The LeaderShifter Show

After research showed that a lack of relatable role models was a huge barrier to women achieving greater success at work, today’s guest, Melinda Garvey, decided to shift that dynamic (sorry Oprah and Sheryl, but most women don’t exactly find you relatable!). She founded On the Dot Women in 2016 after having successfully launched and run Austin Women Magazine since 2002. Join us to hear about her vision to “brainwash” women so that we ALL know our worth, build tribes to support us, and kick ass in our Manolos!

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 28: Helping Women LeaderShift into Entrepreneurship with Melinda Garvey

Shani Magosky: Hey, LeaderShifters. Welcome to another episode of The LeaderShift Show. I’m Shani and our guest today is Melinda Garvey. Say a quick hello.

Melinda Garvey: Hello everyone. I’m so happy to be here with you. Thank you, Shani.

Shani: Thrilled to have you. LeaderShifters, let me just tell you a little bit about Melinda. She is super cool. She is all about all things women and culture, which we will dive into. Just as a small taste, she developed and continues to publish Austin Women’s Magazine and is the founder of On The Dot Woman which is a fantastic site for women and interviewing many, many different female role models. When I was introduced to her, I knew I would love her because when I read this little blurb on her website, I knew it was a match made in heaven.

She just sees this as the– Let me back up. If you ask Melinda Garvey, what her big dream is, you will probably hear her say, “I want to brainwash women.” Now don’t be alarmed, she just sees this as the fastest way to ensure that all women know their worth, have a tribe of other women supporting them, and can see their own path to success through access to the Manolos of women that came before them. I’m a fellow shoe collector, if I may say. Welcome to the show.

Melinda: Thank you so much. I’m excited to be here. I hope all your listeners and watchers are ready to be brainwashed. It’s my superpower.

Shani: Yes, I love it. Well, brainwashing isn’t bad if it’s a positive thing that we’re helping shift mindsets, because that’s really- when we say brain brainwashing, it’s helping people shift their perspective.

Melinda: That’s right.

Shani: Give us just a little bit of a history of how you came up in the business world and bring us up to the point at which you started Austin Woman Magazine.

Melinda: Okay. Well, I– Gosh, that’s going back a lot of years. Austin Women is almost 17 years old, which I can hardly believe. I had an interesting– I was one of those very accidental entrepreneurs. I had this great career trajectory when I was young and I kept moving up. I was just on top of the world and doing really well. I had actually come to visit Austin, Texas. A friend of mine was living here. I just kept extending my plane ticket and stamps, like I love this place. This is amazing.

I thought, “You know what? I think I’m ready for a change. I’m going to move here.” I was probably, I don’t know, about 15 years into my career, I guess. Again, I’d had this great trajectory. I moved here. Literally within 30 days, boom, boom, boom, got a job, great on paper. Probably there are a lot of you, have you ever had one of those jobs where it’s really good on paper?

Shani: My first couple of jobs were jobs that look great on paper. Absolutely.

Melinda: Yes, exactly. It was one of those. It was like you could hear that, like the screeching skid marks of tight– I get into this job, it’s literally the worst job on the planet. The people are absolutely crazy. It just was one of those things where I’m like, “How did I end up here?” What happened was, is that, fast forward eight months into that job, and I’m a really naturally confident person. Like I said, I had had this great career trajectory.

I have to say it really started to just– I thought, “Okay, this must be me, something’s wrong.” You really start believing the myth, like, “Okay, this must be something wrong with me.” That eight-month period I was really like, “I got to get out of here. This is just killing me. It’s killing my self-esteem.” I was out with some girlfriends, having a few glasses of wine as you do, whining about my job.

Shani: Wine and whining. It’s a perfect combination.

Melinda: Exactly. One of my girlfriends looks at me and she- I think she had a martini and she’s like, “Hey, I just got back from Des Moines, Iowa.” I was like, “Seriously? This is my pity party and we’re going to talk about Des Moines, Iowa?” I was like, “Please, by all means.” She’s like, “There was this really cool magazine they’re called Des Moines Woman.” This is in Austin, which I don’t know how many of you know about Austin, but we’re in this tech boom.

We really were the very first tech boom back in 2002, and it was just men, men, men, men, you never read about women and shows that there’s nobody talking about women in this town. “You know you’ve done some publishing stuff, you have that background, you should just do that.” I’ll tell you, I can remember like it was yesterday. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. I knew instantly in that moment that’s what I was supposed to do.

Now, I had never thought about starting my own business. The word entrepreneurship was not hip, cool, sexy that it is now. I didn’t take any classes. I didn’t have any family members that were entrepreneurs. None of that, but I just knew. Literally, the next morning, I got up. I took a couple of Advil because I needed them after the night [laughs] and I started writing a business plan. Seven months later, we launched the first issue of Austin Woman, and that was in September 2002.

Shani: Wow, congratulations.

Melinda: Thank you. It was a crazy ride. I like to tell people because I think that now that entrepreneurship is such a buzz word, I think there’s this pressure like, “If I don’t have this great idea, if I don’t have something planned or–” I just want to encourage people to watch out for that moment, that that change happens and you know.

Shani: Actually, I’m glad you said that because my next couple of questions are really to help LeaderShifters embrace some of what you had to in order to do that because I’m sure that there’s lots of listeners out there who have had that hair standing up on their neck kind of moment and then just didn’t act on it.

They’re like, “Oh,” because they got excited, but then they talk themselves out of it. Those inner critics, those words of doubt, “Who do I think I am to be an entrepreneur? Maybe the idea is not that good. It’s going to be hard. I need the stability of a W-2 paycheck.” How would you recommend people, not just women because I have a lot of male listeners too who I think sometimes let fear stand in their way? What would you suggest people do when they have that moment to not get scared away?

Melinda: Well, I think that there are a couple of things, the first is take some kind of action. I literally got up the next morning. I’m not kidding you when I said I started writing a business plan. I was just like, “Okay, so what would this–” You take some kind of action, don’t just let it live in your head because I think sometimes when it lives in our head, then all the voices can tear that apart. I put some stuff on paper so that that way at least I had that reference point at my most excited, at my most confident like, “Hey, I could do this.”

I had that to go back to when the next few weeks in the middle of the night when I was waking up going, “What am I thinking? I can’t do this.” I would pick up the business plan from the floor of the side of my bed and go, “Oh, yes. Okay, I can do it.” That to me was really key for me. The other thing is really finding your tribe. I talk to women about this all the time, that really find those people that will support you and encourage you and make connections for you and really be that push for you.

The last thing is, and this actually happened to me, is make sure that you get rid of the people who are the naysayers. Now, that doesn’t mean you get rid of everybody who challenges you or who questions things. I’ll tell you, I had an attorney, this young guy that I actually knew. I was like, “I need some paperwork to start this business, right?”

I had known him previously. Super nice guy. He sits me down the first time and just gives me all the stats on how often businesses fail and yadda yadda yadda yadda. I was like, “Okay, I got it. You’ve done your job. Great.” Every single time I talked to him, it was like, “Are you sure you want to do this? I don’t know. This is a real risk.” Every single time. I was going off the rails because here he was, he’s a professional. He’s seen this before. What do I know? I finally got the guts and I fired him.

Shani: Good for you because he was sucking your accidental entrepreneur energy.

Melinda: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen entrepreneurs that have advisors around them, that end up going off the rails, losing that dream because of someone else’s fear. That’s the other thing. You can’t take on– Look, you got enough of your own fear, trust me, it would last your life. You don’t need to be taking on anybody else’s. [laughs] I have to have that confidence that you’ll make those correct decisions.

Shani: It’s so true. The proverbial, they say that we’re a combination of, let’s say, the 5 to 10 people we surround ourselves with most. It’s really true. If we’re surrounded by people who are negative and living from a place of fear, we’re most likely going to follow that path and start to doubt what we’re doing versus if we’re surrounded by people who are encouraging and positive and have the same sort of goals, then we’re going to follow that path.

I think not enough people are conscious of who they’re surrounding themselves with, especially regarding the things that are really important to them. I guess I want to take a minute to challenge those who are watching or listening and say where in your life do you need to maybe reshuffle the deck in terms of the people that you’re surrounding yourself with? Not just if you are striving to be an entrepreneur, but whatever your circumstances are, it’s really important to build that right pit crew, as I like to call it.

Melinda: That changes as time goes on. I think that people feel– That doesn’t mean you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but there are certain roles for people that they fit in or don’t fit. Even now the people that I’m surrounded by are much much different. Especially with On The Dot being global, rather than just local, I have to surround myself with different people. All of those things are important to understand. I love that reshuffle the deck. It’s a perfect [chuckles] way of looking at it like that. You don’t have to throw out the deck, you just have to reshuffle it sometimes.

Shani: Yes, exactly. It’s all about expectations. If you have certain friends who just aren’t capable of providing moral support and encouragement, yes, you don’t have to necessarily get rid of them as friends but readjust your expectations about what they’re in your life to deliver. Maybe they’re just the friend that you go out and wine with wine to, as opposed to the friend that you’re going to call when you’re getting frustrated and demoralized you want to go to the right friends.

Let’s actually talk about On The Dot. What was the culture? Since the leadership project is all about helping the organization shift culture so that it aligns with the proper execution of the business plan. What was the culture you were seeing out there especially visa vee women that prompted you to do something like On The Dot?

Melinda: Clearly, I’m a little nuts because I thought [crosstalk]

Shani: How much time do you have?

Melinda: Back up to, I guess, 2016, 2015-ish, when we have a woman running for president and definitely, you just felt the media and everything. Everything was rubbing up about this women’s movement and just talking about all the issues facing women. This is really before the me two times up stuff happened. This is all about those top things that you hear about lack of access to capital, lack of access to networks. I was really interested in what was happening in the inequality of pay. What was happening with women?

Here I am in Austin, Texas. I’m like, “We have this great little great network. I’m around women.” I’m feeling the abundance. I talk a lot about this abundance versus scarcity and I’m feeling the abundance, so I’m clueless. I’m like, “Really.” I know gazillions of fabulous women who are killing it and doing it. I’m exposed to them all the time and I have that powerful–

I started doing research on really what are these things that are affecting women and why? You hear all the ones I just mentioned, but then when I realized that right at the tippy top of the list, lack of access to relatable role models. If you can’t see it, you can’t be it. Then I just got ticked off. I really was like, “That’s not okay. I can solve that.”

I’ve been doing down here in Austin for, at that time, you know, 14, 15 years. I didn’t understand because I often go to conferences in different parts of the country, really just to fill my own cup for these women’s conferences and meet all these amazing women and find out what they’re doing. It’s so interesting, and I thought, “How is it?” What I realized in the media, all we see is Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg and Oprah and Beyonce.

Shani: Meghan Markle.

Melinda: The thing is they’re all great people. They’re really great for getting people like Whoo, excited and getting a message known. At the end of the day, none of us can really relate to them and see that path. That’s not someone that you can say, “Wait a minute, she looks a little bit like me. You know what? If she can do it, I can do it too.” That’s really what On The Dot is. On The Dot is just a global iteration of what I’ve been doing locally for a long time. It’s really about celebrating the accomplishments of these incredible women, but exposing that to other women so that other women could– That’s why I talked about the brainwash part.

I have this vision. Especially with On The Dot, I thought, “How do I really want to do this?” Of course, being global, it really had to be digital. I knew that women are so time-starved. We don’t make times. We don’t make time for the things that actually will advance us. I knew I wanted it to be super short because I wanted– I didn’t want anybody to have any excuse. You can choose not to read or listen to On The Dot every morning but you can’t say, “I don’t have time,” because you got four minutes.

You’re putting on your mascara and your makeup and you can listen to it. We made it four-minute audible and a short form newsletter, you can either read it or listen to it. My whole vision was what if? What if every day millions of women the world over just had four-minute talking about mindset change? Four minutes incoming positive, relatable role model. “Wow, this woman could do that.” This is women who are getting it done? How would that change the conversation about women’s advancement?

If we know that one of the top issues facing women is the lack of those role models what would happen if there was an abundance because there is an abundance, we just can’t see them because nobody is talking about them and that’s what we’re doing. That’s really was my whole mission and passion around this. It’s really interesting how it’s morphed.

