Author: AJ Vaden

Ep 182: How to Develop Stronger Social Justice Sensitivity with Kim Scott

RV (00:06):
Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/podcall brand builders, group.com/podcall. We hope to talk to you soon.
I am excited to introduce you to a new friend of mine, Kim Scott.

RV (00:57):
You probably recognize her as the New York times bestselling author of the book, radical candor but a mutual friend of ours introduced us to each other. And so we’re really just kind of getting to know each other, but I’ve got a lot of respect for her work specifically with radical candor, which was you know, a huge book is a huge book. She also turned that book into a business an executive education company. And we’ll talk a little bit about that and she’s done the same with her new book. So she has a new book that is out just came out. If you’re listening to this, this episode, as it’s being released called just work get BPO stuff, get stuff done fast and fair. And that is her newest book. So what you may not realize is that she’s been a high profile CEO coach for years and years, she worked with people at Dropbox, Qualtrix, Twitter, several other tech companies.

RV (01:57):
She was also a member of the faculty at Apple university. And then before that she worked at Google on the ad sense and YouTube and DoubleClick teams. There was a portion of her career. She worked directly for Sheryl Sandberg. She tells some great stories about that. And so anyways, we just thought it would be fun to have her come on, talk a little bit about her journey, becoming an author, but really talk about just work the new book and also how this, you know, kind of getting things done fast and fair applies to those of us with personal brands and businesses and our online community. So anyways, Kim, welcome to the show.

KS (02:36):
Thank you so much. It’s an honor to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah.

RV (02:40):
So how did you go from radical candor to a book about work? I mean, correct me if I’m wrong. I, as I understand this, this is just work. The new book is really about workplace injustices. How did you talk to us about how did that transition happen?

KS (03:02):
So after I wrote radical candor, and by the way, if you write a book about feedback, you’re going to get a lot of it. And I started, and so I was giving a presentation about radical candor at a tech company in San Francisco. And the CEO of that company was someone I really liked and admired a lot and had been our colleague for the better part of a decade and is one of two few black women CEOs in tech. And after I gave the presentation, she pulled me aside and she said to me, I really love the idea of radical candor, Kim, and it’s, I think it’s going to help me build the kind of culture I want, but I got to tell you it’s much harder for me to put it into practice than it is for you. She said, yeah, as soon as I offer even the most compassionate candor, I get slimed with the angry black woman stereotype.

KS (03:54):
And I knew this was true. And I sort of realized three things at the same time. The first was that I had failed to be the kind of colleague that I wanted to be, that I saw myself as, because I had been in denial about the kinds of things that were happening to her. I had failed to notice that over the better part of a decade working together, she always 100% of the time showed up as cheerful and pleasant and never the slightest bit annoyed and believed me and that period of time she had what to be PO about. So it never had occurred to me that the, the toll that must take on her and I had ignored the kinds of things that were causing her to have to behave that way. Furthermore, I had also been in denial about the kinds of things that were happening to me as a woman in the workplace, because it was harder for her than for me. It was harder for me than for the men who I worked with to put these ideas into practice. And I had just kind of glossed over that fact, but touch very lightly on it in the book and the third revelation I had. Yeah, you’re talking

RV (05:02):
About in radical candor, you touched on that very lightly about the, about the messenger in addition to kind of like the method effects that can affect things just

KS (05:15):
About sexism in the workplace. And, and the third thing that I realized was that throughout my career, I had very often failed to be the kind of leader that would prevent this kind of nonsense from allowing everyone on my team to just work, to, to do the best work of their lives, sort of unimpeded by nonsense by, by, by, by various sorts of bias, prejudice and bullying that happens at work. And so I realized this was something I needed to give more thought to, and that was sort of when I sat down to start writing just work.

RV (05:53):
Gotcha. Okay. So you’re, you’re kind of waking up to the idea that in justice or bias, which I guess would be a lighter form on the, on the continuum is, is something that is there all day every day. And I mean, is that, I mean, is that part of the conclusion you would still stand in? Is that like what you said it was harder for her. It was, you know, it was harder for her than you harder for you than maybe a white male. And do you still stand very much convicted in that space? That, that is the truth. Yeah,

KS (06:26):
Yeah, absolutely. A hundred percent. And in fact, I would say it’s not only biased. I think one of the mistakes that I made for a lot of my career was that I, I tried to commence myself. It was always bias, but I think it’s one of the core ideas in the book is it’s really important to distinguish between bias, prejudice, and bullying. So bias. I’m going to define as not meaning it prejudice, I’m going to define as meaning it, it’s a very conscious belief and bullying. I’m going to define as meaning harm. And these are three very different attitudes and behaviors. And I think both when we’re confronted with them as the person harmed by these idea, by these, by these attitudes and behaviors, we’ve got to respond differently. And as leaders we’ve got to respond differently, we’ve got to, we’ve got to create very different kinds of interventions depending on what we’re facing.

RV (07:20):
Huh. And so w I mean, I think that’s really fascinating delineation there, but between those and what are some of the, as a, as a, as a leader in the workplace or as you’re training leaders, what are some of the things that you’re teaching them to look for to kind of identify, you know, bias, prejudice, bullying? I mean, and I think bullying to me feels a little more obvious, a little more noticeable, but to me it’s more like prejudice is a little harder to identify and then bias is almost like invisible. So, I mean, yeah,

KS (08:00):
So you’ve got to make the invisible visible. So, so, and by the way, it’s, it’s, you’ve got to notice what you are reluctant to notice, I guess, is a better way to put it. So one of the things that I recommend that leaders do is to create bias interrupters on their team. So, and there’s all different kinds of bias. There’s racial bias, there’s gender bias. There’s, there’s bias around sexual orientation. There’s bias around mental health. There’s all these biases that we have. And so rather than doing an abstract, unconscious bias training for folks, what I recommend is, is to teach people to, to come up with the phrase that they’re, that everybody’s going to agree on, that, that they’re going to use to flag bias when they notice it in a meeting or, or just in the hallway, in the office, on the zoom. And the important thing is that it’s a shared vocabulary.

KS (08:54):
So some teams we’ve worked with have chosen to say bias alert with my editor. He and I would use yo. So if he said, yo to me, I knew that night that I had said, or done something that was biased with tree air Bryant, my co-founder and I, we use a purple flag. So, so if tree air says purple flag to me, I know I’ve just said or done something biased. And then the nuts thing that leaders need to do is to teach people when you’re, when you are the person whose bias has been flagged how to respond. Because very often when, when somebody, when somebody points out that we sat or done something bias, we feel ashamed. And very often when we feel ashamed, we don’t respond well. In fact, we respond with denial or

RV (09:45):
Defensive, for sure. Like, nah, I didn’t say that. I didn’t mean that. I mean that, yeah, for sure. Yeah.

KS (09:50):
Yeah. I mean, I’ve, I’ve done that. I bet you we’ve all done that.
RV (09:55):
I feel almost like it’s a human instinct to that. It’s almost like a form of being attacked, like, like a same way. You would deal with a physical attack with like running away or fighting back. It’s like, when you under encounter this, like, you know, professional feedback is like, nah, nah, you know, that’s not, that’s not me. Yeah. Yeah.

KS (10:13):
So I think what you want to do is you want to teach people either to say, you’re right. I get it. I’m sorry. I’ll try not to do it again, but please point it out if I do. And if you don’t understand why, what you said or did was biased. You just say, I don’t, I don’t get it. Can you explain it to me after the meeting? And then the meeting goes on and it’s important that it be very quick, but these bias interruptions because bias happens so often. If, if, if we don’t learn how to interrupt it quickly and publicly, then, then it’s bound to keep going. So I, and I think you, you want to, as a leader, teach people to have kind of a growth mindset around their biases because obviously if you’re learning math or you’re learning to throw base, you’re learning any new skill, throw a baseball, you’re going to make mistakes.

KS (11:02):
And then you can only get better if someone points your mistakes out to you. And if you can overcome that natural feeling, and this is true in general, when I was teaching medical candor, I still do. People are defensive in the face of any kind of criticism. There’s specially defensive in the face of criticism around something that they said or did is biased. But we’ve got to learn how to accept this with a growth mindset, except this kind of feedback with the growth mindset and unlike other kinds of criticism, this needs to happen in public. It needs to happen in a meeting publicly because otherwise, if you don’t, if you don’t interrupt the bias, it’s gonna, it’s gonna continue and people will keep making the same mistakes. So, so that’s my, yeah. Let me tell you just like a quick story about a successful bias interruption.

KS (11:58):
So friend of mine, alien Lake walks into a meeting with two colleagues who are men and she sits down and her two colleagues sit down to her left and Ayleen is the person who has the expertise that is necessary for her team to win the deal with this other company they’re meeting with. So they’re sitting down on this long conference table, people from the other team file, and the first guy comes and sits down across from the guy to aliens left. The next guy comes in and sits across from the guy to his left. And then everybody files on down the table, kind of leaving a lane, dangling by herself at the end of the, at the end of the table. And so this is a little awkward, but she doesn’t let it bother her. She starts talking and the people on the other side of the table respond to the men who she’s as though she hasn’t talked as though they’ve taught. And this is a very sort of standard kind of no, not

RV (12:52):
An uncommon, not an uncommon, probably all too uncommon thing. Yeah.

KS (12:57):
Happen all the time. And it happens once it happens twice, it happens a third time. And finally the, the, her business partner stands up and said, I think Eileen and I should switch seats. So this is a small bias interruption. They don’t have like a co you know, they don’t have this. It’s

RV (13:14):
Not an intervention, like a big intervention, but they’re saying, Whoa, something’s going on here. I

KS (13:19):
Think Elena and I should switch seats and, and they switched seats. And the whole dynamic in the room changes because all of a sudden, the other side realizes what they’re doing and they stopped doing it. They didn’t mean to do it. And so I liked this story for a couple of reasons. One is, it was so much easier for him as an upstander to do this than it would have been for Eileen to do it. If she had stood up and said, I think we should switch seats. And then there would have been like bias heaped on top of bias. She, all of a sudden would have been aggressive or abrasive or having knows what else she would have been called. So it was much easier for him. And also his motivation is really, as an upstander is really important. Part of the reason he did it because he cares about Elaine and he didn’t like seeing her get ignored.

KS (14:03):
But the other part of the reason that he did it was because he wanted to win the deal. He wanted to just work. And he knew that AYLIEN had the expertise. And if he couldn’t get those people on the other team to listen to her,then they were not going to win the deal. So it’s, this is the just work part of just work. It, there was a justice element. There was like a, I just want to get the deal done. And, and there was also him just standing up, not for Eileen. It wasn’t like she was a helpless person, but to what was going on in the room. So that’s a simple example of somebody who used an I statement to intervene to, to flag. And, and the reason why I think it’s so important that leaders create these bias interrupters is that that sort of thing happens so rarely. And if you can get that kind of thing happening more on your Team
RV (14:59):
and the bias interrupters happen, the bias

KS (15:01):
Interrupter happens. So rarely. Yeah. The bias itself happens lot. Yeah. All the time incessantly. So if you can get that flywheel going, it’s like, doesn’t have to be a huge deal. And that it wasn’t like a major conflict, but it is a huge deal in that they won the deal because of it. And and everybody was able to do better work because the, the, the bias was gotten out of the way. Yeah.

RV (15:28):
And I, I mean, I, I really appreciate the message and kind of the spirit of that, you know, of the title, which is, you know, in alignment with the book, which is like, Hey, if we can get this bias and this prejudice out of here, then it’s like, we can just work. Like we can, we can come together as a team. We can focus, we can drive results and not like get caught up in, you know, nonsense as you, that word I think you used earlier. I, one thing I hope you don’t mind, I’m fascinated about this is I was wondering if, if I could talk to you a little bit about, you know, a lot of people who listen to this show are influenced. I mean, pretty much everyone who listens to this show in some level would re probably considered an influencer.
RV (16:07):
Some of them have very large following, some have very small followings. I think it’s really fascinating how you’re talking about how bias interrupters, this type of feedback should happen publicly. Whereas typically feedback is, is usually more private. You know, it makes my mind think of social media. Like this is the world we’re, we’re, we’re trying to navigate, particularly our community is going okay. One is, I guess, I guess my, my biggest question is to go, how do we catch ourselves? Particularly if we’re creating content, which is a little bit different, but not too much different. I wouldn’t think like, how do I create catch myself? And I, it could be with creating content, but I think it’s probably the same in a board room or the same at a restaurant, or anywhere we go, how do we catch ourselves committing these biases? And is there a way that we can create these interrupters for ourselves? And then is there a way that that does or does not shape our communication, our public communication through social? Yeah.
KS (17:12):
Yeah. It’s a really, it’s a really important question. So one of the things that I did when I was in the course of writing this book, because I was, obviously, I knew that I was probably writing in a way that was biased revealing certain prejudices. And so sometimes I tend to use very aggressive language that some people might consider bullying. And so I really wanted someone to help me flag this. I mean, I think that some people can, can give themselves feedback and can catch themselves, but I find I need others. I need other people to offer me criticism. And so I actually, I actually worked with a number of people who, who were sort of biased busters. So I asked them to read the book with, with sort of looking for examples of bias that, that, that were making revealing themselves in my choice of words.
KS (18:07):
And breeze Harper is one of the people who I worked with as a, as a, as a bias busters, as well as a number of others. And she was incredibly helpful to me to, to help me understand where I was going wrong. So to help me identify problems before the book got published, which was really important to me, sometimes this is called like a sensitivity read, but I really object to that term because it wasn’t really just about sensitivity. It was I did not want to harm people. I did not want to do harm to people with the words that I chose. So I’ll give you an example of one of the things
RV (18:47):
That, and that is the definition of bias you, that you gave earlier. It’s like, I’m not meaning to do harm, but it kind of happens anyways. Yeah. Yeah.
KS (18:56):
My intentions don’t really matter. My impact does. And and so, so one of the, one of the words that, well, one of the things that happened actually in this, I think happens to a lot of people. So I’ll share this breeze flagged about nine words that I tended to use that were problematic nine. And my instinct, my first instinct was I like God, no word of English. Language is saying, which is ridiculous. Right. But I think a lot of people. So anyway, one of one thing I would recommend to people is that you try to quantify your biases. Like there were nine words I needed to change, and they’re hundreds of thousands of words in the English language. So it was not that big of a deal really. And one of the words in particular that you flagged as I tend to use the word, see when, what I mean is notice or understand.
KS (19:45):
And so this is called abelist language. I’m sort of, I’m sort of a S because the implication, the UN, the unintentional implication is that if someone is blind, they don’t notice or understand. And of course that’s false. I know that’s, I don’t mean that, but that, that’s kind of the way a sloppy metaphor slop while I call them soppy sight metaphors. And I care about this, and I care about it because I believe words matter and I’m a writer. And so I should care about words. And I also cared about it because another one of the people who was helping me to edit the book is a guy named Zach shore. Who’s a historian who’s blind. And so the last thing in the world I wanted to do was to, to use the language that would, that would harm Zach and people like SAC and other blind people in some kind of way. So, because I care about Zach and also because I wanted to use better language, I thought I had fixed this problem that I had. And and, and, but I decided to do a quick search right before I sent the bark to my editor. And I had used sloppy site metaphors, guess how many times? In a 350 page book?
RV (21:02):
I mean, I don’t know, 25,
KS (21:04):
99 times, 99 times. A lot of times. So, so it is, it’s difficult to become aware of your biases and I believe we need, this is why I think it’s so important to flag bias publicly, too, to say bias alert to have these bias interrupters, because only when, when they get our biases get interrupted repeatedly, do we begin to change our thought patterns around them? So I think that’s really, so I really, that’s a, long-winded answer to your question
RV (21:40):
Though. Social plaster. Yeah. But social media kind of serves is, is more and more serving in that way. Right? Like people are speaking up very clearly when they think you have said something or done something wrong. So the let’s talk about the response part of it for a second. Cause I think that’s really, like you said, like the, I think my default, whether it’s in a business boardroom or if it’s at a family Thanksgiving, or if it’s on social media, my, my initial feedback, my initial response is probably the same to reject, denied, dilute Dodge, you know, defend whatever, you know, variation you want to use of that. And I, and I think, you know, so many of the events that have happened, particularly in the last year, I feel like have at least opened up a number of people to go, you know what? I want to get better at this. I want to, I I’m open to the idea that maybe I do have some biases. Maybe I even have some prejudices that I’m not aware of and I’m wanting to be open to it. So when it comes to us, how should we receive it? Yeah.
KS (22:56):
It is one of the best, one of the best things I’ve ever heard about this is a podcast by Bernay Brown about shame. And she said and she, she, she offered this podcast shortly after the murder of George Floyd. And she said so often, and she said, I’m speaking to my white audience here. She said, so often when we get feedback that we’ve said something or done something that’s racially biased, or even prejudiced, we feel shame. And she encourages people to like notice in your body where you feel shame. Like, I feel it in the back of my knees, the same place. I feel like if I get too close to the edge of a high drop, I feel afraid, you know, it’s a physical feeling. And when you feel ashamed, you learn how to calm. You’re having a fight or flight response. And we rarely respond in the way that we want to spot respond and we’re having a fight or flight response.
KS (23:54):
So you gotta learn how to calm yourself down. So the first thing is calm down, like take a few deep breaths, walk away, don’t respond immediately, walk away from Twitter or wherever you are. And then even if the person, I think there’s her point Bernay Brown’s point was that there’s a giant difference between feeling ashamed and being shamed. So very often the person is giving you some feedback that is perfectly reasonable. And so you want to make sure that you respond to that reasonable feedback with a reasonable response. So try to stay open to the feedback, but even if, and this is true of any kind of criticism don’t criticize the criticism, when someone is offering you some criticism, try to look for the gold in it, treat it even, even if it’s not perfectly delivered. And so, and this is something I’ve found over and over again, when I’ve gotten, I got feedback, it was couple years ago.
KS (24:50):
Now I tweeted something and I used the word crazy and enable list way. And I didn’t w what I really meant was irrational, you know, and somebody pointed out that it was, it was unfair to to people who struggled with mental illness, for me to use a sloppy soppy metaphor. And, and I really appreciated that. They said it very nicely. They, they sent me a link to an article that I read that was really helpful. And so I said, thank you. And then I retweeted it so that others could avoid making the same mistake. And there, I got some trollish response, you know? Oh, everybody’s over-sensitive. And so now all of a sudden, I’m in the position of having to explain to folks why it’s, it’s worth listening to this, to this kind of feedback. So I think that’s really important is, is being open to the feedback, even if the feedback is, especially if it’s well-delivered, but even when it’s not well delivered.
KS (25:56):
So I think social media kind of, it kind of lends itself to moral grandstanding. And so, so people are likely to, to call you some terrible name and if you can, and those, and this has happened to me over and over again. If you can say, if you can find like the 5% of what you can agree with and, and, and state that rather than going fighting and attack with another attack, it’s incredible to me what good conversations you can have with people, how you can actually turn them around, even on social media, but don’t give in to this moral grandstanding. Don’t play
RV (26:37):
That game. Well, it’s funny too. And I, you know, you said don’t criticize the criticism, which is really good. What I find myself doing is I not only criticized the criticism, I criticized the criticizer, so they attack me and I go, well, yeah, I might’ve done this, but only because you, yeah, you did this. And it, it just becomes this really negative spiral. Yeah. Navy seals have this thing called arousal response, which is like, you know, there’s a stimulus and it’s like, don’t just react to the stimulus, like process it for a second. And it’s, it’s such a, it’s like an emotional discipline or like a mental mental discipline. Yeah. So I think you know, on, on the, on the topic, you know, in the space of this, is there any sort of advice or wisdom or counsel specifically that you would give additionally to people who are out there, you know, that are messengers, they’re communicating you know, these are the content creators of, of the world that are listening here and going, is there anything that we can do to kind of like I guess just be aware of this and drive more towards fairness and be sort of sensitive to, I mean, I think you’ve used some really hyper, granular examples with you.
RV (28:05):
That would be, I think you, you know, you could, you could argue are overly sensitive or certainly being very hypersensitive. I mean, do you think, do you think that all content creators should be that way or, you know, or any other kind of like last wisdom you would leave with us?
KS (28:23):
I think you w you want to be aware of the impact that your words have on others. I think that whenever you are writing something or offering a podcast, or even just tweeting words, matter words really matter. And if you’re going to communicate with other people, you need to understand the impact of your word. So let’s imagine that you were accidentally stepping on someone’s toe and someone said, Hey, you’re on my toe. You wouldn’t stand there and continue to stand on their toe and say, don’t be so sensitive or wear steel-toed boots, or I didn’t mean to stand out. You would just get off their toe. And I think if you can kind of use that metaphor, that metaphor, that can be helpful. Another thing that I would say is when you notice bias, use an ice statement, and I statement invites someone in to understand things from your perspective, when you notice prejudice and you don’t necessarily want to have a big debate, because people have a right to believe, whatever they want to blame, but they don’t have a right to impose those beliefs on others.
KS (29:29):
And so when you, when you notice prejudice, when you notice an actual prejudice where somebody is saying something and meaning it, I think in it statement is much more effective. And then it statement can appeal to law. It is illegal to, it can appeal to common sense. It’s ridiculous too, but use that it statement to demarcate that boundary between one person’s freedom to believe whatever they want, but another person’s freedom not to have that belief imposed upon them. And then when it’s bullying, you want to use a use statement, sort of which pushes the other person away. You can’t talk to me like that, or what’s going on for you here. If that feels like it’s going to escalate. My daughter actually explained this to me in third grade, she was getting bullied. And I suggested to her that she, that she used an I statement.

