The Mindful Marketer With Lisa Nirell
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Mindfulness is not the first thing that comes to mind when talking about marketing. Zen and being one with nature is the opposite of the high-stress environment of marketing. But, Lisa Nirell makes it work! She is the mindful marketer and she’s here with your host John Livesay on how to practice mindfulness. Lisa is the founder and CMO of EnergizeGrowth LLC and is also the author of The Mindful Marketer. Join in as Lisa shares the secrets to innovative marketing, why she is the CMO whisperer, and more. Go out, practice mindfulness, and make friends with nature.
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Listen to the podcast here
The Mindful Marketer With Lisa Nirell
Our guest is Lisa Nirell, author of The Mindful Marketer. She said, “Don’t let a good crisis go to waste.” She also talks about the key to success, especially as a CMO, is not about doing more. It’s about being more. Find out what she means. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Lisa Nirell, who helps marketing leaders build more sustainable companies and better lives. She’s known as the CMO Whisperer, a LinkedIn faculty member, live streamer, podcaster, executive coach, and award-winning author of The Mindful Marketer and EnergizeGrowth NOW. It’s so much fun to have her because I’m known as the Pitch Whisperer, and I get to talk to the CMO Whisperer. Lisa, welcome to the show.
It’s great to be here, John. Thanks for inviting me.
Let’s dive into your own story of origin. You can take us back to childhood, school, wherever you want, where you’ve got interested in marketing, in general.
I have been thinking a lot about my father. He passed away years ago. It has been fun to connect all the dots that he taught me that helped me get to where I am. I have been an entrepreneur for many years. I looked back and realized, “Dad was preparing me for this.” The first moment happened when I was about twelve. We used to live in this bucolic town in Connecticut at the top of a hill. This is in the ‘70s. You could open your front door and let your pets roam free. My mom, dad, and I had a dog named Buster who liked to hang out with another dog named Barney.
Mindful Marketing: Wake up, check the weather, and figure out what to do or what not to do. Sitting on your sofa and looking out the window is a perfectly fine exercise to do on the weekend.
One day they didn’t come home. Back then, there were no email and cell phones. We started calling all the neighbors until an elderly woman, miles away, said, “I think I hear dogs barking in the woods.” My dad and I embarked on this long hike. Lo and behold, we heard the dogs barking, found them on a 4×4-foot ledge, which had a 100-foot drop. Dad dropped me with his pants belt. He said, “I need to let you get down on the ledge and lift the dogs to safety.” At age twelve, that’s a feat.
That’s not very often that you get that opportunity. The dogs were emaciated because they had not drunk nor eaten in three days. This continues. I think about the time then I’ve got my driver’s license. I drove my mother’s Ford Pinto wagon back from high school up the big hill. I spun the car, and it was facing a ledge. I called dad and said, “Thank God, you are here. Here’s the car key.” He said, “No, get back in the car. I’m going to teach you and walk you through how to get your car out of the spin and away from the ledge.”
These little lessons have prepared me for my first pandemic of completely retooling my business virtually within three weeks, the courage to make some tough decisions, release some people from my team, hire new people that were prepared for the change and have the courage to fall in love again as well in the middle of a pandemic. It has been a roller coaster but I owe a lot of the courage muscles to my dad.
I also know from reading about you that your dad was an inventor and had a lot of patents for medical security devices. That must have been so inspiring to be brought up by somebody who not only teaches you how to fix problems for yourself, as opposed to rescuing you but you’ve got to see somebody not just creating one thing but multiple things. That spirit of creativity is where that got born in you.
That is true. He was an inventor, had several patents filed, and was in the security business. He invented all kinds of push-button security locks and added machines before the computing age. My mother also taught me creativity because she was a fashion consultant and worked in upscale women’s boutiques. She brought a different type of creativity to the family than my father did. He was the fixer and innovator but mom was the warm-hearted fashionista. They brought very different gifts and talents. Isn’t creativity a wonderful thing?
[bctt tweet=”It’s not about doing more. It is about being more.” via=”no”]
Yes. Especially, many people think if I’m not a painter or an inventor, I’m not creative but you talk about that boredom creates a space for creativity and self-reflection. I’m thinking your philosophy might be, “Don’t resist being bored, embrace it.” You have this great quote that I want to make as one of our tweets. “It’s not about doing more. It’s about being more.” Can you expound on that?
I will expound as little as possible and say when was the time any of us walked outside, turned off our phones, looked up at the sky, and allowed nature to be our friend? When I think back at how I named my company, EnergizeGrowth, how I started my business, every single moment when those a-ha moments came to me, I was outside and in nature. I wasn’t sitting at my desk with a 2×2 matrix or an Excel spreadsheet trying to do market research. I was out with an open heart and mind in the place I loved the most.
We hear so often that people get inspiration in the shower and all these other places. We don’t know why something is happening when we are not trying to force something to happen.
The other great place to get bored is when you are sleeping because that’s the time that our brains are refiling. They are taking all the stuff out of the filing cabinet, putting it back in where it belongs, and allowing us to process issues for the day. That’s also a wonderful place for boredom to happen. My friends always say, “Did you have a busy weekend?” I say, “I did not.” For the most part, I woke up, looked out, checked the weather, and then figured out what to do or what not to do. Sitting on the sofa and looking out the window is a perfectly good exercise.
You are also a speaker like I am. One of your talks, which has a very clever title, is From Order Taker To Innovator. I like anything that has a little rhyme to it. It makes it easy to remember. You cover five rules on how people can spend more time creating things that are innovative for marketing. Can you share one of those rules with us or is it what you described? Don’t be afraid to be bored.
