Show Notes

• One extra hour every day
• How to be in the top 10%
• Interviews with self-made millionaires
• People don’t succeed by accident
• Why mindset is so critical
• Mindset / choices / actions / habits
• Why some people do, and some people don’t
• Self-doubt
• Treating relationships as assets
• The extra mile
• The Acorn Principle

Connect With Jim Cathcart

Website – https://cathcart.com/ 
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/jim.cathcart
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/cathcartinstitute/
Instagram – http://www.instagram.com/jimcathcart/
YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/user/jimcathcart
Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Cathcart

Summary

Jim Cathcart is an award-winning professional speaker, and the author of over 20 books. He reveals what the top 10% do that others don’t, and how the acorn of an oak tree can help us unlock our potential.

Full Transcript

Brian

Welcome to another episode of Life Excellence with Brian Bartes. Join me as I talk with amazing athletes, entrepreneurs, authors, entertainers, and others who have achieved excellence in their chosen field so you can learn their tools, techniques and strategies for improving performance and achieving greater success. Jim Cathcart’s professional speaking achievements look like a list of dream goals for most speakers:  President of the National Speakers Association, Speakers Hall of Fame, Sales and Marketing Hall of Fame in London, a top one percent TEDx video with millions of views, 22 published books, 3300 highly paid speeches worldwide, five years of lectures in mainland China, and speaking engagements in all 50 States and around the world. Jim received the Golden Gavel Award from Toastmasters International, which has been presented annually since 1959 to an individual distinguished in the fields of communication and leadership. He also received the Cavitt Award from the National Speakers Association. That award was created to celebrate and honor those members whose careers demonstrate the spirit of sharing, guiding, and inspiring other professional speakers. In addition to speaking Jim is a guitarist and singer/songwriter, a fitness enthusiast who logged over 10,000 miles of running mountain trails after age 60, and a lifetime member of the American Motorcyclist Association. Jim’s personal purpose is to help people live a more abundant life. Welcome, Jim, and thanks for joining us on Life Excellence. 

Jim  

Well, thank you for that generous introduction Brian, it’s wonderful to be with you.

Brian

Well, it’s great to have you. Jim, you’re a phenomenally successful speaker by any measure, but I’m guessing you didn’t grow up thinking, hey, geez, I want to be a motivational speaker when I grow up. What sparked your interest in personal development first of all, and in speaking specifically, and how did that interest develop into a now 40 plus year career?

Jim  

Well, I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. I live in Austin, Texas today. And for 37 years, I was in California. But I grew up in Little Rock, dad was a telephone repairman, mom was a homemaker and took care of my grandfather who was an invalid from a stroke and spent the last seven years of his life in a hospital bed in our front bedroom. So mom was taking care of him, along with my grandmother and me and my little sister. Dad was on the road as a telephone lineman and then a repairman. So I didn’t expect much growing up. I dreamed of being my heroes, like being a cowboy movie star like Roy Rogers, which dates me – or somebody like Tarzan, or John Wayne, or whatever. So it was all movie stars or Elvis Presley. I thought that was pretty cool. I wanted to be like him. But I had no hope of doing that, because I couldn’t see the path. Then years later, when I was working in a government agency as a clerk for $500 a month – $525 – I was newly married, had a baby at home, no college degree, no money in the bank. 50 pounds overweight, two pack a day smoker, never been fit, and didn’t have a high IQ. And on the radio, I heard someone like you. I heard Earl Nightingale, the Dean of Personal Motivation, he was on 900 radio stations all over the world at that time in the 1970s. And he said, If you will spend one extra hour every day studying your chosen field, in five years or less, you’ll be a national expert, in seven years, an international expert. And I thought, well, an hour a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, five years, that’s 12,150 hours, one subject. This guy’s telling the truth, as long as that subject [is] narrow, if it’s a subject like medicine, too broad. If it’s something like ear, nose and throat, that’s fine. If it’s something like philosophy, a little too broad, but if you’re going to be teaching philosophy, that’s just fine. So whatever you focus on, if you can narrow that field more and more, and stay that path for five years, putting in an extra hour beyond the normal work day, every day, studying that, man, your advancement will be phenomenal. Well, I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I thought about it for weeks, and then it hit me. I want to do what he does. I want to help other people succeed. Problem. I had never succeeded. You cannot lift someone to a level you’re not on. So I didn’t know what to do. And then it occurred to me, he just told me, spend an hour extra every day studying this field of personal development and in five years, you’ll know enough. I figured I was starting from way behind so I overcompensated two, three hours a day, entire weekends, listening to recordings, reading all the classic self-help books of the day, which at that time was pretty limited. It was, Think and Grow Rich, Power  of Positive Thinking, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Psycho Cybernetics, As a Man Thinketh – the few things like that, but there weren’t all the books there are today. Today, there are millions, it seems. And so I focused on personal development without knowing a thing about it and became fanatically dedicated to learning about it. Within a year, I joined the Junior Chamber of Commerce, Jaycees. And I found out they had a group discussion program called Leadership in Action. It was all about goal setting and personal development and interpersonal communication and things like that. So I said, I want to help and they said, okay, here’s the manual, you lead the discussions, what is important about goal setting. Brian, I was that awkward at first but I led the discussions, it went well, and it kept getting better. I went to 400 Jaycee’s meetings after working on weekends in two years. For free, no income from it at all. In fact, I paid to go to some of them. But 400 meetings in two years, you will start knowing what you’re talking about because I was leading these discussions and going through these manuals and I had the manuals memorized after 30 or 40 sessions. And so I really knew how to do this and do it well. Then I started getting requests from businesses to come and give a speech or lead a discussion with their group. And then that led to more and more, and I bought a big expensive library of Earl Nightingale’s recordings, and listened to them fanatically every day. Then I started selling them in 1974. I was selling them door to door to businesses. I was selling a library of 48 audio recordings, on personal development to businesses, and no businesses were buying anything on personal development. So it was a struggle, but I did okay at it. Now, fast forward ten years, I had developed the skills and the knowledge I needed. I got into the field of training and development. At first I was teaching other people’s courses. And then I started developing my own. So ten years later, I’m in California, got my own business, have formed a partnership with a college professor, Dr. Tony Alessandra. And the phone rings and it’s a Earl Nightingale. I said, yes? He said, may I speak to Jim Cathcart? He knew my name and that’s the guy I’ve been listening to! That’s the guy whose tapes I used to sell. And he said, Mr. Cathcart, I read an article of yours that would make a good recorded program, audio program. Cassettes were what they used back in those days. And I said, well, sir, the article you’re referring to is an audio program we produced. He said, well, I produce those. I said, oh, believe me, I know. He said, send me yours and if I like it and you re-record it to our specs, then we will publish it. So I sent it to him and he published it. The title was “Relationship Strategies for Dealing with the Differences in People” it was on personality types, the first audio album ever widely published on that subject anywhere in the nation. And Nightingale Conant Corporation, in the first two years of selling that – so three and a half million dollars worth – Tony and I went from being obscure little consultants to being world famous. Our careers just took off. We were both doing about 120 speeches a year, which is 240 round trips. That’s amazing.

