Cathcart.com

Cathcart Institute is the creator of http://Cathcart.com and of http://Academy.Cathcart.com

speech transcript of Keynote Speech by Jim Cathcart, motivational speaker and author

Increase Your Success Velocity™

CEG Roundtable San Francisco, CA, USA

Featuring Keynote Speaker: Jim Cathcart, CSP, CPAE

10/8/2015

Speakers in the audio file:

Speaker 1: John Bowen – introduction

Speaker 2: Jim Cathcart – main speech

Speaker 3: Joel Weldon – critique

John:  INTRODUCTION: Let me ask you a question. What if you could get more done and achieve even more success with the exact same amount of effort and energy that you’re using now? How many of us would like that? Come on. Show your hands. Some of us might want a whole lot for less energy and effort. That is huge. That’s really is what round table is all about. I’ve got a treat for you. You can and you will increase what our next speaker called “Success Velocity”. Our kick-off speaker this morning is Mr. Jim Cathcart. Jim is an internationally recognized expert on Success Velocity. I got this sheet because I want to have all the numbers. During his 39 years, as a professional speaker, Jim has written 16 great books. He owns a psychological research firm. He has been inducted into the Professional Speakers Hall of Fame. Plus he knows our industry. He’s worked in the industry and had a securities license. There’s something about this group “Need for Speed”, go look at Bruce as I said “Need for Speed”. Jim rides motorcycles on race tracks at very high velocity so get set to increase, everyone in the room, Success Velocity. Please join me in welcoming Jim Cathcart.

[Applause]

Jim Cathcart:  Thank you, John. Good Morning.

Audience:  Good morning.

[Chatting]

Jim: John said your theme this year is about Scaling Up and that’s (slide) what a lot of people see when they think about scaling up. It will be a lot of times you scale up and you’re not quite of the size you need to be to fit the new scale. We’re going to talk about how to increase your success velocity so that you’re able to be and stay in the position that you want to be. When you think about this event, just looking at this event, it’s easy to take things for granted but what I love about this is, let’s take a few moments to point out what works here. Let’s just see the uniqueness of where we are and who we are. This is a group of eagles. This is not just a flock, right? This is a group of people who have committed themselves to high achievement, who’ve gone through a breakthrough and said and shown, “I’m ready for this”, right? It’s a group of people who are my favorite audience. What’s my favorite audience? People who want to be in my audience. Not necessarily for me but people who want to learn, right? People have asked me, “Who do you like to speak to?” and I said, “Anybody who’s eager to learn and people who are committed to personal and professional growth” Look at this. (Gestures to the CEG logo) Commitment, Education and Growth. Does that work for you? I mean, even John said, “Oh, I like that better.” [Laughing] He’s starting to write it down, so I’m going to go with it. This really is a wonderful forum. What I love about the format is that it was created so that each person’s value is tapped so that you fuel each other’s fire. Velocity, as I define it, especially success velocity is the rate of advancement towards your goal. What’s essential in that equation? The rate of advancement towards your goal. What’s the essential element in that statement?

Audience:  Goal.

Jim:  Goal. Exactly. The rate of advancement towards the goal. If the goal is not clear, then everything else is obviously going to be poorly spent. Whether your goal is serving on impressive boards or getting more fit or luxury travel or fine dining, whatever it happens to be, once your goal is clear then it’s time to focus on success velocity. Now, considering the fact that this is a room full of successful people. I mean, you may not consider yourself successful but you are by the rest of the world’s definition. When other people look at you, they say that person is successful. Alright? When you’re at the top of your game, when you’re in the group that everybody else aspires to be able to fit into, what do you do next? Where do you go? How do you make sure you don’t

[00:05:00]

lose that special status? How do you grow on top of growth?

I remember years ago, I was called by a guy who owned an insurance agency in Florida. He said, “I want you to speak to my group and after you speak, I want to take you over to the house.” We got in his, I think it was a Mercedes. We drove over to his house, drove through his gates up the circular drive around his 30-foot Christmas tree that he had had imported to Florida from Seattle. The boy was doing okay. We stopped the car there. We went into the house and he gave me a tour of the property. He said, “I hope you don’t mind but I’ve got a guy bringing a car by for me to look at it. Would you go with us on a test drive in our Rolls?” I forced myself to go along in the ride in a Rolls Royce. We came back to the house and he sat down with me, he and his wife both. He said, “I’m bored”. I said, “Get out of here! You’re bored?” He said, “Yes.” He said, “Everything I’ve decided to do, I’ve done. Everything I decide to do, I know I can do it. What do I do now? How do I keep the spark? How do I re-ignite me?” I said to him, “You’re asking me?” I said, “Lord! Man, you’re up here.” He said, “No, no, no.” He said, “You’re life is working. You’re still on the zone. Help me get some perspective on mine. What can I do?” I said, “First thing you’ve got to do is set some goals that are bigger than you know how to achieve. They don’t have to be big in a global sense but they’ve got to seem big to you. In other words, you’ve got to want something you’re not ready to achieve yet. Something that puts you back to work to figure out how to get there. Because if your goals don’t excite you, they’re not goals. They’re to-dos. To-dos don’t ignite the spark.” Would you agree with that? Can I get an “Amen” here?

Audience:  Amen.

