Enthusiastic You! With Joshua Evans

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

 

We deserve a life of enthusiasm and passion. However, because the human condition is so fragile, it is easy for everyone to find discouragement and lose focus. In this episode, Joshua Evans, the #1 best-selling author of Enthusiastic You!, shares his thoughts on how you can provide meaning in what you do and succeed in your life. Bringing it to your organizational culture, he talks about how the team becomes passionate when your purpose is connected and identified. Joshua also dives into combating workplace traps and avoiding spreading toxicity, emphasizing that complacency leads to mediocrity, obscurity, and nothing. Tune in to this conversation to rediscover and reclaim your purpose!

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Enthusiastic You! With Joshua Evans

Our guest is Joshua Evans who is also the author of Enthusiastic You. He talks about his model Is/Does/Means, how you can take an inanimate object and give it meaning, and how that allows you to find your purpose so you can rediscover and reclaim it in your career. Enjoy the episode.

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Our guest is Joshua Evans. Joshua has quite a story to share with us. He has studied workplace behavior for over fifteen years. He’s a keynote speaker and a TEDx programmer. He’s the number one bestselling author of Enthusiastic You. He is an adventure seeker. He’s also the father of three. Welcome to the show, Joshua.

Thank you so much for having me, John. It is a pleasure to be here.

Let’s talk about how you got into what you’re doing. You can take us back to childhood and school. What was your first adventure or passion point that led you into being so enthusiastic?

I have always had a zeal for life, excitement, and palpable enthusiasm behind everything that I did. The way that I thought as a young child is how I continue to think as an adult. If you’re not willing to throw your entire self toward something, then why are you going to put in the effort at all? You need to do that. What’s funny is that enthusiasm was never a word that I used in my vernacular but it’s fascinating. I’ll give you how I got into what I’m doing now, and then we can even back up from there.

I was in Corporate America. I studied business and workplace behavior. I studied clients, conversations, and communications. I was in a technology company selling software and working with lots of dynamic teams. It was a very fascinating place for me to work. One day, I got into an argument with a guy that I work with. We had walked into a client’s office, and he came with me as a technical resource because I’m not a technical guy. We talked with a client and turned this small $100,000 deal through one conversation into something that was over $2 million for our company.

It was going to be a huge project. I was excited. You get happy ears as a salesperson. I’m thinking about the commission checks. I’m excited, “We’re about to solve all these problems. We’re going to make all this money. It’s going to be great.” My technical guy goes, “Why would you tell him we could do that?” I go, “We can’t do that. I didn’t lie.” He goes, “We can but it’s going to be so much work.” I was like, “That’s why we’re getting paid.” I was so frustrated with how despondent he was. That evening, I was home by myself because my wife was working late. This was before I had children.

I was having a scotch with my dog. I was like, “People should care about their work. They should be enthusiastic.” I started venting in dictation mode to my iPad. It grew to tens of thousands of words. By happen chance, I ran into a publisher. We started chatting. She goes, “I want to publish your book.” When she published it and it became a number-one bestseller, I said, “That’s it.” I quit my job. I put in my two weeks and said, “This is what I’m going to do full-time.” That’s how I jumped into the keynote-speaking world. It’s in my desire to bring passion back into the workplace and to get people to care about the things that they’re doing so that their lives can be much more fulfilling.

One of your topics that grabs me because I love soundbite and alliteration is Purpose or Perish. It’s so much in the news. Are people coming back to the office? Is it going to be hybrid forever? What is the future of work? How do we get top talent? You say that pay and benefits are no longer enough to keep people engaged. What is the missing link? How do companies figure out how to make people feel engaged?

Everybody starts with a deeper sense of purpose in their work. On the first day, when they walk into their jobs, they’re excited because nobody shows up on the first day like, “I can’t wait to be mediocre.” Over months and years within a role, we lose sight of why we cared in the first place. We get stuck in that day-to-day minutia. We’re staring at the KPIs, the unread emails, and the office politics. All those little things distract us from why we cared so much in the first place. We forget.

My goal with this idea behind Purpose or Perish is we have the decision. We can either choose to have a purpose in our work, or we’re going to perish, never having achieved that result. The interesting thing is if you can dig deep enough into anybody’s career or anybody’s job, as long as they’re not doing anything illicit, and if you can dig deep enough into what somebody is doing and follow the impact that their work has on somebody, you can show them that purpose was there the whole time. I love watching people rediscover it and reclaim it in the work that they’re doing. All of a sudden, this light bulb comes on, and they realize, “This whole time, I did have a purpose. I just didn’t realize it.”

