 9/10 of our criteria is meaningless if the one things that’s missing is a mission critical piece. If the most important piece is the part that’s missing, you’d be better off with 7/10, as long as it included the most important part. It is often our non-critical wants that cause problems in our decisions.
We also need to be aware of our deal-breakers when we are prioritizing.
This is what the exercise of prioritization accomplishes – we put guardrails around what we care about the most and narrow the field to make a decision easier. Which is why it’s so important to figure out what’s a deal-breaker, what’s a waffler, and what’s a hankerin.
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Whether in meditation or business, it’s important to periodically ask yourself – what’s going on right now, in this moment. Because as important as the future is, we just don’t have enough information to live there.
Why is that important for business?
In this time of unprecedented uncertainty, we are getting a concentrated dose of the frustration inherent in not being to predict the future. But it’s also a good reminder to bring ourselves back into the present moment – what are pain points right now? Instead of focusing on generating future problems to solve, what current problem do you have that requires a solution? When people talk about pain points, they are often talking about anticipated pain points.
As a leader, we need to be able to look at multiple sightlines to gauge where you are – we need to see the horizon but also our own feet. There is a narrative about how disproportionately important planning, and the horizon, are. We need periodic reminders to not look too far out and try to solve future problems, because we can’t foresee the future opportunities that will help offset those future challenges.
We also just need to be aware of where we are expending our valuable time, energy and focus. When you spend too much time contemplating things that may never happen, with only the solutions of today, current opportunities are losing out on those precious neurons.
Zooming in to the future can also create a lot of toleration. We need to reframe the conversation about tolerations from “can I change this?” to “how can I change this?”
Take some time to build mindfulness into your business practice, including allowing time for what’s going on right now.
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How many times have you been told you are “too much” for someone – too loud, too talkative, too pensive. Now – how many times have you let someone believe they were too much?
Why is that important for business?
The right people are going to welcome your “too much”, and a smart business understands the opportunity available in “too much”. Some of the most amazing people you know have been accused of some version of “too much”, and as members of the "Too Much" Club, we need to learn an important lesson, right from Jodi’s mom’s mouth to our ears:
“Never cut off your toes to fit in a boot.”
Telling someone they are too much stunts their development and stops growth, all the things that make a great leader. Anything that trims a person down and files their edges is criminally (not literally, but you get the point) unfortunate.
If people are telling you not to be yourself, they aren’t your people.
It becomes almost a litmus test for finding your people, because your people will appreciate all the too muchness of you. And that too muchness? You should follow it to the places where it’s an exact right fit. Because someone who calls out another person as too much, is also saying they are not big enough for the level of what you are bringing. You won’t ever see how much someone can be if you are always telling them they are “too much”.
This is also a useful tool for growing your organization – be on the lookout for someone too much in some respect for their current situation, because therein lies the opportunity for evolution.
But the real irony is that you very well might be nodding along, never realizing that you are also telling people they are “too much”. So it’s important to go from asking “am I restricting someone?” to “how am I restricting somebody?” Make the assumption that you are and be curious to find the answer.
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How many times have you been told you are “too much” for someone – too loud, too talkative, too pensive. Now – how many times have you let someone believe they were too much?
Why is that important for business?
The right people are going to welcome your “too much”, and a smart business understands the opportunity available in “too much”. Some of the most amazing people you know have been accused of some version of “too much”, and as members of the "Too Much" Club, we need to learn an important lesson, right from Jodi’s mom’s mouth to our ears:
“Never cut off your toes to fit in a boot.”
Telling someone they are too much stunts their development and stops growth, all the things that make a great leader. Anything that trims a person down and files their edges is criminally (not literally, but you get the point) unfortunate.
If people are telling you not to be yourself, they aren’t your people.
It becomes almost a litmus test for finding your people, because your people will appreciate all the too muchness of you. And that too muchness? You should follow it to the places where it’s an exact right fit. Because someone who calls out another person as too much, is also saying they are not big enough for the level of what you are bringing. You won’t ever see how much someone can be if you are always telling them they are “too much”.
This is also a useful tool for growing your organization – be on the lookout for someone too much in some respect for their current situation, because therein lies the opportunity for evolution.
But the real irony is that you very well might be nodding along, never realizing that you are also telling people they are “too much”. So it’s important to go from asking “am I restricting someone?” to “how am I restricting somebody?” Make the assumption that you are and be curious to find the answer.
What story do you want to tell?
So, that's our story... now, we want to hear yours!
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Have you ever thought about the difference between staying and not leaving? There is very different energy between the two, even though we confuse them. Sometimes the middle lane seems like a lane where you can hang out and coast, and not make a choice, but it can be a dangerous place to stay.
In this episode, let’s talk about that place between staying and leaving.
Why is that important for business?
In companies, often there is an employee that someone is frustrated with, but no one is ready to terminate. Whether it be because of value or potential or just the hassle of hiring someone else, they are kept on and both parties live in that dangerous middle lane.
Sometimes “stuck” is when you already know what you want to do, but you are not ready to admit or commit to that choice.
If you make demands and they do everything you ask, are you going to be happy? Or are you going to be disappointed that, even though they have met all of the theoretical criteria that set out for them, you are still not satisfied with them remaining? We make emotional decisions and look for rational validations for those decisions after the fact. But if you have already made a decision about an employee staying or leaving, don’t set up a process that their best outcome leaves you disappointed.
The worst case scenario isn’t that they quit, or even that they stay – it’s that they quit and stay. An employee that is emotionally checked out, driving in the middle lane, doesn’t allow for anything good to happen for either the employee or the employer.
The ability to stay in the honest conversation and just talk about the things that are is the way through it. You can’t know where that path leads, but the honest conversation is the only way to get there. Nothing good ever comes in the middle ground.
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The phrase “means and methods” might not mean a lot to you, but it can make all the difference in both employee satisfaction, and the success of your business. Which is why we want to talk about it.
Why is that important for business?
In the world of architecture, or at least the world of Jodi’s experience of architecture, Means & Methods is the term used to talk about the outcome of a project without outlining the methods for achieving that outcome. Like a game of Taboo, you can describe the window without specifying the window. In this way, the destination is the architect’s domain, but the journey is for someone else. There is a clear litmus test for the desired outcome and a project schedule, but the means and methods aren’t delineated.
When leaders are frustrated that their team aren’t innovative or don’t have a sense of ownership over outcomes, it is usually because they are not following a Means & Methods approach. They think they are setting expectations, but often they are really telling people exactly how to do the project. And in that message is another message – you are not required to think here. They are inadvertently training people to look for guidance at every step instead of setting up an expectation for the outcome and giving freedom with the means and methods of getting there.
This constricting of space to work increases turnover and job dissatisfaction (in Daniel Pink’s Drive https://www.danpink.com/drive./, he talks about autonomy being one of the three elements of employee satisfaction). But it also makes leaders frustrated and less effectual. If a leader tries to manage someone at something that person is better at, they are depriving their organization of that expertise. If you’ve hired well (and you should assume you did), your team might have a better way than you do, or might get further than you could. You can’t leverage people if you don’t give them space to bring their brain to the table.
Instead of trying to solve problems for other people, it’s much easier to invoke Means & Methods to solve the problem. Taking that pressure off the leader will do wonders for the organization and for everyone’s mental health.
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You’ve probably spent a lot of time and money figuring out how to talk to new clients. But how much do you know about your existing clients? Do they know you value them?
Why is that important for business?
Your existing clients are most likely incredibly important to you, but it’s important to think about exactly how you are reinforcing their value and reaffirming their decision to work with you. Or at the very least, think about the ways you might be devaluing them, in the pursuit of new clients. Like, for instance, don’t make it a chore for existing clients to login to a service they are already paying for.
It is also important to consider what do your particular clients actually value. Don’t just create activity – no one has space for extraneous events right now – but consider what your people actually value and need right now. This might be a conversation with your clients about what they value, but sometimes it is just enough for people to feel like you have thought of them.
Business owners often get frustrated when they hear from users about what isn’t working, but that is such rich information to have. You don’t have to do everything your clients request or suggest, but if you listen for the opportunity under the request, there is incredible value in that feedback. You just have to know how to eat the fish and spit out the bones, and decide what parts are yours so you can improve and become more valuable.
Business development to new customers is the way to expand, but marketing to existing customers is the way to evolve.
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What was once thought of as a temporary situation that we just had to get through is starting to feel a lot more permanent. Let’s talk about how that realization changes the approach.
Why is that important for business?
At one point, COVID-19 and its effects on business felt temporary – something we had to get through before things returned to “normal”. Working at the dining room table was an inconvenience, not a business plan. So how now do we navigate this temporary situation that is less temporary than we thought? How can we restructure the changes we made in haste, and make them more permanent?
At this point, we need to be willing to invest in what had been a temporary model to get through. Many businesspeople have to invest in the business model and processes that make remote non-temporary. There may be certain things that need to go back as soon as we can safely do so, but this doesn’t preclude investing in the thing you can do remotely. At what point do we change from investing to get through a temporary quarantine, and investing in the next evolution of our company?
We also have to take into account what resources our clients and staff have at home, and how that changes how we work.
Part of a shifting business model includes the shifting of schedules. What was once inconveniences are now trends - this is no longer “getting through it” but getting better at it. And it’s possible that this is an opportunity to do a redesign of our business and our day.
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As businesses and services slowly start to re-open, the need for communication and transparency is needed more than ever.
Why is that important for business?
Right now, there are so many things everyone is unsure of – lots of moving parts and uncertainty – which requires a great deal of empathy. But the uncertainty requires communication. There is a misperception that if you don’t have a definitive statement to make, you should wait until you have more information to communicate with people. However, communication is still necessary, so people know they haven’t been forgotten. In any time of uncertainty, there is both a heightened need for communication and decision-making. Silence is not the answer.
Could you be using this time of unknown to be building trust? Like hairdressers and dog groomers who send out tips for getting by until you can see them again, this time can be used to cement relationships. The vital part of communication isn’t necessarily certainty, but the ability to demonstrate empathy, through the attempt to understand from your customer’s eyes.
This is also important for internal communications. Simply acknowledging the human experience, and letting people know you haven’t forgotten about them, can do so much for morale. You don’t necessarily have to have the answers, but there is a need right now to communicate with empathy and to be transparent about the process of finding the answers.
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Little by little, we are starting to re-experience things we did before Covid-19 and finding them completely different. Whether it’s in-person facilitation or a lunch out at a restaurant, things have…changed. And it’s starting to be even more clear - we don’t know yet what’s going to be different when we “go back”.
Why is that important for business?
Our first experiences doing things we used to, pre-Covid, are an interesting opportunity to preview some of the things we are going to have to start thinking about. Are people really comfortable returning, or are they feeling pressure? Can I write large enough to be seen in a room with social distancing? How do you hand out a handout, when no one wants to touch anything that’s touched you?
Adjusting for these new needs can be paralyzing.
It’s also interesting to note how much non-verbal communication happens with the mouth until it’s covered by a mask. Snark, for instance, doesn’t make it to the eyes. Eye contact in general suddenly becomes more important – like watching a foreign-language movie with subtitles, there is no looking away.
There’s lots to figure out, but you can’t think of everything.
We imagine we will be doing all of the same things, just with a mask on or further apart, but there is so much more than that. We even need to relearn how to hug during a pandemic. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/well/family/coronavirus-pandemic-hug-mask.html?fbclid=IwAR0VvDkNNu3-871yBS52rSimvnF8QQYM63CtuK3cJ0f51xDVlDvCZBeudu4
Returning to work also reveals a lot of power dynamics we perhaps hadn’t noticed before. Suddenly, wearing masks or not wearing them has significant meaning, beyond safety. There is an unspoken dialogue hiding behind a lot of our decisions, and as leaders, that adds an extra layer of complexity. Navigating these rules is the toughest business decision we have faced in a generation.
Whatever you come up with in your business, you have to make it clear that these are not the rules forever; you have to make a commitment to listen and re-evaluate. Make sure people know that even if they aren’t comfortable with the rules as they stand today, they haven’t missed their opportunity to be heard.
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What is your line between diversity of thought, and completely unacceptable, in your business? And how do you tell you are being fair when you make that judgement? Super simple topic with super simple answers that we tackle all in one short podcast episode!
Why is that important for business?
It can be uncomfortable to address it when an employee does or says something controversial or completely unacceptable. But you also have to ask yourself – how comfortable will you be if you get called out on not doing anything?
Like we talked about in episode 123 https://soheresmystory.com/ep123-sugar-spice-radiating-values/, if you choose to radiate your values with your business, you have to accept that there will be consequences to standing behind those values. And you have to be prepared to deal with it when something falls outside of those stated values.
It’s usually an easier choice the more extremely out of alignment with your value something is, but most of what you will be forced to deal with won’t be so clear cut. But ultimately, while you may recognize, appreciate and value diversity of thought, you are the ultimate arbiter of “what is acceptable here”.
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How do you talk to people in a professional realm about racism? This isn’t the kind of thing we are going to have solid answers on – in fact, that’s part of the problem. But we are willing to have the conversation, and we hope you join us.
Why is that important for business?
These conversations are hard, complicated and messy, but they also can’t be ignored. We need to have these conversations, and we need to listen, because until people feel heard, you can’t have a discussion. Admitting that you don’t know how to talk about it, but you feel it is important to discuss can be a great starting point. Like with grief, there are no magical words that will say that will make this better, so don’t let “what if I don’t say the perfect thing” hold you back – there is no perfect thing to say. A lot of it is just showing up. Just acknowledging.
Is it better to say the wrong thing than nothing at all? The point is – don’t make it about you, or your perspective, and acknowledge that you don’t know. As we talked about all the way back in Episode 3, When Leadership=Looking Dumb? (https://soheresmystory.com/episodes/ep03-when-leadership-looking-dumb/), this is not about having answers, but convening the space for the questions and conversations that can change a thing.
And no – you can’t just follow your instincts, as your natural instincts are borne out of your own (non-universal and maybe privileged) experiences and perceptions, and are therefore not the best way to navigate conversations with someone who has a different lived experience. So make sure you are prepared to listen. You don’t have to stake out a prescription; you just have to acknowledge the issue.
And when you find yourself hesitating to say anything for fear of having your fingers slapped, remember – it isn’t about you. Don’t let yourself be more worried more about yourself and the perception of me than you are about saying the thing that needs to be said.
This is a discussion, and we would like to have it with you. Let us know what you think.
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So much about how we interact and who we interact with is being changed by our experience of COVID-19. Where before we might have not been putting much care into these decisions, now, we are getting a glimpse at our priorities.
Why is that important for business?
We all have different reasons for our priorities and decisions: convenience, being part of a community, cleanliness – these might all be factors in the new way we determine where we are going to spend time and resources. There seems to be an overall increase in the value of understanding the community and being a part of it.
There is also a developing set of needs that comes with changes, like working from home, that influence our decisions. Everything has gotten distilled down to what you really need – there is less impulse-buying and more intentionality in our purchasing decisions. Our metrics have changed. We have been stripped of convenience and it has forced us to be more intentional and more thoughtful.
Convenience may not have been a conscious priority before – it was more a default position made under pressure. Now there is much more space for intention and actually choosing priorities. We are seeing a transformation to a life of intention and it will be interesting to see the long-term effects of this change.
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COVID conversations are about to get super awkward and much more prevalent. So if tricky conversations aren’t your thing... it’s time to learn. (Last week’s replay episode also has some good pointers.)
Why is that important for business?
There are so many opportunities to have awkward conversations right now because we are making decisions not just for ourselves, but for others as well. We are dealing with several different versions of The Trolley Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem) every day in business.
Company policy has to start with first person plural – the we. We can’t make decisions for everyone without considering the individual, but we can’t make decisions based on each individual either. If we did, it is inevitable that pressure would develop, either from higher up or peers or the bonus structure or something else. Which means we are being called to higher levels of leadership and good boundary setting and communicating well. To do that, we need to look for the right questions instead of the best answers and get curious. Whenever someone acts in a way you don’t understand, if you squint your eyes and look for the commitment in what they are saying – what are they committed to in that action? – it helps to understand they why.
When you have a strong company culture, your employees can help with this by pushing back with “that’s not who we are”; a strong collective identity helps you put a stake in the ground to navigate the trickier waters.
As you decide who you are and what you care about, resist the urge to make everything a yes or no and look at the nuances. Things are going to get complicated and awkward and we’ll have to respond withhigher levels of leadership, communication and boundary setting and conversation than we have ever have before.
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This week, Jodi and Eliot talk about how emotions in business relate to dental hygiene and peanut M&M's. Trust us – it makes sense.
Why is that important for business?
Often people are apologetic about the emotional component of their response in business. Somewhere along the way, somebody made up this rule that business never has anything to do with ever feeling a personal emotions. And because of that made up, unspoken rule, no one has ever made it okay to do the emotional version of brushing your teeth in business, and then the plaque builds up and it’s problematic. Then the emotional build up
gets in the way of what really needs to be dealt with.
Whoever said “it’s not personal, it’s just business” is an idiot.
The word “hygiene” is important here, because it alludes to a regular practice of cleaning and getting rid of what doesn’t need
to be there anymore. We don’t apologize for needing to clean your teeth, and we need to get as comfortable with emotional hygiene.
Not clearing the plaque results in the explosive conversations that start with “you always do ____”.
A resentment that you didn’t practice good hygiene on has come up, and now it is plaque. Resentment is always something that you have let build up; it comes up because you didn’t address something. Resentment is always yours.
We practice good resentment hygiene in the smallest, most inconsequential ways. Most grievances can be dealt with by dealing with the next act. You don’t need years of ammunition to justify your grievance; you just need to deal with the little things as they come up. And when you start with raising objections
to little things, your tone and language and demeanour has to be befitting a little thing. If you have decided that the content of the conversation is on the little incident, you can’t punctuate it with 2 years of rage over similar little things.
Sometimes, a third party is necessary to help you get at the real issue, and that’s okay.
And it is important, in good emotional hygiene, to be clear on what is yours, and when you are ascribing intent to someone else.
The language is so important. Because how you approach an issue will determine, often, how the conversation will go. Emotional hygiene is knowing when you need the pause, when you need to talk it through with someone else because you can’t find the clarity in it, right-sizing your attack, and lastly, being clear on what outcome you want.
Emotional hygiene is the ability to separate the perceived slight from the actual need. Do you need to fix the slight, or is there a different way to get your need met? But the first step is acknowledging that it is okay to have emotions in business.
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What happens to holidays when you don’t leave your house?
Let’s talk about how much harder it is to tell people you are taking a day off when everyone knows you will just be in your living room anyway.
Why is that important for business?
Just because we are in isolation doesn’t mean we don’t need days off – we need the contrast and the rest. But our uneasiness with telling people we are taking a day when they know we can’t go anywhere is surfacing a lot of social constructs that may or may not be useful. And it seems many of us believe we have to be unavailable for reasons beyond our control in order to say we’re not going to answer emails today. We have nothing to hide behind now when we want to take a day.
We have a perceived sense of agency over our time, but we construct weird, completely fabricated rules around it. And it’s not our right to tell anyone else what should matter to them.
We need punctuation marks between things; we need contrast. Our brains are made for sprints, not marathons and you are literally less valuable to your company when you are exhausted.
The only person who is truly free is the person who can turn down a dinner invitation without an excuse. If you really want to be the master of your own time, you need to take the day off with no apology and no excuse.
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There is lots of talk about re-opening businesses and returning to work right now, and it is undoubtedly on your mind. Unfortunately, there isn’t a simple answer to how or when is right for your business. But there are some important questions.
Why is that important for business?
What is re-opening going to look like for your business?
Every industry is going to be different, every company will be different, every department will be different, and every person will be different. There is no one solution.
But it isn’t enough to make the assumption that a tiny bit of being back is a move in the right direction. We have to give serious thought to what is and isn’t working about the virtual world and be clear on what problem we are solving. We need to be honest about why we are making decisions we are making.
You also must consider the individual agency of everyone involved. What is the level of each person’s authority to say no? We are all going to get a crash course in boundaries, including literal ones.
Start by looking at it from a metrics point of view - what do you count as a success? Hone in on the metrics for success. This doesn’t mean the intangibles, including that you might just want to come back, aren’t important. It just means you need to establish what you are aiming for.
Any opportunity to name an amorphous experience we are having helps make the decision. There is value in identifying those things that drive us, and being able to prioritize them instead of choosing by random criteria.
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Technology allows us to do so much from the comfort of our homes. But just because we can doesn’t mean we should. Once everything is jammed into the same tech, it loses its texture and everything – personal and business – just becomes one blur.
Why is that important for business?
When we have the option of bringing everyone into a meeting now – because it can be done by the click of a button – we can make the mistake of prioritizing means instead of best outcome. There is no wrong or right, but we need to consider things like: Does this need to be a video chat, or just a call? Is there any requirement for a shared visual? Do I need to see everyone’s faces?
Now that so many things could be done in a Zoom meeting, everything requires sitting in chair staring at computer. Experiences begin to lose their texture. When everything feels the same, everything feels like everything else you have done that day. We are missing out on the sensory experience of life and are constricted to what is front of you on screen; there is a dimming of the senses that we need to be aware of. If we don’t actively work to add texture, everything starts blurring together, and even fun things don’t feel that different from work.
It’s also interesting to notice the impact of having markedly fewer unplanned interactions, or how a thing feels different when you don’t have a kinetic experience of it. Places have a different texture. As The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows so aptly describes it, there is a sense of kenopsia, or the eeriness of a place left behind.
In order to see people, we have to be more intentional about it; everything is more contrived by necessity, and we have to consider what connections we actively want to strengthen. A lot of the whimsical things of life have been lost; the nuance of experience, the surprise, is missing.
As mentioned in the Power of Moments, we mark time by moments, and our days have no distinct moments in them anymore, so everything blurs. Even things that could feel like moments are jammed into same conduit as everything else and begin to lose their distinction. Everything gets shoved into the same-shaped container. Observing the moments is the antidotes to the personal and mental fatigue. We need to find ways to add texture into our experiences again.
Resources Mentioned
The Power of Moments, by Chip and Dan Heath. https://heathbrothers.com/the-power-of-moments/
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For a lot of people, the morning commute to work has been reduced to about 10 feet. Theoretically, that is extra time we now have to do other things. But maybe that commute was exactly the break you needed in the day. So what now?
Why is that important for business?
Commutes can be a wonderful transition time to change between a work mindset and a home mindset. It’s time to think without an agenda, to decompress. It’s the lemon sorbet, helping you cleanse your palate between courses. Although a commute is inconvenient from an efficiency standpoint, it can be incredibly valuable for your mental state. Otherwise your day lacks white space and becomes one big run-on sentence that passes in a blur.
Instead of consciously using that time in a similar way, we just pack it with other activities that don’t provide the same benefit. It isn’t about having time; it’s about consciously using the time. Though not technically challenging, we can find ourselves not doing it.
“I wish for you that you live on a cul de sac because a cul de sac is that structure that surprises the city’s motion with a pause.”
(Quote from some city planner article Eliot read a long time ago that I can’t find).
You have to build these pauses into the day. That time, and what you did in the commute, might still need to be built into your routine in a new way. Our brains are built to sprint, not marathon. Even just a 2-minute pause is important. And you have to build these pauses in with intentionality.
Your routine doesn’t need to look the same as it did pre-isolation, but there is value in seeing what you used to do and considering building that into your life. You might need to weave spaces into the pattern, but the pattern doesn’t have to look the same.
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Are you and your business applying for support from your government during COVID-19? Your answer might say more about your style of entrepreneurship than you think!
Why is that important for business?
The very characteristics that make someone prepare for these kinds of circumstances in business are the same characteristics that make people apply for this help, regardless of urgency of need. The very thing that makes someone a billionaire, for another example, is the same thing that leads them to cash a cheque for $1.11 (or even $0.64, in Donald Trump’s case - https://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/entertainment-articles/billionaire-cash-13-cent-check-someone-actually-conducted-experiment/).
It’s interesting contemplating what would make a difference between someone who would rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it, and those who just choose not to ask for help until they absolutely need it. This might have something to do with the distance in time some people can think. Some people only think a day or so ahead, while others can clearly see things a year out. If you’ve seen this kind of planning ahead modeled, it might not be natural.
It’s also possible that some businesses are thinking more about their employees and are planning ahead because they understand the wide net that is cast with their business. And those that don’t plan so far ahead might not have employees to even consider.
And for others, taking aid, like buying paper towels, can feel like a moral decision. If you don’t really need it, should you take it?
Lastly, it has a lot to do with an individual’s or business’ comfort with uncertainty. The successful businesses of the future are probably going to be those who start to grow their comfort with uncertainty and adaptability now.
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Emotions are running high right now, and while business leaders shouldn’t feel the need to become counselors, we are being called on right now for heightened awareness and a well-timed, “are you okay?”
Why is that important for business?
Right now, even in business, emotions are constantly creeping around the edges. And even our intrepid podcast favourites, Eliot and Jodi, can fall prey to the charms of frustration and emotional exhaustion. Luckily, their first “fight” (not to be mistaken with fist fight) has a lot to teach us about heightened emotions in business.
People might be coming to conversations already primed with anxiety, fear, stress and little sleep. Like a toddler who throws a fit ostensibly over a blue cup, but truly because they need a nap, we’ll need to get better at noticing when things are off. In the current state we are in, not being aware of heightened emotions is no longer a luxury we can afford.
We’ll need to get better at balancing personal needs against business needs.
Unfortunately, it can appear as though there is a fundamental glitch in our inability to grasp other people’s experiences if we haven’t had similar experiences. We need an expanded empathy and awareness for the times when we just aren’t ourselves, even without a specific reason. We need a heightened antenna as to when someone needs more space, but a business leader shouldn’t feel an obligation to necessarily fill it.
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We’re not here to Pollyanna the coronavirus, but one of the things we hope we can learn from this is that business is a human experience. There is a return to humanity in business, and we are here for it.
Why is that important for business?
Like most business stories right now, this story starts with, “so I was on a zoom call the other day”, includes feral children, and ends with this lesson: we are weirdly grateful for the return to humanity in business that this is providing us. There is a process of clearing away of how you are supposed to be and to act, and the whole world is getting on board with caring less about a façade of professionality.
We can’t help but be curious to see how much of this we will retain, or will we pretend none of this happened and go back to hiding our humanity? Will we go back to limiting this sense of intimacy we are forced into now?
This crisis is stretching the bounds of what we thought was possible. For instance, we may have thought we were being creative, but it was only creative within the constructs of what we have to be creative about. Creativity never shows up at the level it does when you don’t have other choices. When you are truly hemmed in, creativity reaches a new level.
And the coolest thing is that the CEO in the room is just as likely to be the person whose pet or spouse comes crashing through the call as the intern. Whether we like it or not, we are all just humans. We have perpetuated this myth that in business, you are always supposed to have it together. But we can’t even pretend that everything is together now.
Don’t forget that you are talking to a human. Don’t underestimate the value of simply asking: “how are you?” That question used to be just an entry into the conversation you really wanted to have. But now the conversation you want to have truly is “how are you?” This crisis took it from the appetizer and made it the entrée, and we should remember how that intimacy feels moving forward.
If on the other side of this, we end up where some degree of authentic humanity remains in the soup of whatever business looks like, that will be a good thing. Business is a human experience.
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“Progress looks like a new set of problems”. As you evolve towards a goal, you have new problems to deal with that you’ve never had to deal with before. Apparently, it’s also true of the opposite of progress – this time of massive uncertainty.
Why is that important for business?
Right now, as businesses process this pandemic, the definition of what it means to be a leader is changing. Leaders might want to come int and try to maintain business as usual, to set an example that it can be business as usual. But in our current times, leadership is the opposite: recognizing and adjusting to the fact that it is not business as usual.
We indeed still need to set a good example, but this is a different type of good example we have to set than we have ever had to before; we have to set the example of reacting to the circumstances vs overcoming them.
We cannot forget to pause and find ways to connect with the people that work with us and remind ourselves that these are humans going through a scary thing. They are humans, not just fires we are putting out. They are still part of an organizational family.
All the math we have used to figure out things in the world feels different now. In times of this much uncertainty, it’s not just the math on the side that is causing problems that is changing; the consequences/outcomes side of the math formula is also going to be changing and adapting. People are working on solutions and they are changing all of the time. Just as every solution leads to new problems, every new problem has space for new solutions.
Messy “good enough” is going to have to be the new excellence for a while.
We all have skills and gifts and thoughts and creativity and if we pull together, we can’t fix this, but we can make it less bad.
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There’s so much to talk about with Covid-19, you can hardly blame us for having a second episode on it. Let’s talk about the behind-the-scenes decision making happening in businesses right now as they navigate these wildly uncharted waters.
Why is that important for business?
As businesses navigate the difficult decisions that come with this unprecedented time in our world, we want to remind you that there are often no clean solutions to problems in business (see our episode Stop Ignoring the Solution https://soheresmystory.com/ep132-stop-ignoring-the-solution/). We can’t dismiss solutions simply because they come with new barriers – we don’t have the luxury right now of waiting for the perfect solution. It might not even be possible to let your values guide your decision. This requires a new way of dealing with a problem and it can be paralyzing. We aren’t used to thinking 9 steps out from our own thing. We live in a world that makes assumptions about other people’s availability that are no longer true.
