motivation Archives - Customer Experience Podcast

259: Susan Fowler: Let go of the junk food motivation

Junk Food Motivation comprises a multibillion-dollar industry Susan Fowler shares new research on the science of motivation. When she shared these findings with the CEO of one of the world’s largest financial institutions and John Calipari, University of Kentucky Men’s Basketball Coach, they immediately changed how they led their people. Susan Fowler was born and …

Access Now

182: Jonathan Low: If it fails, it’s not me failing

Jonathan Low Show Notes Page

Jonathan Low worked 80 hours a week for two and a half years. Then his body collapsed and he began to doubt himself. It took him an entire year to recover and learn to change his perspective on what is success, how to fail and to be a happy person and to find gurus to inspire you.

Jonathan was born and raised in a small city called Aarhus in Denmark (Europe). He has 2 younger sisters May and Kira. His father works as a psychologist and his mom as a social welfare worker.

In his younger years, Jonathan Løw was a national champion in the sport of badminton. He was passionate both about his sport and starting up small and local projects. Today he is one of Denmark’s most well-known entrepreneurs and business authors. He has been nominated as Entrepreneur of the Year and is amongst Denmark’s 100 most promising leaders according to a major Danish business newspaper.

In addition to being a serial entrepreneur, Løw is the former Head of Marketing at the KaosPilots – named Top 10 most innovative business schools in the world by FastCompany. He is also former Startup-Advisor and Investor at Accelerace – the leading investment fund for startups in Denmark.

His books, Listen Louder and The Disruption Book, both made it to the top of the bestseller-lists in 2015 in the category “Business and Entrepreneurship”. His latest book, The GuruBook – is an inspiring collection of 45 articles and interviews with well-known thought leaders and entrepreneurs, whose leadership and strategic skills have resulted in very successful businesses.

Jonathan Løw wants to inspire others to follow their dreams and enable them to do so by sharing the experience and working tools from other great entrepreneurs and leaders of our time.

Jonathan still lives in Denmark, but frequently travels across the world to doing keynote speeches and workshops with major companies such as Vestas, LEGO and others.

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Listen to @jonathanlowdk to get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow Click to Tweet

“How are we going to use all of this new technology to improve lives and not de-humanize ourselves?” -Jonathan Low Click to Tweet

“Whenever I hear about something that we can do, I always try ask myself, should we do it.” -Jonathan Low Click to Tweet

“Should we build everything and how do we guide the tech world?” -Jonathan Low Click to Tweet

“Fear is not a bad feeling, as long as it doesn’t paralyze you.” -Jonathan Low Click to Tweet

“I’m working on building my fifth company and it’s always a combination of fascination and fear.” -Jonathan Low Click to Tweet

“I know I should love the process, but really I love when things have impact.” -Jonathan Low Click to Tweet

“When you have a smartphone, you don’t go back to a dumbphone.” -Jonathan Low Click to Tweet

“An idea is also an action in the sense that it can create a change in your own mind.” -Jonathan Low Click to Tweet

“The idea is a very little part and the execution is everything.” -Jonathan Low Click to Tweet

“I meet a lot of nice human beings with good intentions and I meet too few people that act on this intention.” -Jonathan Low Click to Tweet

“There’s a far gap between idea and execution.” -Jonathan Low Click to Tweet

“The future belongs to the curious people.” -Jonathan Low Click to Tweet

“You need people to challenge the status quo and the executors that actually make it happen.” -Jonathan Low Click to Tweet

“When you decide to become a leader you also decide to take all the blame if something fails.” -Jonathan Low Click to Tweet

“If the leader doesn’t want to take the blame, then you don’t want to take the risk.” -Jonathan Low Click to Tweet

“We have an old stone age brain that has limitations and we should respect that.” -Jonathan Low Click to Tweet

Hump to Get Over

Advice for others

Know your limits and when you need to recharge your batteries.

Holding him back from being an even better leader

That I don’t really want to be a leader. I want to be an entrepreneur.

Best Leadership Advice

That I should listen more.

Secret to Success

That I have been born with and developed a creative mind.

Best tools that helps in Business or Life

The lean start-up method.

Contacting Jonathan Low

website: https://www.listenlouder.dk/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jloew/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonathanlowdk

Resources and Show Mentions

Call Center Coach

Empathy Mapping

Subscribe to the Show on iTunes (Quick and simple!)

Sign into iTunes using your ID and password
Search the iTunes store for “Fast Leader Show”
Click on the Subscribe button. It’s in the upper left corner of the screen.

Give Me a Rating or Review on iTunes (Also simple)

Sign into iTunes using your ID and password
Search the iTunes store for “Fast Leader Show”
Click on “Ratings and Reviews”
Give us a rating. Thank you for going ahead and leaving a “review” as well

Show Transcript:

182: Jonathan Low: If it fails, it’s not me failing

Intro: Welcome to the Fast Leader Podcast, where we uncover the leadership like hat that help you to experience, break out performance faster and rocket to success. And now here’s your host, customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

Call center coach develops and unites the next generation of call center leaders. Through our e-learning and community individuals gain knowledge and skills in the six core competencies that is the blueprint that develops high-performing call center leaders. Successful supervisors do not just happen so go to callcentercoach.com to learn more about enrollment and download your copy of the Supervisor Success Path e-book now.

Jim Rembach: Okay, Fast Leader legion today I’m excited because I have somebody on the show today who is really going to give us some insight into the global impact of three important pillars. Jonathan Low was born and raised in a small city called Aarhus, Denmark. He has two younger sisters Mae and Kyra. His father works as a psychologist and his mom is a social welfare worker. In his early years, Jonathan Low was a national champion in the sport of badminton. He was passionate about both his sport and starting up small and local projects. Today he’s one of Denmark’s most well-known entrepreneurs and business authors. He has been nominated as an entrepreneur of the year and is among Denmark’s 100 most promising leaders according to a major Danish business newspaper. In addition to being a serial entrepreneur, Low is a former head of marketing at the KaosPilots named top 10 most innovative business schools in the world by FastCompany. He’s also a former startup advisor and investor at Accelerace—the leading invest leading investment fund for startups in Denmark.

His book, Listen Louder, and the, Disruption book both made it to the top of the bestseller list in 2015 in the category of business and entrepreneurship. His latest book, The Guru book is an inspiring collection of 45 articles and interviews with well-known thought leaders and entrepreneurs whose leadership and strategic skills have resulted in very successful businesses. Jonathan Low wants to inspire others to follow their dreams and enable them to do so by sharing the experience and working tools from other great entrepreneurs and leaders of our time.

Jonathan still lives in Denmark but frequently travels across the world to do keynote speeches and workshops with major companies such as Vestas, Lego, and others. Johnathan Low, are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Jonathan Low: Absolutely. Let’s do it.

Jim Rembach: I’m glad you’re here. Now I’ve given our legion a little bit about you but can you share what your current passion is so that we get to know you even better.

Jonathan Low: So I’m actually very passionate about the space between artificial intelligence and then human beings. How are we going to use all this new technology to improve lives and not humanize our stoves and have nothing to do at the end? So yeah, I’m from the tech world but most and foremost I’m a human like everyone else so I have a passion and concern about the latest developments within this field.

Jim Rembach: I think that concern is for everybody and a lot of the concern comes into the things that I think will really affect our whole stability in regards to those whole fear factor issues. Fear of am I going to get hurt by it? Am I going to get invaded by it? Am I going to be affected by it meaning it’s going to affect my career? And so when you start thinking about that from an innovative perspective and talk about leadership of innovation and creative thinking is there a possibility that all of that human emotion and fear could be squashing some innovations that otherwise we would have?

Jonathan Low: Yeah, absolutely and sometimes maybe that’s not even a bad thing there is also like—I also have a big love for technology but I also think that we should not just innovate for the sense of innovation or because we can do it we should always—opposes are a good thing and being hesitant is a good thing and doubt is a good human feeling. Whenever I hear about something that we can do I always try to ask myself should we do it as well? So I’m not really doubting that in the future we can build almost everything. Maybe the bigger question will be should we build everything? And how do we guide the tech world and young people into—because this is also like philosophy within business and philosophy is very small in business and very big in other subjects and part of our lives. Even that companies become as big as nations in turnover they also start to have the same kind of responsibility I think as humans and as nations to start thinking about what they’re doing. I think that all the debate with Zuckerberg and Facebook is showing just this that we’re realizing while these were not just idealistic cool Silicon Valley nerds these were also really good business people that are growing businesses at a scale where we don’t really understand what it’s doing to us and our societies. And now we are starting to doubt whether it’s entirely good and I think this doubt and discussion is really crucial.

Jim Rembach: That’s a really interesting point. Did you just add fuel to that whole fear?

Jonathan Low: Yeah, fear is also a bad feeling as long as it doesn’t paralyze you it also makes you move. I have started four companies and currently building my fifth and it’s always a combination of fascination and fear. I don’t see as failing because I’ve tried it before but I fear that we will spend years of our lives because that is our most important currency, that’s our time so I feel that we spent a lot of time and energy on a project that ends up having no impact in the world because then for me it’s a waste of time. I know you should love the process but really I love when things have impacts. And when they don’t I feel I have wasted my time on them.

Jim Rembach: Yeah, and one of the comments that you made in the book that you talked about the companies of the future and the billion dollar companies of the future are going to be the companies that can affect a billion lives in our world, that’s a pretty impactful statement. But there’s three pillars that the Guru book is pretty much centered around and it’s the entrepreneurship, the innovation, and the authentic leadership. And I think you were really talking about initially that authentic leadership piece—are we doing the right thing? Are we doing the things that can impact and affect humanity the most? And so when I think about the 45 contributors to putting this book you don’t even call yourself and author you call yourself an editor of the book which was great. All 45 of those are in here for various reasons. But if you were to say that there was kind of one that kind of just stood out, why did it stand out the most? And what should we what should we take away from that particular one?

Jonathan Low: I think I interviewed a guy called Daniel Burrows he’s from the US who is a serial entrepreneur and a futurist and he inspired me a great deal in his way of talking about how much we actually know about the future if we sit down and spend time understanding what is going on right now. Because of all this digital development there are some accelerators that are going to happen whether we do it or not and the question is how are we then going to deal with the impact of this? When you have a smartphone you don’t go back to a dumb phone. And when you have 4G you’re going to get 5G and 6G and so everything is going to speed up meaning that you can do more. With all this talk about artificial intelligence we’ve been talking about it forever but now it’s coming to a point where we can actually utilize it and then the question becomes so now when the technology is ready what are we going to do about it? And that is Burrow’s big point that we have a lot of hard trends that we know pretty accurately when they are going to have a huge impact on our societies but the question remaining is it’s up to us to then decide which way is that impact going to go. We can make a lot of jobs automatic and we can choose not to do so. And if companies decide that they will—the biggest target is to have no one working for them because that is going to be the best business model in the end then what are all the rest going to do? And are we going to lose some of the people in our companies that might not be grading maximum value on the bottom line but might be the colleagues that makes it attractive to actually go to work. Not the top salesman but the human resource staff or just the leader who shows empathy and who is authentic and makes us feel good about ourselves.

Jim Rembach: I think that’s a really interesting point and that’s also a skill that has been notably in great need. And that’s one of the things that we talk about a lot on the Fast Leader show is that it is that emotional intelligent leader that is the one that is part of a higher producing team it’s not the one who knows everything it’s the one who can get the best out of everyone that’s really the differentiating factor. And even when you started talking about an important point is that if we stop and think about the future we can come up with all kinds of ideas. But there was one thing that you actually wrote in the introduction to me that was just so impactful and I want to share it, it was that, we cultivate thinking about good ideas far too much while we cultivate the craft of transforming the ideas into reality far too little. What made you come to that type of conclusion?

Jonathan Low: Yeah, an idea is also an action in the sense that it can create a change in your own mind. When an ideas time has come it can be really powerful but only if we actually execute on it and everyone who’s been an entrepreneur will know that the idea is very little part and the execution is everything. The point is that I meet a lot of very nice human beings with great intentions and I meet to too fee people that maybe act on this intention because of one reason or another. It’s very seldom laziness a lot of times not knowing how to go about it. If you don’t come from, for instance a household where it’s natural or a culture it’s natural. I was born in a home and in a family where there has never been an entrepreneur before so I didn’t get it from my parents or from sisters or brothers. I grew up in in a part of our country where when I started my first company in 1999 there was not really an entrepreneurial culture, there’s nothing like Silicon Valley or any other places. A lot of people will become scared of starting off because it doesn’t feel natural.

Now when you do it a lot of times it starts to feel more natural not that you don’t make mistakes but it’s just like, the training part of it, like you mentioned I was national champion in badminton, it’s something completely different but then on the other side it’s the same with sports as with entrepreneurship in that the more times you practice doing it the less awkward it feels. Actually trying to test out a new idea and of course you also will become better at it. So you also become better at being like your own critic and when you have an idea you start to understand that there’s a gap between idea and execution. You have had so many bad ideas over the years and luckily I was I was realistic enough to drop them. And then at some point like with the start of I’m currently working on you have this gut feeling that there is a market need for this and also it feels right so this is the combination of—that’s also why the book has these different topics because one thing is talking about listening to yourself and understanding is this something worth spending the next five to ten years of my life on because that’s what you have to do if you want to start a growth company it’s going to take five to ten years. So you have to think about this first is this worth the time and effort? And then also think realistically is there a business model or something.

Jim Rembach: That’s really interesting. When you start talking about that and how the time component is one of those factors that could cause that pause that you were referring to. Here’s one of the thing that also stood out in the book that you had written in the introduction, you talked about the difference between knowledge and learning and you kind of really—we’re just talking about that yourself as far as being in the right environment going through and having the mistakes and it’s not a situation anymore because you’ve gone through it several times that you’re worried about certain factors but talking about difference between knowledge and learning and says that the knowledge and being able to convert it into practice which is the craft that you need to build is something that you’re responsible for. And so when you start talking about taking all of this information and the people that you were referring to that it’s not a laziness thing it’s the know-how thing you have to get better at know how seek that out because here’s the thing when you start talking about entrepreneur and I refer to a lot of people who are within organizations that have to transform they have to do things differently than it used to be. The world keeps changing and smaller and smaller clips it used to be that people would say, well ten years ago, and then it became people said, well five years ago, and now it’s like, well three years ago, if you were doing what you were doing three years ago that’s outdated already. So you have to be someone inside an organization that has that entrepreneurial spirit and has to do things that causes and helps that company to transform. And when you start thinking about that those people who I’m already in a particular position and I need to do something different, where are they going to get their best inspiration to build those skills and build better practices?

Jonathan Low: I really think the future belongs to the curious people and we need these curious people in all organizations. When we start asking questions I think the main part of good leadership good entrepreneurship is having people that dare to challenge the status quo and then having the executors that actually make it happen and you need that both in startups and in corporate and often times I see people failing because they have one or the other. So you have an inventor who has a great idea but hates to sell or maybe doesn’t know how to do it and then you have the sales man who doesn’t really know how to solve problems that are they’re so it because she has been used to selling products that were already on the market and the same in organizations you need you need to have the leaders that set out a course and don’t drive away from it and then you also need to have the visionary leaders who dare to fail together with their teams.

