From Inner City Poverty to Boardroom Success: Joe Mechlinski's Journey of Conscious Transformation

Creating your own reality. Is it possible for me? I am Jennifer K. Hill, the Consciousness Architect, and I am here to tell you that it's not only possible, it's closer than you might think. Welcome to the show. Hello everyone, and welcome back for another episode of Regarding Consciousness. I am Jennifer K. Hill, CEO of OptiMatch and host of Regarding Consciousness. Always grateful to get to share time with you as we share wisdom from top thought leaders, authors, scientists, and revolutionaries from around the world on the latest of consciousness and how we can all live a life that is by design and helps us to better fulfill our dreams. Today we have with us Joe McClinsky, and Joe and I had the pleasure and honor of meeting in person actually several months ago via a mastermind that we're both a part of. Joe is a New York Times bestselling author of the book Grow Regardless and also his second book, Shift the Work. Also in perusing his bio, I noticed that not once but 9 times he was rated as one of the best places to work. He has a consulting company called Shift. It's a tech-enabled management consulting firm that is nationally recognized that he has been running for many years now. And Joe, you are doing great work in the world here of coaching, of human development. Thank you so much for taking some time to be here with us today.

You bet, Jennifer. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, Joe, I was so humbled to hear your story. Would you mind sharing a little bit with our viewers and our listeners about how you came to be this prolific entrepreneur, thought leader, author, and coach, and where you came from that shaped your journey?

You bet. And I was humbled too, to meet you. So there you go. We're even. So I usually start, I was, I'm from Baltimore. I grew up in the inner city of Baltimore. I had 2 and really 3 amazing parents. My parents met when they were young and got divorced, and then I got a stepmom and her birthday is today. So by the time she sees this, she won't know, but today was her very special day. Sending her lots of love in the world. So my secret weapon is I've had the best 3 parents. You could ever imagine. But I also went to some really troubled schools. I went to the worst high school in Maryland. We had all of the things. We had the guns, the violence, the drugs. We had a 23% graduation rate and the number one football team in the state. So we had this sort of just general stereotype of a lot of the inner cities across the country, frankly, that really struggle with all the issues with equality and equity and poverty. And at the end of the day, consciousness, the idea of just a greater level of awareness. And I got lucky to go to Johns Hopkins through all of this. And it was like my first quantum leap to a whole new world and a whole new environment, one with the material wealth, but not so much the spiritual wealth. And it was really clear to me that I was not going to follow the traditional path. And so I started up a few small businesses because I had to, I was hungry. And I, as much as I really appreciate the way that you laid the tracks here for me in terms of my Prolific entrepreneurship, it's really been out of desperation for most of it, which was, I laugh and tell people I'm more of like an outdoor cat, not an indoor cat. I'm not someone who follows the rules so well or really never thought about this. I took an internship once at school and it was for Merrill Lynch and I just was like appalled by the whole thing. We're going to wake up early, we're going to put on clothes that we don't normally wear. We're going to Take a long drive to a place that we're not fired up to go to. We're in a place with bad lighting. It's stiff. No one's being themselves. We eat lunch that you would never eat, this rushed, crazy, terrible food. And then we do it all over again. We go home and then this is the thing. And I just was like, is anybody paying attention to this? You couldn't pay me enough money. And frankly, I wouldn't have been good at it and for all the other things. So not judging folks who decide to go down that path, but for me it was just something different. My mom had instilled these values of service early on. And I don't know, I took the pain of thinking about what most of us spend a good chunk of our life doing, which is working and saying, what if you change the way people worked so that at the end of the day when they go home, they're like more of themselves, not less of themselves? And before we start singing Kumbaya and like holding hands and doing trust falls, you don't have to dig too far or read too many books to find that We don't do so well in environments that are pressure cookers or when there are mandates, when you are treated like a child. We basically put adults in these organizations and we tell them why to be, where to be, when to be, and how to be. And then we expect greatness. We expect this potential to be potentialized. We expect high performance. And what I found early on is that You can make people do things like you can say, I have to do these performance reviews. I have to go to work. I have to do these meetings. Or you can simply say what my dad said every single day that he put on his pants and went out to work in a blue collar environment. I get to. And this idea of an unlock of agency, you know, of like real choices that my little thumb up, I don't know how that happened, by the way. I don't know. I'll give you my thumbs. I don't know why Zoom is messing with us here, lady, but Anyway, the long story short is I think when you talk to executives or entrepreneurs, they just want people to care about their business like they do. And that care is not something you can engineer or manufacture. It really has to be an invitation. And so for 23 years, we've been working with, I think it's like over 600 companies, big, small, and medium, all the way up to like companies like Crocs, Hancock's, Microsoft, all the way down to startups, companies that have IPO'd where Executives have this big, bold vision. They need it to be scaled and activated. They need collective action, but it needs to be authentic. It needs to be a get-to. And that's really what I've spent most of my life doing. Because I think at the end of the day, if you can go home more of yourself, you'll be a better mom, dad, husband, wife, partner, global citizen. Like you won't go home depleted or empty. And so I think that's one of the, at least one of the many things that we could probably talk about today. But I think it's one of the things that you could really unlock a lot of potential, a lot of consciousness, a lot of upleveling of the way that we treat each other if we just did it differently during the day. There you go.

