The Biz Bites podcast features business leaders of change talking about topics they’re passionate about, including their personal journeys. Listen as I share the stories behind their story.

Latest Podcast
An Expert Panel on Thriving in the Digital Age
In this can’t-miss special edition of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, get actionable strategies for not just surviving, but thriving in today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape.
Our expert panel featuring learning specialist Jd Walter, spiritual coach Cheryl Stelte, and tech leader Dave Alton dives deep into continuous growth, the power of your inner drive, and how to balance technology with real human connection.
Discover how to tap into your intrinsic motivation, learn through doing and collaborating, and align with your true self to make a meaningful impact. Learn to navigate the chaos with balance and purpose!
Experts include:
Cheryl Stelte
JD Walter
Dave Alton
Technology, learning and leadership, an expert panel on thriving in the digital age. It’s a very special edition of Biz Bites where we have three visionary experts sharing their insights on navigating what is today’s very complex technological landscape. We have a learning specialist in Jd. We have also a spiritual coach in Cheryl, and we also have tech leader Dave, joining us to reveal powerful strategies for continuous growth.
Authentic leadership and leveraging technology for success. You’re gonna discover some practical approaches to daily learning, the secrets of intrinsic motivation, and how to balance digital tools with human connection. Whether you’re an established thought leader or aspiring to be one, this conversation is one that is gonna transform how you approach growth and innovation in our rapidly evolving world.
Welcome to Biz Bites. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites proudly brought to you by CommTogether, the People Behind Podcast done for you because we are all about exposing other people’s brilliance. Don’t forget to subscribe to Biz Bites and Check Out Podcast done for you as well in the show notes.
Now let’s get into it.
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites, and we have another panel discussion today from a group of thought leaders. And I say thought leaders because we are coming from all different areas. We’re gonna get everyone to introduce themselves in just a moment, and also to give you a little bit of an insight as to where they’re coming from, how they see.
The market at the moment, the climate that is out there. It’s a very interesting time in the world right now. So I’m gonna throw to each of our panelists, we’re gonna start off with Jd. Welcome to the program. Thanks Anthony. Greatly appreciate you having me here today. It’s a pleasure to be on. My name is Jd Walter.
I’m the president of tric. We are a small learning and development company. We focus on human skills developments and organizations looking to achieve peak performance. A couple words to describe the market today. Crazy. I think it’s high volatility, constant change. I. Yeah, I can see that it is crazy is a good word at the moment, isn’t it?
Cheryl, what about you? Do you wanna introduce yourself first of all? Yes. Thank you. It really is an honor and a privilege to be here. Thank you so much for that. I am Cheryl Stet and I’m a spiritual coach, a master healer, a three time author, and I help people who are feeling stuck in their lives lost.
They know they’re meant for more and they just. They really lack clarity. So I help them discover that clarity within themselves and step into who they truly are. And yes, crazy. And what I see and what my clients see and I just see this more and more every day actually is people who can really make a difference.
All those change makers are really being called. To step up and move to a whole new level to do what we can do. Yeah, I can absolutely see that. And I think that’s a really important point, and we’re gonna come back to that in a moment. But first of all, Dave, why don’t you give us your words in a bit of an introduction as well, Anthony, thanks for having me on.
Really appreciate being here. Honored to be among these other thought leaders. I’m Dave Alton. I’m the CTO of a managed service provider here. In the United States we help businesses protect themselves from cybersecurity threats and do it for a lot of small companies. And I would say how I would describe the market right now is, it’s just wild. It’s so all over the place. It’s really hard to keep up and keep track of everything that’s going on. And I echo a lot of what Jd and Cheryl have said. I think it’s an interesting starting point and I think it’s interesting too for me, I mean I’m based in Australia, as listeners will know, but the three of you clearly based in the United States where crazy is probably the word that Australians might subscribe to when they, where they’ve been watching the news in the last few months. But I don’t think it’s just about the politics. I think the politics is not something we need to get too much into, but rather it’s about everything else that’s going on, isn’t it? Dave just coming back to you for a moment.
Technology is a big player in the crazy and wild that’s going on at the moment, isn’t it? Because it’s moving so quickly. Yeah. Not only is it moving quickly but we have seen such a transformative time with AI and, augmenting humans’ abilities to do what they do day in, day out. That I think, I’ve always been in the IT industry for way longer than I care to admit, and it’s always moved fast.
But these last four years have just, they’ve been. Cyclonic right to just, everything is like rotating around and moving and moving and it’s, there’s, it doesn’t ever feel like there’s a break and then you add the global, trade everything else on top of it. It just makes everything a lot more chaotic.
Yeah, chaos is an interesting one and we’ve discussed that on the Biz Bites program in the past. But I think there’s some chaos being deliberately created at the moment in and in many ways. And I think, she coming back to you. How do people, I. Navigate through that. It’s such a difficult such a difficult time when things are not happening as where you would hope that it would happen at a steady, slow space pace, I should say.
It’s all over the shop. So how do you cope? How do you cope? It’s such a great question. And number one, don’t get bogged down in Warrior fear. Because so much of what’s going on stirs up fear in individuals, and that’s a low vibration. We’re not gonna be living our lives well, we are not helping ourselves evolve and grow and expand into, human, into humans, into what we all have the potential to really.
Become so noticing when you’re in fear and seeing how you can really move into a higher vibration of feeling empowered what can you do? And so that can mean, going to a yoga class, if that feels right or riding your bike or connecting with a loved one, looking into someone’s eyes. It’s also looking at yourself looking inward and saying, what is it that I can do?
Because we are all made of energy and we are all radiating what and who we are and where we’re at all the time. So talk about chaos in a mix of things. We have all these humans and everything is energy. And so how do you really want to be in the world and what is your contribution? Big or small, we can all make a difference.
And so taking that place of empowerment and making decisions for yourself in a positive way, yeah it’s a tough one, isn’t it? Because on one hand you wanna be making decisions for yourself. On the other hand, if you’re a leader, you need to be making decisions for other people as well. And finding that balance at the moment that’s challenging.
Yes and no. It’s really making that. Commitment. I, I just got off a call a little while ago with a woman and another woman this morning that I did a session with and I just see how, specifically how they’re being called. So I do chakra readings, I do readings on people.
I can see their energy and even when we’re doing something for ourself. For ourselves, it affects the greater whole. It affects those around us. So I can see where people are blocked and I can let them know what they can do about that and how they can move into their superpowers. And the superpowers are the light, are the energetics.
So I’m not talking so much at the level of the mind or what we can do. Physically, but helping ourselves evolves, it sorta evolve. It’s like putting the oxygen mask on yourself first before you go to help someone else. So it’s up to me to do my personal work every day so that I can best serve my clients to help them do their work with their clients, and that ripples out in the world.
And when I get bogged down in fear and trust me. It happens, I’ll sink and and I’ll, and I have lots of skills to get myself out of that. But then to reflect and look at a situation, what is this? Reflecting back to me to understand what I can do and don’t we all feel better when we believe we’re making a difference, that it builds confidence.
It, we encourage ourselves then to do more, especially when we start to see results. Absolutely. Jd, it’s a good opportunity to bring you in here because making a difference to other people is essentially what learning and delivering of learning is about, right? Yeah. I think I. So I think there’s two things that both Dave and Cheryl said, as a segue into what does learning really do for us, right?
There’s the world outside of us and there’s all the things that are going on. There’s in, in each of our little ecosystems, there’s our job, there’s our personal, our home life. There’s all the things that we’re involved in socially, and each of those have their own dynamics and interpretations of these externalities.
So I, I think, I don’t wanna, I talk about learning and development from an organizational perspective, but I’m really interested in learning from an individual human perspective, right? Like, how do we help individuals find, Cheryl’s talking about, find that center right? Find that ideal vision for themselves, and then chart a course to that.
Then how do we align all of these things in our lives so that we’re being purposeful and intentional as we go forward? The organizational return on investment for learning is enfold, right? Fill in the blank. It’s huge. Employee engagement, which is just an employee’s emotional connection to this thing that they’re doing, is, at all time lows, stress is an all time high.
Extreme stress is skyrocketing. Managers are the, probably the one group that are under the most amount of duress in the workforce. And learning and development isn’t just about training a skill set so we can perform our job. It’s really about how do we optimize ourselves as human beings so we can achieve peak performance.
I talk about it very specifically in an organizational context. When I’m talking to an organization, a potential customer, we’re talking about how do we meet business objectives? How do we overcome a dip in the market? How do we overcome competition in a market space? And that has to do with productivity and performance.
But you can’t just throw more people at it and deference to Dave, you can’t just throw technology at it either. And I don’t think, Dave, that’s probably what you would argue. But you can’t just throw these things that we’ve been throwing at this challenge traditionally and expect that the, they’re going to net any kind of a result.
We live in a world right now where volatility. Is the norm there? I talked to a state trooper in New Jersey one day and he said There’s no such thing as a routine traffic stop. And I ruminated on this idea of routine, and I realized that there’s no routine anywhere. It’s not just for tactical athletes, those first responders or trauma ward surgeons.
There’s no routine for anybody anymore. And I, that’s the hardest thing. How do we build habits in a world where there is no routine? We have to become the routine. And Cheryl, I think you’re driving, I don’t wanna put words in anybody’s mouth, but I really felt like we were going down this path where we’re just about to hit this part where this is about creating the normalcy for ourselves and not trying to adapt ourselves to whatever the world’s norm is at the particular moment.
So social norms are something that we want to, div abide potentially, or, ignore, but do so deliberately in either regard. But the normalcy will come from ourselves. And that is that kind of alignment between what is the ideal vision that we have for ourselves and what are we realizing in our day-to-day right now?
Dave, I’m gonna come back to you in a minute about the technology side of things, but Cheryl, just to pick up on that point, how easy is it for people to find that sense of self amongst the chaos and the crazy at the moment and to, to, to work out? Particularly even in terms of, learning new things.
It’s, that’s a difficult thing for a lot of people to accept that they need to and to actually. Find their space about what is right for them to learn and how to learn, and I think it’s such a crucial point because I believe it’s a human need. Learning and development is a human need. It’s, and so many of us, so many people get to a place of stagnation and historically that’s what retirement was all about.
Become stagnant. You’re done, you hit the age of 65 is what it used to be, and you’re gonna retire and get your social security. I’m actually Canadian, so your Canadian pension, whatever it is. But to recognize the need to learn, no matter what happens in learning and development, you’re gonna grow.
You’re, and we are all meant to evolve. There’s no plant out there. Think of the plant, anything in the natural world, the trees, even crystals, everything grows. Everything grows. The plant doesn’t go. Yeah. Okay. I’m done. I’m just gonna sit here and if it does, if it’s not getting nourished. It’s going to die.
So we must nourish ourselves, whether that’s through books, listening to podcasts, going inward and finding our own truth. So it, your learning can be multifaceted, but the number one thing is. To make sure you’re learning. And yes, there’s time to integrate What we learned, that’s part of the developmental stage is the integration.
And in our culture today, I think way too much emphasis is placed on a external learning. If we go back to the truth or at least the truth for me, that all the answers are inside me. So I don’t tell my clients what’s true for them. It’s just if I’m going to learn, like you’re saying, Jd you want to empower your students, those that are coming to you.
And even in it, everything is, you want to empower them to find the answers. That’s the empowerment of learning. It’s not, I traveled in many countries and in Africa, all those kids, they only learn through memorization. Just see how much you can stick in there and hold. And that’s the learning, it’s teaching to think for the self, but it’s we all have the opportunity in this lifetime and it’s intentional and it is required that we continue to learn.
My grandmother used to say that, and I’m no spring chicken here, folks. She used to say, Cheryl, you’re always learning. Don’t stop. If you stop, you might as well be dead. And so I think it’s something that has been forgotten in many ways, and that it’s, I think of it as a human need.
It’s required. Yeah, I think Dave bringing you in here, I think that picking up on that point, I think we don’t have much choice sometimes when it, particularly when it comes to technology and business, there’s a lot of pressure to learn new things. And I was sitting yesterday afternoon learning new things about a CRM that I’ve had for a little while and didn’t realize all of these things that it could do that I’d like it to be able to do.
And it’s. You don’t sit and think about it as learning often, but the truth is, it is. And we are, but there is a lot of pressure to do that, particularly on the technology side. Yeah. I mean we as a technologist and sometimes I call myself a solutionist ’cause I’m always out solving problems. Sometimes I think we overcomplicate things too.
I have had many a client come to me and say, Hey. Find me the magic bullet that does this, and the answer is it’s that pen and paper that you have sitting there like I, I can build this really cool tech thing that will. Do all that stuff you said, but it’s gonna cost you a million dollars and then it’s gonna take me two and a half years to get it done.
That pen and paper that’ll take care of it right now. You don’t have to wait, you don’t have to wait and pay for it. And Cheryl, I love what you’re saying about learning. ’cause it, I actually I try and set aside. Just 15 minutes a day to learn something new. And it doesn’t really matter what it is.
Like I, sometimes it’s silliness sometimes it’s technical, sometimes it’s how to listen better. It’s so important to my routine to have that little tiny bit of. I get to learn something new. And I think when we dedicate ourselves to that, when we dedicate to, Hey, we’re always learning and we’re really always committed to that.
I think things open up to us that, wouldn’t have before. And I know I, I mentioned AI when we started talking and I know that’s the buzzword and everybody’s it’s all over the place, but. It really has been something that I’ve used as a tool to point me in the right direction of things, because I don’t know everything about tech.
I don’t know everything about life and I surely don’t know everything about myself. But AI has given me inroads into things I would’ve never looked at before. Is just a tool, just like the. A pen and a piece of paper is you can use it to get better at stuff and learn new things and really capitalize on the world of information that is out there that there’s no way humanly possible to go and learn all of that, right?
You have to find some way to filter it and. I have found that AI is a good way to do that but there’s a lot of other cool new tools to do that with as well. And some of it is just like what we’re doing here, right? Having conversations with people. I love getting on these panel discussions and I’ll jot little notes down other panels will say, man, I’ve never heard that before.
I gotta go check that out. And connecting with people. So it’s, I don’t think there’s any one way to do this and there’s definitely not a right way to do it. I think there’s a right way for you. I think the one thing that we’re missing is that accountability of taking that on, right?
I think too often we put a lot of blame out there. Oh, the world’s terrible because so and so did this, or so and so did that, and. I take the attitude of it’s all my fault. Everything in the world is my fault. Because if I do, then I have some power to do something with that. If I say, oh, it’s somebody else’s fault, then it’s all on them and I and they have all the power to, to fix and change and do whatever.
But if I say, Hey, that’s on me. I can do something to make that better. I get all that power back and then I do, I get into a learning mode or I find new balance in my life and things like that. I’m Cheryl, I love what you’re saying about learning. It’s awesome.
And I think it’s a good cue also to bring back Jd into this discussion because I’m intrigued as well about. The different ways people are learning and it, Dave talked about being deliberate in doing something every day. And I don’t know if everyone puts a label on it and does that every day, but I think it’s hard pressed to find a day when you’re not learning these at this time with so much going on.
But I. I’m interested as well in terms of the kind of learning that you are delivering. How many different ways do you have to deliver the same thing? Because not everyone learns in the same way. And in this day and age, there’s so many opportunities to learn in different ways. So is that something that businesses have to accommodate as well?
Yeah, I think there’s, so two things I would, I kind of wanna jump on here. The first is this idea of continuous learning, right? The individual drive to grow. I. That shows up in organizations. I see it time and time again. We, I have a lot of conversations about rewards and recognition in organizations.
Unfortunately the organizations wanna default to the easy, right? So they grab something off the shelf and they say, here’s our wellness group, or, which has value but isn’t. The development that people are necessarily looking for. What they really want are opportunities to expand, stretch themselves inside of this job that they’re doing to demonstrate that they have value beyond their particular job description at this point in time and showcase what they can do for an organization in the future.
So more times than not, this is interesting because I think to Cheryl and Dave’s point. Everybody does wanna learn. Everybody does want to grow. That’s a natural instinct inside of us as human beings, propagation of species. The only way we continue to evolve as a species is if each one of us individually does our part to.
Push that foot forward. So I think inside of organizations, what you’re seeing is people are starting to step up and say, my growth is not just training. It’s not just this class that you wanna put me in. It’s give me that project, give me that high profile, quick turnaround project that everybody’s gonna be looking on.
I wanna see if I can do it. I want stretch myself. That, that feeds into something that Dave said and it strikes me. Is autonomy. What people want on the job more and more is they’re looking for this technology to relieve them of the mundane so that they become more, more critical thinkers, more strategists, more of the leadership stuff, more about the human element of working together in an organization.
Productivity is productivity and we’ll always get the work done, but we’re looking for is ways to bring more to the table. I don’t wanna just come in and stamp out widgets all day long. I want to think about the assembly line and I wanna make a contribution. To refining it. I wanna say something about this process that I’m involved in, and that I think is a growing trend across all workforces, that workers are looking for more opportunities to be.
Autonomous to be able to take risks, to be able to make decisions, and then to be celebrated when those things fail as much as they are when they succeed. So the challenge to organizations is really structural and maybe policy driven. Are our employees being given those opportunities, our managers allowed to make those kind of decisions.
So I think that’s what organizations are probably wrestling with more. Than the learning itself. When it comes to the learning itself, the one thing I would say is that it’s not styles of learning. There’s a lot of research out now that suggests, there really isn’t any style of learning that we are.
That’s necessarily baked in. What we take away from that is that the best, and this has always been the philosophy, the best learning opportunity mixes everything, right? You’re bringing in all the different pieces. So when I build a pro a learning opportunity, I focus on human skills, so I focus on human interaction.
I don’t do e-learning, I don’t like self-paced because of the subject matter. If you’re asking somebody to change human behavior, they have to be in an environment where somebody is modeling that. So a workshop for us is typically, we do some kind of an assessment at the front end, right? We have a little bit of an interaction.
So there’s this baseline understanding of where we’re showing up on a particular scale of behaviors, leader, leadership, emotional intelligence, et cetera. Our workshops have some lecture, of course, with lots of small group discussions. We want peer-to-peer interaction. They, we want everyone in our workshops to get comfortable collaborating.
So it’s a skillset. I don’t have to teach it, but we can implement it in every one of our workshops. We do a lot of scenario based role playing so that there is an opportunity to practice. So we try and identify right behaviors. We define those right behaviors, we give them some ness of their own, and then we talk about ’em and we talk about how we experience ’em.
We talk about how they show up. We start to model them. We start pointing at each other and saying, I think that’s mostly it. Nope, that missed it. That kind of interaction is what takes all of our learners to this collective point where we now we understand what the desired behavior is. Fill in the blank of what it is.
And they’re able to move forward with it. They have a language now, they can talk to each other about it. They’ve got some coaching on the backside, so whether it’s one-on-one or small group, we can come back and we can continue to help them individually or collectively develop along those action plans.
So to your question, I think I don’t think, I don’t put a lot of stock on learning styles. I do understand everybody has a preference for how they want to intake information and how much time they need to digest that information, contextualize it, and then get ready to have the conversation. So that’s the part of the train the scenario.
I like small groups too. I don’t, too many people in the room. You really can’t give that kind of attention to folks. So it’s really about letting them express themselves and show up in their authentic way, and then accommodating that. And so somebody needs a pause and needs to take longer to think through stuff.
I’m very adept at like reading the room. I drag my heels when I’m necessary ’cause I want somebody to catch up or I want to give them. I can see somebody when they’re ready to jump in. They’re just trying to get their thoughts together. I wanna make sure we don’t miss that opportunity. So the learning environment, I think the facilitator led interactive sessions, performance-based stuff that we do.
It’s much more accommodating to preferences, whether we call ’em styles or preferences, but it’s much more accommodating. To the individual learner. An online course is an online course. All four of us could take it. We’re all gonna experience it differently. The level of knowledge that we take away from it is gonna be different in our acumen, in performing whatever the thing is that we’re supposed to perform at the end will be varied.
Not that anybody will better or worse, it’s just we all have a different experience with it, and so we really want to get the most out of the learning experience. I always advocate for. Put more time and energy into the interaction, into a, experiential learning and see the dividends pay off. I think too many companies is a closing thought.
Too many organizations run out. They buy an LMS, there’s a bunch of content in there, and then they throw it out there and say, take whatever you want, but just don’t do it during working hours. First of all, this is part of the job, so pay me for it. It should training, learning and development should always be done within work hours.
If you want ’em to do it, you better pay ’em for it. But it’s in context too, and that gets lost when I have to go do something after hours. It’s not in the context of work anymore. So it loses that sort of gravitas that it should have. Yeah. I’ll pause there. No, look I love you made some really amazing points there and I wanna pick up on, on three particular words that you talked about in the course of that was collaboration, relationships, and also experiences.
And I think they all talk together and I think that’s such an important aspect of. What we need to do to be able to learn and to improve ourselves. And ultimately, if we want to be thought leaders in our spaces, then we need to constantly be working on those things. Dave, that, particularly in the technology space, people focus so much on the actual tech, but those other elements are really what’s critical to making that work.
Yeah, and I, the whole idea of. Learning is so interesting to me because I, I think about, how I learned this and it wasn’t like I didn’t read a book. It was like 1984 and there was no such thing as internets and things like that. I just, you fiddled around with stuff and you found something that worked and you did it, and then you did it again, and then it didn’t work that time and it was.
It was very incremental and I’m sure people of know of, agile kind of methodology around project management and things like that and it’s, I think it’s a really good, just way to think about life is that everything we do is incremental. All of it. It’s all incremental learning because everything builds on everything else.
I’m sure Cheryl could talk about how, once you understand your kind of spiritual journey and how connect with your energies and things like that. Once you understand that, then you can go to the next level and you can take it further and I think all learning is.
Is based around that. And we see that in, in tech. We see that in, life, in being a thought leader. Like I, I see a lot of people trying to be a thought leader. Like you don’t, there is, that doesn’t exist that you’re, you just are, you aren’t, and you aren’t, Andre, not, you’re not a thought leader because you’re.
Trying to be like, all you have to do is say you’re a thought leader, like that that, the minute you recognize that I am that. You are that, and you get to start doing that stuff now. Are you perfect at it? Are you always going to be the, the smartest guy in the room? I would argue if you’re the smartest guy in the room, you’re in the wrong room.
You should never be the smartest guy or person in the room. You should always want to look at another person and go, what can I learn from them? How and how can I make a difference? That person’s life. And I think if we did more of that just in general for the world would be a far better place than it is maybe at this very moment in time.
So I think continuing to learn how to interact, collaborate, be part of. This thing called life instead of worried about what label we give it or how we’re perceived or what other people think about it, or any of that kind of nonsense that, that get, that feeds into that fear, uncertainty, and doubt, right?
Let that stuff go because it really isn’t going to make a difference day in, day out at the end of all this. I don’t want to be remembered as a guy that was scared of everything. I wanna be remembered as this guy that, made a difference in somebody else’s life. And whether that’s just my son who’s 14 and playing baseball and is having the time of his life, or, my staff that works with me or my clients.
I, I am here to make a difference. In whatever way I can. And a lot of times that’s technology ’cause I’m really good at that. But a lot of times it’s just listening. Just be paying attention and being present is such a lost art. Like I have to keep talking to my 14-year-old son. Look, put the phone down.
I know you think that is your world right now. And to some degree he’s not wrong, but. Put the phone down like it, you don’t need to doom scroll for four hours and pretend like you’re having a conversation with your wife. It doesn’t really work out all that well, tr trust me, I’ve done it.
Yes, I, and it is, it’s that, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because we were all brought up with this idea. Multitasking just doesn’t work. You’re not really doing this a whole bunch of things at once. You’re only doing one thing and not really paying attention to the others.
And yet we have a generation that are focused on, even the simple act of watching tv. When was the last time someone sat down in front of the TV and didn’t have their phone in their hand and were, looking, scrolling through emails or looking at things on social media. As well as what’s on the show.
And did you see that scene? Yes, I saw it. No, you didn’t really see that. And was it critical? It’s, it’s just nobody is sitting there and just paying attention anymore. It’s not something that we are teaching people. And I think having that, coming back to you Cheryl, and having that stillness and that ability to reach inside and then to you, you look at the impact that you can make on other people, that’s a learning skill within itself these days that seems to get neglected.
And what we’re doing with all our learning. I’m listening to you and Jd and everything that you’re doing and what you’re helping your people with. Everyone that comes to your trainings that you are personally involved with, you have developed. The neuropathways in your brain. That’s all energy moving certain ways, and you’re helping people learn how to collaborate at high levels and receive the information and all of that to help them develop the neuropathways.
And Dave, how long have you been learning something for 15 minutes a day? You’ve got that neuro pathway nailed, right? And you’re, um. You’re doing so much in the world with it, or maybe you’ve really strongly developed that neuro pathway of figuring things out as a way of learning, whatever it is.
