Creating the Life and Family You Want

Happy New Year! Have you ever wondered what truly fuels company growth and personal leadership? In this special holiday episode, we bring to light how our internal monthly new hire meetings are more than just introductions to our team and values; they're incubators for personal development and leadership. We discuss the significance of aiming to give more than we receive, especially during the holiday season. Our conversation will leave you considering how your aspirations for others can shape the culture within your own circles, families, and communities - making a lasting impact on the people around you.

Amidst the festive cheer, we take a moment to underscore the importance of appreciation in business just as much as in family life. It's the little things—remembering a client's birthday, acknowledging their value—that can loop back and create an environment of mutual care. We share stories of success that highlight this ripple effect, offering insights into creating a space that allows for free expression and aligns with the virtues that we stand for. Through these anecdotes, you'll grasp the tangible influence of our everyday actions and how they contribute to the larger narrative of our clients' and colleagues' lives.

Lastly, we explore the relentless pursuit of excellence and the journey of continuous personal and professional betterment. Our conversation turns to the 'peaks and pits' concept, shedding light on the power of reflection in our daily experiences and the essential role we play in the lives of others. As we close the episode, we extend an invitation to join us in savoring each moment and making the most of every single day. Let's carry the spirit of the holidays into this New Year and wish each other a heartfelt season filled with happiness and togetherness.

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Looking for additional content that can help you get the most from your life? Check out Unleashing Leadership with Travis Maus, premium bonus content from Ditch the Suits Fans, at https://unleashingleadership.buzzsprout.com/

Thanks to our sponsor, S.E.E.D. Planning Group! S.E.E.D. is a fee-only financial planning firm with a fiduciary obligation to put your best interest first. Schedule your free discovery meeting at www.seedpg.com

Ditch the Suits is produced by NQR Media. NQR also produces the One Big Thing Podcast with Steve Campbell.

You can watch all episodes, as well as other great content produced by NQR Media through their YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/@NQRMedia

📧 For more information or to get in touch with us, visit https://www.ditchthesuits.com/ or email us at info@ditchthesuits.com

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

Welcome to Ditch the Suites, a movement, awakening and opportunity for you to start getting more from your money in life. I'm Steve Campbell. With my amazing co-host, Travis Moss. We're going to share industry insights nobody wants you to know about, so buckle up and enjoy the episode. It's the holiday season, Folks. Welcome back to Ditch the Suites. Steve Campbell here with Travis Moss.

Speaker 1: 0:30

Hey, thanks for giving us some space in the last episode to talk about some of the incredible things that have taken place in 2023 with Ditch the Suites, walking through all those series and some of the accolades. Travis and I. We know it's a holiday week. We know that people are gathering with family, maybe even doing their own, self-reflecting on things that have happened. To give you just a positive, special holiday message from us to you. Really, around the context of things that have happened to us that have been very cool in the workplace conversations we've had that again can inspire you to maybe do the same thing with your loved ones, colleagues and people you love. Travis, why don't you give people the framework as to where this conversation today came from?

Speaker 2: 1:10

We have a meeting every month with everybody new from the company and it gives them a chance to talk to me and our operations manager and ask us just what's going on with the business. I saw this or I experienced this, or I don't know what that acronym means, or whatever's going on with them.

Speaker 2: 1:27

That's also where we do book reports and we do a lot of hands-on learning. We try to shape the perspective of where they're going and why they're with us and we really just try to build a solid foundation under them. There's a lot of communications, a lot of leadership building. It's a lot of find your voice, that type of stuff. We always tie in something about teamwork or collaboration or communication, those types of things that we think are very important qualities to have and perspectives to have.

Speaker 2: 2:01

It's the holiday season and I'm thinking, okay, we should. It's the season of giving and it's not about you, it's not about what you're getting, it's about what you're giving. I wanted to know from each of our new hires. Basically, I asked them two questions. I asked them what is one thing that you would like to see happen for a client? And one is one thing that you would like to see happen for your colleagues.

