Hi, I'm here with Nick Reed, He is an online coach who helps busy parents and professionals regain control of their health without sacrificing the things they love! also the founder of @ryzeupfitness.

JOIN NOW!! AND BE PART OF MASTERMIND PROGRAM

learn how to activate yourself for a better future!

https://createanewtomorrow.com/master...

CHECK THIS LINK FOR A FREE GIFT FOR YOU!

https://www.createanewtomorrow.com/gift

DO YOU WANT TO BE OUR NEXT SPECIAL GUEST?

Book an appointment now and let's create a new world together!

https://booking.builderall.com/calend...

CHECK THIS OTHER WEBSITE FOR MORE INFORMATION!

https://www.CreateAnewtomorrow.com

https://www.Achievehealthusa.com

Create a fundamental change in the global community from a strictly reactive system of medicine that focuses on symptom and emergency treatment to a proactive system based on whole-being health as well as illness and injury prevention. Personally teach and influence at least one million people.

We are a multifaceted Health and Wellness company that specializes in Corporate Wellness and Culture Consulting, Industry Speaking engagements and Continuing education for the industry.

We Help corporations by solving the most costly problems they have with Productivity and Health Care while creating a culture that thrives on accomplishment and community.

We help organizations think outside of the box and gain tools that allow them to be nimble and strong as tides and markets shift.

We Up level the skills and tools of other practitioners by providing them continuing education that actually leads to greater success and standing in the business community.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Ari Gronich 0:07  

Welcome back to another episode of create a new tomorrow. I'm your host, Ari Gronich. And I have with me, Nick Reed. And Nick is a conscious capitalism kind of guy. He's an author, speaker, entrepreneur and activist. Presently he works at the Americans for Prosperity foundation as a speaker and content creator. Previously, Nick holds degrees in psychology philosophy has worked in radio, politics, education, business, and nonprofit. So Nick, why don't you tell us a little bit about how you became Nick?

Nick Reed 0:43  

Oh, how I became Nick is where do I begin? But the short version is, I was growing up following the same path that everybody else did you know, you go to school to make the grades, make the grades to get into college, get into college, to get a degree, get a degree to get a job, get a job to make the money to then by the time to do the things that make life worth living, right? Well, in my story, I'm looking around at the adult community, it's say age 1415. And these are people who follow the traditional path much farther than I have, and they don't look like they're in any kind of place that I'm trying to get to, you know, they're still looking for that thing that I'm looking for. And so I'm wondering, well, is this a path for me, so me and some other really stupid friends kind of had this quarterlife crisis, and we decided we are like Peter Pan never going to grow up. We're just going to try and BASE jump and skydive and suck all the fun out of life that we possibly can recklessly probably die before we turn 18 and have any real responsibility. So you can see how much we appreciated our parents. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 1:57  

yeah. And

Nick Reed 1:59  

so we live like this, but we didn't die, or at least I didn't die. And, but I did have an epiphany. And I was out surfing hurricane, I think it was Katrina, in Galveston. And I realized, I don't know if it was like the near death experience type inside or just a just an epiphany. But I said, this is a moment where I feel fully alive, where I feel truly free. And I can honestly say there's nowhere else in the world I would rather be than exactly where I am in this moment. There's nothing else I'd rather be doing than exactly what I'm doing right now.

Ari Gronich 2:37  

Nice. Yeah, you know, I got to the opportunity to see Peter Pan at the pantages theatre in Los Angeles with Sandy Duncan. And that song, I won't grow up, I won't grow up, you know, it just always has stuck in my head, I won't grow up. If growing up means it would be beneath my dignity to climb a tree. I won't grow up, right. And that's kind of the idea that that people tend to, you know, I hear this this word a lot. adulting. You know, this is a new word in the dictionary. It was just being a human being of age before that, right? I'm adulting. And, and it seems like, you know, the more we adult, the less fun we have. And the more serious life is and the more problems we get. Did you find that to be fairly accurate?

Nick Reed 3:36  

Somehow, we've come to Alan Watts. He's a philosopher that was popular in the 60s and had a radio show, I believe in California, he talks about how we have learned to do things that we don't enjoy doing. And then we teach our children to grow up to do things that they don't enjoy doing to teach their children. And it's all retching no vomit, we never get there. And I think that today we have this and people blame the educational system or the media or who knows, but without any blaming, we do have this idea that life is drudgery that you have to get through and and not this as he would say musical thing that you were supposed to sing or dance as the music was being played, you know, it's this real serious pilgrimage, we have to get to that thing at the end the success at the end of the road or, or heaven at the end of life, or whatever it is, you know, and we're all focused on that. And we're just flying by at the speed of light, not even looking out the window. And if we did, it would just be a blur anyway, because we're moving so fast.

Ari Gronich 4:46  

Yeah, so what is, you know, to me, like I look at the world, it's changed a bit. We're starting to develop this nomadic society because we're all in the digital age. We don't have to go to the building. For the job, so people are starting this process of becoming more nomadic, which is kind of like going backwards in time, to a place where, you know, the gypsies would travel freely around, and we would explore the world, right? How do you think that not exploring the world has damaged kind of a country's ideals, our country, other countries, but damage the the ideals and the the nature of how we act in our society?

Nick Reed 5:39  

Well, that's a really interesting question. I don't know, I would say that we're gonna have to find out, you know, people are locking themselves in their dungeon, for fear of going out. And, you know, maybe there's some real risk. But, I mean, I had Corona and made it through, and it was rough, it was pretty rough flu. And there's some, my grandmother's got it, and she's in the hospital with pneumonia. And, you know, it's a serious threat to people. But at the same time, there's risk every time you walk out your door, there's equal risk by getting in a car and driving on a freeway. And, you know, we're if you really calculate the risk and compare it to things that we do on a daily basis. There's some significant trade offs to not living your life and staying in the dungeon. You know, I mean, we're, we're growing up with our kids, you know, not being allowed to do things that we were allowed to do they, you know, kids don't climb trees anymore. Kids don't even go outside unsupervised for fear of the parents having CPS called on them. We're coddling our youth and coddling the American mind is a great book by Greg lukianov. And Jonathan Hyatt, who I had great conversation with about this. Not too long ago, you know, I don't really know how this is going to affect us. But I do know that people are getting on socialize. And people are and it's really easy to dehumanize and objectify people, and therefore treat people more like objects than humans, the more distance you get from them.

Ari Gronich 7:18  

Right. You know, one of the things I love about the, the Israeli government and this may be controversial to some but it this is a piece of the government that I like is there's 18 parties all with an equal say, and if you know any Jewish person, then you know that for every one Jewish person, there's kind of opinions, because we're always exploring the options, the possibilities, the thoughts, we're having discussions about what is possible, what's not possible, what's real, what's not real, what the interpretations are, of things. It's, it's an interesting culture in general. And, and so there's a diversity in conversation, even between two people, you could have two people having a conversation that goes into 20. tangents, right? So the question that I have, and it's a question I've had it for a while is, how do we remember how to listen? And listen, not with the response that we're about to give, but listen with the intention of learning, maybe the truth, maybe not the truth, but at least the perspective of the person and where they're coming from?

Nick Reed 8:41  

I think we really need to do a thought experiment. And that a thought experiment is what would life really be like, if everybody thought and walked and talked, and believes just like

Ari Gronich 8:56  

us, the conversations that I've been having lately, there's this big push against the freedom kind of and they don't call it that, but it's more about what's your civic responsibility? What's your duty to others? What's your, you know, what your actions do so much contribute to other people's lives, good or bad, that you have a civic duty to say, wear a mask or, you know, quarantine yourself in a hole in the ground where he can't see sunshine and you can't see people and you can't, you know, do the things that make life worth living? Because it's your civic duty, to not do the things that make life worth living, because you might possibly die otherwise, and see to me that's like, just death while I'm living while I'm breathing, so how do we balance this To

Nick Reed 10:01  

Well, the word responsibility is interesting because its meaning has literally been reversed to the opposite. Okay. So responsibility, I think it's sort of spun that it from Latin, it, it doesn't mean what it means today, responsibility today means your duty, your obligation, it's what you have to do, right? It used to mean your ability to respond. And your ability to respond is totally different. Right? responsibility, what you have to do, your ability to respond, is what you can do its possibilities, right? And obligations, reduces possibilities, down to one. Okay, so I want the personal responsibility is not an obligation and a duty and something that you owe to the world, you know, this is some kind of new drudgery, religion, in my opinion, you know, the opportunity here for people to take an active role. And to be a gift to the world is not about you, fulfilling your obligation and paying your debts. This is about you getting a sense of meaning and fulfillment out of life. And this is an opportunity,

Ari Gronich 11:19  

Rage, rage against the dying of the light. It's a Dylan Dylan Thomas, not Bob. But you know that, that saying to me is like, you must commit yourself to fully express life from within. Because life is light. And we don't want to extinguish that in people. And, you know, this whole world that we're living in right now is is an interesting kancil culture. It's this political correctness, it's this, this level of responsibility being what what what they're calling being woke, right. There's two people who are woke one side and the other side, there were I'm woke, because I'm politically correct. Or I'm woke because I can see the conspiracy or I'm woke because whatever it is, like, are you really have you come out of the dream, because I don't see the world shifting out of the dream of separation right now. I see this divisiveness because people don't know how to talk to get to each other without being in full on reaction and being in you know, I do it myself. What I love about doing these podcast interviews is that I'm forced to listen and listen clearly. So that I have what you're saying to me in the forefront of my response, rather than what I want to say to you because I got reacted to something you said, right. So I had a reaction to it. But so I love this format of interview because it forces me to learn more and more and more how to listen. I think that's a skill set that that we're lacking in, in society right now. nobody's really listening for the nuance for the common sense for the critical thinking for the, the, you know, the minutia, they're only responding to the generality and reacting to their own echo chamber, basically.

Nick Reed 13:50  

Which is a delusion. It's a total delusion that your image of other people is them. It's not it's a caricature. I mean, the mind, I don't think that this is a evil thing that you know, people on the left and the right or whatever the top and the bottom think that the other is always, you know, this greedy bastard trying to do everybody in i don't i don't think so. I think it's, like, maybe in our evolutionary development, it's, the mind likes to conserve calories. And so it's easier rather than looking at a person like you're looking at him for the first time, every single time you look at him, is this human, a tiger? Or is this, you know, a mouse? What is it, you know, to make a shortcut, you know, to take a little snapshot, but eventually, we built up this mental collage of mental images that I think can blind us to the truth. You know, it's like the map we're holding up in front of the territory. And when the territory changes and doesn't match the map, which happens like actual map like, you know, the landscape pushes up mountains and opens up canyons and rivers meander, and people change, buddy, you know, and so our maps need to be refreshed.

Ari Gronich 15:12  

Awesome. On that note, give a give the audience like three or four actionable tips on what they can do to create a new tomorrow today for themselves.

Nick Reed 15:24  

Talk to people you disagree with depolarize a conversation. Look for people, winning people over winning arguments. Think of the one thing that you would like to see change in this world more than anything else. And then outline the best plan that you can think of to actually walk out the door and make it happen. from the bottom up. You can think how can I? How can I create a product or a service that will advance this thing that I care about? You can think how can I create more awareness around this thing that I care about in a way that will advance it? You can think how could creating more healthy and strong communities advance this cause that I care about? or How could I reform or supplement or innovate within the existing institutions of business community education or government that could remove barriers to people who are facing this issue that I care about? You can go to Americans for Prosperity foundation.org. And you can find other nonprofits that can help you get connected to causes and join others in making a difference beyond just what you can do as an individual. But the biggest thing you can do is dispel the myth that personal action doesn't matter. We have this change the world ism, which is a psychosis that says nothing matters unless we're fixing global hunger, or, you know, world, something another. And I'm not going to do anything unless it's it's at a global macro economic scale. While nobody does anything. If everyone would do the thing, the one thing that if everybody else were to do that would lead to the whole world changing, you know what the whole world changes. Your personal action is the only thing that counts. And that'll inspire other people to do things. And it may not be joining you and doing what you're doing. But it may be the equivalent of that. And if everybody's doing the things that they wish everybody else would do. You get a whole lot of things getting done.

Ari Gronich 17:44  

That's awesome. How can people get ahold of you if they want to learn more and work with you?

Nick Reed 17:50  

They can check out Americans for Prosperity foundation.org you can look up our podcasts be the solution on Americans for Prosperity Foundation, YouTube and social media channels and pages. You can also check out our larger philanthropic community stand together.org Awesome.

Ari Gronich 18:07  

Thank you so much. This has been an amazing conversation. I know the audience has gotten a lot out of it. Hopefully they were taking some notes. Remember to like subscribe, rate, review and comment because we like to have your comments. We like to be able to start conversations with you and come up with more solutions for you. So anyway, thank you very much. This has been another episode of create a new tomorrow. I am your host, Ari Gronich and we'll see you next time.

Hi, I'm here with Nick Reed, He is an online coach who helps busy parents and professionals regain control of their health without sacrificing the things they love! also the founder of @ryzeupfitness.

JOIN NOW!! AND BE PART OF MASTERMIND PROGRAM

learn how to activate yourself for a better future!

https://createanewtomorrow.com/master...

CHECK THIS LINK FOR A FREE GIFT FOR YOU!

https://www.createanewtomorrow.com/gift

DO YOU WANT TO BE OUR NEXT SPECIAL GUEST?

Book an appointment now and let's create a new world together!

https://booking.builderall.com/calend...

CHECK THIS OTHER WEBSITE FOR MORE INFORMATION!

https://www.CreateAnewtomorrow.com

https://www.Achievehealthusa.com

Create a fundamental change in the global community from a strictly reactive system of medicine that focuses on symptom and emergency treatment to a proactive system based on whole-being health as well as illness and injury prevention. Personally teach and influence at least one million people.

We are a multifaceted Health and Wellness company that specializes in Corporate Wellness and Culture Consulting, Industry Speaking engagements and Continuing education for the industry.

We Help corporations by solving the most costly problems they have with Productivity and Health Care while creating a culture that thrives on accomplishment and community.

We help organizations think outside of the box and gain tools that allow them to be nimble and strong as tides and markets shift.

We Up level the skills and tools of other practitioners by providing them continuing education that actually leads to greater success and standing in the business community.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Ari Gronich 0:00  

Has it occurred to you that the systems we live by are not designed to get results? We pay for procedures instead of outcomes, focusing on emergencies rather than preventing disease and living a healthy lifestyle. For over 25 years, I've taken care of Olympians Paralympians a list actors in fortune 1000 companies, if I do not get results, they do not get results. I realized that while powerful people who control the system want to keep the status quo, if I were to educate the masses, you would demand change. So I'm taking the gloves off and going after the systems as they are. Join me on my mission to create a new tomorrow as I chat with industry experts, elite athletes, thought leaders and government officials about how we activate our vision for a better world. We may agree, and we may disagree, but I'm not backing down. I'm Ari Gronich. And this is create a new tomorrow podcast.

Welcome back to another episode of create a new tomorrow. I'm your host, Ari krzanich. And I have with me, Nick Reid. And Nick is a conscious capitalism kind of guy. He's an author, speaker, entrepreneur and activist. Presently he works at the Americans for Prosperity foundation as a speaker and content creator. Previously, Nick holds degrees in psychology philosophy has worked in radio, politics, education, business, and nonprofit. So Nick, why don't you tell us a little bit about how you became Nick.

Nick Reed 1:41  

Oh, how I became Nick is where do I begin? But the short version is I was growing up following the same path that everybody else did you know, you go to school to make the grades, make the grades to get into college, get into college, to get a degree, get a degree to get a job, get a job to make the money to then buy the time to do the things that make life worth living, right? Well. In my story, I'm looking around at the adult community, it's say age 1415. And these are people who follow the traditional path much farther than I have. And they don't look like they're in any kind of place that I'm trying to get to. You know, they're still looking for that thing that that I'm looking for. And so I'm wondering, well, is this a path for me, so me and some other really stupid friends kind of had this quarterlife crisis, and we decided we are like Peter Pan never going to grow up. We're just going to try and BASE jump and skydive and suck all the fun out of life that we possibly can recklessly probably die before we turn 18 and have any real responsibility. So you can see how much we appreciate it. Our parents. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 2:55  

yeah. And

Unknown Speaker 2:57  

so we live like

Nick Reed 2:58  

this, but we didn't die, or at least I didn't die. And, but I did have an epiphany. And I was out surfing a hurricane. I think it was Katrina in Galveston. And I realized, I don't know if it was like the near death experience type inside or just a just an epiphany. But I said, this is a moment where I feel fully alive, where I feel truly free. And I can honestly say there's nowhere else in the world I would rather be than exactly where I am in this moment. There's nothing else I'd rather be doing than exactly what I'm doing right now. Well, I can't live in a hammock eating mangoes every single day surfing every day, if I want these moments to come more often than all the other ones. What is it seriously about surfing that, that I can't get from the rest of my life and education and a career in a family and a job and all the other things? What is it that I can't get? And so that question wasn't like a question you find in school, this was like a quest. And so I had to go on this quest for maybe a decade to figure out how to get that thing that makes life not just worth living for, but worth living fully for. And what I realized is I realized that it's not just me who's having a coming of age crisis, that in many ways, our society and our entire world is having a coming of age crisis. You know, we also are running from our responsibility and you know, using our freedom, really in irresponsible ways and you know, there's there's all the problems that you know, people complain about all the time that I don't have to list here but when people look out the window, see the world laying in ruins and past the point of no return and they say, Yep, never Neverland for me, buddy. Yeah, so I realized that, that there was a real opportunity there. Okay. An opportunity to play an active role to try and create the conditions that makes life more conducive to the kind of experiences that we think makes life worth living fully for and to inspire others to, to do the same. And so that's led me kind of to where I am today.

Ari Gronich 5:18  

Nice. Yeah, you know, I got to the opportunity to see Peter Pan at the pantages theatre in Los Angeles with Sandy Duncan. And that song, I won't grow up, I won't grow up, you know, it just always has stuck in my head, I won't grow up. If growing up means it would be beneath my dignity to climb a tree. I won't grow up, right. And that's kind of the idea that that people tend to, you know, I hear this this word a lot adulting. You know, this is a new word in the dictionary, it was just being a human being of age before that, right? I'm adulting. And, and it seems like, you know, the more we adult, the less fun we have. And the more serious life is, and the more problems we get. Did you find that to be fairly accurate?

Nick Reed 6:18  

Somehow, we've come to Alan Watts. He's a philosopher that was popular in the 60s and had a radio show, I believe in California, he talks about how we have learned to do things that we don't enjoy doing. And then we teach our children to grow up to do things that they don't enjoy doing to teach their children. And it's all retching, no vomit, we never get there. And I think that today, we have this. And people blame the educational system or the media or who knows, but without any blaming, we do have this idea that life is drudgery that you have to get through. And and not this, as he would say, musical thing that you were supposed to sing or dance as the music was being played, you know, it's this real serious pilgrimage, we have to get to that thing, at the end the success at the end of the road or heaven at the end of life, or whatever it is, you know, and we're all focused on that. And we're just flying by at the speed of light, not even looking out the window. And if we did, it would just be a blur anyway, because we're moving so fast.

Ari Gronich 7:26  

Yeah, so what is, you know, to me, like, I look at the world, it's changed a bit, we're starting to develop this nomadic society, because we're all in the digital age, we don't have to go to the building for the job. So people are starting this process of becoming more nomadic, which is kind of like going backwards in time, to a place where, you know, the gypsies would travel freely around, and we would explore the world, right? How do you think that not exploring the world has damaged kind of a country's ideals, our country, other countries, but damage the ideals and the the nature of how we act in our society?

Nick Reed 8:20  

Well, that's a really interesting question. I don't know, I would say that we're gonna have to find out, you know, people are locking themselves in their dungeon, for fear of going out, and, you know, maybe there's some real risk. But, I mean, I had Corona and made it through, and it was rough, it was pretty rough flu. And there's some my grandmother's got it and she's in the hospital with pneumonia. And, you know, it's it's a serious threat to people. But at the same time, there's risk every time you walk out your door, there's equal risk by getting in a car and driving on a freeway. And, you know, we're if you really calculate the risk and compare it to things that we do on a daily basis. There's some significant trade offs to not living your life and staying in the dungeon, you know, I mean, we're, we're growing up with our kids, you know, not being allowed to do things that we were allowed to do they, you know, kids don't climb trees anymore. Kids don't even go outside unsupervised for fear of the parents having CPS called on them. We're coddling our youth and coddling of the American mind is a great book by Greg lukianoff. And Jonathan Hyatt, who I had a great conversation with about this not too long ago. You know, I don't really know how this is going to affect us. But I do know that people are getting on socialize, and people are and it's really easy to dehumanize and objectify people, and therefore treat people more like objects than humans, the more distance you get from them, right? And especially you can, you know, I mean, like, let's say people on the other side of the world, let's say, you've never been to China, or you've never been to Peru, or Iceland, right? And you're talking about those Icelanders, okay? And their culture and all you know about them is what you've read in a, you know, Encyclopedia Britannica or something. It's all an abstract, like your your knowledge and relationship to those people is not direct, it's not firsthand, it's all abstract. And it's way easier for that relationship to degrade into something that's not good. The more distanced you get. And so here we are, we're all isolated, and quarantining and locking down and travels, you know, being restricted. And there's something about being able to be introduced to different ideas, different perspectives, different viewpoints that enriches and adds to our own, that I think is super valuable, especially today, if you look at where we're at. There are people who are more so divided politically, that they can't have a conversation with their family at Thanksgiving, people aren't even getting together for Thanksgiving, first of all, but if they did, they wouldn't be able to get along. And people dread it, because their uncle is going to go off about the president. And that's going to start a conversation with their sister. And before you know it, everybody's looking down at their dinner plate trying to avoid it or up in a fight depending on their their temperament, right. And people can't talk to each other, much less get along, much less work together to make a difference. And we need each other's perspectives in order to to grow in order to arrive more nearly to the truth. And in order to get anything done. You know. And so it's it's really going to, it could possibly damage our ability to even have a democracy, if people don't get that exposure to a diversity of ideas anymore. And we really just sit on Facebook with our echo chambers.

Ari Gronich 12:05  

Right. You know, one of the things I love about the, the Israeli government and this may be controversial to some but it this is a piece of the government that I like is there's 18 parties all with an equal say, and if you know any Jewish person, then you know that for every one Jewish person, there's kind of opinions, because we're always exploring the options, the possibilities, the thoughts, we're having discussions about what is possible, what's not possible, what's real, what's not real, what the interpretations are, of things. It's it's an interesting culture in general. And, and so there's a diversity in conversation, even between two people, you could have two people having a conversation that goes into 20. tangents, right? So the question that I have, and it's a question I've had for a while is, how do we remember how to listen? And listen, not with the response that we're about to give, but listen with the intention of learning, maybe the truth, maybe not the truth, but at least the perspective of the person and where they're coming from?

Nick Reed 13:28  

I think we really need to do a thought experiment. And that a thought experiment is what would life really be like, if everybody thought, and walked and talked and believes just like us, it's in order to actually be interested and curious about other people and their point of view and their ideas. You have to be able to think about what it would be like to lose that. Okay. Now, so you can imagine, let's say you're in a dream, everybody's had this kind of dream, a lucid dream, where you wake up and you realize you're dreaming? Well, let's say you have a lucid dream, okay. And you, you wake up, you go, Oh, my gosh, I'm dreaming. And you look around and you realize, I am dreaming. All of this. Everybody in this dream is actually a character in my dream. Wow. So so then play with it. Okay. So let's imagine, and I'm not sure this really happens. But let's imagine Nothing can happen that you don't dream is going to happen, right? No surprises. You are the creator, in your dream world. Alright. And you make everything up. Now. Let's play that out. Okay. Everybody who is going to say something? You already know what they're going to say. Everybody who thinks something, right? They can't think anything different than you because you're the dreamer of them. There is nobody there just a figment of you, okay. In this scenario played out for a day, what's that, like, played out for a year, what's that like, where you have total control, where you are all knowing and all powerful, was probably pretty cool for a day, right? played out for two days. Now three days, nothing can come, you can't get hurt, you can't die, you don't need to sleep, you don't need to eat, you don't need anything, you don't need any one played out for a lifetime. How about eternity, what a boring and lonely world this is going to be you're going to want to hit the surprise button, you know, you're going to want some risks and some mystery, some adventure, some unknown, some diversity, some others, some companies some companionship, but a boring and lonely world, it becomes in world full of just you, you know. And if you were to actually experience like the flip side of life, right, because we have this now we are in constant companionship and communion with others who are totally different and infinitely unique from us all the time, you would come to the conclusion that this is actually pretty good, this is great, you know, we are we have a sense of, of, or an opportunity to actually get to know others to grow, to share this experience of life in this journey to have a meaningful role in other's lives and in the in the, you know, in the way that this world unfolds. You know, this is an incredible opportunity, just being born a human without you having to do anything, you know, when a human being is born, where it's totally different than any other being when a bug is born. It can take off in the air and fly right away, right? There's nothing has to learn do all of its actions is going to take its entire life are present and fixed through its genetics and its heredity, it's right there at birth, when a deer is born, can take off on a spirit within minutes. Right, right. human being is born, we're the most helpless creature on the face of the earth. And that's because we are born fundamentally differently than any other being on this planet. And that is with magnitudes more degrees of freedom, that life for us can be an open ended book, we can choose to show up and be interested in people or just wait our turn to talk we can choose to be creative or to be destructive, to be nice to be mean to be accepting to be intolerant, we have the opportunity to be a gift to take an active role in this world. And that's totally different. And that right there is an incredible opportunity. You know, when we're sitting here, as human beings with with all this freedom that people use in so many ways that make people wish we were not so free. I don't think people understand the opportunity. Through freedom through you can receive things freedom, things become a gift. Okay, right.

Ari Gronich 18:04  

So hold on a second, go ahead. The conversations that I've been having lately, there's this big push against the freedom kind of it they don't call it that, but it's more about what's your civic responsibility, what's your duty to others, what's your, you know, what your actions do so much contribute to other people's lives, good or bad, that you have a civic duty to say, wear a mask or, you know, quarantine yourself and a hole in the ground where he can't see sunshine and you can't see people and you can't you know, do the things that make life worth living, because it's your civic duty, to not do the things that make life worth living, because you might possibly die otherwise, and see, to me that's like, just death while I'm living while I'm breathing. So how do we balance those two?

Nick Reed 19:12  

Well, the word responsibility is interesting because its meaning has literally been reversed to the opposite. Okay, so responsibility. I think it's sort of spun that out from Latin. It, it doesn't mean what it means today. Responsibility today means your duty, your obligation, it's what you have to do, right? It used to mean your ability to respond. And your ability to respond is totally different. Right responsibility, what you have to do your ability to respond, is what you can do. It's possibilities right? And obligations, reduces possibilities down to one. Okay, so I want the personal responsibility is Not an obligation and a duty and something that you owe to the world. You know, this is some kind of new drudgery, religion, in my opinion, you know, the opportunity here for people to take an active role. And to be a gift to the world is not about you, fulfilling your obligation and paying your debts. This is about you getting a sense of meaning and fulfillment out of life. And this is an opportunity, you know, when, for example, like we just interviewed a comedian the other day talking about jokes are a really interesting thing, when you share a joke with somebody. Jokes only have value after you've heard in the first time, when you give them to others, you enjoy jokes again, when other people laugh at them, it is by giving them up and sharing them and putting them in the other people's worlds that you get value out of it. Well, it's the same thing with life. When I'm sitting here and just thinking about myself and serving myself. Yeah, that can be fun. I surfed hurricanes and skydive and bass jumped, and it's a great adrenaline rush, but it doesn't contribute meaning to anybody else's life. And so to do with the waves in the ocean, and the mountains did for me, for other people, creates an endless opportunity to see that get that same Richmond through other people's eyes. There's science on this, this isn't woowoo mystical nonsense, you know this, there's science that shows that when a human being does an act of kindness, for example, for another person that's doing something without the expectation of getting anything in return, it creates a chemical cocktail in the brain of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, the love chemical that Bond's people together. I mean, we're talking about a high end people that's extremely pleasant and natural to, and it doesn't just happen in the person receiving the act of kindness, guess what? It happens in the giver of the act of kindness. And it happens in everybody who observes the act of kindness, and three degrees out. So if you want to talk about getting what I got from surfing from the rest of life, and everywhere else, this is it, buddy. This isn't an obligation. There's no obligation for anybody to do anything to be a non contributing zero in this world. All right, that's the baseline. You don't owe anybody anything. But the opportunity and the benefit, if you do is you get to experience what it's like to live a full life. This way. Henry Thoreau talked about to dig deep suck the marrow from life, you know, so that I will not when I come to die, discover that I had not lived. Right. When you're surrounded by gifts. That is to be rich. Yeah, that's the opportunity. That's it. There's no obligation, right?

Ari Gronich 23:04  

That's the other one, you know, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. It's a Dylan

Unknown Speaker 23:12  

Dylan Thomas, not Bob.

