Relationships are the Currency of Success, with Jason Lauritsen

Welcome to Building your Leader Brand. Today on the show, Bob is speaking with Jason Lauritson. There's no shortcut. You can't build relationships with other human beings without spending time with them, investing time in them. But in that time, the core building blocks of better relationships are conversations that matter, having real conversations that matter. And this is where it all falls apart. But it's also where it begins. If we learn a skill on how to have better relationship or how to have better conversations, then that will lead towards better relationships. Hi there, and welcome back to Building Your Leader brand. My name is Bob Gentle, and every week, I speak with incredible people who share their secrets to building, marketing, and monetizing their expertise and the mindset you need for your business to grow and thrive. If you're new to the show, then while you still have whatever device that is in your hand or on your lap, tablets, do they go on Laps or Enhance? Let's just worry about that later. Take a second to subscribe. That way you won't miss a single thing. So this week, I think we're going to have an interesting conversation. One thing that I think a lot of people who run businesses think about is their people, and they need to have strong people. And strong people are great, but it's a little bit like having big muscles. If you don't have good connective tissue, you just injure yourself all the time. That's what we're going to be talking about today, is the connexions between people in organisations and outside organisations. To help me with this, I'm joined by Jason Loris. Jason, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. At this point in the show, my listeners will know I often get enthusiastic. I get carried away with myself, and I start talking about all the reasons why this is an important topic. My guest is sitting there listening thinking, When is he going to let me introduce myself? I'm not going to make that mistake today. For the who's meeting you for the first time, could you just tell us a little bit about who you are, where you are, and what it is you actually do? Wow. There's a lot there, but the short version is who I am. Jason Lourdes and I am a speaker, I am a speaker. I am a management and leadership trainer. I am a advisor and coach. The heart of my work is helping leaders and organisations create an experience of work that works for everybody, creating a more human-connected environment at work, which is the key to unlocking and unleashing employees' full potential, their opportunity to maximise their impact. And so that is what I do. I'm also a husband and father of three children ranging from, I guess, almost 28 to 15. That's where I'm at in the parenting journey. I live in Omaha, Nebraska, dead centre in the middle of the continental US. One of the reasons I really wanted to speak to you today is there From my chair, it feels like I could throw a stone and hit a management development consultant, almost guaranteed. But what I love about the way you've approached it is, number one, you have a very specific flavour that you bring to it. You're really focusing on a particular area of this, a particular problem. But you've positioned yourself very intelligently as a leader. There are people who do what you do that are almost invisible. They have ho-hum brands. When I meet you online on any platform you've decided to be present on, you look like you're holding court. You look like you have a confident, strong brand, which I really like, and I always like to pay attention to that. I think a good place to begin is, what was your journey towards that? What did that actually look like for you? How intentional was it? Wow. That's a question that probably has... The journey to my current branding probably is a 20-year journey. I started down this path, I would say, so if I rewind the clock, when I first started doing the things that would become what I do today, the thought leadership work, I started blogging and I started speaking at some conferences here and there, and that sent me down the path. That's close to probably 20 years ago now. I think I've always... I found the branding exercise to be fun and interesting. In the early days, I actually... In the early days, I was part of a speaking tandem One of my best friends and I, and we did this to entertain ourselves as a side hustle outside of our corporate day jobs, we would go and speak. We were this speaking tandem. We called ourselves Talent Anarchy. We fashioned ourselves as... That was almost like a... If you look at our branding from that time, we looked like an indie rock band, two guys. We played up certain in personas. I was the corporate guy, so I was always in a suit. He was the antithesis to the corporate guy because he's got an edgy Mr. Clean look. He's got the bald and the goatee, and he looks angry naturally. There was all of that stuff going on. We played with that. We did a lot of fun things with that brand, and it did a lot of interesting stuff for us. I think that's when I started to get really interested and curious about the power of branding and personal branding and positioning and all of that. And then I think you play this out over the next 15 or 20 years. And what happened is, I think over time, it became less performative in trying to put forward an image. And what happened for me is to my current brand is I had to get really clear about my work and how I was going to be in my work so that then I could hire people to help me capture and tell that story. The biggest thing that I would say I learned, and I'm sure, Bob, you probably preach this all the time, is that I'm a good writer. I'm a better than average writer for sure. I am good at telling stories, all of these things. But I was terrible at figuring out how to tell my own story in a way that was compelling. I just couldn't see it. I couldn't unlock that story. A lot of it was over the last year or so was finding... I was in a conversation with someone at one point, actually a branding consultant. He gave me one of the best gifts ever is we got on the phone. We had been introduced, we scheduled a call, and I was waiting to get on the call. It took a few weeks. We got on the call, and we were about 20 minutes into this or 30 minutes