Up The Mood Elevator with Larry Senn

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 TSP BE02 | Mood Elevator

Episode Summary

TSP BE02 | Mood ElevatorToday’s guest on the successful pitch is Larry Senn, the author of Up the Mood Elevator. He has some great insights on how you can shift from being angry and irritated to being grateful. He said that really is the key. He’s been called the Father of Corporate Culture so he knows how to get people and teams to work really well together, and of course that’s the secret to being successful. His whole premise is if you maintain a gratitude perspective, everything shifts, and that companies have value systems just like people do. He’s got so many great nuggets that I can’t wait for you to hear how he tells people to ask this question, “Do you have winners or whiners on your team?” Enjoy the episode.

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Up The Mood Elevator with Larry Senn

I am honored to have Dr. Larry Senn on my show today. Larry is someone that you probably don’t realize what an impact he’s had on your life and your business. He is a pioneer in the field of corporate culture and has literally been called the Father of Corporate Culture, so we’re going to ask him about that. He really has a vision to create a process to allow leaders to create a healthy and high performance culture. Of course, if you’re trying to get your startup funded, that’s one of the key factors as to whether it’s successful or not. Investors are always asking you, “What kind of culture do you have here?” From his Doctoral dissertation, Organizational Character as a Tool, he’s played a key role in really helping people for the last 30 years. He’s got a book out called Up the Mood Elevator. I can’t take you on a ride literally but since I’m all about helping people with the elevator pitch, we’re going to have a lot of fun talking about that. Larry, welcome to the show.

The Mood Elevator: Take Charge of Your Feelings, Become a Better YouThank you. I’m delighted to be here. It’s great to be with the famous Pitch Whisperer. There’s actually some mysticism in being a whisperer. I’m anxious to learn more about how you really create that deeper connection, which is such a key. I also think we’re aligned in the notion that nothing happens until you can sell something, whether it’s funding, an idea, a product, a vision. That’s what makes life move. Nothing happens until that happens, so it’s a wonderful art to develop.

We all have to “pitch” ourselves all the time. Even if we’re starting our own company, we have to pitch our vision to get the right team, we have to pitch to get clients, and if you want to pitch to get funding, it’s a skill that everybody needs to learn. Part of it has to do with being comfortable with who you are. That comes from defining your own culture even if you’re a one man band or one woman band at the time. If you wouldn’t mind, Larry, can you take us back to your own story of origin. There’s a story behind how I became The Pitch Whisperer, as you alluded to. I’m really fascinated to hear the story of how you became known as the Father of Corporate Culture. 

I followed what my father told me to do initially, went off to engineering school. I didn’t come from a wealthy family so I started my first commissioned work selling flowers on street corners at eleven.  As I started college, I started a business with kids selling flowers on street corners. Then I found that they didn’t sell flowers that time in supermarkets, so I started a second business selling flowers in supermarkets. By the time I was eighteen, I was driving a Jaguar XK120 and doing pretty well for my businesses. I said, “Maybe I’m more a businessman than engineer.”

When I finished engineering school I went on to get my MBA at UCLA. What I found is that I loved case studies. I love to try to understand businesses and what made them tick. Early on, I decided I want to be consultant. With the help of a professor and a kid named Jim Delaney, that’s why it’s named Senn Delaney, after the two of us, we started an early day retail, more of a process improvement firm. What I quickly found was that it was easier to decide on change than to get people to change. Most organizations were a bit like dysfunctional families.  They had politics and turf issues and trust issues. I got my epiphany. We actually were hired, Delaney and I, to help Sam at Walmart, create the original supply chain for Walmart. It was a dream job. He was like an evangelist. Talk about a Pitch Whisperer, this guy just could charm you in. He had this vision of bringing low-cost goods all over America. He really lined up all the financing to build that organization and to grow it. Working with him was a dream. At the same time, we were trying to do something similar at Woolworth in New York.  I would fly from Bentonville, Arkansas into New York and it would be like going to the morgue, just a bunch of old guys and there were old guys sitting around the table. Their only purpose seems to be to maintain the status quo. I said to myself, “That little company in Arkansas is going to take over the world and this one is going to die.”