Not only do we have the consumer version, but we actually now have a white label internal corporate platform of women in large companies, like Adelle for example that has 30,000 plus women that help those women make connections within their own companies, and advance and profiles women within those companies. What we found is that those women that are in corporate America are often far more siloed even than entrepreneurs.

It seems weird because if they work with all these women and we work alone or with small teams, but we’re naturally out there because we have to be for our business. We naturally connect a network. Whereas women in those big corporations often they look around their cubicles, they are the only woman. They certainly don’t see anybody in leadership or in the C-suite. That’s really what corporations are struggling with. Not only how do we get to gender parity, but then how do we take that and get these women and advance into our upper levels?

Shani: I love that.

Melinda: It’s so fascinating.

Shani: Again, I want to take a quick pause and address folks who are listening, not just women also men, what could it look like in your organization if you teamed up with On The Dot for a white label way to shine that spotlight on exceptional women and maybe other underrepresented folks who feel disenfranchised just because they’re not white guys, right? Let’s just call it what it is, right? To do that because there are plenty of talented folks in your organization whose accomplishments deserve to be highlighted. I really love that. That’s a fascinating evolution to what you’re doing. [crosstalk]

Melinda: One that just happened based on– You talk about these shifts. That was probably the most significant. Of course, I’ve never worked in big-time corporate America. I’ve either been in smaller companies or doing my own thing in the entrepreneur world. When I really started getting to know these women in these large corporations and talking to them and looking at what they’re doing, I think, “They’ve had tons of resources.” Surely and they all have these ERG, employee resource groups, which 20 people show up to at a monthly luncheon.

I thought, “Oh, my gosh. In one fell swoop, I could reach 30,000 women like bam, and help these women and help connect. That got me excited. It’s accomplishing the mission that we set out to do working with these big companies. It really became fascinating to me, and just the learning and how we’ve developed. We’ve developed out a whole platform where you can make introductions and connect with each others, like an–

Shani: Almost like an internal LinkedIn.

Melinda: That’s right, very similar. It’s gamified so you get points and badges if you’re a super influencer so that you get recognized. We have this idea ****that if the top executives could see that you are like, “Who’s this super influencer? She’s super quiet at her desk, but man, she’s making some waves in her own way.” I think that women often get overlooked because we don’t stand up for ourselves or we don’t apply for that job because we don’t think we’re qualified. This really allows women to have that recognition and to make connections and to have those tribes within their own company.

Shani: Great. Well, I’d love to turn around that statistic that I’m sure you’ve heard as many times as I have which is that most women won’t apply for a job unless they feel they have 90% or more of the qualifications in the job description. Men will feel comfortable applying for the same job if they have 40% to 50% of the qualifications of the job description, which is bizarre. Somewhere in the middle is, I guess, the mindset that folks should have.

I think what you’re doing is so important for inclusion efforts in general because telling people we have to be more inclusive doesn’t really go very far. You can talk until you’re blue in the face and it doesn’t sink in for a lot of people but when they experience it, when they see it, when people are doing it, that’s when inclusion starts to really matter and get into people’s bones. You’re highlighting women who are actually doing it and showing other people that it’s possible and that they’re missing- until now, they’ve been missing talent development opportunities.

Melinda: That’s right. Well, and I think that it goes back to at the core of when you hear about the reputation of some women which– Look, it’s earned in many way and it comes from a scarcity mindset. If there are 10 jobs that are available. You’re like, “Okay, I might be qualified for these 10.” But if you only see one woman, and nine men, in your mind you think, “I have one shot, so I better not help anybody else because there’s only one slot for a woman.”

Whereas a man, if you had nine women and one man in a job, the man would go, “I got all 10. Of course, I could apply for all 10.” He wouldn’t even see that as a barrier. I think that’s the first thing that needs to happen. That’s just getting those women into those upper levels so that we see them and go, “Of course, I can apply for all these.” That’s part of overcoming that mindset. Also, that abundance mindset also creates an environment and an ecosystem where women are helping one another.

There’s a new research that just came out which, I haven’t known this forever, from the University of Notre Dame that basically now proves that the women when interviewed and figured out women who have made it to leadership positions, the number one factor is because they had a tribe of women.

It’s the same sex not just a tribe around them, a tribe of women who encourage them and help them and connected them and really help them feel that confident throughout their career. That is the most common factor. Those women, they’re almost three times more likely to get in other upper-level positions if you have a tribe, it’s really helping. It’s so critically important. We’ve got to be in abundance because if we’re in scarcity, it’s every man for themselves. You’re using those Manolos to kick somebody in the face not to uplift, right?

Shani: Right.

Melinda: Not to, let say, “Here, take mine, walk in them, right?”

Shani: That’s right. Right. Your Manolos got popularised by Carrie Bradshaw on Sex in the City. Those four women were each other’s strengths, best friends, champions. It’s not even irrelevant that we’re talking about designer shoes because I think those women were–

Melinda: It’s never irrelevant to talk about designer shoes. Can we just put that out there?

Shani: #truestory. I know.

[laughter]

Shani: Something else I wanted to ask you about because it’s really piqued my curiosity, because I worked at Goldman Sachs for the first, almost half of my career, and I know that you participated in their 10,000 Small Business Initiative. I guess three things, tell folks what it is, how you got involved, and what the impact was?

Melinda: Well, the 10,000 Small Business I actually met the woman who was running it at the time, Patty Green, at a conference. It was just this crazy– I think I was at a point where Austin Woman had been running on, we were 14 years in, something like that. I was feeling this like, what is next? How do I grow? What the Goldman Sachs program does is it takes people that are in business and ready to go to the next level. It’s about growing your business or scaling your business, figuring out how to do that. That was really my impetus.

I was like, “Okay, so what’s next? How do I grow and scale this? What should I be looking at?” Really just brushing up on those skills and being around other entrepreneurs. It was incredible. I actually did the national cohort. Still enclosed with many of the people that were in the program with me, it’s a great program.

It really goes back and forces you to go back almost to the beginning where you’re putting goals together, you’re really thinking through five years, you’re looking at financials and matching those financials. I can tell you, as a small business owner, you do that in the beginning because you’re like, “I’m going to do this, right.” You have all these people helping you. After a while, you’re like, “Budgets, what?”

I think that it was a really good refresher for that. What ended up happening during that is when I was thinking about how to scale, really what kept coming up is national, global, national, global. I was like, “Kill me now. I’m not going to do a national magazine, blah blah blah.” I think that what it did is again, this mindset change, I hadn’t really ever thought bigger. I definitely attribute– On The Dot is actually a separate entity, but obviously there are sister companies and very closely aligned.

Shani: Sure.

Melinda: It definitely expanded my mind to think about that scale to not just think local. Even though it wasn’t necessarily right for Austin Woman per se on that, but then developing out and it’s really what started getting the juices flowing and giving me really the confidence to think bigger. It was a great program.

Shani: That’s terrific. How long is the cohort from start to finish?

Melinda: It’s a semester-long. You do everything virtually except for twice during the semester, you actually go to when you’re in the national cohort. They have some local cohorts that you do on the weekends. Then you fly to Boston and you’re there for a week and you work with your teams and you do presentations and all kinds of really interesting things. It’s a great program. Goldman Sachs funds the entire thing so you have to apply, but they pay for everything. Your plane ticket, the whole schmear, which is so great for what they’ve done for small businesses.

What it’s done is it really is raising the level of sophistication for small businesses and helping to scale them because what Goldman Sachs knows, because there’s a lot of really smart people there, that they understand that small businesses are what’s driving our economy. If they can help get those businesses to think bigger and scale and be more sophisticated, then our economy is going to thrive and flourish. I think that that really is a big part of why our economy is thriving right now is because small businesses is just buzzing and booming.

Shani: Right. Terrific. Well, again, congratulations on completing that program and having it launch you into that global space because you’re right.

On The Dot’s mission is relevant for women all across the planet and in some regions of the world, even more so where women don’t even have the kind of rights that we do. Kudos to you for all the great work that you’re doing in the world. Any last words of wisdom for LeaderShifters?

Melinda: Oh, gosh. I think that always asking for help– I just recently hired a business coach. It’s the first time I’ve done it, which is surprising. I’ve noodled with it and thought about and I could never find the right fit, but I really feel like– I felt a lot of this fear gripping me and it’s lonely. It’s lonely at the top.

When you’re an entrepreneur and you’re small and even when you’re going through- even if you’re working at a big company, and you’re going through some kind of change, having that outside influence. That was my way of asking for help but whatever that looks like for you because it’s so important to be able to push through because you can’t change your mindset, you can’t make that shift if the fear is stopping you.

Shani: Absolutely. Thank you for that and thank you for joining us today.

Melinda: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Shani: I want to wrap up and summarize all the wonderful things that you shared with us today. Before I do that, though, how can folks reach you either for Austin Women, On The Dot, white-label program or as an individual participant?

Melinda: Yes, well, for On The Dot, the signup is free so it can come to your inbox every morning. It’s 6:00 AM on the dot, no matter what time zone you’re in, you go to onthedotwoman.com. You can just, again, just put in your email address and bada bang, bada bing, you can also download–

Shani: Four minutes ladies, you have time.

Melinda: You have four minutes. Like I said, you can either read it or listen to it. Right there from your email, you can just press listen, you can also get it on iTunes and Spotify and all those things. We have lots of great additional content on our website and articles just to encourage you in your advancement.

For Austin Woman, you can read all of our content online at atxwoman.com. I just would love to and certainly, for the white-label program, you go into our website and contacting me about that if you’re in a big company and this interests you and you can make a connection for me, that would be fabulous. I’m just [email protected], pretty. [laughs]

Shani: Absolutely. Women helping women. Let’s help Melinda get this as global and make as big of an impact as she possibly can. Love that. Great asking for help by the way.

Melinda: Thank you. [laughs] I’m getting good at it.

Shani: Just a random question. Are you in favor of keeping Austin weird, which is every time I go to Austin, all the bumper stickers, right?

Melinda: Well, it is funny because I have to say, Austin’s a wonderful city. For those of us who have been here, I have been here now, gosh, I guess 18 years or so. Right now, everything’s hard. The traffic is atrocious. It’s just there’s so many people moving here every day, there’s so much– prices are skyrocketing. Where a lot of us who have been here a long time are feeling like– I think hopefully, it’ll settle out a little bit. That’s what’s happening. It’s really booming into a very big city and becoming much different. I think that Austin is probably becoming a little less weird because it’s hard to stay as weird when you get bigger and bigger.

Shani: For sure. I know. [crosstalk] I’ve been there a bunch of times for work over the past six months, I’ve been there five times.

Melinda: Oh, my gosh.

Shani: Actually, five times in four months.

Melinda: Wow.

Shani: I love Austin, but you’re right.

Melinda: You have to look me up the next time you come.

Shani: Absolutely. All right. Again, thank you for joining us. LeaderShifters, if you, once upon a time, had some dreams of being an entrepreneur, accidental or otherwise, and you didn’t take action, is it too late? Are there some small steps that you can take to take that vision and turn it into a reality? If so, and frankly, for anything that’s a goal of yours, find your tribe. Who are those people, those 5 to 10 people who are going to support you and help you grow and be your best?

The post 28: Helping Women LeaderShift into Entrepreneurship with Melinda Garvey appeared first on The LeaderShift Project.

We are joined today by my dear friend, Sara Arey, author of the boldly titled book, The Universe Fucking Loves Me (isn’t that name fantastic?!). Sara coaches people on replacing their STUFF – Stuck Thoughts Unresolved Feelings and Fears – with limitless ideas for what’s possible (she calls this Refuturing). When we get better at playing that inner game, it will certainly seem like the proverbial universe delivers on its part of the bargain! Sara’s message will resonate for LeaderShifters seeking tools for resilience and productive mindsets for tackling big challenges.

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 27: Refuturing your STUFF with Sara Arey

Shani: Hey, Leadershifters it’s Shani. Welcome back to another episode of the Leadershift Show. We are blessed to have on the show today, a dear friend of mine, Sara Arey. Say hello.

Sara: Hi, there.