On top of that, we are faced with the question: what if we’re wrong?
These are difficult decisions, and we don’t have the luxury of navigating by avoiding known regrets.
Look to other companies not for advice, but for the scaffolding that will help you make your own decision. And after we have made the decision, we have to be ready not to judge it by what others think.
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Are you prepared to deal with large scale problems, like the Coronavirus, in your workplace? Although we don’t have a ready answer for how to deal with issues like this, we do have some ideas in this episode.
Why is that important for business?
Adopting a plan for how to work through something like the Coronavirus is something to work through now. Do you have a culture of “being a hero through attendance”, where taking a sick day is a sign of weakness and powering through a sign of strength? Do you have everyone’s phone numbers available? Do you have a plan to work virtually? These are all questions it’s better to ask now, instead of in the middle of a crisis. What is your plan if you can’t go about business as usual?
It can be hard to tell when you are over- or under-reacting to a situation. Like our episode on deciding when to take your kid to the doctor (https://soheresmystory.com/ep119-the-fear-of-reaction/), making decisions on when to call it a crisis can be really challenging. There is no tidy answer.
But that’s the thing about being a leader: many of the decisions that come in front of you are between two or more things that are varying degrees of bad. You often have to chose with limited information and lots of unknowns, and it’s easy to start white knuckling your hold on “not wanting to be wrong”. “Right” is just the best you can do in the moment; often, we’re aiming for the least regrets possible.
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Feeling misunderstood? Maybe you need a little metaphor in your life!
Why is that important for business?
“Metaphor is how we nail the jelly of reality to the wall”.
- Joe Moran, from First You Write a Sentence. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38470061-first-you-write-a-sentence
So often, we feel like we have good communication - we think everyone knows what is meant by a word, but everyone has their own perspective of how they imagine that word.
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
- George Bernard Shaw
If someone says “stability” and one person thinks they mean financial independence and one thinks they mean flexibility, we are now living on separate islands, trying to have a conversation and make decisions. If you use metaphor, however, it takes people out to the fuzzy focus of a thing, where you don’t get stuck on wordsmithing and things become somehow more clear.
This isn’t necessarily about stories – stories are where we draw metaphors from, but metaphor is a stage above. Stories can have same risk as words do – they are often too precise and seem to reflect just one situation. Metaphor allows you to create a widely applicable construct that you can use to navigate and define numerous situations. It gets at the intent behind the words.
Against all odds, clarity can actually come from the abstract.
While metaphor can’t claim to be exact, it’s better than the alternatives because it gives you your best shot at alignment. It creates a dotted line around the sensations and meanings of things, and the intent of the space. If we can draw line about the intent behind a thing, we don’t have to be as precise about the pieces or words.
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College is a really big buying decision, and it can teach us a lot about buying decisions in our business, and why it’s important to not just give information, but connect to wants, desires and fears. And potentially, to help people discover wants they didn’t even know they have (like bespoke librarians!)
Why is that important for business?
When making a sales or onboarding presentation, it can be interesting to notice what businesses (or colleges) decide to highlight. With colleges, you are speaking to prospective freshman and, often, their parents about one of the biggest decisions they will make, and you have the opportunity to speak to all of their wants and desires and fears. But if you focus instead purely on information – like tuition and financial aid – you miss an opportunity to connect on an emotional level. And ultimately, these are emotional decisions.
These conversations are an opportunity to reflect your values. Too often, in a misguided perception of what people actually care about, we miss an opportunity to demonstrate these values and help people connect to them. You want to always make clear: “if you walk away from this meeting remembering nothing else, remember this.”
There’s a difference between knowledge – which is useful and important – and giving someone the feeling of being part of something. You need both. Stories are a great way to demonstrate your values for people – they confirm parts of your culture that information might not be able to.
It’s important not to forget that you are talking to humans who have wants, desires and fears, and sometimes those wants, desires and fears often sound like things 5-year olds say. If you can speak to those first, these conversations will be more successful.
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If you handle it right, sometimes the biggest snafu can turn into real business.
Why is that important for business?
When the very thing you offer to clients - your core competency – hinges on someone else’s business, things can go bad completely beyond your control. Which is what happened recently with our texting app. Instead of taking our (non-paying!) business elsewhere, we opened a door to communication that ended with us turning into paying customers.
When someone complains to you, you have an opportunity. You can highlight exactly what your marketing brochures say you do (we really care! #1 in customer service!) in real time. When you know there is a real person responding in ways that align with their best promises, even if it’s at a time when everything is falling apart, you’ll follow them anywhere.
When you bring love into your business - whether for the people you connect with or the service you bring into the world - it gets right into the meat of loyalty and connection. It’s hard to replicate that care in only positive interactions, which is why it’s such an opportunity to build loyalty when things go wrong. When your customers are angry, you have an opportunity to interpret it as passion and reply just as passionately, in favour of solving the problem. You have the opportunity to hear the request as opposed to hearing it as an attack that you have to defend, opening into the vulnerability of the conversation.
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We often rely on other people to self-screen in our relationships – to not ask too much of us, to know when “a quick question” turns into “I clearly need to hire you”. But when others breach your boundaries, sometimes you have to be the one to speak up.
Why is that important for business?
Sometimes setting boundaries on your expertise is a concrete or even legal issue – you can deflect blame to your lawyer, your association rules, or even company policy for why you can’t do something. But what do you do when something is just a personal boundary, or it just doesn’t feel right?
Your ability to define and hold your own boundaries is one of the most important skills you can master in business. Exerting boundaries not only benefits you, but it also helps build trust in the relationship. If you make it clear that people can ask of you what they need and trust you to maintain your own boundaries, you can trust the same, and everyone saves a lot of time. Every time you set out healthy boundaries, you plant the seeds in that relationship for it to be okay to take care of your own needs, and show that person it is okay for them to do that in the world as well.
And if you find yourself struggling with building that muscle, sometimes, a little white lie might be your gateway drug. You get to see that when you set a boundary, even if it isn’t completely true, the world doesn’t come off its axis. It can help you develop a taste for saying no; it can help you build that muscle.
If you really are making a stand to not damage a relationship, you must also take your needs into account. You are also part of the relationship, and as much as you want to protect the other person, you must also protect yourself. When you make decisions solely based on the impact on the other person, you are not honouring the relationship and risk damaging it.
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Being the guardian of your time can bring up all kinds of issues. You want to be accommodating, and you don’t want to disappoint people. Which is why sometimes, you need to outsource to an Enforcer.
Why is that important for business?
If you aren’t naturally someone who can enforce policies, and also effectively filter them by understanding the nuances to needs, then it might be best to delegate that role to someone who is good at it. Even if you are still ultimately involved, having a first line of defense for your time and resources means you can still make exceptions, but someone else ensures that the exception doesn’t become the rule.
But first, you need to have the willingness to subvert your instinct to accommodate or your fear of disappointing someone else. If you want to solve the problem, you must shamelessly admit your limitation. Whether you outsource or tap into part of the Enforcer in your own personality, you need to craft a solution that makes the problem better.
Sometimes, the Enforcer or Guardian doesn’t even need to say no. The role requires the wisdom to know when there is an issue to fix, and when it isn’t your problem at all.
Ultimately, you need to be clear about you are good at. If you are always accommodating, you are not being an effective guardian of what you do best.
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It’s not often that you use a room full of orphans with puberty as a metaphor, but when you talk about abandoning new clients, who just bought a product and now have questions, you almost have to.
Why is that important for business?
What is your responsibility, as a business, to deliver and guide new clients and customers in a responsible way as they consume your products or services? How often are you theoretically trying to simplify an experience, but actually complicating it? And where are you investing too much time, charging at windmills and fighting battles that aren’t yours to fight? These are just some of the lessons we explore as we talk about the fasting app that abandoned some pubescent orphans. Metaphorically, of course.
Some businesses don’t do a good job in meeting their clients where they are at – they build a box and make clients fit into it. In the process, they can install angst in a paying audience. Especially when a business doesn’t provide ongoing support. If you host a party, you have to make sure people are taken care of at that party.
Leaving a leadership vacuum is dangerous – something will fill that space, and the information might not be good. And if you want to avoid “teaching from the seats”, you better teach from the lectern.
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Tough conversations are…well…tough. But we make them harder by tensing up and predicting how tough they will be. We make them harder when we don’t consider all of the ways our solution will affect people. And mostly, we make them harder when we aren’t leaving space for them to not be hard.
Why is that important for business?
Usually there are a number of ways to accomplish a task, but often we focus so much on what we feel we “should” do that we lose focus on the goal. And as much as we might not be able to control or influence the way someone else sees something – a perspective that is rooted in experience and beliefs that are individual to each person – we can come to a hard conversation with openness, empathy and curiosity.
Instead of presenting our solution, looking at the ramifications of what this solution means to the person or people it affects can help us craft a strategy that isn’t so much about the “can’t”.
Things often go awry because we are bracing for a tough conversation, and not leaving any space for it to possibly go well. It works much better when we approach it with empathy and curiosity and leave space for a solution.
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When things are going well, it’s natural to want to stay where you’re at. But at what point does lack of change become complacency? Where does contentment stop being a positive in business?
Why is that important for business?
It’s a wonderful feeling when you’ve had a great year in business and realize that there isn’t much you’d change about how things are going. But comfort can easily start to feel dangerous. How do you avoid changing for change’s sake, but not surrender to complacency either?
In the middle, between complacency and hunger, is comfort, and it can feel dangerously close to complacency. You don’t want to always be chasing something new, and you can’t be successful if you don’t have some drive to make things better - the fascination with gaps is what motivates entrepreneurs. You want enough contentment to turn away work that isn’t a fit, but when you find yourself coasting, that can be a problem.
In the beginning, change is often big and involves a lot of scrappy hustle. But there comes a point when it feels more like refining and tweaking. You stay in the comfort zone until a new hunger emerges, a new itch, that motivates you to make change. But you have to respect the flow. Goal setting at this stage becomes more nuanced and strategic. This can’t be about simply doing “more”, because at some point, more doesn’t feel different, it just feels more. You must find ways to layer in evolution. Complacency comes with lack of evolution.
But the opportunity to grow isn’t a mandate to grow. You need to be able to be content and be satisfied with what is (and not haunted by what isn’t). Only then do you earn the right and stability to evolve. If you keep trying to evolve and innovate without the base of satisfaction, it’s going to feel bad.
Resources mentioned
The Bigger Game workshop https://www.biggergame.com/2-day-experience/
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Found yourself with a paralyzing list of things to do? Where you can’t start anything because there are fifteen other things that need to get done first?
Overwhelm comes in at least 35 different flavours. For this particular flavor, we have a suggestion.
Why is that important for business?
When you get paralyzingly overwhelmed by everything on your plate, prioritization can itself feel overwhelming. You have a large project to finish, but there is a pile of smaller projects weighing on your mind and sapping your energy. In cases like this, sometimes it’s best to realize that you aren’t giving your best to the priority project when your mind is focused on everything else that is backing up. Taking time to clear some of the smaller projects actually frees you up to be more efficient with the larger project. Those little tasks can feel like a barrier to getting something bigger done and can make everything feel bogged down in clutter. Taking a few hours to complete as many of these little tasks – that realistically are lower priority but are nonetheless on your mind – can bring you back to the main task with new energy and focus.
Most have us have heard of the concept that you can fit more into a jar if you start with the big rocks and add the small rocks and sand after (if not, you can watch the presentation here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_N_uvq41Pg). This is incredibly useful. But sometimes, there is value in realizing that the sand – those small tasks – can take up a lot of space and weigh you down.
It’s also important to notice that stale tasks – ones you procrastinate on again and again - are often actually unmade decisions. Sometimes that acknowledgement helps you make the decision, because the hesitation tells you it’s a no. And suddenly, there is one less task on your list.
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Have a business problem?
Before you start dismissing solutions, listen to this. Because there’s a very simple rule to finding solutions that you are probably ignoring.
Why is that important for business?
It’s probably not too bold of an assertion to say that you probably don’t like having problems. But if you have a business or, you know, you breathe, you are probably going to encounter a few. But the simple fact of problem-solving is this: you have to pick your problems.
Every solution comes with a new set of problems to solve. So which problem would you rather have – the original one, or the new one? People get disillusioned and discouraged when they can’t find a perfect solution, because they are suffering under one key misunderstanding of solutions: they think the perfect solution is problem-free, and it isn’t.
That’s why we have to pick the problems that we want to work on.
Instead of just picking joys, you can also think about what problems you want to have in the world.
Dismissing a solution because there is a new problem becomes a brick wall that stops perfectly viable answers. People think solutions are supposed to be problem free, but every new solution comes with new problems, and you have to decide if those are ones you want or not.
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In this special by-listener-request episode, we talk about the importance of helping your team understand your decisions, and the even greater importance of setting up a joke before delivering the punchline.
Why is that important for business?
When you have to make a decision, you go through a whole process to get to an end point. But often in leadership, you only communicate the decision, not the process. That means that people who have no connection or insights into how you arrived where you did have to understand the decision out of context. It’s like walking into a room and telling the punchline to a joke without the setup. Dropping a pronouncement on people that haven’t had the benefit of seeing the entire path that took you there often makes it hard to understand and accept. They needed a line of sight to how you got there.
What would change in people’s reactions if they could see all of the things that you are seeing from your vantage point as leader?
Of course, even if they had all of the information, they might come to a different conclusion, but they will at least better appreciate how you got there. It helps make decisions feel less arbitrary and capricious.
If you are frustrated that your people don’t get XYZ, make sure they have a clear line of sight to how you arrived at XYZ.
Of course, you can’t always include everyone in all decision-making processes. But as early as you can, bring them in. Don’t cheat your people out of the benefit of understanding leadership decisions and conversations. Looping them in will not only help with buy-in, but it’s also a great opportunity to mentor them to be better leaders. Leadership means making unpleasant choices; the earlier you can give people line of sight to that, the better.
Having your people involved in solving problems and making choices helps everything run more smoothly, and it also might give you the benefit of some ideas you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. And at the very least, it helps to stand at the bottom of a hill with people you trust (do you get that reference? If not, listen here: https://soheresmystory.com/ep128-how-to-make-everything-easier/)
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What can we learn about our own businesses from the cannabis industry? Well, sometimes we design our culture to reflect the product we are selling, but not what our people need.
And sometimes we learn that what we think will be fun…isn’t.
Why is that important for business?
The cannabis industry went from something you get behind the dumpster in an alley while looking over your shoulder, to an actual industry, and the transformation hasn’t been without hiccups. Which is why you see over 80% of the employees who approve of the industry, yet there is over 60% turnover and over a third would not recommend the company they work for to a loved one. The reported problem relates to a lack of structure, which seems ironic for an industry that doesn’t seem suited to structure.
But weed jokes aside, there is a lot to learn about how it can look when an industry (or even a business) goes from nothing to something really fast (much like our secret episode on the used panty industry - https://soheresmystory.com/bonus)
This story shows us the necessity of clarity in expectations and in leadership, and the problems of romanticized expectations.
Resources referenced:
Article on the cannabis industry: https://www.civilized.life/articles/industry-turnover/?fbclid=IwAR2DgoqX5Vm1GV5Li7QsBeVDu2A1iW9-TIoYZvCIVxUcTjCTsaFbpPIMS_g
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Sometimes, our actions today ripple out and have long term effects. We know this. But it’s wild to think that what happens in 2019 might cause a Christmas tree shortage in 2030.
Why is that important for business?
The 2008 recession is far enough in the past that we think of it mostly in abstract terms. But for the Christmas Tree industry, the effects are very real and very current. https://whyy.org/articles/you-can-thank-the-great-recession-for-2019s-christmas-tree-shortage/. And that gets us thinking – how often in your business is there a financial cliff that you can see coming a decade away? How is the Butterfly Effect going to show up in your business? What are you doing today that is going to affect your business in the following years or quarters?
Can you look forward into the future and see what’s coming? And when you know there is a cliff of some kind coming, what can you do now to mitigate the damage? Diversification, obviously, is an option. Anticipating your customers needs if things go sideways can help. Planning for the future, like Eliot is doing with his studio (https://soheresmystory.com/ep125-office-space-and-your-future/), can also help. But the value of this conversation might not be in its predictive abilities, but in helping us prepare to not be surprised. You might not be able to predict the details of upcoming crises (and you probably shouldn’t spend a lot of time trying to), but you can have a plan, knowing that another recession or obstacle will eventually show up.
And this is the love-hate relationship we can have with planning. It is important to scan out into the future and think about what you want more or less of; to think about what matters to you. But when we plan around the idea that we can predict the future, especially as we increase the distance from the present, we may not be doing ourselves a service. The further out you go into the future, the more you have to leave room for unexpected things.
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Does social support help just as much as physical support when facing an obstacle?
Jodi has been reading NIH studies before she has even had her morning coffee, and it turns out that having someone you care about beside you make even real hills look less steep.
Why is that important for business?
The way you perceive the slant or steepness of a hill is changed by a lot of factors, including your energy levels and even the weight of the backpack you are carrying. But perhaps surprisingly, it is equally as affected by support. Having anyone beside you as you contemplate a hill makes you perceive the hill as less steep than it appears when you are alone. Having someone that you are closer to or have known for longer makes it seem even less daunting. When you have some kind of social support, your perception of slant (and difficulty) goes down. “Social support reduces psychological load.”
This can relate to many areas of your life. Your mind’s perception of a thing impacts how much of a challenge you perceive it to be. But most importantly, we have scientific evidence of why support is important when you are leading. There is always a hill of sorts in front of you when you are running a business, and it’s going to seem bigger and harder if you are standing there by yourself.
Much like our episode on Business Depression (https://soheresmystory.com/ep80-ever-been-business-depressed-replay/), sometimes the best way to get out of a rut is to surround yourself by people who support and inspire you. You have to build in layers of psychosocial resources, because they “moderate your vision in a similar manner to physical resources”. We know instinctually that it feels good to have someone to talk to and rant to, but we are often also embarrassed by this need. But truly – it helps the hill not seem so big. It has value, even if there is no “solution” offered.
If we recognize the validity of this experiment in our own lives, it helps to eradicate some of the guilt and to seek out support. It also helps us realize that it isn’t about having a solution when people come to us for support – like grief, it is simply the presence of someone who cares that matters.
So how do you find more people to stand shoulder to shoulder with? Who do you think about standing next to you when you envision contemplating the next hill?
Resources mentioned
NIH Paper - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291107/?fbclid=IwAR0aaZJbg2WVYIZmUPTdjMIk3HGIzoJnu_xL3B3j15voffgm88Op1eb8o6M
Original thread on FB https://www.facebook.com/516700194/posts/10161372193515195?d=n&sfns=mo
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We aren’t always game for business talk. But it is hard to set a boundary between private and business time if you are unclear on the boundary you are setting. For those fuzzy areas, where you don’t want to set a rule, but you feel like a boundary has been breached, we have some ideas.
Why is that important for business?
There is a very blurred line between business and personal for most people. Each world can easily bleed into the other, and many people want just that. But sometimes, you wish you could create a rule, or boundary, just for today, like a temporary profile picture on Facebook, and not have it stick for every situation thereafter.
Sometimes boundaries are grey and ill-defined, and when we can’t even codify our own rules about when to talk business and when not to, we can’t expect others to follow these non-codified (or expressed) rules. It is hard to set a boundary if you aren’t clear on the boundary you’re setting.
Often, this need for a temporary boundary is an indication that we are feeling depleted and in need of sleep or rest. In these times, when you’ve got nothing more to give and need a little space, we have to be careful not to set a precedent that we don’t actually want. The best way to do that is to address the specific case: “I would love to talk to you about this, but you are not going to get my best neurons today. Can we talk about this Monday when I can give you my full attention?”
Instead of judging what others’ rules for business talk in a personal space should be, it is a far more useful skillset to know and communicate your own. Expecting others to know your nuanced rules for their behaviour is unfair, especially when you don’t know them. Plus, it means you have to learn their subtle rules. As we get to know people, of course we can construct our own Care and Feeding manual (https://soheresmystory.com/ep60-care-and-feeding/) for their particular wants and needs, but we can’t expect everyone to know our wants in every moment. The more any of us can learn to read other people’s social cues, the better. And, no matter what, there will always be people who don’t read social cues.
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Expecting a Christmas bonus? Readying to give one? Listen to this first! Because, though you might not think it, “bonus” can mean more than one thing. Getting it wrong is the difference between a disappointed staff, or a story that spreads the good word of your company far and wide.
Why is that important for business?
How do you surprise and delight your employees, and how is this different from the bonuses they’ve come to expect?
There is a huge difference between an expected bonus, based on performance and seen as part of compensation, and an “I wish I worked there” story of delight.
A surprise, random bonus has a completely different function than one with a formula or pattern. They serve to provide a story. If your ideal recruit asked one of your employees, “why should I work there?”, the answer isn’t going to be a bullet point list - it’s going to be a story. What do you want that story to be?
Similar to our episode on how your business is an extension of your values https://soheresmystory.com/ep123-sugar-spice-radiating-values/, these kinds of bonuses speak to who you are as a person and help people get a feel for the place.
And though you won’t be able to please everyone, every time, as long as you help create the feeling you want to create (i.e. you aren’t enforcing participation), you can establish a strong sense of loyalty and satisfaction. And even better if you design the bonus so the impact of what is done is seen by their loved ones as well. If you work at a place and your spouse thinks it’s a nice company, then your positive feelings about it naturally increase.
However, it is important to realize that there is a difference between this type of bonus and one that has shown a pattern or reliability. Falling short of what is expected in a bonus is, after all, what caused Clark Griswold to lose it on his family https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SXB1hvxnzw.
Sometimes expectations are being set, and you don’t even realize it. As the business owner, you might not be aware that there is a pattern developing and that an expectation has been formed. Sometimes, even employees don’t know they have that patterned expectation until it isn’t met. You have to develop the awareness that anything that creates a pattern is at risk for becoming an expectation.
It’s important to create two distinct swim lanes – the random and memorable surprise, and the very separate bonus with clear expectations and an understandable formula. That way, you don’t run the risk of, in effort to do something nice, failing to meet an expectation you didn’t even realize was there.
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Let’s talk about strength of commitment, and designing your space to support your future, not just your present or past.
And to make it even more interesting, let’s throw in an ill-researched analogy about hermit crabs, for good measure!
Why is that important for business?
When our life, our work, and even our work spaces are designed around what we are currently doing, the things we want for our future are often – by necessity – shoved into unused corners. Almost as though our future doesn’t really fit in the existing figurative or literal space of our life. And a lot of this is about commitment – how committed are you to what you want next? Committing space, then, is about committing to the future.
Of course, commitment often comes in stages. But at some point, we may find ourselves struggling because we are shoving our dreams into the corner, in terms of space, energy, and time. Our future is getting the last dregs of our resources. If you were to make a list of things you really care about, on a scale of 1-10, how much time/energy/resources are you spending on those things?
When you commit to having the space (and time) around you that is built for your next stage, you grow into it far more quickly than you can imagine. You are creating something not for right now, and not for your present needs, but for that which you will grow into. Making that space represents your commitment to not only do this thing but to make it work and have it evolve.
Ask yourself, “what do I really want the future to look like?”, and then ask, “how is that going to be reflected in everything, including my physical environment? What changes do I need to make now to accommodate what I want to be spending my time, money and effort on in the next year or two?”
When we hear ourselves saying, “I want to do this thing but…”, the mistake is putting a period at the end of that sentence and stopping there. Instead, focus your attention on what comes after the “dot dot dot”. When you do, one of two things will happen – it will be clear what the next problem is that you have to solve if you want to move forward, and then you can focus on the work of removing that obstacle. Or, you will confront the fact that you really don’t want it enough to do that action. Either way, you’ve made room for the future.
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There is no shame in losing out to Butter, as Eliot finds out, but sometimes, there is shame when it comes to time and productivity. And we want to fix that.
Why is that important for business?
It is incredibly easy to grossly overestimate what is possible in the time you have available. People want to talk about time in terms of to do lists and apps, but so much of it is simply knowing how long things take. Getting a clear understanding of what you can accomplish in a month or year or a meeting is crucial to productivity and feeling good about what you’ve accomplished. But we’re generally really, really bad at it.
We also often feel like failures if our lists only have 3 things on them, even when we know we perform best when we have the time and focus.
Productivity and time management is not where you should start. For instance, if you were to list three things that you desperately want more time for, what would they be? And more importantly – are they or have they ever been on a calendar or to do list?
We have a broken perception about how long things take, and then we beat ourselves up about what we can get done. We also set our sights on the aspirational parts of things and don’t break down what goes into it. Then we are mad at ourselves and feel like failures. But we’re actually adding a problem, because in addition to everything you have to do, you are feeling bad about how much you are getting done.
And sometimes, getting over the emotional drag of the shame is about thinking small, in order to think big.
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Does your business radiate your values like a spice company? Find out in this episode!
Why is that important for business?
Have you heard about the spice company that spent more money on impeachment ads than anyone but Trump?
When asked why, he answered “I’m running ads to run a business. And so much of that is using your business to radiate your values.”
When you have a business, you have this same opportunity to radiate your values. But that has consequences that you have to be willing to accept. And though you might applaud the spice company and condemn the baker that won’t make the cake for a gay wedding, if you are okay with one being able to radiate their values, you have to be okay with the other side radiating theirs.
Of course, where businesses get into trouble is when they speak for everyone in the organization. It might seem like it is better to pick neutrality. But who decides what neutral is?
Does your business radiate your values? If so, to what degree? How much does it need to be in lock step with your values? You have to decide how you are going to show up in the world. And the louder you get, the more love and the more hate you will receive - you have to be willing to take both of those.
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Getting hacked is bad. Of course it is.
But what if…it’s not all bad? What if being hacked is the key to some really big marketing questions?
Why is that important for business?
Despite 17 years of putting on marketing events, sending out emails, making connections, sometimes it takes a hacked email to show you how many people are ready to engage with you. Or at least that’s Eliot’s recent experience. And while we don’t recommend you use a hack as a marketing technique, there are definitely things to be learned from how effective this hack was in generating interest and actual business.
So what is it about responding to a hacked email that so galvanizes people? How can we explore what makes a call to action actually call people to act? Especially since, in this instance, people took an action that wasn’t even requested, it’s important to ask – what were the stimuli that created the action?
First, there was value to the action, and not just to them. They wanted to help. There was a clear purpose to the response.
Second, the subject line was very clear – “action required”. But that on its own does not create action. It has to be paired with a trusting relationship with someone who has established credibility. This may also mean it has to come from a person, not a company – the hack capitalized on the building of a personal relationship.
It’s also interesting to note that relationships take time, and that just because people aren’t responding, doesn’t mean there isn’t a relationship. It might take a hack to get them to officially engage, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t listening. We are always looking for data on what has value, and we have to rely on engagement because it’s the only data we have to go on. And yet we shouldn’t underestimate the value of lurkers – people reading and considering, but who don’t say anything.
In business or in your personal life, the lesson from this email hack just might be that if you are not getting the action you want, it might be an issue with the relationship and the credibility you have built. This story also points to the importance of reciprocal value – people want to help you, too.
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When is process valuable, and when is it a distraction from the productivity it is supposed to create? As always, we come at this question from the angle of stories about things like too-small-roasting-pans and piles of dirt. Because the title of this podcast isn’t “So Here’s My Brief and Boring Synopsis of a Business Lesson”.
Why is that important for business?
While sometimes differing processes can simply be two ways to get to the same place, there are also processes that are productive and some that are “that’s how we’ve always done it” or status quo-maintaining processes.
Instead of creating structure for everything – from negotiations to meeting agendas – we should instead ask ourselves: “What’s the tiniest hint of structure that I need to prevent chaos, so that we have the freedom to work creatively without going off the rails?” This is very different than the kind of structure that exists simply for the sake of structure (structure that often gets in the way of communicating, and that can create work that isn’t on the path to real value). Structure like this serves an entirely different master than results.
What you want are systems that allow people to be smart, thoughtful and to use their best brains, not structure that is a reaction to fear. There must be enough insight to talk about the process you are using, what you’re trying to protect, and what you’re losing when you’re trying to protect that. What are the conversations you aren’t allowed to have?
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Uh oh – someone tried to show gratitude to Eliot again! Let’s revisit an early episode of So Here’s My Story, where we talk about compliments, thanking someone, and all of the ways to drive Eliot crazy. (Bonus: we get to hear Jodi use Eliot’s full name in a chastising way!)
Why is that important for business?
As we have learned, Eliot enjoys sucking all of the joy out of compliments and acts of gratitude. And maybe you do too.
But here’s the thing:
Giving and receiving of any kind is a finely balance ecosystem. If I want to give something to you – a compliment or a favour or anything – you have to be willing to catch that ball, or it doesn’t work. It can’t be a one-sided exchange. There has to be someone on the other end of the seesaw.
