What Is A Success Mindset? with Joanne Chen
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
When it comes to successfully making a pitch, you need to establish your own success mindset – and that involves not letting rejection affect you more than it should. Learn how to spot the characteristics of a founder: grit, tenacity, and of course the ability to tell a good story, which is what the successful pitch is all about. Joanne Chen, a venture capitalist at foundation capital in Silicon Valley, talks about this in a discussion of her journey, and how her company is transitioning from being one of Netflix’s early investors to getting a head start in the future of artificial technology.
Joanne Chen’s passion for technology developed very early. Her parents taught her how to program: her dad, who was a mathematician, and her mom who specialized in computer science. By the time Joanne was nine, she turned that into a business, making her first webpage for a client. This glimmer of entrepreneurial ability soon sparked as she began her career as an engineer at Cisco Systems and then later at a mobile gaming company. She spent many years working at Wall Street at Jefferies & Co. She had also been an angel investor for two years, and now works with passionate entrepreneurs who want to disrupt businesses by leveraging data assets.
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Our guest is Joanne Chen who’s a venture capitalist at Foundation Capital in Silicon Valley. I had the pleasure of being on the Coca-Cola CMO Summit panel with her and she is smart and fun. She will talk about the mindset you need to have when you pitch which all boils down to not taking rejection personally. She looks for two characteristics in a founder: grit and tenacity, and the ability to tell a good story which is what The Successful Pitch is all about. Enjoy Joanne’s journey and how she and her company were one of the early investors in Netflix and what they’re doing in artificial intelligence.
Listen To The Episode Here
What Is A Success Mindset? with Joanne Chen
I’m thrilled to have Joanne Chen who is at Foundation Capital in Silicon Valley. She and I met at a Coca-Cola CMO Summit and I instantly knew I wanted to have her as a friend, as a guest on this podcast, and let you hear what she is doing with her life and in the tech startup world. She has a passion for technology that she developed very early when her dad, who is a mathematician, and her mom, who is in computer science, taught her how to program. By the time she was nine, she turned that into a business and made her first webpage for a client. That entrepreneur blood was in her from the beginning.
She began her career as an engineer at Cisco Systems and then later co-founded a mobile gaming company. She spent many years working on Wall Street at Jefferies & Company in which she helped tech companies go through the IPO and the M&A process. She has been an Angel investor previously to joining Foundation and she works with passionate entrepreneurs who want to leverage data assets to disrupt businesses. She knows what she’s doing and she’s worked a lot with people in SAS, drone tech, and virtual reality. In fact, some of the other companies that she’s worked with include Zen Gaming and something we’re going to ask her about called Mya. Joanne, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. It’s my pleasure to be here.
Can we start by taking us back to those early days of your childhood when you were nine years old and watching your parents as you say, “I’m going to learn how to code and start a business?”
Thanks for bringing that up. It’s always a fun story. My father left China to pursue his PhD at the University of Montreal. He was initially supposed to be in Montreal for just a year to do a study abroad. Then what happened was the whole Tiananmen Square incident happen and then he decided to stay. Eventually, my mother and I was able to join him in Montreal and we lived the life of an aspiring PhD student. We were in this one-room apartment in Montreal in this terrible neighborhood and that’s how they started their careers in tech. My father was initially a professor; my mother was a programmer. Both of them eventually moved into the industry. At a very young age, I was influenced by both their passion and their tenacity in the space as well as content-wise. I was very influenced by computer science and tech.
When the first version of the internet was available, we got this clunky and slow computer and we got online. My mother taught me how to use file systems, access DOS, and play very simple games. Eventually, when webpage making became a little bit simpler, she taught me how to use HTML. At the same time, I was working part time at Pennysaver. That was the only job that you could get as a nine-year old, delivering newspapers down the street. As part of the reward for delivering newspapers, they let me post one ad of my choice for free and so I thought about that.
The other experience and realization I had at the time was I created this terribly ugly website that I brought to my second or third grade classroom. I showed this to my classmates and teachers and not a single one of them knew what it was. That sparked an idea in my mind which is, “We’re early in this evolution. I’m sure there’s probably a lot of people don’t know what this is, or if they do, they don’t know how to make it.” I decided to post the ad offering my services around website development. A week later, I got my first client.
You then went on to get your BS at the University of California in Berkeley and then went to get your MBA at the University of Chicago School of Business. I’m from Chicago and I know the contrast of the weather from Berkeley to Chicago. That must’ve been a shock to your system.
It was certainly very cold. I remember there were two days during the year where the school advised us not to go outside because more than two minutes outside would have given us frostbite.
When you were getting your MBA, did you know then that you wanted to become a venture capitalist?
Success Mindset: Never give up. At some point, someone will see the beauty of your business.
Yes, the reason why I went to business school was to think about that career transition. I had always known that I wanted to be in tech. I studied Computer Science at Berkeley and Electrical Engineering. The first exposure to venture capitalists was at Berkeley, not University of Chicago where I had no idea what venture capitalists did. Berkeley had this competition called The Venture Capital Case Competition. As part of that, we had to submit a company that we were excited about, I was maybe nineteen or twenty years old at the time, and present to a panel of VCs who will judge how we did as VCs. Three friends and I got together; all three of them eventually became entrepreneurs. We knew one of the early people at Mint.com which was one of the first, modern-day fintech companies and proposed that Mint as an investment candidate.
The funny thing was I believe Mint was in stealth mode at the time. It wasn’t a company that most people knew about, but a few of the VCs were looking at Mint as a potential investment opportunity in real life. They were impressed with how we found this company. We eventually won the competition. That stuck in my mind. I enjoyed the process. I thought it was very easy to get to that point. A couple of years later, Mint was acquired by Intuit for $170 million, which was at the time a huge acquisition in this space. At the back of my mind, I had always thought about venture capital ever since that experience. After working at Cisco as an engineer, working on Wall Street advising tech executives, starting my own mobile gaming company, I thought about the combination of my experiences, what I really loved, and decided that I wanted to give it a try at investing.
Fintech was your first expertise level and public still continues today and the kinds of companies you invest in?
My firm, Foundation Capital, is a very strong investor in fintech companies. We have lending club, lending home, and financial engines back in the day in our portfolios. We’ve been very lucky in the sector. For me personally, I focus primarily on B2B enterprise companies that leverage data and machine learning to create hopefully self-driving software that sells into different functional units or different verticals. I focus on that world.
What lessons did you learn about what a good pitch was when you were first being exposed to that because you’ve been on both sides of the table, it sounds like?
It’s very enlightening to get the investor side, especially when I first started as an Angel investor in 2012. Lessons learned? Let’s see.
What makes a good pitch?
You’re the expert on this topic, but for me personally, a couple things that I look for in a 45-minute to a 60-minute meeting for an entrepreneur, one is that he or she has a very interesting problem statement that they are communicating and that this problem is either large today or going to be large very soon in the near to mid-future. This is a problem in market size description that’s compelling. The second piece of it is a reason why this person or this team of people are the right folks to solve this problem, some secret sauce or insight that they have.
Perhaps it’s them as individuals or as the team, perhaps it’s their experience and therefore relationships and networks in the particular domain, or perhaps it’s because they’re amazing technologists who are just better than everyone else in the world. Some secret about them that lets them solve this problem. Third, it’s their ability to tell the story in a compelling way. We are story-driven creatures and they have to be able to tell the story to me, to potential customers, to potential people they hire in a compelling way, especially when data is not there in the very beginning. Those are the three things I look for in a 45 to 60-minute meeting.
