ROAR Into The Second Half Of Your Life With Michael Clinton
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Retirement doesn’t have to put an end to you living out your purpose and passion. Here to talk about how you can energetically dive into life post-retirement is Michael Clinton with his book, ROAR: Into the Second Half of Your Life (Before It’s Too Late). Michael is the special media advisor to the Hearst Corporation’s CEO. He is also an author and a photographer. He’s traveled to 124 countries, ran marathons on seven continents, and started a non-profit organization. And that’s just scratching the surface. In this episode, Michael joins John Livesay to advise his peers going through mid-life that you can pivot and do more after retirement. It’s just another layer to your cake. Tune in to learn more about Michael’s optimistic and proactive view on retirement and embracing the third act of life.
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Listen to the podcast here
ROAR Into The Second Half Of Your Life With Michael Clinton
Our guest is Michael Clinton, the author of Roar: Into the Second Half of Your Life (Before It’s Too Late). He talks about a life lesson he learned early in his career that whatever job we’re doing is not who we are. He’s all about not retiring but instead rewiring and refiring. Find out how to energize and life-layer your life. Enjoy.
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Our guest is Michael Clinton. He’s the Special Media Advisor to the Hearst Corporation CEO. He’s also an author and photographer, has traveled through 124 countries, run marathons on 7 continents and started a nonprofit foundation. If that’s not enough, he’s also a private pilot and the part-owner of a vineyard in Argentina. He holds two Master’s degrees and still has a long list of life experiences he plans to tackle. He is the author of a new book called Roar: Into the Second Half of Your Life (Before It’s Too Late). Michael, welcome to the show.
John, thank you for that great introduction. I didn’t realize that’s a lot.
To give the readers some context, I’ve known of you for decades. I also had a career in ad sales on the West Coast. You were a publisher of GQ when I first heard about you. What I respect and admire about someone like you is your reputation has always been stellar through time. That it is a rare commodity that someone is so beloved by so many people. There’s a reason behind that, which we’ll delve into. I want to ask you to bring us up to speed on your story of origin.
Your book, Roar, has been dedicated to your father, who influenced you. There must be some situation in your childhood when you went, “I’m going to live my life like an adventure.” The book opens up with you moving to New York with very little money in your pocket from Pittsburgh. It’s this wonderful story of like an actor almost moving to Hollywood and conquering the city. Take us back as far as you want. I’ll let you start the story wherever you want.
Thanks for those nice comments. I had a 40-year publishing career as a young publisher at GQ, ultimately becoming the President and Publishing Director of Hearst Magazines. Our team got to launch Oprah’s magazine, Food Network, HGTV and buy a couple of publishing companies. Throughout all of the 40 years, the one thing that I always did was have a sense of gratitude for what I was able to experience. I came from a poor working-class family in Pittsburgh. There was no education, role models, money or anything.
To your point, at a very young age, I’ve discussed this with my dad at nauseam. I had this spark that there was a whole other world out there. Part of it was influenced by my dad, my maternal grandmother, and by my high school English teacher, which I write about in the book, who is a very present way at a parent-teacher meeting said to my parents, “Michael would do well on the publishing business, the magazine business in New York. Go figure.” I had no idea what that meant.
I was the editor of the high school newspaper and ultimately became the publisher of my college newspaper. There was a little something in there that he identified. I’m still in touch with him. He’s a great influence. We still communicate. What happened was when I landed in New York with $60, no contacts and a young person, I was able to find my way and it was a combination of skills, luck, timing and all of that.
[bctt tweet=”Don’t retire but rewire and refire. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
What I learned was your reputation, integrity, character and all the ups and downs that you have in business are the stuff that is always remembered and stand out. You and I were long-time sales executives in various capacities. I remember your great reputation in terms of the various jobs that you held. What we learned is that our reputation is what preceded and followed us in any successful business relationship and business success. I learned that young.
I also learned in a young way that we all sit in a seat and the seat is not who we are. It’s what we do. I remember being a little full of myself up as a young 34-year-old publisher at GQ. It was a senior executive who said that to me and a light bulb went off in my head when I realized that I was sitting in a great seat but the reason I had access to so many things was because of the seat I sat in. At a very young age, I started cultivating this notion of what we do is not who we are. I started creating all of the personas of who I was as opposed to what I did. That served me well because I didn’t hang all my chips out of my professional seat.
There was a reason that I felt such a kinship to you because that’s going to be one of the tweets. What we do is not who we are. I also learned that life lesson when I got laid off from Conde Nast the first time. It’s the premise of if we get so identified with our job title and who we are in making reservations at a hotel or in your case, I’m sure going to all the fashion shows in Italy as the publisher of GQ. When that stops, your self-esteem can plummet. We need to realize that we’re bigger than any one thing happening to us. You talk about this in the Roar tips that who I am is bigger than winning a salesperson of the year or being laid off and all of those things that happen.
If you identify, “I had a good quarter and feel good about myself. I had a bad quarter and feel bad about myself,” or even shorter timeframes, you’re up and down all day long and that doesn’t serve anybody. I’m so grateful to have you say that, especially with your expertise and experience in the world. My first question with your background is and this explains why you’ve been so successful. When you are the publisher, you not only have to have expertise in managing and attracting a great sales team but you have to be the conduit to the editor.
Typically, they’ve been very much divided between church and state. You almost have to have empathy and understanding for what an editor feels is newsworthy and unique. Your background is in journalism. Sometimes people who like the writing part are not good at the selling part of it. You have this wonderful ability to do both. It’s almost like someone who’s an engineer is typically not good in marketing and vice versa. How did you get some sales experience as you were also this amazing journalist growing up?
That’s a very astute observation. The secret is that I did start as a journalist. I started as a journalist, a reporter and an editor at Fairchild Publications, which is a company that you worked for as well in its early days. I always had that skillset and identified as a words person and a writer. At the same time, I was a freelance writer. What happened was I was approached by the publisher of a new magazine that was being launched for the sports industry. It was a B2B magazine called Sportstyle. You may or may not remember it.
What was happening in the whole sports industry was going through a major disruption. Companies like Nike and Reebok were being born. The soft-goods side was beginning to overtake the traditional hard goods side. The publisher came to me and said, “You are so well known and established,” because I was writing for that industry, “Why don’t you come over to the sales side?” I thought, “That’s the last thing I realized.”
ROAR Into the Second Half of Your Life (Before It’s Too Late)
My agenda was jelling. I was in my twenties when I wanted to be a publisher, which I had to go into that lane. I jumped the fence, much to the chagrin of all my editorial friends. What I ultimately learned was that creating the affected sales pitch was like developing a story that you would write. When you’re writing a story, you’re going out and gathering the facts, interviewing and talking to different people. You sit down and write the story. In this instance, it was the same skillset but rather than write the story, you wrote the pitch.
The pitch was embedded in storytelling. That’s what you’ve always espoused and important to your message. Storytelling is critical for effective selling and results. I had that epiphany to end up loving what I was doing and being my trajectory into my career. That served me well because I always had a connection with writers and editors. I would always be talking with them, cultivating them and wanting to know what they were working on. They appreciated that from someone from the business side.