When someone tells you that you are wrong about a compliment – “no, no, I’m not actually that good” – they are taking something that is yours. They don’t actually get to weigh in on what you think (and admire and appreciate) about them. There is a responsibility to recognize that you are wrecking something for someone else when you refuse to take a compliment.
You also can’t grow as a person or a company unless you are building on a solid foundation of what is working well.
And even if you can’t accept what you are good at, through someone else’s eyes, the least you can do is simply say “thank you”, so you don’t disrupt that ecosystem. This allows you to create space for the possibility that this might be true, and it allows you to create a foundation to build on.
It is an important practice to be able to be with both ends of real and authentic; to be able to take both genuine criticism and genuine compliments.
We are all hungry for that spotlight, but once we’re there, we deflect out of it as soon as possible. But if we can stop and take a breath in that space, and just say “thank you”, it can be an opportunity.
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How do you know when you are overreacting, and when you should call in help? Whether it’s double pneumonia or a product recall, making a decision to be proactive in the face of a potential emergency can be complicated, and fraught with a lot of “I don’t want to be dramatic” baggage. So how do you do it? Let’s talk about it – in story form!
Why is that important for business?
When you are facing something like a sick kid or a decision to call in help in business, often our driving force is the desire not to be perceived as an idiot or someone who is overreacting. When do you call it and make the decision to make a thing, a thing – and possibly looking silly - versus waiting and possibly regretting not acting sooner?
Especially when you are forced to make a decision in isolation – without the help of experts – you have to figure out with your limited knowledge if an issue is serious enough to communicate to someone else. We want to figure “it” out first, before we call in the expert. But between doing nothing and calling a neurosurgeon every time you have a headache, there are so many steps where you have to decide.
Which is why so many people start conversations with “I’m sorry to bother you with this”. Yet the problems are often easier to solve when you get them early.
Which leads to the question: how do you ease the path to get people to call sooner? How do you lower the barrier for honest communication without fear of feeling shame? Answering that question behooves every single kind of business out there.
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When you set lofty goals that not only don’t serve your larger objective, but actually work against you, you might want to reflect on this episode about Homeowners Associations, lawn gnomes, and setting pointless rules.
Why is that important for business?
When you are establishing rules and culture, make sure that you are not setting yourself up for an impossible task of compliance. When you target with incredible specificity and end up micromanaging, you might actually obscure your message completely, or worse – ensure everyone not only misses the point, but actively fights the bigger picture goal.
You are also often setting yourself up for failure by establishing an expectation of enforcement that is impossible to adhere to. It’s important to establish just enough of a boundary to stabilize and make clear what you need and no further. Overreach makes people react against the bigger goal. If you don’t enforce these arbitrary rules that you have set, you show yourself as powerless to live up to your own standards. Companies set themselves up with aspirational policies.
Look for opportunities to get buy-in through collectively deciding what people care about. Don’t let the fear that you have to have a consensus or have to listen to every opinion stop you from engaging the people affected by the policies you are setting up. Getting granular without buy-in is a nightmare.
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“You look so beautiful that I almost didn’t recognize you.”
Ever have someone deliver a compliment with that kind of precision and deftness? Sure, there might need to be training to help them better communicate; but listening for intent is just as important. Do you have a culture that assumes best intent, and trains from there?
Why is that important for business?
Sometimes, you need to be trained to hear the intent behind the words or clumsy phrasing. Just like a good daughter, the training and the culture of your company needs to be such that people are encouraged to acknowledge the intent behind the message before trying to correct it. Especially for people who fail to put the period where it should be in a sentence.
It is important to first acknowledge the best intent, and then give feedback on the delivery.
It’s also important to create a culture where people can give such feedback to someone to gain perspective on possible intent, even if it’s not the person directly. Sometimes, having another outlet – a safe person – can save hurt feelings.
It’s easy to say we want to assume best intent, but in practice, it can be challenging. If someone hands you an orange, but to you it’s clearly an apple, you have to be willing to ask: “is this really an apple?”, even if it doesn’t feel like it deserves questioning. Assuming best intent is to wedge a crowbar into something that feels like the truth. It’s hard work to assume best intent.
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Have you ever received one of those messages from a friend from high school, who clearly just wants to sell you something? Or had someone try to jump 6 or 7 rungs on the intimacy ladder, just to do business? Let’s talk about when the attempt to create an add actually becomes a detract.
Why is that important for business?
“Happy birthday, Eliot, now give me your money!”
Although it’s not an exact quote, these kinds of emails happen. And they actually end up devaluing the sender. Like a celery is purported to have negative calories, this is a negative calorie birthday greeting, where they actually take away from your estimation of them.
Social media especially makes it easy to simulate a relationship without actually forming one. Instead of forcing closeness, it might be more effective to create the start of closeness by being honest about the lack of closeness. But creating the veneer of a friendship where none exists borders on a violation, like someone crawling through a window you left ajar and joining you in your living room.
The only place you can begin to grow a community is from exactly the place where you are right now. As is described in Tribal Leadership https://www.triballeadership.net/: people can only hear you one layer above or below where you are. You have to meet people where they are at and grow from there. Presuming you are on a level that you are not is when the add becomes a detract.
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Can you feel the difference between setting a goal and setting a Big Grin Goal? We sure can, and we want to spend some time talking about it.
Why is that important for business?
We’ve all set goals that – theoretically, at least – we want to achieve. And then…we don’t. But Eliot wants to introduce you to Scott and his concept of the Big Grin Goals (as measured with a Grindictator!)
Now, you could really like something, want something, but it might not make you grin. That things that “gives you the grins”? That goal that animates you naturally? When something is so compelling that it has a magnetic quality, it pulls you towards it. It might still be hard work, but it feels more worth it. It’s like the quote: “discipline is remembering what you want”. When you are energetically tied to a thing that you want – so much that it makes you grin just to think of it - the hard work just takes on a totally different flavour. And it can transform from what you have to do to what get to do.
It’s hard to deny that if you put that energy of the grin behind a goal, it becomes easier to achieve. But it might not be a direct line to the Grin Goal. In fact, if it was as a direct line, it wouldn’t scratch the itch.
And here’s where you need to look for the Power of the Metaphor. The Grin Goal might simply point to something you want more of – it might not be the ultimate destination at all. Like the great meditation teach Joseph Goldstein (https://www.dharma.org/teacher/joseph-goldstein/) says, “the thought of your mother is not your mother.” Be aware of when you are creating words around the image and where you need to get closer to the image means, what the goal feels like.
So…where do your goals fall on the Grindicator?
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It’s part 2 of our lovely dalliance with guest host, Joe Natoli, and he has a lot to share, including how to say no to non ideal clients, how to (politely) ignore your clients requests, and how to stand for the truth of your work.
Why is that important for business?
When clients come to Joe with a defined problem (and a proposed solution), his first step is to politely ignore their request and ask, “what occurred to make you think you needed this solution? Tell me the story that led you to this moment.” That story is at the core of what needs to be solved.
It is a natural human inclination to have decided on a solution by the time you reach out for help – otherwise, why would you call? But the danger is when you have someone who listens and does what you think you need. It’s important to pause and ask diagnostic questions to discover what the real problem actually is.
People often don’t know what their actual value is, because no one is asking the right questions and no one is willing to look dumb. Ask the question that is on the tip of your tongue, even if it feels humiliating. Often, the best question is, “have you tried asking?” For instance, if you are writing a proposal and it is hard, you haven’t asked enough questions.
Learn to say no to things and clients. Stand your ground for the truth. Hold less tightly to the solutions and more tightly to the core truth.
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We have a guest host today, and he has a great (2-part) story about finding the right work, making the invisible visible, and helping humans find new results from their systems.
Why is that important for business?
Our guest host Joe helped us explore a lot of topics in this 2-part conversation, including:
- Finding what you are skilled at doing, even if no one supports you
- Sometimes we need “not that” people in our life, so we can discover what we want by having to fight for it.
- That you don’t have to march in straight line with 1000 other people; you can actually stop people from doing what everyone else is doing, but for a living!
- When you want to fix a problem, it’s helpful to be clear on what you are doing now before you change it.
- Look for the fear or the unmet need. When someone is tightly controlling something, there is a reason.
- You can’t ignore a problem just because the proffered solution doesn’t work.
- Forget about the recipes you know and the things we are good at that you want to automatically apply. If you’ve been doing something the same way and getting the same unwanted result, you have to stop doing what you are doing.
- Ask what you need out of a meeting, instead of having one because you think you need a meeting.
- Obstacles that get in the way of good end result are very rarely peoples’ abilities, skills and experience. It is the stuff in the periphery that creates the obstacles.
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How do you tell when something is just a quick rant, and when something actually matters? Well, we’ve got a story about that. Or a series of rants, as the case may be.
Why is that important for business?
Rants are specific to the people you tell them. What bothers you doesn’t necessarily bother other people. But these are the things that are the poppy seeds between the teeth in an organization that end up causing tension. If everyone agrees that about the poor etiquette, then you can course correct from there. But what if there is disagreement on whether it’s okay to even be upset about it?
Often, people see a dismissal of what bothers them through a lens not of this concern doesn’t matter, but I don’t matter.
The answer, as usual lies in conversations, and about not shying away from having conversations about things, even if they feel silly. “While no single conversation is guaranteed to transform a company, a relationship, or a life, any single conversation can.” (Susan Scott, Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/289515/fierce-conversations-revised-and-updated-by-susan-scott/9780425193372/)
A great way to start these conversations is as Brene Brown suggests: “the story I’m making up is…” https://www.businessinsider.com/brene-browns-biggest-life-hack-is-a-simple-phrase-2015-8
Tell people what your assumptions are right up front. At least start there. Otherwise you might end up the subject of someone else’s rant.
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Leadership isn’t about taking responsibility for just the parts you like; leaders don’t get to separate themselves from their organization. And as much as this episode is about the things Trump said about Baltimore, it’s more about good (and bad) leadership, and choosing between a chair and a hand.
Why is that important for business?
When you lead anything, whether it be a country, a state, or an organization, you can’t disconnect yourself from the things that are in your charge. When you are a leader, you wholesale relinquish your right to consider yourself separate from anything within your organization. If some part is bad or wrong or struggling, then you are also bad or wrong or struggling. And although it may not be your job to fix it per se, you don’t get to isolate yourself from it.
This isn’t to say that you aren’t allowed to have judgements as a leader – your job is to identify what is not working and where there are issues to solve. But if you see a part of your business not getting the outcomes you want, then it is ultimately your responsibility. You don’t have the luxury of kicking it in the shins or cannibalizing part of the thing that is your job to raise up. Your job is to always facilitate a solution to make that thing better. Otherwise you are setting yourself up where people are defending themselves against the leader. And as Lincoln said, “a house divided against itself cannot stand”.
There is no amount of team building you can do if, at the end, you don’t imagine you all have the same goal.
This is where the Zen of the Hand and the Chair comes into play in leadership. If you attempt to cut off the hand’s little finger, the rest of the hand would curl up in a fist to defend it. A chair, in contrast, is fixed in structure – if you chop off a leg, the rest of the chair would notice it was tipping, but wouldn’t move to fix it. The chair would hit the floor. Each organization has to choose if it will be the hand or the chair.
Organizations are almost always a reflection of leadership’s best and worst traits, and in that way, teach (or even stand for) what they tolerate. Whatever you stand there and be is the message you send to your organization about what’s okay.
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It’s important to remember that clarity comes through action. For instance, clarity that two semi-introverts might not like to be the stars of their own party. And that there might be a better way to build a community without needing to hide in the corner or fake a bathroom break.
Why is that important for business?
Figuring things out in business is an imperfect path. But it is only by doing something that isn’t quite a hit out of the ballpark that the next thing that IS a fit becomes possible. We often want to think things through before we take a step, but the only way to figure a thing out – the only way to get clarity or confidence – is via action.
That’s why it is so helpful to ask: what did I love about this thing? It doesn’t have to be all of it or even most of it, but it’s important to identify and keep those parts, and find a way to mitigate the parts that don’t serve.
Without action and reflection, it’s like you are sifting through puzzle pieces without knowing what the top of the box looks like. You shouldn’t – we shouldn’t - underestimating the immense power of continually making imperfect steps, gathering the “not that” from it, and redirecting.
As the saying goes: Eat the fish and spit out the bones.
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In business, sometimes you need to lead, and sometimes you need to follow. Like singing harmony, it’s a balancing act of merging talents. And if someone doesn’t know or respect their role, nothing sounds right.
Why is that important for business?
Just like when you are singing, running a business involves asking yourself this question: “Is this a moment when I am the driver, or is this a case where I am a passenger?” Because everything gets harder when two or more people are trying to drive at the same time.
This can be especially apparent when one company buys another. Both parties need to understand that they must integrate the two cultures and philosophies into one to create a whole. This doesn’t mean that everyone has to march in lock step – singing harmony is distinct, not a copy. But you must match and merge and flow with each other in a way that isn’t distracting, and that doesn’t take away from the whole. Like in the Ted Talk about how to start a movement (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V74AxCqOTvg), you need both leaders and followers, or nothing significant happens.
You don’t want 100 synchronizing voices; you need a combination of different pitches and tones, and at times, harmonizing requires some dissonance. But that dissonance has to resolve, and it cannot be a surprise. Dissonance has to be built into the process.
The problem isn’t necessarily with the lead or with the harmony; the problem is when any of the people involved aren’t focusing on the larger product. The problem to answer is: does this harmony create what you want to create? If roles are blurry, it may be leaving gaps in the end product, so the key is having the conversation, identifying who is playing which role, and then working together to create an even better result together.
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When you’re starting a new venture, you’re all passion and enthusiasm. But can you expect your team to be the same? How much is too much to ask of the people around you?
Why is that important for business?
When you are getting something new off the ground, you are often asking people to make your priority their priority.
You may have some basic rules – you won’t ask anyone else to do something you aren’t willing to do yourself, for instance. But there aren’t any hard rules about what is too much, because everyone is different. Ultimately, this is a conversation you have to have with your staff individually – you can’t guess where other people’s boundaries are.
Everyone has a different limit. Finding out what is too much has to be an individual conversation, but if you establish the right culture, that conversation gets easier to have. That culture has to be one where things aren’t left to fester; where no one is above anything; and where the enthusiasm and dedication that you have for what you do becomes contagious. If you can create such a culture, where you notice and nurture the people who are almost as passionate as you are, you can build around them.
Resources Mentioned
Chris Vos, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if your Life Depended on it,
https://info.blackswanltd.com/never-split-the-difference
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You probably don’t expect the story of a rabbit statue at a Shinto temple in Japan to be the inspiration for an episode about the importance of deepening your business relationships, but here we are.
Relationships in business are often looked at as transactional. But what happens when we see relationships as valuable in their own right?
Why is that important for business?
So many of the lessons we are taught about marketing, about networking and about business development in general have a basis in the idea that what goes around comes around. There is an essential expectation of reciprocity, or that the relationship is a means to an end. The relationship is not seen as valuable in and of itself. When someone joins a close-knit business group, where the focus is on relationship-building, and begins to immediately cold call all of the members, it’s a turn off. They are missing the relationship aspect of business relationships and jumping right into asking for help.
Focusing on the relationship instead of the business is not about asking, “what can you do for me?”. Instead, it is more in alignment with the idea that “a rising tide lifts all boats” (or, as Jodi refers to it, the “boats, ships, water thing”.) This is about building something real, not saying, “hey, I was thinking about something that you could do for me”. The business may very well come from these relationships, but it comes obliquely, like happiness comes through the pursuit of meaning.
What would it look like to deepen your relationships instead of just sowing seeds for more relationships? How would it change your networking events to answer the ubiquitous, “who can I introduce you to?” with “whoever you think of that is cool; who has something to say; who contributes to the world in a passionate way; who has an interesting take on things”. Most people don’t want to think of themselves as a carbon copy of somebody else, broken down to their transactional value. Instead, look for people that you zing with, who expose you to new ideas with which to cross-pollinate.
We imagine the whole point of networking is meeting as many people as we can. But the real value is to reignite or deepen existing relationships. We’ve all sown more seeds than we could ever reap – we need to invest in tending to these relationships instead of sowing still more. We need a greater awareness of where we skim the surface, and where what we really need is to go deeper into the relationship that is already there.
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Ever fallen in business love and just assumed you will be working together forever? Typically, life just doesn’t work that way – employees and teammates come and go in our career, even when we wish they didn’t. And even though we might intellectually know this, it doesn’t mean we don’t sometimes react badly.
Like so many of Eliot’s stories, this is one he isn’t proud of.
Why is that important for business?
When you find that perfect person for a role in your business, it can be hard not to get carried away with what that means. We create a story of who and what they will be for us, and we think, somehow, it will be forever.
And then one day it isn’t. And in that moment, when we feel hurt and abandoned, we don’t always behave in a way we are proud of. Whoever said, “it’s not personal, it’s just business” either never ran their own business or is just a moron. It’s all personal.
This is such a common experience, yet it always comes with dollop of shame, and with the strong impulse to suppress the feelings. It can hurt to put your heart into someone and have them leave, but there is also a downside to not investing in people. As the saying goes: “what if you invest in people and they leave? What if you don’t and they stay?”
Or, as they say in horse jumping, “throw your heart over and the horse will follow”. (This is what Jodi refers to as “the horse phrase”.)
The moment someone starts to think you doesn’t care personally, that it’s just business, is the point when they start considering leaving for any small reason. You have to invest personally if you want that personal investment back. But, as with all things, it is a risk. An incredibly worthy risk.
Ask yourself: “are you investing in your people in some perverse ways of imagining they are yours forever? Or are you investing in them for as long as the relationship is mutually beneficial, then seeing them go off in the world and being proud of your part in what they accomplish next? The latter is clearly the healthier approach, and yet - it’s okay to feel hurt, too.
Think of the paper feeder in a printer. When you adjust the feeder, perhaps to print on an envelope, both sides move in tandem – you can’t move one side independently. Emotions work like that as well. You can’t avoid the yucky feelings without also avoiding the positive ones. You can’t selectively numb your emotions. So feel all of them.
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There’s the part of the job that is in the job description and the part that is harder to define, but typically just as (if not more) valuable. This amorphous magic that someone brings to the work they do is hard to hire for and often, completely irreplaceable. Yet it can be considered superfluous. Why is that? Let’s discuss in this episode.
Why is that important for business?
There are people in our businesses who simply make things better. They may or may not excel at the specific tasks they were hired for, but they bring something intangible to their work that is often even more valuable. They create a role in the business that is completely “them-shaped”. And though a business might not hire specifically for that skill set, once it is discovered, it is difficult to lose.
Like a great team player on the basketball court (for example, Shane Battier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane_Battier), these people position themselves to make everyone around them better. Or, like BASF said in their marketing campaigns: "We don't make a lot of the products you buy. We make a lot of the products you buy better". (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/26/business/media/a-campaign-for-basf.html) It isn’t boxes they are checking; they are creating value no one even knew was needed.
So why don’t we value these indescribable but irreplaceable skills? Why is there such hesitation to value – on its own merits - the indistinct egg white, not just the more obvious egg yolk, of the work we do?
Our organizations desperately need these skills, but we don’t even know they exist or that we need them. It becomes, instead of a hiring challenge, a matter of encouraging staff and employees to grow the things they are uniquely good at. The less room there is to stray from the job description, the more difficult it is to give this hard-to-define gift to the organization. The more unforgiving a system or process is, the less room there is for this egg white.
We want (and to a large degree need) things to be systematized and to have clear roles and responsibilities. But it is equally important to reveal and support people’s individual magic sauce if we want to thrive. We must cultivate a culture of communication, so it comes to our attention when someone has these unique but amorphous skills.
Because we can’t just eat egg yolks.
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Ever found yourself in the middle of a “who slept less or worked more” competition? It happens to the best of us, and it is always weird. So why do we do it? Let’s see what our intrepid hosts have to say about this entrepreneurial misery one-upmanship.
Why is that important for business?
Even if we would never admit it – or worse, outright deny it – busy working people often take a strange pride in being overworked. But if there is honour in being too busy or not sleeping – which is nonsense- then there is, conversely, dishonour in taking time off or taking care of ourselves. And that is also nonsense. We establish these rules for ourselves about how hard we work or how hard things are, but we can’t ever construct a rule for ourselves that only affects one side of the continuum. If we make it honourable to suffer, then we accidentally make it dishonourable to not suffer, or to take care of ourselves.
There is often a distinct difference between the things we think we believe, and the things that show up in our behaviours. Although we might say we value sleep, time off, and spending time with loved ones, our behaviours can belie these assertions.
It is prevalent even among entrepreneurs and leaders, a typically ambitious and focused group who still succumb to this weird socially acceptable form of victimhood. When we don’t take responsibility for our choices, it is important to catch – there is something insipid about victim energy that keeps us from getting what we want.
We need to take ownership of our choices by first recognizing that they are choices. This means taking the time to step back and realize when we have, even inadvertently, prioritized something over something else. Only then do we have a shot at the clarity to say either “that’s the right choice for me right now”, or “something needs to change”.
If we don’t see the door is unlocked, we will always remain in that cage. Noticing when we are entering into an unhealthy competition with someone is an opportunity to pause and notice the choice we are making.
Do I really want to value being busy or tired to the point that I will compete for it?
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Ego is a requirement of entrepreneurship, but it can also be an obstacle. Let’s go back to the recession of 2007/2008, where Eliot recounts some of his personal failings for us, so we can learn from his mistakes.
Why is that important for business?
Hope and optimism are necessary attributes of an entrepreneur; so is a healthy dose of ego. But they can also be dangerous. When you need to make tough decisions, all of these traits – assets though they might be – can become obstacles. Especially if you feel like the tough decisions are a result of your own personal failings, like layoffs when business is down. It can feel like you have fallen down, but the whole team gets a skinned knee.
Entrepreneurs often wait to really look at how bad something is. But if we look early, if we ask for help and get clarity sooner, we can often avoid the worst of the pain. We can sometimes soften the landing for some of the people affected; we can give longer runways to find another job. But it can be hard not to fall into the trap of The Object Permanence Rule of Business: if don’t look at it, it doesn’t exist.
By trying to avoid looking like a personal failure, we often make mistakes that make the situation worse.
Ego has to be there for you to be a driven entrepreneur, yet it gets in the way of getting help sometimes. Leading inherently requires making decisions about things that are uncertain. There is no true rule book to follow. There is a whole list of attributes you need to be able to navigate this world of leadership and entrepreneurship, and every single one of them has a nasty underbelly. You need to learn to manage that underbelly and understand the stereo equalizer about how much of these traits is required, and when (and who) you need to mitigate and compensate for them.
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Are there any places in your business where you are falling short of expectations? You might be surprised. There are elements of service and care that, when present, make little impact. Yet when they are absent, they can make all the difference in how clients feel about you and your business. Miss them, and you might be telling clients not to return.
Why is that important for business?
It’s important to do periodic audits of the customer or client experience – are there any ways you are communicating the message that you care only until they’ve signed on the dotted line or paid the invoice? Are there ways you are telling your most precious asset – your existing client base – that you are going to squeeze every single dollar from them that you possibly can?
This can be especially apparent when we try to make expense cuts. By adding a new line item to your invoice – one of the few documents you can be sure every client will scrutinize – you might be conveying a message that doesn’t make the client feel like remaining a client. There are much better ways to cut expenses than to take away from any “big moment” – driving the car off the lot, for instance – in your business relationship.
This takes a certain degree of anticipating what your customers or clients will care about. As entrepreneurs, though, we often miss opportunities to simply ask. If you’re struggling with something -if you aren’t on the same page with them about exactly what they want or need or how to structure something for them - then you haven’t asked enough questions. Much like our episode Just Say… That (https://soheresmystory.com/ep07-just-say-that/), there are times when you are overthinking and need to Just Ask…THAT.
And in those times when asking doesn’t work, you need to put yourself in the customer experience path and examine where the pain points are in the process of engaging you. (You can check out this Harvard Review article for more ideas on how to smooth the path your clients take to work with you: https://bit.ly/2Wcvfc5). There are probably a few easy wins that you could foil with a small misstep, if you aren’t careful. This requires a lot of noticing, being aware of, and tending to the client experience.
There are many opportunities to make people feel thought of. Missing them can mean missing out on the next $70k sale.
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Sometimes things go sideways. Especially when we have big plans, but absolutely no…”plan”. Like, for instance, our “plan” to make last episode a two-parter. But as always – our stories are yours to learn from.
Why is that important for business?
When you are a busy entrepreneur with more ideas than time, things are bound to go sideways. Between the idea and the actual awareness of what it takes to execute the idea are often a massive disconnect. We want something to happen, we make no actual plan to make it happen, and poof frustration.
Sometimes, it’s a matter of asking, “what would have to happen to make this idea a reality?” Before we even get to the action phase, we are skipping the part where we even evaluate how or what would need to happen. A missed opportunity like this usually involves a lot of skipped conversations.
Everyone talks about how life has sped up, but there’s a deeper problem beyond the obvious lack of time to execute. We have almost developed an inability and intolerance to sink down into a thought and think it through. We have to find, make and insist upon the time and energy required to go deep on our ideas before we move to the next thing, or we’ll never be able to bring a great idea into the world.
This is why we need to check in when we are feeling frustrated, and ask ourselves, “am I giving this idea or this desire the time, energy and focus it needs?”
The inherent underlying problem is prioritization - we have a stack of ideas but not the time to dedicate to them. And this means hard questions are necessary – “which ones do I care about?”; “which ones am I willing to not work on right now?”; and “what am I willing to stop doing in order to give this new thing the time and energy it requires?” It’s like running around putting a penny in 10,000 buckets, and then becoming frustrated that none of those buckets are amassing wealth. We have to remove the frustration from the space in order to do that.
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It’s a very special 100th episode, which leads us to this important question: how do we celebrate milestones?
It turns out, this is harder than it sounds.
Why is that important for business?
The act of intentionally creating a ritual in order to pause and feel the weight of an accomplishment, a milestone or an event – in business or in life – can actually help solidify the experience in your mind. It adds punctuation. Yet we are quite bad at celebrating these milestones in any way. Often, we will work incredibly hard to achieve some goal and then we go on immediately to the next thing without ever taking the time to enjoy or celebrate it.
It might not even be a question of celebrating, but simply acknowledging what the milestones even are. It is important to step back and ask, “where are the milestones of progress?”
They don’t have to even be large milestones – anointed from on high to be worthy of celebration –but the small marks of progress or of doing the necessary work of our business. Because really, it’s all arbitrary. Nothing changes with 100 episodes. It is not memorable to simply record a 100th episode; what makes it memorable is the act of celebrating it. Mile markers woosh by whether you acknowledge them or not. It is the act of pausing – of adding punctuation – that creates the significance.
So what do you do to celebrate wins, large or small? Part two of this episode is your story, and we want to hear.
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There’s a difference between taking a side door into an opportunity and gaming the system. Just what that difference is and why it matters is what we want to talk about in this episode.
Why is that important for business?
Some marketing can feel a little extra…gross. But working to get a seat at the table feels a lot different than gaming the system to create the illusion of a seat, or a title or a reward. It’s the difference between hustle and manipulation. And it’s a recipe for Imposter Syndrome.
On the other hand, there is a point when a fierce commitment to integrity can keep you from doing the things you need to do to get you where you want to be.
This is where it is important to embrace the side door and look for an opportunity to be judged on your own merits.
Resources Mentioned
Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek https://fourhourworkweek.com/
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Feedback can be a tricky thing. If you listen to every opinion that you hear, it’s easy to get lost. But if you ignore valuable input simply because you don’t understand the perspective, you can easily get stuck in a rut. The art of eating the fish and spitting out the bones is a fine one, and it’s worth a discussion.
Why is that important for business?
If you’ve ever led a workshop where feedback forms are handed out to participants, you know very well the frustration of hearing diametrically opposing feedback on the exact same topic. Or it may be obvious that the participants simply cannot perceive their lack of understanding on a topic. (See the Dunning-Kruger Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect).
Feedback always says way more about person giving it than it does about you. This isn’t to say that you should ignore it, but simply that you cannot gobble down every bite as inarguable truth. Input is simply a piece of a puzzle; sometimes a statistically insignificant piece.
So why even ask for feedback? What’s important about it?
Participant perspective can reveal a larger truth, even if only one person says it. If someone doesn’t understand instructions, for instance, that requires a closer look. But how do you distinguish between opinion and feedback worth considering?
It’s hard to articulate exactly what makes valuable feedback different from the kind that creates a problem where one needn’t exist. You might consider read input like horoscopes – their value is when they either validate something you had a hunch about or reveal something that feels like a blind spot. The blur in the middle is often better ignored unless it achieves critical mass (i.e. a statistically significant number of people comment on it). Of course, you are always risking missing valuable input, but you can’t deal with something if you can’t see it yet.
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Business is chock full of snarly, complicated problems, and sometimes, they are especially hard to wrangle when we are close to them. Like watching someone else parallel park a car, outsider knowledge doesn’t have to be profound to see what we can’t – it just has to have the benefit of not being in the car with us.
Why is that important for business?
