Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The Smoke Trail, hosted by Smoke Wallin, is a journey into awakening consciousness, weaving authentic stories and deep discussions with inspiring guests to unlock high performance and perfect health. Each episode delves into spirituality, leadership, and transformation, offering tools to transcend trauma and find your bliss along the way. It’s a reflective space for achieving peak potential and inner peace in a distraction-filled world.
Welcome to the Smoke Trail hosted by Smoke Wallin. Join Smoke on a unique journey of awakening consciousness, sharing authentic stories and deep discussions with inspiring guests. Explore spirituality, leadership, and transformation, tools to elevate your path.
Smoke:Is this your birthday?
Dave:No. It's not my birthday. My birthday was a week ago, but close enough.
Smoke:I guess I saw a post from Emma, that let's talk about your birthday, and I saw it today this morning. I was like, oh, I'm doing we're doing the podcast on Dave's birthday.
Dave:Let's call it my birthday. Every day's a birthday.
Smoke:We'll call it your birthday month.
Dave:Alright.
Smoke:Well, awesome. Well, great to see you and welcome to the Smoke Trail. It's been a long time coming, and I'm super excited to to to talk to my dear friend, Dave Garrison, who's got his brand new book out, which is cool, very cool.
Dave:Glad to be here and looking forward to learning and sharing some maybe.
Smoke:Dave and I have been friends for, I don't know if we're on decades yet, but we're getting close. I think we are. We're certainly in our second decade. And we've done a bunch of things together over the years. And I have a great deal of respect for you and the work you do and have always enjoyed your perspective on engagement and getting people involved.
Smoke:I was listening to the buy in advantage on my ride from Vegas back to Sedona last night yesterday. I got some good bits of wisdom, but it sounded very familiar because it's stuff that I think you've been bringing to the table with your presence and the way you interact with people all along. Maybe you've fine tuned how you talk about it, some of the terminology, you've created some tools around it, but it feels like the Dave, like when you get up and lead a group and you got us all doing stuff to get engagement, just sounded familiar to me.
Dave:Awesome. You know, it's all based on this belief that when leaders deeply know that all of us are smarter than any of us, they've taken the first step to creating buy in, recognizing we've all got our blind spots. And collectively, we can cover for those blind spots. And since everyone's experience is different, if we can tap into everyone's experience, then we can have the best options to choose from as we create outcomes. And that's very different than most businesses or some businesses where you hear people say, well, you know, when you've been here a couple of years, then you might be able to have a voice in this.
Dave:As opposed to, you know what? You've got life experience to bring today, so let's start. In fact, in some Japanese companies, at the end of the first week on the job, they say, tell us what we can do better. Because that person brings experience to the workplace and has experienced the workplace and you get one opportunity for fresh feedback.
Smoke:Yeah, yeah, before they've been tainted by the existing system structure apparatus, right, that they get stuck in.
Dave:Yeah, the right answers. Another thing in the book is there are no right answers. There are only answers.
Smoke:Yeah. Yeah, I love that. And I to talk some more about that. But like, for me, as you know, this is a dialogue about leadership and consciousness, which I think your book fits perfectly into, and like, the way you are, the way you show up is about consciousness. So I'm going to tie it in there, if you're okay with that.
Smoke:Going to like at least I dot the lines. But one of the things in my work, in my journey, that I have experienced is, as I have learned to drop my judgment and to come with a completely open stance when I meet people or situations or, any, you know, anything I'm experiencing to the degree I'm successful at dropping judgment, which takes practice and takes a lot of work because it's our natural instinct is to have opinions and judgment. Your ego mind is always doing that. But as I do that, I realize that information is revealed to me. Like, things are revealed that would not otherwise be revealed.
Smoke:And I feel like that's kind of the stance that you take is like, all right, if you come with a prescribed answer, you come with, like, I'm the leader, I know how to do things. I just went to a YPO event, I learned all this great stuff from my friend Dave, and now I'm bringing it back to my team and here's what we're gonna do, and here's the model, and now go do it, guys. That's, you know, and I'm on send. Right? I'm gonna miss a whole bunch of information because I'm not, literally, it's not exactly what you think of coming from judgment, but it is.
Smoke:It's judging, it's basically coming from like, I'm telling you the answer as opposed to, I want to perceive what what am I missing? Like, what's the resistance that I'm not seeing?
Dave:Yeah, you've just laid about four key concepts into one description, which is so true. But the higher level order of thought here is curiosity and judgment cannot coexist. You're in one state or the other. If you're in judgment, you're saying to everybody, I know the answer, which says as well, I'm not inviting your input. I'm telling you the way it is.
