It was an honor to be on this fantastic podcast, Short Story Long. Chris “Drama” Pfaff was a star on the hit MTV Show, Rob & Big, and now has a VERY successful apparel and clothing line. His podcast is downloaded more than 500,000 times per month, making it one of the most popular ones on Apple Podcasts. You can listen to it here, watch the video above, and read the transcript below.
In the podcast on Short Story Long we discuss the following:
- Why understanding your patterns creates massive business breakthroughs
- How to eliminate your own blind spots and patterns that sabotage your success and your team’s success, and why it is the #1 way to maximize your performance and leadership over every else you can do
- Why leadership training and development is broken and doesn’t work
- Why your level of self-awareness is always higher than your social awareness, and that only 5% or less of people are high functioning on the self-awareness scale
- How to build an extraordinary team with no money, and outflank your competition (even companies 5x or 10X bigger than you).
- Why Google’s Project Aristotle is the secret to build a great team, holding effective brainstorming and elevating strategic thinking on a team- and company-level
- Why psychological safety is the foundation for all great teams even though no one really does it other than Google (and how you can do it for free.)
- And much more…
Jason Treu: At the end of the day, if we don’t have some accountability, you screwed.
Speaker 1: The hardest part is figuring out what you want to master.
Chris Pfaff: Just focus on your product.
Speaker 2: Can you tell somebody that they suck?
Chris Pfaff: You got to just go for it.
Speaker 3: This is exactly I want to do for a living.
Speaker 4: You can’t even tell somebody that their breath stick.
Chris Pfaff: Okay, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Short Story Long. We have a very special guest today. His name is Jason Treu. Jason, thanks for coming in.
Jason Treu: Hey, thanks for having me in the show today.
Chris Pfaff: Of course.
Jason Treu: Fun to fly out here today and …
Chris Pfaff: Did you fly out here just for this?
Jason Treu: I had some other things but …
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, we’ll say just for this.
Jason Treu: Just for this. Just for you.
Chris Pfaff: I feel special. Yeah.
Jason Treu: You’re so special.
Chris Pfaff: Yes. I’m really excited because you are an executive coach and I mean we’ll get into all of it, but I’m really interested in what you do and I think that for me, I’m 31 years old, I’ve had a business for close to 10 years now. I had always obviously heard about coaching and life coaching and executive coaching, all this different stuff and I will say that for a long time, I mean born and raised in Ohio, didn’t go to college and maybe my brain was a little turned off to these things, but I always thought it was just, I don’t know, not for me or didn’t really understand what it even was and whatever. It wasn’t until I actually did an interview with somebody who now is a really good friend of mine named Cavion who does a lot of life coaching type stuff.
Chris Pfaff: After his podcast, he said, “Hey man, that was so cool and there was so many people that listened to that. Let me give you a couple sessions for free.” I said, “All right, I’ll do it. I’ll answer whatever questions you asked me, I’ll listen to your advice.” I mean even just his perspective and his outside knowledge on my life and what I’m doing right and wrong was really, really useful and that …
Jason Treu: What did you learn?
Chris Pfaff: Huh, you want to know what I learned is I learned some basic things that I was doing like a lack of proper goal setting was the main thing and a lack of holding myself properly accountable. Now don’t get me wrong, he went over like everything from affirmations to just the mentality of be, do, have and all these deeper, right? Really what I took away from it was like, “Man you’re working really hard, you’re a relatively intelligent guy, but like what’s your goal, what’s your goal for the end of 2018 and are you waking up every single day and trying to fight towards that goal or are you doing 10 other things that are just presenting themselves that day and then you’re waking up six months later and wondering why you’re not happier or closer to where you thought you were going to be?”
Chris Pfaff: It’s really just clarifying that, carving that out, and then being accountable to another adult that I respected really changed my viewpoint and it got me. I mean I hate to say it, it got me waking up earlier, it got me working out with a trainer. It got me all those things because it was just the clarity to take a step back for a second and say what are you really doing, it’s that awareness. All that big intro is to say now I’m super excited about people like you and what you do. I’m really excited to have you on, not only learning your story, but then they’re like get and give some advice and insight. I just think people like you can help a lot of people, especially young people like my audience and I don’t know that everyone is as open to it as they should be.
Jason Treu: Yes because end of the day, your blind spots and the patterns you’ve been doing a little kid are the things that are holding you back the most. When you can start identifying those, you can take exponential leaps forward and if not at some point, you weight a sealing in a plateau and can’t go any further. Then what happens you also crater to your own life too because at some point being a bull in a China shop works to get a business so far, but then it stops, right?
Chris Pfaff: It’s so true man.
Jason Treu: There’s a people management and it’s building a culture, psychological safety with people, it’s building transparency, it’s caring. I mean there’s a lot of things that go in to doing it and end of the day, a successful person is a glorified people manager not only professionally but personally …
Chris Pfaff: So true.
Jason Treu: You’ll get the most out of people if you spend the time doing it because it’s like the old adage, right? It’s like you can fish for someone else, but if you teach them to fish and you can teach a whole business how to do that people, you can operate at 10, 15, 20 times where you’re currently at you can outflank the competition.
Chris Pfaff: It’s so true, and what blew my mind as my business started becoming successful, what blew my mind was the amount of time that I was spending managing personalities and feeling like a therapist and solving issues between people that didn’t like each other or you know what I’m saying? Or people that felt unsafe or …
Jason Treu: We’ll figure that out because I think it’s way easier than people think you just have to set up the dynamic different, like Bernie Brown and I’ve sent you that book, Braving The Wilderness. One of her things in the book is it’s hard to hate people up close, right? When you get to know people at a deeper level, you may not become best friends with them. You may not even become friends at them but you’ll like them and respect them at some level and in a working environment, you’ll get along with them much better because you have that deeper level, right? The problem with most working environments is you have people who dislike or hate each other, you have people who are neutral, then you have people you like and love.
Jason Treu: Well, it depends on the mix of people in that group because it can creator it, right? What happen is, is you’ll find the people that like and love do the best. They may not be the smartest, but they work together the most because they care and they’re invested in other success, right? It’s just like at outside of you, your best friends and the closest people, you’d do anything for them. When you walk out in the street with a stranger you don’t know, you’re not going to do the same thing.
Chris Pfaff: Nothing and it’s so insane too. I think what else it makes so much sense is a lot of times including my business but I’ve seen it happen time and time again, you start the business and you have this startup culture and this feeling and it feels like a bunch of friends and it feels like we’re all just passionately really chasing this same dream, and it’s not so much about financials or titles or all that stuff. A lot of times you have a lot of quick success and something magic happens and when you start to try to actually put in the talent and the structure and do things the right way, it falls apart or it gets really, really difficult because you’ve lost a lot of that caring for one another.
Chris Pfaff: Then you just think I remember once again when I was younger I thought man you can just hire talented people from other companies and your company will be best one, right? That’s how it works and it wasn’t until you see that the new guy has a problem with this and they don’t like the way this is happening and now this group has built an entire clique to rebel against that one. It becomes this thing that I didn’t realize.
Jason Treu: One of the things that I heard you point out is with Gerard Adams with Elite Daily. He went out and raised all that funding, but because he trusted the people and cared about it, even though he was headstrong and it getting and he was like I’m going to get this funding and build his business, he got talked out of it because he trusted the people with him and cared and just said wow, you’ve got some good points and stopped in the tracks and if we’re not on the same page, let’s just get out, right? I think that’s exactly what businesses need to do on a larger scale, right? When you can build that, then that happened, right? Because if he didn’t with that person, he would have still been trudging forward and who knows what would have happened, right?
Chris Pfaff: Mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative). That’s so true. The other thing is this I think that there’s something that happens with people and I’ve seen this happen a lot to people. I try to audit myself once a week to make sure that I’m not also becoming a victim of it and that is that like you got at it with the bull in the China shop reference and it’s like the people that need the help the most from people like you and from outside perspective and from awareness are the people that are obviously the least accepting of it or the least open to it, and people will just self-destruct. One of the things that I learned from working with my friend Cavion is I always compare it to this.
Chris Pfaff: I compared it to I worked for a long time out of anger or out of like I’m going to prove you wrong, right? I was the younger brother. When I moved here, I was on a TV show with my older cousin, I was the younger cousin. I was always the lesser, right? I was always this like I’m going to prove my place in this world and that was really effective and I got a lot done because of it but the problem was …
Jason Treu: You keep, yes.
Chris Pfaff: I did prove everyone wrong, I was successful and then I was exhausted. I was just over it and it was like okay so I proved everyone wrong and now I’m just tired and I don’t even know why I did this.
Jason Treu: Now what?
Chris Pfaff: It’s like I always compare it to like let’s say a running back in the NFL. Let’s just say all you learn is to mow people over. That probably works really well for a couple years. You’re mowing everyone down, you’re killing it, right? You’re doing so well. Eventually, you’re damaged, you’re hurt, you’re over it, you’re beat up, you know I’m saying?
Jason Treu: Yes.
Chris Pfaff: As opposed to the guys maybe took the longer better path who learned how to be take care of his body, take care of himself, learn the right routes, do things the right way, that guy’s going to have a long successful career.
Jason Treu: Or least transition in his head, right?
Chris Pfaff: Exactly.
Jason Treu: Because I think what people always mistake is that you can use negative emotions and go a long ways with them, right?
Chris Pfaff: Yeah and you need them.
Jason Treu: Yeah. I think it can’t be hopeful. It’s that you have to have a transition to something else, right? Because if not, what happens is you wake up one day and you just get tired.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah with CTE.
Jason Treu: Could you lose the hate, right?
Chris Pfaff: Yeah.
Jason Treu: You just lose the other emotions and they’re gone and you’ve got nothing to replace them with and you feel really empty because now you look back and thinking I don’t have anything positive to fill this, I have no direction, I’m just out of gas.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah. Here was the other problem is there’s always going to be someone to try to outdo, you’re never going to win that battle, right?
Jason Treu: Of course.
Chris Pfaff: It’s like you can go from in my case like younger brother, younger cousin, younger this, younger that. It’s every time you get bigger, there’s somebody else to put a target on their back and that’s a very just taxing not fulfilling way to work. You know what I mean? That was another thing I learned from my thing, but I just think gaining that awareness really changed I would say my life and my business and how I approach things. That’s where I have so much respect for people like you and what you do because you’re able to do that. You’re able to see it from a different point of view and really change people’s minds and I’m sure that you’ve seen it in action.
Jason Treu: Well, the thing is out of that is self-awareness brings you social awareness and your level of self-awareness is never more than social awareness. What happens when you looked inside yourselves and you found all these things, immediately then when you looked external, it opened up a whole other world for you because you took your self-awareness in the next level and then automatically you take your social awareness too. That just makes you a better leader, a better friend, a better everything, right?
Chris Pfaff: I mean I would say I’m not too much of like … I try to stay away from coming off too preachy or too whatever, but I think that one of the number one flaws that I see in young people trying to start businesses or trying to go down this path or anything really of high-level achievement is a lack of realistic vision of themselves, and whether it’s the work that they’ve really done or the knowledge that they really have on any given topic or that people tend to see themselves in a slanted view and sometimes give themselves too much credit, sometimes think that the opportunity is bigger than it really is, thinking that the market for something is bigger than it is.
Chris Pfaff: I think that once again, it’s just that’s what’s so cool is the more that you can teach these younger people how to be clear and what the things to even be clear are about and how to practice that self-awareness, the more chance they have of succeeding.
Jason Treu: It’s being humble and grateful, right? I mean I think as a CEO when you see it, you have to have unbridled positivity. I mean that’s just part of the fact …
Chris Pfaff: It’s hard.
Jason Treu: It’s hard?
Chris Pfaff: Yeah.
Jason Treu: The most successful people are very humble because they don’t care about the success for themselves, right? They don’t get caught up in the ego cycle Ryan Holiday’s ego is the enemy, right?
Jason Treu: They don’t get caught up in that cycle near as much as the other people do and that can be really dangerous because then you start feeling invincible and you start feeling like well I started this business and I did that, so I can do the next thing, which is not the truth because the next thing you’re doing is completely different, new variables, new time everything else but you’ll all your self into believing that you can do it because your ego is now taken over and you’ve not stayed humble, you’ve not stayed grateful, you’ve not done the little things that you did before because now you’ve got a little taste of power and all of a sudden, it’s going to your head.
Chris Pfaff: What blows my mind is the people that haven’t accomplished anything yet that still have that. I think it’s a protection mechanism, right? I think there are people that don’t and you would know better than I would, but I think that there are people … That’s why let me clarify what I’m saying all this. My main goal with all this with my podcast, I have a deep passion for just inspiring people to achieve better than what they thought they could, right? That’s why I’m going so hard on like what are people’s problems. I don’t mean to tear apart young people, but what I’m saying is I think that I see a lot of ego in people who have not accomplished anything and people who are too good to get in the trenches and do the dirty work and do those things haven’t even accomplished. It’s like this weird …
Jason Treu: You have to …
Chris Pfaff: Protection.
