#95: Operationalizing Courage: Your Business’ Ultimate Competitive Advantage with Ryan Berman

Thanks for having me, man. I appreciate being here with you.

I gotta say that it's an amazing I read your bio, a blessing for me to be able to read it because there's a few tongue twisters.

Sorry about that.

No, no, that's totally okay. What I'd love to know, and I know our community loves this as well, is what's not written? What's sort of in between the lines of that bio that you'd love for people to know about you? 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, 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.

I'm just trying to figure it out like everybody else. You read a bio and it sounds so perfectly in ink, like you have it all figured out. And that's 20 years of work. You know what's not in the bios? Ryan Berman fumbled and failed over and over again. For years, you know, like that part gets left out of the bio. And, uh, but those failures are sort of— they're just experiences that I've been able to use to figure out my what's next as well. So, you know, what's between the lines is just there's so much more there. You just— all of you just— I loved how you started even the show, like, appreciate all of who I am, the good and the bad. There really is no bad, really. The imperfections are what make us who we are. And I totally agree with that, that open as well.

Yeah. Well, look, life is— it's not neat. It's not necessarily orderly. I mean, and I'm not somebody that even requires that, so to speak. I've been known to leave a messy room or a messy situation in my life. I've created some of those and all that. So, I don't need it personally to be so neat and orderly, but I crave the certainty. I mean, this is something you and I were chatting about just before we hit the record button is how Certainty is something that maybe we all as human beings sort of crave on some level, that security. And so to let go of the requirement and even the, quote, need for security and safety is not an easy thing to do. And I'll say this, I believe in my core that it's something— it's the journey that I'm on and I think we're all on, is this ability to let go and trust. And to live in faith. And I don't mean spiritually even, even though that's certainly a part of my existence, but just the ability to know we're, we're all okay no matter what. You and I were chatting about that. What's your thoughts on that, on the sort of the need for security and safety and knowing what's, you know, ahead, so to speak?

I think there are places in life where we should be certain, and there are other places in life we should be okay with not knowing. I do think there's a clarity epidemic happening right now, and I think there are ways to help people best understand who they are. If one of the things I've found myself saying quite a bit is, if you don't know what you stand for, you'll never know when to take a stand. Well, that's one place where I think we should be certain. We should have certainty and clarity in certain places. And then, and then know, like, as much as I wish I could control outcomes, there's so much out of my control, so much out of our control. All you can do is try to understand who you are, who you choose to surround yourself with, what sort of journeys you go off of, go on to, and then, you know, the rest is sort of out of your control. Like, I love how you said life is a bit messy. It's— someone once said to me, life is short, but it's very wide too. I like the idea of like wherever that may take me, I'm at peace because I know who I am now.

I want to circle back to clarity epidemic. That's a turn of phrase you don't hear all the time. What do you mean by clarity epidemic? Right.

I think, again, when I talk about courage, often I'm talking about it from a corporate courage standpoint, but the irony there is like, what is a business but just a shell of people? What I mean by clarity epidemic is right now more than ever, I think people don't totally know themselves the way that they should. One of the earlier interviews that I had the opportunity to run was with a woman named Loretta Hidalgo. She's a founding astronaut at Virgin Galactic. The world is a funny place. Literally a month into my journey on writing this book about courage, which I'm like, well, I'm not really sure what this word really totally means, and part of this is to come up with the definition of it. So the universe delivers Loretta to me as one of the very first interviews, and of course it's in person, and no more than 10 seconds into the interview, she says, what makes you qualified to write a book about courage? Touché, astronaut, right? It's like, she's like, no, no, no, no, like, you need to— she's like, you need to go figure out why you're the perfect person. To go tell this story. And then she proceeds to tell me her definition of success is when there's no daylight between the professional her and the personal her. That interview was in Orange County. I live in San Diego. You can imagine my drive back in silence. It was like me and my 2 knuckles on the drive, on the steering wheel, as I drove back down to San Diego and started to figure out what this concept of courage really was about. And it is, it's about finding yourself and knowing yourself. And one of the big aha moments I had on the word itself is that courage is a journey word. You kind of need it when you're in the messy and in the muck to get to something meaningful. Doing something meaningful in your life to me is more of the destination. And so how are you gonna know yourself well enough to at least do your best to impact whatever that future looks like?

Yeah, I mean, this is sort of where we were taking the conversation before we started the actual podcast because you asked me about I don't think you knew I was a lawyer for 18 years. And then when I told you that, you had a kind of a reaction. You remember what you said to me?

I said, you're well protected. Yeah.

