Ep.101-Dr. Jim Van Allan "Communication Is Key"

This is the You Winning Life Podcast, your number one source for mastering a positive existence. Each episode we'll be interviewing exceptional people, giving you empowering insights and guiding you to extraordinary outcomes. Learn from specialists in the worlds of integrative and natural wellness, spirituality, psychology, and entrepreneurship so you too can be winning life. Now here's your host, licensed marriage and family therapist, certified neuro-emotional technique practitioner, Speaker:LMFT 🎗️] And certified entrepreneur coach Jason Wasser.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the You Winning Life podcast. One of the things that I love talking about most with our guests is communication, communication patterns, how to best put yourself out there into the world, how to connect more with people when it comes to your branding, when it comes to your marketing, but that also applies to who you are personally. As it plays out in your personal relationships, whether it's in dating, in marriage, in parenting, with friends. Communication is really funny enough. One of the things that most people say when they come to see me when it comes to relationship dynamics, they put, we have communication issues or we have communication problems. And I don't always want to let them on at first by saying, oh, okay, it is a communication issue, but it's actually not what you're communicating, but what you're meaning and what you're believing about what you're trying to communicate. So today's guest is an expert in communication. In fact, he also has a podcast called Communicate to Motivate, which focuses on different areas of communication as it applies to real life situations. He's an accomplished speaker, trainer for schools and organizations across the country, and he's a professor of communication studies with Kaiser University. So welcome, Dr. Jim Van Allen.

Good to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

My absolute pleasure. So of all of the things that we can probably start with, I would love for you to be able to communicate how the heck you got into communication as not only something you're probably, you know, knowing what you're doing, especially when, when someone puts out a podcast, my guess is they're probably really passionate about what they're doing. So, but what's a little bit about how did you get into communication studies and then take that all the way up to an education leadership perspective and a doctorate in education leadership and use this niche to put yourself out into the world?

So I think with communication, I mean, let's face it, it's all around us. It binds us all. And as I started, you know, just getting a little bit older, going from high school to college, I just started getting a little bit more just plugged into people around me. And, and I, and I, you know, when I got out of the safe space of high school where you have all your friends around you and you're, you know, you're really social, when I got into college, everything kind of flipped for me where I became really introverted. And in my head a lot. So what that really forced me to do was monitor the world around me, right? And if you're in your head a lot, if you're a little more introverted, you know, you're very hyper-aware of people around you and situations around you because you want to know how you act and how you fit in. So having that monumental shift, right, when I was younger in my teenage days, from high school to college, really made me be like, well, this is interesting. I'm starting to notice the way people walk and talk and my own things like that. And I was big into public speaking, believe it or not, you know, because when I was on stage in high school doing competitions and things like that, it was sort of an outer body experience. I sort of became a different person than I when I was off stage. Off stage, you know, a little bit more introverted at times, but on stage you could really explode and, and reach out to people and have this new personality. So I just kind of had to figure out what do you do with this?

Right?

Which, that's the age old, what do you, what do you do with this? So going through college, I went to the University of Florida and I probably, and I minored in communication studies. You only need 15 credits for a minor. It's like 18 credits for a minor. So that's 5 or 6 classes. I probably took 30 or 35 credits worth of communication courses at Florida because I just loved it. And I just thought it was fascinating. To me, it was like learning another language.

Yeah.

When you understand nonverbal communication, you're reading between the lines. It's like decoding the matrix, right? You're reading between the lines. And I always liked, enjoyed learning. And I just saw like, okay, you know, I would try to use a concept from my nonverbal class on reading somebody's body language. And I would try to go and do that with my friends or do it in a situation and see what information I could gather from that. Just, just loved it, found it interesting and wanted to dedicate my life to it. Wanted to—

I'm assuming as a college kid, right, that kind of gave you an advantage when it came to connecting with people, probably gave you some advantage when it came to figuring out like how to approach someone or what their, what their body language was, especially when it came to like meeting, you know, people. Did that play out? Like, were you able to like kind of tweak the system a little bit and like give that to your benefit as a, as from the social perspective?

