KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Matt Townsend

Episode Date: June 6, 2024

You're listening to the Coach Code podcast, and this is your host, John Kitchens. Join me as we unlock your greatest potential, collapse time, reveal your blind spots, and become the best version of yourself. What is going on, everybody, man? Welcome to another episode of the Coach Code podcast. I am super excited today. We have a very special human being on with us today, somebody that has had a tremendous impact on my life. I know we've only been connected for a short period of time.

However, just the transformation and the opportunity to work with Matt has been life-changing. And I know how it's impacting me and is allowing me to impact others. And I'm just super excited to have Matt on with us today. Matt, how are you? Good, John. Thanks. Thanks for having me. By the way, it's impacting me too. So it's mutual.

It's good. Yeah, I think you find. entertainment in our conversations. Yeah. No, no. Not entertainment. It's just depth and coolness. It's awesome.

Depth and coolness. I would love for you to kind of unpack your story a little bit. I know on the post and we'll put it in the show notes and everything, your bio and connections to you. But I would love for you to just kind of unpack your story. And I was introduced to you through somebody that is mutual, mutual friend. Yeah.

And just, you know, through conversation, he didn't even kind of recommend. He was just sharing his story and how the impact that you had on his life and how and on his kids' lives. And I was like, I've got to connect with this guy and dove in to as much content as I could. Found your TED talk and, you know, got a copy of the book. And so love for you to just kind of unpack it a little bit. Well, it's funny, John, like, you know, you never know how you get where you get, you know. My life is, it all weirdly started.

My parents divorced when I was eight, right? So as an eight-year-old, I'd listen to my parents argue in the back bedroom of our little 1,800 square foot house. And I thought, why can't they get along? Like, these are good people. And I love them. And, you know, I love both of them so they could figure out a way to love each other. So back at a very young age, I learned. that communication is not easy.

And then they divorced. And so literally from about 10 to 12 years of age on, I was always watching relationships. I was just always watching my friends, parents. I was kind of that creepy kid that just stares a lot and watches. And I was just trying to figure out, what is the deal? Why couldn't my parents do it?

And, you know, it creates weird issues because then you're different. then every all of your friends or all the neighbors. And so what I found, though, is I always had this feeling. If I could just help people communicate, then then I'd be doing my mission. I felt like I was called to do that. But when I was in college, what job is that, right? So I thought I'm going to go pre-law. So I thought that would be a lawyer.

And then I did a little law and I'm like, yeah, they're not. They don't help people talk. They help you. Then I did a little counseling. I thought counselors would do that. And then I learned about Freud. and I thought that dude's messed up. So I didn't want to do that.

Then I actually got a bachelor's in journalism in communications, basically, because I knew I could do that. I knew I was good at that. I went and I started teaching at a university. I went to grad school. And while I was there, I was teaching journalism classes. But I fell in love with this theory in interpersonal communication, which is about dialogue theory.

It's conflict resolution. At the same time, I got a job with a company you may have heard of called Franklin Covey Company and slowly kind of worked my way up through that company, traveled for about seven years for them, was a consultant and would work with all these big companies, teaching them weirdly how to communicate, how to resolve conflict. I got to work on a lot of books with Stephen Covey and his son, Sean Covey. I helped write some of the book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teen's Program. And worked with big companies, big Fortune 500 companies.

But I always had this calling to like get back to the couples, get back to the couples. So after seven years of Franklin Covey, I decided out of nowhere, by the way, had the best gig ever. I was the youngest presenter there. Life was good. And I felt like I needed to leave and go start my own thing. So that was about 20 years ago, 21 years ago. And I left, built my own company, started mediating divorces. because I thought that would be fun.

Like, what would be more fun than helping people that don't like each other to divorce? And what I would do is as I was divorcing them, I'd start teaching them skills to make my life easier. I'd teach them all these communication skills. I had been finding and developing and they learned to communicate. And as they were divorcing, they were the happiest couples you've ever seen. And I thought, let's not wait till people are divorcing. So after about two years of mediating, I started just working with couples. From that, I wrote a book, Starved Stuff, Feeding the Seven Basic Needs of Healthy Relationships.