Jason Treu: When you don’t feel like you can go and do the menial stuff, I’m not doing a start-up and we have a bunch of interns, and I try to show them that I will do the same things they will, right? I put a spreadsheet together, I was looking up stuff the other day and put it in there and typed it in because I want to show my time and not any let more or less valuable than yours, right? I think that you have to train people that way in business and if you’re a leader, whether you’re 20 something or whatever, you’ve got to be able to do that because otherwise you forget the roots and don’t stay humble, don’t stay low, and don’t realize it like I mean this is what’s required in order to do it, right? It’s like you tell us … I mean I hear you say all the time …
Chris Pfaff: There’s no way around it.
Jason Treu: You got to go all-in and you got to believe and you got to be there and you can’t, and you lose touch with the business too if you get on your high horse and you refuse to go do some of the menial stuff. Now as you get bigger, you can’t do as much because your time, there’s an opportunity cost.
Chris Pfaff: Sure.
Jason Treu: You can’t be afraid and think it’s below you to do that.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, agreed. Let’s real quickly because this is what I do here go through your story because I want to know like your background. I know you’ve lived a lot of live, you went through this path, you know what I’m saying? You work to get here and I want to know it. Where did you grow up? Where were you born and raised?
Jason Treu: Well, I was born in Wausau, Wisconsin, which is a really small town in Northern Wisconsin and we didn’t stay there that long. I had a tumor when I was really young and almost died. I had to go to like a Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and my mom was a nurse anesthesiologist. She’s like one of the first ones and she still practices right now and her number is so low that it’s like funny, I tell us of my friends who actually are and they said what’s your mom’s like license number. It’s like she did it before they had nursing school but like …
Chris Pfaff: She goes through it, yeah.
Jason Treu: Yeah. She didn’t have to go to college. She’s had to go to like a nursing school and then they had some other program to teach you how to be like a nursing anesthesiologist on top of that, right? Then she just did that. She identified that and took me and at a pretty large size tumor on my stomach and …
Chris Pfaff: What age?
Jason Treu: I think it was like one or two, I mean …
Chris Pfaff: Jesus.
Jason Treu: Yeah. It was a pretty bad situation and they removed it and then we made our way to Chicago when I was really small. My mom had a lot of opportunities there and my mom was a really big extrovert and my dad I think was, but he was an engineer and just not as outgoing. I think my mom just took the reins and just said I’m going to live my life and …
Chris Pfaff: That’s cool.
Jason Treu: Took him along with it.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah. They divorced when you were young?
Jason Treu: Yeah, they divorced when I was in sixth grade. They didn’t really get along for a really long time, like they slept in different rooms and they were just two different people. He let his health go and I think mentally, he wasn’t all checked in, and they were just so different people. It’s just like night and day. I don’t really know how they even stayed together as long as they were, right? I like asked my mom or even my dad like how did you two ever get together because it made no logical, emotional or any sense to me even as a young kid at the time why this was going on and why it had gone on. They fought a lot too, so it was really …
Chris Pfaff: Not fun.
Jason Treu: A disturbing household, right? There was a time like my mom took a knife out of the drawer and I thought I didn’t know it. I got in between them so I got in between some of the fights and it just was like I was really glad when they’re getting divorce because I was like finally I’ll get some peace. That was the first word in my head like going through the whole thing …
Chris Pfaff: That was a relief more than a devastation?
Jason Treu: It was relief. Yeah. I didn’t even care. I was this like stop the madness because there’s nothing like trying to get in front of your parents at like midnight or 1 a.m. and then you have to go to school and you’re like …
Chris Pfaff: Yeah especially that young.
Jason Treu: Then you can’t make any sense of it. We don’t really have any close family friends, so there really wasn’t any outlet and then who are you going to talk to when you’re 10, 11, 12. I mean like you don’t even know how to process all that stuff and what really went on.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, Jesus. Did you have brothers and sisters?
Jason Treu: I didn’t.
Chris Pfaff: Just you?
Jason Treu: Just me.
Chris Pfaff: It was literally just you trying to figure all that shit out?
Jason Treu: Yeah.
Chris Pfaff: Jesus. What type of stuff were you into? What would you do for fun at that age or did you start to gravitate to passions or any of that stuff?
Jason Treu: I was outside a lot because my mom worked a lot and then growing up too, my mom had leukemia and it was really bad. She had to go that for quite a while and then my mom also because she didn’t go to college, they instituted a rule that she had to go back and get her degree. She had a fly from Chicago to Detroit like every month on top of dealing with leukemia and all the rest of this stuff and working probably 60 hours a week in a hospital to keep all this stuff going and my dad was just checked out, right? He just wasn’t really there. It was better to get out of my house and hang out with friends and do anything outdoors because one, I didn’t have to deal with my dad, right?
Jason Treu: Two, I didn’t deal with any stress or drama and then three, I was around people having fun and I was out in nature and doing stuff. I did stuff, we fish, we played baseball, basketball, anything that I could do to get out.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah. At that age like so through high school, you didn’t lock in on any dreams or were you going around your friends like giving them executive coaching lessons, “Hey listen Billy if you just would care for the team a little bit better, your softball team would perform better.” Did you at that age like did you start to wrap your head around what you think your career might be or anything like that or no?
Jason Treu: Just I dabbled in a lot of things I think in high school and just tried a bunch of things and nothing really caught fire, but I’m successful in some stuff. I tried out for a school play. I went to an all-boys Jesuit school, which is really different because they don’t talk about religion as much, it’s more about service. The motto in our school was being a man for others, so like my junior year, I went to Cabrini Green and was doing latchkey kids. I was working with a lot of different underprivileged kids and doing things, and the whole mantra all the time was help other people, serve other people, that’s your job. I was naturally curious, I was taking a lot of college prep stuff.
Jason Treu: My mom was really into education, so I had just a lot of work and studying to do on top of this so it was just hard to … For my mom doing well in school was a badge for her that she was doing a good job as a parent. She gauged that by like what I was doing.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, how interesting. Did she obviously beat the leukemia?
Jason Treu: Yeah, she did …
Chris Pfaff: That’s crazy.
Jason Treu: She’s really lucky because she worked at one of the biggest trauma hospitals and went to Sloan Kettering and got experimental drugs and a lot of things I think that eventually saved her. She wouldn’t had access because today, there’s waiting lists and stuff and back then, I mean when all these doctors, I mean you just get in and they just find a way, and you’re working at the biggest hospitals. They filmed my mom worked at the hospital Cook County where they filmed ER that TV show a long time ago and was there and saw that …
Chris Pfaff: That’s cool.
Jason Treu: Work at the second biggest trauma hospital with gunshots and knife wounds. My mom would tell me people coming in and blood squirting everywhere and just back in the old days where people would do surgeries and they didn’t need to, doctors would sign … I mean it’s just like you imagine healthcare back there and now the cost now and the stories my mom told me, it’s unreal what they did.
Chris Pfaff: I bet, I bet …
Jason Treu: The money they made too …
Chris Pfaff: It’s just like Chicago …
Jason Treu: The money they made too wasn’t like they were making crazy money more. I mean they were making a lot of money back then and doing a lot of things they shouldn’t have been doing, there’s a lot really.
Chris Pfaff: That’s just funny because anytime someone like talks about how crazy things are now, I’m sure there’s a lot of things that are absolutely crazy right now. You just think about those things, like how much we have evolved and like it was just a bit of a free-for-all in some places that being one of them.
Jason Treu: There’s no oversight, there’s no real trance … I mean there’s no transparency, right? A doctor comes in and says oh I did anesthesia work and my mom’s looking at this thing it wasn’t even in the room and charges someone $1400, $1500. I even remember that number too and I mean just like walking by, like just think of you’re walking by in the office and just sign something saying hell there’s another $1500 in my account that’s just going to go in there tomorrow, right?
Chris Pfaff: Lovely nice man. Then what about College? What about when college time came around, what sort of what’s going on then?
Jason Treu: I went to Indiana University because I had a lot of friends going to University of Illinois and everywhere else, and I just wanted to go somewhere my own. I just wanted to make it on my own and not just be held back by friends or doing anything else. I really loved school. It was a lot of fun and I really started to master socializing with people and meeting them and understanding how to build great relationships with people because in some ways, it was default because I didn’t have anyone. There, I was forced to do it, but because of all of that, eventually I got to run for student body treasurer and we won. We did this crazy election where I was with this ragtag group of people, some guys like way overweight.
Jason Treu: One of my really good friends from high school is a hippie and we had a woman who’s a lesbian and going against the straight-laced, more typical Bloomington. We ended up winning the election and then somehow the ballot boxes, there were numbers or something that weren’t adding up so we had to do a whole other redo election. I had spent all this time and we had like a 100 people involved in this thing and I had a rally all these people to do it all again because I mean I was like four months I’m just doing this pretty intensely staying up all night and stuff.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, that had to be fun. I mean that had to be a bit of a like breakthrough at that age of like a big success …
Jason Treu: It was …
Chris Pfaff: Gathering a team and …
Jason Treu: Because we did a lot of cool stuff. We had a 1% initiative that we got passed through the board of the school to hire more teachers that lower the student rate, but then like all administration what they did the following year after that after hiring more teachers, they cut the budget back by 1%. We did a lot of diversity stuff on campus too because there were some issues that we really got into and I thought like really made some pretty significant social change for just a bunch of kids that really we’re just figuring out as we’re going along against people who are administrators and had everything locked down and …
Chris Pfaff: That’s cool.
Jason Treu: You walk in these meetings with 10 people who faculty and reading books like this and you have to try to get influenced. You got to get buy-in, you got to do all this stuff with people, and you don’t even really have any clue how and no one shows you. You just have to figure out how to build relationships with people and do it well to get anything done and to advance any piece of an agenda that you want to do.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, that’s such an incredible learning experience. Did you ever think you might have a future in politics or no?
Jason Treu: No.
Chris Pfaff: At that age?
Jason Treu: I think all that stuff had happened, I was like I wasn’t really that interested. I mean in the back of my head a little bit, but I was like I don’t know if I really want to go down this road again. There was just a lot of work and a lot of headaches and just all these crazy things you have to deal with like all the time and I thought to myself like I just don’t know if I really want to get involved. A lot of the people I did deal with, I really didn’t like. It was just like trying to change like cement into something. It’s like so hard, literally they just chipped it away til there’s nothing there and I was like man, I don’t know if I want to do this my whole life with all of these other people.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, I don’t blame you. I can’t imagine that life, like the life of like a just true politician is brutal. Okay, go ahead.
Jason Treu: It was fun too because I got to meet a lot of people. I mean I was involved in my fraternity, I was in like everything. I took my parents out one night to bars, which I never have done ever then we walked around and it took us like almost all night to get from one side of the bar all the way around with all the people and my parents were like everyone in a campus is 36,000 people and I said like I guess they do know a lot of people and it was a …
Chris Pfaff: That’s a gift.
Jason Treu: Really it was, it was interesting, but again I go back to the fact that like I had to have these people in my life because I would have father-son golfing outings and my dad wouldn’t come down, so I’d be like the only person really without one in it and my fraternity was like a 100 people. I remember one time we were doing it and I was like all by myself. It’s like …
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, yeah, so you had to learn?
Jason Treu: You just had to cope and I didn’t really know any better at the time, but it definitely was hard I think later in life to build some closer relationships at some level because I don’t have any role models and you questioned everything when it got down to that level.
Chris Pfaff: That’s true, how interesting. What did you major in?
Jason Treu: Well, I majored in history and then I got a minor in econ, Spanish and religious studies.
Chris Pfaff: Got it. Then did you have a plan of what you were going to do with that combination or no?
Jason Treu: Honestly, I just love the teachers. I found teachers and I kept taking more and more classes with them. I took a graduate class in like public health or something and I loved the teacher. He was likes was a mentor for me. I had some idea that my mom always in my head told me be a doctor, be a lawyer because that’s what she thought I should do …
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, that’s the safe …
Jason Treu: Which is the safe bet, which is really not me, but I did it because I don’t want to disappoint my mom and all she had done, and she was really good I think it guilty me.
Chris Pfaff: Mom are good at that.
Jason Treu: They really are. When your mom is the driving force in your life and then I went back and I thought about it a few years ago, like all the driving forces in my life were women, my two grandmothers and my mom and that just was like I wanted to make them all happy and so I ended up going to law school and I thought about oh well I can do crisis communications. I went to Syracuse and I went to Newhouse because it’s the number one communication school when I was like okay we’ll just go and do that. Just I didn’t really even think would it make me happy, would I like it.
Jason Treu: I just didn’t really even consider that there was another way and I had no entrepreneurial influences because most of the time when I’m coaching people, one of the things that I noticed is that the people who are entrepreneurs early had some influence that was close to them or they basically said fuck you to the world, right?
Chris Pfaff: Yeah.
