Brett Bartholomew: The Power of Effective Communication and Self-Awareness

Full Episode Page: Brett Bartholomew: The Power of Effective Communication and Self-Awareness

Episode Summary:  Brett Bartholomew, founder of Art of Coaching, shares his journey as an entrepreneur and the evolution of leadership communication. Brett started Art of Coaching, where they focus on guiding and leading people through the messy realities of leadership and life. He emphasizes the importance of understanding communication styles, contextual competence, communication strategy, and power literacy in effective leadership communication. One key theme was the importance of effective communication and its role in building relationships and resolving conflicts. Brett emphasized the value of self-awareness and the ability to manage one's emotional state. 

Takeaways

• Effective leadership communication requires understanding communication styles, contextual competence, communication strategy, and power literacy. 
• Effective communication is crucial for building relationships and resolving conflicts
• Self-awareness and the ability to manage one's emotional state are important for effective communication
• Being open to feedback is essential for personal growth and improvement
• Improv is a valuable tool for developing adaptability and improving communication skills

Chapters
00:00 Power Dynamics in Business and Personal Relationships
19:46 Social Agility
28:59 Understanding Individual Styles
33:48 Embracing Discomfort
40:44 Improv as a Tool for Self-Discovery
51:40 Confronting Limitations
56:27 The Power of Improvisation in Communication
01:04:24 The Dark Side of Leadership

Where to Find Brett:

• ArtofCoaching.com
• Brett on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X

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Transcript

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Nick (00:00)
I think what you do is really unique. I don't know many people who I would say who are doing that. I don't know anybody like you.

And I say that lovingly, but you're an impressive, impressive

Brett (00:09)
Appreciate it.

Nick (00:12)
tell me about your, your journey as an entrepreneur.

Brett (00:15)
Yeah, the gist of it, and we can go deeper on any of this if you want, but the highlight is, so I spent 15 years in the world of human performance and strength and conditioning. And I found out, you know, really through that, as much as I love the training side, it was really the psychological piece and the interpersonal side that was most fascinating to me. My calling card really became dealing with difficult athletes. So I worked primarily with NFL athletes, a lot of folks in Major League Baseball, combat sports, and...

because of some stuff I went through when I was younger, depression, anxiety, when I was a teenager, you know, and I had gotten labeled as, somebody that was difficult and you, you know, you're angry or you're anxious. And I just remember at a young age, I was very like, that doesn't really define me. You know, my parents were going through a divorce. I had a lot of friends that got into hardcore drugs. So I had turned into, I had turned to exercise and training as an outlet.

So when I would work with these athletes, inevitably somebody would say, hey, we have so -and -so starting tomorrow. I'm not gonna use names. Kind of a difficult guy. You know, the GM says be aware of this, this, or their strength coach says be aware of that and that. So I always just found it fascinating. I'm like, I doubt these people are that difficult. You just gotta figure out what drives them. And I would take pride in treating people like puzzles. Well, eventually that gave way to me writing a book called Conscious Coaching. And at that time, the context was strength and conditioning, because I had dealt with all these different...

personality types. And that's something we all deal with in life. When you run in business, when you deal with people, you're gonna deal with different archetypes of individual. For example, we know somebody that's a manipulator, a politician, somebody that is what we call the royal, a little bit of a know -it -all, all those things. Well, just by the grace of God, that book had taken off and gotten into other industries. So we started doing work with companies like Microsoft. We've now worked with Apple in a consulting capacity.

And people started bringing me in saying, hey, can you help us deal with some of these interpersonal issues or power dynamics issues in the workplace? So long story short, eventually kind of just looked at this and said, okay, this is where my heart is. You know, I love the training piece, but I've now done this 15 years. For me, it's really about the people and the puzzle. And this isn't meant to sound prideful, but just the performance side got easy. Anybody that studies kind of strength and conditioning, after a while, it's not hard to get people stronger.

It's not hard to get people to be, I'm not trying to simplify it. It's not, I'm not saying it's super easy, but you know, you just look for another challenge and to a degree, some inputs equal outputs. If somebody shows up every day and trains hard and does whole body movements, you know, and each ride and get some sleep, they're gonna get stronger. And if we do the right drills, they're gonna get faster. And I just realized I wanted to solve some bigger issues. So my wife and I took a massive risk and I decided at...

one point I'm like, you know, we're getting a lot of these speaking gigs, we're getting a lot of these consulting deals, I can't keep living this double life. And I quit being a strength coach. And we started Art of Coaching, the company we're at now. And for us, coaching means to guide, to lead, you know, there's nothing sport related about coaching, that term's existed for a very long time. And so we started doing a combination of live events.

executive one -to -one coaching. So when we'd go to these companies, inevitably they'd want to do continuing calls. And so, you know, we'd deal with the manager of this department. They'd come on calls and say, hey, this is what we're dealing with today. This is what we're dealing. We've worked with the United States government, Canadian special forces. And it's cool because you just get to go in and hear about some of these interpersonal issues. And you get to go deep with people on this stuff. So my wife and I worked together.

We've been doing it since 2020. Well, I went on my own in 2018. She joined me in 2020, 2021. We've gone all models. We had an all staff model. With some contractors, we've done an all contractor model. We've done every little kind of pivot you could imagine to try to find our sweet spot. We're a remote staff by and large, so we can get into that if you want. But that's the gist. Started off in one career, built something that really followed my passion, took a huge risk.

used my life savings, it was probably very naive at the time to make this book, became a best seller, started transcending into other industries, took a massive risk, was scared out of my mind. Now we've been doing it for quite a while now. It seems like the years just kind of fly by. Was there anything there that you want to hone in on?

Nick (04:27)
Yeah.

So a couple of things. One is, so when I met you, you were, it was just taking off and you blew up. You're one of those stories and immediately everybody wanted a piece of Brett,

Right. Everybody wanted a piece and still do, right? Like I think the trajectory is still continued. So you obviously figured out how to handle that.

Brett (04:44)
Good, bad, and indifferent, by the way.

Nick (04:56)
Talk about the lessons you learned, some of the takeaways from like, you know, you didn't just wake up one day, but it did happen fast. It was like, shit, I've got to figure out how to turn this into something because the attention is here.

Brett (05:09)
Yeah, well, and it's tricky and I want to, you know, I always try to be transparent with people because I think a lot of people share the glory and all that. Listen, I had publishers that were like, nobody's going to be interested in this book. Nobody's going to be interested in a book on communication. What I found is not many people knew what a strength coach was. There was a lot of, I had one large tech company when I was done speaking say, thank God we thought you were going to be like Jillian Michaels. And I just remember talking to my wife and I'm like, you know,

I've gone to a lot of these places and nobody really knew what we did. Like we had the opportunity to work with Wells Fargo and I'm speaking to a room of around 400 folks and you know, them to try to get them to connect the dots with like, why is this guy that was in the performance realm talking to them about managing personalities and relationships here? I showed a slide of me working with about, it was like 52 guys in the NFL off season lined up doing a warmup. And I said, this isn't me training athletes. This is $175 million of assets under management.

These are people that play on different teams, some of which don't like each other, some are great friends, and I've got to get them focused and to do something that they inherently don't want to do in 102 degree weather, right? There's numerous tie -ins to try to get people to learn how to invest and save for retirement and do things they don't need to do. And so it took a lot of time to try to like really reinvent yourself, especially when you're coming from a profession, a lot of people don't understand. Strength and conditioning prides itself, you know, on kind of being,

grinders, miserable behind the scene grinders. You know, it's not like the fitness realm, which has its own kind of archetypes, but more people are aware of, you know, fitness, those folks are kind of out there in all the shows. So that was one part that we had to overcome. Another thing that we had to overcome early on was, you know, when we got to self publishing, self publishing a book, you know, something we do now, a part of our business is I literally will help people that are wanting to write a book.