Leadership is as Simon Sinek writes in the book, Leadership is not a rank it’s a choice, so when you decide to become a leader you also decide to take all the blame if something fails. We need to have these leaders in organizations that wants to change that are willing to take the blame on behalf of their teams because when you innovate you also fail and that is sort of what people have been saying for ages. But the problem has been that it’s a nice thing to say but failing also means taking the blame somewhere in organization and if the leader doesn’t want to take the blame then you don’t want to take the risk. I see a lot of times in organization where they say we want to be innovative and we have an innovation strategy and it’s okay to fail and then something really fails and then everybody is like yeah but it was not really my fault and it’s a really bad culture. You have to mean, that is again the thing with this book is that I try to find people that have actually done it so it exceeds the motivational speaker/mantras because it’s so easy to say, just come up with great ideas and do it—fail thing big expose fail cheap and fast blah blah blah, we have all these nice sayings. But then we also need to have really courageous and authentic leaders that say, okay this is part of what I do in this organization I am strong enough to take the blame from the CEO when my innovation team loses 10 million because they went in the wrong direction.

Jim Rembach: I think that’s a very great point. I would dare to say if you’re one of those creative leaders that’s willing to do all that you really just need to find the right organization that enables you instead of disables you.

Jonathan Low: Yeah, absolutely. We need to have, I think I mentioned it before, we need to have very different kind of competencies within companies. We need to have the people that’s really come up with these bold new ideas and then we need to have the people that act upon them and then we need to have the people who are willing to take the blame when they fail but then on the other hand also get all the praise when they succeed and you need these three sort of core competencies both in a start-up and in an established business. And there is a tendency that you don’t hire the bold thinkers when you get thru corporate because then you want to streamline everything and make even more money so you hire the people that are good at making even more money. There is a tendency in startup to have too many bold thinkers that maybe lack a bit of business understanding or realism and then they fail because they don’t know how to turn this into a profitable business.

Jim Rembach: Yeah, that’s an awesome point. Okay, going through this book there’s a whole lot of inspiring people and then you also infused it with a whole lot of quotes from other people in which to me I just enjoyed going through. And just looking at all the folks that are involved, because there’s a lot of names that I never heard of you exposed me from a global perspective to a lot of people and I thank you for that, but then also just going back and reflecting on some of the people who’ve been around or at least that we’ve known of for literally thousands of years who kind of started this you’re talking about out Aristotle and Socrates and you talked about several others it just got me to think about things that inspire us. On the show we do that through quotes, now I know with all the research and putting all this together you probably literally have hundreds if not thousands of quotes that you can reference, but is there one or two that kind of stands out to you that you can share?

Jonathan Low: I don’t even know if they’re from the book actually but I have two quotes that I love and they’re not—the first one I don’t know who actually said this but I read this quote—the world is giving you answers each day you just have to listen. A quote that I really love because it’s sparks this creative curious mind. And the other one is sort of maybe it’s an entrepreneurial quote but it’s actually from a Bruce Springsteen song and the song is titled Working on a Dream. And I love this title and the dream can be so different from each one of us but this thing that should be what you’re doing when you’re an entrepreneur in my mind you have something that is so important that you’re willing to fight and take all the hard knocks along the way because the idea is bigger than yourself.

Jim Rembach: Those are two great ones, thanks for sharing. Now you also talked about going through several iterations from your own startups you talked about growing up in an area that really didn’t have that incubation that was happening for entrepreneurs you had the bold piece you said and even admitted you failed and I’m sure there’s been other times that you failed that have actually added to your knowledge and practice right but can you share one of those stories when had to get over the hump?

Jonathan Low: I had a very personal one where I had been working too much for two and a half years and working 80 hours a week and I ended up having stress which turned into a depression. For someone like me who has always been—and now today luckily it’s like a happy person, and my mood is very stable, going through a period which was almost a year it’s like a big hump where I had felt terrible. I also lost my belief that I was an entrepreneur because maybe I couldn’t handle the stress and the pressure since my body sort of collapsed. And then coming back from this, this was actually when I started working on the guru phobia and then market then globally saying that now I want to get inspired

by people who have done things that I look up to and learn from them and then based on this build something knowing that—like I think before a startup was sort of my life and my identity and now a start-up is something I build and enjoy but if it fails it’s not me failing and I can always start a new one so it’s sort of also gave perspective. And here in Scandinavia, try to teach the young entrepreneurs that their passion is amazing and that the human brain can be passionate about everything is amazing but you should also just remember that we have a an old Stone Age brain that has its limitations and we should respect that and remember that entrepreneurship is beautiful but there’s also a lot of other things in life to consider.

Jim Rembach: I think that’s a really good point and when you start having that identity being determined by what it is that you do instead of who you are is where it creates problems. I want to bring up a really important point because I get a lot of comments about it is that I read a bio that’s a little bit more of a personal bio we infuse some of the things about what people do and stuff I tell them I guess because a lot of them have to write the bio that I asked for they just don’t have it in there ready. So I explained, look it’s not what you do that makes you great it’s who you are that makes what you do great. And I would dare to say that even when you start looking at the gurus that are in this book you could probably say the same thing about all of them. When you were going through and looking at these people and their contributions and the discussions that you had with them I would dare to say that you found uniqueness in them as people and therefore that was the elixir or the thing that caused them to end up doing the great things that they’ve done. What are your thoughts on that?

Jonathan Low: Yeah, absolutely. And I also I think I write it in the in the foreword I was very hesitant about using the title The Guru Book because all the people I met didn’t want to get referred to as Gurus so that is why I spent some time on explaining what is meant with this. Because in the old meaning of the word it’s more like a teacher and a mentor and inspirators not somebody who is unachievable or that you should look up to like some sort of God. It’s very interesting that for a lot of these people the most successful they have become the more humble they have become and I think that’s also a part of what I like about them because you can also become very successful and very arrogant. And I really tried to avoid these kind of people in the book because I’m very inspired to see how people also grow as human beings so they realize they’ve created something amazing and then they sort of want to pass it on to others and I think that it’s a beautiful insight to get so that’s also part of how to select 45 people to a book who have so many and I was also looking for people where I see, wow, they have built something that’s made a lot of money but now they’re really interested in from an open good heart to inspire others. And that is also the purpose of that was to fellate these people and give some hands-on advice that other could benefit from.

Jim Rembach: I’m glad you shared that because for me when I think about the word legacy, what is the legacy you want to leave behind? To me that’s what I think about when I think about a legacy that I want to leave behind. I don’t want to leave the legacy behind that, hey, just to say it for example from a money perspective—made tons of money and now three generations if they didn’t anything themselves will still be able to live off my money. No, to me that’s not a legacy. Like you had said the billion dollar companies are going to affect a billion lives it has to have that type of legacy where you’re actually making an impact on humanity for the good not some monetary impact.

Jonathan Low: Yeah, and especially when we both live in countries it’s like they don’t have problems and they don’t have poverty but it’s still countries where you have a big opportunity and you can view your life or your work as something more than just making money. You can also go to Africa or India where it would not be fair to ask yourself, is this a meaningful job for me? Because yeah, the meaning is given you have the job or you die. But in countries that have better options even though they also have problems I think it’s fair that people ask themselves the bigger question, does my job gives me meaning? Can I provide meaning for others? Because work is so big part of our lives and we spend so much time on it I think we should continue to challenge our employees and ourselves in in creating environments where it feels meaningful going to work and it’s not just something you do to make money. That is why I love the entrepreneurial environment because there are so many crazy people that spend so much time on building an app that maybe if you look at it from the outside and you are filosopo you will think, wow that app really doesn’t make any sense. But for this person it does and they can’t stop thinking about it when they get up in the morning and go to sleep in the evening and I love that the brain can become so passionate about something that is perhaps from a philosophical standpoint meaning meaningless.

Talking about passion, we all have goals. You said you’re starting your fifth company you had the Guru book you had two bestsellers prior to that you do a lot of travel and working with a lot of organizations there’s a lot of things that you’re working on and doing but if you say you had one goal one, what would it be?

Jonathan Low: If it job related it’s working with people that I really like and where we have fun and we inspire each other. Actually building this fifth startup I’ve chosen a different approach, before I was picking people to the team truly based on skills, so I see I need this very good programmer and I need this great bookkeeper, but now I’m looking much more can I see myself sitting with this person in the airport in Copenhagen wanting to go to New York and the plane is six hours late? Can I stand sitting there with him for six hours? Or will it make me go mental? So yeah, really we’re putting together a

Team where we can—because we know we have processes that are going to feel like sitting from a delayed plane in six hours and then we need to still be able to respect each other and have fun.

Jim Rembach: That’s a great point. And the Fast Leader legion wishes you the very best. Now before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsor.

The number one thing that contributes to customer loyalty is emotions. So move onward and upward faster by gaining significantly deeper insight and understanding of your customer journey and personas with emotional intelligence. With your empathy mapping workshop you’ll learn how to evoke and influence the right customer emotions that generate improve customer loyalty and reduce your cost to operate. Get over your emotional hump now by going to empathymapping.com to learn more.

Jim Rembach: Alright here we go Fast Leader legion it’s time for the Hump Day Hoedown. Okay, Jonathan, the Hump Day Hoedown is the part of our show where you give us good insights fast. So, I’m going to ask you several questions and your job is to give us robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Jonathan Low , are you ready to hoedown?

Jonathan Low: Yeah, I feel express already.

Jim Rembach: Alright. What do you think is holding you back from being an even better today?

Jonathan Low: I don’t really want to be a leader. I want a plain entrepreneur.

Jim Rembach: What is the best leadership advice you have ever received?

Jonathan Low: That I should listen more.

Jim Rembach: What is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success?

Jonathan Low: That I have been born with undeveloped a very creative mind.

Jim Rembach: What do you feel is one of your best tools that helps you lead in business or life?

Jonathan Low: A lean start up methods.

Jim Rembach: What would be one book that you’d recommend to our listeners and it could be from any genre, of course, we’re going to put a link to the Guru book on your show notes page as well as your two other books as well.

Jonathan Low: The book called Winning without Losing. About how you can become successful without losing other important things in your life.

Jim Rembach: Okay, Fast Leader legion you can find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going to fastleader.net/jonathanlow. Okay Jonathan this is my last Hump Day Hoedown question, Imagine you were given the opportunity go back to the age of 25 and you’ve been given the opportunity to take the knowledge of skills that you have now back with you but you can’t take everything back you can only choose one, what skill or knowledge would you take back with you and why?

Jonathan Low: I would take the skill of understanding when I reach my limit workwise so I can spend more time having holiday and recharging my batteries.

Jim Rembach: Jonathan, it was an honor to spend time with you today can you please share with the Fast Leader legion how they can connect with you?

Jonathan Low: Absolutely. I love LinkedIn and I have a website called listenlouder.uk. I would love to connect.

Jim Rembach: Jonathan Low, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom the Fast Leader legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump. Woot! Woot!

Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leader Show today. For recaps, links from every show special offers and access to download and subscribe if you haven’t already, head on over the fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster.

END OF AUDIO

Jeff Piersall - Dogs Don’t Bark at Parked Cars

179: Jeff Piersall: It cost me a tremendous journey

Jeff Piersall Show Notes Page

Jeff Piersall was in a 14-year business relationship with who he thought was a good friend. But it ended in a betrayal. Despite another partner betrayal later in his career, Jeff holds on the belief that ethical capitalism is what the majority of the world believes in, desires and practices.

Jeff Piersall was born in Orlando, FL and raised for elementary schooling in Winchester, KY and graduated from high school in Dade City, FL at Pasco High School. During his junior year at Pasco High, a special teacher saw something in him, his talent for leadership. Jeff was a four sport letterman at that time but basically the class clown so running for Student Government President, the most prestigious honor at the school was way out of the comfort zone. But this teacher convinced him to run and he actually won and went on to have one of the greatest moments in the history of the school, starting activities that still to this day that are traditions at Pasco which all four of his younger brothers enjoyed graduating in the years to come and still today nieces and nephews experience them nearly 40 years later.

Jeff’s younger brothers and his mom were all MENSA qualified academic types, he was the only entrepreneur in the group. Jeff got his entrepreneurial spirit from his grandmother on his Dad’s side and his coaching skills from his grandfather on his mother’s side. The unique combination of both has been the successful edge that Jeff possess in leading people.

When he was 10, he and his buddies would play cops and robbers all over town in Winchester, KY riding their Huffy bicycles all day. One particular road was home to a huge Dalmatian Dog that would chase you with the most ferrous bark. The kids all avoided that street. One day Jeff thought he would teach the barking dog a lesson and took the street on purpose and when that dog came after him instead of racing with fixed eyes on the target at the end of the street he turned and kicked at the dog’s jaw and instead of making contact the dog bite him in the left cheek of his butt – Barking Dogs only chase moving objects and if you pay attention to them they will bite you; a lesson for all people but especially entrepreneurs building a business.

After graduating from Troy University with a physical education degree in 1981, Jeff followed his Grandfather’s influence and became an accomplished high school and college basketball coach for the decade of the 80’s. He left the basketball ranks in 1990 but never quit coaching. He was an accomplished sales person and sales manager in the ‘90’s working both domestically and internationally. He became CEO to a turn-around company that was a spin-off from Dupont and Conagra in 2000 moving him to Melbourne, FL his current resident today except for the time he stays in TENN at his second home.

Jeff is the author of Dogs Don’t Bark at Parked Cars where he shares how to build the foundation for leading an ethical capitalist organization. The only real method to provide prosperity to our communities and country and globe. Unethical is unsustainable.

Jeff is most proud of his 35 years of marriage to Judy and their three children are their greatest accomplishment, they are now 30, 26 and 24 and they are each successful contributors to society and make a difference with the people they touch every day.

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Listen to @jeffpiersall to get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow Click to Tweet

“When we talk about ethical capitalism, it really is a void in the marketplace today.” Click to Tweet

“Between our universities and our media, we continue to get capitalist as really a cuss word.” Click to Tweet

“When you know what capitalist truly stands for and you blend that with the component of ethical, you now have a power tool.” Click to Tweet

“If you don’t have trust, everything else is going to be substantially more difficult.” Click to Tweet

“The bigger your purpose, the bigger your why, the more critics you will actually end up having.” Click to Tweet

“You got to be very careful and not get sidetracked and get your eyes off your goal.” Click to Tweet

“Sometimes it’s what’s inside of us from our past that keeps us from ever achieving our true intention.” Click to Tweet

“If you don’t have the courage to get up and to go get in the game, then it really isn’t going to matter at the end of the day.” Click to Tweet

“You’re not acting with courage because you have great faith, you’re acting with courage because you have fear and the faith gets you to overcome that fear and still act.” Click to Tweet

“Smart working is what’s going to get us get where we need to go.” Click to Tweet

“Your joy must be your work and your work must be your joy.” Click to Tweet

“We’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of our past if we don’t transfer wisdom.” Click to Tweet

“We’re either going after time freedom, money freedom, the freedom of relationships or the freedom of purpose.” Click to Tweet

“Start becoming the person you want everyone else to be.” Click to Tweet

“Have the people around you that you want to be most like.” Click to Tweet

Hump to Get Over

Advice for others

Have the people around you that you want to be most like.

