Episode 95 - Jill Hellman On What It Takes To Enroll And Inspire Humans

I do really believe 100% from every part of me that everyone has the capacity to be able to do the things that they want and not to be held back by the mental baggage that's in our head that we want to push through.

Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. In each episode, we get down and personal with people who go after the things they want to make all their wildest dreams come true. Join us as we unveil and dissect a formula for what it takes to do the thing. Here is your host, Stacy Lauren.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. This is your host, Stacy Lauren. So I love how things happen so naturally and serendipitously. I had decided, gosh, I think it's been a few months ago, that I wanted to do a Do the Thing public speaking challenge, and I'm going to do it sometime next year. And I was thinking, who could I actually talk to that is a really incredible public speaker that could help me? As I decided to plan this challenge, and all of a sudden, my cousin appeared in front of my eyes. And she is an international speaker and she does so much more. And I just pretty much had asked her if we could do an episode. We could talk about her history of how she even became a public speaker in the first place and what she's up to now and just more about her story and all the good stuff. And so I am just beyond excited to get a chance to have you guys meet my cousin, Jill Hellman, and she is going to be talking to me about her story, and I have a feeling I'm going to even hear things that I've never heard before, because when you know someone, and even if you know them well, it's weird. How this works with this podcast platform is you get to know them even deeper through because you have uninterrupted time that you get to ask any question you want. And so, anyway, I'm welcoming Jill Hellman to the show. Hey, Jill.

Hello. Hello. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I am just so excited to have you on.

I know it's about time. We've been talking about this amazing podcast of yours, and who knew it would circle back to public speaking being such a key part of it right now?

And it's funny, I actually, I have this public speaking thing on my radar for next year, but, you know, it's coming up even before then, and I've already set the date as I'm doing a Do the Thing start a podcast challenge. So it's funny how all of A sudden, just the way that this is naturally evolving, but it all connects to public speaking anyway.

You do such a cool stuff. Well.

It'S funny that you say that. You're the one that actually inspired me from the very beginning with this podcast, because you had. As soon as I told you I published it, you sent me a message right away telling me how much you loved it. And coming from you, it's like such a huge honor to just know that it meant something to you, because you're just someone that I've always admired and respected with all the things you've done. And so, I don't know, there was something about when you said that it just really lit a fire in me.

That made my day. And this is for anyone listening. This is my first podcast. I have not done interviews on podcasts until now. This is my first one.

And I'm so glad you shared that, because being someone that gets paid internationally, Speak, and people dying to have you pretty much when.

When you.

When you're able to go to their whatever. I'm thinking of all the things you've done. We'll get into it more. But yeah, and just the fact that being your first podcast interview is so. It's such an honor.

Great. I'm excited. Cool.

Well, for everyone listening, go ahead and share about you and your background.

Sure. I actually had no idea that I had it in me to be a speaker. No idea. I didn't think of it one way or the other. It never occurred to me that getting in front of audiences and speaking would be a thing for me. And it's a really long story, but I ended up in college living in Okinawa, Japan. So this was really pivotal in my life because it actually had me traveling internationally for the first time, which, you know, has become something that I do quite often now. And then. The second thing is I learned I could speak in front of audiences. I was basically taking your typical communications class in college when living in Japan. It was American University that was doing classes overseas. And so it was back in the day, and they might still teach you this way, but back then, they would teach you in a communications class to give a speech, and you would make an index card. Tell me if. If you remember this, Stacy, if you had to go through this, where you made your main points on your. Your index card, and then you get up in front of the class and you were supposed to stand in the center and make your first point in your speech, walk to the right, look at everybody, make your second point, walk all the way over to the left to make your other point and close. Anyway, I. The first time I stood up, we could tell. I knew the audience knew the class knew that it was just something that was. Was a bit in my DNA. And so fast forward. The funny story is, one day, the professor was training us to use these cards, and I didn't have a card with me. I knew my speech. I'd made it up while driving to school, and I was asked to jump up and give this speech. And then I heard he, you need to use your index card. You'd get points. So I faked it, which is terrible. I took a blank one. I got up, I looked down, I used it. There was nothing on it. He could tell. He might have even seen me get the index card. So after class, he called me up and said two things. One, you failed the assignment. Oh, no. He collected index cards. Sorry. And saw that there was nothing on mine. I got busted, and so I failed the assignment. This is how I began my speaking career, with an F. But he did tell me that I had a gift, and so this actually set me up for success. I hit pause there in case you want to hear me in a different direction of where that took me next. But I really didn't know it was in me at that point. And I also didn't know that I had the ability to teach and coach other people to do it. And I absolutely had no idea at that time the importance of being able to get in front of a group, whether that group was 1500 people I've done overseas or to people that I'm. I'm raising money, investor dollars from. I didn't understand that that was something that would absolutely set me up for success in my career.