You know, how do I do that? Do I go with a big publisher? Because the book I'm currently writing is with a subsidiary of Penguin Random House. So I've written a book now with my own, just self -published, and now we have the opportunity to work with one of the largest publishers. They both have crazy challenges. You know, there is no grass is greener. There's things that are better or worse about both of them. And so those things were tough. And then managing, you know, as you said, you all of a sudden become...

pretty well known and this is locally, right? I'm not like, you know, so it was definitely not some movie star or anything like that, but it was trying to find a balance of boundaries is what I'll say because I never really had a mentor. And so one example, let alone a mentor that taught me how to do with this, I understand that everybody's a situational mentor, but nobody ever put their arm around me and said, hey, this is how you build a business, this is how you build a brand, this is how you do these things.

I would sometimes spend all night answering DMs, every message, because I just always felt like I had gotten big time coming up. And I never wanted anybody to feel like that. So my first lesson in business too was knowing how to create boundaries, because I could stay up all night answering messages, building relationships, and not even looking at these people as leads at that point of time, just trying to honor the platform that I had created. And you have to balance things. All of a sudden, you're two hours sitting there with your wife. You're answering these questions.

Nick (08:19)
Mm -hmm.

Brett (08:25)
I had to learn how to tell people no. I had to tell people, hey, this is what this costs. No, I can't do a deal. All this stuff that you go through as a business owner to segment your audience, turn some things down, deal with unhappy customers, happy customers, all those pieces. So I think, yeah, that's the thing is you have to just get comfortable with the fact that it's going to always feel like you're never going to be doing enough. You're not going to really live up to your own expectations. And the dark part of leadership or entrepreneurship that I don't think a lot of transparent are about,

is there's gonna be times that no matter how much money you're making or not making, you just wonder if you can sustain it, you know? And then you hear all the gurus talk about their systems and 90 % of them are BS, and you're trying to find the right people and one minute you got a great hire, the next minute they're super entitled and lazy. So you're gonna go through all these phases. And I think just people need to realize, you don't get to skip a level. You don't get to skip a level. You know, even if you, I hope some of you listening have made,

Nick (09:20)
Exactly.

Brett (09:24)
$5 million a year the last 10 years, drama's coming. And that's not me being cynical. I don't say that to scare you. I say that to prepare you, because it's just reality.

Nick (09:34)
I think you just named this episode. You don't get to skip a level.

Brett (09:38)
You don't, you don't get to skip. I mean, one way or another, it's going to hit you. If everybody loves you now, the hate's coming. Everybody hates you now, the love's coming. Like you just, it's all patterns and trends and you know, it comes and goes. And there's times where, I mean, we did a $250 ,000 course launch over five days where I thought, my God, our life's changed forever. And then we've spent $30 ,000 on ads and I might as well have set money on fire and fed it to the coyotes behind my house. And so,

I just think that anybody needs to be aware of these people that are quote unquote 10Xing their business all the time and killing it and the boss babes and the people that are like, you know, running retreats in Bali and all like, just, you know, the more outlandish it seems and the more unrealistic it seems, there's usually bull crap behind it.

Nick (10:22)
Thank you.

Yeah. I mean, there's like my whole thing with leadership and business is the amount of uncertainty, right? And so there's just so much uncertainty, but nothing's a given. Whatever you, if you, as soon as you decide that this is the way that it is with yourself or your situation, or you've got this element figured out, it's going to catch you. Something's going to happen. It's coming.

Brett (10:32)
Yeah.

Yeah, and I think you make a good point. What I tell people is I'm like, it's a lot more Gotham than it is Eden. And that just means there's gonna be so much conflict. That's actually like a chapter in my next book as long as the editor doesn't change it. But you gotta deal with criticism. You can think you gave your best to somebody. You sat here an hour longer after your kid's home from daycare. You could go out and be playing with your kid. But we run a business mastermind, right? For grassroots, like when I started business,

our business, I was like, man, there's only like two masterminds. There's ones that are hyper -specific, either need to be in real estate or fitness or this, or there's ones that are like the crazy, get a jet, get a platinum blonde, get your millionaire. I'm like, where's the stuff for people that no matter what you're in, and if you've made your first dollar or first million dollars or your third, three million dollars, you can join. So we created something like that. So there would be times I'm sitting here guiding people through business plans,

I'm trying to get them out of their own heads. I'm sacrificing time with my son, but I think I'm providing a service. And 10 of them love it and they write thank you emails afterwards. And one person like wants to quit and go spend 20 grand on click funnels. And you're just like, what am I missing here, dude? And so you're just gonna deal with criticism and self doubt. And a lot of times where you just feel like people aren't appreciative. And I think that those are worthwhile things to mention because you don't hear them on a lot of podcasts.

Nick (12:14)
Yeah, absolutely. So before I jump into your area of expertise in the future of art of coaching, talk a little bit, if you don't mind about you brought your wife into the business. And I mean, you know, Kelly and I, we've worked together. We've been business partners for since 2012, work together every day, man. I get it. It's the best thing that I've ever done. I love it. But it's, it's not for everybody.

Brett (12:34)
Amazing.

Nick (12:43)
So tell us about your experience.

Brett (12:45)
Yeah, I mean, it's been, I think one just, and there's a lot of ways to anchor this. I'll give people insight. And so I'm a very direct communicator. Like we have different communication styles that we really hone in on at Art of Coaching. Somebody that's more analytical, somebody that's more of a realist, a realist is kind of direct to the point, not to be abrasive, but out of respect to people, right? There's a relator, somebody that uses a lot of analogies, metaphors, tries to bring people with them, and then an empathizer.

That's the complete opposite of somebody that's purely analytical. And of course, nobody's ever won, right? We're gonna skew and it's context dependent. But to give an idea, like I'm a realist and a relator. My wife is very analytical. I spent a lot of time studying communication for a living. Like we have a 26 point communication evaluation that we use at our workshops on everything like clarity and tone of voice and.

On the other hand, this is stuff that, you know, my wife grew up in a family where you don't voice your thoughts and opinions much because she had a big family and it could make somebody mad. And so, whereas I'm direct, Liz could be more avoidant and withdrawn, right? So there was conflict navigating that. How do you know, how do we have meetings without clashing? How do we, you know, hey, get to the point here or what are you saying here? How do you tie? When do you turn this off at night? Can you create a ritual like?

Are there pajamas that you put on at eight o 'clock that all of a sudden mean no business talk? Well, that shit doesn't work. You know what I mean? Because you're gonna be watching a show and you get a business idea and you're like, I know, but hear me out. So we had to deal with difference in communication styles, work styles. I'm somebody that very much like we're remote. Of course, Liz and I work in the same place. If I get an idea, I'm walking down the hall, we're sharing it and we're whiteboarding it. Nuh with her, it's all gotta be scheduled. And...

she's right to do that sometimes and I'm right to do my thing sometimes. So it's figuring out boundaries, communication styles, it's figuring out how to still talk to each other like a spouse during sometimes, but also not running from the hard conversations that you've got to have. There's some times where I need, like I did something wrong. There's other times where like we had a scheduling snafu this week. It was her fault. There's other times it's my fault and we have to own those things. And so,

You know, we've had fights, we've had things that tested our marriage, we've had things that strengthened our marriage. We've had arguments at 1 a we've had celebration impromptu hot tub champagne sessions at 3 a You know, and so I think that's the thing too is like, I don't understand where this life is, where whether you work with your spouse or not, again, business is perfect, relationships are perfect. The nice thing for us is, and then I'll turn it back to you is,

The fights we get in, the wins, the losses, the fights, the bad times, the good times, that's all our product. Art of coaching sits at the intersection of anything, leadership, relationships, and entrepreneurship, because we focus on communication. So the nice thing is, is if we fight, we all of a sudden turn that into a workshop of how to fight more productively with your spouse. So we try to turn shit into sugar, pardon my language, but there are some phrases that just work.