Dave:And that's been modeled to us. That's what leaders do. People come to us and say, Smoke, what do you want me to do about? If you give them an answer, you've just cut off your learning. And
Smoke:yet
Dave:we feel good like we're helping people to give them the answer, but the answer does not teach us anything. And our opportunity is to learn from that person and ask them, for example, how would you think about that? What allowed you and so that's a trap. If you say what do you think and they say blah, blah, blah and then you go, well let me judge that answer and tell you what you're missing. It's keep with a curiosity, which is a trained behavior to say, what else did you consider?
Dave:How did you know that was the right answer? And then the learning begins. You learn about them and you get to add your experience. So that example of, let's come back from a YPO event and say, hey team, I learned this great idea is a way to cut everyone else out. What in our world, what enlightened leaders do instead is to think, okay, I heard this idea.
Dave:It's really great. Ask yourself two questions. What's the problem this idea addresses in my organization right now? Number one. Number two, how did I know it was a great idea?
Dave:And if I can then share with my team the outcome I'm trying to address, you know, I'm thinking about this problem of X. And if you can share what we call your criteria, what's on the checklist in your head, and then don't share your idea, ask them to come up with their own ideas. And then, and only then, leaders go last, except when it comes to vulnerability. Share your idea. But you're going to hear a lot more ideas if you just share, hey, here's the desired outcome, here's the problem I'm trying to address, and here's what's on the checklist of what a great outcome looks like to me.
Dave:Then you're going to get people engaged and whatever answer you all come up with, they'll buy in because they were part of the process as opposed to, what do you think of my great idea? Let's see, you're the boss. You just told me it was a great idea. How's that working for us?
Smoke:Yeah, it really is just reversing your natural instinct. And leaders, as leaders, we became leaders because we weren't afraid to step up, right? And so, you know, we often come to the table believing that we have a lot of answers because we've been successful, right? Like it's natural.
Dave:And that's totally with good intent. And we've been taught in school there is an answer. What's two plus two? What's the capital of France? There's an answer, and it's an answer, and there is not one answer.
Dave:There are answers. And the question is, how do we cultivate the best answers from which to choose? It's a very different But back to your point of, it's because you're asking questions, you're not telling.
Smoke:Yeah, no, I mean, and the other thing that I think is tied to this is it's not even always what we say or what we hear. There's a lot of communication that's not verbal. And if we're talking, if we're prescribing, or we're judging answers, we're not in a position to even notice what is the reaction? What what is this person really saying? Because they might not be saying what they really mean.
Smoke:You know? And if they feel defensive or they feel judged, they may say, they may go along with it, but you're miss, you're probably missing, I'm probably missing, the fact that actually they're having a lot of resistance and that that's not really what they're meaning. Like they're saying yes, but they don't mean yes.
Dave:Yes, absolutely. This human machine that we occupy is amazing because it'll take a billion bits of information every day, sort through it, ignore most of it, and then generalize, distort and delete what we don't believe. And it's what we do with media, what we do with ideas, everything we see. For example, if you drove into the office this morning, you saw all the other cars in the parking lot, and you saw what their license plates are. But if I ask you what's the number of the license plates of the cars in the parking lot, You wouldn't know because you didn't need the information, you deleted it.
Dave:And so our brain is working so fast at that process. When we hear people speak, we're thinking of our response when we really don't know what they meant. And a simple example, we'll ask a group, hey, what do I mean when I say chair? And we'll hear everything from a lazy boy in front of the TV to chairman of the board to the wooden stool you sit on in elementary school or church. And until we ask, hey, Smoke, what did you mean by chair?
Dave:I'm going to apply my meaning, not what you meant. And there's where the misunderstanding begins from the very first step.
Smoke:Wow. Yeah, that's a great point. And there's so many examples of that where the context matters. The content you might judge, and you're like, wait a minute, what is the context that this person is actually saying this? And that changes the meaning of that content dramatically.
Dave:Absolutely. And that context comes from each individual's experience. And what we are trained to do is to apply our experience to filter what they're saying. As soon as we do that, we lose that curiosity you were referring to earlier.
Smoke:I was recently reading one of Irvin Lazio's books. I don't if you've followed him at all, he has a book on the Akashic Records. He's a really brilliant guy who's done a lot of work in consciousness. And he was a maestro at you know, as a as a child in Eastern Europe and escaped the iron curtain and and then and then ended up as a teaching philosophy at Yale without actually having gone to college. Like, he's just one of those brilliant guys.
Smoke:But in one of his discussions, he said, you know, they did these studies where there's always an informal network in any organization of how things actually get done. Right? There's the organization chart, and then there's the how do things get done? And they did some studies where, they mapped it out and they realized like, you know, there was this whole informal structure. And then the management people that were doing this study, they went in and said, all right, well, let's formalize that.