All right, Joe, I want to break down this dichotomy you just illustrated for us so beautifully. On the one hand, we have what I'm going to term soul-crushing loneliness that we're all seeing, this loneliness epidemic, the 24% of people surveyed across 142 countries around the world that are saying they're fairly or very lonely right now, which I think is being displayed in what you experienced when you went to Merrill Lynch. Why would I do this? This is painful. This is suffering. It's soul-crushing. And then on the flip side, you just illustrated something, which is I get to, I have the opportunity to. So, I can feel and hear what people are thinking and listening as they're watching this. And they're asking, how do we reconcile the two? How do I shift from that? You can't make me, I don't want to, this is not meant for me to a different perspective, a different consciousness of I have the opportunity to, as your dad instilled in you. How do we make that shift? And how do you help the companies you work with do that?

When I was 23, I started this company. And so, I didn't go to Harvard. To get my business degree. I didn't work at McKinsey. I'd never worked in corporate America. My ignorance, my lack of everything was actually the biggest advantage I had because I think if you were an alien and you dropped onto this planet right now and you looked at the way that we did things, you would definitely scratch your head and say, are you sure you're doing this? Is this really what we're doing here? As you're hurling on a rock through the universe, like this is, we all decided to leave Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. You decided to work 5 days a week. You decided to be chained to a desk all day. When you think again about inviting people in, our change management approach was really basic. We would ask questions, we would deeply listen, and then we would do something about it. We call it the flywheel effect. And so, it's not that complicated. In the very beginning, it was, I would go talk to their teams and I would say, hey, did you know, Jennifer, they're really scared of you? They don't feel like they have a voice. They don't feel like they can see something, say something, and then do something about it. When we think about hierarchy, there's an embedded asymmetrical imbalance of power. Fancy way again of saying that these pyramids that every organization is shaped, you are setting up a game. And the game is, if I stick my neck out, if I raise my hand, just think about the way that we were taught in school. We were not rewarded for the questions. We were rewarded for the answers. We weren't rewarded again to take chances. We were rewarded to fall in line. This conditioning is everywhere. And so I sometimes tell the story of the keyboard, 1862, right? This thing was more or less invented. There was a patent granted to a guy and it was great. It was a typewriter, not a keyboard at the time. And so people were typing All the time so fast that it broke. So instead of arranging the keys A through Z, he arranged them in the QWERTY keyboard that we're using, both of us today. This complex configuration, it took him 7 years, by the way, in 1867 or '69. This QWERTY keyboard, it's the same keyboard we use today, 140-some years later. It's the— we all took typing class. I didn't, but most of us took typing class. There are all these assumptions that we need to go back to first principles on. Are we really sure this is what we should be doing? And so from a change management perspective, in terms of like, how would you get everybody rowing in the same direction or on the same sheet of music, so to speak? It's simple. It's asking questions, it's listening, and then it's doing something about it. And then it's repeating that cycle over and over again. And some of the very best leaders do it. Some of the very best organizations do it. And we've just played a very small part in helping to facilitate that exercise. And that's really what it comes down to. And look, there's a two-way street here though. So it's not just about the organizational executives or leaders inviting this in. It also means if you want to be seen, heard, and understood, all of the things that people talk about as it relates to, like a lot of air quotes today, by the way, I'm just trying to get the icons to jump back up. If you want to see your organization do this psychological safety thing, which was a phrase that came onto the scene in 2017, Google did their famous high-performance study. They were trying to figure out what are these, what are the factors that drive high performance in their engineering teams? They studied thousands of people, hundreds of teams. You could bundle it all the way up to this term that has been charged politically these days to be like too safe spaces or like a little too soft. But psychological safety just means this to me. It means that the organization has your back. And so for me, going all the way back to like where I come from, which is the streets of Baltimore, so to speak, that's how I got out. I got out through people having my back. And if you play that forward, most of us are not self-made. We're community made, as a friend of mine, Jason Gaynor, says. And I think that's Really what it comes down to is like, how do we treat each other more human, not less during the day? Because we keep doing this over money, over power, over fear. And again, some of the very best organizations have like found a way to like move away from that gravity of status quo to say, man, maybe there's another way to do it. Patagonia. Great example of a company that closes between Christmas and New Year's.

