Improve Your Career Potential - Tina Johnston, LPC
Transcript
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01:31 today. We interviewed Tina Johnston. She's a psycho therapists and the master potential list and in our society career is such. There's so much emphasis on what you do and what your title is and all of that. It creates a lot of stress on us, especially men. Definitely soft skills on number one thing that an employer looks for a soft skills and the number one thing that our, that our young people are are very low in. Our employers are having problems finding the right kind of of employees, partially because of the soft skills our young people are are not well versed in customer service and a lot of managers
02:21 and that is going to hurt business. It's not being tracked yet, but it will be. I've had some people who have had such bad experiences at work where I've heard it put them in the hospital.
02:38 Let's get started.
02:49 Hi and welcome to make more love not war. This is Tara Harrison, a licensed professional counselor and relationship expert. This is her husband, Jeff Harrison. Have no
03:00 qualifications whatsoever. Just a normal dude today we're here with Tina Johnston. She's a psychotherapist and a master potentially list who specializes in personal and career development. I like it. Well, thank you. What got you in to. We'll start with the personal and career development. What got you into that? Well, the career development started a long time ago and and since I am in the latter part of my career, I have all those wonderful years of experience. It started actually when I was in college and I went to the career center because I was a little confused about what to do, so I just knew they would have all the answers. Certainly they know everything you would say. This 19 year old young girl who wanted to be a psychologist and whose boyfriend told her she couldn't handle it, decided she needed some help. So I go to the career center and they give me a test and I'm so excited because I'm sure this is going to be the answer of the century and I opened that, the, the envelope and the all important answer said I should be a mechanic.
04:14 Well, yeah, kind of a mechanic of. It's interesting that you say that because as I, you know, at first it was like, oh no, that's not really what I wanted, but as I started to understand more about career, I went, Oh, you know what? Yes, I enjoyed cars back then. Oh, but they're. The way that I answered the question wasn't just about cars, it was about people and about building and about rewiring things, but of course I didn't know that at 19 and then years and years later I went to therapy school and I got my, my therapy license and started doing the traditional thing with therapy, but I started to see so many people who had career issues, so it kind of pushed me in that direction and having that experience when I was young gave me that kind of that, that way to relate to how easy we can get off track when we don't have adequate information.
05:18 Yeah. And also the need to be open minded to the fact that for you, mechanic wasn't about being a mechanic car. It was about being a mechanic of the mind and figuring out how someone's mind is wired and how to make it run better. Basically that's being in the wrong career and create a lot of issues. Yes, so what do you see with your clients when you're working with people who feel like they're in the wrong career and this is something they're struggling with and so they're struggling with that with themselves, and then they also have their family and their relationships in their family, their relationships with their spouses, et Cetera, et cetera. That seems like that would create a lot of friction. Career can affect everything. It concur can affect the relationships. If someone is very stressed at work, they will often bring that home and that creates stress on the relationship.
06:13 It creates stress and internal conflict, which is gonna Affect Mental Health, so I've seen scores and scores of anxiety and depression because of a poor career fit. If someone loses her job, that fear factor comes into and and that's even an additional stressor. I've had seen some people who have had such bad experiences at work where I've had to put them in the hospital. Those are extreme, those are extreme, but that has happened on several occasions, so it's really, really important and in our society, career is. So there's so much emphasis on what you do and what your title is and all of that. It creates a lot of stress on us. Especially men. Yes. And so what do you think about all of all of that? The fact that career defines us and what you do defines us and. Yeah. How do you work with men on that?
07:15 Well, it's really interesting because career has changed a lot, so it's not the way that it was years ago and years ago when I took the all important test. It was very different. Back then we were more linear and now we're combining careers. We're having companies who are, who are downsizing, who are changing or who are having to adapt to technology and so they're giving an employee act or activities or or, or jobs that are not necessarily part of their original job description. So there's a lot of combination and we also having a lot of people who were kind of designing their own, which is really interesting and is actually very good for an employer when you have a talented employee who sees a need and sees a way to fix that need, they're actually rewriting their own job description can be very beneficial for the employer, is very empowering for the employee to absolutely. Absolutely. Now a lot of employers are not open to that, so that can create some issues with the employee and oftentimes those employees leave and go find somewhere else that's more progressive, which is good for them.
08:34 Well in in what you're saying, I won't. I also want to go to the title of master potential list, so that's why I'm seeing this idea of being the person who is encouraging people to really find their true identity of who they are and then go find a job that fits their identity instead of placing their identity in their job. You find a job that fits who you are, right. Is, is that part of that or can you explain more? It's part of that. So master potential is taking a bigger approach, so that's looking at career development as well as personal development and that's looking at the individual and, and looking at beaver and beyond their strengths and saying where is your potential and how can you go and find it and accomplish those real goals. So it's actually giving someone permission to see beyond what they, they believe themselves to be so that they can reach more reach for more.