Brian  

That is amazing. And I definitely want to jump in that idea of relationship selling and talk about that book that really put you on the map in many respects and of course, led to you writing and publishing a number of other books. But I want to just delve into speaking. And I’m going to ask a question that you’ve answered a little bit, you’ve given one of the the nuggets or the secrets to your success. But I read, Jim, that there are roughly 3500 members of the National Speakers Association.

Jim  

Yes, give or take, depending on the year, it ebbs and flows between 2,500-4,000 typically.

Brian  

And so that’s 2,500 to 4,000 people who are either speaking full time or at least have the desire to do so. Now, at this stage in your career, you’ve obviously, and I read the bio, so everybody knows now, you’ve obviously achieved the pinnacle of success in your industry. And I’m curious, what is it that differentiates say, not just you, but let’s expand it a little bit, so the top ten percent in the speaking industry from the rest of the membership? So what qualities do they possess that others don’t? And what are you and the rest of the top ten percent doing on an ongoing basis to achieve that level of success in the speaking business? I know it’s way more than the the one hour per day (Jim:  Oh, yeah.) that got you started. But you’re doing a lot of things and the rest of the top ten percent are doing a lot of things that cause you to be in that top ten percent. I’d really love for you to share a little bit of insight around that.

Jim  

Well, a few years ago, I took on the job of being the chair of the audio magazine, I guess you could call it, for the Speaker’s Association, “Voices of Experience”. And it was an interview style audio that was produced every month. I had the opportunity, in one year, to interview – just like this interview, a direct interview – with 110 self-made millionaires. Well, that’s substantial. That’s quite a rare air. I chose all these people in advance because of their level of success. So these were the top 10 percenters and some of them top one percenters. I was asking them, how do you operate and what’s the thinking behind that? What’s your own philosophy toward life, toward business, towards yourself, towards your customers, towards your work, and I really did explore it. I found that there are certain qualities shared by those in the top, top, top of the industry and this may be true in other industries as well but I know it’s certainly true in speaking. The traits that stood out for me, number one, not a single one of them succeeded by accident. That’s universal. People don’t succeed by accident, nobody does. A few people have stumbled onto a winning lottery ticket in their field, and sort of became successful, because of whatever that was. But if they’re not the kind of person that belongs there, they can’t sustain it. And that’s the whole point, when I’m speaking, I tell people, don’t just be an arrow shooting at your target, become a magnet attracting what you want. Develop in yourself the qualities that will attract to you the lifestyle of friendships and relationships and the outcomes that you dream about. And that means develop solid character. Be a person who can be trusted by others, become a professional, be an honorable individual. Be, not just willing, but demand to be held accountable for what you do or what you neglect to do. Put yourself on the line. Never stop learning and learn from everybody, even the people at the lowest stations of life, because they know something you don’t yet. In that area, you can become more enlightened by listening to them and paying attention and honoring their input and then become that. And by the way, I’m still talking about the qualities I observed in those multi-millionaires. Become more intentional about every single thing you do. I teach a course called “Going Pro”, where I mentor people into developing their own careers as a subject expert and the five things that I focus on are: looking at everything they do, increase intentionality, increase accountability, increase their knowledge – and never stop increasing that – increase their discipline, and increase their honorability – in other words, be honorable in what you do. Be worthy of other people’s respect. Don’t just get people to admire you because you’re successful. Have people saying to themselves, I want the qualities he or she has, I want to be that kind of person, that’s someone I would trust my kids with, someone I would trust my passwords and bank accounts with, that’s a person of character. Jim, what I hear, some of what you’re talking about is mindset. And I know that you write and speak about the idea that to improve performance we must first change the way we think and I heard that in a lot of your response. Why is the – I call it the head stuff, what’s going on between our ears – why is mindset so critical? And what are some practical things that we can