Tag

KF #10. Courage Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Jun 19
0

1068: Finding the Courage to Say What Needs to be Said with Molly Tschang

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Molly Tschang shares how to turn difficult conversations into opportunities to build connections and relationships.

You’ll Learn

  1. The preamble that helps your feedback land well
  2. How to say no while still being a team player
  3. What to do when you disagree with the majority

About Molly

Molly Tschang, founder of Abella Consulting and Say It Skillfully® Inc., empowers senior management teams to Win as One. With expertise in over 80 mergers and acquisitions, she has guided executives through the intricate human dynamics of transformational change and growth. Molly helps leaders cultivate mutual commitment, enabling them to excel in complex, high-stakes environments. Through Say It Skillfully, she equips individuals at all levels with the skills to communicate effectively and authentically. Her mission: to empower everyone to be seen, heard, and understood—especially when tackling their most critical challenges.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

  • Strawberry.me. Claim your $50 credit and build momentum in your career with Strawberry.me/Awesome
  • Quince. Get free shipping and 365-day returns on your order with Quince.com/Awesome
  • Plaud.ai. Use the code AWESOME and get a discount on your order

Molly Tschang Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Molly, welcome!

Molly Tschang
Great to be with you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to hear your insights about how we can Say It Skillfully. Could you kick us off with what are the most fascinating discoveries you’ve made about us and humans communicating over your years of coaching and teaching on this stuff?

Molly Tschang
I think, number one, is how much communication starts within. It’s so easy to say, “Pete doesn’t get it. They don’t want to hear it.” And when I realized this, this is so much of it is about our relationship with our own self and really be grounded within.

And it seems like sort of namby-pamby perhaps, but I have been with some of the most extraordinary communicators, and their ability to really be in service to others is because they really feel solid in themselves, and they’re not kind of worried about themselves. So, I think that’s really been first and foremost.

Pete Mockaitis
So, they’re solid in themselves and they’re not worried about themselves. What are the typical worries, concerns, hang ups that get in most people’s way here?

Molly Tschang
Yeah, the fears are real. And I want to caveat that I’m not about unicorns and rainbows, Pete. So, if you really are in an environment where it’s been shown that people don’t want to hear other people’s points of views, bad things really happen to you, Molly is not saying, “Skillfulness is really on your radar at all.” That would be a waste of time.

And my bigger question is, “Why are you there?” because I would really hope that you would be in a work environment where you could spread your wings and fly. So, first and foremost, we’re talking about places where people really do want to hear from people. They really want to get a sense of an accurate truth.

And the fears are real, and I say they’re threefold. One is just that fear of being wrong. And, of course, making mistakes is how we succeed. Like, conceptually, we all know that, but you go to school and you’re trying to get an A. And you don’t get an A by getting wrong answers. So, it’s been beat into us to get the right answer.

I’ve even heard senior people say to people on their team, “You need to be the smartest person in the room,” right? And when you’re in a room where everyone’s jockeying for a position like that, it’s intimidating. And so, if there’s a chance that you really may not be right, you’re inclined to be like, “Well, I better not say anything,” right? So that fear of being wrong.

The fear of not fitting in, which really gets to being perceived as not a team player. Let’s say everyone’s going one direction, you have a different point of view, but you’re a little bit hesitant to put it out because you don’t want to be like, “Eh, I don’t want to be like, I’m not, you know, all for the team,” and so we hold back, and that’s very real.

And the third one is, particularly, when we’re giving, I would say, constructive feedback that someone needs to hear. It’s this notion of, “I don’t want to offend them. I don’t want to offend Molly because she’s going to feel bad about herself.” And so, again, I would say that that’s about, “Hey, what’s your relationship about giving feedback to someone?” because that helps them to grow. That helps them to be a better person.

And so, that ability to have a mental shift on “Why are you speaking in the first place?” and to get whole with that, I really think can change the whole game for lots of folks.

Pete Mockaitis
And if we have these fears, what should we do?

Molly Tschang
Well, I think, first of all, it’s just really assessing, “Is it really there?” So, I hear this a lot, “Well, so and so doesn’t want to hear it.” I’m like, “Okay. So, if you have something that you see that the person is doing that maybe isn’t serving the team, right, and you don’t say something, how are they ever going to know?”

And so, what happens is people really are able to peel it back. Now, again, if someone has really shown they don’t want to hear it, again, I’m not saying stick your neck out, but I think a lot of folks will be like, “Well, wait a second.” And I say this, I mean, does your boss get out of bed, fly out of bed going, “I’m going to make it so scary no one tells me what I need to hear”? No, that’s not the output they do.

And so, I think if you take a little bit of lightness with it, people realize, “Hey, maybe there’s a little bit more fear in my own self.” So, I think it’s really determining if it’s valid or not. And I think the other thing to do is, “What is my intention?” Now, if you’re trying to speak up to make Molly look so amazing, like everyone else put down, okay, I would argue, I’m not sure about that intention.

If you’re there saying, “I want to say something because I think it’s going to help the team think more critically about this problem. I think if I say something, it’ll help people understand the customer’s experience,” then you’re really there serving the whole. And so, that intention, by the way, when you come across as really wanting to help others, that generally goes really well.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, it’s funny, that phrase, “They don’t want to hear it,” it’s like there’s layers of truth to that. And I’m thinking about a tale of two landlords. One, I’m thinking about like, so if you own a building and you got tenants, and then there’s a problem.

On one sense, we don’t want to hear it because it’s like, “Oh, no, this means money and difficulty in hunting down a contractor or a handyman, someone to repair this thing. And this is a hassle, a headache, a thing I wish I didn’t have to deal with.” So, on the one sense, we don’t want to hear it.

But I’m thinking about my friend, Lisa, who had some tenants just completely ignore, like, a really nasty rat situation. It was in the corner of the basement they weren’t in all that often, it’s like, “Yeah, whatever, you know, it’s kind of a pain, but, you know, I don’t want to annoy Lisa. I don’t want to put her out,” and so they just didn’t tell her for years.

And it just, as you can imagine, multiplied into an epic horrifying problem. So, it’s like, that phrase, “They don’t want to hear it,” it’s really good to examine that in some detail because, on the one hand, it’s probably true. They would prefer they live a life, a day without this big unexpected problem plopping on their lap, and them having to now contend with it.

So, on the one hand, yes, they don’t want to hear it. But, on the other hand, it is so much better to address a couple rats than dozens after years of neglect.

Molly Tschang
Yeah, 100% on that. And I think that gets down to what is our intention in sharing and how do we say it. And so, “This might be tough to hear, but I’m saying it because, if I were in your shoes, I would really want to know. I’m saying this because I think this will help. We’ll put something out there that is addressable now that if I wait a little longer, I think it only gets worse. So, I appreciate you being open to this because I really think it’s going to help us, the team, you.”

And so, again, it’s thinking about “What is worrying me about saying it?” and getting whole with that. I don’t want to make people bad or wrong for having fears or worrying, but think about that and then take the high road, like, “What is my intention? Why am I saying something? And it’s to contribute and it’s to be helpful.”

And so, I think this is like, “Ah, this is sort of really disgusting, but I have to tell you. I think it’s better to know now.” So, you can kind of grease the skits for how someone receives something by the way you offer it up. That takes a little bit of planning, Pete, right? So, you can’t just be like blurting stuff randomly.

And that idea of really, as a little bit of structure, which is the framework that we teach in our book here, is just, “Hey, what’s going on for me? The me side, getting hold of myself, getting out of my own way, knowing what do I want to have happen? And knowing that that’s what I want to have happen, how do I show up? What’s my energy? Is it with heart? Is it with anger? How do I show up to set the stage?”

And then that you is, what’s it like for the other person, which is like, “Ugh, no one wants to hear they have to spend more money.” However, they’d much rather spend less money now than more money later. And at the top level, the we, who are we together, here we are in this relationship and we want to have a really open, communicative, transparent relationship where we’re trying to help each other.

And they don’t really want you to live with rats, frankly, and you don’t really want them to have a major rat problem, ideally.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, certainly. Okay. Well, could you maybe share with us some beautiful, illustrative conversation examples from your work, either your own conversations or conversations you’ve helped sort of navigate, mediate, that bring some of this stuff to life?

Molly Tschang
Just yesterday, I was talking to someone who has been at our company a long time. They have a new manager. The manager has been promoted to a more senior level and the relationship with this person had been fabulous because they were not micromanaging and diving in when maybe they shouldn’t be now because they’re more senior.

And so, that idea of, “How do I give this senior person constructive feedback without risking my head being chopped off or them freaking out or being even more anxious than it’s already obvious to you that they are?”

And so, because this person happened to have a pretty good relationship, I mean, I said to this person, “You are not at risk of being fired, and you should know that you’re trying to really help this individual be the best leader they can be. And if they don’t know that what they’re doing demoralizes the team, the team feels dismissive,” they had a specific example of how something was said that the manager thought, “Oh, this is so fabulous.” And then her point of view was, “No, that was not fabulous.”

So, getting hold of that situation, and then it’s saying, “Hey, I want to this person aside,” saying, “Amy, we’ve worked a long time. I have a ton of respect for you and I’m really glad you got promoted. I want you to be able to look great for everybody. And in our last meeting, I’m wondering how you thought that went.” And so, you start to get an engagement of how the person, their reality of the situation.

So often we get into it and you want to blur it out, “This is what you need to do,” right, because you’re so worried about saying it, but that ability to kind of on-ramp with someone, create a conversation, and then kind of say that’s how that landed for you, “I can see what you were trying to do when you said that, but I want to share something because I think it may be a blind spot for you. We all have blind spots, Amy. And I think this could really help you be even more effective.”

And then you share that, and you go back and forth. It’s not a “My way or the highway.” Again, it is your reality. And I have this notion of shared reality. We want to get to an accurate shared reality. And Amy is only going to be able to lead to her full potential if she kind of appreciates, even though she might have meant something, it landed differently.

And so, I think the biggest part for any individual is just that courage. Because it does take courage. It is far easier to say, “She doesn’t want to hear it. It’s not going to go well. I’m not going to say anything.” And the thing is, if you do that, which is totally your right to do, you’re contributing to the problem. You’re not a bad person, but you are perpetuating the disconnects.

And that is what I’ve seen, Pete, I call them your A and B players, they’re like, “Wait a second. I didn’t work my butt off, whether it was community college or Harvard or Cambridge, to be beige or a wallflower. I want to be able to contribute.” And so, that’s the energy. You have to come with that. And if you are coming across in a way to be helpful, genuinely to be helpful, the person may not want to hear it – but you know what – they’re going to respect that, and deep down, they’re going to be grateful.

I have just seen this time and time and time again, because, even at the most senior levels, we’re all human. And, by the way, we all do stuff that we think is going well and it’s not landing that way. It doesn’t make us bad leaders. It means that people are different. We all respond differently. So, I mean, I think that one working, managing up, if you will, giving feedback up is a big one.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we talked about the fear and the courage and the “They don’t want to hear it,” I mean, there is a segment of, you mentioned sometimes these fears are completely justified in terms of retribution or whatever. They will not receive it even if you say it as skillfully as Molly herself.

So, could you help us? If we’re gauging, doing like a risk assessment, what might be some indicators that this really is a danger zone to say this versus, “No, no, we’re just getting in our heads. We’re, like, we have nothing to fear, but the fear itself. Summon the courage and you’ll be glad you did”?

Molly Tschang
I think people are pretty apparent about that. And so, “Hey, I’ve noticed how that meeting went. How do you think the meeting went?” You just open up with an open-ended question, “You know, I’m really working on improvement. What are some areas you think I could be improving? Hey, I’m going to flip it a little. Where are some areas that you could be improving?”

You can see if someone’s going to go with you on that, or if they’re like, you know, stiff arm, like, “What are you talking about?”

Pete Mockaitis
“I discuss these matters with my coach, not my subordinates. Thank you very much.” “Oh, dang.”

Molly Tschang
Exactly. That’s like a clear indicator. Okay. That’s like get out the resume, freshen up the resume and let’s go, right? I do understand that it’s a big disconnect. It can be very hard to look for new roles. I really want people to value themselves, Pete, because you have to decide that you’re finding a place that deserves you.

I know so many people, super hard working. I mean, you’re going to go all out and you got to find a place that values you, and that’s on you. It’s not someone else’s job. And it’s a very personal decision. And I get, sometimes, things aren’t exactly perfect. That’s fine. You decide for whatever reason that’s the right situation for you at that moment. Totally respect that.

I don’t want to give people both sides. You can’t complain about it and not be willing to do something about it. That’s where I have to call a spade a spade.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, and I’m sure it varies quite a bit by industry and situation and dah, dah. dah. But if I could put you on the spot to very roughly hazard an estimated guess of what percent of people can handle getting some feedback versus what percent, I will say managers and up, versus what percent are just not worth it?

Molly Tschang
Yeah. So, this would be only Molly’s very limited experience. I have no data on this, but my very limited experience is, I think, there’s probably 15, 10, 15%, they’re not bad people. They cannot kind of get out of their own way, in certain situations, right? In certain situations. And in those cases, it’s far better to be at peace with that and figure out “How do we work it so that we can mitigate this?”

Seventy-nine percent of relationship issues, if you will, are perpetual. We don’t solve them. They are there. So, it’s, “How do we manage around those?” The more we have transparency about a tendency, let’s just say, as a leader, I have a tendency to jump the gun, shiny new object, right? And I know that. So, if I’m transparent, “Team, I know that I can be attracted by the shiny new object, and that can feel like I’m deprioritizing these other things.”

“I’m being open about this and I’m giving you full authority when I’m doing that, to do a Heisman, or whatever you need to do so that I can wake up and appreciate that I’m kind of going off a little bit.” So, I think the leaders who do that, I mean, are empowering their teams to be part of the solution, are owning, showing vulnerability in a good way because we all have stuff, right?

Pete, no one’s perfect here. We all have stuff. No one, for the leaders are out there, you’re the leader for a reason. People respect that. I think something has come up recently, where sometimes in decision-making, a leader wants to seem very inclusive, which is fantastic. However, if the decision has been made and, in your mind, you’re just going to do X, and by the way, you’re the leader, so it’s your prerogative to make the decision. Just let the team know.

“I took some feedback,” or, “I didn’t take feedback,” or, “It was a short amount of time. I’ve made this decision.” What people don’t want is to go into a meeting, you’re pretending to take all this input when you’ve already made up your mind, right? So, these are the things where I’d say, from a transparency standpoint, the leader knowing, “Okay, where am I on this? Hey, I’ve decided this is the call.” Awesome. Tell people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so you’ve got these specific scenarios where the fears pop up, and it could benefit a lot to say it skillfully. So, we talked a bit about giving that feedback. How about some additional magical words, phrases, scripts, pro tips for these other scenarios, like speaking up when you disagree, confronting a bully, sharing bad news or a mistake, setting boundaries, saying no? Give us some of your top scenarios and favorite ways to say it.

Molly Tschang
Well, I think the saying no when people are like, because the people who are the highest performers, right, they’re always getting more stuff because they get it done. And so, this is where I would say to people, you’re enabling people to give you the work at 5:00 o’clock and it’s due at 9:00 a.m. or what have you. And so, you have to draw the line.

And part of that is, “Oh, I said you’re being a great teammate and you are helping them to be more planful. You’re helping them to be a teammate.” And so, this is where lightness, I would say, I would offer folks, “Oh, my gosh, Pete, I love working with you. You’re so great. You’re driving me out of my mind. Okay? And so, I’m going to tell you right now, I’m not doing it.”

“I said, Pete, I’m not doing it. For the last 20 times you’ve come to me, I’ve done this and I can’t do these 11th-hour ditches, so I’m going to tell you no. And here’s why. Because I have these other priorities, people came to me, I’m accountable for this. I know you can appreciate that. Once in a blue moon, I’m happy to jump through hoops for you, but it can’t be a habit.” Right?

This being open-hearted about it and how it serves the whole, not, “I’m right and you’re wrong.” But, “I understand what situation you’re in. I’m explaining my situation so you get it, and I’m doing the best I can for what I believe serves the organization.” And that’s defensible. Again, people might not like it, but we don’t want to enable people to be going with behaviors that don’t serve them.