09:34 So how do you help people do that? Um, it's, I don't, it seems to come really natural. I don't, I'm not really sure. I'm still trying to figure out that. And your identity, right? Being able to see your potential and being a master potential is delving into it. Myself of course has been part of that. But as a psycho therapist, this is what we do. We are delving into who people are now. We've been kind of dictated to by insurance and by education that we're supposed to do certain things. We can do so much more than that. And I think that I just got to the place where I wanted more. I didn't want to be dictated by a diagnoses or by a dsm five. I wanted more than that and I saw in people so much more and as I started to kind of delve into it, it was such a natural process that I started to look at it and say, well, what is it that we're doing?
10:34 And it was all about personal potential, which is about personal growth and development, which includes career but is not limited to just career. Right? So if people are feeling strong in their own personal identity, feeling like they have the potential to do whatever they want, then that gives them the flexibility in their career so that it does help career, but then it helps all the other areas of their lives as well. How do you see that improving relationships? Oh, it's huge with relationships. It gives each individual of that relationship the permission to look at themselves as well as each other and looking at their strengths. We focus on weakness so much in our society and we focus too often on the negative, what someone's not doing. When you're looking at someone's potential, you're looking at what they have the opportunity to do or what they have the skill to do, but maybe you're not doing so you're speaking to their better self in relationship. How fantastic is that when you have a partner that says, you know what, I see that you're doing this, but I see so much more in you and how empowering that is for the individuals as well as the relationship itself for both of them to be encouragers to each. Absolutely
11:54 and supportive. You know, I was thinking as you're talking about that, I'm thinking just on July fourth, we took our daughter to see the incredibles two and have you seen that yet? Okay, well I don't want to ruin anything, but there is. There is a shift in what they're doing as far as their roles in the family where she needs to go out and be a super hero and they've both been super heroes, but when they had the family, they took the roles and they had to go into cover. They took the roles of, of he was working and she was a stay at home mom and so they, she had to be the hero. She needed to go out and be the hero and he to be the stay at home dad. Well, and a lot of these movies we've seen before with stay at home dads like Mr Mom and all that kind of stuff from the eighties or whatever, like the dads fail miserably.
12:35 And what I love about it is that they, even though it was difficult for them to shift the roles, they both really encouraged each other and it shows the struggle with that too. Even though this is just a, you know, just a kid's movie. It's really not, it's, you know, Pixar is always more um, but they encourage each other through this and they were able to have the flexibility to just rock it with both the roles and it really made the family a team. And so as you're talking about that, I'm thinking how those show up and like the superhero movies and stuff like that.
13:02 That. Exactly. That's what potential ism or out, not really sure exactly what to call it yet because this is very new and it's based on positivity. It's based on positive psychology, which is exactly what that movie would have shown.
13:18 Right. And it's like we have the superhero potential in all of us. Absolutely. We all have a cape even though you're not supposed to have a cake for have living in our house right now. Um, but that's for me and jeff later. But anyway, but then out there jeff. But so when you, when you brought up positive psychology, explain, explain what that is.
13:41 Positive psychology is, is looking at who we are as individuals. The good, the bad and the not so good. And just putting a positive spin on it. It's, it's looking at it, it looks beyond the diagnoses, it looks beyond the symptoms and actually looks at the good because we get things out of an anxiety, depression, we, we get things from that. It can be turned into a positive, but it takes some work to do that. Take some delving to do that. So this will. Positive psychology kind of looks at sort of like the Norman Vincent peale positive thinking and it's beyond that so that that concept was popular in the seventies and it was just just think positive and things will come to you and then the very simple way of looking at law of attraction is kind of the same thing. Well, if you think of a pink Cadillac, if that's what you want, then you'll get it.
14:38 There's a little bit more to it than that and there's a little bit more delving into who a person is and who we are as individuals so it's going to our deeper selves and looking at family, of looking at our personal goals, our personal desires, why we think with the way that we do, and then looking at that more critically and analytically and why do we think the way that we do and then finding the gems and the jewels that we all have even in in things that are negative or hurtful. Even sometimes in trauma there can be sown some gems that we. We learned from those experiences. Yeah, like how much of a survivor a person has who is goes through any kind of trauma and what they did to survive and how they can use that now, right? Like Viktor Frankl, his book man's search for meaning is iconic and that should be required reading for every one of our students.
