15 Top Insights From 2021's Actionable Intelligence Podcast

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Hello everybody and welcome to the Way Forward Actionable Intelligence Podcast. I'm your host, business coach Steve Sandusky. For those of you who are regular listeners of the Way Forward Podcast, you probably picked up on the fact that we have multiple hosts of this show. One week I host the show and the people that I interview are typically from outside of the financial industry. And my goal is to tease out their insights and then connect what they do to what you do as a financial professional. On opposite weeks, Greg Bartolos from Barron's typically hosts the show. And generally speaking, he's interviewing people from within the financial industry. And the thought is that between the two of us, we can capture the full spectrum of what it takes to be successful, not just in business, but in life as well. And And today I wanna change it up a bit and do a couple of things. First, I'm gonna walk you through highlights from 15 of my 26 episodes in 2021. And in the Barron's tradition, these will be actionable insights. And my hope is that they're gonna spark your interest in going back and listening to these episodes to get even more details. And second, I have two decision-making frameworks that I'm gonna share with you toward the end that I think will help you as you think about your business strategy for this new year. All right, let's get started. As I began to work on this episode, I quickly decided that it made sense to categorize my shows into 4 categories. And those categories are number 1, elevating your performance. Number 2, business strategy and execution. Number 3, planning and investing. And then number 4, client communication. And as I looked at all 26 of my shows, it was pretty clear that they fit pretty well into one of those categories. So as I go through my highlights here, I'm gonna discuss them in the order of these categories. So let's start with elevating your performance. A key theme here with my guests is that top performance begins with what happens between your ears. And when you get your head right, Everything else will start to fall in place. So let's start with the first one here and talk about harnessing pressure with Dane Jensen. So I had a conversation with Dane and he said that there are two types of pressure. There's long-haul pressure and there's peak pressure moments. And he developed what he calls the power of pressure model that prescribed specific actions to deal with each type of pressure. But let's just start with, well, what is pressure? How do we define that? Well, Dane said that 3 components have to be in play in order for us to feel under pressure. First of all, it must be important. Second, there has to be some uncertainty about the outcome. And third, there has to be a volume of pressure that feels like it's more than we can handle. So let's talk for a moment here about peak pressure. Let's just say that you're about to walk into a room. You're going to be meeting with a prospect that has $12 million to invest after selling their company. What's one thing that you can do to help relieve any pressure that you might feel in this peak moment? Well, Dane said you could ask yourself a question. He said you can ask yourself, what's at stake? And the point in asking yourself this question is, unless we're on the battlefield or there's a life or death situation here, you know, that's not what's at stake here. Sure, we want to win the, you know, the account. We want to get this new relationship. But even if we don't, our world's not going to end and our life will go on. So by putting the moment in perspective, we can take a breath. We can put a little space between trigger and response. And by doing that, we remove the tension that the pressure creates, the tension that can destroy our performance. And in its place, we can open up a space for us to rise to the occasion with confidence. Another way that I think about this, instead of asking what's at stake is, and I'll often use this with my coaching clients, is I'll say, okay, what's the worst thing that can happen? For example, let's say we're looking at investing $20,000 in a marketing campaign. Well, what's the worst thing that could happen here? Well, we could lose all $20,000. We might not get any new business from it. And I think the reality is $20,000 is not going to change the lifestyle of any of you that are listening to this right now. But on the flip side, if that $20,000 marketing campaign worked well, we might get a multiple return on that 20 grand. So we could end up with an asymmetric marketing opportunity. Now, it's also important to understand that pressure is not something that we should fear. If you have no pressure in your life, how alive are you? And when you understand the power of pressure, it can actually propel your performance. All right, let's take a look at number 2 here, which is about what role talent plays in your success. So another guest I had on the show is 4-time Olympic medalist Lauren Williams. And we all know people who are uniquely gifted. It could be an athlete, it could be someone in academics, it could be a singer, you name it. There's talented people all over the place. But we also know highly talented people who flunked out, who never reached their level of success that their talent would have predicted. So I asked Lauren, what is it that gets in the way of hugely talented people who never reach their potential? And she said, it's what you do with what you have that determines how far you're going to go in business and life. And specifically, she said, there's two things that get in the way here. Number one is your work ethic. If you have great talent, but an average work ethic, You could easily get beat by someone with less talent but who has a voracious work ethic. And