do to advance how we approach those areas of our life? Well, the single dominant factor in your life is the way you think. Because the way you think, leads to the way you act, the decisions you make, the choices you make, and the ways you feel. So everything grows from how you think. If you think the world is evil, and there is no creator and this is all you’ve got – this life, then your life is going to be a life of greed and selfishness, you’re going to be trying to get yours while you can and you’re not going to trust anybody. That’s all mindset. It could have had totally different behaviors but those are the patterns that grow out of that sick and sad mindset. If your mindset is what Carol Dweck called a “fixed mindset”, versus a “growth mindset” – what others have called a “scarcity mindset” – if you believe there’s a limited amount available, and everything is pretty much fixed and you’ve got to get it while the getting’s good, then that leads to one pattern of behavior. If you believe, on the other hand, that even Earth is alive, not just people and animals, but the entire planet is a living system – and if it’s a living system that means it’s constantly growing and evolving. It’s sloughing off unproductive parts or old parts and growing new ones, and changing and morphing into something better, constantly. Well, if that’s the case physically, isn’t that the case economically? Isn’t that the case interpersonally? Isn’t that the case spiritually? If we say that the universe is ever expanding, humans don’t know how to think about that, because everything we think about has limits. We say the universe is ever expanding, expanding out to what? Where’s the edge? We don’t know how to think without an edge. So we put edges around ourself, and the trouble is, the mindset brings those edges in way too far. People live, little tiny versions of the life they could live if they had cultivated a much greater, more enlightened mindset. I recognize that my mindset was very limited, that I didn’t expect much of myself, because others didn’t expect much of me when I was growing up. Mom and Dad basically taught me to be a good person, do your duty, do your chores do what a good person would do and then get out of the way because other people need that seat. So I figured I’d live a decent life, be a nice guy, retire at 65 and die at whatever statistical age my gene pool was scheduled for. That was it. Then I started getting exposed to ideas like Earl Nightingale had presented and I thought, well, if I’m going to embrace ideas this big, I’ve got to recondition my mind. So I listened to those recordings – they’re back here on my shelf, even to this day – I listened to those recordings, one hour, two hours, four hours a day, for five solid years, listening to inspiring recordings, talking about fundamental truths about life, and about how to succeed in any type of dealing. And it just constantly led me to better and better ideas, which lead to better and better behaviors. I talk about a causation chain and I show a staircase, at the base of the staircase is mindset and the next step up from that is actions. Because your mindset leads to the choices you make, which manifests as the actions you take. Well, the actions you take repeated over time become the habits you’ve acquired. Do the same thing again and again and again, sooner or later you don’t have to think about it. It just is your automatic tendency, it becomes your default mode. So the habits are the outgrowth of the actions that came from the mindset. Well, the rest of the world doesn’t know you until they observe you. So they see oh, look, there’s Brian, well, I wonder what Brian’s like, so they watch Brian. Well, what they see is a pattern of Brian’s actions – the way he talks, the places he goes, people he associates with, the things he thinks about and talks about, and so forth. In other words, your habits are your reputation, once observed by other people. So how do you build a good reputation? Good actions, which form into good habits, then the other people see that, and that’s the reputation you not only own, but deserve. Your reputation, tells the world whether it’s good to spend time with you or would be better to avoid you. So good reputation, doors open, bad reputation doors shut, and your relationships grow straight out of your reputation. So if you’ve got relationships with the kind of people that can open the right kind of doors for you, wow. Then your future has just exploded into a whole new realm, that wouldn’t have been possible with a fixed mindset where you were worried about who else was getting something before you did.

Brian  

You had the opportunity to interview 110 people, I think you said 110, very high achievers. And I know your purpose, Jim, is to help people live a more abundant life. I’m just curious. You’ve been around a while, you’ve been exposed to personal development for over 40 years. Why aren’t more people exposed to this?