That storytelling element is everything. Most people think, “Let me just show you how this app works,” and they’re not telling you a story as it relates to what problem they’re solving for people. It’s like, “Isn’t it cool that this would work?” You’re like, “Yes, but would anybody want to use it and why? What problem is it solving?” If you haven’t thought that through, then the technology works without understanding what’s important to someone like you, which is how am I going to get my money back? Is this market big enough to scale, is someone going to buy you, or are you going to go public, or whatever the issue is? That’s important. Is there one mistake that you typically see when people pitch that you could share with us to make sure the listeners avoid doing it?
I don’t think this is necessarily a mistake, but more a frame of mind that people, in my opinion, don’t consider as much. I believe investing and picking both entrepreneurs and investors is like a dating exercise. The reality is there is a big percentage of it in investor’s decision that’s rational and there’s a significant percentage of the decision making that is not rational. It’s based on chemistry or emotions or something else, just like dating. That part of it is hard to predict, hard to control, hard to necessarily filter for. As an entrepreneur, I would not take rejection as necessary correlated with the business entirely. It could just be because of the personality fit or a lack of chemistry or something. That is an important element that entrepreneurs don’t think about as much.
[Tweet “Don’t take rejection personally.”]
I talk about this a lot. Don’t take rejection personally, whether it’s a date or a no from an investor. It doesn’t mean you need to start rejecting yourself or your business model or your idea, it just means it’s not a fit. If you’re going to get up and start talking to someone else at a dating situation or as a potential other investor, you have to hit the reset button every time. It’s almost like, if you go on a date with somebody who just broke up or got divorced and all they talk about is their ex, that’s a horrible date. You have to clear your mindset that that wasn’t a fit onward and start remembering the times when you did get a yes.
I love that you brought that up because it hits my sweet spot of what I like to do when I give keynote talks to companies, especially when I talk to people in sales. It’s the same thing. You cannot take rejection personally. For me, the big lesson is never reject yourself just because someone has said no to you. We tend to do that. Even if people say, “It’s hard not to take rejection personally.” I tell people, “What’s the cost of taking it personally?” You’re depressed and you’re down for however long it takes you to shake that off, so it’s important to develop some skills. Let’s dive into some of the companies you said yes to, starting with one that I’m particularly intrigued about called Mya.
Mya is a company that is in the recruiting space. What they offer is an AI-driven conversational solution to help recruiters become more efficient. They are a recruiting assistant, if you will. If you think about the problems in recruiting, especially around hiring high turnover, high volume jobs, like staffing Amazon fulfillment centers or Nike hiring retail store associates, they can’t hire more than 10,000 retail store associates per year, for example. It’s a massive problem because there aren’t enough recruiters and recruiter time to go through these candidates in a timely fashion. At the same time, there isn’t a shortage of candidates that are interested in these jobs. Mya is able to source, screen, and place these candidates into an in-person interview, eliminating 75% of the grunt work that recruiters typically have to do. In addition, it delivers a better experience to these candidates because it’s able to tell candidates, yes or no, this or that, right away.
If you’ve ever applied for a job online and not heard back, it’s frustrating. You just assume it’s a no. It’s like dating again. There’s no response. It’s killer.
Mya is able to make judgments within milliseconds of having these conversations.
Does it apply for bigger companies that maybe have to hire some quality, high-skilled labors as well?
It certainly applies to the high-skill labor market as well. The challenge in the high-skill labor market is a little bit different from the high frequency, high turnover talent pool. In the high frequency, high turnover talent pool, there isn’t a shortage of supply. In the high-skill labor market, there’s a huge shortage of supply. The matchmaking there is much more difficult because you had taken fit and personality and social data and a bunch of other things which makes someone a good candidate. The focus areas are different, but Mya is totally applicable to both. They started off at the high frequency, high turnover market and they’re going to be expanding more and more into the high-skill labor market.
What was their pitch like? Do you remember anything that made it stand out that you went, “This is for us?”
I met Eyal the CEO in early 2007. He is one of the most articulate, crisp presenters of this problem statement and what he’s envisioning. I liked his storytelling capabilities. The second thing that I was very impressed by is Eyal grew up in the recruiting world. His parents ran agencies that did exactly that, and as a kid, he followed them and shadowed them. He helped them source and screen candidates. Even though he’s only 30 years old, he’s intimately familiar and had over a decade of experience in this particular space.
The domain knowledge was incredibly attractive. The third part that I was very impressed by is Eyal started a company called FirstJob before he created Mya. With FirstJob, he ran the company for a number of years and grew it to quite a nice size but realized that the bigger opportunity lied in Mya. He made the hard decision to pivot despite growing FirstJob to a sizable company. The tenacity, that desire to succeed and keep going and go for the bigger opportunity is a trait that all successful entrepreneurs have and that he exhibited.
Success Mindset: The tenacity and desire to succeed and keep going and go for the bigger opportunity is a trait that all successful entrepreneurs have.
It sounds like, in addition to being a great storyteller and having tenacity, he also was able to zoom out and see the big picture and not get caught in the weeds that he didn’t see the need to pivot. Tell me a little bit about Tubi TV.
Tubi TV is an interesting one. They are a company that has a long history with us. What they offer is, think of Netflix, they offer a free Netflix, ad-supported TV network, the replacement for cable, if you will. For the consumer, it’s free. For advertisers, they can advertise on Tubi TV. For content providers, like MGM and Paramount, this is how they view as next generation cable television. If you think about the trends that have been happening at the macro level, it’s fascinating because on the consumer side, I know that I prefer streaming and on-demand and a place where I can watch where I want to watch and when I want to watch it and control what I want to watch. Tubi is on IOS, Android, Apple TV, Amazon, Roku, pretty much everywhere where you want to consume content. It’s an experience dictated by the consumer. Consumers are more and more interested in that and less and less interested in subscribing to cable. Cable is dying. Linear TV is dying. On-demand streaming is on the rise.
From the content providers’ side, it’s an interesting opportunity because if you think about where studios and these content providers monetize, most of their revenues came from movies and cable television, historically. Now that cable is dying, they have fewer opportunities to monetize. Netflix, which was one of our earlier investments and very successful, invented the new business model which is that they unbundled all these different shows and created this subscription service for consumers. In the early days, these studios would be able to sell their content to Netflix, and Netflix will use that and offer it as a subscription. What has happened is Netflix is becoming more like a studio, like a content provider, as they’re making their own original programming, etc. For these traditional studios, like MGM, they’re thinking, “I have fewer opportunities to monetize via Netflix as well or the likes of Netflix.” Now they look at Tubi TV and they think, “This is the next generation cable television that I can partner with and monetize my content under.” That’s attractive from a content provider perspective as well.
Tubi TV is never going to be competing for an Emmy like Netflix or Amazon, correct?
That’s correct. They don’t have any original programming. Think of them as the replacement for shows that you will see on afternoon cable television.
Anything about that particular pitch or the founder that stood out that made everybody go, “This the right team.”