Ep 181: How Personal Brands Can Create an Unbeatable Mind with Mark Divine | Recap Episode

RV (00:07):
Welcome to this Navy seal recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. Whoa. Talking about how personal brands can create an unbeatable mind with long time Navy seal commander, mark divine. I mean this guy. Oh, holy moly. Like hoof. I mean, I don’t know what to say like this, th th th this interview, it blew my mind and I’ve interviewed mark before. We’ve, we’ve known each other for years and every time I interface with him, I am just amazed at like, I mean, the thing that jumps out to me is just like the concept of mental toughness of literally just preparing your mind for battle. I mean, but not just, you know, not just battle in terms of war, which of course he’s got a lot of experience with, but, but, but more than that leadership and, and problem solving and challenges and vision, and just like, you know, there’s so many things that, that you can learn you, you know, like there’s knowledge that you can learn.
RV (01:17):
But when I think of mark Devine, my, my brain goes, my brain goes to basically going, how do you prepare your brain as a tool as your, as your most important tool and your number one asset in everything that you do. And, you know, I just, I love the brand unbeatable mind. I love him. I mean, obviously he’s extraordinary pedigree and you know, just track record and, you know, does it get much more of a practitioner than what he’s doing? And so I love this and if you haven’t listened to the interview, you need to go listen to it because this is, this is it’s about strengths. It’s, it’s about having a strong mind. It’s about being able to overcome your circumstances. And how do you, how do you, how do you rise above the, the negative thing that’s happened, the negative things that happened to you, and how do you overcome and get around the difficulties that are every part of life and, you know, learning the tactics that mark talks about are super practical and just powerful, right?
RV (02:23):
Just because of the intensity of the situations that, that he’s been in. And, and if you haven’t listened to the interview yet, or even if you have one of the things that’s amazing to me is, you know, you hear Navy seal, like the mind kind of goes to like war hero, but mark has this, this really elegant, beautiful balance of, of, you know, like Eastern meditation and, and you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a higher level than just, you know, I am strong and I’m going to destroy, like, it’s not that at all. In fact, so let’s just run through, I’ll run through the, my top three takeaways here for personal brands. This truly is an episode that, you know, would apply to anybody though. I mean, a lot of our episodes are very tailored to like, okay, here’s a skill that somebody has mastered and how to build your personal brand.
RV (03:11):
This is two, but this conversation applies to like everybody and everything that you, you ever do. And so the, my very first takeaway is funny because this was my takeaway years ago when I interviewed him. And it was probably six years ago when I interviewed mark, maybe not that long, maybe four or five years ago, but it was long time ago. And this stuck with me, which is using box breathing as a way of centering yourself. Before, you know, like in his case, he calls it reducing arousal response. That’s what, what Navy seals call it and refer to, which is basically like controlling your emotions to not instantly react, which is what the, the indulgence of the human mind and the human body is just to instantly react. And what I learned in martial arts, which is aligned with what he’s saying here is, you know, you have mind, mind, like water, they call it mind like water, which is like, you know, if you drop a drop of water into a puddle, there are ripples.
RV (04:13):
The ripples are exactly directly proportionate to the size and velocity, which the drop fall in. So it’s like, it is the perfect, the exact perfect response to the stimulus. Not more or not less. What most of us do is we tend to over respond. We tend to overreact. We tend to overanalyze. We tend to over amp ourself up, we get overly anxious, overly nervous, even overly excited, even overly enthusiastic. And, you know, listening to mark talk about this was both taking me back to last time we talked, but even taking me back to when I was a kid studying martial arts about mind like water, which is just basically receiving the stimulus and reflecting back the exact perfect and proportional response. So box breathing is a technique. This is what I love about him, right? As he makes it. So practical is going okay, here is how you center yourself before going into battle, which is that you breathe in. And so you just do four, four counts of whatever number. Let’s just say four counts of four. So you breathe in for four seconds, one, two, three, four. Then you hold for four seconds.
RV (05:27):
Then you breathe out for four seconds. Then you hold for four seconds and the breath, and this is so huge. I mean, this is, this is mind blowing to hear Navy seal at his level, talking about how this, this is a technique that he uses in life and death situations. And yet it’s like, it is our breath. It’s how strong are you? It’s not how fast are you? It’s not, how tough are you? How much pain can you endure? It’s going, can you control your breathing, breathing? As he said, I love this. He said, breathing is, is basically the, the glue between mind, body, and soul and breath is something that you can control. And so you learn to control your breath and by learning to control your breath, you learn to control your emotional response, which controls your body, which controls your brain, which allows you to think clearly, which allows you to react appropriately and swiftly and decisively and sharply.
RV (06:29):
Amazing, amazing. And so, you know, that that certainly applies to a battle, but as a personal brand, when does that show up? It shows up before any presentation, right? It shows up before a keynote before a webinar before you make your offer, right? Like before you get on a big podcast or media interview before, before you turn a video on, right. And you just go, don’t forget to breathe. Like air allows you to think clearly you’re hyperventilating. When it’s time to record your like weekly video blog, like don’t forget to breathe for a second before you hit record and like center yourself. So it’s not so frantic. I think that’s really, really powerful. All right. So that was my first takeaway, which has stuck with me and will continue to stick with me. The second takeaway though, I’ve never heard him say, I’ve actually never heard anybody say, and he said it like very quickly, almost as if like it’s a, you know, it’s like a cliche or it’s like something that is like you know, just kind of a platitude that’s out there in the world.
RV (07:30):
But I had never heard this before. And it really stuck with me as he said, no plan survives contact with an enemy, no plan survives contact with an enemy that is so good and so important. Like for two reasons, one is to go, don’t spend all day planning. It’s not going to work out according to plan anyways. Right? I’m not saying don’t plan, but I’m saying don’t overplay it. All right? Like at some point you just gotta get out there because it’s gonna adapt, like no plan, survives contact with an enemy. The other thing is you have to be flexible. Like you have to be willing to adapt. Like, and, and the word he uses survive, right? This is a very matter of survival. If you can’t adapt, if it drives you nuts, when people don’t follow the plan, if you overreact to people like deviating from the system, like it’s going to eat you alive.
RV (08:33):
And I think as an entrepreneur, right? It’s like, we want to create processes and streamlined and checklist. This is how we multiply time and all that sort of stuff. But it’s like, people are not going to do it the way that you do it. And even when you create a launch plan and you think this is how it’s going to go, like, it’s not, it doesn’t work out perfectly. You have to be in order to survive, you have to be able to adapt and not just adapt, create a new plan. I think there’s a deeper part of this is to go, it’s not just create a new plan. It’s to be emotionally prepared for volatility. It’s to be emotionally prepared for imperfection. It is to be emotionally resilient to the idea that, yeah, I got a plan, but I’ll, I’ll adapt accordingly. I never know what the enemy is going to do.
RV (09:18):
Right. I never know how the project’s going to turn out. I never know what’s going to be thrown at. And so you trust in your, your preparation, but you allow yourself to adapt on the fly. And I think this is really hard. I think this is really hard specifically for entrepreneurs who are, do gooders and checklists and task masters. They like to create the plan, execute the plan. And entrepreneurship is a mess, right? Like success is messy. Success is never perfect. It’s always like, you know, Donald Trump would say, it’s a total disaster. Like it is it. Every time we try to accomplish something, it never works out. There’s always something that shows up that we didn’t expect. No plan survives contact with the enemy, by the way, it reminds me of another, this it’s another one of my favorite quotes, which is kind of like on this subject you know, Mike Tyson said it this way. He said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.
RV (10:11):
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. I mean, this is a big deal, right? So a plan is not going to just be the thing that is your shield that causes you to survive like a plan as a starting point. A plan should give you confidence, but it’s like, you can’t hide behind the plan. You can’t expect the plan to go perfectly. You gotta be able to adapt. You gotta be flexible. You gotta be nimble. Because that’s just the way that battle is. And most of us that’s what we’re doing. And so that was super powerful to hear him talk about that. The third takeaway for me, which I’ve I have heard before, maybe not quite in this way, I’ve, you know, we talk about it a lot. You know, this very much points back to the creation principle of integrity in our first book take the stairs, which was, he said an observer or a witness to your own life as a way of help helping yourself better manage your own thoughts.
RV (11:11):
Right. So that I think is so powerful. It’s so true. And that’s a skill set that I learned, you know, I think of all the way back in college, you know, going door to door and dealing with rejection of just like, you know, you’re you, the real battle is in your own mind. And it’s, what are you telling yourself about yourself? And that’s really, it can be a really discouraging space to be in. And what he’s saying is going, okay, just step out of it for a second and observe what you are saying about yourself, about the situation. And he used this phrase, he said, you know, you have the power change your relationship with the past one when you do this. And I think that’s so true is like, once you step back here and you go, okay, those thoughts that I’m having, that’s not me. Those are just thoughts that I’m having. And it’s like separating your thoughts from yourself, which I know feels a little weird, right? You go, wait a minute. How do I separate my thoughts from myself? Like, isn’t my thoughts who I am, but, but I would say, well, no, it definitely isn’t right. Because I mean, think about it this way. Like your thoughts are your thoughts, because if your thoughts are you then who the hell are you talking to? Right?
Speaker 3 (12:32):
Like you’re, you’re the
RV (12:34):
One hearing your thoughts and, and evaluating your thoughts. But I think a lot of us don’t observe, we just kind of allow ourselves to be absorbed and, and assimilated and amalgamated with our thoughts as if they are us not realizing, oh, we have control over our thoughts. And, and even the first step to controlling our thoughts is to observe our thoughts. And, and, and even the, I guess the prerequisite to that is that what you’re doing right now, you’re learning right here that, oh, those thoughts are not you. And you can observe them. So you learn, you know, you realize that then you start to observe them. Then you kind of take note of what you’re saying, and then you naturally go, oh, I don’t like that thought that thought doesn’t serve me. That saw that, that thought, you know, doesn’t give life to me.
RV (13:23):
That thought drains my energy. And this is what amazing is. If your thoughts aren’t serving you, then throw your thoughts out seriously. Like if your thoughts aren’t serving, you throw your thoughts out, but realize the first step is to be an observer of your own thoughts, be a witness to what your thinking about yourself, to what you are telling yourself about yourself. This is super empowering. And what you’ll find when you do this, you’ll be shocked at how many, any of your thoughts don’t even come from you. So many of your thoughts came from a teacher, a parent, a bully, you know, something that somebody said casually to you. They came from a movie, they came from some other books that you read or some line in a song that you heard you know, or some quote that somebody shared with you that you never even stopped to question like, is this real?
RV (14:17):
And you go, whoa, like, or the other thing is a huge number of our thoughts come from immediate responses to stimuli. They come from something happened. We immediately responded and we immediately created a story and said, oh, that happened because I’m not smart. Or that happened because I’m not attractive. Or that happened because I’m not good at blank, or I’m not good enough to blank. And this thought it wasn’t even specifically or deliberately or intentionally crafted. We allowed this thought it happened in an overreaction in moment of over response. And that thought entered our mind. We never questioned it. We never scrutinized it. And now we’ve allowed that thought to build a house and set up its home to define our life about what is possible and what is possible. And the first step to breaking free of that is to become an observer of your thoughts and realize your thoughts are not you, your thoughts are your thoughts. You are hearing your thoughts and you are the author and creator of your own thoughts.
RV (15:28):
This stuff might sound like hooey, phooey. This is one of the other reasons that I love. This is like this kind of stuff, like box breathing and visualization and, you know, be adaptable. And self-talk, these things all sort of feel fluffy, right? Like on their own, they feel you know, they feel decidedly soft and, and kind of like impractical. And maybe even like, you know, I don’t know who he phooey motivationally until you hear commander mark divine, who is an Ivy league graduate has multiple degrees, is best-selling author and has been in the, the most elite of special forces units on the planet and been in war time saying, no, no, no, this is the key. These are the secrets to an unbeatable mind. And if you want to master anything in your life, whether it’s building a personal brand, building a business, making a difference or surviving war, these things are the things that you must do. You must prepare your mind. You must strengthen it, condition it, shape it over and over and over again, because it is the asset that you will have with you for the rest of your life, which is a good reason to keep coming back here to the influential personal brand podcast. We’re so glad that you’re here. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 180: How Personal Brands Can Create an Unbeatable Mind with Mark Divine

RV (00:06):
Welcome back to the influential personal brand podcast recap. It’s your man, Rory Vaden breaking down the interview with my time friend, Todd Henry. I’m all about accessing your creativity, which I think is just super relevant. Right. And, and I guess it’s funny, cause I’ve known about Todd’s work for years, but now more than any other time, I think in my career, how do I feel like we’re playing in this space of creativity on a regular basis? And, and I would say even feeling like creativity is a core component of succeeding in the workplace today. And I would say probably my first biggest takeaway from the interview with Todd was even just kind of reframing what is creativity and what, what should we think about and what does he think about, or as someone who’s spent spent a lifetime studying this which is that creativity is just problem solving.

RV (01:09):
That’s it? Creativity is problem solving and there’s constant problems. I mean, this is the story of being an entrepreneur. It’s the story of being a leader? It’s the story of being a parent? It’s the story of building a personal brand or building an empire it’s like life is basically just a series of one problem after the next, after the next, after the next and the problems just get bigger and different and more complex, the more successful you get and a lot of the most fundamental problems, you never, you never resolve completely, right? Like what are we eating for dinner and how do we keep the house clean? And you know, what are we wearing? And like, there’s just this, this rhythm of life that is a steady stream of problems. And so if you don’t have creativity or if you’re not developing that, then I think you’re going to really struggle.

RV (01:59):
And I’m realizing that, oh my gosh, this is, this is an essential skill that isn’t just relevant to artists, but relevant to all of us. And you know, so I think this first takeaway there’s two big definitions that are in this. So one is what is the definition of creativity? I think Todd defines it as problem solving, which will, will stick with me. The other was what’s the definition of art. And I think the way that Todd said it was, he said that art is an expression of values, right? So it is your values, the things that you care most about the things that you believe in the things that you buy into, the ideals that you hold, the, the principles that you know, to be true, it is those things codified, manifested, extrapolated transformed into some expression, whether it’s, you know, a painting, a song a movie a, a book, a speech, a course like a business.

RV (03:20):
I mean, I think business is art. Like creating a business is, is nothing other than expression of values. I think it’s like, I love that definition because if you go, okay, well, core values are to a business. What personal philosophies are to an artist. So your personal viewpoints and philosophies come out as the expression of art. Well, if you’re an entrepreneur, your business basically is that, I mean, it is that, that an entrepreneur being an entrepreneur is our chance to create a reflection in the world of the things that we believe, the things that we hold value to the things that we, we most trust and we believe to be true and that we want to see more of in the world. And so I think that is a really fascinating way of seeing it is that art is this expression of values, businesses and expression of values.

RV (04:16):
You know, and, and I think when you, you know, that it’s art, when it moves people emotionally, we talk about that in world-class presentation craft which is, you know, our course, our, our course on teaching people how to speak from stage and the mastery level, stage mechanics of what, what set mechanically, what separates the greatest speakers in the world from everyone else. And it is all about, can you move the audience emotionally? Do they have some type of visceral response in their body to the things that you are saying? And you know, some of those are techniques, but that you can do, you know, there’s, there’s things that you can practice and we teach a lot of those, but a lot of it is more of it is aligning your art, your presentation, your, your masterpiece, your creation, being in alignment with your uniqueness, the things that you believe.