Holding him back from being an even better leader

Believing that we can make a positive difference on a global level.

Best Leadership Advice

Believe in you, first.

Secret to Success

I work hard and my faith is my guiding light.

Best tools that helps in Business or Life

Respect for other people.

Contacting Jeff Piersall

website: http://www.jeffpiersall.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffpiersall/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeffpiersall

Resources and Show Mentions

Call Center Coach

An Even Better Place to Work

Show Transcript:

Click to access edited transcript

179: Jeff Piersall: It cost me a tremendous journey

Intro: Welcome to the Fast Leader podcast where we explore convenient yet effective shortcuts that will help you get ahead and move forward faster by becoming a better leader. And now here’s your host customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

Call center coach develops and unites the next generation of call center leaders. Through our e-learning and community individuals gain knowledge and skills from the six core competencies that is the blueprint that develops high-performing call center leaders. Successful supervisors do not just happen so go to callcentercoach.com. To learn more about enrollment and download your copy of the Supervisor Success Path e-book now.

Jim Rembach: Okay, Fast Leader legion today I’m excited because of somebody on the show today who’s really going to give us an understanding of something that we can all connect with and how it could help us move onward and upward faster.

Jeff Piersall was born in Orlando, Florida and raised for elementary schooling in Winchester, Kentucky and graduated from high school in Dade City, Florida at Pasco High School. During his junior year at Pasco High a special teacher saw something in him, his talent for leadership. Jeff was a four sport letterman at that time but basically the class clown so running for student government president the most prestigious honor at the school was way out of his comfort zone but this teacher convinced him to run and he actually won and went on to have one of the greatest moments in the history of the school starting activities that still to this day that are traditions at Pasco which all four of his younger brothers enjoyed graduating in the years to come and still today nieces and nephews experienced them nearly 40 years later.

Jeff’s younger brothers and his mom were all meant to qualified academic types and he was the only entrepreneur in the group. Jeff got his entrepreneurial spirit from his grandmother on his dad’s side and his coaching skills from his grandfather on his mother’s side. The unique combination of both has been a successful edge that Jeff possesses in leading people. When he was 10 he and his buddies would play cops and robbers all over town in Winchester, Kentucky riding their huffy bicycles all day. One particular road was home to a huge Dalmatian dog that would chase you with the most ferocious bark the kids all avoided that street. One day Jeff thought he would teach the barking dog a lesson and took the street on purpose and when that dog came after him instead of racing with fixed eyes on the target at the end of the street he turned and kicked the dog’s jaw and instead of making contact the dog bit him in the left cheek of his butt. Barking dogs only chased moving objects and if you pay attention to them they will bite you a lesson for all people but especially entrepreneurs building a business.

After graduating from Troy University with a physical education degree in 1981, Jeff followed his grandfather’s influence and became an accomplished high school and college basketball coach for the decade of the 80s. He left the basketball ranks in 1990 but never quit coaching. He was an accomplished salesperson and sales manager in the 90s working both domestically and internationally. He became CEO of a turnaround company that was a spinoff from DuPont and ConAgra in 2000 moving him to Melbourne Florida his current resident today except for the time he stays in Tennessee and his second home.

Jeff is the author of Dogs don’t Bark at Parked Cars, where he shares how to build the foundation for leading an ethical, capitalist organization the only real method to provide prosperity for our communities and country and globe, unethical is unsustainable. Jeff is most proud of his 35 years marriage to Judy and their three children are their greatest accomplishment. They are now 36, 26 and 24 and they are each successful contributors to society and make a difference with the people they touch every day. Jeff Piersall are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Jeff Piersall: Absolutely.

Jim Rembach: I’m glad you’re here. Now I’ve given my Legion a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better?

Jeff Piersall: Yeah. I appreciate that very much and thank you for being here today. When we talk about ethical capitalism it really is a void in the marketplace today because between our universities and our media we continue to get capitalist as really a cuss word. Quite honestly when you know the true value and what it really stands for and you blend that with the component of ethical you now have a power tool. And through the thousands of CEOs we’ve interviewed over the last 13 years I got to tell you over 95% of them all fit the definition of ethical capitalism but you don’t hear about them I only think you ever hear about on the media’s the ones that have got it wrong.

Jim Rembach: It’s really interesting you say that. A couple years ago I had a conversation with my next-door neighbor who was the Dean of business school for like 22 23 years which happened to be the third longest tenure of any Dean in any Business School in any major university. We were talking about ethics and he finally stopped me and he said, you know what he goes c-level people don’t care about ethics because it doesn’t affect the bottom line, but you’re saying different.

Jeff Piersall: Yes, very much so. I tend to like them and we quoted it in the book, Harris Rosen of the Rosen Shingle Hospitality Center in Orlando and he’s such a great example because he was asked to give a graduation speech at Cornell and they said they want him to come speak on the topic of ethics. He turned the speech down and he said, that’s very simple there’s only just one statement just do what’s right. And if you work for Harris Rosen and you work for him for five years he will pay for your children to go to college that’s ethical capitalism and that is what Harris Rosen is all about. We see this all over the place and I understand what your Dean is trying to say but it’s really taking something in a silo and saying just because I got to make tough decisions as a CEO that doesn’t mean that they’re unethical decisions that just means that sometimes some people aren’t going to come out on the best side of that stick but you’ve got to make the ethical right decision. That typically is kind of like Spock would always say, the few do not outweigh the many.

Jim Rembach: As you’re sitting there talking I have to go to the to the book and actually how you’ve outlined it because ultimately you’re giving the elements or the pillars, there’s many ways you can describe that, or an organization that actually build an ethical operation and therefore receive the benefits associated with that, I’d like to run through those if that’s possible.

Jeff Piersall: Yes, please.

Jim Rembach: The first one we have is the foundation of trust, relational priority, diversity of expression, influence not imposition, the significance of synergy, prevailing vision, process orientation, validating desire, recognizing life is both natural and spiritual and then building a legacy. Are these also in an order of maturation? Meaning that I need to first start with that foundation of trust in order to be able to go to the second or can these things be worked on at different times or even in parallel?

Jeff Piersall: It’s a great question, honestly, nobody’s ever asked me that. However, there is a hierarchical structure in the sense that really the foundation of trust is where it all starts and if you don’t have trust everything else is going to be substantially more difficult. Obviously legacy and what you’re leaving is obviously the last and the ultimate goal of whatever your passion and desires are. Now in between there they can kind of rearrange in any certain fashion but trust and legacy are definitely the bookends.

Jim Rembach: Also like the way that you actually position this talking about that story in your BIOS you talk about that these ten qualities have been part of the attributes that you found and the most effective trailblazers and dog out runners.

Jeff Piersall: Yes.

Jim Rembach: So, you’re not going to get bitten in the butt if you get these ten things.

Jeff Piersall: Yeah. When you think about it, it really is a constant journey and inside that journey there’s a lot of little sprints. Even the story of us being kids when we were running around cops and robbers if you went down that road where the big Dalmatian was and you stayed focus at the end of the road and all you did was just pedal and went as fast as you could that that dog never bit you it was just the time that I turned and paid attention to it that it got me. That is so true, the bigger your purpose the bigger your Y, the more critics you will actually end up having on that journey. You’ve got to be very careful not to get sidetracked and get your eyes off your goal.

Jim Rembach: I think that’s a great point. I think it’s too easy for us to look backwards when we should be looking forwards.

Jeff Piersall: Yeah, Jim, one of the big pieces and you really kind of touched of touch on it we tend to look at barking dogs as external people or external concepts and ideas there’s a lot of same barking dogs inside of each of us and sometimes it’s what’s inside of us from our past that keeps us from ever achieving our true intention more so than the people external of us.

Jim Rembach: I definitely can risk resonate with that. And I can also resonate the times where I was the barking dog at others.

Jeff Piersall: Yes. We’ve all been victim, yeah.

Jim Rembach: When you start thinking about—you had mentioned something about the longitudinal aspects of you doing this research and building and understanding these ten qualities is that you probably found a lot along the way that maybe possess one that weren’t in the ten but actually experienced some success, so what was the number eleven?

Jeff Piersall: Number eleven in our position is really the one virtue that is the sum of all virtues which is courage. You can have all ten of these foundational principles but if you’re sitting on the couch and you don’t have the courage to get up and to go get in the game then it really isn’t going to matter at the end of the day. Courage is really where all the separation is and I liken it to a lot for a lot of people, faith and fear has the exact same definition, it’s the things unseen in our future. The difference is which one of those two you choose who have a great difference on the end result. You’re not acting with courage because you have great faith you’re acting with courage because you have fear and the faith gets you to overcome that fear and still act. So, it’s a very substantial principle and it is the one that we find in all great entrepreneurs.

Jim Rembach: As you were talking and the way that you explained it I also started thinking and even looking at these ten qualities I started thinking also about effort. Is effort kind of just an implied thing it’s like table stakes, sorry I mean if you don’t have any effort kind of like you talked about getting off the couch, is the courage thing or it’s just the overall effort thing? I think those are two separate things but maybe that’s 12 or maybe that’s underlying every single one of these.

Jeff Piersall: It’s an interesting concept because there’s the effort and I think a lot of entrepreneurs and their very beginning will spend an awful lot of time like myself you’re doing everything and anything in the business. And we sometimes think that that effort is out working others therefore we’ll get what we want to go when in fact we need to learn how to work more smart and that smart working is what’s going to get us where we need to go. In fact, today I work on actually taking 153 days a year and if you had two told me that two years ago I would have told you were just crazy there was an even three free days. And now I forced myself into those days and it actually makes me better on the days that I’m actually working and so if there is a tremendous sense of balance that comes out of all of that.

Jim Rembach: You mentioned something about an entrepreneur but as you were talking I also started thinking about somebody who’s working in within an organization it’s kind of a similar thing because what I see is—there’s been such a—you want to call it whatever you want but people are trying to be more agile or trying to be more streamline they’re trying to bootstrap more they’re trying to really limit the amount of resources and so what happens is an effect of that is you pile more on people. Even when you started talking about an effort and focus and all of that is even when you’re inside it’s not just an entrepreneurs problem you can’t do everything.

Jeff Piersall: If you study Coach John Wooden which was a major influence on me in my lifetime he is a pyramid of success and I think this answers the question for you and your listeners. The pyramid has two cornerstones one is joy and one is work and in the description from Coach Wooden those two cornerstones are there because the pyramid falls apart without them and your joy must be your work and your work must be your joy and out of that now you can start to build the rest of your life which leads to competitive greatness. That is where I like to really refer to it not necessarily as entrepreneurs but the entrepreneurial spirit. It could be a single mom who’s raising three kids but that entrepreneurial spirit that outlook and the same with my employees. I want employees that have that entrepreneurial spirit to them because they’re going to get more done in less time and they’re going to be much more effective and they’re going to have a positive outlook they’re going to be team players I mean everything starts to come together.

Jim Rembach: Gosh, so when I started thinking about these ten elements the—been chased by the dog because I was been there too as I was reading this and as you’re talking about I’m like, I wasn’t on that road but I was on another road and one with Dalmatian but it was another dog that was chasing and this one was nipping at my ankles—there’s just so many things I can think about is that there’s a lot of humps that you’ve had to get over along the way and a lot of things that have inspired you. On the show we look at quotes in order to inspire us and I know you have several especially with all the research that you’ve done in regards to leaders but is there one or two that kind of stands out that you can share?

Jeff Piersall: Wow! There’s so many of them in my life. I kind of love Zig Ziglar’s quote, set yourself on fire and they’ll come from miles away to see you burn. And I think it really says a lot about the whole essence of the book. It really does say a lot about a person’s life for me because you can be the water cooler person who is always down and out complaining and finding what’s wrong and guess what? You could always get an audience it’s a very interesting thing. But when you get an audience because you’re enthusiastic, and I mean balanced enthusiasm, I see a lot of people that take this to the extreme and they’re so enthusiastic they’re so overboard that you’ve got to get away from them because they just don’t have a balance to themselves. You present yourself and you communicate with yourself in a very enthusiastic but yet balanced manner and therefore people want to listen and they want to hear what you have to say and I think that’s the importance. Zig always said it, if you’re on fire they’re going to come watch and that really is It. I can’t remember exactly how it goes but Teddy Roosevelt’s great quote about being on the field of play and those that are bloodied up at the end of the war are the ones that really can sit there and say, regardless of the score I gave it my best and I think there’s a lot to that. My partners and I on our team we kind of like look at it as—in the sports world you’re either a fan or a player. And players are on the field making things happen fans are up in the crowd they’ve paid to come watch there they’re overly enthusiastic they’re all jived up and ready to go but they ultimately have no outcome on the game as much as everybody may want it but ultimately they don’t, It’s the players. I try to challenge everybody be a player get in the game and be a player.

Jim Rembach: Most definitely. So when you start looking at this particular transition in this journey that you’ve been on and going through getting over your own hump of finally running to be that class president and getting it, I know there’s a lot of hump that you’ve had to get over in order to be able to get where you are today. Is there a story that you can share that we can find some inspiration in?

Jeff Piersall: What a great question because there’s been hundreds of them I think and I think it’s what’s uniquely prepared me for what I am today. I would challenge anybody who’s listening today to always know that everybody’s journey is extraordinarily unique and all of them are filled with potholes. There’s a lot of times where you get to this point in your life and people will look at you at 58 and they’ll go, wow! Look at everything that you’ve accomplished everything is just so neatly put together and no it’s not I’m the same guy that struggled to even believe that he could be the student council president and then I’m the same person that went through a 14-year history with what I thought was a very good friend who completely stabbed me in the back and cost me a tremendous journey that I thought was what my destination was, well, the truth of it was that it wasn’t. And then I’ve even had in this most current business a partner that we had to deal with in the same manners with financial embezzlement and other different types of lies. All of us have gone through these battles and these journeys and the one thing that I learned from my dad from years and years and years ago and he just always said it to me, just never quit. I remember Jim Valvano in his going-away speech and really nobody knew it was but today it’s just a landmark and in the parts of North Carolina where you come out of you hear it all the time and it’s just never, never, never, quit and that is our journey and that’s really for anybody on your call that’s got to be your motto, just never, never quit.

Talking about never quitting and then talking about taking that extra time and getting more done talking about right now over the weekend where you’re going to be up in Tennessee and turkey season started opens tomorrow you’re going to have some fun with your brother-in-law but you have a lot of things going on—writing a book they say is the easy part promoting it is totally different story, that’s one reason why you’re on the show and then we’re glad you’re here, but you have several things and by the way 57, that ain’t old you got a lot of things that you want to accomplish. But if you have one goal, what would it be?

Jeff Piersall: Right now the one goal that we’ve got is for the company itself to become a self-managed company. And what I mean by that is that the company itself can run without me being there. The company has been so reliant upon me and—yes, I’ve got a very large charismatic personality and therefore it even makes it a little worse and I am the entrepreneur that’s got a new idea every ten minutes and that and that adds a lot of stress to the situation. About four years ago we started the process to become very process-oriented. As the company becomes more self-managed then I can go do the things that I’m more uniquely adapt to go do which is a lot of what we’re doing today but it’s even more so back to the teaching roots that I had when I was coaching and teaching these fundamentals and teaching these principles.

