Success Story with Scott D. Clary

success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square me there i was feeling very very disconnected in my life i was lost i thought i had a lot of friends but when the chips were down i didn't for me and for a lot of people not feeling a chronic sense of disconnection is a trauma income today's episode features someone who turned disruption into her calling anna ron is a visionary strategist whose leadership has reshaped the landscape in insert her field e g education slash wellness slash innovation people who grew up with trauma when they were very young like abuse is bad but neglect is worse it's going to lead to a life that's empty emotionally and emotionally so much of our personal growth depends on being able to interact with other people and what happens if that's stressful we go into hiding we were told that if we would go talk about it enough we would feel better but i was one of the people and i'm not alone and i don't speak for everybody am i some kind of a freak because i'm going to the therapist and i just feel terrible she doesn't follow trends she sets them from building initiatives that uplift communities to driving change in how we think about impact and purpose her work isn't just about success it's about significance this is anna rum once i had that experience of so quickly popping out of it when i had better tools to deal with the thoughts and the feelings without talking about them writing about them and then following it with meditation it worked like a charm don't give up do not get discouraged because this is hard and i'm super happy that you're here today just to kick things off so that everybody's on the same page help me define ability it's a word that i made up when i was feeling very very disconnected in my life i was lost i just realized i didn't really have people who were there for me i thought i had a lot of friends but when the chips were down i didn't and i thought to myself some people have this thing and i just my word for it was connect ability they have this air about them that they they find people easy they're easy to be around people like to have them as friends and they easily get into a conversation where they hear the real point and people feel heard and all this stuff used to feel very elusive to me until i taught myself how to do it why do you think i mean this is obviously something that i think a lot of people feel and deal with i mean you wrote this whole book about connect ability i think that and you studied this for a living so tell me if my if my uneducated guess is correct but it feels like it's just gotten worse since covid and it just keeps getting worse and worse and people feel increasingly isolated so what's going on just in terms of what's happening since covid but also just happening socially culturally when people feel like they lack connect ability what was happening with you there's two layers that i'll talk about here and one of them is what happened during covid which made everything worse and i think everybody since that there are those few people who are like i loved covid lockdown was my dream i didn't have to deal with anybody i wasn't one of those people but a lot of people whatever was odd about them whatever they struggled with got str or you know by the time those years were up so for me and for a lot of people not feeling a chronic sense of disconnection is a trauma symptom now it's not the only way you get to feel that way some for some people it's baked into their personality they're introverted they're on the autism spectrum they just are socially awkward that that's not uncommon but people who grew up with trauma when they were very young especially neglect like abuse is bad but neglect is worse there's some kind of neurological development that maybe got disrupted through that neglect through not having that interaction with their parents as much as a baby needs and we walk around life feeling just like there's a membrane around us like somehow everybody got the memo on and there's some sort of i've heard somebody describe it as the wifi where everybody's kind of talking this nonverbal language and they understand each other and just feeling like a little bit like i don't know what's going on i easily put my foot in my mouth it's harder for me to feel close to people i feel like i have to hide who i am so that's the kind of disconnection and when i started my work as crappy childhood ferry which i backed into over years of just being somebody who taught people my techniques for healing trauma symptoms when i got online and started you know hearing from thousands of people through their letters and their youtube comments i realized anecdotally i'm not a researcher formally but i have this huge sample that talks to me about what it's like to have this problem they all said me too i feel really disconnected and so i i do find that it's a nearly universal symptom a feeling of disconnection i see three one three things neurological regulation disconnection and self defeating behavior like those are the three things that really need healing when you're walking around like the walking wounded from a bad childhood so this all stems from from early childhood does it does it all stem from early childhood no i mean we all know we everybody struggles with this a little bit but early childhood trauma has a it just has a unique opportunity to alter your nervous system development and so if you if you had a perfectly normal childhood and then you went through a lot of trauma as an adult sure it would affect you and it might make you feel alienate from people but when it happens in childhood you're actually in development your nervous system is forming itself and that just as a little example i'm not a neurologist but most of us have heard of mirror neurons there these neurons that develop and wire up because you're getting interaction from your mom or dad and so literally neglect can cause these neurological deficits or disruptions and i don't think we ever get a perfectly good lens on we don't have the technology to do it but we know it's true and you can sense it in yourself and it's helpful to just assume i assume i'm neuro i have neuro on this one i'm going to work on it and most things can be improved and who even knows what your perfect condition would have been it's a hypothetical you know how connected would you have been if your life had been different who knows people are different but for traumatized people this has been an invisible symptom all along you know people really focus on other things that are quite obvious to others like depression anxiety terrible relationships that kind of thing but but it's just like it's this very sort of quiet humming in the background of your life and you don't quite know and put and you can't put a finger on exactly what's wrong but you feel like something's off because you see in others they're optimized to a degree compared to your baseline yeah and the way they relate to others in their family and the way they can just participate in groups you just think how do they even do that like it takes this tremendous effort and what's the toll what's the toll of that it's it's terrible it couldn't be worse it it's it leads to you know if a person can't learn to connect with other people it's going to lead to a life that's empty emotionally and emotionally i mean that's so much of our personal growth depends on being able to interact with other people and what happens if that's stressful for a person we go into hiding we we use isolation as a way to manage our own symptoms and i can't really talk about this without without defining dis discoloration the nervous system becomes dis regulated everybody gets dis regulated sometimes it's when you feel disco disoriented or out of sorts or you're wake up on the wrong side of the bed a little newborn baby cries and you know is is inc uncontrollable and then finally through you know love holding feeding the baby calms down and becomes alert again that's regulation so we all know how to do it virtually everybody can do it but people who were traumatized are dis regulated more of the time they they struggle to get re regulated and it happens so easily and the only part of dis regulation that's obvious to other people is the emotional part of it where we lash out or have a panic attack or be romantically impulsive or something it's too much emotion but that's just one little piece of the dis regulation pie there's so much else going on there there's disruption of hormones an an immune system part and blood flow and learning and cognition and memory and so people who were traumatized as kids have this way out of proportion probability of having almost every chronic health condition there is heart disease cancer diabetes obesity reproductive disorders dementia the the list is very very broad and it's hard to think of anything that isn't exacerbated by early trauma so not everybody who has cancer had early trauma but your risk goes way up if you were traumatized as a kid the solving i mean like now this sort of like puts your bodies of work in perspective so this is why the solving of your dis regulation is a prerequisite it's required if you if you understand that you cannot be connected to people if you understand that something's off okay we gotta go to the root cause first and i'm curious if you see just in terms of people that you know consume your content and reach out to you do you see a lot of people seeking out help finding band aid solutions as opposed to dealing with the root cause yeah you know some of them are obvious band aids there's there's different things for different people like the big thing about me that made it necessary for me to figure out what was going on is therapy didn't work for me talk therapy made me very dis regulated and that's not on uncommon made it worse yeah made it worse so i would go to try to talk about problems in my life and and it seemed like therapist were always very interested to hear how hard my childhood was it was you know it's like it's like cat you know for therapist when they hear it's like a you know you my mother was a drug addict and an alcoholic and she left me outside a casino in the snow and you could talk about this your whole life and i'm glad i got a chance to tell what happened and to get validated but talking about that stuff would always just make me feel very der regulated i couldn't focus couldn't feel my hands i would just feel really shaky and forget what where i was or who i was talking to not like unconscious but just very spaced out and it turns out that's really normal and in in the past i don't know ten years finally they're starting to recognize that but not the whole not everybody but there are some some therapists who are they're working with dis regulation first nobody can really process information unless they're regulated it it accounts for a lot of difficulties in school too of course and everybody knows the kids who had a rough home life they struggle in school but this is a lot why the left front cortex will start to go dim under stress like let's say you're taking a math test or something left front cortex where reasoning is starts to work less well it's it it goes dim on a on a on a scan the right front cortex which is a motion starts lighting up so it's like panic panic can't think can't think and then it it registers as a inability to learn there may not be an inability to learn there's just discrimination between you know the person and what they're trying to learn and if you can learn to re regulate that's the only real level playing field i've ever found in my life is people who can regulate success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just a panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now the house hubspot podcast network has great podcast like the ops authority if you are constantly putting out fires in your business instead of focusing on growth and innovation listen to the ops authority hosted by natalie gin and brought to you by the hubspot podcast network natalie speaks about actionable strategies that actually move your business forward so every week natalie shares some transformational stories from real business owners who've mastered their backend end systems so they can focus on what really matters so get your off in order get your business running smoothly so you can scale and you can really build something meaningful stop letting all this chaos steal all of your energy and listen to the op authority wherever you get your podcasts survey monkey is a success story partner now look we get it you can hardly go anywhere or do anything these days without hearing about ai this or ai that and if you're like most people when it comes to ai you're impressed but you have a few concerns but what if ai was used not as a tool to replace people but as a way to help understand people better ai from survey monkey is designed to do just that from crafting the perfect survey which is harder than you might think to analysis that digs deep binds patterns and services trends quickly survey monkey powerful suite of ai capabilities makes it faster and easier than ever before to get insight from real people helping you make confident decisions for your business try it today at survey dot com slash scott when you so i guess you know i i i love people that think you can apply sort of entrepreneurship ideology to everything right like you have a problem and before we press the quarter talking about how entrepreneurs have a high level of agency and they wanna solve their own problems and i think this is actually the perfect example of what you did because you realize okay the the fact though sort of playbook for making me feel correct however you define that it's not working the therapy that's supposed to be helping is making me feel worse so obviously something isn't working out here so let me figure out how to actually solve it which is how you you sort of started to understand about regulation and der regulation i'm curious for somebody who's in your position like when you were first starting therapy who's was going through all these same things that you were going through is experiencing all the same things that you are what was that first step towards regulation that you took that was actually helpful well i wish i could claim it was like i i decided to do it i i was really like it the like i was in therapy three times a week and things came to a head when i was attacked on the street once randomly i got just beat up by a gang and they broke my jaw on my teeth and i was unconscious at in concussion and it triggered a lot of it triggered ptsd and in the hospital and later when i talked to the doctor they never said the word ptsd they just said oh are you you know you're upset you should go talk to a therapist about this well i was already in therapy i live in california there's a pot of money for victims of violent crime to go to therapy so i had this big pot of money and i started going three times a week as recommended in every session we would sit and talk about this assault and there were other things going on my mother died during this period too there was just stuff going on and so i was sort of weakened i was in a bad place already but i could not put my thoughts together once i had you know was it the brain injury i don't think it was a official brain injury but it it was a post concussion you know something but getting attacked randomly on the street is a trauma where you know it it messes you up and i my work wouldn't give me time off work i had to go to work and i was saying incredibly inappropriate things and i would burst into tears all the time and i felt desperate for people to talk to me and like help me through this but i was being very annoying i think is what people said and they couldn't really deal with it i was constantly asking for help but i was very much like i had been raised with the site not raised but through therapy i had this idea i should be talk about this people should listen to me this will help me never knowing that that's like the worst thing a person with my with complex ptsd that's like the worst thing is going and talking about what just happened there's a lot of things you can do like with movement there are some treatments like em somatic therapies there are a variety of things it just happened that right when i thought i couldn't go on i mean i was so dysfunctional and i had alienate everybody and i was about to get fired for saying something inappropriate that i couldn't you know i i only knew by looking at people's face and i'm just like nice girl you know what this was so out of character for me but they did not know what was wrong and what it was was classic signs of ptsd from childhood brought on and led out of the bag by an adult onset trauma like it's a really known pattern now but it wasn't then and i might have died i did not feel like i could keep going with the problems that i had and then magically this somebody i was in some improv group at the time and this woman said i happened to con convey in her how bad i was feeling and she said dad do you wanna come in and try this technique that i learned and she had been a homeless person in the tenderloin district of san francisco in her teens and she had sober up and went to aa i'm not an alcoholic but she had had this marvelous recovery and she was so miserable though even when she stopped drinking she was so unhappy and so somebody in aa a woman there named sylvia walked told her do you wanna try these techniques and what it was is and is for me i've still done it i do it twice a day still it's a specific technique to write fearful and resent thoughts and feelings whatever's is up you know whatever's is bothering you and because i learned it from somebody who had learned it in a twelve step context now i mind you most people in twelve step don't do this it's it's considered sort of arc cane or too much or you know some people look down on it even but damn if it didn't save my life what she showed me how to do this writing and then she said now you gotta go learn meditation because if you're doing this you're not gonna be able to sustain it unless you're able to go into deep rest afterwards each time she said do it twice a day call me when you like you can read me what you wrote you can get help from me if you want advice but i was thirty at this time she was twenty three and she was like this street kid covered with tattoos she's not she's a she's a beautiful woman you know but i still know her a long time ago but i was i couldn't believe i was taking like life and death advice from this person she said the f word every other word and then she was talking about god and i was like this berkeley girl who was like people who talk about god are stupid i don't but i i she just had credibility with me she knew about the life and death moments and so i did what she said and like that night i started to feel relief and within two weeks i really if if i can diagnose myself as having ptsd i'll diagnose myself as having completely popped out of it and i was able to focus my mind better than ever before so i had a job at this nonprofit i was the marketing person at the time and once i had this head injury i had a terrible time focusing i probably wasn't a one at before that either but i really i could not sit in a business meeting and really track what was happening my mind was just all over the place when i started using these techniques i would sit in a business meeting and i would hear every single thing that was said and so my career rocket forward because i would listen to the whole hour and at the end i would say well i'll tell you what i think blah blah blah blah i was able to s what i just heard and i realized that very few people can do that almost everybody's mind was popping around like popcorn and you know the i found it very annoying once you're once you're able to really track with attention the way that people talk can be very frustrating they're all over the place somebody goes off in an anecdote you're like wait we were just about to like name that next bullet point what is it or they're making some chart on this used to drive me crazy when people are on the flip chart you know being like let's talk about stuff but it's like they're not matching things they're talking about like a phenomenon a person an idea and my mind was so organized that i was just like no no it's like so then i rewrite it and then i'd show it to and they would be like oh my god she's like a genius now yeah i was just i could pay attention you know what i okay so when you're saying this i have i have a thesis and you can tell me if i'm i'm right or wrong so a couple ideas first i have heard that truly truly traumatic experience like early childhood experiences they get implanted in your subconscious and there they're always like running in the background and this is why it causes so many other problems in your life because it's almost like a broken operating system impacts everything and this is what you're mentioning about all these potential health issues and cognitive issues and memory issues now that's something that somebody can pinpoint is wrong where at least say i feel like their life is completely der regulated and that could be right or wrong i don't know i'm spout from somebody else that i've heard now i think most adults they don't maybe not all of them have true trauma but they are der regulated to the point where their thoughts aren't clear as clear as they could be like to your point like in those meetings they don't see anything is super wrong because nothing really happened but they've never put the work into organizing their thoughts or clarifying how they think and then they can't communicate or they can't reiterate what that hour long meeting was about or they speak in circles or they're not so off base but you can tell they're not a hundred percent there so there's like levels to this now i think what happened with you is that traumatic experience what it was like pouring fuel on the fire to the point where you're like okay something is definitely wrong like i i'm aware that something's wrong i can't even function anymore not just function poorly i can't function at all so this was you know it was a horrible event but it was kind of like a the silver lining was okay now i gotta do the work to get myself back on track and i think that a lot of people just me through life without having this traumatic event that forces them to do the work to get back on track so they actually live in the sort of sub par sub optimal conditions cognitive because there isn't any work done towards reorganizing their or fixing the way they think and the way they sort of sort of just mean or through life i don't know if any of this is correct but this is just my takeaway from just listening to how how your life has played out yeah i i probably use different words for some of it but yeah it's like that yeah that's so most people don't even realize that they're not that they're der regulated yeah it's just regulated der regulation is what we to happen in california oh fair seriously is like the it's the you know disruption of normal flow of nervous system operations and your nervous system governs everything in your body you're thinking your digestion your your hormones you know what age you go into puberty and to a large degree how you think you know with there i i do think there's something there there is something inside of ourselves that's beyond the scope of the nervous system but i couldn't define it that clearly i just sense that there's more to it it governs just virtually everything and so when it's not working properly literally your blood can't get this is i had a when i was going through a a very traumatic period i i had a surgery and it it just failed and they did another surgery to fix it and it failed even worse and soon i had fourteen surgeries and later we were able to sort of diagnose backwards i was going through a lot of trauma my my my circulatory system couldn't adequately carry blood and oxygen to the damaged tissue so whatever they fixed wouldn't heal and it would just fall apart like that's how much the the presence of of those that's whatever the substance of trauma is is affecting body functioning but people disagree about what is the substance of trauma i think some of the way people talk about it is metaphor they think it's literal but when they say traumas carried in the body i sort of questioned that a little bit is that literal or metaphor i know what they mean hubspot is a success story partner now think about listening to this podcast right now you're probably multitasking you're probably catching seventy to eighty percent of what we're talking about but let's flip that and imagine you're only catching twenty percent that'd be crazy right it's really not a good use of your time if you only remember twenty percent of what we're talking about but most businesses most entrepreneurs are only using twenty percent of their data all the most important details in call logs emails chat with their customers it's just left floating in digital space not being used hubspot it gives you the access to those insights to help you grow your business because when you know more you grow more visit hubspot dot com to get the full picture of your business today nets sweet is a success story partner now what does the future hold for business if you ask nine experts you're gonna get ten answers bull market bear market interest rates are rising they're falling honestly at the end of the day we just need a crystal ball but until then over forty two thousand businesses have trusted and future proof themselves with nets suite by oracle the number one cloud erp bringing accounting financial management inventory in hr into one cohesive platform with one unified business 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bring yourself back in so that is not removing the trauma completely is it well i think you know just a first semantics i think of trauma as what happened and just regulation is the thing that's happening in you right now that you have some control over you can't do anything about the trauma so when you when you go through these exercises is this a i guess to just frame for the audience is it something that you have to do once or is this like a constant practice well i think it's kinda like brushing your teeth it helps to do it once but it's better to do it twice a day people will say well i'm having a good day and it's like well are you having a good enough day that you're not gonna brush your teeth today like just do it just be be consistent and be steady it's like training i i didn't think of it like this way you know the science of this regulation did not come out until i was twenty years to using the daily practice simply to feel better and function better than the science came out and i was like wow i now i know what it is that we're we're dealing with here and why this works and that's the last you know it's like twelve years or something since i learned that it's just been like the greatest thing in my life to find out it's a thing it has a name it's normal it's it happens to a lot of people and going out on youtube to talk about what it's like has been this great experience where thousands of people go i have that too i've never heard anybody describe it before and so i get to witness all these people having that moment like you're kidding it's a thing i thought i was crazy well not yeah because you can put a finger on it now now not now it's something that's actually fixable or at least treat right that's what that's what stresses people out when they feel a certain way and they can't put a finger on it that's what's horrifying well yeah and we were told that if we would go talk about it enough we would feel better but i was one of the people and i'm not alone and i don't speak for everybody but a lot of us were like am some kind of a freak because i'm going to the therapist and i just feel terrible and that's a really scary feeling when you think well then this must be the last house on the block i'm out of i'm getting worse i must be really damaged and so it was just you know once i had that experience of so quickly popping out of it when i had better tools to deal with the thoughts and the feelings without talking about them writing about them and and then following it with meditation it just it worked like a charm and it's so simple that's the hardest thing when it i i've taught like a million people now how to do it and sometimes that's the hardest hurdle for them to grasp it is like no really it's this simple and i'm not saying it will solve all life problems but it puts you in a place where you can solve life problems it's you start to what what the benefits of having a clear mind are is you start to have discernment you go well this is interesting when i talk in this manner people get very offended why don't i ask them a question like did that offend you and then you have information and you can use it you start to you know suddenly the world is your oyster you can figure things out and it used to just be this like tumbled this big like beaver dam of mess you'd who even knows why people feel the way they feel i better go hide and so it becomes sol and so i'm always encouraging people like use the daily practice to keep rinsing off your dress about trying new things and making your life a little bigger every day and then leave your life and bump into the wall make some mistakes are there daily practices or habits or even like i don't know how deep this goes is drinking caffeine and and not sleeping enough like are there any things that really really hurt that people have to be aware of that they have to like nip in the bud right now well sleep is really important and sleep is really hard to do properly when you're dis regulated so it's kind of a it's a vicious circle or a virtuous cycle so you start working on one until you get better at the other and you keep going caffeine i i drink caffeine some people find it kind of dis regulating i find it helpful there's a lot of things that are regulating but they don't work long term like for me oh cigarettes did they help me yes they helped me so much i smoked two packs a day for sixteen years it had it came with so many problems it couldn't laugh and that was before i had any idea about any of this stuff when i learned the daily practice my friend said i was like i feel so bad i just can't stop smoking i know it's killing me and my mom just died of lung cancer and and she said don't worry about it just keep going with this daily practice it'll fall away i was like you don't know this addiction does not fall away from me i've tried everything again and again but it would took about three years and it fell away and i just one time i was doing some patches and that time it just worked i just didn't relapse and it was easy and for some reason that time that was like twenty eight years ago i've never crave a cigarette again it just it literally just like pop it just was gone so that was that's one thing that i would have to say is one of the miracles of my life that i would say that was a miracle so if people don't understand what's happening to them of course if they if there's a substance or an activity or something that isn't actually long term healthy but short term helps them see life better or operate better of course you're gonna jump on it and you don't and and even if it's harmful well it's okay let me let me be human and realize that yeah it could be harmful in thirty years but for the next thirty minute meeting it's gonna be helpful so not worried about the the long term implications i can only process a short term pain that i'm trying to get rid of yeah and and so anything that sort of gives a boost like anything that gives you a little bit of dopamine or adrenaline starts to be like so precious not and hence enter all the addiction problems you know for everything from screens to food i mean sugar oh sugar you know that's like that'll give you a little temporary lift and then you crash and then you're very dis regulated and you know needless to say drugs and alcohol that's a lot how people manage it and for some reason like if i if i'm feeling kind of bad and i drink i feel worse so drinking his i just don't have the gene or something for that but a lot of people in my family did and they're not here to tell at the tail that's a that one will take you out pretty fast so so so a lot of people are really just trying to regulate and so my my second book connect ability is about one of the biggest ways people do that it's tied into everything and it's the urge to isolate as a way to cope with the dis regulation you feel really uncomfortable in your body disco your feelings come out too strong you don't dare it's express what you really think to somebody because the way it comes out tends to damage relationships like almost every traumatized people when i talk about this is they're like oh yeah the damage relationships i lashed out i i you know later i was really sorry but it was too late and that that caused people a lot and so learning to connect and to be able to hang out be present with people listen to them be yourself this is rocket science for a lot of us so the issue is that to connect with people you have to regulate but as part of the as part of the dis regulation you want to avoid people so again it's almost one of these cycles of where where one thing is feeding into the other thing and basically your whole life is is getting worse so i think the pandemic played a big role in giving us a lot of outs where we were not forced to deal with people and it's kinda like a lot of bad habits kinda got bigger for people during that time but the isolation i noticed in myself because i was already like pretty good at connecting when the when the whole thing started but when it was over and i started being fully social again i noticed that i was very rusty and i would just blur out weird things and i was having trouble like reading other people like are you annoyed with me are you happy about what i just said like i i i i was losing my abilities without like you need regular contact with people to be good at dealing with people and certainly in work this is incredibly important to be able to read the room and to be able to know when to hold your tongue about something and instead have it as a private conversation like when i had was dis regulated that was one of my big blenders again and again here's a story i would i was at a conference for this nonprofit i worked for and everybody was sharing cab to go to restaurants after the day had ended and you know i was just some like mid level marketing person i wasn't like a big shot or anything and the ceo of one of the things it was getting into the cab with somebody i said you guys wanna share cab they said sure and she was with some older woman i found out later well what i did is i just ended up talking i was thinking maybe the ceo is gonna give me a little like promotion you know maybe i can negotiate something for myself here so was just like bla about myself later i found out that the woman she was with with susie buffett and and they were discussing a big grant and i just completely wrapped it up for her you know with and hopefully they salvage it later but i just made a complete fool of myself and i had no idea i couldn't read the room i wasn't sensitive at all i wasn't like sort of going would it be appropriate if from i the under underlying said something right now and probably not just but you know they were just letting me share the cab so that was the sort of thing i did all the time and it blocked me i never got promoted i was pretty smart i i knew how to regulate but it was like life lessons that i did not have yet on how to act my parents were just like marxist hippie they thought money was evil you know and people people who dress nicely obviously we're had a bad agenda you know and so i didn't know i didn't know how you're supposed to act so the whole experience of healing for me has been like going to charm school like how are you supposed to be a person and i find it really fun actually it's it's a a it's it's a delight to me now but it was very hard at first well i think that this is why covid again to your point it's such an impact because people forgot how to be people and how to communicate and how to be social for whatever three three and a half four years and now work has accommodated not being social right with zoom and virtual and everything so i haven't noticed listen i i chat with people for a living and if i go week or two without leaving the house and i'll go to dinner i feel awkward i feel i feel this regular like for a second can we go home now because i just wanna watch tv yeah i know and that's not how the world works i mean if you want to be successful at anything you have to figure out how to interact with other human beings not just transactional like you have to build relation to relationship with other people yeah and it's not just like saying things it's like being aware of how it's landing with them and then being able to sort of hypo what would be important to this person you know if i want something from them if i'm trying to like negotiate something or have a favor given or anything to to be able to anticipate like what do they care about this regulation is like wearing headphones with ac ac blasting in your ears so loud you don't you don't actually hear anything you're just sitting there pretending oh yeah u m mh and you're it's it just des you and we all know people who seem to be blu through social situations and a lot of times that's what's going on they're they can't tune in and it's it's not necessarily a permanent state they you can learn to re regulate and be able to feel i call this feeling other people's nervous system there's we have all these phrases for it like tuning in reading the room being sensitive but actually our nervous system is very good at reading other people's nervous systems if you do go through these sort of steps these daily practice to regulate and you still feel like you have i mean you've you've coined a few terms like covert avoidance that's one of the ideas that i think just the way when you say it it just hits it's like you don't want you don't want anybody to know that you like being at home you don't want anybody to know that you don't like social situations it's almost like a shame that you feel but you feel it i think a lot of people feel it explain what that is but also explain okay so i have regulated i've gone through these daily practices but i still feel that i still feel like i'm not comfortable in these social situations like what's what's the the the thing that i have to do because this is hurting my career it's hurting my business it's hurting everything i can't date whatever it is well in my book i i list eight big ways that big obstacles that are in the way to being able to develop connect ability with other people and they're the they're the common ones you could probably name hundreds of them but these are the common ones and the first one is avoidance and people talk about this a lot in the context of romantic relationships like i'm dating an avoid guy he won't really commit you know he blows hot and cold that's like a pattern so that's avoidance but a lot of us are covert to avoidance we actually we make the commitment but we don't really put our heart in it we say yes to the rs you know request to the party and we come late and leave early or we just sit there and say empty things to people and never really connect or we just find ourselves too busy and too tired to really pay attention to what's going on you could have a family that you know needs your attention very much if you're a parent you you gotta be present and it'll be just like oh i'm just so i'm just exhausted and it's like that every day and maybe you are exhausted and maybe the way your life is set up that's the outcome of the whole thing and maybe a few people really can't control that right now but most of us can it's like a setting that we turn our dial up to so that we don't have to deal with people how could i be i was a single mom for nine years and all the time they put out these memos of you know come help with the bake sale or something and i i worked full time and being working full time and dealing with