Tragedy On My 100th Day As CEO With Dr. Diana Hendel
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The 100th day is typically a milestone for any career. For Dr. Diana Hendel, however, it came with a tragedy that changed her life and led her to a profound understanding of trauma and how individuals and organizations can come out of it with hope and resilience. Joining John Livesay, she shares the tragedy on her 100th day as CEO, and how she learned to let go of the blame, shame and guilt that came with it. Diana’s career spanned more than 25 years of experience in leadership at all levels of complex organizations. She was the CEO of Long Beach Memorial and Miller Children’s & Women’s Hospital and currently serves as Senior Partner with Partnership Advantage. Join in as she shares the story of how she and her organization came out stronger after the traumatic experience – a powerful message which she brings out to the world through her new book.
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Listen to the podcast here
Tragedy On My 100th Day As CEO With Dr. Diana Hendel
Our guest is Dr. Diana Hendel, the author of Responsible. She shares what it’s like to be a CEO of a major hospital and have a tragic shooting take place and how she helped heal her post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as that of the fellow employees and the hospital itself. The lessons that we all need about the things that don’t kill us can in fact, make us stronger and how we can let go of this need to have guilt, blame, and shame. Instead, go on a journey where we see themselves or other people in this story of resilience. The book is called Responsible. You’re going to enjoy her story.
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Dr. Diana Hendel is an experienced healthcare executive, inspirational leader, and a team builder. Her accomplishments span a career of many years with experience in leadership and all kinds of complex organizations. She was the former CEO of the Long Beach Memorial and Miller Children’s & Women’s Hospital. She led one of the largest acute care trauma and teaching medical centers on the West Coast. She is a senior partner with Partnership Advantage, which is a consulting firm that helps individuals and organizations achieve optimal performance for the betterment of the communities they serve. Her areas of expertise include a strategic vision, business growth, as well as creating agile and resilient teams. She’s held many leadership roles with all kinds of hospital and healthcare associations. She has a new book out called Responsible. Diana, welcome to the show.
It’s great to be here, John. Thanks for having me.
I touched on a few things about your career. I’d like to ask you to take us on your own story of origin. You can go back to childhood, college, wherever you want. Where did you start your journey to get into healthcare? Did you always dream of running a hospital? Is that a little girl’s dream that I don’t know about?
I grew up in Southern California and went to school at UC Irvine. I’m interested in biology. My undergraduate degree in major is biology. As I was thinking about careers and where I wanted to best serve, healthcare jumped out at me. There were many aspects of it that were important to me. One, the technical aspects, the operational aspects were quite intriguing. My graduate work was in pharmacy. Systems, processes, analyses, and therapeutics were all interesting to me. More than that, I loved the way hospitals ran. I loved that the focus was on people. The focus was on creating this well-orchestrated team that had to work in sync and that not any one patient can be cared for by one person. It takes an entire team.
When I thought about a career in healthcare and particularly in hospitals, it makes sense that when I was growing up, I was involved in sports and played all kinds of different sports. In those days, you didn’t specialize in the sport. We played all of them. I played a lot of individual sports, but the ones I enjoyed the most were team sports. I liked being part of a team. I liked competing with the outside. We had to create camaraderie and unity. We had to be in sync. We had to settle differences. We had to be well-orchestrated. You can see the analogy between a hospital and being on sports teams. It was natural from my upbringing and my childhood and the things I was interested in to then embark on a career in healthcare and particularly in hospital care.
How does someone get to become the CEO of a hospital? That would be of interest. Not many people achieve that level of success. An analogy would be you’re a teacher and then you become the assistant principal and then you get to be principal. Is it that step-by-step process?
Hope And Resilience: So much has been written about individuals who have been traumatized, but very little has been published about the impact of trauma on organizations and on their culture.
It can be. To your point earlier, did I grow up as a little girl wanting to be a CEO? No, I didn’t. What I was interested in was learning and growing at each stage. How I became a hospital CEO was, I have a clinical background. I started at Long Beach Memorial as a pharmacy student. I did an administrative residency after a clinical residency. I found that as much as I enjoyed clinical pharmacy practice and the department of pharmacy, I liked the inner workings, the operational connections with all the different departments, laboratory, nursing, medicine, etc.
Over the years, I took on more and more responsibility and progressively got larger promotions and more responsibility for hospitals. Over the years, I gained a lot of experience in how hospitals ran and their strategic tactics, working with teams, being effective as a leader. I knew what it was like to be at every level of leadership, from the ground up, from being the student to then becoming the CEO. It was a calling. I love the role of CEO. I loved being involved with the hospital, its operations and its strategic future. I also love the connection with the community. Most hospitals are cornerstones of the community. They’re the bedrock of the community. They’re often one of the largest employers in the community and often a large educator, all the student nurses, physicians, and pharmacists. I like being connected to both the community and running this large business.
How many people were you managing when you’re the CEO?
Our hospitals were three hospitals in the city of Long Beach. They were a part of a larger health system. We had over 6,000 employees and about 2,000 independent physicians and specialists. At that time, there were 2,000 or 3,000 independent contractors and other consultants that worked there. It was a city within a city.
You’re like the mayor of that city. It got its ecosystem and who gets allowed in and all of that stuff. How long were you the CEO before this life-changing incident happened where there was a shooting? How long were you the CEO before that happened?
It happened on my 100th day as CEO. While I’d been in the system and the organization for more than twenty years at that time, it was my 100th day. I know that because I always created 100-day plans. On that day, I stopped and thought about what it meant to be on my 100th day, and the words I said out loud were, “I’ve got this.” What I meant by that is I knew there would be a lot of challenges in the future. I knew I had a lot to learn. At 100 days, I had a strong sense that I knew that I could do this job and I knew I could do it well.
[bctt tweet=”Tell a story that other people can see themselves in.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Take us back to that monumental day. You’re like, “I got this. I’m feeling confident.” There are some contingency plans for anything, whether it’s an earthquake, shooting, flood, you name it. Whatever could go wrong, everybody has to try in some way to prepare for something. Take us back and paint a picture for us, Diana. What day and time was it? How did you find out about what was going on?
It was April 16th, 2009. It was mid-morning. I was in my office, which is adjacent to the lobby. A little before noon, a man came into the lobby and entered the outpatient pharmacy, which was adjacent to it. He shot and killed the supervisor of the outpatient pharmacy. The shooter then traveled through the hospital quite a long distance to the other side of the hospital outside the emergency department and encountered another man who was the executive director of the pharmacy services. He shot and killed him. A few moments later, just before the police arrived, the shooter shot and killed himself.
Did you hear the gunshots?
I did not hear the gunshots. I got immediate reports of the gunshots.
How much time between the first shooting and the second shooting?
About two minutes.
Hope And Resilience: There are patterns of individual responses and reactions that are normal to trauma and they can shape how they respond in the future.
There’s not a lot that you can warn people or anything.
What is important to know is that any shooting and anytime someone comes into a hospital and kills people, it is shocking. What was particularly shocking about this shooting was that the shooter was an employee.
I didn’t see that plot twist coming. Were these personal specific people that he targeted? He knew his way around. I thought it was going to be a disgruntled patient with some pharmacy issues. It’s like the postal workers get accused of being upset at their boss and losing it.
