225: Brian Burkhart on Elevating Others through Core Values, Growth Mindset & Flexibility

What's poppin' y'all? Your man James Say What Sales Buckley here, and we are back with the latest episode of Make It Happen Mondays with your host, John Barrows. Big shout out to our partners, Sales Loft, Proposify, Gong, Vidyard, Chili Piper, and Demo Desk. When you're building a tech stack, you need a lot of bases covered. Our partners cover so many functional product needs. Sales Loft for cadence and sales engagement, Gong for recorded calls and data insights, Proposify for all things proposals and attachments, Chili Piper for scheduling. There are just amazing products in our tech stack to help you get started and cover many of the bases with these incredible tools and great partners. The JB Sales Squad is defined as someone who consistently shows up to learn and attend our events and engages with us on a one-to-one level relatively frequently to grow and develop their sales skills.

Super simple, right? They are also members at on-demand.jbarrows.com, where they subscribe to all our training and content that helps you succeed every single day. So join us and become a member. That URL again is on-demand.jbarrows.com. I'll see you there. Today, we welcome a human that stands out in the crowd, Mr. Brian Burkhart. As chief word guy at Square Planet and author of a great book entitled Stand for Something, Brian wants to Elevate People. Plain and Simple, that is his focus. He is a lift when you need one and a guide when you have to have one. Brian and JB are going to dive into some core values and beliefs and some other topics that should interest a growth mentality. So let's pass it to Brian and JB to get this momentum going.

It's all yours, brother. Good afternoon, everybody. It's John Barrows. Make it up on Monday. Hopefully, you had a fantastic weekend. Mine was actually pretty legit. I went out with some friends, saw people that I hadn't seen for a long time, did some work around the house. So I actually felt somewhat productive and had a good time. So win-win right there. And also, it was coming off of a very cool conversation. I actually think that my conversation before the weekend set the stage for my good weekend because Brian Burkhardt, the CEO and founder or chief word guy and founder of Square Planet Presentations. And I had a very, very interesting conversation. I'm going to recommend you all listen to before you listen to this podcast.

But Brian, introduce yourself to the crew here and tell us, give us a little background of where you're coming from, my friend. John, good to see you, bud. Happy Monday to everyone. My name is Brian, everyone. I believe deeply, first and foremost, in elevating people. That's right. You heard it. I'm going to elevate people before I do anything else. It's the core belief of both me as a human, but certainly of Square Planet, my firm. And really what that means is that first, we're going to make some waves. That's how we do our job. We cause a little trouble. We break from the pack. We acknowledge that the status quo can often suck. And John, I'm out here in Phoenix. It's 118 degrees today. When we make waves, it is not of the aquatic variety, sir.

Yes, that is. Yeah. And what we do, we help our clients, both individuals and certainly team slash enterprise clients, communicate in a way that's far superior to anything they've ever dreamt of before. We help really get to the heart of the matter by unlocking core beliefs and then building presentations around those things. We spend a tremendous amount of time with salespeople. These are our folks. And so you and I share a lot of real similar worldviews, which was why I liked you the very first time we spoke some time ago. So, you know, we got some cool stuff to discuss today. We do. And like I said, you know, there's sometimes where you come across, I think one of the reasons why that conversation was an easy one for us last week was because of the core value.

I genuinely believe that as long as your core values are aligned, then you and I could argue until the cows come home, right? But we're going to come back to an understanding because we share core values. Now, if you and I don't share core values, we're going to just end up arguing at each other, right? And I talk a lot about people identifying, and I think COVID was a really good opportunity in a lot of ways to reset and have people take a step back and understand what their core values were so that they could then go look for companies and opportunities that aligned with them. And I know, so your book is, what's the book called again? Stand for Something. Stand for Something. That's it. Right.

So Stand for Something. And it took a corporate spin too, right? Like knowing your core authentic values as an organization so you can do great things. Okay. Let's back up a little bit. I don't know where, I think it was when I read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. And in there, he talked about defining your core values. And I think it was one of those books that I don't remember anything about it, but I know that's where my 12 guidelines to success came from. And people have always asked me, well, like, how'd you come up with these? I'm like, I don't really know. I don't really remember. I kind of just sat down and started writing shit that I liked. And at first it was eight, then it was nine, then it was 10, then it was 11.

Go from there. Help me understand the process that you as an individual should go through to really identify what is a true core value of yours versus something that is just something you believe in or whatever it is because that's the essence of what I want to talk to you about, because that's going to be the springboard for every other part of the conversation. You got it. And this is beefy. This is tough stuff. And it's harder than most people are willing to actually admit or do the work on. And let me back up just to touch, because it is rooted in science. And I know you're a big proponent of both art and science. So let's deal with the science first. There's this thing called cognitive psychology.

And it essentially says that our beliefs lead to our actions. What we believe leads to what we do. I'll give you an example. If you and I were going to go out for lunch and I was in charge of picking the place, there's a pretty good likelihood we're going to go get something like sushi. I love sushi. I'm a big fan. But you might think, oh my God, that is disgusting, awful, slimy nastiness. And so, John, if you're in charge of picking, we're going to go get a burger or pizza, something like that. Your beliefs lead to your actions. What unfortunately is the case is more often than not, if you think about both individuals and certainly enterprises throughout, not just the United States, but the world, is we all know people, plenty of them, and we might be one of them that is essentially rudderless.

They're like a cork bobbing on the top of the ocean. That's because their beliefs are not yet codified, meaning that we really don't know what the actions should be. And so, going backwards again, this stuff is so paramount to us as both successful humans, but certainly as successful companies, because it so clearly tells us what we should do. You and I share a very similar aligned core belief, the thing that we stand for, which is elevate people. For me, I take that wildly serious. And so, it's not just the work that I do, which is to help people better at their job, engage themselves in a way that promotes their career in a very positive trajectory. All that's great, but it also means that I'm going to be extra good to the people in my world, including the kid that changed my oil, or the guy that drops off the post mail, the mailman here.

Or when we see someone at a restaurant, that name tag that they have on, it's an invitation to connect them as a human being, to see them for who they are. That's what elevating people really is. And so, all of this notion, yeah, it's heavy stuff, but it deeply matters because it impacts quite literally everything. It changes the trajectory of your world. So, I'll shut up and let you go. I'm sorry. No, you go. No, I was just going to wonder, in your mind, is there a different, because you specifically use the word beliefs, and I use the word values. Are those the same things in your mind, or are they different? I think they're quite synonymous. The truth of the matter is, though, is that values can absolutely be something that's more aspirational.

Beliefs feels more tangible. I believe in versus I aspire to be. They are definitely different. And you can aspire to have a value of being more worldly or whatever the heck it is. And so, it really is two sides of the same coin. So, help me here with ours, because I went through the Gary Vee, like he had this 4D session, and that type of thing. And I went there for a day, sat down with Gary and his whole team. And one of the big things is know your why, right? And Simon Sinek, right? Know your why. And we went through a little exercise, and I liked it. And I always had my core, you know, 12 personal guidelines to success coming out of Napoleon Hill, that type of thing. But this got me to kind of refine them a little bit.

And I have five, which are believe in what you do, like genuinely believe in what you do, work your ass off, earn everything, what goes around comes around, and get better every day. So, those five are what I would consider our values. And I put them up, and I share them with my team, and I tell my team, as long as you are abiding by those, I don't care what you do. Because if somebody gets pissed off at you, and you get bad feedback, or whatever it is, or a client gets mad, or something like that, if I can look back and say that you followed those five things, then I'll deal with the repercussions of that. But if you broke one of those five things, I'm going to then we'll have an issue. So, to you, when I outline those to you, are those beliefs, or are those values?