my kids was a lot to deal with and then i have all surgeries and it was a lot to deal with but i kind of like permanently adopted this how can i be expected to contribute to the school i'm unlike a special person who can't possibly do that and then i felt left out because i wasn't really friends with the other parents they were all going on camping trips i'm like why weren't we invited it's like maybe because i never hang out with them and they have no idea who i am and that was that was my distorted thinking of thinking that they were sort of per me i think that's incredibly common but actually we're avoiding truly connecting with people who we still we wish we'd connect with them but we're magically expecting them to like reach out and save us from our isolation and we've gotta come out and meet people at least part way to have any kind of a relationship with them but i think screens have been a huge obvious problem for connection and it's a it's a form of covert avoidance i don't know about you but i have to force myself to put my phone away when i'm eating dinner with other people the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now a quick podcast recommendation i've been listening truth lies and work they're in the hubspot podcast network just like success story it's this husband and wife team a and lia elliott they break down why people actually do what they do at work so if you have a business if you manage people if you have to hire people at any you have to listen to their show i just listened to an episode on why good employees suddenly quit that's an issue that we all have and it totally clicked for me one of the reasons i explained is why it's not usually about the money it's about all these little promises that we as founders entrepreneurs managers leaders we break without realizing it like when you tell someone you just hired that they're gonna learn all these new skills but you just keep giving them the same tasks over and over and over again it made me realize that i probably lost a lot of good people for dumb reasons that i never noticed and hiring is one of the most important things you can figure out so if you manage people or if you just wanna understand what makes your coworkers workers tick it's worth checking out listen to truth lies and work wherever 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the future of business from september third to fifth at the moscow center you're gonna be surrounded by forward thinking professionals who turn insights and ideas into breakthroughs don't just watch the future unfold be part of creating it visit inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today as i'm looking through some of the things that you've uncovered some of the some of the some of the things that are not going right in our life are a self sa but we're not even aware that we're self sa ourself so of course if if again just this one particular example of of covert avoidance if i don't even realize that i'm doing it to myself of course i'm gonna argue with you about it i'm gonna say it's not my fault that you know the people at the party for example they're well we're not on the same page or you know they're not my friend group or i don't feel comfortable like they should be more accommodating to me or the the narcissist plan attracting all the wrong people i'm going on the dates with the wrong guys well i'm just unlucky like how my how is it my fault that i'm attracting these assholes like into my life but there's there's subconscious sabotage advertise that you're doing to yourself it's it is subconscious and you know the word grooming it sort of means you get somebody used to something that's illogical and harmful and you get them so used to it i call it crap fit you fit yourself to crap sabotage you fit yourself to unacceptable people and situations you were very good at it it's not your fault that you got groomed like this to be so good at it but literally no one is coming to save you now so once you can recognize it and it's very hard because it feels like a criticize a criticism to to realize that you've kind of been making the same mistake over and over again and it was you and you could have not done that it's it feels like an existential threat to a person who's been traumatized like they've already been like put down so much that they're holding on to their ego in the good sense of the word by a thread so it can feel like like it can feel life threatening to accept criticism even though it's actually the most empowering thing you can point to somebody like that person is such to me you married the guy that was empowering even though i i did feel slapped but things turned around after that and i was able to completely drop my aerial relationship with him i just realized this isn't in my best interest it doesn't help the kids he may start a fight but if i don't fight back it'll be fine and within like two days we weren't fighting ever again not ever again but a lot less fighting like we have so much agency and and and i'm not somebody who you know we get i'm a youtube channel i get people like oh grow up you're just a bunch of pans you know everybody has trauma stop whining and the thing is what we're talking about the trauma we're talking about is some people have been sexually abused by a parent they have been hit over and over and over again they've even told they're worthless they've you know it we're not talking about imagined injuries these are grave injuries to the spirit to the body and it does affect people and it can have lifelong effects but what we're trying to do is detach that downstream effect of that of of that damage so that the damage can heal when you if you don't learn to regulate and you remain isolated you know if you think about it you can probably think of people you've know in your life you know like some angry guy down at the end of the block who hates kids and won't let them ride their bikes past the house or something and they're always yelling at them and you're like what's what's wrong with that guy well he's probably been isolated when his dis regulation got the better of him and he really believes that he's the victim of the children riding their bikes we get weird like that have you you've heard the concepts of lo of control yeah yeah and i think that that ties into agency and just a brief explanation is really external versus internal lo of control and if you believe sort of in a very simple definition does the world happen to you or do you happen to the world right do have agency and control over your own life basically but my question and i think it's a beautiful way to sort of just show how some people believe they happen to the world and people believe the world happens to them and that shift and i'm gonna ask you like if you have an idea of how to make that shift from the world happening to me to me having agency and me happening to the world because that seems as we're going through we're we're going through you know dis regulation we're going through all the different things that you have to heal sort of the leading indicator of success and everything we're talking about is having agency and feeling like you can actually make a difference in your own life as opposed to just being the victim of whatever's happened to you in the past as horrible and horrific as it may be have you ever thought about how to actually gain agency if you'd feel like you don't have any well yeah i mean that's kinda how i make mah whole living is helping people do that but i think there's well two things i wanna add i wanna sort of like append there is one is trauma is real the trauma injury is real and if you if you kick a dog and you neglect it enough you you've we've all met dogs where you approach them and they they're sort of wag their tail but then they're shiver and they pee on the floor they're not trying to get attention they're not playing vic the victim card or anything they have trauma injuries and so it's a real thing to have to overcome so so it's not just like you flip a switch and go oh i agency over this but it's part of it i i think the part that conventional treatments have done well is be able to like say okay come talk about it you know have a witness here what happened to you but i think for people who don't have this you know complex ptsd this is the kind that comes from chronic ongoing and exposure to stress or symptoms similar to it i don't think everybody's been diagnosed but childhood ptsd i call it i think we instinctively know yeah the set of the cluster of symptoms that are common for people for people who don't have it it must look like they say the weirdest things we joke about it on my channel but they say stuff like you just need to love yourself that's like the craziest psycho ba thing you could say like well how would why would i do that how why why would i do that like oh you're kidding i just need to love myself and it's kind of funny and and i i could i didn't love myself at all i despise myself i was quite angry with myself and i've ended up sort of by extension loving myself because i did a lot of loving acts i cleaned up a lot of problems where i was hurting other people i didn't feel ashamed to myself i a lot of work went into me feeling better about myself to where i'm like yeah i feel good about myself and so i just think when people are like girl you just need to love yourself i'm like you don't have what i have it's not that easy or they say yeah your picker is broken it's true the picker is broken but like and so what do you do what do you do about that and so again like learning to make better choices about who you let into your life is a combination of sen through regulation you have to become sensitive and then you have to blu her along and let a few jerks into your life and go oh i see we had that conversation they actually told me the red flag at the beginning but i overlooked it because i felt really impatient to get together with this person and then when i realized they they were not a fit or they were dangerous i didn't wanna leave because i was afraid of being alone like you have to develop a lot of self awareness before you can start to like unpack why did you make self destructive choices and it the why of it isn't even the most important thing the guard rails are the most important thing so i teach people for dating for example because dating is probably the most potentially poisonous area for traumatized people to lose their bearings big consequences come this is how trauma goes into the next generation and and so i teach a lot about how to go very slowly a traumatized person who struggles to detect red flags who attaches too quickly who is scared to leave a relationship benefits immensely from going slowly so you can let information come to you and then you hang out with like minded friends and you go what do you think you know i i was gonna call because he didn't call and they go no don't call you have friends who help you kinda make sense of reality and don't go off into you know a trauma driven rev of crazy behavior that will drive people away and so with tools to start re regulating and friends to help you stay on stay grounded in reality you can kinda reason things out and start making your mistakes honestly and as soon as you realize you're dating a jerk you get out and if you have friends you can do that if you have nobody in your life and you don't connect with anybody few people feel they can afford to leave a relationship and they'll stay and put up with anything because they've gotten stuck in the belief there will never be anything else so we we have to keep ourselves with guard rails of how to how to handle life friends to keep reminding us and tools that help us keep processing the information keeping in mind we struggle to process the house hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now the hubspot podcast network has great podcast like the ops authority if you are constantly putting out fires in your business instead of focusing on growth and innovation listen to the ops authority hosted by natalie gin and brought to you by the hubspot podcast network natalie speaks about actionable strategies that actually move your business forward so every week natalie shares some 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before to get insight from real people helping you make confident decisions for your business try it today at survey dot com slash scott how do we how do we so we're talking about people that i have trouble making connection but also boundaries are important as well so not over connecting and not depending too much on people boundaries key if you don't have good boundaries you can't be close to people explain that so let's say i i i'm thinking of going to a party and i'm a little worried it's gonna be a weird party and i won't wanna be there so my boundary is if if if everybody's like doing drugs or something i'm i'll just leave that's the boundary and if you don't have that boundary you go to the party and then you just stay and you think i better somehow crap fit to this party even though i'm getting weird it out or i should just do the drugs with everybody so they don't think worse of me boundaries are just like you know you know what your limit is and you observe it most people who say boundary they've confused it with an attempt to control other people don't you guys do drugs i'm not comfortable with it my boundary is you don't do this that's not a boundary that's a that's a request and is that the only way to to set up a relationship so that there isn't some sort of c dependence or something that is a little bit too engaged i wish it were that simple well the eight obstacles i told you one of them is you you we have wobbly boundaries you got you have to have good boundaries and you need to understand the difference between what you won't put up with and things that you would like to quest of other people that you're not really likely to get their compliance so that's that's one of them one of them is other centered ness a lot of people adapt to trauma by being excessively good at locating their being inside somebody else you know maybe starts in child trying to get a parent keep a parent from becoming too high or too abusive but it then turns into there are a lot of forms it takes of c dependence people pleasing obsessive love where you just think i can't be happy unless this person who's not interested in me will come around so it's all about some other person and you lose your agency there you've done it again and so as so the boundary thing you've lost your agency you guys don't do drugs or i'm not gonna feel okay you've lost your agency and if somebody who's really tried to make other people change i can just tell you just abandon all hope it doesn't work you can ask in in a perfect world what should somebody be striving for like what would that perfect level of connection and relationship actually look like well i think that each of us might have two or three people in our lives who really really get us and if we find those two or three people were very lucky hopefully it would be a part it would be the spouse one of them and the other two would probably be friends maybe a relative but somebody really getting you means they they know who you are they understand the nuance of what you say and they they don't really judge you for being the way you are and that's a tall order if you're still in a state of trauma where you're acting out getting emotionally just regulated unreliable friend saying cruel things sometimes so character development goes hand in hand with being able to form these true connections with people and so two or three very close people and then the rest of it is being like as a parent to be totally present for kids and as a person who works for a company or for clients whoever you're there are customers they're accountable to like i have customers really i'm accountable to them and to be able to keep my head on straight about like what that relationship means at what point like in my line of business because i'm dealing with people who are traumatized occasionally i get people who are abusive and so that means i cut off the relationship with them but other times i have to really get up on my toes and provide the customer service they deserve even though it's inconvenient even though who knows you know what happened so that takes a high level of functioning is to have professional relationships with people and then to be able to just to be able to go out on the street without looking out the window first and making sure that your neighbors aren't there to feel confident to bump into people you sort of know and people who are a little irritating and strangers and feel confident like i'm gonna kinda know how to handle this situation in a friendly way i'm not gonna add conflict to our relationship right now i know and then to know how to undo a conflict how to give a proper apology how to bring the temperature down when people are getting things are getting heated with people all this stuff you're supposed to learn growing up in a you know in a healthy family a lot of people didn't get that i didn't my parents fought all the time so i had to learn and now that i learned it's just i love the skill i love it so much i feel so free i i just i just got back from traveling i was in london i was you know meeting up with all these people i would just chat with people anywhere it's like a new life for me where i'm free i and then i gave you know i did a large workshop for hundreds of people and people come up and talk to me afterwards and i just it's a certain kind of like ease and confidence that's what connect ability is a sense of ease that i can i can pretty much be myself i trust myself to filter things that are not appropriate in this context i trust myself i know what to do if i make a mistake i know how to fix it too and then i don't know the whole world instead of living small you get to live as big as you please for somebody that's listening to this it recognizes signs of this regulation and their spouse or their partner or their family member and there's somebody who they want to help and they wanna fix like what do you do is because is these are not people that hopefully you can you don't wanna just cut them out of your life you these are people that you wanna put work into and you wanna help them go through their own is there is there something that you can do or is this have to be something that they have to take on on their own well it's not always easy to make other people change or to fix them but when you've have found something that you think might be of interest to them a lot of people will find my work because a partner or a friend or a therapist said hey i think you should check this out a lot of therapists use my videos on youtube to ask their clients to look at between visits so they can talk productively about something and the education piece happened offline you know before they met so it's okay to suggest things to people what i think is not okay is to try is to get angry at them because they didn't go for it it's a very personal decision to to decide that you're ready to take a step also you know one method of healing isn't right for everybody and so it's sort of like i don't know like religious fan genetics coming to your front door you know if you just like insist like i know what you need that's a in fact that's a sign of deep code dependence and i get this sometimes it's like i i people write me a letter like well i i i bought my girlfriend ten books about healing and she won't read them and i'm just like time the time to just like read the books yourself or like oh you know like read them yourself but when we hang on to somebody who we don't find acceptable which is what's happening there it's possible we're being avoid and and sometimes it just helps to be honest like i wanna fix them because i don't actually accept how they are and we've asked them to change we've shown them what we think might be helpful but i think if it gets to where you've asked somebody three times it's you that's it that's gotta be the line you just have to like accept this is not something they're interested in and if somebody is abusive i don't think it's acceptable if they're not willing to work on being abusive but i really i just thank god for the people in my life who put up with me when i didn't know how to fix this and you know except for when i got really really bad they they they were my friends and some of them are still my friends sometimes people left me at that time and they see me again now or they see me on youtube and they're like damn and girl what is this you've changed and i'm like yeah i changed yeah but you put the work in i mean like but not everybody that's the thing not everybody wants to put the work so there has to be there has to be a point where yes if if you're if you're with that person they're a spouse or partner like you wanna give them the tools and the resources to to regulate themselves if you notice if you listen to this and you're like i'm seeing signs that a little bit of this wisdom could help them out so maybe you tell them to go you know watch your youtube or or read a book or something like that or read a resource but there also is a point where i think that you know you shouldn't you shouldn't date or marry on potential you shouldn't go into business with somebody who's a business partner based on potential either i think that you have to be healed the healthy people going into this and i i consider business relationships just as difficult as marriages in some cases and sometimes there's more money on the line too right so yeah you have to go into these things healed yeah it's gonna be it's gonna be difficult i would sort but then you also have to know how a little asterisk on the word healed because there's not really any such thing you know there's no island where these are the people who are all the way there and everybody else's is at sea you know everybody's just kind of like dog pad around right now and we're like we can kind of manage things or we can manage things pretty well or we can't manage things at all and so it's really you gotta go in with open eyes and just decide can i accept this person when you when you realize that you do eventually have to end a relationship with someone what is the best way to do it i'm a con oh my goodness well i've had it done to me enough but i've also i've had to do it and i i learned this is what i believe is the best way is if you're clear that you wanna do it you do not try to be friends and i'm talking about romantic relationships here but when things have gone that bad leave in a business relationship is you leave with goodwill but you don't say okay now we're just gonna be friends i don't know about you but i spent a long time trying to cool in some situation where i was dying of heartbreak and jealousy trying be like no no i'm cool with this and i did it to other people too and then you know kind of criticize them for taking it hard and that's ridiculous i'm old enough to know now that's ridiculous and the mature and loving thing to do is to just cut it off the way the victorian did and perhaps in some time when things have literally cooled off and neither of you happens to be in another relationship there can be a friendship or really enough time has passed that it's it's there's no spark there or anything like that one of the things i did to heal was i stopped having friendships with men who one of us kinda had you know a little a little thing there you know where nobody would ever admit it and i just ended it i ended it whether it was me or them and i told them frankly and kindly you've been a great friend there's this thing in our relationship where you know i i always feel like maybe you like me or conversely i've always had this little attraction but i know this is not going anywhere and i need to end it and i wish you the best can't be friends and and in this culture that was like a astonishing they they would just be like what you know i but i didn't and i go no you did nothing wrong it's okay we were just doing what people do but i'm trying to make a big change in my life and for me that's how i became emotionally available for the real thing is i stopped f away all my romantic energy on little things true connect ability and and true healthy relationships and i get i get the healthy there's no end to this game it's you're constantly trying to move in the right direction but something that is not negative and not d distracting from you and not toxic it's your own self work it's work with you know strengthening connects with other people it's also making sure they're even the right people that you should be connecting and strength like strengthening those relationships with so it's not just like a one it's not just like a one and done solution it's all of it it's it's it's sort of this three sixty about how you first of all heal yourself put work into other people make sure they're even the right people yeah and and shedding the people who are not the right people as a whole chapter of my book about releasing the people who are mean and troubling you know just troubled all the time they just bring trouble into your life and some there's some people you have to hard hard quit or you know boot them out but sometimes it's just releasing you don't just keep them around you don't keep filling your weekends just because there's somebody to hang out with it does take up space and it keeps draining your batteries and it keeps dimming your light for those people who you could have that great affinity that's inspiring and positive and well matched for who you are today you know not to put people down who are not there right now like we're all just like working on it but we do tend up and we tend to connect with people who we match who we feel you know get us and aren't judging us too much and so when we make when we take a big step up people are gonna fall away you'll get a lot of criticism people will think you're acting too big for your riches you think you're better than me you get a lot of that and that you have to release it just be like okay well best of best of luck to you and allow there to be an emptiness in your life and that's how the good stuff comes in what would be the one thing out of out of all sort of strategy or idea around connect ability and connecting with other people that people have the hardest time with i i think it's human nature to have a really hard time getting out of ourselves to stop taking the temperature of how do i feel what does everybody think about me what do i look like where is all you know where is all this going and to be able when they approve when the situation calls for it when it's time to be present with somebody to give them your full attention and to be able to hear them like we all know how good it feels when somebody really listens and i don't mean active listening how do you feel how's that but just like just in the funny moment moments just to laugh at your jokes just to remember you know something you liked at the restaurant and be like should we go to that restaurant because i know you like that thing to attend to who that person is and what's special about them and to be able to like turn your radar to appreciating that person because people are so beautiful and amazing and we completely miss out on what a great experience it is to be in the company of another person when we're so self centered and how it's affecting us and it's a i think it's a you know it's a developmental delay and trauma definitely keeps us stuck in our feelings and our heads but i think that's also part of the culture and part of the downside of therapy culture it has many upsides but one of them is so much of that like inward focus that that that can sabotage the the outer the right balance of outer attention don't wanna be all the way of focused on other people but to really be able to hear them and and appreciate them and that's those are the people we love i'm i i was thinking i was talking to my son the other day i'm like aren't you know why is it that everybody loves their grandma virtually everyone your grandma must nice your grandma is just so happy to see you all the time it's like i said well then i'll be a grandma one day i i think that sounds like a really good role where i'm just so happy to see you i thought about you when you weren't here and i got you some presents i would just feel like this is the best place ever you know somebody cares about me and so the connect ability happens when we can develop that capacity and not lose ourselves and others i love that if you had if you had one wish for people who are reading this book to take away and just to take the heart not the hardest part of of this whole process sort of just focusing outside of yourself but just the one takeaway that you hope would change somebody's life what would that take away be don't give up do not get discouraged because this is hard go slowly disconnected people need to go slowly persevere it's worth it the the disconnection will start to be at this loop that tells you people suck you shouldn't deal with them you be much better off by yourself but just fight it fight it and no your dog is not your child and you know and your books are not your friends and the books and dogs are wonderful but so are people you'd before we wrap up just let everybody know so the book is connect ability heal the hidden ways you isolate find your people and feel at last like you belong and this podcast will be dropping the same week that it's out so you can get the book anywhere you get books amazon and is there any other places you wanted to send people website social youtube website and i have like a i have a couple of freebie b's you can use if this isn't too many things okay one is a quiz of signs that you might have complex ptsd or another one that might be more relevant you can decide i'll give them both to you one is signs that trauma is affecting your ability to connect it's very popular just a like a little one sheet and the other thing is it's a free course the techniques the daily practice techniques if anybody wants to take it and give you a link it's free it's a free short course give all of these and i'll put them all in the show notes cognate is a success story partner now have you ever wondered how all those scammers get your phone numbers all those tele marketers how you're always drowning in all these spam calls it's data brokers right now hundreds of companies are collecting and selling your personal information without your consent your address your phone number even your family members names to anyone who's is willing to pay and this puts you at risk of identity theft scams and harassment and that's where cog comes in they contact over two hundred and thirty data broker on your behalf and legally force them to delete your personal information no more spending hundreds of hours doing it yourself and cog handles all the paperwork follows up on objections and keep your data off the market with repeated removal i've actually been using con incognito myself it's scary and also incredible to see how much of my data was out there but they get rid of it they've got a thirty day money back guarantee so you can try at risk free use my code success adding cog dot com slash success to get an exclusive sixty percent off their annual plans you have to take back control of your privacy today monarch money is a success story partner now you know what what's weird i'm doing well financially but i have this constant low level financial anxiety that i was missing something because i have crypto on all these different exchanges i have multiple investment accounts old four zero one k's saving scattered everywhere i knew the pieces were fine but i had no idea if the whole picture made sense i finally got monarch money to pull everything into one view and the first thing i noticed i had ten thousand dollars sitting in a temporary savings account from eight months ago when i sold some stock that's eight months ten thousand dollars that could have been working instead have just waiting for me to remember it existed also it showed me that i was spending tons monthly on all these subscription services that i couldn't even remember i signed up for every sunday morning it takes me five minutes to check everything all my financial stuff in one place no more wondering no more anxiety the wall street journal just named it the best budgeting app of twenty twenty five but honestly it's more about finally having control so don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks use code success at monarch money dot com in your browser for half off your first year that's fifty percent off your first year at monarch money dot com with code success your

success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square me there shop the asu in william super sale and get forty percent off paints and stain september nineteen through the twenty fourth with prices starting at twenty nine thirty nine it's the perfect time to transform your space with color whether you're looking to revamp your interior or exterior we have you covered with bolt hue soothing neutral and everything in between visit your neighborhood she williams store or shop the sale online delivery available on qualifying orders click the banner to learn more retail sales only some exclusion apply c store for details in this lessons episode explore how moral psychology and cognitive science are redefining models of decision making discover why instinct patterns reveal more than demographics understand how life experiences and core instincts shape worldview and uncover how these profiles can predict behavior influence choices and guide strategy and after you align with these data scientists then you then obviously this this it's starting to manifest yeah yeah so when it when i guess my i'll i'll ask you when does this turn into i guess path sites or or is this like when does this actually turn into something tangible that you can build a model out of and what does that model start to look like yeah so six six years ago we we we found that there was this smelting of of of disciplines and i became controlled with the area of moral psychology i i i and that's a long story but suffice it to say that if we believe that if the brain allows you to work or help helps us figure out how you how you can create a moral point of view in terms of your dis decision making values and things like that and if in fact you you used all that brain power to create your your moral point of view mh don't you think there was a an a aha for me that if that is consuming a lot of what your brain does don't you think it would have ubiquitous use beyond moral judgments and that was the premise that was the the that was the premise so why why take something and use it for esoteric choices when it could be front and center in how you decide what you like how you vote mh were to join who you love all those things are really moral decisions so i really felt there was a a great mel of those things with our with the models that we we talked about and so we took some basic decision making models and merged them with an applied model of cognitive psychology to to look at what we knew about how people make those decisions and then we found that these moral decisions were were tied to these deeply embedded instincts that were showing signs of of of of being significant all the way back to the the stone age so you may maybe have heard of a lot of the work of jonathan hayden and moral foundations those those were the the the instincts that i felt wow finally we have a scorecard to be able to take some of these points of view quantify them and look for ways that they can influence decision making and and behavior change so we put all that together and started to look at what does the data tell us about what we could reasonably expect success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in my miami last week and beyond the incredible cor what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square me you there the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now the house hubspot podcast network has great podcast like the ops authority if you are constantly putting out fires in your business instead of focusing on growth and innovation listen to the ops authority hosts hosted by natalie gin and brought to you by the house hubspot podcast network natalie speaks about actionable strategies that actually move your business forward so every week natalie shares some transformational stories from real business owners who've mastered their back end systems so they can focus on what really matters so get your ops in order get your business running smoothly so you can scale and you can really build something meaningful stop letting all this chaos steal all of your energy and listen to the op authority wherever you get your podcasts survey monkey is a success story partner now look we get it you can hardly go anywhere or do anything these days without hearing about ai this or ai that and if you're like most people when it comes to ai you're impressed but you have a few concerns but what if ai was used not as a tool to replace people but as a way to help understand people better ai from survey monkey is designed to do just that i'm crafting the perfect survey which is harder than you might think to analysis that digs deep binds patterns and services trends quickly survey monkey powerful suite of ai capabilities makes it faster and easier than ever before to get insight from real people helping you make confident decisions for your business try it today at survey dot com slash scott and i guess my i have questions about what that result is but my before it before that i think i would ask is this this is is this a dangerous model to build is this a model that could god like dangerous as if you if you can predict how somebody makes decisions could that be could that be used to influence like i i don't know i'm trying to think of the implications of building out a model where you can predict certain things that certain people can do or or decisions that they would make well well let me start by saying the human interface is the most complex node on the most complex network and we've ever experienced so you i'm flattered but we we we don't have that degree of of of of predictability yet we what we what we have is something that goes beyond anything we've ever had but it's still you know it still leaves a lot that we don't know but so what we've we've done is you know for a hundred years the conventional wisdom was that demographics really could be used to to tell us why we did these things mh you know but after a hundred years we we know a lot about demographics they tell us kind of who we are and what we do but they are really lousy at telling me us why do why do we do it and there's so many segmentation models that are based on on those pre sets of of demographics and and they've all sooner or later will under scrutiny scrutiny and so we added these instinct points of view these are five things of how do you care about children what is your your need for fairness what's your who who are you loyal to who how do how do you what are the rules of the game what's your authority idea and then this this instinct for purity so with what they are they're they're not to be confused with an end instinct like when we you go into the doctor cross your legs and you get a patel in in instinct where you kick the the yeah doctor right like a response exactly yeah those it's not like that it's not you you you trigger the care instinct and bam something new automatic comes in but what these do the the patterns of those instincts you you do have a have a early in child that we've figured out that you have a pattern of which which ones of these instincts you're sensitive to mh and what happens is as you go through life and your you're your life experiences edit those those instincts we know that how you see the world your world view is is constructed by those life experiences and your instincts and your demographics and all the other things that we we've known no over the years go into creating an identity and we've we've decode that we think there are five of these instinct extinction patterns that we can identify but two of them are really really significant and these two were what we see all the time referenced in in our tribal world you know the the and and they're they're referenced in politics and and philosophy and all sorts of things but these two are really really kind of be bi the world in in terms of these two major instinct profiles and then the the three in the middle are the kind of the way we marry up which part of of the of of of the two instincts are are you most influenced by so they're they kind of morph back and forth so so so really it's these two two big ones that are really hard are the immutable forces and and the rest of the other three would just to draw a parallel would it be almost like a a venn diagram of crossover of various components between but you can make polarizing ones and then the smaller yeah exactly okay and and and and and yeah and so what we've done is we've started over the last six years to explore the way these profiles can predict what people help people will will respond to different environments different problems for stimuli and things like that so the the the real wildcard is to say what do we what do we think these instinct patterns are because we've done a lot of the the work on the on the back end of saying oh if we know you have this one instinct pattern likely you're gonna be really fair minded empathy is is is is a is is a given you probably fight the conformity of of of a cultural mandate but you're you're you're probably gonna look for new and different problems to solve and and trends to to make friends with so that would be one and then we can get all sorts of detail about what that looks like and so what we've what we've done then is created this intelligent adviser so that when somebody says i'm i'm interested in my brand for example and i'd i'd like to figure out who likes to do doesn't like and what can i do about it and those those are kind of the simple questions that we can answer now thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just a panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there monarch money is a success story partner now you know what what's weird i'm doing well financially but i have this constant low level financial anxiety that i was missing something because i have crypto on all these different exchanges i have multiple investment accounts old four zero one k's saving scattered everywhere i knew the pieces were fine but i had no idea if the whole picture made sense i finally got monarch money to pull everything into one view and the first thing i noticed i had ten thousand dollars sitting in a temporary savings account from eight months ago when i sold some stock that's eight months ten thousand dollars that could have been workings instead have just waiting for me to remember it existed also it showed me that i was spending tons monthly on all these subscription services that i couldn't even remember i signed up for every sunday morning it takes me five minutes to check everything all my financial stuff in one place no more wondering no more anxiety the wall street journal just named it the best budgeting app of twenty twenty five but honestly it's more about finally having control so don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks use code success at monarch money dot com in your browser for half off your first year that's fifty percent off your first year at monarch money dot com with code success

