At the University of Virginia School of Medicine, I interviewed a group of women about the impact of our programs. I spoke with Ellen Beverly, Dawn Spiller, Olga Kipnis, Carolyn Saint, and Jenn Oliver about how the framework of Transactional Competence has helped them in their roles within the university.

What might you wonder is the most surprising outcome? An environment of respect for different roles and personalities.

While they each experienced more effectiveness and influence, the ability to understand Personality and Transactional Behavior™ has produced a culture of respect for the both the simple day to day transactions but also for the larger transactions that support the aims of the enterprise.

You can hear how Transactional Competence™ provides a framework where each individual can understand their own and other’s role in the transactions we all serve.

I apologize in advance that some of the audio quality may be difficult – but stick with it, as there are many great lessons here.

Below you’ll find a transcript of this podcast episode that has been edited for your reading pleasure. You’ll also see links at the bottom of this post where you can find more information on the people and ideas mentioned in the episode.

by John Patterson
Produced by: John Patterson & Tyson Crandall

The Influence Ecology Podcast is produced by Influence Ecology, LLC in Ventura, California. This episode was recorded July 16th, 2019 and was produced by Tyson Crandall and John Patterson. You can find a transcript for this and other episodes at InfluenceEcology.com. This episode is made possible through the assistance of the Influence Ecology Faculty, Staff, Mentors, and Students around the world. Co-founder Kirkland Tibbels and our colleagues comprise an international collective of professionals who are active in the development of the philosophy of Transactionalism and the discipline of Transactional Competence. Kirkland is considered a leading philosopher and authority in the field and he has authored more than 500 papers on the subject, study, and discipline.

This episode includes contributions by Karal Gregory. The podcast theme is by Chris Standring and titled ‘Fast Train to Everywhere.’ You can subscribe to the Influence Ecology Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or via email at podcast@influenceecology.com.

If you haven’t yet offered a rating or review, I ask that you take a moment go to iTunes or your podcast app and let us know what you think. This helps us more than you know.

Why do some quit while others bounce back? Chances are you’ve heard tales of Thomas Edison overcoming failure. Edison (1847-1931) most famously invented the long-lasting, practical electric light bulb and is credited with developing devices for electrical power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures.

As a master of trial and error, these innovations have had a widespread impact on the modern industrialized world. When asked about the many thousands of failures he had when trying to create the light bulb he famously said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Success is not for the faint of heart. Lofty goals are challenging to achieve, and most won’t reach them. But why do some quit while others bounce back? How do some muster up the resilience to try again when faced with failure? Maybe some people are not equipped with the constitution to handle failing, much less, repetitive failure. Likely, most of us wouldn’t stomach 10,000 failures in search of success. So, how do we develop the resilience we’ll require for our ambitions?

Perhaps it is useful to consider resilience in a new light. What if it isn’t an inherent trait or behavioral characteristic? What if it isn’t something fate happens to bestow upon us. Maybe there is something we’ve overlooked. What if resilience is not an individual trait but to a greater extent, an environmental phenomenon?

In today’s’ episode, we’ll hear Kim Corbett, a poster-child for resilience, talk about how she’s built a surplus of help to bounce back during challenging times.

Below you’ll find a transcript of this podcast episode that has been edited for your reading pleasure. You’ll also see links at the bottom of this post where you can find more information on the people and ideas mentioned in the episode.

by John Patterson
Produced by: John Patterson & Tyson Crandall

“I had a high, ambitious aim for this year, to triple my income. And I thought, ‘How in the world… I am not fit for it.’ And to confront the lack of fitness was upsetting. I had a few moments of, ‘Forget it. What were you thinking?’

I thought, ‘No, do not move that target. How do I start studying and talking to people that can help me in the company? Hey, how can I reach that? How do I do that? I’ve never done it.’ And I would have been embarrassed in the past to do that.”

John Patterson: First of all, for our listeners, if you would please introduce yourself, say your name, where you live, and all that good stuff.

Kim Corbett: I am Kim Corbett. I live in Carmel, Indiana, which is a suburb of Indianapolis, Indiana.

John Patterson: And what do you do for a living?

Kim Corbett: I work as a territory director for a diagnostic imaging company, the largest in the country. We provide radiology services. I set up cancer programs and such in hospitals throughout Indiana and Kentucky.

John Patterson: Then you have a son aged 22, right?

Kim Corbett: Yes. Yes. Ryan.

John Patterson: Good.

Kim Corbett: Yeah. Very proud of him.

John Patterson: Good. And you’re also health enthusiast.

Kim Corbett: I am. Yep.

John Patterson: Good. Anything else we should know about? We want to get the full round of the character that is Kim Corbett here.

Kim Corbett: Oh, let’s see. I can’t think of anything. Those are my main…

John Patterson: Okay. Good.

Kim Corbett: Yes.

John Patterson: Okay. No worries. No worries. First of all, you and I had a great conversation on an earlier podcast and we wanted to invite you back. And we’ve had this kind of conversation also with several others, Marcus, Joe and Joni, Paul Adams, and the likes. There’ll be several more. Really the purpose of this conversation is to find out, where are you now? A lot has happened since we last talked, from what I can tell. And you’ve been studying with us from… When did you start studying with us?

Kim Corbett: 2012.

John Patterson: 2012.

Kim Corbett: Yes.

John Patterson: So, seven years ago. And when we last talked, I think you had made some moves. There were some accomplishments that you had noted. We talked a little bit about the whole world of selling. But where are you now? What’s happening with you? Kind of take us to the end of your journey, where here you are. You’ve been studying with us for seven years. What’s happened?

Kim Corbett: Wow. Well, from the last podcast, I’m still with the same company. My goal within that company was to move into more of a larger complex sales role. So I worked on developing my identity within the company, and being well known by volunteering for projects. And I watched out the company for opportunities for growth. I was last year promoted to a director level. So I went-

John Patterson: Congratulations.

Kim Corbett: Thank you. Thank you. Because that was quite an accomplishment. It took work. So I worked my way. I, in, my last role became… Because they said, “Well, prove yourself.” So I became number one in the company, won president award, won a trip to Turks and Caicos from that. Took my son on that. But then I worked into this role where I now work with very large multi-million-dollar contracts, which is… that’s what I love.

Kim Corbett: I love working with the hospitals. I work with very large academic teaching hospitals throughout Indiana and Kentucky, so I am responsible for a large quota and retaining these multi-million-dollar contracts.

John Patterson: That’s fantastic. Congratulations.

Kim Corbett: Thank you.

John Patterson: I am so happy for you. I knew you way back when, right, of…

Kim Corbett: 18 years ago.

John Patterson: I know you’ve been working with Influence… Yeah. Yeah. That’s really fantastic.

Kim Corbett: Yeah. That was a lot.

John Patterson: You should be proud of yourself.

Kim Corbett: I am. I am. Because I think back where I didn’t think it was possible ever. First of all, ever to even get in the six-figure range. But then I thought… I’ve worked in diagnostic imaging for several years. And in our world, we call them modalities. And so, there’s mammogram and x-ray and MRI. But when I started studying and learning about PET scans, I was so drawn to that. But the company I worked for previously didn’t offer that. And everybody on my dad’s family had cancer, and I wanted to work in something where I could make a difference, but also make money, because it was always the other way. I was always giving and I thought there’s no way to marry the two.

So, for me, to then look at working for the largest company in the country that offers it, but I sub-specialize mainly in PET scans, and then all of the new things that come out with cancer. So I educate the hospitals and the physicians, and encourage them to offer… A lot of them are all focusing on building robust cancer programs, so I come in and help and partner with them. So it’s pretty exciting.

John Patterson: For the lay people, including myself, a PET scan is…

Kim Corbett: Is for instance if you have cancer and you want to see, has it spread to other parts of your body. So you need a… or if you are getting cancer treatment, is the cancer treatment working? Yes. And they do some of the scans for brain, so there are some new things coming out with Alzheimer’s where they’re detecting signs of Alzheimer’s in the brain. So it’s a very precise test.

John Patterson: Fantastic. And you mentioned that you, in your early days, couldn’t imagine both making a difference and making a good living, and now you do both. In the early days, what’d you deal with about that? Do you remember?

Kim Corbett: I worked hard at fixing my personality. I thought there was a flaw. I thought, “I have to fix… There must be something wrong with me. I don’t know how.” Then I thought, “Well, if I just hoped and wished for it, that it would just turn out.” And I knew though. Deep down, I knew I was in trouble, so it created a high level of anxiety.

And since studying with Influence Ecology, that’s where I learned to do accurate thinking and think, “Okay, I have this skillset. I have this aim. How do I take it with what I already know, with my education background. And then how much do I need to make? And then where do I want to work where I enjoy it? What do I want to do, and how do I put that all together?”

And it looked impossible. Especially as I’m getting older, I didn’t think I could. Some people told me it was impossible. They said, “Go and get married to a rich man and just hang it up.” And I thought, “No. I don’t want to do that.” So I found a way-

John Patterson: Fun.

Kim Corbett: I know. I hear them more often than you can imagine. I still hear it. Why are you working so hard? And I love what I do. So I’m having fun.

John Patterson: Oh my gosh.

Kim Corbett: I know.

John Patterson: That’s a topic for another day.

Kim Corbett: I know. Exactly.

John Patterson: So since 2012, you doubled your income, at least that and more, and expected to do that again and so forth. Really, congratulations on all that you’ve accomplished.

Kim Corbett: Thank you.

John Patterson: It’s really amazing.

Kim Corbett: Yeah. It’s hard to believe. Sometimes I forget about it. I had a friend, within Influence Ecology, that I’m close with. She had me step back and take a look at that recently and said, “I want to just look at where you’re at in comparison to the statistics in the country. You’re up there for your age. You’re a single woman. This is what you’re doing.” So it’s important for me to reflect on that occasionally.

John Patterson: It is. From time to time, I’ve gotten out I think it’s the US census on income or something like that. And there’s a particular set of ranges that people can look at and get the truth about where you are in those different levels of incomes. And I think many people that work with us are kind of surprised, like, “Oh, I’m kind of up there. I’ll take it.”

Kim Corbett: Well, and it never seems like… For a while I thought, “Okay, is it enough when I didn’t measure it?” Because a lot of people said, “Well, if you’re going to spend your life just chasing that, what kind of quality…” So that’s why I’m not doing that now. I look at all the areas of my life. What does it mean to be satisfied? And then, where do I say yes and no to, and then where am I going to focus? And that’s what I’ve been doing.

John Patterson: That’s great.

Kim Corbett: Yeah. And then to see people in my life like my parents who… they’re starting to be a demand for satisfaction. My dad’s in his 80s, my mom, late 70s. And so, first of all, it’s getting on them… Even my son, he’s aiming to be high honors in college and graduating next spring. That’s been the bonus part of me studying here, is watching them watch me, and then how they’re taking it on as themselves. So that’s exciting.

John Patterson: One of the things that I’d love to talk to you about and get your thoughts about, because I know people… You and I, again, we’ve known each other for so long, right?

Kim Corbett: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

John Patterson: And sometimes there are people, and I think of them, and I think, “Oh, studious.” Or maybe somebody else, I think of them and I think, “Oh, they’re hilarious.” When I think of you, I think of the word resilience because you’re resilient. You bounce back. You aren’t thrown by the… everybody has peaks and valleys. You don’t seem thrown by that, the valleys. I’m not saying you’re not bothered by them. I’d rather have just peak, peak, peak, peak. But you tend to be rather resilient around your own health, around your money, around what’s happened in your earlier days around your own son’s health, around your moves.

When I said earlier that you’ve moved around a bit, know that you did a lot of moving, some of which was not of your choice, right? You’re like just this resilient woman, and I just wanted to find out if you have any secrets to share with us about that.

Kim Corbett: Something Kirkland pointed out is he said he watched how I related to things as they came up, as it’s another transaction. It’s not to say that I don’t get upset and I’m not distracted and delayed. But I don’t stay there. There was something you said early on in my study, is, “You transact for help until you’re satisfied.” The part, for me, that I’ve learned the most, because I’ve been very independent and never ask for help in the past, what I’ve done since 2012 and I continue to do it at higher levels every year, is ask for help.

I don’t spend a lot of time suffering. I get help and I get more help, and I just continue to do that. That’s why I get through things. I have a study group that I’ve had now for a couple of years. We call each other beyond our study time and I get help from them. And I don’t have a problem any more with shame or embarrassment, that I have weakness that I have to ask for help. So that has been the biggest impact for the resilience and bouncing back and just doing what has to be done.

John Patterson: I was going to ask you about that because you wrote in your notes something about… You said it and I wrote here. You said you ask for help and ask for help again and again and again until you’re satisfied. First of all, I think it’s very brave. I would, as in a Inventor Personality, tend to want to look like I’ve got it going on, I’ve got it all together. Took me a while to learn to ask for help. So I’m glad that you brought that up because I’ve never thought about that as maybe a key to resilience.

Kim Corbett: Oh yeah.

John Patterson: Anything else you want to say about it?

Kim Corbett: Yeah, because I think about… It was late last year, I lost everything I owned to a flood. And I was studying at the time-

John Patterson: That’s so funny. I’m laughing now because, if anybody’s listening to this went, “Oh my God.” Oh yeah, I just lost everything. Oh fire. Oh yeah, my house just… Oh yeah.

Kim Corbett: Yeah.

John Patterson: Please continue.

Kim Corbett: I started studying minimalism right before it happened. I didn’t think I’d be impacted to lose so much. I went to start replacing my belongings. And I went to a furniture store and I froze. I could not even think straight. So I went to my study group during one of our calls, and I was embarrassed that I was in that state of mind and mood, because I thought I should be able to have it all together, I’m strong, I’m confident. But I wasn’t at the time.

And so, one of the people in my study group suggested hiring somebody and getting help. And I never would have thought of that. Not only did I replace, I went beyond what I ever imagined because I asked for the kind of help that I need. Then there is times that I ask for my health. At my age, I feel like I’m 30, and I sometimes when I’m having problems with hormones or hair loss or whatever, you go to some physicians and they’ll say, “Oh, it’s just part of aging.” And so, for a while I started accepting it. Then I thought, “No, I’m going to decline that,” and I went to another physician and another one and another one, and I got help until somebody said, “You can still lose weight. You can still get your hair back.”

And so, I was unstoppable because I thought, “All right. I want to live with vitality into my 100s,” and my goal this past January to mid year for our conference coming up was to lose 10 pounds, and I did.

Which was going to be impossible. That all came from asking for help and keep asking for help. And I researched and studied health, and then I finally hired them and built a team that could help me with that. Now it’s starting to pay off. I learned stand-up paddle boarding with my 22-year-old son, and I did a 20-mile bike ride a couple of weeks ago from… They did a night ride here in downtown Indy, 11:00 pm till 1:00 in the morning. I did 20 miles straight without stopping, with 2500 bikers.

So now I’m like, “Wow,” and I feel fantastic. And I need that kind of vitality to do the kind of work that I want to do and fulfill on my… Part of my work is legacy because I am making sure these hospitals offer the top possibility for detecting cancer early. And some hospitals are… So I need to have that, and for the kind of money that I’m aiming to make. So it’s part of my plan, is to have a level of vitality. So it’s all fitting together.

John Patterson: Now, for it to make the kind of impact that it could, do you mind saying your age?

Kim Corbett: I’m 56.

John Patterson: That’s fantastic.

Kim Corbett: I know.

John Patterson: Fantastic.

Kim Corbett: And I went kayaking. My son visited recently from college, so he stayed with me. He’s 22 and he’s 6’2, handsome, very lean. And we went kayaking on… It was windy. There were weight caps on this lake. We kayaked for about an hour and a half. And he had to stop and rest, and I kept going. I do weight training, personal training, two to four days a week. And I hate it. I’m not going to lie. I’m not a fan for it. And I hired somebody to work with. So it’s paying off.

I work with 30-year-olds who, I’m passing them up even with work measures. So I love it. And then also to be asked out on dates from 30-year-olds, that kind is fun, but I don’t go that route. But it’s still fun.

John Patterson: Just to know you could.

Kim Corbett: I know. Yeah, it is.

John Patterson: Just to know you could.

Kim Corbett: I know. Yeah. That’s a little added…

John Patterson: Well, so 56 years old. So you bounce back from the flood. There are some other bounce-backs. What are some of those other bounce-backs. Your son’s health.

Kim Corbett: Oh yeah. While the flood was going on, my son had a very high-risk health issue. He was in ICU. He had blood clots above his heart, so that was life-threatening. It was all around the same time, and I really didn’t think I could make it through that, watching your child, they’re doing this drip in ICU trying to break it up. And the risk of it going to his brain or heart was high. That’s why I was determined, watching that, I was going to win that president’s club trip and take him to Turks and Caicos.

I asked him. I’m like, “I know I’m your mom, but would you want to go with me?” And he said, “Yeah.” And at the same time, he had a goal to be high honors in college. So when he was sitting with the doctors and they were telling him the kind of surgery he needed to be able to live through all of this, he was like, “I’ve got to get back to my classes.” So he started transacting with the professors and he got back on track. And he’s going to do high honors, so even with all of his health stuff. So it’s been phenomenal.

Even years ago, because I didn’t know how to transact before I studied with you all, I spent years in court with his dad because our personality types clash. So, now, the level of friendship that I have with his dad even is phenomenal, and the kind of partnership that we have. When my son graduated from high school, and I think, “Man, if I would have known how to transact, I could have saved 16 years of being in court. I could have saved thousands of dollars.” So I really would love to see this in every level of education, that people know how to transact.

John Patterson: I’m imagining that some people might listen and think, “Oh my God. If I had her life, I’d be exhausted.” But I don’t think that’s how it is for you.

Kim Corbett: Mm-mm.

John Patterson: I don’t think, when we talk about all of these different conditions of life… And for our audience, just to say a moment about that, we’re talking about being satisfied in many different conditions of life. So while you’re very satisfied with money and health, for example, you can’t do that and then trash everything else.

Kim Corbett: No.

John Patterson: No. So there’s a real balance that people take care of here. Anything you want to say about all that?

Kim Corbett: Oh yeah. I no longer accept… Even different friends that invite me to go places, I am very conscientious about time and my rest, and my downtime, and my sleep. Some people might think I’m boring, but I make sure to rest, and I take care of myself. I nurture my relationships even with my family who live in another state. I don’t want people to misunderstand that being ambitious is like that Taipei personality where you’re driven to exhaustion. I don’t do that. So there is a complete difference of that, because I look at my sociality.

Kim Corbett: When I even moved here, I didn’t know many people in Indianapolis area. So I wanted girlfriend relationships. I knew the importance of the sociality. So I started a book club to meet girlfriends immediately. And so, I already have a connection of people here that I can call on. We study fun books, and then now we’re starting to explore nice restaurants in the area. I found a biking person, a friend. I’m not exhausted. Now, sometimes, I mean, I may get tired. But I mean, I’m not an exhausted, worn-out, overdriven person.

John Patterson: Yeah. I’m so proud of you.

Kim Corbett: Oh, thank you. Back at you.

John Patterson: I’m so very proud of you. We’ve actually covered a lot of ground here because I think resilience points to a variety of things. One of the things that you do, as a specialization, is to help poorly performing markets produce record-breaking sales. So you help companies bounce back too.

Kim Corbett: I do.

John Patterson: Well, can you tell us about that?

Kim Corbett: Yeah. For instance, I took over this market now for Indiana and Kentucky, and I’m responsible for not only retaining the market, but I also need to bring in a million dollars a year. I really love messes because I know how to take a step back. And I have what we study, the judge personality. I take time to analyze, assess, talk to people. And then I look at what’s the company’s goal, what’s my goal financially, and then I create a plan before any action is taken. Where there’s other people who will just get out and start doing the hard work.

Kim Corbett: I started this position the end of November last year. And then I moved here December 1st. And so, I had a goal, a six-month goal. I had three pipeline development goals that I had to obtain. So I hit two of those three but I exceeded the two of them. For instance, to have 2.5 million in the pipeline. I had 5 million. And to have three joint-venture leads which are substantial, multi-million-dollar contracts. I have six.

And for third quarter, I’m probably going to close 5 million. And my annual is a million. So I don’t just do it in a hopeful space. I first of all look at who has to be taken care, and that’s always what I’ve done, like coming from the level of, we call it, influence ecology, customer intimacy, that’s what I do. I look at what customer relationships need the attention immediately.

And so, I’m working right now on saving… Out of Indiana right now, it’s 2.9 million. We’re at risk of losing 2.5 million. And I’m pretty close to saving… And it looks impossible to the company because people with the odds were against normally doesn’t happen. Again, talking about the resiliency and if people are thinking I’m exhausted, I really manage… Because my thing was how do I stay at high-level vitality and energy in a high stress environment of work where there’s pressure? If I lose $2.5 million, 13 people lose their job. You can imagine the pressure.

I know what it feels like… I know what my blood pressure feels like. I could measure it, so I know what it feels like if it’s rising. To avoid it going high, I will stop and take walks. I will take a day off if I feel like I can’t even… My health and wellbeing is number one, that I focus on that.