then second, fear and doubt. If you're scared when you get up on the big stage and you lack confidence that you can succeed in the arena, then you're clearly not gonna make it. So let me dissect this just a bit. Some amount of fear or some amount of a feeling of pressure is necessary to perform at your best. That's why you often see world records broken at the biggest events, because people are primed to perform at their best, because they know that the competition is going to force them to. On the other hand, doubt or a lack of confidence is definitely a killer of performance. If you lack confidence, there's just no way you're going to be able to rise to the occasion when the occasion calls for it. And confidence, where does it come from? Well, It comes from your self-talk. It's what you say to yourself. But like chocolate chip cookie dough, there is a point where too much confidence will lead to reduced performance. Research has shown that a small amount of overconfidence will elevate skill, but too much confidence will diminish it. So dialing in on the right amount of confidence will give you the impetus to go beyond your comfort zone but not so much confidence that you slack off because you're telling yourself, "Yeah, this is easy. I don't have to work any harder." The third show in elevating your performance that I want to talk about here is Bending Reality with Victoria Song. Let me ask you this. Where does your fear stop you short of making your ultimate contribution? The natural course of life is to follow the path of least resistance. And that's why many people just stay ensconced in that warm and fuzzy place that we call the comfort zone. In this zone, we know what we're doing, life is good, and we usually don't have to push ourselves too hard. But when you look in the mirror, do you see someone who is alive, someone who is full of energy, who is living with the clarity and the minimal distortion that can only occur when you're living at your edge? Fear pops up when we get close to or move beyond our edge, but it's only when you stay with this fear, when you recognize it and when you feel it, that transformation can occur. So Victoria said that emotional freedom is the key to unlocking all freedom, and what she meant by that was we have to be able to feel the emotion— fear, for example— here. We have to let it wash through us. We have to process it, and then we need to know that no matter what happens, we're going to be okay. Let's go back to the comfort zone for a second. If you have a vision that you can see from across the chasm of your comfort zone, what are you afraid of if you try to cross it? Are you afraid of failure? Are you afraid of being humiliated? As Victoria said to me, quote, "What's the fear in the way of that vision? It's not until we can hold the flip side of the worst thing happening as we go after and chase our dreams that we're finally ready for that dream to come true for us," end quote. I want you to think of it this way. It's only when we have a dream that's bigger than our fears that we can cross that chasm to move beyond our comfort zone. And when you cross that chasm, that's when you'll be able to bend reality. The fourth show that I want to talk about here is Get Off the X with David Sears. David is a former 20-year Navy SEAL, and he said to me, quote, The kill zone in an ambush is either a really good spot if you're the one picking it, or a really bad one if you're stuck on it, end quote. And he said in SEAL training, they call it the X. And if SEAL members find themselves in such a position, they have to maneuver as quickly and violently as possible to reach a more advantageous fighting position. Now, in business, we usually don't find ourselves as the target in an ambush. Instead, our X might be more personal. We might get hit with a divorce, we might get hit with a debilitating illness, or our business might lose its biggest client. And when we get hit with our version of the X, the first key is not to freeze. Instead, we have to orient ourselves and then take action. We have to get off the X and move toward a better position. David also said that our X could be what he calls target fixation. For example, we might be fixated on hitting certain profit goals or making certain sales targets, but if we get too fixated on those X goals, it might blind us to other problems that this fixation could lead to. We might end up cutting corners or making promises to prospects that we can't keep once they become clients. So the first step to overcoming target fixation is simply awareness. We have to remind ourselves that we all have blind spots. And one way to shine a light on them is to have someone play the role of devil's advocate. So let's say that you're doing your annual planning meeting and you decide on an aggressive growth goal of, let's say, 35% next year. Well, instead of groupthink, have one or two people who are designated to point out all the problems and the challenges and the risks that they see with this aggressive growth goal. This should help you get off the X of target fixation on that growth goal. And even if you decide to stick with the 35% goal, you'll probably have identified other measures to ensure the goal is not achieved at the expense of good business practices and promises kept. The fifth show that I want to mention here in elevating your performance is with Valerie Kondos Field. Now, as a business person who's leading a team, you can make people work hard through dictate, or you can lead and coach in such a way that your team wants to work hard because they're intrinsically motivated. Now, you may have seen that viral video of Katelyn Ohashi doing a floor routine and getting a 10 on it while she was with UCLA. Well, her coach, Valerie Kondosfield, affectionately known as Miss Val, told me that it wasn't always that way. She said that when Katelyn started at