I believe that everything is here for our learning relationships. We don’t get married with the how to map and there are how to maps, but we don’t, there’s no. Cookie cutter, how to map really for anything, whether it’s friendships, marriages father, daughter, son, relationship. All of those relationships and the relationship with the self.
So it used to be, psychology used to really believe that there were in our early development, that there were certain things that were permanent. Our brains that were developed in certain ways, and we have dec, we have discovered that is no longer true, that because of the brain’s neuroplasticity, we can learn anything.
We can change how we think, we can change how we look at the world. And so when we look at, learning is a need. Learning is fundamental. And if we look at life in that way, look at the relationship, we can have the neuro pathway of, oh, it’s his fault, it’s her fault. I did nothing wrong. And that’s the easy road, but to neuro pathway of, oh, it’s his fault.
Oh, what do we always like, like Dave modeled for us. For what? It’s Greg. Braden gave a wonderful talk on, AI and said that science has now proven that we can duplicate anything. We’re making lamb wounds, we’re giving birth to lambs out of artificial wounds, and we’re practicing on the humans.
The lamb wounds are legal. And we could put chips in our brains to make us learn better, learn faster, that actually adjust. But the one we cannot duplicate is source energy, chi the vital force, God, what, whatever you wanna call it, that will never happen. It’s impossible. And science has proven that we can’t do that.
And so the learning is so much more complex. Than what we see as everything that’s available and that every bit that we learn and grow in the way we think we’re growing. Sometimes we grow a certain way and we look back 10 years later and go, oh, what was I thinking that was, it’s still learning.
It’s still learning. And like you said, Dave, we can make mistakes. It’s all okay and keep going with it. But I think it’s just the idea of living from a place of learning helps me grow and evolve and develop myself and helps others indirectly and directly, and that’s what’s gonna make our world different.
It’s not, yes, we can look at what I had a spiritual teacher once say, whenever we see that something is really outta place and it just eats away at us. It’s ours to do. It’s ours to do. Like Dave’s nodding his head, he is owning that one. Oh yeah, I hear you. It’s ours to do. So take action. Even if you mess up, even if you mess up, you’re learning in that way.
Anthony, can I jump in here for a second? I just wanna kind of foot stomp something here, and I think Dave’s bringing it up and Cheryl’s bringing it up and probably both did a better job, but I think there’s this there. And Cheryl, I love where you’re going with this, right? And I think Dave you’ve hit on this without saying it right.
What drives us has to be internal, right? There’s a misuse of the word motivation. How do I motivate them? Sorry. You can’t, don’t even try. Motivation’s intrinsic. I got, that’s mine. You can in, you can try and influence my behaviors potentially, or my thought processes, but you can’t motivate me. Only I can do that.
And I think, part of the challenge of the world today is there’s so much noise, there’s so much competition for our attention. There’s so much information being thrown at us. Every day. I turn around and AI is going to fill in the blank of the new greatest thing and we’re going to Mars.
And it’s just all these crazy way out there things. And I think they’re all abstractions. And I don’t spend, personally, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about moon travel. ’cause I just don’t care. I don’t even care about Mo Mars travel. I wanna travel to the beach, right? I want something that’s like tactile and within the realm of mine.
Because I think that’s where we start to see what Cheryl just said. That’s where we have those moments. We can only live in the, we say this from a government perspective, right? Citizens can only experience government at the local level because it’s the only place that it’s actually physical, right?
We drive on the roads, we see the water come through the faucet, we watch the sheriff drive down the street. Anything beyond that is an abstraction and it’s hard to get our heads around it. So I think there’s all this demand for our time and our attention these days and the things that we’re supposed to learn.
I wanna go back to Cheryl’s point though, but if you find that internal driver. That motivator to Dave’s point to learn and grow and to be the best version of you that you can be, then the opportunity to make those significant contributions become available to you. ’cause if you’re distracted by everything that’s out there, that’s all you’re ever doing is you’re looking down the road, you’re trying to find this place to fit in.
And it’s I live in southwest Florida, and so for anybody in the US you know what driving in Florida is like on the interstate. It’s like trying to merge onto 75 the interstate during rush hour. You better be doing 90 or you’re gonna get run off the road, right? Because everybody’s moving so quickly and that’s what feels like it.
It feels like every time somebody says we should, and they point off there in the distance. I can’t get my head around it. It’s a abstraction. It’s too far removed from me. I can’t do anything about that. There’s too much competition. But if I reframe my thinking, I actually can influence it. But I have to start right here.
I have to be, to Dave’s point, I need to model what I believe is right behavior, and I’m not gonna tell people I’m doing it. There’s an old zen cone riddle, right? And it’s a student in the master top of the mountain. They’re sitting there meditating. Student says to the master, master, what do we do when we achieve enlightenment?
And the master says, go home. Just go. Go back to your lives, citizens. And I think there’s a lot of this baked into what we’re talking about today. There is learning. There’s learning and growing because I want to be the best version of me that I can be so I can make my contribution to the species.
That’s my piece of evolution, right? That’s my piece of moving the species forward. So I just wanna foot stomp that idea that there’s, that it’s these internal drivers that we really ought to be focusing on and not the external. Manipulation to be whatever somebody else says we should do or want to be.
I love that. And I know we’ve gotta wrap things up in a moment, but I just wanna bring Cheryl and Dave back in here for, to, to finish things up. How important is it in this day and age to. Take all of those things on board that Jd was just talking about, and also have that, drive yourself to be able to stand out, particularly in an age where in many respects, technology is leveling the playing field.
So being able to stand out should be an internal motivation, shouldn’t it? Cheryl? It. It absolutely should be. And if you don’t feel that within you, you need to find it. It’s what’s getting in your way. And there’s some kind of block in your energy system. It’s as simple as that. It’s like a plugged drain, a plugged plumbing pipe.
There’s something in there. That’s what I do. I help people discover what that is, that’s getting in their way so they can learn more about the truth of their being and what they’re really here to do. So they can actually, then you’re motivated. Then you have your passion. I. That’s what motivation is.
That’s, it’s your passion. Without it, you’re just coasting and like you say Jd, about all the noise out there I just can’t be involved in that. I can easily get on the highway and do 90, that’s not a problem. I’ve learned, I’m from Canada, we don’t do that there, but I’ve learned how to do it here and I make it fun.
But it really is. Finding that within yourself. And we all came here to find that. We all came here to find our passion and what’s ours to do. And that’s high level energy. And you can’t know where it will all go. You don’t until you do it. It’s an energy flow. So if you’re feeling stagnant if you’re trying to go by what someone else says you should do you’re not gonna find it.
You’re gonna stay stuck. So it’s learning about yourself, finding out what’s in your way, and it’s all conditioning. We’ve all been conditioned and we keep conditioning each other, and it’s releasing that and discovering what’s true, learning about what’s really true for you, and then going after it.
That’s, that is a really great way to wrap things up. But Dave, I just want to give you the final say on here because I love what you’ve said because you’ve come through, we started talking off about crazy in the beginning, but really what we’ve talked about here is a way that you can motivate yourself to see through.
All of that dis, even whether it’s the technology or outside of technology it’s bringing it all together and taking control of that and being able to stand out. Yeah. I love the word balance in these discussions because it really does take, it takes all of it, right? You there isn’t, life isn’t.
Compartmentalize, like we like to think it is, right? It’s holistic, right? It’s everything. It’s all the relationships, it’s all the interactions. It’s all the experiences. It’s all of it all at the same time. And JdA, you made a great point about noise. You have to learn what’s noise and what isn’t.
When you do things start to balance out and things start to happen the way they need to happen. Until you do, you listen to the noise and you’re distracted and you’re not on your, you’re not on your right path, right Cheryl? You’re on whatever everybody else says your path is. If you really want to be on your path, you have to filter the noise, find what’s true for you.
Find that balance and then go after it and be accountable to it. Right? Be accountable to yourself. That I am doing the absolute best that I can in this situation. And sometimes it’s still not gonna be fun. It’s still gonna be awful. And we all have had those, but that’s what others in this life are for.
It’s about connections. And when it’s shared, it’s so much easier than. When you have to have the entire weight of the world on your shoulders. What a great way to wrap things up. I think there’s so much in this discussion that we’ve had. I think we all could have kept talking for a lot longer about all of this.
It’s a terrific topic of conversation and I think, going from crazy to how we can learn and motivate ourselves and the idea of collaboration and relationship building is so important. So thank you all for being a part of the panel discussion on the Biz Bites for Thought Leaders Program.
We really appreciate all of your insights. And of course we will include details on how to get in contact with each of our panelists in the show notes. But for now, thank you each of you for being part of the program. And thank you everyone for listening in. We hope to have your company next time on Leaders.
Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Biz Bites is proudly brought to you by podcast done for you, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance. To the world. Contact us today for more information, details in the show notes.
We look forward to your company next time on biz.
Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Biz Bites is proudly brought to you by podcast done for you, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance. To the world. Contact us today for more information, details in the show notes.
We look forward to your company next time on Biz Bites.
Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Biz Bites is proudly brought to you by podcast done for you, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance. To the world. Contact us today for more information, details in the show notes.
We look forward to your company next time on Biz Bites.
Jeremy Harris & Deborah Harris
Grow Group – Grow CFO and Direct Management
Finance/Business Consulting/Bookkeeping
In this episode, we welcome Deb and Jeremy, a married couple and co-founders of a virtual CFO and bookkeeping business. They share their journey from traditional tax accounting to a forward-looking approach focused on business growth, highlighting the unique aspects of being spouses and business partners.
Their discussion covers the evolution of their services, the importance of collaboration with tax accountants, and their experience acquiring another business and managing a remote team.
Looking ahead, they explore the significant impact of AI on their industry, envisioning a future with automated bookkeeping and a transformation of roles for financial professionals, emphasizing the need for skilled individuals to guide and utilize these emerging technologies.
Offer: We do a cash flow strategy session and referrers get 10% of the revenue for it. it is 1500 and it is where we take the numbers of the business through our diagnostic tools and then spend 2 hours with the entrepreneur showing them what levers to pull and push in their business to make the most strategic sense. View their website and don’t forget to mention Biz Bites when you make contact.
The virtual CFO Revolution, how to Transform Your Business finances for the AI age. Today we’re exploring game changing insights about modern financial leadership with the co-founders of Grow CFO, Debra and Jeremy Harris, who also happen to be married, and I’ve known them for many years. And I can tell you they’re genuine thought leaders who consistently give back.
To the broader and business community, you’ll discover why traditional accounting isn’t enough anymore in this day and age, and how virtual CFOs are driving business growth and the essential steps to prepare your finances for the AI revolution. If you are ready to move beyond managing the bank balance and want to dramatically increase your business value, this is an episode packed with practical strategies you can implement today.
So let’s dive in with my friends, Deb and Jeremy.
Hello everyone and welcome to a really exciting episode of Biz Bites. And I say that because I’ve had the privilege of knowing Deb and Jeremy for many years now, and we always have fun talk, talking together, and they’ve got an extraordinary business. And I wanted to share ev with the audience all about their business.
First of all, welcome to both of you. And why don’t we kick off with you, Jeremy, why don’t you introduce both of you and and what the business does. Sure. Thank you very much Elene. Thanks for having us. My name is Jeremy and I’m here with Deborah. We are co-founders and co-directors in a business.
We also happened to be, have been married for 33 years. And actually we did that first before we went into business together. So our business is we do virtual CFO as in chief financial officer, and we have a bookkeeping team to back that up as well. For me personally, I was around 25 years as a tax accountant.
Took me that long to figure out that tax accounting was not my thing. The kind of accounting that we do is more of about forward facing. More about what’s in the future for a business and how do we help a business to grow and improve. Deborah’s background is from a quantification point of view is hr and has had a lot of years in dealing with people, including our five children.
And and she really leads the people and the systems side of our business. There’s so much that we are going to explore in this, but I actually wanna start with, and I know it was a bit of a throwaway line about the fact that you started the business after you, you came together, but there aren’t I suppose there are a lot of people that go into business together in partnership.
It’s even more difficult to do it when you are married to that person and to make that decision even after you’ve been married for a little while, and to then do it. How do you, how did that impact the relationship in being able to pull that off? ’cause I, it’s not easy. I wanna take that one first, and I’m sure we’ve both got fruits on this.
I it’s really easy on a topic like this to make jokes about it. But there’s obviously like a real intentional and serious side to it as well. For me, being in a partnership in business with somebody else initially or with other people. Debra then came in and started working in our business over those years.
It became really clear to me that I wanted for us to be doing something together and that was a way to actually parallel our goals and our aspirations of what we wanted to do in business and the impact that we wanna make with our relationship and having fun doing it at the same time, and being able to do those things together instead of just every day.
Going apart and coming back together again and not having that common purpose. There’s there’s certainly times when it is a we need to be very present to the impact that business has on our relationship or the other way around as well. And and actually we’re probably both really of the same.
We, we approach it in a similar way where. We sometimes there’s no boundaries, but we actually know that we need to put boundaries in. But it, it hasn’t caused any disruption from my point of view. Are you to say the same thing, Jeff? It became very evident when Jeremy was coming home very he, he wasn’t loving his business and it was because he had a partner that didn’t necessarily agree.
With the same vision that he had for the business. And it’s typical in an accounting firm that a senior partner brings in junior partners, and then the senior partner leaves and the junior partners are stuck with each other. And while the other partner had his own thoughts and ideas, it wasn’t the same set of thoughts and ideas as what Jeremy had and what Jeremy wanted to run with.
That and the fact that I already knew that my husband was struggling with the fact that tax accounting is about as interesting as stabbing yourself repeatedly in the leg with a fork. And he really didn’t wanna do that anymore. And we had this belief that our, the accounting fraternity were letting down business owners, and by that they.
They would come to their tax accountant. And you’d get the financials for the year end often. After the end of the year. We hope you’re enjoying listening to the Biz Buys podcast. Have you ever thought about having your own podcast, one for your business where your brilliance is exposed to the rest of the world?
Come talk to us at podcasts. Done for you. That’s what we’re all about. We even offer a service where I’ll anchor the program for you, so all you have to do is show up for a conversation. But don’t worry about that. We will. Do everything to design a program that suits you. From the strategy right through to publishing and of course helping you share it.
So come talk to us podcast done for you.com au. Details in the show notes below. Now back to Biz Bites. So that, and the fact that I already knew that my husband was struggling with the fact that tax accounting is about as interesting as stabbing yourself repeatedly in the leg with a fork. And he really didn’t wanna do that anymore.
And we, we had this belief that our, the accounting fraternity were letting down business owners. And by that I mean they, they would come to their tax accountant and you’d get the financials for the year end, often, after the end of the year. And a great big tax bill and a great big invoice. And see you next year and you are left with thinking if I’ve made such a profit, where’s the money?
And so that was a driving factor for us about switching it up and trying to start something new. So we started the CFO engagements within that business, but it became clear that the type of people we needed to do those engagements was completely different. So people who are trained to report on the past.
Not necessarily trained to forecast the future. So that was the big difference between the types of people we then had to engage in our new business. So we started it as a side hustle and rolled it out to its own business in June or July, 2019. And then and we also did what most people find completely strange is that even though Jeremy had been the main.
Partner in the accounting firm. We flipped it so that I was running as CEO across this business because I had the broader business experience and broader business skillset having done human resource development, but really it was part of a management degree. So I had more of a taste of those other things.
So whenever we do find ourselves. In that situation where you haven’t quite broken off for the day and you take that home with you. And for us, we work from home. So home is where everything happens. I’ll sometimes find myself walking out my office door and going, hi honey, I’m home. And it’s just it just breaks the energy, right?
And there might be no one else in the house, and I will still do that if I need to break the tension and break the energy and then move on to other things. I’m sure Jeremy’s got the recordings of you doing that while you’re at home alone, doesn’t want us being I hear what you’re saying too because I, I do that as well where I work from home and there has to be that break. And particularly for me, Fridays is the even bigger one where, my kids know when it’s Friday because they say dad’s in silly mode. But it’s a deliberate. Attempt to break that energy and to get out of work mode. ’cause it’s, and I think that’s the thing that, that’s also the interesting dynamic that you’ve got here is that you’re working from home as well.
So that is even tougher when it comes to, relationship and building and having those boundaries. Yeah. Can be, doesn’t have to be, it’s about how you set it up really. I think. I think we’re good at. Catching each other and catching ourselves. When we can feel that that something is starting to impact on our evening or on our personal relationship, we just, we can pause it and park it and pick it up at the right time.
I, just before we move on from all of this topic, I wanted to bring up something else that I know you guys do, because I remember you’ve told me about it before and I think is really fascinating is that because you’ve got this kind of reporting scenario you actually have your own kind of mini board meeting, don’t you?
Between the two of you? Yeah, we do. And sometimes that gets a little bit impacted and lately it’s we’ve struggled a bit to keep that rhythm up because the business is growing, but it’s just a matter of. Leaning in on checking in on each part of the business. So being mindful of the fact that you have to do it as though you are, if you go from that perspective, it’s as though you are on a board and you’re looking down from a height at what’s happening.
So you, I believe in, in, on and above. So in your business, you’re working as a worker on your business. You’re working as a manager. But above your business, you’re working as an investor and you’re looking at your business from an investment perspective. What does this investment need to make it progress further?
What does this investment need me to do in three to five years time? How much capital value there be in it? So it’s a different conversation, so it may, it needs its own space. And Anthony, to bring in a point that you’ve already highlighted about working from home. When we have that board meeting, we’ll go offsite as well.
’cause we think it’s important to do that in a different environment. I think what’s fascinating too, by what you just said, and Jerry, I want your perspective, is that what you are really doing with your business is what you’re doing with other people’s businesses, isn’t it? It’s, you’re taking that high level approach to really see where things are going and where they should be going.
Yeah. Yeah. That’s right. That’s right. It’s, uh. Coming back to the core of what we do with virtual CFO and bookkeeping one of the things that we talk about is that tax accounting, which is what I used to do, is looking backwards, looking in the rear view mirror about the past. And that’s important.
Somebody has to do it. There’s compliance obligations to be met. And and actually one of the really liberating things for us in the last couple of years. Is to actually have our own tax accountant now. I feel like a real business owner because I’ve got a tax accountant, so I’m not doing it anymore myself.
So that is about the past. The virtual CFO is about the future. It is understanding what are the numbers telling us about a business and how does that help us to map the path forward. To help business owners to connect that into their goals and aspirations. What we found is that there was a missing piece, which is quite often before we could do our CFO work our analysis and our dashboards and our forecasting, we were held up by data that was out of date or just not correct.
So we added a bookkeeping element. And on that continuum where tax is about the past, CFO is about the future. Bookkeeping is about the present and that so our bookkeeping team is able to make sure that the numbers are right for our CFO team to then do their magic. And our CFOs don’t need to be doing bookkeeping work first before they can get into the CFO work.
So how closely do you then work with accountants then, who are. Jumping in I, I imagine as well, with a lot of these businesses. Yeah. Much more closely actually, than what we anticipated. From my time in as a tax accountant in that part of the industry, I had experienced a lot of, um, a lot of a trend towards doing more.
The commenter was business advisory work. And to be wanting to do more of that with clients. But meantime, there’s this competing increased pressure on compliance work because regulations keep on changing and also keep on increasing. The amount of regulation keeps on increasing and it’s challenging to fine team to be doing that.
So I think tax accountants are are probably as much short of time as they’ve ever been. So they haven’t been able to get to that CFO work. I have some ca the tax accountants that say, where we have a mutual client and they say, I’m glad that they’re finally getting somebody to help them with this because I’ve known that they need to, that somebody needs to.
For the most part we have really cooperative relationships with tax accountants and which is important because we need to be doing our different parts of it for the better for the client. That kind of managing collaboration relationships, that is difficult. And there’s lots of, there’s lots of things for people to navigate in business as well, particularly when you might encounter businesses that are going to come into a relationship like this, thinking that you are competing or trying to steal something from them when that’s not the case at all.
So Deb, how much is it education process, how much is a relationship building process? How open do they have to be? When you start finding those collaborations through clients? I always start from the client first and say, what is your expectation of what do you wanna see? What do you see as your ideal team?
So they can very clearly articulate to us who they wanna have in the picture. And if they say, I want this person to do the bookkeeping and that person to do the accounting, and you guys just come in and do the CFO, then that’s what we do. They know that we have the bookkeeping arm and we can help them, but we don’t poach.
And so we will then go I had a situation just yesterday where I make notes and explain to the other person, the other professional in this space what needed to happen. So they, I was actually literally just going in for a pitching engagement to help them pitch to a corporate. And that was the extent of our engagement.
And yet they have a tax accountant, they have bookkeepers and they have other business coaches there. And so I left notes for them to say, look, this is why we’re doing what we’re doing. This is how I’m doing it. I’ve adjusted this. I hope that’s okay. It shouldn’t impact any of your reporting. I checked on that.
So it’s just a professional courtesy more than anything to say, this is the space that we’re holding for this client and this is the reason why. And if people get upset about the fact that they think that we’re taking something from them, my response to that would be, why didn’t you offer it? Because I can only take a piece that no one else is doing.
If someone else was doing it and doing it well, the client would never come to me. They would go to the person who is their trusted advisor. So there’s some, there’s a disconnect there. It’s not me taking, it’s them not offering if there’s a disconnect at all. We do find sometimes that the reason they’re coming to us in the first place is because they’re not happy with the service they’ve been getting and that they’re planning to change and they just wanna know what the implications are going to be.
That can happen too. So it is a big challenge. Sometimes we find, especially in the bookkeeping space, we’ll sometimes find that the client’s file isn’t particularly, well done. Let’s just leave it that way. It’s a bit messy. Yeah. And problem is because of the clients wouldn’t necessarily know, would they?
Because you, they tend to hand over everything to the bookkeeper and assume that they know what they’re doing and live with what they’re doing because they, you don’t know any better until someone comes along and says, yeah. And I think you see that in lots of, I know personally, I’ve seen that in the marketing space where I had a client recently that came to me and showed me a.
A new branding that they’d had done. And I went, did you go to Upwork and get that? Like where did that come from? What was the, why did, what was the brief for that? Because that does not seem to make any sense for your brand at all. And that’s, it’s a difficult thing to navigate that, right?
To make people aware of, to aware that there is a problem. But there’s no need for it to be confrontational. It’s just training your own team. We can’t, there’s something like 350 small to medium sized bus, micro, smaller and medium sized businesses, 350 million on the face of the earth.
We can’t serve that many people. Come on, there’s plenty of real estate. There’s enough for everybody. We don’t need to be treading on all each other’s toes. I think what we find is that sometimes there’s a real gem out there doing work in a client’s file. If we need a new contractor to help us out and to, to white label to us that, that’s who we can ask.
So it, it can actually be a great way of finding new team too. I was gonna say, Jeremy, that’s an interesting approach as well that you guys have in that you start looking at. Where there are new opportunities, building from relationships, and even going to the point of acquiring other businesses that is correct.
Yes. And you’re almost giving me a segue there to talk about ai. But I think we’ll get to that. That, when I said before that we, we saw that the we, I talked about the continuum of the past and the future. The gap in the middle was the present. We identified a couple of years ago that one of our strategic opportunities would be to to acquire a business and that could be in the bookkeeping space.
So we had been doing some bookkeeping for our existing business owner clients before that, but it was really just to fill a gap. It was it was a much more. Strategic decision to actually have a whole bookkeeping team. And so we did that by acquiring an existing business, which then also gave us another group of business owners to talk to about the opportunities that that we can offer in the CFO services that we do as well, and the ways that we can help them to grow their business.
And for quite a few of those, it’s the first time that someone had that kind of discussion with them. It’s been really interesting to. To define the boundaries, but also just to play with like I, I’ll call it bookkeeping plus. So beyond just keeping things reconciled and keeping it all in order, what are the little things that we can add that a bookkeeper can do because they’ve got the skills and the knowledge to do it, but that are really just super supercharging?
The information that the business owner gets. So that even if they’re not fully availing themselves of our CFO services, they’re starting to get better decision making information. Why us just going that little extra 1% or 5% in what we do in keeping, Deb, when you start acquiring businesses as well.
Then there’s the people issue and navigating that balance, right? And bringing new people into the business and familiarizing yourself with systems, them and you and finding that, how does that all work? That’s a, that’s in itself is quite a piece to navigate. Absolutely. That’s, it was a really big challenge too, because we run from a virtual headquarters, and so the, when you acquire a business, not everybody understands how to work remotely.
Not everybody wants to work remotely. We had to navigate that whole situation and it, we had we had attrition, we had all sorts of things happen. But we were able to stabilize it, settle it all down, and then just start to, to make sure that we had everything integrated well. We’re still we’re still looking at how we do our systems and processes.