Farhad who’s the CEO of Tubi TV is incredibly gritty. The context there is interesting because Tubi TV was spun out of a different company called adRise which was selling software to studios and content providers. This was in the 2010 or 2011 so quite a while ago. In 2014, Farhad decide to pivot the company from a B2B company into a consumer offering, realizing the big opportunity behind creating Tubi. He’s been doing this for quite some time. It’s been seven years that he’s been working on this and he hasn’t given up. After the pivot, we looked at his performance and what he’s been able to achieve with this new product and decided to double down and co-lead this $20 million round along with Jump Capital earlier this year. His tenacity from a pitch perspective stood out.
[Tweet “Tenacity and grit are the keys to success.”]
It’s a combination of tenacity and grit. That’s a similar theme coming across here. The last one I want to ask you about is Localytics, the mobile app marketing engagement that’s so popular right now. I would love to hear what is it about that platform that made you and your team decide that that was a winner?
Localytics is a company that I work with, along with my partner, Ashu, who’s a board member there. Localytics is a mobile analytics engagement platform based in Boston. If you think about consumers, we spend a lot of time engaging with our apps. The app provides a better experience because it’s able to personalize and send push notifications to us and do a bunch of things that are interesting to the individual user. Localytics enables brands to be able to do this at scale, both sending the messages to consumers as well as personalizing that experience and then serving analytics to these brands to help them understand how their consumers are behaving.
Are there any final tips that you have for people who are saying, “Is this the right time to be pitching?” Are there any suggestions you have for them on trying to figure out timing? I know that’s very important.
Timing is a difficult question. The most important part is to understand yourself and your business first and foremost. Understand what it is that you need from a cash perspective and then give yourself a 50% buffer because something’s going to go wrong. Let that dictate when you fundraise and how much you want to raise. You want to plan for 18to 24 months. That’s a time period in terms of cash needs for every single route. Be sure to be internally-driven, first and foremost, versus externally-driven. That’s the first thing. The second thing is fundraising is going to be one of the most difficult processes that an entrepreneur will go through. I rarely hear that people love pitching for a fundraising. At the same time, it’s a very good experience in terms of reflecting what investors think about and what are some of the business fundamentals and perhaps even longer term vision of a business.
[Tweet “Tell a compelling story of why you and why now.”]
The second most important tip is never give up. At some point, someone will see the beauty of your business. I still vividly remember this one entrepreneur who did not have a network in Silicon Valley who wanted to get a meeting with me and with my partners. As a way to get noticed, he sent us this envelope that he created out of a Lumascape, which was a landscape of different companies in a particular space. It was marketing tech. He wrote a letter with this envelope telling us why he deserved fifteen minutes of our time. I remember that very clearly even though I didn’t think his business was the right fit. I called him and gave him advice on what he should do in the future with investors. Eventually, he raised money even though his starting point was perhaps more challenging than other folks. Never give up. Always have the tenacity and then things have a way of working out.
And being creative, it sounds like, a little bit. What you touched on about being internally-focused versus externally-focused, if we’re externally-focused on feeling good about ourselves, that’s when we take the rejection personally. If we know who we are, we’re internally-focused and our mission and our why can keep us on track. Joanne, thank you so much for being generous with your insights, your stories, and your passion for making the world better through technology and getting entrepreneurs to make their dreams become a reality.
Thank you, John.
Links Mentioned:
- Foundation Capital
- Joanne Chen
- Zen Gaming
- Mya
- Mint.com
- Eyal
- FirstJob
- Tubi TV
- Farhad
- adRise
- Jump Capital
- Ashu
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How To Become Millionaires At Make It Happen University With Spencer Lodge
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
It’s not rocket science. The real reason people don’t buy from you has nothing to do with price or time; it’s because they don’t trust you. If you want some real insights on how to build up your confidence up to your first million, Spencer Lodge has some great tips on how to do that. He shares his expertise in selling at Make It Happen University. He’s also a leader in the international financial services and sales industry with over 24 years of experience although if you look at him, you would never know it. Spencer has personally trained thousands of people to build some of the largest and most successful financial consultancies. His university, “Make It Happen”, was born to give entrepreneurs and employees the tools they need to succeed, literally training people on how to become millionaires. Feeling skeptical? It’s your call. But just so you know, Spencer’s journey started with a working class kid from a working class environment. If that kid with limited resources made it, then with your current assets in business, so can you!
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Our guest on The Successful Pitch is Spencer Lodge, who’s an expert in selling. He has got a whole university called Make It Happen for a reason. He said, “When you write a book,” which he’s written a new one called, It’s Not Rocket Science, “you’re creating content that’s valuable to read versus creating something valuable that you want to share.” It’s all about not taking criticism personally. He has some real great tips on how to do that. He said, “The real reason people don’t buy from you has nothing to do with price or time. It’s because they don’t trust you.” He gives us insights into how to build up our confidence and more importantly, being aware of how people receive what you say when you say it.
Listen To The Episode Here
How To Become Millionaires At Make It Happen University With Spencer Lodge
I’m honored to have my guest, Spencer Lodge, who is a leader in the international financial services and sales industry with over 24 years of experience, although if you look at him, you would never know it. He looks like he’s just out of school. He’s personally trained thousands of people and help them build some of the largest and most successful financial consultancies. He delivers expert advice for clients and investors around the world. He’s dedicated his career to building and training people to achieve their full potential. In 2015, he decided it was time to spread his wealth with people who want to learn about the recipe to success. Make It Happen, his university, was born that give entrepreneurs and employees the tools they need to succeed. He’s done so many amazing things. He was the top regional director for seven years running, he’s a top wealth manager globally for multiple years, and he’s literally trained people on how to become millionaires. Spencer, welcome to the podcast.
John, thank you for that lovely introduction.
I had the pleasure of being on your Facebook Live show. I’ve had guests from Australia and Israel but never anybody from Dubai, so you’re the first. Would you take us back, Spencer, to your own story of origin? It can go back as far as you want in school. Did you always know you wanted to “make it happen?”
The journey starts with a working-class kid from a very average working-class environment. To be honest with you, I was bullied quite severely at school and suffered trauma but was very grateful in the end because the bullying taught me resilience and taught me that, “I’ll show you. I’ll prove it to you,” type of mindset. I wasn’t very good at school. I never missed a day. I wasn’t one of those kids that played or anything but I wasn’t very good at school. I left school. I wanted to become a ski instructor. I did that.
One August when there wasn’t any snow, my mother kicked me out of bed and said to me, “It’s time to get a proper job or proper career.” I was like, “I have one, mother. How dare you?” She said, “No, seriously, it’s time.” She ran a recruitment consultancy back in London and so I didn’t have much choice but to go for some interviews and find out what I wanted to do. I fell into selling and then going for a job interview with these two guys. I had no idea what to do or what to say. It was the first suit I ever bought and worn. Remembering back, it was something like dark green, a horrific color. God only knows what people must have thought of me. The guy took one from his pocket and said to me, “Sell me this pencil.” I was like, “Are you serious?” He was like, “Yes, sell me the pencil.” I don’t remember what happened but on the back of that, I was very lucky to get offered the job. I was the trainee photocopier, an office equipment salesperson.
Make It Happen University: Financial service is interesting because everybody wants to make money, so you could appeal to people’s sense of greed.
I worked in London. It was a competitive environment, but I didn’t know what competition was. I didn’t know what tough was. My life was knocking on the doors of 100 companies every morning and my patch said, “Easy 31 Postcard in London.” Every afternoon, I had to make 100 cold calls and 99 people would say no or they would swear at me. One person would say yes, and that one person was enough. I was taught to understand the 99 noes led always to a yes. That’s what happened. I then became okay. I wasn’t a massive success. I was young, in my early 20s. I was earning decent money, better than most of my friends were earning, so I was quite pleased with myself. Then the opportunity came to go and work in financial services in the Far East. Because I had some experience overseas as a kid, my dad worked in the oil industry overseas, so I’ve been to where he was living and spent time with him, it excited me to go and see a different country and work in a different country.