We can tend to have blind spots when it comes to our own problems, and this includes the problems of our business. But it is important to remember that what is crazy hard to you is someone else’s sweet spot. Instead of the solution being something you bring, often it is someone else that is required to solve the problem. If you are struggling with a knowledge base that isn’t yours, take a couple of steps back and ask who you need to bring in.
Of course, once you have the solution, you might feel like you can do it yourself. After all, you are surely talented enough, and not above the work. But you must consider if it is your highest and best use of time, or if someone else could easily do what you struggle with. Determining your highest and best use is one of the most important things that will be asked of you in leadership and entrepreneurship. You have to ask: where am I a value-add and where am I a drag on the system?
If a problem feels “sloggy” hard, or you are asking yourself to learn a new skill in order to move forward, it’s a great cue to step back and ask yourself, “for whom would this be a breeze?”
It takes a village to not only raise kids, but to succeed in business. Other people have perspectives and ideas and skill sets and resources that you don’t. They are outside of your car, and they can help you in ways you can’t even see.
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While you can’t always be looking down at your feet in business, sometimes, short-term solutions are necessary. They can give you enough momentum and energy (and maybe even resources) to find a more permanent solution. And sometimes, they provide just enough organized chaos to shake things up in the long term.
Why is that important for business?
When we are trying to fix a problem, we often try to find a solution that we can maintain long term. This is, of course, logical. However, sometimes you need a short-term fix, and in those cases, different rules apply. We may just need to get started. While we may not be able to maintain our short-term solution in the long run, it can provide value and space to come up with a more permanent solution.
Although running a business involves seeing the big picture, sometimes, especially in crisis, it can help to look at it like AA and take one day at a time.
The key is to make sure you are making these decisions consciously. You may take on different types of work in specific circumstances, with the very clear intentions to get through the short term. But the short-term solution should be something that isn’t going to do some degree of violence to your long-term goals.
You may also want to consider the way you communicate this shift in focus, even if it is temporary. Make sure to let your people in on the secret. If they signed on because they knew your long-term plan was something they believed in, they need to understand where the short-term solution fits into that focus. You may also need to consider how you communicate this shift to clients.
As entrepreneurs, we not only have to look up at the horizon line to see out as far as we can, but we also have to periodically look down at our feet, to make sure we are not stepping into a hole. We can’t myopically keep eyes on either – we must scan both. When people are stuck in the decision-making process, you might be looking at the wrong one. For that reason, interjecting short-term solutions can be beneficial for the long-term plan. As suggested in the book Messy (http://timharford.com/books/messy/ (as featured in the podcast Hidden Brain https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510308/hidden-brain), this can be a way to inject some intentional chaos into your plans, to freshen things up and spark new thoughts.
It’s ultimately all about proportion. You want to keep the main cupcake part of your business intact, and layer on innovation as icing.
A great way to explore this is to try this thought exercise: if you had to go out and generate $x this week, how would you do it? Looking at short-term solutions engages a more scrappy, resourceful part of your brain than long-term planning does, and it can be a great way to add flexibility and agility.
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Have you ever hired a close friend or a family member? There is so much that is wonderful about hiring someone you already trust. But there are also inherent risks: what happens if things go wrong? Will you lose both an employee and the relationship?
Let’s talk about untangling the risks and rewards of hiring friends and family.
Why is that important for business?
People rarely move through life in lockstep. If something goes wrong, how do you fire your best friend?
Conflict at the best of times can be a challenge. Dealing with it with someone who is close to you in your personal life, in addition to your professional life, can feel even more fraught. Sometimes, instead of dealing with the conflict, we just assume they’ll also just know it isn’t working and will leave on their own. But you have to be prepared beforehand to deal with conflict, even when the professional might bleed into the personal. Because really, business is absolutely personal.
Unfortunately, people have a story that they shouldn’t have intense emotions in a professional setting. It feels like, in business, things are more black and white, nuts and bolts. But there is also heart. People are often surprised, and even embarrassed, by where their emotions show up in business. And if the person you’ve hired is already someone you are strongly attached to – if you go into the professional relationship already with heightened trust –when it inevitably ends, emotions can be higher and more complicated.
So how do you safeguard or protect yourself against the fall out?
You really can’t. All you can do is go into the relationship knowing it is possible and double checking if it is worth it. Am I willing to risk the worse case fall out? Can I live with the possible outcome?
Beyond that, regular conversation is the only way to mitigate the risk. This is the relationship version of flossing your teeth so you don’t get a cavity, but even then, things can go sideways. But checking in before things are bad can help a lot.
And keep in mind that even if you have a great written agreement about how you will handle the relationship: if you get to the point that you have to pull out this operating agreement to solve the conflict, then you have already lost.
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It’s not often that a quest to find the perfect red lipstick leads you instead to a great business analogy. But when it happens, it’s probably going to happen to Jodi.
Let’s talk about whether you are accentuating the right things in your business.
Why is that important for business?
How often do we attempt to apply solutions to things simply because they are the solutions of the moments, not because they are the right solution for us? We see someone doing something cool on social media or in their marketing and try to make it our solution as well. But – like red lipstick - just because it works great for someone else doesn’t make it the best answer for us.
Consultants and coaches can also do this – they arrive with a ready solution without considering the fit for the business.
Of course, there is an important distinction to be made between stretching a comfort zone and proposing a solution that doesn’t accentuate the best features of a business. There is value in being willing to explore something outside of the narrow context which you’ve already done. But not if it comes at the expense of being authentic. There are two kinds of “comfort zone” resistance: the first is edging out of what feels comfortable, but also feeling some nervous excitement and perhaps even feeling compelled to try the new thing. The other type involves something that simply feels “not me”. There is a big difference between being out of your comfort zone and being out of alignment with who you are.
You cannot take someone else’s thing and slap it like a sticker onto your business. You have to make it yours. Because if it is not right for you, your audience can tell, and it will make them uncomfortable, even if they don’t know why.
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Have you ever used the phrase “integrity is our watchword” in an onboarding document? Do you have a “behind-the-scenes tour” you give new hires, to show them what working at your company is really like?
How you onboard will affect how new hires integrate and perform. And it might force Jodi to make her rolly-eye face.
Why is that important for business?
There are several parts to a good onboarding process:
- The logistics of the company. This is almost pure data and gives the basics of how the company functions.
- The basics of your job. You need to understand what you will be doing and where the resources to do your job can be found.
- The cultural tour: All the invisible minutiae that makes up the “real” culture.
Onboarding is more than just knowing where the bathroom is; part of onboarding needs to include a behind-the-scenes tour of the culture of the company. What are the rules of engagement that are unique to this workspace? Who can put what in the refrigerator? Do you reply all, or will that make everyone angry? This is the stuff that can make new employees the most anxious, and yet it is often neglected.
It’s the difference between sharing a (largely meaningless) cliché mission statement and having somebody put themselves in the position of someone who was new and didn’t yet know how things worked and addressing a lot of it upfront.
If you don’t share this information, either formally or informally, you can create a minefield in your office where the only way to learn the rules are to step on a potential mine. It’s important to consider how you create the space to teach people about the informal but important cultural rules of an office, without forcing people to step on mines and learn by blowing up.
For this, it is important to have some people who are the Guardians of the Culture and can give this behind-the-scenes tour in an onboarding process. Whether it’s creating a Care and Feeding binder (check out more about that in this episode: https://soheresmystory.com/ep60-care-and-feeding/) that detail how higher ups like things done, or another process that works for your environment, you need to ensure the unique culture isn’t hidden from new hires.
So what are the quirky idiosyncrasies of you or your office? What are our rules that only you have? We’d love to hear over in our SHMS Facebook Group! bit.ly/shmsgroup
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There is a lot of talk about “finding your passion” in this world. For some, their passion is so clear that it is almost inevitable. For others, though, the idea of finding their passion weighs them down and makes them feel incomplete. But passion isn’t a package you find where all you have to do is untie the bow. Often, it’s more like following a trail of breadcrumbs to an unassembled piece of Ikea furniture. And that’s the kind of passion we want to talk about in this episode.
Why is that important for business?
It is easy, in a “job”, to feel like you are simply killing time before you find what it is you are really “meant” to be doing. It can also be easy to not invest in employees who are good workers, but who aren’t committed to staying. But what if both sides were to act as if that job is the passion? Even if the person leaves the job, they are both still better off for having made the effort, and in that work, breadcrumbs – facets of the work – will often be revealed that are part of the employee’s passion.
Unidentified passion should not be left as an “until then” or “someday” kind of thing. It isn’t always something you can go after, but instead, takes curiosity and detective work. In a previous episode, we talked about the difference between staying at a job, and not leaving a job https://soheresmystory.com/ep59-staying-vs-not-leaving/. The “one foot in, one foot out” kind of working inherent in not leaving actually makes it harder to find your passion, because you aren’t discovering the pieces or aspects of your work that are either a clue to your passion, or a clue to what definitely isn’t your passion. (Because it’s important to remember that some people are better at creating from “not that”.)
Sometimes, not committing to a job feels safer, because it means that it will just stay a job – something temporary, not a part of your identity. Like Jim Halpert on the Office, when he said:
“Right now, this is a job. If I advance any higher in this company, then this would be my career. And, uh... Well, if this were my career, I'd have to throw myself in front of a train.”
But if you never really commit to what is in front of you now, how will you ever know if it – or parts of it – are your passion? Sometimes, the only way you get to the next cool thing is to take ownership of the current job and use it to learn about your passion. If you coast, you will miss out on the opportunities to learn about other things that might end up being your passion. Be fully there until you decide you want to get out or want to stay. There is nothing of value in the tepid zone.
And if you find yourself on the other side – managing someone who is only there until they find their passion – it is also important to invest in good people, whether it is their passion or not. If you also exist in the tepid zone, if you don’t pour something into that team member, then what you have done is made it impossible for anything to develop.
Resources mentioned
Elizabeth Gilbert, speaking about passion.
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Today, we meet Eliot’s sadistic side.
In a story about the baseline criteria that he demands from his students (as well as a little glimpse into how he enjoys making students squirm), we get a great discussion about expectations, feedback, and the price of admission.
Why is that important for business?
When do you get to the point where - regardless of perspectives – work simply isn’t good enough?
There is a difference between setting a bar for someone – here is the minimum level of skill and participation I expect from you - and being in a feedback conversation, where there is a need for specificity. In responding to someone who hasn’t met your expectations, it is important to consider what short term and long term results you are looking to get.
Sometimes the problem is with content or substance. But sometimes you can’t hear the substance because of the noise of the appearance. It’s important to be clear where the problem lies, and what result you want out of the interaction. It is challenging to have a nuanced conversation about content, however, if a basic set of criteria or a baseline of skill hasn’t been met. There is a price of admission to even be taken seriously.
What is your price of admission? There is often a temptation in business to say, “I like this person, I could train up.” But you can only train up from the baseline, so you need to determine exactly where is your personal baseline; you need to get clear on your price of admission.
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What work culture are you strengthening or weakening every day with your language, your behaviors and your messaging? Maybe you need to make it more like jury duty!
Why is that important for business?
How you frame the work you and your team are doing is how they are going to experience it, and how they are going to share it with your clients. The messages you are delivering should consistently be helping your employees buy-in to the meaning of the service; that meaning has to be baked into the culture. Every person and every significant step in the process should all be singing from the same sheet of music.
When you are trying to change the messaging of your organization, you first have to determine what that new message even means. Then you have to determine who the front-line personnel responsible for making that change are, figure out how to get buy-in from them, and establish the little things that the organization can do in terms of the interactions with those you hope to impact – the public. It is important to think about how you are going to actually create a new belief system, as well as the set of actions that will convey it.
But if it’s not authentic, it’s worse than not saying anything at all.
So ask yourself: What are you propagating? What seeds are you planting and watering and nurturing in the culture and experience of your employees and your front-line staff that are interacting with your clients?
Universities, Frank Lloyd Wright, and even Walt Disney use a concept called Desire Paths https://blog.fullstory.com/what-are-desire-paths-and-how-use-desire-paths-for-design-and-development/ when planning the most their walkways: they let natural traffic determine where official pathways go. In company culture, you’re the person wearing the path that becomes a pathway for everyone to use. What path do you want to start clearing for your people? What connects them to a higher purpose or cause? How can you use the example of jury duty to transform individual discontent into a group mission.
Resource mentioned
You might think jury duty is the very embodiment of Roz from Monster’s Inc, but it turns out, it doesn’t have to be! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJWm0TWH7d0
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A simple holiday trip to Grandma’s house teaches us a lot about delegating and the balance between micromanaging and full autonomy in this episode.
Why is that important for business?
There are two traps at either end of managing people and delegating responsibility that can both be problematic:
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Not making space for the story of them to evolve and micromanaging them, or;
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Giving them full autonomy, perhaps before they are ready or developed for that responsibility.
So how do navigate this fine line?
Often, a great first place to look are at the stakes of the project. Look for low and medium stakes issues to delegate – areas that you can leave room for some autonomy, and even some failure, because they can be repaired or fixed if a problem occurs. Like in parenting, if you want your team to be able to handle disappointment or frustration, you have to let them be disappointed or frustrated. If you want to delegate, you must first let people have low stakes failures and allow them to develop. You have to let employees have space to learn by doing, but it doesn’t have to be a binary choice between micromanagement and hands off.
The projects or tasks that you delegate should also help them appreciate the impact of mistakes and have an insight into the larger pictures. Mindless busy work can be delegated, but it doesn’t help them develop a sense of responsibility that tasks that are clearly tied to the next step will.
Besides the stakes, you want to consider the impact of the project you want to delegate – who will a failure impact? If it’s important customers, that is something you want to observe more carefully.
At some point, you also have to consider that well-delegated tasks are a good litmus test for assessing someone’s strengths and suitability. It is important as a manager to recognize what is important to the staff member, and recognize the skill sets they have and where they work well. They might not be suited for the tasks you want to delegate.
The best way to move into delegation is to make sure people can change the sentiment of “you’re right” to the sentiment of “that’s right”. Pay attention to what part of delegation you get stuck on, and what part they can help you with from the other side. Notice what role the story you have of that person plays into your delegation experience.
And lastly, if you delegate a lot, and it always fails, maybe the problem is you.
Resource mentioned
- The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, Wendy Mogel, PhD https://www.wendymogel.com/books/item/the_blessing_of_a_skinned_knee
- The Price of Privilege, Madeline Levine, PhD https://madelinelevine.com/the-price-of-privilege/
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What behaviors are you encouraging and measuring in your business? Are those behaviors actually creating the results you want? It might just be that you are building an environment where your people are learning to game the system instead of achieving the results you are looking for. And that’s exactly what we’re talking about in this episode.
Why is that important for business?
In lots of organizations, people are judged by things that may be completely irrelevant to what the organization is trying to attain. It can be easy for a company to focus on the wrong thing, and not measure what they think they are. It is important to ask yourself: are the behaviors that I am noticing, acknowledging and maybe even rewarding the behaviors that I really care about? And are they leading to the outcomes that I really care about? It is especially important to note that hours aren’t necessarily reflective of productivity. When businesses create incentive programs, they often end up incentivizing the wrong behavior.
It is also important to consider how your organization deals with outliers – people who can win for you, if you let them do things in their own way. You cannot make creativity uniform. Sometimes the right who comes with their own how, and you can’t leave them with no room to navigate with what they bring to the table.
The more effective tactic is often to describe the expected outcome clearly and let them come up with a method that works for them.
Resource mentioned
Watch Les Nessman from WKRP set some office boundaries: https://youtu.be/SkP9DKnOgn0
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What do you do when the gum of your business loses its flavour? Our special guest, Andrew Torrez of Opening Arguments https://openargs.com/, helps us explore the idea of forging a new path and embracing the version of your business that makes you the happiest. And for that, he gets a gold star.
Why is that important for business?
Finding your own way of doing things is a critical aspect of creating a satisfying and successful business, especially when you feel like you were set on a path early on. When you suddenly find yourself without someone to give you an ‘A’ or a gold star, you have to find a way to replace that validation with a different kind of satisfaction. There comes a point in your profession where you realize you cannot just be a passenger, but you have to become the captain of your own ship. You are responsible for steering your ship. You get to choose your own gold star.
Creating a path out of a pre-existing template involves a lot of “eating the fish, spitting out the bones” kind of examination. When you are feeling dissatisfied, instead of simply dumping your whole profession in a fit of binary displeasure, it is more helpful to use the parts you do and don’t like to do some course correction.
No matter where you work and what you do, there is an opportunity to shape and carve your own path in a way that is uniquely yours. So many professions tell themselves stories about what they are supposed to be, then feel trapped in that story. But you forget that you get to write your own story.
As your discontent starts to broil, you are ready to shed a skin and make a bit of a shift. If you sit on that discontent and stew in it, it gets harder and harder to change. But if you notice and look for breadcrumbs of where to shift, then it is never too late to change what your profession can look like. You can shape the edges to more accurately reflect what you want to bring to your profession without overhauling your entire life.
There is comfort in having a simple job description. But there can be great happiness in embracing a business that is harder to describe, but accurately represents you.
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As you can imagine, the process of learning to do a headstand is a challenging thing. But did you know that it can also lead to a powerful business metaphor about commitment and failure?
There is a huge difference, in yoga and in business, between failing to succeed, and failing to try, and that’s the topic of this week’s story.
Why is that important for business?
When learning to do a headstand, the only way you don’t risk going all the way over is if you didn’t commit to going all the way up. If you aren’t regularly falling over, you need to take a look at your relationship with commitment.
But not just in yoga – this shows up in business.
There is an inherent truth that talks about the relationship between commitment and failure in business. Part of this is examining that there is more than one kind of failure. Some failures we take as inherent parts of the process – they don’t daunt us. Another kind of failure might feel riskier – more vulnerable – and it might look more spectacular. But the truth is, the former often gives evidence of a lack of commitment, whereas the latter gives evidence of an actual effort that simply requires more work or a few tweaks.
How often are we failing because we are not really committing?
For instance, last week we talked about branding. Had Rachel watered down and half committed to her branding, it may have failed. That’s a different kind of failure – the failure of half measures - that we are unfortunately quite comfortable with. What we should do instead is celebrate the failures that are intrinsic to truly trying. When you give it your all, you get valuable feedback that you can fix or tweak; you will never be able to work with, fix or tweak if you don’t give the effort in the first place.
Another key lesson we learn from this yoga story is about making it safe to fail. There are things you can do with your environment that make it a little safer to swing for the fences and make bigger commitments. Part of making it safe involves strong leadership in training. Training involves asking yourself, “which part do you need them to get at the moment?” Yes, you might need them to know everything, but you can’t teach – or learn – everything at once. Being more myopically focused on what the building block right now they need to get so that you can teach the next thing is more useful.
This also means your company has to be comfortable with a high degree of failure. You have to create an environment that allows for the level of commitment it requires to grow. Sometimes, the leader has to be willing to be the support wall in the headstand, to allow their people to explore how far effort needs to go.
Note: If you are in the Baltimore area, check out the class Jodi mentions: Jamal Pender at Movement Lab https://classpass.com/classes/movement-lab-baltimore/budokon-yoga
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We were inspired to look at the business of our 50th Facebook member for business inspiration, and she didn’t disappoint. Rachel’s strong brand identity gives us an important reminder to look our own business’ identity. And hopefully, this will serve as your reminder to do the same!
Why is that important for business?
A strong brand immediately tells people, “this is who I am and these are who my people are”. Instead of speaking to everyone, a strong brand speaks to the people you most love to work with. After all, your ideal client shouldn’t be 6 billion people.
A strong brand represents who you are, but more than that, who the business is. If the business was a person, it is that business’ personality and shape. The furthest reaches of integrity in branding is when you make a bold stand about who you are and who your company is.
Yet, while there are so many dangers to deciding who you are based on a poll, you also don’t want to pick a personality for your business just for personality’s sake.
One of the best places to look when doing an audit of how well your business reflects its personality is the physical environment. If you thought of those clients that you would fight to keep (previous episode https://soheresmystory.com/ep52-the-business-sommelier/) – your ideal clients – what message do you want to send them, and people like them, with your space? Find the right feel for the energetic space you want someone to be in, and then do what you can to create that feeling in your environment.
And here's a link to the infamous BLUE HAIR: https://www.facebook.com/jodihume/videos/10154264639209780/
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What can you learn about business through learning to run? We have a special cohost this week, and she teaches us an important lesson about regular check-ins, pacing, and starting small.
If you are struggling to hit your business goals, maybe it’s time to take a lesson from a somewhat reluctant new runner!
Why is that important for business?
Julie’s story about learning to run gave us a lot of business lessons:
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Learning to run 12 miles doesn’t start with a 12 mile run. Much like in business, you aren’t going to have as much luck getting a new client to sign up for your super-deluxe package as you are starting small. There is a gradual process, in running and in business, of getting to where you want to be. You need to have an awareness of what it takes to get people started; to get them in the door and to say yes to something. If you want to sell them Z, you have to know what the A is that would get them started. Meet your clients where they are and give them something they can say yes to.
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Pacing is critical to success. You need to not only know what your pace is, but what is important and what stake you are trying to claim at the moment. For different goals, there are different paces. We don’t ascribe to the “if you aren’t growing, you’re dying” philosophy of business (link to this episode https://soheresmystory.com/ep29-cancer-kudzu/) – you need to find the pace that works for you, for your goals.
And it helps to keep pace with someone at your level – you need people to talk to in business who are working at the same pace you are, but who also have goals that are in sync with yours.
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Like the coach who cheers you on in the final half mile, it’s important to identify where your customer or your team might be flagging or fatiguing and setting up support at those points. Link to past episode https://soheresmystory.com/ep73-i-would-have-hired-you-but/ Ask yourself, “where are your people feeling the weight of what they are up against, and how can you support them at that point to keep going?”
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You need feedback and check-ins throughout the process, not just as a year-end review. Whether it is running 12 miles or hitting a business target, you are more likely to accomplish your goal if you check-in with your team at every stages.
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Going into an audition as an actor, you have to make a decision about how you are going to play a character. You can play it as you think the director wants to see it, or you can make your own choices about who the character is.
Turns out, taking on a new client as a business owner is a lot like being an actor at an audition.
In this episode, we ask, “when do you need to say ‘no’ to a client?”
Why is that important for business?
Just like in acting, the secret to success could very well be making a clear, early choice about who you are and what you do. When you are the trusted advisor that someone is relying on, part of what they are buying is your expertise and your insight. In trying to please the client, you can’t ignore your own perspective.
Sometimes, the key is to go for the “no”. No is a magical word. As an expert, it is often incumbent on you to say, “no, that’s not the way we are going to go”. But in taking that stand, you have to be willing to either walk away or do it the client’s way if they don’t agree with your perspective. There comes a point that the customer has a limitation that they won’t move on, and that also has to be okay. This is why it is important to take a stance of “committed but not attached” - you are merely committing to giving your expert view, but not attached to how they respond to it.
It requires some bravery to being willing to not get every job, and to get over the insecurity of appearing wrong. It is daunting to take a stand, and you should make sure it is a stand you believe in.
Resources mentioned
Jason Momoa does the Haka for his Game of Throne’s audition. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dE786RERGE
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Most businesses dream about having their best year ever. But that doesn’t mean it comes without new problems and without competing priorities. There’s a limit to what you can say no to and still have the full life you want, and this episode is all about finding a way to have it all – even if it involves mall-walking.
Why is that important for business?
When you spend a lot of time in your business, you might find other priorities suffer. Conventional wisdom might have you deciding which of your priorities you have to say no to. But a fulfilling life only has room for so many noes.
Perhaps you can blend priorities instead. This isn’t just about “two birds, one stone”; it’s about making each individual priority even more effective by finding a way to combine them. This can especially work with combining physical activity with stimulating business conversations. A lot of creative things happen in the white space, so why not build it in?
In the book, “Total Leadership”, Stewart Friedman talks about how we have all of these circles of priorities in life, and the more you can overlap them, the better things will be. This ability to overlap is a next level hack for making the most out of the time we have here.
There is also something to be said about not blending too much. This isn’t about multitasking – there are things that want your undivided full attention. But the discipline of scanning for opportunities to combine things together in a way that makes each individual thing more fun allows you to have a fuller life. It also ups their individual priority level.
This is about more than simply not giving into the idea of competing priorities. The real value is that it provides greater meaning and significance to each priority. It is the art to using one priority to support another priority, like legs on a stool – add another leg and the stool becomes more stable. The more you use priorities to support each other, the more likely you are to accomplish all of them.
Side note about tough conversations: There is something about having important conversations shoulder-to-shoulder instead of face-to-face. It can give a little space for detachment from the rawness, making it easier to be brave about something you weren’t brave about before. It can bring comfort to both the speaker and the listener – in a difficult conversation, the speaker might not want the listener to see how vulnerable the conversation is, but there is also shelter for the listener to process.
Resources mentioned
Total Leadership, Stewart Friedman, http://www.totalleadership.org/books/total-leadership-5/
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A night of karaoke might not seem like the most logical place for an epiphany about company culture. But that’s the beautiful thing about using stories to talk about business – you never know from where the lesson will come.
Why is that important for business?
To get everyone to participate in karaoke, you very well might have to build that expectation into the party – an “everyone must sing” rule. Otherwise, you will get a Ringer Circus, where instead of a fun night, you have a series of performances by people already confident in their singing. But if you make it safe and important for everyone to participate, it becomes fun for everyone. The same can be true about the culture you create in business. Yes, it’s important to reward and highlight people who do a good job – to elevate talent – but if you only focus on the people who are naturally good at things, who naturally raise their hand, you will miss a whole other layer of energy, talent and fun that won’t show up otherwise.
A culture that prizes and values - and even insists upon the addition of - every single voice is one that is enriched by each voice, not just those that are inclined to come forward immediately. This is a wonderful thing to build a culture around. What you need to consider, though, are the people who don’t show up to the party because of the “everyone must sing” rule. The rule may very well enrich the experience of everyone at the party and brings out hidden facets of the people who attend. But it is also true that the presence of the rule comes with the cost of keeping out people who would come if they didn’t have to participate. This is absolutely fine, as long as you have evaluated the unintended consequence. After all, a well-defined culture accepts that some people will say “this isn’t for me”. The tricky part is deciding what issue you are going to draw a bright line around; what issue makes the cost of exclusion worth it.
Of course, if you are not careful, you can build “Participation Trophy” culture. Creating space for everyone to participate doesn’t preclude celebrating success and giving feedback. But there is something magical that happens when you find this weird mix of forcing people to be vulnerable in a relentlessly supportive environment.
Identifying the biggest fear or obstacle to participation and creating a culture that eliminates that fear can yield some hidden treasures. If you create a space where it’s okay to fail or not be perfect, then someone can speak up and give the germ of a potentially incredible idea.
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Motivation – Morning Routine
This week, Jodi and Eliot talk about how motivation and routine are linked, and what filing cabinets and pit stops on a race track have to do with business.
Why is routine important for business?
When we are especially busy or stressed, it is easy to forget to do, or convince ourselves we don’t have time to do, the very things that keep us centered. And it is only in returning to those routines that we find ourselves able to navigate the work effectively again. Even though absolutely nothing might change, the way you see those things in your business or life changes.
Interestingly, the things we tend to skip when we are busy are literally the things that help our brain to work its best – down time, sleep, exercise and good eating. These are critical for your work, yet the things that you often cut first.
You have to be able to step outside of the experience you hare having and contextualize it. Clues that you need to recalibrate before continuing can be when it feels hard or slogging or like nothing is fun, but you have to learn your own cues.
Far more harm is done than good by stepping over our own vulnerabilities.
Poll Quotes
Be around people who remind you where the spark is.
You need to not only understand your own low fuel” indicator, but also what fuel goes in your tank.
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It can be hard to ask for help, especially when the stakes are high or when you are supposed to be the leader. Almost as hard as asking for help in finding the small lump in a polyurethane testicle.
Why is that important for business?
Asking for help can be really hard - admitting that you don’t know something, especially if you want to be considered an expert, is a vulnerable thing. The higher the stakes get, the bigger it feels to admit you don’t know and the stronger the impulse to keep hobbling along as if you do. When your ego is involved – when you start reading your own press releases – it can be harder to admit you don’t know something that feels basic.
There are many different sizes and shapes of baggage can cause people to choose pride over the truth of not knowing. Whatever the particular baggage, it can be a deterrent to good leadership. Becoming comfortable with “I don’t know” is a much-overlooked leadership skill. As important as it is to be skilled and informed, it is dangerous if it feels like leadership equals always knowing.
Beyond the leadership level of a company, it is an even better sign if everyone who doesn’t have their name on the door feels free to ask for help. Establishing that culture is the job of the leader.
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We often don’t see the way we are influencing and affecting those around us. We don’t make the link from our behavior to what we see pervade our company culture. And then – like so many of our episodes - a trip to the bathroom changes everything.
Why is that important for business?
Often, we experience an effect in the world, and then rationalize that thing without taking the time to notice if we have a hand in causing it. The truth is, everything you do is modeling things for people in your organization. You teach what you tolerate. And you teach what you model, even when you don’t know you are modeling it.
