PP 328: The Deep Work of a Clear and Compassionate Communication with Say Gabriel

Kim Sutton: Welcome back to another episode of Positive Productivity. This is your host, Kim Sutton, and I’m so happy that you’re here to join us today. I’m also thrilled to introduce, Say Gabriel. Say is the Chief Strategist at Anansi, and we actually work together for a common client that we have, so I know this is gonna be an amazing conversation. 

But Say, welcome.

Say Gabriel: Thank you so much. I am really stoked to be here.

Kim Sutton: Oh, I am stoked that you’re here because I’m just so excited, really. I would love it if you would share a little bit of your backstory and how you became an entrepreneur.

Say Gabriel: Absolutely. I’ve been writing every which way ever since I was a kid. And initially, I had thought that I really wanted to be actually a novelist and write fantastical fiction and change people’s lives that way. But of course, as the years went on, I found myself falling into the position of copywriting a lot. Writing descriptions for products and services in every company that I worked for. We’re talking about more like service retail days. I would help them with their internet presence and writing, and help to just communicate to people on what they did. So I started to think that maybe that was the area that I would go into instead of that idea of what I can realistically earn a living with. But it wasn’t until I actually got a job in student communications services for the university that I’ve been attending, and I entered this new role, which I had taken because I knew that it had a lot of web writing, and just writing in general. 

But once I got into the role, I got thrust into this larger project that was going on that was really revamping their main student portal, like the students.ubc.ca, where the 40,000 plus students all go when they’re looking for information. And at first, I started out just producing content for that portal, linking them to resources, writing in a way that connected people to what they were looking for, giving them ideas. But they were in the middle of actually revamping that entire portal, and it became a much, much larger job where all of a sudden, we were trying to look and understand, who are the students? What are they trying to accomplish? What are their problems? How can we organize this massive crazy amount of information in such a way that they could actually access it, find what they were looking for, and have the most amazing experience possible? And I was working with a team of 10 people, all of whose jobs were to make students lives as amazing as it could be, to make sure that they were getting the most out of their student experience, breaking down what that meant, what that looked like, making sure that they’re getting all of the resources that they need for any issues they might be going through, whether that’s mental, emotional, physical. 

Anyway, it was just amazing, and it was such a bigger job than just writing. It was really letting our empathetic awareness, developing an empathic awareness of who needed help the most, and then giving it to them. This was a whole new world, I’m lingering on it a little bit, even though I know we haven’t gotten to the entrepreneur part yet, just because this changed my whole perspective in my whole life. Having just exited being a student, being on the way out of that that I was just like, well, if I had known this at the beginning of my time here, how different it would have been. And it showed me that communications, internet and writing could serve this deeper, more amazing purpose than just conveying a piece of information. It was about this organization, and empathy, and planning, and strategy, and all this other stuff. So I was really excited. That position was a term position. 

So after a year, I was done. And I thought that I would just be on a track for getting a role, a more permanent role either within student communication services or somewhere else in a communications role in the university. But something happened, and that something was called the Sunshine Coast. And it was this rural area, it was a fairy right away from the city I was living in, and from the first time I went there, I was just like, oh, my gosh, I don’t want to live in the city anymore. I want to be here, and I want to live here. There was a huge arts community and all this other stuff I was interested in. Anyway, so I decided that ultimately doing a job I loved in a place where I was really unhappy and unsatisfied, being in the city versus being where I want it to be, you know what? I could figure it out. So everything kind of worked up. It worked out, I packed up all my stuff and moved. 

I was expecting it to be like a five year plan, and it turned out that I was there within a year. But the type of role that I’ve gotten a taste for the kind of impact that I wanted to make really wasn’t possible from this. I mean, it was, but positions were scarce. And it became more and more apparent that if this was something I really wanted to do, I would have to do it myself, and I would have to figure out a way to deliver this to the world. So that’s where I really got the idea to start this business. And that’s really what pushed me towards it. I’d flirted with starting a business for many years, and had avoided it out of fear. But now, I had a reason. I had a reason, I wanted to be here, I knew what I wanted to do. Although, of course, it was a little bit of a curvy path to get there as it so often is. And so I just started doing it. I started reaching out to nonprofits on the coast, other organizations and businesses, and seeing how I could help them connect to the people they could help the most in such a way that those people could understand the value that they serve. A bit of a long winded answer. But hopefully, that answers your question.