And then I've designed a dozen workshops or so. We're trying to put all of them online now. And I've built a pretty robust coaching program. And now I'm starting to coach coaches how to coach and just share the skills, basically. And from then, I've just been speaking and writing and doing events. And I love it. And it's fun because I feel like I'm in my, I feel like I'm in my calling.

I'm where I'm supposed to be. And I gratefully, blessedly been able to do it with my unique strengths, which is a little more humor, a lot, a little more fun. And then I eventually just in all of this, decided to go get another master's,

got a PhD in human systems and human and organizational systems. And now I just love what I do every day. Yeah. going to meet people like you, John, and hang out. Great awesome guy. You know, I mean, I look forward to to our conversations and they are. They're, like you said, there's, there's the humor in there. And just your way of kind of helping unpack kind of some self-awareness.

Yeah. And really, you know, allowing me to at kind of, you know, kind of at my own pace, you know, You know, self-discovery and learn things about myself. I mean, you know this about me. I'm just trying to be the best version I can each and every day. And, you know, how we came together, but how, you know, the direction of things have gone, have been, you know, I felt like it was supposed to be. And it's been really powerful. What for you with working with Covey, what were some of the like things that still.

carry with you to this day with that relationship. Yeah, that was, you know, that was really cool because he's very guru-esque and he passed away a few years ago. What a wonderful man. And literally was everything he purported, everything he taught. He was doing everything in his life to live. One of the things that stood with me, and again, I got to sit in his office and at times and meet and do meetings. But one of the things, he's legitimately real. So he doesn't pretend to be anything.

I mean, and I had heard story after story, like he would go to a movie theater with his kids and he would, his back would hurt. So he would just lie down on the ground in the theater and just stretch his back. And nobody, you know,

get up with popcorn stuck to his bald head. And you're just like, Stephen, come on, man. But I was, I sat in a meeting with him once where my one of my jobs early on was to help the authors at Franklin Covey write their books. So I was in charge of book development and managing the teams that develop the books. And so I got pretty good at content development. And I was in a meeting once where I thought the, I thought the authors, the authors tended to be, you know, really high level consultants that were making awesome money. And then they'd get a book deal and get like, you know, 500 grand from a big, a big book publisher. And but they need to use the money to get the book out, right?

And so I'm the guy that had to run the team. So I was getting frustrated because I wasn't getting enough money to get them the team to get the books out. And we were having a big conversation about that. And I remember, um, Stephen asking something and one of the, one of the authors kind of started pontificating. And I just subtly rolled my eyes. in that meeting. And Stephen did this thing. I call it Get Real, and it's an acronym for four things.

He didn't call it this, but he recognized my emotion. He explored my story behind the emotion. He attended to where I was really starved, and then he lifted the conversation. So he recognized my emotion by saying, Matt, you seem to have something on your mind. Help us understand what you're thinking. And so he got me to speak in a conversation that I wouldn't have spoken in. I mean, I wouldn't have piped up. Yeah.

And he, but by recognizing my emotion, he then got me to explore the story and share the story publicly. And as I started to share it, he attended to where I was feeling unappreciated or disrespected or discouraged. And he just pointed it out. He didn't judge it. He didn't question it. He just showed me that he could understand it. And then he lifted the conversation.

He went from where I was and he showed where he agreed and he appreciated it. And he apologized if he was part of the problem. And then he shared his side. In fact, my TED Talk, if you just Google Matt Townsend and TEDx, I do a 20 minute video or so on this get real process. And so that's one of the best things I ever learned is I actually learned the very technical skills. I just, I learned them in my master's programs, but the real caring, loving, get real conversations, I learned by sitting with Stephen Covey and watching him do it.

That's amazing. It's pretty neat. That's so neat. And attend to it, lift it. And the biggest thing is not judge it. Yeah. If you judge it. So you kind of have to care before you judge it, right?

