1715: Sunday Podcast: The Power of Personal Touch

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Quick break. Don't worry. We'll be right back to the podcast. I want to talk to you about destination motivation. These are the guys who offer vacation vouchers for seven-day cruises or resort vacations that you can either use as a promo and advertising to drive in more leads or in your sales presentations to boost your closing ratios and virtually eliminate cancellations. Think about running an ad that says something like, hey, you don't have to choose between going on vacation and remodeling your bathroom or windows or replacing your roof, whatever it is. You can now do both. Or if you're in the home, hey, Mr. Mrs. Johnson PERSON, if you buy today, we'll send you to Cancun or Branson or Hawaii or on a cruise to the Bahamas GPE,wherever it is the heck you want to go. I mean, this is a game changer. And no, these are not those stupid BS vacation vouchers from 20 years ago where your customers are forced to sit through a brutal timeshare presentation. Nope, none of that. These vacations are the real deal.To learn more, go to increase our sales.com. That's increase our sales.com. Now back to the pod.

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Welcome to the Level 10 contractor Daily Podcast with Rich Harsha PERSON.

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Your daily dose of insights, information, and inspiration to grow your remodeling or home services company to $10 million and beyond.

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Here's your host, Stu Gray PERSON.

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Remember the old TV commercials for AT&T back in the day? Reach out, reach out, and touch someone? Well, that's the theme of today's episode. We are reaching into the archives today, and this comes from a webinar Rich did back in 2010, what he called his Personal Edge ORG series,and geared then like now on personal development topics. You'll hear Rich PERSON in his trademark storytelling style discuss the importance of getting out of your comfort zone to get to know people so that you can have an impact on their lives, and vice versa.

