220 - Unleashing Financial Independence: The Rise of a Real Estate Investment Business with Rise Capital Investments' Emma Powell

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Emma Powell, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the founder of a number of companies, but we're going to keep it really simple. You're the founder of Rise Capital Investments, which can be found at risecapitalinvestments.co. Welcome to Listening with Leaders.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Doug. This is such a great platform for getting leaders together and just learning from one another. It's a soft skill that's not really taught in school. And it's something that we go by feel. And I love that we're putting a little bit more conscious attention to it.

Thanks. It is actually a skill that can be learned and mastered in about 8 weeks, listening skills, which is it. And that's what I do. That's, I teach people leadership empathy and how to be a strong, confident leader by learning how to listen. So. That's my thing. But we're not here to talk about me. We're here to talk about you. So what I want to do is find out a little bit about your backstory, who you are, and how the heck did you get into the business of investing?

It all started when, after we started homeschooling our kids, and I felt like we had a lot of time freedom where we could be running around doing what we wanted to be doing. I had a real estate and wedding photography business at the time, but my husband still had a W-2 where he commuted downtown into an office. And so I really felt like that W-2 was holding us back from really having true time and location freedom. And so I was always bugging him about, let's go travel full-time. Let's just go on an adventure. Let's move abroad. Let's buy an RV, whatever I could come up with. I have a high novelty-seeking personality, ADHD. And he just said, if you can figure out a way to pay for it, I'm on board. But he felt the pressure of supporting 6 kids and a wife and basically having to— he took that very seriously, even though he is very adventurous. I used to call him the Mountain Dew boy when we first met, because he was always spontaneous and running off to do something. But that pressure of supporting a family and being mostly the sole provider, he really did take that seriously. And I think that as he approached middle age, it was just basically getting to the point where I felt like it was getting in the way of us living life and being chained to a desk. As he got laid off from that job and we suddenly moved across country and had to rediscover ourselves. And so then I realized I didn't want to restart my photography business. It was just too labor intensive. It was more of me trading my time for money. And so because we had done well on the house that we sold in Texas, I decided to take most of the profit from that house and go and start a real estate investing business. There's something about where we moved from Austin into Salt Lake City, a lot of real estate investors and they had a lot of meetups. And so as I was going to business networking events, I was running into so many real estate investors and learning about what they're doing. So I joined some of their local clubs and once I got that glimmer in my eye of this could be part-time work for me that could not only make it so I can spend more time with my kids, my homeschool kids, but actually could retire my husband and we go on an adventure. And so I really got excited at that point that we could both be working part-time, retire early, and travel around on passive income. And I thought, let's go down this rabbit hole. So 6 years later, here we are.

And 6 years later, you are having a sufficient passive income to be able to do whatever you want, and you don't live anywhere. You travel with your kids in probably a very large RV.

They wish it was bigger.

They would.

We've got, we've got 3 of them with us.

Pretty much.

Yeah.

And just out of curiosity, where are you calling in from today?

We are just outside of Dallas, Texas. We actually bought an RV park on Lake Fork. It's a trophy bass fishing lake, one of the best lakes in the world for bass fishing. And so we picked up an RV park here last— late last year, and the solar eclipse went right over it. And I saw that on the map and I said, let's take our RV out there and do the property takeover in person. And get to enjoy watching the eclipse because we were planning on being here for the eclipse anyway. So it was just— it ended up working out very coincidentally, or depending on what you believe, some higher power telling us like, this is where we need to be right now.

So you go from being a wedding photographer to becoming a real estate investment person. That sounds like a journey and a learning curve.

Oh, yeah.

How did you make that happen?