Those are values to me, John. And I'm not saying that they're by any stretch wrong. I would just tell you that they can ladder up to a single core belief. And JB Sales and you, the individual, they are inextricably linked. As the founder of your firm, sure, you have to set the tone. Remember, the fish rots from the head down. And so, you want your gang, you want everyone on your team to know exactly what you want them to do. Do. That's an action, right? The only way that they would know is if you make it very clear what it is you believe. Go back and put back to cognitive psychology. We need to know what it is you stand for before we know what to do. And in this particular case, if you go through your five again, which I'll note, I'm going to call you out just a second.

You had to cheat. Yeah, I did. Well, I wanted to read them because I have the 12 in my head, but I forgot the core five that I wanted to make sure that you heard. Yeah. Well, and I can tell you that we've got a bunch of sub beliefs. They live on my website, but I couldn't rattle them off without looking. But I can tell you that they ladder up. There it is, right? But they ladder up to elevate people. That's the one. You have to have one that really is at the center of your orbit. So ours is our why is sales done right, right? Because we believe that when sales is done right, it's the greatest profession in the world. That's a what. Okay. That's a what. What it is, is sales done right versus sales done wrong.

Right. That's not why. Okay. All right. To elevate the profession. So ours is also to elevate the profession. You say elevate people. Ours is elevate the profession of sales. You're getting closer. That's the why. All right. Cool. So for somebody going through that exercise, do you recommend they write down a list of I believe ins? For sure. The reality is, is that this can be a very onerous task. The one thing that I really encourage people to do is to reverse engineer it. It's really easy to look at all the actions we take. You could go through your day and very quickly scribe all the things that you did since the morning, since the moment you woke up, right? Those are your actions. Over time, if you do that enough, patterns will begin to emerge.

You'll start to see all the things you do that elevate the profession, that elevate the people within the profession. And all of a sudden you're going to go, holy crap, there it is. That's why I get out of bed every day. That's my belief. And by the way, for those of you that think it's about making money, it's not. As you alluded to Simon talks about this in his book, money's an outcome. You could work at Foot Locker or Amazon to make money. Why you do something is totally different. Yeah. And I think that's, you know, I'm a huge fan of Gary when he talks about happiness is the goal, right? Like whether you make 40 grand a year and, and, you know, go home every day and go to your soccer games and that type of stuff.

If you're happy at 40 grand a year, you win compared to the millionaire who's a miserable prick, right? And so I think it's defining what makes you happy. And this is kind of the transition that I, that I'm trying to work with right now with, with one of my teammates, which is Morgan, right? I did this, I don't know if you saw, but I did this kind of quadrant of energy management. And I've been thinking a lot about energy management versus time management and how I actually think energy management is more important. And so I said, all right, let's write down the kind of like the goals here. What do I want to get accomplished? What do I need to do to be successful in whatever that definition is for me?

Then which ones of these help me achieve my goals and give me energy, right? So it's like, it gives me energy versus sucking energy away from me. And there's certain things that I believe that we have to do, unfortunately, that don't necessarily give us energy, but they help us achieve our goals. Look, if it was up to me, we'd all live in the quadrant of gives us energy and helps us achieve our goals, right? But there's the other quadrant of takes energy away from us, but helps us get our goals. And then there's the takes energy away, does not help it, let that stuff piss off, right? And then there's the gives us energy, but doesn't help us. And that's more of a hobby. That's more of something that kind of is, is something that makes us feel good, but not might not necessarily help us get our goals or whatever it is.

Now there's a huge part of our population that I think just wants to try to live in gives me energy and love to what I do. I'm 45 years old. You and I are pretty close. We've kind of gone through the stages of life and kind of settled in. In some ways, I'm not saying we're settled. I'm saying we're settling into what, where we are and what makes us happy. Do you believe that there is a time and a place for doing the stuff you don't like to do, but still helps you achieve your goals? And I'll put one piece around this. The reason I ask is because I feel a lot of kids right now are very eager to do all the stuff they want to do that gives them energy and helps them achieve their goals, but they're not willing to do the stuff that they have to do that might suck away energy from you.

Do you believe that you can find that Zen zone of always being able to do what you love to do and giving you energy? What a great question. I've always admired you and I love listening to your podcast. It's fun to be here because you have such good, deep questions and this is one of them. I think the truth of the matter is, is that it's probably inevitable that in some point, at some time, some way, you're going to get stuck doing things that at the moment don't seem so great. Yeah. I think that's called life. That Zen zone that you're talking about, though, the older I get, the easier that gets, frankly. I'm 51. I, like you, have owned my companies now, it seems like forever, but it's been two plus decades.

And so I have the enviable position of, from time to time, coming across an opportunity and simply saying, no, not interested. And I think that comes from a place of really understanding the things that provide me energy, my core beliefs, the things that I stand for, and really the core strengths that we have. I've realized, and this was truly the silver lining of COVID for me, was I recognized my zone of genius versus my zone of excellence. These are two wildly different things. Of course, I can look back in time and recognize that I spent plenty of moments in neither, in my zone of just slogging through to learn. But you can learn an awful lot by knowing what not to do. I think those are very valuable pieces of experience that people should do.

And even in the moment, if it sucks, yeah, try to find the learning you can. I'll give you one quick example. This is true, by the way. Let's call it a decade ago. The National Speakers Association, the NSA, National Speakers Association, is actually based here in Phoenix. They do this thing called Speaker U. And I was very intrigued. I get the chance to stand on stage and give presentations like you all the time. Something I really love to do, very high level. It's great. Get paid real money. And I thought, okay, I should do this. And so I join Speaker U. I go to the first class. It's 12 weeks, I think. We're halfway through. We get to the first break of the first class. I walk up to the instructor, really nice man.

And I said, please tell me this gets better. Please tell me this won't suck so bad. And it was awful. It was like the worst hot garbage of all time. And what I said to myself in that moment was, I'm going to do all 12 weeks and I'm going to learn exactly what not to do, how not to be, how not to think. I'm going to do the exact opposite of these people. And I did it. And so, yeah, you can just sometimes suck it up and learn a ton. Yeah. Cause, and that's where like, I'm struggling with myself right now because I've done training now for at least probably what? 2007, 2008, right? So 13, 14 years. And it's funny because I don't do consulting. I do training. So I got two main training programs, one filling the funnel, one driving to close.

And I've obviously evolved them over the years, but for the most part, I've been saying the same shit for 12, 15 years. You know what I mean? And so, but I know I have to do that to generate the revenue to be able to do the cooler shit and build a company and all that other stuff. So training used to give me energy cause I would stand up in front of a room and be like, whatever. Now don't get me wrong. It would absolutely suck energy away from me cause I'd be exhausted by the end of the day because I was exerting so much energy. But now, and, and look, I still step up to the plate every time I do a training. Um, but it's not the, Ooh, this gets me jazzed anymore. Right now, if I had I, if I had my way, I wouldn't train anymore.

You know what I mean? I would just, I would just stop doing training at this point because I've done it for 10 years. I got a team that can do it right now, but we're still in that transition zone right now for, for me to really backfill two or three other people behind me. And there's always clients that are going to come to me and say, Hey John, we had you five years ago. We want you forget about your team. So I understand I have to do that. And I've been doing it for 15, 13 years knowing that it's a means to an end for me. So with that, with where I am at 45 years old, building a company, the challenge that I have is I, is somebody like Morgan who's on a rocket ship on his way through his career.

I mean, this kid is 27 years old. He's like a million times further down the road than I ever was at 27 years old, but he's kind of getting that like, Hey, I want to do the fun stuff. I want to do the sponsorship stuff. And I want to do these things. And he's kind of almost at my mentality right now of training, right? Which is, I know we have to do it. And I, and, and trust me, every client gets a hundred percent of me, but that stuff sexier. So, and I'm trying to say, well, am I holding him back by saying, Morgan, you're still going to have to do some shit you don't like to do. So for instance, like you'd still going to have to do a little bit of training next year in order to be able to do that cool shit.

