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We need a new definition of success—one that harmonizes meaning and money.
Imagine diving into your workday with renewed energy, leaving behind the exhaustion or dread of a monotonous grind.
Traditional beliefs about success and the root cause of burnout are the same:
Prove yourself.
Work harder.
Take care of the business, and it will take care of you.
We’re recycling the mindset and practices that keep us stuck. Our souls need a jumpstart into The Age of Humanity.
Tune in for a new way of working that honors our nervous system and the bottom line, using knowledge of the brain, the Bible, and business. We’ll discuss timeless truths that amplify growth, ignite change, and reshape the world of work. No corporate speak or business BS. Let’s get to the heart of a rewarding career and profitable growth.
We speak human about business.
What’s in it for You?
Value, Relevance, and Impact (VRI): No, it's not a new tech gadget—it's your ticket to making your work genuinely matter to you and your company.
Human-Centric Insights: We prioritize people over profits without sacrificing the bottom line. Think less "cog in the machine" and more "humans helping humans."
I'm your host, Rebecca Fleetwood Hesson, your thrive guide leading you into the new Age of Humanity. I’ve navigated the highs and lows of business and life, from achieving over $40 million in sales, teaching thousands of people around the world about leadership, trust, execution, and productivity to facing burnout, divorce, raising a couple of great humans (one with ADHD), and navigating the uncertainty of starting a business.
I’m committed to igniting change in the world by jumpstarting business into profitable growth with the timeless truths of our humanity.
Sound crazy? It’s only crazy until it works.
Hit subscribe to never miss an episode, and leave a review to help other listeners discover our show.
Want insight and advice on your real career and business challenges? Connect with me on social media or email me at rebecca@wethrive.live. Your story could spark our next conversation.
Frankie Russo [00:00:00]:
I'm not coming down I never locked it on the ground I'm not coming down I wanna go higher, higher, higher than that.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:00:10]:
Welcome back to the Business Is Human podcast. I'm your host, Rebecca Fleetwood Hession, and we're here to bring you episodes that blend meaningful work with profitable success. Here to steward what I call the age of humanity. I believe if we transform the way we work, we can transform the way that we live. As always, my friendly request. If you like what you hear, hit subscribe so you don't miss any episode and leave a review to tell the other humans that they might like it too. Always looking to help you and connect with others. All right, let's get into it, shall we? If you ever just stop and think about how many smart, engaging, interesting, unique humans are out in the world doing their damnedest to make the world better.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:01:02]:
I was just going through some of my old podcasts and the ones coming up in the future, and just looking at the list of people that have been on the show and just thinking how many people are out trying to make the world a better place, trying to bring us all together. And nothing describes my next guest better than that. Frankie Russo is someone that I am connected with as a keynote speaker through a shared community that we're a part of called Impact 11. But we really hadn't had a chance to get to know one another, and I started noticing his LinkedIn post and thought, you know what? That's a guy I want to talk to. And so I dug into a little bit of his work. He's published two books, The Art of Why and Breaking Why, and is in the midst of writing another one called Love Your Weird that is likely going to come out next year. Also has a podcast called School of Weird. And just to get me a little insight into what you're about to get into, I had my own little therapy moment on the show today.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:02:06]:
So let's get into it, shall we? Frankie Russo, welcome to the show.
Frankie Russo [00:02:10]:
Thank you so much, Rebecca. I am so excited to be here today. And with all the technical difficulties out there, I'm just amazed that. Here we go. We got this. Nothing can stop us.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:02:20]:
All we need now is a puppy interruption. I have a new puppy that is. Barbara doesn't understand podcast scheduling, so we'll see how that goes.
Frankie Russo [00:02:27]:
It'll be on your end. Yeah. The only thing best I'm going to do is maybe an Amazon doorbell or something.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:02:31]:
Okay. I love social media for one reason. I get to know a bit about who people are. If they choose to show up there that I wouldn't otherwise get insight into. And so one of your LinkedIn posts, several of them, actually got my attention and I reached out and said, come be on the show. And thankfully you said yes. So we both share a passion for authenticity, for bringing humanity into business. Obviously the name of the show is Business is Human.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:03:02]:
And today I ask you, you've written two books so far, another one getting ready to come out, which will link all those, probably talk about those casually today. But the topic that you are most passionate about, that you want to talk about today is maximum usefulness to others. And that's the post that got my attention, is you talked about your road to sobriety and how one of the key things that really kept you sober was that Helpers High, that Connection piece. And so knowing an author, you've probably now gone down the rabbit hole of researching this idea to the point that we could have 18 episode series. Is that a fair assumption?