Speaker 2: 2:24

If you're listening to this, I think that this is awesome, because you could take clients out. You could say siblings, you could say family members, you could say a member of your congregation, you could say community members, you could say friends, you could put whatever word in there that you want to put in there. You could say your business. You could sit around Christmas dinner, steve, with your kids, and you could take this idea and say to each of your kids what is one thing you'd like to see happen for one of your friends this year? And then you ask them and the follow up question is what is one thing that you could do for one of your friends? You know, which is really, really powerful? And so these are some of the answers. And so, what is one thing that you would like to see happen for clients? And I've got a list. I know you weren't on the meeting, steve, but we can go down through the list together.

Speaker 1: 3:23

Before you even jump into this list. But I want to give you a little bit of credit. You know, almost a decade ago when we first met each other, you had this crazy vision for reshaping what it means to work with a financial professional. You had started seed planning group and it was a concept that you wanted to get off the ground because you believe that you know clients should have a different relationship with whoever's helping them make decisions when it comes to their money, and you've been at the forefront of that. We had mentioned in our last episode that what good is it in that Economist episode series that we did if you hear from somebody who's supposed to be an expert but doesn't actually do what they say?

Speaker 1: 4:00

I know that we have really worked very hard to not just say things that you know, you read in books, but like, how do we actually begin to implement this?

Speaker 1: 4:08

So I want to give you a lot of credit and honor because you don't just on unleashing leadership, your podcast talk about how to be the best leader and how to get the most out of people, and it's just this ethereal idea that you try to motivate someone you've never met.

Speaker 1: 4:21

You actually take those principles that you read about and try to figure out.

Speaker 1: 4:25

When it comes to a business that you help run, how can you apply these principles with new people that are giving us a chance to really make a tremendous impact on them, and what are the experiences that they bring to the table that we need to somehow extrapolate? So I think that these answers are incredible, mostly because you gave people a space to really share what's important to them and kind of this framework of how might we and what could they look like. So, as you go through these answers, I just want to tell you that, as somebody that's been a part of this with you, if you've never listened to unleashing leadership it's not just Travis you know doing what a lot of leaders do, saying what you should do. You actually do this every single day. So what you're about to read really comes from the fruit of creating space for your staff members to explain what really means the most to them. So why don't you tackle maybe some of these first few responses that you heard on what's one thing you'd like to see happen for clients?

Speaker 2: 5:18

Yeah, and some of these folks in this meeting are, when we did this, were literally it was their first meeting. They were literally within their first month. So this is completely raw and they didn't have any time to prep. It was impromptu during the meeting. Hey, what is one thing that you would like to see happen for clients? And we would like to see clients feel that their time is valued and that they get something from every interaction. And I love this stuff, because if you were to call us or work with anybody at C, this is the internal heartbeat, this is literally the collective consciousness, right, so we can always work on executing it better, but this is the intention and this is the raw intention, and I love that.

Speaker 2: 6:08

They did not know, in fact, that when we did it, I didn't know what I was going to do with this. I was just so touched by it. I wanted to share. We want our clients to feel understood and not overwhelmed. We want our clients to feel appreciated and that their time is valued and properly responded to and that they know that they are important. We want our clients to receive acknowledgments, like birthday cards, so that they may feel remembered and appreciated. And this is where I'll say like you could change the word clients here, right, I want my family members to feel like their time is valued and that they get something from every interaction with me.

Speaker 2: 6:49

Whoever you love, whatever's important to you, whatever you're struggling with, you can play this game. You can do this, you know, and it's very powerful if you do it from a grip, and the reason why it's one thing that you would like to see happen for clients is think about it like this If everybody is trying to take care of somebody else, that means somebody's trying to take care of you too, probably more than one person. You can take care of yourself. That's one person taking care of one person. Or if you try to help all these other people and everybody else is interested in the same way, that seems like it's going to come back around to you. I think that that's just so powerful.