Ari Gronich 23:15  

But you know that, that saying to me is like, you must commit yourself to fully express life from within. Because life is light. And we don't want to extinguish that in people. And, you know, this whole world that we're living in right now is an interesting kancil culture. It's this political correctness. It's this, this level of responsibility being what what what they're calling being woke, right. There's two people who are woke one side and the other side, there were I'm woke because I'm politically correct. Or I'm woke because I can see the conspiracy or I'm woke because whatever it is, like, are you really have you come out of the dream, because I don't see the world shifting out of the dream of separation right now. I see this divisiveness because people don't know how to talk to get to each other without being in full on reaction and being in you know, I do it myself. What I love about doing these podcast interviews is that I'm forced to listen and listen clearly. So that I have what you're saying to me in the forefront of my response rather than what I want to say to you because I got reacted to something you said right? So I had a reaction to it. But so I love this format of interview because it forces me to learn more and more and more how to listen. I think that's a skill set that that we're lacking in. in society right now. nobody's really listening for the nuance for the common sense for the critical thinking for the, the, you know, the minutia, they're only responding to the generality and reacting to their own echo chamber, basically.

Nick Reed 25:36  

Which is a delusion. It's a total delusion that your image of other people is them. It's not. It's a caricature, I mean, the mind, I don't think that this is a evil thing that, you know, people on the left and the right or whatever the top and the bottom think that the other is always, you know, this greedy bastard trying to do everybody in? I don't I don't think so. I think it's, like, maybe in our evolutionary development, it's, the mind likes to conserve calories. And so it's easier rather than looking at a person, like you're looking at him for the first time, every single time you look at him, is this human, a tiger? Or is this, you know, a mouse? What is it, you know, to make a shortcut, you know, to take a little snapshot. But eventually, we built up this mental collage of mental images that I think can blind us to the truth. You know, it's like the map we're holding up in front of the territory. And when the territory changes and doesn't match the map, which happens like an actual map, like, you know, the landscape pushes up mountains and opens up canyons and rivers meander, and people change, buddy, you know, and so our maps need to be refreshed. We have to be able to listen to each other or else what we'll end up with a civil war or civil conflict. You know, we're going to have riots in the streets and what's going to happen when the other this is what happened in the park, the ad people became cockroaches. Right? This is what happened in the Holocaust. This is what happens in war, when people become enemy combatants, rather than people. We're, as soon as you can set up a caricature of another person you can say and do things to a caricature that you would never do to a human being. And so it's it's time for a refresh it's time to start listening to each other and overcome the polarization that I think and dehumanization that is alienating us.

Ari Gronich 27:43  

Right? So to me that's, that's because the labels like I would love it if we didn't have any of these labels. Red, blue, left, right, snowflake,

Nick Reed 27:55  

it's always red and blue, isn't it Bloods and Crips? I mean, yeah, exactly.

Ari Gronich 28:02  

I was actually looking at at the the red and blue map and the song from colors popped in my head. I don't know if anybody remembers colors. The movie was Sean Penn and Robert Duvall back in the 80s. But you know, there's a song colors and like, red and blue Crips and Bloods it just don't matter gonna fly for your life when my shotgun scatters, you know, this, this, this concept of if you live on this block, you're okay, because I live on this block. But if you live on that block, no longer are you okay? Because you're now on the opposite block. And and I'm not going to go to your block either. So don't come to mind because I'm not going there. Right? This tribalism kind of tribalism is interesting, because, and I'm writing a book actually called tribal living in a modern world, the corporate culture revolution, I'm going to do a series of these. And to me there, there's a massive benefit to going back to a tribe alized kind of a culture, meaning purpose driven culture, not not just living next to you know, people because they happen to live there. But like creating communities that are purpose driven, so like my, maybe one community, and this is for corporations. But let's say you know, you have a corporation and it's an engineering company. Well, you got engineers in one space, you got accountants in the other space, you got finance people in the other space, you got marketing people in the other space, and nobody is really connected, that are in the same projects. And so if you took those people put them in their projects. Now you have this tribe, this family, that is all going for the same goal, your productivity goes up Up, people flaking on you goes down because they're kind of accountable to their family, right? versus this individualized in your boxes in your cubicles in your, you know, corporate offices, that kind of thing. But in the other's respective of tribal, right, is that brutality of, well, if you don't perform, then you're out, you're ostracized, you're gone, right. So the meaning of tribal has has taken itself into several places, but I like those tribal cultures of like sitting around a campfire. And talking about the day, talking about what you guys are going to do tomorrow, talking about how you're feeling, you know, whatever it is, but that that circle around a campfires and always been in my head as the place it's like sitting around a dinner table, the place that we're missing, that that level of community connection, we don't have dinner with our families anymore, because everybody's working. So there's, you know, the family dinner time is kind of, you know, going by the wayside. And those kinds of things to me are tribal, but I'll let you continue with your definition and so forth of it.

Nick Reed 31:25  

No, no, no, I think you hit the nail on the head. I mean, I think that there's aspects of it's interesting, I've never heard it framed as tribal life. But I would, but what I used to think of is, like smaller, more intimate community life, you know, has extreme benefits. You know, we live in large societies where you meet somebody on the street, you'll never see him again, you're basically on the internet, you know, and there's no natural social consequences. If you act like a jerk, or do things unfriendly, you don't lose friends, you know, there's no friends, they're strangers, they're all strangers. But in a community, if you act like unfriendly, you're gonna lose friends. You if you act like a jerk, you have to wake up, and you have to see that person tomorrow, and not just be in their company. But real communities often have a lot of inter reliance, you rely on these people. And so there's, there's, I think there's less need for artificial consequences. Like you don't need 35 million laws, all backed by felonies in jail time and and our bloated prison and criminal justice system, because you can replace it with natural social consequences. I also think that it humanizes things a bit, you actually know people beyond the surface, and it helps get past the caricature phenomenon. of objectifying people, you know, there's an interesting researchers named I think, Dunbar and he came up with, he researched people and chimpanzees and species, and he realized that there's like, there's a limit to the amount of relationships any individual person or chimpanzee can can hold, before it becomes really inefficient to act as a group, but just abstract, like, you can only have so many real friends before. It's no longer you can't maintain them. There's no they're no longer real friends. They're their acquaintances, right. And you don't really know those people. But at that line, right, is, is a real line where communities become, I guess, somewhat tribal, right? Like you can't be we can't be I don't even think we're a real country of 340 million people like, what, where our real sense of togetherness is maybe with a few people in our lives right now. You know, but the tribalism that we usually traditionally use this here that the term being used in is political. And it's weird because communities gone. People don't have community, they don't even know their neighbors, to a large degree, and politics or political identity or belonging has taken its place. So now people feel a sense of unity or togetherness, and identify with people who share the same political views, or political affiliations rather, it's really partisan tribalism. Not just like, we we have the same purpose. We have the same beliefs because it's not. There's actually if you if you really talk to people about the principles behind people certain policy positions. There's a huge discrepancy, everybody, even I'm guilty of it between our personal beliefs and our political ideologies. Because at that level, it just becomes so abstract when you're talking about supranational macro action. nomic policies, you know, you and I, we, I mean, nobody's got the whole picture. There's nobody who's all knowing and all powerful here and got it all figured out. And so when we go to school, and we see our kid in the lunch line, and, you know, you know, Brad is beating up Johnny for his lunch money, you know, we're like, Hey, stop that. You don't take people's things. He can give it to you, if he wants to? Well, then you talk about the IRS, and everybody's like, Oh, well, you gotta pay your taxes. You know, we have huge discrepancies between between the way that we actually believe that we should get along, and the way that we vote, and the policies, and the the party is that we think are okay, and so I think that that is really the lack the lack of community. And we've shifted this need for a sense of community and belonging to politics. Everything is politics. We're Homo politicus. The news has one perspective, if you know, you got ABC, and CNN and you got Fox News, and whatever else, and everyone's like, oh, they're so different. No, they're the same. Everything they talk about is through the lens of politics and government, there is no other dimension of human life that you get viewed through the media, it's all politics. And that is the exact same background, you know, and but there's so many other dimensions of human life,

Ari Gronich 36:24  

there's community, you know, I missed the voice. And that's the way it was. Because that period of time, it was a revolutionary period when TV was just coming out. And news was literally, fact telling. We just told the fact there was the the, the news channels were not allowed.

Nick Reed 36:53  

Walter Cronkite,

Ari Gronich 36:54  

they were they were not allowed to be profit builders. They weren't allowed to be things that made money. Government was telling them basically, the FCC said, you cannot make money off your news. And so it was news was fact, commentary was commentary. But news was fact. That's the way it was. And I think it was in the 70s or late 70s, early 80s, maybe when when Reagan was president that he started doing all of the the deregulation. And they deregulated things like pharmaceuticals being allowed to be advertised to people on TV, and billboards and stuff like that. It never was allowed to do that before. And then also, things like news was made to be allowed to be a for profit, which is why they started with that 24 hour news cycle eventually, because, oh, well, we can be a profit. Great. Let's see, the more we do, the more advertisement we get, the more money we make. And then the advertisement became who who's the big money companies, the pharmaceutical companies. So they're advertising on the news. If you watch news right now, who's the advertisers, the majority of the advertisers, the pharmaceutical companies, the agricultural companies, food companies that are processed food companies, pretty much I mean, you don't really see much about organic and healthy foods. So the the messaging that be that came out of that deregulation is, whatever we are doing is always good, because that's what we did before. And so now we can sell you on the stuff that we're doing. And it may or may not be good for you. And that is the intellectual property that you're sucking in your brain as well as the food that you're sucking in your mouth, the pill that you're taking the shot that you're having. I mean, it's all the same, on that same level, but that's the history of when that started to come. Come to, you know, to pass that that everything we started to hear. And it was a slow ramp up. But nowadays, it's like, always like the 10 seconds, seven seconds, soundbites. It was a slow ramp up to that, you know, back when I was a kid, it was a two minute commercial, not a 32nd commercial or a 10 second commercial, right. And so, that's where people I think, started to get programmed more into this idea that the things that they're seeing aren't correct aren't real news. And now there's this trepidation about everything that you see either we believe it fully or we don't believe it at all. Depending on who you are, right, so the messaging that we're getting is really confusing to people. Is it not?

Nick Reed 40:10  

Oh, absolutely. Our attention span is, well, according to Google seven seconds, we're almost, we've almost beat out the goldfish for the shortest attention span. And you know, what's crazy, is, it's it's a weird kind of feedback loop. Because, you know, people complain about the media and social media, creating echo chambers, right. But really, their algorithms were designed, we brought on Jason Pfeiffer of editor in chief Entrepreneur Magazine to talk about this social dilemma. He was telling us that I mean, their algorithms are designed to show us what we want, right. And so we're just always getting more and more or really even only, and exclusively what we want, or what the algorithms or at least we're showing the algorithms we want. And I think that there's a weird space here where like, whatever it is, that is gonna hold our attention ends up being shown to us by the algorithms. But even if it's a human, the news is showing us what sells, and I don't think people realize the power that we have in that to make a difference. I mean, it wasn't too long ago, there was no organic option. In food, there was no consumer label, to even let people know, what's GMO, what's not what's organic, and what's not what's anything and not what's got what's got in it, there was no nutrition label, I mean, it was literally nothing. And then all the sudden people advocated in one a consumer choice. And it was because there was a market for it. Now you have 94% of millennials who say they will switch which brand they buy a product or service from if they know that it is supporting a cause they believe in or something, we have a new consumer market that's transforming the whole institution of business for good. And it's happening because of the conscious consumers out there that's growing its value based decisions, it's no longer just going to make my buying choices based off convenience and, and price, people will sacrifice 60% of consumers say they will sacrifice price and convenience to support a brand that they they believe in. Right. And these are. And that's why you see every company website getting greenwashed with how carbon neutral they are and how many trees they planted this year. You know, it's because that's what people want. Now, what people want is shifting, and because of that the boss of business is making different decisions, because we are that boss, you know, and I think there's huge opportunity there. Like, why does Joe Rogan, and Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein have an audience in the first place? It's because, you know, the institution of mainstream media sucks is because people are going somewhere else. They're voting with their feet, and their dollars. And that's a strong signal to mainstream media, that what people want is different. And so if you want to exist, you've got to be able to provide meet meet the new needs of the market. And that's a huge power. You and I are having a podcast, in fact, because of this shift in the market, right. And I totally agree, I think that there's nothing preventing any media institution from being a nonprofit. In fact, there's nothing preventing any government department from being a nonprofit, everything in the government that's being done, could be funded voluntarily through through a nonprofit. In fact, the government usually duplicates a lot of services that nonprofits are already doing, and they just compete with them using your tax dollars. There's nothing preventing anybody from doing things in a nonprofit way. It costs you as an individual $150 to set up a nonprofit and get started. All right, and we have internet and technology and Kickstarters and start fun. There's all kinds of ways that you as an individual can get connected and get things going right

Unknown Speaker 44:27  

now. So

Nick Reed 44:28  

if anybody thinks this is a problem, I mean, there's never been a better time to be the solution.

Ari Gronich 44:34  

Yeah, absolutely. So how do we how do we, you know, people go from really focused on the problem to focused on the solution. And I'll give you just a quick example of what I'm talking about. So my buddy, AJ Ollie, is a film producer and media expert and things like that he's he did a movie called Wild While Black Love is the answer. And it's basically going through his story of walking down the street in his neighborhood in, in Maryland, I think it was in Baltimore, and getting harassed and guns pulled on him by police. And how he basically, you know, defended himself by calling his attorney and saying, if you want to talk to my attorney, he's right here. And so they ended up harassing him for almost a year stopping him for walking while black in the wrong neighborhood. And even though it was his neighborhood, and, but what he did with it wasn't just complained that I'm black, and I'm walking around and people are harassing me, right? He created a solution to it. Love is the answer, which I don't remember all the llv. But it's like, listen to people who are different than you understand them that the Oh was, is something I don't remember, though. The V is volunteer to be a part of the solution. You know, it's like, he created this whole program. Now this program has gone out to police station after police station after police station, the movie has been picked up by the NFL, and they're taking it into some of the police station, some of the players, he created a solution to the problem that he saw in front of him rather than just complaining about the issue as as it is. And he's an activist, he takes an active role, that's what activists means is you're taking an active role in the thing that you believe the most about. And so that's the question is, I want to spark through this show, through the things that we say here, I want to spark a mass of activism. And people taking action on whatever it is they believe in, because, frankly, I don't care what you believe in, you're not going to offend me, my roommate, who happens to be my co dad is, you know, kind of, like an interesting guy, because, you know, he hates everybody equally. And I, you know, and he says, I hate them all equally, especially my own people. And that's just because I love them as equally, right. He's, he's an interesting guy. But we don't agree on much of anything, when it comes to certain things that way. But we're like close friends, we, you know, we we have an affinity towards each other where we and we love having the debate. That's even the better thing because we'll start debating, and we'll argue and we'll fight, and then we'll come up with a solution and find out where we're same and where we're different. And what those differences are. It's an interesting dynamic, frankly. But the point is, is that activism for solution, rather than complain about a problem, and then connect with people who are diverse, from your thoughts, so that you can increase your perception of the world through other people's reality.

Nick Reed 48:27  

No, I think you nailed it. I think you absolutely nailed it. That's so interesting, that you guys are complete opposites. My wife and I two, she's from Sweden, you know, she grew up, you know, it's more more socialist culture. Actually, I think they are not quite socialist, according to their government. But anyway, people say, well, what's that, like, being married to a socialist being, you know, with your views? I said, Well, you know, she takes half my paycheck, but great benefits. But I'll tell you, so there's a difference between being. I mean, these people, you're talking about her, that that's an entrepreneur, but it's a different kind of entrepreneur. It's, it's like a social entrepreneur, and, you know, starting a nonprofit and trying to make a difference. It's, it's no different than entrepreneurship. You know, when people want, I mean, everything in this room, everything in your pocket, and everything that we're using to make this podcast right now was once the idea of somebody who said, How can I? What can I do to improve people's lives through a product or service? And that's how nonprofits dark too. It's usually somebody who sees something going on, and they think of a way to fix it or create value. And that's what they do. And people do this every single day in their lives as parents with their kids. You know, there's there's no way we're not doing it. And what's your buddy? What's your buddy did is very common is called public awareness campaign. Most problems are exacerbated by the degree to which they remain in the dark and so raise awareness around them and shedding light on them. And I don't mean like spotlight like, you know, kancil culture, we're going to try and shut this voice out solve a problem. But raising awareness about no one can fix a problem if they don't understand it. You know what I mean? And so why do people know what the purple, the pink ribbon means? Why do people know what the Ice Bucket Challenge is? These are really creative ways that people raised awareness around a cost that they cared about, and money to solve a problem. And there's nothing preventing anybody from doing the same thing and raising awareness around the issues that they care about the most. You can also start a business and be a real entrepreneur, their products and services that solve people's problems all day long. Everything in this room is you can also though most problems in one way or another are also exacerbated by the absence of strong community or toxic or unhealthy community. You know, and and the police relations that you're talking about is also exacerbated by that. Our community can strongly affect issues, especially social issues. You know, in California, police are afraid to go and arrest somebody for join, even though it's illegal, because, you know, millionaires are walking around looking like homeless people, you know, the community is totally different. They don't know who they're gonna arrest, they're gonna end up losing their job getting suspended, this guy's got some powerful lawyers, you know, we can change that, that culture and the community and build a stronger and healthier one. And that can really help a lot of the social issues that people care about. But you can also actually reform or supplement or innovate within the existing institutions. If there's a problem, too. There was a person, Melanie Armstrong, in Mississippi who she started a small business, she wanted to do African hair braiding. And she was told that she wasn't allowed to, and needed permission, she had to go and get a license to braid hair. And this was actually set up and lobbied by the brick and mortar cosmetology businesses who didn't want any competition in Mississippi. And so it was $10,000 to get this license, and an over like, 10,000 hours in school. I mean, it was more more training than you needed to be an EMT or a firefighter or policeman or anything. It was ridiculous. And hair braiding wasn't even in it. Yeah, go ahead. Old doctors.

Ari Gronich 52:35  

College is approximately 3800 hours that's in that's full through their internship. chiropractors, it's about 40 to 100 hours, but that's for a doctorate. That's, that's a seven year eight year committed degree with an internship. That's how many hours it is. And so yeah, 10,000 is quite a bit, especially for braiding hair. Is

Nick Reed 53:00  

that what you're saying? Yeah, yeah. I mean, don't quote me on that. It could be 2001. It could be seven. I don't actually remember the number. I can barely remember my kids birthdays. But it was a significant amount of hours. And ridiculous. Yeah. But people can supplement and fight that, you know, we fought some occupational licensing barriers in Texas to try and protect some complementary alternative medical innovators and oncologists in Houston, from a witch hunt by the Texas Medical Board, you know, and people, people can fight back and create more accountability, and try and remove some of these barriers to people improving other's lives and succeeding and doing so. And here. So we had an oncologist Dr. Brzezinski, who he had found out that some cancers have a genetic component to them. And through the epigenetic process, right. You can you can affect genes you can turn on and off their expression, using certain foods and pharmaceutical compositions. And so he would do this and he would treat cancer patients. And according to the definition of what a cure means, which is five years without returning, he cured many cancer patients who had cancers that were exacerbated by genetic conditions. And what he what he did at the time was an innovation. It had never been done. He was a medical innovator, right. But instead of being a hero, the Texas Medical Board tried to take his license and the FDA and they had been on a witch hunt for a decade. And this guy had spent millions 10s of millions of dollars just fighting to keep trying to save lives, and he's just improving people's lives. And he's a successful practice. You know, he's got a big building. And so what happened was the Texas Medical Board comprised of mostly traditional doctors And maybe I think they allowed one chiropractor on the board recently, and they had to fight for that. They didn't like competition. And so they really narrowly defined what's called the standard of care. And the standard of care is defined by whatever is the standard of the day is acceptable if you want to keep your license, so everybody's got a permission slip, and they can yank your permission slip, if you act outside of the status quo of treatment, and what's acceptable today. So here's this medical, so it makes all medical innovation, an act of civil disobedience. So this guy, and here's the crazy thing. At the time, they were trying to take his license and put him on trial. It had already become the standard of care, it was being done all over the place. Okay, but it wasn't the standard of care at the time that he invented it. And so they were threatening to take his license. So this is an example of a barrier that a lot of people face right now, when kids say, what do you want to be when you grow up, and they say I want to be x, whatever it is, they have a one in four chance that they're going to be told they don't have permission. And they're going to have to go through some of the barriers that this doctor and other complimentary alternative medical doctors, and Melanie Armstrong in Mississippi, go through called an occupational licensing, and much of it is not for your safety. It's anti competitive business practices, that our institution of business is still engaging in by going to their politicians and saying, you know what, there's a safety issue that you don't know about, because you're a politician, and you're not in my field. And you should create a law that blocks other people from engaging in this profession. until they've they've they can pay to play. Right. And it's a major issue. Yeah. So anyway, there's lots of ways people can engage in change. And that's, that's some of them, you can reform and innovate.

Ari Gronich 57:01  

Yeah, I know. I know, Dr. burzynski, or know of his him and his story. I had because I'm in the medical field, we had a functional medicine practitioner, she was a gynecologist, in Orlando. And she got her entire practice, like rated, because the AMA, which is pretty much the mob, the medical mob, didn't like the fact that that she on a regular basis, had patients that would show up for visits and not be prescribed something. So the standard of care as you were staying, saying, the standard of care is that within four visits, they either need a prescription or a procedure, if they don't get a prescription or a procedure meaning a pharmaceutical prescription, not not maybe a supplement, not maybe like, like exercise for you know, for a while and a lifestyle prescription but a pharmaceutical prescription or a procedure or a medical procedure, because she didn't do that. The ama and the Florida Department of Health decided that they wanted to investigate her and literally ripped apart her office took all her files, I mean, talk about breaking HIPAA law, just by by rating an office and taking the doctor files and why because standard of care. The standard of care sucks. The standard of care in medicine is absolutely horrific. It's, you know, seven minutes max in an office these days, according to the insurance companies. So, you know, you can't even get your story across, let alone get them to understand what's going on with your body, let enough for them to be able to, to treat you. And it's it's fairly ridiculous, you know, the system as a whole has. You know, this is a harsh word, but it's rape, the health of American, you know, public, I mean, and it has nothing to do with the doctors. It has nothing that the doctors are here trying to be of service, the system that they're in is bullying, and intimidating, threatening them every day with their livelihood. Because if you're out of school with a couple, you know, a quarter million to half a million dollar debt. And now you're being threatened because you're practicing, you know, without the standard of care. You could lose your license. Now all of a sudden that debt is completely unpaid hackable. And you can't even work in your in your profession. It's, I mean, if people knew, to the depths of their knowledge, what is really happening in the medical world and how much The monetary system is affecting, you know, what happens in people's health? I don't think that they would stand for it. Maybe they would. But I don't I think people know that it's broken. They just don't know why and how.

Nick Reed 1:00:17  

So, and we're doing it. Yeah, we It is, it is our fault, I have to say. And I mean, everybody that none of this machinery returns without the gears of each and every single one of our participation. We are the system. And I just, you know, when you were talking, I'm sitting here thinking about the the standard of care and the issue, it does suck this, this whole situation. But it's, and it's not the doctors, it's the one size fits all. approach that's top down, it doesn't work. It stifles creativity and innovation out because you're you're trying to micromanage from a distance. And it doesn't work in giant corporations. And it doesn't work in giant governments, and it doesn't work in the medical industry. It doesn't work in any practice, when you're trying to dictate what everybody should do. You have different people with different needs, every single person is a unique individual with different problems. And it's there is no one size fits all. It doesn't work in education. Any teacher who walks in a room and try it into a third grade classroom and tries to teach to the statistically average third grader misses every single person in that room. No one is the perfect statistical average, kids are all over the place. And they're all over the place in different areas of their learning. It's the same in the medical field, you can't prescribe a one size fits all for anything. And so the top down approach that we have is really the problem. And you know whose fault it is. It's the people who do top down thinking, who's going to become the decision makers who comprises the people making and enforcing the decisions we do. And you know what, who thinks top down? We do. Let me give an example. I used to do this workshop. Actually, I used to masquerade around as a substitute teacher, so that I could test out my social experiments and workshops on unsuspecting audiences. So I went into this classroom, and I did this experiment. And I said, Okay, today, guys, we're gonna change the world. So here's what I want you to do. I was in Sweden, was the international High School. And this was a conversational English class. So I can do whatever I want, as long as it's in English. So I say, Okay. Get into groups. identify what's one thing you want to see change in the world more than anything else? All right, then to what's best plan you can think of to make it happen. Three, do it in English, come up and present. Okay, so boom, get into groups. All right, five minutes has elapsed, and they're all done back in their seats. And I'm impressed. I'm like, Wow, you guys solve all the world's problems in five minutes? Come on up. Let's hear it. Bachelor number one. So they come on up. And here's kind of what it sounded like. Well, we think that poverty is a big issue. And what the Prime Minister should do is to the next person, well, we think that the criminal justice system is a big issue. And you know, what the man should do is that it did the DA. Well, we think that the environments that they issue and you know, what the UN should do is, and I realized something. They're all top down answers. Nobody had anything that they could walk out the door and actually do. And this is extremely disempowering. And I did this all across the United States, in schools as well. And you know, what is the exact same outcome? Everybody is thinking in terms of top down solutions, they're thinking in terms of what the president should do. And when everybody's doing that, you know, what everybody's not doing

Ari Gronich 1:04:16  

anything to solve any problems.

Nick Reed 1:04:20  

It's all somebody else. And the worst part about it is when you when you're thinking in terms of top down solutions, we are creating and supporting and acquiescing to a one size fits all solutions. Because you know, what, 500 people in Washington DC, cannot logistically, it's impossible solve all the problems of 340 million people across a continent that they've never met and don't know anything about. It is science. It is impossible to do. And this is a giant delusion that we have, that we're going to solve our problems through top down. Thank you. We are creating the problem, you know, the Einstein quote, you can't solve a problem and the same level of awareness that's creating it. This is us guys. Hello, you want to be woke? Wake up, we need to start stop thinking from the bottom up. And the medical industry is a perfect example of it.

Ari Gronich 1:05:16  

Yeah, absolutely. You know, people talk to me all the time about how bad big government is, and how bad government is, and how bad big businesses and how bad you know, these things are? And I'm like, so who's running the company? who's running the company? who's running the government? Is that person a person? Is it? Is it a? Is it like people the like, oh, the deep state, right? Are they people? Because if there are people, then we have those people, you know, through sex. And then we raised those people through our ideals. And then they started acting on our ideals when they got to those places of power. That sounds like the people to me. So why is it that? Why do you think that people want to separate themselves from the thing that that they created? And then hold it up to some highest, you know, position of authority that can overthrow or overtake or over? Well over the people, the people? because, to me, it's like, we are the people? Oh, that's the saying, Is it more?

Nick Reed 1:06:42  

somewhere? I heard that once maybe it was in a movie, I don't know. Why do we have this, this, this this obsessive stated in our minds

Ari Gronich 1:06:53  

of the entity versus the people running the entity because nothing is evil inherent of itself. Government is not evil, governmental systems are not evil. People are the people who do the things can be evil, or just the things that they're doing. Could be let's take it away from evil versus good, right? Lack of optimization versus optimized.

Nick Reed 1:07:22  

Or error or ignorance, right, we're all acting in ignorance, we don't have the full picture, that I think there's a lot more innocence to the picture than then than people think. And the systems that we have, they oftentimes do create barriers. But there are no systems without people, it all comes back to the we are people in this we are the gears in the machinery of it. And we give away our power way too easily. You know, the the scene from they live where the preacher standing up saying, they are our owners, they own us, we're controlled, we love to find a perpetrator and to play the victim. And there's a kind of virtuosity and righteousness about it. I don't think today that we know how to solve a problem without creating an enemy. We have this this war mentality that we have to find an enemy, polarize it, isolate them and attack them. You know, we that's our approach to Corona. That's our approach to everything. We have the war on drugs, the war on poverty, and the war on war on everything, you know, war on disease, we're going to war it all right. And the problem is, is when you go around looking for a perpetrator, you're always in the victim story, and you give away your power. And the power that people have is incredible. You know, when my kids were born, I'll give you a good example. My first kid was born Jessica, she's four years old now. They she was born, she didn't look like the name that we picked out. Right? Which was Olivia, I was like, I look like that She looks like a Jessica. So I was they said, Well, what do you want to name or we have to write something down. And I said, I don't know. I'm sorry. And so all the sudden this beautiful birth process because they got afraid they have requirements to fill out an application of live birth turned into like a bureaucratic proceeding. And anytime that somebody tries to turn one of the most meaningful experiences in my life into a bureaucratic legal proceeding, I'm going to push back so we didn't sign any paperwork. So we're driving away. They're literally stuffing paperwork in the window to sign as we're driving away. So she ended up with you know, no social security number no birth certificate. I think there is a birth certificate is priceless baby read somewhere, but we didn't have any of that. And then you know, okay, here we are a few months later and my wife's ready to go visit her family in Sweden so they can meet our first child. And she says, Okay, great, we need a passport. Nick, you've figured this out.