And I digressed into saying, yeah, I've lived a guarded— part of my journey has been to be able to not be so guarded. I've lived a pretty good guarded life. And when I was 18 years in that profession, I didn't just guard myself and my family, I guarded my clients. This idea of well protected really dropped in for me. What did you mean about that? I sort of went off that way and I was curious, what were your thoughts on what does it mean to be well guarded?

Yeah, I think it means to feel somewhat, from a perception standpoint, your definition, some version of safety. And sometimes that safety, it feels good. And your audience doesn't know my background. So my last life, I ran a 70-person creative agency. And to be honest, I felt like a 5th-year senior walking around the hallways of my own company where I really couldn't make the impact and the change, or I chose not to for whatever reason. I felt well protected. I felt it was safe, but I didn't feel like I was doing something at the level that I was really going to make my mark. And for a show called Pivot, the Conscious Pivot, as I pivoted to my next— I feel very much alive right now, even though there's not a lot of proof That what I'm going to do next is going to work. It's going to be adopted.

Yeah. I think this is the reason this showed up in the show anyhow at this moment because our community is filled with people who are either sort of mid-career and considering, am I going to go the extra 50 yards to the finish line or the goal line, right? Or am I going to pivot? Am I going to transition? And then there's a lot of people already in their pivot at some point beginning, middle, or We're ready to pivot again kind of thing. And there's no question that for me, as I was transitioning out of practicing law, I would say yes, I was well protected. That feeling insulated, that actually felt claustrophobic to me. And I think that's probably the way it felt or feels to a lot of folks. I want to ask you that direct question, whether that's a little bit about why you moved out of the more traditional space of running a company. Or in a sort of an executive role and then wanting to go out and create something, do something that was yours. I mean, you were— you definitely kind of expanded the size of the box. I think we're always living in a box, but, you know, it's small, insulated, protected, and that's a good thing on some level. And then at some point when you feel maybe like those walls are closing in or that you're not able to expand You do something about it. So tell us about where you were when that happened, when that dropped in, because that must have been a shock to you and maybe even some folks around you that you were going to leave what was the kind of the brass ring for, for a time.

Well, the irony, right? I'm here, I am writing a book about courage, right? And the real question is, am I going to live the premise really authentically, or is it going to be fake? And I think unfortunately that's the Don't lie to yourself. Like, how do you start? By just having the honest conversation with yourself and being like, am I really living out the life that I thought I would live at the level that I thought I would live? I was walking around the hallways of my own company. I felt like— and by the way, I think this happens to a lot of creators. Like, let's talk about the first maybe unconscious pivot with growth. You go from— sometimes you go from creator to manager and you're like, well, I love creating. It's not that I don't love I don't love people, 'cause I do, but I know when I became like a manager and I hired smartly and I had people running that didn't need me, 'cause they got it, they got it, I empowered them, something changed for me. And I was like, you know what, this isn't— I'm not making the impact that I wanna make at the level I wanna make it. So the joke, of course, is if you're gonna write a book about courage, you sort of have to live the premise, right? I thought I was writing this book to deviously position my last creative company, and it gave me the courage to fire myself.

I love what you said, that in some ways when you write a book, it forces you to live, to live it.

Yeah,

I think that's— it's, it's the courage to do it, but it's also what then shows up as a result of it. So not only did you, you know, have the courage to sort of make that departure, but after making the departure, I think that's probably when the courage really starts to begin. So for me, leaving the law was the huge decision, but it was the pivots that happened afterward that required me to actually live into the book that we had written and put out in the world. And that still is the case. So yeah, I mean, you're probably called to courage a lot, and more so now than even before you wrote the book. Is that accurate or no?

Totally accurate. And again, now that I believe it, state it and create it, right? State it and create it. Like, get it out of your head and spout it somewhere, tell someone you love, put it on social media. The ultimate is a book that's going to be out in the world for everyone to see. And so, so I— what I like about that is that that book keeps me honest too. What I will say about the book, and I don't know if you felt this way when you were writing your books, but like, I felt like I was writing more of a documentary than a book because I didn't have all the answers. So curiosity sort of took me down all these different paths to see what I could find. But then once the book is out there and you're like, okay, how can I activate this in my own life? One, I thought I was writing the book for one person. You know, I'm a storyteller, so like I study story structure. So every movie and book is primarily the same, right? The hero thinks the treasure is one thing and it turns out to be something entirely different, right? Perfect example. Who did I really write the book for? Who needed the book more than anyone else on the planet? Me. I needed the book.

Yes.

