Change Your Mindset

Debbie Peterson is a certified trainer of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and mindset expert who works with companies to increase bottom line results through greater clarity in communication and in leadership.

We discuss how you can change the story that you’re telling yourself to transform negative self-talk into a positive thought process. We all suffer from this, at times, but Debbie provides proven strategies that will help change the dialogue in your head.

Neuro-linguistic Programming

One of the most important skills that Debbie learned was neuro-linguistic programming. After she went to NLP training, she figured out how to think differently in a way that changed her career, and her belief system about herself and what she was capable of.

After discovering that positive mindset shift, she wanted to help others do the same.

Then, one fateful night, Debbie woke up with an idea formed in her mind: Getting to Clarity. She rushed downstairs, secured the URL, and the rest is history.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

People often say we are the stories that we tell ourselves, and it’s true. But it’s important to remember that you're the author – you can pick up the pen and write a different story too.

So how can we change the stories we tell ourselves that cause limiting beliefs?

Behavior rewarded is repeated, so it's really about rewarding yourself with the behavior that you choose to believe.

Limiting beliefs can run full-time in your head, so the first thing you need to do is be aware of them and the story that you’re telling yourself; understand that some stories are not only limiting, but also inaccurate.

“If you change your mind, you change your results.”

RACE to Clarity: 4 PIeces of Shifting Your Mindset

Debbie’s RACE system is a tool you can use to think differently, and act differently. By constantly redirecting yourself through these four pillars, you will take consistent action towards your goals, and you will continually improve as a professional and a person.

1. Responsibility - There are certain things that you have responsibility for in getting more clarity. Whatever it is that you're trying to achieve, you need to know exactly what you want, and you need to know your Why. How can you hit a bullseye without a target?
2. Accountability - Do you have a plan or goal or strategy? Do you have some sort of system that is going to incrementally move you towards what it is that you want?
3. Community - Who are the people that you surround yourself with? You are the average of the top five people you spend the most time with, so who is it that you're spending the most time with, and are they people who support you in your goals and aspirations?
4. Engage - There's a lot of people out there who will figure out what they want and why they want it, but when it comes to taking that first step they want to backpedal and make excuses. We’ve all done it, but then you have all this great wisdom about yourself and you never do anything with it.

RACE isn’t just about thinking differently – it is doing differently as well.

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Chris Shirer describes herself as a devoted champion of all things food, beverage, and guest experience… and she got my attention at “food!”

Chris is the Founder of two companies: Madison + Fifth, a marketing agency, and the recently-launched JoinMyTable, a new platform for prepaid group dining created to encourage community and increase our time spent in real world conversation.

JoinMyTable is a fascinating and unique concept: people who want to go out for dinner can pre-purchase off-the-menu dining experiences online with everything included (tip, tax, and any fees). Then they can invite people to join, and all of this is from a web-based platform.

The idea is to bring communities together over dinner for some good conversation, without technology or the usual hassle of going out. This could be a group of your friends or your team from work, but the real gem is bringing a like-minded community together to make new friends and have good conversation.

It took five years to get to this point because they needed to do market research. How could a service that brings people together for a night also help businesses?

• One of the biggest benefits for businesses is that these experiences can be offered on slow nights (usually Monday-Wednesday), which adds directly to the bottom line of a restaurant.
• Because the entire payment is included up front, the service staff doesn’t have to worry about common problems (like low tips) that come from big parties.
• It also shares the stories of individuals within these businesses: the chefs, brewers, distillers, coffee roasters, and other artists who we don’t always get to know, but who are sharing their incredible creativity in our communities.

JoinMyTable is now available to anyone in the Columbus area, and it’s going great so far! Restaurants like The Refectory, Paulie Gee's Short North, The Whitney House, The Avenue Steak Tavern, and Barrel & Boar have offered successful tastings, seafood boils, and other interesting experiences.

You can watch this video to check out the Low Country Seafood Boil at Barrel & Boar, and you can head over to JoinMyTable.com to invite friends and reserve your seat at an upcoming Table.

