Show notes
This Episode's Focus On Strengths Jason Treu joined me to chat about using your natural talents to build better relationships at work. He gives lots of ideas for building real connections. What You'll Learn Jason reminds us that business is not the only thing about your life. And he translates it into asking simple questions like, "what do you have planned for this weekend?" Those questions can build rapport very quickly. It's about being human. And getting beyond conversations about spreadsheets. And he shares ideas on: Tapping into emotions (don't worry, you don't have to be a walking Hallmark card). Rapport, likability, and trust – getting beyond the surface in small talk so you can get to know a person. Being magnetic and irresistible, even when you feel awkward or quiet. Listening. I mean listening actively. And not thinking about your next topic while your conversation partner is still talking. Spreading the contagion of high fives. Allowing vulnerable moments. Stop trying to be perfectly perfect. Build on people's ideas with a "yes, and" philosophy. Learn how to lead through a person's strengths to be a better manager. Why you should consider offering the gift of a book (and Jason did this for me–what a delightful surprise to receive a book as a gift). Jason, if you're reading this, I'm digging right in to Give and Take. Thank you for walking your talk! Resource of the Episode Check out Jason's book Social Wealth when you're ready to go deeper on these topics. Subscribe To subscribe and review, here are your links for listening in iTunes and Stitcher radio. Subscribing is a great way to never miss an episode – let the app notify you each week when the latest question gets published. You can also stream any episode live on the website. Just click through the title you like and there will be a player waiting for you on each page. See you there! Episode URL http://pinchyourselfcareers.com/build-extraordinary-relationships-through-your-strengths-with-jason-treu/ Read the full Conversation: Lisa Cummings: Today you'll get some ideas on how to make career transitions and how to increase your success through the relationships you nurture and you'll get to do all of this with Jason Treu. So Jason is the author of a book called Social Wealth, and just like the title implies, the wealth part, it's not about the blinky kind of currency, it's about building extraordinary relationships and that's why it's social wealth. So Jason, thanks for joining. Jason Treu: It will. Thanks for having me on. Lisa, in speaking to your fantastic tribe. Lisa Cummings: They are fantastic and as you know, these fantastic people are all about exploring their strengths, how to find them, leverage them, and what it's like. What's your life is like when you do that. So let's give him just a little glimpse of your life before getting into your expertise. So think about your life and a peak experience or a peak moment where you can think about when you were in your relationship flow and can you tell us about what that was like for you? Jason Treu: Well, before I found the job that I have now been in business and executive coach, I was working as a marketing executive and I noticed that when I was on the road and doing roadshows with my usually my CEO of the company, I was with, you know, I'd be on fire. I would just be so passionate because I'd be speaking to different people. We'd be evangelists to whether it's financial analysts or media or customers or whatever it is. And I just be loving it. And you're right. And that was when I was in my peak because connecting and belonging are my core emotions, are my top emotions. And so having that ability to connect and feel that belonging and be passionate about speaking and evangelizing with something that I really got me excited in my life. Lisa Cummings: And I love that. You know, that the connecting and belonging matters for you. How did you find those values and how have you come to that to determine that those matter that much to you? Jason Treu: Well, one of the things is finding your purpose, so people typically mixed up a mission statement with a purpose because they say to themselves, well, my purpose is to help entrepreneurs or help you know my clients do better work, or whatever it is, but that's something external to you and everything external to you will let you down. So if you have your purpose outside of yourself, what happens with people as they go through some precipitative crashes in their life? Because eventually when that purpose lets you down, whether it's something you've unconsciously made or consciously, you really go through some significant trauma. But if your purpose is inside you, you don't. And when you attach it to emotion and your top emotions and figure that out, life really opens up for you. And how you really do that as an exercise. You know, you go back and recall your earliest happiest memories in your life. And from those you can extract your emotions that are in each of those memories. And then ask yourself what emotion would you rather feel and you can really uncover that. And what's really great about that is that although as you age, you will want your different experiences will be different. The structure and form of bad emotions will not. And so then when you can say to yourself, am I living my emotion? Am I living my purpose? And that's a little bit more than that, but that's really an easy way of taking a look at it for someone. So to see what they're doing. Because the problem for me in my job before was I was great when I was connecting and belonging, but I was, as I was going up the corporate ladder, I was sitting in my office more and more about myself and I was dissatisfied more and more so I realized at some point I connected the dots and realize well I'm better with people and I need to be with people all the time and not just part of the time. Lisa Cummings: Yeah, and your hitting on a topic and getting into things like emotion. I love that you brought that up straight away here because a lot of people shy away from that and the corporate space and they're afraid to talk about it or use that word and I think that one thing that's important as, hey, there are a lot of emotions that go well beyond the hallmark kind of emotions. I mean you might go through that exercise and recount all of the times where you just felt jubilant because you were riding your bike faster than anyone else on your street or because you won a track meet or something like that and you can start tracing back those. And those are emotions too. So that's cool to hear that terminology in this context because a lot of people shy away from it. Jason Treu: Yeah. And I think the great thing about it, I have a client of mine who's a CEO of a large company here in Dallas and he is extremely unemotional. His father was in the police force in Boston area and you know, they never showed emotion and I went through exercises like that earlier on with him and you know, probably like a month ago and then I working with about three months. He's like, I got to tell you a story, and I'm like, okay. And he was like, he told me he dropped off his daughter at summer camp and as he drove away, he cried for the first time in 25 years. Oh Wow. And he felt so good. And the ability, he said, the ability for him to actually open up to people, be more vulnerable, be authentic speak his truth and be generous, has transformed his ability to lead, manage and actually run his entire organization, which is a very large company. And I thought that, you know, that's a really critical thing because when you're not in touch with your emotions, you don't understand what drives you, you really become lost because you