Compete Every Day: What You Can Do Differently With Jake Thompson
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
There’s so much that goes into actually becoming competitive—in sports, in business, throughout your industry. But the best place to begin is by sorting yourself out, and making sure you’re ready to get where you want to go. Jake Thompson is the Founder and Chief Encouragement Officer at Compete Every Day, a lifestyle brand that helps leaders stay motivated, and reach their career, fitness, and life goals. Jake sits down with John Livesay, and gets into the nitty-gritty of what makes you a more competitive individual, and what makes your business ultimately more competitive. Hint: It’s all in you, all the time.
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Listen to the podcast here
Compete Every Day: What You Can Do Differently With Jake Thompson
Our guest is Jake Thompson. Jake teaches people how to compete every day so they can reach their full potential. He’s got experience as an athlete, an entrepreneur and a speaker, and he’s learned how to change a few choices that everybody makes so that they can be closer to the career, health and life that they were created to reach. The world’s most successful display of a specific mindset and the five traits of a winning competitor is what allows everybody to overcome the challenges we all face in life. He’s got book called Compete Every Day, the seven things leaders do differently so that they can win both in their career and in their life. Jake, welcome to the show.
John, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.
I want to ask you like I do most of my guests to take us on your own story of origin. You can go back as far as childhood, high school, college, whatever it was, how did you get to be you?
I grew up in a small town out in East Texas, Piney Woods. For anyone that’s ever seen or are familiar with Friday Night Lights, that is Texas small-town football through and through. We’re about 12,000 to 13,000 people. The town shuts down and packs into the stadiums on Friday nights. I grew up with a massive love for football, sports and competition. I left East Texas and came to the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex for college fully with the intention of being a sports agent. I was passionate about staying in that career. It was a competitive industry. I found love working at an internship for a few years. I got my Master’s degree. Then getting into that space and spending a few years in there, I realized that wasn’t what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
I read a book about the importance of story, ironically enough and how the actions we take, the things that we do, tell others what we believe not only about ourselves, but about the world around us. If we’re constantly pursuing things that only take care of ourselves, that are only padding our own bank account, if we’re not doing anything to make impacts beyond us, then we’re selling ourselves short. We’re selling our story short. I was challenged at that point in my early twenties to evaluate what I had been focused on, what I was telling everyone was important versus how my actions were showing others what was important.
I started going down this path that led me to the idea of Compete Every Day and this brand has started. I came up with the brand message at the end of 2010 while I was doing marketing consulting with a number of companies in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Eventually, it led me to putting some money into a few boxes of t-shirts and tank tops and selling them out of the back of my car back in 2011 as a side hustle with the one message that, “I believe you’ve got what it takes to show up, compete against your own previous best and I want to remind you of that and motivate you to keep doing that every day.”
Becoming Competitive: You burn yourself out and exhaust your energy by focusing on things outside your control.
There are a couple of things I want to click on that. First of all, this concept of only competing with yourself versus other people. I used to be a competitive swimmer. They’d line you up in heats and you have this race and I remember there’s always a guy that beat me. In breaststroke, you pull your head up out of the water and you take a breath and put it back down and then they measure your time to the thousandth of a second at the touchpads, and I beat him by less than a second. I said, “How did that happen?” They said, “You stay focused on the wall and he turned his head to the right to see if he was ahead, and that half a second of looking caused you to win.” I went, “I wonder if that’s true in life and in business, staying focused on our own progress.” It’s easy for us to start comparing ourselves to other speakers, other companies, “What are they doing? Maybe I should change.” Let’s talk about your insights on how you help people take those lessons from athletics, into the business world where we’re not competing with anybody else but ourselves.
That example is beautiful. I love that. If you haven’t seen that swimming example as well, there’s a wonderful picture of Michael Phelps in one of his Olympic Trials swimming. You see the competitor looking into the lane to his left and Phelps ended up winning that race beggarly and they show the importance of comparison. For all of us, it’s easy, all around us. There are other speakers, companies, and people doing what we’re doing or what we want to do. We need to look everywhere. We need to do exactly what they’re doing. In all reality, what that causes us to do is be like a track star swimmer who’s facing and going toward the finish line straight ahead. Anytime you turn your shoulders or your head, turn your focus off, you slow down. Your body is not designed to go at peak speed forward if you’re looking at somewhere else or if you’re twisted. The same applies to our life, we burn ourselves out and exhaust our energy, honestly, by focusing on things outside of our control.
[bctt tweet=”Being responsive is a competitive advantage.” username=”John_Livesay”]
A lot of my work is talking to people about how do we not only turn the focus inward? What do we control? Every day we control our actions, attitudes and efforts. Those three things regardless of what life has our attitudes, actions, and efforts are always up to us. It’s our choice every day, what attitude we’re going to have. It’s our choice what efforts we’re going to give and it’s our choice what actions we take or we don’t take. For us, once we start to understand it, then we look at what we’re going to do. One of the examples I love using with sales teams is this idea of three yards and a cloud of dust. If you’re familiar with football, it’s the old 1920s, ‘30s South football before they ever threw the ball. A snap and run three yards downfield. You can go from your own one yard line all the way down the field to the opposite end zone and score by doing that. However, it’s not sexy.
No one is putting you on SportsCenter for highlight reels because you didn’t make this crazy, amazing play. However, that’s ultimately what success is. It’s putting your head down, it’s doing one little thing every single day consistently moving that ball that gets us down the field toward our goals. You can’t do that if you’re looking everywhere else. What are we controlling every day? What’s the 1 to 3 things that we’re doing to advance that ball that are on us? We’re not waiting on someone else to make a decision. In sales, this is a perfect example of prospecting, putting out content, contacting people. It takes a second person to make that sale but it’s 100% on you, how many much outreaches you’re doing, how many things you’re creating, how much help and stories are you telling the world to help drive inbound sales as much as you are doing the outbound.
I like what you said there about, “Let’s focus on what we can control, not what we can’t control.” You and I are both keynote speakers. We get typically called in, they like our video, our agent has got us an interview, we do our best to tell them what we’re going to do and then we wait. Anybody who’s been in sales, you go in, you make a presentation, they have other people they have to see, there are a lot of people that have to make it. Their timeframe is different than our timeframe, 9 times out of 10. Getting that job, that sale is our number one priority and then making a decision is not their number one priority. I would love to hear what you do to follow up without being pesty or pedantic like, “Checking in to see if you’ve made a decision.” As if they forgot to tell you one way or the other. If we could give that to the readers, that awareness of, “I can’t control when they make the decision, but how I interact with them, I can control.”
You 100% can. One of the things that I’ve learned or trained myself in this area is the idea of a quick response. If someone were to immediately reach out to you about a gig, sometimes you’re like, “I’m not going to pick up the phone and call them right now or email them back right now, that’s going to make me look I’m desperate.” I’ve switched that thinking to where you can say, “I’m effective and I’m going to be efficient in my time. If you’ve reached out on your computer, I want to jump on this opportunity to help you.” It’s getting that limiting belief out.
From a follow-up, when we get off the phone immediately, the first thing I’m going to do is send an email with a recap of everything we talked about and a personalized video. I’m going to pull out my phone, shoot a quick video talking to you. Especially as a speaker, someone that’s in sales, I want to add some energy, some color, some commentary to the conversation we had on the phone by showing you my face, by showing how I’m going to present to you in person, that I’m excited about it and feel like, “I’ve got this cool video in an email that is personalized, it’s not some standard thing.” It’s going to help you tell that story a little bit better about what you do and how you stand out.