UCLA, she was the last gymnast to have beaten Simone Biles. But Ohashi entered UCLA as a burned-out freshman, out of shape with an aching body. And midway through her first season, she told Ms. Val, quote, "I just don't want to be great again." Now, fortunately, through great understanding and coaching, Ms. Val realized that the best way to help Ohashi become great again was not through coaching her as a gymnast, but to help her find joy as a human being. And over time, with guidance from Miss Val, Ohashi started fulfilling the rest of herself and not just focusing on being a gymnast. And once she found joy outside the gym, it was easy to find joy inside the gym again. And that translated to her viral floor routine video and led to her winning an individual NCAA championship as well as a team national championship. Now, for you as a leader, this translates into coaching the person, not the position. And as Valerie said to me, quote, every good coach knows that magic happens when the whole person is vibrant, when an athlete gets in the zone. If you only coach the fundamentals or execution of skills, that's all that you're going to get back, end quote. Let's move on to the second category here, which is business strategy and execution. The first one that I want to talk about here is Leveraging the Path of Least Resistance to Running Your Business with Robert Fritz. Last year, I completed a 4-day training program on the fundamentals of structural thinking with Robert Fritz. And in my podcast with him, we discuss this idea of structure being a dominant factor in our lives and in how we build and run businesses. Now, more specifically, the idea here is how can you form new structures that will enable you to leverage and direct the path of least resistance to where you truly want to go? In other words, you get your business flowing in the right direction by working with 3 fundamentals of structural thinking rather than against them. Now, here are these 3 principles of structural thinking. Number 1, energy moves along the path of least resistance. Number 2, the underlying structure of anything will determine its path of least resistance. And number 3, we can determine the path of least resistance by creating new structures. Now let's take company culture as an example. If you want to change your company culture, You have to change the underlying structure of your company so that the behaviors you desire happen naturally by people following the path of least resistance. The big insight from Robert is that you can learn to recognize the structures that are at play in your life, and then you can change them so that you can create what you really want to create. Now, I think Robert Fritz is one of the great thinkers of our time, and I highly recommend that you read his books and that you go back and listen to the podcast that I did with him. Now, one other thing that I wanna share that he said was, and this is a quote, "You can solve all of your problems, but still not have what you want," end quote. And what he's getting at here is when you are solving a problem, you're taking action to have something go away, which in this case is the problem. But having something go away doesn't mean that what remains is what we want. To get what we want requires an act of creation. When you are creating, you're taking action to have something come into being, which is the creation. Now notice that the intentions of these two actions are opposite. When you think structurally, you're going to ask yourself better and more useful questions. So rather than asking, how do I get this unwanted situation to go away, Instead, you would ask, well, what structures should I adopt to create the results that I want to create? Now, for me personally, going deep into learning about structural thinking was one of the highest impact things I did in 2021. Let's move to the second one here, which is deconstructing Amazon's massive growth by working backwards with Bill Carr. Now, Beginning with the end in mind, that's a popular trope here with coaches and consultants. And at Amazon, they found a way to turn that concept into a continuous process that has led to some of the company's greatest innovations. Now, they call it Working Backwards PR FAQ process. That's kind of a mouthful there. And the way that this process works is anytime somebody in the company has an idea for a new product or service, They start off by writing a press release, which is an enticing description announcing the new product or service. The second part, the frequently asked questions, goes into more detail about how the product or service works and other details about the deliverables. So essentially, they're beginning with the end in mind. And if you read this press release and you're not thrilled about what you just read, then you either need to write a more enticing press release or you need to trash the idea because it's just not a compelling idea. This process is a key way to bubble up innovative ideas through the organization and allow everyone to contribute. In a similar way, I've adapted this press release idea, and it's an idea that I work on with my coaching clients. And now that we're here at the beginning of the year, I think this is a perfect time to go through the exercise. So let me just share how it works. So I'll ask my clients to write a forward-looking press release, and here's the structure of it. Pretend it's December 31st, 2022. Write a 3-paragraph press release that describes the success of the year just passed. So paragraph 1 is going to start with XYZ Advisors. So put the name of your firm in there. Is pleased to announce that we— and then you just go on to describe what you achieved for the year. Paragraph 2 starts with our client and then put the name of one of your clients in there. Said, and then now you add a glowing testimonial about your service and the