Jason Treu: You’ll find other variances, but you won’t really find many of them. It’s …
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, that make sense.
Jason Treu: It’s in either camp and I didn’t really have either one, so I just said okay well just law school seems like a good thing to do, let’s just go.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah. How long into that? Did you do you finish law school?
Jason Treu: I did.
Chris Pfaff: I guess what I’m wondering that is like when did it hit you that that isn’t what you wanted to do, was it before you finished? While you’re in law school, are you starting to feel like oh this isn’t connecting, I’m not passionate about this or was it after?
Jason Treu: Yeah, I did … One of the things that really hit me was I was interviewing in New York City and other places for jobs during my second year and I built great relationships with a third year law student. They told me all the questions and like everything to do. I had this thing like war game down and every step of the way, right? I had like a battle plan, I was a general and I had little things placed. I mean I knew everything, even some of the interview some of the people, I knew who they were, what they liked. I mean I had like books and sheets and like a playbook like Bill Belichick going and I was so prepared, it was unreal.
Jason Treu: They all said at the end asked some easy question and it was the only question that I didn’t ask because I was like oh an easy question, I mean I got all these covered, it got to be pretty simple. Well, every interview the last question I would ask is some version of are you happy and I didn’t realize at the time how naive that that question really is. Every interview and with 30 some interviews, it was the longest for me to ask the question for people to answer from a senior partner level down to an associate level. I could tell that they were either not telling the truth, confused, something, like something was really off because when enough people do the same thing, your brain starts to show you a pattern and all of a sudden, it was there’s something weird in these interviews, right?
Jason Treu: I was driving home and I thought oh my God like these people really don’t like what they’re doing, right? Then I had this epiphany, I said what makes me think of Michael Jordan that I can create a career that all these people can’t do, like there’s some really smart people. Then I thought to myself I’m not the best lawyer, I’m good, but I’m an extrovert, so me sitting in a room by myself all the time doing this is going to drive me crazy. A way that I’d have to make money and do well would be a rainmaker, right? I’d be the guy going out to 2, 3 in the morning and then I’d have to be doing stuff and then I’d be dead at 50, right?
Jason Treu: I’m probably really wealthy and doing well, but I wouldn’t be a great attorney but they couldn’t get rid of me because business development I would just have in the back of my hand because I could do this. I was like I saw my life flash before my eyes and I’m like this is not a recipe that I’m going to wake up and I’m going to want to be doing.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, that’s smart man. I mean even just to have that moment, that’s that awareness we’re talking about, you know what I mean? To have it that clear and track your whole life, I mean like now and there I am at 50 exhausted and dead, like man I need to reel this back in. What do you do? What was your correction? How did you adjust?
Jason Treu: Yeah. In one of the things in all the interviews I’ve heard you talk about is that everyone thinks you’re crazy and you get no confirmation, so people in the career service department try to talk me out of it. I didn’t have any support, none, zero. The thing that I loved is technology because I’m really curious and I was like I’m going to go out to Silicon Valley and I’m just going to find a way, and that’s what I did.
Chris Pfaff: That’s what you did.
Jason Treu: That’s what I did, right?
Chris Pfaff: How old were you at that point like 24?
Jason Treu: Yeah, like 24 and just made some calls and talked to some people and got into really the biggest and best technology, PR and marketing agency in Silicon Valley and just started out there and making less money than I would have made in a more expensive city. I was really passionate about it and it was something that I knew that I would love because I’ve always been a really curious person and I love to learn. Getting an environment like that were an agency with all these different clients and is back in 1970, 1980 where this whole thing’s taken off and you’re a part of all this stuff, it’s just like …
Chris Pfaff: It’s the energy …
Jason Treu: Unreal. I mean I’ve never been in an environment where there’s that level of energy …
Chris Pfaff: I bet.
Jason Treu: I don’t know if I will ever be in that place because it’s just insane, like literally energy could just light up the entire city 24/7.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, it’s insane. That’s why I love that when you feel even when we do stuff, like we’ll have meetings with I don’t know influencers or artists or rappers or whatever and like you just can feel when you’re in them, you got the right thing. When it’s someone or something that connects with what you’re doing and it’s just people are working and move in, and it just feels good and it’s the way I felt when I first moved to LA. LA was always my dream city to move to and I always say the same thing, I don’t think that I’ll ever feel that feeling again is when I first moved to LA because I was also super passionate about skateboarding and this is like the skateboard capital of the world.
Chris Pfaff: It’s just I find myself chasing that energy frequently, like trying to find it and oh that’s it, we got it because when you got it. I can only imagine that Silicon Valley in that time must have just been like …
Jason Treu: Just on fire …
Chris Pfaff: On fire.
Jason Treu: On fire everywhere and I got to work with great people like Steve Jobs at Pixar and won the business when it went over to Apple, the small little agency taking on everyone. I got to meet Mark Cuban. We worked on Yahoo when they bought him and just all these people and these seas that are well-known and famous. At that time, these people were successful but not legends like they are right now.
Jason Treu: I mean you don’t really know what you were experiencing and a part of because there was just a no way … I mean there was an insane amount of smart people year around like all the time that it’s hard to appreciate that especially at that age because you don’t have any experience to tell you that’s something magical to be in, but I look back and I think wow I went through my LinkedIn and some of the people or I’ll come across and when I’m like wow I worked with you and look what you’re doing now like that’s just …
Chris Pfaff: That’s insane. It’s like the stories of like Sunset Boulevard in like the music golden era with Janis Joplin and you’d walk down and the Roxy, there’d be this person and the Beatles and whatever. It’s crazy, it’s cool, really cool. What did that do to your … Me trying to wrap my head around it from the outside, you got a really good education, did a lot of hard work, but then you made this complete 180 into a totally different world, you feel that energy, you feel all this stuff going on, I’m guessing you’re loving it. What did that do to your perspective and your approach and what shaped the rest of your life at that point? How did that happen? How did that go?
Jason Treu: We went back to a lot of relationships because in the agency, I was the only person that didn’t have to report into anyone but the CEO of the company, and I wasn’t that. I was like a mid-level person but I had such great relationships with my clients and I had such a value that they were just like the VPS or like or anyone else, they’re like we don’t even need to talk to them and if you spend more time and get the CEO to come a little bit here in there, we’d be happy. I was managing a lot of business there and doing it all by myself and had a lot of autonomy, and it was great and they had great clients.
Jason Treu: Then they would also give me clients that were really mad with weekly meeting with green, yellow and red and I’d inherit the red clients and have to make them and slowly but surely I would. When you’re part of an agency and growing it and they made it seem like a family, you just did that and I didn’t really have a family, so in some ways it was a surrogate family for me, which was actually really negative because when it’s attached to money at some point leaving, I had a pretty bitter taste in my mouth.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, yeah it’s true. How does this transition into … Is that when you started realizing that you had a knack for team building and working with people or not yet not?
Jason Treu: Not, I said I went to some startups and nothing really got off the ground. I went with some really brilliant people but just the ideas and the funding and the timing, everything just started to like fall apart. Then I started to get disillusioned because I had going away party every week for a friend. I was just getting sick of being in this downturn where everything was just like … I mean you’re in such a pool of negativity, it’s just hard to exist on a daily basis when you have people committing suicide, you had people who just like liquidating everything and moving into some small little apartment.
Jason Treu: They had a story in the Wall Street Journal about a repo man going in and basically every day taking a new Lamborghini or Ferrari and breaking in and doing it and that was his job every day. He just had to get as many as he could because they were all over the place and people were living on stock options that they didn’t have and like it just creator. It just was like I wanted to get out and then I had a couple friends of mine whose parents just died weird ways, like one of them was running in an indoor track and a heart attack. I thought to myself like I hadn’t been around my mom in a really long time and it was hard to see her but maybe a couple times a year.
Jason Treu: I thought I need to move to Dallas because she had moved to Dallas for a couple years because at least if something happened, I did spend some time with her.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, yeah.
Jason Treu: I couldn’t get to Dallas, but I got to Austin and then one of my mentors I got a job signed sealed, was going in there and signing the paperwork, and he’s like I got a better job for you. He drove me to a startup company where they hired me that’s based in Dallas.
Chris Pfaff: Oh wow.
Jason Treu: That’s how I made it to Dallas.
Chris Pfaff: You got in to Dallas.
Jason Treu: It’s a software company in Montana and it was an interesting ride, you went public like the same month as Google and …
Chris Pfaff: That was a success?
Jason Treu: That was a success, right? I mean it was still hard times and it wasn’t near as much and again we had this weird thing where he had some reverse stock split and like it was the CEO in a lot of the company and it’s weird being in an organization where everyone was not happy about it because. That was like another piece, but it seemed like there’s always some disillusionment in this process and it was always just doing that and then starting back up and building these relationships. I started to figure out a few things, but it took me still probably several years later and then it wasn’t until I started more helping people because when I moved to Dallas, I didn’t know anyone.
Jason Treu: I started to get involved in charities and nonprofits, and just I didn’t know anyone so I started walking around the room and introducing strangers to other strangers, acting like I was the mayor and running it and I don’t even know and people believed it. Then pretty soon people meeting all these people and I got to be friends with them, but no one went back and said how did that person, right? I just said well, I know this person, I put people together. I think you do it all of a sudden like this magic happens and then I just realized at some point that I could help people really build social lives and I pitched an idea to someone who had an existing business out in LA, and we started to do something on the side as I was still working in Corporate America.
Jason Treu: I wanted to use something more in business. It wasn’t fulfilling enough just to do that alone, it was a start.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, yeah. What was that concept? What was that …
Jason Treu: How to build a social life in 30 days or less. I wrote a book on it. I mean I came up with it because I was like okay well why not have something great, you don’t really need to wait a long time, you just got to have a plan and the plan is you have to go meet people in groups because then you can get to know people at a much deeper easier level without the opportunity cost of going one on one. If you leverage groups, you can meet a lot of people and then meeting your best friends and people then is more of a number’s game.
Chris Pfaff: What’s that look like? What’s the epitome of a group atmosphere that’s good to get in? Let’s say you move to a new city and you’re looking for that sort of …
Jason Treu: I would go to a charity organization, meaning like in Dallas there’s like young Texans against cancer, American Heart Association has groups because you have successful people, that’s where they go because they’re trained from other successful people. They’re mobile, they’re young professionals, they’re doing well. When you’re in something like that, people are more giving and open to meet you, right? It’s not like you’re going out to a bar where people’s defenses are up, so you can meet everyone in the group easily and remember all those people have friends behind them too.
Jason Treu: What I started doing was I realized that a lot of those people were doing those other things and then I’d go to museum groups and then all of a sudden, I would do is I’d get people’s information, contact information and then I invite people on saying oh I’m getting a bunch of people together for happy hour, which in the beginning I had no one, right? I just said that because I figured okay someone’s got to show up, right? Then I had happy hours and they would so get five, 10, 15, 20 and then I started to throw charity stuff where I get 300, 400 people to come out. I just learned how to work the door and then I learned that when you walk in a room and like anyone throwing a party, this works so great.
Jason Treu: Those people walk in the door, if you introduce them to other people, they get out of their head, they had no social anxiety and they start to remember and recreate the happiest moments they’ve had in their life where they knew the entire room and act like they do, and then pretty soon you have a whole room of people operating at their social maximum. You can create a lot of energy and things special where people then want to come back and they don’t understand and essentially you did it for free, right? All you did was you were a gracious host and you just help people. I learned a lot of this stuff by reading some stuff here and there and then just some common sense.
Chris Pfaff: You just have a gift for it. I mean you did it since high school.
Jason Treu: Yeah, yeah.
Chris Pfaff: You just have a natural … I would say that’s one of my shortcomings, you know what I’m saying? I’m a relatively, like relatively I’d say anti … where the anti-social seems a little negative, but I stick to my small group and that’s about it. I just think one place where I would be a little bit more successful if nothing else is if I was better at remembering to and then following up and bringing people together. It’s a gift, it’s a gift and it’s also a learned skill that is really effective.
Jason Treu: It’s really effective for people because that’s where the greatest learning goes, that’s where … You meet great people yeah and the other thing about it too is it’s okay when you go and transition through life patterns and don’t have a lot of people with you because you have the belief that you can get to the next place, right? I remember Erica in the interview did said something like that, like you got to believe in yourself when no one else does. Well, it’s the same thing, right? You can transition people that aren’t coming with you because what I see a lot of people is you’ll see relationships get 70/30. That’s where a lot of people get bitter and they have all these bad breakups rather than just letting it go and saying that person is just happy where they’re at.
Jason Treu: It’s neither good nor bad, they just don’t want to go where I’m going to go, so I need to walk away from them and find new people.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, learning that is so important too. I think a lot of people will ride a bad relationship into the ground, you know what I mean?