I’ll set a follow-up. When we’re on the phone I’m going to ask, “When would be a great time on your timeline to touch base with you?” You’re going to use like, “Give me that ballpark.” What I’ll do is I’ll shoot them a note on the day, “Following up as promised on this date. I’m going to touch base with you at this point.” If I haven’t heard back, it’s usually about three days later, I’m going to give them a call at that point. I’m going from email, touching base as I promised, following up with a phone call that’s going to allow us to have that conversation on your timeline. Then if we need to, let’s hop on another call, video call and whatnot.
[bctt tweet=”What is the best attitude, action and effort?” username=”John_Livesay”]
For me, it’s always that personalized touch of, “Let’s hop on a call and then let me send you a video with that email follow up.” If it’s someone of, “The timing is not right now.” For us, it’s a timing game on speaking and it maybe 6 months or 8 months from now before we’re ready or perhaps in a month or two, it’s already off their plate, it still may be our top priority but it’s not theirs. I’m going to send them a little packet in the mail, “Here’s some information about one of my programs. Here’s a note.”
What’s always helpful is if you’re someone that will go above and beyond and you’ll find these people on Facebook, on LinkedIn and Instagram and what they’re talking about, what they’re doing, then you have a talking point. If you’re a big sports fan then I can say, “Congrats, your team won. Their state rival wanted to send you this information so your team is set up to win the same way this year.” Something that’s not pestering them but you’ve also touched them in multiple different ways to tell that story, not only, “Here is how I can help you, here’s how I talk about these certain things, teach these certain things. I want you to see how I behave in our interactions that reinforce I’m someone that’s accountable, gritty, persistent, all the same things I want to teach your company how to behave.”
There are several things you said there that are great. In fact, we’re going to tweet this out, “Being responsive is a competitive advantage.” Unlike in the dating world where you might be seen as needy, “I’ll call you back after the date three times,” it’s the opposite here, and that’s fantastic. Also, I like the concept of personalizing something. I always tell people, act as if you already have the job. When I was up for a speaking job at Redfin, which is a real estate company, I thought, “I’m going to call and pretend I’m selling my place and see how they treat me. I’m going to call a competitor and see how I get treated before the interview.” They went, “What did you find out?” You say, “If I do that much preparation for the interview, imagine how much I’ll do if you pick me.” You connect those dots for people.
The other thing you said that I love is, “I saw your team won, congratulations. Let’s help your team and business.” You connect those emotional dots of winning, which is what your brand is all about. I’ve done the same thing, if I’m going to be speaking to a client, I’ll look them up on LinkedIn and say, “I see you worked in San Francisco, China, and now you’re in Europe. That’s an impressive career.” Some little thing that lets them know that you’ve taken a minute to know something about them personally is strong.
How many invitations do we get on LinkedIn or by email of people that’s a standard copy and paste, there’s no awareness of what we do? I laugh because the company name is Compete Every Day and I get all of this email about, “We own gyms and fitness professionals.” They’re selling me equipment if you’re a gym owner, and I’m like, “You didn’t even look at my profile.” A little bit of research, even the tiniest bit helps you stand out and tell the story that you’re invested in this process, this relationship. It’s not a, “Wham bam, thank you, ma’am. Quick, let me get you sold and out the door. Next person up.” You care about continuing on that story.
Becoming Competitive: Great players in sports aren’t so wrapped up in their failure. They immediately decide their next play.
How did you come up with the name, Compete Every Day, for your book and website?
The brand, ironically, took a few different iterations. I always was a competitive guy. I was a smaller kid in sports. For me, a competition was the opportunity to prove I belonged, more than anything I wanted to show I could outwork you and outsmart you, no matter what your talent was. The older I got, the more I started to realize the comparison game we all play is exhausting. There’s always someone ahead of you. There’s always someone behind you. If you’re constantly competing against everyone else, not only you’re going to burn yourself out, but you’re going to be lost because your identity is tied up in every single one of those head to heads, versus saying, “Who was I yesterday? How am I going to show up better in my work today? How am I going to show up more focused, more present with my coworkers, my family? How can I compete?”
[bctt tweet=”Your attitudes, actions, and your efforts are always up to you.” username=”John_Livesay”]
When I started exploring this path, it was the idea of looking at all areas of your life, your health, your relationships, and your career. What would happen if someone were to show up and compete to be their best in every single area? Honestly, I laughed, the first iteration of the company I called Stacked and I was like, “That’s a terrible name.” It had the core philosophies of the idea of stacking them on top of each other and pursuing greatness. Genuinely, I was on a ski trip with two friends and tinkering with designs and sketching things and I said, “What about Compete Every Day?” Both guys were like, “That is you. That fits your personality. You’re the most competitive driven person we know, run with it.” That was December of 2010. It took 6 to 7 months to try to play with things to figure out, what is the best fit for this message?
You referenced Michael Phelps and when I was selling advertising, I had Speedo as a client. They invited him to an event because he was on their payroll as a spokesperson and I got to ask him. As a former competitive swimmer, you can imagine what a thrill that was as an athlete yourself, “I’ve got to meet Tom Brady or something.” What would you ask them? I said, “Everyone says you’re a great swimmer because of your physique. You’ve got these big lungs and your feet are like fins. I bet there’s something else.” He said, “Yes. My coach asked me early on if I was willing to work out on Sundays and I said yes. We’ve got 52 more workouts in the near competition because everybody takes Sundays off.” I thought of that story for you when I saw your brand name, Compete Every Day, because I went, “Most people don’t think of competing. We certainly take Sundays off.” I thought, “What a great little nugget of that for you and your world of athletes.” Is there a professional athlete that you have met or want to meet? What would you ask them if you haven’t met them yet?
Probably, I have a laundry list that I would want to meet. Michael Jordan, obviously, being one of the greatest. I’m fascinated by the stories I’ve heard about him. We’ve all heard the story that he was cut from his high school varsity, and then everybody’s like, “He’s just Michael Jordan. He’s the greatest player ever.” He wasn’t always, he was a good player. In college, he did extra work. The Carol Dweck mindset profiles that if he didn’t follow shots to the basket during games, he would force himself to run sprints after the game, do extra practice. When he got to the NBA, he still was not the greatest player of all time. He was good. It was only by going through the adversity of the Detroit Pistons three years in a row, that he changed his workout routine. He changed how he trained, how he bulked up, how he played the game, encouraged more of his teammates to step up their game from a mental perspective and then went on the run of two different three-peat.
[bctt tweet=”The difference between nervousness and excitement is your preparation. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
He would be someone I would be fascinated to learn how he approached the idea of his habits. What did he see? How did he create the habits he created? What held him accountable to it? He has one of the greatest work ethic drives that we’ve ever seen and it was too much for a lot of people to deal with. I’m curious how he built those. What fires stoked him to develop the right habits and then how he’s stuck to it. A lot of us have habits we want to start. We have things we consistently want to do, but we don’t have that resolve to stick with it for years.
Speak to the level of lessons you learn from sports as it relates to confidence in business. For example, if you’re a baseball pitcher, you’re not going to be perfect and yet do you lose your confidence for the next pitch? They don’t say, “No. I remember who I am.” What lessons have you learned in athletics that can help people with their confidence in business?