success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success swear me there life is unpredictable but preparing for the unexpected shouldn't be take ownership of your life planning with policy genius to help your loved ones have a financial safety net in case something happens to you they offer life insurance policies starting at just two hundred and seventy six dollars a year for one million dollars in coverage don't wait for life to make other plans protect your family today heads a policy genius dot com that's policy genius dot com in this lessons episode explore why entrepreneurial thinking is essential in both startups and large corporations discover how adopting this mindset keeps organizations competitive understand how to present innovative ideas effectively within bureaucratic systems and uncover how perspective shaped by pressure passion pleasure and pain leads to better decisions for lasting success and i'm thing that you mentioned and and you you sort of highlight on your site and i like it a lot there's people that are in all walks of life all stages in their journey trying to do a thing you know the side hustle is more popular than ever now and one of the pieces that you actually mentioned was entrepreneur entrepreneurs is not nice to have it's a skill that must be unlocked in every company so speak to me but what that means for somebody who's in a company that doesn't understand how they can associate with the word entrepreneur yeah it's a great point so there's there's two kind of lens of this one lens is okay you're in a company and you're thinking about leaving and doing your own thing and that applies to some of things that we've just been talking about but companies to compete past to sync like entrepreneurs right i mean i mean amazon should not exist right walmart should have created amazon and blockbuster should creative netflix and sony should have created spotify like these organizations tied all the way with all the duties old things and today if you don't think we call think like an entrepreneur if you don't think like an entrepreneur within a larger company you're just gonna become kind of the next you know company that just doesn't stay up at the times and that's a difficult thing to do right because large companies don't operate that way they think about quarterly numbers and it's really hard for them to innovate so we have a program called think like an entrepreneur which is a training program which helps large organizations take what you learn from entrepreneurs and employ it within a corporate environment to try to create some of these methodologies and thought processes that entrepreneurs have all day long but just don't regularly get deployed in a in a corporate environment do you feel like you have advice for people that feel like they're are being i guess held down or or or just like just like their ideas are being choked out in in the organization like how do they how do they actually thrive in a company that is by the quarterly numbers with all the red tape i'm curious to how to do that so there are people the people that rise the men and women that rise to senior levels within organizations are the ones that are able to deliver results right there are ones that if you ask them what do you do with your job the first thing they're gonna do is give you a number right i deliver x i deliver the sales or this expense savings or whatever maybe add the shareholder value those people are always interested in innovations at work right so if you're s then you're in an organization i mean i think about we talking about before we sold the health plans health plans did the same thing for fifty years and the people that you were selling to were the very same people that put in place the things that you were trying to get rid of right yeah so and the same thing exist within an organization what i would say is i respectfully whether it's the innovation people or the senior leaders in your group and say listen do your homework like come up with a business plan come up with a business case don't just walk in somebody who's the executive vp vp of blah bitty blah and say i have an idea do your work and put in a package but say this i believe that this can deliver us revenue competitive differentiation significant cost savings and i'd like to have the opportunity to present it to you and i can tell you that the people that are in those roles certainly you and me we would always wanna have that conversation if it was something that was that was credible even if you're s at different levels of your reorganization yeah yeah not the very good point very well said i think that that's something to take note of like you don't even if you feel like the organization doesn't support or perhaps you don't see the peers your peers working on things like this take that initiative and and i think the the takeaway message the lesson is to you know you'd be surprised at what you can accomplish if you start going out there and like you said acting like an entrepreneur within a company and pushing these ideas in front of the right people are presenting them in front of the right people it could really take that career to the next level within an organization yep i gotta you i can tell you what i did when i started my company and all our clients were health plans and we're an early stage company i used to literally sit down at eight o'clock at night and leave voicemail mails for the ceos of our nation's largest healthcare care companies united healthcare ci ae and i got seven out of ten calls back and and that wasn't because of my bubbly personality i basically said listen so there's gonna be a health plan here in the united states that's gonna have a reward program just like marriott in citi bank and the one that does is gonna win the consumer and the one that it doesn't is gonna fall behind this is what we're doing give us a callback right so the ceo would we'd normally say how you could never get to the ceo if you go to somebody and say this is how you really win or this is how you really lose right they will break all the rules for you obviously you have to be concise on point and really talk to something that really makes a difference but the people that arise to senior levels rise to senior levels because they they cut through things and ultimately deliver some kind financial performance mh the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now the hubspot podcast network has great podcast like the ops authority if you are constantly putting out fires in your business instead of focusing on growth and innovation listen to the ops authority hosts by natalie gin and brought to you by the house hubspot podcast network natalie speaks about actionable strategies that actually move your business forward so every week natalie shares some transformational stories from real business owners who've mastered their back end systems so they can focus on what really matters so get your ops in order get your business running smoothly so you can scale and you can really build something meaningful stop letting all this chaos steal all of your energy and listen to the opt authority wherever you get your podcasts success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there survey monkey is a success story partner now look we get it you can hardly go anywhere or do anything these days without hearing about ai this or ai that and if you're like most people when it comes to ai you're impressed but you have a few concerns but what if ai was used not as a tool to replace people but as a way to help understand people better ai from survey monkey is designed to do just that i'm crafting the perfect survey which is harder than you might think to analysis that digs deep binds patterns and services trends quickly survey monkey powerful suite of ai capabilities makes it faster and easier than ever before to get insight from real people helping you make confident decisions for your business try it today at survey dot com slash scott one point that i wanted to highlight because you list off a whole bunch of problems with mentors that align themselves with entrepreneurs yep people that overs sell themselves people that are only looking for winners so on and so on that keeps going going so as an entrepreneur scare there to align with someone yeah how do you look for the right person there are a lot of mentors that are doing all the right things but then there's also a bunch of mentors that are trying to sell you things trying to bring in their own financial partners trying to bring in their own you know marketing partners and things like that here's what i would say a lot of times mentors that maybe don't always have your best interest at heart like i said there's many to do mh a lot of times they they prey on the risk that entrepreneurs are feeling when you're talking to somebody and you have a mentor and somebody you really like and you're connecting with go ask a colleague of yours not somebody that has the last same last name in you or somebody you're dating or your brother just somebody whose business judgment you respect and say to them hey listen i'm i'm thinking about getting involved in this can you talk to them for a half hour an hour because you know they're completely objective view yeah right and they will come in and say well i think this person's a little too this a little to that and that can really help you especially you know you talk about the book and this this whole idea of perspective we all know this we're in the middle of it we have a really tough time seeing things what other people can see really clearly that also works a lot when you're hiring employees right when you're working twenty four hours a day the person in front of you might just hire them just because they can speak right because you're so busy if you go to like if i went to you and say hey listen could you interview this person for me you would give me us reason thoughtful you know objective view and i'd be able to make a the right type decision just like i would with a with a mentor yeah good advice it's very good i've never heard a frame like i've never heard that suggestion before but i i really like that a lot especially when you're you know as an entrepreneur you right you're you're just over tired absolutely exhausted no decisions you're making are probably the right ones so so yeah i mean you're trying to look for all these little tricks and tips to to make it easier on yourself i like that a lot i'm not what we've said before about like bit being a series of skills yeah right it's it's not yes the big things matter but it's also you know how you hire the wrong partnering person you get the wrong mentor you know you're already kinda you know behind eight ball a little bit yeah yeah one of the the last thing not to end innovate with lessons from the book but i thought there was a a few really good ones and then i wanted to ask to some like some personal insights from your career but the four p's you mentioned that perspective can be influenced by pressure passion pleasure pain yep or a flawed per flawed perspective you you speak a little bit more on that and and extrapolate just what that means exactly and how to sort of watch for that as an entrepreneur i think we sort of touched on it a little bit but just to make it clear interesting thing yeah it's really interesting when you take a step back after i sell my company and you're like what is what do we all really go through like when we writing the book risk and what do we really go through and and this whole idea a four piece camera we started saying well you you have passion right and you're like well i'm gonna make meatballs right and somebody will go well the world has plenty of meatballs and you'll be like well not my meatballs right so with we also have that kind but then you also have you know pressure right there's a lot on you sometimes financial pressure sometimes you leave a job you know you have the pleasure of you know the first time you you you print your business card you get your first customer it's like your first kiss right mh and and then the pain you know when the first time an investor tells you that they don't like your business it's like somebody's calling your baby ugly and and we're really investing and when you're we're always under the influence of these four p's doesn't make us do the wrong thing when we're under pressure right we hire the wrong person right when we're dealing all passion about our meatballs sometimes we're not listening to the feedback of the market saying hey doesn't think we're this way but it might work that way so we just always have to be really cognizant to the fact that we're kinda under the influence of these things so we can employ some of the techniques we were talking about before thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out links in the description to full episode see you in the next one monarch money is a success story partner now you know what's it's weird i'm doing well financially but i have this constant low level financial anxiety that i was missing something because i have crypto on all these different exchanges i have multiple investment accounts old four zero one k's saving scattered everywhere i knew the pieces were fine but i had no idea if the whole picture made sense i finally got monarch money to pull everything into one view the first thing i noticed i had ten thousand dollars sitting in a temporary savings account for eight months ago when i sold some stock that's eight months ten thousand dollars it could have been workings that have just waiting for me to remember it existed also it showed me that i was spending tons monthly on all these subscription services that i couldn't even remember i signed up for every sunday morning it takes me five minutes to check everything all my financial stuff in one place no more wondering no more anxiety the wall street journal just named it the best budgeting app of twenty twenty five but honestly it's more about finally having control so don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks use code success at monarch money dot com in your browser for half off your first year that's fifty percent off your first year at monarch money dot com with code success cognate is a success story partner now have you ever wondered how all those scammers get your phone numbers all those tele marketers how you're always drowning in all these spam calls it's data brokers right now hundreds of companies are collecting and selling your personal information without your consent your address your phone number even your family members names to anyone is willing to pay and this puts you at risk of identity theft scams and harassment and that's where cog comes in they contact over two hundred and thirty data brokers on your behalf and legally force them to delete your personal information no more spending hundreds of hours doing it yourself and cog handles all the paperwork follows up on objections and keep your data off the market with repeated removal i've actually been using incognito myself it's scary and also incredible to see how much of my data was out there but they get rid of it they've got a thirty day money back guarantee so you can try at risk free use my code success adding cog dot com slash success to get an exclusive sixty percent off their annual plans you have to take back control of your privacy today

success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there did i put the clothes in the dryer i hope they don't think i was saying to be a ranch cut just sleep already when you're racing thoughts keep you up at night it's tough to let go and get the rest your need better sleep can help you might have heard of white or brown noise there's a whole rainbow of color noises and they can help you calm your mind reduce stress and sleep better like the green noise you're listening to now with the better sleep app you can discover more color noises and over two hundred soothing sounds guided meditations and bedtime stories high quality rest is vital to your mental well being and physical health calm your restless mine conquer your day and sleep better at night download better sleep from the app store or google play and start a seven day trial today because when you sleep better you feel better in this lesson episode we're talking about all those hours that you spend doing things you hate the soul crushing jobs the endless kid sports practices the networking events the committee meetings the social obligations that you dread if you are constantly sacrificing what you want to do for what you think you should do if your weeks are full of activities that you are just enduring instead of actually living a life that you enjoy this one's for you you are growing your kids up on top of screwing your own life up i'm gonna show you why your kids can tell when you're dead inside what you're actually teaching them about adulthood and how to stop modeling a life that you hate and start turning life into something you enjoy not just survive watch the parents at any kids soccer game this weekend half her on their phones another quarter are gossip about work the rest are staring dead ida the field mentally calculating if they have time to hit costco right after this and the worst part is the kids see it all not that you're distracted they see that you're dead inside that you are enjoying the game not living it's sitting in those bleach features at seven am it's killing you slowly see when dad checks email during the game the kid sees it and the kid knows the dad would rather be anywhere else when mom is fake smiling through another tournament that she rather not be at the kid understands that love means pretending and when parents stand their dead inside pretending to care the kid learns that this is what adulthood looks like see this is a truth that should terrify every parent children are emotional mirrors they don't feel what you say they feel what you feel and if you feel that when you sit in those bleach yours at seven am you are dead inside your kid knows it their body knows it and they're learning that love and life means dying slowly in public while pretending everyone else is fine and this isn't good enough this isn't acceptable being an adult does not mean that you have to hate your life but if you don't work on yourself this is what you're showing your kit we have convinced ourself that to be a good parent we have to sacrifice everything right that love is measured in hours logged at practices or dollar spent on equipment or weekend surrender tournaments or any of the other million different hobbies and past times and extracurricular that kids can do so we sit in these stands and we're dead inside scrolling on our phones gossip with the other dead parents pretending that this is what love looks like but this is what i wish more parents understood your kids don't need more activities they don't need more gifts and honestly they're probably getting lots of love what they need is to see you living a life worth living really living a life worth hopping because right now if you are just going through the motions you are just showing them some cautionary tale that growing up sucks and it doesn't have to you want understand what you're actually showing your kids do this exercise it's gonna ruin your week but it's important for the next seven days track your hours in two columns a live hours and dead hours so a live hours would be hours where you feel genuinely energized and present and chosen and just living and doing things that you enjoy and then dead hours would be hours when you are just enjoying and scrolling and just counting the minutes until it's over and i wanted to include everything so the commute to practice dead the tournament weekend dead the networking dinner dead the gym class you actually love that's an a live hour the coffee with your friend alive the book before bed alive okay what you're gonna discover is that you are modeling seventy plus dead hours per week seventy plus hours that you hate whatever it is you're doing you're modeling that to your kids and that is seventy hours of teaching your kids that adulthood is a prison sentence seventy hours of showing them that love means endurance and seventy hours of programming them to expect misery your kids are watching and they're not learning what you think they're learning they're not learning dedication they're learning that adults are zombies they're not learning commitment they're learning that marriage means two people always fight and never see each other they're not learning love they're learning that having kids means your life ends but news flash it doesn't here's a different way to live life here's a different way to model how to be an adult my dad coached my hockey team for ten years but here's what made him different he didn't do it for me he did it because he loved hockey every practice he'd be on the ice an hour early working on his own game running drills with his beer league buddy still trying to perfect his snapshot at forty five and when practice started he wasn't teaching us hockey he was sharing his religion the way he talked about the conditioning anymore the joy when someone finally got a play right the way he demonstrated a drill and you could see that he forgot he was coaching he was just lost in the pure pleasure of the moment and other kids parents they sat in the stands they're miserable they were counting the minutes my dad was on the ice alive so his alive hours that week probably fifteen just from hockey plus his work that he loved plus his thursday poker game that he loved plus his saturday morning pawn hockey before my game so he was modeling forty plus a live hours per week doing things that he actually enjoyed and that's what i absorbed not that adults sacrifice but that adults play adults live see i learned that adults are allowed to want things parents are allowed to choose themselves and sometimes showing your kid what it looks like to honor your own dreams is the best coaching you can do my mom was the same with the outdoors she'd wake up at five am on saturdays and just love to hike and love to snows shoot and love to do anything outside and she did it on wednesdays and sundays and random tuesday evenings and the mountains of forest the trails those were her life she take a snows shooting and spent half the time looking at birds or identifying these animal tracks and it i guess a little bit was for education but not really for our education because she genuinely needed to know what made those prints she loved it she'd stopped mid hike she'd pull out her plant identification book totally absorbed basically forgetting that we were even there so her live hours were off the charts every sunrise hike every camping trip every moment that she spent plotting the next adventure and we absorb that energy me and my brother we love the outdoors is growing up but more than loving me outdoors i loved that she was doing what she loved to do see kids whose parents have lives are more secure not less they don't wonder if they're enough to make you happy because they know that the parents happiness comes from all these different sources they don't carry the burden of being your entire world they're just a part of a rich life and they don't feel guilty about growing up and leaving because they know you're the parent you've had a great life you love what you love you're gonna be fine and they get something better than a parent who never misses a game they get a parent who shows them what a life worth living looks like so this is a lesson to you to the parent the parent who's just existing through life because hey it's a job i have it's you know i have to do this i have to do that i'm not saying blow up your life overnight and quit your job and never go to another tournament i'm just saying that start moving towards a direction of enjoying your life enjoying your hobbies enjoying your work enjoying your spouse because what your kids actually need to see is you excited about tuesday because your thing is tuesday you and your spouse kissing in the kitchen not performing happiness but actually being happy your kids need to see you say no to something without explaining yourself to death they have to see you working on something hard because you wanna get better at they have to see you protecting time that's just yours like it's sacred because it is they have to see you having friends who knew you before you were someone's parent they have to see reading a book in the middle of the day to dancing to music that they think is ancient do you starting something new at forty and fifty and sixty do you choosing a alive over dead even when it's inconvenient and to you modeling that life it is worth living this isn't about being a different parent it's about choosing to be alive so i want you to start small this week add one thing that makes you feel electric that lights you up not for your kids not for your spouse do it for you could be a morning run it could be lunch with that friend who makes you laugh until you can't breathe it could be a hobby you haven't touched in years it could be a class that you keep saying you'll take and then look at your dead hours look at the things that you really hate doing and pick one that is truly optional the committee you hate the book club that you hate the standing coffee with somebody who drains you the favor you do every week that no one actually needs cancel it this week right now not after the holidays right now the goal isn't to abandon your responsibilities it's to stop treating every obligation like a life sentence look at everything through this lens and this become alive can i bring something i love into this can i shift how i do this if not if it's truly irr dead can i kill it and slowly and deliberately you're gonna start choosing a alive over dead whenever you have the choice and your kids will notice they won't notice what you're skipping notice what you're choosing they'll see you protecting your morning workout like it matters they'll hear you laugh on the phone with your friends they'll watch you say no to things without apologizing for just existing they'll catch you doing something badly and loving it anyways they'll see you building a life that doesn't require escape and they'll learn that adults get to one things that marriage can include two people with their own interests who choose to come together that having kids doesn't mean your life ends it means showing them what a life looks like a good life looks like remember your kids are keeping score not of your attendance at their tournaments but of your alive ness and for most of us right now we're losing your kid won't remember the activities they will remember that you look trapped that you're living a life that looks like hell that you are showing them that being una adult means your life is over and it doesn't have to be choose things that light you up choose things that make you feel alive choose things that show your kids what living a true good fulfilled life actually is think big bi small is a success story partner now if you love hearing from bold entrepreneurs and leaders who carve their own paths you'll definitely wanna check out think big bi small it's back for a brand new season it's one of my favorite shows think big by small is the 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i've been playing in this world for many years now when i first gonna taste of it i was a teenager i've volunteered at my local crisis support helpline for kids your advice my advice is never as good as i think it is and it's often the thing that is actually wanted in most interactions today's guest has changed the way leaders coach mentor and create impact michael bun stan is the mind behind box of crayon a global company that's thousands to shift from being advice driven curiosity led be the person who has the answer that's how you prove that you're the smart person the good person the valuable person good advice has never been cheaper faster more accessible we are kind of attach a good degree of our sense of importance in the world as to being the person who has the answer he wrote the coaching habit a book that's sold over a million copies and is now considered the best selling coaching book of this century he's a erode scholar awarded canadian coach of the year but his real gift isn't just the accolades it's how he helps you ask better questions resist rushing into advice and find courage in the unknown if you're attaching some sorts of importance in the way you can be most helpful the way you can add value giving advice is probably not the thing to be hanging your head on once you understand that this will be helpful for you to be more coach like that's a good place to start one of the challenges with coaching is there's a lot of coaches in the world so michael i'm excited you're here you've sold over a million copies of your book the coaching habit which essentially tells people to stop doing the thing they love most giving advice that's right and you've called people advice giving man is to tell me what made you realize that our desire to help might actually be hurting yeah you know i've been playing in this world for many years now when i i first got a taste of it when i was a teenager and i i volunteered at my local crisis support helpline for kids so you know young people ring up with with challenges and we've got some basic training on how to deal with those slightly slightly scary phone calls and one of the things i kept saying is like first of all the first thing they're telling you is just the first thing it's not the thing so your job is to stay present to them secondly they're not actually looking for advice i mean sometimes they might be but almost never are they actually looking advice they're looking to be seen they're looking to be heard they're looking to be encouraged they're looking for sympathy and empathy and it was a it was an early seed and as i've had a career and had a life it's just become increasingly obvious that your advice my advice is never as good as i think it is and is often not the thing that is actually wanted in most interactions and you know if you fast forward to where we are in twenty twenty five where we have amazing somewhat scary ai which knows everything as far as i can tell good advice has never been cheaper faster more accessible so if you're attaching some sorts of importance in the way you can be most helpful the way you can add value the way that you can maintain your authority and your status giving advice is probably not the thing to be hanging your ahead on because that that it was ever there it's going way fast so building the muscle to be curious now that's something that's a little a little trickier and a little more powerful i think that is very tricky i mean i think the obvious question is why do we default to something that really isn't that helpful yeah well i mean there's a couple of levels to it the first is we have been trained all our life to be good kids to have the answer i mean you know you're you're a six year old in school and the teacher goes does anybody know and sticks their hand up i've going me i meet me pick me pick me and then you we get a little more cool when we're in high school but we're still trying to pass tests and same if we go to university like there's this quest to say be the person who has the answer that's how you prove that you're a smart person the good person the valuable person so it's just to say look there's that we we've we've had a lot of training to be told you know deliver the answer but there's probably a deeper level there as well we kind of attach a good degree of our sense of importance in the world as to being the person who has the answer now in one of my books the advice trap i talk about the advice monster yeah advice monster as soon as somebody starts talking it looms up out of the dark and goes oh you're gonna add some value here just just wait till you can interrupt and start telling them stuff and the advice ones directly actually has go to three faces three facets if you like is the tel they're sa and there's control it and these are kind of just basically really core human drivers so tell is you need to have all the answers you need to have all the answers to all the problems if you don't you're letting yourself down and you're letting them down savor it is you need to protect everybody from everything you need to make sure that nobody has a hard time a difficult time has an unsure time you need to make everybody as absolutely safe as possible all the time and control it is you you need to control the world you know you need to make sure nothing unusual unexpected it happens as you need to fight off the future you need to keep your hands on the wheel and of course all of these are impossible you can't know everything you can't save everybody you can't control everything but we've got deep drivers in ways that those those that belief has served us in the past i keep showing up going look well look i know i should ask your question but maybe i just tell them the stuff maybe that will fix it faster so first of all i want you to just tell me for people that sort of have ever wanted a mentor or a coach what coaching should be and why do they maybe get this ic feeling about it why do we have to un weird coaching in the first places because people are giving too much advice and not being curious enough what's the what's the issue with this industry well it's a big word that everybody's heard of and not everybody's entirely sure what it means because it's actually changed and evolved over the years so i think coaching does come with a whole lot of baggage i mean first of all it can show up and it can all sound a bit woo and a bit kind of like i'm wearing a caf down and i'm writing inc and i'm gonna talk about their chakra and whatever else and for a bunch of people they're like yeah there's a bunch of people who go i love that stuff bring it on and that's what coaching is i love that but there's a number of and i'm one of them who are like look not that much into the the woo woo of it all there's a second thing that baggage comes just is like it's a bit of a black box like nobody's quite sure what we're what we're even talking about sometimes there's baggage because like i had a really tough mean sports coach she just made me shouting it at me and made me do press ups and push ups in the mud and so there's a whole bunch of this and they're like well what what is coaching what is coaching and i think there are two ways that coaching can be really helpful there can be really helpful in a in a formal sense which is you you bring somebody into your life typically you're hiring somebody and you're like help me solve a problem help help me move from a to b and one of the challenges with coaching is there's a lot of coaches in the world because there's no qualification yeah the barrier the barrier to entry is simply can you say the phrase i am a coach can if you can do that you can kinda say i'm a coach now so you know there's some really brilliant coaches out there but there's a a certain amount of mediocrity in the profession but if you get a great coach they can help you figure out this and figure out how you're getting in your own way and have figure out how to make progress on a project and they figure out how to find a business model that will scale your business or find a way of showing up to help you be a better parent there's all sorts of people who can say i can help you solve a challenge and if you can find a great coach that is really powerful and that tends to be you know you show up in every on a regular basis you have a conversation with them and you're like here's what's here's what i'm wrestling with and they're like well let me ask you some questions and let me teach you something and we can make some progress on that you know i have coaches i have a couple of coaches at the moment for different parts of the businesses that i run but part of what i'm really trying to champion is this idea that we can all be coach like now i don't want everybody i who reads my book to become a coach i mean if they do okay that's fine but i'm like look if you interact with other human beings being more coach like can be a helpful way of showing up because being more coach like stay curious a little bit longer rushed action and advice giving a little bit more slowly i'll probably say this another nine times during this conversation because actually if you show up and you're a parent and you're trying to raise your kids staying curious is a really powerful way of being with them if you're a manager a leader and you're trying to grow your team not just grow them in terms of they get stuff done but grow their sense of confidence and confidence and autonomy and self sufficiency then asking questions can be a really powerful way of doing that it's not the only way of leading one of the it's part of the baggage that comes with coaching is like what does this mean i can never tell anybody anything ever again because i can only ask where i'm like no