Speaker 1: 7:27

Well, I think what's neat about you posing these questions to? You know, it's one thing if we get a bunch of new people that give us a chance, come here and you, as the CEO, sit down and you say, you know, this is what we do for our clients and you list off all of these items and they just have to sit there and go. Okay, yeah, that's great, let's do that for our clients. But you gave them permission. You know, I'm a dad to four kids. I can tell my kids how I want them to act, or I can ask them questions in a way to find out, like, what's inside of them. You know, what are they thinking about. You know, when I asked them like, hey, what's one way that we can spend more time together as a family, and they give me an answer I think, very similar to what we saw with some of our colleagues.

Speaker 1: 8:07

You hear things that, not that you didn't expect it, but it just makes you feel so good that somebody actually said this without being prompted to realize, man, we got some really great people here that if this is their answer, without being, you know, force-fed, there's a lot that you can do with it, and I think that's something that you did to. You did this with our staff, but doing these kind of things over the past year with my family has really opened up dialogues in a way, because you never know what's important to somebody else unless you ask them. And if you tell them this is important to us as a family, then they're just more order takers. But when you give people the space to say like, hey, what would success look like to you, or what would it be like if our family gave more next year? What are some things we can do? I think when you give permission of people like that, it is very, very cool Because the answer is that, you know, may not have been expected.

Speaker 2: 8:57

Well, you're owning the why. You know. If I were to ask you why do you do these things, you say why do these things? Because I believe they're important, not because I do these things because Travis told me I have to do these things. The way that you go about doing something because you believe in it is very different than the way you go about doing something that you feel like I have to do it or I'm going to lose something. Somebody's going to take something away from me, right, which is a typical employer-employer relationship. What you really want to see happen and what is happening in this scenario, is that the team member is making the contract. They're drafting the contract. I'm not drafting the contract. They're saying to me Travis, my standards. I believe, when I look across how every client is treated, I believe that clients need to feel like they are engaged, because we're actively listening and we're meeting with them where they are, and that they are being understood. Those are my standards and I'm going to hold everybody around me to those standards.

Speaker 2: 10:00

Our job, as the people who kind of shepherd all of this, is to make sure we're just hiring on virtues, to make sure that we bring in people that truly feel like this. It's hard for people to fake these type of intentions because it's very easy. They're roomful of people trying to help others to pick out the person who's mooching off of everybody right To say, okay, that person is not living the virtues, that person is doing lip service. It's very easy to point them out because it just shines out. We want our clients to share. Well, this was about clients, but it was about internally. One of the requests was, or one of the things that this group of doing and again, some of them haven't been here long enough to know what we're doing to do but one of their requests was we want to be able to share client success stories internally to ground us and remind us why we are doing it and what we are doing, because we've done some amazing things with clients. We have stories that bring you to tears because of the pain in them that we've walked with the clients, because of life just isn't fair a lot of times to some people. Or they bring you to tears because of the success stories, the things that clients have been able to achieve. We're always in such a hurry to help more people that sometimes we forget to slow down and have those conversations or we forget there could be somebody in a different part of our business looking at spreadsheets all day that doesn't realize the name behind the number and what that person went through and what somebody else on the team actually did with them through that process and the change in multiple people's lives that are a result of that. So they wanted to make sure that we're taking a moment to better recognize these success stories, these stories of walking life with our clients, and why that is so important, because that's the inspiration behind it. Like, if you look at it we talked about it in our last episode a little bit Everything that we talk about on our podcast here is from real life experience.

