Signature Leadership With Jamie Mason Cohen

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

 

If you have a challenge, how do you deal with it? How creative do you get to become productive? In this episode, we will dive into how our guest applies the skills and lessons he learned being in Saturday Night Live. Jamie Mason Cohen, the Host of The Signature Leadership Show, shares how you can become productive through smart work, not hard work. He explains his focus on “What’s your 11:30” is the problem you want to focus on and turn it into a possibility. Being still during chaos is key in dealing with challenges to help focus on finding a creative solution. Learn more about Jamie Mason Cohen’s signature leadership.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Signature Leadership With Jamie Mason Cohen

Our guest is Jamie Mason Cohen who worked on Saturday Night Live. Find out what he means when he says, “What is your 11:30?” He said that when you’re laughing, you are learning and you can also hear a story of how to be still during the chaos. Enjoy the episode.

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Our guest is Jamie Mason Cohen. He is a leadership development and resilience expert. He integrates his experiences working at Saturday Night Live as a Dale Carnegie Business Training Award Recipient and as a Certified Leadership Coach with The Leadership Circle to help organizations thrive in change. He’s a keynote speaker and facilitator who’s been hired to teach resilience, wellness, leadership and communication at organizations like SunLife, Meeting Planners International, Broadway Video Entertainment, the Canadian Society of Association Executives and many others.

He uses a toolkit of unconventional virtual approaches to cultivating resilience through unique performance assessment. He has something impressive and a little bit frightening, according to Forbes and the power of a superhero in his TEDx where each person learns how their strengths may serve that organization in 60 seconds. His new podcast is called The Signature Leadership Show. He’s a frequent commentator on CNN and The Morning Show. Jamie, welcome to the show.

John, I’m thrilled to be here with you.

I have been a big admirer of your work and follow you on all these social media platforms. I see how audiences light up. You have this amazing skill of not only all the lessons you learned while being at Saturday Night Live. We’re going to do a deep dive into that but you also have this skill as an artist. I’ve seen some of your paintings and you also can analyze people’s signatures.

You did mine, which was mind-boggling how fast the insights come across depending on the angle of how I cross a T. I want to ask you, before we get into all these incredible things that you do and have done, your little story of origin. You’re Canadian so take us back to school. Where did you first discover your love of creativity? I would think that’s the overriding umbrella over all of your skills.

I trace it back to my mother. One of the things you mentioned was my love of helping people discover their authentic selves through their handwriting. I remember my mother who was an educator. One day I was in drama class. I was standing on stage when I was about twelve years old in Toronto where I’m from. I froze because I stuttered whenever I got up in front of people.

I came home to my mother and I was devastated. I told her what happened and she said to me, “Let me see your handwriting in your daily notes from school,” when we were handwriting regularly. I showed it to her and she saw what you said. She saw the T-bar. The T-bar in handwriting tends to represent your goals amongst other things. She said, “You also have fluency of thought in the way you write.” It’s almost a figure eight for those who know anything about hockey, our Canadian pastime.

You had it in yours too, John. It planted a seed that I could change and grow and that I could in a sense build my growth mindset, which is a fundamental component of all creativity. I went on this journey from twelve years old onward to exploring how my brain works but also about how my creativity and my ability to make these connections in the world between disparate ideas could come to fruition. That’s a short version of how that one moment when my mother turned a crisis or a problem that I was facing into an opportunity.

Did she know how to analyze handwriting? Is that why she asked for yours and then she taught you? From that insight, were you able to overcome the stuttering because you realized the stuttering was not a physical ailment but more of a fear thing?

The stuttering was something that I ended up getting some help and support from experts in that field. It also drew a new level of self-awareness in that I could overcome challenges in my life. Part of it was my mother believed in me before I believed in myself. Something like stuttering was something that I thought was forever at that moment. Is this going to be my future in terms of how I communicate? Many years later, I became a professional speaker and what my mother said about me, “One day, you’re going to write and speak in front of people,” ended up coming true. It was a prophecy that my mother planted in me at that age.

There are so many takeaways here starting with you’re a dad yourself. Whether you’re a speaker, a teacher or someone that you’re working in a situation with other people, the influence we have to see the greatness in someone else at specific times and plant that seed or believe in somebody when they maybe have forgotten the truth of who they are is such a gift.

To be a parent that can do that to a child, I don’t think there’s a greater impact or legacy. As a speaker, there’s no greater impact that you do. Before we jump into your incredible keynotes, I want to hear about this and the audience does too. We teased it. How in the world did you find yourself involved with Saturday Night Live? What was that all about?