The same thing, I think, goes with boundaries. It’s just being clear, “Oh, Pete, but I don’t want to be a witch.” I said, “No one said you had to be a witch.” I said, “Hey, team, this is the deal.” Whatever you might have at whatever time, “I want people to understand, I am a thousand percent in.” Maybe you’re available later in the day or what have you, but you explain to people how you’re going to get your work done and you just let them know, “I will get it done. I need this amount of time because of…” whatever reason. And people will honor that.

I think people feel bad about asking for what they need. But I think if you’re delivering and you’re adding value to the team, you’ve earned the right to say, “Hey, I want to continue to perform at a very high level. And this is what it takes for me to perform at a high level.” For some folks who aren’t maybe getting as much feedback as they might like from their managers, and managers are busy. They’re running around. They’ve got stuff and they’re not trying not to. They maybe just haven’t had the time to think about it.

“Raymond, I would really appreciate a chance to sit down with you every month to get a quick rundown of what you think is going well and where I can improve. And the reason this is important is I’m going to feel more motivated because I’m getting specific input. And I feel like I’m going to be able to do a better job for you and for the team.”

Go in with a positive intent. It’s easy, “Well, they don’t value me. They don’t trust me.” Maybe they don’t, but that’s not going to set you up for success if you start that way. Show the positive intention that you would like someone to give you and reflect that back to them.

And then, I think, sometimes we get into the solving mode, and I understand this. “Get in. The project is late. What are we going to do?” That ability to acknowledge where the other person is, to be human. Let’s say someone you’re working with shows up and they’re just not quite themselves. You’re a little uncomfortable, frankly, with that emotion so you just want to jump to the work even faster.

But I would offer, “You know, Sandy, before we get into the project, you don’t quite seem like yourself. Is everything okay?” That’s it. That shows caring. Now people say, “I don’t want to pry.” I’m not asking you to pry. Sandy may say, “Oh, I appreciate that,” or, “No, I’m fine. I just didn’t get a lot of sleep,” or what have you.

But that moment is for you to connect because effective communication starts when you actually connect with the other human being. So don’t feel that that’s a waste of time. That’s helping someone feel they’re seen, they can feel heard. I think for some folks who tend to want to solve a lot, the last thing I’ll say is this, my favorite is say more, right?

We have two ears. We have one mouth. Then give the other person a chance to fully share what’s going on for them without you feeling like, “I have to construct some brilliant response,” but rather just hear it for what it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you know, it’s funny when you talk about just acknowledging that there’s a human and their emotions and what’s up, I recently had a conversation where someone said, “Oh, how are you doing?” I said, “Oh, hanging in there.” And he said, “Yes, so what does that mean because…” and he figured it out. Like, that’s my code phrase for “I’m not doing great, but I don’t feel like really getting into it so I’m going to say I’m hanging in there,” which is accurate. Whereas, to say fine is to lie.

Now you could say, “Well, hey, it’s a social norm, so it doesn’t count as a lie.” So, okay, that’s another conversation. But so that’s my little personal code but he saw right through it, he’s like, “Wait, but so, like, what does that mean?” And I thought that was so good because we were able to talk about the things, and it was very helpful.

Molly Tschang
That’s good. That’s really good.

Pete Mockaitis
Because you’re right, it’s delicate because you don’t want to pry, but you really do care and you really are conveying, “No, seriously, I’m offering you the permission to tell me what’s actually happening in your life, in your current mood, state, vibe. There’s an open floor invitation for that conversation right now, even though you might not be accustomed to that in many work contexts.” So, yeah, you don’t want to put them on the spot, but you do care. What do you recommend?

Molly Tschang
So, I think this is realizing that we can be skillful and show that we care and do everything that we can. And that’s what we can do. We can’t make the person feel comfortable sharing something. Some people, they’ve never shared at work. And I understand, I have done workshops with people, and I had one person say, “I’ve been at this company 17 years. I have never had a conversation like this.”

The ability to be real and to share who you are and what’s going on, particularly your struggles, that’s not the norm. I think, to the extent that you can create that space where people can show up, not to bog down work with all the personal problems. That is not the point, but that people appreciate that we’re not pretending you’re some perfect robot that just marches along and everything is, like, fine.

So, I think the individual may say, “Well, you know, I’m fine.” “Okay. Well, I just want to make sure. I care about you. And I just want you to know, if there’s any time that I can be helpful to talk about something off the record, I’m here for you.” That’s it. That’s it. You’re extending an opening and an olive branch, sharing that you care. You’re showing that you care.

And I can assure you that, even if they don’t respond to it, deep down, that lands well, right, because we’re human beings, at the end of the day. We’re not project manager or tech lead to, right? There’s a human being with a lot of life experiences.

And I think one of the things that, I think the social media is not so great for that, but, you know, we learn the most from the things we mess up and the struggles and stuff that’s hard. And it’s not really necessarily fun to share. You don’t want me to brag about how weak I was or how I screwed something up but I think creating space for people on that front is really important.

In fact, there’s one situation where this person talked about this conversation. It turns out this person, essentially, cannot see out of one eye, but had never shared this disability with people because he just didn’t feel comfortable doing that. And, of course, we’re in awe of him to be able to function the way he did.

So, I want folks to own your own sense of courage, and that when you share and are open of yourself, that’s an invitation to let other people know that they can do the same. And you have the saying, “I can see you because I’ve gotten to know you.” And to get to know someone, it’s about hearing their story and being open to hearing it without judgment.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now let’s hear about the scenario in which there’s a group meeting situation, folks generally seem like, “Okay, yeah, yeah, this is the thing we’re going to do.” You think it’s a terrible idea. You’ve got the minority opinion of disagreement. Any pro tips on going there?

Molly Tschang
This is where you have to get deep down and say, “You know, I’m saying this not because I want to be right and make everyone wrong. I’m saying it’s because I think that there’s an angle here that we would want to explore. And I think weighing in that way can help. So, I am observing,” so you’re noticing, “I’m noticing everybody’s on the same page with this, which is great for you, folks. I have to share that I do see it a little differently or a lot differently.”

But what you’re not saying is, “You guys are all wrong and I’m super right.” Okay, that’s not the insertion. “I see it differently. I’d like to share this to spur the discussion. And I’m sharing it because, obviously, I want us to get to the best answer for us, for the customer, for whatever, so,” and then you share it.

I think, lots of times, people feel like they’re trying to one up, they’re trying to like go through all the details that you may not know. Realize you’re only seeing it from your angle and you can share, “I’m in customer service. I know all you folks are in engineering and in marketing. I see perhaps something different and I want to give you the benefit of what I see because I think it could inform the best decision.”

It takes being grounded in myself to be able to offer that in a way with that language. So, that’s where I would say getting clear on, “Hey, why am I here? I’m not here to make everybody else look stupid and I’m the smartest one in the room. That’s not why I’m here. I’m here because I do legitimately see something different.”

And it can also be, “You know, I’m really tracking that everyone is seeing this the same way. I’m missing a few pieces. Could you help me understand X?” Rather than say, “It’s not going to work when you do it that way. When this happens, help me understand how that’s going to move.” You’re being curious without judging, without expecting an answer.

So, I think that just giving folks different ways to insert so that you’re best serving the whole. That’s my main message here is that we’re here because we really want to help everyone get to the right state. Okay, sometimes people have to make their own mistakes. You’ve done what you can. If they’re like, “Hey, we hear you, Molly. I think that…”

And the leaders can say this, “You know, given what I know, I’m going to go with this. I might be wrong, but we’ll go with it. And if we need to change course, we will.” You’re like, “Okay, great.  You go with it.” You did what you could to the best of your ability. You sleep well at night.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I’d also like to hear your perspective on what are some things you recommend we don’t say, like common missteps, like, “Uh-oh,” you’re better off maybe purging any key words or phrases from our vocabulary?

Molly Tschang
So, two come to mind. So, one is if you’re a more senior person, really not, it could just be anyone, but someone comes to you with bad news or tough news, something you may not be so thrilled to hear. I have heard senior people, the first thing out of their mouth when a more junior person tells them something that’s not easy to say, “Who said that?” Just like, “Did you just blurt that out in a very aggressive declarative tone to someone who was trembling because they wanted to tell you something that they thought you needed to know?”

So, I get that you might be outraged. I get that you’re trying to connect all the dots. The number one thing, when someone comes to you with stuff that might be tough, is to say, “Gosh, before I say anything, thank you. I appreciate that may not have been so easy to say. And I want everyone else who is here to know that I need you and want you to be able to come forth with things that maybe you don’t think I want to hear.”

So, the leaders who do that, you have to reinforce it every day. What happens is the leader is like, “Well, I told them that they should be able to say anything that they want.” And you said it once, you know, in January 15th of 2025. Like, it doesn’t work. It has to be reinforced and it has to be backed up with how you respond when someone gives you the bad news or something that they don’t want to hear, okay?

And that doesn’t mean you’re happy about it. I’m not trying to conflate that. Saying, “Hey, I really respect that you shared that with me. I’m going to push back a little, but I want you to continue to do that.” You can be upfront about that. I’m not saying you have to be namby-pamby about it, but you have to realize that, as a senior person, it’s just inherently scary. It just is.

Even if you are saying, “I’m not scary and I want to hear it.” From a power authority level, it’s hard for people. And appreciating that, I think, is super important. Now, I know other folks on the other side where people are so comfortable with them, they’re coming to them all the time and telling them whatever, and then they have a different problem, they’re like, “Wait a second. What do I really need to know here, right?” And so, I mean, you got both sides of that coin.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Anything else?

Molly Tschang
Well, I think there’s a lot of feedback scenarios, and this is the one I alluded to earlier that I just want people to realize, like, “Molly doesn’t get better unless people feel comfortable helping me get better.” Someone else doesn’t get better unless we help them. So, we need each other on the team to be able to grow and to get better. So that’s normal.

And I want people to feel good about the fact that someone cares enough to say, “Hey. I see what you were trying to do there. I’d like to offer something that I think could be more effective. Are you open to it?” And so, I think this back and forth in a conversation is what I want to help people think about. So often, they get in and they have this piece of feedback and it’s, I’ve seen people go four minutes.

And the poor person is like, just from a fire hose, getting all this deluge of words. They don’t really even know what you’re saying. So, that ability to just take the time, to set the stage, “I’m speaking up because I think it’s something that can be helpful. I may not be 100% right, but I want to share it for your consideration.” So, you’re giving them optionality, and then roll into why you think it could be helpful.

Now, if someone, you’re in a situation where you really think they did something that didn’t work, you have to say, “Hey, you’re the boss person. I have to say, I’m calling it like I see it. I don’t think that really worked, and here’s why.” “I could be wrong about that but this is my decision.” Or, “Since I’m the leader, I can make that call.” And that’s fair.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell me, Molly, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Molly Tschang
Well, there’s three things, I think, that differentiate the approach that Marshall and I took to this book we wrote. And I think the first thing is we really wanted to confront a very widespread workplace blind spot. And that is that people are, in fact, not speaking up, even in the highest performing places. They have these fears or they lack the skill.

And the disconnect is the leaders actually think they’re super accessible and the employees think otherwise. And so, the ability to bubble that up is like, “Hey, folks, that is going on.” For the leaders who are like, “Oh, my people love me.” Those are like, “No, I’m not really sure that’s going on.” So, I think just being upfront that people are not speaking up as much as they could be, that’s an opportunity for everyone.

And so, the idea of this effective communication is it is a life-changing skill. Learning how and when best to use your voice benefits your relationships, your career, and every single thing that you do. Yet, of all the things we’re trained in and all this corporate training I had for three decades, it’s not something that we learned. So, I just want to encourage folks that, because it is a very personalized, individualized skill, we come from different backgrounds, different experiences, it’s really on you to figure out what words work for you.

Certain words work for Pete. He can use them. Certain words work for Molly. But for each of us, I want to encourage you to really find what works for you because, fundamentally, your communication is how other people experience you. It is you, right? So, people are, “Well, how come she doesn’t think I’m confident?” I’m like, “Well, maybe she doesn’t think you’re confident because you’re not communicating very confidently, right?” Newsflash.

And then I think the third thing I would offer is that I think a lot of personal development, the communication space is you have a certain, like, “How do you play the game? And how do I win?” And there’s nothing wrong about figuring out how you win the game. I would offer that what we’re trying to come forth with in the Say It Skillfully way is that we’re trying to help people learn how to actually change the game, Pete, so that everyone wins.

And I think when you’re actually giving people the space to be who they are, to say what they think needs to be said, and really bubble up all the different viewpoints, you have the best shot of aligning, really, on what’s real, what’s the accurate shared reality. And from that we can do our best work together.

And I really want that. I really truly want that for everyone because I didn’t speak English until I was five. I was painfully shy. Super, super unskillful. So, it’s a hundred percent a learned skill.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now let’s hear a bit about your favorite things. Could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Molly Tschang
Well, “To serve is to live,” Frances Hesselbein, passed at 107, says it all.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study?

Molly Tschang
I like Marcus Aurelius. So, his book of little genius wisdoms. I can’t pick one, but I think he’s amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Molly Tschang
So, my friends wrote this great book on meditations, and I can’t believe I’m just spacing out. It’s by Bruce Kazanoff, and, gosh, I can’t remember the name of it. I’ll have to come back and put it up there. But it’s this tiny book of meditations.

And the reason I love it so much is the short meditations were a collaboration. And they collaborated, and they just wrote it organically, and they would send something back and forth and the whole process of that. And I did learn to meditate later in life and it has just made a huge, huge difference for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be honest about your job?

Molly Tschang
I have to just say that this little Yeti Nano microphone so that I can be heard more clearly has been a game changer.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with clients, they quote it back to you often?

Molly Tschang
“Transparency is your friend.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Molly Tschang
SayItSkillfully.com.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Molly Tschang
And one resource I want to gift to all of your subscribers, Pete, is my mini audio book The Me-You-We Framework. And this is the way to skillful conversation that anyone can apply regardless of your level, industry, job. So we’ll give the download link in the podcast, but I really encourage folks to check it out, to start your journey, and encourage others to do the same because when you say it skillfully, performance improves, and everybody wins.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Molly Tschang
Learning how and when best to use your voice is the number one thing you can do to succeed in life and, really, I think, bring you happiness. And so, I would encourage folks to check out all the resources and learn to speak up in a way that’s really true to yourself.

And it’s going to help you in working together, but I think really more importantly, for me, is it helps you with your most cherished relationships at home. And to feel like you’re living a life of no regrets because you’re able to put forth and say what you think serves the whole.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Molly, thank you.

Molly Tschang
Thank you, Pete. That was super fun.

Apr 10
0

1048: Transforming Insecurities into Strength and Action with Margie Warrell

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Margie Warrell explores how to build the courage to move beyond fear and unlock new possibilities.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to identify your insecurities and overcome them
  2. The two dimensions of courage
  3. How to take action despite your fear

About Margie

Margie Warrell is a five-time best-selling author, keynote speaker, leadership coach, and Forbes columnist. With twenty-five years of experience living and working around the world, she has dedicated her life to helping others overcome fear and unlock their potential.

From her humble beginnings on a small farm in rural Australia to her former role as a Senior Partner at Korn Ferry and Advisory Board member for the Forbes School of Business & Technology, Margie has learned that courage is essential for every worthwhile endeavor. A mother of four and an advocate for women’s empowerment, she inspires others to live bravely and refuse to settle in any aspect of life.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Margie Warrell Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Margie, welcome!

Margie Warrell
Great to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m super excited to hear your perspectives on courage. And I want to start by hearing, what’s one of the most surprising and fascinating and counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about courage in your career and researching this matter?

Margie Warrell
Ah, it’s probably that courage is not always about stepping bravely forward, putting yourself out there, saying a big yes and climbing out onto the far limb. Sometimes courage is saying no, sitting still, doing nothing, and reconnecting, disconnecting, pressing pause on all the doing and the bold acts of bravery, and just reconnecting with who we’re being, and being still and being unproductive. That is, sometimes, even more challenging and requires even more courage than being busily in action.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Could you share with us a story that illustrates that?