There's a life hack for you, right? Yes. And, you know, it did help, especially because when you are, when you were somebody like me who was a little more introverted in your head, kind of going through college, when you knew sort of how to react to somebody or how to frame your words or how to read personality and audience and body language, it definitely gave me, I would say, an advantage, but it gave me sort of a boost in talking with people. And then when I finally met my wife and then developing that relationship on a really strong level. She'll say to this day, you're the best communicator I know. And I take pride in that because it's something that I really worked at for a very long time.

So there's a level of confidence there that people don't maybe realize that by studying, learning, reading, absorbing these things, they can bring into their life and it can help them in multiple ways, not just asking more for what you want. That's kind of like the cliché or the, or the low-level frequency of like, you can learn how to ask for more for what you want and put, put it out there into the world and hopefully you'll get that back. But there's other layers at play here as well, right?

No, of course, there always is going to be other layers at play. And I think the more that we, the more that we learn to read people, the more that will, the more information we're going to get for sure.

So I recently just restarted from the beginning, although I'm almost done, probably in about 10 episodes, Dr. Paul Ekman's based work TV show Lie to Me with Tim Roth, who's an amazing actor, one of my favorites, right? So as I'm getting into the third season, it's now like, you know, they teach you tips in the, in the show of what to look out for. And obviously, some things are exaggerated, and some things are not really always science-based. But the work of Dr. Paul Ekman, who was a— really was a body language facial coding expert, and uses science to see the universality of body language and body expression. Right? How much of that was in your studies? How much of that did you have? You know, have you ventured into that on your own?

And it's funny you mentioned Dr. Ekman and the show Lie to Me. So when I was teaching on campus, I would show the TV show Lie to Me in class. We would actually watch it and study it. And it was fascinating to me. And I said, this is the hidden language. This is it right here. And we would do it in conjunction with our chapter on nonverbal communication. And of course, Dr. Ekman's work was always in there, and I've talked about his work in with my clients as well because he put together, uh, he categorized 10,000 different facial expressions. And if you go even in my textbooks, if you go look, it'll, it'll show the photos that he took in the '70s of all these facial expressions in black and white. You can tell everybody's in their '70s garb, and 10,000 of them. And then the FBI would later go on to use his research in facial recognition software. It just shows to show you, like, they're— the human body, from emotional standpoint, from a nonverbal standpoint, we're so capable of so much expression and emotion. We're constantly giving off information, and a lot of that goes right by people if you're not looking for the right thing, right?

Right. Or if they're misinterpreting it, or they're seeing some type of body language but they can't interpret it at all. I remember a client years ago the person came in and it was, you know, regarding relationship issues and they just had a disagreement. And I wasn't seeing both of them at the time. I was just seeing one of them. And they came in and they said, I don't know what happened, but we just got into this huge blow-up argument and I wasn't even yelling. And they said to me, like, stop yelling, stop raising your voice at me. So I said, okay, great. Can you walk me through what you said right before it. And I remember the person retelling the narrative. And they were sitting directly across from me on the couch. And they go to me, Jason Wasser, I wasn't talking any louder than I am right now. I wasn't raising my voice. I wasn't screaming. I said, okay, great. Tell me exactly what you said before the other person said to you, stop yelling at me. And they said it. And they said it exactly low-key, monotone, right? And I promise you, that's how it happened. And I'm like, oh, okay. I see where you were yelling at them. And they're like, what are you, what are you talking about? I'm like, can you say that, what you just said again? And they did it again. I'm like, yep, you completely without a doubt were yelling at them. And they're like, no, I was talking to you. Like, I'm like, when you— so I said, there was a word in there. I said, can you swap this word out for another word? And they said that sentence again with this new word. And I'm like, okay, now you're not yelling. And they're like, okay, what's going on? I said, when you use that word the first time in the middle of that sentence, your face grimaced up for a half a second, right? For those on the video version, it was like, right, a flash of anger. And when you said it with the second time around with a new word that was lighter, that was more flexible than that word, there was no facial grimace. That was your yelling at your partner.

Microexpressions.

Yep.