I called Lorne Michael’s office 25 times before his assistant said, “What would it take for you to stop calling?” I didn’t know better at that age. I just graduated from school. I said, “Thank you for asking. Can I send him a letter? When it arrives, can you put it on the pile of letters he probably gets every day?” She said, “Fine, go ahead.” I did and heard nothing.

I was working part-time on films in Toronto. I was a clerk at a school and I was living in my parents’ basement after graduating from Western, which is in Ontario where I’m from. I get a call and it sounds like Dr. Evil’s voice which is Mike Myers and Lorne Michaels. I hear, “Hi. Is James Cohen in there, please?” I thought it was one of my buddies, John, because I told all my friends, “I’m going to work in New York for Lorne Michaels in Saturday Night Live.”

Everyone said, “Stop talking crap. Come on.” It was him. I ended up asking him in a few sentences. I know you’re the master of the pitch. This was before I knew how to pitch. I pitched him and something clicked. I ended up going and I was backstage at Saturday Night Live waiting for my few minutes with Lorne Michaels.

I hear a voice coming behind me and it was someone I had heard before growing up but I didn’t want to turn around because I was so self-conscious and nervous. He’s high-fiving people, “How are you doing? How’s everyone doing?” I said to myself, with the introvert in me, “Please don’t sit beside me.” He sat down right beside me and it was no other than the late great Chris Farley a few months before he would pass.

He said, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m no one. I’m here to see Mr. Michaels. I got an interview with him.” For the next twenty minutes, Chris Farley ended up listening to me, actively listening, engaged, leaning in with his body language, completely mesmerized by the little stories I was telling him. It lowered my anxiety.

Lorne Michaels, the king, walks in. Everyone addresses him. He walks in with his Armani and tailored suit. I end up going into the interview with him. We talked about books where I’m from in Toronto because he’s from Toronto. At the end of the brief time together, he said, “Why don’t you come work for me?” That was my beginning at working for Lorne Michaels on Saturday Night Live.

You’ve written a book called Live from Your Class. It’s so clever as everything you’ve learned about teaching from working there. Did you start as his assistant or an intern? Where’s the humble beginning here?

I started as a little more than an intern. That is a broad company. That company produces TV shows, live shows and SBs. It goes on and on. I worked directly for Lorne Michaels in his orbit, Broadway Video Entertainment. This is his production wing. I worked for the show. I was young and I was more of a fly on the wall. I wasn’t an important player in that ecosystem but it allowed me as a young, ambitious and driven person to jump to different roles.

I learned things like how to pitch ideas because I was around people like Jim Sharp who ended up being one of the people who ran Comedy Central. I learned from several executives who pitched the TV, the film and as well as the show itself. I came out of there after a few years of having this behind-the-scenes but also this corporate understanding of how storytelling works and also where I might fit in the future.

How long were you there?

Four years.

There’s a great quote you have from Lorne Michaels that he would say that the show was not ready because it was finished. The show was ready because it was 11:30 on Saturday night and your whole focus is, “What’s your 11:30?” Can you explain to us how that relates to the audiences you speak to?

“What’s your 11:30,” is symbolic but in the context of Saturday Night Live, which is a metaphor that I use regularly in my talks, your 11:30 is that problem that you want to turn into a possibility or an opportunity. By the end of that week in Saturday Night Live, from Monday to Saturday, they have to have a show. There are people’s jobs on the line. Countless challenges come up. There are ratings they have to make sure they hit. Somehow this show has existed my entire life since 1975. This system works. Your 11:30 is, “How are you going to co-create a solution when you have a deadline in your timeframe that you need to make that happen?”

I’m sure there’s a story of, “We’re never going to make it,” or a celebrity going on after rehearsal. I’ve heard some stories. Whitney Houston was supposed to be in a skit and they didn’t think she was going to show and things like that. Do you have a story of the drama of last-minute people making a deadline or what you had to do when somebody didn’t show up?

I’ll pivot a little within that because what came to mind was someone who handled themselves so admirably and I learned so much from and how they dealt with that high-pressure situation when they had several challenges. That was Jackie Chan. I don’t know if he is the most famous or well-known movie star in the world.

Jackie Chan came on that show and I remember being backstage. That day, I brought my mom who came in from Toronto. She didn’t know who Jackie Chan was but when I pointed out who it was, she went, “He’s such a nice man. I can see he’s lighting up the room.” What Jackie Chan did so well was I watched him in the transitions between the commercial break and then coming out into the costume area where he had to change.