There are two areas to that question. The first is, “What’s the next play?” That’s the terminology I use with athletes of asking, “What’s the next play?” There is going to be a bad play that happens in sports, you’re going to throw an interception, you’re going to get a home run hit off of you, just the same as you’re probably going to give a presentation. That sucks. You may lose a deal. Something bad is going to happen. At that point, it’s behind you, and great players in sports aren’t wrapped up on, “I do an interception. I missed the shot.” They’re taken out of the moment. If they’re like, “That happened. What did I learn? What am I going to do differently? What’s the next play?”
For us in life, it’s an idea of getting out of our own head. Most of us, like we talked about when we’re swimming, if we look into the left and the right at everyone else we slow down. The same applies when you’re trying to look behind you at what has already happened in the past, you slow down, you’re taken out of the present. For us, something bad is going to happen but at that moment, you have to say, “What’s the lesson and what’s the next play?” Get your eyes back to the present moment. The second thing is the difference between nervousness and excitement is your preparation. Simply done is preparation. The best way to prepare is by getting your reps set.
You build confidence one choice at a time, one day at a time. It’s like getting your reps. A pitcher is going to throw thousands and thousands of fastballs throughout the course of their career. A quarterback is going to make many passes. All of these basic drills that we see athletes do, they’ve done them time and time again, which makes them good at them in the middle of the game. The same, a lot of us go into sales meetings and presentations and we’re like, “We’re going to wing it.” What that does is it creates more nervousness in us, we’re trying to pull from things and our presentation isn’t as sharp.
[bctt tweet=”The preparation allows you the opportunity to improve.” username=”John_Livesay”]
If we put in the reps of preparing, just like we do when we speak, I had someone talk to me about the presentation, she’s like, “That looked natural.” I’m like, “That 45-minute talk, I’ve given twenty hours’ worth in the last year. All of those little bits, I’ve told those for hours and hours. That’s 60, 70 hours’ worth of content that you saw. The reason I’m able to do that is because I’ve done all the prep, I’ve got all the rep.” The only way we get better at work is by getting our reps in. Most of us are concerned about what we’re going to look like in the beginning. I don’t want to look like, “I’m at this certain level and my company, I can’t look like I don’t know what I’m doing or I’m trying to learn something new. That would look bad on me.” No. Successful people are saying, “I don’t care if I look like a rookie. I don’t care if I look a little bit foolish trying something new. I want to get better.”
Athletes, actors, everyone practices and rehearses and yet sometimes salespeople who’ve been doing it for a while, “I don’t need to practice my presentation.” It’s not going to be customized in and they might stumble and they might confuse people, they aren’t doing the work, especially when the stakes are high and there’s a big potential win. It shows when people have put the preparation in it and when they haven’t.
The preparation allows you the opportunity to improve in the moment. If you think about football, when a play breaks down and a quarterback has to scramble and improvise on the fly, they still know where everybody is on the field. They may have to change where they are, where they’re rolling to, but they still know. When you get up to do a talk or you give a presentation, you know all your story, you know your bit, but then something can happen in the audience, or the client does something and you’re like, “That’s a perfect analogy for this.” You can use that in the moment to tie it in and still continue to flow through the conversation because you’ve rehearsed, you have those reps and you’re well-prepared. Otherwise, if you saw that, you would see it and dismiss it and you would lose the opportunity to tie something in immediately on hand and on purpose.
Becoming Competitive: Grit is the ability to really go get your goals, but more than anything it’s the decision you’re going to put forth 100% effort every single day regardless.
Good actors will do that all the time, they’ve done all that rehearsal and then when the cameras are rolling, there’s a moment where they say something or react something that’s authentic because they’ve done all the prep. Arthur Ashe, the famous tennis pro said, “The key to success is confidence and the key to confidence is preparation.” It’s full circle back to you, Jake. I love your message and what you’re saying and how you let us apply it in our everyday lives. You talked a little bit about grit and I know that’s a big foundation of your talk and your book. Tell us what we can do if we don’t think of ourselves as someone who has grit and how do you define it?
Angela Duckworth does a phenomenal job in her book of defining grit as the ability to pursue goals with relentless inner fire. It’s that propensity to pursue it, that no matter how long it takes, how hard the road is, you’re willing to endure. Duckworth does a good job in her book of showing that talent will factor into success, there’s talent in all of us. You put effort and how much effort you put forth is twice as important, which is why there are people in sales that are incredibly talented communicators and storytellers that are lapped by people with less talent, less natural communicative abilities, but far greater effort. They’re putting in the effort to improve their communication, how they tell their story, how they prepare for their presentations. Effort is a big deal.
For me, grit is the ability to get your goals, but more than anything, it’s the decision that you’re going to put forth 100% effort every single day regardless of how you feel from day one until the day you get there. What that looks like from day-to-day is going to vary, but it’s going to go back to you maintain your grit when you’re focusing on what you control which is today, my attitude, actions, and effort. I’m not worried about tomorrow. I’m not worried about six months from now. I’m only focused on what I’m doing today.
We all get demotivated. We all burn out when we start saying, “I’ve been working on prospects for a month, two months, I’m not getting the leads.” What you don’t see is you’ve been planning some good seeds that are taking more time to develop. A lot of people are going to quit right then instead of saying, “What have I learned from the process? How do I keep planting seeds this year? How do I keep cultivating those relationships so when the opportunity arrives, I’m ready for it?”
Grit is relentless inner fire. You have one of those comments on the t-shirts that you sell on Compete Every Day, outwork your talent. To me, that’s what you define grit as.
It doesn’t matter how good it is that you’re born with, what talents and natural abilities you’re born with, what matters is what you do with them and what you choose to build. That’s a core tenet. One of the chapters of the book is all-around effort and how successful people I’ve seen aren’t as reliant on what they’re born with but continually build it. Even if they were born with unworldly talent, they still choose to outwork it, which has made them legendary in their field.
It’s been fascinating and inspiring. I can see why you’re a great speaker. The book, I can’t wait to get my hands on Compete Every Day. Any last thought or quote you want to leave us with, Jake?
The biggest one that I always go back to is the fact that our careers and our lives are worth competing for. If you’ll be someone that would commit to yourself, not anyone else but just to yourself, to start showing up every day doing the little things and writing the story that you want for your life, success awaits you. It may not be immediate, it may not be a year from now, two years from now but over time, it will start to develop the story that you leave behind on this earth is the one that matters and the one that you wanted.
What a great place to end. Thanks again.
Thanks for having me.
Important Links
- Jake Thompson
- Compete Every Day
- Angela Duckworth
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Habits For Success With G. Brian Benson
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Self-esteem and valuing yourself can help you be comfortable just being yourself and avoid being pushed around. In this episode, John Livesay, aka The Pitch Whisperer, chats with Habits for Success author, TEDx speaker, and coach G. Brian Benson about following his intuition and leaving the family business to pursue a life of balance and creativity. If you’re running out of creative juices, learn how G. Brian goes out of his comfort zone and tries different sporting endeavors that lends him excitement and a sense of accomplishment. Also discover how physical and mental clutter affects your vibrational energy and how you can operate from a healthy perspective.
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Listen to the podcast here
Habits For Success With G. Brian Benson
Our guest is G. Brian Benson, who is an award-winning and bestselling author on self-improvement. He’s a child’s book author, he’s a filmmaker and TEDx speaker. He is a four-time IRONMAN triathlete and cross-country bicyclist. Brian knows the value of hard work and never giving up on his dreams, a message that he shares with audiences through each of his creative expressions. Brian’s brand new book, which I’m happy to say I’ve read and loved, Habits for Success: Inspired Ideas to Help You Soar, is an Amazon number one bestseller and was selected as a 2019 Book Excellence Award in the motivational category. Brian, welcome to the show.