Hmm.

A company that's transitioned CEOs, a company that's transitioned. It's a private company that's given all of its wealth back to the planet. Just principles that we all intuitively can feel at some level have sparkles or specks of truth. And so the question is, how do we unplug from the matrix? How do we get and disrupt the pattern? It is hard. I'm still working on it too. I think we get there by being examples, And not explanations. I think we get there by, you know, really sincerely being humble to realize that none of us have a freaking clue of what we're doing. We're just making this up moment by moment. We really are. And I think it's almost like interesting to think about, we always gather and we want to talk about things that we don't know. Wouldn't it be interesting to get a group of community together? How about we just come together and talk about things we don't know? Hmm. Like we just, I think that's the opportunity that groups, teams, and organizations have. So there you go.

You would love one of our other prior guests, Joe, Terry Nopert, who's the founder of an organization called the Octopus Movement. It's not really an organization. It's a group of nonlinear thinkers from around the world that companies are now hiring to solve world problems because think tank that to your point, all they do is sit around and ask questions and brainstorm different ways to do things. And I think that It's a great place for us to get curious, Joe. What if we could get curious rather than just saying, okay, it's a top-down world and I'm just at the effect of it? How do we take the reins of responsibility, accountability, our own lives back into our own hands and begin building these teams? There was another brilliant thought leader I was on a call with a couple of months ago who was talking about, hey, I found a way to solve the world's problem. It's called outcome democracy using the blockchain to like solve the world's problem. This is what's becoming available for us. And I think step 1, to your point, and I love that you referenced Google's Aristotle Project and psychological safety, because I think it's paramount to our unraveling this loneliness epidemic, this lack of intimacy that we have. So step 1 begins with our own awareness. Joe, it took your own willingness to have these tough conversations with yourself and then with your own team and other teams. And to emulate and embody that. I was just listening to another brilliant woman who was referred to me and she said, listen, I could say, I could stand up here and I could spit information to you and I could shout at you and tell you what to do and what not to do. It's going to go in one ear and out the other. Though what will make a lasting difference in your life is if I embody what I'm saying, which is what I really hear you sharing in the work that you're doing, Joe, is that You're showcasing us this way of doing things differently and breaking down barriers that maybe have existed for millennia and finding new ways to do things. So, what is your advice for us as human beings, as entrepreneurs, as people who are working on evolving our consciousness to begin to embody more of these wonderful ideas that you're talking about?