into the call and we're chatting, getting to know each other. He's like, Jason, I got to tell you something. Before our call, he said, I did some research on you. He said, I went and looked at all your stuff online. He said, If I'm dead honest with you, I expected you to be fairly boring. And he's like, You are the opposite of boring. And he said, Once you figure out how to match your brand persona, what you're presenting online to the world, to who you actually are, that you're going to unlock some magic. And that sent me down a path of finding people that could help me do that. And so that's how I got here. That's a long-winded answer, but that's what the journey looked like. It's not easy, but I think it starts, you have to be pretty settled in who you are and what you're about and what matters to you, what you're trying to do in the world. But then you have to find the right people who really can help you articulate that and bring it to life in words, in video, in photos, in design, in all of those things. And so that is a very long-winded answer to your question. No, but I think it's a really good answer. And I think the essence of all of this is you can't really present a strong personal brand. And I say strong doesn't necessarily mean presenting yourself as the alpha male. Strong is clarity. How clear is your signal? I absolutely I echo what you were describing there. It took me a very long time to relax into representing myself authentically. I don't like the word authentic because a lot of the time people hear authentic and they think compromise. But an authentic, I think a lot of the time people will think it needs to be... A lot of people approach marketing like it needs to be a reality show. It's not a reality show, it's marketing. We need to emphasise and deemphasize Emphasise different things, but emphasising what's genuinely there. I think a lot of people, particularly in your industry, they're all trying to outnormal each other. Mike McAlowitz wrote a really good book called get different, where he's talking about the primal need that we have as human beings to fit in, to not stand out. And it's a survival mechanism, but it's a survival mechanism which holds business owners back. And when I see people overcoming that and move beyond it, that's almost always where you're going to see people breaking out. Yeah. First, authenticity, I think, is exactly the right word. And there are people that have taken that word and tried to take away from what it actually means. But I actually My colleague Joe and I that used to speak as talent anarchy, one of the topics we used to speak about was authenticity. We actually have a process that we would teach people. What does it mean to find your way to authenticity? I think this is relevant to what you're teeing up here is that we basically had a four-step process or a cycle that you go through continuously. I think this is where people miss what it's all about is authenticity starts with self-awareness. It starts with really understanding who you are, but then it also is moving through a process. The second step is self-acceptance, because a lot of times we come to an awareness of some things about ourselves, but we don't fully embrace it. We talk ourselves out of it, we rationalise our way out of it, whatever. That work is the hard work, I think, because there's things about yourself that you're like, Okay, that's inconsistent with who I think I am right now or who I've been positioning myself to be. The cheesiest example I can offer of this is that when we started down the road with that talent anarchy brand, because I had been in corporate America, I had worked in places where I had to wear a suit every day, we made my persona the guy in the suit. But here's the thing, I hated that suit. I always hated that suit. That suit represented everything about work that I hated, the restraining and the loss of autonomy and all these things. It took me 15 years or more to finally arrive at a place where I'm like, No, you know what? My natural state is the dude in the T-shirt and jeans. That's who I've always been. That's who I will always be. It took a 15-year journey for me to finally go, No, I can do that. I can be that guy. I can still talk about the same thing. Actually, I talk about it so much more meaningfully when I'm dressed in my natural uniform. I feel comfortable. I feel myself. I'm not hiding behind a suit. I'm not trying to be something or pretending to be something else. I am just me, and I'm doing the work that I'm here put on this planet to do. I think the self-acceptance is a hard step, but the more you give over to that, then you can get to step three, which is integrity, which is all about how you show up in the world. It's showing up what you put forth in the world, aligning to who you really are. Then the fourth step is, we called it daring, which is really just a step about continuing then to push yourself outside of your comfort zone to get new information to put into the start of the process again. So you learn more about yourself, and then you're constantly in this cycle. That authenticity isn't an end point. It's a journey. It's a constant process that starts at some point in your teenage years, I think, and continues through the rest of your life. I think that is really important to getting this right. And as someone even that studied authenticity, that has taught authenticity, I'm still in that journey all the time, every day. I discover things about myself that... The tricky part is there's things that used to be true, that are stories that I took on that I was convinced were true about myself. Then I will learn years later, Like, actually, I don't think that's true about me anymore. What does it look like to let go of that to make room for something else to emerge that feels more true to who I am today? That's the part of branding work that nobody tells you. It's like you go through the branding and you're branding on a moving target, right? You're trying to hit, where are you right now? But this is why you also have to keep on that exercise because you evolve, which means your work evolves, which means you have to continually, if it's It's a personal brand. Your brand is going to evolve as you change because it should be an authentic reflection of who you are and what you actually do. You've really delighted