The Accidental Entrepreneur With Alec Melman
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
The road to entrepreneurship isn’t always a one-way path. For example, today’s guest considers himself an accidental entrepreneur. Alec Melman is the CEO and co-founder of Gotham Artists. In this episode, he chats with host John Livesay about how he went from journalism to law school and now manages his own business using all his accumulated skills. Plus, Alec discusses what makes Gotham Artists stand out from other speaker agencies and why forging relationships is valuable. Stay tuned for a fun conversation on entrepreneurship and how it’s not too late for you to make it too!
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Listen to the podcast here
The Accidental Entrepreneur With Alec Melman
Our guest for this episode is Alec Melman, who’s the CEO and Cofounder of Gotham Artists. He tells a great story of how he got from law school into being a cofounder of a talent agency that represents speakers and entertainers. He talks about himself as an accidental entrepreneur who takes risks. His one big secret is creating a seamless experience for buyers. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Alec Melman, who was raised in Brooklyn, New York, long before he became cool. He is a graduate of the University of Maryland and New York Law School. He’s also a member of the New York State Bar and Notary. For some reason, we’ll find out why. He is an East Coast guy. He is also someone that is involved in the world of entertainment and speakers. He founded Gotham, which is something that is a unique hybrid, from what I can see, of not just entertainers and comedians but also speakers. Alec, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, John.
Let’s go back and hear your own little story of origin. I don’t get many speaking bureau founders or talent agency founders who also have a Law degree. I’m sure that came in handy but you can go back to childhood. Did you have a passion for certain comics or something? How did this all evolve from that to law school to where you are?
I grew up in Brooklyn. I thought I was going to be in entertainment, an entertainer, writer, performer or something like that. I went to Stuyvesant High School, which is my greatest academic achievement.
Tell us why that’s impressive for those of us who don’t know.
The Accidental Entrepreneur: We’re always going to send that extra email to check on something.
It has a harder rate of acceptance than Harvard does, for example, based on the number of students in New York City who apply for the specialized high schools. I got in by the skin of my teeth, a couple of points and it changed the direction and course of my life. I met some of my high school friends in various ways. They’ve come back to help me. To that end, my friend from high school and I wanted to be writers. I went to Maryland. I studied Journalism there and didn’t know what to do next.
The job market wasn’t great. I said, “Here’s a great idea. Let’s go to law school.” The thinking was, “If the writing career or acting career doesn’t take off, let me focus on entertainment law in law school. I could at least be a resource to my talent and friends and help them navigate that world.” I focused on copyright law, intellectual property and things like that. As everything is in this world, it’s not what you know. It’s who you know.
One of the benefits of growing up in a big city like New York City is you know a lot of people by virtue of you are around a lot of people. I needed part-time work to help pay the bills. My Aunt knew a woman who works for a solo practitioner, Larry Fabian. He was into entertainment law. I said, “Let’s try this.” I worked for him for a year or so. He had a client named Greater Talent Network, which was a big speakers agency. It was acquired by United Talent Agency.
It was around for years and I met the folks there. That’s was my first job right out of law school. I went from law school, took the bar exam, passed the bar exam and then jumped right into working there. I worked there for about three years. I knew immediately I didn’t want to be a lawyer. On the second day of law school, I was like, “This was a mistake.”
I should have sat in on a class at least one time. If I can give any advice to anyone thinking about going to law school, it’s, “Go sit on one class,” which I’d never done. I was like, “This is what it is.” All things happened for a reason. I wouldn’t change anything. With law school, I went to work for that attorney. With that attorney, I met the folks at Greater Talent Network and because of that, I met my former business partner and cofounder, Daniel Ymar. In 2009, he convinced me to go out on our own and we’ve been at it ever since. In 2021, I took on the CEO role and more of the head of the company.
What I hear often from founders of startups, and you would consider your company a startup years ago, when people are in partnership, what seems to work well is skills that are complementary as opposed to the same. If you’re both great at marketing but nobody has any tech skills, let’s say if it’s a tech startup, that’s not great if you’re both great at tech and no one knows how to market. Would you say that the two of you brought different skills that were complimentary to making Gotham Artists successful?
[bctt tweet=”Entrepreneurs are not afraid to take risks. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
What Daniel brought was the spark. He had the vision. Every time I had an objection, “How are we going to do this,” he had a reason why we could. It was his motivation that got me thinking about it. I remember I was going in for an annual review. I was doing pretty well at the other company. This is 2009. I said, “I want to work from home 1 day in 1 month. I want a higher commission, the basic stuff.” I was rebuffed and I went to Daniel. I was like, “What was that conversation we were talking about?”
That’s so timely with the Great Resignation going on. The fact that you were so cutting edge going, “One day a month.” People are like, “How about 3 days in 1 week?” That’s fascinating.
He gave me the courage to try. It was your classic startup story. I got a $15,000 loan from my sister. He got one from his brother, a family affair from jump street. We worked out of my girlfriend, now wife and mother of my two children’s apartment on the Westside. She would go off to work as a teacher, and her roommates would go off to work. Little did they know that Daniel and I were going to the apartment working all day from there and hustling. Daniel was about to be the father of twins, his first children. We quit a month before his kids were born. I don’t know what he was thinking but I was not married, had no kids, no mortgage and not a lot to lose. It was good timing for me.
You’re growing the business. Did you start representing speakers first or performers first? How did it all begin?
The name ‘Gotham Artists’ is chosen on purpose. It doesn’t say speakers in the title. We were a little bit fortunate that the URL, New York Speaker Bureau, was already taken because we had considered that, but Gotham Artist was available. My mom is the one who came up with the name. We wanted it to be broad enough that we could have flexibility.
One of our angles was we wanted to be the buyer’s advocate. That was the difference in how we were going to approach it. Whereas the bigger speaker agencies with the exclusive clients and big talent agencies represent the talent and artist but who’s looking out for the buyer? In that case, nobody. Our pitch was, “We have access to all the same people. We’re going to be your advocate in the negotiating process and help you get it at the best price of the most seamless experience.” We built up the buyer side.
The Accidental Entrepreneur: Our default is “no harm in asking.”
The other benefit we had was there are a lot of speakers in the market who aren’t exclusive. Bob Woodward is an example we always love to go to. He’s one of our favorite speakers of all time and a delight to work with. He was the same price whether you booked it through Gotham or 1 of 10 other agencies. We had a parody with our much bigger competitors on pricing. They couldn’t beat us on pricing on those non-exclusive so we focused on the non-exclusives and building up buyer relationships.
What happened over time is we got so many great buyer relationships. One of my favorite data points of the company is how much business we retain. We have repeat customers that opened us up to opportunities with speakers because buyers would ask us to go find someone who would open up a relationship with that person. The next thing you know, we started booking with that person. Over the years, while we’re still buyer focus, we’ve taken on a couple of exclusive clients and looked to grow that piece of it but always the person writing the checks is who comes first. That is the client, the buyer and then the talent.
You gave us a great soundbite, a tweet, if you will. “Create a seamless experience for buyers.” That is the essence of what you’re saying here. I know myself as a sales keynote speaker, oftentimes, clients say, “You were so easy to work with and responsive.” That is as important to us as the content and the outcome that we’re seeking, that you’re easy to work with. Can you talk a little bit about what a seamless experience looks like for the buyer?
I can’t tell you how much business we’ve gotten and how many conversations we’ve started with. I worked with so and so in 2021, and it was less than ideal. It’s the polite way to put it. We’re always going to send that extra email to check on something. We’re not afraid to ask. We’re the default. While a lot of companies say, “No. He or she won’t do that,” our default is, “No harm in asking. Let’s check.”
We’ve seen this experience over and over again, especially high-profile talent or A-List talent. They get on-site and the meeting planner finally meets them. They say, “It’s too bad. You couldn’t do that meet and greet.” They say, “I would’ve been happy to do a meet and greet.” Their big talent agencies should look out for their client and their talent’s interests.
It’s almost to a fault where they’re not going to bother them for things that are like, “We’re going to go the extra mile and look for speakers that go the extra mile.” We tend to recommend people that we know are going to do all the extras, customize the content, get on another phone call with them and make the buyer feel like the most important person in their lives for that period. It does not stress on their back to do so.
[bctt tweet=”Relationships are forged in a time of crisis. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
Sometimes it’s the little things, Alec. For myself, if I’m hired to go to a live event, I will text or email the event planner letting them know I’ve arrived on time. That’s one less thing for them to worry about, especially with the weather, canceled flights and who knows what else. You as Gotham Artists, one of the things I’m sure that you’re caring about is if God forbid, something happened that a speaker couldn’t get to an event, you have a whole well of talent of people who are quick to respond, can hop on a plane, do whatever they need, get in a car, whatever they need to do to get to something so that the event planner is not left with this big gaping hole to open their event.