I love this so much because something I've been exploring lately. I had Alexis on my podcast a month ago, and she had mentioned having this, like, rough draft of a goal and not needing to have every step prescribed, like, to get to that goal, which a lot of people, I think when they think of doing something new, they think they have to have all the steps. And for you, almost with this. With this story, it's almost like you didn't even have a rough draft. You just had, like, a vague idea, or you just were going into this communications class while you're in Okinawa, Japan, you give the speech because it's something they had you do, and then all of a sudden, you realized you were good at this thing.

Yes, absolutely. And I didn't realize. I didn't know that that could be part of My career. And it popped up again completely by accident, which is another crazy story. How I ended up first going into my career and where this was relevant. It was a complete mistake. Another good story. But I ended up in the field, in business. That had to do with speaking by accident. And I think at that point then I said, wait a minute. There's two, quote unquote, accidental stories that have happened. I need to think about this a little bit more. And I can remember. I can tell you more about that story, but I can remember my mother and I were talking, and I said, this is so great. I always got in trouble for talking so much as a kid. Now people pay me to talk. I found my calling, this idea of.

Having breadcrumbs where you're having all these little things happening at the same time, but you not realizing where it's ending up. And now since you've been doing this for decades, pretty much you're seeing all those breadcrumbs and how they. How they've been pretty much lining up your whole life.

I actually have seen it. And during. During the pandemic, when I could not travel the world, I do. And I could not jump on big stages for companies and organizations, I was asked to. I call it my side hustle. I was asked to be a visiting professor, visiting faculty member. And universities were open, so I saw this as my chance to still engage with an audience. And it was supposed to be live. The first year. We did have to go virtual, but I did it last year in person, and I'll do it again this spring in person, where I teach a class now. The class is called Key Drivers for Making Innovation actually Happen. It's all around growth and making growth happen. And the way that this class came about is I was in a meeting and someone who runs an entrepreneurship institute at Cornell University was there. A couple people who run this institute. They're amazing. Linda and Dave. And after the meeting, Linda and I sat together at dinner, and Linda asked if I would be interested in being a visiting faculty member, which I had never considered. And so then the pandemic was coming, was gearing up, and I said yes again to keep that interaction with audiences going. And the university was open, where Europe actually was not open for me. A good portion of Europe we couldn't get in, which is where I do a lot of my speaking. So I ended up asking her what she wanted me to teach, and they talked about innovation and say that she was really wanted me to teach students what it is that I do, what I have done that can set them up for even more success in making innovation actually happen. So I picked four key drivers, and they're all very different from each other. But one of those key drivers, Stacey, is the ability to enroll others in your innovation because you might have the best growth strategy in the world, you might have the best execution plan, you might have the guest product, this product service. But if you can't enroll anyone to move forward with you, you're probably not going to make innovation actually happen, right? Business doesn't get done unless humans do it. So the ability to enroll and inspire other humans to move forward is so incredibly important.

I don't think a lot of people understand that when I talk about public speaking and why I want to do that challenge, and they just think, oh, I don't want to be a public speaker. But it's so much more than that. It's what you just said, the ability to enroll others and inspire them into innovation or into what something you're wanting them to do. Or let's say some examples I've given and you'll have a million more. Your kid has autism and you need to speak to a board of the school to be able to help them have the right care. Or your friend has cancer and you need to talk to the hospital to make sure she's getting care. You're trying to inspire people at your company. You want a job or your promotion or whatever it is, and I'd love to have you kind of expand on that because there's so many opportunities for people to be able to use this skill.