I think we probably would never ever say that everything was all the systems and processes would all put to bed because with AI changing everything so rapidly, and particularly in our industry. We see this as a great opportunity for us and a great opportunity actually for AI to start doing some of the records management and that type of approach that knits everything in.
And I can see in the future that there will actually be. A level of AI that you can plug into a business and say, this is the golden record. This is how we want things to happen, and that it just goes out and grabs it from other places and brings the new acquisitions seamlessly into the fold. I think that would be an amazing development, and I’m sure that it’s something, I know I’ve been speaking to people already about that in that space, so it, there’s a lot that happens when you.
Bring on a new business and you learn sometimes from mistakes more than you learn from successes. And I think we had a few mistakes when we did it, but we definitely learned a lot about what we would do in the future if we did the same thing. We also learned about just, the types of business to bring in and what to look for and how to look for that.
We’d been doing mergers and acquisitions with some of our clients, so we were fairly much across what needed to happen, but some of the nuances of it were different with our industry, and so we just learned that quite grid of factions in the fire. One thing I’d add just on, on systems and processes, and I’ve seen this over many years of working with a lot of businesses, buying and selling businesses, as well as our own experience, is that, like it’s a common premise that the more systemized a business is, the more valuable it is because it will be giving a consistent output. Within that. There can be a system or a series of the system can be the actual piece of software that’s used, but it can also just be what is our approach and what is the way that we do things.
But within that, there can be subsystems. That are not that obvious initially without really digging deep, if there’s 10 team members, there might be 10 subsystems as in 10 different ways of doing the same thing within the overall system. And that, so that’s a real challenge to look for but is worth taking the time to look for because it makes a huge difference to the integration and to taking on that business.
And the other thing I’d add just on, ’cause we’re talking systems and people. Is so Deb, what is that quote that one of our mentors uses? Culture is the team. What product is to customer? So your client, if your client either loves or hates your product or somewhere near in between, your team either loves or hates the culture or they’re meh, somewhere in between.
And if you want to have a really great team, you need to have a really great culture.
That’s so important. And I think as well, I know that particularly and we’ve talked about it before outside of this podcast, but about remote teams as well, which are increasingly a thing for people. And that’s still, you still need to create that culture, even if people are.
Split all over the world, it doesn’t really matter. That’s still an important part of the business. Yeah, absolutely. And ours are distributed across we have a, someone dashboarding for us in Sri Lanka. We have team in India. We have team in the Philippines. We have team scattered across Australia.
So we bring them together in a virtual headquarters. They see each other every day. They can see. Who’s in the office, they can just go and knock on their other person’s office door. We try to bring that sense that it is just like you’re just knocking on some, knocking on a physical door because it just gives people that sense that they’re there and they belong, they’re inside the building.
That also gives them a sense of completion when they finish for the day that they exit the building so that they’ve. They can create that separation and it just runs in the background as a platform. But within that, we’ve been able to start using all of the AI that comes with that particular platform and developing our own AI and helping our team understand how to use AI assistance and AI agents.
So it’s been a real part of the progress for us. We were determined. I know myself as a leader. My role is to actually lead the way with ai because there’s a lot of fear around bookkeeping in particular. There’s AI agents out there now, AI overlays that you can put over it and see if it’s true and accurate.
It still needs training. It’s not, you couldn’t just set and forget, but the thing about it is that. I don’t employ bookkeepers. I employ people who at the moment do bookkeeping. And there’s a distinction in that at some point they might not do bookkeeping, but if they’re really good people, I wanna keep them and I need to make sure they’re ready to do the next thing.
And that thing lights them up so that they don’t ever have to feel like they’re going to be redundant. So that’s part of leadership, as far as I’m concerned, is driving that, that space. And it’s a tough one, but I, it is an important one. It is an important distinction as well because, and sometimes of course, of the people that come to you and are working in a particular space don’t even realize that there’s opportunities that could be open to them to go somewhere else until they start experiencing it.
So I think it’s all part of a growth process. Yeah, definitely. Jeremy just coming back to the AI thing and seeing how much of that influence is going to be it’s, people would immediately think, oh, counting and, numbers and areas are probably not a great space for ai, but in fact.
Really a lot of automation. If we extend AI to being into that automation space has been happening in this space, almost leading what’s been happening in other areas. And so where is it going to go? That’s the question. And how much do people need to be doing in their business? It’s a very exciting space at the moment.
Very exciting. It’s so if we look at bookkeeping. There was a real revolution 15 years ago when zero came out QuickBooks Online and others similar to that. So cloud accounting, that’s all under the terminology of cloud accounting, but it’s been feeling like it hasn’t really advanced in that 15 years and more and more over the last few years I’ve been thinking.
And especially since we bought the bookkeeping business, I’ve been realizing how much human intervention is still required to get it right. It’s the automation is, the bank data comes into the system. There’s some suggestions, but it’s not that, it’s not smart in that sense of making sure that everything’s right.
I’ve shifted in the last couple of months from thinking, yeah, AI is on the horizon in our industry. To thinking it is here. There’s a couple of programs in particular that are really making a difference. They’re probably not quite there, but I think somewhere between, in the Australian market, somewhere between two months and six months from now, we will see what I would call robotic bookkeeping, where it is actually making the matches in the system, checking itself, getting it right, and continually learning as well as it goes.
And we’ll still lead the training. I. But that training will make it more and more reliable instead of it just being rules that can be subject to to, to human error or to change. So that’s one thing in, in the bookkeeping, in the CFO side of what we do one of the reasons that I sold my tax accounting firm eight years ago now, is that I had said to my team a couple of years before that Zero has changed what we do it, it’s.
What we do as accountants, as tax accountants is totally different now to what it was 10 years ago. Similar to the data is in the system for us. We’re not spending our time just data entering into the system. We’ve, and we’ve got live information. Let’s not kid ourselves that, that term I used before.
But business advisory can’t be automated in the future as well. There’s a code behind it. If I look at a set of financial statements and I say, oh, that Pat, there’s something wrong between those two numbers or those two crews of time, or, oh, I can see what’s wrong with the cash flow. Here’s what should happen next.
There’s a code behind that. There’s an algorithm that can be codified. When I said that 10 years ago, my team freaked out. So that was probably one of the things that under me to realize that I didn’t fit my team anymore and to sell the matter. I was sitting there, but. I was sitting around that table and it was the funniest moment around the board table and just watching everybody’s faces go white, just looking at, they just went that, no, that’s, that can’t happen.
What about our jobs? And it was interesting to see that beer back then, and I, it does make me wonder how they’re feeling now, but I think there’s two reasons why AI in this space is, the accounting is in the front runner. The first is because it comes with a discreet set of data, right?
There’s a right and a wrong. It’s easy to see the right and the wrong, the, so that can help train the majority of it. And then it’s just the nuances of personal preferences. So that’s the first thing. But what most people wouldn’t be aware of is the second thing, which is the bookkeepers probably touch more pieces of software.
Than just about any other profession with maybe the exception and maybe not even the exception of it providers. And the reason I say that is that, if you have a client load of 20, 30, 40 bookkeeping clients, you’ll have access to all sorts of things like PayPal and totally different CRMs from one thing to the other.
And that data usually has to be used for some purpose. Bookkeepers are actually in an ideal situation to take that forward. When I look at the CFO space, I think a lot of that is actually coaching in that hope, dreams, and aspirations and matching the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of the business owner to the data that’s coming out of the business.
So that you can move them towards that. That’s still a little way off, but I think that to a certain extent it will be able to be codified or a set of questions can be asked that would get you in those positions. To get to where you needed to know, please excuse my, I didn’t turn off my calendar setting.
Sorry, my ding dong, Mel. Yeah. What I was going to ask Jeremy as well is how much do people need to be on top of it themselves versus needing to rely, or having people like yourselves that are gonna come into a business and take care of it for them. Because I think that’s the hardest part about AI at the moment.
Lots of people have dabbled in, chat. GPT has got the name, but there are versions there, all that have dabbled with it as far as particularly content is concerned. But actually making it work for your business and doing things, it’s hard because you also need to be on top of some of these areas.
So is it gonna take someone like yourself coming in and doing that, or do you think it’s going to be things that people will just sign up for? I think there’s a short, medium and long term answer to that. And I’ll deal with long term. First we dunno what it looks like in the long term. So who knows where it could go in the short term.
There is, there somebody with the right skills needs to be training the ai and we view it that these AI tools will be another team member for us. And we’ll spend the time just helping it to learn. And just like in, in the way that probably lots of us use chat GPT, now it gets better the more it learn, the more that you teach it.
So it’ll be the same same approach there. For both bookkeeping and CFO services that we do. In the medium term, I think it is about the opportunities for accountants and bookkeepers to transform their role into much more of a people connection business. Which for some accountants and bookkeepers will actually be against their natural energy.
So maybe a challenge, but, the, I go back to something that, that one of my mentors highlighted many years ago, really forecasting what we’re seeing now when he said that and we’ve both quoted this in different ways in on this call already, that the role of the accountant in the future is to connect to under someone who understands the numbers and to connect those numbers to the goals and aspirations of business owner.
It becomes a a a personal connection, a personal understanding of what that business owner wants to achieve, and then to partner with them in taking the data that’s being automated to, to use that to make decisions. I think there’ll be a blend of the technology and the human. That’s what I call the medium term there, and that’s the opportunity to evolve.
Yeah, I can see there being two roles in businesses. Quite commonly there’ll be the role of someone that is looking out for what is the latest AI and reviewing things because the, it’s moving so quickly. So what you choose today, in six months time, you may need a different choice. And then there’s the person that’s going to be implementing and making sure that.
Whatever is happening in the business is doing that. But the, I think I wanna bring it back to you. Just to finish off this part of the discussion is just to bring it back to the systems that you talked about in the beginning. Of course, the important thing is you’ve gotta get the systems right.
’cause if the systems are wrong, all the AI is gonna do is ex is exaggerate the problems. That’s right. And you, in the previous question you were saying. Will we see business owners trying to do it themselves basically versus what would our role be? So there will be for sure business owners who identify AI tools and then just try to implement it themselves in the same way that there’s business owners who now do their own bookkeeping.
Some will do it well and some won’t. I think the outcome will be very similar. The, and the opportunity is to. To just get it right with that little bit of help, extra help from someone who understands both the fundamental principles and the technology. I think there’s a real reason why you wouldn’t want to leave.
Leave it for too long before you explore this as a, an opportunity though, and it comes back to the capital value of your business because. Within the next three to five years, there’ll be those that have and those that have it. And if you’re looking to explore maybe an exit in that time, and you are one of the ones that has, suddenly your capital value will be greatly appreciated in the marketplace compared to the capital value of a business that doesn’t have that.
In an industry where you might get three times the revenue of your clients, you might get 10 times the revenue if you’ve got. AI overlay and integrated throughout your whole business. Because people will look to come in and go, someone else has worked all this out for me. I’ll jump on that.
So if it’s in your inclination to explore it, that would be what I would say is a really key fundamental thing to reason why you might wanna do it sooner rather than later so that you’re not one of the. Later adopters and that you’re in that space, that you can actually get a really good market value for your business if you’re looking to exit.
And I think that there’s a lot of different approaches to AI at what I would say is AI makes you ask a better question because if you’re not getting the right answer, it’s likely that it’s because you’ve asked a question that was too broad without context. If you, if that’s what’s happening with your ai, it’s probably also happening with your team.
You’re probably still not doing it there either. And what’s even interesting is a comparison to that. So I’ve got an AI tool that I’m using that is, I guess an aggregator maybe is the right way to, to describe it, where you can actually choose from multiples. And which one you want to do. And what I’ve found as well is it’s not only whether you’ve asked the right question, but whether you’ve asked the right AI the question.
So sometimes it’s, and it’s a bit like people where you could ask a question to two different people. I. Exactly the same way and get two completely different responses. And I think you, you have to understand that the ais are also wired differently for different reasons. And so sometimes, I had one yesterday where I was asking a question and I asked it three or four different ways and I was still getting exactly the same response.
I then changed it to a different, AI got exactly the response I wanted. It was just the wrong ai. Yeah. And I think that’s part of the learning curve. Yeah. We spent a lot of time, I’ve spent. Nearly two years now, training a digital twin. So that it’s been preloaded with all of our 10 year goals, 5, 3, 2, 1, and an understanding of our complete organization chart and understanding of our complete every part of the business and what it needs to do and how it feeds into the next thing.
And so by spending that time, it’s got a very strong context of what I wanna get out. So if I need to go and get. Bio written, I can tell it what the bio is for, and then we go backwards and forwards and asks me a few questions to see what do I need next? Like why is it important? What is the context of that thing that you need the bio for?
And it gives it to me well crafted for that. So it’s actually speeding things up a lot now, but it was a matter of really training it. So having five kids. If you want them to be able to tie their shoelaces, you have to just keep going. They have to keep I was gonna say, were you want, were you wondering where the AI was a few years ago when you had five kids at home?
I was too busy to wonder.
I’ll just wanted to ask you as well in the last pub, but a couple of things I wanted to ask you about to finish things up, but. One is just in terms of recognizing who needs the services that you guys off offer, because it’s, whereas accounting, bookkeeping, yeah. We know we need taxes done, we need our regular stuff.
Being done from the bookkeeper kind of makes sense to most people, but often the term CFO has been something that has generally been associated with larger companies. So when you’re in a smaller business, you. What do I need this kind of service for? So tell me who can benefit from services like yours?
Common things that we see are businesses that are managing by the cash balance in the bank. That is their key key decision making metric or their key indicator at least, of how they’re going. And then often the driver of action. The cash balance goes down. So they chase up their accounts receivable.
If they have a cash receivable, the cash balance goes up. They spend some money on marketing or decide to get a new hire. So that’s one thing. Another thing is business owners who look at their profit loss, see a profit at the bottom of the page and don’t see that in the bank account and wonder why there’s a difference and just never understand why there’s a difference.
’cause no one’s ever told it. The third one is we often hear business owners talk about they feel like they’re flying blind. They just don’t have the data that they know they need and should have to be making the right decisions. A lot of what we do is actually starts with education and and one of the things that really lights us up is to have a session with a business owner where we explain those things the.
The how to pull and push the levers of cash flow to really make a difference and how to understand why is there a difference between profit and cash flow. When we have a business owner that says, I’ve been in business for 10 years, nobody’s ever told me that. Now I finally get it. That’s one of the things that we really love to do.
Which it’s gonna jump me to the last question I’m gonna ask. I’m gonna come back to it ’cause it needs to be the last question of you. We asked about a heart moment, but I did just want to bring in one other, one other topic here that’s dear to all of our hearts is the idea of being a business for good.
And I’ve interviewed Paul Dunn, who we know and love on the program in the past, but I wanted to talk to you about how that’s made a difference for you just because of how you feel about it the difference that it makes in the way you go about things, because it’s such a. It’s easy to talk about the idea of a business for good, but actually doing something and demonstrating you’re doing it and bringing that to people.
It’s such a buzz, isn’t it? Yeah, there’s it. It’s so powerful that it should be through everything that you do, and I think the reason why I was talking about how many small businesses there are on the face of the earth speaks to our why. It’s because half of those businesses will employ other families as well as that, the business owner has a family, but they’ll, half of those will employ other people as well.
And when you unpack the statistics of that one in five of those bus, so that 60% of them in the next five years will go out of business, which is a terrible statistic, right? It’s that’s about 2 billion people. Impacted by small businesses, small, medium, and micro businesses closing in the next five years, 2 billion people.
And so when you’ve put that in the context of someone’s family livelihood it’s scary, right? It’s scary for those families that they don’t know how they’re gonna feed their kids and sometimes it is spouses working together and that’s everything they own gone. And one of the top five reasons is poor cash flow.
It’s stupid ’cause it’s something we can do something about. And so I find it really powerful to have that conversation with people, to say that this is why we do what we do. We are passionate about fixing this problem and we’re passionate about fixing it for the other people who are out there that the heroes in our community there they might be a tradie, but they take on an apprentice.
That’s someone’s kid. That’s someone’s kid who needs a job. They’re the allied health professionals that get people able to work. Again. They’re the it might be some it might be a guy in marketing, but he’s also coaching the local footy team. And we can have this amazing impact if we just stop and think about who the, who’s are in our life.
Who are the people that are our customers, and how can we better influence them? Then I like to think too, I’m a global citizen first, so this isn’t just happening in my country. This is happening in every country around the world that there’s these businesses going out of business, and it’s really sad.
And so it’s something that I really wanted to do something about. So we aligned with B one G one Business for Good, and we, it was actually deliberately the very, very first expense of this business. Because that was how important it was for us. And we have had our children on different study tours with B one G one.
We’ve taken them over to Cambodia. One of our children actually decided she wanted to go to one in Kenya by herself, and she went and did that so she could meet other business owners with this philanthropic mind frame that it wasn’t just all about them and how much they could get. Actually, if you spend some time giving, you actually receive so much more yourself.
And it’s just a really lovely expression of who we are. And it’s probably what, it’s just as much an expression of our business as it is us personally. I love that it’s such a great way to encapsulate the importance of all of that. And I feel the same way as well, and it’s, and.
B one, G one is such an important part of my business, but of many of the businesses, that you and I both know and we’ll include in the show notes as we always do, we link to B one G one, so people want to know a little bit more. They can check that out. But just before we wrap up, the final question that I have.
And I’d be interested to know whether it’s different for both of you or whether it’s the same. So I’ll ask you Jeremy first, ’cause you started alluding to it, what is the at heart moment that businesses have when they start working with you that you wish more people will realize they were going to have and so they would come flocking to you in the future?
It’s so I, I gave that example before of. Somebody who has been in business going through those sort of struggles that I described, and they’ve been on a session with us where they actually get it and they don’t feel dumb as a business owner they don’t feel dumb for not understanding why the cash in the bank is not there when it shows they’re making a profit and they feel empowered because they have the.
The understanding of how to make that different going forward. It’s it’s, there’s moments almost every day when a business owner has been holding onto a problem that they’ve got for a long time. And it might be that their bookkeeping is behind and there are a couple of basses behind, or that they just don’t get how to get the information outta the system.
When they hand that over and have someone working with them to solve that problem and to get that understanding, they feel like the weight is lifted off their shoulders. And they actually say that to us which is very rewarding to, to hear. And and then at a higher level, as a business grows and expands, it’s the ahas they have around, how they work together with their team. And ’cause some of what we do is almost like a mentoring role for the finance team, but for the broader team as well. And and just helping them to understand if I choose that example, how the finance team works with the rest of the team.
Sometimes they’re a bit of a silo, but through some mentoring and some of the strategies that, that we have. They actually feel a part of the bigger team and feel like they can make an impact. I love that. So what about you, Deb? Any difference? Slightly Yes. I, but I love that too. I think that it’s very true.
I think for me it’s the calm. So by that sometimes business owners are like those circus acrobats that have the sticks and the plates up on top, and they’re so busy spinning every stick because they’ve been told. You’ve gotta go on Instagram, you’ve gotta have your Facebook leads, you’ve gotta have Google ads.
Where’s your Google This search rankings? Where’s where’s the customers? You’ve gotta have a good customer journey. You’ve gotta have all of your service and your delivery and they’re trying to make the money go round. All these different things. All these things. And it’s frantic, it feels frantic even as I say it, but when you can actually hone them in on the three things they need to do next and to focus down.
To that, it just takes, suddenly, it just takes the crazy out. And I think that’s the nicest aha moment. And when they start to get the pattern of that, and you see the results from the pattern of that, and we’ve had some clients where they were turning over maybe 20,000 in a month, and they actually accelerated up to, I think, 2 million a month.
In that period of time they just learnt the pattern and it’s so satisfying and it’s really satisfying to, we graduate clients by graduating. There’s a point where they become too big for us and it’s amazing. That just lights me up. To graduated client means that they’ve accelerated through all the services that we can offer.
We’ve helped them train their new. Finance team, they have a new CFO in store. Everything’s set up for them to succeed. The CFO knows how to communicate to the business owner in a way that the business owner can understand, or that’s a really powerful thing to actually bring about, and it starts at the smallest place, which is just understanding the numbers.
So powerful, so good. I love all of that. We could talk for hours. We’ve already talked for hours before in the past, and it’s been an absolute joy to talk to both of you on Biz Bytes. Thank you so much for being part of the program. Thank you Anthony and Blake. Great to meet with you. Of course we will include all the details, how to get in touch with you both.
Fire the show notes so people pay attention to that. There are lots of great things in there and for everyone listening in, don’t forget to subscribe and get ready for the next episode of the Bites. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bytes. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode.
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Karren Jensen
Conductor Software
Business Consulting
Unlock the secret to a thriving business in the latest Biz Bites for Thought Leaders episode, where Karren Jensen, CEO of Conductor Software, reveals how understanding and enhancing psychological safety directly fuels team performance and profitability. Discover the historical context, the power of a fear-free environment for participation and innovation, and the insights of the CARES model used to measure threat and reward drivers.
Through real-world examples, learn how improved psychological safety boosts sales and productivity, while consistent values and clear communication build essential trust. This insightful episode concludes with actionable tips for business owners to cultivate psychological safety and emphasizes the necessity of a neuroscience-driven leadership approach for success in today’s evolving workplace.
Offer: View their website for the latest offers and don’t forget to mention Biz Bites when you make contact.
Did you know that the hidden key to boosting team performance and profits is psychological safety? Welcome to this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. Today we are diving deep into the science behind workplace performance with Karren Jensen, the CEO of Conductor software. Discover how measuring psychological safety.
In of itself can unlock untapped revenue. We are going to learn some practical strategies on how to create an environment where teams thrive. Innovation flourishes, and productivity absolutely soars. This is a conversation that is going to transform the way you think about leadership and team dynamics.
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Biz Bites, and I have a very interesting guest with me today because I think we’re going to get into a whole lot of different areas that we haven’t discussed on Biz Bites before and getting into psychological territories and more information about teams. I think this is gonna be of great value to everyone listing in.
So Karren. First of all, welcome to the program. Thank you very much. It’s so exciting to be here and yeah, really looking forward to getting in a bit deeper. It’ll be a lot of fun. Karren, why don’t we start off by you telling us a little bit about who you are and what you do. So I am one of the co-founders and the CEO of Conductor software.
We are a Brisbane based company proudly female led. And we’re obviously we’re looking at psychological safety. And we’ve been in that field for quite some time, way before it became the buzzword that we know it to be now. But. The reason for that is it is so fundamentally important to the success of leaders, of teams, of humans.
So for us as humans, to thrive into the future of work, we really have to start understanding. What psychological safety really is. You know what talking psychology here. But we have to understand that and we have to be able to monitor and measure that and work. Towards always trying to balance that within the workplace.
So Conductor was built for that purpose because we knew it was so important. We knew it would be important into the future. Didn’t realize Covid was coming around the corner that’s not, just not that ball into the park way faster than we had expected. But now watching what’s playing out on the global stage with the US you can start to see just how fundamentally.
Important it is to us as human beings to be able to flourish in this modern age of work.
I think we need to start with defining that psychological area because as you say, it’s become a bit of a buzzword but in many respects, when things become buzzwords, they actually lose their meaning a fair bit to people. And you’ve, as you said, you’ve, this came about prior to. It becoming something that lots of people were talking about.
So take me back to the beginning. What did it actually mean and what does it come to mean as far as progress has been concerned over the last few years? Wow. That’s it. Look, it actually, it was first termed in 1965, so it has been around for quite a lot of, for quite a long time.
And it has morphed in some respects, but basically, whoever’s been working with psychological safety and there’s been a number of players along the way, but, what we’re essentially talking about is that as human beings, we feel safe enough to participate. So Amy Edson talks about being safe enough to speak up, speak out.
So that’s part of it. Shine and Benni back in 65 though, it was an environment in which you could learn. It’s an environment that you, your brain is able to learn because it’s not in this state of fear and holding itself back. And am I gonna be embarrassed? Am I gonna be ridiculed? Is someone gonna laugh and think I’m stupid?
So when you, we’ve always known that, we’ve known that through school, through education, all of our lives, how important that is. We just haven’t really had the tools or the insights into our human biology enough to understand why that was so important. And that’s been the real game changer. Over the past, 30, 40 years is that we now have tools through neuroscience to be able to understand what’s really going on in the brain, what’s really going on with our neurobiology, and why this has become so critical for us to understand.
The issue is none of this is getting down to leaders who need this information. So that’s what Conductor has really set out to do is we want to democratize that this information should be first and format with every person in an organization because it really takes us away from looking at behaviors.
