Raise Your Resiliency With Kris Coleman
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No matter what field or industry you’re in, it’s always a good thing to raise your resiliency in order to achieve your goals. In this episode, the founder, President, and CEO of Red Five Security, Kris Coleman, shares some of the skillsets he’s gained in his time with the CIA that will improve your understanding of what it means to be resilient. Learn how he defines critical thinking and how to translate it into your business through communication. Know the importance of building trust, not only with those people you work with but your clients as well. He also talks about the ripple effect that you can originate from you towards the people around you when you decide to be a resilient and self-sufficient individual. In addition, learn how you can train yourself to be resilient if you believe you’re not quite there yet.
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Listen to the podcast here
Raise Your Resiliency With Kris Coleman
Our guest is Kris Coleman, who’s worked for both the FBI and the CIA and has a wonderful book out called Raise Your Resiliency. He talks about how important it is for us each to be responsible for our own resilience and about getting off the X. More importantly, how critical thinking includes empathy. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Kris Coleman, who founded Red Five Security back in 2004 to provide world-class state-of-the-art security and protective intelligence services. He continues to use his knowledge, experience and integrity to grow Red Five into a multifaceted company that focused on bespoke security solutions for unique clientele. He’s also the author of Raise Your Resiliency. Kris has worked in both the private and the public sectors throughout his many-year career and served with the Central Intelligence Agency, the FBI, and is a former principal with Good Harbor Consulting. His depth and range of experiences allow the Red Five team to specialize in high-quality, proactive and discreet security services. Kris, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. It’s a pleasure to be here.
You’ve worked with both the FBI and the CIA. What a fascinating background that is because after 9/11, a lot of people think those two agencies aren’t known for communicating well-enough, let alone sharing staff or having one career lead to the other. That’s something I want to explore. Before we get into that, let’s let you decide where to tell your own story of origin, where you as a child, growing up and you saw an FBI TV show or a movie or a CIA thing and said, “That’s for me.” How did you get into this world?
I had many different majors in my college career. I was undecided, but I was a great fan of different works by Tom Clancy and other writers that were that whole international entry. I’m looking for a job. I’m trying to figure out what I am doing with my life in college. I went to a career fair. There was a CIA that day. They were like, “We’re looking for people that can be trained, that can think critically, and apply their skills to National Security.” I’m like, “What could go wrong? Let’s go.” I signed up, and they were happy to train me and give me some amazing experiences from the training perspective. That was how we got started. I was trained to do a whole lot of things, as you can imagine. I did a lot of time overseas with that particular organization.
Is there a myth that a lot of people have about what happens at the CIA and/or the FBI that you would like to bust?
It’s not everything that you see on TV and in the movies. I got paid to travel the world and see some amazing things, work with amazing cultures, very diverse experience, and then carry out some of the best work in my career in trying to protect this country in a proactive way. I can’t say enough about my coworkers and my colleagues at both those organizations, CIA and FBI. The dedication, sacrifice, and evidence is in the memorials and it’s in the successes that they’ve had. Both those that are publicized and those that are not. That’s my shout-out to those organizations.
I know you were a member of the FBI Enhanced SWAT team, as well as when you were at the CIA, you were a senior instructor and a team leader. My question is that experience has got to help you with what you’re doing at Red Five. Both in terms of figuring out who’s a good fit for your company and the training that’s required because you touched on that in your story of origin there about, “We’re looking for people who have critical thinking.” That leads to the obvious question for me, which is how do you define what critical thinking is? Everyone has their own version of it. I would love to know yours with your incredible background, being trained in it as well as now using it for your clients.
Raise Your Resiliency: You, Your Family and Your Business Can Achieve Resiliency in an Uncertain World
Both organizations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to train new employees that are new special agents or new intelligence officers. A lot of that, as we said, is about critical thinking. It understands the psychology of who you’re talking to. It’s being able to empathize with who you’re talking to. When you are an active listener, whether you’re interviewing a potential criminal or you’re investigating a crime or talking to a victim, or perhaps trying to understand someone in an overseas country that may want to work for the US government and for the US government’s interest, you need to understand who they are, where they come from, what their motivations are. When you hear them talk, pick apart what they’re saying to you. Get every little bit and piece of the meaning and the nuance out of the conversation.
Whether you’re reading a piece or doing an interview or talking to someone, critically taking it apart and understanding its totality of what’s being said to you, what’s being communicated is important. We do that when we do our deliverables to our clients. We make sure that those things are very clearly articulated. We mean what we say, and we say what we mean and what we write. We can back it up. It’s not just, “When we went to this place, we saw these things, and we wrote these things down.” It’s like, “This is what this means, and this is why it matters.” That’s important. A lot of our products are like that, “This is what it means. This is why you need to listen to us.”
You’re connecting the dots, you’re not just reporting on facts. You’re putting it through the lens of, “Here’s why we recommend doing this or not doing that because of our in-depth understanding and ability to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes.” This concept that critical thinking includes empathy is fascinating to me. I don’t hear a lot of people saying that. Empathy, storytelling, listening have been labeled sometimes as soft skills. Soft skills can make you strong. It sounds like that’s the direction that you’re also leading that when you have empathy, and you’re this example, that allows you to make those hard skills choices of taking action or not. Whether you can trust someone or not. Can you speak a little bit about how someone can build trust? What’s your red flag when you don’t decide not to trust somebody?
We were trained to look at a whole variety of things when we were talking to people, whether it was interviewing or eliciting information from a foreign source or whatever it might be. There’s a whole element of reading body language, eye contact. Are they leaning forward? Are they speaking in an active voice? Are they hanging back? Are they defensive by turning away? There’s a whole variety of things, eye movement. You’re taking all that in but depending on what your objective is, as the listener, are you trying to help them? Are you trying to recruit them to work for us? Are you trying to get them to confess? Whatever your objectives are of the conversation matter. You need to go into the conversation, knowing what you’re trying to achieve.
In normal daily life, you may not have an objective just to sit down and talk to a friend or to grab a coffee, but in a professional environment, knowing what your objective is and then using empathy to communicate non-verbally as well as verbally with the other person is important. If you want them to work for you, give you information, and collaborate, then that empathy has got to be there. “I understand your current situation.” “No. You need money or you need medical help or whatever it is you need.” In showing that verbally or non-verbally, they’re going to be more likely to collaborate with you, whether they’re a victim, an interview on a witness, or whatever it might be.
One of the services that you offer at Red Five is Private Family and Family Office Security. That’s certainly been in the news with William and Meghan talking about their own security. One of the things that resonated with me was it’s about trust, not about wealth, and that it’s about the mindset. However, you have a whole thing called Measured Risk Management. Can you explain what that is and why it’s important?
We’ve done a lot of work with private families. Since the inception of Red Five many years ago, we’ve been working with high net worth and families that consider themselves more private than others. Discretion is a huge piece of that. We trade and trust. That’s our currency. Our discretion, where we came from in those two organizations. How we know how to keep things quiet and be discreet is important. When you talk about trust, it’s not selling them things they don’t need. There was a big piece of that. There’s a lot of families that have this, “Are you going to give me the Smith family special price?” Which means they’re going to gouge me because I’m wealthy. The reality is we never do that.
