Hello and welcome to the top floor podcast. This is our Denver edition. I'm your host, Darren Canthal. And today for episode five, we have Skylar Ellesburg. Hello, Skylar. Hey, Darren, thanks for having me. All right, so just a minute ago, you asked me about some lessons learned. And in my very first podcast, I did a horrible job of allowing the you in the story to introduce himself. So before I get too far down the road, please take a moment to introduce yourself in your business. Absolutely. I think anybody on the sales side or anybody who's ever held a sales position can empathize with that getting too far into it and realizing you missed steps one or two. So no worries there. Yeah, my name is Skylar Ellesburg. I am the CEO of a company based in Denver, Colorado called Wishlist. We are in the rewards and recognition space selling primarily through HR to service clients employees. All right. So I got to pull it up. Hopefully I still have it here. I was looking at your company website and bear with me because I want to find it. I'm not finding it now. It was your mission. Our mission is to make work a life you love. Yes. Tell us about that. Yeah. So, you know, in general, we, like I said, we plan the rewards and recognition space. And I think it's important to understand why companies invest in programs like this. There was a lot of effort or intentionality more recently to address labor imbalances as a lot of people were struggling to attract and retain top talent. And so, you know, a lot of this has to do with how employers are creating an environment where people enjoy work. And some of that has to do with, you know, the way that somebody feels while working for an employer. And that is really a lead into culture and all of these more ambiguous topics that often are difficult to define. But really do cut to the core of why, in my opinion, an employee would stay over a broader period of time with an organization. So one of the ways that we believe we can attack that balance is through our mantra, which is meaningful giving at meaningful moments. So because of the rewards and recognition angle, we believe that there's a really unique aspect into that that creates more humanization in the workforce, thus leading to some of these broader outcomes that justify the investment in the first place. All right. So it's the two things there that I do want to pick up on. The first is, when we first met, you had talked about writing a mantra, not a mission. And you use that word mantra just a moment ago. I just want to call that out. I thought that was really cool. Yes, that. So, you know, to be honest, and maybe other listeners have read or are familiar with Jim Collins work, good to great, built to last. Those are pretty iconic books in the business sense for anybody that wants to work in an entrepreneurial sense, anybody that's looking at scaling an organization, anybody that's looking at perfecting themselves in that role, there's a lot of good information in there. And this is absolutely not a shot at Jim Collins or any of the team that helped him research that. But I think it's important to realize that that's also coming at this from an academic lens, right? The original point in writing those books was to deconstruct what made the most successful companies successful. And what I find very interesting about that is that it is inherently corporate. I mean, he was studying very large organizations and trying to distill these principles that somebody like me or you could utilize at an early stage or at a scale up stage. And so out of that came really famous terms that are used across organizations like a purpose or a mission or a B-HAG. And there's absolutely value in doing all of these. What I found was actually two things. One is that our, so the process in which you develop a mission statement is critical. And I will say something that might be a little bit controversial, but mission statements are not meant to be developed in a democratic process. That was a big lesson for me in the early days in that I almost personally, and I'm seeking for personal experience, was trying to placate a bunch of different voices in the room. And through that was just completely destroying the point of the mission in the first place, because everybody wants to, and for good reason, right? They want to put their own spin on it. They want to have their angle. And through that process, you're diluting the entire point of the exercise. So what we were left with is these hilarious mission statements that you read on companies websites, and the gentleman who developed this concept of a mantra, he makes fun of the Wendy's mission statement, which is like, you know, for me, a great example of what it shouldn't be. I couldn't tell you what it meant. That's part of the problem. I couldn't even tell you what it is, but I can tell you it's like two or three sentences of just mumbo jumbo. And certainly, it's not there to inspire or make an employee or a customer or a stakeholder feel something. So it became clear to me that we had an issue with the mission, because nobody could tell me what it was. And I couldn't even tell you what it was. I could get roughly there, but it was like I'm missing a word every once in a while. And, you know, it felt more like we're just going through the motions. So an individual that had been a colleague of mine for a number of years, we've done work together. He actually now is an employee of wishlist, which we are very grateful for. Introduced me to this concept of a mantra, which is popularized by Guy Kawasaki, early Apple, early investor in Google, some of these, you know, early stage of the tech wave in Silicon Valley. And his point on the mantra was very similar to what I had been mentioning, right? Like, it's not meant to be overly corporatized. It's meant to be very simple