My whole premise is that whoever tells the best story is the one that gets the sale. The fact that you could write and tell good stories, it allowed you to do that. It goes back to the basics of journalism, the exposition of any story, the who, what, where and when. Many reps jumped right into the product without giving any framework of something.
I would have this discussion with many writers and editors who are also selling. They’re pitching their story ideas and that so-and-so should be on the cover of the magazine. I have evolved into this place where I do the whole world. You’re either a buyer or a seller, no matter what you’re doing. I’m very involved in the philanthropy world. I finished a Master’s degree at Columbia in Nonprofit Philanthropy.
It’s interesting going back to school in my 60s. I made this comment in class. There were a lot of young professionals. I said, “Effective development directors or CEOs of nonprofits are great sellers.” They were all appalled at the idea. I said, “You’re getting hung up on the fact that you raised millions of dollars for your nonprofit. That’s salesmanship and storytelling about your mission, purpose and recipients. That is effective storytelling and selling.” People sometimes get hung up on semantics. We’re either a buyer or a seller in all aspects of our lives. I’ve always liked being a seller as opposed to a buyer but someone’s always like, “I want to be on the other side.”
It was always a rude awakening if an ad director decided of a client that they wanted to get into sales and had all these salespeople calling them all the time. They couldn’t figure out why nobody was returning their appointment or calls as a salesperson versus every time they called us the client and got instant return. You’re not your title. What you do does not stay the same. The premise of the subtitle of your book, “Before It’s Too Late,” is so much a part of a good story. There’s got to be some sense of urgency. It’s part of good selling that we got to make a decision sooner than later.
You could have called the book Stroll into The Second Half Of Your Life but instead, you called it Roar. What hooked me was Before It’s Too Late. I thought, “Before I die and run out of opportunities, I’ll ask him because I know how much effort goes into a book name and title.” How did you come up with that hook Before It Was Too Late?
[bctt tweet=”Learn to life layer with different aspects of who you are.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Let me first say that the whole reason for the book was, as I was stepping out of the day to day, everything I read, learned and observed was all about the big wind down as opposed to the big wind up. What happens is if you’re 50 or 60 and you’re healthy, you’re going to live to be 90. The construct that you were given is based on something that was created back in the 1930s and ’40s when life expectancies were in the early 60s. You retired and died.
Retirement is an artificial construct that is about 80 years old in the history of the world. It was created by our government and policies in the ’30s. This awareness, all of a sudden, that you’re going to live another 30, 40 years, what are you going to do with that time to make it meaningful and engaging might mean something like starting a whole new second career, lifestyle or relationship. The punchline of Before It’s Too Late was to underscore a sense of urgency about it.
You can pivot in midlife and create a whole new second-half journey but you’ve got to do the groundwork and don’t want the opportunity of that to pass you by. What was ironic is the book was conceptualized and written before the pandemic. The book was bought by the publisher as the pandemic was happening.
Before It’s Too Late, you have this undercurrent of the pandemics here, stuff happens to the world at large and affects all of us. The last years have been an existential time for so many of introspection. Am I doing what I want to do? Am I living where I want to live? Am I the person I want to be with? All of those things gave it a sense of urgency. That punchline amplified the times that we’re in.
I have the image of Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones with that boulder chasing him. You talk about how important it is for us to re-imagine our life before someone re-imagines it for us. You can sit back and say, “I have a high chance of getting laid off. Print sales seemed to be down everywhere. Am I going to try to learn a new skill or am I going to wait and let that happen? If it does happen, am I going to let it take me down and never get back up? I can’t imagine doing anything else. I’ve been doing this for so long.”
Tell us a story, if you don’t mind, of either yourself or someone else. You have so many great examples in the book who said, “What I’m going to re-imagine?” You’re living your life like that. You got a new Master’s. You’re traveling. You probably have a whole list of places you still want to go and photograph, I’m imagining. The core thing I got from your book, Roar, is the people who are the most curious are the happiest and most successful. Would that be fair?
That’s very fair. One of the things that I wanted to do with the book is to identify people who were embracing this way of living. I call them the re-imaginers. I interviewed 40 people that I found who have done what I’m talking about in terms of this re-imagining process that should be with us for our entire lives. One example of this is a woman who was in our business. She was a journalist for a newspaper and saw what was going on around her.
Second Half Of Life: Retirement is an artificial construct that is about 80 years old in the history of the world.
She was a divorced single mother. In her 50s, she started thinking about the rest of her life. She decided that she wanted to go back to school and wanted to study a particular form of Psychology. She lived in New Mexico but the school was in California. It was part online and part in-person. She had to do the commute and all of that but she didn’t have the money. She decided to sell her house and move in with a roommate in her 50s to bring her costs down and did her Master’s degree.
There’s a lot of money out there for people in midlife, lots of resources like ScholarshipOwl and other sources if you want to do that. She ended up getting a degree in this form of Psychology and has become a counselor. She works primarily in the drug and rehab world. In her 60s, she said, “I can do this for the rest of my life. I’m passionate.” She did a complete 180 because she was a lifestyle reporter, had a degree in Journalism and then later in Psychology.
I found two things with common threads. One of them was curiosity, always curious about the future and the other was every single person I talked to put in the time. They spent a year plus dissecting what is it that they wanted to do in terms of not just making change. Some people say, “I’m happy with my life. I don’t need change.”
The world is constantly changing around you. You have to morph and adapt to that change. They spent a good year doing that, whether it was noticing that their job skills were waning, their company or industry was being disrupted or hit with a natural disaster in their community and making big decisions. The book has a lot of inspiration but also has a lot of tools and resources for people to use to figure out how to do it and get there.
What I love about what you’re saying and Roar is about is saying, “You’re the movie director of your life. If you don’t like what you’re seeing or doing, say cut, change the location, the cast and rewrite it.” They rewrite screenplays all the time. This whole concept of retire, your whole motto is, “Rewire and refire,” which is brilliant because it’s a great soundbite and also inspires us to take action, which is a big part of what Roar is about. Not just, “What if someday I could maybe become a photographer or help people?” Analyze it and take some action. Don’t stay in this “what if” mode where you don’t pull the trigger.
ROAR is an acronym. It’s a four-part process and the A is the Action plan. One of my favorite chapters is a chapter about life layering, which is how you can go about building these different personas, interests and directions in your life so that you’re building a multifaceted aspect of who you are and what you’re experiencing. The action plan is important but you have to step back and look at where do you think you want to go in some aspect of your life to do that.
Let’s give everybody the tease out of what that acronym is. The first R is Re-imagine, which we opened with. The second one is Own where you came from. We covered that in the sense of where you came from and where you are doesn’t define you because you’re bigger than all of that, whatever seat you’re in or title you have. We talked about A for Act.
[bctt tweet=”You can start a layer at any time in your life.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The final one is Reassess. It’s not something you’d go, “I’ve changed myself. I never have to look at it again.” No, it’s an ongoing process. I don’t know if you were the publisher of GQ at the time or not when Art Cooper retired from being the Editor-In-Chief for many years and died shortly thereafter. I thought to myself, “How tragic.”