I then went to the Far East to Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, across the Africa, Europe, South America and now the Middle East, so ten countries all through those years. What I found along the way is that first of all, financial service is interesting because everybody wants to make money, so you could appeal to people’s sense of greed. When you’re prospecting, when you get 99 noes and one yes in the photocopier industry, you would often get 50 noes and 50 yeses, because people were interested to learn more. Getting your foot through the door back in the early ‘90s wasn’t as difficult. Then I learned my craft. My boss said to me, “None is going to trust a 23-year-old kid looking like you. They are not going to trust their money with you, so you have to make sure that you’re a hotshot.” I went and studied and studied. He used to give me a book every couple of days and he said, “Unless you’ve the read and you can tell me about it, I don’t want to talk to you.” I was busy learning.
About six months into the role, I knew more about financial services than most people who have been doing it for ten years because I’ve taken time as part of my learning experience to study. I wasn’t given an option, so whether it’s was the equity market, the commodities market, it didn’t matter what it is, I knew about it. I was this youngster with limited life experience but a lot of essentially theoretical and academic experience and knowledge in financial services. Then I went on to be pretty successful at that. I then became successful at that and was one of the best in the industry that I was noted to be. I built various sales teams. What happened after all of that massive success, something else kicked in, which was the cause of the biggest change in my life, and that was my ego. My ego grew out of control. I became arrogant. I thought I was above others. That was an ugly thing. I remember I sat down with my boss one day and he said to me, “After sixteen years of working together, you’ve become too big for the company. You have to go.”
It was truly devastating when that experience happened to me. However, it was the first time in my life that I’ve got time to sit and reflect. Whilst I was recovering from my ego being bashed, I looked back at all of the things I’ve done and I worked out the things that I enjoyed and the things that I probably didn’t enjoy as much. I’ve been teaching people for years how to sell, “Is there a way that I can put it into some form of format and structure so that people can learn themselves?” Then I came up with this ridiculous idea of producing an online sales training university. That ridiculous idea was in a studio recording 400 videos about selling, literally everything from what you wear, how you wear it, all the way through to how you present yourself to how you prospect, how you market, how you use social media, how you close the prospect, how you look after your clients, everything in there, A to Z of selling. I launched it in December 2016.
What I find so interesting is you talk about learning through reading a book from your old boss and it’s one of the sales behaviors that is now in Make it Happen University where you were talking about where you’re talking about reading a book a week. You have a new book coming out. You went from reading a book to now writing a book, so that’s always an interesting journey.
Writing a book always sounds like a great idea until you start. There is a lot to it. You have to find out and think it through. It is not just a case of downloading your memoir. You have to put stuff together that’s valuable for people to read rather than valuable for you to share.
[Tweet “Create content people want to read versus what you want to share.”]
That’s true whether you’re writing a book or creating content for an online course or going out in a sales pitch or pitching to get your startup funded. Whatever it is, what you’re saying here, Spencer, is make it about who’s reading your book or what the audience is and not about what you think is important. Would that be accurate?
Spot on, absolutely. You’ve got to create something that people want to get engrossed with. When you pick up a book and you read a really good book, you are one chapter in and you cannot put the thing down. That’s a good book. It doesn’t matter what the subject matter. That, to me, is a good book. That, for me, is what I’m trying to create with the book that I’ve got coming out because I wanted it to be something that people would be drawn into as they start to read it. They could learn a bit about my story but how I accomplished what I accomplished and the basic principles that I’ve used along the way and essentially the skills that I’ve learned and how I apply them.
What’s the title?
Because I’m well -known for saying this and have been known for saying this for 25 years, the title is It’s Not Rocket Science.
I love it but there is a science to it. You don’t have to be a genius to understand is the takeaway I get.
Everything I know is literally skills-based. I’ve learned skills; there are soft skills, technical skills, the process-driven skills, the stuff that everybody can learn, which I did. I hear a lot of times, and you would have heard this, John, people say, “I can’t be a sales person. I’d never make a sale person. I don’t have the gift of the gab. I’m not an extrovert character like you.” When I look at successful salespeople that I’ve been inspired by over the years, some of them have been incredible introverts. A lot of salespeople are like standup comedians. A standup comedian is an entertainer on stage when he is performing and then when they come off stage, they become somewhat withdrawn and into themselves. They are not so gregarious when they are not digging with their clients. When I look at brilliant salespeople, it is not about what they say, it’s about what they learn. Invariably, if you are going to see people for the first time, your job is to try and find a solution for people’s problems. Your job is not to come in with your briefcase full of products and try to sell you product. That’s what the stereotype is, isn’t it?
Like the Fuller Brush man here in America back in the day, or the knives or whatever it is, people selling jewelry on the street with their coat. It’s that mindset that turns so many people off. You’re changing the perception of what it’s like to think of yourself as a professional salesperson.
At the end of the day, it’s a profession when you think about it. If all of us salespeople resigned at every company across the world, the economy would collapse overnight. The stock market would collapse. Wars would end because nobody would be selling guns. The automotive industry would stop. The oil industry would come to a stop. When you think about it, people would not be able to travel because flights wouldn’t be sold, and so it’s such an important skill to learn, yet where does people go to learn it? That is the reason for putting the university together. It came from that. We need to learn how to do this. In this modern age where we don’t want to go and sit in a classroom or we don’t want to go to a seminar, people want to be on their mobile phone and they want to do it in their own time, on the subway or in the car or wherever it is they’re going and want to be able to learn on the go, and so the university was put together to enable people to learn on the go through their phones or whatever device they want to use.
Make It Happen University: Some things that people say to you aren’t meant in the way that you are defensively receiving it.
You also mentioned that after a certain point, you’ve got a little arrogant and one of the things that you have on your course is the ability to accept criticism and they’re tied together. Can you explain a little bit about what’s in the course under that topic, accepting criticism?
The problem with people in many respects, whether that’s constructive, destructive or conflictional criticism, people don’t break it down. They look at it as an attack on them before anything else, so regardless of how it is positioned, a lot of the times, they take it personally. What I try to teach people to understand is that criticism is good, that someone who is taking the time to say, “You are not as good as you should be or maybe you could improve this area,” when actually they don’t need to, they can let you be. They can let you wallow in whatever environment you’re in but they are taking time to say, “You could be better by doing this or by doing that.” To me, that is a positive thing, “I don’t like the way you X or I don’t like the way you Y.” Think about what they are actually saying. They’ve taken 30 seconds, one minute or five minutes out of their time to try and add some value to you. It may be their own way. We all have to remember is it is not what we say to people, it is how people receive what we say. If you remember that, sometimes you will then remember that some things that people say to you aren’t meant in the way that you are defensively receiving it. It may have been meant in a more positive manner.
That’s everything, especially when you’re getting objections from the client. It’s one thing if you’re getting feedback from a co-worker or your boss of some criticism on how you can improve, but when you start getting feedback where the client is criticizing you or your product. Any tips on how to not take that personally?