[bctt tweet=”Critical thinking includes empathy.” username=”John_Livesay”]
We come in and say, “I know you approached us with an emotionally charged problem. This was happening in the family, or this happened to the state that we were in or while we were traveling, but it’s not my place to take advantage of that. It’s my place to solve the problem.” I will approach it in a way that says, “I hear you. I understand this is a problem. Let me provide you some solutions. What you’re telling me I should do as your vendor, as your partner may not be what you need,” that emotional, “I need a protective detail. I need ten people to protect my family.” You may not need that. It was my job to come in level-headed, take a look holistically at the situation, and give you a measured risk management response. You’re not paying for stuff you don’t need. I’m not taking advantage of the situation. I would never do that.
The approach may be that you’re wildly off in the emotional state of the solution you think you needed. You need me and my team to come in and go, “Here’s a measured risk management approach. We’re going to do A, B and C.” It’s not about men and women, earpieces, sunglasses, and suits standing around a black Suburban or a black Escalade. It is about us changing the process of how your domestic staff walks into the house or how you set up your travel arrangements so that people don’t know that you’re traveling. There are many things we can do that are below the radar in a relatively inexpensive that could raise the security of a private family. That Measured Risk Management approach is a big part of us, building that trust, then I’ll be displaying competence and delivering excellence.
It totally leads right into your expertise on resiliency, which can include safe rooms. I see that sometimes on shows and movies, but that part is real from what I can see on your website that certain families and situations do require a safe room. In a way, I never thought of it as a resilient thing, but it’s a backup. Ithas other options. For example, being here in Austin, when the power and the water went out, the airport closed, the roads were icy, didn’t have stuff going on, and the grocery stores were closed, you had a firsthand experience of, “There’s not a lot of resiliency. I can’t zig or zag here. The heat is up, there’s no water, there’s nowhere to go. I can’t fix this with money.” There are many situations of the need for resiliency over and above the pandemic that everyone is taking a look at a whole new way of looking at it. That’s your expertise, isn’t it? It’s analyzing what could go wrong so that there is something that you never find yourself in this situation that so many of us were in Texas when all that happened.
To talk about safe rooms, you’ve seen them in Hollywood movies. It’s this seven-figure, very expensive, extremely elaborate high-tech room that people run to when things go bad and it doesn’t have to be that. We operated in environments overseas where it’s going to be a closet that we throw a bunch of sandbags in on the lower level floor of a building in Bosnia during the war. We’re going to set up defensive positions, and that’s going to be the safe room. In Africa, we used to set up a whole floor of a house. It would be on the upper-level floor. We would have multiple layers of protection, a strong front door, in the hallway, at the top of the stairs, and at the bedroom.
We’re building into that detection element. Is there a problem than a delay element to slowing down, trying to get in the house? You have to get into this concept of neutralization of the threat. Ideally, by the time they’re getting to that 2nd and 3rd layer of the cavalry, it is coming over the hill and they’re going to save the day. Same thing with wealthy families. Not even the wealthy families and private homes in the US. We’re seeing questions and people are coming to us and saying, “We need a safe room because of the riots or because of some of the uncertainty in our neighborhoods.” That doesn’t have to be a million-dollar room. We can talk about simple upgrades to make that a safe room.
People don’t want to sell you that because it’s not expensive and not a big price tag, but it goes back to measured risk management. We’re going to build you what you need. To speak to Austin in the winter polar vortex for easy guys went through. I had a number of examples come in from my colleagues. They were like, “I am making sure my well though that it doesn’t freeze. I am boiling snow. I am working through two different generators to power the house to keep the well warm, keep the TV on, lights on, the refrigerator.” People were taking food out of the freezer and putting it in the front yard because it’s colder outside than it is in the freezer. There are smart things about that. It’s food, water, shelter and self-defense. We start there and make sure that all those things are taken care of by the family.
What that experience taught Texas and should have taught the rest of the country is that our electrical grid is very fragile, also our infrastructure and supply chain. We built all these things so they are efficient. You only get what you need right when you need it. You hit the button and it shows up at the front door. The reality is those networks and those supply chains are extremely fragile because they are at the last minute. They are built that way on purpose. What we need people to do when we talk about this in the book is if each individual family and each individual thought of themselves as resilient self-sufficient, the whole nation becomes more self-sufficient and more resilient. It’s a National Security thing if you ask me. The more families are resilient, then the more resilient we are going to be as a country. We’re looking at hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires in the West, all those things drive resiliency. We need to be more aware and become more resilient.
Raise Your Resiliency: The individual is the cornerstone of resilience. As an individual, you have to decide to be resilient and learn to be if you’re not.
You talk about it’s time to get real in the book, Raise Your Resiliency. A lot of people is like an ostrich that we bury our head in the sand, “Let me know when this pandemic is over. Let me know when this crisis is over. I don’t want to ever pretend that there’s never going to be an earthquake in California again.” What I like about what you wrote here is it’s not just the business. It’s you and your family. Everything is connected. This virtual experience we’ve all been through, we used to be one person at work and another person at home.
Now, all that’s completely changed. We’re like, “This is who I am. This is me at home. This is me working.” Those lines have blurred, which increases the need for a book like this. We talked before the show that this cover is fantastic about somebody on the edge of a mountain and holding their hands out. It reminds me a little bit of our mutual friend, Alison Levine, who climbed Mount Everest, talk about resiliency and a mindset. How did you and your publisher decide on that image in that cover?
The premise of the book is that the individual is the cornerstone of resilience. If you, as an individual, decide you’re going to be resilient, and you can learn to be, if you’re not. That’s a key part of the book, but then if you’ve made the decision to be that, that means that those around you will have a chance to benefit from that. If you have a family, then you will then be that cornerstone for the family and the family is going to be resilient. If you’re an entrepreneur or a founder, or you work in an organization that is open to that, you can then be a key element of resiliency in that company or your own company, or perhaps, in a corporation. It could be a nonprofit as well. There’s an element there of the individual achieving resilience.
Getting to the top of that mountain and knowing that we’re going to get knocked back down. We’re not always going to be at the top. There will be people in adversaries and things that we refer to as the jackal that always tries to knock us down. It might be an illness, a divorce, a natural disaster, or a career setback, but regardless of the jackal coming at you, you’re going to make it back to the top. That is the whole core of adversity. The real deal of resiliency and is that you’re bouncing back from adversity. Whatever knocks you down, you get right back to the top of the mountain.
The speed at which you get back up is crucial. From other people I’ve interviewed about salespeople getting a rejection, for example, some people shake it off and move on. Some people keep holding onto that. The ability to get back up fast is like any other skill that we can practice. How important that is to model that for people in our world, whether it’s our family or our coworkers, is to not let something that’s knocked us down keep us down. Is that a good definition of resilience?
Yes. What we talked about is the mindset in the book. It’s one of the five pillars. The mindset is that there are no doomsday thinking. There is no catastrophic thinking like, “I didn’t get picked for the job because I’m this or that. I wasn’t as good as this person. I wish I had done these things.” The reality is it’s all about a positive growth mindset. When you have a setback, it’s like, “I’m going to learn from that. I’m going to turn right around, pick myself up, and get back up there.” That is an important piece. That was drilled into the US at the CIA and FBI. You’re going to have a bad day. You’re going to be confronted on the street.