This employee was a beloved employee. The shooter was beloved. He had been our employee of the quarter, recognized the month before. It begs the question and what emerged instantly was why. All motives eventually were dismissed. The only one that remained and became an urban legend was the question of whether he had shot and killed his bosses because of the upcoming layoff. The layoff as motive became ingrained certainly for me, personally. As the CEO, I had made the decision to do that layoff. The pharmacy department was my home department. These were my friends. These were people I knew well. By virtue of my role, I was the first responder to all three scenes within moments after it happened. The shock of encountering the two victims and then encountering the perpetrator who had killed himself was individually or personally to me extraordinarily shocking. My world was shattered.
It’s one of those things that happened where it would be a lot to digest. You know someone who’s been murdered. Two people you know are your friends and the third is a beloved employee. Our system is not wired to handle that back-to-back trauma. You talk about in your book, Responsible, that you realized you were experiencing your own PTSD, which I want to talk about. Is this still painful for you to discuss?
Interestingly it doesn’t trigger me in the same way it did. As I completely processed and integrated it, recovered and healed, I feel it’s important to talk about less the actual details but to introduce and to come out as a leader who had PTSD and as a patient who had PTSD. That wasn’t apparent immediately. I knew I was shocked but I was well-trained to respond to a disaster. Hospitals are good at responding to disasters. We’re practiced in it. Our structures and processes are well oiled. We do them well. This was a situation where we were responding to our trauma. We were accustomed to people being brought to us but not responding to our own.
[bctt tweet=”Let go of blame, shame and guilt.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I’ve heard horror stories of someone being brought into the ER that’s part of a gang shooting and then the gang breaks in to finish the job off. I can only imagine how dramatic that would be. To know the people and then feel on some level that you’re responsible for triggering that behavior, that’s a lot to process. My next question is, how did you come up with the book, Responsible? I’m sure everyone reading is going, “Surely, she’s not saying she was responsible for causing that guy to kill those people and himself.” What does the title mean?
I wrote the book for a number of reasons. One, it’s a tribute to my former colleagues, the ones who were killed and to my former coworkers. I ended up staying as CEO for the next six years. I had grown up in this organization. The other reason for writing it was an exploration of the word responsible. We say, “The leader is responsible for what happens.” We say, “The buck stops here.” We say, “Who’s held accountable for when things happen?” Our first question when something happens is why it did happen. What could have been done to prevent it? What provoked it?
What I discovered is that while it was irrational to believe I was responsible or to feel responsible, it wasn’t all that off-base given our societal messages and my upbringing of responsibility. I didn’t feel like I caused it. It was a slippery slope with a sense of responsibility. I wrote it to introduce that concept and to explore it. When individuals and an organization are traumatized, there are biological responses that happen involuntarily. There’s the fight-flight-freeze response that happens biologically. I thought it was important to introduce how PTSD develops and how you can recover from it, but also the impacts of trauma on an organization. We don’t think of organizations themselves being traumatized.
The first step is realizing you’re a medical professional. Sometimes doctors are the worst patients. That’s the standard line anyway. You think, “Surely, I’m equipped to handle this. I’ve been trained.” You write about it in your book, the sheep in wolf’s clothing. Tell us that story of when you realized, “I’ve got this. I’m suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. I can’t sleep. I got all the symptoms.”
I did get help right away. We certainly brought in help for all those affected. I didn’t think I was immune to the need for help. I got help right away. What I didn’t appreciate was that usually, when severe trauma that shatters your worldview or shocks you significantly happens, rarely are you needing to return to the same place that happened. Usually, there’s a distance or separation. You can remove yourself.
It’s like the people in 9/11 don’t need to go back there for a while.
Hope And Resilience: While going through trauma can shatter you and your organization, you can emerge stronger and better than you would have been had you not gone through it.
When things happen in schools, churches, and other places, often they’re torn down. A memorial is created in their place and then they’re re-established. This was a 1 million square-foot hospital that had been there for decades. We certainly weren’t moving or closing. We didn’t close that day. We’re 24/7 operation. There’s no closing. We kept going. We had 600 patients still to care for.
You don’t go home and check yourself. You don’t go like, “I need a minute here.” You’ve got to function and your adrenaline kicked in.
To your point, many people but certainly hospital people are stiff up for lip or resilient or tough. I had been through lots of adversity, hardship, setbacks, failures, and disasters. I’ve had a lot of practice going through that. I knew well enough to get help and I did get help. What I didn’t appreciate was that staying in the same place certainly could have a long-term impact. I don’t suggest anywhere in the book or even now that I should have left sooner, not at all. In parallel, a lot of my healing was because it was due to the bonding, the camaraderie, and the teamwork that we all experienced. It was the worst day of our lives and I saw the best in people. In parallel, the bonding and camaraderie served to heal. I got to a point where I wasn’t going to be able to fully recover and heal without stepping down.
A lot of CEOs are afraid that if they say they have PTSD, they can’t function. They have to step away from their job and miss months or weeks. What was your situation?
That’s interesting. I felt a calling and the importance of staying. It never occurred to me to leave. I wasn’t worried that if I said I needed help that I would not be able to remain CEO initially. What I found was that over time, the organization had moved on. The handful of people who were closest to it had moved on and gone to other places. I found that I became extremely isolated while surrounded by lots and lots of people. It became important that the organization deserved a healthy CEO and I deserve to recover. After six years, I stepped away. I wasn’t as afraid to say I needed help. It was clear that having PTSD, having nightmares, having flashbacks, losing sleep, that was taking a toll on my health.
Do you get triggered sometimes walking in the building?
[bctt tweet=”Your title role makes no difference. It’s all about how you show up in every interaction.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Often, because it had happened in three different locations and in locations that were right near my office, there wasn’t any time that I didn’t walk through. After the shooter situation, that was the new term in 2009. In fact, we didn’t have disaster protocols for that. We wrote them for hospitals thereafter based on our experience. At the time, I viewed the hospital as a sacred place, as an ultimate safe place. I thought it was the safest place I could ever be. That sense of safety and security was shattered. It can be difficult then to remain in that same setting.
That leads to a perfect transition to where we are with some people returning to the office. I’m careful about my wording. I’ve been talking to one of my clients, Gensler, the world’s largest architecture firm. They create a lot of workspaces. It’s not a return to work. When you say that to people, they get angry because they’ve been working hard from home. It’s to return to the office. Suddenly, if the office because of the disease no longer feels like a safe place, your timing is perfect to help people deal with this issue. “Is it safe to go back to a workplace and be exposed to germs, especially if I’m at high risk or I’m living with somebody who’s high risk and all the issues around that?” Before we get into that, I want your expertise on this. What does it look like for an organization to have PTSD? You never thought about it like that and I haven’t either. That will help us help others returning to the office if we can say this is what it looks like when the organization has it. What does that look like? How can people identify it?
Much has been written about individuals who have been traumatized, but little has been published about the impact of trauma on organizations and on their culture. There are parallel paths similar to the individual. Even though everyone within the organization has experienced a trauma, to make a parallel with COVID, even though all of us are experiencing COVID, we’re not all experiencing it the same way, in the same degree, and in the same impact at this moment. That may change in the future. Similarly, for organizations, there were people close to it who had survivor guilt and had self-blame. There were people further removed who thought, “I didn’t know those people. That was tragic but life goes on.”
It’s the ripple effect and the idea that you have this large body of people or this culture of people who all had a different experience with that trauma. The patterns I noticed initially and similar to COVID was, “We’re all in this together.” That sense of camaraderie and togetherness. Also, what emerges is varying degrees of blame, guilt, and shame. When I say blame, it ranges from one end of the spectrum of the shooter being crazy to who and what made him do it and everything in between. One end of the spectrum leaves the shooter very much responsible for the shooting, his actions, but also the notion that if he was crazy, it leaves a lot of unpredictability. Who else among us might be crazy, especially employee of the month?