Some of the best relationships we have with buyers are forged in times of crisis. It’s easy to look good when everything goes right but when something hits the fan, that’s when we have our chance to shine. We’ve pulled rabbits out of hats with 24-hour cancellations, getting people on private planes and doing whatever it takes. That is what I’ve seen. When there’s a cancellation or a problem, usually it’s how we act in those situations that will lead to long, strong relationships with people. It’s not that I’m looking for crises to solve.
It’s the same thing when you’re on an airplane. You want that pilot if, God forbid, has to land in the Hudson, he can do it. He’s got the training and all that stuff. This concept that relationships are forged in times of crisis reminds me of what I do as a storytelling keynote speaker that describes those stories that have some drama in them. The stakes are high. That’s why you care about what happens.
In this case, the buyer is the hero and you are the mentor, the Sherpa, if you will, or Yoda, making sure that that event planner doesn’t have an egg on their face. Behind the scenes, things that the audience will probably never know happened. That is the key. When someone like a buyer or client feels like you have their back, then the relationship is solid. Show it, instead of saying it like a story. A good story is you’re showing something instead of telling it. It’s the same thing. It becomes an amazing story for you to share with potential new clients who are trying to decide if Gotham Artists is the right place for them or not.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t say it was because of the team. Samantha Conine, who’s our COO, is on top of it. This is a relationship and person-to-person business. It’s the fact that people know that they can reach her, me or anyone on the Gotham team if there’s a problem. We can fight for the answers. You’re going to be blamed for something that isn’t your fault but 9 times out of 10, our buyers recognized that if something’s going wrong, it’s not our fault. We are all working very hard in unison to solve it. That’s what I mean by forging it in times of crisis. They can see that our hearts are on our sleeves with that.
When you and Daniel started Gotham Artists, did you have in mind what the culture was going to be and the types of clients you wanted or has that evolved? You did say that the culture’s fairly relaxed.
The Accidental Entrepreneur: It’s easy to look good when everything goes right, but when something hits the fan, that’s when we have our chance to shine.
It’s evolved. We’re much like any living thing, which Gotham is. It’s matured over time. We’ve exited our childhood and we’re in young adulthood as a company. When we started, we didn’t have a lot of long-term visioning. Remember, it was my first job out of law school. The thinking was along the lines of we want to do it our way. We want a place where we can drink, smoke, mess around and get the job done but do it in a more relaxed environment, our way, as Daniel would say. That was it.
The company has grown and we have fifteen people. I have a responsibility to them and I take my leadership role seriously. It can’t be all messing around anymore, unfortunately, but we always try and save time to have a little fun. We want that work hard, play hard balance to always be in place but working hard is the first part and play hard is the second.
I want to give a shout-out to Paul Epstein, who introduced us because you talk about living in a big city or being out in the world allows you to meet people and that ability to get those warm introductions make such a difference in terms of are you willing to have a conversation? I always say, “It allows you to realize there’s some trust that’s being transferred when you have a warm introduction.”
It’s going to sound corny but it’s Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People, of which every business book since I feel is in some way a child or an offspring of that seminal text. I go back and read it at least once a year, and make everyone who joins the company read it. We printed the principles and they hung them in the office. It’s something we turn to often.
I bring it up because people would argue that some people have a natural inclination towards it. I happen to be an extrovert and that’s a good quality to have if you’re going to be selling. I like being the center of attention in certain circumstances or lighting up a room with a joke. I feel like most of the agents at this company fit that mold as well.
We were going down that line of warm introductions, trust being transferred and the importance of relationships so that if you’re getting an introduction to a potential new client and it came from a warm introduction versus you getting a cold email. It’s a night and day thing. You have to build trust with one person for them to feel they want to make those introductions.
[bctt tweet=”We never want to make promises that we can’t keep.” username=”John_Livesay”]
It’s a blessing and a curse. It’s the New Yorker in me. I’m a straight talker, straight shooter and blunt. Curt might be another word for it. Sometimes it bites me when I’m too honest but by and large, when people are interacting with me, they would say that I mean what I say and I say what I mean. That comes through pretty quickly.
That’s my definition of integrity. A lot of the readers are always curious about any agency, whether it’s a talent agency or an agency like yours that represents talent and speakers. What are the criteria to decide whether you take on a speaker or not? Do they have to be as famous as Bob Woodward? What is the decision on a process for that?
As we’ve grown as a company, the metrics and benchmarks have changed. I’ll be very candid. We’re looking for speakers that are already doing about $300,000 or 400,000 a year in top-line sales. That’s the ideal. We want to grow them from that to $900,000, which would be exponential growth. What I’ve said for a long time is we’re not great at getting a stopped train moving but we’re good at getting a moving train up to a very high rate of speed. We can add fuel to the fire.
With that being said, there are still passion projects where it’s like, “I love this person and I want to work with them.” I’m going to reach out to them. We have two levels that we’ve developed. We have exclusive, The Gotham Collective, and then one level below that, which is called Preferred Bureau Relationship. We list this on your website and start recommending you but the expectations are a lot lower too because we never want to make promises that we can’t keep.
If that person in the preferred relationship starts to take off, 10 to 15 events, then we elevate. We have a conversation about becoming fully exclusive. That’s what we’re looking for. I reached out to someone who has done zero speaking engagements but I saw an amazing article about them in the New York Times where I was like, “This is a great story. I’m going to take some time out of my day. I’ll get this guy some speaking gigs because I believe in it.” There’s always one of those.
If you have an exclusive speaker, that means any inquiries they get from other bureaus have to be booked through you but other bureaus can still recommend them and get them jobs.
The Accidental Entrepreneur: You put in the work, and good things will come out of it.
We have Kate DesRosier in our office who’s amazing at the bureau relationships. She’s making sure that they know to recommend our people and we give them a healthy commission. Everyone is incentivized by that and is happy. We’re trying to build that piece more.
The other thing that intrigued me about Gotham Artists is this creative section and that great quote from Dorothy Parker, “Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.” That fits your brand a lot. You’re doing a lot of amazing things from an inventive culinary setting to performing arts. Do you have a story of a client that you said, “We’ll get you a speaker?”
That’s my colleague Laurie Barnett, who is up in a godsend. She has come in. She used to work for Anthony Bourdain. She’s had such a storied career before she even came to Gotham. She brought the culinary piece to us. To be honest, it was what saved us, not just financially but mentally, during the pandemic. The culinary events and cooking demos that we did, where we would send packages of food and have a celebrity chef cook along, were the most fun events that we did and the ones that felt almost we were making a community. She led the charge on that with the culinary.
We do music as well. My colleague Ben handles the Music Department. Back to why we have such a vague name like Gotham Artists was we wanted to be broad enough to do all that. The newest person we brought on is Magdalena. She’s an influencer marketing expert. That’s brand ambassadorships, things like social media influencing and those paid types of deals, which are in a parallel but completely different lane than booking a speaker. There are enough similarities that we think we can expand to that. We’re trying to make our company more recession-proof, COVID-19 proof, live events and disaster-proof. That’s part of the strategy of becoming more well-rounded as a company.
Is there any last thought, word of advice or a quote you want to give to the readers before we sign off?
I Am An Accidental Entrepreneur is the title of my forthcoming book. I’m working on it. I’ve copyrighted it. It’s been a blessing. Take risks when you’re young. Be honest with yourself and with others. I’m a firm believer that if you put in the work, good things will come out of it. I was lucky and blessed. My sister helped. I had family and support. I had a law degree, which became very useful later in my career. When you want to start your own company, you need to figure out all these documents. I can’t believe my advice is almost going to be to go to law school. Do anything but don’t go to law school is my advice.
If people want to reach out, find out more about you and Gotham Artists, it’s GothamArtists.com. You have an impressive LinkedIn profile that you post things on that people can comment, like and stay in touch with what you’re doing. Do you have any other final words or ways for people to reach out?
We show up on Google. Shout-out to Gail Davis and Shawn Hanks. They inspired me to participate because you made them look so good.
That’s so kind. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to hear that. Thanks so much for sharing your story. It was fascinating, fun and inspiring. Who could ask for more from a guest? Thanks, Alec.
Thanks, John.
Important Links
- Gotham Artists
- New York State Bar
- Notary
- United Talent Agency
- Daniel Ymar
- Bob Woodward
- Samantha Conine
- How to Win Friends & Influence People
- The Gotham Collective
- Kate DesRosier
- Laurie Barnett
- Ben Anshutz
- Magdalena Boujenah
- LinkedIn – Alec Melman
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Energize! With Dr. Michael Breus
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
What do we usually do when we feel tired? We may feel like we don’t have enough energy to continue on our daily activities, and that’s the time we know that we need rest! How important is sleep? In this episode, Dr. Michael Breus shares his expertise on sleep medicine and how we can actually maximize and energize our bodies. Dr. Michael shares some of the techniques and methods on where we can get and replenish energy aside from sleeping, and that is through intermittent fasting, diet, exercise, or movement schedule. Not every person is the same. So Dr. Michael shares the different chronotypes of people to identify the correct fasting for you. Listen and be energized!