Mindful Marketing: Communities that are aging gracefully have three cornerstones in common. One, they are focused on their wellness. Two, they have a purpose. And three, they have a robust community.
I look back at some of the research on aging. If you read what doctors say about people who age gracefully and look at communities around the globe that have very healthy aging people living together, they have three things in common. Number one, they are focused on their wellness. Number two, they have a purpose. Number three, they have a robust community. I believe that we have to have those foundations in place for any innovation to occur. COVID has put a sucker punch in all of those areas.
Many of us have had to revert to online communities. The quarantine messed with my mind a few times. We are coming out collectively out of a state of trauma and grief. Unfortunately, overdoses are at an all-time high in the United States, depression and treatment of depression and therapy are at all-time highs. They are going to be for a while.
I would recommend for anyone who’s reading this, if you don’t remember anything else from what I have to say, use this as a time to rebuild those three cornerstone pieces of your life and be gentle with yourself. Once those three are back to some form of stability, innovation can begin to occur and happen. As marketers, we can start to contribute in a more wholehearted way to the growth conversations in our organizations.
In your book, The Mindful Marketer, I love anything with an alliteration. We all know the concept of being in the moment and mindful being in nature. I’m not so sure that many marketers automatically think about taking that Zen quality of being aware of their thoughts and feelings to their marketing. How did you come up with the title?
I owe that to a brainstorming session or five with one of my favorite mentors named Mark Levy. He calls himself the big sexy idea guy. I called Mark when I was in negotiations with my publisher, and I said, “Mark, I have trouble coming up with the big sexy idea for my next book. Would you help me?” He said, “Lisa, it’s time for you to out yourself. You have been hiding and haven’t told people that you have been a mindfulness practitioner for the last years.”
[bctt tweet=”Find your purpose by asking yourself ‘what business are you in?'” via=”no”]
I said, “That is true.” Guilty as charged because I don’t like to proselytize. If people are interested in the various mindfulness practices that have helped me get through multiple moments of trauma, I will talk to them about it.” However, you will notice I don’t ever push them to try any form of mindfulness practice unless it calls to them.
Mark said, “You’ve got many years of marketing and sales experience, and marketed some of the most complex technology and professional services solutions, 6 and 7-figure solutions, to big businesses. You are also a mindfulness practitioner. What you are is you are the mindful marketer.” I said, “Mic drop moment for the mindful marketer.” That’s how that was born. This book, which I started writing years ago, still has legs more than ever.
When people like you share your story of looking at things that haven’t been connected, what it is about you that makes you unique, and then figuring out a way to package that in a way that makes it unique and memorable, it helps to hear those stories. Let’s do another one. How did you come up with being called the CMO Whisperer? What does that mean?
I was sitting across lunch one day in Tysons Corner, Virginia, with a 25-year marketing veteran named Sam. He said to me, “Lisa, I needed to meet with you. I have an existential crisis.” I said, “What’s going on?” He says, “The Board of Directors wants me to start having revenue responsibility. I have never sold anything. I’m a marketing leader. They want me to solve problems, understand and deploy customer experience initiatives. I don’t even know what that is yet but I’m not so sure I want to stay in the CMO profession. I’m overwhelmed and feeling alone in this.”
I said, “What do you think about helping me build a private community of CMOs who all work in non-competing industries? We can come together, innovate, solve problems, and share resources. Would that be of value?” He said, “Yes.” He helped me build the community years ago. Here we are working with some of the country’s top CMOs with that purpose in mind and helping them make that leap from that order taker mode to innovator mode. Our members get promoted faster than their competitors, and they enjoy a more enriching life.
Mindful Marketing: CMOs can go two paths. Either they exit a toxic work environment faster, or they build credibility faster because they are appreciated and given room to grow.
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room a little bit about the CMO world. Typically, people are not in those jobs for more than eighteen months. There are a lot of stress to perform quickly, keep the job, and a lot of pressure in Corporate America around that. I’m imagining having this group that you were describing, EnergizeGrowth, can help people tap into other people’s ideas as well as their network when they need it.
Being the contrarian that I am and I have been known to be not just the CMO Whisperer but also a provocateur, I challenge people to look at those turnover numbers. The people who are reporting the high turnover happen to be recruiting firms. I view that like the fox guarding the henhouse statistic. I would look at that and also challenge people to say, “Did you bring that upon yourself?” If you focus on output versus outcome, you have already started a job on the wrong foot.
People can find some of my posts at LisaNirell.com. I’ve got 110 articles and another 50 videos out on LinkedIn if you follow me there. It has been very interesting working with CMOs around this topic. We find that the members of our group either exit a toxic work environment faster or build credibility faster in the company they like, where they are appreciated and given room to grow. If I can help them in either path, I say, “I have had a good day at the office.”
It’s reframing that need for fear. No good ideas come out of fear. I was fortunate enough to be asked to be one of the speakers at the Coca-Cola CMO Summit. They had invited all the CMOs of all the quick service restaurants and movie theater chains that had sold their product versus another. I wanted to give them some storytelling tips. I remember asking the CMO of Domino’s Pizza. I said, “What’s one of your biggest marketing challenges?”
I normally would get answers around going after a certain customer or the niche. He said, “Our biggest marketing challenge is getting tech people to work here. We are in the Midwest, competing with Amazon.” His team was in charge of that wonderful app that tracks your pizza order and tells you who’s put it in the oven or the name of the person driving it to you and all that interactive connection.
[bctt tweet=”Don’t be afraid to be bored.” via=”no”]
He said, “We used to say that we are a pizza company that uses tech to get tech people to come work here. Now we say we are an eCommerce company that happens to sell pizzas.” I said, “That sounds a lot more like Amazon books.” I wanted to get your intake because a lot of people assume marketing is very outward-facing towards consumers buying a product but CMOs are also responsible for getting the right people, at least in their division, the branding of the company.