impact in their life that describes what you're trying to do for your ideal clients. So here we're getting a glowing testimonial from your clients and showing what you did for them. Paragraph 3 starts with, we couldn't have achieved this without the, and then you go on to describe who supported you in your great achievement and how they supported you. By writing a press release that highlights the success of the year just passed, along with a client testimonial, you're going to force yourself to define what success looks like in 2022. Then it becomes a matter of defining and executing on the leading activities that will generate the results that you described in this press release. Now, you could take this even a step further and look at your client list and then identify 5 clients that you have done some amazing work for. Then you can ghostwrite the testimonial that describes in glowing terms how you changed their life. And then look at those 5 testimonials that you wrote on their behalf and see if there's any common threads in the work that you do that would generate these glowing testimonials. And whatever it is that's in common here, do more of that. Now, on the other hand, if you're not able to ghostwrite 5 glowing testimonials from your clients, then clearly you've got some more work to do to be referable. The third show that I want to mention here is going on the Journey Beyond Fear with John Hagel. The firms that have managed to navigate all the uncertainty of the past couple years, they didn't sit on their hands waiting for things to magically get better. Instead, they took in all the available information, they confronted their fears, and they focused on strategies for delivering what their clients needed. Now, John Hagel is a retired partner from Deloitte. He also spent 40 years working in Silicon Valley, and he wrote a book called The Journey Beyond Fear. And one of the things that John and I talked about was a business planning strategy called Zoom Out, Zoom In. This approach focuses on two very different time horizons in parallel and iterates between them. So one time horizon is 10 to 20 years. That's the zoom out horizon. And then the other is 6 to 12 months, which is the zoom-in horizon. So here's how it works. These are the key questions that you would want to be asking yourself in these two time horizons as you're working on your business strategy. So we're zooming out 10 to 20 years in the future. So we want to ask ourselves, what will our relevant market or industry look like 10 to 20 years from now? Second, what kind of company will we need to be in 10 to 20 years from now in order to be successful in that market or industry? Now, a minute ago, I also talked about Bill Carr, and I think Amazon's a great example of using the zoom-out strategy. So early on, Jeff Bezos said that at Amazon, they asked themselves, what won't change over the next 10 years? And what they concluded was customers will always want 3 things. First, they're always going to want low prices. Second, they're always going to want fast delivery. And third, they're always going to want a vast selection of products and services. So what did Amazon do? They invested heavily in delivering on all three of those things. And they were able to invest heavily because they were confident that those three consumer desires were not going to change for at least the next 10 years, if not pretty much forever. So this zoom out part is about getting the direction correct. The zoom in part is about the next 6 to 12 months where we have a lot more visibility. So here are some questions to ask. Number 1, what are the 2 or 3 initiatives that we could pursue in the next 6 to 12 months that would have the greatest impact in accelerating our movement toward that longer-term destination? Number 2, do these 2 or 3 initiatives have a critical mass of resources to ensure that will have high impact? And then number 3, what are the metrics that we could use at the end of 6 to 12 months to best determine whether we achieve the impact we intended? Now, this 2-step process really proposes 2 distinct sets of questions for businesses that want to break through fear. So the zoom out, basically, what is our relevant market or industry going to look like 10 to 20 years from now? What are the implications for the big opportunities that we could be addressing 10 to 20 years from now? The zoom in. What are the 2 or 3 initiatives, no more, that we could pursue in the next 6 to 12 months that would have the greatest impact in accelerating our move toward that longer-term opportunity? How do we measure that success? How do we measure our progress? So by connecting that 10 to 20 year goal with the daily tasks that need to be executed over the next 6 to 12 months, you're going to get your employees feeling like they're engaged, like they're making a positive impact and that they're making some meaningful progress each day. Now, I realize that we can't predict what's going to happen tomorrow, let alone 10 years from now. But like Amazon, there are some big picture consumer behaviors and trends that likely won't change, and you can drive toward those. And if the world changes, you can adjust your heading to get back on track in the right direction. And one more thing on this zoom out, zoom in idea is You can connect this idea to the path of least resistance that I just discussed a moment ago. Zoom out gives you the direction. Then you can put the structures in place to create the path of least resistance to march forward in that direction on a daily basis. Everything is part of a system. Everything is connected. Let's not lose sight of that. Let's now move to the third category, which is financial planning and investing. And I want to start off here with a conversation that I had with Professor Andrew Scott, talking about how financial planning will change as people routinely