Did I just write a book for myself? How narcissistic does that sound? You know, but like, in some ways, I was the first person that needed this, and it's allowed me to then break out of my last life into this new life.

Yeah, there's great irony in that. I mean, in Joseph Campbell's work on, on the hero's journey, and, and even recently I was reading, uh, Michael Haig. It's actually an Audible, great Audible book called The Hero's Two Journeys, or, or The Two Heroes' Journeys, I think is the actual title. This whole idea that not only is there sort of this outer journey that we can track and see and all that, but there's an inner journey that's happening at the same time on sort of a parallel path, if you will. And sometimes there's this, yeah, this place where there's a disconnect for us in the journey and it calls a lot of things into question. So, I mean, the question that you asked at the very beginning is, what do you stand for? So, what was the moment of truth for you where Here you are, you're running a creative agency, it's your baby, but now you've moved, as I tracked your— what you said, you moved from more the creative side to the management side. You're running a business.

Yeah.

You have this sort of— is it a dark night of the soul? Is it a moment of truth? What are you gonna, you know, where you have to determine for yourself, I'm gonna make a change. And is the question, what do I stand for, a part of that, or is it some other process that you went through?

By the way, like, for your audience, it's not like I'm feeding you questions. Like, we didn't review questions, but like, that is the question. Like, it always comes back to you. And I wish there was a cooler way to talk about values because I found myself saying core values, they're not eye rolls, they're how the exceptional roll. And like, when you understand yourself and you know yourself, then you can like really like actually audit what's going to be a violation of those values. Or not. And when I looked at it, I had multiple partners and I looked at what I was learning from people running really big companies and they weren't sacrificing their souls. They weren't lying to themselves. They figured out a way to really empower the people inside their larger organization. So it wasn't about the size of the organization. It was really about like, is there true conviction for what I'm doing? When it came down to it, the answer was not this way. Not the way we were doing it. And it doesn't mean my partners were bad people or are bad people. It just means it was a violation of my personal values, the way we were going at it, and it didn't feel right to me anymore. And again, I think because I had just spent 1,000 days talking to astronauts and Navy SEALs and CEOs and fear experts, and you throw it all in the soup and you're like, it's right there front and center. And Everything I'm learning from these amazing people, I'm going, I want that. I want that life. I want to design that life, and no one's going to design that life for me if I don't design it. So I remember the moment when I honestly, I went to my business partners and I said, I'm ineffective in this unit the way I want to be, the way I'd like to be effective. Hard conversation to have, but the honest one. And that opened up so many doors. For my what's next. And like I said, this is sort of a great data point because there really is launching this new thing called Courageous, and I've got the Courage Bootcamp coming. But like I said, I have no idea if people will accept it, if we can turn it into something that can help people, and that on the business side that will be monetizable, if I'm honest. But I'd rather try it. Pull the Ryan Berman string. One of the lines I find myself saying is that courage is regret insurance.

Say that again.

Okay. Courage is regret insurance.

Courage is regret insurance. Oh, that's, that's an interesting one. I like that. That is Orionism officially.

It's Orionism. And I like that too, by the way. And so I think if you are having that conversation with yourself, you think you might regret not going for it. Like, you know, you, how long were you? 18 years a lawyer. And so Something maybe inside said, this necessary evil, I want to flip to a necessary good. We need lawyers, so it's not like— that's how I feel about advertising, which was my background. It's like, okay, it feels a little bit like my necessary evil. I know it can be a necessary good, but I would rather put my time into inspiring other people or helping people be better versions. Or how do you take somebody that's stuck and get them unstuck? And that was like the best part of the book writing process was just the research of You're sitting with a guy named Nicholas Alp, who's a Cambridge PhD that studies the way that we're wired. Broke down the central nervous system. And let's talk about these 3 words really quickly. At the core of you, central, is a system, your computer, designed for your nervous tick. Central nervous system. And it's calling the shots. It's calling every shot you make. And it's saying, don't say that. Don't touch that. Don't think that. Don't do that. Don't feel that. And so I was like, well, I wonder if I could help you combat that central nervous system with the central courage system. Like, could I actually hack your central nervous system and give you the tools you need so when you're in a hard situation, your central courage system would take over? Well, that's the premise of the book, is like, is there a way to teach people how to actually operationalize courage in themselves and do it in a way where you almost take the risk out of the risky part of being courageous. Now, you're never going to have all the answers, but that's what my journey's been over the last 3 years is figuring that sort of process out.

Yeah. Ryan, walk us through a little bit of that system. I'm curious in the corporate context, and by that I mean in an organizational context. So, for folks that are listening and you're the organization, you, yourself, and you, it's just as applicable for you as it is for a company that's 50, 100, 10,000 employees. So what does that look like?