Jason Treu: It negatively affects you in a big emotional way because if you have really, really close friends, breaking up with them is like a divorce of sorts. Now I’m never married and divorced, but my friends all tell me that when they’re going through it and afterwards and when I’ve interviewed people and spoke to them about this. You’ve got to find a way to transition out of those moments if you can rather than stay to the bitter end because there’s a lot of things skeletons that stick in your closet for a long time because of that.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah. I think also people just don’t realize how much effect that truly has on. I mean there’s that once again that saying that we’ve all heard on repeat that you’re the sum of the five people closest to you.
Jason Treu: It’s true.
Chris Pfaff: It’s so true and I think I learned that more as I get older and people don’t understand how true that is. I also think that people think that they’re strong enough to deal with everyone’s problems, right? If you have a friend that’s just a complainer or negative Nancy or whatever, you just think like oh well that’s not affecting me, like I can deal with that and you just don’t realize how much it truly does. I think that’s another lesson and people don’t take to it easily because they think that there’s value. Don’t get me wrong, for a certain select couple people and everyone’s life, it’s worth it to be there with them through thick and thin. I think that to build a social circle full of negative people is a terribly toxic idea and people don’t know how valuable that really is.
Jason Treu: Yeah, and I think you lose part of yourself trying to be Oprah every single day and every other people …
Chris Pfaff: So damn true.
Jason Treu: That you’re at. I mean like you have your own life to live and you’re not there trying to solve problems and they think now my friends are having problems, I realize having a lot of women in my life, it was told me listen, I’m not here for you to solve my problems and I think it’s a man you always have to remember that because otherwise you try to put your values and what you want other people. That rarely works unless they’re on the same wavelength you are.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah. Yeah, that’s so true. That’s the thing that you worked on with your friend from LA is writing that book and starting that thing?
Jason Treu: Yeah. I can’t wrote most of the book and had him just do it. It was more of like I wanted to put something out there and I done research and I had seen Keith Ferrazzi’s book and I liked it. I thought that there was a lot of good parts in Never Eat Alone, but I feel like there was just a lot of stories and I wanted to have a book that was just like a blueprint, right? I feel like a lot of times when people write books, they write all these stories because they feel like they need to give social proof to act as if they’re important enough to impress other people. I’m like if you want that, great, read 300 pages but really just need 75.
Jason Treu: I mean because you need 75% of a book to convince you to do it, that says a lot more about where you’re at and why it won’t be successful because you’re in the taking mode, you’re not in a giving mode.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s true. Is that what transitioned your life into this?
Jason Treu: It did because it opened up the door to see what was possible, right? I mean I put a glimpse in and I was like this just isn’t great, and then I started to connect the dots that every time in a company when I was doing technology stuff when I was working on a product launch, I was like knocking out of the park because I was dealing with all these outside people and bring them together and preparing. Then when I had to go back in the company and do the mundane things, I would drop and sold my performance and it was like riding this up and down. I realized that that wasn’t sustainable and it wasn’t something that I liked to do, so I had to find another way and the only thing that I didn’t know how to do enough was how to create behavioral change like super fast with people.
Jason Treu: A therapist would do it in a year, but I knew high-performing people wouldn’t do that so I started to … One of the things that I’ve been good at is finding people when they haven’t reached rockstar status, but they are and they don’t know they’re there yet and then been able to work with them for super cheap and learn and then take that and then move to the next level because going to law school, doing all this research, I’m not going to sit in the internet and just sit there and get lost and find the answers and put them together because I had to do it essentially most of my life high school and everything else just working in all these classes where it was a requirement of having to really press yourself and come up with this stuff and find nuggets, Middleton haystacks.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, that’s so cool. Did the book do well, the first book?
Jason Treu: Did all right. I mean we really didn’t know what we were doing with it and the other thing too is that the next book I wanted to write was more how to build great business relationships and putting something together. In the process of that book and going forward, I started to interview people, I started to ask a lot of questions, I started to get a lot more inquisitive successful people what they were doing, how they were going about it, how they were thinking about relationships, what they were saying, and then I put these things all together and kept testing it and throwing it out and saying would this work or what do you think about this to people all the time.
Jason Treu: It’s then I just fine-tune it and wrote the next book Social Wealth like over probably 13 or 14 months, but I knew that I had to find people to help me market it. I found some people that were doing really great stuff, but they had just started out. I knew they had hit on something because I had interviewed and talked to a lot of people who were trying to sell me these outrageous packages and these guys were just young and hungry and doing this. It was pretty fun and I got to leverage a lot of it. I didn’t even need the writing part of it, I just need the marketing part of it and made a lot of really genius ideas that help market the book. I got a lot of reviews early, I did stuff on YouTube.
Jason Treu: I mean there’s a lot of things that were nuanced small things that really helped me get out of the gates really strong without having any brand or really having anything that I could leverage on my own. I had to do a lot of his stuff grassroots and literally email people and do this stuff like one by one to get people to take any action and then they would, right? It was a slog in the beginning, right? Then just trying to figure all this stuff out because I also had try to want to do more executive coaching but the people that I had approached to try to learn from mentor, all were working on the external world and doing more things I thought was sexy.
Jason Treu: I was like I need the answer was inside, I hadn’t quite figured out completely, but I knew the answer was that if you’re broken on the inside or you feel like you are, how can this be good. All this is putting on a mask and taking money, right?
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you think there’s a lot of that in your world or in the coaching world or the …
Jason Treu: Oh yeah because you have to sit with people through really difficult times and not reach out to them and just let them sit in absolute discomfort, uncertainty, cry, and not tell them it’s going to be okay because you don’t know that it is, right? You don’t know when it’s going to get better. You can give them certainty saying hey if you do these things, you’re going to reach the other side because you’re going to reach a level of transparency and you’re going to dig so deep that you can’t help but get in a much better place and get out of your rock bottom moment. You don’t know how long it’s going to take, you don’t know what’s going to be required of someone in order to get that done, right?
Jason Treu: Initially when I meet with someone, like I’ve been a few people, I mean I’ve had a referral and I know that they have deep issues and they have to see a therapist, right? It’s not something that I can handle or do in a specialized person at that.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah. Man, how interesting. Okay, let me ask you this did the second book do much better than the first?
Jason Treu: Yeah, it sold like about it’s a little bit over 50,000 copies so far.
Chris Pfaff: That’s huge. Was there a moment when you felt like this part of your career in coaching and in this stuff that you really want to do like caught and you felt like oh I’m on to something or this book did really well or was it all just a slow gradual build?
Jason Treu: It was a slow gradual build I’d have with clients. I had one really successful client that went to the TED Conference and got some massive deals by doing exactly this. He basically just got some people together with someone else he knew and brought … We had flown in wine from Texas to Vancouver and we made a joke saying hey we had to bring along our own wine and then I had him have booze in his room at 2 a.m. in the morning so people would have somewhere to go because people want to talk at that point, right? We thought about all this stuff and now he’s on the board of TEDx and on XPrize with a small group at Tint. It was all that stuff and built up all this stuff and things really exploded and giving him a lot more opportunities over the last three years.
Jason Treu: I think when I saw that, I realized that it was all possible because I helped him initially in the inside so now when he walks in a room full of people, people are attracted to people’s vulnerability because courageous. He has no problem lying everything else out because he dealt with a lot of demons that he had along the way and if he or she had a lot of women do that too. It’s you have to go to that place and then when you stand in front of a room full of people, you’re uber confident because what you have to do and other people do too and other people see that vulnerability. You don’t have any armor on when you’re walking in that room and they know like man like that’s leadership, right?
Jason Treu: That’s someone who’s got their thing together whatever they’re doing, like I want a piece of that whatever it is. One of my clients, this CEO of a company Worldwide Express. He was working with the chairman. He’s like whatever you’re doing with him I want some of that and that was like literally the first thing. It was pretty funny at the time so I thought to myself but it was something that really helped me move forward was to be able to do that, but I had to learn how to sit with people and help them internally and put that together, and that was really hard to do.
Chris Pfaff: You deal was like I didn’t realize how deep the real personal issues that you’re dealing with.
Jason Treu: Oh they’re really deep. I mean it’s stuff for people that a client of mine has had abuse issues. He and his wife were in and out for 20 some years and just five marital therapists and I had them do some radical stuff like going to art therapy, abuse survivor, and all this stuff. I told them I said in six months if you do all this stuff, you will get back together with your wife and it will be the best marriage you’ve ever had. I didn’t even know this, I had to believe it more than him …
Chris Pfaff: You got to. Yeah.
Jason Treu: I had them do radical stuff like art therapy and painting kids because there really wasn’t any adults. He was in a big city yeah and he did all this stuff and literally almost six months today his whole family’s back together and happier than he’s ever been before and has convinced his wife to believe him and go through this path because she saw at some point that someone couldn’t be bullshitting it if like they were that committed because no one would do it.
Jason Treu: I was like you can’t force anything on her, you got a letter come in her own time and just keep communicating and eventually she’s going to get so curious that she’s going to want to go in and do more and more stuff that she knows it’s real, and you’re going to only have conversations with her you never did before because you’re going to piece all your life together and all the things that had happened. I think a lot of times that happens even in marital therapy, right? It’s like you can’t go in a room and have a conversation with someone else when you haven’t looked at the patterns that are holding you back blind spots, trauma and dealt with it on your own because that’s going to be the things you’re holding back, right?
Jason Treu: If you’re a poor listener growing up and you walk in a room and someone says listen, brute force rarely works, right? Nearest resolutions rarely work, right? It’s hard because there’s all these other we have six to seven unconscious messages a day going in our head and we’re aware 60 to 70, right? I mean like how are you ever going to get to the next level and that’s really what it comes down to, right? Then I realize that with all my clients and I’m like that’s why I tell every one of them, you’re getting exponential results, you’ll get massive ROI because when you look back in your life and you put it all together and understand why your parents were doing it, why you married someone, you came from an alcoholic family, why is it that your spouse has an alcoholic parent too.
Jason Treu: These are all patterns and it’s pattern recognition and then you don’t feel like you’re broken, you just connected the dots and realize you did what you did because this is the patterns and things that you’re attracted to, and now you just have to change the pattern you’ll get another outcome. If you don’t, you won’t be successful, so no matter what you do, it won’t work or you’ll just get incremental lift. That’s why most training in organizations is broke, right? I had a CEO who told me in a leadership problem, and I talked to his executive team people for five minutes each and they all said he doesn’t listen.
Jason Treu: Then I went back and asked questions and grew up in a family of six kids, got recognition for talking over one another, had other instances like that and I said you realize that you just don’t listen and here’s why and you realize that they’re telling you that feedback and if you don’t change, you’re going to lose them all and performance in this company is going to go down, you’re going to lose tens or hundreds of millions of dollars so what are you going to do.
Chris Pfaff: In that instance, do you prescribe like a solution? Do you say like here’s a practice of how to listen better?
Jason Treu: Yes. One of the things is when you’re in a meeting, right? This is for any senior leader, right? If you’re in a meeting with all people hear, you speak last. You never speak first because what happens is in then you’re going to complication bias, right? You need to listen.
Chris Pfaff: Explain what the confirmation bias is.
Jason Treu: Well, I mean basically what happens is, is that if you go out in a meeting and saying you know what I think we should go do more YouTube advertising. Well, everyone’s going to probably agree with you or try to get more information to do that because they don’t want to take you on unless they absolutely know that they have counter information and even then, they’ll be afraid because then you might not like them, get mad that you’re embarrassing in front of the group, right? People just confirm what you already know and then lead you to make a poor decision, right? I’ll have them do empathy exercises like actually sit there and say to yourself well how do you think the other person is thinking and feeling really, right?
Jason Treu: Then you can better answer what’s going on, right? If people do temperature checks where they go around the room and ask okay is it sunny outside for you, is it just cloudy or is it storming and why and give someone a minute because then if you’re in a meeting, you know everyone thinks and feels around the table and if you have an agenda to brainstorm and three of the people are checked out, you’ve now wasted that meeting and how much money. If you haven’t won as a leader, you know what’s going on with your people that you can manage it too, you can change the agenda and so you’re much more nimble and you get a lot more done.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah. Okay, this might be a stupid question for you, but this is something that is I don’t know I think that is more apparent after hearing you talk than I thought, but like would you say that professional success and personal I’ll say stability are like undeniably linked?
Jason Treu: They are. There are people that can compartmentalize them for a period of time …
Chris Pfaff: But never forever?
Jason Treu: But never forever because eventually the walls cave in.
Chris Pfaff: Yup, so that’s why you always try to track it back to a personal story habit fix adjustment, you’ve seen in your experience that it almost always connects back to something like that.
Jason Treu: Almost always something under 10 years old or some trauma that happened that’s pretty significant if it’s beyond that, right? It almost always does and you have to link it to that because then you’re going to find outcomes and then when you start explaining it to people, the understanding and the pattern that’s going on then allows people to change because if you don’t, they feel like they’re broke and when people feel like broke, they feel negative and they reach wrench and then they rebel, and they don’t embrace it because then they think that well there’s someone else out there that doesn’t have these problems, then I’m an impostor, right?