Frankie Russo [00:03:48]:
Yes. And most of my research has been on the job training, if you will. So in all of my years, there's you, you know, you ask me, hey, what's, what's the one thing, right? And there's so many things that I'm passionate about and that are part of my work, but at the heart of all of it is this timeless thing that's universal to all humans. I've had two different versions of this come out in my life. So I've got a lot of research as a kid helping the homeless with my family. And then I've got equally or more research as an adult helping about 300 drug addicts and alcoholics get sober, both of which I did not get paid for. Which is part of why I realized a new kind of currency that money cannot buy. It's tied to this idea of helping people unconditionally or without taking score.
Frankie Russo [00:04:35]:
It's incredibly contrary to most of the culture that we live in now that is driven by a capitalistic bend, which I've also lived in that world. So it's an interesting duality of like, having lived in the machine of capitalism in that world and having done some things that I can now use to come back and be like, all right, how do these worlds of maximum usefulness to others and dare I say love, coincide with this machine of capitalism? Which brings us to today. And yes, I've had a lot of research. It's mostly been on the job. It's not the HBR type of research.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:05:09]:
But what I love about this is when I talk about Business as human. It literally is just what you've described. There's the control, measure, optimized thing and there's the personal, emotional, social. And you have this depth and breadth of real life experience which I'm most interested in about the separation of the two and how that happens and how to bring those two together so that we can still have high quality growth businesses without sacrificing our souls.
Frankie Russo [00:05:39]:
Yeah, like one of the things I always talk about is this idea that there's a world. I call it the new world of work. And I believe in this new movement called the New World of Work. You're a part of it. You didn't know it until this moment, but congratulations. It's a movement in a collective of people that have their own missions, that are aligned together that create a powerful movement. And it's very simple. This is a movement where the new world of work can serve both of the worlds we spoke of.
Frankie Russo [00:06:03]:
Meaning every business has four or five objectives that are universal. We have to have revenue growth, we have to have profitability, we need to have low employee churn, we need to have loyal customers and maybe one other custom KPI. But every business basically needs that. So now that we got that out of the way, how do we create a world where you not only get that without having dead bodies behind you, but what if creating a world where there's those humans, those people were actually what makes those KPIs sustainable and continuous and that's the world that you and I serve. Obviously people are the sum total of these organizations that we work with. And if you don't treat the core deeper rooted issues as humans, then we're always going to be a little bit sick as it relates to how this translates to organizations and where the role of the organization or the leadership of an organization starts and stops in each individual key contributor's journey and how much work is supposed to do to be a part of that. I think we're still feeling that out all of us, but it is a bigger role than in the past. People have thought work is not everything.
Frankie Russo [00:07:10]:
You're going to have to get some of this development outside of work. Some of the obvious human experience happens outside of work. But we're starting to all realize that work must play a deeper role in the whole self of a person.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:07:26]:
And that identity can't be as tied up in the actual title or ego of it, but more about the maximizing the usefulness to others part of deal. And if you tie in burnout research, all based on proving ourselves and working harder and sacrificing your own needs is kind of how we all. We grew up that way. I mean, I'm 58, and when I looked at the research on burnout, it said, root cause. Prove yourself always being willing to work harder to sacrifice your own needs. And I was like, well, that's what I was told success is. And so as we make this shift as leaders and business owners and speakers and authors and helping others make this shift, I'm fascinated with the realization that our nervous system is always working off of patterns of the past. That's just what it does.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:08:19]:
Same equals safe homeostasis, all that. And so what we're saying in this movement is we have to do things dramatically different in order to satisfy our human needs, meet the business needs. And leaders keep going back, trying to recycle what used to work. So how are you inspiring others to kind of go on this new frontier and this new movement in what you're writing and what you're speaking about? Like, how do we help people believe in a future state and not being stuck in the past?
Frankie Russo [00:08:52]:
Well, like anything, if you're trying to motivate someone to make a shift or a change, they have to understand the value of what they're going to get. So there's a reason why I think I was able to do the things over the last 25 years in business. Today I realized that to get me in the room to be able to have the authority to speak to what it is that they want. So what do they want? They want money so they can have wealth, so they can have freedom, so they can have limitlessness, let's say. So if you go up into that, like, everybody's being driven by this thing like security or safety or freedom or something that's driving why they show up to begin with. And so you have to be able to speak to that part of it. It has to live in both worlds. You cannot have one.
Frankie Russo [00:09:37]:
Just utopic ideas thrown out there of, like, how we're going to make everything good from a personal, emotional, and social standpoint if it's not going to also align with what needs to happen in order to get money. Let's just face it, let's call it what it is. This is about changing the relationship ultimately to money and success. So you call it burnout. What I call it is brute force. The problem I've solved today in a business setting is something I call the stagnation spiral. And the stagnation spiral is what feeds brute force. Because what happens Is that like you've got, especially these organizations that have been the juggernaut for multi decades, maybe even multi generations.