RV (05:11):
So that was really beautiful. And I, I really loved that. And, and I loved the practical application of that also with kind of like this artistic juxtaposition was, was really good. Now, the second big takeaway that I want to highlight is how do you find, like what art you should create? I mean, a brand builders group, right? We would call this finding your uniqueness. It is always the first thing that we do with every client as we help them identify their uniqueness. It’s the thing that so many people struggle with. It’s, it’s almost a thing where it’s like, it’s, it’s kind of impossible to like, figure it out yourself. You need help doing it. It’s really, really difficult to nail this, but if you nail this, I mean, it changes everything. It changes everything because you’re being the person that only you can be.

RV (05:57):
And I love what Todd said here, which is another way, or I would say a hint or a clue or a suggestion. You could say, I guess a shortcut, probably not a shortcut, but, but maybe corroborating evidence for you to find your uniqueness. Here’s what he said. This is my second takeaway. The thing that you’re most equipped to put into the world is the thing that feels most obvious to you. The thing that you’re most equipped to put into the world is the thing that feels most obvious to you. It’s, it’s parallels kind of what we say a lot, which is that your most powerfully positioned to serve the person that you once were. And that’s because, you know, in full integrated detail, what it’s like to be that person. So it is obvious. Yes. Do you, because that’s what you have done.

RV (06:52):
It’s what you have lived and not just what you have learned about. And I think the way that he comes at it here in, in the way he says it is, is kind of like you know, a different presentation of the same core concept, which is what’s most to you. What is the thing that you do without, you know, trying, what is the thing that you do naturally? What is the thing that you’re gifted at? What is the, what are you like? What have you become? What super powers do you have you naturally developed over the course of your life. These things that you don’t think are special, there’s a huge need out in the world because other people have not gone through what you’ve gone through. They haven’t walked the path that you have walked down. And so you’re super equipped to help those people, which is amazing.

RV (07:37):
It’s amazing when you tap into this, because this is a gift like this is, this is such a great blessing that your personal brand is built, not on having to create something out of scratch, not on, not on having to manufacture ideas out of thin air, but rather to express things you already are to, to convey things that you’ve already been doing to, to translate the very persona in history and experience that you have lived, the more that we can access that the faster and the shorter, the distance to you breaking through with your personal brand. And it’s in a lot of times, it is the thing that’s, it’s so obvious to you that you don’t even notice it. I would say that a lot, like a lot of our clients, like it’s it’s, so it’s such an ingrained part of them. Like their uniqueness is such an ingrained part of them that they can’t see it.

RV (08:39):
Cause they’re so close to it that they’re, it’s almost like they questioned like, well, why would this have any value in the world? Like surely no one would care about that. They have the curse of knowledge, right? They, they automatically, we assume and believe that everyone else out there in the world knows the same things that they know. And they don’t because they haven’t studied. They haven’t researched to use the, the brain DNA helix term. They haven’t researched the same things that you have researched. They don’t have results doing the same things that you’re doing. They don’t have the same passions. They haven’t tried to solve the same problem. And and so it’s like, it’s hard to see. So that’s really, really important. And even though it’s hard to see, it’s a place to start with is, you know, what is most obvious to you?

RV (09:22):
Like, what is the problem you have most overcome? What is the path that you have walked down? Or as Todd said, it you’re most equipped to put into the world. The thing that feels most obvious to you, which by way of the curse of knowledge, you probably think has no value in the world because you assume that everybody knows it just because you do. And they do not. My third takeaway. And I would say this one was my, my favorite part of that entire conversation is the difference of pursuing a craft Haft versus pursuing stardom. This is the difference between pursuing a craft versus personal, doing the stardom. And it actually reminds me you know, so one of our, one of our longtime pals is John ACOF and we saw John at church a few weeks ago, and we were just having this conversation.

RV (10:16):
We hadn’t seen each other in a while. And, you know, he said something, something about how far we’ve come over all these years. And, you know, I told him, I said, yeah, honestly, I think it, it has more to do with the fact that you and I have just stuck around than anything else. Like we have weathered so many storms. Like we’ve just been, we’ve been in this space now for 15 years. I mean, I met John AJ and I met John 12 years ago now. And so it’s, it’s like, we’ve known him for 12. He was already, you know, just like us. He had been around in awhile and it’s like, I think what we’ve both been doing is, is like we’re pursuing a craft, right? We want to get really good at what we do, which is we want to get really good at helping people.

RV (11:01):
We want to get really good at providing solutions, really good at providing answers. And when you do that, you have true staying power. I mean, it’s, it’s so powerful because you’re not constantly tied to the results of your last post, right? Like you’re not constantly consumed with how many video views did I get, how many podcast downloads or even your last book. Right. It’s it’s like, yeah. If the book sells or not, I mean, it’s, it’s one part of this lifelong journey that is the, your craft. But you’ll see a lot of times when people are like, oh, I just, you know, like, I feel like I need to just like, do this one, one thing. Or if they’re just pursuing stardom, like they just want to have a lot of followers, like you’re going to burn out, you’re going to burn out, or you’re going to look for shortcuts, or you’re just, you’re going to make a lot of sacrifices because you’re ultimately serving something that isn’t that significant in terms of its, its staying power.

RV (11:58):
And it’s, it’s, it’s lasting power. And it’s trick, it’s a little bit of a trick because look at like at brand builders group, right, we win when our clients win. Like we love when our clients get hundreds of thousands of followers or millions of Ted talk views, are they, you know, hit the New York times bestseller list or they land, you know, six figure consulting, deals, all, all things that happen, you know? And, and recently they’ve been on a pretty regular basis. But even those things, it’s like, we want those things to happen for our clients, but they’re not what we measure success by because it’s like, first of all, certain parts of those things can kind of be like manufactured, right. And the, the, the reality is going, but, but it’s not these external achievements or these vanity metrics that change anyone else’s life, nor do they provide side the kind of meaning and deep satisfaction that a true mission driven a true mission driven messenger seeks in their own life.

RV (13:03):
They’re certainly not bad. They’re great things. We want them to happen. It’s just not how we measure success at brand builders group. Because, you know, we focus on, on reputation, over revenue. We want revenue, we want wins. We want money. We want likes, we want followers. We want views. We want all that stuff. But at the end of the day, we’re more focused on helping people figure out what are you called to do, do that. Nobody else can do. Like what problem were you put here on this earth to solve, solve that nobody else can solve. And, you know, focusing and, and standing your identity, grounding your identity more in that is much more significant and long lasting. And it’s going to be a greater source of fulfillment and satisfaction. Even if for some reason it wasn’t going to bring more money. And over the long term, we are convinced that it absolutely does.

RV (14:04):
But there are certain things that do create more results. Short-Term I mean, there are certain topics and there’s certain things you can do. Like, I mean, anything sexual, anything outrageous anything to do with money like there are certain topics that just naturally draw more attention, anything that’s based on celebrities, there’s things that you can do to kind of manufacture short-term attention. But if that’s, if, if that topic or that thing, isn’t what you want to spend your life doing. It’s like you can’t chase that because you’ll, you’ll eventually be running from an empty tank. So pursue mastery of craft laughs don’t pursue stardom, pursue figuring out how can I help versus how can I known? And if you do that, you likely will grow your influence and you will have all of these amazing things happen to you. And that really, really was powerful to hear Todd talk about that.

RV (15:07):
Especially since he’s spent a life around. So many creatives is, is, is to just really pursue that, that craft. And don’t get caught up, resist the temptation to be caught up in the fame and the vanity metrics and the stardom and you know, whatever word you want to call it. Cause it’s not ultimately what changes lives and it’s not, what’s going to bring you satisfaction, but find what’s the message you could spend your life sharing. What’s the problem you could dedicate your life to solving who is the audience and you can dedicate your life to survey.

Ep 179: Accessing Your Creativity with Todd Henry | Recap Episode

RV: (00:06)

Welcome back to the influential personal brand podcast recap. It’s your man, Rory Vaden breaking down the interview with my time friend, Todd Henry. I’m all about accessing your creativity, which I think is just super relevant. Right. And, and I guess it’s funny, cause I’ve known about Todd’s work for years, but now more than any other time, I think in my career, how do I feel like we’re playing in this space of creativity on a regular basis? And, and I would say even feeling like creativity is a core component of succeeding in the workplace today. And I would say probably my first biggest takeaway from the interview with Todd was even just kind of reframing what is creativity and what, what should we think about and what does he think about, or as someone who’s spent spent a lifetime studying this which is that creativity is just problem solving.

RV: (01:09)

That’s it? Creativity is problem solving and there’s constant problems. I mean, this is the story of being an entrepreneur. It’s the story of being a leader? It’s the story of being a parent? It’s the story of building a personal brand or building an empire it’s like life is basically just a series of one problem after the next, after the next, after the next and the problems just get bigger and different and more complex, the more successful you get and a lot of the most fundamental problems, you never, you never resolve completely, right? Like what are we eating for dinner and how do we keep the house clean? And you know, what are we wearing? And like, there’s just this, this rhythm of life that is a steady stream of problems. And so if you don’t have creativity or if you’re not developing that, then I think you’re going to really struggle.

RV: (01:59)

And I’m realizing that, oh my gosh, this is, this is an essential skill that isn’t just relevant to artists, but relevant to all of us. And you know, so I think this first takeaway there’s two big definitions that are in this. So one is what is the definition of creativity? I think Todd defines it as problem solving, which will, will stick with me. The other was what’s the definition of art. And I think the way that Todd said it was, he said that art is an expression of values, right? So it is your values, the things that you care most about the things that you believe in the things that you buy into, the ideals that you hold, the, the principles that you know, to be true, it is those things codified, manifested, extrapolated transformed into some expression, whether it’s, you know, a painting, a song a movie a, a book, a speech, a course like a business.

RV: (03:20)

I mean, I think business is art. Like creating a business is, is nothing other than expression of values. I think it’s like, I love that definition because if you go, okay, well, core values are to a business. What personal philosophies are to an artist. So your personal viewpoints and philosophies come out as the expression of art. Well, if you’re an entrepreneur, your business basically is that, I mean, it is that, that an entrepreneur being an entrepreneur is our chance to create a reflection in the world of the things that we believe, the things that we hold value to the things that we, we most trust and we believe to be true and that we want to see more of in the world. And so I think that is a really fascinating way of seeing it is that art is this expression of values, businesses and expression of values.

RV: (04:16)

You know, and, and I think when you, you know, that it’s art, when it moves people emotionally, we talk about that in world-class presentation craft which is, you know, our course, our, our course on teaching people how to speak from stage and the mastery level, stage mechanics of what, what set mechanically, what separates the greatest speakers in the world from everyone else. And it is all about, can you move the audience emotionally? Do they have some type of visceral response in their body to the things that you are saying? And you know, some of those are techniques, but that you can do, you know, there’s, there’s things that you can practice and we teach a lot of those, but a lot of it is more of it is aligning your art, your presentation, your, your masterpiece, your creation, being in alignment with your uniqueness, the things that you believe.

RV: (05:11)

So that was really beautiful. And I, I really loved that. And, and I loved the practical application of that also with kind of like this artistic juxtaposition was, was really good. Now, the second big takeaway that I want to highlight is w w w how do you find, like what art you should create? I mean, a brand builders group, right? We would call this finding your uniqueness. It is always the first thing that we do with every client as we help them identify their uniqueness. It’s the thing that so many people struggle with. It’s, it’s almost a thing where it’s like, it’s, it’s kind of impossible to like, figure it out yourself. You need help doing it. It’s really, really difficult to nail this, but if you nail this, I mean, it changes everything. It changes everything because you’re being the person that only you can be.

RV: (05:57)

And I love what Todd said here, which is another way, or I would say a hint or a clue or a suggestion. You could say, I guess a shortcut, probably not a shortcut, but, but maybe corroborating evidence for you to find your uniqueness. Here’s what he said. This is my second takeaway. The thing that you’re most equipped to put into the world is the thing that feels most obvious to you. The thing that you’re most equipped to put into the world is the thing that feels most obvious to you. It’s, it’s parallels kind of what we say a lot, which is that your most powerfully positioned to serve the person that you once were. And that’s because, you know, in full integrated detail, what it’s like to be that person. So it is obvious. Yes. Do you, because that’s what you have done.

RV: (06:52)

It’s what you have lived and not just what you have learned about. And I think the way that he comes at it here in, in the way he says it is, is kind of like you know, a different presentation of the same core concept, which is what’s most to you. What is the thing that you do without, you know, trying, what is the thing that you do naturally? What is the thing that you’re gifted at? What is the, what are you like? What have you become? What super powers do you have you naturally developed over the course of your life. These things that you don’t think are special, there’s a huge need out in the world because other people have not gone through what you’ve gone through. They haven’t walked the path that you have walked down. And so you’re super equipped to help those people, which is amazing.

RV: (07:37)

It’s amazing when you tap into this, because this is a gift like this is, this is such a great blessing that your personal brand is built, not on having to create something out of scratch, not on, not on having to manufacture ideas out of thin air, but rather to express things you already are to, to convey things that you’ve already been doing to, to translate the very persona in history and experience that you have lived, the more that we can access that the faster and the shorter, the distance to you breaking through with your personal brand. And it’s in a lot of times, it is the thing that’s, it’s so obvious to you that you don’t even notice it. I would say that a lot, like a lot of our clients, like it’s it’s, so it’s such an ingrained part of them. Like their uniqueness is such an ingrained part of them that they can’t see it.

RV: (08:39)

Cause they’re so close to it that they’re, it’s almost like they questioned like, well, why would this have any value in the world? Like surely no one would care about that. They have the curse of knowledge, right? They, they automatically, we assume and believe that everyone else out there in the world knows the same things that they know. And they don’t because they haven’t studied. They haven’t researched to use the, the brain DNA helix term. They haven’t researched the same things that you have researched. They don’t have results doing the same things that you’re doing. They don’t have the same passions. They haven’t tried to solve the same problem. And and so it’s like, it’s hard to see. So that’s really, really important. And even though it’s hard to see, it’s a place to start with is, you know, what is most obvious to you?

RV: (09:22)

Like, what is the problem you have most overcome? What is the path that you have walked down? Or as Todd said, it you’re most equipped to put into the world. The thing that feels most obvious to you, which by way of the curse of knowledge, you probably think has no value in the world because you assume that everybody knows it just because you do. And they do not. My third takeaway. And I would say this one was my, my favorite part of that entire conversation is the difference of pursuing a craft Haft versus pursuing stardom. This is the difference between pursuing a craft versus personal, doing the stardom. And it actually reminds me you know, so one of our, one of our longtime pals is John ACOF and we saw John at church a few weeks ago, and we were just having this conversation.

RV: (10:16)

We hadn’t seen each other in a while. And, you know, he said something, something about how far we’ve come over all these years. And, you know, I told him, I said, yeah, honestly, I think it, it has more to do with the fact that you and I have just stuck around than anything else. Like we have weathered so many storms. Like we’ve just been, we’ve been in this space now for 15 years. I mean, I met John AIG and I met John 12 years ago now. And so it’s, it’s like, we’ve known him for 12. He was already, you know, just like us. He had been around in awhile and it’s like, I think what we’ve both been doing is, is like we’re pursuing a craft, right? We want to get really good at what we do, which is we want to get really good at helping people.

RV: (11:01)

We want to get really good at providing solutions, really good at providing answers. And when you do that, you have true staying power. I mean, it’s, it’s so powerful because you’re not constantly tied to the results of your last post, right? Like you’re not constantly consumed with how many video views did I get, how many podcast downloads or even your last book. Right. It’s it’s like, yeah. If the book sells or not, I mean, it’s, it’s one part of this lifelong journey that is the, your craft. But you’ll see a lot of times when people are like, oh, I just, you know, like, I feel like I need to just like, do this one, one thing. Or if they’re just pursuing stardom, like they just want to have a lot of followers, like you’re going to burn out, you’re going to burn out, or you’re going to look for shortcuts, or you’re just, you’re going to make a lot of sacrifices because you’re ultimately serving something that isn’t that significant in terms of its, its staying power.

RV: (11:58)

And it’s, it’s, it’s lasting power. And it’s trick, it’s a little bit of a trick because look at like at brand builders group, right, we win when our clients win. Like we love when our clients get hundreds of thousands of followers or millions of Ted talk views, are they, you know, hit the New York times bestseller list or they land, you know, six figure consulting, deals, all, all things that happen, you know? And, and recently they’ve been on a pretty regular basis. But even those things, it’s like, we want those things to happen for our clients, but they’re not what we measure success by because it’s like, first of all, certain parts of those things can kind of be like manufactured, right. And the, the, the reality is going, but, but it’s not these external achievements or these vanity metrics that change anyone else’s life, nor do they provide side the kind of meaning and deep satisfaction that a true mission driven a true mission driven messenger seeks in their own life.

RV: (13:03)

They’re certainly not bad. They’re great things. We want them to happen. It’s just not how we measure success at brand builders group. Because, you know, we focus on, on reputation, over revenue. We want revenue, we want wins. We want money. We want likes, we want followers. We want views. We want all that stuff. But at the end of the day, we’re more focused on helping people figure out what are you called to do, do that. Nobody else can do. Like what problem were you put here on this earth to solve, solve that nobody else can solve. And, you know, focusing and, and standing your identity, grounding your identity more in that is much more significant and long lasting. And it’s going to be a greater source of fulfillment and satisfaction. Even if for some reason it wasn’t going to bring more money. And over the long term, we are convinced that it absolutely does.

RV: (14:04)

But there are certain things that do create more results. Short-Term I mean, there are certain topics and there’s certain things you can do. Like, I mean, anything sexual, anything outrageous anything to do with money like there are certain topics that just naturally draw more attention, anything that’s based on celebrities, there’s things that you can do to kind of manufacture short-term attention. But if that’s, if, if that topic or that thing, isn’t what you want to spend your life doing. It’s like you can’t chase that because you’ll, you’ll eventually be running from an empty tank. So pursue mastery of craft laughs don’t pursue stardom, pursue figuring out how can I help versus how can I known? And if you do that, you likely will grow your influence and you will have all of these amazing things happen to you. And that really, really was powerful to hear Todd talk about that.