live to 100. Now, traditionally, we've thought about life as having 3 stages. We've got roughly 20 years of school, we've got 40 years of work, and then we've got maybe 20 years of retirement. Now, today, most advisors are focused on helping clients through that third stage of life, those 20 or so years in retirement. But what we're starting to see is life is evolving from 3 stages to multiple stages. And this multiple-stage life has several implications for you as a financial advisor. First, advisors tend to focus on the retirement stage of life. But if we have multiple stages throughout life, we need to make sure that we're able to fund those and not just focus on the retirement stage. Second, We need to rethink what we consider to be assets and broaden the definition to include non-financial assets. And Professor Scott says that we have financial assets, we have productive assets, we have vitality assets, and we have transformational assets. Yet for the most part, advisors are only focusing on those financial assets. And then the third is from a financial planning standpoint, We need to focus more on whole-of-life planning, not just retirement planning, because in this multi-stage life, people are going to be cycling in and out of education, work, leisure, recreation, sabbaticals, the gig economy, encore careers. And that requires a whole-of-life approach to planning. What I took away from my conversation with Professor Scott is how financial advisors who focus narrowly on a client's financial assets are missing a wide range of other assets that are vitally important to living a full life. And by incorporating these other assets, you can become even more invaluable to your clients. The second show that I want to talk about here is my conversation with Professor Stephanie Kelton. Now, many of you, I think, are familiar with her. She wrote a book called The Deficit Myth, and she is a popular speaker and expert on the topic of Modern Monetary Theory. You also probably have a strong opinion one way or the other on MMT. If you lean Republican or conservative, you probably think MMT is going to be the end of our financial system. If you're a progressive, you probably think that it could be the answer to a lot of our problems here. But here's the thing. Whether we call it MMT or not, our country has essentially been functioning as if MMT describes how our government accounting system works. Now, there's always been a faction of our politicians who rail against deficits and think that our national debt is out of control. So I went back to January of 1981 and I looked up President Reagan's inaugural speech. And here's what he said back in 1981, quote, "For decades, we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals, end quote. Now, when he said that, our national debt was less than $1 trillion. Today, it's about $29 trillion. And yet our country keeps on ticking. And during that period, our total public debt as a percent of GDP has grown from 30% to 122%. In other words, our debt has grown 4 times faster than our GDP. Now, my point here is I'm not trying to convert you to MMT. I'm not trying to tell you that, you know, that's the be-all, end-all. What I am trying to say here is that I think it's important that we all be critical thinkers, that if we let ourselves get caught up in binary thinking, we'll end up missing a lot of the nuance in how things actually work. The third show that I want to discuss here in this area of planning and investing is the conversation that I had with Demetri Kofinas. And we talked about this concept of memetic desire. As we look back on 2021, one of the most talked about things that was happening in the year as it relates to investing was what was happening with these meme stocks and cryptocurrencies and alternative crypto coins. And according to Demetri, one of the reasons why he said so many people were trying to get involved in those areas is because everyone else was doing it. So we've got social media, we've got all these financial trading apps, and they're creating a new form of mimetic desire in which for some investors, the emotions of the crowd are overriding the rationality of the individual. Now, what is mimetic desire? Well, it's the idea that I want what I want because I see that other people want it. And it can lead to the herd instinct or a piling-on effect. So let's look at NFTs, non-fungible tokens. How much value is in a CryptoPunk or a Bored Ape Yacht Club beyond the fact that a lot of other people want it? Okay? So compounding this is a strain of financial nihilism in younger investors who have come of age during the Great Recession, during the student debt crisis, the pandemic. So many of these folks are feeling like they're left out of this economy, or they might feel like the traditional system is rigged and they're seeking some alternative avenues to generate wealth. My point in sharing this one is that as the next wave of all this hype hits, that we just need to be prepared to help our clients and perhaps more appropriately our clients' kids to help them understand how memetic desire might be influencing their decision-making in a way that's far more likely to hurt their finances than to make them rich overnight. All right, let's move into the fourth category here, which is client communication and persuasion. I did several episodes on communication and persuasion, and as I got deeper and deeper into this area, it was fascinating to see in real time how politicians and dictators and basically anybody that's trying to influence you It was interesting to see how they're actually using these techniques. And the more that you know about these techniques and how they work, the less susceptible you're going to be to falling for them in a bad way. But used appropriately for good means, they can be super powerful. So let's start with the first show here, which