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The topic today is called Making the Connection WORK_OF_ART. And I'll tell you why I decided to do this call. I had an experience about, I guess, maybe two months ago now. It was kind of an ongoing experience, but it culminated a couple months ago. And the general topic of the call, or let me just outline the theme, what we're trying to communicate here and naturally lay out a theme,and it's tantamount to platitude, but we'll get into a lot of detail here. But here's what the idea is that by making efforts to connect with other people, we can enrich other people's lives and our own, which is kind of generic, and why would I want to listen to that? But let me tell you what happened. I had this interesting experience about, like I said, a couple months ago. And in my church, I am assigned to teach Sunday school to the kids who are 15 and turning 16 during a given year.So I just got a brand new group of students in January that are 15 that will be turning 16. But I had my previous group last year, and one of the kids in that class happened to be my own son. And there was only about, I think about five or six kids in the class, depending. Some would show up and not show up on given weeks. But there was about four boys that were real consistent coming to that class, and there was just one girl.And this girl was a little bit of, I don't know, how would you call this, maybe a little bit of an outsider. She was not super engaged with the group, and she was a girl that had in her personal life some struggles that were unique to her. They weren't common struggles that some of these other kids in the class had. These other kids tended to be a group that hung out together, did things together,mutually encouraged each other, had very similar standards and beliefs. And this girl, while being in this group and sharing many of those same standards, was falling into some problems. And she was, her base group of friends were from school, and her school friends were not into super productive, wholesome, moral things. They were into things that were bad.And she had a couple of friends that were downright horrible influences on her in terms of, in terms of alcohol, use, drugs, sexual behavior, things like that. Not saying that she was massively into that, but her friends were. And it influenced her to certain extent in a bad way. So this is the setting for this story. There's this girl who's kind of a little bit disconnected. Within the church, her older sister had gone way off the deep end, was out doing weird things. Her parents were divorced.She never knew her death. She was kind of a troubled situation. Not the worst you've ever seen, but anyway, here's this girl. So this is the setting for the story. So I'm encouraging them in this class over the course of several months. I'm encouraging particularly these boys. You need to include this gal in some of the things that you do outsideof regular church activities. If you guys are getting together to watch a movie on a Friday night, why don't you give her a call? And all of this is being done with her right there, and her sort of being of the attitude of, yeah, you know, that would be pretty neat. And they were starting to come along on this and, you know, it was kind of a pain and this girl and we really want, you know, we don't really get along with her in a social way as much as we might some of our other friends.But they started making some efforts and they started having her come over and started doing some things. And she related to me that she had an opportunity to go out with some of her other friends and they were getting into some pretty, you know, not good things. And right then, one of these boys in the class had called her and said, hey, why don't you come hang out with us?And she did. Well, here's what was interesting about this particular situation. Right before I went to the class, as I was walking to the class, I ran into a gal who was a member of a different congregation that just happened to meet in that same building. And this gal is my age, and I knew her growing up. We grew up probably about a half hour away from here, and we were not in the same congregation back in high school, but we wereclose enough that we saw her, I knew her, and she was, we were friends back then. I wouldn't consider her to be a really good friend of mine, but she was a friend and I knew her and so forth. Anyway, here's what was interesting. As I was going to my class, I met up with this gal that was my age, and I sat down and I talkedto her for a few minutes, and her brother happened to be there and I knew him a little bit too and just kind of catching up. How's things going and she had this beautiful family and she was busy with all these different things and her life was going well. And I remember thinking back going, wow, I remember in high school, this was a girl that we knew, but we never really embraced.We never really gave her, we being my set of friends, we never really connected with her. And she started moving in some of those paths that were not so good. And sure enough, by the time she was a senior in high school, by not being connected with, quote, unquote, the right people, she ended up connecting with the wrong people, and she got pregnant. And she had a baby when she was a senior in high school, and she ended up, I think, giving that baby up for adoption.I can't even remember exactly what happened. But naturally, as you can imagine, very stressful situation for her family, for her. I just had to think, how much did this affect her future life? And now, 20 years later, it's ended up that she's got a good family and things. But I wonder what kind of pain that's caused her. And I was talking to these kids in that Sunday school class.And I said, let me tell you who I just ran into. And they don't know her. And then I didn't mention her by name. And I told her this story. And I said, guys, this is the power of the connection. If we make an effort to connect particularly with those people who are around us already.Now, not exclusively with those that are around us already. We're going to talk about getting a little bit outside of our comfort zone here. But if we can make an effort to connect, I think there's an opportunity to have a positive influence on each other and ultimately on ourselves. And I've known this gal for 20 years, and not until that day did I really feel the regret of not having made any kind of effort to connect back in the 1980s. So that's a little bit of a setup for this call.And as we transition to the next part of this, I want to tell you another story. And this one is from 1973. And my family was in Texas GPE, and we moved from Texas where my parents had lived for a while to Colorado GPE, where my dad was moving to take advantage of some business opportunities. He was in the real estate business at the time. And we moved into Denver in the dead of the winter. And I was just a little kid. I was only about four years old when we moved there. And I remember just this hazy memory of just huge snow drifts. And we moved in the middle of the winter. And it was awful because there was just this very foreign climate to us, Texans.And here's an interesting thing that happened. As the spring came and things thought out, one day my dad was out in the yard, and he was doing some routine yard work, no big deal, whatever. And this gal came riding by on her bicycle, and she stopped. And she said, hey, you're the guy that just moved in. Isn't that right? Didn't you just move in?This was the house that was for sale. You just moved in. And he said, yeah, you're the guy that just moved in. Isn't that right? Didn't you just move in? This was the house that was for sale. You just moved in. And he said, yeah, we just moved here. Where did you move from? Well, we came from Dallas.Oh, really? So what are you doing here? Well, we've got, you know, business that we're running and we're doing these kinds of things. Interesting. So do you have any kids? Yeah, I do.I have two boys. How old are they? Well, my oldest son is seven, or eight, and my youngest son is four? Interesting, so is your oldest son? He's eight. Is he in Cub Scouts ORG? Does he do stuff like that? Well, no. We just got here. He's never done anything like that before. Oh, well, you know, we've got a Cub Scout group right here in this neighborhood that meets every Tuesday after school. I don't know if he's interested or not, but if he is, we'd love to have him in the group. Does he play any sports or anything like that? Well, no, he really doesn't. Well, you know what? We've got a soccer team here. And this lady, her name was Jody PERSON, turns out later, started to befriend my dad and by extension to my mom and their family and our family. And over thenext couple of years, this family and our family. And over the next couple of years, this family and our family became extraordinarily close. My brother became best friends with their son who happened to be the same age through Cubs Scouts ORG. My dad ended up getting involved in coaching soccer and knowing a lot of these other dads. And there was this tremendous bond that was built and there was a lot of positive things. and I don't go into detail all the positive things that came out of the relationshipsbut I know for a fact that my parents' lives were made tremendously better by some of these connections that were made with these people and some of the things that they learnedand some of the habits that they developed and some of the philosophies that they were able to gain were really, really influential at an influential time in my dad's life and my mom's life and it's extended all the way through the next 30, 35 years. And I look back at that. And this family, of course, is good friends, you know, to this day kind of a thing.And I think, wow, what if this gal had not stopped by on her bicycle? Wow, what if this gal had not stopped by on her bicycle? And I wonder if she was riding her bicycle by looking for somebody to be outside so that she could stop, or did she just happen to stop? And I actually asked her that question about two years ago. I ended up talking to her on the phone because she's obviously my parents' friend.I don't talk to her a whole lot. And she said that she was interested in getting to know people and meet them, and she did. Well, this is an interesting little story and it made me think about my own life and my own situation now, and not only my own self, but society in general. And I think my conclusion that I've drawn is that we tend to, in our society today, we tend to be very closed, and we tend to build walls, and we tend to do this because of a couple of different reason.Reason number one is there seems to be a different pace of life now than there was in the 70s, 80s, certainly before that. And this isn't good old time syndrome or everything used to be better and now it's getting worse. I really am not a believer in that. I think a lot of things are getting a lot better or everything used to be better and now it's getting worse. I really am not a believer in that. I think a lot of things are getting a lot better than they used to be. Some things are getting worse, but this isn't really a romantic view of things used to be better.This is a reality. I look at myself growing up 25, 30 years ago versus my kids growing up now. And one of the things that strikes me the most is the amount of structure that is involved in the kid's lifestyle now. They've got a certain amount of homework, which is a lot. They've got certain activities that they've got to be at.There's practices. There's no real bike riding to the practice and over to the friend's house. There's play dates that are scheduled and kids are dropped off and it's very structured. And I'm not saying that's good or bad. I'm saying it is what it is, but here's the interesting part of that. It seems that we tend to have a lot less time available for just what I would callfree-flowing, unstructured time to do stuff. And I know we still watch a lot of TV and we're still on the Internet and all these statistics you can see about we have more free time. But I think we also, for some reason, it seems like we have less. My kids between band and sports and school, it's unbelievable. The days of when I was a kid of just leaving and running around the neighborhood roughshodfor hours at a time are gone. They don't exist anymore. And I think as adults compared to previously as adults, we also have a lot more demands on our time. A lot of it has to do with our kids, but a lot of it has to do with just ourselves. And our business and our work obligations, we've got more dual-income families. Again, this isn't a judgment call, is that right or wrong, good or bad?It's just a fact of statement of what it is. And here's the point of all that. We tend to get inside ourselves. We tend to cocoon, I think, within our homes and our families, and we tend not to reach out and extend and develop these relationships that in reality could be, quote, unquote, the spice of life, the thing that makes living worthwhile.If you do an analysis on what you do with your time and how you spend it, it tends to fall into two general categories. Category number one is your work-related things that you have to do for work, okay? Great. And then number two, it tends to be self-absorbed indulgences. And it sounds like a really negative thing, self-absorbed indulgences.And my opinion is there's a healthy amount of that that's available that you should be partaking in. You don't want to be completely outward-centered. You want to be somewhat self-centered. We do want to have time to refresh and to tackle the projects and the things that are interesting to us on a personal level. But there's this bigger world out there of connecting with other peoplethat if we don't look for it and we don't make an effort to do it, it's going to go past us and we're going to miss opportunities. And a lot of those opportunities we're never going to even realize. It's one of those things of not knowing what we're missing. So I'm going to encourage you through this call to make that effort. And again, there's a couple of groups of people that I want to talk about.One is the people that are around you all the time anyway, not unlike the gal in the Sunday school class that I mentioned, here's a gal that left unchecked without any kind of conscious effort by these other boys to make it an inclusive situation. I'm telling you, it's going to go nowhere good. The family in Denver GPE that befriended my family, and that story has repeated itself lots of times.Those are people that are right there in the area. So I'm going to give you a quiz here in just a few minutes, but I want to ask you this first. Here's a question, just sort of a self-analysis question. What is your reason for being here? What are you doing on this planet? Why did you get put right here in the place that you're put at this particular time? I mean, look at the history of the planet. There's what, 6 billion people on the planet now. We've got 6,000 years of recordedhistory. Who knows how many people have inhabited this big blue marble? And for some reason, you're here now, and you're wherever you happen to physically be located now, and you've got influence within that sphere right now. And this isn't really a discussion of spirituality and believing in the origins of where did we come from and why are we here. It's really much more fundamental than that, which is, what are you here for? What is it that you're doing?What are you trying to accomplish? I mentioned this to my wife last night at a basketball game. We were watching my daughter play basketball. And this kid walked by that is the brother of one of the girls on the team. And I said, what's that kid's name again? And she says, that's no. I said, isn't that kid in Ben's class? Isn't he 11 years old? And she said, yeah. I said, wow, he looks. He's a dead ringer for one of my best friends growing up. He just looked very similar to him. He's had the same haircut.Just kind of look like him. And I looked at my wife and I said, wow, I hope it turns out better for him than it did for my friend. And I started pondering and thinking about my friend, who now at age 40, is single, lives in Utah GPE, and skis a lot. And he lives in Utah GPE because he likes the slopes there, the skis good.He's been a bartender for most of his adult life, and this is what he does. And I thought, wow, okay, I'm sure he's happy, and there's joy in that. And this is what he does. And I thought, wow, okay, I'm sure he's happy and there's joy and that. But what kind of impact does living the ski life have? And it just makes me wonder and makes me think. So give you a story here. I received a phone call in about May of 1997, and it was from a gal that I knew from church.And she asked me this question. She said, do you have a job for my son at your business? Now, that was a funny question at the time, because at the time there was two people in my company, me and my partner. We had never had any employees, and for her to think that we could have some kind of job for this kid, it was kind of funny because we just really didn't have anything for anybody to do. And something inside me said, let's see what we could have some kind of job for this kid. It was kind of funny because we just really didn't have anything for anybody to do. And something inside me said, let's see what we could have this kid do.And you've heard me maybe talk about this kid before on some other calls, but here's what ended up happening. We happened to be getting into a sideline business at the time, which was selling cellular phones for Sprint ORG. At the time, they had come out with a really tremendous offer that was light years ahead of the competition.