RV: (15:07)

Especially since he’s spent a life around. So many creatives is, is, is to just really pursue that, that craft. And don’t get caught up, resist the temptation to be caught up in the fame and the vanity metrics and the stardom and you know, whatever word you want to call it. Cause it’s not ultimately what changes lives and it’s not, what’s going to bring you satisfaction, but find what’s the message you could spend your life sharing. What’s the problem you could dedicate your life to solving who is the audience and you can dedicate your life to survey

Ep 178: Accessing Your Creativity with Todd Henry

RV (01:01):
One of my favorite things is when I meet somebody, who’s kind of starting out on their journey and then I lose touch with them. And then I come back and we reconnect and they have like exploded and become huge and influential. And just even, you know, as awesome as they were. But now the whole world knows that. And that’s how I kind of feel about Todd Henry because we’ve known each other for years. And I feel like I was around as a guest, maybe on, on one of his early podcasts. And now his podcast, if you haven’t heard of, it’s called the accidental creative. It has over 10 million downloads and he is one of the world’s leading thinkers on creativity leadership and passion, and just kind of like bringing out your everyday brilliance. And he describes himself as an arms dealer for the creative revolution.

RV (01:54):
He’s written five books. His most recent is called the motivation code. And I just think he’s amazing at helping people access their creativity and helping leaders learn how to pull out the creativity and the ingenuity and the innovation of their teams. And so he’s one of my favorite people in the space. I love his podcasts. I was on his podcast again recently, and we shared the stage on different years at a, at a very large speaking event called the global leadership summit. And that was how we reconnected. And man, it’s just great to see you and I love what you’re up to. So thanks for making some time for us

TH (02:32):
Rory. It’s great to see you as well and always a pleasure to chat with you. I, I always walk away with a combination of like ins inspiration and challenge. Every time I talk with you challenged to up my game, but inspiration that I can actually pull it off. So thanks for all that you’re putting into the world as well.

RV (02:52):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, likewise and I, you know, I think as you know, we’ve known each other as colleagues, but as like a consumer I’m very interested about the stuff that you teach and at about accessing creativity. And I find you know, as I get further, along in my career, there’s a li there’s even more focus on and more, more flexibility for me to go. I want to dive deeper and I really want to even, you know, understand my passion and speak my passion and access some of my truth.
So Rory when we have that conversation, whether it’s an, a new, younger, personal brand, or, you know, someone who’s more experienced like URI, what do you think are some of the roadblocks there to accessing that creativity, whether it’s writing a book or starting a podcast or a course, or being a speaker? I think it’s like when I think about being creative, it almost seems like it’s less of a, maybe this isn’t right. Less of something we have to learn, and it’s more of roadblocks that we have to remove. So that, that naturally shows up. So what are some of your thoughts around those roadblocks and how to get past them?

TH (04:05):
Yeah, I think one of the big challenges for anybody who wants to put something into the world is that the very thing that you’re probably most equipped to put into the world and probably most motivated to put into the world is the thing that seems most obvious to you. It’s something that you’ve been thinking about for a very long time. Maybe the other people don’t think about quite as much as you do. And so for a lot of people, when they start thinking about putting an idea out into the world in some capacity, they think, well, that’s not going to fly. I mean, everybody knows that, or that’s obvious to everybody. And the reality is though it’s obvious to you. It’s not obvious to everybody. I mean, I felt that way with the back in 2005, when I first launched the accidental creative podcast you know, I was talking about things like creating on demand and how do you quell uncertainty in the workplace and how do you create an infrastructure for your team and how do you build rhythms and practices and disciplines to help you have ideas when you need the most?

TH (05:05):
And I thought all of that stuff was obvious. You know, of course every creative professional is doing these things, but, you know, Hey, I wanted to talk about this. And all of a sudden the podcast just gained thousands of listeners. I mean, I wasn’t, I wasn’t, by the way, was not trying to start anything. I just wanted to have a conversation about these things. And I thought, Hey, there’s this great thing called podcasting, where you put audio out into the world and people can listen to it. It’s like my own radio. That’s really cool. I had no desire to like start a business or do anything. And I was a creative director in an organization, had a team of like three dozen people. I was leading, like I was in a good place, you know, and it just kind of took off. And the reason is I was putting something into the world that was scratching an itch that I had something that I was needing and also something that I was maybe in a lot of ways uniquely positioned to be, to talk about because of my purview at that time.

TH (05:59):
But frankly, a lot of that stuff felt kind of obvious to me until I put it out there and realized, oh, people don’t sit around thinking about how they do their work. You know, people are so busy doing their work. They don’t think about how they’re doing their work. And so there’s room for that conversation to happen. So I think you, the one thing I would really encourage people to consider if they’re thinking about trying to carve out some space in the marketplace for themselves is the place where you’re probably most well positioned to occupy space is probably an area that you have already discarded because you think it’s too obvious or it’s something that it’s too familiar to you. And just realize that it’s probably not nearly as familiar or obvious to other people. It’s just that you’ve spent a lot of your time honing that expertise to the point where you’re ready to present it to other people.

RV (06:55):
I love that. I mean, I think, you know, our very first book take the stairs, which still is like, to this day, the best selling thing that we’ve done is just all about self-discipline. And I, you know, that very much felt that way. Like, doesn’t everybody do this? Like, doesn’t everybody think about this. And then when we started brand builders group, it was the same thing. It’s like, well, everybody knows like how to build funnels and how to do book launches. And you know how to like get speaking deals and tell jokes. And it’s like, oh, actually they, they don’t. And I think, you know, what’s interesting about that too, is it doesn’t feel creative to me. Like when you’re saying not only is it the obvious thing, so you go, well, you know, people aren’t, you know, people maybe wouldn’t buy that or wouldn’t consume that content because it’s obvious. Everybody knows that the other thing is in a weird way. It’s like, well, that doesn’t feel creative to me because it’s the thing that I do naturally. I do it all the time. But would you say that that’s where the magic happens is just really diving, diving deeper and deeper into that, like leaning, pressing into that space more?

TH (08:07):
Yeah, absolutely. At the heart, creativity is problem-solving, that’s all it is. If you are an entrepreneur and you’re creating a new product that scratches an itch in the marketplace, you’re being creative. Obviously, if you are an engineer solving a problem for your organization, you’re being creative, or if you’re an artist out there making art, you’re, you’re being creative. Obviously I think we tend to conflate creativity and art. We tend to think that creativity means that I’m one of those like mystical singer, magical unicorn people who can go out and just, you know, a little pixie dust in something amazing appears. Those who are really in the trenches is creative professionals and emphasis on the professional part, know that a lot of the stuff that you produce that ends up being really successful there isn’t that magic moment that magic, oh, this is going to be the best thing I’ve ever done.

TH (09:05):
Right. Instead it just feels like the logical next thing. Okay, I’m going to make the next thing. And now I’m going to make the next thing or okay, now I’m going to tweak it this way or tweak it that way. But you’ve been working on it for so long that by the time you get to the place where it starts gaining some recognition in the marketplace, it just feels like the next thing. I mean, success, I believe comes in layers and you’ve experienced this. I’m sure you have. Most people think that there’s going to be some defining moment where all of a sudden you can say, okay, now I’m successful. Right. It doesn’t work that way. And frankly, when you finally get those moments, I mean, they’re very special moments for sure, but they just kind of feel like a data point along a journey. You know, that you’re on. I mean, you mentioned the global leadership summit. That was a, I mean, anybody who’s spoken that or bend to that knows it’s a phenomenal experience to be on stage in front of 400 and something thousand people around the world. Like that’s a really cool, like 10,000 or something in the room. Like that’s really unique or zero in the room. If you happen to

RV (10:05):
Do it the year that Rory does it, which is the COVID the year of COVID where you just talked to the camera. I’m sorry. Yes, I know it was actually, I mean, it was, it was awesome.

TH (10:16):
The event where it was a huge event, so experiencing it, and that was a, that was a remarkable experience. And frankly, the reason that you or I, or anybody else who can step on that stage feels comfortable doing that is because we’ve spoken in the holiday in your conference room for 20 people. Most of whom are only there because their boss told them they had to be there that day. Right? Like we’ve had years of speaking to groups of people, of all different sizes, honing our skills. We’ve done. I’ve done at this point, you know, probably two or 3000 podcast episodes where I’m communicating my ideas. We’ve written multiple books. We’ve been out doing these things for years and years and years. So yes, it’s a very cool, special moment to step on a stage like that, but it kind of feels like the next thing you go and you do that. And then, you know, then the next day or a week later, again, you’re like speaking in a conference room to accompany with a hundred people or whatever it is. Right. Which is still a really cool experience. But these are just like data points along the way. So I think one of the things we have to sort of demystify for people is what this journey of success looks like as you’re building something or as you’re focused on building the personal brand. I mean, there’s a great scene from,
RV (11:43):
Oh, movie scene alert here comes, okay. Sorry about that. And now we’re going the
TH (11:47):
Other way to the sea. It’s a movie a, that was made back in the nineties, called the comedian with Jerry.
RV (11:56):
Oh, it’s Jerry Seinfeld. I’ve seen it. Yeah. You’ll love it. Phenomenal.
TH (11:59):
It’s just a phenomenal, phenomenal film. And there’s a scene where this young comedian and I can’t remember his name, frankly, there’s this young comedian who has been working and working and working. And he like is starting to kind of feel like maybe this isn’t going to happen. And I don’t know if I’m going to break through and he’s talking to Jerry Seinfeld, he says, but you know, like what, what, what about my parents? What are my parents gonna think? And Jerry Simon was like, your, your parents. He’s like, yeah, my friends are like, you’re getting cars and buying houses and having kids. He’s like, you’re what, like, you know, Jerry Seinfeld is just like a gas at this. Guy’s like worried about what other people think or about other people getting ahead of him or whatever. And there’s a scene where that young comedian gets the call that he’s going to be on the tonight show right in the midst of all this.
TH (12:52):
And he calls like five people he knows. And the very next thing that happens is he’s sitting there on the corner and he’s like, that’s it like, that was the moment I’ve been working for was to tell everybody that I was going to be on the tonight show. And now like, that’s it. And the whole, the whole premise of that film, at least as far as I can see is contrasting Jerry Seinfeld’s mindset of like, listen, if there are 10 people in a hole in the wall bar, somewhere in a basement in New York who will listen to me, do comedy, I’m going to show up and I’m going to do comedy because comedians, right. And comedians make jokes and comedians go in front of audiences and share their work. That’s what they do versus the mindset of like, I want to be a star, right?
TH (13:39):
I want to, I want to be somebody who is known for doing my comedy versus somebody who does my comedy, all of us. And I spent time in my early twenties. I jokingly call it with my kids, my misguided twenties, because I was a musician. And I kind of don’t want them following that same path through. But I spent a lot of time opening for big, big, big acts, right? These huge name acts. Some of them were the most lovely people in the world. Some of them were people who quite frankly, like they would, they would stare you into non-existence. You know, if you w if you took a step in the wrong direction, like don’t even come close to my drum kit, like don’t even, don’t look at my guitar, right? Like, like that kind of thing, the really weird thing was there is no correlation between success and attitude.
TH (14:29):
Like some of the most successful people that we encountered were the most unbelievably generous people. They were helping. They were, they would offer advice. They would stand in the wings and cheer us on. They would talk about us when they went on stage, like unbelievably generous people. And some of the people who had just started to kind of break through where the most miserable, selfish, you know, argumentative, frustrating people. And I think what I learned Rory in that moment was the people who were the most generous were the people who were in it because they love to make music. And every single night they showed up and they walked on stage. After spending three days in a metal tube with a bunch of sweaty guys traveling across the country, they would walk out on stage. And they, every night, they just had this mindset of, I can’t believe I get to make music with my friends tonight.
TH (15:18):
This is unbelievable. And the miserable people were the people who thought they were doing it, not because of the music, not because of the craft, but because of what they would get out of the craft, they were chasing the fame or the money or the, of being a star or whatever. And so when they realized, oh, this is actually about doing the work, this isn’t about all those other things. This is about doing the work. They were a little bit disillusioned. So what I always tell young professionals, young creative professionals is you have to fall in love with the work that you do. You have to fall in love with the craft, with the process. You have to fall in love with your message. If you’re out there trying to put the message into the world, you have to be a person who is in love with the process of what you do. Because at the end of the day, if you’re looking for the outcome for the product, for the recognition, for the aura to fill some void in you, you’re going to end up miserable, frustrated, depressed, sitting on a corner in New York city with your cell phone and say, I can’t believe that’s it. That’s all it is. Right. You have to fall in love with the value creating in the process of what you do with the craft.
RV (16:23):
Yeah. That is so powerful. And, and, and moving of just, it’s like, if you really love the craft, whether or not the crowd’s there, the money’s there, the credentials are there, you show up because you’re, you’re there to make art versus to, to be a star. That’s really good. You know, you, you meant, so you mentioned earlier, there’s a difference between creativity and art. Yeah. Can you touch a little bit more on the dis the distinction between those two? Because when I hear you talk about lot, like creativity, even you’re you’re you even used the word logical or sequential several times. Like, when I think of art, I almost think of it as like obscure or abstract or kind of like a, I don’t know, esoteric or a theorial like and yeah. So just, what do you think is the difference between creativity and art
TH (17:20):
Creativity at the, at the base of it is problem solving. We are creative beings by nature. That’s what we do. We solve problems. Your mind is wired to do projects. Your mind is wired to solve problems. And you know, and so as human beings, biologically, you know, me hungry me, need food, right? Not me hungry need to build restaurant. Like that’s not what he’s thinking. Like I need to find a source of sustenance. And creativity is the same thing. Creativity at the, at the root of it is there’s. I need, there’s something that needs to be solved. And I need to find a solution. I need to be resourceful. I need to find a solution. Now you might apply your skills, your artistic skills, even in solving that problem. So a designer designs, something designers by the way, are not necessarily people who are great at drawing or graded at necessarily at the technical skill of bringing something visual into the world.
TH (18:14):
They see things differently. You’re great. Visual artists see things differently, great artists who are great writers think differently that their minds function differently. They see different combinations, different patterns, different systems at work, right in their mind, when they’re going about their writing, they’re trying to solve a puzzle is what they’re doing. How, how can we use all of this experience and connect some dots that maybe other people can’t quite Intuit, but I can Intuit. I can make that intuitive leap. That’s what great writers do they write? Something that feels so familiar to you that you think why couldn’t I have thought of that? It seems like you should have thought of it, or maybe you have thought of it a million times. They just put it into words that you didn’t how to, how to use, right. And the same with great visual art or great music.
TH (19:01):
Great music feels familiar the first time you hear it. Very creative art feels familiar. The first time you hear it. The reason I like to differentiate between creativity and art is because I think sometimes people say, well, I’m not creative. You know, I’m just, I’m just an engineer. I’m just a sales person. I’m just an executive assistant, right? I’m not creative. And yet, and yet I’ve known many executive assistants for C-suite executives and organizations who are some of the most ingenious, creative, resourceful people I’ve ever met, who can on a, just on a dime can turn around and deliver results because they’re so stinking creative in terms of how they use the resources. They have to solve the problems in front of them. So the reason I say that is because when I say creativity, a lot of people think, well, that’s for those people.
TH (19:59):
When I talk about the disciplines that are required in your life, or the practices that are required to prepare you to be creative at the moment’s notice, sometimes people think, well, that’s for those people. That’s for the designers and the writers and the musicians and the unicorns. No that’s for anybody who has to solve problems every day. So if you’re in a position where you have to solve problems, you need to have some practices in your life to prepare you, to be able to connect dots at the moment’s notice to prepare you, to be able to bring those resources, to bear, to hone your skills so that you’re prepared to deliver when it matters most. So if you solve problems, which by the way, surprise, surprise, most of us do these days for our job. That’s what we pay people for, for the value they produce. You are a creative, which means you have to be prepared to deliver the moment’s notice, which means you have to start building practices into your life to get you to a place where you’re prepared to do that.
RV (20:49):
So what is art then? So I love that. And that is totally I’m guilty of going, oh yeah. Creative. I mean, I literally spent the first 15 years of my career speaking out loud to people I’m not creative. Like, you know, and it’s like, I’m not, I, you know, I’m just a speaker. Like, and, and then it was like, I create content. I’m like, I’m not creative. I’m, you know, I’m only writing a book because I have to, to be a speaker. And it’s like, I’m not a creative, I only build websites. Yeah. I’m only like build a website because I have to have something up there. And then it was like, oh my gosh, like, I’m totally creative. Like I am an artist. I just don’t, you know, my, my, my can like the, the, my canvas is different and my brush is different. It’s like words are my paint. And you know, like the canvas is different. So, so if creativity is problem solving, then what is art? Yeah.
TH (21:45):
So I think the best way to think about this is to think about it in terms of, and this is maybe a worn out comparison, but think about the, you know, the Greek computer wars of the early 1980s, right? You, you basically had IBM and sort of this more sort of engineering mindset where we wanted all of our hardware to be infinitely expandable. We wanted the people to be able to tinker with it, people to be able to do what they want, insert chips, if they want insert memory, however they want to basically it’s an open system, an open box. And then you had apple being led by Steve jobs in his first incarnation at apple saying no we’re ticking open our computers. Absolutely not like everything about this is going to be beautiful. Everything about what we make is going to be exactly the way we meant it to be.
TH (22:39):
And it’s going to be an expression of who we are and what we value as an organization. You could argue that they were both solving the same problem, you know, IBM was producing hardware that would crunch numbers and do whatever right. Apple was doing the same thing. The difference was the apple product was an expression of values. Brought into the world into physical form. In some capacity, I would argue that all arts has to be creative, but not all creativity is necessarily art. Say that again, say that again, art is creative by nature, but not all creativity is necessarily art. I can be creative without putting my personal values into what I’m making without spending the extra care to craft it in such a way that I feel like it is refined and honed. So that it’s an expression of who I am in the world in some capacity.
TH (23:40):
And really, I think that’s what art at the end of the day, that’s really what art is. And its essence is an expression of the point of creator in some capacity expression of values. Yeah. And expression of values or an expression of my point of view in the world. I can make things. And I do that all the time. I make things that are creative, but I wouldn’t call them art necessarily. I mean, I don’t think every podcast interview I do is necessarily a work of art. I wouldn’t say that every post blog, post or Twitter posts that I created this early, a work of art, I would say there certainly are some that I’ve put blood, sweat and tears into where I’ve really tried to create an expression of something that is putting my value into it, where I’m spending myself on behalf of the work.
TH (24:24):
And I’m being a little bit vulnerable in how I’m presenting it. I’m taking a bit of a risk because at the end of the day, I believe all art requires risk. In order to be effective, you have to risk something in order to produce art that is going to resonate with other people. And so that’s really probably the cleanest Dylan Lane delineation I can make is like the apple Macintosh was a work of art. Whereas, you know, something else is just kind of utilitarian, right? And another computer might just be kind of utilitarian because the apple Macintosh expressed the point of view. And it was something that was created to make a statement to say, no, this is the way that computers should be. And so it’s going to be exactly what even had Steve jobs even had. I think engineers autograph, the inside, like the circuit boards of some of the, some of the computers, because they saw it as a work of art. Right. and so that’s probably the cleanest delineation I can make is when you’re making art, you’re putting yourself into the world, your values into the world in a way that requires you to risk and be vulnerable. Whereas you can be creative and come up with a creative solution that isn’t necessarily a risking much, or isn’t necessarily expressing your values. It’s not, well, I
RV (25:38):
Liked the problem solving thing is very clear, right? It’s like, you know, we live on a hill, we live on a hill, a very steep hill. We have to figure out a way to get the grass mowed. It is a problem. It’s not as easy as hiring a landscaping company. We’ve had to like solve this problem with different tools in different ways. It’s creative, but it’s not an expression of art. Versus if I plant a garden and I manicure like hand select what flowers are in there, it’s a, it’s almost like as an ex, an external manifestation of like my identity, then that garden would be art. And I liked that a lot. I, I was pressing you on it because I, I struggled to delineate between those two. And I think that’s really, really good and really, really clear of that. You know, creativity is problem solving, which we all do.
RV (26:32):
And sometimes it is also art because we we have put our heart and soul into this kind of like, you know, personal communication almost of like what we believe in into that. So I have one last question for you before I let you go. So before that, where, where should people go? Obviously you’ve got the accidental creative podcast, which is, is some way that, you know, people are probably tuning into a lot of our audiences, probably already listening to it. Where else should people go if they want, if they want to connect with Todd Henry and learn more?
TH (27:04):
So my personal website is Todd henry.com T O D D H and R y.com. And you can access the podcast, my writing, and my books. And anything else you want to access there? The website for the axle creative podcast is accidental creative.com. And then I’m on all of the socials at just Todd Henry, T O D D H E N R Y. That’s the benefit of being old and getting in early is you get [inaudible] handles with just your full name,
RV (27:30):
Everything. All right. So last little thought for you here is if somebody is trying to write something, an article, a blog, post, an ebook, a book, or they’re trying to create, you know, a piece of, of, of art, a speech, or, you know, a Ted talk or something like that. And they’re struggling because they don’t feel like what they’re saying is creative. What advice would you give to that person? You know, what do you think they should know? What do you think they should do to kind of access the, their, their deepest levels of creativity and art?
TH (28:11):
Yeah. So a couple of things, first of all, recognize that everything in the moment of creation is either going to be the greatest thing you’ve ever done or the worst thing you’ve ever done. Like there’s very, very rarely is it like I do I write something and think like, that’s okay. That’s all right. Like it’s either, oh, this is great. Or, oh, that’s complete garbage. Neither. The reality is that somewhere in the middle, we are the worst judge of our own work. Because we have context. So we’re comparing it against what we did yesterday and what we plan to do tomorrow, and maybe the best thing we’ve ever done. You know, that’s, that’s one of the challenges. That’s why, and you’ve written several books. I’ve written several books this way into editor is so critical. I’ve had editors in, well, I’ll give you an example for herding tigers.
TH (28:57):
My editor Niki Papadopoulos said, yeah, we’re going to lose chapter six. Like in other words, we’re going to cut 6,000 words out of your manuscript. By the way, 6,000 words represents, I write about 500 boards a day, every single day, when I’m writing a book, that’s my discipline. He has 500 words before nine 30 in the morning is my discipline. When I’m writing a book that represents weeks of work that I put into working on that chapter and my response wasn’t, you know, how dare you cut an entire chapter out of my book and it wasn’t, you know, why is it not good enough? Like maybe I’m not a good writer. My, my response was, I’m really glad that you’re my editor, because I probably would have kept it in there. And you’re, you’re exactly right. It actually doesn’t belong. We can use it in other ways.
TH (29:44):
It’s not bad writing. It just doesn’t belong in the flow of the book. I totally get it right. We need other people in our life to speak truth to us. And the reality is some of us, maybe some of us, our writing, isn’t where it needs to be. Maybe it doesn’t move people in the way we need it to move. Maybe we work on our craft for sure. They be selfless, really great writers, but we haven’t refined our point of view to the point where there’s an idea set that’s compelling. And so we need to work on honing that idea set, which is where an editor really comes into play in that, in that situation. So my advice to people is, listen, you have to have one or two at the, at the minimum trusted people in your life that you can bounce things off of.
TH (30:25):
You can share things with who will not be afraid to speak truth to you, but also will really encourage you when you need to be encouraged. I’ve shared things with people before and said, I don’t think this is very good. What do you think of like, what are you talking about? This is like maybe one of the best things I’ve ever read that you’ve written, you know, but those are also the same people who will bring me back down to earth. When I think I’ve written something really great. So we need those people in our lives. My wife reads all of my manuscripts when I’m finished with them and she marks them up. And you know why? Because a, my wife’s going to speak truth to me, B my wife has skin in the game. She is, wipes
RV (31:00):
Are really good at that. Oh, absolutely invested
TH (31:04):
In me succeeding. And she’s going to give me really good advice, right? About whether something works or doesn’t work. And nine times out of 10, when she’s given me advice, it’s been the right advice because
RV (31:16):
That’s such a great relationship because the spouse is so emotionally invested spiritually, financially invested like reputationally invested. And they want it to be honest, but they want it to be supportive. I mean, any spouse is, is, you know I’ve made a trusted spouse. A good, healthy relationship is a great, you know, that’s a great one.
TH (31:37):
It is. And you know, you have to hold your work very loosely in your hands. And that’s really difficult for a lot of people, especially younger people. You have to hold your work very loosely in your hands, because you’re about to put it into the world and it’s going to belong to other people. And so if you hold on too tightly to your work and you don’t let other people shape it, you’re going to, you’re going to strangle it. You have to let other people help, help you, help it become what it needs to be. And really at the end of the day, it’s not about you. It’s not about you and your voice and all that. It’s about the other people you’re going to impact. And so that’s why it’s so important to have other people in your, in your world. The other, the final thing I’ll say about all of this, sorry, there’s a long answer is whenever I create something, I create it for one person, not an avatar, not a group, not like I, I conjure up.
TH (32:28):
I could tell you the specific person that the axon creative is written to the specific person die empty. It was written to the specific person, that lot of the words, hurting tigers, motivation code. I wrote each of my books specifically with one person in mind and as if that person was sitting across the table from me. And that the funny thing is because I’ve done that people come up to me at conferences or wherever I’m speaking. And they’ll be like, I feel like you wrote this book just for me. And the reason is I wasn’t writing to an audience of is writing to a person. And I was writing as if I’m speaking to that person. So when you read the book, you feel like I’m speaking directly to you. So no matter what kind of art you’re making, or whether it kind of creative problem solving you’re doing, or what kind of brand you’re building, I encourage you don’t think about your avatar. Don’t think about your audience. Think about the person that you’re trying to communicate with. If you do that, you’re going to come across as far more authentic to that person, and far more useful to that person.