Because I’m really convinced that we’re on a move we’ve got a huge uprising that’s coming we’ve got a major trend that a lot of people aren’t paying attention to with the baby boomers exiting you’ve got a workforce today that’s over average age 50 by 2025 it’s going to be average workforce of just over 30, that’s a 20-year swing in your workforce in less than 8 to 10 years and that creates a wisdom gap and we’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of our past if we don’t transfer that wisdom. Ultimately there’s one thing I think that all of us are wired for Jim and that’s freedom. And that freedom comes down into really four different pillars we’re either going after time freedom we’re going after money freedom we’re going after the freedom of relationships or the freedom of purpose. If you think of those four pillars those pillars is what makes up ethical capitalism because that is your pursuit as after that freedom. When you think about the guy that’s in the inner city streets it’s pursuing freedom but he’s doing it through selling drugs that unethical becomes unsustainable eventually and you see it across the world in all areas. I think we’ve got a huge opportunity to teach ethical capitalism the way it ought to be done and the millennials are open to it because there are very balanced generation that will ask questions when given the opportunity.

Jim Rembach: That’s a really good point. Unfortunately, talking about that particular generation when they get glamorized by they all think that they could become social media experts or people that get followed by, hey they’ve got a million followers or making all these money or hey they could be an athlete or hey I think a lot of times the idols and the people that we have to look up to oftentimes are problematic. I think Cohen goes back to what we’ve been saying a long time ago as far as having the courage and stick it out. I think more of the older generation needs to put themselves in a position to be the ones that we want to emulate and instead of people who are getting that entertainment glamour spotlight.

Jeff Piersall: Well it’s kind of like the last chapter of the book of the ten principles, start becoming the person that you want everybody else to be. And that really kind of says a lot by itself because we’re quick to pass judgment we’re quick to say, oh they’re not doing this they’re not doing that. Well, why don’t you start becoming that person resonate it and it’ll attract and be on its own? So I hear you loud and clear and I think that there’s a huge opportunity in our generational shift to learn courage to learn persistence and I think those are some of the things I’m worried about as I’m watching. We’ve got a brilliant, brilliant group of kids that are really, really talented but they can’t buy into the lottery mentality because it doesn’t work that way everything is a long journey.

Jim Rembach: I think there are several things that lead me to being able to create the legacy and you do it every single day, that’s what you do day in and day out. We also have a situation where a lot of them don’t know how to be resilient, you have to learn resiliency. So, there’s a lot of these particular factors that I been talking about for a long time that impact the effect that our workforce is going to have on our businesses. When we start about creativity and innovation and all of those things you have to fail and have to have gone through that failure in order to learn how to overcome.

Jeff Piersall: Yes you do.

Jim Rembach: You also have to be thinking about that legacy that you’re going to be leaving and it starts with that older generation. I specifically remember sitting down in a particular meeting where I was on the Finance Committee for our church and one of the folks on the Finance Committee we’re talking about his giving and the way that he gives and he said, well that’s personal I don’t talk about that. I said, well, how do you expect the other generation to learn what giving means? And he just kind of looked at me strange, you keep it to yourself and that’s where it dies.

Jeff Piersall: That’s exactly where it dies. You made a great point particularly on failure and it’s the reason why I think athletics is such a great teacher because there’s nobody in athletics that hasn’t failed everybody fails. I grew up in the coaching era with Michael Jordan coming into college and then Pro and you look at his career and you just think but nobody remembers that he got cut from his varsity basketball team first and it was getting cut that led to the success. Nobody realizes that you know, okay, yeah he hit the last shot to win Dean Smith’s first NCAA title but he missed the last shot of the preceding games when he had those opportunities but he was still willing to take that last shot when it meant the most. That’s the persistence factor that—you really got to have and it’s got to motivate you to continue to work harder and harder and it’s the reason why we’ve got a generation that we really have to work hard on because we’ve had participatory trophies for everyone and competitiveness taught is a very, very, healthy thing for all kids and for all people because life is competitive. I think we try to put icing on that cake that’s just unrealistic and we’ve had a generation of parents that have done the exact same thing and we’re kind of paying the price right now for that.

Jim Rembach: And the Fast Leader legion wishes you the very best. Now before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsor.

An even better place to work is an easy-to-use solution that gives you a continuous diagnostic on employee engagement along with integrated activities that will improve employee engagement and leadership skills in everyone. Using this award-winning solution is guaranteed to create motivated, productive and loyal employees who have great work relationships with our colleagues and your customers. To learn more about an even better place to work visit beyondmorale.com/better.

Jim Rembach: Alright, here we go Fast Leader legion it’s time for the Hump Day Hoedown. Okay, Jeff, the Hump day hoedown is the part of our show where you give us good insights fast. So I’m going to ask you several questions and your job is to give us robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Jeff Piersall, are you ready to hoedown?

Jeff Piersall: Let’s hoedown.

Jim Rembach: Alright. What do you think is holding you back from being an even better leader today?

Jeff Piersall: I think the biggest thing that’s holding me back right now is just believing that we can do this on a global level, it’s just mindset and I work on it every day.

Jim Rembach: What is the best leadership advice you have ever received?

Jeff Piersall: Believing you first.

Jim Rembach: What is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success?

Jeff Piersall: I work hard and my faith is my guiding light.

Jim Rembach: What do you feel is one of your best tools that helps you lead in business or life?

Jeff Piersall: Respect for other people.

Jim Rembach: What would be one book that you’d recommend to our listeners and it could be from any genre, of course we’re going to put a link to, Dogs don’t bark at Parked Cars, on your show notes page as well.

Jeff Piersall: John Wooden on leadership is a must for everybody.

Jim Rembach: Okay, Fast Leader legion you can find links to that another bonus information from today’s show by going too fastleader.net/jeffpiersall. Okay, Jeff, this is my last hump day hoedown question: Imagine you were given the opportunity go back to the age of 25 and you have been given the opportunity to take the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you but you can’t take everything back you can only choose one. So, what skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

Jeff Piersall: It’s what I’ve learned in discernment of people. Having the people around you that you want to be most like. I’ve had people around me and I think most of us do this that we think we like and we enjoy because they’re addressing weaknesses of ourselves and it’s not our weaknesses that we need to be focused on we need to have the people around us to continue to challenge us continue to move us up and people we admire people of great character. And when I made that shift it’s made a huge shift in my life the same way but the people choices have been probably the single greatest lesson I would have corrected.

Jim Rembach: Jeff it was an honor to spend time with you today can you please share with the Fast Leader legion how they can connect with you?

Jeff Piersall: Yes sir, you sure can. If you just go to Jeff Piersall in either Facebook, Linkedin, or my website www.jeffpiersall.com and you can get to any of our businesses from jeffpiersall.com and also the book and we’d love to be able to stay in connection with all of you.

Jim Rembach: Jeff Piersall, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom the Fast Leader Legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump.

Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leader show today, for recaps, links from every show special offers and access to download and subscribe, if you haven’t already, head on over the fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster.

END OF AUDIO

156: Kimberly Davis: I really melted down

Kimberly Davis Show Notes Page

Kimberly Davis had an anxiety attack. Days before she was to give a TEDx talk about being brave she lost her brave. She began to fear the spotlight, failing to connect to her audience and missing out on capturing her opportunity. But Kimberly knew what do to squash her own anxiety. She retrieved her brave.

Kimberly’s life on the stage has taken many forms. From small-town beginnings, having grown-up on a ranch in NW Montana singing to the cows in below zero temperatures – to the international stage.

Guided by the winds of happenstance, Kimberly found her way to the theatre – acting on stages across the country and throughout Germany – misplacing, testing, and ultimately discovering her brave.

Eventually she left the theatre and, after a very circuitous path, found her way into the world of training and development, where the hundreds of Fortune 500 participants became her education. She’d secretly study them and, much to her surprise, she discovered that the theatre world and the business world aren’t that different after all.

For the past 15 years Kimberly has taken that discovery and helped thousands of leaders and emerging leaders, from every different industry imaginable, perform authentically and powerfully on the high stakes stage that is work. In her program OnStage Leadership, in her TEDx talk, through her work at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business’ Executive Education Program, and now in her new book, Brave Leadership, Kimberly has dedicated her life to cultivating brave authentic leaders who know how to connect powerfully to get powerful results.

Still a small-town girl at heart, Kimberly has crafted a life for herself, with her husband Tim and son Jeremy (and feisty cat, Sulley Magee) in the gorgeous hill country surrounding Austin, TX, where she fights every day to bring her best, most authentic and powerful self – what she calls brave – to every situation she faces. Sometimes she succeeds, sometimes she doesn’t. But she’s committed to the fight.

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Listen to @OnStageKimberly to get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow Click to Tweet

“I want to democratize what it means to be brave.” -Kimberly Davis Click to Tweet

“So many people think that they can’t be brave.” -Kimberly Davis Click to Tweet

“We are all far more brave than we know.” -Kimberly Davis Click to Tweet

“Every single one of use has an impact we can make here in this world.” -Kimberly Davis Click to Tweet

“I need a way to crystalize what I stand for.” -Kimberly Davis Click to Tweet

“I can hold myself up to my own standard; am I living this or am I not?” -Kimberly Davis Click to Tweet

“If you can say, this is what I’m aiming for, you’re more likely to hit it.” -Kimberly Davis Click to Tweet

“Your super objective is your purpose and action.” -Kimberly Davis Click to Tweet

“We all as individuals have our super objective that is unique to you.” -Kimberly Davis Click to Tweet

“In order for people to experience you as authentic, they need to experience you as genuine, worthy of trust, reliance and belief from their perspective.” -Kimberly Davis Click to Tweet

“If you’re imposing, you’re never going to get the buy-in or their emotional energy.” -Kimberly Davis Click to Tweet

“If you’re going to ask exponentially more of people then you’re going to have to connect to their hearts.” -Kimberly Davis Click to Tweet

“If you’re really clear about what you stand for then you know where you hit the mark and where you didn’t.” -Kimberly Davis Click to Tweet

“So many people haven’t even asked themselves the question, why do I care.” -Kimberly Davis Click to Tweet

“You do what you do for the sake of what?” -Kimberly Davis Click to Tweet

“Where am I getting in my own way of having the impact I want to have?” -Kimberly Davis Click to Tweet

“Brave leadership is not going to make your life easier, it’s going to make your life harder, but it’s going to make your life richer and your results better.” -Kimberly Davis Click to Tweet

“There are no simple five steps, there’s one situation at a time.” -Kimberly Davis Click to Tweet

“Brave, is not an all or nothing thing.” -Kimberly Davis Click to Tweet

“Every situation that you face, how can you refocus your attention to get back into the game.” -Kimberly Davis Click to Tweet

Hump to Get Over

Advice for others

Trust yourself. Move forward anyway.

Holding her back from being an even better leader

Second guessing myself.

Best Leadership Advice

Be yourself.

Secret to Success

I connect deeply with people because I care deeply for people.

Best tools that helps in Business or Life

Being able to focus outside myself and get myself back on track when I need to.

Contacting Kimberly Davis

website: http://www.braveleadershipbook.com/

website: https://onstageleadership.com/blog/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/OnStageKimberly

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OnStageLeadership/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberlydavisonstage/

Resources and Show Mentions

Developing a Better Place to Work

Increase Employee Engagement and Workplace Culture

Empathy Mapping

54 Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Competencies List: Emotional Intelligence has proven to be the right kind of intelligence to have if you want to move onward and upward faster. Get your free list today.

Show Transcript:

Click to access edited transcript

156: Kimberly Davis: I really melted down

Intro Welcome to the Fast Leader podcast where we explore convenient yet effective shortcuts that will help you get ahead and move forward faster by becoming a better leader. And now here’s your host customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

Jim Rembach: Okay, Fast Leader legion, today I’m excited because I have somebody on the show today who is going to really help with a couple things and one primary thing being a good sense of direction. Kimberly Davis’s life on stage has taken many forms. From small-town beginnings having grown up on a ranch in Northwestern Montana singing to the cows in below zero temperatures to the international stage. Guided by the whims of happenstance Kimberly found her way to the theatre acting on stage across the country and throughout Germany misplacing, testing and ultimately discovering her brave. Eventually she left the theater and after a very circuitous path found her way into the world of training and development where the hundreds of fortune 00 participants became her education. She’d secretly studied them and much to her surprise she discovered that the theater world and the business world aren’t that different at all.

For the past 1 years Kimberly has taken that discovery and helped thousands of leaders and emerging leaders from every different industry imaginable perform authentically and powerfully on the high stakes stage that is work. In her program on stage leadership in her TEDx talk through her work at Southern Methodist University Cox School of Business’s Executive Education Program and now in her new book, Brave Leadership. Kimberly has dedicated her life to cultivating, brave, authentic leaders who know how to connect powerfully and get results. Still a small-town girl at heart Kimberly has crafted a life for herself with her husband Tim and son Jeremy and feisty cat Sully McGee in the gorgeous hills surrounding Austin Texas where fights every day to bring her best most authentic and powerful self what she calls brave to every situation she faces sometimes she succeeds sometimes she does it but she’s committed to the

Fight. Kimberly Davis are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Kimberly Davis: I so am ready to help people get over the hump, Jim. Thank you for having me here.

Jim Rembach: I’m glad you’re here. Now I’ve given our listeners a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better.

Kimberly Davis: Jim, right now what I’m really most passionate about is creating a brave movement. I really want to democratize what it means to be brave because so many people think that they can’t be brave and they don’t realize that we are all far braver than we know. So, I really want to help as many people as I possibly can really connect to the fact that every single one of us has an impact that we can make here in this world.

Jim Rembach: It is true and I think through the course of our lives a lot of times that gets dampened. And so for me when I was actually looking through the book and just a just to kind

of give a little bit of insight about me, I’m left-handed so a lot of times I grab a book and I actually look at it from the back to the front and so for you looking at this book I came across immediately which is in the back of the book the leadership manifesto. And then as I started going towards the front of the book and then coming back from left to right like normal I started seeing all these things start fitting and coming together. But for you when you start thinking about the leadership manifesto, how did that come about?

Kimberly Davis: Well, I went the opposite direction, Jim, I’ve been teaching this content for probably a good 15 years some iteration of it. So, I been having these conversations with myself and with others for a really long time and what I realized is I need a way to crystallize what is it I stand for. Every day, and we’ll talk a little bit later about what is it I stand for as an individual and we’ll talk a little later about that, but every day I can hold myself up to my own standard, am I living this or am I not? Because if you can say this is what I’m aiming for then you’re more likely to hit it.

Jim Rembach: That’s a really interesting point. When you started talking I started thinking about—even a conversation I had with my daughter the other day about compromising her principles, compromising what she believes is the right behavior and action. This weekend she’s getting ready to go on a trip away from mom and dad and going to a place where there’s going to be a lot of things that she’s going to get exposed to that’s going to potentially question her judgment. I said look, don’t bend and be part of something because you feel like you’re going to get cut out or they won’t ask you back. And I said, instead you need to influence them and say, you know what? I don’t think that’s the right thing to do. So, don’t compromise.

