Succeeding at Leadership: Building a Shared Vision and Trust W/ Jeff Bloomfield

0:14Welcome to the Big Success Podcast. Gus, your mind is going to be blown. Why your mind? Gus, we've got Jeff Bloomfield. Now, Jeff's a farm boy, cancer survivor, former sales and marketing executive, mostly in biotech. Now, at one point, they started studying the brain for brain cancer. It's there where Jeff fell in love with how the brain actually works. So we're going to go through things like trust, how to build trust, and the two types of trust. I never even knew there were two types of trust. When he explains that to me, though, it makes so much sense as to why people never build real trust in relationships.

0:47Then he goes into the decision making and the two types of brain and how they don't work. Again, stuff you're going to want to make notes of, stuff you're going to want to learn. The book, Neuro Selling, I'm suggesting you read it. Look, marketing, sales, personal communication. In fact, the stuff he teaches on communication helped me understand how me and my kids are missing out on a couple of points. So learn, study, become success. You're on the Big Success Podcast, and this is Jeff Bloomfield. So, Jeff, what is success to you? How do you define success? Yeah, isn't it funny that many of us grow up and we're constantly trying to define that.

1:27What is success from the time we're young, even today? What is success? What is success? You hear that a lot. And I think for me, asking myself that question for many years, I realized I was asking myself the wrong question. and the question really came to really be for me was what was significance yeah because it seemed like when i pursued success i didn't always find significance but when i pursued significance success always followed so then to answer your question then what is success for me success really turned out to be how can i use my god-given talents and gifts to make the world better for one more person and if everybody tend to operate out of that same spirit i think that then we would have game changers all over the globe.

2:09Yeah. Yeah, it would definitely be the case. So how did your definition change over the years, I guess? Where did it start to – that's where it's ended today, but where did it start for you? Yeah, I grew up on a farm. I'm a little farm boy, Midwest, Ohio, farm boy. And, you know, I had a lot of amazing teachers from a communication standpoint. My papa was a great storyteller. My uncle was a great storyteller. So I got to watch these blue-collar great communicators. But I had a little bit of a not-so-good relationship with my father, being out of that Marine, post-traumatic stress syndrome. So I had a little bit of those daddy issues growing up.

2:47So I was constantly looking for that approval. Yeah. And what I realized was the pro of that was it made me really good at sports. It made me really good at winning. Because, you know, I was constantly just yearning for that affirmation. Yeah. So to me, success was on the scoreboard. Success was people giving you accolades. Success was, man, you had a great game. And success was all those things that you can measure based on what the world tells you success might look like. And so that kind of leads into your adolescence and then into your college years and then onto your first years in your corporate career.

3:23And then it really kind of hit me that those were all, though it was a product of my background, they were completely self-serving. It was completely from a perspective of lack of identity and comfortableness in my own gifts and my own talent and my own identity who I was made to be, in my opinion, by God. I'm a big, big guy. So for me, it was that idea of, wait a minute, significance and success are very different based on what the world tells you. And when I stopped pursuing everything for my own personal accolades and affirmations, which, by the way, I still get stuck on because I still love to win.

3:58I still think winning is much more fun than losing. It was really about, can I help other people win? And that's when you start to feel significant. And that's, to me, the true measure of success. It took a long time. I'm 52 years old, and I can't say that I figured it out yet. I can just tell you that I recognize when I'm not doing it right now than I used to. If you go back to that time as a kid, maybe, is there a point where you recognize you chose success? You chose to be not average, not normal. You chose success? Well, and again, part of it, you don't know how much of it, you know, I probably need years of therapy on this.

4:37I'm going to take you back at the end of the talk today. You're going to be like curled up in a ball. Don't make me read that. I'm sucking my thumb late on my table here. Thanks, Brad. I'm glad I was on your show. Appreciate it. No, but I think a lot of us, right, a lot of us don't ever really unpack the junk in our brain trunk and find out why are we who we are today? Positively and negatively. What were the things that led us to be who we are? I do know that as a result of me not wanting to be around that, you know, that home life that I had, it pushed me into the arenas of, well, if I can go do two days, if I can go spend, you know, six hours on the basketball court and the coach thinks I'm amazing because I stayed after four hours, he didn't realize I just don't want to go home.