Smoke:Now, since that's the way it works, let's formalize it. And of course they wreck it, right? They destroy the thing, because the way humans connect and get things done, you know, there's a reason it's the informal method. It works, and it's great to identify it, but like, you don't want to necessarily jump in and try to like micromanage it and say, Oh, if that's the way it works, then that's the system. No, because like, people are going to figure out different ways to do things.
Dave:And, you know, one of the things that we talk about in the Buying Advantage book is alignment, and we think about that as horizontal alignment. So what we'll find in organizations is this department is perfect. We're doing really well. And this department is perfect and doing really well. But it's the horizontal synergy that makes the difference between great and mediocre.
Dave:And so we'll interview teams, executive teams, C suite teams before we begin working with a client at Garrison Growth. And we'll ask this question, What values do you see in practice? Not what's on the wall, not what's on the card. Do you see as we make decisions and communicate? Number one.
Dave:Number two: What are the three most important priorities for the company right now? And we'll hear most of the time that values we see practice generally line up, to your point, but priorities rarely do. They're not expressed in the same way. So think about that. These C suite people are the messengers who are bringing that message down into the verticals.
Dave:And if they interpret things differently, then the chances of horizontal synergy are slim to none.
Smoke:Yeah. And you would never get that from an org chart or a workshop on what is our company goals. Everyone walks out and says, yeah, those are our goals, but then they have completely different thought process around them.
Dave:And the question of Ben, let's assume that everybody on the C suite agrees on what the goals are and they would say them the same way. Then the question is, what do you do with that information? And I hear so many CEOs, so many YPOers say, hey, I'm so frustrated because people aren't carrying out this great strategy we spent a weekend creating. Like, what the heck? And what we observe to be true is there's not a proven technique that leaders are aware of to get the levels below them to buy into the strategy.
Dave:And so often what they'll do is say, hey, we're going to do a town hall call. Smoke, here are the strategies. We'll put out an email and say, here are the strategies. Or we'll post them in the wall, say, here are the strategies. Or call me and say, here are the strategies.
Dave:And that doesn't create buy in. What does create buy in is to say, you know what, these are the strategies we came up with. I have a couple of questions for you. Again, leaders ask questions. First question, what clarification do you require about these strategies?
Dave:Secondly, how do you see our department or our team contributing to these? What do these strategies mean to us? We internalize and personalize and create an action plan for each group that they create. So it's done with, not done to.
Smoke:Yeah, that makes sense. Well, I know that you spent a lot of years actually running companies and doing this and making mistakes. Did inform you? I mean, because you come at this with such a high level of awareness. And that's what you're teaching.
Smoke:You're teaching leaders to be aware of all these things that you can't be aware of if you're on sin, that you've got to bring people in. It takes checking our egos at the door and being truly open to, you know, getting the input from everyone. Because it's nice to say it, but it's like, you know, you have to actually be able to accept that, you know, if you're going to ask for it. If you don't, you ask for it, you actually even dig yourself a deeper hole because they'll know you didn't receive it. They'll know that that what you asked for, they gave you, you ignored or you shot down.
Smoke:So it's actually worse than even not asking, I think. I mean, that's my sense of it. But when you, you know, can you share an experience or, like, you know, an example that was like, like now would be so obvious, but was at the time, you were hitting your head against the wall or, you know, running into struggles, trying to get something done, but not seeing why the resistance was there and just getting what you wanted out of it? Yeah. It comes back to alignment, and I wish I had the buying advantage twenty years ago or thirty years ago as a
Dave:young executive, a young CEO. I wish I had it. And here was the challenge. I was working in companies that were venture backed or PE backed. And the challenge is that buy in, things like turnover, things like employee burnout, don't show up on our metrics, don't show up on the stuff the board looks at, don't show up on the P and L.
Dave:But you know and I know there's very real cost. If we have high turnover or we have a vacancy, it means other people are doing two jobs. When we finally hire somebody, somebody has to spend the time training them. So there's a very real cost. I didn't, I was being asked all the time by the PE firms, where are you on this month's profit?
Dave:What are your forecasts? How are you gonna drive profit? I was passionate about people and passionate about values, but was unable to convince the investors that this was part of value creation. And so I didn't have alignment. And so I was always under personally under huge stress Because internally, I knew that the culture and the people were going to make the difference.
Dave:And the questions that were being asked had nothing to do with people and nothing to do with culture. And yet I look at companies like, there's a YPO company, CHG Healthcare, which is I think now on their third private equity owner, everybody has made money along the way, and they put people first. That's their belief, that's their philosophy, that's what they practice. And their turnover as a result is half of the industry average and profitability significantly higher. And in the book, we tell the story of this, Cadillac dealership, the GM came up to me and he said, Dave, I've taken every dollar out of this business.