You bring up a point and a pattern that I started noticing right before the pandemic. The CMOs that I work with and advise are expected to focus generally on making sure that our demand gen, brand, and image with investors or stakeholders is the best it can be. Right before the pandemic, I sat down with the former head of employee engagement and recruiting at Kimberly-Clark.
He kicked off a phenomenally successful program to help apply marketing strategies to attract candidates to one of their Wisconsin plants. They were trying to attract high-quality corporate interns and younger professionals to Wisconsin. They are competing against brands that are based in big cities like New York, LA and Chicago. The level of engagement and gamification they use to attract good candidates to the Wisconsin plant paid off. Taking those marketing skills that he generally only used to bring in more customers could be equally applied to their recruiting and employee engagement programs. Klaus is a great guy and knows how to use storytelling to tell the Kimberly-Clark story.
I love that there’s a gamification element into the marketing because that says a lot about the culture right there. It’s a little playful, fun, even not quite so intense data-driven that they forget there’s a playfulness to that. There are so many nuances in how you market a company to attract top talent. Especially with the Great Resignation, brands have to not just attract but also figure out a way to keep them.
Another topic that I wanted your expertise on is a lot of companies are focusing on the environmental, social, and corporate governance of what a company stands for. Are they lead certified to be green? They have to measure and improve that, not just to stockholders but to the employees. It’s a recruiting tool. I’m guessing that also falls under marketing. They have to make sure that that’s part of their culture and why some people are investing in them for social impact or whatever the issue is or they are being environmentally correct. That also becomes another part of your marketing messaging. Do you have any thoughts on that or an example of someone you have seen doing that well?
Mindful Marketing: When your business is facing a financial crisis, you need to figure out why are you in business? Maybe you can’t go head-to-head with your competition. So differentiate yourselves and tell a different story.
One of the things I am not is, I am not an expert in ESG initiatives. The only thing I remember is years ago when the business round table worked hard to get those 140 CEOs to sign that pledge on sustainability. Sadly, the jury is still out as to whether there was ever any progress or improvement. A lot of people and journalists claim that it was nothing more than posturing. I tried to reach out to the business round table run by former GM CEO, Mary Barra. They haven’t responded to me yet.
I would love to see more movement there. I understand that many companies are still trying to figure out how to establish baseline data on what to measure and how to hold themselves accountable. It will be interesting to see what comes out of the G20 Summit and the Glasgow discussions, whether we see the government step forward and make the big moves or whether corporations step forward and make the big moves first. I feel like you, and I are in the middle of the maelstrom. We may not know for a few years how things play out or what you are seeing.
I gave a talk to a company called Measurabl that measures that data. That was my first awareness and introduction into how important it is for companies in the commercial real estate world, especially when they are building a building, that has to hit a lot of checkmarks. It ties into the recruiting part. A lot of people, Gen X, Millennials, whatever you want to call them, are a big factor for them. They don’t just want to have a job. They want to have a job where they feel like the company’s values are matching their concerns. That is a relatively new emphasis that I don’t think was around in the ‘80s and ‘90s. There was Earth Day and all things like that but that was an isolated thing.
Companies were like, “Let’s all recycle,” but this is a much more sophisticated in-depth look at what we believe. We want to have those people work here and even attract a certain investor who’s not just looking for a good ROI but wants to put their money into a company that has a social impact. I find that whole concept fascinating because the old school of the ends justified the means. As long as we are hitting our numbers, no one cares if we are polluting or whatever the issue is, making a car that’s not safe, or all the other things that come into play. It’s great. It makes the CMOs job much more challenging because there are so many different messages you have to communicate beyond selling a product or service.
I want people to shift their thinking away from a conversation around the planet and think a little higher around the purpose. What is the purpose of our organization? Follow the footsteps of the former CEO of Best Buy, Hubert Joly. Hubert and I are both members of Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches community. You can read more about us on 100Coaches.com. When he was hired to be CEO of Best Buy, they lost $1.2 billion in one quarter.
[bctt tweet=”If you’re focusing on output versus outcome, you’ve already started a job on the wrong foot. ” via=”no”]
The first thing they said to him is, “We need you to lay off people and close stores,” but he said, “No, we are essentially facing an existential crisis. We need to figure out why we are in business. Amazon is cleaning our clocks. We can’t go head-to-head with them. We have to differentiate ourselves and have to tell a different story.”
What they did is they came up with 4 or 5 key areas to focus on and came out with this beautiful and simple message, which is, “Our purpose is to enrich lives through technology.” If you haven’t followed Hubert Joly or read his book, The Heart of Business, it brings it all together. ESG initiatives fall underneath that purpose. There is a place for it but the higher-level question that we need to ask is, “What business are we in?”
I’m going to be leading several offsite planning sessions for my clients here as we embark on the new year. One of the exercises you can do, which also was popular at Airbnb is to set up pairings of people, dyads, have people sit across from each other, go through five rounds, ask each other and take turns, “What business are we in?” You have to do it five rounds. You can’t comment or judge what the other person says. You write it down and say, “Thank you.” You go through it five times. That’s how Airbnb came up with their purpose statement around, “We want people to belong and feel like they belong.” Not we rent outhouses.
That’s one of our mutual friends, who’s also been a guest on the show, Chip Conley, who’s one of the Founders of Airbnb and continues to help people, not just figure out their purpose and business but in their third act with the Modern Elder Academy, which I love.