Frankie Russo [00:10:15]:
And so who is a new idea or a new person or someone that loves their weird coming in saying to them how things should be done? It's like, no, we're number one or we have been number one. And this industry is a, is a titan. And so that's where the mentality comes in. So it's like, okay, cool, so what is the natural state or the natural ideas that, okay, let's go back to doing what we used to do and then when that doesn't work, let's just do more of that. That's where the brute force comes in and then the rest. Everybody else is like, well, yeah, well, we need this to survive. I don't want to be left behind. I don't want to not matter.
Frankie Russo [00:10:45]:
I don't want to not make money for my family. So got to do what I got to do. This is just where we're at. And then over time, the whole system starts to crater. So everybody's burnout, plus the industry is dying or plus the company is stagnating and everyone is just trying to throw it at the wall. And we wonder why we have so much burnout and disengagement. It comes from an extended period of denial is where these spirals start. And so the opposite of denial is usually where my work starts.
Frankie Russo [00:11:16]:
And that's why the first phase, my infinity growth loop and the first part of any talk I've ever given starts with getting honest and getting honest about the problem. And the problem is kind of like what you've been talking about, what you saw in a lot of cases at a very broad standpoint. The problem is we're trying to use old models to continue growth and we no longer have a workforce that is going to allow themselves to burn out the way they used to. So there's this huge gap now, and they're calling it a talent gap. But in fact, what it is is a gap of what needs to change here to go from selling and promoting talent back to attracting talent. And the way that you attract something is that you have something that they want, something of value, which is money. Plus a personal, emotional and social healthy environment that, dare I say, might even be a catalyst to grow in personal, emotional and social. Even at work.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:12:20]:
I believe that we work is the perfect place to live out an impactful purpose. It doesn't have to be I cured cancer or some mountain climbing expedition. It can be that I Just know who I am. And I showed up and I did that well this week. And it had an impact to other humans, I think. In fact, the word work and worship are the same in Hebrew, which I think is fascinating.
Frankie Russo [00:12:44]:
Interesting.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:12:45]:
So let's think about the time of the year that we're in. We're in planning season for next year. People are thinking about their goals and their budgets and what's gonna happen in the next year. And you say the first step in being able to max, give, get maximum usefulness to others embedded into our work. The first step is getting honest. If you're a leader out there of a team, a business, whatever it is, what would you recommend to our listeners as that first step of creating that honesty?
Frankie Russo [00:13:20]:
Well, with honesty, you step into honesty and you inventory it. So the first step is inventorying. What's the problem? So getting honest about the problem, and the problem's a little different for each one of us. There's some universal problems, but when you start getting more specific, it's like, okay, what is the problem that I'm facing? And the getting honest process boils down to an inventory process where you're looking at, all right, this is the problem. Okay, what can I change and what can't I change? That's one of the most important parts of the inventory. Because where a lot of us get lost and also get insane and burnout is quite simple. It goes back to the simple serenity matrix, I call it. So if I want to.
Frankie Russo [00:14:01]:
The opposite of serenity, the opposite of peace, the opposite of clarity is insanity. Okay? So if I want to get insane, I've figured out exactly how to do it. And most people don't wake up in the morning and say, hey, I want to get insane. But, Rebecca, if you're looking to get insane, I'm going to tell you exactly how to do it. Here's how you do it. You take this list of things that you can change and this list that you can't change. And what you do is you just have use all your power to try to change the things you can't, and then just accept all the things you can't change. And within 24 to 48 hours, I guarantee your money back, guarantee that you will be insane and burnout will be well on its way.
Frankie Russo [00:14:35]:
This happens every day in organizations. We're sitting here trying to force this stuff. I can't change. We make it into brute force, and you will do it, and you will do more activity, and we will do this. And then we're going to add AI to it and we're going to do all this other stuff and it's like, of course we're overwhelmed. And I was taught, hey, do a good job, otherwise you're lazy, right? Or do a good job or otherwise you're not good enough or somebody will replace you. You weren't drafted into this job, you know, all that kind of fun stuff. So one of the things that happens when you start bringing maximum usefulness back into focus so that this maximum usefulness to others, I call it stakeholders.
Frankie Russo [00:15:10]:
So this others has to be in every phase. So in this get on a stage, I'm looking at this, it's like, am I being of maximum usefulness by working on the things I can't change? Of course not. And even with the things I can change, how do I prioritize that based on the maximum usefulness to these three stakeholders, customers or clients or patients, depending on what industry you're in, that's number one. Number two is your colleagues, the people that you work with, the people on your teams. And number three is the community. Now you notice I didn't mention stockholders, I didn't mention C Suite, because that's not relevant. This whole model is based on the fact that if stakeholders are being helped at a maximum level, clients, customers, patients, colleagues and the community, if these are helped at a maximum level, stockholders don't have any problems, leaders don't have any problems, C suite's getting their bonus. The problem becomes when we're trying to move numbers around, make stuff up, brute force, just so we can get numbers.