And even if you have to judge it, there's a really cool trick that you can always. always, I believe most of the time in any discussion or argument or debate, 80% of what you're talking about, you really agree, you agree on. And if you slow down a conversation enough, you'll be able to find the agreement. The agreement's there. I mean, even on the biggest divisive issues, pro-life, pro-choice, if you start to dissect that issue, most of us agree that you should have choice, right? And most of us agree, you should favor life, right? Like, if you get into it deeply, it's just a few parts of it, maybe 20%, where we don't agree. And that's where we spend 100% of our time fighting. And so I use the word and a lot. So yeah, I may not, I appreciate

what you're saying. I acknowledge what you're saying. I apologize if I was part of that. And and then you use the and to segue into any, you know, opposite or conflicted part of what you need to talk about. And we keep the whole mind open and usually we throw a word out there like, but and then butt shuts down the conversation. So if you use and then I can love my children with all of my heart and they can suck the life out of me. Those two things can go together. And I don't want to get rid of them. And I thought about it. And when they're gone, I miss them. And then when they're with me, I kind of need them to leave. So if you use and you can do that forever and ever. And it allows our minds to kind of float in paradox a little bit instead of getting really rigid

in a binary either or argument. In that situation there where, you know, Covey did what you kind of later, you know, put as as get real. Yeah. And I know you've worked with some of, you know, going in and teaching communication. Like, where do most people struggle with with their communication? Where do they struggle in, in being able to? to not even understand this.

Is that really what it is? They just, they don't know or they don't care or? Yeah, I think it's that. I think it's, people are smart, right? And what we all are, we are also very habitualized.

So a lot of what we do is just pure habit. So most of us when we're actually talking, we're not listening. We're, we're just reacting with our typical script. And so one of the hardest things I think people have, have the struggle with is that they actually, they don't know how to sit in the space and suspend. They feel like there's a compelling need to have to take your idea and sink it.

So in dialogue theory, which is if you've read any books like difficult conversations, crucial conversations, these are all books that come from one theory called dialogue theory. And dialogue theory came from a physicist, by the way, that replaced Albre's. Albert Einstein in the in the in his seat chair in academia. And this David Bohm basically just teaches that dialogue is like a pool. And what we want to do is just let all these leaves of information float in and just let the leaves or your your content just land in the pool. And when you let it land in the pool, the leaves are either going to float because they're coherent or they're going to sink because they're not. The ideas in our conversations in and of the

themselves have their own life and their own ability to live. But what we do as communicators is we feel a need that the minute an idea lands in the pool, if we don't like it, we try to drown it and sink it. And the minute you're actively, that's actually just so you know what that's called, that would be a debate. The debate is where I'm going to try to use my ideas to beat up your right is. But a dialogue is where I'm going to allow a free flow of information and logic. But in order to do that, you have to suspend. And you have to, in fact, I don't know if you know this, John, there's a really very basic concept in communication. It comes from a guy named Otto Sharmer, who uses a U-shaped model to explain what communication is. Almost always, it's a guy.

communication, we start really polite. We're really nice. And then it kind of regresses from politeness and it goes down into kind of the conflict. Now we're in the fight and we're not so polite. And this is where it starts to get super ugly. A healthy conversation would have the ability to get to that place and then lift it. And I'll show you how we could lift it. If you don't, if you start to recognize the fight is starting and the politeness has gone, and now we're just going back and forth in a debate. If you don't catch it right then in the moment, and I call it start to presence, get presencing,

and notice you're reacting. If you don't catch it and you just go with the reaction, then you're just going to lower the conversation. So negative conversations tend to have a history of like a slippery slope that just keep going down. Yes. Healthy conversations always have the power to create that smile again, that you. And the way you do it is you have to catch yourself in the moment and start to get

present, mindful, that you're reacting. Now you're reacting to what they're saying. And it's a really wild thing, John, because if I know I can get you to react to what I'm saying, then I own you. Right. I, there is nothing easier than discussing something with somebody that's really reactive because you are really the one in control. If I can get present and then once I'm present, here's the simple key. Get out of yourself and start to inquire into their position. The big lift is the minute I don't react anymore

and I take one more step in. I don't fight you and I don't flight from you. I just inquire. And the minute I inquire and go deeper, then I can start to learn. your story. And my goal is to learn your story if I can better than you do and be able to reflect it back to you clearer than you can and just show you I'm with you and then even show you where I felt similarly. I felt that exact same thing. And by the way, that's how we end up growing trust.

So in any conversation where it goes sideways, there's three signs that's going to go sideways. And if we as humans can't get in presencing and get present and stop this, I call them the vital signs, we're going to lose the patient. And those signs are three things. Negative emotion. Anytime you see negative emotion going up, you're already, so that's where you're in the fighting side. Got it. You got to get negative emotion. Pay attention to it.