Everyone’s behaviors or what’s their personality type to this is actually a human need. We hope you’re enjoying listening to the Biz Buys podcast. Have you ever thought about having your own podcast, one for your business, where your brilliance is exposed to the rest of the world? Come talk to us at podcasts, done for You.
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So come talk to us podcast done for you.com au Details in the show notes below. Now back to Biz Bites, everyone’s behaviors or what’s their personality type to This is actually a human need. This is what humans need to thrive, and as we move further and further into AI coming on board, we really do need to understand this because we are driving people at such intense rates at the moment.
That cognitively, we’re all burning out, we’re exhausted all the time, so we’re, we don’t do that to our cars. We protect our vehicles. They’re precious to us and we service them and we make sure that we’ve got all the fuel and the necessary things within them to be able to ensure that they run at peak performance.
Why do we not do this in the workplace? Why do we insist on pushing people to the level that we’re burning out and we actually can’t? We can no longer cognitively process and make decisions when, at a time when that’s really what humanity has to do. There are so many things to unpack in what you just said there, and I’m trying to work out the best starting point, but I think.
What I wanna ask about initially is really this bridge between the idea of what psychological safety is and the reality of what it means even to, to leaders in itself. Because therein lies the biggest problem, doesn’t it? That is the first and foremost, is understanding what it actually means and what the impact is before you start getting into the tools that you’ve got.
And we definitely want to go through that. At Conductor we, we look at it. A little bit differently because what we are doing is we’re actually measuring the drivers of threat and rewards. So those human drivers in which we feel motivated to lean in and participate into something, or where we’re actually feeling a threat response and, protecting ourselves, we’re actually measuring those drivers.
So it’s a little bit different to what a lot of regular psych safety tools are using. Not to disparage any of them because I wanted to go a little, we wanted to go a bit deeper into understanding what are the triggers? Not whether it’s actually people who actually feel psychologically safe or not, because that doesn’t help leaders.
I can tell you, your staff don’t feel particularly safe with you as a leader. What does that mean? That gives them nothing. And I, for. For the founders at Conductor, we really understood the pressure that leaders are under the demands for them to be the solution to everything. And I think that’s a really big expectation for us to hold on any human being, let alone leaders themselves.
So that’s number one is so when we’re able to measure that, what we can see is what is the willingness capacity. For leaders to, and people within the organization to be able to contribute at their best. And what are the practices that we are doing in business that aren’t supporting that?
And so many of the traditional leader practices, the way that we’ve learned to be leaders and the demands and the drivers that we have to be leaders, they’re actually counterproductive to creating that space where people. Can maintain peak energy and continue to con continue to contribute at their very best.
So we’ve got this disconnect between what we as humans need to be able to perform really well, but the demands of business of what they want us to do, and it’s actually counterproductive to being able to achieve that. So we really wanted to get into that and understand what that was. So yes, it’s about, where can people speak up, whether they, where can they contribute?
Where are their energy levels? Where are we draining that? Who, where are the teams that are most at risk of stress and burnout? Risky behaviors, toxic behaviors, competitive behaviors. Where are we? Where are we rewarding the wrong behaviors? I. A lot of the time unaware that we’re actually creating the toxic behaviors that we want to change.
So I think that’s really important for everyone to understand. As I said, we’re not looking at people’s, we’re not, it’s not a psychology assessment by any stretch of the imagination. We are looking at where cognitively do we feel safe, which draws onto our emotions to contribute or not to contribute.
And then between that’s the real gap in business performance and productivity. So what we see is businesses are nowhere near. Operating as well as they could. Most of them are mediocre at best, yet they have no awareness of that because we’ve become so indoctrinated into these human behaviors and how difficult it’s to deal with humans, that we accept all of these behaviors and these actions where it’s actually really easy to circumvent that and change the outcome of those things.
There is, I. One thing that I wanted to ask you before we get into how businesses can better understand that, because clearly there is a lot to discuss there, but the whole idea of safety and. I’m wondering, is that a term that workers relate to? Is that what they’re looking for? Or is this a, some, is this a kind of a, an anchor tool that’s been provided around that?
Like when you speak to different businesses as you do and you speak to the teams within it, is safety what they are looking for or is it made up of a whole lot of different things? That’s a really interesting question actually. I. I think there are aspects of the workforce who are, who consciously are thinking of safety, and I think it depends on your role as well.
In construction, in mining, in any of those really high risk industries, you are very aware of safety and its impact on not only you, but on your colleagues and the whole thinking of everybody deserves to go home at the end of the day. But I think subconsciously, I believe we are all looking for safety.
Like it’s, you don’t want to, you don’t ever feel comfortable walking into a meeting knowing that you are going to be the target that’s going, that all the blames going to be put onto, or you are at the pointy end of having to respond to that makes you so fearful. And yes, it can be intoxicating to come through that successfully, but for every human being we can all stop you.
You and I can stop now and you can think of an experience that you had to hold your breath, where your stomach felt sick. Where you were sweating, where you had no idea what the outcome was going to be, where you did not feel safe, you did not feel like people were there to support you, protect you, to help you to learn.
So what happens there is that, yes, we might all be looking for it. We might not all get it, and you, we get a lot of leaders who go, that’s not my job to make it a safe space, but I argue it is because. It’s impacting your bottom line. That is the whole focus of conductor. You can choose not to help make a an environment that allows people to make mistakes and learn from it as a team.
But it’s your productivity. It’s you hitting your goals at the end of the day, at the end of the month, at the end of the year, that is impacted. You are not hitting your goals. So when you have an organization. That isn’t interested in making sure that people feel safe enough to learn. They don’t have a learning environment, and we have enough research globally around this.
Now, to understand how important that is, what happens is your teams don’t align. So either the individuals in your team don’t align, so they’ll be competitive. They’ll hide information because that’s how you are rewarded. You get a promotion. So we’re hiding information from each other. Instead of actually sharing that information, which drives new opportunities.
So those behaviors are actually impacting the business over a longer term. So yes, I believe subconsciously we all want to feel safe and that there’s a balance because we can feel too safe that we don’t want to perform or that we’re comfortable not performing, and that’s no good for an organization either or we can feel so fearful.
That we are too afraid to make a mistake. We are too afraid to offer a customer, an a solution that’s not part of our product line that could be really unique and valuable. So it, it has consequences at either end. And I think for me, the issue for so long, and the reason I was so excited about being able to start conductor was because.
Because how people are feeling in an organization and how they’re performing are so disconnected. That’s all siloed. We don’t know what really works. Leaders don’t know what works. Organizations don’t know what work, so they don’t know what is the right decision to make. It’s, and as you were talking there, I was thinking as well that, the most immediate examples that are, that even I can think of as someone who’s run my own business for a long time is actually, that knife’s edge that you have sometimes when you don’t know which way a client’s going to go, and they may have been the client for a while and you, they’ve called for a meeting and suddenly you’ve worked yourself up into a tears thinking that it’s all going to.
For some reason, and they could be on completely the opposite page. But it’s that anxiety that leads up to that. And and I think there wouldn’t be a business owner that hasn’t been through that to some degree. And I. So that’s, if you think about that’s what your staff are going through as well, and it’s interesting to know where their thinking is at various times.
I’ve had team members where you are worried that they may be thinking exactly that kind of scenario, thinking the worst. And you are trying to push them into a different place. So how do you go about. First of all, being aware, and second of all, making a at a safe place.
So what are the key factors? I think that’s, part of the core of what we’re doing at Conductor is it can feel very overwhelming. Like you’re trying to put all of these pieces together going, oh my God, like this isn’t easier for leaders. This is more complicated for leaders because as you’re right, depending on your previous experiences.
You are creating scenarios in your head about what could be happening. Every employee’s doing that, every leader’s doing that. So what our reason and our reasoning for being able to measure these threatened reward triggers, these motivators is so leaders don’t have to try and guess. So we measure at the team level and we’re actually able to create.
A roadmap for every individual leader about what it is their team is needing from them so they don’t have to guess anymore. So it can be a really targeted approach to them being able to give the leader the understanding of what those drivers are and why that’s important for their team. So the reason that works so well is because you don’t need to be offline.
You don’t need four hours on end doing training. It’s. Targeted to what’s going on in your team. So it’s meaningful. It has application for you as a leader, and it’s actually providing you with skills and habits that you are able to embed because you are conscious, consciously using them on a day-to-day basis.
So we never go in with, 30 different. Issues that a leader would have to address it. It’s always one, two, or three things at the most that you would ever look at addressing because the moment you’d start to make changes in those areas, you can start to see the rest of the things fall into line or become a little bit misaligned that a leader needs to focus on.
So things I’m talking about, and we all know how important certainty is in an organization. Like we know we have to have values, we need to have a mission, we need to have, goals, KPIs. We also need to know what our role is. But you can start when you start to see that certainty breaking down within a team, because leaders are struggling in being able to provide that communication, that certainty, but also to support their team and make sure that they’ve, got what they need.
You can start to see that. Pull at the edges. I’m gonna say sometimes just really pull at the edges and you can, that starts to create some manifestations in actions not being taken or people not really fully collaborating or contributing into the team, simply because it might be a trigger for them that they’re not really sure about what to do and they’re too scared to.
To just make a guess in case there’s ramifications to them making the wrong move. So we’re able to just see that in a heat map really easily, really effectively, really quickly. And then the leader can actually target in those particular areas that come across in the factors. And it, as I said it, it’s one or two of those factors that would be driving that issue, and then it’s just.
Leaders being able to understand what can they do each day in able to support and address that and, support the team to feel, not feel so confused or unaligned with what the team’s trying to achieve. So it needs to be very simple. It needs to be fast and it needs to be something leaders can look at periodically and just.
Start to tweak the things that they’re doing within their team. Because teams change all the time. Psychological safety is not a place you get to ever. You have different team members coming in. You have different external environmental things coming in and impacting people’s everyday lives. You have different products being released.
You have, all, a whole range of different things happening in any organization on any given day. And so, it’s not a say, it’s not for us to get to this. Oh, you are psychologically safe now. Good luck. And you’ve got everything you need. It’s really about building skills that help you to pay attention to what’s going on in the people around you.
And the more you learn those habits, the quicker you’re able to actually see those things in real time. So you don’t, you. What my experience is, I can walk into an organization most times. I don’t need to see the results of what conductor’s doing. I can already see what’s happening in the organization because you become so finely attuned to the micro cues.
And I think, what happens in leadership, particularly today, is there is leaders don’t have time to look for the micro cues. Those that can. They have really good people skills. But those that are so busy doing business as usual and trying to cope with all of the demands that are being placed on them, they often miss the micro cues and because of our technology that we’re on all the time.
So it’s a very simple process. We benchmark leaders see their results and they work together to be able to. Understand those results and how they will be impacting them, achieving the goals for the organization. And we like to do that with leaders together as a cohort because leaders are feeling really vulnerable at the moment.
They don’t feel safe enough to often acknowledge that they might be struggling. And so I think. As they’re building psychological safety down into their teams, creating leaders who have psychological safety and actually can collab, collaborate more effectively together is really important because then they start as a team to function together to hit the goals so you don’t have siloed functions and teams and leaders trying to achieve their own goals.
It’s what’s the goal of the organization that we’re all trying to achieve? And that’s where the power comes in of building the psych safety. I imagine that one of the hardest things is as well, that you talk about triggers. It’s particularly as a leader, if you’re aware of what some of the triggers are in, in trying to.
Allow for that. You also have to try and be not specific to the person because you don’t want everyone else to necessarily know that’s a trigger for them as well. Is that so there is that, it’s not it’s finessing this all the time and there are gonna be new triggers all the time because of external factors that will come into the equation.
So it is a difficult navigation path for leaders, isn’t it? I.
I think if I understand correctly, what you’re saying is that an individual’s personal triggers. Maybe I’m having, maybe I’m struggling to find a new place to live. I need to, maybe I can’t find, I’ve gotta change residence and I’ve got all of this home struggle. So you bring that personal.
Pain with you? We do, because it’s a bit of a it can create tension, it can create exhaustion, it can create but I don’t think it’s, what am I trying to say? There’s a level of understanding as a leader that we can appreciate the personal things that our people are going through, so we can, we know that somebody might be struggling with something in their day to day life.
We can allow space for that, we can allow them time to be able to deal with those things. That’s one scenario. But I think a lot of the triggers I’m talking about are the to do with the, those threat and reward triggers that happen every day in the workplace. So for us, we use the CARES model our CARES model, we talk about certainty.
Autonomy, relatedness, equity and significance. So these drivers are what drive us as human beings. So if you are a leader, and most leaders often are, a lot of leaders have really high significant needs, like I’m important, I’m recognized as being important because you’re a leader, you need to have that authority.
So that can be understanding. Or they have very strong needs for autonomy. Okay? So they don’t, they’re very autonomous. They make decisions every day. But very often what will happen is leaders will then start to treat their teams in the same way. So they will expect them to operate with autonomy.
But you might have a team who, yes, they don’t want to be micromanaged, but they might need high degree of certainty about what are the rules? Maybe there’s no tolerance for mistakes. Or maybe they’ve learned that people who make mistakes or don’t hit their numbers get fired the next month.
So you might have these practices that create this outcome that everyone’s fearful of, because it’s meant to motivate you to be a really high. Performing worker, but the person at the bottom gets, let go. So you have this duality happening of you have a leader going, just go and do your job.
I trust you. But then you have staff just going, yeah, but if what am I gonna get fired? I need this job. I have home commitments. I’m trying to find a house. So you can see that those triggers like pulling at each other, they’re not a there’s no support mechanism around them. And there’s no clarity around what they need to do.
And so the leader just wants you to get on to do it. And they’re just looking for some clarity about what’s going on now, if that’s happening, what you have. Is a team that really drains the leader because they’re always looking for clarification. They’re always looking for someone to be the final decision maker.
They don’t make decisions on their own. So that can end up draining a leader because they’re always, they can’t strategize. They’re always having to help fix their team’s issues. So these are the types of triggers that happen every day in the workplace. Leaders have become really accustomed to them. They talk to us about how frustrating it is.
But then when you just start to see what’s causing those, then you can start to change the whole dynamics around that. So as the leader becomes much more efficient in their communication, much more clear in what’s expected of them, then you have, you can create team members who feel really comfortable making decisions.
Day to day with regards to their work because they know now know what the outcome’s going to be. So it seems complex, but it’s not. It’s actually incredibly simple because we don’t have the foundations, right? What we see is most leaders don’t have an understanding of the foundations. They don’t have insight into what’s happening at that ground level.
They’ve got all of this leadership knowledge and expectation. But not the foundations built. So if we can give them clarity and insight into that, that creates a very strong base from which to build a team. Because it builds trust, it makes the team more resilient. You have a leader who’s not constantly stressing on the edge of burnout, taking on more and more responsibility to cover for their teams.
We’re seeing that happen so much at the moment. And then you have a team that can actually flourish because they know the rules, they know what to expect, and it’s consistently delivered so they can start to trust and relax. Once they start to trust and relax, that means their prefrontal cortex starts to do all the work, not their emotional side, just stopping them and pulling back and not allowing them to actually engage.
So two questions that came out of what you were saying there. One part is how often do you need to check the temperature of your team in order to be able to making these results consistently valid and for people to check in on. And then the other side of that as well is.
What do we need to do then as a result to take them to trust? I, with organizations we work with, I recommend around two times a year that you would, particularly if you haven’t been looking at psychological safety and that you have, the results most organizations are sitting at around in the seventies at the moment.
There’s a few in the sixties, but most that, so the scores between zero and 100. So most organizations are sitting in seventies. So for us, that’s what we see is these are organizations where people, they’re accustomed to working in teams but not as teams. That makes sense. So scores much lower than that.
People are very individualized, very self-protective. But at this 70 range. We’re accustomed to working in teams, that means we can collaborate. But we don’t know how to work as a team and we need to be able to get teams to work as teams because then you can have robust conversations and idea exchange.
So twice a year in order to to start off. So that might be for the first year or two. To so that leaders start to understand where their teams sit and to start working through some of these factors. So it really depends on the speed of the leaders in how and how much knowledge they have.
And as they understand the neuroscience and the neurobiology that sits behind each of these factors, then they start to understand. The opportunities that are ahead of them and how to capitalize upon those and how to. You’re moving away from the carrot and stick manipulation approach of leadership, like trying to get people just to do what they need to do to actually being an influencer.
You become a key influencer. You become a leader that people, because they trust you, because they know your expectations, because you are predictable. They know what to expect. And it allows them to follow through. So I definitely would say two, two times a year for the first couple of years so that they’re learning and understanding those skills.
And then after that, you may go to once a year depending on what’s happening, but it depends what go, what’s going on in organization. We have organizations who use it before going through an m and a merger and acquisition. Or change project so that they can understand what’s the capacity, what’s the resilience level of the organization to be able to support this.
So the usual ways, particularly in a change project, let’s identify who the change champions are because we’re gonna get them to do the work. That’s a whole lot of additional work that you are putting on a few people. As opposed to ensuring you’ve got everybody understanding that why the change is important and actually the majority supporting the change project because you’ve got so much better communication coming through that it leads that change very simply instead of pulling you, this anchor behind you trying to get everyone to change.
So that, that would be my recommendation. And it ranges from depending on what’s coming through in the results. So that’s always the tricky piece. It could be that there are. Policies and practices that need to be looked at. So they might need support or working groups in order to be able to do that.
They could do that themselves. They can hire consultants in to help them do that. We do a lot of coaching and workshops just to get that neuroscience and neurobiology information. The why. Behind these things, why they’re important to us as human beings. That’s the piece I wanna get to the leaders because that what, that’s, it transforms the way you look at life, transforms your relationship with your families.
It transforms the relationship you have with stakeholders, with clients. You use every part of this with every interaction that you have. ’cause you start to understand people in a very different way. So it could be coaching, could be cohort coaching. Could be workshops, depending on the extent and the level of what’s going on in the organization and what it is they want to achieve.
Is your utilization or efficiency rates not high enough? Is it sales conversion rates? Is it work health and safety metrics? So what’s not working? And that’s always the target for us. So whatever changes we are doing is always. To lift that bottom line piece. And once you do that, leaders start.
And do you see that? I was gonna say, do you, yes. Is that once you’ve been working with the business for a while you start to see those, the impact of what you’re doing. Yeah. It’s not even a while. It’s not even a while. It’s. Oh my gosh, that can happen so quickly. We’ve had a retailer, they increased their sales conversion rates by 14.3% within 60 days by folk, by improving the psychological safety, helping the leaders understand what it was and what their teams needed.
We’ve had we’ve had dev teams improve lines of code by 50% within 30 days. We currently have a, one of our partners who works in the services sector call centers not-for-profits, anyone that delivers services. So what we’re seeing is for every 1% improvement in efficiency or utilization, they’re seeing a 12% increase in bottom line revenue.
So 1%. It’s huge. It’s absolutely huge, particularly if you’re talking not-for-profits because they have such little margin. Anyway, so this is what psychological safety goes to the heart of you actually, because your teams can’t align. How can you be efficient? You can’t make that efficiency because you are all disconnected, focusing on different things.
But when you focus on. When you actually can connect it to the bottom line, you’re keeping the leaders focused on what’s important, but you are giving them the skillset and the habits to make sure that they can bring the people along with them. And that’s the game changer, and that’s what we haven’t had.
So, give me a few tips for business owners that are sitting out there at the moment going, what is it that we can do immediately to try and understand a, I was gonna say if we have a problem, but as you say, pretty much everyone is gonna have something that they can improve and problem may be too strong a word, but.
What are the things that they can be immediately attuning into and starting to shift that will make a bit of a difference. One of the big things I see consistently in organizations that I think they, to really start with organizations, have they create their values, okay. Which are really important.
It’s really important to understand what the values of an organization are. But then those values aren’t lived by leaders or teams further down, particularly in large organizations where they spend so much money developing their mission, their values and their objectives. So that lack of cons. This comes back to consistency.
’cause the brain is a prediction machine. We need to predict. That’s why Covid was so difficult. It’s why things are so difficult now. We can’t predict what’s gonna happen into the future. We’ve got all this catastrophizing going on. None of us have been through a world war. We’ve never been through this much turmoil.
We’ve never been through what the United States is going through right now. The United States have always been this major partner for a lot of the countries, Western countries, we are seeing all this play out, but we’ve got no map to go, oh, this is how we deal with it. And that’s what the brain needs.
It absolutely. That’s how it functions. Oh, this happened. I know what to do with that. I’m going to make this decision. So the, when you have organizations that don’t, whilst these are your values, but then everybody’s not aligned to those values or they’re not actually. Living those values. There’s certain individuals who get to do it differently, who have, different rules that they can live by.
That is the biggest odor of trust. So if there is anything for any executive team, CEO is to understand that because I guarantee you there are leaders further down who might who circumvent those. And that creates, if you feel like there is a lack of trust in your organization that’s potentially where it will be coming from.
The other big thing is we’re just one big happy family, which a lot of organizations talk about. Sorry about that. That’s often, it can be true. It can be true, but often what I see is. Big, happy families just mean people are too scared to speak up. So you are going to struggle to innovate. You’re going to struggle to understand what it is your clients really need.
’cause it means you either have staff who really don’t care, they don’t they feel like they don’t belong or nobody listens to them anyway, so they’re not gonna raise things ’cause they know it doesn’t go anywhere. I think as an organization you are missing a lot of opportunities when your people don’t want to com don’t want to sit down and have a chat with you and go, Hey, I was.
I was with Joe, our client this week, and he said this if your cl, if your staff aren’t coming back and sharing that stuff, you are missing gold. And that’s a big red flag. Ai, there’s a lot happening with ai. There’s a lot that’s going to happen with ai. There’s a lot of opportunities for people with ai, so I think a lot of people, particularly at the moment are seeing this as.
A launchpad to go and do something different because they’re not finding satisfaction in their roles. So I think if you, if that’s happening in your organization as well, if you feel like people aren’t satisfied, you don’t just have to put up with it. It’s not just people. There’s a reason for it.
There is stuff happening inside your organization as to why they’re not satisfied, and it is so easily rectified. But you have to just understand what those triggers are, that the barriers that are getting in the way from people going, this is a company that I really believe in and trust. I don’t think they’re lofty goals at all, so we should all be aiming for them.
No. There are so many great tips in there, and it says one of these things that we could keep unpacking for many hours. But just before we wrap up, I think there’s two things. One, one firstly was just to lay the groundwork for all of this. There’s a fair amount of neuroscience and training and stuff behind it.
This is not just something that you’ve just magically pulled out of the clouds to come up with. This is. Based on a fair amount of work. And I think it’s important that people do understand that, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so my background is I used to work with Linda Ray at Neuro Capability.
Neuro capability delivers neuroscience of leadership training to leaders all over the globe. I also. Studied policy at uni. So looking at the cause and if I was always interested in the cause and effects of things, so looking at government policy and programs. Have this background in the social sciences of always looking at the environment and what were we trying to do and what was the outcome.
And that’s just fed this crazy view and desire I have in the world of. Why? Why do we just accept what we’re doing even though we’re not getting the results that we want to be getting? So yes, we can change that. And neuroscience just opened me up to all of that. It was like, oh my gosh this is the why behind everything.
And it’s so powerful and you don’t need to be a neuroscientist to understand that at all. It’s there. There’s so many things that we do on in an everyday practice. That come from that understanding. It’s, we use it in economics, we use it in marketing, we use it in education. So much of what neuroscience is showing about human beings is just giving us the evidence that, so instead of us just, psychology was often just about trying to get research, testing animals and humans, unfortunately at times for both of them to try and understand why we do things.
Thanks to neuroscience, we’ve actually realized that the brain isn’t fixed. The brain continues to learn and grow otherwise, before that we just assumed whatever you, your temperament, your personality, your behavior, your intellect, it was fixed and it couldn’t be changed. And actually it can dramatically.
Neuroscience has really just opened up a window. I think there’s many doors to come as we continue to explore the human condition. And we should always be trying to learn more and better ways. And I always knew it was important. I just didn’t real, like I had no idea. A, I was coming down the pipeline and.
This capability is something AI will not be able to replicate. So leaders, if you want to be a leader through AI learning, this is going to be one of the best things you can do for yourself because it gives you higher order thinking and understanding.
I, I think just to wrap things up, there’s a question that I ask. All of my guests and I was just gonna say that I think you’ve already given us a whole bunch of different answers to this, but I’m interested in your one main response to it, which is, what is the at heart moment that many of your clients have when they start to work with you that you wish more people knew they were going to have in advance?
Wow. I think I’m trying to put it into words. ’cause I’ve, yes, I’ve had those big aha moments. I’ve had doors closed. No one’s allowed to leave the room. We are, I wanna hear more about this. I think for me it’s the fact the conductor, particularly for A CEO or CFO or COO, these executives who are making decisions every day, they often don’t get to see the full picture.