Totally agree with that, by the way. Let's start by putting the business and yourself on pause and start with this question. If you had to, and I'm not gonna give you the definition of either yet, so like if you had to guess, is your company more a coward brand or a courage brand?

Interesting.

Okay, if you're gonna put it on the spectrum, where would you put it from coward brand to courage brand?

So we'll say 1 to 5 is coward brand and 6 to 10 is courage brand. Pick a number. Where are you? Is that sort of what you mean?

Yeah, maybe right in the middle. We'll call it like a stasis brand.

Got it. 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, Nora, 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 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 and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are.

So coward, stasis, courage.

So meaning status quo, sort of some maybe equilibrium point, is that what you mean?

Yeah, like stasis, like you're not really taking action at the level that maybe you need to. I mean, one of— and just because we're talking about corporate here, so one of the statistics that set me off on this journey was that over 1 of 2 of the Fortune 500 since 2000 are now extinct.

Say that again. I want to hear this. I want our folks to hear that statistic.

Yeah. So, it's actually 52% of the Fortune 500 since 2000 are now gone.

The Fortune 500 started interestingly enough in 1955. Sometimes I ask people, you know, how many companies were in the Fortune 500? It's like, it's not a trick question, right? Although it appears as one apparently. But yeah, 88% of those companies as of just a couple years ago are extinct or gone. So, yeah, I love this premise. So why, right? Yeah. So, would you take them next?

Yeah, yeah. And so, so the idea is like, well, how could I avoid that? Like, by the way, when you say 52% of the Fortune 500 since 2000 are gone, you go negative first, but the flip is the positive. That means there's opportunity, right? That means spaces are opening up, right? This is good. If you're not in there, this is good news. The question is, and I believe courage of all things, like becoming a courage brand is the sort of the remedy to this particular issue. So there's a price of being a courage brand, and PRICE is actually an acronym. PRICE is my— the 5 steps to becoming a courage brand. PRICE stands for prioritize, rally, identify, commit, and execute. And when you go back to prioritize, the first step is prioritize your values. So again, it's going back to understanding ourselves And just to sort of seesaw between, you know, I've already talked a little bit about core values that are not high roles or how the exceptional role, but with the audience, how old they are, millennials may miss this, but my favorite movie growing up was Jerry Maguire. I love this movie. And there was, you know, okay, so I don't know who's gonna get this, who isn't gonna get this, but there are 3 amazing lines in Jerry Maguire, right?

Okay.

Good. One, there was, show me the money. This is a great line. I have no— anyone have a problem with show me the money? Nobody has a problem with

show me

the money.

Show me the money. The Kwan.

2 was, uh, you had me at hello, which is a sweet line. And then 3 was, you complete me. And I think you complete me screwed my entire generation. I don't believe in you complete me. I believe in me complete me. I believe in you complement me. But I think when you compromise too much, eventually you become compromised. And so I like the idea Going back to values is knowing yourself fully. And this whole you complete me idea that you need someone else to complete you is a fallacy. I think it's me complete me.

Yes, that's utter nonsense for sure. And it becomes a burden to the people around you because when you require either your most intimate partners or friends or anyone else to complete you,

yeah,

yeah, you're giving them a task they can't handle. They have a hard enough task just handling themselves.

Totally.

Let's call BS on that. Great Hollywood line for sure. It's so ridiculously ironic. As you said earlier, Ryan, we didn't plan any of this out, but this is sort of the universe in full— or maybe not full glory, but we get a little peek of what this is like. So the TED Talk that we've got is all about 4 words that have the capacity to change things for ourselves. So the premise or the through line of the talk I gave in Lake Tahoe was, what if you decided to love your life no matter what? And the origin of that, the origin story for this whole I love my life thing, which has become part of our brand and a movement really in many ways towards self-love, so toward this idea of how it is that you love yourself first so that you complete you, just as you said, right? The origin of that is Jerry's mentor in the movie. Do you remember the guy's name?

Oh gosh, I totally forgot his name. I remember—

Just pops out of your head, right?

What's his name?

His name is Dickie Fox.

Dickie Fox.