Jim:  Yes. So I was called last year to go to Bali, Indonesia and do some training with the number one beach resort in all of Asia, number three in the entire world. It’s called “The Mulia”. I’d never heard of it but then again I didn’t go to Indonesia very often. I got there and there’s an unbelievably fabulous resort in Bali. It had 2000 employees, 500 managers, 135 executives and they wanted me to train the executive team. The way I opened the seminar was with the question, “What’s next?” When at this moment, you’re of the world’s best, what do you do? How do you sustain the velocity you’ve had? How do you increase your success velocity if you aspire to greater things like getting out of the lower ranks like down at number three? J

[Laughing]

Jim:  Being the number one resort in the world. That was what we focused on in the time I was there. What we focused on most was mindset. Because they were not going to change their location. They we’re going to necessarily change their personnel. They were not going to change the way they were doing business in a profound way because they’ve achieved the top of their industry. They clearly had to change the mindset of the people occupying those spaces.

You see that? There’s a familiar sight; the oval office. I can share with you a story from 1994. I’m a member of the National Speakers Association. That’s my industry group. That’s what this lapel pen is. I’m a past president of that group. The National Speakers Association is about 5000 worldwide. Professional speakers and there are trainers, educators, people that sell their expertise and deliver it mostly through speaking in some form. The National Speakers convention in ’94 was in Washington, D.C. I went, of course. As a past president, I had an opportunity to go on a tour of the White House with other past presidents and spouses. How many of you have toured the White House? Many of you have. Well, if it was for you like it was for me, you got goosebumps walking around through the place and seeing that this was the seat of history of all the things you’ve heard about. We’re walking through this place and we ended the tour in the foyer. We were standing there looking around

[00:10:00]

and my wife Paula was right beside me. All of a sudden she said, “Oh my gosh.” I said, “What? What?” She said, “Look. Here he comes.” And here came the president of the United States, walking up, shaking hands

Jim: He just worked the room. It was Bill Clinton. It’s a pretty big deal to meet the president of the United States in person, especially in the White House. So despite my vote —

[Laughing]

Jim:  I’m from Little Rock, Arkansas. I know his story. You know what I mean. I grew up in the south.

[Laughing]

Jim:  Come to think of it, if he had made better life choices, he could be speaking to you right now.

[Laughing]

Jim:  Anyway, I was thrilled to meet him. He’s a very charming man. We had a wonderful chat. During the course of our conversation, someone in our group said, “President Clinton, we’re professional speakers but, Sir, in many ways, so are you.” He looked directly at me when he answered. He said, “Half my job is keeping people in the right frame of mind.” I said, “That’s a keeper.” (Jim writes it down)

[Laughing]

Jim:  I asked, “Is that what he said?” Half my job is keeping people in the right frame of mind.

How many of you would agree that half your job is keeping people in the right frame of mind? Which frame of mind is the most important in that equation? Your own. Absolutely. When I was talking to the people at the Mulia, I recalled what I had recently, at that time, read in the book “Four Seasons” written by Isadore Sharp, the founder of that hotel network. My son is the Director of Human Resources at the Four Seasons in Westlake Village, California, so I have sort on an insider’s view on the Four Seasons. The Four Seasons is about as good as a huge network of hotels gets. They’re winning all the awards. They’re top ranked in their field. In many ways, they’re like you are in your field.

What I found fascinating was Sharp said, “At first, it was my vision, my dream and all about putting in place the standards, the systems and the facilities that we needed and getting other people on board with that. We built it. It started thriving around the world and I found that my job changed. I found that my job was no longer putting in place the standards, the systems, the training, the reward, the recognition and so forth. My job became…” not his words but mine, “keeper of the flame”. The guy in-charge of getting the other people to buy their dream in their own mind and heart. Like Walt Disney. He constantly kept himself selling the vision “This is the happiest place on earth. This is why we exist.” When you keep that alive, when that spark is there, then there’s a reason to activate that velocity in each individual.

Because we each have a natural velocity and at the same time, we have an I call “Success Velocity”. Natural velocity is the energy in drive that sort of the setting of your metronome. Some people just go like tic-toc-tic-toc. They operate at a moderate pace. Everything in their life seems to work at that pace. Some other people you could use them as a fan! Whirrrrrr. Some people are just harder to fire up, “naaaah”, right? We’ve each got a natural velocity and it’s either high, moderate or low. When you look back over your life and you think about the times you were working on something that you really cared about. When you think about something that you really cared about and you look at how you worked on it, you probably are observing your natural velocity, what I call your optimum. Not the maximum, not the most but the optimum. The cruising zone so to speak.

When you’re working on things you don’t particularly identify with or care about, your velocity may show in a different way. When you work on what matters to you though, you can observe it.

What if my velocity is not very high and I’m on your team? Clearly, this high velocity organization would be operating in the upper zone. Does that mean I’m not valuable to the team and I ought to be given a new job opportunity? Not necessarily. Eighty percent of the work in the world is operational work. Eighty percent of the tasks that we deal with from day to day are just fundamental things. It doesn’t require high velocity. There are moments, of course, when everybody has to pitch in with everything they’ve got. But they are only moments. That’s not the day-to-day routine. If it is a day-to-day routine, you’re burning up people like crazy and you need to re-examine.

My friend Daniel Burrus is a futurist. You know Dan Burrus. Many of you were here when he addressed

[00:15:00]

the round table, yes?

Jim:  He’s a futurist. Dan says, “People don’t know what they want until they know what’s possible.” That’s the truth. It’s like Sharp. If Isadore Sharp keeps the vision, the mission and the dream alive, then everybody else is activated at a much higher level. If we know that keeping people ignited, so to speak, is what we want to achieve, then what happens when we loosen our grip? When you’re losing your grip on the dream, on the vision and on the goals you’re working toward, people don’t default up, have you noticed that? They always seem to go back to a lower level of operation like this lottery winner. All of a sudden, all the money in the world and new life choices? Not so much. (Picture of a mobile home with a stretch limo under the carport.) Although I’ll have to admit that is an exotic car, a sort of. Alright.