Kimberly Davis: That’s right. I think so many organizations have their vision, mission, values—this is what we stand for but oftentimes they’re just lovely things that marketing has put together that lives on a mug or lives on a poster. And so if we can say, no these are the actions we’re seeing in the hallways in our conversations with each other in our meetings in our client in our client conversations that this is who we are then it changes everything.

Jim Rembach: It does. Another thing that really stood out to me talking about that who we are thing as I was going through the book which to me I think I’m going to as soon as we get done here I might start working on my own because oftentimes if we don’t have it we’ll end up wandering in different places and get off-track and not even realize it you have is that you have something in here called uncover your super objective, tell us about that?

Kimberly Davis: A super—let me back up a little bit. I borrowed the super objective from the theater, I did theater for many, many, many years and there was a fantastic tool in the theater called the super objective that was clarified at the turn of the century by this guy named Konstantin Stanislavski. What the super objective is essentially—if you can get crystal clear about what drives you from that internal space or from a purpose perspective and you could focus all of your attention to achieve that purpose in whatever situation it is you face to have an impact outside yourself then that essentially will allow you to be brave. So, your super objective is essentially your purpose in action. What is it you stand for? What is the impact that you want to have outside yourself?

Jim Rembach: I would dare to say that when you start thinking about other than maybe the theater and maybe even so in the theater when you start thinking about the different qualities and capabilities of certain actors is that not a lot of people actually go through and find what that is. Do you find yourself oftentimes having to start with that or do you have to start somewhere else and then ultimately get to that for folks?

Kimberly Davis: Yeah, we’re all into it we all start at different places and we’ve all had different journeys and have learned different things. It all begins with some very, very basic questions. The first question is to really understand why you care for real. Now, why do you care not based on a paycheck not because your boss says you should care about this or your mom says you should care about this but why do you personally care about this. And then then as you build on that you start asking herself, what’s the impact I want to have? What’s the impact I want to have on my employees? What’s the impact I want to have on my clients? What’s the impact I want to have on my listeners? In your case. Or the community or the industry or the world or that my patients or students whatever it is for you specifically—in addition to that get really clear on who or what do you care about most, who and what do you want to impact the most.

In your case Jim, you teach, you run a podcast and you write and you consult and you coach and you do all of these different things who or what do you care about most? Because if you can get really clear about that then the byproduct that is going to affect everything else. So for me personally—I’m a belly button to belly button kind of person I care about the individuals but I have specifically chosen to work with leaders because I know that leaders if I help them uncover their most authentic powerful sells then the byproduct of that is there’s going to have a tremendous ripple effect and it’s going to change the world. So, yes, it’s a big picture but the way I go about it is individual to individual. I care about making a difference in one individual’s life and then another individual’s life. Some people care about growing their team it’s all about the team. Some people it’s all about the culture, If you can get really clear on what it is that you care about and then what’s the impact you want to have on that person or that group of people then that will lead you down an active path to making the impact you want to have.

Jim Rembach: As you’re talking I started thinking too about the potential risks associated with that if I’m not aware. One of the risks being is that I start discovering these things for myself I get excited because I found that connection but then I start taking that same thing that I’ve identified myself and try to put it upon others. And so when you start talking about for example customer centricity and creating a customer centric organization while I may be totally customer centric and I do need other people within the organization and matter of fact the entire organization if I can accomplish it to be more customer centric as well because that’s how we all can benefit. But right do I run the risk of trying to do something on to others instead of helping them to learn and discover that within themselves?

Kimberly Davis: There’s such a huge insight. Here’s the deal we all as individuals have our super objective that’s unique to you so for you to impose your super objective on other people it’s not going to have the same impact. In order for people to experience you as authentic they need to experience use genuine worthy of trust, reliance, and belief from their perspective. You have to make sure you’re standing firmly in their shoes, what do they need from you to experience you as genuine, worthy of trust, reliance and belief? And then why do they personally care? I remember I was leading a program for a group of directors of operations for a large casual dining chain at one point and they were going through a tremendous amount of change and after the first day of the session, it’s a two-day program, after the first day I met with it the SVP who had hired me and I said, look, here’s the problem they don’t understand why they should care about this change. And he looks at me and he says, Kimberly I’ll tell him why they should care. I’m like, well, yeah, that’s the problem they’ve each got to understand from an individual perspective why do they personally care and that’s going to really help them harness their own values and their own strengths to do something about it. But if you’re imposing something on it you’re never going to get the buy in, you’re never going to get their emotional energy around the change or whatever needs to be done.

Jim Rembach: I’m glad you said that because often times I have to explain what the Fast Leader show really means. It’s not about shortcuts the shortcut would be let me tell you why you need to believe in this and why you need to engage in this and why we need to accomplish these goals. But the fact is that particular tactic may be easy to say it creates the most friction.

Kimberly Davis: Absolutely. It’ll get you a quick result it’s not going to get you a lasting a result and you’re going to have a by-product that it’s not going to be what you want.

Jim Rembach: Absolutely. And I think that we often see that happening in a customer environment very much where we’ll create a process flow that we want them to go through but if we force it upon them that’s going to create a lot of friction.

Kimberly Davis: Yeah, it’s never going to work, it’s never going to work.

Jim Rembach: It might accomplish your short-term goal, like you say, we get more transactions taken but now we’ve basically made everybody upset.

Kimberly Davis: Yeah. Well, and especially now because the workforce has changed so dramatically in the last 10 15 years, that we are asking exponentially more of the people that work for us. Ten years ago you ago you never expected someone to answer an email in their pajamas at 10 o’clock at night and now that’s a normal thing. You never expected people to jump on a conference call in the middle of the night or during the dinner hour but now that’s a normal thing. So if you’re going to ask people ask exponentially more people then you’re going to have to connect to their hearts instead of their heads because if they don’t want to do it you’re not going to get that extra energy.

And the reality is those things take time and they take tactics and they take tools they take the manifesto to be to the forefront of your mind. And even when I was looking at Manifesto I started thinking, and I know you don’t necessarily mean it this way, but for me it’s kind of like a checklist saying that, okay, where can I focus? Or where should I focus? Where am I doing okay with? What am I not doing okay with? How can I use it as a way to get feedback from others to see where I need to focus? To me it could almost be used as a development tool in a lot of different ways. Well, it holds your feet to the fire. The manifesto is we as an organization this is what we believe. We believe these things and then you’ve got your super objective which is your individual, what do I stand for? For me personally my super objective is to connect people to the best of who they are. That’s what I stand for and sometimes I do that and sometimes I don’t but I gets a chance to hold my feet to the fire. Did I do that in this conversation? Did I do it in this meeting? Did I do it in this message that I just sent? Did I do it when I was frustrated and everything—I didn’t have time to deal with it? No, I didn’t so I have to clean it up. So if you’re really clear about what you stand for then you know where you hit the mark more and you didn’t so you can go back and clean up the mistakes.

Jim Rembach: Okay, so going through and thinking about this as far as a pathway is concerned I started thinking about those folks that are not like me, meaning that I’m always trying to seek out a different way. I may pivot because of a new piece of information meaning that I want to focus and help other people develop and for me really that’s one of my motivators behind why I develop myself so that I can help people be more successful. It isn’t about me grabbing and gaining the success it’s about—

Kimberly Davis: So your model in development for other people and the way that you do that is you have to grow yourself because if you don’t grow yourself you can’t you can’t actually model.

Jim Rembach: That’s right.

Kimberly Davis: Exactly.

Jim Rembach: But not everybody’s like that I mean there’s some people who aren’t focused in on that and so they are the people when you start thinking about making a bigger impact for themselves in the business they’re maybe not proactive in seeking out those opportunities but yet we need them to grow and develop. How do you approach those people that just seem so difficult to be able to take to the next level?

Kimberly Davis: Well, so many people haven’t even asked themselves the question why do I care? And so if they think they’re doing it for somebody else they think they’re doing it because of their boss if they think they’re doing it for all of these other reasons then they’re it’s going to be hard for them to take any initiative and to get on board and to really get behind it from an emotional perspective which is where you get that extra energy. So if you can get the people that work for you to really get clear, and this is the impact, I personally want to have then they will automatically drive themselves. I don’t know if you’ve read, Dan Pink’s book, Drive? You probably remember in his book he talks about three key things in order for motive motivation to happen in this new work environment that we face in the last 10 15 years. He talks about autonomy. Are you able to make choices about how you do what it is you do? Mastery, do you have a chance to experience yourself getting better and better and better and raising your own bar and purpose? Are you doing something for a purpose greater than yourself? Well essentially, if you can identify your super objective, this is what I stand for. And you take action consistently around your super objective in every situation you face you achieve all three things. You achieve autonomy because nobody’s going to tell you, this is how you need to achieve your super objective today. No, you get to choose that all day long. Mastery, it’s going to force mastery because every human being you come into contact with it’s going to have a different set of needs. And for you to have an impact that you want to have you have to pay attention to those unique needs in front of you in order for you to have the impact so it’s going to force you to get better and better and better and raise your own bar and purpose. So, you’re super objective is essentially is purpose and action. So, the key to getting those people that don’t seem to be engaged and don’t seem to be taking any initiative and doing it for themselves is to help them start to get clear on what’s the impact you want to have. Why do you care for real? You do what you do for the sake of what? Not a paycheck. Why do you care about it? And then they can emotionally drive themselves.

Jim Rembach: I think what you’re really just talking about right there is why we have this significant emergence right now in coaching within organizations. Whether it’s them being able to do it internally, which is not quite possible for most organizations because they’re so thin, there are no internal coaches they’re very few and far between and so they’re seeking a lot of outside assistance for coaching. But I think that’s one reason why they’re focusing in on it in one way or another.

Kimberly Davis: Yeah, coaching is so incredibly important because here’s the deal we came off of the—we used to scale everything we treated people like widgets and in this humanistic movement we’re moving into, you cannot scale how people behave you cannot scale these things. We talked earlier about the challenges in call centers how call centers say like their scripts and everybody should do it the same way, but you know what? If you want that person on the phone to bring their emotional energy and to really serve that customer and listen to them they have to understand why they personally care about listening to their customers. They have to have a coach that helps them get that clarity around what matters most to them.

Jim Rembach: That’s a great point. Everything that we’re talking about here and you’ve even said the word several times and it’s all wrapped in all kinds of different emotions positive and negative. When we start thinking about that emotion on the show we love to look at quotes. Your book is full of different quotes and there’s some new ones I haven’t seen, so I’m looking forward to reading through the rest of the book. But is there a quote or two that you can share that you like?

Kimberly Davis: Oh, my gosh, well okay so my book is right in front of me and the one that I just turned to, I love them all because I put them in my book, but the one I loved it’s at the very back of the book is Diane Nyad, she’s the woman that swam from Florida to Cuba, she’s an amazing woman, I think she was like 70 years old when she did this. Her quote is, “This journey has always been about reaching your own other shore no matter what it is and that dream.” So to get really clear on what it is that lights you up and so you can start making that impact and smart making choices around that and also start taking responsibility for that. And I think this is where people get really messed up where they think purpose is all about hearts and rainbows and sunshine but it’s all about responsibility. Because if this is the impact that you are here to make you have to hold your feet to the fire. Did I have that impact? What actions am I taking? Where am I getting in my own way of having the impact that I want to have? And from an emotional intelligence perspective am I really clear that I’m having the impact that I want to make in the world on this person, on my team, on my culture? So it forces you to really step into another’s shoes and see from their perspective.

Jim Rembach: What you are talking about right there that can be painful.

Kimberly Davis: You know what? This is exactly what you said earlier, you and I are such kindred spirits around this stuff is that, I tell people look, brave leadership is not going make your life easier it’s going to make your like harder but it’s going to make your life richer and it’s going to make your results better. If we’re looking for the fast way of doing things there is no magic pill there’s going to be a lot of people out there they’re going to tell you follow my five steps and we you will be brilliant and be successful beyond measure. But that that’s not true there is no simple five steps there’s one situation at a time. Did you have the impact you wanted to have yes or no? If not what action can you take to get yourself closer? How do you grow yourself to be better?

Jim Rembach: Exactly right. So, part of that growth is that we have to go through experiences where we’ve made me falling down or had a hump that we couldn’t get over. Is there a time where you’ve gotten over the hump where you actually learned more and you can share with us?

Kimberly Davis: Every single day, every single day, Jim. So, let me think of a very specific time. I talked about in my book actually when I went to speak for TEDx. I had a bit of an anxiety attack right before I spoke at TEDx and really it came out of thin air for me because here I teach about connecting and showing up powerfully and being brave and you know when you talk about being brave and you’re not feeling very brave you’re really up against your own stuff. The day before I went in to speak to TEDx I really melted down and I had to teacher teach thy self I had to go back and use my tools. What’s the impact I’m here to have? This is not about me. I focus my attention outside myself, what’s the impact I want to have on these individuals? And I had a suspicion that I might get some kind of emotional push back for myself.

And so I packed photographs of all of these participants that I have worked with for the last 10 15 years, some of my most beloved people that had I’ve really seen take themselves from not believing in themselves to really risking owning their brave. And I went into my hotel room and I spread these pictures out all over the room and I gave my TED talk by myself to these people in this room but I focused on them—and this is the impact I want to have on you Gary, and this is the impact I want to have on you, and I connected individual to individual based on these amazing human beings that I knew they were and got myself back into recognizing, you know what? If I’m focused on what people think about me and if I’m focused on making a mistake and I’m focused on this going viral and me looking stupid these are the things I’m focusing on I can’t have the impact that I’m there to have . So, I had to find a way to push through all of that. Let it go. I talked about pushing through your lines the messages that you’re bumping up against and focus outside myself to really connect and have an impact.

Jim Rembach: Thanks for sharing that story. We have to learn how we as individuals can hijack our own anxieties and feelings of pressure so that we can do actually what you ended up doing.

Kimberly Davis: So funny people think—I think this is something that the media perpetuates, people think that you’re either brave or you’re not you’ve either figured it out or you haven’t. And brave is not an all-or-nothing thing it’s not like, okay I figured it out I’ve got great tools I’ve got it dialed in and every single time now I feel brave. No, the truth is there are so many times in my life I feel afraid and there are so many times that I don’t trust myself and I’m uncertain and I’m overwhelmed and all of this I feel vulnerable and all of those things because that’s what it means to be human and to think that you’re not going to feel those things is fantasy. But the key is every situation that you face how can you refocus your attention to get back into the game and let your brave unfold one situation at a time.

Jim Rembach: There was a really good book written called Crunch Time, by one of our guests who’s been on the Fast Leaders show, that talks about that talking about that refocusing piece talking about how you can really reflect upon the fact that you have put in the work you have had some success and how can you bring that to this moment right here right now so that you can accomplish what you’ve set out to do. We talked about a lot of the things that you’re doing.
We talked about—you still do any work in the theater?

Kimberly Davis: I’ve got a 13-year old son, so I’m not doing the theater anymore. But I have to tell you the work that I do it lights me up more than the theater did. Although I did see the Greatest Showman the other day and I now am addicted to the soundtrack and so it kind of reignited this passion for theater but—no I’m not doing any theater right now.

Jim Rembach: Well you’ve still been on a big stage the main stage been on stage as you said so that’s great. And you also have this new book and you’re promoting it and you have a lot of things going on but if you think about one thing that’s a goal, what would it be?