And, and that's— and you're exactly right. You may not have been raising, you know, you may not have been yelling in a traditional standpoint, but The microexpressions, you see, nonverbals are hardwired into us. Our understanding of them are hardwired into us. We'll react to the slightest eyebrow furrow or somebody twirling their hair or somebody's eyes get big or somebody's wringing their hands. I luckily have a tell, but I scrunch my toes up. Nobody can see it except me, but if I get uncomfortable or something, I scrunch my toes up. But you know what? That's probably sending a shock up my body where maybe I'm tensing up a little bit. And people will start to notice that a little bit. And I love how you mentioned, you know, change this word out for another word too, because, you know, from nonverbal to verbal, we have, you know, all the words we use evoke different feelings as well. And that's why, that's why tone can be inferred when you're writing an email and you have certain words in there and somebody writes you back or text message back and they completely misinterpret what you say because a certain word you used evoked a certain emotional tone or a connotation, positive or negative. And you didn't intend that. You were just using the word because it's the easiest thing to come to mind. Yet when they read it, they put a certain tone or intonation on it, and it can derail the whole process. So the misinterpretation is definitely something to be keenly aware of when you are dealing with nonverbal communication, when you're trying to read people. It has to be contextual and situational when you're, when you're quote reading or interpreting.

I also find a lot, and I help my clients navigate through this, is that I really don't care what you're arguing about. I care what you mean. What the argument's about to you, right? About what you're seeing. How are you interpreting that? What is your— like, what are you— well, if the person is not getting this right, or if they're doing this wrong, or they're doing X, Y, and Z, what does that mean for you? Not what actually happened. And what are you afraid will happen if they continue to do that again? Like, what's the risk factors involved? And where is that in your personal belief systems? And that's right. We're playing at a whole different level of meta-communication at that. But as a systemic trained family therapist, my whole thing is the problem is not the problem. It's the belief about the problem. That's the problem.

Yeah, it's— and usually that's always the case too. And that's why when, you know, couples and people are arguing or in a disagreement, they, they go off on tangents and they'll start bringing up things that they argued about in the past, or things, you know, things that we thought that we had forgiven or forgotten. And all of a sudden you, you're like, where, where are we, right? We've gone so far off topic because once you open that window, a lot of times will, will blow it wide open because they're like, oh, we, we don't know how to argue correctly. We don't know how to conflict correctly. And there's a correct way of doing it. And it's like the floodgates open. And then, like you said, then it's that, it's that deeper things that start to come out. It's not just about the point at hand. It's, it's everything else around that, for sure.

Yeah. So let's jump back into your journey because I was fascinated that the degree that you ended up with as a doctorate is education leadership. And most people would not assume that education leadership has to do with what you're focusing on and you're specializing in. In fact, it's more about getting into, like, if you're working in a school system and you're wanting to become a principal, or right in that regards, or, you know, anywhere in the higher levels of administration. But you went in a totally different direction with that. So I'd love to just pick apart a few moments of like that, because people out there might not know that there are certain degrees out there or certain fields of study that you can have a hard pivot left and still use that education to go there? And I'd love to hear that.

So that's sort of been my MO is hard pivot left. I started, just briefly, when I was in high school, I wanted to be a doc, a medical doctor. So, and I'm not doing that now. I'm a PhD doctor. So, but I used my, I used an organization I was in called Florida HOSA, which gives you, helps you to do competitive events in medicine and healthcare to decide what you like and stuff. And of course, the competitive event I picked was public speaking, right? So then I hard pivoted towards communication from that. And when I got into teaching, when I got into the university ranks and I was, you know, being a professor and teaching, I always have upward goals. And I said, well, you know, maybe I'd like to be an associate dean someday, maybe a dean, maybe a campus president somewhere in that, you know, there's a lot, long line of different administrative roles you can have in education, especially in higher ed. So I said, well, that might be a route I can go. I just, the only thing is that as I started getting more and more into you know, being on campus and learning what the administrators do at the university, I, it was just not something I could see myself doing.

Way too much politics, right?