[Laughing]

Jim:  So this (photo) is the Mulia. When you’re looking at the Mulia, you see a gorgeous place. You see the Indian Ocean there. You see zillions of dollars of investment in that place. What made it occur was people with vision. Somebody had the vision of turning that jungle beach into that resort. Somebody dreamed this place up. Then they set a mission to achieve this in a certain way at a certain level of cost by a certain time. They clarified what they cared about, what values they were embracing so that that entity, that resort could become a reality. Then to keep it a reality, they put in place the standards they operate by, the systems that they follow day to day, the training the people needed, the rewards and recognition that keep people invested on an ongoing basis.

Think of your own operation…,or a better statement, “what this means to you is…” Would you please write that one down? “What this means to you is…” What this means to you is. I think the more frequently we use that phrase in our mind or even out loud, the more we’re reminded to tailor what we’re talking about to the client or to the colleague or whoever it is we’re addressing. What this means to you is in your own practice, in your own business, whether you have a team that’s internal to you or external who you achieved things through remotely. Like me, I used to have a staff for many, many years. Now, everything I do is outsourced. I’ve got no employees whatsoever but lots of people I work through so I’ve still got a team, of course. My job is to keep that team believing in the vision that I’m working to achieve and I hope they’ll invest in as well.

Clarify for them the mission that we are working on and then make sure nothing we do contradicts the values that drive it all and make it the quality that it needs to be. Then we can put in place the standards, systems, et cetera that can allow us to stay in our optimum zone of personal velocity. Okay?

This is the current you or me. If we don’t change in anyway, we will still achieve the things that we’re likely to achieve as a direct, predictable outcome of what we do today. Your mindset determines what actions you’re going to take. The actions you take form into habits over time. The habits you form become your reputation. That’s how you’re known by the rest of the world. Your reputation determines who is willing to build a relationship with you and who is not. Those relationships open doors then increase the size of your potential future. Does that make sense?

It’s what I call a “causation chain”. Mindset leads to action. Actions become habits, et cetera. Alright? The question becomes how much of yourself is really making it to be applied to the goal? How much of you are you really applying day to day? Then, project that outward. Each of the people on your success team, how much of them is getting applied? Imagine for a minute. If every person you work with… I’m not talking about your clients. I’m talking about your delivery team, right? If every person you work with brought 100% of their personal velocity to the task…

[00:20:00]

Jim: …everyday. Same people and you were getting 100% of their personal velocity applied to your goals, how much more successful could you be if you didn’t change personnel, didn’t change systems, didn’t change technology and didn’t even change the dream? How much more successful could you be by just tapping more of who’s already there?

Think about that for a second. How many of you believe it would make a profound difference? I agree. That’s the whole point of Success Velocity. How can we create a culture, like the Mulia resort there, like the Four Seasons there, and like John and Jonathan here? How can we create our culture around ourselves in our business that causes people to reach their optimum zone of velocity and stay in it, to the maximum extent possible?

Let me eliminate a potential confusion. Velocity and speed are often equated as the same thing. They are not. Speed is rapidity of movement. You can go 200 miles an hour in an oval and your velocity would be zero. Why? Because velocity is the rate of advancement towards your goal. The rate of advancement towards your goal. (By the way, all of my slides are in a PDF file that will be delivered to each of you digitally at the end of this program. I’m sorry I didn’t mention that earlier. You’ll get all these slides so don’t worry about trying to duplicate in the notes. Okay?)

Rate of advancement towards your goal. That’s velocity. Success Velocity is the velocity related to the goal of the organization or the practice. When you think about your velocity, you don’t have to push yourself to your maximum because if you do, you’ll burn out. You’ve got to figure out where’s your optimum and stay at that point. You’re scaling up to the better you.

Matthew McConaughey last year got the Academy Award for best actor. I don’t know if you remember when he did his acceptance of that but he said, “You know I was asked when I was a kid, ‘Who’s your hero?’ I said, ‘It’s me 10 years from now because that guys is so much better than me. Then 20 years later after I’d done quite a few things that I was impressed and pleased with, that same person came to me and said, ‘Who’s your hero now?’ I said, ‘It’s me 10 years from now because that guys is so much better than me I could never catch up but that’s my goal. That’s what’ I’m working toward’.” In other words, he was always asking himself, “How would the person I’m capable of being, how would the person I’d like to be do the things I’m about to do? How would the oak do my acorn work today?” That is a powerful question.

The future that you envision for yourself and your organization determines who you’re going to need to be. That’s why it’s so vitally important that that goal be clear. Okay? I wrote a book called “The Acorn Principle”. Here’s the basic premise of the book. “Your greatest success is going to come from what’s natural to you.” When you figure what your natural values are, in other words, what you care about the most, just as who you are, not what you were taught to care about but what you genuinely, down deep care about. When you figure what your values are, when you figure out how your brain works best when processing information, when you figure out your intellectual bandwidth so to speak and you determine your own personal velocity, be it high, moderate or low. Success velocity is about structuring your life so that you get to stay in the best zone of each of those categories. Values- Intellect- Velocity. When you do that, man, all of you is showing up every day. That’s pretty high performance.