Now, I still have room. I’m studying people in the company who seem to have that figured out, and I’ll ask them, “What are your routines?” Some of them go to bed by 9:30. They never miss a day of exercise, especially cardio. They start their day… Some of them meditate. So I’m studying the practices of people who are well. Because when my son got sick, I didn’t feel well. And I thought, “Okay, I need to find people who…” I talked to people who lost their children who had similar things, “How are you staying healthy? How are you staying focused,” because there’s other people that I still have to take care of like my parents and my job. So I would never have done that level of attention without knowing what I know with my aims. That was a long answer.

John Patterson: No, it’s great. It’s great. I’m just studying resilience. And like I said, I was very interested in talking to you. One of the things that we’re dealing with this year, as you know, is this is the year of ambition. And because this is the year of ambition for Influence Ecology, many people started out the year with an ambitious aim. And by that, it’s an aim that is difficult to achieve. So, ultimately, when people start out looking at that aim, it’s difficult to achieve, they start out, they’re not fit for it. They don’t know how to do it. They don’t have the help to get it done. If they did, they’d be doing it. So there’s something that people begin to confront about moving towards that aim.

I have seen you on many membership calls or webinars where we’ve been in conversations about that, that we’re headed towards, in the latter part of the year, one of the topics will be resilience. And your life is a study in resilience, as far as I’m concerned, and from people’s health and wellbeing, to what you need to do, must do, have to do, if you’re going to be up to big things, the degree to which your health is numero uno. I think that’s a fantastic lesson for anybody.

But also, the degree to which you just ask for help and ask for help and ask for help until you find something that really does work for you and help you satisfy those particular aims. So I think we should just put you up as a poster child for this and just… we’ll just have a, “All right, today’s webinar is with Kim Corbett,” because it really is something that, if we could all be a little bit more resilient, we could all reach it a little higher, but not exhaust ourselves.

Kim Corbett: Yeah. And that right there is the key because I watched two… There were several people within my company that died because they didn’t take care of themselves. They pushed it. It’s a high-pressure… When you’re working with anything to deal with healthcare and cancer and the equipment and all the changes in healthcare, I love the industry. And I don’t want to leave it. And I had a high ambitious aim for his year, to triple my income to me.

And I thought, “How in the world… I am not fit for it.” And to confront the lack of fitness was upsetting. I had a few moments of, “Forget it. What were you thinking?” I thought, “No, do not move that target. How do I start studying and talking to people that can help me in the company? Hey, how can I reach that? How do I do that? I’ve never done it.” And I would have been embarrassed in the past to do that.

Plus, companies usually just say, “Here’s where we expect you to go.” And nobody goes and says… They say, “All right, well, that’s our target.” But what if I want to make this much? How do I do it? And I learned somebody surpassed that, so I listened during our different sales meetings of how did people… It is possible. It may not happen this year by my deadline, but I’m not moving it, just like my weight loss. I’ve been working on that for a while and I didn’t move my aim for it.

John Patterson: It’s great. It’s really great. Last thing I want to ask you about is, you say in your notes that it’s now clear more than ever that you become who you hang out with. Tell us about that.

Kim Corbett: Oh yeah. I have preached that to my son since he was little, that you really do become who you hang out with. And I’ve had my eye on this team that I work with now, and I was intimidated by them. It seemed like in my past, I was always on the top where the cream rises. And I thought, “Okay, well, I’m not learning anything.” Then I realized, oh, because I didn’t put myself out there for more challenging environments because it’s hard. It’s embarrassing, because I don’t like making mistakes publicly and flailing at the beginning. And I am doing that a lot. Very humbling. So I needed, with Influence Ecology, I have people, from all walks of life, from around the world, that it’s almost like… I don’t have that anywhere else where I have other ambitious people with their health, with their money, with their legacy, with their family relationships, with intimate relationships.

Even now as I move trying to find new friends, it’s surprising now, especially in my 50s and I’m looking to date, how many people are in their space in their head that they think… They’re disappointed by how life turned out. They’re divorced. They paid child support, alimony. These men now have to rent. They don’t have a home, and so they gave up. So they’re depressed, they’re drinking, and they’re overweight. But they’re not putting themselves in an environment where they can reinvent themselves. And that’s where I want the world to get, that if you put yourself in a place…

I interviewed a lot of personal trainers in gyms because I knew I had to go two to four times a week, and that person better be walking the talk because it’s going to get on me. I mean, I interviewed a lot before I even came to Indy, and I found a woman who’s in her 50s, rocks it in a bikini. She lives and eats very healthy. She’s mentally and spiritually healthy, and I’m with her two to four times a week. And we laugh a lot, but I figure I’m going to become what I hang out with.

I know because I used to hang out with people who love to go and eat an eight course meal, and eat cake for dessert. I liked it because then I had the permission almost. But I can’t do that for my health. I would love to, but I can’t. I know that was a long answer as well.

John Patterson: No, no. They’re fantastic answers and examples.

Kim Corbett: Good. Good.

John Patterson: Yeah. I don’t accuse you of being long-winded.

Kim Corbett: Okay, good.

John Patterson: You’re a storyteller with some very good examples. Well, I think that we’ve covered most of what you’ve offered in some of your notes here. I just wanted to find out, before we end this today, is there anything else you would like to say or share?

Kim Corbett: Well, just, I know another podcast, because I listen to them all. I love them. I travel a lot and it’s great listening content. But you are sometimes on the Soapbox and I was thinking about that, and I just want people to… the exercise of asking for help and asking for help and keep asking for help. I don’t care what age you are, where you’re at. You don’t know everything. And that it’s too late to reinvent. Just because life didn’t turn out how you expected, and there’s still some level of satisfaction and legacy for somebody no matter what they did. But you need help. And you need the environment of people to surround yourself. I would love for that to get out to people in the world.

John Patterson: And Kim, you’ve never occurred to me as somebody who’s too proud to ask for that help. Is that true? Would you say that that’s true, or you just learned to sort of mitigate your own pride.

Kim Corbett: No, I learned here in this study because I didn’t want to ask for help. I was always a bubbly Doris Day kind of que sera positive-

John Patterson: It’s all good.

Kim Corbett: Yeah. And people-

John Patterson: I’m fine. I’m awesome.

Kim Corbett: Yeah. And if I was sad, people are like, “No, you can’t be.” I couldn’t even tell people if I suffering because they didn’t know how to be with it. They’re like, “You always have it figured out. You’ve got it together.” I would try to ask for help and it didn’t even resonate with people that, hey, her ship is sinking. So it took something for me to… At the beginning, I had to ask for help a lot before people could even here it. And then I was more of demanding and a command for help because I didn’t want to waste… Now I don’t waste time.

It’s getting to be such a muscle. Like in this new position, I work remotely and we’re all throughout the country. Everybody’s busy, so there’s times I’d call and I couldn’t… I would call 12 people until I got the answer, because I’m dealing with two-million-dollar contracts and I’ve got language that has to be corrected. I have somebody possibly not following legal healthcare guidelines, so I don’t waste time now. I get on the phone and I am non-stop. And I even reach out to people at night. I’ve learned, do they respond by text or phone call, or I’ll do all three. Then I get compliance. That’s why everything’s moving faster for me, is because of that.

John Patterson: That’s great. All right. Well, Kim Corbett, it’s a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

Kim Corbett: Thank you.

John Patterson: I can’t wait to share this with the world.

Kim Corbett: Thank you. It’s been an honor and lots of fun as usual.

Drew Knowles: Here’s what autonomy is all about. It’s a condition where you have more help than you require, not one where you’ll be able to act alone as you see fit without the need of others. It’s the opposite of that. It’s a surplus of help. It’s demonstrated when you start to see autonomy, and many of you will begin to see this a lot more out of your step of Influence Ecology. When you’re bumping up with people out there, you’ll see it’s demonstrated by those who have their invitations, offers, and requests met quickly and at low cost.

I’m going to keep expanding this for a moment to have you confront and see and inquire further into, like, “Well, what does that look like? What does having more help than you require look like, a surplus of help, and how do you actually get that?” We have this really well-thought-out step that John and Kirkland came up with called Build and Expand Your Influence Ecologies and Cooperation.

Power in the marketplace is determined by your ability to get things done. Now, that takes the cooperation of many people who comply with your invitations, offers, and requests. Now, cooperation requires co-existence, coming back to what we were just saying of relying on yourself and not depending on anyone else. You are not going to create any cooperation because cooperation happens with others in reciprocal relationships.

So if you start to get your head around what build and expand your influence ecologies and cooperation means, it really starts with, how much cooperation do I have? How many reciprocal relationships do I have where if I made some kind of invitation, or offer, or request, that would get accepted and somebody else, not me, somebody else would coordinate some kind of action or work to get a thing done that helps me meet my aims.

When you’re building and expanding your influence ecologies and cooperation, we’re not talking about networking. It’s not to say that if you go to some kind of networking event or you’re doing the activity they call networking… The market out there has this name called, “I’m going to do some networking.” The pitfall people can fall into is they…

I talk about it like this. If you can imagine a dartboard and grabbing a handful of darts and throwing them all at the dartboard from quite far away, maybe 20 or 30 feet away, and hoping that one of those darts hits the bulls eye. It might not, which is…

I’ve been to those network meetings, John, and hoping that I could hit the bulls eye if I gave out enough business cards, and it was a useless waste of three hours of my time. In fact, a whole lot of other people just wanted to get me to home their business. How about if you really thought out some very specific series of exchanges that needed to take place with some specific individuals, that if you had some sort of invitation or offer or request accepted by that individual, that exchange could move things forward for you to meet your aims in a very, very powerful way?

That takes some time to slow down to really think through, what would I need to do to get into that center of influence. I’m going to talk about that in a moment. But I love this quote here, John, “No individual has efficient experience, education, negative ability and knowledge to ensure the accumulation of a great fortune without the cooperation of other people.” What kind of other people? Well, hopefully, a center of influence.

John Patterson: Hey, before we go to center of influence, I want to just back up for just a second because, Drew, one of the things that you’ve done such a great job in distinguishing for people here at Influence Ecology is you often talk about having a surplus. And so, an example might be that you have a surplus of health, health fitness. And if you have a surplus of health, then what that means is that you’re able to manage the threat to your health in ways that someone who does not have a surplus of health does. So you’re able to manage the threats in a different way.

When you have a surplus of something in any condition of life, then you’re not threatened in the same way that other people are. So if you have a surplus of money, you’re not threatened in the same way that other people are. And so, one of the ways that we’d like for you to think about a surplus of help, help, H-E-L-P, is as something that is available to you to produce autonomy.

One of the things that I don’t think that we often do is make the connection between autonomy and a surplus of help. And I just want to take a second and create that connection because many people imagine autonomy as that condition where they can do what they want and have what they want, and live as they want, and so forth and so on. But no one ever says how you get there, how you get to a condition where you have the freedom to act as you’d like, is because you’ve removed all threat.

How you remove all threat is you have a surplus. In every condition of life, you have a surplus of help. So when there’s a breakdown around money, you’re not threatened. When you have a breakdown in your career, no problem. I’ve got a surplus. When you have a breakdown in relationship, no problem. I have a surplus. You have a surplus in those conditions of life. So autonomy is about having a surplus of help. Well, I’ll just say the same thing again. So, Drew, I wanted to connect those dots for just a moment. Is there anything you want to say to add to that?

Drew Knowles: Yep. Two things. It requires you to take some time to really think about and sit down and look, what would that look like for you, having a surplus of help? Just taking the condition of life, health, for example, who do you need? Basically, you use this term in America, but who do you need in your Rolodex or your address book, or your iPhone or whatever it might be, where if just about anything comes along, that challenges your health or the health of someone that’s very close to you, do you have some very, very professional and successful and specialized people that you can call upon to stave off any threat to your health? Or people that can actually call you on if you’re not acting as you should regarding your health.

In the domain of money, like you said, John, do you have professionals and people that are guiding you and that it’s like, all you need to do is follow their advice and do what they say and you’re going to be well taken care of with your money. And I could go on and on. One example I love, John, is a friend of both yours and mine, that works in the government. And some media and press came out about him that was inaccurate. Before he could even try and do anything about it, or anything, the community that this person had produced so much value in of his help, rose up and basically declined it on his behalf. That is what I would call a surplus of career, of identity.

John Patterson: That’s right. It’s a great example.

Drew Knowles: I’m not saying this person… Maybe now they would because they really understand career. But I don’t think they would have been diligently working on having that surplus of people in such a conscious way that it came along like that, it would stave off that threat. But you can do that now that you know, and you can do it consciously.

The last thing think, John, was this doesn’t happen haphazardly. It’s not just going to happen if you ran around transacting as well as you can. It’s you’ve got to think it out. You’ve got to spend some time and look, who do you need in your ecology. And, John, that will lead into our next conversation.

John Patterson: My special thanks to our guest, Kim Corbett. In our show notes, you’ll find links to connect with her and all the links to websites, books, or downloads mentioned in this podcast.

The Influence Ecology Podcast is produced by Influence Ecology, LLC in Ventura, California. This episode was recorded July 16th, 2019 and was produced by Tyson Crandall and John Patterson. You can find a transcript for this and other episodes at InfluenceEcology.com. This episode is made possible through the assistance of the Influence Ecology Faculty, Staff, Mentors, and Students around the world. Co-founder Kirkland Tibbels and our colleagues comprise an international collective of professionals who are active in the development of the philosophy of Transactionalism and the discipline of Transactional Competence. Kirkland is considered a leading philosopher and authority in the field and he has authored more than 500 papers on the subject, study, and discipline.

This episode includes contributions by Karal Gregory. The podcast theme is by Chris Standring and titled ‘Fast Train to Everywhere.’ You can subscribe to the Influence Ecology Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or via email at podcast@influenceecology.com.

If you haven’t yet offered a rating or review, I ask that you take a moment go to iTunes or your podcast app and let us know what you think. This helps us more than you know.

We all assume we can play to our strong suits – but what about when these don’t work? How do I influence or gain compliance when being likable is my primary tool – and it sometimes backfires? As we teach it, all personalities experience themselves as both an asset AND a liability depending on the state of the transaction. For example, if we’re brainstorming new possibilities, it doesn’t work for skeptics to chime in with critical standards. However, skepticism is required if we’re making assessments about the value and relevance of something.

In today’s’ interview, our guest, Janet Vreeland, found herself puzzled when her attempts to be likable were met with disdain. We discuss how each personality may not know that their most powerful asset – can also be their most costly mistake.

Below you’ll find a transcript of this podcast episode that has been edited for your reading pleasure. You’ll also see links at the bottom of this post where you can find more information on the people and ideas mentioned in the episode.

by John Patterson
Produced by: John Patterson & Tyson Crandall

“It’s taken me studying with Influence Ecology to fully respect the different personality types and how my skill of being able to create a mood is one to be honed and refined, and it really is a gift.“

John Patterson: Well, first of all, what I’d like to do is I’d like to introduce our guest today. This is Janet Asher Vreeland. And Janet, I want to give you an opportunity to say hello and introduce yourself.

Janet Asher Vreeland: Thank you, John. Hello everyone. This is Janet Asher Vreeland recording live from Long Beach, California. Delighted to be here to put together a podcast that I hope will bring value to the ecology.

John Patterson: Great. And say a little bit about what you do. Tell us about your work and a little bit of a bio, if you don’t mind.

Janet Asher Vreeland: Absolutely. My work is with a firm by the name of Mercer. We’re an international global consulting firm, and my role is to bring in new clients in the US primarily, specifically here in Southern California. And my target client contacts are either human resources or financial executives or other business leaders or organizations that have approximately 200 employees or more. And I’ve been in this industry quite a long time, a number of decades. I started off working for group insurance companies like Prudential and Cigna, and along the way enjoy the opportunity to build relationships, to communicate, to help others help their employees. I’m originally from Kansas and I’ve come to Southern California by way of Texas and Arizona. And my husband, Bob, is a CFO for a publicly traded company, which is just coincidental because he’s also not just my perfect mate in life, but he’s also my perfect target customer.

John Patterson: That’s really great. So that works well. I’m assuming you pick his brain a little bit about how to position this or say that?

Janet Asher Vreeland: Yes, we do, John. We love talking about business, and I absolutely enjoy pillow talk with Bob about business and how people approach him and the marketplace. Just this morning we were having a great conversation about the misuse of reciprocity with somebody approaching him by sending him a Starbucks gift card that he didn’t ask for. And now the follow-up email, now that you’ve received the Starbucks gift card, when can we meet? And I said, Oh boy, that’s just such a shame that it happens so frequently in the market. So yes, he gives me all kinds of great insights.

John Patterson: That’s great. All right. You have been, Janet, studying with Influence Ecology for how long now?

Janet Asher Vreeland: I started in October of 2015 with Fundamentals of Transaction, class 41.

John Patterson: Class 41. Okay. And I got your notes about sort of your journey through your participation here, and I’m eager to talk to you for a couple of reasons. Janet, one of the things that I loved about your notes, you send this great things, and I think it’s the best part in your early days, your kind of journey with Influence Ecology. It sounds like one of the things that you recognized and you wrote it that, I was puzzled when my attempts to be likable were at times met with disdain.

Janet Asher Vreeland: Yes.

John Patterson: And I almost think we could talk about that for, oh, I don’t know, two or three days for a variety of reasons. And one of the reasons I want to bring this up is because as we teach it, as you know, we talk a lot about personality and transactional behavior. So for those that are listening for the very, very first time, do you want to talk a little bit about the four personalities and then talk about your own?

Janet Asher Vreeland: Oh, absolutely. Think of a transaction cycle. So at the very top you have inventor. And you got one step to the right, you have performer, which is where I reside. Come down to the bottom and you have producer. Keep coming to the left clockwise, then you have your judge, and then you come full circle to inventor. The inventor is someone who sees far out into the future. They have unlimited possibilities. They tend to be arrogant. When you first meet them, you might think, boy, this person certainly thinks well of themselves, and that is inherent to the inventor. They are quite cerebral, they’re confident in their intellect, and if you don’t know that about an inventor, you can misinterpret how helpful and how generous they are. In fact, they have an almost unlimited generosity with their ideas.

And then if you go to the right to the performer where I reside, I look at time as real time, right in the moment. I can be late, I can be a little bit early, I can be on time. I don’t dwell too much in the past and I don’t bother myself too much with what might happen in the future. What really motivates me are building relationships, and it’s paramount to me in that process that I perceive that I’m being liked and well-received in my efforts to be helpful. And I was recently told by an inventor friend of mine that the reason he doesn’t trust performers is because he doesn’t see them as being genuine. That they try too hard to be likable, and that he sees that as not being authentic. So that was quite an insight to me on how that could be misunderstood.

John Patterson: That’s great. I think we’re going to come back to that in just a moment too, so please continue. You’re doing great.

Janet Asher Vreeland: Good. Thank you. The other thing I will say about a performer is I have an orientation where I see others relative to others. I am highly inclined to say, Oh boy, John Patterson, I think he would love meeting this friend of mine who lives in Ventura County. I’m going to put the two of you together. I’m oriented toward putting people together outside of how that might support my aims necessarily.

And if you come down to the producer, producers are vitally important to the two personality types I’ve mentioned because they are really focused on accomplishment and execution on getting things done. Producers might seem to be a little bit, not thoughtless necessarily, but they’re such task managers that while it’s critical to a producer to not be left out, I’ve learned you can really hurt a producer’s feelings and not meaning to, if you don’t include them in communications, invitations even in things you wouldn’t think they would be interested in them. Producers don’t want to be left out. And my interpretation of why they don’t want to be left out is that it impedes their ability to be effective. They need all the data and all the input. They’re almost like a border collie, if you know that kind of dog. A border Collie lives to herd sheep, and I think a producer kind of lives to take chaos and list of things to do and to bring them to fruition.

And then you come around to the judge. I’m married to a judge, and I’ve learned in the ecology that it’s not uncommon for judges and performers to do well together. A judge by nature will come across as a pessimistic individual, glass half empty or however you want to describe that personality type. And I learned that with my husband, Bob. I just didn’t understand why he was so cautious and skeptical and worried. And that’s because a judge is oriented toward the past. They draw from that to assess what could possibly take place in the future, and they really can get stuck in analysis paralysis because there’s just so much data to contemplate and consider. Judges make terrific CFOs, so Bob plays the type quite nicely that way. They’re quite loyal. Judges don’t need a lot of relationships. They can have a handful of relationships for life, and they’re critical to the planning process because they will keep you grounded in reality. And then you come back up to the inventor.

John Patterson: That’s fantastic. All right. You did a beautiful job. I think we should all give you a round of applause for that. It’s a beautiful job.

Janet Asher Vreeland: My pleasure.

John Patterson: So now one of the things that I think some of your notes really illustrate in your own journey is that for every one of those personalities you just described, we’re all an asset in some part of a transaction, but sometimes we are a liability in another part of the transaction. And so we tend to, all of us, think about surviving, thriving, doing well in life by playing to our strong suits. So in other words, I bring my strong suits to every situation. And I think that’s where what you point to is so valuable, because it looks like in your own journey that you discovered that this strong suit, this approach, just being likable or being a people pleaser or doing something like that didn’t always fly well with the other personalities. Sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t. And I just want to find out if there’s anything else you want to say about that.