Frankie Russo [00:16:04]:
That's the problem. And there's a lot of that going on. And it's hard to stop and get honest because it's uncomfortable. So a lot of this getting starts bumping up against a very, very important thing. And I'm sure this is something you talk about all the time and that's this fear of what's going to happen if I make this shift. The fear of getting honest, the fear of stepping into this new. Because most people think continuous growth comes from success, but the truth is continuous growth comes from failure. Failure is what drives continuous growth.
Frankie Russo [00:16:36]:
And what is the number one fear that people have? The fear of failure? One of two things will happen. I will lose something that I have or I will not gain something that I want. And once we reconcile with the fear and recognize that failure isn't just something that happens, but it's this non negotiable part of the process and this thing that should be looked at from an experimental Mindset where we're constantly hunting failure and we're digging and mining for failure because that failure is the window to maximum usefulness to those three stakeholders. Because if we're failing at it, or this is an issue in a gap, or this is a problem, then there is an opportunity for a solution and there is a usefulness available to us now.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:17:18]:
I love that. If you're asking yourself, okay, what's the problem? And you're willing to get honest, you're willing to hunt for that failure. Are we looking at the people problems, the business problems?
Frankie Russo [00:17:31]:
Here's what you're looking at. There's three things that mess up growth. People, product positioning. That's it. So the first thing you want to look at is like, let's say if you're in leadership, is which one of those do you perceive as being the largest problem first? Is it a people thing? Is this a culture thing? Is this a product thing? Is this a positioning or marketing thing? Because essentially, if you've got those three things aligned, people, positioning and product, and they're all hitting on every cylinder, you are growing continuously straight up. Somewhere in one of those three categories, there's a denial. But each one of the things I mentioned, people, product, promotions and positioning, all of those are there to again, super serve the stakeholders right. It's all gotta be aligned.
Frankie Russo [00:18:14]:
Back to this. Why this purpose. That part of that clarity and alignment is critical for moving out of the stagnation and stagnation spirals, which by the way, is driven by denial, status quo, siloed decisions, rigid processes and beliefs, and disengagement, which is rampant. Those are epidemics right now. Yeah. So how do we move from that into this is. First of all, it's not easy. It's simple, but not easy.
Frankie Russo [00:18:39]:
And the not easy part is the stuff we're talking about. So where do you start? It depends on where you're at. You start exactly where you're at, is where you start. That's why each one of us has to do this inventory and then show by example to the key contributors. Because a key contributor can do this. This doesn't have to be a C suite person. This can be somebody at the bottom or the middle and they can start this loop, start this honesty, and start a ground surge and a lead by example around them. And that ground surge might lead to them leaving the organization they're in.
Frankie Russo [00:19:08]:
And that's okay too. That's part of getting honest. I mean, I got to a point in my companies where I started looking for opportunities to Let people fly. Yeah. I mean, one of the guys at Zappos would pay $3,000 for you to leave, which I was always fascinated by, because in my early days, I was doing all these things to try to, like, make sure my people don't leave, make sure they're happy. What's gonna happen if they leave? It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Why would I want to get in the way of their maximum usefulness and tie them down at this organization? Not everybody's right for every organization. This is the type of stuff that I'm talking about.
Frankie Russo [00:19:37]:
When I talk about honesty is like this transparency around. Okay, hey. And so when I talk about authenticity, this is what I'm talking about. Let's take the mask off for a purpose, not just so we can all belong and be psychologically safe. Absolutely. We need all that. Right. A lot of people think about this love.
Frankie Russo [00:19:52]:
Your weird thing is like, all about just belonging and mattering and authenticity. And it is. But it's deeper than that, you see, because the second part of the loop is that once we've identified the problem, then becomes the next part, which is equally as interesting, which is, how am I going to imagine a new solution to this problem? So you gotta first understand the problem. Then you have to go to phase two of the infinity Loop. And that is imagine a new solution. And this becomes a problem. Because many people don't imagine identify as imaginative anymore. Which brings us to the Love Your Weird movement.
Frankie Russo [00:20:25]:
I've done a lot of work around why? What's the purpose? I believe all of us have the same purpose, and that is to be of maximum usefulness to others. I believe that's our purpose as humans. Now the question then becomes, where do we point that purpose? And that's why my work went from writing a couple books on purpose and why to going deeper into the weird. Because what I've found is that there's this powerful thing that's unlocked in a human, and then when it's harnessed collectively as an organization, it's unstoppable. And that is the intersection between why I'm doing what I do and my expertise. And weird at that intersection of why. And weird is a powerful energy source, because that's where our genius is unlocked. There's a reason why not everybody loves their weird at work.