Margie Warrell
Well, look, I’ll share from my own life. So, I am someone who has a bias for action. I am someone who tends to be an Energizer bunny, sort of productive, productive, doing, doing, doing, doing. That’s almost my comfort zone is to be out there, furiously working hard, and doing a lot of things and juggling many balls. And that can be, in some ways, affirming of a sense of identity, and I’m in action.

And so, for me, over the years, is recognizing that there is actually a deep-seated fear of slowing down and doing nothing because, “Well, what if I become lazy? What if I never achieve anything again? What if this means I’m amount to nothing? What if…?” And so, just looking at where fear is pulling the strings and sometimes pushing me into the state of doing and busyness, and actually confronting that and going, “You know what, I don’t have to do more to be worthy. I don’t have to achieve more to be worthy. I am worthy.”

And, actually, right now, the most valuable thing for me to do is to just sit and pause and get really present and grounded in who I am and what I’m about rather than being in action. And then that enables me to then actually upgrade my action so that when I go back into action, I’m far more aligned, have far more clarity, much more intentional about what I’m doing. So, does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, intriguing. And I’d love if you could share a little bit more in terms of what are the scariest things that may be lurking for us in the solitude, in the quiet, in that silence?

Margie Warrell
Well, we have to come face to face with just like who we are at the deepest place because it’s easy, busyness can be a great tool for distraction. When we’re busy, it almost can be addictive because it can be feeding us and giving us a sense of significance. And, I mean, we all want to feel significant in our lives. To be human is to want to feel significant in some way. And we can achieve that through healthy means and we can achieve it through unhealthy means.

And I think that the busyness can provide that sense of, sort of like, “Oh, you know, look at all that I’m doing.” And people are going, “Wow, aren’t you doing a lot?” And so, the confronting part of just pressing pause on that is to go, “Who am I if I’m not doing that? And what are the deepest fears that are sometimes lurking there out of immediate line of sight?”

And I think, for many of us, there’s a deep-seated fear of being unworthy, of being judged and found wanting, “You are not smart enough. You are not clever, capable, experienced, intelligent, educated, likable, lovable, leader-like enough,” insert something before the word enough. And I think it’s part of the deep work of growing into who we can become to kind of pull back the covers on those fears.

Because they’re not always obvious but they can pull invisible strings that shape how we show up, how we speak up, the presence that we give to other people, how we lead, whether or not we are in tapping into our own intuitive sense of what’s going on around us and what’s going on for the people around us so that we can speak into their listening and be someone that builds trust and others come to count on  for the integrity and the character and the courage that we bring to situations, but not always loud courage, sometimes quiet courage.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say enough, I always wonder, enough for what?

Margie Warrell
Yeah, enough. Enough of what gives us a sense of innate worthiness.

Pete Mockaitis
Enough to have worthiness.

Margie Warrell
And so, yeah, when people say enough, that can be many things, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, enough for your life to, fundamentally, have value.

Margie Warrell
Yeah, for you to have value.

Pete Mockaitis
A human being identity.

Margie Warrell
Yeah, and I think that can be, we can carry sometimes a sense of inadequacy in that we’re flawed, fallible in some way. And of course, let’s face it, we are all flawed and we are all fallible in some way. None of us are, get a 10 out of 10 on every category. That is part of the human condition, right? And so, my experience for myself, but also working with people, many whom have achieved incredible success, there’s often this insecurity in them that can be driving and driving, and actually can drive them to be work really hard and achieve amazing things.

But actually, they get to a level and that insecurity, if they haven’t done the inner work required to make peace with their vulnerabilities, to heal those childhood wounds, then that insecurity actually can cap them and ultimately can be a saboteur.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I would love to get your pro take. You’ve been working with many CEOs of large organizations with your time at Korn Ferry and your own work. So, just for funsies, could you share with us, roughly what percent of super high-achieving, big-deal executives have substantial levels of insecurity?

Margie Warrell
Well, substantial is a big word. But what percentage of high-achieving executives have some insecurity? I don’t want to say 100%, but I would say close to it because we all have something in us that can feel insecure at times. We all have moments of feeling insecure. None of us are invulnerable to things that can trigger something in us. So, I would say it’s close to 100 % of high-achieving executives have moments where they can feel insecure. But it’s whether they have their insecurities or their insecurities have them.

And so, when you use the word substantial insecurities, well, then that’s where, obviously, there’s a lot of insecurities that are running them versus them going, “Yeah, I’ve got this thing. This can make me feel insecure, but I’m self-aware enough.” And that’s where that self-awareness is so crucial to being a great leader, to being an effective executive, because we aren’t being governed by our insecurities and our fears.

And, of course, our fears don’t always show up as, “Oh, I’m really nervous. I’m so scared I’m going to mess this up.” You know, it’s not necessarily paralysis, it’s not panic, it’s not outward, overt self-doubt. More often, those insecurities can show up as intellectualizing emotions, being controlling, not delegating downward effectively, micromanaging, second-guessing people, being someone that is not okay with being challenged, so people don’t challenge because they know that this runs a risk.

And so, there’s lots of different ways that our insecurity, and let’s just be clear here, insecurity is just another term for an unfaced fear, an unprocessed fear.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, so you nailed it in terms of that’s what I mean by substantial insecurity, like you have a hard time being wrong or letting someone else shine, or clearly acknowledging humbly, it’s like, “Yeah, you know a lot more about this thing than I do. So, I’m going to let you take over.”

Margie Warrell
Yeah, you bet.

Pete Mockaitis
“And, hey, I like your idea better than mine. Let’s go with yours and forget what I said.”

Margie Warrell
And not just that, but actively seeking that out, too, and saying to people in the room, “Hey, look, I don’t know everything. You know, what is it that I could be missing here?” And actively soliciting people to put forward opinions that may actually contradict or, if not contradict, may not line squarely up with your own.

And when they say those things, that you might actually disagree with, you might actually think they’re wrong. And maybe they’re critical of you and the judgment that you’ve made, that you don’t get defensive, and you go, “Wow, tell me more about that. Tell me more about that.” And that people never have to hesitate to say that. And, to me, that is an indicator of a leader who has done their work, and who is well and truly leading from values and not emotions and not insecurity.

Because no matter what anyone says about them, they don’t get triggered by that, they don’t take offense, “How could you say that?” They’re, like, curious, they’re humble, they’re eager to learn and they listen with an ear to how they could be wrong. And then they always acknowledge when they’ve changed their mind and they share that, and go, “You know, I thought this, but, yeah, I realized I was wrong. I wasn’t factoring in these other things,” and they can share that openly. And there’s a lot of senior executives who are not in a place where they’re able to do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s what I’m getting at. I think you’ve painted a lovely picture on what I mean by substantial insecurity versus substantial security. So, could you give us a very rough figure, like, at the top levels, who’s got that substantial insecurity and who doesn’t as a rough percentage?

Margie Warrell
I would say a solid 50%.

Pete Mockaitis
Fifty-fifty, all right.

Margie Warrell
Yeah, I mean, that could vary and it varies in organizations because there’s different cultures. So, I’ve worked in organizations where the culture is very grounded in purpose, and values, and authenticity, and people who posture and who are ego-driven, you know, overtly ego-driven. Their behavior gets, their, like, white bloods, they get ejected out.

Like, they can be really brilliant at what they do. But it’s like, at the end of the day, people are recognizing, “Ah, very ego-driven.” They’re an insecure person, even though they might be brilliant at what they do. And so, then there’s cultures where, “You know what, it’s about what are your numbers? Honestly, we don’t care much about all the other stuff. What are your numbers?”

And sometimes the people who get the best numbers are people who can be massively ego-driven and not the least bit, or very only mildly self-aware. And so, it’s all about, “Hah, who’s winning?Who’s winning? And who can get the biggest number fastest?” And that gets rewarded and that gets promoted.

And so, you end up with an executive bench of people who are all very, very ego-driven, competitive, but not necessarily particularly self-aware.

Whenever executive teams don’t make great decisions, and you see over time, there’s a leakage of value and the organization starts to lose edge and the culture grows, there’s toxic elements to it and disengagement and higher turnover, etc., it’s never because the people on that executive team lack intelligence individually or collectively, that they lack expertise and skill individually or collectively, that they lack access to information and resources.

It is because of the ego, and I’m talking about ego, I’m talking like, “I got to prove that I’m right and you’re wrong,” and there’s a defensiveness and it’s that insecurity at play because that undermines the dynamics in the team, and it undermines the quality of decision-making. There is not open, candid conversations. There is silos. There is protecting of information. There is a whole lot of conversations going on outside of the room. There is not good upward and sideways feedback.

And all of those factors at play, they are what create this slow leakage of value that, over time, you see organizations start to lose edge. And so, yeah, it’s not that they don’t know what to do, it’s that they’re not doing what they know.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, this reminds me, we had Pat Lencioni on the show and talking about smart versus healthy with regard to teams and dynamics and how it’s, a lot of times they got the know-how, but in terms of the courage and going there and having those conversations, it’s great.

So, it sounds like we’re pretty strong on the case here for how having more courage will help you be more awesome at your job with regard to just feeling good, facing down those monsters, as well as better teamwork, etc. Any other key things you’d put forward in terms of the case for why professionals would be better off with an extra dose of courage?

Margie Warrell
Well, let me just share, there’s two core dimensions to courage. And we often focus in on the field of fear and do it anyway, “Be bold. Take a risk. Put yourself out there. Set a bold vision. Have the crucial conversations. Take those risks for yourself, professionally,” in terms of then leading how you manage others.

But what we often fail to factor in is the second dimension of courage, and that is the regulation of our fear, the management of our anxious thinking. Because courage is action in the presence of fear and the presence of risks, real or perceived, but often we’re more afraid than we need to be. And right now, it’s a perfect case in point.

There are a lot of people right now who are feeling incredibly anxious because there is immense uncertainty. Yes, there is a new administration in the White House. There has been massive disruption. The markets are volatile. People are worried about the future. But you know what? There’s always been uncertainty. We’ve always had disruption. And, yes, it may feel like, “Oh, no, but not like this.” But these times have come before and they’ve gone before.

And so, a lot of the time we are victim to what’s called certainty bias. When we look back at the past, we know how the story ended, so we go, “No, it wasn’t like this,” because we don’t know how the story is going to end. But five years from now, we’re going to look back on this moment right now and go, “Oh, well, you know, it worked out,” and because there’s going to be new uncertainty.

So, often people are feeling more anxious than they need to be, and anxiety magnifies our perceptions of risk. And people pull back and they triple on what they can control and they try and find certainty so they get really short-sighted, and then they fail to take the very actions that would actually expand future possibilities, that would grow and accelerate learning curves, so that they’d be in a better position for whatever unfolds out the other side of this disruption, whether that’s Gen AI, whether that’s regulatory policy changing, etc.

And so, I think it’s just so important for people to realize it’s not just about, “Be brave. Just put yourself out there.” It’s also going, “Where am I scaring myself because of how I am perceiving all of the risks and all the uncertainty and all the unknowns? And where am I being a little short-sighted and not looking far enough ahead to the horizon and go, what is it that I could be doing right now that will put me in a better position, one, three, five years from now?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can you share with us what are some of your favorite tips, tricks, interventions, actions, things to do to get more courage?

Margie Warrell
Well, obviously in The Courage Gap, I talk about five key principles for closing that gap between what we could do and what we actually do, between our insight and the impact we make for ourselves, for others. And the first one of those principles is focusing on what it is that you want, what is the highest outcome you want to achieve.

And that could be, right now, today, “With an employee, my boss, a co-worker, I’m having a difficult time with. There’s a lot of frustration. Maybe I’m feeling really resentful toward them. Maybe I’m feeling underappreciated.” So, ask yourself, what is your highest intention for that relationship? Or, if it’s your career, “What is my highest intention for my career over the next one year, three years, five, 10?”

Because, if we’re not clear about what it is we want, our vision and our values, then our attention is going to be held captive by what it is we don’t want, because fear is a really potent emotion. We naturally gravitate to the negatives, to what’s wrong, to what we can’t do, to what we hope won’t happen.

And so, there is a huge power that we unlock within ourselves, but also it expands our field of vision of what actions we can take when we connect to what it is we do want and what our highest intention is, what our ultimate outcome is, because what we focus on expands. Energy multiplies by a factor of what our attention is on.

And so, that is a key principle. And many people don’t realize how much of their time and how much of their energy and how many of their conversations are all about what is wrong, and what can’t be done, and what shouldn’t happen, and what a pain their boss is, or what a pain this colleague is, versus “What can they do? What do they have? What do they want? How can they work better with this colleague? How can they help foster a better relationship with their boss?”

And the way I could go about doing that versus kind of being stuck in either a self-pity, you know, feeling like a bit of a victim or getting stuck into a blame like, “Ugh,” or just having a story that we are powerless to improve our situation, which is never true. And the biggest way we disempower ourselves is telling ourselves we can’t do anything.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say highest intention, you mean highest in the sense of most noble and in fulfillment of our deepest, most important values, as opposed to just a really big achievement, like high, like Mount Everest high.

Margie Warrell
The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive. So, you can have a really high intention to live a life of adventure and do amazing things, and that means you want to climb Mount Everest. But it also could mean, “I want to have a really good relationship with the people on my team. I want to do what I can to be the kind of person that I would want to work with.” But the highest intention, whatever it is, it has to align with our deepest values. So, what are your deepest values that want to define you and how you live your life?

And it’s funny you mentioned, you know, climbing a mountain. Several years back, I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with my husband and our four teenage children, which was a pretty bold, audacious undertaking at the time because we lived at sea level in Australia. We didn’t go mountain climbing on weekends for fun because there weren’t any mountains near us. And so, it was pretty bold to kind of go, “All right, let’s do this.”

But one of my kids, Ben, said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to climb Mount Kilimanjaro for dad’s 50th birthday?” He did this whole PowerPoint deck. He rallied the whole family behind this vision of climbing to the rooftop of Africa for dad’s 50th, “Our family will always remember it.” So, we created an intention for, as a family, right, to do this thing that would be so cool. There was a chance we weren’t going to get to the top. The altitude can really take a toll on our bodies, particularly younger bodies. My youngest was 13 at the time, but that intention to do that is what kind of galvanized our collective resolve to go, “Let’s try.”

And as it was, we did make it to the top of Kilimanjaro. It was a really tough day, but our intention will always align with some value. I mean, I have no desire to climb Mount Everest after climbing Kilimanjaro, but for us as a family, like this would be a really cool thing to do as a family. That was a value.

But for some people, it could be, “I want to just build a business that contributes to my community, that serves the needs of these customers, these people in my local geography,” or maybe it’s to do something that’s on a global scale, but there’s still a value that it’s aligned with. But for people listening to this, I know for me, professionally, I have always wanted to do work that aligned with, one, yes, my value to make an impact for others, to help others live their purpose, to use their talents for the greater good, but also to use my talents in a way that honors those talents.

And so, we all have different talents. People, we come out of the womb with different gifts and, yes, we have to hone them. But so it could be that you just really want to do something that lights you up. You’re leveraging your strengths fully. We thrive the most when we are leveraging our strengths in service of something that’s meaningful to us versus something that’s purely superficial. And while when we’re younger, sometimes it is superficial. As we go through life, people who thrive the most are doing things, they’re working hard toward meaningful goals.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and I guess that’s what I’m zeroing in on when I say highest intention is it’s like, you could have, maybe you want to build a business to prove everyone wrong, “They thought I couldn’t do it. Look at me now.” Or it’s like, “I want to have a sick Lamborghini.” So, these are things that motivate some people. But I’m guessing that if we dig deeper into values work, those wouldn’t be, in fact, the highest intention that have the most potency for boosting the courage.

Margie Warrell
Well, look, and if you love cars and you want to have a Lamborghini, like, great, knock yourself out and work hard for that Lamborghini. I’m not a car person myself, but if your sense of security and identity is coming from sources outside of yourself, then you will always feel a little insecure. Because once you’ve got that Lamborghini and you drive it right up the main street of town and you’ve got the music blaring and you’re making sure everyone’s looking at you, and they’re like, “Wow, you’ve got a Lamborghini.” It’s like, “Great, it feels good. Like, yeah. See? See my Lamborghini?”

But, okay, after a while, it gets a little, it wears off. We habituate to, “Okay, now what do I have to do?” Because it’s a cup with a hole in the bottom. It’s never going to fill up if your sense of worth and value has to be externally validated all the time. And that’s not to say, it’s natural to want to have external validation. I love external validation.