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At the time, it was 1,500 minutes for $75.

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By today's standards, that's not a very good deal at all. But by those standards, it was so much better of a deal that we looked at that and thought, well, we could sell the heck out of this, And we got involved as a Sprint ORG authorized dealer. And I told this gal, her name was Marianne. I said, yeah, you know what? Send them over.Let me talk to him. And this kid at the time was not a lot different than the girl in my Sunday school class two months ago. He was sort of semi-interested, less interested than he was interested. His dad was not a real strong figure in his life. He was an okay guy, but not super strong. He didn't have a lot of coaching on how to be successful in any aspect of life.

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And he was just kind of drifting.

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And he would kind of sometimes come to church, and sometimes he wouldn't. And he had some issues. He had a girlfriend that maybe things weren't exactly, you know, morally wonderful there. And he was just kind of bumbling, stumbling, rumbling through life. And he had just graduated high school. He was 17 years old still.And his mom wanted me to give him a job. So I gave him a job. And the job was he was going to sell these cell phones. He was going to sell cell phones, okay? And I ended up actually hiring another guy at the same time, who was a little bit older, who was about 22 years old, who had been stocking grocery cells at the grocery store in the middle of the night, and I thought, well, I'll get these two guys on. Well, here's what happened. Interesting situation. About a weekor two after I hired these two guys, it became very painfully obvious that this kid was not cut out for sales. And I should have known him because he could barely speak at a decibel level that you could understand him. He was timid, shy, just very, very non. He had no personality, okay? Let's just put it bluntly. And he was just horrible on the phone.So I decided after a couple weeks, you know what, I'm going to have to just let this kid go. I'm going to have to fire him. I've only had an employee now for a couple weeks, and I'm going to have to fire one. And, boy, you know, I don't know if you've ever fired anybody before. It stinks no matter what, regardless of the circumstance. It's a horrible thing to have to do to somebody.It was especially bad because I'd never done it before. So I asked him to come into my office, and I said, you know, let's sit down and talk for a minute. And he says, so, you know, what's going on? I said, well, there's something, you know, I need to talk to you about. And basically, Bryce PERSON, the thing is you're, and I started to use the word fired. And right when the F part of the word fired came out, the phone rang, and it was somebody in the other office.And they said, hey, there's a call for this guy. There's a customer, and is he available. And I took the call and I said, well, why don't you go out and take that call? And, you know, then come back in and talk to me. So he left the room for a minute. And when he went outside, I got this overwhelming feeling that said,you just can't fire this guy. You just can't. And I had this struggle within me that said, this kid is just worthless. He's just horrible. It's not going to work. But the feeling was very strong.You just can't. You got to keep him on. And so he came back in the office and he sat down and he said, okay, so what is it? You were saying something about your what? I over-dramatized it just literally a little bit. And I said, oh, well, here's the deal.I said, I'm going to reassign you to a different job. And he goes, huh? I said, yeah, I'm going to reassign you to something else. Now, he knew as well as I didthat there wasn't anything else. So what it was that I was going to reassign him to was a mystery to both of us. And he said, well, what are you going to reassign me to? And at that moment, here's what came to mind. I said, well, here's what I was going to reassign him to was a mystery to both of us. And so he said, well, what are you going to reassign me to? And at that moment, here's what came to mind. I said, well, here's what I'm going to do.I'm going to have Jeremy, the other guy that's 22. I'm going to have him sell the phones. And then what you'll do is you'll actually drive around and deliver those phones to the customers that he sells. And you'll get a chance to interface with some of the customers. And we'll kind of get your confidence up a little bit. And then maybe later on you can come back and sell phones.And he said, okay, that sounds fine. And so he went about delivering phones. And over the next few weeks, he did that, and finally, after a month or so, we got him back on the phones a little bit selling and coached him and worked with him.And he got to where he was actually fairly okay. He wasn't ever good, but he was fairly okay. Our marketing system, as you can hopefully imagine, was pretty strong. And we actually, funny story, became the number one Sprint ORG authorized dealer at that time. And these two guys became the number one and number two sales people in the entire region for Sprint ORG. Not necessarily a testament to this kid, but maybemore to the marketing. And that's not really the point that we went on to sell good, because this story actually