He never seemed to get perturbed or overly serious, which I do sometimes if I get stressed. My brow wrinkles and I look different. His energy with everyone was very balanced considering the situation. Jackie Chan also spoke English as a 2nd or 3rd language. I thought, “He’s going on live American TV in front of millions of people. There are no do-overs and yet, he’s running around backstage with a smile on his face, doesn’t look stressed even though 9 out of 10 even stars are stressed by that experience. He’s got this way of being still within the creative chaos.”

[bctt tweet=”Be still during the chaos.” via=”no”]

That was something where you asked almost the opposite. That was someone who walked into the fire and thrived. As a speaker, what can I take from that? That’s what you and I do. We spend a considerable part of our time standing in front of people, strangers and adults who might be judgmental based on where they came from. We have to somehow make them see something that can help them transform themselves. At that moment, Jackie Chan helped me see myself differently. If he can do that, maybe I can find that within me somewhere.

Isn’t that interesting that not even interacting but observing someone else staying calm and not panicking gave you hope that could happen for you?

It wasn’t his acrobatic brilliant stunts. The superpower he showed me at that moment was being quiet, staying calm, centered and present under pressure.

One of the things that intrigue me about your outcomes after people hear you speak is the difference between focusing on outcomes versus outputs. Can you give us a definition of what those two words mean to you and how that impacts productivity?

I heard this a lot before I started focusing on it. Companies would say, “We have a certain part of our workforce who works very hard and they want acknowledgment of how hard they work, not quite getting the outcomes that we need. How do we deal with that?” I look back on one of the themes in our conversation, Saturday Night Live or live TV as a metaphor for reaching outcomes on a deadline. You can’t hide. At the end of the week, there has to be that tangible show. The concrete sketch has to be turned into something real.

Nobody cares how many jokes were written if it’s not funny.

It’s how you show up. The way that I could simply define them and differentiate them is this. An output is a busy work. An output is an email. That’s important but is that getting you to whatever your ultimate outcome is to help your customers? Is that getting you toward the solution? It could be an email. It could be spending all day on ChatGPT, which I’ve loved doing. Just because I’m on ChatGPT, asking it to list five reasons for something, I’m impressed but it’s not necessarily helping me deliver my speech. It’s often busy work. It could be presentations.

Often, in companies, I found people think that a meeting is an outcome but a meeting virtually or in person, that’s an output unless it has a takeaway or something that’s going to directly move toward that solution. The outcome is the opposite of that. The outcome is solving a problem. The outcome is products. It is a service that helps someone solve their challenge or problem. You know if it’s an outcome because if you think of yourself or I think of myself, what value has the work led to that I am better off and my problem is solved? I have a solution that goes beyond the features.

It’s an actual solution that I’ve helped that person deliver. In some way or another, they are more evolved and less stressed. Whatever your promise is, that has led to that. That’s not to say we shouldn’t acknowledge the output. We need to acknowledge outputs in ourselves and others but we can’t stop there and say that’s enough. Smart work is ultimately more important than hard work.

I haven’t quite heard that before. I’ve heard, “Work smart, not hard,” but that smart work is more important than hard work is a great soundbite. There’s also a takeaway you have here about how to be creative on a deadline. Many people feel so stressed out when they’re given a deadline. Coming from the world of advertising, I was in advertising sales because I knew I was not the person that someone could come up to and say, “Give me twenty headlines by 5:00.” I would be deer in headlights.

I can come up with creative ideas when I’m not under deadlines typically or in the shower and middle of the night. A lot of people can relate to the challenge that my brain shuts down when I’m given a deadline to be creative. You saw that week after week for four years. Can you give us some a tip on what we can do if that’s our challenge?

Let’s go back to that Lorne Michaels quote and unpack that a little bit. Lorne Michaels said the show was not ready because it was finished. The show was ready because it was 11:30 on Saturday Night. What did he mean by that? What he meant by that is people will rise to the timeframe that you give them a task. If you and I said we have to produce this in the next 48 hours, we might not like it. We might kick and scream. We might resist it. Ultimately, if the stakes were high enough and it was urgent enough, we’ll finish in 48 hours.

Some of your readers might not like to read this but this is what the data shows us. There’s real data and organizational psychology that if you shrink your deadlines in half, your team will be more effective. You can take that as you want. People might disagree with that and that might not be popular to say. This is the outcome-based conversation that I like sometimes. If you are struggling with finishing something, give yourself a deadline where it’s cut in half.