Kim Sutton: Say, either New Year’s 2016, or New Year’s 2017, I made a resolution to stop interrupting. And I’ve been getting really bad interrupting on the podcast, sorry to tell you. It’s a good thing that I had mute on, because my mind was blowing over here. Absolutely blowing. Listeners, Say and I are both on a weekly team meeting call for our client Pivot Ground, I just got to give a shout out to [inaudible], mark and the whole team. And I was thinking about something that I’m working on now. And actually, you believe our last meeting just a little bit early, we tend to go a little bit long sometimes, listeners. We get along so well, and conversations just start. But we started talking about Facebook messaging box. And while you were just talking, it made me think about how these messaging box are basically doing what you were trying to help create, or what you were creating on the portal. Because people go to these to get the resources that they’re looking for. 

Listeners and Say, you know I have chronic idea disorder, but I’m just thinking, oh, my gosh, you and I need to work together. I’m just putting it out there, right in the middle of my podcast. I have the systems, I know how to do the systems, you have the content, let’s take them on a journey and take them exactly where they need to go.

Say Gabriel: Absolutely 150% yes, I’m so into that. That’s what I love about you. And actually, while it’s in my mind, one of the coolest things that I have kind of discovered on this journey is that this type of content work, if you take the systems out of the picture, like if you have someone who can handle the systems, it is very much like that narrative that I first wanted to do, like writing a story. Not that it’s false in any way, not at all. It’s all about delivering really authentic true information in a way that shows that you understand empathically the people who will benefit the most from it, more empathetically. But it’s all about telling a story. It’s about being able to guide people on a journey with a story understanding of the types of questions they’re going to ask and how you can answer those questions in a way that they’ll absorb. So anyway, where I was going with this is that I’m super stoked that you do know the systems because that’s always the piece that I like a little bit. I mean, that’s why we have the model that we do in the business. We work with people who have the systems.

Kim Sutton: You know what I’m thinking about is, Choose Your Own Adventure books. Did you ever read those when you were growing up?

Say Gabriel: Absolutely. Many. Yeah.

Kim Sutton: But what you’re doing is you’re adding the personal touch.

Say Gabriel: Yeah, yeah. And you’re doing the research too. Choose your own adventure, you’re kind of thinking, what do I want to happen? And what are the options to happen versus when you’re doing this in an engagement/marketing. Although it’s not always marketing, it often is. Sometimes, it’s usability and that kind of stuff.

Kim Sutton: Which is often the most difficult part.

Say Gabriel: Oh, I know, it’s so challenging. But all of it comes back to understanding, I don’t want to beat a dead horse into the ground here. But understanding, really, who is it that you serve? Who is it that you can help? What are their problems? What are they feeling? What would they be feeling? What do they want to be feeling? What are their goals? And then how do you get there? That’s where the magic happens.

Kim Sutton: Well, when I set up my first one, and I think we talked about this in one of our team meetings a few weeks ago, there’s a few of us, me included, that when I called customer service, I just wanted to push and talk to somebody. I think you said the same thing.

Say Gabriel: That’s me. I always want to push zero.

Kim Sutton: Yeah. And I don’t get irritated very often, except if it’s my kids, because they know which buttons to push. But if I push zero and it says, I don’t understand that response. Then I’m like, really, just really. When I was setting up my own messaging bot, I accidentally left this autoresponder on. That if it didn’t have a response, it would just send them the same can’t response. Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t understand that. And that’s where a lot of miscommunications and disconnects come in on websites and email marketing. It’s not congruent, it’s not in line. I’m going to pause there for just a quick second, not to do an ad, but when you’re talking about writing, and I know this is not the same type of writing but I just had to throw in there. Did you know that they are not really teaching cursive in schools anymore?

Say Gabriel: I think I did know that. Yeah, we learned cursive extensively when I was in school. By the time, like I moved across the country to go to, even by the time I was in high school, some of the people I was spoken to had never learned cursive even as a kid.

Kim Sutton: I did not realize until this past weekend that my kids stopped learning cursive in third grade, and they are in sixth and ninth grade. I had no idea. I just thought they were printed because they didn’t feel cursive. No, we don’t want to put it on a website necessarily because it might be illegible, but it gives such a style to what we’re saying, and how do we expect our kids to be able to write their signature on anything. I guess it’s going away with eye scanners and fingerprints. We can pay online now, but yeah, I just had to ask. With authors like J. K Rowling, and Stephen King, and a lot of other big ones who have series books that have just gone huge. I’m not saying that Stephen King has a series, but just multiple books. Do you think it’s harder for wannabe authors who are wanting to enter the fiction realm to have the confidence to get in there now?

Say Gabriel: Well, I don’t think that it was ever easy to get into publishing. I think that from what I know and understand, things have shifted. I’m not sure if this is kind of taking your question at a right angle. 