Janet Asher Vreeland: Absolutely. I’m thinking of a specific example where I worked for a firm with a similar responsibility prior to joining Mercer for 10 years, and in the office, we were constantly bringing on new associates, new colleagues in the role of producer or sales similar to my role. And I remember we brought on this big, heavy rainmaker. He was just going to do great things for us. And in my efforts to build a relationship with him, regardless of the fact that we could be competing for the same client, competing for the same resources, I upon reflection was a little bit clownish in the office. I would see him down the hall in the office and I would take my hands and I would not quite do a jumping jack, I’m just appalled to say this, but I would give a little kick and a clap. I could make certain people laugh, like the receptionist thought that was really funny, but my colleague who is highly ambitious toward making as much money as he could, didn’t see that as being tremendously valuable to him. And I remember a distinct moment when I was giving him my best performer routine and I thought, boy, he just looks horrified.

John Patterson: Was that a bit like … One of the things that you say about performers is that they campaign for moods, right? So to say more about what I mean by that for all of our listeners, many of the performers that I know that are really good at campaigning for moods, they’re often attempting to cultivate a good mood in the room, at dinner. Isn’t this spaghetti delicious? Oh my gosh, isn’t this a wonderful day? Can you believe how amazing that was? Those are kind of campaigning for mood, and some people campaign in a lot of ways. They cheer lead, they ra, ra. Sometimes they do that with their voice, their expression or their body, for example. And it sounds like … Would you say you were doing a little bit of campaigning for mood?

Janet Asher Vreeland: I was. I was. That’s very well put.

John Patterson: And it didn’t land, right? It didn’t do the trick.

Janet Asher Vreeland: It didn’t land at all.

John Patterson: Right. Okay. So it sounds like this was puzzling to you. What did you think about that?

Janet Asher Vreeland: I defaulted in true performer fashion to thinking this guy was a jerk. I thought that, Oh gosh, what a buffoon. The kind of the term we use in performer land. Either the other person’s great or if they’re not great, they’re buffoon. And as opposed to looking inward and evaluating how that might come across that particular physical almost cheerleader type move, how that might come across, I invested in the emotional response that it was a shortcoming of his and I didn’t contemplate changing or behaving differently necessarily, although I probably did tone it down. It’s taken me studying with Influence Ecology to fully respect the different personality types and how my skill of being able to create a mood is one to be honed and refined and it really is a gift. I wasn’t aware of that at that point though.

John Patterson: I think this is an important point. So you began to see that other personalities may not receive your campaigns for mood in the same way. Did you then through our study start to learn more about how to tailor your approach to the different personalities? And if so, how?

Janet Asher Vreeland: Oh, absolutely. I became quite focused and studied on body language as well as linguistic narratives starting with a very simple body language, and that’s smiling. Sometimes you can smile too much, sometimes you don’t smile enough. And I started practicing with my chief financial officer prospects and relationships that I was building here in Southern California and I made a concerted effort to be cordial and pleasant but tone down the smiling, and be a little bit more judicious with the boys and the food grade and everything’s lovely but rather to be more calm, I would say. And it’s helped me tremendously to understand that when I’m in a conversation with a judge and on occasion with a producer as well, that their negativity or their lack of being in a good mood or wanting to laugh is actually quite appropriate for the conversation that we’re having, because we’re talking about a lot of risk to the company. We’re talking about perhaps an HR executive having to deliver bad news to the CEO who in turn will have to deliver bad news to the board of directors.

And it’s really empowered me, John, to be more empathetic, which comes whole circle to being congruent with a performer. I see other performers at their best and I really appreciate that quality and empathy, and that comes full circle to what you asked me about and that’s the personality types and understanding how I can be most effective in creating a mood that’s going to be conducive to a successful transaction.

John Patterson: I think what you’re saying then is that what you’ve learned about different personalities and shaping your own response to those personalities allowed you to do what you want to do anyway, which is ultimately to empathize with their situation and in some way empower whatever needs to be empowered in that transaction to move that transaction forward.

Janet Asher Vreeland: Yes. Yeah. That’s right. That’s funny. I was noticing that myself. Ultimately, I still get to do what I want, which is to play to my strengths, which I think it suits everyone to play to their strengths. It’s taken awhile though. As I mentioned, I’ve now been studying for four years with Influence Ecology and I can see how continued study will yield even greater results, but it’s been a great awareness for me.

John Patterson: Sometimes when I’m training a room full of people about personality and I’m trying to make it normal that a performer is a much more present moment kind of person, right? And a producer is really just trying to get the tasks done. And a judge is really concerned with the past and the standards and the evidence and so forth. The inventor is just really committed to the future, the longterm future, that we often don’t get the opportunity in life to consider that the degree to which we compare ourselves to other people. So for example, sometimes with judges, judges will spend a lifetime being told to, Hey, cheer up. Stop seeing the glass so half empty. Hey, you know what, pull the stick out of your butt. Just chill, relax, lighten up. Right?

Performers may hear quiet the opposite. Hey listen, this is serious business. Come on, don’t you take this seriously? My performers, I’ll sometimes talk about the degree to which they spend a lifetime trying to get more disciplined, all of that kind of stuff, like trying to get, I need to be more disciplined. I find a lot of performers trying to work on that, because they can see it around them, people doing things like they’re using their calendars and schedules and showing up on time. And for the performer for example, that’s not necessarily what happens. In the present moment, what’s going on for performers, whatever’s going on in the moment, in that moment, it’s what matters, not the future, not the past, whatever’s going on right now.

So I’m bringing all of this up to say that for every one of the personalities, and I think you’re doing a beautiful job here, there was a kind of accounting for how do I temper, tailor, shift my own approach so that it works for the other personality, so that it speaks to them in their language. And I wanted to find if there’s anything else you want to say about all of that. And I have another question for you.

Janet Asher Vreeland: Well, the one thing I would say to all that is that it helps to be biologically prepared to deal with other people. And my mantra for years has been the secret to success at business is to be hydrated and well rested. If you don’t fundamentally start out with enough sleep, and if you don’t drink enough water, just as key examples, other people will just exhaust you if you don’t exhaust yourself. So I would just offer that as a little bit of advice that physical fitness is a key component to being able to study and manage and develop a skillset for customizing your approach to take into consideration other personalities.

John Patterson: Now, tell me a little bit about what you discovered here at Influence Ecology about indifference.

Janet Asher Vreeland: Oh boy, that’s a tough one. Indifference hurts deeply to a performer because you feel you’ve lost your magic. You don’t have that ability to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and be helpful or thoughtful kind of that level of helplessness that’s typically seen as positive and likable. Indifference, I first noticed it as I was becoming, I think, more ambitious and moving away from being an adult in terms of my thinking and behavior and becoming more in tune with my aims and what I wanted. And as I was getting a sense of a narrative in my mind about my aims around the condition of life, and I would approach others within the ecology or outside of the ecology, that’s when I became sensitized to how indifferent other people are to your aims.

John Patterson: And so for people that are listening that may not know exactly what we’re talking about, to make it really clear, one of the things we teach here is we want to make it very clear for people that every day, 7.5 billion people get up to transact to satisfy their own aims, and they may in fact be indifferent to yours. And that if everybody else is indifferent to your aims, then it’s your job to, of course, to transact powerfully because no one’s going to make sure your aims get met. That’s your job, right? So sometimes it’s really profoundly upsetting to consider the reality that people are indifferent to your aims. In the fundamentals of transaction program, it sounds like something about this really opened your eyes to that all pervasive indifference. What can you tell us about what you experienced, what you went through and how you dealt with it?

Janet Asher Vreeland: Well, I’ll correlate it back to Mercer, which is what inspired me to join Influence Ecology. And that as I was new to Mercer, although not new in my career, I wanted to take full advantage of being at such a prestigious firm and such a robust market. And I had a sense that Southern California and Mercer would be a competitive environment. And yet I wasn’t fully prepared for … The day I was hired, as an example, I was hired with another person in the exact same role and I was perplexed by her behavior toward me. First it was, Oh, let’s be best friends. Let’s take coffee breaks. Oh, let’s go home early. Let’s not fully comply with what was being asked of us as new hires, which made me very anxious. And yet she seemed to want to be great friends. And it didn’t take very long for me to realize that she was behaving quite differently with other people.

And I feel that her goal was to undermine me, to kind of disarm me, sort of take me out of play so that she could build up more powerful relationships in the office. And when I recognized that, I distanced myself versus accepting every invitation to coffee breaks and every invitation to happy hour and that sort of thing. And I was shortly promoted above her to move into a management role in the region. And when I shared that with her, I could just absolutely see that look in her face of hurt and upset. And within maybe five, six months, this particular individual had filed a claim against the company, not about me, but with regard to another manager and subsequently left shortly. So it wasn’t very long before I was confronted with somebody who was ostensibly going to be a peer and a colleague who’s also a contemporary, same age by the way, but was not any of those things at all.

John Patterson: And so all of that kind of indifference must have been quite surprising. It sounds like the world that you know and the world you trafficked in, that was not necessarily something you expected to come across, but you did. Did you then discover a kind of vulnerability that you sometimes have as a performer personality? Can you say something about that?

Janet Asher Vreeland: I did. I did. I recognize that my go-to over the course of my career had been to simply work harder, literally put in more hours, generate more output. And I’d come to a place in my profession, in my career, that it wasn’t as effective for me to work long, long hours or work every weekend. Simply I didn’t want to. I wanted to spend time with Bob. We were relatively newly wed. I say the honeymoon never ends for us. We’ve been married nine years now. But moving here six years ago, we had just married. So I was confronted with a choice. I didn’t want to work harder. I didn’t want to work weekends. I was already on a number of volunteer boards at the leadership level, putting in a lot of hard work and labor.

I recognized that I needed to do the harder work of having powerful conversations with those personalities in the office leadership. And I still worry every day I had the chance to practice and to learn and grow, but instead of putting in more hours rather to think more strategically or thoughtfully about how I approach the leadership, my consulting colleagues, my prospects, to derive a better result. I don’t know if that makes sense or not.

John Patterson: It does. It does. It’s a kind of working smarter, not harder. Being more strategic. Well, I would also call it that as we describe an ambitious adult, so an ambitious adult moves strategically and tactically to satisfy their aims, which requires a kind of thinking that is a bit uncommon, right? And I think that leads me to my last question. How are you now? How’s life now? I understand before Influence Ecology, there was a kind of life where your personality didn’t win every game, right? And you learned to tailor that and everything. How is life now? How is life now? How’s work? How’s career? How’s money? How are things now?

Janet Asher Vreeland: Things are fantastic, I would say, now. I guess what I mean by that is I can think more accurately across my conditions of life and recognize life for all of its positives and challenges. It’s been a very extreme year for me. I lost my father earlier this year, and-

John Patterson: I’m so sorry.

Janet Asher Vreeland: … I know. I know. Everyone’s been very supportive, John. Just such a dear close person to me and at the same time I learned so much from him and his focus on legacy that it’s helped me put into perspective how I think about my own legacy. What’s life like for me when I’m past my profession that I’ve cultivated so carefully for so long. So I would say life now is informed for me by far more accurate thinking. I’m extremely appreciative of being with a judge with that personality type. We do financial planning together and it’s a pleasure. So we have a clear sense of our resources and our planning for the future.

I have a greater ability to appreciate my resources available from Mercer and here in Southern California. I’d have to pick and choose my ecologies. I was on too many boards, I was volunteering to do too many things, and I took the opportunity this year to resign in good standing from two volunteer leadership boards, and this evening one of those boards is hosting a happy hour in my honor to thank me for my service to them. So that validates that that was a good decision, and it freed up all kinds of time on my calendar. I feel really quite fortunate and want to thank Patricia Tyler who introduced me to the ecology, and you for taking the time to have this webinar with me so that I can share how grateful I am for the learnings and that Bob too appreciates the quality of thought that I bring to our conversations now. And I feel better prepared to deal with the inevitable breakdowns that will occur in life.

John Patterson: Well, Janet Asher Vreeland, thank you so much for sharing your story with us, and we’re grateful for having you participate here as well. It’s been my pleasure and I’ve enjoyed our time together today. Thank you so very much.

Janet Asher Vreeland: The pleasure was all mine, John. I look forward to seeing you very soon.

John Patterson: In today’s talk, you’ll hear a segment of a webinar where cofounder, Kirkland Tibbels and I speak on the subject of the asset and liability of each personality. Here’s the talk.

Kirkland Tibbels: When you consider, for example, the inventor’s asset and liability of ego, it would make perfectly good sense if you know that inventors step out into the future or point in a direction and say, we’re going that way. It’ll make perfectly good sense to understand that that personality has to have a pretty big ego to declare something that doesn’t exist and produce a kind of vision for people to be willing to follow that individual into something that doesn’t exist yet. That takes some brass, right, to step out there and say, that thing is possible. I declare and assert that if everyone goes in that direction, does what they are supposed to do, we can achieve this vision, a possible way to live our life that would have us be better today than we are right now.

To expose themselves in a way that opens themselves up for all kinds of criticism, all kinds of assessments, I mean you name it, when those visionaries that we all know so well point out there and say, we’re going to the moon, we’re going to invent a technology that has never been invented, and in fact, nobody knows this, but they want it, they just don’t know they want it yet because it hasn’t been invented, we’re going to go do that thing, that’s a visionary. That’s the ego. That’s the asset of that personality. And it’s a damn good thing we’ve got people like that, and we live better lives because of it. But at the same time, that ego will run the show to the point that it will overshadow and cause problems for the rest of us who are attempting to do the work and take the action to make that vision something into a mission that other people can follow, work that we can actually get done and declare and pass certain judgment on that being acceptable and satisfactory.

So while that’s a huge asset and it’s necessary, inventors must recognize, and those of us who work with inventors on a regular basis must recognize that it is also a liability we’ve got to confront. What of the personality that is relationship oriented? We’ve got to have people who are mission-driven and who can have a dialogue in the moment with other individuals where people can see themselves on a mission and in the ideal situation, following a vision set by someone like an inventor. A performer’s job is to construct narratives that have people see themselves playing roles and fulfilling the functions required to commit to and do the work and action that produce the satisfaction of many people.

While inventors are global in their perspective, performers are local in their perspective. They are mission-driven and their asset is relationship. They know about producing moods and using influence that anything is possible with enough people will go along with it, and we need people like that. We have to have people who know how to do that, and they live and die by their relationships. And as an asset, it’s pretty easy to see we need people and we need lots of people to be willing to consider our invitations and our offers and be willing to commit, and that’s their job, but that’s also their greatest liability, because they don’t want to give up those relationships. They don’t want to produce consequential environments that threaten those relationships, so they hang on to them for dear life, and for many performers like me, way too long, too often.

And who’s going to do the work, by the way? All that, everything and anything from the vision and the mission, from the great ideas and we’re going to go to the moon to here’s all the people that we need to go, and they’re lined up and ready to go. Who takes care of the day-to-day activity, the work in action? Who produces the deadlines as currency? Who through alliance and force gets the job done, holds people accountable, and in many times is the rigor that’s necessary on the factory floor to get the production taken care of? Well, that’s your producer. Their greatest asset of course is that they want to be included, they need to be included, and that inclusion has them the vision and mission accepting. They want to surround themselves with people who are big thinkers and they want to satisfy the work required of those transactions.

John Patterson: And you want them to be included.

Kirkland Tibbles: And you want them to be included. You need them on that wall. They must be included. And if they’re not included.

John Patterson: Watch out.

Kirkland Tibbles: … you’re in serious trouble. They get belligerent about it even. They’re people oriented in a way that is different than the performer. They build alliances. And this is important to understand that they build alliances to get things done. They are the rigor of production. But at the same time, that inclusion biology can be problematic because they’ll think they want to be involved in places where they don’t belong. It’s our job when we transact with producers to make sure that they understand what they’re being left out of and why. They’ll accept that. What they don’t like is to find out after the fact that they weren’t included in something where they have to be left with the responsibility of getting the job done. That’s a terrible mistake on your part if you do that.

If you go have a meeting and you’ve gotten into the tactical apparatus of a transaction and you walk out and you tell your producers what you’ve just decided without them being in the room, tell the truth, John. It’s brutal.

John Patterson: Never. Never. It is brutal. It’s very brutal. The liability is also when they burden a transaction for the need to be included where it ought not happen. Not a part of that as well.

Kirkland Tibbles: A lot of people misunderstand the mood of determination and rigor as being negative. While I would accept that it’s certainly not a bed of roses being hammered with deadlines and requests, which is the way that producers move, can be unpleasant sometimes, it’s necessary. But being included is the Achilles’ heel of every producer. One of the biggest mistakes we will make in dealing with a producer is this whole inclusion biology. They need to be included in anything that’s going to include them or they’re required to do the work and take the action and fulfill on the transaction. So keep that in mind when dealing with a producer. John, anything else about producer you want to put in there?

John Patterson: Nope. That’s good.

Kirkland Tibbels: When we get around to the judge, that most skeptical and critical and often confrontational personality, we bump up against standards. The asset of standards is that if we follow along the rules, the laws, the regulations, the expectations, the standards, the ethics, the codes of conduct that we all agree we would when we engage in this transaction in the first place, we end up better off for it. The general public, those with whom we engage on a regular basis, our business partners, our superiors, our subordinates, our employees, our vendors, everyone sees a consistent representation of who we are as an enterprise operating by a standard. Those standards include quality, they include consistency, commitment. They include a number of things. Those standards, we pay bills at a certain time, we make our payroll at a certain time, ethics and standards. And that is the asset of having a highly critical confrontational skeptic who is always concerned about whether or not the enterprise and the individuals in it are holding to that standard.

That to me is probably the easiest one to see. Maybe ego, but this one tends to be a pretty easy one to see how it can also get in the way when it’s time for innovation, when it’s time for some creativity, when the standards become bureaucratic, when they become too narrow and they begin to choke the possibilities that exist in re-invention, then it becomes a problem. And judges will hold on until their last breath to every single standard that gets put in place, unless you are working with them continually, ongoingly to recognize which standards are appropriate, which ones work, which ones are becoming outdated along the way.

The mistake to make with a judge is not to have that dialogue on a regular basis, ideally allowing the judge to bring up the standards that ought to be put in place when they ought to be changed, rather than taking the same route of you making that determination Mr. CEO, Mr. President, and then you letting them know that. That’s a terrible mistake just like the inclusion biology of a producer. That’s how judges respond to being told what to do when it comes to standards. When make a rule and you give it to the judge, they’re going to hold tight to that rule. If you’re going to make an amendment, include the judge in that work.

John Patterson: Great. Any conclusive statements about the asset and liability of any personality?

Kirkland Tibbels: If you look at the work we do in our most advanced programs, we begin to see how these personalities work in quadrants. And you can see the benefit of standards and vision coming together when you start to do your planning. You can see the ego needed to think about the future right next to the person who’s there to hold the standards of the enterprise at the same time. When those two personalities work together, you’ve got the proper unit to do the planning on behalf of the enterprise. You can see vision and you can see ego right next to skeptic and standards, and that pairing is very important in terms of planning. You can see the same thing working with the ego of the inventor and the relationships needed to build the mission with the performer.

As you’re looking to invent the strategic intent and commitment of how you’re going to deploy resources, you can see how those two are the perfect two to be in the room to talk and to design the strategic intent of the enterprise or the transaction. And ideally when you get into tactics, the relationships, tactics are mostly how you’re going to have other people take action, right? When you’re talking about people, the two people, personalities in the transaction, the performer and the producer, the ones who go out and build the alliances along with the person who is going to be engaged in making offers, relationship and building alliances and being included in all of what has to be done, tactics. Maybe that’s a good trigger line, John, is anytime you’re working on tactics, that producer better be in the room.

When you’re working on anything that has another human being engaged in work and action, you put the producer in the room, and ideally it’s the performer and the producer working on the specific tactics, the commitments that must be made by other people and themselves to get the work done. You can see how they come together in that quadrant and there’s nobody better to capture the metrics required that get done in work, that get produced on the factory floor, and the person who will be declaring and passing judgment on and drawing certain conclusions about the work in action, in metrics than your judge and your producer together. You can even go so far, and we do in our advanced programs to look at the entire hemisphere of the transaction cycle in the same way.

John Patterson: My special thanks to our guest Janet Asher Vreeland. In our show notes, you’ll find links to connect with her and all the links to websites, books, or downloads mentioned in this podcast.

The Influence Ecology Podcast is produced by Influence Ecology, LLC in Ventura, California. This episode was recorded July 27th, 2019 and was produced by Tyson Crandall and John Patterson. You can find a transcript for this and other episodes at InfluenceEcology.com. This episode is made possible through the assistance of the Influence Ecology Faculty, Staff, Mentors, and Students around the world. Co-founder Kirkland Tibbels and our colleagues comprise an international collective of professionals who are active in the development of the philosophy of Transactionalism and the discipline of Transactional Competence. Kirkland is considered a leading philosopher and authority in the field and he has authored more than 500 papers on the subject, study, and discipline.