Chris Pfaff: Can we talk about that?
Jason Treu: Yeah, that’s …
Chris Pfaff: That’s the most common. I don’t know who wrote the article or what the hell ever, every one of the most common messages I get from my listeners, followers, whatever is that they’re suffering from impostor syndrome and how do they fix it.
Jason Treu: Everyone has it.
Chris Pfaff: That’s the thing that you wrote and I was like thank God …
Jason Treu: Every CEO I work with no matter how big of a company, no matter what they’ve done they’re all afraid that it’s going to fall apart at any moment and they’ve convinced themselves to link it to something that then is about their persona and who they are …
Chris Pfaff: Like what?
Jason Treu: Well, if they don’t deliver this or sell the company or get this revenue target, they’re going to let everyone down, they’re going to let their family down, right? Then it’s going to be a mark against them.
Chris Pfaff: Mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative). Everyone has it? Everyone has told you about it?
Jason Treu: There’s not a single person. The thing about it is is why people don’t hear it is that when CEO or an executive walks around, they’re unbridled positivity because they know that they have to be in that place. You look at that and you say well how can that be an imposter, look at that person, and they’re just good at telling everyone that because that they know they have to do that and they’re monitoring other people and they see that’s a necessity to do that and they’ve talked to other people and they all tell them that. Tony Soprano said in an episode like no one knows that it’s like to be the number one, it’s the loneliest place to be when you have to make every decision hinges on you, right?
Jason Treu: That’s a lot of pressure and that’s a lot of implosion that goes on and if you don’t have like sounding boards, you don’t have enough self-awareness, you don’t have support, right? Support not meaning but you need other people at your level because if you just have tell a stranger a story or someone who doesn’t get sitting in a chair like you like running the company, you’ve now have to tell them all these extra details, and that gets tiring and at some point I’m like I don’t want to do that. If you talk to someone else who’s running another business, they’re like oh drama I know all that, like I get it, like okay what’s what’s the real nugget here, right?
Jason Treu: You have to tell 10% of what’s going on, the other 90 you skip and then you get to the support, empathy, help, whatever you need, right? You need to have that because the isolation ends up killing you literally because loneliness rates in the United States are at 40%. Four out of every 10 people feel like they’re alone and it’s really negatively affecting our culture in a significant way, not just personally but also professionally and what people are able to do because now people are walking into work and that’s their social life.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah. I’m guilty of that.
Jason Treu: Right?
Chris Pfaff: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jason Treu: It’s never really been the case where it’s been at the level it is now.
Chris Pfaff: Well, can I ask you one thing before because I want to go down this road, but I just want to ask you one thing because I hear it so much. Let’s say I, 31-year-old owner of a clothing line or even 23 year olds starting a new business, feeling some success, is suffering from feeling like an impostor, what are some exercises or anything that we can do to manage it?
Jason Treu: One of the things you can take a look at is Bernie Brown talks about shame and I think a lot of ways this just mimics this because the silence and secrets lead to judgments which then leads you down the rabbit hole, and the key is you have to find trusted people that you can share this with, not everyone but trusted people, right? It could mean there’s a board member that you trust, it could mean you need to seek out other people that maybe like you and get to know them and you’d be able to form your own support group, right? You have to begin to share your stories with other people that have earned the right to hear them because otherwise you feel like you’re all alone, right? I mean that’s the purpose in having like even a coach with a lot of my clients, right?
Jason Treu: I know more about them than their own wives or husbands know because they can tell me without judgment and they know I’m here to help them and support them, and I’m not here to tell them what to do necessarily, right? Then they know that, right? Sometimes I think to myself like I’m their own chief of staff in a way. A lot of times my job like rolls into that because they’re sharing stuff with me because they can at least balance ideas or hear themselves think by talking about this, so then they can take the idea to the next level and have someone to talk to.
Jason Treu: I think you have to form these things and also if you don’t it can lead to delusional thinking, let your ego get in the way because there’s nothing to check it with someone else, it’s going to be able to tell you it that’s got no vested interest in the outcome, right? Like a CEO of the company, no one’s going to stand up there and tell him that he’s wrong, I will and I have no problem and that’s why I my clients I’ve got great relationships because they know if I tell them that I think they’re doing something wrong that I care and I want the best for them, not that I want to be right, right?
Chris Pfaff: It’s interesting because I can even feel it sometimes in my business and I have 40 employees, but I can feel when I’m having a conversation and people are agreeing with me because I’m the leader. I don’t even like looking at myself as like the boss or like you need to like respect me for no reason than because I say so and straighten up or I’ll fire you. I hate that and I just want to be one of the group, right? I mean I want to be the leader but I want us all to be working together.
Chris Pfaff: I can tell sometimes when I’m in meetings or whatever and people are agreeing with me because they’re scared to say it and I try so much to urge people to speak their minds and to speak clearly or freely without any judgment because I don’t care for you to all sit and tell me I’m wrong, but you can tell that people just won’t do it because you’re the boss. I’m trying to constantly figure out how to stop that and how to create a culture of free idea flow. Sure, I’ll still make the decision at the end of the day but I want to hear everyone’s opinion.
Jason Treu: Yeah. You can do something like a hackathon or something where you get everyone together and they come up with an idea to solve a problem in the business or add something and get 24 hours and put things together or you have a big event. You can do a triage and then people on a post-it note put one or two things they think that everyone could have done better and have them write it down so then they don’t know what you’re thinking or saying and then put it up, and then talk and then start with the most junior person in the room and go around, so there’s no get rid of the confirmation bias.
Jason Treu: You have to institute a lot more things and controls and things and processes in order to set that up and that also comes down to setting up more psychological safety inside of the group too where they feel like they can do that, and that’s usually a telltaling sign is when you’re feeling it so are they, and then you got to do something to try to change that because otherwise it’ll just keep going the same way because you can’t think it and make it different.
Chris Pfaff: Yup, yeah, so true.
Jason Treu: You know that, right? I mean
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, of course. It’s just a struggle. I see it. I try so hard to set that standard and to make that the culture here, but you just noticed that it’s difficult. I mean there’s some things that people that work here will say or do and they’re like oh yeah but you’re my boss so I can’t say that. I’m like what, I don’t even act that way, you know what I mean? I’m not even that type of leader and I hate because I think that that is nothing, nothing but a flaw. I think it does nothing but hurt your company for people to feel like they can’t freely say that they agree or disagree with something, whether you choose to go one way or another like I said is up to you, but you should be able to say it. You should be able to hear people’s real opinions at all times but people just don’t always act that way.
Jason Treu: Yeah.
Chris Pfaff: Okay, I want to make sure that we talk about this card game, and you have it.I’m excited to like answer some questions. Tell me where the idea for this card game came from.
Jason Treu: I wanted to find a way to help people build great businesses like Google and all the top companies you read on Forbes list without spending a dime. I thought to myself there has to be a way, right? Every great entrepreneur thinks at some point right there just has to be a way, right? The answer has to sit out there and it’s lying somewhere. I just don’t have enough of the data or research and I’m not connecting the dots. I just need to immerse myself in this and try to figure this out, right? I was like okay we’ll just do a TEDx speech and I’ll try this thing, and I’ll just dive in do research. Before I come up with any premise, I’m just going to go find some things and just brainstorm.
Jason Treu: I took like three months and just read stuff and nothing really hit me, and then I came across this research study by Professor Arthur Aaron and back in 1997, pre-social media. He was trying to find out how to make fast friends with people and build deep relationships like snapping your fingers and he played this question game and he got grad students and there were 54 grad students. They didn’t know each other, complete strangers and over the course of 45 minutes, they asked each other 36 questions and they became more revealing as they were going through it. Well, they measured at the end and 30% of the people rated the relationship they just created the complete stranger as the closest relationship in their life.
Chris Pfaff: That’s insane.
Jason Treu: One of the people that were doing in the original study got married and invited everyone to the wedding.
Chris Pfaff: They got married to someone they met there?
Jason Treu: Yeah. It led to a New York Times article where a woman went to a bar and started asking these questions and that’s where it got more famous. When I started to look at that article, I thought to myself when you read a research article, like it’s so dry, right? I try to read on some stuff, but I had to put in my head like who are the people and businesses and I’m like the reason that is, is that when you get to know deep personal information about people, you care about them because you can relate to the experience but also you relate in a deeper level to the emotion, right? Maybe it’s an emotion of loss, right? Doesn’t through the same loss, but if you did a deep loss and can relate to them, you immediately have a really close bond.
Jason Treu: It’s like I’m sure there are people that have gone out and met someone in five minutes and felt like they’ve known them their whole life
Chris Pfaff: Sure.
Jason Treu: Right?
Chris Pfaff: Yeah.
Jason Treu: Everyone’s had that experience sometime or another, right?
Chris Pfaff: Yeah.
Jason Treu: Well, why can’t you do that all the time? The issue is you’re not asking the right questions to get to that point, right? We don’t ask each other deep personal question.
Chris Pfaff: Why not? Too invasive, too vulnerable?
Jason Treu: It’s too invasive and also it’s just weird too, right? If all of a sudden I walked in the door and I said hey Chris if you had one year of your life to do over, which one would it be, you’d be like yeah get out of here like interview is over.
Chris Pfaff: Oh man, I love it. You’re right but I’m the type of person, I’d be like what, well shit, I guess, at 17.
Jason Treu: Most people, they get this thought in their head like … Because our brains are wired for survival, they’re not wired for happiness. The brain initially says why is that person asking me, why are they judging me, right? Then you get entrenched and you just stop asking deep questions, right? I mean even on the question level, I gave this game to some people who had been married for 20 some years and had been best friends because I had some friends say to me well if you know someone for a while, like what’s his game going to do for them. Every person I gave it to said it changed the relationship because they learned information they never known about that person because they never thought of asking those questions, right?
Chris Pfaff: Can I ask you this? Is there a way or like do you do this? Is there a way to apply that lesson learned to day to day life? Do you find yourself asking people deeper questions or is it just too weird or like can you do it outside of the game? You see what I’m saying? How can you …
Jason Treu: I think you have to just be much more inquisitive and start asking more questions of people and trying to get down to who they are and their experiences of things, and then I think you can draw them out. I’ve just naturally done that a lot and I think women do that a lot better than men do that in general, but I think you just have to do that with people and stop keeping things at a surface level because the meat in all the Meryl of life is down deep, right? That’s where the magic happens and the problem if you don’t do that, it just takes you way longer, right?
Chris Pfaff: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I guess if you’re talking about married couples who haven’t done it, sometimes people just never do it.
Jason Treu: They most never do it. I mean if you look through the questions here and you go give them to every single person that you’ve known, well you probably look the same, I barely ever even touch the surface of any of these things with all the people combined, let alone one, right? It’s just human nature because we just don’t do these things, but it is what builds great relationships outside of work and if you do that inside of work, now that’s where the magic happens for people too because end of the day, the other question I started asking people that I was coaching was going to people that they were managing.
Jason Treu: I was just curious to know why were people up at 3 in the morning and working really hard and I asked a bunch of questions they know light bulb went on and all of a sudden like something hit me, not in an interview. It was that like none of these people are talking about their own success. They’re more worried about pleasing the other person, so I started to put it together and I went back to some of the people and they didn’t want to disappoint the person that was their leader or they were reporting into because that person they knew cared about them, and that disappointment was much more of a motivation and of the day than anything else because a lot of disappointing them was more painful than lack of success or anything else.
Jason Treu: I bet if we went around here and talk to people who’ve been working here for a while , I’m almost positive that every single person would give me the same answer too. I know it’s hard for you to see it in your positions like …
Chris Pfaff: No, I know, I know, but how do you solve that?
Jason Treu: I think that …
Chris Pfaff: How do you work on it?
Jason Treu: Well, but I think that that’s the magic because then they know you care.
Chris Pfaff: Okay, so the way of the reaction to it is to double down and letting them know that you do actually care?
Jason Treu: Yeah.
Chris Pfaff: Not to … Yeah, yeah.
Jason Treu: The other thing about it is managing peoples and this happens all the time, managing people’s personal lives and it’s something if you’re a young entrepreneur and you’ve got a business, one of the biggest places where you’re going to lose money and productivity is when people’s personal lives go off the wheels and you don’t try to help them, right? I always say the rule my clients is that how much money that that person is producing in revenue or some metric is how much that you should intervene and try to help them, right? I talked to a CTO to a company, she was having really bad marital challenges and this is a huge huge, huge company.
Jason Treu: I asked her like on a scale of one to ten, how present are you on a day-to-day basis, said of six. It was six of a person who’s running all technology. Do you know how much money that’s costing? I was like how many people are intervening or asking questions, no one, right? Someone could have hired a divorce attorney, done everything, probably gotten her to release an eight, now you’re getting 20% lift at least, 30% whatever lift off of that. I mean it’s massive, right?
