To develop our fitness to transact effectively, we must practice.

For example, consider how we get competent at swimming. We could read about it, study it, watch videos, discuss it, and perhaps even practice on dry land and yet still we wouldn’t know swimming until we got into the water and tested our understanding through action. Furthermore, our fitness to swim could not be developed in a single attempt.

For competence, knowing requires doing and fitness requires practice.

We would never consider that we know how to swim or are fit to swim until we get in the water. Yet, in our experience, many people claim to know things they have never themselves done, practiced, or applied. Often, we claim to know a topic we’ve merely read in a book or seen online. In fact, our collective wisdom allows us to share in a kind of knowledge illusion, where we all think we know more than we actually do and rarely inventory how little we truly understand.

The recent Gladwellian phrase of “putting in your 10,000 hours” refers to this aspect of this discourse on practice: the notion that “talent” and specialized ability, expertise, and knowledge are as much a function of the environment as they are practice—a lot of deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice shapes the experience that in turn shapes the perception of new opportunities. Simply put, you do not and cannot see the same tennis ball serve as someone who has deliberately practiced the ability and expertise to return thousands of serves.

Suzanne Pool is a Cambridge grad developed her early career as an intellectual property lawyer working for large and small media organizations across London. She says: “did well financially but I was fat, unfit and bored with life.”

When she began our programs, she realized that she didn’t understand everything that was being taught – and had to consider her arrogance in relation to learning. She started applying deliberate practice to her habits and lost 70lbs in 18 months, grew a business in a new field and internationally, developed new partnerships. She states: “Having broken through my own barren, celibate, career-dominated life of my 30s – to living a fulfilling, adventurous and seriously fun (in all ways!) life in her 40s, I show her clients it is possible to grasp life by the horns, conquer their fears and live life as a daring adventure – no matter their age, or where you live in the world!”

Suzanne now owns a consultancy for Women’s Sexual Empowerment and supports women in their 30s, 40s and beyond – to have the most mind-blowing sex and enjoyment of their lives! As she says “You want your orgasm back – And it’s been missing for more than a decade?” Speak to Suzanne Pool.

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

“We live in a society that rewards overnight success, but we forget how much those people who’ve had overnight success have put in to being in that position. And probably it was many, many years of effort, and toil, and sweat and tears. And actually, the success is in having put in that effort.”

Suzanne Pool: Hello, John. My name is Suzanne Pool. I live in London, in the United Kingdom. I am now a coach for women, I empower women to enjoy sex in particular. In my former life, I was an intellectual property lawyer in the media industry, but I’ve undergone a major career transition in the past two or three years. As I said, I live in London. I am a born and bred Londoner. And I have studied at very well-known universities around the world, including Cambridge where I have a degree in history. And as I said, I was a lawyer for about 15 years in the media industry before I changed career. I am in my mid-40s, and I’ve been participating in the work of Influence Ecology for approximately two years at the time of recording. And I’m forever grateful for having encountered the organization.

John Patterson: There are a few things, by the way, you sent us some notes, and one thing that I often do is take a look at the journey that’s unique to you and perhaps there are things about your story that might be quite beneficial to people. As you know, and I think you’ve listened to many podcasts, many people have spoken on personality. Many people have spoken on some common kinds of things, but you bring up something that I just love talking about, because I think it is an often underutilized aspect of people’s accomplishing amazing things, and that is habits and practices. And so I want to get to that in just a minute because I think it’s an important piece. But before we do, it’s always useful for people to have a sense of you prior to Influence Ecology and what was life like? What were you dealing with? Describe Suzanne Pool of what, two or three years ago, if you would.

Suzanne: Yes. Well, so as I said in my introduction, I’ve gone through quite a major career transition in the past two or three years, and I would say that my happening upon Influence Ecology happened about the same time that that career transition… It had already begun before I came across Influence Ecology, but I was going through a transition. So at the end of 2016, and currently we’re in early 2019, I had been laid off from my job as a lawyer for a telecoms company and my father had passed away. So I had been through two very significant major life-changing events simultaneously. And up to that point, I had been quite a successful intellectual property and media lawyer in London working for some of the very largest companies in that sector. If I named them, almost certainly people listening to this would have heard of, I’m not going to say the names but they are very well known organizations.

But I found myself at the beginning of 2017 without a job, but also with needing to administer my father’s estate and support my brother and other family members and myself through that process of grieving for my father, and also not having employment. So I was left with a question of, “Well, what do I do now?” I’d been practicing as a lawyer for about 15 years, as I said, and it was great, and I was financially successful, and it was a good career, but I was a bit bored. And so I was looking for a new challenge, and at the same time, Influence Ecology was introduced to me. And the notion of transactional competence came into my parlance. I didn’t really know what it meant. And I can talk about what that does mean if you’d like but I think you’re better at that than I am. I was a transactional lawyer. That’s what I’d done. I’d negotiated contracts for my entire career. So transaction was something that I was very familiar with.

Influence Ecology had me think about transacting in a different way, and that spoke to curiosity for me around how I wanted to show up in the world. Which brings me to my new career, which I’ve had for about 18 months now, around empowering women and coaching women, really to have fulfilling lives, but in particular amazing relationships and amazing sexual relationships.

John: And when you first were introduced to Influence Ecology, did someone introduce it to you as, did they say the words transactional competence? Did they say anything like that? Did you happen to go, “Oh, yeah, I’m good. I’m good. I know transactions.” What attracted you to it? Or what was the thing that you heard that kind of had you go, “I should check this thing out.”

Suzanne: Yes. I can speak directly to that. So I was introduced to it by a friend of mine, Liz Marley. I’d known her for about 13 or 14 years at the time. I hadn’t seen her for a while, but she was somebody that I knew well and whose opinion I respected. And she emailed me quite randomly having seen some posts on Facebook, where I was sharing about having been made redundant and the situation with my father. She offered me an opening for a conversation, I would say, about different things and ideas that she had come across. And also just an opportunity to really talk and create a space for communication, which I appreciated. And one of the things that she introduced me to was Influence Ecology and really all she did was sent me a link to the website. She didn’t actually say anything specifically about it, other than, “You might be interested in this.” With a link. And she had participated in the fundamentals of transaction course, and I clicked on the link and there was the video of Kirkland Tibbels, our co-founder, speaking about ambitious adult and thriving in a really uncertain world, I would say.

What was said in the webinar about, well, frankly, working less, making more, essentially having more fun, really spoke to me. I can hear goals that I had for my life being articulated in what it was that I heard Kirkland talk about. So then I got in touch with Drew, and before I’d even had the appointment with Drew I was like, “Well, I want to apply.” And I have to confess I am a little bit arrogant. So when I say I wanted to apply, for me, that was given that then I would be accepted. I’m grateful that I was because here we are two years later.

John: So in everyone’s journey, there’s your life before, there’s sort of what happens when you’ve start studying with us, you know, where you discover you’re naive, or perhaps you discover a little conceit, or ego, or naivety, whatever the case may be and you began to perhaps discover where. While you may have thought you were transactional and competent, especially with what you did in your previous career, how did you begin to discover that you were naive about your own transactional competence?

Suzanne: Yeah, so transacting was something that I was very familiar with and the act of negotiating contracts. And so there was much of the technology in the work that was quite familiar to me, in terms of the articulation of it, but I think one of the things that I found most curious was very early on in fundamentals, you speak about the 13 steps of transacting. And I remember reading the 13 steps, and I related to my… I still do relate to myself this way, but I related to myself as someone who picks things up very quickly. So I can read something and really understand it on the first go, because I’ve trained to do that over 20 years. And I found myself having to reread this document several times and looking at the words thinking, “I know what each one of those words means, but I really don’t understand what that entire sentence means.” That was really out of my comprehension. You could say I was naive, I was naive to this language and articulation that I just didn’t understand, and I didn’t know what to do with that. So I was partly agitated by it. It sort of upset me slightly. But also, I was excited by it because I’d become quite complacent in my career, and I think what I was looking for with something that fired my intellectual brain.

John: Tell us a little bit about some of the results or outcomes of this. And in your notes, you really did say a few things about relationships, habits and practices, and commitment and consistency. And I think those are important bets distinctly but together their makeup is something rather remarkable. So just tell us a little bit about how those three things were either impacted, perhaps relationships were impacted or how those three things assisted you in what’s happened now?

Suzanne: All of life now is really inconceivably different from how it was two or three years ago. I travel the world at least once a month. I spend more time away from my home than I do at home. I think most critically, one of the outcomes that happened after my father passed away was that my brother came to live with me. And that was supposed to only last for six months. At the time of recording, it’s been two years. And there was no way that in 2017, my brother and I could possibly have conceived of living together for two years amicably, let alone actually, and we do live together amicably. Plus, I’ve lost 70 pounds in weight in the last 18 months, so I’ve lost about five dress sizes. I am a regular attendee at a strength training gym, and I’ve got the records for the gym in weightlifting, for women. And my business is growing in a way that I really didn’t expect. I’m sought of after to speak, I’m invited to participate in podcasts like this one, but others and I am offered large scale stages to speak on. So people know me and I am developing a reputation in my new career.

And I attribute all of that down to the work that I’ve done with Influence Ecology. And I think the thing that you speak to about relationships and commitment and consistency is the thing that has really transformed for me in my work with Influence Ecology, in terms of understanding that the smallest detail makes a difference, when repeated, consistently. Done once, it might produce the result, but if you want that result to happen over time, then you need to repeat that pattern over and over again. And what I used to do before Influence Ecology was I would throw the baby out with the bathwater. So I had a history of yo-yo dieting as an example, where I’ve lost pounds of weight many times. But I would reach my goal, and then I would kind of go, “Well, I don’t need to do anything else.” And then over a short amount of time, the weight would creep back on because I’m… Not even creep back on but pile back on because I didn’t ever follow the consistent patterns that were required to maintain that weight loss. And I didn’t know how to do that.

And what I’ve learned with Influence Ecology is to establish a foundation for myself. So what are the practices that really make a difference to my life every day? For those I can say getting up early in the morning. So usually around or before 6:00 AM in the morning, what to eat each day, how to exercise, and then rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater when something stops working, because things do stop working, they don’t go quite the way that I want them to go all the time. Looking at what are the dials that I’ve turned? What are the things the habits that I know work, that I’m not necessarily following as consistently as I want to, and then putting them back in? Or, how can I challenge myself to the next level in the habits that I have? So weight training is a really good example of that.

The way to progress in weight training is to put more weight on the bar. But most people don’t do that, they do more reps, which does produce a result. But I’ve learned that going to the gym, wherever I am in the world is fundamental not only to my physical well-being, but also my mental state, makes a difference to how I feel, and my ability to do work. And if I want to improve, challenge myself, so lift more. Even if it’s just one or two pounds more, lift more, but do the work. It’s the same with my business development, in terms of contacting people, maintaining relationships, making sure that I follow up. Working with people in my team, writing, I’m writing a book. And the way that that is moving forward is because I write every day. And I just didn’t know that before. I really didn’t.

John: I happen to be working on something right now for another program. And it was up in front of me this morning and yesterday and I’m doing some writing on this, but I’ll read a part of it. It says the recent Gladwellian phrase of putting in your 10,000 hours refers to this aspect of practice, the notion that talent and specialized ability, expertise, and knowledge are as much a function of the environment as they are practice, a lot of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice shapes the experience that in turn shapes the perception of new opportunities. Simply put, you do not and cannot see the same tennis ball serve as someone who has deliberately practiced the ability and expertise to return thousands of serves. And there is a kind of knowing, a kind of experience that arises through the practice of practicing. And I hear you talking about fundamentally the practice, if you will, of developing practices, and attending to your practices, and continuing to validate, modify your practices in accordance with your aims. First, anything you want to say about that. And then second, I’m going to ask you, what does that have to do with transactional competence? Because it sounds like something separate, right? So first, anything you want to say? And secondly, what does that have to do with transactional competence?

Suzanne: Yeah. The first thing that I would say about practice for practice sake, is that that in itself is revolutionary to me. So I practice yoga, and I have practiced yoga for a long time, very sporadically. But in the last two years, I’ve become very consistent with my yoga practice, and it gets better because I practice every day. And the creator of the system that I practice, which is Ashtanga Yoga, Pattabhi Jois said, it’s 99% practice, 1% theory. And so I think that speaks to the Gladwell comment. Yes, it has lots of benefits to me, but really, I practice because I practice. And the discipline of that is very satisfying.

I think that is what I would say about transactional competence. The practice of practice for the sake of it creates a trust in myself, a relationship that I have with myself for reliability, and steadfastness that enables me to engage in conversations and relationships with people that I might not otherwise have had, because I felt too flimsy in them. So I can be more demanding of other people, because I know that I’m demanding that of myself. And it also creates a flexibility, which is surprising, because practice takes discipline, which often is seen as rigid. But actually, in the having clarity for myself about what my boundaries are with my time, in particular around, I practice this, I do this exercise, I lift these weights. In having that clarity, I can then afford others space to create for themselves. It creates a clarity with me. That means other people can be clearer for themselves. And again, I didn’t know that.

I’ve always thought that I’m a lawyer, I understand obligation. I thought I knew what a person of integrity is. And actually, that required quite rigorous examination. That isn’t over, by the way, like I continue to engage in the inquiry of what is it to be someone who engages in deliberate practice, for the sake of it. That in itself is an interesting inquiry, in that I used to think deliberate practice was to accomplish a goal. And it’s very difficult to accomplish a goal without deliberate practice. But I think the beauty of deliberate practice is the deliberate practice, not the accomplishment of the goal. I think the Gladwell comment again spoke of this, where there’s innate talent, where we’re good at things because we said we’re good at things, and you don’t actually have to do any work to become good at them. And the reality is that a virtuoso musician is a virtuoso musician, because of the virtuoso, and they’ve practiced a lot to get like, probably way more than the 10,000 hours, Malcolm Gladwell speaks to. To become the virtuoso, that has them be the sought-after concert performer that they now are.

And it’s the same, so you’re not going to walk into a room of 10,000 people and be able to deliver an inspiring motivating speech that rouses them on your first go, it just isn’t going to happen. You need to rehearse and rehearse and rehearse and refine and refine and check out what you’re saying, and do it again, and throw it away and bring it back. We live in a society that really looks to instant gratification and satisfaction of need, immediately that need comes to the surface. And that will satiate a desire to eat a chocolate bar, but it won’t have you cross the finishing line in a marathon. And it won’t have you create a successful business. And it won’t have you get out of debt if you’re in significant debt.

We live in a society that rewards overnight success. But we forget how much those people who’ve had overnight success have put in to being in that position. And probably it was many, many years of effort, and toil, and sweat and tears. And actually, the success is in having put in that effort.

John: I think it’s worth mentioning, this is the year of ambition for Influence Ecology. In other words, this is you could say the year where what we said at our global conference in January of 2019, was we challenged people to develop a plan for some ambitious aim. In other words, an aim that is difficult to achieve. What we’ve been finding is that people are experiencing that when you attempt to accomplish something that’s difficult to achieve, your inspiration to accomplish that aim, if you will, goes up and down. I myself have been in some of the worst moods I’ve been in a while because I’m finding my incompetence, or my inability, or my lack of fitness for those things I seek to accomplish this year below par. They’re not where they need to be for me to accomplish those aims. So, what do I do? Well, I practice, and I practice, and I practice, and I practice, and I practice, and I practice. And I’m finding myself developing fitness in ways that I never imagined. So anything else you want to say to the topic of fitness and practice and habits?

Suzanne: I think you’ve summed it up really, really well. All I’d say is that in reference to the ambitious aim, what I’ve really learned is that in fulfilling an ambition, you have to do some work, and it requires deliberate practice, and just having the ambition isn’t sufficient.

“What I’ve really learned is that in fulfilling an ambition, you have to do some work, and it requires deliberate practice, and just having the ambition isn’t sufficient.”

John: I’m very happy that you’re now speaking in front of people. You’re quite, eloquent, authoritative, and you’re a rare combination of those things, and a commitment that people, and particularly women, I think that your specific customer, experience as you say, mind-blowing sex and enjoyment in their lives. And so I would expect if we investigated a little bit that you find that’s not happening. People might be experiencing quite the opposite, or perhaps they… You could say whether or not their concerns, issues, body image, who knows whatever goes on, where someone doesn’t allow themselves to enjoy sex, or whatever? I’m not the expert on this as you’re. So I just want to turn our attention to this, as I know it’s titillating, and I know it often gets a smile from people whenever we talk about it at a conference. But I find what you do to be an important thing for someone that probably has a reach into so many areas of their lives. So I want to let you talk about what you do a little bit.

Suzanne: Thank you, John. My personal belief is that having a fulfilling sex life is really a foundation for having a fulfilling life in all aspects, like you just said, at the end there. So when you are experiencing an intimate connection with another, usually your partner, then there’s a freedom that comes from that, that allows for more joy to be expressed, and freedom to be expressed and experienced in life. And it is sadly the case that not only do we not experience that level of connection and intimacy with another, but we just all ready don’t talk about that we’re not experiencing it either. So there’s a notion that we see Hollywood movies, where it looks like a couple are riding off into the sunset happily ever after, and at the same time, they’re jumping into bed with each other and ripping each other’s clothes off. And most people are looking at the screen and wondering why they don’t have that. And what I would say about that is that, well, they might not want to have that. And actually, they probably don’t want to have that because that’s fiction, it’s a movie.

But having a really beautiful, intimate, close, loving connection with a partner or another human being, allows for someone to see you in a way that we no longer have to hide ourselves from who we truly are. And when we stop hiding ourselves from being who we truly are, that’s when you can have that level of connection. So what I find amazing about the work that I do is the symbiotic relationship of allowing someone to see you, because you’re seeing yourself for the first time, and you’ve become okay with who you are, to allow someone to see you. And it speaks to the flexibility that I spoke of earlier, which is having open, transparent, clear relationships, in all aspects, in sexual relationships, in business relationships, in familial relationships, in friendships, makes things easier and I think more fun.

John: You mentioned before that you are being invited to speak. Is there a particular topic you’re invited to speak on? Are people asking you to talk about this generally? Or is there something you tend to address when you go to talk?

Suzanne: This subject that I most usually speak about is women in the 40s and 50s, who feel like their sex life is passing… well, their life is really starting to pass them by. They’re somewhat consigned to the scrap heap of society, their children are getting older, they’re in school, or heading to university, and they’re moving towards menopause or going through menopause. And that is a time of life when women start to feel like their function as women has dried up, for want of a better word. And what I speak about is that it isn’t the end of life. And I offer some ways to bring the sexy back if you like, and have more fun, because there’s no reason at all that we shouldn’t enjoy healthy sex lives and healthy relationships all the way through to the end of life. And they certainly don’t need to stop when we hit 40.

John: Anything else that you would like to say?

Suzanne: I just express gratitude really for and appreciation for you and Professor Tibbels, as I like to call him in making Influence Ecology and transactional competence available in the world. I think it provides a unique platform for communication and relating with people, whether it be in business or in other areas of life. I know that Influence Ecology speaks particularly to business. It’s intellectually stimulating and challenging in a way that I’ve never encountered before, and I’m grateful for that. And the opportunity to come and interact with amazing people that I have lots of fun with, from all around the world is really great at conference. So I look forward to being with you guys in the future. And yeah, thank you, is what I’d say.

In this episode, we include a small segment from our membership program webinar, where we talk about knowing and deliberate practice. This includes contributions from members, Maura O’Flynn, and Jennifer Judy.

John Patterson: There’s a few things that I want to talk about in terms of deliberate practice and how it’s relevant. So one thing for sure, is we’ve said this in a variety of ways throughout our programs, and that is that knowing requires doing. I think what I’d like to do here is I want to work with somebody. So if somebody like to work with me a little bit, then raise your hand carry on, I’m going to have you call on someone for me. If you would, please raise your hand, and I invite you to participate with me.

Karie Kohn: All right. We have one hand out. How about Maura O’Flynn?

John: Okay, great. All right, Maura.

Maura O’Flynn: Okay.

John: How are you?

Maura: I am really good. Thank you, John. How are you?

John: I’m good. I’m good. So do this for me. So we’re going to study this for just a second, then we’re going to move on to studying this. I’m going to have you read it. We’re going to ask some things about it. Everybody else listening, to read this along with Maura and I and study this, and I invite you to place your ego or hubris aside, make sure that you’re here to study. Okay? So Maura, please, if you would read this from the top?

Maura: Great. Knowing requires doing. To develop our fitness to transact effectively, we must practice. Application is the act of purposefully and intentionally putting into practice that which we have come to understand. For example, consider how we get competent at swimming. We could read about it, study it, watch videos, discuss it and perhaps even practice on dry land. And yet still, we wouldn’t know swimming until we got into the water and tested our understanding through action. Furthermore, our fitness to swim cannot be developed in a single attempt. For confidence, knowing requires doing and fitness requires practice.