However, we are often unaware of the things that we are inadvertently modeling. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect and it keeps us blind to our blind spots. It can make us unaware of the impact we have on those around us, which is why it is important to ask: when I see a behavior that I don’t like in others, where does it exist in me? Where am I nurturing or tolerating this behavior and teaching others to replicate what I would rather avoid?
If you want people to exhibit leadership skills, you must create a culture of leadership where everyone has the mindset of considering their impact, and where everyone – like our favorite squeegee kid – is going into every corner.
People notice your behaviors and habits. Everything you do is a constant traffic signal for what’s okay, and what’s acceptable. They will pick up the culture from you. You may have a very good reason for your behaviors, but it still sends a signal that that behavior is okay. As a leader, you are always on stage.
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Time is a valuable commodity, and we hope all of our listeners properly value their time.
We also know that our time does not inherently have the same value to others, including our clients. And that’s why we ask the important question: does time really equal money?
Why is that important for business?
Just because you invest a precious asset - your time – into work for someone doesn’t necessarily mean they will equate it to value. The idea that time equals dollars is very misleading. For instance, if they were charging by time, iPads would cost $10k. Instead, they have to price according to the value to the buyer. Because of this, you have to make sure that when discussing value, that you have determined and discussed your expectations well in advance.
The question of value is especially confronting when you talk about raising your prices. If someone that has never worked with you balks at a price, you can dismiss that as them not understanding your value. But it can be hard to not attribute it to your value when an existing client – familiar with the work you do - hesitates or gasps in response to a price raise.
Dollars really are an arbitrary assignment – they don’t have their own meaning. Acknowledging that the important thing isn’t who is right about value, but as early as possible agreeing what something is worth, is the key to these discussions and agreements.
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You can learn important business lessons from just about any source, including a squeegee kid with a surprisingly nuanced sales approach.
Why is that important for business?
The biggest challenges you will encounter when doing sales – and if you are in business, make no mistake: you are doing sales – are the silent objections of your potential clients. Often, while being sold to, we are busy stacking up a list of reasons to say no. Good sales is about making it easy to say yes.
What, by trying harder, makes sales barriers go up; and what, by trying harder, makes sales barriers go down?
First, the young business ingenue made you root for him, but he also made it feel like he was rooting for his potential customer. He looked at the world through his customer’s eyes and figured out what mattered to that person. He essentially asked, “if I can give you more of what you want, is it worth it to you?” His approach wasn’t adversarial at all – it was customer-focused.
And even though this particular instance was not one in which “I’ll think about it” was an option, there was enough pressure to make the “yes” simple. Although pressure can definitely cause your barriers to come up, there is a service to the kind of pressure that makes something a definitive choice. “I’ll think about it” is a burden for busy people. Helping people to make a decision simple is a gift.
Authenticity is also critical to a positive sales experience. Sales is often a long-term commitment – people who don’t buy from you can help you understand what approach would work in the future, as long as the request is made in a genuine, un-pushy way. You can’t lie your way into truly good selling. And the work, like this squeegee kid’s, should live up to the promise.
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Audience Q&As can quickly devolve. Someone wants to share a story instead of a question; someone else wants to demonstrate their own expertise and “teach from the seats”. No one seems to know how to ask a succinct and relevant question and you can feel the frustration from the group. As the leader – whether it be in front of a large audience or just at your staff meetings – you must consider the impact of these contributions on the room, and your goals.
This episode is about being clear on your objective and helping everyone make the best contributions possible. It’s also a little bit about Jodi’s terrible poker face.
Why is that important for business?
There are people who are always going to answer, regardless of the question, with the answer they want to give. It can feel like they are not taking responsibility for the care and feeding of the group, nor considering the impact to the group.
As the leader, it is important to frame the rules of contribution before asking people for their contributions. For example, instructing them that the first sentence should end in a question mark. Give the Processors in the group time to think about what they want to say, and how to frame it within the guidelines you have given them. Set the expectations early.
However, it is also important to recognize that there are things that can get stuck in people’s craw, things they need to be acknowledged before they can move on. You don’t have to let this get you off track, but you do have to deal with the pothole in the parking lot, or it will keep coming up all day long.
Leadership is key here, and will affect the happiness of your team, and retention. You need to be clear on your top priority in the moment. Is it to keep train on the track, or is it to surface new thoughts and ideas? Are you trying to assuage concerns or present information? Each priority needs a different style of leadership. And you need to periodically asses if your leadership is angling you towards the outcome you want.
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Have you ever been in a conversation with someone who ignores the substance of the conversation, and instead present themselves as an authority based on their experience or resume, instead of their response to the issue? This is exactly the kind of incident that instigates todays story/rant, and leads to a discussion about authenticity, confidence, and credibility.
Why is that important for business?
This kind of appeal to authority can sometimes be mistaken for confidence, but it comes across as having its roots in insecurity instead. When someone is truly confident, they let the substance of their input speak for them. You can do something for 30 years and still not do it well, so experience isn’t a replacement for a cogent argument.
Relaying your resume is an attempt to build credibility, but it often backfires. Genuine, authentic presence can do more for your credibility than a listing of your experience.
Sometimes, confidence is simply a matter of acting as if – it is starting at the end, figuring out how you want to present yourself to the world, and then justifying that with action. If you want to be a hat person, start wearing hats; if you want to be a writer, then write. Confidence only comes through action.
When someone starts talking about their experience instead of the issue in front of them, that means they are coming at this from an “I” agenda. The only way to get a win is to come at it from a “We” agenda. And it is easier to arrive at a “We” agenda with authenticity, the Litmus test for which is the act of pulling from the moment, the present conversation, instead of a potentially irrelevant resume.
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How hard are you making people work to hire you?
Sometimes in business, people make it hard to give them money. Like you are drowning, and they need you to fill out twelve forms in triplicate to order your life preserver.
In this episode, we talk about the importance of small victories, triage, and making it easy for clients to hire you.
Why is that important for business?
When someone is ready to hire you, it is important to find the points of disengagement – the part of the process of on-boarding or hiring you where they become frustrated or overwhelmed – and find a way to give them a small victory. This isn’t about solving the whole problem, but about making it easier to get started. If you need a lot of information to best help a client, can you determine the key things you need to get started, and begin there? This is about facilitating the “yes” process.
The confused mind says no. If you can determine the place (in any of your processes, but especially the hiring process) where a client is most likely to be stymied or stalled by confusion, you have an opportunity to make it not only easier for them to say yes to you, but for you to give them a sense of relief.
Even if someone says yes, their mind is still in “gosh, I hope I don’t regret this” mode. If early on you can create a small win, you can earn more than just their business, but also alleviate the concern that they might regret this. It is confirmation for the client that this was not a bad idea.
This isn’t about trying to fix everything right off, but about giving them a small taste of your value. Making all of their pain go away in the moment is not only bad for sales, but a disservice to them. Solving what is currently hurting them the most isn’t necessarily solving their problem. You just have to show you can take some sense of pain away and give them a sense of relief.
You have to keep earning the yes going forward. But you don’t get the opportunity to keep their yes if you don’t get their yes in the first place.
Like in curling, you run ahead of the stone to sweep the path, so the stone can go where you both need it to go.
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In this episode, we are podcasting live from the National Association of Broadcasters Show New York and talking about fist-bump people, Jewish high holidays, and genuine human connection.
Why is that important for business?
Some people – even clients! - deplete your energy and those relationships may need a second look. It is rare to regret not taking a client, but you will most likely experience the feeling of regretting taking on a client. This is why it is important to surround yourself with what Eliot calls “fist-bump people” – those people that you get excited and inspired by.
There is also importance to periodically throwing out the agenda. There’s an unspoken rule that everything in business must have distinct purpose or must have an exacting line to an outcome. But so much of what is needed for business happens in the whitespace between. As Eliot’s friend says about the Jewish high holidays: “God is in the hallways”.
We have to make time for connections, and for these hallways, or we will burn out. These spaces, where our brain relaxes into alpha wave state, is where you get ideas and insights. You need times when your business brain is not being directly stimulated; sharpening the axe has extraordinary value.
A great time to throw out the agenda is when making genuine connections. These connections that we make – in the white spaces or the hallways – are important for more than just building our network. Genuine conversations with employees, for instance, will yield better results than structured performance reviews – when we feel threatened, we can’t have nuanced discussions.
In business or in life, you can’t ever go wrong by leaning towards being genuine and human. Real connection is trying to understand someone, versus trying to navigate a conversation. What obscures connection is canned conversations; what forges connections is a story.
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When her son wants to quit something, Jodi and her husband must decide if they want to encourage him to stick with his commitments or applaud him for knowing what he wants. And this common parenting dilemma brings us to some important decisions you will need to make in business, too.
Why is that important for business?
There are so many opportunities in business to make similar decisions. But commitment might not always be the skill to flex - quitting can be just as important as commitment, even though it isn’t a skill that we often celebrate.
The question becomes: how do you discern when the most important thing is following through, and when quitting is the right way to go?
Some points to consider might be whether the commitment involves other people relying on you, the duration of the commitment, and what you are trying to accomplish with the commitment.
It is also important to consider your core values, or the core values of the organization, both in the initial decision, and in re-evaluating a commitment. Is it in alignment with what you care about most? If the mistake was saying yes in the first place, then if you continue to be involved, it can be a large energy drain and an opportunity for resentments. Ask yourself, “what interest is this serving?”
It is also important to be aware of when you are making fear or lack-based justifications for the commitment. Fear-based decisions are generally bad decisions waiting to happen, and if you recognize that you made one after the fact, quitting might deserve a second look.
What matters now? What is the point right now? What are we reinforcing right now? Consider that if you don’t quit whatever it is, you have to spend finite resources keeping it alive. Is it that important to you?
The decision itself may not even matter, but the why might. And so too might the unappreciated art and substance of quitting.
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Eliot recently spent 3 days walking 60 miles for the Susan G. Komen foundation, and as usual, came home with a bunch of ideas for what your business can learn from the experience. In this episode, we’ll talk about company culture, and what you can learn by staring at people’s backs for 60 miles.
Why is that important for business?
There are many important lessons to be learned from an organization like the Susan G Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. Chief among them is how to create a culture that engages people, regardless of their “learning style”. Wherever you looked, you were inside the “pink bubble” and you couldn’t avoid their mission, their impact, and why people cared so deeply about the cause. Even if your mission isn’t to cure cancer, you can still learn these lessons by helping to tie people to your mission.
A big part of making that happen is by weaving new people – whether they be staff or clients – into the fabric of your business’ culture. You do this by encouraging:
- A sense of belonging. This can be as simple as making sure that new people have someone to eat with.
- Some sort of status recognition and some layer of healthy competition. This needs to call to a higher level of performance in the areas you want to reinforce.
- Connection – This can include a connection to the story or mission, and a connection to the people and why they are at your business, and why they care.
If an organization struggles to weave people into their bubble, it may be because they don’t have a very well-defined “thing” to get behind or rally around. In terms of culture, the 5 most powerful words are “that’s not who we are”. Part of culture is being okay that dogs will hear your particular whistle and cats won’t.
The most important thing is having evangelists in your crowd - frontline people who don’t have management titles - to be enthusiastic about the cultural characteristics that you most want to highlight. You have to find a way to nurture, encourage, and reward that kind of evangelizing.
Lastly, making people feel like they are an integral part of what you are building is key. This is the “Ikea Effect” where people place higher value on what you have a role in building. This is when labour leads to love. Finding ways for your people to grapple with the problems that you want your organization to solve is a really beautiful way to engage them.
Resources Mentioned
The Ikea Effect: When Labour Leads to Love. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/11-091.pdf
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When illness befell the Hume household, Jodi learned an important lesson about empathy, and how bad we can be at empathizing if we haven’t experienced something for ourselves. It turns out, empathy involves more than emotional intelligence.
Why is that important for business?
So often in business, we jump to conclusions about the motivations, experiences and decisions of others. Sometimes, this lack of empathy is a matter of needing to develop some emotional intelligence. But perhaps more often, it is simply a lack of knowledge or a need to ask more questions.
Lack of empathy is often a lack of curiosity. We think we know what we are looking at and don’t take the time to do additional diagnostics. In the moment when you want to be frustrated with a behavior, there is power in being willing to ask a couple of questions.
In this way, empathy in general is more like a shared understanding as opposed to an emotional response. If you don’t understand why someone has a problem with something, maybe it’s because you don’t understand the problem enough.
This lack of empathy often lives in a blind spot and usually isn’t a conscious choice we make. It is important to pay attention when our inner dialogue is dismissive – and where we are making assumptions about other people – if we want to develop our ability to share understanding with other people.
Resources Mentioned
Empathy Exams, by Leslie Jamison. http://www.lesliejamison.com/the-book/
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Business platitudes: they aren’t wrong, but they also aren’t right. And they annoy Jodi.
So let’s talk about them!
Why is that important for business? There are many business platitudes around leadership – how many leaders there should be, for instance. Even Mark Twain said, “the perfect committee is made up of three people, two of whom are dead.” (Or at least Eliot insists he said it. Google isn’t as certain.)
But if you have the right people around you, you should value their input based on merit, not based on equity. The problems that people are attributing here to leadership clichés are actually an issue of lack of clarity, either in vision or priorities - it isn’t inherently a problem with the number of leaders.
It is clarity, not equity, that matters.
One of those things to begin to have clarity around is deciding, for each area of business:
- Who is in charge or/responsible for this area?
- Who needs to be consulted around decisions?
- Who needs to be informed of decisions?
These are the three things that tend to get people upset. They don’t always need to feel as though they have a vote, but they usually want to know or be consulted about the issue.
But problems occur with any amount of leadership. And the issue with these platitudes is that they tend to shut down discussion and dilute the importance of collaboration in favour of certainty. Instead, having more than one or a complex leadership structure just introduces a new set of questions to think about, and an opportunity to tailor-fit your own solution. Accepting the platitude as truth takes someone else’s answer and pretends it’s yours.
Ep 66
It’s starts with a movie and this famous dialogue:
“What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around?
…He will be attractive! He'll be nice and helpful. He'll get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation. He'll never do an evil thing! He'll never deliberately hurt a living thing... he will just bit by little bit lower our standards where they are important. Just a tiny little bit. Just coax along flash over substance. Just a tiny little bit.”
And from that simple movie quote, we get a story about how it is not the destructive people in our lives that we can see coming from a mile away that we need to worry about; it is the ones that move us just a little bit, slowly and repeatedly, away from our values that will destroy us.
Why is that important for business?
In business, it isn’t so much the employee stealing from you that is going to ruin you - it’s the one that get you to lower your standards just a little bit that truly does the damage. They might even be profitable, but they get you to depart from who you are, and those people are collectively the “devil”.
Often they have a small, almost imperceptible – but very toxic - impact on your business’ culture. They are the quiet spreader of discontent that poke holes in your culture that allow cavities to grow. It might be passive-aggressiveness, which makes it hard to address and therefore insidious. It can become the business version of emotional abuse and gas-lighting.
Because it is subtle and small – there is no distinct contrast – it blurs together and is harder to see. You may not even notice the damage the devil has done until they are gone. And it doesn’t just affect the leaders of these companies, but it undermines the entire culture and can start to dilute core competencies.
So how big of an issue is big enough to address? You don’t want to micromanage, but you also don’t want to create an environment where you send the message that it doesn’t matter. Context matters, as does who the offenses impact. It isn’t the individual incidences that make up a devil, but the ongoing impact and consistency of the action.
And sometimes you need someone outside of you and the business – your very own Albert Brooks - to look at you and say, “he’s the devil”.
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Sometimes, all you need is a public restroom and a therapy dog to teach you some important lessons about leadership. This episode is such a time.
Why is that important for business?
The episode starts with a story about a dog named Max and his annoyed owner, but it turns into a lesson on leadership.
There are leaders who micromanage and push and blame their employees when things don’t work. And then there are leaders who are compelling and make a space for people to be their best. People and dogs can tell when you are interested in them, when you are invested in them, and that interest is magnetic.
When you make your people do things, versus creating an environment where they want to do the things that you want them to do, you will notice resistance. You want your people naturally engaged.
In leadership, it is common to see managers and leaders try to control people’s behaviors in times when it really doesn’t matter. There is a difference between controlling when and how people do certain things that are vital to the job that they accepted and controlling things that simply satisfy the leader’s need to be recognized or catered to. If you are managing activities and not outcomes, then you have a leader issue, not an employee issue.
Interested in telling a story and trying to stump Jodi and Eliot to come up with a good business lesson. Send your entertaining story to Talktous@heresmystory.com and we’ll make some business gold out of your non-business anecdote.
Resources mentioned
Want to learn more about the x and y leadership Jodi mentioned? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y
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Ep 65
Ah, September. Not only does it usher in the birthdays of your two favorite podcasters, but for many (or just Jodi) it is also a time for fresh starts. And even if you don’t naturally feel this fresh start energy, there are ways to bring a clean slate feeling into what you do.
Why is that important for business?
Fresh start energy can feel like a reboot, where you get to start with a (nearly) clean slate and bring some new energy to a project or business or client that had previously been missing. The baggage of past performance weighs less, and you get a chance to start anew.
But if you are like Eliot, and don’t naturally feel this energy, how do you inject some of that enthusiasm into your business and life?
You don’t have to join the Witness Protection program to feel like you have a bit of a clean slate. Even in most constrained situations, it is always a little possible to find that fresh start energy feeling, or to reinvigorate what’s going on. You just have to start recognizing the opportunities and perhaps even identify the rituals that exist when you do feel that energy. Those rituals don’t always have to follow the feeling – they can actually hack your brain into feeling a new burst of energy, and create the feeling.
How do you find your way towards this fresh start energy?
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Ep 64
You know all those things you have to do in business, but you really dislike? What if it were possible to strip your business down to just the necessary and even – gasp – the enjoyable? In this episode of So Here’s My Story, we discuss the secret burger joint, and the lessons that it might be able to teach you.
Why is that important for business?
We often assume that there are things we will have to do in business, whether we like them or not. But there are businesses, like the secret burger joint in Eliot’s story, that belie this idea. They eliminated every part of the restaurant they didn’t care for and stripped the experience down to the parts they wanted to focus on. The message is clear: if you want what we offer, we will do it really well. If you don’t want that, don’t come here.
That begs the question: what is in your business that you wish could get rid of?
Sometimes businesses do things because they think they should. But is it possible to give thought to what can be pared away to reveal just what each business is really good at, or what they really enjoy?
If you don’t want to do what you have been told works, then perhaps it is best not to do it. It is possible to be successful by taking out the parts that don’t work for you. The clearer your business is on what is and isn’t important to you, the easier it will be for you, your employees and your clients.
And if you can’t hire and fire by your values, then you don’t have them articulated enough.
p.s. check out “Come From Away” on Broadway, the story of how the small community of Gander in Newfoundland, Canada, came together to house and feed 7000 stranded travelers on September 11, 2001.
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Not just any host of a popular podcast would be able to turn a disagreement with their spouse into a lesson for business. But that’s exactly what happens in this episode, as we discuss the layers and nuances of “good enough”.
The distinction of how “good enough” you do things comes up often in business and in life, because there are ultimately levels of good enough. Unfortunately, the whole discussion runs with baggage. The first to bring up the “good enough” discussion risks being labeled as someone who doesn’t care about quality. But it isn’t necessarily about suggesting that something be half-assed; good enough is often about triaging.
The problem with being absolutist about “good enough” arises when you spend all of your time solving problems that are seven problems down the road – problems that you might not even encounter – instead of the immediate need. It can even paralyze you from any action at all.
It is important to look out into the future at unintended consequences, but to stop short of becoming paralyzed around the action that needs to happen now. It is a concern when the level of “good enough” that you are demanding gets in the way of taking a next step – when getting ready for a deluge of clients gets in the way of finding your first client, for instance. You can look 5 chess moves ahead, but you also need to have the flexibility to move the piece and adjust your game once the board changes.
Often, “good enough” is about being clear on the nice-to-haves vs the need-to-haves.
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Sometimes... you need to stop and get out the map. Yessss... we know it's 2018, but WAZE just doesn't WORK for the metaphor we're trying to use in this week's episode. Today, Jodi & Eliot explore getting stuck, spinning your wheels, when you need to know exactly where you're going and when you need to just DRIVE.
This episode is all about getting clear on where you are heading, not before you start, but once you are already doing the work of your business.
Whether or not you had a clear objective for your business when you first started, the need to gain (or re-gain) that clarity can emerge years in.
You can start with a clear mission and a clear problem to solve but find over the years that you have drifted away from it in pursuit of the opportunities that have presented themselves. And there is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, the Photosynthesis Model where you bend in whatever direction that has the most sun. But when there is no clear direction that you are headed, it is almost like each individual opportunity that you pursue has its own rocket engine boosting in a different direction. That makes it hard to drive the overall ship.
Other times, you were clear on your don’t wants at the beginning, but need to take some time once the business is progressing to get clear on what you want.
(This is the case for this very podcast, so we put So Here’s My Story on the couch and bring you along for the process!)
There are two perspectives on planning. There is forward thinking planning, where you get clear on where you are now and where you want to be. There is also an option that involves just starting, getting into action in the general direction you want to go. You just start heading west. But still, at some point you have to decide if you want to go to Seattle or San Diego; somewhere in time, you need to pick a more specific path than “west”. It is usually apparent that that time has come when you start to feel a bit aimless.
Many great ideas go down in flames because energy and resources are too diffused over too many things and there isn’t enough focus. Anything you can do to narrow the channel of focus has value.
And if the question you are trying to answer feels really hard, you’ve probably skipped a prior question that needs to be clarified.
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In this episode, we talk about how the little things more than just count – they are what make up people’s first impressions of your business.
Why is that important for business?
People are making judgments about the details – a flicked cigarette in a parking lot, a tidy dining room table – and making decisions about what that means for the rest of your business.
Small things can often really matter, but you can’t possibly see or care about everything. You need to navigate which small things to care about by being clear on the overarching value. Details make it easier to dismiss your business, and they make it easier to ascribe values to your business.
It can feel like too much to think about – how can you be expected to think of all of the small things that might matter to other people. But if you simply ask, “what feeling or experience do I most want to convey?”, then it is easier to imagine what details can effectively demonstrate that.
If you start to infuse that value into every aspect of company, then you not only get clearer on the details, but you also know your priorities. Because you can’t make everything a core value.
Choose the filter through which you are going to examine the little things. And pick details that will truly matter.
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Ep 60
It turns out, customers are a lot like cats – they are a lot happier when you follow their specific care and feeding instructions.
Everyone has different priorities, different things that they care deeply about. In this episode, we discuss the importance of knowing what makes people tick (and where they like to be scratched).
Why is that important for business?
A “care and feeding manual” clarifies these priorities and helps you address individual needs without worrying about everything. You know where the deal breakers are, but also where the areas of flexibility are. Everyone tries to take good care of clients, but if don’t have a clear understanding of their priorities and what they really care about, you are going to try to do everything well, which is an impossible standard. Using your own filter of what you care about isn’t enough, because we all feel cared for in different ways.
Much like the book The 5 Love Languages (http://www.5lovelanguages.com/), knowing what is important to clients helps them feel the way you want them to feel and deliver work that is good for them. This isn’t a manipulation, but fertilizer – it is the investment the relationship needs to thrive.
This involves establishing trust with your client. However, as Stephen Covey talks about in The Speed of Trust (https://store.franklincovey.com/books-and-audio-360/the-speed-of-trust-book), trust is both a rational and an emotional act. You need to establish both.
Asking clients (or even staff), “how do I screw up this relationship?”, can make all of the difference.
Note: knowing your own priorities is also important.
Different clients and employees need different strategies and care. Care and feeding manuals are not a must, but they make life easier. Think of them as a shortcut to making relationships thrive.
And all it takes is making the invisible visible, so it is a known instead of a guess.
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Ep 59
Have you ever thought about the difference between staying and not leaving? There is very different energy between the two, even though we confuse them. Sometimes the middle lane seems like a lane where you can hang out and coast, and not make a choice, but it can be a dangerous place to stay.
In this episode, let’s talk about that place between staying and leaving.
Why is that important for business?
In companies, often there is an employee that someone is frustrated with, but no one is ready to terminate. Whether it be because of value or potential or just the hassle of hiring someone else, they are kept on and both parties live in that dangerous middle lane.
Sometimes “stuck” is when you already know what you want to do, but you are not ready to admit or commit to that choice.
If you make demands and they do everything you ask, are you going to be happy? Or are you going to be disappointed that, even though they have met all of the theoretical criteria that set out for them, you are still not satisfied with them remaining? We make emotional decisions and look for rational validations for those decisions after the fact. But if you have already made a decision about an employee staying or leaving, don’t set up a process that their best outcome leaves you disappointed.
Model of engagement – Jodi provide? The worst case scenario isn’t that they quit, or even that they stay – it’s that they quit and stay. An employee that is emotionally checked out, driving in the middle lane, doesn’t allow for anything good to happen for either the employee or the employer.
The ability to stay in the honest conversation and just talk about the things that are is the way through it. You can’t know where that path leads, but the honest conversation is the only way to get there. Nothing good ever comes in the middle ground.
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Pee my WHAT? The encore performance
What does peeing your pants have to do with better business? This week, we revisit our very first episode, over a year ago, where Jodi and Eliot talk about the importance of sharing those vulnerable stories that businesses need to tell.
Why is that important for business?
There’s this weird counterintuitive perception that people don’t want to share those stories. And peeing your pants might not be the story that you are going to lead with the first time you meet someone (in theory). And yet what is also true is that given a moment where someone else is sharing their story, suddenly other people want to share.
That is at the core of what we are getting at with this podcast.
That safe space, where people can share their Pee Pants story, can be created by the fact that the first person shared their story. You can’t judge me if you’re not going to judge her – there is safety in numbers.
People are dying to tell these stories and creating that safe space doesn’t take a lot of work, it isn’t magic. Sometimes, all you need is an agreement.
Our acknowledged shared humanity in sharing goofy embarrassing stories made even more vulnerable things easier to talk about.
How do I start these conversations?
To really get this idea of how one person can create this space, you really need to watch this video on how to start a movement in 3 minutes of less: https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement#t-52060
The first follower is what turns the Lone Nut into a Leader.
That’s what we want for this podcast: for us to be the Lone Nuts of telling these business stories.
And of course, we wouldn’t expect you to go it alone. So we tell our own Business Pee Pants stories in this episode (and probably future episodes!)
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Ep 57 – Certainty
Have you ever noticed a tendency to view things in a binary, all-or-nothing way? Does delegating frustrate you, because you worry someone else would just mess things up, so why not do it yourself? Do you “hate conflict”? In this episode of So Here’s My Story, let’s talk about exactly that, and the secret dial that just might work better than that switch you are currently using.
Why is that important for business?
When we think about examples like delegation, one of the things that comes up is our perception that there are only two ways things can go: either we do it ourselves, or we somehow accept the inevitable subpar results of someone else doing it. There is an imagined binary switch that suggests we either must do it the way we are, with our high standards, or we let everything go to hell in hand basket.
Instead, we can look at it as a volume knob or a stereo equalizer. The ability to get things done at a high standard is a wonderful trait, and we don’t want to destroy that trait. But every trait has a nasty underbelly when it is dialed up too high; if we can turn the knob down a little, or use that trait in a different way, our options open up.
In the example of delegation, it is also important to ask: Is it wrong because it is not the way I would have done it, or wrong because the outcome wouldn’t be realized?
If we can consider opening up the spectrum and imaging a stereo equalizer and finding balance instead of making a binary choice, solutions become more plentiful. But this goes against our nature to classify everything as binary. Humans have a bias towards certainty; what is compelling about the binary switch is the certainty involved. Unfortunately, that certainty leaves you with fewer options; yet even if neither binary option is useful, we are still drawn to imagine the world in that way.
A great example is confrontation, and people who “hate confrontation”. This means we are imagining confrontation as a light switch, assuming it is either off or completely on, in a ballistic missile kind of way. But the irony is that it is the not dealing with small confrontations that actually makes them build into these large scale confrontations that we are trying to avoid. If you can talk about little things while they are still little, and not step over them, then you can actually avoid the big confrontations. Making the invisible visible is how you prevent conflict, not avoiding it.
Leanne Davie?, who works with corporations on the subject of conflict, even suggests there should be more conflicts in organizations. In the absence of conflict, we settle for unappealing and middling solutions because we don’t talk them through. Avoiding conflict means you are accepting something else.
In all of these examples, it comes back to fear. Whatever the fear is – usually something to do with a fear of tarnishing our value – the person is using the best tools at their disposal to protect themselves from that thing, but those tools are not getting them what they want and often getting them the exact thing they are most afraid of.
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Ep 56 – The Red Hen
The notion of choosing politics over business has been in the news lately, and it begs the question: how you know when choosing clients for fit is discriminatory, and when it is beneficial to the culture of your business. That’s the topic of this episode of So Here’s My Story.
Why is that important for business?