Jason Treu: You can’t like put your head in the scene and that’s what most … I mean it’s pretty rare when you see senior level manager getting that involved in people, but the requirement today is because that’s affecting your business and people are not separating this stuff out, so this is the kind of stuff you need to do so you get much more ingrained and in tune with what’s happening and then people also come to you with it, and then you can then help them or figure out what to do, right? It’s way different if it’s the CTO of a company whether it’s an admin, right? You have to know that that’s your job and if you think it’s not, you’ve just lost a boatload of problem.
Jason Treu: I bet if I went around this office like any other one if I wanted anyone and we looked at people over the last several years and people are saying like … They clocked a point when their personal lives weren’t really well, I bet we can 100% link it to the productivity, right?
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jason Treu: I mean you can’t stop it, but what you can do … You can’t just take someone who’s a six and make them a ten, but that’s not the point. You can bring them up and that’s going to make a significant lift in your bottom line.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah. Interesting. Okay, let me ask you this too, how do I play the game? If I were to play this game with my employees, let’s say I took it, I said I’m going to use this, how do I actually do it? Do I have everyone sit around and you put a pass out the cars out?
Jason Treu: Yeah.
Chris Pfaff: Everyone operationally …
Jason Treu: Only you’re passing, you just put them in the middle, right? I put two sets of cards for people because there are conversation starters, which are easier questions and their connection questions, which are much deeper ones. I put them that way because some people they may not want to dive in, but I encourage leaders and I can I wrote in the instructions. If you go with the connection question first, then you have to go first because you have to be vulnerable because when you’re vulnerable and leaned, you’re telling everyone else that it’s safe to share, right? Otherwise, it takes so long in this game because then someone eventually takes this. It messes up the flow, then what happens is just people go, right? You give two minutes or less to answer the question.
Jason Treu: You don’t need to get a diatribe about it and you just go around the room and anywhere between four to 15 people. If it’s more, it doesn’t work because it’s too many people. If you do them in separate groups and everyone knows you’re doing it, you still get to lift because people ask each other and then you get a lot of the goodwill and people know that it’s all going on, it spreads, like positivity they’ve done studies and that it just spreads around. Then that’s where the magic starts to happen, you get to learn people. I set another study was that if someone had a best friend or a good friend at work, there were seven times more productive and seven times more loyal, right? You don’t …
Chris Pfaff: Just one?
Jason Treu: Just one. You don’t really need a lot, right?
Chris Pfaff: Yeah.
Jason Treu: Then what happens to is in this game what you’ll find is people who dislike people they’ll least move it to neutral because they may say I still don’t want to be your friend, but I like you because I respect that you had to go through that or that moment is something I had to go through, so they’ll relate better to each other. What happens when people relate better to each other, they treat each other better, they communicate better, right? They collaborate, they practice better business skills, they’re better leaders, they’ll problem solver, they’ll be more invested in people’s success, right?
Jason Treu: I mean all that stuff, that’s like taking training that you’d tens of thousands of dollars for and essentially free because now you’re getting people to start operating towards their peak performance, towards optimal levels just because they get to know each other on a much deeper level and make hair, right? When you care about people, you want the best for them and that’s just human nature, right? You look at trust, the most important factor, trust is caring, right? If people know you care about, if they’re unreliable, they’re not sincere, people let that stuff go, but if they know they care, like they will never let that go, right? Then you look at Google, they looked at their top 180 teams, right?
Jason Treu: They were trying to find any pattern that they could there, they’re all the best researchers from all the Ivy League schools to come in and look at all the data because they were like we’re going to build the perfect team. Over three years and millions of dollars, they finally found out because someone was sitting in a group where the group manager said that they had like stage four cancer and they saw that group productivity go up, and they realized it was psychological safety. It’s the only factor was across all the groups, so much so with that project X that they had. They spend a billion dollars a year trying to make pond water and fuel.
Jason Treu: The first thing they do is psychological training, safety training with every single person before they do anything else because they’re like we have to do this and …
Chris Pfaff: It was essentially like this? Is that what you’re saying?
Jason Treu: Oh, I don’t know if it’s like this, but they do other things to build that in. This is just an easier way to do it.
Chris Pfaff: Well, I was trying to wrap my head around psychological safety, does that mean you feel safe to be vulnerable and …
Jason Treu: Yes.
Chris Pfaff: Within your team?
Jason Treu: Yeah, and what it means is that people in a deeper personal level, you’re able to raise controversial ideas and it’d be okay, and you’re able to ask questions without thinking like you’re a fool, right? The key thing there is people talk about creativity and doing brainstorming. I’m like unless you have psychological safety like why would you do a brain storming episode because the people in the room, you’re not getting the most out of them. You’ve got to create this and all it takes is just going around a room and playing it and even if you’re in a big company, just getting everyone to do this and spend time, or you can be an executive, you take these cards and I did people go out to lunch with people and just play it with them one on one and do other things.
Jason Treu: I mean it just starts a conversation where you get to know that, right?
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, yeah.
Jason Treu: I mean …
Chris Pfaff: Where do I get these if I’m listening and I want to …
Jason Treu: You just get cards against mundanity.com, just download it and it’s like cards …
Chris Pfaff: You just download and print them?
Jason Treu: Yeah.
Chris Pfaff: That’s so cool.
Jason Treu: I just print and cut them off, right? I mean it’s free and …
Chris Pfaff: They do it for free?
Jason Treu: Yeah. I just think so I was like I want people have access to something that they can just use and it can make a big difference. You could use these with friends too and family. I bet people use it with high school sports teams and do other stuff, right? It’s a galvanizing way to get people together quickly and bond and this deep research behind it, and it just makes a lot of sense. When you talk a lot of HR people and they’re spending all this money in training and onboarding, I’m like no one cares about then of the day, like no client of mine is sitting there saying boy HR did this for me, therefore now I’m more loyal the company two, three years in.
Jason Treu: I mean sure, could you do the process better? Yes, but what they’re thinking about in their head is who cares about me here, am I getting compensated appropriately and if I leave, what’s the cost to me both personally and professionally. They may not be saying personally and professionally but they’re thinking it, right?
Chris Pfaff: Yup. Okay, let’s play a couple.
Jason Treu: Okay.
Chris Pfaff: Where should I start?
Jason Treu: You can take any card. We’ll start with really …
Chris Pfaff: Okay, so I grabbed this.
Jason Treu: Yeah.
Chris Pfaff: I’m asking you?
Jason Treu: No, you answer it.
Chris Pfaff: Okay, what characteristic do you most admire in others, do you have it in yourself or do you have it yourself? I most admire … This is what I’ll say I most admire when people are able to socially like walk into a room and command everyone’s I almost want to say like affection. I mean that for in the sense of like you just walk in and you just seem likable, you just seem like you have the best intentions. You seem like you just wanted to be friendly, you know what I mean? That’s what I admire the most and I think that I admired the most because I actually don’t think that I have it. I think that I work on it and I think that in sometimes I get it right, but a lot of times I don’t.
Jason Treu: Yeah. I’d answer vulnerability when I can see a leader walk in front of a group of people and not have the answers, the courage to do that. I think that’s pretty magical because there’s not many people that are able to deliver bad news or say things that aren’t necessarily rosy or give people a wake-up call and give it with crystal clarity and feel it and know that there is emotion that they care and are present in that moment and it’s not bawling people out or blaming people or being negative. I think …
Chris Pfaff: It’s hard.
Jason Treu: I think that myself like I’ve never had to deliver anything like that and I’m always in the back of my head thinking, would I be able to ride to the occasion to do something at that level with people because you don’t see it that often and you don’t really have that many moments in your life where that is going to happen and you don’t have a do-over.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, so true. Okay, what’s next?
Jason Treu: Take one or you can just skip around this, take middle.
Chris Pfaff: Okay, take a middle random.
Jason Treu: Yeah.
Chris Pfaff: Okay. Fill in the blank, if you really knew me, you’d know … Hmm, I feel like I’m being repetitive, but I think it ties in. I think that if you really knew me, you know that in some social situations I actually feel much more like intimidated or overwhelmed then people would think. Sometimes also because I’m quiet or standoffish, people think that I’m an asshole or arrogant or whatever, but it’s actually the opposite. I actually may be intimidated in those situations, but because of my history and my time on TV and I do this podcast and all this stuff, yeah actually what’s going on in my head is I feel out of place or maybe like I don’t belong there but people see the opposite. How about you?
Jason Treu: I would say that people think that I don’t really have any walls and that I’ll share a lot with other people but I have that you go really far and then there’s that big wall that starts to come up and it’s really hard for me to get through that point because that’s like the tender underbelly of talking about my parents and really having those lack of relationships in my own life. To me, that’s really scary because and it brings me back to those moments. I’ve just gotten really good at letting people in super far more than they normally would get from other people, so they think that that’s the case. They just don’t see the wall because I pushed it back so far, but they don’t really know it’s there but it’s there as big as anyone else’s.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, that’s good. I already feel more connected. I already feel like we’re closer friends.
Jason Treu: Yes.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, I trust you. Okay, last one. Is there anything you consider absolutely unforgivable? Like anything at all in life? Oh man, I keep coming up with answers and then I have like a rebuttal, like that this is me trying to be Oprah. I don’t know, when I think of the worst thing … Okay definitely 100%, this can be anything in life that’s absolutely unforgivable?
Jason Treu: Yeah anything.
Chris Pfaff: I would say that like hurting especially sexually abusing a child is unforgivable because in my head I went to murder which but my Oprah answer was like understanding the different nuances of why something like that can happen. Hate crimes. A lot of times the person committing it is much more tortured than the damage that they’re doing. It’s way deeper, but I think that that abuse of a child is just unforgivable in my opinion. How about you?
Jason Treu: I would go to that place and then the other part of me is saying when you hold on that hate, you allow that other people person to control you and you ultimately have to let it go because otherwise and Oprah we mentioned that. I mean look at that, she’s a prime example of all that, right? I mean you can’t get to the next place if you have all of this hate and anger because it’s just controlling you moving forward, right? Now it’ll take the time it takes for you to move beyond that and that’s okay.
Jason Treu: Eventually, you have to otherwise it will define you because it will harden you and that will be who you are is that pain will lead everything and anyone coming your life is going to have to get through that, and do you really want to have that be the thing that holds you distance with other people, right? Even the most horrific things and obviously all the things that you mentioned right there, absolutely horrible, right?
Chris Pfaff: Yeah.
Jason Treu: Anything happened and painful, it’s just when I think longer-term, there has to be an endpoint because otherwise they win and you lose.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, man it’s so true. It’s like one of those things that like when you really go down the mental path, there is no end. There’s no positive end to holding on to any anger but man, it’s Oprah level expert to be able to let things like that go.
Jason Treu: It takes time and I think you have to reach breaking points. I mean there’s a lot that you have to do in order to get to that point, right?
Chris Pfaff: Yeah.
Jason Treu: I can’t imagine what it would be like for someone that have to go through and do that, but if you look at infinity and their whole life being that, I wouldn’t want them to ultimately be the victim forever in that situation because then they are.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, that’s so true. I’ve been very fortunate that I haven’t had to deal with like mega tragedy like that in my life or anyone like my family growing up really anything like that. I’ve met a lot of people who have and I just see the effect it has on people’s lives. There are some things that can happen to a person even not as severe as what I said, but that just changes, like you said changes the course of their entire life.
Jason Treu: Yeah. I mean I’ve seen more people in the last year on Facebook commit suicide and people with family and kids, and you think like those people what they have to go through at that point to get to the other side. I mean it’s pretty tragic, but even then they’re going to have to learn how to let it all go, otherwise it’s that’s going to be their story.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, that’s nice. Okay, well I get it. I definitely want to try the game with the team here because I get it. I feel real open.
Jason Treu: Yeah, and other people will too. You’ll learn stuff about them and they’ll learn things about each other. The key thing to is if they can find another go-to person or maybe start changing their perspective about people and thinking well I really don’t know everyone here, that can also change how they interact with people. I mean all these little subtle shifts go on when you start to … I mean we’ve all met people and we thought we’ve known that we’ve learned some information and we’re like wow I really didn’t know them or I didn’t really understand that and you learn something and then you’ve softened, right? Whatever it might be.
Chris Pfaff: That’s true. Almost every time. I’ve learned that almost every time in my life when I’ve been forced to know someone on that deeper level or what their intentions were or how they saw what they were doing that you thought was so offensive, almost every single time it leads to a stronger connection or empathy or something. You know I’m saying? People hardly ever wake up in the morning and set out of their front door to just mess with people. You know what I mean? Or to rub people the wrong way or to be an asshole. It’s because of their own issues that are causing these other things and once you can see that level of a person, it just opens it up so much more.
Jason Treu: Yeah, and you start seeing things. It’s even like cultural diversity and when I was my first year in Indiana, I had a roommate and I was the only person on my floor that had a black roommate. We did some stuff together and he’d invite me out the stuff and I’d be like the only white person among everyone else. On the first time, I thought about it a little bit, but after a while, I never even thought about it another time, right? I mean I’d be in a room full of people where they invite me on some party and I’m going to be the only person or one of the only people, I would never even think about it until told someone else one time asked me about something and then brought that up. I had to pause and think about it because it wasn’t even in my mindset, right?