Speaker 2: 12:19

We're walking this path and we're talking to our employees about this is in our team members. This is how we're walking this path. This is what we're doing and how we're pushing the bar and pushing the envelope to do it better, because it's important to do it better, because you owe it to each other to do it better, and we're telling our clients that listen, we're trying to do it better for you. This is why we're doing it and we're telling people who are clients that listen, there possibly is a better way to do it than what you're doing and you can get more out of this thing. And even if you don't want to talk to us, here's our advice, right, here's perspective, here's things you should consider. It's up to you to do with it what you will, but it's based on the actual, real stuff that we're doing Like it's real. And the last one was to give all clients extra patience, and that's just a good reminder. We get in a hurry sometimes. Everybody deserves a little bit of patience.

Speaker 1: 13:17

You know, if you've been following our journey for a while, when it comes to money, sometimes you know some topics may not be your forte, that might be hard to follow. But I think what you're talking about which is kind of neat is that you get a little bit of a flare, for maybe Travis is hard and some of the things that you hear on unleashing leadership, where again we're not talking about money and investments right now. We're talking about a standard through which we communicate with our staff for every day, how to take ownership and what's important to you, and I know that. One thing again that you're talking about, you know our staff to clients.

Speaker 1: 13:47

One thing that I do with my kids personally if you're a parent out there and you know I talk about it quite a bit with other parents when I sit my kids down at night a table, my wife and I always do what's called pit and peaks. So we ask our kids about a pit and a peak in the day and they'll give us the answers, obviously a peak being something great that happened to them that day. So it creates an opportunity for us to listen. But also a pit. You know somebody picked on them, something didn't go right. And what we found is like if you just took those answers, like that's a great baseline. But what really transformed our relationship was when I posed to my kids hey, you know how, what you just said about your peak, how great you felt when this happened how can you be somebody else's peak tomorrow? And it was like my oldest son, who's seven, sat back and was like, oh man, let me think about it. And when he came home the next day he ran in the house and was like dad, I did this for my classmate and he was so excited because it made him realize he's part of something bigger than himself. And again, if we're not careful, we can so internalize and make everything about us, not in a malicious, not in a violent, not in an egregious way. But if we're not careful, every headline could be personalized, every situation can be personalized. Every family situation, you know, could be them out to get us.

Speaker 1: 15:01

And I think by doing this exercise, whether it's with your staff, if you're an engineer, if you're an advertiser, if you work in a hospital, you know having this conversation around what do you expect to do in your day to day and how can you be somebody else's peak or help somebody else have a great day. It is very cool giving people the space to go. I didn't even know that that was something I can do. And then, when they actually have those experiences themselves I will tell you this from somebody who hears from our staff all the time when they're like you know, I talked to so-and-so on the phone and because of that I sent them a postcard about how great our conversation was. And, look, they sent me all these pictures of them with their grandkids and how much it meant to them.

Speaker 1: 15:43

You can't fabricate that and demand that that's what they do. That has just become a natural part of who they are as people, because you gave them the space to acknowledge, like I really want to have meaningful work, and the way that I can have meaningful work is by going out of my way to make sure that you know the people we deal with feel appreciated, feel valued, that we're patient with them because we don't understand. We don't understand what they went through this morning when they picked up the phone and maybe we're a little grumpy with us, maybe something happened to their child or like just it begins to change the entire mindset of people. So I thought that for that first part. Do folks do this with your family? Do it with people you love? Post questions around the holiday. Don't just talk about what you do. Post questions of people and you'll be fascinated at what you hear.

Speaker 2: 16:27

Well, the business world is under attack, and I think that it's the consumers that suffer, the people who need to help and want to help, who are paying the money. They're the ones that suffer. What I mean by it being under attack is when you go on social media or you go on yeah, who are Apple? And you're going through your news feeds and stuff, everything's about me. Everything's about how I get more money, how I get ahead, how I get the jab over somebody else, right, and those things are important, but they're not all that's important. Everything's about you know, you're supposed to go into work and you're not supposed to talk about anything. Personal Work as work home is home. Keep them separate, right? Don't be friends with anybody at work. Everything is about isolation. It seems like you know what group do you belong to? What group did they belong to? Do those groups get along at all together? Well, if they don't get along, you can't get along that type of thing.