But if that’s what our identity is built on, it’s going to be built on a house of cards because, you know, what happens if you lose your Lamborghini? What happens if you lose all your money? That can happen. That does happen to people. And so, I think we have to be really careful about where our sense of identity comes from. And there is no greater source of identity than being really living in alignment with our values. It is got to be an internally sourced identity versus externally validated all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’ve got five principles. The first is the highest intention. What’s the next?

Margie Warrell
Second is re-scripting the narratives that are keeping you stuck, stressed, or living too safely. So, of course, we all tell ourselves stories all the time, like, “Oh, it’s a nice day out there today.” As it is, while I’m talking to you, I can see the cherry blossoms coming out here in North Virginia. But sometimes our stories get in our way and keep us from doing the very things that would serve us.

So, our stories can stoke up our fear. They can make us feel more stressed like, you know, we tell ourselves stories, “Oh, it’s the end of the world,” “I’m never going to get another job,” “I’m too old.” There’s a lot, I’m surrounded by people who use even language, “It’s a nightmare situation. I’m never going to be able to figure this out.”

And so, they make themselves feel more stressed than they need to be. But sometimes our stories can give us air cover for living too safely, for going, “Oh, well, you know, it’s not so bad. And everybody else has got it worse than me. Or, at least I’ve got a job.” And I’m like, “Yeah, but are you happy in your job?” “Yeah, but at least it pays the bills.” I’m like, “Come on, like life’s short.” And so, we can often tell ourselves stories that keep us from taking the very actions we’re wholly capable of taking.

Sometimes we tell ourselves lies. We call them vital lies, the soothing myths, truths that spare us from having to look at ourself and go, “What is the price I’m paying for the story that I’m telling myself? It’s making me feel okay in the moment, but it’s actually keeping me stuck. It’s actually keeping me from connecting in more meaningful ways with other people, or making a change that I know deep, deep down, I really need to make because I’m not feeling a sense of purpose. I’m not feeling like I’m living the life I want to be living?”

And so, just recognizing that if your stories aren’t making you feel more powerful, like they’re not empowering you, if they’re not aligning with something that gives you a sense of meaning and purpose, and if they’re not making you feel more positive about your future, then your stories are working against you.

And I often say to people, like, “Tell me, what’s your ultimate vision of success?” And then they’ll go, “Well…” And when they let themselves really connect with that vision and they focus on what they want, I’m like, “Well, what story would you need to be telling yourself for that to become your reality?” because our beliefs are the software of behavior. Everything we do is belief-driven. So, what’s the story that you need to tell yourself so that you’ll take the actions to create the outcomes you want?

And if you’re feeling stuck in your career or you’re feeling like you’re hitting your head against a wall, I would just say to you, like, “What’s the story you’ve been telling yourself? And what emotions does that create? Where is that keeping you playing too small? Where is that keeping you stuck in excuses? Where is that keeping you showing up in a more diminutive way than really serves you? And so, what’s another story you could tell and re-script that story? Because you create your stories, but your stories then create you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And the third principle?

Margie Warrell
The third principle is about embodying courage and connecting to the sources of courage within us, but also around us in our relationships with others. And often we don’t recognize how we’re moving through the world in an anxious state. John Wooden, the great iconic basketball coach, once said, “It’s not about how tall you are. It’s about how tall you play.”

And often we don’t realize how much fear is trapped in our bodies, keeping us from showing up, stepping up, speaking up, walking into a room in a way that not only changes how others perceive us, but changes how we perceive ourselves. Some great research out of the Kellogg School of Business that found that postural expansiveness literally shifts how people perceive us, as well as how we perceive ourselves, regardless of our actual status on an organization chart. And so, just stand tall and take a deep breath and reset your nervous system, named a nervous system for reason at that ground level, and, likewise, connect with people around you who make you feel braver, who help to quell the doubts versus to feed them.

 

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And the fourth?

Margie Warrell
That’s about stepping into discomfort and really resetting our relationship with discomfort. All of us are wired to want to avoid what’s uncomfortable, but the more willing you are to do uncomfortable things and embracing discomfort, embracing the growing pains, it actually will expand your behavioral repertoire to do the very things that are going to set you up for success.

And there is a lot to be said for recognizing that our fear constricts what we do. And the more we’re willing to get comfortable, practice getting comfortable being uncomfortable, then it expands us to do all sorts of things. Because when you’re willing to feel anything, it emboldens you for everything.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And the fifth?

Margie Warrell
And the fifth is all about making peace with our failures and making peace with ourselves for failing to show up as the person we most want to be sometimes because no one is brave all the time. And the more we can be kind to ourselves in those moments when we either try something and fail, or we fail to try, and that little inner Chicken Little wins out, then the quicker we’ll be able to pick ourselves up, to dust ourselves off, to learn the lessons that our failures and our mistakes hold, and then to move forward more wisely.

And for those who are listening who can be really hard on themselves, I think this final step which is about finding the treasure when you trip can be the most, the biggest unlock because we’re so often really hard on ourselves. And when you’re really hard on yourself, it doesn’t make you braver. It actually makes you live a little smaller and hold back from taking the very risks that would serve you most.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s talk about the rescripting narratives for a bit. Could you give us a common narrative that you’ve seen hold folks back and an example of a finer script to replace it?

Margie Warrell
Yes. So, as people are moving up in their careers, often they’ll look at management, the leadership, and it’s them, they over there, you know, “They don’t care. They have no idea what’s going on. They’re just, you know, they’re all so disconnected and removed from what it’s really like to try and run this business at the ground level and deal with the clients, etc.”

And so, there’s this kind of othering of those people in management, those who are on the executive team. And the reality is those people were once in your shoes, and sometimes people become the they, and they realize, “You know, if only management…” I’m like, “You are management. You are the they, like this is you.”

But wherever you sit on your career trajectory and on some org chart, recognizing that you have the power to be a leader at every level. And so, rescripting it about how you see yourself in your own power, like, “I am a leader. I have the ability to influence change here. And, sure, I mightn’t have as much as the person at the top, but I have the ability to lead change in the sphere of influence in my workplace every day.” So, that’s one re-script.

Another key one I hear people talking about is other people and saying things like, “Ugh, they’re so intimidating. They don’t care,” and they create negative narratives, and maybe there’s some evidence to support them. But when it comes to saying someone is intimidating or something, “That person is an a-hole,” or something like that, ask yourself instead, “What is it that’s going on in me that needs me to judge them? That person’s going to be how that person’s going to be, but how do I choose to show up?”

So, I choose to show up as someone who is empowered and is focused on bringing value regardless of how the behavior of others around me, and by reclaiming kind of the power that I get to choose how I show up, regardless of what other people are doing. And that often when we call other people intimidating, actually they’re not intimidating. It’s the story you’re telling yourself about them that’s making you feel intimidated. It’s got nothing to do with them. It’s got everything to do with you. So, yeah, there’s a couple of examples right there. I hope that’s of value.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, thank you. Well, tell me, Margie, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Margie Warrell
Well, I would simply say if there’s something that’s causing you stress right now, that just keeps coming up again and again, maybe in different clothes, but it’s just a recurring issue, in there, lays your greatest growth. In there is an un-face fear, there is fear in some form that’s kept you from addressing it more effectively.

Maybe taking ownership for something that you’re doing that’s contributing to it, that you’d rather blame it on everyone else. But recognizing that those things that test you the most, also teach you the most and can be the catalyst for your highest growth and transformation.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. And now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Margie Warrell
Anais, Nin, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Margie Warrell
My favorite study is the work of Amy Edmondson out of Harvard on psychological safety, and that it’s the teams that report the most mistakes that are actually the highest performing because they feel safe enough to be able to share the truth.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Margie Warrell
My favorite book would be The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool you use to be awesome at your job?

Margie Warrell
My daily planner.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Margie Warrell
Reading wisdom literature first thing in the morning over my cup of tea in the early hours to set my intention for the day.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a Margie original sound bite or nugget that people quote back to you often?

Margie Warrell
Yes, and that’s “Living bravely is indispensable for living well.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Margie Warrell
They can head over to my website, MargieWarrell.com, or just connect with me on LinkedIn or anywhere that you hang out on social media, or my Live Brave Podcast.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Margie Warrell
Thank you. I invite people to take my courage quiz. If you head over to my website, to “The Courage Gap” page, you’ll see The Courage Quiz, and I invite you to take it because it’ll help you identify where the courage gaps are in your life and how you can close them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Margie, thank you.

Margie Warrell
Thank you.

Mar 17
0

1041: How to Tell Compelling Stories and Build Brands with Alex Neist (CEO of Hostage Tape)

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Alex Neist shares principles of storytelling and branding that help Hostage Tape –and you.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why brands like Hostage Tape and Liquid Death resonate
  2. The defining element of an inspiring story
  3. The downside to making your story amazing

About Alex

Alex Neist is the founder and CEO of Hostage Tape, the best-selling mouth tape. The company has helped over 200,000 customers worldwide and has strong partnerships with the UFC and The Joe Rogan Experience.

Prior to founding Hostage Tape, Alex was an Arena Football League quarterback. He later ventured into sports technology, building a seven-figure business which was eventually acquired.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Alex Neist Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Alex, welcome.

Alex Neist
Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s great to be chatting with you. And I will tell you, I am a Hostage Tape customer and lover. So, first things first, for the uninitiated, what the heck is Hostage Tape?

Alex Neist
Hostage Tape is mouth tape, okay, quite simply. And for those who have never heard of mouth-taping before, what it does is it forces you to keep your mouth shut so that you breathe through your nose. It sounds absolutely wild and crazy, I know, but I promise you’re not going to suffocate.

We were born, we were made to breathe through our nose, and it seems to be something that we just lost over the last 20, 30, 40 years, especially with a lot of changes to our diets, what we’re eating, all sorts of things that have kind of changed us. And over 70% of people in this country are mouth-breathing at night when they sleep, and we shouldn’t be.

And so, mouth tape shuts your mouth, forces us to nasal-breathe the way that we were made to, and it does a whole host of things. We get more oxygen. We wake up feeling better. We don’t have mind fog. We don’t annoy the heck out of our partner. And just everything opens up and you feel like you’re 20 years old again. You feel like you found the cheat code.

This is how I explain it. It’s like when we were younger, you played Nintendo and you had that Konami code, up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B-A-B-A, start. It’s like you found the cheat code from Nintendo, but for life, and now you feel like you’re 20 years old again.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, Alex, I love so much of what you’re saying here. And it’s funny, we’ve had sleep doctors on the show, and this is actually not really a sleep episode, although that’s a freebie, huh? We’re getting some bonus goodies here, Alex.

Alex Neist
Totally.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve read in the research, because I’m such a dork for this, that mouth taping is particularly excellent for individuals with mild sleep apnea, and I was such an individual, and I was not feeling the CPAP machine, but I needed a little something. I need a little something, something, Alex, and the mouth taping and some other interventions combined did the trick, so I’m off the CPAP machine, and I’m having great sleep, and I’m a fan.

Alex Neist
So, what you’re describing right now, Pete, is a pretty common thing where, again, I’m not a doctor. Ironically, I grew up in a doctor’s family. Like, my dad was a doctor, so I come from that whole world of medicine, but I’m not a doctor, and I think CPAPs are over-prescribed to people because I think the reality is, from what I’ve seen with all of our customers, is that there’s a certain person that definitely needs it, and those are the people who are like severely overweight.

Guys who are really overweight, who’ve got excess weight in their neck and everything, that’s pushing down, they definitely need help, but I think for, like, the average guy who’s not overweight, man, it’s as simple as just keeping your mouth shut. Assuming you can breathe out of your nose and it’s not like severely impacted, it’s just keeping your mouth shut and breathing through your nose. And we don’t need a CPAP for that. We really don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you.

Alex Neist
The amount of people who have used a CPAP and then now they don’t because they wear Hostage Tape, countless. But there’s also people who, they’ll use their CPAP and the Hostage Tape helps it work better because it keeps their mouth shut so that there’s no air leak.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true, especially like a nasal-only CPAP. We’re getting into the details. And if folks have sleep apnea who are not overweight, I just want to give you a shout out. I know that also happens with anatomical things, neurological things in the mix as well. But, yes, great sleep is important. We’ve covered that with a few sleep docs before, and we’ll just check that box, and mouth taping might help.

I want to talk about branding and storytelling, because, Alex, you’ve done a heck of a job. I remember my favorite CPAP influencer, and there are many, will be Uncle Nicko from SleepHQ.com. And he said it very well about you guys. He’s like, “Great job, guys! You made mouth taping cool!” He’s Australian. Apologies for the poor accent impersonation.

And it’s true, and it’s so interesting. In terms of brand, I have so many questions, but why don’t we start by, tell us the tale. What made you think, “Let’s call this thing Hostage Tape” was a good move?

Alex Neist
Yes. So, here’s the story. So, I actually went through a low point in my life and I hit rock bottom. And it was at this point of hitting rock bottom, where, my wife and I were actually separated and we divorced, and so I was living in another house at the time.

And when you go through a divorce, it’s messy, it’s crazy, assets freeze, you know, all that kind of wonderful stuff that happens. But I was in my aunt’s house. I was living in her basement at the time, okay? And I said to myself, “Okay, I need to really work on myself. How do I become a better man, a better father, a better leader, a better business owner, all those things?”

And I call it my Jocko-moment of extreme accountability, like I need to take extreme accountability for me and work on everything that I can control. And I started with my health, specifically my sleep, because I snored so bad for so many years that it pushed my wife out of the bedroom. And I explained it like this. It’s kind of like Indiana Jones running out of the temple. You got this boulder coming after you, and, at some point, it catches up to you, overtakes you, and then you don’t know what to do.

Because snoring is one of those things where it causes all these issues, it’s like an accelerant of all these other things that happen that just kind of get out of control. And then before you realize it, it’s out of control, and you just can’t fix it, and you can’t get it back. And so, that’s what had happened. And so, then I looked at my sleep, and I went, “Okay, what do I got to do to fix my sleep?” And I went down this rabbit hole of mouth tape, of all things.

And when I started the mouth tape, whenever my kids would be over, I would say, “Okay, guys, kids, if you bust into the room, and you see me, it’s going to look like I’m being held hostage, so don’t freak out, okay?” Because anybody that you see is mouth-taping, it looks really, really strange, really weird. And so, there was that part of it.

And, at the time, I didn’t know that I was going to start a mouth tape brand just yet, let alone call it Hostage Tape. But then I realized that, “Wait a minute, there’s this like double-sided coin to this here. Yes, you look like a hostage when you’ve got tape on your mouth, but we’re actually tapping into this core emotion people feel. People feel held hostage by poor sleep or their partner, and they don’t know what to do. So don’t let bad sleep hold you hostage.” That became the idea. And I was most importantly inspired by my favorite water, Liquid Death.

Pete Mockaitis
I was literally talking to your publicist about Liquid Death and branding.

Alex Neist
Yes. So, I explain this to many people, and a lot of times when we meet with retailers or anybody else that’s interested in the brand in some way, I say, “We are the Liquid Death of the sleep space.” And they go, “Oh, okay, I get it.” Because, inevitably, there’s always somebody that goes, “Wait a minute, why would you call it that? That’s really weird. That’s really polarizing.” And then I say, “Liquid Death,” and they go, “Oh, okay, I get it.”

So, it takes like a giant, like what Mike did with Liquid Death, for people to truly understand, “Oh, I get it. Okay.” Because I knew, in this day and age, Pete, it’s all about attention, right? And I saw a quote the other day, that when you think about products, things that people buy, mouth taping, it’s not a fad. It’s not one of those fads that’s like, here then gone tomorrow, because it’s based on fundamental core principles of our body, and it’s solving a clear problem. So, it’s not a fad.

And it’s gaining awareness right now. With the amount of money that we spend on marketing, more and more people are gaining awareness of it. You’re seeing it on TikTok, because we’ve had other copycats try to do what we’re doing, and more people are going, “Mouth taping. I keep seeing this. I keep seeing Hostage Tape everywhere.”

