Ping & Persuade: How to Win in the Era of Always-On Communication | Andrew Brodsky

25:38Well, I think part of what also happens without the hierarchy and that urgency bias is then it's really hard to have the perspective taking pause and really think, how's the other person thinking or feeling? It's very easy to think, oh, they're upset with me or read too much into it and focus on the eye as that urgency and that pressure from all this communication builds. So what are some ways that we can start to be more adept at perspective taking in these moments in the past where maybe that notification has created anxiety. One of my favorite research studies on this topic focuses on something called egocentrism over email.

26:16It's this idea that we become very self-focused over email. And the example that's used is in a study that was done by a Stanford researcher where she had two different people get paired up. One of them would tap out a song on, you know, a desk. And then they asked that person, how confident are you that the other person will guess the song that you tapped out? And they would say, oh yeah, really confident 80%, 90%. And almost always the other person never got it right. The reason was that when you're tapping out the song, you hear the music in your head while you're tapping it. And so it seems obvious.

26:59For the person on the other side, all they hear is tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And that doesn't yield anything. And the parallel is made to the same thing with text-based communication. When we're writing a message, we hear the emotion in our heads. It seems super obvious to us. But on the recipient side, they're coming from a completely different set of assumptions, information, and they interpret it differently. An example I give in the book when I was doing interviews with a publishing company is this manager sending emails saying, you know, good job on this, but I think we can continue to improve it.

27:40Smiley face. And the subordinate was like, this was a super condescending email. Like, this is just me doing the work. The fact that we're saying we, the modicon was very condescending to me. And the idea here is that we both hear it different ways. And the research on email showed a similar thing to the tapping study. The senders think it's obvious, the recipients don't get it right. But there's a twist on the study in that they found that when as a sender, you take a second and you read your message out loud in the opposite tone you intended. So if it's a sarcastic message, read it out loud to yourself as serious.

28:20If it's a serious message, read it as sarcastic. If it's happy, read it as angry, and vice versa. And when people did that, they suddenly realized, oh, wait, my message is not as unclear as I intended. So getting in the habit for important conversations, you know, I wouldn't recommend this for every single message, but for those where you're concerned, they might misinterpret. or it's an important one, just reading it out loud in the opposite tone you intended can make us suddenly realize that, wow, we were in our own heads and that may not be as clear as I meant. And then they fix it. There's a couple examples that illustrate this very much.

28:58So the first one, you were talking about publishing. We talk about music publishing for a second. Ask the drummer how much they get in music publishing, right? You don't get any money as a drummer, right? unless you get added in to one of the writers of the songs. The melody lines and the lyrics get the money. So that settles the tapping of a pen and how that works. And then the other thing is, I've been seeing a lot of articles lately, and because I am on TikTok, I see a lot of how the younger kids interact, and they hate, Gen Z hates the thumbs up. The thumbs up to them is the most sarcastic.

29:42They can't stand it. They see it as, yeah, it's just bad sarcasm. And they want to shove that thumb up everyone's ass. So just to go along with the emojis, yeah, we attribute to them different meanings. And that's why having these open conversations is so useful. because getting everyone on the same page can be really valuable in any relationship because people have different approaches to communication, different ways they're interpreting it. And this is related to emotion too. If there's a potential for misinterpretation, aside from getting your message right, actually be more explicit about it.

30:23Say, I'm excited. As opposed to just assuming the other person gets where you're going with it, spell it out more clearly and you could avoid a whole lot of the misinterpretations that cause a lot of trouble. Another struggle that a lot of our clients face and probably a lot of listeners too is with this rise of productivity and everyone seeking to be as productive as possible, especially as we've moved to a remote and hybrid work environment. We've now sacrificed productivity for actual communication and visibility. And we think we're getting a lot done, but out of sight, out of mind and not communicating well what's going on, we lose that visibility and that we're getting passed over for promotion and frustrated that other people who are less productive seem to be moving ahead of us in the workforce.

31:09So what are some strategies that we can utilize around virtual communication to showcase some of the productivity in a more meaningful way and increase our visibility so we don't fall into that trap of being out of sight and being judged as a negative, not getting work done? Yeah, I could probably talk about this topic for an hour by itself, but let me give like the key things here. The parallel I like to give is, you know, there's like the old saying that I'm going to mess up, but if a tree falls in the forest or woods and there's no one there to hear it, did it actually make a sound? It's kind of the same thing for a remote worker is if a remote worker does a really good job on a task, but no one's heard about it, did they actually complete the task?