 

Rediscover and reclaim it. That reclaiming is where people feel empowered. You do workshops and retreats on this as well. Paint a picture for us of what that looks like in a workshop and a retreat.

When I work with companies that want to bring me in for one of their leadership retreats or a team retreat and workshop, my goal is to dive into their business. The more I can understand their business, the better I’m going to be at tailoring my messaging, tools, and methodologies that I share with them directly to the organization. I can give you a good example. I spoke to a medical company. They rent very high-end medical equipment to clinics, hospitals, and doctors that can’t afford to own that equipment. Because of this company’s efforts, people are now able to rent out these amazing lasers. They’re able to bring those to the underserved areas. Patients are now getting access to unbelievable technology they never would have had access to before.

We were talking with their team. The interesting thing is at a moment’s notice, they fly all over the country delivering these tools but they never have time with the patient. Because of HIPAA laws and all the sorts of governing factors within the medical industry, they don’t get to connect with a patient. They don’t get to see the impact of the work that they’re doing. They get to interact with the doctors. They will show up after the patient has been sedated, but they don’t get to talk with the patient afterward to see how they’re doing and how their life has changed because of the work that they did.

They have this disconnect. Not all of them but some of these people have started developing this disconnect between the work that they’re doing and what it means to the end user. A lot of us do that because it gets so comfortable to sit in what our role is and what somebody in our role does. It’s easy. Our role is our title. It sits in our LinkedIn profile. It’s on your email signature. It’s on your business cards if you still hand out physical business cards, but it’s not compelling. It doesn’t make me on Monday go, “I’m so excited. I have this title.” Nobody cares.

The next thing we’re good at is talking about what somebody in our role does. It’s comfortable. It’s all the tasks, functions, and responsibilities we have in our role like responding to emails, talking with clients, and the things that I have to do on my to-do list but then again, looking at a to-do list is also not compelling. The problem is most organizations stop there. Most employees stop there as well. Whether we’re talking about what our organization is and does or we’re talking about what our role is or does. We forget to go that extra step and talk about what it means. Here’s where the rubber meets the road. I can share a fun story about another organization that I work with.

I love a story.

I was brought in for a leadership retreat for one of the top five law firms in the United States. It was a leadership team. In this small conference room, we were going through this methodology that I have of getting to what it means. Going past Is and Does and moving to Means. While we’re walking through this, there’s one guy that is in this audience. He’s the manager of IT. His name is Joe. To understand, Joe in IT is at the table with the partners or the executive team of this firm.

You can tell that he feels a bit out of place. We’re going around the room and working through Is, Does, and Means. I get to Joe and say, “What is your role?” He goes, “I’m the IT manager.” “What does somebody in your role do?” He’s like, “What somebody in my role does is we manage the firewalls, make sure emails are working, and make sure people aren’t going on the wrong sites. That’s all I do.” I go, “What does the work that you’re doing mean to everybody else at this table?”

All of a sudden, Joe looked a bit crestfallen. He looked down at the conference table. He goes, “I don’t know. It just means the computers are working.” My heart broke for him. He can’t see the deeper meaning. He doesn’t see purpose in his work. He sees tasks to be completed and personalities to be managed. That’s such an abysmal place but the problem is most people live there.

I was about to say something. I would love to say something because I’m a speaker. I was about to jump in when all of a sudden, one of the senior partners at this firm stood up and said, “Joe, are you telling me what your role means to us? You don’t know that. You have no idea what your role means to us.” He went on almost a tirade but it was positive. He goes, “Two weeks ago, Joe, when our servers went down, you showed up on a Saturday to get things fixed. I can’t think of a single function in this office that isn’t dependent upon everything that you’re doing.”

[bctt tweet=”A company culture should be unique.” username=”John_Livesay”]

“Without the work that you’ve done and that you make sure continues to work, we would never talk to our clients. We wouldn’t be able to talk internally. We would have nothing. We would not have a firm without the amazing work that you’ve been doing. If I haven’t told you this before, I’m sorry. The work you’re doing means so much to me and every other partner at this table.”

What a great story.

Here’s the crazy part. It hung in the air. I’m observing at this point and taking notes so I can retell this story because it’s so emotional. Joe looked up. The smile on his face told me that he had rediscovered purpose in his work, but the tears in his eyes told me that he had never been told that before. How amazing would organizations be if we took those moments to tell people the amount of meaning that their work has to us?