John: Good. So, what do hear in all that?

Maura: I really love the analogy. It’s sort of like the bicycle, but it’s even better because it’s swimming in water, because you could drown if you don’t know what you’re doing. And we act sometimes, like if we know something, knowing everything. And particularly for me, my ambitious aim is about my health and a lot of weight loss, and I know lots about that. But knowing and doing something are very different, and even thinking that I know and starting to do the things I know, don’t even show up the same in practice.

John: What about your fitness? Let’s say Maura, you were fit to swim five years ago, but you haven’t been in the water?

Maura: Yeah, we think just like someone says… Yeah, just like riding a bike. Well, let me assure you, I actually had that experience. I went to Hawaii last year. And I do love to swim and I can swim. But I noticed it was definitely different, because it had been a few years and I can… Definitely I’m not drowning I can get around, but swimming like to actually, like laps, that is very different than not dog paddling. And just because I knew it, and I was a great swimmer, let’s say when I was much younger, it’s not the same. And it’s not just the body, it’s also your you brain, how it works, it’s just different.

John: You’re addressing something, I think some people, I think generally you and I are naive to or perhaps we have some hubris about, which is that our fitness is always in decline. The fitness is the kind of skill ability, practice competence that is developed. And if I’m increasing my fitness to reach an aim, and I’m working on that fitness, I’m developing that fitness, and maybe on a scale of one to five, we’re just going to call it that for the sake of some rating. Maybe I have moved from a one to a two, now I’m at a level of three, I feel pretty good because I’m at a level of three in terms of some scale of fitness, I start to go to work on level of four. But now, you know I’m certainly a bit cocky, and I feel good, feel like I’m accomplishing something. So I stop practicing, I stop doing the work that I was doing before. And I don’t know it, but typically my fitness then slips backwards. And it might slip back to a three or a two. But lo and behold the hubris, I do the thing that I’ve known for a long time, or I’ve already demonstrated that, and then find myself unfit. Often a bit taken aback or surprised, by the way which fitness just simply declines.

I’m going to go to Jennifer Judy. I’ve got some other hands too. Thanks. Keep your hands up, guys. I have some more questions here. Jennifer, please. Anything else you want to cover be to this or ask?

Jennifer Judy: Well, the thing I would say is, I’ve transformed my physical fitness over the last 15 months, like really profoundly. And the thing it took for me was an extraordinary concentration. And the very first thing I had to do was start acting like I didn’t know what I was doing. And as background, most people here won’t know this, but I’ve been on a magazine cover in a bikini as a bodybuilder. So the opportunity that offered for hubris and thinking I knew how to do it was hilarious, because my doing that 15 years ago had zero relationship to the body I’ve got now. And at the time, I had a personal trainer who swore to me, “You are really always getting better, or always getting worse.” And I know I was kind of cocky about that, and I actually got that. I think I hear you saying that too. Really, and truly, those are the only options. Physical beings don’t stay the same, we’re not really made for that. So your two opportunities are just picking which direction you’re going.

John: That’s very good. Good. And then Jennifer, you know this thing about we wouldn’t know swimming until we got in the water, I wanted to take the moment to make a point about this environment called the water. Because, look, each of us knows practice or perhaps we know study. We even see it with some of our really, really smart folks here to Influence Ecology. They study on papers. They’re real intent about studying for a long time. They’re proud of it, “I studied for 20 hours.” Or whatever they may say, “And I wrote that thing out so carefully. And I wrote it out. It’s there, I’ve written it, I’ve read it, I’ve studied it and watched it.” But then we say, “Well, how many invitations did you make,” for example? “Oh, well, none. I’m just…” And I appreciate this study, by the way, I really do. But until we get in the water, whatever that water may be. And this is just meant to be an example of an environment where we must address our fitness in the environment in which it occurs. So anything you want to say about this and you’re done?

Jennifer: Oh, I could go on. And one of the conversations I have with people is people who are like, “Yeah, I tried dieting, you know I gave it two weeks, and I didn’t lose any weight and I gave up.” As background, and I really thought I knew what I was doing right and like the things that worked 15 years ago didn’t work now. So I actually had to fit to do things that didn’t produce the result I was after, but moved me in the right direction. It took like four months of work, which included a lot of failing at like what I thought I needed to do. For instance, giving up refined sugar was early on, and I know that’s not a thing for everybody, but it was for me. And there are so many opportunities to fail at that. But until you get in and start failing and failing and failing, and working at like, “Well, what new habits am I going to build? And what’s the stuff I’ve tried, that’s not working?” I’m a bit of a data geek and I collected an extraordinary amount of data. So when people are like, “Well, you should be able to eat this.” And I’m like, “Well, thank you for sharing. But I’ve tried that and that’s ineffective for me. It may work for you.”

Everyone’s got a different biome, different genetics, but you cannot just go read a book and actually have the result. And you won’t know what it takes for you to put it into practice until you start doing and swinging and failing.

John Patterson: My special thanks to our guest, Suzanne Pool. In our show notes, you’ll find links to connect with her and all the links to any 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.

In Inglewood California, Christopher Mercier, President and Design Principal of (fer) studio builds award-winning Contemporary Iconic Architecture designed by a process whereby the final form is a result of a unique and collaborative design research method entitled Form Environment Research – or (fer) studio for short. FER’s approach is to produce a unique iconic form that offers each client a strong personalized visual identity arising from exceptional care for their aims.

Christopher Mercier is a specialist in the human-environment relationship and uses the “environment” as a tool to help do a lot with a little. In today’s interview, we’ll speak with him to discuss the opportunities for building these “environments” to do the heavy lifting for us. After the interview, we’ll hear a segment from one of our webinars about building these kinds of environments to help us influence others to meet our ambitious 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

“When you create some type of organization of spaces, rooms, or relations, you create that environment and that environment then ends up with a form that becomes an identity.”

Christopher Mercier: I’m Christopher Mercier, founder and president of (fer) studio. We’re an iconic architecture and urban design office in Inglewood, California. John, I appreciate being here this looks like it could be fun.

John Patterson: Yeah, I think it will be. Say a little bit about you first started participating in Influence Ecology in what year?

Christopher: Geez, I think it was at least two years ago now. Two and a half maybe. Something in there. And I started with Fundamentals of Transaction and originally I worked with Lorenda Phillips. And she was a coach for many years and I did her structures for success course that she did years ago. And Lorenda was the person who got me over to finally meet with you when you were doing a presentation in Pasadena. One of the workshops.

I went to that with doubts I would say. By the time I walked out of there, I was like, “Wow, this is really, really good. This is great. This has everything I’ve kind of been looking for.” So, I was really impressed.

John: And tell me a little about that. What was it that you were looking for, if you remember? What was it that had you say to yourself, “Well that sounds like something I should do.”

Christopher: You know what, it was just in the presentation and going through the conditions of life and personality types and everything. Over the years, I’ve been… read philosophy, this and that, and I’ve done this and that program. I’ve done some Tony Robbins stuff. All of these things that we’re doing were pieces of information that could be applied here and there. But I never felt like there was a comprehensive approach to something and I feel like that’s where Influence Ecology for me really comes together as it’s not just a business tool. It’s not just a life tool. It’s not just this tool or that tool. It’s kind of like the whole toolbox all together and that to me, was kind of groundbreaking.

John: I don’t disagree. In fact, we have a lot of people that say something like, “Well, I’ve heard this and I’ve tried that and I’ve studies this and I’ve applied that. But it seems as if you guys at Influence Ecology bring it all together in kind of a cohesive program.” Anything else you want to say about that?

Christopher: That’s been a key piece because I guess I think I’ve always struggled with… You do this stuff for your business and then your life’s over here, and it’s this separate thing. And now working with Influence Ecology, where I am now, it’s the first time where I’m kind of combining everything. And it all looks cohesive under one idea. There’s separate parts to these things, but it’s all a full, continuous, collected idea which I think is fabulous.

John: One of the things that you pointed out in your notes was you began to discover that of the many conditions of life, and by the way for those that are listening for the very first time, that condition of life is I don’t wanna say an unavoidable area of your life that all human beings must attend to. For example, money, work, career, relationship and many others.

So, Chris, in your notes, you talk a little bit about the conditions of life. As, we presented them, you began to see some things about thinking accurately about those different conditions of life and then how to take care of many of those conditions of life, perhaps in new ways. So, anything you wanna say to reflect on that part of your journey?

Christopher: Yeah. I’d say that I grew up in Michigan in a typical Midwestern, middle-income family household. And my parents always taught the idea of kind of hard work and you’re gonna get where you need to go and that was really the motto of everything. But having gone through Influence Ecology, everything we’ve done so far and what I’ve been doing is realizing that yeah, hard work is great but unless you’ve got plans and accurate thinking and you’re really setting yourself up to understand how you’re gonna address these things, it’s really not gonna happen. And so, that’s what I really have been working on over the last couple of years since I’ve started is really strategizing different plans for these different conditions of life and creating deadlines and goals and aims within each of them.

John: And prior to that time, were you just crossing your fingers or you were just working hard and thinking, “Well, if I just keep working hard it’ll turn out?”

Christopher: Probably a little bit of both. A lot of the second one.

John: Well I think it’s the same for all of us, right? I’ve got my head down, I’m working, this should turn out, right?

Christopher: It would be funny because partial plans would come along and you’d kind of have a plan for one direction for a while and then at some point that plan would kind of like, deluded. Then off to another thing. So, there was no kind of consistency with it either.

John: So I think one thing is useful to point out the design of our programs and everything else is kind of an environment. Our programs are an environment. One of the ways to relate to the name of our company, Influence Ecology, is this way.

And I’ve told this story a dozen times, but, that if I want to compete in the Olympics, then I have to go put myself in the right environment to develop myself. I have to put myself amongst other Olympic athletes. I have to put myself inside of kinds of frameworks and commitments and obligations. I have to eat like them, sleep like them… I have to be around people who are going to say, “No, no, no. Try that one more time,” and all of that.

So there’s an environment that’s built for people to be able to produce those rather uncommon result. So Influence Ecology, is an ecology that influences you and I to meet our goals. Or said another way, we produce an influence ecology that allows the environment to do the heavy lifting. In other words, we use the environment to help us a little bit. And I’m excited about that part of what we do in talking with you, Christopher, because as an architect. And not just any old architect, I’m going to ask you to brag a little bit about some of your accomplishments, but environment’s your middle name. I look forward to finding out a little bit more about that and its importance as far as what you do and what you offer. Anything you want to say about environment generally before I get onto that?

Christopher: Yeah, I think the environment is what we are all, in all the time. In terms of ecology and stuff. To me, it’s really the basis of how we as architects understand and structure the world. Environment is really all about relations and I think that’s a huge, huge point. And that’s something that we’ve built on with my firm, form environment relation. Form environment research and the funny thing is John, I’ve never said this but when I was developing the name years ago, I was back and forth between form environment research, what it is called today, and form environment relation. It’s a funny thing that I ended up on the one because I think both of them play into what we really do today.

John: And say more about that for people to understand form environment relation or form environment research, what does that mean?

Christopher: What we’ve been working with is the words, form environment research, which become F-E-R in our name, basically. Form is basically an iconic identity that a building or environment takes on. And then, the environment itself is what takes that identity through its organizational solution. So when you create some type of organization of spaces, rooms or relations within an environment, you create that environment and that environment then ends up with a form that becomes an identity. It is the research process, which we call our design research process, entitled Form Environment Research, that basically helps us establish those relations within an environment to create that form.

John: What do you mean by iconic architectural design or iconic architectural urban design in reference to F-E-R?

Christopher: I guess the first thing I’d say is I actually think all architecture is iconic. And it’s really just a question of what level or what degree of iconic-ness it really takes on. Some buildings are bland and I would say there’s almost zero iconic-ness. Whereas or authenticity. But as you increase something like the Eiffel Tower, there’s a huge amount. So all buildings have a level of iconic identity. I think that’s the nature of architecture. In my definition of what iconic is, it’s really what makes the form identifiable, memorable, as an entity.

And our process, at form environment research, why iconic form is important is it because each company or at least should have their own identity. And that identity should be derived from, and created out of, the relations of their environment. One of the ways we work with clients is we basically, we start off and we develop different relational diagrams. And what you’re trying to do is to look for ways that your first solve any breakdowns or any difficulties they’re having when they need efficiency. And this can go from a creative office space, this could be a museum, this could be done through residence. But it’s these relations that you’re looking for, that you’re trying to establish new organizations of those relations to create its own iconic form. And that form should become the identity of that specific customer.

John: And I’m thinking about, as an example. I’m thinking about when I grew up. When I grew up back in Texas… When I went to school, we learned very early on about certain types of architecture. For example, I remember bank architecture. So the banking industry in the old days, if you will, or in the early 1900s at least in the Unites States, need to represent something rather permanent and sturdy and authoritative. And so the architecture was heavy and it was stone and it was columns and there were pillars. So there was something meant to be demonstrated in that environment. In that architecture. And nowadays, as I’m looking at banks and watching bank architecture, it’s so funny I pay attention to this stuff still to this day. I watch bank architecture become a little bit more hip. You could say not so old white guy sitting in a… more hip, more of the times. So there’s a different kind of iconography that’s being represented in that architecture. So are those examples of what you mean or anything you want to expand on?

Christopher: The bank example is fabulous. And I can’t remember, I’m blanking, I think it might be Citibank? They have the new bank café or… So, when I look at that, the way that I read that situation is that what happened is that they reorganized the environmental relations of how the bank works which has allowed them to restructure an identity that you now recognize as the new café slash bank. So in other words, the way you use that interior space, the way that those conditions of environment relational things are going to happen inside the bank is different than what happened in the bank you’re explaining from the past which was a much more formalized and rigid structure with youth.

And I think this is where a lot of architecture goes astray. You can’t just apply an identity to a form, to relationships. You have to use those relationships to find the identity that comes out of that and I think there’s… You see a lot of buildings that look like one thing and you walk in the door and it’s something else and there’s this unrelated-ness that I struggle with. If it’s not intentional and if it’s not for a very good reason.

John: So, I think you and I, Christopher, to bring to light some things that you do naturally in your architecture and in what you’re focused on which is through the relationships between the individuals in an environment, the environment’s utility, all of the different functions. And there’s probably a lot I’m not even bringing to this example. But you make real, in architecture, those relationships into some iconic representation of those commitments so that when the architecture is present, that the architecture itself then does what to us critters that see it or inhabit it?

Christopher: What we started to do over the last couple years, thanks to Influence Ecology, is we’re starting to look at the relations in an environment as actually transactions. And we’re starting to look at the individuals, the groups, people, within those environments that create different departments, say, as also how they transact.

And the idea comes… kind of another level. What we look for is we look for… A client comes to us and they say, “Look, we’re having this breakdown. This isn’t organized right. It’s not flowing correct.” So one thing is to find that solution. That’s one level. The next level that’s more interesting to me, and it’s more important to what architecture can do, is that you say, “Okay. So here’s the solution. But what are the unrecognized opportunities that we aren’t catching?” So that’s where we look for and we bring in a word that we call cross-pollination.

A simple way to explain how cross-pollination would work if we were playing with this larger urban design project and it had in it, there was an elderly housing situation that was part of the project. And that was on one side of the project from the developer and on the other side of the project there was gonna be a preschool. A daytime preschool. And so what we decided to do was take that preschool and take elderly housing and actually merge those two programs. Because they’re two programs that have in one way, nothing to do with each other. But in another sense what the elderly individuals can gain from spending time or interacting or creating or transacting with the children of the day center and vice versa, creates that whole new cross-pollination opportunity.

And so what that does it says, well then what does that environmental situation look like? Where do they interact? How do they interact? And then when you work that out, then if you have wood as the form of this. And so, that’s where form environment research really comes around and that’s what we’re really after is we’re trying to not only solve the problem but we’re trying to find the opportunities that people aren’t even aware of so that in the end what we’re doing is we’re creating an architecture that helps really increase an individual’s or an organization’s performance in the world.

John: You know I’m working with a variety of different companies around the world and one of the things I’m helping them do is to use the power of environment. So, to make a long story as short as possible, sometimes within organizations, many people are attempting to produce buy-in. That’s typically the catchphrase to use for a whole bunch of influence and compliance that the people seek within enterprises. In other words, I’d like for my new initiative at the company, I’d like to get buy-in on this and have that thing go throughout the enterprise. I want that thing sort of, ingrained into the enterprise. I want these new practices, I want these new habits, I want these new narratives, I want these new ideas, I want these new standards to be accepted and complied with throughout the enterprise.

So that’s what we might refer to as compliance. And I will talk to them about building an environment that does the heavy lifting for them. And it’s often the case that someone will be really gifted in a particular aspect of this, like a performer personality which is the relationship oriented personality, will be quite gifted at building influence and compliance, producing buy-in. As a relationship person, going out and getting everyone on the same page having lots of conversations. But it’s much more relational and conversational. Whereas the judge personality, the person that’s much more about evidence and standards, will construct sort of the boundaries and edges, the guidelines, the standards, the policies and procedures to produce influence and compliance. Right?

So what we’re doing Christopher, is we’re working with people to understand that there are a lot of different pieces to the architecture of building an influence ecology. There is the ideas, there’s the relationships, there’s the processes, there’s the standards and you can hear all four personalities in that. There’s something to building an influence ecology where we take those things and use them to produce influence and buy-in within an organization or an enterprise.

Now, from what I can hear and what you’re doing is you’re doing something quite similar. Producing architecture that does some of the heavy lifting for your clients. It tends to speed the transactions in some ways and I’d love to hear your comments about that.

Christopher: Wow, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do too. Is really create an environment that really supports and enhances what people are already doing and really can take them to the next level. To me, it’s such an obvious thing that it needs to happen and it’s such an obvious place of what architecture should be doing. I’m great to hear that. This is really cool.

John: Well it’s great to hear from you too. I mean, I think that’s the fun of having two guys again, it’s been a while since I studied architecture. But what I loved about it was the relational study of it. What drew me to it originally growing up as a kid and loving to go outside and build stuff in my garage… But as I studied it, I started to understand how relational it was. In other words, that some people would throughout history build a church for example to embody the principles and ethics or perhaps the spirituality or the divinity of something. So religion expressed in architecture. And we have so many examples throughout history of acts expressed in architecture. Or acts expressed in this room. And so as people are listening, the reason I’m excited to talk to you about all this is because for you and I, it might be normal to think of well what’s the environment that it’s required for this aim. Now that’s ultimately what we’re talking about. What’s the environment required for this aim? Well I don’t know, what’s the aim?

It sounds like that form environment research begins with, “All right well what are the aims, what are the relationships here and then let’s take those aims and reify them.” That’s a word we use a lot around here. Make them real, produce them in reality. So that again, that environment does some of the work for us. I’d be interested in any comments about that. But also, I’m curious to know in some of the architecture that you’ve built, what have been some of the responses to the things that you’ve attempted to reify? Where you’ve taken ideas and placed them, built them into something real and concrete?

Christopher: I’m gonna refer to a project we completed a couple years ago in Santa Monica. It’s a residence. It’s for a couple, their children are grown and into college at this point. They had had a house in Sherman Oaks up on a hill where they grew up, had a swimming pool, decent sized yard and everything. And now that the kids were out of the house and everything they wanted to move out of Santa Monica and somewhere closer to a walkable kind of market and coffee shops and things like that. And so they purchased a property there, they tore down what was a perfectly fine small house on the property and it came to exactly your question about, “What’s their aim? What did they really want?”

And so, it was interesting because part of the thing that I think we do when we go through a design process, is we actually try to pull that question out of our client. Like, what is it that you’re really looking for? And it’s surprising how difficult that can be. In the end, what we created was a contemporary home, which is something that they were well aware they wanted. But the nuances or the environmental structure and organization of that house was something that they were not clear. So, we had to listen for cues. And some of these things were that they wanted a two-story residence with so many bedrooms and bathrooms because of resale. They wanted a house full of light. They wanted to never have to go upstairs if it was at all possible because they felt were gonna grow old in this house and we want to have a master bedroom on the first floor so we never have to go up there if we don’t want to.

And this can go on and on and on. There were a ton of these cues but the driving force there were a number of pointers. So what ended up happening is we developed the house where we had bedrooms on the second floor but then we took the house and we pulled the house apart down the middle. Down the spine. And so we created a two story street, if you will. What that became the circulation for both upstairs and on the first floor and it was visibly and physically open. So you could be upstairs on the corridor and look down to the corridor below. And so, what this did is it said because there was a master on the first floor, you don’t have to go upstairs but you will experience the entire house without having to got here. And it also allows when somebody’s at home, one of the kids are home and they’re upstairs, you can engage somebody from two floors and this was kind of my growing up as a kid and everybody’s upstairs yelling, “Mom,” because you need your shoes or something.