Shameless plug, I have a new book coming out called Who Says? It's about challenging everything and the sort of the creative genius and thinking differently. And it's a book after being a management consultant for 23 years where I don't want to give advice. So I'm bringing this up because I think it's important to start off with just because I have a way doesn't mean it's your way. And I think the self-help industry and space has such good intentions at times, but I think We fall into no different than this dogmatic religion or other sort of areas of study that become very, it is like the Mandalorian, like my way or the highway. It is the way. There is just not the way. So I think it's important to really, when you talk about embodiment, it's like, you know, what's right for you? How do you get still and silent enough to hear that? Now, maybe that's a little too woo, right? Maybe there's a place to start. And so I do have a practice. We call it the 25 Reasons Why. Yeah. Stumbled upon this exercise after I graduated from Hopkins. I went back to my old high school just to do some mentoring and we ended up doing a foundation to help these kids transition from that high school to college journey. And I remember what, like I would ask the kids, again, this is 20-some years ago, what do you want to be when you get older? Which is the dumbest question an adult should ask a kid because how many adults know what they want to be when they supposedly get older, which is, you know, we're all still becoming. So whatever that means. And traditionally in my environment, people would say things like, I want to be an entertainer, a rapper, a basketball player, football player. But one day we had this kid, he said, I want to be a chef, Mr. Joe, which felt weird because I was 23 at the time. I was like, all right, chef, why do you want to do that? Like, just genuinely curious about this answer. And he's, because I want to, money's going to get me a girl. Now, again, don't shoot the messenger here. This is just what he was working through. But as he was talking through this, he said, I'm hungry. I don't have food. I don't have clothes. It would get me a house. It would get me a car. And I know where this kid's coming from. I'm from the same area. I, there is a first base reality of that, like Maslow's hierarchy of needs of just getting to a place where Danny Kahneman, who just passed away, he did this big famous study on happiness and he later evolved it because what he found was, yes, money does create happiness to a certain point. Now there is a diminishing return past $100,000, past $200,000, past $300,000. But make no mistake, when you don't have money, the difference between somebody making $30,000 and $50,000 is Ginormous. So this kid is imagining what that would be. Now we're like 20 minutes into this conversation in front of his friends, and I'm like, you could just sense I had a little Tony Robbins in me at that day. And I was like, so why else would this be important to you? He's like, I don't know, maybe, I don't know, maybe I'd like to serve people. I'd like to help people. I'd like to be creative. And this is, again, I think intuitively where we move from me to we, that there is this oneness where The person who sees somebody stranded will help them, even if they're a stranger. The stories of heroes that have stepped in front of grave danger to save someone that they didn't know. What is that reflex that occurs in all the great mystics and poets and philosophers and artists? They talk about, we will all have at some point dreams or real life experiences where we feel like we're connected. Now, maybe you have that feeling with your family or your kids or your partner, but we should have it with the whole thing. And so You could sense in the room the energy starting to shift. Like, I was like, everybody's, oh, this is starting to feel like a little revival here. All right, why else do you want to do this? Because here's the other thing I think people forget is that like change is hard. People can't keep their New Year's resolutions. People have a hard time keeping their pro— I sometimes struggle with keeping my word to myself. Like I have big dreams, big goals, big aspirations, and I fall short often of being able to Put it all together. I try and I have my routines and I have all the other things, but I think it's important that we just meet the moment and say, yeah, we sometimes we miss. And so for him to go back to his environment where all he's going to see is not what we're talking about right now, he's going to see again, people who are prisoners of their past, a generational trauma-based environment that is something that many of us can't endure or even understand. I was like, why are you gonna do this? Like, why? And so I literally listed 'em off on a flip chart. We got to number 23 and the whole thing shifted. And for him, it was like, I wanna pay back my grandmother who has taken care of me and my brothers and sisters. And I've told this story probably a gazillion times. I've done this work for organizations, executives, and for people, tens of thousands of people. It's, it's not my exercise. It's just something we stumbled upon. But like really trying to get down to, are you, is it a job? Is it a profession? Or as that parable says, are you building a temple? Are you doing something of service? Are you doing something with greater purpose, greater impact? Now look, I think sometimes that can get a little twisty, that we can get a little too martyry and try to think that we're going to be the one to save the whole world and the whole planet. But I also think it's important for us to have some level of connection. Yes, I'm doing it for me. Doing it for we, but I'm also doing it for something else that's maybe bigger than all of those things. And I think for him and certainly for me, I think that's one potential practice or a potential exercise that you could put yourself through. But look, this just probably better than I do. What are some of the things that you do to interrupt your pattern or to get your cognition shifted to where that you can wake up a bit more to a certain thing? Like I'm positive you have some. of this stuff too. So I think they'd probably be more excited to hear from you than they would from me on this.