me because it's often when I'm speaking to people on the podcast, I have these moments of revelation, and I've had one today. What you described there in that four-step process, it sounds fairly simple, but somebody once said to me that your business will only grow when you grow. I think, yes, that's It's true of us as business owners, but it's also true of executives. Your opportunity will only grow when you grow. The result of that four-step process is charisma. Charisma has a magnetic effect. We look around people in our world and you think, Why are they so lucky? Why do they simply attract opportunities? It's largely because of this four-step process. A lot of the time, that's a process people go through unconsciously. It's almost like an alchemical initiation, but it's one that we can approach very intentionally as well. For me, I'm looking at this thinking, there's so much opportunity here for everybody. If anybody is listening, why is the world not going my way? There's probably a really powerful opportunity here. Yeah. And the one caveat I will offer, too, is that I want to call out the fact that we're two white guys talking about this because part of what makes authenticity and part of what makes this journey so difficult is the stuff that is put on you by the external world. There are so much, especially if you think about what women are against in the world of work and in the world of business, anyone that's a minority, anyone that is coming into the world facing a world full of stereotypes and barriers and all kinds of things that interfere with your... It's stories that are put on you. It's not even... Sometimes it's like when you are trying to find your way to your authentic self, your authentic true self, when you unleash that, you're actually unleashing a counter trend or a counter message to what other people are going to want you to be or what they think you should be. So authenticity is not for the fane of heart. That's the other thing I always tell people is that it is profoundly powerful and it is freeing. But it puts you in a narrower category. There are going to be people who push back. There are going to be people that want you to be normal and simple and easy to understand because when you start being different, then that creates some dissonance and all kinds of things. Just know that this isn't the easy path. It's the righteous path. It is the right path. It's a powerful path, but it's not always the easy path. I think it's much, much harder for those who the world wants to put you in a particular box or where you're fighting uphill against stereotypes or bias or whatever else. Just as a caveat, just know that that's there when you start the work. I think we should talk about your particular philosophy of how you do what you do, where everything is really revolving around the relationship, the connective tissue in an organisation. How did you arrive there and how does that colour your work? And maybe for the listener, give them a little bit of orientation. Sure. So I have a couple of pieces of, I guess, backdrop or context about me is that I grew up on a farm in Iowa, which means I started working, like legit working for other people, including my family, very early in my life, probably 10, 11 years old, doing work that a lot of adults would whine about doing because it's hard. I've been working for most of my life. I entered my first super advisory role on a corn detasseling crew when I was, I think, 13 years old, 12 or 13 years old. I've also been in the management realm or whatever, confronted with the ridiculousness of management sent for most of my life. And pile on top of that, I am a person that when something seems off, I am a person that looks at the world through the lens of... I'm always scanning for, I guess, things that don't make sense or that I will recognise and see things like, What is that about? Why do we do that? That makes no sense. And yet everybody's just doing it as if it's normal. What is happening? And so you pile all that together. And from the very early days, I think when I started working, getting post-college work where you're supposed to be in your professional career, a lot of it just didn't make sense to me. I'm like, What are we doing here? Why is this... Why do we do it this way? It just wasn't working. Anyway, all of that to say, I've been trying to solve the puzzle of work for myself was the first half of my life. And then I found my way eventually into corporate human resources, leading big teams, trying to solve this at a broader level. And so that's the journey that I've been on. And I was like, All this, so much stuff that doesn't make sense, so much stuff that doesn't work. And so I was on that journey. I've been on that journey for a long time. And the unlock for me came when actually post my HR executive stint I spent about a decade inside of corporate America, and then I came out. Then one of the jobs I had after that was I worked for a technology company that built employee survey or feedback tools. One of the tools was an employee survey. One of the One of the things they did with that survey was they used it to be the research engine behind a bunch of best places to work contests in cities across the United States. I got to run that team for three years. The best places to Work team collected hundreds of thousands of employee survey responses every year. Then at the end of each year, one of the things we would do is we would do a macro analysis on that data to see what things in the data showed trends around what was happening with the broader employee base, what was driving them to be more satisfied and engaged, what was leading them to be dissatisfied and maybe leave or more prone towards leaving for another job. We would produce a report of top 10 drivers, of the drivers of employee engagement or whatever every year. The unlock for me came as we were doing this work and I was looking at these lists, the findings that we were publishing. And then I was looking back at some of the publishing, some of the trends that we had been showing. And what I recognised or noticed was that the things that were always driving employee engagement, satisfaction, the were factors like, I feel appreciated at work. I feel valued at work. I know someone cares about me at work. I trust the people I work with, and I