31:49So this means that communication is even more important when you're interacting with someone from a distance. If you have a manager walking around, they can see what you're doing. You don't have to communicate it to them. If you have a relationship with someone and you're in person, they could see how engaged you are in the conversation. You don't have to communicate it to them. But when we're interacting with others at a distance, we need to provide that information. Communication ends up being the filter through which people see your effort and see your engagement in any interaction. So that communication is key.

32:26One trick that I like to highlight that's pretty simple and doesn't really require extra effort is thinking about that you want to seem present. And let me compare two different people. And I'll use a work example for the moment. There's two employees. One communicates every week they send their manager on Friday afternoon a five-paragraph-long email about what they did for the week. The other employee, at the end of each day, sends their manager a few sentences email about what they did for that day. Which employee do you feel like will feel more present and more productive to that manager? It's the one who sends their manager a few sentences each day.

33:07And here's the thing. That employee is not necessarily any more productive. In fact, both employees sent the exact same amount of communication. right we got our we got a few paragraphs versus a few sentences one day one day a week versus a few sentences each day a week so the absolute amount of communication didn't change but the frequency did and by showing that hey i'm here today i did something today that creates this perception on the other side that the person was more active and it's unfortunate that this is necessary you know if i was just talking to leaders i can provide recommendations about how to avoid this need for productivity theater.

33:47But for all of us who aren't CEOs, the unfortunate truth of it is, is that everyone enjoys a little bit of theater. And the only way in many cases that managers, friends, whoever else can understand your engagement when you're not physically in person is in the way you communicate with them. And those outcomes, especially when they're collaborative, they're hard to determine who played what role and how much effort was put in by everyone. So in that absence of communication, I know for a lot of our introverts, they're like, oh man, I got to send an email every day. I'm trying to avoid communicating.

34:23Well, you're actually killing the visibility that leads to getting ahead that allows that collaborative effort you put in on that outcome to actually shine through for leadership to make the promotion, to make the recommendation. When people aren't in person, there's an illusion that they're working harder. This is called often the FaceTime bias. And there's this idea that when people see people working or see people in the office, they assume they're working harder, even though that's not necessarily true. There's a fun study on the input bias, where they had people evaluate one of two different presentations.

34:59In one of the cases, they heard this presentation, the person spent over eight hours making it. For the other set of people they heard, they only spent about 20 minutes making this presentation. And participants in the study, the evaluators rated when they heard the person's the presentation that the person spent over eight hours preparing, they rated that as better than the one they heard the person spent only 20 minutes preparing. But it was the same presentation. And this is the thing, which employee do you want? Or which person do you want? The one who gets the job done in 20 minutes or the one who takes over eight hours.

35:33But we reward the person who took over eight hours because it seems better because they put so much effort into it. And we're not really good at objectively evaluating things that for the most part don't have clear numbers about what makes it better or worse. So it's not so much that in person makes people work harder or that it makes them more productive. It's just people, managers, they can feel like they can observe it. So it makes them more confident in their ability to evaluate others, even when they may be biased in those evaluations.

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39:08Visit rexmd.com slash charm. That's rexmd.com slash charm. See full details and usage at rexmd.com. Prescription required. Results may vary. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. When your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again. You fix the problem. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use Indeed's sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast. And even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Now, a blind spot that comes up around that frequent communication, especially for our clients who have bosses, and then we can talk about reaching out to strangers, is this belief that, oh, it's the boss.

40:06they're so busy, they don't want to be bothered with my daily email. They don't want to be bothered with my daily message. And then that also goes to, well, that stranger is so busy, I can't reach out to them and make a request or ask something of them. So we choose not to send that message. And it's, again, robbing our visibility. So how do we actually start to level the playing field so we're not in this hierarchy, assuming people are too busy for this communication? One of my colleagues here, actually, the University of Texas has done some research on this. And they've shown that people overestimate how awkward it is to reach out to more distant contacts.

40:44And then, you know, they do it. And then after the fact, they're like, well, how awkward was it actually? And they're like, oh, it was far better than I thought. And they asked the second question too, is what mode is best and which one's most awkward? And generally, people tended to feel that email would have been the least awkward, You know, phones next more awkward and then video in person is the most awkward because it's richer, it feels weirder, whereas email feels much lower stakes. And what they found was that participants indicated that afterwards, phone, video in person weren't any more awkward than email, actually, even though they predicted they would be.