They get bits and pieces of analysis from different groups and they’re trying to understand and do the best that they can with that and for them. So when we show them our bubble chart that plots, the psych safety of each of their teams against a particular KPI and how they’re performing, the big aha moment that we see is that then when they see that they’re not performing as well as they could be like.
The enormous opportunity that they have to lift performance even higher that they had no awareness of. And to realize that it’s just so simple to achieve. There’s work, but it’s not complicated. It’s not years and years of work and investment. I think that’s the biggest one when you can quantify that.
Yeah, it’s, our first client. We were able to show them $88 million in untapped revenue opportunity. Now, we weren’t going to get all of that. Wow. But when we could look at their KPIs and how much they were leaving on the table in an environment where they were losing money and they were considering having to close some areas, it completely blew their mind.
And that’s why when I refer to it with what’s going on in the US at the moment, you’ve got Musk in this march for efficiency that we’ve got to cull everybody and cut departments. And yes, some of that might need to happen, but what we’re showing is you can actually increase even more of that.
By focusing on the people and creating an environment that just allows them to be able to contribute at a much higher level, and that has much greater gains because you’re also looking at the community services and all the downstream effects that you will not see at the back end of what the US is doing.
They’re not recording that, so.
There’s just another opportunity and another way to do this that’s so much better for businesses, communities, humanity in general. I. So often businesses jump to the conclusion that to create efficiencies you have to cut. When in fact, if you drive more out of the what you already have, then that can be a much better result than trying to cut back.
And I, this is such a worthwhile argument. I’ve seen that many times myself, and I’ve seen it in the not-for-profit sector as much as I’ve seen it in the for-profit sector. And it is about an attitude of how you go about things. Thank you so much for everything that you’ve given us today. It was amazing amount of of insights and information for everyone to, to take on board and look.
We will obviously include all of the information about how to get in contact with you and your, and to have a look at the company and how your actual software works and ’cause it is a very visual tool as well. So it is something that I encourage everyone to. Ta to check out through the show notes afterwards.
But for now, thank you so much for being part of Biz Bites. Oh, thank you. It’s been wonderful. I’ve really enjoyed being able to have this chat. Thank you so much, and thank you everyone. Don’t forget to subscribe and never miss an episode, and we look forward to your company next time on Biz Bites. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites.
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Amanda Johnson
Saved By Story & The Story Oracle
writing, publishing, coaching, speaking, facilitating
In this episode of the Biz Bites podcast, the host engages in a conversation with Amanda Johnson about the power of storytelling in transforming both business and personal life. Amanda, who has spent her career helping aspiring messengers become authors, speakers, and coaches, discusses the crucial role of storytelling in communicating one’s “why” and connecting deeply with audiences.
Amanda also shares the significant “aha moments” her clients experience and the broader implications of understanding and reshaping one’s narrative.
Offer: Check out Amanda’s special offer here.
The power of storytelling, how to transform your business and your life with Amanda Johnson. I really enjoyed this conversation with Amanda. We traded so many stories about why stories are so powerful, getting into the why and making sure that you understand how that’s gonna impact your business. And impact the audience that you’re trying to engage.
There is so much to unpack in this episode and so many great tips and insights. You don’t wanna miss this. Let’s get into Biz Bites.
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites, and this is going to be a bit of a journey, I think today because we’re gonna be talking a lot about story and the power of story. And Amanda, thank you so much for being a part of this program. Thanks for inviting me. I’m excited. So Amanda, do you wanna start by telling us a little bit about what you do so we can give everyone some context?
Sure. So most of my career has been spent helping aspiring messengers become authors and speakers and coaches. So I am normally trying to help them figure out how to alchemize their story and their expertise into something that is really exciting and memorable for their audience. Get it on pages and stages really powerfully.
And along the way, very early on, I realized that. It was gonna be a little bit more than just giving them really good organisation and and a little bit of accountability. I figured out that a lot of the people, at least the ones who were landing in MySpace, were suffering writer’s block that was associated with their story.
There were parts of. Their message that they felt like they needed to share and their big why was in a story that they weren’t really excited to share or weren’t sure how to. So there’s a, I’m a partner in the writing and then I’m also a partner in the transformational process. And then the Save by Story is a publishing house.
So we take people from inspiration and impact. It is such a powerful thing to be able to share your story, but I wanna start with why people share their story. Why do you think it’s, it is so important for people to do it I think that you can answer that question from two angles.
For people who wanna be speakers or authors or coaches. Our goal is really to go into the world and help other people, right? We’re trying to share a message, and the question that everyone is asking when you’re sharing your message is, I wonder why this person cares about this. And the why is in the story.
Usually the solutions that we’re bringing to the world, the insights, the paradigm changes, those are all associated with everything that we’ve learned along our journey. And so telling that story is a really. Powerful way to connect with the audience, help them to understand, not only understand the message more intuitively, let’s say, but it’s really a powerful way to connect with them, to create that level of attunement and trust that we all need if we’re gonna take people on a journey.
And then from the personal angle, I think that, I’ve had some people come through. With really big visions of what they would do on the other side of the book. I’m gonna be a speaker, I’m gonna hit all these big stages, and they had their list of conferences they wanted to speak at, and then they got into the writing and that personal transformation that happened.
They realized that was actually what made them want to tell their story, that there was something that. They weren’t remembering correctly or some sort of insight that they needed to take back or some part of their story that needed what we say it’s saving. Go back and save your story.
There’s all of these parts of us that get left back in these, hard times and also in the good times. And so going back and just seeing that whole narrative. I think it adds a huge amount of confidence when we’re sharing our messages with people. We know, like we know that what we’re saying is coming from an A 100% authentic integrated space.
Yeah, it’s I having worked in that space as well in terms of asking people about their, why it’s such a powerful thing. And you are almost border on being a therapist feeling like that, don’t you, when you start getting into and prodding people? I have been called such, yes. Yes. In fact, I had one client who.
We wrote a book co-wrote a book with a bunch of my clients called, you can’t make this story up, because the things that would happen inside of the creative process were just so synchronistic magical, fill the blank. It was just hard to believe you couldn’t make these things up. And so I asked them to write their stories about what happened while they were working with me.
And then I got the opportunity to write why they came into my life. ’cause each client has driven my own personal and professional story forward in a really important way. So I had one client who wrote her chapter for this and shared it with one of her therapist friends. She’s also a social worker, and he said he sent her an email back and said, does Amanda know that she’s a therapist?
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We will do everything to design a program that suits you. From the strategy right through to publishing and of course helping you share it. So come talk to us podcast done for you.com au Details in the show notes below. Now back to Biz Bites. So I had one client who wrote her chapter for this and shared it with one of her therapist friends.
She’s also a. Social worker and he said he sent her an email back and said, does Amanda know that she’s a therapist?
Yes, it’s happened. Yeah. It’s I think one of, a couple of my favorite stories of doing something similar. One was with, actually with a friend and I was prodding him about his why I. And it led him back to a memory that he hadn’t thought about since he was, he was in his early teens, I think when this, when it happened.
And it, it involved a going to a markets with his father and that going into the whole story. The interesting thing about it was that. It had set him up for his entire career and he didn’t know why he loved what he did. And where since finding that out, it’s changed his perspective completely.
And ma, as you say, it made him a lot more confident as a result of it. And also that willingness to be able to share it and give people that perspective. ’cause we are a product of our upbringing. Yeah. And it affects, it shapes the way that we deliver everything into the world too. I had, when you were sharing that, I was thinking about one of my clients who I worked with, oh, a decade ago or so, and same thing.
Got her all of the organisation, we figured it out which stories are gonna go where and how she was gonna help these young professionals figure out how to be successful. And she came to me knowing that her, the wisdom that her mother shared with her when she was very young was extremely important. She knew that would be a hallmark throughout the book because she knew that’s what set her apart when she was a young professional, like she had all that wisdom.
She didn’t have to go searching for it or developing it. Her mom really imbued her with it at a young age. But this woman cannot write this book. She just sit down and get absolutely stuck. And so I said, you know what? Why don’t you just let’s rent a cabin in the mountains. I was living in Oregon at the time, and we’ll just hang out and get the writing done.
Just, I just need you to like, get into the momentum of it. First day, no writing. No writing. Stuck stuck. Second day. I’m making breakfast this little cabin, and this woman is asking me a hundred million questions about what I’m making. What are the ingredients? Where did I get the recipe? Why do I do it like this?
How does this deal with my, she’s asking me and I thought, are you like a foodie? Is this part of your story that I don’t know? She said, oh, yeah, I’m a trained chef. Okay. So I thought maybe there’s a way to integrate her love of food, because this was something that was really important.
Do you use food when you’re working with young professionals? Oh yeah. I invite them into my kitchen all the time. I bring them stuff at work, coffee croissants. This is how, this is the then environment in which these little bits of wisdom are being transferred. And so I thought that’s interesting.
I wonder. When did your mom share these little tidbits of wisdom with you? And she said, while she was cooking our dinners, bingo. This love of food was deeply connected to all of her expertise, all of her wisdom and everything that she wanted to share. And it was so hard for her to be able to deliver that without.
The ingredients that mattered. And so once we infu infused food and this idea of ingredients for success into the process, the book was written so quickly, it would make your head spin. I was gonna say, you didn’t end up, did you end up turning over the kitchen and eating lots while you wrote the book?
We did we eat, excuse me, we eat a lot when we’re on retreat together. It’s it’s good fuel, it’s good connection time. It’s good. Currency for story, what do you do when you break bread with other people? How was your day working on it? It, and it is and I think if people that are listening or watching in now, don’t believe us.
Just go and look at, pick your TV channel these days. Whether it’s Lifestyle Channel or SBS or any of those. I, one of my favorite shows that I watched in recent times was the Stanley Tucci series where he goes in Italy and it’s really him eating food. And telling stories with people. And it’s just fascinating and it’s just, you feel like you’re there and a part of it. And I think it’s so powerful that mix of those two things. And it actually doesn’t really matter what’s being eaten. It’s just the sharing of it and it’s, and food is quite personal. It’s when you’re sharing it.
It is, it’s absolutely personal and it’s one of those personal, and I’ve heard one of the thought leaders that I love to follow talks about. How primal it is that very primal social connective tissue of our families, sitting around a table and what happens to a culture when we stop doing that and when we stop doing it, around the water cooler at work or in these different places where we go and connect with each other.
When we miss out on that, the sharing that happens over food and stories. It’s, and it’s funny you say that is while you were talking, I was thinking. Thinking back on a few of the business conferences that I’ve attended over the last couple of years, and the most memorable parts of all of them were the sitting down and for want of a better term, breaking bread with people.
Yes. And it was just the casual conversations that you have while you’re sitting down and you’re. Having, eating something, drinking something, and it didn’t matter what it was. And I’ve had some incredibly memorable moments and discussions around those things, which is not to say that the conference themselves wasn’t incredibly powerful, it was, but the more memorable parts that stick with me were the stories that came out of it.
Definitely. And, I tried for the first year of my work working with these. High achieving overperforming, helping professionals who were just, out there changing the world like crazy, trying to get them to sit down and find some time in their lives to write a chapter or even a paragraph was hard.
And so it really is very early that I needed to. I kidnap them with consent, get them away to a place. And so I developed a retreat model, and that’s what I found very quickly was that here I had all of these, well-crafted exercises and all of these experiences that were designed to really pull the deep stories and the content out of them.
When I got the best content over the meals. Late at night when we were eating popcorn or dark chocolate together and this, all of those, all of the defenses and those perceived, needs to have a certain sort of persona associated with the expertise that they were bringing into the space.
With all of that gone. Over a good story of, and a piece of dark chocolate. All of a sudden I had a whole bunch of content that I needed like what happened with that client, over a meal. All of a sudden, boom, there’s that little bit of information that makes the message so much more memorable and powerful for the reader.
And it’s, and it is a good tip for people that are listening in and wondering how to get to some of this content that they’re trying to unlock for different reasons. Sometimes it is just walking away from the office, going and sitting down, and whether it’s with someone or on your own, but going and having a meal that’s.
Taking you away and taking you to and I think often it’s something that whether you are put yourself in a situation where you’ve gone to a nice restaurant and it’s a beautiful view, or whether you’re at home and cooked something for yourself that has meaning for you. If it’s something that, your mom used to make or any of those kinds of things, it’s often a great way of doing that.
And I mentioned before I had a another client that I was very memorable. And it was interesting because we’d done this whole. Exercise around trying to get to her why? And she really gave me nothing. Like we were just, we got bare bone stories, but I was getting yes, no responses. And it was a really tough session in that respect.
And I left it with her. And then as it turned out, that night around dinnertime, I had to go out with my wife and we were in a, we were in a shop and so it was like 7 30, 8 o’clock at night. And the phone rings and it’s this woman. And I’m like, why is she calling me now at this time? I wouldn’t normally, clients don’t call me at that time of night.
So I picked up the phone and she said, oh my God, I’ve got it. I’ve got it. And she was just so excited because it had suddenly clicked for her. I got more words out of her in a, two minute phone conversation than I did for the sort of one hour session that we were together. And it was just that, that she was, she had been sitting down at home having a meal and suddenly it clicked.
And I think that is a, it is a powerful thing to take yourself away. It is. And to do things. If you think about food, it’s so sensory. It’s the smells and the tastes and the textures and the, like a whole experience. It’s a different setting, and so it is a story in and of itself.
And those are the. Those are the elements that make a story re, memorable inside of someone’s mind, right? Like we, when we look back, we don’t remember the everyday mundane things. We remember the moments that have a lot of sensory experience, how we felt, what we smelled, what we saw when we were in that moment.
And so I think when. That is one of those secrets of, a little bit more immersive of an experience that’s touching on all of those senses, activating all those neural pathways. And if you do that with the intention of calling something up, who knows what’s possible. I. It’s funny, isn’t it?
’cause I think we can all do this exercise and just go, what are some of our favorite memories as a child? And and I was thinking about it then as you were speaking that I remember when I was probably about four I. My grandparents used to come and come over on a Saturday and they always brought like a gingerbread man or something like that.
And I’ve got a memory of that and that, you know what? You know that they used to take we little bikes and things, whatever. My sister and I, whatever you had at that age, and they used to pretend that we could. Cycle up a tree or something where they just lift us up. We were little obviously at that point, and that’s, that is a full sensory kind of memory, because I can, it’s the smell of the gingerbread man.
It’s the, them arriving, it’s, they’re pushing us along and whatever bike we had, it’s, that whole experience is very memorable. And I think that’s something that’s. The reason we are talking about this is because it’s so important in a business sense as well to be able to deliver that to people.
Because if you just rely on, and you, we see it all the time on LinkedIn, for example, people just telling very flat. Stories. And and it’s just yeah, it just it drives you mad, doesn’t it? It’s and it must be for you, be frustrating for you as well as a as someone who is trying to bring out stories from people to read these things and going, what are you doing?
Yes. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And I mean if we want people to come along on any journey, any sort of growth journey, personal, professional, if we want them to learn anything, we have to establish a connection with them. And that connection, if you keep it a completely mental connection, here are my great ideas.
That’s as far as the learning can go. Oh, there’s a good idea. I. But if you start to, to your point, start to include some of the other senses, and you start to ask questions that evoke emotion, and you start to connect that emotion with the physical senses that are happening in their body, all of a sudden, all of that person is listening to you.
All of that person is totally engaged. And so whatever you deliver after that, it’s being soaked in at a completely different level. And that sort of idea of that immersive experience is so incredibly powerful. It’s, and if most people in business think about it, when people get to touch, feel, experience, whether it’s a product or a service that you have, then it’s completely different to just, here’s what we’re going to do in a lovely PowerPoint presentation.
It’s not the same. It’s not and you have to and the power of story is that whilst that may not always be practical and possible to give that, you can try and bring people into that by a great story. And I think that’s the power of it, isn’t it? Yeah. And it doesn’t even have to be your own story.
I think it’s more powerful when it’s your own story, but making that initial connection through story. If you can make it meaningful and authentic and from your own particular journey, fantastic. But if you’re in a professional setting where the culture isn’t one that’s, completely open and authentic and vulnerable, then why not use story itself to begin to make those connections?
What are you watching right now? Whatcha reading right now? Yeah. What are you, what story has you like gripped? Like we’re here in this meeting and you’re thinking about what’s gonna happen when you turn that next episode on, what is that? And all of a sudden you get this little window into someone’s soul and what their.
Interested in and what they’re what type of medicine they’re looking for in the world. Because I, I think that all of our story addictions are attempts to, get some medicine out of what we’re watching, some sort of hero’s journey that we’re trying to. Figure out on our own.
And if no one tells us, Hey, there’s medicine in there, then we’re just watching it. We’re just consumed by it for, a good 10 episode run. And then we’re onto the next one because we didn’t get the medicine. Yeah, it’s interesting about that, isn’t it? Is it? And I always find those discussions are quite fascinating when you have, with people, when they say, what are you watching at the moment?
What’s good? And sometimes you listen to and you go yeah, that that’s not my thing. And you wonder if they’re thinking exactly the same thing when you’re telling them, oh, you’ve gotta watch this. And then it’s of course if they do watch it, then you go, did they get the same thing out of it?
Did they enjoy it as much as you did when when you were watching it? So it’s but you’re right, it is, there’s something that’s in there. We, yes, it’s not just entertainment for entertainment’s sake, because otherwise we would literally all be watching the same thing if we were, if we all had the same interests.
I know even in my household, we’re not all watching the same thing. It’s quite rare when we all just, there’s only one or two TV shows where we sit down and we are all watching it. The rest of the time it’s, I’m usually off in another room watching the sport while they’re watching something, some documentary that I’m, that I don’t wanna follow.
So it’s, but it is it is those windows in which allow. People to want to engage with you. And whilst that works on a friendship level, it works on a level of business as well. Because when you allow people into the stories that are making you tick, that are driving your business forward, that are experiences that you are willing to share, brings people in who are interested in those, or interested in those experience or find them relatable.
Yeah, we’re all wrestling with universal themes and I think that anytime you show real curiosity in another human being, I. Unfortunately in our culture, that’s a refreshing thing. You know it when someone says, oh, how are you doing? I’m fine. What if they really meant it?
Like, how are you doing? And they followed it up with I, what are what are you interested in? What are you working on right now? What are you watching? Any sort of. Additional attempt at curiosity and connection. It matters in our co and it matters in our world right now, where we’re all pulling up information on our phones in two seconds and, we’re so highly connected in some ways and so disconnected from each other in other way.
Absolutely. Your story. Yeah. And I think that’s so important that you. Have those engagements. I think, we talked about LinkedIn before and I’m sure when there’ll be people that’ll be seeing little clips on LinkedIn for this as well, and hopefully diving into the full episode.
But the real value in LinkedIn is actually connecting with people individually because the post, they’re great. They go out and more people might see you, but you’re at the mercy of the algorithms. You’re not at the mercy of an algorithm when you reach out individually to people. And just taking a moment to en engage with them in whatever level that might be, whether it’s.
Because it’s a special occasion, or whether it’s just because you’ve got something they might be interested in or you just wanted to touch base with them. All of those things are so incredibly powerful because the more that you build a relationship with people, the more opportunity you have to engage with them and their networks.
Yeah, absolutely. And I also think it’s really fun to think in terms of. Sharing client stories and sharing and asking clients to share their story of working with you. To me that’s one of the fun things that I love to see happening. It’s one thing for me to share the story of, this incredible event that happened with this client, this big transformation or book launch or something.
But it’s another for them to then talk about their experience in the process of creating that in our company and then go out and share that with the world. It’s just, the reciprocity of stories and what’s possible and the networking. I’m fascinated with that and I am, I’m really, I was just sharing with one of my clients this morning.
I. I wanna, I want a new model for that. No. One of my, one of my favorite things to do very early on I had this, my very first client, I. As this dynamic connector, she’s a sales coach, powerful human being, walked into a room and just knew how to connect with everybody. And I marveled because I was very introverted, had just spent, years at home with a toddler.
Can I talk to another adult again? What would I about adults talk about these days? The same thing they said five years ago. But that was one of our favorite things to do in networking was to tell our stories of working with each other because I was her coach helping her with all of her books, and she was my coach helping me to grow my business.
And so when we walked into spaces, we were listening for opportunities to tell our stories about the other person, and we just drove so much business to each other. It was crazy. It was so much more fun than going in and constantly introducing myself to people and telling my own story over and over again.
Yeah, it’s and it’s funny isn’t how the networking in those ki in, in those, when you go to those functions. Can be so hard because people go with the wrong attitude, I find most of the time, but also they’re not really listening. Yeah. And so if you take the time to just be listening and to respond to what they’re saying, it’s again, we go back to the story and I think you, it.
You relate to people so much more when you’re trading stories with one another as we’ve been doing. We’ve been trading stories for this during this podcast and that. Makes us more relatable to one another. Hopefully makes us more relatable to all of the people that are interested in what we do.
And I love the fact that, what you are trying to do is bring people into writing their books and writing their writing stories in that way. I’m doing it through the art of podcasting, but it’s the same. We’re driving for the same purpose, ultimately to make them more relatable.
Absolutely relatable and memorable because when you find that story, like the one of this, this client who had these incredible moments with her mom when she was a youngster, these very memorable, I remember the moments with her mom almost more than I remember. The moments that she had as a, young professional because they, they were so sweet.
And every time I think about her, that’s what I think about, and so they just make it easy for people to recognize you and I. Also to continue sharing stories about you after they’ve met you. Oh, I just, met this other person who told me this great story. What is it that she does again?
Oh yeah. She would be a great connection for you, yeah. It’s, and so let me ask you this. You’ve talked about one or two of your stories. So what have you got some favorites of people that you’ve worked with over the years and what made them favorite? Are you asking favorite stories of the writing process or favorite stories that they’ve told?
Favorite stories of the of the writing process first. Yeah. So the writing process, there’s always, I always love telling this one because it surprised both of us so oftentimes, many years I would work with someone and it would be pretty clear we’d be connecting their expertise and their story in a very important way throughout the book.
And I. And so it became obvious which chapters held the stories that were hard for them or that they were wrestling with, maybe outside the process of writing. These are things that story loops that are continuing to show up. They figured it out in the world of their profession, but this story loop is still happening back here in this part of my personal life, right?
And it always became the opportunity to say, that reminds me of this story over here. Could you apply the same method that you used here over there? And maybe improve that situation. But one of these clients decided she wanted to put her expertise into a fiction. So she is a social worker helping.
Very hard cases. Parents in high conflict divorces who were wrestling over custody for the children and, high conflict, high emotion. They’re making decisions out of hurt or revenge or like all of these motivations that are happening. She said, I could just write a bland.
How to, here’s how to prepare for your custody evaluation and to maximize your opportunity for getting more custody for your child. But I really want people to see themselves and to see the outcomes of their choices when they don’t put their children at the center. Okay, so she opted for a, do you remember those books, the Choose Your Own Adventure books when we were younger?
You get to the end of a chapter and you get to make a choice, and then it sends you in one direction or another. She created a book like this. And so she took a family where the parents were going through high conflict divorce, and the children were, of course, immersed in the very messy process of that.
And she took these characters and she gave the mom and the dad both three different choices. And all three choices sounded really good. This is probably the choice that this, that every parent should make, but only one of those three choices. Actually ended up with their children thriving and any sort of amicable experience between the parents.
And so it was this fascinating experience of watching her, mapping this out for the first time. It was a brain bender, first of all, ’cause I’d never done anything like that before. But as she started to write. I started to see a character on the page that reminded me of a character that she was constantly complaining about, interrupting her process of writing, and I thought, uhoh, I wonder if she’s writing her own story.
She’s, she hasn’t said anything about her marriage. She hasn’t talked about any sort of high conflict custody, anything like this is her profession. But this character reminded me a lot of what she was telling me about her husband. And I thought, oh dear. And so I, as I do I’m an, I call myself an Oracle.
I’m not the person who’s gonna tell you the way things are going. I’m gonna ask questions so that when you’re ready, you can put those pieces together for yourself. And so for 18 months, Anthony I tried to make these connections while she was writing this and. She couldn’t see it. Couldn’t see it.
Couldn’t see it. But she kept showing up for the retreats and doing the story saving work, and doing some of our writing quests. And 18 months in, I got a phone call from her that said, I think I just realized I’ve been writing my own story. And I said, oh, thank God. And she said, what? You knew. And I suspected.
And why didn’t you tell me? Oh girl, I tried to tell you like at least once a month for the last 18 months, and she couldn’t believe it. And so the beauty of what had happened was that, being inside of a space where she was able to write this story that had a lot of. Dark humor to it that gave her the ability to really get clear on who this character actually was in her life before she connected the dots, that was the character in her life.
