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October 3rd, 2022
I don’t think it’s news to anyone that if you want to achieve your goals , you need to set intentions, and you need to be proactive about it. But how many of us actually do it? Author and CEO, Brian Smith sits down with Rob and provides a refreshing, and spells out in no uncertain terms, not why to set intentions but how!
In this Pocket Sized Pep Talk, you’ll learn:
• The fact that far too often barriers or setbacks hijack our ability to attain these goals, and what you can do about it.
• How to define goals, delegate, hold oneself and others accountable, to achieve balance.
• Process maneuvers that apply to work and life.
• Reaping the benefits of slowing down and existing within the moment.
• The biggest battle of all; with ourselves!
• Needless to say, we live in a polarized environment. Brian talks about how to operationalize empathy to help us overcome differences (cultural, political, gender, generational) in the workplace.
To learn more about our guest, Brian Smith:
Guest Email: Brian@IABusinessAdvisors.com
Guest Website: www.iabusinessadvisors.com & www.theiinteamseries.com
Twitter: twitter.com/yourbizdr
Rob Jolles (00:00):
I don’t think it’s news to anyone that if you want to achieve your goals, you need to set intentions and you need to be proactive about it. There, finished. But how many of us actually do it? Let’s have ourselves a pocket size pep talk because we don’t need to debate why. We need to set our intentions. We need to learn how. And today’s guest is going to help you do just that.
Intro (00:25):
A pocket size pep talk, the podcast that can help energize your business and your life with a quick inspiring message. Now here’s your host, Rob Jolles.
Rob Jolles (00:39):
Brian Smith is the founder and senior managing partner of IA Business Advisors, a management consulting firm that he’s worked with more than 18,000 CEOs, entrepreneurs, managers and employees worldwide. Together with his daughter Mary Griffin. He’s authored his latest book, individual Influence, finding the I in Team and shares how to become our Best Self with Everyone We Influence. I love the title and I really wanted to talk about this book. Glad to have you with us. Welcome to the show, Brian.
Brian Smith (01:11):
Thanks Rob. Thanks for having me.
Rob Jolles (01:13):
Well, it’s a pleasure. So let’s dive right in. And I want to start with the book Individual Influence Finding the I in Team. So a lot of times we don’t find a book, it finds us. So how did this book find you and your daughter?
Brian Smith (01:27):
Yeah, it found me our out of our body of work, we do a lot of work with humans and human interaction with technology and each other and we’ve experienced a tremendous amount of conflict, not with e just each other but also with self. So really it came from our body of work over the last 25 to 30 years watching technology and watching humans change as technology changes. As for my daughter Mary, she came out of college with a degree in English. I was writing a book, so I said, how about you help me edit and write this? And we found out that we work amazingly well together. So she joined the company and we started writing together in 2018 and haven’t stopped since.
Rob Jolles (02:24):
That’s great. What a nice thing. First of all, I’m smiling because I’ve got three kids of my own and I’m sitting there thinking, English major. I had a theater major, but who’s found some really interesting work, but what a blessing to be able to take that and then be able to not only work together but find out that you’re as compatible as you are. Because as we both know, sitting around and having cereal at the table isn’t really the same as working together on a business project. Wow. What good fortune for you two, let’s put it that way.
Brian Smith (03:03):
Yeah, it has been, and we’ve both been very blessed and so have her siblings and her mother, my wife. It’s really become something that has brought the family together. Also, we have very different conversations once we start doing this work and we start writing about the topics that’s in our book and the things that we’re trying to teach and to push to be more mainstream and to be more part of human interaction on an everyday basis.
Rob Jolles (03:36):
Excellent. My wife edits my what I call blarticles, my blog articles, but I’ve been writing ’em for almost 14 years and I get to a month. And in a sense, because she edits them, it’s brought us a completely different vocabulary and conversation because there’s so many topics now that we share that never happened before. So I kind of came in through the back door, but I do get what you mean and anyway, I’m good for you that you’re a very blessed and fortunate man. Okay. All right. So as I mentioned often in the opening we all set goals and with the intention of achieving them, but you write that unfortunately far too often there are barriers and setbacks that hijack us from these goals. Let’s talk about some of those barriers and setbacks. Tell me cherry pick a couple of the big ones and then even as important if not more important, tell me how we’re going to combat them.