15:40 Actually for all of us, it is. It is so, so powerful. Viktor Frankl was a psychologist during World War Two, Germany during World War Two, and he was. He was Jewish and he was rounded up and taken to the concentration camp with his family and somehow he knew he had to change his mindset in order to survive and he came up with such a brilliant plan on how to change his own thinking and it was all about gratitude and finding the joy in the smallest of things. Things that we would take completely for granted and he survived. His family did not, but he survived and he went on to develop what's called logo therapy, which is based on his experiences. I love that too, because they can, when you're going through any traumatic experience, someone can strip away so many parts of you, you know, and, but they, if you are able to keep that joy and find it in anything, somebody can't take that from you.
16:47 And that's where your power is absolute. That's where your super power is. That's her superior joy. Absolutely. I love that. Yes. Yeah, that is definitely. Everyone needs to read that book. It's, it's a given. So amazing. And there's also a, uh, along those same sort of lines is some of the stuff that mean I'm a big fan of the stoicism. Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and all this. And then there was a, there was a famous quote from a, I can't remember the guy's name, but he was, uh, in, in Vietnam. He got shot down and he was coming down to earth. And even in his mind he just said, okay, I'm leaving the modern world and I'm now entering epictetus world. So he had the change his whole way of thinking to be, you know, I can only control what I think. I can only control my own actions and that's, that's it. Don't worry about anything else and that, that's, that's really what it kind of boils down to. We have responsibility for one thing
17:50 and that's ourselves and how we react. Life's going to happen. It's going to throw his curves. Depends on how we approach that is how we survive it or thrive from it. Yeah. And um, my therapist gave me a really good intervention called the memo intervention, which I, which I think goes along with all of this. So I'll explain it. Basically he, I was like, what are you doing? He took like a piece of paper and he wrote out this thing and I was like, what are you doing? And he gave it to me and he said, okay, this is your memo that you're giving to people when you're getting upset about anything that anyone else does or thinks or says. And the memo said, be like me or else.
18:33 But the thing is, as I think we find so much pain and the fact that we want to hand people that memo and being able to redirect that and know, okay, you know, our w I wish that I could control other people, not because I'm a controlling person, but because it causes me anxiety or pain when they behave this way or that way, but I can't. And the only focus that I can have that's really going to be successful for me is focusing on what I can control, which is me. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And You bring that back to career. So many employees feel so helpless because they can't. There's such a limit to what they can do. And so they become cogs in the wheel. That's not good for anybody. It's not good for the employees. It's not good for the employer. Dehumanizing. Exactly. Exactly. And it doesn't allow them to bring in their own creativity and innovation. We don't celebrate that in so many jobs. And so we're limiting the abilities of people.
19:42 Yeah. That reminds me of something that Seth Goden talks about is he talks a lot about, um, people, you know, making your, your work, your art and not worrying about, um, you know, a lot of people are afraid to do something because their boss may take credit for it and his sort of thought process is just go do it and get it. Just go down the process and go ahead and let them take the credit for it. You do that three or four times on just pick. He, you know, maybe it's not a big thing that you do. Maybe it's a small thing, but you do that one time. Let him get the credit or guarantee he's going to let you do it again because trust me, he wants to get more credit, but you have the biggest problem is you need to. What a lot of people do is whenever they're going to try to do some new project or something, they, they go to their boss and they say, Hey, I want to do this thing. And basically what the boss is doing is, you know what he's saying no against is I don't want to do that because I'm the WHO's going to take the blame whenever it doesn't work and you're going to have an escape goat, basically you did it. You screwed up, but I get to take thing. So he's like, you need to take on that responsibility of the thing falling apart and you have to do that upfront to the boss, right? And, but let him have the credit, take some risk.
21:07 And there there's ways to to, to use that. Even in a resume or especially now with so many tools that we have, you can celebrate things that you do like that, like a project or a process that maybe you've designed and yes, maybe the baskets credit. Okay? But if you designed it and you have it, put it on Linkedin, make your own little website. There's so many things that you can do when you think outside the box. Unfortunately too often we don't think outside the box. Well, his point is that the work is your art that's in itself. It's portfolio. Your resume, you're talking about work stands on its own. You don't need anything else. That's true. That's true. Well, I think that that just comes from that place that you were talking about earlier, Tina, if not coming from a place of fear, the fear and I would say like I need to get this recognition from it for it to be valuable versus having that identity of I my I am my own instrument, my work is my art and so anything I create is going to be beautiful even if it has flaws because it's a process of something I created and it doesn't really matter who takes the credit because I know that I created this and I can still show that other people if necessary, and sometimes flaws turn out to be better than the original plan that's posted.
22:31 Notes came from. That's where White Zinfandel came from. A lot of people like that wine will too sweet for me, but I'm just saying it was a mistake. Very popular. Exactly.
22:42 Do you find that a lot of people are coming to you after they've. As far as they're concerned, they've done all the right things. They've checked every box, they did great in high school, they got the great college degree, everything. They did, everything right and then now here they are, they're out and they can't get the job that they wanted. They're frustrated, they feel like they did everything right. Why is it not working?