Frankie Russo [00:21:13]:
But that weird, that curiosity, that willingness to step into an imagination that does not make sense on paper at first, that is the raw gold that so many of us have abandoned. And so a lot of the work I do today is helping people reconnect with that gold genius. And the first reckoning with that is actually going back in time to when you were five or six years old. I'm not coming down. I never locked it on the ground.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:21:44]:
A quick reminder, if any of the topics from the businesses human podcast really resonate with you, when you think you know what, I'd like to dig deeper on that, well, let's have a discussion. We can do that through coaching, keynote speaking, or a variety of video based solutions that I have available. We can talk about authentic leadership, thriving women, or even nervous system foundations. There's lots of options. So if it needs to be more than a podcast, let's make it more than a podcast. Hit the show notes. There's lots of ways to contact with me and I can't wait to hear about you. You take my clients back to what was 14 year old you doing for fun.
Frankie Russo [00:22:25]:
Yes. Yeah.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:22:25]:
Before the world told you who you were supposed to be and why.
Frankie Russo [00:22:30]:
Yeah, it's a. It's big. And I usually go to five or six because it's before the original conditioning started, which is schooling. The reason we don't love our weird is because of some form of conditioning and for some of us, even worse trauma. And it wasn't until adulthood when I started to really realized were those parts of me, this inventor, astronaut, cowboy, TV preacher, that there was more to it than I thought, especially as it related to work. And this changed everything. And when I was able to give myself permission to step into that, my imagination, my genius took fire. And then when I was able to give all of my employees the same permission, some incredible things transpired.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:23:15]:
Give us a snapshot of some of those incredible.
Frankie Russo [00:23:17]:
Yeah, let me give you a little snapshot. So the company that we had, so first of all, we had a make believe company. It was called Potenza. It was Italian for power. And it was another post that I.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:23:27]:
Resonated with that you wrote about.
Frankie Russo [00:23:29]:
Yes, make believe company.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:23:30]:
Yeah, do it. Yeah.
Frankie Russo [00:23:31]:
So I wasn't always in a make believe company. My first company was actually in the 2000s. That was when I was at my height of addiction and I had one objective, make money. And I was in the mortgage business pre mortgage crisis. Yeah. Couldn't have been a more. More opposite of what I was raised as, helping homeless. And so here I am raging on that.
Frankie Russo [00:23:52]:
I crash in 08 with everybody else, lose my company, lose my family, lose all kinds of stuff. And I'm like, all right, I got to do something different. So it was this reckoning and when I was looking at, I picked up the ashes and I was like, all right, what is it that I do good? And it wasn't hr, it wasn't CEO, it wasn't business. I wasn't good at much. Honestly, I really wasn't. But there was this one thing that kept popping up that I was good at. And what I was good at was making people believe. That's what I was good at.
Frankie Russo [00:24:16]:
So I was like, all right, we're gonna make a make believe company. And it was real simple. We made our clients believe that we were a legitimate company. That was the first step. And the second step was that we made the entire community believe that our companies, our clients, company and product was amazing as well. Now some people may call that branding. We called it a make believe company. And that's how Potenza was started back in 2008.
Frankie Russo [00:24:37]:
From there, all kinds of fascinating weird things happened, not the least of which was going to India and starting a division there, getting into tech when we didn't belong there. And eventually we were on the Inc 500 list of fastest growing companies in America eight years in a row. We actually were the fastest growing company in Louisiana in 2020. And that was after 60x of revenue growth in three years. And the next year we exited to a Fortune 500. So when I say that this Love Your Weird thing is researched, it's.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:25:06]:
That's the kind of research I can get behind.
Frankie Russo [00:25:09]:
Yeah, yeah. It's from our world. So I'm not saying everybody can do it, but I'm not saying anybody can't. So the beautiful part is the last three or four years I was already writing books and doing things. But it wasn't as full time as the last three or four years where now I've been able to step into my calling where the company was sold. And so now I've. I've been able to just make all of my work around not only living in all four of my weird archetypes, but helping everyone else unlock theirs in the name of not just feeling good, not just getting a helper's high, not just stepping into my genius, but the way that the relationship that of that is to the ultimate capitalistic goal of ongoing revenue growth.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:25:50]:
Yeah. Because when business is successful, our societies are better. It's not inherently a bad thing. It's just the way it's been done that's created some bad consequences. And two things that you said that are so resonating with me is this movement that you said, hey, welcome, you're now in. And I have helped this also and talked similarly about that to others. That when many of us are getting these ideas that need to come out into the world, that's a spiritual thing that I'm. I love that it's not a competition.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:26:23]:
It's. We need lots of people moving more people towards this. And I'm here for it. I love it. The second thing that I'm thinking about is, and I agree so many people don't see themselves as a creative or as creative. When you talk about imagining a new solution or imagining the problem differently is a key part of getting honest. And nothing could be further than the truth. We were all created as creators, but over time, the societal industrial age model of work and school has treated us more like machines here to produce than actual artists here to create.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:27:00]:
And what I love that you're doing by calling it out about your weirdness and who you really are and creating from that place is it's tapping into a place that so many people weren't allowed to explore at the most formative times of their lives. And I just wanna fan the flame of that for our audience and say, yes, it'll be the most rewarding journey that you'll go on is to explore that weirdness within you because it's for a purpose. And I just love watching the transformation of my clients. When those lights come back on, you know, they've dimmed out for a long time. Just getting through it, getting through it, getting through it. And then when they have this recall of who they really are and see how they can actually use it at work, it's not just like this airy fairy woo thing that's there on the side. It actually is for a purpose. That's some good stuff.