Or am I, am I being the father figure learn from my mistakes type of guy? Like I'm, I'm, you know what I'm saying? I'm trying to figure out where I am. I know what you're saying. I think there's two parts of this equation that strike me. The first is going to sound a little, a little corny, I admit, but the truth of the matter is, is the root of the word presentation is present as in Merry Christmas, happy birthday. And so for you to stand and deliver training at an incredibly high level and knowing at an intellectual level that you've got to give, give, give, give it's because you actually care because you are giving a gift, your gift. And so, yeah, you're tired because you should be, you're doing the right thing to give.

Right. And what that tells me is the second thing in Morgan's case is you can't give what you don't have. If I asked you for a hundred dollar bill and said, right now, John, give me a hundred bucks. And you looked in your wallet, checked your pockets, et cetera. And you had two twenties and a five, you know, you can give me $45, but you couldn't give me a hundred. Right. And I could stand here all day and say, John, give me a hundred. And you might have a credit card, driver's license, whatever, but you couldn't give me a hundred bucks. You can't give what you don't have. Morgan may not have the right stuff to give just yet. His intentions and his desires, they're sound and they're there, but maybe he's got to make a few more deposits before he can give a withdrawal.

Gotcha. Yeah. And I think that, and that's why, I mean, I told him like when he came on board here, I said, give me three years. Right. And, and, and bleed for me for three years. I'll show you everything it takes to build a business. And then after that, we'll figure it out. Like, we'll say, Hey, if you want to go off on your own, if we, you know, we can do something here, then great. And we're in that transition zone right now. And my biggest fear is holding him back. Right. Like, that's my biggest fear as, as a, as a quote unquote leader is I want to do everything to put my employees in a position to be successful and, and grow to wherever they want to go. But I also want to, it's almost like being a parent in some ways, you know what I mean?

Like you don't want to see them fail hard, but they do, but they have to fail in some ways to figure it out, but they can learn some. So I don't know. I'm just in this weird spot. And, and I think it's both of our journeys. It's my journey and his. And what I'm very consciously trying to do is not, not impose my mentality. Cause I do think in a lot of ways, I personally have a limiting mentality of, of, ah, it's not that good. Um, posture syndrome, uh, you know, whatever. And you know, I'm doing, I've done all right in my career, but I'm not a multi multi-millionaire. I'm not, you know what I mean? I'm not like, it's not over John. I'm getting there, but I'm slugging my way there. You know what I mean?

I am, I am. I mean, we talked about this with the Jack Wells story when in the previous, whereas like playing shoots and ladders, I'm not catching the fucking ladders here, man. I am going color by color, by color, by color, by color. Right. And I'm just like, I guess how much of a leader is, is letting your people go and experience and potentially fail in a lot of ways in some areas versus giving them the guidance and the structure and the protection of, you know, what I've learned. Seems to me like you're talking about some of the hardest things in business and in parenting and they are so closely related. This is something that only you and Morgan can probably come to grips with. I have a hunch that if he could suddenly walk in your shoes, he would recognize how much he has yet to learn or experience.

It's not to say that he couldn't handle it or won't get that lesson on his own someday, but it's just the nature of the beast. You know, I mean, I look at my bosses back in the day, they just knew more because they had been there before, you know? Well, that's, and that's the funny thing. It's like, it's that 10,000 hours thing is a real thing. I don't know whether it's 10,000 hours or what, but like once you hit a certain threshold of doing something the same, you know, doing the similar things or in your profession for a period of time, you just start waking up in the morning and having conversations and you've forgotten more about whatever that topic is that most people have ever learned, right?

I was working on a presentation with a client last week. And one of the things that is always intriguing to me is how business is business. At the end of the day, it's all the same. I mean, it really is. We're just trying to make a living, make it go. People are people, business is business. And they're going through their whole pitch and I'm scribbling notes and it's over. And within mere moments, I basically just twist everything, rehash it, start all over and spew to them the pitch that they had always imagined. And the guy was like, dude, how did you do that? I was like, well, that's because that's what I've been doing for the last two decades. Like this is what we do, right? I do it every day.

And so it's not hard. And that's exactly what you're talking about. It just becomes predictable in many ways. It is. And that's why there's a quote that I always say, you know, this is when anybody tries to get into like an hourly rate conversation with me or anything like that. And they peel back my hours and they say, well, you're charging X amount of dollars an hour. I go, you're not getting charged for the content. You're getting charged for the 25 years of shit that I've dealt with to get to this point. That's what you're paying for. I wish we could do this visually, but people don't necessarily know, but I am a ceramic artist as well. I'm a potter, not a very good one. And yeah, it is like the movie ghost, but without any of the romance, it smells clay stinks.

It's gross. Anyway, I'm with one of my most favorite instructors of all time. His name is ironically art and he's a big guy and I am not, he's a huge man. And he was throwing this monstrosity of a pot, this huge bowl on the wheel. And I was just like, holy shit, Art, how long did that take you to do? And without missing a beat, he goes 15 minutes and 35 years. There you go. Yeah. And that's it, right? I think that that's the part that is encouraging to me about, you know, sticking with, sticking with going through the hard times, right? Cause, cause kind of once you get over that hump, I don't want to say it becomes easier, but it's a lot more intuitive. You, this, and this is actually something that I'm, here's another thing I'm trying to explore is, and maybe you can help me out with this one too.

There's two thresholds that I personally, going back to elevating the profession of sales, there's two thresholds that I want to get through. One is the original give a shit factor, right? Where you stop going through the motions and doing what you're told to do and hitting the cadences and making the cold calls and hitting the numbers. And you actually start giving a shit about the person you're reaching out to the giving a shit about the email, right? So there's that threshold. And a lot, not a lot, not a lot of sales reps get to that point. They just go through the motions. They just, I don't give a shit. I'm just getting a paycheck here. I just want commissions, right? Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, boiler room, Wolf for Wall Street, all that, those assholes.

And so they don't give a shit. So there's that threshold. And then there's the threshold of the unconscious competence, which is what you and I are talking about here, where you've just gotten to the point where, you know, you, you 10,000 hours, you just fucking do it because, and that's where I fit in the middle, which is all these techniques that we train on. Those are techniques to get you to the point where you don't need them, right? I don't use a lot of what I train because I do it. You know what I mean? I don't use the specific template or the specific talk track anymore because it's been so ingrained in me that now I just kind of inherently know when and where to pull it out and bring it up and all that other stuff.

So that's that middle ground. Any thoughts on how to expedite either one of those for, for sales professionals specifically? These are great conversations and they've been happening quite literally since man walked on the face of this planet. What you just described is the difference between your job, your career, or your calling. And you and I are lucky because we've been at this long enough to really get way past job, way into career. And for me, at least it is truly, and I think I can say this for you, we are doing our calling. And so it's one of those kinds of things. If you look at it from the standpoint of, yeah, we need to pay our bills and eat and have vacations and put gas in the car from time to time.

But I would literally do this stuff for free because it means that much to me. It's just so naturally ingrained in my DNA to do what I do. Like that guy I was talking about earlier last week, when I can just whip out his presentation in mere moments, I'm not thinking through all the steps I'm just doing. It's just a natural extension of me. For people to expedite that, I actually think they have to look inward first. You are a thousand percent right. The vast majority of people start with a job. For a few, it feels pretty cool and they want to turn it into a career. For the very, very, very, very, very few, it becomes a calling. If you look inside first, if you can really get clued in to the things you stand for, to the things that really matter, everything will go faster.

You can reach that goal of a calling exponentially faster. Of course, that's easier said than done. The thing that I'll tell you even, and this is true, my book, it at length repeatedly talks about our core belief as a firm and me as a human of making waves. And yet, if you replay what we talked about just 20 some minutes ago, I said, that's how we do our job. I have realized my book is wrong. It came out in August of 2019. And here we are in 2021. My book, the guy that writes about this stuff, me, I have it wrong. It's that hard. And it took something like COVID for me to have the clarity of thought and frankly, the time to sift through and see all of the stuff. I think we often just go, go, go, go, go without hitting pause, reflecting and really getting deep.