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is much longer term than that couple of months, where I almost fired him and then did not.

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Because after a few more months, that sprint opportunity changed, their phones changed. It wasn't as good of a deal anymore, and we decided to get out because it wasn't our core business. And I made a decision to keep this kid on, and he started working for me doing some office kind of stuff, and as we grew, he became sort of the guy that did everything. And he ended up working for me all the way until he was about 20 years old or so, aboutthree years. And during those three years, there was at least two other times where I was so upset with him, so mad because he messed up so bad that I wanted to fire him. And every time my wife would talk me out of it, she said, no, you've got to keep him on. Well, why? He's horrible.She said, I don't know. You just got to keep him on. And so I kept keeping him on. And his personal life never really seemed to get much better. It seemed to actually get a little bit worse. Then, as the story goes, we had a program in our businesses.It started to grow where we were out on the road with sales guys doing seminars and selling people into our what we called MCA program, our master consulting agent program. We were licensing people to become marketing consultants, and we had very talented seminar givers and salespeople that were on the road doing this, very accomplished men, and we decided as a part of this program we would send out younger guys with themto help be their assistance. We called them simply road assistance. And we paid them a salary of $500 a week to go on the road and help out with these seminars and closing and all the logistics that went along with this. And we decided to go ahead and give this kid a chance. And we put him on the road.And over the course of the next year, something interesting happened and he blossomed. And he changed, and he became somebody worthwhile, not just as, you know, we're all important in the side of God, but actually productive and worthwhile to people. And it was the most unbelievable and sudden change, and really hadn't expected it because it had been three years that he had really just lagged. Well, after a year, he ended up deciding, as is common within the LBS Church ORG, that he wanted to serve as a missionary,which was a complete, utter shock to pretty much everybody that knew him. And so he went out and he served as a missionary for two years in Oregon GPE. And he came back, he ended up getting married to a gal and started a family. And I kind of lost track of him for a while there. Kind of lost track of them. Didn't really hear from him.Knew his brother a little bit, saw his brother one time a few years ago and said, hey, you know, how's he doing? Well, he's doing okay. And funny thing, last October, I was on a business trip with one of these same guys that used to work for me in the old days doing seminars. And we had been out in Chicago doing a seminar, and we're at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport FAC, coming down the escalator.Big, huge, huge escalator. And we get to the bottom, and sure enough, here's that guy. Haven't seen him for probably five years. And he's standing there, and he's wearing a suit with a hat, and he's holding a sign. He's a limo driver.And I saw him, and I said, hey, man, how's it going? What are you doing? He explained that he was a limo driver, and, you know, he was at work. He was waiting for somebody. He was holding a sign to pick up somebody. So he didn't really have much of a chance to talk. I asked him if he could, you know, give me at work, he was waiting for somebody, he was holding a sign to pick up somebody. So he didn't really have much of a chance to talk.I asked him if he could, you know, give me a cell phone number, and I texted him, and I ended up texting him, and the next day I got a hold of him, and I said, you know, how's it going? And he said, it's not good. I said, what do you mean it's not good? He said, it's not good.He was basically what you would want to call depressed. Now, I'm not an expert on depression. I don't want to talk about it because I really don't know enough about it. But he was depressed, in my opinion, him specifically, this has nothing to do with anybody else that may be afflicted with depression. But him himself, he was depressed because he was just basically leading a sucky life.Okay? He had a wife. They were not very close. It was pretty rocky. Money was tight. He didn't never go back to college or to college.He never had a degree. He was working a crappy job. He was working nights, driving limo, trying to earn some extra dollars. Wasn't super close to his kids. Wasn't super close to his wife. Had some personal problems that he was trying to work through.And he came to me and he said, it's just bad. Things are not well. And I said, okay, well, you know, let's talk about that. And so I started talking to him.

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And, you know, he's 30 years old now. This is 13 years since that first day when his mother called me.