It was maybe a partial response to that of my youth. So we split the two in that way. Created this double hygge space. A master on the first floor and then what we also did is down that spine we created a linear skylight that tracks the sun throughout the entire day. So that spine becomes a two story piece that pulls the house apart, allows for the integration of the second floor which they never want to have to go to, and it also becomes a natural daylight piece for the entire day as the sun moves across the sky from East to West and it lights the house differently all through the day. So the house became the environmental or organizational aspect of the house was of a particular solution derived directly from what we learned in trying to understand their aims. And they loved the house. They absolutely love it.

John: I’d like for you to brag a little bit about yourself because I know that your firm has won some awards, received some recognition, there may be some things you’d like to say to brag a bit about yourself. So anything that we should know about what you guys have accomplished or anything about who you are?

Christopher: Well I think one of the unique things about (fer) studio is a lot of architects I think they specialize in building types. And that’s understandable. It’s a logical way to address things and become specialized. But we’ve taken a different approach.

So what we do is we specialize in a client who’s looking for something unique. A client who really wants to make something that’s out of the ordinary and is really particular to their lifestyle, where they want to go in life, what they’re looking to do and what they’re looking to achieve. And so, we will do a variety of projects to museums, to single family residences, to multi-family residences, creative office spaces. We’re recently working on a cannabis store. Any type of project is open to us as long as the client themselves is looking for a very, very specialized solution. And I think that’s where we really can bring a lot to the table.

John: That’s fantastic. I was looking up some information on you and I saw an article titled, Space Man. By the way, I loved this title so much. I thought, “God, that’s so great, I gotta rip that off.” It’s such a beautiful way of saying that you’re a guy concerned for environment, but I’ve read a few different articles about you and about what you guys have accomplished. Anything else you’d like to say that you’re really proud of?

Christopher: The last thing I’d like to say is, I think this is really important, is that what Influence Ecology has brought to the table for (fer) studio is… We’re reinventing what (fer) studio is using the 13 steps, using the Pattern of Inquiry, using the Transaction Cycle and we’re trying to completely restructure how we do, how we operate, and how we address situations. And it’s interesting for me because when I first came up with the idea of creating (fer) studio and doing these things, I was always looking for that and I never had a clear path as to how to do it. It’s really finally coming together. That realization is how to make that work. And I would say to everybody who’s studying with Influence Ecology is you really have to be patient. I know John, you, and Kirkland constantly say this. You have to be really patient about going through these steps and these pieces. They look awkward, they look funny sometimes. It doesn’t seem to be working. But if you keep plugging at it and keep plugging at it, it really starts to come together. And it’s really been doing that for us and I really appreciate that.

John: Well I hope you had fun today. I certainly did. I enjoyed talking about that subject, as you can tell. I love that subject as much as you. I think you might like that subject a little bit more than me but it’s hard to tell. I might have to arm wrestle you for it. I might go after that Space Man title, myself. It’s a fantastic one.

Christopher: Yeah, I’m welcome to share the Space Man title with you.

John: Well Chris Mercier, of (fer) studios, thank you for being with us today. It was a pleasure doing this interview with you and I look forward to letting the world know a little bit more about your talents and your studio.

Christopher: Well thank you, John. This was really great and I appreciate everything Influence Ecology’s done and… Thank you so much.

John Patterson: We offer a segment of our Fundamentals of Transaction program here to give an example of what it might look like to begin to build and expand your influence ecology. This bit includes myself and Vice President Drew Knowles in Auckland, New Zealand.

John: Well, I’m going to sum it up this way by saying money is the value of your help. It’s the value of your help. It’s how your help is seen as valued to others in the marketplace. That’s why we work so much on your being valuable or low cost. Both of those things are ways in which you can increase your value, or the value of your help. And your career is your identity. In other words, the way that people are related to your value or health in those specific ecologies.

So you build and expand the help, the others that you require to fulfill your aims in each condition apply. You get help by offering help. You get help by offering help. So when we began this entire session with concentration and focus, one of the reasons I’m committed that you began to concentrate. Concentrate your offer. Focus your offer. Make it quite clear that you want to expand the identity of the value and help that you are to others in the ecologies where your health is seen as useful.

So, you must build an identity of value or help to attract the invitations, offers and requests from powerful centers of influence. In specific ecologies, there is something important for you to understand about your known-ness in ecologies because you are already known, perhaps unknown. But you’re known as unknown. I don’t know that guy. I could see in there, but I don’t know him. So there’s a kind of known-ness, a value or health, ranging from unknown to celebrated in different ecologies. And we want to just caution you, don’t assume that your smartness, that you’re liked, that you’re productive, that you’re sufficient to meet your aims because you may be naïve to the actions required to produce an identity of value or help.

For example, do you only take, or do you offer help? Go ahead Drew.

Drew Knowles: Yeah, one of those things John I’ve been seeing and learning for myself is it’s not just help. Someone the other day was saying to me, “Oh, I offer my help often and sometimes it reciprocates.” I said, “Well, you could take that up one level. How about you think about what specific help you can offer.” And two examples, John.

One is the editor of this magazine, I found out earlier on, and I’m writing for them regularly now. I found out early on, he isn’t as networked as I am and I thought he must have access to everybody. But it happens that there are certain networks he doesn’t have access to. And he needs quality writer, quality speakers, all sorts. So I had deliberately, and it’s partly because of the other people that I know want to get a chance to write and deliver. I offered him a number of people recently where not they’re going to be speaking at certain events and writing certain things, and he’s calling me regularly. He rang me the other day. I talked to John said, “You’re doing this keynote for us. How can I have the day event be a really good lead generation for Influence Ecology and help you grow your business?” And I was like, “Go on.” And that’s the kind of thing that’s happening, right?

And then this new office space that I’ve got that the woman whom manages it, it’s a kind of co-working… I found out early on, and this is the key point everybody, is I found out their aims. What has her win in her job? And it so happens that people through the door of this beautiful office space that looks over the water in Auckland, is one of her KPI’s. So now we’re working together and we’re going to put on a partnered meet up event, and I’m basically going to bring a bunch of people through the door, which is what I want to do anyway. And she couldn’t be more supportive and helpful in making sure my office experience… They’re gonna open up to their members, and we’re in this incredibly lovely reciprocal relationship. Really, I just found out what are her main aims and thought to myself, “Can I or is there someone else that I know offer that specific help to help this person. Because then they are really gonna help me.”

And I could go on and on, but it’s about specific help. Not just saying, “How can I help you?” That’s costly.

John: Right.

Drew Knowles: That means it’s on them to think about how you can help them. That’s not an ambitious adult. That’s an adult. Anyway. That’s the last thing I’ll say.

John Patterson: Good, I’m gonna do a quick thing to the work. I’m gonna help the producers, or the more objective minded, and what does it mean or look like to build and expand your influence ecology? So, I’m gonna start right here with this. I’m gonna tell you my story.

So, first of all, I want to build and expand my influence ecology and cooperation in a very specific ecology. So, I live in Ventura, California. I moved to this area a decade ago. I live in Ojai, California, which is up the valley a bit, but I work in Ventura, California. And I have not been known publicly here and I’ve always not wanted to be known publicly here but I began to change my mind and look at how I might be known not just as, “Oh, that guy.” But being known for a very specific offer of help.

So, all I did first is I looked at this list and I asked, “All right. Well, in what ecology, what specific ecology might I want to impact? You know what, I’m gonna start with the Ventura Chamber of Commerce.” The Ventura Chamber of Commerce is quite celebrated in this part of California for a bunch of stuff. They’re rather unusual and kind of amazing group of people. So I thought, “Nobody knows me. I’m unknown.” Top of the list, unknown. No identity value help or harm. How might I become somewhat known or known? The Chamber of Commerce president and the chairman of the Chamber, I emailed them and I send them an email that says, “Hey. I was involved in Austin, Texas back in sort of the beginnings of what’s now South by Southwest if you know that large global conference and I was also involved quite substantially in attempting to attract the Olympics to Chicago and Chicago tech industry. I’d like to help produce some kind of global identity for Ventura. Can we talk?”

30 seconds later, I get an email back. I am not kidding. 30 seconds later I get an email back inviting me to lunch the very next day. That lunch led to a meeting with a committee head who happened to be one of the people accountable for LinkedIn Learning. So LinkedIn Learning is a campus nearby us. They invited me to now spearhead this particular group and now I’m one of the co-hosts for the 2019 Economic Outlook Breakfast for Ventura for 300 people, all the local politicians and VIPs. And we are pointing to a big future for the city of Ventura that my committee is ecstatic about. I am now quite known in that group, but I’m about to be not just somewhat known but very known. Perhaps well known in the city of Ventura for a very specific kind of help.

By the way, I didn’t ask to lead any of these things. I didn’t ask to head up this committee. I simply demonstrated my help and as I demonstrated my help, I was invited to participate. Now knowing I was doing an experiment in career ecology in building my influence ecology, I was very picky about what I say yes to and I said yes to a few things and I’m about to be quite known in this area for something that matters to me very dearly.

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

The Influence Ecology Podcast is produced by Influence Ecology, LLC in Ventura, California. This episode was recorded May 1, 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.

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.

What are you working on? Are you busy being busy? Many of us can end a day wondering what we’ve accomplished, yet know we were quite active. How do we know we’re working on the right thing? In today’s interview, we address how slowing down to speed up, accurate thinking, and asking for help can produce satisfaction and balance across many conditions of life.

Moira Clay Ph.D. is regarded as one of Australia’s foremost experts in the niche area of health and medical research strategic management. Her sole focus is helping research organizations drive better health outcomes through world-class research. She has been a vigorous advocate for researchers for close to 20 years, with extensive senior executive experience in funding bodies and medical research institutes in Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia. She was President of two peak bodies – the Australian Society for Medical Research (2003) and the Australasian Research Management Society (2013) – leading significant public, political and scientific advocacy initiatives. She has worked closely with Federal and State Governments for over 20 years. She holds an Adjunct Position as Professor with the University of Western Australia.

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 turnaround for me was getting help and to recognize that I couldn’t do it all myself. Much though I loved the concept of being superwoman, I was not superwoman and actually getting help was going to be the key. When I got help, I suddenly became a lot more focused on what it is that I do […] Now, I am saying no, I am getting help and my business is flourishing.”

John Patterson: Moira, welcome to the Influence Ecology Podcast.

Moira Clay: Thank you, John.

John Patterson: If you would take a moment and introduce yourself. Say your name, where you live, what you do.

Moira Clay: My name is Moira Clay. I live in Perth, Australia. I have a Ph.D. I run my own business in medical research strategy. I offer medical research organizations solutions to overcoming barriers, and I love what I do.

John Patterson: That’s fantastic. Your Ph.D. is in what?

Moira Clay: My Ph.D. is in biochemistry. Yeah. I studied liquids, fats in the bloodstream and that was a long time ago.

John Patterson: If I may, just what as a youngster had you interested in that?

Moira Clay: I was always interested in science and the pursuit of knowledge. I was fascinated by it and I really continued down a path which was pretty much what was laid out for people at that stage, and it certainly was the path that my family had been accustomed to. My siblings had all had higher education. My parents had a higher education, so that was what I did. So I went on to do a degree without really giving it a lot of thought. That was the path that I took, but it didn’t have a lot of direction to it at that stage.

John Patterson: Yeah. And now how has it shaped what you do now?

Moira Clay: It shaped what I do now in one very, very important way, I love medical research. I’m excited by medical research. I know medical research. I’ve done it, and I really feel that through my experience and what I’ve been able to contribute, I can have a much greater impact for the community because of my knowledge of medical research. I’m very passionate about it.

John Patterson: For those of you that are listening, I’m able to see you and you’re quite passionate about it. It’s very great. Well, I love that and I would imagine you love it for the science. You love it for the difference it makes. You love it for the opportunity to expand our body of knowledge and its impact in the world. Anything else you love about it?

Moira Clay: I love it for the people, their worries in their own way. They’re looking to solve a problem. They’re looking to find solutions for some really significant health problems affecting the community today and the people right from the youngest to the people who are, you know, in their eighties who are still doing research. They’re amazing people.

John Patterson: That’s fantastic. Now for people to get a sense of you, cause not everyone’s got an image or a picture of you. So you’re in what age range or unless you want to say your age, are you?

Moira Clay: I’m in my early fifties.

John Patterson: Early fifties excellent. And I’ve often seen pictures of you out adventuring about and all kinds of ways. You’re quite an adventurer. You’re currently wearing some athletic wear. I’ve seen you climbing off off mountains and crossing ridges across canyons and all kinds of things. You’re quite an adventure, aren’t you?

Moira Clay: I didn’t realize probably up until about 10 years ago how much I loved adventure. As a child, I had a number of physical challenges. I had various surgeries and you know, I was led to believe back in those days that I probably had to be fairly conservative in what I did. But I’m also a great passionate believer in having a go and really doing your best and trying things. And you may not do it as well as others, but have a go and you know, work with people who know what they’re doing. And it’s amazing what you can achieve. I have achieved some exciting things in adventure and I will keep on doing that.

John Patterson: That’s fantastic. Now you and your husband Paul both participate here in Influence Ecology and I believe you’ve been participating for a little while. How long have you been participating?

Moira Clay: About two years.

John Patterson: About two years. All right, very good. And then if we come forward to now we’re going to take people on a bit of your journey and what you experienced through your participation here at Influence Ecology. But here you are now, and how’s life now? What have you been accomplishing lately?

Moira Clay: Life for me now is fantastic. So I think my experience in Influence Ecology has actually simplified my direction for me. It’s made me a lot more focused on what it is I want to achieve. It’s made me a lot more focused on what it is I offer and also given me clarity on the slowing down. It is actually, it’s actually fine. You don’t need to always be in a hurry. I’ve been in a hurry in for a lot of years. I’m actually not in a hurry now. I think the other most powerful thing about Influence Ecology has been all the people within the Ecology. I’m working with people all over the world and they are offering me such valuable help in developing my enterprise, in really developing my personal pursuits. And that has been priceless.

John Patterson: Are you in a study group with people from different places around the world?

Moira Clay: I’m in two study groups. I have people from the US, people from New Zealand. It’s fantastic. It’s like they’re next door to me. The technology means that you can communicate very effectively with people from all over the world.

John Patterson: That’s great. And one of the things that I saw in your note is that you said in the past financial year, your business earned as money as you did in a previous two years and that you were able to purchase a brand new home. And can you tell us a little bit about that?

Moira Clay: So, I think when I first started my business, my focus was on being busy enough to earn the money to pay my mortgage. But then through Influence Ecology, I actually took the time to work on my business and to get help. And I think The turnaround for me was getting help to recognize that I couldn’t do it all myself. Much though I loved the concept of being superwoman, I was not superwoman and actually getting help was going to be the key. And when I got help, I suddenly became a lot more focused on what it is that I do. I was able to say no to people. And I had never said no to people because I was always scared that if I missed out on business, I was not going to be able to survive. Whereas now, I am saying no, I am getting help and my business is flourishing. It’s very, very exciting.

John Patterson: And counterintuitive. I mean, you know, you’ve made as much money this year as you made in the past two years. You used to be busy. Now you’re not. You are adventuring and playing and traveling every time I look at you on Facebook. So you know, life is a very different thing. Let’s go back to the, let’s go back to pre-Influence Ecology. What used to guide your thinking? You know, was it just I need to get up and if I work, work, work, work, work, it’ll turn out? What guided that?

Moira Clay: I used to hide under my rock. I used to hide under my shell, you know, this was all me if I bunkered down. I can get all this done. Sleep was not a priority for me. I could just really focus on me and the amazing amount of things that I could do. That was naive, that was absolutely naive. And now I’m able to actually look at my business, my health, my legacy, my relationships, my friends. Say, well actually I can achieve what I want to have a balanced life, to have a satisfying life and through really thinking accurately about what it is that I want to achieve. And it’s incredibly satisfying. Sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes it doesn’t go right, and that’s okay. It’s really about taking the time to assess that and really learn from it and plan a trek forward. It’s been a great journey and you know, being where we are now, Paul and I look at our home and we think, wow, this is fantastic. It’s a great environment. We liked the space, we like the air here. It’s wonderful.

John Patterson: I’m curious about this, this note, I love that you included in your grand plans in the beginning. Now listen, what I love about this, and I think it’s a fun piece. Do you want to tell people what I’m pointing to that in your early grand plans, you wanted to what?

Moira Clay: I wanted to be Prime Minister of Australia.

John Patterson: Yes. You have to tell us. And by the way, if that was the serious aim, fantastic. Right? Fantastic. Because certainly there’s people who have that aim and become Prime Minister. You wanted to be Prime Minister and why and what changed?

Moira Clay: I wanted to be prime minister because my passion was improving the health of the community. And my perception was that the best way to do that was to have the top job, so to speak, be the big boss of Australia and actually to be able to lead policy and drive investment. That’s what I wanted to be. And that goal continued on for years, and I’ve shared it with a lot of people. And lots of people said that they would vote for me, which was very exciting. But then I had a real reality check. I actually went down a path of assessing the practicality of getting into politics.

So I went to see my local member of parliament and I told him what I wanted to achieve and he said to me, Moira politics needs more people like you. They need people who have diverse experience and backgrounds who can offer something into the political landscape and really the oversight of the country, that you can. But the problem is you either need to be in politics literally from when you’re 15 or 20 or you need to be famous. You need to be famous and be able to parachute into a political role at a later time.

I was neither and I think probably the most profound thing he said to me was that you can have more impact when you are not Prime Minister. You can have more impact from behind the scenes. So, unless you want to be the front person, pursue other ways to have impact, because it is possible.

John Patterson: That’s fantastic. So you now make a difference in the way that you do with medical research and everything else. Do you have an eye towards policy now in politics? Now that you’re in the position that you’re in and beginning to satisfy other aims? Is Politics starting to wink at you again from the future?

Moira Clay: I don’t want to be in politics. I would like to influence politics. I would like to influence policy direction. I would like to advocate the medical research and I have done that. I’ve done that very successfully and I would like to continue to do that, but I can do it more effectively from within medical research than I can from politics, because this is where my credibility is strong.

John Patterson: So with all that you’ve done, and care for, and are passionate about. Then I would imagine you must have a bit of a soapbox about something. And we always give people an opportunity to soapbox about something. Is there something you’d like to soapbox about?

Moira Clay: As I work with medical research organizations all over the country, they have very clear aims that they want to make a difference to the health of the community in whatever their specialist area is. It could be brain health, it could be cancer, whatever it might be. The soapbox I have is that whilst they have those aims, they’re not willing or open to setting a plan to achieving them.

They are very much stuck in sort of the old traditional thinking. This is the way we’ve always done it, so this is the way we’ve always done it, so this is the way we go into achieve our aim. It’s incredibly naive because things have changed, the environment has changed, the requirements have changed. You need to be working in a different way in order to achieve the impact that you have said yourself you want to achieve. So it’s really about actually being aware of the environment, responding to the changes in the environment, setting your direction to achieve your aims and be willing to follow that path. That’s my soapbox.

John Patterson: It sounds as if you might be one of those fans of what we teach when we talk about that we validate or modify assumptions along the way as we measure things, especially as a scientist. I know that many people in science, of course, the scientific method, thrives on disproving what they know or think to be true. It sounds like the scientific method might be a wonderful thing to bring to politics.

Moira Clay: Very true. One of the challenges is the drivers for medical research now in achieving funding have driven behavior. People are not focused on, are less focused on their ultimate aim as they are on surviving, they need to survive, they need to get money. So they do what they can to get the funding to do research. And the problem is that drives the wrong kind of behavior.

John Patterson: And do you have a proposal for correcting that? Maybe, maybe not. Just checking, but can you solve that problem? Yeah, that’s a big one.

Moira Clay: There’s a number of things to correct it and one of it is to actually get organizations focused on what their aims are and the plan to achieve those aims rather than the plan to get money. So if they’re focused on achieving the aims and putting in place that plan and then saying, well what resources do I need to achieve that? That will make a difference. And there’s other plans to attack the sources of the funding for them to be saying, well we need to see different evidence of your fitness for us to give you money. So it’s a multilevel plan of attack.

John Patterson: Alright, very good. Lastly, if you were to, you know, there are probably lots of people that you run into and given what you now have learned here or given what matters to you and caring about the people around you, what are some of the things that you either tell people when you see them transacting for all kinds of things or what are the things you think privately about what they ought to be doing differently?