Those are, those are amazing examples, 100%. And people often think public speaking is this thing over there. What, what you just started to say, it's like this thing over there. It's not. It's not over here. Because I'm not good at it. I don't like it, and I don't know if public speaking is the right. I'm using those words because that's what we started with, and I'm trying to stay consistent for you and your listeners, but really it's enrolling and inspiring others. And so there's several dynamics going on when you're having a communication to a group, to an audience, of course, one on one. Although I mostly talk to big groups and coach people on big groups or even meetings of five people. And there's several factors, right? There's the words you're using, there's the style in which you're using them. There's potential nerves and anxiety going on. The other Factor that's huge is people are different. So if I have a room of five other people, or I was just down in Miami with one of my really large multinational corporations and I had 25 people in the room, they're different. Communication. Some of them are perk up when they hear a number. Some need a story, some need a graphic. And I don't know going in who's showing up that day. Now if I know them well, I might know, hey, every time I talk to Bob, Bob needs that number. Give him a metric, give him a statistic. Without it, he's going to have a hard time to enroll him. But often I don't know. And similar case is people are often there's research that shows people when they make big behavior changes or are incredibly enrolled in doing something, it's because they're moving towards something they really want. You're moving towards something you really, really, really want, or you're making a big shift being enrolled in something because you're moving away from something you really, really, really don't want. And so as a speaker, as the person delivering the message, or as I often say, if you're front of room, because front of room might be you're leading a conference call, you're sitting at the end of a conference room table, or you're standing up in front of a board or a group of teachers, as a parent, you're front of room. So as someone who's in the front of room, you have to take those into account that there's actually a matrix, that tool that I've created that helps you take your messages and come up with a metric for it, a story for it, a graphic for it, so that you can vary your delivery because your audience receiving it is different. And also make sure you're covering moving towards things and away from things. And then the other part that I find a lot is nerves to people who are nervous. So another part that I hear often, mostly I just happened last week, I told you I was in Miami with a client. I did a session for 90 minutes and then I ended up at a reception and then dinner with the attendees. And these attendees all work for, for a big corporation. And one of the men walked over and was talking to me and at the end he said something that's a similar story that I often hear, which is I'm not good speaking in front of groups. I wasn't teaching them how to speak in front of groups. I was actually leading them on an exercise for their growth strategy, looking into the future and Then stepping back so they can figure out what to do now based on that future. So it wasn't about speaking, but he was commenting on me in front of the group for 90 minutes and he said, I could never do that. I'm really nervous. And so within eight minutes, I gave him two techniques that he could use that could set him up for even more success when he's speaking.

Okay, I've got to hear what they are.

So the first one's going to sound very simple, but it's don't try to be not nervous. So my goal is in working with clients when I do this very small part of my portfolio. But when I do work with clients on coaching them, I should mention it's a part that I am actually growing. I have a call tomorrow about doing this for investors and coaching them. But when I work with them, I don't try. I'm not a psychologist. I think a psychologist can get to the root and also how that person deals with fear or anxiety or elements like that, that's actually not my training. So I. If I can make them feel better and less anxious, great. But that's not my goal. My goal is, and this is one tactic, don't try to not be nervous. Because oftentimes when you say, I'm not nervous, I'm not nervous, you're more nervous. Instead, do it anyway. Right? Because we know that one thing that helps you is exposure. So if you're nervous to speak on a stage in front of a group, give a presentation, however we want to define it, then if you do it more often, the science, I believe, shows that, that that's considered exposure therapy. So we have to get you doing it. So I don't try to get you unnervous not nervous. Instead, I have people do it anyway and do certain things that won't show that they're nervous. So for example, don't hold a sheet of paper that's eight and a half by 11 because it's thin and flimsy. So if you're shaking, your sheet of paper will shake. If you need a piece of paper, fold it. So it's tougher. So you know, I mean, it's thicker. Whether you use cardboard or you fold your one sheet and just keep flipping it over and opening it. Because if you're nervous and shaking, people won't hear that flipping back and forth like an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper. Or if you're sitting on a panel, I'll be leading a panel, a really cool one in New York for hospitality design. We're looking into the future. I'll be doing that on Sunday in New York. So if I had someone who's uncomfortable in a panel, we just focus on the way that they're sitting and how they're holding their hands. Because if I can get them to not mess with their hands and also not grip the couch in a way that people will see them, but relax them over the edges and just practice that, then they won't show that they're nervous, which then makes them feel better. The second one that I teach people is actually the most important in my opinion, and I still use it to this day. I think I just do it naturally. One of the problems with speaking that gives you that trembling, at least what I find from people when they tell me about it, is when you first stand up, when you first get in front of the group, or when the attention's first on you, even if you're sitting down in a conference, or if all of a sudden it goes to you on a conference call. Because you could think about this. Let's say that you're at an audience, you're going to speak to a group, and you're speaking to 100 people. Although, again, this is relevant to 25, this is relevant to 5. What's typically happening is you're sitting in a chair facing forward, right? And somebody else is talking. They're. They're the person before you or even the person introducing you. So if you're in the front row waiting to be called up, then you're looking at the person and the person's addressing everyone. If you're a few rows back, all you see are the back of heads of people. But then when you're called up, you have to stand up, you have to walk to the front and you have to turn around and whoa. Now all of a sudden, you have all of these people staring at you. And that is so overwhelming. To go from you're looking, you're passive, to now everyone's staring at you. And so what I train people to do in this scenario, and I think I still do it naturally, is before you go on, you try to scan as many faces as possible. Have you heard this before?