I disagree, says the bestselling New York Times author who just blew all of our minds with that. That was so brilliant, Joe. And I love that. I've been there. I went and did that and I've talked to schools before and it's so powerful. I remember I had a similar situation where I was talking and I made the same mistake. I'm in my 20s and I say, what do you want to be when you grow up? We're all like whiteboarding it. And then this one kid says something and I said to him, you can be or do whatever you want with your life. And Joe, he started crying and I said, are you okay? And he said, nobody's ever told me that before. Yeah. And that's the possibility. I love this process of asking questions. I was a terrible coach years ago. Oh my God. Most people don't know this about me, but ironically, the company I sold, the website was jhcs.com, was the original domain we had. Which was my epic failure consulting company that I launched at 27, 28. It was Jay Hill's Career Consulting Company, which we kept the website. Nobody even never noticed it and morphed it into the staffing firm that we later sold. And the reason I failed so badly at that company is I sucked at asking questions. I thought I had all the answers. And it was only about 5 or 6 years ago that one of the greatest mentors I've ever had in my life invited me to shadow him for a year on what it's like and how to be a great mentor. And the only thing that he taught over, and I'm minimizing it, but you'll get the point, was to ask questions, get curious. And there was another woman who I heard in 2020 had given a talk. I'm drawing a blank on her name, but you could probably look it up. And she had an exercise similar to this where when we're faced with an obstacle or something that we're really challenged by, to do what's called the 100 Ways Game. So let's say that you see no way out of a situation, like no way, you can't even fathom it. You're locked up, you're in debt, you're miserable, your health is terrible, whatever it might be. And so I've been playing this 100 ways game now for years with people. And you would start off, let's say you needed money and you're like, 100 ways you could get to $1 million and you pick up some realistic ones. I buy 1 cent of Bitcoin and it goes to $100 billion, whatever. I'm like, you come up with these obscure ones. And I remember one time I was teaching a class on how to connect to more miracles in your life. It was last summer. And one of the students in the class were playing this way, and I think I'd given a funny example, like you're walking down the beach and you find a note in a bottle that leads you to somewhere further on the beach and you find XYZ amount of money. No joke. I love this so much, Joe. 6 months after that class, the woman, one of the women in the class emails me and she says, Jennifer, you're one of the only people who can appreciate the story. I was walking down the beach on blah, blah, blah place. And I picked up a seashell and there was $1,000 inside. But that's, it's the 100 ways game.

Yeah.

How can we get out of our own way of 100 ways why something can't work and begin to play the yes and rather than the no but game? And that's where having great mentors, consultants, teachers like you come in, Joe, is having people who can help us to see something in a different way. Because to your point, we all become mired and fixed in our own thought processes, belief systems. I'm not good enough, imposter syndromes. I have it too. I'm getting ready to deliver a couple of speeches and I'm like, who the heck am I? Like, I'm speaking at a conference this Friday. One of the women speaking at the conference, Joe, is one of 5 women in the world who surfs the 100-foot waves. And I'm like, I can't be on stage. She's like amazing. She's out there risking her life. Right. But the point is we all have our own different path and some people might resonate with your book, Who Says, or with somebody else's book or Joanna's book, who's going to be speaking on the stage with me. And it's not about trying to be everything to everyone. It's about speaking your truth and then allowing that truth to vibrate and resonate with the consciousness of the people that we're meant to draw to our tribe and help support one another, right?

Yeah, 100%. It's really beautiful. I think the idea of legacy thinking gets us all. And I think the ability, I, I did a talk once where I was like, it's, we're in a rowboat paddling forward, but we're looking back.