Ask yourself every day. How would the person I’d like to be do the things I’m about to do? This is the causation chain I mentioned earlier. The mindset that we adopt determines the actions we’re going to take. If we’re constantly

[00:25:00]

working each day to something to keep our self in a really productive frame of mind, keep ourselves looking at the positives, looking at the opportunities instead of seeing only obstacles. That’s the difference between an optimist and a pessimist. They said there are two types of people in the world – optimist and pessimist. I say there are three types of people in the world but it really boils down to two. You’ve got an optimist who says, “Somehow, somewhere, there’s a way”. You’ve got a pessimist who says, “No, there’s not. I’ve seen the reality and it just can’t be done.” Then you’ve got a person who says, “I’m not an optimist or pessimist. I’m a realist.” A realist says, “The pessimist is right.” In other words, a realist is just a pessimist who won’t admit it. Think about that. Next time someone says, “Let’s just be realistic”, are they pointing out opportunities and possibilities or are they only looking at the obstacles? Chances are good they’re only looking at the limitations. Optimism is a cultivated mindset that you can, in fact, generate more of. The more of that you have, the more your actions will lead you to find opportunities. The more that happens, the more, over time, those actions become habits. That’s how people get to know you. They say, “I choose to go to her because, I’ve got to tell you, everything she goes after, happens. She knows how to make things work.”

By the way, let me back up just a second. You can start at either end of this causation chain. You can clarify the future you want and that will tell you who you need to know. When you see who, what kinds of people, you need to know, you can determine what kind of reputation on your part would open the doors to them and what kind of reputation would not. Once you know that, you know which habits you’re going to need in order to earn that reputation which tells you which actions to take, which tells you what kind of mindset to sustain. Does that make sense? It’s a very workable chain. When you keep it in your own mind or keep it somewhere in front of you where you can see it day to day, it reminds you of the relationship of one item to the other.

The Zone

You’ll notice we’ve got it angled upward for a higher velocity. There’s a zone in which you’re at your best. That zone is somewhere between boredom and stress. When you’re pushing yourself too much, when you’ve taken on too many things at one time and the size of the task is always related to the time frame, if the time is eternal, you could achieve anything. Yes? Okay. The time frame changes the intensity of the task. If you’re pushing yourself too much, the first thing you’d experience is stress. You’d just get a little stressed out from it all, a little anxious, because anxiety is the next stage. Anxiety is fear-based. When people say, “Hey! I’m anxious to meet you”, my question is why?

“What? I want to meet you.” Well, that’s not anxious. Anxious is fear-based. I’m afraid of the experience. Anxiety is not a good thing. “I’m eager to meet you.” Cool! Let’s get together. “I’m anxious to meet you.” Gee! I’m sorry I didn’t mean to make you nervous. Anxious and eager are not the same words, right?

When you overload with too much of a challenge or too many variables, or too short of a time frame, what happens at first is stress and then it becomes anxiety. If the anxiety persists over time, it leads to burnout. Burnout is not actually an accurate term because you don’t truly burn out, you just become overly stressed. You have to go through a recovery cycle to get back to your optimum zone. Does that make sense? If you don’t challenge yourself enough, then the first thing that happens is like my friend in Florida, you’d get bored. If that persists for long, then it leads to apathy. “Why bother. I don’t care. It just doesn’t do anything for me anymore.” Apathy is where you detach from it. If you sustain that state for long, it’s going to lead to depression. Depression is going to need a recovery cycle just to get you back to normal again.

The best way for us to get the most of our own selves is to figure out where is my optimum velocity. What is that zone? How can I keep myself in it? What’s enough of a challenge to keep me ignited? What is not too much of a challenge so I don’t get overwhelmed? Do that same thing for the people you achieve your results through. This produces the zones of velocity. The goal is the thing that activates it all.

(Slide) You’re starting point is in the lower

[00:30:00]

left hand corner, that’s you today. How long is it going to take you to get to that goal? Well, it depends on the size of the challenge, the gap between you and the goal, the amount of time that you have to achieve it and your angle in approaching it. If you’re a high-velocity person, it’s going to take you a shorter amount of time. If you’re a moderate velocity person, longer. The lower velocity is even longer than that. Alright?

What does this mean day to day? Does it show up it a person’s personality type? Not so much. Personality type we’ve found is independent of velocity for the most part. You can be a very high velocity person who’s very calm in demeanor, who’s very cool and blase’ on the surface but never takes their eye off the goal. Never has a time they’re not intentional about what they’re doing.

And there, by the way, is a real keyword – intentional. If you’ll notice, this meeting is about as intentional as one can get. The layout of the room is intentional. The seating is intentional. The program and the printed material, it’s intentional. What’s in the hallway is not just who agreed, “Hey, I’ll do a table. I’ll sponsor something.” It’s intentional. Those are people used by (your organization), right? Everything here is intentional. When you put yourself into this and you go with the natural flow of this event, you come out of here a much better person in many other ways that it’s touched your life. Wow!

How much of your day-to-day is intentional? What’s the first thing you think about when you get up in the morning? Or do you take intentionality in that? What’s the first thing you do in your day? When you’re driving, what are you learning or listening to? The higher the percentage of your life that becomes intentional, the higher the degree of success you’ll experience. When you get back home, (this is another “what this means to you is,”) when you get back home, look at your team, the people you achieve your results through and make sure that if someone needs a ride, you get it for him. If someone is stronger and they can pull, then put them in that position.

Let’s talk about Intellectual bandwidth. Start noticing the thinking or processing capacity of the various people you work with. Eighty percent of the world, as I’ve mentioned, is all about function. Its an operational world. It is brushing teeth, hauling materials, assembling workbooks, putting meetings together and guiding traffic and so on and so forth. Eighty percent of the work we do in this world, maybe more than that, is operational work. It does not require a heck of a lot of bandwidth. It just requires dedication to the outcome.

About 18% of the work in the world tends to be strategic. That’s more about figuring out how to leverage things, get more from them and get them at their highest and best use. About 2% of the world is about concepts, philosophies, visions and grand ideas. By the way, people tend to be either conceptual bandwidth people, strategic bandwidth people or operational bandwidth people. The vast majority of people will be operation in their bandwidth. In other words, you show them something, they will assume what I see is what I get. What I see is what I get.