Jim  

Well, I think everybody is exposed to it now. It’s like when I started as a speaker, professional speaker, I used to tell people…they’d say, what do you do? And I’d say I’m a professional speaker. They’d say, what’s that – people just pay you to speak? And I said, yeah, just to hear my voice. And they said, really? [Chuckle]. I said, no, they pay me to bring them a message that is worth paying to hear. Oh, well what do you talk about? Well, I could tell you, but then I’d have to bill you. [Chuckle]. And so I’d do that as just a little playful thing and then I’d explain to them that my field is applied behavioral science. I, personally live an abundant life in every way that I can, and I teach others how to make their lives more abundant. Because the more fully you live, the more gifts you give to the world, the more you help, and that make things better for other people, as well as for yourself. So back then, back in the 1970s, and 80s, very few people had even heard about these ideas, and motivation was brand new. Oh, you’re a motivator? Wow. I’ve heard about you kind of people. Tell me about that. Well, today, it’s common knowledge. You say, what do you do for a living? Professional speaker. Ha, yeah, like what, like Tony Robbins? Yeah, as a matter of fact, I did the firewalk with him. I had lunch with him a couple of years after and I’ve seen him and chatted with him at various events. Oh, you actually met Tony Robbins? Yeah. When I went full time as a professional speaker, he was 12 years old. Oh, so you really are a professional speaker? Yes, as a matter of fact, and then all of a sudden they start paying attention. Why are more people not interested in that? Because you’ve had Zig Ziglar and W. Clement Stone and Augmon Dino and Napoleon Hill and on and on, all the big names over all these years, it’s out there. Why don’t people do it? Because it feels like work at first. Because their mindset that they’ve embraced is a limited mindset. And when they see something like that, and they say, well, yeah, he could do it, but not me. Now look for a moment at my example. I didn’t score high on IQ tests. I hadn’t been an athlete. I was overweight and out of shape. I didn’t have a college degree. I came from working class parents. I had never been encouraged to dream big dreams and think about a big life that made a difference. I thought my life would be ordinary and that I would do my part as a drone in the beehive and I would die when the appointed time came. That’s all I expected until Earl Nightingale’s recordings cracked the egg open and showed me what was inside. And I started realizing, wow, if I really were disciplined about studying one field, I could master that field – me – I could become really, really knowledgeable about one particular field. Hmm…[I] wonder what I would like to become knowledgeable about? [I] didn’t know. Then [I] discovered that what he was doing was what fascinated me the most. So I said, Okay, five years, or maybe seven or ten or 15, however long it takes from now, I will become one of the leading experts in the field of personal development. And 22 books later – with two more books; one already written, the other 95% done, just needs a foreword and a few other things to put it to bed – I’m soon going to have 24 books, plus many books translated around the world into various languages, a lot of them in Mandarin, and some in Polish, and Romanian and German and Spanish and on and on and on. Gosh, look at the number of lives I’ve been able to touch coming from the background I came from. But had I not had the inspiration available through books and recordings and articles and podcasts and things [that] are available to people today, if I hadn’t had that information available, and forced myself to listen to it, pay attention to it, and think about it, then my life would have ended up being what I expected back then.

Brian  

So part of it was exposure, and as you explained, you were exposed to Earl Nightingale. Sometimes people come into contact personally with people and that changes their lives, other times they read a book, or maybe they attend a seminar or workshop, or now there’s a lot online that people can be exposed to…[cross talk]

Jim  

Or there’s a guest speaker at a convention. I’ve done 3,300 of those. So most of the people I’ve reached, not through my books and recordings, but through live in-person address to anywhere from a dozen to thousands and thousands of people at a time.

Brian  

And so for you, that was the starting point and for a lot of people it was the starting point. But a lot of people, as you know, are exposed to those books or they meet those people or they attend those events and they still don’t make the decision, like you did, to take that and to utilize it to improve your life.

Jim  

I think that’s because of self-doubt.

Brian  

Share more about that if you would.

