So, Here's My Story... - TopPodcast.com

Latest Episodes:

Ep178: Company Culture & The Importance of Snow Days Nov 17, 2020

Show notes

Remember snow days? Remember how exciting it was to have that found day? It’s important to find ways to incorporate these experiences into your lives, even when everything is virtual.

Why is that important for business?

It’s also important to create these experiences – these blips of normality or shared experience – in your business as well. We talk about the quantitative parts of business often, but the qualitative experience is just as important – how people feel is not something to be overlooked. Culture for companies is often talked about as an “other” thing that lives in its own room, when it is more like interstitial tissue woven through everything.

Sometimes, it is as simple as refusing to forfeit some of the joy that come with normality.

Especially as go into winter, with the weight of not having many things to look forward to and lacking spontaneous found joys that come with semi-quarantine, we have to be mindful about how to incorporate snow day energy into our businesses and our lives. We need more emphasis on seeing see people and interactions beyond the transactional. The interpersonal is a chance to create another texture to the conversation that is missing.

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Ep177: Expectations with a Side of Peaches Nov 10, 2020

Show notes

What can a peach the size of your face teach you about expectations? Let’s discuss!

How do you manage expectations to avoid disappointment, while avoiding complacency? How do you go from the perfect peach, to whatever it is that they sell at the grocery store.

These are the questions we tackle in this episode, and you can listen here.

hy is that important for business?

When you have the perfect peach as a child, every other peach will reliably be a disappointment. When you have an amazing first experience, you often have to contend with unmet expectations, so how do you manage those expectations, in life and business, so you aren’t perpetually disappointed.

“Satisfied” can sometimes feel like a dangerous word. How can you give conscious thought to creating an experience for our staff, for instance, so they are as happy with the decision they made on day 418 as they were on day 1? How do we balance desire and expectation with satisfaction, while avoiding disappointment? Satisfaction feels like it can easily dribble into inertia and complacency without a little hunger. If every single peach met the standard of that first one, it would just be a peach.

“Fine is something you pay, not something you get” – wisdom by Eliot.

From The Incredibles

Helen: Everyone's special, Dash.

Dash: Which is another way of saying no-one is.

As we talked about in Episode 149 Everything’s a Blur, we mark our time with individual blips and the punctuation of life, and sameness tends to cause life to blur. The answer to fear of unmet expectations isn’t to keep our expectations low, but to communicate about them. The problems with expectations happen when they haven’t been discussed, or when they are confused with certainty. And most importantly, expectations without truth are dangerous.

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Ep176: Engagement, Hope & Drowning Rats Nov 03, 2020

Show notes

This episode will be released on a pretty significant voting day in the U.S., which gets us thinking about how voting (and NOT voting) relates to business. How do you get people to tell you what they think, what they want, if they have lost faith that it will make a difference? And the biggest question of all – how can we use rats to tell this story?

Why is that important for business?

Voting is an act of hope. But if you don’t think your vote matters, or you don’t think anyone’s vote matters (because the people at the top will do what they want anyway), you can get disillusioned in the process. The same can happen in a business. Whether it’s customers or employees or anyone else involved in your business, if people think their voice doesn’t matter, you can miss vital information.

So how do you reach people who don’t vote, or speak up?

The most honest place to look – does their vote actually count? Do you really want to hear from them, or do you just want to feel good that you heard from everybody? If you actually want to encourage people to speak up, you have to be prepared to hear.

The opposite of love isn’t hate; it is disinterest. Do not imagine a silent voice is happy. Disengagement or lack of engagement is far worse than any amount of criticism. If someone is willing to give you feedback, even if it is negative, that means they are investing energy, and that they have hope things can be better. This doesn’t mean you always have to take the suggestions, but the people using their voice must believe they were at least heard, even if answer is no.

Of course, there is a significant difference between feedback in general and the concept of voting, which has higher level of expectation of outcome. But the core questions are similar– how do you get people to engage (or vote)? How do you create and sustain hope and why does hope matter?

As we learn from Jodi’s horrific rat study, when there is no line of sight to what matters or has value, or when everything seems closed in or without options, it is hard to breathe hope into a situation. We can go a great distance if we actually see a purpose, but if you deprive people of reason – or keep them figuratively in the dark – they lose hope sooner.

What story do you want to tell?

So, that's our story... now, we want to hear yours!

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Ep175: Finding the Path of Least Resistance Oct 27, 2020

Show notes

Rant alert! In this episode, we talk about the frustrating ways that businesses make it hard for us to give them our money, and the importance of keeping things easy and keeping the customer in mind.

Why is that important for business?