There something about them, it’s almost like they have a different personality. I need to understand that. I realized that companies are like people, they have value systems, they have habits, they have character and that’s what corporate culture is. The name didn’t exist back then. This is in the 60s. I found a professor at USC who’d written a book called Readings in Organizational Character, just people commenting on the phenomenon. I went to him and I said, “Dr. Wolf, I’ve got to understand this thing because it has more to do with success in any company, even my own company as a startup, than anything else.” He said, “People have talked about it. No one’s ever studied it. What if we paid your way through the doctoral program and you study this phenomenon?”

You hit on a big problem there and you got a big solution for yourself out of it, what a great story.

That was really what led to ultimately writing my Doctoral dissertation as the world’s first research on the concept of corporate culture, then starting the world’s first firm devoted to shaping corporate culture. It’s those two things that got CEO Magazine to name me the Father of Corporate Culture.

The big takeaway for me is when you said companies have value systems like people.  I love that so much, Larry. I think people sometimes aren’t even introspective enough to figure out what they value. Then if they’re starting a company they certainly don’t think of it like a person, so they don’t really even think that they need to define what the values are. You’re saying you really better have it, otherwise you won’t succeed.

In fact, for anyone who’s creating one, there’s a series of essential values that exist in any healthy individual leader, team or company. One of those, for example, is called the performance value rooted in accountability because I think in life we have winners or whiners. If you really want to make it, then you really want to be highly accountable. Then you also have to have a collaborative value because you can’t do it all alone. Unless you can partner with others and bring people on board and have healthy relationships, you can’t be successful, so that’s a second of the essential values. There’s a set of values that we all have if we’re successful, even if we haven’t thought about, but we have them. We are accountable. We are collaborative. We are open to change. We do have integrity.

[Tweet “You either work with winner or whiners.”]

You speak in such great sound bites and nuggets, I can’t get enough of you. That’s great stuff. It’s memorable, it’s got a good hook, and it really is an a-ha wake-up moment for people who are running their own company, and then also if you’re at all willing to look at your own growth as a person and as a leader. You can take a minute and go, “What do I have to do the majority of the time?” If I find myself whining or complaining about something that’s not really important, stop it.

I think that life is partly about energy management. What’s your energy like? If you think about it, one of the great drains of energy is moaning, complaining, blaming, being in wait and hope as opposed to the energy created by having a bias for action and results orientation. Energy is drained if you have politics in your company, no matter how small or large, people not getting along, that’s another energy drain. If you have people who are aligned around your purpose and going for the same goal with healthy relationships, then you have this clean positive energy that really does move you forward. That’s just a part of any person or organization.

That’s a really interesting way to distinguish it because from a metaphysical standpoint, quantum physics, you look at everything as energy. Certainly, when I’m working with people on crafting a great pitch and telling them the importance of using stories to pull people in and literally become magnetic, being magnetic, being charming, that is an energy that is created between people. You either repel or you’re attracted to want to work with people or not and have them as clients. All that stuff comes into play. If we can take the perspective you just gave us and say, “The better I manage my energy, then the better I’m going to be as a person and the better I’m going to be at being magnetic to my ideal clients.” I just love that. That leads us right into managing our energy on upping the mood elevator. How did you come up with Up the Mood Elevator: Living Life at Your Best? How did you come up with that title?

[Tweet “Companies have values like people.”]

We got to thinking about these essential values. In fact, one of the values is positive spirit. What became clear to us is that when people are at their best, when people are their best selves, at the top of their game, they tend to be more accountable, collaborative, creative, innovative. They have better energy. If you think about even yourself, when you’re at your very best, what are the kinds of feelings you have? For example, when I’m at my best, I’m more optimistic, I’m more hopeful. I feel more resourceful. I feel more confident. Those are some of the ways that I feel. I feel more loving as a father or a spouse. I feel more creative, more energetic. Those are feelings I have. On the other hand, think about those times when you’re really off your game, when you’re at your worst. For me for example, I tend to get more bothered and impatient easily, more irritated and bothered. I can become more judgmental. I can worry. I can become more self-righteous.