You’re going to be attacked perhaps by terrorists, whatever’s going to happen to you. You’ve got to mentally be prepared to fight through the gunfight, to fight through the attack that you’re going to experience. We always talked about, “Get off the X. Something bad is going to happen.” Don’t sit still and let it happen. It’s much like a career setback. “Don’t just sit there and let it happen. Change direction, get off the X. If you’re moving forward, stop. If you’re sitting still, move forward, turn left, turn right.” The point is get away from that adversarial environment and move forward through the problem. That is the important key to resiliency.
[bctt tweet=”Get off the X. Get away from the adversarial environment and move forward through the problem. That’s an important piece of resiliency.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I literally experienced when the power went out here. I had a friend’s son visiting me. Suddenly, my responsibility for what I do is not just on what I’m going to do for myself and my choices that I would make for myself. I said, “Your mom will be mad at me if something happens to you while you’re here.” A friend of mine had called and said, “We have electricity. We’re about 12 miles away. If you can get here on these icy bridges, you can stay here. You can bring your dog and your friend. The house is big enough.” Thank goodness for all of that. It reminded me of that moment in the movie where you see people leaving their car in a storm. You’re like, “Should they leave the car?” I’m like, “Technically, we’re safe here in this place, but it’s getting down to 40 degrees inside.”
We decided to get off the X. We’re going to take the risk and drive without snow or icy roads. We saw some cars in the ditches. A truck went by and threw a bunch of snow on our windshield. It was not an easy, fun, 12-mile drive by any stretch of the meat. We are 20% of the way there. I’m like, “That’s all? It seemed like forever.” It was the right choice to make. You would rethink that if you were in the ditch and how long it would take somebody to come get you was a whole other choice. Do you have water in the car? That fight or flight response that you’ve been trained to not have, which is we are deer in headlights, and you freeze. This is a calculated risk, but the reward is worth it. That’s what I think you say about this get off the X.
That’s one of the things we talked about in the book is you shelter in place. What would you have done? Had you stayed, or did you evacuate to a place that appears to be, and by all reports, is safer? You’re making that judgment decision, “I’m safer here. I have a shelter. I have a defense. I have food. I don’t know how long the power will last or how long it will stay warm.” At some point, you may make the decision that it’s safer to take the risk, to travel to point B instead of point A. We talk about what you should have in your vehicle and what you should have at home, then what should be at the other location. If the other locations are predetermined safe place or location, we call like a bug-out location.
You’ve got a bug-out from where you are to get to where you want to be. What supplies are there? What have you already pre-positioned in that other location? Ideally, if they’re saying, “Come to our location.” They’ve got enough water, beds, power, food, and they are in a safe location. Now you’re making a judgment call that a travel element where you are now exposed to other things that you weren’t exposed that when you were at home is a smart choice. Those conditions will be different. Whether it’s a winter storm, a terrorist attack, an earthquake, a wildfire, the conditions will change.
That’s another one of the pillars is awareness. You have to be aware of what’s going on around you. It may not be that Facebook Feed that’s giving you the best information. You may need to turn to an actual news source that’s trusted and then use that or call someone, which we like is get information on the ground in that other location so that someone is telling you firsthand, “I saw this. This is the situation here where we are.” That awareness piece is another key pillar that we talk about in the book to resiliency.
There are five pillars that are in this wonderful book, Raise Your Resiliency: real awareness, real mindset, real fitness, real skills and real relationships. The one that we haven’t touched on that I think might surprise some people is fitness is an attribute of resiliency. I’m not probably ever going to have to fight somebody. We’re talking about stress. Fitness can include a meditation practice, anything to help you not “freak out,” stay calm, and not panic. That’s what your training has done. That’s what this book can help us become a roadmap so that we can not only raise our own resiliency but those around us.
Fitness, emotional, mental, physical. It’s not how much weight you can lift or how many miles you can run. It’s about your flexibility, endurance, whether or not you’re emotionally mature. Are you professionally mature enough to deal with what’s going on around you? That’s a big piece of this fitness. We talk about it when we get into the biophysical elements of stress. If you have poor physical fitness and/or emotional fitness and more poor mental fitness when that stressor hits, your body performance drops, and it usually drops below what we call the hard deck. That’s when you talk about deer in headlights. When you drop below that hard deck, your body dumps a lot of adrenaline in the system, and you typically lockdown. You are now the deer in headlights, and you can’t move.
Raise Your Resiliency: If you’re not resilient, then seek out scenario-based training experiences. Create muscle memory to do good things regularly and have it be an innate part of who you are.
You’re going to go to some level of paralysis. It’s more of an adrenaline lockdown. That’s when people, unfortunately, bad things happen to them. They died in place when things happened because they just froze. If you’ve got that fitness level tool to a higher plateau, where when that stressor does, you don’t drop below. You might go below but you come back quick or you drop down, you’re close, and you may be stressed, but you’re not freezing up. That’s where we were lucky to be fitness-wise. Mentally, emotionally, and physically, don’t drop a low hard deck. Keep your wits about you, and then move to the problem. Get off the X.
Your book and your company, Red Five Security, have never been more needed than they are now. I’m grateful that you and your team are out there helping us all. I highly recommend the book Raise Your Resiliency. Any last thoughts or tips that you want to leave us with?
What we talked about with people is that it can be a learned experience. If you’re not resilient now, if you’re not self-sufficient, you don’t see yourself as ready or prepared in your business, then seek out scenario-based training, experiences like we offer because you can read it in a book. You can do it a single time at a shooting range, but those aren’t training. Those aren’t experiences. Those are one-time things that you did that don’t embed and create muscle memory to do good things regularly and have it be an innate part of who you are. We want resilience to be learned, people to get experiences, then they’re immersed in the environment. They can learn from them and repeat the solutions, so the next time when it hits, they’re ready to go. That’s the ideal path or someone looking to be resilient.
My TEDx Talk is called Be The Lifeguard of Your Own Life. That’s what you’re preaching. Thanks so much, Kris. Thanks for being who you are in the world and for this wonderful book.
Thank you very much for having me.
Important Links
- Kris Coleman
- Raise Your Resiliency
- Red Five Security
- Be The Lifeguard of Your Own Life
- Private Family and Family Office Security
- Measured Risk Management
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Trustworthy: How The Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism With Margot Bloomstein
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
With competition getting tougher by the day, how can you make your brand stand out in the market? John Livesay has the perfect guest who can tell you which brands are doing it right and which ones are doing it wrong. He sits down with the creator of BrandSort, Margot Bloomstein. Bringing her book, Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap, she highlights the importance of regaining the trust of cynical consumers through empathy and authenticity. While having the ability to understand and share the feelings of your customers is key, understanding yourself should come first. Margot then dives into the importance of knowing who you are as a company and brand so you can be in a better position to engage with audiences.
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Listen to the podcast here
Trustworthy: How The Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism With Margot Bloomstein
Our guest is Margot Bloomstein, the author of Trustworthy. We get into conversations about which brands are doing it right, and which ones are doing it wrong, and why trust is so important as well as an interesting conversation around empathy. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Margot Bloomstein, who is one of the leading voices in the content strategy industry. She’s the author of Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap and Content Strategy, with real world stories to strengthen every interactive project, as well as being the Principal of Appropriate, Inc., which is a brand and content strategy consultancy based in Boston. She’s a speaker and a strategic advisor. She works with marketing teams, leading organizations for the last several years. She’s the Creator of BrandSort where she developed the popular message, architecture-driven approach to content strategy. She teaches the content strategy graduate program at FH University in Austria, and lectures around the world about brand driven content strategy. Welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. I’m delighted to be here.