You got to get understanding, almost invariably when emotion goes up, understanding goes down every time. understanding the quote is hijacks meaning or no anxiety or uh negative emotion hijacks meaning every time so if somebody's too negatively charged the the understanding and meaning are going to drop so i look for negative emotion going up i look for understanding dropping and i look for trust dropping whenever i see negative up and understanding and trust down i call it nuts because it spells nuts um every i have to use acronyms because it's how I remember it is nuts but when I see it going nuts negative emotion understanding and trust then I know I now need to presence how and I always stop and what I do is I know my history

okay so this is the mindfulness stuff we have to work through you know maybe offline not in the middle of a fight but I need to know for example when my parents divorced when I was eight I know that I didn't feel as safe and I know I didn't feel as respected because in my community It's a Christian community and they, you know, divorce isn't Christian, right? Like everybody, it's not right. But the reality is it is. It is. It's life, right?

So, but I felt disrespected. I felt discouraged. I wondered if anyone was dedicated to me. So those are some of what I call my starved needs. And I know that when I got starved as a kid, I learned that I needed to please people more. So I had to actively try to please. and so when I know what triggers me in a fight is if someone's disrespecting me or not or pulling away from me. And the minute I see that, I get in a fighting mode.

Now, I've worked years trying to understand it and stop it. So when I'm starting to have a conversation with somebody and they're pushing on those buttons of disrespect or that they're not dedicated or that they don't appreciate me, the minute I feel that, I stop and I notice it. Okay, it's happening. I'm starting to get hijacked. This is emotional intelligence 101, right? I'm recognizing my emotion and I'm lowering it. And the way I lower it is I always stop, pause. I try to sit up straight. I try to take a big, deep breath.

And then a lot of times I just try to lean back. And leaning back is a really interesting symbol, right? In the conversation, I'm going to lean back. But part of that, it comes from a kind of a Buddhist concept that you lean out of your mind. and get back into your consciousness, your real self. And so when I do that, and then all I know I need to do is inquire. And the minute I start, so what I try to do is reflect what they're saying. And by reflecting back what I hear I'm saying,

I can no longer be in my fight or flight brain. You can't reflect another human being's content and emotion and understanding if you're in your low fight or flight brain. Right. Instead, you fight them. Right? So it's super cool. So that's how I do it.

And then once I start listening to them, it's super powerful too because the more you listen, the more you actually see, oh, they don't believe in this. They really are just afraid of that. And you can start to hear and really attend to what I call their starve stuff. So for me, starved is seven needs that need to be met. I need to make sure people feel safe with me, trusted. appreciated, respected, validated, encouraged, and that they know I'm dedicated. Every fight anyone out there has, okay, imagine just as a real estate agent, you walk in the house

and the house is $400,000 more than the guy wanted to pay. But his wife found the house and she loves it. And she already knows where the baby room's going to be. And the yard's going to fit the dog perfectly. So it's already pretty much sold, except the guys kind of peeped around, about. about the price and he's hung up on the price. So I call that price the smoke. That's not the real issue.

If we listen to it and we listen to him. So it sounds like Jim, you're really upset about the price. Talk to me more about the price. The more he explain, well, it's just stupid. I told you guys, this is my budget and now we're fourth to hundred thousand over.

This is crazy. Like I can just go qualify for 400 grand more. And now she's in love with it. So now she's going to be mad at me. So now when you're starting to hear is, he's not feeling safe. He's feeling kind of disrespected because I've made him look bad in front of his girl. He feels discouraged.

He wonders if she'll respect him, if I'll respect him. He feels probably discouraged because he's not sure he can get the loan. And he loves it. So he's kind of in this weird conundrum, right? So he's starved. And the more I listen, I can realize, oh, okay. So you love the house. It sounds like Jim.

I mean, you're just worried. You just feel disrespected because we threw this higher price at you. And I probably should have done a better job of letting you know that it was up there. And then he let him respond to that. Well, yeah. I mean, I mean, no, it's, I know how houses go. And I know. I know how this works.

It's just, I'm just mad. I'm just mad that it's out of my ballpark. And so, so you're just hurting. And then I just reflect it back. You're hurting because you love it. You want it. and it's just now can you finance it and you don't think you can finance it. Help me understand what you've gone through for financing already.