If you think about those things, you can put those on a scale that you call a mood elevator. At the top of the mood elevator is grateful. That’s an overriding emotion we have. When we’re seeing a sunset for seeing the birth of a child, there’s no thinking, it’s just positive, just embracing emotion. That’s at the top. Then you come down to feelings like being forgiving or being creative. Those are all higher states of the mood elevator, then you go all the way down to depressed at the bottom. Every moment of every day, we live somewhere on this thing called the mood elevator. Wouldn’t it be great if you know how to press a button that could move you up? What if you learned how to not do damage when you’re down? For example, have you ever said something to a loved one you wish you could take back? Where were you in the mood elevator? You were down there because when you’re down there, your thinking is unreliable, you say things you don’t mean, you sent emails you shouldn’t have sent. It’s just learning to know that you’re thinking’s unreliable in the lower mood states in the mood elevator and not acting on them, it really can change relationships, it can change companies, it can change many things. I remember one of the CEOs said to me, “Larry, I can’t always be up the mood elevator but I can learn to do no harm.” His mantra is, “Do no harm when you’re in a bad mood.”

[Tweet “Don’t do damage when you’re down the mood elevator.”]

If you’re at the bottom of this mood elevator that you so brilliantly created where are your depressed and angry, because typically behind depression is anger that’s unexpressed from my experience, is it possible to just jump right from that to being grateful or do we have to slowly move ourselves up? Like let’s just get a little where we be just maybe realizing we’re not depressed but a little irritated and then maybe we can start to find some humor in the situation so that we can start? Can we jump from depressed to grateful?

Let me give you an example.  Let’s say that you’re sitting there at home one evening and you really are down that mood. One of the goals you had in your life is you wanted desperately to see Hamilton. It’s impossible to get tickets and you’re sitting there depressed. Your friend calls up and says, ” John, I just scored four tickets to Hamilton and I want you and your spouse to come with me. In fact, I know a member of the cast, we’re going to get to go backstage. We’re going to have dinner beforehand across the street. Would you like to come with me?” Now where would you be in that?

You instantly jump up.

TSP BE02 | Mood Elevator

The Mood Elevator: Take Charge of Your Feelings, Become a Better You

Let me tell you what happens. Our thinking creates our experience of life. Our thinking creates our reality. We’re talking about how someone can immediately shift as in the case of learning about going to Hamilton. The fundamental principle in understanding the mood elevator is that we create through our thinking. Worried thoughts create worried feelings. Grateful thoughts create grateful feelings. Every moment it’s like we’re creating a movie and we’re the producer and we have all the Hollywood sound effects to go with it. There are times where we will be stuck for a period of time in the lower levels. Just to know it’s our thinking though helps a bit, but there are things you can do. There are pointers to being up the mood elevator.

One of those is if you can do a pattern interrupt, and what I just described is a pattern interrupt, you were thinking very depressed and all of a sudden you are thinking Hamilton. A pattern interrupt can be as simple as taking a walk, walking with the dog. I pick up the phone I call Bernadette, my soul mate of four years, because just talking to her raises my spirits. I call one of my kids and just listen or maybe pick up the phone and call the grandkids. There are things you can do. I can read a book and get lost in the book, go to a movie. If I can change my thinking, I will change my mood.

We found that there are two things that scientifically shift what you call your set point on the mood elevator. One of those is pretty obvious but people don’t do it, and that is take better care of yourself. We don’t get enough sleep. We don’t take enough breaks. We don’t eat right. We don’t exercise. It’s scientifically proven that if you really get run down, you can catch a cold more easily. The fact is if you get run down, you catch a mood more easily. If you’re physically fit, taking care of yourself, you are much less likely to slide down the mood elevator. That’s one basis. That’s in my book, The Mood Elevator, that’s actually chapter nine, Shifting Your Set Point: The Wellness Equation.