Brian Smith (04:35):
I think the number one barrier we have with our intentions is life itself. It is so fast. Things are happening so quickly in our lives and we are so laser focused on our jobs or our children or our spouses or whatever it is that is capturing our influence and attention at the moment that we lose track of our intentions, we lose track of our goals and setting them as we talk about setting them is the first step. Developing the tactics as a second step. But really that’s the number one thing that gets in the way of intentions is just life. And the context of that to each of us is different because each of us is experience a different journey, but we all have one thing in common. Life moves fast. We get laser focused on that life and regardless until we decide to elevate the intention and make that intention part of that fastness in our world of influence, it generally gets blown by sideswiped gone around or put on the shelf and forgotten about.
Rob Jolles (05:47):
Yeah. Okay. And in the opening I said, we all want to do it. We know we need to do it, but we don’t always do it. So I’m with so far big question is, so how do you combat life? How do you combat life getting in the way?
Brian Smith (06:04):
Yeah. Our biggest chapter in our book is called Slow Down and we talk about how to slow down in different ways and humans are so different. There’s no one size fits all. One of the things we’re most proud about is our book is not a here’s one way of doing it and if you do it this way, you’re going to be successful. Here’s two ways of doing, and if you do it this way, it’s successful. It’s going to be a journey. And that journey starts with slowing down, understanding what makes you go fast, understanding what is influencing you to have behaviors that you do. And then once you understand those, looking at ways to battle things like environmental urgency, people barging into your office or people that can interrupt you or being in the subconscious mode, this comfortable focus, what gets you in that focus? Why are you in that focus? And then am I an immediate gratification person or do I have a different path to gratification? And if we don’t understand what that means, we never really get there, even with immediate gratification, that gratification is immediate, but those type of people move by it and move on to something else and something else and something else. They always seem to be chasing something. So the slowdown aspect is the foundation of setting intentions.
Rob Jolles (07:34):
Yeah, that makes sense. What about emails? Because emails, I see you laughing, I’ll leave it right there. Talk to me about emails because they absolutely just blitzkrieg our thoughts and our intentions and our goals and our actions. Talk to me about that and how do we get around that? Because I don’t know about you, but I’m getting 70 to 80 a day.
Brian Smith (07:59):
So emails are right up their next text messages or teams messages or whatever way you message. And for us, we recommend time blocking or some type of task blocking. Some people call it time blocking or task blocking. Setting aside time to focus on those things. That takes a little bit more discipline because what do you do with it outside of that blocking time? A lot of people say, well, I’ll minimize it and put it in the corner, but it’ll still distract you identifying that you have an environmental urgency that is called email. And how that environmental, environmental urgency influences you is where you need to start. So if the distraction is the t the ding or the focus on the screen, take it out of your area of influence and set an influential tone or something that opens it up in that block of time and puts it in front of you and allows you to focus on it at a time when you can give it your intention and you can be intentional about your email and whatever is in that email. When that time is up, move on. And that’s usually the way that we work through that with clients. To start.
Rob Jolles (09:23):
I coached a client of a real estate agent who was had terrible time and there there’s numbers out there, you know them better than I, but when we stop and hear the bing and go look at the email, we’re conning ourselves to believe, oh, I’m just going to look at the email, then I’m going to go right back to what I was working on that there’s studies out there. It’s 10 or 15 minutes. I mean it there’s isn’t that easy. So as simple as this sounds, cause I, I’m written a book on this, but this particular client, we actually went into the settings and just changed it from, I think it was every 30 minutes. It would allow her to know what emails had been accumulating as opposed to that instant being, the moment they hit her mailbox and symbols. That sounds it actually really helped her. But that’s as far as I got at it,
Brian Smith (10:15):
Yeah, it’s interesting some of the hooks and the tools that are available to us within our technology. Like you just said, setting up your system to only grab email every 30 minutes, setting up rules in your email system to move spam to one place or to a whole nother person or redirecting certain emails. I mean there are so many different ways to set up communication systems nowadays, however, setting that ’em up requires slowing down and being intentional about the setup phase. Also, if we rush through that, we’re going to create gaps in those systems and those gaps are going to be distracting and take us right back to where we started.