[bctt tweet=”Shrink your deadlines by 50% and become more productive.” via=”no”]

Start anywhere. Start at the end if you have to. If you’re stuck at the beginning, find an accountability partner, which is the oldest thing in the book. As a matter of fact, I had someone on my podcast who is a three-time bestselling author and she’s the number one person in her field. She is ranked in several different studies I’ve seen. Yet she said that she is stuck and procrastinating on a passion project, something she wants to do. I told her on the podcast, “I will be your accountability partner. I am going to call you.” I’m going to remind her gently that it’s due. By the end of the day, she needs to take a step.

 

The other thing is to cut your deadlines in half because we rise to the timeframe. Find an accountability partner. This is not new and it sometimes almost becomes cliché because we hear it so often but what is your purpose? Why is it that you want to do this in the first place? If it’s not a priority, then the question I’d ask you is, “Is there a better project or goal to pursue now?”

I have two real-life examples of these deadline situations, having been in sales for most of my career and you schedule half an hour, maybe 45 minutes if you’re lucky to present. When I was speaking to a sales team in Canada, they said we’re given ten minutes. “The doctor will see you in ten minutes. You have ten minutes in between patients.” A lot of them are wasting those ten minutes by talking about facts and figures the doctor could look up for themselves.

It was my job to teach them how to tell a story or have something of value to intrigue them to want to keep talking. The same thing is true for a keynote speaker. I’m guessing this has happened to you because it seems to have happened to not only me but many of my friends who are in this keynote-speaking world. You’re booked for an hour.

Usually, if I’m the opening speaker, that usually works. Oftentimes, we’re the last speaker of the day. They’re running late and there’s a cocktail party that people want to get to, planes to catch or who knows what. They come up to you ten minutes before you go on stage and go, “Can you cut that down to 45 minutes?” There’s no time to edit the slides.

You talk about deadlines and creativity, first of all, your attitude and then your ability to not go through. Most people are like, “If I don’t have the time to rearrange my slides and cut slides, how in the world would I do that?” Anticipating those kinds of requests is the first step. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

The question is what happens if this has happened to me as well? Even within that timeframe, you are asked to present. It could be as a professional speaker like we are or in a business meeting and your time is cut drastically at the last minute. What you said at the beginning is crucial. Your mindset going into it is, “I’m okay. I’m going to be okay.”

We’re coming full circle to Jackie Chan. I don’t know what to expect in terms of how they’re going to react to me. All I know is I can go out and deliver this presentation, talk or workshop because I prepared for it. I am ready because of what happened outside of myself that’s not in my control. The audience doesn’t know the difference. They’re not going to be upset.

They have somewhere to go after this. They probably can’t wait to go to lunch and it’s not personal. I am going to fit within the timeframe because my audience is also the event organizer and I want to build a relationship with them. You have two audiences. One is our event organizer. Like if you’re pitching, one is the executive and one is the customer and then there are the actual people in the audience.

Number one, if I make their life easy and I don’t pout and go or say, “Come on. I prepared for the last two months for this,” if I put all that aside and I have the Jackie Chan attitude, which is I’m going to smile, I’m going to go with it, I then will shift to, as a professional and say, “The number one goal here is to stay within my timeframe.” It depends on my structure.

I’ll give you one example. When I give my talk, it’s called Signature Leadership: Transform The Way You Lead. I look at the seven traits of renowned cultural icons and look at their handwriting. Get the audience to look at their handwriting. I then give strategies they can build into their work life to build more of these creative competencies or remove some of these barriers.

I won’t go through all seven. I will go through 4, not 7. I will make sure that my opening is not rushed. My opening is powerful. Like you’re the expert in, I’ll tell a story. At the end sometimes, I bring someone up on stage and I coach them or I do what I did with you. I’ll look at their handwriting and it will be the beginning or prompt for a short conversation about them.

If I have that opening and I have that end, do you think the audience is going to be asking, “Where are the other three traits? You only talked about four traits.” They don’t care. Yet I’m not rushed at the beginning. The beginning and the end are the most important parts of a talk. In the beginning, it’s like silly putty. I can move it or shake it and then we’re good.

That’s so helpful. Also in your book, Live from Your Class, you talk about the importance of laughter increases learning. Does that also apply outside of the classroom? Does it apply to corporate situations and corporate cultures? My question is, was there a lot of laughter in the process of creating Saturday Night Live or was everyone so stressed out? Did you see people who were nailing it, having fun during the week?

The theme of that book is when you’re laughing, you’re learning, which was by a public speaking coach and comedian in England named Jack Milner. When you’re laughing, you’re learning doesn’t mean you’re laughing all the time but there have been studies that show when you’re in a playful mood, you tend to be more creative, collaborative, easier to be around and a better leader.