John, thank you. It’s a pleasure.
I like to ask my guests to tell us all their own stories of origin. You can go back as far as a kid, high school, college or wherever you want. Did you start off saying, “I want to be an actor,” or “I want to be an athlete?” How did all that begin?
I grew up in Salem, Oregon and growing up, I love sports. I love history. I was independent. I did my own thing and I was creative in different unique ways. I didn’t know what I wanted to do other than to be a Portland Trail Blazer when I was in grade school but that didn’t work out because I’m only 5’8” and probably not fast enough. I went to college, I didn’t know what I wanted to do the whole time I was there and I graduated and tried to run the family business. I did that for eleven years. I felt in the back of my mind that there was something else I was supposed to do that was my mission but I had no idea what it was at the time. After eleven years of being there, I told my dad, “I’m finished. I don’t feel I’m growing anymore and I feel I needed a new challenge.” He was understanding. I ended up taking a year to be able to leave because we decided to sell it and we had to go through that whole process, which was tough because I was ready to hit the road.
Let’s talk about that. What was the family business?
We had a golf center, which was a driving range, a retail store and a nine-hole par-three course.
You also talk about in your book, Habits for Success the importance of patience, you had to experience it and then were able to run it and live it. It’s one thing to tell people and give advice, learn to be patient. You are told you don’t have to do something you’re not passionate about and then you still have to be patient for a whole year until it gets sold, how did you find the patience for that?
It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Not only was I ready to get going with my life, but I also picked up a staph infection in my knee, not sure how and it was misdiagnosed. It caused a lot of problems. I had to have it drain ten different times until finally, they sent me to another doctor and he said, “You need to have an emergency surgery tomorrow to wash this out or you’re going to have a problem.” It was a nightmare in that regard as well. I sat down one day while all of this was going on, contemplating my future and I knew that I was feeling out of balance. I told myself, “Write five things that you feel will help keep you in balance at this moment.”
I did that and I put the paper in my wallet and I would refer to it occasionally and it helped, my intuition said, “Expand the list and write a book.” I had never written anything before but I did that and in about six weeks, I wrote this simple little book called Brian’s List: 26 1/2 Easy to Use Ideas on How to Live a Fun, Balanced, Healthy Life!, it gave me some direction, it was interesting. I self-published it and right at about the same time that I left the business. I moved to Reno, Nevada to be with my son who was in the Tahoe area, who was entering high school and connecting with him and helping him through that process and I started to reinvent myself.
Habits For Success: Truly enjoy the process of creation and trust that it will reach an effect.
It’s curious to know what those five things are, I see them in your book. Some of them are, “That’s good.” The secret is the combination, almost like a little mini checklist or do you have something in there that I haven’t seen but most people put in? I’m going to let you tell us what the five are.
Some of them we think about that, but it’s easy to forget. One is to drink enough water. That’s a sneaky one. I made sure I was drinking enough water. Two is to make sure that I was getting enough sleep. The third one is to make sure that I was getting some daily exercise and that was tough while I was going through the knee problem, but I needed movement and that helps me. Another one is to make sure that I was getting some alone time every day because I’m outgoing but I’m an introvert and I need time to refill my cup. The final one, make sure that I was being creative. At that time, I had not got to anything that I’m doing now. I wasn’t writing. I wasn’t doing anything like that. At that time, playing my guitar was a creative outlet.
That last one is important, you’re like, “I’m going to make time to exercise and going to make time to make sure I’m hydrated, maybe even find some time I can be alone. I can go to the sleep thing, most of the time I can do that, wait a minute, am I making time to be creative? I’m putting out fires all day at work and then I feel like I do that at home.” Especially if you’re a leader or want to grow as a person. This need, just because you’re alone doesn’t mean you’re having time to be creative. There’s a difference between alone time and creative time and I wanted to double click on that.
I learned this more in my journey, which we’ll probably tap into a little bit here going forward. Creativity is important. It’s like connecting with God, the source, the universe or whatever you want to call it and it’s a form of meditation. It’s a great way to feel good about yourself. It’s a great way to slow down and just be. You don’t have to be Van Gogh if you’re painting or you don’t have to be Walt Whitman if you’re writing, but in your own special way, it’s an outlet that is important.
You said another gem there, Brian, which is let go of thinking that what you’re creating isn’t good enough to spend time doing. Don’t have any attachments to having to produce income or winning the awards or anything else. You’re creating it for you and if nobody even sees it or hears it, that’s okay.
It’s interesting because initially, that was the case. However, as I kept going down the road and creating more stuff, then I started putting more attachment to it and held more expectations to it and that started to cause some problems for me. Even though it made a difference in a lot of ways, it probably helped solidify my foundation and keep moving forward. If it didn’t do something that I felt like it was supposed to do, I’d be depressed for a couple of weeks. I went through this roller coaster of the creative process and how I was reacting to what I was creating. Finally, a couple of years ago, after releasing my first kid’s book, it had a good release but then for some reason, I don’t know what I was expecting, I ended up with this depression. I said, “If it’s going to be like this anymore, I don’t want to do it.” From there on, I tried to truly enjoy the process of creation and trust that it will reach and affect whoever it’s supposed to and the rest is out of my control.
[bctt tweet=”Intuition is the language of the soul. Make time to be creative. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I’m fascinated that you used the word going on a roller coaster because I talk about that all the time, helping people get off a self-esteem roller coaster of only feeling good if their numbers are up and bad if your numbers are down. As if our identity is contingent on an outcome and then we feel like, “I’m not worth anything if I’m me. I need to have all these achievements and they have to constantly be topping myself and impressing people nonstop just to get to acceptable.” As opposed to, “Who I am is enough, whether I create something or not, whether it gets accolades or not.”
Not be obsessively checking your ranking on Amazon or how many views you got or how many likes on a social media post or whatever. You can do to constantly go like, “I’m not feeling okay about myself. I feel even worse because I didn’t get a like on something that I thought was brilliant.” It will drive you crazy. I love helping people get off that self-esteem roller coaster. You are big on intuition and then you have a line in here which is, intuition is the language of the soul. Tell us a story of how you’ve let your intuition be your guide if you don’t mind.
It’s been my guidance so much. When I first got into triathlons, I was listening to it without realizing and I was listening to it until looking back. It was definitely a watershed moment for me but I had a knee injury in college. My kneecap got knocked out of place playing mud football and it sucked. I had to have surgery and I was nervous. I played a lot of sports in high school. I set a goal to do a short triathlon when I got done to have something to look forward to while I was rehabbing. I started feeling good about myself, I lost a few pounds and started to change my life. Intuitively, I felt drawn to the sport of triathlon. I wasn’t sure why, but I even wrote my first poem and it’s not good based on a person racing the IRONMAN and this was three years before I ever did one. Once I stepped to the starting line in that first short course race in 1987, I’d finished it and I felt alive and empowered. I ended up doing four more that summer and then ten the next summer and in the third season, I did my first IRONMAN. I felt destined to do that.