And that's a reality. So it's tested us, strengthened us, and everything in between.

Nick (16:03)
So let's take that and go right into like, what is the leadership strategic communication? What are those things look like in the world of business right Take me through like, what did it look like a few years ago? What has it evolved into? Where do you see it going?

Brett (16:20)
Yeah, well, one to just anchor this, right? Everybody's familiar with like vision statements, mission statement. Our vision statement is changing the way the world interacts. Now, obviously, you know, a vision statement is your pie in the sky thing, just like Microsoft in the 80s, it was like a PC in every home. I don't have the illusion of thinking I can actually change the way the entire world interacts, right? But I can change the way a lot of people interact through a lot of the things that we do.

And then our mission statement, a core part of that is through experiential learning. So we use a lot of role playing, kind of we call it adversarial simulation or social scrimmaging. So we just had a, we had a married couple come to one of our workshops the other weekend. They're like, you know, we need to have this conversation with our daughter. We don't know how to do it. Somebody in the workshop plays their daughter. We put them in these situations. So we'll have married couples next to somebody that's there from HR of another company that we had an FBI forensic analyst. So we have this mixed bag of people that come.

And they're essentially wanting to deal with conflict resolution, persuasion, self -awareness, just it's like, yo, I've done the technical parts of my trade. I need to work on some of this hard stuff. Cause I could either improve the way that, you know, I argue in my marriage or I know I got some things that I'm an avoidant person and I've got to deal with, or I steamroll per like, we all have our stuff, right? And so what a lot of this looked like in the past is, and then there's good research behind this, a lot of leadership,

and corporaty stuff didn't work because it's usually large groups, not very interactive. And if it is, it's interactive only in the networking sense. A lot of it was almost kind of comedic or very, you know, trust falls. And a lot of this stuff was just put on by organizations. There's this great researcher named Jeffrey Pfeffer that talks about it. There was never really an evaluation of like, did this actually...

go into the real world? Could you go to this weekend clinic or this leadership thing from Disney? And did it make you better on Monday? Did it make you better at dealing with that difficult coworker? It was more so, did I get networking out? What was the figure? The figure is like $375 billion was spent on leadership training in the United States alone in 2015. But by and large, people just feel like they evaluated on, did I have a good time? So our model is very different. We do very small and intimate.

Nick (18:34)
Yeah.

Brett (18:38)
We've done in services where we'll do, you know, bigger groups, like we've done up to 300, but generally if somebody comes in one of our workshops, 10 to 20, 10 to 20, very hands A mix of PowerPoint, of course, because you've got to get core content, a mix of case study reviews. So people come in and this is all tied to my doctoral work. People will come in with a case study. Of course, we respect privacy. Nobody needs to use names, right? One the other day was,

I have a boss, I've worked for him for five years. He talks about boundaries a lot, yet I get texts at one in the morning. We're often expected to work over weekends, which is fine sometimes, but now it's turned into almost every other weekend. I need to find a way to tell him or her that I'm still committed to the job and hungry as ever, but there needs to be a disconnect here. So we'll work together. And it's great, because we had somebody from Spain that's like, here's how...

Nick (19:24)
Mm -hmm.

Brett (19:31)
you know, I've had this conversation with a boss, here's how it went. Here's what assertiveness was, looks like on our end. Somebody from the UK is like, that would get me in trouble. And so you have this whole room of people now thinking and strategizing and interacting. So that's really.

Nick (19:44)
Yeah. And you're not sending that person, you're not sending them back with a script to handle it. You're giving them the mental agility to handle the situation.

Brett (19:53)
Yes, and you chose a perfect term and we haven't talked in a long time, so there's no way this was a plant. We don't teach people communication, we teach them social agility. So under social agility is three things. That's a big umbrella skill, kind of like financial health, right? We know that financial health comprises many things, right? You're gonna have certain amount of assets that are liquid, certain ones that are tied up in investments. You know that you even need to take some losses.

every year to offset capital gains, right? Financial health is multifaceted, right? We know a lot, like I had athletes that were wealthy by standards of like they're, you know, they have 18 million, but it's all tied up. And so they're cash poor, right? So when we look at social agility, there's three main components. One is what we call contextual competence. Can you read the room? Right? So say somebody listening right now is like, hey,

we've had a lean year, we need to do some cuts this year and there won't be any staff bonuses. However, we're still gonna honor all other incentives tied to commission, sales, you know, whatever. And then imagine two weeks later, a staff member that was on that call comes up and asks for a raise. That is a lack of contextual competence. You're not, hey, listen and read the room. Or your buddy who decides he's gonna go to Europe, but he goes to Europe and acts like the most,

entitled American in the world, right? Hotel, give me six pillows, give me an extra large, where's a cheeseburger, you know, do as the Romans do. And a lot of people don't have contextual competence, so they end up offending people. They don't pay attention to the culture, the code, all these things. That's one. Am I clear on that piece for now? Okay.

Nick (21:37)
absolutely. Yeah. We all know that person who in the somewhere out in public that has to talk on their phone on speaker when they're the only person doing that.

Brett (21:48)
Right, yeah, and by the way, within contextual, because it's not just people that do that, like it's just, are you a self -aware individual? There's a lot of people that think they're contextually competent, but they're not, you know? Like, we had a great individual that worked for us and had all the intangibles teaching all that, but often couldn't be vulnerable. And it was a lack of contextual competence, because we would have people in the room that want to be vulnerable. So you need to create that vulnerability loop. Hey, share some failures. That's...

That's the nature of this event, right? Normalized failure, let's help people grow and deal with conflict. Wouldn't do it. And so I remember telling them, I was like, hey, this is a lack of contextual competence. You're letting your own lack of self -awareness and vulnerability get in the way of people. Like you've got to revamp this a little bit. So anyway, that's one. The next one is communication strategy, which this is, do you understand that there's different communication styles? Do you like, can you appreciate, like a lot of times people,

You know, let's say you and I are getting in a disagreement. There's so many things that can come into play. It could be timing, the environment, the medium in which we're interacting. There's so many components to communication. But at a base level, we're probably just not matching styles. You know, if you're my business partner, Nick, and let's say we had a down quarter and you're like, well, it's gonna be okay. We got, you know,

it's gonna be fine. And you're talking to me more of an inspirational tone, but you're not actually giving me details, right? You're not saying, well, we got this coming out and I've spec'd this out and this is likely to bring us in anywhere from 20 to $30 ,000 in that quarter alone. Here's why I think that, here's what's in the pipeline. That's how I wanna be talked to. If you just give me a bunch of inspirational nonsense, we're gonna have a little bit of a conflict, because I'm gonna be like, Nick, why? Give me an informed opinion here. Don't just BS me.

Nick (23:37)
Mm -hmm.

Brett (23:37)
So a lot of times people just, they're not matching the style. And it doesn't mean you give up your end. It just means like, hey, meet them where they're at. Meet them where they're at. And then the final one is just power literacy. And this is just the power dynamic side of things. Knowing that, okay, if contextual competence is do as the Romans do, communication strategy is speak as the Romans speak, right? Power literacy is see how the Romans maneuver.

So what I mean by this is everybody can do this right now. You can go into your workplace or you can even think about in your family. And there are certain people, let's use a workplace example first, that will lean on formal authority to get things done. I'm the senior manager, I'm the CEO, right? There's a formal title behind that, right? It's a legitimate title and that's what they kind of lean on this kind of coercion or this force.