All of that time, plans and saving money is a very common thing that we hear in men a little bit more than women. When I’ve lost my job, either through being laid off or retiring, I’ve lost my identity. That’s why your book is so valuable. If we’re all going to be Baby Boomers living longer, nobody wants that. That’s the worst possible outcome because you don’t have a reason, whatever that is. I’ve retired. I don’t know what to do with myself and I’m bored. I suddenly find myself getting sick because I’m depressed or who knows what all that is. I thought, “I cannot mention that with your connection to him and your new book about all this.”
I have great fond memories of Art. We worked together for ten years. I saw him at lunch the day that he did have the stroke later in the afternoon. It was very tragic. You raised a great point because oftentimes, people do go off the cliff when they lose that identity and seat. That’s what we need to do about being proactive, re-imagining ourselves and having things happen to us. I want to go back to life layering for a minute because it was the philosophy that I embraced when I was around 39.
I had a great job. I was at the time publisher of GQ and had my rhythm. I had a happy personal life, healthy and all that stuff. I thought I was the most boring human being on the planet because all I was doing was working. I thought, “I’ve got to, in the old vernacular, get a life.” I always had an adventure gene in me, so on my 40th birthday, I decided I was going to go climb Mount Kilimanjaro, take a flying lesson and go to Skip Barber Race Car Driving School. I was going to have a set of adventures.
I ultimately became a pilot and ended up climbing many mountains around the world. What I realized is that adventure and adventure travel were very much a part of who I am and how I self-identify. I proclaimed that my 40s were going to be my adventure years. That became my layer if you will. Many years later, I’ve had an enormous set of experiences around adventure. I took photography seriously and called that my creative years. In my 60s, I was much more interested in giving back as well. I called those my philanthropy years. One layer didn’t abandon the other.
It’s like a layered cake. You have your professional and personal layer. In my instance, I have my adventure, creative and philanthropy layer. When I stepped out of my seat, people said, “Who are you?” I didn’t say to myself, “Who am I?” I said, “I’m a photographer, an adventure traveler, a marathon runner, a student, this or this.” I had a whole host of self-identifiers. I was able to lean into my layers. You can start a layer at any time in your life, 25, 55, and 75. Life layering has become my go-to philosophy. I’ve got many friends who have been influenced by that. In the book, the chapter in the life layer gives more flavor to that.
It’s a wonderful visual, especially the cake part of it all and layering a cake. One is not siloed from the next. That’s another shout-out to another mutual friend of ours, Alison Levine, who is an amazing speaker about her adventures climbing all kinds of mountains, including Mount Everest. She’s been a guest on this show in a previous episode. When I think about it, I’m thinking, “I’ve layered without even knowing I was layering by becoming a host.” It’s so interesting how those layers add to who you are, what you know and learn and the conversations you get to have.
Second Half Of Life: Stop being obsessed about age and start being obsessed about person-appropriate versus age-appropriate.
One of the things that you have in Roar is this question, “Imagine you’re 90, what do you want your legacy to be?” That would be a great last question for you, Michael. You’re far from 90 but because you started layering in your 40s, you’re starting to imagine getting your decades labeled, adventure, creative and giving back. Have you thought about what you want your legacy to be?
I have. First of all, I’ll be working on all those layers and adding a few more to the cake. What I’ve come to learn and it was the accidental role model, is as we live longer, this is all new territory for the culture or the world. The longevity factor of people living well into their 70s, 80s and 90s and how they live is a whole new construct. Creating role models of people who are living life fully at those ages, what I’m saying is I want to be one of those people and the accidental role model with many other. The 40-year-old, the 35-year-old or a peer can say, “That’s the 75-year-old I want to be.”
I’m always looking for those 70, 75, 80-year-old people. I have a good friend, Alan Patricof, who you might know is a big hedge fund manager when he’s 87. I want to beat him when I’m 87. He’s an entrepreneur, started a new fund, training for his first marathon and dating because his long-time wife has passed away. He’s vibrant and dynamic. All of us creating role models for our peers and next generations is what I want my legacy to be.
The book again is called Roar: Into the Second Half of Your Life. It’s available on Amazon and wherever else you might like to buy books. RoarByMichaelClinton.com will give you everything you need to know about Michael and the book. We’ve scraped the surface of the tip of the iceberg. Hopefully, we’ve intrigued you enough to start thinking about your life layering, regardless of how old you are and how you need to have this book as your guide and roadmap to make your life all that it can be and become a role model for other people as well. Michael, any last thoughts you want to leave us with?
The last thought I would leave people, especially those who are in midlife, is we tend to put barriers around ourselves. Some of that is what I’ll call self-imposed ageism. “I can’t do that because I’m 50, 60.” Stop being obsessed about age and start being obsessed about person appropriate versus age-appropriate. Go back to school, start new careers and relationships, be an entrepreneur or get onto a new regimen. There is hopefully a long life ahead of you. Break the barriers of the self-imposed ageism and restrictions that we all tend to put around ourselves.
What a great inspirational thought that the only things stopping us are our own internal stories that we’re telling ourselves that we can’t do something. Thanks again, Michael.
Thank you, John. It’s great to be with you.
Important Links
- Roar: Into the Second Half of Your Life (Before It’s Too Late)
- Michael Clinton – LinkedIn
- Sportstyle
- ScholarshipOwl
- Alan Patricof
- Amazon – Roar: into the second half of your life (before it’s too late)
- Alison Levine – Previous episode
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Power To Create With Tim Redmond
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
What makes a successful organization great? What does every organization need to bring their labors to fruition? In this episode, we hear the answers to these questions as John Livesay interviews the CEO of Redmond Growth Initiatives, Tim Redmond. Tim discusses the values and culture necessary for organizational success and why respect is given, not earned. Tune in and learn more from this powerful discussion.
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Listen to the podcast here
Power To Create With Tim Redmond
Our guest on the show is Tim Redmond, who is an expert in helping businesses grow. He’s the author of Power to Create. He has a great definition of wealth, “Creating value to serve.” He said, “Leadership starts with leading yourself.” Find out the one missing ingredient from teams when they are not performing at their best.
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Our guest is Tim Redmond, who for many years has been growing highly successful businesses, including his work at PricewaterhouseCoopers, growing a software company from 2 to 400 employees, and selling it to Intuit. He helped thousands of business owners gain time and financial freedom. Tim is also the author of Power to Create and a speaker throughout the world on leadership maxims that have been featured in John Maxwell’s The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. Welcome to the show.
John, thanks so much for having me. I’m looking forward to this discussion.
We found out we have a mutual friend right off the get-go, Tim Sanders. He’s someone we respect and admire. I love to open the show with your story of origin. You can start from childhood, college, or wherever you want. Give us a sense of how you’ve got on your path.
I’m 1 of 11 kids. I’m one of the older ones. It’s learning cooperation in the toughest place on the Earth, which is in your own family. I have learned a lot of skills. I was very introverted as a child. I read a whole bunch of books, determined the person I wanted to be, and began to do it afraid. Even for me to get in front of anybody to speak, it was a miracle.