You talk about how intuition can communicate with us in different ways. It could be feeling restless, which is fascinating because some people don’t realize that your intuition is trying to talk to you. This concept of even a gut feeling or sometimes you become ill. If our body is not getting our attention with the other things, it’s like, “I’m going to make you slow down enough so I could maybe get your attention to listen if you’re home with a cold or something even worse.”
Sometimes we get smacked hard because we aren’t paying attention or we’re too busy in our lives to listen to it. It’s no accident that my first book, even though it was accidental, was all those different ways to stay in life balance because it taught me how to be aware of what kept me in balance and what threw me out. Which in turn, the more that I can institute balance into my life, the easier it is to let our intuition come through.
What advice do you have for someone who’s like, “I’m not in touch with my intuition and I feel out of balance.”
I’ll definitely try to get them to start thinking about what they’re doing. Start documenting your life and try to identify it and it might take the help of a coach to help be an accountability partner and to look at it with fresh eyes to see what one might be doing. With Habits for Success, habits can work both ways. You get habits going that aren’t that healthy for us and it becomes a part of our system that we forget about anything else. You have to identify it and become more self-aware of how you’re living and then you can start to eliminate and institute different ways to go about things. That’s the best place to start.
Habits For Success: Tearing up another crumpled paper ball for the pile.
You talk about helping people get over their fear of failure and how important resilience is, any stories around your own failures and how you picked yourself back up?
For me, failing can mean a variety of things, but I’m going to jot back to what we were talking about the expectations at the ends of things. For me, I put my expectations high that when something didn’t do what it was supposed in my mind, even though it did wonderful things, I felt I was failing.
That’s an insight right there. We are mostly the ones labeling something a failure more than the outer world.
Anybody else looking from the outside and maybe the different things that are creative, they’re going, “That’s amazing,” or “How’d you do that?” I would love to have one of those things. I’m driven and I feel I know where I’m headed that it’s like I’ve got tunnel vision or I had tunnel vision. I’m trying to be patient and step back and allow things. It messed with me and it put all these undue weights on my shoulders and pressure. Failing in the traditional sense is healthy even though we can beat ourselves up and feel like failures, but it builds character. It can help us become more empathetic. It humbles us. If you’re coming with the right intentions, it can force you to dig deeper and hone something that you’re working on, maybe a blessing in disguise. It can teach us new ways to do things. Failing isn’t that bad. We make it bad, we put this stigma on it.
As opposed to, “This is feedback.”
It’s information.
This power of saying no to things you don’t want to do, a lot of people have trouble saying no. They feel guilty. They find themselves doing things that they don’t want to be doing and resenting doing it and not showing up all because they don’t want to say no. What advice can you give us on how we can break that habit of not saying no?
This could be a little bit deeper answer than you might’ve expected but it all stems from maybe, sometimes our own self-esteem. What I’ve learned, I’ve had to work hard at learning how to love it except myself. As we’re climbing that ladder, if we’re not valuing ourselves as much as we should, we will say yes to a lot of things that we shouldn’t and let people push us around a little bit, hypothetically speaking. The more that we can find that place of accepting ourselves for who we are and what we have to work with and finding the value in ourselves, it becomes easier. Everything else starts to fall into place and we start to do things that we want to do and we start to respect ourselves more.
This concept of play that we all have as a kid somehow goes out the window as we get older. You’re a parent so you probably have seen, “I can play with my kid.” That’s okay, but in the business world or when we get stressed out, the last thing a lot of people think about is, “Let’s go have some fun.” I can’t. I’ve got to worry about the bills or what somebody said to me or this deadline I have to meet. How can we remind ourselves of the importance of play and how that can help us reduce our stress and be productive?
For me, I try to hike almost every day and that’s a form of play. It puts my mind at ease. For some reason, nature has this vibration that helps us. Nature is perfection so whenever I step into it, I relax and my creative juices start flowing and as a form of exercise. It’s important to do that. If you’re in the office and you can’t get out to do that, maybe put a little Nerf hoop up or something in somebody’s office and if you get a ten-minute break, go in and shoot some baskets. There are many different things we can do that snap us out of that.
[bctt tweet=”You don’t have to be Van Gogh if you’re painting, but just in your own special way, you can be creative. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
Being a little playful, even if it’s a big meeting, there’s nothing wrong with being playful with someone so that it lightens the mood for everybody a little bit.
Figure out some little office game, pool or whatever, that gets everybody involved and that breaks the tension. What’s the point of life if we’re not getting some of that? It’s easy as a kid, but it’s even more important as an adult.
This concept, especially living in Southern California, traffic and being late and stressed out and lost, my big nightmare is being late and lost. You have a whole chapter about leave ten minutes early, tell us what that means, beyond the obvious.
In LA, it’s going to be like, “Leave a half-hour early.” Whenever we are racing to get someplace, it’s a stressful drive and not only that, you get to the place and you arrive disheveled mentally. If you can leave ten minutes early, which is not a big deal, maybe once in a while it is but switch your routine up. You can enjoy the ride over there. You go in there relaxed and everything is fine. You’re ready to go with whatever you need to do when you get there. It makes total sense to me. Especially here in LA, there’s such frenetic energy on the roads.
A lot of people feel like, “My time is not important if I’m there early waiting for someone,” or “What am I going to do?” That’s part of the weirdness for some people is, you can be alone with yourself for ten minutes and that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.
It’s frenetic enough and if you’re going to someplace late, freeways here, it’s a horrible experience.
This concept of, we all want more clarity in our lives and we certainly want clarity when we’re pitching, because the confused mind always says no. One of the things I like about what you’re talking in Habits for Success is, clarity is not just a mental thing but our environment. If our environment is cluttered, then we keep looking at that clutter and it’s difficult for our brain can feel clarity. Is that what you’re insinuating here?
Absolutely. There are many different ways that we can have clutter in our lives. Your office, if your office has papers everywhere and stuff is messy, that’s subconsciously a weight on your system. I’m all about having a tidy place. If you play a lot of music, loud music or do busy stuff, if you’ve got the TV going all the time in the background, that’s mental clutter and that’s another intuition.
I’ve always been fascinated when some people turn the TV on the minute they walk into a hotel room. I’m like, “Do you need to have that background noise the whole time?”
That’s not to say it’s okay to chill a little bit while watching TV.
Let’s have the news be our wallpaper, I’m like, “Oh boy.” There needs to be a start and a stop time for that. We don’t realize the cumulative stress that provides. The news is edited and if it bleeds, it leads, it’s a constant source of, “How can I agitate you and tell you things that are scary, whether it’s a storm or some other tragedy?” We need to be our own filter and if we’re depending on an outside source to tell us how we should be feeling, the news is not going to be the place to begin. Unless you’re onto the Own Channel or something, it’s not designed for that. It’s designed to get people to go, “Let’s pay attention so we stick around to watch a commercial.”
Everything’s vibration and there’s higher vibration stuff and lower vibration stuff. Most of the stuff we’re talking about is lower vibration and it’s hard to operate from a healthy perspective when you’ve got lower vibrational energy surrounding you.
Let’s talk about your TEDx Talk and how that came about. I think that’s a fascinating story for people and tell us what the title is and how you came up with that.
Habits for Success: Inspired Ideas to Help You Soar
The title is Be Yourself to Free Yourself (Finding Your Personal Freedom). I was aware of TEDx Talks when I was approached to do one, I have never thought about maybe doing one, but a gentleman I briefly met in Nevada rang me up when I was here in LA. He said he was curating an event and he said, “You’d be a good addition. Would you like to do it?” I didn’t know what I talked about, but I go up and said, “Yes.” I had three months to get ready and write it.