No. This is great.

Oh, it's amazing. So if you are speaking, let's say you're speaking to 25 people. I know I said 100 earlier. And you know you need to speak and you're a little nervous about it, my recommendation would be to stand off stage where you can lean against the wall where you'll often see me before going on stage because again, I just do this naturally. And while someone else is speaking, you're looking at the audience in the view in which you'll see them when you take the stage. If you can't get up and stand against the wall, not everybody will allow you to do that. Let's say that you're seated, while seated, and someone else is talking. You might even be in a U shape situation. You can look at all of the faces from your seat. Try to desensitize yourself as much as possible so that when the attention shifts to you, at least you're used to looking at everybody's faces.

I like the word desensitizing yourself to it. And so you're pretty much your top two pieces of advice when you're coaching someone to help them through speaking. I know there's 5 million other things that you do with them, but just to get the simple version, it's really just, number one, doing it anyway. Getting that exposure therapy of doing something over and over again until you feel comfortable. And then number two, standing off the stage, also not holding your hands and learning that. And then number two, it's standing off the stage and scanning the faces before you're going up.

Absolutely. And you could imagine that second one. I do want to add one more. I can't. Not now that you heard you say that back to me. But also, if you're sitting in a conference room, it's not your turn to talk. You're looking at all of the faces that are looking at you. And if you're on a call right now, if somebody had to speak where we wouldn't even see their face, but we would hear them, I would even desensitize to them, just laughing, like, get your voice out there before it's time for you to get your voice out there. Or when everyone starts saying hello, make sure you say hello so that you're. You're desensitized to that. Let me add one more, because I also think it's just one of the keys that sets you up for success in speaking, and it can help with nerves, but it also just sets you up for success. And it's actually one of the main things that I teach every time I do this, which is your opening. So I fundamentally believe, and I have not done academic research, just my own anecdotal research, that when you nail your opening, your first few lines, your first few minutes, that the rest of your session is going to go far better. You're setting yourself up for even more success. So when you open, whether it's on stage or in these other environments, if you just nail your first three lines or your first five minutes, there's a couple things that happen. One is that the audience, now the audience has this excitement about what you're going to do next. And in my experience, you have to really mess up after that. Once people have already made, I think it's called principle of privacy. Basically, when you do that, your audience is really anchored in you. This is going to be cool, you know your stuff, you're a good speaker, I have confidence, you, whatever those kinds of feelings and emotions are that you just had your audience feel, you have to kind of, I mean, you have to pretty much mess up after that for it to drop back down. Alternatively, if you don't start strong, I believe it's harder to ramp people up if there's a cracky start. So that's one thing that happens is people's confidence in you immediately goes up. They're excited. And I think it's pretty hard after that to bring it down. The second is you feel good. Which is why I'm, I'm adding it here around nerves. Because when you nail your first few minutes or your first five minutes and you nail it, you have this confidence that you just did it. And so when I'm working with people, I don't say rehearse everything. Let's say you're giving a 30 minute presentation. I wouldn't have you rehearse the 30 minutes over and over and over and over. Now, if you're doing something which I've done some of these, where I'm speaking and it's connected to something very serious, very political or sometimes on stage, I need to be done in 26 minutes and so I need to make sure I'm at 26 minutes. I'll practice all 26 minutes over and over just to make sure I have my timing right. Because we will naturally add words in or take them out. And if you're doing something maybe government related, you may not have the luxury of adding words in or out. You have to stick to your script. So barring that, I'll tell people to not practice the whole thing over and over, but always practice your opening. And by the way, this opening needs to be practiced three times before you actually get on stage and it needs to be done three times that day. And there is a great story, which is I was helping a client who had gone through an RFP process and they were shortlisted based on their, their Document. And then everyone who was shortlisted had to come in to give a pitch, a presentation. And so they brought me in to do their presentation. It was their material, their information, their truth, and I was the communicator of that. And so we had worked on it before the night. It was the night of the presentation. I ran through it with them one last time. They were so excited. They were like next morning eager. And I did tell them, when I get here tomorrow I have to do it three times before we go over and do the pitch. But I guess I didn't emphasize enough. I might not be good the first two times. That's why we do it three times. It's called the warm up. It's kind of like how you're first mile in the morning, if you're a runner, at least for me, is like my worst mile because you're still just waking up, you're still warming up. My third mile is often the best. And so I got there the next morning, Stacy, and everyone's excited and I didn't realize that they were thinking I would be exactly the same from the night before, the night before. I'd been practicing all day, we'd been working on it, so there was quite a disparity. And I got up to do it for my first run through and they later told me they almost fell over in their chairs. Like, what happened? She's broken. It was good last night and it's terrible this morning, but I did my three run throughs and by the third they were excited and we actually did very well.