But personally, I think one of the biggest barriers right now to people being able to achieve that kind of success with writing actually is more on the side of all of the media that’s in our face all the time. I think it’s becoming harder and harder to do deep work, and to commit to something, and keep at it again, and again, and again without a lot of return and persevere until you achieve that success. I think that that’s something that in today’s day and age, we are living in a world of much more instant results. And even if you look at something, like your more typical entrepreneurs and businesses that they’re starting, usually that is coming out of a need that they see or an opportunity that they see. And they can really see what that future return is, and keep at it, and get some initial success. And often, people who are entrepreneurs don’t fit the mold of your typical employee anyway. So they have a lot of motivation to keep going versus somebody who’s trying to publish a full length fiction novel. Even nonfiction, as you yourself have said, Kim, that they want to know your followers. Like they want to know what kind of following you already have. They want to know how much work they have to do to market, or whether it’s already there versus fiction, it’s a lot harder to prove that. It’s a lot harder to prove and say, oh, I have this many followers on social media. 

Therefore, I have this many people who are going to want to read a fiction book. It doesn’t quite work out that same way. So I think with those two kinds of things hand in hand, also with the, not to get political, but the political landscape in North America has not been one that’s been super conducive to the arts in general for years. And so I think all of these things combined, but especially that lack of deep work, I think. Not totally making this up. This is coming from a book I’m currently reading called Deep Work, but there’s a lot of it that is really challenging. I mean, this is even why I run the business that I do. It’s difficult for me to lock myself in a room all day and not talk to anybody day after day, after day, after day to produce something that may or may not ultimately be published and have a return on value for me. Like it’s something that I still love and want to do, and I have finished books and intend to pursue that a little bit further. But right now, I need to put food on the table now, and set up my family now.

Kim Sutton: I am glad that you brought in the topic of deep work. And listeners, all the books and resources that we talked about will be in the show notes, which you’ll be able to find at thekimsutton.com/pp328. I’m reading Lingo by Jeffrey Shaw right now. And he was talking about how in the last decade, the attention span of humans, maybe just Americans, I forget exactly what demographic he was talking about, has gone from 12 seconds to 8 seconds. So it’s not just about the amount of time that we have to grab somebody’s attention on social media or on our website. But it’s also becoming harder and harder to focus on our own work, which you’ve heard about from me, listeners and Say. I mean, my own book is Chronic Idea Disorder. And the reason that book is not out of my head and published yet is because I have chronic idea disorder. So I tend to lose focus and jump, and jump, and jump and I want tonight, it’s a constant struggle. Someday, the book will get published someday.

Say Gabriel: Yeah. And when it does, you’ll be able to help a whole other whack of people with the same issue.

Kim Sutton: I hope I’ve conquered it by that point. But at the same time, I don’t know that I hope that I’ve conquered it by that point. Because I feel very blessed by the amount of ideas that I have.

Say Gabriel: I think it’s also like many things, it’s an ongoing process to live with it, manage it and kind of point the flow in certain directions rather than something that you want to kind of conquer and move on from right. Because like you said, those ideas are great, or grateful to have them. It’s just how you navigate your life through it and get stuff done. That’s really what you need to learn to manage, at least.

Kim Sutton: Absolutely, yeah. How do you schedule your work for the week? And I asked because, although most of my work week, when I’m working in client work, is spent in Infusionsoft, I can only tolerate so much Infusionsoft in any given block of time. But I’ve also found that batching and blocking, especially for podcasts, so it’s not constantly interrupting my flow during every single day, helps alone. But I can’t say this with love towards the podcast and towards Infusionsoft work. I can’t take too much of a good thing. I get bored. How do you manage your process so that you can break up the monotony, or maybe it’s not monotony for you, but so that you can stay engaged?

Say Gabriel: Whoa, that is an amazing question. I think I’m going to approach it from what might seem to be a little bit of a roundabout way. I think it comes down to the three pillars of the podcast, self care, systems and support. Also, I’m a freakishly process driven and organized person just because it helps keep me sane. And it helps keep me from being dragged down by that monotony all the time. But anyway, to come back to your question, I think it starts at a higher level of goal setting. Actually figuring out what you want. And in pretty much all parts of my life, in my business, to my relationships, to everything, I’ve noticed that one of the greatest challenges is figuring out what it is that you want? What does success look like? And again, just like your chronic idea disorder, it’s something that changes and that needs revisiting over time as you grow and learn. 