Frankie Russo [00:27:55]:
Yeah. No, listen. What's wild is that what I've come to realize, that like most of us just weren't, we no longer felt like we had permission. The reason I go to four or five year olds is that at four and five years old, you have pretty much permission to play. They love to play. You love being around people so much that you create an imaginary person to be with you. So you love collaboration, you love imagination, and you don't even know not to be your authentic self until you start to be told a certain way.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:28:19]:
Hold on, hold on. You just trigger something in me. Let's have a Rebecca therapy moment.
Frankie Russo [00:28:23]:
All right, Rebecca, what were you into at 5 years old? Come on.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:28:26]:
Well, I'm just realizing because we are created to be in relationship with another to Maximum impact, right? I grew up on a small farm in southeast Indiana, and my mom had me at a ridiculously young age. And so I was raised with her brothers, which were. My uncles, were more like my family, because we all lived on Grandma and Pop's farm. But I spent a ton of time in the barn creating characters and friends with the animals and imaginary friends. I legit was one of those people that had imaginary friends that I would say, hey, let's go to the barn, and we would go together. Well, one of them was a sheep dog that I created this because we had all these dogs in cash.
Frankie Russo [00:29:09]:
Is it a talking sheep dog or didn't talk?
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:29:13]:
I don't remember if it talked or not. I don't remember its name either, but.
Frankie Russo [00:29:16]:
I used your thoughts. Sheep.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:29:18]:
Oh, my God, Frankie. I carried around a leash and pretended that it was on the leash, and my mom let me do it and didn't send me off to the crazy farm, thankfully. But I am just having this realization that I created my own community because I didn't have one out on the farm. I didn't live in a neighborhood with, you know, kids stopping by. And so I created a community for myself.
Frankie Russo [00:29:43]:
Of course you did.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:29:44]:
That's frank.
Frankie Russo [00:29:46]:
Yeah. There you go. Yeah. So here's what it is. So. Yeah, so. And we could do this for a long time, and I hope we will. But here's the deal.
Frankie Russo [00:29:55]:
That kid, the thing about that's consistent. Like, for you, we're talking sheep dogs and all kinds of other fun stuff that you created. But if you go back through your life and you look at the moments that you were just the most alive as an adult, you didn't realize it until, if you look at it from this lens. But in those moments, so many of them were because you were tapping back into that original DNA. You didn't know it or why it would be, why it was so big, but it was big, and it's why, like, when you create community with your clients or you create community with your work, or you create community with me, you light up all of a sudden, and, like, no matter what's going on in your life, which is all kinds of dumb, I'm sure you're good, even for a moment. And when I talk about this, like helpers high, it's because I've gone from drug addiction to becoming addicted to these moments, the moments we're having right now. I try to have four or five of these a day, because I'm that kind of addict, all right? And so I call it the limitless drug. The limitless drug is being able to be in these moments with humans at their most real, authentic, raw, true selves, where I have become a.
Frankie Russo [00:31:01]:
A ambassador for permission. Because here's what I've come to realize. When you have permission and so many of us become entrepreneurs just to be able to have this permission, not realizing it, but that you don't have to be an entrepreneur to get this permission. We can create this in a corporate setting. But when you have permission to be that, dare I say, ridiculous version of Rebecca that creates and talks to fake sheep dogs, okay, there's something that comes alive, that can then be harnessed for limitless possibilities. Because now all of a sudden we're in a space right in this moment where you feel safe, you feel seen, and you feel like you have permission to show up however we want and nobody can stop us. And one consistent thing, whether you're a mad scientist like me and, or a sheep herding dog, fake dog herder like you, there's one consistent thing with all the billions of humans, and that is that in that moment at 5 years old, you believed that it was possible. You believed that that was possible until someone told you it wasn't.