There are pros and cons and limitations to the concept of “fit” in business. Fit can tell you who to hire, what clients are ideal, and how to build a team. But they can also lead you to discriminate and look only for people like you.
What doesn’t work is having one homogenous glob of the exact same person at the table, because you need diversity of skills and strengths. This is when the concept of fit can be a scapegoat – an excuse to not get along with a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives. In those ways, fit can be incredibly dangerous. But not accommodating for fit can hurt culture. If a company’s core values aren’t clear enough that some people might say “no thank you, that’s not for me”, then they aren’t clear enough. They need to be clear enough to hire and fire by.
If your team can say “that’s not who we are”, that’s a great sign of direction and clarity. There has to be enough substance to the culture that it can be identified and cared about. After all, everybody likes vanilla, but nobody loves vanilla.
Fit becomes easier when the company has its own core values and personality; when the company becomes almost a separate entity with identifiable likes and dislikes. If fit starts to look like trying to match each individual with each individual, you risk having something homogenous and dangerous and lacking in diversity. But if there is this other entity that is the company and you fit to that, fit can create a even stronger culture.
For it to work, you have to be okay with people saying, “that’s not for me”.
Fit has to be bigger than each or any one individual. That’s where fit starts to fit.
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Ep 55 – Is It Too Late for Me?
Ever heard a 20-something lament about how it’s “too late” for them to do something?
In this episode of So Here’s My Story, we talk about the idea of it being too late for our dreams or aspirations – when it’s an excuse, when it’s time to let go, and when it’s time to try to get Whack-a-Mole into the Olympics.
Why is that important for business?
When we feel like it’s too late to make a move, we can become paralyzed by that determination. We have a false sense of security in the middle ground, but we either have to accept it is not too late or find a way to be at peace with letting that thing go. It is a big energy drain, delaying the commitment to either be in or out; circling that decision is tiring. It can be helpful to ask, “What does the process for getting over that look like?” Either the question will help you come to a point of resolution or will spur you on to actually do what you thought it was too late to do.
You can become imprisoned by faint hope if you don’t confront the question of whether it really is important or whether “too late” is just an excuse. Because there are very few circumstances where it really is too late – it may require a different version of the dream, or it may require you to distill down the essence of what you really want. It may involve things that you are not willing to do. But if it will be a major regret, it is worth having a solid conversation about.
It can be scary to remove the “it’s too late”; then, you may have to do the work and take the risk. There is no right answer, but you have to weigh your regrets.
Doing the hard thing can require a change in mindset, from “I’d love to do this, but…” to “I get to do this, IF…”
Often the resistance comes from the human need to make things binary – we think that we have to start completely over and scuttle the whole ship for something new. Sometimes the “it’s too late” dream has a component of what you want, and often you can get that component far more easily. Instead of burning it all down, we need to go into sculpting mode: chipping away or adding to and sculpting a shape that fits better.
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Ep 54 – Pick a Lane
In traffic, it is critical that other drivers be able to anticipate your behavior; you need to be clear about your direction and your intentions if you want everyone to stay safe. But the same can be said about business. And that is what we will talk about in this episode of So Here’s My Story.
That, and the time that Jodi almost ruined Pajama Day.
Why is that important for business?
You have to pick a lane, in driving and in business. People, including your employees and your clients, have the right to rely on the fact that you are going to proceed logically in that direction and give them warning as to whether and why you are changing.
Accidents tend to happen when you do something unexpected. Other drivers have the right to anticipate what you are going to do; if they have a reasonable expectation of what you are going to do, and you don’t hold with that, accident happen. This doesn’t mean you can’t change lanes, in traffic or business, but you have to put on your blinker.
When businesses are in start up mode, it would be unfair to not expect there to be changes, but you have to set the expectation that this will be an adaptable, quick pivot culture for the next while; you have to set up the expectation that there will be regular change. But that unique environment aside, you are never going to create the behaviour you want if everything is unexpected and changing and nobody has a north star to follow.
The decision to change lanes isn’t inherently wrong, either. What follows that decision is important – you have to consider who you are affecting, what route will accomplish the change most efficiently and with the least potential for chaos, and what the unintended consequences of the change might be.
There is a difference in adding in innovations into the way you do things vs innovating your business model over and over again – it is the difference between changing a play in the game and changing the game altogether. People get confused and time and energy are wasted when we change lanes too often.
When asking your team to do something new, you also have to consider the question: “Instead of what?” – what would you like them to stop doing to allow them to do this new thing? The task list that comes from an idea is much more than the idea itself.
Initiative fatigue is a very real thing. As Stephen Covey (can’t find source) explains, if you have 0-3 strategic initiatives, you will probably accomplish 2 things; if you have 4-6 initiatives, you will accomplish just 1; but if you have over 6 strategic initiatives, you won’t accomplish any. Diffused effort and lack of clarity of what really matters kills results.
Saying no to a lot of really good ideas in order to say yes to just a couple is a large, but challenging, part of business success.
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Did you listen to the now famous “Laurel vs Yanni” audio that has been making its rounds on social media? Despite an ingrained reluctance to participate in such popular phenomena, Jodi noticed an important message inherent in the debate – even here, in this simple form, people hear different things.
And some people even think kale is sweet.
Why is that important for business?
With all of the value judgements and complexity and nuance stripped away, people will still have different experiences of the same thing. And if it happens in this, the most binary version of perception, is it surprising that we hear or see completely different things in more complex situations? If we can have such different experiences of a simple audio clip, then it shines a light on much needed respect for how often that is happening in more complex and nuanced situation.
Whether we like it or not, we see and experience things differently, and we cannot ignore that.
There is a translation problem between what I experience and what you do. Stephen king thinks the magic of writing is that he can take what is in his mind and can magically put it in yours. But can he? He thinks he does, but once it has reached my mind, I do with it what I want.
Sometimes, two people’s truths don’t match up, and it isn’t about being right. Our starting point in these situations needs to be curiosity. Instead of arguing perspective, we need to ask “how is it that you see something I don’t”.
That when you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You appreciate it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.
The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying “You’re too this, or I’m too this.” That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are. Ram Dass
You have to allow for the why and how questions, and you can proactively acknowledge perspective by using the phrase Brene Brown employs when dealing with conflict: “the story I am making up in my head is…”
Like an M&M, every nugget of peanuty truth is wrapped in a chocolate story. The goal isn’t to address only the peanut, but to be able to discern the different between the peanut and the chocolate.
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“I fired a client recently”, Eliot says, with a twinkle in his eye and some understated elation in his voice.
And so begins today’s story.
Sometimes, we have clients that, although they are wonderful and maybe even very profitable, aren’t a great fit for our best work. It’s okay to both realize this and design our work around those clients that are a great fit. And it’s also okay to fire the ones that don’t.
Why is that important for business?
Having a business and having a business that brings you satisfaction and joy are two very different things. Occasionally, firing a client is necessary to ensure the latter. And so it is important to periodically ask yourself:
If someone came along today and said they would take all of your clients away, which would fight to keep?
This exercise helps you reach hard decisions because it creates contrast, and your brain needs contrast to see things clearly.
Just as a wine sommelier may select a wine to, in fact, contrast with the flavors of food instead of matching them, contrast helps us experience nuances we would otherwise not be able to perceive.
So if you find yourself unclear on what you want to do, would it help to be clear on what you don’t want? If you are trying to determine what you love in a website, would it help to start with what you hate? The “not that” helps you see where you have strong feelings, where before you felt indecisive.
When dealing with your staff and you ask for feedback, and none is forthcoming, give them some contrast to help them. What do they not like? If this business were to grow to 10 times the size, what would you hate about working here?
Sometimes, it isn’t about articulating a vision, but paying attention to what your gut says about something. What would make you really excited, and what would you really dread?
Contrast is important, but we tend to not seek it out. Instead, we seek out ease, comfort, simplicity. Navigating to the middle, where there is less contrast, seems simpler, but it makes it harder to have clarity. Expanding to the edges, where there is more contrast and perspective, can actually make it easier.
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“I fired a client recently”, Eliot says, with a twinkle in his eye and some understated elation in his voice.
And so begins today’s story.
Sometimes, we have clients that, although they are wonderful and maybe even very profitable, aren’t a great fit for our best work. It’s okay to both realize this and design our work around those clients that are a great fit. And it’s also okay to fire the ones that don’t.
Why is that important for business?
Having a business and having a business that brings you satisfaction and joy are two very different things. Occasionally, firing a client is necessary to ensure the latter. And so it is important to periodically ask yourself:
If someone came along today and said they would take all of your clients away, which would fight to keep?
This exercise helps you reach hard decisions because it creates contrast, and your brain needs contrast to see things clearly.
Just as a wine sommelier may select a wine to, in fact, contrast with the flavors of food instead of matching them, contrast helps us experience nuances we would otherwise not be able to perceive.
So if you find yourself unclear on what you want to do, would it help to be clear on what you don’t want? If you are trying to determine what you love in a website, would it help to start with what you hate? The “not that” helps you see where you have strong feelings, where before you felt indecisive.
When dealing with your staff and you ask for feedback, and none is forthcoming, give them some contrast to help them. What do they not like? If this business were to grow to 10 times the size, what would you hate about working here?
Sometimes, it isn’t about articulating a vision, but paying attention to what your gut says about something. What would make you really excited, and what would you really dread?
Contrast is important, but we tend to not seek it out. Instead, we seek out ease, comfort, simplicity. Navigating to the middle, where there is less contrast, seems simpler, but it makes it harder to have clarity. Expanding to the edges, where there is more contrast and perspective, can actually make it easier.
What story do you want to tell?
So, that's our story... now, we want to hear yours!
Pull up a chair and join the conversation in our Facebook Group: bit.ly/shmsgroup
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You can hardly expect Jodi to go to Italy without bringing back some stories. In this episode of So Here’s My Story, we learn about what eating for pleasure might have to do with business, and why joy might be more important to the process than you might think.
Why is that important for business?
Just as there is a difference between being full and being satisfied with a meal, there is a difference between increasing revenue and providing a service that satisfies you and your customers.
If the food we eat isn’t pleasurable, or if we don’t take the time to appreciate it, we can find ourselves at full in a search for satisfaction. In business, we are often chasing a feeling – maybe a feeling of satisfaction - that we want to have and finding ourselves at “full” instead. For lawyers, for instance, chasing billable hours to reach a feeling of success may seem like a worthwhile pursuit, but those billable hours tell us nothing about the quality of the work you delivered, or about client satisfaction.
Joy is delivered – in food and in business – when you focus on the entire production and ritual, not just the consumption. Satisfaction comes when we engage in the whole experience instead of just the result. A misplaced focus on quantity can threaten that satisfaction.
When we focus on chasing revenue and growth instead of enjoying the other aspects that we want our business to provide, we miss an opportunity for satisfaction. When we focus on fee structures instead of what pace you want to work, what kind of work you want to do, and how you want that work to feel, you can find yourself at that point of full, but not satisfied. Or we mistake full for satisfied and wonder why we don’t love our business.
There is an oft-repeated mantra that assumes that is not growing is dying. But if what you are doing isn’t satisfying, it is dangerous to assume the answer is more.
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“I wish I could, but I just can’t”.
Have you ever heard that phrase and thought to yourself, “yes, you could. You just don’t want to”? Have you ever said that to someone, but known that it wasn’t the whole truth?
In this episode of So Here’s My Story, we talk about priorities, telling the truth, and personal sovereignty.
Why is that important for business?
Instead of taking ownership of how you chose to spend your time, “I wish I could” can feel like an abdication of responsibility for your own priorities.
It is okay to chose not to devote your time I have to each thing you may want to do. If you want to claim that something is important to you, it almost always comes with the responsibility of giving it time or energy. There needs to be an internal acknowledgment and recognition that, at the end of the day, you may not care enough about that thing to give it what it needs.
There is also the external side to this conflict, which is how you deal with priorities externally; how do you take responsibility for what is and what is not a priority when presented with opportunities?
When faced with an opportunity, there are some essential questions to ask: Should I do x? If so, how do I do x? If you really truly want to say yes, you have to want to do it enough to transition to that second question. Then you need to reassess once you take the measure of the how – is this still a priority now that I know what time, energy or resources are involved in making it a priority?
For instance, there are infinite ways to market your business, but despite your wanting, you cannot make them all a priority (and as Stephen Covey found, you shouldn’t make them all a priority).
Ask: am I willing to give my time to this? That is the most unignorable diagnostic question to ask to determine whether you really want it or not.
Time and attention are like a walk-in closet – if you want to add something new, you have to like it enough to take out something else, reorganize the closet, (or hire a new closet, which is kind of where the metaphor falls apart a bit).
As Eliot’s friend and top corporate trainer Ahmad Alafaliq says, this is about personal sovereignty, and acting like the sovereign of your own kingdom.
So how do you go about communicating these priorities to the outside world when presented with another opportunity? The annoying answer: tell the truth.
Part of the reason that telling the truth feels hard is that we only think about the part of the truth that is hurtful. The whole truth isn’t hurtful. We often think of honesty as setting off a bomb and leaving carnage, whereas we would do better to think of it as adding ingredients to the soup. If you are withholding some of the ingredients, it isn’t your soup.
The beauty of the truth is that it is something you can lean back on; it is much simpler than anything that has to be bent into a shape. If you lean back on the truth and avoid trying to control the response, then you don’t have to have it all figured out. That being said, choosing your words and practicing and getting the will to speak your truth is a practiced art.
Sometimes, just mustering the courage to say “I have something hard to tell you”, and then letting gravity take over, is all you need to begin.
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Sometimes in your organization, there needs to be a bit of transparency. But, it needs to be just the right amount. How do you give your employees a peek behind the curtain without unleashing all of your company’s problems? It’s a fine balancing act.
Why is that important for business?
In this week’s episode, we talk about the business equivalent to turbulence on a plane. When notified of severe turbulence on a plane, and you’re the passenger, your mind immediately goes to a panic state. The natural reaction is to start asking the questions with hopes that it will answer the root of your anxiety.
This happens in businesses all the time. Employees will ask questions when they are noticing some turbulence in your organization. It’s the responsibility of the leader to address these concerns truthfully while still maintaining the element of compassion. It's important to answer their questions, but also address the anxiety that lurks their mind about the issue.
If you are having issues in your organization, but not being transparent about it, your employees can see the symptoms. Then this starts the mental fears of what is truly happening. This is when they will make up their own story, so it's important to explain what's really going on to prevent the panic.
In addition to this compassionate component, it’s also important to show some transparency when you are operating day-to-day. If you’re able to let your team members in on your decisions, then it can create a sense of empathy right back to you. By keeping all information on top-secret lockdown, you create friction between your employees and the flow. When people aren't part of the decision, they lose their empathy towards leaders.
Leaders need to address the things instead of pretending that everything is going to be perfect. You need address it truthfully yet empathetically, so your employees don't create a whole new set of problems.
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Have you ever had a client try to get you to serve two opposing masters at once? How do you get them to settle on a priority so that you can move forward?
In this episode, we talk about just that.
Why is that important for business?
There are certain aspects of how you deliver your services or products that simply must be prioritized. For instance, if fast delivery, quality production and cheap price area all things your customers seek, they usually have to pick just two priorities at any one time. It’s like a stereo equalizer – you don’t have to turn anything right off, per se, but you can’t have all of the priorities at a 10 at once.
Part of this process is defining expectations, yet the words we use to describe our priorities are often insufficient and rely heavily on context. Words like “simplicity” or “success”, for instance, mean wildly different things to different people in different situations. Stories tend to be a more effective way to get these expectations and priorities across.
There are also times where we pick a priority word because we think the word is non-threatening. Communicating a story of why this is a concern can help avoid this. What is it you are worried about for you? For the other person? For the relationship?
If a conversation feels difficult, overly complicated, or if it feels like you just can’t find a solution, you probably skipped some questions about priorities and expectations. The issue is most likely that you are trying to get everything done, but if you get clear on priorities, the solution becomes easier. When expectations become clear, solutions become clear.
Consider that, just like in the show Stranger Things, there might be an Upside Down, where you can only see one plane of existence, but someone else sees an entirely different side. Consider that your customers may be in the Upside Down, and you can’t see what they see. Spend time checking out what the terrain looks like from their perspective. It is easier – and more fulfilling – to do business with people who feel seen.
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Whether it is learning the guitar, jumping in the pool, or doing something brand new in business, feeling foolish is a powerful motivator to keep us from growing.
In those moments, it isn’t always enough to just keep the door open for the person. Sometimes, we need to support them in a more proactive way, and that is exactly what this episode is all about.
Why is that important for business?
When you are trying to lead people, sometimes you think that all you can do is provide them an opportunity to try something new. Often, that just leaves you feeling frustrated when they don’t. Even when there is nothing in the way, new things can still be daunting, and we often need something more to facilitate growth into the stretch. When leading, it is helpful to ask yourself: “Is this an instance where I need to lay out more than just an open door?”
Often leadership looks like a choice between passive allowance, and high pressure “sink or swim” immersion. But we can create a comfortable middle ground without the pressure of self-propelling into the pool or diving in and either sinking or swimming. You don’t have to be the one to dive, but you don’t necessarily want someone to push you into the pool; you might want a situation where if you decide to jump, the right person is in the right place to support you.
This isn’t about enabling people – it is about escorting someone over the first hurdle and then letting them run with it. It can be hard when you are standing on the side of the pool to contemplate jumping in, but if you have the muscle memory of getting your feet wet – of moving forward a little – you can start something. Breaking it down, so it isn’t all of the newnesses at once, can also make the process easier.
If you want to crack the nut of how to get people who work with you to do bigger and better work, part of that is the humility of untangling what is in their way.
When you are leading, you most likely are hoping to get others to do what you do. In order to do this, you have to be able to reach back to the beginning and have empathy for how it felt when you started. We lose empathy for how things used to feel when we get better at them; you don’t remember when it was difficult. But if you could watch the movie in your head in slow motion and describe even 1 out of every 100 frames for the person trying to learn a new skill, it can help them see what you see. You can either choose to be frustrated by it or acknowledge that if someone doesn’t see things the way you do it is because they need help seeing things the way you do.
It’s also key to remember that there is a disproportionate effect of supportiveness compared to the tiniest bit of eye-rolling or judgment when you are feeling vulnerable. Inside, we are all 6 years old and we don’t want to look like idiots. In moments of growth, you need an overgrown amount of empathy and space and non-judgment.
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We don't talk about endings enough, especially not ending things well, with as much celebration as we began them. And that is exactly what this episode is about.
Why is that important for business?
Consider ending your business, or a product line, or even a relationship with a client or a team member – are you putting in the same effort to make a beautiful ending as you did when you started? Instead of ending by tapering off into a fizzling nothingness, celebrate everything that was; end with as much joy as you started with. Just because something is ending, doesn’t mean it was a failure; endings aren’t inherently bad. That is the belief that allows people to hold onto things they shouldn’t.
In public speaking, there are two aspects of the talk of particular import: primacy and recency. Primacy is the first thing you say, and it is what will be remembered. But recency, the last thing you said, is equally as memorable. So when considering how you want to be remembered, or how you want your business to be remembered, consider both the beginning and the end.
It is also important to remember that quitting is an art. We often have weird hang-ups around ending things or quitting things. But we need to allow endings to be thinkable, to be okay. If the possibility of an ending is unthinkable, you shut down so many options. It doesn’t have to be sad or wrong to say “this is done”; it is important to know when the last brush stroke has been applied to the painting. But take just as much care with the final brush strokes as you did with the rest, or your work may be ruined.
This also applies to letting someone go.
“The time has come for us to help you succeed somewhere else.” Paul Ricks
When someone is not a right fit, love them enough to not let them stay somewhere they don’t shine. Help them find where they belong and let them leave as a valued member of the team. Put as much effort into that ending as you did with the onboarding.
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Ever have the networking equivalent of a glass of water: it has substance, but no flavor? This episode is all about those conversations you have that don’t feel like a connection at all. Luckily, it’s also about how to have better conversations, and how to curate a network that not only refers you but refers you clients that are a perfect fit.
Why is that important for business?
If you have a conversation that is more than just a surface conversation, you each bring certain life experiences and perspectives. But if there is no curiosity present at all, there is little to build on for the conversation. It is like an electrical circuit: it is not until the other wire comes and completes the connection that you actually have an electrical circuit. There can’t just be one wire connected.
And it is frustrating to experience this lack of interest, not because of a need for attention from the other participant, but because you feel cheated out of an opportunity to make a connection.
The whole reason people network is to build a business, together. If you don’t have a sense of someone, you won’t develop these relationships, and you won’t remember them well enough to refer them. And the more you understand each other, the more likely you are to get clients that are a perfect fit for you as well.
This isn’t pointing to a need to ask more questions, but to ask deeper ones. Curiosity is walking a bit more slowly and looking for rabbit holes that may be interesting. Curiosity is about digging deeper beyond the first question. Curiosity is about the third question; it is about unexplored or unexpected territory. It is even about asking what might seem like an obvious question – one you think that you know the answer to – and leaving space for someone to say something they haven’t said before.
This is especially valuable for people who don’t like networking and meeting people. Being curious is easier. If it feels uncomfortable to talk about how great you are – GOOD! It should be uncomfortable, because that’s not genuine engagement, and that isn’t what networking should be.
The secret to finding out about people is a (sort of selfish) desire to actually enjoy the conversation. For that to happen, you have to find out something about them that makes you genuinely interested in that conversation. This isn’t about faking interest.
It’s also okay if you simply don’t “zing” with every person. Not every person is a fist bump person. Not everyone is zingable. This is about a practice of creating those conversations, about being aware of your contribution to the conversation, and about curating your network (a zingable network).
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If you are someone who has ever worked with a fitness trainer, you have probably heard their mantra: “engage your core”. It turns out, almost everything you do in fitness becomes easier, safer and the results more prominent when you involve the muscles of your core.
Turns out, the same is true in business.
Why is that important for business?
Wherever you are looking to add some “umph” – even if it is theoretically a leg or arm exercise - if you source your energy from your core, it is easier. This is true in business as well. Maybe you think you need to do some marketing or improve sales, but the truth is: if you haven’t strengthened the core of your business – of what you really do – you’ll never get far, and it could be dangerous.
“Dabbling” is an example of not using your core. “If we don’t do it every day, we don’t do it any day.” So what is your core competence? If you can’t do your best work for your clients, should you be doing that work? Your core not only the most important “muscle” in business to develop, but it also informs you about the kinds of clients to go after, and the kind of marketing you should do to convey that message.
If you are wondering how strong your core is, ask yourself this important question: “If this company was 10 times the size, what would break?” That is where your focus should be.
One of the things that is symptomatic of a problem with your core is if you can’t have consensus in your company about what your core business is, or if you don’t have a culture where you can discuss it. You need to understand your core, and actively support it. If you value innovation, for instance, you have to celebrate failure proactively.
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When you enter a new environment or talk to someone who isn’t as intimately familiar to yourself as you are, it can be hard to navigate the language gap. Even when you think you know what someone means, words can mean considerably different things in different contexts, and to different people.
In this episode, we talk about navigating conversations where you can’t even rely on the English language for clarity. And we do it using Star Trek references.
Why is that important for business?
When something (or someone) is new, we often don’t have the vocabulary to even begin to ask – or answer – questions. This may mean unique language used in a new industry, but it can also happen when you use commonly understood words, for which differing context or perspective changes the meaning. And sometimes we think we know what a word means, but our understanding is incomplete. It is important, then, when entering a new environment or navigating a fraught one, to poke around for the words that mean something in this particular space.
A way to do this is to dispense with the words and focus on the stories. By using stories, or even metaphors, you can ensure you are clear on what you are understanding, and what is being understood. Because you can’t always trust that the language matches up.
This is especially true when emotions are higher - we tend to have less nuanced hearing skills in such situations. It is important, when you see someone have a reaction to words, to clarify what they are reacting to.
Words are almost worse for communicating than anything else. Stories, metaphors, visual representations, and body language are often more useful. And it is easier to validate understanding than when you only use words.
Language means different things in different place and with different people. If you find yourself frustrated, as a leader, with how your team follows directions, the first place to look is at the clarity of your words, and the gap between what you wanted, and what they understood. Paint a picture of what you mean instead of just using words.
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Here you are, just trying to live your life, trying to use your brain to solve complex life problems or just navigate your way through Costco, and all you can think about is some unresolved conversation or situation that has lodged itself in the most obsessive part of your mind. As Eliot likes to say, you are letting someone else live rent-free in your mind.
In this episode, we discuss how to deal with these situations, and how to free up space for something more productive than trying to think of the perfect retort to an upsetting email.
Why is that important for business?
The magnitude of the obsession is usually inversely proportional to the size of the issue – the more petty and stupid the issue, the more space it gets in your mind.
Then you get mad that you are irrationally mad at the petty thing.
This is not a recipe for a productive mind. And the reason it bothers us so much is that you now have to spend time and energy dealing with a situation that you would rather not dedicate brain forced to. And it is dragging otherwise good neurons away from things that would be more useful to think about.
So how do you exorcize those obsessions?
Curiosity is – again - one of the answers. Often, if you wait long enough between your anger or irritation and your response so that you can frame the event in terms of questions instead of accusations, you will have better luck. It can be a challenge, but it is important to stop short of ascribing intent.
Borrow a technique from Brene Brown and use the phrase “this is the story that I am making up” when confronting an issue. It makes it clear to all parties that this is just what is happening in your head and gives them an opportunity to give a new perspective.
There are few things more important that how you manage your energy, time and thoughts. If something is draining energy from you, it is significant and worth noticing, and worth assessing – “is this person or thought worth taking up space in my brain?”
It’s also important, as a leader, to make sure that - as much as possible - no one is wasting energy needlessly because of you. If you tend to let others live rent-free in your head, you have to be aware of where you could be squatting in other people’s heads.
'You've made this day a special day, by just your being you. There's no person in the whole world like you; and I like you just the way you are.' - Mr. Rogers
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Knowing when to show up is an art form all its own. Ever found yourself saying more than you should, just to fill the silence?
This episode is all about knowing when to stop talking, and when to let a lack of talking enrich the conversation. If you’ve ever found yourself oversharing, or failed to get someone really talking, it’s time to embrace the silence.
Why is that important for business?
We spend a lot of time on this podcast discussing how to frame a conversation, but it is just as important to discuss when to end a conversation. Knowing when to shut up is an art form all its own. There is an impulse to fill the silence sometimes but understanding what not to say and when to stop saying anything at all is sometimes more important than planning what you are going to say.
Especially when you are working with a client, beware of the point where you’re doing all the digging, and hand them the shovel. You need to lean into silence. Allowing someone else to discover something, rather than telling them, creates more profound learning.
Silence is especially huge for sales. It’s not true unless they say it.
Silence makes people uncomfortable, and we often try to fill space mentally just as much as verbally. If we don’t know the details of a story, we’ll try to make up our own narrative. Externally, we feel social pressure to have no silence, so we end up filling space with information we maybe shouldn’t be sharing.
It is helpful to walk into a meeting with a clear agenda and a clear mission of what you want to accomplish. If not, you don’t know when the mission is completed, and you just keep going. Oversharing can be a lack of clear understanding of what you need from this meeting.
Transparency is important, but you don’t have to be transparent about everything, at all times, with all people. It has a time and a place.
How do you define where the finish line for a sentence, a conversation, a meeting is? When are we done? When does this get a bow on it? How do you be more clear on what’s enough?
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It isn’t uncommon for businesses to be stalled by interpersonal conflict, which seems like it might call for some serious Business Couples Counseling. But at the root of that conflict can be a more technical problem with an easier fix.
When the emotional meets the operational – that’s the topic of this episode of So Here’s My Story.
Why is that important for business?
Interpersonal conflicts – that bone on bone friction; the assigning of intent with assumptions instead of being curious – often bubbles to the surface more than simply dysfunction in dealing with personal disputes. Often, it points to operational issues that require attention.
There is conflict because something needs to be defined; there needs to be structure. There is a special chaotic hell when you don’t have enough structure – it is what gives freedom.
“There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. 'How much do you love me?' And, 'Who's in charge?' Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief, and suffering.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
The key here is finding the right amount of guardrails that allow you to go fast without careening off of the cliff.
So often we separate the personal and the science (the operations and the structures) of business without realizing that they influence each other.
“Let’s move away from this ‘there is no I in team’, to ‘teams are made of nothing but I’s that just want to fit in’”.
When you shore up an operational flaw, it immediately relieves pressure on the interpersonal relationships; it puts cartilage back in between the bones and reduces the friction.
Everyone’s decision matrix is invisible to everyone else. When you can make that invisible piece visible, it can help take care of the individual I’s that make up your team.
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In business, emotions can run high. And when emotions are high, often our inner Business Toddler comes out, which can make professional discourse seem impossible. In those moments, all of our instincts are counterproductive to a healthy work environment.
So what do we do about it?
Let’s talk about it in this episode of So Here’s My Story.
Why is that important for business?
Often, sorting out business issues often comes down to what is essentially business couples therapy. And these individual disputes often come down to a simple decision: “Am I more attached to being right, or solving the problem?”