But for me, I know that in the longer term and on a deeper level, what I want is, well, I want to have kids, raise a family, spend a lot of time in the garden and empower people. I mean, that’s what I want in my overall life. And then as part of my business, I really, really, really, in both business and personal life, want to empower people to live fulfilled lives. And part of the way I do this in my business is by connecting them with products or services that will help them. How that actually translates to that day to day, and how do I plan my week because I promise, I am getting there. Since I know what I really want in the long term, I know that, for example, although I love what I do, it’s really, really important to me to build an impact driven heart centric business. I know that I don’t want to be in that nitty gritty everyday managing it. So my larger goals, and how they relate to my smaller goals is that I know that I want to set up a business that I can essentially walk away from, at least for periods of time. I still want to be involved in it, but I want to be not integral for any little thing to happen. I think that lots of entrepreneurs can probably relate to me. But this is something I’ve known, and has been part of my big goals for a long time, so that helps me in terms of understanding what I want my week to look like, and what I’m putting my energy into. So with that in mind, I’ve been building a team, and a team of amazing people. We have a core staff of three, and maybe like five active contractors at any given time. So I spend a lot of time, I know that I need to be in the project work, but I also need to be doing a lot of process building. I need to have those systems set up. 

I personally also know, and here’s where we get to those three pillars, self care, the systems and support. So I need that support. I need support in my personal life, for my family, but I need support in my business to help me execute the goals so that I can eventually tackle that really scary phenomenon of leaving it in other people’s hands. Despite the fact that it is my baby, or whatever, some people like that analogy, some don’t. But it’s this thing that I’ve built, created and developed. A lot of people, when they think of my business, they think of great, it means running a lot of time with the systems. And I also know that self care time is critical. Like it’s critical. I know conceptually that I need self care to be healthy. If I work through the weekend, when I get back to work on Monday, I’m exhausted, I’m not doing my best work. 

Actually, for me to do my best work, I need at least one full day off, or else, my productivity suffers enough that it’s actually not worth it. Because I’m doing way worse work than if I’d taken that time off and just crunched a little bit harder, or shifted, or delegated a little bit better come Monday. I also know if I work past 9:00 PM, then I’m going to dream of work, wake up the next morning and feel like I worked all night because I dreamt of work and I worked until like 9:30 or whatever. And then I wake up at 5:30 to start work at 7:00. Again, I feel like I just work in the sand. It makes me nuts, and I’m not very productive. 

So getting into the specifics, I wanted to answer kind of on a more strategic emotional approach level, but also on a specific level. So with all of this in mind, I look at my week and I think, okay, what are the top things that I need to get done this week? Like those five things that, if I only did these five things and nothing else, it would be okay. And usually, that’s a mix of project work and management/process work. And then I actually have my week divided so that Mondays and Wednesdays, I have no meetings at all, so that I can get into that deep work, whether that’s project work, or whether that’s process and working on the business work, which is what I’m starting to skew more towards. I know that I need to have really fat blocks of uninterrupted time. And on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I switch in as many meetings as possible because I know my own productivity habits. Which is that, if I have a meeting, I’m pretty much totally unproductive for the rest of the day because I’m in chatting meeting mode. And I can go from meeting, to meeting, to meeting, get my prep done on those deep work days and have some days that are totally meeting free so that I can really get into that uninterrupted time. And then Fridays are kind of a flex day. 

So some weeks, they have more meetings. Some weeks, they have less meetings. But I just allow myself to be a little bit more fluid on that. And then every day, and this is very much, again, I’m talking about books and resources, The ONE Thing by Gary Keller. I’m thinking every day, I try to think of what is that one thing that which by doing will make everything else easier, or unnecessary. Or alternatively, if I walk away from today only having done this one thing, what does that need to be? And I know that as long as I’m getting that done, I am working my way towards those larger goals, which also means that when I’m grinding, that sometimes I see myself as grinding now if I’m putting in more work, and not taking as much time off, and not living the lifestyle I’m building this for. Not because I have to quote unquote. But because for me, now’s the time. 

Like I don’t have kids yet. I have a lot of support from my partner right now. I live in an isolated place. I can really put in that work, but I always, in order to make it okay and to get through those boring moments, I need to be accountable to myself to know that I’m not getting caught in the hamster wheel. I feel like it sometimes. Even when I’m doing the stuff, I get sick of that. I’m doing it with the purpose of moving myself towards my ultimate goals and those things that I really want. So see? I did bring it. I don’t want to get too far off.

Kim Sutton: I have to go back to what you said about your business being a baby. Yes, my business is older than my three youngest kids, So it’s my sixth child. And I do have a lot of passion for it, I love it. I love what I do, And it’s going to get a lot of attention. But at the same time, I can’t be having an affair with my business instead of neglecting my husband or my children. But with that said, so much of both of our businesses right now are, well, you have a bigger team than I do, But they are very much content and services driven. They’re not passive is what I’m trying to say. So what have you learned in your team building journey that you can share with listeners about how to gradually move yourself out of the business while still keeping yourself in it? Does that make sense?