When a company (even *EEK* your company) doesn’t seem to understand the problem that we are attempting to solve, nor how they are going to solve the problem, it makes it hard to give them our money.

And it’s an important reminder to make sure you look at your business from the client’s point of view. Are you repeatedly getting the same questions, or repeatedly having to explain the same things? That’s a clue that you need to look at that part of your process and make it easier.

Like we talked about in Episode 2, Rule #1: make it easy for people to do what you want them to do.

Anticipate what your customers need by seeing the experience as much as possible through their eyes. And where you can’t anticipate, respond to their struggles as something that isn’t about them, but an area that you can improve.

On the side of a frustrated customer is a person at that company who is frustrated that a customer isn’t doing what they want. It’s worth it to look for the path of least resistance and put your thing on that path. It’s worth it to put the sidewalks where the path is well worn.

Tl:dr - make it easy.

p.s. Have you checked out our updated website www.soheresmystory.com? You can get your own Podpages site here: https://www.soheresmystory.com/podpage

What story do you want to tell?

So, that's our story... now, we want to hear yours!

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Ep174: A Lesson in Creativity from a Dictator Oct 20, 2020

Show notes

We cheat on our own podcast for a story this week, as we talk about This American Life, North Korea’s former leader Kim Jong-il, creativity and risk.

Why is that important for business?

This episode references the This American Life podcast episode, Same Bed, Different Dreams https://www.thisamericanlife.org/718/same-bed-different-dreams

If, like Kim Jong-il, you are finding your people lack creativity, consider where you are making it unsafe to be creative. Perhaps there is too much structure, too little structure, or perhaps your people believe it is better to do something safe and crappy than to be sorry for taking a risk. And the risk doesn’t even have to seem dramatic – it doesn’t have to involve a single dictator to be a deterrent. But you do have to help your people embrace the risk of being sorry so they can push past crappy and safe.

While it might not be wise to create a culture that courts all kinds of failure, you need to encourage it in spaces that require creativity. You have to recognize and mine for the really good parts of failure that only arise because someone took a chance.

Keep in mind – this is often a blind spot for leaders. But when people aren’t acting the way you want them to, as a culture, there is a shockingly high probability that this is the reason.

Sometimes it is as easy as eliminating part of structure, so you create more breathing room for creativity.

Lastly, a great trick to look at the solution of opening up creativity is to access it as if you are giving advice instead of finding a solution from your current place within the problem. Imagine yourself being interviewed about your success – “how have you helped your team to work so creatively” – and imagine your answer.

What story do you want to tell?

So, that's our story... now, we want to hear yours!

Pull up a chair and join the conversation in our Facebook Group: bit.ly/shmsgroup

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Shoot us an email: talktous@soheresmystory.com

Connect with @SHMSpodcast on Twitter: https://twitter.com/shmspodcast

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Ep173: Assumptions at The Drive-Thru Window Oct 13, 2020

Show notes

Ever written a whole story based on a flash of behaviour from someone else? In a twist of irony, in this episode, we explore the process of writing a story about someone else writing a story about us!

Why is that important for business?

So much of our miscommunications in business and in life are based on these imagined stories based on other people’s behaviours. It is much like how conspiracy theories are built – we emotionally organize things that don’t make sense. But when we respond this way, we are forgetting the question mark; we are forgetting to be curious. We skip past all of the unknowns and jump right to certainty. And often, we are filling in the storyline with our own fears.

When you lose the question mark, you lose a great deal of your ability to understand.

There is great power in writing your own story, but with that power comes great responsibility.

What story do you want to tell?

So, that's our story... now, we want to hear yours!

Pull up a chair and join the conversation in our Facebook Group: bit.ly/shmsgroup

OR...

Shoot us an email: talktous@soheresmystory.com

Connect with @SHMSpodcast on Twitter: https://twitter.com/shmspodcast

Text the word STORY to 345345 to get access to bonus content and weekly episode delivery.

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Ep172: Navigating Negative Feedback Oct 06, 2020

Show notes

Received some negative feedback? Before you react or internalize the feedback, we have a few things to say that may change your mind about what it means.

Why is that important for business?

In business, you are bound to get feedback, solicited or not. And some of it is bound to be negative. If you are someone who cares about delivering value and not disappointing people, your instinct might be to internalize that feedback and make changes to aspects of your business. But there are a few things you should consider first.

Are these outliers?

Determining whether the feedback, whether incredibly negative or incredibly positive, exist only on the margins is important context you need to give them. What percentage of the whole do they represent? Are you reacting to 6 reviews out of 50 as if they are the whole truth? The truth is nuanced and is not shaped just by people who have decided to speak up. Also, unless it is mandatory, you aren’t going to hear from the large middle of people who are satisfied. People give feedback when they have a strong emotional reaction to something, and that can skew perceptions.