no like advice is really powerful and useful in its place just most of us just lean on it a little too heavily and it means that when is a a leader of a business for instance you you do give guidance and you give advice it's more likely to be useful and to the point if you've actually asked some questions beforehand i love that and i think that that's actually you know if like you mentioned coach means different things to different people and i think that like my my sort of lay interpretation of what you're saying is coach is synonymous with good leader like that that's the way that i i look at it and the reason why i say that it's probably that maybe there is a nuance or a difference but the reason i say that is because a good leader whether or not you look at them like for example as a coach because i don't wanna say that a manager in a company they don't have the formal title of coach but a good manager or a good leader in a company is asking questions and is delaying advice giving and is being very curious and is enabling and empowering and letting people sort of come to their own conclusions that that's that's your definition of a coach yeah know so i i say you it i mean i'm i'm basically agree with you but the the new nuance for me is i think a good leader a good manager a good parent is almost always using coaching techniques and coaching skills as part of what they do because it's not the whole thing it's not the whole thing in parenting or leading or managing people but it's a key part and it's typically an underutilized part i mean there's a guy called daniel goldman who he kinda made the idea of emotional intelligence popular and and twenty five years ago he wrote an article for harvard a business rate review and it's called the six styles of leadership and he said look there actually six different styles of leadership and each one has pros and cons risks and rewards each one is appropriate in certain contacts depending on what's what's required and what what's interesting is he said look most leaders use one or two maybe three of these different styles great leaders know how to use or six of these different styles because if there's an emergency if the house is burning down you don't wanna be going how do how do people feel about smoke that's not that's not useful what you need is clear direction if the house is burning down so what's also interesting in that article and i don't think much has changed is that coaching was one of the least utilized forms of leadership even though you could see direct impact not just on culture but actually on bottom line as well it actually drove strategy and culture yeah i i i would assume that's because people don't actually know what coaching is i think that that's the thing they assume the coaching because you mentioned like when you rush to give advice within like the first ten to fifteen seconds that we are actually diminishing the person that we're trying to help but if i was gonna ask somebody okay what is your definition of coaching to be like well when somebody screwing up i'm gonna i'm gonna give them advice well that would be the immediate it's a it's answer to what which is not way to do well i mean that's the i mean that's the this it's says coaching is a slippery word i mean it's basically it gets used in all sorts of different contacts so you know there's you're not alone and going i'm just using coaching as a an updated version of just telling people what to do and that's why i love this kind of core behavior thing which is like can you stay curious a little bit longer if you can do that everything changes so what does that mean staying curious a little bit longer so let's put it into a a framework for people because again this can this this kind of coaching behavior the way that we're we're describing it right now this can be used for an employee hiring if you're an entrepreneur if you are leading a department in a business i know that there's a lot of crossover in like family life how you how do you coach and raise your kids so what is the what is like the framework to do this properly well in the coaching habit book i basically offer up seven questions and say look if you can integrate seven of these questions or even just some of the seven questions into the way that you work that's gonna help you stay curious a little bit longer but the the framework probably starts not with the questions just about with an understanding and and a belief that it's like this would be helpful this would be helpful if i was doing that because if you don't think it's helpful doesn't matter how with the seven questions are you're not gonna you're not gonna use them so when i'm talking to people in in businesses in particular i say look there are three vicious circles that managers and leaders whether a small company or big company that they typically face and and these are the three vicious circles the first is an over independent team like the more they come to you for advice the more you give them advice the more you give them advice and more they come to you for advice and will they come to you and you just into the thing where you're i mean i hired some good people but they've lost all capacity to do anything without running it past me it's really annoying and of course they're saying i i i was really looking forward to working with this person but i now i have to run everything through this other person is it's really annoying and a real bottleneck and there's like control issues and you know an an over dependent team is a team that is not performing because you become a bottleneck they've lost some of their confidence they've lost in their sense of autonomy and everybody's is paying a price for that so that's the first vicious circle the second vicious circle is just a sense of overwhelm you know the more that ends up on your plate the more you lose focus on the key stuff the more you lose focus on the key stuff the more ends up on your plate and before you know it you're like okay i've got emails dating back to nineteen eighty three i've got text i haven't answered i'm gonna think from somebody other day going i've got fifteen thousand five hundred and forty three una unanswered emails in my inbox i'm my god i like i was like i feel physically ill thinking about that but i mean it's a pretty common affairs for most people that they're like i'm never going to get to the end of all the stuff i have to do you know you go to bed because there's slight tremor of anxiety around okay i'm i'm i'm behind i'm behind it's like the white rabbit and alison wonderland i'm late i'm late i'm behind i'm behind and then the third vicious circle is a sense of disconnect you know if you like some sending stuff it's like you've lost the connection to the why of the work you know the less impact you have the more you kinda resign yourself to being a small cog in the wheel machine the the the more you resign yourself the less impact you have and if you're listening and you're like yeah one or two or three of those resonate for me the reason you might be interested in being more coach like is it can help you break through these three vicious circles that it can help you have a team that's less dependent it can help you and those around you feel less overwhelmed and it can help you find connection to the work that matters most so you're gonna have a purpose for the coaching before you actually do that i think that that'll i was i was just gonna say that sounds i mean like from anybody who's even hired one person that sounds like a a good outcome like i i think that we all fall into these traps exactly i'm believe i'm i'm teaching this because i have to learn i still have to learn it annoying unknowingly enough so part of that and i mean people i don't know if everybody knows but you built a coaching company and then you actually exited this company so this you've had like frontline exposure to like the best and the worst coaching in the world look i've done i've i've played all the roles you know i've been an employee i've started a business i've run a business i've exited a business i've started another business i've i consistently make all the mistakes but it means that i've got some scars and some stories to to tell around that so once you understand that a this will be helpful for you to be more coach like that's a that's a good place to start secondly there's a perhaps a a a deep promise about being more coach like is to realize that when people are in conversation with you partly they want a solution to a problem but partly they wanna be seen and they wanna be heard they wanna be seen and hurt as human beings and when you're in advice giving man mode you're actually kind of like i'm just gonna process this stuff and get the work off my plate and get you out of my office or off my zoom screen and there's a way that being curious a little bit longer is actually about human and humanity and about connection as well so just to say those things as framework and then we get and get into the seven questions so i'm gonna rattle through them really fast and scott why don't you tell me which one you wanna double click on and we can go deep on it alright so okay cool the kick start question is what's on your mind one of my beliefs about coaching is that if you can't coach somebody in ten minutes or less you don't have time to coach which means you've just gotta get into what the real stuff is as fast as possible and what's on your mind accelerate you into that then there's the focus question the focus question is what's the real challenge here for you this is really powerful because most organizations and in life people are really busy trying to solve the wrong problems and if actually if you know if you are in business if you realize that the most or one of the most profound changes in identity you can have is moving from the person who has fast ideas to the person who figures out what the real problem is that changes everything the third question is seven is the best coaching question in the world or that's what i say and it's a really simple one and it's and what else and what else because the first answer is never their only answer and it's really their best answer but your advice monster doesn't want you to believe that so and what else honestly if you add just one question to the the mix this might be it the fourth question the foundation question is what you want it's really profound it's a it's of all the seven questions it's probably the hardest one to answer because what do you want i mean what do you really want is kind of existential in some ways but if you can help people figure out what they want you can help them actually have a foundation for action the sixth question fifth question the strategic question if i'm saying yes to this what must i say no to right if you i mean strategy is saying no to the stuff you wanna say yes to so that's a really powerful question the seven question is that the helping question which is like how can i help i i actually call it the lazy question because it sounds contradictory because it's like wait how can i help and you're just asking for more work but one of the things that makes us over work and jump in and try to fix things is we think we know what that other person wants and needs from us but actually one of the most powerful things you can do is just ask them hey how can i help what do you want for me and then the final question is the teaching question which is what was most useful almost valuable for you here with the key inside being look people don't your job as a leader as a parent as a teacher as a manager is to help people get smarter and you gotta know how people get smarter and it's not by telling them stuff annoying enough and it's actually by helping them have a moment to reflect on what just happened and have them extract the value from the moment so that's a kind of rapid fire kind skip through the seven questions hubspot is a success story partner i think about listening to podcast right now you're probably multitasking you're probably catching seventy to eighty percent of what we're talking about but let's flip that and imagine you're only catching twenty percent that'd be crazy right it's really not a good use of your time if you only remember twenty percent of what we're talking about but most businesses most entrepreneurs are only using twenty percent of their data all the most important details in call logs emails chat with their customers it's just left floating in digital space not being used hubspot it gives you the access to those insights to help you grow your business because when you know more you grow more visit at hubspot dot com to get the full picture of your business today nets sweet is a success story partner now what does the future hold for business if you ask nine experts you're gonna get ten answers bull market bear market interest rates are rise they're falling honestly at the end of the day we just need a crystal ball but until then over forty two thousand businesses have 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indeed on this podcast indeed dot com slash cla terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need i think that the question that a lot of people may have is okay i have these seven questions locked and loaded for the next time somebody walks into my office but how do i get somebody to feel comfortable enough to open up and be truthful and actually because you mentioned there's one question and what else which reminds me of almost like the five why right you ask why five times and you you get past all these sort of cognitive walls that people put up these mental blockers but is there a a practice or is maybe one of the questions meant to do that just to get people to be honest about their answers so because it they could just like bullshit and give you whatever they think that you want to hear which is not gonna help you at all but it's a big question let me talk about the seven wise and and what else first and then come because i think it'll lead to a a more expanded answer like the seven wise is a a really a classic discipline particularly in kind of the strategic thing to try and find root cause of stuff yeah but why this but why this but why this oh okay we found the essence of what's going on but i actually recommend most people most of the time don't ask why questions because as soon as i start saying hey scott why did you do this it's very easy for that to sound like hey scott why the hell did you do this why on earth did you do this it's very hard to get the tone of why questions right in a way that doesn't sound like you're pointing a finger adam in some way and also the why in most conversations is actually not that interesting it's not that useful to actually making progress on the conversation so most of those questions that you heard me list start with what because it's a little more open and exploratory and and neutral as a word now the bigger question is around so how do you get people to trust you how do you get people to actually open up and the answer is well it doesn't just happen you know if you've had a two year relationship where you just been telling people what to do and they're like oh i just heard this amazing podcast so what's on your mind you can imagine them going have you been on a course have you been on a conference you've been listening to that podcast again haven't you so it's one of the things that takes time but the first thing i would say is context matters so it depends a little bit whether you've someone somebody into your office for a coaching session or whether you're just in conversation with them and i think that one of the most powerful ways of framing coaching is not that it's an an occasional one off formalized event but that it's an everyday way of working with people and everyday way of of showing up with people because there's no doubt that if i said hey scott i'd like you to come into my office in half an hour i'm going to coach you that's like a vaguely terrifying off you're like i yeah what am i doing what am i being coached on that sounds like i'm being punished for something i don't know how this coaching you know block works what's what's going on here whereas if we're testing conversation and i'm like scott it's a one to one what's what's in your mind how how can i help and that person will meet you where they're at so it's actually quite hard to resist somebody with genuine curiosity showing up with that kind of like i'm here to be helpful what's on your mind how can i help so what's what do you think the real challenge is here for you there's a kind of genuine curiosity in that that is quite s productive quite hard to resist and there are times where people are like yeah i see what you're doing i'm not falling for your games i'm not gonna be answering your questions and then there's a conversation to we had around well look this is the way i wanna be managing now i wanna be leading with a bit more more coaching or you can even say look it feels like we're a little bit stuck in this conversation what does it take for us to go deeper and be more useful for it and there may be other and you can actually just ask that you can ask one of my flu i've got three principles around coaching be lazy be curious be often being lazy is i just stop trying to do their work for them and solve their problems for them but also it includes when you don't know what's happening ask them yeah all those things that are in your y try and why try figure it out because a you'll be wrong and b you could get them to tell you what's actually going on as much as they can being curious means tam your advice monster and being often is that any interaction can be a bit more coach like i mean you know as we finish this podcast or even right now to the people who are listening we can say look you we've been talking for what twenty minutes or something like that maybe half an hour by now and i'm like so we covered quite a lot in a short time because scott's a great ask for of questions but as a listener what's been most useful or most valuable for you so far what do you wanna remember from this podcast because we got another thirty minutes at least to go what what what are you taking away from it so far and the reason i'm doing that scott is is i'm i'm trying to clear people's cash so they've got more room for what's coming to them because at a certain point people's brains get full you're pouring water into a full glass and so having a break about now going hey what's been most used that's been most valuable and people might go or the definition coaching was great or the seven questions were great or the think about trust was great but what it's done is it's kinda to processed rework rewire the insight and we're now opening up to a deeper conversation because i can have my own curiosity but because you've worked with the framework for so long i would actually ask out of the seven questions which is the one that is not brought up or not asked enough that is probably the most powerful that you wish people would ask organically more when they're trying to coach and help somebody all the questions can can really unlock something powerful you know the strategic question is is underutilized because almost everybody has too much stuff going on and the and it is quite scary to say no to the stuff that you wanna do so there's something quite powerful in in the strategic particularly if you're running businesses where you're like oh you know maybe i'll just keep my options open but strategy what am gonna say no to and if i'm gonna say if i'm gonna say yes to this if i'm gonna be fully committed to this what what must i say no to to make that actually a decision with some oo to it but actually i think the one that shifts behavior the most is simply the question how can i help or a variation on that which is like what do you want from me and i'll rewind a few steps just to explain why i'm saying that there's a a model of human dynamics that i love it's called the carbon drama triangle and it says that look whenever things get dysfunctional and of course in relationships things always get dysfunctional eventually three different roles play out there's the victim there's the per executor and there's the rescue so what i love about is you immediately know what these roles look like and sound like you know when somebody's playing the victim mode bit w bit complain but oh it's so hard that's not fair but there's a genius to the victim role is that they attract people trying to help them and fix them and save them then there's a per persecuted mode the per humor mode you know what that looks like it's like the bully somebody shouting more subtly it's like the micro manager kind of like let me try let me control everything basically it's like look i'm good i'm surrounded by turkeys if anything breaks around here it's because i've got idiots left right in the center if anything works just because i've miraculously pulled something out of the fire there's a there's something that's great about playing the person heater role which is like you feel better than everybody you feel superior you feel you know kind of like you're you're the best person there but it's a it's but it's a lonely overwhelmed place because nobody like you when the whipping stops everybody goes home and you feel like you have to do everybody's work for them because they're all useless just like with the victim you know for all of the oh this is great because everybody comes and rescues me it's an utterly powerless place to be because you're like i got no control no power no influence and then the third role is the rescue which i appreciate sounds better than the victim and the per but trust me it as equally as dysfunctional as the other two roles and the rest is like let me jump in let me fix it let me solve it let me help that does not fight let me give it to me i'll take it on and the the advantage of playing that role as quite controlling you got your fingers and everybody's pie you feel helpful you also feel like you're a matter to the cause nobody appreciates how hard i work as i try and make everything work around here but the price you pay is a you perpetuate the the triangle because rescuers create victims rescuers is even create yeah exactly and also you're like so busy doing everybody else's work you know you're exhausted your burnt out you never get to your own important work so that's a helpful framework i love it and then if you ask that question and then it's shifting it's so regardless of how dysfunctional this this relationship is it it is shifting if you wanna be the rescue or it just seems like a comfortable spot for people to fall into it's not so don't don't don't buy the hype so then shift shift the how can i help to something that's actually meaningful to the person as opposed to just yeah turning them into you got this so fast because how can you help is a way of it's a self management question to control your rescue tendencies because when i ask people how you know of those three roles which roles you identify with most and i've done this with lots of people ninety to ninety five percent of people will say i i identify as a rescue which i actually think is often the the choice that a victim would make but that's a whole another story but if people go look i am a that means i've got a tendency to jump in uni unrelated to try and fix things then that question how can i help or what do you want from me is a way of slowing down the dynamic just enough so that you're not instantly pulled into the rescue mode and you know it comes with this key key addition which is when they tell you what they want you don't have to say yes to it you get to say yes or you get to say no or you get the say maybe or you get to say not that but i could do this instead but it's like at least you get to hear a clear request from them and you get to decide what to do with that because if at the heart of this is how do we build adult to adult relationships in our workplaces and our lives well what's an adult to adult relationship it's being able to ask for what you want knowing that the answer might be no and be willing to negotiate the difference and that's a true relationship that's an uncle call that an adult to adult relationship and it turns out as simple as it sounds asking for what you want knowing that the answer might be no and negotiating the differences they're all hard things to do but if you can step into that and asking that question what you want or how can i help is part of the equation of that you go through a framework i've heard you speak about it before it's it's a it's a philosopher framework martin b framework on i vow and i it and i think that this all comes in i don't wanna get too complicated on people who are listening but i think this all comes down to building relationships with humans as opposed to like who they are as a human as opposed to just what their function is in the job or or in life right and can you explain can you explain that concept just at a very basic level and why it's important to use this concept understand if we're treating somebody like a human versus a job title the good news is i only understand it at a very basic level so that that's the limit and i'll be able to to explain it because me man is a a a philosopher and a spiritual list and i'm none of the above but i think he just says this very simple powerful saying look your your relationships has fallen into two different categories many of them are i it relationships which is when that other person is a bit object when you're trying to get something from them and you're trying to get something from you and that's okay but a more enlightened type of relationship as an i vowel relationship which is that sense of you know you feel seen you both feel seen and you both feel heard and you both feel present and you're both feel able to bring the best of who you are to that other person's presence and you know it feels to me that that's aspirational as much as i don't know forty three percent of my relationships are either thou relationships but we so often work in context which kind of nudge just towards less humanity rather than more humanity i mean i think organizational work you know in many organizations as you can feel a little bit of a part of a cognitive machine you know there's a lot of transaction that is going on and it's this very hard to forget your own and forget other people's humanity in the mix and i think one of the we touched on this right at the start which is one of the the the less seen aspects of being more coach like staying curious a little bit longer is this sense of relational curiosity of connection to the other person is there is there a way because i think that listen we're talking about work but i think that some people even in relationships it starts to become transactional and they forget the humanity when you've been married to somebody for thirty plus years i'm not sure i'd go that far i think even when you're in mean because if i look at most of my relationships most of the time it's me aspiring to iv relationships rather than me being in iv relationships even with my wife who i love and you know it's been thirty pretty great years there are times where i'm like you know snip and this sat and the other and i'm like because that is this an eye moment it's not an eye moment it's an eye at moment so it feels as much as a an orientation to say keep remembering that that's what i'm trying to what i'm trying to get to and there's no doubt that some of these coaching techniques and leadership techniques they work they work just fine in in i relationships what i would notice is there are moments when you're coaching somebody you're being more coach like with them the opportunity to kinda touch the eye there becomes easier becomes a little a little bit closer you know i get like you know one of the things that we talked about before we hit record was next year twenty twenty six the tenth anniversary of the coaching habit at book i'm really trying to figure out how to make it a better known resource for parents picking parents are teenagers because yeah you're in an ie relationship it's parents and teenagers it's like teenagers and their brains are melting and their you know they're like rebelling against everything and they're allergic to advice even as they struggle with all the hard stuff that young people are up against parents are like what happened to my nice kid you've turned into this monster and by the way take my advice because i think you i know what you should be doing and it's like it's set up for this kind of tough tough passage and i get i mean i and i don't even have kids at my own like these are the stories of their head i'm i'm i'm happily child free but cheering on all the parents and i get emails regularly from parents saying look it turned out that me asking questions and then being quiet and being present and thing for an answer that shifted something in the relationship and know for a moment perhaps it's just gotten a little closer to being an eye relationship with that kid talk about what transfers over from these questions and sort of these frameworks into like a personal relationship maybe all of it does but is there any nuance is there any way that you do it differently is there any way that you because you can't be like hey come into my office to talk about our marriage no or talk about or talk about you know could try that the fact that might be the end of your marriage yeah so what do you do differently what do you do the same what carries over what doesn't well i think the what's what's the same is this principle which is like hey can i stay curious about this person on what's going on can i resist the need to fix things because i mean my best is this has been true for every single person listening to this podcast you've had that moment when you know maybe the your spouse or your partner or that romantic person in your life or maybe just a close friend you're like hey this is what i'm up against and they're like oh you know what you should do and your heart sinks a little bit because you're like that you know a i'm not really looking for advice b your advice is terrible this a if i was looking for advice it wasn't the advice you've just given me because this is not doesn't feel helpful at all and you know often enough people just wanna have somebody listen to them and challenge them and provoke them you know there's a there's a phrase i use and i think this works in all these relationships that you have it can be more coach like in a way of showing up that is aspirational and it is exists it is fierce love so the love part for me means i want the best for them i want them to be the best version of who they are you know it's like part of part of my role as your is your husband as your your friend as your boss as your colleague is to try and contribute to you being the best version of you and a fierce for me means a willingness to do and say what needs to be done as part of my commitment to that and also a willingness to not do and not say the things that need to be not said and not done as part of my my commitment to that so a fierce level might manifest itself in you going look i'm gonna ask the question and be present to whatever that person says and not correct them and not give them advice and not give them suggestions or it might be to say hey look this is the pattern i'm noticing or it might be and it doesn't feel like it's healthy or it might say this is the impact your words have just had on me and this is how i feel sad or angry on embarrassed or whatever it might be around that because there's like a fiercest to say look it's hard this stuff is hard but my commitment to that person being the best version of themselves and therefore me being the best version of myself with them in other words i thou relationships requires some of that and if you've got that and you know that curiosity can take you a long way down the path for this you can abandon the i mean the seven questions are great because they they work in in many contacts but actually it said essence of stay curious stay present help them be seen be heard have a fierce heart and open love fierce love that that works if you're working with another human being the hub about podcast network is a success story partner now a quick podcast recommendation i've been listening to truth lies and work they're in the hubspot podcast network just like success story it's this husband and wife team a and lia elliott they break down why people actually do what they do at work so if you have a business if you manage people if you have to hire people at any point you have to listen to their show i just listened to an episode on why good employees suddenly quit that's an issue that we all have and it totally clicks for me one of the reasons they i explained is why it's not usually about the money it's about all these little promises that we as founders entrepreneurs managers leaders we break without realizing it like when you tell someone you just hired that they're gonna learn all these new skills but you just keep giving them the same task over and over and over again it made me realize that i probably lost a lot of good people for dumb reasons that i never noticed and hiring is one of the most important things you could figure out so if you manage people or if you just wanna understand what makes your coworkers tick it's worth checking out listen the truth lies and work wherever you get your podcast chip station is a success story partner you know what separates successful online businesses from literally everyone else it's not just having great products it's delivering an amazing shipping experience that keeps customers coming back all of my friends that run the biggest 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people that are adopting they they're listening to this they wanna to adopt this framework just so that they don't do things the wrong way what is the the the number one thing that people screw up when they're trying to coach and they implement this framework what do they do wrong well i would i would first of all invite people to say you don't have to feel that you're coaching somebody just be more coach like with them so as soon as you as as soon as you're coaching you say i'm coaching you that can often come with that baggage we talked about right at the cell is she's like i'm trying to solve this i'm trying to fix this i'm trying to be valuable here i'm trying to move you from a to b and actually more valuable is your presence and and your curiosity in the conversation so it's like how do i be more coach like and and so and you heard me say this before but to say it again which is like so realize that you can be doing this all the time you can be doing it at dinner around a table you can be doing as you drive them from a to b you can do it on a walk together is just asking a question being present and listening to the answer and i'd say if there's one thing that people could think about on and look at is like just notice how fast you wanna to interrupt and how fast you wanna offer ideas and opinions i mean there's a ted talk around there's a tedx talk called how to tang your advice once where we get get into this a little bit do you wanna kind of a my this isn't an side scott but my my favorite comment on the ted on that ted video is i tried to watch this but his trousers were too tight so you know people pizza people can decide whether or not they wanna risk seeing me in two tight trousers i to kinda of watch me talking about the advice monster but it's like that's why if you're gonna pick a question it might be and what else or it might even just be silence because actually we're so keen to be helpful and so keen to add value and so keen just feel like we're we're part of it we just so often and jump in with stuff that you don't actually need you can just hold the space for them i don't know it's just it's this landing i mean you know i'm worried i'm worried a little bit that i'm getting a bit too woo for people here so i'm wondering how they're landing for you you know it's so funny because he just mentioned like you were concerned that it was sort of like a two of a an esoteric woo idea i think that actually just shows how conditioned we are as humans to just jump in and give like this hard tactical advice because like we're talking about we're talking about creating space for people to to to be curious to talk about things that are actually important to them that's how you build relationships that's how that's how you just become a better leader a better coach a better human being that that shouldn't be that shouldn't be woo that should be the default operating system for most people however it isn't and you know when i say say curious a little bit longer i'm not saying for a week and a half i mean honestly if i can get people to say curious for another seventy five seconds that would be that would be a great win and for the who's listening who's going yeah but how do i give advice i mean what if i want to give advice well first of all there are sometimes when giving advice immediately is the right thing to do like when somebody comes and says hey michael where's the folder we don't wanna have a coaching conversation around that i wanna say look the folders over there in the cubicle call over there go get it so there's a place but if you're like i've got some ideas i wanna share them when do i best share them let me give everybody a script so they can use this exact script scott comes to me and goes hey michael how do i how do i become a better podcast now scott's done a thousand shows for this podcast i've been doing it for six years i've been podcasting for twenty years i haven't actually done a thousand shows yet but i've been like i'm older than he i've i've got no no twenty years is like you one of the og like i had a podcast before anything called podcast existed but when when the when the word podcast podcasting cable i had to rename my show to call it for something something podcast so when scott comes to me and says michael how do i be a better podcast trust me i've got a bunch of ideas just based on this interview alone well i could like i can tell you a thousand thousand things but that's not the way to do it so here's what i would say god comes to me knows how do i i go scott great question i've got some ideas and i'm gonna share my best ones with you but before i tell you what i'm thinking what ideas do you already have and you see i'm just hitting the ball back over the head saying tell me what ideas you've already had because they always come with at least one idea and scott will give me his his first idea and i'm like that's great i like it what else could you do and what else could you do and what else could you see how i'm just using the am m1 else question here just to carry the comment i'm just keeping the curiosity space open longer and if i feel like the energy is winding down a little bit i'll go is there anything else it's is there anything else as a variation on and one else and it's kind of a shall i shut the door or shall i leave it open a little longer is there anything else since come my go well no that's about it i'm like look i love all of those let me give you a couple of ideas of my own that i think can add and build onto onto your ideas and then i'll share my advice so why this script works so well is a you stay lazy you help them figure out their own ideas because what's miraculous is when you go what ideas have you already got and what else they won't even realize that they've got those ideas saying them out loud they're like i had more ideas than i realized to solve this problem secondly it it shows you what ideas you already had that aren't worth sharing because they already had them so you don't kind of repeat redundant or obvious ideas you're actually figuring out what they already know and thirdly it means that when you do share your ideas at the end a you're sharing something new and better and you're suddenly saying yeah i still got it i still i still have a few things up my sleeve that you don't you don't know so you're kind of reminding them you've got some value and some wisdom and some perspective and all of that so it's a much faster accelerated way to get their ideas out on the table and go these are all great i love all of them here a couple from me now of all those ideas which