As soon as it became an awareness for her that this was her life, she knew exactly what to do. She’d already written the book about it. She knew all of the right choices to make. She knew all of the ones to stay away from, and she was able to move through that phase of her life and like completely change her.
Not just her own personal story, but the generational narrative because she went on to find out that the same dynamic that had happened for her had been happening for generations before her. And she thought, what would’ve happened if I hadn’t seen this and my kids had been raised in it? My daughter, my son might have ended up in the same.
Sort of dynamic and she just ended it by writing the story, seeing it for what it was, and then taking the pen back in her own life and changing her own personal story. I. So incredibly powerful when people can do that. And and in the meeting it has and ’cause we are a product of our upbringing.
We’re a product of all of the things that have gone on around us and what have been told as being the norms. This is what what you’re expected to do. And and. Has played out different ways in different generations. A few generations ago it wasn’t unusual for parents to very strongly dictate what their children would study.
A little bit less so these days, but doesn’t mean there aren’t expectations there are around. Things and and what you end up doing, how you end up doing it, all these things. And you’re, I was talking with someone regarding finance yesterday and how that, your upbringing is such an impact on the way you think about money.
And so all of these stories that you’ve. Being told. And the stories that you tell yourself, and then the stories that you tell other people have this ongoing impact. And that’s why unpacking these is so incredibly powerful for, pers but and I think that’s the interesting thing here is that blend that you’ve got between what’s happening at a personal level, but then what can happen at a business level as a result of it.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and it’s, it really is amazing when people have the opportunity to really see their whole story a little bit more, honestly, because it’s the stories that we’re told and, but it’s also how the stories shape us, and not just the stories that we’re living, but the roles that we’re cast in.
You know what the identities, this is the role that you play in the story. If you’re always a supporting character, how fun is that when you’re trying to grow a business? Not so much. You have to be the main character. If you’re out there growing the business, you have to figure out where did that story come from?
Where I’m the supporting character, and how do I change that? How do I become, what do they call an A-list actor? How do I change my own story about the role that I’m playing in the bigger story and that, there’s hardly any there are hardly any places in our culture and especially our education system that have any of us thinking about that at a young age.
We have to run into the end of a painful story to look up and say, okay, this isn’t working. Is there another story available instead of having people when we’re young, my son and I wrote a book called Raised by Story, and I wrote that because when he was born, I did not have any good stories to tell him.
I was like I’m nobody, but all of my stories don’t seem to be playing out. We need to write one. And because I didn’t have the religion or the dogma or any of that to figure out how to raise. A healthy, responsible human who could survive and not just survive, but thrive in the world. All I had left was the great stories, and so I got to instead of just, sit there and consume them with him, I sat on the couch with him and I asked him really hard questions.
Not at first when he was really young. They weren’t hard questions, but, building critical thinking and asking what would you do in that circumstance, he always hated it when I paused the movie to ask the question but it started to build that pause for him inside.
He started to ask those questions by himself without me. And what ended up happening was he just figured out okay, I’ve walked millions of miles and a whole bunch of character shoes who’ve made a whole lot of mistakes. I know what not to do. And what, if we had that, what if we had the opportunity to, when we were young, to think I could write this story the way that I want to.
I don’t have to necessarily be, I can be shaped, but not defined by my early story. Have you got any tips for people in terms of how to, what is the, is there a perfect construct for a story? I don’t think so. Right now I’m working on a program I. Where we’re talking about all of the different structures, so nonfiction when someone’s trying to include their personal story.
There are all different ways that plays out. But for me, I’m always looking, like I said, for the alchemy between the story and the expertise really to, so that the story is driving. The reader forward more than the concepts. The concepts are all deeply embedded, but it’s really the story that has the person, okay, what’s the next, what’s the next chapter gonna look like?
As it relates to, fiction, I. I think that we have that blueprint inside of us. If we’ve been paying any attention at all to the great stories, that are on in great books and on big screens that completely grip the world, we have that pattern inside of us. And I have one client who’s actually a partner now who.
She had this amazing idea for this story, wrote the entire, the plot out, had a whole bunch of scene work done, but something wasn’t working. And so she started to explore all of these different structures. Oh, I’ll plug all of my content into this structure, and I think this is true for.
Fiction and nonfiction, right? I’m trying to plug it in. Here’s the conflict and here’s the this, and here’s the that. And what started to happen was her, like the essence of what she was trying to bring. It got choked out. She got to the point where she felt like she was trying to put puzzle pieces together instead of enjoy the process of writing a story.
And so when I asked her to, pull her gripped fingertips off of those structures that were choking her message out and just right. What happened was unbelievable. In fact she’s an avid reader herself, so knows the blueprint since she was four years old and started to read and what was hilarious was we get to the end of the manuscript and I said, okay, now go back and look at all of those structures, the hero’s journey, the all of these different frameworks, and see how your book lays out next to them.
And do you know that it fit most of those structures just like to a t. But not because she’d been forcing and shifting and choking and reshaping and carving pieces of her character experience out, but because she just went with it, she just knew story innately and let it come out of her. And of course there were things to do around perspective and seeing work and those types of things that made it even more powerful.
But man, I think we all have that blueprint inside of us. I agree. You know this. There’s no one that you’ve, that you meet that can’t tell you a story and. How they tell it is always going to be different depending on the situation and things. But people can tell stories innately. They’re part of who we are as human beings and being able to bring them out is again, so important.
I wanted to ask you as well, what have you seen as being the impact? You’ve once, once someone has brought out their story, particularly, not just in a personal sense, but also in a business sense, what’s been the impact of being able to do that? I have a few, I have a few stories. One of them is I worked with this all my clients were brilliant in their own ways.
This one in particular was like an Ivy League trained. Educator who had gone through a very intense personal trauma that like this type of trauma upon trauma of losing her child, blew open her nervous system. And so she went from being this. Very functional, very, left-brained human, somewhat intuitive to all of a sudden feeling and hearing everything like she could.
She knew what people, where people were hurting in their bodies. She could hear some of the thoughts that people were having. She was like, wait a minute. This isn’t, I can’t continue living. I can’t be a mother like this. And so she went on a journey of repairing her nervous system and learning how to do that.
I. And so when I met her, she was in the process of trying to get this business off the ground of helping other intuitive empaths figure out how to be more productive in the world, right? Not to be burning out and to be overwhelmed with everyone’s empathic overload all of the time. And so when I asked her, what do you wanna write about?
She said, bliss. I said that, that didn’t ding me at all. What else you got? Are there any other stories that you’ve been thinking about or messages you’ve been thinking about sharing? And she admitted that there was one story that was this story. And she said, I’ve been thinking that eventually I’ll have to write that book about feeling other people’s pain.
I. That was the connection to her audience, not bliss. Bliss is so far away from individuals who are barely making it every day because they’re so overloaded with empathy and their nervous systems are all out of whack. And so that, I feel Your Pain was this perfect way to connect with her audience. And then she thought I’m gonna grow the coaching business and the certification business out of this.
And so she had this big plan and she was working it. And then the book got into the hands of someone at a university, and the university said, we have a problem with empathic overload and neurodivergence, and we need your help. And so I remember her calling me and saying am I giving up my, my am I selling out my mission, my vision?
There are all of these opportunities available to her. More impact, stable income, all these things that new entrepreneurs struggle with. I. And I, of course I was listening to her and we talked about it. Eventually she took the job and within a very short amount of time, she was working with big districts, helping all of these helping professionals and educators figure out how to regulate their nervous systems, completely changing classrooms and districts, and now has a global audience.
And it was all because she got clear on the impact of that story that, no one wants to go back and rehash that type of loss and pain and everything that happened after, and the wrestling match. That was the journey of finding the solution. But it turns out that’s what our audiences need.
They need to know that we have been there. That we have figured it out, that we have steps that they can take. And when they see us taking those steps, it’s a whole, it’s a whole new opportunity, a portal of possibility that opens up for them. I love that. I. So much more that we could talk about. But I do have to wrap things up and I wanted to ask you, the one question that I like to ask all of my guests is, what’s the aha moment that people have when they after they’ve been working with you for a little while, that you wish more people would know about in advance?
So you’re gonna get more people coming to work with you? The aha moment that they all have is at some point. Usually around the 60 to 70% mark, which is a funny thing. If you look at the hero’s journey and all of those story structures of the 60 to 70% mark of the writing, I get a phone call very similar to that one I told you about with that client where they say, okay.
I think the thing that I have been really challenged the challenge that has been keeping me from working on this project and moving my message and my business and my life forward. I could actually solve that if I just stop saying the same stupid script over and over again. Do you notice that every time this happens, I say yes when I should say no?
Do you notice that every time I should stay there and confront that person? I turn tail and run. I. Yes, I’ve noticed that in your story. And that’s the moment where I say they, they really have the opportunity to be the co-author because until then they are absolutely driven by a story. They’re the character in a story that is happening to them.
But when they have a moment where they realize, oh, if I just change the script. If I just walked off the stage, instead of keeping the stupid show going, I can change the trajectory of everything. That’s the aha moment. I’m always excited and waiting for. I love that. Thank you so much for sharing so many great stories and what those stories have meant to people and how they’ve changed people.
I think it’s such an incredibly powerful thing to be a part of. And I can see the absolute joy that you have and what you do every day. So thank you for being a part of the program. Thank you for the invitation. And of course we will have all of the information about how to get in contact with you, including some free resources and things that you have on your website.
And a link to your podcast as well that you’ve got as well that where you get into some deep stories with with some of the people you’ve worked with. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much and thank you everyone for listening in to Biz Bites and stay tuned. Of course, for the next episode. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites.
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Sophie Anderson
Cairns Coaching
Health & Wellbeing Services
In this episode of Biz Bites, the host welcomes wellness coach Sophie Anderson, who shares her journey from corporate burnout to coaching teams towards better work-life balance and purpose. Sophie discusses the importance of prioritising employee well-being for productivity and innovation. She emphasises the role of self-awareness, recognizing personal triggers, and making small, actionable changes to break negative cycles and improve overall health and happiness.
Sophie’s insights into work-life balance, the impact of personal well-being on professional life, and the significance of small, incremental steps in achieving lasting change resonate throughout the conversation, offering listeners practical strategies to enhance both their personal and professional lives.
Offer: Check out Sophie’s special offer – Workplace Wellness Solutions.
Thought leaders, are you ready to revolutionize your workplace culture and boost employee wellbeing? In today’s fast-paced world, the success of your organization hinges on the health and happiness of your team. So in this episode of Biz Bites, we’re gonna dive into the transformation of your workplace from burnout to balance with wellness coach Sophie Anderson.
Sophie is an amazing person. She’s got a fantastic story to tell about. How she transitioned from corporate burnout to guiding teams towards balance and purpose. So you’re gonna learn why prioritizing employee wellbeing is not just a nice to have, but a must have for productivity and innovation. So get ready for some actionable insights, transformative strategies that will elevate your leadership and create lasting change.
Stay tuned for this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites, and we’re going to get into a fascinating discussion, I think today about people particularly and the impact of people in our business and the impact on ourselves we have with us today. Sophie, very warm, welcome to you. Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me. Now Sophie, I’ve only got to know you very briefly from a discussion we had, and it made me think straight away. We’ve gotta get you on the podcast. So why don’t you introduce yourself to our audience? Thank you so much. I’m a workplace wellness coach. I’m based in Cairnes, but I’m originally from Quebec, so I am French Canadian.
Moved to Australia as a backpacker and basically never left. So this is me and short I worked in the corporate sector for 25 years. So my whole career if you do the maths, and I have been working for big organizations that have the employee assistance program. I had beautiful managers, but I was never satisfied with what they were providing me, and I was always waiting for them to make my life better.
And I was looking at other jobs and then eventually, long story short, I got a coach and she helped me make changes in my personal life. So I realized that all the things I wanted to work. To help me with, I could do it myself. So I was bored. I found hobbies. I was unhealthy. I started, I quit drinking.
I started eating better, started doing yoga. I was really overwhelmed and anxious and I was, back then, I was seeing a therapist and seeing a coach. Help me not only understand that I was anxious, but what to do about it. So ultimately it changed my whole life. I became such a better employee and I decided to bring that back to the workplace.
So I went back to school. I got accredited and certified as a life coach, and now I’m coming back through the back door of the corporate world to coach people. I love it. I think it’s so much more powerful when you’ve got a lived experience that makes you responsive to what you want to do. People talk a lot about finding a purpose and things, and I think it’s it happens through lived experience, doesn’t it?
Absolutely. And when you see something that really works, and I see it from a lot of people in my network as well, they’re like, I’ve got to bring this to the world. And this, the coaching place, coaching as a term is not new. But it’s used as a buzzword unfortunately. And coaching is used to describe training.
To describe mentoring and even some managers and will say that their coaching, their staff, but they’re telling them what to do. So, the space that I want to be is between training and therapy. Where we help people understand who they are and how to change their habits and their behaviors and then we help them have the tools to actually take control and act on what they control and let go of the rest.
So I definitely want to come back to some of these tools and things and talk through that, but I’m really fascinated by what you’ve just said about that blend between the two different areas, because you’re right, coaching can sometimes have a bad rap because people have got this image of what a coach is in their mind, and that can be a good or a bad thing.
But it’s typically not really what the reality is when you get in with people, and there are so many different types of coaches these days as well. So it’s become more of an umbrella idea rather than necessarily what specific. But tell me about working that tightrope between those two different elements.
There’s, and there’s a lot of different roles that people will think when you do workplace wellbeing as well. So there’s, I’ll start with the role as a coach. And this is something I described to my clients as well. I’m not a therapist. I don’t go in the past and try to really, label all the problems that you have.
In fact, I see you as resourceful and already. You don’t need to be fixed. You just need to get out of your own way essentially and stop. We hope you’re enjoying listening to the Biz Buys Podcast. Have you ever thought about having your own podcast, one for your business where your brilliance is exposed to the rest of the world?
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So come talk to us podcast done for you.com au details in the show notes below. Now back to Biz Bites. You don’t need to be fixed, you just need to get out of your own way essentially and stop. Rip off those labels is what I often tell people when they’re saying, oh, but that’s just the way I am. And I look at them and I do this and they know it.
They’re like, oh, I gotta rip off the label. So I am not a therapist. I don’t go into labeling people. I just wanna quickly say though that I’ve had a therapist for years and it’s very valuable and EAPs are valuable, but beyond that, there’s coaching, and also, I’m not a mentor, so I’m not gonna tell you what worked really well for me and what my sister-in-law did was she was in the same situation as you, and that worked really well for her.
I don’t go there either. I don’t train people to become healthier, and I don’t tell them. What to do, essentially. So it’s that beautiful place where I help people just identify what they want. And even if I ask you, Anthony, what do you want in life? It’s a huge question. Absolutely.
Absolutely. It’s a massive question, isn’t it? To, to truly. Ponder you can give the straightforward one word response and say happiness. But that’s not, that’s pretty shallow in many respects. And but it is, it’s a difficult it’s a difficult question and it’s it really cuts into an emotional state if you truly want to answer it, doesn’t it?
It does. And for a lot of people, it’s an uncomfortable place because they say. What do you mean what I want? I’m just getting by. I’m just doing what I have to do. But there’s so many things when you start really looking at and I don’t wanna go too deep in the, like the coaching structure and approach, but when you start really looking at what you value, what you are good at, then you can start designing.
Things that you want. When I want a smaller house, like it can be just random things like that. Like I just want something smaller, so I just want one space in the house that’s dedicated for me. I want to reconnect with this old friend, like I really want this. It’s also, I just want to have more energy.
What is exactly do you want? And all those things. Essentially are your blueprint for happiness. ’cause you’re right, everyone wants to be happy. This is what we want. I just wanna be happy. I just want a great life. I just wanna make the most outta this life. And it takes a lot of courage to do that though too, doesn’t it?
It’s to, if you are looking for that, sometimes pursuing that can mean that you, a realization that you have to make a whole bunch of changes. But not all at the right time, but not at the same time. No. And a lot of people are perfectionist and the danger in being a perfectionist is you only see the end result and everything you do is never good enough.
’cause it’s never, you are never gonna get straight to the end result. That is perfect. And this is a big trap, and it’s the same with. Goals or happiness. People see this big picture I have heaps of money, the kids are gone. Or some people is, I finally have a baby. It’s this big picture and you can’t get it straight away.
And that’s why it’s so important to have someone who goes let’s reverse engineer this happiness piece and what are the first few steps that you can take and to notice. Also when you are progressing instead of always focusing on the end result and being like, I’m still not there. I’m still not there.
It’s amazing what you say there that. That whole focus on the end result. We have that in most businesses would have that all the time because people come to you, whatever product or service that you are selling and they’re focused on the end result. What am I gonna get at the end?
And they forget about the journey and the fact that there’s so many variables that come into the equation. Why get focused on that? I used to do a lot of websites in my business. We still do a few, but the. The most common question that people ask at the beginning is how long will it take?
And they’re, and then they’re imagining their big, beautiful website at the end of it. And they’re going, okay. And if I say, I can pick a number, and anyone that’s ever built any websites will know, you’ll say to them three months and they go, oh that’s quite a long time. And I go. I’m telling you, three months, it’s going to take six to nine months.
What I’m going, because it’s going to take you that long to do the things that you need to do and all of the changes that you need to make. But the journey that happens along the way when you start writing content and realizing changes that you wanna make in the business or the way you wanna speak, all of those things are part of the journey.
Being focused on just on what the end result is of the website is actually a mistake. There’s more to think about, but it’s hard to get that across to people because people come with a very much a focus on, it’s a bit like it’s not quite the same as walking to into a shop and saying, I want that.
And just walking out with that particular object because most of us aren’t selling those kinds of things to people. And so it is really hard for people to have that focus ’cause we are trained. So much for that instant gratification that getting them to focus on the journey and not the end result. That must be a difficult thing to constantly combat in what you do.
Yes and no. I think there’s a parallel, but it’s very different when I work, ’cause I work with people one-on-one and I work with organizations. And organizations are very focused on the return on investment in terms of dollars productivity, engagement. And I think it’s fair enough that they want to start by with that kind of end result.
Like, how is my team gonna be transformed after they’ve worked with you or we’ve worked with you for three months? And to explain the milestones to get there. And it’s the same with a client, whether they get a six. Session package or a three session package, I think it’s fair enough that they go, but am I really gonna be much more transformed by the end of your six session rather than three?
It makes sense ’cause it’s twice the sessions, but it doesn’t to someone who hasn’t done coaching before. So I think. I don’t really mind how people see it, and I never feel like I have to defend coaching ’cause I deeply believe in the process. But I think it’s helpful and maybe if some coaches are listening, it’s really helpful.
To be able to describe their journey. They don’t care about what we’re gonna do. First, I’m gonna establish what your core values are. That’s like really helpful. And then your strengths. You wanna know your strengths. That says nothing to them. But first, I’m gonna look at the main, pains, like the main energy drainer is in your life, and I’m going to help you use your strengths and make it really easy to get let go of them.
Boom. It’s the same thing. It’s the same work. And then I can say, and for this, typically it would take three sessions to really let go of your biggest energy drainers to really understand yourself and to do it so that, that would be the first three sessions. Then it starts making sense a little bit more for people.
And same with teams. If I say. I don’t know if it’s valuable if I draw the parallel, but it’s a similar approach with organizations. I hear you. You want this and you want this tomorrow. This is the initial situation. This is where I can get your team in the first. This is where your team can be in the first session.
Like I can help them to stop asking you, for example, for work life balance and asking for more and more when you feel like you’re already doing a lot. I will help them to reflect on what they can do, and they’ll come with specific solution and ask you, can you do this? Instead of saying, just improve everything for me.
I don’t know if that makes sense. People really start taking more ownership. Yeah. I think what you’re talking about there as well is a much more personable. Approach. It’s not a one size fits all. Let’s grab everyone into, everyone together. And every, no matter which company you’re with, you’re all gonna be on the same journey.
It’s going to be different, isn’t it? Absolutely. I do have a, the program is cookie cutter. Let’s say there’s a workshop, a quarter and a coaching session every month, but the workshop is. Interactive with the participants. So of course in that sense it’s flexible and the coaching sessions one-on-one, they’re adapted to what they need in the moment.
So yes, there’s no one size fit all in terms of content or yeah, in terms of the way that I will interact with people, it’s not like I have one slideshow and script. That I just vomit on all the organizations. ’cause that wouldn’t work. So if you I imagine that it’s such a personal choice when you come to choosing a coach, but also on the flip side, from your point of view, choosing the right businesses that you are going to be able to make an impact on.
There’s a challenge in doing that and making sure that you are going to be the right fit. And I think people forget about that, that it’s a two-sided consideration. Yeah, no, I got you. I got the question. I think it’s how do I make sure that we’re a good match? The client and myself. Yes. Yeah. So in both areas, the one-on-one coaching and the organization I’m looking for people who understand that they have a role to play so similarly to, to your web design as well.
I can’t do the change on my own. I can deliver the workshops. I can coach people but I can’t change the culture of an organization if the leadership team is not on board and I can’t change a person’s. Overall health and wellbeing if they’re only engaged in this session. And then they also don’t do any changes between the sessions and the main the main it’s easy to detect if someone is ready for coaching or not.
It’s either they want things to change or they want to change. Themselves and in an organization that can sound a little bit like, can you straighten them up? Can you just coach them? They’re driving me insane. That kind of approach. I’m not the right person, but I work with people who can certainly help them.
I have a range of associates and I’ll go. Yes, we can help. This is where I bring the we as CAIRs Coaching as a group. Yeah. We can definitely help with human resources challenges. But me as a coach, no, I’m not there. They’re not there yet. But the person who comes to me and say, I’ve tried so many things and they’re still super stressed, they still take their emails on the weekend.
I’m not asking them to, and I organize events. They don’t participate. Everyone’s just so tired. It feels like it’s December already. That’s a business owner. Recently, she said, it’s got that vibe and I don’t know if you’ve observed it. I’ve observed it in myself. Sometimes in people it feels like Christmas break didn’t do the trick this time.
It’s like people are already tired. It’s like end of Q1. What? Hang on. No, it’s Christmas NMA next month, isn’t it? It’s the end of the year. I’m done. So these kind of people who are really aware of their team’s energy and they genuinely wanna help them and they know that they need to help themselves, like they’ve done a lot, but now they realize that it’s time for the employees to look after themselves, but they do it from.
Maybe more of a heartfelt place than the, than they’re the clients who benefit a lot from coaching. How important is it for you to be standing out in your approach? ’cause it is quite a different approach, I think to, to most people that are in your space. I’m not afraid of not being liked. By everyone.
I know this to be true. I coach CEOs. I’ve coached business owners and the way you treat yourself and the goals you set for yourself in the pers in your personal life, your habits, the way you start your day, the last thing you do before you go to sleep. All of this has an impact. On your workplace, and if people think that only the leadership team needs to be developed and it’s all about training and therapy, they will not agree with me, and that’s okay.
But I like to say, and it’s gonna sound pretentious, but I know. I know what I’m talking about. It really works. People start looking after themselves. People start having healthier habits, and they discover why they want to have so much control on everything. Why aren’t they able to delegate? Why aren’t they able to relax?
And then they can make the changes
that is. That is a really, I can totally understand that process because. You are, what you’ve been saying all along is it needs to come from the inside. That it’s not just an in you, you’re not creating this structure. This is not a regimented exercise program where you come in and say if you do these exercises three times a day, seven days a week, you’re gonna get these muscles.
And that’s the end of it because everybody’s different. Absolutely. And I was watching a webinar by a highly regarded HR firm in Australia. And they talk a lot about engagement and they were talking about performance, and they have a beautiful platform and they have, they, they do a lot of their own research and they sound very knowledgeable.
They are very knowledgeable. But all along I was looking at it from the employee’s lens and thinking this is what the leadership. Teams are listening to, to help their staff perform. There’s nothing in there about giving them resources to. Except for therapy, but resources to take control of the toxic relationships they have in their life, their negative self-talk.
’cause you’ll have a beautiful leader who’s gone through the platform who’s doing a performance review, will go, you did so well in that presentation. And the employer will go, he is just saying that to keep me happy and to shut me down and. And even the best leadership team with all the best approaches that, all the bells and whistles in the performance review and the right process, they’re not gonna get a highly productive team if there’s nothing in there about their mindset and their lifestyle outside of work.
It’s not gonna work. And the best. I guess a very powerful example of how this plays out in real life is employees who like me, right? I’m not saying that these people are wrong, like these people just need support. People are in the union waiting for the, they’re asking their employer to change everything and work life balance and give me four days a week and give me more money.
And then they leave because they’re not getting what they want and they either go to another organization or they say stuff that I’m gonna start my own business and I’m finally gonna have that work life balance that I want. All those people I know who’ve done that, they will recreate the same problems in the next organization or in their own business.