If that’s the case, you show them a pen and you say, “What is this?” The operational person says, “That’s a pen. Well, tell me more about it. It is gold.” “Tell me more about it.” “It clicks instead of twisting.” In other words, they’re just describing function. If you say, “Why does the pen exist?” they’re going to look at you like “What?” You show this to a strategic thinker, a person that has strategic bandwidth. You say, “What is this?” They’ll say, “It’s a pen.” Tell me more. “Well, it’s a writing instrument.” Tell me more. “Well, it’s business jewelry, goes with gold. It’s business jewelry.”  Tell me more. What else can I do with this? “Well, you can make markings to communicate. You can write with it. You can prop a window open. You can scratch with it.

[00:35:00]

It’s got lot of functions, right?” They see this as the beginning of a whole lot of possibilities. That’s strategic thinking. We need lots of that and of course, we do a lot of that.

The conceptual that you show them the pen and you say, “What is this?” they say, “Jim, what you hold in your hand is a symbol of mankind’s ability to transcend space and time.” You go, “Huh?” They say, “Think about this. This pen didn’t start off like this. This was gold in the ground. It was mined from the ground. It was reshaped. The other materials in here were blended with it. It was created in a form that contains the ink that’s inside it. By the way, it’s blue. It’s a got a roller ball”… and they start talking about it. They say, “All of this was done to allow people to transcend space and time”. Huh? “When you make markings in the appropriate language or with the appropriate symbols, it can communicate with people you’ve never met, even a thousand years from now, if you mark with something that will endure on it.” Okay. Well, I really didn’t want to know that much. Thank you very much. Right? Conceptuals are the ones that are creating the world in their minds. They’re the Steve Jobs. They’re the Elon Musk. The people that are coming up with the unbelievably big ideas. They get together with the strategic thinkers to work out the plans for how to make it happen. They get lots and lots and lots of operational thinkers to make it a reality.

What does that mean to you and your team? Well, you’ve got a mixture of those kind of people. Now, here’s the drawback when it comes to velocity. If you’ve got a conceptual thinker with high velocity, every day is a brand new business that doesn’t necessarily relate to the other one. They come in the office and the staff goes like this (defensive) because they know they’re going to come in and say, “I went to a seminar and I was at the round table. Oh my God! Have I got an idea for us?!!! Here’s what we’re going to do. Everything has to change to make that new thing a reality.” That’s the problem with the conceptual thinker with high velocity. They’ve got to learn to moderate that and implement before they revolutionize with the new idea.

Strategic thinker, they come in and they’re constantly seeing new ways that you could do what you’re already doing. Things tend not to stabilize if they keep on doing that. Operational thinkers tend to only follow the process that exists instead of coming up with new and better ways so you have to continually stimulate them to look for improvements and to listen to the clients, customers and the people around them, for better ways. We’re on the same team here. You get it.

Use all your strength is what I’m saying. How much of you are you bringing to the task? Bring as much of you as can be brought and sustain over time. This is my friend Karl Klessig. Karl’s climbing team was in the Grand Tetons. Other than Karl and his equipment on his back and his red helmet, what do you notice in that photograph? The rope. What do you notice about the rope? It’s going down and it’s tight. That’s right. That means somebody else in this case Andy Watson is at the other end of that rope. Andy is depending with his life on what Karl does next. Fifteen minutes earlier, Karl was at the end of that rope and Andy was above. There is always somebody on the other end of your rope and you’re always on the end of somebody else’s. I think, when we think about using all our strength, we should never think about using 100% of our capacity. I think we should think who else cares about what I care about? Who else am I connected with? How can I help get them into their optimum zone of velocity? How can I get into mine so that this is not a burst of achievement? This is a sustained high achievement over a long period of time. All your strength means all the people you care about, all those people who care about you and all of you who care about the same ultimate outcome.

If you look at an organization as a living thing instead of looking at it as a stack of boxes like we did in the industrial era, a tree is a much better representation of an organization than an org chart. Because a tree, if you think about it, grows toward the opportunities so it’s got a growth above the ground and it reaches for resources. It’s got a resource system under the ground. The growth system creates solutions and services to reach those opportunities and serve people.

[00:40:00]

The strength system looks for resources and skills to broaden its base to give it more stability for further growth. What keeps all of it together is the connection between people. The relationships are at the center of it all. By the way, I define a relationship as a direct connection between people in which value is exchanged. Now, that value could be support, friendship, love and encouragement but value is exchanged whatever form it tends to take.

Look at your inner circle. This is a big to-do, define who are the five to twelve people that are on your true inner circle. Even if like me, you have no official employees, you’ve got an inner circle. If we’re more intentional about our inner circle, we’re more successful in optimizing our velocity. The inner circle, those key people that you connect with in order to achieve your results. Figure out who those players are. Do a sociogram, that’s what this shape is called. The acorn in the center represents you, of course. Do a sociogram and the line between you and each person represents your relationship with that person. When you get home from this meeting, back off and look at that group of people. Even while you’re here, you might want to this in collaboration with some of your colleagues. Look at the inner circle. Put initials or names on their so it means something to you immediately.

Then ask yourself, “Is this a championship team?” Who are the players and look at each one. Think about what they bring to the table. On the mix of players, for example, is there anyone on this team that’s really good with marketing? Is there anyone on this team that’s really good with business systems? Is there anyone on this team that’s really good with money management? Well, I hope. Look at whatever their critical skill sets are and ask yourself, “Do we have that on the existing team?” If not, go shopping for new talent to bring in to the team.