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Listen to the podcast here
Energize! With Dr. Michael Breus
The reason we sleep is so we have energy the next day, which makes perfect sense that The Sleep Doctor, Dr. Michael Breus, has written a book about how to energize ourselves through movement, eating, and even intermittent fasting. He said that movement is what prevents stagnation and that when we change our sleep, we change our life. Enjoy the episode.
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We have a guest that’s very special to me. We were great friends. It’s Michael Breus. He is a PhD. He’s a clinical psychologist who is both a Diplomat of the American Board of Sleep Medicine and a fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. He’s 1 of only 168 psychologists in the world to have passed the Sleep Medical Specialty Board without going to medical school. He was named the top sleep specialist in California by Reader’s Digest and 1 of the 10 most influential people in sleep. The reason I’m excited for all of you to get to know him is he has a book out called Energize!: Go from Dragging Ass to Kicking It in 30 Days that he co-authored. Dr. Michael, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me. I certainly appreciate it. Everybody should know John and I are dear friends. We have been friends for quite a while. He has been a big supporter of my work, all of my projects and products. I want to thank you from deep in my heart.
Before we get into this wonderful book and congrats on the branding and the colors, I love the bright orange Sutton images and yellow. Let’s know a little about your own personal story. I was reading the opening of the book, and you smartly took the readers to have a dramatic moment in your life. Let’s go back in time. Was sleep always on your radar as a student or as a kid? How did you find your passion?
My dad used to often say he would wander into my room when I was in high school on Saturday morning at 1:00 in the afternoon, which was morning still for me. He would say, “What are you doing with your life? Are you just going to sleep your life away?” I’m doing something that’s not too far away from that. To be fair, I had no interest in sleep.
I went to graduate school to get a degree in Clinical Psychology. I wanted to specialize in sports and Sports Psychology. I want to work with athletes to make them throw faster, run harder, and all these super fantastic, wonderful psychological things but the best program in the country, which is the one that I wanted to go to, was at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi.
They had a specialty program. I was interested in eating disorders and athletes because I wanted to combine my two areas of interest and see if I could be helpful. To be truthful, if you didn’t go to Harvard, Princeton or Yale, you weren’t getting into this program. It was one of those super high echelon programs but they had a sleep track on the side where they were asking people if they had an interest in sleep.
I had worked my way through graduate school in the Electrophysiology department. I’m the wonky geeky guy that likes to take apart EKG machines, put them back together and make sure that they work. I know how all those signals were coming in and out of the body. That was how I was making my living going through graduate school. They use the same machines for sleep.
[bctt tweet=”You change your sleep, you change your life.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I was like, “This is going to be easy. I’m going to tell them I’m going to be the sleep guy. I get into the program, and then I will transfer as soon as I get there. No problem.” I applied. I’ve got into the sleep track, which nobody from my program had ever done before. As soon as I’ve got there, I raised my hand. I said, “Doctor, I would like to transfer over to that other program.” They said, “Hold tight, Mr. Breus.” I was not a Dr. Breus at that time. They said, “You promised us, and we filled that spot for you. You are going to do six months there, and then you can do six months in whatever you want to transfer to.” I was like, “How tough could this be? It’s sleep, for God’s sake.”
By the third day, I fell in love with clinical sleep medicine, and I knew I was never going to go anywhere else. I help people like this. It’s unbelievable when somebody is suffering, and you can identify something that’s going on with them and give them practical, useful advice to change something that’s important in their life. I say it all the time, “You change your sleep, you change your life.” I’ve got the lucky job of doing that and I love it. It’s a lot of fun. I have been very fortunate. I have gotten a chance to have a varied career. I have done things with WebMD.
I was the WebMD sleep expert for fifteen years. I have been on Dr. Oz for 40 times. It’s crazy when you think about a sleep doctor getting to do all these fun, funky things, and then the book, Energize!, is out and pretty exciting. My fourth book out of all the things that I have done. I can’t believe I’ve got four books on the shelf. That’s fun. You are going to have another one coming out.
My fourth, The Sale Is In The Tale.
You and I were contemporaries in our authorship. We are crawling up that library very quickly. I’m excited to have that out with my co-author, Stacey Griffith. For folks who don’t know, Stacey was the founding trainer of SoulCycle, the indoor bicycle inside the class. She helped us develop a wonderful program looking at movement and why movement is important. The book Energize! is a different program. “Why is a sleep doctor writing a book about energy?” It’s usually the question that most people want to know like, “Michael, you are the sleep guy and not the energy guy.”
Since we are talking business here, as well as personal, one thing is I needed to expand the brand. There’s nothing wrong with sleep but it’s a niche universe. Having been the sleep doctor for a long time, I wanted to expand the brand and go more into energy, how to feel bigger, better, happier, and all of those different things. Let’s be honest, why do we sleep? We sleep to wake up to feel good, to spend time with the people that we love, and to have energy.
I started thinking through that as an idea, and then, to be honest with you, it was a little scary because it’s easy to measure sleep. How do you measure energy? I knew how to measure sleep. I have been trained on it. I have been doing it for many years. EEG, electrodes, and all this crazy stuff. You are playing around with all that stuff. That’s easy, but how do you quantify energy?
We did a lot of thinking and spent some time. We figured out different types of energy, a way to monitor your energy and increase your energy without pharmaceutical help, without external help, all done completely internally, holistically with your own body. That’s what Energize! is. It’s a program that has three specific components.
Energize!: Go from Dragging Ass to Kicking It in 30 Days
We have intermittent fasting to represent nutrition. There are lots of data to show that intermittent fasting helps increase people’s energy. To be fair, this is not a diet book. I want to be super-duper clear. That’s a big topic, and I am not an expert on it. You can do this intermittent fasting with whatever meal plan. If you are a vegetarian, vegan, paleo, keto or Mediterranean, I don’t care. Do it during a certain prescribed time.
There’s the sleep portion. To be also fair, if people got a chance to read my third book, The Power of When, which I know you enjoyed quite a bit, we talked to people about when to go to sleep based on something called their chronotypes. We take a lot of that data, and then we update it into the new books that we have fresh information but people are definitely still following those guidelines. Now we have a movement schedule. It is unique from the standpoint that it’s not an exercise routine. Nobody is getting big muscles from this.
This is to prevent stagnation because sitting is the new smoking. We’ve got to get up and move. I like to use that old physics principle, even though it doesn’t quite apply here, “A body at rest has a tendency to stay at rest but a body in motion has a tendency to be in motion.” We’ve got to be in motion because if we are stagnant and not moving around, we are getting sedentary. When we get sedentary, we gain weight. When we gain weight, nothing good is happening.
I’m not here to shame anybody who’s got weight issues. That’s not what we are talking about here at all. What we are talking about here is moving. You can be big, medium, small, I don’t care. I want you to move because moving helps increase your energy and gets you towards many of those goals that you would be looking for. The book breaks down into those three different categories.
That last one begs the question of what you have in here about The Daily 5×5.
This is the most unique aspect of the book. Thank you for highlighting it. I appreciate that. It’s called The Daily 5×5. Here’s what we do. In the very beginning of the book, Chapter 1, as a matter of fact, we ask people to assess their energy because most people, when they come to me are like, “I’ve got low energy.” I’m like, “When?” “I don’t really realize it until it’s low.” I’m like, “Let’s track it, and let’s see.” We have people take out their cell phones, and we give them five different times throughout the day. One after they wake up, one before lunch, one after lunch, one before dinner, and one before bed. Five different times and they do a rating scale, 0 to 10, on how they feel in terms of their energy level.
What we have to do is figure out, “Is there a time zone where you’ve got low energy?” If there is, we can focus on that. We don’t have to worry about some of those other times. Step number one is doing this energy scale, then about three chapters into the book, we flip things around on people. We say, “Those five times that you were going to be monitoring your energy, we want you to use those five times for movement.” That’s where the 5×5 comes from.
We have five different kinds of movement. I want to emphasize to your audience, this is not an exercise program. This is a movement program to make you feel good and change your energetic profile. The first one is called a stretch. Surprise, you have been lying in bed for 7, 8 or 9 hours, you would probably need to stretch. You can even do this while brushing your teeth if that’s what you want.
[bctt tweet=”We sleep to wake up to feel good to spend time with the people that we love.” username=”John_Livesay”]
We see our animals do that. Instinctively, dogs, cats, they all stretch and I’m like, “What makes humans think we don’t need to do this when they are modeling it for us?” I love it.