Resources:

• Learn more: JoinMyTable.com | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

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Bob Dean, Founder of Dean Learning and Talent Advisors, returns to the show to talk more about virtual learning. Our conversation is framed around ThinkTank, collaboration, and an article that we wrote titled “The New CPE: Collaborative Learning Experiences.”

Bob works as a practitioner consultant using ThinkTank, a collaboration-as-a-service software company. By providing a collaborative structure to the way people work together, ThinkTank enables leaders to transform business processes and create a culture of collaboration, innovation, and engagement.

Bob recently facilitated something remarkable: a (successful) virtual collaboration experience with over 100 people from around the world that lasted 90 minutes – and he did that four times in one day!

Not only was his experience a feat, it benefitted both the client and the participants:

• It was all people ages 27 to 30, so all millennials, and they really embraced the virtual collaboration experience.
• In a live group, you may not get everybody's thoughts or ideas. ThinkTank has the ability to get all the ideas from people from everybody in that group, which makes it a much more richer experience, from a learning perspective, than just getting responses from two or three people in a live audience.
• Because nobody had to get on a plane, nobody had to travel, nobody had to be away, and nobody had hotel room, it was MUCH cheaper than training 400+ people in person, using the same exercise.

In the future, there are a number of exciting possibilities for virtual collaboration communities on ThinkTank:

• Optimized and effective onboarding processes.
• Training in the new revenue recognition principle, or other technical training sessions
• Teaching people to write effectively, and other skill-building courses
• Possibly even a virtual improv course!

In a world where change is happening faster and faster every week, we have to learn faster – and the way we learn faster will be learning through collaboration.

Resources:

• Connect with Bob: LinkedIn | [email protected]
• Learn more about ThinkTank
• “The New CPE: Collaborative Learning Experiences”

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Today our guest is Patrick Donadio, MBA, CSP, and MCC. For the past three decades, he has guided leaders and their organizations with powerful presentations and one-on-one business communications coaching.

In his desire to help leaders grow their people, Patrick has taken his decades of experience and crafted a results-based process for his new leader’s guide, Communicating with IMPACT, focused on improving communication, increasing profits, and boosting performance in less time.

Patrick’s process, The IMPACT Model, outlines The Six Keys to Communication. As you go through these six keys, think about which one is a weakness for you and try to pick up a couple of tips you can put in practice tomorrow.

The IMPACT Model

• I is the intention. What's my intention for this conversation? What do I want the person(s) I’m communicating with to think, do, or feel after we've met?
• M is the message & the method. How do I craft a message that's going to help me achieve the intention I have for this communication, and what method of communication will be most effective (verbal, nonverbal, or writing)? People respond differently to different forms of communication.
• P is the person. Who am I communicating with and how do I adjust my communication to that particular person?
• A is to activate. How do I activate this message to engage me and my receiver? A little rule of thumb: every three to five minutes you want to be engaging the receiver physically, mentally, or emotionally.
• C is clarify. How do you make sure that what we both said is being communicated correctly?
• T is transform. How do you transform this particular interaction into the result that you actually set for yourself?

The first half – IMP – is the planning phase. What's my intention, what am I going to say to achieve the intention, and how am I going to adjust the message to make sure that it fits this person I'm communicating with? The second half – ACT – is the activate phase.

Put it all together, take about two minutes before you open your mouth, and you too can be communicating with impact.

You can order your copy of Communicating with IMPACT now, which also includes a “Communication Inventory” to rate your current communication skills!

Resources:

• Connect with Patrick: Website | Facebook | LinkedIn
• Communicating with IMPACT

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Chris Jenkins, CEO of the South Carolina Associations of CPAs, joins us today to discuss how you can better engage an audience of any size when you are speaking, and to discuss how we can improve association management.

Although Chris is a technology guy – we originally met when he served as the Chief Information Officer at the Ohio Society – he believes that Associations, and business professionals in general, are relying on technology far too much, and using it improperly.