So, because that awareness is growing, what happens, it’s kind of like the 95/5 rule, right? 5% of your people are in market to buy. The other 95% are not. But for those 95% of people, when they are in market to buy, what do they do? They buy the brand that they remember. And who are they going to remember when it comes to, “Oh, yeah, I keep seeing mouth tape. You know what? I’m going to try that. I’m going to buy Hostage Tape.”

Because when you see Hostage Tape come across your feed, you never forget it. Ever. I’ve never met somebody that didn’t go, “Oh, Hostage Tape. Yeah, I’ve heard of them. They’re that mouth tapering.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s black, and it can look a little scary, and it’s intriguing. When you said polarizing, I think, I want to dig into that for a bit. Like, I remember I was telling my cousin, Carrie, that I was doing some mouth taping, and I was like, “Yeah, I love my Hostage Tape.” She said, “Wait, it’s actually called Hostage Tape? Wow, they’re really leaning into it.” And I was like, “Well said, they are really leaning into it.”

And I think that it’s so intriguing because you say polarizing, and that’s the word, because I think some might say, “Alex, hostages are no cheeky, fun, laughing matter. Right now, there are hostage situations in the world. And it almost seems like you are kind of poking fun at it a little bit.” And so, help me out there with polarizing, because I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten furious messages or if that’s just me.

Alex Neist
Oh, we get it all the time. Yeah, we get people all the time. In fact, somebody DM’d me on LinkedIn the other day who said exactly that. And I think you have to look at it like this. Like, the wonderful thing about language is that context matters. We have all these words, we have all these amazing ways to use language, and context matters. Intent matters.

So, when I use a word like hostage, Hostage Tape, look at the intent, look at the context. It’s not poking fun at those awful situations. Just like Liquid Death, how many people die and get murdered? Like, a ton of people. “Liquid Death, murder your thirst,” like they’re just as bad, if not worse, than we are with this term death and murder, right?

But when you look at what they are, who they stand for, and the authenticity behind it, look at the authenticity behind our brand and why I started it, I’m not just some no-name, no-face, like brand that said, “We’re going to poke fun at this.” I’m a real guy. You do a little bit of research and you see me everywhere. You see me talking about it. You see me telling my story about feeling held hostage.

And then once you explain that little bit of the term hostage, everybody relates to it. Then that’s the genius behind it, is that everybody can relate to feeling like a hostage from their partner or their sleep, and they feel helpless. So that’s why it’s so good, is, again, context and the intent behind it.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s intriguing, I was listening to an interview with the Liquid Death guy. What’s his name again?

Alex Neist
Mike, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And it was really interesting, he said, “Well, our water, it’s in a nice aluminum can, and it’s tall, and it’s from a natural spring. So, there are some kinds of objective matter material elements of it that that make it seem quality relative to alternative packaged waters.” And he said, “And yet, the bulk of the price premium for it is just for the brand, the associations, the experiences, the hilarious marketing that is attached to it.”

And it was really interesting, he got me thinking hard, he said “That’s kind of how I define brand is it has a value for its associations,” I might be using my own words here but it has a value for associations in your brain, above and beyond the actual matter inside the package.

Alex Neist
You want to know why?

Pete Mockaitis
Lay it on us.

Alex Neist
Because people don’t buy with logic. They buy with emotion. That’s why. So, what people do, the way that our brains work, is anytime we make decisions on buying things, you know, especially if it’s not something that costs, you know, thousands and thousands of dollars, that’s a little bit of a different decision process, but something as small as mouth tape, Liquid Death, whatever, we might buy on emotion.

We do buy on emotion for the most part because we’re connecting to something about it, and with a brand like Liquid Death and a brand like Hostage Tape, people are buying on emotion. There’s something about the brand that’s attaching to their psyche or the way that they are. And then after you make a decision on emotion, then you validate it with logic, “Oh, yeah. Well, of course, I bought it because of A, B, and C.”

And so, that’s, I think, what Mike was really talking about there with Liquid Death, is that you’re creating this emotional connection with people, and that’s what makes a strong brand.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s interesting. And I say before I had encountered Hostage Tape, I was using some 3M micropore tape, and that kind of works for keeping your mouth closed, but it doesn’t stick as well. It’s not as comfortable. It’s hard to get just the right size. So, these problems are relatively minor but I will hand it to you, you solved all of them. It’s like this is more comfortable, it’s quicker, it adheres better, it even has just a little bit of holes or perforations or whatever, so it’s like…

Alex Neist
Yeah, because it’s a fabric, it’s completely breathable. And that’s what people think when they think, “Hostage Tape? Mouth tape?” They think it’s like duct tape, but in actuality. It’s a flexible fabric. You can breathe through it, so, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it’s interesting in that your product cost more than the generic micropore tape, and it has some performance characteristics that are superior but there’s also all this emotional stuff, and I just find it fascinating how that works because I don’t think I’m very good at brand, branding, both in terms of when I market stuff and when I buy stuff, I think it’s like, “Oh, this costs 10 times as much. Is it 10 times as awesome?” Well, maybe, yeah, in terms of when I’m sleepy and I don’t want to be fiddling with my tape for an extra 30 seconds, I value that substantially. But, again, maybe I’m just doing that post-emotion rationalization you were speaking of in the moment.

Alex Neist
Well, think about it like this too, right? So, when I built the brand, I had that dilemma that everybody has when you start a new business. You go, “Wait a minute. Is there a business here? Could I actually build something that’s worth my time and money to put into this because it’s just tape? Like, it’s a commodity. Is there a moat here? Can I actually build this?”

And then it was looking at Liquid Death. In fact, it was Liquid Death, but it was also so Moiz Ali is famous for the Native deodorant founder, okay? And I’ll never forget, he was talking about, when you go down the aisles of Target, and you look at a wall of, let’s just say, white of a product, there’s an opportunity there. There’s an opportunity because the TAM is there to create a product that stands out, that’s different.

And that logic, to me, went, “Okay.” Now granted, there wasn’t really a market for mouth tape, but there’s tons of tape, so I knew I could take something and I could improve upon it. And guess what? There’s 70% of people in this country that have this problem, so it was a very clear problem solution. And I had experienced it, that I went, “This is too big. This is too big not to be able to build something, but it all hinges on brand.”

So, I knew, the point I’m getting at was I knew that nothing about micropore tape, 3M tape, inspires you to go down to Walmart, Walgreens, Target, or even on Amazon, and buy mouth tape. It doesn’t inspire you at all, because that’s not really how we all make the decision to begin with, like, at least consciously.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you got to be desperate, like, “I need something, and I’m out. I guess I’ll go, not like I’m excited or inspired.”

Alex Neist
Well, and mouth tape, to begin with, because it’s so weird and new and different, you’re not going to see an ad for 3M micropore tape and think, “You know what? I should use that and put it on my mouth.” And even if it was advertised, you would think like, “Well, that’s just weird. That’s not cool. I don’t want to do that. That sounds dumb.”

But then you see this, like, really cool story that’s relatable, that you go, “Oh, I’m going through that same problem, too. My wife’s sleeping in the other bedroom. You mean to tell me he solved it by taping his mouth shut? Oh, man. Well, that’s kind of weird, right? Well, but that looks actually kind of cool. I like it. Okay.”

And then you start connecting the dots, connecting all these emotional barriers, and then, boom, you’re now inspired to go online and order Hostage Tape because it’s cool, it makes you feel cool, it makes you feel like you’re actually solving a problem, which you are, and you don’t feel weird because you’re putting medical tape on your face.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you said, when you go walk down Target and see white, do we literally mean the color white? What do we mean by you see white?

Alex Neist
So, it could be anything.

Pete Mockaitis
Like a gap or blankness?

Alex Neist
Let’s use, like, deodorant as an example. Like, you might go down a section in Target where it’s just the deodorant aisle, and they all look the same. That’s the point, if that category exists and they all look the same, that means the TAM is big enough.

Pete Mockaitis
Total addressable market.

Alex Neist
The opportunity is big enough, and you have a chance to stand out to create. It’s, like, Dr. Squatch is another really good example. Dr. Squatch said, “We’re going to take soap,” which is like, you know, this behemoth, huge behemoth in soap, and it’s just soap, right? But that guy took it and went, “I’m going to make it different, all natural, but I’m going to create this amazing brand around it.” And now look at them, you know, they’re huge, right?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so now I’d love it if you could bring it into the realm of the average professional. So, all right, we’re not building, we’re not inventing brands, new products, but we are seeing opportunities and certainly having to make a case, build a story, conjure up some emotion for support of initiatives and whatnot. So, tell us, how do we apply some of these perspectives to our everyday conversations and persuasions?

Alex Neist
The first thing that pops into my mind that we could riff off of is, like, when people are thinking that they want to start a business and they want to build something, they always ask, “Well, how do I start? Where do I start?” And I always tell people, “Look, the best place to start is like solve a problem, number one.”

And then when you solve that problem and you figure out what that business is, then there’s a story around it. That then you have to learn how to tell the story for that particular product in business, and then tell it in a way that’s relatable. And I’ll be honest, I launched this business, Hostage Tape, three years ago, and it’s taken me three years to craft the story in a way that’s relatable for people.

Very early on, I would tell the story, and I don’t think it was relatable enough, and I kept telling it, and then I kept hearing it, and I’m like, “Who can relate to that? Like, yes, there’s elements of shock and amazement that are interesting, but at the end of the day, people aren’t going to buy into something that they can’t relate to and see themselves somehow looking back at them.”

And so, I’ve morphed how I tell the story in a way that, “How do I bring out the right pieces of the story that are relatable to people?” So, I keep evolving it in a way that is not so grandiose. In fact, you probably know, the guy that I love is Matthew Dicks. He has a book on storytelling. And this dude, he wins all these awards for these competitions he goes to where he tells a story.

And one of the things he talks about in storytelling is, you don’t need to tell an amazing, oddball, wild story to have a great story. Most of the time, it’s a story about the most simplest thing that happened to you in your day that most people are going to think, “Well, that’s not interesting,” but it actually is interesting. You just have to learn how to tell the story, and then you make it relatable in a way, and also, you’re showing change.

A great story shows a change, “At one point, I was this, then this happened, and now this.” And so, that’s it, that’s another key there with that storytelling that you’re talking about, is that so many things happen to people during the day that you can tell stories on rather than just reciting back, “Well, this happened.” Well, that’s boring, like just reciting back anecdotally what happened to me today.

It’s telling it in a way that says, “I changed,” or “Something changed.” That’s what captures people’s attention, right? It’s like that when I tell the mouth tape story, I like to tell the story about how, “Before mouth taping, I was this. And then that first night I mouth taped, then I woke up and my whole life changed in that moment. And I knew that, now, I was going to be a different person. I was going to be able to get to here just from that one night of mouth taping.”

And for anybody listening to that, who can relate to having bad sleep, goes, “Wow, that’s crazy. I can resonate with that because I feel the same way. I felt the same way. And maybe if I just put a piece of tape on my mouth and shut my mouth, I can feel the same way too.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I mean, I’m a believer in sleep, so it does not strike me as hyperbole at all. The difference between terrible sleep and great sleep is night and day for mood, productivity, all the good stuff. So that’s intriguing. So, a good story, change, you reminded me of, I think, in Dan Harmon’s Story Circle. I’ve actually worked through that with my kids a few times. And so, yes, and then the character returns changed at the end, and it’s fun to watch Community, because they are deliberately doing that with every character in every episode.

So, change and relatable. So, help us out. If the story’s evolved, can you share with us a suboptimal, prior version of a snippet of the story, and then give us the improved version, and tell us why is that better?

Alex Neist
Exactly. Okay. So, I used to be a professional athlete. I was a professional quarterback, and part of the story that I tell is I used to tell it where, so when I discovered the fact that I was mouth-breathing, I basically read a book. It was a book by James Nestor called Breath. And in this book, he details this experiment.

And part of the story is, as I talk about this experiment, reading this book and how it opens my mind, and I say, “How have I been a professional high-level athlete my entire life and my coaches never taught me this?” And so, then later I went, “Wait a minute, being a professional athlete has nothing to do, like it doesn’t matter to the story that I was a professional athlete, and nobody listening to that story is thinking, ‘I was a professional athlete, too, and my coaches never taught me that.’”

There’s a sub-small percentage of people that have ever gotten to the level of being a professional athlete that can relate to it. So, then most people then might feel alienated, and thinking like, “Well, I’m not a professional athlete, so I guess I don’t really know how I could relate to that.” But now, rather than say I was a professional athlete, I just say, “Look, I was an athlete my whole life. I played football, I played sports growing up, and my coaches didn’t teach me that.”

How many people played sports growing up and were athletes? Almost everybody did, in some capacity. So, that’s way more relatable that people now can connect, they can lean in, and go, “Oh, yeah, I was an athlete, too. Yeah, and my coach has never taught me that. Wow. Huh, this is crazy.” So that’s a really good example of something that I’ve adapted.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s funny, and not to critique your story life here, Alex, but I guess I have the hubris to do it. It’s like, I’m thinking that what you’re saying is perfect because, like, “I was a professional athlete,” it’s like, “Okay. Well, we’re not vibing with that.” But what’s interesting is we had Anjali Sharma on the show recently talking about this storytelling principle just like this.

It’s like, “You think you want to have it dramatically awesomely whoa remarkable, but you don’t want to be remarkable. You want to be relatable,” because it is remarkable that you were a professional athlete. And it is all the more remarkable, shouldn’t someone have known, with all the recovery information that’s so important for high performance?

Alex Neist
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
So that makes it more remarkable but less relatable. And so, I’m intrigued, as someone who didn’t play very many sports, just that the notion that I’m relating to most about is it’s like, “Hey, shouldn’t someone have told me?” Like, I almost feel betrayed or shocked, disappointed. Like, “Shouldn’t someone have told me you can enable shortcut keys in Gmail? Everyone knows I love productivity and I use Gmail.”

Or, “Shouldn’t someone have told me that Severance is an amazing TV show?” So, yeah, I like that a lot in terms of we’re going to drop some of the most amazing wow factor pieces in pursuit of more relatability.

Alex Neist
I’ve got another one, too. This is another one that I used. Okay, so the other part of the story that I used to really lean in on was, I mentioned it earlier that my wife and I, we had gotten separated, and then we divorced, okay? And we actually got back together. So, I used to tell that part of the story, and I used to say that, “You know, six years ago I had it all and then I lost everything, and my wife and I went through a divorce.” And then at the end of the story, “After building this thing, then my wife and I got back together.” And then I’m like, “Actually, you know what? How relatable?” Like, divorce is relatable to 50% of the population, yes. But still, you’re still alienating 50% of the people who haven’t gone through a divorce, and, to boot, getting back together.

Like, how many people get a divorce and then get back together with their partner? That almost never happens. So, then I’m like, as amazing as it is, and as amazing as the reactions I get from people when they hear that story, they’re like, “Oh, my God, that’s wild!” it is not relatable at all to anybody because it just doesn’t happen.

So, now, I’ve started really kind of dropping those points and leaning more in on the idea that, “Here’s what is relatable about that. The fact that I snored so bad that it pushed my wife into the other bedroom, and we slept in separate bedrooms. It killed the relationship, it hurt us, put a wedge between us. And then you know what? I discovered mouth taping. Now I don’t snore anymore. I feel amazing. And my wife and I now sleep in the same bed again.”

That’s a more relatable story, and it’s all true. I just left out the most amazing parts of it that actually don’t make the story better, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s interesting in that, now, what’s juicy about this is, unlike the first example, it’s sort of like nothing feels lost in terms of like, “Okay, we don’t know as much about how awesome you were as an athlete, Alex, okay. So, but that’s okay.” But here, it almost does feel like something is lost because it’s like, it almost makes the Hostage mouth tape less of a hero.

Alex Neist
It could be.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “It saved a dead marriage” sounds more awesome than what you’ve described. So, now it’s interesting. Now I feel like we have a real juicy trade-off here between the relatability of the story and the amount of heroic impact the product can make. How do you chew through that one?

Alex Neist
I think you could argue that, while heroic it is, like, I’m a phoenix rising from the ashes, I think that, there’s a hero’s journey, though, that I can tell, the true story of this hero’s journey of that bedroom tale that every man and wife, more men and women are going through that story. That hero’s journey that I can help them become the hero of their story.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, got you.