He’s a great guy. I’ve got to get down to Baja. He got hired by the Cofounders of Airbnb to teach them about the hospitality industry. He was an employee for a while. He still advises them but he came in after they founded the company to get them to the next level. What are they valued at? It’s $120 billion.
The Mindful Marketer: How to Stay Present and Profitable in a Data-Driven World By Lisa Nirell
Before I let you go, I wanted to have one more awareness of the amazing impact you are having. You also have a LinkedIn learning about helping people become an effective CMO. Can you tell people how they could find out about that or what that entails?
You can do a couple of things. You can go to LisaNirell.com and make sure you sign up to receive our insights and invites. I have a course that 11,000, almost 12,000 people have finished on LinkedIn Learning. It’s called The Effective CMO. When you launch a product, you come out with the best of intentions and say, “This is for directors of marketing and VPs of marketing who someday want to grow up and be a CMO.”
What has been fabulous is people who don’t understand CMOs or who work with a CMO but don’t get what it’s like to be a CMO are taking the course as well. You can go to LinkedIn Learning. I’m also hosting December 9th, 2021, a follow-on update to the course on LinkedIn Live called The Seven Secrets of Modern CMOs. The role of the CMO has changed since the course was launched pre-pandemic. People can follow me on LinkedIn or get my newsletter at LisaNirell.com. We will make sure you get some of our latest insights and lessons learned.
Inviting people to enroll and get your insights and invites. From a branding standpoint, that’s so memorable. It’s alliteration and not a typical opt-in to get emails from us. You have packaged even that in such a way that is cutting through the clutter, making it feel warm and personal. There are so many examples of what you are doing and the kind of people that you get to work with. If anybody is lucky enough to get to work with you or have you as their coach, I’m sure their business will certainly take off. Any last thoughts you want to leave us with? Any last quote or an insight you want to share before we say goodbye?
Everyone, don’t let a good crisis go to waste. That’s my advice for people. I don’t care what profession you are in. This is a time to revisit, who am I? What is my business’s purpose? How can marketing communicate that purpose to the world and make the new world a better place than pre-COVID? Please don’t sit back and wait for life to happen to you at this stage. The new world is emerging and let’s be part of it. I also want to honor you, John, because I love joining these shows. I get invited a lot to speak and be on live streams. You did your homework. You made this so easy for me.
That’s one of my favorite quotes, Arthur Andersen, the famous tennis pro, Arthur Ashe, “The key to success is confidence and key to confidence is preparation.” I treat these interviews like it’s an Olympic moment or a Super Bowl. It’s also a form of respect for the guest. I’m thrilled that you noticed. Thank you.
I appreciate you, John.
If you want to find out more about Lisa, her book, coaching program and courses, go to LisaNirell.com.
Important Links
- The Mindful Marketer
- EnergizeGrowth NOW
- EnergizeGrowth
- From Order Taker To Innovator
- LinkedIn – Lisa Nirell
- Measurabl
- Hubert Joly
- 100Coaches.com
- The Heart of Business
- Chip Conley – Past Episode
- The Effective CMO – LinkedIn
- LisaNirell.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Dancing Dots
Posted by John Livesay in blog | 0 comments
Have you ever heard someone say that if you zoom out and look at Earth from space, we are all just little dots?
I remember when I was in high school on my first trip to New York, I went to the top of the Empire State building and looked down from the deck. People looked like dots moving on the sidewalk below.
From the macro to the micro, dots are also used in Morse Code and in Braille for the blind.
How do we connect the dots in business so our stories resonate with potential buyers to make them want to buy us? This concept was top of mind for me when I was in Columbus, MO, working with two architecture firms on their upcoming interview and pitch presentation to win a huge client.
They had been talking about this project and how to collaborate for over two years. They brought me in for two days of consulting and training to pull their “story” together in such a way that the client would choose them over three other firms who had also made the final cut.
One of the key challenges was to show that these two firms worked together as one team and brought complementary skills to the project. And after years of preparation and proposals, it would all come down to a 45-minute presentation and a 45-minute Q&A.
One myth is that people only care about the design of what you will do, and they make the decision based on that. But the truth is that the team that tells the best stories wins the project. This has been proven time and again, as this was the third time I was called in to work with his team who had won two big projects worth over $1 billion using my storytelling techniques.
Most teams have a weak opening. Something like, “We are excited to be here. Thanks for this opportunity.” (Remember: It is not about you! And nobody cares that you are excited.) Many teams also have a weak closing: “That’ s all we got. Any questions?”
We reverse-engineered the presentation and started working on the closing statement first: how we wanted the decision-makers to feel, what we wanted them to think, and what he wanted them to do. Once we had a closing that tugged at the heartstrings, we crafted a compelling opening statement to highlight what made this team unique and valuable.
Then we worked on each person’s short but memorable story of origin for the team slide, so the decision makers can feel like they had a sense of who these people are and the passion they bring to the project.
Then we honed in on the pitch, from just telling a case study to turning it into a case story. A case story is one that pulls people in so they see themselves in the story.
We practiced several times, including how to best answer questions they would most likely get asked. My work was done on Thursday, and they all felt prepared for the big meeting on Friday morning.
Little did I know that my adventure was just beginning. I was set to fly back to Austin from Columbia via Atlanta, but when I got to the Columbus airport, they told me that the Austin airport was closed. They suggested I get to Atlanta as quickly as possible, since an ice storm was coming to Columbus.
Running to catch the last flight to Atlanta at 6 p.m., I called my sister to ask her to book me a hotel in Atlanta so I would know where I was going when I landed.
I finally landed at Atlanta airport, which is one of the busiest airports in the U.S. It requires shuttles to get to baggage claim, and after what seemed like an endless journey to get outside after two long days, I finally jumped in a cab.