That was part of it. And I really enjoyed being in the classroom and having that one-on-one interaction with, with students from a, from a teaching standpoint. I mean, I was doing these crazy fun activities in the classroom and field trips and all this great stuff. And I just wasn't ready to, to move on from that. So, you know, I decided, well, maybe that's not the route for me. But remember, on the side, I've always been a speaker and a trainer. So I work with an author. His name is John Gordon. He's written The Energy Bus, Power of Positive Leadership, 20 bestselling books. And I've always done workshops for him. He can't be everywhere at once. So he has a small speaking team and I've always done that on the side. But then all of a sudden that started to pick up considerably and I was traveling a lot more and I was able to shift to an online teaching position, still maintain my speaking as well. But I was doing schools, right? I was starting to train more and more schools and work with principals and work with superintendents in large districts as I'm still getting my degree, right? Finishing up my degree. And I said, you know what, this degree is going to come in very handy because now that's the credibility. I can walk into a school, I can talk to a superintendent or principal and say, my degree is now in educational leadership. And of course I pivoted with my dissertation and I wrote it all on professional development in schools, because what do I do now? I do professional development for schools. I was able to focus on that. And, you know, this is a world where it's not necessarily about the title, but it's about the credibility, right? That, that degree now gives me a lot of credibility. I'm running a John Gordon's Positive Schools program, and now they can— he can say it's being run by somebody who has their PhD in educational leadership. So that's the whole key. It's, it's, it's a degree in leadership, how to be a better leader. How to run the school most effectively and efficiently. And you can use that as a dean, but you can use it in my world now as a consultant, speaker, trainer type. And I'm glad that I stuck with it, right? And, and have that degree on my wall now. But it was quite a process, and I'm glad it's done. But it was quite a process.

And the hand-in-hand correlation between being a leader, being in leadership, and good communication has to be there. Right. And, and whether you're an elementary school student or you're in a relationship or running a business or working in a business and helping grow the business, right? Communication. Everything is communication and everything, right? Even non-communication is communication. Where can someone start navigating or understanding where they're at along maybe a spectrum or some type of assessment tool of seeing like, okay, here are the areas that I'm good at. Here's what are the areas I'm not good at. Here's where I know I need to work on, like where, like what would be like 101 for them to start tapping into as far as resources and, you know, assessments and, and looking at themselves in this new light to say like, I might need to get better at this at any age, at any level.

First, like, you know, you're, you have to start with, with being very self-aware. And I think if you're, if you're very self-aware, that's going to make whatever changes you decide to make much more organic. So when I work with people on this, I normally have, you know, if I'm working with teachers or principals, you know, we'll go through some of the areas of communication like listening, like nonverbals, like time, conflict, and I'll have them just be honest and say, you know, list some specific examples where you did well in this area, or maybe you didn't do well in this area. It's like, how many times are people just going to sit down and do that? Probably not often, but in a, you know, type of— it's something that I would encourage people to do and just say, because if you, if you start looking back at yourself and failed relationships or challenges at work or business, wherever you find yourself, you know, you can probably identify some area of communication that was lacking in that area. Maybe you, you lost a customer because, you know, you got too emotional. Why did you get too emotional? Well, you probably were not listening to what they were going to say. That would go on the needs improvement on the listening side. So I think starting out and kind of jotting down some of the major communication areas—public speaking, listening, conflict, nonverbals—and bringing it to the forefront of your mind and walking around, talking to your family, significant other, work, and telling yourself, I'm going to monitor my listening today. I'm going to monitor my nonverbal communication today, how I hold myself. The more you bring it to the forefront, the more self-aware you're going to be. The more you're going to start noticing things and the more others maybe start noticing things as well. It's when you let the program run in the background, right? Our apps run in the background on our phone. When you let the nonverbal sort of run in the background, you're not even thinking about it. It's like when people say "ums" when they talk, they don't even know they're doing it because it's running in the background. So if you bring it to that forefront and you have active conscious thought about it, that's going to— that's probably a good place to start. But you have to kind of jot down and whether you want to meditate or pray on You know, how do I know if I'm a good listener or not? You know, how do I— well, look back. How have your relationships been up to this point? Right? You know, you can kind of piece it together a little bit by looking backwards in how things may have worked out and try to find the communication piece that maybe was lacking in that area.