Frankie Russo [00:32:08]:
And we're stepping into a world where things that we never thought were possible are as simple as a. One sentence prompt into a machine and a Hollywood movie scene is created. You think about this, Think about the world we're stepping into. Part of this new world of work includes a new species that has been unleashed artificial intelligence. So think about it. I've done a lot of work around this idea of like, what should be our compass in navigating this AI and machine revolution. And I believe our compass must be our weird. It must be our weird because that's the closest mentality that could be prepared for what we're stepping into.
Frankie Russo [00:32:47]:
Because now you look around, it is possible now. Things that we never thought were possible. So the best mentality to have is actually the sheep dog talking, herding, Rebecca, going into this, like straight up. And it sounds ridiculous, but like, think about as like we're. We're sitting here wondering why are we stagnating? Why are we not growing? Why don't we have any new ideas? Because we haven't given ourselves permission to tap back into that raw genius that everyone has. I'm sure you, you're a school advocate for schools and reform. Did you see the NASA study with George Land? Have you seen that one?
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:33:20]:
Tell me more about it and see if it clicks.
Frankie Russo [00:33:22]:
Okay. They gave a NASA test to five year olds.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:33:25]:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Frankie Russo [00:33:26]:
Okay. Now most people use that test because it's like, oh, wow, this is, this is what schools do. They dumb down your kids to go from 98% geniuses at 5, all of a sudden, even at 10 years old, to 30, 15, they're 12. And adults, it's 2%. The genius is always there, but it's not learned. You don't learn your genius, you don't learn creativity, you unlearn it. And so all we have to do is retake, if you will, the conditions. If the conditions are what made us lose our genius, then we should be able to change the conditions back and the genius will come out.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:33:57]:
Yeah, we just have to rediscover it.
Frankie Russo [00:33:59]:
And it's as simple as, one, getting honest about it, two, unleashing it and allowing it, giving it permission to come out. And then three, which is the third phase of the loop, is being willing to collaborate without boundaries.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:34:12]:
Oh.
Frankie Russo [00:34:12]:
Collaborating without boundaries is how the collective genius comes together. And at least for a time, is willing to get messy, willing to break some things, willing to go beyond silos. And even if I don't know how I'm going to get paid, because that's one of the biggest silos of all.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:34:28]:
Absolutely.
Frankie Russo [00:34:29]:
My pay plan doesn't go to that. And then all of a sudden we get addicted to this, like, only strategy out there is fixing pay plans and moving pay planes around. Like, nope, that's not going to solve it. You will never be able to fix the pay planes fast enough to get out of the stagnation spiral. And if you think that the beatdown from AI is bad now, we've seen nothing yet. And so you take those two things. A new species that's replacing talent in some cases and the stagnation spiral that most companies find themselves in and most industries that are changing and not innovating fast enough when you put those two worlds together. And we've got a very interesting next five years.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:35:03]:
Agreed. I'm excited about it.
Frankie Russo [00:35:05]:
Oh yeah, you're here because. Yeah, because you're a weirdo.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:35:08]:
You know, I spent 20 years with the Franklin Covey organization. I've taken every personality profile, every assessment, every360, everyone known to man, and done a lot of self assessment. And then when I left that to start my own business, I continued down the path of what are my unique gifts and talents and trying to shed off what I was told was that I needed to be. I literally left a very well paying job that I'd been at. For 20 years for more creative freedom. That's exactly why I left. And when I. What I recognized in that time of, okay, what am I going to do with as.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:35:41]:
As this company? What. What is it going to be if it's based on my unique gifts and talents? I knew through all of that work that it was about building community in some way, and I knew it was about connection. I knew that. And I can give you a million stories about why I know that, but that in the barn, as an imagining child, that's the first time that has popped up as a. All the way back there, I created my own little community in the barn.
Frankie Russo [00:36:08]:
That's right. No matter how many tools we have, no matter how many things we try to create, if each person's not willing to show up as their whole self, we can't connect. And if there's an environment in a culture where masks are basically part of the pretense in order to keep your job, in order to stay afloat, in order to, like, check the boxes, as long as that's happening, we can't even get started. That's why it always goes back to getting honest. And that's how the loop works, is that basically you go through the getting honest process, which can be daily, the imagining a new solution, which can be daily, and the collaborating without boundaries, which can be daily. That's the experimentation taking and turning the imaginator, imagination into reality. I call that imaginuity. And so from that, things will break, things will fail.