41:22But interestingly, in the context of connecting with an old friend or colleague, visual interactions. So video in person didn't end up adding anything beyond phone. So the idea here is just the big jump was moving from asynchronous email to synchronous phone. And then moving to video call actually didn't add to anything in those conversations about how much they felt they gained from it, how much trust they built. So sometimes just picking up the phone can be one of the best things you can do. I wouldn't recommend necessarily cold calling people because you're You're going to feel like you're interrupting them, but maybe sending a quick text saying, I'd love to catch up over phone.

42:01Do you have a few minutes in the next few weeks? I'd be great to chat. Can be a lower stakes way than kind of forcing a video call where they have to be sitting in their office. And leading with that text, but having the richer interaction can help to strengthen that relationship. For a lot of the cold outreach, the type of message you send has a huge impact. And I was recently working with one of our clients who was putting together some messaging seeking investors, and he got a database of some people he was basically cold outreaching to, some real stretches in there. And as he sent out dozens and dozens of messages, he actually accidentally sent one to a billionaire who owned a massive building that he was hoping to reach.

42:44He was hoping to get someone else on his team, but he actually sent it directly to the billionaire. And within minutes, the billionaire responded. and I find that so often the people who are the the most successful the busiest actually get less of those messages because of this bias where everyone assumes they're too busy I'm not going to message them but if you actually follow through you're more likely to get that quick response and it's sort of counterintuitive but a lot of the really busy successful people they have EAs who can very quickly go through their email discern hey this is an opportunity make a quick recommendation that they actually reply.

43:19So you're actually doing yourself a disservice by assuming that person's too busy for this communication. We had done a podcast with Ben from The Buried Life and here's him and his boys on MTV getting a show playing basketball with Obama and doing all these outrageous stunts. And their whole bit about that was just, they would start with just sending some random emails to folks. Here's what we're doing. Here's what we'd like to do. Would you like to be a part of this? And they were always blown away by the amount of people that actually responded and were like, Hey, this, this sounds rad. And would always be surprised of who was, who was so difficult to get in touch with.

44:06And it was always a mind blower from them. And we had some fun discussing that with them. So another example of how that proves out. Yeah. So what does the science say around that bias that we have or the blind spot that we have around people being too busy to respond? And then what are the most effective messages to break through that noise? One of the key, one example that's coming to mind too, is some research on reaching out to people who could use support. So maybe someone's going through something really bad with their family or they've got cancer or something else. But the research has found is that people often feel uncomfortable doing that because they feel awkward.

44:45They think the other person won't necessarily appreciate them reaching out of the blue. And it turns out that we're all completely wrong about that on average. And when you reach out to someone who could use some support, it turns out that they really appreciate it. And that can make a really big difference. Because so often, so many people are afraid to reach out that it can be very isolating when you end up in one of those situations. Even if it's someone you're really distantly connected to, that can make a huge difference in the relationship. And then that is a great way too to like strengthen that bond, strengthen that relationship while doing something nice.

45:20Now, in terms of the messages, just moving more broadly, whether it's when you need support or you want a business opportunity, the big thing is that people on the other side make assessments based on the effort you put into the interaction. So in my own research, I've shown that people will tend to discount email as inauthentic because it is so low effort. Whereas higher levels of communication, whether that's phone or even better video in person, it seems higher effort on your part. Whether or not they want to engage in that joint effort with you is a different question. And the other big thing is you want to make sure to personalize your communication.

45:58I get so many emails from all over the world that are either completely formed template that do not mention anything personal about me that were sent out to like 2000 plus professors. You know, I get an email from someone who's from some random country who's studying healthcare and nothing related to my research. And they're like, I would love to come to your school to collaborate with you. And like, clearly you haven't researched that. And the new thing, of course, is AI. we had a high school student who reached out to my to my department or everyone in my department actually asking to do research and the message was clearly written by ai uh and it was you know it was dear professor one line about one of your papers form email and one of us mentioned it to the other person our department and we all got the same ai basically form email to every single one of us.

46:52And the problem with this is if we're going to work with someone, we want to be someone who's really motivated, interested in our kind of research. We don't want them throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. So making sure that your message is truly personalized, especially if you're going to someone big or someone important, is going to be what gets you through the filter. And actionable. You know, I find oftentimes we put so much effort in trying to explain what it is that we are and our credentials and why we need them and why we're hoping to connect with them and what the similarities are.