Let’s take a moment and acknowledge that you walk your talk, because a lot of people can say, “Exercise, eat right, take breaks.” You literally do it. Can you just tell us a little bit about what you do to stay in shape?

Yes. I am nationally ranked and undefeated in the 80 and over sprint triathlon category. I just won the Long Beach triathlon two weeks ago in my category.

When he says 80 he means 80 plus years old, not 80% of something. I wanted you to really own that because you are walking your talk and it’s such an inspiration of how not only live better at any age but how to live better in our third act. I just think it’s so inspiring there are people out there like you. We know people like Carl Reiner maybe and other people or Norman Lear that are even older than you are that are still out there creating and making a difference. When you say something, it has a whole different level of credibility than somebody who’s just saying it, I don’t know, 30 or 40 years old. Thank you for that.

I want to also ask you, because this is one of my passions, is to help people get off the self-esteem roller coaster, especially if they’re in the sales position of only feeling good about themselves if their numbers are up, and feel lousy about themselves if their numbers are down. Let me tell you, it goes up and down multiple times in a day sometimes. I love your example of you can go from depressed to grateful if suddenly something wonderful happens, like getting tickets to a show you want to go to. Do you have any insights either from your own personal life or within the mood elevator of how can we shift our mood without having to have something outside of us come in and shift it?

[Tweet “Maintain a gratitude perspective.”]

That’s a deep question. What’s interesting is that we are so attached. We just learn in life that we think we are our results. The most significant factor that can help someone with the mood elevator is this notion of maintaining a gratitude perspective. I might have lost this sale today but my wife loves me. I have five wonderful kids. I can still run a triathlon. I’m so blessed in many ways. What can I learn from that sale? What did I do there that I didn’t do as well as I could? How do I turn that into a learning experience? The ability to maintain perspective in life. Whenever we get depressed and down, we’ve made the thing too big a deal. We’ve lost our perspective. All of us here and anybody who’s listening to this is in the small fraction of a percentage of people in the world based upon how fortunate we are, where we live, the fact we have a job, the fact that we’re learning and growing by turning into something like this. All of those things are wonderful things and yet we sweat the small stuff too much.

It’s Maslows hierarchy, isn’t it? You’ve got the basics handled and you know where your next meal is coming from and you’ve got a place to sleep, anything above that and the self-actualization stuff of constantly trying to make things perfect will drive you crazy and you won’t have any peace of mind. I’ve been fortunate enough to interview thought leaders, business experts like yourself. I interviewed Isaac Lidsky who happens to be blind, and wrote a book called Eyes Wide Open and runs his own company and looks at his blindness as a gift. I’ve interviewed Sam Morris who is known as the Zen Warrior. He was hit by a drunk driver 16 years ago and he’s paralyzed from the waist down. He tells me, “My brain’s not paralyzed. I’m helping other people transcend their physical.” Whenever I start to get a little mopey or frustrated or overwhelmed like, “Why isn’t this happening as fast as I want it to?” the impatience button, I go, ” I can see and I can walk. Let’s start there.” This maintaining the gratitude perspective is brilliant. I just love it so much.

I want to do a little bit of a shift if we can because you’re such an expert and you have so much information. One of the things that you are the master at, Larry, is helping companies that have merged two different types of cultures figure out how that team is going to get along. Can you tell us when example of what you’ve done so people can know to go to you for that in the future?

TSP BE02 | Mood Elevator

In any relationship, look at your differences as complementary.

Yes. Actually two companies merging is almost like two people getting married and all they have is their bios. They just met each other. It’s this phenomenon called cultural clash when two organizations come together. A famous example is a very costly one. Sprint when they tried to buy Nextel, it cost them $20 billion of market cap because of cultural clash. Most of the problems that United had. Continental was a pretty good culture and United was a terrible culture. The culture there was a clash. These things can happen. Some of the very successful mergers, CVS and Caremark, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, all those we’ve been a part of. It’s really about really understanding the culture of the two firms and getting really to respect and value the differences as opposed to judging it. I think in any relationship, a marriage or anything, if you can look at your differences as complementary, if you look at them as helping one another as opposed to being opposing or critical.