Then look at the relationships with each individual and see if it has the three essentials for a healthy relationship. This happy fellow is James Forrestal. He was Secretary of Defense at the end of World War Two. He said, “Eliminating human friction is 90% of the key to the success of an organization”. Because when there’s a tension between people, trust is low. When the trust is low, cooperation is low. Our job is to reduce tension by getting all the tension-causing things out of the way as much as possible so we’ll become more relationship intelligent. That’s the ability to understand and employ human connections to achieve the desired outcome. The more intelligent you are about your relationships, the more you are seen as a partner in problem solving instead of a persuader trying to talk them into something. It’s not what you know that counts you for this. It’s what? Who you know.

I say, it’s not who you know that counts. Here are the answers I typically hear. It’s who they know. It’s who knows you. Here’s the better answer I think. Tell me what you think. What really counts when it comes to relationships, who is glad they know you? Can I get an Amen to that one? Yes. I think we and our team ought to be committed to making as many people as possible really glad they know us. The more that we do that, the more everything else opens up as a possibility. There are specific known ways in this room for more making other people more glad that they know you. I think we ought to walk out of this meeting with a lot more of those in their own resource file.

Here are three essentials for each relationship. If you want someone to operate at an optimum velocity, there’s got to be a mutual commitment to the success of that relationship. If we’re standing here at the business altar and you say, “Yes, I’ll do till death do us part. Come wind or rain or dark of night. I’m there. I’m all in. Yes.” And I say, “Sure. I’ll give it a shot. Do you see any problem with that equation?

[00:45:00]

If I’m not committed to it but you are, clearly, this is dysfunctional relationship at present. What we’ve got to work on is either increasing my commitment or changing the nature of the relationship. In any relationship, both parties have to be committed to the success of it.

You go back to your inner circle and look at each person and say, “Am I committed to the success of this relationship? Are they?” Okay. What do we need to do about that? Second question. Does the truth flow freely? In other words, do they tell me the truth, because I need to know bad news the instant it occurs so I can do something about it. I don’t need a banked shot where I get the news so late that I can’t do anything anymore. Like Bill Gates said in this book, Business at the Speed of Thought, “Bad news must travel fast.” Also, good news. If you’re one of these people that only says, “Well done” when you order steak, then you’re team is looking to you and saying, “Yes, I get it that I showed up two minutes late for that event but did you notice that I just earned us $116,534.00 while I was being late?” Yes, but that’s your job you know that.

My friend, Karl, who was on the mountain, he had a meeting with me one time. We were talking about this and he said, “I don’t praise my employees. I point out what they’re not doing or what they’re doing wrong but I figure that doing the job is what I paid them for.” I said, “Karl, if I worked for you, my brain stem would shrivel and I would die.” He said, “What?” I said, “There are people desperate to hear that you like what they did, you approve of what they did and you’re proud of them or you admire them or you were impressed by the way they handled something. You’ve got people throughout your organization that if you did that, they would bloom like a brand new plant. He said, “No, I don’t think so.” I said, “I think you need to rethink your thinking.” Karl, over time, came to me and he said, “You know when I started doing that it paid off like crazy.” Yes. We need that.

Open communication has got to be so the positive and the negative news flow freely. Third. We need to know what we expect from each other. We need clear agreements so that I’m working on what you expect me to be working on, instead of me doing what I think is a really good job, giving it my all and then you say, “Man, I wanted you to do so and so.” Well, I thought you wanted this. If I’m getting criticized for an outcome that was a result of a sincere effort on the wrong thing, what’s the appropriate response for that? Appropriate response would be, “Praise the effort and the intention then change the application.”

Three essentials for each relationship in that inner circle, right? The purpose of what we do in the final analysis, I think it always boils down to making life better for other people, for those we serve. Would you agree? If what we’re doing is making life better for other people, how often should we talk about how it makes life better for other people among ourselves? Daily. All the time, like you said. Yes. The more often you tell stories, the more often you point out how you’ve touched lives, how you’ve made things better, the more often each person gets to tell, “Hey. When I dealt with our client the other day, this happened. We did this and they said that and so on and so forth.” When you share those stories and you make it part of your culture to always share those stories, then your culture becomes one that people look forward to being in. People show up at work eager to hear the next story or share the next story. Nordstrom did that. Years ago, I did some work for Nordstrom Department Store. This was in California. They gave me a copy of their company newsletter. “California Connection” was the title of it. It was interesting. This is the employee newsletter. It went out to all the people that work in this Nordstrom Store or that group of Nordstrom stores. I looked in there for the usual thing that would be in the company newsletter and I didn’t find it. Company news. Here’s what the corporation is doing. Here is how our stock is operating. Here’s what the different departments have done and so on and so forth.

Instead all it was,

[00:50:00]

was a storybook. It had pictures of people… and the story of their experience, page after page. Each person was telling, “The client came in with this problem or this situation occurred. We didn’t know what to do. We collaborated and this is what we decided to do. We did this and here’s the payoff, page after page after page. If you’re going to run an organization like yours, or like the Four Seasons or the Mulia Resort or Nordstrom Department Store or Lamborghini, whoever else is at the top end of the food chain, how will you keep it alive? Well, Nordstrom said one of their management policies was to tell people “Use your own good judgment”. Use your own good judgment. Now if you tell people “Use your own good judgment”, where is your vulnerability? Yes. What if you don’t agree what they judged to be good is what you judge to be good, right? If there’s a miscommunication on that one, oops, you just empowered someone to hurt you. Use your own good judgment. By the way, here’s our newsletter. This is what we think constitutes good judgment. Story after story after story from each department. Is that an idea you’d use? Share the stories and make the sharing of the stories systematic or systemic, I guess, so they’re just part of your culture day to day.