Moira Clay: Last week I talked to a group of young entrepreneurs in science and these were really excited. You know, their energy was very, very high. And they wanted to learn from me, sort of what my recommendations were for setting up their businesses, becoming an entrepreneur, and really getting them on track. The big thing I said to them was that you need to recognize what it is that you do and know what you do well, and ask for help. Getting help is absolutely critical. It’s not just you in your little isolation. It’s around actually seeking and actively ambitiously requesting help from people to help you achieve your goals. As you will be able to help others achieve their goals. It’s all about asking for help, giving help. That’s the big thing for me.

John Patterson: Beautiful. Well, it’s a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. I enjoyed so much getting to see you and Paul at the Annual Conference and I look forward to seeing you at the Midyear Conference coming up in July. And hopefully are you guys coming back in January again?

Moira Clay: I definitely am not sure that Paul is, because his new role may not permit that. But I’m definitely coming.

John Patterson: All right, very good. Well, I just look forward to seeing you and continuing to work together, play together, and learn from one another. Thanks so much for being here.

Moira Clay: Really appreciate it.

John Patterson: In this episode, we’ll listen in on a Fundamentals of Transaction program where Vice President, Drew Knowles and I talk about autonomy and building a surplus of valued help.

Drew Knowles: Most people relate to the notion or idea of autonomy as a condition of individuality. You hear that as the inventors, which you’re speaking to. John is very much about individuality. Don’t have to rely on anyone. Freedom is definitely when you were saying it, John, as a more of a performer.

[inaudible 00:21:56], I used to think of autonomy was just, I’m just free to do whatever the hell I want. No one.

John Patterson: Right.

Drew Knowles: And I don’t have to plan and schedule and do all that, which is, you know, that’s never going to happen. But as far as you know, never having to do anything. Freedom for sure, and total self-reliance as the other way people were like to the notion or idea of autonomy. And it’s really as if one day that you will no longer require the help of others, and you can exist independent of others.

If you haven’t already realized this now, but this is a false notion. Want you to get, this is a false notion. You could even say it’s the current.

John Patterson: Yeah.

Drew Knowles: Autonomy is not a condition. Will you be able to act alone as you see fit without the need of others? It’s in fact a condition entirely the opposite of this, it’s polar opposites. Autonomy is having more help then you require. It’s more help than you need, a surplus of help. When you start to pull together what you’re learning in the fundamentals of transaction program and begin to make some connections here, you can see why we stress dealing with work, career, and money as fundamental conditions of life. The most important you could say in order to live a fully satisfying life across the layers and your health. Because if you don’t have your health, good luck with getting all the help you need.

But why you study money and you get so clear about money. Money is a unified source or instrument for people of exchange. And the way we talk about money at Influence Ecology, at it’s simplest, money, is help. Money is the value of your help. Money is the value of help you have access to. It’s your ability to enter into economic exchange with others.

So, when you start to think about what we’ve said here about autonomy, which is what we’re all seeking, at some level, it’s a surplus of help. So, if you’re not tending to and dealing with career and your identity in the marketplace and specialization, you’re going to struggle to have the level of exchange, the money to have you be autonomous.

John Patterson: Sometimes there are lessons where I would love to reach through the microphone here and you know, grab people by the shoulders and go, listen, this is the big point here. This is the big deal here. And here’s why. In every condition of life what you and I are working on ultimately is having surplus. Surplus money, surplus identity, in other words, it’s the kind of identity that opens all kinds of doors. A surplus of health, in other words, we have little concern for our health into the future where it’s well taken care of. We have a surplus of time, right? So, what we’re at work on here really is, is surplus of some kind. And one of the primary shifts that many people experience in doing our program is that rather than working to someday have freedom, they work on the value of their help.

So if you think about that for a second one, I’m going to work on the value of my help. I’m gonna work on the value of my health. What the heck does that mean? Well, that means I’m going to work on building a powerful and relevant and valued identity. That means I’m going to work on my enterprise, whatever I’m doing to make money through. I’m going to work on the value of my enterprise.

Many people are clear that if you buy a house, and you do things to it, you improve it because you want to improve it’s value, because then, later on, you hope to sell it. And like a profit. Well, you’re doing the same thing all the time in your career, you’re always at work on building the value of your enterprise, increasing the value of your enterprise, increasing the value of identity, increasing the value of your help. So if you have autonomy then you the kind of help around you that is in abundance.

Drew and I were talking about this, remember we were talking about this thing, a day or two ago, Drew. And you had a really good example of turning to someone, you know to meet something.

Drew Knowles: I could say it right now cause he’s actually on the call as I was going to mention it.

John Patterson: You know, I’ll say this Influence Ecology was built fundamentally so that we have, I’ll say it selfishly, and then I’ll say it from a group point of view. So, why did I start Influence Ecology? Cause I wanted to have a huge network of valuable help around me. Why? Because I have a surplus of help. I’ve got autonomy, I have anything and everything I need. I have people, and resources, and money, and connections, and networks, and a reach into almost any industry. I have a reach into all kinds of places around the world. I’m constantly invited to stay in people’s homes all around the world. I can pick up the phone and get help with almost anything.

The Influence Ecology Podcast is produced by Influence Ecology, LLC in Ventura, California.

This episode 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.

Kristen Moeller is a literary agent, author, and speaker who lives in the mountains of Colorado. Her career includes an acquisitions editor at Morgan James Publishing and executive publisher for Persona Publishing. She is now an agent at Waterside Productions, the literary home of Eckhart Tolle, Neale Donald Walsch, Jean Houston, and other luminaries. She has authored three non-fiction books, two of which include a foreword by legendary Chicken Soup for the Soul author Jack Canfield. A three-time TEDx speaker, Kristen has appeared on NPR, ABC, NBC, Fox News, and been featured in publications such as the New York Times and the Huffington Post. She even had a brief stint on TLC network’s Tiny House Nation after losing her dream home and all her worldly possessions in a devastating wildfire in 2012.

Today’s episode focuses on the subject of accurate thinking vs. magical thinking. Kristen shares her views about the bankruptcy of magical thinking and how quickly life can turn around when just a little accurate thinking is brought to objective situations like money and business.

For those unfamiliar, magical thinking is a term often used in anthropology or psychology. It denotes the belief that one’s thoughts by themselves can bring about effects in the world – or that perhaps ‘thinking something’ corresponds with doing it.

If you study the evolution of modern western thought, Magical Thinking appears to have been born of modern mysticism, pseudo-science and psychological studies which claim that confident belief in one’s vision (or one’s self) produces real-world effects. The occasional coincidence of belief and effect further confounds the error.

In the 2006 self-help book by Rhonda Byrne – The Secret, (based on an earlier film of the same name) extolling the law of attraction, claimed that thoughts can change the world directly – that people and their thoughts are both made from “pure energy”, and that through the process of “like energy attracting like energy” a person can improve their own health, wealth, and personal relationships. The book has sold 30 million copies worldwide and has been translated into 50 languages.

In this episode, we’ll hear more about Kristen’s own lessons on the subject – and – finish out the episode with a small bit of our Primer on the Transactional Approach.

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

“I rely so much on my personality and so much on spontaneity but […] that really didn’t actually serve the bigger picture because I hadn’t done accurate thinking. I’ve spent a lot of time doing fun things but didn’t necessarily actually get me anywhere.”

John Patterson: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world. I’m your host, John Patterson, the co-founder and CEO of Influence Ecology, the leading business education in transactional competence. We teach you how to transact for more of what you want. Broadcasting from Ventura, California. This podcast features case studies, stories, and lessons from business owners, executives, and entrepreneurs who found real solutions, real results, and real satisfaction, not only with work, career, and with money, but in every area of life.

You’ll hear how these ambitious professionals found that those who transact powerfully thrive. Kristen Moeller is a literary agent, author, and speaker who lives in the mountains of Colorado. Her career includes an acquisitions editor at Morgan James Publishing, an executive publisher for Persona Publishing. She is now an agent at Waterside Productions, the literary home of Eckhart Tolle, Neale Donald Walsch, Jean Houston, and other luminaries.

She has authored three nonfiction books, two of which include a foreword by legendary chicken soup for the soul author Jack Canfield, a three-time TEDx speaker, Kristen has appeared on NPR, ABC, NBC, Fox News, and been featured in publications such as The New York Times and the Huffington Post. She even had a brief stint on TLC network’s, Tiny House Nation after losing her dream home and all her worldly possessions in a devastating wildfire in 2012.

Today’s episode is on the subject of accurate thinking versus magical thinking. Kristen shares her views about the bankruptcy of magical thinking and how quickly life can turn around when just a little accurate thinking is brought to objective situations like money and business. For those unfamiliar, magical thinking is a term often used in anthropology or psychology. It denotes the belief that one’s thoughts by themselves can bring about effects in the world or that perhaps thinking something corresponds with doing that something.

If you study the evolution of modern Western thought, magical thinking appears to have been born of modern mysticism, pseudoscience and psychological studies which claimed that confident belief in one’s vision or oneself produces real-world effects. The occasional coincidence of belief and effect further confounds the error. In the 2006 self help book by Rhonda Byrne, The Secret based on an earlier film of the same name extolling the law of attraction, claimed that thoughts can change the world directly, that people and their thoughts are made both from pure energy and that through the process of like energy attracting like energy a person can improve their own health, wealth, and personal relationship.

The book has sold 30 million copies worldwide and has been translated into 50 languages. In this episode, we’ll hear more about Kristen’s own lessons on the subject and finish out the episode with a small bit of our primer on the transactional approach. Here’s the interview. Kristen Moeller, welcome to the Influence Ecology Podcast. Pleasure to have you here today.

Kristen Moeller: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

John: Take a second and introduce yourself if you would.

Kristen: Hi, I’m Kristen Moeller. I am an literary agent, a published author, at three-time TEDx Speaker, a pit bull Mama, rescue dog lover, and a mountain girl. I live in a little town called Salida, Colorado. Three hours southwest of Denver in the mountains with my husband as well.

John: That’s fantastic. You first participated in Influence Ecology when?

Kristen: Let’s see. I know I watched my husband begin first. My husband David started and I really think that was 2012, maybe fall of 2012 and so I watched his progress. We had been to the introduction, an open training session in Denver. My interest was peaked, but I thought, “You go, let me see what happens. You go first.” Then went to the annual conference in Ohio. I guess that would’ve been the January of ’14 and something was shifting then. About a year after he started. I think fall of ’14 is when I started.

John: Very good. What would you say your primary lesson has been studying here? What’s the biggest takeaway you’ve gotten from studying here?

Kristen: The combination of accurate thinking and really seeing my naivety and my– Magical thinking is a little bit too, I don’t quite want to say I was that far out there, but I was definitely and I swim in the world of personal growth and so the world of some woo woo. I would say I had hopeful thinking, so moving from hopeful thinking to accurate thinking. I was thinking about this interview and I was thinking my theme might be, growing up is hard to do.

John: [laughs] That’s great.

Kristen: But necessary when you’re 52 years old.

John: Absolutely. One of the reasons that I was looking forward to this conversation was because of that. I know a great number of people who have been weaned on the nuggets of magical wisdom. I’ll say it though, I don’t know how else to say it and there’s a lot of great things out there, there’s a lot of amazing things out there. There’s a lot of spiritual things out there. There’s a lot of profoundly moving things out there.

There’s all of that. I’ve participated in some of those things myself and have been moved to tears over, I would say, some awfully magical, wonderful life inspiring things. I think what you’re pointing to is why I was excited because there’s nothing wrong with all of that. Certainly, in terms of making sure that life turns out for you, I think what you’re saying is that ultimately it may not have been good strategy. We could say it that way.

Kristen: I was just thinking as a long-term strategy by most of us, not effective as a long term strategy. As a short term burst of enthusiasm. I took a lot of really– a bold action and did amazing, amazing things, but all of it just burned and burned away. There wasn’t really anything lasting that I could say, “This is what I’ve created.”

John: I think that’s the great thing. Did you find that the long-term strategy that you did have was more about something quite spiritual or something perhaps in tune with the universe in all its cosmic order and good things happen to good people? How would you say it was for you? I’ve got my own version of it, but how would you say it?

Kristen: I wasn’t completely in the camp of the universe will provide, however, those words might not have come out of my mouth, but that was still the water I was swimming in, the air I was breathing. My skeptic mind, I think it was more trying to relax into that the universe would provide as a strategy but not believing it, but working with trying to believe that versus thinking, “Maybe there’s something else that might be more effective.” Something that actually has legs and has something I can count on and return to.

John: It’s really good. Like I said, you and I have the opportunity to make available a lesson if you will, a case study. Again, I am not committed that we sit here and dismiss magical thinking. I myself, my spouse says, “You have amazing carma.” We spell it C-A-R, carma because I always get a parking space up front. I enjoy the notion of having good karma and that I always get a good parking space.

Do I sincerely believe that it has something to do with my will over the universe to go my way, I don’t. Is it fun to think so? yes, it is. Do I think I have the same karma around money? I don’t, I certainly don’t. I think I used to. When a decade or so ago when we began this work, Kirkland had said this one thing that I thought was very powerful. Which is, all that stuff’s great, it’s not good strategy. It’s like winning the lottery, everybody has the opportunity to win the lottery. Don’t bet your future on it.

Kristen:  I love that. I love that. I mean it’s not a good strategy. I love everything you said. I think for me it’s wishful thinking, is really where I rested. If I’m good, if I’ve done all the right things, if I had a different kind of foundation. I have a master’s in counseling. I’ve done a ton of personal growth work. Am in the personal growth field, and I had done my time, I had the degree, I had the right connections, and so all of these elements coming together, I had hopeful thinking that it would then, then is when I guess the universe would step in or something that it would be the tipping point, it would just happen.

It’s not a good strategy, and now it’s funny because I can, maybe I could hear it, no I probably couldn’t have. I was going to say, I can spot it now in other people. I can really hear the naivety in other people. Then the tricky thing in my industry is that it appears “to work for some people” because they seem to be, that’s what’s coming out of their mouth. Vision boards, and if you think it, if you believe it, it will happen, and law of attraction, all of that kind of stuff is what comes out of their mouths and then a lot of them seem to be successful. There is this illusion that gets created that that’s true.

Then all these followers are trying to do what they’re doing, and not having success and wondering what’s wrong with them. I think that’s actually part of what happened to me is like, “What’s wrong with me? I am thinking positively, I have not maybe the best vision board but I have some, why is it not happening? I have this winning personality and I’ve made all these great contacts and connections, and I make a difference and I genuinely care and I’m helpful, and I’ve put people together and I’m a connector, why is it not actually then just happening?”

A pretty major crash of disillusionment and despair happened after all of that of just thinking, “I gave it my all. I don’t know what else I can give, because I gave it my complete all.” It’s very very upsetting. Then being upset in that world of law of attraction, if I’m upset then I’m just going to attract more upset. I was 22. I know, it’s like exemplified after. I felt like maybe I should just go and get a J-O-B and just forget all my dreams and goals and aspirations, just really throw in the towel and give it all up.

John:  I appreciate that you are transparent about the despair. It is our experience that oftentimes when people work for quite a while in what I think you termed the manifestation of something or the attraction of something, whatever the magical thinking might be, whatever the hope might be. When the hope runs out and you’ve tried all the things you know to do. When the magical thinking, the manifestation, and those things don’t pay out, and you have no alternatives then it makes you not only question your actions but it also makes you question some other things. What did you begin to question about yourself for or life at that time that threw you into despair?

Kristen: Well, I just want to add a little piece to that because I think it’s more than just– For people listening, because you may think, “Well, I do more than just sit and create vision boards, I’m actually out there doing things which is action.” Because I was doing a lot of action, I mean tons of action. Just so many things and speaking and radio interviews and had my own radio show and writing books and doing all these amazing things, where there was a lot of action, and coupled with the hoping that all of these factors that there would be some kind of conversion of all this effort, and then it would turn into my dream.

It was doing everything I was taught at that point, everything I knew to do to try to create this dream. The despair wasn’t just being– I didn’t actually know what else I could do because I was doing. I was taking actions. I was hopeful and doing all the internal aligning with. I was ready for that level of life. I was ready for my book to be a huge success. I was ready to be the next Elizabeth Gilbert.

I was ready to be on Oprah’s couch and I had people saying to me, “Oh, I see it. Kristen, I see it. You’re going to be on Oprah’s couch,” and I was like, ” I’m going to be on Oprah’s couch, really, it’s going to happen.” With all the actions and all the degrees and all the prep and then all the hoping to have it not actually happen, despair might even be too small a word. It was devastation really, but I didn’t completely want to admit because it was so crushing to that little hopeful part of myself of just this childlike hope. Because then without hope, what do you do? If there’s no hope, then what’s the point?

It was this kind of, “I really don’t know what to do.” It was a bankruptcy, an emotional psychological spiritual bankruptcy. Fortunately, not a financial bankruptcy but that could have been coming down the pike. It just really deeply impacted my confidence, impacted my– because I thought, “oh, bold–” I even wrote, I told people how to take bold action, “Take bold actions, you get results.” It’s like I’ve stopped wanting to take any bold action. I wanted to just really hide from the world and retreat completely and not say, “Screw you, I don’t want to put myself out there.” Really, it was a big, “Screw you world. I don’t want to do this, this sucks.”

John: I want to take a moment and also draw some correlations because what you described isn’t too dissimilar from people we see following any kind of popular idea about how to succeed. Let’s just say that you listen to all the people who say, “Well, you need to build your lead’s pipeline and automate your lead’s pipeline. It’s all a numbers game. All you need to do is increase your number of leads from 1 a week to 50 a day and then it’ll turn out.” Then people go do all of that. We watch them have the same, “Oh, wait a second. All the experts said, and all the things, and I did all the deed, I took the classes and I signed up,” and so forth and they have the same kind of bankruptcy.

I could go on with different popular things. You could say the same thing about a diet. There’s all the different popular, go do this thing. You go do those things it doesn’t turn out for you, so then it throws you into kind of bankruptcy. I think we can include those people because there’s something I feel that people begin to discover when they start thinking accurately. First of all, before we go to accurate thinking, anything that you’d like to say about that general thought of all of the ways that people tend to follow, some particular strategy and find out might be bankrupt for them?

Kristen: Yes, I actually can relate to as well, because I did then do some training to help me start to build that funnel and all of that and I still ended up in just exhaustion and kind of in the same place. I think that all these things that we do that aren’t quite getting it, that aren’t quite, it’s that– I mean, bandaids, I don’t mean to trivialize it because it’s like you said earlier. It all really serves a purpose. I wouldn’t be who I am today without having done all the various things I’m doing, I have done. I pay homage and tribute to all of that, and it wasn’t getting the job done.

John:  It’s worth acknowledging also you and other people, the ambition, the drive, the determination, the kind of not stopping, the face of all kinds of– You’re just determined. You’re going to go for it and make that thing turn out and all that. There’s all of that to acknowledge as well.

None of us would be where we are without all those lessons, none of us would be where we are without having developed our own will and determination and all those kinds of things. Yet, something is missing. You have pointed to something that you’re going to call accurate thinking. What did you discover then?

Kristen: Well, I think first I discovered that I wasn’t thinking accurately. Obviously, I’ve heard those words before, but it wasn’t something kind of removing judgment and again, like we’ve just said, not making anything wrong that I’ve done before, but just looking at how it went, the case study of how it went. All of that naivetY and hopeful thinking and the hoping that all of those forces would just conjoin and become the thing that I really wanted.

I never thought accurately about it. I never really took it apart, I never did like we do in Influence Ecology. I have a manual now for my business where I’m looking at different– everything I do is in the manual instead of making things have this structure that before I rely so much on my personality and so much on spontaneity. It had served me but then it could be the thing that I think I’ll just try my personality again in a different way. I’ll just take another bold action, I’ll just pursue.

The amount of energy and time that I spend going after particular things that really didn’t actually serve the bigger picture because I hadn’t done accurate thinking, I’ve spent a lot of time doing fun things but didn’t necessarily actually get me anywhere. If I took all those hours back and those days back and those years back and had put them into what I now know, then, I wouldn’t have spun my wheels so much and I would actually have something to show for it.

All those years I’ve been at the radio interview, yes I did, they were great. I got to know people and it was wonderful, but zero results like no results, no nothing other than relationships but as you know, some of us think that relationships equal results, and I thought relationships equal results. I have all these amazing relationships, but it wasn’t showing up as money in my bank and something consistent I could count on, and something that I knew was going to continue to come in. It was just something that really felt good and I was all about what feels good. I’m not afraid of hard work, but it’s got to feel good?

John: Yes. Oh, my God. I think people are going to love this interview. You’re describing so many people and what they truly think or go through. You’re giving some great language to it. It’s very good.

You did develop some really amazing relationships throughout this journey. I know one of the people that did the foreword for one of your books is Jack Canfield, an amazing relationship, an amazing person to be connected with, especially if you’re in the business of helping people as you are and the way that he has and does, and then you’ve befriended others in that camp. You want to say a little bit about what’s happening now and what you’re currently working on.