RV (33:20):
I love it. Todd Henry a friend is so great to have you so inspiring and deep and just insightful on how do you, how do you, how do we bring the breasts the best out of ourselves? How do we create everyday brilliance? Check him [email protected]. We’ll put links over there. And my friend, we wish you all. We wish you all the best. Thanks so much for being here.

TH (33:44):
Thanks, man. It’s great to be part of it. Thanks for all the great work.

Ep 177: Lessons in Personal Branding from the Ziglar Family with Tom Ziglar | Recap Episode

Welcome back to the influential personal brand podcast. Special recap edition joined today by AJ and we are breaking down an important family to us, the Ziglar family. If we got a chance, if you didn’t get a chance to make sure you listen to the interview that we did with Tom Ziglar, of course, Zig Ziglar, son, and Zig had a massive impact on our life and our early career. And so it was an honor to reconnect with Tom and see what they are up to. AJ and I are going to share with you some of our biggest takeaways from the episode. So why don’t you kick us off?

I think, I think one of my biggest takeaways was just really interesting quotes that Tom shared that was one of zigs old quotes. And I think he even said it was from the seventies or eighties, an older quote, but I thought it was really relevant for the, the time and space that we live in right now. And the quote was if you pursue standard of living, you will likely, never have a better quality of life. But if you pursue a better quality of life, the standard of living will always go up. And I thought that was really good and timely. Just in the, the season that so many of us are in and our businesses are in, and there’s been a lot of economic change and family change and business change and virtual and just all the things. And I just I was listening to radio station a couple of days ago and they were sharing that HR department’s number one concern right now are there people’s mental health and wellbeing.

It’s not retention, it’s not recruiting it’s, it’s actually employee mental health and wellness. And it was timely because I had heard that on a radio interview. And then this interview with Tom was almost back to back and I kind of just thought, Oh, that’s the universe going? Ding, ding, ding, connect the dots here of what are you in pursuit of? What are you in pursuit of? And I just thought it was really good to kind of like take a step back. And as we get into this recap to settle in of like, Whoa, what I am I in pursuit of and where does my own quality of life fit when it comes to what I’m working forwards working towards and why am I working towards it? So it was a little bit off interview topic, but for whatever reason, I kind of just even pause the interview and kind of sat with that for a moment of going, I know the rest of the interview, isn’t going to be talking about this, but this really simple quote really stuck out to me of just taking a moment of going, am I in pursuit of something for the wrong reasons?

And where does the quality, where does my quality of life come into the equation of what I’m working towards? Or is that even a factor? So I kind of off script there, but that was my very first and probably most important takeaway, not from just the interview, but probably my whole week.

I mean, that, that it was for me too. That was, that was one of my big, my big takeaways. And just this idea that the quality of your life directly influences also the quality of your work. And I think it’s like, you know, that that idea in school, that companies I think are waking up to that. I mean, that’s, I think one of, one of the good things that have come out of the recent time is going, it’s not only the right thing to just care about the quality of life of the people who are working in the business. It also is a good thing for the health of the business. Like the financial health of the success is when you have happier people, they do better work. So if you can’t get yourself to come around to it, you know, if you’re an employer just because you’re good natured is, is to make that connection.

And, and I think it, it hit me even more personally as going like, Oh, wow, where is the quality of my life? And am I focused on that? As much as the quality of work. And if I allow myself to really create the quality of life and focus on that, that the quality of work will increase as, as a by-product and the standard of living and just everything. And, and I think, I feel like there is this trend in the world right now, where people are in some ways, in some ways, letting go a little bit of like the money in the hustle and the, you know, the achievement and starting to wake up more to just like happiness and joy and fulfillment. Although there’s plenty of that other stuff that we’re all, we’re all hanging on to, it’s hard wired into our brains, but, and it was, that was my first takeaway too.

That was really good. So my second thing that kind of stuck out to me as I love this, and he was talking about his own identity. Tom was talking about his own identity and correlation to such a publicly and widely positively known reputation there. You need to get your own points. These are my points. And he said, he said something I had to realize is that, although I was speaking through and for my father’s legacy on principles and values, that my dad Zig was a one of a kind and I’m not him. And he’s not me. And I don’t speak like him and think like him, I don’t motivate like him, I don’t inspire him, but that’s okay. Is that people still wanted zigs principles and values and ideas, but they wanted them in the own way that Tom could deliver them.

Right. And I think that was really kind of an aha moment for so many of us is what are we trying to be like? That is not who we are just because we think that’s what other people want. Not because that’s what they told us they want. It’s just because that’s what we think they want. And so, as Tom was going through this story of how he really had to learn that the gift of his was not his own, but he had his own gifts and that people still wanted to learn from him and his own way. And he didn’t have to be Zig or be like Zig in order to complete that, you know, cycle there. And it just made me think of how often so many of the clients that we work with and people that we talk to, and even us, right, our own family, friends, our own team that we live in this idea of a I’m going to be this way, because I think that’s what my audience would like.

Like Rory actually heard this again on the radio, in the car lot here lately. Apparently the other thing I was going to say but one third of Americans actually decide where they’re going to vacation based on how that location will look on social media as they take pictures and kind of shared that. And I was like, well, that’s funny, wait, that’s not funny. Funny, not funny because it’s, it’s a, it’s really unfortunate that we do things. We live our life thinking that this is what other people want from us without ever living into our own uniqueness and originality. And quite honestly forget that, like, we don’t even do things for ourselves anymore just to impress, please show others on what we’re doing versus is that really what we want. And so anyways, it was a great part of the interview. It was short and sweet, but also very poignant in the fact of man, how many of us are living in the shadow of other people’s expectations?

When indeed no one, they didn’t, they don’t even want that from you. They want what, you’re not giving them, but you’re not giving it to them because you don’t think that’s what they want. So I just thought it was very I don’t know, humbling in a way of going, wow, have you ever even thought, are you trying to be someone that you’re not to impress people that actually want the real you, not the fake you? And it was a, I think it was just a really good part of the interview of this aha moment that so many of us relate to.

Yeah, I was pro that was profound. I mean, I I’ve I wrote, I wrote down when he said, dad always told us that his gift is not our gift and that like, I mean, that gave me chills because I was going what an important lesson for Zig to pass on. And also for everyone to know, like the way he said it too is so true is like Zig had plenty of weaknesses, just like anyone else does that are Tom’s strengths. And who are we trying to be like, that is not us. That is preventing us or disallowing us from, from being us. And I think that happens all the time. Right? We’re trying to emulate somebody or something, some set of people versus what you said, just settling in and receiving the idea that what want from us is to just be us. I, I love Sally Hogshead kind of talks about this, where she says, you don’t have to become more fascinating. You have to just become more of who you already are. And as a by-product of that, you’ll be fascinating. But when we try to become like everyone else, then we, you know, we, we become bland and and we’re not living in our, in our gifts. And that, that was powerful, powerful moment. That was really cool.

Yeah. So apparently we have the exact same takeaways. Maybe the third one will be different. We’ll say that the third one, I thought wasn’t necessarily a point in the interview. It was the interview as a whole. And we talk a lot about this and we’ve had several guests on the show over the last several months that have also talked about how do you take one existing piece of content and build an empire? And it’s not just a book or just a course or just us speaking or justice, but it’s like, how do you take a piece of content or in the Ziglar, Ziglar family, lots of pieces and pieces of content. But you don’t have to have thousands of pieces of content to build a very large production engine of business. You can build a big business off of one set of curriculum. And, you know, I could give you dozens of people who have done this, but one piece of content can be a book and a speech, and a course and shared on a podcast and turned into a coaching program and then a training program and then a consulting program, and then a certification program or a train the trainer program.

It’s like, the list goes on and on and on off of one set of content, it’s like, you don’t need 35 different pieces of content to build a very big business that’s multifaceted. And I think so often people get consumed with, in order to do a new thing. I have to have new content and what Zig the kind of Zig vault of content and what Tom is doing with that is a great example of no, we’re not necessarily trying to create brand new content. We’re repurposing content that has been loved and adored around the world and giving it to people in new ways. Smart and really good. So again, it was just the whole interview as a whole of reminding all of us. You don’t have to have lots of pieces of content to have lots of different business models.

Yeah, that’s a really good reminder. It’s another example of like, when we talk about she hands wall, where if you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. And I think people are always like off chasing the next content. And sometimes I think in a lot of cases, you’re more likely to make more money by serving your existing audience in a deeper way versus creating a new thing for a new audience. And so that’s a good reminder. For me, my third takeaway that I wrote down was, was just again, it wasn’t so much related to personal branding except for like being an entrepreneur. When Tom said, you know, a great leader is more focused on the growth of their people than the results from their people. It’s kind of tied back into that quality of life thing that it was just like, if you really can invest in people and care about people and build them and provide for them and coach them that, you know, that is, that is how you get the most out of them, not by just coming at them and pressuring them to get the most out of them and, you know, just building those relationships and investing in people and, and, and believing in them.

And I think that’s part of their shared legacy. Definitely, as I say, that’s very Ziglar, Ziglar, Ziglar philosophies. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So well, there you go, a great chance to sit down with legendary family and Tom is such a great guy. We’re excited to see how that brand is doing and the new era and it’s transitioning and it’s it’s really, really cool. And anyways, it’s honor for us to get, to bring conversations like that to you and an honor to us that you would keep coming back to listen to them. So thanks for being here. We’ll catch you next time.

Ep 176: Lessons in Personal Branding from the Ziglar Family with Tom Ziglar

Well, if you followed me for a while, you’ve probably heard my stories about me being mentored by the one and only Zig Ziglar and getting to be backstage with him at the get motivated seminars and having dinner with him and his son, Tom, and his wife, the red head. And that is how I met the man that you were about to meet Tom Ziglar, who is Tom, who is Zig Ziglar son, and is today the CEO of Ziglar. And Tom is an author and a speaker as well. He had a book come out recently called choose to win, which they’ve expanded into a coaching program. And he now carries the reins of the Ziglar family. Of course their philosophy is really based on what has become just a worldwide famous quote. You can have everything in life, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.

And so I thought it would be good to talk to Tom and catch up with him. We haven’t talked in a little while and hear everything that’s going on at Ziglar. And some of the story about how his dad built his personal brand and what they’re doing now in the succession and the legacy and transitioning to everything that Tom is doing. So Tom, welcome to the show, my friend, well, it’s great to be here. Rory, it’s been too long, right? I’m excited for what you’re doing and just honored to be on. Well, thank you buddy. I was trying to think I there, I have a video on my YouTube channel unlisted, I think is the first time you and I met, which was at dinner with your mom and dad. And I think I was like 23, which means we’ve known each other for 15 years now, already. Which is, which is wild. Give us an update on what’s what’s going on over there at Ziglar. And you know, I just, I think it’s fascinating. Your dad has such an incredible legacy inspired so many people. It’s really exciting to see that everything is still going and it’s transitioning. So talk to us a little bit about, like, when did you take the reins? What has that been like and where are you guys at now? And, and, and what is Ziglar focused on as Ziglar legacy?