is a show I did with Annette Simmons, and she wrote a great book called The Story Factor. So let's talk about storytelling here for a second. I think that becoming a great storyteller is one of the most useful talents that you can have. I'm a parent, I've got 3 kids. So one of the greatest joys for my wife and I is as our kids were growing up was reading to them. And Annette said that these stories, reading these children's stories, they're actually behavior modification stories in many ways in that they taught us how to share, they taught us how to delay gratification. They taught us all the lessons that we needed to be, you know, about good friends and good family members and so on. And she went on to say that storytelling is actually the oldest form of influence in human history. And those stories weren't just to entertain. She said she thinks that there's an evolutionary reason why we have stories, and that is to share lessons learned. Now, each of us in business, we're in the business of influencing behavior. So we wanna influence our clients to take our advice. We wanna influence a colleague to level up their performance. We wanna influence a spouse that it takes no more effort to put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher than it does to put 'em in the sink. And I know I've been guilty of that one. But the key to being a great influencer is not to get somebody to do something they really don't wanna do. That's just manipulation. Instead, great influencers help people reach their own conclusion that it's in their own best interest to move forward with what you're trying to influence them to do. Engaging storytelling is your best path to becoming influential. Now, here's something that I think we can all relate to. Two people can be given the exact same fact but have two wildly different interpretations. You know, politics is a great example here. Now, why is that? It's because they're each operating from different stories surrounding those facts. When you share more facts trying to persuade, the listener is simply going to discount it because it doesn't fit their existing story. And as Annette said to me, their story is more powerful than your facts. So if you want to influence, you need to slip in a new story that your listener adopts as their new story. Then they'll use this new story to interpret your facts, and if all works well, you become a person of influence. Now, the sequence here is important. It's story first and then facts, and you share the facts once you feel confident that the listener has adopted your story as their own. Now, how can you use storytelling to influence how people interpret their facts? Here are a couple things to think about. One is Think of story like mental software. When you tell an effective story, your listener can call up that story in the future and apply new input specific to the current situation. So as Annette said, "Once installed, a good story replays itself and continues to process new experience through a filter, channeling future experiences toward the perceptions and choices you desire." End quote. So imagine being able to influence people through a story long after you've left the scene. That would be very, very powerful. Second point here is the more specific the story, the more universal the connection. Now, this is a bit counterintuitive, but if you want to connect with more people, tell a more specific story. For example, if you want to instill a sense of urgency in your listener to make a decision, then tell a story about a time when you were indecisive and what it cost you by delaying that decision. Your listener is going to be prompted to think about a time when they were hesitant to make a decision and how it may have come back to bite them. All right, let's move on to another conversation here that I had, and this was with Shankar Vedantam, and we talked about useful delusions. This one was really fascinating. So why is it that people cling to delusional beliefs? When in many cases it's pretty easy to get the information that you would need to conclude that that's actually not true? Well, often it's because the belief is bigger than the facts. It could be that that belief solves a problem or that that belief is central to that person's sense of identity. And according to Shankar Venanam, he said that not all of these delusions are harmful. He went on to write, Anyone who wishes to overcome the destructive delusions and self-deceptions that pervade our politics, our economy, and our relationships would be wise to ask a new set of questions. What psychological benefit does holding a false belief confer on the people who hold it? What underlying needs does it address? Are there other ways to address those needs? If so, supplying those needs likely provides a powerful way to fight delusion and self-deception. End quote. This is such a key here. When someone holds a belief that is clearly false, rather than try to fight them with your facts— now remember, Annette Simmons said you can't fight facts with facts— instead, you should ask yourself, what psychological benefit or what underlying need does holding this belief solve for that person? And when you approach it from that angle, It might make you more empathetic and less prone to get defensive and dismissive. Now, I hope you're picking up on a common theme here that when it comes to effective communication, facts just aren't enough, and arguing is just going to entrench people in their beliefs that they already have. And another benefit of emotional storytelling is that feelings tend to break down these barriers, especially if the speaker approaches an audience from a place of compassion and understanding. All right, let's roll into the third one here in this category, and this is about a conversation that I had with Kelly Leonard from Second City, which is the improv entertainment