I’m glad you brought that up because it’s the perfect segue into the second section, which is the shake. What do animals do after they stretch? They do that crazy big shake. Your dog does that. I have seen him do it. What is that all about? I did it, and I feel more energetic. Shake out your hands and legs. What it does is it move the blood distally out to your extremities, and it causes alertness in you. It increases your energy level. The third one is called a bounce. It’s exactly like it sounds. Maybe you are doing some jumping jacks or you are just jumping up in the air. Skipping is my favorite one of these.
Everybody out there is going to be like, “Really, Dr. Breus, Skipping?” Yes. People on my street have seen me skip down the street. They think I’m crazy. I’m pretty sure they thought I was crazy before but it’s so much fun. If you do it for 2 or 3 minutes, even though you look insane, it changes your entire energetic profile. It makes you feel good, plus it gets you out of the Zoom, out to the outside with a little bit of fresh air, sunshine, and stuff like that.
The fourth one is called the build. This is where you use a major muscle group. Thighs, butt, chest, maybe it’s a pushup, deep knee bend or some crunches, nothing to break a sweat. Just to be clear, this is not an exercise. This is merely to get those big muscle groups moving because they haven’t been moving all day. The final one before bed is a balance. This is where we have people doing like a tree-pose on the side of their bed or standing in a balanced position with their arms out. What it does is it calms you down.
If you are standing there in a tree-pose on one foot, you can’t think of anything other than what you are doing, “I’ve got to stay right here. I can’t move.” It helps clear that mind and things like that. The 5×5 is generated for people who find themselves, “I wish I were more active. I know if I moved more, I would feel better.” Maybe you are stuck at an office job or maybe you are at home.
Maybe you have been secluded to your house now and trying to get the motivation to do something in-between Zoom call after Zoom call. It’s crazy. This is what I do in between the Zoom calls. I will do a shake in between my morning ones. I will do a bounce in between my other ones. I will do a build afterward to give myself something to do to make my body move.
If you are going on camera like you do for live TV, if someone is going into her life pitch or pitching anything, getting a product sold or bought, getting hired, getting your energy up before you are in person or on a Zoom call is key. You can’t start cold. One of the favorite things you said a while ago that has stuck with me around sleep is if we are not burning energy up, then there’s nothing to recover from. I love that so much because I never thought of it like that. If I haven’t exerted any energy, what am I recovering from? Therefore there’s no need to go to sleep.
Perfect example. I have one patient who is not debilitated but doesn’t want to leave their home, a shut-in kind of person. This person has tremendous problems, and I’m constantly turning them and saying, “If you’ve got out of your house, if you were active or did more and used up more energy, then your body would have something to recover from.” Remember, sleep is recovery. If you don’t do anything to recover from it, there’s very little need for your body to do a whole lot of sleeping.
Sleep Medicine: We sleep to have enough energy. We need to move to prevent stagnation.
We try to activate those ideas in people’s minds and have them think through those ideas of like, “It’s COVID. What can I do? I don’t want to go to the gym. Maybe I don’t feel comfortable going to the gym. Maybe everybody there has got a mask on. It’s freaking me out.” I don’t know about you, John, but I don’t like cycling in a mask. It’s weird. Trying to find those things to do just to keep yourself active turns out to be a challenge. This is one of those things that you could possibly do.
Going back to your story of origin there of being interested in eating disorders and athletes. Certainly, we are aware of that with gymnasts sometimes or lean runners. What I find interesting now is in this wonderful book, Energize! that diet is a big part of this. A lot of people have talked about, “I have gained weight during a pandemic. Someone tells me not to eat after 8:00 at night. That’s impacting my sleep. That’s stress eating.”
Let me break it all down for you. I see where you are going with this. It’s a good place to go. It’s important for people to understand. Let’s talk about intermittent fasting, when to eat, fast, and all of these different things. If I had to pick a second unique thing that we learned by putting this book together, it has to do with intermittent fasting. Not only did we learn when but for how long to fast? I will tell you how we learned it. As you know, I have been an intermittent faster for several years. I follow something called my chronotype.
For folks reading, you may not know what a chronotype is. You do. You have just never heard of the word. If anybody out there has ever been called an early bird or a night owl, those are chronotypes. My contribution to the literature is we used to think that there were three. There were early birds, night owls, and people in the middle. We called them hummingbirds, not original. My contribution to the literature was I came up with a fourth chronotype and renamed them completely. The early bird is now a lion. Hummingbird is now a bear. Night owl is now a wolf. Insomniacs, the additional person, are called dolphins.
What we know is we have actually based a lot of things on these chronotypes. When I started doing intermittent fasting, I did it based on my chronotype. I’m a late-night chronotype. I’m what’s called a wolf or a night owl. To be fair, I can’t eat breakfast. I like breakfast food. I love omelets, pancakes, and all that good stuff but I can’t eat early in the morning. I will get sick. My system cannot take it but if I wait until about 11:00 in the afternoon, that’s when I can start.
I can get food in me. It feels good to eat. I started to think about that and I said, “If I’m a night owl for my sleep, I must be a night owl for my nutrition as well.” I started figuring out when to do my intermittent fasting because here’s the problem. Nobody gives you any guidelines. They all say, “You should eat breakfast, have a late lunch, have some dinner,” and then it’s like, “Who can do that?” I can’t do that.
The first thing I tell people is, “Figure out your chronotype. You don’t know what it is. You can go to ChronoQuiz.com, and you can figure that out. It takes about three minutes to do. Once you figure out your chronotype, we tell you when to fast based on your chronotype. The second thing that we learned, which I thought was even more interesting was, how long to fast based on your body type. We haven’t talked about body type but that’s the newest addition to the book. With those four chronotypes, we layered in body types on top of that. You are going to have to go back to high school Biology because you can remember there was the endomorph, mesomorph and ectomorph.
Visualize all of those sizes.
[bctt tweet=”It’s really cool to be able to keep your energy all 24 hours, even when resting.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Those are genetic, and your chronotypes are genetic. They can’t change. That’s who you are. That’s locked and loaded. If readers want to figure out which body type they are, you can actually go to MyEnergyQuiz.com or EnergizeMyself.com but there’s an easy way. I’m going to teach everybody real quick. If you take your thumb and middle finger, you make an okay sign, not the first finger but the second finger. Put that around your wrist. If the hands touch, you are a mesomorph. If they don’t touch, you are an endomorph. If they overlap, you are an ectomorph.
The wrist size determines this. People out there can figure out what their body types are. I’m going to give you a brief description in case you want to remember that. An ectomorph is long and lean people, and it turns out they have very fast metabolisms. It’s going to be an important thing to remember when we are talking about intermittent fasting. I’m a mesomorph.
[bctt tweet=”We sleep to have enough energy, We need to move to prevent stagnation ” username=”John_Livesay”]
We have a tendency to be more V-shaped. Our shoulders have a tendency to be wider than our waist, and then we hang meat on the skeleton that way. The endomorphs are a little bit on the thicker side. Their shoulders and waists are closer. They have a tendency to put weight in their toes, gut and for guys are in the spare tire. This is something that would have been going on since you were a kid.
What’s fascinating about this is your body type tells us how long to fast. Ectomorphs are long and lean people. They don’t need to fast for a long time. They will do 12 hours of eating and 12 hours of fasting. Mesomorphs like myself may want to lose a little bit of weight, but not a lot. What we will do is we will fast for 14 hours, feed for 10. Do you see what I did there? I jostled it around a little bit of time.
The endomorph who are a little bit bigger, who usually are trying to lose weight, we are going to have them feed for 8 and fast for 16. Now you have a starting point. The thing that’s so ridiculous is nobody knows where to start. In telling the story of intermittent fasting, weight loss, and all these things, you’ve got to know who all the characters are and the setting, and the scene. I’m talking your language here.
As a storytelling keynote speaker, I talk all the time about who are the characters in your story. The big a-ha for most people is, “We never thought to put that person as the hero instead of myself as the hero.” Now you have given us characters in the movie of our own life. We can say, “I’m not fasting long enough based on my body type. No wonder it’s not working,” or the classic Oprah saying to Dr. Phil, “How come other people can eat more than I can? It’s not fair.” You are not one of those people. Check your wrist size.
We are super excited to have discovered that. We did a study where we took 5,000 people who had taken my quiz, and we gave them the body type quiz. That’s how we started to learn all of this information about people. It’s very exciting and cool fun stuff. We’ve got the movement schedule, sleep schedule, and intermittent fasting schedule. Being able to keep your energy all 24 hours, even when resting, turns out to be cool.
I did mention that there were a bunch of different types of energy. Here’s the thing, a lot of people don’t think about it. When you think about energy, “How do you metric that? What does that mean?” There might be more but I came up with four different energy categories. There’s eating energy, so fuel. That’s obvious. There’s resting energy. That includes sleep and napping. There is emotional energy and moving energy, which we have talked a little bit about.
Sleep Medicine: A body at rest has a tendency to stay at rest, but a body in motion has a tendency to be in motion.