I always like to ask my guests their own story of origin. You can go back to childhood, school. Where did you get interested in this concept of trust and content and all that good stuff?
I’ve been working in the content strategy industry for many years, and over that time, I’ve had the opportunity to work with organizations in a pretty broad variety of industries in healthcare, retail and financial services. The common thread that I always see between all of them is this interest in meeting unsolved problems and identifying the problems for their audiences and their customers, and then figuring out how to combine what they offer with what their audiences need. My background before content strategy was in design focused on problem solving. That’s where my interest has remained over time. Our problems and our client’s problems have become more and more complex, but still, some of the tools that we use to meet them around establishing personal relationships and trading and empathy and compassion to meet their needs, those things haven’t changed.
[bctt tweet=”What responsibility do businesses have to care about trust? Why do trust and credibility seem like they’re under attack?” username=”John_Livesay”]
I am all about empathy. I’m always telling audiences when I’m in front of them about the importance of putting on your empathy hat, and the better you can describe a problem, the better people think you have your solution. What are you seeing in your work around empathy?
It’s interesting because in design, in content strategy, in the web industry and how we make the modern web, empathy has become almost like a buzzword in our industry. We talk about empathy and authenticity and transparency, a lot of marketing departments throw around those terms. Over the past several years as we’ve seen different social issues and different social movements come more and more to the forefront. Businesses are trying to figure out how they fit into them if they should comment on them at all. Empathy has become more and more of the latch word. I want to push back on that and say that sometimes empathy demands a level of arrogance of saying that “I can understand exactly your needs, even if I don’t have your life experience.” What we’re realizing more and more is that empathy maybe is a big ask for a lot of organizations, but let’s start with compassion and respect for our audiences first.
How did you come up with the name of your book, Trustworthy?
As I was looking at this problem of trust and seeing how cynicism and gaslighting were undermining the marketing and sales cycles in so many industries, I was starting to notice the brands that were doing it right, that were rising above and saying, “We can still combat cynicism. We can still establish rapport with our audiences. We can still build trust.” I want it to look and see what were the brands that were doing it right, and then figure out why, what can we learn from them, what can we unpack. In Trustworthy, a lot of what I profile are the organizations, brands, campaigns that are doing it right. It’s easy for us to find bad examples of organizations that are destroying trust and we can pile on them, but we don’t necessarily learn from them either.
Smart Brands: Empathy is a big ask for a lot of organizations. Start with compassion and respect for your audiences first.
What’s an example of one that you like?
They’re all my favorites in the book, but one of the ones that keep it much where we all are now is Zoom. When we look at how they’ve faced different challenges over the past several years, it’s a model in how you build trust. Starting back in probably December of 2019, they were seeing maybe 10 million daily users, 10 million daily business users. It’s mostly people coming from within businesses, within marketing departments, having meetings that were all supported by IT teams that were teaching them how to follow security protocols and set passwords. Within a few months, that all changed. Now they have something like 90 million daily users. People are using it that don’t have the support of an IT team. Every schoolteacher or preschool teacher, everyone that wants to get together with a happy hour with their friends over Zoom or celebrate a holiday with family over Zoom.
They’re not doing it with the support of an IT team. That’s when we saw the rise of Zoom bombers pretty early on in the pandemic and all sorts of problems around that. Zoom could have responded by saying, “You’re seeing problems because you’re using it wrong.” They didn’t. Instead, last April 2020, the CEO wrote this open blog post that came out as an apology to say, “You’re having problems with this? That’s our problem. That’s our fault. Thank you for noticing some of these security issues. We appreciate our critics calling out these problems. Here’s what we’re going to do about it.”
He phrased it first in the first-person singular saying, “I’m sorry,” and pivoted to that plural saying, “Here’s what we’re going to do about it.” Calling out his team and giving them credit. He proceeded to say, “Here’s what you can expect to see as far as changes from us. Here’s how we’re going to shift a lot of our engineering resources to support improving security and privacy. We’re going to submit to third-party audits. You can expect to hear from me at this frequency.” He was accountable. That way of building trust when he was at such a point of vulnerability, when the company was at such a point of vulnerability and in the public eye to say, “We’re sorry. Here’s how you can hold us accountable and here’s why things are going to improve from here.” That’s a model in building trust.
[bctt tweet=”Know what your organization is, who you are, and how you are so you don’t lose yourself when engaging with the rest of the marketplace.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The concept of building trust also comes into play for those companies that are trying to win back customers they’ve lost for whatever reason. I was working with one and they had said they didn’t make some deadlines. They were then let go for a year, then they had an opportunity to come back in and convince them to work with them again. I said, “What are you going to say?” They said, “We have all this research we’re going to share on how things have changed.” I was like, “You need to own that you caused the problem, even if it was other vendors and even if it’s the new team, you still have to own it.” What you said is so valuable. That’s why I want to underline it. You have to say, “Here’s what we’re doing to make sure this never happens again.” If you don’t have those systems in place, don’t even bother taking the meeting.
It sounds like you’re describing where a client was saying, “Here’s our new research. Here’s how things have changed maybe in the industry.” When you need to apologize, when you need to demonstrate accountability and show how you are responsible and ethical as a company, it isn’t about pointing to external research. You need to point the mirror back on yourselves and say, “Here’s what we’re doing. Here’s how we are changing.”
Texas was out of electricity and water. People want answers and they want to know what are you doing to make sure this never happens again? It’s not just a business thing. It’s a personal thing. It’s a political governing thing. This concept of trust is in the news.
Texas is a wonderful example. I had the opportunity to speak with someone in their Department of Public Works because I saw him tweeting in a personal way. It was a thread where he was saying, “Yes, this is a problem. I want you to know what I’m experiencing too in this leadership position. Here’s what went wrong. Here’s why we think we’re experiencing this problem. Yes, I am experiencing it too. Customer, as well as a leader here. Here’s what we’re going to do to make sure that hopefully we can right this ship now so that we don’t have this problem in the future.” I reached out to him because I said, “That’s wonderful.” I would love to see that level of discourse and detail and vulnerability as well as voice speaking in a way that your audience can understand. I’d love to see that from more public officials. We can learn from that. That’s what I would love to see moving forward.
Smart Brands: When you need to apologize, demonstrate accountability, and show how you are responsible and ethical as a company. It isn’t about pointing to external research; you point the mirror back on yourself.
You brought up something that if you can explain someone’s problem or their pain points, because you’ve experienced it yourself, your trustworthy factor goes up big time because you’ve been in their shoes. You also talked about that we should double down on qualities that we find that make us unique if we want to increase our social media engagement. The first question I’m thinking our readers will have is, what’s the quality that makes me unique? Let’s start there. How do we even find that?
As you mentioned, a lot of my focus within content strategy has been around brand-driven content strategy, looking at how organizations do identify, what makes them unique so that they can establish that consistent, cohesive, persistent tone of voice. When an organization does that, it does a few things. This is digging into ancient history, but that idea of gnothi seauton. It was carved over the door of the temple in Delphi. Ancient Greece, they said, “First, gnothi seauton.” Know thy self. Before you engage with anybody else, know who you are. In modern branding and modern marketing, we need to embrace that idea, know what your organization is, know who you are and how you are so that you don’t lose yourself when you’re trying to engage with the rest of the marketplace and prospective customers, prospective clients.