Dave:We're under financial pressure. This is a great financial crisis. We're under financial pressure. What do I do? And I said, what's your turnover?
Dave:And he told me some percentage was north of 50. I said, cut it in half. He came back a year later and said, I found a million dollars. I said, where did you find it? He said, reduce turnover and getting people to buy into what we're doing.
Dave:And so there's very real financial connection. I didn't have the skills or the knowledge to, apply that connection and have the patience with the owners to see that cycle through. So when you're talking about mistakes, that was a mistake.
Smoke:Yeah, well, part of it's so you had like an innate sense of what the right thing to do would have been, but lacked the tool and the framework to convey it to investors and people that had a certain very narrow framework. It's kind of like, so part of my objective here is to open up conversations around consciousness and what that means, and do it in the context of leaders and business people who maybe don't talk about these things that often. And it may be terminology, but I actually think, you know, what you're doing, what you do in the workplace is about raising consciousness. It's just a different way of kind of conveying it. And my strong belief, and this happened recently, I was with a group, so I did a couple different YPO events.
Smoke:I did Bangkok, as you know, a few weeks ago, and I did another chapter that was out here in Sedona. And one of the questions I got from a small group of leaders was, I like this, it sounds good. Know, mindfulness and meditation, it sounds good. But, you know, it's hard for me. It's like, but how does it really it really matter?
Smoke:Like, what is, you know, what's the how does it help me in my business? And I, you know, one of the things came to me in that moment was just this question. I'm like, if you could make your decisions without emotion. In other words, no matter how angry a customer was or how upset a worker or employee was about their situation or an investor was about something, that you could separate yourself from that energy of upsetness or anger or whatever it is, and you could reflect on what are all the options and what is really being said here and what's my best way to navigate this? Would you be better or worse off?
Smoke:And he looked at me and goes, Well, yeah, that would be much better. I said, Well, that's a simple way of just thinking about mindfulness and being present. You know, it's separating the stimulus from the response. Right? So we're not animalistic in a mechanical mode of, you you say this, I say that, and before you know it, you've escalated.
Smoke:Instead of trying to find out what is actually being said, to try to read the situation and say, well, what is actually being said so that I can, you know, I may not agree with the person, but surely I can make a better answer if I understand where this is actually coming from, as opposed to whatever my immediate response would be. And it seemed to resonate, but I love your thoughts on that.
Dave:Yeah, absolutely. So when we talk about removing emotion, I would like to clarify and say that's removing our emotional response versus validating the other person's emotion. So if you have somebody, if you have a customer who's really upset and screaming, hey, look, the human condition is they're screaming because they don't feel heard. And so as you said, you don't have to agree with them. But if you would simply validate them, you'll find that their emotion is like letting air out of a balloon.
Dave:Their emotion goes away and then you can get to, okay, how do we deal with this situation together?
Smoke:And
Dave:anger and that angry customer is because they're frustrated and validation looks like this. You know, after you mirror what they said, so you make sure you got it right, you didn't put your story in there. It's look, if I've been through what you've been through, I'd feel the exact same way. Note, I did not say you're right. I did not say your judgment is right.
Dave:I just said if I had been through what you've been through, I could see I'd feel the same way. And as soon as you validate someone, then they're able to put their own emotion aside and say, okay, well let's work on this together. Could we do that? And they're going to be all ears. And so it's not putting emotion aside, it's putting, as you said, your emotional response aside.
Dave:So that you don't have
Smoke:to be great.
Dave:You don't have to be, wait a minute, we don't do that. That's not the way we treat people. That didn't really happen. It's not going to further the conversation.
Smoke:Yeah. Yeah. That's well put. Yeah. Because it's not we're putting all emotion aside.
Smoke:We're not letting our emotion cloud our ability to hear them and respond in the best or the optimal way. Right? But that's really hard. Are there techniques, are there things, tools that you think about that help, you know, a leader, but anybody, really, what we're talking about is universal. It applies to any human situation.
Smoke:It's always better to not react. It's always better to be able to respond with acknowledgement, with, actually active listening and then be able to respond. But is there a way to get your own head out of the way that you found it works?
Dave:Well, as you said, a quiet mind is really the place to start. And so whether you do that through meditation or however you get there, get to a quiet mind. And one of the, images we describe to our leaders is, look, imagine you're handing the other person a blank canvas and you're handing them the oil paints and the paintbrushes. Your job is to say back what you heard them say using their words based on what the picture is that they painted. You don't have to be involved in this at all.
Dave:You simply mirror and then validate. So mirror and validate are two steps that we're all capable of. But if we have a need to be right or a need to respond or worse, a need to fix it. Okay, I'll tell you what I'm gonna do. You just skipped over the validation.
Dave:You just skipped over saying to them, I hear you. I hear you. And so when people feel heard, then we're able to have a conversation about what would you like to happen as opposed to you giving the answer, go to questions. And that's not hard to do. It's a muscle that we have the opportunity to develop and practice.
Smoke:Yeah, it really is. It's a muscle that we don't even know exists at first. And then once we discover it, it takes practice. Definitely takes practice to get out of your own response, reactionary state. And this is true, like, I mean, I just talked to a really, really successful person who's who's kind of on one of the shows, and, you know, he's a billionaire and very successful.
Smoke:And, you know, he said, yeah, he's like, I he just said, like, I get reactionary, you know? So it happens to everybody. It happens to everybody at some point in time, even if you're aware of it. You know, you don't get a good night's sleep and have a long flight and things are disrupted and, you know, you're just not feeling your best. You're you're out of whack.
Smoke:You have a cold also. And yeah, a lot of things are like going against you physically, you're just feeling not feeling great. And then you get thrown something in your face. It's really easy to react. But all it does is escalate the situation.
Smoke:It doesn't help.
Dave:And to be clear, I'm not suggesting, I don't think you are, don't react or don't have your emotional response. It's have it at the right time and use it as a powerful force of understanding, which is different than Pavlovian, you know, hit the hammer on your knee and your leg shoots out. This is different. This is let me allow the other person to be validated and have the experience and be curious about what would great look like to them? How would we know it's great?
Dave:And no matter what they say, look for the elements in their answer that you can achieve. Because they might say, well, give me a new car. Okay, well, would a new car do for you? And get really curious and keep asking questions until you can come up together with a solution. We see this in meetings all the time.
Dave:Leader will ask a question, somebody will throw out an idea, then it's debate like a ping pong match between the two loudest or the two most experienced or the two biggest ego. Total waste of time. Everybody else is just an observer because we don't have the techniques to get all the great thinking on the table. But we could.
Smoke:I really like just the simple framework you have for, like, have a plan for the meeting, have a plan of like, what are we trying to get out of it? Having a time that we're willing to allow for each each, you know, topic. And if we're going go over it, we know it's coming out of something else. It's just like seemingly simple, but also doesn't get done a lot. It's a framework to apply to every situation, right?
Dave:Yeah, and how much does that cost again, since we're all cost conscious? Costs nothing. Yeah. It's awareness and intent. Yeah.
Smoke:Yeah. And, you know, we're never going to get rid of the human ego mind in situations, but I guess it's about getting the team, the group, for the most part, check it at the door to be a part of this group. The buy in is like, you know, we all have different personalities, all have different backgrounds, everything else. We're here to try to work together to achieve something. And you've given equal footing to the quietest member and the loudest member, and you're not going to allow that to get out of whack just because of personality traits or aggressiveness.
Dave:Yeah. And, you know, speaking of effective meetings, one of the techniques that we talk about in the book is taken directly from YPO forums that are very successful at using get on board questions. And we'll see some forums, as we work with forums say, hey Smoke, tell me about what are the TV series you're streaming right now? Or tell me about a new book. And that's all interesting and irrelevant because it doesn't tell me about Smoke.
Dave:What a great get on board question that we recommend every single week you use a get on board question with your team. Great get on board questions have two elements. One is an emotion and one is in your youth. Hey Smoke, can you tell me about a time, that you were over the moon with happiness under the age of 12? What did you learn?
Dave:How does it apply today? Hey Smoke, can you tell me about a time you were really frustrated? Can you tell me about a time you felt unheard? Can you tell me about a time that you were confused? If I ask that question every single week of each one of my executives and allow them to show up as human beings, they aren't able to focus on their to do list, what they're going to do next, and their mind is somewhere else.
Dave:It brings them to the present and connects us as people because we believe human beings get a lot more done than human doings. So if I want to talk to the Vice President of Manufacturing, that's not a person, that's a position. And so how do we connect as human beings to get stuff done? That generates buy in.
Smoke:Yeah, no, that makes sense, Dave. You know, I also I recently was reading I can't remember which thing all my sources are blending together, I'm like which is good. I I mean, it means it's like, it's becoming amalgamated inside of me. Right? But but I also, like, I I can't remember where I get things now.
Smoke:But but in one framing I really liked, which was the distinction between the working mind and the thinking mind. And so when we're focused on a task and we're busy and engaged with it, that's our working mind. That's a really good mind. That's the mind that's getting things done. Very present.
Smoke:It's in the moment. It's focused on now. The thinking mind is, well, what's going to happen after this? What's going happen next week? What if I don't fail?
Smoke:What if this fails? Or, oh, and that guy was mean to me last week, or, you know, it's either thinking about the past or thinking about the future. It's another way to be talking about being present. But I really like that distinction, the thinking mind and the working mind. The working mind is the one you want to be active and engaged, and it's a good use of this tool we have.
Smoke:But this tool we have is a tool. It is like an untrained pet until it's trained. Mind needs to be disciplined so that it doesn't run rampant, and your thinking mind is the untrained aspect of it.
Dave:Yes. And so what happens in most meetings in organizations I've observed? We do death by update. Okay, manufacturing, tell us what's going on. Alright, sales, what's the latest in your area?
Dave:It's like, what a waste of time and potential. You know, why don't we have the discipline to share that information ahead of time and just say, hey, everybody got the updates. Got any questions? Any clarifying questions? And let's focus on specific issues we want to address in the meetings and tap into all that great brainpower as opposed to, Oh my God, another update.
Dave:Where are we going to go to lunch?
Smoke:Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's a little bit, you know, we always try and inform to get to that five or two and a half percent on the up or down, right? At least that's the objective, to not give a book report, to share something that's meaningful. And, you know, doing that in the workplace, I think what I find is, and this is my experience, but I think I find it in multiple forums I've been in.
Smoke:A lot of times leaders can do that in a forum because it's a special situation, and they're able to check their ego at the door, and they're there with peers. And so it's really created a it's one of the magic of YPO, and I think EO and other things like that. But it's harder to do it in your workplace. You know, it's harder to translate it.
Dave:It is. And it's especially hard if you have so analogy we use is So Smoke, if you and Anitra have over other couples to dinner, how many couples can be there before there is more than one conversation going on? How many couples? How many people?
Smoke:If I had to guess, I would say, well, once you get past two other couples, you're going to start having multiple conversations.
Dave:Right. So about six people. So if you're having a staff meeting and you have more than six people, it really inhibits vulnerability because then what will other people think? And you're thinking about your own answer as opposed to listening to others. So in that case, what we would say is break into groups of three for any discussion because you cannot have a meaningful discussion with more than six people.
Dave:That's fool's errand. So if you want to do vulnerability, break into groups of three and ask people to share their Get On Board answers. And what happens, this is a human mind trick, if I feel vulnerable in my small group of three, and I feel like people are telling me the real deal as opposed to the Facebook deal, I will transfer that trust to the larger group when we go back to the larger group. So vulnerability happens in small groups. More than six, not going to happen.
Smoke:Yeah, that's important. And how often do we keep it to that size? I mean, I think meetings end up getting bigger and bigger, and they don't go through that step of breaking everybody out, which, as you said, you can build trust and vulnerability in a small group that then can be translated to the bigger group if it's kind of reported out by that smaller group, right? Is that the idea?
Dave:It is. And then we hear, Oh, well, we can only do that when we're in person and we're not in person that much. It's like, I'm calling bullshit on that. You can do it virtually. You can do it in person.
Dave:It's great if it's in person, doesn't have to be. You can build trust. And this is where we said leaders go last except when it comes to vulnerability. So if you've got a real question about childhood and plus emotion, then you go first as the leader and be real. Your ability to set real, just like in forum, the first person who speaks sets what real looks like.
Dave:We've got a weekly newsletter that gives everybody a buy in question every single week, a get on board question. So you don't have to think about them. Just get the free newsletter, read the question and use that if you don't want to create your own.
Smoke:Yeah. Well, had a conversation around that vulnerability question, and it's funny, the way I look at it now is, you know, and this is after, as you know, some of my journey, but, you know, after doing a lot of work, you know, of coming to terms with trauma and just, you know, kind of getting through a lot of stuff. Me sharing things like that are very, would sound very vulnerable, isn't vulnerable to me anymore. It's just sharing if it's useful. If it's helpful to build trust and to create an understanding, then I will share things.
Smoke:But it's not vulnerable to me. It's not at all vulnerable, but it feels vulnerable to others. Does that make sense?
Dave:It does. It makes perfect sense. And you know, one of the things about our relationship that allows me to tell you anything, and we don't have to have a bottle of wine to do it. What allows me to do that is I feel like I will not be judged. You will accept that whatever I say, I say in good faith, and I believe it to be true.
Dave:I'm not trying to bullshit you. And I believe it will be heard and accepted. And then you might have a totally different experience or belief, which is great, but I don't feel it'll be judged. And that's back to the curiosity and judgment cannot coexist.
Smoke:Yeah. And another trick, if you never want to feel judged, all you have to do is own all your flaws. You know, I'm a failure. I've lost companies. I've been dishonest.
Smoke:I've done this. I've done that. I own my shadows. I own the things that I experienced. So, there's no judgment.
Smoke:What are you going to judge? It is what it is, right? So I don't know. A, it's a, it's a little. Yeah.
Dave:That's very powerful. And you know, when you were talking about different kinds of minds earlier, something that was, that I learned about my consciousness in the writing of this book. When I tried to write or be a writer, it failed. When I allowed it to come through me, it succeeded. To the extent that you think this is a success, it was because things came through me.
Dave:I was just a channel. That's when real stuff came out. But that takes meditation, takes the quiet mind. And honestly, 04:30 and 05:30 in the morning is where this stuff came to me. Because I wasn't thinking, oh, what's the next line going to be?
Dave:Because I don't know what the next line is going to be. But if I would just listen, you might call it intuition, you might call it sixth sense, you might call it Elohim, whatever you call it, the voices came to me to say, Okay, here's where to go.
Smoke:Yeah, that's beautiful. I think that's for many, particularly men, who live in a very like, we got to go conquer, we have to go do that. Are big achievers, right? We came from the ego mind mentality. We can do it.
Smoke:We make it happen. And many of us have been very successful doing that. But we've suppressed and ignored and not been able to listen to our intuition, our higher power, our heart, which I think many women have a greater ability naturally to receive, to be aware of, that I think what I'm seeing is a lot of leaders today becoming more aware of that. You know, like rediscovering it, or now becoming to an understanding of, wait a minute, you mean there is intuition. There is a thing that comes to you that if you will allow it, it has to be an allowing place.
Smoke:It's almost like the discussion we had earlier about the judgment, you know, showing up a judgment and not being able to see. Well, by coming with your ego mind as the lead, you can't receive the bigger wisdom, the higher power. That's the download. That's what you're talking about with your book, think.
Dave:Absolutely. You know, you talk to somebody who studies the body, what you'll hear is we actually are wired, if you use body as if it's a computer, we're wired with three minds. And you know this from what you just said, the heart, and you hear this in language, my heart's breaking, my heart's happy, my heart's exploding. We're wired with a brain to our heart. We're wired with a brain in our gut, which is gut feeling, or that's like a punch to my gut or whatever.
Dave:And that was the brain in our head. And in school, we're taught to memorize answers. We're taught there's one answer and we're taught to cut off the input from the heart and the gut. And so I think there's a big opportunity to really listen to your gut and listen to your heart. We don't have this story in a book, but another person known to some who are watching this was trying to make a major decision about their life and, taking their very public life in another direction.
Dave:And they called the night before and said, I'm just having second thoughts and I made a big list of pros and cons. Can I share it with you? And so we spent thirty minutes going through the pros and cons. And I said, that's really interesting. That's all your brain.
Dave:Now, what I want to ask you is, what is your heart? If you listen to your heart, what does your heart tell you? And what does your gut tell you? Because I want to put as much emphasis on that as all these pros and cons, which are brilliant, but they're all above the neck. I want to know what's
Smoke:above
Dave:the neck. Yeah. It's much harder to do that for guys, as you said.
Smoke:Yeah, but it's something we can cultivate. And it's actually the real power. I don't remember if we've had this conversation, but did you ever read David Hawkins' Power versus Force?
Dave:No, tell me.
Smoke:Okay. All right. Well, I'm going to share it with you, but I think it's mandatory reading for anyone who wants to be serious about leadership, because it gives us a framework, at least terminology wise, of understanding consciousness. And so it goes through all the levels of consciousness, and it actually puts a framework around it. He was a psychiatrist for fifty years.
Smoke:He had the largest practice in the country, very successful, and then became enlightened. And then after a decade of just being isolated and vibrating at a very high level, realized that with his knowledge, his human knowledge, and his enlightenment, he had to tell the story. And so he wrote Power versus Force, and then he wrote 12 other books. But it's a framework, and it just puts it into these buckets. But it gives a, I think, way to think about accessing this higher power and this heart mind, you know, coherent what we want is coherence.
Smoke:We're not saying, you know, the mind goes away, but it's heart mind coherence. To the degree we can become heart led, we're going to be much more powerful than if we're just brain led. And, you know, so much of the West is in this thinking mind, you know, we've been beaten down on the other stuff that we're missing a big part of the power of knowing. And there's a knowingness. And we have access to all this information in the universe that is way better than the greatest AI that will ever be created.
Smoke:It's actually accessible right here, right now, but we have to be open to it too, and you have to ask the question in the right way, and you have to be willing to accept the answer. And just as simple as what gives you energy is telling you that's what you should do. If feels like it's exciting, it's the universe saying that's the right answer. You don't need pros and cons and all this stuff to tell you that it's right. You have to just, it's like, follow your heart.
Smoke:Well, that's what that means.
Dave:Yeah. We were talking to a CEO who's built a successful company that's purpose driven this morning. And he was saying, well, as we grow, I'm fearing that our executives are going to resist giving up a piece of their role because they're going to see that as losing power. I said, well, maybe what if we reframed it and asked them what parts of their job they love and what parts they hate and what would they be willing to give up? I'm telling you there are parts of the job they hate they would love somebody else to pick up.
Dave:And it's that awareness of what gives you energy. And that's what you don't like to do is not a brain thing. That's a heart and gut thing. That's taking feedback from your other brains going, I don't like doing that, which means you're probably not very good at it either.
Smoke:Yeah. And every time I just to put it into my own perspective, every time I have not listened to that, or like gone counter to what my energy was, I've never been it's never been as successful. Know, you can gut through it. You can if you're smart and you're willing to work hard, you can make you can do anything. But it's like you're fighting resistance.
Smoke:And whereas you're going with the flow if it's the energy. And you're letting the universe lead you and you're working with it. You're going with the stream, with the current, as opposed to like, you know, paddling upstream against the wind, you know, without the right gear and all the other stuff, you know, when you're doing something that isn't giving you energy.
Dave:Great analogy. So true. So true. But it's a muscle that we need to learn to tune into that and then harness it.
Smoke:Yeah, for sure. Well, Dave, is there anything else that you'd like to jump into or talk about or explore? You know my topic, but I'm always open and interested in these discussions. This is a discussion. So it's like, you know, it's like I'm learning every time I have one, learn something.
Smoke:I learn things from the great folks I'm having on here and having a lot of fun doing it. And I know it's reaching who it needs to reach. It's funny. It's like someone asked me, well, do you do? Another YPO friend, you know, does this for a living and said, you know, gave me a list of all the things I could do to increase my presence, I guess.
Smoke:I said, you know, it's actually all great ideas and some of which I may do, but I'm not doing it for that. I'm doing it because I think these conversations are important, and I believe that leaders should be having it's important for us to be having these conversations because the more we raise the consciousness level of leaders, the better chance we have of raising it of all of humanity. And that's actually what I'm hopeful that, not that we're going to do it for anyone, but if you're on the path, you're thinking about it, this maybe gives people permission. This whole conversation around heart led, gut led, getting out of your ego mind, it's not the natural thing for those of us who came up through the MBA ranks and management ranks and learn business that way. You know, it's actually a knowingness that comes to you if you allow it.
Smoke:And giving others permission to, like, feel like, oh, we can have this conversation. You know, it's nonlinear. It's not the kind of thing that you read about in a business school book.
Dave:Yeah. Smoke, there's one thought I'd like to leave your audience with, and that's if in fact you believe that all of us are smarter than any of us, we have an assessment tool in the book that says, that asks, have everybody on your team take this assessment and then compare notes to find out how we are each experiencing our current situation differently, which takes curiosity, not judgment, and then prioritize what is it we can do first to change the environment we're in. So tap into everybody's consciousness with a curious mind and collectively you're going to see collective genius, which we talk about in the book. Because only then can you come up with the most impactful solutions because you're not blinded by your own ego. You're not blinded by your own experience.
Dave:And that's a thought I'd leave you with. And thank you for having me. This is incredible. You're doing important work.
Smoke:Well, thanks for being here today. I love that collective genius thing in your book and what you just said, because actually each one of us, because the only thing we control is our own level of consciousness. That's actually the only thing we control in the whole world. There's nothing else we control but where we are. And each of us, as we raise it, helps everyone else.
Smoke:Because it's a collective field. So the collective genius is a great, way to think about it. As we raise our vibration, we raise and make it easier. It's easier today to become Buddha like by many factors than it was for the Buddha, Because consciousness of humanity was so low. And you might think with all the wars and everything, it's still very low.
Smoke:Well, yeah, there's elements of it, but there's a lot of people waking up and that's making it easier. So it's getting easier and easier to raise consciousness. And people like you doing the work you do, the book, it's more than a business advantage. I think it's important for people. And I think you could easily write the next book.
Smoke:Maybe you already have this in your plan, but, you know, it's the buy in advantage for families and the buy in advantage for relationships because it's same thing. Absolutely. Yeah. The same thing.
Dave:It's not about business. It's about life.
Smoke:Yeah, it's about life. So I mean, that's did I just outline your next two books?
Dave:You did. Sorry, you blew it. My publishers can be furious that you've spilled the beans, but smoke, you're pretty intuitive. Thank you for having me.
Smoke:Alright, brother. Thank you. Great to see you.