ones are you most excited about it also if you're in a in a working relationship in particular where you're the boss it gets over the the boss's idea is always the best idea phenomenal you know what normally happens is like when the boss says well i have an idea i think we should do this everybody goes that's a really good idea let's well i'm writing it down well i think we should do the boss's idea and you know obviously the boss's idea is not always the best idea you sort of gone through a lot of different questions that can help someone else but i know that you also have a daily practice where you ask yourself questions so again the questions are the root of i do a obsessed happiness moment what yeah yeah like i i'm just like i'm i i love a good question like i've been collecting the no no i i do too yeah listen and it's this is the good questions changed my life on the podcast and on yeah yeah but you have a daily practice where you ask yourself five questions so three questions in the morning two questions at night so what are these questions and why are they so important because i'm listen i'm i'm not naive i'm assuming that some of the questions that you ask yourself they're also on uncovering the same things you're trying to figure out in other people yeah exactly so the three questions i i i journal in the morning too and you know some people journal off for you know half an hour i joan off for five minutes maybe make some days a bit more some days a bit less but it's a way of me just kinda grounding myself in the moment so the first question is what do you notice and that's trying to make me a little bit more present to it's just what's going on in my life so what's in my head what's out my window what's in my heart what am i feeling just kinda what's the swirl of thing that's going around because i'm i'm a bit of a heavy guy and i'm a bit of a kind of living in the future guy and what do you notice is asking me to be present in the moment right here right now so that's the first question the second question is one from the coaching habit book which is what do you want and i tell you what this question annoys me every morning because it is a it is a hard question to answer like it i mean you can answer it a really superficial level like i want my coffee but really it's trying to it's inviting you to go a little deeper because i what you what you want what do you want in your life what you want in this day what you want in this week what you want in this whatever and what i find is having to answer that question kinda on a on a for me anyway five times a week basis when when the same answers keep coming up i'm like i i probably need to do something about this and then the third question is what's the one thing so i i still live a life of perpetual over commitment i'm like i'm trying to get a bit better at it but it's it's a long journey and so you know i'll rock up to a day and i'll have somewhere between ten and forty different tasks to do which are completely disconnected from the fact that my calendar is fully booked with other stuff that i've committed to do and i'm like i just spent i can't tell you how much many hours of my life i've spent re dating to do tasks they move it from three days ago to five days in the future hoping it was some magical thinking that i'll get it done so what's the one thing to do is an encouragement to say look don't do ninety three tasks and avoid the most important task do the one thing that will move your worthy goal your great work the thing that matters most if you only do one thing today what's the one thing that matters most so those are the three morning questions and then there's a question designed for the evening it it turns out that i also answer yesterday's question in the morning when i when i'm doing that but it is what made today a good day what made today a good day and it's a kind of a it's kind of a gratitude question you know and i'm sure lots of people have have heard that kind of gratitude is that silver bullet if you can have a gratitude practice in general your life is going to go to get better and there are questions related to it like what did i make progress on today there's a a book by a harvard professor theresa mar called the progress principle they said look at work people feel good about work if they make regular daily progress on something that matters to them so i was like you could make it what progress did you make but i wanted it to not just be about progress or productivity or efficiency like of all the things that happened in the day what what are you celebrating what are you grateful for for because sometimes it's like you know the the bin man came and i didn't think they were gonna come and it means that we're actually gonna have crashed cleared away or sometimes it's like my my wife begged a peach pie and i only get one peach pie a year and it was it was yesterday so that was what made yesterday a great day and so that that point of reflection for the day so if we talk about if we talk about sort of daily practices and the goal setting something else that you you you help people with what is an actual goal or what is a worthy goal because i think that's something that i think allude people a lot they don't i've thought about this a lot actually how many people just sort of mean and or through life and they don't really even know why they're doing the things they're doing and i see it a lot with entrepreneurs who are just trying to build the company because that's what instagram said they should do or they work a job because that's what their parents said they should do or their guidance counselor so what is a worthy goal how do we how do we quantify that you're right i mean it's a it's a bit of a minefield walking into this whole goal setting thing because there's there's a thousand things around everything from at a corporate level we can start talking about o chaos and kind of all of that sort of stuff people have been talking about smart goals forever nobody can ever quite remember what smart stands for they're like i think i can guess but there's like two or three or four options for every one of those letters and i'm try i'm talking about the bigger goals the kind of the bigger game that you wanna be playing and it's with a an article i read from kevin kelly many years ago in the context of something causes his death clock so suddenly everything turns a bit dark here which is like you can calculate statistically your date of death he's like he gives a bunch of kind tables in a way of kind of like plugging in who you are how old you are how tall you are how what your body mass index is a bunch of other things and it will give you a an estimated date of death so for me it's oh my god it's like twenty thirty seven i can't be right i feels too soon but god twelve years yeah exactly no it's gotta be longer than that because i'm in fifty seven and i'm i'm sure i'm alive into my seventies but it doesn't matter i forgotten my date of death but i thought was really powerful as kevin goes after you've figured out your date of death here's the thing to say it takes about five years to do a major project whether that's a book or a move or a family it was something it's something significant really if you think of the whole thing working five block five year blocks and i felt really powerful because you know i know looking at that i was like i've got about five big projects left in me what are those five projects gonna be and that's what i've given the language and in the book how to begin worthy goals it's like how do you do something that makes a difference and so the three pillars of a worthy goal is it needs to be thrilling important and daunting i think this one might be useful for people so thrilling means does it actually light you up does it actually get you excited does it actually feel like it speaks to the values you have the things that you care about does it make your pulse but go a little faster is make you rub your hands and you go i'd be totally up for that but because as you said i think it's so true so often we inherit goals that well like i always i should be doing this but actually there's no real thrill on it there's just an obligation so one of the tests of any goal you're setting yourself is you know on scale one to seven how thrilling is this for me the second test for me anyways it's important meaning it contributes to the world it gives more to the world than it takes because like i'm all if people setting goals that that are good for them but for me this world needs all the help it can get and i'm trying to encourage people to take on goals that that make their world a better place it doesn't have to you know you don't have to liberate india like gandhi it can be you know your family it can be your neighborhood it can be your team it can be a workplace whatever you're are defining your world is but it's like does it add to the general good and i do love that quote from jacqueline nova regrets she has a ted talk on this which is like can you give more to the world than you take that feels like a really powerful place to stand and then the third element is is a daunting in other words is this gonna stretch you and grow you is this gonna take you to the edge of who you are today and crack that open so you can become the person you want to be tomorrow you know this is the this is future you calling you and so daunting is like you know i know kinda had a i know how to take the first few steps on this but i don't really know how to get get it to the end goal and you know we have a we have a little community called the conspiracy which is people working on their worthy goals it's like books that's going back to universities at it's recalibrate themselves as parents it's building a home halfway house for a a a murdered sun there's all sorts of really powerful projects working on but they've all got these different three drivers which is it is thrilling for them they care about it there's a flame important it contributes to the world and it's daunting it is stretching them and growing them to make them the the next best version of who they might be there's a little bit a little bit of like self coaching involved in this to be honest because you can you can coach other people all but if you're not helping yourself sort of guide you and put you on the right path for your life i mean you're just gonna you're gonna be wondering so this is this is about figuring out like really like why are we here what exactly what we it's us it's it's it's that really big question why are we what am i doing what is what does a life of significance look like and what can i do to have a little more of that significance because you know there's a lot going on for everybody there's ever got a lot on their plate but as somebody once said you know many of us live lives are quiet desperation and one of the ways to move beyond that is to start going what's the worthy goal for me you ask yourself these questions how do you know when your answers are right and you should make and you should take action on them gosh that's great well what i here's how i suggest you do it first of all i think it takes a number of drafts for you to get closer to what your worthy goal might be so the first thing you put down is probably a great start and it's probably not your final answer so one of the things that i suggest is like you keep going how do i keep tweaking this to make a closer more resident on thrilling important daunting but a certain point you're like alright this feels like it might be pretty good and then you reach this moment where you're like okay i've i've declared this as a worthy goal do i do it or do i not do it and what i suggest is that people look at both of those options because those are both two real options and ask yourself what are the prizes and punishments of choosing this option what are the prizes and punishments of not doing this and we've i've done a lot work to define it but what are the prizes and punishments if i didn't do at the prize is that the status quo maintains the same you know you don't disrupt anything you don't actually have people going on what the hell are you doing michael why you why are you doing this now you risk very little the punishment is pretty much the same the status quo remains the same you remain the same no expectations of you shift you continue on the plateau plateau that you're at and then you look at the chance of of of doing it what are the prizes and punishments of that well the prizes are you become the next best version of you you achieve this thing you stretch and grow you do think you don't even think you can do right now the punishment is you fail you know that once that risk is at this might not work you might annoy people you might be os criticized from your current community this might cost you time and money and it may not get your result that is there is risk involved in taking on a worthy goal and you have to weigh up those prizes and punishments and go i've i've looked at it as clearly as i can knowing that what's the choice i wanna make and then once you make the choice find your people to do it with because it's really hard to do this by yourself so you need to find your you need to find travelers with you people who who bring different energies you know you know you you need you need you know this this draws on kind of native american wisdom and calling in the four energies you know you need warrior or energy you need healer energy you need teacher you need visionary energy and you will have some of that yourself but you need other people to help you with that and whether it's a coach or whether it's a community or whether it's your friends whatever it might be start the journey knowing that whatever you think is your worthy goal is gonna change and evolve and morph for a little bit as you begin the journey because it's just your best guess for now of course but you still have the the the caveat is you have to start you're gonna start it's like classic hero's journey stuff which is like you know what you hear the call you have a choice you cross over the threshold you're not cross over the threshold as soon as you cross the threshold and the hero's journey which of course is not a gender thing it's a male female or whatever you you are changed as a hero you know and the adventure continues by the time you return you'll be a different person and the question is do you answer the call and to answer the call you have to cross the threshold i think that's the the i think that's the the meaning of life at the end of the day you're not supposed to you're not supposed to you you will never die the same person you were born i know you have to go on these days exactly okay you have how to begin the advice trap the coaching habit which has over a million copies sold you have you've written other books on on coaching and leadership but next year is a ten year anniversary of the coaching habit which is first of all congratulations i'm still on my first book journey so i'm gonna probably ask you some maybe something maybe maybe we'll do a coaching session another time on on the podcast and on how to write a book and i'll get opinions about that for sure one one of which is you should almost certainly not write a book unless you really really wanna write a book it's a lot of work it's a lot of work and it almost never works i mean like the coaching habit isn't an anomaly because not only has it sold more than a million copies but i self published it because they got turned down by theory a publisher yeah bringing bringing good stuff to the world is really wonderful like you do with this podcast writing a book is just another channel for content and it's worth thinking is to book the right format of all of that but that's that's for another time perhaps maybe maybe maybe for your tenure year anniversary you can talk about the life of a self published off because that's not easy i know how difficult that is but what my question was was first of all what can people look forward to for the ten year anniversary but also so let's let's go through i'll i'll list all the things that i want you to drop for the audience and then you can go through them so i want you to drop website and social so people can go follow it'll be in the show notes too tenth year your anniversary walk can people look forward to for the coaching habit and then after you just give some people some information to where to go and i want to look forward to i want you to just give people one last sort of just if they could only take away one thing from the coaching habit the most important lesson than what would it be great okay so next year is the ten year anniversary the coaching habit stoked about it so it's a miracle that a book stays relevant for ten years so we're doing a we're doing a hard back version a funky kind of tweak on the cover design i'm really interested in excited by the fact that it's in become an illustrated book so there's gonna be a kind of a graphic novel experience as you read through the book and my friend my friend eric has designed this and it's just delightful so that's gonna be great and i've also written a a new chapter about it and i i'll talk about what that is in just a minute if you want more about me and the stuff i do the kinda umbrella website is m mb s dot works so mb dot works if you pursue the book tab each of the books have like a a ton of additional resources video teaching and downloads and other bits and pieces and that's all free so you're welcome to go and pill any of the resources from the books i'm on linkedin and instagram mb s underscore works at that's the main other social i'm on and you know you you perhaps this is the thing to leave folks were gone when i was writing the the ten year anniversary edition i was writing a new chapter and i wanted to add a little bit new content i didn't wanna wreck it by doing a director's cut of a book and make it worse but i wanted to add a chapter and in the end the chapter the new chapter is about the being of coaching and we've touched on this a little bit but one of the things that's become really clear to me over the last ten years which wasn't clear to me when i first wrote the book is a lot of this idea of coaching is showing up and staying curious longer and using the seven questions and all of that good stuff but when you're in that type of conversation with somebody you're role modeling way of being with that person which is heart forward heart centered fierce love curious present people remember the conversations with you really not for the questions are asking them but for the for the way you're showing up for them so you know we can get a lot wrapped around the axle thinking about techniques of this stuff but the real core form of this work is how do you keep showing up as this best version of who you are generous and present with fierce love the last question i'd like to ask you've given a lot of advice but if you could only pass on one piece of advice after all of your work and and your your life's to work if you only pass on one piece of advice to your kids what would that piece of advice be in a hawaii here's what comes to me before you ask before you tell people what you think ask almost always before i tell you i'm just curious to know what do you think about this and just always hear their point of view first because it is such a generous invitation it gives you more context and understanding of what's going on and it invites them into the spotlight to be the kind of the hero of the conversation cognate is a success story partner now have you ever wondered how all those scammers get your phone numbers all those tele marketers how you're always drowning and all these spam calls it's data brokers right now hundreds of companies are collecting and selling your personal information without your consent your address your phone number even your family members names to anyone who's willing to pay and this puts you at risk of identity theft scams and harassment and that's where cog comes in they contact over two hundred and thirty data brokers on your behalf and legally force them to delete your personal information no more spending hundreds of hours doing it yourself and cog handles all the paperwork follows up on objections and keep your data off the market with repeated removal i've actually been using incognito myself it's scary and also incredible to see how much of my data was out there but they get rid of it they've got a thirty day money back guarantee so you can try it at risk free use my code success adding cog dot com slash success to get an exclusive sixty percent off their annual plans you have to take back control of your privacy today success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square me there claude is a success story partner now as a podcast my worst nightmare used to be going into an interview under prepared now claude has completely changed my prep game and if you don't know what claude is claude is the ai for mines that don't stop at good enough it is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you not for you whether or not 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success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there in this lessons episode uncover the framework that enables businesses to scale far beyond incremental growth discover why singularity of focus eliminates distractions and drives exponential results understand how a strong cadence of accountability transforms performance and culture and explore how building repeatable processes create sustainable momentum for long term success maybe i'm just being pessimistic that it's hard to replicate in every single circumstance but you did it and you you've probably worked with other ceos to do it too so is that is that you know you exit that now is that where it works i wanna i wanna understand how you did it and i wanna understand your process and you know at a high level only have a few minutes that to do this but so so after that is this when you started advising is this one kingston lane chain to be is that after the real estate transaction yeah yeah yeah so so totally so that let there's two parts as puzzle right one we'll let's actually break down you know kinda what is the formula for ten the business so let we'll give it to everybody so that's really good but very briefly touch on what i do now so a we three things number one is i have active operating businesses that i run and there are across the board some are in the roles of business some are not that's but that they're all part of what is part two which is my partner and i have a fund so we have a private fund that we invest in businesses some we operate some we don't which means they have professional operators mh and so we are investors advisors to those and most of my time is spent either operating businesses that we own or that we're investors in that's because that way if i scott you're are one of our portfolio company ceos i have a vested interest in making sure that the business grows five ten fifteen x and you succeed i have vested interest in that now outside of that i probably spend a hand a little bit of time i i probably have sixty eight c founder ceos at any given time and the average business size is roughly twenty five to fifty million and the goal for that is to get them to two hundred and fifty to five hundred million over three to five years so that's the goal so i never take on more than sixty to eight at any given time and most of these folks you know it's a it's how do you break the grass glass ceiling of how do i get past this so it's it's a it's a cool very cool relationship all all mind mentoring relationships all have an equity stake in it which makes sure that i'm aligned with that growth because most operators are like hey i'm doing twenty million you get me to two hundred you can gladly have the ten percent because that's we started off in the first place so that's no problem at all now let's talk about the formula for how you actually you know technically playbook that's good that's the pay out right yeah here's a playbook on mechanics connect something right so there's a it's unfair to say that oh yeah this will work for anything right but but there's is a there's a call it a heuristic there's it's a guideline like go with the framework right frame there are three parts here part number want a singularity of focus the if you think that you can add seventeen hundred skus eighteen business lines and all to get that result you're crazy that stuff does not work like after you've achieved the ten x then you can add more to it but the the what drives the bus is hey i'm gonna turn my focus to one big bone i'm gonna wake up and i'm gonna na on this big bone i'm gonna ask everybody in my organization to figure out what is this big bone that they can on and the question becomes for them hey i'm waking up in the morning am i doing something that's helping me with this big bone or it's not so the filter becomes very clear when everyone's working on different initiatives and different divisions yeah you start to have some acc revenue on a lot of this stuff but the singular division never driven forward so i'll give you a very simple example when we had we decided in on our real estate business growth that we would drive everything by people so it was all it was straight up everything related to acquiring great sales talent and that sales talent drove our business and so everyone everyone's was like well yeah we should train productive people we should have sales skills and i'm like i don't care about any of this our goals to go higher and recruit and retain the best salespeople possible and that's really hard to do in a competitive environment so our singularity of focus was if we got to six hundred plus really productive salespeople doing what they did they would drive our business so that was our singularity area of focus now every time i did anything my team would say sean why are you driving to san diego is this gonna help us ten x like they would ask me that question they're good team yeah a yeah it's really good because then i would ask them the same question say like hey why are we why are we spending three million dollars on this advertising campaign does it help us get there right so the filter is really important so number one singularity focus on the problem with the singularity of focus is as an operator you and i i call it out when you're inside the bottle it's hard to read the label you think seventeen things are important but as an adviser when i'm looking from the outside i can tell you sixteen of those are noise yes it may drop revenue a little bit but it's really hard to do by yourself right so that's so singularity focus is number one number two call it the cadence of accountability accountability is is an interesting concept right like hey if you wanna if you wanna lose weight what do you do you get an accountability coach you gotta get that food every single meal that you that true yeah you have a you need yeah you need some form of accountability right yeah so i'll tell you i'll actually give you the practical accountability that we have so i was like hey we need to go recruit some really bad ass salespeople and normally what i would say hey we'd have this chicken call every friday to see where our recruiters were at getting these great salespeople and we made kind of bumping along progress and i was like well this is stupid it's this is we're not growing as fast as we need so scott is exactly what we did at nine forty five every single morning we had eleven what we call sales managers their job was to go work record great kids his salespeople at nine forty five every single morning five days a week we got on a phone call and the eleven people went an order it was like jim jack scott johnny same order every single day and they would reel out two numbers they would out they would say two zero one five eight seven whatever it was right the first number was how many appointments did i have yesterday and the second number was how many appointments do i have scheduled today mh so think about that for a second i say two zero then yu go you say three one and the next person goes and says zero zero how do you think that person feels right now terrible i'll tell you all three of those people should feel terrible because they should be moving in the opposite direction then correct i i hear what you're saying yeah yeah but nobody what we saw is nobody that said zero zero ever turned up the next day and had a zero zero again right i think motivated right yeah and you also realized that if somebody could be it also gives you a perspective of what is possible someone said seven three i had seven appointments yesterday and three today that's crazy someone that says zero nine you know that hey i was busy whatever and scott all we did was this there was no judgment it was you wake up nine forty five it went an order and if someone missed the call i paused for ten seconds to let everybody know that that spot was not taken that day i mean it got very very clear and it sounds militant but that was the single most important thing that drove the accountability of because we knew that appointments drive people we knew them because without meeting with people you're not hiring anybody so our cadence of accountability was this fifteen minute chunk that we installed in our business that literally changed the nature of our entire business right so number one singular to focus number two cadence of accountability now in the different companies that i work with that accountability is a different thing it just so happens that in in our business we've that was the fifteen minute chunk that we came up with number three good process and good process alone drives good results so a lot of times what we say is i'll i'll i'll figure it out later is what the average entrepreneur says right and that's why they that's why they'll like doubling your business is actually easy you can tighten in a few screws get a few bowls sell and make a bunch of extra calls you know offer a bunch of discounts you can double your business but when you do that it's very hard to sustain a doubling because you have your way to doubling it and everything starts to break mh so the one thing that we realized from a process perspective was when a new salesperson came in because we drove our business with people then we needed to have like a bad ass onboarding program and that's all we focused on because we said if if scott comes on and he has a delightful onboarding process he never leaves and continues to be happy producing results for us so i literally shut down my focus on anything else and all i worked on was how do i have the most amazing like we brought my consultant from four seasons and your you know you is see sharp where forces was warren with toronto we brought a consultant for four seasons to say how do we design this delightful onboarding process and that was a process for us so for us it was how do we get to you know six hundred plus people selling three point four billion dollars a year how do we do this fifteen minute call every single day and how do we have an insane onboarding process those three things were this very specific three things that actually drove our ten growth i love it and it makes sense because now you're taken that you taking that mantra that ideology that that that that one bone you have and on on and then you just you have that one bone and each piece that will actually lead back to your main high level kpi bone whatever and how now i'm curious how do you how do you figure out what that bone is as an entrepreneur stuck in the bottle right yeah so so it's a it's a series of questions and then i think that's the process that's a little difficult right so i'll give you an i'll give an i'll you an example i was driving to a con i drove to a conference that i went to there was a hundred entrepreneurs invited to this conference i'd never had a i'd i was busy around operating my business at this time i get to this conference i sit down i'm put on and put out my hoodie and i'm sitting in the back i'm like hey i can't believe i'm here i committed to being here it's a whole day it's wasting my day that's what most entrepreneurs when most entrepreneurs go to conferences there's like i can't believe here right and i'm sitting there it's past lunch and i'm like i wasted this morning i'm here i might as well listen this this five foot four lady shows up on stage she starts talking and i'm like i should probably pay attention and scott started talking about leadership building a business etcetera and i started writing some notes and as she was talking a couple of questions came to mind so i was almost gonna raise my hand for verbally to ask the question but i felt like as soon as i asked the question she naturally answered it in my head mh like a ear experience right and then i would take more notes i would have another question and she would magically answer the next question i was like that's weird like the how does she know what i'm thinking that's weird that she did this through a whole hour and i i was driving home that day and i'm like this is magical call my dad i'm like dad you won't believe what happened and just as a you know i call my dad because call my dad and he says oh well you should hire her and i'm like to do what well she can answer all your questions even before you're thinking about then maybe she can help you with your business your life whatever i was like well i don't know what i would do and so he goes well write an email or my dad was very good about you know scripting good about language patterns and he said give you the phrasing told it's sean writer this email that says hey so and so i i met you at this event and you're amazing and here was the phrasing the hughes and he says i would like to offer you blank and he said come up with a number a dollar amount that was painful to you but still large enough mh and at that point in my career when i was twenty nine years old i pick i'll pick the number it was ten thousand dollars right and i said i would like to offer you ten thousand dollars as a symbol of my seriousness that was the line right all i'm looking for is for you to prioritize some email communication for me and that's it i don't need any structured calls i don't need any meetings or anything and i was like i was like dad really he goes yeah dude would you pay ten thousand dollars for a to read your mind i was like of course so i wrote her that email within two minutes scott she responds to me and says is this a joke i said no and then she i i i said no absolutely i'm i'm dead serious she responded she's like here's not here a wiring instructions i was like awesome i wired the money and she became my first coach literally she was instrumental in helping me chain come up with this ten plan put the singularity of focus together like i had none of these pieces then and she was the one that told me hey when you're inside the bottle it's hard to read the label so while i was discussing all the things that i was working on she was the one that pulled out that hey you're working on operations and dropping money to the bottom line but you're telling me but the people are the ones that are driving the growth let's think about a future where if it were only the people that you're focused on what would happen to your organization the coach asked the right question and i think coach is an interesting thing coach mentor advisor i i try to call myself i'm my client's private adviser because for a a a two hundred and an entrepreneur running a fifty million dollar business dropping twenty million dollars to the bottom line doesn't need a coach per s because they're are like hey i they they just need somebody to talk to who is non judgmental who has been there and done that right so whatever my clients are going through right now i have been there like i know i know that they're thinking about wanting a private jet because their friend has a private jet i know it and i told him i i've been on enough private jets you don't want one you don't want one and i'll tell you what you can charter one all day like you may think this is a sn thing to talk about but that's what goes through their mind when they hit a level of success hey should i have the jets should i have the car should i have the house should i have the bank balance should have the second vacation home should i bonus my employee should have an operator like that's what they're thinking about and when you've already been there i can kinda wade through that stuff because that's all noise yeah the of the day it is hey here's a singular day focus here's a cadence of accountability and here's a good process right so it's a discovery process there's no like formula for it to come out but i've seen enough businesses service product manufacturing whatever that after like a couple of conversations i can at least pick out the candidates pretty quickly of what is gonna drive growth and then you build a hypothesis around saying hey scott if you focused on this division only will it change your business well let's figure it out and then that makes for a really good kind of conversation work thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one in cognate is a success story partner now have you ever wondered how all those scammers get your phone numbers all those tele marketers how you're always drowning and all these spam calls it's data brokers right now hundreds of companies are collecting and selling your personal information without your consent your address your phone number even your family members names to anyone is willing to pay and this puts you at risk of identity theft scams and harassment and that's where cog comes in they contact over two hundred and thirty data brokers on your behalf and legally force them to delete your personal information no more spending hundreds of hours doing it yourself and cog handles all the paperwork follows up on objections and keep your data off the market with repeated removal i've actually been using min incognito myself it's scary and also incredible to see how much of my data was out there but they get rid of it they've got a thirty day money back guarantee so you can try at risk free use my code success adding cog dot com slash success to get an exclusive sixty percent off their annual plans you have to take back control of your privacy today success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just a panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square me you there think big by small is a success story partner now if you love hearing from bold entrepreneurs and leaders carve their own paths you'll definitely wanna check out think big buy small it's back for a brand new season it's one of my favorite shows think big bi small is the chart topping entrepreneurship podcast from harvard business school the show explores an innovative approach to business leadership it's called acquisition entrepreneurship that's where you buy a profitable small business and then you become the ceo rather than trying to start a business from scratch if you need somewhere to start check out their season three debut episode with ensemble performing arts ceo and harvard jeff homer in the conversation you're gonna follow jeff's journey through the search process all the way through to building up a sizable business which is interesting because this all began as a passion project for him it'll miss out follow thing big bi small and apple podcasts spotify or wherever you're listening now