47:26And then we forget the most important part, which is like, what is the simple action that the receiver of this message can take, who's time starved and busy to move things forward? And I'm in the same boat. I know Johnny is too. We see emails all the time. Dear bracket name, bracket comma. All right, here's our pitch. And then there's no action. There's no call to action or something specific and simple that I can say yes or no to. Okay. A five minute call or a two minute demo time and time again, it's a lot of fluff around why they want to talk to us. I heard this thing on the podcast. My AI transcriber said, reach out to you because of this.

48:06But there's no clear action for me to take. And then it just goes into the recycling bin and I'm onto the next email and trying to get to inbox zero. So one of the key lessons that we always share with our clients who are trying to break through the noise in this environment is, hey, keep brevity at the front of this email around what's the connecting point, and then make sure the action that the person can take to help you is clear. It's not picking their brain. It's not hours of effort on their end, or it's not nebulous for them to figure out. and there's good strategies related called which i'm guessing you two probably talked about the foot in the door technique which is you start with a small request and especially for people who are busy they're not going to want to do something huge initially but just getting a small initial connection where they give something small to you whether it's a little bit of time or a little bit of something that opens the door to a bigger relationship to bigger requests because now they feel like one they've helped you they know you but now they sunk time into this relationship so it has more value to them than someone just emailing them out of the blue.

49:10Yeah, and those relationships build when you actually respond to how their response helped you, impacted you, what changed, what you tried, what you applied. That actually leads to mentorship. And so many of my mentorship opportunities, both being mentored and then mentoring others, started with very small requests that led to, hey, you took initiative, You took action. My advice actually helped you in some way. So let's keep trading information. Let's keep developing this relationship. And now they've become lifelong mentors through a very simple ask in the beginning. And one of the hesitations I often see with people wanting to ask for advice is their concern is going to make them look incompetent, that they're asking for something to make them seem low power.

49:58What studies at Harvard have actually shown is that asking for advice makes you seem more rather than less competent. The reason being is that on the receiver side, you're basically flattering them by saying, oh, you're the expert, I wanna come to you. And the receiver's also like, wow, this person has a really good head on their shoulders that they know the best person to come to for advice, right? Like they know just who to ask here. So in those ways, it actually can make you seem more rather than less competent when you're engaging those kinds of interactions, which is the fear that many people have is it's going to make them look bad for us getting in the first place.

50:34Specificity here is also really helpful. So for a lot of professors, authors, content creators, who've probably done a video on that or written a book on that or an article on that, for you to ask a very surface level question that shows you didn't take the time to consume what they already put out there and ask their time to help you specifically, that's actually going to have a lower likelihood of succeeding. But if you tell me that you listen intently to this toolbox episode and this one part, I said something that grabbed you that you'd like a little clarification on. I'm much more inclined to respond to you because you've shown that you put in the time and the effort to solve this for yourself or find the answer.

51:13And we find so many times we're getting general questions that, well, we covered that 10 episodes ago. It's publicly available if you just checked out the YouTube channel. And knowing that the value goes to the person that you're asking the favor or the request of, I like to inflate it a bit or inflate them a bit, knowing how that works. So, hey, I'm coming to you because I really appreciate your perspective on things and I'm looking forward to hear what you have to say about this. Here's the question I have, which even makes them even more excited to answer or to help you out.

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52:53You want to do it all. So, want to drive? CarMax. Pickup not available everywhere. Restrictions and fee may apply. Bring this all back to virtual communication. One of the tips I have that's also related to perspective taking, I would say 99 % of the meeting invites I get, no one ever asks me how I want to meet. I either get a video invite, I get a phone invite, or the person just assumes we're defaulting to email. This happened a lot with reporters for the book. Some of them wanted to talk on the phone. Some of them wanted to email me 20 questions that I would answer over email. And the thing is, I have a strong preference.

53:31And so do most people. And one of the easiest strategies that people so often miss when making these new connections, or just interacting with everyone is one, yes, in ongoing teams and relationships, it's good to kind of strategize, figure out what's the most productive mode or the best mode. But sometimes just asking another person like, hey, how'd you prefer to do this? Like I can do email, phone, video, happy to do whatever's best for you can be extremely successful strategy because one, you're communicating on their terms. So they're gonna be more willing to communicate with you because you do it in the way they want.