I would love your opinion on this. I gave my TEDx Talk, Be The Lifeguard of Your Own Life!, around my own experience of being laid off. After being in a job for fifteen years and the industry is being disrupted, it was challenging even though I talk about who we are is bigger than what we do for a living. Especially if you’re a CEO, I would imagine it’s challenging to not let your identity get tied up with your job. If someone is beloved and an employee of the month and they feel like they’re losing that identity, we never know what the trigger is. I would be mad and scared, hurt but I certainly wouldn’t go “ballistic.” That’s you. You’ve got some emotional intelligence, some support group. Maybe this is all that person had. Who knows? How do you not take being laid off personally? If it’s between laying off some people and the company or the hospital continuing to function and pay their bills versus keeping everybody employed and everybody going down, you’re not thinking rationally. Your brain has been hijacked.
That’s the key. Your brain is hijacked. These thoughts and feelings that emerge initially are the results of trauma. It’s not necessarily whether it’s rational thinking. It’s our survival mechanism. To your point, most people who face layoffs do adapt and yet there is an impact on their identity or on their ego. Even the fear of paying bills, it’s much more than losing a job. It equates to our value, all those things. At the other end of the spectrum, it then became this sense of, who made him do it? What pushed him into doing that? There was a wide range of opinions, mostly as the result of our brains being hijacked. The layoff as motive narrative was not the only narrative. It happened to be central to me. There were lots of narratives that emerged. I don’t know all of them. I know most of them but that one resonated and traumatized me for obvious reasons. It’s because I had been the one to decide on the layoff. The overarching is we’ll never know. There’s a sense of uncertainty. We had to grapple with that.
Responsible: A Memoir
It’s fascinating because friends of mine who work in other industries have said that the most stressful part of the whole quarantine situation for them, besides their own impact of having to work from home, teach their kids, not take their kids to school and the kids are traumatized, they miss their friends, all of that. You now need to lay off X percent of your team that you’ve assembled for the last year and a half or two years. I don’t think anybody usually thinks about the person having to do the layoffs and how traumatic that is, especially if you care about your people. You’re focused on the person receiving the news.
If you’re an HR, that’s part of your job. You’re trained how to stay neutral and let the person have their feelings and all that stuff. In this situation, it’s like we’re a speaking bureau. We have to let go. There are no live events. We’re a hotel or we’re a university even, and it’s all online. There’s a lot of gold you have from having gone through this that can help people realize this is not a normal layoff time. You get to be traumatized by having to lay off this many people all at once for no fault of anyone. Who cares?
Let’s get out of the guilt and blame or even shame of being laid off. I don’t think it’s a thing anymore because there are many people that are experiencing unemployment. That can contribute to the fear-fight-flight or “How am I going to get a job now?” It’s this bizarre time on all sides of the experience, even if you’re not someone who has been laid off. What’s interesting is a lot of my friends, their salaries have been cut 20% to 50%. They’re not laid off but they’re sure under some financial stress. It’s like I have half a leg that I had completely amputated.
They’re probably working 2, 3, or 4 hours more a day than they were before.
They’ve had to lay off the staff and they are being blamed for things. “Marketing is not doing their job.” It’s like, “What?” That’s a go-to statement for a lot of marketing people anyway, but now that’s an easy scapegoat. This concept of guilt, blame, and shame is fascinating through the lens of how do you deal with that when you have post-traumatic stress syndrome. What would be the one thing you’d want people to know about the book and why they should get it?
The book immerses you in a story that, while it’s unique, it is relatable. It evokes universal feelings and thoughts. People who read the book will see themselves or others in it. It can help to normalize when individuals and organizations are traumatized, there are patterns. There are responses and reactions by the individuals that are normal to trauma. It can change and shape how we do respond in the future. To your point, in our time, individuals are under extraordinary stress. There are no easy answers. We do a disservice by reducing, simplifying, or making it one dimensional.
We do a great service by talking about the dilemmas and talking about the struggles. That’s where we as humans and our society do well is when we can surface the dilemmas without becoming polarized and without saying, “We have to choose the strength of our economy or the health of our population.” How about if we leverage both? The book surfaces that through a story. The book offers hope. It’s a message that while going through trauma, that can shatter you in an organization. You can emerge stronger and better than you would have been had you not gone through the trauma.
I talk about the importance of telling a story that other people see themselves in and how that takes people on a journey. One of my clients is a high tech healthcare company. Those salespeople are in the operating rooms with the doctors. Because of the shortage of masks and their own health issues, they have to do it virtually. It’s a whole another paradigm for everybody that makes it challenging to even “do your job” if you’re in healthcare. This concept of helping people see themselves in the story is a reason enough to get any book. We’re going to be taken on a journey where we either see ourselves or someone we know in it and we can start to recognize patterns that can help us get some new tools in our toolbox to deal with any situation, whether it’s what we’re experiencing now or something in the future. Diana, how can people find you? I know you also do some consulting. What’s the best way for people to reach out to you?
The best way is via my email, [email protected].
Diana, thank you so much for sharing your story. Your courage and your vulnerability inspire us all.
Thank you, John.
Important Links
- Responsible
- Long Beach Memorial and Miller Children’s & Women’s hospital
- Partnership Advantage
- Be The Lifeguard of Your Own Life! – TEDx Talk
- [email protected]
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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The Empowerment Paradox With Ben Woodward
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Life is not without its own set of challenges and struggles for us to go through. Understandably, these are the very things no one asks for. However, the paradox in all of these lies in the way it reveals our strengths that we often don’t know we have. In this empowering episode, John Livesay interviews Ben Woodward, the author of The Empowerment Paradox: Seven Vital Virtues to Turn Struggle Into Strength. Here, Ben gives us a peek into his book and talks about the philosophy behind his words. “Surrender does not mean that you give in or give up.” “Imagination can help you increase your patience and strength.” “We’re always going in and out of a crisis in business and our personal lives.” At the heart of these, Ben shows us that while challenges are a part of life, they nevertheless help us to emotionally and mentally overcome whatever may come our way. Join him and John in this conversation where they discuss how to handle disruption and more.
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Listen to the podcast here
The Empowerment Paradox With Ben Woodward
Our guest on the show is Ben Woodward, the author of The Empowerment Paradox: Seven Vital Virtues to Turn Struggle Into Strength. Ben talks about the philosophy, “Surrender does not mean that you give in or give up.” Find out what he means by that. Also, “Imagination can help you increase your patience and strength.” Finally he said, “We’re always going in and out of a crisis in business and our personal lives.” How do you embrace that? Find out more, including how to handle disruption, whether it’s sickness, death of a loved one or even aging. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest on the show is Ben Woodward, who is the bestselling author of The Empowerment Paradox: Seven Vital Virtues to Turn Struggle Into Strength. His unique experience as a senior executive and multibillion-dollar companies has seen him flourish as a businessman and thrive as a successful entrepreneur. His intimate experience with personal suffering, having to send his own father to prison has taught him how to make tough choices, live outside his comfort zone, and turn adversity into an incredible opportunity for personal transformation. He’s a dual citizen of New Zealand and the UK. He lives in Southern California with his wife and seven children. Ben, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here.
You have quite the story and the readers love a good story. I’m going to let you decide where you start your story of origin. You can take us back to New Zealand or the UK childhood since your dad’s involved in your story, whatever you think is relevant that allowed you to learn these seven vital virtues.
The story probably began a long time ago. It is often the way. When I was 22 years old, I was living in New Zealand and I made a wonderfully impulsive decision to jump on a plane, fly to the UK and see my father who I hadn’t seen since I was fourteen. It has been a long time and I had enough money for a one-way ticket. I jumped on that plane. I remember panicking as I was halfway across from New Zealand to England going, “What have I done? I’ve got £50 in my pocket.” That was it. I landed in the UK. I moved in with my father and with £50 to my name. I certainly didn’t have any means of doing much else other than relying on that relationship, which I anticipated would be great as a platform for me to get going and have my overseas experience as a young twenty-something and then work my way back to New Zealand. That was the original goal. It didn’t work out that way. Shortly after moving in with my dad, I learned he’d done some terrible things. What do I do about it? It was obvious that a prison sentence was looming over his head. If I was to act on the knowledge that I had come across, what do I do with that? It impacts me as well. I’m living with him. It’s me and him. What do I do now?
[bctt tweet=”You are always going in and out of crisis…how do you handle it?” username=”John_Livesay”]
There are many issues there: loyalty, survival, betrayal and morality. What’s the right thing to do on a bigger level? I can’t even imagine at such a young age when we’re still developing our emotional intelligence, how you coped with that. Please, tell us.
I moved out of his place and I had an older brother that was living there. Long story short, I initiated a criminal investigation into my father. It resulted in his arrest. The day that happened, I can’t even begin to express the ache in my heart knowing that he was sat in a police department somewhere being interrogated for hours on end, what that would be doing to him? These things aren’t quick processes either. You don’t get investigated, arrested. This stretches out for months and years. It led to his arrest. The arrest led to a trial at court. On the day of the court case, I’m sat there with my brother. We’ve been given a tour of the environment that we’re in, “This is where you’re going to sit when they call your name. Your father will be sat over there. This is where the jury is going to be placed. If people are in,” it was a public courthouse, “This is where they’re going to sit if they want to sit and listen.”
We sat there, my brother and I, with this horrible ache in our chest, going through this ordeal. The court official comes up and says, “The court case has been postponed. It’s not going ahead.” “What’s happened?” “Mr. Woodward has had a heart attack. He’s in hospital.” The stress of the event of everything that was going on gave him a life-threatening heart attack. He’s in hospital. Fast forward, it comes out again. He’s back in the courtroom. He gets sent to prison and he’s there for about 4.5 years. He misses my wedding. He misses the birth of my first child, maybe even the second. How was that at the start of my story? That sounds like a terrible experience. It forced me to confront difficult questions. By nature, I’m not a confrontative person.
Some people like to embrace confrontation and conflict and others don’t.
The Empowerment Paradox: Seven Vital Virtues to Turn Struggle Into Strength
That’s not me but this certainly demanded it of me. You used that word morality. What is the morally correct thing to do? Don’t focus on who is right or what is comfortable for you. What is right? What is the right thing to do? Even for my dad, I don’t think anyone wants to go to prison, but if you want to turn your life around and get rid of the demons in your life, you’ve got to confront the tough stuff. Sometimes you need someone to help you out. This wasn’t done as a punitive measure from my part. It was done as a helping hand to say, “You’re not going to have the guts to do this by yourself to put it right. I’m going to help you.”
You’re not going to turn yourself in. As we transition that into your career in business and managing salespeople and consulting, there are some life lessons that get translated because sometimes you have to fire people who aren’t performing or tell them the truth. It’s awkward. If that’s not in your wheelhouse, it doesn’t impede your leadership skills.
A friend of mine who was the CEO of a billion-dollar business once said, “In business, you’re always going into or coming out of a crisis.”
I saw that in your book. He said, “If you’ve got a smile on your face, I know what’s around the corner.” What a great line.
[bctt tweet=”Surrender does not mean give in or give up.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Of necessity, if we want to be real leaders, we need to understand how to deal with a crisis, with the unexpected, to respond to things that are uncomfortable and are unpleasant, to do it with honor, morality and to do it because that is what is right versus having our own private agenda of comfort, ease or personal benefit front and center. That personal benefit can be things like, “I don’t want to confront this issue with this person because I like them. We’ve become mates.” You’ve got to be willing to do what’s right. That’s what leadership’s all about. Another friend of mine that I worked with, I was the president of the company at the time and he was a CEO. We would often spar off each other and work together and strategizing and planning. We were dealing with a particular crisis and he said, “Many people aspire to have our jobs. They love the title of CEO and president but I don’t know if too many people that would enjoy doing what we’re having to work through and would have the guts to make these decisions.”
The glamour goes out the door when a crisis comes in the door. You’ve got a quote in your book that I love which is, “In business, you’re always going into or coming out of a crisis.” I don’t think people think of it in terms of that. They think, “We’ll fix this problem and then we’ll never have another problem again. Things will always go smoothly. Our growth will be linear year-after-year.” All of us experiencing a pandemic know that whether we like it or not, this is a crisis that those skillsets come from. For me, I learned how to not panic and stay calm in a crisis when I was a lifeguard and someone was drowning and my training kicked in.
Instead of panicking, I stayed calm and that’s helped me in my career when I got laid off after being at Condé Nast for fifteen years in 2008 when the mortgage crisis hit. That training you have from dealing with the crisis in your father of confronting hard times and dealing with doing the right thing and all those things, my lessons from a lifeguard of not panicking and staying calm, the same thing when I got laid off, I didn’t panic and stayed calm. There’s a through-line there for everyone reading going, “There are some stories here of things we learned about childhood tough decisions we had to make.” You talk about in The Empowerment Paradox, this concept of it’s about perspective. Can you expand a little bit upon that, Ben?
This is the critical thing and it’s the reason why I started perhaps with an unusual story at the frontend of, “Where does my story begin?” It revolves around my dad going to prison and the pain around that, what relevance does that have in my career? How do we view ourselves? What perspective do we give to our own life experience that can add value, diversity, insight, and clarity to a commercial environment, that they are all interconnected? If I was to look at myself for example, I come from a divorce, broken home. My father went to prison. What was me? I color myself in that light then, what strength do I give myself internally to rise up to claim my own ambitions and dreams, and chase them? Do I say, “I navigated that with a strength that taught me some lessons. I’ve got some wisdom here and some insights that can be a value I can make a difference in the world. I’m going to do something?” Do I see myself as someone with strength or someone that grew up on the wrong side of the tracks and got lucky?
The Empowerment Paradox: If we want to be real leaders, we need to understand how to deal with a crisis, with the unexpected, to respond to things that are uncomfortable and are unpleasant and do it with honor and morality.
It’s easy. I’ve heard this many times in many different frameworks that we’re only as sick as our secrets and whether that’s an addiction, secret or being ashamed of something you did or someone in your family did whether it’s sickness, death or getting older or all the other things that you talk about in the book, those are all forms of disruption. I’m fascinated to hear your tips helping people embrace the disruption of getting older because even if you’re still young and you’re reading this, you have people in your life who are getting older whether it’s your parents or grandparents.
Sometimes depression comes for a lot of people that they’ve lost their purpose, “Why am I still here? I’m not working anymore. Are the best days behind me?” There are a lot of perspective thoughts that come up and I’ve been through some of those questions myself. That’s why I’m glad that you agreed to be on the show because you’re someone who walks your talk. Now you’re raising your own children and you’re clearly a different father. What tips do you have for us on dealing with the disruption of growing older or someone in our life growing older?
There’s a whole chapter that I dedicate to this principle in the book, which is around surrender. The word surrender doesn’t mean give up. We’re not talking about giving up or giving in to getting older and throwing our hands up in despair. That’s not what it means. What we mean here is that we surrender or let go of the illusions that we’re holding onto in our lives that hold us back from moving forward. As long as I’m holding onto that illusion, that illusion being, “I refuse to grow old,” like Peter Pan. There’s a perfect example. If I’ve got something that’s holding me back, as you said, it’s a secret within me that I’m keeping to myself and I’m not confronting it. If I’m not looking directly at it, I’ve started to build illusions in my life that allow me to exist and move forward. Pretending that reality is not what it is. If I can’t let go of that, there are a number of problems that come in. First, I devote a lot of mind space to that illusion and that mind space is wasted time. I could be devoting it to a real solution, but I’m not going to be able to get to a real solution if I’m holding on to illusions.
This concept of where are we on this journey of surrender and the illusion that something is happening, I tell people all the time, “Don’t play a horror movie in your head that’s not even happening.” What if this happens? What if the economy gets bad? What if this goes on? You cannot solve problems when you’re playing horror and I think of ourselves as the director of our own movie, and we can yell, “Cut,” any time and stop where the thinker thinking the thoughts, not the thoughts thinking us. I love the way you described that. Especially in business, in crisis situations, this premise of the illusion of, “I’m never going to grow up and I’m holding onto that. I’m going to fight it tooth and nail because I have a belief system behind it that I will no longer be valuable.”
[bctt tweet=”If you want to turn your life around and get rid of the demons, you’ve got to confront the tough stuff.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Here’s a story. A friend of mine has a son that’s a teenager. He found a picture of his dad in his twenties and he brought the picture out to his dad. He said, “What happened to you?” His dad calmly went and got a baby picture of him at 4 or 5 and said, “What happened to you? Where’s my little boy? We all change.” When you’re in your teen years, you don’t think you’ll ever get old. You think you’re immortal. This concept of growing old doesn’t happen at a certain age. It’s a whole awareness that life’s always changing and then you can embrace it or fight it. Let’s go through some of the seven vital virtues that are part of this Empowerment Paradox. Before we go into that, did you entitle it? What made you want to say paradox? Is there something that’s a surprise that you think it’s one thing the paradox is something else? What makes it an empowerment paradox?
There are two layers to this paradox and multiple paradoxes within it. The first one is the necessity of the coexistence of joy and suffering in life. They’re two sides of a single reality and they both exist. There’s this wonderful saying we’re familiar with, “Time heals all wounds.” What a wonderfully reassuring message but time also seems to wound all heels if you can get your head around that. It’s heels the heel of the foot. Each of us gets hurt along this journey of life. I’ve been in a number of events where the self-help and personal development and a lot of people go. If you could imagine the ideal life for yourself, 5 to 10 years, let’s craft this, let’s build it out, what does it look like? Everyone builds this emotional homeostasis where everything is perfect, my health is in tiptop shape. My finances are fantastic. My relationships are good. My work-life balance is right and there’s no pain or suffering. I’m not suggesting we seek it or that we build it into our future. It will find its own way in but what we’ve got to recognize is that joy and suffering exist in our lives. It’s not one or the other. There’s the paradox.
It is a paradox. It reminds me of when people come to me and they said, “I get nervous when I have to pitch or speak. I get butterflies in my stomach.” I said, “The goal isn’t to get rid of the butterflies in your stomach, it’s to get them to fly in formation.” Part of that is when we’re excited or scared, our body feels similar. When you were writing about the perspective of it, “Either I get to do this or I have to do this. Either I’m excited to give a talk, a presentation or I’m scared to do it.” Our adrenaline has kicked in and we get to decide how we label that. That goes to what you’re talking about this paradox, “Something’s going, it’s out of my norm, butterflies and my stomach. Am I excited? Am I scared? If I’m scared, can I reframe it to be pretending like I’m excited?” One of the things you talk about is well-practiced patience. That’s my favorite of the seven vital virtues. Tell us a little bit about that and then hopefully that will entice people to go by The Empowerment Paradox.
My wife and I have the saying that we’ve got up in our bedroom up on the bookshelf, “No one knows how strong they are until being strong is the only choice they have.” That’s true. The reason I wanted to feature patience, I’ve even toyed with writing a whole book on that one virtue.
The Empowerment Paradox: Our capacity to become more, achieve more, be more is in our humble acceptance of the reality of joy and suffering.
I’m telling you it could be the next power of now and the fact that it’s well-practiced not just patience. What you’re saying then is we need to practice being patient. Isn’t it something we automatically either have or don’t?
There’s a lot in this virtue. First of all, there’s an old proverb that says, “In patience possess ye your souls.” This means if you take the antithesis of that in patience, we run the risk of losing them. How many bad choices are made as a result of impatience?
“Should I have that second piece of cake?”
Especially if we are going to experience adversity, there is a necessity in understanding the role of patience in that journey so that we can get through it to the point where the wisdom and the lessons can emerge. There is a journey when we are hit with adversity, suffering, trials or whatever it may be, it’s not an event, it’s a process. It’s something where we need to first embrace it, and then strive to understand it and then get to a point where we can be transformed by it. That requires patience.
[bctt tweet=”You’ve got to be willing to do what’s right. That’s what leadership’s all about.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Let’s talk about being stuck in traffic. That’s usually a big trigger for people who get impatient or waiting in a line. If you go, “I can embrace this or be mad.” Maybe listen to a podcast while in traffic or something or waiting in line. The DMV is a big test of everyone’s patience.
Yes, it is. It looks like chaos there all the time.
You know you’re going to be in line even if you have an appointment. It’s going to happen in our personal and business life and how we reframe that will allow us to embrace the empowerment paradox. The outcome of that is ironically we’re not at battle with everything that we don’t like happening. We are embracing it is my summation of what I got out of the book.
I like this principle going along with patience that often we interpret it as, “In order to have it, we need willpower alone to see us through.” There are research and evidence that demonstrates that if we can have a greater sense of imagination, then the role of imagination in dealing with our adversity and struggles increases our capacity to respond with strength. If I can have in my mind’s eye a clearer picture of where I can go and what I can get out of this that will empower me more to exercise my patience and to allow time to pass through me well, versus having it come through me tooth and nail with resistance.
[bctt tweet=”Let go of the illusions you’re holding onto in life that hold us back from moving forward.” username=”John_Livesay”]
What a great note to end on. Ben, is there any last quote or thought that you want to leave us with?
“Our capacity to become more, achieve more, be more is in our humble acceptance of the reality of joy and suffering.” When we can accept it and embrace it, surrender our illusions, we can become the best version of ourselves.
That’s ultimately the journey we’re all on. Thank you so much, Ben.
Thank you, John.
Important Links
- The Empowerment Paradox: Seven Vital Virtues to Turn Struggle Into Strength
- Ben Woodward
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Social Impact Investing With Neil St. Clair
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Doing good and doing well is a philosophy that all entrepreneurs with a philanthropic side want to do, but there are so many ways to approach it. Neil St. Clair does his share by removing fear from everyday life through social impact investing. Neil is a serial media entrepreneur, senior marketing and startup advisor and creator of the “Intrigue Marketing” philosophy. He is currently leading the launch of a global media network focused on “investing with impact.” As a former journalist, Neil knows the value of telling a good story and he uses this ability to pitch venture deals and get high-net worth people and organizations to get into social impact investing. Listen as he joins John Livesay to share his story.
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Listen to the podcast here
Social Impact Investing With Neil St. Clair
Our guest is Neil St. Clair. He has a lot of great philosophy here about doing well and doing good. Social impact investing has always been at the core of who he is. He has a great suggestion, which is that we write our obituary and create goals, so we meet how we want to be remembered. He tells us about verbal judo, leaving a little surprise to create that wow factor when you give a pitch. You’re going to want to be sure to find out what that is. Enjoy the episode.
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Neil St. Clair is the President and Founder of NES Impact, which is a management consultancy firm and they work with single-family offices to help them develop social impact goals. They’re not only investing the money but money having a social impact. We’re certainly going to ask him about that. He also serves as the President of Child Safety Pledge, a nonprofit combating child sexual abuse through storytelling and impact investing. Before that, he was the President of Karma Impact. It’s a media platform for the next generation of private impact investors.
He’s hosted several shows for the network, including Timeless Media. He was the first-ever Chief Growth Officer for a venture-backed AR marketing platform and served as the first-ever Director of Marketing for over $11 billion. Earlier in his career, he was an on-camera news journalist. You can tell by his handsome face that that is the case. He’s also been at the forefront of a lot of award-winning media outlets. He’s a speaker that presented at UPenn’s Wharton School and Bloomberg News to name a few. Neil, thanks so much for coming on the show.
It is my extreme pleasure, John. I got out of TV because I had a face for radio and now this is a podcast.
You graduated from Boston University as magna cum laude. You went on to go to Yale. You clearly have a competitive edge as a marathoner and choosing to live in Manhattan. It’s the make it there, make it anywhere. Would you share with us a little bit of your own story of origin? You can start in college. You can go all the way back. Where did you get this drive to make a social impact?
I’m a Jersey boy for better or worse. A lot of us that come out of the garden state have a little chip on our shoulder as we stared across the river at Manhattan and wondered, “What if?” A lot of it is instilled values from my parents. Some of that is also natural. I spent a lot of time thinking about the science and art of ambition. What drives somebody to pick themselves up out of their circumstance? Why sometimes people that are born into great circumstances don’t have that natural ambition? A few years ago, I did two exercises. I would recommend this to any of your readers. The first one’s a little bit maudlin but well worth it, which is to write your obituary.
[bctt tweet=”Do well and do good.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Imagine your death at 100 years and work your way backward from that. What are all the things that you would like someone to say about you as your final act? Take that literal lifetime goal and break it down into yearly, monthly, and the actual week by week, day by day, and sometimes even hour by hour execution items. You’ll find that there are many little things that you can do to start to agglomerate and lead a great life. It also helps us offset procrastination. There is a lot of science around that setting moderate goals that have an almost cocaine effect. It releases dopamine when you achieve those goals but if you’ve set something that’s massively large for yourself, you’re less likely to ever even get started.
That’s one little ordering principle. Beyond that, what started me down the path of social impact was about a few years ago I said to myself, “I do believe that doing good and doing well is an equation that rings true, but there are many directions that I could take with this. How can I put an ordering principle into a place that’s going to be my philosophy of life?” I looked at a variety of things and finally came to a simple conclusion, which is that everything that I do philanthropically, investment-wise from a career perspective must be one simple thing. I must remove fear from everyday life.
That ordering principle has given me so much opportunity, but also so much direction. It’s flexible. It allows me to sometimes make my own definition and say, “Is this fear from physical harm?” I do a lot of work in the child sexual abuse prevention space. Is this removal of fear, say economic fear? There’s a great index at the Chapman University in California that puts out the top fears for Americans. You find political corruption, environmental change, and fear of not having the money for the future tend to be the variations of a theme of the top five going back twenty-some odd years. That plus an action-oriented way of thinking about my life has given me a social impact undercurrent but real ways and means to achieve that.
I’d be doing a disservice if I didn’t say that part of what woke me up to this was working with multibillion-dollar families like The Hinduja Family. The founding family, at least one member of the AllianceBernstein, the investment bank, working with them and seeing how they wanted to put their efforts into action. They didn’t want to sit on their money but wanted to go out and prove that equation of doing well and doing good. I’ve subsequently become involved with several networks like Nexus and Concordia that have similar outlooks. It’s been phenomenal to get involved and see that. Maybe this Gen Z/Millennial generation is going to put this into practice and help change the world.
I love what you are encouraging us all to do by writing our obituary so we can create goals to get there. It’s reverse engineering, which a lot of startups do. They like to reverse. What do we want this product to do? When I gave my TEDx Talk, I remember the coach said, “Reverse engineer your talk. What do you want the audience to think, feel, and do at the end of your talk?” You’re saying it in a bigger picture. What do we want people to think, feel, and do about us at the end of our life? I thought that was a unique way to do that. You have this quote on your LinkedIn profile from Churchill, “It’s better to be making the news than taking it, to be an actor rather than a critic.” Tell us what does that quote mean to you and what made you pick it?
Social Impact Investing: When you work backwards from what you want your life to be at the end, you’ll find that there are so many little things that you can do to lead a great life.
It means a lot. I came across it while doing some work for my undergraduate thesis many years ago and I let it rattle around in my brain. It was written by Churchill in a book that he wrote when he was a young man called The Story of the Malakand Field Force. He was coming back as a young lieutenant or colonel from the Boer War and was just getting into the political realm. This was his clarion call to himself into his generation to get involved and not to be swept up into action by others. He actualized on that in a big way. That quote, as it bounced around in my head has led to two momentous shifts in my life.
I like to think that post-college had three acts in my life. The first was as a journalist storyteller. The second was as an entrepreneur. I’m now in the third act as the gray haired disseminating my knowledge. I’ve got to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life. All that aside, I was starting my life as a TV journalist. I was with YNN in upstate New York and Binghamton. I was promoted and worked in New York 1. At a certain point, there are a couple of other factors in this. Let’s not kid ourselves. Being a TV journalist until you make it big time is not the most lucrative way to build one’s life. Beyond that, we become increasingly frustrated by telling other people’s stories and not writing one of my own.
This quote started to bind around in my head, to be an actor and not a critic, to start making the news, and to not simply take it. It was at that point that I decided to take a break. That’s when I went into graduate school at Yale and that’s why I said, “I’m going to start my own company.” I did that first one almost the same day that I made that momentous decision. We were incubated at Yale and spent about two years on it. I was a peer-to-peer marketplace for buying and reselling hotel rooms. It was a wonderful abject failure. I’m happy to have at least one of those under my belt. You learn infinitely more from failure than from success.
I’m in the process of writing a book about the science of failure. There’s this interesting psychologist, to give you a quick example, the smartest people in the room, let’s call them venture capitalists in this scenario, or let’s call them the heads of major movie and TV studios. They get it right 1 out of 10 times. That’s success. Yet all we try to do in almost all aspects of our lives is model success, but success is the random factor. Failure is more mathematically predictable and there are ways to minimize failure than maximize success. We’ve been getting it wrong for a long time and the way that we’ve been thinking about how to go about our lives. There are more to come on that at some point. I’m in the process of collecting stories and architecting that a little bit more.
That quote drove me out of journalism and into the do part of my life as an entrepreneur. I went on to have a couple more successful companies. It also spoke to me again later in life when I was working with the Hinduja Family on Karma Impact as part of Timeless Media and Timeless Capital. I love the work we were doing. It’s meaningful but we were telling stories of social impact and social investing. I said, “I want to do social impact and social investing.” I had the capability to do that. I left there and went to go work with the daughter of the Founder of AllianceBernstein on child sexual abuse prevention.
[bctt tweet=”Write your own obit and set goals to meet it.” username=”John_Livesay”]
We created the first-ever matrix to allow people to invest in both private and public capital markets in child sexual abuse prevention. We did some other cool things while we were there. It was that quote that started creeping up again, saying, “You’ve got to do. Don’t just tell the stories.” That’s not a knock on journalists. I have an extremely soft spot on journalists and they’re getting a bad rap now. Storytelling is immensely important and can be completely impactful, but once you’ve done that for a while, it behooves yourself to circle back into the active part of life and have other people look at you and say, “Can I tell your story?” That’s a yardstick for me.
I wanted you on my show so you could tell your story. You’re not reporting on someone else’s story. I’m fascinated by yours. Now that you have seen both sides of storytelling, people present ideas and startup ideas because you’re always looking for things to possibly invest in, whether it’s your own money or the family-offices that you represent. What do you think makes a good pitch?
A couple of things and this took a lot of years of trial and error of having been an operator and subsequently having been an NLP in various venture funds or looking at it from an investor’s perspective. It gave me both sides of the equation to finally understand what I was sometimes getting wrong. I was pitching for money. The first thing, and a lot of us are guilty of this, is being short and sweet, especially when you’re dealing with investors, whether they’re venture capitalists, family offices, direct investors, it doesn’t matter. Whether they’re right or wrong, they think they’re the smartest person in the room. When you have that syndrome, listening to someone drawn on and on with rare exceptions, all you’re doing and I’m sure we’ve all sat on the chair at this point, where all you want to do is jump in and state your opinion or, “Have you thought about this?” They’re patient and respectful. What’s the TED rule? Is it twelve minutes on stage, no more or something along those lines?
My TEDx Talk came in under twelve minutes.
That’s a well-honed, true, tried, and tested rule. Twelve to fifteen minutes max is the true attention span. The shorter, the better. It’s one of the most amazing things you can do. Think of it almost as a verbal judo. Twelve to fifteen minutes, knowing that you’re leaving a couple of key points out because they assume that you’re on a pitch with a Q&A session. You won’t be comprehensive if you don’t have that Q&A, but draw someone in. Leave one slide in the appendix that you know is a killer slide. When that person or investor said, “Have you thought about this?”
Social Impact Investing: Outside of the United States or the developed world, there is no such thing as access to credit. Either you have the cash or you do not.
You say, “In fact, we have.” You pull up that slide and knock them down. I will tell you that having been that investor, I love that because that shows that you anticipated my question. To be drawn in and have that question answered in such a prepared way and not someone that’s clearly bluffing. It’s clearly thought out, gave me a short enough presentation that I got it already, and knocked me over the head, I’m like, “I’ve got to learn more about you.” That is one of the things that investors are often looking to challenge you on. They like to play these games.
I love that so much because I’m constantly teaching people when I tell specifically sales teams that you’re selling yourself when you pitch to get funded, you’re selling yourself to get hired or get a new client. You must tell stories to become magnetic. Showing someone that you have thought out a potential question and have a slide ready to go as the answer is much more powerful than telling someone, “I am someone who uses critical thinking.” When you show it in, as you said, verbal judo almost, the energy is going back and forth. To me, a great story, a great pitch is all about having a collaborative conversation. The potential buyer or investor leans in and goes, “I want to know more about you.” You’ve intrigued them enough to pull them in. That’s what great storytelling does. I love this analogy that you use of saving a little something for the wow factor. It’s almost like dating. You don’t want to tell everybody everything about yourself. Intrigue us a little bit more that there’s something else. It’s this and more.
You’ve used my favorite word. If you go to NeilStClair.com, which frankly needs to be updated, I came up with an idea of something called Intrigue Marketing many years ago, which leads to this. It is to leave a little something out. Human beings are social animals and I have seen that concretely now in the time of COVID how social we are. We want good stories. We want to be surprised. Why do we go to the movies and see a horror movie where someone’s going to jump out of the darkness? Why do you think Steve Jobs or that television detective from back in the ‘70s would always say, “But wait, there’s one more thing.” That was always the thing. Psychologically, when you write an email to somebody, the one thing that almost everybody remembers is the PS. Always write a PS. Always make that the most important point.
There are many of these little psychological games that at the end of the day, the way to tell that effective story is to employ some of those techniques. There are some great books that were written amongst others, but the bottom line is if you can get someone to lean in and do that verbal judo, you’re already 80% of the battle there. If you’ve been short and sweet enough that you’ve been able to get those 3 or 4 mission-critical points across, the reality is human beings can’t store that much information in their head. You’re going to have such a higher chance of success than if you try to talk for 45 minutes. There are still questions at the end and now you’re trying to riff and come up with answers.
At the end of the day, don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good and allow that person to lean in effectively. Intrigue is one of my favorite words. I run a private membership organization that relays and proved out over the years this concept. I essentially sometimes will rarely send it to someone I know but oftentimes cold emails to prominent figures. The number one word I get back in the invitation I send is, “This is so intriguing.” It’s my absolute favorite word. Human beings love to have that interest piqued. Do that as much as you can. There are a lot of techniques within all things that you do that can lead to some material positive results.
[bctt tweet=”If you start off with massive goal for yourself, you’re less likely to ever even get started.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I’ve created this whole ladder. That’s why I was resonating with who you are and what you do about going from invisible, to insignificant, to interesting, to intriguing, and at the top becoming irresistible. That whole “Where you are on that ladder,” whether people see you, is the whole key to pulling people in.
You’ve leveled one of the things that I wanted to speak on for a moment, which is talking about analogizing it to dating. Let me be somewhat crass. Human beings are driven. The things that cause joy and fear are universally the same. It doesn’t matter whether you’re marketing on Twitter, Facebook or you’re writing in Sanskrit 10,000 years ago. The idea of stories and the way we communicate and the things that cause us joy are universally similar. What is one of the things that truly drive our lives? Where do you got it a lot wrong but you got one thing right? I hate to say it but sex and relationships drive us at a material level.
As you’re thinking through business, use the relationship analogy in all aspects of your business to understand how do you make yourself irresistible to somebody. Begging usually doesn’t work. Talking one-sidedly usually doesn’t work. How can you get that person to lean in and say, “I absolutely must learn more about this person?” Sometimes a little air of mystery and sometimes going 80% of the way to the kiss, and letting them come in the other 20% that works. The psychology of successful relationships cross-applies in business.
It’s so true that magnetic field of energy. When you think of energy in terms of what energy am I putting out? What is that attracting? Who is this for? Who is this not for? The clearer you get both in your dating life and in your business life, I feel is what makes people attract the right one. What kinds of projects in social impact are you looking to be part of? I know you have an AI background. Are you looking for something that has AI with social impact? Is there any magic formula or you know when you hear it?
Talking about a relationship analogy, one of my biggest turn-offs is when someone walks in and says, “We’ve got AI, insert whatever platform here.” The same way that a lot of people on dating websites or whatever oversell themselves. The picture doesn’t match up with the reality in life. If you come to pitch me as an investor and say, “Artificial intelligence,” the conversation is usually over before it started. Unless you’re coming from MIT or the Jet Propulsion Lab or something, no one has true AI. It’s a branding term. Having worked in that world, primarily what we have now is machine learning. I won’t go off on a long tangent about this, but when it comes to investors, if they’re smart investors and there is stupid money out there, let’s not kid ourselves.
Social Impact Investing: Storytelling is immensely important and it can be completely impactful.