success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there in this lessons episode explore how lessons from real estate and coaching reveal the importance of focus and discipline in both business and life discover why consistent small wins outweigh chasing shortcuts understand how adopting a ceo mindset creates alignment between personal and professional growth and uncover how accountability and self awareness unlock the actions that drive lasting success so how do you how do you deal with that what's a lesson that you learned in real estate on how to find where to spend your time and is it something that we could easily take into other environments so that people can figure where to not waste time yeah that's that's super good because i do you know because now i'm in coaching right so i'm doing the same the same thing i'm selling my time but it is but with that being said is i gotta like you said qualify what are those opportunities are are like so anyone that is in a sales role or growing a business and trying to figure out how to pick up clients and customers those kind of things the first thing you have to you have to ask or you have to do is you have to be a really good listener you have to listen for the cues of what people are telling you if it first thing you need to know if it sounds too good to be true and you don't have to really work hard to make it happen guess what it's too good to be true there's no there yeah there is and you know that's that's the first thing that's the first thing you qualify if it really if it sounds too good and it's too easy it's not it never had those things don't happen you're gonna hit singles a lot more than you're gonna hit those home runs so you know look for the singles always you know what are the deals that i can get done that i know that are real that can make it happen and and get rid of that swinging in for the fences mentality yeah nuance it's it's very good advice what now i'm curious i'm curious what you're working with now so let's let's keep going down the career path because i will dovetail and some great questions as to what you're helping people with out right now after your career so what's next after you after you exit and real estate and you're done that what are you doing now what's what's the book what's coaching what's your academy all that stuff and why are you doing that yeah so so i was i was in my last two years as a partner and i i found myself coaching more than i was really doing the sales anymore and i was finding my joy in there i found a new joy right the deal making fun but i what i was really enjoying was watching other people be successful and working through the m and was finding my joy through that process mh and and so i decided i wanted to do coaching i talked to my partner partners i talked me out of it twice but i finally eventually made that happen and and so so we so i did so i jumped in and i created a a coaching company called the return on you investment academy because i wanted to tie back to money because everything does come back to money in terms of you know a basis of successful measure but really there's another piece to it which is how are you investing in you right if you invest in you then the money will come so it's a return on you investment academy so i started at coaching academy i went got certified i'm a certified high performance coach i carry some credentials with me and and i started this company and along those lines i started to reflect a little bit especially when covid happened is is this mindset that came to me about a ceo right i'm i'm coaching executives i'm coaching you know ceos or entrepreneurs for their own company and i'm really thinking about what it is that makes them successful and what i began to realize is that they're this concept of work life balance and all this other stuff is really flawed because what i see in the most successful people and i also see in my own life is that i'm no different at home than i am in my job i'm i'm the same person right and so why do we break apart the workplace in the life place really let's bring those two things together and if you can bring those two things together you will be successfully rounded and so i started thinking about the ceo job description and if you go through a ceo's job description you'll see it's a lot like how you should leave your life you should have a vision you should have mission you should have goals you should know who the people are that are around you as your shareholders you should be able to say no you should have values you should set boundaries you should know how to deal with you know a lot of shit every day because it's gonna come and so you know all of those things and so i wrote this book ceo for life for that purpose is to try and bring the concept together for people that you really should be the same person in the workplace in life place so mh a lot of fun and i've really enjoyed it survey monkey is a success story partner now look we get it you can hardly go anywhere or do anything these days without hearing about ai this or ai that and if you're like most people when it comes to ai you're impressed but you have a few concerns but what if ai was used not as a tool to replace people but as a way to help understand people better ai from survey monkey is designed to do just that i'm crafting the perfect survey which is harder than you might think to analysis that digs deep binds patterns and services trends quickly survey monkey powerful suite of ai capabilities makes it faster and easier than ever before to get insight from real people helping you make confident decisions for your business try it today at survey monkey dot com slash scott the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now the house hubspot podcast network has great podcast like the ops authority if you are constantly putting out fires in your business instead of focusing on growth and innovation listen to the ops authority hosted by natalie gin and brought to you by the house hubspot podcast network natalie speaks about actionable strategies that actually move your business forward so every week natalie shares some transformational stories from real business owners who've mastered their backend end systems and they can focus on what really matters so get your ops in order get your business running smoothly so you can scale and you can really build something meaningful stop letting all this chaos steal all of your energy and listen to the ops authority wherever you get your podcasts success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in my miami amy last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there no i i appreciate the the the transitioning i think actually you probably your love for coaching probably comes from your your love for helping people and that's actually probably why you transition from electrical engineering to hr in the first place i'm just reading along your career it makes like it makes a lot of sense we keep defaulting to and and what you sort of excel at but i guess i guess my question you know the ceo for life i love the i love the analogy that you have to run your life like a ceo so how do we solve how do we solve for that how do we remove the work life and the and the personal life because there's things that i'm sure like this is ingrained in people like to have to act one way at work and they and act differently at home so what are like the the actionable steps that you can start doing or it's just a matter of finding the right organization that also recognizes that they want a certain authenticity and who they hire how do you fix that great great that's a great conversation it's a super conversation so the first thing is you have to work your road roadmap to to make sure that your your life and your work who you are maps to what a ceo is right do you have a okay first thing you gotta know is do you have some level of self awareness listen if you're a dick it it ain't gonna work no matter what you do right i mean you know or if you're a bad person or you know whatever whatever label you wanna call it in terms of being a jerk or have working difficult with people you have to some have some level of self awareness once you have some self awareness from there you can decide okay well what is the vision for my life and what i tell people is their vision is never big enough when i sit down with clients and i talk to them tell me about your vision for your life it's never big enough it's never big enough it's always it's always well this year i wanna do this or you know we're looking to buy this house or you know we're you know one my kids kids to college well what i talk about in the book is dream generation only you know a ceo doesn't the ceo measures in a year or a quarter but when they look at casting vision for the company they're thinking five years ten years thirty years where where are we gonna turn this ship and take it to you know elon musk is looking at mars he's not he's not just thinking about trying to get this thing to go up and then come back down right i mean he's so dreaming generational is super important so self awareness and making sure you have a big dream and then from there you can begin to put your road roadmap together okay so what are the goals that are gonna get you there what values are gonna keep you in line right you're not gonna cross any ethical barriers so those kind of things then what are the people that you're surrounding yourself with who are your shareholders listen it's it's cliche but it's truth i guarantee if you look at the people you spend the most time with the five people you spend the most time with you eat where they eat you listen to the same music they do you dress like them you talk like them you drink the same beers or wine i mean that's just what we do right i it's funny because have six year old daughter and and it's just so apparent in in in her boyfriend all the boys in high school they dress the same they have the same fever haircut they all listen the same music yes they all drive the same trucks they all you know it's it's all the same things right and it's so apparent in in in high schoolers that but it never leaves us we're always there so who are you leveling up in your sphere and then from there you can then begin to say okay now that i have all these pieces in place how am i how am i learning to to work within that and that comes with having this firefighter mindset is i was told a long time ago you live your life in three states you're either in a storm coming out of a storm or going into a storm that is life period and so you better be preparing today for that storm that you're either in going into or coming out of and every day be be a good firefighter so those are the things that are that are wrapped up in the book and they all have practical exercises around and that's that's what i'm trying to help people find is that direction for their ceo and do you find those are good lessons and and not so the context of the books book makes sense excuse me do you find that that's similar to what people reach out to you for when they look for business business advice or coaching advice are those is that the core problem that the to solve or what other types of coaching do you actually work with people on outside of this ceo work life balance sure and so it's you know go coaching is so interesting to me is because it i guess the easiest way to say it is everybody that i coach already knows what they need to do all do we all know we need to lose weight or we need to exercise or we need to do this or need to pick up the phone and make those phone calls or you know i need to get my accounting you know what everybody knows what they need to do but what they need is someone to speak that truth into them so they can they can then release themselves to go do it and that's really what coaching does it allows a person to release themselves into what they know they need to do because what happens often is we get caught up in this mental chatter right we talk to ourselves in our head four times more than we talk to a person verbally so you're having a conversation your head four times more than you're having a conversation with someone else and so we get lost in that but sometimes you need that person to have that verbal conversation with make some accountability good that so that's what it i spend a lot of time with people we first start at what is it that you're not doing that you know you should do and from there everything else unravel we put a plan in place we execute on that plan and my normal coaching time is twelve weeks at the end of twelve weeks i mean they've they've gone way beyond they ever thought they would have been from the beginning thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one survey monkey is a success story partner now look we get it you can hardly go anywhere or do anything these days without hearing about ai this or ai that and if you're like most people when it comes to ai you're impressed but you have a few concerns but what if ai was used not as a tool to place people but as a way to help understand people better ai from survey monkey is designed to do just that from crafting the perfect survey which is harder than you might think to analysis that digs deep binds patterns and services trends quickly survey monkey powerful suite of ai capabilities makes it faster and easier than ever before to get insight from real people helping you make confident decisions for your business try it today at survey dot com slash scott monarch money is a success story partner now you know what's it's weird i'm doing well financially but i have this constant low level financial anxiety that i was missing something because i have crypto on all these different exchanges i have multiple investment accounts old four zero one k's 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success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there in today's world it's really difficult to break through you're talking about a world where there's five billion people on social media when i start in two thousand five there's less than forty million people on social media the amount of competition for attention is pretty fierce in a world drowning and digital noise one strategist found the formula to break through it all meet brendan kane the pioneering force who engineered the first influencer campaign on youtube in two thousand seven he steered more than two hundred million dollars in getting for brands like mtv paramount and global celebrities like taylor swift and rihanna we see everything go viral taxes finance nutrition real estate it doesn't matter this subject matter it's more about the story that you're telling one of the biggest mistakes people make their doing too much they may have a meme card text on the top they'll have captions on the bottom and then you'll be talking if the viewer the subconscious doesn't understand which one i need to focus on and thus it's gonna move on this hook point method has unlocked over sixty billion views and help generate one hundred million plus followers across every platform and in thirty days he proved the power of his own strategy by gaining a million followers with no tricks just strategy you need to connect with the way that you're gonna be telling stories if it doesn't resonate with you you're just gonna burn yourself out or you're just gonna quit after the first few times the algorithms which control reach and distribution of content they care about just one thing that is holding people's attention the longer people spend on these platforms the more as they serve the more profit beginner so one of my favorite quotes that you say it's a very simple quote and i think it's probably to the majority of people listening controversial even though i know for you it's gonna be something that is it seems so obvious any subject matter can go viral you said this many times you've proven it out explain let's explain why for most people listening and watching that's such a difficult idea to understand i think it's because there's a lot of frustrated content creators business owners that have tried to tackle social media or tackle any type of marketing and it just really hasn't connected and like i feel they're pain like listen i've been doing this for twenty years and like if your content like i it's just like putting your heart soul you know resources energy time into content or a strategy and it doesn't work like i've been there i know how that feels so i think that that's where a lot of it comes from as you've you've tried everything but it just doesn't seem to work and in today's world it's really difficult to break through i mean you're talking about a world where there's five billion people on social media when i start in twenty two thousand five there's less than forty million people on social media and now we're talking about five billion so the the amount of competition for attention is pretty fierce so a lot of that comes from just trying something and it just not resonating and breaking through but as you you know mentioned in the quote like we've worked in every industry or sector we see everything go viral taxes go viral finance goes viral nutrition goes viral real estate it doesn't matter the subject matter it's just it's more about the story that you're telling around the subject matter that dictates whether it succeeds or fails when you think about replicating viral vitality which is really what you do for a living and that's you know what you've done successfully across literally every category you've worked with when did you first realize that there was a little bit of a formula to go viral and it wasn't just chance i think that and i don't know the exact date but to me so i started my career in the in the film industry making movies and before going in the film industry i went to film school so i wanted to be a movie producer and when you go to film school no matter what you wanna do whether you wanna be an actor a director or a screen writer or for me a producer they make you learn every discipline of making a movies so i had to take acting classes i had to take screen writing classes i had to learn how to light sets i had to learn how to direct and edit and the reason is there's all these small nuances that make up whether you tell a successful story or it flops so when i started my career in the film industry i worked for academy award winning producers and even them like with like very veteran storyteller if one small thing was off let's just say the cast the wrong person there was a conflict between the the actor and the director or between actors or the cinematographer and director didn't get get along or the dialogue was just off what are these small things would just destroy the performance of the movie i'm sure a lot of people watching this like you've seen a bad movie but you can't just put your pink finger on like why that is so it's it's pure storytelling and the light bulb went off for me was and i think most people forget or don't even see this but social media is just a pure storytelling platform and the best storyteller win and again like in film the same thing applies the social media there's all these small little nuances that dictate whether the story that you're telling on social media is successful or not so like the the the one thing that that that has kind of solidified that light bulb is we spend a ton of our time we spent over ten thousand hours researching and content and social media and what we're looking for is like what we call formats and these are like storytelling structures or blueprints so like any movie over the past one hundred years has used the same format the three act structure now in social media it doesn't use a three act structure but there's hundreds of these so that's where you start seeing the patterns of the people that are successful and successful on a repeated basis they're finding their format they're finding their structure and they're mastering the nuances within it if you think about like steven spielberg one of the best directors over time every movie he creates is using the three act structure now each movie feels distinctly different like jurassic park versus et or jaws versus indiana jones but he has spent his career mastering the nuances within that format within that structure to become a master storyteller so it was just starting off of my early career studying stories and now you know well into my career and social media it just goes back to the same thing is just studying stories and understanding the elements that equate to success and also just as important to track from success you know this is interesting because first of all not a lot of content creators went through the education that you went through so i understand how you can see the parallels between sort of how media has always been successful and how to translate not the exact framework that makes a movie successful maybe there is some crossover i don't know i'm sure there's a little bit but not the exact framework but the patterns right there's it you can understand and identify the patterns in the content you can replicate those but it's interesting because i would have assumed that cmos of big brands who have been in the game for a long enough period of time should have had some sort of understanding of what makes good media what makes a good commercial what makes a good hook but i don't see very many cmos of big brands take any experience and apply it well to social like outside of like i'm thinking in duo ryan when these on twitter like there's a a handful of brands that i can remember that there they're they kill it but ninety nine point nine percent of brands don't so what happened did like cmos just throw out the rule book and they no longer apply any other they're trading the social like why does the majority of social media suck yeah it's a great question and i i think that you know when you talk about like brands and specific there's there's kinda two waves to it like the first wave that i saw is it was just purely taking traditional assets and putting it on social media so it's like taking a tv ad and putting on social media and expecting it to work or like if it's an image like a printout ad and putting it on social media to work then a majority of the brand started to wake up and say no we actually need to create you know original content specific for this platform with the challenge in the second phase is that they're leveraging creative models and creative practices that were designed before social media so they're they're not doing it within the realm of social media and the same thing goes with like a filmmaker like filmmakers are designed or creating content for that format for that audience that's sitting down in movie theater they've already made the decision they bought the ticket they drove to the theater they're sitting in the seat they're gonna sit there and watch and it also stays you know holds true at home now people can switch a little bit easier but in in the art of social media literally you have billions of content to choose from like literally with a click you can move on to the next one literally within a second you move on to the next piece of content so the creative models that they're using were designed for these other mediums television and print and radio and things of that nature not understanding that you need to tweak the nuances of how to tell a story so specific to these platforms because if you think about commercials they were created before social media and that creative process of model you basically have the audience locked in like you had them locked in until ti came around and then netflix and things of that nature so it's more about about the approach to creating content and just making these slight adjustments in terms of how people consume content how to retain audiences and things of that nature what's the most important thing to un learn and let's let's give examples of a small business and how they should start un learning and redoing and revamp but also maybe give some advice to the decision maker in a very large corporation if they watch your content they love everything that you're saying but they're like i feel like my hands are tied i can't do anything at all where do i start who do i speak to what's the proof point that i have to put in front of my boss because getting them to buy into the idea and for the company to buy into the idea of our social sucks let's do better that's the first barrier that you have to come with or you have sort of get over yeah so the the first place to start in un learning from previous experience is don't start with ideas this is where everybody starts they're just like throwing ideas at the wall they're creating content calendars of like just ideas off the top of their head or they're chasing trends you know they're just oh there's a trend let's come up with an idea for that trend the reason that doesn't work is there is no proven structure that you're inserting that into so it's kind of like going back to making movies is if steven spielberg just came with ideas and was just reinventing the way he told those stories each time instead of using the three act structure that's been used for a hundred years it would fall flat so the first place to start is to say we're gonna stop just coming with ideas first we're gonna switch our mindset of just passive social media consumption to active consumption from an expert creator standpoint and what we're gonna start doing is start looking for the patterns so the way that you look for the patterns is we we created something and my company hook point the hook point format finder so basically what you do is you see a viral video and you're like hey this viral video is kind draws parallels to like a message that we could do or a structure that we could use so what we do is we click on the greatest profile and we see have they use that same structure that same format at least five or ten times if they haven't it's likely a trend or it's just some original thing that they are not gonna be able to reproduce and you keep doing that process over and over again until you find a format that has been used at least five to ten times successfully that you can insert your message into so let me just kind of define like format and give some examples so that we can solidify it so like a format is is basically a blueprint it's it's a structure that has repeatable success that you can insert your message your brand your content into so for example just and i'm just gonna give ones that most people have seen they're not meant to be suggestions but one that pretty much everybody's probably seen as man on the street is you approach a random stranger on the street and you interact with them so we i have a friend and we've done some work with them alex s who is a photographer and he approaches rams strangers on street offers them a professional photos shoot and the story unfolds he's built an audience of twenty million people doing that there's another really popular account now called the school of hard knocks which will go up and interview people how did you make your first million dollars it's used for fitness there's a guy body by mark that he approaches fit people on the street and says hey you look really fit what did you do to get into shape so just to note that when we look at a format it can be used for any type of subject matter it's just the container the interesting thing about a lot of formats is they were created before social media even existed the man on the street format was invented in nineteen fifty four for late night television so that's one example another example is called two characters one l bulb where it's the same person and they play two different characters so like erica ko does this for legal things like what happens when your flight gets canceled what happens when your airpods break mark ti the t teaches finance uses that format a lot you see a lot of people doing it that one i don't know who invented it but if you remember the first austin powers movie that was before social media you had doctor evil and austin powers and they were going back and like doing very po conversations about society and politics and and culture and things of that nature so a lot of these formats have been used for decades so the first step that we have to do is stop with ideas start looking for formats understanding which format is the right fit for you and then study every element of that format so what we do we created a process that's called gold silver and bronze it's like a proprietary process that we created to really decode why content goes viral at a very high level what we'll do is let's just take man on the street let we'll say we wanna analyze why is the school of hard knocks so successful because we're thinking about doing a man on the street format so we'll open up a spreadsheet we'll put like five or ten of the high performers in that format it's like five million views plus then we'll take five to ten of the average performers and five to ten of the low performers which is like a few hundred thousand views or less and what we're doing is we're cross analyzing like what is happening in those high performers that's not showing up in those low performers and typically has nothing to do with the content but more the context so could be things like pacing facial expressions and that format reactions of the people are very important it could be the environment that you should in captions title cards hooks if it's youtube thumbnails so the big un learning starts with we're not just trying to create a content calendar we're not just trying to find the next trend we're not just trying to find the next idea but we have to get to the roots of storytelling and the roots of storytelling on social media is through formats you said that any kind of business can go viral what of a boring business because not everyone you mentioned a few different styles of content a man on the street you know two characters one light bulb there's some very boring businesses out there like i'm trying to think of like the most boring one taxes taxes are pretty damn boring finance can be boring finance is usually pretty boring real estate it's pretty boring is there is there any advice for people that have super boring businesses or is it the same process of studying what's viral and finding a way to take whatever boring businesses you own and then put it into that content style yeah absolutely so and the work that we do we we leverage what's called the generalist principle which means how do we speak to our core audience the audience that drives our business but also at the same time make our content interesting digestible and exciting for the average person the person doesn't care or doesn't want you know may not buy our products or services and the question maybe be well why is that well the the algorithms which control reach and distribution of content they care about just one thing and that is holding people's attention the longer people spend on these platforms the more as they can serve the more profit they generate now because they have so much content to choose from with billions of billions of pieces of content there's like over across all social platforms there's a billion pieces of content posted every day so they have so much choice they want to find content that they could see to the most people and hold their attention for as long as possible so our goal is if we believe we have a boring businesses how do we still speak to our core audience but make it accessible to our wider possible audience so i'll give you examples of of the industries you talked about so we talk about taxes there's a great youtube channel called clear value tax they went viral during covid because they were doing videos about stimulus checks like and it's just a guy sitting behind a desk but what he did is he he tied on to really relevant culturally relevant events that are happening in the new cycle that impacts their ability to make money so during covid everybody was super curious about like am i gonna get a stimulus check because people were worrying about money and things of that nature he generated millions and millions of views with that we have like we have a client chris cobb that went viral with car insurance and he uses a format that's called a visual metaphor that breaks down using like toy cars and characters like talking through the process of how insurance works so that's one example you talk about real estate there's a perfect example with a real estate agent ryan ser who is a luxury real estate agent in manhattan that represents properties that are valued at fifteen million to two hundred fifty million dollars so and this is an example of how it actually translates into business so he's playing the generalist principle by creating videos like let me take you on a two of a seven million dollar clause let me take you in a two over a two hundred fifty million dollar ranch now what format was that before social media the lifestyles of the rich and famous so he's little leveraging that that format because he knows millions of millions of people wanna see what a seven million dollar closet looks like and because he generates tens of millions of views a month if less than one percent of that audience is his core ideal target he is killing his competition because that is so many more people than the the competition are doing and he's even said that he's sold a thirty million dollar penthouse from a a youtube video so what we have to look at is like how do we make it interesting and accessible to anybody so like an exercise the people could do is like ask a grandmother ask a loved one that has no interest in your subject matter and like test hooks on them you know just study you can even use chat as like just how do i make how do i make insurance you know more accessible like we talked about erica ko earlier that is a lawyer you know she's a lawyer and she breaks down the fine print which is super sexy but the fine print of what happens when your nike shoes rip what type of or warranties do you have there's even a youtube account called legal eagle that has millions of subscribers and he'll break down like you know the honey scam that's going on things of that nature so it's just it's just thinking through a different lens of not just creating a niche piece of content for a niche audience so when somebody thinking about creating content and they and they look at some of the examples that you mentioned all these people are huge personalities too like ryan ser is a huge personality so i don't want somebody to think that they have to be huge personalities because i haven't thought about this with like my podcast i i've seen how fast school of hard knocks has grown and i've and and simon sq does the man on the street interview as well and i've thought like i should probably just do that but like that's stressful to me it's very stressful to walk up to a random stranger on the street and interview them it's like you're getting your own at about it so what's the strategy for somebody i don't even consider myself super introverted but there's a lot of people that are me or even more introverted when it comes to social what's the strategies that people think about if they're more introverted if they don't want to be running around like ryan ser are there ways for the person who is a little bit more has a little bit more anxiety about showing up on social to still be as successful as some of these creators absolutely so just know that if you are looking at like a man on the street simon sq or school of hard knocks and like that gives me anxiety to do it don't do it there are hundreds of different ways hundreds of different types of storytelling formats that you can leverage to be successful so the the way that i kind of coach people through like how do you choose the best direction the best way to tell your stories choose your format your blueprint for success is number one start with what are the resources you have available to you like if you just have an iphone there are ways you can be successful just an iphone you don't need to have necessarily a team or fancy equipment or any of those things the second is what feels authentic and exciting to you you need to connect with the way that you're gonna be telling stories if it doesn't resonate with you just knock it out because what's gonna happen is you're just gonna burn yourself out or you're just gonna quit after the first few times it should be an enjoyable process it shouldn't match your personality it should be authentic so you look at somebody like you said simon sq you know who has a massive personality and just loves engaging with all those people and you can compare it to content creator hunter prosper which does man on the street but he's never on camera and he's just basically asking people emotionally charge questions about their life like what was your first heartbreak you know what was your you know you know first date like things like that or you can look at like dan c which a lot of his short form content where animation you know animation thinks he's not even showing up there so the thing that i would say is just because you see something working doesn't mean you have to do it you can keep searching for something that works that matches who you are in what you wanna do in terms of your message your content and how you wanna represent yourself in the world hubspot is a success story partner now think about listening to this podcast right now you're probably multitasking you're probably catching seventy to eighty percent of what we're talking about but let's flip that and imagine you're only catching twenty percent that'd be crazy right it's really not a good use of your time if you only remember twenty percent of what we're talking about but most businesses most entrepreneurs are only using twenty percent of their data all the most important details in call logs emails chat with their customers it's just left floating in digital space not being used hubspot it gives you the access to those insights to help you grow your business because when you know more you grow more visit hubspot dot com to get the full picture of your business today nets sweet is a success story partner now what does the future hold for business if you ask nine experts you're gonna get ten answers bull market bear market interest rates are rising they're falling honestly at the end of the day we just need a crystal ball but until then over forty two thousand businesses have trusted and future proof themselves with 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terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need one more style of content that i see work it seems well but i'm curious about your opinion on it is reaction style content so i've seen what who's it guy jordan this is it jordan stallion yeah so he finds a viral video and then clips it at the front then he switches to himself it seems to have worked out for him is that a is that a good strategy for an introvert that doesn't or is that a lazy strategy does that build the same amount of trust with the audiences if you create the content yourself so the answer is yes they can do that but ninety nine percent of people will fail with that format or any format because they skip the step of actually analyzing the format so let's just say jordan stanley most people will look at it be like oh man he's just reacting the content i can do that and then they tried it doesn't work why doesn't it work because they haven't studied like what are the things that contribute to the unsuccessful people using it or the even with him the unsuccessful videos versus the successful ones because there's a lot of nuance in that like we've done reaction based content and one of the big things i'll tell you is it depends on the clip you have to source the right clips in addition to like what is the pacing what is the editing what are the first three seconds set up like all these small elements contribute to it so i'm not gonna say it's it's definitely not lazy because like to get good at it it takes a lot of work and there's another youtuber doctor mike that blew up with this it was real doctor reacts to grey's anatomy real doctor reacts to the good doctor and it's a great format to leverage your expertise and respond to it but it's not as easy as just like oh i'm just gonna sit in front of a camera and react to some thing we're going deep into like the actual content but the hardest thing for people to do is to stop people from scrolling on social media because if they don't stop the scroll right then they're not gonna watch to the rest of the content so what's the strategy to get somebody to stop scrolling is it a ridiculous hook in the first second like how much time do we have is it a cover image is what is it that stops you from scrolling so a lot of this happens on a subconscious level so you're making decisions subconsciously about what you're gonna walk before it gets your conscious mind so oftentimes you're scrolling past something not from a conscious basis but from a subconscious basis so one of the biggest mistakes people make with that is they're doing too much so