Jim  

Whenever I talk to an audience, at the end I stick around and I either sign autographs or take selfies with people or whatever in order to provide a forum for them to connect… (Brian: Do you take the selfies or do they?) They do, or I posed for pictures with a photographer that’s on site. Like in China after one of my speeches to about 3,000 people – I’d spoken for six hours through an interpreter who was standing at my side, six hours in front of 3,000 people – and at the end, I found that they had sold the privilege of having a private photograph made with Jim. Well, they didn’t tell me this beforehand. They surprised me with it at the end. They said okay, we’re going to go to dinner and you’re done now except we have a few people who want to have their picture taken with you. And I said well, okay, and so I was about to take my jacket off and get ready to get in the car and go to dinner. And they said oh, no, no, no, no, you’ve got to keep the jacket on and pose for these pictures, these people paid for the privilege and I said okay, expecting a dozen. 700 people. (Brian:  Oh my goodness.) 700 – they were herding them through like cattle. Okay, okay, you sit, look at camera. Okay, smile. Okay, next. Okay, no, get up, get up move. I was trying to be polite to these people and they’re treating them like animals. But I did that, 700 photos. Well, the point of all this, making myself available – not in that sense, but in the voluntary sense – is, I want the questions and comments that people give. People come to me privately and they say, Jim, I love what you’re saying, and it’s so encouraging and I’d love to do that but I couldn’t do it. And I say, really, why is that? And invariably, the reasons they give me are never solid reasons. They’re just self-doubt. They just have not been able yet to push themselves into that photograph, and see themselves growing and improving and becoming successful. So I asked them very, very fundamental questions. Could you do this? Yeah. Well, if you could do that, could you also do this? Yeah. Well, those are the first two steps. Oh, oh. It’s like, Jim, I can’t do push-ups, you do push-ups every day. I can’t do push-ups. Really? I say, would you do something for me? I say, I’m going to give you an easy way to do a push-up. I can’t do push-ups. I know. Would you just lay down on your face on the floor, put your arms at your sides? Well, Jim I can’t…I know, just do that. And so they do that. And I say okay, thanks. And they say what do I do now? I say, doesn’t matter. What do you mean, doesn’t matter? No matter what they do, they have to do a push-up to get up. [Chuckle]. So they’re either going to do one where they roll on their side or something, but they’re going to do a push-up. So okay, now you’ve done one, if you did that twice a day, that’s 100% improvement, that’s two. So you can do push-ups, you just haven’t done many yet. When I started, I could do maybe 18. And then I got to where I could do 100. And I would stop at about 80-85 and go back on my knees and catch my breath and then do the other 15 or 20. And I did – for five consecutive years ending at the end of 2021, five consecutive years – never missed a day doing 100 push-ups every day. Well technically I did, one one week I was ill and so I skipped three days, but as soon as I started recovering, I doubled up on the push-ups to do the requisite number to check that box.

Brian  

It’s amazing the things that we’re capable of, and this goes back to mindset and it also goes back to just the decision that people don’t want to work at all to do it. I mean, there is…

Jim  

And also they pick up on their parents and friends and teachers and other other people around them. They pick up on the observations those people made long ago, which are long since obsolete – Jimmy’s not very good at math, or Janie’s not an athletic type, or Bob really finds it awkward to deal with other people, and so and so has kind of an emotional sensitivity so you’ve got to be careful. We hear that kind of stuff from other people and we accept it as truth. Well, says who? What do they know? What made them so knowledgeable that they could limit the rest of our life with a brand like that and not have us revise the news about it? If someone says I’ve got COVID, okay, then let’s treat the COVID and recover. Not say, oh, I’m sorry, I can no longer do anything. I’m doomed forever to be a person with COVID. No, it’s a disease. It’s a condition. It passes. I know because I’ve had it. The same thing is true for weakness in your muscles or from a lack of flexibility in your movement or for any number of other things. There are work-arounds. I mean, if you ever want to be encouraged, watch the Paralympics. Look at the people without arms or legs, the people with severe difficulties. Look at the amazing things they do physically. Go to the Special Olympics. I had the honor, the phenomenal honor, of being the keynote speaker for the USA Special Olympics in the year 2010. It was in Lincoln, Nebraska. There were 13,800 people in the audience and about 3,600 special athletes. I was there as the keynote speaker among all these world famous celebrities and political leaders and public figures and all that, and all these Olympians who were coming to support the Special Olympics athletes. Those folks, they’re dealing with serious impediments going into that competition, and yet they sustain a happy spirit. They give it their all, and they’re not worried so much about the score they get from somebody else who doesn’t understand their situation. I’m really glad you talked about that because it really illustrates the limiting beliefs that we tell ourselves, I mean, we’re all telling ourselves stories every day. Some of those stories are small stories that are, maybe, inconsequential. You were talking earlier about some of the stories that we’ve been carrying around for years that maybe our parents told us, or our grandparents told us, or that we heard from teachers or other students or just people around us, and how that becomes our belief system, that becomes our reality. And it doesn’t have to. When you see athletes like in the Paralympics or in Special Olympics or you read stories about these amazing physical endeavors, amazing mental endeavors, it really helps to put it in perspective, what’s possible, and it also…

Brian  

Not just in the physical world, it’s also in the intellectual world and in the business world, and interpersonal dealings. There’s just all sorts of manifestations of that. Absolutely. I’d like to talk about a couple of your books, Jim, I think it would take us probably a week to fully discuss all your books, including the one that’s written but not published, and the one that you’re working on that isn’t yet published. But I’d like to touch on a couple of them in the short time that we have today. One of your early bestsellers – you mentioned it, the work that you did with Tony Alessandra in the area of relationships, but the book “Relationship Selling: The Eight Competencies of Top Sales Producers”, Jim, in that book, you wrote that relationships must be treated as assets. I know you wrote that in the context of selling, but tell us why relationships are so important, both professionally and personally. What are a couple of things that we can do to build great relationships, if we’re talking about business with our customers or clients, like you wrote about in the book? Also, though, in our personal lives in our own sphere of influence, if we’re talking about personal relationships?

