#139: Cards Against Mundanity: A Team Building Game To Create Extraordinary Teams Fast With Jason Treu

Welcome to The Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, bestselling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markel. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So, please join Adam as he guides you on your conscious pivot.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel, and I am feeling blessed and thankful today. Just concluded our holiday here in the US, Thanksgiving holiday, and pretty much every country around the world has its own version of that. Does it a month or two before we do. And I never want to say this is Thanksgiving because it's not Thanksgiving for everybody around the world. But I will say that I hope wherever you are in this moment that you are feeling thankful, that it doesn't take a holiday to bring you to that realization that there are so many things that we can be flat-out grateful for, even the things that are tough. There's something that we can appreciate, even if in the moment we can't fully appreciate the value. There's that old expression about everything happening for a reason. And I think on some level, people say that but don't always believe it. I tend to push back on that statement myself. I think it's more that there's value in everything that happens to us, and we don't always see it in the moment, but over time, we find that those things have helped us to serve in some way, in a way that maybe even we didn't expect we could serve. As a result of that thing, whatever that thing might have been, and it can be divorce, it can be some other form of dissolution of a business or some other trauma that's happened in our lives, disappointment, failure of a relationship or health or business or any of those things. The gentleman that I have the honor to interview today on the show is no stranger to that. We're going to dive into some of his pivot tales from the crypt in just a couple moments, but first, I'll read— A little bit about him, we'll dig in as we always do. His name is Jason Troy. He's an executive coach who works with executives, managers, and their teams to maximize their leadership potential and performance and build and execute their career blueprint, something that we also think is very valuable to have a blueprint for your career and for other areas of your life. Not everybody does. He's the bestselling author of Social Wealth: A How-To Guide on Building Extraordinary Business Relationships. He was a featured speaker at the TEDxWilmington event in 2017 where he debuted his breakthrough team-building game cards against mundanity. We're going to talk about what that is, derived from the word mundane. Finally, he is the host of Executive Breakthroughs podcast, which brings game-changing CEOs, entrepreneurs, and experts that share their breakthroughs and their breakdowns. That's great stuff. Jason Troy, welcome to the show today. Thanks, Adam.

Hey, thanks for having me on the show and speaking to your fantastic tribe.

Wonderful, wonderful. Jason, it's a great bio and our audience is pretty familiar with me asking this follow-up question. What's not written in the bio there that you would love for people to know about you?

Well, I got married on Halloween, on this Halloween. So, I guess that's part of it. And now I have 2 stepdaughters, 13 and 16, and 2 dogs. So we just got this year one adopted, one we got as a puppy. I live in Dallas. I'm a Dallas Cowboys fan.

Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience, but that of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Oh man, that's heartbreak.

But I'm a Dallas Mavericks fan too, so that's a little bit better on the other side of things.

We're not gonna go down that path, but that's way cool. And this is the person that you married. She had 2 kids from a prior marriage, I'm assuming?

Yes.

And how about yourself? Any—

I don't know. None myself. Yeah. Or none that I'm aware of.

I didn't expect to ask you this, but is it— was it a part of your plan to become a daddy? Did you want to eventually be a father?

Yeah, I think so. I just, I mean, I don't think you ever set off to meet someone else and then saying, oh, they have kids, right? I mean, I think you go and you always lead, or I would say the most important thing is the person. And then all the other things that go with it usually add more value than you ever thought to begin with when you were on the search to begin with, right? Or in your head. And so I think that's what happened. And I think it's a blessing. It's not one that I had anticipated, but it's one that's been really helpful and grateful for and definitely makes my life significantly better than it would have on the other side of it and not having it happen.

Yeah, it's probably— I didn't expect this would be the case, but that's a great example of and a lead-in to what we were going to talk about, which is the pivots in life. Because as you said, it may not have been expected, but it's been a joy. It's been a blessing, to use your words. So maybe take us back to a prior time in your life, in either the career side or the relationship side, where there was a significant pivot, something maybe that went wrong or whatever that inflection point looked like at the time, where you weren't clear that it was going to work out or clear that there would be some silver lining or blessing. But ultimately there is something that comes out of it that you find beneficial to you. Take us back to any point in the past.