This episode includes contributions by Karal Gregory. The podcast theme is by Chris Standring and titled ‘Fast Train to Everywhere.’ You can subscribe to the Influence Ecology Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or via email at podcast@influenceecology.com.

If you haven’t yet offered a rating or review, I ask that you take a moment go to iTunes or your podcast app and let us know what you think. This helps us more than you know.

Twin Studies have been used for decades to settle the age-old Nature vs. Nurture debate about human behavior: are we hardwired to act according to our biological blueprint, or does our environment influence our behavior or gene expression? Twin Study research has helped find answers to questions on space travel, obesity, IQ, and much more. Empirical evidence has settled the debate for good. The answer? We are both Nature AND Nurture.

But what about a Digital Twin…and what can it teach us? A digital twin is a real-time digital replica of a living or non-living physical entity. This replication is used to find the root cause of issues -or- experiment with changes before they are implemented in real-time. Neil Calvert and his company LINQ model your business with a digital twin – helping organizations experiment with future opportunities before investing in change and transformation. Think of it as Twin Studies for organizations – offering decisions based in evidence.

Below you’ll find a transcript of this podcast episode that has been edited for your reading pleasure. You’ll also see links at the bottom of this post where you can find more information on the people and ideas mentioned in the episode.

by John Patterson
Produced by: John Patterson & Tyson Crandall

“Have I got the right people, the right time, the right money, the right systems, the right data to be able to achieve this thing I want to achieve in the future?“

John Patterson: Neil, welcome to the Influence Ecology podcast. If you would, please take a second and introduce yourself. Tell us a little about you.

Neil Calvert: Yeah. Thanks, John. It’s great to be here, a brilliant opportunity. My name is Neil Calvert. I’m the co-founder and chief executive officer of Linq. We are a technology startup. Though I say startup, we’ve been going for five years now in disguise, but it still feels like a startup. I’m based in Wellington, in New Zealand, so I have an amazing opportunity to live somewhere fantastic and lead a lifestyle that works with a platform that is based around being on the cloud, being an incident-based platform. I can pretty much work from anywhere. That’s what I do.

John Patterson: Fantastic. By the way, Wellington is one of my favorite cities. It’s a beautiful place. To me it’s kind of European in its feel. It’s not too big, it’s just right. It’s in a Goldilocks Zone. It’s just the right size of a city to really enjoy. It’s in a beautiful environment. Anyway, I love where you live. It’s a fantastic place.

Neil Calvert: Well, you’re welcome here at any time. You know that.

John Patterson: That’s great. There’s a few things I’d like to do here. First of all, I’d like to learn a little more about Linq. If you can tell us a bit more about what that is, and what that company does.

Neil Calvert: Sure. I describe Linq as being a time machine for your business. We let organizations peer into their future and understand whether that future is going to be successful or not. We do that by helping the organization model their digital twin, so a digital representation of how they operate. That digital twin lets them account for the people that they have, a really highly valuable resource, the work that gets done, the systems they use. Our point of difference is, we also account for the data and information that makes all of that possible. We bring together this model of what people are doing and which tools they’re using … and the information they need to do that work, and how they do that work. We effectively account for all of that, in terms of how the business then generates the value that it needs to create to be successful. Whether that’s, you’re producing something that you’re selling. Or even down to things like, you might have the budget inside the organization which you are using to plan your fiscal year, but also know when you might recruit or you need to tighten up on operational costs. We account for how all of that work leads to those outcomes.

Neil Calvert: Then we let the business really gain insight, what does that mean to them, the way they work, and what they’re doing? You can effectively do future planning because you can say, if I got this area of the business which is really high value to me being successful, but I find things that are not quite so efficient or effective as they could be, what happens if I change that? So you do that in the model before you make the investment to do it on the ground, which of course, that costs real money at that point. You might be reorganizing teams. You might be thinking about recruiting new people. You might be buying new technology, which costs real money. So we let the business do that in the model before they go anywhere near doing it for real. That process lets them basically, as I said, peer into the future and define the measures and the metrics meaning they will be successful. Then they can get on and implement that change and that transformation with a much higher degree of confidence than they have had before.

John Patterson: That’s fantastic. I was going to ask you about digital twin because I’m not familiar with the term. Is that a term that’s used in some technology I don’t know about, or is that something that is your own IP?

Neil Calvert: No. It’s been around for a very long time. NASA were actually the first organization to think in terms of having a twin. You might have seen Apollo 13, the movie. They’re up in space heading to the moon, and their carbon dioxide filter stops working as a result of the fire. So in order to fix that, there were six teams on the ground who were in simulations of the module that they were in, with exactly the same environment and equipment. They worked really hard to come up with a solution that was then implemented in space. That’s the kind of analog version of a digital twin. Now if you think about doing that, using the technology that we have available to us today … the digital twin primarily is used in the engineering space. So there will be a model of a wind turbine, or the model of a generator, or an aircraft engine. That model exists to an engineering specification. What happens is, there are sensors on the real thing and that sends data to the digital twin, which responds as the real twin is responding to the environment. So you now have an effective mechanism to be able to monitor, to control, to maintain the real twin from the digital environment.

Neil Calvert: So it’s moving out of that engineering space and the term that’s been used is, the digital twin of an organization. We have to think slightly differently now. The organization as an ecosystem, as an entity, is made up of people, of systems, of work processes and of information. That’s where the digital twin just starts to extend the capability that we’ve had around the engineering digital twin for a good number of years. I’m taking advantage of the fact that the environment is changing. We’re recognizing, this is a term. I like it because it’s an interesting term. I get that response you just had from people when I talk to them, and that allows me to really help them step into the future. Because that’s what this feels like, and people like that.

John Patterson: Yeah. I pretty much would like to stop the podcast and just ask you about this for the next hour. I won’t. I won’t do that, but I do have some additional questions about it, just for our listeners as well. And especially those of Influence Ecology, because here at Influence Ecology our very name has a lot to do with the environments we find ourselves in, and how those environments influence us. My questions are first about your own business. You launched this approach as it pertains to businesses. You mentioned that it had been relevant in the engineering. Is this something that you guys began to bring to enterprises itself, generally speaking, as an ecosystem? Or was that also already being done some other way?

Neil Calvert: No. The digital twin of an organization isn’t something that’s been implemented inside the enterprise, other than for a couple of very select exceptionally large and wealthy organizations that have the capacity and the capability to do it in a way which is really unattainable for the majority. So we responded to that change in the environment at Linq in terms of our messaging. We started out talking about information flow modeling. How does data flow through the business, which is a bit yawnie. People are kind of, I don’t really understand that. This was us really adapting to a change in the ecology, which was led by some research that we did. So we’ve really jumped on the back of work that they’re doing, and just connecting ourselves to that messaging, which is becoming more and more adopted and accepted inside the enterprise. But as far as we are aware today, nobody else is creating an opportunity for a regular business to take advantage of something which is really exciting. So the digital twin of the organization is something which will fundamentally change the way that organizations operate in the future, and the way they make decisions about their future in response to what’s going on in the external environments in terms of digital technology and how that impacts all of our lives.

Neil Calvert: For me it was an opportunity to really make sure that Linq was being connected at the forefront of where the business is going, and align ourselves to a term, which just generates interest. It’s not just that, we have a capability which absolutely aligns to what a digital twin is supposed to do for an organization. It was the coming together of several things which allowed us to take advantage of that as a business.

John Patterson: I’m now wondering what other questions you commonly get, but I’m going to ask one and see if this is one of them. So in this digital twin, do you account for in this ecosystem factors outside of the system itself? Say, the market place or certain trends. I mean, there is countless variables, of course, in an ecosystem. You couldn’t count for all of them. But are there ways in which you do account for some of those kinds of variables?

Neil Calvert: Yes. But we do it by allowing the organization to stipulate the business’ outcomes that they need to create. So within Influence Ecology, within any organization, we have a set of strategic level aims that we are aspiring to, which is really driving the ethic and the culture inside the organization. We’re motivating our people to achieve things because we believe they’re the right thing to do for our business. Those get accounted for in terms of the business outcomes that we need to achieve as an organization. We’ll have a set of those, which we know about based on the horizon through which we look at time. We’ve got some near-horizon objectives that we’re trying to achieve, some medium ones and some far-horizon objectives. As you push out to the far horizon those things become significantly more aspirational, because you’re not really sure how you get there. Linq expresses those planned-for outcomes in terms of what the business is trying to achieve, and then lets the business understand whether they’ve got the capability inside the business to deliver those. At that point, in all terminology I guess, that looks like a gap analysis. Have I got the right people, the right time, the right money and systems, the right data to be able to achieve this thing I want to achieve in the future?

Neil Calvert: So, yes, you’re right, the environment external to the organization is huge and complex, and ever-changing. We would say, it is in constant process. You can’t account for all of those, so you have to rely on the people inside the business that have their finger on the pulse to help define objectives that need to be met, so then you can start to account for them.

John Patterson: All right. Very good. Well, thank you for taking the time to let me know about that. It’s fascinating. Maybe we’re in together at the conference, I can ask you some more questions about it. I’d love to turn our attention to the reason that we’re here really. People, Neil, have a commitment to find out about other people’s journeys because other people’s journeys teach us something. If I can learn from you, or if a listener can learn from you, then it serves all of us. Now you’ve had a journey here at Influence Ecology, where obviously you found out about us and started studying here. First of all, how long ago did you start studying with us?

Neil Calvert: I’m into my third year now.

John Patterson: You do a third year, okay. When you first started studying with us, how was life then? What was happening, what were you dealing with, struggling with? You obviously came this direction for a reason. How come?

Neil Calvert: I was introduced by another Influence Ecology member in Wellington, Jen Rutherford, who I think is in membership now. She had just come back from a new member conference, and we were talking just about, how do you help people understand the new thing that you’re trying to get them to think about? How do you disrupt their thinking? We were throwing some ideas around and she said, “Do you know what, Neil? You would love this study. It’s all about people. It’s all about how you think and how you can understand what they’re thinking, so that you can alter your messaging.” I was like, “Oh, that sounds really interesting.” I’ve always had this ponderance about psychology. At some point in my life I might have wanted to become a psychologist. To understand people I think is fascinating. I love airports for that reason, you know that. People watching is incredible at airports and the behaviors that come out are fascinating. Jen suggested it was something that I looked at. So I spoke to Drew, had a good conversation with him. And then sat back, based on that first hour of conversation with Drew and went, well, how am I dealing with this stuff today?

Neil Calvert: I think my overriding ethic was, if I work hard, good things will happen for me. I realized, that puts the reliance on other people to do things for you. If you sit and you just work hard, you’re expecting somebody else to recognize that you’re working hard and then reward you with something, whether that’s a new role or an increased salary. The combination of what Jen said to me and that initial chat with Drew made me immediately realize, that’s ridiculous. I’m effectively passing control of myself to somebody else who has their own things that they’re dealing with, and I might not be their priority. So it was a reasonably quick realization that my mindset was probably entirely wrong. As you know yourself, one of the first things you have to do is a huge amount of self-reflection in order to accept that is the wrong way to think. That you are naïve to all of those considerations. As I reflected more, I realized that’s where my mind was. I was just a really hard worker. I’d be lucky to some degree with that, but luck’s not a planning tool.

Neil Calvert: So it was time to really start thinking about whether there was a better way to understand what I wanted to achieve and how to get there, and at the same time connect that to the business opportunity that Linq had. It was very much, for me it was a personal journey, but it was my personal journey connected to Linq as an organization because of my position or the fact that we were trying to build something new. All of that was going on in my head at the time.

John Patterson: In the very early days when you began to study with Influence Ecology, did it impact how you thought about Linq?

Neil Calvert: Oh, without a doubt. I challenged Drew from day one that my learnings within Influence Ecology had to be practical enough that I could pretty much implement them immediately. I wasn’t interested in theoretical study, which didn’t really go anywhere, because there was no action to be taken as I learned. That was my challenge to Drew, okay, I’m in, but best I can apply this. And thinking about the fundamentals of transaction, paper one, that whole conversation about, can you articulate and aim in anything in a fundamental condition of life? When you start thinking about money, career, health and work, and going, I can’t. I don’t know for me what that means and I also don’t know what that means for Linq. So immediately having to do the work and say, right, wow, what does success look like in terms of the identity that Linq is trying to push into the market place? How do I get to the ecology without spending a million dollars, to make a million dollars? There were some very fundamental thought processes put into my head from effectively week one, fortnight one of FOT, and to be perfectly honest with you, it’s been that way ever since.

Neil Calvert: It’s been three years of monthly challenges to the way I think. That’s what’s it made so exciting.

John Patterson: It’s really great I think there’s an opportunity for those that are listening, because we do often get the question, is this just all theory? Which we would say, no, it’s quite pragmatic. You just described a bit of that. What would you say to those people who wonder about that?

Neil Calvert: It’s absolutely not just theory. The tools that you’re provided with, like the 13 steps, the transaction cycle, provide a framework where you can implement your thinking immediately. You follow the 13 steps against the challenge that you’re having, or some barrier in your thinking, and you can find a way to break through it. The tools are provided as part of the study to really let you, if you want to, begin to think differently and make it work for yourself and the business.

John Patterson: How did this study help you understand yourself and others?

Neil Calvert: That’s a great question. I don’t know if I’m there yet, the study of yourself, right? The thing I’ve realized and I’m still working on is, what does a successful, happy life mean for me across the fundamental conditions of life? I never thought about my life in that way before. So I’m beginning to understand me. I’m married. I’ve got a son. We have a dog. We’ve got a nice life, but what does it mean to say, I’m successful and satisfied in my relationship? The distinction between work and career, I’ve never really thought about that. Career as an identity. What does it mean to have an identity? What is the identity you want? How do you want people to see you? How does that fit with your ethic and your morale base? I’ve never really thought like that. So to be asked some really simple questions … there’s nothing simpler really than, how do you know that you’re happy in your relationship? It’s a really simple question to ask. It’s a massively complex question to answer. So for me that was a bit of a revelation. Then, of course, there are aspects of that, which cross right into the business. Therefore, what are your aims for your business? If you took the money aim, how do you know that you’re satisfied as an organization with money? How do you even describe that?

Neil Calvert: So the challenge that has been laid down that I’m still dealing with is, yeah, how do I describe to myself what those things mean? If I can’t articulate those, how do I expect to understand whether an opportunity that’s staring at me, is really an opportunity or a threat to myself and my business? I think that’s one of the fundamental pieces of challenge that was laid down by Influence Ecology and remains for me today. It’s not a simple thing to do. But the thinking that you have to do, the accuracy with which you have to approach that work, is astonishing. And it gets deeper and deeper the more you go into it. So, yes, that crossover is very, very real. I’m getting there. I’m focusing on the things that matter today. There are a bunch of them which I know I have neglected to even think about, but I think that’s just part of the timeline and the journey. We have to deal with those more fundamental conditions before you can start to worry about some of the more aspirational ones like legacy and politics. They don’t matter when you’re still worrying about keeping a roof over your head and feeding yourself and your family, as an example.

John Patterson: Any correlations between the work that you’re doing to produce a digital twin for an enterprise and considering all the conditions of life for a human being?

Neil Calvert: Absolutely. There’s a really interesting philosophical conversation that could be had about, what is an organization? It’s an environment, but it’s an organism in its own right. It’s an organism that’s made up of individuals who have aspirations and aims. They’re an entity inside that bigger entity. And the environment is created on a daily basis between the people that are working together, and where that organization sits in its own market place. So you have to make sure that, as you are talking about the digital twin, you’re not oversimplifying it, but at the same time you’re not overcomplicating the conversation because then it can feel too big. I’m always minded to come back to, who am I talking to? How does this help them, at this point in time, achieve something that they are aspiring to? Whether that’s their reputation inside the organization, whether it’s keeping their job because they’re under pressure, whether it’s giving them time back to do some of the other things that are important to them. So if you can break this massive idea around, yeah, we can model the whole of your organization and show you how things are working, right back down to, and your place in it … so you can understand your impact on the whole of this organism that you are part of. But also, how do you manage the environment that you’re operating in on a minute-by-minute basis potentially, because of the way that the people interact?

Neil Calvert: That’s for me where the excitement is around the opportunity, but that’s why it makes it so complex and you have to think carefully about it. These are conversations that you often start with some trepidation, but you have to navigate that in order to make this valuable to the people that you’re talking to, and have them understand it and accept it and want to be a part of it. So that’s a huge crossover, and probably I’m only just scratching the surface of the implication when you start thinking that way.

John Patterson: Yeah. In the work we do with enterprises there is a lesson that moves people from thinking of themselves as some sort of overlord in an enterprise … or that they have some sort of means in which to command things to go their way. At some point they begin to consider themselves as a mere aspect of a larger transaction, of a larger enterprise. And in doing so start to then be concerned, instead of over-lording and commanding, perhaps to influence or to build environments that begin to move things in the ways that would benefit the entire transaction. Are there any correlations with what I’ve just described in the work that you do to produce a digital twin and what it shows to people?

Neil Calvert: Yeah, absolutely. Most organizations think about their people … or they like to believe they think about their people as individuals inside the organization.

John Patterson: People.

Neil Calvert: As people, right. But they tend to come down, at some level they turn into a line item in the budget, an X number of FTEs, which depersonalizes them, but also doesn’t reflect anything about the value that individuals have inside an organization. So the models that we build contextualize the people and put a value on the people. At that point I think you can’t help but begin to understand that your influence is only achieved by having a relationship with all the other people who are delivering value into an organization. You take one of those pieces out, because you’re not thinking the right way … you’re unkind, or your approach doesn’t sit well with them, you can impact the whole of the system. So the models that pivot around what do people do and how do they do it, and the value they enable inside the organization, those really sit well with helping senior leadership understand how they can do that in a new way. A friend of mine is an expert in leadership, and I need to have a conversation with him about the stalls of leadership, and it moves away from the shtick.

Neil Calvert: It’s not even a carrot, it’s a full collaboration between people who understand that without the team around them, they’re not going to achieve the success that’s required.

John Patterson: In your view, what is it most people are dealing with to move away from the command and control model into more of a collaborative organizational model?

Neil Calvert: Oh, there’s a few constant struggles, I think. The first is time. People never have enough time to do anything. I’m more and more convinced that a lack of time to step back, have a look around you, reflect on what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, actually leads people to become trapped into a way of working, that might have been a way that was defined for them before they even arrived in the organization. This is a bit of my bugbear around the word ‘process’ in business. Process modeling. Because as a methodology that organizations use, it becomes very stale quickly because it’s out-of-date. It also turns into procedural documentation as opposed to an evolving way of describing what people do. So time is one of the key reasons most things never get updated. It has a huge influence over the way people work. That’s definitely a constant struggle. I think the other is that we know human beings as animals are reluctant to change. We don’t like it, so we will always follow the path of least resistant. When something new comes along, it might be the best thing since sliced bread, to use that analogy, but it’s hard and it’s significantly harder than the way I’m doing it today. Even if the way I’m doing it today doesn’t necessarily give me all of the results I need, it’s easy. So why would I choose something hard over something that’s easy?

Neil Calvert: There’s a psychological barrier, a cognitive bias, that exists in all of us, that I think you break down through diversity in teams. The more diverse you can have a team with different backgrounds and different experiences, those biases become much easier to overcome. But we’re not built that way. We don’t default to that inside organizations. Those are two things that immediately spring to mind where the impact is severe, because we don’t ever think about doing anything differently. Because we don’t have enough time and we’ll just stick with doing what we’re doing. It’s that safe.

John Patterson: You’re talking about a bit of … what I saw in your notes was your soapbox moment, if you will. A bit about the cognitive bias that we don’t realize we have. Anything else you want to say about that?

Neil Calvert: My soapbox can get pretty big when I start thinking about these things. For me it’s about, we’ve got to think differently. This is not just me inside Linq. I just think as a worldwide society it’s time to think differently. Einstein’s got this amazing quote, which is, “We can’t fix problems using the same thinking that we used when we created them.” But I see that happening all the time, this is the way we’ve always done it. It’s a very hindsight, oversight-orientated perspective to have, rather than an insight and foresight perspective. I’m looking forward, so I’m trying to think of new ways of doing things. I’m innovating, I’m being curious. I’m intrigued by the things I see and I’m motivated to do something about it. I think it’s necessary for people to understand what it means to think differently. Bringing that soapbox back to why I study with Influence Ecology, and why am I in that too, and here in year three, it’s because it forces you to think differently. You have to reflect on yourself and how you deal with other people, in order to have the opportunity to show them that there is an opportunity. Bringing it back to business, I see that all the time, that the way business cases are written today is an abomination.