So is there ways that people can over-communicate, over-share, right? We can call that like too much self-disclosure. And I know you and I were talking previously about like, you know, how much is too much. And then, right, as a therapist, the debate is like, we shouldn't self-disclose at all. But I actually find that self-disclosure in helping my clients understand that, like, everybody's human, and even, right, professionals can get stuck in this type of scenario, uh, whatever the scenario is, um, that self-disclosure is helpful. But is there a time where there's too much communication, too much overcommunication, too much overinformation, too much oversharing, too much self-disclosure?

I think it depends on— so if you're— if it depends on where you are in the relationship, So let's, let's maybe start if you're newly, if you're dating, if you're newly meeting somebody, even a friend, right? You're, you're a couple meets another couple and you're, you're, you're hanging, you know, you have common interests or something. Let's start at the beginning part. What I always like to explain to people is think of self-disclosure like an onion, right? You're peeling back when you, when you're cutting an onion or you're peeling an onion, right? You start one layer at a time. It's sort of the, the scaly part of the outside that you don't eat and you kind of get deeper and deeper to the good stuff. So that's kind of what self-disclosure is like. It's peeling back the layers one at a time. I give a little bit of information, then you give a little bit, and it's equal. It's equal. So where are you from? Where are you from? What do you— what do you— what the biggest question we got in college? What's your major? It's so easy. What's your major? But here's what I'd say from there is what you do is you go down the rabbit hole and you treat it like that. Where are you from? You know, what's your major? Or what do you— what are your— where do you work? What do you like to do? The whole point in that dance, and it is a song and dance, is you're trying to find one or two pieces that you can latch on to where you're like, oh, I'm from Fort Lauderdale. Oh, oh, I like doing that too. And then you find that and that's like your, that's like your safety net, right? The hand comes down. It's a commonality. Yeah. You're hanging off the mountain. The hand comes down and grabs you, right? And pulls you up. That's your commonality. That's your link. So that's the proper way to do it. But then you're asking about over, over self-disclosure, over communication. Yes. And that can happen where you're, you're meeting people and you're, you're immediately talking about, so, you know, what do you think about the political situation right now? And you're like, I just met this guy, you know, where I don't, we don't really need to be talking about that right now. Or strong social issues or even certain religious stuff, which is great to talk about as you go on through progressive relationship. But early on, it's, it's starting superficial and working your way in. You don't go right to the first date. You don't say, so do you want kids? Right? Like, so what, what, what's your stance on marriage? And it's 2 dates in, like, it's just, it's got to turn, it's going to turn people off. And that's what we have to be aware of at the beginning part. It's a very tightrope situation at the beginning part of relationships when it comes to, like you said, reciprocation and self-disclosure.

It's interesting because when I'm working with my young professional community and if they are looking for something specific, Right. The question is, is how much do you put it out there? Right. Even on a dating profile, right? Because this is a great— like, even the communication patterns of dating profiles, right? It's nonverbal, but you're putting out there what you want people to either hopefully see or, or get about you. But I see that especially right in this young professional community of like dating. Are you dating to date? And, oh, and then if I meet the right person, then I'll consider getting married to them? Or are you dating to get married and you're looking to date now to know if this person is the right person for you that you want to spend the rest of your life with in that context? And to be— how clear can one become when they're putting that out there upfront? Because, you know, at some time people are afraid to ask questions because they don't want to be mean or they don't want to insult the other person or hurt the other person. But a lot of times I'll find that they're, they're more willing to protect the other person from their, right, asking the question that if they didn't ask the question, it's going to end up hurting them more, but they don't want to hurt the other person more. So I'm wondering, like, on the other end of the coin, right, there are probably some times where if if you're in a scenario where you're looking for a job and you know that you, A, have been at a certain price point in a career, right, and you need to be making at least that plus, it might make sense to say, what's the salary range before the interview, before you have to travel, before they bring you in, before they— and I'm sure there's obviously the right ways to say it with the right languaging versus a demand or an expectation in a negative connotation.