So I sent in the application. And I sent in so much documentation to establish citizenship and identity. It was a, I mean, it was like a novel thicker than your book. And it had everything in it. And they didn't even look at it. I just got Johnny, you know, processor sent me this automated boilerplate letter said, Sorry, no social, no birth certificate, your application has been put on put on hold, right. So I'm, like raging against the system right now. Oh, bureaucracy, Oh, we got this is our life, you know. And I say Hold on a second. Every single part of the system I'm raging against is made up of and created by and run by human beings. So I call up the passport agency. And somebody answers and they say, Hello, this is so and so you know, it's a passport, blah, blah, blah, can I help you? And I say yes. Can I speak to your supervisor? And so I get a supervisor on the phone, and she says, Hello, this is so and so the supervisor? And I say yes, can I speak to your supervisor? Okay, sure. And I do this until there is no more supervisors. And then I say, Hi, look, I'm about to become a casualty and the bureaucratic process here. Please help me and let me explain what's going on. It would really make my day, if you could call this processor and tell him to actually look at the documentation that we sent, because we got a plane ticket to catch. And she's a citizen and all this. And you know, what this person did? This person said, Yeah, absolutely. And wrote up this nice long email and sent it to him, the whole was removed off of our, our passport application. The next day, the passport came in the mail with no birth certificate, no social security number, we flew on our way. And everybody got to meet the baby, and we lived happily ever after. And you know what, ever since then, I can't get myself to rage against an abstract system ever again. Because the humanity came through. And I've experienced it. I've tasted it. And I've tasted it over and over and over again, because I looked for it, because I was curious about it. And I found it, but you won't find it if you're not looking for it. But it is there. Everything is done by humans in the human world.

Ari Gronich 1:12:37  

Right? I definition. You are kind also, that's the thing that that eludes a lot of people is the art of it, where it's like, the kindness, got you the result? Had you had you approached her differently? That person that you spoke with, you might not have gotten the humanity, right. But you approached a human with humanity, and then you got the humanity. I find it fascinating. When I have to call customer service. And the person says, Well, that's not our policy. And then I ask for a supervisor, and the supervisor will say, Oh, yeah, no problem, we can do that. Like, so why is it the policy to tell the person that it's not the policy, so that they have to get frustrated, right, so that it's like, it's like, purposeful, frustration. And I don't know if that's like a point, the point is, somebody gets too frustrated, so they don't bother so that they get their extra 10 bucks or 100 bucks or whatever, bucks, you know, like, what, what's the what is the purpose of the process that makes it so complicated? To have humanity go, Oh, okay. Well, that makes sense. Right? A computer can't really go, that makes sense, an algorithm can't really go Well, that makes sense. A person can, though,

Nick Reed 1:14:15  

can and often doesn't. And, you know, companies are changing the way that they operate to and to a large degree. They're decentralizing. They're empowering their employees. They're allowing them to make more decisions. They're getting rid of a lot of the red tape and the process and barriers that have prevented people at at the front lines to create value and with massive results. For a long time, we've had a top down approach to running business too. And the approach has been that we know best and the employees on the front line don't know anything. So we're going to tell them what to say and we're going to pay them to be our Robots. And so then when you do this, when you don't empower them, they take no ownership, it becomes your company, not their company. And they focus more on doing things right, than doing the right thing. And so we got to shift out of the top down command and control mentality in business two, yes. And once we do, we can empower people to know what to do, without being told what to do, and to be adaptable and flexible. Because they know the vision and the mission, we have the same purpose. And we're going and companies are doing that. And they're winning the day. And they're called conscious capitalist companies. They're called self governance organizations, according to the legal research network. And over a 15 to 20 year span, we're talking long term, these companies are outpacing the s&p 500. And the good to great companies, sometimes by 14 to one. I mean, we're talking extreme long term profitability for companies that don't treat people like robots. And don't try and create this burn and turn mentality. Right.

Ari Gronich 1:16:12  

Yeah, I just just to highlight a couple of Costco

Unknown Speaker 1:16:17  

had Oh, for sure. Rate

Ari Gronich 1:16:20  

rate worked, you know, they do great work with their employees, they give them a lot of freedom, they pay them very well pay for benefits, even like ups, I think, UPS what no FedEx paid for my friend was working there in high school. And then he they paid for his college completely. And he still works for them now 30 years, you know, later. I mean,

Unknown Speaker 1:16:48  

what his loyalty?

Ari Gronich 1:16:49  

Yeah, well, his loyalty was because they were loyal to him. Right? Because he was able to own his position in that company. He had worked for ups before he worked for FedEx. And they were completely different culture at the time, you know, I don't know what their culture is now. But, but yeah, the the employee loyalty, I've done a lot of corporate wellness and corporate culture work. And one of the things that employers and HR reps need to really get their heads wrapped around and CFOs. And CEOs, but I mean, is that you put the frickin employees on the wrong side of the balance sheet. Okay, stop putting them on the deficit, stop putting them on the on the side of the balance sheet that makes them a liability, and start putting them on the investment side of the sheet. Okay. Because you're not investing in your employees, which means you're not investing in your, in their families, which means you're not investing in your community, the community in which you exist in. And the only reason companies and I really want you to take this as, as much as I mean it, companies need to start having their responsibility to their people at the forefront of what they're doing, because their productivity is dropped. There, their reputations are gone. I mean, you know, nobody wants to work. For Walmart, they work there because they have to, but they don't want to, and they will leave as soon as possible. And then you got to hire and train a new person, and how much does that cost? What's the cost of employee turnover? what's the what's the cost of retraining? What's the cost of sick days? What's the cost of having three hours of the day be productive, while eight hours while the other five are completely unproductive for the employee? What's that productivity cost? I mean, it is so against logic, in my logic, at least, to not treat your employees like they're the frickin kings and queens of your company making your company work. It's just stupid. I mean, that's a really strong word to use, but it's just not smart.

Nick Reed 1:19:17  

Is and you'll create, you're going to inspire people who work against you.

Unknown Speaker 1:19:22  

You know,

Nick Reed 1:19:24  

60% of employees, actually it's more than 60 but I don't remember the exact statistic are disengaged, disengaged employees and 17% of those disengaged or actively disengaged. Do you know what that means? That means disengaged means not creating value. actively disengaged means actually they are actively undermining the value of that other 4030 to 40% who are engaged creating value. This is the cost if you take take 60% and multiply that times the average salary in your business, okay? Now, add that as a cost. That's how much you're losing, you're losing 60% of everything that you're paying out to an employee who's disengaged or actively disengaged. And not only that, but the cost is 1.5 times what it is to keep an employee, if you have to re hire and retrain and onboard a new employee and get them up to speed, we are wasting significant amounts of money if you're a person who only cares about money, you know, so the arguments there, you know, there's stories you get from Whole Foods, for example, who had declaration of interdependence on their wall with all their different stakeholders. And you remember Whole Foods sold to Amazon a few years back, right? And everybody knows why Amazon bought Whole Foods. But nobody knows why Whole Foods sold to Amazon. It's an interesting story. So Janis, partners, one of their major shareholders, came to Whole Foods and said, you're paying your employees too much, too much benefits, you know, you're wasting a lot of money. We want you to squeeze all the other stakeholders, you know, we're gonna have some good returns in the next quarter for our shareholders. And they, they they stuck it to them and said, No, I don't think so. And what we'll make, we made some changes where it made sense, but the rest of them they didn't make according to john Mackey, and his book conscious capitalism. And so James Parker's went and got some other investors together. And they they created a coup and threatened proxy to the board, which means they're just going to fire everybody. And they said, Okay, well, you got four days to make these changes or to sell the company. And so on the fourth day, he sold to Amazon, who he thought had some kind of affinity to try and keep the spirit alive. But john Mackey took in Whole Foods, a, what's called a multi stakeholder approach. And this wasn't this flies in the face of the the philosophy that took a stronghold in the institution of business for like, 5050 years or so. Which is the the premise of the shareholder, the shareholders King, right. And everybody else is just a cash cow, you know, to be exploited or something. And what companies realized is when you take a multi stakeholder approach, you create a very long term profitable and long term sustainable business because you lose the burn and turn waste. Okay, just from an economic standpoint, but more than that, the markets have shifted, employees, especially millennials today comprise the largest segment of the workforce don't want another place where they're going to clock in and clock out. That's, that's the other generations, that's their parents, right? They don't want to do that. They want a place that appreciates them, where they feel they can have contribution, where they're going to enjoy the people that they work with, and they feel trusted. And, you know, a sense of meaning and contribution, like this is

Unknown Speaker 1:22:59  

the new world.

Ari Gronich 1:23:01  

Yeah, and respected. I mean, that's, that's the other thing people want to feel like, the value that they're giving is, is being respected and being honored. And, you know, that's an interesting story about about Amazon and how they ended up with Whole Foods. You know, we call it a whole paycheck. But But, you know, Amazon is an interesting company, because Bezos, the amount of money he personally put in his pocket, three throughout this COVID, I saw I saw a statistic. If he were to give, I think it was $110,000 to each and every single one of his employees. He would be back to the net worth that he was when he when Corona started. And he has like 100,000 something employees. That to me is like, okay, so these are the people who are out there on the forefront of your business making your business happen. Wouldn't that be a way to honor them? Even if it wasn't that much, right? And so it's just an interesting like, $110,000 to the employees, what would that do for the economy for 100,000 people, or however many the however many employees there are, that's 100,000 people they all get 100,000 plus dollars? What would that do to the economy overall? What would they what would those people do with the money probably spend it and probably spend it on Amazon and probably it would go back to the company anyway or at least other companies. And so this is where, like, the bank bailouts didn't make sense to me. Because if you're bailing something out, because they were stupid in their behavior, wouldn't it be better to pay the people to give the money to the people that they were stupid about, you know? And then what are those people going to do with the money, they're probably going to freakin pay their bills. You know, they're not going to hoard the money, they're not going to take it and say, Oh, I'm we're not lending it out anymore. You know, we're being conservative. Now we're listening. We're being conservative, they're going to spend the money and make it circulate. And one of the things that was really fascinating, I was watching an interview with the guy who, what the Gordon Gekko was on Wall Street was made for, you know, the guy that that was Gordon Gekko, I guess, and his character was based off of, and he said, money is called circulation for a reason, right? You circulate money, or currency, it's current, because it needs to circulate. If it doesn't circulate, it has no purpose. And so money needs to go through this flow in order for it to be a value at all. And right now, we have this situation where there's a lot of hoarding going on right? Of Money, there's lots of money in big pockets at that top end, like you were talking about, not a lot of money at the bottom end. And not much is circulating as being passed through the world, right. So if we were to create more, you know, balance with our actions, and circuit, the money would circulate, and all of a sudden, our dollar would go up again, right now our dollar has basically plummeted. It's like not worth a whole lot. I mean, I was in London, dollars, not worth nearly what it was there, you know, Canada not worth that. Paris, you know, not worth. It's like we have devalued ourselves as a country and our currency in such tremendous ways that are so easy to fix, in my opinion. You know, the solutions are so easy if if all we did was think outside of the box.

Nick Reed 1:27:38  

Absolutely. There's an organization that was co founded by Deepak Chopra. So Oprah, Oprah not sure I'm never saying his name, right. When I say it, it's called just capital. And just capital champions and highlights. Companies that are being more just are fair. And and that's a pretty ambiguous term, but they poll they do focus groups, they take all the top things that people say makes adjustor not just company. And then they survey the United States about what people think about it, what people care about, and then they rank and order the largest companies, according to those metrics, right? So it's all crowdsource it's very interesting.

Ari Gronich 1:28:26  

Yeah. And when source when we, you know, give us that resource when, for when we post? So,

Nick Reed 1:28:35  

yeah, absolutely. I believe it's just capital.org. Okay, he's,

Unknown Speaker 1:28:41  

I'm

Nick Reed 1:28:44  

sorry, I lost my train of thought so so the companies are this corporate tracker, and I get these emails. And they show me all the things the cool things that companies have done during Corona to to address the crisis that they didn't have to do. And it's things like the CEO, gave their salary to their employees. Everybody got kept their benefits, even though they had to do some go down to part time or everybody took voluntary time off in a coordinated effort so that nobody had to get fired, which is what Southwest Airlines did during the 2008 crisis. It's they turn their distillery into, you know, making hand sanitizer. There's a lot of really cool things that companies have been doing that I hear about not just through the corporate tracker, just capital that I get in my email as a you know, principal and entrepreneur walk but through stories from people who, you know, are employees at places and who who hear other stories about What's being done, there's some really cool stories. And I think that there's, there's a lot of principled entrepreneurs out there that are showing us a better way, and people are picking up on it. And people like that. And there's a lot of power, we have to vote with our feet and vote with our dollars a lot. And people who hear about something like that, like, let's say, there's not a lot of mutual benefit happening during Corona with Amazon between the CEO and their employees, and somebody doesn't like that. They may go and find another marketplace. And Amazon may start to see an exodus, what it's going to take is people actually caring. And people actually voting with their dollars and feet is very important. None of this happens without us. And you know, what, also, I talked about the the shareholder and how much power they have every single person, if you have a savings account, and you have to pay taxes on that one cent of dividends, or you have a 401k, you know, and that's growing at an annual percentage rate of 8%, or whatever. Where do you think that's being invested? It's being invested in companies, which companies? And according to what criteria, are they being selected? Is it short term returns for the shareholder? Is it a multi stakeholder approach? You know, co sanity advisors is a company that has that offers portfolios, there's lots of portfolios that you can do for companies that take a multi stakeholder approach, who's calling up their bank? and saying, Where are you investing my money? Where am I investing it? Because the things that we're complaining about? We're probably funding and we don't even know it, we are the employees. We are the investors. We are the consumers? We are the boss. We are the people.

Ari Gronich 1:31:57  

Yeah, you know, I'm enjoying this conversation, I could probably talk to you for another 10 hours or something about it. Give us a you know, what's your philosophy

Unknown Speaker 1:32:12  

on

Ari Gronich 1:32:14  

the entire nonprofit sector? And how, because people think that nonprofit means you're not making any money. So can you kind of just for those people who might be interested in starting a nonprofit and and making a difference in the world that way? Can you explain to them what a nonprofit really is? and how it can benefit them as well as the cause that they're wanting to do?

Unknown Speaker 1:32:47  

Yeah, well, I'm

Nick Reed 1:32:48  

not a lawyer. But I have ran nonprofits, and I work for a nonprofit. And the difference between a nonprofit and a for profit is there's a lot more accountability, and you have more of a fiduciary responsibility to achieve your and advance your charitable purpose. Right. So there's a purpose beyond profits. There's nothing preventing a company from having a purpose beyond profits, instead of the C Corp, there's the B Corp, you know, that you can get. And there's all kinds of community giving programs and principled entrepreneurs out there doing it. But nonprofit, usually people start that because they are able to take donations, that they can offer the donors to make tax deductions on. And so the IRS tax deductible status is what is a big a big draw to that, but you can pay yourself as an employee just the same and you can pay yourself, you know, a really reasonable salary depending on the size of your nonprofit and the flow of donations that you have coming in. I'm not really qualified to talk more about the legal rights aspect of it or the structure part. But I do think if you want to go out there and make a difference, you don't need anything to get started. You don't need anything to take donations, you don't need tax deductible status and you don't need to set up a nonprofit, you simply look out the window at the world that you see laying in ruins and past the point of no return. Instead of seeing that you say what an opportunity to make a difference. How could I come to the table you know, I sat in this Think Tank this utopian think tank of dreamers and visionaries who went around and described the perfect world they all wish they had and it was you know more war no more violence no more poverty numerous starvation or death decimation the environment on and on and on. And then it got silly. It's like oh, nobody has to die. We won't get sick. You know, we don't have to sleep You know, we're we can fly. By time it got to me. I'm like, this is no world. I want to be a part of what a boring and lonely world What would I have to bring to the table in a world where nobody needs anybody? it anymore, we need to look out the window and say thank god the world's not perfect already. You know, this is an opportunity for meaning a purpose, we go and turn on Netflix or go into a dark hypnotic theater and dream through watching our favorite actors and actresses about having a purpose and calling. We watch him overcome, all in the face of all adversity and wrongful accusation, do what only they can do. Right? While in our own lives, the greatest opportunity for meaning and purpose, and calling exists right here, right now, within the fabric of this moment. And we know it not

Ari Gronich 1:35:41  

awesome. On that note, give a give the audience like three or four actionable tips on what they can do to create a new tomorrow today for themselves.

Nick Reed 1:35:53  

Talk to people you disagree with depolarize a conversation. Look for people, winning people over winning arguments. Think of the one thing that you would like to see change in this world more than anything else. And then outline the best plan that you can think of to actually walk out the door and make it happen. from the bottom up. You can think how can I? How can I create a product or a service that will advance this thing that I care about? You can think how can I create more awareness around this thing that I care about in a way that will advance it? You can think how could creating more healthy and strong communities

Unknown Speaker 1:36:36  

advance

Nick Reed 1:36:37  

this cause that I care about? or How could I reform or supplement or innovate within the existing institutions of business community education or government that could remove barriers to people who are facing this issue that I care about. You can go to Americans for Prosperity foundation.org and you can find other nonprofits that can help you get connected to causes and join others in making a difference beyond just what you can do as an individual. But the biggest thing you can do is dispel the myth that personal action doesn't matter. We have this change the world ism, which is a psychosis that says nothing matters, unless we're fixing global hunger or, you know, world something another. And I'm not going to do anything unless it's it's at a global macro economic scale. While nobody does anything. If everyone would do the thing, the one thing that if everybody else were to do that would lead to the whole world changing you know what the whole world changes. Your personal action is the only thing that counts. And that'll inspire other people to do things and it may not be joining you and doing what you're doing. But it may be the equivalent of that. And if everybody's doing the things that they wish everybody else would do. You get a whole lot of things getting done

Ari Gronich 1:38:14  

that's awesome. How can people get a hold of you if they want to learn more and work with you

Nick Reed 1:38:19  

can check out Americans for Prosperity foundation.org you can look up our our podcast be the solution on Americans for Prosperity Foundation, YouTube and social media channels and pages. You can also check out our larger philanthropic community stand together.org. Awesome. Thank

Ari Gronich 1:38:36  

you so much. This has been an amazing conversation. I know the audience has gotten a lot out of it. Hopefully they were taking some notes. Remember to like subscribe, rate, review and comment because we like to have your comments. We like to be able to start conversations with you and come up with more solutions for you. So anyway, thank you very much. This has been another episode of create a new tomorrow. I am your host, Ari Gronich and we'll see you next time. Thank you for listening to this podcast. I appreciate all you do to create a new tomorrow for yourself and those around you. If you'd like to take this information further and are interested in joining a community of like minded people who are all passionate about activating their vision for a better world. Go to the website, create a new tomorrow.com and find out how you can be part of making a bigger difference. I have a gift for you just for checking it out and look forward to seeing you take the leap and joining our private paid mastermind community. Until then, see you on the next episode.

Hi, I'm here with Nick Reed, He is an online coach who helps busy parents and professionals regain control of their health without sacrificing the things they love! also the founder of @ryzeupfitness. Hear it live on Monday at 6 Am for the full episode in your favorite podcast app.

JOIN NOW!! AND BE PART OF MASTERMIND PROGRAM

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CHECK THIS OTHER WEBSITE FOR MORE INFORMATION!

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https://www.Achievehealthusa.com

Create a fundamental change in the global community from a strictly reactive system of medicine that focuses on symptom and emergency treatment to a proactive system based on whole-being health as well as illness and injury prevention. Personally teach and influence at least one million people.

We are a multifaceted Health and Wellness company that specializes in Corporate Wellness and Culture Consulting, Industry Speaking engagements and Continuing education for the industry.

We Help corporations by solving the most costly problems they have with Productivity and Health Care while creating a culture that thrives on accomplishment and community.

We help organizations think outside of the box and gain tools that allow them to be nimble and strong as tides and markets shift.

We Up level the skills and tools of other practitioners by providing them continuing education that actually leads to greater success and standing in the business community.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Nick Reed 0:00  

The opportunity here for people to take an active role. And to be a gift to the world is not about you, fulfilling your obligation and paying your debts. This is about you getting a sense of meaning and fulfillment out of life. And this is an opportunity. You know, when, for example, like we just interviewed a comedian the other day talking about jokes. jokes are a really interesting thing when you share a joke with somebody. Jokes only have value after you've heard in the first time when you give them to others. You enjoy jokes again, when other people laugh at them. It is by giving them up and sharing them and putting them into other people's worlds that you get value out of it.

Hi, I am here with Kimberly Spencer, she is a certified high performance coach and intuitive life coach, Amazon bestselling author, and international motivational speaker.

CHECH THIS AMAZING WEBSITE BY KIMBERLY TO LEARN MORE!

https://crownyourself.com/

JOIN NOW!! AND BE PART OF MASTERMIND PROGRAM

learn how to activate yourself for a better future!

https://createanewtomorrow.com/master...

CHECK THIS LINK FOR A FREE GIFT FOR YOU!

https://www.createanewtomorrow.com/gift

DO YOU WANT TO BE OUR NEXT SPECIAL GUEST?

Book an appointment now and let's create a new world together!

https://booking.builderall.com/calend...

CHECK THIS OTHER WEBSITE FOR MORE INFORMATION!

https://www.CreateAnewtomorrow.com

https://www.Achievehealthusa.com

Create a fundamental change in the global community from a strictly reactive system of medicine that focuses on symptom and emergency treatment to a proactive system based on whole-being health as well as illness and injury prevention. Personally teach and influence at least one million people.

We are a multifaceted Health and Wellness company that specializes in Corporate Wellness and Culture Consulting, Industry Speaking engagements and Continuing education for the industry.

We Help corporations by solving the most costly problems they have with Productivity and Health Care while creating a culture that thrives on accomplishment and community.

We help organizations think outside of the box and gain tools that allow them to be nimble and strong as tides and markets shift.

We Up level the skills and tools of other practitioners by providing them continuing education that actually leads to greater success and standing in the business community.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Ari Gronich 0:07  

Welcome to another episode of create a new tomorrow. I'm your host, Ari, Gronich. And here I have with me is Kimberly Spencer's, certified high performance coach and founder of crown yourself.com. Welcome to the show. Kimberly. Tony, a bit about yourself.

Kimberly Spencer 0:25  

Thank you so much for having me on re Yeah, I am the certified high performance coach. I'm the founder of crown yourself.com. I specifically work with visionary leaders to help them build their empire and stand out authentically and serve, serve you with their leadership.

Ari Gronich 0:43  

Awesome, very cool. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and what got you to this place.

Kimberly Spencer 0:50  

So my background was quite varied. It was very much from a place of following my curiosity, and exploration, I grew up with two entrepreneurial parents. So the entrepreneur gene is kind of like in my blood. But I watched my parents, from a very early age, my dad was an addict. And so I saw that struggle between the higher self and the potential of who he could be, and the addictive state of pharmaceutical drugs of non pharmaceutical drugs and of alcohol and all the things. And I saw the ability to recognize someone's potential very early on, and see someone when they're not living into it, or when they're making excuses for it. And I believe that we're kind of blessed with the children that we need to remind us of who we have been that was kind of programmed and stripped away from us. And I was always a very emotional child. I was big emotions, big feelings. And growing up that wasn't really praised. In my house, I saw my dad escape his emotions, my mom would suppress and repress hers. And so he there I was left with all these big emotions and not knowing what to do with them. And so it turned me into two things one a bulimic and to doing in writing in Hollywood, when I was 17, I got my first feature film produced when I was 20. And it was such a fun experience, being able to have that dream and have seen my name on the up on the big screen. But I was surprised at when I was at the premiere, I was actually only 90% fulfilled. And it was at that time that two weeks later, after the premiere, I got a notification from a friend of my friend who came to the premiere because when you write a movie, you get extra tickets. And so she and her son had come to the premiere and had seen the film and it changed his life based on the story. And the story was a very simple story. That was about a young kid who wants to fit in with the cool crowd. And he adapts himself into the high flying hard partying world of freestyle motocross to do so I didn't know anything about motocross at the time, I just researched it. Like most people are like, Wait crowned yourself and freestyle motocross, I know. But that that experience of learning that something that I created, had transformed somebody's life and the story that they were living in, into some and made them want to be better and recognize their own possibility and their own potential. I was like that, I want to do that. I want to do more of that. At the time, in order to support myself in Hollywood, I was also transforming my own story with with my body and what was possible for my body because I became a Pilates instructor simultaneously. So I started out teaching Pilates, to support myself and my career and entertainment. And it was there that I saw that the power of the mindset, and I was surrounded by different types of clients training 10 hours a day, seeing all these different types of bodies. And it didn't matter whether somebody was technically overweight or technically thin or technically ate healthy or technically didn't, what mattered was how they thought about their bodies. And what matters was how they thought and those thoughts were reflected in, in their actions and in their habits.

Ari Gronich 4:09  

That is, that's fascinating. How is it in Australia during the pandemic? I mean, I hear that they've been pretty shut down. Is that correct?

Kimberly Spencer 4:20  

That was Melbourne. So Melbourne, Australia and that Melbourne where you are and the Gold Coast where I live, it's back to normal like and my son can go to pretender. He can go hug children. We don't have any mask ordinances. Melbourne was the one that was really struggling. There's like no cases in Australia In Australia, right. There's very, very few and there's been no cases in Queensland for the past, like two months. So festivals are coming back. So I keep on trying to inspire my American compadres to be like, come on. It's like it's going to it's going to turn around, I promise you, things will come back. Like, I just saw a beer festival the other weekend. Like,

Ari Gronich 5:09  

that's awesome. So, you know, let's kind of unpack some of the things that you said, one of the things that you said that was fascinating to me is the bulimic for your body is blaming for your finances, which basically, is a good metaphor for life in general, where, you know, the quantum theory of how you do anything, is how you do everything. And so tell us about that a little bit more kind of dig deep into what it is that made that pattern repeat itself, after you had thought that you already took care of the pattern. Yeah.

Kimberly Spencer 5:47  

The the pattern really stemmed from that deeper subconscious belief of enoughness. And from deserving, and from, I mean, if you think of bulimia, I mean, what bulimia was, it was an emotional thing for me. So I didn't know how to process my emotions. So I would shove them down, repress them and then explode. And that was what I did with food. And so with finances and money, that's that was similar to what I was doing, I would take money, and I would receive it I had, I was okay with making sales, but then it would just explode, and then it would explode beyond. And we got me into a nice portion of debt, it would explode beyond the capacity of what I consumed. And it was seeing that parallel of the beliefs of being enough and the emotions that were attached to it. So there's, there's an emotion that comes with receiving, but there's also an emotion that comes from having and nourishing. So a lot of the entrepreneurs that I work with now, they have like money in money out, like there's like there's the bills that they they're able to do make sales and they're receiving money, but then it's immediately money out, there's no profit, there's no profit margin. And there's very little for them to take home personally.

Ari Gronich 7:06  

Gotcha. So let's, let's say, what's the difference between deserve and entitlement? Hmm,

Kimberly Spencer 7:14  

good question. So, entitlement really comes from the ego is what I found is is an egoic belief of an eye like almost like an IRA, or, like I see a lot of fear based beliefs of an entitlement is kind of like the perception that it's, it's more of an egoic perception, it's more of an intention versus the intention of of deserving its grace combined with the desire to then put something out into the world to serve with it. That's what I found is for me, that's just what I've been able to, to navigate with, with my own perceptions of deserving is desert, like everything that I desire to do or create in this world is ultimately to be of service in some way. Versus entitlement is kind of like an entitlement is also I see this reflected in like, Oh, I should have this now. I should have this. Well, you don't. So what's going on in the present moment that we can actually take ownership of entitlement is a lot of times here with so many shoulds and supposed to, like I'm supposed to be farther along by now. I should have, you know, a family were like, why don't I have this right now? versus let's look at where we are, what are the beliefs that are that have me where I'm at right now. And then moving forward from that space and then moving forward from the present? Because if you're moving forward from should you're not even at the starting line, you're on the outskirts looking in, it's like, oh, I should be running that race. Did you get to mile one, did you cross the starting line? like did you get there? You have to go through all the steps to be able to run it, you're not actually in the race yet.

Ari Gronich 9:11  

Okay, so let's take it to one other word that came to my mind as you as you were talking is burden. There, there's a thing and I call it the healers burden or the spiritual burden, where money seems to elude the people who are wanting to give the most. And I don't know that it's a belief necessarily like money is bad because I think that spiritual people really get the idea of an exchange of energy. But it's the burden of if I charge them too much, then I will be a burden to them rather than a benefit. Or, if, if I need something, then I'm a burden to the people around That rather than being a benefit to them in some, some respect or even, you know, being giving a gift is a gift, right? But we rob people of being able to give to us, because we feel like that would be a burden. So let's kind of unpack that, because that was what popped up when you were talking. Yeah.