feel trusted by the people I work with. Those are all things. And what I recognised about that, those were always at the top of the list. They never went off. They never went anyway. And it wasn't just our list. I started looking around at anybody that was collecting data about employee sentiment, and it was the same stuff. And what What I realised is these were all relational things. These were all relational constructs. If I took those things and just said, told you, Bob, I'm measuring the effectiveness of something. The thing that I'm measuring the effectiveness of is based on these criteria: trust, appreciation, care, feeling valued. What am I talking about? You're going to say, Well, you're We're talking about a relationship, obviously, a marriage or some relationship. That's when the light bulb went on. For me, all this data we have, we have decades of data that has been trying to tell us that we experience work as a relationship. The things that are required to help us do our best work, to be most committed, to be most creative, to perform up to our potential, are the There are things that go into making for a strong relationship. That's the unlock. Then once I saw that, it was like seeing, it was like Neo seeing the matrix, I finally everything made sense. Everything made sense because then I could look at it and say, Well, almost every workplace problem we have at its core is a relationship problem. If I can start helping leaders and managers and people at work build better relationship skills, better skills to connect to each other, to connect to the organisation, then that is the path towards truly unlocking higher performance. That's the journey I've been on and where I landed, and that is what I fundamentally help people do today. I'm interested to hear from a practical perspective. I've worked most of my life on my own, but I have worked with businesses my entire their life. So I'm generally always on the outside looking in. And I think sometimes that allows you to see what they can't see. And what I often see is organisations promote, this is a bit of a cliché, but promote to the level of greatest incompetence, I think is the way the phrase goes. And a lot of the time as well, they're employing people who are technically very good at something into a management role. So they're not necessarily employing or advancing people for their ability to maintain and manage good relationships. Now, in sports, there's this phrase where hard work beats talent, where talent doesn't work. I'm quite sure that you can train these skills. How do you approach an organisation where there are people who don't understand the importance of relationships and think people should just do their jobs? Do you know what I mean? I do. What you describe is an epidemic in the workplace. We could have a whole another conversation about why that's happened, because it has to do with how we've designed work to work and why it just is inevitable that we're going to promote people that probably shouldn't be in management. For me, I'm very pragmatic about my work in that when I approach an organisation, first off, I tend to find, and this is part of going back to our original conversation, is part of my... Part of compelling branding or clear branding, clear positioning is that organisations who don't fundamentally believe in the importance of relationship don't even reach out to me because I'm not going to make any sense. My ideology is going to make no sense to them, and so they don't even reach out. Or when we start getting into what the work looks like, we quickly decide this is maybe not a fit. That's a big piece of it. However, there's cases where inside of organisations, just because the organisation values relationships doesn't mean that each individual does. I don't worry about, initially, I will give you the pitch. When we do the training, you're going to get the pitch about relationships mattering and why you should care and all of those But at the end of the day, what I am more interested in is getting you to do the right things that help set those people up for success, that create a better experience for them. Even if you don't understand why, even if you don't, as the manager, value relationships yet, if I can get you to do a few of the right things that changes the experience for your employee, the employee will perform better, which creates then a feedback loop to you You're like, Oh, this stuff worked. Why did this work? And then you're going to do more of that. The beauty of the stuff that I do is that these are core relationship skills. They're valuable in any relationship. If you start doing it at work and you see it work, you might carry that home to your family relationships, or you might carry that to your outside relationships with others, with friends or colleagues or whatever. That's the real beauty of it. I don't worry so much about. I just try to give them effective tools. I give them the context for why it matters. But if you don't want to do it for the right reasons, just do it because it works, and then we'll sort out the right reasons later. I think what's interesting listening to you is you're typically going to be hired by senior leadership because they've decided the relationships matter. And part of your work is probably towards trying to restructure, not restructure is possibly the wrong word, but nudge company culture in a certain direction. And if key performance indicators and reviews are based on the things that measure relationships, then everybody has an incentive, whether they understand it or not, to perform on these key performance indicators. Really, it comes down to leadership, genuinely and authentically saying to everybody in the company, We know relationships matter, and therefore we've decided to do this, and this is how we're going to measure everybody in the company. And that is probably going to have quite a deep impact over time. The ironic part of this is that the reason we struggle at work with performance, the reason we struggle with retention, the reason we struggle with engagement, pick your favourite metric of the effectiveness of our culture or management practises. The reason we struggle at work is the same reason that we have a global epidemic around relationships and connexion outside of work. It all boils down to the same things, and it