Alex Neist
So, I think that’s way more impactful.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. Because we might have less of an emotional spike, but we have a broader set of folks getting into it. And those broader sets may actually have more of an emotional vibe.

Alex Neist
And here’s also the risk, because I’ve seen a ton of it. I’ve gotten a ton of feedback and responses over the years, the past couple of years here. The story sounds so unbelievable that people think it’s fake. Like, “Oh, it’s so fake. No way that happened.” I mean, it happened, it’s true, and I can understand why it sounds fake, but it’s so wild that it sounds fake.

And so, that’s the risk of it is that, again, now I’m alienating because of the craziness of the story. Now I’m alienating, again, too many people that I don’t need to alienate, that I could just tell a much more relatable story that still has the impact and goes the distance.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I’m reminded, I think, Ramit Sethi was talking about copywriting, and he said this product or offer of his really did have some epically transformational results for folks in terms of additional income or business revenue or whatever, but some of the results were so huge it was beyond belief. So, naturally, he wanted to say, “Look at the success of these students,” but he’s like, “Well, if I do that, I lose the credibility, even though it’s true, so I’m going to have to back it down.”

Alex Neist
Yeah, totally.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Alex, so much good stuff here. Any final thoughts on storytelling, branding, persuasion?

Alex Neist
I guess all I would say is, again, that everybody has so many stories that you can tell every single day that happened to you. You just have to pay attention to them, and they’re there, and just understand the key to a story is change. That’s the key. That’s what makes merely reciting facts versus telling a compelling story is change.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Alex Neist
It comes from my mom. And she taught me that you can do anything you want in life. You just have to be willing to work for it.

And along with that what I’ve added to it when I tell my kids, is I always tell them that, “Don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t do it. If you want it, go get it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. And a favorite book?

Alex Neist
It is Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Alex Neist
Sauna.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Alex Neist
Go to HostageTape.com. You can find it on all the socials, Hostage Tape, Hostagetape.com. If you’re going to try to buy it on Amazon, you can, but it’s not the best place to get it. Just go to the website, HostageTape.com, and you can find your best deals. And don’t let bad sleep hold you hostage anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Alex Neist
We’re in an age of virtual digital meetings worlds. I would challenge people to actually upgrade their equipment. Have a better camera. Have a better microphone. It makes so big of a difference when you’re on Zooms or you’re on Google Meets all the time, and you can actually sound great and you look great. It makes all the difference in the world.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Alex, this is fun. I wish you much luck and good sleep.

Alex Neist
Awesome. Thanks, Pete. I appreciate it.

Mar 13
0

1040: Building an Unstoppable Mindset with Alden Mills

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Former Navy SEAL Alden Mills shares his battle-tested strategies for building mental toughness.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to push past fear
  2. How to master the mindset loop
  3. How to direct your emotions

About Alden

Alden Mills is on a mission to help 100 million people Be Unstoppable. He is a three-time bestselling author, the Inc. 500 CEO of Perfect Fitness, and the founder of multiple businesses. Throughout his time as a businessman founding and leading multiple companies, he has been awarded over 40 patents. A former Navy SEAL, he is a three-time platoon commander and ranked #1 platoon commander each time. Alden teaches people, teams, and organizations to Be Unstoppable. Entrepreneur magazine recently ranked him the #1 top virtual speaker.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Alden Mills Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Alden, welcome back.

Alden Mills
Pete, it is so great to be back. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom. So much good stuff. So much unstoppability. This time we’re coming in to chat about Unstoppable Mindset. So important. And I’d love to kick us off, because I know you’re good for it, could you set the scene for us with a dramatic, exciting, high-stakes tale of when you had an unstoppable mindset at work doing something awesome?

Alden Mills
Oh, so there I was, I’d raised a million and a half dollars, only to learn $1,475,000 worth of ways not to launch a product, I was broke, and I finally decided to pivot away after four years of toil on the first product, and the unstoppable mindset arose when the team of five of us couldn’t raise any more money, decide we’re going to launch this product with $25,000, $500,000 of debt to a manufacturer, only 90 days of runway for benefits. And we decide we’re going to break this down one obstacle at a time.

And with 90 days, most people are like, “It’s not even going to happen. It’s not even close. You can’t even cut steel to make a mold. And let alone, where are you going to get a couple hundred thousand dollars to build the product so you could even make some money when you put it on a container?” Well, one obstacle led to another, led to another, led to another, but we were able to overcome each of those.

And 87 days later, we launched a product called the Perfect Push Up. And a lot of people are familiar with the Perfect Push Up. I know about 20 million people in the United States alone were. And that was the third product in this series of failures that I had beforehand, and that product was always one conversation away from never happening. That product, through almost three years later, we do almost 100 million in sales, puts us on the fastest-growing consumer product company, number four overall on the Inc. 500.

And I would say that was a monumental, unstoppable mindset by all five of us that decided to go after bringing that product to market.

Pete Mockaitis
I knew you would deliver, sir. Thank you. That’s juicy. So, wow, let’s zoom into that moment there in which you got this idea, but it seems like the odds are slim. Not enough time, not enough money, not enough people, resources to have a reasonable shot at this. And yet, away you go. What is going on inside your brain, inside that unstoppable mindset right there? It’s probably not, “Oh forget it, it’s no use. This is never going to happen.” What does that internal conversation sound like?

Alden Mills
That internal conversation was going between two basic fears: the fear of staying put and the fear of moving forward. In this particular case, the fear of staying put was very specifically called out by these five investors that I went to raise money from, and they’re like, “You have one option and one option only. Let me show you this chart. It’s called a cashflow statement. You don’t have any. There’s only one option for you. You have to go bankrupt. Your wife is pregnant with child number three. You’re not making any money. You have to go get a job.”

It wasn’t even a question of, “Oh, there was a slim chance.” It was like, “It’s over.” And when you ask a question, “Okay, so what’s going through your mind?” it became very clear that if we go behind door number B, called bankruptcy, we know exactly what’s going to happen. We’re going to flush the last four years of hard work.

But if you look at the A door, the alternative, and the alternative was, “Hey, what do we still have available to us?” Well one, we had a good relationship with our manufacturer. He knew what we were dealing with, and he liked the new product and he was willing to take more equity because that’s what we had left in the business. And he was able to float us the first couple of containers, and he was able to cut the mold, the steel, much faster than 90 days. He got it done in 26 days.

And when people started to realize, like, “Hey, this is it. We’re going bankrupt,” or “We can give you a little equity, and if you want to come along for this wild ride with us,” a lot of people chose to do the wild ride and chose door number A. So, when we talk about the two basic fears, I really think of it like this. Until the fear of staying put is greater than the fear of moving forward, you’re going to stay put.

I did not want to star in the bankruptcy movie, and I was willing to go way down the line of venturing on the unknown to see what would happen and what we were capable of. And one conversation would lead to another. One day led to two, led to four, led to a week, led to six weeks. And that’s how we tackled that. And, literally, the same analogy of climbing a mountain. One step at a time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that question a lot, “What do we still have available?” because it’s very grounding and very real. Because it feels like the opposite question is, “How are we screwed? Let me count the ways,” it’s like a poem, and the brain just rattles it off. It’s very untethered. It’s precarious. It’s floating. It’s drifting. But, “What do we still have available?” that’s very concrete and that’s grounded.

And you sort of look at it, write it down, assess it, and note like a great relationship with the manufacturer doesn’t just mean he thinks we’re cool, we think he’s cool, he gets our stuff kind of fast, and we’ve got good credit terms. It means, “No, he might actually become an equity player and provide some levels of flexibility and goodness that is absolutely atypical of a typical manufacturing customer.”

Alden Mills
You know, I think it’s very important to take inventory, and you learn that early on in SEAL team about taking inventory of, “Okay, what do we have available to us? What are the weapons?” I’m using that quotation wise, “And what are our assets? What are our skills? What are our strengths?” For every negative, there is a positive. It just comes in a different wrapper, and you have to look at it from a different perspective.

And I really find where you decide to put your focus is where your direction gets determined. Focus determines direction.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, share with us a little bit of the how-to then. Any key insights, discoveries you made as you were kind of reflecting on these experiences and synthesizing the goods into the Unstoppable Mindset?

Alden Mills
The first thing I really want everyone to understand is that there are very few controllables that we have at our disposal. We can’t control the weather. We can’t control our kids, that’s for sure. We can’t control our colleagues. We can’t control the business environment. But we can control our thoughts, where we put our focus, and what we decide to believe in.

And if you think about those three mental controllables– now we have some others. We can control our emotions. We can control our physical capabilities, if we’re blessed enough to be able to use our arms and legs and our minds. And then we can control our faith. What we decide that we really want to put our faith into from a spiritual perspective. Okay?

And what I really want to hone the conversation on is the first one, the mindset, the mental controllables of thoughts, focus, and beliefs, and make sure everybody understands how they build upon each other. They work in what I call a loop, a mindset loop. Thoughts direct your focus. Focus drives to an action. And beliefs power a thought based off of an action that you or I just took or about to take.

And when you start to appreciate, and let’s start with thoughts. Every single one of us has a conversation, and it was the conversation that you just asked me in the very beginning off of that story, “Hey, what was going through your head?” Remember the conversation you just asked me? And that conversation, I call out in my latest book, there are two main voices, the whiner and the winner.

The whiner is your negativity bias. My whiner, when things are getting hard or I’m struggling and I’m tired and I’m starting to have a pity party for myself, sounds like a 10-year-old, “You know how hard this is going to be? Why do you think you can do it? Who do you know who’s done this before? Everyone else thinks you should go this way. No!”

And the whiner in your conversation, it wants to look in the rearview mirror. It knows what it knows from the past. It wants to bring the past into your present. Now that’s a danger because if you’re using something that’s restrictive or limiting from your past into your present, what do you think that does for your future?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it limits it.

Alden Mills
Yeah. Right? It lowers your ceiling. Because that whiner is living out of the comfort zone, the comfort zone of familiarity, which it breeds mediocrity. Now, once you get this thought, and then you got the winner, the winner whispers. The winner will say things, especially when you’re doing something new to you, and that’s what I really want to focus on.

When you’re doing something new to you, where you don’t know the outcome, you’re taking a risk, but you’re like, “You know, what if, what if I could do this thing, accomplish this goal?” The winner, when you do that in the beginning, it whispers to you because you don’t quite have the confidence yet, and it might say things like, “Hey, try again. Get up. Go another way. You can do it.”

And you have, all of us, we all have that conversation to deal with. And I call that conversation our first leadership decision. And it’s the first leadership decision of deciding whether I can or I can’t. And you have to know the deck is stacked against you. It’s stacked in the form of “I can’t,” that’s negativity bias. Neuroscientists will say, on average, we have about a 3-to-1 ratio of negative to positive. And we have that because it’s a survivability mechanism to keep ourselves safe.

Here’s the good news. Most of us don’t have to worry about staying safe anymore. It’s not just about surviving; it’s about thriving. So how do you override the negativity of your negativity bias that came from a couple million-year-old survivability mindset inside your brain?

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say 3 to 1, that means just in the course of my internal mental chatter, I’m likely, on average, to have three times more negative thoughts like, “This is dumb. I hate this. I’m tired. I want to quit,” than I am positive thoughts of, “Booyah! Let’s rock and roll.” Is that what you mean?

Alden Mills
Yes, and I can go a step further. There’s a study that I talk about in the Unstoppable Mindset book about a UCLA neuroscientist who goes through and figures out one negative thought needs three positive thoughts to offset the impact of the negative. And if you want to be in the plus column, you’re going to need somewhere around five positive thoughts.

So that’s how incredibly important it is when you’re starting to have that conversation, and the whiner is coming at you, to really flood your brain with, “Okay, we’re going to figure out ways we can do this. Let’s take our inventory. Let’s take a look at what we have available to us. Let’s remember that there’s always a positive to a negative.”

One of the tools that I use and talk about in the book is playing the opposite game. What I mean by the opposite game is when a negative confronts you, an obstacle that seems insurmountable to you, play the opposite game and give yourself, force yourself, force your team to come up with two reasons why this obstacle is a positive for us, “What are we going to learn from it?”

And when you do that, you’re going to get people to shift their focus. You’re going to force them to shift their focus. Sometimes, if you hear a lot of negative banter and you’re sitting around in a meeting room, like, “Oh, this can’t be done for this reason and this reason and this reason,” you’re like, “Okay, great. We’re done with the ‘can’t be done’ meeting. Everyone, get up. I want you to walk around the office space or walk around the building, and come back here in five minutes.”

“And once you’ve done that,” that’s a state change, by the way, moving, getting oxygen to your mind, “I want you to be thinking about the can-do reasons why we can do this and what that obstacle is going to do positively for us,” and watch what happens. It will take a while because you got to get people to look at it from a different angle, but you can find at least two positives. It wouldn’t surprise me if some came back with three or four.

So that’s on thoughts.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, I’d love it if you could give us a couple examples. Like, this thing seems bad and I got two positives on it.

Alden Mills
Okay. Gee, really negative that we’re going near to bankruptcy, like, this is the only stop we have. Give me two things why my investors said, “Hey, your only option is bankruptcy.” You sit around the table, and like, “Well, it’s going to get us really focused.” You know, one of the big problems was when I raised a million and a half dollars, I didn’t have a massive sense of urgency to hit our timelines.

When you have just $25,000 left in some credit cards, you have a real sense of urgency and it brings everything into clarity very quickly. So, we got clarity from the fact that there was bankruptcy. Number two, when you go to a supplier, and say, “Hey, your only other option is bankruptcy,” they don’t want you to go bankrupt. They start to lean into you, if they like you and you’ve been honest with them, and they started to work with us and give us new ideas that we hadn’t gotten in the past.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Understood. All right. And so, what I’m hearing is with the two positive reasons, it’s actually actively positive as opposed to, “Well, it could be worse. Well, I guess it’s nice that we have bankruptcy protections in this nation and I don’t have to be thrown into debtors’ prison.” I mean, I guess, yeah, it could be worse, but that’s not what you’re saying. It’s like, what we’re saying is, “No, this is actively positive.”

Alden Mills

Yeah. And I want to be clear to everybody about positive. Sometimes when I’m up on stage, I will ask people, “Hey, raise your hands if you’ve done 23andMe, or some variant of genetic testing?” A bunch of hands typically go up. And then I’ll ask somebody out of the audience, “Hey, you that just raised your hand, tell me, did you screen positive for the positive gene? Did you get the positive gene?” And they’re like, “Uh, I don’t remember.”

And I go, “Well, let me tell you, it’s right above the leadership gene and just below the success gene.” And then they kind of get it, and they’re like, “Oh, uh, no, I don’t get that.” And I’m like, “Obviously you didn’t, because there’s no such thing!” And when I talk about the positive, let me be specific here, I’m talking about can-do positivity. I’m not talking about just saying, “Hey, let’s be a cheerleader for cheerleaders’ sake.” I’m asking you to look at this from the perspective of “What can we do?”

Pete Mockaitis
And, indeed, how does this circumstance enable us to can-do it better than if it were absent? Bankruptcy yields focus, and that’s handy.

Alden Mills
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, yeah, let’s hear about the focus.

Alden Mills
So here it is, we’ve had this conversation, and we’ve generated some thoughts. We’ve generated a bunch of negative thoughts because that’s what the whiner is really good at. And then we’ve got some positive thoughts and can-do thoughts, like, “Hey, okay, so now we got a tight timeline. Time to get to work. We’re going to cut out all the slough of what we need to do, and just focus on how we’re going to bring this product to market.”

A thought is neither helpful nor hurtful until energy gets attached to it. Neuroscientists today will say we generate somewhere upwards of 10,000 thoughts a day, and I don’t know how they’re counting that, but a minimum right. It’s a large number of thoughts a day. Thoughts come in three main categories: past, present, and future. But how do we add energy to a thought? We do it through focus.

Well, how does focus work? The way focus, this is the way I communicate how focus works, is that it acts like a funnel. It funnels energy to a thought that drives us to an action. The action could be, “We’re going to sit on our hands and feet. Sit on our hands and do nothing.” Or, it could be, “All right. We’re going to call up that manufacturer and see if that manufacturer will work with us and help us with this new product.”