I was actually sitting in a real estate investing conference and it was called Raising Capital. So raising investor capital. And I knew a lot about that because my husband worked in the startup space. And so there was a lot of angel seed and early venture capital coming into those businesses. And I have a degree in entrepreneurial management. So a lot of that degree was spent on how to fund a business through those early phases with the angels up to VCs. And so I knew raising capital from investors, I had, I had invested in a few things myself. I knew it was a thing, but I, so I'm like, I need to learn how to raise capital for real estate. So we wanna do commercial real estate. Unless you are wealthy enough to pay for it by yourself, you have to do something called syndication, which means you basically just join forces with other people. Somebody's got to sign on the loan with a high net, a high enough net worth. Somebody has to be putting the money in. So you have limited partners or investors who put in the down payment. Somebody has to be managing the property. That was me as the asset manager, and I didn't know how to raise capital and I was struggling to fund the deals that I found because I was not that good at raising money. So I went to a conference on raising money and it was all about marketing. And I remember saying that I'm a marketer, I have a graphic design certificate, I have an information design background. I used to teach online courses about— for graphic design. And what I basically did for all the companies I worked for was marketing content management. And I sat there thinking, I already do all of this. So I'm just going to become a capital raiser. Wasn't really very good at the asset management part of things, like the day-to-day property management kind of stuff. I found it to be annoying. I just want people to solve their problems, more of that CEO mindset. Where I'm like, we pay you to do this. Why are you asking me what color the carpet should be or what to do about this problematic tenant? I just really wanted to keep them on track at a high level. And I had so many properties at that point that the asset management meetings were just eating me alive and I was still having to raise capital because if I wanted to expand, I had to go buy a new property and raise more capital. And finally I thought all the rules changed for raising capital in 2015 and 2021, and I thought, I'm just going to become a full-time capital raiser. There are people out there who are much better at managing these large assets than I am. And I'm talking about retirement. I got one foot out the door. That's absolutely not someone that you want doing the day-to-day on your property. So I met people who were just doing a fantastic job on the management side, and I thought, I just wanna raise money for your deals. And so we started a fund, a syndicated fund. Basically it's through the SEC, you know, FINRA regulated. We file our Form D, all of that. And now I just raise capital full-time. To put into deals where people are really capable.

And so you find deals where you already have asset managers in place, or do you have to put asset managers in place?

No, basically when you raise capital, if anybody who's in the startup space raises capital, people come to you with amazing deals because they know that you can get it done. Whether you're a lender or you're an equity raiser, it doesn't really matter. If you have the ability to bring in capital, people just bring you deals. And so what I found was when I was looking for my own deals, I was having to sift a lot through the garbage that wholesalers or brokers or talking to sellers directly, like the owners directly. And I was doing much smaller deals. And but when I started raising capital and getting the word out there that I want to look at your deal and see if we want to bring capital into it, the deals that were coming in to me were already screened. They were already under contract, they were already going through due diligence, and they were just much higher quality deals. But I had about the same amount of them. So instead of screening through, trying to find the needle in the haystack, Suddenly I was screening through— most of them were at least base hits and I could really screen for the home runs instead.

And when we're talking about what dollar volume are we talking about, what kind of valuations are we talking about?

The largest deal that we're in, we brought in maybe $500,000 to $1,000,000, but that was a $70 million property. So it has a lot of investors in it. And so we try to do between $500,000 to $2 million per property. Our current fund that we're filling right now is $15 million and we're about a third of the way into that. And so that should take us probably about another year. And then we'll start another fund after that, that will be much larger because once you get the word out, you scale.

Once you have these funds created, how are they managed? They've got to be managed financially, but they also have to— you have a physical asset that has to be managed.

How do you— correct.

They set up an LLC and the LLC hires people to do the management side of it.

Yes. So we have what we call the difference between property management and asset management. So property management is the property manager who has a leasing agent there, who's walking it, picking up of trash, hiring the maintenance guy. So that's property management. And then you have asset management is a step higher than that, where we make sure that the property manager— we're managing the managers, right? And also the owners who, or the sponsors who are managing that property, they're doing more asset management than we are. We're just making sure that the financials are sound, that there's no funny business going on, that it's being managed in a way that is sound and has good business practices. And that's where me being a former asset manager, former owner come in important because now I have the experience to know what a well-managed property should look like. And if they need any help, we can step in and offer assistance in any way. And so that helps us to be on top of what's going on, even though we don't have every single detail under it with people we trust to have the details and then they do the property management.

And then you're looking at the 50,000-foot level, looking at everything.

Yes, exactly.

How does everybody make money on this deal? Your investor, you and your investors, is it asset growth or income or both?

That's a really good question because to be able to be fully transparent, you need to know someone's revenue model. If you don't know how they make money and you're feeling like, what exactly are they trying to sell me here? That really is not a way to engender trust. And that relationship between an investor and the person who's placing or managing their money is really important. So you need to know where that revenue is driven from. So that should be a question that everybody asks. How do you make your money? Why are you out here spending your time and energy and effort doing this? So on the investor side, we'll start there. They make money when the asset performs. So basically they will have a stated rate of return. We have two options. They can either invest as a lender, which means basically like a hard money loan where they're putting money in and they're getting a stated rate of return, an interest rate. And that is something that people do when they're just looking for really consistent cash flow and lower risk because the lender is going to get paid before the investor. So if they want to invest equity, that's more like profit sharing. And so there are stated profit sharing splits. So they get the first, say, 7 to 8%. And then after that, the managers and the investors share it at something like an 80/20 or 70/30 split. Just really depends. That's called a waterfall to see like where is this money coming from, who's getting paid what. And there'll also be an asset management fee that's being charged by the fund manager, by the sponsor, like the property manager charges a property management fee. That's an expense that comes before profit. And so there'll be some asset management fees. And the way that we earn our asset management fee is by finding the great deals, placing it. If it's a loan, we do our own loan servicing in-house. So if they need more construction money, we inspect, we release that, we make sure that all the K-1s are done by the end of the year. So that's the management fee on the lending side. And on the equity side, it's basically we're taking a pool of capital that our investors are trusting us with and then using that pool to go and negotiate for better terms. So we're either going to get a higher percentage or we're going to get a higher split, something like that. We want the investors who invest with us to be doing as well as they would be if they invested directly with that sponsor because maybe they didn't know them or they needed us for the introduction. Or in the best case scenario, we want to negotiate a better deal. So if they go through us, they're actually going to get a better deal than if they went to that sponsor directly.

This does not sound like a part-time job. This sounds like a very sophisticated, multi-pronged business that requires a lot of attention.

It does. But that's where the part-time comes in and why I'm not the CEO of my own company. So When we started it, coming from the tech startup world, some of the companies that we worked for or contracted for, once they began to get some scale and grow, the founder would have to step aside and bring in an outside CEO who was supposed to come in, increase the evaluation, and then be able to then get more money from venture capitals. And we were seeing that just wasn't the case. The IPOs were not going as planned, the valuations were not going up as they were predicted, and the CEOs came in to run it and it wasn't their baby and they didn't love the company. And so I started looking into this and I found that companies that maintain their founders as CEOs actually outperform those who the founder steps aside and somebody else comes in. The reason that the founder steps aside is 'cause they don't wanna be CEOs. They're not cut out for it. They're basically inventors and the dreamers and the visionaries, and they're not cut out to be day-to-day operators. And so I thought to myself, I'm not going to start a business, a large scaled business until I have a CEO that I can trust who will love this business like their baby. And so I just looked and looked and looked.. And I thought, I'll either not do it or I'll do it when I find a CEO who can also be a founder. So my co-founder is a CEO and I am more like the, I don't know, just the founder. I take care of the investments. I meet people, I go do stuff like this. The key person of influence, as David Daniel Priestley calls it. And so for me, I felt to run this, all these arms and this complicated thing, I needed somebody who was really dedicated. So the CEO that I'm working with, he's the former CEO of the Times Grocery Stores in Hawaii. So if you've ever traveled there. You see these grocery stores all around. That's a billion-dollar company. He came in, he started investing in some of my real estate deals. And when I saw his personality, how he attacked things, how great he was at managing things, and just basically such a hard worker and so experienced, I thought, this is the guy that I really want to partner with. So we did 4 or 5 deals together just as a— each deal is its own business, right? And I said, hey, do you want to come start a fund? And it took me about 6 months to talk him into it, but I knew that was the key to success, was me not running it.

So is he still in Hawaii?

No, he actually moved to Salt Lake City. That's where I met him. And then his kids were moving to the mainland and he said, I can't, I can't keep my kids in Hawaii. So we've got to move to the mainland so we can be around our grandkids. And so he basically just retired early and was living on his own passive income from private lending. And I said, I'm the multifamily commercial real estate girl and you're the hard money lending guy and a CEO. This is, it was just a perfect combination of what I was looking for. Wow.

So what is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to work?

Working is hard. Living on passive income, you get very spoiled. It ruins you a little bit. And so it really diminishes my work ethic. We're almost 50 and I feel like it's time to maybe start slowing down a little bit. So what really gets me out of bed, even though it's hard, is 6 years ago when we first started in this, there were people who were trying to raise capital from us, like we had some capital to invest. And they wanted it. And so they spent so much time with us educating us, befriending us, and they are still my friends. I at no point did I ever feel like if I don't have money for these people, they're just going to abandon the friendship with me. I felt like it was a good business, um, collaboration, and I learned so much from them, and they were so patient. I invested some money with some, I didn't ever invest with others, but we're still friends. And so that help that they gave me completely changed our lives. And the thought that I could put that out there, free content, free consultations, just all the things that you do to get a business going. I felt like if that can change somebody's life where they're a hard worker, they're earning good money, they, but they don't wanna work until they're 65 years old. They wanna retire early and either go start a nonprofit, spend more time with their family. If they have a large family, sometimes that's the best way you can contribute to the world is by turning out some high-quality adults. Either their kids or their grandkids. And I just found that, that people want to give back. They're so altruistic and they think, oh, if only I didn't have to work 40, 50, 60 hours a week, what would I do with that time? That really moves me because then we're creating kind of an army of philanthropists where I'm teaching people how to get financial freedom, how to retire early and do themselves 2.0. How are they gonna give back? And the people that we work with, are so amazing that way because they're almost there. They're almost ready. They just need a little bit of help to see it and figure it out and make that commitment to becoming financially free, time and location freedom, and then the dream of how they're going to go out and give back. So that, that really excites me.

That's really cool because I've learned that I have had to reinvent myself a number of times. And I think that my legacy project is Prison of Peace, where my co-founder and I started in 2010 training 15 women in the largest, most violent women's prison in the world how to become peacemakers to stop prison violence.

Beautiful.

And I learned— I knew, but I really learned that service to others is what creates meaning. It's not about money.

Yes.

About how can we make this a better place? And in my particular case, how do we go into the darkest places on the planet and bring light? So that's great that people are able to invest. Now they have the freedom to, as you say, become 2.0s, right? Version 2.0, reinvent themselves and hopefully are able to serve others who are not so fortunate. And exactly. I think that ultimately is what gives meaning in life. It's not about the money. It's about the service. So that's really cool. Good for you.

Yeah.

What is it? You've answered, you said this a little bit, but I, I wanna dive into this a little more. What is it that's unique about you, Emma? That makes all of this work?

I ask myself that because you hear people will get into a business or something and usually are trying to sell you something and they say something like, if I can do it, anybody can do it. And they'll be, because I'm not that smart, I'm not that educated, I didn't come from a great family. And I think to myself, okay, what is it about me that has this drive and this passion? And honestly, I had an experience right after I got out of high school where I didn't have a car. My parents were not helping me figure out how to get to college, how to get to work. They wouldn't give me a ride. I didn't have a job. I couldn't buy a car. I felt like I was in this catch-22 of life. I couldn't get to college if I didn't have a car. I just, I was graduated from high school and I had nothing on the horizons. I wasn't dating anyone. I think they just hoped I would get married and move out or something. I was not in college. I did not have a car. It was a pretty horrible time for me to figure out like, where am I going to go from here? And I had this job offer from from somebody that I babysat for that if I became their nanny, that I could work there basically 6 to 6, 5 days a week. And I thought, oh, that's great. But my dad couldn't give me a ride there that early in the morning and I didn't have a car. And so that didn't work out. And I was so angry. Like, I love my parents. They were great parents. But in this particular aspect of helping us kind of transition into adult life, I thought they did a good job with my siblings. I'm not really sure what happened with me. I don't really know. So I had this, this, uh, idea that if I lived where I worked, then I wouldn't need a car, but then I could save up and eventually buy a car. And so I was gonna become a live-in nanny. And so people who hire live-in nannies are not like the rest of us. And so I found, uh, a family that hired me. They lived in a great area near Seattle where I grew up, uh, on Mercer Island, if you're familiar with it. They were both physicians in downtown Seattle. They were both the leaders of their divisions. They went to Stanford Medical. I think he was summa cum laude at Yale. These were just people that I didn't normally hang out with, but I got to live with them for a year and a half and I got to see the books on their library shelves. I got to see how they argued. I got to see their problem solving. I got to see how they parented. They were very high-achieving people, and that meant in their personal lives as well as their professional lives. And I just got to sit back and see how these people tick. The kind of vacations that we went on— they didn't— they lived in a nice house, but they didn't drive fancy cars, they didn't have fancy clothes. But we went on some nice vacations, like we would go to Hawaii and stay at like the Hilton Village, these kinds of places. And I just felt like there are people out there who live like this, and not only them but all their neighbors. And so I don't think I realized it at the time, but looking back, that experience moved me in ways that I didn't realize that it moved me. And it motivated me to do well in school. It motivated me to do well financially. And it motivated me to build my character by reading all the same self-help books that they were reading, because they argued like they were a self-help book. And I would sit there, oh, this is how disagreements are supposed to be worked out. So that was powerful in my life. And I think that really is where it all started, the seed.

Interesting that they, cuz I teach people how to stop fights and arguments in their lives forever.

Yeah.

And you have another argument again after you learn the skills that I teach.

Exactly. It was like that. It was like when you disagree, you treat each other with kindness, respect, you reflect back what the other person is saying. And even if you don't agree, there's no, and there's, it's still, there's a disagreement. There's no fighting. There's no contention. There's no yelling. And, and that was, to me, it wasn't like I grew up in a house that yelled all the time. We didn't have a lot of contention either, but we certainly did not have those kind of problem-solving skills. It was fascinating.

Yeah, absolutely. So this show's called Listening with Leaders. It's about listening, but tell me about the importance of leadership listening and leadership empathy in your business.

Oh, so I, this is something I'm really good at and something I really struggle with. On the empathy, empathy side of things, I feel like I'm almost too empathetic. I sometimes have to detach myself emotionally because if I can't help or I can't do something, I freak out. I, I don't know how to handle the situation. It's just like a man who wants to fix his wife's problem and he can't because he's just supposed to be listening. That's how I am with my kids. It's very difficult for me to not just dive in there, and I, I, I'm right down in with them. So the empathy there, I have to actually make sure that I control that desire and that urge to feel like it's me in there, it's my problem, and let's get down to the solutions and really just reflecting back. And listening is another thing I really struggle with because I am an introvert who loves to talk. So I not only love to be alone, but when I am with people, I will dominate the conversation. And so what one thing that's really helped me is actually sales, those sales conversations where I'm the one asking the questions, because he who asks the questions controls the conversation. And that was a turning point for me to recognize that. So now I'm asking the questions and then I get to listen to their answers. And I found that it was just relief to not have to be the one talking, to just get to sit there and get to know this person. It's almost like qualifying leads, uh, portion of sales. Is this the kind of person that would be interested in investing with our fund? Is this the kind of person who would be interested in helping us market their own investments? I don't know. So I just get to ask questions and find out, and I'm solving a problem in my head. Which funnel does this person belong in? Which workflow in my CRM does this person belong in? And the only way I get to know that and solve that problem is listening to what they're saying. And then I'm solving my own problem by helping them solve their problems by getting them into the right funnel, making the right introductions.

Interesting. So the first part of what you were talking about had to do with problem solving. And so you have that when you see somebody who's struggling or has an issue. Maybe your kids, maybe your investors or whatever, your urge is to help them solve the problem.

Yes. Which is not actually—

not the right way to go. Right.

You think it is. You think it is. You think people will respect you if you're smarter, or you think people will respect you more if you help them with things. But really it's just unsolicited advice, which is interpreted as criticism.

That's right. Think about how many times you've had a problem where you've been upset and emotional and somebody's, hey, Emma, if you just did this, it'll all be taken care of, right? Yep, yep.

Don't want to hear it.

Yeah, there's a tissue.

Ah, yep. Right. Yeah.

So let me tell you what's going on. Give you a little quick coaching tip here.

Awesome.

Anxiety. When you see somebody else who's got an issue that provokes anxiety inside yourself that you may or may not be aware of, and your urge is to solve the problem to soothe your own anxiety, and that's what's going on. So the trick is to learn how to recognize and manage your own anxiety, and the way you do that is ignore the words and listen to the emotions. And you only reflect emotions. You never reflect words.

Yes.

With the you statement. That the, there's some brain science behind this. It's really powerful, but that's the secret.

And it's, it's fascinating that you say that because when I first found you, we went and listened and read some of your articles and I told my husband, I said, look, this is very simple right here. We are just going to reflect those emotions back, help them name their emotions. Just like I, we did that with our little kids. Are you feeling happy? Are you feeling sad? But for whatever reason, once they learned the words for emotions, we stopped there. I said, this is like taking a step back into the simpler. And he just sat there and he looked at it and he said, I don't get it.

He's a problem solver too. There's no question about that. It's counterintuitive, but there are some really powerful brain scanning studies that show why this counterintuitive idea works the way that it does. And it goes completely against the way we think we operate, but it's really powerful. And when you label the emotions of your kids, what the studies show is that if you start around 2, 3, 4, 5 years old, by the time they're 12, they're 2 grade levels ahead of their peers.

Wow.

Emotional development grows with their cognitive development. Most parents don't coach their children in emotional development, so their emotional development stops at around between 6 and 8 years old, and it never gets beyond that.

Hmm.

Their cognitive development grows, but their emotional development becomes stunted. And when you affect label them, listen to label their emotions, then their emotional development progresses in step with their cognitive development, become— they become very high-functioning people at a very young age. It's really powerful stuff.

And that's back to the nanny days. That's what the parents were doing that I learned from, but I was only with them till they were 2 and 7. And so I think that parenting teenagers, I was doing that on my own. I didn't have that great example to look back to.

Right. So when you act— when you took some of the stuff you saw in some of the articles I've written, what happened? Did it work?

Yeah, I, I actually asked my kids about it. It was pretty funny because I, I went to them and I said, look, I wanna solve your problem. I wanna get in there. I wanna ask lots of questions. I wanna find out what's going on. And then I wanna make a lot of suggestions, brainstorm with you, all of that, and figure out how we can solve this problem. Especially my daughters. My son actually does like that. So when I just reflect his emotions back to him, he gets a little frustrated. He's this is not helping. So he has communicated, I'm coming to you for advice. Whereas my daughter said, they said, yeah, just name the emotion and validate it back. I say, I don't have a solution for that, but I'm always here to listen because your emotions are important to me. I said, that sounds like a total cop-out. That's a line from ChatGPT that I could memorize versions of and just feed it back to you. It seems so patronizing and banal. And they said, no, that's what we want. We just want you to say, I don't know how to fix your problem, but your feelings are important to me. Do you need to talk about it? I'm here for you.

You're really angry. You feel disrespected. You don't feel heard. You feel ignored, unappreciated, unsupported. You're really worried and concerned. There's a way to structure that. I teach structured emotions. How do you make an emotional database? It's structured data that your brain can access. And what we find is that people have a greater need to be validated emotionally than anything else. They need to be deeply heard. Even your boy needs it. He doesn't know it.

But yeah, he doesn't know it yet.

He, he needs it. Every human being needs it. And when you can satisfy this need to be heard, all kinds of magical things happen in relationships.

Yes.

And, and that's leadership empathy. It's learning how to recognize and reflect the emotions of the people around you. And it's not weak and it's not soft. It actually makes you strong and confident because you can walk into any situation, no matter how intense, and know exactly what to say and how to say it. And know that the situation is gonna calm down.

No matter.

Yes.

That's, and I've seen that it, with my kids, our relationships have really turned a corner these last couple of months with just reflecting that back, validating, helping them figure out what emotion they're feeling. Sometimes they don't want me to name the emotion. I was like, oh, you're feeling anxiety. I'm like, I am not. This is not anxiety. I'm angry or whatever. If, if I name the wrong one, sometimes they can name their own, right?

This is something that Since I'm— we're doing this and talking about this way beyond the scope of the interview, but it doesn't matter. You're never wrong.

I love this stuff.

You're never wrong when you reflect emotion. Say, I'm not angry, I'm frustrated. They're really angry. They can't process the anger because they're— a part of the brain called the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex is disconnected right now. It's not online. And that part of the brain is what analyzes and processes emotions. And when it gets overwhelmed, by the emotional centers of the brain, it can't function. And so the affect labeling allows the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex to come back online, and then they can process. So it goes like this: you're really frustrated. No, I'm not. Or you're really angry. No, I'm not. I'm frustrated. Oh, you're really frustrated. Yeah, I'm really frustrated. And you feel completely disrespected. Yeah. No one's listening to you. Yeah. And I feel unsupported and unappreciated. Yeah. You're worried. Yeah. And you're really pissed off. Yeah, I'm really pissed off. That's how it goes. So never assume that you're wrong because you're not. Your brain knows how to understand the emotions of another person. This goes back millions of years. Our brains are hardwired for looking, understanding the emotions of another human being.

Yes.

There's really interesting evolutionary biology behind that. But it can't be— whenever you do affect labeling, it can't be wrong. You will never be wrong. Just hang in there, keep reflecting, and then cycle back to the emotion that they rejected and they'll eventually say yeah. Exactly.

Some more synonyms are for—

we could go on for hours about this, obviously.

Yes, yes. But that's where— that's what the podcast is about, is like finding business success through this. I, I think I found it in business before I was able to then truly deeply implement it with my kids. So I started with my kids, and then I went out to my business, really started consciously learning these skills. There's a lot of autism in my family, and it's almost like we have face blindness when it comes to emotions. It's very difficult to read that. But when you start learning about it from a conscious perspective, you actually become better at it than people who don't have this disability or this, this naturally lower ability, because that consciousness will overcome the subconscious person who's just winging it. It's like when you ask somebody who speaks Spanish, why are you saying it like this? And they're like, I don't know, that's just how we say it. Because they've never really studied the grammar and the structure and the etymology behind it. And so people with autism, I find, or introverts are sometimes better at this because they're like, why Can't I do this? And they start studying it and then they really get the hang of it almost mechanically at first, but then it becomes ingrained with practice.

That's it.

That's it.

We teach it mechanically, but then it becomes natural within 8 weeks. It becomes a normal part of the deal. And it's, there's, it's all supported by brain science. And there's a long story about how I developed all this, but it, it, you're right. It's extremely powerful. And once you start using it, you'll never go back because you're able to see people at a completely different level and way than you've ever seen them before. In the sales conversation, for example, what I've learned and what I teach is validate, ask a question, validate, ask a question. Really? You are, you're really concerned about this? Because, and then you said, and tell me more about what's going on.

Yes.

And you never, telling is not selling. As you constantly, but you just don't ask a question, validate first, then ask the question. And that's the Validate what they say and feel, and then ask a question, get them to pull out more.

Yes.

And, and that's the selling conversation that works.

And this is what has helped the pitch deck side of the business, the marketing side of the business. Because most people will hire a VA or somebody to put their pitch decks together and it may even look pretty, but from an information design standpoint, it's not there because they're really not going in and, and asking themselves a question like, what is most important to my investor? What does my investor even care about? How am I gonna present this to a way that will appeal to investor, answer their concerns, get them excited? And that's where good marketing design comes in, is thinking about that customer underneath and the psychology and me asking the other sponsor or the founder, what is it that your business is doing? What do they offer investors? And we're gonna tell that story. That's a difficult thing to do. It's very subtle, but it's the same kind of thing as you need to be able to validate what that investor might be feeling. Ask the questions and answer them before in the pitch deck itself as a single body. So that's probably one of the reasons I love doing marketing and pitch decks is that emotional psychology part of it.

One more question. I'll let you go. What is one thing about yourself, Amma, that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

Like it's not on, it's not online or anything?

Yep. Something totally—

There are a lot online.

Unknown about you that you We wouldn't know unless you revealed it.

I'm pretty open online.

But what, what about you? There must be something about you that's interesting or different that we wouldn't know about unless you revealed it to us.

Oh goodness. I, wow. I don't know. I share very freely online. I feel like there's a lot of, but then at the same time, I'm also very private.

You wouldn't know, for example, that I'm a jazz violinist.

There you go. I would, I wouldn't know that you're a jazz violinist. I play the guitar. I don't share that online because I'm not very good at it, but I play the organ at church and I play the piano for children's choir. And one day I thought, I want to learn how to play guitar. I don't know what seized me. I think it's because I had learned how to sing. I had to actually go through voice retraining because I was having severe throat pain. And so I had to go to a speech therapist to learn how to speak in a different way to avoid the throat pain. And it made me a better singer. And I thought, well, now I can sing, I can play the guitar. So I picked that hobby up. Couple years back.

Thank you so much, Emma. This has been an amazing conversation. Really appreciate it.

I thank you so much. It's just, this stuff is so fascinating and it makes anybody in any situation, parent, business, whatever, a, not just a better leader, but just a better person. It changes lives. And like I said, way back when I was a nanny all the way up to now, these concepts are the ones that have the biggest impact in my life, my business, and my relationships. So thank you for getting the message out there and thanks for having me on your show. You're welcome.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media, just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up Ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.