54:07And two, by just showing you care more about their preferences, it shows you care about the relationship. It signals there that, hey, I care about this relationship because I'm going to do it in the way that you want to, what's best for you. Because the same thing isn't everyone's favorite. We've also seen that bias to everyone's too busy to respond hurt the relationships that have fallen to the wayside. We understand that things get in the way. Maybe you started a family. Maybe you moved to a new location or you got a new job, and then you didn't keep up your communication with a relationship that's important to you.

54:43And it feels often the longer you go without that communication, the harder it is to reinitiate. So what does science say around reinitiating those relationships through communication? And what are some strategies our listeners can do right now with those relationships that I know we all have in our phone? Well, first is we tend to think that other person won't value the communication as much, especially when it comes to these friendships and relationships. You think it'll be intrusive. It'll be awkward. In reality, people, it's nice when you show that you care about the other person, right? When someone messages me who I knew or lost connection with and they're like, hey, you know, I was just thinking about you, you know, be great to reconnect.

55:23I don't have any, you know, I don't need anything. I just, you know, would love to hear your voice or, you know, I'd love to hear what you've been up to. that can really show that you care about the relationship. A fun example of during COVID, LeBron James texted his teammates, miss you guys, can't wait to get back on the floor with you guys, finish what we started. And like, that was big for his teammates. They were talking about it during interviews afterwards. And sometimes just that little touch can be really meaningful when it comes to those interactions. It's also challenging then to pick up the communication thereafter.

56:01You know, sometimes it feels good to send that I'm thinking of you, but then how do we actually get that person back in communication? I think at that point, you could just say, I'd love to talk to you on the phone. You know, I'm flexible. Is there, you know, anytime? I just want to catch up here, what you've been up to. Just trying to use a foot, again, this foot in the door. We start with a small interaction, something that doesn't interrupt what they're doing, a text message or an email. and then just asking for that richer interaction and making it clear. And if we're talking about the context of an existing relationship, making it clear that you just wanna reconnect.

56:36If we're talking about a cold contact, then it's all those things we already discussed. You wanna make sure it's personal. You wanna make sure it's not something you can just find on Google or by reading their existing content. You wanna make it clear that you wanna talk to this person for a reason. It is you I wanna talk to. and the one caveat I want to add to all this advice about asking for advice is that there's an important buyer's beware. If you go to someone, you ask for something, whether that's advice, whether that's an investment, and you end up not taking it, it can really harm the relationship.

57:15This is that polar opposite of where you're flattering someone by asking for their advice. when you don't take their advice, that shows that you, you know, they think, wow, this person doesn't know what they're doing because they don't, you know, I know I'm right and they're not doing it or they don't care about this relationship. And that's one of the quickest ways to burn a bridge. So if you're going to go to someone for something, be ready to take whatever it is or risk ruining that relationship. That's an incredible point. In fact, AJ brings that up a lot when he gets bother for mentor work, but young folks need to know that those people in high value positions, they're probably probable givers and they want to give value.

58:05They want to help people. They want to see folks succeed. However, in giving out a lot of advice, they have seen a lot of people squander it and squander their time. And I know even myself, when people ask me about stuff, I immediately go, are you going to watch this if I give you this? Are you going to listen to this if I give you this? Are you going to do this if I give you this? Because if you're not, I'm not interested. And they're like, oh no, oh yeah, right away. Absolutely. Okay. I'll do that all day long, but I'm not interested in entertaining you if you're not going to participate in this.

58:50And so when you put yourself out there and you don't get the response that you are hoping for, keep trying, let them know that you're incredibly engaged and interested because no might be a default just because of how these people have been treated in the past and how their advice and mentorship had fallen on deaf ears. Not to date ourselves too much, but many of our audience members and clients have expressed frustration to us as well around the death of the water cooler. When I went into my first office job, there was a lot of downtime with my peers where we weren't actually doing the work, but we were engaging in camaraderie and conversation that built and strengthened relationships.

59:35And it seems and it feels in in virtual environments now that's disappeared. And with that, we feel less ties to our peers and our colleagues at work. What can we do through virtual communication to start to bring back the water cooler and nurture these relationships as they're so impactful on our career? I talk to a lot of leaders about culture and org culture and remote work. And there's a lot of things that are happening simultaneously that is not solely due to the remoteness. I see a lot of leaders taking what I call the house arrest approach to fixing culture. So for those who aren't familiar, House Arrest is a movie from a couple of decades ago, where basically these parents were divorcing.