Neil Calvert: It takes so much time. It’s so complex, people don’t enjoy doing it. The statistic that gets thrown around is, 70% of the change projects fail. It’s become a myth in the industry that 70% of projects fail. The number is pretty close to that, and it’s because we’re just constantly doing things the same way. We haven’t stopped to go, if we approach this from the other way, could we actually get to a decision faster and save ourselves time and money … and actually do something of value and control what that looks like, and care about the people that are impacted? We just don’t seem to. We’ve got ourselves fixed on this methodology that we’ve learned from people before us, and we just carry on the same old way. Yeah, my soapbox is about challenging people to reflect on what they’re doing, and be brave and think differently, and help them articulate that inside the organization to people that will listen and care. I think if we do that across all sorts of aspects of our lives, we would be living in a very different world right now. We need to moving forward, we need things to change.

John Patterson: It’s great. Very good. It sounds as if you’ve learned some things about personality and transactional behavior, especially yourself as an inventor personality. Then as a typical inventor … by no means that you’re typical, but we don’t ask for help too much. You’ve learned a lot about asking for help. I want to give you the opportunity to address anything about that area of your notes.

Neil Calvert: It was a bit of a revelation I had at the last, at your member conference, when we were in Los Angeles. I started asking people for help. I started talking about … not about me. That was the other revelation, I think. Don’t talk about yourself, talk about the gaps that you have and the challenges you’re facing, and really sit down and ask people for help. You can’t expect people to read between the lines, so you have to say it. I could really do with some help with this, can you help? Do you know other people that might be able to help me? The reaction you get from these most simple words is astonishing. I’ve had more help as a result of my conversations at the member conference, than I think I can remember at any point through my career. Because people are interested and they do genuinely want to help, if they can. The majority of people do. I continue to use that. I’m having conversations right now, and I turn around to the guys and I said, “Look, I’m not too proud to say, I really need help.” The reaction you get from people when you do that … you’re putting yourself on the line, there’s the heart on your sleeve, you’re being vulnerable. But I think it’s necessary when you want other people around you and a huge acknowledgement, I can’t do all of this on my own.

Neil Calvert: LINQ is a really small team and I know the impact of being stretched too thinly. So the only way of resolving that without having huge operational expenses, to have people help you. That’s been really good. I think the other point you asked about was understanding more about personalities. I often talk to people … I think Kirkland told a story once about two people walking down the corridor and one comes up with a good idea and articulates it to the other. The other either thinks they’ve been told to run away and do something, or one of them thinks that they just transacted for somebody to go and do some work, but the other one just hears a great idea and goes, oh, that was nice and wanders off. And two weeks later it’s like, where’s that thing? What thing? You didn’t ask. Once you become aware of that, you see it happening all the time. We might speak a different language.

John Patterson: Everywhere.

Neil Calvert: Yeah. But it’s not what comes out of your mouth that’s different. It’s what people hear going in through their ears, and how that processes in their heads that is hugely different. Yes, understanding the personalities and how they hear, that’s been super useful. Being able to quickly go, right, you’re a judge character. Now I know the things I need to say to you to have you help me, or to prevent your biology from overtaking you and causing this conversation to self-destruct. That’s hugely valuable because that happens every day.

John Patterson: How has that understanding impacted your relationship with your team or your spouse, or the actual construct that is LINQ itself?

Neil Calvert: You can find yourself having a lot more control over your own biology. It’s not about having control over other people, because you can’t. You can’t control other people. You can’t tell other people how to think. What you can do is control your own reaction to the things that come out of other people’s mouths, and use that to move the transaction along in a really positive way. So whether that’s just a calming voice, or an alternative viewpoint put in a specific way that works rather than a reaction … don’t react but contribute instead. I’m now able to do that with the people that I talk to. That includes my wife and my son. Max is 12 years old, is a very typical boy. Being able to have a different type of conversation with him when he reacts to things … even if it’s as simple as, hey, Max, can you unload the dishwasher? A typical reaction. Well, you can deal with that because you don’t have to react biologically to him reacting biologically. And you can go and have a proper conversation that diffuses everything, I’m getting to unload the dishwasher. There’s some highly practical outcomes, knowledge and tools that you end up being able to use in everyday situations.

Neil Calvert: As well as then you start talking to a chief financial officer inside an organization that you’re trying to sell to, and you realize they’re a judge. They are trying to diffuse your innovation that you want to talk to them about by thinking about the results that they have had in the past. But they’re talking cheese because this is entirely new. So having the skillset to be able to handle the dichotomy of situations, you find yourself in on a daily basis, has resulted from a better understanding of who people are and how they operate and what they hear.

John Patterson: It’s great. Neil Calvert, it’s a pleasure to speak with you today.

John Patterson: In today’s talk you’ll hear a segment of a webinar where co-founder Kirkland Tibbels and I speak on the subject of accurate thinking. In this talk I refer to a quote we’ve included in our show notes. Here’s the talk.

Kirkland Tibbels: Accurate thinking is a term or a terminological distinction that we borrow from Napoleon Hill. Napoleon Hill has done some great work in his philosophy of success. One of, I think, the most powerful things that Napoleon Hill offers us in his philosophy is this notion of accurate thinking. Because as much as he lives in a world of positive mental attitude and enthusiasm, all along the way Napoleon Hill also offers in his philosophy a sense of deliberate and accurate thinking. Accurate thinking asks you to consider the facts of the situation that you’re currently in. John, that’s where I’ll stop and let you move on.

John Patterson: All right. What is accurate thinking? I put this quote up and I hope you’re laughing, because the Internet is filled with a lot of stuff. It’s filled with a lot of stuff. It’s my biggest fear that people will attribute say, quotes to me and millions of morons on the Internet will believe it. Albert Einstein, right, I don’t know that Albert Einstein was alive during the Internet. Is that right? Anyway, I hope you get the joke, but this is a kind of thing we see a lot of. I remember early on in my work with you, about a decade ago, Kirkland and I said something to which you said, “Yeah. John, I don’t know that I accept that as fact.” I was slightly offended when you said it, as if I wasn’t entitled to my view. But it was a wonderful course correction for what began to be a journey to think accurately. Because I was quite used to saying things and thinking things, and believing things that I heard or saw on the Internet, or that were common notions, or what you and I, Kirkland, call the current.

John Patterson: I think it would be useful to say a little about what we mean by the current, because this slide is such a great demonstration of it. Could you say what the current is?

Kirkland Tibbels: Yeah. I’d be happy to. We coined the phrase the current. A phrase that essentially addresses the kind of environment we can get swept away by, or caught in, like a river current or a stream, if you will. The current is simply the dominant narrative in any particular ecology or situation. If you’re in an environment, say a business environment, you can count on, the social narratives that drive your particular business environment are the things that are most current. The things that aren’t necessarily true, they’re not necessarily factual, but they catch hope. You could state in some ways they’re cultural narratives that sort of sweep us away and carry us in a direction without us necessarily stopping to check the facts. I’m expecting most of you recognize what we’re talking about, that it’s easy to get swept away in a current of narrative. We call that distinction ‘the current.’ The current, sometimes it is accurate. Sometimes there are things going on in the dominant narrative that are accurate and we should pay attention to it, for sure. But my experiences for the most part, it’s mostly not accurate. It’s mostly a dangerous place to spend a whole lot of time.

What is required of us, as we move in our social constructs, is to demand some fact. To have people ground their assertions. To have people recognize and qualify their opinions. We are a social being and we exist in language, and predominantly we do that through the construct of narrative. More and more, especially as the Internet is taking hold and media begins to be more and more distinct, distilled and specialized, we tend to traffic in bubbles or currents that we like, and resist those that we don’t. Every one of us is comfortable in some narrative, say politically, or in some kind of cultural environment. Some of us would rather not look at or even hear the views that are counter to the way we were brought up or some of our beliefs. We would like to invite you to consider that there is opportunity in that diversity. That there is opportunity in finding out the other side of the story, and to examine the facts of situations before we jump off and make critical decisions and start taking action on things.

John Patterson: My special thanks to our guest Neil Calvert. In our show notes you’ll find links to connect with him and the links to websites, books or downloads mentioned in this podcast.

The Influence Ecology Podcast is produced by Influence Ecology, LLC in Ventura, California. This episode was recorded July 15th, 2019 and was produced by Tyson Crandall and John Patterson. You can find a transcript for this and other episodes at InfluenceEcology.com. This episode is made possible through the assistance of the Influence Ecology Faculty, Staff, Mentors, and Students around the world. Co-founder Kirkland Tibbels and our colleagues comprise an international collective of professionals who are active in the development of the philosophy of Transactionalism and the discipline of Transactional Competence. Kirkland is considered a leading philosopher and authority in the field and he has authored more than 500 papers on the subject, study, and discipline.

This episode includes contributions by Karal Gregory. The podcast theme is by Chris Standring and titled ‘Fast Train to Everywhere.’ You can subscribe to the Influence Ecology Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or via email at podcast@influenceecology.com.

If you haven’t yet offered a rating or review, I ask that you take a moment go to iTunes or your podcast app and let us know what you think. This helps us more than you know.

In a 2015 speech, American actress, producer, and entrepreneur Reese Witherspoon launched a campaign to support women and their aspirations with the battle-cry, “Ambition is not a dirty word.” In 2018, Oprah Winfrey interviewed Reese Witherspoon and American actress, comedian, writer, producer, and director Mindy Kaling to talk about that moment.

Growing up in lower-middle-class Texas, Influence Ecology CFO Darryl Anderle was raised to think of ambition as a negative word—it had selfish connotations. It seemed as if the standard for success was to get noticed for being independent, self-reliant, and hard-working; waiting for someone to consider him for advancement . . . which never came.

In our interview today, you’ll hear how his life is now very different; how a little ambition can go a long way to satisfy our aims.

Here’s the interview.

Below you’ll find a transcript of this podcast episode that has been edited for your reading pleasure. You’ll also see links at the bottom of this post where you can find more information on the people and ideas mentioned in the episode.

by John Patterson
Produced by: John Patterson & Tyson Crandall

“Businesses don’t do business with businesses. People do business with people. And until we all learn how to people, we will not be successful at business.“

John Patterson: Today on the podcast I have a special guests with me. It is the CFO of Influence Ecology, our own Darryl Anderle. So Darrell, it’s a pleasure to have you with us today.

Darryl Anderle: Thank you John. It’s really nice to be here with you there in surfers paradise Australia.

John Patterson: I know, the power of technology, so you’re in Ventura, California and I’m in surfers paradise Queensland, Australia. It’s fun. A couple of things, if you would, can you just introduce yourself, say a little bit about, so people know something about you.

Darryl Anderle: Absolutely. I am the chief financial officer of Influence Ecology. The third person to join the company, or as I like to say, the first person not called a co-founder.

John Patterson: That’s right.

Darryl Anderle: And so I’ve been with the company since early 2010 and it has been a treat.

John Patterson: It has been now you and Kirkland and I happened to share several things, but one is that we’re all originally from Texas.

Darryl Anderle: Yes.

John Patterson: And you’re originally from Texas and you grew up where?

Darryl Anderle: I grew up in Houston as I like to joke, the biggest city in the country, no one cares about. And you being from Dallas. You’ll agree.

John Patterson: Well, yes, I mean from Dallas’s perspective, Houston is a little bit like, Oh yes, those people, but Dallas is kind of got its own little entitlement problem, we’ll call it that. And the Texas people do too, right?

Darryl Anderle: Yes.

John Patterson: Anyway, we won’t get into that. Texas we love you and, goodness. A few things here today, you’ve offered some really great notes for us to work with, but before Influence Ecology, we all have what we think and, so just tell us Darryl before Influence Ecology. And by the way, I know that you’re the CFO and people might wonder, have you done our programs? And yes you have. And you’ve been involved with the programs for quite some time now. You’re currently in the middle of which program?

Darryl Anderle: MAP2, about two thirds of the way through.

John Patterson: Perfect. So you’ve been a participant in our programs as have I. So life before Influence Ecology, what was that like?

Darryl Anderle: It was fine. It was a good hearty middle class, Texas up upbringing. Before I came to work here and learn the stuff I did, I had been a COBOL programmer, had a magazine ad sales company, multiple jobs where I was either the finance guy who could talk to the tech people or the tech people who could talk to the finance people. I had just operated from the ethics of depend on being reasonably smart, be dependable, be respectful of your elders and your employers and coworkers, work really hard, et cetera. And in hindsight with my mom, after I started working and I’m starting here, I asked her, why do you always hint? Why don’t you just ask for anything? And she said, well, we were taught not to. It was rude. We were literally taught, never ever make invitations, offers or ask the help of other people. We were taught that ambitious, it was actually, we grew up with the word ambitious being a negative adjective or a negative trait.

John Patterson: And so ambition is a dirty word then?

Darryl Anderle: Yes, it was absolutely for decades. And so I was a very well-respected, very well-reviewed employee. But I was always wondering why no one considered me to move up beyond being a very well reviewed employee. And so I was a bit frustrated that as I had, being I was reasonably smart, dependable, respectable, worked hard, things weren’t working out as I imagined that they were supposed to, it wasn’t advancing up the chain as I intended to, hoped to and was supposed to. So what I also got to is that when I would work later in life, like I’m trying to figure out what a future could look like and so forth. Even once I could identify what I wanted to get to because I was much better at describing what I did not want my future to look like. It was hard for me to describe what I did want it to look like. And then once I did had no idea how to chart a path to actually get there.

John Patterson: Right. And I’m going to get to that in just a minute because I think that’s a fun topic for you and I to address and share a little bit about. I’m the inventor in this transaction for Influence Ecology. And you are the-

Darryl Anderle: Judge.

John Patterson: The judge in the transaction. That’s right. Let’s go back to ambition for just a moment because I think it’s a fantastic thing because I was wondering, even as you said it, if that was the difference between Dallas and Houston, because Dallas is rather ambitious, Dallas is oil and well in the old days and all of that. But Dallas seems to be a rather ambitious place. Was Houston not an ambitious place or do you think that was just your family?

Darryl Anderle: I think it had a lot to do with my family because both my dad and my mom grew up about halfway between Houston and San Antonio, my dad and the big city of 950 people and my mom on a farm. So it was a very old German, old Czech culture and it was very much, you will be self-sufficient. And back to the Dallas thing, you may have been an ambitious, we just saw you as weighty 20.

John Patterson: Yeah. I want to say same thing, but anyway, no, that’s not appropriate. Not for this conversation. Well, if we can spend a minute there, just you and I talking a little bit about ambition as a dirty word because you bring up something really, I think a bit fascinating because if you did live on a farm or if you did live rather rural and it was 50 or 75 or a hundred years ago, then I think one of the most important skills might be to be self sufficient because you didn’t know if you had access to anything or anyone, which is really powerful.

Darryl Anderle: Absolutely. And so you had to be Jack of all trades, master of none.

John Patterson: And that’s environment specific as well. So something to account for and then it will have that environment. Yes, of course. So here we are in a different time, in a different age, in a different world, a global ecology, global marketplace and the like. And so we’re training people to move ambitiously towards the satisfaction of their aims. By the way, I think it’s useful for our listeners especially, accounting for that there are people who may not know anything about us and people that have been studying with us for quite some time. Ambitious or ambitious adult is a state of mind that we talk about.

We teach and we point to different states of mind, like naivete, despair, adult and ambitious adult, and ambitious adult is a kind of state of mind that we address where by people act in accordance with their aims. First you got to know your aims. Got to think aggregately about them and then make invitations, offers and requests that facilitate your aims being met. So that’s what we mean by just for the clarity of this conversation. And at the same time I recognize that there’s a lot of, there is a negative connotation in some cases in the marketplace that ambition is a dirty word.

Darryl Anderle: Well, for us it was because money was the root of all evil and obviously you’re only going to be ambitious if you’re in the pursuit of money. Therefore, it was very easy to equate ambition and evil. The desire for money, not thinking about how it is simply a tool to achieve things, but don’t be greedy.

John Patterson: Don’t be greedy. Because of the great note about ambition. I looked up a little bit on the online, to do a little research about the notion that ambition is evil or is ambition of virtue or is it a good thing or a bad thing to be ambitious. And one of the things I discovered as well is that in some cases, and there’s a lot in the rhetoric about women, and when a woman is ambitious, they’re not seen in the same light as a man who is ambitious, which is just terrible. But, and in any case, there’s a lot of baggage about that word. Just a ton of it.

Darryl Anderle: Absolutely.

John Patterson: So you were trained to wait to, do good work, show up, labor, get her done.

Darryl Anderle: Well, back in childhood, the perfect example my friends wanted to go to Astroworld and it’s six flags type of a park. And I was told you may not ask to go with them. So if they ask you, if they invite you, you may go, you may not ask to go. So a lot of hinting went in to try to get asked to go.

John Patterson: Do you remember what you did? Sure. Just hung around stuff like that. I bet you y’all are going to have fun. It would be nice to be able to go along. Just that sort of stuff. As an eight year old, my goodness. Well I know full grown adults that do that as well. It’d be really great if the dishes were done. It’d be nice if the trash just took itself out, things like that. I’ve, I actually do hear people talk in those kinds of ways as opposed to Hey can you take out the trash for me? Right.

Darryl Anderle: Well that’s just far too direct.

John Patterson: It is just way too direct. All right. But part of what we’re dealing with and part of what we’re teaching here is, you do got to know your aims. Listen, it’s so funny because we put Texas in the beginning. I’m going to go little honky-tonk on this now here, but we do have to know our aims and we do have to act in accordance with him and we do have to make invitations, offers and requests. Totally. Great. All right, well, so, and you were respected in your occupation, prior to influence college, you were respected, you were liked and did you observe other people around you climbing the ladder so to speak, but you were not, or how did that show up then in your career?

Darryl Anderle: I did. It was partly that and also partly I would from time to time team up with another person. A friend of mine had started a magazine ad sales company, and so decided I would pick up from Texas and move to Beverly Hills adjacent West Hollywood, and so did that whole make the trip from the South out to Los Angeles and we had some success and yet we’re not ever able to take it up to a level of consistent, comfortable achievement. And so then went back into the corporate world to work again with that history. Then under my belt started out with just accounts receivable and then manager and then worked my way up in a publishing company, but still had a few couple of people under me. But I’m certainly not to the degree that I thought I was capable and as I looked around at other people wondering what are they doing differently, they don’t seem any brighter than I am and I don’t think my stutters that bad, so there must be something going on that I just don’t understand. And I went for another couple of decades, not under standing and not moving up as I thought I should.

John Patterson: And in that frustration, did you then think it had to be, what did you do think? What did you say about yourself?
Darryl Anderle: Whether it was being unable to identify an aim or whether it was being able to identify an aim and then unable to chart a path or being unable to move or advance in the company as I wanted to. I thought there was something wrong. I thought I was somehow broken. There’s something not quite right here. One of the cogs is missing. That began a bit of a journey to figure out what that was. More fortunately, I got lucky and a couple of my friends started a company called Influence Ecology.

Yeah, no kidding. So this is really good though, Darryl, because you’re talking about what I think many people do when they don’t understand transactional competence. They, you could say don’t know how their personality shapes their value in transactions, how their role seems to somehow be limited by, could you say, we could call it skillset, but it’s much, much more than that. And we bring in personality, there’s a limitation there. And you in the absence of finding out what that’s all about, you then just go, all right, well I must be broken. Something must be wrong with me. I must be, something, right? And you go searching for the missing thing. And I know a great number of people that go looking for the missing piece, the missing link, the thing I don’t get the thing I don’t see about my brokenness. Right. And so they go about for many years trying to resolve all that. Anything else about that?

Darryl Anderle: Well, not about that part, but the realization once I started to study how much more to say about that at the end of it.

John Patterson: Well, yeah. Well, so tell us about that. Once you to started to study here then what happened?

Darryl Anderle: I learned hinting is not the best way, is not the best pathway to achieving one’s aims.

John Patterson: Intent. I need a raise. Right? Okay.

Darryl Anderle: It would be nice if someone would appreciate me around here, that sort of stuff. But once I really began to understand, unlike the working on the farm where one needs to be self sufficient and so forth, working in a tribe, whether small company, big company, small town, big town, you’re working with other people and whether you’re in a city of a million or a city of 100,000, you’re probably going to really work with sort of the same number of people. And transact depend on the same number of people, whether it’s a department in a multinational or a small company, and regardless of the size and the number of people you deal with, you have to deal with the people and effectively communicating with them, effectively designing an aim, effectively coming to a common understanding of what our communal aim is is the way to finally get there.

I never realized that being unwilling to make a request of others or make a suggestion to others or make an offer to others, I’d never realized that not doing that was actually completely making my being reasonably smart, being dependable, being respectable, working hard. I didn’t realize that that four thing made the first three impotent. I mean, I got the job done but was never going to move up because in business it’s all about working with other people. Businesses don’t do business with businesses. People do business with people and until we all learn how to people, we will not be successful at business.