Maybe there's some ways I can help you. Maybe there's some things I can do. Maybe I could. So once you know what the deeper issue is, is it's his own safety to get the house. It's not the house and it's not you and it's not whatever. So that's getting real with him. And the minute you do that and you let him talk because you're inquiring, three things will happen. is negative emotion will start to go down because people can't maintain negative emotion if they're

venting it and you're understanding them. As they're venting, you're going to increase understanding. So you'll lower the negative emotion and you'll increase the understanding. And then if you can hold the space for them, that trust will be built. So you literally reverse the vitals of them. That's pretty powerful. That is really powerful. When you can change a person's emotions and weirdly increase more understanding about them and build trust, that's what I call getting real. That is, and what that is is nothing more than holding back your own emotions, suspending it, just neutral, put it in neutral, and then be open to what they say and inquire and listen,

attend to where they're really starving. And then once I hear where they're really starving, lift it. Show them where you agree. I agree. this is an awesome house. And I, you know what? I felt the same way you did. Last year I bought a house and I did the same thing to myself.

And it is frustrating. And what's weird is I was able to figure out some tricks on financing. And maybe if I, can I just introduce you to my one friend that helped me get into a house better than I could have myself. So it works. And it's, again, even if it doesn't work perfectly, you're still better off recognizing an emotion than reacting to it. You're better off exploring their story than jumping into yours.

You're better off attending to where they're really hurting instead of chasing the smoke. You're better off lifting a conversation long term than always lowering it. I love it. How do you, you know, I can go a couple different ways here. One, how do you work on getting those, getting our own emotion? emotions into neutral. Yeah. It's,

in fact, right now I'm designing a leadership program called the emotionally intelligent leader for the Air Force. And it's, it's an awesome, it's an awesome program. But basically, if you need a skill set to manage emotion,

one of the areas I would go, well, there's two or three areas I'd go to. One would be any content on mindfulness. And two would be any content on emotional intelligence. emotional intelligence is all about five things basically, recognizing your own emotion. You can't manage an emotion you don't understand, period.

So what we tend to do is we just think that our emotions are us. You know, I just run hot blooded. Well, you don't because there's sometimes you can control it. Right. And like, I mean, some people can't, right? But we all know that there's just certain things you don't say to cops. You know, you just know that. And some learn it the hard way.

But some people don't know that because they've spent so much time running from their emotion and avoiding their emotion and stuffing them and medicating the emotion that they've never learned it. So part of what you need to do is learn to recognize your emotion and go on the journey of where that emotion, every emotion has a past, has a present, has a future. Every emotion does. By the way, every emotion, the word emotion comes from the Latin word emo verre, which means to move. It has the word move in it.

All emotions are designed to move you. So if you ever recognize your own emotion, you can detect what your intent is. So when I'm sad, my emotional intent is to, and think about it, when someone is sad, what does that do to you? It kind of draws you in to people. When people go sad, they tend to try to draw people in. When people are mad, they tend to try to push people away. When people are scared, they tend to want to move away from people. When people are embarrassed, they tend to want to shrink and escape from people.

Every emotion has a movement. And so when you start to look at your emotion, you start to realize, okay, right now, my wife said this, I now am feeling angry and I'm starting to get anger. So if I'm feeling angry, I'm trying to probably now push her away. And I might, a lot of, that's why a lot of people escalate the fight right before they want to withdraw. So they really don't want to fight, but they have to blow it up in order to withdraw. So I try to recognize my emotion. Notice what it is. See what movement it's trying to create in me. If I can, I love to identify the root of that emotion, meaning where did I learn that emotional script? Where did I learn that when I'm sad,

I go quiet, I shrink, and I escape? If that's my pattern, what's my earliest memory of feeling sad, going quiet, shrinking, and hiding? And then it could be like, I could track it back to my parents' divorce. And if I track it back to my parents' divorce, then I know I built a script back when I was 10 years old. By the way, that has nothing to do with me being 52. So why am I still running that script? And it's simply because I don't, I'm not mindful. But now I recognize my emotion. So by the way, John, we don't have to do this in the moment even. If you just blew it and God, let's just say hypothetically, John, you were out to dinner with your family last night, and you got in a fight and it went sideways. Let's just say hypothetically that happened.