The important thing is thoughts are constantly going over our focus funnel, which we all have. And until we put the thought into our focus funnel and apply energy to it, thoughts are neither helpful nor hurtful. Now, here’s how I want people to think of it, and I offer five different solutions. And I love acronyms, and I created an acronym called FOCUS. And I’ll give you the F of FOCUS as one of five different ways to hone your focus when dealing with a thought.

I’d like you to think, on top of your focus funnel, that you have an adaptive screen. You can open and close that screen. You’re in charge of what thought you want to give energy to it. Now, let’s just do a little thought classwork. If we focus on a negative thought in the past, what do you think that leads to?

Pete Mockaitis
Emotionally? Maybe bitterness, resentment, regret.

Alden Mills
Yeah, those are all components of depression. They lead to depression. If we focus on a negative thought in the future, what does that lead to?

Pete Mockaitis
Like, worry, anxiety.

Alden Mills
Anxiety, okay? That’s the power of our leading ourselves. Everything we’re talking about here, Pete, is leadership, and it is leadership of what I call the first level. The last time I was on here, we talked about second-level leadership. That was team leading, right? The level before team leading is how you lead yourself. In these first initial leadership decisions, okay, picking the thought, then we’re deciding, “Okay, where are we going to put our energy? Where are we going to put that focus?” That’s leadership decision number two.

So, when we get this adaptive screen that’s on top, and we put a thought in there, how do we sort out all these thoughts that are going into our funnel? Because we only really want one, and we want the one that’s going to be most helpful to getting us to our goal. So, I have this very simple question that I ask people, and I’ve even made-up little wristlets so people can remind themselves of it, “Is this helpful or hurtful towards the direction of the goal I’m going?”

Case in point. Is it helpful or hurtful to focus on going bankrupt? Or is it helpful or hurtful to focus on, “How can I figure out a way to cut steel in less than 90 days so we have a shot at launching the product?”

Alden Mills
Now, you may say, “Well, Alden, that’s remarkably simple.” And you know what? It ain’t complicated. It’s just hard, as a good old Navy SEAL instructor have us want it done. And that’s what we’re after here, is I want people to walk away from our conversation today with a couple of very simple tools that they can ask themselves or their team members, “Hey, every time you come in here and talk about everything we can’t do, do you think that’s helpful or hurtful to trying to accomplish the company goal that we’re all being measured against?”

It’s like throwing cold water on somebody. And then when people start to go, “You know what, I guess it’s hurtful.” I’m like, “Yeah. And if you’re saying that inside your mind, and now you’re saying it out to infect everybody else, remember the old adage, ‘One bad apple spoils the bunch’?”

Pete Mockaitis
Right, yeah.

Alden Mills
That’s negativity bias. It’s the same thing we’re talking about here.

Pete Mockaitis
So, let’s zoom in. So, we’re living life, you know, we’re having idle moments of me in the shower or driving, and then a thought comes into the mind, like, “Oh, I might go bankrupt and we might have to downsize, sell the house, and get a tiny apartment somewhere.” So, I guess that’s a future negative, anxiety-producing.

And so, I can ask myself the question, “Is that helpful or hurtful? Oh, it’s hurtful. It’s making me anxious instead of, like, focused and zeroed in.” And then what? Do I just kind of try to have my list of go-to helpful thoughts to return to? Or how do you recommend we manage that in these moments?

Alden Mills
Great question. First of all, we’re human. What does that mean?

Pete Mockaitis
We have feelings.

Alden Mills
It means we’re imperfect. It means we can’t do it all. It means that our focus funnel, that Alden just talked about, it’s porous. It can sprout holes on the side. And it can sprout holes from external forces of different people saying, “You can’t do that. It’s never been done before. No, that won’t work.” And, all of a sudden, energy gets pulled off the side of your focus funnel, so you’ve lost your laser focus.

Or you have internal focus funnel hole-makers, that are saying, “What are you doing? You can’t do this.” They’re based off of fear, things of doubt, or questioning beliefs. And when you get to those points, the key is being aware enough to be like, “Hey, hey, hey, that’s a negative hypothetical. If I’m thinking about something in the future, if I can’t do this, then I’m going to have to move to a smaller apartment, and I’ve just gotten married, and my wife’s going to hate me, and I’ve burned through all of this, and, oh, my God, I’m going to look like a loser, and I’ll never get a job. Whoa, I should stop right now. What am I doing?” Right?

That is projecting a negative hypothetical into the future. Pete, helpful or hurtful, negative hypothetical?

Pete Mockaitis
Hurtful.

Alden Mills
Yeah, right? But you, the listener, has listened to Alden and Pete talk about this and say, “Hey, that’s something in the future. I can’t control that yet.” The only thing you can control is what you decide you want to create for your own future. And at that point, you get to go back and say, “Hey, flush the funnel. New idea. Alden, what is helpful that I can do today to take action to accomplish this goal? What one thing can I do?”

And when you start having that conversation hourly, sometimes by the second, example, going through Hell Week in SEAL training, where they give you a total of three and a half hours of sleep over five and a half days, you get to a point where all you’re saying is, “Can I take another step? Yeah, I can take another step. I’ll take another breath. I’ll do one more step.”

Climbing Denali at 50 in 15 days and I didn’t get to see the summit until 45 minutes before we made the final turn. Do you think it’s helpful or hurtful to say, “Where’s the summit? I can’t see it.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Are we there yet?”

Alden Mills
“Are we there yet?” Right? No. No, it’s not. But you got to be like, “Hey, forget about that. I’ve got to stay in the moment and not focus on the mountain.” And that’s a phrase that I use a lot. And then talk about staying in the moment versus the mountain. Use the mountain of work in front of you as a way to measure the yardstick of your progress because you’re still making progress.

Even if you’re like Thomas Edison and you fail 10,000 times in inventing the light bulb, you learn 10,000 different ways not to light the light bulb, right? Stay in the moment and ask yourself, “What’s helpful or hurtful to get me a step closer to my goal?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. Thank you.

Alden Mills
You’re welcome.

Pete Mockaitis
And then we got belief.

Alden Mills
We got beliefs. So here it is. We’ve now taken an action. An action we think, hopefully, is helpful in the direction of the new goal, the new thing. We have dared to try to do something new to us. When I’m doing all of this conversation with you, those are the people I’m speaking to that have been willing to set a goal that’s audacious, that sometimes they have no idea how they’re going to accomplish it, but they know if they accomplish this goal, this could be transformative for them, or at least a step in the direction of something transformative for them.

So, we take the action. And, lo and behold, we fall flat on our face. We create this product, we cut steel, we spend all this money, and the damn product doesn’t work, or people don’t like it, or it doesn’t do what we thought it would do. I’m using that as the example. We have a decision to make. We look at that action, and we say, “Oh, my God, I’m a total failure. This is never going to work,” and we accept that as fact, and then our thoughts get in alignment with our focus, and we create a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. Step one.

Or step two, we look at it, and go, “Yeah, it didn’t quite work the way I thought it was going to work, but, hey, we learned how to cut steel, and we got a product that we didn’t have before, and now I can go around and get feedback from people to tell me what they don’t like about it because it’s so much easier to have the hard good in their hands versus just talking about it on a PowerPoint, right?”

And then we start thinking to ourselves, “Wait a second, I got a couple other ideas,” and we develop a different belief. What is a belief, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, a belief is an assertion that you hold to be true.

Alden Mills
Amen. Bingo. Hundred points for Pete today.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.

Alden Mills
That’s all it is. It’s something we have determined that is true. We’ve determined it. Now maybe we’ve picked it up from other people because beliefs come from all different portions of our life. Beliefs can come from the environment we grew up in, from our parents, from our brothers, our sisters, our coaches, our teachers, on books we read, the TV shows we listen to, or watch, the podcasts, whatever. They come all over the place.

And here’s the wonderful thing about beliefs. We can decide which ones are true or not, and we get to change them. Leadership action number three – we get to decide. I decide what I can or cannot do. Nobody else. You might allow other people to do that, but at the end of the day, it’s your leadership that decides “What I want to believe in.”

Alden, born with smaller than average sized lungs, asthmatic since the age of 12. I remember my mother said, “No, you can’t go to the Naval Academy. They don’t like asthmatics. You’ll definitely never go to SEAL team. Forget about it. You’ll never be a Division I athlete. You won’t be able to try out for the Olympic team. Are you kidding? You have smaller than average sized lungs.”

You know a couple of things they didn’t even know back then? If you really work aerobically, you can increase the volume of your lungs. They know that now. They didn’t know it then. Huh?

Pete Mockaitis

Cool.

Alden Mills
Interesting, right? So, what’s that got to do with thoughts and focus? Beliefs come in two, this is how I think of them. They come in two major genres: limiting or empowering. Is the belief I’m deciding to be true helpful or hurtful toward my goal? Imagine starting off in a company going, “Well, I’m raising all this money, but I really don’t think it’s going to work.” Would that be helpful or hurtful?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s hurtful for your motivation and belief in doing all the things you’re trying to do.

Alden Mills
But why would you do that? But you know what? Half my SEAL class, who took, on average, two years to show up and get to the starting line, when push came to shove and they had already passed a PT test, physical fitness test, four times, they got one more time to do exactly the same test. This is the lead story in the book, right in the beginning, 122 of us, 64 passed the test. You know why?

Pete Mockaitis
Tell me.

Alden Mills
Because they had a belief that they really couldn’t be there. They really couldn’t do it.

Pete Mockaitis
So, they passed it four times previously, and the fifth time…

Alden Mills
But the fifth time, when it mattered to class up and actually start training, because all of the other stuff was just pre-phase training, they don’t class.

Pete Mockaitis
That is surprising.

Alden Mills
Belief, it’s an operating system. It’s our basic operating code. And here’s the rub wrong with the belief? A belief acts like a seed, and the more we empower it, fertilize it with our thoughts and focus, it drives us to take an action. That action is called a behavior. We decide like, “Hey, you know, I think I could run a little bit faster,” or, “I think maybe my manufacturer will give me a little money, or maybe they’ll accept. I’ve got to try, I’ve got to ask, I’m going to take a behavior and I’m going to try something different.”

And then over time, that behavior can turn into a habit. Now habit is an interesting challenge. It’s what keeps me in the coaching business, because a lot of people, the habit becomes so automatic that they don’t even know about it anymore. The automatic could be, well, the first thing that comes up is that, “No, this can’t be done.” They listen to their whiner. They’re talking like the whiner, and they’re the one that’s holding back the whole team.

And then they call in somebody like me, to say, “Hey, Mr. or Mrs. Executive, if you don’t fix that, you’re not helpful on our team anymore.” And that is where you’ve got to go to work on your belief. So how do you do that? Well, you do it the way we initially started when you asked me that big question, and you say, “Hey, we have to ask ourselves these two basic fears, the fear of staying put, or the fear of moving forward.”

And you run an outcome account in your head. What’s an outcome account? Basically, “Hey, what happens if I allow this belief that I think I should accept as true? Am I accepting the fact that it will hold me back from achieving this? Am I comfortable with the fact that I don’t achieve this?” If you’re comfortable with the fact that you’re not going to achieve it, you’re going to stay put.

But if you’re not comfortable with that outcome, and you say, “You know what, the risk of going out there and trying, and maybe, you know, some people laugh at me for failing, or maybe this, that, or the other thing, I got to believe that we can try.” Then that’s going to empower you to look at your beliefs in a different way.

Now the other thing you can do, and I call this confess and assess, is you find somebody, a swim buddy, a close friend, someone that’s not going to judge you, and you call up your buddy, Pete, and you say, “Hey, Pete, I’m struggling here. I can’t seem to see the light of day here, but something’s holding me back. This is what I’m dealing with.”

Pete asks a couple of basic questions, like, “Well, tell me more. Why are you thinking like that? Are you okay if you take that action or don’t take that action? How does that make you feel?” “Oh, no, that would be miserable. I’d hate that.” That’s the confess. When you get your judgment, that inner narrative that’s driving the belief out on the table, and then you use you and your buddy to assess it, that can help you on the path of what I call the “I Can Belief” loop.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s cool. And I’m thinking, we had a hypnotist, Dr. Marc Schoen, a clinical psychologist, who also practice hypnotherapy, given his credentials. And I asked him about what are some of the suggestions or beliefs that are kind of core and super powerful, useful, all the time in many, many contexts, and just to carry with you everywhere.

And I’d like to ask you the same thing. Are there a couple go-to super beliefs that are just so handy in so many circumstances that you cling to?

Alden Mills
Yes. So, I would classify those beliefs as mantras. And that is absolutely one of the things that I encourage, and I talk about it in the book on how to build mantras that help you with your focus of, “Is this helpful or hurtful?” And one of the mantras is, “I decide what I can or can’t do.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Alden Mills
“I’m unstoppable. I can do this.” And you speak in the present tense of what it is you’re trying to do. I love to help people achieve things they didn’t think they could do. That’s kind of my term about being unstoppable. And, by the way, to be unstoppable means you first have to have been stopped. And let’s say, in your case, Pete, you want to be a best-selling author. I would say to you, “Okay, Pete, the very first thing, I want you to create a new mantra for yourself, ‘I am a bestselling author. I write books people want to read. I write books that help people unlock their potential.’”

“Pete, throughout the day, anytime you’re sitting down, and you’re thinking about writing, I want you to start talking to yourself in that present tense, and give yourself that mantra because that’s the goal we’re after. I want the mantra to be in alignment with the goal you’re after in the present tense.’” So that’s one of the techniques.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I also want to get your quick thought on, you said we can control emotions, and I think some might say, “Can you? Is that possible? What about depression? Isn’t that a thing where we cannot?” What’s your hot take on controlling emotions? And any quick tips on how to do it?

Alden Mills
Emotions. What is an emotion?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know, it’s funny. I was reading Ethan Kross’s book, and apparently, it’s somewhat complicated. But I’m going to simplify it, and just say it is a feeling and thought existing within us.

Alden Mills
There’s something called a feeling-thought loop, right? Thought gives energy to it, generates a feeling. Emotion derives from it. The definition that I enjoy most about emotion actually comes out of a book from Conscious Leadership that is called E-motion. It’s energy in motion. Now, if you have an E-motion, and something that has been driven from a thought and a feeling, you first need to know the root cause.

If I sit here and spend a lot of time stewing on, “Somebody ripped me off,” I’m making that decision to go down and create that emotion. Can you control every single emotion? No, we’re imperfect, right? But can you control emotions? A hundred percent, you can. It’s in your control, but how do you do that?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I guess the pathway then sounds like is, if there’s an emotion I would like to experience, “I would like to feel inspired and motivated,” I’m going to choose a thought that’s in the inspirational motivational zone and resonant for me, maybe an experience, a memory, a goal, and I’m going to put focus and energy upon that thought. And, in so doing, I will often, but not always, conjure emotion.

Alden Mills
Yeah, and make it even simpler, “Hey, you know what? I’m feeling kind of blah right now. I’d like to feel a little bit better. What’s a simple way to do that? Oh, I love American Authors’ ‘Best Day of My Life’ song. I’m going to listen to that.” Boom! What just happened there? I just changed my emotion. I did a state change, “You know what? I don’t feel that great. I feel low on energy and I feel kind of blah. I’m going to go for a run. I’m going to get on the rowing machine. Get a workout.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, sure. Get a glass of water. I mean, I guess when you raise the question, you naturally say, “Oh, there’s several options that I can immediately take right now.”

Alden Mills
A hundred percent. And, by the way, that’s you leading you, right? So, in the case of when you get ambushed, and I talk about this in the chapter I used, one of the hardest Navy SEAL training evolutions is practicing an ambush. They’re violent, they’re terrifying, they’re unexpected, and you got to think clearly when you get ambushed, but we ambush ourselves all the time.

We let our thoughts run wild. We’re not paying attention because we’re doing something else or looking at our phone, and, all of a sudden, something pisses us off. Before we know it, an emotion comes out and we’re all fired up. So, you got to learn to move that emotion. Now, what is a big challenge when we get an ambushed emotion? Well, that fires the amygdala, the amygdala, the little almond-sized piece of our brain that has to deal with fight, flight, or freeze.