And a lot of that, like you said, is, is entirely entirely situational. And, and the, you know, the young professionals and the, and, you know, starting from that example and the dating perspective, I mean, look at like when I was kind of starting to date more at the end of college, I was looking for my wife, right? I wasn't really looking to casual, I just wasn't into that casual dating. So I knew, and you know, it's funny that the first, first, second date my wife and I ever had, we talked for like 6 hours, like 2 nights in a row. And, and it was exactly what I told you, we, we progressed through, we found some commonalities. By the end the 6 hours we were talking about our, our faith and our spirituality and our things that really linked us and guided us. So that— but that was my goal, right? In going— I was on that date to really get to really know this person. And then, then I've been on others where before that where it's just let's go hang out, let's go to a movie, let's just talk. So I think for your young professionals too, be, be very aware of your social media too because there's a lot more eyes out there that are now on these things. And, and, and put your true self out there too. I'm tired of seeing a lot of the superficial stuff on social media, and it's just not— it's not who we are. It's— and social media is now turning into a pageantry, right? It's turning into a pageant where it's not the real you. And I couldn't imagine being in the dating world right now with, with Tinder and all these apps, where I would be insane. Like, I would just be like— it would just be so overwhelming and frightening because you just don't know what you're gonna get.

Yeah, you don't. And I was just in a Facebook post group before and someone posted, um, it's like a whatever, the Singles in Quarantine type group, right? And one of my friends runs it and they put up a post like, for men, if you're looking at someone else's profile, what are some of the things you would not want to go out on a date with them about or, or judge them about? And I'm like, oh, I love, I love that topic because, right, it's what your stand is, your brand, and what you put out there and what you show the world is going to be what you want them to see, good or bad, right? Like you said, and a lot of it's pageantry. So, um, I playfully said if there's more than one picture with one drink, right? In other words, if you have a drink and more than one picture in your hand, um, two, any kissy faces, duck faces, Kardashian slash face, right? And three, if you're doing a yoga pose anywhere in the world outside of a yoga studio. Brilliant. And one of my friends wrote back, but how am I supposed to get that picture inside the yoga studio? Maybe that's the whole point of yoga, that it's not right. And I'm being playful, but like, you know, I basically want to say like anything that you would have to say hashtag before you say the next word, right? So it's, you know, pose in the wild. So it's right. And I'm being playful because I have friends who are like that, that are just wonderful, wonderful people. So I'm being cliché with it. But, but there are things that like we don't realize that we do that other people who are looking— you might lose the opportunity to connect with someone by those type of moments that someone's going to do a flash judgment of you because of what you're putting out there into the world. And you may have all these amazing redeemable qualities that a person may not see because you're putting yourself out there in not— in the not the most authentic way to you, or you're doing it because of, of peer pressure.

Everything sends a message. Every— you know, you're exactly right with what you're saying with, you know, with their posing, what they're wearing, uh, their— the tone of their posts. I mean, I would probably be walking the earth single now if I was still dating, just because I would be picking apart everything. I'd be like, "Why are they standing there?" or "What does this post mean?" or I would be overanalyzing everything. So part of me is glad that I was sort of, you know, in the dating pool before like the social media took off because part of the fun, I think, is discovering that organically and having to kind of go through that conversation with that person and figuring it out live and not having like a cheat sheet like you do kind of now on these dating apps. And by all means, hey, if that's available, hey, that's great. Kind of gives you a leg up. But there's so much more around that. Like if you're just seeing a couple of things on social media, you're right, you may be missing out on so much more than that. And you're just going based on what you see. And I think we could be missing out on a lot of people who are probably really interesting or probably right for us. Because we're, we're just going based off of a couple of things we're seeing online. Cause you know what? That's probably what I would be doing, unfortunately, cause that's all you have. That's all you have.

So, right. It's, it's the quick snapshot thing, right? Cause our attention spans are, are so, so short at this point. So there's one other category of stuff that you and I were talking about in our, in our pregame, you know, it's this idea of, um, time-based personalities, how you structure your day, your life, your communication based on two different ways of doing things, which I was fascinated by. So I might even— I'm going to have you present the title of it and the explanation of it because I do not want to mess it up.