Say Gabriel: I think it does. And feel free to kind of help me correct the course correctly if I’m misinterpreting your question, or going off course in any way. But I mean, there’s lots there. There’s some kind of snappy one liners that I’ve heard that were actually crazy, crazy useful, hire slow, fire fast. And nobody wants to hear that because firing people sucks, and hiring people is really exciting. But I went through something like five days in the past year and a half, like virtual assistants. And now, the person that I’ve had, one of the VA’s I hired is now my right hand woman. We have a 10 year plan. She’s on my leadership team for her to be taking over the day to day operations. And one of them has now been with me for most of the year and is serving as project manager. But it took a lot of trial and error to get there. And if I had heard that, hire slow, fire fast, because it’s really tempting. Especially when you’re busy and you want someone to be like, okay, you seem like you can do the job and you’re competent. Sure, when can you start? Can you please do anything? But that can lead to lots and lots of issues, especially if it takes you months to fire them even if they’re not doing a good job. 

And one of the hard things to absorb there, and one of the things that’s been really helpful for me is to understand that you’re doing both of yourselves a favor. You’re doing yourself and them a favor by letting them go quickly, if it’s not working out, because it will be better for, I mean, if you have a bigger team, it will be better for the rest of your team. Guaranteed they are pulling down morale even if nobody’s saying anything, your own time and energy that goes into worrying about it, fixing things, feeling frustrated, all of that that bogs you down, like your sense of, and I don’t know if I’m allowed to wonder if this is considered swearing, but it’s your level of give a damn. That is your most precious asset. And that’s why it can be so scary to expand your team is because you don’t know if they have the same level of, give it damn that you do. And the answer is, no one will ever have the same level of give it damn that you do. It is your business that you birthed from nothing. But that being said, another one of those kind of snappy one-liners that’s been really useful is, hire first for culture, seconds for aptitude and third for skill. And that’s what I’ve seen. It can be frustrating. Sometimes, you want to bring someone in who already has the skill, aptitude and can kind of take it off your plate. In fact, that’s what my whole business model is built around. That’s what we do for other people. We take content off of agencies plates, everything from selling strategy, all the way through to delivery. 

But that being said, when you’re talking about hiring people internally, which ultimately you need to do, you can look at what capacity you can increase by hiring people or teams who are ready to go. But eventually, if you want to take the core operation out of your own hands, that’s internal people. And making sure that they have the right culture fit is so important, because that’s the closest you can come to understanding that they have the same level of give a damn. If we look at, and we do this every quarter, we look at our company values, we look at our company, why we look at our niche and how we go about it, and we check in and make sure that every single person on the team, and we have a small enough team that we can do this. We don’t necessarily do it every quarter for all of our contractors, but we screen for it when we’re hiring even contractors and writers. You want to make sure that other people are motivated by those same values that you are, that you have the same reasons for wanting to do a good job. It doesn’t have to be an exact match. But when you have that kind of connection with people, everything just going to flow and goes so much smoother, and so much more awesomely.

 And of course, the second thing that I learned is that culture isn’t everything. It’s like in relationships. First, I learned I could love everyone, and then I learned that wasn’t a good idea. And I didn’t have to love everyone. And third I learned that even if I love somebody, that doesn’t mean it makes a good relationship. And it’s very similar in terms of building out your team. Great culture is important. But making sure they can do the thing that you need them to do, they may not know the exact skill, they need to get it done, but they need to have the aptitude to be able to write another one of those one liners, hire for the role, not the task. 

If you can spend some time understanding what that role is, what the key success metrics are for it, what the goals are, and then look at kind of what the individual pieces are that go in it, that is so, so, so critical and key. And last but not least, although I’m sure I could find more stuff to talk about on this note all day. And this is something that’s actually like proprietary in that, I didn’t read this through books or online, it is something I have literally put together myself just from hiring and going through different people is laying out the role, especially for an assistant type role which is going to be your first, usually in an entrepreneur system, that’s going to be one of your most important key hires. An assistant to get all of that stuff, that is the low value work. And think of it as $10 an hour work, $100 an hour working, $1,000 an hour work. You always want to be spending your time doing the 100 and ultimately the $1,000 an hour work, the stuff that’s going to drive that great amount of value for you, for your business and for your clients rather than the $10 an hour work such as data entry. So getting someone to do that stuff is really, really critical, and being able to break down the role in terms of what that entails. 