Yeah, well, since we’re talking about brand building you know, my challenge was our brand was built on a personality and it doesn’t get better than Zig Ziglar. And you know, who in the world influenced more people through his spoken word on stage, and then through his books and his audio programs, I mean millions and millions, but he told us, I mean, he told the whole family, he told me that his gifting is not our gift, right. I mean, he, he could reach into the bootstrapper the individual and inspire and motivate them to become the person that God created them to become. And each of us have our own gifts and talents. And so at the end of 2019, I really sat down and I said, well, what do we do at Ziglar now? Because as much as I would like to speak, like Zig Ziglar, I can’t neither can anybody else

I’m not, Oh, welcome to the club. Right? Like he was a one of a kind. So what in, what year was that you really started?

Well, I’ve been thinking about this for 20 years because you know, the transition and everything. But I looked at where we were at the end of 2019, and I said, how w how has our company transformed? And so I wrote these words down. And so I want you to think about when dad was leading and his voice was out there. His market was everyone. I mean, it, if somebody wandered in off the street, their life was, was likely to get changed if they just came with a friend or whatever, because he, he really spoke to that individual. And now we, we do the same thing, but we’re very focused. There are four groups of people that we work with, people who are intentionally building a legacy. So these are very successful people who are looking at, you know, what am I going to do next?

How am I going to impact my family and my business so that it lives on the ripples through eternity. Then we work with coaches, speakers, and trainers. And so what we decided to do was to equip coaches, speakers, or trainers with our life-changing content, so that they could take it and go and reach their own community. And so that’s really the focus of what we we do. And we do that in four ways, by encouraging, by transforming, by equipping and by supporting. And so anybody who comes in and they’re going to find all the Ziglar material we’re going to encourage you, we’re going to help you transform. And then if you’re called into one of those areas, Hey, I want to, I want to build an intentional legacy, or I want to take this material and speak on it or train on it, or coach on it. That’s where we get into the equipping and the supporting.

Yeah. Well, and I think a brand builders group, a lot of what we do is we help draw out of people, their own content. We help them create their own original IP, their own sort of like thought leadership, but many, and I would say most coaches and a lot of the most successful ones do this, where they get certified and trained in an, in an existing curriculum with an existing brand, like what you guys are doing. And so, so if I hear you, right, you are now licensing the, basically the the Ziglar content, so that coaches, they don’t have to actually create their own content. They can just basically take yours and go out and apply it directly to people.

Absolutely. And that’s one big category. And let me just give a, a common the second category, and that’s this, we built our program to align with somebody who is already a coach or a speaker or a trainer in a niche. And what they need is, is they got all the professional experience. They’ve got the industry scars, they’ve got the network and they’re going to get the attention in their area, but they also might want to dig into the foundational quality of life things. And here’s a big trend. That’s just happened. In the 1970s. Dad said this, this is, you know, dad’s like when I look at his material and what he was saying 50 years ago, and all the research, that’s proven it out, it’s, it’s unbelievable. But he said this. He said, if, if standard of living is your goal, quality of life almost never goes up.

But if quality of life is your goal standard of living almost always goes up. So you fast forward to the pandemic. And now everybody’s working from home and there’s all these new pressures and changes and challenges and disruptions. The number one issue in large companies today that HR, all the reports have shown is the health and wellbeing of their people. In other words, the life stress that’s happening is the biggest challenge to productivity and performance bigger than the technological challenges. And so what does that mean? It means this, that the world at large organizations have realized beyond the lip service, the quality of life equals quality of work. And so the way we work with leaders who were coaches and speakers and trainers, is they speak in their own area of expertise. And when you dig in, you realize that the challenges in that organization are usually relational hits. It’s usually problems stemming from individuals who don’t know how to do life. And we provide that content, that material that allows them to add that to what they’re already doing.

How did you, I guess, come up with that? Or how did you transition? I mean, that had to be a pretty big transition in terms of you taking the reigns and figuring out the business model. Cause I feel like when your dad was around a big part of the business model was, was speaking. Right. I mean, so you’ve got speaking and then, and then like tape tapes and CDs and like the, the recordings and where you guys weren’t at least, I, I don’t remember you having have been as much of a coaching model back in those days. So that’s a, that’s a big pivot that you’ve, that you’ve made as the CEO. Right. It’s a big pivot.

And it happened, let’s call it part one, part two. So part one is I just started speaking and it was gut wrenching. I mean, not that I did a bad job necessarily on stage, but I hated it. I mean, it was just the anxiousness and all these things. And I had to go and sit with myself and say, why, why is this such an issue? Because dad never put pressure on me. So in my head, I had told myself, people want to hear Zig Ziglar. They want me to be like dad. And I translated that into, I have to speak like him. And so what I’d done is I’d bought it and bought into a lie that had been telling myself. And so immediately I started working on that mindset and I said, no, people want me to be me, but they want me to have the same principles and values that dad had.

So that allowed me to, I’m a why behind the why guy? I like to know, you know, I like a lot of evidence. I’ve got a dry sense of humor. And so once I became myself in leading, then you start noticing, okay, who, who gets naturally attracted to this? And what are my talents? So dad was speaking, I’m more a trainer and a coach. I like a little bit longer. And so we created our Ziglar legacy certification where we work with speakers and trainers to go teach it. And then the coaches started showing up from, from every direction and even crazier. It was a lot of business owners came in and said, Hey, I don’t want to make a business out of this, but I do want to take this back to my own company. I want to develop my own people. So that’s been a great, and so, so first I had to realize, quit trying to be somebody else, what are my gifts and talents, and then how do my gifts and talents best serve our customers. And so that was the, that was the graduation or the, the timeline, if you will.

And then what’s the, what is the organization look like? Like how many people are on the team, like employees versus contractors in terms of like how you support. Cause you guys just to be clear, you don’t do coaching per se, you license your content to coaches. And like you mentioned, like maybe business owners to go out and, and teach the content. Although you do provide support some support to the coaches, but you’re, you’re you’re, am I understanding that right?

That’s right. So this is kind of cool. We have three employees.

Wow. Okay. And then contractors is everything else.

And we have about 200 and some odd Ziglar speakers and trainers, and about 150 Ziglar coaches. Wow. And these coaches and these speakers they’ll have their own brand. And it will say Ziglar legacy speaker, or choose to win coach or see you at the top coach Ziglar coach. And so that’s how we kind of partner with them.

I love that. Yeah. I mean, I think that is, is so cool is yeah. Who doesn’t want to be associated. I mean, anybody who, you know, has known the brand, it’s like who doesn’t want to be associated with it and, and be able to talk about those principles. And so I think that’s part of why I’m asking is just, I think it’s a really great model. Like it’s a very great it’s you guys are in a licensing model where you have figured out if we can, if we can take our content, which we do content really well, your dad created all this content. You’ve created all this content. If we can take all of our content, package it up so that people don’t have to create their own content, they can use it or use it. In addition to the content they’re creating, you basically got this, this license licensing model and a wonderful network of people who you do, you know, are like friends and comrades, as well as people helping market the brand and like push the brand out there.

That’s awesome. And, and people are attracted off of the quote that you mentioned at the beginning. You can have everything in life you want, if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want, that’s why they come in to Ziglar. And then we help them gain clarity on what, what does balanced success mean for them? What’s their purpose and what’s their why. And then we have decades of content that we equip our speakers and our coaches with to dig deep on that. And you know, one of the cool things that I love is that when corporate world says quality of life equals quality of work, they’re recognizing that people are spiritual.

And so I see, you know, one of the big disruptions that’s coming is I think the spiritual conversation is it going to be politically correct and dangerous anymore? It’s, it’s literally going to be, Hey, you know what? I want to be successful. I want to spend time with my family. I want to live in Costa Rica. I, you know, that’s what a top performer is going to say. And these principles and values are important to me and who they are and who do they want to work for? If I’m a top performer and I can work anywhere in the world, I’m going to want to work for leadership that says, you know what, you’re right. We value that we, we understand that life is more than getting the next project done. And what’s weird about it in a very cool way is that once you start to support that productivity and performance goes up, everybody thought when we went home for the pandemic, that it was going to kill our performance for people who could work remotely performance went up.

Yeah. I mean, I, I think that is so valuable and important. I think the, the human spirit has in many ways just been ignored at the workplace for too long, just viewed as just, you know, some hands or a cog to produce something and, and people waking up to the quality of life. And I think the other thing that’s driving that trend is that leaders are waking up. Cause they’re going, man, I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I’m burnt. Like I’m, I’m toast. Like, you know, the, the raise isn’t worth it, the title isn’t worth it. Like I’ve had two divorces or whatever, you know, like they just I haven’t had two divorces for those of you listening. I’m, I’m still married to AIG, but I think people are going, yeah, there’s more to it than this. And so what I heard you just say is you think that part of the future includes just as people are waking up to this idea that the whole person is you know, fitness and you know, like finances outside of work and free time. Do I hear you saying that you think that the faith conversation is also coming up is going to be coming up more and more in, in the workplace environment?

I do. And the reason for that is, and I’m going to give a new term that I’ve landed on and there’s so much going on. So here, so here’s the term that I’m kind of coining in that and that’s this ACE, asynchronous vulnerability. So we now live in an asynchronous world, which means that people in different locations in different times zones are working on the same project together. And they’re doing it through technology, you know, Slack or Google docs or whatever they’re using. But we also know that the, the, probably the number one aspect of a winning team or organization is vulnerability. Lindsey only talks about it. Renee Brown talks about trust and those different things. And vulnerability means that if I have a doubt or I don’t understand something, or I have a crazy idea, I can throw it out to my, my team.

And I know it’s a safe place. Well, that’s difficult to do around the conference table. It’s really difficult to do if you live in different countries in different time zones. And you’re only communicating through a static document in zoom, right? And so what creates an environment where somebody would be vulnerable in this new world? It comes down to virtues like kindness and respect and all the spiritual qualities that we talk about. The old style top-down leadership do it because I said, so command and control. You know, this is the way it’s going to be. That’s gone. The millennials are pretty much ushering that out anyway, but now through a camera, if you tell somebody what to do over a camera, they start looking 46%. I read a study this week. I think it was a Microsoft study. 46% of employees are going to look for a job somewhere else this year.

Wow. That’s crazy. So what are they, you got to ask yourself, what are they looking for? In my mind, they’re looking for a coach leader, somebody who’s collaborative who asks questions, who’s more focused on the growth of their people. Then the results. Let me say that again. They’re more focused on the growth of their people than the results. Not that they don’t want results, but that they know this when a pandemic black Swan happens and you try to revive a business plan based on an environment that no longer exists, you’re doomed to failure. So what, what old-style companies and organizations do is they beat that horse. That’s lying on the ground, hoping that it will get up and run it’s because they’re focused on results. If they were focused on growth, they would look outside and go look at all this opportunity. People have more problems than ever before.

This is a buffet for us because our people are growth oriented and they get excited about embracing the change and some of that. And so leaders who embrace the growth mindset, which I love all the research that validates what that started in the see at the top book in 1974, people who embrace that, they’re the ones who do well in a time like this. And when we look at technological convergence and the things that are going to come in and change, I mean, Warren w when we do this podcast five years from now, we’re going to have on glasses and the video screens going to be on the back of our lenses and our brains going to think we’re having coffee together. We won’t even know we’re not in the same room. So why would we ever go into the office if our brain thinks we’re in the office? Why would we go? It’s a, that’s what I’m wanting.

Yeah. It’s a wild time. I mean, I, I, I think that, and I love just this. It’s kinda just like developing your people and not just focusing constantly on profit. And it’s like, that’s what a leader is. It’s, it’s like, that’s, that’s who I am willing to submit myself to. As someone who’s looking after me versus someone who’s just trying to get something out of me. And yeah, certainly principals and virtues. Your dad made a career out of talking about long, long before. You know, there was the data and the, and the trends. Let me ask you this, Tom, where should people go? If they want to plug into what you guys are doing and, and you know, just get connected to you and the team and, and what’s happening in the Ziglar these days,

I’ll make it easy. Kind of one of these weird, crazy guys. So first is easy. Just go to ziglar.com. You can check out what we’re doing, but if you, if you want to reach out to me, just, just email me, Tom, at ziglar.com. So

That’s pretty, that’s pretty easy. Thomas Ziglar, Thomas ziglar.com or go to ziglar.com. I, I mean you’ve always been so approachable, my friend, and you’ve always been so supportive of me and Ajay and the stuff that we’re working on. You know, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve felt almost like a distant part of the Ziglar family, as I

Imagined, probably millions of people do. Because your whole family has that now

You got brothers and sisters all over the world, and it’s just unbelief. If there’s anything that I could, that I would say about the legacy is I could walk into any room and I’m speaking to friends and family. I mean, it’s just amazing.

Yeah. Well, we wish you the continued best for you and the family and the friends. And you know, of course, the honoring memory of your father who carries a dear spot in my heart and always will. And thank you for coming on and giving us an update and you know, tuning in. So we’re praying for you guys, appreciate you.

Ep 175: How to Write a Great Book with Allison Fallon | Recap Episode

Welcome back to the influential personal brand recap. I am joined today by my wife and CEO. AJ Vaden she’s back back with us. She’s been, she’s been gone for a couple of weeks, but great to have her back. We’re talking about Alison Fallon and breaking down the interview that we had, and we’re just going to share our kind of top three and three. So since you’ve been gone awhile, I’ll, I’ll extend you the floor for.

Okay, good. So my first, my first kind of recap, takeaway or highlight that I jotted down was this a comment that she made very early in the interview and it kind of set the tone for the rest of the interview, in my opinion, which is great writing comes from great thinking. And I thought it was really good cause she was like, great writing is not about great grammatical structure and commas and periods. And she goes, that’s what editors are for great writing is about great thinking. And I love that because it really tied in to a couple of other things that popped up that I’m sure we’ll discuss later. She said, but the challenge is, is that most great thinking never turns into great published books because of our own writer’s block. And I thought that was really well connected because I think so often we don’t think, well, we’re not good writers.

And we think about being a good writer is in the grammatical sense, not in the thinking sense. And so we go, well, I’m just not a great writer. I, you know, I don’t know where all the commas go or I don’t know how to get my thoughts on paper. And I just love it. It’s like, well, it’s not about any of that. It’s that great writing comes down to great thinking. And then you work with editors to take care of the rest and what an amazing relief of going. Oh, there is a way for me to get my thoughts into a book and create this established thought pattern that I so believe in and get it out into the world, but it doesn’t require me being such a writer and the, in the, I dunno, traditional sense. So I just thought that was pretty revolutionary in my opinion. Yeah.

I had never heard anyone say that. That was my first takeaway too. I thought that was so profound. I wasn’t even copying off your paper. I came up with that legitimately as it may take away. And there were, there’s a couple things that stuck out to me cause you know, people ask us all the time to say, Hey, this brand builders group helped people write books. And the answer is yes. And they’ll say, well, do you publish books? And it’s like, no. And we do edit them. No, I think what we help with the thinking we help with the organization.

That’s why I like it so much. Cause it’s, it’s related to what our skill are. Right.

We actually farm out the editing and the publishing to our implementation

Partners. Yeah. And

We also are not the pros on how to design the book and how to get it distributed and warehouse and all that stuff. We’re good at. We’re good at the, and then we’re good at the selling, but all the actors outsource the production part. We have to outsource the rest of the rest of it. But yeah, that’s super powerful. The other thing that I think is, is a worthwhile you know, lesson here that I’ve learned over the years is there’s a lot of different types of writers, writing and writers and editors. There are content editors, which like, you know, I think of Marianne who is via my content editor, our content editor for the books.

There’s a lot of hands going around right now.

Yeah. Hands, but they’re just listening. So they can’t, they can’t, they can’t all, not everybody can see, see that. But you’ve got content editing, which is really about the thinking and the organization. And then you’ve got more of like copy editing, which is like the commas and the periods. And then, then you have copywriting, which is different. That’s more of like the marketing and sales copy that would go on the jacket. And those are a couple of different types of skillsets and different types of people. If you’re thinking about launching a book or doing a book that, you know, just to kind of think about that. So we both have the same first one. What was your second?

My second one I’m kind of connected to that was around this writer’s block kind of concept and idea. And I’ll kind of say this again, but I wrote it down and the way that I translated what Allie said Alison, this year that Allie or Alison goes by Allie, Allie, I’ve got her in my mind is Allie. So Alison alley, but most great ideas never get published due to your own inability to get your great thoughts onto paper and most great ideas. Never turn into great books because of your own writer’s block. So in order to get past that, it’s really somewhat simple is that great content comes from trying to simply provide value to the end reader. So instead of thinking about yourself all the time of, well, what if no one likes this? Or what if it, no one buys this? Or what if me, me, me, you just stop that and you go, what would provide value to the person I’m trying to reach?

What lesson have I learned that could, that could provide impact for someone else? What is something that I have done that I hope no one else ever does? So if I can share this and save you some time, heartache, trouble money, or this is something that I did do. So instead of just thinking about, well, what if it doesn’t hit the list? Or what if no one buys it? Or what if it’s not any good? What if no one likes it? What if people hate it, stop all that nonsense and just go, how do I provide great value? And one of the ways that you can start providing great value is just to start answering valuable questions that your audience has just go through. What are the questions that you wish you would have had the answers to back when, and start answering those and develop your content from there. And she goes just a simple way of getting out of writer’s block as you start answering questions. Thought that was brilliant. We talk a lot about that. But, and the context of a book about it was so helpful and simple, which is so important to all of you who are listening.

You know, it’s funny, cause I think of myself more as a writer today, but so many people don’t think of themselves as a writer. And I never thought of myself as a writer and I was worried like, are they going to like my writing style into what you’re saying? The best writing style is just something that’s valuable to the reader, like who they don’t really care about the others. So I think that’s so good. My second takeaway was this a super quick little nugget that she said, which was, she said, think about what’s your favorite book and then who published it? And none of us would actually know the name

Unless you’re a publisher, unless you’re a publisher. But even though I bet a lot of publishers yeah.

They didn’t publish. And so I think, you know, we get caught up a lot of times and like who’s the publisher and you know that, and it’s like at the end of the day, it’s just what you’re saying. It’s how do I create a valuable book? I mean, the there’s there’s value. Each publisher has different values and there’s, you know, there’s pros and cons of, of different things. But at the end of the day, as, as the author, it’s your ideas that matter. And don’t get so hung up on whether it was self published, traditionally published, you know, vanity publishers, just like in between just create an awesome book and help help some people. So that was a great reminder.