John Patterson: That’s well said. We’re preparing for the conference today, the surfers paradise conference, and if we look around at some of the students, there’s a theme starting to show up amongst those that are here. They’re really studied, some of them, they’re smart people, savvy people, some very successful people, but some of them continue to deal with the same kind of issue over and over and over and often is the case that those people have not utilized the team in the way that we teach. So for example, you and I share this wonderful sort of history where the very early stages of our working out, our personalities and our roles, in this transaction called Influence Ecology. You said to me something I’ve never gotten over it and I remember being moved to tears on the day that you said it to me. And you just said to the effect of John, hey listen, I know that you think you should do everything, but we only need you to do what you do best and that is take care of our future.

Just take care of the future. I remembered that day that it was as if the weight on my shoulders of decades of working myself to death melted away. It was as if, wait a second. You mean there are people that want to, just do the doing and people that want to just do this selling and people that just, it was a little bit, I know, it’s funny saying it now. It sounds, gosh it sounds a bit naive, but it was a surprise to me that I could work with other people who would happily embolden my role in the transaction, while I embolded there’s. Anything you want to say about all that?

Darryl Anderle: Yeah. And we don’t want to do what you do. Our brains aren’t built to do the strategic longterm planning. It hurts. I’ve tried. It literally hurts.

John Patterson: Glad to hear this, funny you do have that visceral sort of like, I can’t think about the future.

Darryl Anderle: They’re in like in, now. I love to play in the future with you. I love to play enhancement or what if? I will never though walk to a beach for the first time and imagine a sand castle. However someone else has started building a sand castle. I’m like, Oh, I have these other experiences that I can draw upon to enhance this sand castle. What about this thing called a river? What if we make it into a circle and make a moat and keep people out of our sand castle? Maybe there’s a better construction technique for building that tower, so I love to play in the future with the imaginative creature. I just won’t go imagine it all myself.

John Patterson: Yeah, that’s very good. Good example.

I did a podcast interview with Liz also working with implants ecology just recently, the producer in the transaction and she and I were talking a little bit about how it has become more evident to Influence Ecology over time that the producers and the judges or the more objective minded to people in the transaction tend to thrive when involved in other transactions underway to your sand castle example, here’s the sane castle, can you help me build it or can you help me protect it or shore it up? It seems as if those personalities tend to thrive when they’re responding to the transaction underway or where they’re invited to participate in the transaction under way. Any comment about that?

Darryl Anderle: It speaks to I think a biological predisposition to us to be adult versus and vicious adult. It lets us re-respond, which is a very comfortable spot for the objective side, the non dreamers if you will. It also is an area where we can look for a little bit and figure out what to do before jumping in. It’s an area that maybe we’ve done it before so we know exactly what to go do. Whereas dreaming up something brand new is scary and if we haven’t done it, really don’t want to go do it that first time and there’s a song from the show of Vieta that resonates with me significantly. Something to the gist of it is hard when it is you that you are following. So it’s difficult being the leader or it’s lonely when it’s you that you are following. There’s something like that and we can can look it up. But it is much easier over here to have someone else point to the moon and at the same time to realize that what we bring actually helps everybody get to the moon. That without our side there’s would be a lot of pointers and no one actually getting there.

John Patterson: Well, and in that, I think there’s some youthfulness and us beginning to talk about the value of the producer and the judge in the transaction because your ambition gets satisfied when you know your value in the transaction. So going back to our earlier conversation, if you think there’s something wrong with you and you’re trying to find out what that is, that things are turning out or things aren’t, you’re not climbing the ladder like everybody else, then recognizing your own value in the transaction and then making that value really known is an opportunity to move ambitiously towards your aims because you can now accept and decline to, no, no, no. I know I’m valuable in this transaction.

Nobody else wants to do what Darryl Anderle does. By the way, I don’t ever want to do what Darryl Anderle does in the transaction. I mean, and thank God for you, for all that you do in the transaction. By the way, ladies and gentlemen, Darryl Anderle is accountable, he may not do all these things, but he’s accountable for many things that are enterprise, from all of our business affairs to everything there is to do with accounting and taxes and finance, tech and everything else. A brilliant mind. So any comment on that about knowing your value in the transaction and then moving accordingly?

Darryl Anderle: Yes. Just that learning, just like you felt the relief to not have to be burdened with anything from the moment backwards, that you are free to design our futures the same relief is what I feel. Knowing that you’re handling that, and that I get to work in the area where I’m best suited and built for and comfortable and effective and fit. Yes. And so everybody understanding their role, understanding that the salesperson actually does need to be talking and no, you should really not try to pin the contract on their jacket anymore. Figure out how they’re going to hand that phase of the transaction off to the appropriate person actually results in a lot more contracts. And having the inventor know that they really shouldn’t jump into action without going through the performer to help kind of vet some of those ideas and the remainder of the team spares you from wasting lots of time on false starts and having you help design a future that then I can tap into gives me the security that my future is working out.

And it’s not to say that I never have an idea or never offer a suggestion, something we could do. It’s simply that it’s not all up to me and I can hand it off to you and you’ve got the big picture in mind and some ideas fit, and yes, you accept some don’t and you’re like, Nope, that doesn’t work for what we’re up to. And there’s on my side, no recoil. Just because an idea doesn’t get accepted doesn’t mean as bad or anything like that is just not in the now and maybe next year, maybe not. But it’s simply we are where we are. We’re fit for what we can do right now, we’re growing more and more fit and our inventor has his eye on that up sky high view.

John Patterson: One of my favorite things about our work together, you and I, is the opportunities that we have to plan because as we teach it, the inventor and the judge get together for planning. And the PSTI of MAP2, PSTI. It’s the planning, strategy, tactics and implementation. So that planning I love because when we get together to do that, it is often, lets look at the facts. Let’s look at the resource. Let’s let’s pull all this up on a spreadsheet or an inventory. Let’s look at all of these things. And my dominant need for happiness is certainty. So I am now in partnership with you, certain about these facts, certain about these calculations, these formulas, these projections. And it gives me the ability to check my… some vendors will sometimes say, Oh it’s easy, you just do a little of this and a little of that and poof, you’re done. Right?

And you’ll ground all that in a way that I think is really effective for me and for our company and I have seen that where ever you and I get together to do that kind of work and do that work well, then all that happens after it, the strategies, for it to fulfillment, the tactics, the way that those things turn into actions, all of that is very powerful. When you and I did that great work together

Darryl Anderle: And the dominant need for happiness for judges is security. Knowing that the future will be okay. And I colored misconstrued your need for certainty. I originally, for the first few years heard your need for certainty as you need to be certain it’s going to work out. And a big aha for me was like, no, no. You’d simply need to know, you need to be certain that the facts are accurate. You couldn’t figure out what to do with the situation as long as you know the facts are accurate.

John Patterson: Correct.

Darryl Anderle: You don’t need to know that next month is handled. You need to know exactly where we are and what you need, what’s missing between now and where we need to be next month. And that was a huge aha. Like for you, I won’t say that there is no such thing as bad news, but you primarily, it’s information, data points.

John Patterson: Right. I think in the conversation it started off that insight. You said something like, I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news. And I said, Darryl, it’s just news to me. It’s not good or bad, it’s just the facts. And so to your point, yes. Once I know the facts, I’m ready. I’m ready. Yeah.

Darryl Anderle: And So that also then takes pressure off over here. Like, Oh, I don’t have to solve everything before I go report, I can go report and work with you in solving it.

John Patterson: Yup. So life is pretty good now, huh?

Darryl Anderle: It is. I continue to learn. I have that ethic still that I have to fight, that I want to be the Jack of all trades and I can do things faster. And more accurately and so don’t want to let go of anything and at a point now where if I do something weekly I probably shouldn’t be doing it myself, and developing staff to hand off to so that we can go do more of the things that are brand new first time work with you and planning the future, figuring out what may or may not work and so forth. I now identify and work towards longer term aims with others. I use the inventors to help map the pathway to get there. I don’t wait for life to hand me my just rewards because I’ve learned that it won’t.

The universe is indifferent in spite of the billboard or two that I’ve seen along the way, and I have learned to be ambitious, that I do have to make and we’ll make invitations, offers and requests and all in all life is good. Now I am a 92nd walk from my front door to my little boat and we take that out and go play with dolphins and whales out next to Santa Cruz Island. And work is satisfying. I know the value of my judgeness and judges can be a little prickly. So I also know to mitigate the prickly for the most part.

John Patterson: You do a good job though. I mean you did a really good job for those who’ve, for those that… well I know people who have met you and you strike fear in their bones, but then there are those who have met you in social situations and may think, Oh, I think he’s a performer. He’s like a people guy. So you do have those qualities about you as well. But, yeah. Do you have any other notes about what you’ve learned about yourself as a judge or what you’ve learned about judges? For our judges?

Darryl Anderle: Okay. So for us, past based thinking assessment machines, I suggest we remember two things. Just because we have an observation, correction or judgment in our brain, it doesn’t mean we have to spout it out. It can stay in our brain and that might hurt to begin with. As we begin to exercise that muscle of keeping our mouth shut. Because as shocking as it may be, people around us are not a constant requests for our assessments and instructions or how they can do their life better or should have done it differently, especially when it’s too late to change it anyway.

John Patterson: That’s how funny because it is, you’ve exactly expressed one of the ways that a judge can mitigate their costs in transactions. So while their value, your contribution to transactions is to offer your judgments. So if unchecked, then it can be quite costly to other people. But when you do hold your tongue, it’s really valuable. It’s great.

Darryl Anderle: And when we’re in a structured transaction, our observations, corrections and judgments are invaluable, respected and appreciated.

John Patterson: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Darryl Anderle: And then the number two is, the future quite regularly doesn’t just work out and we are not broken if we can’t map the pathway, it takes steed design. So two parts there. Take time to learn what goes into identifying aims and designing what would be satisfactory in each domain and then team up with those who can help you get there. Bring your skills and value to offer along the way and work with people. It’s great.

John Patterson: Good. Is there anything else for you Mr. Darryl Anderle? Thank you for embracing the future. This has been a fun ride. I appreciate that. Almost 10 years ago you marched into Kirkland’s office with a company name and the starting class roster and got this parade going. It has been an exceptional experience and the people that I get to meet and people that I get to study with are people that I would never have met otherwise. And every time going to conference people once again become more than a name and a balance. The stories, the achievements, one of the biggest joys I get is having known people for six years and having them gone from being full time mom, part-time yoga instructor, part-time operations person in their company, to being on the cover of a magazine for their specific trade because they are like known as the top notch, top tier company. And to see transitions like over the course of six years or so is astonishing.

Darryl Anderle: It is.

John Patterson: I love it.

Darryl Anderle: And me too.

John Patterson: Well you’re welcome. And back at you, you know Kirkland and I met in Austin, Texas, by the way, for the record. We’ve actually talked about it and he’s clear to Austin, but the joke is funny. So anyway, way back in Austin, I didn’t meet you until I moved to Los Angeles in, I think I was visiting in 07, 08 or something like that maybe. But in any case, I met you and you and Kirkland had been doing some work together when I met the two of you, you were already in a working relationship and I was the new guy, now officially for Influence Ecology. You came on, you were the first non founder as part of the group, but ultimately I walked into your little club and you have been an exceptional man to get to know and to work with and you have… a little skeptical at first.

That’s your job, about who’s this guy and what’s this future he’s pointing to. But I really appreciate you have embraced my role and my value in this transaction and it’s been a pleasure to get to be around you personally. You’re one of my close friends, business partners, I love working with you. You’re a fantastic human being. So glad we get to share your story with other people.

Darryl Anderle: Thank you very much. I really appreciate working with you and here, and it’s a good little team we built.

John Patterson: Yes, it is. I guess it is. All right. Thank you so much.

Darryl Anderle: Thank you. Have a good day.

John Patterson: In today’s talk, you’ll hear a segment of a webinar where co-founder Kirkland Tibbels and I speak on the subject of common adults and how this contrasts with ambitious adults. Here’s the talk

Kirkland Tibbels: Adults are sensitive to their own needs. They’re responsible for taking care of their needs. They know they have needs, they know they have wants and they are moving in some way to take care of their future. Adults rely on offers from other people. That is what you are for the most part going to confront when you are transacting day to day, especially in your day to day work environments internally and in the marketplace, adults tend to wait. They will wait. They’ll react, they’ll stay open. They will often respond to offers that they can accept to satisfy their conditions of life. They are waiting on your offer. They are conditioned to wait by the current. They are taught to wait and in fact they will require that you produce the consequential environment. They will require from you the kinds of moods, the kinds of environmental stimuli, the use of weapons to have them move.

They will require that of you. They tend to let the invitations, offers and requests of others, guide how they think and act. I hope you’re listening to this, because this is the majority of the folks you will need to engage to satisfy your aims, adults. And if you didn’t hear me say it, let me say it one more time as clear as I can. They are waiting on you. So if you are waiting on them, you got a problem. Adults are waiting for the environment to move them to situations and others. Maybe it’s their mood, maybe it’s the clock, maybe they have a narrative about the universe. Maybe they have a narrative about their gut. Maybe they have a narrative about their move. Who knows? Whatever it is. In that package of things we’ll call the environment that stimulates, agitates and excites people to move. That’s what I’m pointing to. And too many adults wait on the environment, those situations and others to do the deciding for them. And this is mostly what you will be confronting.

In my civic organizations I’ve been working in, in my social experiment. This is who I deal with almost on a constant basis. And I am shocked at how few people move ambitiously and how many people are simply just waiting to be moved. They are waiting to be motivated, they are waiting to be sold. And some of them are bold enough to even call me on the phone and go, listen, I’d like to do that, but I need you to give me the features and benefits. They know they’re going to do it. They know they want to do it, but they need to be sold. And I’ll tell you sometimes I’m that guy, I recognize it. Most of you will move in conditions of life where you’re indifferent, where are you kind of, eh, yeah, I’m probably going to do that. But I’ll just wait. I missed an opportunity at a conference that’s coming up to save $20 on a room and, kind of disappointed about that, but I just didn’t move and it really didn’t stimulate me or agitate me. And that’s how most people move.

I invite you to consider that, your money, your satisfaction, and the aims you have and the conditions of life have a lot to do with how you hold this state of mind and observe others holding this state of mind. Learning how to frame your invitations, offers, requests, and I mean this in very specific terms. Framing the dialogue is critical when you’re dealing with highly accomplished adult. Someone who is moving as as an adult will require from you some ambitious move, use of weapons, understanding that it’s their lizard brain that needs to be addressed first, for example, framing it with what you know about biology, language and the competence required to transact. Now listen, adults will respond to threat far more than they will opportunity. I had an opportunity to save a little bit of money, but I wasn’t threatened with the conference itself, so I was indifferent to it. Adults will in any situation be far more likely to move because of threat. Even if they’re accomplished adults, if they have some surplus, they’re going to be moved by threat. The opposite of that is the ambitious adult. The ambitious adult is more likely going to move toward opportunity.

Ambitious adults make plans, they do the proper inquiry, accurate thinking, the proper planning, and they move strategically and tactically to satisfy specific conditions of life. They make invitations, they make offers, they accept and make commitments. They accept and make requests. They clearly articulate the consequences to do or not to do things. They make judgments, they make assessments. They make assertions, that when accepted, give them the very best opportunity to satisfy their unavoidable conditions of life. They accept the constraints and limited resources available to them in the environment and they do not argue with or deny their understanding of biology, linguistics, and transactional facility. The facticity of life does not escape an ambitious adult. They know the clock is running. They are willing to move in order to produce the consequential environments that they must to have others comply, ethically in a moves of cooperation.

Transactionally, they know their limits, they know their liabilities and they know their assets and ambitious respond. Ambitious adults respond to opportunities. You are more likely to move a highly accomplished and ambitious adult to an opportunity. In fact, good luck getting their attention any other way. Ambitious adults tend to have surplus in specific conditions of life, areas of life. They tend to have time. They tend to show up and to give evidence to that. They don’t run around with their hair on fire, always busy and in a mess. They could be counted on. They’re the people that you call when you know, you know you’ve got to have the right health.

I want to be known as that kind of person that when push comes to shove my MAP2 people know when they’re in trouble. I’m the guy to call and if I know, I know and if I don’t know, I will tell them. That’s what an ambitious adult will do. Ambitious adults move in a way that is specific to satisfying their conditions of life ethically and making sure that the folks involved with them are meeting their aims at the same time. Ambitious adults do not ask people to make commitments that they cannot demonstrate they can make. In fact, an ambitious adult will ask you to prove you can keep the commitment before they accept a commitment from you.

John Patterson: My special thanks to our guests Darryl Anderle, in our show notes, you’ll find links to connect with him and all the links to websites, books or downloads mentioned in this podcast.

The Influence Ecology Podcast is produced by Influence Ecology, LLC in Ventura, California. This episode was recorded July 31st, 2019 and was produced by Tyson Crandall and John Patterson. You can find a transcript for this and other episodes at InfluenceEcology.com. This episode is made possible through the assistance of the Influence Ecology Faculty, Staff, Mentors, and Students around the world. Co-founder Kirkland Tibbels and our colleagues comprise an international collective of professionals who are active in the development of the philosophy of Transactionalism and the discipline of Transactional Competence. Kirkland is considered a leading philosopher and authority in the field and he has authored more than 500 papers on the subject, study, and discipline.

This episode includes contributions by Karal Gregory. The podcast theme is by Chris Standring and titled ‘Fast Train to Everywhere.’ You can subscribe to the Influence Ecology Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or via email at podcast@influenceecology.com.

If you haven’t yet offered a rating or review, I ask that you take a moment go to iTunes or your podcast app and let us know what you think. This helps us more than you know.

Phyllis Eleanor Tichinin has always struggled to have her contrary voice heard amongst the mainstream. Raised rurally in the once fruit-filled Santa Clara Valley, she earned her education as a soil scientist and environmental manager at the University of California Davis. Now in New Zealand, she raised her two children on her deceased husband’s family farm. She is currently involved in consulting and activism to remove biocides from our food supply and environment.

During her studies with Influence Ecology, she discovered how to have her voice heard. As we teach it, the marketplace is indifferent to us and our aims. If we want our voice (or invitations, offers, and requests) heard, we might need to understand how to excite or agitate the indifference in others—to awaken them from their stupor. Like many who study here, there comes a time when the fact of an indifferent marketplace is accepted. We recommend that you don’t wage battle with gravity or indifference; you’ll lose. Instead, you must learn to work with it.

So how do you and I transact in an indifferent world? In this interview, you’ll hear more.

Below you’ll find a transcript of this podcast episode that has been edited for your reading pleasure. You’ll also see links at the bottom of this post where you can find more information on the people and ideas mentioned in the episode.

by John Patterson
Produced by: John Patterson & Tyson Crandall

“As individuals, if we have something we want to get across, it can’t be about delivering it the way I want to. I have to deliver it the way that it will actually land with others, and they’ll take action as a result.“

Phyllis Tichinin: I’m Phyllis Tichinin. I’m older than I can imagine myself ever being. That’s a realization I’ve come to in the last two or three or four months, that, “Oh my gosh. Now I’m up in the Krone category of things.” I like to think of myself as always someone with a young perspective, and I think I’ve more or less managed to maintain that into my now late 60s.

I grew up in California rurally, in the Santa Clara Valley, which was fruit tree-filled and has since morphed itself into Silicon Valley. I think that experience really had a deep impact on my view of the environment and my sense of loss, if you will, about the natural world and the impact that we humans have one them.

This is a result of those, seeing cherry orchards go under as a foreign five-year-old. It seems to have prompted me along a line of study in life endeavor to revitalize, re-envision agriculture and our relationship with the environment, and how that carries on to our soil.

I went to school, got a degree, science degrees in environmental management and soils, and have pretty much, since then, dedicated myself to helping people understand the links between soils, our treatment of the environment, the quality of the food they eat, and in turn their health.

I’m currently living in New Zealand, have been here for the last 30 years, recently retired from being a farmer, continued to do soils consulting. I’m just really delighted with the perspectives and the support that Influence Ecology gives me and the skills to move towards my legacy aims.

John Patterson: That’s great. If you would please, can you say a little bit about Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand? What’s it like?

Phyllis T.: Right. I managed to have landed myself. I think there’s whatever “cosmic connection” there is here. I’ve ended up living, married a New Zealander who grew up in a farming family in Hawke’s Bay, which is on the North Island of New Zealand, two main islands in New Zealand, and on the east side, which means its climate and its latitude is almost identical to the Santa Clara Valley. It’s filled with apple orchards and fruit and vegetables in the same sort of way, and very close to the ocean, clearly, as all of New Zealand is.

It’s a place where I am slowly over the last 25 years gaining some career identity as the weirdo in the agricultural scene who is attempting to cajole everyone towards a more biological or holistic view, non-chemical view of agriculture. I really enjoy the climate here. It’s a lovely combination of foothills, ocean, grazing land, and quite a center for art and innovation.

John P.: I love that you described yourself as a weirdo, because in your notes you sent, you said a few things about, I think, perhaps growing up as a contrarian. For all of the people listening that find themselves wanting to make some kind of impact, but their impact is sometimes heard on deaf ears, as you will, most of us throughout our lives, whether or not we want to impact something environmental, we have a cause that we care deeply about, we have a congregation we want to impact, or we want to impact the people around our enterprise, we often, as human beings, struggle with our experience of being unheard. We can’t get heard. We want to seek to get heard, to influence people in a way that we believe will make a difference.