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He's a grown man. He's got a family. And I go to lunch with him at Wendy's ORG, and we're talking about a situation. And I said, do you want me to help you? Would you be interested in me helping you?And he said, yeah, I think I would. So I started working with him a little bit, and I asked him to do some things that I knew would help him out that would kind of get him back on track. And after about a week,he basically said, look, I just can't do this. I'm at a point right now, or I just can't make myself do these things. Things just suck. And I would text them and say, well, you want to, you know, you want me to work with you. And you finally came back and said, look, it's a waste of your time. I appreciate the effort, but it's just not going to happen.Okay. So what do you do now? Well, here's what happened. I'm one of these guys that I'll sit there when I have time and I don't have anything else to do, and I'm in a situation where I really don't have access to anything other than my cell phone. I'll start texting people, and I'll look at all the people that I haven't texted a while, and I'm in a situation where I really don't have access to anything other than my cell phone, I'll start texting people.And I'll look at all the people that I haven't texted a while, and I'll text them. And that happened to me yesterday. I was sitting on an airplane. It was delayed a little bit because of some mechanical problems. I was sitting on the plane. I couldn't use my computer.I read my newspaper, and so I pulled my phone out, and I started texting. And I looked on there, and I saw this guy's name. It was low on my list because I hadn't texted him a long time. And I sent him a text. I'll just read it to you. It's just a little bit funny.Not hilarious, but it's kind of funny. Here's what the text said. I sent this to him yesterday at 10.48 a.m. It said, ready to quit sucking yet. And he sent me back at tech last night. It said, you know what I am?I'm back in school, and that's a positive start. And so I texted in the back, I said, good, good. So what day is best for you to meet me at my office at 6.30 a.m. And he texted back. He said, AM, and I said, yeah. And his text back to me said, tomorrow.And I said, okay, I'll see you then. So I actually met with him this morning at my office. And he sat down and he said, I'm ready. And I need some help. So I talked to him, and we work through this. And, you know, who knows where this story ends, but I know this.We're 13 years in, and we're at not that much greater of a starting point than we were 13 years ago. But here's what I know. There's a connection, and I look at it this way. Now, this is just me, and I'm sure you've got these same situations in your life. I'm not saying this in any kind of way to say, hey, look at this great thing. It's really not about that.It's really about you, and that's why we're holding this call. Is there people in your influence that are in your area physically or whatever? That for some reason you're the one that can connect with them and make a difference. And the answer is probably yes, but it's also easy to not send the tax. It's easy to let the person get fired instead of listening to that thing inside you that says, no, maybe not. Maybe this needs to go on a little bit longer. And I'd like you to thinkabout that. Do you have any kind of people in your sphere of influence? Okay, let's take the quiz, okay? I prepared a little quiz just for fun. It's the make-the-connection quiz. And this is something that I want you to do a self-audit and think about it and see how you stack up, okay? We're not going to grade it or anything like that. It's just food for thought mostly, okay? So section one is you. Making connections has a lot to do with your personality. If you're more shy and reserved, you're going to have to work on that.So there's two questions in section one. And it says this, people who know you would consider you to be, and then there's five choices for these, okay? Choice one, aloof, self-absorbed, or number two, shy and quiet, number three, usually serious, number four, nice and friendly, number five, fun and interesting. Where do you stack up on that?People who know you would consider you to be which of those five things, aloof, self-absorbed, shy and quiet, usually serious, nice, friendly, fun, interesting. And then the second question is very similar. It says, how would you consider yourself to be? And then it's the exact same five choices. Aloof, self-absorbed, shy, quiet, usually serious, nice, friendly, fun, interesting. And this is an interesting situation because it all starts with yourself.Are you the kind of person that's willing to extend the hand of friendship and comfort and just put yourself out there a little bit? Do people consider you to be friendly, nice, fun, interesting, or more aloof, self-absorbed? Because this is an issue. Now, maybe you're not with me on this whole premise. Maybe you don't think this is a big deal. You probably hung up a long time ago if that's you.So if you think there's value here, really look at this self-audit because if people don't consider you to be nice, friendly, fun, interesting, and if you don't consider yourself to be, then this is probably not going to happen for you. Now, that's just part of the quiz. There's more to it, okay? Section 2 at home, how are you going to build a connection with anyone if you don't even pay attention or spend time with those who you're already around all the time? In an average month, how many dinners do you have together with your entire family?Now, you know, circumstances are different. You know, maybe you've got smaller children, older children, maybe your kids are grown and gone. But nevertheless, here's the question. How many, in a month, how many dinners do you have together with your entire family? And then the choices are this.None, one to five, six to 12, 12 to 20, or 21 or more. And there's a scoring system that goes along with this. I won't have you actually take the quiz, but just kind of go through it with me mentally. Number two in Section 2. In an average month, how many nights is somebody out of town? Now, if you heard me last month on Personal Edge ORG, it was the same theme.It was about families and making the connection there to a certain extent. But here's what I found. Somebody who's consistently gone from the family is creating a lack of connection. Next, question 3 in Section 2. In a given month, how many dates do you have with your spouse? None.One, two or three, four or five, six or more. Again, naturally you would need to adjust for your personal circumstances. I'm not saying that everybody's married. But here's what I'm saying. There's connections that can be made there. Next question, how many times in a month do you sit down with your child and or spouseand have a one-on-one personal discussion with them? None. There's only two choices there. None or one or more. Okay. Now the next one is groups that you're a participant in. It could be your book club. It could be your church. It could be parent-teacher association. Whatever groups you might happen to be a member of. Here's some questions for you. Question one, when you see somebody at your group that you don't know, what do you do? Number one, pretendthat you didn't see them. Number two, make eye contact only. Number three, say hello. Number four, introduce yourself, shake their hand. Number five, talk to them and get to know them. Next, question two in section three. What percentage of the people in your group do you know by first and last name? Now, this is a little bit tricky depending on the group, right? If it's a really small group, this might be easier. If it's a larger group, then, you know, I don't know, think through it. Do you know less than 10% to 40%?40 to 70% to 95% or 95% or more? Again, there's a scoring system with this quiz, but I'm not giving that to you. Next, in the last year, how many times have you socialized with members of your group or groups outside of official group activities. So if you're a member of a book club, that's good. Have you socialized with those people outside of that activity? If you meet people at church activities all the time, great.Do you ever do anything with them outside of those activities? And then it gives a grading scale none, one to three, four to six, seven to twelve, 13 or more. Again, that was for an entire year, not for a month. The next section is called co-workers and neighbors, and it says,find opportunities to extend people who live closest to you, whether at work or near your home.