organization. What Kelly told me is that Second City, this comedy troupe, does not build teams. Instead, they build ensembles of people that always have each other's back. And that's why Second City is able to keep cranking out great shows decade after decade, even as their superstars come and go. Now, while he was a producer at Second City, Kelly said that he had produced shows with Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey, Keegan-Michael Key, Seth Meyers, Amy Poehler, and a whole host of other folks who have gone on to great fame. Now We've all heard the old saying that your team is only as good as your weakest member. Now, Kelly changes that and says that you're only as good as your ability to compensate for your weakest member. And let's face it, at some point, each of us is going to be that weakest member, and we want to know that the rest of the ensemble has our back. Now, he told me, quote, one of the things that's interesting about Second City is that we let talent go. In an ensemble, that's just fine because the ensemble is always there. Teams fall apart. This is never gonna fall apart. Ensembles are free from hierarchies and competitions. Members are free to chip in whenever they want, end quote. He went on to tell me that building a strong ensemble starts with diversity. Putting together a group of people with unique perspectives and experiences creates creates a group dynamic that emphasizes everyone's strengths and minimizes everyone's weaknesses. And it's only in hindsight that these Second City ensembles actually look like all-star teams. It's the ensemble process that takes top talent and organizations to the next level. Now, I know that building a team is very popular in the financial industry, but I'd encourage you to think about this idea of an ensemble. Now, it's a slight twist on the idea of a team. It's a nuance, but in some ways it's actually more powerful and enduring. Okay, let's move on to the fourth one here in this category. And this is a conversation I had with Matt Abrahams, and we talked about preparing and perfecting your persuasive presentation. Now, research shows that people retain structured information up to 40% more reliably and accurately than information that is presented in a more freeform manner. And according to Matt, he's a lecturer at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, he said that finding the best structure for your presentation starts with your audience and what you need them to hear. Now, I wanna share a few presentation structures, and I thought that, you know, this is a good way to think about how you communicate, how you deliver presentations, and it also ties in with one of the themes of my conversation here today, which is about structure and putting structure in how you do things. So different ways to structure your presentations. One is in a past-present-future structure. This type of framing is good for providing a history or reviewing how a process works. A second one is comparison and contrast. So this is good for showing the relative advantages of your position. A third is cause and effect. This is good for helping people understand the logic of of your position. A fourth is problem, solution, benefit. So this is good for persuading and motivating people. A fifth one is what, so what, now what? And this one is good for leading people to a call to action. And then the sixth one is know, feel, do. And this is good for adding more emotion to your eventual call to action. And I think as an advisor, you might wanna pay particular attention to this last structure, especially when you're thinking about your next marketing campaign. So let's break down these beats here just a little bit more to try and get inside your audience's head. So know, feel, do. Know, what is the one thing that you want your listener or your reader to know? Feel, how should your listener or reader feel about that and why is that important? Why should that be important to them? Do. What do you want your listener or reader to do as a result of what they're reading or hearing from you? So essentially, by following the structure, you're making sure that you engage the audience's head and heart. And connecting that point to a relatable emotional issue and explaining how your services can help resolve that issue— doing that is going to make your call to action feel all the more important. In addition to using these structures in presentations, they're also perfect to use when you are being interviewed by the media. So these structures are great devices to organize your thoughts and help you think quickly on your feet. All right, those are 15 highlights from my 26 episodes in 2021. I would encourage you to go back and listen to all 26, not just these 15, and listen to all the other episodes that Greg and the rest of the team at Behrens did as well. Now we are starting season 2. I've got another outstanding set of guests lined up and very excited to continue with that. But before I leave you today, I want to share 2 decision-making frameworks that I use to help me make both business decisions and personal decisions. And I think these will be helpful as you think about your strategy for your business going into the new year here. The first framework that I want to share starts with a quick story. It was December 2011. I was the managing partner of Peak Advisor Alliance, which is now called Carson Coaching. I had been running the company for 11 years and we grew it from zero to approximately 1,000 financial advisors that we were coaching. Now, to prepare for the year ahead, I had a call with a top business coach and he asked me a simple question. He said, Steve, On a scale of 1 to 10, how enthusiastic are you about what you're doing? And there were a few seconds of silence. Now, this coach, being a good coach, he picked up on my hesitation in answering, and he said, hey, we've