It's called chronemics, and it's an area of nonverbal communication that not a lot of people are familiar with. But when you stop and think about it, and when your listeners stop and think about it, they're going to be like, oh wow, this is a huge part of my life and how I, you know, construct my personality. So it's called chronemics, and there's— it's how we value and study time, what time means to us. And basically there's— now I always get in trouble when I talk to my audiences about this because I say there's two types of people, you know, two types of chronemic people. And there's always people who are like, well, I want to be the third type. I'm kind of both. But if you had to kind of— if your listeners, if you kind of had to pick one, usually there's one of these that you would lean more toward. And the first one is called, you know, a monochronic person, monochronic person, which this would be myself. So we do our tasks one thing at a time. Like, I have my to-do list. I don't like to do multiple things at once. I do the first one, I get it done, it's time, move on to the next one. Boom. And I get it, and I get it done. I write stuff down. We have our datebooks. We know exactly what we need to get done, and we try very hard to stay within time limits. So we always know what time it is. I mean, I can walk outside, right, and look at the sun like a caveman and be like, it's 2:30. Look at my watch, oh, 2:40. I'm right on. Like, we're that plugged in. We're also the type of people who were very boundary conscious, meaning what's my neighbor's is his, what's mine is mine. Now, you know, if we're cool with borrowing stuff, okay, but I'm going to want that back, and I'm going to make sure that you get yours back. We're very boundary conscious as well, and we're also very fact-driven. So in a conversation, we'll have a conversation, we're good in conversations, but we want it to be a bit more— we need it to move, right? Give me the facts, it's got to move a little bit because we're very monochronic logical focused. The other side of it is polychronic type people. Polychronic. They can do things simultaneously. They can have, you know, the watching a YouTube video while working while somebody's coming in the room. We'll have a computer over here. They can kind of do all things at once here. They tend to be a bit more— they can get distracted maybe a little bit easier than a monochronic person. And time, time for my polychronic people is a bit more abstract. You know, at 1 o'clock meeting time, well, 1:05, 1:06, it's all the same. You know, it's all the same to them. So they borrow stuff more frequently. And, you know, they are, but they're very, they're my talkers, very relationship-driven, will tell a story for hours, my storytellers. Time's a little bit more abstract to them. So when you look at those two, you kind of decide, well, you know what, that's kind of me. I always wear a watch and I like being on time. Or you're the other side and you're like, no, time, you know, hey, we're at a— we're to get together. I don't need to know what time it is. Who, you know, who cares? I'm getting ready to get out the door. However long it takes, it takes.

I'll get there when I get there, right? Yeah, it's that.

Where me, you know, I could say, well, let's, let's meet at the park at 5. Well, there's no— there's nothing that's going to happen if we're late, right? There's nothing— it's— there's no consequence. We're not going to be late to a show or anything. But I said we wanted to be there at 5, so we got to be there at 5 because that's just That's what we said, and that's what the schedule is. So a lot of our personality and decisions and how we handle people and talk to people and, and function is a direct result of how we view time.

And I can see that contributing a lot to a person's— I'm just using the word playfully— their anxieties, right? That if other people don't meet them at that time, why aren't you taking me seriously? And why, right? And the other person can be like, well, why does it matter if we're 3 minutes later? Not 3 minutes late, right? Like there's the dance between those two personality factors are really interesting because there's always the positive parts of that and there's always the challenging aspects of what that brings to the table.