Shani: You guys, Sara is incredible. One of the reasons I wanted to have her on my show today is she is one of the most resilient people I’ve ever met and does such a great job in her own life and with her clients of helping people shift to a healthier mindset. You know I’m all about in the Leadershift Project, what are all the various shifts that we need to make? Sure, some of them are in strategy and execution and a lot of them are shifts that need to take place up here in the know game.

[laughter]

Welcome to the show, Sara.

Sara: Thanks for having me, Shani.

Shani: Give people just a quick sense of what your background was and how you got to the point where you were a coach followed by an author.

Sara: For as long as I can remember, I have been interested in consciousness and, “Why are we here? What is all this about?” Because I felt there was something more than what I was seeing and being told about. When my aunt introduced to Reiki in 1990, I was like, “Oh, that sounds interesting.” I’ve always just jumped into things that felt they would be extensive, even though I didn’t always have that vocabulary.

Shani: Let’s pause for a second before you continue. For my viewers and listeners who don’t know what Reiki is, please give us a 30-second explanation?

Sara: Reiki is an energy healing technique or system that emerged out of Japan. Reiki is Japanese for universal life energy. It uses the universal energy conducted through somebody who has had Reiki initiation to benefit whoever they’re currently working on.

Shani: Great. Super. I can tell you guys, Leadershifters, I have had Reiki done to me and it can be extremely powerful. I had one session. I know it sounds a little like woo-woo, energy work, how can that possibly work? I’m telling you that– I’m just going to share one personal experience with you. Some negative shit had happened in my life and I got Reiki and I literally was vomiting for a couple of hours when I was finished with the Reiki because it helped release some of the toxins that, of course, I generated here in my mind and with my emotions that were being stored in my body.

Sara: And did things like, somebody told me about Landmark Forum, which is all about raising awareness and consciousness. I did their next event that was three days later. As I kept playing with all these things, I was introduced to a technique, an energy healing technique called TAT, Tapas Acupressure Technique. This was years later after I had already had kids and gone through several different phases of what I was doing in the world. When I learned about TAT, it’s along the lines of, if you’ve heard of EFT Tapping?

Shani: Yes, I have.

Sara: It falls among the category of energy psychology. It’s great for working with traumas, with allergies that can be mindset, emotional, physical, so many of these things.

Shani: I know. I’m so sorry.

Sara: In my healing from that, a new friend introduced me to TAT and did some sessions with me. I was really intrigued by it and the effect that I could feel from it. A few years later, when the woman who developed the technique, Tapas Fleming, came to town to a workshop, my friend said, “You really got to be there.” I jumped on board. At the end of the workshop, she asked if anybody wanted to help her with her business. My friend and I both raised our hands and I became her education director helping her develop an international certification program.

Shani: “Yes.” [chuckles]

Sara: Exactly. Here I was with the– Newly focusing on my business and she had realized that she could give people all this strategy in the world, and if fears and doubts and limiting beliefs were keeping them from taking action, nothing was going to happen.

Sara: Yes.

Shani: Tell us what refuturing means to you and how do you describe it to prospective clients who maybe aren’t so enlightened?

Sara: Well, refuturing is a technique that I developed that morphed out of everything I’d done before. The basis of it is becoming really present with ourselves. I teach clients a lot of mindset and perspective shifts, a lot of which I outline in the book, and there is an energetic thing that happens when two people sit down together and create a space for things to happen, things to shift. I have energy poses I have people hold and we go through a process of getting connected with what’s truly going on with them. Not the surface level stuff that we can really obsess about, but what’s underneath them.

Then I use a series of our refuturing statements. I’ll start up, “What if it’s possible?” I have them do an energy pose that helps them connect with their energy and their body and their whole system as I say these statements. It could be something like, “What if it’s possible that it is safe for me to be all of who I am?” Speaking could go on for several minutes and they build on each other.

By saying, “What if it’s possible?” That opens up the person to creativity and curiosity.

Shani: Okay, great. Refuturing, in other words, it sounds like, to put it layman’s terms, is helping people get the right mindset to change their future because a lot of times, we have a vision for what we want our life to look like and it’s just not happening for some reason, and it’s not necessarily that we have to change what we’re doing, we have to change why we’re doing it or the spirit with which we’re doing it, and that’s what refuturing gets you or that’s the idea of refuturing, yes?

Sara: Absolutely so if you think of it as a trajectory, if we keep doing the same thing we’re doing it’s going to look pretty much like it has.

Sara: Yes and with refuturing when we make shifts now it puts our lives on a whole different trajectory.

Shani: Got it. Let’s say I am– Because most of my listeners are leaders and executives managers in corporate settings so if someone were to come to you with a business challenge like, “Oh gosh, shall we make one up?” I manage a sales team and that sales team, they’re stretched too thin because we had some downsizing and our competitors are undercutting our prices and so we’re having a hard time making our numbers. I made that up but I didn’t make it up because lots of people experience something along those lines or close to it. How could you help that sales Leader refuture? What kind of things might you say to me?

Sara: First of all, when something happens we’re taking it then on a lot of different levels. There’s the thing that’s happening exactly what you described. Then it’s also about how is it resonating inside of us? It’s not just this situation it’s the times in the past when you have felt pressured or inadequate or like you’re being judged or that everything is stacked against you. You’re carrying all that stuff into this situation which means you’re dealing with more than what’s here. It’s that feeling of just weight on you.

Shani: Right. That’s just the latest version of it?

Sara: Exactly. Often these things go back to childhood.

Shani: Okay. You would help me refuture so that I would handle the situation differently than I might have in the past so that I’m no longer coming from a place of inadequacy or feeling judged et cetera?

Sara: Right. Part of what refuturing does is that it helps you release your stuff. That’s an acronym I use for your stuck thoughts, unresolved feelings and fears.

Shani: Oh I love that. Stuck as an acronym. I love that.

Sara: Stuck thoughts, unresolved feelings and fears. If you imagine there’s a pipe that connects you with the universe, the world at large, then our stuff is like gunk that sticks to the side of the pipe. All that emotional baggage from the past, the experiences you’ve had in the past, the identities you have. That you actually see yourself in specific ways like what you can and can’t do. The more that gets cleared out, the greater an opening is for both things to come to you and for you to show up in the world.

Shani: I love the imagery of cleaning out the pipes so that the throughput moves through with a lot more ease rather than having to work its way around the gunk or the stuff. I want to pause and ask any leader shifters who are listening or watching to think about what’s your stuff? Your stuck thoughts, unresolved feelings and fears. What are some of your stuffs that you think are holding you back?

Sara: That affects how we interact with people because you know that person who just gets on your nerves, it’s not just about that person. They are simply bringing up something in you that is unresolved. It would be like if I said, “Gosh Amy, your purple hair is fabulous. You go, “You know your hair is not purple.” So you know that was something I was seeing but it wouldn’t upset you. Write it off like whatever.

Shani: [crosstalk] Wear some wonky contact lenses in.

Sara: Exactly. If I said something to you that was already something that was a sore spot for you, you wouldn’t see it as just my opinion, my way of seeing things because you’ve already got that sensitivity.

Shani: Right. That makes sense. It’s an easy way to explain that it’s not about me, it’s about the other person. Good. Well, can we jump into talking about the book?

Sara: Sure.

Shani: There’s a couple of places I want to go with this. Again folks, Sara’s book is The Universe Fucking Loves Me. Again, awesome title. I guess let’s go there first. What was the reaction you got? I obviously love the title but I am free with profanity sometimes but some folks aren’t. You live in North Carolina which is still considered part of the South where maybe those kind of words aren’t typically said in polite company let’s just say. What was the range of responses you got to the title?

Sara: One of my more vulnerable moments was telling my parents because I grew up in Alabama and my parents still live there.

[laughter]

Shani: You’ll go to hell if you say that word.

[laughter]

Sara: I have to say my parents put it on their coffee table, my mother has posted on social media about it and not everybody has reacted that way. Some people absolutely love it because it really does strike a chord. It’s so much more powerful than just, “The Universe Loves Me.” When we have those intense times that are just filled with all of our self-doubt and fears, we don’t go for the, “Oh this hurts.” I know this fucking hurts. This is painful. The book addresses a lot of that. The title needed to have the same vibration as those intense times.

Shani: Love that. All right. First of all, I love the names of all of your chapters. They’re so catchy. Every chapter title is maybe not quite as powerful as the title of the book but they’re very clever and attention-getting. There’s a few– Since we don’t have the time to talk through every chapter but there’s a few that I wanted to ask you for a synopsis to give people a taste of the flair that you infuse into your book. One of my favorite ones is lightening bolts of duh. Talk to us about that?

Sara: [laughs] We know things on different levels. Then we have knowing something in our mind like two plus two is four. I apologize for the doorbell.

Shani: It’s okay. This is what happens on a live show.

Sara: That’s right.

Shani: Alexa, let the person in at the front door with the package.

Sara: [laughs] You can know something in your mind like that like knowing that the earth is round. Then you can know something in your heart. You know you love someone. It’s not an intellectual thing. You could list the things you love about them but knowing that you love them is in your heart. Then you can know things in your body, in your very cells. It’s not a belief it is a knowing. Example I use in the book is knowing that ice is cold. You never stop and debate about it. If you wouldn’t do a free webinar on proving ice is cold, you know it. Lightning bolts of duh are when something moves from our intellectual knowing into our experiential knowing which is how it gets into our body knowing. You can have this revelation and on one hand, it’s like, “Oh my God, this is changing my life.” On the other, it’s like, “Duh, I always knew this.” It could be something like knowing I am enough. If you know it on an intellectual level, you’ll agree.

You’ll say, “Yes, of course, I’m enough blah blah,” but when you get it in your bones and you’re acting on it and you’re not questioning when you have a conversation or go into a meeting or presentation or face that big hairy problem, it’s a different thing.

Shani: Yes. What came up for me as you were describing that is the phases of when people learn things goes from unconscious and competence to unconscious competence where you just know something. You could be sleeping and you could be opining on it because you know it that well. It’ sounds the lightning bolts of duh, first, you may not know it on unconscious incompetence, but then you know it on the intellectual level but for it to be a, “duh” is when it’s just second nature. I guess the thought becomes a habit versus a forced affirmation or something?

Sara: Right. It’s when it becomes your normal.

Shani: Yes.

Sara: It’s why we can read these amazing books and listen to speakers, and we get all this intellectual level knowledge, but then our lives aren’t changing.

Shani: Right.

Sara: It’s because it hasn’t gotten down into our experiential level of knowing.

Shani: Okay. LeaderShifters be on the lookout for those lightning bolts of duh, things that you’ve always known but haven’t internalized the level of it becoming a duh. [laughs] All right, so the next one is, “Your weakness is your superpower?” What’s that all about?

Sara: Well, there are things about us that we consider a problem with ourselves. They are the things that we just keep coming up against. When we get that, that thing is part of our power, and we can use it and own it, then it becomes our superpower. For instance, I have a client who was having problems in her life because she seemed to create tension places.

Shani: In her body or tension in relationships?

Sara: In relationships which resulted in tension in her body.

Shani: Right. [crosstalk]

Sara: What we came to in our work with that causing tension is part of her superpower. That when she is using it consciously, she is creating appropriate tension that leads people in organizations to change. That was a whole different perspective than why am I such a mess that I keep doing this. What’s wrong with me?

Shani: It seems like same superpower, and the shift was going from telling yourself a story that I use this superpower for evil or that not effectively versus I’m using the superpower for good.

Sara: Even seeing it as a superpower and not just a defect in my personality or my character.

Shani: Yes, got it. Helping people turn around what they think as flaws and redefining them as superpowers enabling them to see the gift in whatever that is for them.

Sara: Right. Again, getting it on a deep level, not just the intellectual nod. Sure, superpower whatever.

Shani: [laughs] Then this last one I love, I actually say something like this pretty regularly. Why we don’t do what we know to do. It’s like New Year’s resolution, right? People make them all the time. They know what they need to do to meet the resolution. For example, going to the gym. That’s probably the most common New Year’s resolution on the planet. People know. They know where the gym is. They know how to use the weights.