5:20So for part of me, it was a product of avoiding a situation. And so I poured myself into this work ethic. If I can outwork people, I might not be the fastest or the most talented, but man, I'm going to outwork you. And then I started to recognize, well, the harder I work, the luckier I get, you know, that whole adage. And it just started spilling over to my grades, started spilling over to everything I was doing. So I think I just started to, out of a reaction of avoidance, created some really positive habits when it came to winning and doing good in school. and really all those things that set you up for success in life that you don't realize you're doing.

5:59Yeah. So let's look at that then. What is your formula for success then? How does success happen in your mind? Yeah, success to me, and again, depending on how you're defining it, I think there's productivity success, like professional success, and how do you measure that? What's it look like? Are you an entrepreneur or whatever your world is? How would you measure what success looks like? And I think, and I love your question because I don't know that very many people actually define it more than professionally. So I started BrainTrust over a decade ago. When I started it, I was a guy with a lot of experience, a lot of great ideas, a flip chart and a marker.

6:36And I really didn't know what success was going to look like. I just knew that I didn't want the corporate America path anymore. I needed something different for my family and for myself. So I say that almost as a warning to people out there is what does success look like in your in your professional life? And then what does success look like for you in your personal life? And I promise you, when you start to put those two together, it really comes down to that. I hate to be cliche, but which one of those is going to have the biggest line on your tombstone? Yeah. Now, one you need to help almost drive the other, right?

7:10So we have to provide and protect and all those kinds of things. So the formula for me was if I can build a business that's tapping into my superpower, to my desires and my passions, and I can monetize it. It'll help me take care of my family better. It'll allow me to do something I love, which therefore makes me less stressed, which makes me a better husband and father. So part of the finding success for me is, are you doing something today that brings you stress? It causes you to communicate transactionally that allows you to have cortisol shooting out of your ears every day and causes you to be somebody who's not your ideal self at work, which definitely is going to translate when you walk through the door.

7:50Or have you recognized that your professional vehicle, whatever that is you're doing to make a living, is simply that of vehicle. And you recognize that that vehicle is driven by a human being who understands self-care, who understands their giftedness, who understands how to manage stress so that when they get home, they're their best selves at home. That's, to me, the formula. So let's flip it then. We don't always win. How does someone learn success by failure? How does failure teach success, I guess? I love it. And I know, again, words matter sometimes, right? And I tell my kids all the time, failure is an option.

8:30It's a desirable option. They're like, what are you talking about? I'm like, because we've misdefined failure. Yeah. And so many people think, well, failure, they just, you know, they slump their shoulders, they drop their chin, and they walk off defeated. No. Like, failure means that you push something so far in one direction. Yeah. And you had a hopeful outcome, but it didn't turn out the way you thought it would turn out. So then, number one, what did you learn? And number two, did you quit? Because if you didn't learn anything and you quit, then, yeah, that's failure. But if you learn something and you didn't quit and it caused you to make a right turn, left turn, pivot, redeploy that learning in a new way, you're never going to fail in life, ever.

9:15That redefinition of failure, is that something that like, when did you learn that? How did that come about for you? You know, it's funny. I was in this conversation recently and I have my grandmother and I still have a grandmother alive. Thank the Lord. She'll be 97 in July. and she just has always had this amazingly positive optimistic outlook she's never had a lot very blue collar still lives in a very small house that she's lived in for 50 years and but every day she's always looking at the positive yeah and i remember when i met my wife i have a few people in my family a lot in my family tree who maybe don't look at things that way yeah they're kind of the pity party people right and then i have this grandmother who's this beacon of optimism.

10:02And I always had that. And I think I really got that from her. She was always there kind of guiding me to redirect me to say, okay, that was, you might've felt that was a negative situation, but now what about this? And she was always pointing to the, you know, to the lighthouse and to the, to, to the sunshine versus the rain. I think I developed that at a young age. And so now couple that with, I love to win and you can't win if you're losing. and if you're going to be negative you can't win it's a mindset yeah and you can literally train your brain you can rewire your brain to have a positive optimistic outlook on any situation i think that's where it started to turn for me was in my probably my teenage years through sports and through that example my grandmother said but then this just this willingness to never give up that there's always going to be a better day if you had a bad day the next day is going to be better.