They’re gonna be sitting at their desk working. Through the weekend, taking their emails at night. It’s just, it’s something that’s inside us that we carry wherever we go. So what’s the tips on how to change that if you recognize, that’s the first thing is you’ve gotta recognize it of course, in yourself and take a look at how you are operating and whether that’s ideally how you want to be operating.
But what are the tips then to change it? Because recognizing is one thing, changing is another. And bearing in mind that there are. Very poor workplace culture. I’m not talking about this. I’m not challenging the fact that you can’t work well if there’s too much work. If you have zero control the leadership team is super uninspiring, but if there’s nothing overly wrong in the workplace, it takes, to put our ego aside, I think is the first thing, and to go what exactly is.
The challenge for me, and where can I take responsibility? Where can I speak up? What are the little changes I can do? And a very easy thing you can do is to recognize patterns. So patterns in life are created by our habits, our thought patterns, like our habitual thoughts. So if you look at someone who.
I will give a typical example. Someone comes to work and they just, they’ve got so much to do. There’s there’s the emails, there’s, and then people are on holidays or they’ve sacked a whole lot of people they had, so they genuinely do, it’s a real problem and they’re refusing to hire more people.
This is just real problem.
What do they do when that happens? They. Scroll on their phone or they just randomly reply to emails. They chew through their email box. Maybe they talk to people about how much work they have. Look at this. I’ve got so much work. And then what happens? The workload, there’s still more work or if they just like randomly just.
Chip working on a whole lot of stuff throughout the day. They’ll be super activated, super overwhelmed. And then that continues the pattern. Where can you break the pattern? You can break it before or after you notice the workload. You can come to work energized and refreshed. So then that means you work on your sleep.
Hygiene or what you had for breakfast or your relationship with your kids, like mornings with kids, sometimes no fun. No fun at all. You carry that into work, you’re already overwhelmed or you can work on just after that trigger. The trigger is seeing your email per example, so you can break the pattern there.
When I see the workload, I am gonna step away from my computer, take three breaths, and then write my, what do I need to? That’s an as and hour matrix that I work with every day, and I’ve got an erasable pen. This is what I have to do. This is urgent. This is what I have to schedule in my day. This is what I need to delegate to my va, and this is what I need to get rid of.
If people make the time to either work on before the queue to be more prepared to respond to it, or they work on what they’re gonna do when they get triggered, boom. They’ve broken the cycle. They’ve taken control. You just have to recognize where it starts. Where does the cycle start? That is so powerful that simple idea, and it is a simple idea.
It’s committing to that. That’s the probably the first step. But if you can, I can absolutely see how that is, because we all have triggers, don’t we? We all have little things that set us off. I know, for example, that I get, have a tendency. To come in the morning and look at what all of the messages that have come in overnight.
And I get sucked into that vortex of responding to whatever’s been coming in rather than getting on with what actually is the priorities and some of the things that I want to be doing for myself as well in the morning. So you don’t and then it just changes your whole day. Suddenly you are three quarters of the way through the day and you go, I haven’t done any of the things that I wanted to do.
Yeah, that’s such, it’s so powerful and it happens all the time to self-employed people, to people in the workplace, but when people are in the workplace, they tend to blame the employer. When we’re self-employed, we can’t blame anyone else. So absolutely. I recognize, again, I recognize there are some toxic workplaces.
I call them toxic. They’re not toxic. ’cause if toxic is like, it poisons your body and that’s your decision to let it infect you. But for the sake of a conversation, there are toxic workplaces out there, but not always. There’s so much we can do to change ourselves. So just to help you, Anthony, with this, like putting fires out first thing in the morning and responding to people, letting their energy come into you and treating them like something that’s a priority is potentially a habit, which was unconscious and you just do it on autopilot.
Am I correct? Yeah, absolutely. So now that you’ve named it, the good news is it’s not a habit anymore ’cause you’ve brought it to your consciousness and now you can do something about it. And now you know what your trigger is seeing the messages so you can act on not seeing the messages. You can act on the before or you can act on what you’re gonna do once you’ve seen them.
I’m gonna plan an hour at 11 or 12 once I’ve cleared. High value work. This is where you take your power back. Such an important lesson for people who own businesses, but also as you say, employees. So let me ask you this as well, because this is the main focus of what you’re doing is coming into organizations and helping them with their teams, not, it’s not just the business owner.
How do you take that for a team? How do you firstly recognize what is going wrong? Because there’s always something going wrong. That’s probably why they brought you in the first place. They’re recognizing that something’s not right. So how do you, I. Understand what those factors are.
And is it, does it tend to be more of a cultural thing that is similar for, across a team? Or does it tend to be very much an individual based that’s a good question. They do. Most people, most leaders will come to me saying that the employees, they don’t align with what they want. They seem entitled or.
Ungrateful. I’m trying to recognize trends and the people that came to me. I think that the main challenge, and I hope this answers your question but the main challenge is that they communicate in leadership words to people who. They don’t have the same values. They’re not at work for the same reasons. They will get their paycheck in most instances, whether they work hard or they don’t.
So I think the problem is the clashing in values and making people understand why they go to work. ’cause more, most people go to work for the paycheck, to have something to do. So I think that the challenges for everyone,
I’m not sure if I can answer your question clearly, to be honest, but I think that the main clash that I see is the priorities for the leadership team and the priorities for the staff. And then obviously they can’t. They don’t feel like they’re heard on both ways and leadership team is waiting for the employees to do their part.
And the employees and I say that because this is how people see it often, this, there’s the leadership and there’s the employees. And really what I do is I bring them on the same level. This is what we need. This is what we’re here for, and this is what we need and this is what we’re here for. Does that make sense?
Does that help? Absolutely. It’s such a challenging thing, isn’t it? Because you, as you say, many people are showing up to work. It’s not that they don’t enjoy what they do, but at the end of the day, their commitment is to making sure they’re getting a paycheck at the end of it. And they, most people recognize that they can always get another job somewhere else.
So how much are they actually committed to what they’re to what they’re doing? And I think many people. Work on the basis that it’s always about money as well, but it’s not always about money either, is it? It’s, there are other factors that people want for themselves. Whilst money is nice, it’s not the answer to everything.
As they say, money doesn’t necessarily make you happy. No, and the best proof of that is that people are terrified of retirement. ’cause what am I gonna do with my time? And that demonstrates that. People don’t know how to use their time. They don’t know what they value. They don’t know how to have fun.
Like it’s less and less a thing to just enjoy our life. It’s just we’re on autopilot and this is what I have to do and I should be doing, and we’re missing the point missing. We can embed things that we like in work. And beyond work, then we still have those other aspects to look at as well and to prioritize.
Yeah, it’s and I wanna come to that tricky terminology. And I say this because I know when I’ve used it in the past in post that you get. A whole lot of people that say it’s not the right terminology, but I’m gonna use it because you’ve used it. Work, work life balance. Ooh. Say, the reason I say it’s controversial is that a lot of people say it’s not about balancing things, and that’s the wrong way of looking at it.
And so let’s put all of that aside and just say, how do you find what you need to bring from. Your personal life into your work life, and how do you find the right amount to put into each? Because there is a crossover between the two, no matter what you do. 100%. And I actually, one of my presentations and workshops is called Life Balance, and this is how I start.
I’m like, this work-life balance thing doesn’t work, but you can call it whatever you want. The idea of balance is the idea that I feel like I am giving energy to a number of areas in my life and. And this can be done outside of work, and it can be done at work as well with simple things like going for a walk on your lunch break or bringing food that you like to work or calling your, when you have that midday slump calling a friend.
You can bring those other aspects. And when I’m talking about life balance, I’m talking about something that’s very coachy. It’s the Wheel of Life. And the Wheel of Life has several aspects that you can improve in your life. And these are all aspects that can be improved at home and at work as well.
So we’re talking environment. So simple things. Is your desk super messy? And that adds to the overwhelm of, I’ve got so much to do. Look at this pile of crap. Then this is one aspect that you can improve. And it’s part of life balance. It’s just realizing that the small steps matter.
Taking control. You absolutely nailed one of the most important aspects that I say that this show is all about. It’s the small steps. That’s what you know, this whole podcast has been about. Talking to thought leaders like yourself and being able to implement the what little one percenters, those little things that make a difference, that accumulate over a period of time and make a huge difference to the way you’re doing it.
So I, that, that way that you think about things I think is so important. And because it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. If you come in thinking just about the big outcome, then it’s just too hard, it’s too overwhelming. It’s the little things that you can achieve along the way that are gonna make the big difference.
100%. And for your listeners, if they’re so they’re business owners. Potentially looking at, making more money, but also finding life balance in their life. And they’re responsible for it, most of them, right? They don’t have an employer. Their employer is their clients. I would, I’m happy to share the Wheel of Life exercise and they can start to actually design and implement those small steps one segment of their life at a time.
I’m happy to share that with them. Fantastic. And I certainly welcome all the listeners to to jump on and do that. We’ll make sure we’ve got a way of sharing that through the show notes. I appreciate that. We are nearly running outta time, but I wanted to ask you also about terminology that you use health and wellbeing at work and home.
What does that actually mean? Because people often just think health, oh, that just means going and doing a few exercises and eating vegetables. But what, when you start saying health and wellbeing at home and work go how do, what does that actually mean? Absolutely. And thanks for asking the question.
It’s funny ’cause I’ve actually drafted a post about this, like the language I use, the language we use. So health is multidimensional. Your health is what people call holistic. So there’s the physical health, mental health, social health, spiritual health, environmental health. These are all the ways to improve your overall health essentially.
Then wellbeing is your level of life satisfaction, your fulfillment. Some people call it happiness. Happiness. Happiness comes and goes though it’s quite quick. It’s oh, that was fun. That was a fun thing. And these are moments that are really important to grasp. But wellbeing is that place of I, I feel fulfilled.
I feel like I am in the right place at the right time. And what I like to say with wellbeing is you wake up and you’re excited about your day. And when you go to sleep, you’re happy with the day you’ve had. This is wellbeing. And then I also talk about wellness like I’m a wellness coach, and wellness is all the proactive steps that people take to improve their health and their wellbeing.
So how do I take control to improve this? And it’s in the simplest steps. Again, it’s all surrounded by self-care, which means, which is another buzzword, isn’t it? But self-care is just knowing who you are and then honoring what you want, who you are, what you need through daily actions, through wellness, essentially.
So much more that we could explore there, and I know perhaps we’ll do it another time. I’ve got two final questions I wanted to ask you. And the first one is going back to the beginning, ’cause I’m fascinated by this because you’ve made a massive leap in your life to be going from to growing up in another country, to moving, like you can’t move much further away than between Canada and Australia.
It’s a long trip and how’s that journey been for you when you reflect? Back on it and making those changes. ’cause I imagine you came with a backpack, you came on your own. Is your family still on the other side of the world? And how much how hard is that journey and how much has that had an impact on what you are doing today?
Do you know one of my friend is Dr. Nadia Maid, and she’s a supervisor for research papers. They called ethnographic. Research paper. And this blends your story with research facts to explain what happens to people. So you use your personal experience and you write a paper about it, and this is something I want to do.
So your question is highly personal and meaningful to me because I grew up. In a loving family, but a family that pretty much stays small and don’t be too loud and don’t bother people and don’t try new things. ’cause you might fail and you don’t wanna look stupid in front of people. If you trip in front of people, you wanna get up and get out of there.
And I moved here the first time. Because I learned to just avoid pain and avoid things, and I lost my partner overnight in a car accident. He was gone and I felt like I had to go as far as I could and I came here, I escaped and then I went back home, didn’t work, came back and I think I was, when I was here, I kept saying, oh, it’s so much better in Canada.
And then I’d go back to Canada and it’s so much better in Australia. I was never happy. Do you see the patent? Then I had a job and I was like, this is not it. And I get another job. This is not it. And I guess along the time here, and I found a beautiful partner that’s how I got to stay is he wanted to marry me.
And we’re still together. That’s a good decision. Very good decision. Very good decision. But the main thing is I decided that I was not. Was giving up anymore. I was not giving up on myself. I was not giving up on people. I was not giving up on Australia. I was just like, I’m here. This is what I’m working with now.
And noticing the cultural differences, learning a new language. ’cause let’s face it, Australian English is not the English I learned in Canada either, and I was speaking only French there. All of those challenges that I decided to take and then having a kid, it’s just. Made me have that perspective of, um, what’s a small problem, like when things, like I escalate things and I wanna give up, and I just, I can’t face it.
I’m like, is that a real problem or am I just trying to run away and this is what the paper is gonna be about when I write my auto ethnography is just. Just stick with it. Just believe in it. Just keep getting traction into.
Leave, like just, oh, that’s gonna sound super cheesy, but like leaving a legacy, right? Just do something. Just keep growing. It’s fine. There’s no real risk. People are afraid of failure. But when you think about failure, like the worst thing is often just the way you’re gonna feel. So if you know that you’re gonna have your own back, if you do fail, then there’s nothing to fear.
That is so powerful. And I can’t wait to read the paper, so I’m looking forward to that Sure. To hearing about it when it’s done, and and we’ll share it with the audience as well when that happens. One final question and I feel like, wow, we could just sit and talk about that for another couple of hours as well, but, one final question I always like to ask my guests is, what’s the aha moment that people have when they come to work with you that they perhaps didn’t realize they were going to have? I think the biggest aha is how much they’re trying to protect themselves. So people have, people are the people who come to see me, they’re very perfectionist, but they often have a value of financial safety per example.
And ’cause they’re trying to protect themselves and then they do things or they, they jeopardize relationships with their kids or with their partner ’cause they’re trying to protect them from making a mistake or and the big aha moment is they’re the only ones who suffer in that. People around them don’t really, they don’t really see it like that and they don’t need protection.
So that’s, I. Mostly on the one-on-one side and on the business side, the biggest aha is how I think people are. They seem what they’re doing at work seems like they don’t care or they’re doing something wrong. And when I start coaching and I start reporting back with the, not the coaching.
Conversation, obviously that’s confidential, but with the, where the conversation, the themes of the conversation the reasons why they’re doing it self-protection. Ultimately people are just trying to stay safe. They feel like the world is very overwhelming. But this is, they’re shooting themselves in the foot.
That is, so many powerful moments in this discussion. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it and I hope the listeners have as well, because there’s a lot of. Amazing insights and simple things that I think you’ve given us that to, to think about and how we can do and how and the approach and your own journey, I think adds to that value as well.
And people can understand how you’ve come to do what you do. And I want to thank you so much for being a part of the Biz Buys program and a reminder to everyone. Of course, we’ll include lots of details in the show notes of how to get in touch and some of the things that we’ve talked about.
But thank you for sharing so openly with everything. Thank you. Thank you for your time and for inviting me. And to everyone listening in, thank you again. And of course, stay tuned for the next episode of Biz Bites. A reminder to subscribe and never miss a thing. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program.
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Nina Fountain
Nina Fountain – The Executive Stylist
Personal Styling & Style Coaching for Women
You want to have the confidence to be able to be out there, but you also want the personal style to make sure you get that right. Also, you need to consider what happens if you are presenting online, getting your background right, and developing your personal style to show.
This episode contains more than just a high-level discussion, you will gain practical tips to make a real difference to your personal brand from a genuine Thought Leader in this space.
Offer: The Style Personal™️ quiz, BIZ BITES audience can use the code BIZBITES to receive the quiz as a gift.
From fear to confidence, how to unlock your personal style and build a strong personal brand. This is the subject of a really special episode of Biz Bites because we look at the elements that are really going to help you stand out now, be that being on stage and being a keynote speaker, or just being in front of a small group of people.
You wanna have the confidence to be able to be out there, but you also want the personal style to make sure you get that right. But you also want to consider what happens if you are presenting, but you are here in a online situation, getting your background right, developing what is your personal style to show on there.
We talk through all of those things and so much more. Some really practical tips. You don’t wanna miss this very special episode of Biz Bites with Nina Fountain.
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites and today’s guest it’s a little bit different from what we’ve talked about on the program before, but a really important aspect and idea for thought leaders to think about and we’ve got lots of avenues to talk about through there.
And Nina, welcome to the program. Thank you. It’s great to be here. Now, as I always like to do. I’d love to introduce yourself into the program and tell us a little bit about you and about about what you do. Sure. My name’s Nina. I am the executive stylist. I’m known as the executive stylist, and I’m also a management consultant.
So I wear two hats, which means I know what it’s like to be in the public eye, to give keynotes, to be on tv, and I know what it’s like to be raising a visibility. So my clients are usually women who are looking to expand their influence. Through speaking, or they’re gonna be in front of the media more.
They’re stepping into the C-suite. They’re thinking about how they can take that visual message and make it aligned with what they want to, what they wanna say to the world in that moment. I think there’s so much to unpack in all of this, and we’re gonna go through lots of different things, but I want to hit you up first just, with a question without notice, but what would you say is the number one reason that women object to or put up a barrier, I suppose is a better term to actually being.
The front person, and I think that probably extends beyond women, but I’m interested as to whether there’s a difference between men and women as well. Yes. Oh, it’s such a good question because the thing I hear in my mind is people saying, oh, it’s someone else’s role, or, oh, I, I couldn’t do that.
Because I’m not overly qualified or I’ve never done it before. I don’t know if I’d feel comfortable. And all of those, they’re coming from different places and there’s different reasons, but essentially it’s a fear of standing out too much and doing something that might misalign them from the group.
I think that’s the main fear, is it’s a safe place to be. When you’re fitting in. You feel like you are not super visible. You are acceptable amongst the, your peers. And then when you stand out and you’re visible and people are looking at you on stage for 40 minutes or they are really aware of your image because you are, you’re public, then yeah it’s, there’s a fear piece that can kick in.
Am I worth it? Do I belong? Am I looking, the part is, part of that, is part of that whole fear. So yeah. I’d love it if I could boil it down to one thing, but I’m gonna have to come back to you on that so we could perhaps we could say the one thing is the fear is the and. And I think that it’s an interesting, a lot people often talk about the whole idea of the fear of public speaking.
People would yes. That whole, that old joke that if it’s a joke that they would rather be in the coffin than speaking about speaking at a funeral. Yeah. Which, I guess for me it’s, that’s always been a little bit bizarre because you speak for a living effectively, correct?
Correct. I don’t do, I speak for a living, but I also worked in the funeral industry for seven years. Ah. So I also know all about that side of things as well. So it really always seemed like a strange thing. But but I totally underst I, in saying that, I do totally understand that people have that that fear of doing that and it’s not.
And it’s only when you realize that it’s, when it’s something that does come relatively easy to you that you realize. Sometimes that it’s not so easy for other people. Yeah. And I know I had a a, an event that was organized recently that was very last minute. In fact it was organized on the day and I spent the day organizing it and organizing all the speakers and I’d put my hand up to be the mc for the event.
Wow. And we literally sat down in the event starting and I went. I’ve been so busy focused on everyone else. I have no idea what I’m supposed to say. And so I had nothing scripted at all. I had the people’s names. That was literally all I had. Wow. And, but it was actually I actually got a buzz out of doing it.
It was fun. In the end, you turned it in. It was so much fun. I was just going, I love that idea. And then people said to me, what, they loved what I said, but I couldn’t completely recall everything that I’d said because yeah. It was so spontaneous and Yeah. But I did recognize that, having watched other people mc events and things that Yeah it doesn’t always come easily.
No, it doesn’t. And I think back to my own journey of how do you then get to, how do you get to the point where you are on stage and you feel comfortable? And I think there were two really key turning points for me and. One was that I think initially I had heard this fear of public speaking thing, and I remember when I was at school, my first public speaking, we hope you’re enjoying listening to the Biz Buys podcast.
Have you ever thought about having your own podcast, one for your business where your brilliance is exposed to the rest of the world? Come talk to us at podcast. Done for You. That’s what we’re all about. We even offer a service where I’ll anchor the program for you. So all you have to do is show up for a conversation, but don’t worry about that.
We will do everything to design a program that suits you. From the strategy right through to publishing and of course helping you share it. So come talk to us podcast done for you.com au Details in the show notes below. Now back to Biz bites. One was that I think initially I had heard this fear of public speaking thing, and I remember when I was.
At school, my first public speaking opportunity. What, like at the age of nine or 10, I was a bit scared and I didn’t feel like my cards were adequate for the occasion. And I think I carried that through into other opportunities. ’cause I never, as far as I can recall, up until, my, probably my early thirties didn’t feel okay.
I really nailed that. I landed it, I feel really comfortable with what I said. And then someone told me that someone pointed out that the experience you have when you are nervous, your body’s response, the parasympathetic response of, perhaps a bit of increased temperature and some sweat and your palms go clammy is exactly the same as when you are excited.
And I realize that’s so true and that gives you an opportunity to reframe it and to. To say to yourself, maybe there’s a bit of nerves, but I’m excited about this. And to look more at the excitement element rather than thinking, this is just nerves. Look at me. I must be nervous. Instead you have the opportunity to say, look at me.
I must be excited. And that actually really helped me to flip my mindset and to become excited about it. And then I think the other turning point was when I decided to. Let go of my preparation and just turn up like you did for that event and go with it and just at some point say, I’ve done my prep.
Now it’s time to be present. It’s time to just be the show, this is what people have come for and I need to, I need all of my self and all of my mindset to be in this moment to be able to deliver on. On what they’re expecting and not to, be caught in my prep and in my thoughts, and did I say this and did I say that?
So that, that’s actually really turned things around for me as well in terms of feeling comfortable because there comes a point when you can’t prepare anymore. You just have to be there. Yeah I’ve, one of the things that I participated in a couple of years ago it was a talk by a guy called Todd Herman.
I don’t know if you’ve heard of Todd, I dunno the name. No. And he’s written a book called The Alter Ego. And he’s worked with a number of very high profile celebrities and sports people, and it’s this whole idea that particularly I think Beyonce is the most well known, not necessarily that I don’t know that Beyonce was his client but her idea was the most well known that she was, got very, got a lot of stage fright.
And so she interesting. She invented this character called Sasha Fierce, and she. Was for her purposes. Sasha Fierce when she went on stage and not Beyonce. And I think she’s since overcome all of that. So very interesting. And but I find that kind of interesting, that idea because it’s a little bit it’s a little bit almost, it’s not quite the opposite to what you’re saying.
It’s about in, in on one respect, it’s going, okay, I’ve gotta pretend I’m somebody else. And I always found that a little bit challenging. Whereas the idea that you are talking about is really just being at one with yourself, but understanding that you can turn those emotions around and to think about it in a different way.
I think there’s something, this is so interesting, this is fascinating. I really wanna find out more about that now. And what it reminds me of, and I wonder if this is. A concept that’s somewhere between the two is that concept of persona. Which is the, the small aspects that people get to observe about you in a particular situation that you can manage for your own message if you like.
So your, at any one point in time. If you only have a couple of contacts with people, you see very little about them. You don’t fully get the three dimensional version of them, you get the two dimensional version, you get specific aspects. And in marketing, branding we call that persona because it’s not the full personality.
It’s not all the complicated aspects. It’s the aspects that will help serve that purpose. I guess in, in a way, what we’re doing when we’re on stage or when we’re speaking is being the persona, speaker or podcaster or leader or, it’s really just one aspect of you, but it’s when you do that to your fullest extent, when you serve in that moment by really stepping into that persona that actually.
Gives people what they need from that moment as well. It’s yeah I just wonder if. Persona could be another way to, to think about it. It is very much talking out loud, thinking out. Part of what Todd talks about as well, he gave a personal example where when he walks into the office, he puts on his glasses.
Now he’s, he actually doesn’t need glasses. He just has a pair of glasses that then make him feel like, okay, this is work mode. Which equally when he takes the glasses off Oh, and steps into the home, he’s now in, dad. Mode. And so he’s no longer at work. And I understand that there’s certain triggers that you have in different environments, and I know certainly, for me, I know I make a point of getting changed, so I work from home.
Yeah, nice, lovely studio from home. But the the thing, and I’ve been doing that for a very long time. Probably, I think it’s about 15 years now. And I’ve made it a point from the beginning of going, when I finish work, I get changed. Nice. It’s just because that way it triggers and goes, no, there’s no inclination to go back into the office.
And it’s also that different mindset, and I think it’s I’m interested as well, when you’re going on stage, you or you’re in a you’re in a situation where you’re a thought leader and therefore you have to speak in front of people, whatever that looks like. Are there certain things that people need to, should be thinking about as triggers to.
Lift themselves in a way that needs to project who they are and the circumstance. Absolutely. And let’s come back to what you said around the glasses and changing your outfit for work versus home, because there’s some research done around that. It’s really fascinating. And I think to your point around if you’re on stage, you’re speaking.