Yeah, I mean, I think probably, I mean, there's always a lot of them. I would say probably one of the earliest ones is I went to law school and I was getting a master's in communication at Syracuse. And I had just decided probably midway through my third year in law school, I just really didn't want to do this, practice law. And I think the epiphany started to happen was that as I went on a lot of interviews, one of the last questions— I talked to people that had been interviewing. I'm an extrovert. I made a lot of friends and they were like, we'll ask a softball question at the end. And at that point in my life, it's a naive question, I know now, but then I thought it was an easy question, was to ask people, are you happy? And I didn't realize as I was asking these questions, especially during my second year interviewing, Was that I really found everyone I asked, after probably 30-some people, that was the hardest question I asked all of them to answer. Like, the longest for me to actually get the words out of my mouth and then to answer back without feeling nervous, their eyes darting around, or giving me an answer that sounds really canned. And when you get enough data points in your head, it makes all the connections, and then you think to yourself, What makes me think I can do something that they're having a significant problem doing themselves? These are all super talented individuals across the board doing something in law that I would want to do. And so that led me to think that maybe there's some alternative path that I could do. But as you're doing something like that, everyone around you thinks you're crazy and tells you you're crazy, right? Because you've been going to school and putting yourself through proverbial hell to get there. And to go out to Silicon Valley and to do something that's pretty far away from where I'm currently at, right? And I'd have to look for a job and do all that stuff that far is really, really hard. It's not like it is now. So that was probably a huge leap of faith to have to go out there and do that and really start to kind of build something through my own lens and not what other people would think that I should be doing. Or where probably some of the opportunity was square in my face. This was definitely outside the lines and failure was probably pretty high and so were a lot of unknowns and I didn't know anyone. I knew one person there. Yeah.

Well, you just had me thinking about something too that I want to just interject here. I saw this movie that was out months ago called Avengers: Endgame. Anybody that was a Marvel fan has seen it, saw it when it first came out. I was a little late to the party on seeing this particular movie, but what a great movie. And there's a part in it where there's a conversation with the character that's Thor, and he's getting advice from his mother, and she's deceased, so it's kind of a moment where he's going back in time and able to talk to her. And she says to him, you know, something to the effect of, it's really difficult to live into what other people think you should do. That's almost an impossible task. The goal, as far as she was concerned, in giving advice to her son was to be who you're meant to be. That, that— to spend your time just being who you are, that's very different than trying to be something that you should be. And the should-bes can be everything from your following in the footsteps of a father, mother, brother, sister, whoever it is. But— There's reasons. You and I are simpatico in some respects. You went to law school in your 3rd year, which is really late in the game. For folks that don't know what we're talking about here, it's like you've gone to— done your undergraduate degree, and I don't know whether you had student loans or not or whatever, but you got through 4 years. You get out, you take the LSAT, Law School Admission Test, and that's not an easy exam. It's probably as difficult or more difficult than the SAT. Yeah. You'd score well enough to get into a law school, and then you go through getting into law school and surviving the first year, which the attrition rate for 1Ls is very, very high. People that just don't make it through the first year because it's brutal. I mean, the workload is brutal, the professors are brutal, the Socratic method is unusual, and there's tremendous competition within the class, etc. And so you make it through year 1, you make it through year 2. You're in your third year, and as I understand it, you're interviewing, or maybe you're in your second year, you're interviewing for your internship jobs, places where you get invited to be a sort of an intern at a law firm. And in the Q&A where they're interviewing you, see if they're going to want you at their firm, and you're interviewing them to figure out which firm you might say yes to, you're asking them a question at the end. Which is, are you happy? Is that— did I get that right?

Yep.

Yeah, very unusual. I mean, incredibly unusual. And what's great is, like you said, at the time it might have sounded like a pretty trite, simple question to ask, but after having— I was a lawyer for 18 years, so I sort of was following that path, frankly, because the idea of it had gotten into my head through a conversation I had with an older gentleman who was a nice man that I was a lifeguard at a at a local pool and I had a conversation with this guy who was very successful. He was a lawyer. My brother was thinking about going to law school and I had no direction at that point. I was a schoolteacher. I knew I wasn't going to stay in that. I said, I'll go to law school. And I do the same thing as you. I get in, I get through first year, second year. We have 2 kids in law school. That was going on. Got through third year. I didn't even have an offer. Forget an internship. I had no offer for a job. I just said, I'll go Go out on my own and did and did that for 18 years and probably midway through, 8, 9 years in or something, I know in my heart, this is not my— this is not what I'm meant to be doing for the rest of my life. Like, it's not my calling and my heart is, you know, I just feel like I'm selling out and mostly just selling out for the money. So, you ask this question and what you find from people is they're answering it honestly. And what they're telling you is this is not a profession for happiness. Is that—

They didn't find fulfillment or they weren't happy or they never had taken the time to think about it. Like, there's a lot of different things that it could be, but the end result is still the end result, that you ask a simple question and they couldn't really answer it in a succinct way that was believable. It was almost as if no one had really ever asked them that question before.