So Dickie Fox says at this certain point, he's talking about how he— his philosophy of life, of business, and relationships. He said, I love my life and I love my wife and I wish you my kind of success, right? And that was, I think, 1993 or '94. Our kids were really, really young. I think Chelsea was 2 and Lindsay was just born. I was just getting out of law school. And I remember seeing that and thinking, man, I want to love my life. I want to love my life. That's— I want to love my life. And it wasn't until maybe 10 years later that as I'm putting my feet on the floor in the morning and just dreading what I'm going to do for the day, just the money was great, the prestige or the respect was great. Like, I was fully insulated. Like you said, I was well protected and yet I'm putting my feet on the floor feeling this dread and thinking, I can't say honestly I love my life because 8, 10, 12 hours of the day, I kind of hate my life.

Yeah.

And when 55% of the people who are in a job are looking, actively looking for another job, there's a lot of people kind of hating significant portions of their life. So, that's a tough thing to admit. Oh, I don't like my life. But people will readily say, you know, I just hate my job. I hate my boss. I hate what I'm doing for a living. And so, there's no question that to have the courage to be able to do something about that starts with who you are. Yeah. So, prioritize being the first step in that to get clear on your values. It's a huge starting point for— it was for me and clearly it was for you as well.

Yeah, and I wonder if you polled the country, you got 320 million of us here, how many have actually run a personal core values assessment on themselves and truly has done the hard work to know themselves and, and can prioritize the values and then obviously live the values that they're emoting. So even for myself, you know, I mean, playfulness is my number one core value of all things. I take my work seriously, but I don't take myself that seriously. I like to play. I want to play around. I want to have a good time while we're here. We're not here that long. So to me, I do really, really well with other people that are playful. And when I run into super serious birds, it's okay. I just recognize that we're wired differently. That's okay too. They've got to go find their people. For me, I do really, really well when I find my people. And which that kind of leads to the second step of price, which is it's rally believers. So I think you even make believers or fake believers and Corporate world, by the way, fake believers, they don't wear a t-shirt that says fake believer, right? They just sort of nod and smile and collect the paycheck. And then like you said, that 55% is looking for another job, hoping to be fulfilled and doing something else. And I will say from a corporate standpoint, when it comes to rallying believers, I like the concept of leadership. I think we need great leaders now more than ever, but I think poor leaders Turn leadership into cheerleadership and they start rah-rahing to their team and maybe there's— they think their team needs a pick-me-up. Basically, they're kind of lying to the team versus like authentically giving people the truth of what's going on there. And cheerleadership may work with part of the staff, but the people that are really doing the work are gonna be like, hey, that's BS. That's like, give it to me straight. I'd rather have the truth from you. And like I said, I like the word believership. Like, I think the Believership, the sole goal of the Believership is to make believers out of your staff, make believers out of your board, make believers out of customers. And I just think it keeps you honest. It like reminds you the whole goal of Believership is to make believers and find your raftmates in life. And I love this concept of raftmates, by the way. Yeah.

Raftmates. Say more about that.

Yeah. I mean, again, I think there's only so many spots on the raft. You know, too many people on the raft, that thing's gonna sink. If we're not communicating, people are gonna be rowing in the wrong direction.

Mm-hmm.

So find your raftmates. Like, who are the 5 to 7 people you can really trust in this world that are part of your raft? And go back to where we were before about even myself. Like, I felt like I was in a pretty comfortable raft and I was afraid to jump back into the cold water. I knew it wasn't the right raft for me anymore and I had to go find the right raft. Or create the right raft. And to me, that's what it's all about.

It's a great visual. I love it. I love anything that kind of touches on the water for whatever reason. I'm a Pisces, so that comes up. But—

Me too. When's your birthday?

March 19th.

March 2nd. Full Pisces.

Look at that, brother.

I love it.

Yeah, I love it. Always reasons for things. Yeah, you know, Simon Sinek had a big part of his book Start With Why talk about that people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And so that whole idea of believership It's paramount, paramount both internally as well as externally and how the market feels intuitively, feels into what you're doing and whether or not it resonates with them. So yeah, let's get the I as the next in the acronym. So

yes, yes. So again, it starts with know yourself, find your people, right? Prioritize through values, rally believers. And then we get into the heavy stuff. It's about identifying fears. And again, like you said it perfectly at the beginning, Whether this is something happening in corporate life or your home life, there's this famous proverb that fear and courage are brothers, that you actually can't get to the courageous choice without first channeling it through fear. Most of us, like, the last thing we want to do is address fear. We, in fact, we suppress fear. So this is flipping it. This is like, you actually— I want you to have more fear in your life. Understand what the fear is, smoke it out, identify it. As a Seinfeld fan, I like to say I'm in the fear shrinkage business, by the way, now. So like, you know, it's like, let's help people actually figure out what fears are in front of them and to put it into a business context. I mean, this is covered in the book, but the way that I'm looking to audit fear, I think is a better way to SWOT. I guess, I don't know if you remember the SWOT analysis.