Jim  

Certainly, well, let’s first define a relationship. People say, well, it’s…and they guess. In other words, there’s not a universal definition of relationship that all people just roll right off their tongues. They say, well, you know, it’s people, it’s a connection, it’s someone you’re friends with, it’s somebody that trusts you. Fine. Those are all useful responses, but let’s just come up with a definition we can agree on. A relationship is a direct connection between people, because you can’t have a relationship with a thing. You can be, in a physical sense, related to something but it’s not a relationship in this context. It’s a direct connection between people in which value is exchanged. Well, the question comes up; what is value? Well, value is whatever the recipient deems to be valuable. So in other words, I could have a beautiful diamond that’s worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and I give it to you. If you don’t care about diamonds or care about tangible wealth, then I conveyed what I thought was value, but you didn’t perceive that you received value. So value is always and only determined by the receiver of the value. You might find that my undivided attention for five minutes is worth more than $1,500 of cash. Great, I’ll save myself a little cash and I’ll focus on you, for heaven sakes. But still, whatever you value, that’s the thing you’re looking for from other people and those who help you get it are the ones you want to stay connected with. So, a relationship is a direct connection in which value is exchanged. So how do you form a relationship? Make a direct connection with another person. You pull up to a toll booth, you look up at the person in the booth, and they say $5 and you give them $5 and you leave. Is that a relationship? Well, it could ultimately be, but it was just a transaction because transaction is the earliest form of relationship. I guess maybe an earlier form would be acknowledgement – I see you, you see me, next – no relationship, but we saw [that] each other exists. Then we have a transaction and that’s another level, that’s where we’re actually engaged with each other. But next time you go to that same toll booth, you say, good afternoon, and the person smiles back at you. Now it’s progressing along a little continuum toward a friendship or more of a robust relationship. Then you pull up one day and it’s going kind of slow, there’s no traffic behind you. And you say, hey, you know, I’ve seen you here every day, what’s your name, my name is Jim. And now then you know each other’s name. And next time you pull up, it’s, Brian, good to see you again. How’s your day, great, thanks. And you go on your way. Well, that may never become anything. But then again, you could run into Brian at a grocery store, strike up a conversation, find you have something in common, end up doing business together. And who knows, a year or two down the road, become partners in some kind of adventure and build a lifelong friendship. So relationships start with just proximity, and grow all the way through bonded commitment to each other. And there are stages along that continuum that can be used as milestones. You know how to offer value in the early stages, in the greater stages make it more and more and more value in different forms, more customized, as the relationship evolves. That’s the same way you grow a business. Let people know you exist, connect with them somehow, offer some form of value that makes them want to stay connected for a little while, make it so valuable that they want to stay connected indefinitely, and then grow them into the best client you ever had. Now, if you look at your life, reflecting back over your life – you know, when I ask you, where’d you grow up? What was it like? Where’d you go to school? What was it like? Where’d you work? What was it like? Have you been married? What’s that like, and so forth. In every case, you will reflect upon relationships. And the people we are connected with at those stages of our life determine the quality of our life experience at that particular point in time. So if you want a more abundant life, be a little bit more discerning in who you reach out to connect with and who you just accept by default into your circle. Because some people are not good for you. Some people bring clouds and sadness everywhere they go. It would be best if we would diminish the amount of time we spend with those folks. We don’t have to cut them off entirely but we certainly don’t have to invite them over for dinner. If you’re in a situation where you’re connected with some people like that all the time, just change the percentage of your time that is spent directly with them because I understand [that] we don’t have complete control over who we’re going to see, and when and how we’re going to see them. But we can certainly control what the nature of that involvement is for the time we’re there.

Brian  

Oh, that’s great. That’s really terrific. I talk a lot and write about the concept of surrounding yourself with success and it’s really the same thing. Surrounding yourself with success, to me, can include environment, it can include some external things, but primarily, it’s about the relationships in your life. And like I say, you want to evaluate the quality of those relationships. First of all, you assess who you’re spending your time with, (Jim:  Exactly.) who are the people in my life? And then the second part of it is, what effect are they having on me? So I’m hanging out with this guy named Jim and he’s a speaker, and what effect is he having on me through our dialogue…