starts with things that seem so... When you talk about it, and actually this connects back to what we started with, is the most powerful, important part of all of this is clarity. It always comes back to clarity. That's where when we get into, I'm talking about relationship skills, and everybody goes to Kumbaya, like hugging stuff. I'm like, no, this is about clarity. It's about an ability to create clear expectations with another human being about what I expect of you and what you expect of me and how we are going to interact with one another. That is the foundation of any healthy relationship in any part of your life. We don't do it well in very many... I mean, some people have good relationship skills, and they do that, but most of us struggle with that in all areas of our life. It shouldn't be surprising at work where the stakes are high. There's actually real... The consequences are very visible of not doing that that it shows up there. But it shows up in all areas of our life. This is why we struggle, is that we don't have the skills around how to create clarity. Clarity, by the way, is the first vital ingredient of accountability. It's hard to have accountability without clarity because what are you holding them accountable to? Clarity is also part of why we... A lack of clarity is why we struggle with feedback. We have trouble giving each other feedback. Why? Because we were never clear in the first place about what we were expecting of each other. We weren't creating clarity there. When I talk about relationship skills, I'm not talking about only... I mean, yes, we need to build trust. Yes, we need to demonstrate care. I also talk about things about compassion as a management skill. But at its core, though, it's very practical and very tangible things like that, clarity, feedback, accountability. A very practical thing we could perhaps talk about is having a rumage through your website and other bits and pieces. I came across again and again something that you termed the check-in method. I haven't gone too deep into it, but I know I want to talk about it, and I know I want you to tell me about it because it seems important. What is this? Context for this is that if work is a relationship, then it's important to recognise that the currency of relationships is time. So that's first step one, is you have to spend time with people. There's no shortcut. You can't build relationships with other human beings without spending time with them, investing time in them. But in that time, the core building blocks of better relationships are conversations that matter, having real conversations that matter. And this is where it all falls apart. But it's also where it begins. If we learn a skill on how to have better relationship or how to have better conversations, then that will lead towards better relationships. The check-in is I have a four-step process to how to have an effective check-in conversation. A check-in conversation is basically it's a technique to open up a conversation that matters in a in a pretty efficient and effective way. It's a very fast way to get into a conversation that actually matters. I'd be happy to share that with you, Bob. It's the thing I talk about the most, and I'm delighted to talk about it because it's so actionable and it's practical, and you can start using it immediately after you hear this. So there's four steps. I'm going to ask you, you're going to participate with me in this a little bit, Bob, as we go. So the first step of an effective check in is to ask a great question. And that seems too obvious, right? We'll, of course, ask a great question. It seems too obvious, but this is where we tend to mess it up. This is where we go right off the rails. We don't even get off We'll get started because we mess it up. Because the most common question we ask when we check in with people is what, Bob? How are you doing? Right. How are you? How are you doing? How you been? Then when you ask that question, what do they say? They say, I'm really good or I'm fine. Yeah, fine. Good. I always joke my 15-year-old's favourite thing to say is decent, whatever that means. But it's a one-word response, and you don't know anything differently than you did before you asked the question. So this is not a great question. A great question is one that invites a response that demands a follow-up question. So what a great question does is a great question invites you to share something with me that is so interesting or so it basically opens a door that it would feel ridiculous if I didn't walk through that door. So a great question invites a response that requires a follow-up or demands a follow-up. The simplest example I can offer of that is that we can take this question that we usually use, How are you? Or How have you been? And we can turn that into a great question with one simple tweak. That question sounds like this, Bob, how are you today on a scale from 1-10? Ten couldn't be better, one couldn't be worse. Where are you at today? I'm probably a seven. When you ask that, well, you just said a seven. If you and I are having a hallway conversation or we're just doing a quick check-in, if I ask you that question, you say seven, I can't go, All right, well, okay, that, I guess, sounds okay. I'll I'll check in with you next time. You can't walk away from that because you just opened a door, and now that door is one for me to step through. And so now step two, of course, of the process is ask the follow-up question. So if I'm going to ask a great question that's going to demand a follow-up, now I have to ask a follow-up. I like using the number scale because the number scale gives you lots to work with. So what I would say to you is like, Okay, seven, Bob, what's on the positive side of that? Seven feels fairly favourable to me. What's on the good side of that seven? What's making that number move towards a 10? Yeah, and you're automatically inviting me to tell you what would make my day better, my experience better. Well, I'm actually first I'm asking you to tell me why that seven is a seven, what's on the positive side of it? So that you're going to tell me, if it is a seven today, Bob, why is your number a seven today? Well, so far, everything's been fairly straightforward. I had some time this morning that I didn't expect I was going to get, and I made productive