There's other people that have tremendous power and influence because they're likable. They don't have to have any formal title. They could be nobody. They could be literally not like a peon in the mail room if such a thing exists anymore. But a lot of people like them and respect them. That's its own form of power. Then there are types of power that, hey, do you have a resource I need? Do you have access to information? Do you have this? So it's teaching people, hey, if you're coming up against resistance to change,

And maybe you've been trying to persuade somebody through rational techniques a lot or carrot and stick. And in reality, you need to be spending more time relating to that individual and building more of a connection and a friendship or vice versa, right? But it's getting people to kind of, what's the word I'm looking for, audit their approach. Now there's some keys here, Nick. A lot of times, analytical people and analytical communicators will try to persuade through rationality.

this is why we should do it, this is what the research says, this is what the numbers say. Well, if you're dealing with somebody that's more of an empathizer and values personal connection, you know, feelings of friendship, and they want you to move the emotional needle and they need a different level of trust, you're in the wrong, right? And a lot of people just don't see that. Everybody else is the asshole, everybody else is stubborn, everybody else is wrong, yet if they just sat and did like a 24 -hour food recall, if they did a 24 -hour...

recall like the types of persuasive strategies are using, they would realize that they're using the wrong gear for the wrong hill, the wrong key for the wrong hole. So it's teaching people that, hey, there's no perfect formula. This is a scientific method. Nobody's gonna come out right and tell you what they are. You've just gotta be able to do a combination of active listening, pay attention, and it's a skill like any other that you can absolutely pick up.

to learn how to navigate rooms, relationships, and everything in between.

Nick (26:28)
Yeah, I love that. And, but so it sounds like a lot to try to get your head around. Like where does somebody start? How do you, what is it actually to take somebody through that?

Brett (26:39)
Yeah. Yeah, so again, it's just anything. If I were to ask any of your listeners to teach me what they do for a living, right, it does seem like a lie, because you're using a new language. And unfortunately, we're not taught how to communicate in any of this stuff in school. Like, it's a little weird. You know, it's a little weird that we don't have how to have conversations with other humans in school. Like, somehow taking sex ed, teaching people, not teaching people about money.

not letting them be physically active and not teaching them how to have hard conversations, we're supposed to have a thriving society, which is bizarre to me. Yeah, exactly. And so the main thing is, and I'll anchor your question in this, I went out and give a presentation recently and somebody said, I had like an hour, and somebody was like, all right, well, where do I start? And I said, well, what are you paying attention to now? And he goes, well, what do you mean? I go, well,

Nick (27:13)
We're lucky to be here.

Brett (27:32)
you know, like what out of what I discussed seems like an easy jump off point. He's like, well, the communication styles, there's only four of them. Whereas the influence tactics and power dynamic stuff, there's a lot. So that seems overwhelming. I go great, then start there. Because here's the beauty. It's not a lean year thing. You know, all of this stuff is part of what's called just complexity theory. It's like, where do I start with building financial health? Should I follow the Dave Ramsey thing and pay off debt? I mean, that's good for some people.

it depends what kind of debt you have. Some debt is good debt. There's a lot of people that got really wealthy off of debt because you can use other, you know, the bank's money when we had interest rates that are 2%, you know, to build wealth. Other people, yeah, they should pay off debt. So I'm like, I don't care whether you audit the way you've tried to been persuading people as it been through logic, emotional appeals, some other kind of technique, credibility, whatever, or if the communication starts somewhere.

And it could be as simple as say there's somebody right now that's, they got somebody at work they're disagreeing with. They could say, hey, I listened to this wackadoo on a podcast and he talked about communication styles. And it made me realize I've probably been direct in a way that makes me look like a little bit of an a -hole. I just want you to know that that's never coming from an I know more than you or I'm better than you. I'm just a really passionate person. And I just kind of tell it like it is. But.

I wanna get better at this. Like how do you wanna be communicated to? What kind of feedback do you like? We asked a camera guy that filmed one of our events. Hey, when you get feedback from us, how do you wanna receive it? Email, text or the phone? So where they started is just having conversations about communication. You don't need to worry about the language so much. Like when somebody thinks I'm aggressive, I'm like, I'm sorry. Like I speak very directly because I wanna respect your time. You know?

Nick (29:15)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah, absolutely.

Brett (29:28)
And so it was another thing of, and we won't get too much into this, because I don't want to overwhelm people if I already have, but you also have to know what drives people. And people act like that's tough. It's not. You listen to people. I have a client that everything is about efficiency, the most efficient way, what's the best way, what's the most streamlined way. It's not hard to know that this person values, he finds security in kind of this prescriptive nature of things.

Right, I have another client that's like, yeah, man, I'll wing it. I'm just gonna figure it out. I love it. You know, like, I'm gonna just dabble in a bunch of things that you told me. I'm gonna see what works. I'm gonna break some stuff. Great, that person's more curiosity or adversity driven. He doesn't need a step -by -step approach. So I think a lot of people just need to think, wow, if I had to sit today and write, what kind of communicator am I? Why do I hide from hard discussions? Is it because it threatens my self -worth?

Is it because the way my family taught us to talk? What is anchoring my perceptions here? What assumptions am I making about other people? And man, if I go into my emails and my texts, almost every time I'm trying to convince somebody, I'm using logic or research or statistics, maybe I should try more metaphors, analogies, and stories. So there's...

Nick (30:47)
I mean, do you think that do most people have the awareness? Do they recognize the things that you just said about themselves that it's not landing and it might be you?

Brett (30:57)
No, because we have a society that by and large, when it comes to this stuff, doesn't ever look at that. And I'm not casting aspersions, so don't feel attacked listeners if you're hearing this. It's just me talking real. Most people don't do, they either do nothing or go to therapy. That's it. Most people do nothing or they go to therapy. When it comes to communication.

Nick (31:19)
they had therapy because they've tried everything else that they could find and that's where that's what's left.

Brett (31:25)
I mean, I can't answer for everybody. You know what I mean? Like, and I think therapy is a great thing for people to do. There's no, there's not me saying therapy is not worth it. What it is saying is here's the core thing. When we sent out semi -structured interviews for my doctoral work, we asked people a simple question, many others, but there was one question in there. You know, it was like, how do you rank yourself as a communicator with one being terrible, 10 being incredible, you know, or very effective?

Most people would give the answer you'd expect. you know, there's always room for improvement, you know, but I'd give myself a seven or eight. The follow -up question to that is what tool did you use to evaluate that? Where does that number come from? And usually what you would get is, wow, well, nothing formal, but one guy said, and he laughed afterwards because he knew exactly what he said. So I'm not trying, he was like, do people do what I tell them to do? And he goes, that sounds awful. Because that in no way, shape or form means I'm a great communicator.

And another person was like, well, feedback from my staff or this and well, and then they know, well, that's biased. So when I started looking up stuff out there, when we went out on our own, I'm like, who teaches communication? Like who teaches like not rah rah, we are the world. Like, hey, I'm the type of person that's come here ready to do the hard stuff. I wanna meet other people that are emotionally mature adults that like learning about psychology and persuasion, but are, we're all flawed, right? Like I teach this stuff for a living. I have so many.

things I could work on. That's the fun of it. And so the fact that most people don't see it as a skill, and we had one person actually say, well, I would never come to one of your workshops because I communicate every day. I feel like I'm pretty good at it. And so we had a professor, a communication professor on our podcast once, and I talked to him about that, and he said the same thing you would say, or at least I think you would say, the people that think they don't need it at all are the people they need it the most. Like, I could train people.

Nick (33:16)
Yep, absolutely.