Jason Treu: You just learned the people or people, it doesn’t really matter, but other people don’t because they see the difference because they’re really far apart, right? When you bring people together, you realize everyone’s just another person struggling and trying to do the best that they can with the life that they have, and we’re all on the boat together so we might as well try to help each other.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, and you mentioned I didn’t go into it, but the isolation issue and the suicide issues that it’s causing and I guess how serious is that? How much is it growing and how do you start to chip away at it? Even if you’re a listener and you’re like wait a minute am I being isolated, am I like …
Jason Treu: It’s feeling lonely, it’s not being alone.
Chris Pfaff: Got it.
Jason Treu: Right?
Chris Pfaff: That’s interesting because you would not necessarily be alone but feel lonely.
Jason Treu: Yes, that’s why I have to do stuff like this. You have to get support, you’ve got to be able to share, organizations. You need to get people in these situations that they don’t even realize, right? A game like this is great because it does all these performance issues brings people together, but they don’t know it because they’re playing a game, right? We’re like a kid, right? Well, what happens there is you’re doing all this work and basically then you take a loneliness out of the picture because you’re creating connection inside of the group but the problem is when you don’t is that they linked it to now proof that it’s loneliness is the same as food shelter and water, right? I mean …
Chris Pfaff: It’s literally that important.
Jason Treu: That important. Every day that you feel lonely is like smoking 15 cigarettes. I mean it’s going to kill you. The surgeon general, last surgeon general thought and I believe it’s true, it’s like it’s the number one health hazard for people the days is disconnection because of social media and feeling like we had people around and we really don’t. When you go out like in 1950, you were forced to go out and meet people in order to have a friend. Well, you had to build your social communication and emotional skill sets because that’s the only way you got to meet someone, just walking in full strangers but now you don’t. Those skill sets at our all timing up, right?
Jason Treu: Those exacerbate being lonely because then you don’t know how to get yourself out of the problem that you’re in and it cycles worse and worse and worse, right? It becomes a workplace performance and if you’re a 20 some year old person starting a business, you got to make sure everyone’s connected and together and working and not feeling isolated because otherwise, I mean you’re killing your own business.
Chris Pfaff: Mm-hmm (affirmative), that’s so important because the other thing that’s scary about it that I worry about young people is like if you smoke 15 cigarettes a day, you saw yourself physically smoke them, you feel the coffee, you smell like cigarettes, whatever, you eat bad food, you start to get fat. You noticed physical things loneliness especially if it’s as tricky as being able to be around people and still feel lonely is this imaginary thing. I think that young people are spending a lot of time on social media and you don’t think that you’re lonely because you’re seeing people and you’re watching stories and oh my God, so-and-so is out tonight in this and that, and you don’t even realize what you’re doing to yourself.
Chris Pfaff: I think that that’s the interesting thing about it and such the scary dangerous thing about it is you have to really sit and audit yourself and be like wait a minute is this something that I could potentially be suffering from, you know what I mean? Is this something I’m doing wrong and make corrections and explore and experiment without the physical proof that it’s happening.
Jason Treu: Because you won’t get it.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah.
Jason Treu: I mean that’s the problem. Any people who are in extroverts can go through. It’s like anyone can, right? I mean it depends on how you feel about yourself and what’s going on yeah and eventually everyone’s going to go through phases where they feel like this too because they’re going to get in trench, they’re going to have a lot of stress. I mean that’s life, right? You just can’t have it control you moving forward in your life every single day and you’ve got to find ways to get support to talk to people and do things and force yourself outside your comfort zone because once you’re lonely and feel like it, it’s easier and easier to keep in that place and it’s harder and harder to take a step forward because you don’t know how.
Jason Treu: Like I said, you don’t even know what and then it just is like it’s hard to give it a voice, right? Who do you tell and what’s going on, and that’s why I like I think as friends and stuff like that, we’ve got a step over the edges sometimes and we have to intrude and we have to do things because it’s too late, right? I mean I saw on Facebook this year, I mean I counted and there’s like 12 people that I knew, not knew, there are more associates. I mean like I barely knew that committed suicide …
Chris Pfaff: You haven’t met.
Jason Treu: Most I’ve ever seen, right? All the people at families and all the people at kids and all the people you think were successful, right? That it’s not the case, right? I think that’s the problem we’re living in this whole ESPN highlight reel and Facebook newsfeed, and it’s not real and it’s not sustainable for anyone. We’ve got a step in and help people as friends and other people and not let them languish or let them … If you see them withdrawing, there’s a reason. If you have a friend you’re going out with every week or every two weeks and it starts to be every month, you’ve got to ask yourself is that really because they were busy or is it because they could be lonely and with a 40% chance of being lonely, it’s better to step over the edge and do something because that can cause people some serious mental health and other issues, right?
Jason Treu: You don’t know and I’d rather be safe than sorry later on.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, yeah. That’s so interesting. Okay, here’s a big thing too that I just wonder is like it because I’m so fascinated because of being in my position and I think that a lot of my listeners are either in a similar position as me, meaning owning a business roughly my age or younger but have goals and are starting out, just starting. Really fascinated by this idea of it being of your work life and your ability to achieve and have a clear mind and do all these things is so connected to your internal battles, right?
Chris Pfaff: If you could take all the coaching that you’ve done of these already high-level people and having they almost fix them for lack of a better word, is there any starting like diagnosis or starting exercise that you could give a young person and say hey maybe just take a look at these things or do these exercises or make sure that these things are clear and in order first before you go down that path? Is that …
Jason Treu: Yeah. I think it’s to start with some behavior that you’d want to change, right? That’s the first thing is saying okay what I want to do, right? Then the next question I’d ask myself is what’s the external story I’m making up about that of why that I can’t fix that, right? Maybe if it’s a New Year’s resolution I want to lose weight just because it’s a simple one, right? That you don’t want to lose weight because you can’t do it because no one’s supporting you, right? Your family won’t give you time to go to the gym or whatever story it is that’s stopping you, right? What happens is you’ve got to understand that story because that’s controlling the behavior and if you …
Chris Pfaff: How do you find that story because you’re the one telling it?
Jason Treu: Well, you got to start asking yourself it doesn’t really even have to be the number one, it just has to be some stories that you’re making up because it starts the process of digging. You can’t really do this by yourself because the problem is the human mind keeps us from seeing all this out of fear because otherwise we’d be overwhelmed and we’d literally just jump off a building because we couldn’t handle it all, right? That’s why it’s so easy for you to go in a room and see someone else’s problem but you can’t see your own. Our brain is set up like this, right?
Chris Pfaff: So weird.
Jason Treu: Then when you start the story, the next thing is you ask yourself okay what negative emotions am I feeling when I’m going through this, and you just got to start writing it down and there’s no real wrong answer, but you start drawing a picture. I’ve got some stories that are top of mind. I have some emotions that I’m feeling, right? Then you start to ask yourself okay well what internal self-limiting beliefs do I have about that, right? Usually that’s like I’m not enough of something, right? I’m not smart enough or it’s the imposter one, who do I think I am, who do I think that I am that I can build this business, right? Because I feel like I’m not enough or not smart enough, let’s start, right?
Jason Treu: Then the last question is you’d ask yourself when’s the first time I felt like that because then you can at least start to get the pattern of what’s going on and then you work back up the stack from when the first time you felt it is saying okay well if I felt like I was good enough to start this business and I’m smart enough as in power, like what would that make me feel and then what limiting beliefs what I have to have the support that internally, like I am enough, I’m smart enough, right? Then what emotions what I have to have I’d had to feel confident and I have to feel passionate, I feel driven, and then what stories about the world, right? The world needs this.
Jason Treu: They want to support me, they want me to succeed, people want to join my business, right? Then you get to that behavior and then you can start to create some change, right? You can start to see and put that stuff together, but it’s hard by yourself because there’s always pieces that you end up missing, right? I’ve even asked some mentors and other people about like doing or product and I mean I’ve seen stuff out there. It’s so hard to get yourself to do that, right? It’s like I saw this interview with David Goggins and he’s amazing, right?
Chris Pfaff: He’s good.
Jason Treu: He talked about drivers as motivation in an accountability mirror, and what he talked about is you’re not going to get out when it’s 20 degrees below zero and run if you have motivation that’s fleeting. You have it if you have drive, if you figure it okay I’m going to do this for a reason, like he’s going to go do the adventure races to raise money for fallen soldier’s kids can go to college, right?
Chris Pfaff: Yup, yeah.
Jason Treu: The deeper question is what am I lacking in my life that makes me want to do this, and that’s the accountability mirror, right? You got to get to that level like what am I lacking that makes me want to do this, what am I lacking that makes me want to start that business, right? Be honest with yourself. I feel like I’m not enough, I feel like I have to prove to people. When you start doing that, you start finding the answers because then you get really honest and down deeper what’s going on and when you keep yourself at that level, you start finding more and more of the answers and you can start digging into it.
Jason Treu: It’s hard when people don’t want to do that level of work because they’re afraid of what they might uncover, and then they’re afraid to share it and the only neat they should share those things again with people they trust and care about, not with everyone because that’s not vulnerability, that’s having not boundaries, right? It’s like on Facebook when people say oh well I just got divorced and I have the worst husband, right?
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, the worst. Yeah, they just want sympathy.
Jason Treu: Like the worst husband, right? Yeah. That’s not having boundaries, that’s not vulnerability, right? That’s having verbal diarrhea.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, yeah it is.
Jason Treu: Right?
Chris Pfaff: I hate it. It’s common in like family Facebook’s, you know what I mean? The old family members love to like vent on Facebook.
Jason Treu: Yeah, and that’s going to actually hurt you yeah because that’s not training and that’s not getting the right inform … It’s not talking to people and getting the necessary support. That’s getting fake support from people that don’t exist, which leads to feeling lonely because a bunch of people on Facebook saying it’s going to be okay, well …
Chris Pfaff: Yeah and you think you solved it.
Jason Treu: Yeah.
Chris Pfaff: You think you’re feeling better.
Jason Treu: No one is, right?
Chris Pfaff: Yeah.
Jason Treu: All this is is now it’s not real because belonging requires human connection face-to-face, right? I mean you can’t get that over an electronic communication or over the phone talking Istanbul. You need it to be in person. It’s like when people ask you the question and say when’s the last time you built the best friend over the phone, right? Never, right? Even if you built a great relationship with someone on Skype, I’ve had people who’ve gotten together and met each other in person, I said it crystallizes when you met face to face. Maybe you did 99% of the work on Skype or the phone, but that 1% is the glue that made it all possible.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, yeah. It’s so true. It’s just so interesting. I feel like it’s a lot of issues that I hear a lot and a lot of things I wish there was something you could create where like an 18-year-old could team up with a buddy and make that buddy their life coach because of some set of rules that you implemented and taught them how to hold their friend accountable. I wish that existed because there is so much of it that I don’t think is doable alone and that accountability and that honesty …
Jason Treu: You have to have that, right?
Chris Pfaff: Yeah.
Jason Treu: I think that’s a requirement to get at what you need to do in your own life, and you have to realize that your level of self-awareness will never be greater than social awareness and as you’re a leader, right? No matter if you’re 20 some person building a business, that is going to make or break the business because you have to get execute a business that’s all three people might grow to 30 or 40. Well, now you have less control over the outcomes because you just have frontline leaders you’re interacting with, in the rest of the people you’re not.
Jason Treu: If your blind spots are big, you’re affecting the business in a negative way and can make a major impact on what goes on so you’ve got to be able to dig deep and do the work that’s required on a consistent basis and then it’s some check and balance that’s good. A lot of people don’t even have with board of directors, right? They even picked the wrong board of directors and the wrong skills and …
Chris Pfaff: Well, you learn to control the people around, I’ve also noticed that. I think that …
Jason Treu: Oh yes.
Chris Pfaff: You start to get some power and all of a sudden, you can control everyone around you and you do that on purpose subconsciously and you don’t associate with equals that you can go to and get their opinion about yourself, you know what I’m saying? Your team ends up being a bunch of people, your friends or your everything ends up becoming a bunch of people under you as opposed to people that you can go have a drink with and say hey man here’s what I’m dealing with, does this seem, okay?
Jason Treu: Yeah.
Chris Pfaff: Because that feels weak. It feels weak to go have a drink. Luckily for me I’ve had pretty good like mentors and other people my cousin’s older than me. I can go now because I don’t have any work related to those people and I can go say hey does this seem fishy to you. I’ll get their opinion and I haven’t had much of that like pride issue, but I see it a lot. I’ve seen myself almost do it. I’ve seen myself feel like having that instinct or going and doing that is a weak thing to do and it makes me not smart enough to be running this business because the other leaders probably don’t ask. You have those thoughts.