Okay. Then, and now we're here today. All you have to do is go back, rethink through the fight, what was said where, instead of just justifying it logically, because she's such a witch, my wife is so mean to me, don't just go there and justify it. Recognize what you felt. recognize what the emotion was trying to get you to do, recognize how you, where you first learn that emotion. And then what you could do is right now as an adult think, okay,

so if I wasn't hijacked by my 10-year-old emotions, what would I do as a 52-year-old if I saw that happening again today? And then figure out what your new script could be. And then if you want to really complete the circle, go back. back, talk to your partner, say, hey, I want to apologize about the fight, but don't just apologize. Teach him what you learned. What I'm learning about myself is that I have a pretty knee-jerk reaction when my respect is question, when my lovability's question.

And so I want to apologize because that's what set me off. And that's right then is when I said that really rude line to you. And what I would rather say if I could redo it right now is, okay, the way you just frame that made my eight-year-old go off. And so can we, can we slow down? And I want to stay with you and hear what you're saying. Can we just say it in a safer way for me? And let me say things in a safer way for you. And we just try to readjust it as an adult. And by the way, even it's kind of like practicing golf in your mind. It's pretty effective. It's still good practice. You could be on the course. Or the course. It's awesome. But thinking it through helps. And then and then having a

bunch of other tools you can do. I know breathing helps me. I know breathing calms me. So I do a lot of breathing. I know I can reframe stuff. I know that I can, I know that I can change my scripts by adulting up on them and making them into something new. So there's some tools there, but I'd study mindfulness and I'd really study emotional intelligence. I love that. And I love, you know, you're, you're so spot on with, even with the golf thing. I, you know, when playing, playing competitively all the time, I mean, that was, that was like the exercise all the time, like even the night before. Like, we would, you know, we'd play a practice round, but then all night would be thinking

about how we're going to attack the course. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. Thinking about it before, you know, the pre-routine shots and just everything. And it mattered. It mattered. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Isn't that? It's pretty powerful, right? like, so if you could, what if you could do that in your relationships? What if you could start to do that more? And you don't need to be afraid. Everybody's wounded. You don't need to, and you don't need to like go talk to your parents about how they wounded you.

I don't think you always need that kind of closure. What you need is your brain will rewrite the script if you'll put some effort into realizing it's there, surfacing it and then rewriting it. So it's, you have a better adult script. A lot of scripts, by the way, happen when we're young. So we don't have voice, right? When you're eight and something traumatic happens to you, you don't have a voice. What do you, what does an eight year old get to choose, you know, if their parents divorced, right?

Nothing. So what you tend to do then is a lot of times that traps you in, in the type of voice you're going to use in the future to handle your conflict. If you're, if you're afflicted young, then you might have less of a voice. So you might play more of a victim. But sometimes if you're kind of a teenager where you have a voice and that's where you're hurt, you might be more mouthey, more belligerent, more attacking. So a lot of times what you'll see when you see people fight, you can see about the maturity of where they broke emotionally on certain issues.

So if you see people fight like 10-year-olds, they both have young emotional trauma. And once we know that, we can start to re-rule. rewire it. Yeah. Re-script it. Yeah. No, that, that was one of the key things that you really helped me with in in kind of in conversation that's typically there's four, there's four people there in the conversation. Yeah. And it's just, it was, it was really a level of awareness to understand, you know, hey, is this, is this, you know, 14-year-old me or is this, you know, the 45-year-old me? Right. What's going on here? So what is my, yeah, what is going on here? Yeah.

So that's cool too. By the way, John, not to interrupt, but that's, if what you're fighting about in your marriage isn't what you're actually fighting about, then we don't have to end it. What we just need to do is start to get real about this isn't about our friendship. This isn't about communication. What it's about is I have an issue with feeling lovable or capable. or belonging. And let's talk about that. And when you said that one thing at the party, that made me feel like I don't belong.

And all of the sudden, it doesn't have to even be between you and me. It's really between our histories. And that's where we literally create new meaning. And I etch out a space in my life for your history to fit into it. And then you're willing to let go of some of your history so you can fit in. and especially the history that we don't need to carry. Yeah. Do you,

you know, one of the things that that was kind of helpful, just kind of on the work dynamic side of things, is also kind of pre-framing that we're going to have a certain type of conversation. Yeah. Hey, we're not trying to make any decisions here. Let's just have a great dialogue.