Kimberly Spencer 10:24  

So what what came up for me is, is ownership. And that is, your own personal ownership is you are allowed to take 100% ownership for your life and your results. You're not allowed to take 10% of anybody else's ownership. You're not like, you're not allowed to take the the burden of somebody else and say, Oh, well, like, let me take ownership over that and then claim that as my burden, that's that's that's overcompensation of ownership. And it's actually it actually leads people into a spiral of of guilt, like massive guilt, versus taking ownership for like I have, these are the prices that I charge, these are the services that I offer. I call this this one money, mothering, when I see it show up and for entrepreneurs, is, it's not my job to be that person's financial advisor for what is best for their life, it is my job to open the door, to give them the possibility to give them the opportunity to say, hey, if if they see the value in it, then awesome, I have seen the value in programs that I'm like, I see the value in that. Not going to be investing in that right now. Versus I've seen the value in some programs where I'm like, I see the value in that I don't quite have the money for it. Like that's how I was when I first signed up for NLP timeline therapy, I saw the value in it. And then I felt this like desire that I knew that I would be able to figure it out, I needed some new tools. And so I knew that making that additional investment going and additional $5,000 into the already 30 5000s of dollars of debt that I was in going in that additional, I would be able to pull myself back out faster and farther with those tools and without them. And so that made the investment worthwhile.

Ari Gronich 12:17  

Absolutely. So why don't you give us about three or four actionable steps, actionable tips, tricks, to becoming the influencer, that you really want to be in life.

Kimberly Spencer 12:31  

So step one, take ownership, you are not your results, you are the cause of your results. So so often, it's very easy for us to identify with our results, the number on a scale the number in our bank balance room, instead, those numbers are just a reflection of the actions that we've taken. So instead of getting down on yourself, or like, Oh, I don't have this or Oh, I I gained five pounds, or Oh, I did this thing. Or Oh, my social media numbers dropped or whatever it is. Look at the actual action steps of like, what did you do this past week that caused that? Look at those action steps and or what did you not do that you had done in the past? Because that will give you that will give you a very clear tactile playbook as far as like what works, what doesn't work for what you're looking to grow. Another tip is to question what you know, quite just ask yourself the question question what you know, whether that's a belief, because everything we're we're working with our beliefs every single day, and they're so unconscious to us. So say, for example, something is just as silly and as simple as like, a belief like, Oh, this, the client turned me down. So that means that you know, I struggle with sales, does it necessarily? Is it possible that maybe that client wasn't the right client for you? And if so, what else could be possible? Is it possible that maybe your messaging is a little off so that you're not attracting the right quiet clients? So allow yourself to ask better questions, ask questions that provide instead of saying, like, why is this happening to me? Ask questions that provide moving forward, like what if this happened to you or what, what and how questions will always produce more strategy and forward thinking than why questions?

Ari Gronich 14:34  

Yeah, I'm one of my mentors used to say, How can it get any better than this? Whether it was horrible. Yep. Really, really good. That question still works. How can it get any better than this? Yep.

Kimberly Spencer 14:52  

And I learned this one from my mentor. It was how is this the best thing that ever happened to you? No matter how awesome It was or the worst. I mean, because and when you look back, because hindsight is not 2020 hindsight, it's an asshole, like hindsight, because you're looking back with the tools and the resources that you have, now that you didn't know when you were making those initial decisions. So, in hindsight, it's not really 2020. So allow yourself to ask those questions that can that can that can lead to greater change?

Ari Gronich 15:26  

It is hindsight is 2020. If 2020 is this year, because we've had an asshole of the year 2020 was not what

Kimberly Spencer 15:42  

2020 definitely allowed for some pretty powerful perspective shifts, and then my last one would definitely be Watch your language. Watch what you're saying yourself. Just Just watch. Are you saying you can't a lot? Are you saying you'll try a lot? These are words in your vocabulary that imply a lot of effort, sometimes, but not necessarily a lot of results. are you? How are you speaking to yourself? How do you think about a problem? When you think about a problem? Do you immediately think, Oh, I can't or Oh, is that's too hard? Or do you think? Oh, heck yeah. Like I can figure this out? I'm gonna figure this out. Watch your language observe, like an anthropologist, and you will have a lot more perspective as to how you are communicating with yourself to produce the results that that you want. Awesome. Yeah, my

Ari Gronich 16:31  

son is checking out the Star Wars world. He's watching the Mandalorian right now with I guess, baby Yoda. And you know that there is no dry. Yeah, whole thing. And so I've been working on because obviously, we always say I'm trying to do this. I'm doing you know, but I've been working on doing my best. I'll do my best. And so yeah, we'll try. Just because that whole, I will do my best is an action. And try doesn't exist. Like, you can't pick a quarter off somebody's hand because either you do or you don't. So it doesn't really exist.

Kimberly Spencer 17:16  

And implies a lot of effort, though. And sometimes that effort makes people feel good, but or feel feel that necessary social guilt that they feel is required to feel, but doesn't actually produce results.

Ari Gronich 17:28  

So how can people get ahold of you if they'd like to work with you?

Kimberly Spencer 17:33  

So you can get a hold of me at Crownyourself.com super simple. And you can also email [email protected] and I am on all the socials. You can find me at Crown yourself now.

Ari Gronich 17:44  

Awesome. Thank you so much for being here. This has been a great episode. I hope you took dubious notes and made it something that you can actually take with you and action upon do today because we always want to create a new tomorrow today. Thank you so much. I'm your host, Ari gronich, and we'll see you next time.

Hi, I am here with Kimberly Spencer, she is a certified high performance coach and intuitive life coach, Amazon bestselling author, and international motivational speaker.

CHECH THIS AMAZING WEBSITE BY KIMBERLY TO LEARN MORE!

https://crownyourself.com/

JOIN NOW!! AND BE PART OF MASTERMIND PROGRAM

learn how to activate yourself for a better future!

https://createanewtomorrow.com/master...

CHECK THIS LINK FOR A FREE GIFT FOR YOU!

https://www.createanewtomorrow.com/gift

DO YOU WANT TO BE OUR NEXT SPECIAL GUEST?

Book an appointment now and let's create a new world together!

https://booking.builderall.com/calend...

CHECK THIS OTHER WEBSITE FOR MORE INFORMATION!

https://www.CreateAnewtomorrow.com

https://www.Achievehealthusa.com

Create a fundamental change in the global community from a strictly reactive system of medicine that focuses on symptom and emergency treatment to a proactive system based on whole-being health as well as illness and injury prevention. Personally teach and influence at least one million people.

We are a multifaceted Health and Wellness company that specializes in Corporate Wellness and Culture Consulting, Industry Speaking engagements and Continuing education for the industry.

We Help corporations by solving the most costly problems they have with Productivity and Health Care while creating a culture that thrives on accomplishment and community.

We help organizations think outside of the box and gain tools that allow them to be nimble and strong as tides and markets shift.

We Up level the skills and tools of other practitioners by providing them continuing education that actually leads to greater success and standing in the business community.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Ari Gronich 0:00  

Has it occurred to you that the systems we live by are not designed to get results? We pay for procedures instead of outcomes, focusing on emergencies rather than preventing disease and living a healthy lifestyle. For over 25 years, I've taken care of Olympians Paralympians a list actors in fortune 1000 companies, if I do not get results, they do not get results. I realized that while powerful people who control the system want to keep the status quo, if I were to educate the masses, you would demand change. So I'm taking the gloves off and going after the systems as they are. Join me on my mission to create a new tomorrow as I chat with industry experts, elite athletes, thought leaders and government officials about how we activate our vision for a better world. We may agree and we may disagree, but I'm not backing down. I'm Ari Gronich And this is create a new tomorrow podcast.

Welcome to another episode of create a new tomorrow. I'm your host, Ari Gronich. And here I have with me is Kimberly Spencer, certified high performance coach and founder of crown yourself.com Welcome to the show Kimberly toning a bit about yourself.

Kimberly Spencer 1:23  

Thank you so much for having me on re Yeah, I am the certified high performance coach. I'm the founder of crying herself calm, I specifically work with visionary leaders to help them build their empire and stand out authentically and serve serve you with their leadership. And it is my like it is my soul. Like that's like Solas and like the number one and Solas and like soul connection mission, that more good hearted, mission minded, purpose driven, conscious leaders are making more money so that we can seriously transform this planet. That is that is my big mission that because I truly believe that when more good hearted, mission minded leaders are making money that that is what can create the change. And so it's my it's my honor to be able to serve some of the amazing leaders and entrepreneurs that I've been able to help over the past four years. And it's been a very fun ride.

Ari Gronich 2:22  

Awesome, very cool. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background, and what got you to this place.

Kimberly Spencer 2:28  

So my background was quite varied, it was very much from a place of following my curiosity, and exploration, I grew up with two entrepreneurial parents. So the entrepreneur gene is kind of like in my blood. But I watched my parents, from a very early age, my dad was an addict. And so I saw that struggle between the higher self and the potential of who he could be. And the addictive state of pharmaceutical drugs of non pharmaceutical drugs and of alcohol of all the things. And I saw the ability to recognize someone's potential very early on, and see someone when they're not living into it, or when they're making excuses for it. And I believe that we're kind of blessed with the children that we need to remind us of who we have been that was kind of programmed and stripped away from us. And I was always a very emotional child. I was big emotions, big feelings. And growing up that wasn't really praised. In my house, I saw my dad escape his emotions, my mom would suppress and repress hers. And so he there I was left with all these big emotions and not knowing what to do with them. And so it turned me into two things one a bulimic and to reading and writing in Hollywood, when I was 17, I got my first feature film produced when I was 20. And it was such a fun experience, being able to have that dream and have see my name on the up on the big screen. But I was surprised that when I was at the premiere, I was actually only 90% fulfilled. And it was at that time that two weeks later, after the premiere, I got a notification from a friend of my friend who came to the premiere because when you write a movie, you get extra tickets. And so she her son had come to the premiere and had seen the film and it changed his life based on the story. And the story was a very simple story. That was about a young kid who wants to fit in with the cool crowd. And he adapts himself into the high flying hard partying world of freestyle motocross to do so I didn't know anything about motocross at the time, I just researched it. Like most people are like wait, crowd yourself and freestyle motocross. I know. But that that experience of learning that something that I created, had transformed somebody's life and the story that they were living in And to some and made them want to be better and recognize their own possibility and their own potential. I was like that I want to do that I want to do more of that. At the time, in order to support myself in Hollywood, I was also transforming my own story with with my body and what was possible for my body because I became a Pilates instructor simultaneously. So I started out teaching Pilates, to support myself in my career in entertainment. And it was there that I saw that the power of the mindset, and I was surrounded by different types of clients training 10 hours a day, seeing all these different types of bodies. And it didn't matter whether somebody was technically overweight or technically thin, or technically ate healthy or technically didn't, what mattered was how they thought about their bodies. And what matters was how they thought. And those thoughts were reflected in, in their actions and in their habits. And it showed me the power of the mindset. And it was from that perspective, and that like little aha that I had, that I was able to shift out of being a bulimic into an entirely new identity of being transformed. I don't believe I'm recovered, I believe I'm transformed. Because the idea of going back to that old identity is so horrific that I would never want to go back. And so it was through that through Pilates, I was able to transform and eventually built, went into having my own private Pilates studio, I own an e commerce business where I was also transforming people's stories about the possibilities for their back pain. We were selling it bringing it back pain device to market. And then three weeks before I got married, my business partner told me he wanted to buy me out. And I was like, Okay, well, three months before I got married, and then we signed the buyout agreement three weeks before I walked down the aisle. I was on my honeymoon, wondering like, what the heck do I do now? And I was like, I love the body. I love writing. I love creating I love helping people. I've loved transforming stories. And I leapt off the couch and I said crown yourself and my husband's like, what's that? And I said, I don't know. But but it's the it's it's a holistic leadership. It's stepping into holistically claiming your power and reining your life and making choices from that empowered state. Problem was is that I was going through that buyout process made me it was the first time I'd ever had my integrity called into check or my capabilities called them to check and so I was very, very

stuck in the dungeon of doubt. And so for a year and a half, I dabbled in my business. I did all the things. I was always busy, I was always working on my computer, but I wasn't actually making any money. I was simultaneously teaching out of my Pilates studio and feeling really unfulfilled. And then I found out I was pregnant. And then that just changed the game. Within two weeks, I was driving to Vegas to go get certified in NLP timeline therapy and hypnosis because I knew that the problem laid with my mindset. And I saw that the parallel was between that and it was the same parallel that I had with my bank account. And my business was the same issues that I was struggling with 10 years ago with my body image and believe me, so I said, Well, I'd switched from being an actual bulimic to being more of a financial and business bulimic. And so I said, I know I've already shifted this once with just mindset alone, I can do it again. And I did and four years later, I've had the privilege of coaching some amazing, extraordinary leaders, and it has been a fun ride and now we live in the Gold Coast of Australia during a pandemic.

Ari Gronich 8:26  

That is, that's fascinating. How is it in Australia during the pandemic? I mean, I hear that they've been pretty shut down. Is that correct?

Kimberly Spencer 8:37  

That was Melbourne. So Melbourne, Australia and not Melbourne, where you are. And the Gold Coast where I live, it's back to normal like and my son can go to pretender. He can go hug children. We don't have any mask ordinances. Melbourne was the one that was really struggling. There's like no cases in Australia In Australia, right. There's very, very few and there's been no cases in Queensland for the past, like two months. So festivals are coming back. So I keep on trying to inspire my American compadres to be like, come on, it's like it's going to it's going to turn around, I promise you things will come back. Like I just saw a beer festival the other weekend. Like

Ari Gronich 9:26  

that's awesome. So, you know, let's kind of unpack some of the things that you said one of the things that you said that was fascinating to me is the bulimic for your body is blamed for your finances. which basically is a good metaphor for life in general where you know, the quantum theory of how you do anything is how you do everything. And so, tell us about that a little bit more kind of dig deep into what it is that made that pattern repeat itself after you had thought That you already took care of the pattern. Yeah.

Kimberly Spencer 10:05  

The the pattern really stemmed from that deeper subconscious belief of enoughness. And from deserving, and from, I mean, if you think of bulimia, I mean, what bulimia was, it was an emotional thing for me. So I didn't know how to process my emotions. So I would shove them down, repress them and then explode. And that was what I did with food. And so with finances and money, that's that was similar to what I was doing, I would take money and I would receive it I had, I was okay with making sales, but then it would just explode, and then it would explode beyond. And we got me into a nice portion of debt, it would explode beyond the capacity of what I consumed. And it was seeing that parallel of the beliefs of being enough and the emotions that were attached to it, so there's, there's an emotion that comes with receiving, but there's also an emotion that comes from having and nourishing. So a lot of the entrepreneurs that I work with, now, they have like money in money out like there's like there's the bills, they, they're able to do make sales and they're receiving money, but then it's immediately money out, there's no profit, there's no profit margin. And there's very little for them to take home personally. And so for me, what I saw was this, that there's an energy that comes around having money having food having having the ability to have something nourish you. And those that energy of having it comes down to a perception of deserving. And that perception of deserving. We all have what is called adjust world bias. And I've seen that high achievers in specific. They, they have this, like the just world bias, we'll see it played out in society where we'll see something that happens to somebody that's not fair. And so our toddler brains are like, we want we want to be able to like, understand it. So we'll blame the woman who gets raped because she was probably wearing a really short skirt and was asking for it because of her wardrobe. And we'll say ridiculous things like that, to try to make this on this illogical thing makes sense to us to make this world seen, quote unquote, fair. And so with high achievers, what I see is high achievers, and I'm a card carrying one have been since I was like five high achievers, we tended to put the blame on ourselves. So what happens when we're faced with this just world bias that we all have, or something happens to us it's not fair, that that feels funky. And that we feel like we might we feel like we must have deserved it, we must have deserved this bad thing to have happened to us, we must have deserved these bad feelings. And so we kind of punish ourselves and put ourselves down because of these emotions of what we perceive we deserve. And it really messes with that perception of what is it that we deserve. And so we try to earn our way to getting to what it is that we deserve. When really the concept of deserving is grace, it's being able to, to accept and receive grace. And it's being able to receive a gift and allow for that that ability to receive gifts from others, whether it's a gift of somebody's business, or the gift of somebody's money, but being able to receive that and then so it's it's, it's earned after it's deserved, like the actions that we take, we already deserve it because it was placed in our hearts, we already deserve it. Because we have that dream. We already deserve it because it's a desire that and and a vision that we've had, which means that somewhere out there in the quantum realm, it is possible for us to achieve it. So we already deserve it because we brought it we thought of it into our reality. Now, how do we go about taking the action steps to get us to that point where we are it actually is in our present reality.

Ari Gronich 14:09  

Gotcha. So let's, let's say what's the difference between deserve and entitlement? Hmm,

Kimberly Spencer 14:17  

good question. So, entitlement really comes from the ego is what I found is is an egoic belief of an eye like almost like an either or, like I see a lot of fear based beliefs of an entitlement is kind of like the perception that it's it's more of an egoic perception, it's more of an intention versus the intention of of deserving its grace combined with the desire to then put something out into the world to serve with it. That's what I've found is for me, that's just what I've been able to, to navigate with, with my own perceptions of deserving is desert, like everything that I desire to do or create in this world is ultimately to be of service in some way. Versus entitlement is kind of like an entitlement is also I see this reflected in like, Oh, I should have this now, I should have this. Well, you don't. So what's going on in the present moment that we can actually take ownership of entitlement is a lot of times here with so many shoulds and supposed to, like, I'm supposed to be farther along by now. I should have, you know, a family were like, why don't I have this right now? versus? Let's look at where we are. What are the beliefs that are that have me where I'm at right now? And then moving forward from that space, and then moving forward from the present? Because if you're moving forward from should you're not even at the starting line? You're on the outskirts looking in if like, Oh, I should be running that race? Did you get to mile one, did you cross the starting line? like did you get there, you have to go through all the steps to be able to run it, you're not actually in the race yet.

Ari Gronich 16:14  

Okay, so let's take it to one other word that came to my mind as you were talking is burden. There, there's a thing and I call it the healers burden, or the spiritual burden, where money seems to elude the people who are wanting to give the most. And I don't know that it's a belief necessarily, like money is bad, because I think that spiritual people really get the idea of an exchange of energy. But it's the burden of if I charged them too much, then I will be a burden to them rather than a benefit. Or if, if I need something, then I'm a burden to the people around me that rather than being a benefit to them, in some some respect, or even, you know, being giving a gift is a gift, right? But we rob people of being able to give to us, because we feel like that would be a burden. So let's kind of unpack that, because that was what popped up when you were talking.

Kimberly Spencer 17:26  

Yeah. So what what came up for me is, is ownership. And that is your own personal ownership is you are allowed to take 100% ownership for your life and your results. You're not allowed to take 10% of anybody else's ownership. You're not like you're not allowed to take the the burden of somebody else and say, Oh, well, like let me take ownership over that and then claim that as my burden. That's that's that's overcompensation of ownership. And it's actually it actually leads people into a spiral of of guilt, like massive guilt, versus taking ownership for like I have, these are the prices that I charge, these are the services that I offer. I call this this one money, mothering, when I see it show up at for entrepreneurs, is it's not my job to be that person's financial advisor for what is best for their life, it is my job to open the door to give them the possibility to give them the opportunity to say hey, if and if they see the value in it, then awesome. I have seen the value in programs that I'm like, I see the value in that not going to be investing in that right now. Versus I've seen the value in some programs where I'm like, I see the value in that I don't quite have the money for it. Like that's how I was when I first signed up for NLP timeline therapy, I saw the value in it. And then I felt this like desire that I knew that I would be able to figure it out, I needed some new tools. And so I knew that making that additional investment going and additional $5,000 into the already 30 5000s of dollars of debt that I was in going and that additional, I would be able to pull myself back out faster and farther with those tools and without them. And so that made the investment worthwhile. So when I see Oh, go ahead.

Ari Gronich 19:22  

So that's one level of burden. The other level of burden is I need help. And I can't ask for help because then I would be a burden. Hmm. Yeah,

Kimberly Spencer 19:33  

I see that one a lot with the with high achievers have the fear of asking for help asking for support. And that also comes down to a lot of ego because the ego is is either it's saying like I'm either too good, or I'm either like nothing and there's no gray area. It's an either or. So instead, how can you be perceive asking for support asking for help to actually be an act of service for somebody else. Because sometimes people are more excited to serve and to, to help and to lift each other up, I've just found this personally, then, then this perception of Oh, if I ask somebody, then they're gonna, they're gonna, I'm going to be a burden or it's going to, like, if you if you take ownership, and you set foundational ground rules in place, and you also hold those energetic boundaries and standards and say, like, you know, let me know, if I'm asking too much, let me know if I'm, if I've crossed the line at some point, like, let me know, otherwise, I'm going to keep asking for that support, or for that help to be able to get that support in that help. And if it's the other person's responsibility to be able to say, you know, this is actually going into what my paid programs do, or, you know, this is actually something that I normally charge for, it's the other person's responsibility to hold that boundary for themselves.

Ari Gronich 21:11  

Awesome. Give me a difference between weakness and vulnerability. Hmm.

Kimberly Spencer 21:19  

Sure, good question. Sorry, I like how you get really specific with the language. So vulnerability, I believe vulnerability is such an asset. But there is vulnerability when vulnerability when you get caught up in your own story, that can get to the point of where it becomes a weakness. So I'm all about I share very openly and vulnerably, about many of the things that I've experienced and gone through, but it's not from the place of either look at me and how bad or how great or my life is. And the weakness, aspect. weakness. It's, it's an internal compass thing. Like it's, that's something that you only you will know, is if you're dancing on vulnerability to the being into the weakness, like, so I will have to give an example. If I have something that I'm in process with, like, I'm feeling something, I feel an emotion, I'll be vulnerable with saying, you know, I'm feeling this thing. I don't know what it is that I'm processing, I don't know what it is, and I'm working through I know that I'm working through something. But I'll be vulnerable with sharing that a weakness for me would be repressing it suppressing it and pretending like it didn't exist, and then like, having it explode, and, and having me explode and be like, Oh, I'm fine. Everything's fine. No, no, no, no, it's not. So being able to say vulnerably, hey, I'm struggling with this, I'm experiencing this, let me go into this space that's coming. That's vulnerability from a place of strength. When it's a weakness or a trigger, that's something that I like to notice, like, I like to recognize when that is coming from a place of weakness, or that is coming from a fear of powerlessness or a fear of, or a trigger, or it's, it's hitting something that's really raw and personal. That's where I actually like write it down, like, Oh, this is this is one of my weaknesses. This is one of my triggers, and being self aware enough to know where that gauge is

Ari Gronich 23:24  

awesome. I had a conversation once with a guy down the street from me, and he was a military man. And he said, that you can't find pretty much anybody like on the block, right? That could put on a 70 pound pack and march for miles and miles and miles, because they just don't have the health and the wherewithal to do that. And so therefore, it becomes a weaker country, the less our health is. And yet our health care system is really designed not to make people well, but to keep them being treated for being sick. It's, you know, we call it the sick care system versus the health care system. You're a lot in that wellness sphere, especially having having owned a Pilates studio, and so on. So what do you think needs to happen in the world really, because it this is a global crisis, not just an American crisis, but what do you think needs to happen in the world to get people's mindsets on prevention versus reaction to health to whatever it is that's going on in them because we've become what I what I consider to be a very reactive society, versus a proactive society. You know, that works with prevention and making sure they're healthy people. For you get sick, etc, those kinds of things.

Kimberly Spencer 25:03  

I think we have to stop our addiction with fear. I think that that is the greater addiction that we have right now. I mean, you can get the end it prevents us from actually creatively thinking of solutions are finding something. So it puts us in a reactive state, it puts us in fight or flight. And so it's removing yourself from those environments or people that are stimulating and continuously stimulating that fear. And so for me, I, for me, I personally don't watch the news. I don't watch the news. I haven't watched the news and for years, sometimes, like it's on when I'm at the gym, but, and I watch it now from a very different perspective where I'm like, it's just like, death, trophy, drama, murder. And it's all like, it's all fear, fear, fear, you listen to it enough, and suddenly your Migdal is going on overdrive. And so it's really is pulling back from that addiction to fear because it prevents us from actually living with vision and, and and solution mindedness. Because we find solutions creatively in a different part of the brain. That's not the amygdala. So we actually have to physically move the location of where we are thinking in our brain, and it's not going to happen if we're if our amygdala is going fight or flight fight or flight fight or flight fight or flight. Right. And what happens is, is also our nervous system, Oh, go ahead.

Ari Gronich 26:34  

Yeah, let's just define megillah for those who don't know that, it's the reptile brain. So that's for that, you know, because we don't want to just to industry terms, so just kind of give a explanation of what that is, and what it what its function is.

Kimberly Spencer 26:53  

So our amygdala is our it's the, it's the reptile brain, it's, it's the one that's got us on fight or flight. So it's, it is built into our biology. And it serves a purpose if we're running away from a saber toothed tiger, it really serves like, and what happens is, is to our nervous system is when we face that stress, when we face that stress, that fear, that suddenly is like I'm in danger, our brain cannot recognize whether it's like fully physical danger, or emotional danger, it's the same, it registers the same. And so what happens is, when our body goes into a stressful state, or blood becomes more thicker, so that if we were, you know, attacked by a saber toothed tiger, then our blood will be able to coagulate faster, we get a bad taste and a bad odor. Actually, if you get like, you can get bad taste in your mouth, or you can actually like start smelling you missed it like if you may start smelling a bit more you can it causes your esophagus to basically not your peristalsis in your in your, in your gut, it's stops really digesting because you don't need to digest your food if you're going to be the food. So you got to run, if your body tries to do everything that it can to store the energy so that you can run away in that fight or flight space. But what happens is, is when our nervous systems are in this fight or flight response, eventually, our sympathetic nervous system can only run so far and so fast. And eventually then our parasympathetic nervous system, which is the rest and digest part of our nervous system, which you can actually physically train through Pilates, through yoga through Tai Chi, through just even you can train it through just some deep breathing with an inhale and a longer exhale. It felt so good, like, literally take three breaths like that, and you will already have activated your parasympathetic nervous system. But your parasympathetic nervous system, it's your rest and digest. And then it also has this other function, it's called freeze. And you'll see this in the wild. When an animal it thinks that death is imminent. And immediately it'll just drop, it'll just completely drop, it'll go lifeless, because just in case the predator chooses not to devour it's meal at that point, it gives that that animal playing dead, a few extra minutes to be able to then regain play dead and then maybe go to safety again, maybe go back into that fight or flight, if it's not consumed. That freeze also produces a rush of endorphins in our body that so that if we're, you know, pierced by a saber toothed Tiger that we're not actually going to feel as much pain. But what happens is, is when we're in this, it's a traumatic cycle for our nervous system. A fight or flight and then freeze is it. It we lose our natural oscillatory rhythm that can happen. That is part of nature nature oscillates, we have day and tonight we have ultradian rhythms that flow is about every 90 minutes. We just have that natural ultradian rhythm throughout the day. Our our heartbeat, it oscillates, it's not flatlining, flatlining is bad. So, when we, our nervous system is supposed to oscillate to the fight or flight is not a bad thing, it's necessary. Like if you're if you're you're fighting the fight or flight gets stimulated, if you're, you know, going to go kick, that goal, that winning goal and your soccer team match, it gets activated when you're going to give that presentation and it gives you that like, little boost of energy to give give a little bit more energy to that, that presentation in the board meeting or a zoom meeting now. But that so it's necessary, but it's also necessary for us to have the oscillation back into the rest and digest. And so when we're in this space of, of constant fear stimulation, it's spinning our nervous system into a space of constant and consistent trauma where we're in fight flight freeze. And that cycle, that traumatic cycle can actually cause depression, it can cause heightened anxiety can cause chronic fatigue and cause all sorts of emotional and physical problems in the body. And so I think the biggest thing to our healthcare system is stopping the addiction of fear, and the perpetuation of continuous fear and instead perpetuating hope and solution focus.

Ari Gronich 31:25  

Gotcha. So, you know, fear in the body, according to Chinese medicine is kind of gut right? It's not, it's not like worry would be in the kidneys. And anger is in the liver. But fear is in the gut, when when somebody is scared of something, or they have a gut instinct to go that way instead of that way. It's that signal saying, Oh, I feel it here. I've got to react to that. And it's a natural response. Yeah. Right. So how do individuals regulate that in themselves, some tips and tricks, and then also, how do we get society back on a track where we're not antagonizing that response to the point where there is no oscillation, it's just kind of like this graph that just keeps going up and up and up, and up and up. And there's an explosion, right.