Yeah. Well that actually has a really good transition into my third and last point, which is when it comes to asking yourself, should I try to go the traditional route and try to get a traditional publisher to publish my book? Should I self publish it? Should I do this hybrid model? Like what’s more important, right. But which one should I really go for? And I loved what she said. She goes, well, it’s a really simple question. And remember to ask yourself this, what’s your favorite book. Okay. Now who published it? And if you don’t know, there’s your answer because it doesn’t really matter. And I think that’s really just kind of so awesome. I think we do get so hung up on that. And she said, the truth is, is that most great books. You never know who the publisher was because it doesn’t matter.

It’s about the great content and truly what’s way more important than the type of publisher you have is your own ability to distribute the book. It’s your own personal distribution plan, which comes down to your platform, which is, well, how many people can you get it in front of, on your own without, depending on a publisher, because publishers don’t sell books, let’s just call that what it is. They’re publishers, they’re not marketers and they’re not sellers per se. They’re publishers. It’s going to be up to you anyways. So why not focus on that in the first place of going, how am I reaching people on my email list? Who am I speaking in front of? Who’s like, who subscribed to my podcast? Or how many podcasts am I on what’s my social media reach, but what, what platform do I have? What distribution do I have with that platform? And that’s the much more important question to ask versus who’s going to publish them.

That’s such a, such a good reminder. Cause you think about it. You know, when you start on the journey, you think that the quality of the book determines the sales success of the book. And it’s not really that it, I mean, that’s a part of it, but it’s like the quality of the book is directly and in proportion to the number of people, the audience, the author can get in front of. Yeah. So that’s really good. But the, for me, the third takeaway was, was just kind of a different way of thinking about it. And she said, if you’ve got an idea that’s been gifted to you, you feel this prompting on your heart, this calling, the word that she used really stuck with me. She said, you are the steward of that idea. Like if you’ve been gifted, this, it now means that you are the steward of it.

You, it is your responsibility. It’s your obligation. It’s your, it’s your duty, it’s your privilege to carry this idea and sort of, you know, birth it into the world. And that was just really powerful for me to go, okay, you know, you want to be a, a big author and you want to impact lives. But just the idea itself is something that you’re, you’re stewarding. And that, that means that somebody else out there needs that idea and you gotta be accountable for delivering that. So I love that beautiful stuff. Make sure that you’re listening, go back and listen to the episode. If you haven’t. Allie drops a lot of little nuggets and tidbits. And we really love her and recommend her for a couple of different things that we introduced clients to. But that’s all we’ve got for this recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. Keep coming back. We’re here for you, cheering you on, see you next time.

Ep 174: How to Write a Great Book with Allison Fallon

Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview, we are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming. From anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call to talk to you soon on with the show.

I trust people who my good friend, Donald Miller trust and Donald was how I originally found out about the woman you are meeting about. Alison Fallon comes it turns out we’ve got several mutual friends, several mutual clients that we share. Allison was living at Donald’s house for a minute here as she, she moved in her family moved to Nashville, but Allison Fallon is an award-winning author. She’s got this new book that just came out. It’s called the power of writing it down a simple habit to unlock your brain and re-imagine your life. So she’s a speaker but she’s most well known for being a a writing coach. In the past she’s ghost written very successful books. She’s worked with New York times bestselling authors. She’s worked with newbies and really her company finds your voice specializes in helping people to basically complete their manuscript more or less to get the ideas out of your head onto paper, into a book proposal, into a manuscript, you know, and or manuscript and then get them out into the world, which is important if you are building a personal brand.

And that is why she’s here. So, Allie, thanks for Coming on.

Thank you for having me. I’m so happy to be here.

You are so cool. And I’ve known you for years. I mean, I guess I knew you because you used to work with Don official. Like

I did. Yeah. I was on full-time staff for maybe a couple of months until I realized that I didn’t, I just worked better as a contractor and a freelancer and whatever, but we, I’ve worked very closely with their team for a long time teaching workshops and traveling and teaching keynotes and that sort of thing. So

I know, and you know, we know several of the same literary agents and you just, you’ve got such a great reputation in this, in this space of writing. And I, you know, I’m probably AJ and I probably get, I would say at least two pitches a month from people who are writing coaches that want to come on to this show and, and, you know, so there’s very, very rare where we bring someone on and it’s because writing is such an intimate process and it’s, we really, really trust people who have, have really, really done it. What do you think is the biggest kind of hurdle here for people? And, you know, I know you talk about in the book about the blank page and getting started, and can you kind of just set the, the stage of like, what are the mental roadblocks to writing? Because I think that’s, that’s as big of an issue to overcome as the actual, like writing itself

A hundred percent. Yeah. Well first let me say, I’m honored that you are having me on the show, hearing. You say that you get requests and you’re having me just, I don’t take that lightly. So I hope I can do justice to this conversation because there’s definitely a lot to talk about, but I think you’re making the point here that I would make, which is that the biggest obstacles to actually writing our book are mostly mental. In fact, the number one obstacle that I see most people face when it comes to writing their book is just feeling like they aren’t a writer or a lot of people will say to me, well, I’m not a real writer. I’m not a writer. I’m not really supposed to be doing this. What they don’t realize is that this is a conversation that I’ve had with almost every client that I’ve ever worked with, regardless of how many books they’ve ever sold, whether or not they’ve ever been on the New York times bestsellers list you know, whether or not they make a full-time living from their writing, I will hear people whose names you would recognize and whose books you’ve read.

Say to me, I’m not really a writer. I’m not a real writer. I wasn’t ever supposed to do this. A publisher came to me and asked me if I would write this book. My field is really this other field, but I just got sort of sucked into this idea of writing a book. And here I am, and I have this book out in the world. So I think it’s helpful for people to know here, understand that they’re not the only ones who are facing this. It’s like the, it’s like a different version of imposter syndrome specifically in the field of publishing where people feel like, because I don’t necessarily call myself a writer. That means that I don’t have the chops to get this finished. And it’s just simply not the case. I mean, the biggest predicting factors to whether or not someone will ever publish their book have far more to do with how passionate do you feel about the topic or subject matter? How important does it feel to you to have this book out in the world? How much do you want to be considered a reputable source when it comes to this topic? And those are really the things that drive people to get to the finish line far more than whether or not they have any training or background in the specific field of writing.

So once you get past that hurdle what do you think really makes a great writer? And I think like, and I want to just talk about the pure form of writing here, right? So there’s a whole different conversation, which is, you know, half the battle probably, which is the marketing, but yeah, just the purity of the written word. Yes. What do I need to know about that? That makes, would make me a better writer.

I’m so glad you’re asking this question, because I say to writers all the time that great writing is really great thinking and we get confused. We think that great writing is great grammar, and this is no knock on great grammar. We need good grammar and we need good editors to fix our grammar and edit our grammar because you know, the you’ve heard like all the jokes about how, if you get one piece of grammar wrong, it changes the whole meaning of the sentence. It’s like, let’s eat grandma, let’s eat comma, grandma. You you’ve heard that example. So, okay.

I haven’t heard that. Exactly. It’s funny. It shows you how original, like you take things like assume everyone has heard it, but if you’re not in the same space, even yeah, it’s true.

So grammar is important. It matters because you know, changing the grammar can change the meaning of the sentence, but when it comes to really creating a great book idea, it’s much more about how can we think about this idea versus how can we execute it perfectly. So I teach writers that great books start with great questions. And so if you’re not happy with where your book idea is, let’s ask some better questions. So so that’s a lot of the work that I do with writers is, is helping them dig a little bit deeper, ask better questions, really get to thinking about this idea in a multilayered way, in a multi-faceted way to think about it from a lot of different perspectives. And then to think about how this idea is really going to impact your reader. I teach authors outline books based on the transformation that you want to take place in the end reader. And so that’s, that’s sort of the path that I take writers on, but I think the biggest paradigm shift is really moving away from feeling like, well, if I don’t know exactly where the commas go, then this isn’t going to be written well, and that’s just not true.

Yeah. And, and when you go to the go to the written part, so, I mean, I love this distinction that great writing is really great thinking fully believe that and support that. When I think of the concept of great thinking, my mind kind of goes to logical right. It’s like I’m, I’m presenting some logical arguments, some logical structure. I mean, let’s table fiction for a section for for for a minute. Most of our audience are, are non would be nonfiction. We do have, we do have some fiction clients and stuff, but you know, when I think of non-fiction there, you know, that even my mind kind of goes to the logical, how do we find the balance? Or how much does the balance of logic and emotion matter? Does it depend completely on the book? Is it like some books are all, you know, they’re all heartstrings and emotion. Some books are all logical. Should we always have a balance of both? How do we find it? Is it more one than the other? And, and then, you know, if I’m an emotional person, how do I access more of that logical, if I’m a logical person, how do I access more of the emotional? So can you just like touch on that balance for a second?

Yeah, I totally. So we divide books into two categories. This is connected. I promise, but we divide books into two categories, either story-driven books or content driven books. And I think of content driven books, the content driven books are driven by the content. So this a really great example of a content driven book would be a how to book or some sort of educational resource. That would be like a really clear cut content driven book I’m picking up

Storybrand or take the territory, ran from Donald Miller, even take the stairs from, from like our first book. Those are con content books,

Content driven books. It doesn’t mean that they won’t include stories, but they’re much, they’re usually much more logical, rational, reasonable, analytical, linear. And then there are story-driven books, which are driven by the story. So when you pick up a story driven book, you’re not wondering, you know, how do I like cook chili? You’re picking up a straighter and book because you’re wondering like, will this person survive this obstacle that’s in front of them, will they be able to overcome the obstacle? What’s going to happen to them next, who they meet? Who do they meet tomorrow? You know, wild by Cheryl strayed is the most common example that I give with a story-driven book, because you’re not wondering, you know, the book is about a lot of things. It’s not just about hiking, the Pacific crest trail, it’s about grief and it’s about drug use. And it’s about, you know, a coming of age and all kinds of things.

But you don’t pick up the book because you’re wanting to know more about illicit drug use. You pick up the book because you’re wanting to know what happens to this woman and does she make it to the end of the trail? And that’s what a story-driven book would do. So that those two categories don’t exactly match up with what you’re talking about, about like, you know, some writing being more logical and something more emotional. But I think there, there are some parallels there. And a lot of times people will say to me, I don’t know if my book is content driven or story driven, because I definitely want to tell a lot of stories and I’m going to tell some personal stories, but, but there’s still some content that I want to teach. And there’s a lot of gray area. There’s some books like wild that are obviously story-driven and then some books like, you know, business made simple that are obviously content driven, but then there’s this middle ground where like an author, like Bernay Brown for example, is a great example of an author who tells a lot of stories.

And there’s a lot of emotion in what she talks about, but the book is really content driven. It’s focused on delivering information and sometimes the medium that you use to deliver that information is a personal story. And sometimes in order to deliver that information to the reader, you need to sort of tug at their heartstrings or get them to feel a little bit emotional, or even be a little bit vulnerable as an author. So the question I don’t think is about like, how analytical should we be, or how emotional should we be? It’s more like, who is the end user? Who’s the reader that’s going to pick up this book. What kind of transformation do you want to create inside of the reader? And then what are the tools at our disposal in order to create that transformation that I’m trying to create. And then these two categories that we use of content driven and story driven are more just helping us think through, you know, like what’s the frame, what’s the structure that we’re going to use to deliver the message.

I mean, one thing I love about those questions is, you know, who’s the end user, what kind of transformation in the reader is that they are audience centered questions. And the biggest mistake that I think first-time authors make is they’re all self-centered questions. Like, am I smart enough? Is this good? Will anybody like this? Like, are they going to know I’m not really a writer? And it’s like, they’re so caught up in their own self centered questions. They’re not even thinking about the actual, like, how do I make this valuable for the reader? And if you kind of scent sit and center on that, it’s like, whether it’s logical or emotional, it’s going to be good.

I mean, think about a book like five love languages. And this is not meant to be a negative statement about this book at all, but the book is so simple and it has sold better. I don’t know the exact current stats on the book, but I just, I I’ve heard a lot of statistics on the book because publish I, the same publisher who published my first book, that book is still a hundred percent funding that publisher still to this day, it’s been translated into more languages than almost any other book. It’s I think at one point it was selling more copies than the Bible. So to think about the kind of reach that that book has had, and then the way that the, the five love languages themselves have become totally ubiquitous to the point where I can say, like, what’s your love language, and you know exactly what I’m talking about, regardless of who you are. It just is a good reminder to us that your, your idea doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t have to be very intelligent. And I’m not saying that that idea isn’t intelligent, I’m saying it doesn’t have to be like some really complex way of thinking about the world. All it has to be is helpful for people and it will land.

Yeah. I, I love that and I, I think that’s so true. In fact, I think it’s, you know, like I think back, so like my second book procrastinate on purpose five permissions to multiply your time, you know, it’s based on how to multiply time and there’s this focus funnel. I think the ideas are so much more eloquent and forward thinking and advance that book. Doesn’t sell a fraction as well as take the stairs, which is basically like, you know, more or less it’s do, do hard things. Like it’s a kind of a motivational, but I, you know, I was reading a book here about social media strategy recently, and it was kind of saying the number one thing that matters more than anything is not how advanced the idea it is. That how advanced the idea is it’s how shareable is the idea, how transmittable is the idea, something like five love languages. It’s so transmittable because it’s so freaking simple and applicable. Whereas, you know, sometimes I think some of the stuff that I’ve written is like, it’s too complex to be easily transmitted. And so people like it, but they can’t transmit it

A hundred percent. Yeah. It also feels important to say that there are a lot of different reasons to write a book. And sometimes we write a book because we’re trying to understand a very complicated topic. Or sometimes we write a book because, you know, we, we feel this like creative work coming through us and we kind of can’t, can’t not do it. I would imagine in your audience, those reasons to write a book or maybe more secondary, and the reason I would recommend most people in your community write a book is because it will establish you as a credible expert in your field. It basically tells people, this is the thing that I want you to know me for us. This is the thing I want you to remember me for. And when you’re, when that’s the end goal for your publishing life, it actually makes the act of writing a book much simpler because it doesn’t have to be like this complicated or like really, it doesn’t have to be like this, like masterpiece, you know, like

You’re not trying to win. You’re not trying to win a Nobel prize. You’re just trying to like, make sure that people know, you know what you’re talking about

A hundred percent. So it actually makes the process of writing the book a little bit easier. And you know, like I said, all of those reasons are great reasons to write books, but I work with authors on establishing at the beginning. What’s what does success look like for you? What is the reason that you’re writing this book? Because, because there are so many different reasons to write a book. If you set out trying to achieve them all, you’re probably achieved none of them. Whereas if you set out to write a book so that people remember you as the guy, who’s the expert on commercial real estate, you’ll write a very different book than if you’re trying to channel some great piece of art, you know?

Yeah. I love that. And I I mean, I think that’s so good at even, even determining up front with like your whole publishing strategy, what kind of publisher do I need? And all of that is, is like just being clear on why, why are you writing the book? And it kind of, it kind of points to one of the things I wanted to ask you about in terms of the New York times bestseller list. So brand builders, I’m letting the out of the bag a little bit, depending on when this comes out. So we conducted an independent nationwide research study, weighted to the U S census. We had an independent firm conduct this study about the importance of different factors when it comes to hiring somebody. And we asked them things like, how much does it matter to have a Ted talk? How much does it matter that they have a blog?

How much does it matter that they have a YouTube channel or a podcast or a large social media following? And one of the things we asked them was how much does it matter that they have a New York times bestselling book or a wall street journal, bestselling book. And only 36% of people said that they would, that they would be more likely to hire someone because they have a wall street journal, bestselling book, but 62% of people said they would be more likely to hire someone if they have testimonials on their websites from real people who have experienced an actual transformation. And so it’s like in the industry, we all think of like, I gotta be a best-selling author, but our study literally proved that people don’t give a crap. Like they don’t care about that only you care and authors care, but I do think it matters.

Cause I do think it’s like, sure, you know, in the industry it matters, right? Cause it’s like, if you’re going to get on someone’s podcast, it matters. If you’re going to get on good morning, America, it matters to that. But it doesn’t matter to the end user. So when it comes to the New York times or wall street journal, or just when it comes to the bestseller lists, how much do you think the writing of the book matters as it relates to hitting those lists? Getting on them? Cause I know you’ve worked with authors, you’ve probably ghost written books that have actually hit the New York times. How much does the writing matter when it comes to hitting those lists? Do you feel like,

I mean, I wish I had more like verifiable data, but just from Ali’s brain, it matters very little if at all. Yeah, I mean, I would say there are books that have been in the New York times list that are the kind of books you would save forever and you would underline and that could really transform a reader’s life for the long haul. And there are also books that have been on the New York times list that I don’t think are all that good. Now that’s subjective. It’s my it’s it’s Allie’s opinion. But I would imagine probably if you went through the, the, you know, hundreds of thousands of books, I don’t know how many books have been on the New York times list over the decades, but you would probably find some books on the list that you don’t think are that good either you don’t even think are that interesting.

You think like why would anyone ever pick up this book? So I think that’s good and helpful for authors to remember, because there are a lot of things that you can do if one of your publishing goals is to get your book on the New York times list. But I think it’s helpful for people to remember that there are only certain people who consider that a requirement, they consider it a benefit. They see the sort of value in it and those people, most of them are inside of the industry. So these are the people who you mentioned, it’s national media outlets that care about New York times bestseller it’s other publishers or agents who care about New York times bestseller it’s other authors who, you know, you may be sort of like, they might be colleagues of yours who might see that you hit the New York times bestseller list.

And they might think like, Oh, that gives you extra credibility in my mind. But for the most part, the end user, the consumer doesn’t pick up a book like blue, like jazz by Donald Miller or the shack by William Paul Young, because it was on the New York times list. They pick up a book like that because someone handed it to them and said, you have to read this book. So that’s social proof is far more valuable than the, the tag or the, you know, the title of New York times bestselling author. Although I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with striving for that, that title either. I mean,

So in this study, because we asked, you know, New York times bestselling author versus wall street, journal, bestselling author versus self published, author people, more people said that they value a self published book than a wall street journal bestseller. Like the average person doesn’t even delineate between the two.