Kristen: Well, it’s to tie that back in because Jack was a role model and a hero for me as he is for so many people, but it was an area to where I had the hopeful thinking because I thought if I just get to know Jack and have a connection with him then something will happen. Yes, he wrote my foreword but then that was the next level. Then there’s, “If Jack writes my foreword, then something will happen.” Well, Jack wrote my foreword and that was amazing. For both books, he wrote my foreword. That’s awesome but that doesn’t again–

John: It doesn’t put money in the bank necessarily ma’am, necessarily. There’s still something missing.

Kristen: Ther’s still something missing. For me, I mean, it’s wonderful to have really highly connected people in our lives. It’s a beautiful thing, but it’s really looking and accurately thinking and doing an internal assessment of what’s the motivation here. Is it just feeding my ego? Is it just feeding my hope? Am I wanting to just be swept along with them or do I actually have something that I’ve thought about and considered and used accurate thinking to be an offer that I can present to them that will forward my aims? That’s a different story than just trying to ride along in their coattails.

I don’t mean to diminish even what I’ve done along the way. Again, it was fun to share stages with people like that but in the long run, it didn’t serve. Lately, ever since doing Influence Ecology, participating in Influence Ecology, I have been able to be much more strategic in my alliances and strategic in my relationships and really looking at is this a relationship where I’m just spinning the wheels and it just feels good to be in relationship with this person? How much of my time can I afford to spend doing things like that? Some of it as you know, you came to, I did a benefit concert with Jack and with some other people, some really heavy hitters, and it was amazing.

Did that actually forward my work? Not necessarily. I was consciously choosing that that was that one over here. It doesn’t mean you can’t ever do things that are feel good, that are just kind of the heart-based, heart-centered aspirations. I can do those, but before that’s all I was doing. Now, it’s like, “Okay, now, what is–” I’m connected to all these people and I became a literary agent a little over a year ago, which took my career identity to the next level as I’ve been in the book world ever since 2008 and started working behind the scenes and building my relationships there.

Becoming a literary agent was a strategic move, really done with thinking accurately, done with looking at– I had the idea and had the dream before, but I realized it was going to be more of that bold action kind of place. I sat with it and I kept thinking about it and I kept doing the work and I kept doing the assessment and I kept asking trusted advisors for feedback. When I chose to take that action, I had thought about it for a while. Now I’m a literary agent, but as a new agent, I was getting referrals from some of these heavy hitters, and of course, because they’re these heavy hitters, I’m like, “Of course, I’ll take on your friend and your referral.

They’re huge, and they’ve got this big name, and it’s amazing.” But what I found is I wasn’t doing accurate thinking in those early relationships. I took on some people that now a year later is much savvier this far down the path. I wouldn’t take on it because they weren’t ready. It’s that old tendency to want to be liked and want to be pleasing and be part of it all and then say yes and then like certain things about people and then say yes. Then, it turns out some have proven to be high-cost transactions as we learn about. That’s something I also could never stop before is when, how much is this relationship going to cost me? Am I really going to get the gain that I need for the amount of time I’m spending?

John: Absolutely. There’s a lot of different ways that we could point to accurate thinking and many people share similar kind of journeys. One of them is, if I’m going to think accurately about satisfying my aims, and they could be your aims for money, but they also could be your aims for spirituality, and everything in between. If I’m going to satisfy all of those aims, I have to think accurately about them. In other words, how much money would satisfy me or what kind of work am I willing to do or not and so forth?

There’s another part of accurate thinking I think that many people discover here and that is, when they start to understand what a transaction looks like, they start to see the parts that they’re good at and then the parts they’re not good at. Or you could even say the parts they dismiss altogether, as in making invitations and offers and requests and making those offers on a regular basis so that their financial needs are met and so forth. Anything that you want to say about the accurate thinking that you brought to making invitations, offers, and requests to yourself?

Kristen: I would say that I wasn’t good at making offers that felt risky, that felt where I was– I could offer something to someone. Offer as long as I felt like I was benefiting someone, interview them on a radio show. I could offer and I maybe was thinking along the lines of reciprocity, but I don’t think I actually was thinking too much along those lines. I would offer something that would benefit someone else, but I wasn’t good at asking for something that felt that I wasn’t sure what they would get out of it. I was too much out of my own realm into someone else’s concerns.

John: So too much thinking about them and not enough thinking about you?

Kristen: One might call that codependency.

John: [laughs] Right. Then you discovered that and did you correct that, or are you still at work on correcting that wherever you see it? [crosstalk]

Kristen: I think that my story is really a work-in-progress. I think that some of these tendencies are so hard-wired to fall back on relying on my personality and relying on not making the hard asks, so I’m a work-in-progress. What I’ve gotten much more clear about is determining, is really doing the work ahead of time with a potential new client about actually having the structures in place to determine what kind of client are they, what kind of customer will this be. Will they be a high-cost transaction?

It’s okay if people have some blips in the beginning, but really being able, training myself to watch for that rather than trying to continually beat my head against the wall with a customer who’s just on their way out the door the whole time. Because I’m in the world of the artist, the book writing world, people come up against a lot of walls and barriers and fears and concerns when they’re writing their book. So many people quit. Anyway, 80% of the population says they want to write a book, 2% actually will. It’s so easy to say, it’s so hard to do. That’s what I’m faced with anyway.

Actually using assessment, kind of reassessing my procedures and reinventing how I screen people going in and finding that fine line between not wanting to terrify people when I talk to them about accurate thinking, their own accurate thinking about what they’re up against and also trying to at the same time keeping their dreams alive. Not killing their dreams, but helping them to find that a little bit where they can stand in two worlds and be accurate in their own thinking, and then keep their dream alive.

All the while, I’m doing an assessment to try to see, if they’re cut out for it, if they’ve got enough of the elements in place or at least they’re willing to resource themselves, and then having those hard conversations with people when they’re not and actually saying to them, You’re not ready,” or “I’m not the right person for you. ” That’s been a really– How do I say that? It’s–

John:  Mature.

Kristen: Yes, thank you. That’s being mature. It’s that deep maturing because so much of what I was like, I want to help everybody and I want to give everybody a chance and anybody can do this if you just break through your barriers. Instead of like, no, maybe you really shouldn’t, and maybe you shouldn’t right now and maybe you really actually never should and maybe that’s okay, but I’m going to tell you the straight story versus lead you along and try to give you hope, because hope will kill you, hope will suck the life out of you.

John: [laughs]One of the things that we have said, we don’t often say it publicly but we might say, offering hope without a practical pathway is unethical, would you agree with that statement?

Kristen: Oh, I fucking agree, especially given that I just said hope will suck the life out of you. Hashtag that.

John: I think that’s a whole other cover, we could launch a whole other interview on that topic alone. Well, I want to switch gears just a bit. First of all, you and David have been married for how long or together for how long?

Kristen: David and I have been married since 1995 believe it or not.

John: That’s fantastic.

Kristen: Coming up on 25 years, is that right? If I can do the math?

John: I can’t do the math that quick, but I’ll accept.

Kristen: Yes, and can we say that Influence Ecology saved my marriage. We’re going to talk about that [crosstalk]

John: I was going to ask you about how it’s impacted your relationship. I do know you guys have been through some things because you lost your home in a fire in what year?

Kristen: 2012.

John:  2012, your book about that subject is called what?

Kristen: The book about that is called, Phoenix Rising: Stories of Remarkable Women Walking Through Fire.

John: Excellent and fantastic book, moving stories. My question to you is, in your relationship with David– I now remember you saying or maybe the two of you saying it saved your marriage, may have done so. Tell us a little bit about, why are you saying it saved your marriage? What happened?

Kristen: Well, I think in some ways it saved my husband which helped save my marriage. It was definitely 2012. We had just had the fire. The fire was in March and sometime that summer someone had invited us to go to the open training session in Denver. Like I said, we both saw that there was something there, but I was fried and I was, I just honestly couldn’t do one more thing. I was the one– I’ll scratch that. Anyway, he started participating with Influence Ecology and he got called out by you or Kirkland I don’t know. It was like, “Oh,” it just makes me actually almost want to weep right now. It was one of those things that when it was happening it didn’t seem great.

He got all kind of worked up about something. It was talking about the annual conference and ow extraordinary the annual conference was going to be, the setting that it was going to be in, and the people you might meet. He was just not buying it and got all– My husband is an inventor and inventors think there are the smartest people in the room because most of time they are. They like to remind you of that. They occasionally can occur a little bit arrogant.

You might not actually exist in a room if an inventor is in the room. David kind of got the inventor smackdown of, “Hey, dude. I see you, I got your number, you ain’t all that.” It was like, loving as well. It was also very kind and so it was really kind of just what the doctor ordered. At a time where– honestly that was a rough frickin fall. We had finally just settled into– We bought a house,d decided not to rebuild and this is after living in people’s basements, living in a trailer, fighting the state of Colorado because it was a state caused wildfire, and then we got audited by the IRS for just a random audit. We had no records, nothing to show them.

It was hell, we were going through hell. My husband was at his limit, absolutely at his limit. To have someone who really knew what they were talking about stand up to him but also stand up for him and be in his face like, “Dude, you got it all wrong right now, no matter how much you think you got it right, you got it wrong. Unless you deal with all that over there, you’re going down.”

He needed to hear that, and it just was humbling enough for him to step back because it was true and because it was spoken with authority and someone who really knew what they were saying. It called him forward, and it called forward the best of him. Fast forward however many years later we are now, due to his training here at Influence Ecology. He was able to spot something coming in a company that he was doing contract work for.

He kept saying it with authority to somebody he’s known for a very long time who at first was not listening. David was persistent. He was saying “This company is going down, and it is time for us to form that company, that business we’ve always talked about, now is the time.” Here he is, coming a year and a half into that. It is truly remarkable that it is just completely altered his path and who he knows himself to be. It’s not based on what we were talking about earlier of just like, feel-good stuff. David at that point, feel-good stuff was not going to do the trick anymore.

It needed to be something real and grounded and true. Like, this shit’s happening. He has created an international company that is with a three to five-year retirement plan. It’s real, and he’s working with a team. Seeing this happening for him, and it was just in seeing this sprinklings of him having mentorship in a way, having someone who he trusted and respected speak that clearly and directly to him, started to alter his behavior and how he showed up and what he paid attention to and where he spent his time and how he studied and learned and just threw himself into his career. The results are extraordinary.

John: I’ll love that for the team, so much. I do remember sitting on a little stool at a conference in front of David as he was talking about just having lost the house and the fire, just all of that and to now see Kim as having completed our entire curriculum, going from the fundamentals program to the advanced program to our most elite program. Now, on the other side of that, he’s now an esteemed alumni who’s just continuing to do so, so well. I’m quite proud of him and I’m quite proud of the relationship that the two of you share, it’s phenomenal.

Kristen: I’m quite proud of him too. In partnership, in long-term relationship, you do walk through a lot of things, a lot of life and we’ve walked through a whole lot. It feels like, I think because we’re both entrepreneurs, there’s something about how important it feels for me to be able to trust what he’s doing. He’s been forging this path in doing this work with Influence Ecology, and I’ve followed.

I can go to him and say, “What about this? What do you think about this?” It’s so grounded in something. There’s a confidence I have in his competence that is just really extraordinary and contributes to the relationship in ways that I wouldn’t have thought, I wouldn’t have expected.

John: Well, with that, I think we’ve said our peace here. I actually looked up, I was just fascinated we’re out of time. [laughs] I know, I’m going to have to go for something else, I’m so sorry. Any last parting words?

Kristen: I think for people like me, that come from the healing helping profession, we get to still do that work. We get to still do the helping-healing profession part. [crosstalk] We get to still have that be such an integral part. In fact, we can be more effective if we ground ourselves in accurate thinking because if we’re just living in the world of hopeful thinking, there’s not the ground underneath us that we actually need to sustain and also to help our clients.

I think I’m a much more effective coach and advocate. Well, I don’t think, I know I’m a much more effective coach and advocate for my clients who are still so in that world. I can be a bridge into accurate thinking, and introduce them to it in a gentle way that doesn’t feel like, again, the pain of growing up. It doesn’t have to be so painful to grow up. When we’re grounded in something like this, it can be actually a really great journey.

John: Kristen, it’s been a pleasure having you on Influence Ecology Podcast. Thank you so very much.

Kristen: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure being here.

[music]

John: In 2009, Barbara Ehrenreich, published Bright-Sided, how the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America, as a reaction to self-help books, such as the Secret, claiming that they promote political complacency and a failure to engage with reality. Since publication, Rhonda Byrne’s scientific claims in The Secret, in particular, concerning quantum physics, have been rejected by a range of authors including Christopher Chabris, and Daniel Simmons at the New York Times and Harvard Physicist, Lisa Randall.

Mary Carmichael and Ben Redford, writing for the Center for Inquiry, have also pointed out that The Secret has no scientific foundation, stating that Byrne’s book represents a time-worn trick of mixing banal truisms with magical thinking and presenting it as some hidden knowledge. In the 2010 book, The Watchman’s Rattle, that author, Rebecca D. Costa, warns that time and time again, in the absence of a solution, pathway or sound strategy, humankind will turn to believe, hope and in magical thinking–we would agree.

In our work with people around the world, we observed them in the absence of a clear or pragmatic solution, hope and magical thinking takes many forms that undermine one’s ability to produce real solutions and real results. We’re not here to kill dreams, we’re here to merely point out that magical thinking is not a sound strategy to meet your aims for such pragmatic things like dollars in your bank account.

What is sound strategy? Great plans began with an inventory of your resources and the fitness to deploy these resources towards some tactics that when implemented, satisfy your aims. Here’s a brief excerpt from our primer on the transactional approach, written in 2014 by Influence Ecology co-founder, Kirkland Tibbels. It is common to hear people talk about money and career as though they are some subjective occurrence that will magically be taken care of if they just work hard, keep a good attitude and not rock the boat.

It is highly uncommon to hear people talk about money in any context except for how it is made. Few, those who know how to make it, relate to money as something that is objective and functional, a tool, not a mysterious happening. People who struggle with money like those who struggle in other conditions are most often blindly unaware of the condition at all. What most people do not know and therefore, cannot use to their advantage, is that these important and inescapable domains are only satisfied through transactions with other people.

In fact, transactions are the fundamental function to which all adults satisfy any condition of life, of a commonly defined as the exchange of an asset for payment. To consider this term philosophically broadens our understanding of the very nature of satisfying the fundamental conditions articulated here. Simply put. If we’re to satisfy our most important conditions of life, we can only do so through transaction. Even the most complex of transactions involving millions of participants and spanning multiple years, begins with and is constructed on the fundamental mechanics and practices of reciprocal exchange.

Whether we are transacting for a burger or transacting to take a burger franchise public, the essential elements required to fulfill these transactions are the same. Those who employ the fundamental mechanics and practices required to produce satisfying occupations of work, valuable professional identities, and acceptable incomes, understand the fundamentals of transaction. When adults learn and can competently apply these fundamentals, they are not only able to produce satisfying conditions for their work, money, and career, but are also able to satisfy many other conditions of life. Without the objective means to take care of them, all that has left is hoping, wishing, or good luck.

Money is a consequence of transaction. Any other orientation or activity that attempts to dilute our thinking about what money is, and how it is produced – is simply flawed. Money is a consequence of reciprocal exchange.

This is the purpose of Influence Ecology, to teach people how to think accurately about the transactions built to satisfy their aims. We say, those who transact powerfully thrive.

In our next episode, we interview Mora Clain, a health research consultant from Perth, Western Australia.

Moira Clay: Since studying with Influence Ecology, I actually took the time to work on my business to get help. I think the turnaround for me was getting help to recognize that I couldn’t do it all myself. Much that I loved the concept of being Super Woman, I was not Super Woman and actually, getting help was going to be the key. When I got help, I suddenly became a lot more focused on what it is that I do. I was able to say no to people. I had never said no to people because I was always scared that if I missed out on business, I was not going to be able to survive. Whereas now, I am saying no, I am getting help, and my business is flourishing.

John: Many special thanks to our guest, Kristen Moeller. 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. Some episodes include a transcript and support material. The Influence Ecology Podcast is produced by Influence Ecology LLC in Ventura, California. This episode was recorded on May 29th, 2018 and was produced by me, John Patterson and Tyson Crandall. This episode is made possible through the assistance of the Influence Ecology faculty, mentors and students around the world.

We’re grateful for co-founder Kirkland Tibbels and his 30+ years of specialized study in the philosophy of transactionalism and the fundamentals of transactional competent. This episode includes contributions by Karol Gregory and Tyson Crandall. Podcast team is by Chris Standring entitled Fast Train to Everywhere. You can subscribe to the Influence Ecology Podcast on Apple Podcast, 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 to go to iTunes or your podcast app and let us know what you think.

The Influence Ecology Podcast is produced by Influence Ecology, LLC in Ventura, California. This episode was recorded April 8th, 2018 and was produced by John Patterson and Jason Kelly. This program is made possible through the assistance of the Influence Ecology faculty, mentors, and students around the world. We’re grateful for Co-founder Kirkland Tibbels and his 30+ years of specialized study in the philosophy of Transactionalism and the fundamentals of Transactional Competence.

This episode includes contributions by Karal Gregory and Tyson Crandall. For this episode, the sound design and editing are by Jason Kelley. 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 think we know more than we actually do.

Do you know how paper is made? How does a toilet work? How about a pen? Our species has produced sophisticated technologies, cities, and accomplishments, but most of us don’t honestly know how these things work. How can we aspire to so much despite understanding so little? Perhaps genius is instead found in the ways we co-opt the intelligence of the social ecology: Our collaborative minds enable us to aspire to great things.

In the 2017 book The Knowledge Illusion, cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive—and thrive—despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a vibrant community of knowledge, continually drawing on information and expertise stored in the community with which we transact.

Cory Shepherd, president and financial advisor of Sound Financial Group, is a case study in our mantra: Dreams come true in groups. We can accomplish our loftiest aims when immersed amongst an ecology of resourceful, intelligent, and ambitious mentors and peers. Previously, Cory was convinced that as long as he thought positively and worked hard, everything would turn out. Now, he has moved away from laborious work to harness the knowledge and power of the group.

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, Jason Kelley & Tyson Crandall

“Everything you want in life can be found in groups.”

John Patterson: Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are in the world. I’m your host, John Patterson, the Co-Founder and CEO of Influence Ecology, the leading business education in Transactional Competence. Broadcasting from Ventura, California, this podcast features case studies, stories and lessons from business owners, executives and entrepreneurs who found real solutions, real results and real satisfaction, not only with work, career, and money, but in every area of life.

You’ll hear how these ambitious professionals found that those who transact powerfully thrive. We all think we know more than we actually do. Do you know how paper is made? How does a toilet work? How about a pen? Our species has produced sophisticated technologies, cities and accomplishment, but most of us don’t honestly know how these things work. How can we aspire to so much despite understanding so little? Perhaps genius is instead found in the ways that co-opt the intelligence of the social ecology. Our collaborative mind enables us to aspire to great things.

In the 2017 book, The Knowledge Illusion, cognitive scientists, Stephen Sloman and Philip Fernbach argued that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a vibrant community of knowledge continually drawing on information and expertise stored in the community with which we transact. Cory Shepherd, president and financial advisor of Sound Financial Group, is a case study in our mantra, Dreams Come True in Groups, that we can accomplish our loftiest aims when immersed amongst an ecology of resourceful, intelligent and ambitious mentors and peers.

Previously, Cory was convinced that as long as he thought positively and worked hard, everything would turn out. Now, he has moved away from laborious work to harness the knowledge and power of the group. Here’s the interview.

Cory Shepherd, welcome to the Influence Ecology Podcasts. It’s great to have you here with us.

Cory Shepherd: Thank you, John. It’s my pleasure.

John: I want to give you the opportunity to first introduce yourself if you would.

Cory: My name is Cory Shepherd. I am the President of Sound Financial Group, and the author of Cape Not Required, and also a student of Influence Ecology for little over a year, year and a half now.

John: Fantastic. You live where?

Cory: I live in– It’s a complicated question to answer. I live in Seattle, Washington for the next four weeks, and then a little bit less than that, and then I moved to the great city of Chicago to support my wife in her residency match to pediatric program at Northwestern University.

John: That’s great because you get the come play with us in Chicago too when we do our workshops locally there.

Cory: Yes, it’ll be fun. It makes a move a lot better when I’m parachuting in with some community already there, which is just fabulous.

John: It is, isn’t it? It’s great to have a community around for those reasons. Say a little bit about what Sound Financial Group does and what your role is in it.