Shortly after the cab left the airport for the hotel, we were on a freeway and the cab driver got a flat tire! As we pulled over to the side of the road, I thought, I have a choice here. I can complain or accept what is happening.
After two years of not being able to give my sales keynote talk or training in person, I refused to complain about the hassles of winter travel and freakish events like a flat tire in a cab. (This was a first for me in all the trips I have taken over the years.)
Luckily, I was able to get an Uber driver to agree to pick me up on the side of the freeway just as my cell phone battery was getting low. You can be sure I gave her a big tip!
The next day, I got on the 12:30 p.m. flight from Atlanta to Austin because the first flight of the day was overbooked. They told me the only seat was in the back of the plane in row 35.
Again, instead of complaining to myself, I was grateful to be on a flight home. I walked down the long aisle to find a man sitting in the aisle seat of my row, and I politely asked him to stand up and let me into the window seat. “Sure,” he said as he stood up. I then noticed he was blind and traveling alone!
This was another first for me in all my years of travel. Nobody was sitting in between us for the trip, so we started talking about how he is married to a seeing woman, and they have five children who are all grown now. Bill told me he started a software company called “Dancing Dots.” His company helps blind and low-vision individuals to read, write, and record their music. He said he came up with the name because of the dots in Braille.
We both share a love of music, and I told him I recently joined the Austin Gay Men’s Chorus. He asked, “Are you a baritone?” “How did you know?” I asked. He said, “I know music, and I can hear people’s voices more distinctly than most other people.”
When we landed, I asked how he usually navigates through the terminal. He said sometimes airline personnel will help him but in the past, they would ask him to sit in a wheelchair. He said, “I can walk, so I don’t want a wheelchair.”
When I offered to walk him through the terminal to baggage claim, he happily accepted. (The Delta flight attendants were wonderful to him during the flight, telling him where his cup was when they poured his beverage and thanking me for helping him.)
As we left the plane, he stood up with his cane and asked me to lead. While I was ahead of him, I shouted out: “20 more rows to go! 10 more rows to go! Turn left now to exit the plane. Step down to the jetway. Nobody but me is ahead of you on the jetway. Now we are halfway there. Now step into the terminal.”
He said, “Since you like to sing, will you sing Broadway show tunes, and I’ll follow the sound of your voice?” So I turned my head sideways so he could hear and started singing and walking with my luggage on wheels. He used his cane to stay close to my luggage.
People were staring at us, and I was not sure if it was because of my singing or watching a blind man in a crowded airport. Austin’s city motto is “Keep it Weird,” so I felt right at home.
We made it to the escalator to go down to baggage claim, and I tried to imagine what it was like for Bill with all the noise and potential ways to get lost or fall. Instead, he said, “You know a lot of Broadway songs!”
When we got to baggage claim, he showed me a picture of his luggage on his phone, and I quickly found it. When I grabbed his luggage, he touched it and smiled. “That’s my bag!” he said. Then I walked him over to a chair near the wall and explained where we were so he could tell his sister who was coming to pick him up.
Wow. What a journey! Sometimes life is a series of “negative or frustrating” dots like a canceled plane or a cab with a flat tire. If we zoom out when those moments are happening and trust another dot that will be more pleasant is just ahead (meeting Bill), then we don’t get stuck in the feelings of exasperation. Had the delay not happened I would not have met Bill. Talking with him was the best part of the business trip. It showed me we can all deal with whatever life throws our way if we choose to focus on what we can do versus what we can’t do!
How To Speak Like A Leader With John Bates
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Do you want to speak like a leader? There are two key things you need to remember. One, make sure you’re giving some context as to where you’re coming from. Two, be aware of the tone of your voice. John Livesay’s guest today is John Bates, the CEO and Founder of Executive Speaking Success. John is an in-demand executive coach and is one of the most prolific TED-format coaches in the world. And he’s here to help you out so you can communicate with confidence and credibility. So tune in to discover the science behind communication and how to use it to enhance your leadership skills. You wouldn’t want to miss this episode!
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Listen to the podcast here
How To Speak Like A Leader With John Bates
Our guest in the show is John Bates, who’s an expert at communication and works with leaders at companies like NASA. Find out what the final criteria are on whether you can become an astronaut or not. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is John Bates, whose mission is to bring out what is awesome inside people so that they can have the impact they want in the world. He’s an in-demand Executive Coach. He is also one of the most prolific TED-format coaches in the world. Executives from organizations like Johnson & Johnson’s, JLABS, NASA, including the astronauts, US Navy Special Ops, and Boston Scientific and more recommend him to their colleagues as the best leadership communication coach working. He knows the power creating a TED-like Talk can bring to anyone in business and life. John, welcome to the show.
[bctt tweet=”There is scientific proof that you get what you put out. People always mirror you. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
Thank you, John. It’s great to be here with you.
You and I have been personal friends for quite a while, and I’ve always admired your energy, passion, and your incredible ability to get people energized and discover their story to make it TED-worthy. Take us back to your own story of origin, if you will. You can go back to childhood or how did you know that this was something you wanted to make your career?
The short answer is I failed at everything else but that turned out to be a big benefit in the long run. I was always the guy, maybe a little bit like you who had the soft skills. I always worked with a lot of people who had the hard skills because I was always an early-stage employee or a Founder or Cofounder at companies that were in the internet space.
Starting in 1994, I was working with a lot of people who had hard skills. I would always end up being the Chief evangelist for my companies. I raised several hundred million dollars in Silicon Valley and beyond with my teams, and I still felt I was less valuable than the people who had the hard skills. I go around trying to prove I was valuable.