I had somebody in authority when I was a little baby, a cleft palate, and a number of challenges. I was not expected to live through the first week of my life. He said, “This boy will never be a public speaker.” Even being on the show is like defiance to what I consider somebody trying to curse my life. I did live under the power of that lie for many years. I’m living above that now.
I did go to college. I studied Accounting because I interviewed the seniors and the only ones that had a good-paying job were the Accounting and Marketing majors. They were applying for assistant manager at Payless Shoes and different things. If that’s what you do, that’s great. More power to you but I want to build something. I have more of an entrepreneur mindset. I put my time at Coopers & Lybrand. At that time, that’s PricewaterhouseCoopers. I started with a software company and we grew that. It was just the two of us CPAs. We wrote software for bookkeeping and taxes. You would find it fascinating.
[bctt tweet=”Learn how to lead yourself first.” username=”John_Livesay”]
When you start a company, has it been something that you know? If you would say, “My two CPAs started a company about marketing or car manufacturing.” I would be like, “That worked?” You are in your client’s shoes. That is probably why that was successful. You knew the pain points better than anyone else and exactly what to say to get people to want to even have a conversation around changing what they are doing.
We used some very innovative marketing at the time. We built this thing up to about 400 employees and sold it to Intuit QuickBooks. We had 117 employees and I affirm that these guys are the winners. We had a lot of great people here and it was a huge, successful story. I learned so many lessons on management, building out systems, and how to communicate, motivate, and create a leadership culture where the expectation from the get-go is for you to lead. The first aspect of leadership is learning to lead yourself. We had had a lot of, “Go inward before you go outward.” I’ve got tons of proverbs written about that.
After that, we sold our business. I was in a pretty good position. I started a nonprofit, traveled around, and did training on leadership and growth. I did it in a faith-based environment, a lot of churches, and business groups in South America, Central America, and all over the world. It kept coming back to me where I would do these seminars about how to grow your business, church and idea. People will say, “Can you coach me on this?” It was like, “Bite me in the butt.”
I finally turned around and realized I had been given all this advice for years, not realizing that people have a business where they charge money for this. I still remember somebody came after I did a seminar. I was up in Toronto and they said, “Do you do coaching?” I go, “I do.” “What are you charging us?” “I will give you 90 minutes a month. It’s one session for a $1,000.” I figured they would say no because I didn’t know that’s what I wanted to do. They said, “That sounds great.” I go, “Let’s do it.” That’s how I’ve got started in coaching.
How many people would have the confidence to charge that out of the get-go with no proven track record yet or proof of concept in the startup world? The key, for everyone reading, of what you said is you were not attached to the results.
I wasn’t coming from a place of desperation. In a roundabout way, I came from a place of abundance that I didn’t need that but I had a lot of value to throw out something and say, “$1,000 for 90 minutes. Am I worth that? Yes.”
Power To Create: You’ve got to have a vision for where you’re going, and it’s got to be compelling for somebody to say, “You know what? That would be so cool to be part of that.”
That’s based on your successful sale of that company. That’s the dream.
I figured they would say no but when they said yes, I go, “Let’s do it.” That honestly launched me into coaching.
We were talking about Tim Sanders earlier. When he wrote the foreword to my book, Better Selling Through Storytelling, he wrote about how there is either an abundance mindset or a scarcity mindset. Once you have a decision as to which one you are going to come from, that determines your behavior and experience in life.
The way I look at it is if you want to grow a company, you’ve got to improve your looks. It’s not how you look in the mirror but how you look at what you are looking at, and you are looking at it from a place of capability and incapability. There are only two ways, either you can do it and it’s possible or it’s impossible. Your brain is going to begin to see the way you are looking.
Let’s dive into some of your expertise. How does someone, especially in dealing with this “Great Resignation” after the pandemic, convince someone to come work for their company? You grew a company from 2 to 400 people. Maybe you didn’t have to do a lot of selling and recruiting at the time but maybe you did. You might have some tips for people who are saying, “We are competing against all these other bigger companies with better-known names to get people to come work for us.” What is it you think people are looking for over and above benefits and salaries?
The first thing you sell when you are selling a job is your vision and how compelling is your vision. Is there like a gravitational pull to say, “We are headed in this direction, do you have the guts to join us?” I am a growing coaching company and I hire a bunch of twenty-somethings. I use twenty-somethings to build a number of businesses because they are daring, almost reckless, and smart and most of them are moldable, got vision, and are fearless.
[bctt tweet=”Value differences versus just tolerating them.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I’ve got a vision to 10X our business from where we are at, which as a coaching company would be huge. On top of that, the main reason for our coaching is to train up people because I’m going to be buying the businesses I’m coaching instead of coaching these businesses. We’ve got a whole plan to do that. I said, “If you behave yourself, learn, get after it, and run a business, run one of these businesses and you will be very well rewarded. You’ve got to have a vision for where you are going and it’s got to be compelling for somebody to say, “That would be so cool to be part of that.”
It’s also true when you are trying to get a new client or customer to buy something from you. You have to be able to articulate what the vision is of what business you are in and why people would want to pick you over another competitor. Vision helps both sides of the equation or the coin of recruiting great people, which we know is key to success. Once everybody working there understands the vision and is part of it, they automatically communicate that in subtle ways, not just the marketing and salespeople but even the person answering the phone or customer service.
You are an expert on teamwork, being part of such a big family, and learning that at a young age. You seem to have identified that there’s a missing ingredient. If the team is performing mediocre, not killing it or their enthusiasm might be waning a little bit, what is this missing ingredient? If you bake a cake and you leave out yeast or something, the cake is not going to rise. We look at it and go, “What is missing?” You have heard people say that all the time, “Something is off. I don’t know what it is.” Enter Tim Redmond.
This is simple. People have paid me to hear me explain this. I like to define genius as going on the far side of complexity to make it simple that anybody can embrace it. The missing ingredient that I have seen in teams is the word respect. How do I define respect? Respect is normally thought about as, “I demand your respect.” It’s something that you want to get from somebody but in the hands and bosom of a leader, respect is more of a gift that you give.
I look at respect as valuing the differences rather than tolerating them. It’s finding that person’s unique wiring. You and I talked and I have said, “You have your whole show. You remind me of this one person.” You said, “We talk about the same thing but you have unique wiring to do your pitch in such a healthy way that I tend to embrace that.” It’s a non-salesy, consultative, and intelligent way of interacting. Respect is valuing the difference in people. There are many times when people are at war with themselves.
There’s authority, abuse, their interpretation of that, going through rough times, what they had to endure, and how they look at that. We look at respect as this powerful gift to say, “You are valuable. Your opinion counts and your contribution matters even when your skill level doesn’t measure up.” It’s a gift that you give that reciprocates some time. When you believe in somebody before, they may not even respect you.
Power To Create: If you want to grow a company, you’ve got to improve your looks—not how you look in the mirror, but how you look at what you’re looking at.
The old way of, “I’m the VP. You have to respect me because of my title,” no longer works.
When you empower somebody to say, “You are valuable.” I had a team meeting and it’s like, “When you come up with a question, I want you to have a recommendation of what you would do. I want the other coaches to coach you. If I need to weigh in, I will weigh in.” I sat back most of the meeting and didn’t have to do a whole lot because I’m hoping they felt respect from me because I respected them to come up with the answers.
You are competent. In other words, you are not giving them a fish. You are teaching them how to fish. That’s what it sounds like to me. I was giving a keynote and talking to an audience. I said, “When you are a kid, you jump in the pool, and you want your parents to watch you make a splash, that’s a need that as a child you can’t verbalize.” It’s the need to be seen, heard and appreciated.
What I hear you saying is that doesn’t go away just because we get to be adults. To the people we work and interact to possibly do business with, if you can make people feel seen, heard, and appreciated, not only do they want to work with you but they will stay loyal to you and not jump at the next offer they get because they feel like you see them as a person.
We have these interactions. The whirlwind of the business is going fast. We end up barking at people. They leave not because of a lack of benefits but because of a lack of respect and recognition. This is where you are giving that gift. It frees up and gives breath to the organization to begin to solve problems. It’s such a powerful process. It moves from a parent-child communication that people get defensive.
When the negative reaction comes along, they get this negative feeling called resentment and that leads to resistance, which leads to even revenge. To begin to stop that vicious cycle of parent and child ending up in revenge back, it’s giving them what they may not even be deserving of, which is respect. It’s a chisel that begins to work on people to bring out their best. I’ve got hundreds of people who have worked for me over the years. It’s like a life message because I have seen it work.
[bctt tweet=”We look at respect as a powerful gift that says, “You’re valuable. Your opinion counts. Your contribution matters,” even when your skill level doesn’t measure up.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I love this concept of giving people something they “don’t even deserve,” whether it’s respect or grace. Maybe that person is having a bad day and you don’t know what’s going on in their personal life. They say something insulting, rude, or something you would never do instead of jumping to the reactive mind because they are tense and angry all the time inside that they don’t have any buffer or tolerance. That’s what I see people struggling with sometimes.
It’s almost like they are looking for someone to insult them, ignore them or somehow make them angry as opposed to, “Is it that big of a deal? I don’t think so.” That’s why they say, “Someone has got a bad temper.” The slightest thing triggers them. They get cut off in traffic and you would think somebody smashed their car. It’s like, “I don’t think that was personal,” but their reaction is 0 to 100. Are you helping executives try to not be in such a fight or flight mode all the time?
It’s a huge thing. One of the most powerful leadership books I have ever read was written by the Arbinger Institute. It’s in a story or parable form and it’s called Leadership Deception. The second book they have in that is called the Anatomy of Peace. I’m wired tight, I want to win, and I have to take my own medicine. The whole premise of this book is instead of being at war with the world, you have peace. Choose the way of peace rather than war. It desensitizes that strain that’s ready to go off when people trigger it.
It’s exhausting. You wonder why you are tired at the end of the day. It’s because you are so wired tight all day long. You also have hinted at this but let’s do a deeper dive on this concept of leading from the heart. We want people to feel seen, heard and respected. We want to make sure that the things that we are saying to ourselves are kind and gentle because how can we give that out if we are not doing that to ourselves? I’m guessing you have some other insights there, too.
I’m always focused on taking action. If I don’t go off on this, I want to challenge the folks that are reading this to think about a person they may be resisting and look at that as an opportunity. Identify how you may be resisting them and drop the resistance. How can you hug and embrace them? Most people already got that person. Take action. Instead of resisting them, respect them. Respect is giving them some gift. Maybe it’s a physical gift, a hug or a powerful word.
In terms of leading from the heart, this is where our power is and where we change the outside world with our inside world. First of all, I don’t speak from a place of perfection. I speak as much out of need as out of mastery. I will own that myself. Leading from the heart is you are clearing your mind what your goal is and your relationship with people.
Power To Create: The first thing you sell when you’re selling a job is your vision.
There is no such thing as a neutral transaction, either you are tearing down or you are building up the relationship. Even the slightest little eye movement can mean a world of difference here like Daniel Goleman and his Primal Leadership. He talks about how the executives have little awareness of how they are added to or their responses, and how it sets the course for the entire organization.
It’s leading from the heart as you get clear what your goals are overall in your company and also with connecting people. The better you are able to connect with that person’s uniqueness, the more you are going to benefit from that person coming out and solving the problems they need to solve. Leading from the heart is leading with a mindset of, “I’ve got a goal of connecting so that 1 plus 1 is not 2 but it equals 11 or more.” That’s what that whole concept is about.
There’s no such thing as a neutral reaction. Many people think, “What? I didn’t say anything.” Your face did or, “All I said was no.” How many different ways are there to say no?
One guy told me I remember being in a conference down in Brazil. He and I were the only English speakers. He’s like, “Here’s my perspective. Women speak and hear in the language of emotion. Men speak and hear the language of logic.” How you say them is everything.
Let me ask your opinion on that. I am a firm believer that men and women buy emotionally and back at it with logic. Even the Tesla, the fanciest sports car or Lamborghini don’t usually talk about miles per gallon or how long you can drive the car without needing to recharge. They are going to talk about the environment or how fun it will be to drive this. It’s an emotional decision first, and then you will start doing the logic.
That’s where more my heart is. You put words to it, John. We are emotional creatures first and we back up or support our emotions with logic, which is good or bad because the power of justification can help us or hurt us. I love that thought and that’s accurate to understand that we are more felt than heard and we are going to project whatever is in our hearts. We can’t play poker so well.
[bctt tweet=”Get obsessed with the next thing for you to do and execute that with all of your heart. You’ll make more progress with a serial approach than a multitasking approach.” username=”John_Livesay”]
People see and perceive things thousands of times faster than they hear things. They pick up on things. You project how you feel. That’s why I thanked you. At the beginning of the day, I have a ritual of getting myself built up. I want to project positivity, “We can do it,” rather than being overwhelmed and beginning to conform to the challenges that I’m called to change.
I believe you might have a gift for the readers.
We work with businesses all over the country and we help the world’s growth companies. We have a full marketing service bureau that we offer and we do all this in-house like website, SEO, ad management, and all the things you need in digital marketing. Also, we help with the hiring, training, creating a cadence in the business, and the structure and how to run the meetings.
We help with all aspects of the business. To the people reading, we want to offer our Growth Plan. We bring them through their business and we analyze your local market, the regional market or whatever their reach is. We look at where they are effective and ineffective and we do an analysis. We also look at what does the next three years look like?
Based on what they give us on that, we give them at least eight concrete action steps that they can take immediately and do on their own. We will help them implement it but we give them eight concrete action items to begin moving towards that three-year revenue goal. It’s a powerful process. I normally charge $2,500 for that but give it to your folks if they want it. They’ve got to have a legitimate business.
How do they get that? Is there a website to go to?
The Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict
If they want to send me an email, it’s [email protected]. They can go out to our website, RedmondGrowth.com and there’s a form to fill out and say, “John was my hero. I read his blog.” If they identify with you and say, “I want to have that Growth Plan,” our team will follow up and we will bring them through that process. I would love to do that.
It has been a delight knowing your insights and wisdom. I love the concept of respect. Is there any last thought or quote want to leave us with?
In people, there’s a hesitancy to do the next thing. What we try to do as leaders, and this is your readers, leaders or people that run businesses, is we are trying to solve too many things at one time. Get obsessed with the next thing for you to do and execute that with all of your heart. You will make more progress with a serial approach rather than a multitasking approach.
Tim, thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you so much, John.
Important Links
- Power to Create
- PricewaterhouseCoopers
- Intuit
- The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership
- Better Selling Through Storytelling
- Leadership Deception
- Anatomy of Peace
- Primal Leadership
- [email protected]
- RedmondGrowth.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Where Imagination Meets Business With Christopher Kies
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Mark Twain once said, “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” The same applies to the world of business. If you don’t have an imagination, then your venture will be in for rough sailing. In this episode, John Livesay speaks with Christopher Kies, Executive Sponsor at Blue Sky Consulting. Christopher thinks of Blue Sky as the place where imagination meets business, and that is exactly what he focuses on, helping others tap their imagination to succeed. Be inspired to unleash your imagination by tuning in to Christopher and John.
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Listen to the podcast here
Where Imagination Meets Business With Christopher Kies
Our guest is Christopher Kies. He has many years of successful corporate sales experience and enjoys using his insight to help others achieve their goals. Many of his clients need a second opinion on a sales opportunity or a specific strategy to enhance a deal. He works with CEOs, entrepreneurs and executives on a wide range of opportunities, all with the same focus in mind, understanding what stops may happen along the way and how to move beyond them. Christopher, welcome to the show.
Thanks, John. I appreciate you having me on.
We met through a mutual friend, Ken Rutkowski, with whom you went to grammar school if I remember correctly.
I met Ken in sixth grade and I don’t care to count how many years ago that was. It has been a long time.
I love to ask my guests to take us back as far as they want to their own story of origin since you have a sales background as I do. We both are from the Midwest. I was interested to hear similar influences, concepts, motivations and all that good stuff. You can start in sixth grade with Ken if you would like or wherever you want to start your story in terms of understanding that you had an interest in communications and connecting with people.
We could start back in my past because things for me have always been about long-term relationships. It’s one of those moments in time where we have a mutual friend and somebody I have known for many years. I kept my relationship with my wife from first grade. I moved at a point in time in our relationship and we stayed in touch. We reconnected when we were in our late twenties. We dated for a while and then decided to get married. We were in our mid-30s. When I talk about meaningful relationships, it does focus on how I help folks. I hope those two little vignettes of my life and the way I communicate with people helps you out with that.
We both had a background selling tech equipment. You were at HP. One of the things that I noticed in that world was an emphasis on that term speeds and feeds in terms of relationships, empathy or let alone storytelling, which is my passion. What was your experience in that world?
That’s a great question because it does boil down to what type of salesperson you are. Are you transactional or relationship-based? Those are the two worlds that I grew up in. Probably, like you, I call those the go-go ’90s. It was back between 1995 and 2000, right before the dot-com boom in 2001. It was when I was getting my foot in the sales world.
One of the things that I saw very early on in my career was there weren’t many older men or women in sales that caught my attention quickly. I was like, “Anybody that was over the age of 45 was either a manager or senior-level executive that I didn’t have a lot of connection with.” Even my direct managers were still in their 30s or barely over the age of 40.
That caught my attention because even some of the older guys that I did work with and I say older back then because I was in my late 20s and they were in their 40s, I saw them get pushed aside quickly when the numbers didn’t match up. How I took integrated information as a salesperson in my younger career was, “This is a short-lived world. I better make hay while I can and enjoy it.”
[bctt tweet=”You are not just enough; you are more than enough. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I went to relationship-based sales because that’s what I enjoy. I know you like the storytelling aspect because it does create a binder for the person that you’re speaking and communicating with. I take that from a relationship side because I wanted to get to know my prospects and customers. That was my initial focus.
I remember going to see Death of a Salesman play, where the guy stayed in sales way past his prime. It painted such a bleak picture of what it’s like to not be in management and still be in sales at a certain age and carrying a briefcase, quota and rejection, yet I still wanted to be in sales. I did see that you need to reinvent yourself almost like an actor or athlete. There’s a special premium time.
When you’re first starting, you’re in your early twenties. You don’t have enough experience. You get some experience under your belt. In 27 to 35, you’re getting offers left and right. You think it’s going to last forever. You were smart enough to zoom out and go, “This doesn’t last forever. How can I either not just enjoy this but have that awareness?” You’re not so shocked.
I used to see that in the publishing world that even at the top, the publishers would hit a certain age. The magazine is still doing great, but once 50 something happened, they were like, “We’re going to bring in somebody younger. It’s less money.” Everyone thought it wasn’t going to happen to them, especially if they had been in the company for a long time. That awareness, especially at a young age, is quite fascinating.
You have been doing your own consulting, Blue Sky. Let’s start with that name. I have a sense of where the name came from, but I’m always big on asking people stories of origin, including the story of origin around a company name. You could have named your consulting company anything. What made you pick that?
Blue Sky was easy for me because that’s always been me. When I was a kid in grade school, high school and college, I would always look out the window in class. I could take in the information in one ear, listen to it, decipher it relatively well, but I was always dreaming. I was always in another space. I was like, “What would I like to be doing?” I would imagine myself in situations. Blue Sky was what I always looked at. It was wide open. That’s what I look at my organization and company as wide open.
Imagination Meets Business: What you think is what you create.
I have been in sales for many years. I even manage and run my wife’s business as well and do her P&L. I understand finance very well and also roadblocks. Roadblocks aren’t always about who is stopping you. I find that it is more or less people stopping themselves and not having the imagination triggered. They are focused on their quota, what their lack and limitations are.
I have had this company for years. I would go in and out of it. I would get other offers and opportunities and work with people. Years ago, I finally said, “I’m done. I’m going to dedicate 100% of my time to helping those that are interested.” If you’re interested in what your Blue Sky or dream is, this isn’t a transactional deal. This is you pay me hourly. I’m not a therapist or licensed in any state. I’m just a guy that has been through a lot. I have been through the highs and lows of sales.
I have insights. There are not a lot of men or women over the age of 50 carrying a bag anymore. The insights and relationships that we sometimes have can enable people in our age group that are looking for the next step. That’s what Blue Sky does. It opens up possibilities. To finish that, my tagline is, “Where imagination meets business.” If you don’t have the imagination, I want to help you reignite that, find it again or cultivate it. If you do, look out there because what you think is what you create.
It’s very metaphysical, which is also another reason you and I clicked so fast because I have that same concept of energy and mindset. There is a great Mark Twain quote about, “It’s hard to keep things in focus when your imagination isn’t working.” I think to myself, “Most people think of business as unless you’re hired to be a graphic designer or something, it’s not that creative of a career. It can be extremely creative if you look for solutions where they are not obvious or what else needs to happen to zig and zag.”
If you’re on the left side of your brain trying to analyze things like it’s a math problem, you’re not going to see those. The roadblock is the roadblock. It’s black and white. It’s like, “If you’re doing accounting, it either adds up or it doesn’t. This is a no and it’s a no forever. I’m never going to try again. I’m going to take rejection personally and go down this downward spiral of who I am. I’m not worth anything and anybody else could have done anything else.”
[bctt tweet=”What fun can you bring to your job? ” username=”John_Livesay”]
You’re summarizing what I will say. I’ll contend everybody thinks at the moment. We always go from 0 to 100 miles an hour in the negative. You get down to the space like, “I’m worthless. I’m just lucky to have this job. I’m going to figure out how long I can keep it before I find my next opportunity because my numbers are crap. I’m not selling anything.” I always want to tell people, “Let’s take a breath and pull back. Let’s acknowledge you’re not where you need to be with your numbers. Let’s say that that’s a real thing. Let’s say, ‘What do you want to do?'”
Quite honestly, you have people take a breath for a moment. You and I believe in breathing too. Breath exercises are super helpful. We take breathing for granted because we do it pretty well. Unless you’re on a ventilator, you need support. You don’t think about it. In your life, you must stop and take a breath. That’s where the imagination comes in because it’s asking yourself questions like, “First of all, what am I doing? Is this where I want to be?”
People are like, “I got bills to pay. In the Midwest, it’s ComEd and Nicor. I have got a mortgage to pay and kids to put through school.” I get all of that. You’re young and ambitious. You’re like, “I’m trying to make a name for myself.” Those are all real things. I want to get out of the reality for a second because you’re doing that 99% of the day. Why don’t you take 1% of your day and start to imagine what it would be like if you had fun doing the job you do? Nothing has to change except the idea of having fun.
That’s where I start my clients like, “What’s fun to you in your job?” I have had every person tell me, “There is no fun at all. There is always some fun,” even if it’s your coworkers. It’s anything like, “I like the coffee service.” If you work for Microsoft, you’ll get a great coffee service or somebody still pushes an ice cream cart. That’s one aspect of it. What kind of fun can you bring to your daily routine?
This isn’t rocket science, but we don’t talk about it in business. As you so eloquently pointed out, once you look at your forecast, start getting the numbers and start realizing how many noes you have gotten in 1 week, 1 month or 2 months, your focus is on the lack. It’s a simple redirection. It’s not a trick. It’s like, “Let’s redirect on what’s fun.”
I’ll give you a story. I remember this was years ago and I was working for a company. The guy that was running the company, he and I had a long-term relationship. I had known him for many years. He had asked me to come on board and help him out in the sales area. We had a lot of success early on and then there was a dip. I started realizing that I was taking on the pressures of always being the closer. I would get the award every year for the best closer. I had the highest win percentage and then it became this thing where I was like, “I had to compete against myself. I’m not doing that anymore.”
Imagination Meets Business: Roadblocks aren’t always about who’s stopping you. It is more or less people stopping themselves.
That is such a common thing with all of the sales organizations that hire me to speak to their sales teams. The number one thing I hear is, “I have had this great year. How am I ever going to top my number?” I have been in their shoes and had that exact experience, so they go, “You get us. We want to hear what you have to say.” You think of, “You do this great movie, The Godfather, or you’re Michael Phelps and you have won all these medals. Now what? How do you keep topping yourself? There’s nothing better than a gold medal. You have got eight of them or more.”
In corporate, they can slice and dice your territory. It’s impossible to beat that number even because they don’t want to have to keep paying those bonuses. It’s a fascinating thing. I want to go back to what you said because it’s so important. I want to underline this for everyone. Instead of looking for, “What is this job doing to be fun for me,” you flip the question to, “What can I bring to this job that will make it fun?” It’s a whole different mindset.
The responsibility is not on the individual to make the company fun but to bring what they believe is fun or what they enjoy to the company because it will only make the company better. You will realize that there is not a match energetically and you will move on with complete consciousness that you did everything you could. You feel good about where you’re at and you take that. You have no idea what opportunities open up when you are in the center of having fun.
It’s like when you were a kid. You’re not worried about the bills and your grades. You’re worried about, “Where am I going to have fun? Who am I going to play with?” It’s the same idea. We got trained out of it. There’s nothing wrong with responsibility and wanting to provide the best possible life for yourself, your family and your friends. The point is I took a day off. We have this little pool in the backyard. It was a beautiful July afternoon. I said, “I’m shutting everything down. I’m going to lay in the pool and meditate.”
I laid on this big raft. I had my headphones on. Of all people, I was listening to Tony Robbins and Tony said something very interesting. He said, “I feel bad for people making over $200,000 a year.” It intrigued me. I thought, “What is he talking about? It’s a lot of money for a lot of people.” He goes, “You feel stuck because there are not a lot of jobs out there where you’re going to get paid out of the shoe $200,000. You can’t explore and imagine.”
That’s where I went back to what I was trained in, which was having fun. They had given me a client called Batteries Plus Bulbs. They are a national chain all over the place. We had told them three times, “We don’t want to work with you.” They were looking for a new marketing partner for database, email and digital. The guy that was running the deal left and they gave it to me as a save. I thought, “This is great. We got nowhere else to go but up because we completely embarrassed ourselves. The sales guy that was working with us left.”
The traditional way of doing it was to get 6 to 7 people together in my organization, have a quick meeting, develop a PowerPoint presentation, get everybody online and go do the pitch. I did none of it. My idea of fun was I created a 5-slide deck and the first 2 questions were, “Why do you want to work with us? What aren’t you getting from your current provider that you think we’re going to offer you?”
That’s where I led with and I told the seven people that were coming with me, who are all smart people., “I’m not going to ask you a question you can’t answer. Don’t raise your hand if you don’t know the answer to something. I won’t call on you. Just trust me.” This flew in the face of everything we did. We had everything always planned. It’s always very surgical and strategic. We had success with it.
I walked into that meeting and the first question I asked was, “Why do you want to work with us? We have turned you down several times. We’re not very friendly to what you want to offer. One of the main things you’re asking for, we don’t offer. That was the reason why we turned you down.” The Chief Marketing Officer stood up. She was a tiny little lady. She looked at me and I thought, “This is going to go one of two ways.” She goes, “Nobody has ever talked to us like this.” I said, “That may be the case.” She said, “I like it. Here’s why we want to work with you.”
[bctt tweet=”Build trust through transparency.” username=”John_Livesay”]
They are selling you instead of you selling them.
She laid out why they wanted to work with us and I said, “Here are the things we can do well. Here are the pieces we can’t do well. We never did that as an organization.” I like pointing out what we can do well and what we don’t do well. This company, Batteries Plus Bulbs, had problems and they were going through vendors every year. When you do marketing, you want to have a partner for five years minimum because it takes a while to build up the relationship.
What you said is gold. It’s this concept that when you ask people a question and are completely transparent about what you do and what you don’t do, most people try to hide that. It’s like going on a date. “Do I need to tell them I snore?” If you are that transparent upfront, “Here’s what we do well and what we don’t do,” your credibility, authenticity and trust are off the charts. “They are showing us the whole thing. They are not trying to pretend they are perfect, have all the answers all the time or can do anything.”