23:03 Working? I see a lot of 20 somethings and, and it's, it's very heartbreaking because they, they come in after they, they think they've done it all right. They, they checked everything off the box. I did okay in high school they went to college and college is supposed to be the end all be all and that's supposed to provide you with a great job. And the um, the success that you desire. Unfortunately that's not enough. That's only part of the story. And too often I have seen young people who choose to self medicate and a lot of times I see him in a treatment center. Does that ever work the self? No, I can say from personal experience that does not work. Don't do that very short term. Very short. So I'll do that audit all train wreck, so I got a lot of 20 somethings and then the other thing is business owners and executives whose jobs may go away or a sudden change and and then they're scrambling because they don't know how to go out there and beat the bushes or pound the pavement because things have changed so dramatically. Our, our career centers and our colleges have not really kept up and there's not a lot of places that people can go for advice.
24:26 Let's take a moment to stop and take a quick break. We'll be right back.
24:32 Make love not. War has joined patrion. What's Patrion us? It's an amazing website. We're fans like you can directly support artists like an Italian prince would do during the renaissance era for artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci or Michelangelo. You don't have to donate a bag of gold and silver like a patron prints to be awesome. Simply go to www.patrion.com/make more love, not war and click become a patron. It takes about three minutes and it's very easy. If you feel like a wealthy Italian prince after donating a few bucks, well then you go ahead and own that feeling. What are you seeing are the major changes in careers from, you know, generation x or baby boomers looking for careers to now at where millennials are in it is a huge shift and it's hard to keep you keep
25:34 up. How do you see this trend going? As far as. So there's a lot of elements to that. So how I would work with a with a boomer would be different than with a millennial. What's different from when boomers looked for jobs? Resumes are different, everything's different, resumes, different job searches, different how you approach the job. Search is different. Mindsets are different. It's a little bit more relaxed, but there's a whole lot more components to it than there was in previous times. And the way that that boomers will approach that versus millennials is very different. So you have to take that into consideration. Millennials are much more open to risk, which is good, but sometimes I don't know how to apply that risk correctly. In what way they will do things that are, as far as a societal, um, norms are okay. It's not okay. In a job situation, for instance, taking your phone, do not take your phone to the interview and have it right on the table, on the table.
26:43 Don't answer, uh, a tweet or a text or don't answer it. Do a snapchat that don't take pictures, don't post and it, no, don't do, but that's part of their culture. So they don't necessarily know that we have just changed a lot. Yeah, we call it soft skills, definitely soft skills. A number one thing that an employer looks for a soft skills and the number one thing that our, that our young people are, are very low end is soft skills. We're not teaching that as much in a society. We're not teaching it as much in school as we used to in previous generations. So they are at significant disadvantage and then our gen zs, which is our next generation coming up, they will be at disadvantage in a different way. They are the ones that are, that are questioning education only bad thing. Yeah. I know a couple people right now that would be college age and they're like this makes no sense.
27:44 And then even their parents, I've said it makes no sense. Why did I waste my time at college? It made I can be doing like all these things I could have done that were just a total waste and it Kinda, it actually messed them up. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and now we have so many educational choices, but people don't know this. It's fascinating what you can do and not have a college degree. Oh yeah. Well it's interesting because I went all the way through school, got my masters and all that stuff and jeff finished high school and he's such a much more flexible thinker than I am, which I know some of that is just our personality and stuff like that. But I had to learn that after learn how to be an entrepreneur, learn how to think outside of the box, learn how to not just find a job and stay at the same place forever without thinking about other places I could go and other things I can do.
28:38 And he's really taught me a lot about that. And even in therapy school, no. Well I call it therapy school. That's not really what it's coming, that's just my term for it. But when we went through those masters programs, you know, social work, marriage and family, whatever program that it was, there was, there was a way that you did things and this is what you did and you weren't supposed to deviate from it. I remember one class I took, it was my very last class and, and uh, Grad school was really tough for me and I was a single mom and all this and very last class. So it was almost done. And the professor comes up and she says, I don't think I'm going to pass you. What? Oh my gosh. You know, I felt like somebody punched me in the stomach. The ground went out from under me. I said, Oh, why? She goes, because you don't say, how do you feel about that?