Your Amazing Itty Bitty Guide to Being TED-Worthy: 15 Essential Secrets of Successful Speaking Based in Human Neurobiology
They called what I did fluffy, even though I brought in hundreds of millions with my team. I had a chip on my shoulder and I was frustrated about it. I was going around trying to prove I was valuable. I didn’t think I was. I then went to the TED Conference for the first time in 2009. I saw person after a person gives the most amazing talks I’d ever seen in my life.
To my credit, I remember thinking, “I’ve been a public speaker my whole life but I’ve never done that. That was something else.” I came home and I got involved in the TED and TEDx community and at one of the first-ever TEDx events, which were in Santa Monica. That was TEDx Santa Monica was one of the first TED events but not the first. We had this guy who had all the hard skills. He had the most exciting topic and he was the one I was looking forward to.
When he got up on stage and started to speak, everybody in the room checked out because he was so nervous and awkward, we all thought we were going to throw up. It was unpleasant. I remember thinking how sad that was. I was incredibly sad because I’d seen that so much, often with many other people that I’d worked with.
Somebody who’s smart, has education and so much to offer but can’t quite communicate it. The evil part of me kicked in and I was sitting there going, “Laughing quietly to myself, of course. Hard skills guys blowing it. Calls what I do fluffy.” As I was doing that, my buddy walked over, Michael Weiss and he said, “We got to do something to help people like this.”
I remember it was like the V8 commercial. I could have had a V8. I swear the heaven’s pardon, the angel sang and it hit me like a ton of bricks that if I got over my freaking self, I could totally make a difference for that guy. I went home that night and started working on what I now get to deliver to all those places that I pinched myself when you read in my bio.
What I did differently because of that moment, is I realized if I wanted to talk to that guy and people like that, I would need to base everything I did in human evolutionary biology and human neurophysiology so I could show people, not what works but also why it works based in science. That’s where that all came from was doing public speaking for a long time. Having this epiphany at TED, and then having that moment when I was like, “Let’s look at the science of why this works.” I’m such a soft skills guy. It took me years to realize why this always works and it does always work because it’s based on science and that’s why we like science.
Gravity is gravity. It treats everybody the same. You’ve written a book about this called Your Amazing Itty Bitty Guide to Being TED-Worthy, and there are some secrets in here, as you said, based on human neurobiology. We all know what Biology is from being in school but what’s neurobiology?
Neurobiology is the specific subset of biology that’s like our brains, nerves, how our brain works and how it’s all structured up there, particularly in the brain but we have mirror neurons throughout our bodies. All kinds of things that it’s related to that cognition, mental behavior and how our nerves work.
For those who aren’t sure what mirror neurons are, it’s when you watch a scary movie and everybody in the theater jumps at the same time. We’re in the story. That’s what you want to do when you’re speaking. You want to mirror them. You want them to mirror you and go on the journey with you. You don’t have time to go into all these wonderful secrets. Do you have a favorite one or one that you see people need badly, so they don’t make a certain mistake from your book?
Maybe we could jump into the one you mentioned and we can unpack it a little more. Mirror neurons are neurons and all this neurobiology stuff. There’s always new cutting-edge work that points in different directions. The fundamental workable takeaway doesn’t change whatever the physiology exactly is, and the calcium pathway or whatever pathway. That’s not so important to me.
On some level or another, we have mirror neurons in our bodies. Mirror neurons helped us feel and experience what we see other people going through. If you watch me and I was doing a cooking show and I was chopping up big purple carrots off, and I cut my finger, everybody would jump because they would feel that because we’re human beings and we have mirror neurons.
[bctt tweet=”Being likable is a criterion to being an astronaut at NASA. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I tell people that this is scientific proof for the fact that you get what you put out. The thing most people don’t think about nearly enough is that they are always mirroring you. When you walk in the door and you’re happy, everybody feels happy. When you walk in the door and you’re sad, everybody, “What’s wrong?” We do that with each other.
I always remind people to think about that person who’s grumpy. The person doesn’t say it out loud, and that person walks in and everybody gets grumpy. They grump around for a while and everybody acts grumpy and then they leave, and the minute they’re gone, we’re all fine again but everywhere they go, they think everyone’s grumpy.
It’s that Charlie Brown character where he’s always walking under a cloud of dirt.
That’s the grumpy person, and they think everybody’s grumpy but it’s not true. Everybody’s grumpy when they’re around because they’re grumpy.
This also applies not to speaking, whether you want to give a TED Talk or not, but also to leadership, because that saying, “One bad apple, causes everything to spoil.” You work with leaders, some of these big companies we talked about earlier. How do you help them get rid of that person whose energy is bringing down the whole group?
That can be dicey depending on where you are and all the things like that but the first thing that I would say with a person like that is if I were working with a leader who had someone like that on the team. First of all, don’t even hire that person. The final test to become an astronaut they told me is, “Are you likable?”
I didn’t know that. We’re going to be stuck in that little container with you.
Apparently, they didn’t necessarily check for that in the earlier days, and it led to some problems. Now the final test for a long time has been, you come up, you sit with the astronauts, you talk with them and when you leave, they all talk about, not only did they like you personally but do they think you are likable? You can pass that entire binder full of tests, and if you don’t pass that, are you a likable test, that final test to become an astronaut, people don’t become an astronaut. That is great for any entrepreneur and any leader. If it works for NASA and the astronauts, why wouldn’t it work for you?
We talk about this in terms of fitting into someone’s culture. Where you’re being interviewed or you’re interviewing people. I wanted to have these people over to my house for dinner, go for a drink or whatever it was. Our mutual friend, Tim Sanders wrote a book on this very topic, The Likeability Factor. There are tons of research on doctors spending more time with patients that they like and all of that stuff.