[bctt tweet=”When you are laughing, you are learning.” via=”no”]

Laughing falls under the umbrella of play and joy. How do you feel when you’re laughing? You feel joyful and inspired. I don’t know about you. Even when I’m a participant on a Zoom call or Microsoft Teams or I’m speaking with groups of people, I’m not blaming them, I’m not judge judging, they’re looking down, they look sad and they’re not smiling. They are carrying a load of crap from the last meeting into this meeting. There’s heaviness.

People welcome appropriate humor, laughing and playing into situations. It’s surprising because it’s rare. I’m always looking for ways to help people within learning environments. I won this award, the TED Education, the TED Talk and International Award for Innovation. It was innovation around creating a curriculum for different levels of learning from kids up to adult education.

What I learned by applying what I had taken over twelve years of this study and application of building learning environments was if you can engage people on various levels on an emotional level, as you talk about, storytelling is part of it, on an analytical and appreciative level, you want to engage all aspects. Their brain and neural pathways are firing simultaneously. They will not only learn but they’ll have this emotional experience. The learning experience becomes an emotional unforgettable feeling that they take with them and they are more likely to apply it if they’re in that state.

 

Let’s go back full circle to the letter you wrote as a young man. Do you think there was some emotional state that you created when Lorne read that letter that made him decide to reach out, pick up the phone and call you or a lesson for someone who is trying to break through, whether it’s a prospect in sales or an event planner to get a relationship going for a speaking career?

We always are trying to grow our reach and network. When you look back at what you wrote to him, was it so heartfelt and authentic because you were that transparent and that he responded to it? Is there anything that you can see that you wrote that said, “I didn’t know I was doing it at the time but here’s what made him pick up the phone?”

Number one, it was short. I have found consistently that if you are at any age or level, if you’re attempting to reach out to people and cold calling especially but even if you have a distant thing, you’ve got to keep it short. Whenever I’ve gone against my instincts on that, I’ve been wrong. I have to explain my whole reason. Keep it short.

The next thing I did was I made sure that, without going over the top, there was a brief compliment specifically as to why I was reaching out. Not just why I’m reaching out but something about that person, even Lorne Michaels at his level, that inspired me. One thing I learned by being around some celebrities both then and in the years afterward was they do get bombarded with people who give them an almost superficial level of fandom.

There’s nothing wrong with that but, “I love you. I look up to you.” That doesn’t resonate as much as, “You did something years ago.” For him, I have to go back. I still have the letter in my journals that I’ve kept all these years. I talked about seeing him in the early days before he was on Saturday Night Live on a TV show on the CBC.

I saw reruns of that and I thought, “If Lorne Michaels started from where I grew up, maybe that’s something that I could aspire to on some level.” That’s not the usual introduction. It was authentic in how it was done and it was specific. Also, it’s getting to the point even in the form of a question to tell them what you want and if there’s a way that you can make it so that even if it’s 1%, it’s adding something of value to their life.

I’m improvising this because I didn’t know you were going to ask this question. It could be something like, “I noticed on your websites that you were looking to grow this area. You’re looking to hire someone who understands AI. I happen to be a graduate of Computer Science with a minor in AI. I have an idea that’s specific to solving that problem.” Most people don’t do that. Always end, if you can, with a quick question that’s confident. It’s not too aggressive but in some ways, you’re urging them a certain sense of urgency to want to get back to you. That’s hard but it’s doable.

Give them a compliment. Tell them why you’re reaching out to them in the form of, “I think I can help you with something,” not just, “I want coffee.” You and I, if I’m in LA or you’re in Toronto, if you’re around, I would expect you to say, “Do you want to have coffee,” because we have a relationship. If you don’t have a relationship with someone more successful than you, this is what a lot of people get wrong. I did the same thing.

Even successful people think, “I’m going to pick their brains.” Picking someone’s brain is coaching. It’s not fair to them to put them in a position where they have to ignore you, ghost you or say, “I don’t do that.” Most of them won’t say no. They just won’t respond. You want to flip that switch and offer them something specific to them.

It’s a two-way street. This has been so wonderful. I love that when we work smart, that is so much more important than hard work. It’s the distinction between outcomes and outputs, shrinking our deadlines by 50% and making us more effective, whether it’s in a team or individually. You gave us so many value wisdom bombs here. If people want to reach out to you to book you as a speaker by your book, where should they go?

My website. They could google me, JamieMasonCohen.com and I’d love to chat.

Thanks again for sharing your enthusiasm, your humor and most of all, your energy.

It’s my pleasure, John.

 

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• Live from Your Class

 

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Tags: Accountability Partner, Creative Solution, Live from Your Class, Productivity, Saturday Night Live, Signature Leadership