29:35 Okay. After I peeled myself off of the ceiling, I told her why. I said, I say that for a reason, because about 10 years prior I had been suicidally depressed. I went to three counselors and they all said that. And then I found somebody who actually did therapy and this woman had been through depression and anxiety, so she kind of had it. She was also a counselor, therapist. And her approach was so different. She never said, how do you feel about that? Because it was too. It was too trite. [inaudible]. She really helped me get to the meat of the matter and in help me understand the depression and anxiety and I was able to overcome it fairly easily after that without medication. So I told fresh with this and, and um, she kind of looked at me a little bit. She goes, you know, okay, I understand where you're coming from. I would like you to do this. And she gave me some things to work on and that's great. That's, that's great information. And I'll do that and thinking as she passed me,
30:45 we're glad you're here now with your degree in tax. Wow. You know, I, I'm in my master's program. We, we learned a lot of great skills as well and all of the theories you need to learn and all of that kind of stuff. But going back to what Jeff said about your, the art of things is that there are a lot of things we were told not really to do, that I have found to be hugely connecting like using humor in therapy, um, because that really breaks their resistance and it. And it normalizes just that we're all people here. And also to use yourself and therapy and that self-disclosure telling your own stories really connects with people too. And so I think that that just really shows that your education however you go with it is your tool. It's not your guide like a guide book, but it's a tool you used to get where you need to go. And I think that that's a shift in how people are thinking about education and I see that with millennials to have your, you're a consumer of it and so you choose where you want to go with it. And so I think that's a really positive shift. It's foundational information and it's very good
31:56 beneficial. But what you do with it, it makes all the difference in the world. Yes. And you can go in so many directions and especially now we have so much access to information, so we should do that. We can help young people learn to be experts and we can start them very early, but we're not doing that because we're still. We're still following the standardized method and our school system and education system
32:23 which was developed in the 18 eighties. I'm thinking we need to move on from that really had a specific reason. That's exactly right. Because we needed to standardize education by law mean 18, eighties. Back then in that timeframe, that was before you had standardized like nuts and bolts and things
32:40 like that. It sounds like if somebody was to build a typewriter, they built every piece of the typewriter and you had an. Every piece was different and they had to Redo it and then once I got to the point that they had different nuts and bolts standardized, then they realized, wow, we need to have people who are standardized basically and need, they need to know these quality things. We can't, we can't, uh, you know, custom teach people like an apprentice anymore. So it became that and now we're kind of feels like we're in that area where it's, it has to change, but you know, there's so much baggage or whatever have of a certain type of system that's in place with
33:21 the system and, and the, the industrial revolution drove that standardized system in education for a good reason and we need to flex outside of that. But it's an, it's a system that is so ingrained in itself. It has a hard time flexing and it's been banned, dated so many times that I think everybody's afraid to take it apart because it'll just completely integrated.
33:49 The flip side is that you end up just reading a thing where somebody was talking about this, they were like, yeah, we've got all these kids that shouldn't have even gone to college that have the have degree's worthless degrees for the most part, and they missed out on having any just skills that they could have just learned. I mean and the mean now we don't have them.
34:09 Was that what you mean by the soft skills? Jeff, you said that word or that phrase earlier, and that's not one I'm familiar with. Can you tell me what that is?
34:16 Soft skills are not taking a phone into your office and sitting it down then or or shaking someone's hand
34:23 properly. Are we talking about manners? Manners is part of it or punctuality? Basic courtesy.
34:30 Be Clean, dress up, have your hair comb.
34:34 Okay. It's a lot of common sense kind of things that we think are common sense, but we don't realize that we're not passing that onto the younger generations. It's not as expected as it was in earlier generations. Like with. Especially with the boomers. That was an expectation. I mean you had finishing schools and things like that to that. Has that ever happened? Yeah, exactly. I took cotillion spring. Those bad. I liked it.
35:04 What about, what about bosses? Do you, do you have a, you know, we've talked about a friend of the perspective of the employees. What about the employers who were, you know, maybe they are having a difficult time to finding the right people. I mean it's not just one side.
35:19 Absolutely not. In fact, when I'm working with employees that are looking at say an interview is a two way process, they are looking at you to see if you're a good fit for them, but you are looking at the employer for the very same reason. So yes, our employers having problems, finding the right kind of of employees, partially because of the soft skills our young people are are not well versed in customer service and a lot of manners and that is going to hurt business. It's is not being tracked yet, but it will be because there is. They're going to make such an impact and the bottom line is going to start to suffer and so employers are going to start looking at that. We have a lot of specialized jobs that are not being filled for the very same reason. Kids are going to college instead of working on specialized jobs or distributive education, so they're doing more of the book learning but not the kinetic learning.
36:27 So this is putting employers also at risk. They don't have the specialized skills that they're looking for. So what kind of stresses when you're working with employers, are you working through with them to help manage with this changing workforce? Going in that a one that's really interesting and, and of course I can't reveal any names, but this employer is, is a large employer and I worked with the owner and he decided to go into his local school system and approach this, the school, the school system and start an apprenticeship program at their high schools school. So that is now. They were a little resistant so he's kind of had to to schmooze a little bit, but it's really interesting what can happen. And you think of these kids that that maybe are either are not very motivated in school or or they haven't had a very good experience or whatever and somebody comes and says, hey listen, I'm going to teach you this skill because this is what I need for a job.