At the end of the day, if someone is criticizing your product or you’re selling an external product, then you didn’t make it. It’s not your product, if you’ve invented something. It’s just that a lot of people would have taken it personally. Why would you take something personally if someone is taking the time? If people are saying nothing to you and you know nothing about your product that is negative or could be improved, and then you don’t make any sales because there is an obvious flaw in your product or your presentation or your ability to communicate, then you’re going to run out of steam pretty quick. It’s almost like a little bit of indirect tough love.
What causes a lot of burnout is taking all that rejection personally. You learned how to not do that back in the day, cold calling.
When you’re nineteen years old and you’re told by your boss, “You’re going to get 99 noes, but in there somewhere is going to be a yes, so look out for it,” You are conditioned as a nineteen-year-old kid. That’s it, you’re such a sponge, you go, “Fair enough.” Every time somebody who says no or swears at you, which many times happen, you’d be like, “That’s one of my 99 noes, I will move on.”
[Tweet “Selling is not rocket science.”]
One of the things you have in Make It Happen University that I find fascinating is this concept of, “Dominate, don’t compete.” Can you explain what that is?
A lot of the time, you hear people talking about their competition. What’s that all about? If you’re in a market, if you’re in an industry, surely the best way to be in that industry is to be the dominating business within that industry. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling. If you think about it, who dominates the space for us to watch movies online?
Netflix.
That’s right. Who are they competing with? No one. They don’t have any because they’ve nailed it. They’ve dominated their market. If you and I want to park down and get some fried chicken, where will we go to get fried chicken from?
Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Right, so that dominates that market, that industry. There are examples everywhere of people dominating their marketplace. We don’t even call something by the name of the service. Sometimes we call it by the brand.
Kleenex is a great example of that.
We Google something. We clean it, we get some Kleenex. We Xerox it. That’s what’s being said over the years. There are a million different examples of that. You have to be careful to say dominating. Blackberry is a great example. When Blackberry first came out with emails on mobile phones, they completely wiped the floor with everybody else. Nokia was the go-to mobile phone before then, but again Nokia didn’t keep up with their research and somebody came in and knocked them off. Dominating isn’t something that once you get there, you just sit there and say, “Fine, we are here now. We are the champions.” Netflix will have somebody to challenge them. What’s my point about this? If you’re going to be in business, you should want to dominate the market that you’re in. You should want to be the market leader and dominate, and not looking at what anybody else is up to. Just focus on being the best you can possibly be at what you do. If you do that, then you’ll find that you don’t get sucked in to using energy, negatively and positively, worried about what’s going on over your shoulder.
I’m all about focusing on your own progress and you win. I have a whole story around that in my keynote from swimming, instead of turning my head to the side and staying focused on the wall and the competitor looked to see if he was ahead or not, that little extra half a second of looking, taking the eye off the prize caused me to beat him, so it’s a fascinating.
I want to ask about your insights into why people don’t buy. The most common ones are no time or no money, and you go into how to handle all of those. Do you want to give us a few tips that will intrigue us enough to say, “I’ve got to sign up for Make It Happen University now because that’s my biggest challenge?”
Why don’t people buy? The reason they don’t buy is they don’t trust you. It’s not that they don’t have a need. I will give you an example, you walk into a car showroom, a car dealership in the States or UK. Tell me what percentage of interest do you have in buying a car? You either have 0% or you have between 1% and 100% interest? If you have 0% interest in cars or buying a car, why would you go to a car showroom? There must be 1% of you that says, “I’m interested.” It may not be a big interest but it’s interest. That’s the first thing to consider. Why do people take the time to meet somebody who is selling something if they have no interest?
A simple fact is they do have interest. Do they have an interest in buying the product or service from you? Maybe not. That’s down to your skills. The reason invariably that people don’t buy is that they do not have a good level of rapport with you. They haven’t built up a sufficient level of trust that you know your subject and they don’t believe that you care enough to look after whether it’s a financial investment or an emotional investment in them. It’s as simple as that. It’s about mastering your craft. Let’s say you and I are in business together and we say, “We need to shop for an accountant,” so we go and find an accountant and we go and meet three accountants. How do we choose the best one?
Make It Happen University: The reason invariably that people don’t buy is that they do not have a good level of rapport with you.
Usually by reference or who we like the best.
I may sound a little bit naïve, but I don’t know much about accountancy, but we will go and sit down with three accountants. Let’s say we’ve never met any of them and we haven’t been referred to them and each one of them charges exactly the same amount of money. How do we decipher? We will go with the one that you and I connect with the best. That invariably is the person probably who asked the most questions, probably the person that found a way of creating some common ground with us, and probably the one that has taken time to make us a decent cup of coffee. We come out of that meeting and we walk back to our car together and we go, “I like him. Do you like him?” “He is good, isn’t he?” There you go, we’ve made the decision. That’s because that person has been trained well enough to understand us or to try and understand us.
A lot of it has to do with asking good questions about what’s our criteria but a lot of people don’t even start with that. They just start talking. This concept of trying to figure out whether someone’s going to buy from you or not and you get those objections, “I need to think about it. I trust you, but there’re other people who have to decide,” all the delay tactics that we hear, whether it’s selling a car or signing up for anything, do you find there’s any tactic that people should avoid because you’ve written a whole blog on that?
What we’ve got to understand is that selling is exactly the same as being a lawyer, an accountant, an engineer, a pilot, whatever it may be. It is a skill, an industry, and it is something that you’re supposed to learn properly. The reason that most people get it wrong is because they haven’t studied selling. They haven’t taken the time to learn. They got into selling by mistake or they got into it because they heard instant cash. They’ve had some random innocuous training, they’ve had someone leaning over their shoulder giving them a few tips and tricks. Lawyers have to pass the bar exam to go and defend someone in court. Accountants have to become CPAs. They have to be qualified to do it. Most salespeople are unqualified to sell because they have not taken a professional course in learning to sell, and so that’s a lot of the time the problem.
You can sell anything to anyone, but everything has to be aligned. When everything is aligned by you knowing everything you need to know, that is when the decision-making process becomes very easy for the person that you’re dealing with. You’re not just selling a product or service, you are the best product that you can sell. How on earth do you get a job when you go for a job interview if you can’t sell yourself?
Many people get so uncomfortable and talk about the lack of preparation. You know you’re going to be asked about yourself and you don’t have something ready to go. That’s crazy, isn’t it?
Even when you and I were younger and we would go to the bank to get a mortgage, we sit down with bank manager at his big desk, and he would sit there looking down at you on chairs that are lower than his, and he says, “How can I help you?” You are like, “I would like to borrow some money to get a mortgage,” and he would be like, “Let me think about it,” and he would ask you questions. You’re selling yourself to do business with the bank where they make money from you, which is nuts, but that’s how it used to be. How do you present yourself when you walk into the bank covered in paint and in a pair of ripped jeans? Would you have a better chance or worse chance than if you were dressed in a suit and became more appealing to that person? For me, you’ve got to understand that selling is a prerequisite for everything you do. Dominate your market is important. Understand that sales is a skill that you need to learn and if you learn it and you use it well, then it can be applied in all aspects of your life. I promise you, every single person in the audience, if you think you’re good at sales, great at sales or rubbish at sales, like everything, always start by learning. Nobody has monopoly on good ideas.
[Tweet “Don’t take criticism personally.”]