1:00:16So what their kids decided to do is to lock them in a basement until they reconcile. And of course, because it's Hollywood, it worked out all fine and dandy. But in real life, what ends up happening, you lock people who are divorcing into each other into a basement, one may not walk out alive. And this is what they're doing in organizations. They're saying, well, our culture is not good. So we're going to force everyone back into the office. And that just doesn't improve culture. But getting this question about how do we add the water cooler back into virtual, how can we get these more spontaneous interactions?

1:00:50What research shows is that one of the best ways to do this is short video interactions with fewer people. There's a lot of teams, I've seen a lot of organizations where they have these like three hour long brainstorming planning meetings with like a large group of people. And that is absolutely one of the worst things you can do for building culture for building engagement. The meetings that people are in the interaction people are most engaged and most willing to engage in this kind of small talk in shorter meetings, fewer people. Those are the ones where you get those good interactions in there.

1:01:29And the other step is just being a little bit more intentional about it. Just because something doesn't, those conversations don't happen as naturally virtually, doesn't mean that you can't incite them. Just asking someone saying, hey, I'm working on this at the moment. I was curious, are you doing anything related? I'd love to get your thoughts on this. You just have to be a little bit more intentional about it. You have to take that initiative. So that's like that second part of the ping framework there. Taking the initiative to just engage in that small talk, to ask those questions, can fill them back in.

1:02:00You know, there's nothing stopping you from having those conversations just because they don't happen as naturally. You mentioned nonverbals in virtual communication. And I think so many of our audience members come to us for nonverbals in person communication. What should I do with my hands and how can I be more warm? What should we be thinking about virtually around our nonverbal communication and being more effective? First, it's good to learn all the different cues, what they mean, how people interpret them. But if I'm going to give you the quick answer, the one piece of advice that I often recommend, and this is in respect to the question I often get is, should I use emojis?

1:02:35Should I not use emojis? And the research on this is mixed. Sometimes some of these things are good. Sometimes they're bad. But one thing is clear is a good strategy is something called language mimicry. So if they use emojis, use them too. If they use exclamation marks, use them too. If they use certain business jargon, you use that kind of thing too. If some other person is using a certain mode of communication, use that too. And the reason this strategy is so effective is twofold. One, we all think we communicate the right way. So when someone communicates like us, then we're like, oh, they're a good communicator.

1:03:15And the other side of that is we trust those who are similar to us. So when someone communicates in a way we understand that we're familiar with, then we tend to trust them more. The two footnotes with this though is one, don't overdo it. If you engage in the schema like Simon Says where you're copying everything they do, that will backfire. And two is if you're very high power, don't try and mimic someone who's low power because that just comes off as really cringy and bad. But the central point behind this is take your cues from the other person, see what they're doing and then try and implement them yourself.

1:03:52And that's the safest route you can take if you haven't really done a deep dive into kind of the research and science and all this stuff. Well, thank you for this wonderful virtual conversation. Where can our audience find out more about your book and the research that you do? Yeah, my book, Ping, The Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication, is available wherever books are sold. My company, Ping Group, on our website, pingroup.org. We have additional free resources, so communication styles tests, team norming tools for communication. getting to what we talked about. And yeah, those are my two most common resources.

1:04:27And you can find me on LinkedIn as well. Thank you for joining us. Great. Thanks for having these great conversation.

1:04:44And now comes part of the show where we showcase one of our X Factor accelerator members. Take it away, Jack. Hi, my name is Jack from Colorado. I decided to join X Factor Accelerator when I was stuck in a rut and was seeking accountability I needed to reach my potential and consistently pursue my values. I found like-minded, similarly ambitious people, and each week we drive each other to be better. If you are on the fence about joining, I encourage you to count to three and just do it because no life-changing decisions are made on the fence. Thank you, Jack. It was a pleasure and an honor working with you two and good luck to you and all of your future endeavors.

1:05:25If you've gotten value out of this or any of our podcasts, head on over to your favorite podcast player and rate and review this show. It means the world to us and helps others find the show. Before we head out, a huge thank you to our producers, Michael Harold and Eric Montgomery. Until next week, go out there and make it epic.

1:06:41We'll be right back.

1:06:52We'll see you next time.

1:07:11even tea time, tea time, tea time you. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great. Every minute your finance team spends wrestling with data is a minute lost. Insight Software's AI-powered insights instantly move you from complexity to clarity. Automated analysis, real-time reporting, strategic recommendations, all at your fingertips. Transform how your finance team works and watch your business grow. Stop wasting time. Start making smarter decisions. Learn more at insightsoftware.com.ai