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So here's a good question.

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How many families within a half mile of your home can you name by name, first and last name of the adults? So if you know the kid's names because they come over and bug your kids, that doesn't count. How many families are in the half mile of your home? And again, naturally you would need to adjust this for your circumstance.Maybe live on huge lots out in the country. So you get the point, though, right? And then the choices are none, two or three, four or five, six or seven, or eight or more. Next, how many people who live within a half mile of you have you spoken with in the last two months? And not just high. None, two or three, four, or five, six, or seven, eight, or more.In the last year, how many times you socialize with people from work or school outside of official work functions? Next question, how many people, adults from work or from your neighborhood have been in your home in the last year? None, one, two or three, four, five, six or more. And naturally, that's going to, you know, be a function of maybe you've only got two people at your work.Maybe you work for yourself. Maybe you live in a big neighborhood that's got huge lots and there's just not as many people. But anyway, the idea is this. To give yourself an idea, it's a chance to self-audit. Are you really putting yourself out there at all or are you not? How many times, and think about that first story I told about the gal, the girl in the Sunday school class. I mean, this is exactly what we're talking about. Within your existing groups, within your existing neighborhood, within your existing work, within your existing school, are you making an effort to reachout and connect with these people? And then section five is an interesting one. It's called Out and About. And you might think this is kind of weird, but I'm going to tell it to you anyway. How many groups or organizations are you an active participant of? PTO, books clubs, sports leagues, charities, church. None. That's not good.One, two or three, four or five, six or more. Next question. How many times a month, on average, do you strike up friendly conversations with strangers? And then in parentheses it says in lines, waiting areas, airplane, et cetera. You say, well, I don't want to do that. And what's the value of doing that?And the answer is, I don't know, you answer that question. But I have to think that if you don't do that, that maybe that shows something about your ability or willingness to connect.

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And again, the whole premise of this is that it's valuable to connect. And if you don't feel like it's valuable to connect, that's your personal opinion. And this stuff doesn't really become that important.