Compare it to someone like Tiger Woods or Meryl Streep. They’re still rehearsing, they’re still practicing, they’re still being coached. You have something in your eBook, How To Win, that talks about how to improve your confidence. I know from everything you’ve said that preparation is definitely one of the techniques to improve your confidence. Do you have anything else you want to leave us with around confidence?
Where does confidence come from when you think about it? We get confidence from people feeding us information that is positive and from having little successes. A lot of people lose confidence because they give themselves something that is too big to achieve, so they lose their will and they lose their way. Winning is all about little wins, small wins, because if you have small wins, it will enable you to build small amounts of confidence and you can have small wins consistently. The winning is giving yourself three things to do tomorrow. You go out and you do all three of them. They don’t have to be massive things, but if you get all three, there’s a win. A little win, back in the car, go and do something else. The next day, “I will do four things today. What are they going to be?” Small things, “I’m going to make sure I see this prospect and I get this referral from this prospect. I’m going to make sure that I book two appointments. I’m going to make sure that I spend an hour learning my presentation.” Whatever it may be, give yourself the opportunity to feel good about what you’re doing. Give yourself an opportunity to take small wins, enjoy and relish it just for a few minutes because it will do so much for your psychology, you wouldn’t believe.
That’s all about having integrity with yourself. The more we do what we tell ourselves we’re going to do, the more confident we have. That’s my big takeaway from what you said. I love it. The book is called, It’s Not Rocket Science. The university is MakeItHappen.University. I highly recommend both. Spencer, any other tips on how people can follow you on social media or buy your book?
On YouTube, there are over 100 videos you can go to see me doing various interviews, doing sales training, and different stuffs. If you go to Make It Happen Spencer Lodge, you will be able to find me on YouTube. It’s training stuff that you will make it happen. Spending a lot. If you go to my Facebook page, which is @MakeItHappenSpencerLodge, you will be able to find a bunch of videos and stuff there for you to get an idea of what I do and how I do it. If you want to follow me on Instagram, you can, which is @MakeItHappenSL. By all means go to the website, have a look, go on YouTube, comment, engage with me, ask me questions, go and find me on LinkedIn, go and ask me questions and I promise you I will answer questions for you. I will give you as much value as I possibly can to demonstrate to you what I’m all about and hopefully show you the kind of willing that I’m prepared to make for you as you should make for the people that you live with.
Spencer, you’re walking your talk. I love it. Thanks so much for being a guest.
My pleasure.
Links Mentioned:
- Spencer Lodge
- Make It Happen
- Facebook Live show – John Livesay interview with Spencer Lodge on Facebook Live
- MakeItHappen.University
- Make It Happen Spencer Lodge – YouTube
- @MakeItHappenSpencerLodge – Facebook
- @MakeItHappenSL – Instagram
- Make It Happen on LinkedIn
- https://www.makeithappen.university/
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Where The Magic Happens With Kevin Corcoran Jr.
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
People say that the magic happens when we step out of our comfort zone. You’ve done it once or twice, and it clearly works. But what if you could step out of your comfort zone daily? Award-winning college professor Kevin Corcoran Jr. tells us how in his stunning new book, “Where the Magic Happens! The Science & Stories Behind Challenging Your Comfort Zone”. Blending the latest research, personal interviews and his own anecdotal experiences, Corcoran reveals how you can gain lasting confidence through confronting challenges big and small.
Kevin Corcoran Jr. holds an M.A. in Communication, teaches for National University, San Diego State University, and recently published his first book. With topics ranging from communication and leadership to mindfulness and teamwork, Kevin has worked closely with Apple, Sony, TEDx, Red Bull, Coldwell Banker, American Red Cross, and various startups in Southern California.
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Our guest on The Successful Pitch is Kevin Corcoran, who is the author of Where The Magic Happens! He has some great tips about curiosity, comfort zones, kindness and secrets into the science behind yes. He said, “Yes is all about having an open mind and figuring out what your intentional choice is in life. Saying no to new things can keep you in your comfort zone. If you want to get into the place where magic happens, you have to be willing to step out of your comfort zone.” He has a great story about doing that in the cold waters of Iceland. Enjoy the episode.
Listen To The Episode Here
Where The Magic Happens With Kevin Corcoran Jr.
I have as my guest, Kevin Corcoran, Jr., who is an award-winning college professor and a professional speaker. Over the years he has worked closely with Apple, Sony, gave a TEDx Talk that I saw that I highly recommend, Red Bull, Coldwell Banker, American Red Cross, and several other startups. He owns an MA in Communication and teaches for the National University in San Diego State. When he’s not teaching, he’s speaking or writing. You’ll find him walking barefoot, wearing swim trunks and he lives life as an adventurer. Kevin, welcome to the show.
Thanks, John. I’m so happy to be on.
You’re the author of this wonderful new book called Where The Magic Happens!: The Science And Stories Behind Challenging Your Comfort Zone. I’m a big believer that there’s no such thing as a comfort zone anymore with change happening fast. I loved this book and want to take a deep dive into it. Before we get to the book, would you mind taking us back to your own story of origin as far back as you want? You can go back before college, in college. How did that you wanted to start being passionate about communication?
For me, it started a long time ago during a play in third grade. We were supposed to do a play on dinosaurs and I was given a monologue because the teacher thought that I was a pretty competent young child. I stood on stage before the curtain opens and I remember being absolutely terrified to the point where I couldn’t do it. As a third grader, you don’t have resilience yet. I ran off the stage, ended up collapsing, laying on my side, throwing up, and crying. That stuck with me for longer than I would’ve ever realized. In the moment I was traumatized. It was something terrible. As I progressed and fast forward to different parts of my life, it constantly was something that was holding me back, this idea of public speaking or basically just being public, being in front of people, being in front of an audience.
Where The Magic Happens Book: Where the Magic Happens!: The Science & Stories Behind Challenging Your Comfort Zone
When I became a musician and I wanted to play live music, that was obviously a huge hurdle and definitely an obstacle from the desire that I had. I remember constantly being uncomfortable and hating it. It wasn’t until I finally, as a musician, pushed myself to the other extreme of it by doing things on stage that I never thought I could do. At one point I pushed it a little too far extreme and I stepped out on the front of the stage and I put my foot on someone’s head. I played a guitar riff while I was basically floating on the audience. It took doing that for me to realize that there was nothing to worry about all along except for having the resilience and having the courage to go into that unfamiliar space. How I knew I had an interest in communication is that I started to crave and I started to desire that discomfort as a thrill. I started to become an adrenaline junkie for things like jumping off cliffs into water or going skydiving or something like that, but that same rush kept coming when I was public speaking or when I was in front of people. I reframed how I looked at it. Instead of it being something to hold me back or something that I’d never be able to do, I saw it as a challenge for me to learn things about myself that I never thought I could do and to find out what’s truly possible despite our mindset of limitations.
How did you go from being a musician to being a college professor of communication?
I played music and I ended up playing music professionally at one point but never as a full-time career. I worked in the tech industry for a number of years with companies like Apple and Linux Foundation. At one point I remember I was working at a conference and I used to travel the country for these companies. I would basically work on the technology aspect behind big conferences. I remember at one point I was laying cable on the floor and I was taping it and that was my job, taping cable to the floor so that people wouldn’t trip over it and setting up wireless internet networks for the audiences. At one point one of my jobs was to film all of the speakers at a conference and then run a remote workstation. At any point I had eight to sixteen cameras in a bunch of different rooms and I was running it all remotely. I remember watching the videos and thinking to myself, “I want to be up there, I don’t want to be back here.” It was that moment that I decided, “I’m going to go to grad school and I’m going to get a higher education in communication so that I can be the person on the stage as opposed to the person behind the scenes.”