Is this feedback about you?

Feedback always tells you more about the person giving the feedback than it does about your thing. There is a balance that has to be struck between a need to receive feedback, and the need to filter that feedback. Feedback requires discernment.

Is the feedback authentic or representative?

There is a difference between authentic feedback from individuals, and representative feedback of the whole. You need a sense of the representative in order to put the individual feedback in perspective.

Are you reacting?

Feedback is hard. It’s like a body blow, and you should wait to decide how to react until the sting is no longer present. Once you are more mentally prepared to react, you can see areas where you can better fulfill (or clarify) expectations, and you can also just help ensure people feel heard.

But before you change some aspect of your business in response to this feedback, consider it might be the audience that needs to change – you might be altering the wrong variable. It might be the perfect thing, unchanged, just for a different clientele. This is where discernment is again important.

What story do you want to tell?

So, that's our story... now, we want to hear yours!

Pull up a chair and join the conversation in our Facebook Group: bit.ly/shmsgroup

OR...

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Connect with @SHMSpodcast on Twitter: https://twitter.com/shmspodcast

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Ep171: BLM & Your Business Sep 29, 2020

Show notes

You get an email from a customer demanding you fire an employee for something you don’t think is wrong. How do you handle it?

Let’s talk about it.

Why is that important for business?

The line between private and business is increasingly blurring, and companies are being forced into taking stands. It is important, but it also makes business a lot more complicated. Personal views are not longer tidily kept in the background when it comes to business.

There is a distinction that needs to be made between a differing on viewpoints, and a differing on moral or ethical beliefs when you are deciding what positions you will be willing to lose customers over. But how ever you slice it, we are being forced into having these conversations, whether you think you want to or not.

Sooner or later, it will be incumbent on most leaders to figure out where their lines are and how they are going to react to the non-business side of life. It is harder and harder not to pick a side.

This collision of business and personal is not an “if” but a “when.”

What story do you want to tell?

So, that's our story... now, we want to hear yours!

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Ep170: The Art of Pruning for Growth... Sep 22, 2020

Show notes

A tomato failing to ripen because it is stuck in a bramble of unpruned branches doesn’t sound like it would be an analogy that would relate to business as a whole, but it really does.

Why is that important for business?

There is so much valuable in narrowing down variables of what a plant – or a business – needs. Especially when things get complicated. But one of the things we must confront in both is the necessity of pruning.

This meme about being an inch away from striking gold is the opposite of pruning. The gold might not be there at all, or it might be very far away, and if you follow every path that you think might lead to gold without pruning, you will exhaust yourself.

There is an art to pruning – knowing when and where to make a decision to cut. We need to notice where there is overgrowth or pay attention not what is too much, and notice where pruning would be beneficial. Where are you getting exhausted mining for gold and when do you pull back? This meme only prioritizes getting to the gold, and doesn’t factor in the health or happiness of the person with the pickaxe. Even if you are only three whacks away from gold, those three whacks might not be worth it.

We think of pruning as cutting back, or stunting growth in a certain direction. But what it really is is a refocusing of energy and resources to the places we most want them. Like the art of bonsai sculpting, this is about shaping the tree to the vision we have, regardless of where the limbs want to go. This is about pruning as a net gain rather than a net loss.

What story do you want to tell?

So, that's our story... now, we want to hear yours!

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Ep169: Dog Parks and Discontent Sep 15, 2020

Show notes

What can pro-dog Ohio teach us about expectations and how efforts to make things better can actually make things worse? Let’s find out!

Why is that important for business?

What is done to try to make things better can sometimes end up being viewed as a net negative because the positive wasn’t “positive enough”. In our life and in our business, we have to expect that there are times when not everyone will be happy with our decisions and that doesn’t necessarily mean it was the wrong thing to do. Once someone sees the beginning of something good, it’s almost human nature to only be able to see what could be better.

It’s also important to do what you can to make sure that you get the outcome you actually want, that aligns with the culture of your organization. By virtue of perspective, people are going to see things that you don’t, and that’s a good thing. Make sure you are really seeing the need you are trying to meet, but also accept that even if you see something as pure good or undebatable, it probably isn’t.

And, sometimes, no matter what you do, some people won’t be happy. Can you be okay with some discontent?

Other resources mentioned

Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference shorturl.at/bzO34

What story do you want to tell?

So, that's our story... now, we want to hear yours!

Pull up a chair and join the conversation in our Facebook Group: bit.ly/shmsgroup

OR...

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Connect with @SHMSpodcast on Twitter: https://twitter.com/shmspodcast

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