Professional organizations need to re-emphasize, and re-facilitate, face-to-face human relationships.

Chris has always had a knack for engaging large crowds of people, but he used to struggle with small group interactions. Partly due to technology, we have lost the skill to connect with people one-on-one – because of this, Associations and businesses need to offer more professional development opportunities for soft skills.

Elevator Training

Chris learned to engage people one-on-one through an unconventional training exercise: he was locked in an elevator for an hour and tasked with talking to every person who got on and learning what they did.

When you're in an elevator and you're in that contained space, you catch people off guard by looking at them, greeting them, and asking about them. People are shocked, and you very quickly get over your fear of engaging people. The other thing that you’ll learn is how to stop a conversation properly before they got off the elevator.

You can learn how to network and manage a room by being locked in an elevator – and I know I’m going to try this exercise out soon! It’s also just a great improv exercise because it will train you to listen to understand.

Leaders Need To Build Trust

Leaders NEED the ability to engage people in one-in-one and small group conversations.

If you are in a large group and you want feedback, people will naturally want to be nice. A group of 10+ people is not going to give reliable feedback. But it’s important that leaders are able to go in and make people feel comfortable with giving you bad news, or news that they think you don't want to hear.

So leaders have to build trust, and the only way to do that is in very small groups, and to lay yourself out there and say what you’re trying to do.

If you can't make them believe that you're actively listening and listening to understand them, you're just going to get what they think you want to hear – and a bunch of people telling you what you want to hear is the most deadly thing that you can have in a leadership role.

The Difference Between Members and Customers

Associations also struggle with engagement because, increasingly, they treat members as customers.

What’s the difference?

Simply put, the difference between a customer and a member is the experience, and fellowship is a big part of the member experience.

You have to look at your business and you have to see what you're selling, and professional associations are businesses with something to sell. However, we’ve shifted to selling CPE… and that’s not what we’re supposed to be about; that doesn’t foster fellowship.

When we start looking at CPE as a revenue stream and membership as a revenue stream, it’s easy to start looking at people as customers. And when you look at customer service, you want to make sure that that individual customer has the best possible experience... and then when they're gone they're gone. So a customer relationship is something short.

But a member relationship is a long-term relationship, and it's not just a relationship between the company or the association and the member. It’s about fostering the relationship between the members themselves. They need a network of peers that they know that they can rely on. They need a community, and they need that fellowship.

You can look at it from the other perspective as well: as an association, your stakeholders are the members on your board. That's who gets the pay out of our efforts.

In a customer relationship, your payout is to stake holders who have invested in that company so your goal is to get as much money as possible from your customers so that you can pay out to your investors. We have a completely different goal.

An association’s goal is to give its membership the maximum value for the minimum price, and we've lost sight of that in many ways.

The unique value proposition of state societies is the fact that they’re local. They have local networks in every community. They have a local network at the state level. They have local meetings with real people, both social and educational.

When associations embrace the fact that they’re local – when they don't look to compete with national brands for CPE and don't look to compete with Facebook – they create a very strong network of professionals, and that network has incredible power.

As associations, we are uniquely positioned to create human experiences and we have to come back to it.

Resources:

• Connect with Chris: SCACPA.org | LinkedIn
• The Trust Edge: How Top Leaders Gain Faster Results, Deeper Relationships, and a Stronger Bottom Line by David Horsager

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Today’s returning guest, Karl Ahlrichs, is a human capitalist consultant and a far-thinking and future-planning individual. Back in episode five, we discussed some of the storms he sees coming on the horizon, particularly where HR and the next generations of employees meet. In this episode, we once again look to the future of human resources.

Although our current economy is far greater now than it's been in a while, Karl sees quite a few potential problems on the horizon that we need to be better prepared to tackle, in addition to some opportunities.

What’s are the big things on the horizon for employees and HR?

Workers in the U.S. are very productive, and that’s what keeps our stock market alive. The volume of people working isn’t changing very much, but the volume of what we’re producing continues to climb because we’re leveraging technology and new processes.