You literally started from the ground up with your taping down cords.
I taped cable to the floor. We use the term tech support, but really what I did during that time is I sat out front of the rooms with a little walkie-talkie. Basically, if a power strip went out, I had to go into the room, flip the little switch and turn the power surge back on. That was my glorified position as a tech industry expert. I knew I wanted to be on this stage, didn’t know how to get there, and decided that grad school would be a good option. With a Master’s in Communication, I figured they would teach us practical communication skills that I could then transfer straight into consulting and straight onto the stage. What ended up happening is as a result of that degree, I had a chance to teach. The first day teaching I was like, “This is it, this is great.” Remove the idea of the stage and it’s still the same thing. I was standing in front of a group of people having a chance to influence and I loved it. Hands down, teaching is my favorite thing in the world. I see training, I see speaking and I see teaching as all brothers and sisters to the same family.
You talk about this in your book Where the Magic Happens! about what it was like to give a TEDx talk. It’s a different talk than to lecture to a class, isn’t it?
Yes, absolutely. It’s very different.
Tell us the story of what it felt like even with all your training and preparation to get on that stage.
At the point that I gave the TED Talk, I was a public speaking teacher for already three or four years. I had spoken professionally, been paid to speak, and gone through all different kinds of public speaking coaching and public speaking training courses. As much as I had experience, there was nothing that could compare to the gravity of something like a TED Talk. One of the things I do before any talk that I give is I like to walk around and put headphones in. I forget that our phones can track our steps and later on when I looked at my phone and I saw the health activity app, I had actually paced four miles before I gave a talk.
[Tweet “Saying no to new things keeps you in your comfort zone.”]
The nerves were high, the energy was high, the adrenaline was high. I walked around, I paced, I listened to music, I practiced breathing exercises, I did everything I could. The moment when I was behind the stage and the speaker before me was getting to their final sentences, you can always tell when someone’s ending and I could tell they were getting to their closure, in that moment it was like the most terrifying and most exciting experience I’ve ever had. That’s the thing; the whole point of the book that I wrote Where the Magic Happens! is the idea that the most terrifying things and the most exciting things aren’t that different from each other except for how we frame it. It’s all about the high levels of adrenaline and the high levels of chemicals that are going on in the body. I recognized that and instead of having fear and running away like I did in third grade, I saw it as an opportunity.
When I started to look at that way, it was an amazing experience to be living it right then, right there. I remember looking at the lights and trying to take in as much of my senses as I could. Even with that, it was still way too stimulating. There was way too much going on to take it all in. It felt like a rush. That’s the rush that I chase as a speaker because as a child, the little things bring us rushes. The first time that we talked to someone we’re attracted to, that brings a huge rush, or the moment when we try to get a phone number. All those different situations bring us that state of pure excitement, unfiltered, uncensored excitement. It was that moment before the TED Talk where I felt that. That’s the thing that I chase. I ran up onto the stage and I was super excited and I know right off the bat I was talking a little too fast. I checked in, I slowed down a little bit.
You only get one shot. It’s like live TV. You don’t get to say, “Let me start over again,” at a TEDx Talk. You’re talking too fast, you’re talking too fast.
With a TED Talk, the scariest part was the idea that everything I was going to be doing was going to be filmed and then broadcast to an unlimited audience. I wasn’t sure how many audience members I would have, but the potential is that it could go viral and there could be millions of people. That’s pretty scary place to be. I remember checking in and being like, “You’re going too fast, slow it down a little bit.” Another difference about TED Talks versus regular speeches is that there’s a little red carpet that you have to stay on. In trainings or in the classroom, I’m used to being able to run around the room, jump up on the tables, use the entire stage, and use the entire room. I was excited but there was nowhere for me to go, so I went up and down a lot. If you watch the video, you’ll see me bending my knees a lot. That’s honestly pure excitement. It’s my way of still showing animation to the audience even though I was limited with a side by side movement.
I have to say the weirdest part for me or the strangest part was that you couldn’t see the audience. The lights were so bright because the whole point of the TED Talk is for the audience to see you very well and then mostly for the video to be made. For that to happen, the lights have to be really bright. I remember the lights were shining in my eyes. I looked out to the audience and I couldn’t see anybody. I’m used to eye contact, used to small group trainings, used to classrooms where I can interact and see people. It was a very one to many approach that I wasn’t used to, but it was exhilarating. It was a blast and it was unforgettable. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
You talk about in your book that there is that space between our comfort zone and where the magic happens. It sounds like you’re almost like a tornado chaser. You’re addicted. You love the adrenaline. One of the things in your book that I do to get out of our comfort zones is take a cold shower. I started hearing people talk about this as a way to reframe and reset your mind of, “I’m not constantly seeking comfort. I’m purposely seeking getting out of my comfort zone,” in this case, a cold shower. What I tell myself is I can tolerate something that’s not comfortable. I feel exhilarated after the cold shower, but every time you have to push yourself to do it. Can you talk a little bit about that comfort zone and magic zone?
The funniest part is where I discovered the entire idea about cold showers or cold water are really about comfort challenges. I was sitting in a hostel in Iceland during a snow storm. It was one of the coldest places I had ever been. It was this remote hostel that wasn’t well-insulated. The heater didn’t work that well. I was bundled up in all my snowboarding clothes, my big snow jacket. I was bundled up and I remember I was writing. Before I even had the book idea, this is years ago, I was writing and having a good time. I looked out the window and I swear to you, I saw two elderly women, I would have to guess somewhere in their 70s or 80s. They were in their swimsuits with swim caps on and they were walking down this little boat launch. They walked down it, they got into the water and they started swimming.
Where The Magic Happens Book: People who do acts of kindness tend to report higher levels of gratitude.
It blew my mind. I was watching as what I thought would be the worst thing you could possibly do. These two women looked completely at peace. They looked happy, they looked content, they looked satisfied, they don’t look excited. It wasn’t a rush for them. That was something they did. I found out later that every single day at the same time, these two women meet up together and then went for their daily swim. They do it all year, whether they’re sick, whether they’re healthy, whether it’s cold, whether it’s hot. I found out also later that they do it as a form of reminding themselves that the earth, world, and the universe is bigger than them. Whether it’s extreme or not, depending on the season, depending on the weather, they are just humans that are temporary living on this earth in this universe.
For me, that mindset helps let go of the need to try and control everything all the time. A lot of people who are in startups as a business, a lot of us can fall into this trap of control freak. “I need to control everything and things have to happen in my timeframe, and the outcome has to happen the way I need it to happen.” When you get out of that mindset and if you jolt yourself by jumping into cold shower, a cold ocean or whatever it is, you realize, “There are a lot of things I don’t control and it’s not always about me.” Would that be an accurate summary of what you said?
Yes, absolutely. That’s a lesson that I learned from surfing. The Iceland story involves the ocean as well. I grew up pretty close to the ocean. I was complaining about getting held under water and I was like, “I don’t like to be held under water. It feels I’m dying or stuff.” He looked at me and he was like, “Kev, think about it as a meditation,” and I was like, “You’re crazy. What do you mean? Meditating when you’re about to die? That doesn’t make any sense. You’re held under water and you’re peaceful?” He’s like, “Just try it.”