That idea of first figuring out who you are, that’s what I dig into around message architecture. A message architecture is simply a hierarchy of communication goals. I developed a tool called BrandSort to help organizations figure out is it more important for us to project that we’re innovative or traditional? We’re maybe witty and polished or scrappier and more creative, because knowing that can then help you determine which platforms should you be using. Where should you be investing your time? What’s the right tone of voice as well as then visually and verbally?
What’s the right look and feel and the color scheme and the style of imagery that projects those qualities? When organizations can first prioritize understanding themselves, then they’re in a better position to engage their audiences, as well as then differentiate better from their competition. I would argue it is a service that we offer our users, our audiences. It’s a service that we provide in saying, “It’s a crowded marketplace. If everybody’s competing with similar products, here’s how we’re different. Here’s how that we aligned with what.”
[bctt tweet=”When organizations can first prioritize understanding themselves, then they’re in a better position to engage their audiences.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Do you have a story from your book of a brand that does that well?
It’s one of the first examples that I have in the book. Writing this book was such a wonderful opportunity to talk with lots of different brands, hear their stories and gather up those examples because we all love the stories. It’s always good to get new stories from brands. One of the first organizations that I spoke with was Mailchimp, because in marketing, small business owners know them well. When Mailchimp first started out, they were a small business serving other small businesses. They’ve grown tremendously over time. Something like 60% of the world’s email marketing now goes through Mailchimp. As they’ve grown over time, they’ve offered new services. They’ve rolled out new offerings to their audience. That was always with a little bit of risk, because for their legacy customers, there’s always that concern of like, “Are you going to forget about me as you’re rolling out new eCommerce offerings? Are you going to forget about what I need and stop servicing basic email marketing customers?”
They’ve made choices to, first, solidify and codify what their brand means and how they manifest their brand. Their voice and tone guidelines are a model in the industry, and they’ve published them publicly so that other organizations can also see the level of detail that they document in them. Their design system, as well, is becoming more and more codified so that their content creators internally know where the guardrails are and then how to be creative within them. It helps them become more efficient and more effective. It also ensures that all their communication is more consistent. It’s serving their different audiences as well, because as they’ve grown over time, they’ve realized that there are parts of their brand that don’t scale or don’t make sense anymore.
It used to be that you would hear error messaging and calls to action in the voice of Freddie, their Mailchimp monkey, their little mascot. You don’t get error messaging from a monkey anymore though, but they have maintained other aspects of their brands, still the same sunny yellow, a lot of the tone of voice is still similar and it’s still consistent. They’ve varied other things around their illustration style, some of their phrasing. They’ve also varied it depending on the different audiences they’re trying to reach. Their guidelines document all of that, both to make things easier for their internal users, their copywriters and any freelancers that they might engage, as well as then their external audience. They know who they are, and they know how they’ve had to change over time to maintain visibility, a familiar face as well as then reassure their audience that, “Yes, we’re still Mailchimp, still the organization you’ve known and trusted for years. You can still make sure and feel confident that you know who we are and how we are and where we’re going.”
Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap
You bring up a good point about the need to be evolutionary instead of revolutionary as you’re growing your business. If you’ve made your core customers feel they’re not seen and heard or appreciated trying to go after bigger ones, you can trip yourself up there.
Moreover, those customers need to feel both that they’re still important and that they still matter, but also that they know where you’re going. It can be as simple as strategically sharing your roadmap to build that buzz, but also so that people feel confident that, “This is a company I’ve known for a long time, and I know where they’re going in the future.” Also, by giving them hooks of familiarity so that you’re not relaunching your brand right now, you’re still maintaining elements of it that helps to maintain their confidence in themselves that they still know this brand. They feel like they can still trust this brand, that they made a good decision in going with this brand and investing with it. That’s especially important right now because there is so much upheaval in our world and in our economy. For organizations that say now is the time to relaunch, now is the time to completely overhaul our website, when I hear that, I shudder and my head and say, “No, now is not the time for revolution.” It’s more about evolution. Your audience needs to feel they still know you. If you can offer them that level of comfort and confidence in you and in themselves, that’s helping to ground them in a time that is so otherwise unsettled.
In your book, Trustworthy, you have a three-piece action plan. Can you give us the highlights of what that is?
The framework that I present in Trustworthy, it focuses on three parts, voice, volume and vulnerability. I present this as a framework for anybody that’s in professional communication. Designers, the CMO, copywriters, content strategists. If you’re the small business owner and you’re wearing all of those hats, great, this is something that you can take on. To build trust, you need to focus on those three areas. Voice, we’ve been talking about that a lot. Voice refers to the familiar and consistent way in which a brand engages with the world visually and verbally, so word, choice, the overall look and feel of the organization, the different content types you use across different platforms. That’s your voice. That’s what Mailchimp does so well. Some of the other examples I share like Banana Republic, the early days of that, they did so well.
[bctt tweet=”Be evolutionary instead of revolutionary.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The second section, volume, that refers to the volume of information that you’re publishing. The length and level of detail that you go into, in blog posts, in long form copy, if you’re deciding between long form copy and bulleted lists, as well as then, visually. Are you using images that maybe have a great level of detail in them, or are more streamlined to project the sense of simplicity? Do you have images that are maybe in 1 of 50 in a photo gallery or are things more streamlined so that people can get the gist more quickly? For some organizations, they feel like in order to build trust, they need to publish a lot. They need to have a lot of content marketing. That makes sense for some organizations. I profile in the book, Crutchfield Electronics, in order for their audience to feel good about a purchase, maybe it’s high-end audio equipment or camera equipment, they spend a lot of time on the site.
If you look at the pages on that site, they’re long. There’s a lot of different types of content there. You can make sure that you understand a product fully by the time you’re ready to buy because that’s what’s right for their audience. They know that it’s right. They can measure the success of that in the rate of product returns. They’re low because when people are finally ready to make that decision, they can make a decision with confidence. That’s how you know you’ve got enough content, when people can make good decisions and feel good about the decisions they make.
The third section, vulnerability, that focuses is, we were talking about on how organizations maybe prototype in public, come back from a big mistake, take that risk to say, “Do we double down on what we did that was maybe stupid? Maybe the CEO did something wrong or do we seize this opportunity to say we messed up. Here’s how we’re going to own it and here’s how we’re going to make sure it never happens again. Help us in this process, watch how we’re improving, keep giving us feedback.” It’s a tremendous opportunity to bring your audience closer.
The other way that I look at vulnerability in the book is also around how organizations make their values visible. One of the organizations that I profile there is Penzeys Spices. They’re a spice retail chain based in the Midwest. They’ve been bold talking about their politics, why they support immigration, why they oppose some of the other big intractable social problems that we’re facing now and their stance on it. When they first took to social media, sharing their politics, people pushed back. People said, “Stay in your lane there, spice boy. Why are you sharing this?” It was largely the CEO sharing his personal politics. He was pretty upfront about it. He said, “This is our lane. Not only are we a business that sees itself as part of a community, therefore issues in the community are important to us, but also the stuff that we trade in, spices, they come from war torn regions. Furthermore, cooking as an act of love, that’s not just our tagline. We believe that. Many of the recipes that we all love come here on the backs of immigrants. This is much our lane.” It was risky for him to take that position, but when organizations share their values in such a visible way, what usually happens is that people don’t look away. They respond loudly and they got a lot of headlines for that. They lost a lot of customers.