If someone has a little bit of self-awareness and they are very left-brain, hard skills person and they go, “I would like to be more likable or I would like to not be so negative but my mind is wired to point out all the potential problems all the time.” Is there anything someone can do to not completely alter their personality but move up a little bit on the dial where people would like to hang out with them a little more?
You said one of the keys, which is a little bit of self-awareness. If someone’s got some self-awareness and they want to move up that likeability ladder, which is a very good thing both for their own experience of life and for their career, know thyself. One of the things people can do after they know themselves is to put thyself on the loudspeaker a little bit.
Instead of being all covert about it and not saying it, you can own it. You can say, “I’ve been thinking about it and I was thinking about myself and how I am. I realized that maybe I might seem more negative than other people on this team. What I really think is that it’s my commitment to asking all the hard questions and I’m hoping that brings something. If it’s okay with all of you, I’m going to ask some hard questions.”
Speak Like A Leader: One of the keys to move up the likeability ladder is self-awareness.
Rhyming in that the intent, when you describe the intent of why you’re doing something. Does that completely change the framing of it? We also know how important tone of voice is and you’re an expert on this when someone’s presenting, whether on a TED stage or as a leader. Can you speak a little bit about how important the tone of voice is?
There are studies that show that 60% of all your communication is non-verbal and that includes tone of voice, even though that’s technically verbal. It’s not your message. It’s not what you’re saying. I don’t know 75% of your messages, John. It’s silly to argue about what the percentage is because here’s what I’ve decided.
Your non-verbal, your tone of voice, your facial micro-expressions, your body language, and all that stuff, let’s not think of that as a percentage of your communication. It’s much more powerful to say that is 100% of the context within which your communication gets heard. If I’m looking at you and I say, “John, I care about you. I’d like to make a difference for you,” and I’m sketchy, looking away from you and I can’t make eye contact.
“Give me your wallet because I care about you and I want to make a difference for you.” You’re not going to trust me and that’s going to land one way. If I look you in the eye and I say, “John, I care about you. I want to make a difference. Can you give me your wallet for a moment and watch what I do?” You’re going to be much more likely to hand me your wallet and see what I’m going to do because I looked you in the eye. I came across this trust. Where all that non-verbal stuff was aligned with my message, and if your non-verbal is not aligned with your message, does that damage your message.
That tone of voice and being clear, a big thing is being clear where you’re coming from. For that person who maybe has negative stuff to say at the meeting about every idea. If they come at it like, “Everybody in this room is such an idiot. Here, I have to tell you again like this is so dumb.” That’s one place to come from.
You say all the things that are wrong with the plan but if you’re coming from the point of view of, “Everybody in this room is committed to success. We’ve got a lot of great brainstormers and we’ve got a lot of people with great ideas. Let me be the person to bring the pressure and reality test to this. Here’s what I have to say about it.” You could potentially say the exact same thing but coming from those two different places, it will land 180 degrees different.
The takeaways for all the readers are two things. One, make sure you’re giving some context as to where you’re coming from and then be aware of the tone of voice. Are you coming from a scolding parent? I remember years ago, hearing that people either communicate to you as a parent, an adult or a child and that all very much tone of voice usually.
[bctt tweet=”Bring vulnerability to your talk. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
Being aware that nobody wants to be reprimanded, scolded and nobody wants to be treated like a child. You run a bootcamp for leaders on the necessity to speak like one. Just because you’ve been given the corner office, the title and all the perks that go with it, doesn’t mean people will follow you. I love that definition of a leader that people want to follow them. Can you give us a little behind curtains look at? What do you do in this boot camp that you run for these leaders and what kind of leaders are they?
I’m working with leaders that they’re running big pieces of big companies. What I notice is that the best of them is always looking for the next level of great communication and leadership. The ones who have the trouble or the ones who think they’re already good and don’t need to put the time in on it. In this course, I call it the Speak Like a Leader Bootcamp. Even if you are a leader, there’s always a new level of speaking and communicating like a leader.
What we do in that course and it’s very purposeful for leaders. We go through the experience of creating a TED-like Talk and over the decade of doing that with so many different people from so many different walks of life for TEDx events, for the corporate world and everything. I’ve come to believe that is one of the absolute best leadership exercises anyone could ever go through, whether they’re going to give a TED Talk on a stage or never going to do that. All the things that we go through in that course have leaders step into themselves in a whole new way. You got to be clear with yourself because you can’t be clear with anybody else if you’re not clear with yourself and get inspired by yourself.
If you aren’t inspired by yourself, it’s a lot harder to be inspiring and inspire people. We go through all these steps that I’ve distilled over the years, working with these people on these talks, and it ends up being a great leadership exercise. People come out the other side with whole new levels of courage, confidence, leadership presence, being inspired by themselves and by the people around them. Reinspired is a really fabulous experience.
I know for myself that when I get hired to speak in front of a sales organization, that particular talk has a lot of metrics. Are they learning new skills that are going to help them close more sales? When you give a TEDx Talk, it’s a very different mindset and framework.
Absolutely different animal. People get messed up by that a lot. They walk out on stage, having worked so hard on their eighteen-minute TED Talk but they didn’t get the difference in format, and they walk off stage disappointed. It’s not pleasant.
Some of the stories that you might create for a TED Talk would make your existing business conversations so much more compelling, and part of it is going back to the mirror neurons. If you’re opening up and being a little vulnerable or telling a personal story of when you weren’t always perfect, and things weren’t always easy, people can relate to you in another way that allows others to see the cracks sometimes.