Whether it mattered.

That's true, right? That's the other part of it. So, and to me, that was really shocking because again, you're dealing with super high caliber individuals who are smart and think through every possible scenario because what you have to do in every single legal case,

logic and

reason, right, rests on that. But logical reason doesn't take in a lot of the things that we do in our daily life, right? So I think that's the reason why that, that question Caught them off guard. It seemed like every person that I asked in some respect or another, and that just was a huge wake-up call at the time. I didn't really fully understand what that all meant. All I knew was that in life, I've learned to that date, looking at things, it's kind of like Michael Jordan. Everyone thinks they can, you know, every basketball commentator says, who's going to be the next Michael Jordan? And the answer always is there won't be one. Right, because— or maybe there will be one, but it's overrated and it's a stretch to think that any individual will do that until exactly they've actually done that, right? So my head was like, why do I think that I can do something that all of these people couldn't do at this time?

Yeah.

And the chances are extremely slim that I'm able to figure out what they don't, because I don't even know what it is, and I'm not down there path. I don't have that experience, and there's no way for me to be able to figure that out unless I actually do it and go down it, right, to carve out that niche. Now, that's not to say that there are other lawyers that are happy and they're doing things. I know that there are, but the things I wanted to do, it seemed very, very slim.

Yeah, so you were applying logic and reason in that moment. You're thinking critically about how it is you're going to spend So much more of your time. And it's interesting too because so many people are in jobs now or in a business. There's a lot of entrepreneurs in this community as well as people who are in some form of career, mid-career kind of a thing, more in a traditional corporate job, et cetera. But even with business owners and entrepreneurs, so many folks I meet, they've got time, so much time, years, hours, tons and tons of hours into some It's like they adopt sunk cost mentality, which is something we address in the book I wrote, Pivot. It's all about how it is that we sometimes will continue to do certain things because we believe we've got so much time invested in it that it would be such a tremendous waste now to just stop or change direction or pivot. And you did. I mean, here you are going into your third year, or maybe it was after your third year. Did you graduate from school? Did you leave school? What happened?

No, I mean, I graduated and I got my master's in communications. I was doing this sort of simultaneously. But I was like, at that point, there was no reason not to finish. And then that seemed like even a bigger waste 'cause there's something about finishing things out. And I was like, okay, it also buys me time to try to figure out what is it, what I do next. 'Cause I didn't have some like plan B. Like I had never thought about plan B.

Right.

In law school, and I think the problem with education is they spend so little on what do you do afterwards and preparing you, right? And there's like one or two, people that sit in the career office, hundreds of students. There's no way they could possibly help you, right? Other than if you're going up there and figuring out the right questions to ask and driving them.

Yes.

But those are really advanced things to understand how to do and how to manage and how do you think through a non-legal career. And again, there's a lot more out there today and the ABA, you know, the Bar Association has things. then there weren't, and everyone around you is telling you that you're crazy for doing this, and you don't really have any other validation points to go fight through that. And when people keep telling you that and you have doubts yourself,

Yeah.

That's a way different place to come from than feeling like, oh, I have someone who I've seen do this, right? I have some model to look through this. I didn't have anything. All I had was That what path ahead wouldn't work, but that's not enough every day to keep— when people keep saying these things and the doubts are laid and you don't know what's going on.

I didn't find that out till I was working with other lawyers. And that's when I found it out, was that my colleagues, the people that I was both working with inside the office I had, as well as the folks that I was working with Sort of collaboratively or even adversarially, opposition to one another in a case. And I just found that there were a lot of miserable people, a lot of miserable people in that profession. So, it's interesting because I think the part here that might be really important for folks is that if you are in fact in pivot now or you're contemplating it, meaning you're thinking about transitioning out of something and into something else, what I feel like Jason has given us Is a wonderful lesson and it's something that we language differently, but I feel like that question, the idea of interviewing someone or not one person because one data point doesn't do it, but to interview or meet with other people who are doing what you think you want to be doing and asking them that among other questions that you'd ask, why not end with that question? What a great question to end with. Which is, no, are you happy? And gauge their response. I mean, if you got 10 people to sit down with and talk to you about the business they're in or the job they're in or whatever it is, and just through your normal course of interviewing them, getting feedback, you ask them at the end that question, are you happy? And see, are they searching for an answer? Are they kind of fidgeting in their seat? Like you say, are their eyes just sort of darting around? You can tell pretty quickly. Whether or not that question caught him off guard, right? Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources Resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are.