to explain, to share, and to make you feel something. And that process took a long time, and it was a lot of deep think about who we are, what we want to be, and also where we sit in the market. And so that is what we rolled out. It is, it was not done in a democratic fashion, which, as a leader, was, I'll admit, right? Fairly uncomfortable, right? You feel like you're kind of standing on a branch there and you're being fairly vulnerable. The response was, for anybody out there, you should do this exercise, because it was exceedingly positive. It was a distillation of a lot of the things that we had talked about, maybe in a more convoluted manner. So it was a really simple way for people to wrap their head around, like, what we're doing, what makes us special. And because of the positive feedback, it's something that I believe really strongly in now, and we'll obviously continue to evangelize as we move forward. How did you, all right, so talking about not being a democratic process to come up with the mission? Maybe give a little more, if you would, about how did you create the mantra? And then how did you communicate it with everybody else to get their buy-in, or at least their acceptance, or whatever the right word is? Yeah, those are great questions. So for me, the mantra is about defining the soul of the organization. And maybe taking a step back, what's interesting about Wishlist, and maybe why this exercise was more difficult for me than others, is that I didn't found the company. I walked into the seat of a CEO after the company had been running for almost 10 years. And so there's this process of reconciling, you know, what has been done, and also who do we want to become? You're kind of looking backwards and forwards at the same time. And again, I probably over-indexed on looking backward, the first go around. And this, you know, with two years in the rearview mirror was a lot easier to do after I had gotten my feet underneath me. So maybe there's an insight there inevitably that, like, I felt it was really important to get a mission statement out early on when I took over the company. But what do you know, right? Like, you don't really know what's going on. And so after I had been here for two years, it was a lot easier to do. And the process was fairly straight forward. As defined, it's much harder to execute upon in my eyes, but it's it was an exercise about where do we sit in the market? Where are there opportunities? What makes us special or what makes us different? And how can we double down on that? And ideally, if all of those variables converge, you're creating something really special that resonates in the mind share of not only your customers, your prospects, but also your employees, your stakeholders, your shareholders, yourself even, right? And, you know, very observant people, smarter than I, would also call out where I got most passionate in talking about Wishlist. And there wasn't an explicit connection to the mantra at that point, but that's certainly something that I would consider if you're a founder or a CEO. Whatever you're the most excited about, there's authenticity in that. And that's what transpires when you try to communicate this internally, externally or otherwise. So to get to the second part of your question of how it's communicated, I'm pretty transparent and authentic. I mean, anybody that's ever worked with me or for me knows that they, you know, in my opinion, you need to know where you stand with me at all times. If you don't feel that way, then I'm not doing my job. And so I told people exactly what I just told you. I told them exactly how I created the process. I told them exactly why it was important. I shared some like old B school graphs about like the maturity of the market and some nonsense that probably made me feel better about my ego. But in reality, it's just simply like trying to dissociate myself from the business and put us in the market. Like, where do we sit today? And who do we want to be to be really special? And that's it, right? And so that all culminated into a very simple forward mantra, which needed no further explanation. You know, those four words took six weeks to create. And there was one in particular that took absolutely forever because we couldn't quite figure out what that needed to be. And it didn't sound right in the initial iterations. And it just, you know, it needed to be iterated upon over a number of weeks. Yeah. All right, so I'm going to pick up on iteration. It's something that comes up a lot with clients. And I'm curious. I think I'm going to over talk here. So bear with me. I think you're a software guy. Is that right? Correct. Yep. Okay. Aba former recruiter. And one of the great skills of a recruiter is the ability to use words and sentences, even though if we don't know fully what it means. So a long time ago, I was introduced to Agile software development. And at its core, it's iterative development, right? We're going to build this product. And we have to crawl before we walk. So we're going to build this first piece of it. And the iteration is two weeks. And then after we get through two weeks, we'll reevaluate and keep going. So you talked about iterating to come across the mantra. I'm going to tie this iteration into what I think is a lot of your business. But I think is the core of your business is not the binary of work life balance, but how do we make work a life we love? What were the iterations? How did you guys iterate to land on all of the aspects that lead to a company where people do want to work and stay and the benefits and the accolades and the stuff? There's a lot there. So let me try to tackle the first half of that with just like my thoughts on iteration. You know, in general, I think if you're a small organization and you're competing against big incumbent players