So what we’ve done is we’ve broken it down in terms of recurring tasks versus one off tasks. We know that we want an assistant because one of the big challenges is figuring out, what the heck do I give them to do? And how do I not overwhelm them by trying to get them to do everything at once? We broke this down so that we can see and we’re just like, okay, so we want our assistant, or I want my assistant to be doing 70% recurring work and 30% one off work. And within that 70% recurring work, we have what we call pulse based tests, trigger based tests, and then the one off tests. 

And this concept, like I said, this is something that we just came up with is just so critical, where post based tasks are tasks that are happening on a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly, or maybe even annually although we don’t have any pulse, which means it’s happening. You train them to do it. And then if it’s going well, you’re not even aware of the fact that it’s being done. It’s stuff that’s keeping operations running smoothly. So for example in our case, some polls based tasks include following up on my calendar by organizing within like, I suck at tracking time. So one of the things my assistant does is he assigns, there’s some rules that we set in place where he manages my email every day, he looks and categorizes the time that I spent in meetings based on my calendar. He sometimes sends follow ups or requests for information, that kind of stuff. He also does a lot of project management work, those are all where he’s tracking deadlines, and deliverables, and following up on stuff that’s all pulse based. So that is happening daily, weekly or monthly. We’ve decided what it is, we’ve trained him on it, we’ve set up a process, and then I don’t hear about it unless there’s a problem.

Kim Sutton: So those processes are documented. So if something happened to him, somebody else could come in and just start right back up again?

Say Gabriel: Absolutely, absolutely. And I know it’s a tough process, this is a big topic. I also do a lot of coaching, and I know it comes up. It came up earlier today in fact. If you have a great VA, you can be having him or her documented as you talk. A good simple place to start is by doing little screencaps and then having your VA write them out step by step. And we also, one of my favorite training techniques that I’ve also kind of come into over the past year and a half has been to do a training video, or write out a process and then do a live training session. And have them do it in front of me and be like, okay, here’s your process, follow it step by step in front of me. And then as they’re doing it, we’re figuring out, okay, this had an issue. This was a question, and I’m adjusting the written process on the spot. Because it’s hard when you’re doing it ahead of time to know exactly what you’re forgetting.

Kim Sutton: Absolutely. I have found in my business that I have had much bigger and better success with green assistance. Green is the best way I can put it, but new, like nude because they don’t have preconceived notions of how things should be done.

Say Gabriel: Yeah, exactly.

Kim Sutton: I actually had to let go of somebody a couple years ago who nailed the whole interview process and really impressed me in the first month. But the reason is twofold. Number one, I did not hire slow, I hired way too many people at one time. And one of my good friends told me once, there was a reason why Jesus only had 12 disciples, because he couldn’t manage more than that. And I built my team way too fast. I couldn’t manage what they were doing. I got too many clients all at one time. I couldn’t manage the team members who were supposed to be managing the projects. So when everything started falling apart, it all came back to me, and I had to pick up the pieces. And sometimes, I didn’t even know what the pieces were, which is a problem. But the assistant that I had to let go of actually got really confrontational, not only with me, but with prospects, and with current clients. I thought that they were doing a really great job so I had them to handle a, for lack of a better word, I had an interview with one of my best former clients. We’re still great friends, the former client, and they are, but this person was actually confrontational. The client actually said to me, there’s no way that I will be working with anybody in your company if I have any possibility of working with that person.

Say Gabriel: Wow.

Kim Sutton: Or communicating. And then they actually told me, I was going to drive my business into the ground, and there was a 100% chance of me failing. Yeah, for my right hand person. And it got to the point where I was dreading Mondays, because I did not want to have to deal with them. And there were actually conversations that I hung up crying. So I just decided, no, no. So since then, listeners, I tend to make the same mistakes twice.  Like sleep deprivation, I made that twice, I won’t do it again. Hiring too fast, I made that twice. I did it one more time after that, but I won’t make that again. So right now, my team is very small, but they were all very new to whatever they were doing when they started. And our communication is so amazing. And just the way that we get along. And they’ve actually been helping me develop the processes. And because they hadn’t done the work before, just like you’ve said, they’ve been able to document it because of a threat perspective. Yeah, and I say this in the best way possible, but it really is sometimes like talking to a first grader just because they don’t know how the systems work so they are able to document it from the ground up.

Say Gabriel: Yeah, yeah. And that’s what I said about hiring for aptitude before skill. That’s exactly what I mean. That someone with the aptitude can document the processes and make it happen, and really absorb it. But someone who has the pre existing skills, not that you should never hire for skills. No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. But sometimes, it can be difficult for someone to unlearn something and absorb the way that you want it done, as opposed to just starting fresh and being stoked to absorb it because they understand the goal, and they just need to know how to get there.