Rob Jolles (11:02):
And folks, if you’re listening, you’re starting to hear a theme. It’s almost becoming a mantra at this point. The man is telling us all to slow down individual influence, finding the eye in team the I’m already, I can already sense one of the themes is slow it all down a little bit. Okay, it’s not lost on me. Let’s talk about balance a little bit. And I don’t know if you know this about me, but I wrote a book, I won’t give you the title because this, I want to hear about your book, but the book dealt with some balance issues and I signed thousands of them. Keep it all in balance, keep it all in balance, keep it all in balance. Great mantra, great theme. Slow down is going to help us, but how, any other thoughts to achieve balance? Most people won’t debate it, it’s a matter of can we achieve it?
Brian Smith (11:58):
Yeah, I think we struggle with balance for the same reasons we’ve already been talking about life goes by so fast and it takes me back to why I moved to Oregon in 2004. I had zero balance in my life and I had a new son and a daughter and life was throwed just going by me. And I looked up one day and here’s a four year old, a 10 year old and a kid in college and I was lost. Slowing down was a start having focus, being intentional about yourself. So one of the things we talk about is you have to be your best self before you can be your best for others. And that’s not a selfish thing. Being your best self means prioritizing those personal things, your family, your self, your family, spending that time with them, making that time quality. In the book we talk about how to set up your home environment to be less distracting.
(13:02)
Also not having your cell phone at the dinner table is we could start at the very easy and basic ones having a single place in your office or in your home where you do work when you do it. So you’re not doing that in front of your children or your wife, you’re doing it away from them so that when you are around them you can be more intentional and have more focus on them being open with your family that you want this balance. And when you decide that, you put on those blinders and you get that comfortable focus and you start to ignore your family that it’s okay if they remind you that you’re striving towards balance and have some transparency about this struggle with the people around you and get some help in changing your behaviors to introduce more balance in your life.
Rob Jolles (13:56):
And I think you hit it when you threw in their help to me as a road warrior and as a guy that’s got over two and a half million miles in the air in my career and a guy who was out of balance for many years and very blessed and fortunate to have a wife that helped me get back in balance. I think for me, and you tell me if I’m wrong on this, I think one of the first battles we have is admitting that we’re out of balance. It’s ourselves. You look in the mirror and I forgot the quote, but I’ve seen the enemy and it is me. That’s one of the hard ones. And it’s almost like an AA alcoholics anonymous of we first, we have to admit that we have a problem. A lot of people don’t admit, don’t see it. The people around them, the people who love them, do what if you don’t have that structure? And I don’t a tough one for people hard to fix a problem when you don’t know it’s a problem.
Brian Smith (15:03):
We address these issues in the book. Individual influence isn’t just what we do to others, it’s what we do to ourself. And we have a couple of chapters that go to the heart of what you just said. One’s called Who Am I? And we talk about our ego and self-reflection, looking at yourself in the mirror and that’s in your internal mirror, thinking about your roots and what influenced you to be who you are today. One of our beliefs, and it’s the truth, but one of the things we’re trying to get people to understand is at this moment in time, you are an accumulation of every influence up to this moment. That’s people, that’s what you’ve done. It’s left something with you and it is part of who you are. So understanding that is really important. Understanding who you want to be is really important. Understanding self-deception and how we deceive ourselves and say, oh, I’m okay, or I’m not out of balance or I’m not this or I’m not that.