There's a book called The Road Less Stupid by a guy named Keith Cunningham. Great title, right? He's hilarious. And the whole book, I mean, it's right on the back cover, over and over and over again, every chapter. It talks about creating thinking time. The Road Less Stupid is actually one where you actually stop and think. And the example that I'll give you is for any of you fuckers out there that simply put an address in ways and end up in the ocean. Yeah, that's what you get. Take a minute, look at a map and actually think through where you're going and what you're doing. When you can stop and think, things get better. All right, you guys, some great nuggets already. Setting a tone as a leader, sticking to your beliefs, hiring people that share those same values that you do.

So much of what we do as sales professionals is about surrounding ourselves with people that believe as we believe, but still taking external lessons and making changes for growth. This can be a tough balance. Brian hit a lot of high notes in this conversation, so we really appreciate all his insights. Send me your sales wins. I want to hear your stories at jamesatjbarrows.com to be highlighted on next week's episode. This week, we're giving a big shout out to Hector Sepulveda, who attended one of our weekly webinars and won an annual membership to JB Sales On Demand. He now has access to all our training resources, tips, and techniques simply by joining us for a great webinar with great insights and great guests.

Welcome to the family, Hector. We believe in you, buddy. The same training that Fortune 500 companies leverage can be in your back pocket. Gain the skills and knowledge that you need to be a top performer on your sales team. Join us today at ondemand.jbarrows.com to become a better seller than you were yesterday. I'll see you there. Let's throw it back to Brian and John because they vibe really well together. It's all yours again, fellas. It's a funny, you know, let's go with the Waze example. I can't tell you how often I'll just, I'm a victim of that. I'll put on Waze. I'm like, I don't care because Waze is better than me and no one traffic. Even though I know Boston like the back of my hand, I still don't know where the accidents are going to be or anything like that.

But inevitably there's that really weird route that Waze takes you and you're like, wait a minute, let me see alternate routes. And like the straightforward direct path is actually the same exact amount of time. It's just ways like for, it's saying for a fraction of the second at this moment in time, this, this going, you know, 45, you know, left turns, right turns, whatever, because there's a little bit of a backup between two exits. Right. And if you just were like, wait, let me just look at, take two seconds. Look at the options here. Wait a minute. I'm just going to stay on the highway and you know what I mean? And just chug along your traffic a little bit as opposed to drive myself nuts and taking 75 turns and get stuck at a red light or getting cut off by somebody getting pissed off, which inevitably happens.

So that take a second. And I think you're right. This COVID gave everybody and hopefully an opportunity to take a second and take a step back and figure out what's important to them. How much do you think we need forcing functions though, to figure this shit out? Cause I, cause in the reason I asked this is I wrote a blog post a while ago back called stop doing what you're supposed to do. And there was two very specific examples of my life where I was doing what I thought I was supposed to do. And thank God the other made the decision for me to wake me up. One was my first fiance. People have heard this. I've talked about it. I was, you know, seven years with her, whatever. And like, and I knew the relationship wasn't good, but what are you supposed to do after seven years with somebody you're supposed to get married.

You're supposed to buy a house. You're supposed to have a kid. So I was going to do it even though I knew it was wrong. She broke it up with me devastated for a day or two felt fucking awesome afterwards. And now I'm with my wife and happy. Couldn't be happier. Right. Second one is when I got fired from Staples. Staples acquired my little company thrive networks. I spent a year slugging. I mean, slug fest. Okay. And, and I knew it was wrong, but I was, I didn't have a plan B. I was all in. They fired me first time in my life and fired. I was devastated. Woke up. What best thing that could ever happen to me. So I needed two very distinct forcing functions for me to realize that I got to stop doing what society tells me to do or what I'm supposed to do.

And I'm going to start doing what the fuck I want to do as long as it comes from a good place. So how much do you think we need that wake up call from the outside versus the intro perspective? Like I got to learn this myself. I don't think you need the wake up call at all, but I think you're going to get it no matter what. Uh, the truth of the matter is, is that the vast majority of us, me very much included struggle with intentionality, intentionality. We just sort of, we just do right. We just be, and then you get that wake up call. And all of a sudden it's like, well, where did that come from? And then you're forced to be intentional. Uh, the truth of the matter in my little world is every time I'm wildly intentional, crazy purposeful and put it out to the universe in all kinds of forms, tell people about it, journal about it, make notes to myself about it, do daily mantras about it.

I hit that goal every fucking time without fail. When I'm intentional, it happens every time when I'm not, well, maybe. Do you believe in the law of attraction? Oh, yeah. And it seems to be one of those kinds of things where, you know, it's a lot of hocus pocus, but I'm willing to believe it seems to work. I'm a, whatever, man. Yeah. Like I don't look the same thing with me. Like I don't, there's hocus pocus stuff, but there's things that I'm just like, you know what, what's the harm? Like what's the harm in talking and looking at yourself every morning and saying, you got this, you're going to hit it. You know, you're going to like, what's the harm in that? There's some, your wife walks in and sees you talking to yourself in the mirror.

Oh, well, you know, worst case scenario, right? Yep. Well, I mean, I'll give you one and this can kind of fall into that camp a little bit, but I talk about gratitude all the time. In fact, when we work with one-on-one coaching clients to help them with their ability to communicate more effectively, the first thing I do is I send them a gratitude journal. And I talk about how it's one of those things that it's really about changing your mindset. And when you start noticing the little things, I mean, stuff like in my gratitude journal, you'll see things like my electric toothbrush and contact lenses. It's not always, you know, world peace, right? It's not COVID vaccines. It's like stupid stuff.

But when you start making a repeatable, focused, proactive attempt to remember and notice all of the really positive, good things, it's amazing how good you yourself can become. It's funny you say that because I wrote a, I didn't read about this, but I, I, I think I probably picked it up from somewhere. It's that exact thing. And I, and I've actually wrote a blog post on this and I did, I think I've done a couple of podcasts where a friend of mine was, was going through a really bad time and everything was negative. I mean, everything to have happening to her was negative. And I said, Hey, here's a journal. I go, I want you to just tomorrow. Okay. I want you to literally write down every single positive thing that happens to you.

And I don't care how small it is. If you made the green light on your way to work, write it down. If somebody opened the door for you, write it down. If you've got a text message from a friend you hadn't heard from in a long time, write it down. Right. I go, just do me that. She's like, why? I go, just please just do me that favor. And then we'll talk about, you know, you know, what comes out of that. Right. She's like, fine. So I gave it to her. She came back the next day with four pages of shit written down. And she's, she literally says to me, she goes, John, this was literally one of the best days of my life. Like I like everything, like, I can't tell you how many things that are positive happened to me today.

And I said, can I ask you something? I'm like, do you think today was any different than any other day? Nope. Or do you think your lens was just changed and you started looking for the positive as opposed to, I think you, for the past two, three years, you've been looking for the negative. I go, you got to force yourself to look for the positive because this is a negative fucking world that we're all in, in a lot of ways, but there's so much beauty out there and we can get sucked into that vortex without paying attention to it. Do you ever buy a new car and all of a sudden you see that car everywhere? Everywhere. You're suddenly focused on it. So it's exactly the same. I can tell you, and I mean, I don't, I've talked about this stuff publicly before when COVID struck, we knew, I mean, we saw it coming because the biggest way that we get paid around here is we stack presentations together and we call them meetings and events.

We produce these conferences and it's real money. We saw about $10 million in contracts explode in front of us in mere days. And I'm looking at 2020 going, this is going to be bad. And it was, and I will tell you that the lowest I ever got as an adult, well, in my life was in 2020. But thankfully I knew enough. I knew enough to intellectualize my way out of it. And I have an amazing wife who helped me kind of see the forest through the trees. And I did exactly what you just described. And it was really simply making a very conscious effort at seeing all the incredible positive things in my world and the world directly adjacent to me. And suddenly I started to get a little bit better and a lot more clarity.