Kim Sutton: Absolutely. I’m not gonna hire somebody to do Infusionsoft work who has never touched Infusionsoft before.

Say Gabriel: No, that’s not what we’re saying. But you might find someone who has a basic knowledge of Infusionsoft, who has a big aptitude for the type of work you do for the clients. You do the strategies, you put them together and help them understand how to do the specific things you need to do rather than hiring an Infusionsoft expert who might already have their ideas around.

Kim Sutton: Absolutely. I want to jump into something else really fast. Going back to the project manager that I was telling you about, just the verbal, young, friendly person in some of our team meeting calls, you have been totally enlightening on the topic of nonviolent communication. Am I saying that right?

Say Gabriel: Yes, yes, that is the official term.

Kim Sutton: Can you just touch on that for a little bit?

Say Gabriel: Yeah, absolutely. So many people have heard of Nonviolent Communication, and it’s a book published by Marshall Rosenberg years ago. There’s been a whole community in the courses developed, in workbooks, etc. But I think a lot of people don’t understand, ironically enough, because it’s all about clear, compassionate communication. I think the name can be a bit of a misnomer, because Nonviolent Communication, first of all, is defining it by what it’s not. But it can be hard to see the application of it. I started learning Nonviolent Communication, I’ll get into what it is in a moment here as a way to resolve conflict. I was having a lot of interpersonal conflict in my personal life, and I was realizing that part of it was me. I was with very confrontational and aggressive people. But part of it was that I was finding myself being triggered, and defensive, and responding in ways that I didn’t feel happy with. And ultimately, we weren’t getting anywhere. We were just going around in circles, we were kind of jabbing at each other. 

But I think that what most people miss is, which is why I like to refer to it as compassionate communication as well, is that compassionate communication is a tool that I actually use. I mean, I’ve been a practitioner now for seven years, more than seven years, actually more than eight years now. And it’s actually something that I use day to day in my business too, and conflict resolution doesn’t even scratch the surface because I don’t really get into conflicts very often in my business, whether it’s with partners, clients, staff, etc, almost never. And that’s not because I’m afraid of confrontation, it’s because I’ve learned these strategies and techniques in terms of communicating that help people feel heard, which is one of the basic human needs. Everybody wants to feel heard, and allows me to speak in a way that people will hear me because I’m willing to hear them. And also, because I know how to avoid some defensive triggers in language. So that’s kind of the application, the relevance, the context. 

Speaking a little bit as to the process, like what it means? Essentially, the basic idea behind it is that there are certain forms that exist in our day to day speech. And once you identify them, you will hear them everywhere because they’re built into our speech. And what these speaking patterns do is to create defensive triggers in other people. And it’s not that you’re always trying to put people on edge, it’s part of the language that we use automatically. So the basic concept is if you can identify this, and you can learn to speak in such a way that avoids defensive triggers, and also learn to listen in such a way where you are not being triggered by these defensive triggers, you can help people feel heard, defuse conflict, create mutual understanding in a really deep way, and set the stage for future action. I mean, this is something I could do a whole podcast on really easily.

Kim Sutton: We need to have a whole nother chat just about that. But I’m laughing because I’m thinking, I’m glad my ex husband and I did not know about this. Only because, even though we did not have good communication at all, if we had known about that, I would never have met my husband who was totally my soulmate, and I wouldn’t be here talking to you. Well, maybe we didn’t know. But our communication styles with each other, we’re totally pushing each other’s buttons. Perhaps, not always intentionally. But we couldn’t even say two words without, you’re getting the heck out of that.

Say Gabriel: Yeah. And I’ve been there. And the part of the story that I didn’t mention was after I learned this, I spent months practicing it and trying to apply it with my partner at the time, only to ultimately realize that it kind of takes two to tango, and that I could put in a ton of work to try and defuse all of those triggers we built up over the years. But ultimately, I didn’t want to, and it wasn’t worth it to me, and I ended up moving on.

Kim Sutton: Yeah. And sometimes, we do have to do that. Clients, team members, significant others, we can’t stay in a negative situation, period.

Say Gabriel: Yeah. Just whatever the means is that you use it to move out of that negative situation. That’s so true, because it just drains your lifeforce, it drains your energy and it makes all of your other interactions in your life. So much worse not just for you, but for other people. So for me, that was really like it was a huge, huge learning nonviolent communication like totally changed my life. Because even though, of course, I was learning it for conflict resolution. The hardest time to apply it is when you’re in a super emotionally charged moment and you’re feeling really emotionally charged. So it’s really good to practice in your day to day life. You don’t have to be a perfectionist, cough me, cough, and do it all the time forever. But the more you can practice it in your day to day, and I mean, like I said, if we’re actually talking business, I use these techniques, active listening, especially in all of my meetings because it’s just a way to make sure that you’re fully present, that you’re not making assumptions about what you’re hearing and understanding, and it makes other people feel like, do you have a superpower? 