Jim  

Is he good for me and helping me grow or is he limiting me? I do an exercise similar to that with my clients and my protegees. I lead them through a process that I call their “inner circle”, where they identify who’s in it, who’s in the inner circle, who’s in their outer circle, and which ones are there by choice and which ones are there by default, or you just picked them up along the way, accumulated people. And then I look at the quality of each relationship, because a relationship, to thrive, has to have three essentials:  both parties are committed to making it successful, you can’t do it from one side only. You can have it change power from time to time – more coming from this one, more coming from that one – but you cannot have only one person committed to it otherwise you’re just stalking or they’re stalking. It’s a dysfunctional relationship. Commitment, number one. Number two, open communication, meaning the truth – good or bad – flows freely between the two of you, that you don’t feel you’re being judged or put down or manipulated by the other person. You can tell them the truth and they can tell you the truth. And the third essential is clear agreements, understanding what you can expect from them and what they expect from you. Agreeing to that, so that you know what expectations are reasonable. So it’s commitment, communication, and clear agreements. And when you look at your inner circle and you do that little evaluation, you immediately discover where your homework is. Your homework will either be repairing or building a relationship, or eliminating or diminishing your relationship. And that makes you much, much more intentional, much more strategic, and much more effective in getting around yourself the kind of people that feed and nurture your nature. You say, surround yourself with success, well what if you don’t have any success to bring to the party? Then be very humble and very grateful and very willing to be helpful to the other people and earn your place. That’s what I did when I first got into speaking. I was the junior in all the gatherings of people. I was around all my heroes, all these big deal stars with books and they were famous, that kind of thing. So I just said, how can I help? I was a willing helper and I was humble. I expressed my gratitude but I didn’t grovel and say, oh my God, oh, you’re so great, oh, I appreciate that. No, I was cool about it but I was absolutely sincere about it at the same time.

Brian  

That’s terrific. There’s one more concept that I wanted to ask you about in the sales area. Like relationships, this is something that you wrote about in relationship to becoming an excellent salesperson but in fact, it’s something that can be expanded. I’d like to expand it because, obviously, our audience isn’t comprised of just sales people. You wrote that to become an excellent salesperson you must go the extra mile and not just act as though you’re going through the motions of your job. Tell us about that concept, if you would. And, again, if you don’t mind, expand it beyond selling, because the extra mile concept really applies to every occupation, and really to life in general. 

Jim  

That’s easy to combine. Think like an employer for a minute. You want to assemble a team of people to grow a business that you own. What kind of people do you want? “Eight hour people”, or “whatever it takes people”? Well, “whatever it takes people”, that costs too much. Okay, get them in their early stages. Find people who are eager to succeed, eager to do something useful, not just greedy, wanting things, but eager to be a person worthy of respect and admiration, to be a person that others would say I want him or her as my good friend. I want that person in my life. I had the honor of having a man say to me once, I want you to be my son’s godfather. I said, well we live in different cities and we don’t see each other that often and I don’t know how effective I could be in fulfilling that role. He said, you don’t have to do anything, I just want your influence in his life. Wow, talk about a compliment. I mean, that goes straight to the soul. I want your influence in my child’s life. Man, when we set that as our target of what kind of person we want to become, then that takes on a whole different meaning. So when I look at people going the extra mile, the concept of that is – by the way, let me give you Tony Alessandra’s twist on that. Tony said, my mother – Tony’s mother – taught him, don’t worry about going the extra mile, just always go the extra inch. Well, that makes it do-able, right? So if you think about someone agrees to do something with you, and you’ve got your duties and they’ve got their expectations, do you fulfill the expectations? Or do you exceed the expectation somewhat? The other day, I hired a handyman to come here to repair a tube that connects our air conditioning unit from the outside of our house, to the house itself. There was a crack in it. He arranged to come by and I had him level the dryer in our laundry room, because it was off level, while he was here. So I was on a Zoom call and he did the things he needed to do outside and he got that all fixed. We had left the garage door open so he could get in and out of the house easily, and he got to the laundry room and he balanced the dryer. Then he noticed that a railing on a staircase was a little loose and so he repaired it. Then there were a few minutes before I was through with the Zoom call where I could go and talk to him and pay him, so he swept the leaves out of our garage. Well, hello, thank you! And I said, how much do I owe you? He said, oh, it was a simple job, 50 bucks. I paid him 75. Well, he didn’t ask for it. I didn’t have a reason to give it to [him], I wasn’t trying to win his approval, I just felt like he was worth more in that instance. He was giving me more than I was paying for so I was willing to pay more on the spot. I was getting the value. That’s the attitude, what else could I do while I’m here, that wouldn’t take much from me but would be valued by them. Maybe it’s just, you deliver something, wel,l make sure the package is clean and neat so it looks nicer when they receive it. You throw a newspaper – you got a paper route like I used to, when you throw a newspaper to someone’s house – well throw it to the porch, not the front yard. Or if you’re walking your paper route, put it behind the screen door if the screen door’s unlocked. Do whatever is appropriate under the circumstances, but don’t only do what’s expected. I had friends who had paper routes and they would just throw the papers in the yards and let it go with that. And of course, they never got tips but I did. I’d go to collect at the end of the month and get paid for the newspapers and the people would say, here is a little something extra, thank you for putting it on the porch all the time. Great. So that’s the extra mile concept.

Brian  

That’s a concept that I wish were more universal. My my suspicion and my experience, unfortunately, is that things are sort of swinging in the other direction where when you go to out to a restaurant today or the newspaper example that you were giving, not only are people not going the extra mile, but it seems like they’re just really hard pressed to even do what’s asked of them.