I'm so glad you shared that because I think people don't see the work that goes behind the scenes before you actually are doing the thing in the way that you really want to. You have to have a few different run throughs before it becomes what you really want it to be.

Yes. I don't know how technical you want me to get. If I go too technical, let me know. I'm just really passionate about it. And maybe that could be a whole nother conversation we have. But yes. I mean, when you're doing your practice, the other thing I see people do, and again, these are really nuts and bolts, is people will read their slides to themselves to practice giving a presentation. But you can see the inherent flaw there. As I say, that you're not standing up on stage reading to yourself silently in your head. You're talking. So talk. You'll see me. Sometimes people talk about in the shower on the highway. My go to is I put my headset in I put my AirPods in so I don't look like the weird strange lady talking to myself. And I go for a walk because I need movement. I'm an extrovert. I need to be out around people. I need movement. So when I'm practicing something, I'll put my headset in. Sometimes I'm recording myself if I'm trying to figure out the best way to say something. Oftentimes I'm just practicing while walking, and I'm literally just talking to myself. But no one knows that because I have my AirPods in.

Yeah, I like that. Because, I mean, whether you're planning on speaking to a group of a hundred people or you're even applying for a job and you're interviewing with a panel of people, I mean, having these kinds of skills seem. They would be amazing to have.

Yes, yes.

I'd love to talk more about how having this ability to enroll and inspire others has helped impact your career.

Absolutely. It's. Gosh, there's so many stories about it. I can't highlight enough the importance of being able to address groups. When I was young, when I was in my early 20s, I ended up working in big companies and training and development by accident. What I learned from that is what I thought was just a gift, that I could get up and have this presence in front of a group and enrollment others. I didn't know at the time, which I mentioned earlier, is that I could teach people to do it. And I also didn't know that I would have a knack for, say, training basically human behavior, that I could help people learn things, not just hear things and help people do things, not just hear things. And that's actually really important. If you're in the world of training and development, just hearing a presentation isn't necessarily being trained. It doesn't mean I can go do something. And even if I'm role playing or doing something inside a classroom or having a discussion while I'm there, that doesn't mean I can do it outside. And you can think of this with sales training, for example. Role playing in a classroom is different than going back and doing it, but it does move you closer to going and doing it. But actually being able to impact behavior change outside of a classroom or outside of a session is really what I started learning a lot more about. And if you're in a training room or even if you're in a presentation, the other things that I learned were the experience matters. So if any of your listeners have heard me talk before, I would guess that They've heard me talk about experience. Because even right now, you and I talking and your listeners listening, your audience listening, they're having an experience of us. Right? And so you people are drawn to different types of experiences. I think in Joe Pine and Pine and Gilmour's article about the experience economy, they say that experience something like, it's a memorable event that's inherently personal, but it's each person having a personal memory. And so in that case, any time that you're training someone, speaking to someone, it's very, very individual. And humans are different. And you can actually create different experiences for people. So during those days, my early days in my 20s, where I found myself in big companies accidentally in training and development departments, where I was doing training for leadership, technology, communication, you name it, I started to learn how to create a really interesting experience that people wanted to be part of. It did not include a boring room with a U shape and the pad and the pen and whatever in the curtain, the cloth covering that gets caught on your legs, all of that, and then be able to set them up, help set them up for success, to use what they heard was being said and build community out of the group. So those elements absolutely set me up for success after that.

I love that whole way that you explained that. Well, I never even heard the words experience economy. And it's funny because I've sort of have known what you've been doing, but I didn't know there was actually a name to it, which is really cool. I was wondering what you mentioned, what creating an experience for people wasn't. What does it look like when you're actually doing that?