And one thing led to another. And you know, what's crazy? Haven't missed a meal. Huh? My mortgage is still paid every month. It's incredible. We still have clients calling unbelievable. You know, the world didn't stop spinning. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I think that that, I mean, I think it ultimately goes back to reassessing your values and what's important to you. You know what I mean? Like, and, and stop giving yourself excuses. Like mine was, I think I had a relatively legitimate excuse for being on, for traveling so much because I was trying to build a company and clients didn't, didn't really want the remote. I would pitch it, but they didn't want it. They wanted the onsite, but man, I mean, I was, it's funny because overnight we figured it out.

And I, I, I wonder if, you know, again, forcing function, right? For me, it was a forcing function to get me off of an airplane. I wonder, and I know I would have been able to, but I always said, I can't. If two years ago, three years ago, I said, fuck it, I'm not doing any onsite training anymore. I'm only going to do remote training and I'm going to build my lifestyle around that. If I had made that decision two or three years ago, I guarantee you what I would have made that happen. But I came up with excuses because I felt like, oh no, the, this is what the industry expects. This is what my clients are telling me. And I actually think now the remote delivery is a better version of the training than it is the onsite for, for what I do.

So again, I think that there was a great, great point you made. Uh, I think you can do it without it, but inevitably it's going to happen. That forcing function. If you don't know doubt about it, I will tell you, I don't really miss, uh, at all. I mean, basically none, this whole travel thing. Now I've been very fortunate to travel all over the world, literally six to seven continents, 50 some countries, tons of fun travel, but another trip to Cleveland. Oh my God. Not interested. I'm good. I'm looking for it. I'm, I got, I'm four passports in. Yeah. I am four passports and that's in seven years. So I, if I never get on a plane for again for work, I mean, again, I think it's, I feel fortunate that I'm at the stage of the life that I am to be able to reflect back on two other disasters, 2000, 2007, and just kind of take this one in stride.

Um, we are showing our age cause I have the same thing. It was exactly the same when nine 11 hit, when that downturn in 08, 09 hit, like we've seen this game before I know how, how it's going to work. Yeah. And I know not to panic. Right. And that's what I fear a little bit for the younger generation is that they've been thrown into the fire right now without having any of the normal season. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that's a bad thing. How do you think that, how, who's going to survive? And I mean this figuratively, obviously not literally, um, companies and people moving into this next phase. Cause I think COVID changed everything in so many ways. What do you think the characteristics are of, of let's talk individuals that you think are going to throw, forget about surviving.

I don't like surviving. I like thriving. So what are those characteristics that you think that the people who are going to thrive in this new world coming up are? Oh, this is good. I've been lucky. Cause I'm certainly, certainly able to say this with a lot of experience and very relatable one-on-one relationships with C-suite leaders at some of the most amazing brands on the planet. I mean, I've been very fortunate to work at an incredibly high level with some really amazing people. And there are some that you kind of go, why is this person at this level? And others that you go, of course, this person is at this level. And to me, it's about neuroplasticity, which is a nice, big, fun word of saying, essentially those that are willing to learn new things.

There are plenty that are not. If you have a high degree of neuroplasticity, now I can't even say the word. If you're willing to be flexible and learn, man, the world is your oyster. But if you are stuck and you just say, this is what it is, you're doomed. I've also been lucky enough to be on. So I was on staff at Northwestern university outside of Chicago as an adjunct lecturer for six years. And I can remember coming home from those sessions. And I'd tell my wife, honey, I have hope there's amazing people coming up with incredible stuff. And that's how it feels. If you are a leader or even, you know, someone trying to learn the ropes and become a leader, be flexible, be willing to learn and adapt and adopt.

And if that happens, you're going to be just fine. See, that's why I think sales is such an awesome profession because it's the most adaptable profession there is. You know, I always say like the, that's why I'm trying to introduce sales to kids at an early age to think about it as a real profession. So that's not like kind of the default as everybody else sees it. Um, because I mean, the world's not going to get less weird, right? This isn't the last pandemic. This isn't the last thing that's going to majorly disrupt. I mean, artificial intelligence before COVID hit, artificial intelligence was the one I was freaking. I'm like, shit, artificial intelligence, like the eye of Sauron, right? It's like when that sucker points its eye on you, you might as well say, piss up.

Like if, so if you were somebody like a coder, right? Say you went to school for four years being a coder and you're going to code, code, code, code, and that's the future, right? And all of a sudden AI comes over and says, man, we're going to start coding. A little bit like you're, what do you have to do? You have to go back to school and learn a new trade, right? But if you sell and you're in the software development field or whatever it is and coat, you know, and I saw Ron comes over and says, screw your industry. Fuck it. I'll just go over here and start selling this. You know what I mean? Like I could go to a totally different industry. So is, do you think sales professionals or the profession of sales is inherently flexible from a neuroplasticity standpoint?

Or do you think that it's, it's the same as every other profession as far as like you get stuck in that rut? I actually think it depends on the person, not the larger profession itself. It's a little bit like porn. And by that, I mean, porn is always the earliest adopter, right? I mean, you think about, it's true. Sales is the same way. There are plenty of individuals who adapt to the new strategies, the new technologies, the new ways. And then there are some that say, nope, this is how we do it. One of my current projects, I'm not going to name names, kind of a cool company, really nice people, but they are so stuck in time. And so I'm trying to help them and their sales team see a new way of developing a message that really connects to their audience.

And I keep saying over and over and over again, I'm giving you permission. And that's the word I use, permission to see things with a new lens, to do things in a new way, to act with a new series of actions. Permission. When people have permission to do it, they can rock, but they often just get stuck. But how do they break that? Because it's such a powerful thing of, you know, one of my favorite management books is First Make All the Rules, right? Yeah, that's great. I love that book. Right. It's the reason I liked it mainly because it was a fucking title. I'm like, yeah, no, like all these rules that we're all doing, like bullshit, like there's got to be a better way of doing this, right? But most of us follow the script.

They've, we follow the, the, the temp. So where are you as far as learning from history versus plowing and plowing ahead and figuring shit out? Like where are you on that? Because there's a lot, I'm not a history guy. It's my least favorite class in school. I have a terrible memory and I think there's a reason for it because I never look back. I could give a shit what happened five minutes ago. I'm just always going forward and I'm figuring stuff out. So I don't ever, I learned from my own mistakes, but I don't learn from other people's and I know I could. So what do you think there's that balance of learning from history, if you will, and other people have been there, done that, whatever, versus fuck it, I'm going to do things differently and figure shit out as I go.

Well, I think you're going to be intrigued by the way I reply to this. So I want to take you back, not too many months when the orange moron was in charge in the oval office and there was a revolving door at the front door. People were coming and going and things were a fucking disaster. They were and all of the experience, all of the history, all of the knowledge from before essentially left. It evacuated the situation. Enter our man Jojo and sure he's old and yeah, he's probably going to keel over tomorrow, but some normalcy has returned. And really what they mean is some history, some knowns, some experiences back in the room. Yet at the same time, this old guy is trying to do some incredibly new things.

He's fusing both. I actually think that to go forward, you really need the experience that comes from having some time, some wisdom from being in that role for a while. So for me, specifically to sales, I think you can use all of the tools, knowledge, resources, stuff that you've gained to really move forward. Every client of mine can do that. Every company, every individual can do that. It's just a choice. I think more often than not, people get obstinate and they say, this is how it is. Well, no. Yeah. Like that's my least favorite saying. This is, you know, it is what it is like, fuck that. It's not, it isn't, is what it is. Do you know who Grace Hopper is by the chance, by any chance? Grace Hopper.