they don't have a clear visual hierarchy so they may have a meme card text on the top they'll left captions on the bottom and then you'll be talking so there's three different things happening at the same time and if if the viewer doesn't understand the subconscious doesn't understand which one i need to focus on it feels like it's being left behind and thus it's gonna move on so that's one major mistake people make the other big mistake and thing that you have to focus on is making sure that you're positioning what you're gonna say as something unique and different because if people feel like that they've heard it before even if you have a completely unique perspective on it like we can just talk about like finances or meditation or business coaching whatever subject matter it's been covered billions of times you've you type in a google or there's billions of results to come up so you just gotta make sure that in those first few seconds they realize that it's gonna be a unique story or unique spin on it because if they think they've heard it before they're gonna move on they're gonna scroll past and that's where really solid hooks come in to set an expectation that you should stay to the end or even kind of ce that that there is gonna be a final payoff there is gonna be something that's worthwhile at the end of that video but it's never about bait somebody into the content so is you have to like the hook has to sync up with what they're getting yeah clickbait click really doesn't work that much anymore i think all of us are professional content consumers and we can really tell if something is isn't gonna match up if it if it feels to click bait in addition the algorithms are really paying attention to yes they're paying attention to how many people stop but they're paying attention to how people how people how long people stay so that first wave of audience that gets it even if you kinda trick them into it you'll see that massive drop off in the retention when they realize it's not gonna pay off and thus you're gonna you're gonna stick a you're not gonna stick around does shadow banning exist because i hear this a lot i'm shadow band i'm i'm in all these i'm i'm in all these group chats and they're like all these business leaders and whatnot and some guy said you know i i hit two hundred and fifty six thousand followers on tiktok incredible success and i haven't been able to grow tiktok since i must be shadow band the shadow banning exists is the algorithm against everyone or is it true that like most people's content or at one point their content worked and then audience preferences changed and that's why they're no longer getting the reach they used to ninety nine point nine percent of the time you're not being shadow band so that that's just the simple truth are the algorithms out to get you no because if you think about it we are the fuel that runs these platforms this isn't like netflix or disney where they invest billions of dollars a year in original content they rely on content creators like you need people watching this to keep fueling this engine because if we all stop creating content tomorrow they would have no business so the number one thing is they want to see us succeed now in rare circumstances if you're you know spreading like very like harmful information yes they will shadow ban you or kick you off the account but ninety nine point nine percent of the businesses it's not the case now the other thing i hear is they're suppressing my reach on purpose to get me to pay to boost my post for it well if that's the case well how did mister beast a thirteen year old in north carolina starting in his bedroom become the most subscribed person on youtube like all these people you know in you know some of these influencers like erica ko or mark ti or doctor mike or graham stefan like even joe rogan like these people they would be just favoring like coca cola and apple and all these people that have the biggest budgets in the world to drive that audience so the big thing to to to to just relate to people is just like it just comes down to the best storyteller win and that previously there was less content less content creators to they there's more so it's just more competitive for that attention in that success when you look at you know people like that that seem to seem to grow despite the competition in my opinion that's who you should at least learn a little bit from because they're doing something that helps them grow now when there's this many people on social is that like a fair yeah i would i would definitely say that also the other thing is cutting out people that are having success because of external factors so you think about and this isn't a new brand but just think about apple they have like thirty million subscribers on on youtube like they have they spend over a billion dollars year in advertising like that's fueling that relationship or you think about actors like the rock who's one of most follow people on instagram like is that generated organically no now i think the rock does amazing job with content but every movie he's in they're spending a hundred million dollars promoting he's on every billboard television station magazine cover things of that nature so yes i think paying attention to people that are having success recently but also having success because of social media not because of external factors no we did some work with stephen bartlett team and like they're i mean they are masters at understanding stories like they get super deep into the research of things about the person how to create that emotional connection how to create emotional vulnerability how to create trailers out of those clips and really drive it along in addition like if they have a about a bad podcast they're not gonna post it like and he's front with the guess about it like the there needs to be some quality to to build that relationship with the audience do you find the most people think their contents better than it is yes and what i will say is it's not that your content is bad it's the way that you're delivering and packaging the content so let me just give you an analogy like how many movies are there about world war two a along ton hold what time now there's clear ones that are amazing and then there's clear ones that are just horrible that are un watch so it's not about the content about world war two that's bad it's a story that's being told through it and that's the same thing and you can you know maybe people don't watch a lot of world war two movies let's talk about aliens like there's a a ton of movies about aliens or ghosts so first of all everyone's seen safe and private ryan and everyone's seen well alien an alien versus private they've all seen these but there's but again it's like there's great movies and there's horrible movies it's not about the content and that's what i tell people it's it's typically not about you it's not that you're bad it's not that your content bad it's just the context of how you're delivering it that's just not connecting and if you just start making those tweaks and learning those things that's where success can come from because i never will will work with people and tell them to do something that has nothing to do with what they what their business is has nothing to do with them as an individual i'm never gonna do that tell them to do things they don't believe in like you can be authentic to yourself and continue down the path in terms of your expertise your that you what you're trying to achieve it's just the way that you go about it and deliver that dictate success so what do you focus on when you have no budget no resources you're just getting started so we just look for a format that matches where the person is so to give you an example we worked with a hand doctor doctor aaron na zero social media experience zero followers zero views didn't wanna hire a big team and we helped her find a format that matched her personality and the information that she wanna to share which is called little mis diagnosed and that's her tiktok channel name but basically you will see it if you order tiktok channel she's holding her phone she's sitting in a corner and she's telling stories like emotional stories about what happens in the room what happens when people get mis diagnosed what people's happens with their health struggles and through that she shares advice and things of that nature again zero views zero social media followers is just an iphone and she masked an audience of seven hundred and fifty thousand people she has thirty one videos with over a million views through that she got a book deal with harper collins a podcast deal in a reality tv show so just with her can't or with her phone that she was able to do that now there's a lot of those formats out there if you wanna talk about podcast is maybe you start with a zoom podcast maybe you start with man on the street in that form of podcast just start with the resources you have just to make sure that you're actually studying the success of it like a recent podcast it's not so recent but it's more recent than others is the all in podcast like that's zoom you know they're just they have a amazing no production yeah and they have but the thing is they have amazing chemistry they create an experience with it so you have to study and understand those elements so it's it's definitely not about how big your team is how much equipment that you have but it's more about your ability to tell a story people with iphones all around the world tell amazing stories and reach millions of millions of people when you think about looking at so step one is start and study and get the data and then you create some content and you're trying to figure out okay am i on the right path i don't expect the first piece of content that most people create that's in this new format to just knock it out of the park if it does great but what are the things they should look for what are the metrics you let's talk about instagram because that's really where most people focus not many people focus on podcast podcasts people wanna kill it on instagram is it shares is it likes is it comment is it what what's the thing that sort of the positive signal that this is moving in the right direction i would say that the number the first place to start is just the number of views because that will dick that will just demonstrate are the algorithms seeing what they wanna see to syndicate it to more and more people and typically nine out of ten times engagement is gonna follow views unless you're using paid ads which is it's a little bit different but the the views what they tell you is that you're able to stop the scroll and you're holding attention long enough now i'm not talking about ten thousand views i'm talking at least a few hundred thousand views in and beyond now if you have followed the process that i've outlined which is for shifting from a passive to active mindset understand that there's clear patterns there's the storytelling formats out there that have repeatable success you've taken a time to align with the format that matches you and then you study that format the successful use cases versus the unsuccessful use cases then what you can do if you have an un a pro underperforming video you just take a reference of like a high performer using that same format and you put your content on one side of the screen the high performer the other side of screen and you play them side by side and don't even pay attention to the content people are often oftentimes looking for apples to apples comparison like people saying the exact same thing as me don't do that because it's highly unlikely that you're gonna find that correlation but when you play them side by side and if you're truly honest with yourself truly honest with yourself and open you will start seeing the differences in the execution so that could be things like you know the the pacing the facial expressions the reactions like the camera angles the lighting captions hooks title cards but this simple exercise of taking a high performer with a specific storytelling format and yours with an under underperforming and playing them side by side you will see it and the same thing works for podcast if you're creating a podcast play it side by side with a stephen bartlett le friedman a joe rogan an all in podcast and pay attention to what what is the experience that they're creating what are they doing differently why does it feel different than what i'm doing that you will learn so much through that process if you're open to it you consistently do it and you're honest with yourself and i think the other thing that i think people and i want you to speak on this because i suffer from this as do probably most creators they look at con that's performing and they can't understand why it's performing i'll give you an example i have no idea why le friedman podcast is so popular i like him but i can't sit through a three four hour podcast and i don't find him exceptionally charismatic but something about that draws people in so if i don't understand it it's hard for me to replicate it because they i don't have conviction that i can do it well and i'd also don't understand if i put that much energy in time and convince somebody to sit down with me for four hours and wear a suit with like a little tiny tie i don't understand how that's gonna drive the results so there's a few things in just in terms of le freeman he followed joe rogan model so one of the things that they do is they leverage clips and strong hooks around clips to get people introduced to the podcast and then it sparks interest for people to go into the long form however what those clips are also doing is it's building relationship with the audience you know when we talked about getting people to know like and trust you if they know like and trust you they ultimately want to consume more of your content and there's a compounding effect so you start on a small level and even steven bartlett does this with his kind of like movie trailer es you know you know trailers in instagram or tic tiktok that push into the long form is you're finding that spark that reason that people should pay attention so you think about even like netflix or amazon prime video or disney plus how many options do we have in terms of tv shows it's it's crazy so what drives our initial interest it's either the trailer or a friend telling us about it and then once we've you know garnered that trust or that excitement we're willing to sit and binge watch an entire show or watch a three or four our podcast but if you wanna get into kind of like the difference even just start with like clips like watch a clip of like le free i'm talking like more the youtube clips just to get the experience that he's doing versus what another podcast is doing and you will see and it's gonna be very subtle i'm it's gonna be subtle i'm not gonna be like there's gonna be this glaring red flag that says oh this is different but if you really study it like even le he he is very dry in some ways but he is a master at like pulling things out of people like building that connection with the person making you feel like you are in the room with him and that is the same with joe rogan you get lost in kind of these these conversations these experiences that they create through the screen and i think that's where a lot of podcasts are lost like i spent two years working with katie kirk when she moved to to yahoo and there's just like so much nuance that goes into you know the the interview type format on social media versus kind of the television experience i can't remember where i heard this but somebody i can't remember where who told me this but somebody said you can either make content entertaining or educational but you can't do both do you believe that to be true i completely disagree i'll just give you examples you look at vera potassium that i think they have like twenty million subscribers about science it's entertaining and educational you look at mark robe the former nasa engineer like his is like super education was like can i make a a pool out of jello which sounds like stupid but like he gets into the science of like how you actually do it he he and he and he creates toys it's so amazing he created a toy company that helps kids understand engineering so i definitely believe it can be educational and entertainment value at the same time the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now a quick podcast recommendation i've been listening to truth lies and work they're in the hubspot podcast network just like success story it's this husband and wife team a and lia elliott they break down why people actually do what they do at work so if you have a business if you manage people if you have to hire people at any point you have to listen to their show i just listened to an out on why good employees suddenly quit that's an issue that we all have and it totally clicked for me one of the reasons they i explained is why it's not usually about the money it's about all these little promises that we as founders entrepreneurs managers leaders we break without realizing it like when you tell someone you just hired that they're gonna learn all these new skills but you just keep giving them the same tasks over and over and over again it made me realize that i probably lost a lot of good people for dumb reasons that i never noticed and hiring is one of the most important things you can figure out so if you manage people or if you just wanna understand what makes your coworkers tick it's worth checking out listen to truth lies and work wherever you get your podcast chip station is a success partner you know what separates successful online businesses from literally everyone else it's not just having great products it's delivering an amazing shipping experience that keeps customers coming back all of my friends that run the biggest e commerce companies they use ship station and it has completely transformed how they handle orders they save thousands on shipping costs thanks to the rate chopper tool that finds the best discounts and what makes ships station brilliant you never need to 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getting ai insights from da modi who's literally shaping the future of artificial intelligence here's what makes inbound special it's not just the great keynote you're gonna dive into breakout sessions where you can immediately implement what you learn and plus san francisco legendary startup ecosystem provides the perfect backdrop for networking with all these great entrepreneurs decision makers industry leaders peers who are actively shaping the future of business from september third to fifth at the mo center you're gonna be surrounded by forward thinking professionals who turn insights and ideas into breakthroughs don't just watch the future unfold be part of creating it visit inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today do you think that everything should entertaining an educational great but do you also how do you how do you figure out how to tie your content into someone's emotion so i can entertain them briefly for thirty seconds i can teach them something new but the next layer will be to make them feel emotionally connected with the content and maybe in long form i find that to be a little bit easier because i can get into some deeper topics but how do i figure out how to get emotionally connected to the audience in a thirty to forty five second clip so that they don't want to go anywhere else for content they just wanna come to me repeatedly again and again and again so it's a great question and the first thing to kind point out is only thirty percent of the population views content and communicates through emotions so we use a lot of behavioral psychology and the work that we do there's six different ways that people perceive and engage in content this is coming from a data set of over two million profiles a communication assessment profiles so the largest is motion it's thirty percent of the population so they're gonna connect with you based upon how that clip emotionally makes you feel the second largest subset of the population is fact based it's twenty five percent so them it's not about how it makes them feel it's about data information time frames does this make sense twenty percent is fun based they want just stimulation they wanna know it's gonna be exciting it's gonna be engaging it's gonna take them on a wild ride ten percent is value based so it's more about do i value this person's opinions do i trust them other ten percent is reflection based so they just they basically just sit back and reflect like the best example i don't know if you saw oppenheimer with albert einstein what is he doing and into that movie he's just staring out of the lake and that's what albert einstein's personality was he came up with his best theories by just reflecting on the world around him and then the smallest subset of the population is action based five percent so they don't think they don't feel they just go like tom cruise this is his personality type they're they're fueled by incidents so if you watch mentioned impossible he's not talking about his feelings he's not talking about opinions or logic he is jumping off the side of buildings hanging off the side of planes so when we think about like how do we wanna connect with people yes emotion is the largest but you don't need to go overboard so i'll kinda give you an example as i did work with keller williams in the real estate and we did a deep analysis of how people sell homes in almost all of the marketing material is just fact based it's like this is this house says five bedrooms on an acre of land has a pool and has a nice backyard so that's just twenty five percent of the population but how would i contextualize that single piece of content the house in these six different ways well i still start with logic i said this house has five bedrooms on an acre land four bathrooms a pool in the backyard but can you imagine yourself sitting around this amazing fire on christmas eve like how is that gonna feel when you're sitting with your your your kids opening presence and i really believe that this is a great house for you because it's in the best school district and that pool in the in the backyard you are gonna have the craziest and fun parties and all your friends are gonna be super jealous but i think you should act now because this is the best house on the market so what i did is i take that same content and then just wrapped it in those different ways so you don't necessarily have to go overboard in a certain direction now obviously there are certain if you're talking about podcast podcasts or any type of context there's certain formats or ways that you can kinda manufacture it like like i mentioned hunter prosper in the beginning like his format is all emotionally driven like asking people what was your your biggest heartbreak what was your first love what was your biggest disappointment those questions are going to automatically evo that emotional connection so there's certain things that you can look for in terms of like clips and things of that nature where you're again manufacturing what do you want the effect of the viewer to to have and if you know that ahead of time it makes it so much easier to kinda back into it so if you're doing a podcast and you're kinda just doing research on it is like just think about like okay what are some emotional responses i can get from this person or what are some topics that can have an emotionally charged connection with the audience you know it's so funny because as you're walking me through that keller william's example the way that you said you know imagine your family sitting around the fireplace and enjoying crisp and and this is how a good agent would sell a home yeah that's how that's how they sell they they they make you feel like it's a home before it's even yours now why would you apply a different strategy on social you wouldn't you do the exact same thing you still tie that emotion into it why would you just leave with facts when you can actually wrap it into a story that resonates and to your point so not every style of content has to speak to every every kind of person that's that's really that's it's impossible really to speak to all those different categories of people so you have to figure out which one you want or what or a few that you want to pass in yeah typically we say focus on feelings facts and fun because that's seventy five percent of the population feeling facts and final so you're you're typically getting to hit it like another example as i worked with taylor swift early on in her career and one of the so she's the reason for her success is nobody else like people helped her along the way but the reason that she so successful is she understood that one to one relationship with social media she understood that social media is not a one to many platform it's a one to one platform because people are consuming social media by themselves on their phones in their bed and in the uber the bus whatever but as she scaled go because initially she tried to you know communicate with as many fans as possible respond to comment sign autograph and things in that nature but as she scaled it became more and more difficult so what did she start doing she would go to a fans bridal shower she would show up with christmas presents on a doorstep and they would film the experience and what she was suddenly doing is saying i care about all my fans i love you all i wish i could be with every single one of you but this is just showing that i care now that's she's not saying that it's all done subtly and the fans just love her for it that's why she has such diehard fans is because they truly believe that they care that she cares about them as an individual i saw gary v spoke about this a lot he spoke about when he was just starting out he would stay up till two three in the morning responding to people on twitter who would comment under his tweets and i think they're i think that a lot of people have lost that they look at social and media is like a mega phone and they don't realize that there's real people on the other side of the screen yeah and i think the biggest shift is is the way that you communicate it's shifting it from hey everybody to i wanna tell you a story like i wanna connect with you as the individual not hey i wanna connect with the million people it's just looking at it from that perspective and approaching it as if you're creating creating a video for a friend or creating a video for a single person that's where a lot of that connection is built up that trust in that relationship when a business owner starts to create a whole bunch of content on social because again most of the people you work with they're they're figuring out how do i create a social audience for like a commercial objective that's the goal right not just to a mask a whole bunch of fans so i think that they understand that their social sucks and it could probably be done a little bit better and they could probably apply some of these ideas but i don't think they have a clear line between creating the content and building an audience and then how does this help me with my revenue or sales and the fear is okay how much money do i have to invest in this strategy before i see revenue on the other side and i'm almost positive that's a hundred percent conversations that you have because if you could say with absolute certainty yeah you put x amount of dollars in and you do it for three months or six months and then you're gonna see x amount of dollars on the other side of it it's a very easy sale so how do you how do you set the business owner up or what's the idea that you tell them that they understand when they start doing this this is gonna happen you're gonna get so many fans so many of those fans are gonna turn into customers then eventually it's gonna help your revenue what's that path look like so the the first distinction is are we trying to make a sale or we trying to build an audience that will scale your brand and your company to the highest possible levels if you're just trying to make a sale and i'm not fault people for it just do paid ads it's a lot easier now there's nuances to it but again that is a short term fix like because you're ultimately going to lose out to competition that are building an audience like building an audience is building people that no like can trust you will basically buy anything that you want and you're not gonna have to pay for ads or marketing because they are just exposed to you wanna support you along the way so again if we wanna make a sale just focus on paid ads if you wanna build an audience and really reach the highest potential of your brand in your company you have to realize that your social media profile is not your website and your organic post are not ads people do not log on to social media to watch ads they want to create a connection with people now as i've said is like the whole goal with organic is not about selling it's getting people to know like and trust you so let me give you a prime example of this in action i'll actually give you a few because i just really wanna solidify this point because it's a great question that most people miss so we had a leather craftsman that sell leather goods amazing guy fell in love with creating leather goods at the age of sixty he created his first leather jacket so when he grew up he wanted to to create like leather handbags and purses and wallets so when he came to us he was stuck at two thousand followers wasn't breaking through why because he was just creating ads like through his organic content so we helped him create a format that's called is it worth it where basically take very expensive handbags like a snow handbag d on screen that's like thousands of dollars and tell you whether it's worth the money that you paid for it so with this single format he is not talking about his products he's not doesn't have call to action he exploded he has over two point three million followers across the social media channels channel he has over ninety four videos with a million views so well how does that translate into business he is getting so much exposure he's earning so much trust with the audience because he's building this connection that ultimately people want to buy from him because he's expressing his expertise so he just has a link in his bio that you can click on it to find out more information about his products and previously he's spending money on pay click ads like playing the paid model he's only generating ten thousand visitors a month once this took off it jumped to a hundred thousand visitors and his most expensive products the ones that where custom had made thousands of dollars he can't keep them on the shelf so another example is a dentist again another like un sexy subject matter again he came to a doctor jordan davis out of utah and he was creating commercials and it wasn't breaking through it wasn't resonating so he helped them design a format that is him breaking down celebrity teeth like how he would fix like celebrity veneers like he has one with emily blunt as twenty one million views again through the format he exploded he's not selling his dental practice or any of that stuff that he's opening more dental practices then a hairstylist regina roth in florida you know she's struggling to make three thousand dollars a month she had one viral video that was a reveal of a client generated seventeen million views she's booked out a year in advance from one video of seventeen million views and it i went from three thousand to sixteen thousand in revenue per month again there's no calls to action it's not buy my products by my service and i know it's a bit difficult because it's you know as a business owner you like you need to generate revenue you need to keep the lights on so i don't say like don't do those other things from like a short term win perspective but if you're getting serious about building an audience like you need to give it time to build that relationship like like the other analogy i can give you is like how long like you just let's just say that we meet somebody today for the first time how long would it take before you ask them to loan you some money is not gonna happen in the first day no you know what it's we're friends and exactly when shit's not going so well for me yeah yeah exactly it's not right away exactly and it's the same thing as you're building a relationship with your audience like you look at mister beast like his company is now said to be valued to five billion dollars his company feast which is a fastest selling chocolate bar in the world is estimated to do five hundred million in revenue this year why because he spent years building this massive relationship with people all over the world that just wanna support him because they like him they like the content and what he does not because he's trying to sell it to them when you think about when you think about paid not for conversions but paid as a strategy to help sort of augment the content you're already putting out because every platform has boost or promote or run ads towards con content is that ever part of someone's strategy should they put money towards driving traffic to a post does that help build an audience i mean even on youtube now they have a little promote button where you i've tried it it doesn't work very well i see like the listener retention is shit when you do that does anything actually work in terms of paid or is it always gonna be just a pure organic play so i would say if we're talking about organic content i would say pay comes into play if you have a piece of content that's already proven to work and it's plateau and you wanna push it to that next level if you're trying to drive paid to sell something just run dark ads like and you can re target the audience that consume so i would focus more on like how do i pull my retention up how do i make my content as good as possible because you're not gonna fix it with paid paid is not gonna make it you know running paid ads is not gonna fix your ability to become a better better storyteller so that's the that's the way that i would look at it no that's smart and when you think about all the the different creators out there the people look at as an example of good content this is something that i want you to speak on because it's it's real and i think that it's a a minefield field out there in terms of creators who actually create good content and then creators who fake a lot of their engagement and a lot of their reach so as a business owner i'm trying to find examples of good content what's the signal that somebody has built a real good audience versus like garbage fake engagement so i think that there's a few things that you can look at number like basically the number of followers it's it's getting difficult like if they're you're excel pass like three four million people of an audience but then you could just look at the correlation of views to engagement on content that will tell you but also is just you can watch the content yourself and tell like is it a good story like are you connecting with it if there's something that feels off to it it may not be fake it may not be any know other those things just move on to the next one like because you wanna if you're gonna go and find lessons to learn formats to to create like you wanna feel that connection to be like while this person is really on to something and oftentimes that goes beyond the numbers obviously the numbers are in a barometer of like success but if the content not resonating with you then you know i i would just kinda move on to something else what's you've looked at so many different kinds of formats you mentioned a few here what's one of the ones that's still sort of fa to you or that you get most excited about what is a a certain style of content that you think like wow this is like a game changer so to speak is there anyone in particular stands out in your head i think long form youtube is a game changer for a brand once they've kinda mastered storytelling because if you think about long form versus short form you're building a real a longer relationship ten twenty thirty minutes with an audience versus you know short form but it's inch again again it's it's super interesting the game changing ones are ones that were invented before social media so man on the street nineteen fifty four late night television you know two characters one life of austin bowers you know ryan ser you know luxury the the lifestyle of rich and famous like that's what fa me is the correlation between history of storytelling and what works today like there's always ties in the human psychology and human psychology is forever yes it's never changing and storytelling has been been around since the cape like you know drawing stories on on on cave walls but do you think that if somebody's just starting out out of all the different types of content and we can read even talk about non video content like twitter subs stack like newsletter you did say start where you're comfortable let's say somebody's like okay i do any of it where should they start short form long form written what's the i mean long form is gonna pay the most dividends but the hardest to execute i i would i would just make sure that you at least understand the principles of storytelling through these platforms and and i always recommend starting with short form because you can get your feet under you but if you feel like you have the confidence and the knowledge and you spent the time researching it then yeah try and go for for long form youtube videos but like again if you wanna write you can write like i also have been part of businesses that are successful off social media like you don't necessarily need social media now social media gives you an edge and you can scale things a lot bigger and faster but again i'm not trying to push anybody into any specific direction mh i think it's listen at the end of the day like i was gonna ask you but i know the answer like i was gonna ask you is it quantity or quality but it's always quality and i think that that idea of not just putting out content for content sake but being more purposeful with it that's really one of the most important ideas learning take away yeah and learning and learning and how like how those feedback loops i feel like people just put out content just to put out content well they do it's and and one of the big mistakes that they do is batch producing content if you think about like let's just say that we're a chef and we have a new recipe for baking cakes and we bake all ten cakes at the same time and we fall and they're all in the oven and we pull out that first bake cake and it's too dry what do you do like you've got nine other in the oven well you're just gonna have to throw them out and start it back over versus like let's say that we're gonna create the perfect pasta edition we're just gonna perfect that sauce and we just keep you know adding an ingredients tasting adding an ingredients and tasting adding it like that is the analogy because like people batch produce they first put the first video out and it doesn't work well what do with the other nine you you just it's human behavior you spent the time so you're gonna put it up there and it doesn't create that opportunity for learning with each one as and same thing with like tasting with the the the the pasta sauce is like just take one step at a time learn one step at a time and then as you learn and have success and you understand how and why things work then you can move to more frequency and and pushing out more content out of all the clients you've have worked with this is not very much because people ask me this question about you know who's my favorite podcast guess and i always tell them to f off because i can't answer that but think about sort of the the biggest journey that one of your clients has been on i want you to walk through that story your your favorite story of zero expertise zero social media presence to where have they gone after working with you yeah i would say tanner leather team was mean no he wasn't at zero he was at like two thousand but he is a perfect example because he didn't feel comfortable on camera like he's like i i don't know if i really want to be on camera and even if he watches his videos today he's