Yes. And let me clarify. The experience economy is. Oh, gosh, I use this a lot in a separate context. The experience economy. There's a book, there's an article, an HBR article. I recommend the article. It's part of my class at Cornell. It talks about the. When organizations make additional money based on experience for what they're already doing. And where I talk about the experience economy a lot is I don't delve into, is it an economy? Is it not an economy? I use it as a lens or a perspective to generate ideas. I've been using this a lot, Stacey. It's amazing. And to your audience, if this is the part that they're hearing is, when I read this article, I took it as, okay, so what they might mean is that, let's take a retail store. Let's just take Tommy Hilfiger, because you already mentioned we're related and we Have a family member who's an executive at pvh. And so let's say that Tommy Hilfiger decides one day, the brand decides, you need to pay to enter this store. And once you're inside, you still need to pay to buy the clothing. No discounts, nothing. And someone might say, why would I do that? Why would I pay to enter and then still pay? It's the same thing you could say for a university. Well, maybe one day you have to pay to go on campus in addition to what you've already paid. Or my office building, where I have an office that I'm looking at, you have to pay to get in the front doors. Even though I'm paying rent. If someone's paying rent. And you'd say, why would I do that? And I'd say, that's the point. What do you have to be doing inside of that space? What kind of experience do you have to be providing? What kind of products and services do you have to be providing to warrant people paying money? And I don't want to go too off track, but I'm very passionate about this topic. If you start using money and say, how can I justify charging people for that? I have seen that people come up with many more ideas and solutions and experiences and value than if you didn't put money in. Now, am I saying you should charge to enter the store, to enter the university, to enter the hospital, to enter the grocery store? No. But maybe you should be doing some of that stuff that you generated. Where I got into that. As I was running this innovation network for Cornell University, we brought together leaders in the hospitality industry, mostly in North America, but we brought them together a few times a year. And I was thrilled to be one of the co founders and then built and run it. I think you might remember I was in San Diego running one when I saw you out there. And this was all about experience. So I'd have anywhere from 40 to 80 people coming together. And there are several key elements around it that provide a great experience when you put humans together. One is that you try to put humans together who don't typically go together. We had other interesting people who they may or may never have spent time with. I had people from the military, I had artists, I had makers, I had technologists, I had an astronaut come together. So put people together who don't typically go together. I think I was just quoted overseas as saying, magic happens when you put people together who don't typically go together and you let them talk in a bit of a facilitated way. And so one key is different types of people in the experience. Number two is let people talk to each other. So in any conference you go to, any training, any presentation, it's usually an audience sitting there watching the front of room. Right. I'll be on stage in New York with some great people on Sunday and there'll be an audience and they'll be watching us, Right. Maybe they'll get to ask some questions of us. We're going to try to do Q and A in this really big format. I'll tell you how it goes. But even then, not everybody will get to talk to each other and engage on this content. What I like to do is get people actually talking to each other. So part of the experiences that I ran back until starting with that Innovation Network or even my earlier days of training is let people talk to each other in small groups. They're much more likely to talk to each other. So you can have a room of a thousand people, but still have small groups of five or six. Let them talk to each other as part of an experience and then adding in really interesting, unexpected things. So I've done things where people have come to some of my experience studios and seen their names spray painted on the wall in the arts district in Wynwood, Florida, when you walk in, I've had, oh, gosh, I've. We went to the United nations. We have gone to a nanotechnology lab and put on a lab suit, cover your hair. These are top executive, top CEOs, booties. I've done hackathons where there's unexpected things going on. I've let people see what it looks like when a, when a bomb dog finds explosives. These are all part of an experience. So I also try to make things really tailored where If I have 40 or 50 or 60 people in a room, I try to talk to a lot of them ahead of time. Let me hit pause. That's probably more information than you want, right, Stacey?

Oh, my God. I'm like sitting here like, oh, really?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So what I would say if I kept on that, what I would say so about Experience Studios, that's one of the products that I actually formalized and launched. Where there's. The studio is the same. And what a studio means is an interesting environment, interesting room, a space in Wynwood with your name spray painted. A studio means you put people together who don't go together. So there are small groups, maybe a CEO, a technologist, a street artist, a scientist, an entrepreneur. Another element of it is they get to see something they wouldn't see anywhere else. Does it have to do with the training, the presentation, the meeting? Maybe not. Maybe it's just part of the experience. It's cool. So you show them something really cool and unexpected. When I first became a professor, I mentioned that I had to go online, and I wanted to be a really great experience. But it's online eight hours Saturday, eight hours Sunday, three weekends in a semester. That's brutal. But we ended up starting it. For example, I had a street artist do a video painting all of their names, and that's how it started. So that's part of showing them something they wouldn't typically see and then building it in a way that adds community.

So how do you get people that are so different in this small group to be able to talk to each other? Do you set up some kind of conversation prompts or what's the way that you get them to engage with each other and open that space up?