Grace Hopper is a kind of like the, um, madam of coding. She is one of the original computer coders from back in the day. She's also was a Navy admiral. She was a bad-ass chick and she had a whole series of backwards clocks in her office. People would walk in. I was reading about this on your website. Yeah. Yeah. You walk in and you see all these backwards clocks and it's like, what is this? And she did this because she wanted people to realize that you could still tell time with the backwards clock. But the whole point was that the most dangerous phrase in language is, well, that's the way we always do it. No, you can tell time backwards. You can do things with a different lens, a different way, a different approach.

And that's that forward thing that you like so much. But if you didn't have history as your guide to teach you some lessons going forward, be even harder. Yeah. And I'm just trying to figure out like, how do you break that mentality outside of like, almost like therapy sessions. And I mean, like in a lot of ways, I can tell you there's a couple different ways. One, believe it or not, is to get an outside neutral third party who knows a thing or two to say, Hey, what are you doing for real? It goes a long way. Two is just to have a non-fixed growth oriented mindset. You can choose to look at life as a series of steps. I hope to be a lifelong learner, no matter what, that's a choice. And there are those who say, I got everything I need.

And those that are already fixed, you're struggling. And so to me, have some outside influences, constantly be on the search for the new and more than anything else, really embrace the notion of love for real love. I want you to think about things like a 70 year old white person and person listening to rap music. There's a pretty good chance that that 70 year old white person is not going to love rap. However, if they're open and have a curious growth mindset, I might say, huh, that kind of reminds me of poetry or those beats are similar to jazz in the 1920s or whatever it is. And so they can use history as a guide, look forward and appreciate and lean into love. It's funny. And I, you know, we were talking before we started on, you know, when I, my podcast on cannabis and trying to normalize it and that stuff like that.

And you picked up on, you know, the Picasso when I did mushrooms. Right. And it's so funny. And I, and I, I guess I look back and the more I talk about this, the more I really have needed and thankfully received forcing functions in my life because I was of a limited mindset in certain areas. Right. So I'll take ecstasy as an example. I thought ecstasy was the dumbest, like for, you know, those, like the music was horrible and the scene was terrible and those people were terrible. It was the douchiest thing I'd ever come across. Right. And a buddy of mine came and it's like, take me to a club that came up from North Carolina. And I was a ripped jeans, beer drinking Budweiser, like dive bar kid.

Right. And all of a sudden I'm at this club and he's like, and I, he's like, bring me to a club. I'm like, all right, fine. This is the Roxy in Boston. It's the only club I knew is with house music. Right. I'm like, fine, dude, I'll bring you, but we're going to bail soon. Cause this is not my scene. Right. And, and, you know, I've never actually shared this out loud cause you know, talking about different things, but, uh, or at least on my podcast. And I remember he left, I was sitting on the top of the, like a top of the club. And it was like the dance floor is down in the middle. I'm hating every minute of this, literally every minute of it. And I'm holding onto the railing and he comes over and he stuffs this little pill in my mouth.

And I'm like, dude, absolutely not. I want nothing to do with this. This is not me. I like, I'm just natural stuff. I just like smoking weed. Let me out of this. He goes, shut the fuck up and just do this. And I'm like, fine, whatever. Okay. No joke. 30 minutes into it. I'm looking down on the dance floor and I'm, and I start feeling the music and I'm a huge music guy. I grew up with jazz. My dad, like dizzy miles, that whole thing. Right. And I made that exact connection. I started hearing the layers of the beats and feeling the music and it, and I, I remember looking over at him going, Holy shit. And he goes, Yup. I told you. I'm like, I want to be down there. And he goes, yes, you do. Why don't you go down there?

And, and I literally changed overnight. I didn't change who I was, but I changed my perception of what something I thought was because I wasn't really willing to give it a chance. And I needed, unfortunately or fortunately, however you want to look at it, a little bit of an extra boost to open up my eyes. Right. It's, it's the same thing when I did, you know, Picasso with mushrooms. I never understood. I loved cubism. I loved Picasso. I never understood it. I know. I'm like, how the fuck can you think about putting four dimensions on a two dimensional plane? It makes no fucking sense to me. I did mushrooms. I was like, Oh, that's exactly what it is. This is far less pharmacologically driven, but the truth of the matter is most Americans, most Americans have been in three States and 70% of the Americans who have traveled internationally have been to one of two countries, Canada or Mexico.

That means that 30% of Americans have gotten outside of North America. You want to open your eyes and change your perception of things, go see the world, go travel and realize that this is just one of many ways. The moment you allow yourself to grow, to be open, to experience things with a new lens is the moment that you become a better, more complete human. And I know I'm supposed to be the presentation guy, but man, oh man, this is way more fun to talk about. I mean, and that's, I mean, but that's to me, you know, what we're all searching for here, right? We're searching for experiences. We're searching for growth. We're searching, and we all need it, whether we know we need it or not. And your point on that international thing is extremely, it was funny, you know, during those four years I was travel and, you know, I'm all over the place, just like you.

And it was funny, all these international people would be like, you know what? Everybody says they hate, you know, your president, but every American we meet, like it says they hate their, we don't ever meet any of, I'm like, because those people don't travel. I go, the reason that you're meeting open-minded, frustrated people, Americans right now is because we're traveling and we see things from a totally different perspective. We're not U.S. centric as far as we are the center of the fucking universe. Well said, John. Right? So. So real, right? Yeah. And it, that's why it's like, it's like almost, you want to, I want to put everybody through that. You remember the movie, Yes Man with Jim Carrey?

I love that movie. Like, I just want, there's like one day I want everybody just to say fucking yes to everything. You know what I mean? No matter what comes up, give them the privilege, give them the permission, like you said earlier, to just say yes. Right? And, and I, there's actually a movie about this where the kids, the parents give the kids a yes day, where the parents have to do everything the kids say that they want to do. And you, you can't say no, no matter what it is. And it's like this really cool example of like connecting back with your family and getting out of the rat race and having your kids realize that, you know, you can have fun in different ways. So I don't know. I just wish everybody would have one of those days.

I like that. That actually would help my business. I think the truth of the matter is, is the people that I work with on a regular basis, there's a big proportion of them, a big portion that desperately want the help that we can provide. And then there are some that have been sent to us because that's what their boss wants. And it's that whole notion of you can't lead a horse, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. And people that really desire to be better, we have found that the best often get better. Think about salespeople. It's amazing how many of the same people seem to hit president's club and crush quota year after year after year. Amazing how that is, isn't it?

And I, and I don't know about you, but this is a real thing. When I do a, I don't know, how much do you, are you doing remotely like sessions like this with multiple people? All the time. Okay. There's always the people that are super engaged and asking them a ton of questions. And then there's all these people that aren't right. For me, we do sessions, 30 people at a time, whatever it is. Inevitably there's three, four or five people that are constantly asking questions, you know, you know, throwing stuff in the chat, raising their hand and whatever. Right. And then at the end of the trainings, I always ask the, the, my main point of contact VP, I'm like, can, can you tell me, I'm like, can I take a guess on who your top performers are?

And they're like, how do you know? I'm like, let me just say, and I named the top five. I go, are these top five people, the top five in, you know, maybe the top 10 within the top 10 of your company as far as results. And they're like, yeah, how'd you know? And it goes fucking obvious. Like they were the ones who cared. Exactly. They go back to that, give a shit threshold. Job career calling. I mean, it works every time. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the thing that really is interesting to me about this and I've been, you know, like you, we've been at this a long time. We've met lots of people at various stages. The thing for me that I'm never, ever surprised by anymore ever is that you can't judge a book by its cover.

There are some gamers out there that you just go, I didn't see that coming. And that to me, I love that. One of my favorite clients, they're actually based in a little town outside of Philadelphia. Their top two people are always these two ladies who just crush it in a sea of often toxic masculinity. It's all these men. And then there's these two that just kill it. I love that. I love that. So, you know, just be careful. There's some stealth people out there. Well, and I also, I personally love being, I love my perception being, you know, flipped on its head. Oh yeah. I love that. I mean, that to me is actually one of my joys in life is when I kind of, fortunately or unfortunately or whatever, I kind of put my perception on somebody else.