I’m curious … First of all, I wanted to say that to include all the people who might resonate with some of your own journey and what you’re probably about to say in some different ways perhaps, but also I’m just interested in this thing about your growing up as … I think your family labeled you as a contrarian. Is that correct?

Phyllis T.: No, it was more of a family phenomenon.

John P.: Oh, like a group of contrarians?

Phyllis T.: Yeah, at least in everyone else’s eyes.

John Patterson: Oh, nice.

Phyllis T.: Okay. I grew up as the fourth child of six, which was pretty unusual at that time. We were no longer doing six-person families in the ’50s. But my parents went ahead and had six of us anyway. It was a little bit of an unusual grouping.

My mother was like a fourth generation Californian at that stage. My father was … I’m a first generation Russian on my father’s side. His Czarist family fled eastwards to Shanghai and spent time in China and then moved to the west coast of the US. They met at the University of California at Berkeley, the hot bed of radicalism at the time during World War II.

Just as a small example, my father used to receive Pravda and Izvestia, the two major Russian newspapers in print in open … That you can see that this was not your standard American newspaper, to the Morgan Hill post office. All throughout my life, there was this kind of that’s the family whose father is a communist sort of thing, despite the fact that he … To put it bluntly, he was in part employed by the CIA once in 1959 as an agricultural specialist for the American government.

But all of the time that I was growing up, I always felt as though we were viewed as being different. But at the same time, I also got the impression from my family that that was good. I characterized it as the message was if you imagine yourself in a river of fish and everyone else is swimming in the other direction, you’re probably going the right way. That stuck with me as an image of it’s okay to have different views. This is actually valuable and important. It’s dogged me for all of my life.

I want to say I do struggle with this concept of how do you deliver a message powerfully so that it actually lands with people. I think I jumped out of my chair. I probably shouted and punched the air, and then cried or something, when in the FOT, I read the Influence Ecology definition of productivity, and I thought, “Yes, that is the core of what I want to learn to do,” and that is to be able to say something that has never been said before, and yet say it in such a way that people truly hear it and take action as a result.

John Patterson: What I’m interested in about you, because I think it’s fascinating, is you represent the kind of commitment that we all have to, again, make a difference, impact something, agitate, excite the indifference, whether or not it’s activism or, “Hey, my new product,” or, “Hey, my business,” or, “I’ve got an amazing new bread to sell,” or, “I’ve got this wonderful home that you should buy.” What you’re learning here has allowed you to both understand what’s simply said about human beings and then how to produce breakdowns. What are you coming to understand about human beings, say that again?

Phyllis T.: That we are all basically asleep to our conditions of life, really. Our exposure to media, for most of us, the cruisiness, the physical cruisiness, of our lives, and the media overwhelm and the number of people that we encounter these days in a day, even if it’s just the number of people you see driving by, tends to dull our sense of connection, I think, not only to others but to ourselves and our own condition.

I think a lot of people ignore their health as a result of the pressures we’re under in terms of job, family, commitments, a lot of things outside ourselves without actually paying attention to the signals that our bodies are giving us. The stress epidemic and all of the follow on from that, I think, is a major symptom of that.

Really I find it takes a lot to get people actually centered and calm to the point where you can say something shocking or mildly intimidating enough to pull them out of where they’ve been in the current or in their heads with their worries, to actually say, “Are you seeing the big picture here, that there’d been 80,000 toxic chemicals introduced into our environment that have never been tested since World War II?” It used to be that one in a thousand adults would have a chronic disease in 1970. Now it’s 46% of children have some chronic … That kind of statistic where people will go, “Holy heck. Something’s really wrong with some portion of what we’re doing.”

I’m okay with spouting the statistics, but it’s got to be in a way that is pertinent to them and that will really prompt them to answer. Usually it has to be really short because you don’t have very much time.

You were mentioning my performer tendency to not want to alienate people. Everybody needs to be good with this. Well, for me, I’m coming, as a result of my Influence Ecology training, I’m okay with people, I’m better anyway with people not being good with this because there is no other way that I can see to reach them without some kind of pull them out of where they’ve been floating around in their heads with all of that stress to realizing there is a serious problem here. It’s not just your and my problem, it’s a problem for everyone the way we’re treating our environment, doing agriculture, not really looking after ourselves.

Then it comes down to the problem that’s serious enough that us being good with it, like I’d prefer everyone, is not adequate. It’s simply not enough. But scripting conversations and being willing to hold that uncomfortable space while people check in with their biology or react is something I’m finding I need to practice, but it’s very valuable. Just let them sit in it for a while, let them then ask, “So what can we do?” or, “What’s going to happen?” or, “What are our options?”

John Patterson: What happened when you were studying with us? Where did you kind of wake up to you might be naive about some stuff?

Phyllis T.: I think I was naive about the impact of my delivery on people, and them not…

John Patterson: That it drives people away instead of attracts them to it?

Phyllis T.: Correct.

John Patterson: Yeah.

Phyllis T.: That continues to be a major challenge for me, which gets back to that definition of productivity. How can you say something that people haven’t heard before and still get them to take it on board and to change behavior, do something, take action as a result? Does this whole series of readings in map two in particular, about pitch anything, how to actually utilize people’s innate responses in a way that is predictable? Their responses can be predictable. We just need to be open enough ourselves to hearing.

I would say actually that’s one of the things that I could say that Influence Ecology is kick-starting, kicking me out of my naivete, and that is that not actually listening to what other people are saying and trying to really hear them in a way that enables me to pitch my message and my caution to them in a way that they hear, because, once again, as a performer, my tendency is to download information. That doesn’t work, a, if they’re not ready and it certainly doesn’t work in large bites of information.

It’s, again, utilizing what you’ve taught me about delivery and about how people’s minds work. Then for me, a big challenge is actually spending more time scripting the phases. I think I was naïve, really admired the way you folks have held the line on how we define things, how we say things, because there is absolutely power in words. It’s our major way now of communicating with each other besides, say, touch, for example. It can become very powerful for getting our message across, especially since very few people these days are actually transacting with people in any other way than words.

I mean, yes, we’re doing images, and that’s important. But if you want to be absolutely clear about the message you’re trying to get across, words are increasingly our way of doing it. We’re just not writing to the same extent we were. Therefore, packaging things in discrete, pithy, powerful bites is important.

John Patterson: I’m thinking about some of the people who start our programs and begin to understand that their personality has both cost and value or asset liability to it. For those who may be hearing this for the very first time, every one of us has certain skills and strengths that are natural to us. We may be naive to the fact that sometimes those natural talents or abilities are also a cost or a reliability in certain places, in a transaction.

For example, as an inventor personality, my good ideas are great when we’re brainstorming about new possibilities and we’re inventing some new plan. But when we’re trying to get something done, and we’re now doing the work that we’ve already planned, for me to come up with new ideas in the midst of that as a liability, not an asset, for example.

Phyllis T.: It doesn’t happen all the time, but when I catch myself being in personality evaluation mode and using that in situations, I find my effectiveness, in terms of people’s response, absolutely goes up.

John Patterson: Tailoring your speech to the personality.

Phyllis T.: Tailoring my speech, tailoring the delivery is quite important. I don’t know whether to be discouraged that I’m not getting it soon enough or just back off and say this takes a lot of time. We have a whole lifetime of not being awake to delivery and personalities. It’s an incredibly important skill that really does need to be consciously practiced in order to use it.

John Patterson: You bring up the transaction cycle itself. I think of the transaction cycle as a framework for saying many things. Here at Influence Ecology, the transaction cycle represents a simple transaction, from buying a cup of coffee, or a more complex transaction like building up a coffee franchise. Transactions are transactions are transactions.

This framework, you point out in your notes that having a cohesive framework for achieving what I want for my life has been very valuable. I’m interested in the framework as a whole and why the framework itself is valuable to you as an ecosystem-nutritionist or as an activist. Can you tell us about that?

Phyllis T.: The Influence Ecology framework has been of tremendous value to me in realizing where I tend to live or work best or be most productive in terms of getting my message across to people. Luckily enough, I’m a performer. It involves a lot of talking and enthusing and waving my hands and being energetic. That’s useful.

The dilemma that I’m facing, and where Influence Ecology in that transaction cycle awareness has been particularly helpful, is in that next stage of how do I engage with people after that initial enthusiasm, the wake-up call, to actually create a framework within my scene to deliver additional information to them should they take up, in effect, my offer of help in the form of information?

John Patterson: You’re not just walking around agitating people.

Phyllis T.: Correct. You got it. What’s the point? I mean, remember, I want everybody to basically be happy. Me agitating them and walking off really doesn’t satisfy my aim. But for me, that’s the challenge and realizing that I get energized by speaking to people about their breakdown and about the possibilities, but it’s how do I move them to also pay attention to the other parts of the transaction cycle, the getting the information to them, evaluating was it actually worthwhile to them, staying in touch, all of those assessment, judge-like activities, and then re-inventing the transaction cycle. Great for ideas, but it’s that how do you actually deliver the product and mostly assess whether or not it was effective?

I give a fair number of talks and PowerPoint presentations to rotary groups and groups of farmers, and again and again it comes back to just really have to keep it simple. I lose sight of how much more I tend to know about my particular topic and how little other people know, how asleep we all generally are to the level of chemical or environmental pollution or lack of nutrition in our foods.

Yeah, sometimes I feel very frustrated by that. But once again, as individuals, if we have something we want to get across, it can’t be something delivering it the way I want to. I have to deliver it the way that it will actually land with others, and they’ll take action as a result, and Influence Ecology in that working through being aware of the transaction cycle from my performer presentation perspective, actually realizing that if I want an outcome that makes it worth my while, delivering the information, I really have to pay attention to how do I deliver, how do I assess, how do I reinvent in order to really reach my aim.

John Patterson: Fantastic.

[transition]

So 7.5 billion wake up every day and pitch you something, right? There’s a sea of narratives that gets constructed from all of that pitching going on. If you follow the money, you start to find out that this really good advice, “Oh, no. It’s all good,” or, “No, you can eat that. It’s nutritional,” or, “No, it’s safe,” or whatever the case may be, is more about good marketing than it is about actual science.

We could talk about the facts about that, and you’re certainly welcome to say anything you’d like to about any of that. But from the perspective of anybody who may not know they’re trapped in the current, it’s like being in the Matrix and suddenly finding out you are, I would just want to open up that topic to give you an opportunity to address any part of that, or anything you’d like to say about your own learning journey about that.

Phyllis T.: Weapons of influence. Why I have specialized knowledge in this realm? First off, my Kiwi did his PhD on pesticide regulation policy in the United States in the early 1970s. Having been through that research and entered the document with him, I know more than I wish to know about how disorganized, corrupt the regulation of hazardous substances is in the United States or anywhere else.

I worked with the California Governor’s Office, in the Office of Toxics Assessment. I do have a background from the inside not necessarily as a regulator, but as an overseer of regulators in the arena of hazardous chemicals. I saw over and over again the degree to which those people with an economic self-interest, totally understandable, this is human nature, were able to influence regulators to dilute the standards that are on the books.

They are law, they are regulations, but they are simply not being enforced in a way that actually protects the public interest. It’s really more protecting the economic return to those people who are producing the chemicals that we are assuming have been thoroughly safety-tested and vetted by our regulatory agencies who are meant to be working for our good.

That’s simply not the way it works. We have to come up with another model, but we’re stuck with the legacy of all of the chemicals that have been allowed into our environment, many of them on the justification that we need them in order to produce enough food for people to eat.

The truth is their presence not only poisons us, but it makes it impossible for us to actually get full nutrition in our food. As a result, our health crashes. We’re seeing that now with children being born with birth defects and ADHD and autism and cancer and all the rest of that.

But the bottom line is we’ve been seriously naive and we’ve been lulled by the current in this impression that we are being protected, that these substances are being independently tested and evaluated. Because they’ve got a label on them, they’ve been registered, they’re okay for us to use. They’re safe. They’re not. Any chemical that we use that kills insects or bugs or algae or bacteria, we have the same cells as all of those organisms. They’re harmful to us, too. They’re biocides. They hurt biology. That includes us.

My message after I slap people around with that one is we have absolutely the ability to produce nutrient-dense, chemical-free food that actually improves the soil, reverses global warming, all of those things. We’re doing it 300 or 400 years ago, all natural systems. They don’t need pesticides or herbicides or fertilizers to produce a lot of healthy biomass. We’re just not understanding the natural systems if we think we’re reliant on chemicals to save ourselves from our own environment. We’re actually poisoning ourselves and our environment.

But it’s the breaking people out of that naivete in a productive manner, that is my challenge. I get frustrated because I’ve been doing this stuff for 45 years, and it only seems to be getting worse. But it’s being able to help people to see a way out, but I think in a perverse kind of way the breakdown that almost everyone has experienced in some degree with their health is actually happening is helping to get that message across.

But I see a lot of economic opportunities for people to provide alternatives, but I also see a lot of market hype and a lot of bandwagonism, and just the current continuing to roll on and provide solutions that are basically Band-Aids. That’s my major concern, that we’re being naive in thinking we’re being protected. Then we’re naive at grasping at facile, simple Band-Aids that are not underlying solutions really for our health.

John Patterson: Now I happen to live in California, so that might color my view. I happen to live in an area that is known for food production, all kinds of food production, and so forth. My experience in just listening to the current, observing it, my experience of being caught up in it is that consumers are now beginning to demand healthier choices. They’re seeking healthier choices, more organic, more sustainable, better and healthier and so forth.

It occurs to me that the message is moving the dial a bit. Would you agree or am I just caught up with the Band-Aid? Am I listening to the Band-Aids? What would you say to all of that?

Phyllis T.: Awareness is improving, demand is improving, and we’re seeing a response to that. Whole Foods is held up as the poster child for people who want healthier foods, or they want a Disneyland supermarket. I’m never quite sure which.

But the dilemma with this is, yes, a lot of what is out there is just current response to, “Oh, gee, people are concerned about this, so we’ll slap the word ‘natural’ on this,” or, yes, there has been a shift towards organic production, but is this industrial egg organic where they’re not actually increasing the nutrient density of what they’re producing, they’re simply not adding chemicals to it? Once again, this is a living system.

John Patterson: Got you.

Phyllis T.: It’s complex, it needs nourishment, and just same old, same old is not going to deliver the quality of food we need. But I think what’s really going to shift things in the next five to 10 years is disruptive technology to the fore. There will be, I estimate within 10 years, the equivalent of a phone app wherein you can point your phone at food, vegetables, fruit, ideally eventually milk and liquids, and the device will actually enable you to get a reading from the cloud on what the pesticide level is in this food and what the nutrient density level is.

We already are close to apps that can measure nutrient density, and that’s good because it’s hard to get nutrient density if there a lot of chemicals in it. But when it comes online, that little app will make all the difference in the world because then there will be no place to hide. We can’t ignore the reality of consumers saying, “Whoa! Hey, I’m getting this red-orange color on my phone here when I pointed at your oranges. What’s going on?”

Once again, disruptive technology. But, yes, here in New Zealand I hear a lot about, “We don’t have to respond to what the consumers want. We’re a small country far from markets. We occupy the high-end niche for quality, and our consumers are demanding that we be grass-fed.”

Yeah, we’re grass-fed pretty much. We’re on the clear on that. But what they’re not actually yet understanding, and most consumers still aren’t, is that just not spraying or being natural is just the first step. Given human nature, we won’t, as producers or regulators, change until there is widespread, consistent outrage by an activist and pressure from consumers.

Once again, it’s important that people vote with their dollars and that they understand that what they choose to eat absolutely affects their short and long-term health. That message has never really … We’ve never really taken that on board, I don’t think. We’re all concerned about our environment, but a lot of the negative impact on our environment is caused by agriculture. We’ve got to man up to that as producers, and we need consumers’ help with that.

John Patterson: Last couple of minutes. I want to give you the opportunity to say anything that you would like to say.

Phyllis T.: I would like to express my gratitude to you and John and Kirkland and Daryl as the core team, but representing everyone in Influence Ecology for the depth of foresight and heart and perseverance that you’ve displayed in creating the curriculum and particularly the ecology. I stand in awe of your legacy aim and mission and what you are accomplishing. Absolutely, bottom of the heart, thanks to you for that.

What I have learned, what I’ve been able to transmit to my family members and others has been … I keep saying, damn, you guys need a teenage program so we can actually get productive from early ages, which is why part of me grieves that you weren’t around 45 years ago to make my life more enjoyable and productive.

John Patterson: Me, too.

Phyllis T.: Yeah, exactly. Particularly for me, there’s tremendous value in the ecology of Influence Ecology, the group of us as an ecology, a functioning, living, interacting, transacting, interconnected, ever-changing complex system of help.

What really has struck me is that sense of tribe within Influence Ecology, of you got a problem, absolutely, I’ve got an hour and a half to talk with you and impart my specialized knowledge, because someone within the Ecology who I know has a set of awarenesses and values that are similar to mine, that we can speak similar languages, we can talk in a way that we understand, and productively in a way that we can transact with each other. It’s just incredibly powerful and uplifting and it really highlights that need for us to get back to being able to communicate and understand and trust each other and to offer help.

The help part of it is something I struggle with because I know personally it’s difficult for me to ask for help, because, hey, I’m superwoman. I ought to be able to do this by myself. But it’s the help, being able to accept and ask for help. As a performer, I understand it’s difficult for us. Well, I’m absolutely here to say that’s very much the case. But within Influence Ecology as a system, as a group of people, the help that’s available to you, if you’re willing to ask for it, is phenomenal.

John Patterson: That’s great.

Phyllis T.: Thank you.

John Patterson: Phyllis Tichinin, thank you for being a guest on the Influence Ecology Podcast. It’s been a pleasure.

Phyllis T.: I’ve absolutely enjoyed it. I encourage everyone who has the honor of being asked to take up the opportunity.

John Patterson: In today’s talk, you’ll hear from Co-Founder Kirkland Tibbels and me on the subject of indifference. Here’s the talk.

Kirkland Tibbels: If you’re going to move ambitiously beyond your basic and fundamental satisfaction, if you are going to get beyond the behavior of most adults, you are going to have to come to terms with your own naivete, and especially your indifference to your naivete.

Adults are in a different category, and this is when you’re in the more sophisticated transaction, especially around work and money. When you’re in the occupational concerns, when you’re in the marketplace, when you’re presenting and so forth, you’re going to be dealing with adults who are open to and need help, and they’ll make that known. People who are adult about their transactions will tell you that they need help, they’re looking for a very specific kind of help, and they are mostly relying on other people and the environment to get them that help.

Most of the folks out there who are looking to get help, whether they’re in the board room, the kitchen, or the grocery store, or they’re your future customers, most people are waiting to observe, to be approached, to find, to be agitated, to be emergencied into acting.

They are waiting and will respond. If they see a way to satisfy a condition of life, they will respond. But I’m telling you they’re mostly indifferent to you and your concerns. A lack of interest in or concern about something is someone who is naïve, a form of naivete when unacknowledged or resisted. Indifference is a form of naivete.

Georg Simmel in The Philosophy of Money goes to great lengths to define and characterize indifference. Not only is it pointed out to as perhaps the most dangerous thing to a civilized and developing society indifferent, but it is in fact a negative value.

It’s not the same as caring about something. People care about the environment, but they cared about it when they were littering. Most of you are probably too young to remember the campaigns in the ’70s in the US about littering. It’s not that you didn’t care about the environment, you were just indifferent to the behavior that was being engaged in to satisfy your own immediate concern for the trash in your car.

Indifference is a negative value, according to Simmel. It’s a fascinating way to look at it, that it’s associated with the fact that human beings are always valuing and ranking something constantly. When you’re indifferent to it, it just simply means that you see no value.

We don’t take a step, says Simmel, without evaluating and ranking every move of that step, every single thing about it. We don’t take a step without first evaluating, ordering, and ranking that step in terms of its importance. That means that we rank things as to their importance or their value. Therefore, we attend to those things that have value and we are indifferent to those that do not. Therefore, we produce a negative value with indifference. When you demonstrate indifference, what you are saying is it holds no value.

John, we talked about if you really want to demonstrate your authority and power in the transactions that are important to you, ask yourself this question. If you remove your help, if you take yourself out of that transaction, does it do any harm? Does it make any difference? Or would everyone who’s engaged in that transaction be left indifferent one way or the other? There’s your answer.

Would it make any difference in the organizations where you participate, if you were there or not? Really, like really make any difference? If it does, you can start to measure your value because people have ranked it. They’ve evaluated and they see value in it. But if they’re indifferent to you, all it means … It’s not that they don’t care about you, it just holds no value. We’ve had people who have come to terms with their own indifference and had biological reactions to it. I have several stories about people who have called up and said, “I had to pull over when it hit me after an open training session how indifferent I am to my own concerns, much less the concerns of others.”