use of it. And yeah, I'm just enjoying my day. Do you not usually have that time in the morning? To where it's like you said earlier that you're always in Zoom, so I'm assuming you usually have a tighter schedule, so it's fun to have that extra time. Today was supposed to be my busiest day of the week, and I had a big no-show this morning. I had set aside an hour a half, and I had a no-show on my calendar, which I'm not upset about. And it was just a whole chunk of time I hadn't expected. Found time. So found time is delightful. When you think about that seven, between the seven and the 10, there's something that is making today a seven and not a 10. What's the gap between there? What would have moved today to a 10 or closer to a 10? I think I'm somebody who always leaves. If I were 10, I'd be dropping it back down to a seven because you're always looking for areas to improve. I'm a very satisfied person. Yeah, I think I have a big issue. That's a great answer. Thank you for playing along. That's how it works, right? I would continue. If we had more time, I would ask you some more questions. I would follow up more about that. I'd say... Because what I just learned about you is that if I'm going to use this scale with you on a regular basis, when you say seven, we're grading on a curve here. So a seven is really closer to a 10. When you say you're at a five is where I probably need to pay attention or a three because that's probably there's something going on. And so I thank you for playing along. That's how it works. So you ask the great question. I like using the number scale. It doesn't have to be a number scale. There's a bunch of different things you can do. But great questions come in lots of different flavours. They just have to be open-ended and invite something that requires you to follow up or calls for a follow up. But you ask the number. If you're using that number scale, the beauty of it is if someone's in a 7-10 range like you are, Most of that conversation is going to be about, so what's going well? Is there a win or something which you shared a little bit about that? Then if it's in the middle, you can have a conversation about, okay, well, it sounds like a mixed bag. What's on the side that's moving it up towards a five? What's on the positive side of the ledger? Then it's like, what's moving it from a 10 to a five? What's the gap there? What are you wrestling with or struggling with? And you'll immediately get into those. You go from zero to a conversation that's really meaningful really quickly. On the low side of it, if it's a one to three, that's somebody offering a... That's a call for help, if you will. That's someone saying, I'm really struggling right now. The irony of that is that they might give you that number, and when you ask them what's going on, they may not be comfortable talking about it, but they gave you the gift of letting you know that today's probably not their best day. Anyway, so that's step number two, is you ask the follow-up. Step number three then is really important. It's the other part where I think we often mess it up is you have to really listen. It's shut up and listen, use your ears, use your eyes, and really pay attention. Because if you're going to go to the work of asking a great question and asking the follow-up, there's going to be some really good stuff going to fall out of their mouth at that point. And either they'll say it or you'll see it on their face or whatever. If you really are dialled into listening, that's where the good stuff really happens. And you keep cycling through the follow-up and listen as long as you need to. And then you close out a check-in conversation by offering encouragement and/or support. Encouragement might be if we had... If you said, I'll call it a Bob 10, so a seven, it's all positive. It's like, Well, that's amazing, Bob. I'm really excited that you had a great morning. It sounds like That found time was really helpful. I'm glad you're having a great day. I look forward to checking in next time. Just encouragement. If you shared something that was positive, that was exciting, that it happened, your kid had just won some trophy at school, whatever. We both have kids that probably doesn't happen to old enough that that doesn't happen anymore. But whatever it is, you'd learn about and you'd offer encouragement, or if they're struggling, offering support can look like, What can I do to help? That's the simplest thing. The other most common response I coach comes from actually, Brené Brown is who I stole this from, and she shared it, so I shared it as, What does support from me look like for you today? And they may not know. A lot of times they'll say, I don't know. And it's like, Okay, Well, know that I'm here. If you need something, let me know, and I am going to do what I can to help. Or if you think of something later, reach back out. I'm going to check in with you again in a couple of days or whatever. But that's the four-step check-in method. If you learn that four-step and you practise those four steps, you can start having more meaningful conversations everywhere in your life, with the people you lead, with your business partners, with your spouse or your significant other, with your kids. It works every place. The key is just having the great question to kick you off, knowing what question you want to ask, and then really being present for that conversation. What I really like about this, there's a few different angles, really. The four steps that you mentioned previously, the self-awareness, self-acceptance, integrity, and what was the final one? Daring. Daring, yeah. Those, coupled with the check-in method, the net effect of that over time is, and this is a bit of a segue, a brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. People say about you what they feel about you. And what you're allowing yourself to do there is really shape that, cultivate it, because people are going to feel positively disposed towards you. One without the other. So the four steps that I mentioned previously without the check-in method, Yeah, you'll probably be a better leader. Add the check-in method. Now you're properly bringing that charisma to bear very practically in a way that will help drive the whole organisation forward and your own career. You're genuinely building a strong leadership brand