Sure.

Which has somehow survived 60 years as our standard.

Utterly amazing. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats.

Yeah.

So yeah.

And so the idea here is what if we looked at fears like that? So

I'm

looking at industry fears, we're looking at product fears, we're looking at perception fears, which is pretty much just marketing. And then we're also looking at personal fears. So again, if you can bring your full self to work, then you can actually be vulnerable and talk about the things that keep you up at night, which is, hey, am I gonna be on an island by myself if I recommend this? Like, who's really got my back? Unfortunately, in the office, you're even part of a watch-your-back culture or you're in a got-your-back culture. And obviously, if you're in a watch-your-back culture, then it's probably gonna be very hard to share those personal fears. But if you're in a got-your-back culture, then you can actually share, hey, yeah, guess what? I don't wanna get axed for this. Are we really all in this together?

Right.

And business is so hard enough as it is right now. There's so much competition, the business apocalypse. is very, very real. Like, the last thing you need is another war going on inside your own leadership team. So it's like, find your people and then address what could keep you up at night, and then actually start to identify those fears so you can shrink them down, down the line.

Yeah, agreed. Let's fill out the, uh,

price. Sure. So C is commit to a purpose. I thought you nailed it perfectly, Simon. So Simon's my old, you know, he's my old colleague of mine from our New York days, and it's— I love watching what he's done. He's Just so on top of his game. I agree that, like, knowing your why is critical. So 75% of our workforce are going to be millennials in the next decade. They wear their values on their sleeves. They vote with their dollars. So not only do you need to know your why, but I think you have to inject a rally cry in your why. Like, you have to actually put a rally cry in the why for people to actually stick around. And so really figuring out what that purpose is— why are you doing the things that you're doing? This is not a marketing There is no silo between your purpose as a company and how you react to the universe. CVS is a great example. I don't know if you remember, their whole purpose was putting you on a path for better health. Well, they had cigarettes that they were selling in their stores. Well, how is that going to help somebody be healthy?

Yes.

So they pulled it. They pulled the cigarettes from all of their stores because it was on purpose. And by the way, society rewarded them with their stock price. That was their ultimate return on courage, was their stock price went through the roof. But to me, like, this is not a marketing thing. Like, what's the purpose? Why are we here? How are we going to help people be better versions of themselves? And to me, it's putting a rally cry in your why so people want to follow you with something that's truthful and emotional and purposeful. And then finally, it needs to also be differential, which are sort of the 4 pillars of a truthful purpose.

Yes. Reminded of that Starbucks situation that happened recently last April. the arrest. You can imagine you're Kevin Johnson sitting in your office feeling pretty good about your company and stock price and everything else. You get a phone call that says, manager at a Starbucks in Philadelphia arrests 2 people. Not just 2 people, arrests 2 African-American guys for no apparent reason, for using the bathroom. You know, talk about something coming up. And the guy, contrary to what was probably a lot of conventional wisdom given to him, as in, look, we're being threatened with a lawsuit, we're under threat, We're a public company. You know, let's do an investigation. Let's figure some stuff out, but definitely don't make any too much of a public statement here. And certainly don't do anything that indicates that we've done anything wrong. You know, classic lawyer advice. Play it safe, or at least be defensive. He gets on national TV the next morning, gets on, I think it was Good Morning America, to not deny, not blame, not justify, but to do the opposite. Talk about a guy with a certain amount of, you know, cojones, courage to stand up and be heard on the topic and say, listen, this is unacceptable. This can never and should never happen at one of our stores. And we're going to get to the bottom of it. We're going to look at it. We're going to resolve it. We're going to do something about it. We don't know exactly what yet, but we will figure that part out. And sure enough, 2 months later, they resolved the dispute. With these 2 gentlemen in a very amicable way, partnering on some training and some things, and then they closed down 8,000 stores, which to the tune of about $11 million it cost them to close those stores for 4 hours for unconscious bias training. You know, the idea that it's not just overt bias that we've got to be looking at, but what possibly is in the fabric of the company, in the culture of the company even, that's on an unconscious level. That is unacceptable. And so the guy put the money where the mouth is, reputation on the line, and said, look, we stand for something more important, and this is just unacceptable. So I think the return on courage was the same for them, and something I definitely respected how he handled it. There was a creative— and it's interesting because you brought up fear and hacking fear and fear experts and things. I mean, this is something that they very well could have responded to or reacted out of fear. And that would have been a more conventional path to a threat. But instead, what they did was they found a creative opportunity. I would say were looking for a creative opportunity and found it and then utilized it to a great degree to not only resolve things, but also to, I think, make the brand stronger in the process.