(16:07)
Listening to our intuition and having better clarity about ourselves. We talk about all of these things in our fourth chapter and then in the foundation chapter we dive even deeper into self-awareness. What are our habits? What is our character? What is our perception of reality? And then at the end we talk about empathy. Empathy has to start with self first. And if we can be empathetic with ourselves about where we came from and the struggles we’ve had, we have a much better chance of being empathetic to those around us. And when we get to that point, balance starts to really happen.
Rob Jolles (16:47):
That’s really well said in individual influence, finding the I in team. I’m assuming I can get that at any online bookstore, Amazon, etcetera.
Brian Smith (16:56):
That’s right. Rob, it’s Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all the major ones. Yes.
Rob Jolles (17:01):
Beautiful. Do you have an audiobook on it?
Brian Smith (17:03):
We do. We have an ebook, we have an audiobook. Matt Kelly is our voice and he is amazing and we’re so proud to have him and it’s really an easy listen with him reading it.
Rob Jolles (17:17):
Outstanding. Good. All right. So there’s no excuse for you not to go out there and either read this book or listen to this book or put it on your tablet, but we’re talking about things that are really important here. And one of the reasons why I wanted to book Brian is because I’m his client. I happen to have lived this. I told myself many lies. I didn’t know I was lying. I looked at my calendar and every time I, I’d hear, but you’re on the road. So often I’d say in two and a half months it all lightens up. But coincidentally from professional speakers, we’re typically booked about two and a half to three months in advance. It it’s jobb that we play with ourselves. And the sad part is frequently we’re unconsciously incompetent. In other words, we don’t know that we don’t know, we’re not aware of it.
(18:07)
And that’s why it’s, it’s nice to have others and listen to others around us. So to have a book on this that talks about this and applies process behaviors is just one of the most wonderful things and a great gift that you could give somebody whether they’re in the eye of the storm or waiting at home for the person who’s in the eye at the storm. And one other thing you say, Brian, which I like, is in sales we call it with them what’s in it for me? But you say in your book that if we do this, if we accomplish these goals, if we slow down, we can accomplish more. That’s what we call a whiff them. Not only what’s in it for me is we hold that family and keep them functional, but we can accomplish more, sell that to this audience a little bit more on how we accomplish more by slowing down.
Brian Smith (19:02):
You know, it sounds hard until you put it this way. When we go fast, we miss things. Things become a blur. We don’t have situational awareness, we make mistakes. And we oftentimes say, well, I fix my mistakes, my mistakes, I address them head on the time it takes to do that. The time it takes to slow down, fix a mistake, restart, come back and then do it again and again and again is way more invasive and way less efficient than if we just slow down to a point where we could do it the first time. And we don’t miss things. We don’t take things out of context as often. We understand people better, there’s better clarity, the work product gets better. I could go on and peel the onion through any one of those and continue to build on the value of slowing down. It just makes the process cleaner. And when it’s cleaner, it’s faster and when it’s faster, it’s more valuable to us.
Rob Jolles (20:10):
Makes sense to me. And then there’s your whiff them folks. Now I can’t let you go without asking about one other piece. Needless to say, we live in a polarized environment. How can we opera operationalize empathy to help us overcome differences? And I’m talking about political and mainly, but we can talk about gender, but how do we do that in the workplace?
Brian Smith (20:40):
So one of the things we added to our book was this thing about bias, and then it came right after our chapter of individualism. And in the United States and around the world, individualism is thought of as almost narcissistic and selfish. And we don’t look at it that way. As we move through life, think about what’s important. And what I mean by that is when we’re by ourselves, the color of somebody’s skin, the gender, their sexual preference, they just don’t matter. When we get into a team or a group of people working towards a common goal, what matters is the goal. There is no need to think about all those other things that are distractions because they have nothing to do with the end result. Now, I’m sure there’s some very enterprising people out there that can come up with some situations where they could say, well, gender matters here or race matters there.