• The scary thing is that it’s not going to be applied to every industry (e.g. coal industry is in trouble, but natural gas is booming).
• We’re going to see middle management jobs get automated and disappear.
• If you’re working in a job that could be automated, you need to start looking for a way to get client- or customer-facing.

We are getting away from age segregation in the generations, which is great because there's been way too much millennial bashing.

We need to develop better emotional intelligence, which means developing critical thinking skills, maturity, wisdom, and the communication skills necessary to speak to different kinds of people.

We have to look at how young people want to learn and realize that everybody wants to learn that way. We have to gamify how we teach the core skills described above. If you make it a game, make it competitive, and get them engaged, you'll move the needle of learning. Below you can view a video of Karl explaining this process.

Big data is coming in a big way. With the power of algorithms coming and the power of all of this data that we've been gathering, we can now start drilling into it. We're able now to predict what happens next, instead of tracking what happened last week.

• For example, synd.io is an application that, in three dimensions, maps the actual network, of your organization. You get to look at your organization - live data, real data, real time - and you can look at it like a nest of people from three dimensions. You can turn it and twist it to figure out who's important and who isn't. You can figure out who your key employees are.

The one thing that people need to do this year to overcome all of the storm clouds on the horizon is listen to your high performing employees. You have to keep your top talent, and the easiest way to do that is to at least appear to listen to them (which goes back to developing emotional intelligence).

Karl also recently put out a very interesting art project: a limited run of handmade and letterpressed books containing his own poetry and photography. It’s called Spaces Between Places, and it’s central theme is the loneliness of business travel. Check spacesbetweenplaces.net for news about future distribution.

Resources:

• Learn more about Karl: ExpertSpeaks.com | KarlAhlrichs.com | Twitter | LinkedIn

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Today’s interview is love at first improv.

Allison Estep is a former Creative Services Associate for the Indiana Society of CPAs and a graduate of the conservatory program at Second City in Chicago. Our conversation focuses on the everyday application of improvisation skills to help us combat fear, take risks, work as a team, and become a more well-rounded person.

Allison strongly believes that every person should take an improv course at some point in their life – it’s simply a great way to learn valuable life skills, like listening, managing your ego, following fear, and working as a team. As a matter of fact, improv games were originally created by Viola Spolin as a teaching tool.

Getting up in front of people (in any situation) can seem like such a scary thing for people that have never been through an improv class, or don't know everything about the practice, but it's a little less scary once you realize everyone is part of the same team and everything doesn’t have to be a joke… and sometimes the most mundane things can be the funniest.

Here are a few Improv Games that you can play with your team, friends, or even family.

• The Human Knot – Five or more people create a circle (the more the merrier!). Everyone puts their arms out and grabs another person's arm to get tangled up. As a group, you try to get untangled without anyone letting go. This game is a great way of learning how to work together as a group to figure out a problem.
• One Word at a Time – Two or more people try to create a cohesive sentence by speaking one word at a time. Don't think – just react. It’s a great tool for teaching people to listen to understand (and not listen to respond).
• Dr. Know-It-All – Three people sit in a chair and they know the answer to every question that's ever given… But they answer one word at a time. To be successful, groups they need to really park that agenda, not anticipate / get ahead of themselves, listen to what's being said, and then react to it.

If you’re interested in taking the next step, find your nearest Improv school and take a class or get in touch with me about coming to your organization.

Resources:

• Listen to This American Life 532, Act Two: “Rainy Days and Mondays” - A story about how compassion and improv help a woman with dementia

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Today’s guest, Jason Michaels, is a professional entertainer, speaker, and author with astounding experience in the arts of deception. A storyteller by heart, Jason loves to blend impossible mysteries with unforgettable tales.

Diagnosed with Tourette's Syndrome at the age of six, Jason overcame the impossible and became an award-winning sleight of hand artist and professional speaker. He motivates audiences to see beyond their challenges and self-imposed limitations and inspires them to take action by living bigger bolder lives with his keynote program and book, You Can Do The Impossible, Too!