Almost all of our instincts in highly emotional situations - especially those situations where we are trying to be professional – actually make the problems worse. Like when a toddler is acting out, we need to ask ourselves what unmet need is being expressed by the unwanted behaviour. And when things go wrong in business or life, adults often revert to the flailing emotional responses of a toddler. In those moments, we can either be superior, or we can address the problem from a place of empathy and curiosity.
It can feel great to put the person acting out “in their place”. It feels good to acknowledge “Mic Drop” conversations. But it is counter intuitive; the cutting comment rarely solves the problem. Like eating 2 Krispy Kreme donuts, it can feel satisfying in the moment, but leave you with regret later.
In those moments, as a leader, we need to ask ourselves “do I want to lead, or do I want to win?” Because the person who has the opportunity to change this dynamic is not the person having the bad reaction. That is the role of the listener.
But what if the person behaving badly is the leader? People tend to think leadership is a destination, but the further up you go, the more insecure you are, and the less certain you are about your choices because there is less of a path to follow. People stop telling you that you are doing a good job and start treating you like you are infallible. We must listen to our leaders with the same empathy, the same curiosity, and try to discern the unmet need.
We need to see through the lens of empathy, even if they are the leader, and just be curious.
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Have you ever been given information – fascinating information, even – that you almost immediately forgot? There was most likely a critical piece missing in your education on that topic - the stark
difference between knowledge and knowing just enough to get hurt.
And that is the subject of this episode.
Why is that important for business?
Generally speaking, people know the right thing to do. What they need is practice on how to do it. This is the difference between hearing something and knowing something, and it can make all the difference to the culture and the operations of a company. We are too often given knowledge, but not made comfortable in the art of conversation of conveying that information or using that information in practice.
When you hear something - even if you are amazed by that
information – the brain is still in a relatively dormant state. If
you introduce it into practice, however, then neurons start to
fire, and the information begins to be coded in your brain. In
fact, if something is explained to you, 10 minutes after you will
retain but 10%. But if you are involved - if there is a story that
you can place yourself into the context of the information, or if
you interact with the information in some way - retention goes
up to 60%.
Companies often go through long process, and somehow stumble their way through complex issue to get to a conclusion that is really well thought out. But then they want to tell everyone in the company their conclusion and expect people to catch on where their brain left off. The journey is important; it is critical to find ways to involve people along the way. Not including them doesn’t preclude their ideas or stop them from sticking their oar in after the fact, so you aren’t saving time by doing it yourself.
If, as a leader, you are frustrated that your people don’t think things through thoroughly or in the way that you do, it’s because they don’t have line of sight to the same things that you do. Play the mental video for them in slow motion so that they can see all of the things that you are thinking about, and then they will start to see what you see, as well as things that you don’t see.
It is important to not just know the right thing to do, but to really dive deep on equipping people with the familiar ground of how to do it.
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Over at the World Wide So Here’s My Story Podcast Headquarters, we have lots of great discussions. But this one is special, because it all started with a trip to the washroom.
Solutions often have unintended consequences, consequences that could have easily been prevented with a little bit of forethought. And that’s what we are talking about in today’s episode.
Why is that important for business?
In order to prioritize service, you have to make assumptions about what kind of services your customers want. And sometimes those solutions have unintended consequences, or completely misread the customer need.
Often, we neglect to ask ourselves: What would it look like to implement these strategies? What problems can we see if we think it through? It is really easy to throw out big ideas that sound like great solutions without thinking through how you would actually implement them operationally. And in order to think it through operationally, you have to talk to the people who are actually going to be taking the calls.
Sometimes, solutions offer access, but since part of your job may actually be anxiety management, knowing everything is often not a benefit to the client. If solutions aren’t focused on the user experience, they may not be helpful.
This isn’t about creating paralysis, of believing we must think of every possibility. But it can be helpful to have a heightened awareness that every solution comes with a new set of problems and trying to think through what those next set of problems might be.
At times, a short term solution can create a bigger long term problem, or a solution that makes sense operationally can cause cultural issues in a company. You are not going to decide the best escape route while flames lick under the door. You need to rehearse change. This is not about predicting the future, but about becoming a learning organization; this is not about stacking up regrets or creating indecision, but about being a beta test organization.
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Have you ever walked into a space, and something in the environment made you uncomfortable? Or maybe you entered a work space and thought “this space is perfectly suited to the work being done in it.”
Creating a space – whether the actual physical space, or even the virtual space – that supports the work you are trying to do is an oft ignored, but important aspect of your business. In this episode, we talk about what a massage treatment room has to teach us about matching our space to how we want our clients to feel.
Why is that important for business?
The work environment can have a lot of impact on how clients feel. Yet not a lot of thought is given to “what do I want clients to feel?” and creating an environment to support that. Conference rooms, for example, are often interchangeable – they say nothing about the work being done in them, or the needs of those who use the space. What would it look like if you had an environment that worked for you?
You might think, “no one has ever walked in a room and
said, ‘the ceiling height in here is perfect’”, yet people will walk into a space and think “I don’t like this environment”. They won’t usually ascribe it to the ceiling height – they may create a new story about what they don’t like (and that very well might become YOU) - but
the stimulus that they are reacting to may actually be the ceiling height. These are the feelings that a space can create for people, including clients and potential clients. All without saying a word.
A big part of designing a space that supports your work is being clear on what your client is worried about and how you can assuage those worries and provide for those wants and needs in small ways. It is important to always be aware of the client’s emotional experience, and how you can craft it. How do you want people to feel, and how can you make them feel that way? What would make them feel the opposite?
This is more than just physical environment as well. You can create an environment with your words and emails and procedures. How you communicate says a lot about how you work.
You have an opportunity, in designing your environment, to demonstrate your priorities. What is your
environment saying about you?
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Have you ever asked someone a question – a deeper question that gets at who they really are – and received an “I don’t know” in return? This episode is all about the really good conversations that are possible when you ask - in just the right way – who a person is and what their dreams are.
Why is that important for business?
Sometimes, the best conversations are the ones you have to keep plugging away at. You are guaranteed to fail the first few times you try to get to the good conversation, but what you get – from your partners, your coworkers, your employees, or your clients – can change everything.
You may have to ask people things in different ways to get to their real response. It can, for instance, be easier to articulate what you don’t want than what you do want initially. You can’t always walk through the front door of learning; you have to find different ways in. This involves a real commitment to communication; it means fundamentally wanting to know what matters to someone else.
When you do finally get to the real answers, often you will also find “want shame” – what people really want, they are often embarrassed to say. It is a vulnerable thing, to say what you really want, and most people aren’t going to give that up to someone the first time they ask. It requires a lot of trust.
If you are asking someone what they want, and you aren’t being genuinely curious, or you have an idea of what you want the answer to be, then don’t ask. If you get a response, part of your obligation of having pursued that response is – as it is in improv – “yes, and”.
Start conversations because you want to understand the filter through which they view their experience, because that’s the wellspring of satisfaction. Seek first to understand; be curious. Stop short of making guesses about their behaviour.
What story do you want to tell?
So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours! Go to SoHeresMyStory.com and share your story.
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January can have a weird energy for many people, both personally and in business. And all of us, whatever our season of lower energy, could use a proactive plan to help us cope. In this episode, that’s exactly what Eliot and Jodi share.
Why is that important for business?
Just like in our personal life, we can have hard seasons in our business life; a time of year where it is particularly hard, mentally, to be “up”. For Eliot, this is the time to focus on connecting with people, and with his points of light.
We can falsely create a sense of isolation around these seasons of lower energy and ignore that there are not only others who are experiencing similar feelings, but also that there is often an external factor at play, like the weather.
In these times, it can help to remember that when you feel lost in the forest, the trees know where you are.
“Lost” by David Whyte
Stand still.
The trees ahead and the bushes beside you Are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still.
The forest knows Where you are.
You must let it find you.
The key to these low times is to plan something, proactively, that helps you through. For some, it fills their tank to see lots of people; for some, that drains their tank. But we all need some source of renewal when we feel this way. We all need to proactively find sources of nourishment; we need to make a
conscious effort to find vibrancy in the low places.
What story do you want to tell?
So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours! Go to SoHeresMyStory.com and share your
story.
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Have you ever actually felt the exact moment that you lost all respect for a professional associate? In this episode, Eliot and Jodi discuss how straddling two messages in an attempt to be liked often ends in no one being served. For those moments when you are dedicated to something higher than “what the clients says they want”, this episode is for you.
Why is that important for business?
Helping clients doesn’t always mean doing exactly what they say they want. You must make sure you are maintaining your professional responsibility to do not only your best work, but work that aligns with your values. The task of discerning and assigning where your allegiance and loyalty is critical. This allegiance is not
just to a certain party – sometimes it is to an ideal or value, or to the client’s best interest. Sometimes it is displaying allegiance to say, “we can’t work together”.
It is important to also consider the other side. This is not a sign of weakness; it is a sign of strength, and of you being grounded in your profession and the desire to give the client’s what they most need, which is honest advice and not a cheerleader.
It is an act of love to be truthful and honest about what is really going on in the moment for your clients. And making sure you are not losing a sense of yourself when you are deciding what the client needs right now. Is that something I can provide? Can I do my best work with this client? If you are truly doing your best work, you are
always willing to get fired. Often, the most important work you will do with clients isn’t to do what they ask of you. It is instead about
separating the emotional response from the real need, and helping them find another way to get their real needs met. The most important skills you can cultivate are the ability to get to the bottom of the need they are trying to meet, and asking “What other solutions might scratch that itch?” This means asking “what problem are you trying to solve with that solution?” before deciding it is the best solution.
What story do you want to tell?
So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours! Go to SoHeresMyStory.com and share your
story.
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Do you ever get stuck in overthinking? Either indecision or second guessing the decision you already made? Well, so has Jodi (not Eliot – he’s perfect!), and in this episode, we try to figure out why, and maybe even some solutions when you catch yourself in overthinking mode.
Why is that important for business?
Overthinking makes business not only harder, but getting stuck all of the time can also be really draining. And, as suggested by Jodi’s former coach, “stuck” often means that you know what you want but your are just not ready to admit it yet.
“Over-analysis is a form of denial. To over-analyze means that you have the correct answer but are refusing to accept it - you go on searching for the answer you would prefer rather than accept the truth. Remember that the truth for one is not necessarily the truth for another, and that the truth has a tendency to drive you crazy just before it sets you free. Perhaps what you once thought was craziness is simply what it takes to free yourself from outdated beliefs.”
Overthinking comes with a weird sense of pride, like perfectionism. It also comes with a lot of slogging. Often it shows up as either second guessing or indecision, and neither are fun.
The interesting thing about indecision is, as Jodi’s sister said: “if you are having that much trouble deciding, it probably doesn’t matter which you choose.”
There are no right answers in business. As an entrepreneur, you are almost always the front goose, parting waters that haven’t yet been parted. There is no path already laid for you.
This is why having a team in place is so important. When we slog, it is often because we are asking ourselves to use part of our brain that isn’t the best part of our brain. Sometimes over-analysis is a great sign that you need to do more delegation.
What story do you want to tell?
So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours! Where do you get “sloggy” with overthinking? We’d love to hear!
Go to SoHeresMyStory.com and share your story.
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Feeling like you can’t get clients to understand your value? This episode of So Here’s My Story is all about showing potential clients the difference between your work as a commodity, and your work as an art form.
Why is that important for business?
It often feels like a billable hour model punishes efficiency and rewards inefficiency. Just as you don’t care how many hours workmen put into building your car, you want clients to see the value in the end product. But it is often a much more complicated thing to get clients to understand, and appreciate, that value. It requires you to educate clients on the art of what you do, the relevance of the art, and the downside of options that are less artful in their delivery.
But as with butter and margarine, sometimes people don’t care about the difference. A client may not be your client if they don’t care about the difference between you and your competitors. This requires you to be very honest with yourself. If you provide value and your target market doesn’t find it valuable, it’s not actually value. You must find the value in what you offer, which means you have to understand your clients’ needs.
Part of that value may very well be in helping clients digest what they already have purchased from you.
Points of distinction that matter to your target market – that’s what value is. If you don’t have points of distinction that matter to your market, that is the definition of a commodity, and you can expect to be paid as such.
What story do you want to tell?
So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours!
Go to SoHeresMyStory.com and share your story.
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New Year’s Evolution
It's New Years. Want to avoid setting the same ole' “just add water, have shame in 3 weeks" resolutions? This is the episode for you! It’s that time of year where many of us make some resolutions. But we have a love-hate relationship with New Year’s Resolutions, and think it might be a time to rethink how we make them.
Why is that important for business?
What you measure will determine so much about your business. New Year’s is a great time to notice what and how you measure.
Resolutions are often large by their very nature, yet breaking them down into chunks is often much more effective. It’s like what Coach Krzyzewski at Duke University said about winning a game with a 20 point deficit: instead of focusing on the seemingly insurmountable spread, think about winning just the next 5 minutes. Once you string together some 5 minute wins, the bigger deficit will take care of itself.
With resolutions, often the goals themselves are laced with shame to begin with. Like with diet, sometimes it is more effective to focus on adding in the good, not so much about what you need to take out. When you focus only on what is not working, it fuzzes out the system. Focus on what you need to be adding more of in your life instead.
The new year offers the opportunity of a fresh start. Instead of feeling like a failure in 3 weeks, setting looser goals based on a theme or a guidepost – a litmus test for your decisions that year – can be more effective. And always remember to ask: How do I want to feel? What do I want to feel more of? Not in the moment, necessarily, or you may end up having eight more shortbread cookies. But in your life – what do you want more of? If you are so focused on the goal and not on the feeling that you want, you might miss a better opportunity to achieve that feeling you are seeking.
This isn’t about doing away with resolutions, but right sizing them, bring some kindness and grace to them, focusing on the right parts (not numerical achievement, but how you want to feel) and finding a rhythm of measurement that feeds you, as well as the right kind of support. Support more like that described in Winning with Accountability: The Secret Language of High-Performing Organizations – accountability not as punishment, but as an opportunity to set self up to not go off the rails in first place; tether back to what you want, because you will get off track.
What story do you want to tell?
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Sometimes we set goals – like business growth – not because they are true goals, but because it feels like we are a failure if we don’t achieve them... Have you started your 2018 goal planning? We have some ideas on how to make that planning more effective, and we share them in this episode. Jodi also speaks Swedish-ish and coins the term “Zen Mama”, so there’s something for everyone!
Why is that important for business?
The practice of hitting pause and looking back is incredibly important, in life and in business. To be myopically focused on where the gaps are – what you have yet to accomplish, what you still have to do – cheats you out of something. You need to recognize what you have achieved and the solid ground that you can build on for the next thing.
There is also a fierce, tough love piece to this: a need to insist on this reflection, because if you don’t, you are skipping the true and honest act of looking in the mirror.
Sometimes we set goals – like business growth – not because they are true goals, but because it feels like we are a failure if we don’t achieve them. But the only thing that grows for the sake of growth is cancer. And kudzu. Cancer and kudzu. (Hey! That’s the title of this episode!)
A better question than how much did we grow: How well did we do in advancing our core principles?
It is harder to paint yourself into a corner if you are looking around regularly. Don’t forget that there is somewhere in business that we wanted to go, and the occasional pause is helpful in making sure we are still on that path.
And there are breadcrumbs along the path that indicate what is truly important to us. As in politics, we vote with our feet; we can tell where we stand by our behaviour, not what we say. So, it is important to ask: What tasks am I putting to the top of my list? What things do I have to force myself to do?
It is a deeply kind act to make someone pause and check why didn’t do something. Often, a goal set and not done would have required them be someone they fundamentally are not. Rather, it is better to plan your business around your quirks and idiosyncrasies and your natural autopilot, so you can enjoy it.
What story do you want to tell?
So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours!
Go to SoHeresMyStory.com and share your story.
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Quack, Quack
You know those early American Idol contestants? The ones with…less than stellar singing skills? Have you ever wondered why none of their friends pulled them aside and said “listen, dearest friend – you can’t sing”? This episode is all about the business version of “you can’t sing”. And Jodi and Eliot have a few different perspectives to share about it.
Why is that important for business?
We make assumptions that there is only one way to do things when we give advice, instead of trying to custom fit the advice to the person.
When people stop trying to fit into a solution, they can come up with a solution that is a fit for them.
This doesn’t mean we can’t help push friends and colleagues out of their comfort zone. But we have to make sure that the path they are on is their own; if you push your comfort zone on someone else’s path, you won’t get traction.
There is a difference between pushing past something that is scary, and pushing a limp noodle.
The problem often isn’t that someone doesn’t like the means so they shouldn’t pursue the end; it is that they are the wrong means. The “it” has to fit. It is flawed to think that there is only one way to do something and if that way doesn’t fit, you can’t succeed. We all need a custom fit version of business development. We don’t have to change end goal, we just have to back it up and custom fit the means to the end.
We need to get super clear on exactly what problem we are solving. And then often there is a way faster way to get to the solution than the way we are imaging.
It’s a special kind of hell to get your ducks in a row, only to realize that they aren’t your ducks.
You have to bake a cake that you are going to want to eat.
What story do you want to tell?
So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours!
Go to SoHeresMyStory.com and share your story.
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Are you in the mood for a rant? This week, Jodi and Eliot air some grievances about the newest changes to the Patreon fee structure, all in the spirit of championing honest business practices and taking care of you, the listener.
Why is that important for business?
Patreon, the organization we work with to help fund our podcast, has changed its policies in a frustrating way. They have raised their fees, and have decided those extra fees will be added to the money pledged by the patrons. And all of this has happened without the consultation or consent of us, the beneficiaries of that patronage.
The fees are a small amount, but the amount isn’t the point. When you are dealing with such small amounts, it is just proof that it isn’t just about it being “worth it” in the sense of dollar value alone. Sometimes, fee changes are about pushing some button far more core or primal than they are about the dollars. And often that comes down to how the change is communicated. When trying to control a message so that people react in certain way, that is not communication. Don’t navigate their reaction and call it communication.
Most importantly, this is a great time to look within. When something like this happens, something that triggers a passionate response, it is important to look at your own business and your own business practices – what specifically is frustrating me, and is there any where in my business where I am doing this?
What story do you want to tell?
So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours!
Go to SoHeresMyStory.com and share your story.
Want to Connect?
You can connect with us or tell your story…
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Episode 26
Have you ever found yourself adding unnecessary steps to a project? Made something simple way too complicated? This week, Jodi and Eliot talk about the mental feng shui that happens when the mundane creates space for real business magic.
Why is that important for business?
Often, we overcomplicate things in our business. It may just be the way we have always done something, or it may be that we are too close and cannot see what is possible – often we need someone else to point out where our processes are overcomplicating things.
When a process is developed, it initially served a purpose. But where do we stop trying to make things better or more efficient?
Perhaps it is not only a matter of having a rock in your shoe, but it is about also having at rock at the exact time when you are in a position to be able to take off your shoe. Fixing an issue with procedures isn’t just about the irritant being sufficiently…irritating, then. It is also about having the time and resources - and perhaps even the personality - to no longer put up with the irritant. Maybe we all need someone in our life that has no patience for little irritants, and helps us to fix them.
Sometimes irritants somehow make it into our blind spots, and here, there is value in the pause.
Training someone is such a great way to uncover your issues and processes that aren’t necessary. It is a great way to pull out magnifying glass and see where there are places where things can be easier. There is the innate value that increased efficiency brings, obviously, but an even more important benefit comes from simplicity. Efficiency doesn’t just buy you productivity; it buys brain space. It helps you create less overwhelm moving forward. It creates mental feng shui. Instead of focusing on tasks, you are focusing on pathways and harmony, even in something as mundane as office procedure.
Processes and procedures can feel mundane, but there is something so magical about what they can unblock. There is more to what a really well-honed process can do for an organization than just make sure Ts get crossed. They can free up really smart people in a company to be able to act as really smart people.
What story do you want to tell?
So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours!
Go to SoHeresMyStory.com and share your story.
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This week, Jodi and Eliot talk about the situations where you don’t want to collaborate; there are times when you want the experts to lead. And it all starts with a trip to the doctor.
Why is that important for business?
In business, one of the most challenging things to figure out is when is the time to stop listening, and do the thing that they came to do; when to stop collaborating, and be a leader.
If you are a professional, you need to find that place where it is time to stop listening and time to do the thing that they came to you to do.
In the book, When Breath Becomes Air, a doctor becomes a patient, and it becomes important for him to have space to be that –a patient.
Nobody wants an authoritarian leader who tells them what to do without taking their opinion into account. But there is unease when there isn’t clear leadership, and a clear idea of where we, together, are going.
There needs to be an underlying trust when having these conversations, that setting boundaries and limits are not the limits of professional expertise, but instead of guidelines to get the best results.
This isn’t just about who we are as leaders. The best clients are the ones who are coachable, and who are committed to their priorities, but not attached to those staying their priorities.
What story do you want to tell?
So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours!
Go to SoHeresMyStory.com and share your story.
Episode 24
We’ve all had the experience of feeling like a company doesn’t care about us, but how many of us have examined how our own clients experience working with us? This week, Jodi and Eliot talk about Thanksgiving and whiskey, Saturday Night Live spoofs, and how all of it relates to keeping your customers and clients happy.
Why is that important for business?
"You see, this phone system consists of a multibillion-dollar matrix of space age technology that is so sophisticated - even we can't handle it. But that's your problem, isn't it? So, the next time you complain about your phone service, why don't you try using two Dixie cups with a string? We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company." – Saturday Night Live, September 18, 1976)
Companies often differ in how they treat external and internal customers. As an acquaintance of Jodi’s once said – you date the external clients, and all of your effort goes there. Your internal customers are the ones you already married – they’re stuck with you, and you get complacent.
Sound horrible? Setting aside how pleasant it may or may not be to be married to the person making the analogy, a lot of businesses do this. It often feels like they are primed and ready to not care about issues from internal clients.
Part of the problem is with company culture – there may be an issue of not setting up the organization and operations to make anyone care.
Zen of the Hand and the Chair. Every part of the chair has its own function. If someone takes a leg, all other parts of the chair will notice. Despite knowing they are all going to fall, they can do nothing to stop this. The hand, on the other hand (pun probably not intended), cares. If someone wants to cut off the pinkie finger, the entire hand will curl all of the fingers into a fist to defend against it.
So which is your organization – the hand or the chair? If someone were to talk to anyone and everyone in the organization, would they all know the key problems and the key threats to the health of the organization, but no one does anything about it? Or do you have a culture at your business where your people, if they see a problem or threat, come together to solve it?
(speaking of chairs, be on the lookout for Jodi’s Booby Trap Chair on Chairs in Predicaments: https://www.facebook.com/chairsinpredicaments/)
It is easy to see and even to rant about these problems as something those companies do, but it is critical that we uncover where we do it. Often it is a matter of falling into the trap of taking care of the squeaky wheel and ignoring your other clients.
And remember: it is one thing to avoid making people feel unimportant; it is a completely other thing to make people feel important. But that is the level at which you create loyalty and a stronger relationship. And it doesn’t cost a lot to make someone know that they matter. (Check out the book The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath.)
One of the most important places to make someone feel important is in that first contact with someone who is upset. If you don’t communicate empathy, especially in moments when someone is angry and frustrated, it doesn’t matter how well you do your job - what they will remember is you not appearing to care.
Just by creating transparency, you can make people feel like you care. Helping people understand what is going on behind the scenes can alleviate frustration.
So how are you treating your internal customers? Or, for that matter, your husband/wife?
What story do you want to tell?
So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours!
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This week, Eliot and Jodi discuss Taylor’s car shopping experience, implicit bias, and the benefits of curiosity.
Why is that important for business?
As Taylor’s story illustrates, ignoring a decision maker is an excellent way to lose a sale. Who we choose to ignore often relates to our implicit biases, about who is important and who is not.
(Check out this episode of the NPR podcast, Hidden Brain, for more on implicit bias).
The hardest part of addressing your biases is that you cannot actually self-diagnose. They feel like rational conclusions, not biases, and are hard to see, let along overcome. Nobody wants to see themselves as the person who makes these judgements, yet they continue to happen, and they cost us more than just sales.
So how do we deal with these biases if we don’t even know they are there? The best first step is to start all interactions by being curious and seeking to understand. And the better you know something, the more curious you need to be; you have to counter-steer your own knowledge. Bias often feels like knowledge; be curious instead.
It can also help to seek outside observers who can see issues with a fresh set of eyes. Asking for feedback from different areas within your business – suppliers, workers, and customers – can help leaders see their blind spots. Make an effort to do outreach and get feedback about work you didn’t get – what went wrong? And when someone asks a question, direct the answer to the person that asked.
And most importantly, be curious about your own biases. You can’t resolve a problem if you adamantly refuse to acknowledge that you have one.
What story do you want to tell?
So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours!
Go to SoHeresMyStory.com and share your story.
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This week, Eliot and Jodi talk about those moments in business where we have irrational, emotional reactions and what that intrepid traveler, Indiana Jones, teaches us about how to deal with them like adults.
Why is that important for business?
We need to remember that it’s not just business; it’s personal. And when things get personal, we don’t always have the capacity to respond rationally.
We all make irrational decisions; we all think like
petulant children sometimes. And even though these irrational reactions are by definition irrational, they are still every bit as real. Ignoring them, or dismissing them as silly, is dangerous. Acknowledging “yes, I am having the emotions of a 5 year old” and owning it helps you move past it.
As long as, in these emotional states, it feels like an issue of winning or losing, there is no place to go.
When your value feels threatened, blood goes away from your smart, nuanced prefrontal cortex and goes to your instinctual fight or flight lizard brain, making it very hard to see the gray scale in the middle.Things start feeling binary, and you can’t see the options in between. In these moments, our brains are amazing at generating unsatisfying solutions.
And just like in Indiana Jones and The Holy Grail, when you have to deal with these uncomfortable and irrational emotions, you have to walk the path and just have to have faith that there is something solid under your feet. Because, as Susan Campbell’s important work points out, most of communication is trying to get someone to react or not react a certain way. That is not communication; that is control.
When talking about these hard things, you have to talk about what is real. And instead of focusing on winning or losing, in these conversations you need to focus on the third entity: the relationship. What does a healthy next step forward look like for the relationship? When you are standing in the ocean, the place where waves crash hardest are when the water is at torso level. You have to either push through to get to the deeper water so you can ride the current, or retreat and go shallower. When you go deeper with these conversations, even if doesn’t go the way you were hoping for, it is still way easier than the crashing waves where you were. There is no way, in that place of being battered by the waves, that you can do your best work.
So ask yourself: what helped release the tension of those irrational fears in the past? Is there a way to do that with intention the next time you recognize yourself standing where the waves are crashing into you the hardest?
What story do you want to tell?
So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours!
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This week, Jodi and Eliot talk about that famous business poet, Rudyard Kipling, and what he has to say about riding the ups and downs of business.
Why is that important for business?
“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same.” -- from Rudyard Kipling’s If.
Just as in life, business involves both triumph and disaster. Sometimes people are better with the triumphs and some are better with the disasters. But it is important to remember that both the peaks and the valleys are temporary.
There is a special hell that comes sometimes after you have achieved what you wanted to achieve, and the effort of keeping that success becomes your torment.
And there is nothing inherently wrong with triumph, of course; it is the imagining that the goal is to get to triumph and STAY there that is the problem. The white knuckle attempt to keep the success often makes us less agile; the fear of another valley, of the next disaster, can actually cause the next valley.
The imposter in Kipling’s poem, then, is any sense of permanence. If you can treat both failure and success as being temporary – if you can make it so they don’t define you, they are just the current state of being – entrepreneurship and business become easier. Because business and entrepreneurship change so much that there really isn’t a point where you “make it”. Every entrepreneur worth their salt knows it is like a saw blade, with ups and downs. And you need to invest more energy in riding that saw blade than in either revelling at the top or despairing at the bottom.
In Mandy Len Catron’s “A better way to talk about love” Ted Talk, she talks about how love is a collaborative work of art. And just as the trick to really wonderful art from young children is to take it away from them before they finish (and fill every inch with every color) the trick to love is to know when to start a new canvas. The same is true in business: not having a good relationship with impermanence can make us hold onto businesses long after they are no longer serving us.
And the businesses that stick around need a relationship with impermanence – they need to embrace evolution. They need to develop a strategic sense of impermanence to succeed over time.
You can fail without being a failure. And you can succeed without making it your identity.
[We also recommend you check out Derek Sivers “Why You Need To Fail”]
“If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough”. Jillian Michaels
If you are simply hanging out in success, what you are experiencing is actually stagnation. It just looks like success because you are comfortable. Real success is allowing failure and allowing evolution. Because evolving inherently involves trying new things that you aren’t good at yet, and letting go of things that no longer fit.
Triumph and Disaster aren’t destinations; they are simply milestones.
What story do you want to tell?
So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours!
Go to SoHeresMyStory.com and share your story.
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Ahava Story
This week, Jodi and Eliot talk about their interview with Ahava Leibtag of Aha Media about why she started her unique business, the worst day of her business, and the heartwarming best day. And of course, being Eliot and Jodi, they also make time to discuss the perils of putting beans up your nose, all while making it relevant to your business.