Kimberly Spencer 32:35  

So to start with, some tips and tricks are to practice any form of exercise or breathing that activates the parasympathetic nervous system, Pilates, yoga, tai chi, chi gong, these are all forms of exercise, that when you're doing the exercise, they have a, your your, the breath is a key element in all of them. And you can take that breath. And this is actually how I went from being an exercise induced asthmatic at a time where I couldn't run a mile to save my life, to now being able to have run six marathons, because I took the breath that I learned from Pilates, and I applied it into running. So now I activate my parasympathetic nervous system, even as I'm in a sympathetic, doing a sympathetic form of exercise, which is the long distance running, well running to start, and then it eventually kicks into that parasympathetic, because the gotcha has initially the sprinting is more fight or flight, activating. So doing those forms of exercise, taking moments in the day to breathe, taking moments in the day to practice that. That sympathetic activation where you take a longer inhale, if you count on your hand, you can count in your hand for the count of five, for an inhale for five, and then do an eight to 10 count for an exhale, within literally like three to five breaths, you will feel a sense of peace, a sense of rest, a sense of, of release, I also do and I'm getting certified in breath work, which is used specifically for trauma release. So and that is a tool that I found to be super powerful, where you're using the power of activating sympathetic activate activation breath, and then being able to translate and oscillate back into parasympathetic breath so that you're able to actually reprogram that and release the trauma out of your body and in and just release it. Because what happens is our body remembers this, like, the stuff that we've been through our mind will is very kind. And our subconscious mind will repress things that we're not fully ready or that are too overwhelming emotionally for us to process. But our body does remember and so that's why, even if like you see somebody and you suddenly get this like gut instinct and your body reacts and you're like, this doesn't make sense, this person was just like walking right past me. But you get this like gut response in your body, your body will respond because your body's still emotionally recognizes that your body still sees it. So working doing body work is really key. Yeah,

Ari Gronich 35:10  

we call it the issues that are in the tissues. And I do some pretty intense, highly unusual deep tissue emotional release bodywork, but I do it with that includes breathwork, one of my close friends is, was one of the five founders of rebirthing, which is an amazing breathwork technique that was developed by Leonard war, back in the 60s. And so I've had a lot of experience with that. But I've added an element that's highly controversial, which is psychedelics, to process. And I find that you can get so many more of the issues out of the tissues than say talk therapy alone, or, or hypnosis or just body work without without that intention. But you know, that's a it's a really powerful technique. breathwork in general, is very powerful to calm your system. I know that the Navy SEALs us box breath, which is five seconds in hold for five seconds, five seconds out, hold for five seconds, five seconds in, right. So it's it's literally done, that's what they use in the middle of war time, or battle, because it calms that adrenal response in the system. You know, it's pretty cool. So how about how about society at Whole, as a whole? You know, what are some of the things that you've seen that you think that society should think about doing government's, you know, the people who make policies and things like that, in order to help people's immune system help people's adrenal glands and help them be more home? And what's the effect that you think that that'll have if we got back to some of that more connected, breathing, connected way of being versus always in flight or fight or flight? Mm hmm.

Kimberly Spencer 37:20  

So there's a really powerful question that I think everyone should ask themselves. And that's what if I'm wrong? So often, our cognitive bias is going to want to just find that information that just backs up what we already think we know, versus allowing ourselves to question and explore and learn and grow. And so what if, what if I'm wrong thinking, you know, about COVID? In this one way, or thinking about mass in this one way? What if I don't like allowing for and taking, taking the emotion out of the question of like, taking being wrong personally, because that's, there's a concept from the 15 commitments of conscious leadership, that is one of my favorite books on the planet. It's a very simple principle. It's just asking, Are you above the line or below the line. And if you're above the line, then you're operating from a place of openness from learning from growth, if you're below the line, you're operating from a desire to be either right, or a fear of being wrong. And so often, a lot of our society, I think a lot of the problems in society right now are coming from that either desire to be right, or that desperate fear of being wrong of our ego from our egos. So allowing ourselves to ask that question of like, what if I'm wrong about this perception of you know, what we're doing in our country? Or what if I'm wrong about the COVID vaccine? Or what if I'm wrong about this, consuming this fast food do on a daily basis? Like, what if I'm, what if I, what if these habits, what if I'm wrong? And then what if I change them? Like, what if I just experimented, what if I just allowed yourself to get curious, I think that that's something that we've lost. I think that's something that kind of our systemic, or Victorian age educational system is kind of drilled out of us Is this love of curiosity, versus a learning what to learn rather than how to learn? And that ability to to question and get curious and ask those questions that may, you know, stimulate some different answers may stimulate some answers that not everyone is comfortable with. But at least it's opening up a dialogue instead of holding on to these two polar opposites that are thus just constantly repelling each other. But they're that they're they're repelling each other but also they're attracting each other because they they're the exact Same Day, like, the desire to be right and the fear of being wrong. Same thing.

Ari Gronich 40:06  

Right? So you and I both have children. And my seven year old is very, very curious. And he asks a lot of questions. And sometimes I want to answer the questions. And sometimes I don't want to answer the questions because I'm a parent. And I have that, right. So instead of telling him something about him asking the question, I asked him, Why do you want to know that? What's, what's the information that concerns you in this particular thing, especially when he's asking question about something else? Or somebody else? Or, you know, that has nothing to do with him? It's just his way. And he always says to me, I'm just curious, dad. I'm curious. And when was the last time you heard an adult? Say that? was just if you're in the audience, when was the last time you remember saying that? I'm just curious. I just want to know, I? It's not very often right. You're, I'm sure your child does the same thing. Right?

Kimberly Spencer 41:15  

Yeah, I mean, he's a little, he's a little younger at three. So he's, he's figuring his way out in the world. And it's such a beautiful, like, he inspires me so much every day, because it's like, he has such a unique personality. And I look at like, you know, if he were blessed to any other person to be a parent, they may want to program some of that personality out of him. Like not every dad would be okay with their son saying they want glitter nail polish at three, to match with his girlfriend that he has, which he has to like, but I'm like, that's, that's cool with us, like we have like, that's cool. Let him express himself. He likes Clary. He knows that mommy likes glitter. Like, that's my favorite color. So but that's, it's allowing him to have that freedom of expression and that freedom to really find out who he is. I'm not trying to define who he is, he certainly is a leader, I can definitely tell you that. He has his opinions of how things are done. But that's it's it's a beautiful quality to be able to see the the Curiosity I watched him play. And I look at how often as adults, so often, we take things so seriously. And we're stuck in this, like, it's serious because it's business or because it's money or because it's, you know, our relationship, and it has to be this serious thing. Whereas really, like when you learn the most, it's when you're a kid, it's when you're a toddler, and you're learning through play. And you're like, when I watched my son learn how to walk. I got to see this beautiful, this beautiful experience of failure multiple times. And him not shaming himself for it, him not getting upset with himself for it. him just going Oh, okay. And he surrounded himself with people were that was normal, because everybody else around him was walking on two legs. So how often are we doing that where we're making curiosity and play seem normal? Or are we surrounding ourselves with people who make being very serious, and this is a professional matter, and we put these labels and have to be this buttoned up thing? To end that's how we should be doing life in business and whatever, versus allowing for that sense of play, allowing for that curiosity that comes with play and the discovery process that comes with it. And I think that that discovery process of just asking yourself removing the ego, and asking yourself, what if I'm wrong? Then awesome. It allows for you to play with other options and then to see okay, is that one that I like? Is that one that feels good for me? Is that one that feels right for my body? Is that one that feels right for my family? Or is that one one that doesn't feel a lot like when I when we chose to stay in Australia in in March in the middle of a pandemic? I had many of my family come at me saying that it was foolish and stupid and I was being reckless and I said you know, okay, what if I'm wrong about this decision, and I checked in with my gut and my gut said with 100% certainty staying is the best choice that we could make. And my husband is able to now fulfill his dream and go to chef school. My son can be an actual school and hug children and not have to wear a mask like you would at you know be in back in Los Angeles because I don't know how you get a toddler to wear a mask like my girlfriend is able to do it back in California alone. Girl praises because like, my kid would be like, Oh, no, this is not happening. So but it's, it's like it was a it was a decision that was based on my assessment from my gut and knowing with certainty and trust lie in my own body. And I think that that's something that as a leader that we can cultivate is where to certainty and trust, like we know where fear is, but where to certainty and trust lie in your body. When you feel certainty and trust when you feel that deep inner knowing that this is the right decision that I need to make for for me, and then being okay with asking yourself what if it goes wrong? What if it like looking, allowing yourself to dance with the plan A to dance to dance with some additional strategy of like, Okay, if this is not the right choice, what if this, what if this goes wrong, playing with that, but removing the ego, removing the identity of having it be a failure thing? I know that was a very long winded way of answering

Ari Gronich 45:58  

it. So it's all it's all good. You know, I like to brag about my son a little bit, he's got five businesses, he's seven years old. And he had we took him out of the school, and are homeschooling him, because even the virtual school, he wasn't getting the, you know, the kind of attention needed. They were doing, working with the class that was inside the school, as well as those that were online. So their attention was smooth. And, and one day, his teacher asked him, you know, or asked, in general, like how everybody was feeling how everybody was doing. And he said, I'm frustrated and angry. And the teacher said, Well, why are you frustrated and angry? This is a seven year old mind you who's saying these words, right? He said, I have five businesses, and you're not teaching me how to work with any of them. And so, you know, think about that, and I go, Okay, so you know, I mean, he's been around his mom and and an eye for his whole life. And she's a business consultant, and so on. And we've taken him to business trainings his entire life since he was born. And so his perspective on life is totally different than somebody who hasn't had that experience. But my question to you would be, when are you going to get your kid into his own business? Because you know, he's three he's fallen behind.

Kimberly Spencer 47:35  

Oh, he already has three currently here. Oh, he just added another location to his virtual restaurateurs restaurants. So he's, he's got two locations, one in surfers and one he has an ice cream truck he has he's got he's got seven currently his his profit margin is invisible money that he then gives back to me, which he knows where the money comes from. So but he's, he's like, instilling that spirit is so essential, like, and I love the fact that we've taken our son to business conferences, since he was born pretty much like he was in utero when I was going through NLP. So I'd say technically, he's a certified coach as well.

Ari Gronich 48:22  

Absolutely, he's got it born and bred inside of him. And he's gonna have the epigenetics of experiencing that on a regular basis from you. So, you know, it'll be embedded, I believe that the children are our future, right. And I say that as because it's a song. But what I mean by that is, I have a lot of hope for maybe not this neck, this generation, but our kids generation, create a world that's different. And I wanted to ask you a question, because you're in Australia, and you're from the US and so many businesses are starting to go Nomad. And my question to you is, is the new world order so to speak, or trying to have a one world government or One World Without Borders, so to speak? Is that such an awful thing? Because it seems to have such a huge reaction to it. But I'm looking at the world in the generation that's coming up and people aren't going to be stuck in a building for 40 years in one chair and one building desk, you know, with the same people for the next 40 years, people are starting to travel and become nomadic business people and the whole border issue. It's just very fascinating to me, because you're a marketing person. And so you know, you have the ability to travel the world and explore and I believe that exploring the world is what brings us a new mentality versus our little echo chambers, right? So let's kind of unpack a little bit of I like solutions to the world. So how do we create a new world that has all those nomadic travelers where the borders aren't so like, you can't come in and you can't come in, and we don't like you, you know, like, everywhere I've ever gone, they always have what I call the you know, because it's the US I called the Mexicans, right? Because we always say the Mexicans are coming in and taking our jobs. When I was in Greece, it was the Algerians, the algae are coming in, or the Albanians, they were coming in and taking our jobs. Every country has those people, every country has that. Yeah, every country has that. And so to me, Australia,

Kimberly Spencer 50:47  

they have it here too, like I one of our friends is in Australia is a winemaker and saw the He's like, you know, Australian teenagers, they don't want the Australian, because we can't literally cannot find an Australian worker to do the work that the Vietnamese will do, or that an Indian worker will come over here and do because they'll get it done faster, like an Australian will don't, they may get it done. But he just said that he's not finding that he finds that the immigrants are actually more desirous of those those harder labor jobs in some ways. So as far as the digital world is concerned, I mean, I don't know if it's such a bad thing, but I do. But I do know that any sort of new world, there has to be a foundation of the values. And I think that's the difference in all the countries currently they have it China has very different values in the US, Australia has different values in the US,

Ari Gronich 51:51  

isn't it? Is it the people that have the different values or just the government? Because I think

Kimberly Spencer 51:57  

I think the people to really, and it's not that one country's values are good or bad or the other, but it's just they're different. So like, let's say America, people value, very highly freedom. Whereas if you have another country, that very values very highly safety, that's going to be a conflict of values. If if you're if you're seeing for people who feel like their freedom is being taken away for the sake of safety, versus people who feel like they would rather they would give their freedom away for the sake of safety. So that's, that's a, that's a mismatch of values. So it would come down to how do you organize 7 billion people and to having aligned values?

Ari Gronich 52:45  

Right, so I don't think that, okay, so I'm just gonna put this out there, I don't think that we need to have individuals with the exact same values, I think, yeah, well can experience safety, and some people can experience you know, freedom. And they can choose that. here's, here's where that question really comes from, though. I was in Israel, and I found that the people of Palestine and the people who were in that country lived amongst the Israelis, very happily, they, you know, different religions, different belief systems, different everything, and yet they lived pretty comfortably together. Always that small faction that is pretty well government or, or a centralized leader that is trying to cause the havoc, right, whether it's Israel, government, or Palestine, government or US government, I have always found when I really dig deep and look at things, that the government has an agenda that is completely different than the people. And the people pretty much all want the same things, which is they want their families to be safe. They want to have the ability and to be able to express themselves freely. And so the safety and freedom is in every one of us not. Obviously, it's more in some than, you know, it's like balancing thing, but I don't find that it's entire countries that want the same thing. It's the government of the country that says this is what's important to us, despite what might be important to the people that they're governing.

Kimberly Spencer 54:40  

Yeah, I could definitely agree with that. I've definitely seen that play out in both America. I've seen it play out in other countries to have the narrative that is being told the and for me, seeing hypocrisy in in the narrative. The people in the government in different places in the government, not really abiding by It or Not really, ultimately believing it or there being some sort of agenda. Like I could definitely say that they're like, it's like, I remember when I was 10, I wanted to be president. And now there is not a job that you like, I could want less. Because the, the idea of creating this identity, that is the sellable identity that you can sell, sell them that that's what it is. It's a persuasion. Our elections are a persuasion battle. And that's what sales is. persuade people to buy into. And it's fascinating because I see these messages. They're very similar. But it's it's the the more chunked up you go, the greater agreement that we're all going to get, like, we all can agree that we all want hope we all want change. We all want safety. We all want freedom. We all want greatness. And the more you chunk down into the details, it's definitely there. You can see that's where people start to split. And that's where divisiveness happens. And I'm just yeah, I'm not the biggest. I definitely am. I am aware that there are some people who are in power that want to stay in power. And that's something to to be aware of, and that there are some people who are making a lot of money right now, who wants to continue making a lot of money right now. And I love making money. But it's looking at what is what is the intention? And what is the what will be negotiated for that. And that's why I think that as more good hearted mission minded, service based leaders start to make more money. That is when we can definitely see a change in in the world being more accepting and more empowering of each other and empowering of each other's health and empowering of, of each other's choices. Rather than I'm right. You're wrong.

Ari Gronich 57:33  

Yeah, you know, it's funny, I posted something on a site recently. And it was just me literally saying, I'm really interested in having a party for the holidays with this group of people, this kind of party is like fire dancers and, you know, some Burning Man is kind of party at my house. And I was like, would anybody be interested in that? And the post, eventually taken down after about 130, some odd comments, some people yes. And some people just were like, calling me names, like, Oh, you believe in eugenics and you're trying to kill people and your was a plan a pan demick rat or something like that a disease out in like, thinking that this is what I'm what I'm about, I'm like, you have no idea who I am. I didn't even say anything. Like I'm having a party. I was like, I'm really interested in this. Would anybody else be interested in it too? You know, and it was just fascinating the experience of going through such intensity of belief. And yet, no one asked me a question of what it was that I was thinking, like, Are there going to be masks? while you're in, you know, like, you're an adult, you can wear one or not, you know, it's at my house. I don't have the restrictions of a business right as just like, but there wasn't a whole lot of curiosity, there was just a lot of blame and a lot of shaming and a lot of, you know, tearing down, and I found it really interesting because in the name of that particular group is the word love. And the I found that the people really weren't expressing the love, you know. So it was just really fascinating and interesting to me, how closed minded and inside of a bubble and unwilling to hear even a fact or to acknowledge that effect is a fact. You know, like a mask that you wear, like a cloth mask, I think it filters to something like 10 microns, and a viruses point oh one microns. Approximately, and so one is smaller than the other, and it can probably go through and it's not going to, you know, that mask isn't going to probably do much for you. And so, you know, that's like a fact and people can't get grasp the fact that that's the fact. There's no opinion there. There's no possible other explanation there. It's just, that's the fact there's, I didn't put a commentary,

Kimberly Spencer 1:00:24  

right? It's the emotion, their emotion didn't agree with your fact. So that's and that's the thing is when we're when we're driven and charged by these emotions of fear, and, and blame and guilt and shame, when we're charged by these, and the internet is a very, very safe place to be charged by emotion. Because you're not going to get punched in the face. Like you're most likely someone is, you wouldn't people are saying things that they wouldn't actually say to your face, like my husband, because he's has a bit of a following in and some fan base in the anime and voiceover world. He's heard some really gnarly things said, via Twitter, about him like him, and unlike, you know, like, people wishing the horrible things and I was like, they don't even know him. They like if they, it would some it's something that somebody wouldn't have enough courage probably to come up and say due to someone's face. And and people are very easy to be offended. Right now. I think we have a culture that's that's not really allowing for communication, where we're more interested in speaking, than in listening. And I think that our communication breakdown is something that is a massive issue. Culturally, that is something that does need to be addressed as to how to communicate, how do we actually communicate? How do we communicate from a place of empathy? How do we communicate and connect? How do we communicate and disagree with someone, like, I've been friends with people that I have disagreed with my entire life, and I love them dearly. And we have differing opinions, and that's okay. And I know that like they would, they would come to bat for me, or they would come help me if I needed it. Like, and we disagree on things. And that's okay. But we've gotten into this very like with, especially with online, and especially with social media platforms being the only place that we can really gather as a giant group right now. We've gotten very tribal about our communication. And if somebody doesn't, is not a part of this, like communication tribe of all the things that we believe and all the emotions that we share, then we excommunicate them, then they're out of our tribe, and then we just cancel like this canceled culture is, is what is hurting our country and the world. And it's, it's canceling out someone's opinion, just because they disagree with you. I mean, at some point, somebody is going to like, it's the same as canceling somebody's opinion, because you like minty toothpaste, and they like strawberry. Like, that's an opinion. It's that that's just as much a belief as any other belief.

Ari Gronich 1:03:23  

It's all about the watermelon.

Unknown Speaker 1:03:28  

That's not my jam. I'm a minty toothpaste, kind of girl.

Ari Gronich 1:03:32  

My son, we get him the Tom's watermelon. Anyway, let's get on to more happy talk like marketing tips, entrepreneurship, success, you know, those kinds of things. We don't have a whole lot of time left. But I wanted you to be able to get into that. Because, like you said, your passion is really all about helping heart centered leaders become wealthy. So how do you do that?

Kimberly Spencer 1:04:02  

Well, it starts with vision. And the foundation of your empire is really the values that you stand on. And for, for me, I work with a lot of former people pleasers who have really good hearts, and who are and who really want to serve, but they have struggled with people pleasing or the desire to be needed. And so they make their business an entity in which they are needed that then is their business is then a vessel that is controlling them, which is going directly against the reason why they started their business, which was freedom. So getting very clear on the foundational values of your business of what is it that you want to create? What is it that that you bring to the table? What is it that really sets the foundation and when you're clear on your values, these values will guide who your customers are, who you're who your team is that you hire. It's an it sounds like I had one client, she was like, she'd been running a successful business. And she wanted to get her million dollar year in a year. And she, she was like, she's like the value stuff. This is like life coaching 101, Kim and I was like, just go with me on this, just trust me, turned out to be one of the most transformational parts of her business because she realized she was in a business that was not in a line, she was in a partnership that was not in alignment with her highest values for why she created the business. And she eventually had to buy a her partner. And then she ended up hiring two team members, which I was so proud of hired two team members in a pandemic and a recession created jobs because of her values. Because her vet, she led with her values first. And the people that she attracted, bought into those values. They said, Yes, I want to be a part of this company. Because this company stands for something being these wishy washy companies that don't stand for anything when people are like, well, you're just another like what influencer on Instagram, like, what do you stand for, like posting, like, here's an inspirational quote that I found on a Lululemon bag, that's not really building a transactional business, versus having very clear cut ties and being able to enunciate and repeat and consistently preach those values, like my primary value is ownership, ownership period. That is how it is, is in our value statement. In crowd yourself, it's ownership period of take ownership for our actions, we take ownership for our lives, we let our customers take ownership, because sometimes, you will come up into a situation where maybe a customer wants a refund, and that refund is outside of the refund guarantee. And it's your job as a leader to say no, these are these were the boundaries, it's your job as a customer to take ownership of the commitment that you made to participate in this program. And to abide by these rules. If you don't like them, I'm sorry. But you need to take ownership for your actions just as much like that, that in it of itself. It's tough love, but it's what we're we're kind of missing a lot. And that's something that I love bringing to the table. And fortunately, I don't have to do that very often. Because I attract a lot of clients that have ownership is a very high value. But setting that foundation and then being able to communicate that found that those values, being able to preach them being able to preach them in your marketing in your internal messaging, and being able to constantly reiterate that those are the values that you stand for. And you can also have things that you stand against, like I'm very clear that I stand against negative Nellies and Debbie downers. And like I can get on the topic that I'm like about certain things that I disagree with, but I'm not going to pull myself down into like a negative state, because I have such immense hope for the world and such and I believe was such possibility, I cannot be a mother and think that I'm not leaving a great world for my son, like I that is not within my realm of belief system, that I will even allow that this world will not be amazing for my child. And I will work my hardest to be able to make it so into a trap serve other people to help them grow their businesses so that they can also help me in this mission.

Ari Gronich 1:08:28  

That's pretty awesome. And, you know, I appreciate that. I do I do have an issue though, with with your industry.

Kimberly Spencer 1:08:38  

Yes, oh, I have a few too. So go for it.

Ari Gronich 1:08:42  

industry has turned from has basically turned into what I would say is the same as the healthcare industry. There, the incentives that they've created for themselves are procedure based versus results based, which means that you, you know, you're paying for, okay, there's 30 posts per month, there's, you know, two different channels, and that's what we're gonna do, or we're gonna run Facebook ads for you for this long. We're gonna put 10 of 10 ads up, okay, did they get results? Did they do anything? Are they you know, like, the marketing industry has seen in my eyes has felt like they've moved into just a really lack of integrity space. And, and that is kind of that's kind of where the healthcare industry is. It's just lack of integrity. They do procedures that are not necessary in order to create more billing versus to create more health. Right? If we change the incentives to results based, then we're going to change the outcomes. So that people can actually get what they're looking for. So how do you ensure that this is a loaded? Question? How do you ensure that you're getting results for the people rather than just doing a bunch of stuff?

Kimberly Spencer 1:10:11  

Oh, for me, it's constant. Like I'm in constant dialogue with my private clients on what they're doing. And they have action steps that they need. Like, it's, it's, it's a result of, they also have to show up as well. So it's both parties taking ownership. And it's my job to hold the the bill to hold the standard of what they're working toward, if they say, this is what I want to work toward, that I hold that standard, like my one client, he joked with me a year ago, he said, if you can be if you can help me get this plane, then then then I'll know that you were worth it. And I was like, Challenge accepted. And so within a year, he ended up buying his dream plane. And being able to park it literally writes out outside of his office. And I and he was like, I didn't even think that that was a reality. And to think that that was possible. And I was like I did, because you said so you said this is the level that you want to be playing at. So I'm going to write I'm going to challenge you to rise into who it is that you need to become. And I'm going to have some uncomfortable conversations. And we did that challenge them to rise into that next level same, and it's happened with every single client of mine that I will deliver the challenges that they needed by saying not exactly, I won't say exactly what they want to always hear. And so in the marketing it like in the marketing industry, and I love the fact that you pointed out that it's results driven versus it's not results driven versus process driven. Because like my process, the process is what you sell, so you can sell the process. But you also have to be able to produce results like that, that's where I believe the integrity has to come in. So for example, I didn't raise my prices to what they are now with until I saw that my clients are getting such good results that they were making their money back within a month to two months by increasing their profit and increasing their their income. So I was like, Okay, if they're, if they're able to double their monthly income in the span of three to three months of working together, I should raise my price. My prices are not reflected at that. So I need to I raise my prices because my route of the results that my process was getting. But I think that that comes into like because I and I it's a problem that I have with the coaching industry, of coaches just coming out from like $25 online school saying like, you can charge whatever you want to charge and $25,000 for that. I'm like, that's awesome. You can't Yes, you can charge whatever you want to charge. Can you produce $25,000 worth of results? like can you produce the results that are worth $25,000? Like my one client reconnecting with her kids that were strange, totally worth $25,000? Like she says to this day, priceless? Because that's something that she can never have have even fathom was going to happen. But that's and that's the thing Can you can you? Do you have enough certainty and trust with yourself to go back to that certainty and trust? Do you have enough certainty and trust to produce that level of results like when I first started coaching, I was I did not have certain interests whatsoever. And so I was doing it for like 100 bucks a month in my car because I was totally stuck in doubt. And then once I got certified and then had enough confidence that I had a process that was transformative enough because it transformed me to be able to sell that for $2,000. And so I started selling it for $2,000 my clients were getting great results. They were getting better relationships with their kids, they were releasing past relationships, they were able to heal from divorces, they were able to to start up their businesses like they were starting to get get progress, they were starting to manifest and attract in clients and partners and and deals. And so I said okay, great. So then I raised my prices again, because I saw that they were producing my route. The process was producing the results, but they both have to be in alignment.

Ari Gronich 1:14:31  

That's awesome. You know, I I have this book, this course that I created. It's called the performance therapy Academy certification course it's a continuing education course for the industry. Basically chiropractors, massage therapists, pts, anybody who touches or trains a body really should take that course. And it's it's interesting to me because one of my one of my students The very next day, he calls me up. And he says, we just did one of the techniques that you gave us to do for my autistic daughter, who has massive, uncontrollable anxiety attacks, that lasts sometimes hours, and usually in the middle of stores. And they used this technique. And within 30 seconds, she was calm. And then another one said to me, I had a client come in, she just wanted to learn how to use use the equipment in the gym. And I did some of the things that you wanted, you know, that you taught me to do. And now it's three months later, and she's lost 50 pounds and is hiking up a mountain in Colorado, you know, and I'm like, that's what makes me feel good. Not the information, the teaching of the information, it's fun, you know, it's like, it's like, cool. But that's the thing that I get charged by, I get, I get my energy goes, whoo, when I hear the results of the people that I've touched, and I just wonder how much better people would feel about themselves if they did the same thing. And, and I think it's really all about that fear thing that you were talking about at the beginning, is people are so afraid of life, and they need the money. And so they'll do anything for it. And then they feel bad, but they still keep doing it, because they're getting that that reward, right.

Unknown Speaker 1:16:54  

But how much some degree, sometimes it's even not that much of a

Ari Gronich 1:16:57  

reward. What's better would they feel when they can see the results on a consistent regular basis with multiple people all the time, you know, like, in my world, as a sports therapist, working with Olympic and Paralympic and pro athletes, if I didn't get the result, I didn't have job because they had six months to, you know, or however long to get back to playing a sport where they were making a million plus a game or a, you know, an impure app. And it costs a lot of money if they don't get back to that thing that they're doing. Right. Yeah. And not get the results. You have to have that level of care for the person you're working with, enough to know what to do for them specifically, in order to make it work. And it's just yeah, I I get pissed when, when the systems allow for. I get pissed when the systems allow for people to be taken advantage of that way. Yeah. And, and so, you know, let's get back to to you.

Kimberly Spencer 1:18:10  

I mean, you and I are totally in alignment, because I've never even the thought of not getting a client not getting results is just not even within my wheelhouse. Like that's, that's not even a possibility when, like, it's it. It's Yeah, that the thought that Oh, yeah, I'm going to have you involved with this program, but not get results. I've closed programs because I saw clients I said, this, like, I literally just did this, I saw a program I saw I was making making some nice money, but I wasn't seeing the the participants participate. And I'm like, I know I'm not gonna mother you, but I'm not gonna I'm gonna take this option off the table so that you're not using it as a crutch and so that you can actually do something that it's going to actually enhance you which which was offer, I offered a very new low Pat low cost private coaching package for people making five figures. So if you're not yet making six figures, I said, look like I get it you can't you can't drop what my clients who are making who are working with me for six to 12 months, but you can do this and I know this because I was in your spot. So I and I so I took the the membership option off the table. I said no more $99 a month because you're showing up. You're showing up at that level. And I'm going to give you this option, and some took me up and some didn't. And it just showed me who the dabblers were and who the ones who were really serious were like, you know, this is my time. This is what I want to do.