It’s so rare that you see somebody smiling and also tears in their eyes at the same time. I love that you were able to notice both of those. It’s almost like the sun is up and the moon is up. That doesn’t happen at the same time. Every once in a while, you can see those phenomena but you put meaning to them. The smile told me he loved being recognized, and the tears told me no one had ever told him that before. It was very moving for him to rediscover.

It was such an emotional experience for me as an observer because the human condition is so fragile. We’re all humans that are based on these emotional situations. We don’t always allow ourselves to be that vulnerable or authentic but there in that room, something happened. Something deep and existential connected these people together. I guarantee you none of them viewed their work the same way after it.

I’m sure because everyone starts looking through that lens. You also give a keynote on the topic of building strong cultures and passionate teams. What I love about your work is that it all fits together like a jigsaw puzzle. If you have a purpose, and when that gets connected and identified, then the team becomes passionate again. You have a culture that is palpable. Would that be fair?

I’m of the opinion that not everybody should like your company culture. If you build a good company culture, it should be unique. There should be people like, “I don’t like that at all.” It should be like jalapeno basil strawberry ice cream. Some people are going to be like, “That’s disgusting. I want no part of it.” There are a few people that are like, “That sounds delicious. I want some of that.” Those people are going to be living purposefully within their work. They will drink the Kool-Aid. I’m a huge fan of if you make a good Kool-Aid, get your employees to drink it. I’m a huge fan of that but it needs to be unique. It can’t be a cookie-cutter off-the-shelf culture. We need to do it intentionally.

Do you have a story of a culture of a company you spoke at that you thought, “They have nailed this. They know who they are and who they’re not.”

It happens with a lot of organizations because a lot of organizations will want to hire somebody like yourself or somebody like me to come in. They’re already thinking about those things. I had a great client in Northern Michigan. They’re such a cool company. They have a slide in the middle of the break room. It’s a giant two-and-a-half-story slide. It’s metal. It’s so fast. They warned you before you get on it. I got to ride it.

You got to be this tall to ride the ride.

 

They have stand-up paddle boards because people take breaks to go to the lake right next to their office. All those things are great but they know that those are just perks or bribes to keep employees happy at the moment. They needed to do something deeper. Having become good friends with the HR leader in that organization, when COVID first hit, I called him, “What’s going on? You’re the CHRO. How are you handling this?” The laws in Michigan got very strict quickly.

Anybody without essential jobs had to go home. They’re a manufacturing company. You can’t manufacture stuff at home. They still have to be on the manufacturing floor but all the administrative pieces, sales pieces, and management had to go home. What do you do when an organization has no work-from-home policies in place? They have never allowed anybody to do that ever.

We have people with desktop computers wheeling them out to their cars on their office chairs. How can you get your team to stay cohesive? How do you build that collaboration when they are so remote? They were telling me about the things that they did. It’s about developing this collaborative sense that we’re all in this together. We’re all in the same boat, the same team, or whatever you want to call it.

What they ended up doing is on their Monday morning calls, they would have a few of their employees do a home office edition of MTV Cribs, “Show us your home office.” I got to see some of their videos. It was amazing because they had people like, “I’m in my kid’s playroom. I’m sitting in Play-Doh. There are a bunch of puzzles over there. I stepped on a Lego.” They would show somebody else. Their wife was unhappy with them working from home. They were stuck in their shed next to a lawnmower.

My favorite one was one of them had no room for an office in his house. He set up shop in his laundry room. Since he missed the stand-up desk that he had at the office, he was using his ironing board as his stand-up desk. It’s those little things that humanize us. They reconnect us emotionally to not just our goals within the organization but to the people that we work with and the people that depend on us.

You also have a third topic. It talks about combating workplace traps and how to avoid spreading toxicity. What is a workplace trap?

This is a big conversation. While that’s not a topic I’ve been given recently and I’ve moved on, that is something important to remember. We get stuck doing stuff with an organization using our preconceptions, knowledge, experiences, and how we have seen other people do it. Organizations have this problem too. Somebody comes into a role with an organization and starts reforming it how they have seen it done before. The problem is that makes people complacent. Complacency leads to mediocrity. Mediocrity leads to obscurity. Obscurity leads to nothing.

Now that you’ve written the book Enthusiastic You, you’re not only helping people rediscover their passion but you’re giving them tools that they can use. Give us a little sneak peek of what’s inside the book of a tool that you think that people could say, “I need to rediscover my passion before I can reclaim it. I don’t even know where to start.” What would be one thing inside Enthusiastic You that tells them they could start doing?