(21:44)
But the reality is, is that if the goal is world peace has nothing to do with gender, race, or anything else, it has to do with humans getting along and accepting each other for the uniqueness that we are and the fact that we’re all working towards one goal, which is a viable, happy life that allows us to live in a free society and freedom’s messy, but it’s way better than the alternative of dictorial ships or what we get when we have this polarization, which is one side telling another what to do. And that’s not freedom, that’s dictatorship. So think about these things a little bit more about why you have the bias and where they come from. What is driving you to have a bias against whatever it is that you’re bias against? What’s the root cause of it? And is it real? Does it really affect you and your life goals? And I think most people would learn if they slowed down and got that into focus, that those particular things are actually superficial to what your real personal goals are.
Rob Jolles (23:01):
Yeah, I deal with trying to change the minds of other people and I’m asked a similar question. I wrote that question down for you because I really wanted to hear how you handled it because I get that question a lot myself and because I’m supposed to be the guy that can help people change people’s minds. And the bottom line, there’s a lot, we’ve got a few days, we can put some process babe behind it. But I love the way you address that. And the way I hit it is in a similar way, I tell people, particularly when it’s becomes a political question, everyone is so dug in on their own and ideas. But I’m going to change your mind on this idea. I think the rule, I think really if you want to do that, you have to be willing to have your mind changed and you want to engage in that kind of conversation, that’s fine. But if you’re going to sit down at that table, the rules should be, I’m open for change as well. And if we both sit down with and follow that, maybe we can hear each other a little bit more. But usually it’s my fingers in my ears, but I’m, I’m going to make you change the way you think. It’s impossible. Can’t do it that way. Just doesn’t work.
Brian Smith (24:25):
When you start a conversation like that, you’re already headed in the wrong direction. And you’re right. And it’s such a great way to approach conflict is how can I go into this conflict with an idea that I might come out of it believing what the other side believes in and how do I get there? And when we think that way, we’re looking for reasons to believe in that person. We have empathy to how they feel, and we’re looking for something that we can get a hold of. And we’re asking questions that clarify how we might get a finger hold and a finger hold goes to a handhold and a handhold goes to a hug and it goes past it. So you have to, if you can approach conflict that way, whatever that conflict is, you can move yourself forward. You may change and you may fall back where you are, but when you do that, the other person might start to in kind treat you the same way.
Rob Jolles (25:27):
Love it, love it. We’re on the same page on that one for sure. And we handled that one in about four and a half minutes, four minutes. But that’s a big piece that’s that’s really a major piece personally, professionally, it gets in a lot of people’s way. So I’m glad we got that one out on the table. Come down the home stretch with two last questions. All right. One of them, ’em would be this. If you could go back in the way back machine and meet a Brian circa 25 years old, what would you give me one or two things that you’d tell him, whisper in his ear that you’ve learned, but you only get one or two.
Brian Smith (26:11):
Yeah. Well, the first one is get out of your own way. So the younger we are, the more arrogant we are in our ego gets in a way. We actually talk about ego in our book. And I actually outline some of the ways at that timeframe that you just asked me to go back to that I got in my own way. I ruined friendships, I ruined business relationships, I got my own way. And the second thing is to listen to your elders. They really do have some experience, especially those elders that are in the areas of influence that you’re moving through and that have been there doing the things that you want to do. And they’ve been successful already. Listen to them. And when you listen to them, they’ll probably listen to you back. And that’s how evolution happens in industry or in business or whatever it is. Your particular area of influences, you start to work together. When you don’t listen to ’em, there’s just walls and nobody moves forward.
Rob Jolles (27:20):
I have to tell you, I’m not, so it’s such a wide open question, but I honestly think I would. That second point you just made, I really believe if you forced me into that question, I’d say the exact same thing. And at 25, I had the arrogance of, well, how, who says that person knows more than me? In which that’s, arrogance is a nice word for it, by the way. But the reality is just live. Just the experiences. People who now even in my career, the experiences that we’ve had, the successes and failures and hopefully the conscious knowledge that’s learned from each one, that’s what does it. And that’s why we really need to pay attention to people who’ve lived these experiences. And I 25 is a wonderful age and I’m not beating up on or my younger audience here, I’m just saying pay attention to those who have been there and done that. Because even if they did it wrong, they learn from it. I can assure you. All right, last question. A mentor or two that has shaped, oh, and one last thing, I really thought one of the two is going to be slow down, so you disappointed me a little bit on that one, but I was talking to a 20, 25 year old you mentors, one or two mentors that shaped your life that really had an impact.