Hmm.

And so it's like, how do you turn around to your point and really see yourself, see what you could be, see how it could go? And I love that 100 ways to get there. It's again, it's forces. It's like, I think they say the, the average adult asks 6 questions a day when the average kid asks about 125 questions a day. And it's like, Well, yes, because again, we've been taught to know and memorize things as opposed to deeply understand them and to be curious and to let your curiosity take you to different places. And so again, this all sounds whimsical if, and I do, I payroll and I have a business and we have a mortgage and we have things, right? I think it's like the battle between this idealistic, hopeless romantic part of me of wanting the world to have this as the design point. But also the practicality of we have kids and we have stuff. And when I think about it often about, and I hope one day they hear this, like I can tell you that I know one of the regrets I'll have is when the kids are older that we didn't homeschool or we didn't find a different place. Like I'm sending them to an environment that I know is ass backwards. The whole thing is wrong. And at the same time, I have rationalized and/or justified to myself that it's also helping them see how the world is. 'Cause that is also a teacher. Like, it's important for them to see and for them to choose. It's not my life, it's theirs. And I think in some ways, again, to each his own. And I think everyone's doing the best they can and hopefully sometimes it's good enough for them. I think it's been such an exercise in surrender. It's been such an exercise in not just applying my worldview and points of view to them because at the end of the day, I think that's again, part of that, that you gotta do it my way. Yeah. Even as a parent.

Beautiful. Well, that's a great tie-in, Joe, to share about your book. But before we get there, before we tell people when and where people can find Who Says, I want to know, is there anything else that I didn't ask you or something that you'd like to share? You shared so much beautiful wisdom today that maybe you'd like to leave our listeners with before we tell them where to connect with you.

Look, I think we've said a lot today. I think if you're listening to this and this wonderful conversation that Jennifer has with so many great people is, is to to find something that works for you and to try it and to realize that you're going to mess it up. And when you do, you've got 3 options. You can keep doing it, you can apologize, or you can readjust and then just keep running the play. But don't let the small things get in the way of the big things. And again, just realize that every single day is a gift. I'll drop one last little, not fun fact, but certainly experience I had, which is I went to 23 funerals by the time I was 23. The last one was my mom and it was a really tragic ending. And then what it gave me was, and it does give it to you, you don't really have much of a choice at this point to, but to accept the gift and the wisdom of life is short. It is a cosmic blink of an eye. And I get this doubly hit between the eyes with kids who are now 13 and 11. I can re-remember what 3, 4, and 5 felt like. And we're 4 summers away from no longer having our daughter here. We're About 6 of those with our kid James. And yeah, I think again, everyone's got to pick their own way. And to the best of our ability, if we can, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, leave this world a better place, either through a healthy child, a garden patch, or just know that one life has breathed easier because you have lived. I think that sounds like a life well lived. So there you go. November 12th. Who says Check it out.

Well, say that again. I want to hear it again.

November 12th.

Right.

Or the line before that one. Yes. November 12th will be the public, the release date. Who Says? Wiley's publishing this one. The book is called Who Says? Question Everything and Discover the Genius of Thinking Different. You're going to get no advice in this book whatsoever. You're going to get deep thinking. You're going to get deep questioning. You're going to get a bit about my story of how I came to be. And a lot of invitations to think very differently. So there you go.

I think it's a great opportunity for us all to reflect, to go within and to ask ourselves new questions, new ways of thinking, and not just to be at the effect of our environments and jumping like lemurs off a cliff because the other guy or gal is doing it. My invitation lies in a quote by Howard Thurman who says, Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go and do that because what this world needs is people who have come alive. I am Jennifer K. Hill. We've had Joe McClinsky on here with us today, author of numerous books, including his upcoming one, which will be out November 12th. Go out there. Don't be afraid to ask questions. See if you can challenge yourself and whether you find 100 new ways to do something, whether you ask yourself 23 questions, see if you can ask one more question today than you did yesterday. Thank you for joining us.