One of the simplest tools is the IDM or Is/Does/Means. I have people do an interesting exercise where they take an inanimate object and write down what that object is. I had them write down what that object does, and then I challenged them to talk about what that object means and to get as emotional as they possibly can. I was doing an event for American Express. I had a group of their management team. We walked through this exercise. I pitted these different teams against each other in sharing the most emotional way to describe their inanimate object.

The best one I got was sunglasses. I go, “What is it?” They go, “It is a pair of sunglasses. It has darkened lenses and frames. That’s what it is. It’s not compelling.” “What does it do?” “A pair of sunglasses block the sun. It can make me look cool. It’s shade. It’s a fashion statement. It’s still not compelling. That’s what a pair of sunglasses does.” “Tell me what a pair of sunglasses means.”

[bctt tweet=”Find the meaning in what you do.” username=”John_Livesay”]

This small group of leaders whispered to each other back and forth, stood back, and confidently went, “I’m going to be honest. What a pair of sunglasses means is that my eyes are protected to see the things in my life worth seeing.” He went deeper than that. He goes. “I can see the smile on my wife’s face. I can watch my daughter walk down the aisle. That’s what a pair of sunglasses means to me.”

Having never watched grown men cry in a group setting like that, it was pretty fun and emotional. That small or simple tool of using an inanimate object but somehow getting to a deeper piece of meaning or something very deep to it is so invaluable. If we can do that for an inanimate object like a pair of sunglasses, why can’t we do that with our role? Why can’t we do that with our company? We fail to follow the impact that our work has and the people that depend on the work that we accomplish. We had stuck thinking about the efforts, not the impact of those efforts.

If people are thinking, “This is great for my professional life to rediscover and reclaim my passion,” is there any of this that gets transferred to their personal life, whether it’s discovering their role as a parent or a loving spouse? I’m guessing there is. You might have an example of that.

Everybody starts from a place where they are engaged in any relationship, whether it’s a professional relationship or a personal relationship. It’s like a glass door. In the beginning, it’s so clear but over time, smudges begin to appear. It obscures and distorts our view of the role that we find ourselves in. We get stuck thinking about all the daily challenges and the minutia of our life. We forget. It happens in all of our roles, whether you’re the VP of X, Y, Z, or the Chief Blankety Blank Officer. It happens in our personal lives as well in the role of a parent, friend, or partner. We forget what doing a great job means to those that depend on us. We forget why we cared so much.

It’s easy for us to get stuck in the day-to-day minutia of who didn’t do the dishes, who forgot to pay that bill, or whatever it might be. We get stuck in that minutia. We forget the commitment that we had and the purpose that is underlying everything that we’re doing. If we can bring that back, all the small tasks, actions, and decisions we have to make are less significant because we have this underlying foundation of purpose within the work and lives that we live.

What I hear you saying is when we can figure out how to rediscover and reclaim our purpose at work, it can help us be better people, friends, spouses, and parents, and that it’s not this separate, “I’m one person at work. I’m another person at home.” It all gets connected to one big purpose. I love it. Before I let you go, do you have a favorite quote or book besides your own that you want to leave us with?

My favorite quote is by Virgil. It’s, “Audentes fortuna juvat.” It means fortune favors the bold.

What does that mean to you?

I’ve always been a very bold person. I’ve always been the person that people have told, “You’re being too loud. You need to settle down. You’re too enthusiastic,” but that quote to me means that I’m very content living my fullest being bold. It means to me that I shouldn’t apologize for living out loud like that because others are too afraid to do it.

Let’s go full circle to your story of origin. Did your parents encourage you to be bold?

Both my parents are very bold people. They’re loud people. They encouraged me along the way.

Are any of your three children bold?

All three of them.

If someone wants to buy your book or book you as a speaker, where should we go? Where should we send them?

Come on over to my website, JoshuaMEvans.com. You can check out my Reels there, buy my book, and book me to speak.

I love it. Thanks so much for sharing your enthusiastic and bold passion for living. You’ve got us all re-energized.

Thank you, John.

 

Important Links

• Enthusiastic You
• Purpose or Perish
• JoshuaMEvans.com
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

 

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Tags: Build a Passionate Team, company culture, Enthusiastic You, Purpose in Your Work, Purpose or Perish, Rediscover and Reclaim Your Purpose