10:54And I give a lot of that credit to her. And I think that's to be the key. We all need that grandma. We all need that grandma. You're on the Big Success Podcast. I'm Brad Sugars, your host. We'll be back with Jeff in a moment. Neuro Selling. We're going to talk about sales, marketing, leadership, how the brain actually works. From financial advice to hairstyling, fitness training to auto parts, no matter what your product or service is, you've got to sell to stay in business. In Instant Sales by Brad Sugars, He delivers techniques for infusing your business with a powerful sales ethic and creating super sales success.

11:25Pick up your copy of Instant Sales today. And you're back on the Big Success Podcast. Brad Sugars is your host, Jeff Bloomfield, a genius at this thing called the brain. Jeff, you named the company Brain Trust. Tell me, how do we succeed at trust? Yeah, when we started studying the brain at a much deeper level, now the last 20 years, especially with advances in technology, and you've been able to look at the brain through functional MRI, EBG, and PET scans, and all that stuff. What I learned when I started this company and I really started diving into the research was something, I had this epiphany.

11:59There's two different types of trust. There's personal trust, and there's professional trust. So personal trust comes from my impression, as you and I are interacting, the way that you engage with me, the way that you're communicating with me, the way you're behaving around me. My subconscious brain is formulating, are you acting honestly, authentically, with a little bit of humility? And here's the key, the super charge director of personal trust. You have just the right amount of vulnerability that I see you as somebody who gets that you're just human, just like me. There's not an air of hubris or arrogance.

12:38So if you come across as honest, authentic, humble with the right amount of vulnerability, biologically, I can't help it. I feel a connection. If I feel a connection, there's a likability there. Therefore, there's a personal trust. And it can be gained almost instantaneously through body language and nonverbals. And then within the first five minutes, it gets reinforced quickly of meeting someone. Now, that's personal trust. And of course, that can ebb and flow as you have a relationship with someone. Then professional trust comes if I perceive you as someone who's knowledgeable, skillful, capable, and you bring insight that's relevant to the things that I care about, I will start to see you as credible.

13:17So I will trust you professionally. Now, if you think about that, those two, most people have no idea how to build personal trust. They just do it intuitively. And most people are trained to try to build professional trust. So that's all they do when they communicate communicate with people is try to come across as smart, knowledgeable, capable, credible, because they think that will build trust with them. But what we've learned with the brain is, is no matter how smart, credible you are, like people listening right now, they probably connected better with my story about my grandfather, my grandmother and things earlier in the segment.

13:51Right now, they're like, okay, this nerd's talking about the brain and yada, yada, yada. If we'd have led with that, they wouldn't even care. They would be like, okay, he sounds smart enough, but not really connected to him. What we've learned with these two types of trust is, It's really not until somebody trusts you instinctively on a personal level are they truly open to how you can help them on a professional level. That's what I've really learned with the differences in the two types of trust. So let's throw that to leadership then. How do we succeed at leadership? Yeah, this is a topic that I'm super passionate about right now because I'm seeing, you know, we're going through right now.

14:27We're seeing tons of layoffs in companies. We're seeing disengagement rates that continue year after year in the 60s and 70s, depending on what survey you look at for employees. And what I have found working with clients of all sizes, which we do at BrainTrust, is most people who are in a leadership position are managers. They're not leaders. They're trying to manage people instead of lead them. And the biggest gap that we're seeing is they don't have a shared vision. And what I mean by that is, as a leader, they don't know how to lead. They don't know how to communicate. They don't know how to build that kind of trust we just talked about on a personal level.

15:01They don't know how to be vulnerable. And so they manage people. And that causes people to repel and resist them. And so by shared vision, what I really mean is leaders need to be able to communicate to their people why they do what they do. Why do they want to be a leader? Why does that inspire them to help others achieve greatness? What is it about them? What's their story that has driven them to want to lead people in a way that they will be successful? And then that's point one. The other part of it is woefully missing. You know your people's personal vision. Yeah. If you have a team of people working for you, even one person, and you don't know their personal vision, you will never, ever lead them down a path to where they'll use your vehicle or company to pursue that personal vision.