I couldn’t say it better. I might add a little bit but that work that people do in a TED-like Talk is one of the things about TED-like Talk is they’ve got to be vulnerable. It’s one of the TED commandments. When people bring their personal self to this talk and they bring some vulnerability and some insight that they got out of the failure they had, and tell us about the hard times that before the good times, people walk away in love with them. Why wouldn’t you bring that to your sales talk? Why wouldn’t you bring that to your all-hands meeting? What we see modeled in the corporate world in terms of communication, connection, how people speak and everything, I’d say 90% of that is not only not what works best.
I’d say about 80% to 90% of that is the opposite of what works best. People get up in a business talk or a first sales meeting, and they think they need to establish their credibility. You don’t need to establish your credibility. They want to let you in the door if you don’t have credibility. Your credibility is already established. What you need to establish, and this is going to be the title of my next book. I’m coining it.
Instead of establishing your credibility in that first conversation, you need to establish your emotional credibility. Why can they trust you? Why can they believe in you? How can they connect to you? Fundamentally, this is another huge piece of neurobiology and I’ll bullet point it, if you’ve ever had this experience, when you go in and you’d get yes, yes, yes, no. “Yes. We like to borrow that guest. It’s first try. Yes. We think it would make a difference. No. We’re not ready. We want to think about it.” That’s never happened.
What that is, is yes, yes, yes, no. That means no. That means you didn’t get the sale but what’s happening there, people say, “Were they lying to me? What were the three yeses and then a no?” Here’s what happened. Yes, yes, yes, no. That’s logic, logic, logic, emotion. We did not make the emotional. Yes, they want it, of course, it’s a great product. You wouldn’t be selling it if it wasn’t a great product. Logically it’s all there but what we didn’t do is make that emotional connection. Give them a way to connect with us, be in the same tribe with us and all that. That’s what gets what I call the fourth and most important yes.
Speak Like A Leader: Be aware of the tone of your voice.
Partly aware that people buy emotionally, and then back it up with logic instead of pushing out all the facts and figures. I remember working for a publisher who had come from another situation that was very complex. I was asking her about it, and she said, “Yes, there were a lot of moving pieces.” I thought, “What a wonderful framework she has as a leader to not get overwhelmed.” I thought, “Certainly if you’re at NASA, that’s a lot of moving pieces.”
That mindset of what you see working at NASA and how that can be applied to the business world, I thought you might have some insights into some of the skills in addition to the likeability being so key that, talk about staying calm under pressure. Many movies are made about this but when you’re working with those leaders, do you think they have had training in this or is it a personality trait that they screened for?
The first thing that comes to mind is, you got great people working at NASA and there are two big things that come to mind for me around that. One is your most important job as a leader. It is to always be creating, speaking, and reminding people of the empowering context for what you’re up to. We’re not here shoving widgets around. We’re not here moving pieces of metal and machining parts. We’re sending people to the moon.
We’re exploring the frontiers of what’s even possible in reality. NASA has a pretty natural building good empowering context. One of the things about many of the leaders that I’ve talked with there is you’re not going to go to NASA, get the job and work that hard if you’re not inspired by it. They’re inspired by the context of what everyone there is doing. One of the key things NASA gets maybe more than most organizations is, how absolutely impossible anything any of them are doing without everybody else.
They’re talking about admissions. They have the missions that they do, and then we have corporate missions. They are a great example, and you’ve certainly had a front-row seat to it, of implementing that mission and the need to collaborate. John, if people want to reach out to you to learn how to be a better speaker or maybe do a TED Talk or hear more about your Speak Like a Leader Bootcamp, where should they go?
There are two places in there, pretty similar. One is ExecutiveSpeakingSuccess.com. I do one-on-one executive coaching. I do large and small group training, virtually, in-person and all that stuff that you could expect from someone like me. You can find out more about it there. If the idea of creating a TED-like Talk as a leadership exercise sounds, maybe it sounds like something that you would, “That sounds terrifying,” you should go check out Ed, which is for education Ed.ExecutiveSpeakingSuccess.com. We run that course about four times a year. It’s an eight-person cohort. It’s a ten-week class. It’s pretty intense and it is absolutely inspiring, beautiful, fun and amazing. It makes an enormous difference. Not if you want to give a TED-like Talk somewhere or speak on a TEDx stage or something but also if you’re selling.
[bctt tweet=”Stories are like songs. People don’t mind hearing them more than once.” username=”John_Livesay”]
What you teach people about so much, John. You can bring that emotional connection of a TED Talk to anything and why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you bring that to your leadership, your sales, your all-hands meeting and to the board meeting? The things that people create in that course stay with them for a lifetime.
It’s a ten-week investment that will pay back over an entire lifetime. The stories that you choose, craft, and tell in that course will become some of your greatest hits. Stories are like songs. People don’t mind hearing them more than once, and when you get a good story and you can tell it well, keep using that thing. If it’s a new audience, don’t tell a new story, tell that story that you’ve been perfecting and that just you know exactly how it lands and keeps making it better.
I love that quote, “Stories are like songs.” We’ll make that one of our tweets as well. John, thanks for sharing your passion, your insights, your great stories about how NASA decides, whether you get to be an astronaut or not. I love that. I’m looking forward to hearing how many people take you up on your offer to get your book, Your Amazing Itty Bitty Guide to Being TED-Worthy or make the jump and are smart enough to get into your Speak Like a Leader Bootcamp. Thanks again.
Thank you, John.
Important Links
- John Bates
- Your Amazing Itty Bitty Guide to Being TED-Worthy
- Speak Like a Leader Bootcamp
- Ed.ExecutiveSpeakingSuccess.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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