Speaker 2: 17:29

Look at coming back into the office after COVID. Nobody wants to come back in the office, right? There's article after article after article online about being able to work from home and about whether or not workers should have to come back to the office. You know, one of the reasons why workers need to go back to the office it's not because they can't do their job at home, it's not because they're not responsible, it's because community matters and for a large group of people, they get their strength from the people around them. It's easier to communicate, you have more, stronger connections, you have better innovation. There's a whole bunch of stuff that happens when you get people together in the flesh and when you isolate them and you say, look, you don't have to talk to anybody, you don't have to see anybody, you don't have to spend any extra time. Or it doesn't matter if you give somebody a card on their desk saying I know you had a bad day, but I'm here for you, right? Once you remove that, what do you have? You have a transaction, and life is not fun if all you do is transactions. All right.

Speaker 2: 18:34

So we looked at this. That's a good bridge into what is one thing that you would like to see happen for your colleagues and for this we just we put that we may in front of just about everything, but the first one was that we may all have more expertise and knowledge in the things we work on and communicate to clients. So basically, the pursuit of knowledge that we may all make an active effort and personal development, no matter the realm. That we may work in an atmosphere of family and familiarity, that we may, or that everybody may, feel happy and engaged, that we may have team cohesion, especially across our different locations. That each colleague may walk in another shoes to learn what our colleagues are actually experiencing. There's specifically talking about each other's jobs and learning each other's, having some more awareness of each other's jobs, and then that we may be genuinely interested in each other's growth and each other's success.

Speaker 2: 19:42

One of the big shifts we made coming into really, it's over the last two years now, but we really emphasized it this year is we want to be a place of personal and professional growth. We want to do that for our employees. We want to do that for our clients. We want to do that for our listeners on our podcasts. Right, like everything that we touch, we want to focus on personal and professional growth. You do not do that by yourself. Yeah, you cannot do that by yourself. You have to have positive influences all around you. You need people, you need to receive the help of others in this pursuit.

Speaker 1: 20:27

Well, I think I can kind of speak to you. Know, you say all those things and that sounds great. I think there's been a shift to what you were talking about, where social media is all about me. I think people are hungry for authenticity, community and genuinism. That when you meet another human being, that you can have a deep personal connection with them, and when you spend 60 to 80% of your life every day with the people you work with. Man, wouldn't you love to have the healthiest relationship, not where you don't look forward to coming into work every day but you just want to avoid work and go home? What would it look like to not use things like hashtag team, hashtag, family on new, you know, employee announcements on social media, where it looks like to everybody you love your team and your life. But like what if you actually did love them?

Speaker 1: 21:11

And I think what you have done a really nice job of you and our leadership team is you know, life is not perfect. We're humans. We all make mistakes. We all have issues with miscommunication or mis-expectations. It's one thing to say. You know, we strive to have personal development and genuinism in other people's lives, but sometimes life happens, it breaks down and you misunderstand somebody, because an electronic correspondence was sent in it, you read it differently than the way that somebody meant it, or you know somebody didn't want to go to lunch with you that day, or you could just. It's very easy to allow all those things to whittle away companies and business, but I think your, you and our leadership team have done a really nice job of taking books, resources, ted Talks, youtube's as part of our training and said look, sometimes, man, we're all going to miss it, but here's some resources to understand that you and I, travis, are wired very differently as people, and that doesn't mean that we can't work well together. We've actually learned over the years that we compliment each other very well, and so I think what's been very cool is not just to say these things, but then, how can you provide your coworkers, how can you provide your children, your family, the people that you love Like? How can you provide resources to help you? And this was one thing that you know you had talked about you and I. We have our different podcasts.

Speaker 1: 22:27

Outside of this, I have this interview style show called the One Big Thing, and I just had this conversation with somebody recently, which is if you're trying to lead to real life change.