Kimberly Davis: A one thing that is a goal…the one thing is that—this brave conversation gets out there in a way that is going to make a difference. My husband wishes I were driven a little bit more by money, I think we’re wired similarly this way, but that doesn’t really show up on my radar at all. What drives me is feeling like that someone in Sacramento, California and someone in Phoenix, Arizona and someone in Kalispell, Montana they can pick up this book and they can find themselves and they can be excited about who they are. And seeing people get excited about who they are and what they can do to me is the most amazing thing in the world so I want that to happen for as many people as can possibly happen.

Jim Rembach: I can definitely connect with you on that because we talked about that off mic and I would say that getting paid isn’t always a monetary thing.

Kimberly Davis: Right, oh, absolutely, absolutely.

Jim Rembach: And the Fast Leader legion wishes you the very best. Now before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsor.

An even better place to work is an easy-to-use solution that improves the empathy and emotional intelligence skills in everyone. It provides a continuous diagnostic on employee engagement and provides integrated activities that will improve the leadership and collaboration skills in everyone. This award winning solution’s guarantee to create motivated, productive, and higher performing employees that have great working relationships with their colleagues and your customers. To learn more about an even better place to work visit beyondmorale.com/better.

Jim Rembach: Alright, here we go Fast Leader legion it’s time for the Hump Day Hoedown. Okay, Kimberly, the Hump Day Hoedown is a part of our show where you give us good insights fast. I’m going to ask you several questions and your job is to give us a robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Kimberly Davis, are you ready to hoedown?

Kimberly Davis: Oh, yes, I think.

Jim Rembach: Growing up on a ranch and living in Austin, Texas you have to be ready to hoedown. Alright, what do you think is holding you back from being an even better leader today?

Kimberly Davis: What’s holding me back from being an even better leader today is second-guessing myself.

Jim Rembach: What is the best leadership advice you have ever received?

Kimberly Davis: The best leadership advice I’ve ever received is to be yourself.

Jim Rembach: What is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success?

Kimberly Davis: That I connect deeply with people because I care deeply for people.

Jim Rembach: What do you feel is one of the best tools that helps you lead in business or life?

Kimberly Davis: My super objective being able to focus outside myself and get myself back on track when I need to.

Jim Rembach: What would be one book that you’d recommend to our listeners they could be from any genre, of course we’re going to a link to your Show Brave Leadership—Unleash your most Confident Powerful and Authentic Self To Get the Results you Need, on your show notes page as well.

Kimberly Davis: Well, thank you but I Daniel Pink’s book, Drive, I been using it in my work for the last ten years. I think it changed the landscape of what it means to be a leader.

Jim Rembach: Okay, Fast Leader listeners you can find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going too fastleader.net/Kimberly Davis. Okay, Kimberly, this is my last Hump Day Hoedown question. Imagine you were given the opportunity to go back to the age of 25. And you’ve been given the opportunity to take the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you but you can’t take everything back you can only choose one. What skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

Kimberly Davis: I would tell myself to trust yourself. I think at 25 I second-guess myself all the time and I stopped myself and so if I could just know, trust yourself you’ve got this move forward anyway move forward even in the face of that not knowing I think that would have changed a lot for me.

Jim Rembach: Kimberly it was an honor to spend time with you today can you please share with the Fast Leader Legion how they can connect with you?

Kimberly Davis: So, you can connect me through my website www.braveleadershipbook.com or onstageleadership.com. I’m also very active on Twitter and LinkedIn I’ve got an onstage leadership Facebook, it’s under Kimberly, you look under onstage leadership or Kimberly Davis author. And I hope to connect with you because I love connecting with people.

Jim Rembach: Kimberly Davis, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom the Fast Leader legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump. Woot! Woot!

Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leader show today. For recaps, links from every show, special offers and access to download and subscribe, if you haven’t already, head on over the fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster.

END OF AUDIO

098: Michael Teoh: I thought I could motivate my staff

Michael Teoh Show Notes

Michael Teoh was working on growing his business and he was getting results. Michael kept pressing forward thinking he could motivate his staff to meet client demands. But his staff pushed back. That’s when Michael learned a valuable lesson.

Michael was born in the northern state of Malaysia, known as Penang, a melting pot of cultures, ethnicities and even food delicacies, renowned for being one of the top tourist destinations in the world.

He was raised in a typical middle-income family, where Michael’s parents ran an education school, which provided academic support to the poorer students in the state. At a tender age of 4, Michael was brought up in a ‘Classroom-like’ setting where he recalls fondly, of the moment he picked up a chalk and started to sketch his stories for the amusements of teachers and the students.

Despite his humble beginnings, life did not ‘Spoil’ Michael, as he too had to struggle through his years in school, where he was bullied because he was weak in sports and that he hailed from a middle income family, who couldn’t afford much.

However, Michael learnt an invaluable lesson from his journey, growing up, and that is ‘We should Strive to Create Opportunities to Help Others, rather than to Wait for Others to Give Opportunities to Us!’

Today, Michael Teoh has surprised many of his ‘Naysayers’ who had once bullied him. He is the Founder of Thriving Talents, an award-winning ‘Millennials-focused’ talent development company who attracts, develops and retains young leaders for Fortune 500 companies across 39 countries – A business which Michael excitedly wakes up every day to reach out to clients like Microsoft, Intel, General Electric and more, to share his services to train up their talents! He has also been featured on CNN, BBC and the Malaysian Book of Records, while being recognized as a ‘National Youth Icon’ by the Malaysian Prime Minister.

Michael is also a serial investor with investments in properties, precious metals, commodities and had recently endeavoured into the food & beverages industry in South East Asia’s booming consumer market. He was also a Global Advisor with Microsoft’s Youth Spark initiative, SAP’s Millennials at Work campaign and a Board of Director of several companies & public entities in Malaysia, with his focus on Talent Development, Sales and Leadership.

He is the Co-Author of the Potential Matrix®, a book in which he has researched the world’s most celebrated young leaders and has been serving him, as the tool for him to inspire and guide other people to succeed in their lives and at work as well!

Michael currently lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Listen to @michaelteoh to get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow Click to Tweet

“If we want to see any positive change, we need to develop our skills and attitudes.” -Michael Teoh Click to Tweet

“Why not give the best we can give in life?” -Michael Teoh Click to Tweet

“As human beings we need that one turning point.” -Michael Teoh Click to Tweet

“The biggest pitfall for any human being is to just give up.” -Michael Teoh Click to Tweet

“If you want purpose, commit and do it to the best of your abilities.” -Michael Teoh Click to Tweet

“There is a time to have fun and there is a time for the bottom line.” -Michael Teoh Click to Tweet

“Never wait for opportunities to come, instead create your own.” -Michael Teoh Click to Tweet

“Have the heart to create opportunities for others.” -Michael Teoh Click to Tweet

“Live with kings, walk with kings, but never lose that common touch.” -Michael Teoh Click to Tweet

“Never forget how, and why, and where you started.” -Michael Teoh Click to Tweet

“Always think about the people first, the results will follow.” -Michael Teoh Click to Tweet

Hump to Get Over

Advice for others

Create an environment of caring AND bottom line performance.

Holding him back from being an even better leader

Self-doubt.

Best Leadership Advice Received

Always think about the people first, the results will follow.

Best tools that helps in business or Life

My persistence to deliver excellence.

Contacting Michael

email: http://www.potentialmatrix.com

LinkedIn: https://my.linkedin.com/in/michaelteoh

Twitter: https://twitter.com/michaelteoh

Resources

Show Transcript:

Click to access edited transcript

098: Michael Teoh: I thought I could motivate my staff

Intro: Welcome to the Fast Leader Podcast, where we explore convenient yet effective shortcuts that will help you get ahead and move forward faster by becoming a better leader. And now here’s your host, customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

Need a powerful and entertaining way to ignite your next conference, retreat or team-building session? My keynote don’t include magic but they do have the power to help your attendees take a leap forward by putting emotional intelligence into their employee engagement, customer engagement and customer centric leadership practices. So bring the infotainment creativity the Fast Leader show to your next event and I’ll help your attendees get over the hump now. Go to beyondmorale.com/speaking to learn more.

Jim Rembach: Okay, Fast Leader Legion, when my good friend Karen Hurt, who’s on Episode 64 of the Fast Leader Show said that I needed to meet this person she was right, so I have him on the show. Michael Teoh was born in the northern state of Malaysia known as Penang, a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities even food delicacies renowned for being one of the top tourist destinations in the world. He was raised in a typical middle-income family were Michael’s parents ran an education school which provided academic support to the poor students in the state. At a tender age of four Michael was brought up in the classroom-like setting where he recalls fondly of the moment where he picked up a chalk and started to sketch his stories for the amusement of teachers and students.

Despite his humble beginnings life did not spoil Michael as he had to struggle through his years in school where he was bullied because he was weak in sports and that he hailed from a middle-income family who couldn’t afford much. However, Michael learned an invaluable lesson from his journey growing up and that is, that we should strive to create opportunities to help others rather than to wait for others to give opportunities to us. Michael Teoh has surprised many of his naysayers who had once bullied him. He is the founder of Thriving Talents an award-winning millennial’s-focused talent development company who attracts, develops, and retains young leaders for Fortune 500 companies across 39 countries.

He has also been featured on CNN, BBC and the Malaysian Book of Records while being recognized as a national youth icon by the Malaysian Prime Minister. Michael’s also a serial investor with investments and properties, precious metals, commodities and had recently endeavored into the food and beverage industry in Southeast Asia’s booming consumer market. He is also a global advisor with Microsoft’s youth spark initiative SAP’s Millennial’s at Work campaign and has been on the board for many organizations. He is also the co-author of the Potential Matrix a book in which he has researched the world’s most celebrated young leaders. Michael currently lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Michael are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Michael Teoh: Fantastic. Thank you so much Jim for having me here and hello to everyone tuning in right now. I’m very excited to be here.

Jim Rembach: I’ve given our listeners a little bit about—I’m glad you’re here too—but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better?

Michael Teoh: Well, my current passion is developing the human potential. Because I believe—who want to see any positive change to happen in our world today, even in our own lives the day she starts with us needing to develop our skills, having the right attitude and of course having that guiding hand just to guide us to weather through the stormy weathers and help us unleash our potentials. I’ve seen how some of my students who regularly attended my talk who have actually learned some of the strategy that to me years to learn have transformed their lives overtime. And the best thing I’m doing right now Jim, is that I’ve incorporated into running it into full time business, and that’s what I do in Thriving Talents.

Jim Rembach: You know, I’m really intrigued because of reading and learning a little bit more about you and talking about your growing up, how you were bullied, and really you had the opportunity to be someone who just melted away within society. How can you take the adversity that you went through and turn it into this whole potential thing that you’re talking about now?

Michael Teoh: I believe it all started with a self-realization. Realization that I’ve given all my best, I try to become the best athlete that I possibly could at school but I just couldn’t make the cut. And what happened was I thought we just live once, that’s my personal belief, and I just thought why not give the best that we can in life. And that was the time I start seeking out mentors and I was very glad that when I was in school I had teachers who actually gave me my first opportunity. Oftentimes I believe as a human being we need that one turning point, and that one turning point is essential and you need that comes in disguise as opportunities for us to make the best use of. So as for me, I started participating in business plan competitions. I started participating in conventions and seminars. I become a volunteer. I start to raise up my hand to take up responsibilities in life and in school. And without knowing it, I started to realize that, hey, I found a new niche in my life. I’m may not be good in sports at that time but at least I could be good at something, and for me at that time, I was running a business, it was inspiring lives at a tender age when I was just 16 to 17 years old and that was my turning point. And I think the biggest most fatal pitfall for any human being to make sense of the purpose in this life is to just give up and like you mention Jim, melt away with the flow. I believe all of us are put into this world for a destiny—for a purpose and I think we could actually find it. And once we found it we just have to make that opportunity the best that we can.

Jim Rembach: Okay so I have to know Michael because it’s just kind of one of those things that as a parent, I want to make sure that I’m doing the right thing. And I look at others and I’m like, “Okay, I’m not going to do that or I should do that.” When you started talking about those moments, when you came home and probably wept to your parents and talked about how mean they were at you, what did your parents do in order redirect you or in order to have you to have the outlook that you have now in being able to accomplish the things that you’ve accomplished?

Michael Teoh: You know, I’ll be honest with you, Jim, and for all of you who are coming from the parts of Asia, you will know that Asian parents were normally want their kids to excel very well in academic studies, at least during my time, where we just turn to the millennium it was the early 2000’s. But one thing I really appreciated what my parents did was they supported me in my pursuit of enhancing what we today know as sought skills. They knew that I was not so academically inclined because I was studying something that I didn’t like that was science subject, I didn’t like science subjects during that time, but one thing though when I had put in the effort to explore other side about me, oratory skills, public speaking, acting and drama, debating, business plan writing, one thing that

I really appreciated that my parents and my grandparents as well did, was that they supported me. And I’m not asking parents out there to give all their wealth to their kids to experiment on an idea, what I am asking is to all parents out there is to give that moral support. Because you cannot imagine how just a simple remark from your dad or from your mom encouraging you to pursue your dreams or find that purpose in life could lead that ordinary person to become an extraordinarily person in the future. And I think as for me personally, as the son, as the daughter or as the kid at that time, I believe there should be more conversations that should be held between ourselves and our parents to make or at least try to make them understand, I would say, about our perspective or the world of what we may not good at right now and what can we excel in and just have a win-win situation.

One of the things that I basically did with my parents was to form a wager in a sense where I was not so academically incline because I was studying science but I have proven to them that whenever I join competitions, whenever I commit myself to get involve in businesses I do it at 100% and I think if you really want success, if you really want purpose in your life, just convince the other party, your stakeholders that you are there to give your 100% commitment and just do it to the best of your ability and show them results.

Jim Rembach: There’s a study that I was reading in regards to the difference between Asian parents, cause you brought that up and just say American parents cause I’m here on the states, so when you started looking at some of the things that were associated with how your parents supported you, one of the things that they were talking about on the study was that American parents would do too much coddling they would actually—when you talk about support they would give support and say that they did well even if they didn’t do well. Whereas Asian parents, kind of cut to the chase and said, “Hey! You did bad in that. You did bad in that because you didn’t focus on and do these things. And so therefore, if you want to perform better at it you need to be no more diligent and show more effort to be able to have the performance.” And they talk about the difference between the coddling and the tough love. Did your parents coddle your or they give you tough love?

Michael Teoh: Well, I would say it’s a mix of both actually. I would imagine that my mom coddles me while my dad gave me tough love but I would imagine that it’s very important to have the best of both world. One of the things that really change my life was that, I was 16 years old and I was trying to find a purpose in my life and I remember my dad permitting me to go for a real estate conference. At the age of 16, I was there all alone by myself and I was attending a conference about real estate, what do I know about real estate? One of the thing that I did realize is that it opened my mind and it also, I would say broaden my horizons to see what are the opportunities out there and how all these riches assess with people manage to accomplish their dreams and how did they get to where they are today.