John Patterson: Let’s talk about that for a second because I think that’s one of the things that I want to make sure that we confront here. It’s been my experience that people often don’t actually accept the indifference in the marketplace. They don’t accept it. They tend to say, “Well, people do care. People really do,” or, “Well, my mother care. She’s not indifferent to me,” or, “Well, the people at work, they care about me.”

They don’t relate to the others of the world as indifferent. They don’t relate to, in some cases, the weather as indifferent or nature as indifferent. I don’t remember the last time that I argued with gravity. I’m fine with that, I accept. But indifference? Now hold on.

Kirkland T.: Well, there’s something, I think, to point to contextually here, and this might ease the pain for folks who have trouble with this conversation. If you just relate to those places in your life that are the most important, that have great value, that carry some significance and importance with you, and you are attempting to engage your environment and no one gives a rat’s ass, you come face-to-face with indifference.

It’s not that they don’t care. It’s different from caring. They hold no value. It is incumbent upon you to wake up to the fact that if you are going to get their attention, you are going to have to produce that narrative of value. You’re going to have to agitate the environment. Sometimes it means agitating it a lot. It means sometimes you’re going to have to go out of your way. When you’re just unwilling to go out of your way, you are starting to come to terms with your own indifference.

John Patterson: My special thanks to our guest Phyllis Tichinin. In our show notes, you’ll find links to connect with her and all the links to websites, books, or downloads mentioned in this podcast.

The Influence Ecology Podcast is produced by Influence Ecology, LLC in Ventura, California. This episode was recorded April 1st, 2019 and was produced by Tyson Crandall and John Patterson. You can find a transcript for this and other episodes at InfluenceEcology.com. This episode is made possible through the assistance of the Influence Ecology Faculty, Staff, Mentors, and Students around the world. Co-founder Kirkland Tibbels and our colleagues comprise an international collective of professionals who are active in the development of the philosophy of Transactionalism and the discipline of Transactional Competence. Kirkland is considered a leading philosopher and authority in the field and he has authored more than 500 papers on the subject, study, and discipline.

This episode includes contributions by Karal Gregory. The podcast theme is by Chris Standring and titled ‘Fast Train to Everywhere.’ You can subscribe to the Influence Ecology Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or via email at podcast@influenceecology.com.

If you haven’t yet offered a rating or review, I ask that you take a moment go to iTunes or your podcast app and let us know what you think. This helps us more than you know.

From time to time, I’ll explain Influence Ecology and our approach by telling a story about the ABC television series American Idol. The award-winning series involves discovering recording stars from unsigned singing talents. The winner receives a record deal with a major label.

In one audition listed in the category of “worst of the worst” from Season 4, Mary Roach, sings “I Feel the Earth Move” by Carole King. When finished, a gobsmacked Simon Cowell asks, “what made you audition for this competition!?” Mary replies, “all my friends told me I was an awesome singer.” Simon responds, “Mary, not only can you not sing, you have one of the weirdest voices I’ve ever heard in my entire life.” Mary responds, “many people around me have told me I have an amazing voice…random people I don’t know have agreed.” With great care, Paul Abdul says, “Mary, they lied to you…”

…and we all know why – we live amongst people who don’t want to kill our dreams. They want to give us hope. They want to stroke our confidence and make us feel good about ourselves. Sometimes we even surround ourselves with people too much like ourselves and we can fall prey to a group bias for thinking we’re winning when we’re not…or making the right choices when we’re not.

In Mary’s case, her friends and family could have told her she was a mediocre singer. They could have saved her wasted time, an emotional toll, and international humiliation. They could have said to her that if she aspired to sing, that through practice, she might sing one day and if good enough, possibly consider American Idol.

So, how do we find our ignorance, challenge our hubris, and confront our naivete? Where can we find a means to see a correct reflection of our selves as others see us? Who gives us an accurate read of ourselves and our aims – before we spend time, energy, and money – before we make poor choices?

In today’s episode, we’ll hear how Influence Ecology has helped Paul Adams see an accurate reflection for himself – and how he helps his customers do the same. Paul shares how he’s growing his company with a team that genuinely supports his aims – and where their freedom to check his “inventor” hubris is cherished.

Paul Adams and Sound Financial Group help those making annual incomes of $300K to $2M secure their financial independence. Like Influence Ecology, Paul and his team are hired to help people confront their naivete so they live satisfying lives.

Here’s the interview.

Below you’ll find a transcript of this podcast episode that has been edited for your reading pleasure. You’ll also see links at the bottom of this post where you can find more information on the people and ideas mentioned in the episode.

by John Patterson
Produced by: John Patterson & Tyson Crandall

“You could tie that to anything else, your health, your marriage, to parenting. And all of the options get a lot easier if we’re measuring them against a future state that we’re solving for.“

Highlights from the original interview with Paul Adams

“I can think of so many things where I thought of something one way, and now I think of differently and I can articulate it. Like how somebody thinks about a particular money issue, they can articulate, ” thought this way before, now I think way differently.” And it’s very difficult to do when it’s something is all encompassing is what you teach in Influence Ecology. I’m different with my spouse, my wife now, I’m actually different in the ways I’m helping my church be able to be effective in certain areas, different with my business, different with my children.”

“What I think of when you mention the thinking, doing cycle. And the idea that we have to do both is, I think about it as, how I look at whether or not somebody knows something. And so often people will say things like, “Well yeah I mean I know how to do that.” How often they’ll say, “Well I know what it takes to get to $300, 000 of income, all I’ve got to do is go do it.” Hmm. And how upsetting it is to them to just say, “Uh, You don’t, know how, because if you knew, you would have had it, by now.” And if you just pause longer and say, “I think I know how,” and then go try to do what you think is going to work, and then adjust.”

Here’s the latest interview

John Patterson: Here we are with Paul Adams. Paul if you could take a moment and introduce yourself.

Paul Adams: My name is Paul Adams, I’m the founder and CEO of Sound Financial Group… Live in the Seattle, Washington area with my family. I’m married, with my wife Kristen for a little more than 10 years. And three kids, who by the end of this year will be, seven, eight and nine years old. So it’s a busy life out here with us. And we spend a lot of time traveling in our RV. I think we’re racking up about 80 nights a year, staying in our RV.

John Patterson: That’s fantastic. And you designed your whole life to do that, so you could kind of have it all, right?-

Paul Adams: Yeah definitely. We love the outdoors, spending time with friends and family, and one of the thing I really enjoy is the level of autonomy that comes with having constructed an enterprise in a way, that it would care for my aims, instead of the other way around, where most people are, really sacrificing their own personal aims, to feed their career or feed their business. And over the last, about three, four years, who’ve really constructed the business, to make its primary purpose, caring for building the life that we want.

John Patterson: And that kind of leads me to the last time we were together, and why I wanted to talk to you today. This is a… an episode in the series that we’re calling where are they now? We interviewed you some time in the past. Do you know how many years ago that was?

Paul Adams: No, but I remember where I was. I was in Vancouver, Canada, for the interview. So that had to be like three and a half years ago is what it seems like.

John Patterson: Yeah, something like that. So it’s been a little while. And it’s worth just noting what’s happened since. The last time we were together, we talked a lot about accurate thinking, we talked a little about what happened out of your participation in our programs, and the life that you designed. So first of all, I’ve told your story, a few different times because, I love… I was just on the phone today, by the way, with Trisha Tyler, know you have a close relationship with Trisha Tyler. And Trisha is one of those people that just has… designed a life of surplus and being able to enjoy a great life, and you know, she’s getting her pilot’s license. She and Jeff are about to take off on an amazing adventure for 19 days, and all that. But you really have designed a life… that many people would admire, in a variety of ways. You’re known in all kinds of ways, now even more known. Say a little bit today about your recent podcast. You have designed a life, you can travel and play as you want. You’ve designed a life where you don’t have to look back, you know at the end of some career and say, “Gosh I wish I could have spent more time with my family and with my kids or things that matter to me with my church, or my community. And everything else.” So you’ve done a really amazing job about that, and we… again we talked about that last time. I want to just take a moment, anything you want to say about all that.

Paul Adams: I would say that, you know, you mentioned a little bit about, one of the things we’ve got coming up now that’s much closer than it was prior, is we will leave on our one year, RV trip, June 1 of 2020. And it’s taken a lot of… I don’t want to say… work. But it’s taken a lot of thinking, and a lot of subtracting things out of our lives to make that a reality. To now it’s like, pretty much all the pieces are in place.

We just need to finish actually planning where we’re going to be and when. My business partner Cory Sheppard has bought in that we’ll be down to a three day work week. That I’ll be doing things down to a three day work week before the trip begins. So that it makes it seamless for the team. We’ve made the company entirely location independent, so we still have a mailing address and office location, but none of us need to be anywhere, in particular, to be able to do what we do. So if, one of our staff said, “I want to go live in Japan for a month.” They could do that. And that was something that wasn’t real last time we spoke. But most importantly is that idea of every time a business option comes up, some of which were huge opportunities that I’ve actually declined. And the whole reason to decline them was, they were going to require that I travel the country and speak at a lot of conferences instead of a few conferences I most want to speak at. That that would clog up my capacity and prevent me from being able to do this trip. Or that being more involved in some local associations. Those would not allow for… I was able to serve on my church board for a while, like about five years, and then said, “Okay, now that needs to come to an end because we’re getting ready to go on this trip.”

All of those things are only possible because we set that aim, that flag in the future and then every time an option came up, we always filtered the opportunity through “Will that get us closer to or further away from these major life objectives?” You could tie that to anything else, your health, your marriage, to parenting. And all of the options get a lot easier if we’re measuring them against a future state that we’re solving for.

John Patterson: I could just stop right now because…Well you probably know when you interview someone, you have to pull out examples, and you have to pull out things that illustrate a thing you just said. And you just did that beautifully-

Paul Adams: Oh thank you-

John Patterson: By the way. And I think it’s a testament to your own work with clients, to help them think accurately. And I’ll just congratulate you. It sounds like you’re thriving. If we can though, let’s just take a second and think about if… Let’s imagine we have a new listener here with us today. Somebody who’s never heard an Influence Ecology podcast. They don’t know anything about what we’re talking about. You’ve been on a journey that started many years ago, here with Influence Ecology — I know that you and Kirkland known each other for a little bit longer before-

That. But in terms of what you might say to a listener, a new listener, about your own journey. We’ll get to what’s happening now, because we’re here to talk about where are they now. So we’re going to leave the where are they now, for just a minute, but if you think about just talking to a brand new listener, who wants to sort of take the first couple of steps, towards the journey you have. What would you recommend at them?

Paul Adams: I would say, first, if you’ve not done it, find out with you and if you’re married, with your spouse or partner, what is it you actually want from your future. And you know when we meet with our clients, one of the things we often ask is, if we were to meet three years from today, looking back to this conversation to today, what is it you’d most want to have accomplished personally, professionally, financially, to be really happy with your progress over those three years? And even though, almost all of our clients have household incomes between $300 thousand and $2 million a year. So these are people who… like they’re smart and they have done things-

John Patterson: Not sitting around slacking-

Paul Adams: No. And yet that is not an easy question for most of them to answer. Because most of them have spent their personal lives, reacting and responding to the needs of their business or career. So I would say the first thing to get settled in, if you’re going to lets say have a conversation with Influence Ecology or you’re just hearing this podcast, randomly somebody sent it to you, maybe you saw it on somebody’s LinkedIn, that you’re now reflecting like, wait, pause, long enough. You and your spouse, maybe it’s a long dinner together and a piece of paper to just write out, what would we actually want our life to look like three years, five years, ten years from now?

Generally speaking you could just use those three domains of personal, professional, financial. Make it super easy to just, here is where I want to go. And then look at the other people doing what you’re currently doing, the way everybody is doing it is we would talk about it being in the current. And like —  Is anybody having the life, if they’re five years further down their career that you’re in, do they have a life that you want? And actually a good friend of mine that I introduced to Influence Ecology some years ago, he realized in our planning sessions, I said so, “What’s the next stage of your development?” He says, “Oh, it’d be this role.” And I said, “How much they travel?” Because travel was something he didn’t want to do as much of. And you could see he just went, like his face sunk in the moment, because he… it had never occurred to him to look at it that way. It was always the next customer, if you’re a business owner, that next client, that employee growth, the additional office location. Or in a career that next promotion, that next big move, the next bump in pay, are all what people center on and not for a moment do they pause and say, “Wait, is that what I actually want in all the other areas of my life that actually matter?”

And if you think about it, people can ignore a lot of concerns in their life, outside of their career until they’re about 40. I think. People can hard charge, go at it, ignore their health, ignore their family, get a lot of forgiveness, because they’re getting a lot of success. And then they look up at 40, the problem is, all the habits and practices that they developed for the first 20 years, now have to be somehow unwound. It’s not like you can get to 40… Like a diabetic can’t suddenly get diagnosed with diabetes and give up ice cream. It doesn’t work that way. Neither can that person in their 40s now, realizing maybe they want to be home with their kids, now that their kids are, you know, almost, you know, double digits. They can’t just say this is where I’m going to stay home now. Because they’ve got a career that has a momentum and trajectory that they now can’t control.

And to first pause and reflect if, well what I’m doing now actually put me in the… all of these areas, personal, professional, financial, in a way that I would even be remotely satisfied with. And I think a lot of people in their dark quiet moments, maybe by themselves, or maybe with a spouse, they find out, it’s not really going to take me where I want to go. And that’s probably a really good starting point.

John Patterson: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Sorry to interrupt, that’s so heavy — It’s really good because I’m wondering, I know that people are listening, that are both, customers of ours and customers of yours, or possible future customers of yours. Many people at Influence Ecology, user services, wisely I might add.

Paul Adams: Thank you.

John Patterson: And… You’re welcome. Well thank you back. In your work with people, when you have them consider that future, that three year, five year, ten year future. What do you find most people have to confront, I know you said a few things here, but, in general what are some of things you find most people have to begin to confront?

Paul Adams: So one that I don’t think is the way, it’s not the way that they digest it, so I’m going to say it this way, just for the sake of the audience, to get the concept but-

John Patterson: Yep.

Paul Adams: The first thing people have to do is locate themselves inside their ignorance. If you’re going to start excelling in some new area of performance, better marriage, better physical health, better athletic performance, better professional performance, better performance with your money. You kind of need to like… If you were learning chess, first find out what are the bad moves that you’re making, stop those. So locating yourself in what’s not working as a primary tool. And I think that a lot of that can come from being a part of an ecology, of people, where somebody else says, “You guys talk without being able to hold up the mirror.” Because we operate in our everyday life and we don’t hear about these things.

In fact, Cory and I don’t tell everybody the things that… Because people can’t take it all at once anyways. It has to be dripped in overtime, so they can take the little pieces. So I would say one of the first things people have to confront, especially when looking at their long term planning, is understanding that they don’t know simple financial mechanics. Like most people probably listing right now, do not know that if they want $200 thousand of income every year, all throughout their old age, how much money actually has to be in capital at work outside of home equity, to be able to do that. They just… No one has ever taught them because, inside their current, everyone has just taught them the things they need to know to buy the next financial product, but not to hold an entire financial strategy.

John Patterson: Now everybody wants to know that number now that you just said that.

Paul Adams: You’re probably thinking right now, “I wonder what the number is?” And-

John Patterson: What is that number-

Paul Adams: It’s just a four percent distribution rule. So, for every $40 thousand of annual dependable income you want to have, what all the scholarship says, it doesn’t not matter if you invest it in single family homes, or commercial real estate, or you have a diversified basket of stocks and bonds in a diversified portfolio. You can still only take out four percent because those assets, even if they over time do seven or eight, they trend up and down. And as they trend up and down, and you take distributions, your distributions in down years accelerates the erosion of your capital and puts you in a position, where… I’m a little country so it’s like, you’re just eating your seed corn. You got to plant the field again next year.

So we got to make sure people are at least aware, that for every $40 thousand of income that you want to have control over, you got to have a million dollars set aside. So $200 thousand of income, is $5 million capital at work. Or said differently, if you’re making $400 thousand a year a people say, “How do you feel today?” And you say, “I feel like a million bucks.” You should say, “I feel like ten million dollars.” Because that’s what it would take, to throw off $400 thousand a year. You are a really, really valuable asset to your family. And many people don’t think of what’s the capital at work equivalent needed to produce for my family every year, what I do naturally by transacting the market place.

John Patterson: Great. So let’s go back to the beginning of your journey with Influence Ecology. And I’m trying to remember your word, we would say, we point out where people are naïve you’d said, what was your word for it?-

Paul Adams: Oh, locate themselves in their ignorance.

John Patterson: God I can imagine saying that to some people, and they’d be so offended. In any case, so if you locate yourself in your ignorance, in your early days of FOT, simply said, what was it?

Paul Adams: I would say something I went my entire career doing, is I thought what mattered was facts, and not feelings. And facts don’t care about your feelings. That’s what I would literally… like that’s how I oriented to the entire world. And, that worked pretty well because I was such a high performer and I could bring in a value.

But what I realized was, this entire time, every time somebody gave me some new profile to take, or something else, I would use it to learn about myself around personality, but I ignored communicated with other people based upon their personality. Now I did it for a very different reason. The financial services industry, the reason I built out my own business so quickly is, I didn’t like the sales culture of most financial firms. So I tried to distance myself  — As quickly as possible and so much of that sales training had to do with, for this type of personality do this, for… So I just wanted to be as far away as that sales stuff as I could. But I necessarily left behind everything around personalities. And what I learned in Influence Ecology, that I did not know prior, was that knowing something about personalities actually gave me a better capacity to teach people, to help them feel understood, and to give them the ability, for their sake, not mine. But to be able to understand concepts more quickly and transact easier, to become a client of ours, so that it didn’t take so much time. Because otherwise I would just work with the people who’s… their personalities would tolerate mine. Or ones who are simpatico with mine. And I had no idea this entire time, that I had been creating that. And now just understanding those personalities, and the same thing inside my own enterprise.

And now it’s like constant sort of inside jokes about the type of personality I am, between me and Jeff, or me and Miranda, or me and Cory. And how we navigate that and how we keep me focused on the areas I’m most apt to excel at because of my transactional personality type.

John Patterson: That’s good. That’s really great. Well said. Alright so, here you are. You’ve been how many years in this study now.

Paul Adams: I think it’s been almost… I think it’s almost four years… so wait a second, I think I could tell you. Two thousand, so it just have been just three years ago, that I was on the podcast, or 2 and a half, because I started, I think in March 2016… is my guess.

John Patterson: Yeah. So you’ve had the journey up until the time that we spoke before. Where are they now, where are you now? What’s been going on since we’ve last talked. And I know you’ve addressed a few things here, but what’s your journey been about, the last couple of years here at Influence Ecology? You’re still studying with us. You’re still a part of this you know… where I’m going to see you in a few days. So you’re still here. How come? What’s happening now?

Paul Adams: Well I’ll tell you. One of the things, John, that has been the most valuable for me being in Influence Ecology is how, I mean this in a really good way, but I’ve gotten, you know we say inside Influence Ecology like I’m hard to threaten now, both not just because of income, and net worth, who are also helpful. But also, we go out of our way to control our expenses. So it makes it very difficult for one client to say, “Well I might leave” and I say, “Well I can still tell you the truth about your money, because I don’t have to have you as a client.”

That same thing has also branched over to make it that I don’t have to study as rigorously as I used to. And it’s super easy to sit back and yet every month there’s an assignment due. And I have gone through months where I’ve been, maybe conceivably, the worst student that completed an assignment that month. And yet, if it weren’t for that, and I don’t mean it like a pressure. But the cadence of another — every month. There’s another assignment due. Over and over and over again. And If I wasn’t in this study, even if I had all the same books on the shelf, I wouldn’t be able to be in a study of those books. I just would be glancing at them on my shelf, that I think is one of the biggest things that keeps me connected to the ecology. Because frankly, I’ll show up to this mid-year conference, and I will in some way be left in a… And I mean this in a good way, like if you’re a runner and somebody just goes flying past you. People that are still managing to hold all of the major concerns that they have, and get their studies done, and then there will be somebody that might see me and go, “Oh my gosh, like I’m taking too much time in my career. Maybe I need more time with my family.” And they’ll take that from me and we end up being like that old biblical phrase of ironing sharpening iron, in the room together, to be in the position where here we are, all learning from the same… We’re all drinking from the same well but applying it to our own lives, in a way that-

Actually makes it faster for all of us to learn because we see it applied in different environments over and over and over again.

John Patterson: Great. That’s really good. And since we were last together, there have been a few changes in your, staff — So you now… I’ve noticed Cory is part of many of your marketing endeavors — Jeff and say a little bit about what’s happened there and why?

Paul Adams: Yeah so Cory became a partner this last year, and in no small part, became a partner because of, not just the value he was able to bring prior, but going through the fundamentals of transaction program, made him… like the best way I can think of it, like made him the $6 million to me. Like, he now understood who… more about what it was like to deal with me and my personality, and where to get the most out of me, where the enterprise could get the most out of me. To point me like… I can be like a guided missile in a client meeting, as long as I have something that I’m foc