Speaker 1: 22:36

The question you have to ask yourself is do I have enough resources currently, as it is today, to really do the change that I'm talking about? Or are there resources beyond my control that I need to go acquire in order to become the best father, the best husband, the best coworker? And so I would challenge all of you that are listening If you work in environments that you wish were different, does your current team, as it's constructed, have enough resources to really get honest about what needs to change? Or, if you're in a leadership position, are there some resources that you need to introduce this year to your team that might give everybody a common you know foundation or a common vernacular or things? And so I know, with our Hungry Humble Smart, you have implemented a lot of things that you've learned from book acquisitions that you've brought to our team that have really just not made these bullet points that sound good, but have really helped impact and bring positive change to what we do every day.

Speaker 2: 23:30

Yeah, you know I'm doing a book report on the unleashing leadership, on Simon Sinek's Infinite Game, and something new that I was doing is I was doing a book review on it. I was actually looking at the reviews of his work and one of the reviews calls his ideas very flimsy at best, and this is, I think, just so important. All I'm sharing here is an idea. It's what you do with the idea that matters. These folks on our team here. These are their ideas. These are the things that they want to see happen. It's like a code of conduct, almost, or it's a pathway for it.

Speaker 2: 24:19

Now, what might I do with these two list of questions? How can I use those to really galvanize and create the experience that they're talking about? Because I don't think anybody can disagree that those are very important things to make sure are happening. Even if they are happening, how can they happen better? So all an idea is a starting point to catalyst. What do you do with it? Next? Our point is sharing all this. We just wanted to share a message of hope and inspiration and thankfulness for the holidays. The world is moving so fast today and there's just so much to do, and it's crazy too. Do you have politics and finances and work. If we could just slow down for one minute and imagine if everybody in your life was actually trying to help each other in these ways.

Speaker 1: 25:09

Hey, at Ditch the Suits, we're all about bringing you great resources. You're obviously here because you love podcasts. Well, what if we told you that I, one of your co-hosts at Ditch the Suits, has now launched my own podcast? If you like the tone of, obviously you've learned in this episode, I try to always bring the heart of the issues that we bring, to bring it full circle as to how to apply it to your life. Well, if you want to head over and check out the One Big Thing podcast, it's an inspiration and encouragement podcast where my job is to help you, as a listener, really move the ball forward, to take you from inspiration to transformation. So, if you like podcasts, be my guest. Head over to the One Big Thing podcast today and take a listen. Yeah, now I'll bring to the table that you talk about and unleashing leadership all the time and we've been brought it up on this episode before that one framework that helps us is when we talk about Ditch the Suits.

Speaker 1: 25:58

There's two components money and life. We spend a lot of time focusing on the money aspect and how to do that, but the other seesaw is the life component. This conversation today is definitely much more around that life side of things and if you're like, okay, I want to implement this, one thing that you can do during this holiday season or starting the new year pose these questions to people that you love your spouse, your kids, your colleagues. What would it look like? And when they give you answers, one thing that you've implemented with our team, that really helps continue.

Speaker 1: 26:27

The conversation is framing two questions what if and how might we. And so when somebody says something like I just want to make the most of every single day, it's like, well then, how might you actually do that? And someone might. All of a sudden, what it does is it makes them really think further along, kind of what that thought process is, and it's actually very fascinating how you can actually help people solve a lot of issues.

Speaker 1: 26:52

So two ways to really help is not just having these conversations, but learn, as a follow-up question, how to ask the how might we and what if. But I think, as far as a special holiday message, travis, thank you for keeping it light, keeping it fresh, giving people things that they can actually do. Folks, we want you to enjoy every moment with every person, because this life is far too short. We see it all the time and your job is to go out and just make the most of every single day. So, on behalf of both Travis and I, as we bring this year to a close, we want to wish you and your family a happy holidays.