That’s not a lot of time, because the amount of work and practice that goes into that is huge.
Not only that, for some reason, the TED Talks, you know it’s going to be videotaped and they’re for posterity. It adds a whole level of pressure and I hadn’t done much speaking at that point. I’m happy how it turned out. It’s my journey since I left my family business, trying to share the story and then I weave it through five points that I learned and utilized. The first one is to listen to your intuition, be open to whatever comes your way. Number two is to step out of your comfort zone. Three was to stay in life-balance. Four is to have fun and enjoy the ride and five is there are no rules, expect the unexpected.
That’s a big one, because everyone’s brought up with tons of rules as a kid and the concept of giving people the freedom to say, “This is your life,” just because you have a family business and it’s expected, the rule is, “You will do this.” You broke that rule and you continue to break other rules and more importantly, what I see you doing, Brian, whether it’s with your coaching, your speaking or your wonderful book Habits for Success, is you’re giving people permission to break rules that aren’t working for them anymore.
Thank you. I feel I was put in this to be a living example to help give permission to people to be themselves. I’ve had to work hard at it myself and I’ve done the work and I paid attention. It all falls into the point of learning how to love and accept yourself.
The book is called Habits for Success. Is there any last thought or quote you want to leave us with?
Be yourself to free yourself.
Thanks, Brian. To follow you on social media is, G. Brian Benson. People can find you that way. What you’re doing, the energy you put out, being in your presence when we had coffee was a calming experience and it lets other people calm down and possibly listen to their own intuition. Congratulations on this wonderful book.
Thank you, John. I appreciate you.
Important Links
- Habits for Success: Inspired Ideas to Help You Soar
- Brian’s List: 26 1/2 Easy to Use Ideas on How to Live a Fun, Balanced, Healthy Life!
- Be Yourself to Free Yourself (Finding Your Personal Freedom) – TEDx Talk
- G. Brian Benson – Facebook
- GBrianBenson.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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How To Slingshot From Invisible To Irresistible With Gabor George Burt
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Customer satisfaction is, and always will be, the ultimate purpose of any business. Reimagining your service apart from your competitors creatively can be game-changing. Author of Slingshot, and expert at making yourself magnetic to your customers, Gabor George Burt, goes back to where it all began, the curiosity and creativity of a child. He explains how applying creativity systematically in setting your brand apart can give leaps and bounds of success. Gabor relates this to keeping your customers infatuated with your product/service and how you can make this happen for your company.
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Listen to the podcast here
How To Slingshot From Invisible To Irresistible With Gabor George Burt
Our guest on The Successful Pitch is Gabor George Burt, who is the author of Slingshot. He has been instrumental in blue ocean strategies and is an expert at innovation and reimagining how to make yourself magnetic to your customers. He talks about the importance of keeping the infatuation that customers have when they start working with you or trying your product. He said, “Standing still is not an option. Creativity is the most important leadership skill but people have trouble figuring out how to identify it and use it.” He’s going to show us how in this episode.
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I have a special guest. His name is Gabor George Burt. Gabor has a fascinating background and has been seen by many people in the world as an innovation expert. We have the pleasure of having a friendship and met through our mutual friend, Sameer Somal. I always like to give a shout-out to people who introduced me to great people. One of the things that Gabor is known for is his expertise as a global authority on reimagining boundaries. He’s the author of the book, Slingshot. He has the ability to speak around the world on innovation, creativity, and strategy, where he helps both individuals and organizations overstep these perceived limitations and carve out some successful growth strategies.
He is a leading expert on Blue Ocean Strategy and has contributed a case study material to that book. His new book, Slingshot takes off where that one’s ends. In other words, people have an understanding that there’s a need for a different way of thinking, but Gabor helps people figure out ways to start implementing that. He’s listed on that top list of Top Visionaries on numerous prominent appearances. He gave the opening presentation at the World Marketing Forum and was the architect and host of the Forum for Partnership in America. Gabor, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. It’s so good to be with you.
[bctt tweet=”Standing still is no longer an option. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I’m always interested to hear people’s stories of origin. We see you being a global citizen and in cutting edge of innovation. I can only imagine what your childhood was like. Were you the kind of child that took apart the vacuum cleaner and try to figure out how it worked? You can take us back as far as you want when you decided you wanted to study one thing versus another in school. Wherever you want to start.
Thank you for asking. One of the things that I say when I’m asked about my background is to mention an intriguing fact. For a brief moment in time, I was once the youngest person on earth. If you think about it, that’s also true for you and for anyone. It’s an interesting insight because one of the core principles at the heart of my whole platform is this notion that all of us have this inner child that’s full of curiosity, adventure and wanting to do new things. We get disconnected as we grow older and that’s a real shame. One of the things I then ask is, “What evidence do you have that you were once a child and the youngest person on earth?” I’m thinking in the right direction.
I was born in Budapest, Hungary, hence my name. I was born during a period of communism, although as a child that was not as apparent in terms of what that meant. I was uprooted at age twelve and brought to America because my stepfather is American. As you can imagine, that’s a huge shift in everything in terms of the environment and culture. I didn’t speak a word of English. I’m Hungarian. I was studying Russian and French. That had a huge impact on my worldview and life philosophy. It’s always asking questions and looking at things almost from an external perspective and saying, “What if?” “Why does this have to work this way?” That’s the trajectory that I’ve been on.
Besides business, I studied psychology because I’ve always been interested in what motivates people. After having spent some time on Wall Street, I went back to business school after college. When I finished, coincidentally was when the Iron Curtain was coming down in Eastern Central Europe. I was invited to go back with Citibank and be part of the first Western-type banking in that whole region. I lived through that whole decade of the ‘90s, which to me is one of the most fascinating times in human history when a whole region transformed culturally, socially, economically and politically, in a mostly peaceful way.
Customer Service Satisfaction: Blue ocean is all about reimagining what you do and finding new market spaces of irresistible customer value.
I left the bank, after a short while and started my own business. I launched and ran a financial software company all the way until my favorite professor from business school, called me one day and said he finished the research to this new management and leadership concept. He thinks it will have a big appeal and invited me to be one of the first people to join him. That became the Blue Ocean Strategy, which of course went on to become the most influential leadership management concept of the new millennium.
It immediately appealed to me because Blue Ocean is all about reimagining what you do and finding new market spaces of irresistible customer value. I transitioned myself out of the business that I founded. For over ten years, I was one of the top blue oceanographers around the world. Based on my work with that, I was fascinated by the idea that everybody loves the notion of a blue ocean and wants to create one for their own business. In practice, few companies were ever able to do that and I wanted to find out why.
I arrived at the fact that everybody saw Blue Ocean as disruptive meaning leaving behind what you already know and are comfortable doing. Secondly, that no one was good at engaging their natural creativity, which is the fuel that you need in order to reimagine what you’re doing and find Blue Ocean. That was the impetus for me to set out and create my own framework, the Slingshot Framework, which is the practical application of Blue Ocean Strategy. That’s my journey.
That’s quite a journey. I love the what-if in your mindset and getting to do that what if implementation in Budapest and imagining what life would be like to introduce all that software and banking into the world. You mentioned that you’ve contributed some case study materials to Blue Ocean? Can you tell us about one of those?