that have budget advantages over you that might have market share advantages or whatever else, speed or agility, maybe speed and agility is absolutely like the secret sauce in this. It needs to be channeled effectively and it needs to be channeled properly. But in general, for me, that always was our most effective competitive advantage in the sales cycle and how we serviced customers. And so what I mean by that, in practice, would be, we're able to respond to the market fairly quickly. And that can be on a micro or a macro level to be able to meet the needs of a prospect or even a customer. Now, you got to have really entrenched solid processes. So you're not overselling and you're not setting these accounts up for failure or you're not always stuck on an MVP. But when that process of somebody on the sales side or somebody in leadership who's able to read the market can inform product, product development, engineering, that works really, really well. Obviously, there's a cliff in which that doesn't work well anymore. But I'm saying for like customers or for companies that are young and trying to find that footing, I would really think deeply about how you can weaponize that as a competitive advantage in the early days. So that's my perspective on iteration. You know, on the, I guess, the second half of that, which is more about like, how do you create or how did we at Wishlist create a place where people might want to work or view it properly? You know, I think there's certain things that I call table stakes that every organization has to get right. And that would be like comp. I mean, you have to have comp in the ballpark. There's just too many options out there for people. And there's real needs on the cash level for people. Obviously diminishing returns as you make more and more cash compensation. But so there's probably some elements like that. I mean, health insurance in the United States. That's pretty much table stakes. Right. So there's some of these elements that like, I'm just going to ignore and assume that like you have those right. I'll be honest with you, like one of the big learnings as a first time CEO, which is going to sound really stupid to a lot of people probably, is that a lot of people work here as a direct relationship with me. You know, I recruited a lot of the folks that are on our team directly or indirectly. And through that process, it's just about transparency. You know, Wishlist was in a very interesting position a couple of years ago. And I made no qualms about the work that lied ahead of us. And it was about finding the people that that excited. So who wanted to get their hands dirty and rebuild or sift through or optimize or whatever that is. And it's not to pass judgment on whether or not that's a skill set that one, you know, contains or not. It's just to say that like, we knew it pretty well. What type of personality would be successful here? And most people that have interviewed with me would tell you that I spend more time in the interviewing process trying to convince them that they should not work for Wishlist as I do the opposite. And you know, there's a couple of people that I'm thinking of intently where I scheduled specific meetings just to tell them, Hey, you really should think about this. Like you haven't asked me enough questions. You didn't think about this. I'm telling them all the crappy things about what it's like to work here. And through that process, some people leave, but a lot of people actually have affinity towards the authenticity. And the goal is that like in your first 30, 60, 90, there are no like surprises here. I mean, it is exactly what we talked about in the sales sales process, which I would call recruiting. So I think that sets the tone right for who we are as an organization. We're very, very transparent. We share financials every single month, we share, we share KPIs. Everybody has a KPI dashboard that is accessible up, downside to side across the organization. There really is no closed door meetings with the exception of a few HR related topics. So that's my perspective. And honestly, all that comes down to is that's a reflection of who I am and what my personality is. And so that's what works for Wishlist. But I think in general, you have to figure out like who you are as an organization. And you have to support that with your actions and behaviors throughout the employee's journey with the organization. I love it, man. From your seat as CEO of a company, but also from what you learn from some of your clients, I'm curious, what are some of the, I don't know, cutting edge, most unique, off the cup types of experiences or benefits or things that companies are providing that further make people want to stay? That is a million dollar question. So I will not sit here and say that I have all the answers, but I can certainly give you some observations. And a lot of this is how my brain just kind of processes information. I think we went through a phase from we'll call it like mid 2000s, maybe late 2000s till about COVID where the answer was keeping up with the Jones. So you had these big, very wealthy companies setting the gold standards of what they said was culture at the workplace. So I'll throw Google under the bus because my wife used to work there. And I know a lot about their benefits. It's easy to provide these benefits when you're generating the cash that Google's generating. So I don't think like anybody needs to feel bad if they're not giving everybody under the sun, right? Because what you don't get at Google and I have plenty of friends that have moved there, you don't get a lot of fulfillment. You get a lot of like you work on something for six months and it's thrown in the garbage can because somebody wants to pivot. There's a lot, a lot less fulfillment for people that are trying to make an