I asked, what habits do we need in order to have the future we want? A few years ago, I was not exercising nearly as much as I needed to. I knew I needed a new fitness habit. I found some colleagues and friends who were mountain hikers in the Santa Monica Mountains around Thousand Oaks. Every Wednesday, every Sunday and every Friday, we show up at the trail head at 7 A.M. on one of 25 different trails and we do a power hike for three miles to the top of whatever that trail is. We recover for a minute or two and then we march back and go to coffee. But it’s always each person pushing for a personal best on that particular hike. It keeps us trim and fit. We don’t have to worry about diet nearly as much as we used to. We don’t have to go to the gym nearly as often but we still do.

What kind habits do you need? Let’s go to thinking habits. In 1972, in Little Rock Arkansas, I was born in 1946 so I  was 26 years old, I was newly married, had a new baby at home, had no college degree and no money in the bank. I had never been an athlete. I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. I weighed 200 pounds. This is 150. This was 1972. I was working for the Little Rock Housing Authority, the urban renewal agency, as a government clerk. I was an assistant to Bob Moore and he didn’t need an assistant. I was an unemployed government employee. [Laughing]I sat there day to day, bored to tears. I had no goal. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I just wanted better.

If someone asked me, “What’s your goal?” I would have said, “Healthy, happy and have plenty of money.” In other words, no goal. Just the desire to be alive and have fun. I’d read all books on urban renewal and that didn’t work for me. I couldn’t see a future of that. I’d read the Bible cover to cover at work in three months, cover to cover. Talk about spare time, right? I was just sitting there, bored. In the next room a radio was playing. It was the voice of Earl Nightingale, known as the “Dean of Personal Motivation”. Well, Earl Nightingale was on 900 radio stations around the world at that time. By the way, Joel Weldon was good friends with Earl Nightingale. I, later, got to know him. But Earl Nightingale said that day, “If you will spend one extra hour each day, studying your chosen field, in five years or less, you’ll be a national expert in that field.” He specifically said… “One hour a day extra in your field and in five years or less, you’ll be a national expert.” Wow! I thought, “Even me? I’m basically a professional loser. I’ve got nothing

[00:55:00]

going for me. I could be a national expert? Hey! I could because 1250 hours, that math works, even for me. What am I going to be an expert at? Not urban renewal. I wanted to do what the guy on the radio was doing. I wanted to help people grow. Now, I have a problem. I was aspiring to a career as professional speaker and author but I’d never given a speech and I had nothing to say. [Laughing] I’ll guarantee you that will keep your fees low. [Laughing] I thought, okay. An hour a day. Well, I’m starting further behind than most so I need to do maybe two hours a day. I became, I mean this literally, in the dictionary definition, fanatical about personal development.

I knew nothing about it but I was thrilled with the idea of it. I wanted to be like Earl Nightingale. I wanted to help people grow but first I needed to grow and I need to figure out what that meant so I read every motivational book under the sun. I went to seminars and there weren’t many back then in 1972. I got around anybody I knew that seemed to be doing well. I studied them. I listened to recordings, at first on record and then on cassettes. Cassettes are little boxes with ribbons in them that have sound. Well, look it up. Anyway, I listened for hours and hours and hours, probably thousands of hours, over the next five years and my life started transforming.

Within a couple of years, I was leading seminars and workshops that other people had designed. I became pretty good at facilitating training. That got me some other opportunities. Then, I got the chance to get paid to speak one time. I remember, that was a thrill. I got $100 for talking to a bunch of college faculty members in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I thought, “Man, I have arrived. I’m speaking to people that have higher degrees than me and getting money for it.” A hundred bucks, yes! Within a year after that, I had an opportunity to collaborate on a book, wrote a book on how to be your own sales manager with Dr. Tony Alessandra, a professor from San Diego. Then, I went full time in professional speaking. Today, I’ve done over 3000 speeches. I’ve been inducted in the Speaker Hall of Fame. I’ve been the president of the National Speakers Association. I’ve published 16 books and been literally all around the world as a professional speaker.

More important than any of that, in 1972, I heard Earl Nightingale on the radio. In 1974, I actually started selling Earl Nightingale’s recordings, door-to-door to businesses. In 1984, I was in San Diego, California, at my new home. I got a call in the office that day and it was the voice of Earl Nightingale himself. He said, “I’ve just read an article of yours that I think would make a good audio album. I publish those.” I said, “Believe me, Sir. I know.” He said, “Send it to me. Send me your audio album if you already have recorded this and maybe we’ll want to publish it.” To make a long story short, in 1984, I sent a little primitive audio album to Earl Nightingale. He said, “If you will re-record it, we will publish it.” Nightingale Conant and published that album “Relationship Strategies” by me and Dr. Tony Alessandra in 1984. In ’84 and ’85, it sold three and a half million dollars’ worth worldwide.

In 1974, I was selling Earl’s tapes. In 1984, he was selling mine. Oh yes! [Laughing] In other words, this equation works. I have not only applied it in my own life. I’ve seen this in the lives of hundreds of others, maybe thousands, over the years. In your case, 15 minutes a day, focused on the thing you most want to learn about. Just make a habit of managing your mindset more. That will begin the process to get you into your zone of optimum velocity.

There is an outfit out of Tulsa called Thrive 15. It’s kind of like lynda.com or some of those, or Khan Academy for kids’ education. Thrive15.com has online learning and I have been chosen as one of their mentors. I’ve recently recorded 110, little five, ten and in some cases fifteen-minute training sessions and learning modules. I arranged with them for you to get a 30-day free ride

[01:00:00]

of looking at those programs. They’ve got 1000 programs in there. But if you want to, just go to Thrive15.com/acorn and you get a 30 day access to the entire library of all the learning they’ve got there. I think you’ll really enjoy it. It’s entertaining as well as educational.