They expanded their audience. They gained a lot of customers, and they weren’t just people that were interested in cooking, they were people that said, “Your values align with my values. This is where I’m shopping next Christmas to get presents for my family. The people that I know that do cook, this is where I’m going to buy presents for them.” They saw something like 50% growth year over year in their profits after they got more political and made their values visible. It’s such an act of vulnerability, but more and more, what we hear is that people do want that level of insight into the organizations where they spend their money.
The book again is called Trustworthy. It’s available wherever you can buy a book. Any last thoughts or link you want to leave us with?
No, thank you so much. This was wonderful. If you want to learn more about it, please visit AppropriateInc.com/Trustworthy. You can follow me on Twitter @MBloomstein. I look forward to hearing how more people use the ideas in this book.
Thanks, Margot.
Important Links
- Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap
- Content Strategy
- Appropriate, Inc.
- BrandSort
- @MBloomstein – Twitter
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Be A Professional Human Being With Rajan Nazran
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
We’re all born with a brain and not a calculator. That is why it’s so important to tell stories and connect with people emotionally because that is what drives business. This is what journalist and entrepreneur Rajan Nazran believes in. Calling himself a professional human, he explains on today’s show with John Livesay how being one is all about taking a deeply human approach to deal with whatever situation is on hand. They also talk about the art of storytelling, what the human experience is all about, and so much more. Rajan has travelled to over 58 countries, taking on some of the biggest conversations and covering stories from around the globe the Global Indian Series, an immersive platform that provides original and exclusive content based around the lives of people of Indian origin.
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Listen to the podcast here
Be A Professional Human Being With Rajan Nazran
Our guest on The Successful Pitch is Rajan Nazran, who talks about the fact that we’re all born with a brain and not a calculator, and why it’s so important to tell stories and connect with people emotionally. He said conflict resolution is a silent orchestra, that you have to interpret what the notes are. Enjoy reading how he’s done this around the world.
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Our guest is Rajan Nazran, who is an award-winning explorer, content producer, entrepreneur and over the last couple of years, traveled to 58 countries, building networks and building Global Indian communities through his mediums. As a result, he is a highly established network and has brokered many deals independently. His network extends to heads of states, ministers, CEOs, entrepreneurs, and he’s the Senior Partner of NazranRoth and Chief Explorer for the Global Indian Series. He’s also an International Chairman for the Center for Leadership Development in Africa and an Executive Member of The Kenya Society. He’s the International Sports Director at the Corinthians Football Team of Malta, and he sits on the board for the Mental Health Change Working Group of England. Rajan, welcome to the show. That is quite the bio.
One does try. That was pretty good.
I always like to ask my guests to take us to their own story of origin and you decide how far back you go. It could be your childhood or school because you said to me earlier, you consider yourself a professional human, which I’ve never met anybody who’s put those two words together. A lot of us are focused on the awareness of being as opposed to doing. The concept that we can be professional at being human and make money typically is what the word professional means, you’re an expert at it. That alone is fascinating. I’m curious to see how that all came about, this urge to travel and this urge to make such an impact in so many ways?
First and foremost, John, it is a deep privilege to be on your show. I’m humbled for the fact that I’m here, especially amongst your guests that are far greater than I. It’s a nice place. How far back do you go? Being of Indian origin, we believe incarnations or reincarnation, going back too many lives. To give a brief background, my mother was born in the Philippine Islands in Cagayan. My father is born in Punjab, India and I’m from the UK. I am pretty much 50 shades of brown that automatically is the Indian community.
In fact, we’re the karaoke singers of that. Growing up was slightly different for me. I got to see the world in a different light because culturally, you don’t know where you belong to but you get this perception of identity that comes in. My mother was an entrepreneur. She set up a working group for Asian women in mental health. She became an artist and did incredible tapestries in museums now in the VNA. My father is incredibly hard-working from becoming a bus driver towards setting up the factory, then going to cars and they both work hand in hand.
I grew up around this series of passion, which is saying everything we do we do it because we believe that we’re making a difference. Whether it is to help and support Asian women or if it was to say, “What can we do to help support the country that we could have then,” which was the UK. From there, I went to university and this urge came in, which was saying, “I want to explore the world. I want to see where I fit into it all.” As every young person comes through, I did what you normally do, which is door-to-door sales, thinking, “That’s how I’m going to get my financing together.” I did that and went to university.
I was fortunate that I was at the right place at the right time. There was this whole Erasmus Scheme that took us to Italy where we could study abroad. I was there and I happened to be there when the Italian Olympic team was there. I did quick courses in NLP and hypnotherapy. I pitched my way into the Indian team and became their first youngest ever mental coach. That’s where I first started from.
I was there doing things with athletes in the interim. I got headhunted. It’s the right place at the right time. I got to go to Israel for P3 Consideration work. I went to the Middle East working with this great guy. He took me under his wing and told me about the weird and wonderful world of the media so I was getting aboard with him. My story has been one of either the constellations coming together or downright stupidity at times of saying, “What if,” and ending up in places. That’s how it all clicked off.
I want to double click on this background you have on what you called practical soft skills, the neuro-linguistic programming because I wrote a blog about soft skills that make you strong. A lot of people think, “I’m an architect. These are my hard skills.” Soft skills are not something that’s that important and of course, now we realize that soft skills are defined as empathy, listening, storytelling, EQ, emotional intelligence, not only your IQ.
So many entrepreneurs forget that as a key element of their success, whether it’s to get funded or to get the right people to join their team and eventually, you have to create a way to convince people to buy whatever it is you’re selling or download an app, etc. I want to hear and I know that you’ve incorporated this into the NazranRoth offerings of what kinds of things have you’ve done. What do you notice across countries? This ability to connect with an audience and everyone processes things differently is a starting point. Can you tell us a story about using soft skills to help companies in different countries?
[bctt tweet=”Conflict resolution is a silent orchestra you have to conduct.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I’ll continue an even better story than that and I’ll get to that. You probably know that I’ve been held hostage in Eastern Europe, so I have to use my words to get me out of tricky situations. I’ve been to 58 countries. Being held hostage. I was in Syria during the Ebola crisis, and at that moment, I came across a family who unfortunately lost somebody. The police were saying that they’re going to arrest me as a part of it. I was there. The power of soft skills is not left to the wells of business. This is who we are as humans, which is what I say a professional human. This is our faculties to be able to speak, understand and absorb.
Taking that to the wonderful world of internationalization, we work with a lot of clients to help them develop their own narrative, their own story, especially countries towards forging a way for them to get FDI, Foreign Direct Investment. It’s like what you say, everyone looks at this and your first notion is one has to be incredibly strong. You have to be academic and tell people the numbers. The numbers are what make things happen. There are only so many numbers you have for a country.
What we do is we reach out to that and say through the product offerings we have with the Global Indian Series, “Why don’t we showcase a softer form of public diplomacy. Let’s tell the stories that connect human beings together, not with each other but with a country.” We’ve done that with, for example, Portugal. We did this massive pitch in Portugal and we brought together some amazing individuals and we took a massive spin saying, “Rather than focusing on the economic support, let’s focus on the human interest of Portugal.” That feature that we created reached out to over 40 million people.