impact, your marginal impact on the organization clearly is smaller when there's hundreds of thousands of employees. So anyway, but I bring that example up to say that like you had very wealthy companies convoluting the labor market and you know this from recruiting, right? Like these were setting a standard with comp and with benefits that other companies were trying to follow. And so then you saw like venture capital explode in a lot of these industries and really a lot of the expenditures going towards labor. And so what you, what I started to see, at least in the early 2010s was there's this proliferation of what we would call point, point solutions, point-based solutions, which is just like a solution that solves a very specific problem that a company would add to an incumbent's benefit package. So I'll give you an example for that. There are fertility benefit companies out there. This is a relatively new phenomenon within the last 10 to 15 years. Not to say that it's not important, right? For people that are experiencing infertility, it's an awful process overall, but it's a fairly niche solution that affects a fairly minor percentage of your population. And so again, just using that as an example, and you can imagine if that's one, companies start to staff like 25, 30, 40 vendors in all of this. And yet the communication strategy around what's available hadn't really evolved. So if you've ever worked in a larger organization, you get your crappy benefits booklet in October, which is 14,000 pages long. They go through a lot of mumbo jumbo. They give you a lot of acronyms. They tell you a bunch of information that certainly isn't relevant at that time. And it's a lot of it's lost. And when it is time, you can't remember or you're not even aware of what's going on there. So I think there was an issue with the over saturation of some of these point solutions in the mind share of an employee. So that's certainly, you know, one of the trends that I have seen, and you're starting to see more consolidation companies like Rippling just believe inherently that they want to build everything natively. You might see more of that in the future. But our perspective is also and to kind of, you know, take a different turn here. Benefits and perks is what I would put a lot of that into. It's, it's really, those are tools that you can use. Those are not solutions for culture. Those are not solutions and all these salespeople that'll say like, you know, we boosted engagement by 10%, whatever. If you're an HR, those are, those numbers are garbage. They're not true, right? Like what these companies are doing is they're sending out a fake survey, not a fake survey, but they're sending out a manipulated survey at the beginning of the engagement, framing questions in a manner that they know will drive down scores at the beginning. And then they're altering the way that those questions are asked after a six month or a 12 month poll pulse of those same employees so that they can demonstrate some sort of material progress. At the end of the day, employees aren't staying with your company because you offer fertility benefits or you don't offer fertility benefits. If you don't have cash, right, if you don't have some of the like table stakes, right, you need to solve that. But let's say you have solved that. What you need to be looking at is your managers. Are you training your managers? Are they treating people like human beings? Are you creating a culture that's people are excited to come to work? Do they see fulfillment in their work? These are just much more amorphous topics that are a lot more difficult to pin down and can't be solved with, with benefits alone. And I'll get off my high horse here because I understand the irony coming from a point-based solution and saying everything that I'm saying. But I genuinely believe all of that, right? Like, you shouldn't be buying wishlist if you think we're going to be the cure for your culture. We simply can't do that. We can absolutely make an impact. But the companies where we make impact are those that participate actively with program structure, with trainings and allow us to touch employees. And we're helping them. It's not, you know, we're not the end all be all certainly in that aspect. Fulfillment is a big word. I'm going to be 49 this year. And it's interesting because a lot of my contemporaries, I don't think we ever talked about fulfillment until we reach this, you know, middle age of life that we're in. Very anecdotally from some of the stuff I read, it seems like some of the younger generations are asking this fulfillment question a lot earlier. How does fulfillment play into? I don't know the exact question. I guess I'm curious is, does fulfillment come up as prospective clients are coming to you? Is fulfillment a thing that business leaders in your walk of life are even attempting to address with their employee base? You know, it doesn't come across our desk frequently and not to say that it shouldn't. You know, I don't know that wishlist could. I think there's, that's a multivariate equation, and certainly a company like ours can help with some of that. I'll detach myself from wishlist for a minute because when I was doing consulting, I was working with an organization that was in the, you call it like leadership development or career development, L&D space, and one of the things that we realized pretty early on there is that a lot of times employees are expecting fulfillment to come from their employer and forgetting to realize that that's a mutual exchange there. And so what I think is really important is creating environments where people are asking the questions very simply of like, what are you trying to do? What motivates you? Now, those are tough questions for people to answer. And so you can't just ask them passively. You got to