15:47They'll take it as a job. But the minute you really understand their personal vision, what they want out of life, what they care about, their passions, their dreams, their hopes, and then you understand that, and then you can show them how, what you can do to help them achieve that through the vehicle that is the company they work at, everything changes. And I think that's the magic formula for leadership right now that I see is missing. So let's dive into communication then, because obviously a lot of this is built in the communication systems, and we'll get to marketing and sales in a second.

16:18How do we succeed at communicating that? So we say this, and I don't believe it's hyperbole. I think I could probably back it up with science if I needed to. The number one determining success factor of any organization or any individual is their ability to communicate effectively. Now, I ask organizations when I do keynotes all over the world, I'll throw out, hey, what do you think the number one determining success factor is of your organization? And what do I hear? the right strategy the right people the right culture the right services the right solutions the right fill in the blank and they just go on and on and on and the answer those are all great answers right they're all necessary yeah but they're all lost if you can't communicate effectively and so the idea around communication effectiveness is i started studying this why are some people great communicators and why are others not is it a personality trait issue is it something in genetic is it something in their training is it something in their background And it turns out that, yes, that can be an impact, but primarily it's a biological thing.

17:20What we learned when we studied the brain at a deeper level from a communication standpoint is, and we work a lot with a lot of other PhD researchers on this, Dr. Tony Jacks, one of my favorites, he's out of the UK and he studied at Case Western. He took some of the Kahneman work on the thinking fast and slow, system one, system two, and he turned it into this study that showed that there's the analytical network in the brain, And then there's the emotional pathic network in the brain. And you can't activate them both at the same time. You vacillate between them. But... Hang on, hang on, hang on.

17:53Define those two parts of the brain again for me. Yep. So the analytical network. This is the part of your brain that you think of consciously. It's where you process facts, figures, logic, rational thinking. It's the CPU. It's the computer part of your brain, right? Yep. Then the emotional pathic networks where you bring all meaning, emotions, feelings, internal visualization. Sam, you said you can't switch them on at the same time? No, they can't both be activated at the same time. And you can see it in the studies, like with the technology. So here's what the driving... This is the money. This is the money part of the podcast episode.

18:30All human beings, regardless of sex, regardless of background, regardless of anything that we would typically do demographically, they make decisions to buy, to trust, to change. emotionally, then they look to recruit information to validate and justify that decision, not the other way around. So if my brain naturally operates that way, but as a communicator, all I do is communicate with you analytically with facts and figures and reasons why you should do something different, reasons why you should buy, reasons why you should change, reasons why you should eat your broccoli, whatever the case might be, your brain is biologically built to resist that information and the person communicating.

19:12Yeah. So we teach people how to make sure they understand that their messaging, regardless of whether it's marketing, sales, coaching, leadership, parenting, being in relationships, you have to be able to activate that emotional pathic network in people. And the way that you do that is through storytelling. The way that you do that is through evoking emotions in people about things they care about, is connecting with them on that kind of a level. And then don't activate their analytical network unless you're darn sure you want them to evaluate and compare and analyze the information that you're giving.

19:43So let's bring that across to marketing and sales then, because Dan, you've just blown me with that part there. It's like it now explains a lot of when I'm in that logical parenting mode with the kids. It's like, no, they're not making the decision that way. If we use this for marketing and sales, what are some of the keys to success in that area? Well, and you see it a lot. You see that a lot of brands on the consumer side that are very good at storytelling and emotion. You know, everybody likes to use Apple. Well, Apple's obviously done a lot of the behavioral psychology research and studies, and now they know the neuroscientific impact of it.

20:22So you rarely see Apple come out with a commercial that tells you all the great features of the latest iPhone and the iOS 75 or whatever run. What do they do? They grab you by the emotional network of your brain. they project you into a setting like they did with the new Apple Watch that had the automatic 911 on it where they story told you with the guy who was drowning, the farmer who fell in a well and they're telling their story and listening and they're playing their actual calls to 911 from their watch and then at the end they present this was done on the Apple Watch if you had it you'd be saved as well see what they did there, they just tapped into your emotional network, sucked you in, allowed you to be part of that story, you made it part of your story your own, then they gave you a reason to choose them.