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Here's another question for you. So that one, the last one, just by way of review, is how many times a month on average you strike up a friendly conversation with strangers? And then the last question is, how friendly are you to various workers that you encounter? Clerks, waiters, office attendance, delivery people, etc. Just people that you run into in the normal course of your daily life.And here's the choices. Rude, aloof, or oblivious. Two, cordial but strictly business. Three, warm and friendly. Four, friendly and occasionally chatty. And number five, engage in conversation where and when appropriate.And of course, it's not always appropriate. You know, I was at William Sonoma on Monday, buying a panini maker for my wife. And I asked if they could gift wrap it, and they could. So they went in the back and they were gift wrapping this pinini maker for my wife. And I asked if they could gift wrap it, and they could. So they went in the back, and they were gift wrapping this pinini maker for my wife. And as I was in there just kind of looking around at all the stuff while I was waiting, it took about five minutes.This lady and man came in. And they were returning a gift that they had received from Christmas. And they had a receipt, but the receipt was only part of the receipt, and it happened to not contain the information that allowed the store clerk to track how much had been paid for this. And obviously you understand this scenario where the store, if something was bought on sale, they don't want to give you a refund or an exchange at the higher price, not the sale price. And this gal brought it in and she said, well, here's my receipt, but it didn't have the information. And she said, well, look it up.And the clerk said, well, I can't look it up. There's not the right information. She says, well, the date's on there. And the clerk said, well, I don't have an ability to look it up that way. She said, well, can't you do something? And the clerk said, I really need this information.I'm happy to exchange it for this sale price, the lowest price that we've offered it. But I can't give you the full price that we sell it for now because our system doesn't allow it, and I don't have enough information from this receipt. And this cow just started getting irate. And I stood there and watched this and thought, wow, we're getting upset because we want to impose our gift receipt that has incomplete information on the storeclerk. And I'd put this clerk in, here's the point. It's not anything about returns and Christmas and all that. How are you treating people that you happen to come in contact with? Let's go on. So here's a challenge for you to create meaningful contacts. Reach out to other people, neighbors, coworkers, like people that we've talked about. And here's the biggest challenge with this that I foundas we kind of work into the final stretch of this call. The biggest challenge I found with this is simply making the time because none of us have time. And that was my premise as we first started this call and I was talking about some of the reasons why our society has changed is because we haveso many more things going on. I mean, if you look back 25 years ago, how much time did you spend an email? None. We didn't have it. How much time do you spend on Facebook ORG? How much time do you spend on your iPhone PRODUCT and games and all these kinds of things? And these things, while maybe not horrible, you know, if you look at it from a standpoint of good, better, best, and how do you spend your time, they may be good, but certainly not better and best. And all I'm doing is asking you to look at maybe making some connections as being betterand best as opposed to, you know, not. So think about it. I was at dinner the other night. It was interesting. There was several of us at dinner, and there was a couple of the people that were at the dinner that were not quite as engaged. They worked for this company that I was at dinner with, and they sat there with their iPhone PRODUCT playing a game back and forth on the table at the phone, which wasn't offensive to me. It wasn't any big deal, but I found it just interesting that we utilize technology to that extent, that we're going to play games at a table where normally it would be just simply discussion.Again, there's no judgment call there that was good, bad, right, or wrong. It's just an interesting observation that I think is symptomatic of a lot of things in our life. So here's the key is making time. And I want to give you another story as we kind of hit the home stretch here. And this one, I hope it doesn't weird you out because hopefully you understand this about me. There's really only three things in my life that matter.One of them is my family. One of them is my business. One of them is my church responsibilities and beliefs, okay? And I have a couple of other peripheral interests. I'm interested in sports. I like basketball.I like running. But those things, really, my main three is my family, my faith, and my work, okay? Because this business is important to me. And so a lot of my stories and experiences come from those three areas. So please forgive the personal nature of sharing a story, particularly about church and faith, when perhaps your faith is different than mine. I don't really think that that's relevant. In my opinion, it's not because the story has a principle that's the key here.But here's the story. It was told to be by a guy named Dirk Pelton PERSON, and he's a guy that's in our church here in the South Lake LOC area. And a few years ago, sometime within the last 10 years, I don't know exactly when, he was called by the higher-ups in our church to serve as what we call a mission president. Now, in the LDS Church, you may be aware, Mormon NORP missionaries is kind of a big deal.They ride the bikes around and all that kind of stuff. Well, there's about 330 or 340 different missions all over the world. And so there's one in, for instance, Dallas, Texas GPE. There's one in Fort Worth, Texas GPE. And each mission has what's called a mission president who's responsible for managing the affairs of that mission, and most particularly in managing the missionaries.And of course, the missionaries are typically young, 19, 20, 21 years old. And so they'll call older, more mature men to come out and be these mission presidents. And it's a three-year calling. It's not paid. They do it as a volunteer service. And this guy, Dirk Pelton, who I know was one of these mission presidents. And he happened to be in Spain.And again, somewhere in the early 2000s. And he told this story to me that I thought was very, very interesting. He said when he was first called to be this mission president, they sent him through a training seminars, as you can imagine, to kind of figure out what his duties were and how he was supposed to do it. One of the things they told him was we would like for you to meet with every single missionary for an interview one time per month.And he was in training, and he heard that and said, okay, it sounds good, whatever. They told him lots of things. That was one of them that sounded good, so he decided he would do it. So when he got out there into Spain and he was serving, he started to realize what an enormous responsibility this was to actually hold these interviews on a monthly basis with all these missionaries. And the reason was because two things. Number one, there was a lot of missionaries.There was about 130 to 150 at any given time that he had stewardship over. And there was geographic issues. They weren't all just right there in the same area. They were spread all over a huge geographic area. So to go meet with them in person required either him to travel to them or them to travel to him, which was not particularly convenient. So he thought to himself, well, you know, they've asked me to do this.It seems like a good idea. So he started doing these, well, you know, they've asked me to do this. It seems like a good idea. So he started doing these interviews every single month. And he said that he figured out at one point that to do all of these interviews took him eight full work days. Now, it wasn't always just eight days, but if you add it up all the time, it took eight full days early in the morning to late in the evening to interview all these missionaries every single month. And it was kind of a monumental pain in the butt. And he thought, well, you know, it seems like it's worthwhile, so he'll keep doing it.Well, about a year later, he went to another training seminar because they will hold these seminars for these mission presidents periodically. And it was in Europe LOC there, and people, mission presidents from all over the Europe region came in for this training. And as you can imagine, they kind of sat there in some of their downtime, and they compared notes, you know, how things going, what are some of the challenges that you have. And he said he was really surprised that a lot of these other mission presidents that wereserving in other parts of Europe LOC were telling all these stories about their quote-unquote bad missionaries. And hopefully everybody can understand the sheer numbers involved here. If you've got 150, 19 to 21-year-old young man, there's a likelihood that there could be some problems, okay? There's a very strict set of rules that these guys have to follow. They can't watch TV.They can't date. They can't. Basically, they're full time. And there's some that have problems. I think everyone can understand that there would be some problems. And he said these mission presidents were swapping these stories of these guys who were, you know,doing some things, and they had to send this guy home, and this guy got in trouble. And he was listening to these stories, and in the back of his mind, he's thinking, wow, i must be doing something wrong because i don't have any stories like that i don't have any problems like that so he made a conclusion in his mind that his problem was that he wasn't grilling his missionaries hard enough when he was interviewing him because certainly these types of problems they seem to be widespreadand he must just be missing them. So he resolved when he went back, hey, I'm going to be a lot tougher on these guys. He gathered his leadership council because in the missions they would have certain missionaries that would serve as leaders over certain zones and districts. And he gathered them together, and he said, okay, guys, there was maybe, I don't know, maybe 15 or 20 of them that were in the leadership positions. And he said, okay, guys, here's the deal. I know what's going on here, and you can't hide it from anymore.And they said, what are you talking about? He said, look, I just went to the seminar. I was talking to these other guys, and, hey, I know what's going on. There's guys that are messing up. There's guys that probably need to be sent home. And I just want to be a lot tougher, and I want to find these things out so we canfix these problems. And the leadership looked at him and said, we really have no idea what you're talking about.