Brett (33:21)
And I couldn't look them in the eye and say, I can guarantee you a healthier life and all that, because there's so many other things. I, with a hundred percent certainty, and I don't mean this with an ounce of pride, I mean this with conviction, can look at people and say, poor communication is guaranteed to make every part of your life worse. Every part. It's what starts wars, it ends relationships, it costs you business, it costs you peace of mind.

Nick (33:40)
I can't believe it.

Brett (33:48)
To me, there's nothing more scalable than water or air and nothing more sensible to say, hey, maybe I can go in a safe place to fail with non -judgmental people and work on this stuff. And it's addictive for me to teach because I get to work on it while I'm teaching it.

Nick (34:04)
Yeah. Well, and I think that you just kind of like explained why I think you're in such a great space. Like what you do is so powerful. And really to go back to my comment about, you know, what do they end up in therapy because they knew like what I'm doing doesn't work. And I've tried everything else, but there really is nothing else. I don't know what else. I don't know how else to work on this. You're the first person that I've heard that brought like some methodology and reinforce the fluidity needed.

Brett (34:20)
Yeah.

Nick (34:33)
Right? So it's kind of like, if you don't have the fluidity, if you think that this is going to be like a crystal clear, clear, clean path forward, not for you.

Brett (34:41)
No. Well, that's not, that's a right. Like whenever you're looking, let's just get nerdy for a minute. Leadership, management, entrepreneurship, any of those things, those are nonlinear, right? By nature. Like nobody, yeah, they're nonlinear. Like it's a, and that's why our tagline is guiding people through the messy realities of leadership and life. So it's nonlinearity. So how hypocritical would it be for me to say we have this static formula for how to teach you to deal with everybody? No.

Nick (34:53)
That's the nice way to say it.

Brett (35:09)
What we have is we have principles and mental models and opportunities for you to practice. We video people. We have three different price points. If this is interesting to business folks on the business side, because I know pricing always comes up. We offer three different pricing strategies. People can come just for the event. They can come for the event and the slides and the notes and things like that. And of course we give them goodie bags and all that. And then they can come and actually have their role playing sessions videoed. And then we break them down after.

And what's powerful about that is they get an evaluation when they're there. So they can actually say, like, let's say you and I watch this back and we both wanna do just improve the way we interacted here. There's categories as basic as, all right, Nick, I thought your tone of voice was this and we have a numbering system, it's not worth getting into unless you're interested, but I thought your tone was this, what'd you rate my tone? How'd you perceive it? It's not about the number. Let's say the contextually appropriate,

score is a three. Like, hey, I want to be really mad. I never raised my voice. I want to practice just raising my voice. I never I get stepped on all the time. And I just kind of want to practice losing it cool. We had somebody want to do that. So in that her tonality when she quote unquote lost it was out of this world, but she got a three because that was the role that she wanted to play. You know, if you on the other hand, we're like, I'm trying to keep my cool. I need you to pester me a little bit. And here's some things that were pester me. Right. It's my job to facilitate that for you.

So I'm playing that role. If you lose your cool and you were trying to keep it, that's your state management, your emotional state, you would get a one. Because hey, Nick, you were trying to keep your cool. Hopefully I said that right. You were trying to keep your cool and you lost it. I gotcha, that's a one. But the value is not the number. The value is the discussions and the like navigating the perceptual gap. The person you worry about.

And when you need to worry about yourself, including like I need to worry about me, is if I think I'm a three in state management, use of influence tactics, tonality, clarity, conciseness, all these things, and everybody else in the group thinks I'm a one, that's a problem. A two and a three, we don't worry about. That's cultural, that's where were you born, that's how you perceive things. People might hear it.

Nick (37:29)
Are you able with that information then, are you able to take somebody? So I'm a one, you think everybody else thinks I'm a one. I thought I was a three. Are you able to use that to open my eyes and get me to a more accurate perception? Or is it usually like, if you're that far off, you're gone.

Brett (37:48)
Yeah, I mean, usually people that don't want feedback and don't want to work on it and don't actually want somebody to help them don't come to our course, you know. So usually we don't have that issue every now and then. I think we had our first walkout this year. It was somebody that said, I'm only here to know. Like we always do this thing like, hey, why are you here? How can we help you? You know, just kind of an icebreaker so everybody gets to know. Because when you have these kinds of things, you want you want an intimate setting where people really get to know each other. So it's a powerful.

And the guy stood up and is like, I'm just here to network. I don't have any weaknesses. So like that's not our ideal client. You know what I mean? Or like my boss made me come to this. Like that's not our ideal client unless they're, now we've had people that their boss makes them come to it and they're like, I'm excited to too, cause I know I need something. That's great. But generally people are not, that's the nice thing about our product is if you actually like don't care about communication, you don't really want to practice these things.

and you don't wanna get around others that, I mean, by and large, everybody's got some version of the same problem. They're all dealing with, we don't like conflict. And it's not a negative environment. We break it up. So you might do two role playing sessions and then we go out and do comedic improv. Cause improv is a great way and a non -threatening way to get people to work on some things that they maybe lack in terms of like, I get in my own head. So I self edit or.

we have a game called gibberish where you and I would literally talk just nonsensically, but modulate our tone of voice because then that person doesn't have to worry about what they're saying. They just worry about how they're saying it. And that was stuff that we stole. And I use that term purposely from a woman named Viola Spolin and Neva Boyd who in the 1920s when immigrant children were coming in in mass during the great depression era and everything and getting to come into America.

they were trying to figure out improv has its roots in social work. So how do we get American children, Irish kids and Italian kids who all speak different dialects and languages and whatever to come together? Well, they used improv games and they could teach them social skills through the use of improv. So we have improv and then there's a good part of day one, people get to sit back and just kind of listen and take in. So you kind of have something for everybody to manage that. But the important thing is that people walk away and feel like, one, I really connected with people there.

Nick, thank you so much. We had people that fight. We had one woman that was like, I hate small talk. I don't think I should have to demonstrate empathy. And she's like, I know how messed up that sounds. And she's smiling the whole time she says this, right? She knows. And she's like, there's nothing you're going to tell me in these two days that changed me, but I respect you nonetheless. And so we're all just laughing. Because again, she just, you know, she knows how she's coming across. She meets four people there. Two of them are exactly like her. They tell her how they do it and they kind of survived. Another two give her feedback.

people leave like friends, because they've kind of gone through that together now. And so it's cool for us, because I hate cliche trust fall nonsense. I want to see people bond through shared struggle and discomfort.

Nick (40:44)
love improv as a tool, like you're talking about, for that reason, because it's uncomfortable as fuck. Before I met you, like just, it was probably within a year, I had hired an improv company to come into our company in Indy and do a workshop for us for that reason. And man, like, you know, it was, that was what we were able to do at that time.

Brett (40:51)
Yeah!

Nick (41:09)
And it was just, it was really exciting for me to see you using a tool like that because, you know, we're just trying to figure out a way to, to grab some value out of it. Right. I know it was in there, but so to see you put it to use, I think.

Brett (41:25)
I think the tough, thank you. I mean, the feedback's appreciated. The thing that gets tough is capturing that on video. I mean, one, you know, like we're a small staff still and you hire contractors to video some stuff. Sometimes they get good B -Rules, sometimes they don't, even when you kind of lay out what you want. Then you got to add, but there's some things that don't always translate well, you know, like over video. And that's always been a struggle of us is like, how do you market something like this? And, you know, we try to switch it up a lot and we try to.