that will go before you. People will want to work for you. People will want to talk about you to their colleagues, to their friends, which sounds quite self-serving, but a work It's such a big part of our day that we want it to be fulfilling, and it's only going to be fulfilling when those people around us are happy enough about what we're doing that they would want it to talk about it. It's an important measure. Yeah. And that's a really great point, Bob, that I think a lot of people underestimate how much a lack of authenticity gets in your way in your ability to build relationships with others. Because if I don't have to try to manage any... If I'm not conflicted about my story, who I am, who I'm trying to be, what games I'm trying to play, the more authentically dialled in I am to who I am and I've accepted who I am, and then I can show up in the world in alignment. It requires no energy then to adapt. I'm not trying to shift into anything else. What that allows me to do then is show up and do that conversation with someone else wide open because I can be fully available to them. I can be fully present to the person in front of me. And that's when the magic starts to happen because they can feel that, but it then allows you to see and hear and notice and sense things that you wouldn't otherwise sense. Because if you're not living in authenticity, if you're not showing up that way, you've got some armour and some stories between you and that person And that's always going to limit your true effectiveness, whether that's charisma or presence or whatever that looks like. It's a journey towards effectiveness in your ability to communicate and build relationships, too. We are drawn to authenticity because of that, because even if the authentic version of that person is not our jam, is not someone who I maybe want to be a best friend with, I still am drawn to the pure authenticity of someone who is unapologetically who they are and lives with the consequences of that. There is some real gravity to that. It's not always good. It's not always used for forces of good. We've seen that in the political arena, but it's powerful. I think there's an old phrase where your vibe attracts your tribe. If you're not transmitting or you're transmitting on a frequency that's not authentic, you're going to attract the wrong things. This This is what I really do like about this. If you're sitting at home thinking, Well, this isn't me. I work on my own. I don't have an organisation that I'm part of. Everything that we've spoken about is equally valid in your content marketing and your outward-facing life and at home, probably. But if you want to attract customers, this check-in conversation probably has a wonderful home in a first discovery call with a client. I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, I could probably achieve a lot with this in coaching calls and in discovery calls with clients. The authenticity comes into all the content marketing. Everywhere I show up, if I'm unapologetically me, if I'm really comfortable with that, I'm going to attract people who are attracted to me, not to something I was pretending to be, which I think is a mistake a lot of people make. I think that is right. I think the hardest part of that, the hardest part of this journey is realising and accepting the fact that you are not going to be everybody's cup of tea. You are not for everyone. When you try to be for everyone, you end up in a conversation like I had with that consultant earlier. It's like, I thought you were going to be boring. Because when you try to be appealing to everyone, you come off as boring. You are not then anyone's cup of tea because you are the most boring, bland cup of tea out there, and nobody wants a boring, bland a cup of tea. They want a cup of tea that sings to their particular palate. And so figure out what flavour you are so that you can attract the people who are craving that flavour. And they're out there, but they can't find you unless you're willing and brave enough to be the thing that you are to the world. So I'm pretty sure I want to have you back sometime because something I'm aware we haven't really spoken about is your own marketing process, how you approach sales. And I think for a lot of my listeners, they're probably screaming at me thinking, Why haven't you done this yet, Bob? We'll do it sometime. Deal. But I know what I would like to talk about is, what are you working on right now? What is your big thing at the moment? So the thing that I am that's my next... I'm always experimenting, and I'm always trying to push to a new domain. And one of the things that I feel very, very called for called towards right now is the work of helping organisations foster connexion, build connexion, teach the skills of connexion, which is central. But I'm thinking about it even more broadly because in a world that is increasingly polarised and disconnected, I believe that the workplace can be part of the solution. The workplace is one of the few places we have to come together. We have this opportunity to help people feel connected and learn the skills of connexion and learn how to build better relationships. One of the things I'm doing to advance that work, which is a new addition, is I'm hosting a retreat, an open enrollment retreat in September of this year in Austin, Texas, called the Connexion at Work Retreat. It's a retreat for human resources, leaders, and executives. It's going to be a small format, like 25 total seats available. We're going to do a three-day deep dive into what Connexion looks like, how it how organisations foster and build connexions so that they can get a deeper understanding of what it is and how it works, but also build a roadmap to take back for how they can do this work more effectively or more deeply in their own organisation. I'm pretty passionate about... I love designing. I design and facilitate retreats and create experiences for people like that, and I love that work. It's transformative work, and so I'm pretty jazzed about that as an upcoming project. Project. That sounds like a lot of fun. A lot of work, I think. So, yeah, hopefully, if there's people listening, you should get in on that. Now, I have a part two to this podcast, which I've forgotten about today. And I don't know if you got the briefing notes Did you get my briefing