be able to dig and create a, obviously a space where people feel comfortable sharing that information, but you also got to revisit it. You know, so there are, there are people that will tell you, well, I want to make more money. Okay, great. Like, well, let's unpack that a little bit further or I want to be a lot of maybe more frequently than money. It's like, I want to chase this title. I want to be a director of this and it's like, okay, what do you mean by that? You know, like, what do you think a director entails and why is that important? Do you want to get into people management? I mean, people management is a classic case of like, maybe more intentionality behind that decision would help a lot of organizations. People management is undoubtedly can be a great part of the job. It can also be the worst part of the job. And it's not for everyone. And that's okay, right? There's nothing wrong with, with that. So I think, you know, making sure you're getting to the core of what drives an employee is step one, right? You got to have the data set to work off of. And then I believe strongly in career path thing, right? Like, I think you've got to put a pathway in play. It's not to say, and you're not doing people any favors if you tell them, like, you can be a director tomorrow. What if they can't? Or what if they shouldn't be, right? And so again, as I've said a couple of times now, I believe strongly and authenticity. So for people that I believe can get to a certain stage, I'll tell them the five or six areas of deficiency. But if I don't see them ever sitting in that role, I'll also say that because I think it's actually very cruel to dangle that carrot out there if it's never going to happen. So I don't know. I don't know if that was helpful at all. It's a very meaty topic, but there's some thoughts on it. Yeah, it's something you said reminded me of. Is it Zappos? Maybe it's not Zappos. Maybe it is. But is it Zappos that will pay you $3,000 if you leave the company if you're not the right fit? Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Tony Shea was like really, I think if you've been to business school, you've probably read the case study on Zappos. I feel like that's in everybody's curriculum. But yeah, they paid people for that. And I mean, a little bit of that is kind of related to what I was talking about earlier in that like, an employment relationship is no different than any other relationship. Like both parties got to come to the table, open and honest with all cards on the table. And those are really the most long-lasting. And if it doesn't work out, that's okay. I had a gentleman earlier on in my career say something that's always stuck with me is of like, we want to be as good of a place to work for as we want to be as a place to be from. And I loved that. I think that's super important. And there's always a trajectory in certain employees, 10 years with an organization where maybe they've just outgrown it. Or there is no appropriate next step for them. And as opposed to trying to wield them like hoarders, you probably want to share them out. We have multiple boomerang employees at Wishlist, which I think is an awesome testament to what we're doing here. And you know, something I could easily see happening in the future as well. Yeah, I would agree that boomerang aspect is remarkable. It is. They must have thought the grass was greener elsewhere and realized that no, the grass was actually the best at Wishlist. Totally. Yeah. And I got to be careful here because I'm going to go off on a tangent. But I got to be honest, the grass is greener thing. That is a Western way of thinking. That is not a global viewpoint. And we have a global team. And I see this a lot in US culture about. And it gets back to like not thinking clearly about what it is that upsetting you or frustrating you today and what you might be getting out of the greener grass scenario. So, you know, if you were to unpack that further, I think it's really important. So I spent, when I was in business school, I spent a lot of time with my Indian colleagues understanding the concept of arranged marriages. And that really changed my viewpoint on this grass is greener mentality. All right, you got you got to tell it. What did you learn about arranged marriage? Yeah, I mean, there are some beers being exchanged. So I'll probably like screw up some of this. But the thesis is fairly straightforward. It's just like, you know, their attack, he wasn't really attacking, but he was commenting on like, why our divorce rate is so high here. And a lot of it likely is attributed to a grass's greener mentality. I mean, there's nothing saying that, you know, in today's society, you need to stay with someone when times get tough. But I mean, man, if you're an entrepreneur, like, you know, you go down with the ship, like you got to figure it out. And his perspective was simply, when you're in an arranged marriage, the arrangement is for life. Like, so when you have conflict, which is absolutely inevitable in life between two people between two entities, you got to find a way through it. You got to figure it out. And it forces a lot deeper conversations about that. And again, completely anecdotal, right, might not be appropriate to generalize there. But that comment also has always stuck with me and applied to a lot of the way I think about my own career and wishlist as a business and other businesses that I look at in general. I wonder what you think. I want to share an observation that I've had through my years of being a HR guy and now I'm an executive coach. And that is, I feel as though a lot of people are ill equipped to talk about fill in the blank, what makes me unhappy, what makes me happy, disagreeing civilly, buying in even when I disagree, how do I debate going hard on the topic soft on the person, right? All these communication things. I appreciate what you're saying in the realm of getting to the heart of someone says, I want to be a director. Okay, why? What does a director mean to you? You want to be a people manager? Okay, what? So going into it, right? What I find through my travels is that a lot of people are just ill equipped to have open discussion. They're either too outspoken or too reserved. What I hear a lot is, I don't know what to say. I don't know how to start the conversation, I mean, all these different things. So I'm curious, what are your thoughts on how equipped people are to have these deeper emotional, vulnerable conversations? Two things jump out to me immediately. And I'll also preface all of this by saying like, I am although at night, maybe I think I'm a closet psychologist, I'm certainly not. But you stated a holiday in last night, right? You totally. And my wife probably hears my psychoanalysis of her all the time, which annoys her. So I would say first takeaway would be something that I learned when I was in college is that changing the medium of which you think is helpful in distilling your thoughts. So if you sit there and wallow in your thoughts a lot, try writing, or try speaking, or try some other form of communication. I promise you, each different channel will elucidate something different. There's a really cool essay written by Joan Didion about, it's called Why I Write, which I read in college that's always again stuck with me. And it just has to do with like, her thesis is essentially, I write to figure out what I'm thinking. And again, always stuck with me, because there's something to be said about, and even in the, in the context of this discussion, right, you're asking me questions that I've thought about before, but maybe not phrased in the exact same way. So I would encourage you, if you're unable to kind of like push that rock, generate the initial inertia, talk to somebody that you love, talk to or write it down, I mean, figure out a way to change the environment, to have that discussion, I promise you'll get something started. You got to have a safe space there, you got to have somebody that's not going to pass judgment clearly, or jump too far into solutioning before you've figured it all out. But that's always been super effective to me. And like, most of the high performers that I know do something like that, they're taking voice notes, they're journaling, they're engaging in mentor conversations frequently, where there's just an outlet outside of this. So that's certainly what I think the employee can bring to that equation. Now, if you take the other side of the equation, I think managers just got to be able to ask better questions. I mean, it is not rocket science for me, but like one of my old CEOs used to start all of our one on ones with, he forced us to write a document to like prep for the meeting, right, which talked about our goals and things like that. But the first two bullet points were, tell me something that went well professionally, tell me something that that went well personally. And if you didn't have something good to share, tell me something that went poorly. And it just set the tone for the meeting. We had a lot of very human discussions. It's not crazy. Like, if I know one of my employees is moving, have you moved? It sucks. Ask him about how the move went, right? Like, ask him if he had moved, or you can just simply demonstrate some level of interest in their personal life. And you got to mean it, hopefully, right? Otherwise, you shouldn't be a people manager. But there's a lot to be said about just creating that environment where you set the tone for that. And it's crazy how many people I see just launch into a meeting. And never mind the fact of like a gender setting and like goal setting for the meeting. They're just like in there. And it's made worse over Zoom, clearly, because you miss a little bit of the riffing that happens at the beginning. But asking some of those questions and genuinely demonstrating some interest would be helpful. Salespeople are terrible at this, right? So like, if you've ever been sold to recently, the playbook that's being taught of a lot of these firms is like, okay, Darren, I see he's in Des Moines. Darren, how's Des Moines today? I see that it's 92. Is it hot there, Darren? Do you enjoy the heat? And then you're sitting there like, dude, you can ask me anything else about life. And I would give you a more authentic answer. And then when I inevitably say, no, I actually enjoy the heat, then it's like, okay, well, Darren, let me tell you about my software company. Like, why are you asking me about the weather? I don't understand. So, again, I, you know, I make a joke, but trust me, this is happening. So I think like, just just be a human being. Like, I don't know, that's what's always worked for me. And I'm not quite sure why that's so difficult. I'm curious if you, if you feel like that resonates with you, or if you feel like that's out of scope for a lot of people. It does resonate. There's a number of thoughts. I think there's three, but I could be wrong. The buzzword today is psychological safety. Right. So how does a company or a leader or a department create psychological safety where the masses feel safe to speak up? The second part to this to me is I talk to myself a lot. There's internal narrative that's happening in my brain. As a quick little sidebar, I have read some stats that suggest upwards of 50% of the population does not. And I don't understand what goes on in their brain, not to suggest nothing, but I don't understand how you don't talk to yourself. Sure. Anyway, where am I going with this? When, when I'm talking to myself, and I feel unsafe, there's a lot of discussion of protection. Be careful what you say. Is it okay to say anything? What if