Jason Treu: Yeah, that’s why you need to get other people, right? I mean like even a bunch of guests in the show in other people, like something you could do is saying hey twice a year, you get together a handful of people and then make some short agenda and someone brings in their biggest challenge, brings in their highlight, their low-light and …
Chris Pfaff: That’s one thing that I … Sorry, I thought about it’s like trying to do a hybrid between like the connection building and like the guests that I’ve had on the thing, and just say twice a year I invite everyone to this thing and we just mess around, get to know each other, do some exercises.
Jason Treu: That works a lot for people because that what that is is that’s like a effective mastermind especially when you’re doing … Because you’ve got to control the people in it and have the right people in because a lot of the masterminds these days, it’s caught on to be like a cutesy term and people are charging a lot of money, and it’s not really serving people and it’s not really helping them because a lot of this is just getting support. It’s not necessarily doing something and maybe highlighting some stuff that you do do outside of it does that cost you a lot of capital and paying all those money to get together to do stuff for the most part. There are other ways that you can orchestrate and do these things.
Chris Pfaff: Yup, absolutely.
Jason Treu: We all need it because end of the day if we don’t have some accountability …
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, you’re screwed.
Jason Treu: Because everyone I talked to eventually … I mean I was listening to this podcast of Michael Gervais, he’s a sports in a psychologist and called Finding Mastery and I really liked it. Someone asked him a question on there about how can you find a way so athletes could continue to do better all the time and he said that’s a Holy Grail. He said it’s in the rock bottom moment that Michael Phelps got his last Olympics, if he didn’t have what he had happened, he likely would not have reached the pinnacle that he did, right? I think that’s the challenge in these rock bottom moments, right? The problem is today is people have a rock-bottom moment and they may get off it, but they never really solved it because they don’t seek out any help, right?
Jason Treu: They just power through it and they figured how to do it before and they just do the best they can, and then they just live like this, right?
Chris Pfaff: I think it just chips away at you.
Jason Treu: It does.
Chris Pfaff: I feel like those type of people’s a little bit of a bold claim, but I feel like those type of people that insist on powering through and trying to fight life, it just gets slowly, slowly, slowly chipped away at and the end of that story is usually not so great and it’s usually someone who’s exhausted and kind of throws in the towel, right?
Jason Treu: Yes.
Chris Pfaff: As opposed to the guy who is constantly getting input, learning from experiences, building, growing, they usually …
Jason Treu: Way up, right?
Chris Pfaff: Yeah.
Jason Treu: Because they’re way more successful but they’re way more fulfilled because the journey they’ve learned from the failure, they’ve taken in stride, they can look back on it, they’ve gotten support, they’ve thought of other people, they know they don’t have all the answers, they’re willing to go back to the drawing board and do whatever works necessary, and they just keep going up, right? They don’t take these falling off into the precipice, which is almost everyone does, right? I mean I see this with most executives and the cost is so high. When I’m in a business, one of the things I always can tell I can go like three, two, one off the cliff is that if you are like a CEO of a company and you know the next step is being the CEO, you really focused on that.
Jason Treu: If you get to that point and you don’t know the next point, you wake up one day and saying why did I want what I want because now I don’t know what I need next. You’ve got to constantly once you’re almost getting in the next hill have the next thing to climb, or at least say now that I’m here I know I need to figure this out and it’s okay that it’s unclear, but I’m going to do things like go to conferences, set up stuff, right? I feel at least like I’m making progress and I’m taking steps to figure out what that next point is because if not, almost everyone gets to that point, right?
Chris Pfaff: Yeah.
Jason Treu: I talked to accessible venture capital. I talked this guy Wayne Chang who’s a really successful angel investor out in Boston and he’s like in his early 30s and sold the company to Twitter and Google and all the rest of stuff. He said one point he’s woke up and he’s like what am I doing, right?
Chris Pfaff: Yeah.
Jason Treu: You think how …
Chris Pfaff: With all the success in the world.
Jason Treu: How could you ever think of it because unlimited success beyond that, but he didn’t know the next step wasn’t just selling and making more money. It had to be something beyond that and he reached the point where he got the money and that in the success, he didn’t have the next thing set up, and what happened, you’d fall off the cliff …
Chris Pfaff: You do.
Jason Treu: Right? I talked to him, it took him a year to do this and like it takes people a lot of time and all this money and pain and energy, so you have to monitor all this stuff. It’s a challenge, but you’ve got to start investing in yourself and had difficult conversations, not only with other people but yourself consistently. Otherwise, you’re goin to be paying some heavy prices and we’re all going to rock bottom moments, but what are you doing and what’s your plan once you get there.
Chris Pfaff: Mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative). That’s the only way out.
Jason Treu: It’s the only way out, right?
Chris Pfaff: Yeah.
Jason Treu: Well, we all can sit there for a little while …
Chris Pfaff: Sure.
Jason Treu: Because it’s difficult when you’re in that level of pain, but you then have to have a plan to get out of it yeah and if you don’t have a plan going in how you might get out of it, it’s going to take you way longer to figure that out.
Chris Pfaff: I mean you’re just going to sit until you do, that’s it, right? You’re just going to sit there until you say all right tomorrow I’m doing the first thing. I don’t know, I see it a lot.
Jason Treu: Yes.
Chris Pfaff: Okay, let me ask you this final question now and let’s get out in here because we’re cranking. You have lived an incredible life already, you’ve learned a lot, you’ve worked with a lot of really successful people, you’ve watched people fail, you’ve watched people succeed, you’ve seen a lot of shit, and you’ve given a lot of advice. If you could go back to the high school version of yourself and tell yourself one little gem to make it all a little easier, take the edge off maybe a lot that you wasted time worrying about or those things, what would you tell that younger version of yourself?
Jason Treu: I would give three piece advice. One would be to stay curious because that is one of the most important qualities and most undervalue. I would say two, you have to be vulnerable because that’s where true courage is found and if you want to get to it. I’d say the third one and I’ll steal from Gerard like is do you because I spent a lot of time trying to please a lot of other people because that’s all I had to do. It really led me on a road that wasn’t really helpful for a long time until I was … Even now, I think struggle with it because I had to do it for so long, it’s hard to unwind it when you …
Chris Pfaff: It’s hard.
Jason Treu: When you brainwashed yourself trillions of times in your head saying it.
Chris Pfaff: We’re all brainwashed that way I think. I think it’s very, very few exceptions, rare exceptions of people that are programmed not to think that way. I think we’re taught to impress teachers, coaches, friends, fit into circles, do this, do that, and that comes from like saying okay well what is cool, what is pretty, what is smart, you know what I’m saying? You got to fit that. Another thing that I love I just wanted to say it because I just finished Daring Greatly by Bernie Brown and the one thing that she said in there that I loved was putting the value in being courageous, not in being right or the smartest or the best.
Chris Pfaff: You go home at night saying how courageous was I today, how many uncomfortable situations that I put myself in, how much did I force myself to grow, not was I the smartest in the room, was I the best, did I know it all because you’re going to get this shit kicked out of you every time you judge something by that. If you judge by courage, every day can be a win.
Jason Treu: Yeah. She’s brilliant.
Chris Pfaff: She’s great.
Jason Treu: I mean that’s an author I give every client the books to. She is the best business and leadership author out there, period, everyone else and I read a lot and I think there’s a lot of great a material out there, but that materially is priceless. You want to be an extraordinary leader of your time and whatever you do, you do what she does, it’s almost impossible for you to not yeah because again you take an average bunch of people together who are courageous, they will move mountains. You can take the most brilliant people and they won’t, right?
Chris Pfaff: That’s so true. I can’t wait to read that book that you got.
Jason Treu: Will be coming …
Chris Pfaff: What’s the one you said? What’s it called?
Jason Treu: It’s Braving The Wilderness, her new book.
Chris Pfaff: Got it.
Jason Treu: It’ll be coming here Wednesday I think.
Chris Pfaff: It’s so good. This is you being good at this …
Jason Treu: Thursday.
Chris Pfaff: I need to get better at this. You know what else I would like you to send me if you have the time, is send me a list of good books that I should read for upping my social and gift-giving and being better at that. John Rouen was I told you one of them. His book Giftology is the best book out there and many people call him like the giftology God or I made that up maybe, but it’s something. I mean his book is it’s riddled with great things that he did and it’s rooted in giving, right? It’s just giving gifts for people that are much or targeted doing stuff that would mean something to them, so you just have to find out …
Jason Treu: Go looking for them …
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, you’ve got to find out what those things are and when you can and then it much more personal and if you’re doing a business betting, especially for sales and business development and stuff like this because one of the guys Wayne Chang that I interviewed in a podcast that I haven’t released, I looked on his Twitter and the pin he has on the top is a commencement speech they got because he never graduated from college. What I did is I took his commencement speech and I put it in like a frame that I gave him like the whole thing and put it out …
Jason Treu: So cool.
Chris Pfaff: I just like go like thanking for his time and it’s someone that I probably just started on a podcast. It was home run that I hit that I even got him to do it and I gave a couple other people some really like interesting things that I did a lot of research and sometimes you can’t find stuff, right? When you can, they’re really touched that you spend the time doing it and they’re really …
Jason Treu: It’s so good.
Chris Pfaff: That’s the book, so there’s also … I’ll send you other book.
Jason Treu: Done. Anything to tell people where to go? Are you launching a podcast soon, book?
Chris Pfaff: It’s on, called Executive Break. There’s like 10 episodes up already, that’s had a bunch of it.
Jason Treu: Up on iTunes and everything?
Chris Pfaff: Yeah in iTunes, yeah. Then you can go to jasontreu.com and learn about coaching whatever. Then the cards against mundanity, it’s redirect and you can just download the game for free. There’s instructions on there and I just put a new blogpost up. I interviewed a lot of people about like the five best team building games and activities that I saw that I put something together in my own head and there’s a couple fun ones in there. One of them I found was get everyone in the group to do like an air guitar or lip sync and then say why they got together and just organize people randomly and then play from anyone and just do something really fun …
Jason Treu: That’s so cool.
Chris Pfaff: Because it bonds a couple the people together in different way, and there’s a reason they pick this like … They share with everyone and then people think about the story of maybe that song for them, right?
Jason Treu: Yeah.
Chris Pfaff: Then that connects it on another level and I found people doing it, right? I had another one that, and I’ve use this and it’s work exceptionally well and you might want to use a staff meeting …
Jason Treu: Yeah, please.
Chris Pfaff: If you have everyone bring in a picture that means something of them, right?
Jason Treu: Could be anything?
Chris Pfaff: Whether anything, give them 30 seconds to explain why they picked it and what it means to them and go around the room. It’s crazy great.
Jason Treu: It’s amazing what even that’ll do
Chris Pfaff: Oh, it will because everyone now can relate to stuff, right? I’ve had clients do it and everyone after a while starts to love the meeting just for that, right? It changes the whole dynamic of going in and I didn’t even realize this but the surgeon general, he was in Harvard Business Review actually did that for his staff and it turned the entire meanings around it and got way more productive. When I read it, I was like wow that’s pretty cool, like you do something and someone else smart does and don’t even really realize it doing it.
Chris Pfaff: Those type small little things to do really draw people out and find ways to connect and belong and you don’t need to find a lot of hooks, and then it makes your job as the owner of the business or as an executive in the business way easier because then people care more and they’ll do a lot more because they can’t have this business not be successful, right?
Jason Treu: Yeah.
Chris Pfaff: Then they’ll do anything for it and that’s something that will make a fundamental difference if you’re someone in your 20s or 30s or whatever, I mean people that love working there because they love you and the people because that sense of belonging is so great. It’s harder lure people away and all this stuff, and then we feel like there’s your purpose, right?
Jason Treu: Yeah. Stop looking for the purpose, the purpose is every person around that room.
Chris Pfaff: Yeah. It’s so good. All right man, you killed it. Thank you so much for this, thanks for all the advice, thanks for everything, this was great.
Jason Treu: Hey thanks for having me on, I love this.
Chris Pfaff: Of course, we did it.
Jason Treu: We did it.
Chris Pfaff: There it is. All right, thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed it. Like I said, obviously I didn’t know Jason at all getting into that and I’m relatively new on executive coaching and that thing, but he did a really good job at sitting in and not only telling a story, but walking me through some of the things that he does and how it works. I was really excited about it, so hope you gained a little bit of knowledge from that episode. I appreciate all of you guys, I appreciate you listening, I appreciate you spreading the word. Please continue to share on social media, tell your friends, post me on your stories, whatever you can, every little bit helps. Youngandreckless.com. Use the promo code SSL, you get 40% off. Leave me some positive feedback.
Chris Pfaff: My newsletter is ynr.la/drama and youtube.com/dramadramas where I put all my video content. Thank you guys, you’re the best audience ever. I’ll be back guys next week. Guys if you like that and you want to see more like it as well as vlogs, other web series, and all the random stuff that I’m doing here on YouTube, don’t forget to click that subscribe button. You won’t regret it, I promise.