can't connect to other people. People don't buy facts and figures. They buy emotions and buying could mean anything, any part of the organization, right? It's everyone's selling something right and idea of thought or to a client partner or supplier, etc. Lisa Cummings: Yeah, and let's talk about that part where you get into the other. So building relationships, it's great if you can feel your own emotions and also watch what other people are feeling because it's going to inform you about how your connection. So okay. One of your key principles I've heard you talk about is that your career potential, your success happens because of your relationships with other people. So give us a tip on making the brand-new connections and not feeling awkward about it. Jason Treu: Right? So the building blocks of any relationships are rapport, likability, and trust and how you build a relationship quickly or you can take an existing relationship significantly farther is on the rapport side. You have to start tapping into people's emotions because emotions are what runs people. That's why they do everything that they do. So I find that people ask questions to other people that are just surface level questions. You know, where do you work, what are you doing or how's your weekend? And that's fine, but if you never get any farther than surface level, you will never really get to know a person and that's going to hurt you in your career because people make promotion decisions, they give you money, they do everything because they like you. And the more passionate they feel about you, the more they're going to advocate for you in anything that they do. Jason Treu: So in an easy way to ask this, I've done this to strangers all the time, is I ask people, what are you passionate about? What projects are you working on that you're passionate about? And in fact, I did that a month ago to a woman. I was at a charity event and I asked her, you know, what's, what are you passionate about? And she told me she's passionate about, you know, cancer, charity events. And I was like, well gee, that's awesome. I am too. And my mom had leukemia and I told the story about how she almost died and etc. And you know, this woman just lit up. She didn't. She told me a story about her sister having breast cancer and literally in a couple of minutes later she was crying and I'm sitting there and I gave her a hug and she introduced me to her friends like, this is the greatest guy you got to meet him, and so we carried on a conversation and all that. Jason Treu: My conversation between me and her was less than 10 minutes. Right? And then I created an emotional connection at that point that I could have done anything else. And in top of that, what you do then is you ask a person, well, what do you need any help with that? Are you having any challenges around that passion in your life? And then you can actually help people with the things they actually care about the most. And if you can do that, people will do anything for you, right? Because one, if you lead with giving, people know that you don't have a scorecard and the only people that don't have score cards with them are people in their inner circle. The closest people to them. And also there's a thing called the law of reciprocity. Meaning, people don't like to get things too far out of whack typically, so when someone gives the other person many times will at least give back in match that in that relationship and get back to even. So either way you can get pretty far and take relationships pretty quickly or take existing ones and really move them forward quickly. Lisa Cummings: Yeah. So okay. There's a situation that I keep hearing happening with the audience and they will buy what you're saying and when it comes to their peers and where they get tripped up is with exec senior executives that they want to build a relationship with, but for some reason the hierarchy gets this thing all out of whack for them. So let's say because you mentioned promotional opportunity in there, so that's what prompted me to think about this. I keep hearing at where suddenly people feel more awkward or they feel that the opener that they might be pushing. Strangely if they come in and they're trying to make emotional connections. So when somebody is approaching a senior executive, they don't yet know who would be in a promotional power kind of situation or even just an org chart kind of power situation in their company. What would you do if anything that's different or would you do it totally the same? Say you're nervous around that person. How do you work through that? What's your first step? Jason Treu: I realized they're human beings too and they're having a connection with me too. You need to understand that you have to learn about them. Right? And the business is not the only defining thing; their personal life really is and what their passions are. So I think a great thing is I ask people all the time is what did you do this weekend? What's on your agenda for the week? Right? Something like that. So I can try to find some things that they might really like, that I can find some common ground and build rapport quickly with them. Especially if I don't have very much time because at least you can build some quick rapport with that. The other thing that you can do is some more technique on mirroring and matching them, and that's a very powerful way because most communication is nonverbal, so you can, if you mirror how someone is, speaks, the tone of their voice, if it's high or low, if they're animated, not animated on the space in between them to make sure you have the proper space. Jason Treu: If you can actually match their movements a little bit, you don't need to be like mirroring every possible thing, but the more that you can do, the more helpful it will be because people like people that are like themselves or the people that they want to be like. So you need to build that rapport on both sides of it, the verbal and nonverbal because then it's a way a quicker way to build a relationship that matters for them. Right? And how they see you in view and you because people make snap decisions really quickly. So you want to go in there and do that in plus most people are not really interested in the other person, right? Or they're trying to ask them business questions or they're trying to get it and they're trying to an angle and when you try to do that, the other person knows because again, most of communication is nonverbal so people know when you're trying to get something from them or you're trying to run your own agenda on them. I try to go into with a contribution mindset, like how can I help someone else and how can I get to know them? Right. And that is what I'm always acting like in everything that I do and everyone I meet. Lisa Cummings: Yeah, I love those. And I like the weekend one because it's easy. It's repeatable. I mean, if you give someone that tip alone and they go ask five people that same question, then they have something also to follow up and take the conversation beyond later because you can say, hey, how'd your triathlon go that weekend? Or how was your son's play? And then it fuels future conversations as well. And then on the mirroring part, one of the simplest of all of those is the kind of the pace and the tone of that person. So that's an easy one. If it's too much mentally to handle having all sorts of things to watch, for just the pace of their conversation. Trying to match that and bring it up a level or down a level can really be helpful. Jason Treu: The other thing to do too is that if you know, something I think often we don't do is trying to do tha…
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