37:34 And, and then you finish high school and then come and taught to me and let's, let's see if this will will work out for us. Well the, the student learned skills outside of the regular curriculum and has a potential job waiting on the line. And if that student, that young person wants to go to college, that that door is not closed. It just may not be. It may not be the right time for them right away. You don't have to go to college at 18, you can go at another time and there's a lot of opportunities. You don't have to do brick and mortar face to face. There's a lot of different ways to go to college now for sure. And also like you were talking about your experience in Grad school and the fact that you had already had life experience before you went into Grad school really helps you to become a better therapist as you were learning in therapy school now that had to be a therapist. And so I definitely see a, a lot of value and taking some time after high school
38:36 to work on some skills and to have some real world life skills like that to be able to take into wherever you're going and also that really important time of building your identity from 18 to 25 sometimes up to 30 is really for a lot of people taken up by school, which again, I mean that's a great institution for learning things. But at the same time there's not an, a lot of schools. There's not a lot of creativity encouraged. Right? Um, yeah, I had a better experience. I went to um, a, a, a, a small school in Georgetown called Southwestern University and I had some really great classes that really taught me how to think outside of the box, which I didn't know before because I was so school based. My entire school career I was all about that a plus and crying if I got a b on something, literally cried. Um, but once I went to college I actually had that experience.
39:33 So it, that's for sure possible, but, but the real world skills are really important is what I hear you saying. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I can give you some examples here that are kind of something that we're in the process of with, uh, you know, from the employer's point of view in, in car dealerships. So we had a, we're in the process of buying dealerships right now. So we bought a dealership and I'm out of state and the person who was part of the deal was a guy who was one of the, in the top three running dealerships for years, like 20 years. He, he specifically ran these kinds of dealerships in New York in a great market. He was number one in the top three in the country. Uh, the manufacturer loved this guy. Everything looked. I mean everything on paper. If you were to put it on a resume, you go, this is a no brainer.
40:30 Get this guy and just roll with it. We went with him for about six months. He's successfully lost about seven figures for the company and we had to go in there and get rid of the guy and just now. So now we have a whole nother way of looking at it. You're like, okay, I don't even care what you've done. Even in this industry, I don't even care. We got to train you from the beginning. You have to completely change it. So we're having a whole new process now where we're going out there and we're going to start getting these guys younger, working with them directly. We're not even trying to bring them up through even specifically our own, you know, in house. We're trying to find people who are actually out there on small, who run their own smaller businesses, who know the pain of spending, the who know the pain of having their own money on the line, who've done all the bits and pieces instead of somebody who did this little job.
41:26 They did okay. They moved up to the next job. They did. Okay, now we need somebody who has a better feel for the whole picture. So that's of our way of looking at this and we're also looking at at high schools as well for in, in the shop area and trying to take some of the burden off those guys where instead of having to spend 10, 15, $20,000 on tools, just even get started. We'll get the tools will get you started. You will get you a place where you can start interning at in college and give them a route so they can get to the, to the top job in the shop and maybe by the time they're, you know, in four years of just doing that, making money the whole time, they're going to be better off than their classmates that went to college and they got 50, 60, $70,000 in debt with no job working. We're going to wherever, if we will
42:21 do things like that where we're molding the, our, our workforce. We haven't been doing that and now a lot of our, our employers are starting to really recognize that which is great that that progression is what we need from our employers to drive education and it's great for the student. Nobody. Everybody wins in that situation. So it's brilliant
42:45 and then I can put it on the other side. I've asked the owner of our company has any, and in all your years of running this thing, has anyone ever come to you and said, look, I want to be a general manager or I want this position or I want that. I'm going to do whatever it takes. I'll go pay for the extra education. I'll go do this. I'll do the exercise. Not One person has ever done it. I'm just amazed that how they just expect to get picked to move up to the next position or whatever. Instead of just doing it, just go ask them and do it. It's that linear
43:23 thought process. You here's, here's step a, step B, step c that that's not the way that the job market is now and that puts someone at at a disadvantage of that kind of thinking of step one, step two or level one, level two. You don't have to do it that way and it's to the benefit to the employer and the employee to look at goals or at the end game and find out what is the. What do, what do I need in order to get to the end game? What education do I need? What skills do I need? Everybody wins in that situation and businesses better.