We try to be very, we ask our audience, you know, how would you tell a friend about this? How would you do this? And it takes somebody that again, is just, we tend to find two demographics that come, I'm gonna mainly speak to age in this demographic. We see a crowd that, and there's gonna be variants here. We see a crowd in their forties and beyond that have typically been there, done that, made mistakes. You know, they're done chasing the technical thing to know when like, I've gotta be the absolute best of this. And they're more like, hey,

I understand that it's relationships. I want to do this. I've gotten screwed over for not playing the game at work. I need to learn more about that. Or I need to learn why I'm scared of conflict. Or I just, I'm ready to do something different because I'm tired of going to seminars that are all just death by PowerPoint and whatever. And then we have the younger professional that they don't want to make those big mistakes. What we don't tend to get and transparently what we don't want, because we're not for everybody,

We don't want the person that's just like, I don't think interpersonal skills are important. I think they're easy and I have no room. Like that's no, you know, if you're just like early on when we were transitioning from strength and conditioning, like if you were just worried about sets and reps, don't come to our event. That's not what this is, you know? So like we had a forensic analyst from the FBI. It's like, I'm going to lose my job if I don't learn how to put my science speak in language that other people in the bureau can understand. And he's like, so I need to figure that out.

And I think just for me, too, you think about when you talked about what was that journey like for your business, and I don't know that I'll say this perfect, I needed to do something where I felt like I kind of wasn't wasting my life on stuff that was ephemeral. And of course, that means something different to everybody. But to me, most of my hardships in life have been to, like, you know, I've dealt with either really shady people or, you know, I had flaky friends growing up and I could never really understand why certain people were flaky.

There are a lot of things I just didn't understand about why do people behave the way they did. And I think that that's stuff that's gonna matter regardless of what AI does and doesn't do. It's stuff that's gonna be relevant for a hundred years and a thousand years. It's stuff I'm gonna teach my son. And so I just felt like if I'm gonna pay money, cause God knows and I know you do too, you spend a lot of money on Con Ed. And you know what it's like to go and be away from your family and your business and to walk away disappointed. And I'm certainly not gonna say that we blow everybody's socks off, right? We all like,

But I was like, what would I spend $10 ,000 on? What would I spend a scary amount of money on? But I knew that it would give me something that is everlasting, that would help me in my marriage and me with myself and me with my business. And then we set out to create that thing.

Nick (44:37)
It's totally transferable. It pays off immediately and indefinitely. Like, yeah, it's a, it's the perfect investment in that way. So you, you touched on something there. This was a thing from very beginning that I want to go back to. you said, so let me say this. So I have, I know you have a young son. I have a two year old daughter. So, you know, these are the kinds of things like, you know, I want to make sure I don't mess her up. Right. I want to give her a shot.

Brett (44:46)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Nick (45:07)
And one of my big concerns, and you probably have kind of picked that up through our conversations is the closed mindedness or like the limiting beliefs, the fixedness that people may feel about themselves. You said that you, you may have even said it was when you were early teens, all that stuff's going on in your life. And they were saying these things about you and you said that doesn't define me. How the fuck did you have that like mentality?

at that age. To me, that's incredible.

Brett (45:41)
Yeah, well, it's not as impressive as it sounds. I mean, one, it was like the contrast principle of, you know, to give more context there, I had talked about how exercise and training kind of became my drug because I was a high school athlete. And so when my friends were going, you know, doing all this kind of like they were getting into coke and stuff like that. And it was just it was bizarre. And my family, you know, my parents were going through a divorce, which ironically, you know, they were married 22 years, divorced for 18, and they just got back together two years ago. So it's very interesting.

So I would just train all the time. Well, and in my book, Conscious Coaching, I talk about this more in depth. I ended up getting put in an inpatient eating disorder hospital because I had lost so much weight. Really what I was going through was depression. I wasn't really trying to lose weight. You know, I didn't know anything at the time about good training and good diet. So I was just training all the time, like a machine. Anybody that's ever gone through depression knows that you're just, you know, you kind of just go through the motions. You're in this kind of tunnel. You're not really, let alone as a teen that doesn't know how to really understand your feelings.

And I'm eating like, you know, what these magazines tell you to eat, low fat, low carbs. So you're basically eating nothing except egg beaters and turkey bacon. So when I'm in this hospital and they're treating me like I'm scared of a piece of pizza and they're telling me you have an eating disorder and they're treating me like, and I'm like, no, like you have no idea what's going on. Like you just, this is a one size fits all. You use the term it's functional fix it. What they do is they see one thing so much that everything becomes that thing.

Right, there was a woman there that was 68, her husband left her. Eating disorder was a coping mechanism. A little girl that was, you know, the middle of like, I don't know, nine kids, that was a way for her to get attention. A junior Olympic wrestler who got beat by his dad. That was, you know, there was all secondary things. And so when I'm sitting here getting told like, you know, this is this, I'm like, no, it's not, you know? Like, and it took a while because you were basically isolated in this hospital. I mean, you spent every day and every night in this hospital,

And when you weren't eating, you were confined to this little day room. And so it took a lot of me being like, all right, I'm not explaining something well enough, because I'm not getting it across to these people. And you were assigned to a therapist and the therapist generally wouldn't listen to you. So you'd get put on more antidepressant meds. So it was like, you know, it was like that movie, Misery, you know, you're just getting fed pills and nobody's like, I got called non -compliant because they said I was in denial. Eventually, I just remember like, and this probably led to a lot of me being obsessed with

refining the way I use my words. I remember just listening to music because that's the only thing you could do in there. You couldn't stand, you couldn't fidget, you couldn't burn calories. And like I just heard something in a song and it was like kind of about facing your own demons and whatever. And I'm like, all right, why am I angry? What is going on? What would it take to get me out of here? Why does this make me mad? How could I phrase this? You start going down this like screw five whys. I'm going on 35 whys. Just massive self confrontation, introspection. All right, you say this isn't the problem, then what's the problem?

And eventually, you know, I had asked to change therapist told it to this woman. And she helped me convince my parents that that wasn't the place for me. You know, and it but it took and that's one of our influence tactics and the power literacy thing that we teach people. Sometimes it takes a third party to get your point across, especially while in parenting. And you know, like you're the most potent means of influencer indirect, I can sit here and advertise our course all day long. We got one this weekend.

the potency of you going to your audience and saying, hey, you should go to this and whatever. And then another third party saying that, right? That's the power of word in mouth and outside agents. Cause there's a disconnect. Same reason if you ever came to speak at one of our events, right? I'm never gonna make you introduce yourself. I introduce you cause that sets you up. So anyway, yeah, you just, people need to literally, can I use, I'm not trying to use colorful language to be edgy, but like, can I just use a phrase? At some point,

Nick (49:28)
You be real.

Brett (49:30)
People just need to cut the bullshit and say like, why am I like this? And this is stuff that, you know, my wife wouldn't mind sharing. She worked on this too. Like, hey, why are you avoidant? Why do you shut down? Well, because of this. Okay, but why, like, that's not the case anymore. So why, everybody's gotta have this moment with themselves where they just cut the shit and don't let superficial answers reign. A client of mine right now says like, I can't be alone. I don't like being alone with my thoughts. I bury myself in work. Why? Where do your thoughts go when you're alone?

Well, they go to my family. Okay. Well, do you ever think that the thing you're running from is the thing you need to run towards? You know, and I'm not trying to get Freudy here. Like, it's just nobody has the answer except you.

Nick (50:06)
Yeah, well, I mean we get good at we get it good at dodging that discomfort and not even realizing it right like some people can do it gracefully.

Brett (50:16)
Right, yeah, and I think that's my job. Have you ever seen The Dark Knight? Okay, so there's a part in my new book where I talk about how Christopher Nolan had to be very conscious of the villain he chose in that movie. And Christopher Nolan's a very cerebral guy. If you guys don't know, he's the director, almost every movie, whether it's Inception, Dunkirk, things like that, very cerebral, very philosophical, I'll keep this brief. And he knew that...