And what's fascinating about this is for when I've talked to many, many, many, many audiences around the country, I always say, okay, raise your hand if you're a monochronic, put a 1 up, right? Then I'll say, okay, raise your hand if you're polychronic, put a 2 up. So I'll have 1s and 2s. And I always ask them, I said, are all my 1s, my monochronics. How many of you ended up with a 2 as your relational partner? Would you believe it or not? I mean, we're getting close to 80, 90% of all the 1s end up with 2s and vice versa. Monos marry polys, polys end up with monos. So the opposites attract thing, I'm just, I'm just doing a straw poll for you, but most of my audiences, it's, it's the exact same formula where they're like, yeah, my, my spouse They are poly and I am mono. And, and I'll make a joke. I'll say, you know, well, when two polys get together, God knows they're not going to get anything done around the house. And my mono people, woo, you're going to have that thing on lockdown, right? You're going to have, we're going to do this, this, and this here, this here. And polys, you're just having a party. You're just, so it's really fascinating. And I'm the same way. My wife's a 2, hardcore 2. I'm a hardcore 1. And it definitely has created some relational strife, but it's opened up an opportunity for us to talk about and for her to be like, you know what, I never realized that, like, I am like this. And I'll be like, I am like this, so how can we work together?

And I would also see the flip of how can you— how can a 1 learn to take on more 2 type of positive traits, and how can a 2 learn to take on more 1 positive?

And you learn from each other. Yeah. And, and I've learned to take a deep breath, right, when we have 2 kids, so you're not— you're never going to get out the door on time. And but what I've just gotten started earlier, right? I know we got to get out the door on time. Just get started a little bit earlier and build in that buffer time that I know my poly family— and they're all polys, except me— are going to need. And they've also said that, OK, you know what? It is professional. It is for a playdate to not show up 25 minutes late. It shows you that you value that other person by generally being on time or close to it. Because that's our love language in my household is time, like spending time with each other. So we've— and with our friends, as we show that in family, that we love you, we spend time with you. And same thing. So we've definitely learned a lot from each other. It's not easy. I'll tell you what, it's not easy. It's never going to be perfect between when 1s and 2s get together. But it's, hey, that's life. That's the fun of our relation.

And that's the things that hopefully we can use as tools to strengthen all aspects, right? Whether it's at work, whether it's at home, whether it's friends, whether it's family. These are the strategy tools to, to learn about ourselves, to have more insights, to have more personal growth, which is the world that you and I really are passionate about.

I think that's why we're here. I think that's why we're here, to engage in personal development. And in a relationship, you never want to rest on your— on what you've accomplished or You never— you always want to be maintaining that relationship, always working on it, always scaffolding, you know, checking in with each other, with your partner, with your kids, with your family, your friends. You always want to be trying to move it to the next level and progress. You know, if not, you just stagnate. You know, it's just— it's a relationship that's not going to go anywhere. They're not going to get any value out of it and any joy out of it. We're here to be working on these things. And there's so many resources like your show, right, where we can be helping ourself, right? Have this winning life or mind. You use communication to, to motivate you in all areas of your life. So there's so many resources out there that aid in personal development. And hey, it's the beginning of the year. Whenever this comes out, the beginning of the year, this is the time to hit reset or to go back and say there's some things I need to work on personally, and this is the year to do it. Agreed, agreed.

So for everybody out there who's definitely gotten something out of this episode, if you didn't learn one thing from this episode I will be totally shocked and also be upset. So if you didn't learn something from this episode, please send me a message anywhere on Facebook, on Instagram, anywhere on social media, and let's go through this episode together. But what I would love for everybody out there is please do me a favor and, uh, follow Jim on social media. It's Jim Van Allan, and it's A-L-L-A-N. Um, right on that, you can go to his website, which is also the same thing, jimvanallen.com, and you can find a lot more information about everything that he's doing. You can also check out his podcast, which is Communicate to Motivate. And like always, for his, for mine, leave us a starred and written review specifically on iTunes. That always helps us get found by more people. It helps us get the word out more. You can also share it out with anybody that you think that this episode and other episodes would be an incredibly useful resource because that's why we're doing this. We want to be good resources. We want to help uplift people. We want to help people to be more motivated and how to learn how to do that in all these different areas. So once again, Jim, thank you so much for spending some time with us today.

Jason Wasser, it's been a pleasure. Thank you. And thank you to all your listeners.

Thanks for listening to the You Winning Life podcast. If you are ready to minimize your personal and professional struggles and maximize your potential, we would love it if you subscribed so you don't miss an episode. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at You Winning Life.