Risk Forward With Victoria Labalme
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
What does it take for you to start embracing uncertainties? Taking a giant leap towards the unknown results in fear, but doing so can bring you to extraordinary things you may have never expected. What is the right attitude in the face of risks? John Livesay brings in actress Victoria Labalme to dissect the many nuggets of wisdom discussed in her book Risk Forward: Embrace the Unknown and Unlock Your Hidden Genius. She talks about how strict goal-setting may never lead to success, the five myths of achievement, and the right time to say no. Victoria also explains how art can be utilized to level up your businesses and change communities even in the smallest ways possible.
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Listen to the podcast here
Risk Forward With Victoria Labalme
Our guest is Victoria Labalme, the Author of Risk Forward. She talks about trusting your hidden genius and how we have to learn how to embrace the fog of not knowing, and that sometimes goal setting can lead you astray. You’re going to enjoy the episode.
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My guest is Victoria Labalme who is the Founder of Risk Forward and Rock The Room, which is a full suite of programs designed to help people express their hidden genius. Her strategies have been embraced by more than 700 organizations, entrepreneurs, senior executives and thousands of individuals around the world. As a performing artist and member of the Speaker Hall of Fame, she is known for her keynote performances. I can vouch for that. We shared a stage at the Coca-Cola CMO Summit. She is also known for her workshops, her private consulting, and online learning. Welcome, Victoria.
Thank you so much for having me, John.
It’s a joy to get somebody with so much talent, creativity and fun on the show and you have this wonderful book, Risk Forward: Embrace the Unknown and Unlock Your Hidden Genius. My first question before we get to your own story is did you start this book before the pandemic or did it happen to be a great timing?
I started it many years ago. I did a TEDx Talk on this topic back in 2016.
That’s what a thought leader does. They have their pulse on the zeitgeists of what people are going to need before they even know they need it, and that’s certainly you. Let’s go back to your own story of origin. I know you do such a fascinating job of this in your talks. You decide where you want to start the story whether it’s school days or the moment you decided, “I’m going to be an actress,” or wherever you want to start.
Growing up, I found that I was often making choices that took me down paths that are different from other people. I know many can relate. I made these choices that other saw were odd. I went to college out west and my family was back east. I decided to sign up for a 75-day expedition when my friends were signing up for graduate school. I was going left when everyone was going right. When people were getting married, I was staying single. When people were having babies, I was off dating different types of men. I always carved my own path. The thing that I found is that there was this judgment along the way where people would say, “What are you doing? What’s the plan? What’s the goal?” Whether it was your major or whether you’re going to get married or what your career was going to be, and I often didn’t know. Many people had a lot of different interests. We all often do, but we’re taught that’s wrong.
[bctt tweet=”Goal setting can lead you astray.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Pick one thing and major in it for the rest of your life.
It’s a counterproductive proposition for people who are multidisciplined, multitalented, and multi interested. I did lots of different things and oddly enough, me going into the not knowing, not getting married, not having a career path, not knowing how I’d put everything together led me to an extraordinary career. The book is about how we can go from this not knowing and follow what lights us up and find our way forward.
One of your early careers was being an actress. Give us a few highlights of Sex and the City back. I know you were on one of those episodes. I know people are always curious to hear some of those details.
I talk about that in the book. I tell a great story from being on Sex and the City. To answer your question, I started doing television commercials as an actor. I was interested in physical expression. I studied with a French mime, Marcel Marceau. I started studying all kinds of acting, performance, writing, directing choreography, character work in comedy. I got picked up by the manager who manages Robin Williams and Billy Crystal. I started doing all kinds of television appearances in a film with Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel in documentary acting. My career started to take off and then something suddenly happened at the end of the 1990s. It was 2001. I witnessed 9/11 from my window and very much like the pandemic now, the whole world changed. I found myself again in a phase of not knowing and what’s next.
I started helping presenters, executives and entrepreneurs express themselves on stage and on-camera because I had this background. I had no idea how that was going to turn out. Someone had invited me to the National Speakers Association. They’d seen me in a comedy club and said, “You should come.” I thought, “I don’t want to be a speaker. That’s cheesy. That’s motivational. I want to be famous.” After 9/11 and like us in the pandemic, a lot of people started re-evaluating their choices. I thought, “How can I help? Here’s a place people are asking for my contribution. I’m being called to contribute.” I said yes. That yes was not knowing where it would lead. I had no plan. I had no goal but it took me into a whole new territory and I started in the world of speaking. I went from acting and performing to speaking in corporate, associations, and entrepreneurship. That career took off and that’s now how we met. I started coaching executives and entrepreneurs on storytelling, on presentation, on camera, on stage, in meetings and in life.
What I’ve found has happened since the pandemic is, I’ve been getting a lot of requests from sales teams saying, “In addition to teaching our team how to tell better stories to win business, can you help them be better on a Zoom call? None of them feel comfortable on the camera and they don’t have good lighting and there are some basic skills that they’ve never needed before?” What you are doing now is at a whole new level of, “This isn’t a nice thing to have a note. This is a must thing to have a note.”
Risk Forward: Embrace the Unknown and Unlock Your Hidden Genius
I’m finding too that a lot of the people I’ve been helping are about how to bring out their own unique gifts. What you’re seeing with a lot of Zoom is everyone’s starting to look the same with their green screen background in their whizzbang technology. If you’re going to stand out and bring out what I call your hidden genius, what do you have that’s different from everyone else? How do you capitalize on that and trust that even if no one else is doing it? Part of what people get from reading the book Risk Forward and the whole methodology is to trust that, the permission to trust that what they’re doing is cool.
We also talk about how to navigate our way through the fog of the unknown, which is such a great visual. We’ve all been in fog. We’d have fog lights on our car and yet sometimes we have woken up a little foggy, pick our brain for whatever reason and no judgment. I’m fascinated to know when someone’s trying to embrace the unknown which is, “How long is this pandemic going to last? Should I change careers?” What is your advice in the book that can help people navigate that?
To circle back to what you called out, there are seven phases in the book and the first is to embrace the fog. I call it The Fog of Not Knowing. Most people see not knowing as something negative. In fact, in the pandemic, everyone says, “How do we get out of this? How do we have certainty again?” The assumption is that it’s bad to be not knowing. What the Risk Forward makes the case for is there’s huge potential in not knowing because in that gap or in that phase, one of the biggest mistakes we can make is to try to rush out as quickly as possible. To use the fog as an exact metaphor, it’s like jumping through the fog and you run into a wall. You go down a path that’s not right for you because you’re so panicked to get out.
The first phase is to embrace it and to say, “This might not be such a bad thing.” I’m not in any way saying that the pandemic is a good thing in the sense that people are losing their lives, their jobs, the economy has challenges, people are stressed in their marriages with their kids on Zoom. There’s a lot that’s very difficult, but there are also a lot of people saying they’re re-evaluating their lives and their choices. The fog is that gap between knowing and not knowing, that we want to not rush out of it too quickly.
You also talk about that sometimes taking action can be a mistake and I’m guessing that’s completely tied in to what you said about rushing into something because many people will tell everybody, “The worst thing you can do is think about something and don’t take any action.” That’s not always the case. If you run into a wall, there’s got to be a fine balance between no action and action too fast.
I have a client named Anne who like many people got into this treadmill of success. She was very successful and she felt like she had to keep going. She had to keep producing and people would always say, “You got to keep going. Why not?” It’s the more is better mentality. She came to me and she said, “I’m exhausted.” The thought of doing these next projects makes me drained. It’s not feeling good. What I want to do is risk forward and take a break. It’s not risking forward to always go for it.
[bctt tweet=”Embrace the fog of not knowing.” username=”John_Livesay”]
It’s not because you have an excuse like, “I’m pregnant. I’m sick.” This is like, “I’m taking a break because I want to.”
She lives in South Africa and she had the option to go into the bushes as they call it in South Africa. She said, “I want to not do this next series of projects. I want to pause on this. I want to honor myself and take a little break.” For her, that was the risk forward. That’s where the taking action. You’re that speed to market, go for it. We are in such a production type of culture where you’re evaluated and praised for your achievements, rather than acknowledge that sometimes it’s okay to take that break. She’s a private client. I was working with her in the Risk Forward private, VIP experience. She took the break and when she came back, she had clarity about where she wanted to go. Her launch did even better because she had taken that time off. She would have eroded her focus by doing all these other projects.
The big companies like Google give their team sabbaticals because they realize the value of it. You know this from your acting, the worst thing in the world to go to an actress, “What are you working on now?” If you’re somebody in the corporate world, “Have you gotten promoted lately?” Nobody wants to get stuck in that. That is a perfect segue into your tackling the five myths of achievement. Let’s pick the biggest myth and double-click on that a little bit.
The myth of goals would be the most or the myth of goal-setting. I have a phrase in the book which is, “Goal-setting can lead you astray.” I firmly believe that because there’s something called goal contagion. For example, and you probably know this because we’re in a similar field, when I run my Rock The Room programs so often people would come to me and they’d say, “I want to do a TEDx Talk or a Ted Talk. I want to have a New York Times Bestseller.” I thought, “You and 1,800 other people. Where did that come from? Did that come from within? Is that because everyone around you is doing it?” When I was in Hollywood, in my days of doing film and projects, this is now somewhat passed but all the directors used to wear leather jackets and have their hair in a ponytail. It’s like you see young women walking down the street in their flip flops, they have long hair, they’ve got white T-shirts, cutoff jeans, and all the girls look the same.
All the Millennial guys look the same with their beards.
There was a phase when all the guys would have their hair in that tuft on the top of their head with a little crisscross. I used to say like, “I want to put a golf ball in there and whack it like it’s a little tee.” The point is everyone starts to look the same. Whether it’s the cul-de-sac, the community, or the culture, what I’m encouraging in the book is to step back and make sure that what you want is what you want because otherwise, that goal will lead you astray. I’ve seen this so much in the entrepreneur, the speaker market, the corporate market, and the artists market where people have some target that is coming from without. They get it and they’re miserable, or they don’t get it and they’re miserable.
Embracing Uncertainties: One of the biggest mistakes is to try to rush out as quickly as possible.
I should tell you where the whole term comes from, but the risking forward is about following the inner current. Some of the most celebrated companies and creative endeavors didn’t begin with clarity and a goal. I worked with the leadership team at Starbucks, Microsoft, PayPal. I’ve worked with people on the opera stage. I worked with people with PBS Specials, huge talks around the world, Hollywood directors. I will tell you across the board, whether it’s corporate or Hollywood or anything in between, some of the most celebrated creative individuals and corporate individuals had no idea what they were doing. They were following that inner current.
It’s that gut. The classic story around that comes to mind is Steve Jobs creating the iPad. People were like, “Nobody wants that.” Do something even if no one else is doing it whether it’s a product launch or your own brand as opposed to going, “It looks like in order to be a speaker, you must have a New York Times Bestseller and give a TED or a TEDx Talk. Let me check those boxes off and then maybe I get to live my dream.” “Is that really your dream?” is what I hear you saying. If it is your dream then out of that, those things will happen more organically than outside references being, “I don’t want to write this book but I guess I have to.”
On that note, for years, people would say to me, “Where’s your book? You’ve got to have a book.” I don’t feel compelled from the inside out to write a book. I would only be doing it because I “should do it.” Finally, I got the idea of what I want to do. The idea came from within and it’s not your typical book. It breaks the mold because I have a background. I was doing all kinds of artistic disciplines, one of which was drawing and painting. The book is highly visual. It’s highly designed. Every page is different. Each chapter is unique unto itself. You can see this on Amazon. We have a little video that’s going up so you’ll be able to see that. This is full color. When people say, “I’m going to get the audio.” I go, “You’re going to miss out if you get the audio.” You’ve got to get this because the thing is you can read the book in any order. I didn’t want to make people feel like they could pick it up and read it in any section.
That is smart of you because creative people are not linear thinkers or linear learners. Rob Angel who created Pictionary is a client of mine. He took my online course and said, “I love that the modules could be done in any order.” It never even occurred to me because I tend to be linear that somebody might want to do that. I said, “Great.” You’re so smart to make your book like that for people like Rob Angel, who I’m sure will love this book.
Some people do like the linear and some people don’t. It sounds like what you’ve built in your course is both. It’s not that you have to do it out of order or you have to do it in the order, it’s you can choose. That’s exactly how my book is written. You can certainly read it from front to back or you can read it in one section.
It gives people the freedom to go, “I want to read that chapter again or that module again and reinforce one thing.” It does that. There are many good things that you have here. This concept that’s part of our uncomfortableness and anxiety around the unknown is a lot of people like structure, discipline and routine. Whether you’re training your dog or raising children, that’s all part of that world. We don’t realize how much we like it until things are uncertain, “When will I be back on the stage again?” You have a way to reframe that. Instead of thinking of it as the enemy, which we’ve all heard that wonderful quote, “What we resist persists.” If we’re going to resist uncertainty then you’re always at battle with yourself. How do you reframe that to being an asset?
[bctt tweet=”Some of the most celebrated companies and creative endeavors didn’t begin with clarity and a goal.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Things have always been uncertain. We’ve been under the illusion that they are not. I think 9/11 woke us up to that. When you have an emergency in your family whether that’s an accident that happens, an unexpected diagnosis, an unexpected death or a job loss, then we start realizing, “Things might not have been as secure as I thought.” The only thing that’s constant is change, as they say in the world of Buddhism. If we start by recognizing, things have always been uncertain. Part of why people are waking up so much now is they know that tomorrow is not guaranteed. They could have a job loss, we could have any kind of civil war. We could have any issue in our Coronavirus land.
People are waking up to the moment. That’s the first thing. That’s a good thing to wake up to the unpredictability and recognize that. The second thing is I’m all for clarity and goals. They’re great. What I’m arguing against is when we’re not yet clear. That window is fertile and it’s full of promise. In the book, I give people four questions that they can ask when they’re in that phase. They’re more than that but I call it the four questions. I’ll give you the first which is, “What interests me now?” That’s the key part.
Years ago, I took a workshop with a guy named Remy Charlip. He was this wonderful children’s book author, director and choreographer. He started the workshop not by having us introduce ourselves by what we have done because our past can hold us back. We feel we have to follow in line with what we’ve done. I’ve already produced ten films, I have to produce eleven. If I’m known for being this top salesperson, I have to continue to be a top salesperson. Instead, they’re going, “What interests me now?”
That pressure to not keep doing what’s been successful like Matthew McConaughey. You’re in sync with him completely because I watched him being interviewed. He said, “I’ve done rom-coms and made a lot of money. I don’t want to do that anymore.” He had to stop and put the pause button on. It was a while before he got another offer. He was willing to take the risk that might be the end of his career. Had he not, he’d never gotten those dramatic roles.
I have a line in the book which is, “Risking forward requires saying no.” There are times when it requires saying no.
I had a gentleman named Matthew Kimberley on and he said, “Your business should be a love story.” As a storyteller, I love that. You should be in love with what you’re doing, and you say we should approach our business as an art. I thought the two things together were a nice way for people to start going, “Maybe I could figure it out as a love story. How do I think of it as an art form?” What is your definition of art? Let’s start there.
Embracing Uncertainties: Today’s society has a production type of culture where you’re evaluated and praised for your achievements, rather than acknowledge that it’s okay to take that break.
It’s the expression of what’s inside of you. To that end, there’s a section in the book where I talk about something called the Prism Effect. I’ve been talking about this for many years. The idea is that each of us is this full range of colors. That’s your passions, your past, your personality. How do you harness that hidden genius of yours and bring it into your daily life even in the smallest of ways? For example, there’s a woman who is an administrative assistant. She happens to love the Oscars. She rolls out a red carpet by her desk every year in the Academy Award week. She is making a little piece of art in her own way. It’s small. I have another example in the book about the manager who loves poetry. She brings a line of poetry to every Monday morning meeting. This to me is turning your business into art even in the smallest of ways.
Even someone who’s making their coffee. Those people can be artists with those designs they make in the cappuccino.
Years ago in my office Downtown in Manhattan, the guy who was our janitor in the building used to lay out the garbage bags on a sidewalk in the most beautiful formations. He would enjoy that process. I find for myself that we all fall into the conveyor belt of our day, but if you step back and not get caught in the data, the duties, the deadlines, the details and say, “How do we make this moment a piece of art like the way I picked up the phone?”
What you’re encouraging all of us to do is broaden our term that unless I am a painter, I am not an artist. There are many forms of being artistic in communicating and expressing yourself. The most successful artists I’ve ever seen are making their art for themselves and not worrying about the masses. That goes full circle back to what you’re doing and saying.
That’s a scary thing. What I’m about to say goes counter-cultural to a lot of what people are teaching now so brace yourself. There are a lot of talks now about, “Who’s your avatar?” This crept up in the last number of years. An avatar is being, “Who’s your target market? Who’s your ideal client.” Because I came from the arts, we don’t think that way. We’re not thinking, “Who’s that ideal outcome?” It’s, “What is it I’d like to say? How do I say it in a way that’s going to land with people?” and then test it. This book, for example, a lot of people said, “Who’s the target meter?” I thought, “It’s resonating with people in their twenties who are out of college, or people who are in their 70s who were facing a creative project, or people who were in their 40s who were trying to find their new phase in life and a career transition. The book is for anyone who’s looking for that next step in work or in life.”
They’ll probably use it multiple times throughout their life if they start using it in their twenties. They’ll pick it up later in life and go, “I need to dust this off many years later. Now I need another hit of courage to take another risk.”
[bctt tweet=”Risking forward requires saying no.” username=”John_Livesay”]
You’re so intuitive because that is the vision for the book. I said, “I want this to be the kind of book.” It is the book that people will gift and give to others, and treasure for years to come, and keep for decades.
You’re certainly a treasure. Anyone who gets to hear you speak, that’s for sure. I want to ask you what interests you now? You’re always got something going on. In addition to your book launch, I’m sure there’s something else where you’re thinking, “What interests me now is?”
My full-on thing is the book and getting it into people’s hands because it’s beautiful. The response is quite moving for those who’ve read it early. It’s such a joy. We’re building this incredible community of people who want to risk forward in their work and in their life. What interests me now is hearing the stories of people who read this book and hear who it’s touching.
If people want to share their story of what they’ve done after reading your book, how should they do that? Is it by posting a review on Amazon? What’s the best way to do it?
There are three ways. Number one, they can post the review on Amazon. Number two, they can join us. We have not only a book but we’re creating a community inside. It’s called RiskForward.com/resources. Inside of that is not just the book. There’s more. For anyone who wants to also post their stories, they can come to me on my social media handles and post their stories there. In Amazon, the book and social.
What are your social media handles?
Embracing Uncertainties: When you’re in a period of transition, you are not wrong for not knowing because at the edge of it are the beginnings of the extraordinary.
@VictoriaLabalme but you can always find me through the #RiskForward.
It’s not just a book, it’s a movement. You read it here first. Victoria, any last thought or quote you want to leave us with?
When you’re in a period of transition, you are not wrong for not knowing because at the edge of not knowing is the beginning of the extraordinary.
It doesn’t get better than that. We’ll be sure to put the links to Risk Forward and Victoria’s website. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
Important Links
- Risk Forward
- Rock The Room
- Amazon – Risk Forward: Embrace the Unknown and Unlock Your Hidden Genius
- RiskForward.com/resources
- @VictoriaLabalme – Twitter
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Deep Kindness With Houston Kraft
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Everyone can agree that kindness is a vital character everyone must possess, but in today’s world soaked in ambition, achievements, and ego, its meaning sadly wanes day after day. Houston Kraft, the author of Deep Kindness, believes that this can still be remedied by integrating the idea of kindness in the education system. Together with John Livesay, he discusses how providing training and curriculums centered on compassion can help change the perspective of kids in showing kindness rather than merely chasing success. Houston also explains how to bridge the empathy gap by sharing his touching story of one rainy night in Haiti.
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Listen to the podcast here
Deep Kindness With Houston Kraft
Our guest is Houston Kraft, a professional speaker, author, curriculum designer, and kindness advocate who speaks at schools, conferences, and events internationally. He spoken to over a half a million people at 600 engagements and counting. He’s the Cofounder of CharacterStrong, which is training and curriculums that create more compassionate cultures in schools and communities. They work with 2,500 schools serving over a million students with their content. In 2019, he was featured by Lay’s on BBQ and Jalapeño chip bags for their spreading smiles campaign. His first book, Deep Kindness, is being published. Welcome to the show, Houston.
Thanks, John. It’s always nice to have kind things that you helped write read back to you. I don’t know what to do.
It’s quite a journey. What I love about your website is these pictures of you as a young boy. I’m imagining, there’s a story there of what got you into wanting to be involved with schools and students, as well as this a-ha moment of when you realize that kindness was going to help you through something.
My roommate, who’s a comedian and amazing storyteller says, “I was in middle school and I hugged someone and said, ‘I can monetize that.’” His joke for how I’ve ended up where I’m at. It’s not how it happened. My world has revolved around the practice of kindness for a long time. In my senior year of high school, I came together with a group of friends and we started a club at our school that was about weekly kindness practice. That was the premise. It’s protected time to put into action. What we believed was we knew we wanted our school to be a more compassionate place.
[bctt tweet=”The more anxious people are, the less empathetic they become.” username=”John_Livesay”]
We wanted people to feel accepted, belonging and safe in our schools, organizations and for our world. We thought, “What is the most practical way to make sure that we did that on a weekly basis?” That was a turning point for me was the experience of running that club with friends and watching it grow, feeling the joy that I got from participating and practicing kindness. My world and life ever since have been like, “How do we do this for more people in more places?”
What did you decide you’re going to major when you were in school? Did you think you might be a teacher? How did you get to this level where you are now writing books and speaking about it?
Mostly on accident. My two big passions in high school were theater and student leadership. When I got to college, I’m at student leadership, I said, “What does that look like in the real world and politics. I’ll be a politician.” I took one political science class and I was like, “No, I’m not going to be politician.” Acting was my other passion. I went to Los Angeles, the summer after my freshman year. I worked on a movie with Lindsay Lohan. I was like, “I’m not going to be an actor either.” I realized that the fusion of the two was speaking in schools. I got to be a storyteller, performance aspect, but I also got to talk about how to lead in a way that had integrity, that was focused on service and compassion in the world. That’s what I started doing. As I was finishing college, I was beginning to speak on stages and here we are.
Do you find that people are asking for you more than they were even many years ago because of bullying issues, school shootings and things like that? If that’s on the opposite end of what you’re teaching and no matter where you stand on gun control, the whole point is how do we prevent people from feeling isolated and angry that they need to act out is most likely not a lot of kindness coming to them in their childhood.
Deep Kindness: A Revolutionary Guide for the Way We Think, Talk, and Act in Kindness
My ultimate aim is to work myself out of job, and yet, I feel busier than ever, which is tough. It is the context of the world. We’ve always had challenges and access to information distribution that allows us to be more conscious or aware of some of the challenges that we already had. As we communicate information more quickly and widely, the way that we speak about things to me is what I’ve grown to be passionate about. In some ways, it’s why I wrote the book. The language we have around kindness doesn’t do kindness a service.
Tell me more about that.
With every word in our world, we have the dictionary definition, cultural definition and our own personal lived experience definition. The cultural definition of kindness for most people brings to life the things that the news talks about what kindness is, which is like the pay it forward coffee lines or the high five hallways or the Post-it note that were positive. In the book, I talk about that as confetti kindness, which is not inherently bad. We’re about to celebrate World Kindness Day and there are all kinds of organizations that promote random acts of kindness. I suppose my argument is that the kindness the world needs, in my opinion, presently is not random at all. It’s incredibly specific, intentional, thoughtful. It is the by-product of listening and empathy.
As we look into the reality of how most people interpret kindness, a lot of people think about that it’s free. My argument is that kindness is not free, but it requires time, energy and comfort from us in order to in many ways be humbled and do good for people who look different, act different, talk in front of us. In a time where we have divisiveness, kindness is going to require a tremendous amount of listening and perspective taking. That’s what I’m advocating for is a new way to speak about kindness so that we can navigate those issues that even you’re alluding to more honestly. How do we tackle things like gun control or the political divide or bullying? It starts with an honest assessment of what kindness looks like in my life and how to practice it in ways that move the needle, not just the surface level of goodness that the media pays attention to.
[bctt tweet=”The language people have around kindness doesn’t do kindness a service.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I know your opening chapter is titled Something Somewhat Provocative. I love that it grabs the attention with my storytelling and advertising background, which is the kindnesses. I thought, “I guess it isn’t.” What can a parent or teacher do to change that, so that it wouldn’t be normal for a child to do the kind thing first as opposed to it not being the norm?
To me it’s a little bit gentle attack on how we perceive ourselves versus what we do in the world. One of the studies that I think about often comes out of Harvard’s Making Caring Common project. Dr. Richard Weissbourd asked families, “Rank for me what you would prioritize most for your kid. Would you rather they be high-performing or happy or kind?” Eighty something percent of parents said, “They’d rather their kids be happy and kind over high-performing.” It seems like encouraging data. They asked the kids of the same parents say, “What do you think your parents want you to be, high-performing, happy or kind?” The data is the exact opposite. In fact, one of the clever distillations of the study, they said, “The vast majority of kids said that their parents would rather they get good grades, than be a good people.” Which to me runs counter to the argument of most parents or teachers or whoever would say, “We want our kids to be kind.”
The question becomes, “Do we allocate our time, energy, resources, education in order to make that real? What questions do we ask?” The family, when the student gets home is like, “How was your day? What did you learn? How was the test? How was practice?” It’s all about them versus my friend Keith Hawkins have a beautiful paradigm shifting question which is, “What did you do for others today? Who did you serve today? Would did you help?” Those are the questions that rarely get asked. As a result, for the younger generation, they pay attention to more so the indirect communication than they do the direct communication. Most of our indirect communication would say that achievement is more important than generosity.
I love this because I was interviewed by NBC on how to help parents get more than a one-word answer out of their child when they come home from school. With school and you get fine. What I suggested was ask your child, “Tell me a story about the best part of your day,” and then the child can decide beginning, middle, or end. Ideally, the parent tells a story and then you start teaching your child storytelling skills, but this takes it to another level, which would be, “Tell me a story about what you did to help somebody else today.” It would be even more aligned with what you as a parent value. Therefore, the child would then say, “That’s the story they want to hear. Not the best part of my day was I got an A or my team won or whatever the performance measures would be.” Let’s talk about what you described here as the empathy gap. What’s your definition of empathy? Where is the gap occurring?
Deep Kindness: Most indirect communication would say that achievement is more important than generosity.
The definition of empathy is going to require a couple of episodes for me to delve into it a bit more because in the context of kindness, my friend Barbara Gruner has a lovely phrase. She says, “Empathy gives kindness its why.” Which is to say, kindness without empathy, which we can reinterpret for the context of at least as listening and understanding perspective taking. Usually, that kindness is going to serve me more than it does you. To bring an example to it, after the Sandy Hook shooting, this national global tragedy, where there was moment of collective need, people wanted to give kindness to this community who was hurting.
People from all over the world sent stuffed animals or teddy bears, but Newtown, Connecticut had to rent a 20,000 square foot warehouse to house all the inbound gifts. One of the people that helped plan the candle light vigil in a profound quote he said, “There were more stuffed animals present than there were people. A teddy bear is great, but a teddy bear doesn’t pay for counseling and a teddy bear doesn’t pay for a funeral.” I reinterpret to mean, you gave me something that made you feel good, but it wasn’t what we needed. Empathy to me plays a huge role then in our ability to practice kindness effectively, because if I don’t listen to what you need, then I’m giving what I’m projecting you need, as opposed to potentially what you are in need of at the moment.
That might require asking a question of what you need versus thinking, “I’ll send him teddy bear, because that’s what I would like.” That’s easy than taking that extra step. Empathy, as you are saying is not just, “I feel sorry this happened to you,” but literally listening into what it feels like now and what would be the best way or thing I could do. That’s the gap. We think we’re being helpful and showing some, “I’m sorry.” There’s a big difference in my opinion between sympathy and empathy. I think you’re narrowing it down. Sympathy is you send a teddy bear and empathy is you take the time what I’m hearing you say to find out, “You need counseling? Let’s figure out a way to get that right.”
Not empathetic kindness lets me feel like the hero without ever even acknowledging whether or not I’ve made a difference. The gap itself is not in between intention and reality. The gap is between our ability to do it for others and how we’re feeling in the moment. The empathy gap, the term itself comes from Dr. Michele Borba, who spent 30 years researching empathy. She says that the biggest barriers in her research between why we wouldn’t be empathetic to another person or a group of people are anxiety, fear, and narcissism.
[bctt tweet=”Personal relationships will fall short when we prioritize things that do not lead to success.” username=”John_Livesay”]
She goes, “When any of those increase, empathy decreases.” If you think about the reality of the world, where we’re seeing at the huge increase in anxiety and fear, the by-product of that is decreased empathy. She says, “The empathy gap widens as anxiety increases.” The more anxious we are, the less empathetic we are as a culture. If you look at students, the data would tell us the average student now has as much anxiety than the average psychiatric patient from the 1950s. Empathy has dropped 40% in the average college aged students since the year 2000. She correlates that data. She’s like, “It makes sense. The more worried I am about what’s going on in my world, the harder time I’m thinking about what’s going on in yours.” Collectively, the more anxious we get, the more disconnected we get and the more disconnected we get, the harder it is to practice empathy in our life. It’s a little bit of a vicious cycle that creates that loneliness that we’re sensing in our world.
That’s what you talk about here that we created a lonely generation, not just a few people who don’t have friends that even people who have all that are still feeling lonely. It’s not how many people are in your life. You can still feel lonely if you’re not connected to people beyond your own fears and anxieties is what you’re saying.
If our own personal metrics of success are about winning or achieving, which mine for many years were unconsciously around that. I found myself successful and lonely. I was busy. I was traveling to the new school or event every single day, but personal relationships, my friendships, all the things that also mattered in my life had fallen short because I was prioritizing the thing that I thought was success.
You have a section here on incompetence and talk about empathy is standing in the rain. Can you expand on that a little bit?
Deep Kindness: The empathy gap is between the ability to serve others and how you are feeling at the moment.
We get to go down the storytelling route if you want. Many years ago, I had a chance to work in Haiti, alongside my friend, John. He lived in Haiti for over twenty years in American living there because he wanted to make an impact in a community where he saw tremendous need. I was lucky because back in the early 2010s, John was building a school in a poor area of Haiti called Bourjois about an hour outside of Port-au-Prince. I landed, I’ve never been to Haiti before I get off the plane with my camera and my Fedora. I’m working perfectly out of place. We get picked up and we’re driving through Port-au-Prince. As I look around, it’s the first time I’ve come face to face viscerally with that poverty. The beauty of Haiti is the contrast. Poverty sits alongside joy eloquently. As you look around, you see evidence. Although, it had been years since the earthquake had happened, you still saw staircases on top of buildings. You saw potholes that went 8 feet into the sidewalks.
You saw shanty towns with 700 people on top of each other. We drive up to John’s house in the mountains. We pull in and a part of the school is a choir. The name of the choir is Wozo, which is Haitian Creole for bamboo. Their motto is, “We bend, but we do not break.” An attitude of resilience is a natural resource in Haiti. We pull in and we get out of the car and Wozo is singing. I don’t speak the language. I don’t have no idea what they’re saying, but it doesn’t matter. I felt like that love and that welcome is always translatable. As soon as I got out of the car, it was clear that people were gearing up for a big event.
They kept calling it the big event and it was this celebration down in Port-au-Prince by the brand Life is Good, was putting on this concert series. Wozo, the choir was going to perform there and they were pumped. Finally, the big day rolls around, the big event and Wozo, the choir shows up and the bus is three hours late to pick them up. We’re standing outside, it’s over 100 degrees. We’re all sweating. The bus pulls in and it’s not a bus.
It’s a twelve-passenger van to fit these eighteen kids to travel an hour without air conditioning, down into Port-au-Prince. We get there right when it’s about to be their set time. The person who is organizing the event has to explain that they’re running behind and they have to cut Wozo set in half. You can tell that they’re disappointed, but they go backstage. They change their robes and formal gear and they get up and sing their brains out. I have no idea what they’re saying, but exuberance and joy are translatable.
[bctt tweet=”Your primary job is to listen well to love better and suffer alongside people to understand them better.” username=”John_Livesay”]
They get off stage and it’s time to head back home. In the distance, you see this rain cloud coming in and rain in Haiti is not a gentle experience. It is aggressive. You hear the thunderclaps. You see the rain coming in and people are scurrying to get in the cars. We realized that we have another car that can fit some of the kids in the back. We take about six girls from the choir, put them in our car and we begin driving up the mountain. At one point, the thunder is loud that it feels like it’s inside the car. There’s a five-year-old in the back who’s rightfully terrified. I am too, but she starts crying. I want to say something to this girl, but I don’t speak the language. I have no idea what to say. All of a sudden, the girls grabbed her hand and they all start sing.
We drive an hour with the girls in the back, singing and comforting this little girl. Finally, we pull up to the first stop. John who created the organization, hops out of the car, opens up the back and he grabs one of the girls out of the back and it’s pouring rain. This girl’s brother is standing there waiting for him because as I learned, the roads don’t get to these people’s homes. Many of them are going to have to walk another 1 or 2 miles to get back to their homes in the middle of this rain. We do this on repeat for the next hour. Every time we stop, John gets out of the car, gets out with the girl, walks him over and talks to the family and leaves them to go. Finally, he gets back in the car after the last interaction with the girl.
This is me, his brother Jesse and John. I remember feeling so bad because they’d been gearing up for this for long. I’m like, “I’m sorry. This day has not been anything that has been planned.” Jesse in the front was like, “In the US, there would be lawsuits at these girls to walk home in the rain.” I’ll never forget John looks back and he goes, “You don’t understand the big event had nothing to do with the celebration in the park. For many of these young people, this was the best day of their life that they had this opportunity to celebrate, be seen and sing. For me, the big event was standing in the rain with those girls. If I could’ve, I would’ve stood there all night with them.”
For me, it was a paradigm shifting moment in empathy, because I thought for a long time, that empathy was this thing that you had to live it to give it. You had to live through someone’s story in order to feel bad for them or with them in what they’re suffering. The reality is for people in Haiti, my life experience, I’ve never lost someone to a treatable disease. I’ve never had to walk my house for basic necessities, like water or medicine. I do know what it feels like to feel let down, to have disappointment, to be excited to share something and to stand in the rain.
Deep Kindness: You have to live through someone’s story to feel bad for them or with them.
There’s a distinction in my mind between the levels of thy. Which is you got apathy, which means, “I don’t care if you’re in the rain as long as I don’t get wet.” You got sympathy, which is, “I’m sorry, you’re getting wet. Here’s an umbrella.” You have empathy, which is, “I’ll stand in the rain with you.” It’s to suffer alongside someone and recognize that the human experience, whether or not it’s the same story to put myself into your experience and say, “Where do we overlap?” Empathy is an exercise in intentional imagination. Whenever I think about wanting to have empathy with someone, I think about standing in the rain.
It doesn’t get better than that. That’s an amazing story. I love the alliteration of intentional imagination. I love the contrast between, “I don’t care,” to, “Here’s an umbrella,” to, “I’ll stand in the rain with you whether we have an umbrella or not,” as our new definition of empathy so that we can start to work on reducing that empathy gap with a new awareness of what empathy is. Any last thought or quote you want to leave us with Houston?
To me, the whole premise of empathy, the whole purpose of standing in the rain would be, our primary job is to listen well in order to love better and to suffer alongside people means to truly tune in to contextualize who they are through all the pieces of their identity that’s different than mine. Where you grew up, your race, your gender, your orientation, your family, your traumas, everything that you’ve lived that’s different than me makes the way that you experience a situation wildly different than how I might. To stand in the rain with someone means to give our attention to someone well enough to truly understand how their needs are different than mine because that’s what kindness is. It’s my willingness to listen well enough to truly meet your needs in a given moment.
The book again is called Deep Kindness. If people want to follow you on social media, what’s the best way to find you?
I can’t thank you enough for putting this needed message out into the world with a new framework that we can all learn how to be better at it. Kindness. Thanks, Houston.
Thanks, John.
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Backable With Suneel Gupta
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Whenever you’re faced with what looks like a massive failure, you can either be an ostrich and bury your head in the sand or be a peacock and say, “I’m owning this.” That is what Suneel Gupta, the founder of RISE and author of Backable, learned from his experience. Imagine spending your whole career trying to paint a picture of success, only to become a poster child for failure. That is exactly what happened to Suneel as he tried and failed to pitch his idea of a one-on-one nutrition coaching platform to one naysaying investor after another. Put that on top of halted startups, canceled projects, missed promotions, and missed opportunities and you’ve got the perfect person for The New York Times to label as “The Face of Failure.” How does one get back up from that? You’ll be surprised how deceptively simple the answer is. Join in as he shares some of it with John Livesay.
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Listen to the podcast here
Backable With Suneel Gupta
Our guest on the show is Suneel Gupta, the author of Backable. He says that when we focus on seven qualities, anybody can learn to be backable. We go over some of them so you can learn how to be backable. The concept of embracing something negative is an interesting way to look at something and your power to reframe something. Most importantly he said, “It’s not charisma that convinces people, it’s conviction.” Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Suneel Gupta, who is the Founder of RISE, and is on faculty at Harvard University. Using the seven steps inside this book, Suneel went from being the face of failure for The New York Times to being the “New Face of Innovation” for the New York Stock Exchange. His ideas have been backed by firms like Greylock and Google Ventures. He has invested in startups including Airbnb, Calm and SpaceX. He also serves as an emissary for Gross National Happiness between the United States and the Kingdom of Bhutan. Welcome to the show, Suneel.
It’s nice to be here, John. Thanks for having me.
I’d love to hear a little bit more about your own story of origin. You could go back to childhood or school. It’s always interesting to see what got you to where you are now.
Why don’t we pick a moment that always stands out to me? It is the basis for this book that came out called Backable. The moment was in 2004. I am working as a junior-level speechwriter for the Democratic National Committee. I’m at the 2004 convention, which was being held in Boston that year. I’m backstage. The convention draws the who’s who crowd to be there and give speeches. Backstage, there are the Clintons, the Gores, the Liebermans, the standard faces of the Democratic Party. There was one face that I did not recognize and that was Barack Obama. I didn’t know who he was. A lot of people didn’t know who he was. While he gave his speech that night, that changed his career and I would argue changed the world. I got to watch that speech from backstage.
It was interesting because while it seemed like the world was watching Barack Obama, I got to watch the world. What I saw was this tidal wave of energy just ripped through the stadium. I became one of the millions of young people that night who became interested in his story. I started to dig deep into, “What is this guy all about?” What I realized surprised me. Four years earlier, he had run for Congress, not for Senate, not for president. He had run for Congress and he had lost. He had lost by a big margin. What surprised me more, John, was the way that he was received during that campaign. People described him as boring, stilted and professorial. There was a guy named Ted McClellan, who was a journalist who covered the campaign. He said, “Barack Obama is so dry that he sucks all the air out of the room.” Four years later, in 2004, he is this bastion of hope, inspiration and charisma.
The reason that story stands out for me, not only for my career in the way that I view the world but also this book that I wrote is because it turned me on to the power and possibility of human transformation. We can always change and reinvent ourselves. I have become obsessed and fascinated by how people do that. What happened in those four years between 2000 and 2004 for Barack Obama? What happens when we take the stories of all of the people that we admire who we now are looking at the chapters 14, 15, 16 in their story? If we go back to chapter one, what does that look like? Where did that begin? How do they evolve over time? That’s what makes me tick.
[bctt tweet=”Being #backable is not just for celebrities and CEOs. It’s something that all of us can learn.” username=”John_Livesay”]
In your own story, you were called out by The New York Times, “The Face of Failure.” You weren’t the only one. You and Barack share that similar history of being called something that’s not exactly positive and something that most people would say, “You’re never going to recover from that label.” The face of failure, in this case or in Barack’s case, sucking the air out of the room or the opposite of charisma. What’s the story? What happened? What did you do that caused The New York times to say that?
I was an entrepreneur at the time. I was pitching every investor I could find on this idea called RISE, which was one-on-one nutrition coaching right over your mobile phone. I was passionate about the idea and felt like it should exist. I could not get any investors to say yes. I also had a checkered past in terms of success and failure. I’d been part of a couple of startups that didn’t go anywhere. I’d been on the other side of canceled projects, missed promotions and missed opportunities. One day, I got a phone call from the organizer of a conference called FailCon, which stands for Failure Conference. She said to me, “You have been nominated twice to be a speaker at this conference.”
John, it’s a humbling experience when somebody calls and says, “I’m running a conference on failure. We would love for you to be the keynote speaker.” The reason I accepted that is because I thought, “Maybe there might be some investors in the audience, people who I can get on board with this new idea.” It turned out there wasn’t but there was a reporter in the audience from The New York Times. Fast forward to sitting in my apartment one day in San Francisco, my wife turned to the newspaper. There was a full-length feature story on failure with my story as the photo up top. That article went viral. It went viral to the point where for months you could have Googled just the word failure and you would have seen my face as one of your top search results.
That’s some SEO challenge in there.
I bet it’s still there. It’s still probably on page 1 or 2. When something like that happens, you have a couple of choices. One is you can pretend that it doesn’t exist and move in any direction. The other is you can embrace it. I had spent my whole career trying to paint this picture of success. Now, I’m the poster child of failure. I decided, “What would it look like to embrace that a little bit?” The way that I thought about there were all these people that I was trying to get coffee with and get advice from. I was cold calling them. I was reaching out to them the same way that anybody else would. “I’m living here in San Francisco trying to break through into tech and entrepreneurship. Would you grab a coffee with me?” Most people would say no or disregard the email. Now, I changed my approach. I sent them the article and I would say, “As you can see from this New York Times article, I have no idea what I’m doing. Would you be willing to spend a few minutes grabbing advice?” People loved it.
One bullet breaks through the clutter. It’s self-deprecating and clever. It’s the fact that The New York Times covered it, not just you saying it. It works on so many levels. You could be an ostrich and bury your head in the sand or you could be the peacock and say, “I’m owning this.” This story continues to get better. After all those noes and getting labeled that, you did get some funding. It was eventually acquired by One Medical. The full circle to your opening story about Barack is, in 2016, Michelle Obama partnered with RISE to bring this coaching to low-income communities. Nobody could have predicted the outcome of the story. I love that story. When a story has a twist like this, it is fascinating to hear. We all have the hero’s journey of like, “He’s down or she’s never going to recover from this.” Recovering might have been, “We finally got some funding.” It probably went beyond your wildest dreams when you started it, to get the first lady involved with it.
Backable: The Surprising Truth Behind What Makes People Take a Chance on You
John, you and I both love Joseph Campbell. We both love the hero’s journey. We know that one of the components of the hero’s journey is like, “Along the way, there’s an insight, learning, something that changes your worldview.” For me, through these conversations that I started to have, creativity and persuasion are two different things. Oftentimes, we think about them as one. We all know that you can have a great idea, be a great candidate for a job, have a beautiful product and still be dismissed. We see it happen all the time. That’s what I was feeling. Many of us have felt that way.
One of the stories that always pops for me especially is the story of Alexander Fleming, who came up with penicillin. Penicillin, to date, has saved nearly 200 million lives, yet it took him ten years to get people to buy into it. He got dismissed over and over again. Brilliant, game-changing ideas aren’t always met with a room of people who are going to support them. All of that got me interested in this idea of backable people. These are people who tend to be able to go into a room whether that be an interview, an audition or a pitch and they tend to shine. The trick of it is that, oftentimes, it’s when they aren’t the obvious choice. When they don’t have a fully baked product, we still feel like we want to take a chance on them. I wanted to understand like, “What is that quality? Can it be learned?”
Following up on this New York Times article, I started to have these conversations with people and said, “Let me have more and more.” Eventually, I found myself having hundreds of conversations with backable people from all walks of life including Oscar-winning filmmakers, Michelin Star chefs, military leaders, founders of iconic companies and fast-rising community initiatives. What I found was that being backable is not just for celebrities and CEOs, it’s for all of us. Being backable is not something that you’re born with but it very much is something that you can learn.
Let’s take a pause there. You’re being very humble. I’m going to shout-out. You have this book that has reviews from Reid Hoffman, the Cofounder of LinkedIn and Brian Grazer, one of my all-time favorite Oscar-winning producers of amazing movies. You’ve been able to not only have your own insights on what makes someone backable but figure out a way to grow your network and get out in front of people who are clearly backable and believe in what you’re doing. It’s a one-two punch there that gives it so much credibility much like The New York Times. One extreme to the other that social proof that gets transferred is what you’re demonstrating here in a big way that helps a lot of investors. You’ve invested in some successful companies yourself. I’m sure there are some things you look for in a founder that would be helpful to share that other people saw in you. The basic question is, as an investor, what makes a founder backable besides the idea?
The book outlines these seven qualities. We should talk about them. One of the things that I tried with this book, part of the reason that it’s doing well and a number-one new release is it talks about the stories and the substance but we get into the techniques. I personally love it when you can break it down for me and give me some specific techniques that I can use to bring it into my life immediately. Let’s start talking about some of these qualities. One of the first ones in the book came to me as a surprise. When I first started studying backable people, I thought that I was going to find a certain pattern of communication. I thought that backable people generally were going to end up being gifted speakers. They were going to make use of eye contact, hand gestures and pacing. I did not find that to be the case.
You certainly had backable people who are gifted speakers. It can be very Dale Carnegie-esque or Toastmasters-esque. There are plenty out there that are not. They’re shy, quiet and introverted. They’re not what we think of when we think of charisma. If you want an example of that, take a look at the most popular TED Talk of all time. What you’ll find is a brilliant talk being given by a guy named Sir Ken Robinson. It’s got over 65 million views. Amazing talk but not what you might expect. It’s a very un-TED-like talk. He’s got one hand in his pocket. He naturally walks with a bit of a slouch. He meanders on and off script, yet it was very well-received. What I found is that it’s not charisma that convinces people, it’s conviction.
[bctt tweet=”It’s not charisma that convinces people. It’s conviction.” username=”John_Livesay”]
There we go. There’s a tweet if I ever heard one. Plus, I love the fact that it’s got all those great alliterations. “It’s not charisma that convinces people, it’s conviction.” That’s a great line.
Backable people take the time to convince themselves first. They let that conviction shine through, whatever style it is that feels most natural to them.
Going back a little bit to your own story of origin, you have a relatively famous brother. I’m guessing that there’s a story there of what your parents taught you both. Why don’t you do the big reveal of who your brother is? It’s this concept of environment versus genetics. What causes certain families to produce such high achievers that are not just backable but impactful in the world? I wanted to ask, was there any sibling rivalry? Tell us a little bit about that experience with your brother and who he is.
It’s impossible for me to talk about my family without talking about my mom first. My mom was born and raised in a refugee camp on the border of Pakistan and India. She decided that somehow, she was going to become an engineer with Ford Motor Company. Her parents got behind the vision and dream. She got on a boat to the United States, ended up getting a scholarship at Oklahoma State University, drove to Detroit the day after graduation and went into the interview. When she got into the interview, the hiring manager said, “I’m sorry. We don’t have any female engineers here.” She, at that moment, was deflated. She picked up her resume and purse. She started to walk out of the room. In this last-ditch moment, she turned around and told this hiring manager her story of all the struggles that it had taken to get to this country, to get to Detroit, to get to this room. This guy was so moved by her story that he ended up taking a chance on her. She became Ford Motor Company’s first-ever female engineer. That was in 1967.
That’s the genesis story in a lot of ways for our family. I will talk about my brother here in a moment. We were raised with the refugee mentality even though we grew up in a very different environment than my mom. We had all the stuff that she didn’t have. We grew up in a safe, almost boring suburban Michigan. There’s still this refugee mindset of impermanence and possibility combined. It cuts both ways. With impermanence, you almost feel sometimes that things can be taken from you. You almost have an appreciation sometimes for what you have because you realize it could be gone. There’s the possibility. The possibility is there are no boundaries. Your past doesn’t necessarily determine your future. That’s what we learned simply from her story. She didn’t have to tell us that. It was who we were.
For my brother, he went to medical school and became a practicing surgeon in suburban Michigan. He realized he liked his job but he felt like there was more. He felt like he could be doing more of the type of work that he wanted to be doing. Naturally, he’s a gifted storyteller. He wanted to be telling the stories of patients. I remember I was in college at the time. I came home and he was home as well. We were with my parents. He was like, “I think I’d like to be on television. I’d like to start reporting on healthcare and patients’ stories.” I remember my mom was like, “Go do it. Figure out a way to make it happen. There’s no time like the present.”
Backable: When failure happens, you have two choices. The first one is to pretend that it doesn’t exist. The other one is to embrace it.
My brother, very similar to my mom’s improbable story, somehow gets himself in a room with the powers that be at CNN. This was in the year 2001. He has no Journalism and on-air experience but made himself backable in that moment. There are a lot of the techniques in the book that we talked about that he brought to that moment naturally. One of which is that he talked about his central character. He talked about the patient. Even though he didn’t have the on-air experience, his argument was, “I spend day in and day out with these patients. I understand them at a level that I may not be able to understand them if I wasn’t practicing day in and day out. These are the stories that I want to tell. These are the people I want to connect with.” It worked. They gave him a shot just like a hiring manager gave my mom a shot. That’s how Dr. Sanjay Gupta was at CNN.
One of the things that you talked about in the book, Backable, is this ability to put ourselves in a story that makes it memorable. You are singing from my song book. When people are pitching themselves to get a job, as your brother and mom did, pitching people to hire them, to buy their course and as speakers we have to pitch ourselves. If you can’t say something that makes you memorable during that interview and you’re just pushing out facts and figures or the details of your resume, “I’m a doctor. I went here,” and you don’t have a story to go, what I often do is I’ll tell a story of what happened at a recent speaking event and how that transformed the audience and made the people who hired me looked like heroes, all of those things and the feelings that get associated with it.
Stories are the emotional glue. We’re wired for stories. Few people understand that. You are supporting this so much that these personal anecdotes are what make us memorable. If you put yourself in the shoes of a hiring manager, an investor and the number of pitches that you hear in a year, there’s got to be somebody who says something to you that makes that memorable so that you can tell other people. That’s what people don’t realize. When someone like you, your brother or your mom tells a story or anybody who reads this book, Backable, learns is, “Once I have a story that makes me memorable, it’s not just that person who can remember it. They remember my story and tell other people.” That’s when it starts to grow viral or whatever else you might need it to do for those meetings when people are thinking, “Should we hire Suneel or someone else? Should we hire John or someone else? Did anybody tell us a story that we can tell other people of why we want to pick this person over another person?”
It’s such a good point, John. We’re not anymore pitching people. Hardly ever are we pitching the people who are going to be the only decision-makers. Typically, they’re going to have to sell their partners, other people, their boards, even their teams, on the decision they’re making. We’re not just looking for backers. We’re looking for advocates. Salman Rushdie has this great quote, “Most of what matters in our life takes place in our absence.” We don’t know what these conversations are like when we’re not there. We are trying to have people who are as passionate about what we’re trying to do with our own careers and ideas as we are. I do think stories are such a big part of that.
I remember pitching to Tim Ferriss on my company, RISE. I thought Tim was the perfect investor. When I was doing this one-on-one nutrition coaching right over your mobile phone, he had just written a book called The 4-Hour Body. He was starting to invest in companies. I thought it was the perfect fit. It turned out, he ended up passing on the idea. Along the way, he gave me some feedback that I will never forget. When I pitched to him, if you would have looked at that pitch, I spent the vast majority of my time talking about the market. I talked about the rising rates of diabetes, hypertension, obesity and how many people were out there spending money on trying to get into better physical health.
At the very end of the presentation, I told the story of my father. When he was in his 40s, he had an emergency triple bypass surgery. I still remember going to the hospital, I was about ten years old. I remember going to the hospital and felt like I had seen my father aged 25 years overnight. When we were leaving the hospital, they gave us a piece of paper. That piece of paper said things like, “Eat broccoli. Eat Brussels sprouts.” We were an Indian family. We didn’t eat broccoli and Brussels sprouts. There was nothing on that paper about chicken tikka masala. We struggled to make this diet that we were supposed to have now work. We struggled to make it fit for us. It wasn’t until insurance helped us pay for some time for a nutritionist that we were able to customize our lifestyle into something that worked. I believe that’s the reason that my father lived through that experience. He’s still alive now.
[bctt tweet=”The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I told Tim Ferriss that story. His feedback to me was like, “Why the hell are you leaving that story to the very end? Tell that story upfront.” My response to him was like, “It’s an Indian story. It’s an Indian thing.” He said, “No. It makes it even more important that you tell that story upfront even if the people who are sitting on the other side of the table from you look different than that. Even if they didn’t eat chicken tikka masala, it’s important. What you’re doing especially when you get into the details, is you’re helping them see themselves through the eyes of your central character, the one person that you’re trying to serve with this idea. If they can see themselves through the eyes of that central character, that’s when you hook them emotionally and then you talk about the numbers and the market. It’s the story that brings us in. It’s the substance that keeps us there.”
It brings us in and the substance keeps us paying attention but you can’t open with the substance. You did a beautiful job describing 5 of the 7 parts of what makes somebody backable. It’s drawing people into the story that makes them feel like insiders. I did this with Olympus Medical. I was saying to them, “What are you saying to doctors to get them to buy this equipment?” They said, “This equipment makes your surgeries go 30% faster. Do you want one?” I was like, “There’s no story there. That’s a left-brain analytical data like the market size.”
The story I helped them craft was, “Imagine how happy Dr. Higgins was six months ago using our equipment. He could go out to the patient’s family in the waiting room an hour earlier than expected. If you’ve ever waited for someone you love to come out of surgery, you know every minute feels like an hour. He came out, put them out of their waiting misery and said, ‘Good news. The scans showed they don’t have cancer. They’re going to be fine.’ He turned to the rep and says, ‘That’s why I became a doctor, for moments like this.’ That rep told that story to another doctor who sees themselves in the story and says, ‘That’s why I became a doctor too. I want your equipment.'”
That is your dad’s story with getting out of the hospital. By adding those little elements like, “If you’ve ever waited in the hospital for someone you love to come out of surgery, you know every minute,” that’s what pulls people in. Even if they haven’t had that experience, they probably know someone who has or they can certainly imagine how painful that would be. Those are the details that make me love your books so much. I have rarely seen anybody else talk about how to tell stories that are memorable. I say, “Tug at the heartstrings to get people to open the purse strings,” is what you’re showing us together.
I could talk to you forever. We’re only going to talk about a few things enough. Hopefully, it incentivizes people to run, not walk, to the nearest way to get a book. The last question I have for you is this beautiful cover, gold and blue, the gold egg. We all know there’s a story there about the goose that laid the golden eggs. I know, as an author, how much work goes into a book cover. What’s the story behind the book cover?
I’m glad you asked because I don’t get to talk about this enough. The book cover went through a few iterations. I worked with a great publisher. Little, Brown has been fantastic. I will say that when they sent me their first vision for the book cover, it was not something that I gravitated towards. It was the Facebook like thumbs. It was a cover full of thumbs where all of them were thumbs down but one of them was thumbs up. Same metaphor, it was like, “How do you get the thumbs up?” What I didn’t like about it was it felt overtly negative. It was almost littered with negativity.
Backable: Backable people take the time to convince themselves first. They let that conviction shine through, whatever style it is that feels most natural to them.
The other thing was it was very techy. I initially started writing this book because I felt like I was coming from the point of view of somebody who worked as an entrepreneur. I worked in tech. What I realized was like, “There’s not a single person out there who isn’t trying to make themselves backable in some way. You don’t have to be working as an entrepreneur. You don’t have to be working in tech.” It’s a human problem that we’re dealing with, which is unused creativity. We don’t sometimes know how to take these ideas that are inside us and get other people as excited about it as we are. That’s a human problem, not a tech problem. It’s not necessarily even an entrepreneurial problem.
I wanted to take this metaphor and do other iterations. It was interesting, John. I don’t know what your experience was like. With me, there was a push-pull that you have. We were very collaborative about it. I was super grateful to them for being that way. It reminded me a lot of one of the techniques that you talked about, which is flipping outsiders to insiders. One of my favorite stories from the book is it takes us back to the 1940s where Betty Crocker has introduced instant cake mix to the market. They were excited about this instant cake mix. All you have to do is pour water into a mix, pop it into an oven, and voila, you get this tasty treat. Who wouldn’t want that?
They were surprised when they find out that instant cake mix was not selling. Sales were terrible. They were trying to figure out why. They hired this psychologist named Ernest Dichter to go out into the field and start talking to homes across the country. What Dichter found when he came back with was fascinating. He said, “I think you’ve made the process of making a cake too easy and too simple. You removed the customer from the creative process so much so that when a cake comes out of the oven, they don’t feel any ownership of it.” His recommendation was, “Why don’t you remove one ingredient and see what happens?” They did. They removed the egg. Now, as a customer, you have to crack and mix in your own fresh egg. Sales skyrocketed. Now, when the cake comes out of the oven, customers felt like they were a part of it.
I think that comes back to this idea of we’ve been told that creativity and innovation is a two-step formula. You come up with a great idea and you execute on it well. I think there’s a hidden step in-between. That hidden step is where we flip outsiders into insiders so they feel like it’s their idea as well. In that way, when we show up to the execution, we show up together. These can be early employees, early investors, early colleagues who decided to take a leap of faith in your idea. You can trace every successful project, every successful organization, nonprofit company, political movement back to this hidden step.
There are many wonderful takeaways. Flipping outsiders into insiders. It’s not charisma that convinces, it’s conviction. This whole premise that the stories bring us in but it’s the substance that keeps us involved. The book is called Backable. The website to go read about the book and buy the book is Backable.com. Any last comments or ways that you want people to follow you and read about the book?
Go to Backable.com. I’ll leave you with one thought. I have two daughters, an 8-year-old and a 4-year-old. We do this little game every morning. I ask both of them, “What is the meaning of life?” They say, “To find your gift.” I said, “What is the purpose of life?” They say, “To give it away.” The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away. I wrote this book, Backable, so that we can learn how to give our gift away. Thank you, John. I appreciate you having me on.
Thank you, Suneel. What a gift you are to the world. I’m sure you’re a great dad. I can’t wait for all kinds of people to benefit from learning these learnable insights on letting us all become a little bit more backable than we were before we got to read your wonderful book.
Thank you.
Important Links
- RISE
- Sir Ken Robinson
- The 4-Hour Body
- http://backable.com/
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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