I also believe that there’s spiritual energy but I wasn’t sure exactly how to wrap myself around that in this book. I felt like I don’t want to go into that realm but I believe that there is a tremendous amount of energy in the spiritual world, and from people out there who are spiritual, don’t disregard that at all. There’s a lot of very positive energy there. Emotional energy, yes. That was it. That’s a tough one.
What I love about your book Energize! is you talk about your round energy, and I have heard you speak and get questioned many times. One of the most common questions, and therefore I feel obligated to ask, is this jet lag thing, because especially people in business traveling all the time, is there a way to have energy with jet lag? Some of that is emotional because I know myself. If I’m going someplace for a vacation versus a business trip, my energy levels are very different.
Let’s break that down. When we look at jet lag, so number one, jet lag is a physical problem that you have when your body moves rapidly across time zones, and your brain doesn’t have a chance to change that dial. It doesn’t have a chance to go from Pacific Time to Central Time to Eastern Time or the opposite way, whichever way you happen to be traveling. The good news is that your body will naturally adjust one day per time zone crossed.
If you happen to go from New York to LA, it’s only going to take you about 2 or 3 days to get used to it. Many people, when it’s that close, don’t even have much jet lag, to begin with. East is least, and West is best. What do I mean by that? When you travel in an Easterly direction, you are basically asking your body to go to bed early.
If I turn to you and I said, “I want you to go to bed at 7:00,” it’s not going to happen. Even though it’s 10:00 New York time, it’s 7:00 in Los Angeles time. East is not as easy. In West, all you are asking somebody to do is stay up a little bit later. When you travel in the Westward direction, it’s a little bit easier. I do have a cheat code for jet lag called Timeshifter. There’s an app called Timeshifter. I have talked to you about it before. Full disclosure, I’m one of the original investors but also one of the designers.
This is an algorithm that gives you a schedule of light, caffeine, napping, and melatonin to be able to sleep for two days before you get to your destination and you will arrive on time. You will arrive at the local destination time. It’s all very straightforward. You use the light at this time, melatonin here, caffeine, napping, and it works well.
What you are asking is something even more interesting, which is that emotional energy that comes with the trip because I get it. I cannot count the number of times that I’m walking down the jetway and I’m thinking, “I can’t believe I’m doing this again.” It’s never a short flight. It’s never a 45 minute or 1.5-hour flight to Dallas type of thing.
It’s like, “Michael is taking a six-hour flight to Boston. He’s going to Lisbon.” It’s unbelievable. The level of excitement is what you are thinking about. That does have a lot to do with emotions. To be fair, sometimes, when I am getting on one of those airplanes, for one of those business trips, it’s like being in emotional vampires. That’s what I call these situations people that come into your life that suck the energy out of you. I call them emotional vampires. We all know these situations because it’s the not-fun situations but we also know these people.
Let’s be honest. We all have at least one person in our life who’s probably an emotional vampire. They suck the life out of you. Every time you deal with them, you feel so drained. There are situations like business travel or there are a lot of people who aren’t too happy about going to the doctor for treatments and whatnot. There’s a lot of stuff that gets caught up in there.
[bctt tweet=”Everything you do, you do better with a good night’s sleep.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Also, to be fair, sometimes those are people in our lives that are hurting, and we are there to help them but sometimes they need so much help. They take so much out of you. You’ve got to do something to save your own positivity and emotional energy. What are some things that you can do? We give a list of them in the book but I’m going to tell you three of my favorites.
My number one favorite is laughter. It’s the easiest one to change and more accessible than you might imagine. My son, Cooper, used to send me a joke a day. It was from this website that he thought was the funniest website in the thick of the Earth. Number one, getting something from my son every day makes me feel better. Think about how you want to set something like that up.
Number two, some of the jokes were pretty funny. I would get a good chuckle, and it would immediately change my entire energetic profile. Here’s another one that’s super easy, even easier than the joke one. Music is the single best way to change your energetic profile literally within seconds. Think about it. When your favorite song comes on, and you are driving around, what do you do? You are bouncing around. Your whole mood changes. You are like, “This is my favorite song.” Energy goes up, emotional baggage goes down, and you are in a great spot.
Another funny story with Cooper during high school, it was hard to wake him up. He only liked to wake up to music. We said, “Cooper, at 7:00 every morning, you are the DJ. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you get to pick the songs. Your sister gets to pick them Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.” Cooper would play at 7:00 AM on a volume of 10. You Gotta Fight For Your Right To Party by the Beastie Boys. He’s a throwback kid. We had so much fun. We are bopping around, “You Gotta Fight For Your Right To Party.” We are having a blast. Meanwhile, morning times, which used to suck, turned into something that was completely awesome, full of energy, that type of thing.
Thinking through if you are at work and you’ve got a low energy situation or you are nervous, that’s causing low energy for you being able before you are going to give a pitch or presentation. Being able to find those things and have them in your toolbox, whether it’s on your phone, a phone call to a friend who always cheers you up, whatever it happens to be, you are responsible for your emotional regulator. It’s a thermostat. You are in control of it. I heard somebody say something once that I thought was important. They said, “You don’t have control over your first thought about an issue but you have 100% control over your second thought of an issue.”
That’s that reactive mind. Our frontal cortex gets hijacked. I once had a friend say to me, “This isn’t you. This is your fight or flight response reacting. Take a breath, and you hit the reset button a little bit when you get triggered by anything or anyone.” This concept of teaching us how to energize ourselves, so not only can we get better sleep but bounce back. You have hit on a great formula here for resilience, which as a sales speaker, I’m talking to salespeople who deal with rejection all the time, which is one baby step above depression sometimes.
It sounds like my dating career in high school.
How do I get back up there again and hit the reset button? With all these wonderful tools, the moving, music, stretches, and all of the things you just walked through, we now have tripled the number of things that we have in our toolbox as opposed to another cup of coffee or whatever it might be.
I’m glad you brought up the idea of another cup of coffee, a Snickers bar, a muffin. Those are all quick fixes that don’t really work very well. I can’t count the number of employees who are on their fifth cup of coffee by 11:00 in the morning. There’s no universe where that’s a good idea. We get locked and loaded. We are like, “Quick energy. I’m going to go grab a Snickers.” No. Go outside and get some sunshine if you are tired and start to get rid of some of that excess melatonin. Let it burn off in the morning, and then you will feel a whole lot better. Drink water, not coffee, because sleep is a dehydrated event, and you wake up dehydrated, don’t add caffeine to that mix. There are a lot of bad habits that people didn’t mean to have but they’ve got and it’s having a big effect.
Sleep Medicine: Sleep is recovery. If you don’t do anything to recover from, there’s very little need for your body to do a whole lot of sleeping.
Your subtitles go from dragging ass to kicking it in 30 days. I’m guessing that your whole premise, and that has probably been tested knowing you, that if you do these things for 30 days consistently, you were not going to be feeling like you are running out of energy at those key times because you have measured it. You’ve got steps that are doable, memorable and actionable. That’s what your secret sauce has always been and continues to be with this. Kudos for helping us not only sleep better but get more energy. You are helping us 24/7 now.
I’m trying my best. You are helping them all with business, pitching, and getting their ideas out there. I’m just making sure that they are energized when they do it. We are a perfect team together.
Any last thought or quote that you want to leave us with?
One thing I want to tell people is remember everything you do, you do better with a good night’s sleep. If people want to learn more about me, head on over to TheSleepDoctor.com or you can check me out on social. We put up a lot of tips and tricks out there.
Thanks, Dr. Michael, for joining us and sharing your enthusiasm and energy.
Thanks, John. I appreciate you.
Important Links
- Michael Breus
- Energize!: Go from Dragging Ass to Kicking It in 30 Days
- SoulCycle
- The Power of When
- ChronoQuiz.com
- MyEnergyQuiz.com
- EnergizeMyself.com
- Timeshifter
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Communication Connection: How To Build A Resume That Gets The Job With Daniel Usera
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
First impressions last long, and the first impression usually comes from your resume when it comes to finding the right job. In today’s episode, John Livesay is joined by Daniel Usera, an Executive Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University and a Corporate Trainer and Communication Coach. Daniel is a Nationally Certified Resume Writer and has helped over 500 job seekers find employment by improving their resume, interviewing, and networking skills. He shares the key to building the right resume for getting the right job. Plus, Daniel explains how to improve your LinkedIn page and network successfully. Get more insight on how to land the job of your dreams and build the right connections by tuning in to this conversation!
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Listen to the podcast here
Communication Connection: How To Build A Resume That Gets The Job With Daniel Usera
Our guest on the show is Dr. Daniel Usera, who is a Communications Consultant, as well as being a teacher of it. He talks about how to have a great resume, how to bring your LinkedIn profile to life as well as how to communicate in a way that has an emotional connection. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Dr. Daniel Usera, who is an Executive Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University and a Corporate Trainer. His public speaking career started with high school speech and debate, where he won numerous tournaments and made multiple state championship appearances. He then earned a scholarship to do it for Washburn University, where he was a nationally ranked Debater.