[bctt tweet=”You were once the youngest person on earth. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
There was one particular one. If you have read or will read the Blue Ocean Strategy book, it’s full of some great examples, but all of them are about either big companies or companies in well-developed markets like the US market or Europe. I thought that in order to make it universally appealing, it should also have a story about a startup from a developing up and upcoming part of the world. Naturally, I went back to Eastern Europe and found the story of a startup, a bus company called NABI, North American Bus Industries, which, in a short time, broke into the US municipal bus market. It was an already saturated and competitive industry and the way they approached it was absolutely a Blue Ocean. That was my contribution, the case study, which you can read about in the book.
What do you typically get hired to do with companies that want to have you come in and be a keynote speaker? What is a typical topic and your ideal audience?
It’s undeniable that there is an absolute transformation going on in business now. People talk about the VUCA world, which is an acronym for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Adversity. It’s this perfect cocktail and storm of difficult conditions. What that means is that for any organization, standing still is not an option. You’re either moving forward, one of the future shapers and actively configuring the direction of your market space or you get left behind. You’re the ones that become a casualty and at best you’re trying to react to all the change around you.
What I get asked to do in my talks, engagements and work with companies and organizations around the world is to help them be one of the former groups. It’s to be one of the future shapers. I do that by going in and challenging their thinking with the assumption that every single leadership team and company no matter how successful still operates within what I call self-imposed mental boundaries. I expose those boundaries and I take them beyond. The best way I can summarize that is there’s a wonderful old Southern expression that says, “You can’t see the label if you’re inside the jar.” That’s what I do. Every company is somehow confined within a jar because they accept certain assumptions, traditions, limitations that are artificial. What I do is that I come in and I expose those boundaries. I show them the label and help them get outside the jar.
Customer Service Satisfaction: When you’re talking to a prospective client or customer on a high note, get their attention, and their emotional connectivity.
What I’d like to do now is have you walk us through how we can start reimagining the boundaries that we’ve either put on ourselves self-imposed or that we come across in situations. There’s a five-step process. The first one is the one that intrigues me, which is this concept of the infatuation interval. You have a wonderful story that you wrote about your son and his trains. Would you share that story as the introduction to an infatuation interval?
There are two major components of what I do. First is this notion of exposing everyone to this incredible resource which is our creativity organization-wide or individually. Survey after survey shows that in fact, creativity is the most important leadership skill now. That’s the one that CEOs put on the top of their list yet, they also then go on to say that they fell ill-equipped in terms of understanding its power and harnessing and nurturing creativity in their organization. One of the first things I do is to bring them to understand that creativity is something that’s dormant and we can reconnect and systematically apply.
For example, I tell the story of three tourists walking in Africa on a Safari in the Serengeti. All of a sudden, an angry and ferocious lion jumps out in front of them. It’s baring its teeth and groundling. Its intentions are clear. It’s hungry and the three tourists act differently. The first one is absolutely terrified, frozen in fear and is unable to move at all. The second one immediately starts to take off any extra garment and equipment, the vest, water bottle and the backpack. The third one is calmly assessing the situation with his hands in his pocket. After a while, the first tourist turned to the second one and says, “What are you doing?” The second one says, “I want to run as fast as I can.” The first one says, “You’re crazy. You’re never going to outrun the lion.” The second one says, “It’s not the lion that I have to outrun.” The third tourist after a few more seconds takes out a lighter from his pocket, lights it and scares away the lion.
This is representative of the difference in mentality that companies have now. The first one is absolutely unaware of all the changes, all the VUCA world dynamics and is oblivious and will not be able to react. That has happened to famous companies like Kodak, Research in Motion or most to Thomas Cook, the travel company. The second one is a little bit better. His view is only about survival, “As long as I can outrun one of the others, I am still alive and that’s okay.” It’s the third one that engages his creative abilities, looks at the situation, doesn’t accept it’s supposed to be the outcome or its finality and does something unexpected and puts himself in control. That’s the first thing.
[bctt tweet=”Creativity is the most important leadership quality. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
The second is once the creativity of a leadership team is re-engaged or it was reawaken, it’s how to channel that and to apply it systematically. There is a definite process that I use and the heart of that is this notion that what every single company needs to focus on is the customer experience. What do you deliver? That goes across from the sales process, marketing, all the way to delivery and the maintenance of that relationship. That’s why that whole spectrum is critical. How do you achieve optimal customer experience across all those different phases? This is where the concept of customer infatuation comes in.
My premise is that any received service or product creates a flood of emotional response on the part of the target audience but that response by nature is fleeting. It only lasts for a certain interval of time, a temporary period because, after a while, the customers will take whatever you gave them that they were excited about as the new normal as the status quo and they will no longer be excited by it. What perfectly captures this cyclicality is the idea of infatuation. What I talked about is you can see this cycle in fast motion with children because children always get fascinated about the next toy.
In my case, my son Max was obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine and all the different trains in the collection. Fascinatingly, as soon as he got the next train that he had to have, which could have been Percy or some of the other Thomas friends. Within minutes, he would go back to the catalog and now select the next one that he had to have and couldn’t live without. It’s that cyclicality that you can capture and understanding that is the absolutes engine for any company to keep their customers emotionally close to them throughout that whole relationship from sales and marketing all the way to ongoing maintenance of a relationship.
It sounds like it’s crucial for everyone whether you’re a one-person operation or big company, let’s say like Starbucks to keep coming up with something new to get your customer infatuated with the new version of whatever it is like Starbucks, for example. At certain times of the year, it has a special limited edition pumpkin spice for Halloween or what have you. That’s their way of doing that. Is that what you’re talking about?
[bctt tweet=”All of us have this inner child that’s full of curiosity, adventure, and wanting to do new things, but we get disconnected as we grow older. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
Yes and some companies get this naturally and some stumble on it and do it from time to time. My whole point is this should be and can be done systematically. In fact, what I even talked about is that the initial period of elation when you get something that you’re excited about. It could be your new iPhone or a new flavor at Starbucks. That is when you enter what I call the infatuation interval. When you’re charged up, you’re emotionally connected and you’re almost blind to any of the shortcomings of the new offering.
As you gradually start to get used to that innovation, your emotional state starts to decline and you start to gradually notice things that you want to have even better, faster, more customized and fun. At one point, you transition into what I call the entitlement period, where you are no longer emotionally charged up and demand new features and new things that you can get excited about. What companies need to understand is, if they allow their customers to transfer from the infatuation interval to the entitlement period, that’s where they enter the danger zone of losing those customers who may migrate to other suppliers. The exciting part of this is that you can measure the infatuation interval of your customers and what I call the infatuation interval index.
There is now this capability using social media and big data in knowing exactly what emotional connectivity your customers are feeling to you. That’s measurable for any phase of your relationship. It could be for your sales process or marketing efforts. That’s the exciting part of the new frontier that if companies understand that they could be one of the future shapers and optimize the ongoing customer experience, there are no limits to how relevant and how magnetic they can become to their customers.
I see your Slingshot being able to solve two big problems in the world that I see happening. For people who are in sales, let’s face it, we’re all in sales. We’re selling ourselves to get hired, promoted, get our idea of committed or to sell a product or service. You’re in this process and clients are infatuated with, “This sounds great. We can’t wait to share this with my boss. Send us a proposal.” You’re like, “This is going to happen.” You’re all excited and all of a sudden, the infatuation wears off or they’re not returning phone calls.
Customer Service Satisfaction: If you get people’s affection, you have their attention. If you have their attention, that means you matter to them. If you matter to them, then you can stay relevant.