Cory: Sure. If I say we’re a financial planning firm or a financial advising firm, it’s going to be wrong, but it’s going to get people close enough to understand the world that we’re in. I mean it’s going to be wrong because I think their experience would be that we’re quite a bit different than any other financial firm that they’ve met with. We have a client profile that’s actually fairly similar to Influence Ecology.

In general, its clients about 250,000 to 1,000,005 of household income. We do income as our measure of what kind of client would fit not assets under management, which is what most folks are used to for financial firms. Part of that is we know that they’re– Getting to a portfolio is a conversation for on down the road because there’s lots of other things to sort out. Lots of other sources of inefficiency or leaks out of the balance sheet to deal with first. If someone needs help getting their cash flow sorted out, we can help them sort out their cash flow, get them saving appropriately, and they’ll become whatever that asset level would have been otherwise in pretty short order, especially for the physicians that I tend to specialize with in my practice.

Doctors come out of school with a lot of debt and a good income and they need some help turning that into the assets and wealth and just resources to have the rest of their life work out the way that they want. I don’t want to wait around 20 years for them to get some amount of assets that would qualify them for a large investment account when I could have probably helped him get there faster. I’ve just seen so many, not just doctors, any anybody at all have life happen with a little bit of naivete around all the consequences and then there’s some time that we could have taken advantage of that gets wasted. They get a few years down the road and they would rather started earlier.

John: I know what you deal with about saying well, we’re a financial planning company because it doesn’t quite say exactly who you are. I think sometimes it helps to say what you’re not or perhaps what it is that we ought to remove from our thinking when we think of Sound Financial Group. Anything we ought to remove from the way we think about a Financial Planning Organization to get a little closer to what you guys do?

Cory: The walnut walls and giant conference table would be the first one. Paul and I, building a business together, both had things like freedom of location and time with our family and pursuing all the different aims in life as a big goal. We figured that a lot of the clients that we would want to work with, but also want those as well. We’re in a location irrelevant environment, meaning we do all of our meetings online with our clients. Even the ones that I currently live very close to in Seattle, we meet with all online for this very reason.

Whether they have an opportunity to move or be somewhere else for a job, and we don’t want them to have to start over with a financial firm and I have an opportunity in my life to pursue and they don’t have to start over and I don’t have to start over with someone new either. I think that would be the big one. Having to drive across town, get both couple into the same room at the same time during the day for a long meeting, none of that. The other is going straight into that question about, are we asset manager?

We do manage assets for clients, but that’s not at all where we start and for lots of our clients, we don’t. Because we know that we’re not right for every client. For the clients that we are right for, we want to spend a whole lot of time with them and do a whole lot of education. We start every client relationship with a fee up front like a consulting contract so that they know they’re paying us for our advice and our advice only so that at the end of that relationship, we give them a roadmap, a set of instructions for here’s exactly what to do to produce all these things that we talked about you wanting to produce, gain efficiency in your accounts, have better outcomes with what you’re currently doing, or the changes to have the better outcomes that you want.

They can either do it themselves, take it to their friend down the street who works for the large firm with the big glass windows and all that, or some combination of the two. The metaphor we like to draw is like the design build architects firms where you can pay an architect a fee to design your blueprint, and then you can either go to whatever contractor you want, or walk down the hall to use their in house services if you’ve got a great relationship and that feels the most effective and efficient for you.

We can actually engage with a lot wider range of people than many firms can that we previously could. My favorite is the do it yourselfer. The person who’s going to create a portfolio on their online trading account and do everything by themselves. They don’t want a single person touching any buttons that do anything to their money. I love those people now because they often are smart enough to know that there might be something that they’re missing, and they just want that second opinion.

They can consult with us once to get a once over, or they could consult with us on an annual ongoing basis just to make sure that they’re not missing anything. We have clients like that that love us for that part of our business.

John: That’s great. To further distinguish how you guys are distinct from a financial planning services company. I experienced that when the average person starts to think, “Wow, I need some financial planning.” They go look up financial planning, and then they go find that on the web, and then they find someone near them, and then they go call that person.

They’re likely to get a similar service or set of products that are traditional. I think that although you might be able to obtain some of those things through you guys, that isn’t your primary focus. Can you say a little bit about that because I think– There are obviously many people at Influence Ecology who know of Sound Financial Group, many of our customers work with you guys and so forth.

Again, people normally go look for financial planning and get what? What might they instead get with Sound Financial Group?

Cory: Folks normally go look for financial planning, and they get a process where they pile all their documents under the table, push them across the wood to the advisor and say, “It’s too much. It’s crazy. It’s this giant pile. Just tell me what to do.” What they get back is a 50 to 80 page book, usually bound beautifully in leather, looks marvelous on that conference table, and is a very, very expensive paperweight.

The reason I say that is, I actually had the experience of discovering a client of my first firm that I worked throughout to college had used their plan to level their pool table.

[laughter]

It was really a ledge under one of the legs. I thought that is not creating nearly as much value as I thought it was and they certainly have a less expensive solution to that problem, so I need to do something different.

Number one, that giant plan is built on all kinds of assumptions. Averages over time to summarize the vast variability and chaos that is our world. There’s a couple problems. One, life is so random that the only thing I can tell you is whatever that one course is it chartered out on that plan is the one thing that’s guaranteed not to happen. Meaning, it’s going to be something more or less than that line, but I guarantee you it’ll be different because the world is too random to have got it right that first time.

Second, we have got a particular problem with assigning broad averages to individual experience. Meaning, an institution would use numbers about large demographic data to price their products. Say a young doctors looking up on their research portals the likelihood of getting an injury or an illness that would have them out of work. My wife looks those things up all the time in the middle of dinner, et cetera. I know how quickly they can get that information.

The problem would be, whatever decision that they make, that they used that institutional data to make their decision because an insurance company, for instance, doesn’t care who it happens to specifically in that pool, they just care that they got the numbers right over the large group. An individual like I very much care if I get hit by a bus or not today. That matters a lot to me. For things like risk, whether it’s becoming disabled, or the movement of your portfolio in the market, there’s none of this airy 10% chance of 30% drop.

None of that really works for our decision making centers of our brain, which are largely unchanged from what we inherited from our ancestors who were primarily worried about running away from tigers in the jungle. Consequences work much better. For these unknown things in life, it’s either a zero percent chance of it happening, or 100% chance because it just happened. That’s how it works for an individual. We don’t build a plan like that. We come up with a series of conversations and strategies to test the relative strength of action that the client could be in.

We can never predict how everything will end up at the end, but we can measure the relative strength of two strategies, and if one is performing stronger than the other– I say perform but I want to be clear I’m not talking about market performance necessarily, just the outcomes that they produce. If one’s going to be better than the other, whatever the outcome is that one, we can test whether it’s going to always be better to some degree and go with a stronger strategy.

You asked about products and traditional thinking. Number one strategy is going to beat products every day of the week. Meaning there are some products that are traditional, have been around for a long time, but it’s not the product’s fault if it’s not working out well for the client. It’s how it was put in place and how it’s used. Tools are tools that strategy and use of the tool makes all the difference. We look at a lot of traditional planning and we just bring a set of thinking to say, “Everyone says this is how this is, and your friends all say this is a good idea, but god, when someone tells me, “Oh yes, my friend said that was great. I love that. Let’s do that.” I full stop and I say that’s about the most dangerous phrase I can ever imagine hearing because you’re making your decisions based on someone else’s thinking and understanding and you might be missing something that’s important to you. We need to make sure that you understand deeply the implications of this move for your family so that you know it’s the right thing. As much as I could try to care about a client situation, I just never can care as much about their life, their balance sheet as they do because it’s their life and their money.

John: All right. Good. Thank you. You and many of the people around Sound Financial and some of the friends and family and people around Sound Financial are participating in Influence Ecology. Again, many of our customers have become customers of Sound Financial Group. Why do you think these things fit together as well as they do?

Cory: Influence Ecology and Sound Financial Group?

John: Yes.

Cory: I think that it’s not distinct to Sound Financial Group. I think that it’s easier to talk about us interacting with other folks in Influence Ecology. It’s a transaction that pops up in conversation a lot, especially in conferences. We’re dealing with money specifically. It just bubbles up. I think if you did a survey of everyone in Influence Ecology, you would know that everyone in our learning and work prefers working with others that are in our work and it goes smoother because we’ve studied this together about how to be lower cost to each other, about how to work better in that transaction.

Influence Ecology is not about how to push everyone else away and rise up to the top to become King of the Mountain, it’s about how to interact with the humans around you to make more for everyone, and I think that’s key. Also one thing I really appreciate about Influence Ecology is as much the clients I am working with there, but even more the ones that I’m not. Meaning, the ones that declined our offer because we know we’re not high for everyone. Oh my God John, the speed at which a decline can happen, the grace and the definitiveness just to say, “I hear it. Sounds great. Not right for me. We can go back to doing other work together, or we can get on with our lives great.” That has just been a huge gift as well.

John: That’s great. Well, I think the other context that I think is there too is just simply that both of us tend to approach money amongst other conditions of life with some accurate thinking and then build our lives and our transactions accordingly. I think that’s also a framework that I see in both. All right, well, Cory, for your own journey in Influence Ecology for everybody, we want to offer a little bit of a case study. Your own journey is a case study in life before, during and after you found us and what you learned here.

Just in terms of your own experience, what was life like before Influence Ecology, and say a little bit about that.

Cory: I grew up firmly in the middle of the self esteem generation, that everyone gets a trophy for participating, can’t we all sit around and tell each other how wonderful we are generation. Now, thankfully my parents were not helicopter parents, they let me get out there, scrape my knees, supported me just as much in failure as in success. I think that made a huge difference, but I still had the sense that and if I just keep a positive attitude and keep pushing hard, everything will work out.

I was a runner in high school. Some of our mantras from our team, which we were very successful competing on a State level, things like never stop, keep pushing, gut through it, all of those things that served us really well in running melded in my mind with that self esteem generation kind of thinking so when I got to the business world, it was, all right, just keep pushing and think good thoughts and no matter what happens, it’ll all work out in the end. I’ve learned that that’s not so much the case.

John: How did you come to the conclusion that it’s not necessarily the case?

Cory: Part of it was starting my journey of learning how to do the work that I do and realize that lots of folks, the baby boomer generation, especially as a case study, was positive thinking, throwing money at the future hoping that it’ll work out and that didn’t necessarily work out quite as well because there’s a lot of things to consider. Then when I get into influence ecology, start doing this study I realize, yes, there are a lot of, let’s call them technical aspects to producing a good result. Maybe those clients that I called and left very positive messages for five times in a week, maybe that’s now the reason why they don’t want to talk to me, maybe I need to have some better strategy for making an offer, accepting their decline, setting up a structure for how to communicate with people that works well and that is mutually agreeable. Then that’s just one out of many examples of you’ve got to have some planning.

Number one, you’ve got to think very clearly about what we even want to have happen in the future, and then check to see if the actions we’re in are going to produce those results. Again, being part of that self esteem generation with the audio tape gurus. It’s kind of funny that I’m now old enough that I can start dating myself with technology, but the audio tape gurus that you’re driving around listening to the positive affirmations and that will all make it work out really, really well. I thought, this is wonderful, and I want to have a billion dollars a year of income and the five of the cool cars and homes all over the world because that’s what you’re supposed to want. You’re supposed to dream big and want all these things. Then I got to walk through some exercises in influence ecology. That actually happened when I was thinking about what I wanted for the last year, my wife’s schooling and I had a big number, and then I was talking to a dear friend and he said that’s a really big number for results. If it was less than that but you stayed connected with your wife. She felt supported in school. You had good relationships with your friends and family and business colleagues. When you got to eat some good food along the way and maybe take a couple of trips, would you be happy?” I said, “Yes. Actually, I would.”

It took a lot of pressure off of me to say why don’t I build the life and my actions around what I actually want and will actually fulfill me in my life and my family, and then I can just do the things that’ll get me there. The other part about that positive thinking is, you never let up. You never get to stop, you’re always positively pushing forward and he just grows and grows and grows in it and actually be exhausting. I like to give myself the permission to take a day off here and there, and that’s what work around influence ecology could do to say, here are my aims, here’s the actions I need to be in to get there and then once I get those things done, then I can choose to go more if I want or give myself the permission to actually take some time off. That’s a really cool permission to have.

John: That’s great, and you identify as what personality is we talk about it.

Cory: Anyone that’s familiar with those will know that I’m a performer just from the speed and energy with which I’m talking. So yes, performer.

John: Okay. A good intro to our audience and nobody’s ever heard about that and doesn’t know what the heck we’re talking about. What in your own words does that mean?

Cory: A performer of the four personality types and Influence Ecology talks about is about relationship, first and foremost. For me what that means is, you can think of it as the person that always wants everyone around and be having a good time. Like I’m concerned with others’ feelings and thoughts towards me and about the atmosphere that we’re currently in, so I’ll be concerned with the relationship, although I’ve discovered the dark side of performer is the second that it’s clear that relationship has no importance to the other person, like their relationship with me, they’re done, and that’s, that’s a hard thing to fight. It’s the bubbly outgoing everyone have a great time kind of personality.

John: Great. If we take your personality, paid performer personality and the notion that if you just power through it, you could say I just relationship through it. If I just relationship people, I would imagine that some of what’s there and your background to five great and people I take care of them and then it’ll all turn out. Did you find any naivete around that and if so, what’d you find out?

Cory: Sure. Early in my business career, doing financial advising is all that I’ve ever done since college. I started really early, so I got to walk through a lot of personal discovery inside the context of this. I would come home from work. My wife would ask like how was your day and I said great. I talked to three people, had wonderful conversations and she would ask, “Well, do you have a new client?” Well, no. This was the first time I ever talked to them. We’ve got to set up this meeting and maybe we’ll– Misinterpreting a good conversation as any kind of real result is the real trap of a performer. We’ve got to stay grounded in what actually got produced here. Did anyone ever actually leave that conversation thinking that anything was going to happen? My tendency that I discovered was that I was so friendly in making requests that people could miss that a request had even been made.

A week later, I’m sitting here thinking why did they not get back to me with this, and then as I go through my communication with them, especially if it was via email, I could see, maybe they’re sitting there expecting me to call them back or something like that. That was a big lesson for me.

John: That’s really great. All right, so you start off your journey growing up in the self-esteem generation. You begin to confront your thought, to just press through it and all of that. You started to think accurately, start to account for your personality, and then in the latter part of your journeys, you began to develop Transactional Competence. There’s some thinking that in your notes you talked about getting to guide some of your thoughts and skills and so forth. One of those things that you said was welcome to your brain. I love this bed, and I think it’d be great if you could take us back to the moment. I think it was probably in the conference where we had this moment and said something about that. Do you remember when you first heard this bit with Influence Ecology?

Cory: I do. The other part about my generation is that independence that’s pushed it positive thinking. Just go for it and you can do anything. You. It gets really selfish. It gets really me focused.

John: If it’s to be it’s up to me.

Cory: Exactly. When it was Kirkland Tibbels who said in the conference, everything you want in life can be found in groups, and then a little bit later pointed to this whole room of Influence Ecology members and said, “Welcome to your brain.” What that did for me was all of a sudden, my brain expanded to be the whole room. Meaning, I realized that I’m a limited person. We say we only had– each had 24 hours in a day, but it’s really not true. Time is actually an infinite resource if we know how to contract with other people and get the help of other people to use their time towards our aims.

Now, we should also be helping them use their time towards their aims. It only really works if it’s towards both of your goals at the same time, but that’s what I realized was I have access to this amazing pool of talent, if you will, that all of these people that not only have studied the work of Influence Ecology and know a thing or two about interacting with other humans, but then they have all these skills and abilities that I could never have had, and if I get good at making requests for help, which asking for help has traditionally been very difficult for me, but this was part of the breakthrough is that I’m, and I’m fairly useless by myself and I really had to own that. I think we all are and anybody who says,”I can do it all on my own”, it’s like well, are you using a computer today because you probably didn’t make that yourself. Are you driving to work today because you had millions of people contributing to the roads, tires, gas and everything else around you transporting yourself to wherever you are.

As humans, we’re made to work in community with each other. That’s our advantage over any of the animals out there. We don’t have the ability to jump as higher, use our clause or anything like that, but we can coordinate with each other towards the mutual goals in a really unique way. That’s what Influence Ecology has become for me. Some education, yes, but also this pool of people that we have a privilege of diving in together to try to make our lives work. We have clients from Influence Ecology, but we are also the clients of other people and Influence Ecology because it’s one of the first places we look for who we can gain resources from.

John: That’s really great. I’m remembering my own experience of that moment in the conference, and I suddenly expanded my brain to include everything you know, everything Paul knows, everything Gary Ward knows. I have that available to me, but I also have their experiences, their practical knowledge.

I also have the resources available to me of every person in that room, and it really made me quite limitless in that moment. I felt as if as long as I can transact with competence to satisfy our mutual aims, the sky’s the limit. If it’s to be, it’s up to me completely transformed into what we now say which is all dreams come true in groups.

Cory: It’s the alchemy of community, old alchemists are thought of as crazy now. They weren’t totally off base. They were just using the wrong substance. It’s not gold that thereafter really it’s humans and that’s where we can produce more than was there before.

John: That’s fantastic. You’ve written a book called Cape not required. I love the title of the book by the way.

Cory: Thank you.

John: I’m wondering what you address in that book and how it might be related to some of what we’ve talked about here.

Cory: Sure. Paul Adams had already written a book about the financial experience of our firm, of a client going through our process and what they might learn called Sound Financial Advice. We already had that side covered and as I surveyed the landscape, there were lots of money books out there and frankly with Paul’s book and what we do, I’d rather talk to people about their money because I can customize that conversation rather than write a one size fits all, here’s the next step because that just never really works. I thought well, what am I passionate about as a young financial advisor who also was a leader of a team of 30 plus advisors at one point and then intentionally made the choice to go to a much more nimble footprint of an organization. I had to learn a lot over that period of time about how to interact with humans, how to lead, how to put my life together.

I said I want to write a book about all of the non-financial elements that a client might actually end up gleaning from working with us, because it’s not about money and it’s not just about math. I like to say that money isn’t math, its math plus human behavior, and when that human behavior comes in, it really can make those equations do all kinds of crazy things. That’s what I started to look at and I used the concept of power as the background model for my book because power is really fascinating to me. If you think about golf as an example, weightlifters are not the ones that are going to be able to hit the ball the farthest. A lot of the golfers that have long drives these days are actually fairly slender folks, so it’s not about ROM muscle but it’s about translating energy into the right direction. At the right time, and that coordination and so power also has some negative connotations in our country.

You think about the power hungry politician, and that’s a really negative view of power or the powerful executive cheating the people whatever that background view might be and while there are some bad apples, powers and agnostic resource just like anything, if it’s internal nature is not good or bad but it’s how that is used. Someone can use their power to cheat millions or save millions of lives, just depending on how you use it. That’s the context that I pursued, a few different looks at what we can do in our life to live more powerfully, feel more powerful and more agency in our life and have more of what we want to have happened, better relationships, better connections with people in our lives all through power.

John: All right, very good. Any soapbox rants that you have.

Cory: You gave me the opportunity to talk about my financials soapbox, which is my professional, soapbox. There’s one I’ve been thinking about recently, which is this. I’ve observed this current of orientation in our country, especially in a political sphere that is non functional in my view. This is not going to be a political statement, just to say that all across the spectrum, I see this recurring perspective that that person that thinks differently than me is an idiot. That’s how it all starts, and there’s also this sometimes this view of you can think any way you want. Every view is allowed except an asterix or parentheses, except if it’s different than mine. What I would rather I see in our country is for everyone to pursue the other person’s opinion from the point of view of, this is an intelligent human that cares about something or someone very deeply. Let me understand why they’re coming from that view and I might disagree with them afterward, but I can at least understand more about what they’re thinking.

I’ve found that in Influence Ecology, by the way, this is what it made me realize it, is that, we have a wide range of religious, political, social views and influence ecology. I think every single part of the spectrum is available and yet I’ve never found a community where people are more willing to engage with those ideas and respectfully disagree, and that’ That’s old school, that’s something our country used to do really well and I’m hoping that we can do it well again. Otherwise, we’re just going to be torn further and farther apart.

John: It’s very well said. All right, of course, Shepherd, it’s been an absolute pleasure to spend time with you on the Influence Ecology podcast.

Cory: Thank you, John. I appreciate the opportunity. This has been a lot of fun.

John: This episode ends this season of the Influence Ecology Podcast. We’ll be back again soon with more case studies, stories and lessons from our most ambitious members. My special thanks to our guest, Corey Shepherd, and I will show notes, you’ll find links to connect with him and all the links to websites, books or downloads mentioned in this podcast. Some episodes included transcript and support material. The Influence Ecology Podcast is produced by Influence Ecology LLC in Ventura, California. This episode was produced by me, John Patterson, and Jason Kelly. This program is made possible through the assistance of the Influence Ecology faculty, mentors, and students around the world.