got to get to the root of your hesitation before we move forward on anything else. So what happened was, over the next few weeks, I did some serious self-reflection, and I projected myself 10 years into the future. And then looking back from that 10 years forward vantage point, I envisioned a couple different scenarios for what may have transpired over that previous decade. One was me leaving my work at Peak and blazing a new path, and the second was staying at Peak. Now, to help me make the decision of whether to stay or go, I leaned on two of my favorite quotes that really laid out my dilemma here. The first quote is from André Gide. And he wrote, "Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore." The second quote is from Marcel Proust, and he said, "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." Now, the first quote argues for leaving the safety of the known, while the second quote says, reframe your current situation and make it better. In my case, after 6 weeks of soul-searching, the first one, I decided it was time to blaze a new path, to lose sight of the shore, and move on. Now, it took about 18 months flopping around after I left until I finally discovered what that new ocean was. I share the story with you because with this new year, I think these two quotes are a great way to frame your business strategy. So ask yourself, what new shores do you want to sail toward? That's the André Gide strategy. And then which existing strategies do you want to reframe and double down on? That's the Marcel Proust strategy. It's a dual strategy of trying some new things while also doubling down on what's currently working. Both of these can work, and the key is to determine when to apply each strategy. The second decision-making framework that I want to share with you has to do with creating filters, and I call this my 4 filters. So here's how it works. We are all bombarded with ideas and opportunities and things that we can do or add to our life, but how do we go about systematically determining what we want to say yes to and what we want to say no to? And when we say yes, how do we ensure that we do or add that thing to our life in the most effective way. The idea here is to come up with 3 or 4 filters that you run your important opportunities through to determine if it's something you should do, and if so, how can you maximize its potential for success? Let me give you an example. I'm at the point in my career where I just want to focus on the things that excite me, that make me go to bed at night looking forward to to getting up in the morning. And I have no shortage of opportunities. So I started to ask myself, what criteria should I use to determine what work I will do or how I'm going to allocate my time? And as I reflected on that question, I realized there are 3 criteria that all of my work has to incorporate. And those 3 are, number 1, deep learning. So I love to learn. I want to keep growing in my knowledge. And there's a wide variety of areas that interest me. So deep learning is a key. Second is creation, content creation. I love to create, I love to communicate, I love to publish content in a wide variety of medias, whether that's written, video, or audio. So I always wanna be creating. Third is flexibility. It's critical that I have complete control of my schedule in terms of when I work, where I work. I need to have that schedule control. So those were 3 criteria. So I put those in place and I started using it as a filter for some of the most recent ideas that presented themselves to me. And then what I realized was, well, there's actually quite a few things that meet those 3 filters, yet I still wanted to say no to them. And then I realized, okay, I actually have to add a 4th filter. And my 4th filter now is look forward to. And what I mean by that is, I have to get excited when I see that thing on my calendar. So those now are the 4 filters that I'm using to determine what kind of work that I want to do. And I can run all my business opportunities through these 4 filters. It's going to simplify my decision-making process. Now let me share one nuance to this filtering system. I've structured these filters as a way to filter what I want to work on. Now you can structure your filters in a similar way, or you can design them as a way to help you optimize your business and/or your life. For example, one of your filters might be scalable, and you could ask yourself, is this idea scalable? Or how can I structure this idea so that it's more scalable? So you can create filters that will lead to what it is that you're trying to create. In other words, these filters are like screens that you run your ideas and opportunities through to see if they meet the criteria that you've identified in advance that are important for you to meet. Now, a little earlier I talked about systems thinking. Again, that's a theme running through here with Robert Fritz. This filters idea is a perfect example of systems thinking. You're creating a structure that defines the path of least resistance to achieve what it is that you want to achieve. All right, I think we will go ahead and wrap there. So let's close this episode. I love to hear feedback from you. So if you have any comments or questions on this show or any of the past shows or any shows going forward, I'd love to hear from you. You can send me an email, and my email is ssandusky@belayadvisor.com. That's S-S-A-N-D-U-S-K-Y at Belay. Belayadvisor.com, and I will definitely get back to you. You can also follow me on Twitter, and my Twitter handle is @SteveSandusky, S-T-E-V-E-S-A-N-D-U-S-K-Y. You can also visit me at stevesandusky.com. All right, it's been a lot of fun putting this show together, and I look I look forward to putting together some great episodes for you here in 2022. Thanks and take care.

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