Yeah, because I think that's the blessing of asking behavioral-based questions. People normally aren't asked them, and especially if you ask them other questions, you can see the deviation in those confident answers about stuff. Or if you ask someone a standard question about what's your strengths, Or what are your weaknesses? These are easy questions because people have thought through those, right? But if you ask a question like, when's the last time you've had a conflict with another team member or a team itself? Tell me about how you handled that and dealt with that and moved past that with those people. Well, they've probably never been asked that question. So if they don't have a truthful answer, they're really nervous or darting around. You know, there's a lot under the surface that they're not telling you, and they're really good at interviewing and they practice certain things. But the other questions. So when you ask a question like that, you really can tell because you can size the person up based on the information and data and experiences that they've shared with you to that point, comparatively to the ones that are behavioral-based that really give us a clue into the culture, right? The people, the values, right? What their purpose is, all the rest of those things, which end of the day are really the critical aspects which are going to give you the most fulfillment out of your job and the most success.

Yeah, that makes tons of sense. I want to just change, and it might not be a big change that we're talking about here, but the Cards Against Mundanity. I want you to share what those are, what that is, and then I really want to talk to you about your TEDx Wilmington experience. I feel called to find out a little more about that as well.

Sure. So one of the things that I found with people is that teamwork and building great relationships inside and outside of an organization are something that people talk about, but they're never told how to do, and they never put in place the right foundation or to build these relationships moving forward. So that's the problem. People talk about culture, people talk about how do you build trust with people, but they don't really get into the details of how do you really get under the weeds with people. And so as I started to do research for my TED Talk, I wanted to find a tool and something that I could do to go in that would help people really accelerate trust and essentially skyrocket as fast as possible and get people to know each other, right? And to really understand what moves the needle in creating a great, extraordinary team. Like, what do they need to do? And as I was looking through some research, I found some research by a Professor Arthur Aron. And I was looking through actually the New York Times, and I was reading this article about a woman falling in love, and she went to a bar And asked her potential— or potential and then actual husband 36 questions. And I was like, that's crazy, right?

36 questions?

Yeah. And I can't believe it, right? I had to click on this, right? I thought maybe it's clickbait, but it was a study he did. And what he did was he took grad students that were complete strangers, had them ask questions over 45 minutes, and 30% of the people created the closest relationships in their lives.

Hmm.

And so I thought, that's pretty amazing. Like, how would that really be possible? So I wanted to test it out, and eventually that's what led to this game. And instead of doing it with individuals, I wanted to do it in groups, and I wanted to test out the theory. If I could put teams together, how quickly could I build trust, teamwork, better communication, and do something that would be— could be done in minutes instead of probably 5, 10, 15, or 20 years, or never, right, in most instances? So what my theory was, was that when we vulnerably share our personal and professional experiences with other people in a group, we fast-track trust.

Yes.

And better communication and openness and everything that you'd want to build in an extremely high-performing, fulfilled, committed team of people. And that's really what it's played out to be, because now more than 25,000 people that I know of, and it's actually more than that right now, I've done and played the game so far, and people love to do it. And when I do it in speaking, you'll see people share almost anything and everything. And the magic with doing it in this group is that compared to one-on-one, all you have to do is have 1 to 2 people that you can see yourself in, right? So if you ask a question like, what's the most important lesson you learned in the last year? If light bulbs go in your head, if everyone's answering the same question, right, couple of people, you feel really close to that group of people. And if you get through 5 or 6 of these very vulnerable questions, you're talking about things that no one in your life knows, right, at all. And after doing this and speaking in front of tens of thousands of people, I always ask the question, how many people have a coworker that could answer like 5 or 6 of these questions and know your answers to it? And I'll rarely get a hand raised.

Yeah.

And then I'll ask people, do you have anyone in your life like that? And I still will barely get any hands raised.

So share with us if you can, I don't know if this is possible, but what the rules of the game are and maybe some of our folks where they are can actually go home tonight or go into the office more likely and get a couple of people around the break room table at lunch or something and have this experience. So obviously, it involves some questions. Yeah, please.