Oh, that's kind of how they are, who they are, whatever it is based on a few things that I might've seen them do. And then when they prove me wrong about, and in a, in a positive way, I'm like, fuck nice. And it reminds me dipshit, stop judging people, stop coming in with preconceived notions, that type of thing. You always got to give somebody a chance. That's why I tend to have, and, and, you know, I, I have a three strikes and you're out rule. I try to make things pretty objective, right? So if you fuck up once, whatever you're, everybody fucks up once you fuck up twice. All right. You're going to be on notice and we'll work through it. You fuck up three times. All right, we're done here.

Right. Because then you're, then you're showing your colors, right? Fool me once, shame on me type of thing. Right. George Bush, fool me twice. You can't fool me twice. Right. Um, but anyways, um, but let's, uh, let's talk. I want to finish things up with, I want to do one thing first. I have to do this. So people that don't see us, uh, we have very different hairstyles, but about a decade ago, my mom was going through, uh, chemotherapy and stuff. She's fine. But the gift that I can give the world is of hair. I am a hair bomb, man. Like every two weeks I need a haircut. And so when she was going through chemo, I lost her hair, I shaved my head. And so we have at that time, you and I look, looked wildly similar.

I had a goatee working and boy, did people treat me different. I mean, John, people treated me different. I would imagine that people may not expect, uh, what they get from you. Like I see you as sort of this tough Boston sports. And then all of a sudden you're like, hell yeah, it's pride month. Let's go. I mean, it, that dichotomy is spectacular. Never change. It might be the best thing that you have to offer to the world. Thanks man. I appreciate that. Yeah. It's funny. I've always, I can't tell you how many, how often I get, it happened a lot earlier, more earlier in my life than, than later. But for some reason, I either look like a narc or I look like a store employee. Cause I could be wearing like the most non-store employee outfit you've ever seen in your life, like walking through the gap or something like that.

And somebody will be like, excuse me, um, could you help me find the, and I'm like, in what fucking world does it look like I actually work here? So I either look like an employee of almost every retail employer on the planet, or I look like a narc. Cause every time I was at a bar or a club or something like that, I'd walk up. I actually agree with both of those assessments. You do. You fit that really well. Well done. Central casting. Nice and done. So I just, but again, I think it just goes back to the older you get, the more you appreciate people's differences, the more you appreciate giving people a chance in all the ways and letting, you know, letting them prove who they are. Cause ultimately their colors will shine.

Let's go, let's bring it all the way back to their original conversation. The authenticity and the values and those types of things always come out. I don't care who you are. I don't care how you try to hide them. If they're there in you, they will eventually show themselves. So. Yep. And we see it much more now than ever before. We see the worst in people when we're at our lowest. And that's the truth. That's the truth that comes out when it's, we're at our lowest. So it's kind of interesting. Last quick question here. How do you not react? Uh, and, and this probably could be a another whole conversation, but going back to the, like, it's a tough spot out there. There's a lot, it's bringing the worst out of a lot of people.

Uh, we're all on a short thread here these days. Do you have any, um, things that you do when you get, when you feel like you've been attacked or you feel like something's happened instead of immediately reacting to it, which unfortunately I've done too many times versus taking a step back, thinking it through, letting it sit for a little while and then addressing it. Do you have any, do you, do you fall into the trap of reacting sometimes poorly to a situation that you probably shouldn't have? Oh, wow. This is big. Uh, I'm a human and I screw up all the time on a daily basis. And so sure, I react poorly, but I can tell you that, um, I have really tried to make very clear, defined arguments of things that matter and things that don't.

I'll give you an example. Um, I don't mind sharing this one of my companies. I am dissolving my partnership in my stake in and my partner and I are seeing the payout very differently. I see it as a pretty, pretty typical 50, 50 split. He sees it really differently. And as opposed to reacting, I have recognized that this is a big one. This matters. He matters to me and the money matters to me, but he matters to me. And so I'm not just going to fire off or apply to an email or shoot out a text that I'm going to regret later. I'm going to actually stop and breathe and consider what I'm going to do. And the only thing I can tell you, the lesson that that really feels tied to is one that I use often, including today as a guy like you who often has to get on stage in front of people or a virtual stage in front of people.

I know that my headspace matters. If I come rushing in, if I'm in three other places mentally, if I've got 29 other things going on, I cannot give that present. Remember presentation, happy birthday, Merry Christmas present. I can't give that present if I'm not mentally there. And so when it comes to things like reacting, yeah, there's going to be times where I put both my feet in my mouth at one stupid moment of reacting, but for the stuff that really matters. And you know, you do, you know, the stuff that matters, just take a breath, let your mental wherewithal come to be, and then act like a human being and go forward. I think the, I think a lot of that helps with, again, going back to knowing what your core values, what's important to you, what are your goals and visualizing them too.

Like literally having them, there was a big, I can't do it now because I'm in my basement, but there was a period where I had my whiteboard up there and I would write down all my values, all the things that were important and all my goals. And so when I got faced with something that I, that I wanted to react to, I would kind of just remind myself, is it important? Does it help me achieve my goals? Will it matter in the next five days, five months, five years type of thing? Right. And, um, and then kind of relax a little bit and realize there's bigger fucking problems out there than this. Let me give you one, John, really, this is for your audience. Um, I highly recommend this, whether it's a piece of paper, whiteboard, whatever, write down what you want.

And I'm not talking about stuff. I could care who cares about stuff, right? Honda Civic, Ferrari, they'll get you the same damn spot. It's not about stuff, write about what you want. And if you keep that nearby, it's a really telling way on how you should act. It really helps align your beliefs in a way that are really close to you as a human and the things that you desire in the world. I heard another version, which is write down all the things that you, you do react to negatively and realize that your values are actually rooted in that reaction in a lot of ways. Cause if like, for instance, if like you're just this weekend, my daughter, like I got no problems. Like my daughter's, you know, she's a good kid, right?

10 years old. Disrespect though. And trust are the two that I will not bend on. So I, we were making like a tequila drinks and, uh, and there was this one that the rock, right? Dwayne Johnson, he has his tequila and he makes this watermelon tequila, you know, a watermelon margarita and it's delicious, right? But you need watermelons. You need to muddle the watermelon. So I bought a couple of like those fruit packs that had watermelons and melons and stuff like that in them. And I brought them to the pool where our neighbor's pool and my daughter came over and she took one of the watermelons. I said, Hey, you can have that one, but do me a favor and you know, don't eat the other ones. Cause I want to use them for the margaritas.

All right, fine. Daddy, whatever. She then fast forward, gets out of the pool a little bit about an hour later, walks over to me right in front of me, grabs the watermelon piece, another watermelon piece and puts it in her mouth and just is like staring right at me. And I was just like, what, what the fuck are you doing? And she was like, what? And she was, she was obviously showing off to her friends. I think she was, she had a little attitude with her friends. I go, abso-fucking-lutely not. And that, and, and it ended the party because it will, it ended her involvement in the party. Cause I'm like, no, I go, I told you, and you blatantly came up and did that despite me. That is not something that is going to be cool in this household.

Right? Same thing with lying. Like if I catch her lying, I, I overboard reaction on lying. I, even if it's like, I brushed my teeth tonight and she didn't brush her teeth. I legitimately go so overboard with my reaction because trust is such a core belief of mine. Trust is such a core value of mine that if it's broken, I, I, it's hard for me to have a relationship with you. Right. I think trust is number one, by the way, you can't love someone first without trusting them. I mean, I'm so with you. I actually have a piece of granite that has that chiseled in it, in my office, because I am so deeply in alignment with you on this. It's real. No doubt about it. No doubt about it. Awesome. Well, look, Brian, I think we took this in a million different directions.