Jason's also performs The Card Shark, a true story of scams, cons, and hustles. It is a one-man, autobiographical sleight of hand show that dives deep into the world of confidence men, fortune tellers, and charismatic magicians.

If you’re not familiar, Tourette's syndrome is a neurological brain chemical disorder that manifests itself by what doctors refer to as tics, which are basically uncontrollable movements or vocalizations.

Tourette’s can be a challenging disorder to overcome, particularly when your passion is on stage, but Jason has always thrived on putting himself in uncomfortable situations.

Sharing that story is incredibly powerful and important because every single person feels like something in their life is impossible… but it IS possible to overcome that.

This ability to overcome your fears and deal with the adversity – even the seemingly impossible – is a parallel message to the power of improvisation and Yes, And. It boils down to having a strong positive mental attitude and taking on adversity and your fears head on.

Jason’s book, You Can Do The Impossible, Too!, details his journey with overcoming Tourette's syndrome to become a success in business and in life. It is a must-buy if you fall into one of these three groups of people:

1. People who like magic and entertainment and want to read incredible adventures, stories, and crazy stunts (like attempting Houdini’s underwater torture cell on live TV).
2. People around the world that have Tourette’s syndrome, and especially their loved ones. “I know what that's like. I know what it's like to be a kid … how do you get through the next day? Because you're having such a hard day and you're having these twitches and it's uncontrollable and it literally feels like hell … if I share my story, maybe they will learn, from my point of view, some new ways to help their loved one, their child, their sibling, whatever.”
3. And then there's the audience of folks who want to push themselves. People who want to get outside of their comfort zone or need a message of inspiration to let them know that they're not alone.

Resources:

• Connect with Jason: Website | Facebook | Twitter
• Watch Jason’s TEDx Talk
• You Can Do the Impossible, Too!: How One Man Overcame Tourette's Syndrome to Become an Acclaimed Professional Magician, and How You, Too, Can Live Your Biggest, Boldest Life by Jason Michaels

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In this episode we are talking to Clarke Price, a retired CEO of the Ohio Society of CPAs and the very first guest on this podcast one year ago. We discuss how the prevalence of social media (and the decline of respectful debate) creates new challenges for leaders and we provide suggestions on how you can overcome these challenges to provide strong leadership in your organization.

The Ohio Society’s record of innovative leadership during Clarke’s tenure was recognized by the American Society of Association Executives when the society was selected as one of nine remarkable associations that were part of an extensive nationwide study of successful associations

The American Society of Association Executives’ publication, Seven Measures of Success: What remarkable associations do that others don't, featured the Ohio Society of CPAs as the only state-based membership organization profiled in the seven measures study.

Social media fervor is making many organizations far too risk-averse. Organizations are fearful that their membership, customers, or constituency might disagree – loudly, online, demanding a penalty – with any decision or position they publicize... so they do nothing.

Fear of risk leads to hesitation, which leads to inaction – and certainly doesn’t lead to innovation.

From an improvisational standpoint, the inaction kills me. If we don't make bad decisions, how can we find good decision? Bad decisions are just bridges to good decisions.

We need to change the current leadership trend. We can get ahead of these online movements if we train leaders to anticipate and respond to criticism appropriately.

Good leadership needs to share the truth, acknowledge disagreements, and (most importantly) communicate a story.

You need to tell a story about how the decision was made, why it was important, and what the consequences will be – a story full of emotion, as opposed to facts and figures – and you need to share that story in a variety of forums.

Communication strategies may vary but there is one constant: you can't be silent and you can't expect problems will just play out and then go away. 

We should expect more, and encourage more, from our leaders; they should be prepared to actually lead, make tough decisions, and think about the future. It’s not enough to just be present.

Resources:

• Road to Relevance: 5 Strategies for Competitive Associations by Harrison Coerver and Mary Byers
• 7 Measures of Success: What Remarkable Associations Do That Others Don't by Jim Collins
• “Chase One Rabbit: The Power of Small Wins | Philip Kim | TEDxAlbany” 

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