44:02 How many people do you deal with it? Sit there and go, yeah, but I can't go do that because I didn't get. I don't have this degree so I can't do it, or I can't do this because I don't have that. And I say that from the standpoint of A. Scott Adams is the guy who started dilbert. Well, I mean he did. He, he even tells. He says, I'm a mediocre drug. I'm not even used if I have a dinner party. I'm not even going to be the funniest guy in the room at my house, but I, I know enough about business. He was in corporate America and and left Corporate America and just said, I'm going to become a cartoonist. No qualifications, no reason to think he could do this at all. And he's got one of the most successful businesses out there. He never took a writing class and he's has multiple books that have been on New York Times best seller and he's like, I'm not even that great, you know, so he, he basically what he talks about is the skill stack that he, he has all these mediocre skills, but he doesn't, he never thinks like I can't do it because.
45:07 Exactly. That's that outside of the box thinking and it's bringing passion. So he knew he had something. He just wasn't sure quite what it was and he didn't stop. That's that entrepreneurial mindset. It's scary and a lot of people don't have that. So if someone. It just depends on the purpose on the person, but if someone's in front of me and says, I can't do this, I can't, I can't, I can't. I said, well, okay, you can't run. You can't. Okay. I'm not going to really work with people who can't because I want to work with people who want to be very successful and are willing to look at different options. Is it just fear? Fear is that, and this is what I tell people about fear of failure. I'm very sarcastic. I tell them, you know what, you're the only person out there that has a fear of failure. Come on. We all have a fear of failure. Who wants to fail? It's not very fun. However it is how we learned and you can have a successful business without failure is just part of it was Henry Ford that said that
46:12 he can or you can't. He failed three times. You failed. It was the third business before he wasn't well, and the thing is relationally is that people connect on failure. You know, it just makes you more human. A lot of times people think, well, if, if I'm a failure and my career, I'm a failure in my other romantic relationships or friendships or whatever, that people aren't gonna like me, they're not going to want to be around me and it's completely opposite. That's why there's this term called failure porn. People like to connect and failure because it makes them all feel like we all experience as it normalizes it. Like you said, when you're, when you're being sarcastic and joking, oh yeah, nobody else has a fear of failure. Totally true. And if we can be open about our failures and talk about them, then everyone else knows that it's normal to fail and we can take some of that power out of the failure because you can't take a risk if you're afraid to fail. If you're focusing on that, it's just not gonna happen. You're not going to take the risk. But if you know that failure's inevitable, inevitable part of the process, and you can understand that it's an opportunity to learn and get better and that the best way you learn and get better is to fail. Then it takes the fear out of it, right? It's just a part of learning. If you look at a toddler and and little children, just
47:30 brilliant. You look a little toddler who's learning to walk. What do they do? They fall, yeah, they want to walk, but they fall. Is that a failure? Well, in our society, we could look at it that way, but when that little toddler falls, what do they do? They get pick up. What did they fall and get hurt? They get back up. We should learn from that because that's what life is all about. It's getting back up, dust ourselves off. And what did we learn from the experience? I have a saying that goes, I've never failed at anything, but I have successfully found ways that don't work. I love that. That's excellent. It's a great quote. Well, you know, I think we can learn. I already brought up the incredibles two, so I'm going to bring up another one. I think we can learn a lot from children's movies and stuff like that too, because they're directed at children and children are the ones we say, oh, it's okay for them to fail because they're just children.
48:26 But being able to allow yourself to be like a child and fail and there's a song from trolls where she says, Hey, I'm not giving up today. Um, there's nothing standing in my way. You can not, not me over. I will get back up again. Yeah. Okay. I've watched that movie way too many times, but anyway, but that, that's. I think that's a good mantra for us to have in the sense of like, yeah, I'm going to fail, but I'm going to get back up again every time because that's where I get my strength. Well, those were getting back up. That's also with Scott Adams. He wrote a book called, uh, how I, how to fail at almost everything and still succeed and what he talks about in there and you'll even see like you'll do a speech where he talks about, he goes, look, this is.
49:07 And then it's got a list of all the things that he's done that he failed at. Wow. And he goes, the number gets to like 30. And I had to stop because I was starting to get really depressed and. But that's what he talks about. He talks about how like, okay, so he has his mba in business. Well, they, and he has worked in corporate America and things didn't work out perfect, but that gave him enough information to be able to do Dilbert ul to be, uh, you know, in a business thing. He did enough in persuasion to know how to do that. So he just took all these little these skills and made this skill stack and I keep hearing that term. Nobody's really got it totally mastered and what they're going to call it, but skill stacks seems to be what he called it, but I think that that's, if you, if you look at it from the standpoint of there isn't.
49:58 There's no way you can fail. Like you just keep learning. You just keep going. It's just not possible to fail. That's right. It's not possible to really learn many times without failure because you learn so much more from doing it wrong than doing it right. If you do it right the first time, you really haven't learned anything. That's exactly right because you'll keep doing the same thing over and over again and that's kind of the definition of crazy. I remember my dad always was the type of person that had. It was like he had to have
50:28 from all the steps, everything already planned out, all worked out all the way to the end, and I was always the the standpoint of it's impossible to know. You just have to go one step in and I remember, so there's a friend of mine who's very, very successful and actually this is a question I have for you, how many people have come to you who have been worried about the political atmosphere? Either direction that feel like their jobs now? It's like everything's gonna fall apart because of this or how much does that happen?