Yeah. When people get really caught up about whether they should self-publish or traditionally publish, I will ask them like, what’s your favorite book? And they’ll tell me, and I’ll say who published it? And the fact of the matter is most consumers don’t have any clue who published the book. Wow. People, unless you work in the industry, because I work in the industry, I pick up a book off of the shelf and I go, who published this? And I flipped it, flipped open to the title page and I’ll find out who published it. Most people don’t have any clue who publishes books. So the only way that you can know that a traditional publisher published the book is because it’s sitting in a Barnes and noble, and that’s the biggest that’s the biggest obstacle that currently exists in 2021 for self-published authors is distribution. That if you choose to self-publish your book, it means your book. Won’t sit in a Barnes and noble. It’s not going to sit in and books and books a million, but also the fact of the matter is in-person retail is down significantly since COVID happened far fewer books than ever have been sold in in-person retail stores. The internet happened. Yeah. I mean, truly. So like even my book is my book is traditionally published. It’s in all of the brick and mortar stores, but 90% of my book sales are coming from Amazon.

Yeah. It’s it’s, it’s like getting in the store is not the thing that’s going to make you sell millions of copies. It’s it’s your platform will drive millions of copies. And like, man, they’re going to buy it off of Amazon or wherever anyways, like that’s a really, that is a really, really great insight Allie, in terms of like who nobody even knows who published it. I love that. And it’s yeah, you read it. Cause your friend, like, you know, really it’s like you had three friends tell you, that’s how I do it. I’m like my mine is minus the three friend rule when I’ve had three people who I respect that are like, dude, you have to read this. I’m like, okay, let me like, look at what this is really about. And, and you know, so many books sell thousands and thousands of copies never even hit the New York times. They sell hundreds of thousands of copies, never hit the list. And to your point too, like, why are you doing it? If you’re doing it to help you get clients for your business, your clients literally don’t care if you’re doing it because you’re trying to build respect and notoriety and credibility among your peers and like the industry. That’s a little bit of a different story. Yeah.

This is actually an interesting story along those lines that I heard from a colleague of mine the other day, who, where he helps in book marketing. And he was telling me about a book that I know and love. And probably many of your listeners have heard of called boundaries, Dr. Henry cloud. And he told me that, that book, when it first came out, it didn’t hit the list. And it, for a long time, it didn’t hit the list. And it wasn’t until years later that the, with some marketing help, they pulled that list out of, or they pulled that book out of a backlist and got it to hit the list. So now it does have that title of New York times bestseller. But it’s just a great example. There’s very few people in our space who wouldn’t have heard of the boundaries empire, you know, like boundaries and boundaries in dating and boundaries and business and boundaries and leadership and whatever. And it’s been a very influential book in so many people’s lives. And to think that it wasn’t immediately, you know, like number one on the New York times bestsellers list is kind of helpful because of what we’re trying to do is create positive transformation in our reader to know that we can do that without necessarily hitting a New York times bestsellers list.

That’s a Dave Ramsey is the same way. That’s the same. That that’s also true about total money makeover was out, I think for like nine or 10 years before it hit the list. And that’s where it’s like, those are the books where it was well, in his case, he also built a huge platform in those 10 years and that made a difference. But you know, it’s also great writing, but Dave Ramsey is also, I think he’d be the first to say my ideas are very simple. Like by design, they are transmittable, but the, they are very simple. He’s, he’s not trying to have the most complex investment strategy out there. It’s the opposite. It’s like the simplest plan they like get debt free. So this has been super fascinating, Allie. I I want everybody to know. Okay. So if you go to brand builders, group.com forward slash publish brand builders, group.com forward slash publish you can learn about Allie she’s.

She has a course that several of our clients have been through called prepare to prepare to publish. But if you just go to brand builders, group.com forward slash publish, there’s different, there’s different ways you can do at different investment levels. And you can kind of check it out, but I’m telling you, we, we have it. I mean, I can think of five clients off the top of my head, that brand builders group works with that also work with Allie. And these are people that you would recognize. There are people that we feature on our website and stuff. So yeah, she’s doing a great work. Obviously we share a lot of the same philosophies. Is there anything else, Allie, that you would want to leave people with? I mean, just, you know, someone that’s debating out there, should I write, should I not, or they’re kind of struggling with some of that self doubt or does my story even matter? What would you, what would you leave them with?

I would just leave them with the encouragement that if you have a book idea, I believe that book idea has been gifted to you and that you are the steward of that book idea. So nobody else is going to get that book idea. It’s yours alone. You’re the only one who can, can communicate it in exactly the way that you could communicate it. And I feel like that that gives us hearing that gives us a little bit of like responsibility and accountability over this idea and delivering it to our readers in our particular way. The, the voices in your head that tell you, someone else has already done this. I’m not a real writer. I don’t know if I have the time to do this well, what if I put in all the time and no one ever reads it just know that those voices are happening in the heads of your favorite authors, whose books you’ve read and who you keep on your shelf and who have changed your life too. So you’re in good company.

I love it. Alison Fallon, ladies and gentlemen, go follow her on Insta and tag her on Facebook and say hi and give her a shout out and hello, Alison. We’re so grateful for you, and we’re glad you’re living in Nashville now. And we wish you the best. Thanks for thanks for having me.

Ep 173: Leveling Up Your Paid Traffic Acquisition Strategy with Eric Siu | Recap Episode

One of the things that I just love so much about podcasting is how much you learn as the host. It’s like, it’s one of the coolest things ever. I mean, the networking value of podcasts they get by itself is, is just incredible. But then it’s like, you get to talk to some of the smartest people in the world for free, right? I mean, it’s, you know, you’re, there’s an exchange. You’re helping promote them and stuff, but it’s like, I am blown away at how much I just constantly learn from our guests. And this episode was certainly one of those I’m breaking down. The, this is the recap of the Eric Siu episode. I’m going solo for now and covering for AJ on this recap, a special recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. But man it’s just wild. And one of the things I love about personal branding, right?

And this whole space is this is such an emerging space. It’s like, it’s fun, it’s new, it’s exciting. Things are changing. It’s also difficult and frustrating because there’s, there’s so much to learn. And you know, my, my top three takeaways from this episode are really important because they tie in to something that has happened since I recorded this interview originally with Eric. Okay. So make sure you listen to the interview. Of course, if you can, if you haven’t, you know, we were talking about basically leveraging up your leveling up your paid traffic acquisition strategy. So in brand builders group speak, this is what we would typically call phase three, which is where we really create a lot of like scalable growth for a personal brand and, and there’s advantages and disadvantages to all different types of traffic. But with paid traffic, this is so important because here’s, what’s great about paid traffic, paid traffic is predictable.

You know, we divide traffic into three categories, there’s free traffic, you know, SEO, email, social media, et cetera, et cetera. Then there is paid traffic, which is a lot of what we’re talking about here, like buying, buying ads and things like that. And then there’s get paid traffic, which is our favorite type of traffic. Cause that’s when you get paid to be put in front of an audience and then you get to expose that audience to more people, which is like, you know, kind of the best of both worlds, but even in get paid traffic or free traffic, the bummer is they’re not predictable. Right? And so this is my first big point is you want predictable traffic, predictable traffic. And this, this is something that, you know, I think when people hear about traffic, we, we think of you know, we think of like, you know, it’s a lot of people wear it as a badge of honor.

Like I’ve never you know, all my traffic is organic or I’ve built my entire following without paid ads, which is, which is cool. I mean, that’s, that’s cool. It’s like, it’s cool thing to be proud of, but what I, and, and, and that’s the category that I have. That’s the camp that I come from and was raised in and have had to operate by, frankly for much of my career. And then realize, well, wait a minute, you know, I’m wearing that as a badge of honor, but is that holding me back because I’m not willing to invest in paid traffic because the only guaranteed type of traffic is paid traffic and it is guaranteed. Like I can guarantee that I can get you more traffic now, whatever organic strategy I teach you, I’m not sure I can guarantee that brings you more traffic.

And, and even though we know a lot about get paid traffic, I think it’s get paid traffic as some brand builders group is some of the best in the world at, at helping you not only get in front of large audiences, but get, get paid to also be in front of them and assess, especially over the long haul over the course of time, if you follow the things that we teach are going to build your reputation, and that’s going to be an upward spiral, that’s going to get you in front of more things, but it’s not guaranteed. There’s not a, there’s not a guarantee as to how fast or when and paid traffic. It gives that to you in the form of a guarantee. And this is a big mindset shift that needs to happen for maturing personal brands. That’s why we, we cover it in our high traffic strategies event, which is our advanced like mail marketing sales event digital marketing event, which we, we put in our phase three group of courses and curriculum.

But and this is the big, the big change is going okay. Well, even though it costs money, it is a, it’s a lever that I can pull every day to force growth, to ensure awareness, to intentionally accelerate my business forward. And so that’s why paid traffic is a good thing. And it’s something that a lot of us don’t think of it in that way. And maybe that’s a mindset shift for you. And I would say again for maturing brands, this is not something that we teach new brands. It’s not something we would encourage for new brands, because we definitely wouldn’t want you to do paid traffic until you’ve got all your other ducks in a row. And all of your, your funnel streamlined and your dashboards set up in your brand positioning clear in a, an unwell optimized website. And you’ve got keyword targeting going on on your, and you’ve got a content marketing strategy that is on, you know, running on autopilot.

Like those are all the fundamentals that have to be in place first and then paid traffic. Boom is fuel on the fire, but to get the most out of your paid traffic, you’ve got to have all that stuff set up first. But once you get there, then it’s like, yeah, we need to, we need to, we needed to pull the trigger on this. So predictable forms of traffic are super valuable and paid traffic is one of the best, if not the best form of predictable traffic, if you put money in the machine, it will send you more traffic, right? So that’s, that is the mindset of predictable traffic, which is related very much to paid traffic and listening to Eric talk, I think was just edifying and validating for, you know, I think an area of growth for me personally, and for our, our team company and where we’re at brand builders group.

And we’re, we’re really getting to this point now, right? Like the, our company has been around for a few years. It’s like, we’re, we’re getting stuff underneath us. And it’s like, let’s grow. Let let’s go. Let’s grow paid traffic. Here we come. All right. The second big debrief, which I think is the core of this interview is the, the importance and some of the tools around influencers marketing specifically. Okay. So the debrief, the reason this is in the debrief is because Eric shared two tools that you know, we have not used. Okay. So don’t consider them vetted and officially recommended yet by brand builders group, but we’re looking into them. Both because, I mean, because Eric said it and, and because they involve paid traffic. Okay. So here’s the tools he said, mighty scout mighty scout.com, which is for influencer marketing research.

And then, but sift tube, SIF like YouTube, but just to sift S I F T tube sift.com for YouTube advertising research. So why am I pulling these out now? Well, this is because of a massive change that has happened recently with the newest iOS update. And this is going to sound a little bit tactical. It is a little bit technical, and frankly, I, I, I don’t fully do geek speak, but this is from what our team is telling us and what our clients are saying. And the people we know that do, you know, speak geek, speak. There’s a massive thing that just happened that is going to affect the future of digital marketing, you know, in a big, big way in the immediate short-term future and potentially long-term. And that is this, that with the iOS update, they are now making people opt in to being tracked.

So if you’re on a mobile device, specifically iOS, okay, if you are using that operating system, right? So everybody with an iPhone all generations that when you’re on a site, whether it’s Facebook or it’s YouTube or wherever else, w you know, any other place that people run advertising and the past there’s been, you know, this kind of invisible tracking going on behind the scenes that was basically reported in the, I dunno, whatever, probably in the terms and conditions. And so by, by way of using this, these various tools, you’re consenting to have it in this happened well, for whatever reason that has changed and IO and, and the iOS update is doing away with that, which means that now people have to opt in manually to allow themselves to be tracked. Well, the, the, the, the data point that I heard this morning, again, I don’t, I don’t have the sources came from my, our internal team, right.

But these are really smart people that we work with. They’re, they’re saying that the, that up to as many, as 60% of people here, these are the people who have already had this change, rolled out to them on iOS are disallowing themselves to be tracked, which makes sense, right? These are like, when you go to the websites and it says, Hey, a pop-up comes up and Hey, we use cookies. Can we track you? Do you care? You know, and some numbers say, sure, I don’t care. I don’t even read it. Yes. But a number of people are waking up to this and going, no, I don’t want to be tracked. Well, the, when that happens, it dramatically affects and radically breaks down the ad tracking that we’re allowed to do using like cookies and UTMs and pixels. And these, these advanced terms that you hear of like passing through which all point back to going, okay, when I’m spending advertising dollars, I’m tracking to where, where are these buyers coming from?

Exactly. And, you know, letting letting like Facebook, as an example, run an algorithm to optimize, to optimize my advertising, spend to go find other people like the people who have bought. But if, if that, if the people who are buying are disallowing me from tracking them, then that disallows the informing to the Facebook algorithm that says, go find me more people like this person, which is, this is potentially huge. And you need to be aware of this, right? So, you know, consider yourself in the know of, for, you know, listen to this podcast and nobody knows exactly what’s going to happen, but from what I’m hearing and gathering, this is a really big deal and potentially a scary deal. For people who depend a lot on paid trafficking on, on, on paid paid traffic. So w w what, what does this have to do with influencer marketing?

Well, good question. Well, the reason that this matters is because as it becomes less easy to track the effectiveness at a granular level of, let’s say like a Facebook, yeah. Add it increases the value of, of spending money and advertising through an influencer, a specific person. Why? Because we know we can track every single thing that comes through that one link. Like I give one link to an influencer, I pay them, they post it. And everything that comes from that is trackable. It’s measurable. We know it came from that person. Well, we may not know about that, the end user data, but we know that all of the traffic came to that link. Well, that is really it interesting because it allows us to determine more, more naturally and more clearly the ROI versus some of these other tools like dumping money into Facebook or into you know, like YouTube or Google ads that it’s, it’s going to be harder and harder to track exactly where they saw the ad and who, and, and you know, how effective it is.

So that places up premium value on running ads through an influencer, because I can track for sure how well that is performing. I paid someone to promote this link. They shared this link, and either it worked or it didn’t which is just interesting because it kind of means that advertising dollars may flow in that direction. This is a, this is a potential trend that’s coming. It’s not here yet, but this is the kind of thing. And it’s good that you’re listening to the podcast. Right. And it’s one of the reasons I host the podcast is I’m interviewing people like Eric, who are very out there in the front of like the technical, you know, in the tactical world, seeing all these things coming and going, Whoa, how do we prepare ourselves? Cause this potentially alters the strategy. And the big thing you need to know now is going, Hmm, I need to really start looking at influencer marketing and going I need to find people that I can pay to just do a post for me.

There’s a lot less red tape. It’s a lot, you know, straight, more straight forward, but you got to find the people. How do you find the people while you could spend all day searching around online for them? Of course. And you’re going to go after the, all the big ones that everybody else sees, or you can, and, or you can use these tools like mighty scout and, and tube sifts. So we’ll, we’ll see how that plays out. But I guess just to share with you, this is on my radar. This is something that as the interim CMO for brand builders group, this is something that we’re watching closely, we’re paying attention and we’re going, you know what I think we need to wake up to, to influencer marketing and start looking at going. We may end up spending our advertising budget influencers rather than just dumping money into Facebook here in the near future.

And we’re going to be possibly looking at tools like, you know, these ones, mighty scout, et cetera, that have been mentioned to help us find those people. So that’s important. And then the last takeaway, you know, just real quick was the, the, what he said, the F he shared the four forms of leverage by novel Rob con two is like a world renowned early investor into several, you know, big companies and things. Uber four square, Twitter Postmates, things like that. So he’s, he’s kind of, you know, recognizes a very, very one of the smartest people in the world, I guess you would say. And he talks about the four types of leverage, labor, capital code and media. So labor is hiring people to do stuff for us. Capital is investing your money. Code is, you know, writing a code for a process.

And then, and then media, well, it reminded me very much of the focus funnel that we talked about all the way back in 2015, right? So if you look at the focus funnel from procrastinated, a purpose, or from the how to multiply time, my Ted talk it’s eliminate automate delegate, well, automate is basically code anything. You can create a process for today, multiplies your time in the future because the process is doing it tomorrow. Code is one example of automation. There are other examples there can be manual processes and, and, and checklists and workbooks and training manuals. Those, we would all consider those forms of automate, even though they’re not code or technology, but it’s really powerful to hear somebody like, Neval talk about this and go, wow. If he’s thinking that way, we’re really on the right track with the concept of multiplying time.

And then with labor, which we call delegate, right? Which is that it’s 80% done right by someone else is always better than a hundred percent done right by you. Why? Because it multiplies your time. It means they’re doing it instead of you doing it, which gives you margin to do something else without compromising the thing, getting done. That is a form of leverage. He calls it labor. We call it delegate capital money is one that we’ve all been aware of, right? It’s just, you know, compounding interest, let your money work for you when your money starts making money while you sleep. That is a form of leverage. And then I think the new one, which I hadn’t woken up to. So clearly until Eric said this even though he’s quoting and I hope, I hope I’m saying that name right. And of all, I don’t actually follow him.

But I, I, I might now his media, which is interesting, right? Because you know, I’ve described and I’ve heard, I’ve heard this described with money that when you invest a dollar, it’s like basically hiring an employee and then that is working if, when they’re invested to make you more money, right. So that person’s out there working well, media is the same thing. If I post a video on YouTube or I create a podcast episode that is now an asset that is out there working, it’s a form of multiplication. You multiply time by spending time on things today that give you more time tomorrow. So I’m building an asset right in this very moment, recording this, that somebody could be listening to years down the road drawing value from. And they’re just meeting me for the first time, but I’m leveraging an asset that I created, you know, today infinitely into the future indefinitely in the future.

That is super duper powerful. And then I would say, you know, another one that it made me think of is relationships. Relationships are multipliers. Why? Because as I develop relationships with people, okay, so this is like a new form of, of multiplication, not in the focus funnel and not something that Nepal talks about. But as I started thinking about this more relationships are a multiplier. Why? Because if I have a relationship with somebody and that person starts to multiply, that person’s influence grows. Now, all of a sudden as that person’s influence grows, mine grows too because of my connection to them. So this is where it’s like, you have to pour into relationships, you have to serve people and help people, which you should be doing anyways. But if you, if you can’t do it for like, you know just being a good person, you should also realize wow, that there is actual, amazing, exponential value in these relationships. So keep pouring into people, keep serving them, keep coming back here. We’re, we’re doing our very best to create consolidated ideas, tactics, strategies, and wisdom to help you multiply your message. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal