The Five Questions With Dr. James Mellon
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Life always has many questions in store for us, but a precious few of them are actually, in the long run, productive. Dr. James Mellon is the founding Spiritual Director of Global Truth Center Los Angeles and author of the new book, The Five Questions. James joins John Livesay to give you a little taste of the titular five questions that you should be asking yourself. There are certain questions—and answers—that move the needle in terms of the progress you want to see for yourself. But the journey to finding these questions and answers begins with believing in yourself and your own capabilities. After all, life’s too short to keep comparing yourself to other people.
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Listen to the podcast here
The Five Questions With Dr. James Mellon
Dr. James Mellon is the Founding Spiritual Director of Global Truth Center, which has launched a new way to experience a body, mind, spirit connection in a program called Welcome Home. James’ philosophy of life is enlightenment through entertainment. He wears many hats in the entertainment world from being a Broadway actor, director, writer and producer. He’s a sought-after speaker in the field of personal growth. He is also the author of the book, Mental Muscle: Sixteen Weeks of Spiritual Bootcamp and has a new book, The Five Questions. James, welcome to this show.
It’s so great to be here, John.
You’ve been on the planet for a while and you’ve done a few things that have made a big impact. That’s a part of why I was so excited to be able to put a spotlight on you. I know you’ve helped so many people including myself, get clear on who they are and the impact that’s possible. A lot of the people who tune in to The Successful Pitch Podcast are entrepreneurs and they’re looking for a little bit of inspiration, motivation, and maybe some tips on when it’s time to pivot and make a change. I also want to talk to you about resilience because you’re the expert in that and that’s one of the keys to being an entrepreneur. One of the things I like to ask my guests is to tell us your own story of origin. You have so many stories and you can go back as far as you want. You can go back to being someone who wanted to be a priest in Philadelphia or you can jump right into your decision to get to Broadway. You start the story wherever you want.
Mine does start out as a kid in Philadelphia who could see the world outside of Philadelphia as something enticing and exciting. I always knew that I would be a Broadway, movie star or a television star. I had a sense that I was made for something bigger than Northeast Philadelphia. Even with all of the race consciousness and the familial encouragement or I should say lack of encouragement, making the world a big, bad place, a place that’s difficult to get into and succeed at. This is where it all began for me. I never listened to what other people had to say about what I wanted to do. I went and did it. I’ve always been that person to jump in before I knew what I would hit.
The Five Questions. Never listen to what other people say about what you want to do.
Automatically, I’m starting to think of Broadway musicals because that’s a part of who you are from Good Morning Baltimore to There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This to Sweet Charity.
Even the one that I started on Broadway, which was West side story and that was against all odds because I didn’t have the dance training that Jerome Robbins was looking for. I didn’t have the singing training that Leonard Bernstein was looking for and I didn’t have the acting chops that any of them were looking for. Somehow when I stood on that stage and auditioned, it was like, “I’m here and I’m the right person for this. Give me a chance,” and they did. You’re right. When you decide to do something like Tony sings in West Side Story, “Something is coming.”
[bctt tweet=”Life is too short to compare yourself-tick frickin tock.” username=”John_Livesay”]
My whole life I have believed something’s coming. Even now, I still feel something’s coming. I don’t feel that I’m in the, as Jane Fonda likes to talk about, the third act of her life, I don’t feel that. I feel that there’s something new always coming. You used the word pivot. Pivot is so important to my life and I noticed yours too. If something doesn’t feel right, we need to pivot and not be afraid to pivot. Too much of the world is spent dealing with what they are accepting out of life as opposed to, “I don’t want to only accept this. I want to actually be passionate about something.” I pivot whenever I need to pivot and I don’t worry about what people will think about it.
This concept of jumping in without “having all the qualifications or the background that a lot of people think you need to do” is a helpful thing for us to double click on. How do you get the confidence or the mindset to do that?
How would you get the confidence to do something like that? It’s innate in all of us. It’s right there for us to tap into. The question is, “Do we tap into our natural authentic selves or do we tap into what the race consciousness around us is telling us?” For most people, unfortunately, we tap into what we’re being told as opposed to what we know and I mean in a deep sense not what I know because of what I’ve been told but what do I know in spite of what I’ve been told.
I want to get right to your book, The Five Questions, because I want to make sure we cover what those questions are. Think of it as a roadmap, readers, for your own entrepreneurial journey as well as your own personal growth journey. As you’re learning these questions, you can think about what your answers are for both personal and professional. Then I’ll ask you, James, how you’ve applied some of that on your own pivot. Tell us what those five questions are and we’ll go back to each one.
These questions came to me because I was caught off-guard. As you know, I’m a busy person and I tend to do a lot of things at once. I was at a retreat center and one of my partners came up to me and said, “I’m looking forward to your workshop.” I said, “When is my workshop?” They said, “It’s in an hour.” I hadn’t realized my workshop was that day. I went and sat under a tree and I said, “What do I need to know here?” All of a sudden these questions downloaded to me and they came in a specific order. It’s this, the first question was, “Why am I here?” Followed by, “What wants to know me?” Then came, “What wants me to release it?” “What is mine to do right now?” The last one was, “Do I know how great I am?” Those five questions came and I wrote them down. It was almost like a download. I wrote them down and thought, “I can work from these.”
[bctt tweet=”Money is a demonstration of integrity and passion on the right path.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I went into the conference hall and there were about 200 people there. They were all sitting and I asked them all to lay down on the ground and I said, “I’m going to go through some questions for us to start this off with.” When I started and I asked the first question, “Why am I here?” I was flooded with 100 other questions. The first question took about 30 minutes and people were crying, moving around and wriggling. I was like, “There’s something here.” When I got to, “What wants to know me?” I explained that we live in an energetic field of ideas and desires. Elizabeth Gilbert in her book, Big Magic, talks about how these ideas come up and you either take them or you don’t. If you don’t, someone else will because they’re all such viable living things and entities.
What wants to know me is, what am I allowing in my passion, intelligence and my wisdom? What am I allowing myself to absolutely engage in my own mind? It’s been a pretty amazing journey for me with these five questions and how they play out. That first question, “Why am I here?” I think of you and your amazing journey through your many careers and there are moments when something is ending like, let’s say your work at Condé Nast. When something ends, the question, “Why am I here?” can be answered on so many different levels. Why am I here at the end of this journey but why am I here at the beginning of this journey?
When entrepreneurs can ask themselves that question, why am I here? Why am I starting this company? What is my bigger purpose than just making money? They define a culture and attract the right people to their team, which attracts the ideal customers. People go, “I don’t need to figure out what my culture is in my company yet. It’s only me or me and a couple of people.” I tell people, “No. You need to know from the beginning why you’re doing this beyond profit.” That’s what people are responding to energetically.
This concept of what wants to know me, as an entrepreneur, a lot of people have a lot of ideas and in fact, so many of them that I help, say, “Don’t try to boil the ocean. Figure out one thing. Who you help and what problem you solve.” This concept of creating time through meditation or any other options. Google and big companies that now have nap rooms. A lot of people leading tech companies are saying, “One of the keys to my success is meditation and allowing other ideas to come in that are yours and not reacting to the world and emails all the time.” This question of “What wants to know me?” do you have any advice or suggestions for people of what they need to do to create that space to hear their own ideas?
It’s funny you should say that. One of my newest projects is a live space people will go to called Welcome Home. The whole purpose of creating Welcome Home is to give people an opportunity to go somewhere, into a room, into space which is our physical spaces, although they can also be entered virtually, to allow yourself to decompress. Get rid of the outside voices and world, to give yourself the opportunity to focus your mind on only you and allowing nature and nurture and all of the intentional energies out there to flow in and get into the fluidity of this thing called creative mind.
[bctt tweet=”EGO-Enter Greatness Only” username=”John_Livesay”]
You asked the question about, “Why I am here and what wants to know me about an entrepreneur?” One of the smartest things an entrepreneur can do or anyone with a new idea is to ask the question at the onset of something. “Why am I here?” If we find out that the only reason I’m here is that I feel I have to be here or it’s going to make me money, money cannot be the end goal. Money for me is always the demonstration of the integrity and passion that wants to be brought forth. Money is just a natural outcome of when someone is on the right path. Sometimes we hear, “Why am I here?” We may hear, “I’m here for all the wrong reasons.” It’s like you. I’m here for all the wrong reasons. I need to pivot. I need to ask myself, “What can I do to find what’s mine to do?”
The Five Questions. If something doesn’t feel right, you can’t be afraid to pivot.
This concept of, “What do I need to release?” Bob Iger was quoted in the New York Times launching Disney+ saying, “They realized they needed to release something true to only making money from the model of traditional television of owning ABC.” He started the streaming service and he said, “If you don’t innovate, you die.” Sometimes you’re even killing off your existing revenue source. In terms of spirituality and how people are doing things, what you’ve created with welcome home is the Disney+ of church.
Thank you.
You’re creating a place for people who want to watch ABC can still do that and go to church whether virtually or online or go to Global Truth Center or in going to hear you speak every Sunday. For others who are like, “That’s not me or I never did like that format,” you’re doing your own version of Disney +/Netflix for this place of Welcome Home. It’s important too because I’m so big on the story of every origin that Welcome Home is not a destination like, “I’m going home to see my family for the holidays.” It’s a welcome home to yourself going inside. Is that accurate?
That is absolutely right. Welcome Home, meaning that there is a place in you and a place in me that when we’re in that place, we’re in the same place. That’s what Namaste means, when you honor the sacredness and another person. John, you are so correct. I am a minister, a Reverend, I have my Doctorate in Consciousness Studies and yet I lean away from the religious side of even my own ministry. Everyone has a ministry in life. Even whoever’s the head of Sony has a ministry. It’s called Sony. I lean away from the religious side of it because, to be honest, that’s one of those dinosaurs and albatrosses that are dying out. You watch a lot of these religions and churches people aren’t supporting it anymore.
[bctt tweet=”You can’t really run very far if you are weighted down with all of the things that have no purpose in your life anymore.” username=”John_Livesay”]
There are still the holdovers, the ones that still want that type of experience but as the younger generation moves up and becomes the older generation, they want experiential. They want to feel what it feels like to be spiritual. They don’t want to be bored to death being told what it’s all about or asked to do some archaic exercises of prayers and whatever. What they want is to feel it. They want to be involved in it. That’s where we came up with the idea of Welcome Home. I still love Sunday services at Global Truth Center. I love being on stage, singing, band and fellowship. I love all of that but I recognize that there are many people who want something different so we came up with Welcome Home. It’s a series of 45-minute sessions where you go in and either have a sound bath, heart breath meditation or heart math. There are so many different modalities out there that can get us tapped into our inner self so you can finally say, “Why am I here? What wants to know me?”
What is the sound bath for those people who might not be aware of that?
A sound bath is a concert. I remember when we used to go to hear concerts and people still do. It’s a concert. It’s allowing your audible senses to be bathed in sound. Usually, those sounds are glass bowls, chimes, gongs, some rain. Also, those with big tusks that have all those pebbles in them and you turn them upside down and it sounds like a rain forest. It’s a beautiful place to go to. You usually lie on a mat with a beautiful pillow and a blanket and you’re surrounded in love and sound. People take about 45 minutes out of their day to go be immersed in this sound bath.
It gets you out of your head and all the frustrations of worrying about something. You’re fully present and you’re immersed in this experience that can reset your button. This concept that we recharge our phones and yet we somehow think we don’t ever need to recharge our bodies or our minds.
If you recharge your phone, why wouldn’t you be willing to recharge your body? You know what happens when you don’t recharge your phone.
That will be the visual image for Welcome Home. It will be a phone being charged in. It will be the future of us all becoming chips inside of us. The other question of what’s mine to do right now, everyone, whether they’re an entrepreneur or not struggles with time management. So much is coming at us with tweets and text messages and things that we weren’t expecting and our day gets away from us. How does that question allow us to make sure we are in fact doing the right thing at the right moment?
All of these questions take into consideration that you’ve given yourself space and time to let these questions answer you. It’s not about you answering them. If you allow that question to answer itself through you, sometimes we hear things that we may not want to hear like what’s mine to do right now? We may be shocked to find out that a lot of what we’re doing isn’t mine to do right now.
The Five Questions. If you recharge your phone, why wouldn’t you be willing to recharge your body?
The keyword there is mine versus delegating it to someone else.
Even the question, “What wants me to release it?” I have been on the other end of that question and found out that what wants me to release it is a relationship that no longer works for me. It could be a business partner, a friend or a family relation. It could be anything. You can’t run far if you are weighed down with all of these things that have no purpose in your life anymore. You’ve got to let it go and ask, “What’s mine to do right now?” Now you have the ability to go do whatever that is when you’ve let go of everything else. For the businessman and entrepreneur to say, “What’s mine to do right now?” If I were in the middle of it or at the beginning of a business project and I asked myself that question, “What’s mine to do right now?” I might give myself the opportunity to get out of thinking of the seven billion things that need to get done for this company to succeed and hear the first thing that I need to do.
It’s trusting your intuition to let it bubble up as opposed to, “Last night, I wrote down the number one thing is this.” Things might’ve changed and you’re still obsessed and attached to what you think has to get done first. It may not be the case. You said something about being burdened with so many things to do. A lot of this concept of what’s mine to release now might be being obsessed with what other people are doing aka what’s my competition doing and comparing ourselves to other people. That can be a burden. What advice do you have for people who want to release that trap?
It’s a big trap. You put your finger on it beautifully, it’s competition. Not to go all spiritual on you but for me, spiritually speaking, there is no competition. I understand that there is competition in the world. I am in the world. I succeed well in the world but for myself, I have to be clear that when it comes to truth, spirituality and energy of life, there is no competition. Energy is always expanding, creative, growing and moving. If I put my attention on what someone else is doing, not only am I not moving forward, I’ve stopped to pay attention. I’ve heard you talk about Michael Phelps. If you take a second to look at your competitor, you have lost because you’re not doing what’s yours to do.
[bctt tweet=”It is knowing who you are that allows you to step onto the largest stage possible.” username=”John_Livesay”]
There we go. It’s full circle because if you were to analyze what percentage of my day am I focused on what’s mine to do versus what’s everyone else is doing, how they’re ahead of me, how many more likes they have, how many more books they sold or widget, how much more money they’ve raised, or 101 things to be focused on besides what’s mine to do. You said, “I’m spending 30% or 40% of my time subconsciously thinking and focusing on that.” I’m reading the news and I’m thinking about, “Look at what that person did or got that I didn’t get.” What happened? Will you focus some of that energy on what I can do best?”
What would I do with all that time if I wasn’t doing that? I love Holland Taylor. I interviewed her for a show I’m doing called The Inner View and Holland was one of my guests. Someone in the audience, I forget who asked her, but it was a question about, “Do you ever worry about opportunities in what may go to other actresses?” She leaned forward and said, “I don’t have time for that stuff. My life is continuing to move forward, tick-freaking-tock.” I laughed because she put her finger on it. She said, “I’m living my life. Meryl Streep lives her life. Everybody else does what they do. I don’t need to be Meryl Streep. I personally don’t need to be Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra or Marianne Williamson. I am who I am. They are who they are and we’re all doing what is best for us to do at any given moment.”
This final question of, “Do I know how great I am?” This is one that most people might struggle with. I’d love for you to talk about the difference between confidence and arrogance as you see it.
That’s a great way to put that. I always look at the ego. We think of ego sometimes as a bad thing when someone says, “That guy has such a big ego.” You better have a big ego. You better have a big understanding of who you are because it’s your belief in yourself. It’s your knowing who you are that allows you to step onto the largest stage possible. I don’t have a problem with ego whatsoever. Here’s the difference. You said confidence and arrogance. Confidence comes from an ego that knows who it is. It’s entertaining greatness only as opposed to people in spiritual terms, say edging God out, meaning edging the greatness out.
Confidence to me is someone who knows who they are. I tell this story a lot about Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise was my roommate back in the 1980s or early ‘80s. I was starring on Broadway and West Side Story and he was this teenager from New Jersey who wanted to be an actor. He would stay at my apartment because we had the same manager. Tom used to tell me all the time he was going to be a movie star and I used to laugh. I’d say, “Tom, you’re 5’7”. I didn’t see it but it didn’t matter that I didn’t see it. It didn’t matter who didn’t see it. It just mattered that he saw it because he had confidence and certainty about who he was that you could not fight him off of that. He’s also the nicest guy in the world. Arrogance is when you’re actually insecure about yourself. You don’t know who you are so you put up this pompous air of, “This is how great I am,” but you don’t believe it. Let me tell you as a director, when an actor walks into a room and they don’t believe in themselves, they barely have to speak and I already see it.
Listening to you describe these wonderful questions again and I can hear this over and over. It seems to me that there’s a circular connection to all this when I’m thinking visually. If we answer, do I know how great I am, ties into my belief in myself, which stems from answering the first question of, “Why am I here? What is my purpose?” Does the answer to why I’m here help the foundation to answer this is how I know how great I am because I know why I’m here? Is it all connected?
It’s totally all connected, John. Those five questions can be used in any situation. When you peel the onion back, every time you peel a layer back, start over, ask the questions again because if I know who I am and I know how great I am, when I say, why am I here? I’m going to get a different answer.
I promised at the beginning of this that I would ask you about resilience. You’ve had two major incidents in your life that most people would have a difficult time jumping back from. If we’re going to have things happen to us and it’s not a matter of if we get back up but I’m keen on how fast do we get back up. From being diagnosed with cancer to having your daughter tragically die at nineteen in a car accident, you’ve had more than your share of challenges in life. I don’t want people to go, “What an easy-breezy life this guy’s had from Broadway to this to that.” You’ve had all of that too. Somehow you model for yourself and other people this ability to be resilient. My big question to you is, what advice do you have for people on how they can be more resilient?
When you look at the word, resilience, resilience is the capacity to recover quickly, to recover quickly from some difficulty. When I was diagnosed with stage four cancer, to be perfectly honest, as devastating as it was to look at on the surface, I never ever felt that it would kill me even though they gave me a few months to live. They said in March I would be gone by August if they couldn’t find everything. They had no idea where it was. There was something in me that said, “You’re not going anywhere.” I had to go through five months of chemo, radiation, tearing things out of my neck. I went down to 130 pounds. For a six-foot male, that’s not a great weight. The whole time there was something behind me, which is my true self that said, “You’ll be fine. Keep going.” I’ve never had to get back on my feet through that. I don’t think I ever left my feet so I was pretty clear.
When my daughter died, which we’re about to reach the anniversary, if resilience is the capacity to recover quickly, perhaps I haven’t been resilient because I don’t think I will ever recover from that. However, what I did do quickly was to make sure everybody knew that just because the worst thing that I could have ever imagined happening to me happened, it did not change my faith. It didn’t change what I believed about God and about myself. It didn’t change how I would answer, do I know how great I am or that life may unfold perfectly no matter what.
It’s caused me to go deeper into what is life and what is death and try to have a better understanding of that. A day after my daughter passed, someone wrote on my Facebook page, and they didn’t mean it in a mean way. They wrote that they were sorry that it happened and perhaps I would reconsider the many things I’ve said as a minister and as a speaker. When I say, “Life unfolds perfectly and there’s always good in everything.” This person brought that forward and my reaction to it was so visceral that I went back onto the stage within three days of her passing and did not leave the stage. I stayed in my pulpit and my work. I have still stayed within my work this whole time. It was in reaction to that. I still do believe all this and no one is going to argue me down just because I have suffered something because my daughter’s fine. Wherever she is and whatever her next journey is, she’s fine. I miss her. I can’t even tell that I miss her every day. I miss her every moment of every day.
You always remember why you’re here. That’s the key to resilience that goes back to that answer to that first question.
“Why am I here?”
That purpose and reason for being allows you to be such a light and a gift to all of us. How can people find your book, The Five Questions, and find out about Welcome Home? What’s the best place for people to do all that?
If you go to JamesMellon.org, you will find me and my programs and you will find the book there. It’s simple. You’ll find me there. I don’t send people, I don’t even like using the word church anymore, to my center my spiritual center. If you’re interested in that, it’s called The Global Truth Center. You’ll find what goes on there. To me, it’s all one thing. Thank you for saying it at the top of the show, enlightenment through entertainment. I’m an entertainer. I will always be an entertainer, actor, singer, dancer, director, writer and minister. I get to take all that I do, wrap it up into one thing and focus my attention wherever that takes me.
James, I can’t thank you enough for reminding us that we get to remember who we are, figure out where we want to go, what wants to know us and all the other great questions that we can now ask ourselves in any situation.
Thank you, John. This has been a real treat.
Important Links
- Dr. James Mellon
- Global Truth Center
- Welcome Home
- Mental Muscle: Sixteen Weeks of Spiritual Bootcamp
- Big Magic
- The Inner View
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Booking Celebrities: The New Storytellers With Bruce Merrin
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Booking celebrities for appearances is one of the most important functions of public relations and management teams because those appearances, more often than not, really do mean a lot to the people there to witness it. Just being in that space with a speaker who’s also a storyteller can take a person to so many worlds beyond themselves. Bruce Merrin is the Founder and Owner of the Celebrity Speakers & Entertainment Bureau. Joining John Livesay, he shares some of his most heartwarming stories on the job about both celebrity speakers and the people who got to see these celebrities in the flesh.
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Listen to the podcast here
Booking Celebrities: The New Storytellers With Bruce Merrin
Our guest is Bruce Merrin who is the Celebrity Speakers Bureau Founder which is then a top ten grossing firm in both Los Angeles and Las Vegas. In 1973, Bruce booked his PR client, actor Michael Landon, on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson. Bruce credits Carson for inspiring the idea to launch a Celebrity Speakers Bureau. After the show at NBC in Burbank, Johnny Carson invited Michael Landon and Bruce to his Malibu home for dinner. When Carson suggested that he create Bruce Merrin’s Celebrity Speakers Bureau, Landon offered to be Bruce’s first client. That’s quite a wonderful story of origin. Bruce, welcome to the show.
Thank you. It’s an honor and a privilege.
I am fascinated not only to know the story of the origin of how your Celebrity Speakers Bureau started, but also to hear your personal story. You can take us back to your childhood, school, wherever you want that you knew you wanted to be in the entertainment business or the speaking business or PR. Tell us what your early childhood inspirations were.
First of all, I was born in Louisville. My first and big sports star was Muhammad Ali. When I met him, he got such a kick that I was born in Louisville and he was too. We moved to New York City. I lived there until I was graduating in the sixth grade. The important story that ties into my business is my dad was a big Brooklyn Dodgers fan. He took me to the Brooklyn Dodgers games often. One of my favorite players was Jackie Robinson who wore number 42. Fast forward, he became my second sports client that I ever represented. When we were living in New York, that was a real impactful thing for me that I became a Brooklyn Dodgers fan and that Jackie was my hero and became my client.
Booking Celebrities: You find out the true value of a person by how they treat people, how kind they are not only to people who are like them but to regular people.
After graduating sixth grade, we moved to Las Vegas where I am. My dad was the President of the Flamingo Hotel back then and this is where the entertainment side comes in. Dad, because he was the president of the Flamingo, he and my mom would take me to all the big headlining shows here in Vegas. Judy Garland, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, the way the entertainment side comes with a great story. When I was in the seventh grade, they took me to see Sammy Davis Jr., certainly one of the greatest performers of all time. I was a young junior high guy at the time. I had heard of Sammy Davis, but I had never seen him perform.
We went to the Sands Hotel, we sat in the front row and Sammy as his closing number does a song that was called Mr. Bojangles. Everybody knew that was his song. After the show was over, dad and mom took me to Sammy Davis Jr.’s dressing room and I got to meet him and I was impressed with Sammy. He’s one of the greatest entertainers that I’ve ever seen. We were driving back home and I was in the seventh grade then, I said to my mom and dad, “Mom and dad, I want to work in the entertainment industry.” At a young age, after seeing Sammy Davis Jr., thanks to Las Vegas and my mom and dad, those are what gave me that first spark of loving entertainment.
I imagine that being around that much talent and seeing it close-up gives you a different perspective that you get to see them as people and not somebody famous that doesn’t have challenges and things that other people have.
Thanks to my mom and dad, I did. I get to meet these people up close and on a friendly basis as well. The other Vegas story that I’ll share because this is something that affected my life as well. Brenda Lee, the great country music artist, had over 40 top ten Billboard hits. When she first headlined in Las Vegas at the Flamingo where my dad was president, she was only twelve years old. She was the youngest headliner ever to perform in Las Vegas. She was twelve and I was twelve. My dad said, “How would you like to come to the Flamingo pool? We’re having a twelve-year birthday party for Brenda. You can meet Brenda and then you’ll sit in the front row and watch her show.” She had a big hit. It was a number one hit. It was called Jambalaya. I was familiar with her because I would hear her song all the time on KRM Radio here in Vegas. Not only was I her date at the Flamingo pool party, but at the dinner show, I sat in the front row. I’m blessed at a young age. Thanks to my mom and dad, I got exposed to the entertainment industry and it was in my blood from a young age.
The fact you got invited to Johnny Carson’s Malibu home and he was such a private person, that shows that celebrities feel safe to be with you. I want to put that out to everyone reading this episode. In life, whether it’s your personal life or your career, if people feel safe to be themselves around you that you’re not going to judge them or be star struck or whatever the issue is, it’s the best compliment anyone can ever give is I feel safe to be myself. Certainly for me, if someone feels that they can be safe to be themselves with me, that’s what I try to create here as the host of the show. In my personal and business life, that is what’s jumping out at me about you is that all these people felt safe to be themselves in front of you.
[bctt tweet=”Be A Giver, Not A Taker. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
That’s a kind comment to make and you’re right, because imagine I was a young guy at the time when I went to Johnny Carson’s home and Michael Landon was my first big celebrity client. What you’re saying is certainly correct but think this was 46 years that I was at Johnny Carson’s home. Think about how Johnny and Michael impacted my life? Your comment is accurate. The funny story is the next day after the dinner, Ed McMahon calls me up. He said, “Johnny tells me you’re starting a celebrity bureau. I’d like to be your third client.” He was. I’m blessed but that’s an insightful comment that you make because if people don’t have that trust, it never would’ve happened.
One of my big inspirations, I like to quote him quite often, it’s Dr. Wayne Dyer. One of his wonderful quotes is, “If you squeeze an orange, you always get orange juice. It doesn’t matter what time of day, middle of the room, in the corner.” He said, “What happens when you get squeezed and you’re under stress and you’re squeezed into a corner?” It was such a great metaphor. I know that you booked him with Steve Jobs and Apple. Would you share that story with us?
Having done this many years, I’ve been blessed to book about everybody in the world. Dr. Dyer, without question, would be in my top five of all time because I use the term. I already know you and you’d like this term as well, impact lives. I like to have the ability to impact people’s lives. One of the ways that I can do that is by booking clients like Dr. Wayne Dyer, and he was such an amazing speaker. Whenever I booked him, I’d always get a call or a text or some message from the client saying, “Dr. Dyer was the best speaker we’ve ever had. Bruce, you’re my hero.” Dr. Dyer was an amazing man. The lady that was the main executive that worked with Dr. Dyer lived in Miami.
I was in touch with her all the time, but Dr. Dyer truly, he’d be in my top five because of what he talks about and writes about in the books. He had a great quote that you mentioned. For me, he’s still alive. He was such an amazing guy and every time he went out and talked to audiences, he did impact their lives. I will say, of all the speakers that I booked them all. He would sell more books at his engagements than anybody because everybody wanted to get a copy of his book. I’m glad that you did mention Dr. Dyer. He truly was one of the greatest of all time. I love him and I do miss him.
The other thing that you talk about is the impact and there’s a whole philosophy of a good speaker can hold an audience’s attention. A great speaker might give them some takeaways that they can start using in their career, but an extraordinary speaker is someone who has an impact for months, if not years after their talk. I know for myself when I hear people echo back something I’ve said, the old way of selling is to Always Be Closing, the old ABC. I reframe that to ABK, which is Always Be Kind and to the way you talk to yourself and your coworkers and the people you’re working with, telling people to put ABK on a Post-It note. That one little takeaway, people will come up to me and say, “ABK,” and it stuck. It had an impact. That feels like you’re on purpose and doing what you’re supposed to be doing in your life. Do you have a story of a speaker you booked had that impact either there’s a story or when so-and-so spoke they said this, and people still talk about it?
Booking Celebrities: Instead of trying to sell or close with people, ask them this question: What is important to you?
Yeah, and I love what you’re saying about kindness because I believe you find out the true value of a person. If they’re at a hotel, how do they treat the valet? How do they treat the concierge? It’s not the people that are millionaires or billionaires. How did they treat regular people? I love what you’re saying about kind. The instance story that hit me was President Gerald Ford. I, as you know, have been lucky to book all of the past presidents, starting with President Reagan. Here in Nevada, we booked President Ford for a big event along with many other people. One of the people on the stage that same day was Bruce Jenner. We get a talk show about some stories there. President Ford was such an amazing gentleman. A gentleman is a word that I would think. He was on the stage in front of about 5,000 people. When he finished his talk, he got a well-deserved standing ovation with the past presidents.
The Secret Service is with them. As soon as he finished, they were storming the stage and they wanted to whisk them away to the limousine. President Ford holds his hand up to all the Secret Service and says, “Gentlemen, these nice people out here have some questions they’d like to ask me.” He was kind about that and he stayed for 30 extra minutes answering questions. He didn’t have to do that. He easily could’ve gotten into the limousine and left. In terms of kindness, that was a story that immediately made because he was such a kind person that he cared about all the people there in the audience that was there instead of leaving and getting in the limo. He wanted to answer some questions and make them happy. To me, that showed a lot of his character, which had nothing to do with politics.
One of the things I talk about is trying to find something you can do that’s unexpected. Luxury is defined as giving somebody something that they didn’t even know they needed. If you can do something that makes you irresistible and helps you stand out against other people, that extra bit staying for an extra 30 minutes, people want to know that it’s not another job to you. When you come and give a talk and then the more you can customize it and be available and sign books or take pictures or talk to people before you give a talk and customize it to them. I know when I spoke to Anthem Insurance after my talks and said, “How long have you worked in healthcare? I don’t, I took the time to learn your acronyms.” Some people said to me, “Our biggest challenge is, we’re asking people who are nurses and MBAs to sell.” I said, “Let’s ask them to become a storyteller instead of a salesperson.” “They’d like that.” Here’s the secret sauce, Bruce, that people can read, which is trying to do what you’re afforded. What else could I do to give extra value?
In this case with Anthem, I said to them, “What’s happening after I give my talk?” They go, “At the end of the day, we’re going to have an improv session and people from the audience are going to shout out objections they get from doctors and people are going to on stage role-playing.” I said, “What if I stayed and was helping them if they got stuck in the improv of what to say? I could whisper in their ear?” They went, “No one’s offered that. We didn’t even think to ask a speaker to do that.” That’s what made them select me versus someone else. They said, “I wish you could be in my ear all the time. You are The Pitch Whisperer.” It became that extra bond. There’s another example of letting people who are reading our blog think to themselves, “What can I do that would show part of my character and give extra value that’s not even anticipated or requested?”
It’s a beautiful story and I admire and respect what you do. When you mentioned storyteller, no matter who the speaker is, if they are a good storyteller, then they got me at hello. You can get people that are experts and then you can throw out all these different facts. If they’re a good storyteller, especially one of the things I tell to younger speakers who are starting to try to make it, I said, “At the beginning of your talk, if you can touch the hearts of the people in the audience, that goes a long way. If you can touch their hearts, what is your story that would touch their heart and have them at hello? Also, if you can make them laugh, that’s great too.” I love what you were mentioning about storytelling. It’s such an important aspect of a good speaker to be a good storyteller.
[bctt tweet=”When people feel safe to be themselves with you, they want to work with you.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Stories make us memorable. A lot of clients that I work with, whether they’re architects or law firms or tech companies or healthcare companies, they usually get down to a final three where they have to present. Fill out all the paperwork and it’s between them and two other people, and they say, “We hope we get to go because we think whoever goes is memorable.” The problem is you can’t control the order you present like an interview for a job. I said, “Whoever tells the best story are people going to be memorable.” That’s what our brain is wired to remember a story. It’s coming up with things that touch the heart. One of the upcoming social media posts I’m going to be doing, because buildings and restaurants are being closed does not mean you have to close your heart to other people. That’s what good communicators and storytellers do is you take what’s going on and try to have people see it differently. That everything is closing. Don’t close your heart. Still have heart connections with people.
It goes back to the networking phrase, “Givers gain.” It’s not having your hand out saying, “What can you do for me? Instead, it’s what can I do for you?” Especially at this time. I love what you’re sharing. To me, that’s important. I believe the greatest gifts are free. What can you do for somebody else that doesn’t have to do with the money? The way you can touch your heart or impact your life, I applaud you. I’m giving you a sitting ovation.
One of the things that you have talked about, great soundbites and I love a good sound bite because it’s memorable, you tell people that hire you, whether it’s IBM or other Fortune 500 companies. Never hear the sound of one hand clapping at your event. Can you tell us a story of a speaker that you booked that took people from being bored to being entertained and how that all works?
It’s interesting when you’re talking like this, it’s what pops into your head because I’ve been doing this so long, I got to work with all of the astronauts starting from the beginning of the John Glenn’s of the world but Wally Schirra was one of the early astronauts to became famous and he was good that he wound up going on CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. What impressed me with Wally Schirra is he was able to connect with his audience by inspiring and motivating them with experiences that he had in space, but yet taking it down to the earth and the people got what he was trying to say. As an astronaut, he was somebody that I enjoyed working with because he was a hero to everybody in the United States and around the world. He was able to speak on the same level with the people in the audience. He was one of my favorite speakers of all time because, while I worked with all the astronauts, he was one of the early ones, but it shows how good he was the fact that Walter Cronkite, the great newsman, said, “Wally, I want you on my broadcasts.”
I know I’ve had the privilege of being interviewed by Larry King. I did my homework. You can imagine and I read that he does not like small talk. I read his story of origin because I’m always fascinated to hear that. It turns out his big break was interviewing Frank Sinatra. At a time when Frank Sinatra was not doing interviews because his son had been kidnapped and the media was saying it was because of possible mafia connections. Larry has a great story about all of that. I brought that up to him before we went on camera and he said, “That was a great night.” When he asked me what makes a good story in my interview, I was able to say, “You have a great story how you got your big break interviewing Frank Sinatra. Would you mind telling that story and then we could break it down for everyone watching as to what the elements to that story?” The famous tennis pro Arthur Ashe said, “The key to success is confidence. The key to confidence is preparation.” If you’re going to interact with somebody iconic, whether it’s Walter Cronkite or Larry King, you best be prepared.
Booking Celebrities: Instead of trying to sell or close with people, ask them this question: What is important to you?
Larry is one of my favorite people of all time. I first met Larry when he was hosting his radio show in Florida. I was booking clients on his radio show and then when he went to CNN because of the nature of our public relations to business, I got to know him well and I did book them. I’d say maybe about ten times for speaking engagements. When you mentioned Larry, I love him and I was sad when he finally did go off CNN because I thought he did a great job. I love the story about Larry, and I’ll trace it back to Johnny Carson. One of the great things about Johnny Carson, he was a comic genius, but something that I heard from all the celebrities that went on his show when he did his interviews, all the celebrities would say, “Bruce, he is such a great listener. He didn’t always interrupt and he left the person who was his guest do the talking.” Larry had that same quality. Without mentioning names, some people who do shows are always interrupting and they always want to give their point of view and get in but Larry was a good listener. Whenever I book PR clients, they loved it because he was able to listen without always having to feel that he had to throw in his two cents. I love Larry King.
One of the things I work with salespeople on is improving their listening skills because if you ask someone a question and they don’t hear the question properly and they answer something, you feel like, “What is this? A politician trying to avoid the question?” Sometimes it is because you didn’t hear it. I often tell people, “Before they’re willing to listen to you, they have to know you care enough to listen to them.”
That’s a brilliant comment that you’re making. One of our clients is a gentleman named David Fabricius. He’s spoken in over 100 countries. He’s one of the best speakers that I’ve ever seen, but he has a tagline that he shares with audiences in the sales area that you can identify with and certainly people that are reading. That is instead of trying to sell them and close them, ask them this question, “What is most important to you?” Not selling them but try to find out from them what’s most important to them. When they answer that question, that can give you a good idea of how to then follow-up.
That helps people ask good questions when they’re interviewing for a job. When I was on television that was what they wanted to talk about. We have to sell ourselves, including getting a job and daytime TV. Help anybody who’s watching tell stories, bring your resume to life through storytelling. At the end of most interviews and when they’ve asked you hundreds of questions, they will typically say, “Do you have any questions for us?” Unfortunately, a lot of the younger people are saying, “When does my vacation start?” I ask this question, which is, “What would it look like if I were to exceed your expectations in this job?” You’re future pacing and you’re showing not telling that you’re someone who goes above and beyond the minimum job requirements. That’s the joy of well-crafted story question that makes people start to think of, “I got somebody hired from asking that question.”
Going back to your story about your astronaut speaker. People often will say to me, “I’m looking for your help in coming up with a story. I haven’t climbed Mount Everest. I haven’t been to the moon.” I opened my TEDx Talk, which is called Be The Lifeguard of Your Own Life, with a story of being a lifeguard when I was in high school, having to save a young girl. The lesson I learned from that situation is to don’t panic and stay calm. How that helped me in my career when I got laid off and that’s another takeaway that people say, “Not only does that help me in my career, but it’s helped me with my life when things get off track.” With the entire world being disruptive, we want to be people who stay calm and don’t panic when the world is panicking. Buying everything off the shelves and all that other stuff that’s going on that is creating such. We don’t want to contribute to that. We want to be the voice of calm and confidence in our social circle and certainly when we’re able to be in front of an audience. I thought you might have a story of your career when you didn’t panic and stayed calm.
[bctt tweet=”The greatest gifts are free.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I’ve got to throw in one thing because when you mentioned the astronaut. We booked Buzz Aldrin many times and he was on the moon. He has the most spectacular videos and stills from the moon. When I do book Buzz Aldrin, I always get big thank you’s from everybody because they’re dazzling and they’re amazing. There’s one story that comes to mind. I had booked Magic Johnson for a big event in California and this was before we had iPhones and texting. He was late. He was over 45 minutes late. Number one, my face was getting red and I was getting nervous. I thought, “What if he doesn’t show up?” We didn’t have cell phones at this particular time. I couldn’t use a cell phone. What I decided to do was I took the microphone and for about fifteen minutes, I interacted with the audience and I told them some stories.
Thank goodness after I did my best to charm the people in the audience because for me, it was an emergency, it was a red alert. He wasn’t there. There were about 100 kids there that were going to get signed basketball. Instead of panicking and maybe going in the other direction, I decided to take charge, stay calm, and interact with the audience. They appreciated that I did that rather than making them keep looking at their watches and like, “Where is Magic Johnson?” I felt good about the fact that even though it was a mini crisis, for me because he was a big star. I’m a Lakers fan and one of the greatest Lakers fan of all time. Instead of panicking, I did that and thank goodness it ended up good.
That’s another example of your professionalism. In the entertainment business, they call it vamping, to keep it going because that dead time seems eternal if someone’s not up there filling the space with other questions and ideas. That’s as good a place as any to leave. Is there a quote or a book that you’d like to leave us with that you recommend, that you find inspirational or helpful?
I can’t think of a quote, but I will say, because when you said inspirational, the greatest stand-up comic and actor to me in showbiz was Robin Williams. I booked Robin Williams many times and Robin at the end of his speaking engagement, would come up to me and shake my hand and say, “Bruce, you’re the greatest.” It’s meaningful to me because Robin is my all-time hero in the comedy area. The fact Robin Williams would say to Bruce, “You’re the greatest,” that does stand out in my mind.
That shows that no matter how successful you are, it’s important to give people feedback to appreciate them. Do you want to tell people how else they can find you or follow you on social media?
Booking Celebrities: Instead of panicking and going in the other direction, you have to decide to take charge and stay calm in the face of adversity.
On Twitter, it is @CelebSpkrs4U. We have Bruce Merrin’s Celebrity Speakers on Facebook. On LinkedIn, they can follow me on Bruce Merrin and then on Instagram, it is @BruceMerrinSpeakers. Those are four different ways that they can follow me. You’re a delight and I admire and respect all that you’re doing in this area because you impact lives. That’s a plus.
Thank you, Bruce. That means a lot. I appreciate that.
Important Links
- Bruce Merrin
- Be The Lifeguard of Your Own Life – John’s TEDx Talk
- @CelebSpkrs4U – Twitter
- Bruce Merrin’s Celebrity Speakers – Facebook
- Bruce Merrin – LinkedIn
- @BruceMerrinSpeakers – Instagram
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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How To Get Co-Workers To Like Each Other With Jason Treu
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Growing a company is not all about generating revenue. It also means honing your employees to work alongside each other to reach a growth goal. On today’s show, John Livesay interviews Jason Treu on the importance of having a harmonious workplace. Jason is the bestselling author of Social Wealth and a TEDx Talk speaker. He teaches on building relationships and shares some tips on how to get co-workers to like each other. He also talks about his free downloadable game called Cards Against Mundanity, a game which builds deep, meaningful relationships with anyone in minutes.
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Listen to the podcast here
How To Get Co-Workers To Like Each Other With Jason Treu
Our guest is Jason Treu, who’s an Executive Coach. He works with executives and entrepreneurs to maximize their leadership potential and performance. He also helps them build and execute their career blueprint. He’s the bestselling author of Social Wealth, a how-to guide on building extraordinary business relationships. He was featured at the TEDxWilmington where he debuted his breakthrough team-building game, Cards Against Mundanity. Finally, he’s the host of the podcast Executive Breakthroughs, bringing game-changing CEOs, entrepreneurs and experts that share their breakthroughs and breakdowns. Jason, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me on the show and speaking to your fantastic tribe.
I always like to ask my guests to take us back to their own story of origin. You can go back to childhood, high school, college, wherever you’d like that you could say, “This is when I started to figure out my path.”
It was back in high school and college when I had the foresight to start getting involved in organizations, volunteering and serving other people. Through that, I started to see the glimpses of when we can work together, we can do great things. Also, the opposite when we can’t, we can do little at all. It’s how do we get the best out of other people and then get the best out of us. I even thought to myself about all my teachers that I had and I loved. It was because they could reach me and bring the best out of me so I could get more engaged. Vice versa, you also give them a lot of energy and enthusiasm because of how you show up to their class. Early on, doing all those things manifested in me doing more and more things externally. Even though I’m an introvert, I found a lot of my energy was working with other people.
[bctt tweet=”The magic of building relationships is in groups, not one on one. ” via=”no”]
It’s good to figure that out. That’s a great takeaway. Just because you’re an introvert doesn’t mean you don’t have a career working with other people. It doesn’t mean you have to be in an office doing accounting or something and never talking to anybody.
A lot of times when you talk to introverts, and I’ve been doing this quite a bit, the biggest challenge and biggest gap is they want to have as many conversations as extroverts. It’s the path getting there that is exhausting for them so they hung out. I’ve done this over the last couple of years as a pet topic. If you could instantly have deep vulnerable conversations that mattered to you, would you have considerably more topics around that? Almost everyone said yes. What they don’t like is the small talk and the other things that’s required to get there so they are opt-out. It’s too much work for them mentally and how they’re built in order to get to that point. If they could be transported there, that would be a whole different subject. That’s an interesting thing that people leave out when they talk about the difference between introverts, senile, ambiverts and extroverts.
How did you come up with the title of your TEDx Talk? I know you talk about that every leader needs to show some vulnerability. If there’s anything I’ve learned from giving my own TEDx Talk, which happens to have been at the same location you did, is the need for vulnerability. It’s a different talk than being an inspirational motivational speaker.
A hundred percent, because you’re having to give a speech in a little short amount of time that you have to convey a significant amount of information, meaning entertainment, which is the hardest thing to do. I look at a 45 to 60-minute talk that is much easier because you have a lot of leeways and you can try a lot of things. That’s great but when you’re having a short talk, you can’t. You’re not practicing this and giving this 100 times. You’re doing it once or in front of a small number of people ahead of time. You don’t know what a bunch of strangers are going to think about what it is that you ended up saying.
When I started on the journey doing the talk, one of the things I was looking at doing was to stand out or do something different like a how-to speech. One of the challenges doing TED Talks is because there are so many of them, it’s hard to use it as a solely branding thing. I wanted to do it that it would force me to create something along with it and people could walk out of it doing something with it. That’s the other thing that’s frustrating me with TED Talks. They’re inspirational, motivational and they’re at a higher level or whatever it is they’re trying to convey. The problem is when you do stop listening to it, what do you do with the information? I feel that’s always a shortcoming. It’s the same thing at a conference or anything else you go to. How you make it real is the bottom line.
Building Meaningful Work Relationships: The thing about a group of people is that you have to get them all working together.
That helped me think through how was I going to make it actionable and then I look back to the biggest challenges. My clients, my friends or anyone that I was talking and coming in contact with was about their ability to get the most out of the people that were working around them. Either they were managing their coworkers or managing up, it didn’t matter. I felt that was the problem to tackle because that’s where they felt most out of control. It pretty much controlled a lot of their success, existence, happiness and fulfillment, but they were unsure of how to do it on a consistent basis and how to build the relationships with people, individuals, groups and external however you want them to gather and make that work.
The title of your TEDx Talk, How to Get Coworkers to Like Each Other, is the surprise there because it would be, “How do I get coworkers to like me,” or, “How do I get along with coworkers?” You’ve got an interesting and unique twist here of not trying to get them to necessarily like or get along with me because we’ve had a lot of content on, “How do I get along with somebody I don’t like.” Yours is more focused on, “How do I get coworkers to like each other?” Speak on what’s one of the big takeaways from your TEDx Talk on that.
The thing about a group of people is, you have to get them all working together. At the end of the day, we’re dependent on groups. We talked about this before. You have a podcast team behind your podcast. Getting them to all work together and bought in, thinking strategically, adding in ideas can help you or make your show significantly better. Their relationships with each other are hugely dependent on your success. When you can facilitate that, it’s the key. If you’re with a group of people, which typically happens, or a team working in a company of any size, there are usually some people who get along and some people don’t. You never get to be in that place where you’ve created something great.
I always like to tell people, “Think about a time in your life when you accomplished something that was significant and you were with a group of people that you felt invincible around, either personally or professionally. It happened to all of us at least once in something that we had done. Even if it’s a brief flash, it could even be like a school sports team or something as small as that. Not even having to do with work. If you could recreate that feeling, emotion, communication and success into every single team you are on, imagine what success that would be in your life and what it could do for you.” I thought to myself, “That’s one of the holy grails that people struggle with.” It’s not your relationship with other people. You could have great relationships with all the people you work and interact with but if they don’t have it with each other, you end up having to do significant work. You’ll never be able to do the things that you could do if they had them independent of you.
That leads to what is something that leaders can do because they all get stuck and maybe even hit rock bottom. I wrote an article about going from Rock Bottom to Revenue Rockstar when I got laid off. That’s what my TEDx Talk is all about, how do we pick ourselves back up? You talk about that in terms of uncovering our blind spots
[bctt tweet=”What is your biggest blessing in disguise? ” via=”no”]
One of the things I’ve found when I’m doing any work with a group of people or anything is it comes down to your level of self-awareness. When I’m doing conflict resolution work with people, to take that as an example, you have to stem this trust and build trust. The challenge comes in when you can see your blind spots and the challenges that you have. It’s hard to come to the table and be vulnerable and put them out because that’s what other people see in you, but you can’t see yourself. When you can identify and communicate that to other people, they know that change is real and they know that you’re committed to it, but that’s the problem. We can’t see our own blind spots the way our brain is organized for survival patterns and other things when we’re able to have a deeper conversation.
That becomes the problem because those are the things that hold us back the most. That’s the problem with almost every leader. The data is 95% of people think they’re self-aware but only 10% to 15% are. You can look at all studies and it’s pretty close to that. That’s the problem. The higher you get, the more you overestimate your abilities because you don’t have people around you that are willing to tell you the hard truth because of risks and other things. You never get to the point where you’re constantly iterating and getting better and hearing the truth. We all need to be able to do that. The thing is, you have to look inside yourself and you need to get help from the outside in order to figure that out because we can’t see that. When you can, you can take a massive leap forward because a lot of this stuff has to do with past patterns, things that you grew up on and the blueprint of you seeing the world.
Self-awareness to me is not about all the things I’m not doing well. A lot of that is pattern recognition. Recognizing the things that you’ve been doing that may, in a lot of instances, have helped you. I’ll work with salespeople that are good at dealing with objections because they don’t hear them. They don’t hear no; they hear yes. The problem is when you start being successful. When that happens, you can’t do that in managing people. You become horrible at it and you’re unable to get the best out of other people because you’re not listening to them. You’re trying to direct them to the answers that you think they want or you believe they do.
A lot of that’s illuminating those things for people and sharing things. Perhaps you grew up in a family of six people and you would yell over your siblings to get your parents’ attention. You grew up early on valuing and knowing that listening was not a good thing because if you listened, you would never get hurt and nothing ever would happen. You used to talk over other people. The problem is in business, if you stop listening and asking questions, the higher up you go in, the more successful you want to be. That’s a significant blind spot but it’s not a thing you did on purposely. It’s something you learned because you had to.
Let’s talk about how that comes to life with this free game that you created for everybody. How’d you come up with the name, Cards Against Mundanity?
Building Meaningful Work Relationships: Self-awareness is about recognizing the things that you’ve been doing that may, in a lot of instances, have helped you.
I did a little twist on Cards Against Humanity and I talked to a lot of people. One of the things out of my TED Talk was I wanted to figure out a way to help people build a high level of trust and to get deep conversations with people to move it forward. Essentially, take a complete stranger and be able to have a conversation that you could only have with the closest people in your lives and feel comfortable doing it. I found this research by Professor Arthur Aron. I was looking at a New York Times article and I read about a woman falling in love and going to a bar, asking a guy 36 questions and they end up getting married.
I was like, “That’s pretty interesting.” She had asked him many questions in a bar? I clicked on the study and essentially what he did was he asked vulnerable questions and have complete strangers do it. Over the course of 45 minutes, what happened is 30% of the people created the closest relationship in their lives. To me, it is pretty incredible. To think that that would be possible for someone to do that. They replicated this study so many times with different people and geographies that I wondered if it would work in a group.
The first time I ended up doing it, I took his questions and got together people at a restaurant on a Saturday night and had someone else organize it. I didn’t do it. I found an acquaintance of mine and I asked them to bring people that I didn’t know on Facebook or LinkedIn. I asked the first twelve questions he had. I figured that for an hour I test it out and see what’s going to happen. After an hour, the people were sharing things that I thought it was like in a reality TV show. I’m watching these things and you think to yourself, “I can’t believe these people are sharing all these things with other people.” Some of these people knew each other, but some of these people did not. They didn’t know me at all. I wanted to leave and I said, “Thanks for showing up.” People grabbed me and I couldn’t go. I joke at people who are saying, if I ever had to go to prison, knock on wood or be arrested, I would know how it feels because I couldn’t leave. They wanted to know what the other 24 questions were.
I sat there for three hours and I went through these things. They were getting more excited as you were going along. I did this two more times to see if it was real. At that point, I realized that the magic of how you build great relationships isn’t necessarily one-on-one, it’s in groups. Through groups, the sharing is insulated and you’re protected because if you share it with anyone outside of it, all these people know. It stops you from doing it because you’ll be a pariah. You find connections with at least a couple of people who have similar experiences and emotional experiences about things when you answer the same question. That’s the key. They have to be deep questions such as, “What’s the most important lesson you learned in the last year? Tell me about the person you’d like to thank who helped you become the person you are. Tell me about your biggest blessing in disguise.” When you start to get to that with a group of people, that’s where the magic starts. You can break the trust curve and the relationship-building curve.
Also, “What is your biggest blessing in disguise?” Not your biggest blessing, but for me, what makes that question interesting is because it’s in disguise. When it’s in disguise, people can’t go to the cliché answers like, “The biggest blessing is getting married,” “My kid,” or whatever they might say. If they have to think about what is it that’s in disguise where they’re like, “Getting laid off,” it doesn’t look like a big blessing, but it turns out like it did become a blessing. I’m fascinated by this whole concept. One of the connection questions you haven’t heard, “If you could pick a year of your life to do over, what would it be and why?” I bet people have a lot to say about that.
[bctt tweet=”A big challenge among introverts is having as many conversations as extroverts. ” via=”no”]
People say it honestly. The other thing I’ll have a small percentage of people say, “I wouldn’t do anything over because I got here the way I am.”
That’s a good insight too.
You’ll see a small percentage of people that will mention and say something like that. These can be taken in many different ways with people that every group organically goes in a different direction with it. The other thing that happens too, which is pretty magical and which I didn’t realize until I started doing this in large groups is if you do it in a room with hundreds of people or you could dive in for thousands, but close to that is everyone treats everyone like they’re in their groups. The magic in a group like that is they extend it everywhere because they’re in that moment and they know everyone else did it and they want to talk to them so they treat everyone differently. There’s a complete mind shift in a group when you do this. When you look at good speakers, they do similar type things to this in the entire group. They take variations of this and that’s what they do to build more trust, rapport, likability and other things with other people and great salespeople too.
The best salespeople do this in a different form. In essence, what it does is it allows people to see how you do that at the highest level. Once you get there, like any other tool, you can modify and use it and make your own strategies and implement it the way that works for you. You can use it in a multitude of stuff where you could ask a couple of questions. You can do it in a group, use it for hiring and onboarding. Fifty thousand applications building rapport and sales engagements. I call it like a Swiss Army knife. There’s a place I start off with. At the end of the day, building trust, relationships, teamwork, communication and all these things that he does exceptionally well are the foundation points of every single thing we do in our business and personal lives.
The core to this is psychological safety that people feel they’re not going to be judged, won’t be shared out of the group if they share something confidential and you set that criteria up so everybody has an agreement on the matter.
Building Meaningful Work Relationships: Networking per se is not just the people you’re meeting, it’s the people behind them. The indirect network is really the goal and how successfully you can mine that.
You do, and there’s also a group implicit thing. I’ve gone back with people and I’ve never heard it happen. I follow up with people all the time because the group insinuates it. If you do it one-on-one and you share something, you don’t know whether you get a buy in or not and you don’t know the rest of what was said. If you’re getting 5, 6, 7 people and they’ve all heard it, you have a lot harder time explaining why you shared something in confidence. All those people will self-police because you’ll be so scared of the ramifications for doing that in a group like that. There are some cases that someone could do it somewhere, but we’re talking about the minuscule chance of all the people I’d done it and gone back and doing it right.
I’ve counted at least 25,000 people who have done this so far. I would say probably a little estimate. It’s hard for me to track everyone, but I’ve never gone back and asked for all the groups of people and speaking where it ever occurs. Physiological safety is absolutely a critical thing and people don’t understand the value of that. That’s the higher-level place where magic has gone, especially in business. That’s where the great ideas, innovations and breakthroughs start to happen. You can co-create that with other people in the group or team or organization.
In your book, Social Wealth: How to Build Extraordinary Relationships, you talk about something called your Social Wealth GPS. We all know what a GPS is in terms of getting us from point A to point B. We all know about wealth, money and building tips but you’re talking about something different here. You’re talking about social wealth. What’s a social wealth GPS we can use?
It’s your relationship capital. At the end of the day, it is about having a group of people and networking per se. It’s not only the people you’re meeting, but it’s also the people behind them. It is an indirect network. It’s the goal and how successfully you can mine that is pretty significant. It’s hard too. These are things that are a lifelong thing that you have to put in but at the end of the day, the capital that you have with other people is the most valuable form of capital in the world. They’ll do anything for you and vice versa.
When you can create those relationships that aren’t like a bank account in terms of give and take, but in terms of unlimited resources either way, that’s where you can create a massive level of social capital both professionally and personally. It’s something that once you understand how it works, you can do it successfully. The problem when engaging with people is you don’t know where you’re going to find them and you don’t know whether you’re going to find a giver, a matcher or a taker, like Adam Grant mentions, in any engagement that you have with someone. You have to operate the boundaries and know how to give without attachments. Once you start understanding a blueprint of all this stuff, it’s much easier to operate and to build those types of relationships that you ultimately want and have usually in short supply. You can have them in a significant way. You only have to understand how to do it.
[bctt tweet=”Being curious and learning is what life’s all about. ” via=”no”]
That’s one of my favorite parts about hosting this podcast. It’s the relationships I get to start and create with my guests. I’m sure you have examples and stories yourself of either being a guest on the show or having someone on your podcast and how that’s led to multiple things because you’re in a situation where you’ve got some social wealth starting where you’re saying, “How else can I help you and how else can you help me?” You’re already helping them by having them on your show or whatever. They tend to say, “Who else can I introduce you to as a guest?” or whatever it is that you need at that particular moment.
As a keynote speaker, people will often say to me, “You were great. Do you have any other speakers you can recommend?” There are all kinds of ways that people can give back to you once they have you on their radar, have a rapport with you and feel comfortable about knowing who you are and what you do to help people. They go, “This team could use the card game because you’re having some trouble with the people not getting along and I know the guy.” That’s an example of that coming to life.
This is a long-range thing when you’re building this too. The short-term opportunities is for you all the time but if you keep doing it, partly the greatness is you don’t know who you’re going to need when they need them and you don’t know what someone is going to do 5, 10 15, 20 years from now, especially in a world of social networking. For the first time in the history of doing anything, you can track people because before, you could never do that unless you kept in touch with them. You would never know. If you lived in San Francisco and someone lived in New York City, how would you keep track of them? Before the advent of social, you couldn’t.
Networking, business relationships, and relationships in general, we’re entering a new phase where having a lot of them is more important because you’re going to ebb and flow in your life. You will have something that’s at least somewhat of a warm lead or relationships or at least it’s not completely cold like an introduction where you don’t know anyone. There are a lot of things I don’t think we don’t fully understand because we haven’t gone through a full cycle of someone’s life where they’ve had access to this from start to finish or at least from early adulthood onwards.
Social Wealth: How to Build Extraordinary Relationships By Transforming the Way We Live, Love, Lead and Network
Before I let you go, I want to ask you about your comment that curiosity is a requirement for long-term success and not short-term success. Can you give us the story around that?
One of the things I found in life is when you’re curious, you start asking questions. One of the things I saw was when I was speaking at a huge HR conference for the State of Maryland, one of the guests there was Buck Showalter who used to be the manager for the Baltimore Orioles when they were better. One of the things that he said that helped him manage, be successful, stay in Major League Baseball and do the things he did was he kept asking questions from people. He was curious on how things had to work.
When he went to Baltimore as a manager and the team wasn’t doing well, he brought them into the corporate office and showed them the ticket sales, walked in and said, “Everything that you do is connected. These people have to eat and feed their families. The phones aren’t ringing. If you don’t play on the field well and when you don’t care, look what happens to this as an entity. You have a responsibility to think bigger.” That’s because he got curious and he always talked about how he asked questions to other people in his managers, leaders and team before he jumped to a lot of conclusions.
When he was going to go recruit baseball players, he would go and meet their parents, their family and ask questions to other people about their character and other things even before the baseball questions came along. He said, “Today’s world of people is obsessed with analytics and everything else.” The difference isn’t there anymore. The difference is in the people, relationships and getting the most out of them and being curious. That’s something that can serve us all well. It’s consistently be curious and learn because that’s what life is all about.
What a great way to end. Jason, let people know how they can find you and your wonderful game card.
You can go on a website. It’s JasonTreu.com. You can get the cards at CardsAgainstMundanity.com and my books on Amazon and through the website. Coaching, teamwork, team building services and other things are on the website too.
You’ve inspired us to figure out new questions to ask and new ways to stay curious.
Thanks.
Important Links
- Jason Treu
- How to Get Coworkers to Like Each Other – Jason’s TEDx Talk
- Social Wealth
- Cards Against Mundanity
- Executive Breakthroughs – Jason’s Podcast
- TEDx Talk – John Livesay TEDx Talk
- Rock Bottom to Revenue Rockstar – John Livesay Article
- New York Times – Article
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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