Jim  

They don’t even complete the first mile in a lot of cases. But I’ll tell you this, the remedy to that is where you have found it. I know personally, you have found the remedy, and where I found it, luckily early on, and that is in our home. We teach it through the way we live our lives, and we teach it to our kids and it shows up in the way they live theirs. In the Bible, there’s a passage that says, by their fruits, you shall know them. I don’t know what that specific passage is and it may not even be biblical, but it sounds biblical. So by the fruits of the tree, you shall know what kind of tree it is. By the results, the behaviors of their children, their families, you will know what kind of people and what kind of family they are. So that’s why we should be so concerned about character and about discipline and about intentionality and being honorable and seeking to become the kind of person other people want in their world. Because there’s no greater honor or deeper satisfaction than that.

Brian  

It’s very true. And you’ve actually segued in, I want to ask you about one more thing if I can, Jim. You were talking about fruits and talking about trees. You and I have had the opportunity to get to know each other and from my standpoint, it’s been terrific. (Jim:  Thank you), I enjoyed the relationship that we’ve created. One thing that we’ve talked about a little bit, and I know this is near and dear to your heart, it’s the title of one of your books and it’s a subject that you talk about extensively and it’s the  “acorn principle”. If you would, for our listeners and viewers, Jim, share the meaning of this concept and also explain how the acorn relates to unlocking our greatest potential.

Jim  

You bet. Well, I’ve got a prop. [Holds up an acorn]. The woman who used to work with me for about five or six years, Carolyn Brown, gave me this acorn. Isn’t that a beauty? It’s wooden. And if you notice, an acorn, which is the seed of an oak tree, which is also the universal symbol of potential – tall oaks from tiny acorns grow – an acorn has three parts:  a stem that connects it to the tree, the cap that holds onto the seed until it’s ready to grow on its own, and then a seed that holds the potential of the tree it will become or could become, and all the future acorns by the hundreds of thousands that would come from that tree, and the other trees that grow from that. So you could start a forest that would cover the entire Earth with one acorn. That’s the potential that actually lives within one simple acorn. But the trouble with acorns is they are dependent on the environment, they don’t have the capacity for self-determination. You and I do. This is like past, present, future. The stem represents the connection between you and me, and all the people in our genetic line that ever existed throughout time – good, bad, and ugly. All of that is in the DNA that’s in you or me. The cap represents – it protects the seed. That’s our coaches, our teachers, our parents, our mentors, our heroes, our role models, the people who have watched over us and influenced us. And the seed represents the potential that still lives within you or within me. Now, we can, if we don’t like the circumstances we were planted in, we can choose new circumstances. We can move from here to there, we can branch out better than a tree can branch out. If we choose to stay with the circumstances we have, we can shape those circumstances to be friendlier to us. We can build a shelter from the rain, we can meet the neighbors and connect with them and build friendships, we can find the resources in our area and make things better for ourselves. So we can also take certain factors in our environment that may be unfriendly to us and develop ways to adapt to those so they’re not as harmful or as threatening. If you were wearing out the elbows of your sweater years ago, what you would do is put a leather suede patch on the elbows of your sweater. That’s how that came about. And then it became a fashion thing and they sold brand new sweaters with leather patches on the elbows. So you can either adapt or shape or select a new environment. And that comes from the work of Robert Sternberg. Robert Sternberg is a researcher from Yale, who wrote a book called “The Triarchic Mind”, triarchy meaning three, and that was:  adapt, shape, select, and he illustrated how the mind functions like that. So there is potential within you to do certain things really well and other things not nearly as well. Because just like a seed, we are suited to certain things and not nearly as suited to other things. Someone like a Michael Phelps or Mark Spitz is genetically suited to swimming, but without the discipline and the mindset they would never have become Olympic gold medalists. Someone like LeBron James is physically suited to basketball, but without the mindset and the discipline would never have become a world famous, legendary, basketball player. Tom Brady for football. Choose other things of a non-physical nature, everyone’s suited to certain things and they find other things more difficult. Okay, so what do you do? Well, spend a lot of time getting better at what you’re natural suited for, and find good resources to help you with the things you’re not particularly suited for. My grandson is really good at mathematics. He teaches at Mathnasium. So he’s a mathematics coach, while he’s going to college, and he’s also a good athlete, and he’s good with music and you think, gee, he could do anything. Well, I’m sure there are things he doesn’t do very well. But he can find the tools, the software, the apps, the resources, the friends, the helpers, the specialists to outsource to on those other things. So he becomes really good at lots of things, but not just from his basic nature. Same is true for you and me.

Brian  

That’s terrific. Jim, thank you so much for being on the show today. It’s great to talk to you as always, and I appreciate everything you’ve shared today.

Jim  

It’s a joy, my friend. Thank you, Brian. Take care.

Brian  

Thank you again. Thanks for tuning into Life Excellence. Please support the show by subscribing, telling your friends about the show, posting about it on social media, and leaving a rating and review. You can also learn more about me at BrianBartes.com. Until next time, dream big dreams and make each day your masterpiece.