Also, I’ve put together some other things for you that are no cost items that bring you a lot of value. By the way, this afternoon, I’m going to San Diego and I’m speaking at a conference called Assessments24x7. It’s a business that provides online assessments on leadership, personality, sales skills, and things like that, tests. My colleague and best friend, Tony Alessandra, owns that company and produces all of those for the Ken Blanchard companies, for Human Resource Press, for University of Phoenix, for Brian Tracy, for lots of other organizations. Tony and I just co-authored with Jeffrey Gitomer, author of Sales Bible and Little Red Book of Selling a Sales IQ test that produces a 25 page report and it’s being released this afternoon at 4 p.m. in San Diego, but I’ve set it up with Tony’s business so that you could take it for free if you want to, or have one of your people take it. So, just use that link there and instead of paying $79 for it, you can produce your own report.

So, that’s my hand out so to speak, and what I would like you to do, is I’d like you to get the habit of everyday asking yourself, how would the person I’d like to be, do the things I’m about to do? By the way, I love that you’ve got the graphics, the cartoons outside. I love that you’re using that kind of graphic. This (slide) was the result of the seminar that I did recently in Toronto. A woman stood in the front of the room with bunch of paper on a huge chart and drew all of these as the notes to my speech, and the reason I’ve put these in here is just I thought you’d get a kick out of having that graphic in your pdf file to see the manifestation of all these ideas in creative ways.

Can I get John to come up here? John Bowen, would you join me here up please? When we’re talking about velocity, clearly this is a guy of epic high velocity. But his personality is very gracious, very gentlemanly. He’s a guy who you wouldn’t guess he was high velocity until you get around him and spend a little time studying what he does. Thank you Sir.

John:  Thank you, Jim.

Jim:  I have something for you. This is an acorn made of pewter. I’ve found a jeweler that makes these when I came out with the book, The Acorn Principle, I thought it’d be a really cool, little special gift. So, I usually carry one or two of these around with me and I usually don’t pre-determine who I’m going to give it to. I let each acorn find its home. But in this case, I knew before I left home. You are a man that would value the acorn.

John:  Yes.

Jim: The acorn, if you look at it, let me put it in your hand. It has three parts. It has a stem, a cap, and a seed.

John:  Okay.

Jim:  The stem represents the legacy that goes back to all the people that existed in your line before you that made you possible. Good, bad and ugly, all those influences came genetically to reality in you. The cap holds onto the seed until it’s ready to grow on its own. So, that represents your role models, your heroes, your parents or mentors, your guides, your coaches. Okay? And the seed, holds the potential that’s still within you but is not only your potential. It’s the potential of all the future generations you will touch as your seed passes through that stem into theirs. So, nurture your nature.

Jim:  Thank you. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

[Audience clapping]

John:  Great. One more time here. That was phenomenal.

[Audience clapping]

SPEECH CRITIQUE BY JOEL WELDON –

John:   After the break, we’re going to go over and Dr. Bob Neitherman and I are going to share with you what we took out the Jim’s presentation and I do have- Sometimes I got a lot of notes, he’s got a lot of actions there, some words of wisdom that we can’t take back but we have a tradition here. We started a little a year ago. Everybody remember Joel giving coaching to all of us.

[Audience clapping]

[01:05:00]

John:  Jim and I have a mutual friend Bill Bachrach and I said I need some really great speakers. I mean, they’re in a group that’s really good. I’ve reached out to a number of them and they’re phenomenal. Joel is going to share with us how we can be even better and I don’t know how he can do it for you Jim, but I’m going to let him go. [Laughs]

Joel: So first of all, let me explain the speaker enhancement that I do is not for Jim. These comments have nothing to do with the speaker. It have to do with you. So, what I like to do is put you as the Jim for today. This was your presentation. So, what can I give you that could make it even better than what you just got because you know from what he told you, 3,000 paid engagements, you can tell the kind of speaking skills that he has for the wonderful voice great content, good visuals? So, how do we make this even better?

Joel:  So, the title of this was, Your Success Velocity. Did everybody get that? The opening though, for the first 11 minutes were three stories about Rolls Royce, the resort and Bill Clinton and you told these stories with slides that didn’t have much to do with the story. So, one suggestion, when you’re telling a story, go to black, so all the focus was on you. Unless the graphic has something to do with the story because you tell a wonderful story. But go to black in doing that.

Next suggestion, present the premise and then prove it. Defining the terms, the best slide you had was at 26 minutes in my opinion. And on that slide it said, the zone of personal velocity. And on that slide, you showed at one end, the burn out and expressing the anxiety. Do you remember that slide? At the other end was boredom, empathy and depression. And then in the middle, you called it the flow. That’s what this message was about. How do you get in the flow? What if we move that up earlier, and used the stories to support that premise? Because the stories did apply but you had to go back to doing that. Then, he mentioned that my message will help you optimize your velocity, but until we know what that is, how do we use it? So, when you make a presentation, what is your premise? Put the premise out there, then use your stories, in illustrations to prove that premise. You then have a great customization, The CEG, going to the logo, talking about the intention of this room. That was all very applicable because we’ve all experienced that.

And then at that 51 minutes, the energy exploded in this room. Does anybody know what happened in 51 minutes? He told his personal story. We had more laughter, more energy and more engagement. How many felt that, that was a great story? It was a terrific story. Why wait 51 minutes to tell something that connects us to the speaker? When you are speaking, you’ve got to connect with your audience. And your story gave us that connection. I mean, you see somebody who looks so terrific but when he told you where he started. Did he read the Bible because he had nothing else to do, because he was a civil servant? It frames all of this. But you could have used the key word velocity. Tying it back to success velocity.

[01:10:00]

[End of transcription 01:10:00]

For more information contact Jim Cathcart or Cathcart Institute, Inc. at http://Cathcart.com