51:01 It's actually a lot. And uh, I haven't had a collect call from California and they begged me to come out. This was right after the election. They begged me to come out there because there was so much anxiety in California. I'm not sure why California, but just, you know, we'll set you up. We've got so many people out here that are, they're petrified. They're traumatized. They actually, they actually called it that election trauma. And um, well, I don't know that it's that bad. It's we have to adapt. No matter what happens, we have to adapt and things are scary. There's a lot of things that are scary right now and we're going to have to adapt. And as a country, have we shown that we can do that? Absolutely. Does it mean it comes without pain and suffering? No, it can be tough, but that's also a great thing that, that makes us so human is how we adapt and how we survive.
52:00 Even in difficult times like evolution, you know? So that's what, that's what I was going to say. So I have a friend of mine who's like, he has multiple businesses, very successful. He's a very smart guy and he was worked up not, you know, I'm not going to say what politics, but it was, it happened and he was just like kidding. So like crazy about it and I just finally went to him and I go, why are you so worried about? And he just was like, well, things, just this and that. And I was like, you have adapted to every single thing that's ever come to you very successfully. If you got dropped onto a desert island, you would figure it out. You would be fine. I mean you would do the best you can. Do. You have no control over that. Why are you even worried about it?
52:52 You're going to be great, and he's told me multiple times that he's like, that really helped a lot just to stop worrying about it. It's not even. It doesn't even do what does it help to be paralyzed by fear because then you're paralyzed and, and I know some folks just just recently that have come to me and they, they are obsessed with the news obsessed and I said, what is that doing for you? It's still in a lot of deodorant and the newspaper I guess, but it's affecting relationships. Yes. So they're obsessed by the news and the fear and and this person said that and this is going to happen and Yada Yada. None of us know what's going to happen, but you're taking away time from your family and obsessing about it and your wife does not want to hear that all the time because you're addicted to fear. Absolutely. No fear has an adrenaline rush.
53:47 And the thing is, the whole new cycle is like the way it is right now. It's so interesting because I'm right in the middle of listened to Ryan Holiday's book where he's talking about, trust me, I'm lying to you and it's talking about how he was a media manipulator, but he was doing it from a pr side to be able to get this client's more, you know, either books or he was worked at American apparel or whatever he was trying to do and he, he basically, what he did was he would manipulate the system with the bloggers so he would, he would, he would run up the chain where he would start with a little blog and they would push it up the chain, push it up the chain, pushed up the chain until he finally gets to the highest level, you know, the big media, New York Times or CNN or whatever.
54:30 And it was all fabricated. I mean it was all made up and he was talking about how, how all this stuff is becoming that way now because of what's happened is you went from a news media before blogs were. I mean, just before blogs were, it was subscription based and they had to protect their brand, their name and all their stuff. So that was one of the biggest problems that they had. So they had subscription basis before for subscription basis. It was the yellow papers, so it was the like you've seen the movies, extra, extra read all about it. So they were all trying to, it was only that one cell of that newspaper that made them money. So if they didn't have another article or another extra extra and they would be totally making up stuff like, oh, worst declared. And then you read the article and it says maybe it was all made up. So he, um, he got to the point where he, he said that's exactly what's happening right now. It's all about just making it. He's not even, you doesn't even, you don't even have to have any information. You just make up a good headline and it gets it going. And now this thing is just, the whole thing is just spinning out of control right now and we're really seeing it. We've got to have more discernment. Yeah.
55:50 Tina, thank you so much for your time today. It was just a pleasure having you come to interview and wonderful to see you again as well. Really excited about what you're doing and I can't wait to hear more about being a master potential list in the future. You will love the title. Well, thank you very much and thank you so much for having me. As always, if you have any questions, comments, or would like to be on the show, go to our website, make more love, not war.com, and send us an email. Be sure to subscribe to our show on either itunes or stitcher
56:24 to make sure you get our shows as soon as they're available. You can also donate to this show at Patrion.com/mate. More love not war. If you're the type of person that likes to play an active role in your favorite shows, provide us with your email address to join our proactive newsletter. Before we record each episode, we will email you a preview of topics to be covered. You will have the opportunity to provide us with questions on the upcoming show, giving you more control. Everyone struggles with some type of issue in their lives, and this is your chance to directly ask an expert a question you've always wanted to know. Simply go to our website, make more love, not war.com, and send us an email to let us know that you want to be added to our proactive newsletter. Thanks for listening.