I like to joke about how I’m a professional empath, like that’s what my job is all about, especially my role within the company too. A large part of what I do is I talk with people and do interviews, and pull what’s out of their heads and make it easy to understand. But being able, it’s so easy to make assumptions. It’s so easy to listen to someone and to assume that you understood what they told you. And I truly believe comes out of your own excitement, like the goodness within you. It’s not that, oh, you think you just know better? You’re nodding while they’re saying something, and you feel such an empathetic connection with them that you’re like, yeah, totally. I totally get what you’re saying. But once you try, and this is like, if you’re just going to pull one thing out in terms of applying nonviolent communication, I’d say it would probably be this. If you’re going to try active listening, which is just quite simply repeating back to somebody what it is that they said to you in a way that removes those defensive triggers, which are very concrete things like always, never, absolutes, comparisons, putting blame on shadowy outside forces, like using the word should, like you should do this, or I should do this. 

Anyway, but even at the simplest, just repeating back to them what they said to you in your own words, I mean, that’s something we’ve all been hearing since grade school. But being able to actually do that, it’s priceless because you’ll find out that you didn’t hear them properly. You thought you understood something, but you didn’t actually. And it gives them the space to clarify and to correct you so that you can gain a deeper and deeper understanding. And usually, by the time it gets to the heart of what it is they were trying to say, what’s half the time they themselves don’t even know, it just becomes this amazing moment of connection. And if they’re really in like, if it is an emotionally charged situation during a tough place, it also becomes a moment of a really cathartic moment where you just feel like, oh, like cleanse and renew from that mutual experience of discovery you went on together. It’s so rare for someone to just put aside their responses and just focus on making sure they understood you, and making sure they heard you. It’s in fact a beautiful gift that you can give to people. And when you’re doing it in a business context, it’s a beautiful gift that can also have amazing results and create that amazing connection, because we all know that business is a relationship.

Kim Sutton: Absolutely. And I’m going to use that as a segue to say, you’ve undoubtedly created a connection with the listener. So I’m serious, we’re gonna have to schedule part two for this.

Say Gabriel: Oh, I’m so into it. If I had realized what the application in business would be when I first started my own business, I may have just focused entirely on this because it’s so powerful and it’s so meaningful. And it takes a lot of, I think, practice and sometimes support to be able to get really good at it. But oh, my gosh, I truly believe from the bottom of my heart that this has the power to change the world and to create those big changes that we all need, that we all know need to happen, but they seem too vast and overwhelming for us to do anything about. I think if we could teach this pretty much to everyone, but especially to kids–

Kim Sutton: Amen to that.

Say Gabriel: It would create so much change.

Kim Sutton: Say, this has been absolutely amazing. And again, you got to come back, I’m not giving you a choice. Where can listeners learn more about you, though in the meantime, and connect with you?

Say Gabriel: Yeah. I would say probably the best way to connect with me personally is either to email me say@anansicontent.com. That’s S-A-Y-A-N-A-N-S-I content.com. Anansi is the spider who gave the world stories, in case you’re wondering. My website as well, anansicontent.com. We are in the middle of a kind of a revamp and a rebrand so the new site probably will not be launched by the time this podcast is launched. But also LinkedIn, I encourage you to look me up on LinkedIn. Email me, shoot me a line. I love meeting new people. I love talking about this stuff with people. And yeah, I’m here because other people have given me the time to chat and share perspectives and stuff. So I’d love to just pay that forward however I can.

Kim Sutton: Awesome. Thank you so much. Listeners, all of Say’s links will be in the show notes at thekimsutton.com/pp328. Say, do you have a parting piece of advice or a golden nugget that you can offer to listeners?

Say Gabriel: I do. And that is, you can save a lot of trouble by communicating upfront. I know it can sometimes feel like you’re being nice to not confront people about issues or to not bring something up that irritates you. Again, business personal in all contexts. If you have the right language and the framework, or even are just willing to go about it with an open heart, and then open mind and a level tone, you are not being nice by avoiding talking to people about problems. You are being nice and considerate if you bring them up so that you can address them before they turn into these big hairy monsters that can deeply affect your relationship, your business, your life, your well being. So I would just say that, you are actually being nicer and more awesome to bring up an issue that’s happening rather than sweeping it under the rug in the name of quote unquote niceness.