Yes, I like to rely a lot on students, if you can. So if I'm doing an experience studio, if we're going down that path, Experience studios, there's two different types. One is more engagement or stickiness, or shared experience. Someone wants more engagement with their customers, their community, their patients, their anything. And then. And that's just for engagement, Shared experience, something together. And then a different one different type is you really want to generate ideas and solutions that you haven't thought of. I did one of those that was funded by the US Government. So I was trying to explain those two different factors, whether it's training or it's an experience studio, in order to have people talk to each other, one key is how you curate the small groups. So it's almost like wedding seating. I've never. I don't think I've ever relied completely on. I wonder who shows up at each table. There's often seating. At the very least, I know I have one person at each small group or small table that I know will engage. A good group to rely on are students, because students, the ones who are comfortable doing it because students want to be a part of it. In my experience, the students that I brought to D.C. or I just had four students flown from Italy to Turkey to run think tanks with me. Students who want to be engaged is a great experience for them. So they say yes, number one. Number two, students can get into the material, the information ahead of time, with me, with others, so that when it's time to talk, they're already ready to go. Right. They've thought about what they want to say. They thought about the topic. They've practiced with each other. This just happened two weeks ago in Turkey. So when it's time to go into groups, if everyone stares at each other, a student just starts. I actually did this in Washington D.C. where I was brought in. There was a four hour convening on brain health, which I'm fascinated by neuroscience. I think I was a neuroscientist in a different life. But there was a convening that a university was doing on their research and there were panels and discussions and it was your typical everyone's in, in their chairs and rows and they're kind of like a wedding and you're looking at the front and what I did, they asked me to come in and do some experience stuff. I'm using air quotes. So I went into the room and did a few things which I could describe. But to get back to your question on how do you get them to talk, I had set the chairs where you didn't realize when you walked in, but your chairs are kind of grouped together in six, three in the front, three in the back and then spaced. And people didn't notice until I said, why don't you go ahead? And I had heard this had never been done before with this university and pitching research or updating research. I said, you might notice that you're in groups. We've talked about some really interesting things up here on stage all day. If you look at your chairs, you'll see that you're actually grouped in six. And so I might just give you a chance to say hello to the other amazing people in the room. It's not just people on stage talking. And you can talk about anything you just heard. I give a question. What I'll often do, Stacy, is say you can choose from this, this, this or anything you want so that they have something to talk about at the very least. I said, you have a student in your group and they're visiting Washington D.C. working on a project. So you're always welcome to ask that student about their project. We weren't sure. Well, I was sure it would work, but my client wasn't sure it would work. People from Capitol Hill and the agencies and thought it might be strange. I said, I'll cut it off after each student says hello. You know, no one will notice. I had to cut it off at about 12 minutes when we think we booked five because they were so excited to be able to talk to each other.

It's amazing when you can get people that are different together to talk about stuff. And especially for the brainstorming side of it, because who knows what's going to come out of that when you're having so many different people give their viewpoints on the way. On the way they see things?

Absolutely. I believe that is fundamentally one way to make innovation actually happen. One key driver is what I refer to as a perspectives mindset, because I often make the joke that I collect interesting humans. And what I mean by that is, I don't have to know everything, I just have to know enough people. And there's an article that is called the best ideas come from outside your industry, which touches on this a little, that the different thinkers will show you these different perspectives. There's another article, though, that someone tagged me in on Twitter, guy I worked with when he was in the Marine Corps, and it said something about the biggest predictor of career success has to do with how many different ecosystems you have. And so staying broad and having variation on what would be your ecosystem map. So one tool that I often give people is a mind map where you put yourself in the center and then you draw bubbles around you for your different elements, whether it's your friends, your family, your doctors, the people you see running errands, people you went to school with before, who are the different people in your ecosystem. And then keep going out to see all of the different perspectives represented. And when you're working on anything, trying to generate an idea or a solution for anything, and not just the what of what to do, but often how to do it. If you go around your ecosystem and say, I'll call five people to ask for their insight or their perspectives, but you try to pick five people from different parts of your ecosystem, then you'll have many views.

It's amazing to me how pretty much just from this conversation, we've talked about you taking this communication class in Okinawa almost as a fluke, right? Realizing that you're good at public speaking, learning how to enroll and inspire others, then helping other people. And it expanded into innovation. You've been traveling internationally, you've created these experience studios. I haven't even touched on the Matrix yet, which I'm hoping we'll see. If we have, we can get it there. And like, you're basically this thought leader now for so many things, and it's just. It's amazing to me where it begins and then how it just keeps rippling into all these other things that you're expanding into.