What are those triggers? What are the things that are going to enable you to step into that role and to deliver? And one of them is, that sense of power, that sense of personal affirmation and strength, which a lot of people can get from clothing. And I talk about their style as the second skin of a superhero that if you are wearing clothes that feel they’re so connected with you and the, they’re the best version of you and you’re absolutely looking the part and you absolutely feel.
Amazing. You look at yourself and you’re like, that look so good. That’s incredibly empowering and that, that is one of those triggers, if you like that people use to feel fantastic in that moment and to know that they can deliver. And then I think there’s other more personal things. When I was it reminds me of when I was on live tv live National tv.
It was a 10 minute interview. And I wore a pair of shoes that I had purchased with the first payment from a consulting gig. That was one of the best things I’d done in my career. And I had bought them as a celebration of success and a celebration of that achievement. And it was really fun to wear those on set when I was being interviewed on live tv.
And just remember, this is. This is one of those, this is another great moment. This is another moment of what I’ve built in this business and my knowledge and what I can contribute. And so I think the, that’s the other thing is that people sometimes have those personal reminders that are really meaningful of who they are and what they have to bring in that moment.
Yeah. And. So that’s the answer the triggers. That, yeah, I love this as well. Connect, that connection as well between some, a successful business moment and something that you are carrying into a space where you are having to, embellish and talk more about that. It’s a nice way of carrying that forward and what an appropriate place to, to wear them.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And what you said about the glasses and then changing your clothes and that queuing in around the different contexts. There’s some research done on, there’s actually 600 research papers that talk about this concept of enclosed cognition, which is literally that the clothes we wear.
Can affect our thinking style in terms of our productivity at focus or creativity. So that’s what the studies were limited to was, does this particular coat that person is wearing make them more productive or does a coat that they’re wearing make them more creative? And what was really interesting was that the coats were the same.
In the two groups, they were just told that it was different. One was told that they were wearing a doctor’s coat and the other group was told that they were wearing an art. An artist’s coat, a painter’s coat, and the people in the painter’s group were more creative. The people in the doctor’s coat were more focused and more productive.
So these, the meanings that we attach to the clothes that we wear, literally they don’t, they’re not just. Conveniences, they actually go deeper in terms of affecting how our cognition works. They literally change your neuropsychology in a moment based on, on. Yeah. On the meaning that you’ve associated it.
And it’s so true. I know back many years ago, and I worked in a corporate environment, and so it was the full suit and tie thing. Yeah. And I always felt restricted creatively that I just felt like just, the suit and tie does not work with someone who’s in a creative space in the sort of marketing space that I was in.
And I know when I started com together that it was like right from day one. It’s a jeans policy. Nice. And it was like, and I threw away all the ties. Funnily enough, I had to buy a suit recently for some for a different purpose outside of work. And I was wearing and someone commented nice tie.
And I said, it’s the first time I’ve put on a tie in 15 years. Yeah. It was ridiculous. Who am I, what am I in this moment? Yeah. It’s, but it is interesting how the, how those things can make a real difference to. The way we think and the way we are in a moment. And I guess, how important is it in terms of getting, we’re focused on the idea of just putting something on that’s associated right.
But in terms of the image that you project when you are in a position of leadership, because I think we’ve had this traditional thing where it’s suit and tie in the equivalent thereof for a.
Th that’s shifted in recent times. I’ve noticed. I think for me the most bizarre thing was when Covid, so as I mentioned, I’ve worked from home for a long time, so being online and doing things online was not new to me. But I recognized when COVID came and we had lockdowns that people started working online.
And suddenly you went from having conversations with people who were. Wearing a suit and tie in the office. Yeah. And now just because they were at home, they were in like t-shirt and kids running around and dogs everywhere and all that sort of stuff was happening. Yeah. Yeah. And then it the barriers started coming up again when people started realizing it.
But I think this blend of what what people feel is the right thing and spending some time on the image that they project. Yeah. It is really important and. I think it’s one of those things where people may or may not have their own stories and other people’s stories to draw on as they form their own impression around this.
And I think it’s also not simple in that each person’s work context and their personality and what’s important to them are gonna be quite different. How that leader is and what they’re needing to convey is going to change and shift across. As many, as many people as you have in the room.
There’s gonna be different scenarios. So it means there isn’t a great blanket rule at the same time. I think what’s happened is that we haven’t had, because it’s a subtle visual language that we’re talking about, like manners or accent or color, for example. These are things that are, they’re there, they’re part of the experience.
You don’t necessarily bring them to the surface and actually have a conversation about them. So there isn’t a collective conversation about what’s going on here. And it may be for that reason, people aren’t getting shoulder tapped by their. By their boss because they don’t wanna be seen as overstepping the mark and they, so they’re, it’s like, how do we talk about this?
How do we talk about this blurring of the lines? And my take on it is that what I’m seeing is a lot of people are, if you are like abdicating their right to manage their message. By not looking the part. And that makes it hard for people to easily do business with them in whatever context they are.
So for example, I had someone through a video series communicate about how she could help me make a million dollars through speaking. And meanwhile, she was dressed. Really shabby, I’ve gotta say sweatshirt, t-shirt hair pulled back, no, no effort to her appearance at all. And also the setting was in her kitchen where you could literally see the toaster as well as the thing that she was using to present.
And you thought, if you don’t respect this environment, then what respect do you have for this opportunity that you are presenting? And. Really, do you actually have the ability to help me make a million dollars through speaking? Because I’ve just got questions now and it’s certainly not that I could get a clear answer.
It’s just the fact that it raises a question that puts blocks in people’s way to want to do business, and I feel like there. That’s the thing that a lot of people aren’t realizing, but I get to hear the stories and one of them was a lady who was a recruitment agent and had sent an executive along the executive sales through, gets to the third interview, looks really professional in the first two, but the third one’s online.
The others have been in person, turns up wearing a t-shirt with a logo on it and she’s interviewing for an executive position and. She ended up getting the job, but the recruitment agent said that the company came back to her and said what was with her outfit. And then the recruitment agent also said, you can guarantee that they reduced her salary because of how she presented in that last interview.
And, all subtle, all behind doors, no one’s gonna talk about it. But these are the kinds of things that are happening when people. Don’t make it easy to, for the door to open. It is so fascinating. And I think it’s, we’ve lived in different, in such different times now. I remember, you talk about how people present themselves.
It really wasn’t that long ago that tattoos were not a thing that were particularly common. Yeah. And now of course we’ve got the full sleeves and things that people have, but I remember a time. When people would co actively cover it up. So if they had the sleeve, they would Yeah. Wear the one sleeve.
Oh yeah. I was in that era. I remember those. I’m sorry. Yeah. And look, and I remember meeting someone and I’d known him for a number of years and seen him off and on. And I happened to see him one day, and I think it was, he was wearing short sleeves or something. He was getting ready to leave work, whatever it was.
And I was like, oh my God. I didn’t realize, not that it was a big deal, but I just, I had no idea. Yeah. And because he was actively. Covering it up. Covering it up, which you wouldn’t do anymore. That’s just not and but it’s interesting how perceptions have changed. Yeah.
And I’m wondering as well, I remember hearing many years ago that when you’re presenting particularly if you’re doing it on camera, but presenting in general, don’t wear a hat and don’t wear glasses because it’s putting a mask or a barrier between people. I happily do plenty of times when I don’t have the hat on.
I haven’t got a lot of hair. So that’s a different, that’s a different layer and quite frankly, love it. I can take the glasses off, but I won’t be able to see you very well. Yes. And I, contacts have never been a good thing for me, so I just, it is what it is, but I’m just interested as to whether that actually is a thing or that’s just a, an old detail.
And have we shifted much like the tattoos, have we shifted in, in the way that we think? I love that. I think we have shifted. And for you it’s a really, it’s a creative. It comes across as creative, which is so in line with your brand. And that’s I think, where society as a whole has shifted is that we are much more pluralistic, we’re much more every person is an individual and every business is unique and every situation is different.
So we’re much more tolerant of lots of different ways of doing things to, yeah, to look the part or to. Be the person that you are. And at the same time, what hasn’t changed is our really primal needs for for people to, do what they say they’re going to do, to be the person that you think they are to deliver when you ask them to do something.
And these more basic kind of expectations of trust and consistency and. Yeah. Belonging, even. These are all things that, that style speaks into. So it’s walking a fine line. People do need to walk a bit of a fine line there in terms of putting distance between you with glasses and with a hat, I’ve, I think now there’s so much more tolerance of.
Like creativity, especially with someone like you it’s absolutely aligned with your brand and who you are. So it totally makes sense, yeah, it just makes sense. Can you tell my mother that she hates the hat by send the rest of my family? I have no problem with her, but mom, if you’re watching, I’m sorry, I’m still wearing hat and it looks great.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a good question. But it is an interesting thing though about the question of how much time people spend thinking about their brand. ’cause you spend a lot of time, if you go, if you’re in that situation where you’re going to be speaking and whether it is a keynote situation or whether it’s just in front of your team or a small group, whatever that is.
Yeah. How much time do people actually spend thinking about their own personal brand and the way they’re preventing themselves and what that actually means. And again, whether there’s a. A difference between the way men and women think in that regard. And do you know my answer to that is you make one decision that makes all of the decisions for you.
And really when you do something like a styling experience with someone like me where we’re aligning. Brand and style. We’re aligning that person’s style with their personality so that it feels very, connected to who they are and they absolutely feel fantastic in it. Then you’ve got your outfits together, you have your pictures on your phone, so in the morning you can just check what’s on your calendar, check what the weather is and decide.
Which outfit you’re gonna wear. It takes you a minute to choose what to wear rather than having to, think about it every day. So I feel like, yeah, it’s one of those things that falls into just get it done right at the beginning and then have a clear direction. It’s like that’s the strategy and then the implementation follows much more easily.
I love that it’s are very basic tips for people, isn’t it? To think about it and to then literally have that and go well, depending on the kind of people that you are talking to at that day or not talking to. Yeah, I know. I certainly have a, the odd day where I’ve got rather zero meetings or the meetings are just internal so I can don’t have to wear a shirt, I can wear a polo shirt instead, for example.
Yeah. And those little things can make a bit of a difference as to how you. Think in how you want to be and show up during that day and what you’re trying to get done. Totally. Because it’s not just about presenting, it’s about what you wanna get done in that day. It’s absolutely about what you wanna get done and what kind of flow you want to be, and whether you want to be productive.
I’ll have my creative days. Sometimes a Saturday is a creative day for me where I know I’m not gonna have any expectations to meet with people. And actually that’s flipping more to me Monday now because I’m working more in the us. And people don’t book meetings on Sunday, their time.
So I’ve got this whole day, and that’s a day when I turn up in jeans, a t-shirt, and I’m still work focused, but I’m not, as, I’m working, sorry, but I’m not as focused in that moment. I’m looking more for those creative ideas, that strategic thinking, the, the kind of information gathering is what I’ll do on those days.
Now before we move away from the visual brand elements, there’s one thing that I wanted to point out to people that you and I discussed actually when we first met a little bit. And I just wanna talk about the surrounds because I think one of the things that’s important is that many people today are presenting online.
So what you have in your background is also important. The tendency has been to opt for a virtual background for many people. And I personally, I used it for a while and. I get it. Sometimes you’re not in a situation where you can. Particularly tidy up what’s behind you, and you think do I really wanna show all of this to, to the world?
And you tend to think, oh, I’ll have a nice kind some kind of visual thing. Sometimes it shows a fake office or a fake setting. I prefer it when it, when, if you’re going to use it, you see something where it’s a bit more on brand. So you’ll, you might have the logo in the corner and just some color in there, but even then it’s not as good as having something.
That’s real. And it’s actually surprisingly easy. And you’ve got a little secret behind you to make that look good. And it doesn’t, it didn’t take very much, did it? It didn’t take very much. And in fact, I can give you some insights. So this is a it’s a wooden divider, if you like. It’s a wooden fence.
So this is the rest of my office over here is there’s a, there’s my. My bookshelf and the rest of my house is over there, so I won’t show you too much. But for me, that works beautifully in that I am in my workspace. I’m also not seeing everything else behind me. So I’m not distracted by my house.
I can just be in my office and thinking and being focused here. And then, yeah, I think the other thing that makes it work is that it’s not fake. And people. Feel like they’re just focused on the, on, the person that’s appearing in front of them. Yeah, I think like you’ve done a great job where you’ve given some hints of what you do with a, with some words behind you.
At the same time it’s not distracting. So there’s an element of it feeling homely, like you’ve got some home elements, but they’re also not dominating the whole scene and it doesn’t. The eye’s not too distracted. And that’s one thing I’ve seen, like you and I could talk about this for so long, but I’ve seen people, they fill the back of their space with, a whiskey bottle trophy a picture of them on holidays and you name it.
There’s all kinds of things there. And where’s the mind going when. Your, where’s that per that conversational partner’s mind going? They’re trying to work out what all those things are because it looks like you’ve made them important to the conversation. You’ve brought them into the conversation.
So now they’re trying to add that to what they’re thinking about with you and, and join the dots there and. I just don’t think that’s smart business, to be honest. No, and I think the point is as well that you can make it, what you’ve done is it doesn’t cost very much. No.
It’s very simple to get, it doesn’t take up much space. You can easily fold it away when you’re not Yes. In business mode or need the extra space for whatever reason. But when it comes to, okay, I’ve gotta set things up and rather than, and I, look, I’ve done the thing where I’ve put a green screen on the back of the chair and try and cover those and I.
Seeing people do various versions of that if you can do something like that it’s a much easier way of doing it and looking smart in the process. Yeah. And actually centering the focus on the person rather than being distracted by, because I think that’s what people forget is that I.
The virtual backgrounds are often very distracting. Yeah, they are. And you can see the movement, we all, we, no, none of us keeps dead still, when we’re talking and, we exaggerate it. Now we move our heads and we, we move our arms and things and how many times do you see that visual barrier breaking around the person and you go, that’s a virtual background.
Yeah. And it just distracts you from what you’re talking about. That’s right. Another really important tip is what you are managing really well, which is lighting. And so here I have natural light and I also have a light just to my left that helps to supplement that so I’m not half in shadow. And I think people are not always thinking about their lighting, but it’s important, especially if they are wearing glasses.
So again, you’ve managed that like really nicely. There’s no reflection on your glasses. And then yeah the other. Thing is that faces can easily be hidden. They’re often a lot darker than they need to be. So the face doesn’t show as the most important thing. And yeah, we’ve just got to get a few things right.
This is, this little square is how people are meeting us these days, right? So absolutely. You’ve just gotta manage that image that’s. It’s more than and it’s not a big investment. I think that’s the intriguing thing is that, I know for example, when I set this studio up that yes, I’ve got a few lights that are sitting in the background.
But that’s just more for background lighting. But I’ve got one key light. That is just in front of me there. Yeah. Nice. And it was not a big investment, I think it was. Yeah. $150, something like that. Yeah. And but it makes the world of difference. The world of, because it also means that the, it also means that the, what the camera is doing a lot less work in trying to compensate for different lighting.
Yeah. And I think that’s an important thing to remember is that, the equipment that you’ve got, the camera. Can only do so much. And can I add one other thing, and I think, and you and I are demonstrating how to do it, is that we talked before about what creates distance between people.
One of the things that’s creating distance is that people are not So if, yeah. Do we do it from the audience perspective or from the speaker’s perspective? So what speakers are doing is they’re not always revealing much of themselves because they’re hiding at the bottom of the screen, and for whatever reason it might be because they don’t feel comfortable with what they’re wearing on the day.
That doesn’t feel screen appropriate, but that means that two thirds of the real estate is just on the background and this, but this, the more someone can see, the more it feels like they’re. They’re with you in person. Obviously they’re not, but the more they can understand of you, the more information, the better, basically.
And it just visually looks good to break it up into thirds. So to have the eyes at around two thirds of the screen height. So it’s no, there’s no exact rule, but that’s gonna be a more visually appealing look. Yeah, that’s, yeah, the amount of times, I think we’ve all been in these group zooms and you look around and people, and I’ve been, look, I was in a I was actually a one-on-one meeting with someone today, and they were it was almost as if you can picture this, I was, I.
If I was standing up and he was in his lounge chair and because there was that kind of a distance, he was lower down. He was slouching back and I can’t even replicate that because the chair won’t go lower here from the way I’ve got it set up. But it’s, and I think these are things that people forget that there are the visuals.
That you create are really important because you don’t, as I, we talked about the hat and glasses, but you don’t want barriers that are between people being able to relate to you and to Exactly. To, to feel as though they’re there and. I think one of the challenges is and I, I remember a couple of years ago, and I know you are based in New Zealand, so I dunno whether you saw this story, but it was probably about five or six years ago now that Carl Stefano, who hosted the Today Show in Australia, yeah.
Wore the same suit for 12 months every single day. Nobody noticed. Wow. Yet, his co-host at the time was Lisa Wilkinson, who was getting criticized constantly if she would even consider wearing the same outfit two days in a row. And people were critical. Oh, you wore this didn’t like this color, or didn’t like this cut, or whatever it was.
I. And nobody noticed at all what he was doing. And he literally, he nobody even in, I don’t think anyone in the Today Show actually particularly noticed either. And he made a thing of it and he did it very deliberately. And it was only after 12 months that he, revealed it and said, he said, the game’s up.
I’ve been wearing the games up. Yeah. Wow. And it’s, and I think it’s fascinating that, because one of the things that I’ve found in doing, podcasts for other people and having lots of guests come on my program I’d have to say that I haven’t done the exact statistics, but I would say I.
For the majority of people that object to being on video are women. There’s a feeling that, oh, I’ve gotta do the hair and the makeup and I’ve gotta have clothes on and things. Men don’t seem to care as much. But then I think we’ve also seen a little bit of a turn where there, there definitely is men putting more into their appearance and maybe women being a little bit more relaxed as well.
I’m not sure. But it is an interesting psyche that, that. We don’t seem to focus as much on the men visually as we do. Yeah. It’s true. And men are more likely to say to me, look, I just don’t care. Is there different colors of T-shirts? I didn’t know, someone had someone tell me that it’s white or black.
That’s it, isn’t it? That’s right. Is that the response for most of them? But then the same person, interestingly, went on to say. He runs three day events that he wears blue on the first day, yellow on the second day, yellow on the last day, pink on the second day. So he actually and he had reasons for doing that.
So it was interesting in that it was a foot in both camps, like realizing that fashion’s not going to be a huge deal in the day, but also realizing it does communicate something, it does send a message and yeah, I think. Uh, there are genetic differences, social differences between the two, between men and women on the research that’s been done on men and women.
And yeah. And it comes down to things like color sensitivity and there’s a fascinating piece of research done by NASA on the power of color, where they were looking at how could they use color to improve performance. And so they looked at the effect of color on men and women. And women were much more affected by color and it made a much bigger difference to their mood and to their yeah.
The way they went about their day. So yeah. So I think if we just look at men and women, that’s. That’s the research that we’ve got. There does seem to be some pretty clear differences. Yeah. We are talking about backgrounds and things and it, reminds me of certainly through a phase. I think it’s probably through the eighties particularly, that if you looked at every newsroom whatever country you’re in, the background was a different shade of blue because blue was seen as the.
Kind of trusted color. It’s gravitated around. There’s people who have introduced color spots and things now, and you get black and you get blue and you get red and all sorts of different things. Yeah. But, so it’s interesting that they, even that’s moved. But I guess what I wanted to ask you and I, we could, I.
Talk for hours, but we’ve gotta wrap up shortly, but I just wanted to ask you about this whole idea of your building your own brand. And, you talked about before about okay, you have a selection of photos and depending on what you’ve got on in the day but how do you actually work out that piece?
How do you actually find what is. Going to be your brand and what is going to work for, what you’re trying to project and who you actually are as a personality, because it doesn’t always come easily to people. It doesn’t. It doesn’t. So I’ve made a science of this, if you like. I think that’s probably the best way of saying it.
I’ve got an applied science degree, so I looked at style and I’m an artist, so I’ve brought the two together and. I looked at style through the lens of what really makes this work specifically for me, because it was my own journey before I could help anyone else. And there are so I’ve distilled it down to a few really useful tools and.
One of those is understanding your style persona, your connection between your personality, specifically on how open-minded, how agreeable, how conscientious and how extroverted you are. So there are connections there between those personality aspects and the type of. Fashion that you are going to feel fantastic in and in terms of comfort and colors and structure and all of these things.
And there’s subtle cues to other people about who you are as well. Like we know the difference between someone who’s confidently carrying and looking amazing in a bold print suit to someone who’s looking. Incredible. And just as confident and just as amazing in, like a sheer white silk outfit or something.
Like we know that there’s different personalities behind those two different outfits, so I’ve distilled all of that down into the style persona system. I’ll include the. The link so people can get it as your gift with a code. And they can get it as a gift from us and it’ll be there as a, as something they can get that direction.
Once you get that direction, you are down to one of 12 personas and that’s, that’s for a lot of people, that’s a really great level of clarity. You can go obviously a lot. More individualized. And people who are very creative, who are very public, who are very aware of fashion will want to do that next level.
And that’s something, we look at style keywords, we look at influencers, we look at icons. We’ve got a whole, mood board. We, there’s a whole bunch of things we do there to develop this style even further from that. And then there’s really two other key. Pieces, and that is how do you dress your figure to look fantastic.
So I call that my faultless figure body shape strategies. And that’s where I’ve simplified all of those complex decisions around hem lines and neck lines and shapes and silhouettes, down to some really simple decisions. And then it’s about your color alignment. So for example, some people look terrible in orange.
And just shouldn’t go near it. And others look terrible in black, and it just absolutely washes them out. So how do you know that it’s about your skin tone, your hair tone, and your eye color? So once, once you have clarity around those colors, then you can really bring, even if you’re doing a branding piece, like you’re deciding what your logo should look like, the logo that you’re gonna be right next to, it’s best if that’s aligned with you because.
That whole thing looks coherent and there’s a nice congruence there that, that doesn’t jar the eye. So that, that’s when you’re getting really smart. But the, but those are the essential pieces. A lot of stylists will look at the body shape piece, but they don’t go into. Who are you as a person and what’s your, what are you turning up to?
Do you know what’s the value that you bring to a situation and how can we align that with you? So yeah, I call that my purpose led presence method, because it’s being present, connecting with that person’s purpose, what they’re here to do and, then the styling kind of comes from there. I love all of that, and as you said, we’re gonna include lots of details in the show notes so people will be able to get a hold of all of that information.
It’s such an important area and one that we don’t generally discuss all that much. So I’ve loved all of the tips and things that people have that people will get from listening to this. Just to wrap things up I always ask. My guest this question, what’s the aha moment that people have when they come to work with you that you wish more people knew they were going to have in advance?
Oh, thank you for that question. I actually find it quite moving to respond to it because what I find is that there’s a huge amount of judgment. So you talked about those women not feeling comfortable on camera. There’s the fashion world thanks to magazines and high fashion and all that incredible, creative, gorgeous stuff.
Also comes with some baggage around people feeling that they’re less than and judgments that they’re adopting on themselves. So they expect that a stylist is going to do the same. They often think I’m, I’m putting myself on the line here. And they’re expecting some extreme makeover type experience where they’ll be dressed down and told, you shouldn’t be wearing this, you shouldn’t be wearing that.
And comments on their body shape and things, and they’re already being hard enough on themselves. Whereas in fact, the aha is that by stepping into who they are. Giving themselves looks, that feel fantastic. It’s actually an act of self-care. It’s actually and I’m worth it. And I, I’m going to feel fantastic and I wanna feel fantastic and that’s available to me and I’m doing it.
So that’s a, that’s where my clients. Get to before they start working with me is they realize, oh, it’s, it’s not actually gonna be a judgmental experience. It’s gonna be something where I feel like I’ve been affirmed and I’m, it’s a safe space and it’s actually a lot more fun.
And this is why I sometimes have clients just look at me with a tear in their eye and say, thank you. Because it’s really unlocked a whole. Area of life that they previously had a lot of hangups about. Yeah. Such an important thing. And I love that. It’s a great way to end things because I think it, it is such an important message.
And if feel comfortable in who you are. And and I think that extends to the brand that you’re projecting in terms of. Feeling comfortable. What we talked about right in the beginning where we talked about fear. And I think that if you’re comfortable in not just how you present yourself, but you’re comfortable in your stories and your expertise, then that fear will disappear and you can turn it around, as you said, and have fun.
Yeah, with it. And turn that, turn the thing around. Fantastic. Insights. Thank you so much for being part of the FIGHT program. Such a pleasure. Thanks. And again, we’ll remind everyone that all the information on how to get in touch with Nina and to download some of her material will be in the show notes.
Thank you everyone for joining us, and we look forward to your company next time on Biz Bites. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Biz Bites is proudly brought to you by podcast done for you, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance.