E07: Legendary Leader- Greg Voisen

Thanks for joining us today on Street Smarts with Harvey Mackay, where the biggest room in the world is the room for improvement. And now here's your host, managing partner and co founder of harveymckayacademy.com, cliff Jones.

Good morning, everybody. I'm Cliff Jones, managing partner for Harry Mackay Academy, and I have Greg Voisin. I want to say I grew up a little bit in France, so I want to say Voisin, but it's Voisin. Did I pronounce that right? And you do pronounce it voissant.

No, we don't because no one here in the States will, which is why.

We say Paris and not Paris.

Exactly.

Well, welcome today. Thanks for being here.

Thank you, Cliff. It's a pleasure being on with you and it's a pleasure being invited to the Harvey McKay University.

Yeah. So we are transitioning now to from university, which has been in existence for past five, six years and the whole university is now becoming Harvey McKay Academy. And the context of having you with us today is to talk a little bit about who you are, why you're doing what you're doing, who you are out there to help, because we know you're, I know you're a big vision guy, you're an author, you, you're a speaker, you're a successful consultant. You're meeting with us today from your beautiful home in San Diego, correct Encinitas area.

Yes, I am.

Good. Well, glad to have you with us. And I just want to read your biography to our audience in case people don't already know who you are. And you are an entrepreneur, a speaker, author, with a passion and penchant for helping people overcome obstacles and enhance performance. I love that you're the host of a very popular Internet podcast program entitled Inside Personal Growth with thousands of faithful listeners. You've interviewed in excess of 630 authors on topics from personal growth to business, wellness, spirituality, and what we're going to talk most about today. I love your body of work. Your recent book Hacking the Gap, A Journey from Intuition to Innovation and beyond, key word being innovation. And you explain in that body of work your eight step process that leads to more creativity and innovation with ease. I like how you ended that innovation with ease. So tell us a little bit about how you got focused on innovation and became the expert that you are consulting the kinds of customers that you focus on.

First off, I'd like to just consider myself as a mentor. I think that when you go into businesses, the number of years that I have as an advisor Helping people and working alongside them hand in hand in a co creative process that you get an opportunity to actually observe how different people work. It's not like you're stuck in the same business, you coming to work with the same people, but you actually get to see the same patterns emerge usually. And those patterns, if you are a good observer and you're recording the patterns, you can actually say, well, what would you change in that pattern? I always tell my clients, Cliff, if I was to start a video camera, you all day long and it followed you, there was a crew, a reality show, at the end of the day, I played back that video camera. Would you like what you saw? Would you be very pleased with it? Or would you choose to change something about your behavior, your actions or your thinking process? Right. And so I like to let people know that every day I come in as the disruptor, the video camera is going, and it's an opportunity for them to choose to change something about themselves for the better. Right. So I kind of approach this, as I've observed over the last 30 plus years, how I worked, most importantly, but that how that transferred to how other people work and what work means, what is the meaning of work? What do you get out of it? What do you contribute to the world? How far can you take that? What I then do is I broke that down in the book into a process, what I call creatives. You know, if you are an entrepreneur and even if you're not, most people have a creative spark. They don't always find it right away, but there is a creative spark there. And it usually starts with their intuition. Now when you listen to Warren Buffett or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, every one of them, if you type in Google today, you would find quotes of about intuition and they would tell you that it was the intuitive decision that they made that really made a difference in their life. Okay, and so how does intuition work? Intuition works where downloads come in small little pieces. They don't come all at once. Now if somebody thinks, oh, oh boy, I'm going to get an intuitive download and it's just going to tell me what to do and why I should do it. No, it's revealing small little pieces about what you have an opportunity to embrace or not embrace. Now I would say if it's truly, if you're discerning and you know where it's coming from and it's coming from a higher source, and that's where your intuition emanates from, you best listen. But if it's coming from an Ego spot. A spot that's trying to tell you what to do, when to do it, why you should do it. You may want to actually rethink through your discernment if it's truly intuition or if it's potentially an ego telling you to go do something. Now those little pieces all add up, Cliff into putting a puzzle together. I call it putting the dots together. You actually can start to put the dots together. So that's why my book starts with intuition, because it's really you listening, getting the ego out of the way and listening to your soul.

Thank you for sharing that. Hacking the Gap. A journey from intuition to innovation and beyond. So what you really have done with your background in business, your educational pedigree in psychology, spiritual psychology, and your work in corporations, the spirit of work, the emotional intelligence aspects of how leaders and managers and employees show up. Tell everybody, our audience, please, who it is that you're typically consulting with organizationally and what the major issue is they're experiencing that compels them to bring you in as that thought leader and subject matter expert for change.

Most of the companies, there's pain. There's somewhere, there's always a pain. And I would say no matter what department it is, whether it's a 15,000 person company like Qualcomm or a small company with 10 or 15 employees, at some point along the line they're stuck and being stuck because they like, they don't like to be in inertia. Most people don't like to be in inertia. They're willing to look to the outside to hire somebody. So I'm working now in a medical device company. The CEO took three months to hire me. He says I'm a slow burn. He says I'm like Warren Buffett. No, I make my decisions slowly. But now that I'm in there, he has given me the trust. He has a big trust factor. And that's something you have to do, is build up that trust to be able to guide and direct decisions. So most people would call this coaching. I don't really, even though I'm advising, I'm co creating solutions with him that he likes that actually push kind of his boundaries, maybe his comfort zone and so on. So this medical device company makes products that consumers use. And the capacity that I work in is I actually work in a capacity to assist increasing the sales. Right? I work in a capacity to develop marketing pieces that are working for the company. I help people in the marketing department. I help install new CRM systems, I help do all Kinds of things based on the initiatives. And those initiatives are literally the opportunity to drop into one small spot in the company and turn on that video camera and actually see what's going right or what's going wrong. And that's my opportunity to basically say, hey, I've observed this. Do you agree with what it is? And most of the time they do. Well, what's our course of action? As you said earlier, what is the Gantt chart, the Pert chart? What are we putting together to help people reach the goal and objective of implementing something new so that when they try it, they see a different result? You know, we've all heard the same saying about Albert Einstein. You know, keep doing the same thing, expecting different results is the definition of insanity. And we all know that. Yet if I ran that camera almost every day in every business, what you would find would be Albert Einstein at work saying, this is insane. You guys are trying to do the same thing and expecting different results.

Talk a little bit about the eight steps you walk your students, your clients, your audiences through when you're speaking in your workshops. Give us a sense for what those eight steps look like. And thanks for sharing the story, the case study. Those are always very helpful for our viewers. They love the real world, street smart kinds of stories. So take us through the eight steps and relate that back to the medical company and give us a little more sense for the scope and size of that company and organization.

Well, the first step I covered already, and without repeating it, it's intuition. It's if you're going to go all the way to innovation, I have alliterated with I words every one of my steps. Right. The second step is an insight. So as a result of intuition, if you're tuned in, you usually have some level of insight. Call it the aha moment, call it whatever you'd like to call it. But you have that, that period where you're saying, I really believe there's something here, then that manifests itself naturally into an idea. And in that idea, you get an opportunity to what I call solidify it, right? To put edges around it and corners on it and say, oh, you know, this is a good idea. You also have the opportunity to share it. So when you share the idea, just be forewarned, as we all know, there's gonna be doomsayers out there that are gonna say, oh, you know, Cliff, your whole idea about the, you know, Harvey McKay Academy, it's crazy. There's just too many people out there trying to do the same thing. And you're never gonna get any traction, right? It's just like, hey, it's. It's everywhere. Negativity is there. Now, I tell people, don't get despondent by negativity. Almost every inventor was out there, Edison included. He could have given up, had 10,000 tries at the light bulb, right? You can choose to get despondent, or you can choose in that creative moment to add more creativity to the process. And that's where you get to dig back into that intuition, tint your spirit side. Listen to your spirit telling you, don't stop, Keep going. Right? So you now got your idea. Now, here's what happens. Normally when people take it from an idea. They have to stay inspired. Okay? Now, inspiration is a really interesting thing. Where do you get inspiration from? If everybody is the doomsayer, they say, stupid idea. And if you listen to many, many stories, you can read books and books and books about people that everyone said, that's really not a very good idea. It's not going to go anywhere and end up making billions of dollars, right? So it's. It's not so important what they think. It's important what you think and what spirit thinks. Now, the inspiration from spirit is what's going to keep you going. Because that's the only thing really, if you really get down to the spiritual side of this, that keeps any of us going. Okay, in tough times and in tough moments, who is your small community? Well, your first community is going to be whether you believe in a higher spirit and you pray to that higher spirit, that's good. Or you have a community of people around you that support you. Right? Which would be immediate family, people at work, whatever it might be. But the point is, is that grounding area there, and the next spot we stop off is incubation. Okay? You know, it doesn't matter if it's a small idea or it's a big idea, but incubating that idea, it requires a lot of work. That's where I say the pedal hits the metal. It's a lot of work began. I'm an entrepreneur with five or six startups behind me. I recognize the amount of effort that it takes. And that's where I talk about ignition. Because once you get into that incubation stage, you actually have ignition. Now, what is ignition? Well, ignition is the ability to manage your energy. It's the ability to stay focused. It's the ability to actually take whatever it is that came from the intuition into the idea and got inspired and incubated it to actually keep it Moving. This is a spot where a lot of people fail. They fall off, they just go, this is too hard. You know, there's too many things to do. You've started up a business, you understand what it's like, all of the things that have to be done, but to stay there, you have to manage it. So what do I advise? I advise people actually take walks in the park, they go do their yoga, they do their meditation, they do whatever required of them. Right. Or what they enjoy doing to maintain a sound, balanced mind, body, spirit. Okay? And for me, my personal is, it's meditation, it's yoga, it's exercise. And I think when you find most entrepreneurs who are in a regiment like that, who actually go out surfing in the morning or who go do something very physical, come back in, that's their most creative time. That's the time when they have their biggest, aha. They're out running, you know, and something happens. And this isn't anything that any of your listeners haven't heard. I'm just identifying what it is. Now after that, you. You basically are going into implementation. Now, once you've gotten this thing and you've taken it from ignition and you're now going into an implementation stage, that is one of the hardest spots, Cliff, is this is where you say, okay, I finished the product, the service, the whatever it is, I now have to go market it. Maybe you were testing it before, maybe you were using pilot programs or studies to test it. But the reality is you get in there and then you start working through all those steps required. Sometimes entrepreneurs who have big enough companies, I see them leave and hand it off to people, and then the product or the service becomes a failure as a result, because it still needs their energy. They still need to be around to make that happen. So let me, in summary, tell you all of these steps that are, I iterative terms have been designed to basically identify a step in a process that's called how do I innovate? I'm going to innovate something and then that innovate. I'm sorry, I forgot the innovation one. You were the main one in between. Ignition was innovation and then implementation. So in the innovation stage is where you've gone from incubation to ignition to innovation, where you innovate it and then you implement it. And the point there is, is that in that innovation stage is the testing, designing, implementing, seeing if the public likes it. Is it going to be something that they're going to take on, and then you're going to start to implement it, otherwise you're going to come back, you're going to recalibrate, you're going to look at things that you need to do and you're going to redesign and you're going to go through another iterative process of whatever it is that you need to do. Now, is any of this rocket science? No. Is it? Are these steps, things that many people don't know? Yes, most definitely. And I would say the ones that they probably cliff, don't actually get is how they can trigger more ideas through listening to their intuition. Because they're stuck. So they get stuck because they're in this process. What happens is business storming, norming, forming. They'll go through that, they'll get the business to a certain point, it's making money and they actually stop creating. They created once, twice, maybe three times. But the reality is we all know that today, if you're not consistently innovating, if you're not consistently being creative, if you're not consistently bringing something new and innovative to the market, good chances are many of your businesses are going to die. That's why we have an iPhone 10 and not an iPhone one. That's why we have seven, eight, 10 different iterations of the iPad. That's why we've got new imac computers and whatever. They're constantly innovating the brain something new.

Well, my tagline, create, commit, serve, create. We're given this infinite power to create. As long as we believe we have that power, that's what you're really talking about, then we have to commit. You have a process driven approach in your teaching and your consulting, your mentoring, those eight steps. I love the I factor. Now it's interesting because when Harvey McKay's talking about teachers, team building, which is a huge aspect of your work, especially when you get to implementation, he says, well, there is no I in team. Okay, well that's, that is true, the team. But what you're talking about are the elements, the spiritual elements, the energetic elements, the things I believe we don't talk enough about that show up at work whether we want them to show up or not. Right. A lot of communication is non verbal for having a, a rough commute and money issues, family. Anything that shows up with us, it's energy. Right? So it's. Look, in the context of traditional business teaching, we need more of this kind of conversation. And I want to go back to the medical company because there's a real world company in your market like any other company, striving to get more innovative, creative people to produce a better, more profitable result their customers. You're in the thick of it. Would you mind sharing with our listeners what triggered them bringing you in in the first place? Can you share that? And then how big is the company?

The company is small, actually, the company is only about eight employees. The company has, or the founder has built several companies before. This isn't the first time for him. So what this product, what this company does is they create innovative solutions in pain management. So the actual pain management tool, believe it or not, is something called Adipose. And without boring your customers or your people that are listening to this, the big buzzword now in orthopedics and pain management, to actually take your own fat out of your body, sterilize it and put it back into your joints to relieve the pain. And it's working quite effectively. And so this gentleman has invented and created about seven patents, and those patents are for products that are called cannulas and devices that actually extract the fat so that pain management doctors can actually put it back in. They're actually talking about what's called intelligence, intelligent fat grafting. So I just this weekend went to a symposium and I walked into a hotel room, meaning a whole conference room, and there were seven cadavers laying on the side where these doctors were all hovered around them working on these cadavers doing exactly what I'm talking about. And it was a wake up call for me to actually see, you know, go into a hotel and actually have that happen. But my point was this. They hired me. The answer to your question is they hired me because they are on the verge of breaking through to a new market. They needed support and guidance and help with marketing and working with the reps and training and putting this out into the market so that it could get traction. So when we talk about implementation, they were just on the other side of implementation and they actually still on one of the products, haven't implemented it yet. So I'm there helping them gain new market share. I'm helping them write, copy and position and put the product into the best light with the physicians, the hospitals and the places that are actually buying it.

Phenomenal. So, so early stage company, obviously a highly innovative, creative, borderline genius, genius kind of inventor. Right? Is he the patent kind of guy, that level genius or he's the business guy?

11 or 12.

Yeah. So most of those guys generally, in my experience over the last 30 years, don't show up with the highest emotional intelligence, the best ability to share that clear vision and inspire the team. They're generally off in the back room somewhere working on the widgets while others are figuring out how to put the pieces together. The complexity of taking any product to market, all the things that can go wrong and there you are in the thick of it. We're getting close to the end of our time together today and most definitely want to have you back at Harvey McKay Academy to visit with us again and we'll talk about what you're doing because what you're doing is important for me as a leader. We have five, six employees now. Harvey McKay Academy is growing. We're an emerging young company. I feel like I'm a fairly good leader, but I also admit I have a long way to go. I experience my best creativity to your earlier point, when I'm hiking, when I'm meditating, when I'm in the shower, when I'm cycling, when I'm breathing. I just took up archery a few years ago. Archery is a very Z Zen, meditative, breath based, routine based practice. And I'll get an idea and I want to ask your opinion because I know I can't be the only leader like this. I get an amazing idea when I'm in the zone of something not work related. And part of my torment is not to disrupt the meditative commitment I've made to that time and go grab my phone or notepad in fear of losing the idea. Because sometimes the idea is I wake up in the middle of the night. So what do you teach your leaders, right, in terms of balancing the reverence for the time to tap into that creative. We can't begin to define it, that creative innovative source that gives us that intuition and inspires us and all of a sudden, boom, we've got this idea and oh my gosh, it's a product we can sell and make millions on. Right. So what do you tell your clients and your CEOs about that?

A1 always keep a pad by your bedside. Keep some recording device, no matter what it is, even if it's a tape recorder, if you've got a tape recorder or if you use your phone, they all have recording devices on them. Now I recommend using a service called Timmy T E M I and Timi is a will take anything you say in voice and will send the transcript back. So if you just want to sit and dictate something at 10 cents a minute, literally going to push it back to you in less than 3 minutes, 5 minutes, you'll have all these written elements of what you've said and recorded. So that's another way to do it. I tell people that actually getting a hit from your higher spirit and not stopping to record it, like basically someone giving you a gift and you not opening it. The reality would be it would, it would really hurt my feelings and it really hurts spirit's feelings if you don't take the time to actually, if I'm telling you something, to write it down if it's important enough for you to get this jolt right. So there's all kinds of devices out there today that are at our disposal. Recordings on our phones, records pads and papers. I make a hacking the gap little journal that's actually coming out where people will be prompted with questions. I don't believe it all comes when you're running or doing archery or doing whatever. Frequently we get these ideas when we're in community and what happens is we're sharing with other people. So we're in a room or an office, we're in a meeting. And because we ping, ping, ping, ping. What I call them the pinballs of connectivity. What happens is the subconscious mind and the mind that is currently here and present, meaning our conscious mind basically links the dots and all of a sudden you have an aha moment. So I say always have something you can record that with and then share it and start to share it and see what other people think of it. You know, that's in the book. It's actually covered quite extensively in the book because it is one of the things that I'm quite passionate about.

It's a phenomenal topic because now I don't feel guilty that I grab the phone, go to my notebook. Now 90 plus percent of my ideas, they may not stick, but that boy, what a gift it is for any person to have the ability to tap into that creativity, to get away from the office and then to bring it back and to share it collectively. Whatever mechanism it is that the organization you're working with takes in that information, learns from and applies it to action in wrapping up. I wish we had more time, Greg. I want to invite people to get your book because. And you have a course and when we have you back, we're going to talk more about your presence, your stories, your case studies being available to our listeners and our viewers. So tell everybody about your book again where they can find it. And we'll come back and wrap up after that.

Well, the first place that they may want to go is to the website, www.hackingthegap.com. there they can actually download a couple of free chapters. They can listen to many and many of the interviews that I did with people in all kind of walks of Life. I've got 700 at my podcast show, www.inside personal growth.com. but at that website, you can actually specifically listen to interviews about people on innovation. Software engineers at Adobe, professors at Pennsylvania University, teaching innovation classes. Really, really great stuff there. Steven Kotler, one of the guys that wrote Superman, the Rise of Superman, Abundance, and all these books on flow. Right. And so there's three interviews up there that are free. So go to www.hackingthegap.com. from there, if you want to buy the book. Obviously there's links to Amazon. Just go to Amazon and type in Hacking the Gap. It's go going to pop right up. You can get the Kindle version, you get a hardback version and you can get a paperback version.

Wonderful. Greg Voisin, thank you for being with us. Greg is author of a couple of books, actually. Most recent is Hacking the Gap, A Journey from Intuition to Innovation and Beyond. So, you know, I'm going to peg you. We can't pigeonhole you because you're obviously very brilliant and effective and good at what you do. But you help your clients transform the results, whatever their objective is, their goals, by bringing out creativity and innovation and then helping people implement and execute it. Is that a fair way to summarize your work?

Totally fair. And in the process, I help them get to a spiritual side that frequently they have never seen or experienced in that way. Because look in the bottom line, I'm leave anybody with any keywords here. Leaving the closer you can get to finding a source to help you access this creativity, to get in the flow, whatever it is. You know, there's people out there experimenting with ayahuasca and small things of what I'll call it lsd. They call it microdosing lsd. There's all kinds of weird things going on. You don't really need any of that. The reality is you need to find yourself in the flow as a result of your daily activities and do it frequently because that's where you're going to find abundant creativity coming from. You know, just stay in that space, stay in that mind. I like what Deepak says. He says we're in a dream. This is all a dream. We just don't realize it.

Ah, that's deep. Profound. Well, Greg Voisin, author of Hacking the A Journey from Intuition to Innovation and beyond, thank you for being with us today. Very much appreciate your time and your wisdom. Look forward to having you back@harveymckayacademy.com.

Thank you for listening to Street Smarts with Harvey Mackay. If you've enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or wherever you consume your favorite audio. Don't forget to leave a positive rating and review before you sign up for your free membership@harveymckayacademy.com to learn more about Harvey Mackay, make sure to visit www.harveymckayacademy.com. thanks for listening and we'll be back back soon with a new episode.