We know we should be coming home to spend more time with the kids because we can never get that time back, and yet we don’t do what we know. I’m super curious for you to share with everyone what’s the Sara, The Universe Fucking Loves Me, spin on that?

Sara: Well, it’s the same thing that keeps our intellectual knowing intellectual. It’s again that stuff. The stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, the fears we have. Take the example of going to the gym. Part of us really wants to get in shape, live a healthier life, have more stamina, all these wonderful things. All of that is true. What’s also true is that we have stories around not being enough. Will I know who I am if I look so different?

Shani: Will I fail at work if I leave early enough to go to the gym because people are going to think that I’m not as dedicated as I used to be?

Sara: Right. So much what we think other people will think about us.

Shani: Yes, interesting. It’s like there’s a goal that causes us to put our foot on the accelerator, and then there’s these other beliefs that it’s like us putting the other foot on the break so we’re spinning it or not even spinning our wheels, we’re going nowhere?

Sara: We are wondering what’s going on because we don’t realize how hard we’re pushing the break.

Shani: Yes.

Sara: That comes from a part of us that so many people call a saboteur. I call it the safety self. Some of the things are patterns we developed in childhood that actually provided some level of safety.

Shani: Sure.

Sara: That’s a part of our brain that developed millennia ago when it was important to watch out for what could be wrong. Not everything that’s beautiful and peaceful but what’s hiding under the bushes.

Shani: Right.

Sara: That part kicks in and the typical response is to fight against it. That just builds up the energy. If you’ve ever been around a child who really wants your attention, ignoring them only makes them louder. [laughs] We are infinite and that voice has infinite possibilities of things that can say. When we can see it as, “This is a part of me trying to protect me,” and just listen to it. Listen to it doesn’t mean we have to agree with it or follow it.

Shani: Right. I love the way you’ve reframed it as a safety self because a lot of people as you said refer to it as saboteur or inner critic. It’s something that sounds like it’s your enemy. Whereas you’re framing it as, “Hey, it’s just one of the many voices in my head.” Not that we all got a bunch of fake voices in our head but I mean the aspects of who we are and how we think. Of course, we have that. We were children once and here are things that kept us safe as children when we continued to hold those beliefs into adulthood, sometimes they’re still valid sometimes they’re outdated and we need to be a little bit more discerning about which is when.

Sara: Yes. I use the analogy of imagining a coat you had when you were eight years old. Something that felt warm and protective and cozy, if you tried to put that coat on now it would feel constrictive.

Shani: The sleeves would be up here.

Sara: [laughter]

Right. It doesn’t mean that there was anything wrong with the coat or wrong with the fact that it protected you as a child and there’s nothing wrong with the fact that it doesn’t fit now. It just doesn’t fit anymore.

Shani: That’s right. That’s an opportunity to go shopping for a new coat.

Sara: New mindsets without denigrating what was there before.

Shani: Yes, absolutely. The next question I wanted to ask you about your book is because I know how you had had the book written in your head and many people who say they want to write a book. I was one of them and years and years more than 10 I’m writing a book this year, I’m writing a book this year, one of those resolutions never happened. I finally wrote and released my book in 2017 and I remember being when I got a text message or an email or WhatsApp message from you basically saying I’m locking myself in a cabin in the woods for a week and I’m going to write my book and I’m like, “Wow good for you.”

Sure as shit when you were done with that week you had the first draft of the book. I want to know do you recommend that? How did you finally decide to make that commitment and what did you have to do when you were locked up alone with yourself to get it done versus oh let me see what’s on Netflix? [laughs]

Sara: Well, first of all, I have been doing this work on myself for years. Walking my talk is one of my key values. By the time I got that I have been thinking for years, I want to write a book but I don’t know about what and I tossed around some working ideas. The Universe Fucking Loves Me, is a phrase I’d said for years. I introduced it into the group that you and I are part of and it became part of the lexicon. I was like maybe this is really a thing. When I got that that was the title of the book I just got inspired. I got an editor at the end of February said I want the book out by May and she said great.

I made up a list of chapter titles we went to the cabin and I found a cabin that had an outdoor hot tub because that was just a necessary thing and had a space that looked like I would love to write there. Left the electronics never figured out what the Wi-Fi password was, that thing. I just let myself be inspired. I took the focus off whoever was going to read it. I made the commitment to myself that even if nobody in the world ever read it this was going to be a chance for me to experience being as vulnerable as I could possibly be. Then I just sat and wrote. I didn’t try to edit as I went, I just simply wrote. I discovered a couple of things. One is that it was easier to share my struggles than to share my successes. That felt more vulnerable to claim my gifts and my strengths.

Shani: I think a lot of women struggle with that. Human beings, in general, I see it even more commonly with women that I coach or even that are in my set of friends and it’s a pretty accomplished confident group of women on the outside.

Sara: Right, yes. One of the chapters is called when the shits the fan and I had hit a writing block. I thought okay I’m just going to write what this is and this is how I handle it. That’s what the chapter is. It’s talking about this writing block.

Shani: Then suddenly you were unblocked amazingly?

Sara: Right. I wrote the list of chapters and then doubled it just as they came. That was not one I had planned. Then when I turned it into my editor she later told me that it was one of 5% of books she’s gotten that could have just gone to print.

Shani: Wow. That’s a great compliment.

Sara: Yes. There was only one chapter that I did much work on at all and I can’t now remember what that one is. That all started at the very end of February and by May 30th the book was launched on Amazon and had hit number one in all three categories in the US and in Canada and number one in a couple in the UK.

Shani: So awesome. Well, Sara, this has been so fun. Always a pleasure for me to have people who I love and treasure on the show and who on top of that have such useful information and wisdom to share with Leadershifters out there. Any last words of advice you’d give folks based on refuting or knowing the universe fucking loves them.

Sara: The real gifts each of us have or what’s already inside of us and life is our chance to experience being ourselves and whatever you do that supports you in that is worth doing. Shani, I love what you’re creating and seeing you shine this way and love getting to play with you in this arena as we have in so many ways. That’s just what makes the world better and better. It’s when we each shine as who we are.

Shani: And collaborate with each other. I know that everyone and in our leadership group we’re all very 24 different people and some of us are closer than others yet the entire tribe is a cohesive group and we learned from each other. I think we even helped lend our gifts to each other when we need them. One of the things that you said to me once that I share all the time now with credit to you I always say my friend Sara taught me this and I love the imagery is that to give to other people it’s so much easier when you’re already full and you’re giving from your overflow versus when you’re giving from a deficit.

For me and a lot of my clients, it shows up in self-care. We’re not completely taking care of ourselves yet we’re doing stuff for everybody else for our clients for families for friends for boards that were on all those other stuff and then what’s left for us. I use that imagery now to think am I refilling my own cup? Am I taking care of myself and having the downtime and shutting off for any period of time so that I can fill back up so that when I’m ready to give again to the clients and the family and friends and the boards I’m giving from the overflow? I totally forgot about that as part of what I wanted to mention on the podcast until just now.

Sara: Part of that comes from our sense of our own enoughness and our own worthiness like I’m worth taking care of, I am worth setting boundaries for. What I contribute when I am at my best is worth nourishing.

Shani: A-fucking-men.

[laughter]

Leadershifters I hope you enjoyed listening to Sara as much as I enjoyed having her on the show and I encourage you to think about what your stuff is stuck thoughts unresolved feelings and fears and start to think about what’s possible for you in your future if you just shifted your mindset. Instead of listening to those negative voices or inner critic voices instead even shifting the conversation with them and view them as a safety self, thank them for what they have to contribute and then listen to all the other opinions as well, instead of letting that one be the loud voice. Lastly, since it came up just at the end, take care of your self so that you too in whatever context it’s in, are able to give from your overflow. Thank you for joining us. Sara, how can folks reach you or buy a copy of the book?

Sara: Copy the book, it’s on Amazon along with a journal that walks you through the process to really get in in-deep. I have a website,

theuniversefckinglovesme.com.

Shani: Of course.

Sara: And refutureyourlife.com.

Shani: Excellent. Well, thanks so much and Leadershifters just as always. Hit me up on social media, The Leadershift Project on all the social media sites or shoot us an email at [email protected]. We’ll see you next time. Mwah.

The post 27: Refuturing your STUFF with Sara Arey appeared first on The LeaderShift Project.

Today’s episode covers 500 year old ship wrecks, 30 hour scuba dives, mastodon bones, and Iron Man racing. Jarrod Jablonski may be the most badass guest on The LeaderShift Show yet! He is one of the world’s preeminent deep sea cave divers and has turned this passion into several thriving global businesses. Jarrod’s perspectives on the trial and error approach to innovation in cave diving equipment and building a team-based culture on diving projects and in his companies is relevant for those of us mere mortals who conduct our business above ground!

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 26: Diving into Your Own LeaderShift Journey with Jarrod Jablonski

Shani Magosky: Hello Leadershifters and welcome to another episode of The Leadershift Show where strategy and culture finally meet. Today’s guest may be one of the coolest people I’ve ever had on my show and he’s cool for a lot of reasons. First of all, he is an underwater cave diver. If you don’t know what that is, stay tuned. It’s a very small niche of even the best scuba divers do cave diving. He’s also a serial entrepreneur, he does iron man’s, he is a renaissance man, and most importantly, he’s been one of my great friends since high school, if you can believe it. In 12 years ago folks just kidding. Leader shifters meet Jarrod Jablonski.

Jarrod Jablonski: Hi Shani, it’s a pleasure seeing you again and thanks for inviting me, I’ll do my best to try to live up to that sparkling introduction. I’ll see what I can do.

Shani: My pleasure. Jarrod is joining us from Dubai, which is where he’s been living for almost the past five years, but we grew up together in West Palm Beach, Florida, and even though you guys all know I’m a University Miami Hurricane, Jarrod is a Florida Gator, and we maintained our friendship despite that college rivalry. Let’s get right into it because I know my listeners and watchers are going to really want to know all the cool things that you do, not necessarily to emulate them exactly, but some of the tips and suggestions you might have for how they can pursue some of the more esoteric interests that they might have. First of all, how did you even get into scuba diving and then escalate into cave diving?

Jarrod: Well, that really started back when we knew each other in high school. I’ve always been very interested and passionate about aquatic activities. We grew up together near the ocean so I was regularly there. I was always athletic so I engaged in a number of different competitive sports before juniors high school, junior high school and into high school. I was swimming a lot and really enjoying the water so I got certified, I guess, when I was about 12, 13 years old, freshman sophomore kind of range in high school and I really loved it, I loved being in the water then. Then when I went to college, I started to dive a little bit more actively, and I started to teach, I needed to make some money to pay for school even though University of Florida’s less expensive than University of Miami, it’s still a challenge as you know back then for college is always keeping things open.

I liked doing that better than waiting on tables so I started teaching diving and relatively soon around that period I started doing a fair amount of cave diving because that part of North Central Florida, Gainesville area, a couple of hours north of Tampa, Orlando, Florida region has a lot of caves, there’s a lot of underwater caves specifically, so I started doing a ton of cave diving. Being landlocked away from the ocean I had to get my water fixed somehow. I started doing quite a lot of that and I realized I could actually teach cave diving and make a pretty darn good income for a college student.

[laughter]

I not only was able to pursue my passion, but I was able to pay for college along the letters that, you remember jobs.

Shani: I think what you just described is everybody’s dream, to be able to make money at something that for most people is a hobby and something that they are so extremely passionate about.

Jarrod: It occurred to me when I heard you say that. I want to give that advice following your dream and your passion and the thing you love and it sounds so trite, but at the same time it really worked for me. It took a while and it was a lot of work and it was more than a decade of nail-biting stress why did I do this, what am I thinking, I should get a real job, but ultimately, there was enough trial and error and I found a way to turn it into a successful career.

Shani: Absolutely, as I described you as a serial entrepreneur, you’ve got several different companies that you’re operating now, one I know is a guiding company to take other folks out to do cave dives, another one is an equipment company, correct, where you, to the best of my recollection, saw a need for more advanced diving gear than what existed to truly do the kind of cave diving that you needed and then of course I know you also get hired by companies and even countries to do exploration of caves and wrecks. Which one would you like to start with, because I think we’d like to hear about all three and how this succession went?

Jarrod: In fairness we should probably start with the manufacturing company, it’s the largest of the initiatives and it’s what everything was born from. When I was nearing the end of my college career and getting nervous that I’d have to go get a real job for once in my life, I’d been teaching very actively and I had developed a pretty good global reputation as a diving educator, but I wasn’t really seeing that would maintain enough longevity and common sustainability over time, but around that time I was also doing a lot of long-range cave exploration and if we have the time I’ll show you a few pictures of some of the evolution of that activity, but we got into serial, world record distance cave dives that we were doing dives in the end about 30 hours in total to about 12, about 10 to 12 hours in the cave at a depth of 300 feet and then that’s taking about another 20 hours to come up slow because you have to decompress from that dive or remove the cast that your blood has absorbed from spending so much time.

Shani: How many tanks of oxygen do you need to do a thirty-hour dive?

Jarrod: You have a lot of different tanks of special blends, we use helium-based mixtures called trimix or heliox, we use different oxygen level blends with different levels of oxygen in them, we use too much oxygen deep then you have seizure problems, if you don’t have enough shallow then you go unconscious. It ended up being many science experimental along the way, there was a lot to learn. We entered this activity around the time that was really just starting to become more popular and around the time the internet was starting to really develop and I hate to date you that way Shani, and myself I have to admit, [laughs] but there was and the internet was not prolific in every part of the world. During this time, there was really very little, if any, information available about this kind of dive, so we started to the active on internet lists and we built I think my first web page in 1995. We started to really promote the kinds of things we were doing and created a lot of global, a bit global following.

To short-cut a long story, during that time we had to develop a lot of customized equipment because there really wasn’t the kind of equipment we wanted for the kind of diving we were doing and we begin to modify equipment and then ultimately build new pieces of equipment to enable the dives we were doing. People started asking me questions, hey, can I get one of those and I started to develop the idea this was a pretty interesting niche market, I was starting business through that time period and looking for something like that so I settled on the manufacturing side which began to build equipment in this period in the mid to late 1990s.

That spawned the different companies you mentioned, I started originally with retail sales because in the beginning I couldn’t get any dodge shops to carry my equipment so I started my own web retail base, turned that into actually a physical store location, I kept the pricing networks so that I could add stores later so I didn’t try to come out super cheap, I just tried to come out with good quality premium equipment because I really wanted to sell globally through an infrastructure through dive shops and distributors. I kept that pricing and then over, of course, in five to ten years, I was able to build a brand enough to a point where people were actually starting to ask us now at that point if they could carry the equipment.

Then the other companies followed along with that. I started a training company that does a lot of high-end training for performance-oriented recreational divers or leading-edge technical people that like to do deep, long range, cave stuff. Those are the three main interests, I do bunch of other stuff but try to keep it straightforward.

Shani: I want to pause for just a second because what you just described, there’s a couple of really important lessons for those of you who are watching and listening around innovation. The first is one of the best ways to have a successful innovation is to recognize a need that’s missing in the marketplace and fill that need, as opposed to being an also-ran. The second thing is trial and error, you said even before you started talking about the equipment, you were talking about the trial and error you went through in oxygen tanks and blends and all that stuff. What I want to say to leader shifters is listen, the trial and error that you’re most likely doing in your What I want to say to leader shifters is listen, the trial and error that you’re most likely doing in your organizations, while yes, I get it’s serious isn’t life and death necessarily the way Jarrod’s and his team’s trial and error were trying to figure out the right combinations of oxygen and so forth to take them on 30-hour dives. Let’s get past the fear and realize that anything great that’s worth doing is going to take some trial and error and some failures and learning from the failures in order to get to the ultimate innovation. I’ll get off my teacher soapbox now, and go back to–

Jarrod: I couldn’t agree more.

Shani: We would love to see some pictures and for those of you who are only listening to the audio, Jarrod, I’ll have you describe what you’re showing to us. Go ahead and hit the screen share button and take us through some of the cool like some of the coolest dives you’ve done. Love this picture. Okay, I’m turning it over to you Jarrod. Okay, perfect. So

Jarrod: Okay perfect. I’m going to start out in Florida. That’s the area that as you know, we’re both from. This is North Central Florida, we’re looking at Wakulla Springs, which is up near Tallahassee, Florida, the state capital. And this is just a beautiful picture looking over a river. There’s a big spring under here as well called Wakulla Springs, super popular area for glass-bottom boat tours, I’m looking outward. We’re sitting at about 100 feet down and looking up in the beautiful blue sky through 100 feet of blue clear water, and there’s a glass-bottom boat sailing around on the surface. It looks air clear, really a breath-taking kind of location.

We’re shifting to the picture inside the cave now. We’re about 500 feet back into the cave at a depth of about 180 feet, and there’s a diver going in on underwater propulsion vehicle wearing some specialized equipment and several other kinds of things we developed and refined over the years. This cave, the Wakulla Springs Leon sink system is the largest cave system in the state of Florida, actually in North America. And it’s the fifth-largest in the world. Some of the spots are small. I’m showing a picture here of a diver trying to squeeze through a tiny little opening and see just the fins in the foreground and then they’re fighting their way into the cave.

There are many entrances. Well, with a little effort and a little digging, we also built specialized equipment so you can take the tanks off your back. It’s called side mount equipment. And so a number of different pioneering technologies allow divers to do a lot of crazy things that many people might not want to do. Some of the caves are really small like the one we just saw. Now I’m showing a picture of a very large chamber. These kinds of chambers can be hundreds of feet wide, couple hundred feet tall, one of the biggest, will easily hold a 747 full plane, actually even in an A380 anyway I’m dating myself with the reference standard that we’re used to use, but it will hold even the proper larger A380s nowadays. You have massive caves and small caves all throughout requiring a wide range of equipment. This early frame grab in the late 1990s first website for the retail-based company, just for a fun blast from the past. This was the manufacturing company around the same time called Halcyon manufacturing. These are early very ugly web pages, I apologize, but nobody knew how to code back then.

And then the equipment or the exploration company Global Underwater Explorers. This is their one of their first two websites as well. All very simple, old school. A picture of the manufacturing facility which is located in High Springs, Florida. That’s right outside Gainesville, Florida so it’s till about two hours north of Tampa, and this operation really ended up being the sole source of calcium. We used to have a production facility in Fort Lauderdale and a smaller one in High Springs. We ended up closing the one in Fort Lauderdale and opening the one, and opening a large one in High Springs because the labor rates were– It was practical for people to earn a decent quality of living in that part of the world where South Florida just wasn’t possible with all the offshore competition.

Building a lot of different types of equipment. This was one of our very first pieces of rebreather equipment, it’s a massive system. We used to joke it was the fridge because it’s about the size of the hotel refrigerator. Then you put big tanks on either side of it. It was just a monster system to carry around. It was just one of the very first designs that we came up with. This is just a picture so you can see a close up of double host system that allows you to breathe in from one supply and then you exhale through the other rows and that sends the gas into a system that cleans the carbon dioxide out and then remixes the right proportion of other gases into the loop, this will give you about a 50 to one benefit. If you’re familiar with regular scuba diving that that size cylinder would last about 50 times longer if using this kind of system, the benefit from a technological perspective.

This is from the mid-1990s. This is just lots of gear splattered all over that we would use. I’m holding in front of me one of the very first underwater camera systems that we would mount to these propulsion vehicles. We started documenting caves back in the old analog tape days, riding through the cave, documenting these systems. As we got further and further in the caves and got more and more interested in the environment, and were able to build equipment that let us do more amazing long-range dives, we started really falling in love with this environment. At the same time we noticed the environment was declining in quality and so we started doing a lot of different kinds of research to support longer dives.

Here we have a diver who’s going through an assessment so we can build more custom tables to allow us to ascend more quickly from decompression that I mentioned to you earlier. I spent a lot of time talking about it. The longer you go, the deeper you go, the longer it takes to come up to the surface. There’s a technical way we can manage that process. I’ve got a picture here of one of our early teams in Florida. I started to build a team-based approach very early and Shani, you might like that team-based concept. We started building teams in Florida and then globally that would allow us to expand and building on a platform of teams. I wrote my first of several books that allowed us to develop a very standardized platform for equipment and for procedures.

Some of that became a bit controversial because I was promoting a very standardized platform for the kinds of diving that we were doing. Some people thought that was a little too much. We were too militaristic about our diving, but we were very successful in setting multiple records in North American and then global records progressively for longer and longer dives into the caves. This one’s Manatee Springs, which is not so far from Wakulla. This is near to Gainesville, Florida.

We’ve been publishing books, magazines. This is a magazine for the exploration company that we publish on a quarterly business. In the caves themselves, we find fascinating archaeology and historical evidence and this is actually an old mastodon bones. This is old archaeological evidence of this region. This Wakulla Springs was actually a large Indian site at one point and so they would have probably slaughtered mastodon in the area, or they would have fallen into the cave.

Shani: When you find things like that, do you have a way to collect them and surface with them so you can give them to other researchers?

Jarrod: Yes, we do. We work with a lot of different governments. In the United States, we work with a lot of local universities. Maybe neither of us like it but I work with Florida State University a lot because they’re nearby and Tallahassee, we’re grabbing a little bit really fun. They do really good work in the region and we work with depends on where we are. Sometimes it’s international governments and a lot of other countries. Here we would work with archaeologists and biologists and geologists. Actually, there’s a hose running through the middle of this picture right above the mastodon bones. And that’s a water sampling tube that we would install meters throughout the cave, so we could measure water quality in various areas in the cave system. A picture of a few more bones that are scattered near the entrance. We would have to build underwater habitats in some of the caves because the dives were so long. This would allow us to get out of the water for short periods of time during the 20 hours of decompression as we made our way up. This just a nice exit view with a lot of equipment that a diver put in and are wearing.

Shani: I really question, how do you eat when you’re on those 30-hour dives or do you not?

Jarrod: We do. We do. In fact as the dives got longer, we started to eat more. We even started to take hydration and fuel breaks. We normally– The easiest thing to eat underwater is gel-based foods. Similar to what we would use in athletic competition, much easier to eat. Then one of the reasons for the habitats that I showed previously, it’s a little upside-down, plays like a diving bell, almost that the diver can come up and get their head and shoulders above the water. And in that case, you can now eat solid food and so we design special tubes that you could put food in and then pressurize the tubes and then depressure the tube so you could get the food out.

We’d even at the time designed underwater music players and all kinds of stuff to make our deep dives a little less miserable. Here we have two divers with a flow meter between. This is a PVC tripod with concrete field legs so it stands nice and steady in the flow and it’s a flow meter that allows the local hydrologists to get 365 days a week, 24 hours a day sampling of the flow of moving through this tunnel, and we put about 10 of these in, we called a springs cave system. This is another cave right nearby. This one of the small entrances that you have to enter with more tube that’s being run. This is some tube that can be used for water sampling purposes or it’s also showing this is a dye trace.

We would inject a dye into the water then pick it up at different locations so we could track how fast the water was flowing from wet areas. We did a lot of work to see what its contamination potential was. A lot of regional issues. Here this is just showing a picture of a diver holding that injection dye. We really reshaped the way scientists thought of the cave’s impact on the local areas.

Then the final part of Florida, this is just a map of the area. This is- I said is, the largest underwater cave in North America. It’s a little over 30 miles with about 30 different entrances going all over the place and quite close to the city of Tallahassee. Ultimately, any kind of contaminants that might enter this from septic tanks or from gas stations can travel very quickly through these conduits so we’ve been working with the State to designate green areas in critical sections.

Obviously you need housing, you need businesses but there are also better and worse places to put those activities, and so we work a lot with the State and local land developers to try to refine that process. That’s like 20 years in 20 seconds for Florida. We did a lot of that kind of work in that region. Do you want to see any other parts of the world?

Shani: Yes, I’d love to see what were some of the coolest dives or the scariest dives, you just have a few highlight pictures to show us to give us another taste of the stuff that you guys are doing?

Jarrod: Yes.

Shani: Or either do you have pictures from ship recoveries and stuff where you’re down there exploring shipwrecks or anything?

Jarrod: I do. I’ll do that one right after this, this is just China. I’ll flip quickly through some pictures. We’ve done about five years of work here in China. A similar story, massive caves throughout pictures with huge caves that have a lot of dry caves and a lot of interactive wet caves. Massive conduits. The water here isn’t very clear so the government was really working with us to do a lot of water quality samples. It turns out most of that is just surface water like you would see in a dark river. But they were designating this whole region as a conservation zone quite a lot of pretty aggressive, repelling, and dry caving. I know you’ve done a bit of that. We built a lot of maps and three-dimensional models for the government in that sense.

Let me show you some interesting wreck diving. This is a nearly just under 500-year-old shipwreck known as Mars. It was a Swedish ship during the seemingly endless war between the Danish and the Swedes which finally did end. This wreck is amazing. You’ve got massive bronze cannons, they are more than 20 feet long. Longest warship at the time but just under 500-years-ago. The water here is just above freezing, 34 degrees and it’s about 260 feet deep. The divers are all going around looking at artifacts. We have five PhD professors assigned to this project and we do this every year for the last eight years now.

Here I’m showing a picture of some of the researchers that we work with. These are some of the gold coins that we’ve brought up from this particular wreck. Pieces of the wreck they ask us to bring up so they can put them in museums and recover them for people can come visit. These are just some of the recovery of those coins. It was pretty cool because the King of Sweden actually came to visit us. This is a picture of the King of Sweden who made a surprise visit. He’s related to the King whose face was on the coins. It was fun to bring out the coins-

Shani: Wow.

Jarrod: -let him see his 500-year-old ancestor looking at the regions. Quite a cool project there. Then this picture I’m showing now is a pretty neat shot when you start to understand what it is. This is actually a picture of the shipwreck but it’s a compilation of about 5,000 images all stitched together. These pictures were actually taken like about three feet off of the wreck, then thousands of pictures were taken of the wreck and the debris field then stitched together through a computer software program.

This allows us- we do a ton of this kind of work now, even more advanced into 3D modeling, but this is the laser I’ll show you now. This is hyper-accurate so this is a millimeter accuracy scale. I didn’t load the full res image but if I load the full version of this file, you can actually zoom all the way into the file and researchers can study and measure various components of the shipwreck.

I could zoom in even on this low resolution one and I can show you this is a cannonball hole that I’m pointing the cursor to-

Shani: Great.

Jarrod: Yes. If you have the high res version researchers can really do a lot of detail research, even this low res model still isn’t half bad-

Shani: No, it’s fascinating.

Jarrod: -now in three dimensions, you can actually take this and spin it around and cut slices out of it and-

Shani: That’s so badass.

Jarrod: -below it and all that stuff. In situ archeology now is really a big thing that we do because researchers are not really capable of going 300 feet deep in 34-degree water for hours on end-

Shani: Right.

Jarrod: -but we bring them back the data that they can utilize and do a lot of great research. Then let me do the last one, depending on your timing. We also do a lot of work. This more formal globally. This is one of a couple ships that we use. We have a couple substation in Fort Lauderdale where my partner runs the sub-operations. This is from a couple years where we took the ship around through the Mediterranean and did a lot of work with the researchers in a variety of global locations.

A few of these pictures are some of my favorite because this is in Italy, in the Northern part near Palermo. This diver is uncovering a 2,000-year-old sacrificial altar that was part of a large debris field we found in an ancient shipwreck in the area. This is me bringing over some artifacts to a researcher in the submersible. I would bring things over and he would identify whether he thought they should come up or not because we try to preserve as much as we can in location, but really unique items they want to bring up.

In this case, we brought up about 10 items that were moved over to archeology. Here you can see a bit of the debris field. These are amphora which were ancient Greek Tupperware. They transported wine and spices and all that stuff in the ship. So these would all be quite old pottery. Just a few pictures of divers moving around with the subs, a little bit of a compilation image in that cave. Then this last actually image here is of a U-boat that’s up off the coast in North Carolina that we took the same ships and subs over to, and this sits in about 850 feet of water so we were down there-

Shani: The U-boat as in a German U-boat that got to North Carolina?

Jarrod: It did, yes. Not even very far off the shore of North Carolina before it was sunk.

Shani: Shoot.

Jarrod: It was actually sunk by merchant marine ship in the day. This is a project we did with NOAA, the National Oceanic Administrative Atmospheric Association. We’ve done several different projects with NOAA particularly in that part of the world. This is one of those 3D models, I’m not using the full interactive version of this at the moment just for simplicity but, you can see all the amphora littered around in this model and you can see this three-dimensional nature.

When loaded in the program, we can slice different areas and measure amphora relative to their various locations so that becomes a pretty dynamic effort. Sadly this is your interesting fact of the day. Here’s the 2,000-year-old sacrificial altar. This is with a couple friends of mine, sadly the one on the right was the lead researcher and the one running all the conservation work through Sicily who died in Ethiopian airlines crash very recently.

Shani: Oh no.

Jarrod: When I pulled this up to get you the picture, he was a tireless advocate for some of the work in the region. I think that’s– well, there’s Mexico. I could have go on forever but I think you might [laughs].

Shani: Yes, thank you so much for the slide show and sharing your personal photos, so incredible.

Jarrod: My pleasure.

Shani: I was blown away [laughs].

Jarrod: There’s a lot of them and it’s a pretty neat place underwater world.

Shani: Right? Most people don’t even explore what’s above the water in their lifetime let alone all the new stuff that’s below the water. I want to ask you a couple of questions about culture. I guess one, let’s piggyback off a comment you made earlier about a team-based approach. How did you think about laying a foundation for the culture, and how did you scale it as you continued to build, because that’s a huge challenge for a lot of my clients.

Jarrod: I think it is for anybody. It becomes a little overwhelming, and I think actually a lot of the stuff that I learned from running diving teams and volunteers actually helped me from a business perspective because, you know, a lot of the research we do is volunteer based, and when you’re working with researchers, you’re not paying them and it’s even harder to tell them what to– you can tell them what to do, but you don’t have a paycheck to hold on to them, so it can be harder to motivate them. I actually found that thinking about employees in that regard actually was also useful because with a volunteer you’re trying to think about, all right, how can I motivate this person, how can I keep them excited, how can I make them feel part of the team. You know, how can I get them showing up the next day? These are all really the same things we should be dealing with our employees as well.

They need clear direction, they need to have a reason to come to work other than the paycheck. Paycheck’s great but at the end of the day, you know, that’s almost like getting somebody to do what you want through fear. It can work, but it’s not very inspirational and it doesn’t help us.

Shani: It’s not sustainable either.

Jarrod: Yes. It doesn’t seem that way over the long haul. I learned a lot from that activity, and I learned that clear direction and trying to develop a clear motivating influence in people’s lives was a very significant aspect. For me standardization is the aspect that played pretty heavily through the organization because people always do what to do, where to do, how to do, and progressively it just became more and more obvious as everything that we tried to accomplishment did a nice clear handbook or a guideline that we wanted everybody to understand where everybody was supposed and what everybody was supposed to do was useful.

We got criticized in the diving world a bit for that for taking the funds forward and turning it into a military weekend, but–

Shani: But you’re doing the kind of things you’re doing if people aren’t following the standardized things that, you know, there’s no one who can recommend best practices as well as someone like you who’s done probably the most cave diving if anybody alive today. I can’t even– that seems so short-sighted to criticize along the procedures that you’ve come to know work and keep people alive.

Jarrod: I think the biggest thing is a lot of people misunderstand the propagation and the standard as if we’re telling them if you do it this way you’re doing it wrong, you know, you’re making a mistake, and really our intent has always been to build a system and set of standards and equipment and procedures that allow people to follow the same approach so that everybody on the team is on the same page. That application on the technical diving world is similar to what I’d like to use in the business world, keep all of our teams moving in the right direction.

Shani: I like that perspective, that standardization, policies procedures, whatever we want to refer to it depending on our context isn’t about making people right and wrong; it’s about establishing a system that works.

Jarrod: I concur.

Shani: Good. And so– were you going to say something else?

Jarrod: No.

Shani: I want to keep going on the culture and that piece about sustaining it sounds like part of it is the standardization, and is there anything else that went into it because, I mean, it is such a challenge. Like for example, when I work with startups, they have a culture that they envision and it works for the first 20 to 50 people. As they get bigger than that, it becomes a real challenge to sustain it and, you know, we’ve seen that as companies like Google have grown and so forth, even other companies like that who have had enviable cultures to begin with have a hard time maintaining it. Any advice for leader shifters there?

Jarrod: Yes, and I think that– I think trial and error, to be honest, and I really– I try to spend a lot of time maintaining open lines of communication with team members and I really try to work hard to make sure people have the chance to do most number of things they want to do and the least number of things they don’t want to do. Most of them– and all those situations I openly admit, we all do lots of stuff we don’t want to do. I have a company and I do more of the things that I don’t want to do than I think I should, but we’re part of a team. And it depends on we need to balance that, so if you feel after a couple of years or whatever period of time you’re starting to migrate into it in disproportionate and more and more noise, it’s a signal and doing more and more things that you don’t want, let’s look at how we can change that up.

I find often making shift responsibilities around a little because a lot of times something someone doesn’t like to do, they’re just a little tired of doing. It isn’t that it’s necessarily miserable; they’ve just done if for a year and they know it really well, so having them teach the next person how to do some of those kinds of responsibilities. I realize it isn’t always practical but in a lot of cases I found, we can shift around different types of tasks and responsibilities and open dialogue where people are encouraged to talk about what they do and don’t like and give them that atmosphere. I really try to allow people to feel comfortable complaining.

Open the door and tell me what you don’t like and let’s see if we can fix it. You know, come first is obviously with a solution on your own and then let’s explore your solution. And I found many people were pretty good at that, and some are great but then they are if you give them the chance and you keep practicing it with them. Ultimately I find more and more people side on that idea.

Shani: Well, that’s the key is practicing it with them because that’s how you create that psychologically safe environment that I talk about all the time, which is that you’ve created the kind of culture where people aren’t afraid to come in and complain and start to brainstorm solutions with you. They’re not going to get penalized for it because what they see that you view it as, okay, you know, I don’t know how to keep people motivated unless I know what’s demotivating them, right?

Jarrod: Yes. Exactly. And I don’t– you know, and I like to do that especially with managers but even sometimes in larger group meetings in a different region, regional offices. I like to ask people that kind of question. What do you think we can do to motivate you more, you know, as a group? What do you think is motivational? I’ve gotten some surprising answers from different groups before, things that I would have not ever thought about, and I’m always often surprised, maybe less amongst these years, but I’m still often surprised that sometimes there are some pretty easy things that we can do as business leaders and owners that don’t really cost any or much money and that really make a difference for people, and often actually, even just being asked already means a lot to people. Just showing you care whether they’re happy or not, and even if you just say, Okay, well, collectively we haven’t figured out a way to solve that problem but I do care about it. You know, let’s go keep thinking about it and see if we can work on it, then I find if I touch base with them later, they already just feel better about it. It sounds a bit silly but people like to be cared about and respected and if you’re doing that it seems to go a long way.

Shani: Hundred percent. Re-infusing humanity back into our workplace relationships goes such a long way. I talk about that all the time as well, and I’m glad to hear that that’s the kind of leader one of my best friends has turned into. [crosstalk] what’s that?

Jarrod: I’m sorry. I was just going to say I perceive that’s going to be more powerful especially for the younger groups because it appears the millennial and the generations after them are more interested in quality of life and flexibility and they have a different set than our generation. They seem to be less focused on a little career track, material development, and a little more on life experience, so I suspect those things will mean more rather than less as the younger generation comes into the workforce.

Shani: Yes. For sure. I have one last question for you. It goes a little bit to the training for diving but I know more recently you’ve been doing all these iron mans, and for those of you who don’t iron man, it’s crazy like 100-mile run, how long is the cycling and the swimming?

Jarrod: Two and a half miles swim and 110-mile ride and 26 mile run.

Shani: All right, sorry, 26-mile run marathon. I got my numbers wrong. Insanely difficult race and it’s not just about your physical ability to do those things. I think a lot of it is up here. And so what advice would you have for listeners in terms of mindset and training regimen and not so much for iron man per se, but training for anything that is difficult and takes commitment?

Jarrod: I think just learning how to be persistent in life in general. I mean, you know, you really have to try to establish a goal in your mind and you need to hold that goal and you need to keep finding different ways to action it and to stay motivated and oriented around it. The thing about endurance stuff is there’s a certain joy to suffering because you realize progressively overtime, and I learn this in technical diving and sort of 30-hour dives as well, that the thing that seems unbearable once you push past it for a bit and you look back at it, you’re like, “Oh, I can do that,” so each thing is a progressive process. You wouldn’t want to go out and do an iron man or any long-distance or any kind of long anything, but progressively after you push past that envelope, I always sort of– I heard years ago a comment I really liked that you get the courage to do the scary thing after you’ve done the scary thing.

Shani: Yes.

Jarrod: A lot of times, you just really have to put your head down and push past your comfort zone, maybe it’s just a little bit, and then the next time you come back to that thing, whatever it is, it’s just that much easier and pretty soon, you really start to learn that almost anything, I think actually anything if you’re willing to dedicate truly to it, can be accomplished. The biggest issue is you have to pick something. We only have so many opportunities and narrowing in on the thing or things that you want to pursue and attacking it with dogged determinationship and don’t let the setbacks affect you because sometimes it takes months, often years to get where you want to be, and it doesn’t happen without focused effort in my experience. Maybe some people are lucky but [chuckles]-

Shani: I don’t know anyone who is truly great at anything who wouldn’t say it doesn’t take dogged determination and focus, so thank you for that. Leader shifters, what’s your iron man? I’m not saying we all need to go out and run these crazy endurance races and swims and bikes, but there’s got to be something that is a personal goal for you. What’s your personal stretch? What is the series of progressive steps that you think you need to take in order to reach your version of the iron man? So, love that inspiration. Jarrod, thank you so much for joining us today. I know it’s the end of your workday in Dubai so have a great evening. If people want to reach you or learn more about you or are interested in cave diving, how do people find you and your businesses?

Jarrod: Well, let’s see. gue.com is probably the easiest thing to remember.

Shani: Okay, yes. Global Underwater Explorers, gue.com.

Jarrod: Yes, that’s probably the easiest, shortest number of letters. Halcyon Manufacturing was the other company and Extreme Exposure was the third company, but I think most of you who are just looking to access me, you can find me on that website under Instructors and I have my email and contact information there as well.

Shani: Fantastic. Such a pleasure. Captivating. Thank you again for the sharing of pictures. Leader shifters, hope you took away some of the same valuable lessons that Jarrod underscored today in terms of innovation takes trial and error, don’t get discouraged, keep at it, teams, the importance of teams and treating our people right and open lines of communication and figuring out what truly motivates them, just asking those questions in and of itself can be a culture builder. And, of course, what shifts do you need to make to keep things interesting for your people and for yourself to work towards some of those bigger goals that you might have. You know where to find me, theleadershiftproject.com and all of our various and sundry social medias. Until next time, Leadershifters, thanks for joining us. Thanks Jarrod.

The post 26: Diving into Your Own LeaderShift Journey with Jarrod Jablonski appeared first on The LeaderShift Project.

Tune into today’s show to unleash the inner gladiator for you and your team with none other than former NFL football player and renowned American Gladiator star, Dan “Nitro” Clark! Dan is now an author, speaker, and entrepreneur who helps people play and master their “inner game.” He openly shares the many shifts he experienced after having a heart attack in 2013, including redefining success from accolades and material belongings to connection and inner peace. If you’re looking to make a comeback of any kind or shift smoothly into a new phase of life, Dan’s advice is spot on!

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 25: Shifting Your Definition of Success with Dan “Nitro” Clark

Shani Magosky: Hey, Leadershifters. Welcome to another episode of The Leadershift Show. Are you looking to access your inner gladiator or to enroll your team and finding their inner gladiators? If you are, then you are going to want to hang tight for our discussion with today’s guest, Dan “Nitro” Clark.

Dan Clark: Hey, Shani. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here. I’m excited for the work you’re doing and I can’t wait to get into It.

Shani: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Leadershifters just wanted to give you an ever so abbreviated bio of all the cool things that Dan has done over the years. It would take the whole podcast to really review everything ]crosstalk].

Dan: Oh, you’re too kind. You’re too kind. This is how you’re going to get the good stuff out of me, right? By buttering me up. It’s part of your technique.

Shani: Buttering will get me everywhere, right? Well, you guys know I’m a huge football fan. I use football analogies all the time when I’m talking about leadership. Dan played football at San Jose State University and then he played for the LA Rams, and then I believe in Europe. Then he shifted into acting and many of you probably know him from many seasons of American Gladiator where he was Nitro, hence the nickname.

Dan: The shift went from being in front of the camera, Shani, that was the first. First I went from professional athlete, that was my identity. Then I got really super, I would say lucky, but I don’t believe in luck. I believe in hard work creates opportunities and putting yourself in the right situations, but I got a TV show that was also athletic. I had to shift in front of being a on-camera person. Then from on-camera, a sports show, I shifted into more theatrical and television roles. Then I shifted into this 20-year shift into writing.

I felt like there I wanted to redefine myself and like Hamilton, which I just saw this weekend in New York, I knew the way to do that was by creating my own personal books and writing, so I shifted into writing, then into speaking and then into owning another business, which was an entrepreneurial effort. There’s been a lot of different shifts.

Shani: Absolutely. That’s what I think is so admirable about you is that the interesting shifts that you’ve made, and a lot of my listeners and clients, God wish they could even do a fraction of the things they could do and part of my mission is to encourage people, you can do anything you fucking want to do if you just have a vision for it and start putting a plan into concrete action. Let’s get to it. Let’s start with–

Dan: No, I think what you said is exactly right there. People’s potential is unlimited. What is the number one thing that gets in people’s way? It’s fear.

Shani: Themselves.

Dan: Well, it’s upstairs, yes. I always say it’s always an inside game. Everything is an inside game. To master this life you have to master what’s going on in here. When you master the inside game, the results start to show on the outside. For me, what I do now, is I also help coach people. I think the number one thing, like I said that gets in the way is the doubt, the fear, the anxiety and that negative voice inside your head. One of the first shifts I’d like your listeners to take is– I lost my train of thought. [laughs]

Shani: Shifting, the listeners you want to take about the inner game.

Dan: Yes, the inner game. I want them to take control of the inner game. That’s the first shift that I want them to take into mind.

Shani: Well, I’m guessing that you had to learn that earlier in your career because football-well, yes, people have to be talented, you have to be fast, you have to catch. you have to block, whatever- a lot of why various football teams are successful is the inner game of each player and the inner game of the geschult of this team. Can you talk about your experience with that?

Dan: The transition. Yes, I say this. I say that sports taught me about life. It taught me teamwork, it taught me hard work, it taught me a work ethic, it taught me how to rise to the next level by putting in more work. It taught me about a lot of things, but I had a heart attack five years ago, so I say sports taught me about life, but almost dying taught me how to live. That was the latest shift for me from life to learning how to live a life that I wanted to live. A little esoteric there.

Shani: Well, no. Let’s go there. People look at you and say, “You’re athletic, you’re fit. How could you have a heart attack?” What gives?

Dan: Well, I’ve learned this, I learned that we can’t always choose the path that we walk, but we can choose how to walk it. What I mean is a lot of times there’s no reason, there’s no explanations. Bad things happen to good people. We just have to accept that and then we can accept and choose how we want to respond. Lying in the hospital, I remember the day after the heart attack, after I had surgery, and I was depressed.

I was at one of the lowest points in my life and I had completely lost identity to who I was. I was an athlete, I was a fitness expert, almost all my business and stuff revolved around that. Lying there, I was just depressed and I was asking myself, “Why me? Why me? Why me? Why did this happen to me?” That led me down the path to nowhere. It wasn’t until I changed the question that I asked myself. Instead of saying, “Why me?” I started to ask myself, “What can I be given the circumstances?”

When I asked myself a better question, I started to get better answers. All these ideas started to come forward. I could be someone who showed people how to make a comeback.

Shani: Love that.

Dan: I could be someone who showed people how good life could be after a heart attack or I could be someone who showed people how to turn a tragedy perhaps into a gift of inspiration for others. A lot of a shift goes to asking yourself better questions. That was the major shift after the heart attack that puts me to where I am now. Most of my life I chased gratification. What I could eat, what I could taste, what I could buy, this momentary gratification. Well, the thing about gratification, if you’re on a steady diet, if it’s never very fulfilling because the moment that you achieve something-at least this is how I was, I was on that wheel of success.

The moment I achieve something-well, I’ve got a house. Great. A big house. Great. “Oh, now I need a vacation house.” I was rarely ever satisfied. I was looking for the next bite before I’d finished the last bite.

Shani: Absolutely. That’s a common disease among high achievers. We’re never happy with what we have. Always looking, “Well, when I just have this one, I just have that.” That’s exactly backwards. It’s like, “No, I got to be happy first, and then I’ll attract what I want,” versus “I’ll be happy when.”

Dan: Like we talked about in the beginning. It’s an inside game. I was out there busy–

Shani: You were– Oh, go ahead.

Dan: I was out there busy chasing that gratification that I rarely practiced gratitude, rarely practiced being thankful. I rarely practiced appreciation. What the near-death experience has taught me is that gratitude and appreciation, at least for me, are the gateway to happiness. When I practice gratitude, when I practice appreciation, when I practice the simple practice of setting up and designing my daily routine, where I have things, little maps, little posts, little gold posts that I put out for me every day, that if I do this, this, and this, that will mean I’m happy.

When I set up and design my life that way, I can tell you, Shani, happiness beats a path to my door every single day. I realized for me, it’s not me, it’s always me failing the tools and the tools never failing me.

Shani: Love that. It’s a good way to put it. I just want to pause for a second because the last few minutes of conversation is really worth pausing on and addressing folks who are listening or watching. Where in your life whether it’s professionally or personally, are you asking yourself the wrong question? Maybe the question has a bit of a victimy or martyrdom kind of feel to it. If you just shifted the question you’re asking something that’s more empowering and more future-focused, what’s possible for you by just asking that different question?

Situations where you need to make a comeback or you’re thinking like things aren’t going your way, perfect opportunities to shift that inner game.

Dan: Shani, again instead of, “Why me, why me, what could I be given the circumstances? What could I do given the circumstances?” When you make that shift, oh man, Shani do the answers come forward. You’ve put your aim and your focus in a new direction and a lot of it, like you said, is a shift of asking yourself better questions. It never fails me, whenever I’m stuck, I ask myself a better question.

Another tool that I use a lot with the people I coach is instead of “I have to.” and it’s a little shift, and I know you know this ism “I get to.” People, one of the things they talk about is time, how busy everybody is. How much they don’t have time, “I’m so busy, I can’t do this. Oh, man I have to take my kid to school in the morning.” I said, “I have to?” I said, “You mean you get to spend 15 or 20 minutes with this creature that you love more than anything else on the planet?”

They’re like, “Oh, I’ve never thought of it that way,” and that’s a shift, or if someone is working on a project, “Oh I’ve got to start to spend time on my book.” I say, “Wait a second, you got to? You have to? You get to. You have the opportunity to put your life, some thoughts, some feelings and your expertise on a piece of paper to share out in the world.” That perspective, that shift changes everything.

Shani: For sure. It’s amazing how many people don’t go there first and we’re so lucky in this country. I don’t know about you. I’ve traveled around the world and you don’t even have to travel all around the world to just turn on the news and see some of the travesties that are happening in other places and we are so fortunate. You’re right, almost all of us we get to, we don’t have to. It’s like living a great life shouldn’t feel like an obligation.

Dan: Yes, when you start to go from I get to instead of I have to, it changes obligations into opportunities. It’s a little shift of perspective. I find for me and the people I deal with, the high performers, it’s all about those little shifts in perspective that make the difference. So many of your listeners are wanting to go out and hit that home run every single day. Go out and get a base hit. Go out and hit a single. The way our brains work, our brains work by having positive reinforcements, little wins, there’s so much science behind this.

That’s what creates motivation.

Go out and get that little win today. Celebrate that win and it will give you the motivation and courage. I say motivation is a bunch of garbage. It’s having tools that inspire you. Having tools that you can count on, that propel you to take action when you don’t want to when you don’t feel like it.

Shani: Speaking of winning, can we talk about American gladiator?

Dan: Oh yes.

Shani: I know people would kill me if I didn’t ask you what was that experience, just what’s the craziest thing that happened during your tenure with the show?

Dan: Every day was crazy. I came from a football background so the publicity and the traveling and having a light shined on me pretty bright wasn’t such a new experience but I was always part of a team. In college, I was pretty damn good in the pros. I never really got the light shined on me like American gladiators did. I remember the first day I knew it was going to be something was after we shot the first season they were doing a promo.

I drove out of my little apartment in Studio City, California because at that time I was living in an apartment. It was like 1,200, 900 square feet, whatever it was and I pulled out around the corner and I look up and there’s this huge billboard with my picture on it, “American Gladiators, coming to you live.” I was like, “Holy crap, that’s me.”

Then it was just a whirlwind of activity and stuff that was super crazy. I would tell you from meeting three presidents in one night at a function to sitting in a restaurant with a girlfriend and having Steve Martin come over to my table and like, “Excuse me Sir, aren’t you that gentleman from the American Gladiators?” I’m like, “Oh my God, Steve Martin, I’m a huge fan of yours. Yes, there’s another friend of mine I want you to introduce me to.”

He takes me over to the table where he’s sitting with his wife and Dustin Hoffman. There were things like that that were just so eye-opening and so amazing. Going on tour and selling out Madison Square Garden and running out onto the floor at the most famous arena in the world and having 17,000 people saying, “Nitro, nitro, nitro.”

Shani: I can’t even imagine, that’s fantastic.

Dan: It was an amazing, amazing experience. I think the challenge for me has always been how do you find happiness and fulfilment and inner peace and still feel successful when it’s not in front of 16 or 17,000 people? I know a lot of your listeners have probably had bigger monetary or financial successes in their life and they’re in a little bit of a setback. A lot of my work going forward is finding that happiness and fulfilment in the internal things. Do you know what I mean?

Shani: I do.

Dan: The hard thing, Shani, was when I had all that success when I was on the cover of TV guide, when I was doing Good morning America, there was still a part of me that was empty and sad and alone. All that success that I had could not fill it and my life’s work, the next 25 years were dedicated to trying to find meaning and purpose and fulfillment in my life.

Shani: Yes, and I’m guessing that, two big things, connection and giving back.

Dan: Yes, so connection, giving back, gratitude practice, and again calming the beast. That’s what I do now, I help people to calm the beast so they can unleash the beast. I had to calm that beast of doubt, fear, anxiety, of not being worthy, not being good enough because those things would paralyze me. When I first started doing Facebook Lives, I started a Facebook Live show and I was like, “Oh my God, what are people going to think?”

Shani: I can’t do another take if I fuck up.

Dan: Well no, I don’t worry so much about being live. I worry more about– My fear is a lot of what would people think? Here is a guy who used to be in front of sold-out Madison Square Garden and now you’re venturing into something new and there’s that negative voice in your head, that fear, that doubt, that worry about what they will think. Wow, I’ve got seven people listening. Whatever, I’ve got 700 people listening.

A lot of that fear and I think a lot of people, almost everybody I deal with has that fear. What we’re talking about earlier, the first thing people have to do is to take accountability and ownership and move into that fear. To move into that vulnerability, to take action when they’re not sure of the results and to focus on a singular purpose. Before American Gladiators, was all about you’re drunk with adoration.

I always thought that adoration and all the applause was love. It wasn’t until I made the shift to realize that everything is an inside game. That it’s a mind game and to find that love within myself, for myself that I had the biggest shift which allowed me to have the inner peace, the happiness, the connectedness that I think that we all want.

Shani: What you’re saying. I think, resonates so much with so many people especially the folks that I interact with. A lot of people that are my clients or just even in my sphere of influence have had really big careers in whatever field it is, maybe it’s in investment banking, or law or acting or whatever it is. At a certain point they’re done, they want act B or act two, plan B, act two and a lot of people don’t know how to successfully make the shift in the identity from, “I’m an investment banker, or I’m a lawyer,” to what’s next.

It’s like you spend decades with a certain identity. I think it’s so humanizing and I thank you for being vulnerable and sharing this because everyone goes through this whether they want to admit it or not.

Dan: Right. No, I’ve had so many shifts in my life and I have a saying, “Don’t give up on you just because they gave up on you.”

Shani: Yes, all that matters is what you think of you. It doesn’t really matter what other people think at the end of the day, right?

Dan: Yes, I have trusted people that their opinion matters to me but if I could list for you every time I failed, every dream that I had that wasn’t realized, every goal that wasn’t met, I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. I could not get out of bed in the morning. My shift has come from again understanding the inner game, and understanding that the new success is inner peace because inner peace is what I want more than anything else. I want to wake up and feel like my heart’s open. I want to go to sleep at night knowing that I was active throughout the day as a human being that I strive to be. I guess the first step for me was to re-define success. I’ve heard of German cars in the driveway and this is even after Gladiators.

I’ve had the $5 million home and there was still something empty inside of me. I think a lot of it was, Shani, having the heart attack. In that moment when I was at the hospital from the ambulance and I asked the doctor, I said, “Am I going to die?” The doctor said to me, and I was hoping getting a pat on the back, “No, we got you.” He just says, “I don’t know. We’re going to do the best we can but we need to get you in surgery.” There was like a 15-minute gap between they got me into surgery.

In that time, there was only one thing that was important to me. I didn’t care how many cars I had, I didn’t care how many homes, I didn’t care about the plaques on my wall. All I wanted were the people that I loved close to me and then I wanted them to know how much I loved them. I’m so grateful for that experience because, for me, it gave me the answers to the test of life before the test.

Now all these principles and all these ideas that I felt in those moments about what happiness, what inner peace was, what success was. I’ve gotten a chance to go and study those and apply those to my life and I rebuilt my life based upon those principles. As a way to remember what was important to me, I wrote a book, my second book called F Dying.

Shani: Then there is a subtitle to it too if you wouldn’t mind saying what it is.

Dan: How Cheating Death Kicked My Ass into Learning, Loving, and Living My Best Life.

Shani: Yes, love that.

Dan: That was the key and that book has been so empowering for a lot of people because it wasn’t about success principles, it was how to be happy, how to feel fulfillment, how to have inner peace, how to have connectedness. I’ve had everything, I’ve had such a great life and I’ve had everything. Again, I’ve had everything and a lot of times it felt like nothing. Now I have a good amount but I have something that I own and that’s my inner peace.

Shani: Yes, and you can’t put a price tag on that.

Dan: Yes and just to be clear for your listeners, it’s not I walk around in bliss all the time, it’s I still get angry. When someone cuts me off, I still start to flip them off and I still have tense interactions. I’m just able to resolve them quicker and get back to that place that I want to be. In more situations, I’ve been able to respond instead of react and I’m always learning.

Shani: I just taught a class on that to a big group of leaders in a fortune 50 technology company last week.

Dan: Excellent, so yes you know exactly what I’m saying. When I have that inner peace and then I have the knowledge that inner peace, there’s always a place that’s peaceful inside of me. I’m a big, huge believer in meditation of visualization. I have everything good in my life because of these and the work I put forward. When I know that regardless of what’s going on here there’s a place of deep, inner peace in me and I’m used to connecting with that, man. does that help me in those situations.

Another thing, Shani, is I realize just for a moment that it’s not all about me. That’s the hard part. [laughs]

Shani: That’s actually a good segue to the other thing I wanted to ask you about which is your nonprofit, I think it’s called 10,000 Pounds?

Dan: No that’s not mine. That’s an older one that I don’t follow anymore.

Shani: I read about it, it’s somewhere.

Dan: Yes, the last six years, most of my philanthropy has gone to talk about curing autism where I’ve raised $300,000 for them. That’s where the philanthropy has gone.

Shani: Is that raised through the Gladiator Rock ‘N Run?

Dan: Yes, it’s one of my businesses, yes exactly. I have an obstacle adventure race that I started eight years ago and I wanted to bring something to people that I wanted to do in a physical sense that wasn’t just 5k or a 10k. I did that for 10 years and now I’m shifting into full-time public speaking, writing, seminars because I get such joy and satisfaction and happiness when I can use stuff that I know which seems like second nature to me and I can help people transform their lives.

I cannot tell you how much satisfaction and happiness that brings to me when someone’s grateful and they thank you when you’re coaching and working with them like, “Oh my God, I didn’t know if I was going to make it.” I started working with you and I’ve been the happiest I’ve been. My wife is ecstatic, there’s been such a change, my parents, my friends, everybody sees it and that just says, “Wow, this is why I’m here.”

Shani: If anybody listening or watching is interested in working with you or getting in touch with you, how would they do that?

Dan: They can’t, they just can’t it’s impossible. That’s part of the work for them. You really want to find, if you really want to seek, you really want to find you must seek.

Shani: Okay, fair enough.

Dan: I’m kidding. You can find me. [laughs] I’m on social media though, Dan Nitro Clark on Instagram and on Facebook. Then I’m going to be starting a giveaway. My book’s been out for 18 months. It was a best seller and what I’m going to do now is I’ve decided the book was never F Dying, my second book was never about making money. It was about putting a message out in the world so in the next two to three weeks, I’m going to just give the book away for free to everybody.

It will be on website dannitroclark.net so look for that and look for me on social media, you’ll be able to get a copy of my best. It’s not like a little ebook. It’s like 240 pages, I’m sorry, there is reading to do.

Shani: It sounds like you’ve got lots of interesting stories to share that would easily fill 240 pages.

Dan: Yes, a lot of times people say, “Here is my free book and just pay me $9.95 for shipping.

Shani: Shipping and handling. [laughs]

Dan: Right, that always kills me. I look at a lot of the brand gurus, advice gurus, “Here, get my free book, and it’s $9.95 for shipping.”

Shani: No, I know your book is the real deal as I feel mine is too. [laughs]

Dan: Yes, so I’ll be giving a digital download free of the whole book as a PDF file for people I think starting in two weeks or probably by the time this podcast airs, you can just go find me at F Dying. I will ask for an email so I can be in contact with you so you’ll know.

Shani: Perfect, well thank you so much for joining us on The Leadershift Show today. It was great to have you.

Dan: I had such a good time, I feel like we’re kindred spirits and we really connect and I appreciate your advice and the wisdom that you’re putting out into the world.

Shani: Likewise, absolutely. I feel the same way and leadershifters to close off, let’s just recap some of the amazing things that we talked about today with “Nitro. Ask better questions you’re going to get better answers so that you can respond instead of react. Start to shift your language from “I have to.” to “I get to.” because everything is a choice in life. Start celebrating those little wins. We don’t always have to hit the home run, singles and doubles are just as much reason to celebrate.

Think about if you are on the back end of your career, what is most important to you and how are you finding connection and relationship and how are you giving back so that you get that sense of inner peace so that you don’t have regrets?

Dan: Inner peace is the new success.

Shani: As many of you who’ve followed me for a long time now, one of my other taglines is live and lead with no regrets.

Dan: I love that.

Shani: Sorry, what was the last thing you said?

Dan: I said inner peace is the new success.

Shani: Innerpeace is the new success, amen. Amen and namaste, thanks again, Dan. Leadershifters, see you next time.

The post 25: Shifting Your Definition of Success with Dan “Nitro” Clark appeared first on The LeaderShift Project.

In this episode, I honor my Mom, who passed away two months ago on Valentine’s Day. Parents are such an important force in shaping who we become as leaders, and it’s important to recognize and appreciate their influences. Don’t be so subsumed with work that you forget who and what matters most. Specifically, I share some of the biggest ways that my Mom influenced me by being the BEST –

*   (she was) Brave and Benevolent

The post 24: Appreciating the people who shaped us as LeaderShifters appeared first on The LeaderShift Project.