And the problem with when the amygdala gets fired is it changes the blood flow from the prefrontal cortex, the front of our brain, where executive function and compassion and collaboration live, and put us in a state where cortisol and adrenaline are firing through our veins. Cortisol, so we can just go to the sugars. Adrenaline, so we can get up to speed or whether we’re going to fight or flight. And then we’re not solving anything creatively, and then more emotion can stack on there.

The quickest way to move that, and you have to work on this, is through a box breath is one example. Breathing through the nostril, holding, exhaling, holding. Moving, doing a state change, getting yourself to calm back down from that emotional ambush.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s good.

Pete Mockaitis
Well said. Well, tell us, anything else you want to mention before we hear about a few of your favorite things?

Alden Mills
I really want people to understand they are their own best leader. Every single one of us is a leader. We have to lead ourselves to get up in the morning. We have to lead ourselves to listen to this podcast. We have to lead ourselves to decide what we can or can’t do. And you have to lead yourself to decide, “What’s the helpful or hurtful thought? Where am I going to put my focus? And what am I going to decide to believe in?” If you learn to lead yourself through those, watch how many people will learn to lead to follow you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Now, could you give us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Alden Mills
Of course. Seneca, “Success is a matter of belief.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Alden Mills
I’m really geeking out on this book right now, “A Calendar of Wisdom” by Leo Tolstoy. Daily little wisdom to get your mind in the right place, your thoughts, your focus, and your beliefs to start the day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Alden Mills
Telling my kids I love them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with audiences, something they quote back to you often?

Alden Mills
“Is this helpful or hurtful?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Alden Mills
Alden-Mills.com.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Alden Mills
Yes. I want you waking up every day asking yourself, “What’s one thing I can do that’s going to push me out of my comfort zone, that’s going to drive me to do something courageous, audacious, something that, over time, will change my life?”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Alden, this is so powerful. Thank you.

Alden Mills
Pete, great questions. I always love being with you. Keep inspiring, brother.

Feb 17
0

1033: How to Build Your Social Confidence with Susan Callender

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Susan Callender reveals the critical mindset shifts that lead to greater charisma and confidence.

You’ll Learn

  1. Six steps for overcoming shyness 
  2. How to quickly curb nervousness and anxiety 
  3. The small shifts that improve your professional presence 

About Susan 

Susan Callender is a success coach and founder of Social Confidence Pro, where she runs The School of Social Mastery. She helps sharp, high-achieving yet socially reluctant professionals polish their people skills and step into the spotlight. Through her school and coaching, she helps chronic overthinkers create a bigger impact and add more value to the careers they love. Susan shares her expertise as host of the Social Skills Mastery podcast, transforming clients from Boston to Bangkok and beyond.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Susan Callender Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Susan, welcome!

Susan Callender
Pete, I am so happy to be on your show. Thank you so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Well, we’re happy to have you. We’re talking social confidence. That’s a hot topic listeners care a lot about, and you are the social confidence pro, so it’s like we’re a match made in heaven.

Susan Callender
I am. I love what I do.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I want to hear the tale of how you were going to be on CNN and then you just walked off the set. What’s going on here?

Susan Callender
Well, I identified as a shy person, and, momentarily, for that interview, which happened during the Democratic National Convention back in 2004, I thought that I could get over shyness for a few minutes for an interview.

And so, I walked in blindly to the interview. They were putting on my mic, fixing my hair, the reporter’s talking to me, and my mind is spinning and racing, and then they went, “Five, four, three…” and I pulled off the microphone, and I said, “I cannot do this. I’m so sorry. I’m so embarrassed. I should have never done this in the first place,” and I walked off the set.

And the most surprising thing, Peter, is that was an embarrassing moment, but it was not even my worst embarrassing moment. I am so glad to be where I am today and holding out my hand and bringing along other people, other professionals, other business owners that find themselves in that situation. There’s hope for you. There was for me, there is for you, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yes, I like that a lot. Not that you experienced a deeply painful situation, but that you use your pain to help others, as well as this notion, I think sometimes people think, “Oh, you know, charismatic folks who are just great on camera or great on stage or great at speaking, they’re just kind of born that way. That’s sort of their personality.” But here you are with an experience that says just the opposite. You’ve experienced a personal transformation here.

Susan Callender
I did. What I realized, and that was one of the catalysts for my doing what I do now, and that was realizing that, “Oh, I call myself shy. I call myself an introvert. Who first called me shy? Oh, it was my mom protecting me, letting people know, ‘Oh, it’s okay, she’s hiding behind me, she’s shy.’” And then as I grew up, when I was in school or in a play, when people saw me being very hesitant, I could then express, when I was eight or nine years old, “I’m shy. I just can’t do it.“

But then this is what happens. One day you’re in college, and then one day you’re 35 and you’re still shy, but now people aren’t relating to it anymore because you’re a professional. They expect you to show up and speak up and add value and do your thing, and that’s where it becomes really difficult. And that’s why I do what I do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you there in terms of, at some point, the expectations get upgraded and you got to upgrade with them.

Susan Callender
You do, and that’s where I realized, Pete, that it’s not so much the label. It’s the identity. So, you can give a person conversation starters, that’s the most popular thing that I do. People want to know what to say, “What do I say?” I’ll have people line up after a conference, or in a conference room at an office where I’m doing a presentation, and all the quiet people will say, “But what do I say? How do I start a conversation? What should I say to that person?”

But it’s not the words. It’s who you are being. So, I can give you the most interesting conversation starters, but if you still identify as an introvert who really hates small talk, you are still going to be an introvert who hates small talk who happened to have a conversation for one minute. You’ll revert back to who you believe you are. So, what I help people do is to create a new social identity where they can truly fully express themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing and cool, and I’ve heard that that’s a powerful tool for folks trying to make any sort of transformation, like, “I am not going to try to work out but who I am is a runner or a fit person or a triathlete or whatever,” like adopting that identity can really move people to do things differently and to perform better. So, that sounds pretty handy. But, Susan, how is it done?

Susan Callender
Well, it’s done by really priming your brain. So, what I’ve created is a social priming system, and the social priming system is a type of mental rehearsal for social interactions. So, I use the acronym SOCIAL, and what I help people to do is just move through all of those different iterations of how we see things prior to doing them. I’ll give you an example, Pete.

You don’t get lost going to work, because you see it in your mind first. You see your route. But we think for some reason, because we see people performing with social ease, those outgoing people, the people who find it easy to make a conversation, we assume that they do it without practice. We see everything before we do it.

So, with social priming, S is, first, just to settle down. Calm down, take a few deep breaths, and really just find that place within yourself where you really want to do well. Let’s just set this up as a networking event. You’re attending a networking group for the first time. You won’t know anyone, but you know, for professional reasons, you really should be there.

Then O is for observe. Just really look at your current emotional state and just notice, “Do you have any anxiety? Do you have any resistance? Why do you have that anxiety?” That anxiety came from a thought that you have about the situation. What if you changed that thought to, “I’m really looking forward to meeting new people in my field.” It will change how you feel.

And then what we want to do is just create a specific social scenario. Imagine yourself walking into the venue. What’s the first thing you’re going to see at a networking event? Perhaps a name tag table. Visualize yourself walking up to that table. If there’s a person standing behind it, prior to saying, “My last name is…” or just looking for your name tag, visualize yourself, prime your brain to say, “I’m going to say hello to that person and tell them how glad I am to be here.”

When we go through steps like this, Pete, these things happen because we’re priming our brain for exactly what we want to happen. We do the same thing in presentations. And then we just want to immerse our brains in how we want to feel in that moment – confident. We want to have positive outcomes for this interaction.

And then we make it animated. That’s the A in social. Just play through the scene like you’re having conversations, like you’re going over to the bar to get a drink, like you’re going to stop by the hors d’oeuvres table and grab a cube of cheese or a little bit of hummus and pita, and you’re going to turn and find a single person or a person who was alone, and you’re going to walk over to them and mention something about the gathering.

Don’t walk over and say your name first. Because nobody will care who you are until they feel comfortable with you, then they’ll remember your name. And so, just start with something about the setting that you’re in, something about the event that you’re attending.

And then, finally, L in social is for just linking the great feeling that you have with this to any positive situation that you want to have. So, when you click that link, you will know that, “This is how I want to feel in social settings,” and that just seals the deal for you. Then you can do it again, and again, and again.

Pete Mockaitis
So, with the link, can you expand on that a little bit more?

Susan Callender
Well, it’s like an anchor. So, the anchor is, “I just did this. I was able to visualize what I wanted to happen. I was able to just settle my nervous system. I was able to calm that anxiety. I questioned where that anxiety was coming from. Why would I feel nervous? I am a very smart, driven person. I have the degrees, I have the skills, I have the credentials. These are my people. Why would I feel nervous? I’ve said words before. I have introduced myself before.”

Pete Mockaitis
I bet you have.

Susan Callender
“I can say words again. I know how to ask for a drink. I know how to introduce to people. All of these things.” When we take ourselves, Pete, out of ourselves and think about the other person, we are so much more calm.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really cool. With the link is not so much, I think we have a tendency to hurry on to the next thing, it’s like, “Well, let’s see if there’s anything interesting in my phone now,” as opposed to linking that experience to, I guess, a new identity there in terms of, “Yes, this happened. This is an experience that just unfolded,” and to sort of sit in it, steep in it, marinate in it, and let your brain link these connections.

Susan Callender
Celebrate the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. And it’s funny, I’m zeroing in on the cheese cubes, one, because perhaps I’m already ready for lunch, and, two, it really does animate the A there, the scene in terms of when your senses, what can you see, what can you smell, what can you taste, and makes it all more real and grounded as oppose to the soft languages of ideas, idea things, like, “Oh, some people might not like me.”

It’s like, okay, that’s kind of fuzzy and broad and vague as opposed to a cheese cube, “It is orange. I can visualize it on a little white Dixie plate or whatever, a toothpick, and then I’m there and the mental rehearsal seems all the more genuine and powerful.

Susan Callender
It truly does. And that will help your listeners connect to whatever event they are attending, whether it’s taking place in the workplace, or if they have to go outside, or if they’re taking a client to lunch. Bob Proctor had a very popular quote, which was that, “If you could see it in your mind, you can hold it in your hand.”

It’s so true. We’ve gone through all these little iterations in different ways before, but rather than just having your mind go blank with fear, say, “I’ve done this before.” And then at the end, give yourself, when you get back in your car, a little, “Woohoo! So glad I did that. Yes! I knew I could do that.” That just reinforces that. That’s just another type of anchor. “Yes, I can do this again. I’m going to sign up for that other event that I see noted at the end of the month.”  That’s where that momentum comes from.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. I dig that a lot. Let’s talk about the observe the why. I can get into a trap emotionally with why, as I feel a thing and then I say why. And, sure enough, I’m able to generate so many reasons why I feel that, and then I’m almost, like, finding an argument or justification and support for the very thing that I would prefer not to be feeling. Can you give us some distinctions and pro tips on how to do the observe step optimally?

Susan Callender
We all have some resistance in us for whatever reason, “Well, I don’t want to go. I’d rather go to the gym,” “I’d rather go home and walk my dog,” “I’d rather just scroll Instagram,” or do whatever it is that we do these days because we’re so accustomed to being alone. It’s so easy to be alone. Why do we do this?

We do this because we are professionals. We do this because we’ve put in that time and we want to be known for what we know. And the more we stay alone, the more we work hybrid or work from home or do not have all the opportunities that we used to take advantage of, to get to know people, to be seen and to be heard and to be understood for all of the value that you have to offer, well, just take a look at that and observe who you’re being.

Do you want to manage your professional image, or do you want others to manage it for you? Others managing it for you might mean, “Oh, she doesn’t really talk to anyone,” or, “She’s probably not going to show up,” or, “I don’t think that I’m going to ask her because she’ll probably say no, and we really need panelists for next week, so I’m going to go to somebody who I have a feeling will say yes.” And all it takes from you is, “Uh, yes, sure, I can do it,” because you know you can.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s how we do the identity piece. I’m curious, with regard to the settle down, any pro tips on doing that well?

Susan Callender
What we should take more time for is deep breathing. At any point in your day, when you feel just even a pang of nervousness or anxiety, just stop and take four to six just deep breaths in your nose, slowly out your mouth. It is incredibly calming. And in those moments, your brain will have clarity. Clarity that it could not have, that was not possible when your mind was racing.

You are in control. Do not think that some outside factor is in control of you. And once you realize that, it’s so empowering. It stops the limiting beliefs in their tracks, and increases the empowering beliefs that you have the capability to do anything that you want to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, deep breathing. Any particulars on how one breathes deeply to be most effective?

Susan Callender
I practice something with my clients that is called box breathing. And in that, you close your eyes and just picture a cube. And you can, let’s say that we’re going from the bottom to the top on the left-hand side, and I might say to them, “Let’s breathe in with a four count, going from the bottom left to the top left. And then do a six count, blowing out through your mouth going across the top of the cube. And then a four count, going down the right-hand side of the cube. And then a six count, exhaling through your mouth, going across.”

And even if we’re doing it like at the end of their workday, it just helps them to separate from anything else that’s been going on, or if it’s at the start of their day, or at their lunchtime. It helps you to create space between what you thought was so unbearable, or stressful, or somebody needling you, or somebody not allowing you to, or in your mind, to not show up as your best because you’re so focused on them.

And it just helps you to separate from that and realize that you are your own entity, your own being. And then we can begin. Then we can have a great session. And I can do that either whether it’s one-to-one or in a group. We’re all the same in that way. We like to think that we’re different but we’re not.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then when you’re in the midst of building your career and developing these skills, what are some practices you suggest for folks, day in day out?

Susan Callender
What I say often is that if you want to be a big deal, you have to act like you’re a big deal. You have value. You are valuable. People want you right now, without question. Somebody right now needs exactly what it is that you have. They’re looking for you. They’re waiting for you. You have to show up. There is no one who is better than you. They just do things differently. But you have your place and you have to claim it.

So, act like you belong and people will treat you like you belong. And then you’ll start to have fun, and then you’ll start to go out more, and then you’ll start to speak up in meetings more, because you realize that people do listen to you.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, tell me, any other top tips, do’s, don’ts?

Susan Callender
One would be just making sure that you are in control of your professional presence. And so, that means that you want to pay attention and be in the moment. Stop your mind from overthinking and racing ahead and wondering if you’re going to say the right thing, and just get present and pay attention, and don’t try to think of what you’re going to say. Respond to what’s being said to you. So just presence is so important.

And then your body language, being authoritative and approachable. And that could be as simple as just standing with your weight even on both feet, and then being mindful of your space. If you are speaking to one person, or a table full of people at a conference table, or a room full of people, make sure to connect.

So, with one person, eye contact. With a number of people at a conference table, make each word that you say, connect that with eye contact with each person at a table. If you are answering a person’s question, don’t just look at that person because everyone else will tune out unless you connect with them. So, use your space wisely. Make sure that people can hear you and that they know that you want to be heard.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Any final thoughts?

Susan Callender
What I know for sure, Pete, is that when you change or improve your social skills, whether it’s getting over social anxiety, nervousness, unnecessary worry, overthinking, everything in that realm, it changes your life forever. You can’t unlearn these skills.

And I know that these are not things that you’ve just been dealing with for the past few months or years. For the most part, it goes back to formative years, before the age of seven, middle school years, maybe early college, and then we think that it’s our life sentence, but it’s not. It can be changed.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Susan Callender
“You don’t have to be great to start. You just have to start to be great.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Susan Callender
Right now, I’m rereading something, and I do have a tendency to reread things that I love, and that is The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Susan Callender
I journal every day, every morning.

Pete Mockaitis
That kind of sounds like a favorite habit as well. Any others?

Susan Callender
I wake up and I just find ten things to be grateful for every morning, and that’s definitely the habit, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Susan Callender
Act like you belong and people will treat you like you belong.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Susan Callender
I would love for people to go to SocialConfidencePro.com/breakthrough, where I have a social identity shift breakthrough series that they will find very helpful to start speaking up and standing out.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Susan Callender
Allow people to be seen, take the focus off of yourself and greet people. Make eye contact with them. Do not focus on your needs or your fear. Just make someone else’s day. And when you notice that look in their eye, that smile that they give you back, you will then see just how powerful you are.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Susan, beautiful. Thank you.

Susan Callender
You’re welcome, Pete. It was my pleasure to be here.