you don't know what to say? What if you come across like an asshole? What if, what if, what if, what if, what if, what if, right? And often, yes, it's, it's me, it's my narrative. And often it's the environment that may influence the narrative. All that to say is I don't think a lot of leaders, people, sales, HR, et cetera, lean into the humanization of the world. Right. The human condition is the same. They're suffering. There's joy when I've moved. It's the same as your move. Right. When I have strife at home, it's the same as when you have strife at home. Right. We're all children and parents and friends and sons and daughters and all the roles. That's all the same. But it seems like sometimes in our corporate construct, it's like we remove human. And now we're like these corporate robots and no, you can't have dinner with your family because we need you to do this PowerPoint that's due tomorrow at 4 a.m. And I'm telling it to you at 6 p.m. Like, come on, that's fucking bullshit. Totally. Sorry. I get passionate about this stuff. Why I curse. But that's the stuff. Totally. Yeah. And I, I don't quite know where that comes from. So I'll tell you one other like how I nobody ever taught me how to lead. And that's not nobody ever taught me how to manage manage people. And that's not a shot at the companies that I've worked for. It was probably a product that like we didn't have HR console, like we didn't have a lot of those resources that bigger companies should absolutely be employing. But the only thing that I kept coming back to when I was trying to figure out how I could be a manager is just manage how I wanted to be managed. Like, just put yourself in the shoes of the other person and remember that at one point, you were them. And again, like that, it sounds so straightforward, but it's not happening that frequently. And I think, you know, that's a lot of the origin, you know, there's fault on both sides, but that's a lot of the origin of the blame that you can place on organizations. They're putting people in positions that shouldn't be people managers. They have no ability to identify that more quickly, where there is cancerous leadership happening or cancerous management. And it's spreading. And then that sets the culture. And those are really difficult things to pull back at some point. It takes really big catalysts to change that. So, yeah, I mean, there's some simple exercises that you can do. Just start out by asking some questions and then actually listen to the answers. I mean, it's the second half that's the most important. And that goes, that's free advice for anybody that's in sales either, like just pay attention to what somebody says when you ask them how they're doing, and then demonstrate that you care about what they said, as opposed to getting to the next stupid item on your checklist. I promise you, you'll be received as a human being, and you will be a better salesperson. So, I didn't plan on like giving sales talks right now, but like there's a lot of similarities and discovery calls and templates as to how I would consider structuring like a manager one-on-one or something like that. Along this line of salespeople, I have to laugh. I saw somebody's post, I think it was on LinkedIn talking about or writing about what they write to the unsolicited salesperson that reaches out to him. And I don't have it open, so it won't be verbatim. But in essence, it is, if I accept your requests, are you going to try to sell me? Put me on your email list or something else. And so, I've been using it, and it's amazing how few people actually respond back to it. Totally. So, maybe it's like 50% will give me a response and say, "No, I won't do it," and that opens up a discussion based upon a human interaction. So, I'm totally picking up what you're putting down. Yeah, we might have to schedule an additional interview to talk about the sorry state of sales outreach, but I could go on and on about that. I think people are people like you just said they're human beings. If you're trying to thinly veil an outreach or a question, people will pick up on that. And that's why I just keep getting back to the authenticity. In any personal conversation that you have, if you're trying to have a serious conversation with someone and you know there's an ulterior motive, or if they're looking at their phone half the time, how does that make you feel? That's what we should be thinking about here. But when somebody's really engaged, looking at you directly in the eyes and genuinely like nodding their head or demonstrating that they're interested or listening to what you're saying, there's instantly a bond that's created between those two people. And then you can use that, and I hate to say it leveraged that for a million other things in the future if you see fit. Yeah. You reminded me of my very first coach, Chrissy. I remember I was working with her as I became a coach, and I had landed my first client on next door of all places. And I'm never being scared. I was nervous. I was like, what am I going to do? I'm not a coach yet. I was like a month through my training. And Chrissy said to me, and I don't remember verbatim, but in essence, just listen, people don't often have the platform to speak and be heard. And sure enough, so that I did as best I could. And it opened up amazing doors. So in my mind, you are hitting on like one of the biggest lessons, listen with the intent to hear, and then respond based upon what you heard, not as a retort or like listening with the intent of responding. Totally, totally. Yeah, there's so much good in what you just said. Listening is a skill, and it is hard, especially for somebody like me who loves to talk. I want to comment on anything everybody says, and it's not to cut somebody off. It's just because I'm stoked about what they're saying. So you