Ari Gronich 1:19:46  

Absolutely. So why don't you give us about three or four actionable steps actionable tips, tricks, to becoming the influencer that you really want to be in life.

Kimberly Spencer 1:20:00  

So step one, take ownership, you are not your results, you are the cause of your results. So, so often, it's very easy for us to identify with our results, the number on a scale the number in our bank balance room. Instead, those numbers are just a reflection of the actions that we've taken. So instead of getting down on yourself for like, Oh, I don't have this or Oh, I, I gained five pounds, or Oh, I did this thing. Or Oh, my social media numbers dropped or whatever it is, look at the actual action steps of like, what did you do this past week that caused that? Look at those action steps and or what did you not do that you had done in the past? Because that will give you that will give you a very clear tactile playbook. As far as like what works, what doesn't work for what you're looking to grow? Another tip is to question what you know, quite just ask yourself the question question what you think, you know, whether that's a belief, because everything we're we're working with our beliefs every single day, and they're so unconscious to us? So say, for example, something is just as silly and as simple as like, a belief like, Oh, this, the client turned me down. So that means that, you know, I struggle with sales doesn't necessarily, is it possible that maybe that client wasn't the right client for you? And if so, what else could be possible? Is it possible that maybe your messaging is a little off so that you're not attracting the right? clients? So allow yourself to ask better questions, ask questions that provide instead of saying, like, why is this happening to me? Ask questions that provide moving forward, like what if this happened to you? Or what, what and how questions will always produce more strategy and forward thinking than why questions?

Ari Gronich 1:22:03  

Yeah, I'm one of my mentors used to say, How can it get any better than this? Whether it was horrible. Yep. Really, really good. That question still works. How can it get any better than this?

Kimberly Spencer 1:22:20  

Yep. And I learned this one from my mentor, it was, how is this the best thing that ever happened to you? No matter how awful it was, or the worst, I mean, because and when you look back, because hindsight is not 2020 hindsight, it's an asshole, like hindsight, because you're looking back with the tools and the resources that you have, now that you didn't know when you were making those initial decisions. So in hindsight, it's not really 2020. So allow yourself to ask those questions that can that can, that can lead to greater change.

Ari Gronich 1:22:55  

It is hindsight is 2020. If 2020 is this year, because we've had an asshole of the year 2020 was not what

Kimberly Spencer 1:23:11  

2020 definitely allowed for some pretty powerful perspective shifts, and then my last one would definitely be Watch your language. Watch what you're saying yourself. Just Just watch. Are you saying you can't a lot? Are you saying you'll try a lot? These are words in your vocabulary that imply a lot of effort, sometimes, but not necessarily a lot of results? are you how are you speaking to yourself? How do you think about a problem? When you think about a problem? Do you immediately think, Oh, I can't or Oh, it's that's too hard. Or do you think, oh, heck yeah. Like I can figure this out. I'm going to figure this out. Watch your language observe, like an anthropologist and you will have a lot more perspective as to how you are communicating with yourself to produce the results that

Unknown Speaker 1:23:58  

that you want. Awesome. Yeah, my

Ari Gronich 1:24:00  

son is checking out the Star Wars world. He's watching the Mandalorian right now with I guess, baby Yoda. And you know that there is no dry. Yeah, whole thing. And so I've been working on because obviously, we always say I'm trying to do this. I'm doing you know, I've been working on I'm doing my best. I'll do my best. And yeah, we'll try. Just because that whole, I will do my best is an option. And try doesn't exist. Like, you can't pick a quarter off somebody's hand because either you do or you don't. So it doesn't really exist.

Kimberly Spencer 1:24:45  

And implies a lot of effort, though. And sometimes that effort makes people feel good but or feel feel that necessary social guilt that they feel is required to feel, but doesn't actually produce results.

Ari Gronich 1:24:57  

So how can people get ahold of you if they'd like to To work with you.

Kimberly Spencer 1:25:01  

So you can get a hold of me at Crown yourself com, super simple. And you can also email [email protected]. And I am on all the socials. You can find me at Crown yourself now.

Ari Gronich 1:25:13  

Awesome. Thank you so much for being here. This has been a great episode. I hope you took dubious notes and made it something that you can actually take with you and action upon due today because we always want to create a new tomorrow today. Thank you so much. I'm your host, Ari Gronich, and we'll see you next time. Thank you for listening to this podcast. I appreciate all you do to create a new tomorrow for yourself and those around you. If you'd like to take this information further and are interested in joining a community of like minded people who are all passionate about activating their vision for a better world. Go to the website, create a new tomorrow.com and find out how you can be part of making a bigger difference. I have a gift for you just for checking it out and look forward to seeing you take the leap and joining our private paid mastermind community. Until then, see you on the next episode.

Hi, I am here with Kimberly Spencer, she is a certified high performance coach and intuitive life coach, Amazon bestselling author, and international motivational speaker. Hear it live on Monday at 6 Am for the full episode in your favorite podcast app.

CHECH THIS AMAZING WEBSITE BY KIMBERLY TO LEARN MORE!

https://crownyourself.com/

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Create a fundamental change in the global community from a strictly reactive system of medicine that focuses on symptom and emergency treatment to a proactive system based on whole-being health as well as illness and injury prevention. Personally teach and influence at least one million people.

We are a multifaceted Health and Wellness company that specializes in Corporate Wellness and Culture Consulting, Industry Speaking engagements and Continuing education for the industry.

We Help corporations by solving the most costly problems they have with Productivity and Health Care while creating a culture that thrives on accomplishment and community.

We help organizations think outside of the box and gain tools that allow them to be nimble and strong as tides and markets shift.

We Up level the skills and tools of other practitioners by providing them continuing education that actually leads to greater success and standing in the business community.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Kimberly Spencer 0:00  

And it was such a fun experience being able to have that dream and have seen my name on the up on the big screen. But I was surprised that when I was at the premiere, I was actually only 90% fulfilled. And it was at that time that two weeks later after the premiere, I got a notification from a friend of my friend who came to the premiere because when you write a movie, you get extra tickets. And so she her son had come to the premiere and had seen the film and it changed his life based on the story.

hi i am here with paul andrew smith, Paul Smith is one of the world’s leading experts on organizational storytelling. He’s one of Inc. Magazine’s Top 100 Leadership Speakers of 2018, a storytelling coach, and the author of three Amazon #1 bestsellers: Lead with a Story (now in its 11th printing, and published in 7 languages around the world), Sell with a Story, and The 10 Stories Great Leaders Tell; in addition to Parenting with a Story and his newest work, Four Days with Kenny Tedford. He’s a former executive at The Procter & Gamble Company and a consultant with Accenture prior to that.

JOIN NOW!! AND BE PART OF MASTERMIND PROGRAM

learn how to activate yourself for a better future!

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https://www.createanewtomorrow.com/gift

DO YOU WANT TO BE OUR NEXT SPECIAL GUEST?

Book an appointment now and let's create a new world together!

https://booking.builderall.com/calend...

CHECK THIS OTHER WEBSITE FOR MORE INFORMATION!

https://www.CreateAnewtomorrow.com

https://www.Achievehealthusa.com

Create a fundamental change in the global community from a strictly reactive system of medicine that focuses on symptom and emergency treatment to a proactive system based on whole-being health as well as illness and injury prevention. Personally teach and influence at least one million people.

We are a multifaceted Health and Wellness company that specializes in Corporate Wellness and Culture Consulting, Industry Speaking engagements and Continuing education for the industry.

We Help corporations by solving the most costly problems they have with Productivity and Health Care while creating a culture that thrives on accomplishment and community.

We help organizations think outside of the box and gain tools that allow them to be nimble and strong as tides and markets shift.

We Up level the skills and tools of other practitioners by providing them continuing education that actually leads to greater success and standing in the business community.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Ari Gronich 0:07  

Welcome back to another episode of create a new tomorrow. I'm your host, Ari Gronich. And I have with me Paul Smith. Paul is a former Procter and Gamble, employee with consumer communications and research. He's one of Inc magazine's top 100 leadership speakers in 2018. His work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company time, Forbes, and Success Magazine, among others, is a an MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, best selling author, and he leads with a story and I'm gonna let him kind of get into what it is that he's going to be doing and talking about, because he's an incredible storyteller. And he talks about leadership with that. So Paul, why don't you kind of give us an update of background on why you became who you are? And and what you have to offer people that is absolutely needed in in the world at the moment? Yeah, I

Paul smith 1:10  

think our what you just covered was my my background up until about 2012. So at that point, I was 20 some odd years into my professional corporate career. And along that path, I just got fascinated with this concept of storytelling. And, and that kind of frustrated me, because, you know, they they didn't teach me about storytelling at the Wharton School, they didn't teach me that when I joined Accenture, they didn't teach me that when I joined the Procter and Gamble company. But yet I was I was beginning to recognize how important of a skill set that was to be successful in the profession that I was in, or in business in general. And so I started interviewing leaders whom I admired and thought were particularly good at it first inside the company, and then outside the company. And I mean, at this point, I'm up to around 300 or so like individual one on one face to face two hour long interviews I've conducted with these CEOs and executives from all over the world, like 25 countries around the world. And pretty quickly in that journey, I realized that you know, if I want to know this that badly, probably other people do as well. And so it stopped being my own little selfish learning journey, and became an idea for a book. And so that that's what led to my first book lead with a story which came out in 2012. And then that led to another and another and another night, my my fifth book just came out a few months ago. And so what I ended up doing was pretty quickly, leaving my corporate career and becoming a full time author and speaker and trainer on the subject of storytelling for leaders or for salespeople, I've got one of my books is on, you know, sell the story for salespeople, why there's one for parents, you know, a couple of them are for for leaders.

Ari Gronich 2:54  

So do you think that storytelling has become a dying art? As far as practice? Or do you believe that it's going to have a resurgence? Because I know that, for me, at least, my cultural history is all about storytelling. You know, if you look back, it's like, you know, what happened back then? Because that person who is they're told their grandfather, you know, told their kid who told their kid who told their kid who told their kid and, and that's how, at least in my culture, we, we learn. And so, but in a lot of cultures, it's not that way so much as dictatorial. Here's what you do, but there's no context of the story behind it. So how does how does that play out in in modern world? And why is it that it's such a fascinating thing, we all love to hear people's stories?

Paul smith 3:59  

Yeah, so I think, personally, you know, in people's lives, I think storytelling has always been, you know, an important part of human socialization and family and things like that, in the working world, what my, what I've learned through my research in this is that I think storytelling was actually important, even in the business world, you know, or the, the world of commerce for centuries. But then I think there was a period of time in the early 1900s, where it fell out of favor. And that's when you started to have professional business schools, you know, you know, Harvard and Wharton and, you know, etc, training people to become professional business people, which before that really wasn't a thing, right? If you a professional was a lawyer or a doctor or something, but a business, anybody can be a business person, right? Just go start a company. Well, in the early 1900s, we started to credential eyes and professionalize business. And if you wanted to be viewed as part of the avant garde part of new business? You You, you probably didn't do a lot of storytelling, because that seemed old school. Right, you know, a new business leader would lead with a bunch of spreadsheets and, and like you said, dictatorial, you know, methods of leading and and, you know, having a very clear vision and using a bunch of management techniques and things like that, and storytelling wasn't one of them. And so I think it fell out, I think you asked is storytelling, you know, falling out of favor. I know, I think it did fall out of favor 100 years ago, and about 20 or so years ago, I think it started to make its resurgence.

Ari Gronich 5:37  

Okay, sounds good to me, because I again, I really like having stories be part of, at least for me, my business itself. You know, why? everybody always asks, Why did you become this performance therapist, and I have to tell them, you know, I, I started out as an athlete, I was five years old, I was playing, you know, three years old, doing gymnastics, five years old martial arts, playing baseball, doing all these things, and I kept getting injured. And so I had to figure out how to heal myself. And you know, that story is kind of the repetition that I play out when when somebody asks, I know, a friend of mine is doing these things called the story of your business and their books about why you started your business. And they're like coffee table books and things. And that's starting slowly to build. So how do we build that momentum? so that it becomes second nature, again, for people to be storytellers? And do we need our population to actually connect together again, because, you know, lock parties, same thing, people are so separated, that it doesn't occur to them? Maybe? So is that a possibility to rebuild that culture? And do you think that the storytelling will bring us together versus separating us apart? Yeah,

Paul smith 7:13  

so there are a few things in there to unpack First of all, about that coffee table book about the story of your your business. That typically, I would call that the main story, there is the founding story. And, and I think that's a very important story for businesses, for people, for leaders to be able to tell about the company they work in. And in fact, I think it's the first story you need to be able to tell. But it's not the only one. And, in fact, when people say, the story of our business, they often make the mistake of assuming Well, we just have one story. Like, you know, in fact, companies will hire me to, hey, we need you to come and help us tell our story better. And the first question I asked them, when I get on the phone with them just to plan the event is when you say our story, what what do you mean? And then they say all these things? Oh, well, you know, we've got this really unique process of innovation. And, you know, the way our the way the company started was really unique. And our strategy is is, is really interesting, and the first product that we've ever made. So yeah, we want you to tell us tell that story. You realize you just rattled off like five different stories. I mean, you don't have one story. I mean, that would be a novel, right? If you were to write your one story, and nobody in a business conversation, has time to listen to a three hour story. They don't have time to listen to a 30 minute story, you know, you need these are three or four minutes stories that you would tell.

Ari Gronich 8:39  

So is this something that that you would recommend like nowadays, everything is online. So should this be something that that we do online is like a video as well as, you know, a written version of it, that people can really feel the energy of the person when they're telling that story? Or

Paul smith 9:02  

I think video is a video is a fabulous medium to tell stories, right? Because it's so much richer than just the written word on a piece of paper or on a blog post or something like that. So yeah, I definitely encourage people in fact several of my clients you know, after we go create a story with them, they'll go hire somebody to help produce a video in fact, I'm I'm now starting to partner with somebody I've got a call with him right after this with a production studio in California to do exactly that to take stories from idea to concept to story scripting, and then all the way to having it you know, produced into a final video. I think that's a fabulous way and it's easier to tell it then because you don't have to be there face to face every time they can just they can go watch the video,

Ari Gronich 9:46  

right? Absolutely. Yeah, I have a friend's company that does the videos. And another friend who does books, which is really interesting ones in Miami. One's a nomad at this point, traveling Nomad. In those stories, there are certain elements that people would probably want to highlight and accentuate, you know, so what are the kinds of elements that somebody who's watching the video would want to hear or see or feel based on what's going on in that story? So what are like, the basic elements?

Paul smith 10:29  

Yes, well, the first and most important thing for the person telling the story to understand is, what's the lesson that you want the audience to learn? You know, like, in fact, what do you want them to think feel? Or do the three things I coach people like you need to you need to have an objective in your mind, you shouldn't just be telling people stories to entertain them, right? You're telling them for a reason you're trying to accomplish something, you're either trying to get somebody to think, feel or do something different than they are today. So start, you start with that. And then once you have that end in mind, then you go pick the story to tell that will accomplish that objective, right? So then you got to go find something that actually happened in the world and your experience and your business and your personal life or whatever, that will motivate somebody to do that to either think, feel or do something differently. And then you craft that into a story. And so but you start with the end in mind, right? What do I want people to think feel or do differently, go find a story that will convince them of that, then you craft the story. And there are little things that you'll want to do to make the story effective, like, have the right structure to the story. These are just like I said, three or four minutes stories. So you know, you need to have a tight structure. And I teach a very specific structure, the eight questions your story needs to answer and in this particular order for the story to make the most sense. And there are specific techniques that you can use to create the right emotional engagement in a story.

Ari Gronich 11:52  

Okay, reciprocal conversation. Awesome. Is there anything else that you'd like to share with the audience? Something that, you know, tips tricks? I mean, you've you've been dropping a lot of actionable steps already. But I always ask, Is there two or three, four actionable steps that somebody can take to learn to learn this skill skill? Because now we went now we know kind of some of the formats, but the concept is not implementation. So what are some things that implement this skill set?

Paul smith 12:31  

Yes, I'll give you one more is how to create a surprise ending. And you can do it with almost any story. And it's important that you do by the way, not just because it makes the story more interesting or entertaining, it does that. But in in business stories or parenting stories, your goal is to affect change, right? You're trying to get people to do something different. And it's important for them to remember the story that you tell them because the lesson is embedded in the story. A surprise ending literally physiologically makes the story more memorable. Because when somebody is surprised, there's a little bit of adrenaline that's released in their system. And studies show that when you've got more adrenaline in your system, your memory process works better or more efficiently. So you literally your memory is improved, while that adrenaline is still kind of coursing through your your system so and a surprise triggers that so there's a practical reason to put a surprise into a story like this. And you can put you can you can make a surprise ending out of almost any story and I'll just I'll illustrate it for you right now. So there's a young boy named James nine year old kid. He's in the kitchen with his mom and his mom's sister. So while mom and Auntie are sitting at the kitchen table, having a cup of tea, James is standing at the stove, watching the tea kettle boil, and he's just fascinated with it. Right? He's watching the jet of steam come out of the top of the tea kettle and he's gonna get a spoon and he holds it up there into the jet of steam and watches little drops of water condense on the spoon and trickle down and drips into a cup. He's yellow cup sitting there to catch the water and he's just watching the cycle go over and over and over again. He's fascinated with it. Eventually, his mother gets tired of him in the kitchen and she just barks them she's like James, like, go do your homework, read a book, ride your bike, like, Aren't you embarrassed just wasting your time staring at the tea kettle boiling? Well, fortunately, young James was undaunted by his mother's admonition because 20 years later at the age of 29, of course, and in the year 1765. James Watt reinvented the steam engine, ushering in the industrial revolution that we of course, all benefit from today, and all based on that fascination with steam that he developed at the age of nine in his mother's kitchen. All right now, the first time I read that story, was in a book titled James Watt, right Is it a story a biography of the inventor of the steam engine, right. So Of course, it was no surprise to me at all that the story in chapter one about nine year old James was a story about the inventor of the steam engine, of course, right? The whole book was about him. But to you and the people listening unless you happen to be a history buff, that was probably a surprise at the end, when you realize, Oh, that was James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine, right? And why was it a surprise? Simple, because that didn't tell you his last name until the end of the story. Right? presto, surprise ending. So the technique is, you take something that belongs at the beginning of the story, the main character's name, right, it's a question number three out of the eight questions is who's the main character? most human beings expect to know who the main character is? Early in the story? It's, it's natural. So you're breaking that natural expectation, take something from the beginning of the story, and move it to the end of the story. Presto, you've created a surprise that you do with almost any story.

Ari Gronich 15:59  

Nice. Thank you so much for all of that. And I really enjoyed this interview. How can people get ahold of you if they want to work with you?

Paul smith 16:10  

Yeah, thanks. Probably my websites, the easiest, which is leadwithastory.com is the name of my first book. I guess it wasn't more creative with naming websites after that. But yeah, leadwithastory.com it's got links there to all my books and training courses and my contact information and all that.

Ari Gronich 16:26  

Awesome. Thank you so much. And we really appreciate you being here. There's been some great actionable steps. Remember to like, subscribe, and review rate and review. This podcast. We want to be able to get it out to you and give you all kinds of tips and tricks on how you can make your business and your life a success and how you create a new tomorrow today. I'm your host, Ari Gronich and we will see you on the flip side next time. Thank you so much.

hi i am here with paul andrew smith, Paul Smith is one of the world’s leading experts on organizational storytelling. He’s one of Inc. Magazine’s Top 100 Leadership Speakers of 2018, a storytelling coach, and the author of three Amazon #1 bestsellers: Lead with a Story (now in its 11th printing, and published in 7 languages around the world), Sell with a Story, and The 10 Stories Great Leaders Tell; in addition to Parenting with a Story and his newest work, Four Days with Kenny Tedford. He’s a former executive at The Procter & Gamble Company and a consultant with Accenture prior to that.

CHECK THIS AMAZING WEBSITE BY PAUL ANDREW TO LEARN MORE

https://leadwithastory.com/

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CHECK THIS OTHER WEBSITE FOR MORE INFORMATION!

https://www.CreateAnewtomorrow.com

https://www.Achievehealthusa.com

Create a fundamental change in the global community from a strictly reactive system of medicine that focuses on symptom and emergency treatment to a proactive system based on whole-being health as well as illness and injury prevention. Personally teach and influence at least one million people.

We are a multifaceted Health and Wellness company that specializes in Corporate Wellness and Culture Consulting, Industry Speaking engagements and Continuing education for the industry.

We Help corporations by solving the most costly problems they have with Productivity and Health Care while creating a culture that thrives on accomplishment and community.

We help organizations think outside of the box and gain tools that allow them to be nimble and strong as tides and markets shift.

We Up level the skills and tools of other practitioners by providing them continuing education that actually leads to greater success and standing in the business community.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Ari Gronich 0:00  

Has it occurred to you that the systems we live by are not designed to get results? We pay for procedures instead of outcomes, focusing on emergencies rather than preventing disease and living a healthy lifestyle. For over 25 years, I've taken care of Olympians Paralympians a list actors in fortune 1000 companies, if I do not get results, they do not get results. I realized that while powerful people who control the system want to keep the status quo, if I were to educate the masses, you would demand change. So I'm taking the gloves off and going after the systems as they are. Join me on my mission to create a new tomorrow as I chat with industry experts, elite athletes, thought leaders and government officials about how we activate our vision for a better world. We may agree and we may disagree, but I'm not backing down. I'm Ari Gronich. And this is create a new tomorrow podcast.

Welcome back to another episode of create a new tomorrow. I'm your host, Ari Gronich. And I have with me, Paul Smith. Paul is a former Procter and Gamble, employee with consumer communications and research. He's one of Inc magazine's top 100 leadership speakers in 2018. His work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company time, Forbes, and Success Magazine along among others, an MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, best selling author, and he leads with a story and I'm gonna let him kind of get into what it is that he's going to be doing and talking about, because he's an incredible storyteller. And he talks about leadership with that. So Paul, why don't you kind of give us an update of background on why you became who you are? And and what you have to offer people that is absolutely needed in in the world at the moment?

Paul smith 2:08  

Yeah, I think what you just covered was my my background up until about 2012. So at that point, I was 20 some odd years into my professional corporate career. And along that path, I just got fascinated with this concept of storytelling. And, and that kind of frustrated me, because, you know, they they didn't teach me about storytelling. at the Wharton School, they didn't teach me that when I joined Accenture, they didn't teach me that when I joined the Procter and Gamble company. But yet I was, I was beginning to recognize how important of a skill set that was to be successful in the profession that I was in. You're in business in general. And so I started interviewing leaders whom I admired and thought were particularly good at at first inside the company, and then outside the company. And I mean, at this point, I'm up to around 300 or so like individual one on one face to face two hour long interviews I've conducted with these CEOs and executives from all over the world, like 25 countries around the world. And pretty quickly in that journey, I realized that you know, if I want to know this that badly, probably other people do as well. And so it stopped being my own little selfish learning journey, and became an idea for a book. And so that that's what led to my first book lead with a story which came out in 2012. And then that led to another and another, and another, and my, my fifth book just came out a few months ago. And so what I ended up doing was pretty quickly, leaving my corporate career and becoming a full time author and speaker and trainer on the subject of storytelling for leaders or for salespeople, I've got one of my books is on, you know, sell the story for salespeople, why there's one for parents, you know, a couple of them are for for leaders. And so yeah, just led to a radical shift in my career. So So in the last eight years, this is what I've done full time as research and write on the subject of the art and the science of storytelling to help you be more effective at work and then conducting speaking engagements and training workshops on those topics.

Ari Gronich 4:10  

So do you think that storytelling has become a dying art? As far as practice or do you believe that it's going to have a resurgence? Because I know that, for me, at least, my cultural history is all about storytelling. You know, if you look back, it's like, you know what happened back then? Because that person who is they're told their grandfather, you know, told their kid who told their kid who told their kid who told their kid and, and that's how, at least in my culture, we, we learn and so, but a lot of cultures, it's not that way so much as dictatorial. Here's What you do, but there's no context of the story behind it. So how does how does that play out in in modern world? And why is it that it's such a fascinating thing we all love to hear people's stories?

Paul smith 5:15  

Yeah, so I think, personally, you know, in people's lives, I think storytelling has always been, you know, an important part of human socialization and family and, and things like that, in the working world, what my, what I've learned through my research, and this is that I think storytelling was actually important, even in the business world, you know, or the, the world of commerce for centuries. But then I think there was a period of time in the early 1900s, where it fell out of favor. And that's when you started to have professional business schools, you know, Harvard, and Wharton and, you know, etc, training people to become professional business people, which before that really wasn't a thing, right? If you're a professional was a lawyer or a doctor or something, but a business, anybody could be a business person, right? Just go start a company. Well, in the early 1900s, we started to credential eyes and professionalize business. And if you wanted to be viewed as part of the avant garde part of new business, you you, you probably didn't do a lot of storytelling, because that seemed old school. Right, you know, a new business leader would lead with a bunch of spreadsheets and, and like you said, dictatorial, you know, methods of leading and and, you know, having a very clear vision and using a bunch of management techniques and things like that, and storytelling wasn't one of them. And so I think it fell out, I think you asked is storytelling, you know, falling out of favor. I know, I think it did fall out of favor, 100 years ago, and about 20 or so years ago, I think it started to make its resurgence into the business world, because there are a lot of books written on the topic of leading, you know, with stories, starting about 20 years ago and mind. So mine was certainly not the first of them. And I won't be the last. But about 20 years ago, the resurgence of interest in bringing storytelling back into the business world started and I think we're still still early in that resurgence. And more and more people are becoming interested in how to use storytelling to either be a better leader or be a better salesperson be a better marketer to help them communicate their their ideas better, even if they're don't if they don't fit into any of those buckets. So that's where I think we are I think we're on an upswing not a downswing.

Ari Gronich 7:32  

Okay, sounds good to me, because I again, I really like having stories be part of, at least for me, my business itself, you know why? everybody always asks, Why did you become this performance therapist, and I have to tell them, you know, I, I started out as an athlete, I was five years old, I was playing, you know, three years old, doing gymnastics, five years old martial arts, playing baseball, doing all these things, and I kept getting injured. And so I had to figure out how to heal myself. And you know, that story is kind of the repetition that I play out when when somebody asks, I know, a friend of mine is doing these things called the story of your business and their books about why you started your business. And they're like coffee table books and things. And that's starting slowly to build. So how do we build that momentum? so that it becomes second nature, again, for people to be storytellers? And do we need our population to actually connect together again, because, you know, block parties, same thing, people are so separated, that it doesn't occur to them? Maybe? So is that a possibility to rebuild that culture? And do you think that the storytelling will bring us together versus separating us apart?

Paul smith 9:08  

Yeah, so there are a few things in there to unpack First of all, about that coffee table book about the story of your your business. That typically, I would call that the main story, there is the founding story. And and I think that's a very important story for businesses, for people, for leaders to be able to tell about the company they work in. And in fact, I think it's the first story you need to be able to tell. But it's not the only one. And, in fact, when people say the story of our business, they often make the mistake of assuming Well, we just have one story. Like you know, in fact, companies will hire me to Hey, we need you to come and help us tell our story better. And the first question I asked them when I get on the phone with them just to plan the event is when you say our story, what what do you mean? And then they say all these things? Oh, well, you know, we've got this really unique process of Innovation and, you know, the way our the way the company started was really unique. And our strategy is, is really interesting and the first product that we've ever made. So yeah, we want you to tell us tell that story, you realize you just rattled off like five different stories. I mean, you don't have one story. I mean, that would be a novel, right? If you were to write your one story, and nobody in a business conversation, has time to listen to a three hour story, they don't have time to listen to a 30 minute story, you know, you need, these are three or four minutes stories that you would tell. So the story of somebody's life is a series of short stories. And that's what I people need to realize is, you don't have one big story, you have a bunch of little stories, and you need to figure out which ones are important. And when to tell each one because there is zero opportunities to tell all of them in one sitting, that will never happen, right? So you need to figure out which one's which of those little stories are the most important, and the founding story is one of them. But it's just a three or four minute story about why the founder of the company founded the company. It's not about the 25 years since then, and all the money you've made and the successes and the failures, those are all different stories. The founding story is just about that one incident where the the owner said, You know what, I am done working at this company. I'm gonna start my own company. It I hate it here. Like nobody ever, ever quit their job, risked everything to go start a business for a boring reason. There's always an interesting story behind that. But that's story number one. So what I what I did in my last book is called the 10 stories great leaders tell. And I just tried to outline it's a very short book, you can read it in an hour. It's just about what are the most important 10 stories, but it's, but it's that's only 10. There are dozens more that you should tell. But if you're interested and say with those 10 hour, but the founding story is number one,

Ari Gronich 11:48  

no, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay, so

Paul smith 11:51  

so that's first is where we call it a where we came from story. That's your founding story. All right. But it's not everything that happened after that, just the founding story. The second one is why we can't stay there. So that's a case for change story, there's probably something going on in your business that you need to make a change. Where we're going is the third story. So that's a vision story. And how we're going to get there, which is a strategy story, because a strategy is about how you're going to get from where you are now to where you want to be. So if you think about those four stories, those first four, any leader who can tell those four stories can easily articulate where we came from, why we can't stay there, where we're going and how we're going to get there. And that's the kind of direction that everybody needs in an organization to come from the leaders, right? That's four different stories. It's not one story. It's four different stories. So the next four kind of go together as well. But they're more about who we are as an organization. So that's what we believe that's a corporate values story, who we serve. So that's a story about the customer. So everybody can get a visceral feel for who we're working for what we do for our customer. So that's a classical sales story, and how we're different from our competitors. So that's why I call it a marketing story. Because marketing is generally about how you're different from your competition. So again, if you can tell those four stories, you can easily articulate who we are, who we work for what we do for them and how we're different than our competitors. Right? every leader has got to be able to do that. And that leads to more so the last two are, the last two are more personal to you, the leader, why I lead the way I do. So that's a personal leadership philosophy story, and why you should want to work here, not you, but whoever you're talking to, right. So that's a recruiting story, because every leaders job is to make sure talented people come into the organization and follow the leadership. Now there are dozens of other types of stories that I cover in my my other books, but if I had to pick a most important 10 those would be the most important ones to like, start there, but then continue to build your storytelling repertoire. But you got to recognize those are all different stories. So there is no one story for a company there are lots of them.

Ari Gronich 13:51  

So is this something that that you would recommend like nowadays, everything is online? So should this be something that that we do online is like a video as well as, you know, a written version of it that people can really feel the energy of the person when they're telling that story? Or no as I

Paul smith 14:15  

think video is a Yeah, video is a fabulous medium to tell stories, right? Because it's so much richer than just the written word on a piece of paper or on a blog post or something like that. So yeah, I definitely encourage people in fact several of my clients you know, after we go create a story with them they'll go hire somebody to help produce a video in fact I'm I'm now starting to partner with somebody I've got a call with him right after this with a production studio in California to do exactly that to take stories from idea to concept to story scripting, and then all the way to having it you know, produced into a final video. I think that's a fabulous way and it's easier to tell it then because you don't have to be there face to face every time they can just they can go watch the video right?

Ari Gronich 15:00  

lately? Yeah, I have a friend's company that does the videos. And another friend who does books, which is really interesting ones in Miami and one's a nomad at this point, traveling Nomad. In those stories, there are certain elements that people would probably want to highlight and accentuates, you know, so what are the kind of elements that somebody who's watching the video would want to hear or see or feel based on what's going on in that story? So what are like, the basic elements?

Paul smith 15:41  

Yes, well, the first and most important thing for the person telling the story to understand is, what's the lesson that you want the audience to learn? You know, like, in fact, what do you want them to think feel? Or do the three things I coach people like you need to you need to have an objective in your mind, you shouldn't just be telling people's stories to entertain them, right? You're telling them for a reason you're trying to accomplish something, you're either trying to get somebody to think, feel or do something different than they are today. So start, you start with that. And then once you have that end in mind, then you will pick the story to tell that will accomplish that objective, right? So then you got to go find something that actually happened in the world and your experience and your business and your personal life or whatever that will motivate somebody to do that to either think, feel or do something differently. And then you craft that into a story. And so but you start with the end in mind, right? What do I want people to think feel or do differently, go find a story that will convince them of that, then you craft the story. And there are little things that you'll want to do to make the story effective, like, have the right structure to the story. These are just like I said, three or four minutes stories. So you know, you need to have a tight structure. And I teach a very specific structure, the eight questions your story needs to answer and in this particular order for the story to make the most sense. And there are specific techniques that you can use to create the right emotional engagement in a story. There are techniques to create a surprise ending in a story, which is maybe not as obvious, but is actually important in a business story, not just for an entertainment Hollywood Story. And that's because a surprise actually makes the story more memorable. And if the story is more memorable than your idea will be more memorable. You know, you also want to use dialogue. And so they're all the kind of things that you know, somebody in Hollywood would use, you can use the same techniques to create your little three minute story that they're using on a bigger scale.

Ari Gronich 17:34  

That's awesome. So I'm going to take it a little bit away from the business side at this moment. And I'm going to I'm going to push it into what kind of is going on in our current world with politics. One of the things that I loved about ross perot. Yes, I loved ross perot.

Paul smith 17:56  

Yeah. And God rest his soul. And here's

Ari Gronich 17:58  

what we got to do. We got to get rid of that NAFTA business right there. But what he would do different than any politician that I've seen in modern, at least times, is he would go on, he would purchase 30 minutes slots. And he would explain a policy. And the reason why that policy wasn't good. And here's the numbers, and here's the information, and here's what it's going to do to the community. Right. And he would explain it in ultra detail. And I wonder why the politicians go and do these mini, like sound bites, and they never go on and really take the time to tell the story of, of their policy of what they're doing, of why they're doing it to get the onboarding of the citizenry. They scare them with the sound bites the stories with it, you know, in my opinion, enlighten them. So

Paul smith 19:01  

yeah, so a few things in that, um, first of all, I think the our entire society has suffered a radical shortening of our attention span in the last couple of, like, decade or so. And that's unfortunate. I think, you know, there's a lot of reasons to blame for that, you know, social media has done that television has done that, you know, we all have a very short attention span when I started doing training videos for LinkedIn learning out in California. You know, we had seven or eight minute video segments that we would shoot for, you know, one or two hour training course. Well, now they want them in two or three minutes, you know, because just because people's attend to they can't I can't watch a video for more than three minutes without checking my phone, you know, which is kind of sad, but so that's part of the problem. The other thing I think I would, I would say about that is that that 30 minute detailed explanation that ross perot would give about his policy. I don't call that a story. I call that a 30. minute explanation, right? I mean, he's explained, he's going into detail about the numbers. And, you know, and and I think we need that storytelling should not be the only communication vehicle that you use. In fact, it shouldn't even be the most frequent one. In fact, I tell the folks, I coach that only 10 to 15% of the words coming out of your mouth should be in the form of a story 85 to 90% of the time you're talking or writing or whatever, should be normal prose, right, it should be like what ross perot was doing just somebody, I'm just explaining this to you, let me just explain my idea to you, but 10 to 15% of time. So if you've got a one hour meeting 10 to 15% is six to nine minutes. So out of that ross perot half hour, that's three to five minutes, out of a half an hour, I think he should be telling a story. And the stories are only two or three or four minutes long. So he's got time for one or two story short stories during that 30 minutes. And those stories are going to be helpful to illustrate the point he's going to make so he can he can talk about, you know how to get rid, we ought to get rid of this NAFTA thing. And here are my five reasons why and here's the impact that's going to have on our economy. And it's going to have an impact on real people too. So for example, there's a guy named Bob, I met down in Dallas, Texas last month, and he got he lost his job, because his job got moved over to, you know, to Mexico, and, and, you know, he's going to tell a personal story about that guy, and how NAFTA impacted his life and his family and his kids. And then he's going to get back to the, you know, next idea on his list, but that's just going to be a three or four minute two or three minutes story that he tells in the middle of that 30 minute discussion, we need the 30 minute discussion. But if you were to ask people a week after that ross perot 30 minute explanation, what they remember the most from it, what do you think it's gonna be

Ari Gronich 21:47  

the story,

Paul smith 21:48  

it's gonna be the three minute story about Bob who got fired in Dallas, right? So. But if all he did was tell stories for 30 minutes, nobody would know what to remember. So you can't or you shouldn't overuse storytelling, either. You need to explain it, and then use stories to punctuate the key ideas and make it memorable and compelling. Right.

Ari Gronich 22:10  

Hold on one second. I just got to turn on a light. So a little bit green on my face.

Awesome. That's a little bit better. I don't look like in anymore. All right. So So I watch, you know, politicians all the time, and they'll go into that story of the person that was affected by the thing, right. And a lot of times, it'll sound contrived story sounds made up almost even if it's not, it's very polished, our story supposed to be really polished, or are they supposed to be authentic? Because that that is what connects with me. Although I see the politicians and it never feels really authentic, the stories that they're telling.

Paul smith 23:38  

Yeah, I agree. And that's why I don't I don't write books about storytelling for politics, because I, I do feel like they mostly come across that way. So if you find yourself ever using the words, let me tell you a story. Nothing that comes after that is going to sound authentic. Right? So it's when that it's when that politician makes the point and then they go, so let me tell you a story about Bob and in Dallas. Well, you've already made it sound like a big production and any, any if he delivers that story in a really polished way. Yeah, it's gonna sound contrived and, and lack authenticity. In fact, when I was doing the research for the book, sell the story I interviewed, obviously, a bunch of salespeople, but I also interviewed buyers, professional procurement managers, who listened to salespeople sell to them all day, and ask them, what is it that makes a sales pitch sound like a sales pitch? And they all told me the same thing. They said the moment the conversation turns from conversational the tone of the conversations turns from conversational and extemporaneous to something that sounded scripted and memorized, they say that's when I knew the sales pitch had started. And that's when the hairs on the back of my neck would stand up. And I would get defensive and like, you know, you don't want to have that effect on people. And that's the same effect I think those politicians have on people when they go into that kind of Storytelling mode. And so I tell people, you know, the tone of your voice shouldn't change, when you start to tell a story, it should just, it should flow in the conversation very naturally. So if somebody were to ask you, if you're in the office and you're in a, in a meeting with somebody, and they tell you about a problem they're having, and you're the boss, and you say something like, yeah, that's a tough problem. Let me tell you what I did five years ago, when I when I had your job, and I ran into that problem. And then you start telling your story. Like, that's a genuine story. Okay, I've got that problem. And you're about to tell me what you did when you had my job. And you ran into that problem. Now, I don't know yet if you were successful at it, or you're a failure at it. But either way, I'm going to learn something, right. So I want to hear that story. So that's a much better way to, to move into a story then let me tell you a story. And then you're gonna deliver it, you're gonna have some arms and ORS, and it's not going to be perfectly polished, and you're not going to memorize it word for word. And, and, because that's not the way people talk, people don't talk in perfect grammar. They talk and halts and stops, and they start a sentence over and they'll, you know, stutter a little bit, and your story should sound the same way. So in fact, I tell people, don't even script your story out word for word, because if you do, you'll be tempted to memorize it. So you should only script out you shouldn't script it. only write down your story in bullet points. So just and it's the answer to the eight questions. I know, I haven't told you what the questions are. But you know, the eight questions the story needs to answer you should have bullet point answers to the questions. And that's what you memorize. That's like, the outline of your story. And then every time you tell the story, it'll sound like the first time you've ever told the story because it will be the first time you've ever told the story exactly that way. Right?

Ari Gronich 26:42  

So, you know, it's funny, because I've done a lot of speaker training, I was, you know, peak potentials train the trainer's john Childers and his $25,000 speaker trainer, which back then was probably one of the best speakers on the planet, john Childers. I mean, and, you know, one of my, one of my mentors, and a lot of people's mentors, Les Brown, he's very well known for repeating the same story over and over and over again, and it is absolutely memorized, however, and it's like, word for word every time so you can play multiple speaking engagements. And, and almost, you know, make them overlap. Right. But he never sounds like, like, He's right, going based on a script ever. And that's just like a tone. But I I've actually done as a speaker, I've, I've never written out a full script, I can't, it actually hurts my brain and my soul to write a full script for something I like to be able to be spontaneous. And I find that the script keeps me from being more rubbery.

Paul smith 28:07  

Right. So yeah, let me because I know the kind of person you're talking about, I know people, speakers who who do that. And they're probably some of the stories that I tell when I, you know, and I, I'm a professional speaker, as well. And I've done you know, 1000s of engagements, and there are some stories I've probably told 1000 times, and some of those stories probably are like that, you could probably roll the tape back that way. The difference is, most people aren't professional speakers. They're not professional actors, right. So if you're gonna tell if you are a professional speaker, and you're going to tell a certain story in front of an audience, hundreds and hundreds of times, yeah, go ahead and and and memorize it and use the techniques that that guy probably uses to make it sound a little bit fresh every time. But most people 99% of the people, you know, are not a professional speaker. They're just, you know, I'm a vice president at a bank, and I need to be a better leader, or I'm a salesperson for, you know, computers, or whatever. And I need to do a better job of it. And so, and I needed to learn to tell there's different stories I need to tell all the time, and I may only tell them two or three or four times and then that story is done. So most of us need help telling those kind of stories, not the story I'm going to tell hundreds and hundreds of times. So I think the rules are a little bit different. If you're one of those people. Yeah, you could probably get away with it. But most of us aren't that person.

Ari Gronich 29:28  

Gotcha. So how does this you know, go back, going back to you know, we talk politics, we talk in business a little bit, but also personal life. So you're, you're an adult, and you're going to make a friend, which is probably one of the hardest things post college that any adult does is make friends. And they want to express to the person that they meet that they seem to get along with and like who they are, right. Is there a story For that somebody can practice as well or somebody can have them. I mean, I'm just trying to put what are the applications that are outside of the box a little bit?

Paul smith 30:11  

Yeah. So well, first of all my my second book parenting The story is about stories, personal stories, stories you tell at home, not the kind of stories you tell at work. But there are more stories to teach life lessons that a parent would use to teach their kids, you know, the value of integrity or open mindedness or creativity or curiosity or hard work or fairness, you know, those kind of virtues that you want your kids to have. But if your goal is friendship, another one of those chapters is on friendship, by the way, but if your goal is making new friends, and you were looking for the type of stories you would tell when you're meeting people, what I find is helpful there is to tell a self deprecating story. Write a story about you know, a silly mistake you made or something stupid, you did one time. And the reason is because that humanizes us, right? Nobody wants to make new friends with somebody who's so full of themselves that they're just they're just arrogant. And so if you tell a story about well, let me tell you about one of my first book hit number one of the New York Times bestseller list. Let me that's a fascinating story. Let me tell you about that. Well, it's may be fascinating to you, but it's not going to be the people listening, right. But if Let me tell you about the first time I got fired, oh, my God, it was so embarrassing. Who wants to hear that? Everybody? I mean, just because it's funny. And you know, and everybody loves to laugh at somebody else's misery. And plus, maybe they'll learn something from it. So you're telling your own self deprecating failure story is a great story to tell when you're meeting new people? I think, what do you think?

Ari Gronich 31:41  

Yeah, I do it all the time. But I have so many to pick from.

Paul smith 31:47  

I've had so many failures. Yeah,

Ari Gronich 31:49  

I figure you know, I'm a very balanced person, equal parts of genius, and idiot, equal parts of damage. You know, and trauma. And, and, and benefit, you know, I mean, I'm a pretty balanced person, that way. I tell I tell some of those kinds of stories, you know, but, I mean, that, to me, is how I connect. And one of the things that I know about our world these days, is that we are all connected without being connected at all. You know, we all can we can all comment on each other talk to each other do, but nobody is being or very few, at least in the society are being really deep and dirty and dark with their stuff. Because everything is a selfie culture these days. It's like, what is the best angle for my face? What is the best, you know, look for, you know, I just made some food, how can I make it so that the picture will look good, so I can post it on something. And it's, it's this unreal, inauthentic way of being with each other, that I think is damaging the society as a whole in such innumerable ways. And it's that inauthenticity of connection that we're that we're experiencing. And so I'm, I guess, looking for ways that we can, you know, this whole create a new tomorrow is about how do we take ourselves I'm, you know, my new book series I that I'm in the middle of writing right now is called tribal living in a modern society. And it's going to be a series. The first one is the corporate culture revolution. But it's all about how do we get back to living more in a tribal way, which involves things like sitting around a fire with people and sharing stories? And how do we get back to that in corporations in our families? I mean, how many people do you know that still sit around the table with their kids every single night for dinner, and talk about the day? Not very many. And so that's where it's like, I'm trying to, I want to get this the world and it's my own feeling and my own, you know, like, selfish wish, want desire. So, you know, may not be anybody else's, but I feel like people are longing for what that is that they're missing. And a lot of that storytelling, the time that we spend with each other, talking about our history, our past, I think that's what's going to solve a lot of the race issues when people start listening to the stories and hearing them without that reactive mind. So that's the other part is when you're telling a story making it As easy as possible for the listener to digest without reaction. Right? So is there is there a way to do that, obviously better and you know, and be able to tell that story without causing the reactions. This is going to be good for any audience member who's in a relationship as well. Whether It's Your boss, or or a partner, if you can tell your story without them having a reaction, right?

Paul smith 35:33  

Yeah, well, maybe I'm not sure I understand the question. Because typically, when you tell a story, you want your audience to react, what are you saying you want to tell a story without a reaction of.

Ari Gronich 35:45  

So let's say, I'm talking to somebody of another race, and they're telling me the story of their experience with people of my roots. I don't want I want to be able, as a listener, to hear them without react going into a reaction about like, well, he's telling me I'm bad, or, you know, without feeling attacked, or being attacked without you know, that that whole reactive pneus based on ego attack? Yeah.

Paul smith 36:20  

You know, I think that's exactly where storytelling can help. In fact, I'm working on a diversity inclusion course with LinkedIn right now to do to accomplish exactly this, where we have people who've, you know, people of color who've suffered these kind of indignities sharing their stories. And what I think makes that effective is that it allows the listener, people like you and me to get inside their head to try to experience their experience from their viewpoint, that's what the, so they'll tell a story from a first person point of view. Let me tell you what happened to me my first day on the job at this company, you know, I went there, and this terrible thing happened and this terrible thing, you know, and I felt inadequate, and I felt like, you know, they, they didn't want me there. And you know, they go through their whole terrible experience. But without ever naming the person who did this and their person who did that to them. So when you're listening to this story, if it's done well, I think the natural human inclination would be to feel empathy for the person because you're seeing their world through their eyes, walking through it in their shoes, that's what the story can do. Whereas if you're not using stories, and you're saying, look, at 9.6% of African Americans feel like they've experienced one racial incident per week in their life at the hands of a white male. Okay, well, guess what, if you're a white male, you're gonna feel attacked. But if I just tell you a story about somebody, when they experienced some, you know, racial indignity, I think you'll feel less attacked, and you'll feel more involved in the story, you'll feel more empathy. So I think that's what storytelling can do. If I could, I kind of want to Mulligan and go back to one of the questions you asked earlier about, you know, telling these personal stories for friendship purposes. And this book series that you're working on this, this idea might help you. There was a study done by a survey done by I can't remember who did it at this point. Anyway, it was it was back in the around the year 2000, New York Times did the study. And they asked people, what percentage of people in the world are trustworthy? And the answer was somewhere around 20, or 30%, was really low, which is sad. And then they asked the same question, but a slightly different way. They said, what percent of people that you know, personally, are trustworthy? And the answer went up to like 80, or 90%. And you don't have to be a math genius to realize that there's something wrong there. Like, unless the people who are not trustworthy don't know anybody. On average, those two numbers should be the same, right? If you're doing a random sample of people, but they're not and they'll never be the same. And the reason is, because it's not that the people who know other people, the people that they know, or happened to be more trustworthy than the people that don't know. It's just people trust people they know, more than they trust people they don't know. Right? We don't our default setting is not to trust people. And once we get to know them, as long as you don't give them a reason not to trust you, as they get to know you more, they'll just naturally you move into this circle of trust. Well, now, I know you so I trust you. You know, even though you haven't really earned it, you just I know you. And so the reason I bring that up is because storytelling is the shortest distance between being a stranger and a friend. Right? I mean, I can read you my resume and you still won't feel like you know me. But I can tell you a couple of stories about what happened to me as a kid and what happened to me last week, and all of a sudden you know, me personally, just A little bit. And so it won't take six to nine months of us working together for me to earn that trust. All of a sudden, you'll just you'll know me and I will have moved into that circle of trust for you. So, building Frank friendships are based on trust, right? So they need to get to know you personally, and telling personal, you know, sometimes, you know, insightful notes is not the right word, but vulnerable stories of vulnerable pneus. That is what will bring you into that circle of trust, because I feel like they know you, personally, then.

Ari Gronich 40:33  

So this is something I know very well. But a lot of people feel that vulnerability is weakness. I feel like vulnerability is your biggest strength. So how do we get people? How do they feel vulnerable without feeling weak?

Paul smith 40:55  

Well, I think I think if I'm not sure why people, I think people that feel that vulnerability makes them weak, probably just haven't tried it, because they're too afraid to write. So if you were to tell, so remember, we talked about self deprecating stories earlier, right? So you're so say, You're the boss of some small department at work, and you're afraid to tell any of your failure stories, because it'll make you look weak? Okay, well, you're, you're probably not a very good boss. But if just try it, try telling a story to your group, about one about your three biggest mistakes you ever made in your career. First one got me fired. Second one almost got me fired from that job. Third one was terrible. But, you know, I didn't get fired, whatever, you know, and when you tell them about what you did, and each of those over the last 30 years, here are the three biggest mistakes I made. Your, your audience will love you for that, because you've just taught them three terrible things to never do at work, right. And so what you're telling them is, I care more about your growth and development than I do my own ego. I want I'm telling you these stories so that you won't make the same mistakes that I made. Now, I'm the boss here. So obviously, you know, I've done a lot of good things to write, somebody promoted me to this point. So I'm obviously not terrible. But yeah, I'm human. So I've made mistakes here, my three biggest. So do that and see how your people respond? Do they? Do they try and leave the company or like, I don't want to work in this department anymore. Apparently, my boss is stupid, he made three mistakes, or, you know, I don't want to work for her anymore, because she's weak, like, you will never ever get that reaction. The reaction you'll get is, Wow, thanks. I want to work for her more often. Like I want to work for her forever, because she cares more about my growth and development than she does her own ego. So I think if you try it once, you'll realize oh, it didn't make me weak. It made people admire me as a leader. And then you won't have that fear anymore.

Ari Gronich 42:51  

Nice. So is there? Well, let's go with the the eight questions, right? Let's take a look. Yeah, let's, let's

Paul smith 43:05  

hear the structure of a story.

Ari Gronich 43:06  

Right, let's take them step by step and just kind of here's what here's what we can do. Give them an example. And then tell them what the questions are. So like, a short two minute story, and then here's what I was answering.

Paul smith 43:22  

Yep. Okay, so I'll give you an example of that. Number eight, I think is that the marketing story, the why how we're different from our competitors story. So actually, you know what, let me do a different one, because it sounds like your audience is not all necessarily business people. So I'll do number nine on the list, which is a leadership philosophy story, which is also more of a personal story. So a guy named Mike figlio Lowe, who went to West Point. So he's an art was an army guy. His first leadership opportunity was leading a platoon of tanks, right, so and his first opportunity to test his leadership was in a training exercise at Camp Pendleton, California, maybe. Anyway, in California, imagine a 10 mile long five mile wide practice field, and they're going to go into battle, like literally gonna be 400 tanks on this side of the field and 400 tanks on this side of the field, and they're gonna go into this exercise. Now, they're not shooting live ordinances. They're like shooting laser beams and with a little receiver, so that you know, but it's real tanks with real people, but not real weapons. Anyway, he happened to be assigned it to be in the first tank that's going to go into battle on his side of the field with 400 tanks. So of course, then, you know, they're all following him. So the night before, he sits down with the commanding officer, and they go through a map of the terrain and figure out where the high ground is and the best strategy to win the exercise. So the next morning, that exercise starts and he's in his tank, and they're racing out onto the field. Well, he gets a couple of minutes into it, he gets to the place where he's got to make a decision to turn left or right. And he doesn't know what to do. Like, I guess looking at a field through the crack in the hatch of a tank. bouncing up and down at 40 miles an hour just looks a little different than it does on a map in a conference room, right? So he's got a decision to make, he can either stop the tank, turn on the light, get the map out, figure out the right thing to do, which might take, I don't know, 30 seconds. Or he can just guess. Well, Mike chose option two, he just yells out driver turned left, even though we had no idea if that was the right thing to do. But he said it like he meant the right driver turn left, so driver turns left. A couple of minutes later, the light in his tank starts flashing, which means you just got shot by a laser, you're dead. So they've stopped the tank pop has get out those guys are done for the day. Well, you know, 30 seconds later, tank number two, fall is following him and they turn left and their little light goes on. Okay, they got shot by laser tech number three turns left, their light goes on, they're done. But the guys in tank number four saw three tanks turn left and get virtually shot and killed. Right. So they realize that was a mistake. So tank number four turned right. And then 396 other tanks turned right. They took the high ground and won the exercise. Right. So Mike learned a lesson that day. So he made a mistake, right? That was a leadership mistake, he should have turned right. Instead he turned left, right. But what he learned from that was that sometimes it's more important to make the wrong decision quickly than make the right decision slowly. Because just imagine if he had stopped the tank, turn the light on got the map out and wasted, not wasted. But spent those 30 seconds figuring out the right thing to do. What would have happened would have been 399. Other tanks stopped behind him waiting for him to make a decision or getting picked off by lasers because they're like sitting ducks out there. Right? So but because war and business in life are all fairly similar in that when you make a mistake, it's going to become obvious Pretty soon, right? You'll have things will start going wrong. Right? So then you can monitor and adjust. And sometimes it's better, like I said, to make the wrong decision quickly than the right decision slowly and not get stuck in the analysis paralysis that in the business world we often do, we'll study a situation for six months. Meanwhile, your competition is moving forward. So that's story. That's a leadership philosophy story that he uses to explain why he leads the way he does. So when he's telling you to tell people that story and they'll they'll recognize, oh, then he's a decisive leader, if I need a decision made quickly, I want to go to him and not somebody else, because he's a more decisive leader. And that just lets people understand the kind of leadership to expect from him that he expects from other people. So that's an example of one of these stories. Let me let you react to that. And then I'll go into the eight questions about it.

Ari Gronich 47:35  

It sounds like a ready fire aim.

Paul smith 47:38  

Yeah, it kind of is. It is. Yeah, that's good. Ready firing.

Ari Gronich 47:42  

So. So again, in my world, if I have a word spelled wrong, or the commas out of place, or things not completely perfect and clear, right? I don't want to put it out there. It's been a habit, I've been learning to put stuff out, and then tweak as I go. Right. But, but it's, you know, embedded in my spirit from my mom, who is, you know, an old teacher. And, and grammar clean. And so she wants to make sure like everything that I ever put out was proper English and proper commas in the right place, and no words on spelled and, and everything like that. So that's what I how I grew up was needing to be perfectionist, but I have noticed in my business how costly that is. So is that kind of like a story? I know, I cut it off. But is that kind of like a story?

Paul smith 48:46  

A little bit, you'd probably need a little bit more to it. And so when I go through these eight questions, you'll probably be able to recognize where yours is missing. Right? A couple of these

Ari Gronich 48:54  

as I would have gone on I didn't want to make it about me. Yeah, you know, to get that interview. But I mean, I'm just I'm playing with with what you're what you're saying to see. Because I want the audience to actually get it right. And I want them to be able to walk away from listening to you and say, I can use this to change the world. In my world, right to create my new tomorrow today. Well, what I've been doing hasn't been working, I haven't gotten the conversions. I haven't gotten the the friendships, I haven't gotten to whatever it is that I'm looking for. And it sounds like the storytelling is kind of like the missing piece for many people. The missing piece to getting everything that they want.

Paul smith 49:42  

Yep. So I'll get to the eight questions here in just a second. But let me respond to that. You're the story that you told and and and what would make that a better story. First of all, it would need to be unique. It would need to be a narrative about something specific that happened. So what you said in general was, you know, my mom always, you know, told me to you know.my i's and cross my T's and get everything right. And in the business world that ended up being bad decisions that end up costing me money. Well, that sounds like a very general statement about how your mom raised you, and a very general statement about how you've run your business. To make it an interesting story, you'd either need to tell about a specific moment when you were a kid where your mother chastised you for not dotting your i's and crossing your T's. Or more powerfully, you can leave that part General, but get to and then tell us one specific moment a decision you made in business that ended up being a bad decision. And you did it because you were trying to dot all your i's and cross your T's. That would have been made an interesting story. But a story is a narrative about something interesting that happened to somebody. So it has to be a specific instance in time. And that actually leads us into these eight questions. So the first one, by the way, is, why should I listen to the story? Right? I call that the hook, you got to give people a reason to listen to your story, or they might not. So an example of the hook would would be Oh, like I said earlier. Wow, that's a that's a tough problem. Let me tell you what happened to me five years ago when I had your job, and I ran into that problem. That's it. That's the whole hook. That's the answer to question number one. Because I've just told you that if you listen to me for the next two minutes, I'm going to tell you about when I had your job, and I ran into that problem. Now you want to listen, right? And that's all a hook is supposed to do was to get you interested in listening to the actual story. So that's question number one, why should I bother listening your story? Once you've answered that question adequately, you've earned the right to answer the next five questions. So here they are, where and when did it take place? Who's the main character? And what do they want? What was the problem or opportunity they ran into? What did they do about it? And how did it turn out in the end? Right? That should should sound like the natural flow of a story because it is the natural flow of a story. But there's two left, right, so that's only six. What did you learn from it? And what do you think I should go do now? That's number seven, and eight. All right. So so the five questions in the middle are actually the story. All right. The first question is the hook that gets you interested, the last two questions are to help drive some behavior, drive a change, you know, what was the lesson? What was the recommended action? Right? All done with the five questions in the middle is actually the story. So in your example, there, there was no where and when did it take place? Because it wasn't a specific story. It was, in general, my mom raised me this way. And in business in general, these things this has happened, but it would need to be last February. On February 14, on Valentine's Day, I made a decision to do X with my business. And it turned out to be a disaster. And you tell the story about the decision you made on February 14. That's a specific where and when stories need that. If you ever find yourself saying things that don't have a time and a place attached to it, it probably is not going to feel like a real story.

Ari Gronich 53:12  

too vague.

Paul smith 53:13  

Yeah, too vague. Okay.

Ari Gronich 53:16  

I hope you all have taken some notes. This is uh, you know, Paul Smith is just dropping some bombs on y'all. And I only say y'all, because I live in Florida now. But

Paul smith 53:28  

I was raised in Arkansas. So I'll drop it y'all every now and then to

Ari Gronich 53:32  

awesome. So I want I want the audience to you know, hopefully you guys are all taking notes. Hopefully, you're, you're getting to a place where my iPad just fell off the table. Anyway. Hopefully you're you know, as an audience member, you're getting taking notes and learning something that is going to help you in your world and in your life because Paul's just dropping some bombs on you. Give us a maybe, you know, what is the main thought that your last 20 years has taught you the main thing, the lesson that the last 20 years of storytelling has taught you

Paul smith 54:31  

the German a lot so it's hard to pick one. But maybe the most important one to mention at this point is that you should treat storytelling like any other skill set that you want to have in life, whether it's in your personal life or your work life. And that is that it's worthy of studying to get right. So for example, if you wanted to learn to play the guitar, would you just go buy a guitar and put it under your bed and hope that by osmosis you would learn how to play guitar? Yes, probably you would. Okay, that probably wouldn't be very effective, though.

Ari Gronich 55:05  

I wouldn't live, but that's probably what I do.

Paul smith 55:07  

Yeah. If you actually wanted to learn to play the guitar, though, you'd probably go take guitar lessons, right? So you'd go learn it from somebody who knows how to do it. And storytelling is no different, right? And storytelling is an art form for sure. It's not a science, it's an art. But if you want to learn how to do it, you can and maybe that's the other lesson is that storytelling is learnable. So it's not that well, some people are just naturally born storytellers. And some people will not. And if you're not one of them, will you just never have that skill. That's not true. It's like any other art form. Like, I'm not a naturally gifted musician, but if I wanted to learn to play the guitar, I think I could write, you know, but I would, I would take lessons from somebody who knew how and I would practice. So if the way you want to learn to tell stories is just Well, I'll just, I'll just practice telling more stories. Well, that's like me say, I'm just going to practice, you know, playing piano more practice the guitar without ever learning how, I'm just going to start strumming it more like, if you're not likely, you can, but you're not likely to learn very well. Right? So you know, you took classes in college on finance, or marketing, or whatever you know, or engineering or whatever it is that you do, you should do the same as storytelling, it's worthy of learning. So pick up a book, take a class, watch a few YouTube videos, you know, whatever you like to learn. Learn it. Because there are, as I mentioned earlier, the eight questions your store needs to answer there's, you know, 10 types of stores, you should probably tell their techniques to create a surprise ending, there are techniques that you can learn that you won't just figure out on your own by stumbling around and telling more stories. So take it seriously and learn it like a skill.

Ari Gronich 56:50  

You know, I'm, I'm blessed to do these podcasts. And to have had the career that I've had, but what I find most fascinating, and it's the last part of that. So I want to talk about what I find fascinating is the amount of depth of listening that I get to do by doing this, the interview podcast thing that I'm that I'm doing, the the level of listening. So I want to know, in the storytellers world, what is the role of the listener?

Paul smith 57:34  

Well, if you don't have a listener, your stories won't make an impact. Right? Yeah, maybe anything to ask a more specific question? Well, the role clearly, you need to have listeners,

Ari Gronich 57:48  

right, right. But what's their role? What, what what role do they play in? So if I'm on stage speaking, I'm watching body language. I'm watching the listeners to see what they're doing, how they're doing it, how they're responding to me, I'm, I'm very keen on being in the audience, even though I'm up on stage right on. So the listeners have a big huge role for me. And I can play off them, I can do things that rehearsing in private never gives me I won't do, right. So the role of the listener for the person telling the story is, is I don't know how else to say that. You know?

Paul smith 58:43  

Yeah, I have a role I yeah, I get it now. So what role do they play for you the storyteller? Well, so first of all, the most important role they play is, it's their job to make meaning from the story. Right? The part of storytelling, the benefit of storytelling is that the audience gets to decide what the lesson is, if you're just going to boss people around, or tell them here are the five reasons why you should buy the product I'm selling. You don't, you don't need to tell any stories, if that if that's all you want to do is just tell people what to think and do now Good luck that might not be very effective. But the benefit of storytelling is that you tell a story. And then the audience wants to go do what you wanted them to do without you telling them to go do it. Right. You tell your kid a story about how you had, you know, a bike accident when you were seven years old? Because you weren't you didn't look both ways before you cross the street and a car ran into you and broke your leg? Well, guess what, you don't have to tell them to look both ways to cross the street anymore. Because they will have learned they will they will want to avoid having a broken leg. So and it's the same in the business world, right? So the purpose of telling stories is for the audience to come to the conclusion themselves. And so their job is to make meaning with the story. So you as the storyteller, Tell her you're looking at them for those verbal or those visual cues that they're getting it? Are they looking confused? If so, it's stories probably not connecting, right? You know? Are they asking the right questions after the story is over like that that question seven or eight? What's the lesson? And what's the recommended action? Ideally, the storyteller never answers those questions. It's the audience's job. The storytellers job is to answer questions one through six. the audience's job is to answer questions seven or eight. And if they get it, and you have to check with them to find out, are you you know, what lesson do you learn from that? What What do you think you should go do after that? So after you answer question six, you stop, stop telling the story, the story is over. Now you're you're trying to drive action with it, find out what their reaction is. If their reaction if they if they drew the right lesson, and they're going to go do the right thing, great. Your job is done. Because they're more likely to do it. People are far more passionate about pursuing their own ideas than they are about pursuing your ideas, write a story turns your idea into their idea. Now, if they answer question seven, or eight, and they totally didn't get it, right, if they didn't learn the lesson, you wanted them to learn, which is a risk. You can just redirect them, you can say, Oh, you know, that's a conclusion. I thought of two. But I came to a different conclusion. And here's why. Or, yeah, that's one thing you could go do. But I think this is a better idea. And here's why. You can always redirect them like that, but give, give the story a chance to work after that question number six, and let them be the meaning maker in the story.

Ari Gronich 1:01:32  

Awesome. You know, that's what I found is that the feedback loop is, is what, you know, for me and audience drives a feedback loop. And it sounds like that's about the same. Now, it's interesting, because you said after question six, then you stop telling the story. And that's kind of like a sales conversation, or promoting something or if you're like, an advertising agency, and you're, you're showing all your all your campaign that you just created, and then you stop. And you have that awkward silence? How long do you let that awkward silence last? Before the audience, the listener, the customer? This, you know, responds back with a question or a comment or a yes or no, right? So a lot of people will take that silence, the storyteller will take the silence. And if they don't hear the feedback, the uncomfortability in the room becomes palatable, right. So how do we avoid that part of it?

Paul smith 1:02:49  

Yeah, a couple of thoughts. One is six or seven seconds is like an eternity, when there's a silence in a conversation. So it's just almost never happens that there's silence longer than that. So if you're willing to be silent for at least six or seven seconds, the chances are 99% of the other person is going to say something because it's just too uncomfortable. So that's about, that's about the longest you'd ever have to wait. More importantly, if you tell an interesting story, people are gonna want to respond to it. Like, when you when you finish answering Question number six, which is how did it turn out in the end, that's the natural conclusion of a story you're finishing, you're tying up all the loose ends, it's a natural place to stop and let them respond. And if it was an interesting story, they will they'll they'll either want to comment about the story, they'll want to tell you what they learned from it, or they'll want to tell you a similar story about something that happened to them. That's just the way humans are wired. And so you tell a good story. And it will almost naturally elicit a response. If instead you go through the here are the five reasons why you should buy my product. You know, it's not going to naturally elicit a response or another story or, you know, people are kind of waiting for you. Okay, is that it? Is that the end of the sales pitch? Okay, thanks. I'll think about it. No. Stories naturally elicit a mirroring response from people.

Ari Gronich 1:04:12  

Okay, reciprocal conversation. Awesome. Is there anything else that you'd like to share with the audience? Something that, you know, tips tricks, I mean, you've you've been dropping a lot of actionable steps already. But I always ask, Is there two or three, four actionable steps that somebody can take to learn to learn this skill skill? Because now we went now we know kind of some of the formats but the concept is not implementation. So what are some things that implement this skill set?

Paul smith 1:04:52  

Yes, I'll give you one more is how to create a surprise ending. And you can do it with almost any story and it's important that you By the way, not just because it makes the story more interesting or entertaining, it does that. But in in business stories or parenting stories, your goal is to affect change, right? You're trying to get people to do something different. And it's important for them to remember the story that you tell them because the lesson is embedded in the story. A surprise ending literally physiologically makes the story more memorable. Because when somebody is surprised, there's a little bit of adrenaline that's released in their system. And studies show that when you've got more adrenaline in your system, your memory process works better or more efficiently. So you literally your memory is improved, while that adrenaline is still kind of coursing through your your system so and a surprise triggers that so there's a practical reason to put a surprise into a story like this. And you can put you can, you can make a surprise ending out of almost any story and I'll just I'll illustrate it for you right now. So there's a young boy named James nine year old kid. He's in the kitchen with his mom and his mom's sister. So while mom and Auntie are sitting at the kitchen table, having a cup of tea, James is standing at the stove, watching the tea kettle boil. And he's just fascinated with it. Right? He's watching the jet of steam come out of the top of the tea kettle and he's kind of got a spoon and he holds it up there into the jet of steam and watches little drops of water condense on the spoon and trickle down and drips into a cup yellow cup sitting there to catch the water. And he's just watching the cycle go over and over and over again. just fascinated with it. Well, eventually his mother gets tired of him in the kitchen and she just barks and she's like James, like, go do your homework, read a book ride your bike, like, Aren't you embarrassed just wasting your time staring at the tea kettle boiling? Well, fortunately, young James was undaunted by his mother's admonition because 20 years later at the age of 29, of course. And in the year 1765, James Watt reinvented the steam engine, ushering in the industrial revolution that we of course, all benefit from today. And all based on that fascination with steam that he developed at the age of nine in his mother's kitchen. All right now, the first time I read that story, was in a book titled James Watt, right? Is it a story a biography of the inventor of the steam engine? Right? So of course, it was no surprise to me at all that the story in chapter one about nine year old James was a story about the inventor of the steam engine, of course, right? The whole book was about him. But to you and the people listening unless you're happened to be a history buff. That was probably a surprise at the end, when you realize oh, that was James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine, right? And why was it a surprise? Simple? Because I didn't tell you his last name until the end of the story. Right? presto, surprise ending. So the technique is, you take something that belongs at the beginning of the story. The main character's name, right, it's a question number three out of the eight questions is who's the main character? most human beings expect to know who the main character is? Early in the story. It's, it's natural. So you're breaking that natural expectation, take something from the beginning of the story, and move it to the end of the story. Presto, you've created a surprise than you do with almost any story.

Unknown Speaker 1:08:19  

Nice.

Ari Gronich 1:08:20  

Thank you so much for all of that. And I really enjoyed this interview. How can people get ahold of you if they want to work with you?

Paul smith 1:08:30  

Yeah, thanks. Probably my websites, the easiest, which is lead with a story.com is the name of my first book. I guess I wasn't more creative with naming websites after that. But yeah, leadwithastory.com it's got links there to all my books and training courses and my contact information and all that.

Ari Gronich 1:08:46  

Awesome. Thank you so much, and really appreciate you being here. There's been some great actionable steps. Remember to like, subscribe, and review rate and review. This podcast, we want to be able to get it out to you and give you all kinds of tips and tricks on how you can make your business and your life a success and how you can create a new tomorrow today. I'm your host, Ari Gronich, and we will see you on the flip side next time. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to this podcast. I appreciate all you do to create a new tomorrow for yourself and those around you. If you'd like to take this information further and are interested in joining a community of like minded people who are all passionate about activating their vision for a better world. Go to the website, create a new tomorrow.com and find out how you can be part of making a bigger difference. I have a gift for you just for checking it out and look forward to seeing you take the leap and joining our private paid mastermind community. Until then, see you on the next episode.

hi i am here with paul andrew smith, Paul Smith is one of the world’s leading experts on organizational storytelling. He’s one of Inc. Magazine’s Top 100 Leadership Speakers of 2018, a storytelling coach, and the author of three Amazon #1 bestsellers: Lead with a Story (now in its 11th printing, and published in 7 languages around the world), Sell with a Story, and The 10 Stories Great Leaders Tell; in addition to Parenting with a Story and his newest work, Four Days with Kenny Tedford. He’s a former executive at The Procter & Gamble Company and a consultant with Accenture prior to that.

CHECK THIS AMAZING WEBSITE BY PAUL ANDREW TO LEARN MORE

https://leadwithastory.com/

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Create a fundamental change in the global community from a strictly reactive system of medicine that focuses on symptom and emergency treatment to a proactive system based on whole-being health as well as illness and injury prevention. Personally teach and influence at least one million people.

We are a multifaceted Health and Wellness company that specializes in Corporate Wellness and Culture Consulting, Industry Speaking engagements and Continuing education for the industry.

We Help corporations by solving the most costly problems they have with Productivity and Health Care while creating a culture that thrives on accomplishment and community.

We help organizations think outside of the box and gain tools that allow them to be nimble and strong as tides and markets shift.

We Up level the skills and tools of other practitioners by providing them continuing education that actually leads to greater success and standing in the business community.

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Paul smith 0:00  

I realized that you know, if I want to know this that badly, probably other people do as well. And so it stopped being my own little selfish learning journey, and became an idea for a book. And so that that's what led to my first book lead with a story which came out in 2012. And then that led to another and another and another night. My my fifth book just came out a few months ago. And so what I ended up doing was pretty quickly, leaving my corporate career and becoming a full time author and speaker and trainer on the subject of storytelling for leaders or for salespeople. I've got one of my books is on, you know, sell the story for salespeople, when there's one for parents, you know, a couple of them are for for leaders. And so yeah, just led to a radical shift in my career. So So in the last eight years, this is what I've done. Full Time is research and right on the subject of the art and the science of storytelling to help you be more effective at work and then conducting speaking engagements and training workshops on those topics.

Hi I am Here with Matthew Scarfo. He provide a comprehensive fitness program for his clients that exploits every element of his expertise and 20 years of credentialled experience. Corrective Exercise, Fitness Nutrition, Functional Flexibility & Strength, Strength Training, Weight-Loss, and Lifestyle Modification. here is the Highlights of the episode hope you enjoy. Listen to the full episode in your favorite podcast app.

CHECK THIS AMAZING WEBSITE OF MATT FOR MORE INFO!

https://www.mattscarfo.com/

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learn how to activate yourself for a better future!

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CHECK THIS LINK FOR A FREE GIFT FOR YOU!

https://www.createanewtomorrow.com/gift

DO YOU WANT TO BE OUR NEXT SPECIAL GUEST?

Book an appointment now and let's create a new world together!

https://booking.builderall.com/calend...

CHECK THIS OTHER WEBSITE FOR MORE INFORMATION!

https://www.CreateAnewtomorrow.com

https://www.Achievehealthusa.com

Create a fundamental change in the global community from a strictly reactive system of medicine that focuses on symptom and emergency treatment to a proactive system based on whole-being health as well as illness and injury prevention. Personally teach and influence at least one million people.

We are a multifaceted Health and Wellness company that specializes in Corporate Wellness and Culture Consulting, Industry Speaking engagements and Continuing education for the industry.

We Help corporations by solving the most costly problems they have with Productivity and Health Care while creating a culture that thrives on accomplishment and community.

We help organizations think outside of the box and gain tools that allow them to be nimble and strong as tides and markets shift.

We Up level the skills and tools of other practitioners by providing them continuing education that actually leads to greater success and standing in the business community.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Ari Gronich 0:07  

Welcome back to another edition of creative new tomorrow. I'm your host, Ari Gronich. And I have with me Matthew scarfo. He is an endurance athlete, corrective exercise specialist, human movement specialist. He's got 20 plus years in the fitness and health industry, and with an array of certifications and titles behind his name. And so I am really looking forward to this conversation because as you know, this is kind of my bailiwick. This is what I've been doing for 26 years is performance training, helping athletes go from injuries to gold medals. And so that is, you know, I'm just so excited to have this conversation today with Matt. Matt, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, and how you got into this industry and why it's so important to you.

Matthew Scarfo 1:00  

Sure, so, my name is Matthew scarfo. I'm a certified personal trainer among a number of other things I got into the fitness industry about 21 years ago, almost as a lost soul. I was a I didn't do very well in school, I dropped out of high school, the only thing I really ever always fell back on was fitness and exercise. And when I was younger, it was more about aesthetics, and strength, as opposed to performance and functionality, though, one day I was working out in my parents basement, and my mother came downstairs and said, Listen, you don't do anything you dropped out of high school. You're really not racking up any points here. So why don't you pursue a career in fitness and personal training, since this is what you love to do? And you do it anyway? Why don't you invest some time and some effort into figuring that out? So I took her advice. I became a personal trainer, shortly thereafter, got my first job as a personal trainer at a local mom and pop a big gym.

Ari Gronich 2:01  

Nice miles of lunges. Just imagine if you're in the audience, do do 10 lunges, and see how far you are. And then imagine that you've done that for one full mile. And that's, you know, to so many people that is untenable on attainable. conscionable. Right. And so, yeah, it's a lot of unknowns. So where's the mental acuity that comes with pushing your body that far? You know, like, how does, how does, how does that work on a brain.

Matthew Scarfo 2:51  

So, I'm a firm believer and a practitioner. of if you can run five miles, you can run 50. If you can do 50 lunges, you can do 1000 lunges, so long as that you're not in a physically deleted wrist condition where you're not, quote, unquote, pushing through an injury. As long as you've got healthy joints, healthy muscles, healthy bones, and your energy systems are sufficient to perpetuate that kind of activity. And after you've already run five miles, the energy systems aren't going to shift, you're already aerobic, at that point, you can get enough energy stored in your body to do that for quite a long time. So tire flips, it's very much the same lunges, it's very much the same. If you could do a handful you can do them all. What I'm doing is I'm fulfilling the past that is necessary in order for me to have accomplished, what it is that I'm that I'm looking for now, I had mentioned before, we had gone on there that I had listened to a few conversations that you had, and one of which you had mentioned a book, I believe it was called the science of getting rich. Right. Right. Is that Does that ring a bell? Yeah. And that's, that's, that's an old book, too. That's written by like, oh, two, I

Ari Gronich 4:07  

think it was originally or 19. Close to like, it was the early 1900s that that book was, was created. And it's the basis for the movie The secret for the entire law of attraction, you know, world that has that has been proliferated in the last probably 10, 15 years.

Matthew Scarfo 4:09  

sure. And there's so much truth to that book. I it's a short book, the audio books only about an hour, actually. And I remember listening to it on a particular run that I was on. And there's so much truth to everything that is stated in that book. And what I do is I I pick a reality, what's the reality that I want the reality of that I want is I'll give you another example back at the end of May, I decided to run from my house in North Jersey down to Washington DC, so 411 kilometers away. And the only way that I was able to do that, and it took a lot of meditation, it took a lot of praying, I do, most of the time use those two terms interchangeably with all due respect to whoever we gain our conscience from. But I wouldn't have been able to achieve that or any other goal for that matter if I didn't already see myself having accomplished it. And then making that future a certain future by by backfilling in the events that have to occur between now and then. So if I were to quit doing anything that I had set my mind to it, I'm essentially changing a future that I've already believed in. It's

Ari Gronich 5:44  

pretty fascinating. That the, that's how organizational planners create business plans. That's how operational organizational and operational planning happens. That's reverse engineering of anything really, is, is what you're talking about. But you're taking the next step of future planning, and then backtracking it. And then you're taking that next step, which most people don't do, which is they see the future they want. They believe in the future that they want. They plan for the future that they want. And then they see that plan. And they go, Oh, my God, I don't really want that. Right. So what drew, it's made the difference between making the plan and then doing the actions that are in the plan, and doing them consistently enough that you get the result that you're after.

Matthew Scarfo 6:58  

I think that it is largely a challenge for everybody. It's not the first mile, that's the hardest, it's, it's getting your shoes on and getting outside. That's, that's often the hardest part. We know. And I and I've got three kids, three young kids, and when they get in one of their moods, or they get frustrated with something that they're doing, I tell them, just find yourself doing what it is that you want to be doing, turn the brain off and just find find yourself outside walking on the street, that'll turn into the run, but you can make that five minutes it takes from getting your shoes on, to walk into the end of the driveway feels like a very painful eternity, if you're dreading it, but rather than dread it make the commitment that that's what you're going to do. And then turn your brain off. You put your shoes on, you find yourself outside and now look at this I'm running. So it's it's not the first step. It's the hardest it's it's getting, it's walking yourself up to the staircase. That's the most difficult part because action creates action. And if you take that first step, you're going to take the second step.

Ari Gronich 8:08  

I like how detailed that is. And I like how you know the step by step by step. As you know, my background is working with Olympic athletes and and pro athletes and I normally got them post injury and post injury. Anybody who has an injury is trepidatious to do the thing that caused the injury. One of my things was I did a double flip over a car at 45 miles an hour off my motorcycle, literally it was a tuck Pike, gymnastics martial arts kicked in, in the middle of what have I got hit 45 miles an hour t boned. And I literally took pike double flip over the car landed on my feet, unfortunately for me was wearing sandals and shorts, which I don't recommend when you're riding a motorcycle, and and have a I didn't have a broken bone in my body. I didn't have you know, a damaged brain or anything you'd have is Road Rash, massive Road Rash. Other than that, nothing. And one of the first things that I did when I could was I got on my friend's bike, and I started to write it with Olympic athletes. They are ready to get back on the horse but they're trepidatious and their trainers, their coaches, they're there people who are not skilled in multiple modalities Typically they're they're they're pretty narrow focused. And they'll tell them you know, he'll never be as good as he was. So for example, like Kobe Bryant got injured. And Gary Vee, you know, was saying he'll be about 70% we're used to that. It's okay. You know We're used to this in the industry. And I went and I talked to Mitch Kupchak. And I was like, No, he could be about 110% of what he was, if he's trained properly. And all you need to know, like, how much money is gonna cost you for him to be out and how much money is like, that was the conversation I had with him well. And is, is when somebody is injured, or weak, or they feel weak in some way, and they feel like that's going to be something that is going to stop them. And you know, this is goes for me too. I got in a car accident had back to neck surgery and things like that, and I become a little trepidatious. When I don't have proper trainers to work with me, even though I know what to do. You always need a coach, in my opinion, somebody to see the things and you know, that you can't see. And so I become trepidatious, I don't want to work out, I don't want to do push ups, I don't want to do exercises, right? Because I'm going to hurt myself again. So if somebody is listening to this, and they're hearing you say, just walk out the door, just put on your shoes. That is a really good first step, even if you don't actually go outside. If you get the shoes on one day, and then the next day, you open the door and close the door. And then the next day you open the door and you go outside. And then the next day you go and do the walk, you know to the driveway, and then the next day you'd walk down the block. And then the next day you walk a mile, you know, like taking those baby steps is really important. Now, I learned some of this through National Academy of sports medicine, and you've been an ASM grad progressions, equal results, right? If you try to do it all at once you create more injury. So talk a talk to us a little bit about that. And how do you motivate How do you get somebody to have a belief that they can do something when they're injured? And they don't feel like like they can? There's no hope left?

Matthew Scarfo 12:23  

I'm so glad that you asked me this question. So I myself, I've got a history of injuries as well. Nothing is dramatic, thank goodness, his motorcycle or car accidents. And I'm glad that you're well. But I had a slip and fall about 15 years ago on ice that ended up giving me compression fractures in T six through 10, which turned into general degenerative arthritis, which has depleted the bone mass of each of those vertebrae by 20 to 30%. So I've got stenosis, I've got arthritis, I did not opt to go for that fusion simply because that procedure, they go in from the front. And I was already a father at that point, when we cross the bridge of talking about the surgery, and I wasn't going to let them deflate my lung and move my heart out of the way to get into this thing I said when I'm no longer able to carry my kids, we'll talk about it. But until then I'll suffer my lower back l four l five, the the disc is gone. It looks black on on the MRI l five, this one also gone. I've got characteristic, the sciatica running down both my legs, it's always there. And I'm always managing pain as well. But one thing that I've coached my clients with, and I practice this is and I tell them this all the time. It's not a problem unless it's a problem. So if you anticipate it being a problem, I guess to go back to what we had spoken about before your future casting that this thing is going to interrupt you in some way. But rather, when we've got an injury, and everybody's got something, whether it's a shoulder, wrist and elbow and knee or hip, whatever,

Ari Gronich 14:03  

we got to end this on. Fortunately, I could I could probably talk to you for another 10 hours. But I have another another interview coming up in a few minutes. So one of the audience three I know you've already done it a number of times during the conversation but three, just to sum up actionable, doable things that they can do to create a new tomorrow today for themselves.

Matthew Scarfo 14:30  

Sure. So three things one, create the habit of breathing through your nose and out through your mouth, use your mouth for eating not for breathing. For all the reasons that I mentioned earlier. Second one is move deliberately. So whatever space you're occupying or whatever space you are moving to occupy, whether it's during exercise or standing up from a restful situation, and a couch and Walk into your fridge, feel your body move through space, part of the reason why we feel like time moves so quickly anymore is because we're the things that we look forward to are happening in the future as opposed to happening right now we need to be present. So when you're exercising and you're doing a benchpress, it's important not to just bang that weight up off your chest. But as you lower it, feel the tensions as they accumulate in the different parts of your body that are responsible for governing that movement. Feel your triceps lengthen under tension, as you've lower that weight, feel them short and under tension as you press that weight up off of your chest, everything be in your body, be in the moment and be present. And then the third thing I, you know, I'm going to go off of what your last comment was. And that would be to interview your doctor, I certainly didn't mean to, if that was the impression that I gave lump all doctors into this big grand category, I want to expand on it just a little bit that in the sense that I'm a runner, and I'm an exerciser, I make sure that my doctor is also a runner and an exerciser and shares the most important parts of me with them, because they can sympathize, they can empathize. As a runner, my dogs have a foot injury, my doctor is going to tell me as a runner, how I should manage that, not just as a patient, and they don't know what running even feels like. They don't know what it means to me, they don't know those things. Now, that's not going to change, they're not going to change their advice, necessarily, but it'll help them. It'll help me feel like they're talking to me and not at me. So I think when picking your health care team, or your personal health team, it's important for you to find people that share interests with you, but just have a greater level of experience or education in their respective field, whether it's human women science or, or nutrition science, or you know, doctors are so on. So breathe through your nose, be present in your body, be present in the moment, whenever you move and everything that you do. And then also make sure that your healthcare team is a team of people that you trust that you can rely on, and that shared the same recreational interests as you this way, the advice that they give you is contextual, and not just general and vague.

Ari Gronich 17:09  

Awesome. And how can people get ahold of you if they want to work with you?

Matthew Scarfo 17:14  

Sure. So I just started a blog online, Mattscarfo.com. It's where I seems to be a catch all for all of the content that I produce, and that I'm a part of, you can easily reach me there. LinkedIn, you can find me Matt scarfo, Matt scarfo, just about everywhere, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, that scarfo.com. So even if you're not interested in having me help you or work with you in any way, I'm always interested in having great conversations with interesting people. And I try to learn as much as I can from everybody that I meet. So even though it might not be a monetary arbitrage, it could certainly be a, an intellectual one. Absolutely. I've

Ari Gronich 17:53  

enjoyed our intellectual arbitrage today. And doing it again and, you know, working with you maybe in the future, so creating some win wins collaborations, because I think if we do that, we can really, you know, as we come together, we create momentum and movement and we can move mountains when we when we work together. So anyway, thank you so much. I am Ari Gronich, and this has been another episode of create a new tomorrow where we are helping people create their new tomorrow today. Thank you so much for being here and I look forward to seeing you and hearing you at the next one. Remember to Like, Comment, and review