After earning his Doctorate in Interpersonal Communication from the University of Iowa, he decided to enter the workforce to gain some valuable industry experience to complement his scholarship. He started as a career coach at a Workforce Development Center in Kansas City, Missouri, where he helped over 500 job seekers find fulfilling employment by improving their resume writing, interviewing and networking skills.
He joined the National Resume Writers Association and became a Nationally Certified Resume Writer. After realizing there was a large market of working professionals seeking his expertise outside of the center, he started his own career consulting business in June 2015, where he produced job-winning documents and interviewing coaching for hundreds of professionals across several industries.
As he now transitioned into a business in corporate training in April 2009 where he teaches essential communication skills, including presentation, customer service, and teamwork, Dr. Usera has held an academic appointment at the Arkansas State University, California State University Channel Islands and Austin Community College. At each institution, he taught Business and Professional Communication courses that helped both graduate and undergraduate students launch their careers and improve their communication. He continues to teach graduate-level Business Communications at Mays Business School. Welcome to the show, Daniel.
Thank you, John. Thanks for having me.
That is certainly a great little insight into how you’ve got to be where you are but I want you to expand on it and you can start anywhere in your career. You could even start younger than where you started all of this training in public speaking. How did you know that this was where you wanted your career to go?
When you are a kid, the world is very open to you and there’s no limit to your creativity, you always have that big dream. That’s a little bit out there. I still remember in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade, I wanted to be in the NBA. I saw this movie about Isaiah Thomas with my brother and I was super inspired by his story of how he overcame injury and played good basketball for the Pistons. I was super inspired and the takeaway was I want to play basketball like Isaiah Thomas, but then early on, I was playing Pee Wee basketball and we had this tall red-headed kid in our grade. His name was Billy.
I remember the very first Pee Wee game, I thought I had a good game but I take my first shot and he’s way taller than me. He just packs the ball. You have that moment where you were like, “Basketball is fun but I don’t know if I’m going to be tall enough.” Once you see all these other kids playing and I have a lot of work to do but for a long time, I thought I wanted to become a sports psychologist and do that for a while. I’ve got interested in Psychology. My sister is three years older than me but she’s two grades ahead of me. When she was a sophomore, she started doing a debate in high school. I didn’t think much of it at that time but at dinner time, we would eat dinner as a family, she would start telling stories about her debate experiences.
[bctt tweet=”Research is Me-search.” username=”John_Livesay”]
She would be talking about this one team said this thing, and then I went up there and I said this other thing. She made it sound really cool and fun. When I became a freshman and she was a junior, I started at my very first tournament and she had already built a reputation of being an excellent speaker and an excellent debater. She set the standard of, “You set a standard,” if you will. When I first joined the team, my nickname was Little You because my sister Marissa was the big person. She had laid down the path and it set the standard. I did well at my very first tournament. My sister helped me and she helped me get better.
I ended up building a whole career of my own while she was there. After she left, I went on with it. During that time in high school, I fell in love with speech, debate, speech competition, persuasive speaking and formative speaking. I was doing well. I was pretty much the varsity in my freshman year. I did some state competition all four years and got a scholarship to at Washburn. I thought I was going to be a lawyer. All of these speaking skills and such, I thought, “I’m going to be a lawyer when I go to college and maybe a politician. Who knows?” I started watching lawyer shows in high school. I watched The Practice, Boston Legal, Law and Order. Do you watch any of those?
All of them. Ally McBeal, even.
I did not watch that one because I heard about the dancing baby thing. I was totally enamored with the legal field but in college, I majored in Pre-law, took Political Science and also Communication because I figured, “I was good at it, might as well get a degree in it.” It’s a double major and then minored in Philosophy. In my sophomore year of college, I had this Political Science professor named Dr. Beatty. He was young-ish, maybe 40s or late 30s, something like that, but he made professoring looks so much fun coming to class so energetic, happy, lots of knowledge and experiences. He had met Gorbachev. He had been to North Korea.
He had done all these things. One day in the middle of class, I was thinking like, “I could become a lawyer but I was hearing all these stories about it being 70 hours a week paper-pushing.” One of my fraternity brothers who graduated got a law job or he’s an alum. He was talking about the works in a telephone booth-sized office. He’s working all the time. In the middle of my Political Science class, I thought to myself, “What if I became a professor instead? It has all the skills that I want and all the passions that I care about.” After that, I said, “Sure. It looks like fun,” and no looking back.
To this day, I still wonder you have those key moments in your life where you have to make a big decision. I call them the forks on the road. When you have made decisions about moving to Austin or you have made career decisions, it’s like this big fork in your life. You are like, “If I go left, what would my life look like? If I go right, what would my life look like?” You don’t get to know what would have happened if.
It’s a whole another story even deciding what university you go to. You realize that one decision impacts who you meet, your life, your choices, changing majors and all of that stuff. There’s a movie years ago with Gwyneth Paltrow called Sliding Doors, which is all about in one scenario, she catches the subway in time to catch her boyfriend having an affair. The other one, she doesn’t catch the subway and she doesn’t catch him. It completely changes, whether she stays with him or not, and how that impacts the rest of her life. It’s constantly cutting back and forth.
I love anything around changing one decision. There’s another story playing and in another channel, you never get to see. The thing that fascinates me about your PhD is that your dissertation on online dating interactions. How did that come up? That’s an evergreen topic for goodness sake. First of all, I usually don’t understand half of them. The other is it doesn’t sound interesting to me but this definitely sounds interesting. What was your look at it? Has it changed now since you did it?
I had a professor and actually in the actual dissertation. I quote her saying it, which was a little bit unconventional for a dissertation because it was just a one-sentence foreword. It was, “Research is me search.” At that time, I was studying Interpersonal Communication, particularly persuasion, and this concept is called Facework. Facework is the idea that we all portray a particular image in interpersonal interaction. The image can vary from audience-to-audience, context-to-context. Sometimes an interaction stink puts our image under threat.
Communication: Face work is the idea that we all portray a particular image in interpersonal interaction, and the image can vary from audience to audience, context to context.
For example, if I say, “I’m a very smart person who knows everything about communication,” and then you ask me a basic communication question and I don’t know the answer. I put out this front or the space that I’m this smart guy, but then you call me on it, which is a simple question, and I don’t know the answer. Something has to happen called face work. I have a face threat here. There are different strategies and tactics that I can do to try to make up for the fact that I didn’t know the answer.
It’s quite amazing what the human mind will come up with. It’s predictable what people will do to a degree. I was interested in all that, but then online dating was this booming thing. At that time, I was doing online dating. As a guy on an online dating site, I was always like, “I wonder if I’m doing stuff wrong. What can I do to improve my own profile? How does that tie into what I’m interested in?” In the dissertation, you are spending a year writing, researching and talking about something. When you go to academic events and you say, “I’m writing my dissertation.” You have to be ready to talk about it. I want it to be interesting that means something to other people but also means something to me because I’m the one who has to do all the late work of this.
My advisor would help me a little bit. He was great, don’t get me wrong but the whole point is it’s supposed to be yours and only your project. I picked something that I thought would be interesting, timely and useful. I went with online dating plus, a lot of the dating research had limitations. It wasn’t even a purely selfish thing.
When you study First Interactions like opening interactions between two people who are potentially interested in each other, usually, it’s done in the context of speed dating and speed dating is a context. The problem is speed dating has its own context. It’s rare. It’s not a naturally occurring context. You have to go to speed date and you know that somebody is recording you. That’s going to put you off a little bit.
It’s going to change things. You can’t secretly mic up people in a public setting and then say, “Go talk to people at a singles bar, and secretly, you can’t do that IRB.” What you were able to do is ask people to submit conversations that they have had with people anonymize who they send it to because online dating is already anonymous but to a larger degree, any identifying information and look at the conversations themselves. What I was interested in was, how do people begin the conversation? What were the first messages like? What was those opening? What kinds of topics do people talk about?
There are five different types of openings that I found in my data based on people mostly submitting from OkCupid and Plenty of Fish. Now, I don’t remember all five but there are things like the phatic opening like, “How is it going?” Something that’s like, “How was your weekend?” There is something like the profile opener where you talk about something in their profile, and a random opening in which you asked some random questions. I still remember one, it was like, “Pizza or sushi?” That was literally the first.
It couldn’t be shorter, could it? It could be less threatening.
The person responded. They had a fun conversation. Most of the messages I saw were ones that led to a conversation. It wasn’t just all these bad ones. Somebody submitted pretty bad ones but it was a qualitative study. I couldn’t make generalizations about, which ones work better than others. It was more of what were the types and how did they play out conversationally. It was called Conversation Analysis. It’s what I did.
What I find so fascinating is it directly applies to people’s LinkedIn profiles. Of course, you are not trying to date but it’s the same conversation. How do you reach out to somebody that you don’t know on LinkedIn? How do you open that conversation? Many people make the mistake of you want to connect and I want to sell you something. They are asking someone to marry them that they haven’t had a coffee date yet.
[bctt tweet=”When you network, focus on giving, not getting.” username=”John_Livesay”]
It feels like spam because it’s a sales pitch right away.
A lot of it is. Sometimes, it’s artificial intelligence now looking for certain titles and sending the same email out every day to 50 people or whatever. I do a whole thing toggling back and forth between dating and business in terms of going from invisible to irresistible, and jumping the gun. Being stuck at the friend zone at work is a big soundbite of mine where you get people to say they are interested but they never buy. It’s almost like, “I’m not going to date you because you are in the friend zone.”
The dating stuff now has evolved where they try to help people. “Here are six things you could click on and not even have to type now an opening to a conversation.” The other thing that I instantly find that would let me know that’s not somebody I want to date is when they can’t come up with anything more interesting to say than, “How long have you been on this site?” It’s like, “What am I, a house on the market? You can’t think of one other thing to ask me than that? That’s the last thing I want to talk about.”
It reminds me of The Office, Michael Scott. He’s like, “I’m a dating expert. I have been on 100 first dates or something.”
You are also an expert at helping people to write their resumes. Two questions, the first one is, how closely should someone resume mirror what’s on their LinkedIn profile for consistency purposes?
Here’s the interesting part. Your resume is supposed to be targeted towards a specific job posting, and somebody can have 2 or 3 different resumes depending on the degree of difference between the jobs that they are targeting. For example, if somebody’s account is targeting accounting, let’s say. They have an Accounting background and they should make an accounting resume. That’s geared towards the accounting job postings that have those keywords from accounting job postings and make it sound like you are a born and bred accountant. If that same person is also like, “I like marketing too,” then they need to have a marketing resume that takes their work history and highlights the marketing aspects of their work history, and then sell themselves as a born and bred marketing person. Now, that’s the interesting question.
That’s fine because companies aren’t going to know which resume you submit to where if you apply a Deloitte for an accountant and then XYZ marketing company in New York. They are not going to know how you are selling yourself. On the LinkedIn side, that’s where things get a little bit interesting. You might keep your LinkedIn profile a little bit more generic and talk more about you are a professional overall in these two areas and here’s where you’ve excelled in these two areas. Your LinkedIn becomes more of a broad, full story of you. The resume is an opener that leads you into the funnel of your LinkedIn but your LinkedIn should do.
The resume is boring basically. It’s texts. It’s very technical, resume speak, summary, key skills listed out, your work history, maybe some accomplishments highlighted, bullet points and all that but it’s still very two-dimensional. LinkedIn should be what makes you four-dimensional. This is where you get to share stories. Linkedin is where you get to share videos, share pictures of you accomplishing those things and should be a story page more than anything else. The idea is that you put your LinkedIn profile on your resume and you should be hoping they click on your LinkedIn profile because your LinkedIn has everything else that you could put on a resume that makes you look good because LinkedIn is also a branding enterprise as well.
LinkedIn has allowed you to create a short little 29-second video on your headshot.
Communication: Your resume is supposed to be targeted towards a specific job posting. It’s possible for somebody to have two or three different resumes, depending on the degree of difference between the jobs they are targeting.
You can take advantage of that. Now, it gets complicated because it’s like, “That can lead to discrimination and so forth.” That’s where those things come into play. In the age of Google and search engines, people will find out anyway. If I’m going to be filtered for looking older or looking younger, I would rather filter the process that happened earlier rather than later. Being passed over on the resume side, I don’t think it’s always a bad thing or in the early interview stages if they are screening for bad criteria.
Your resume has to have certain keywords to get past the AI that’s scanning them now to even get you to interview because that’s the big challenge, correct?
Yes. That’s why on the resume side, there are three levels of resume that everybody should have. They should have their super generic resume that has their whole life career history, every single job that you have had. You would rarely deploy that resume ever but let’s say you’re giving it to a recruiter or you are going to put it on a reverse job search like Monster.com, where you post your resume and employers come to you. If you have no idea what you want to do, then maybe you would do that. You have your second level, which is your job-type resume. You will have an accounting resume, and then your marketing resume, let’s say. You then have your third level, which is your company job-specific resume.
It branches off the accounting resume, for example. This is for the accounting position at Deloitte and it’s keyworded directly to Deloitte’s job posting. Whatever Deloitte’s job posting highlights, I’m going to highlight that summary and all that. On the marketing side, ABC company. It’s three levels and it gets more specific. What you send to a job board or a job link is the job-specific resume that you might give to a recruiter. Let’s say, recruiter, comes to you and says, “We are looking to fill accounting positions.” You then would give them your generic accounting resume. You do deploy those but it depends on who you are giving it to.
One of the things that makes you unique is not only can you help someone get all these three different types of resumes. It’s like an investor. Founders need to have three different kinds of pitch decks depending on who they are pitching, then you have the skillset, and I’m going to say expertise, to help them communicate when they do get the interview, whether it’s virtual or in-person because you’re such a communications expert. Usually, someone will say, “I do resumes or I help people with their communication skills.” You could help somebody from start to finish on the whole experience.
I technically can. That’s actually what I do more of. I don’t write resumes anymore. I had fun doing it. When I first went into consulting, I took the dive. I quit my 8:00 to 5:00 job to do resume writing and it was so much fun, but then I realized very quickly that it’s mentally taxing because you have to get to know the person, interview them, you have to figure out how to word this and you don’t always know all the specifics.
Anyways, it’s a lot of fun. What I still do because it’s fun is interview coaching. That’s where we are helping people prepare post-resume. How do I take that document and answer those generic questions, “Tell me about yourself? What are your weaknesses? What are your strengths?” Also, there are very job-specific questions. I’m a full-service guy and I do pitch coaching, too. That definitely resonates too with the idea of the different pitch decks, who you are talking to and all that as well.
A lot of people make a mistake when they are pitching in an investor. They treat them like a customer. If you love this as a customer, you will love it as an investor. They are like, “They have completely different criteria.”
You are exactly right. They have to know the difference between a product pitch and a business plan pitch. It’s nice to know what the product is but what they want to know is, “Is there a market for it? Do you have a production plan? What’s their price point is going to be? Do you know when you are going to be profitable?”
[bctt tweet=”The resume is like an opener that leads you into the funnel of their LinkedIn.” username=”John_Livesay”]
“Do you have a secret sauce?” Any of that.
“What’s your unfair advantage,” as they say? If you say, “Here’s why you need this product, that’s good if they were a consumer.” That’s why business plan pitching is its own thing. I did some coaching with the pitch this summer with that at the contest. It was a lot of fun.
We know you are going to get asked on a job interview after they ask you tons of questions, “Do you have any questions for us?” Some of my friends who have kids on their first job and all that stuff, I try to help them a little bit and say, “What questions are you going to ask them?” I’m sad to say that half of them will say, “How much vacation do I get and when does it start?” They don’t know better.
Your questions are statements in that phase. If my question is, “What’s the tardy policy?” Behind every question is, “Why do you want to know?” I’m asking a question, and then as the inquiry, something that goes through your head is, “What’s the answer and why does this person want to know.” If I say what’s the tardy policy, what’s the vacation, even what’s the pay too early on, there’s a potential statement in there that you may not want to convey at least that early.
The pay is an interesting one because as somebody who you want to make sure that meets your requirements, there are different theories on when you should bring that up. Definitely what’s the tardy policy and what’s the vacation, you don’t want to come across as somebody who may be wanting to use a lot of those.
The question I give them to ask is, “What would it look if I were to exceed your expectations in this job?” You are painting a picture of you are already in the job. Instead of saying, “I’m someone that goes above and beyond.” By asking that question, you are showing it instead of telling it, which is why I love that.
That’s a good generic one too that you can use in almost any phase of the interview regardless if you are interviewing with the HR person versus your potential manager. One thing that I generally coach is part of your interview process when you get ready is you should be doing a ton of homework on the company. You should be looking at their website, mission statement, and products. You should be going to their LinkedIn page and look at their social media. You should become an expert on that company and learn as much as you can about the company as much as possible. As you do your homework, as recruiters call it or your research, some natural questions will probably come up in your research.
What you want to do is prefaced with a little bit of research that you have done. Something like, “I saw on the website that your company announced a partnership with the Susan Komen Foundation. Can you tell me more about how I will be working in service? Can you tell me more about what other initiatives the company is taking towards serving women?” Something like that. Now, I have done two things. First, I showed that I have done my homework, I have done my research and I’m paying attention to this company. Number two, I’m able to use that to ask an insightful question that might be important to me.
It’s a win from both sides, isn’t it?
Communication: Your LinkedIn has everything else that you could put on a resume that makes you look good because LinkedIn is also a branding enterprise.
Yes, because you get that preface in and then you also get that information. Generally, with the questions, you should still ask things that are important to you as a job seeker as somebody who’s going to take on the role. If there’s something unclear in the job posting that you think might be important, for example, when I interviewed for my first job ever, post-graduate school, one of the job descriptions was, teach workshops on the job search. I didn’t know what kind of workshop, so it’s a very easy question for me to ask. The first interview was, “I saw on the job posting that it says, ‘I’m going to teach job search workshops. Can you tell me a little bit more about what those workshops would look like, what the class size might be and how I can best prepare?’” Something like that.
You start by mentioning the job posting and saying, “I read it. I want some particular clarification. I’m paying attention. I know the job posting.” It’s a win-win on both sides. I generally recommend that people write down their questions. Here’s the next part, the delivery of the question. You could ask the questions but what I like to do also for preparation and asking questions is when they say, “Do you have any questions for us?” I will say, “Yes,” and I will pull out a legal pad or a notebook, something professional-looking, and I will already have my questions written out. Sometimes when you do the questions, you forget what your questions are, and then you have to go, “Yes, I had a question. What was it?” You have that.
You don’t want to stumble, so have the questions written out, and then you go to your first question. Have 3 to 5 written out is what I would recommend and then prioritize them. If you look at the clock and there are only two minutes left, pick the most important one. You don’t have to ask all five by any means. You just have five picked out. If they have already answered some of your questions throughout the interview because maybe the interviewer will be conversational and they will talk through things, you can still show your preparation and your listening skills by going through the list and doing something like this.
Let’s say, your first question was about the Susan Komen Foundation. You could say, “My first question was actually about the Susan Komen Foundation and your service initiative with that. What you said earlier was that we are actually going to be doing a lot of events with that, is that correct? Great. Is there anything else that I should know about that?” I can ask a follow-up or I can move on to the second question. “You also answered my second question. My second question was going to be,” and then say the question, “But it sounds like the answer is this.”
You are making them look good like, “We are on the same page because you have already answered a lot of my questions but I’m reinforcing I heard the answers properly.” That’s what builds a connection with people. They go, “We want to hang out with you.” At the end of the day, what you are offering people is the ability to create communications in multiple platforms that create a connection, which is energy.
People forget whether you are a coach, consultant, lawyer or whatever your job is you are selling yourself, people buy your energy. When you are interviewing, you have to stand out in a sea of sameness against everyone else who’s graduating, everyone else who has the skills that are required or if you are an entrepreneur, you’ve got to stand out.
The way to do that is those energy things but it takes some preparation and strategy that you obviously have thought through to help people in these situations. Let’s face it. A few of us interview that often. You are a little rusty and you are crazy to think, “I will just wing it,” versus someone who prepares and ask strategic questions. The big other parts of that are the follow-up. Back in the day, people actually write a letter or a handwritten one even, get in the mail and they would be checking how fast did they do it and all that stuff. Now, it’s acceptable to email something.
I think so, too. I still hear people, “You should write a handwritten note.” I’m like, “Now, it’s a little personal, I feel. Maybe it seems too personal and slow.”
Do you have tips for people like you did with the questions on the active listening part on, the recap on those because you are still selling yourself? We want to avoid those cliché things, “Great meeting you. Thanks for the opportunity.” Everyone says that, so don’t say stuff that’s common as my initial thing.
[bctt tweet=”Going to a networking event is to do two things: to teach and learn. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
Definitely, you want to send a thank you email after your interview with anybody. They gave you their time and this opportunity. It’s an opportunity to reinforce your key points, your summary of who you are, and your branding statement. Depending on when you interviewed and how people they are interviewing, if you were that 9:00 AM interview and they interviewed three more people that day, it’s very easy for you to get buried in memory because you were primacy but a lot of things happen. You want to have another shot to reinforce those memories and reignites the memory bank one more time of you before they decide if possible if you know when you think they will make a decision.
There’s a timing thing that gets involved in. I usually recommend 12 to 24 hours after the interview, send that thank you, email. I don’t want to send it right away when I’m done because if they don’t decide until the next day, I can come in the morning before. I don’t like to be too quick. I feel like you’ve got to let it sit. Maybe the next day after they slept on it because they are more likely to forget about you when they sleep.
It’s almost like the dating thing. You don’t want to be too needy.
That’s what I generally recommend. It’s called the 24 hours depending. As far as the content of the thank you, you do want to thank because after all, it does make a thank you email. You definitely want to start off with a thank you. What I generally like to do is start off with, “Thank you for the opportunity to interview with your company.” I usually say something about what I really like about the company. “In our interview, I learned that you all are driven towards innovating in the green sector and this company is very committed to building a team that will take us to the next level. Here’s what I have learned from what you told me in the interview. Things that you, the interviewer or interviewing committee told me.”
That way I listened again because listening skills are always valuable. I would also say something along the lines, and it depends on what happened in the interview like, “I also know that with my,” then I reiterate 2 or 3 key qualifications in 1 to 2 sentences that basically say, “Here’s why I’m qualified for this role. Seeing how I have done that industry experience and I know a lot about solar panels, I know that we will work well together. If any other materials can further demonstrate my qualifications or sample works that can help you with your decision, please let me know. I look forward to meeting you.” It’s a thank you and a sales letter a little bit but you don’t want to be too overt about the selling because I feel like if you are, it then makes the thank you seen. You have to balance it right.
It’s like a sales call. You need to follow up, it’s a thank you and, “Let’s do this. I really want this.”
That’s more or less the point of the thank you email more than anything else. It’s to indicate that you want this job and you are really interested in the position because here’s what you can also do with the thank you email. Let’s say I don’t want to move on. You may have been there. You interviewed for a job and you were like, “Heck no.” How do you bail out without your burning bridges? You send a thank you email and you say, “Dear company, thank you so much for the opportunity to interview. I enjoyed learning about your company and all the great things that it does. At this time, I would like to pursue other opportunities, but I thank you again for this. I will keep you all in mind in the future.” Something like that and you bailout.
The other thing that is necessary for your expertise is the networking part of this, whether you are looking for another job or not, or you are an employee already, so many people want their employees to network, even if you are not quoted in sales. I know you do workshops and coaching on this. Before I let you go, do you have any tips that you can give people on how to become better networkers, especially if they have gotten a little rusty during a pandemic?
I went to a networking event. That was my first in-person one in a while because of the pandemic. I can definitely understand that. There are a lot you can say about networking. I used to teach a whole workshop on it. If I was going to give some beginner short tips, the first thing is a mindset. Mindset is this. A lot of people think networking events are the place to get things from people. The point of going to a networking event is to get more customers, investors or recruiters to call me. It’s getting mindset.
Communication: Questions are statements in that [interview] phase. Every question is a ‘why do you want to know?’
Getting mindset messes people up because number one, they come in to try hard to the extent that I have seen realtors and insurance agents. I have seen people literally handing out their business cards like it’s a flyer or something like, “Hi, I’m Chris.” These are called cardboard connections, I have no reason because you know you leave the networking event and you have a fat stack of business cards. You have to sort through them.
For that reason, at least to try harder. We call it try-hardism. The second reason is when you go to a networking event, sometimes you don’t meet a client. You based on who shows up. There isn’t anybody there who matches what you are looking for or there wasn’t a recruiter there, whatever your goals are. You start to get frustrated, “Networking events are a waste of time because the one time I went, nobody was there. It’s no point.” If you think that way, you are going to have a hard and bad time.
Again, back to the dating. If you are going to a party, “I have to meet my soulmate or this is a bust. It’s too much pressure.”
The whole point of networking is this. This comes from a book called Make Your Contacts Counts by Anne Baber. It’s a really good book. She puts it well. That’s how I teach my students, too. If you go into a networking event, it’s to do two things. To teach and to learn.
If people want to reach out to you and find out more about, either having you come to coach them, run a workshop on communication or giving better presentations, where should they go?
I have a consulting website it’s www.DanielAlexanderCC.com. I’m also on LinkedIn as well. Send me a connection request on there or a note that hears me on this show. I love to connect with you all. I also teach at Texas A&M. If anybody here decides to get MS in Business or an MBA of any type, I would love to have you in the classroom as well. Texas A&M is climbing the rankings in the MBAs. It’s Top 20, I believe now, in business schools and MBA programs. It’s a great place to be.
Thanks so much for sharing your wisdom and your passion for what you do.
You too, John. I appreciate you, your passion, your energy and all your storytelling. We’ve got to talk more about storytelling. There are a lot to discuss there. Let’s do part two sometime.
Important Links
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- Texas A&M University
- National Resume Writers Association
- Monster.com
- OkCupid
- Plenty of Fish
- Make Your Contacts Counts
- LinkedIn – Daniel Usera
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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