It's pretty simple. So essentially what it is, is everyone answers the same question and you give them maybe 1 to 2 minutes. Usually very few times people will go longer than answering the question. And you just keep going around. And I usually tell people the magic amount is probably 6 to 8 questions. And you can do it with one person, but then your mileage can vary depending on how that you connect with it. The more powerful thing is you do this in with 3, 4, 5, 6, probably up to 10 or 12 people in a group. And you'd ask them questions such as, right, and I have this all in the game, but is You know, what's the most important lesson you've learned in the last year? If you had one person to thank for helping you become the person that you are, who was that person and what did they do, right?

Yeah.

Talk— what's your biggest blessing in disguise, right? And what was it, right? And what impact did it have? And when you start going through a bunch of those questions, and you can do fun ones like, if you were a superhero, what would you want your superpower to be and why, right? So there are You can go in a multitude of directions, but what that does is gives people significant insight into you, into everyone around you, to understand your experiences, your histories, your heartbreaks, your breakdowns, pet peeves, all these other things. And people end up telegraphing a lot to you that you can then use when you're working with them. And it also opens a window to communicate better and have really difficult, hard conversations with them, which is where almost all the conflicts start, are with people avoiding simple conversations that then spiral into other things.

Yes. So this is a trust-building, rapport-building, transparency-type exercise because you're willing to be vulnerable or, or not. And in either instance, especially with a group, you'll see it.

Yeah. And the thing about it is doing a group too, what you do is you have a lot of protection and in a sense that If all these people hear an answer and you share it with other people, the group itself will ostracize you. Because I've gone back into all the people that have done it and I've never heard anyone doing it. I'm sure that it would happen, but one-on-one you don't have that code because you have to actually say that. And even sometimes some people might share something with someone else, but when you're doing a group, all these people heard all those answers that you're giving and everyone else, and there's an implicit thing to keep it private. And not to go and share and gossip about it, because then it's looked at as you're betraying all the people, not just one person.

So you debuted this game on your TEDx. You know, one of the things that we talk about on this show is the stories that people share, the messages that— and ideas that people want to share as part of their pivots in life. And one of the great platforms for sharing those messages and those ideas is TED. Obviously, and the road to TEDx is something that is pretty cool. It's sometimes difficult for a lot of people, can be, and sometimes it comes fairly easily. So share with me a little bit, and our audience really, about what was the road to TED like for you, and what was that experience like, and what did you get out of it?

So when I did it, I thought about it in a couple ways. One, that it'd be great branding experience for the business, but on top of that, I wanted something that I could use coming out of it. So that required me to do more of a how-to speech because the problem a lot of TEDx speeches and TED speeches are they're very high level, but they're not practical. And I wanted to give people some application that they could leave and do something with. And also then it would give me something to do with. So by the time I finished it, I would have something to take out and actually execute and conduct rather than having them to build it out. So, I had thought that through. I also thought through that I wanted to find a TEDx that had really good videography. And so, I spent a lot of time trying to understand how many cameras the place had, like all the rest of the logistics and dynamics of it, right? And then, there are different levels of TEDx, right? Depending on the location and the place, some are harder or easier to get in. So, I spent a lot of time researching and figuring out how to conduct this, other than just like practicing and finding someone to help me with it. So it was a considerable amount of time going through this whole process. And I had thought this out before I had even started down the road, what I need to do for the requirements for success and to make this a worthwhile thing to do rather than just figuring it out as I was going down the road.

Yeah, there's over 3,000 TEDx events around the world. In a given year, more than 3,000. So, and it's pretty competitive. You get a lot of people that we work with helping them to construct their talks and often just even the process of getting on a stage. How many applications? Because I think it's important people hear this because we had recently had a client that had applied more than 50 times and landed her talk sort of at the 55th or 56th application. And then 2 weeks later, she got a second yes, you know, which is not unusual. So Jason, how many attempts or how many applications did you make before you got a yes?