Nick (50:22)
Yes.

Brett (50:42)
in order to find the perfect antagonist for Batman, because it's not a comic book movie, that's really more of a movie about game theory and inter -conflict, he needed to find somebody that was uniquely capable at attacking that character's weakness. Well, everybody knows that Batman's weakness is he will not kill, right? He has this kind of full morality, but because the Joker constantly puts this person in situations where because he's not gonna kill the Joker, the Joker's gonna kill 40 or 50 other people,

He makes Batman realize that, hey, there's a flaw in your character. You're not able to do what's necessary and I'm gonna keep exposing you. And so Batman eventually has to realize he can't be the good guy. He has to become the dark knight and do unpopular things. My job is messed up as it sounds at these workshops is to be more of that joker. I put people in situations and we do so respectfully and comfortably. So this is very tongue in cheek. We ease people into it.

Nobody gets yelled at, it's not weird, it's a very welcoming atmosphere. But it's my job to create the antagonistic forces necessary in those two days for people to start asking themselves some very real questions. You know?

Nick (51:54)
So then they've felt what that discomfort is, they recognize it in the future, then they can start to turn and face it instead of unintentionally or intentionally go in the other direction. Is that not?

Brett (52:06)
Yes, the best advertising we ever got from a client was he had posted a picture. We had had him do a role playing session cold at the beginning. He was trying to convince somebody to do something that doesn't matter for the sake of time. And at the end of the two days, we had him do it again. And we took a video of the previous projection of him up there, watched him do that in the new one. And so he posted this picture of like, you saw him and this person at the end, him at the person at the beginning.

And he said, the best way I can describe what I just did was you versus you. This was a weekend where you can't hide from anything and you realize after the first couple hours you wouldn't want to. And it makes you figure things out that otherwise would have taken you five, 10 years or maybe a lifetime. And I'm like, man, bottle that up. Because at the time I was too close to my product and even I didn't know how to advertise it like that. I don't know if you've ever had that experience. Have you ever? Yeah, and so.

Nick (52:58)
Yeah. yeah. Of course, yeah.

Brett (53:02)
You get to, and so like my job is, and if you were to see my office right now, it's why I have a poster of the Dark Knight and the Joker. People think that's the bad guy. And of course in that movie it is, but it's also the anti, it's representative of the antagonistic force that somebody who wants to make a difference needed to become a better version of themselves, a more adaptable, adaptability is our one word that defines our product, a more adaptable version of themselves.

Nick (53:28)
I love it. I mean, it's funny to talk about it that way and even use like the dark night, but it's so healthy, right? And despite where you might think that you are, I mean, I'll even go back and use my experience with the improv. Man, was I uncomfortable. man. And I hadn't done it. And I was the one, you know, I was the figurehead in a group of a lot of people and I was going to look like an idiot. And.

Brett (53:34)
You're right.

Really? Why?

Yeah.

Nick (53:58)
And usually I don't, I'm pretty good about that stuff with them, but in, but that was further outside of my comfort zone. And so I was that guy at the beginning and then at the end who is like, you know, I did it at the beginning, but at the end I was like, man, that is such a change just from these few hours. You know, I was forced, kind of forced to do something, way out of my comfort zone. I did it. And then at the end, you can tell, like, it gives you a new sense for yourself and, and.

Brett (54:19)
Yeah.

Nick (54:28)
like how you feel in situations.

Brett (54:30)
Well, but think about it this way, right? Going back to you said you have a two -year -old, right? One of the, you say little girl. One of the things you'll teach her is that, you know, failure is necessary. You can't be scared to fail. Failure precedes learning. And that's the nice thing about improv, it precedes failure and it's fun. Do you want to do a quick game here that we do for like two minutes? Okay, so one of the things we do right out of the bat, so we're about to run an event in Calgary. When will this come out?

Nick (54:50)
Let's do it!

June, late June maybe?

Brett (54:58)
Okay, so yeah, late June we'll be in Calgary. We'll run another one in Phoenix this year and we run some other courses too, but improvs are always a part of it. And one of the things I do right off the bat after doing housekeeping and thank yous is I say, okay, we're gonna rip the bandaid off, we're just gonna have some fun. We're gonna normalize failure. This is a game you can't win. There's no goal to win it. The goal is just to laugh and it's ridiculous. So the game is called, You Can't Say That, all right? Now you and I are gonna have a conversation.

and we'll make it about whatever, but when we teach it, sometimes we add more structure, sometimes we don't. More structure might look like we're two guys in a Mexican restaurant, but you've gotta add information to the scene. But all this is, is you and I have to have a normal conversation, only we can't use any words that have the letters C as in carrot or B as in boy in them, C or B. Now, high level, right? It looks ridiculous.

Not ridiculous. When I went and spoke in China, I got told by my interpreter, no metaphors and no analogies. Okay, those are things I can't say. I've spoken in other countries where I can't use this term or that term. I go to certain, when I went and spoke at Apple, no cuss words. I go to another place that you'd be surprised by, hey, speak real. If something comes out, we'll applaud you for it. Everybody's got their own code. So C and B here, no words with C and B is just representative of there's sometimes you can't say things.

You know what I mean? Like you can't, there are words that Eminem is good of a rapper as he is cannot say because of his skin color and nobody should say, you know, so we all have constraints. It's a constraint. Now, if you mess up, let's say you're like, can you pass me the salt that clearly has a C. Man, you don't freak out about it. You just say it again, like you're a lawyer who just used the wrong phrase. All right. So I'll start it off. I can't even use your name. Think about that. Mr. I can't say Mr. Barry or Nick.

Nick (56:27)
Yeah.

Brett (56:56)
Man, it's great to see you.

Nick (57:00)
It's good to see you also.

Brett (57:03)
How's your wife?

Nick (57:06)
Great. And yours?

Brett (57:09)
Excellent, I can't say excellent. Amazing, thanks for asking. CMB, yep, we're good. You remember? Thanks for asking again. He's amazing. How about the little girl?

Nick (57:15)
And your son?

Vivian, she just had...

turned to a week ago.

Brett (57:38)
Vivian, wonderful name. When's her birthday? When was she born? Nope. When? How old?

Nick (57:48)
2 on May 22nd. Can't do that.

Brett (57:52)
All right, so see like, yeah, but that's fun, right? So we'll stop. Fun, awkward, makes you analyze, but like, you don't worry about it. You know, just have fun with it. And we'll also do a game called Happy Mad Sad Afrad, where people will be given a phrase, like it's raining outside. Nick, say it's raining outside and act happy.

Nick (58:14)
It's raining outside.

Brett (58:16)
Act mad, say it in mad phrase.

Nick (58:20)
raining outside.

Brett (58:21)
Right now, 30 other people might say it's raining outside or they might say it passive aggressively. All we're doing is we're teaching them variants and different things so that when, hey, when you guys go role play for real and Nick wants you to act like his wife and they're having a confrontation about where to go on family vacation, you need to change your tone of voice. You need to bring some realism. Nick's gonna let you know how his wife talks and some idiosyncrasies. If you can't do that while we're playing here in Improv Land,

You're gonna have a hard time doing it, serious. So it's just, you know, it gets people out of their own skin. It's lateral. It's no different than when I taught athletes, when athletes squatted, if I had an NFL guy squat 300 pounds, there is nothing about a squat that looks like sprinting, correct? Is there anything that biomechanical? Nothing. But can squatting make them a faster sprinter in some respects? Yeah. So improv has indirect application to ways that we communicate, because it allows you to work on,

not self -editing, tonality, and these things. And then we had this woman that was a biologist talk about analysts through and through. She worked at a subsidiary of the CDC, I believe. I can't remember exactly. And she goes, man, that was amazing. And I said, well, thank you. I'm always self -conscious teaching this stuff, because it depends on how people, you know, if they open up or if they fight it. And she's like, but you know what I love the most?