Yes, I love that you say that. That's been my. It's also my biggest challenge when people say, what do you do? So, yes. And then we haven't touched on. I'm hitting. Actually, I hit already three of the key drivers. Remember I said that I. I put together what I learned that I could teach students when I was asked. And I went to four key drivers, and without doing it on purpose, I hit three of them so far. One has to do with a perspectives mindset, collecting interesting humans, putting people together who don't typically go together, looking around your ecosystem map. The second one I hit was enrolling and inspiring others and that there's a presentation matrix that I mentioned to you and that people are different. And then I also give tips and tricks. I don't like that word, but whatever they call it, tips and tricks, things that we talked about with looking at the audience and like nailing your opening, make that your focus. I hit the experience economy a little bit. You can draw a journey map any experience from start to finish, and you can find unexpected places to innovate or add value or solve problems. Whether it's a person going to an airport, that's a straight line from start to finish. Right. Buying a car, straight line, start to. Sure. Sometimes you go back to the beginning. In some businesses, someone's coming to your presentation, start to finish, you can actually map out the steps of the presentation, and you can find areas in there to do something different. The fourth one, the only one I didn't touch on, now that I'm thinking about it, I did not plan this, and this isn't always what I talk about, so it's quite a coincidence, actually. But the fourth one is going from concept to creation to value. So people often talk about what is innovation. In my world, it's new value. It's not necessarily new things. And so it's. It could be. I mean, it's a thing, but then it's doing the thing, which is what your podcast is called, and then actually getting to the value of doing the thing. Because even if you just did the thing, if there's no value, however you're defining value, then I don't know, maybe still did the thing. But is it. Is it innovative? In my world, yeah. How does it grow?

How do you get into the value?

Yes, I think that's a really fascinating thing. Going from concept to creation is easier to explain. Right. There's all kinds of great tools about how to get there, which one thing I'd say is most people look at the next step like, what do we do next? Which is not how I would recommend executing anything which would be a fun conversation around do the thing. But as far as value goes, to get to value is in the beginning, you're often doing the thing for. Well, let me ask you, in your interviews, in your. In your research and all the work that you've done, since you're a thought leader in this area, where does value come into doing the thing?

Yeah, that's actually. And that's what I'm so excited about, hearing you even talk, because you've mentioned a few times how passionate you are about. I think it's been at least two to three of the things that you've talked about that you do currently. And to me, the value comes from where you get lit up, what gives you energy, and then also what drives you crazy, because then that's how you're able to see what really drives your value. Value. So, and that's been the biggest thing with this podcast that sort of came out, I think, by interview, I think 12 was, I really wanted to make sure people understood to do the thing, but do it out of alignment for themselves and not because others want them to do that thing.

Oh, I love that. I love that. Well, I mean, in strategy, we often ask three questions. Where are we going? Or where am I going? I suppose if you're looking at it that way, how do we get there? How do I get there? And number three, what's my role? Where are we going? How do we get there? What's my role? I actually add to that and say, question one is, where are we going by when and how much? What date is this thing happening by and how much? How do you measure it? Number two, how do we get there? Not every single step. But what are the major milestones between now and that date you put up there? What are the major things that will happen to get us there? Not every single step, but the major milestones. To be very clear on, it's these three things, these four things, these eight things by these timeframes. And all of that leads us on the path to number one and number three, what's my role? And in organizations, I'll say we ask that question, what's my role? Which really means, what's everybody's role? And that's where I emphasize innovation doesn't happen. Growth doesn't often happen. No strategy happens unless people do it. So does everybody know their role? And is that clear? So if you take that to an individual and do the thing based on what you just said, where are we going by when and how much? What's the thing? Right? That's where you're going by when and then I guess the how much is like how do you measure that that.

You did it so good? Well, for the listeners, please share where they can learn more about you.

That's a great question. I keep a very low profile. I keep a very low profile online. I'm just laughing because as you know, I have media and things like that, but I haven't drawn it anywhere. Even the recent press person was asking where to put the clip of my name being said on CNN overseas. And I don't know. So as of today, there's a website with a landing page, Jill Hellman Live. So J I L L H E L L m a n live.com where people can send me messages. I also have a LinkedIn which I will start using. And in those two places we'll announce what the new plan is for communication.

Thanks for listening to the do the Thing podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. But even more, we hope you'll be inspired to do the Thing. Do you have a burning question on Doing the Thing that you'd like answered? How about an inspiring do the Thing story of your own that you'd like to share? We'd love to hear all about it. Just leave us a voice message at dothing callcast co or email us hello at do the Thing Podcast. Com.