We’re grateful for co-founder Kirkland Tibbels and his 30 plus years of specialized study in the philosophy of Transactionalism and the fundamentals of Transactional Competence. This episode includes contributions by Carol Gregory and Tyson Crandall. For this episode, the sound design and editing are by Jason Kelly. 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@podcastsatinfluenceecology.com. I want to thank you for offering a rating or review. This helps us more than you know.

The Influence Ecology Podcast is produced by Influence Ecology, LLC in Ventura, California. This episode was recorded April 8th, 2018 and was produced by John Patterson and Jason Kelly. This program is made possible through the assistance of the Influence Ecology faculty, mentors, and students around the world. We’re grateful for Co-founder Kirkland Tibbels and his 30+ years of specialized study in the philosophy of Transactionalism and the fundamentals of Transactional Competence.

This episode includes contributions by Karal Gregory and Tyson Crandall. For this episode, the sound design and editing are by Jason Kelley. 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.

Swimming in possibilities and excitement might be more detrimental than we think. As a biological ‘exchange animal,’ our moods and transactions are inextricably linked. We read or mimic the moods of others faster than we recognize their words. We’ve all learned the hard way that a text or email can’t include the wordless cues like mood, body language, appearance, inflection, and more. Might we sometimes produce moods that are inappropriate for transacting?

John Severson, of Severson Compass & Associates, a Los Angeles-based travel and venue company, offers a case study in the dangers of being oriented around too many possibilities.

In today’s talk, you’ll hear Co-Founder Kirkland Tibbels discuss how appropriate moods are not always positive moods—and how a little too much excitement might be dangerous.

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, Jason Kelley & Tyson Crandall

“Some possibilities are dangerous. I used to think there was no such thing as a bad idea.”

Helping people build ambitious and satisfying careers businesses and lives. This is the Influence Ecology podcast. Now, here is your host: John Patterson.

John Patterson: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world. I’m your host, John Patterson, the co-founder and CEO of Influence Ecology, the leading business education in Transactional Competence. Broadcasting from Ventura, California, this podcast features case studies, stories and lessons from business owners, executives and entrepreneurs who found real solutions real results and real satisfaction, not only with work career and money, but in every area of life. You’ll hear how these ambitious professionals found that those who transact powerfully, thrive.

Swimming in possibilities and excitement might be more detrimental than we think. As a biological ‘exchange animal’, our moods and transactions are inextricably linked. We read or mimic the moods of others faster than we recognize their words. We’ve all learned the hard way that a text or email can’t include the wordless cues like mood, body language, appearance, inflection, and more. Might we sometimes produce moods that are inappropriate for transacting?

John Severson, of Severson Compass and Associates, a Los Angeles based travel and venue company, offers a case study in the dangers of being oriented around too many possibilities.

In today’s podcast episode, you’ll hear co-founder Kirkland Tibbles discuss how appropriate moods are not always positive moods, and that a little too much excitement might be dangerous.

Here’s the interview. Welcome to the Influence Ecology podcast, Mr. John Severson. Take a second and introduce yourself, if you would.

John Severson: My name is John Severson. I have a company called Severson Compass and associates, and I’ve been studying with Influence Ecology for about three and a half years now. We plan meetings and events. We’ve been in business for 29 years. We’ve done probably close to 300 conference type events in the last 29 years. It’s been a wild ride.

John Patterson: You live where?

John Severson: I live in Altadena, California. My office is in Pasadena, just down the street.

John Patterson: I speak to you quite often. You do work with Influence Ecology, also working with us on our events?

John Severson: Yes, I do.

John Patterson: You’ve helped us find some really spectacular venues for events around the world’s last annual conference. January, we were at a fantastic venue in Cabo. I’ve been now twice. Can’t wait to go back again for all kinds of reasons. Love it there. Thank you for that.

You often are traveling too. You and I speak every now and then, and I always start off with, “Where are you at this moment?” and sometimes it’ll be Hawaii, sometimes it’ll be somewhere in Europe, sometimes it’s someplace perhaps in Australia, New Zealand or the likes. You do travel quite a bit.

John Severson: I do. Partly I think I come from a travel background family. My dad has been a pilot all his life and my mom is actually in the travel business as well. She has a big travel empire, I’ll say. I’m a travel baby, so to speak, of that world.

John Patterson: It’s fantastic. Life for you before Influence Ecology wasn’t bad. Sounds like it was pretty great.

John Severson: Actually, pretty good. Yes, I mean, I made decent money. I could take care of myself, but I did struggle in many ways.

John Patterson: Sometimes people do our programs because there is a pretty substantial breakdown in some place. Maybe someone’s not making the money they know they’d like to. Maybe they’d like to be a lot more influential in certain circles. Maybe they are rather stressed out because of the kind of work they do or how much work they do.

So, sometimes people find us because they have a pretty substantial breakdown. It doesn’t sound like that you began your study with us and continued your study with us because you have tried to resolve some big problem. It sounds like there are some other things that are driving your participation here. Yes?

John Severson: Actually, how I got into Influence Ecology was I knew a bunch of other people were doing it so I’m like, “I’ll do it too.” It was kind of like that.

John Patterson: Yes.

John Severson: But then, of course, there was more I discovered as I studied. It was like I got into it and then found out really how valuable it was, I should say.

John Patterson: Are you one of those people that really love the exploration? I watch you sometimes. You’re one of my favorite people to look out into an audience and watch many people to look out and they’re going- and their face looks crunched up. But you’re almost always nodding, you’re almost always a yes. Your body your face goes, “Bring it, bring it more and more.”

You seem to be somebody that loves developing themselves, training themselves, exploration, expedition if you will. Is that one of the things that drives your participation?

John Severson: Yes. Of course, there’s a part of me that thinks I know it all, right? But when I get fascinated over a subject- yes, I’m just like all in. So that drew me in. Also, the part that I love mostly studying with you guys is that it’s not like one or two concepts that once you get down you’re like, “Okay, I’m I’m good for the day.” There’s quite a bit of stuff with Influence Ecology. You really have books to read. You have a lot of subtle distinctions that in one day you know you need to master. So, I love the challenging aspect of that study.

John Patterson: As we’ve come to know our customers, we’re going to be celebrating our 10th anniversary next year. As we’ve grown, as we’ve explored the kind of people who respond to what we do, the majority of people that come here and study with us, they’re typically a business professional of some kind, maybe they work in an enterprise maybe they work for themselves, maybe they’re a small business owner and the like. But they seem to all share a love for bettering themselves, improving themselves, being engaged and involved in their continued development.

It might be very useful for you and I to talk a little bit about that, because there are people that are listening who may go, “You know, I just love this kind of stuff. I’d like to be challenged with new ways to think about things, and grab little nuggets of wisdom that perhaps reshape my day or improve things just incrementally enough that adds up to a whole bunch of good.”

John Severson: I almost want to compare Influence Ecology like a master’s program, if you really were going to do an MBA or something. It’s that kind of rigor, probably more relevant than the stuff you’d learn on an MBA program, I would say, because it’s very applicable in the moment you hear it. But my experience is you’re building a foundation with studying that you do instead of one idea you grasp onto and then build your whole enterprise around that idea. It’s not like that.

You’re building your foundation and then you’re building how you want to set up your teams and how you want to think about the commitments you want to take, and then how simple or complex you want things. It’s that level of thinking that inspires me to stay in what you guys do, that education.

John Patterson: That’s really great. Then taking that, I’ve watched your journey through our programs as a business owner, and tell me if I’m wrong, but I think I watched you at first start to deal with that you had a single client and you may have realized it wasn’t really good for you because then you would be, of course, then beholden to a single client. That’s never good for a business because that client can go away or make demands, or whatnot. That’s one thing that you began to see. So that’s the first thing. Anything you want to say about that?

John Severson: Yes. Even before Influence Ecology, I knew that but there was no way to change that. It seemed like I was on this train and I couldn’t get off– like bring anyone else on. It was like it was just going that way. That is very accurate. That’s the way it was heading before I did Influence Ecology.

John Patterson: Then, I think I observed you start to realize that with a single client then you didn’t have as much freedom or say as you might like in certain contracts or situations, and I don’t think that you moved away from that client. I think some things happened intermittently, but I think you just began to see that you could perhaps transact with them in some new ways. Is that correct?

John Severson: Absolutely. Yes. A lot of it was– you set up your own environment, right? I trained my clients to be that way and to rely on me that way, and it’s no accident that they’re there doing the things that they do.

John Patterson: Or you may like training them to relate to you like you’re at their back-end call.

John Severson: I’m available 24/7 and I have unlimited resources and stamina and all of that good stuff.

John Patterson: Yes. Thus you train them in that so that they, of course, call you whenever and okay.

John Severson: Yes, absolutely. Yes. Then I complain about it. [laughs]

John Patterson: Exactly. You started to see that you could train them in some other things. What does that look like?

John Severson: Again, I want to say accurate thinking stepping back and saying, “Hold on a minute. What is my aim?” Because I think that gets lost so easily in our everyday transactions doing things that we forget. We think, “Oh, this is all about making the customer happy or all about making it through the day making sure that I don’t screw up whatever that is,” but you forget really what your aim is. Like what are you here for? “What the heck do I have clients for in the first place?”

That was the centering moment of Influence Ecology where I could say, “Okay, if that’s the case, then I can say no and I can say yes, but I get to see the parts that really work and then the part that isn’t working.”

John Patterson: When you begin to accept or decline requests made of you more in accordance with your aims as you began to do that, did that scare you a little bit since it was your single client that they might go, “Well, listen Boggo.” Or did you just take little baby steps and found it safe to stick more than a toe into the water?

John Severson: It was actually fun, that whole journey, because before you say whatever you say, you already have your idea what people are going to think. But most of the time people received that well. They were like, “Good for you. Why don’t we do it that way?”

People actually came around and very rarely did people say, “We can’t work together because you’re unreasonable.” But it was this fun exploration with them where they got to see, “Oh, you know what? I like your idea better.”

John Patterson: In that situation, the development or the growth that you had was realizing that you can train people by accepting or declining in particular ways, and then you’re left with the environment that you produce for yourself, and before you have been left for the environment that you produced yourself, which is an environment in which anybody can call you anytime you jump and so forth.

John Severson: Yes. You think that your value is being available 24/7, but that’s not really what your value is. That, “Hey I’m really good at this and let’s focus on that instead of trying to do all that other stuff.”

John Patterson: All right. Good. Then I watched you began to consider the name of your company and the way that you were known– which I won’t say because I know you have a new identity that you want to produce. So the name that you had produced and the way that you were known in the past, you began to confront “Well, that is not a fit for the identity that I want to produce in the marketplace.”

Then you began to produce– first I think you’d began to ask, “Well, what is it that I, in fact, offer? What is the solution that I am to what breakdowns and for whom?” That process, in my experience, started to reorient you from where you had been known to something else. Can you say a little bit about that process?

John Severson: I used to do John lots and lots of stuff on cruise ships like that was the way I started. I had a business name that was a lot about that. But as I started to look at what do I really want to do. I realize I don’t want to do that stuff I don’t want to do all that work on cruise ships so that’s when I saw, “Okay I need to create an identity for what I want to be known for and known as.”

John Patterson: Which was what?

John Severson: Which was to give people the expertise to navigate, having a successful conference that is not only successful but their aims.

John Patterson: Very good. You move through all of that and you now no longer have a single client. You have many clients many different kinds of clients. What’s that been like then now getting away from just simply having a single client having many clients and what have you learned in that part of your journey?

John Severson: Well, one thing I realized was I had this naive notion before that to be a really good vendor let’s say you want to adapt with your client let’s say that if your client says we’re going to this mountain will we better get you up to speed to how to climb that one. I was all up for that. I’m like, “Okay, if we’re going to that mountain let me learn how to do that climbing.”

But what I started to see was that’s not my journey my journey is look. Here’s what I’m offering and if you want to climb that mountain there’s somebody else I can help you there but I want to help you climb the mountain that we’ve been climbing. Okay because I’m good at climbing this one and I don’t want to learn how to climb a whole new mountain over there.

John Patterson: With all of us. If we are serving customers our customers sometimes will want to take us on journeys that aren’t aligned with the help we offer. So, therefore, we start to accept things we probably ought to decline. what all of this labor and maintenance we didn’t plan for.

John Severson: I’ll tell you the popular notion is just do whatever the customer wants but that’s a lot of work. And actually you probably aren’t going to be that good climbing that mountain because never done it before and we forget sometimes that it’s not just about adapting but really being known for the thing that you’re good at. Sometimes you have to say look I’ll find somebody that’s really good at climbing down for you. But I’ve never done it and I don’t want to mess up on the way and then blame you because I decided to go along that journey with you.

John Patterson: Yes. Listening to much of your journey now and different facts of it I’m much more aware of the condition of life work and how that’s played a major role in some of what you’ve attended to. So what we mean by that here at Influence Ecology is work is 1 of 15 conditions of life. A condition of life is unavoidable area or situation that you have to confront. Work is the doing of your mind and body, what are you doing. So what do you do every day?

Often times, when you start to talk about work with people, there’s all the stuff I know I don’t want to do. There are certainly the things that I enjoy doing and what are the things that I know I don’t want to do.

From the beginning of this conversation, you talked a little bit about some of the little aimlessness in the beginning where you go off and do this or that. Then there was the one client and the work that they demanded of you and starting to decline something so you could work in a way that you wanted to, and moving away from work on cruise ships to now work in a different way. I’m just present to the way in which satisfying that condition of life has impacted your journey and some of the ways that you go about transacting for meaning your own names and life. Is there anything else that you want to comment on about that?

John Severson: The one thing I noticed is there is a tendency to do a lot of stuff in any endeavor that you do like any work. Like just do a lot of stuff and stay busy and then eventually you’ll reap the rewards. There’s something like that going on right and I am starting to see for standing with you guys that you don’t have to go that way. You don’t have to do a bunch of stuff just because someone else is doing it. You don’t have to do it because that might not be right for you.

I would go around doing as much as I could because my mom always said, “How you get ahead is you work hard.” I did all that stuff, but now I’m looking at it that’s more of a coincidence than an actual fact that my success came out of doing all that hard work. I’m not against hard work.

I think that’s important but I saw so much of the stuff that I did was unnecessary. When you really get clear about that your aims and the approach to do it a lot of the other stuff falls away. In fact it distracts people from getting to know you because it’s like well I know you’re good at this but then you’re good at this and you man you’re so good at everything. What are you about? I think that’s been my challenges. I get so good at things, people get confused. They’re like, “John, we really don’t know what you’re here to offer us.”

John Patterson: Understood, it’s a great way to say that.

John Severson: Then you think the way to a customer’s heart is by doing more, but it’s actually the reverse. It’s sometimes doing less has them remember you better.

John Patterson: Doing something rather specific.

John Severson: Exactly.

John Patterson: That’s really great. Even I studied with us long enough to begin to observe a lot of other people and the way that they’re transacting in the world. What do you observe about people generally, and perhaps how they may be naive about the way they’re transacting and how some of what they do may be counter to their aims?

John Severson: One of the things that I’ve observed is, some possibilities are dangerous. I used to think there was no such thing as a bad idea. If you get enough people that believe in it, you can do it. That’s what I’m noticing. That’s the most costly in some of the people that haven’t done the Influence Ecology work, versus the people that are starting to do it is they get to sit down and go, “Maybe that’s not a great way to go.” Start building all the other stuff before jumping out and launching themselves into that direction. I want to say it’s kind of human nature. I think we all love great ideas and doing them, but it’s sometimes better to just not do it.

John Patterson: That’s really great. Some possibilities are dangerous.

John Severson: I was in Hawaii with my mom, and she wanted to remodel this vacation home she had. She had brought in contractors and people to redo this whole house. She says, “All right, I want you to go with me to Home Depot and we’re going to pick everything out.”

Here I was going with her down the aisles of Home Depot as she goes, “I want that shower. I want that washer, dryer.” I finally had to stop her and go, “I can’t do this with you anymore. This is so agitating. I have to just stop this and I have to leave. I can’t do this thing with you.” She’s like, “What do you mean? I thought you’re here to help me.”

Well, then finally, I said, “You throw all this stuff in that room, but you’re probably going have to rip it all out again later because you don’t have a plan, you don’t have somebody come in and design in it. You’re going to probably spend $50,000 doing this, and you’ll get it done fast, but it’ll look like crap.”

I think it took her maybe like, 10 minutes to think about it. She goes, “Yes, but I don’t have time to do all that.” I’m like, “Well, that doesn’t mean throw in there.” That was a perfect example of how I observed. I see that everywhere now.

John Patterson: Yes, I know. I do, too. I watch sometimes people addicted to the rush of a new idea. They’re now excited about a new idea often running and then have not taken the time to examine whether or not that idea, that new possibility, that new strategy, that new approach is in any way, shape, or form good for them, or is going to produce the kind of mess you pointed out to your mother. I watch that all the time. Amazing.

John Severson: One of the philosophers we study is John Dewey. There’s a whole thing where he says that one of the hardest things for a human being to do is to not jump and act right away. We have this almost impulse to want to run out and fix that immediately. When I read that, I said, “That’s me.” Once something bothers me, I’ll run out, and within minutes, I’m started working on it. It’s not always such a good thing.

John Patterson: Yes, absolutely.

John Severson: Nine times out of ten, it’s probably not the right thing.

John Patterson: Well, that is funny, because I don’t know that you know but maybe you do. You’ve heard little stories Kirkland and I talking about the early days. My personality wants to go for it, to do it, to grab it and go for it and all of that. His personality is not the opposite, but he’s had enough training and enough observation of cautionary tales, enough study in philosophy and everything else to say, “Well, hold on just a minute, just hold on.” A lot of the experience in our early days was the want for me to go for it. His was going in to pour a little cold water on it. He was always pouring cold water on it in the beginning.

Now, there are parts of it, that he appreciates that I went for because we wouldn’t have a company without it. At the same time, where we balanced one another is I don’t jump as much and he gets to pour a little cold water on that. The beauty in all of that I found is, I can get caught up in what occurs like a good fix, a good solution, a good way to mitigate a problem without any examination of whether or not that’s a good solution for me, or that’s a good solution for my aims, or that’s a good solution for what I’m working on, or whether or not that solution is going to produce some set of breakdowns or maintenance or labor I had never considered.

I’m now more in consideration of the whole thing before I act than I was before. I have stopped myself and thought, “Yes, that’s going produce a whole bunch of maintenance. Yes, that’s going produce a whole bunch of labor. Yes, I’m going to have to–”

As an example, we’ve had many, many people say, “You guys should do this in corporations.” Really? Okay. Do you know what labor that’s going to cost us? Do know what maintenance that– Is that going to get us quicker to our aims? Do you know that for a fact? I appreciate your good advice, but do you know my aims well enough to tell me that and so forth? It’s a very fascinating thing to think accurately about the kind of work I do and don’t want to do.

John Severson: Nike had a saying, “Just do it,” and that would characterize a lot of the way I launched into things before Influence Ecology. Now it’s like, stop and think about it before you do it. Maybe it’s just a fundamental thing being human being that we just want to run out and fix it, and then deal with the mess later, right? Like, “Oh, yes, there’s a few things we messed up.” Like my mom would have done, but it’s just so much more difficult to do it after you’ve laid all the appliances.

John Patterson: You got to rip out all the tile now. Now, where are you in this journey? What do you– We talked a little bit about some of the stages of development of your own business endeavors. Where are you now in your business development?

John Severson: I was just having this conversation with Kirkland. I think right now, this is satisfying my aim. It’s great. I’m thinking three years down the road, I want to position myself for a bigger role, bigger game somewhere down the road. Again, you see how I want to rush in and do it, but I’m going to give myself three years to prepare myself for that. It’s a different way to do something where I’d want to say, “Okay, I’m going to tell everybody, I’m going to do this whole new project.” In fact, I’m not even telling you what it is because part of me is like, “I got all this studying to do, and finding out about things and thinking accurately before I make it public.”

It’s a great question because I love what I’m doing but I think the thing that’s next for me is, three years down the road, I got something else cooking that one day, I’ll be happy to share with you.

John Patterson: That’s really great. That’s just a fantastic sign of maturity, rather than announce it.

John Severson: I don’t want to say it’s like jinxing it. It’s not. It’s just what you do is you create all this stuff out there and then it affects your identity if it doesn’t happen, right? So I’m like, “Let’s not even go there. Let’s do some careful study, see what my aims are, what their aims are, and then-“

John Patterson: We’ll see.

John Severson: Yes, “We’ll see.” Exactly. Yes.

John Patterson: If there’s anything else you’d like to say, any sub box, a thing that you would love to have addressed, I want to give you the floor now, if there’s anything else.