It took me awhile to get to the point where I understood what he was saying. After a couple of times, when I would fall and be held under water, I started to let go. It’s exactly what you’re talking about. I let go of the control. I let go of trying to fix things. I let go of trying to control my environment. Instead I let go, and I was like, “Cool. The ocean is bigger than me. The earth is bigger than me. The environment, the weather, everything in life is bigger than me and I’m going to let whatever happens happen.” In that peaceful place, I was able to make responsive choices about what I would do while I was underwater. It was an easy choice then to simply swim up to the surface and then breathe versus when I would panic and I would flail my arms. Sometimes I’d end up further away from the surface and deeper because I was in a state of trying to control everything and I was confused, I was lost, I was flailing, and not making sense of the actual situation. That’s true of a lot of startups and a lot of big businesses.
As leaders, as managers, and as thought influencers, we try to control the market. We try to control consumers. We try to control the outcome of certain things. If you look at an awesome principle called Chaos Theory, the idea is when we believe and have faith in the chaos of things, then we find a natural state of calm among that chaos. I love that. I live by that and the ocean taught me that in a lot of ways just like it taught those Icelandic women.
[Tweet “Yes is about having an open mind.”]
I want to tap into what you have in your book here about the science behind yes. I give a keynote talk myself on getting to yes through storytelling for brands who have sales teams, so I am all about getting to yes. Please expand upon what you wrote about the science behind yes.
There’s so much interesting content around the word yes, especially with popular movies like Yes Man. There was a recent book, Year Of Yes. There’s a lot of content surrounding this idea of yes. What yes is, is having an open mind. If you break it down, it’s not truly about the word yes, it’s about the outcomes that it brings versus no. I do want to clarify that it’s not even about the word yes or no, it’s about our intentional choices in the moment. The reason I encourage people to say yes more often is because the majority of people tend to say no in order to remain in their familiar or their comfort spaces.
Saying no keeps us in our comfort zone. Is that accurate?
Most of the time, yes. We say no, it’s a natural limiting word because if the request is anything new or different and we say no, then it’s safe. We’re staying where we are, we’re staying in a familiar zone, we’re staying in the comfort space. We’re keeping what we know to be, to be. We’re not expanding ourselves. We’re not opening ourselves up to change.
That’ll be the tweet, saying no to new things can keep you in your comfort zone. Of course anytime you’re asking someone to hire you, to buy something, to invest, you’re asking someone to get out of their comfort zone because they haven’t done it before, which is great. Obviously, changing behavior is what we people are requesting when you’re trying to sell them something.
I want to point out as well that saying no can also take you out of your comfort zone because some people are yes people. They passively say yes because they take on too much and they’re passive so they let a lot of things pile up and stack up and people are like, “Can you do this?” You’re like, “Yes, I can do that.” “Can you do this?” “Yes, I can do that.” “Can you do this project?” “Yes, I’ll do it.” For those situations, no would be the word that would get you out of the comfort zone.
If someone invites you to a party and you go to every party you ever been invited to because you don’t want to offend anybody, saying no to a party invitation could be a big thing out of your comfort zone.
That’s where my TED Talk and the chapter in the book about yes. It’s framed around the word yes because most people say no too often. However, I do make that distinction that the whole talk, the whole chapter; it’s not just about one word. It’s about momentary decisions and acting out of a place of intention as opposed to a place of expectation or a place of familiarity. I did a yes challenge where for a month I said yes to everything and it was wild. It was a captivating, it was fascinating but it was also stressful and it was tiring.
What’s the craziest thing you’ve said yes to during that month?
The craziest thing that I said yes to was going into the ocean without any clothes on at night while it was cold out and then staying in for a total of ten minutes. The ocean is scary at night in itself and then doing it when it’s cold out and then without clothes on, for me that was a huge challenge. I was so uncomfortable on many different levels, but someone found out and they didn’t tell me this until later. Someone found out I was doing the yes challenge. They’re like, “What if you did this?” I was like, “I’ll do it.”
Where The Magic Happens Book: Start to see compassion toward other people and start to seek acts of kindness.
I want to talk about the science behind kindness. That’s such an important philosophy part of the culture and the way we talk to ourselves. What have you found is the science behind kindness?
Kindness is fascinating for so many reasons. The other word that gets used for it is compassion, having compassion for other people, doing kind acts. There’s a ton of research that suggests that doing acts of kindness, whether they’re random or whether they’re intentional, can increase your perception of life satisfaction as well as increase your reporting of gratitude for everyday life or for small things. People who do acts of kindness tend to report higher levels of gratitude. It makes sense, but it’s so interesting because a lot of us are trying to figure out how do we be more grateful for the things we do have? Especially in startups, a lot of times we have more flexible time. We can be at the office when we want to be at the office, we can be autonomous, we can work on one thing one day, work on another thing another day. We know that it’s great, but how do we be more grateful?
One of the ways to do that is to start to see compassion toward other people and start to seek acts of kindness. The most fascinating part of the research that I found was the positive side of natural disasters. I know it sounds like a headline that belongs in a newspaper, but the positive side of natural disasters is that it brings out the genuine human goodness in people, it brings out acts of compassion and acts of kindness. If you look at the greatest disasters that have happened in history, you also see upticks, spikes, and peaks in people reporting generosity, kind behaviors, compassion, and empathy from other people. During a hurricane, the people who did have power, they opened up their front door, put a sign out and said, “Come use my house, come in.”
He let strangers into their house and he ended up having 30 people in his house all wired up to his electricity because he happened to have electricity while no one else did. I love that there’s this inherent part of being human that is compassionate. One of my favorite things that I learned from, it’s a friend and mentor of mine who started a business all about compassion and compassion cultivation. She told me that we are wired for compassion from the moment we’re born. I was like, “Explain that.” She was like, “Humans are one of the few species where when a baby is born, it literally takes a group of people being compassionate toward the baby to keep the baby alive.” A mother can’t pop out a baby, leave, and the baby has to be self-sufficient. It takes a number of people giving to the baby to be able to have the baby survive it. She goes on to talk a lot about how we’re basically hard wired for compassion and I love that idea.
You are all those things. You are kind, you’re curious, you are out of your comfort zone and you’re living a magical life for anyone who gets to hear you speak or anyone fortunate enough to be in your classroom. The book again is Where The Magic Happens!, the author, Kevin Corcoran, Jr. Kevin, how else can people follow you on social media and your website and all that good stuff?
My website is probably the best place for people to start, KevinCorcoranJr.com.
[Tweet “Doing acts of kindness, whether they’re random or whether they’re intentional, can increase your perception of life satisfaction”]
Any last thoughts or words you want to leave us with?
I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to be on your show. You complimented me here at the end and I was going to compliment you. I wanted to say that through your podcasts, through your book and through your work, I feel a genuine sense of authenticity and I love that. In an industry that’s full of professional development books and people trying to be something that they’re not, I feel that you truly are who you are and I’m thankful for that.
That’s a great compliment. I love when people see that I’m being real and authentic because that’s how we connect to other people. Literally, into me I see is the definition behind intimacy. Thank you, Kevin. Thanks for being a great guest.
I love it. Thank you so much
Links Mentioned:
- Kevin Corcoran, Jr.
- Where The Magic Happens!: The Science And Stories Behind Challenging Your Comfort Zone
- Kevin Corcoran Jr.’s TEDx Talk
- Year Of Yes
- KevinCorcoranJr.com
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