Brian Smith (28:50):
Yeah, so the early mentor I talk about in the book is Jack Der, and he’s the one that gave me a job when I quit the big six accounting firm that I walked away from and allowed me an opportunity to get into the business that brought me to where I am today. I actually listened to him, but I was actually younger than 25 when that happened. And I was scared out of my mind and didn’t know what I was going to do. So I didn’t feel I had anything to do, but listened to learn and Jack laid a foundation for me that was built on the structure I got from the military, added to the education I got in school and gave me something that I could build what we have today on, which was basically be your best self and you’ll be the best for others.
(29:44)
And then second to that is actually somebody who I don’t have a relationship with. His name is, I’ll just say his first name’s Wayne. People that know me know who I’m talking about. He was a business partner that I had that was older than I, and he was amazingly successful and I never listened to him and he’s amazingly successful today. But I learned so much about operating a larger business from him. And even though I didn’t listen to him at that time, when we went our different ways, the first thing I did when our company started to grow was fall back on everything that he taught me about managing people in a larger organization. And I actually fell back on top of his business acumen and some of the things that he shared with me, some of which is slowing down, having focus, having situational awareness, being your best self, having empathy, listening to learn. And he reinforced all of that. I just didn’t realize it until after he was out of my life
Rob Jolles (30:49):
You’re a heck of a guy. I’m curious, does this mystery Wayne know the impact that he had on you?
Brian Smith (30:59):
This is interesting. I’ve actually sent him a couple of notes that said that. I don’t know. I don’t know if he reads ’em or if he doesn’t read those notes. I don’t know if he reads our books. I don’t know. I don’t know much and I haven’t tried much be beyond that. But we have some similar friends and those friends know exactly how I feel about that relationship and it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve said something to him, but that doesn’t mean that he listens to them. He could also just say, I don’t want to know.
Rob Jolles (31:36):
Well, okay, well maybe just a little nudge from Rob. Maybe you pick up the phone, may make that call. But that sounds like a really important person in your life. And I think before it’s too late, you want to tie that up a little bit. But just a thought, and I’ll move off of that and go, listen, you’ve been a terrific guest, really enjoyed it. Individual influence finding the I in team audio video ebook, but my audience knows, and here it comes, buying the book is half the story. You’re going to read it and then you’re going to write a review on that book because that’s what we authors really like. And the algorithms don’t lie. Amazon seems to like them too. So go ahead and put the cherry on the Sunday there and not only get yourself a copy, but read it, implement the ideas that you’re getting from there. And these are, I love the way it’s not easy to author, to author, it is not easy to travel between personal and business with a lot of ideas. But this is the classic book, a classic title that should and does just that. So I’m not sure who I’d recommend not getting this book to. So go grab a copy of this book and make sure that you put a nice review on there. It means it means a great deal. How do people get ahold of you, Brian?
Brian Smith (33:12):
Well, our website is iabusinessadvisors.com or you can send me an email. I am very transparent. It’s brian@iabusinessadvisors.com and those are the best ways to get ahold of me.
Rob Jolles (33:27):
Good. Well, we’ll have that on the site, so if you missed it, just go to the site, you’ll see it on there. Really appreciate you sharing your time with us today. I’m very grateful and thanks for being on the show truly.
Brian Smith (33:42):
Thank you, Rob. I appreciate it too,
Rob Jolles (33:44):
Well we’ll do it again as well as we can next time. Until then, everybody stay safe.
Outro (33:52):
Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed today’s show, please rate and recommend it on iTunes, outcasts, wherever you get your podcast. You can also get more information on this show and rob@jolles.com.