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And as he explored it more and as he dig a little bit deeper, he found out that indeed

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there weren't any problems. And he looked up finally and he looked in the mirror one day and he said, you know, I think the reason is that we don't have problems because I do sit with every single missionary, every single month, and I have a hard-to-hard chat with him, and I find out what's on his mind. And, of course, there's people that could lie or not tell the full story.He said, but in a given month, I meet with every single guy personally once a month, and I usually see them and shake hands with them at least one other time per month, so I'm seeing him twice and meeting with him in detail once. And he was telling me this story in the context of who do you have stewardship over and are you having that kind of contact with them? Because if you do, it makes you tremendous difference.So I sort of looking at that and thinking, okay, in your life, me, my life, you and your life, me talking to you right now, what kind of contact do you have? And it reminded me so much of this story of Napoleon Hill PERSON. I told it before. He had the deaf son. The doctor said that he would never hear.This is back in the early 1900s. The technology was, you know, light years behind where it is now. And he determined that he would work with his son, and he did for four hours a day, every day until he was, I think, four years old. And then still after that, until he was a teenager think, four years old and then still after that until he was a teenager, taught him how to hear with no ears and not just no ears, but no faculties for hearinguntil he gained, I think it was 80% of his hearing. And then as he went into his later teenage years, they actually invented advice that took them from 80% hearing to 100% hearing, and the kid was essentially cured. It was a miracle. And the thing that I took out of that story was not that there was a miraclethat the kid could hear, but that the dad took the time to spend four hours a day with this kid who had this problem, who had this trouble, who in other similar situations would have just been written off as deaf and muteand essentially to the rest of the world, outside of his little confines of his parents' home, just to do it worthless, right? Not a contributor to society, but it turned out it was not the case because of the time and effort and the connectionthat was put into that relationship. And I look at that in terms of the kid that I told you about 13 years later. I'm still talking to him. Making the connection, okay? That's what we're talking about here.The premise of this whole discussion was by making efforts to connect with others, we can enrich other's lives and our own lives, okay? So I want you to examine how you spend your time. If it takes eight full days to meet with 130 missionaries, is that okay? If it takes four hours a day to talk to your son and work with him because he can't hear, is that okay, if your son has other kinds of problems, not necessarily being deaf,but maybe fitting in problems or school problems or morality issues or drug and alcohol problems or rebellious issues, is it worth the time to take and sit down? And typically we value our time and we spend it on things that really, in the grand scheme of things, are not worth very much. Some of the things that you might want to think aboutas you look at your life and the people that you may want to connect with, again, review the quiz that I gave you earlier, sometimes things as small as sending a text message or a note or an email can be very helpful. Sometimes just something as small as a kind word could make a major issue. I was talking to a guy known named Chris at church a couple weeks ago.

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And again, hopefully this doesn't sound, hey, let me pat my back, but just an interesting little story. I was talking to him.

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And he said, you know, I want you to know something. I said what? He said, we moved into this area about five years ago. And I just want you to know that you were the very first guy that came up to me and shook my hand and made me feel welcome. And it just set me in the right course.And I've just been grateful for that ever since. And I looked at him and I said, really? I didn't remember that. To me, I don't even remember when he moved in. I have no recollection of that whatsoever, but these little things make potentially a big different.Who is it that you could reach out and touch? Is it just somebody who just moved in? Or is somebody in your book club that maybe is struggling or maybe they're not struggling. I heard this quote one time that said, if you treat people like they're in crisis in their life,you'll be right 50% of the time. You just never know what's going on and when that relationship needs to be there. Reexamine the use of your time. You know, really look hard at how much time you're spending, watching TV, sports, idle, time, maybe time that's spent doing things that are okay,not bad things, but could you reinvest some of that time and pour it into somebody else, instead of just investing it strictly into yourself? Okay, so here's some action items. Action item number one, ponder your definite chief aim. This is a whole different call that we had earlier about a year ago in Personal Edge ORG. Definite chief aim simply says, what is it that you're here for that nobody else can achieve?And think about that for a minute. If you don't really know what that means, you might want to go back and listen to it. I don't have time to talk about it right now. Identify the people that are around you that might be a need right nowthat you could reach out and touch and help. Again, in the case of the gal in my Sunday school class, there's somebody that has obvious, serious, current right now needs that it's so easy to not make the extension. It's not to not make that connection.Again, remember the gal 20 years ago that I knew that there was no effort made and look what ended up happening in her life. And well, so if you would have made the connection, would that have changed that outcome? And the answer is, who knows? Who knows?But we do know this. I can look back now and say, I know for a fact I did not make that effort, regretfully so. So identify the people who need that are in your current sphere of influence. Number next, just make yourself more available, whether it's at work or in your groups that you belong to.Maybe you're a member of, you member of YPO ORG or something like that. Who knows what group you might be a member of? Maybe it's your trade association. Make yourself available. Maybe it's in your neighborhood. Maybe you need to get to know your neighbor a little bit better.Bake them some bread and bring it over. If you don't know how to bake, go to the store and buy something and bring it over. You'll never know. Just put it in a loaf pan. Looks like you made it. We'll allow you that lie.And here's another little tip. So action items are just four. One is Ponder your definite chief aim. Next is identify people who might be a need right now that are in your sphere of influence. Next, three, make yourself more available, generally speaking. Use the quiz as a way to evaluate yourself.And number four, this is an interesting one. Use social networking. Social networking, in my opinion, is fantastic. We've got Facebook ORG now. We've got Twitter ORG. We've got things that maybe are less social networking like email,but there's communication tools that allow us to stay connected to people, LinkedIn ORG, whatever it is. And it can be something that can draw us closer together. I mean, if you're not involved in Facebook ORG or something like that, you really ought to look into it. I'll give you an example.I've got an aunt that I never see because she lives in a different state and it's just, she's not a close enough aunt that I'll ever probably see her until maybe my grandmother dies at a funeral. I hate to say it that way, but that's the truth of the matter. And I don't particularly know her very well. If I saw her on the street, I might not even recognize her.I could if I looked at her, but just in a passing situation, I wouldn't notice her because we're not that close. And then all of a sudden, here she is popping up on Facebook ORG, and now I'm seeing things that she's doing and things that are in her life and things are important, and there's a connection there. And you can do that with old classmates.You can do that with people used to know, maybe it's your old army buddies, your college buddies, who knows what it is. And just make an effort to become more connected. I think you'll find some value in that. And that really is it for the call.So make the connection, guys, that's it. We'll talk to you next time. Bye now.

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Thanks for listening. Listen again tomorrow to the Level 10 Contractor Daily Podcast.