It’s when you say, “No, I don’t do that. That’s not what we’re known for. We would do a horrible job at that.” It’s who this is for and who this is not for, including even in a job interview if you say, “That would not be a good job fit for me. If you asked me to sit in a cube and do numbers all day in an Excel sheet, I would go crazy.” People are so afraid of showing when it does the opposite. It makes you magnetic because if you don’t have trust, as you know in any relationship, you don’t have anything. We have to start with trust. That’s a great way to build trust that most people don’t think of.
Even to echo your point further, I always do a post-analysis with a client or somebody I lost the deal to. I like to get information from both because there’s something that wasn’t a fit. I always wanted to be educated. It’s not about, “We can offer you less money.” I’m like, “Tell me what we did wrong. I’m not going to bother you anymore. You would be helping me in the future if I didn’t bring something to the table that we currently do offer.”
When I gave that pitch to Batteries Plus Bulbs, I said, “We’re not a silver bullet. First of all, there is no such thing, but I’m going, to be honest with you.” That was my lead-in. They said, “We’re only going to do a one-year deal and only want email marketing.” Within a month of talking to them and working with them, their team and my team, we sold the marketing database, email, digital marketing campaigns and creative because they needed all of that with that trust that you’re talking about.
Imagination Meets Business: You don’t have any idea what opportunities open up when you are in the center of having fun.
I said, “Here is the silver bullet that I do have. These are the four areas we’re excellent in and we have many references you can speak to.” They did their due diligence. In that one-year contract, I said, “That’s not a possibility for us.” After I got and earned their trust, I didn’t sign one-year deals with anybody. Other people in my organization do.
I don’t because I was like, “I need three years of your time in investment. Things are going to go sideways. They always do. If we correctly layer this and have the right people working together, we can make it through three years. You’re going to get a better discount on a three-year plan because I can go to management and save you money.” They ended up doing the three-year deal with all of those additional add-ons that we had. That’s one example of many.
To your point, the trust piece is simply, when you have fun, you let go of the tribal BS that you have brought to the table with everybody whispering in your ear as a salesperson or manager. “You need to sell, do and push this.” You don’t need to do anything. You need to be yourself because they bought from my company and team at the end of all of that experience. I represented them, and I don’t want people to forget that.
If you are not in a state of mind before you get into that meeting where you like and trust yourself, good luck selling that. You may be able to fool some people initially, and I have done it. Trust me. I have been in those places where I was like, “I don’t even know what I’m selling them when I go in there.” You have to like yourself. What I do is more about getting you back to understanding who you are, your values, and what you like having fun with.
All of the little tricks and things I can teach you all day. There are nuggets that all good sales and marketing people have that they are willing to share because it’s exciting to see somebody win. You want people to win, but unless somebody is willing to do the work on the front end, all those tricks and tips aren’t going to amount to much because the magnetic part of your personality is the fact that you like who you are.
At the end of the day, what people are buying is our energy if you zoom out and think about that. An example of that was I was up for a speaking gig. It was between two other speakers and me. I got a call from the agent going, “Congrats. They picked you. They liked your energy.” I thought to myself, “Rarely is that clearly stated.” I did my post after they hired me. I said, “What was it about me?” She goes, “I felt so good talking to you that I felt like you would probably make the room feel that good too through the 400 people.”
If we remember that our money is energy and action, that we’re in the energy business as opposed to the pitching business, that will shift your outcomes big time because you approach that from, “The vibe isn’t right. What am I creating here? Am I tense? Are they tense? Can we make this at all fun? Otherwise, why are we doing it and not trying to force something?”
In one of my quotes, Abraham Maslow, the therapist, said, “The only tool in your toolbox is a hammer you tend to go around looking for nails to hit.” The old way of selling was, “If you want to buy, you hammer.” You and I are out in the world telling people, “There’s a whole other way to do this that’s fun and less pushy. We’ll make you proud to be doing it as opposed to, ‘I’m drained.'”
It’s rewarding. You reward yourself, your customers, clients and prospects however you go about it. Let me share something with you. On my website, MyBlue.org, Neil Bohr was a quantum physicist in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He was talking about energy. Going back to what you talked about, “If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet. Everything we call real is made up of things that we cannot regard as real.”
I have that on my website because 99.9% of you, me, the room you’re sitting in and the microphone I’m speaking into is energy. 0.1% of that is mass. You don’t have to be a quantum physicist to get excited about the fact that everything is energy. Even the analogy of if we took out all of the space in between the nuclei and atoms that are in our bodies and then all the physical objects, you could shrink the entire globe, this world, into the size of a marble when you get rid of all the space.
[bctt tweet=”This is a short-lived world, and you better make hay while you can and enjoy it.” username=”John_Livesay”]
You’re very profound when you said magnetic, “The energy you put out is the energy you get back.” That’s true. Not everybody is going to want to buy from you. Get out of that mindset. Get into the mindset of, “Where am I aligning myself in terms of how I feel about myself?” The people that are aligned with themselves will come to you. The people who want and feel your energy come to you too. Through your kindness and grace, you help them.
It’s not your job, but your energy helps them and they are like, “I can do this too.” What I found when I was selling was that not everybody was aligned with the way I was thinking, but all of a sudden, all the other salespeople would ask to partner with me after that deal. The account managers that had accounts started coming to me and said, “We have an account going sideways. Would you come in?”
My senior VP at that time was like, “What do you want to create?” I said, “I want to create a hybrid salesperson. I don’t want to just have to carry the bag. I also want to take on challenging clients and opportunities because I thought that was more fun.” Plus, I’m a low-risk guy. The crappier the account, the more fun you can have because if it goes down, it goes down. If you save it, you look like a hero.
No stand-up comic ever goes and tries a new joke out without saying, “What if nobody laughs? Nobody laughs. It’s not the end of the world.” It’s the same thing with rejection. What a treat to get to know your insights and all your wisdom put to use. Any last thought you want to leave us with? People can find you at MyBlue.org for coaching and other potential ways to work together.
It’s a simple support, an hourly rate and nothing fancy. The one thing that I would like to leave folks with is, you’re more than enough. I hear this little statement, “I’m enough.” It’s like, “No, you’re more than enough. You were born perfect. There are elements in this world that will try and train you out of that thinking. It’s not their fault. Nothing is being done to you. These opportunities are being done for you on your behalf for you to create what it is that you want to create. Take responsibility for your situation, own it and say, ‘I can do more. There’s more out there for me.'” That’s what I want to share with people, a simple message that you have so much more. You are not even aware of all the things that you are going to create. You have to get into the mindset that you are capable. You are totally more than enough in terms of being prepared for that opportunity.
If we have that mindset, we won’t ever have the imposter syndrome. That’s great. It’s not just, “I’m enough for this,” but, “I’m more than enough for anything.” Thank you so much, Christopher. Everybody, go to MyBlue.org to find out more.
Thank you, John.
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