notes? I did. So you know about the three things section. Now, you've been very generous with things today. There's all kinds of frameworks that you have shared. But do you have three things for us? Well, yeah, we've already done one. We've done the check-in conversation, the four-step check-in conversation. That's a big one, and that is the most important one. So that's one. Number two goes back to clarity. And the thing that I will offer there is something I teach. So clarity is the turbocharger of performance. It's the turbo charger of relationships. So it's so important. The The core thing that I teach around clarity is something I call... It's so important. I call it the golden rule of management, and it's this, if it matters, put it in writing. I know that seems, again, so obvious, and yet it's something that I am shocked by how few leaders do this. We have all these things. We have goals, we have behavioural expectations of people, we have all these expectations of people that are important. We have expectations here, and then our people don't behave the way that we think they should or that we wish they would. We get frustrated, and then that creates all kinds of tension and weirdness. Then eventually, the person quits or we end up firing them. In reality, all of that could have been avoided if you had spent some time upfront sitting down and writing down those expectations, sharing those with the individual, discussing them to make sure that they were clear. Because people are pretty simple, and especially at work, people want to keep their jobs. They also want you to be happy. If you're their manager, they want you to think well of them. The key thing you're missing is tell them what to do. Give them clarity about it because they will do it. But it's not a conversation. It needs to be put in writing. So put it in writing because that's where you can find true clarity. So that's number two. I'm reflecting my time as a manager. I had a period in my life where my business was essentially a creative agency, about 10 people working for me. I was a terrible manager, absolutely atrocious. I've learned so much since then. I wouldn't want to do it again. But if I did, I would do it better, and you're absolutely right. Clarity is the linchpin of any expectation. It's just- All starts with clarity. Yeah, all starts with clarity. So people will do exactly what you pay them to do. Just make it crystal clear, put it in writing, because when you put it in writing, it forces you to get clearer. It's why we have contracts, right? Why do we put important agreements in contract writing? We write it down. Why? Because it creates clarity between the two parties. Same thing is true here. So that's number two. And then the third thing is just, I think, just an easy, simple practise that you can use. I have a process I teach in my management training programme that is basically building your manager manifesto. And your manager manifesto is your public declaration of intentions. But within that manifesto process is this three-word exercise. And in essence, you can apply this to being a manager, you can apply this to being a partner, you can apply this to being a business owner. But it's this, what three words do you want to describe you as a manager or as a spouse, as a friend, as a parent, as a business leader, as an entrepreneur? What three words do you want to describe you? And spend time thinking about that because those three words then become a linchpin to everything else. If my word is integrity, if one of them is integrity, then what does that mean? What does that look like? How do I do business? Do I Do I have a money back guarantee on everything I do? Because I am so confident that I'm going to follow through on what I said I was going to do, that everything should reflect that. I think when you get really clear, this is just an exercise to go through to make sure you're clear on your intentions and you're clear about the impact you're trying to have on other people. So three-word exercise, not complicated, but it does take a little bit of reflection and time. Get a cup of coffee or a glass of wine and a pad of paper and sit down and and work that out. That potentially can transform your relationships. Listening to that, it reminds me of a process I go through with clients to help them refine their value positioning statement, which is an intentionally difficult exercise because this is not an elevator pitch. It's a similarly distilled essence of what your value is. People get really emotional because they're having to exclude. It's like polishing a diamond. You have to get rid of really valuable valuable material. Getting it down to three words is potentially really powerful. Somebody once said to me, If you want to be known for something, you better be very repetitive. Then we need to define, Well, what are the signals that we want to consistently repeat? It's probably going to be related to these three words. I think it's a really valuable idea. Jason, if people want to get closer to you, if they want to get into your world, how can they do that? Probably the two easiest places are my website, which is just jasonlortzen. Com. If you visit the website, you will have lots of invitations there to sign up for my newsletter or download some tools or whatever. If you do any of that, you'll be added to my weekly email newsletter, so you'll be in touch. The other place is LinkedIn. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, so just search for me on LinkedIn and connect with me there or follow me there. Those are the two best places. Well, I'm having a lot of fun. I do to have you back sometime with your permission. I'd be delighted. This has been a terrible experience for me. I'll be delighted. This has been fun. I'll come back anytime, Bob. Just let me know. For you at home, that does bring us to the end of another episode. If you have enjoyed this, you will love the Personal Brand Business Roadmap. It's everything you need to start, scale, or fix your expert of a business. Just click the link in the show notes or visit amplifimee. Agency/roadmap. Again, if you did enjoy this, take a moment to subscribe and perhaps give a. Five-star reviews like the fingers on your hand are greatly appreciated. Thanks again at home for listening. Jason, thank you for your time. My pleasure.