So I think, as much as you ask the question, Jim about whether it’s coddling or tough love, I think parents would also require some assistance from the outside that is why it’s very important one thing I would suggest to parents is get yourself involve with associations. I understand that there’s some organizations or NGO’s out there like the Rotary Clubs or the Lion Clubs or Leo Clubs which parents could bring their kids to expose them to some early childhood dose of market reality and then the parents coming in to become a coach for the kids. I believe the time has passed when last time we could see parents often seen as dictators. They would often dictate what the kids should do, what the child should do at least from Asian perspective. But I think right now the parents should be a coach in the sense, do not dictate but at the same time have a chat with the kid, with the child, and help them to find their purpose in life.

Jim Rembach: The reason I’m bringing this up is because we’re finding this same thing really in the workplace. This whole coddling/tough love, this parenting/coaching it’s what has to happen in the workplace these days. It is no longer a situation where you can just say, “Here’s your job, here’s the expectations go to it and I’m going to put you through this evaluation process in order to develop you or terminate you.” That just doesn’t work anymore.

Michael Teoh: Right. It’s so interesting that you mention that because this is one of the things I want to share right now. Leaving my childhood days, let’s talk about business, let’s talk about leadership and I manage a team of 12 full time talents at the moment, very passionate talent, and I am the dinosaur in the company at the age of 29, the rest of my directors, my middle management, my executives, they’re all in their mid-20’s to early 20’s. And managing the millennials group, as they say it, can be quite an interesting challenge at the same time when do you push them, when you bring them back and coddle them, as you would say. And I just recently found out was that there’s actually two types of environment that you need to create in your office space. Number one, all the millennials in the world because they are influenced by Facebook, by Google, by Apple, they were influenced by the [inaudible 12:34] cultures, so in their mind they are thinking it’s all about fun, fun, fun it’s all about colors, it’s all about having the perks at work.

Now, being a startup or running a company like myself, we need to adapt. We know that the millennials are influenced by the cultures of this companies so we need to follow suit. So one of the thing that I do is, I do appear to be become a coach to my other employees. I ask them questions like my favorite question is, Jim, how can I help you? How can I make your job easier? Or your current task? What can I do to help you with it? When you ask this golden questions, your staff your employees will open up and in their mind you would appear more as a coach than a boss. Now, that is the first environment you want to create. You want to create your coddling, love thing environment so that you could stimulate your motivation.

However, there are also some scenarios because we are running a business web the bottom line is important ensuring that we deliver a high quality of services to our client is of utmost importance. We also have a second environment that we have created, we call it the key performance indicator hour. Now during that hour our staff or employees when they come in to our office they know that if they have not been performing we are going to question them. We are going to share with them what has gone wrong? What can we do? What are some of the policies that we may need to amend and change? So what happened is when you create both of those environment your employees will know that there is a time for them to have fun, there is a time where they know you’re going to be there as their coach, the coach there to maximize their potentials but there is also a time for seriousness, there’s also a time when you’re there to talk about the bottom line with them. So, I believe this is a very synergistic relationship that we have built in the office and it has definitely helped us to retain and motivate our staff forward. And I need to share this with you, Jim, Thriving Talents we are angel-invested, so we have two angel investors who back us up. We work with Fortune 500 companies, a lot of people tend to say, Wow! You’re so great. But to be honest our stress level is always in an all-time high. You work with Fortune 500 clients, they expect the best from you they benchmark you across all the global best practices, you have investors who are always chasing you for the bottom line performance. So, we need to be upfront with our employees, without staff just like how I am doing with my team. So that would be my take point.

Jim Rembach: Thanks for sharing that. I think the whole dynamic piece is something that is going to be difficult for organizations if they’ve already been operating in a certain way and a certain manner, is to bring that dynamic in to prepare themselves for the next generation of workers that’s going to be the largest group of workers that we’ve ever had throughout human history. So, I also know that—you’re high energy, you talked about all these research that you’re doing, I know you have so much inspiration and places that you seek inspiration, and we like quotes on the show to help us with that. Is there a quote or two that you like that you can share?

Michael Teoh: There are two quotes that have guided me throughout my life. And one of the quote, you’ve actually mentioned it just now but I’m going to repeat it again because it really resonates that is, “Never wait for opportunities to come, instead create your own opportunities”. And I also believe once you’re able to create your own opportunities have the heart to create opportunities for other people as well, help them out. Because that will make your life much more meaningful and much more purposeful as well. The second quote that I like to share is, “Live with the kings. Walk with the kings but never lose that common touch.” I’m always a believer as a human being all of us are blessed with the ability to speak. We are blessed with our appearances right now. We need to make the best use of it to make a positive impact to the world. But never, ever forget how and why and where you started. Because I believe for every great leader in the world they would always remember and reflect the lessons they’ve learned throughout their journeys since the day they started.

Jim Rembach: There’s definitely a lot of journeys that we have to go through and there’s a lot of humps along the way. Is there a time where you’ve got to get over a hump where it’s made a difference for you?

Michael Teoh: Definitely. And I must say this has just happened just last week. My staff came up to me and said, “Michael, we are over worked you are taking too many projects. We have too many high profile clients, we can’t take it anymore.” I can share with you all the previous humps I’ve gone through but this has just occurred to me just last week. I couldn’t believe it and I thought I was this energetic entrepreneur, I was this energetic speakers speaking with thousands of people around the world, working with the biggest companies ever, and here I am thinking that I could motivate my staff and that my staff they are motivated, my employees are great but they find it they’re now overworked.

So, one of the things that I realized is that, being the entrepreneur we have to pace ourselves as much as we can inspire, as much as we can motivate people I think it is also very important for us to reflect on how our employees, how our staff or team working with us, catching up with us. And I was reminded over lunch with a billionaire entrepreneur in Malaysia, whom I just met, and he just created a great company it’s one of the biggest low cost airline and he shared this to me. He said, “Michael, a lot of businesses say we put customers first.” And he said, “That’s wrong. In fact you should put employees first. Because once you put your employees as your number one priority and they’re well taken care of the customers they will take good care of them.”

So I thought that that was a very powerful lesson that I want to share with you. And I think how did I overcome that hump of motivating my overworked employees or staff? I have conversation with them. I let them off on certain days and I bring them for retreats but most importantly I believe, constant conversation is very important. Have weekly meetings with your staff and just be genuine and honest with them. In a sense where just ask them in all honesty, how can I help you? How are you feeling in your job? What are some of the things that we could together? That’s what I would recommend.

Jim Rembach: I think that’s a good point. For me I find myself that I need to say no more often to certain things so that I can focus on the items and the elements and the people that will allow me to go forward even faster. I know you have a lot of things going on. You’re talking about all of your clients of course and all that work. But if you were to look at all of the things that you have in front you, what is one of your main goals?

Michael Teoh: One of my main goals would be to inspire and to develop as many lives as I can. But the lives that I would wanted to develop are not limited to people who are just attending my workshops or seminar or reading my book and getting inspired and changing their lives. I would want to start developing people who could then speak who could then use their own stories to inspire. Because I believe in scaling, I believe in replication, I believe in sustainability and I think as much as your own voice could move the world. I believe if you have a hundred, a thousand, a million other voices who are united with that same common goal—and we’re not talking about the sophisticated goal, we’re talking about the goal of just sharing an advice, sharing an idea with the person next to you on how they could better themselves. I believe not only we can change the world, we can change the entire universe. We could change the way how people see their lives. We could change the way how people perceived [inaudible 20:50]. So that would be my main goal. I don’t know how I’m going to achieve it yet, but at least now I know I’m achieving it through one life training of one person at a time.

Jim Rembach: And the Fast Leader Legion wishes you the very best. Now before we move on, let’s get a quick word from our sponsor.

An even better place to work is an easiest solution that gives you a continuous diagnostic on employee engagement along with integrated activities that will improve employee engagement and leadership skills in everyone. Using this award winning solution guaranteed to create motivated productive and loyal employees who have great work relationships with their colleagues and your customers. To learn more about an even better place to work, visit beyondmorale.com/better.

Jim Rembach: Alright, here we go Fast Leader Legion it’s time for the Hump day Hoedown. Okay, Michael, the Hump Day Hoedown is the part of our show where you give us good insights fast. So, I’m going to ask you several questions and your job is to give us robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Michael Teoh, are you ready to hoedown?

Michael Teoh: Wish me luck. Alright let’s do it.

Jim Rembach: What do you think is holding you back from being an even better leader today?

Michael Teoh: I believe what’s holding me back is sometimes self-doubt. Self-doubt in the sense either am I really leading my team to the best of their capabilities? Am I maximizing the potential of my business Thriving Talents to impact more lives? Am I taking more risk?

Jim Rembach: What is the best leadership advice you have received?

Michael Teoh: Always think about the people first the results will follow.

Jim Rembach: What do you feel is one of your best tools that helps you lead in business or life?

Michael Teoh: My persistence to deliver excellence and my persistence to reach out to as many companies, as many organizations, inspiring as many lives as possible.

Jim Rembach: What would be one book, it could be from any genre that you’d recommend to our listeners?

Michael Teoh: Anthony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within.

Jim Rembach: Okay, Fast Leader Legion, you can find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going to fastleader.net/Michael Teoh. Okay, Michael, this is my last Hump Day Hoedown question: Imagine you were given the opportunity to go back to the age of 21 and you have been given the opportunity to take the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you but you can’t take everything back you can only choose one, what skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

Michael Teoh: My absolute focus. Just focus on the developing a business that I am excited to wake up every morning to do and that is the training, speaking, and talent development business—growing Thriving Talents.

Jim Rembach: Michael, it was an honor to spend time with you today, can you please share with the Fast Leader listeners how they can connect with you?

Michael Teoh: Great. Guys, thank you so much Jim, and thank for all of you again for listening to my views. Do get in touch with me at www.potentialmatrix.com, website for my book. And I would really encourage all of you have a look about it, you can reach out to me there and I look forward to connect with you on Facebook. Just look me up on Facebook, LinkedIn, just introduce yourself first and I’ll be more than happy to see how I could add value to your life. Thank you again Jim for having me.

Jim Rembach: Michael Teoh, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom, the Fast Leader legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump.

END OF AUDIO

072: Susan Fowler: This is a chance for me to live my values

Susan Fowler Show Notes

Susan Fowler has a career that requires a lot of travel. But travel had become a pain in the neck and getting through security raised Susan’s tension and stress. Then Susan realized she had an opportunity to live her values. Listen to her story of how she aligned with her values so it can help you to move onward and upward faster.

Susan was born and raised in Enid, Oklahoma and Raised in Denver, Colorado as the oldest of four children.

Susan discovered the power of teaching at an early age when her sister, Terri, was born with spina bifida, paralyzed from the waist down and retarded from water on the brain. Doctors explained that if Terri lived, she would never have the mentality beyond that of a 3 year old.

Terri did live and Susan couldn’t help but notice a spark in her sister’s bright blue eyes. Defying the doctors’ diagnoses, Susan used rather innovative techniques, to teach her sister to read and write. Terri became the first handicapped child integrated into the Colorado school system. Doctors asked her parents: How did Terri learn to read and write? Their answer: Our 12-year-old daughter, Susan.

Susan has never stopped teaching—or leaning. Her motto is “I teach what I most need to learn.” She is the lead developer of product lines taught globally to tens of thousands of people through the Ken Blanchard Companies, including Situational Self Leadership and Optimal Motivation.

Susan is the author of six books, including the bestselling Self Leadership and The One Minute Manager with Ken Blanchard and her newest bestseller Why Motivating People Doesn’t Work… And What Does.

Susan lives and works with her husband, Drea Zigarmi, in sunny San Diego where she is also an adjunct professor in the University of San Diego’s Masters of Science in Executive Leadership program and a rotating board member of Angel Faces, a nonprofit group dedicated to teaching adolescent girls how to cope with transfiguring burns and trauma.

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Listen to @fowlersusann to get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow Click to Tweet

“What’s the penny you want to leave the world?” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“If people understood the nature of their own motivation, it would transform their lives.” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“It is our basic human nature to thrive.” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“Nobody wants to be bored and disengaged.” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“People want to make a meaningful contribution.” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“We all want to grow and learn every day.” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“We assume without incentives or rewards that people won’t do what there’re asked to do.” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“What is it that promotes thriving and what is it that erodes thriving?” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“Suboptimal motivation is what erodes people’s natural ability to thrive.” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“We know how to promote thriving through our psychological needs.” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“Things that people think they have been motivated by are eroding the things they need to thrive.” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“There’s an entire industry devoted to providing junk food motivation to workers.” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“It’s important to do the right things for the right reasons.” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“If you ask, is a person motivated? It’s the wrong question.” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“People are always motivated. The questions is, why are they?” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“Not all motivation is created equal.” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“When it comes to motivation, the reason is what matters most.” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“Whenever you feel tension you are in a suboptimal motivational outlook.” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“We are never going to love everything we do.” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“We’re never going to have passion for everything we do.” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“Try to make a difference in someone’s life every day.” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“I got a wonderful opportunity to live my purpose every single day.” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“Leadership is from the inside out; it’s got to be about the people you lead.” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

“Care more about how people are feeling as a result of your presence.” -Susan Fowler Click to Tweet

Hump to Get Over

Advice for others

When it comes to motivation, the reason is what matters most.”

Holding her back from being an even better leader

I judge too much. Myself and others.

Best Leadership Advice Received

Make sure you are prepared for leadership. Leadership is from the inside out. It can’t be about your needs, it’s got to be about the needs of the people you lead.

Secret to Success

Have a deeply felt sense of purpose.

Best tools that helps in business or Life

I can talk really fast.

Contacting Susan

Website: http://susanfowler.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susan-fowler-955a174

Twitter: https://twitter.com/fowlersusann

Resources

Why Motivating People Doesn’t Work . . . and What Does: The New Science of Leading, Energizing, and Engaging

Creating an even better place to work

Show Transcript:

Click to access edited transcript

072: Susan Fowler: This is a chance for me to live my values

Intro: Welcome to the Fast Leader Podcast, where we uncover the leadership like hat that help you to experience break out performance faster and rocket to success. And now here’s your host, customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

An even better place to work is an easiest solution that gives you a continuous diagnostic on employee engagement along with integrated activities that will improve employee engagement unleash of skills in everyone. Using this this award winning solution’s guarantee to create motivated, productive and loyal employees who have great work relationships with their colleagues and your customers. To learn more about an even better place to work, visit beyongmorale.com/better.

Jim Rembach: Okay Fast leader Legion today I am just so thrilled because I have the opportunity to share with you somebody who has written one of really my top 10 reads of all time. Susan Fowler was born in Enid, Oklahoma and raised in Denver, Colorado as the oldest of four children. Susan discover the power of teaching at an early age when her sister Terry was born with spina bifida, paralyzed from the waist down and retarded from water on the brain. Doctors explained if Terry live she would never have the mentality beyond the age of a three-year-old. Terry lived and Susan couldn’t help but notice a spark in her sister’s bright blue eyes. Defying the doctor’s diagnosis Susan used rather innovative techniques to teach her sister how to read and write. When Terry became the first handicapped child integrated into the Colorado school system doctors asked her parents how did Terry learn to read and write? Their answer, our 12-year-old daughter Susan.

Susan has never stopped teaching or learning. Her motto is: I teach what I most need to learn. She is the lead developer of product lines taught globally tens of thousands of people through the Ken Blanchard companies including Situational Self Leadership and Optimal Motivation. Susan is the author of six books including the best-selling self-leadership and the One Minute Manager with Ken Blanchard and her newest bestseller Why Motivating People Doesn’t Work and What Does? And I’m telling you this has to be your Amazon five-star review. Susan lives and works with her husband Drea Zigarmi in sunny San Diego where she is also an adjunct professor at the University of San Diego’s Masters of Science and Executive Leadership Program and a rotating board member of Angel Faces a nonprofit group dedicated to teaching adolescent girls how to cope with transfiguring burns and trauma. Susan Fowler, are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Susan Fowler: I am. I think I never felt better about myself in listening to you read that bio.

Jim Rembach: Oh, you’re too much. I’ve given our listeners a little bit about you, but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better.

Susan Fowler: You know Jim a number of years ago my husband asked me, Susan what’s the penny you want to leave the world? And I was really deep in a research around motivation and I have been, as you said the lead developer of a self-leadership for the Ken Blanchard companies, and I realized that the research on motivation was so compelling and really makes a difference in people’s lives and I said, You know, I want to be the person that takes the research around motivation and makes it accessible for the greatest number of people because I honestly believe that if people understood that nature of their own motivation I will transform their lives. So in that moment he helped me catalyzed my life purpose which is to be a catalyst for good but through the science of motivation. And so he says now too—once I got my hammer everything’s a nail, I look at everything through that prism of motivation. What’s compelling people? What are their values and how was what they’re doing related to what I’ve learned through the science of motivation? And it’s so exciting, it’s really fun.

Jim Rembach: Okay Susan, thanks for sharing that. You talk about passion and connection and all of those things and I think that’s kind of one that had done it for me. I actually purchase your book on Kindle and I had to get the hardcopy too because for me I’m like, I want to annotate on lower place and I’m not an expert annotator on my kindle yet—I don’t know if I ever will. But I was just like—this had so much impact and meaning to me and so different in so many different ways. One of the things I found really compelling is when you start looking at optimal motivation and how as you continue past it there’s kind of a point where it doesn’t become as optimal. Help me understand that a little bit better?

Susan Fowler: Well, if I could start with the basic premise—the basic premise that I think is one of the great discoveries in motivation science is that it is our basic human nature to thrive. In other words nobody want to be bored and disengaged. People want to make a meaningful contribution they even appreciate a challenge and we all want to grow and learn every day. All of that is actually the antithesis of the way we treat people in the workplace especially. We kind of assume that without incentives or rewards or bride people won’t do what they’re asked to do, that they’re basically are lazy until you give them something to motivate them. So if we start with a different premise and the premise is that people by nature want to thrive. Then we ask what is that promote thriving and what is it that erodes thriving? And what we call suboptimum motivation is what we have discovered erodes people’s natural ability to thrive. And so we are motivated by rewards, incentives, bribes, power, status, image, peer pressure, tension, guilt, shame, disinterest, overwhelmed, when were motivated in those ways, those are considered suboptimal because they actually erode what I think is the most extraordinary finding in motivation science and that is we know how to promote thriving through our psychological needs. So all of those things that people think had been motivated by are actually eroding the very things they need in order to thrive.

It does and for those that who haven’t had the opportunity to read the book that are listening, I said you’ve got to have this book, for me it’s going to be a desk reference for many years. You talked about junk food, and many of the things that I see organizations doing in regards employee engagement as well as customer engagement for that matter, are really those junk food items that quite frankly, they spend millions if not billions on, and there’s some pretty large companies who are providing products and services to fit that need, so it’s kind of like without getting into the brand names of fast food, it’s kind of like they’re just feeding the junk food problem and everybody’s getting obese to so speak and not being able to engage their employees. What does the company do? There’s a whole, as you said, an entire industry devoted to providing junk food motivation to workers and that’s a tough thing. So that is why I think it’s up to every leader who I helped or has read the book to say—what do I do with the people I lead to help them maneuver in a workplace, in an environment that is pretty much dedicated to unhealthy ways of motivating people. And the smarter organizations get, and I have to tell you, I am starting to work with some really smart organizations and at the very top levels are changing the culture.

I was just in Miami last week, I won’t name names because I’ve signed a nondisclosure agreement, but it’s a major financial institution that I wasn’t sure I wanted to work with because of a reputation was built during the horrible economic crisis and is actually named in that movie, The Big Short in Michael Lewis’s book. So I went to New York City and I met with the CEO and he read my book three times and he was dedicated to changing the culture of this organization and I asked him why. And he said because it’s important for us to do the right thing for the right reasons. Not because the government is coming down on us, not because we have to do it by law in the near future but because it’s the right thing to do. And for that reason I signed on to work with them and I just met with 200 of their top level executives and we talked about changing the culture so that people are not in the financial industry just for financial gain and to make a buck and just charge a higher fees as they possibly can but to focus on what gives them their joy which is helping people become self-sufficient, help them have retirements and they are able to put their kids to college, it was so refreshing Jim. So I do feel like there’s companies that are willing to take a stand, leaders who are willing to start to back the system. But I think where were really going to make headway is with individual leaders who are willing to have conversations with their people and talk to them about their motivation and why they’re motivated.

Jim Rembach: And that is very inspirational to me and if I can help with that in any way and hopefully this show will help do just that and created that awareness I am excited to be able to do that because I’m right there with you, I’m part of your legion.

Susan Fowler: Thank you Jim.

Jim Rembach: You’re welcome. Okay so, gosh, this journey that you’ve been through and what has come to be able to produce this book, now the work you even adeep part of that, I mean there’s just so many inspirational stories that we can use in order to grow that bigger platform and awareness and we use quotes on the show to kind of help us from an inspirational perspective, is there a quote or two that stands out for you that you can share with us?

Susan Fowler: I think, and I’m not even sure and this may have come after I wrote the book, one of the beautiful things about writing a book and then speaking and training and doing all this is that you start to really get to the other side of complexity in a different way. In the book what we say is that if a person is motivated it’s the wrong question, the question is why. People are always motivated, the question is why they’re motivated because not all motivation is created equal. So I think that my quote today is, if I can remember, when it comes to motivation the reason for your motivation is what matters most. So everybody is motivated the question is why, what is the reason and some reasons are higher quality than other reasons. And when I say high quality what I mean by that is that you’ll have later sustained energy, you will produce higher quality, you will have a greater sense of physical and mental well-being, that you will be able to sustain that positive energy overtime and be a greater role model for other people. So the reason for your motivation is what matters most.

Jim Rembach: And talking about that, in order for us to be able to find what our motivation is isn’t always an easy task and so many times we have to get over a hump or two in order to be able to really hone in or identify what our true real motivations are. Is there a time where you can think about where you’ve had to get over the hump and it helped redefine your motivations?

Susan Fowler: Every single day. I have one of those hump experiences a while back. Jim I think that I’m really lucky, I don’t know if you can call it luck but I’ve really designed my career around what I love to do. So I love to talk to people, I love to learn, I love to teach and along with that goes a lot of travel. And anyone who travels knows that today it’s not like it used to be and it’s a pain in the neck. I don’t know if you know the singer songwriter Dan Fogelberg, he was somebody I met when I was at the University of Colorado many, many years ago, and in one of his songs, Same Old Lang Syne, he has this line, the audiences are heavenly but the travel is hell. And I could really, really relate to that, I was standing in line—I don’t stand in line I’m not kind of person my personality is I will look to see which line is shortest and I’m going to get in that shortest line and I’m going to get through the fastest and everything I do is I make sure that I’m not getting in a line that has families, and forgive me for this, but men because men don’t carry purses and so they’re taking everything out their pockets and will take their belts off it takes them forever to get through security. So, I’m like in the shortest line and getting really uptight and really frustrated and then I thought, “Gosh, Susan, this is exactly what you have written about what you talked about all the time, whenever you’re feeling this tension and this pressure you’re in suboptimal motivation outlook so you should do something different.” And I said, “Okay, this is a chance for me to live my values.” What are my values? And I thought, “Okay, I have a value around learning and being patient, so okay, patience is a good thing. What can I learn about myself?

So, anyway, I went to this whole inner talk thing and I said, “Okay, Susan, get in the longest line. So I found the line that had a family in it and I get in line, they have a toddler, a new born, and all the paraphernalia that you can possibly imagine and there’s struggling and they look at me they go, “Do you want to go ahead of us?” Because I’m pretty organized you know, and I go, “No, No, No, it’s fine.” And so they’re trying to get all their stuff up and finally I go, “Excuse me, you seem to be really struggling here, would it be helpful if I held your baby? And they look at me and “Yeah.” And I’m thinking, oh, this is awesome because I love babies, I love holding babies. And so they get to the line, and actually I just start to go through security and I said, “Excuse me you do want your baby?” they were so plastered like, “Oh, yeah, give us our baby.” On the other side I took the baby again helped them get all their stuff together and then we all went on out merry way. At the gate I see the man coming towards me and he says, “Excuse me, this is the first time we’ve ever travelled with this two kids and we didn’t even stop to thank you. We just want you to know how much we appreciate your kindness. I don’t know that we could have gotten through this without you.” And all this, I have to tall you Jim, I literally had goosebumps and I was thinking, “Oh, my gosh, I love holding that baby it was so much fun and I did some good for people, wow, this is really cool.” And so now I actually enjoy going through security and finding ways that I can be helpful to people it’s totally change my energy going through security at the airport. We are never going to love everything we do. We’re never going to have passion for everything we do but if we really understand what are values are and can find a way to live those values or sense of purpose to whatever we’re doing, it really changes the quality of your life. And so how that was it too long or too silly but I think that all the time because I travel a lot, so I think about it every day.

Jim Rembach: Thanks for sharing that. That was a real world hump that probably so many people can resonate with and because I know even myself, I’m like, okay I need to get all my stuff, and I need to get— instead of thinking about others that I can potentially help. So now I have a very different perspective when I have to go through security line.

Susan Fowler: I share this with a friend and now he’s in his (16:35 inaudible) and he says that when he goes through security he’s like, how can I help people laugh? And he’s a real jokester and he’s really funny, so now he’s like helping people laugh within the guidelines of the TSA.

Jim Rembach: An important note. We had talked earlier about some of the work that you’re doing at many different levels and also about this particular book and of course a lot of research behind it and you have so many things going on, all the traveled course and I know the relationship with your husband and all of those things there’s just so many things on the plate. But if you’re to say that you had one goal, what would it be?

Susan Fowler: I don’t know if it’s a goal because I don’t have one goal Jim but I definitely have a very important purpose. I stated it earlier but let me just clarify it. My purpose is to be a catalyst for good and to use the science of motivation as the impetus for that. So, I have a goal when I speak that if I can make a difference in one person’s life that I’ve made a difference and that’s good enough. And so at the end of the presentations or a training session if just one person comes up and says thank you for being here today, I think that was a good reason to be there that day. And it’s interesting if you change one person or you help one person you usually end up doing it to a lot more people because at least speaking to individuals and not just kind of feeding your own ego or your own needs. So, I guess if I had a specific goal, my smart goal, would be to try to make a difference in someone’s life every day through a conversation, thorough an interaction, through my formal training or speaking or writing. And I’m writing every day, I’m writing a blog, or I’m writing a tweet or at LinkedIn message. You know, I’m having multiple conversations with clients and sales people every day so I’ve got wonderful opportunity to live my purpose and achieve that goal every single day.

Jim Rembach: And the Fast Leader legion wishes you the very best. Now before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsors.

Need a powerful and entertaining way to ignite your next conference, retreat or team-building session? My keynotes don’t include magic but they do have the power to help your attendees take a leap forward by putting emotional intelligence into their employee engagement, customer engagement and customer centric leadership practices. So bring the infotainment creativity the Fast Leader show to your next event and I’ll help your attendees get over the hump, now. Go to beyondmorale.com/speaking to learn more.

Now here we go Fast Leader listeners, it’s time for the Hump Day Hoedown. Okay Susan, the Hump Day Hoedown is the part of our show where you give us good insights fast. So, I’m going to ask you several questions and your job is to give us a robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Susan Fowler, are you ready to hoedown?

Susan Fowler: If I can ** fast.

Jim Rembach: What do you think is holding you back from being an even better leader today?

Susan Fowler: My judgement. I judge too much, myself and others.

Jim Rembach: What is the best leadership advice you have ever received?

Susan Fowler: To make sure that you are prepared for leadership, that leadership is from the inside out. It can’t be about your needs, this can be about the needs of the people you lead.

Jim Rembach: What is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success?

Susan Fowler: I’m having a deeply felt sense of purpose that I’m hope is a noble purpose.

Jim Rembach: What do you feel is one of your best tools that helps you lead in business or life?

Susan Fowler: I think it’s overly fast.

Jim Rembach: What would be one book that you’d recommend to our listeners, they could be from any genre?

Susan Fowler: Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl.

Jim Rembach: Okay Fast Leader listeners you can find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going to fastleader.net/Susan Fowler. Okay Susan this is my last Hump Day Hoedown question. Imagine you were given the opportunity to go back to the age of 25 and you have been given the opportunity to take the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you but you can’t take everything you can only choose one, so what skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

Susan Fowler: You know, I read this so many times from people who say that when they get to be my age is that you wish that you hadn’t care so much what other people are thinking about you I think to care more about how people are feeling as a result of your presence. To be less self-centered, to be less worried about my own image and more concerned about how I’m affecting the energy and quality of life of the people around.

Jim Rembach: Susan, it was an honor to spend time with you today, can you please share with the Fast Leader listeners how they can connect with you?

Susan Fowler: Oh, thank you. Yeah, I’ve got a website, www.susanfowler.com and you can also go on Amazon to see the “Why motivating people does not work” book page and there’s all kind of information on there as well.

Jim Rembach: Susan Fowler, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom, the Fast Leader legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump.

END OF AUDIO

motivation

Jonathan Low Show Notes Page

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Hump to Get Over

Advice for others

Holding him back from being an even better leader

Best Leadership Advice

Secret to Success

Best tools that helps in Business or Life

Recommended Reading

Contacting Jonathan Low

Resources and Show Mentions

Subscribe to the Show on iTunes (Quick and simple!)

Give Me a Rating or Review on iTunes (Also simple)

Jeff Piersall Show Notes Page

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Hump to Get Over

Advice for others

Holding him back from being an even better leader

Best Leadership Advice

Secret to Success

Best tools that helps in Business or Life

Recommended Reading

Contacting Jeff Piersall

Resources and Show Mentions

Kimberly Davis Show Notes Page

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Hump to Get Over

Advice for others

Holding her back from being an even better leader

Best Leadership Advice

Secret to Success

Best tools that helps in Business or Life

Recommended Reading

Contacting Kimberly Davis

Resources and Show Mentions

Michael Teoh Show Notes

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Hump to Get Over

Advice for others

Holding him back from being an even better leader

Best Leadership Advice Received

Best tools that helps in business or Life

Recommended Reading

Contacting Michael

Resources

Susan Fowler Show Notes

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Hump to Get Over

Advice for others

Holding her back from being an even better leader

Best Leadership Advice Received

Secret to Success

Best tools that helps in business or Life

Recommended Reading

Contacting Susan

Resources