have to fight that, and you have to give people the platform, because exactly what we were talking about beforehand, that opportunity for them to verbalize something might be crystallizing or distilling a thought that they've never shared before. And that's their opportunity to do so, and you're learning in that process. I remember also when I was learning how to sell, I found it very difficult to have dead space. And there's one boss that I had that man was he effective at using dead space. And only after like introspectively thinking about how these conversations went, I realized how uncomfortable I was with silence with people. And that's also a skill that I think is a really important one for people to learn, especially if you're on the sales side, but in general. So that point really resonates with me as well. All right, so we're just about time, but let's end on this note about silence. And I am curious, and by the way, I am with you, I hate silence, or at least I used to. Many clients I work with also struggle with holding the dead space. How did you learn to hold it? The same way that you learned to cut out umbs. And mine was, you know, I used to say, you know, all that I probably said, you know, 15. I'm gonna listen back and hear like 15, you know, it's listening. Like you got to listen to yourself, and you got to go through the motion. So I think people don't want to hear that. They don't want to do it because it's awkward. It's cringe worthy, right? But it's also the most effective way to do so. So it's introspection with just straight up review is the most effective way to do that. And as with anything, I believe a lot in exposure therapy, the more times that you've sat there in silence with someone, the less uncomfortable it gets. It's not that bad for me anymore. Um, it still gets a little, see, there's an um, it still gets me a little bit. And it's, it's also about the dynamic of the conversation. But you know, somebody once told me like, you know, you're in a good relationship with your partner when you guys can just sit there in silence forever. And my wife, we don't have to talk to each other for a whole day. Like we're fine. So I think there, there is a lot to be said about that. Some of it has to do with comfortability, but it's also practice, you know, just looking back at when those instances were and what you felt like was important to interject and, and sitting in it, you know, there's nothing wrong with being uncomfortable. We really optimize our lives to avoid discomfort. But what generally speaking pushes us forward, it's almost always uncomfortable. Like when I work out, I know the exercises I should be doing are the ones that I hate the most. Those are the ones I do more of. And it's counterintuitive, but like in my eyes, if I hate doing that, there's a reason it's hard. I'm tired, whatever it is. So those are the ones that are working in my eyes, the ones that I love doing. That's like a half a break. Well, those probably aren't doing much. So that's my, that's my perspective. I dig it. Well, now I need to do more romani, uh, Bulgarian split squats is my least in the gym. That's a great, that's one of the ones I was thinking, I hate those, but they burn and they, they work, I promise. So yes, yes. Um, on the topic of holding silence, one, it's a power play, not in a sinister way. But most people are unpracticed and they are more uncomfortable than we are with the silence. So there is a power play. Two tangible things that I was taught over the years. One is, um, in the silence, make tick marks based upon how often your mind wanders. I was even taught that when I first became a coach, which was when I was with you, my brain would wander making the tick marks was a way to come back and then sitting on your hands to hold the silence, coupled with counting to five at minimum. But those are a couple of correlation with sitting on your hands. Is it, is there, well, these from, for me, I'm a hand talker. Mm hmm. So if I'm sitting in my hands, there's a thought of pausing like I'm sitting on my hands. Oh yeah, don't talk. All right. How long am I going to sit on those hands? I can feel them pushing up against my butt cheeks because they want to start moving. But it's some symbol or signal to just be quiet for that count of five. Yeah. And how did you come to learn that that worked for you? Was it trial and error or was it suggestions from other people? Both. Yes. Just like you were saying, right? Like skill. Yes. You got to try it. Right. You know, you got to try something. So for me sitting on the hands, the tick marks were just two things that worked. Some people just count because we think, you know, three seconds is forever. And then we get to three and I'm like, Oh my God, that was nothing. Totally. Totally. I'm going to try that. I am also, I'm fidgety. So I'm, I'm playing with a coaster right now. So I don't touch my face a thousand times. So there are these little weird things that you, you learn, right? And yeah, I think it's also, I mean, I guess like to put a bow on all of this, you've clearly thought that that's an area that I want to work on. You took the responsibility to do it and then you're, you're implementing it. So back to the iteration comment. I mean, that's how progress is made. And it's not something that your, your coach was responsible for or I'm responsible for. That's something that like if you wanted to get better at it and learn that skill, you got to do it yourself. Yeah. Well, your coaster is my wiffle ball. One fidgety guy to the next. For our listeners, check the links below. Skyler, put your website in there. If it's okay to put your LinkedIn. Yeah, sure. Oh, and then we'll reference some of the resources you mentioned. Thank you very much. It was great talking to you. Yeah, thanks a lot, out there and have a good time.