I think I sent out about 20, almost all at once, right? I looked through them and did a spreadsheet and they were at varying— I picked a window of time that they would be in. So then I would get acceptances in some window of time that makes sense. So that helped me in the process, but I had to take a pretty wide net because I had no idea what I would get into and where, you know, what would work and what didn't. And a lot of these places, right by the time you apply, it takes many months to find out. So I had done a lot of research and as much as I could on a lot of these different events and ranked in my head and then just kept going in it. And then I ended up getting into a few of them and then had to make some decisions based on that, what I wanted to do. And then some of them I hadn't heard back from yet because they had not gone through their finalization of their application process. Because again, I had to take them in a window of time. I think like I looked at opportunities that would start like that I could speak from July until December. So, there were ones I had to make decisions on before I would get back to other people. And some of the people I contacted and said, look, I mean, where are you in your process? I have to make a decision. And if I wanted to get in there and then go forward from there.

Yeah. And you developed the game, the game that we were talking about a moment ago, Cards Against Mundanity, that was developed as a way to sort of test the game or introduce the game during the TED? Is that—

Yeah, and partly I just wanted to help people really build great relationships with people and understand how to do that, right? Because I don't think a lot of people know how to go about fundamentally building great teams and teamwork. And so for me, it was a way to help them. And the tool is a way, right? A game and a tool is what it is. It gets you into really looking at what does an extraordinary team of high performers who've accomplished a lot look like, feel like, smell like emotionally connected belonging, right? All those words that people use. When you do this, you're in that moment because I think when you can actually get the evidence that you can do it and you could be there, then it's much easier to get people to buy into doing all the necessary things, right? This is not the whole step. It is one of them, and it's one that's overlooked because without having a really, really foundation of high level of trust, the rest of it falls down. It's like building a house on sand, right? And that's— most people skip over that because they assume, well, we'll just figure that out down the road, right? It's like conflict resolution. Well, what's the problem? Well, the problem is we have a trust problem first before we have a problem of us two and our issues, right? Because if I don't trust you, I'm not going to deal anything out. So even in my conflict resolution things, the one thing that I tested early on that I was fortunate I did was to work on the trust problem, not the problem that they brought to me, because I couldn't even get to that point. And that's what most people do to conflict resolution, right? They go and ask people, interview them, and try to find out all the things, and then they put everyone in a group, and then it takes so long to do step 1. I'm like, no, the only step is getting people together and stemming the distrust and opening a window where people reconsider trusting the people around them and saying to them, maybe there's another version of this, maybe I don't have it right. Maybe I need to take a pause. Maybe I'm partly accountable and responsible for all the things that are going. And then you open a window and then you can do the other work. But it doesn't work the other way around. Yes. Or it does, but it's super, super slow and it fails a lot because a lot of the times I'm brought in for conflict resolution because it's not something that's front and center in my business. I'm not the first choice and I'm usually the second person brought in to solve the problem. Because the first problem, which is a larger company, failed and they're nowhere where they need to go. So this has been a hard lesson for me to learn because I've had to go through this and do a lot of thinking on it. But I wanted to share with people how do you actually do this more in a data-driven way and how people think through this stuff rather than, I think, a lot of the false narratives and stories people have made up about how to build great teams and what's required of you to do that.

I really hope you're enjoying this episode. of the Change Proof podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. Yeah, exactly. So, Social Wealth, the book. Is that something that's available on Amazon?

Yeah.

Okay, good. We're going to have full show notes so folks can find out more about Jason Treu and obviously go to jasontreu.com, which I'm going to spell out loud. It's just spelled out loud. That's funny. J-A-S-O-N-T-R-E-U.com. And that's— I don't typically do that, but because you might think when you hear Troy that it's T-R-O-Y and you're going to miss the boat entirely. It's T-R-E-U.com. The spelling of Jason's last name, .com, and you can get more information about the work he's doing, working with teams and leadership or segments of organizations, managers, leaders, executives, etc. I think this is fascinating stuff, and I highly recommend people go out as well and watch the TEDx talk. It's TEDx Wilmington 2017. Would you remember what the name of the talk was, what the title?

Yeah, I mean, How to Get Coworkers to Like Each Other.

That's what it was. Beautiful. Well, makes sense. Jason, as we wrap up, I always ask our guests about their personal rituals. I really believe in the power of rituals and that many ways our lives, the quality of our lives really are equal to the power, to the quality of the rituals that we create. And that's why they are so powerful. What's one ritual that you have as part of your daily routine?

Every day I say 3 things I'm grateful for.

Hmm.