Yeah, and again, it's in that moment of courage, right, where There's a story that needs to be addressed and how you choose to respond to it. And again, we're going all the way back to where we started. Like, this is the value of values, right? If your values are CYA values or just-in-case values, right, and that's all you choose to use them for, you've missed the point of what values are there for. Values should be there to like drive the decisions in a company, drive your hiring decisions in your company. It should be on performance reviews. And so I imagine if you're in that role as CEO of Starbucks, you're also thinking about the tens of thousands of your employees and their backgrounds and where his staff is coming from and is thinking through, I'm being watched not just from financial stakeholders but stakeholders in the company, my employees, and what are they going to think of this situation? That's the joy of courage, I think, is having— when I talk about the clarity epidemic, in that particular situation, having the clarity to know What is the right move for that company to make is critical.

Exactly. And then ultimately executing on that level of clarity, he got to the execution piece, which is the last equation, so to speak.

Yeah. And price, the E is execute your action. And it's almost like the do or do not, there is no try. Yeah. To steal from Yoda a little bit.

Yoda move, right?

I don't think I ever shared my definition of courage. This is covered in the book Return on Courage as well. My definition of courage Is knowledge plus faith plus action. And it has to be all 3. So when you're in a moment where you think, okay, maybe this is an opportunity to unlock a little bit of courage again, in business, you're never going to have every bit of knowledge you need to make a call, which is why faith kicks in. And when we talk about faith, we're not, like you said, we're not talking about religion. We're talking about something inside you, this inner belief. And when the knowledge goes up, usually the faith goes up, but then At the end of the day, even sometimes when you know what to do, we don't pull the trigger. So that's the action piece. And by the way, 2 of 3 in any direction, not courage. So knowledge and faith with no action is paralysis, right? Faith and action without knowledge is reckless. When I talk to my mom sometimes, she's like, oh, that's courageous. She means stupid, right? Yeah. So we have the wrong idea of what courage is. And part of the reason is like, okay, knowledge plus faith plus action. And by the way, knowledge and action without faith, if you don't feel that thing on the inside, you're probably working on status quo. You're probably working on safe.

So it

needs to be all 3, knowledge, faith, and action. And so Execute Your Action talks about how to help companies actually take the action that they need wherever they're looking to make change inside of their organization.

Yeah. Without action, nothing ever changes. And then you are in fact either individually or organizationally working on the status quo, literally defending the status quo, which is defending stagnation and ultimately stagnation leads to death. So to circle back to what you said earlier, why is it that 52% of the Fortune 500 are gone since 2000? It's because they've probably been working on protecting the status quo. And that was a question I wanted to ask you. So I've my answer to that, but I'll ask you if you could pin it down to one reason why those companies don't exist anymore. Why is that?

I think it— well, again, I'm now mirroring your answer, which was an awesome answer. It's fear of taking action. It's fear of losing what you already have. And so you don't put in any processes to create what tomorrow could look like. And as a creative guy, it's hard to admit the importance of process. But if we're not creating any process or we're not creating any infrastructure to figure out tomorrow, you will get passed or you will die.

Yep. Well, I mean, I think if there was one thing more than anything about our book Pivot that— and I say our because it's a team effort, as you well know, not just to produce a book but to market it, to continue to convey messages to people. So I definitely feel blessed that we've got a team behind it. The one thing more than anything else is the fact that it's a process book. I didn't start out to write a process book, but it turned out to be that— Because without that foundation of how it is that things, sort of the steps that you take along the path, even starting with I'm not clear, to go back to your essential question, what do you stand for? There are a lot of people right now listening to this who couldn't answer that question adequately for themselves.

Yeah.

What do I stand for? And so, that level of clarity is kind of a fundamental and foundational thing as opposed to where people want more often than not to start in their pivots, in the changes they want to make. in their lives, they want to start with a strategy and want to start with a plan. And it's like, well, you can't get to the planning stage or the strategy stage until you start using a process like, what do you need to get clear on? And fundamentally, your values is— Yeah. You explain what price means. To get clear on your values as a starting point is essential. So, we want to kind of wrap things up by asking you a question about your own rituals because somebody that's practicing courage on a daily basis and Wrote a book about it, both because it was your journey to that point and ironically, as the case is, you write a book about courage, the universe just says, hey, I'm going to give you more and more reasons to demonstrate courage, to learn about courage, to model and be congruent with this thing that you've written about. So, what are the rituals that kind of hold you and keep you in momentum day to day?

Sure. Yeah. I'll tell you one very simple ritual. that any listener can do, and it'll happen once a day if they follow this. And I— and by the way, my fears, because you start to look at— you start using your own process, right, to go through your own situation. So my fears— I had 2 big fears writing a book in general. One was, in my head, I was the least qualified person in my family to write a book. So I had to get over that fear. And then the second is, as a guy that's made a living writing pithy one-liners hiding behind a laptop. I had a hard time writing a book about courage. What could be more courageous than a guy punching away at his laptop, right, as I'm interviewing astronauts

and Navy SEALs?

Like, okay, but like I said, I recognized as a storyteller that this was a story that needed to be told now. What I did to get me over that was every morning when my alarm went off on my phone, you can actually change the label On your phone. I'm going off of iPhone for the record. Every morning that my alarm goes off, the message that I tell myself is liberate with courage. And I needed to train myself to see that where it became a ritual for me. Every day I was writing the book, I saw liberate with courage when I woke up. Liberate with courage. Trying to train my unconscious brain, train myself where I saw it so many times that it became second nature. And I habitualized it. It's the core values of Courageous that I see when I wake up. But whatever it is that you're going through, like, go into your phone. This is where technology is so good. Go into your phone. What's the message that you need to see for yourself? You know, for you, it's like, help people pivot every day. Help people pivot. It's just a trigger. And for me, it's a very simple thing. Now, that means you have to have clarity, right? You got— we're back to clarity again. on the thing that you know you need in your life. But when you have that, then it's hard to take action unless you sort of ritualize it and habitualize it. So for me, that's a very simple way that I go about attacking my problems.

Once again, couldn't ask for a better lead. Like, you're handing me the baton. It's the perfect, perfect segue. Not only to first and foremost to thank you for your time today, thank you for the great conversation. I so thoroughly enjoyed this. I know our listeners that this community is going to really enjoy this, not just enjoy it as in great conversation, but great triggers for thought and self-awareness. Where we are in this moment, I think, is powerful, especially when we get a little clue as to how— what else is there to think about, or what other ways can we approach a situation that we haven't yet come up with on our own. So thank you for your insights today. Thank you.

Thanks, man. I'm so happy to be here. I wish I could be there in studio with you. I always love spending time with you. So, this was a joy.

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. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. This is a joy. I will say as we depart, the way we began was with gratitude and I always have to bookend this because it's the most powerful ritual in my own life. So, to ritualize and habitualize anything, it's gratitude for me. And that starts exactly where you start, brother. That's what I loved about what you said, Ryan, was just how important the waking ritual is. Not just the morning ritual where people focus on those first few hours, which is key for sure, but those first few seconds when we're coming out of our subconscious or unconscious state and into a waking state and what you say in that moment. So tomorrow when we all get to wake up, which is, we know, not guaranteed, like, let's get clear about this. There was no guarantee we were going to wake up today and that we were blessed, lucky, fortunate, however you want to look at it. We got to wake up today. If we get to wake up tomorrow, it's nothing to be taken for granted. It's something to be profoundly grateful for. In fact, in that moment that we're taking that first breath, and I say when we are taking that first breath tomorrow, there'll be people who are taking their last breath. That's the reality of it, like it or not. There'll also be probably thousands of babies that are being born, taking their first breath of life, coming into this world. It is on some level a very special, sacred, holy moment. And in that moment that is that important, we can create a thought, a thought of gratitude. And if for any reason you have trouble with this, the way that I operationalize self-love for me and operationalized my pivot and have continued to operationalize the ongoing pivots in my life is to have this thought and to put this thought out into the, into the field of things that I want to see grow in my own life by saying these words: I love my life. I love my life. I love my life. So thank you so much, everybody. Thank you so much, Ryan, for your time today. It's been a— My pleasure. A true joy and a ton of fun. Everybody have a great rest of your day. If you haven't yet left a review of one of our podcasts, please feel free to leave a review on iTunes. You can go to adamarkel.com/podcast, leave a comment. We're thrilled to respond to you there. You can go to startmypivot.com and join our Facebook community that's growing. Tons of people just like yourself, people who've got questions about their next pivot, the micro pivots, the larger things that are changing in their world. They just want to Be in a community of like-minded and like-hearted people. That's a great place, startmypivot.com. We'll see you there and we'll see you soon. Ciao. Bye-bye, everybody.

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/podcast. For more tips, strategies, and support, support as you consciously pivot into a new business and lifestyle you love, join our Pivot community on Facebook at pivotfb.com.