John Severson: I just want to say I’ve gotten just as much value from is measuring. This the thing a lot of times this is where a lot of companies will go. Is they measure results. Where they’re going to be measuring how many sales you’re going to promise this week, or what are you going to do for all these results that obviously matter? I love that in Influence Ecology, we back it up a step and go, “Wait a second, we want to measure the action, what it is that you’re actually going to do rather than the result.” That’s always got me in trouble. Always promising these big promises of, “Hey, I’m going to have 10 new clients.”

Then they’ll be like, “Well, it didn’t happen.” I go, “Yes, because I was all a declaration kind of a thing.” Now I know, okay, this is what I’m going to promise to do, is I’m going to get on the phone and I’m going to call five new people that I don’t know today. That I can promise, but I can’t promise 10 new clients today. That’s something that I think we go wrong sometimes is it’s all about the result. We forget that to get to the results, there’s something else you have to think accurately about first. That’s so valuable. I don’t think anyone else talks about that.

John Patterson: This has certainly been a very valuable conversation today and I look forward to sharing it with other people. Thank you for being a guest on the Influence Ecology podcast.

John Severson: Well, thank you, John. I had a fun time.

Why Excitement Isn’t Always an Appropriate Mood

John Patterson: Now we’ll listen in on a Fundamentals of Transaction program webinar, where Co-founder Kirkland Tibbles and I talk about producing a mood and why excitement isn’t always an appropriate mood.

Here’s the talk:

Appropriate mood. What do they mean by appropriate moods? Well, Kirkland, what do we mean by that? What do we mean by an inappropriate mood? Appropriate for what?

Kirkland: Let’s start with the definition or characterization of a mood. What is a mood? To hold a particular kind of set of feelings or states of mind, you’ve got to have some sort of narrative in place. So a mood is nothing more than a narrative or a story that you have about an outcome in some condition of life. Could be short-term could be long-term.

But all a mood is is some story that you have about some outcome in a condition of life, and I can prove it to you. If you’ve ever had the experience of being in a mood, and most of the time it’s in a weird mood or a bad mood, and you’ve forgotten why, you’ve had to stop and go, “Now, wait a second, I know I’m upset about something,” and you can’t remember what it is, you have just recognize your still looking for the story in order to justify the mood.

Human beings think in terms of narrative. They think in terms of narrative. We think in terms of story. We have a story about an outcome, and that is a mood. When we talk about moving around inappropriate moods, when we’re talking about moving transactionally where you can begin to look at moods as narratives is what are the moods that are appropriate in a given spot in the transaction cycle? An appropriate mood is a mood that is produced through a narrative at a particular point in the transaction cycle.

John Patterson: One of the main reasons we want to distinguish this in the way we do is because most people approach mood in one of a couple of ways I’m familiar with. One is people have moods as if there’s something uncontrollable about having a mood. “I have a mood. I’m in a bad mood. I’m in a good mood. I’m whatever mood.” That’s one way that people relate to moods.

Then the other way that I find that people tend to relate to moods is something like, “Well, a positive mood is good and a negative mood is bad,” something like that. Or finally a third approach which is that some people tend to have the same mood or produce the same mood in all kinds of situations.

The first thing that we like to say is is that there are moods that are appropriate to certain and moves M-O-V-E-S in a transaction. If I’m inventing or in the invention of a transaction then the appropriate mood is imaginative, optimistic. However if I’m in the producer or fulfillment part of a transaction then there’s a different kind of mood that’s appropriate. Something more rigorous something determined. Knowing where I am in a transaction at any given time can tell me the appropriate mood. As an example, it’s not uncommon for us to sit down for a meeting here at Influence Ecology. Darryl will say something like, “Well, let’s get the optimism and sociability out of the way so we can get to work.”

Kirkland: As in this morning for example with the exact line being, Can we get all that happy horseshit out of the way that we get to that. That is a typical thing you will hear from someone who’s trained in Mood’s attitude and state of mind. They are acknowledging a quick run around the transaction cycle to give everyone a chance because this is where we’re headed in this particular meeting and. My favorite moments are when John will stop and go. Well hey hang on a second.

This meeting needs to begin in a particular way because I want to produce a mood here. Now what John is going to have to do in that situation and very good at it if he is going to have to tell a story that we accept. That’s what we mean when we say or do lose your job in transacting with another human being. Yes first and foremost to determine if the mood is appropriate over there for you to engage an invitation to transact. That begins the whole thing right there.

John: Let’s address the very popular– it’s got more and more popular. I see so much evidence for it? The the popular notion that you ought to be in a good mood you ought to be positive that negativism is a bad thing that you ought not be skeptical that you need to be open-minded and positive at all times and in all situations we say that’s not only wrong incorrect that just simply isn’t responsible for where things are in a transaction. I love the example Kirkland of the factory floor factory floor which mood is best for factory floor where work is getting fulfilled. Well, it’s rigor, it’s determination.

It isn’t the kind of life’s gregarious optimistic approach to things when perhaps safety is concerned or productivity is concerned or systems or processes or structures are concerned. Likewise was invited to a meeting in Tucson some time ago. I knew the meeting was an opportunity to invent nothing more nothing more. It was quite difficult to keep the mood in invent because people wanted to take the mood into a different transaction into a transaction for somehow getting something done or decided or completed. Knowing where you are in the transaction is important so that you can bring the appropriate mood to the transaction.

Kirkland: That’s right. There is a very clean guy that’s available to you through this program called the narratives of the transaction cycle. The narratives are the story that correspond to the appropriate mood.

John: In our next episode we interview Corey Shepherd of Sound Financial group. He talks about the benefits of being immersed in a resource of knowledge and talent.

Corey Shepherd: The other part about my generation is that independence. That’s right. Positive thinking. Just go for it and you can do anything in you. It gets really selfish it gets really me focused. There was Kirkland Tibbles who said in conference, “Everything you want in life can be found in groups.” Then a little bit later pointed to this whole room of influence that college members and said Welcome to your brain. What that did for me was all of a sudden my brain expanded to be the whole room.

John: My special thanks to our guest John Severson and in our show notes you will find links to connect with him and all the links to websites books or downloads mentioned in this podcast. Some episodes include a transcript and support material. The Influence Ecology Podcast is produced by Influence Ecology LLC in Ventura California.

This episode was produced by me, John Patterson, and Jason Kelly. This program is made possible through the assistance of the Influence Ecology faculty mentors and students around the world. We’re grateful for co-founder Kirkland Tibbles and his 30 plus years of specialized study in the philosophy of Transactionalism and the fundamentals of Transactional Competence.

This episode includes contributions by Karol Gregory and Tyson Crandell for this episode the sound design and editing are by Jason Kelly. The podcast theme is by Chris Standring and is 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 a 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.

The Influence Ecology Podcast is produced by Influence Ecology, LLC in Ventura, California. This episode was recorded April 8th, 2018 and was produced by John Patterson and Jason Kelly. This program is made possible through the assistance of the Influence Ecology faculty, mentors, and students around the world. We’re grateful for Co-founder Kirkland Tibbels and his 30+ years of specialized study in the philosophy of Transactionalism and the fundamentals of Transactional Competence.

This episode includes contributions by Karal Gregory and Tyson Crandall. For this episode, the sound design and editing are by Jason Kelley. 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.

Podcast Bonuses:

LinkedIn
Free 30-Day Guest Access

Influence Ecology is the leading business education specializing in Transactional Competence, having published and contributed to the only comprehensive text on the subject, Transactionalism: An Historic and Interpretive Study by Trevor J. Phillips. Co-Founder Kirkland Tibbels has authored more than 500 papers on the subject, study, and discipline of transactional competence and is a sought-after lecturer at universities, major corporations, and civic organizations around the world. 

Influence Ecology’s curriculum includes conferences, webinars, online tools, podcasts, and mentorship utilized by men and women in over seventy countries around the world. Our membership includes an international assembly of accomplished professionals, faculty, and peers from a variety of countries, industries, and cultures.

Jenn Oliver, Senior Director of Service for the Academic Division at the University of Virginia, has learned a valuable lesson about what we refer to as “putting the mask on first.” Before her study with Influence Ecology, primarily, other people’s needs informed her plans. Her work was oriented only around doing for others, leaving her overwhelmed and aimless. Like many people, she was waiting for others to notice her value and reward her accordingly. She now takes care of herself and her aims first before assisting others. She’s learned to decline requests, respect her own aims, and spend time on what matters to her personally and professionally. Her interview demonstrates how she has expanded her value while gaining more time, more money, and more focus.

Later in our episode, Co-Founder Kirkland Tibbels teaches about the willingness to decline and how doing so produces more authority—and freedom.

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, Jason Kelley & Tyson Crandall

“Early on in my career, I did everything for everyone except for myself.”

Helping people build ambitious and satisfying careers, businesses and lives. This is the Influence Ecology Podcast. Now here’s your host, John Patterson.

John Patterson: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening wherever you are in the world. I’m your host, John Patterson, the co-founder and CEO of Influence Ecology, the leading business education in Transactional Competence. Broadcasting from Ventura, California, this podcast features case studies, stories and lessons from business owners, executives and entrepreneurs who found real solutions, real results and real satisfaction not only with work, career, and money, but in every area of life. You’ll hear how these ambitious professionals found that those who transact powerfully thrive.

If you’ve been on an airplane, the flight attendant tells you to put your mask on if the cabin loses pressure. They repeatedly instruct you do it first before helping others, but why? Surely, you should help children first. Destin Sandlin, who explores the world using science is a U.S. engineer and aspiring astronaut, had created a video to show the exact science behind this rule. We’ve included the video in our show notes. He enters this special chamber to find out what happens if you don’t put on your mask. After a few minutes, he starts to lose brain function, cannot identify basic shapes and can’t even speak or put his mask on. Someone must step in and put it on for him to prevent him from dying.

Are you all about others to your own detriment? By the time you’ve helped someone else, you may not know how to help yourself. Sound like you? What do you do to act or think in another way? Jenn Oliver is a senior director of Service academic division at the University of Virginia who has learned a valuable lesson about putting the mask on first. Before her study with Influence Ecology, primarily other people’s needs informed her plans. Her work was only oriented around doing for others, which left her overwhelmed and sometimes aimless. Like many people, she was waiting for others to notice her value and reward her accordingly.

She now takes care of herself and her aims before assisting others. She’s learned to decline requests, respect her own aims, and spend that time on what matters to her personally and professionally. Her interview demonstrates how she’s gained more time, more money, and more focus. In today’s episode, co-founder Kirkland Tibbels teaches about the willingness to decline and how doing so produces more authority and freedom. Here’s the interview. Well, Jenn Oliver, welcome to the Influence Ecology podcast. Great to have you with us.

Jenn: It’s great to be here.

John: Take a second and introduce yourself.

Jenn: My name is Jenn Oliver, and I am the senior director of service for academic division at the University of Virginia, human resources department.

John Patterson: Very good. In the way that we teach it, you identify as which personality?

Jenn: I identify as a producer.

John: Describe that personality from what you understand about it.

Jenn: Producers do a lot of things and struggle declining to do a lot of things, and many others in the environment with us often come to us for things because they know that we’ll do them for them-

John: [laughs]

Jenn: -whether we should be doing them or not.

John: Good. Well, I think that leads us to what I suspect from your notes and from observation and working with you for how long we’ve been working together now?

Jenn: Just over five years now.

John: Goodness gracious. We have said in many different ways throughout our study, put the oxygen mask on yourself first before you put it on others, because many times people don’t do that. Especially our producer personalities, they tend to put the oxygen mask on others first. It sounds like you’ve had some important lessons about that throughout the years, yes?

Jenn: Yes, I definitely have. I have been very successful in my career, but I will say that it came with a cost. Early on in my career, I did everything for everyone except for myself. I was that person that everyone came to, and I would always find a solution to whatever breakdown they had, every issue they had, even if it wasn’t in the domain that I should have been dealing with. I didn’t take care of myself and I suffered pretty greatly in certain areas of my life because of that. So, yes, I didn’t put the oxygen mask on first. I will say that has completely changed, and I’m doing that today.

John: How is life now?

Jenn: Life now is much better. I take care of myself and I concentrate on what is important for where I need to head, and I am comfortable in declining requests that people make of me, but in a very respectful way. That was really hard for me in the past, even if it was just my kids. Not even just in my career, it was throughout everything. I was on every board, I was on every PTO, I was the coordinator for this, that and the other thing, I was on every committee at work. It took hold of my life and who I was, it defined me.

John: What was all that like for you? It sounds exhausting. [laughs]

Jenn: It’s funny you ask that, because I look back on a regular basis now and say, “How did I handle that?” I think because I was just on autopilot constantly, I didn’t know any different, and so I often didn’t know what I was missing until it was missed. That was a huge “a-ha” for me. I also felt value by doing, that’s just in my personality, but I was spending time on that doing in the wrong places in my life. I wasn’t focusing on areas that were important. Marriage, kids, things that made me happy. I just thought by taking care of everyone else was what I was meant to do.

John: There are different personalities, of course. As we teach it, there’s the inventor, the performer, the producer and the judge. The producer tends to be the doer in all transactions. Oftentimes, when people come study with Influence Ecology and come to understand transactions, the way they work, where they’re best suited in transactions, they learn to be responsible for both the asset and the liability of their personality in transaction. There is an asset to your personality in transaction, and it’s obvious. You can hear it, you can hear, how needed, how useful, how helpful, how included you are in all of it.

Yet, there there’s the liability of it, which is what you’ve been describing. Where am I in this transaction? I’m thinking about people who might be hearing about this for the first time and wondering if I identify with Jenn and the way you described yourself before. What are some of the things that you began to do or see that started to change life for you? What would you advise someone?

Jenn: A very first thing that I noticed, first and foremost, when I started studying with Influence Ecology was not only was I doing everything, but I was also so in this mind frame of everyone must do it as well as I. That was really becoming a problem for me in career as well as some other areas of my life. That was the first thing that I focused on. Once I started learning those personalities, I really started focusing on what was important to those individuals and how I needed to move differently with them, and that it wasn’t about everyone being the same as I. That was actually a really bad approach for me to have taken for so long.

John: You mean like people didn’t have to do it with the same perfection as you?

Jenn: The same rigor, right. The same rigor, perfection. I really started accepting people for who they were and where they were at at the time that I had those transactions with them. That’s the first time that at least people in the office started saying to me, “What are you doing? Something’s different.”

John: Was that because you began to see the other personalities would move in different ways than you or be concerned for different things than you?

Jenn: Yes. I was really focusing on what I saw was causing relationships to break down for me in that area. When I’d get a call from a senior leader that says, “Jenn, you pissed that person off,” [laughs] I was starting to take note that it was all embedded in my personality and how I was moving. I was not moving correctly with others that had other personalities. I just expected that everyone should see me as who I am, and if I set a deadline for something, everyone should turn it in on time, and that wasn’t the case. That was the first thing that I really started focusing on.

I would say the second thing that I started focusing on was, as a doer, I am very involved with many different charities and I love taking care of people, and certain missions and areas of my life where– And it shifts all the time, but those that have less than me. So, I really focused on how could I bring that humility that’s in my personality into the workplace and the office and in my career, and really tend to that more often. It really started to show itself in ways where I was recognizing people more. I would say thank you to people privately, but I never thanked them publicly, in front of people, when they did something great. I completely recognized that. I just started to change the way and let people be where they are, and found that they followed and performed better when I stopped being in their business and really telling them how they should do their work.

John: How did that impact things and the family life?

Jenn: Well, it definitely impacted my relationship with my spouse, because he is a judge and he is an introvert, and he is always right first. So, I learned how to provide feedback. I wanted an immediate answer right away, and I’ve learned that if I want to have a conversation, I have to give him 24 to 48 hours for him to think about it. That’s made such a difference. I mean, just some basic things like we have to talk about what camps the kids were going to go to over the summer and I wanted to have it all blocked out and fixed in an hour at 7:00 o’clock on a Wednesday night, and he didn’t want any part of that. He was like, “I just need to think about this for a minute,” and I didn’t understand why. I didn’t want to understand why.

John: I think this is really good. What I love about this is, one of the things that I personally find extraordinarily valuable about understanding personality and Transactional behavior is not just the things about myself, but all the things about how I might speak the language of the other personalities. How do I speak that language? How do I talk to them in a way that works for them? One thing that we’ve seen for sure is that a producer’s mind is like a file cabinet. It’s very much organized where things are objective in certain places. It’s a very black or white, yes or no, on or off kind of world. Then, for the other personalities, they don’t see that way, don’t live that way, don’t think, can’t think that way. It sounds like you gave a lot of room for people to think or see in other ways. Anything else you want to say about all that?

Jenn: Well, yes. I gave them room to think, and then in return, I was able to actually receive from them so much more. All the different possibilities that people who are either on my teams or on workgroups with me at work. I sometimes was quick to shut people down. Not intentionally or to be rude, but I started to recognize how I was moving that way and just really started to see the possibility. I really talk about living in the gray these days. Even with my team here, I say, “We have a lot of process oriented work, and that is our job. We are a service organization, and we provide a very high level of service, but it doesn’t always have to be within the rules. Be able to find the grey within the black and white.”

I was not there seven, eight years ago. It was black or white. I very much live in the, “Well, let’s call this person and see what they think about that.” It brings such a level of collaboration and respect for people, because you’re asking their opinion. It basically is, I’m taking some relationships and I’m building up my favors, right? Any time I ask someone for their opinion on something, usually it’s very well received, especially in higher ed. We’re very collaborative, and it was very hard for me to be in that environment. I’ve adjusted to it very well, but it’s been really great for my personality. I go to my favorite bucket and sometimes I’ll call them up and ask them for a favor when I need to. It’s been very helpful.

John: That’s fantastic. I can only imagine what it’s like for you. As I imagine a character in a movie, if you will, who’s always trying to get everyone to be, and do, and think, and act in a way that’s precise and blah-blah-blah. As in someone else, someone in another character who’s got a lot of room, got a lot of gray areas, et cetera, but both get stuff done. One is certainly more likable. [laughs] One is certainly more enjoyable to be with, and to hang out with, and so forth. What’s happened for you over the course of these five years in terms of your sense of being liked by others, being appreciated by others, being included in new ways? Can you say anything about all that?

Jenn: Well, I would say I’m probably liked a little bit more by my family. [laughs] Not that they didn’t like. My teens think I’m the cool mom, so that is a good thing, but my relationships with people here at this institution have really changed. People will come to me not out of request, but just to say hi. That didn’t used to happen years ago, when I started, 16 years ago with this institution. I think sometimes I was that intimidation factor. I was that one that they only called if you had to call that HR director. [laughs] Now, people will just call, “Hey, hi.” I’m invited to go to coffee and I’m invited to be on workgroups because I’m viewed as valuable now, not just because I can do the work, I may not be the one that’s doing the work.

It’s also lended itself to my ability to really work with others in a way where I see what their needs are and I’m responding to their needs, kind of forecasting it. So, we’ve had a lot of transformation here over the course of many years here at the university. I’ve been able to move myself into positions that I’ve wanted, into committees that I want to be a part of, not that I’m asked and must be a part of. That has been a huge change and benefit to my identity here. Not just at this institution, but at our peer institutions even nationally. When you’re asked to speak at a national conference that’s a big deal.

John: Certainly is. You’ve been participating for five years, and you’re still active and participating today at Influence Ecology, in this study. Why for you is this a valued study?

Jenn: Well, when I started, I did not realize that this is a constant inquiry, and that is something that I’ve definitely learned in the last couple of years. I just did the programs, and to be honest, in the beginning I didn’t get value out of them like I should have, and that’s because I was being my producer self and not doing it for myself but doing it for the program. Especially in these last few years, practicing on a regular basis in this ecology, makes me stronger every day, every month, every year. I’m in a fabulous study group and we have very different opinions, and we really push upon one another.

I said to myself this year, “Do I really have time? Should I continue membership?” If I didn’t continue, I wouldn’t be practicing on a regular basis. This study is not one that you can just stop. Even if I wasn’t participating, I would have to make sure that I had enough rigor to be able to study on my own, but I wouldn’t have that additional education that’s brought from Influence Ecology every single day, every month. There’s always something new and I don’t want to miss out on that. [chuckles] I don’t want to miss out on it.

John: Understood.

Jenn: It’s fascinating.

John: It is. [laughs] It keeps evolving for me and all of us here. Your inclusion and other people’s inclusion, as you know, we’re continuing to grow and evolve in all kinds of wonderful ways, simply because we have so many people from all over the world that are valuable assets to us all, valuable resources to us all, valuable new thinking to us all. It’s been a remarkable journey. Many people often have something they would love to say. So, is there anything else that we should know about anything?

Jenn: I would say that early in my studies, I was slightly intimidated by the fact that there were many ind