Frankie Russo [00:36:48]:
You know, if you're anything like Edison, it'll fail 10,000 times or whatever, right? But what did he do? He always circled back to get honest again. What was the new failure that we learned from here? And when you make that a norm, when you make that kind of a loop a norm. I always told my employees from the day I sold to the day I sold the company, and hopefully beyond how they're running it now, but to the day I sold the company, it was an experiment. Now, that's terrifying if you're an investor, terrifying if you're the buyer. But that's the facts, and that's why they bought it. Now, I didn't advertise the thing as an experiment, but it was. It was always an experiment. And that's what kept us continuously growing, is that we created a space where experimentation, which innately has what would be failures or bugs, these shifts of, like, reframing the way that we approach these things as opportunities, failures, bugs, things that come out of these experiments, things that don't work are the most valuable gifts we have.
Frankie Russo [00:37:44]:
And when you create a culture where that's what we're looking for and like, what have you failed at today? One of my friends that I mentor is another speaker, Emily McIntyre. She's in the middle of a 90 day failure where every day she's talking about one failure either from that day or something that's happened. The best is 90 days of failure. And her. One of her talks is called how to succeed at failure. And I love it. I've done a lot of work with her over the last year and it's always kind of come back to that. Once we're like, you know, let's go deeper.
Frankie Russo [00:38:11]:
She wanted some research, she wanted some stuff like make your own social experiment here. She's in the middle of it now. But anyway, she starts with failure as a gift and then you eventually get to a place where there is no failure. And when there is no failure, that's a really incredible place to be and build from. And when you have people, HR culture team where failure is not a thing, when you have a product team where failure is not a thing and you have a positioning team where failure is not a thing, that is an alignment second to none for any organization. And you've seen it over time, but you have to stay in it. The key is that it's an infinity loop because it never stops. You don't get out of the loop unless you fall out.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:38:51]:
Yeah. And choose to let go. Yeah. I love that idea of holding things more loosely. We just have this death grip on. It's gotta go. Right. And I'm like, I have a program that I've been doing for six years that's really successful.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:39:03]:
I build communities with a small group of executive women in my local area. We do this big event. It's amazing. And every year I sit down on my prayer and meditation and I say, I wonder if I want to do that again. Instead of thinking it's got to grow into this multi.
Frankie Russo [00:39:21]:
That's right.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:39:21]:
I don't know. I may, this may be the last year I do it, but I'm still okay with that.
Frankie Russo [00:39:26]:
Listen, if there's a river, if there's an energy source that you believe in that is more powerful than usual, if that is a thing, then the worst thing we can do is fight that river. So the secret is accepting that I am not the river, but I can go with the river and have more power than I would ever need available. But the key is to remembering that I am not the river.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:39:51]:
No place to go after that. But to summarize. So if I'm a listener of this episode, I'm going to get honest with myself about who I am. Right. Find my Weird. So whether you're leading the organization or you're showing up in procurement, just whoever's listening, get honest, Find your weird and your book comes out. When to help them with that.
Frankie Russo [00:40:15]:
That's going to come out next year. I got a little slowed down. My speaking career really heated up this year and so I did not try to force the river. And Love Your Weird is going to come out when it comes out, but it'll. It's definitely going to be next year.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:40:26]:
Amen. So. So follow you because your LinkedIn post alone will help with that. And the follow up to find your Weird that I noted that I think is really. And you called it your raw genius is that weirdness within you is then have the audacity to believe it because I think that happens too. We find this thing about us that's kind of weird and we kind of like, is it really worthy?
Frankie Russo [00:40:48]:
It starts with identifying it, then it moves to belief and then it's about having the conviction to act in accordance with that belief.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:40:55]:
Okay, we're friends now. Now we've had a therapy moment for Rebecca on the podcast. So now we've had a new level of friends. Your website, you can find all your stuff. The Art of Why, Breaking Why and soon to be released, Love Your Weird.
Frankie Russo [00:41:10]:
There you go. Book you for a key.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:41:12]:
And also the School of Weird spot. Oh, the School of Weird.
Frankie Russo [00:41:16]:
The School of Weird is my second podcast. We used to have the School of why. Now we're the School of Weird. We're in our first season. So yeah, all that's there, just Google Frankie Russo and it'll come up.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:41:26]:
Oh, hitting subscribe to that as soon as we.
Frankie Russo [00:41:28]:
You'll recognize some of your friends on there.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:41:30]:
That's awesome. That's awesome. This has been delightful. I hope you will come back when Love Your Weird comes out and help us celebrate that with you. You are an important part of this movement that we're in and I am really appreciative of you coming in on the show today to help our listeners get involved. Thank you.
Frankie Russo [00:41:50]:
This is my pleasure, Rebecca. I am so excited to have this time with you and can't wait to do more. I'm not coming down. I never locked it on the ground. I'm not coming.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:42:01]:
Thanks for being here. You can follow us on Instagram, businessishuman or TikTok Rebecca Fleetwood Hession. It's a great way to share some of the clips with your colleagues and friends. All right. Make it a great day. Love you mean it.