21:09That's the difference. Yeah. Yeah. My brain is processing right now. I'm trying to get through that. So sales, how do we get sales using this? And if I'm a salesperson, one of the top two or three things I can do to do this, other than read your book, of course. Of course, you got to read my book. You might have to read it three or four times. But in the framework of neuro-selling, one of the things we tried to do was we don't like sales training. We don't think it works. We don't like even a lot of sales methodology because we think they're built off of a background, a backbone of trying to communicate your stuff more.

21:47And so what we built was a framework around how the brain processes information. So the first phase is can you create a true connection with another human being? Don't give me the sales rapport building. I see you have a picture of a sale board on your wall. I drink water. Now can I tell you about my watches? Like, don't be. It's crazy. And yet, that's what a lot of people do. So we teach them how to build a true connection story that makes you human to human. Then that's really important because that's that personal trust. The second step that if anybody listens to this just does these two steps, build a personal why story, use it on every sales meeting, do it authentically, connect with a human being, and don't have commission breath.

22:27If you can get past that, then the next step that's critical is tell me a story about me. Tell me all you know about my business, my business model, how my business model makes money, my role inside that business model, and what do you think my goals and challenges might be right now. Then ask me questions about what you got right now. And all of a sudden, the customer, the prospect, everything changes because you're on their agenda. Now, it sounds simple, I know, but you'd be shocked. You wouldn't be because you coach this stuff and you see this happen over and over and over and over again. How many people want to run straight to their product, right?

23:05I love it. Neuro Selling. Jeff, we're going to come back and we can talk about going from good to great. If you're on the podcast right now, follow, read, learn everything you can from this man. We'll be back in a moment. As a former sales and marketing executive, farm boy, and cancer survivor, Jeff Bloomfield will use his inspiring style and compelling life story to teach your audience how to communicate with more purpose, power, and impact. To learn more about Jeff Bloomfield, please visit jeffbloomfield.com. We're back on the Big Success Podcast. I'm Brad Sugars. We are here with author of the book, Neuro Selling.

23:42And Jeff, I got to ask, how does the brain work when it comes to setting massive goals? Like most people set normal goals. How does that work? How does that fit in? Yeah, and it's interesting. The brain makes decisions internally of value based on points of reference, so anchor points. And if you don't have an anchor point, if no one sets one for you, you'll set one for yourself based on your own experiences, your own life journey. So what happens is if you've been a small thinker and you've been around other small thinkers, you will naturally instinctively set small goals. Right. And that's all you know.

24:19If you're a big thinker and you've been around big thinkers, then what will happen is you'll set those B-hacks, those big, hairy, audacious goals, and your brain will naturally visualize what that big goal looks like. And then it will incrementally work backwards into what are the steps to get there. So part of it's a mindset thing. But this is really important. And I think this is why you built a career off of this. The other part of it is, are you surrounding yourself with big thinkers? Because if you're not, you don't have those people in your life. You will set naturally small goals because they're safe.

24:51And the brain loves safety. How do we then use our brain to get us to want that rather than fighting against us with that whole safety mechanism of the brain? Yeah, the brain will activate at twice the urgency to avoid a loss than it will to pursue a game. It's natural. Hang on, say that again because that's vital. Yes, the brain will activate at twice the urgency to avoid a loss as it will to pursue a game. So what happens for most people is if they set a big goal, the brain will immediately start to fire on, okay, now what are all the things that are going to go wrong? Yeah. And if you come up with three or four things that are going to go wrong, many people will just forget the goal and they'll move on.

25:35They'll set something smaller and they won't ever achieve their greatness. So part of being able to override that mechanism is setting a goal that's out there that has a lot of purpose behind it. It's going to make a big impact, not just for you, but for others. Then reframing your mind to say, these little things that might get in my way, they're speed bumps. But the risk of loss is not these things. The risk of loss is not achieving that goal. But you can reposition the risk of loss of not achieving the big goal rather than these five things that might get in my way of doing it. And you stop majoring on the minors and you start focusing on the big goal and the risk of not accomplishing.