We did an event at the end of that and brought over $3 billion in private net worth to that event. We brought together people who are interested in the stories and human response to the businesses that showcase their humanity. Lo and behold, business takes place and that’s basically real-life practical soft skills. It’s not about getting people to vote for you. It’s about a country embracing who they are, that living organism of identity and culture. Allowing that to go through the narrative, the tonality of their words, the way that people view them to be. In that sense, we’ve helped.
In corporate, we’ve done the same thing. Some companies get some tricky situations that they need a bit of help and support with. Rather than going down the normal, typical legal route, we help them shape themselves and have those softer conversations with people that have a lot of empathy, emotional intelligence, and intercultural communications. To get them to connect powerfully with people that gets the end result on people saying, “I’m prepared to give you ten minutes of my time to listen to you. Let’s take it from there.” That’s the type of stuff that we get involved in again, comes back to the professional human element saying, “We’re all born with a brain, not a calculator.” If it is emotive beings, John, like you, you’re emotive. You wear your personality and your heart on your sleeve. That’s who we are as human beings. It’s common sense that’s what drives businesses.
I love that because it’s so visual. It brings it to life in a completely different way. The global business partner that you offer companies is what allows them to achieve real-world success because there are differences in culture. I know from my advertising background that certain campaigns don’t translate. I remember Body by Fisher for sportswear translated in Spanish to Corpse by Fisher. A car here in the States was called Nova and of course, in Spanish, that means no go. That’s not probably the best name and that’s the tip of the iceberg from an advertising standpoint of the need to translate what you’re doing from one culture to the other.
Is there anything that you see that’s consistent? For example, we’re all wired for stories, no matter what culture we come from and things like that? I would say, since you’ve been to so many countries, that you might say, “We have more things in common than you might expect. If you’re a global company already, and/or wanting to go global, here are a couple of things you might want to keep in mind.”
Coming into that tone there, the art of storytelling is like what you do. You’re an alchemist. You bring together these remarkable emotions, and you connect them together. If we were to put you in robes, we’ll call you guru, in that sense. The art of storytelling is this since time immemorial. Before TVs, what did we do? We stood around a fire and we told stories. We looked at the stars, and we conjured up images of how the gods or goddesses of our choices created the world. We forget about it. We try to make everything so robotic in nature. We forget that it’s the human element that makes us do things so some of the commonalities are down.
In the story alone, people know that the second thing for companies that do go global is that intercultural competence. One needs to know, as you said, that it goes beyond the notion of words and linguistics, but also the way that business is done in emerging markets. Who do you know? How do you know them? How well can you navigate through the policies and procedures to get the end results? Not everything is clear and the same.
One of the biggest obstacles a lot of international companies have is that they take the month of what they think the world is and they go to those countries and they don’t realize the world is different there. Therefore, we help them navigate those spots with that silent guardian that supports their journey because we can open up the doors where they need to be bearing in mind, I’ve got a footprint in over 58 countries that I’ve been to and I’ve got a lot of exposure there. Also, at the same token, we help them and practically assist them towards speaking to the relevant people because we know what those political landscapes are.
Professional Human Being: We do everything we do because we believe that we’re making a difference.
The other thing that I’ll say that’s a common tonality that I see is yes, “We’re all similar,” but the way we interpret our coaches is dissimilar in those markets. In the US, it is direct and straightforward. In Britain, we have the James Bond attitude of the globe, where if we take them to certain markets like Ethiopia, it doesn’t translate well. You need to be more aware of what takes place. What are their cultures? What are their stories? What defines them? How do they want to be treated?
I know that one of your expertise in NazranRoth is the national branding and PR, so it seems to me that what you’re offering is the ability to have the right message to the right person through your network at the time. When all those things align, then results start an act, people start taking action and wanting to partner with you. If one of those things is off and you don’t have the right person, you’re not in the right room, or you don’t have the right story it’s this recipe for success basically. You’ve got all of these pieces from all of these different experiences and countries, that a lot of people need you as the International Sherpa. That’s how I would phrase it.
The other thing that I’m fascinated about is what you’re doing under human excellence is conflict resolution. That is something that can destroy a start-up faster than anything, is a conflict between founders and it’s a big red flag for potential investors. It’s also a conflict within big companies. People say that they don’t leave their job, they leave their boss. The way conflicts are resolved from country to country is quite different. If you’re interacting with people from Japan, from what my study has been, they hate conflict. You never hear stories of people screaming at each other and they also don’t like to say no.
It’s almost like this silent orchestra that you have to read between the words to understand. It is a sign of orchestra. Conflict resolution, when you go and deeper, as you rightly say, it can be from person to person. Business to business. Communities to communities and nations to nations. It all starts off with understanding what are the core deliverables of human behavior. Why do people behave in a certain way? It goes even deeper into this whole notion of purpose and integrity. That’s how our viewpoints are formed. We’re fortunate, so when it comes to countries, we got four former heads of state on our advisory committee for NazranRoth. That helps because they’ve been through all that and they’ve been to some of the most challenging times you can ever imagine.
Donald Ramotar, the President of Guyana, was there at the most complex trading of Venezuela and Guyana of oil. He was there. He had to navigate the shores amongst the other guys across Africa. The way we normally deal with it is that we take a deeply human approach and that is the common core of the professional human. What is currently taking place, and how does it have a human-based impact? Regardless, if you’re head of state, get your person to the ground on the verge of being destitute, we all have emotions, that EQ that you named it to be.
Once we start taking that approach, and we realize as a species of human beings, we have this common denominator of behavior, it’s a lot easier for us to come in and deal with the situations on hand. It gets slightly difficult and murky is when you got large boards on the brink of almost killing each other along those lines. That’s when we have to deal with multiple personalities. Our secret there is, is there any magic to the toolbox to have a look at what is the human response to this? We need to understand what are the words behind the words. We’ve only got there like you creating incredible work that you’ve been doing over 300-plus podcasts. We’ve only got there because of the years of dedicated travel of experience and practically going to the countries and feeling it, blood, sweat, and tears. There’s no real genius behind it. It’s literally the experience I’ve been able to build up.
I see that some of your clients include Deloitte, which I find fascinating that you’re both well-respected advisors and consultants and yet even a company as big as Deloitte needs your expertise. Is there a story of what they engaged you for? Was it navigating some of that?
I can’t go into too much detail there but you’ve done your research. We worked with Deloitte, BP, SR, and Maersk, the big shipping lines. They sent me to Congo to the DRC to work with their people here and that was onboard a ship. That’s real conflict resolution. There are a lot of things happening. It’s because we know the markets, we know the people and we know how human behavior rates, we’re not in competition with anybody. We got the collaborative approach. If companies see that we can help and support them, we come in and we do that. We have large-scale clients to small start-ups. It makes no difference. We’re all humans on our own voyage of life. If we can be of help, we help out. It’s not an issue.
The takeaway is, no matter how big a company is, the smart ones still engage others to help them, especially in an area that they may not have all the expertise. If we can look at that and incorporate it into our own mindset of not trying to go it alone and think that, “That must mean I’m weak.” It’s flipping it on its head. Soft skills make you strong, collaboration and having other people partner with you makes you stronger. All of that has now led to one of your flagship services, which is the Global Indian Series, where you are everywhere and have some amazing stories there. Can you share with us the origin story of how that came about and what people might want to explore?