If you’re talking to a savvy investor, don’t give me crappy, schlocky, corporate terms that you think are buzzwords that get my eyes lit up. The reality is what’s called General Artificial Intelligence does not exist. While I’m looking for things that have automation and machine learning that take a complicated or manual repeatable process, that’s great but the reality is that’s most things. That’s most technology now. That’s table stakes. You’re taking a repeatable process that was done manually and techifying it to some extent. I’m probably, by my admission, not smart enough to understand things that are true deep high tech. There’s a whole class of people out there in the life sciences that are looking at things in true deeper robotics and true neural networks. I love that. I love nerding out about that, but I’m not smart enough to be a proper investor in that.
I’m an investor typically working with families or myself in things like media. Sometimes it’s one of the most exciting and entertaining ways to lose $1 but I’m a glutton for punishment. FinTech and financial services, because I can understand that I still think there’s a lot of nuts to crack there. I also had an insurance technology company in the past. I love taking boring industries and making them sexy wherever possible. I’ll give you a couple of examples of things I’ve invested in. The undercurrent on most of those things is they have to have some degree of social impact.
For example, I’m interested in for-profit universal basic income platforms. There are a few things out there looking at that. It’s fascinating to use financial engineering to provide people with what I call a springing UBI. It’s not a government grant but it’s something that we can do to solve some real societal ills. I’m invested in the company now they specifically does merchant side financing for third world countries. Most people you probably don’t realize, outside of the United States or the developed world, there is no such thing as access to credit. Either you have the cash or you do not.
If you’re a lower-middle-class family in South Africa, Kenya, Peru or Mexico, and you want to buy a stove to heat your house and help feed your family, if you want to have whatever unit of a denomination is an XYZ dollars, you cannot get it. What they do is provide a firm style financing for something like that. You can’t go and buy a TV with this merchant style financing. It has to be things that drive you forward socially. I’m passionate about those folks. Similarly speaking, I’m involved with a company called ScholarMe, which came out of Y Combinator. It’s run by a young kid. It’s a great story. I met him at a venture pitch competition that I was judging. He hacked his way out of Baltimore by going to cafes, hacking into Verizon and getting access to their Wi-Fi. It’s a great story at the outset and you tell this kid has it. He’s a total tech nerd.
He probably shouldn’t be the CEO but definitely, he is someone that knows how to techify a company in the right way. The bottom line is what they do is they’ve created a common application for scholarships using natural language processing and some other deep tech stuff. You can write one application that now goes out and pre-fills 3,000 scholarship applications in a matter of an hour. Whereas before, you probably spend 3,000 hours filling out 3,000 applications with still uncertain results. The way they make money is by doing some interesting plays with student loan companies. I’m interested about what they do in helping people get a low cost or gratis education. Those are the things that I look for which is a true provable business model. Yes, good technology. Yes, good team, but something on the back end, going back to my philosophy, removes fear.
[bctt tweet=”Humans can’t store too much information in their heads, but they sure love a great story.” username=”John_Livesay”]
In the first example, the company doing merchant side financing is removing that fear of being able to frankly live in those instances and be able to see past 30 or 40. In the instance of ScholarMe, it’s removing that fear of, “How am I going to pay for college? How am I going to be able to afford these things? Can I go to Yale? Do I have to go to a community college or a local state school?” I’m not saying they’re bad schools, but by comparison, Yale gives you a natural leg up in life. Being able to even that playing field through inclusion, equality, and equity is important to me. That’s what I’m looking for and all the typical VC things. It’s a great founding team, know your stuff, know your numbers, you got the right kind of gray hair sitting behind you.
When I first heard the concept that we feel excited or we feel scared, the sensations in our body are similar, which is joy and fear. It’s up to us to reframe fear, “I’m excited now. I’m not scared.” Whether you’re getting out there to give a TEDx Talk or whatever you’re trying something new, that framework is helpful through the lens of, “I’m looking for things that remove fear from everyday life.” What a great tweet that’s going to be.
The joy and fear or whatever you want to slot in there, there’s a lot of interesting studies on the science of emotion. They’re not only are physiologically closely linked, they’re also neurologically closely linked. There are actual tricks in the way that you can combine those feelings and emotions either to replace them or to say, “Put fear or anxiety with a feeling of joy.” All of a sudden, you create an entirely hybrid emotion that can stimulate you to act in many ways. There’s a lot of neurological backing that once you become aware of it, you can also start to retrain yourself, your body, your mind, and the way that you process things.
The way that you put it, reimagining fear is something that gives us excitement and something that I look for in an entrepreneur. Someone that’s taking a kernel of fear and has overcome their own lack of privilege or personal shortcomings and has turned that into a hugely motivating factor. That’s the person that’s going to be your next Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, or someone that never stops. There’s a relentlessness to them sometimes to the detriment of their personal life. It’s a great way to think about it. Emotions play a lot in outcomes and success.
When I teach salespeople that storytelling is a skill as a speaker or through my online course, I tell them, “You must create a story that people see themselves in that story. When they see themselves in the story and they know you have empathy and understanding of the problem that you’re solving, then they want to go on that journey with you.”
Social Impact Investing: The things that cause joy and fear are almost universally the same, whether you’re marketing on Twitter or Facebook or you’re writing in Sanskrit 10,000 years ago.
That’s right. You have to match those communication styles. If they are an entertainer and want to tell the story of their life, you match it right back and become a great active listener and provide a little bit of a reflection of that storytelling. I’ve gone through and done a lot of sales training myself in the past. Doing that almost Socratic method, I tend to find that often when you ask someone to do something, they’ll give you the opposite answer. If I sat down and started to say to you, “Tell me what you like about your current software platform.” You’re not going to tell me what you think about your software platform. You’re going to go on a tangent on all the things you don’t like about it.
Heuristically, from a sales perspective, I believe that we define our lives by the negatives. I want to go back to my relationship analogy here. If I said, “Describe your perfect mate,” most people would give something like, tall, dark and handsome for a guy or whatever it is. The reality is that’s not who you’re with right now. When I asked you, “Don’t tell me what you think you want. Tell me what you don’t want based on past experience,” you get a much more specific granular laundry list of things that didn’t work. By definition, the opposite is probably true. People oftentimes fool themselves into this vague sense of what the future might hold when the reality is they already hold the keys to those answers by doing that definition by the negatives.
Neil, how can people follow you and find out more about you, whether it’s some of the charities you’re involved with? What’s the best way? Is it on your website or LinkedIn? Where should they go?
You’re welcome to go to my website, NeilStClair.com but it’s probably not the best repository for information. I love being contacted directly. I’m open to being an advisor or considering an investment or helping you as I can. As my old boss would say, “Sharing my confusion where appropriate.” Please feel free to reach out directly. My best email is [email protected]. I’m perfectly accessible through that. In terms of social media platforms, please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love connecting with people there. I’m not particularly active on other social media platforms. Although if you want to follow my daughter, she has 1,000 followers on Instagram @EllaBearStClair. I tweet to both her and her brother. They appear on a regular basis. They get political sometimes, but it’s a lot of fun. I figured one day, I was like, “Where am I going to have a catalog of their life?” I go out and take a fifteen-minute coffee break every day. I might as well do something that gives my kids a legacy of their life. Feel free to follow them as well.
What a wonderful and upbeat note to end on. Thanks again for being with us, Neil, and sharing your wisdom of when we do well, we can also do good.
Thank you so much, John. It’s my pleasure.
Important Links
- Child Safety Pledge
- Timeless Media
- The Hinduja Family
- AllianceBernstein
- TEDx Talk – John Livesay
- LinkedIn – Neil St. Clair
- ScholarMe
- Y Combinator
- [email protected]
- @EllaBearStClair – Instagram
- NeilStClair.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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