So what DOES this week’s episode say about your business?
Ahava has a big “why” for her business. But yours doesn’t have to be as life or death as hers to matter. What if you just started with asking yourself: “what’s broken in the world, or my industry, that I want to fix?” What do you have the power to fix? What you are frustrated by can be the opening for you to really grow your business. If you are daunted or frustrated by something in your industry, chances are you are not the only one.
Knowing this North Star is also a great way to know when you are going off track as well, and help you get realigned with what matters to you.
It doesn’t have to be world hunger, but you do have to connect to something higher than just your profit margin. What enables you to do your best work? And even more importantly – what is your best work? And who do you do your best work for?
And remember: there is enormous value in the entire span of real – the really good stuff and the really bad stuff - and trying to skip over any of it, like with a “silver lining”, can make for some missed opportunities. There is a gift in contrast that allows you to see more clearly.
If it is lonely at the top, you’re doing it wrong. It really does take a village. There is so much to gain by trusting the smarts and the heart of the character of your team.
What story do you want to tell?
So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours! What was your best or worst day at your business?
Go to SoHeresMyStory.com and share your story.
Want to Connect?
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We watched the new Will & Grace, and at the risk of losing diehard fans, we have some ideas about how it relates to your business. This week, Eliot and Jodi talk about knowing your value, and the importance of white space.
Why is all of that important for business?
Sometimes, in TV and in business, people are not clear with what their real value is. When you don’t know what value you are actually bringing, you can put all of this energy and attention on aspects of your product or service that are not only not what your clients want, but actually detract from the experience.
And yet - what happens when you as a company feel called to change and shift into something different, and people know and love you for something different? You are allowed to change, but you need to be aware of what people loved if you want to make that change effectively.
So many companies guess instead of just asking. You have to think about business as a science experiment: you have to isolate the variables, change one thing at a time, and see what makes a difference. But you never guess when you can ask.
Sometimes the magic happens when there is no agenda. Often, the value that you bring is in the things that don’t sound sexy or impressive; a lot of times, the value sounds insignificant to you, but it is loved by your followers.
“God is in the hallways.” It is not in the structured service at the pulpit that makes a community, but the value is in what happens in the conversations in the hallways.
We often think we have to fill space with activity, but unscheduled and relaxed space and time is equally important. The magic is not only in the structure; epiphanies come in the spaces between. There is actual neuroscience to back this up: for you to have an epiphany, you have to have alpha, relaxed brainwaves present. You need to be in touch with that ah-ha part of your brain to be successful, and you need chill time to make that ah-ha space available. The last thing that anyone needs is more frenetic energy.
It is enough just to be what you are.
How can you design things in your business with enough white space, and with enough awareness of the value that you bring? That’s where the magic lives.
What story do you want to tell?
So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours!
Go to SoHeresMyStory.com and share your story.
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This week, Jodi and Eliot talk about the psychology of loss, VIP sections, and goldfish the size of a continent, terrorizing the ocean. It all makes sense in the context of the divide between your own expectations, and those of your clients.
Why is all of that important for business?
Many businesses and events have a system that allows clients and participants to engage at different levels. But what happens when these levels inadvertently cause valued clients or peers to feel unappreciated?
This all relates to the psychology of loss. If you have different levels of service or product, how can you address the psychology of loss without making people feel less satisfied with what they have already received, while still demonstrating the value of the higher level?
There are many places where customers set their own expectations, and it is a challenge to navigate those unspoken – but never promised - expectations. Nature abhors a vacuum, and in the absence of certain information, people will fill in their own information and their own expectations.
Like goldfish, if you put them in a bigger container, expectations often get bigger.
Ronald Reagan used to stress the importance of speaking positively – framing situations in terms of what people can do, not what they can’t. Sometimes this framing prevents this disappointment.
Business owners: How do you gage, evaluate and respond to your clients’ expectations and the potential mismatch between the perceived value and worth of what you are bringing and what they are getting out of the exchange.
How can you anticipate where your most important clients might feel this psychology of loss? How can you ensure that they feel in control of moving out of that place of loss?
But beware: there is a careful dance you have to do with feedback. It is all important, but you have to remember to “Eat the fish, spit out the bones”. You have to practice responding to the nutritious and meaningful parts, and know that part is not for you to respond to, but to spit out. There is a point when not everyone is a fit.
How do you make people really happy with the decision they have already made, while maintaining the gap to want to move up the ranks if that is a better fit?
What story do you want to tell?
So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours! How big is your goldfish?
Go to SoHeresMyStory.com and share your story.
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This week, Jodi and Eliot talk stereo equalizers, Top Gun, and goals, and how they all relate to your business.
Why is that important for business?
Sometimes, defining a minimum can be more important than, or at least as important as, setting a goal. Where is the line drawn in the sand of minimum participation in your habits?
“God loves us just the way we are, AND he loves us too much to let us stay that way.” Letting someone grow means first loving who they are. The same with goals – goals that extend you beyond what you thought you can do are great. But where is the setting for knowing what is “good enough” without turning off the drive for something better? Creating a solid foundation of enough actually makes it easier to get to the stretch goal.
We spend a lot of time focusing on stretch goals, but we don’t spend much time talking about what is dipping below the “okay” mark. You don’t need to keep all of your tanks on full, but you need to know that there is a low gas indicator somewhere.
Part of the art of leading is knowing which dials to move to a 10 and which then have to come down to a 2 or 3, just like an equalizer on a stereo. Everything can’t be at a 10 at the same time.
In “The One Thing”, author Gary Keller talks about how a lot of different balls bounce if you drop them; others break. You need to know which balls are going to drop.
When you decide that one or two things are a priority, you have to be clear on the minimum level of care required by the things on the back burner – you still need to keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t start smoking. Knowing what your minimum is allows you to safely put things on the back burner while you focus on other priorities.
Knowing where the equalizers are for the rest of your team is also important.
Is there a second zero, a second baseline, which you can set to keep balls from completely dropping? Or, like in the movie Top Gun, what is the hard deck below which you cannot go?
What story do you want to tell?
So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours! What is your hard deck? Or maybe you have a story about “if people only knew this about my job…” – we would also love to hear those stories right now!
Go to SoHeresMyStory.com and share your story.
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This week, Jodi and Eliot talk about bringing the wrong size of clothes into the dressing room, comedian Kumail Nanjiani, and Jodi’s seeing eye dog, which is apparently our team member Kristi. And somehow, it all makes sense relative to this weeks topic: confidence.
Why is all of that important for business?
In an interview recently, Kumail Nanjiani, from the sitcom Silicon Valley and the movie The Big Sick, said:
“I’ve learned that there is no difference between being confident and pretending to be confident. Nobody else can tell the difference. Even your own body can’t tell the difference. Through the exercise of “fake it till you make it”, I was learning to trust myself. I was learning to trust my decisions and my thoughts and my abilities. Because, all those famous comedians who were so confident in that New York show? They didn’t know what they were doing either. Nobody really knows what they’re doing. Some are just better at pretending like they do.”
People talk about confidence as if it is something you can get and then have. And it doesn’t work that way.
For some, it is developing a working relationship with your insecurities. You may have the fear that if you haven’t done it, you cannot do it; you can accept that as valid, but you can also make friends with it.
Other people get anxious imagining what the worst things that could happen, and need to blindly step forward despite those fear. For these kind of people, it is important not to worry too many steps ahead. Like chess, the game changes with each move.
For all of us, it is important to act “as if” - that is the same, biochemically, as confidence.
There is an immutable connection between belief, behaviours and results, and results reinforce the initial belief. The trap can be imagining that you can change the belief directly. Instead, acting “as if” changes the behaviours, which affects the results and, ultimately, the belief.
There are hacks in the moment to create confidence. See, for instance, Amy Cuddy’s TedTalk where she talks about how body language may shape who you are.
But mostly, confidence is the thing you get from doing the thing; it doesn’t come before you do the thing.
Just as in the documentary Euphoria, some things cannot be pursued directly – they can only be attained obliquely, as with happiness. Confidence may be the same thing – you cannot build it; it is a byproduct of taking action.
And when you don’t have the confidence to start? What’s one tiny step you can make on this? It is rarely so binary as “you either do it or you don’t” – there is usually one little step you can take to get you started.
This also shows up in companies – in their culture and in their leadership: the idea that confidence is something you must have before you act paralyzes movement. Especially if you are looking at what other people in the industry are doing: “we can’t do that because no one else does”. Looking to outside guidance is a great place to look for what not to do, never where you look for what to do.
What story do you want to tell?
So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours! What is your favourite confidence hack?
Go to SoHeresMyStory.com and share your story.
Want to Connect?
You can connect with us or tell your story…
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This week, Jodi and Eliot talk about jiu jitsu, palm writing, and other interesting things that totally make sense once you listen to the episode.
Why is that important for business?
The whole premise for this episode is based on a story - that accomplishments should be written on your hand, and you should celebrate them only until they fade.
The idea is that you should absolutely celebrate the moment, but that as it fades, you don’t continue to have it be “your thing”. That it not be part of your routine to wander through your trophy room. None of us should ever be resting on the thing that we did last week.
Sometimes it helps to personify your company, to elevate the conversation above individual needs. What does that company need? Built into a lot of compensation structures is the idea of resting on your laurels; of being rewarded for past accomplishments. Be conscious about what you reinforce. What do you want your organization to value enough that you would like you to write it on the limited space of your palm?
And yet - everyone has a different pace. Some people, what is written on their hand inspires them immediately to the next thing. For some, longer periods of work and longer periods of celebration are important.
This can be an important concept when hiring. In times of stress, you go back to what you are hardwired to do. What do you want people to be hardwired to view as accomplishments, and does that gel with your organization?
Or, maybe it is not about what we write on our palms at all, but figuring out where we are all headed, and along that path, if we get there, will we celebrate? There is magic when everyone is rowing in the same direction.
And the skills that have gotten you where you are are not the skills that are needed to get you to the next stage.
What story do you want to tell?
So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours!
Go to SoHeresMyStory.com and share your story.
Want to Connect?
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This week, Jodi and Eliot talk about how emotions in business relate to dental hygiene and peanut M&Ms. Trust us – it makes sense.
Why is that important for business?
Often people are apologetic about the emotional component of their response in business. Somewhere along the way, somebody made up this rule that business never has anything to do with ever feeling a personal emotions. And because of that made up, unspoken rule, no one has ever made it okay to do the emotional version of brushing your teeth in business, and then the plaque builds up and it’s problematic. Then the emotional build up gets in the way of what really needs to be dealt with.
Whoever said “it’s not personal, it’s just business” is an idiot.
The word “hygiene” is important here, because it alludes to a regular practice of cleaning and getting rid of what doesn’t need to be there anymore. We don’t apologize for needing to clean your teeth, and we need to get as comfortable with emotional hygiene.
Not clearing the plaque results in the explosive conversations that start with “you always do ____”. A resentment that you didn’t practice good hygiene on has come up, and now it is plaque. Resentment is always something that you have let build up; it comes up because you didn’t address something. Resentment is always yours.
We practice good resentment hygiene in the smallest, most inconsequential ways. Most grievances can be dealt with by dealing with the next act. You don’t need years of ammunition to justify your grievance; you just need to deal with the little things as they come up. And when you start with raising objections to little things, your tone and language and demeanour has to be befitting a little thing. If you have decided that the content of the conversation is on the little incident, you can’t punctuate it with 2 years of rage over similar little things.
Sometimes, a third party is necessary to help you get at the real issue, and that’s okay.
And it is important, in good emotional hygiene, to be clear on what is yours, and when you are ascribing intent to someone else.
The language is so important. Because how you approach an issue will determine, often, how the conversation will go.
Emotional hygiene is knowing when you need the pause, when you need to talk it through with someone else because you can’t find the clarity in it, right-sizing your attack, and lastly, being clear on what outcome you want.
Emotional hygiene is the ability to separate the perceived slight from the actual need. Do you need to fix the slight, or is there a different way to get your need met?
But the first step is acknowledging that it is okay to have emotions in business.
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PLEASE Don’t Say Please
What does thawing bait in the microwave have to do with boundaries in business? This week, Jodi and Eliot discuss hard boundaries and why it’s not always kind to be polite.
Why is that important for business?
Often, in an effort to be nice or polite, we make ill-kept or porous boundaries. We try to ask for things politely, when really, we want to be setting a hard boundary.
Sometimes, we are prioritizing the person’s feelings over the boundary. And other times, in the want to keep the possibility open, we put off the boundary.
Yet, there is a soft hostility, or soft torment, to something less than a definite answer. Allowing expectations to linger can be crueller than a hard boundary; being more definitive about expectations can be a relief.
This lives at the intersection between kind and nice, and they are not always the same. It shows both empathy and compassion to let no be a complete sentence.
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Tamsen Interview
This week, Jodi and Eliot interview Tamsen about when Imposter Syndrome shows up in organizations.
Why is that important for business?
Imposter Syndrome is usually an issue with individuals: perfectly accomplished people who are worried about being “found out” as not expert enough, or just faking it. But organizations are just communities of people, and the neuroses and insecurities of those individuals often gets imbedded at an organization level. Imposter Syndrome can be deep seated, even in large, established, and respected organizations.
This is why branding and marketing exist. At some level, as an organization, you understand there is something valuable in what you have. So you start to put it out into the marketplace. But at some point, some organizations just don’t have faith in what they can truly offer.
No matter who we are, whether we are an individual or an organization, we think differentiation comes down to characteristics. But differentiation is actually the product of our decisions. If you can go back and re-create those decisions, then you can reveal to yourself exactly what you do differently.
One of the hallmarks of an institution suffering from Imposter Syndrome is the degree to which they are using other organizations as the benchmark for how they want to represent themselves. Competing on price, feeling like no one gets you, trying to differentiate on the slight variances on commodity product or service – these are all signs that your organization is suffering from Imposter Syndrome.
The answer is usually simple, and if we could just see what other people see, we could see what is truly different about us. It is the Curse of Knowledge: once you know something, you cannot imagine what it was like not to know it. People have to see the backstory and see how you became this thing. You need to put yourself in the position of seeing yourself with fresh eyes, and ask the questions to see objectively. Then the Curse of Knowledge becomes the Blessing of Knowledge.
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This week, Jodi harasses Eliot into seeing how critical it is to be able to take a compliment.
Why is that important for business?
Knowing your value, and using it as a foundation for growing your business, is the only way to create a truly wonderful experience for your clients and customers.
It is typically easier to have a “hard conversation” and tell someone the “bad” stuff about them than it is to get someone to sit still and listen to a genuine compliment.
But here’s the thing: Giving and receiving of any kind is a finely balance ecosystem. If I want to give something to you – a compliment or a favor or anything – you have to be willing to catch that ball, or it doesn’t work. It can’t be a one-sided exchange. There has to be someone on the other end of the seesaw.
When someone tells you that you are wrong about a compliment – “no, no, I’m not actually that good” – they are taking something that is yours. They don’t actually get to weigh in on what you think (and admire and appreciate) about them. There is a responsibility to recognize that you are wrecking something for someone else when you refuse to take a compliment.
You also can’t grow as a person or a company unless you are building on a solid foundation of what is working well.
And even if you can’t accept what you are good at, through someone else’s eyes, the least you can do is simply say “thank you”, so you don’t disrupt that ecosystem. This allows you to create space for the possibility that this might be true, and it allows you to create a foundation to build on.
This is merely accepting that someone else’s experience of you is ____.
It is an important practice to be able to be with both ends of real and authentic; to be able to take both genuine
criticism and genuine compliments.
We are all hungry for that spotlight, but once we’re there, we deflect out of it as soon as possible. But if we can stop and take a breath in that space, and just say “thank you”, it can be an opportunity.
What story do you want to tell?
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Have you ever had someone throw up a barrier when you are just trying to determine if you want to work with them? This week, Eliot and Jodi talk about how a $50 charge at a travel agency might relate to your business.
Why is that important for business?
Sometimes, businesses value their needs to the exclusion of the needs and expectations of the new client, and in so doing, they establish the first step in a new relationship as a barrier.
There is a fear that if you give away, you will go down a slippery slope of giving it all away. But often the thing you do to protect yourself from something puts you on the fast track to that very thing you were trying to avoid.
It might seem like a good idea to establish a policy that protects you from someone who will pick your brain and then not use your services; however, at the same time, that very policy may act as a barrier to the very customers that you are looking for.
This isn’t about creating a policy that will protect you. It is about figuring out the generalized emotional state of potential clients. It is about asking yourself, “What would smooth the road between my client and saying yes?”
Part of the issue is the blurry line between the sales process and the service process. Staying focused on their emotional experience and needs helps you to avoid policies that create barriers in order to solve a problem you are experiencing.
In this wonderful article, “Using Customer Journey Maps to Improve Customer Experience,” Adam Richardson (@Richardsona) explains how you can map out your customers emotions so that you can pre-calm fears and assuage periods of uncertainty or anxiety.
If you can’t find the empathy for your clients and what they are worried about – which, frankly, might be you – you are missing a huge opportunity.
It is important to understand your clients’ needs and expectations, and to smooth their anxieties. And it is also about having confidence in the value you provide, and your ability to convey that value. And trusting that you know where to draw the line where to stop giving for free, and that if they don’t get the value, it’s okay.
Some key things to remember:
- Are you addressing their fear or yours?
- Where are you skittish as a buyer, and are you overly protective about that part of the sales process in your business?
What’s YOUR story?
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this episode, or other business stories you’d like to share.
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Nutrition and business – how much do they have in common? This week on So Here’s My Story, Jodi and Eliot talk about the importance of taking a break, in nutrition, and in business.
Why is that important for business?
In nutrition or in business, there is a level of performance that yields results, and a level that means almost identical energy output, with diminishing returns. It is often better to take a week off and come back at full focus than to continue to work at a capacity that isn’t working. It’s important to play strategic hooky. So why don’t we?
There is almost universal buy in on the smaller part of that picture – we know we get our best idea in the shower or walking the dog because of the mental break. But where people tend to get off the boat is making it strategic, because that seems like an abdication of responsibility.
But everything – from yoga to nutrition to exercise – has built in ebbs and flows, and it is in the rest period that you actually gain the strength. It is counterintuitive, but it’s in the period of not doing that you actually make the leaps forward.
Everyone tells the story of the lumberjack stopping to sharpen his saw, but when the rubber hits the road, most people don’t have the courage to actually live that story.
It’s even more insidious than “that’s how we’ve always done it” – this is perfectionism, and this is pride.
Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough. Julia Cameron
When they do studies, people are often completely mentally exhausted, and also completely unaware of their cognitive degradation. By the time you are feeling exhausted, taking a break is the most important thing you can do, but it often feels like the last thing you can do.
Your brain is not meant to run marathons; it is meant to run sprints.
If you build a routine, and schedule your downtime, it makes it strategic. You also need to set up your company culture to value clarity, and not penalize people for seeking it.
Not stopping is often a point of pride, and that value can be very misguided.
Taking a break can be the most responsible thing you do.
What story do you have about playing strategic hooky?
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Why would you need a safe word in business? This week on So Here’s My Story, Eliot and Jodi talk about clients we don’t love.
Why is that important for business?
What do you do with clients that you feel like you can’t do your best work with? First, you have to know what IS a good client, so you can figure out when a non-ideal client shows up. Sometimes, we lack the courage to disappoint.
We can get better at it if we get better at acknowledging the economic realities and responsibilities of a business. Sometimes we take these clients on because of those pressures. But the opportunity exists when we take these clients on because we haven’t crystalized what a fit is enough that we can say it out loud.
Creating a “Go/No Go” chart can be helpful for this kind of clarity, and this episode talks about how to come to those decisions.
Like when your wheels are out of alignment in your car and the steering wheel pulls, you can also feel that pull to say “yes” every time you respond to a request from a client that isn’t a fit.
The better a business is at framing the concept of “if…we’re not your guys”, the better that business will do. If the culture isn’t so clear that nobody says “I don’t want to work there”, it probably isn’t clear enough. The same can be said about the clients you take on.
Part of this is getting clear on deal breakers. If someone is a 9/10 on a checklist of assets, they can still be a bad fit if the 1 is a deal breaker. A great litmus test: “If you do this, what would make you call me in 6 weeks begging to leave?”
What client have you regretted taking?
So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours!
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Just Say… THAT
What could parenting anger possibly have to do with business? This week on So Here’s My Story, Eliot and Jodi talk hard conversations and, somehow, Sam Shepard (except, she REALLY meant Sam Elliott!!).
Why is that important for business?
You know those moments where something happens that makes you mad, but you know there is no satisfying outcome? It can be so hard to walk away, like you are giving a victory to the other side. How do you just STOP being angry? Whether it’s about your kids or about your work, it can be hard.
But sometimes the value of these conversations isn’t a solution; sometimes it is simply about being heard, and seeking to understand. There might not be a satisfying outcome, but it may still have value.
There is a lot lost when you try to play out all the versions of a conversation, and then decide to not have the conversation for all of those imagined reasons.
The temptation is to make it a binary choice- either I swallow this, and I carry this brick, or I hurl it with lethal force at someone else. But there are other options.
We are really bad at predicting other people’s intentions. Sometimes, just being curious relieves the problem without conflict.
When your sense of value feels threatened, you have the same biological fight or flight response in your body and brain as if a tiger walked into a room. You can’t not have the response, you can only get better at dealing with it. Sometimes, it is enough simply to identify that you are triggered.
Susan Campbell in her book Saying What’s Real talks about how most of us communicate to get or avoid a certain reaction. But that’s actually controlling. An important part of being a leader is being able to look past the surface conversation and see what need is trying to be met.
What bricks are you carrying? So we told you our story – now it’s time to tell us yours! Go to SoHeresMyStory.com and share your story. Want to Connect? You can connect with us or tell your story... via our confidential toll free line at 1-833-83-STORY Email: talktous@heresmystory.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/SHMSpodcast Twitter: @SHMSpodcast Enjoy this podcast? Review us on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to the podcast. Or consider joining in our Patreon page. (http://www.patreon.com/SHMSpodcast)
This week, Jodi and Eliot talk about how motivation and routine are linked, and what filing cabinets and pit stops on a race track have to do with business.
Why is routine important for business?
When we are especially busy or stressed, it is easy to forget to do, or convince ourselves we don’t have time to do, the very things that keep us centered. And it is only in returning to those routines that we find ourselves able to navigate the work effectively again. Even though absolutely nothing might change, the way you see those things in your business or life changes.
Interestingly, the things we tend to skip when we are busy are literally the things that help our brain to work its best – down time, sleep, exercise and good eating. These are critical for your work, yet the things that you often cut first. It is also crucial to “be around people who remind you where the spark is”. This spark is the beginning to becoming centered and returning to a comfortable head space.
You have to be able to step outside of the experience you hate having and contextualize it. Clues that you need to recalibrate before continuing can be when it feels hard or slogging or like nothing is fun, but you have to learn your own cues.
Far more harm is done than good by stepping over our own vulnerabilities. “You need to not only understand your own “low fuel” indicator, but also what fuel goes in your tank”.
What about you?
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Christmas in July…
We know – Christmas is a weird topic in the middle of the summer. But this week, Jodi and Eliot explore what Christmas traditions share with business structure, and what to do when neither are making magic any more.
Why is that important for business?
As kids, it feels like anything can happen during the holidays – it is a magical time. As adults, we often try to recreate those feelings by doing the same things over and over again. We end up creating the opposite of “anything can happen” magic in our effort to recreate it.
It got me to thinking - where is structure and tradition valuable, and where is spontaneity and improvisation valuable? This balance comes up all of the time in business.
If you are going to have rules, make sure they are your rules. You have to figure out what metric you actually judge great work by. Make sure they help you move towards the company you want to be and the service you want to have. Where is there space for you to re-organize or re-structure the rules so that both you and your clients’ needs are met?Where are you saying “well, that’s how we’ve always done it”, and is it serving you?
What is it you are ultimately seeking and is the structures of your business (or your Christmas) meeting that need? It’s like the classic business story:
Two managers are talking about training their employees. The first asks, "Yeah, but what if we train them, and they just leave?" The second responds, "What if we don't train them, and they stay?"
If you removed all of the rules and started from scratch, what would you put back in?
Resources Mentioned
The Disciplined Pursuit of Less from the Harvard Business Review
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How could a couples' massage possibly leave you cranky...?
What do couples’ massages and unfulfilled expectations have in common? Probably not what you think! This week, and Jodi and Eliot talk about how a clear process can be just as important as a clear promise.
Why is that important for business?
Sometimes, no matter how good the product or service is, disappointment can still overshadow the experience when expectations aren’t met.
Often, this is an issue of operations knowing what marketing is doing. And sometimes it isn’t a communications issue, it is a clarity issue.
It can be even more of a challenge to get in front of expectations that you don’t even know to expect.
What is clear is that there is something refreshing about setting authentic expectations – you don’t need to fluff up your promises like Ginsu knives for the promise to be compelling.
If you know where people might be extra hopeful, or scared, or not know, then you can think about how you can address that before it happens.
So often we are so focused on the problem that we have a solution for, that we don’t think about the thoughts and expectations that go through a client’s mind during the process. Sometimes, those fear are even more pronounced than the problem that brought them to you.
Figuring out the process is one thing. The next level is to make sure it becomes part of the culture and operations of your company.
It is so important to look under that rock of mismatched expectations.
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Photo Credit: Blackberry Farm Flickr via Compfight cc
When Leadership = Looking Dumb?
“Are we weird?” is the topic at hand this week, and Jodi and Eliot talk about how a lot of business people feel that they should have the answers to all of the business questions that pop up.
Why is that important for business?
Because leadership is this wild vat of uncertainty, and almost every day, people want to know if their problems are weird.
But here’s the thing: leadership doesn’t look like knowing the answers. Knowing all of the answers is usually about wanting to look good; it takes courage to ask the questions.
Jodi quotes Julio Olalla from one of her favorite videos (http://bit.ly/2s9kehH) as saying “knowledge is a love affair of answers. Wisdom is a love affair with the questions…”
You earn the right to give direction by not having the answers and asking the questions.
The reason that people and companies need leadership is that there are nuanced complexities that have to be navigated, and you can’t see them until you ask the questions.
Sometimes the best thing to say is “tell me what you know”.
And sometimes, in that emotional insecurity, there’s a reluctance to admit sameness. Often, your problems are not as unique are you think they are. Like a teenager, business people are in this tension between standing out and fitting in – you want to know your problems aren’t weird, but you want to be different. The same push-pull exists between wanting to be on your own, but not; being captain of your own ship, but still being part of a loosely defined fleet.
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Rule #1
What do a parking ticket and a cashier’s cheque have to do with business? This week, Eliot and Jodi talk about the importance of not making things complicated for your customers, and the difference between process and outcome.
Why is that important for business?
The confused mind says no.
Having a catalog of options is great, but it still needs to be easy for your customers to choose.
Sometimes, in an effort to make it so each individual in your marketplace finds that custom fit, you make every individual in your marketplace paralyzed with indecision.
There is a certain complexity that comes with being out of touch with what the end user is going to need and want; that complexity is often the result of being too close to your offering. Great ideas tend not to survive their first encounter with the market because of this.
And sometimes, the problem comes with creating global rules to one instance of a challenge; strapping a solution on a problem without thinking about the unintended consequences. Think: is this a situation that needs a policy versus something that just needs a conversation?
Share your story
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Pee my WHAT? What does peeing your pants have to do with better business? This week, Jodi and Eliot talk about the importance of sharing those vulnerable stories that businesses need to tell.
Why is that important for business? There’s this weird counterintuitive perception that people don’t want to share those stories. And peeing your pants might not be the story that you are going to lead with the first time you meet someone (in theory). And yet what is also true is that given a moment where someone else is sharing their story, suddenly other people want to share. That is at the core of what we are getting at with this podcast. That safe space, where people can share their worst stories, can be created by the fact that the first person shared their own. There is safety in numbers. People are dying to tell these stories, and creating that safe space doesn’t take a lot of work, it isn’t magic. Our acknowledged shared humanity in sharing goofy embarrassing stories made even more vulnerable things easier to talk about.
How do I start these conversations? To really get this idea of how one person can create this space, you really need to watch this Derek Sivers video on how to start a movement in 3 minutes or less: https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement#t-52060 The first follower is what turns the Lone Nut into a Leader. We want to be the Lone Nuts of telling these business stories. And of course, we wouldn’t expect you to go it alone. So we tell our own Business Pee Pants stories in this episode (and probably future episodes!)
Share your story… So what is your business version of I peed my pants story? The story doesn’t have to end well or be tied up in a bow; it can be something you are worried about NOW. What you are feeling, what you are thinking, what concerns you, the deepest darkest fears that you have that might be paralyzing you and causing you to spin in circles: these are the stories that so many of us have in common. We want to hear!
So here are several ways you can connect with us and share your stories (and if you don’t want your name mentioned…. Just say so. We’ll paraphrase the important parts and completely obscure your identity, with no references to your name or company.
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