And I was, I'm usually used to hearing people say the role play, cause they're like, I got that out of my system. I got to tell my roommate that she needs to get out and I'm not signing the lease again. You know, they get rehearsal for real life. She goes, the improv. And I said, you know, I'm surprised. Admittedly, I would have thought that you would have not liked that given the nature of your field. She's like, honey, that's all I do is serious stuff all day. People need to play. People need to play. And so that was nice, you know, cause it was a, it was a scary thing to teach when we first did this. I won't lie to you. I was,

Nick (1:00:10)
Yeah.

Brett (1:00:15)
I knew this stuff had value, but it only had value to the point that people were willing to be open.

Nick (1:00:22)
Yeah, absolutely. I think I saw something in it and I appreciated that, but it's just, it's been incredible to see just like everything else about Udo. I mean, I don't want to make it sound like improv is what you do, but to see the tools in the hands of a real craftsman, like that's a different level than like me just trying to do improv.

Brett (1:00:34)
Appreciate it, man.

Thanks.

Well, Matt, the good news with that, and it's funny, you know, up above here, I don't think you can see it, but I have a little wooden sign that says life is improv. You know, and if you look at what improv is, because this is, and the only reason I spout this out is this isn't meant to seem like intellectual, this is just part of my doctorate as well. So people know it's not Brett Bartholomew's made up BS. There are many definitions of improv, but the one that I really like the most and appreciate from this one researcher is essentially it's decision making.

It's spontaneous decision -making within boundaries using available resources. That is what it is. And so like, you know, as a parent, you improvise every day as like we, we have to improvise with everything we do as a business owner, we all deal with scarce resources. So like, and the root term, improvises just means the unforeseen, you know? And so I love it when people come in and they're like, that would never happen. Or yeah, this person role -playing my boss did good, but like,

they raise their voice a lot, my boss would never do that. I'm like, well, it's okay. We'll redo that with a different partner or they can adjust. But do you think you ever might deal with anybody that's gonna raise their voice? Of course, you know? And so it's fun. And for what it's worth, unless I've scared everybody off, goes without saying any of your listeners, if they come to an event within this, what I would say this year, or depending when this goes out, we'd probably even extend it into a portion of next year and we can do a code.

they're welcome to come for 25 % off. And so if it makes it less scary, they get a discount. Of course we do early bird discounts. And when we do this, if this isn't their bag, we have three main hallmark workshops. The one I'm talking about is called the apprenticeship, just because nobody ever masters communication. We do speaker school, which is what we're running this weekend. That's for people that, you know, it could be whether you've spoken a lot and you just still want to sharpen the sword, you have social anxiety and it scares the bejesus out of you.

Or you maybe just want to dip your toe in. So we close that at 10 people, because everything's very intimate. And then we have a brand builder, what we're going to call in the future, entrepreneurial essentials, where people can come and again, whether they're starting their own business, they've had their own business, it's just improv is a part of all those things, because people have to practice pitching and interacting and all that stuff. So we have a lot of different facets that can meet people's comfort zones.

Nick (1:03:09)
Yeah, I love it. I mean, also the, the, the mastermind of coaching programs, you know, I'm a fan of that. So the, all of this is on art of coaching .com, right? I mean, this, you have more resources on, on that site. And so I'm going to say you need listeners need to, if you're podcast people, and I think that you probably are check out Brett's podcast. He's got 300 and some episodes.

Brett (1:03:16)
Yeah, you do a great one.

Thanks.

Nick (1:03:36)
I mean, every facet of communication, there's nothing to want for there, right? He's got anything you could want to hear about, it's covered somewhere in the podcast. I know he's got a ton of free downloads. His book's awesome. Conscious Coaching's awesome. Can you tell us anything about the next book?

Brett (1:03:44)
Appreciate it.

Yeah, I'm trying to think. So I can't tell you the title yet, but a lot of this stuff is going to be covered in the next book. So if you're somebody that, you know, imagine I always speak to just small anchor and myself, I got very tired of reading leadership books that, you know, it was always like, a great leader is always transformational and they make an instant difference and they never have doubts and worries. This is an anti leadership leadership book. It is a book that spits in the face of all those myths.

talks about the dark side of leadership in an inspirational way, why it's actually good to deal with darkness and doubts and demons. So one part of the book is dealing with kind of that part of leadership, the conflict, the can I make it out of this, the constant criticism, the getting screwed over at work and trying to figure out life. The second part of the book is about dealing with external conflict. So that's a lot about the communication styles, power dynamics and all that. So the book is kind of divided, it's two books in one.

dealing with inner conflict related to leadership management and that stuff. And then on the other end, how to deal with communication, difficult personalities and those. So the goal is to write something that speaks to business owners, but also your 13 year old daughter who's wondering why their friends are so shady and can't figure it out. And it's been tricky because there's certain things a publisher doesn't allow me to get away with. There's certain things that they're like, you need to use this many leadership examples. And I'm like, hey, I'm not gonna talk about some white CEO.

and Coca -Cola like every other leadership book. And it's not the stuff of like be the coffee bean, not the carrot, because the coffee bean changes the water. This is like, I've tried to just go into my own mind and think, what did I want when I needed it most? And it just wasn't out there. And I'm not saying people don't do great work. And I'm not saying I'm a perfect author. I'm just like, if you're tired of the BS and you just kind of want something that speaks more visceral,

It'll be available next year. You can just go to artofcoaching .com slash book. My publisher hasn't set a date yet, cause we're still doing edits. Artofcoaching .com slash book will get you on the update list, but 2025 is when it will be released.

Nick (1:06:02)
That's awesome. I think anybody who studies leadership, who reads about leadership, if they stopped and thought about it would say, yeah, there is a void out there. And that's why I wanted to have you come and talk because like you have moved into that void. And it's, I mean, it's been incredibly valuable for us, for all of the, for my businesses, for the businesses that we've worked with. And I mean, you're here because I'll vouch for you with my audience. Like this is the real deal. So thank you.

Brett (1:06:15)
Appreciate it.

It means a lot and vice versa. And like, let me just say this too, like I'm somebody that has just the right amount of self -hate. I am not perfect. We are not perfect, but you know, if nobody should ever have an experience with us that was bad because of a lack of effort, you know? And so I like, I've always appreciated that about you as well. Like just there's, there continues to be a void of just grassroots, imperfect people trying to do better.

not hiding from things that they've struggled with and done and you know, whatever. And it's just, it's nice to know other real people and it's been too long. So we've got to get you out to one of our events sometime.

Nick (1:07:06)
Yeah, I think I'm back on the road again. So I'm game. Yeah, you broke me. We broke the ice with a little two minute improv session here. So now you know that I'm game.

Brett (1:07:09)
Good. All right, man. Well, it's great to see you.

Yeah, well, and like, there is a certain personality and I think, you know, it's important for your audience to recognize it, not that they don't already, but like, you wanna follow people that aren't scared to talk about failures and scars and shrapnel. And that's just like, when people ask, who do I trust? I'm like, well, go to the people that are actually vulnerable and tell you real stuff. The more they kind of hide or pivot or only share successes, man, run. And so,

It's easy to get along with people that aren't trying to, you know, they're not telling you stuff with something behind their back all the time. And you're a great example of that. So thanks for always giving me an opportunity and being able to be somebody that's reliable.

Nick (1:07:55)
Of course, man. It's a pleasure. So.

Brett (1:07:58)
Likewise.