And when I wake up, and it's something that can take you 10 seconds, maybe 5. And I think it's important because it's easy to look at the lack, right? And there are a lot of times, even when I say those things, if you're doing things, it's hard to see it. But I think as a practice, if you begin to see how many things you have rather than the things that you don't have, which is really easy in the world we live in to do, So it's just something simple that I like to do. I also love to run. I picked up running and running with people. It's great to get out in nature because I try to listen without music most of the time so I can get rid of some of the noise and clutter that's going around. And so things like that I enjoy doing. I will often read sometimes or listen to podcasts. to get thinking, right? Other things like that can put me in a better state as I'm going through my day than just, I don't know, getting up and going into work mode, right? I find like those days are usually the harder ones I have to power through. And those are— sometimes you have to do that. You don't have the time if you have to get up super early in the morning and go and do something. But I think having rituals that work for you and get you into a state that's helpful for you is important to figure out and to figure out what those triggers are. Also, if you're in a place that's not great, like, what can you do proactively to help yourself within 15 or 30 seconds that can sort of be like a rubber band snapping your wrist and hitting you, sort of shaking you out of it? So I think I would encourage people to find something they can do. super quick that they can do in their own head or out loud or something that doesn't require technology or another piece, because you may not have that all the time or it may not work.

Absolutely. We talk a lot about resilience. Most of my keynote— this keynote speaking I do to organizations is on the topic of resilience, and often they are incremental changes that we have to make or that we can choose to make that can be as little as, you say, 10 seconds. And it's funny enough because the TED Talk that I gave last year was called Doing This for 10 Seconds Can Change Your Life. So it's so happy to hear somebody talking about how even that simple 10-second timeframe where you adjust something, and sometimes it's a physical adjustment, sometimes it's a mental or an emotional adjustment, sometimes it's more in the nature of something even spiritual, that it does create this ability to bounce back and creates this resilience, this flexibility or this agility to deal with the changes in life, the pivots in life. So, Jason, I've so enjoyed having you on the show. As I always do at the end of the show, I remind everybody and myself, of course, of the waking ritual that I've used for more than 10 years. And it is just a 10-second practice. It's first and foremost to wake up. And I think that was Jason, you woke up today. I woke up today. And when we went to bed last night, that wasn't a guarantee. There was no written contract that we were going to get to wake up. So, that 10 seconds in the morning for me usually looks like the recognition that I've woken up. That's step 1. I recognize I am awake physically and et cetera. And then I immediately recognize that there's something to be grateful for, as you said earlier. I don't have to search far and wide for it because I know that when I'm taking that first waking breath of the day, that there are people in that exact same moment who are taking their last breath of life. And that makes that moment special. Doesn't mean the sun is going to shine all day. It doesn't mean everything's going to go my way. It could be quite the contrary. But in that moment, I do realize there's something very special. And even sacred about that moment. And then I declare something out loud because, again, 10 seconds can be— you can do a lot in 10 seconds. You can shift many, many things. And one of the fastest ways to shift ourselves physiologically and mentally, emotionally is to actually say something out loud, to hear our own words out loud. And the 4 words that I use to begin the day are, I love my life. I love my life. Jason, I ask you that question. Do you love your life?

I love my life.

Yeah. So you asked those lawyers way back when you said you're happy and they were bouncing all over the place to try and figure out how to answer that question. Can you imagine if you'd said to them, hey, do you love your life?

Yeah. I think they may have just jumped out the window, literally or figuratively. Like, I do think that that probably would have Really startled them because, I mean, that question on its own, it seemed like for many of them no one had ever asked them, which is just, again, like we talked about, it's just crazy. But that's a great question, dude. And I agree with you, 10 seconds. And I think that saying it out loud when you can is more helpful than keeping it in your head for any of these things. Sometimes you just don't have that option, right? But if you can, I think it's definitely a preferential to do it, even if you can't say it loud.

Yeah. I couldn't agree more. Well, listen, again, thank you so much for being a guest on the show. Everybody, I'd love to get your comments and feedback. You can go to adamarkel.com/podcast and leave a comment there. Obviously, you can follow us, subscribe to the podcast. Love that. Love to get your feedback. You can join us on our Facebook page at Start My Pivot or startmypivot.com. You can get to the front door of that page as well. Either way, just so appreciate your time today. Really appreciate you. Feel very grateful. Thank you. That you're a part of this community, and I'll say ciao for now. Thanks.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have the tools and greater insights to navigate your own pivot. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com/podcasts. For more tips, strategies, and support as you consciously pivot into a new business and lifestyle you For more of the stories you love, join our Pivot community on Facebook at pivotfb.com. Pivot.