You can relate it to almost dating sometimes, “What happened here?” Somebody gets a new customer and they go, “This is great. Look at all these new customers.” You start looking under the hood and you say, “We’re only retaining 30% of the people who come here to have a meal. Nobody’s coming back.” They were so infatuated. Do they settle on us or were they infatuated with our donut or whatever it was and now they don’t like it? How did we lose that magnetism?
This concept of reimagining how to be magnetic to a customer using your infatuation index is solving so many problems of somebody who went away and their interest when it faded. We didn’t know it was starting to fade and we certainly don’t know how to get it back. You’re solving the awareness problem and we know that’s half of any problem is being aware of what it is. The solution part of it is I’m guessing you have a whole strategy on how to win people back if you have in fact lost the initial infatuation.
Those are great observations and summaries of this entire space that I am promoting. John, you and I both give talks and you talk about the power of storytelling. You talked about getting salespeople from invisible to irresistible. That to me is an excellent complement to both of those topics to what I am talking about. I started our conversation by saying something that probably caught your attention or would catch anyone’s attention which is, “Here’s a fun fact. I was the youngest person on earth.” “That’s interesting that now you have my attention.” As a speaker, what do you do? With that attention span and positive charge, you’ve got to start any relationship but be it on stage or you’re talking to a prospective client or customer on a high note to get their attention. Also, to get their emotional connectivity. How long will that give you?
If I then go into my speech on stage and the next few minutes is boring, I’m not infatuating you. At what point will I lose your attention? That’s the same process in sales, marketing and providing a product throughout that whole process. It’s a real concept and it’s in relationships as well. As long as we are emotionally connecting with our target audience, we have their attention and we have a good chance in the business of winning their business. As soon as that fades, we are letting them go. Our golden opportunity is to keep them re-infatuated and understanding that there’s no such thing as a perfectly or continuously satisfied customer. That doesn’t exist, but we can invent a new way to keep them charged up and do that over and over again. That’s a wonderful platform for innovation and always reimagining boundaries.
[bctt tweet=”Creativity is something that’s just dormant that we can reconnect and then systematically apply. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
We have decided to team up on this because I believe that infatuation is a kissing cousin of irresistible and creating a master class for companies who want to reimagine how to become magnetic to their ideal customers. One of the things we’re going to be talking about in the master class is how to turn customer pain points into points of infatuation. Do you have a story or an example that you want to tantalize someone with and want them to learn more about how that would work?
One quick and easy example is from the airline industry. We can all agree that airline travel is full of pain points where we feel frustrated, discomfort and disconnect from the airline and in our experience. We can also agree that the middle seat is the worst seat on an airplane. If you ever get the middle seat, you feel that that you are the sucker and you’re not going to a good flight. That’s a classic pain point. Spirit Airlines announced they were going to reconfigure their seating. What they’re going to do is make the middle seat the widest. Imagine that transformation from a point of pain to a point of infatuation and smartly and psychologically, they only increased the size of the middle seat by a single inch. That’s enough to make it so that in the traveler’s mind, they need to desire the middle seat because it’s the widest.
You’re taking what was before a pain point, you’re only not removing it or saying, “From now on, we’re no longer offering a middle seat because everybody hates it.” That’s impossible but you’re forming it into a point of infatuation where it now becomes the most desired seat on a plane. The other example, which is a fun one, I like to tell is, if you remember Nintendo’s Wii and it’s profound in the gaming industry. Basically, before Nintendo’s Wii that came out in 2006, the gaming industry was limited to 5% of the population, which was antisocial teenage boys. Everything in that space tries to compete with one another. Along comes Nintendo using Blue Ocean Strategy and says, “We’re going to let you fight over that 5% of the market. We’re going after the 95% who never had an interest in video games.”
Why? What was the key pain point? The answer was simple. People didn’t want to spend hours in front of a screen passively sitting. What did Nintendo do? They introduced the motion sensor and combined what everybody before thought was two separate things active playing with passive playing. By doing this, they transform the biggest pain point of non-customers into the biggest attraction and infatuation. All of a sudden, I can play golf, do skiing, and play tennis in my TV room. It was this innovation that transformed the entire gaming industry.
Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life
The story I tell is that a year into this to show the power of this infatuation, there was a story out of Florida where undercover police agents raided the house of someone suspected to be a drug dealer. The surveillance videos in the house, unbeknownst to the policeman who entered, captured what they were doing. It shows the raiding team members coming into the living room and seeing a Nintendo Wii bowling on the screen that was left on. They were so infatuated by this game that they couldn’t resist. They started playing. They started bowling and getting excited by their results, forgetting all about this important clandestine mission that they were on. My point is that you can’t blame the officers. They were irresistibly still caught in the infatuation interval of the Wii that was created. That’s a great way of visually illustrating that magnetic power that you can create for your own products and services.
I love that analogy of Nintendo and Wii because when I was working with the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Vegas a few years ago when they were launching and coming up with their marketing and advertising, I said to them, “Who’s your competitor? Is it Bellagio?” They go, “No. We’re going after people who hate to come to Vegas.” I went, “Now that is a clever way to target people and a whole different way. It’s about art. It’s about this and that.” It’s not staying in that same competitive set. Now, there’s something called Vegas fatigue, where people aren’t going as much as they want. What Vegas decided that they need to do is create something completely new that’s only found in Vegas. That’s a new tagline.
They partnered with Madison Square Garden to create a sphere. It will be completely immersive that’ll be unlike anything else you’ve ever experienced in concerts and lots of product shows. When companies need our experience and exposure to other brands that are using this innovation, irresistibility and how to create customer magnetism, where’s the best way for people to find you? I know you have your own website as well as a site for the Slingshot. If you don’t mind sharing that.
I am much looking forward to you and I collaborating and launching this masterclass, which will be not just combining our expertise but you and I being on stage together, ad-libbing and injecting stories. We’re delivering not just content but an experience and immersing our audience in these stories as well. That’s a great combination and it’s so important because both you and I understand that it’s all about getting people’s affection. If you get people’s affection, you have their attention. If you have their attention, that means you matter to them and if you matter to them, then you can stay relevant and that’s where the game is played.
[bctt tweet=”What every single company needs to focus on is the customer experience. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I sometimes ask my clients, “If you asked your customers, would they say that you’re one of their favorite brands within the space that you operate in?” They may say, “Yeah, I’m in the top five or maybe I’m in number one.” I say, “How about if you ask them are you their favorite brand across all possible company in this space?” If you’re not, then why not? That should be your mission and your goal. It’s the same way that you said about Vegas. That’s a great example. This is not about competing for other hotels on the strip. This is about making Vegas relevant and matter and putting you as the curator and purveyor of that. I love that. In terms of finding me, if people google me, I have a website and LinkedIn, I’m pretty active on them. Hopefully when you and I start doing our thing together and we’ll have our own website or ways of finding that as well.
That’s GaborGeorgeBurt.com. The book again is called Slingshot: Re-imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life. Thank you so much for sharing your creativity. Everyone I know is already infatuated with you learning what you’ve already shared.
Thank you, John. You’re a pleasure to talk with and I look forward to us doing things together.
Important Links
- Sameer Somal
- Slingshot
- Blue Ocean Strategy – Book
- Blue Ocean Strategy
- World Marketing Forum
- LinkedIn – Gabor George Burt
- GaborGeorgeBurt.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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