Absolutely. The story came from pure and utter frustration like everything else. When one travels, you go to all these countries, you meet with the people and you realize, forget about the flag of India. As people of similar type of origin, we’re everywhere but we don’t know about each other. That has a huge impact because politically and economically, it has an impact, victims of society and identity. Once you start to realize, with every country, everyone defined this notion of indigenous like this white elephant in the room. Some people held the tail, others the trunk, others the legs.
[bctt tweet=”An emotional connection breaks through the noise and clutter.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Everyone’s holding on to the same notion, but we’re different descriptions towards it and that has a huge impact for generations. Some people then take this historical route of, “Our traditions are set in stone. Women behave like this and men behave like that.” Others take it as a fluid part. I thought, “Let’s change this. There’s a lot of misconceptions. Let’s build an active living encyclopedia, a bridge that connects us all together and say, “We are brought up into an identity though, let’s face it, we’re all born into this planet out of luck, an agenda out of luck and in the country out of luck. Any form of wisdom out of luck.” It’s this identity thrust upon you that you have to live and die towards.”
You don’t understand what that identity is because if you don’t it controls you. That’s where we kicked it off. we did not create features. I was physically traveling to these places prior to COVID not in a hazmat suit. All of a sudden, COVID kicks in and you’re thinking, “What do I do next?” That’s when we kicked up from the digital side. We bring the podcast in and now what you hear is this living encyclopedia of the human experience of people.
We’ve had kings on that, heads of state, billionaires, people dealing with alcoholism, nations from around the globe, people there are coming together in a spirit of being a human being and saying, “We’re unmoored from what we thought was normal.” That’s been the beauty of it. It’s something I’m passionate about. It is part and parcel of one’s life mission to understand what is a brief fabric of humanity and is a common core there that we can learn from each other with.
One of the things that fascinated me was the fact that you talked about there are over 70,000 people of Indian origin that call Portugal home. That’s why that partnership made such sense, where you created this whole print feature that was viewed over 30 million times and you were able to get sponsors who wanted to target that audience. I thought it would be interesting for people who might be wondering, “How does a podcast go global and how does tapping into a specific country appeal to the sponsor?” In this case, it was the family hotel and resort. You might want to talk a little bit about that.
We had JLL that supported us. We had PLMJ, a massive law firm. We had Nova Business School in Montana. We’ve got loads of different companies that came together. The whole notion of what we do is a sentimental journey of the human spirit of us and bringing that up all together. What we turn around to our sponsors is, “In this world, there’s a lot of noise.” That’s the reality. You get 1,500 pieces of info thrown at you, bashing for attention and saying, “Listen to me.” What do we all want to know? What we want to know about people like us and the stories that mount our own hearts because that’s the person that gets our attention.
We created and part of what we design in integrity is, “We’re going to cover the story. If I don’t get any sponsors in, I may be bankrupt, homeless, and my wife may be annoyed at me but this is a commitment I have made to me and the high purpose of being, so I’m going to do it.” Lucky for me, the sponsors would rather you do not jump off a cliff, we will help you as well. They got involved with us and what they got out of it was a meaningful connection with not only India, not only with their global audience in Portugal, but they got to be part of the history books on what makes us a living encyclopedia.
They realize quickly at the end of that, that has a lot of collateral because not only now are their responses, the hearts, and minds of a community, the hearts and minds of a community that is across the globe. People that have both wealth and experienced know-how but also community is hard to reach. That’s why they jumped on board with us because there’s a bigger play here like us and like we did with Malta.
The government of Malta supported us and we had big organizations there. We did stuff across the Caribbean. All the large organizations said, “We get you. We understand you,” because now they realize that what we offer is an emotive outreach to the world’s biggest community. What our community realizes is we’re no fluff. We do this without fear or favor. We have no political sides and we say, “Let’s showcase a road as it is not as we are.” That’s a powerful medium for us.
I love what you said here that when you offer emotive outreach, it breaks through the clutter and that’s why sponsors are hungry for that. Every good marketing and advertising is all about good stories about emotional connection. If people don’t have an emotional connection to a story, they don’t remember it but when they do, they share it and tell others about it. That’s what everybody in marketing’s dream is. It’s having something that is so good that people want to tell others and become brand ambassadors for you and that is the magic of what you’re doing.
It doesn’t surprise me that you’re getting all kinds of high-level government officials and high net worth individuals together because it’s your passion that’s driving this. The big takeaway for the readers here is, people buy your energy. I remember once being interviewed for a speaking engagement and my agent wrote back and said, “They picked you. They liked your energy.” I thought, “They said that not, ‘They liked your book or they liked your topic, or whatever you proposed.’” It was, “They liked your energy.” The more we remember that, then the more we transcend all the differences we have with each other.
Professional Human Being: One of the biggest obstacles many international companies have is that they take the mindset off what they think the market is.
If you think of money as energy and action, it’s not such a leap of faith to go, “I am so committed to this.” My passion is so strong, that I know that will attract the right energy, aka money, to support this because it’s giving them real value, which is that laser focus. People are going to as I say, “When you tug at heartstrings, people open their purse strings.” You do that well. I’m excited to see the continued global impact you’re going to have. Is there any last thought you want to leave us with?
It does, doesn’t it? What you said there, we owe it to ourselves to understand who we are as human beings. Your business is your life. Everything you do goes towards a repertoire of your human experience on this planet. Therefore, for us to almost compartmentalize and say, “That is the business side of me now. That is the parental side of me. That’s the lover of me,” is crazy. In the bigger image, if you were to take that 50,000, 60,000, and 70,000 view from above the heavens, then you realize that we are all living in this fragility that is called the human experience.
Everything we do has to drive out who we are internally. Your readers, for example, if they’ve got a business and it’s successful, but they don’t feel happy, that’s a showcase to them saying, “This is your life. Do not waste it.” Likewise, if they’ve got this pursuit of something that they’re going for the finances for, there is a small, narrow-minded existence, because that doesn’t go with them. It’s only going to be who we are, that emerges to the greatest out of there. For me, that is my final thought there. It’s saying, “We owe it to ourselves to become professional humans.”
Whenever we speak, we never speak about money, we never speak about what’s in it for you and what’s in it for me, we speak from the integrity that holds in true of what it means to be human, the species that interacts with each other. That’s what makes me alive. That’s why I’m so drawn to the work that you do, John, because there’s none of this preconceived idea of saying, “This is what I know.” You’re that medium that executes a perfect unionship between people that says, “Let’s have a look at what is that inner yearning that we all have one-on-one together and where are we heading to together as a community of people, not only an individual?”
You’re transcending the concept of having transactional relationships with people, including ourselves. When that happens, everything lines up and your purpose, your meaning and you’re not so it’s a disjointed person going, “Is this all that there is. I thought if I got all these achievements and accolades, I’d be happy and I’m still not happy,” and vice versa, “Why can’t I do what makes me happy as a living and be a professional human being?” What a great way to end and if you want to know more, you can go to the Global Indian Series, the podcast is the same name and also NazranRoth. Thanks so much for sharing your passion and all these wonderful stories.
Thank you. This has been fun. It’s been cool.
I loved it too and I’m sure our readers will as well.
Important Links
- Rajan Nazran
- NazranRoth
- Center for Leadership Development in Africa
- The Kenya Society
- Soft Skills Make You Stronger
- Podcast – Global Indian Conversations
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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