not like a gary v or simon sq where he jumps off the screen but with that again we we worked with him to find an avenue that matched his passion like we were talking about earlier like your passion your authenticity your connection to the material is super important and when the the is it worth it for him for came up of taking a you know a thousand hour no handbag d on screen and telling you each little elements like this is good this isn't good this is overpriced is not overpriced you could see the passion going through the screen not because he's over inflated in terms of his personality but just sharing that expertise and insight and again if you watch the videos now it's not like a gary v type thing but that massive connection that he built with the audience to scaling to two point three million people around the world is amazing and the most amazing thing is is the fashion industry is scared of him like they even they even invited him to paris fashion week like parties with like kendall jenner and things like that because they they're scared that he's gonna like break down his bags and stuff like and the the amazing thing about him is he will not take any product deals like to page due post if you want to break down the product he makes you sign an agreement saying that you're gonna accept whatever video and then he also says you cannot give me the product for free i'm gonna buy the product and i'm gonna do it as a secret chopper so you won't know it's me so it's just that level of authenticity that connection of a leather craftsman like somebody's super passionate but not necessarily like a sexy subject matter could build a connection build that much influenced by just really being himself in finding that vehicle to express to express his genius plus last thought on on that particular case study because that i think is your most popular youtube video ever if i'm not mistaken where you broke that down and you broke if somebody sort of goes down the rabbit hole and they research you and they find that video they're gonna watch that video and they're gonna see you discuss i think there's five five steps five step the first step is taking a ship a mindset shift from just endlessly scrolling to an expert creator mindset understanding that there is such thing as a storytelling format which again is a blueprint for repeatable sec success it's a structure that has proven to work time and time again that you can insert your message and product into so once you've made that mindset shift you can move to step two which is selecting and then analyzing your format so you wanna select the right format for you what is the resources that you have even if you have an iphone there's formats for you so you don't need to go beyond your resources number two which format works best for you what feels great we talked both of us man on the street not really are kind of deal so it needs to fit authentically and again we've done ten thousand hours of research analyze over three hundred different formats so there are plenty to choose from number three is once you have the the or number two once you have the format then you have to analyze it so as i meant i mentioned before we have gold silver bronze our analysis process you cross analyze the high performers in that format versus the low performers and look at what are the elements that drive success in the high performers versus low performers so these things can be facial expressions reactions captions title cards there's like over twenty one that we kind of used to analyze content once you've done that number three is coming up with ideas idea isolation so format is the vehicle that makes it super easy to come up with ideas like the is it worth the format with tanner leather thing breaking down high priced leather goods like chanel handbags prada handbags it makes it super easy so like you know the first video is chanel the second video it's prada the third week it's louis vuitton like it makes it so much easier to create high performing ideas because it's a vehicle for it and then number four is you produce one video at a time because you wanna produce one video at a time so that you learn with each one and then five is you analyze the performance and again with this model if it doesn't perform we have the hook point mirror test where you take the low performer of your video against a high performer and you analyze them against each other to see what the difference is last question what happens if you're creating a type of content because this is a this is something that i know of my content the content that i create that performs the best is not the content that's actually accomplishing the objective that i want my content to accomplish so i'll give you a verb my my clips from my podcast that's what i want to perform and they do okay but they do not do as well as the little graphic images that are hyper shareable they're are little tweet sort of you know square images so i'm going through a process of okay so then how do i i don't wanna stop the thing that drives the most engagement on my page on instagram but i also wanna make the podcast clips the priority because that's really my business so in that case would you keep the content that's going viral and test the other at the same time and then just optimize slowly if it's if it's serving a purpose and it's driving success for where you don't stop it yeah you can keep going with it but the thing that i would say is in terms of refining the clips is again is if you have high performers you can just do the cross analysis if your own high performers or low performers or just look at other people look at steven bartlett look at somebody else that's doing clips on on instagram or youtube shorts and just do that analysis but no you don't if something is working for you why stop it you don't need to stop it but don't be complacent with that if there's larger kind of opportunities to scale smart any last words of wisdom things that i didn't ask you about with content social that you think you wanna leave the audience with i would just say like if you've struggled with success and like you've put your time energy and resources into something and it doesn't work i feel you're pain but i'm just here to tell you it's not luck and you can succeed even though there's so much competition everything that we've talked about today ninety nine percent of people creating content are not following it so even though it's a a severely competitive marketplace don't get frustrated because the beautiful thing is all of the answers are out there like we have billions of data points available to us for absolutely free nobody is charging us for it you can go and do the homework and study and just focus on one thing john i've everything out and just focus on how to become a better storyteller don't worry about algorithm changes or shifts or any that's of just become the best storyteller you can and you will succeed amazing where can people connect with you where do you wanna send them if they wanna learn more about our process and our company can go to hook point dot com if they wanna get access to my third book the guide going viral which dives deep into this methodology they can get it for free by going to hook point dot com forward slash cla i responded to dms on instagram linkedin but those are some places amazing i always asked one question that ended out and this has been like a very tactical podcast so i appreciate it but one thing i mean you've built an incredible career a a massive amount of success if you were going to sort of pass on one lesson that you've learned over your whole career it doesn't have to even be social media related just one lesson that you'd wanna pass on to your kids after sort of achieving you know i would say you're in the point o zero one percent of agency owner of thought leader in social media and you built an entire career around that what would be the lesson for career life that you'd wanna pass on to your children i would say it's it's patience and persistence like just be pacing patient with the process as long as you are constantly learning constantly trying to strive for new answers not getting overly deflate with failures you know failures you do need to sit with it for some period of time and like really feel it but like is just keep pushing yourself keep trying to be the best person you can be trying to kind of learn as much as possible and be patient with that process you know you will see some people over the course of your life that hit it really quick you will see some that will take decades to hit it but definitively and i'm sure you know a lot of people is like you can spot the people that are gonna be success we you may not be able to put the pulse on when they will be successful and when it hits but it's all about that mindset of just being paste patient constantly learning and constantly pushing yourself and and just being persistent with that process that will ultimately lead to the success that you're looking for and that applies in personal life if it applies to social media applies to anything that you do but that's really the key that i would say survey monkey is a success story partner now look we get it you can hardly go anywhere or do anything these days without hearing about ai this or ai that and if you're like most people when it comes to ai you're impressed but you have a few concerns but what if ai was used not as a tool to replace people but as a way to help understand people better ai from survey monkey is designed to do just that i'm crafting the perfect survey which is harder than you might think to analysis that digs deep binds patterns and services trends quickly survey monk powerful suite of ai capabilities makes it faster and easier than ever before to get insight from real people helping you make confident decisions for your business try it today at survey dot com slash scott cognate is a success story partner now have you ever wondered how all those scammers get your phone numbers all those tele marketers how you're always drowning in all these spam calls its data brokers right now hundreds of companies are collecting and selling your personal information without your consent your address your phone number even your family members names to anyone is willing to pay and this puts you at risk of identity theft scams and harassment and that's where cog comes in big contact over two hundred and thirty data brokers on your behalf and legally force them to delete your personal information no more spending hundreds of hours doing it yourself and cognitive handles all the paperwork follows up on objections and keep your data off the market with repeated removal i've actually been using incognito myself it's scary and also incredible to see how much of my data was out there but they get rid of it they've got a thirty day money back guarantee so you can try it at risk free use my code success adding incognito dot com slash success to get an exclusive sixty percent off their annual plans you have to take back control of your privacy today success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there

success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square me there 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how identifying untapped audiences creates rapid growth opportunities understand why tailoring content to match learner needs builds long term engagement and uncover how creative pitching and platform selection open doors to new markets how did you start science people how did you think like this is a viable business idea how did you commercial your brand to the point where now you're i guess you're writing books you other products i guess would be courses you have like your whole social going on you have people school yeah so how did that start as like you know entrepreneur can go yeah go so so funny a funny a funny story is that my my parents are both lawyers and so when i was in college my mom i was i think was home for the summer are home for a break and she said i signed you up for a financial class i'm like great i'm so because excited i do that on my break she said i am a lawyer and i'm paid by my hours and i don't want you to have to do that i am constantly counting my hours it was really hard for her as a working mom she said like i wanna show you another way she said when i was going to college i didn't know of another way i thought you could be a doctor a lawyer accountant everything was hourly and a to a certain extent said there are other ways now so she dropped me off at the i think it was the la convention center in brooklyn in los angeles and was a millionaire mind seminar by t har ec and you ever heard of him yeah yeah so so was a millionaire mind seminar i was a weekend seminar and this seminar completely blew my mind because he introduced me to the concept of passive income so at the time i believe i was eighteen or nineteen so it's very young and he explained that there is this other way of earning income that's not just based on your hours that books and products and courses and or a very powerful active income which is like speaking or training or teaching and so from that age i knew that i wanted to create a career with passive income streams and so in from two thousand six to two thousand eleven i was trying all those ways i hadn't found one that works so i i was doing a lot of active income youth coaching i had a youth workbook that i was on which is a passive income stream had my first book which was published by ping at the time and that the one you mentioned do i get my allowance before hour after i'm grounded for very a long title don't recommend that by the way through writing books shorter kettle or better and so i have these very small door revenue streams and i i could see how it was working but they were very slowly paying the bills but still most of my income at that time with coaching and consulting which was very active once i figured out you know what there's something broader here more than just the n misha working with use in parents i think these frameworks could be used by engineers at companies i think that c suite would love these i think that code and graphic designers would love to have people skills in their back pocket and at the time i believe it was two thousand eleven thousand twelve i just started the website u me which was a new on online learning platform was just starting and at that time it was all for engineers it's almost all like technical classes a couple of accounting things on there and so i thought that's my ideal person right someone who's super engineering minded and so i said i'm gonna upload a body language course to u to me as a pasadena stream and just see what happens so i filmed in my living room i had no professional lights i literally had all the lamps in my house i had a twenty eight dollar microphone that i had bought from amazon that i like weave through my shirt and like pinned on my little blouse and for three hours i just taught the body language frameworks that i had been using and i was like okay my goal was thirty sales like if i can get thirty sales it forty nine dollar course it will just be major game changer thirty sales so i go to sleep and it takes at the time it took about twenty four to forty hours then to approve your course so i go to sleep i wake up next morning and my inbox was filled with thousands of sales thousand for curious so the first the first time you up you uploaded the course yeah that's wow very first example to court wow wow wow i think now i wanna say at like three hundred and seventy six thousand students in in that course in my living room it's it's still the same course it's me in my living room with no lights with a a mic that probably didn't even work and by the way the entire thing was sold on my phone the entire course is filled on my phone that was the first time i went maybe there something here and so i i'm rethinking what i'm doing for a living now i'm my not the wheels are turning i be yeah it it it was it was like madness and so in a wild it would like the wild west in in in six months i completely changed everything that i was doing i filmed four more courses and this time and every course got a little bit better by the last course actually was with a little small crew from them i put them on the on the platform they were telling like crazy very quickly request started coming in for me to speak at companies and the reason why it works i think is because this was a platform where my people already were there was already engineers and c and accountants on there learning online this was the only soft skills course there there might have been one or two others so people were like u something new and what i heard was my students kept telling me you're my lunchtime course they would watch these other very serious courses during the day but i was their break their lunch their dinner break and they would buy every single course that i put out and so that's when i realized okay like i can be the the soft skill balance to the hard skills and i can teach soft skills like hard skills and that was in two thousand and eleven two thousand and i think two thousand twelve is when i finally craft the u game yeah survey monkey is a success story partner now look we get it you can hardly go anywhere or do anything these days without hearing about ai this or ai that and if you're like most people when it comes to ai you're impressed but you have a few concerns but what if ai was used not as a tool to replace people but as a way to help understand people better ai from survey monkey is designed to do just that from crafting the perfect survey which is harder than you might think to analysis that digs deep binds patterns and services trends quickly survey monk powerful suite of ai capabilities makes it faster and easier than ever before to get insight from real people helping you make confident decisions for your business try it today at survey dot com slash scott the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now the hubspot podcast network has great podcast like the ops authority if you are constantly putting out fires in your business instead of focusing on growth and innovation listen to the ops authority hosts by natalie gin and brought to you by the house hubspot podcast network natalie speaks about actionable strategies that actually move your business forward so every week natalie shares some transformational stories from real business owners who've mastered their backend end systems so they can focus on what really matters so get your ops in order get your business running smoothly so you can scale and you can really build something meaningful stop letting all this chaos steal all of your energy and listen to the ops authority wherever you get your podcasts success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there the the very impressive congratulations seriously so that's you incredible success like and and like you know you got the content timing platform and it just took off that's really really impressive i had no idea seriously that this was this is how you'd sort of built your own brand your entire company the reason i was asking about education was sort of alluding to why it was also so i i'm just blown away by the fact that you put this on you to me mean and took off and my point is or my question is is there anything else like this out there that teaches people for fifty bucks i'm assuming it's great content because three hundred thousand plus people have i haven't taken the course and i can go check it after we finish this call but i don't do it's thousand don't take it it's so old if you wanna take a course take my newer one it's i'm so little and so old oh gosh but the the point is during a thousand people can't be wrong let's let's be honest like that's that's some that's some social proof that the course is pretty frank damn good so so is no one else teaching this stuff or you know are there just the people that charged the tony robbins five thousand dollar for ten thousand dollars at the competition right okay so i think it was critical it was definitely good timing right so it very good timing that this was before the wild west of online courses right like two thousand twelve people were like online and what like people kinda knew it was that it was very new and so the timing is really good the other thing was there are a few other at the time there were a few other people teaching soft skills or by language but they were doing it in a very traditional way it was very traditional so they would be hired by a company they would come and they would do a two day sales workshop mh and that was it you couldn't access them otherwise you couldn't even hire them as a coach maybe you could hire them as a dating coach but no one had thought in thought i had other people tell me you can't teach bah body language online you can't can't teach body language in a video and so that was actually hard it was that it was hard to move the content into video format but i think that being willing to try readers and students were like yes i don't wanna attend people also don't wanna attend a two day workshop where they have to role play with their colleagues yeah my person so i think it's also really important to know your person my ideal student is a super high achieve above average intelligence usually very technically minded recovering awkward person they do not want to do a role playing workshop they do not want to have to go to an hr webinar on here's how you smile at someone they wanna learn on their own time and so that means this is one of the reasons why i almost exclusively teach on video is if they wanna speed me up two point five speed because that's how fast they learn cool i'm not offended great do it if they're are like no i i wanna actually pause the video and absorb it we have a lot of our students who say i learn in chunks a i have to i can only do fifteen twenty minutes a time cool you can consume my content however you want and so i think was also critically important to know that my ideal student didn't like the way that a lot of my competitors for teaching and i want to i want sort of unpack what you teach a little bit more sure before before we go into that because there's there's there's entrepreneurial lessons and then there's very tactical lessons that you you teach over that i kinda wanna tease out and and and run through some of those and understand some of those but before i migrate off like your career path was there anything else like notable in your career path that you think would be good to chat about or was this is this kind of the summary of of where you've been to yeah i think it that was so that was the first part and the second part was i try to go to where my students are so i tried very hard to go to other platform or other podcasts where my students are so from u to me i went to creative life so my next group that i wanted to meet with a different audience which was a highly creative audience artists photographers who are super creative but hate selling so that was my next group so i had i hit my engineers and my and my amazing computer geek in u and then i wanted to hit my creative and so creative live with where they were all watching online content and so i cold pitch creative life i was not invited to speak there i had to bang on their door and i cold pitch them and the most creative way i could think of i sent them an email to their support inbox that said i want to make you money and then i outlined all the ways that i thought my course could make them money and it got forwarded internally i didn't know this until later it got forwarded internally and bounce department department department until it finally it's the right contact producer who was willing to take a risk on me and they brought me in to san francisco so this was a very different way of filming and they bring you in the san francisco you film your course and we took a risk it was we did my first course with a three day course and it was one of their top selling courses across their entire platform and so i've done four more courses for them that is a different audience than on you audience and so i think that one of the major things is that i've tried to do over the last you know fifteen years is go to my people know who my people are one who are my people and then try to meet them where they're at thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out in the description to episode see you in the next one monarch money is a success story partner now you know what's it's weird i'm doing well financially but i have this constant low level financial anxiety that i was missing something because i have crypto on all these different exchanges i have multiple investment accounts old four zero one k's saving scattered everywhere i knew the pieces were fine but i had no idea if the whole picture made sense i finally got monarch money to pull everything into one view and the first thing i noticed i had ten thousand dollars sitting in a temporary savings account for eight months ago when i sold some stock that's eight months ten thousand dollars it could have been workings that have just waiting for me to remember existed also it showed me that i was spending tons monthly on all these subscription services that i couldn't even remember i signed up for every sunday morning it takes me five minutes to check everything all my financial stuff in one place no more wondering no more anxiety the wall street journal just named it the best budgeting app of twenty twenty five but honestly it's more about finally having control so don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks use code success at monarch money dot com in your browser for half off your first year that's fifty percent off your first year at monarch money dot com with code success success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in my miami last week and beyond the incredible cor what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there

success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success swear me you there you just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday how can you find amazing candidates fast easy just use indeed stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites with indeed sponsored jobs your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster according to indeed data sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have forty five percent more applications than non sponsor jobs don't wait any longer speed up your hiring right now with indeed and listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollar sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed dot com slash p o k a t z thirteen just go to indeed dot com slash p k a t z thirteen right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast terms and edition apply hiring indeed is all you need in this lessons episode explore how turning customers into investors reshape the path to going public discover how ownership deepens loyalty and brand advocacy understand why retail investors often act like long term institutions and uncover how this model gives entrepreneurs both capital and an engaged shareholder base now i'm curious for the entrepreneur that's going into this an entrepreneur goes and raises some money and they usually wanna find some investors that are gonna provide some value to their business what is the benefit to somebody that has for example fifty million arr or annual revenue a hundred million annual recurring revenue to get this crowd funded investment isn't that just is that is that headache pre ipo or does at that point they don't care because they're already gonna be publicly listed turning customers into investors in an ipo is potentially the most strategic and savvy move any company in the united states can make and we know this is going to be a breakthrough mechanism when customers become investors here's what happens those customers are now emotionally invested in the deal they're financially invested they're literally invested in the outcome of the business so what does that mean it means their lifetime value to the business is going to increase those customers and now investors will buy more product buy more services they're less likely to use products or services from competitors they're more likely to tell their friend's family social network that they're an investor that they're a customer and so the network effect is tremendous and not only that but what we've seen over the year years scott is that when companies turn customers into investors and those companies end up actually going public those investors they tend to act like institutions and institutions are they tend to be long term shareholders they're not slippers they're not day traders an institution that buys fifty million dollars in an ipo usually long term they hold those shares for a number of years they believe in the vision and the founder and the business opportunity down the road they're looking ahead well the customers tend to act the same way so creating a shareholder base actually in this period that's a mix of institutional investors alongside everyday americans the customers of the company the fans the followers they're coming in together investing into the ipo at the ipo price and the smart money the institutional investors by the way they're not getting a discount there's no favors they're all buying the same shares at the same price and these are both different constituents because the average retail investor might buy a thousand dollars of stock but they act like an institution because they are buying into the vision of the company their satisfied customer they've generated value or you know receive value from the product and so that's really valuable for the business so from the company standpoint what do they have to gain by having thirty or fifty thousand customers become investors well those will be the most valuable customers in the history of the business they are a massively powerful type of brand ambassador that can promote the brand and they're going to be long term shareholders as well so we think that this is really a winning formula for founders and entrepreneurs to empower their customers return the favor and it's a thank you and if you think about this it's really interesting companies like uber and lyft these companies that stay private for ten years twelve years they raised billions of dollars in venture capital from private investors in private markets and those companies would never have multi billion dollar valuations in private markets if it weren't for the millions of customers who use the app yet it's the customers who are effectively left out and are always excluded from becoming owners and you and i is you know customers of uber for instance the only thing we could do is buy shares of uber app it went public yeah well by that time scott it's too late the the the values already been realized by the early investors and you and i end up looking like the suckers because we're now holding shares of uber that has stayed private for too long the chances of you and i getting a 5x or 10x and our investment is slim to none so we're changing that paradigm by allowing customers to become owners in these businesses at much earlier stages in the company's of growth and in their life cycle survey monkey is a success story partner now look we get it you can hardly go anywhere or do anything these days without hearing about ai this or ai that and if you're like most people when it comes to ai you're impressed but you have a few concerns but what if ai was used not as a tool to replace people but as a way to help understand people better ai from survey monkey is designed to do just that from crafting the perfect survey which is harder than you might think to analysis that digs deep binds patterns and services trends quickly survey monkey powerful suite of ai capabilities makes it faster and easier than ever before to get insight from real people helping you make confident decisions for your business try it today at survey monkey dot com slash scott success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in my miami amy last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square me there the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now the hubspot podcast network has great podcast like the ops authority if you are constantly putting out fires in your business instead of focusing on growth and innovation listen to the ops authority hosted by natalie gin and brought to you by the house hubspot podcast network natalie speaks about actionable strategies that actually move your business forward so every week natalie shares some transformational stories from real business owners who've mastered their backend end systems so they can focus on what really matters so get your ops in order get your business running smoothly so you can scale and you can really build something meaningful stop letting all this chaos steal all of your energy and listen to the ops authority wherever you get your podcasts yeah that makes a lot of sense and and i would just wanted to highlight that point you mentioned about i didn't even think about that but the the point that you can turn your customers into these evangelist early on by getting them to invest financially that is one of the the strongest commercial plays you can have regardless of of your share price just this the the whole customer base being your raving fan group and of and evan your product i didn't think about that but that's a huge that's a huge plus to getting people to getting your customers to buy in so that's a very very smart point and and i just one more question about about the show itself because this all makes a ton of sense and i think it's a a very exciting story that you're gonna be telling what when somebody watches the show what do they see what's the like what do they see the operations of a of a fifty million dollar company do they see the struggles of a of a founder ceo what do they see the fundraising process dealing with the lawyers or what like what's the actual show look like a great question so the format is what's called a serial narrative and what that means is that in episode one we're introducing company a and company b and the founders of these companies spend twelve minutes talking about their backstory almost nothing to do with the business who are they how why did they become founders what inspired them to create a business what problem were they solving what obstacles did they have to overcome to be successful and build the business that they're now ceo of today and what that's doing is it's really providing insight into the individual and helping the audience understand the character of the founder which creates a strong emotional bond in episode two the first two companies begin developing the marketing materials for their campaign we introduced company number three in episode three the first two founders are now going out and raising capital they're on a road show with institutional investors and retail investors alike and in the ipo process it's the most intense time period in a company's history as they're going public it's filled with drama it's filled with excitement disappointment panic euphoria we're going to capture the excitement of that process in this series and in the second half of the season the companies closed their ipo in a staggered close just like they were introduced in the staggered start and we're filming the ipo ceremony at nasdaq and that's the culmination offer each of these businesses we've brought in an incredible production company to help highlight the drama and the excitement of these ipo and the ipo process and that company is in e entertainment they're based in studio city the principles are best known for c creating and and c executive producing the tv series the biggest loser and so when people say to us well hey the ipo process sounds a little dry and you hey what the lawyers we're gonna film the lawyers what we say is look our producers have a credit in one of the most successful television franchises in history and that's a show about weight loss they made weight loss exciting so imagine what they can do with the ipo i mean it's a scale and their exercise yeah they found a way to make that really entertaining and everybody knows biggest loser and it's they have a brand and you could buy biggest loser branded stuff and the it's it's everywhere imagine what they can do with the ipo process so this will be a very entertaining series and i think we're going to bring out some of that drama and excitement to bring the viewers along the journey right there with the founders as they're going public very exciting this is like my this is like my kind of tv and i wanna i wanna watch this already you gotta get this filmed you gotta get this because i i seriously like this this sounds very exciting i've never seen anything like this i've never i don't think there's anything like this to be honest at all well look i'll i'll tell you what there is you know there's shark take and that's the show i'm thinking yeah we we all know shark tank and listen i'm a fan of shark i love that show i loved it from the moment it came out and to see the judges cri critique the deal and bi with each other it's massively entertainment there's no denying that and what we believe is that it's a great show shark tank boys always be a great show the model is outdated the model is old and at some point it will be obsolete because i think that people are tired of watching the rich people get richer mark cuban adding another know zero to his net worth and what are the viewers able to do well they can buy the product they can help squat potty go from five hundred thousand in sales of fifty million dollars but they don't they're not getting the value right because they're not owners they don't own any shares they don't own any equity in the business they're just a customer so who makes the money then well the sharks make the money in those deals so that's the parallel here is this is similar to shark tank in some ways one of the differences is that of course there are no judges there are mentors but there's no mark cuban or kevin o o'leary bashing these entrepreneurs trying to take advantage of them put in thirty grand for half of the company these ridiculous deals it's the viewers it's the fans that now can participate and in companies they like they can invest and you don't have to put in fifty thousand dollars you put in a thousand dollars by thousand dollars worth of shares and then have liquidity in that investment immediately so that's the difference and in the companies themselves we're not featuring pre product or pre revenue companies we're featuring companies that have traction have millions of dollars or tens of millions of dollars in revenue are ready to go public to nasdaq different different segment of the market thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation episode see success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square me you there monarch money is a success story partner now you know what what's weird i'm doing well financially but i have this constant low level financial anxiety that i was missing something because i have crypto on all these different exchanges i have multiple investment accounts old four zero one k's saving scattered everywhere i knew the pieces were fine but i had no idea if the whole picture made sense i finally got monarch money to pull everything into one view and the first thing i noticed i ten thousand dollars sitting in a temporary savings account from eight months ago when i sold some stock that's eight months ten thousand dollars it could have been working that have just waiting for me to remember it existed also it showed me that i was spending tons monthly on all these subscription services that i couldn't even remember i signed up for every sunday morning it takes me five minutes to check everything all my financial stuff in one place no more wondering no more anxiety the wall street journal just named it the best budgeting app of twenty twenty five but honestly it's more about finally having control so don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks use code success at monarch money dot com in your browser for half off your first year that's fifty percent off your first year at monarch money dot com with code success