The key thing we do, in fact, right now we’re working with a company called CenturyLink and Level 3, a gigantic $34 billion merger. We just did a two-day off-site seminar with the new eighteen-person team about half of each company. We just spent a lot of time really getting to know each other and tell our crucible stories about where we came from, what our values are, what our aspirations are, what we want to have as a joint vision for the future culture of this organization. At the end of that two days is like they’ve been together ten years in terms of trust, openness. A term we put out there is it’s very useful in life to assume positive intentions in others, not assume motives. We so often assume motives. What happens in mergers is we assume motives. It’s believing that each person’s doing what makes sense to them even if you don’t agree with it. It’s not malicious. It’s just how they see things.

We bring these wonderful concepts like the mood elevator and assuming positive intention and accountability and collaboration. We play a fascinating game that they can only win if they cooperate. Initially, they compete and don’t win, but then they finally figure it out and they say, “We’re so much better together than we are apart.” There’s an interesting thing we call an insight or a-ha based learning methodology we use that many people describe our two-day off-site event as a life altering event. That’s part of our magic.

One of my favorite expressions is when you’re healed, you’re not healed alone. When you fix something inside yourself, you’re in an ecosystem or your family or friends or in corporate situations, where if one person can get that a-ha moment of, ” I don’t have to go it alone. I don’t have to assume that everyone’s out to get me or get me fired,” and come from this place of trust. I work with people all the time that there are three unspoken questions people have when they hear you pitch. The first one is, “Do I trust you?” If I don’t trust you, I’m not ever going to hire you, buy from you, fund you, any of that stuff.

You really have delved down into a great way for people to start trusting each other so that then the client could say, “This team gets along. They’re trustworthy.” Just to double-click for a minute on the United Airlines example, which didn’t have a good culture, as you said, those things leak out. That’s the controversy that happened with the passenger being dragged off. Then the way they responded to it wasn’t the ideal scenario according to the majority of people who looked at that. You’ve got to own your stuff when you make a mistake. Putting principles above people never works. That’s what I saw happening there. I’d love your take on if you agree with that or what your perspective is.

I do. One thing that can drive all that is to have a purpose or noble cause. For me, both working today at my age and writing the book all has to do with a purpose. Taking care of myself is my purpose of being around for my family. I have a seventeen-year old son in high school still, kids ranging in age from 17 to 52. The book really, my personal purpose is to help more and more people live life at their best mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. When I formulated that, I said, “I need to write a book about living life at your best.” The original book I wrote in 2012 was Up the Mood Elevator: Living Life at Your Best. The new book that just came out is called The Mood Elevator: Become a Better You. It really is my way of communicating things I’ve learned about living life as your best self more of the time. That’s what I hope to get to the world through the seminars that tens and thousands of people attend every year and through the book and ways like that. To any of your listeners, if there’s any way it’s helped any of them with their startup or their idea or anything, then I feel as if I’ve made a difference.

People can follow you on Twitter @TheMoodElevator. Larry, do you have any last words of wisdom? Obviously, you’ve led an incredibly productive, looking from the outside-in, very fulfilling life. Do you have any insights for people on how to do that? Almost like if you could talk to your younger self, what would you say?

Find your passion in life, the thing that really inspires and motivates you and creates energy for you, and then go about doing it being your best self. Be really accountable for the shadow you cast. Know that your mood affects others and that you are accountable for how you show up every day. You’re accountable to the world for that.

You cast a shadow wherever you go. That’s about being conscious, isn’t it?

Yes.

How else can people follow you?

There are some great videos I’ve done on The Mood Elevator and some great articles on TheMoodElevator.com. They can reach me at [email protected] also.

Thank you so much for inspiring us to find our passion. Stay healthy, stay active, and most of all figure out ways to get up when you’re down by using your mood elevator. Wonderful stuff. Thanks, Larry. 

You’re welcome.

 

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