I think we could take in a million more, but in the, I'm not really sure how you're going to put this one on. Like, what did we talk about, John? I don't even know what this was. Everything, everything, my friend, hopefully, uh, hopefully something in there resonated with somebody else. But you know, I, a lot of times I use these, uh, these podcasts in a lot of ways as my own personal therapy sessions. So appreciate it. Right. A lot of times I'm trying to work through shit on my own. So just bouncing ideas and, and, and having the conversation out loud. Um, Hey, I've got a question for you along that line, a little therapy for both of us in what week of the upcoming NFL season will Mac Jones start for your beloved Patriots and Justin Fields for my beloved bears?

Uh, I don't know about the bears. I haven't been following as much, but I've game five. Uh, I think he's, I think, uh, on our end, uh, he's got four games that, uh, to show. And I actually think that's a, it's a nice soft landing for him because expectations will be pretty low. I love Cam Newton, uh, from a locker room guy. I think that, I mean, he couldn't, he's literally hard, works his ass off. He's, he's one of the best locker room guys I've seen in a long time, but man, that guy just, he's got no internal clock. He can't move the pocket anymore. He can't run anymore. He's got no accuracy at all with his arms. Now I, I need to reserve my feedback for the first couple of games because Belichick has retooled the offense completely.

We got a two tight end set. Now we got strong running backs and, and we missed our slot receiver at this point. So I don't know, but maybe they've built the offense to support him. So he might be all right, but I'm guessing game five. If you, if I had to put money on it, you're back to the Aaron Hernandez Gronk days with your tight offense. It's that good. Minus the murder. No murder. Without the murder factory. Without the murdering. I think you're right. By the way, game five is what I had for Justin Fields for my beloved bears. Same kind of thing. You know, got to move on, man. Got to move on. Got to evolve. Just like we kept talking about it. I think we should just talk football from this point forward.

Let's keep going. Yeah, no, we'll, we'll lose listeners. Like everybody, I always try to keep my Patriots. Like now people are a little bit more tolerant, but man, for the past, like up until like two years ago, people like, dude, shut the fuck up about the Patriots. Okay. Just please. We don't want to hear it anymore. So I'd like lose people. Like we'd be doing a webinar and all of a sudden Patriots topic would come up and you'd watch like drop, drop, drop, drop, drop. I'd be like, all right, all right, all right. I won't talk about it anymore. So I'll tell you what, we could do a whole episode on this though. This is real. It probably only works because they have been so historically awful.

I make a point of creating a ridiculous number of relationships, which always lead to actual sales clients by ripping on my potential client and current clients love for other teams. And if they're a Packer fan, boy, do I take the gloves off? I mean, it's, I, it's a whole thing and I get away with it and it's, there's probably some psychology that I don't quite know, but we could have a whole hour chat of how to win deals by being mean to your potential clients. Mean and educated. And the reason I say that is because at a quick analogy before we bail is, is Red Sox, Yankees. Yeah. Red Sox, Yankees before, and it's gotten a little bit softer now because we've won a few and that type of thing, but there's always been a hatred between Red Sox and Yankees.

I mean, literally I was born hating the Yankees. I didn't know who they were, but there's a respect there because of the knowledge of the game. So I always tell people don't get into like, I'm going to generalize here, but in Boston specifically, do not get into a sports discussion with somebody from Boston, unless you know what the fuck you're talking about. Because, because if you, if you pull the whole like rapport building shit and are like, so John, what about them, you know, Patriots? And I can tell you're just kind of full of shit. I'll start going deep on the Patriots and their roster and their lineup and that type of stuff. And I'll notice real quick that you don't know what the hell you're talking about when it comes to whatever your favorite team is.

And you've just lost credibility. But if you can go toe to toe with me on the Bears versus the Patriots and their schemes versus theirs and history and all that other stuff, you and I could scream at each other for an hour, but then go grab a beer. Should I think that's, should I start telling you about when Tony Eason had to come out of the Superbowl and then the Bears went on to win by the largest margin of victory? No, because I was 11 and I'll bring up the six championships that I have the rings right here to prove and, uh, and have that conversation. Steve Grogan, Grogan and his huge neck. No, I won't do it. Brian, look, let's, let's wrap it up. Um, tell people where to go. How can they find out more about you, your book, your, what you're doing, um, with square, with your podcast and everything else.

So easiest thing to do is just go to squareplanet.com. That's like round earth, but it's squareplanet.com. And then of course, LinkedIn is a great spot. Um, check me out, Brian Burkhart. There is no D in Burkhart, which is the far more obvious way of spelling it. Just Brian Burkhart, Phoenix, Arizona. And I'm sure you'll find me. And I got to tell you are awesome. Seriously, John, we need more guys like you and me who are straight middle-aged white guys leading the charge. The more we do, the better the world gets. And so I deeply, deeply appreciate people like you willing to put your name, reputation, everything out there in honor of elevating people. Let's keep doing our work together. I appreciate that, Brian.

And I think that that sums it up nicely, right? I mean, we talked about this on that podcast, this one right here for, for hopefully for guys, yeah, like you and me resonates, which again, is that quote that I got tattooed on my arm that my dad wrote on his billboard, which is when you are accustomed to privilege, the quality feels like oppression and privilege, not being you grew up with a silver spoon in your mouth, but privilege being that we are just born white males in America. And this world was built for us. Everything that we do is promoted. Whereas if anybody else did it, they'd get ostracized or they get chastised for it. And so recognizing that and having this conversation out loud and learning along the way.

I mean, I think that's one of the things about this podcast and what I try to do is, I mean, there's been a couple of ones recently where I fucked up, you know what I mean? And I've said something I shouldn't said, but let's talk about it. Right. And let's give somebody a chance that three strikes in your out rule. Like let's not just immediately slice somebody's neck because they said something dumb or insensitive or whatever. Let's try to educate. Now, if they don't take that education or if they're not willing to be open to it, then fuck them. But let's give somebody a chance first because nobody's giving each other a chance anymore. And it's like, you know, you could be the most progressive woke person out there, but then say something a little bit off for whatever reason.

And all of a sudden your career's over. And I just don't think that's fair. On the flip side, if you're not learning and being open, then go fuck yourself. You know what I mean? Like if you're one of those people that's that's sitting in that never want to change things, you know, make America great again, fuck off, asshole like that stuff. Go eat shit. But if you're willing to learn, I don't care. You could be the most deplorable person I know from a value standpoint up front. But if but if you're somebody who recognizes and wants to learn and wants to get better and is open to the conversation, serious neuroplasticity, there it is. It's just not that hard. It's not. It's not. You're the man, John.

Awesome, Brian. Well, thank you for coming on. Go Pats. It'll be an interesting one for both of us. Let's put it that way. Awesome. All right, everybody. Well, hopefully you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. I know we went a little bit long on this one. It was because I was enjoying it. So look, like I always say every day, every podcast, if you're having a shitty day, go out there and make somebody smile today. Because even if you're having the worst day that you know, if you made somebody smile, you know, you had a great day in the world needs a lot more of that these days. So thank you all for very much for listening. I'll see you on the other side. Make it happen. Okay, everybody.

That's a wrap. Brian and John share a mentality that acknowledges a need for change in order to grow, whether personally or professionally. Brian talked a lot about being flexible and willing to learn. And I'd wager that people that think this way are often top performers. This is why sales is such an amazing profession, as John said. So what are you waiting for? Someone else to make you successful? That's not realistic. Invest in yourself and make yourself successful. That's what's real in this world of high stakes wins and detrimental losses. Take no chances. Be the one that gave it your all and join us to get the skills that you need to win more deals and make more impact. Ready to win? We'll see you there at ondemand.jbarrows.com where you're going to go and subscribe today.

Be sure to follow us on Instagram at JBSalesTraining, all one word, where we deliver daily tips, techniques, and strategies. And join us for our weekly webinars by visiting jbarrows.com and seeing the blog and events section. Sign up for those webinars. They are quite useful for all sales professionals of any stage at any point in their careers. And we look to see you there. See you next week when we bring you another guest that'll help you sell better. Make it happen, everybody. Thank you.