Yeah. Does how helpful is that? Yeah. That's huge, right? Because you're, you're setting the expectation. And sometimes it's, look, I'm just trying to understand more. This is just a, this is just kind of a search conversation.

I'm just trying to understand. Another one is because a lot of us have a history of we think we need to fix something. So the minute our partner starts talking to us, we immediately think it's, it needs to be fixed. And there, and so sometimes that, that's important to say, you know what, I don't need any answers or fixes. I just need your ear. will you just listen to me and help me listen, listen through this with me and process this with me?

There is another really cool thing that I've learned that there's certain roles that we all play in the conversation. And once you kind of notice these four roles, you'll see them everywhere. And once and you'll see that if you want a healthy conversation, you need all four. But your biggest fights usually don't have all four. So it's a cool way to figure out. what you need to do to change the moment. Here are the four. In every conversation, there's a mover. The mover has a position. Their goal is to push an agenda, a conversation, and they're doing it right now. Okay? There's always movers. And in any fight, in any argument, in any discussion,

there's a mover, right? There's the one that's going to have the agenda. There's also what we call a follower. The follower is the one that just takes the mover's agenda and just agrees with it and yes is it and goes with it. We need to have, we need to have followers in our conversations and we need to have movers. Movers get it started. But if all we ever have is a mover and a follower, then we always just do what the mover wants. Right. So those are only two roles, but they're important roles. The job of the goal of the follower is to create kind of a unity, a togetherness. Right. So it's a great role. The third role is, is what they call the opposer.

And the opposer is somebody that usually has another idea. And they don't really want to follow the mover. So, they oppose the mover. And what they're really trying to do, they're not trying to being a jerk. They're really just trying to show integrity to their own brain and to their own experience. So I've got other ideas.

So the mover moves. The follower starts to follow. That might be one person in the family starts going. Yeah, let's go play tennis. You're on a family trip. Let's go, I want to play tennis right now. It's going to be, it's perfect daytime. And then the follower follows.

But you're thinking, well, I've got three kids. So I can't leave them to go play tennis right now. But I just oppose it. Why don't we wait to play tennis a little bit later and let's instead feed the kids. And so now I'm opposing. And a lot of times that's where you'll see the fight go sideways. And everyone starts to get in the battle because the mover and the opposer go head to head. But if I had just followed, there wouldn't have been a fight. Right. But it wouldn't

have worked with my world. There's a fourth role that is so powerful that anyone can play at any time. And I could play it instead of just opposing. I could also, I could also be what's called the bystander. And the bystander is somebody that just offers new information. Hey, um, interesting idea about going to play tennis. We probably all. also ought to watch out for the people with kids because they might want to go, but they can't go because they have kids and the kids are asleep and we have to feed them and the kids will be up any minute. And so we probably ought to make sure that those that want to go can go and the kids can still be and taken care of. So if all of a sudden you don't have to, if you recognize you have a role or if you're sitting in a meeting or a family event or whatever and you notice that there's a mover and a poser going off. and there's other people that would never say anything, they're just going to follow,

then take the role of the bystander, bring in new information that can bridge the gap, and then say, hey, I would be way excited to go play tennis. And I really just feel like we need to let the kids get up. And so notice that's kind of a follow and a bystander. If we could just let the kids get up and get them some food, that's actually a follow, a bystander,

and an oppose. The more you start to mix your roles and start noticing it, like you've all, we've all been at a group party where there's one strong mover and a bunch of weak followers and then you end up either having to follow or oppose. And you hate being the opposer on everything. So if you follow, you're going to do it begrudgingly.

So you've got to have enough guts to just bystand and just share other information. And once you start to see the four rolls going, in any healthy conversation you've ever had, you'll see all of those four roles were played. And if all, by the way, if all you ever notice is you have followers, then you're getting about half the story. Yeah. So you want to look for opposers. And in fact, that's what Stephen Covey was doing in that room with me.

When he saw me roll my eyes, he saw a quiet opposition. and then by recognizing it, he invited me to get it out. Yeah, explored the story. Yeah. That's cool. That's so cool. That's communication theory 101. That's what you learn in a master's program, basically.

And it's David Cantor's the guru on that. But once you see it, you start to notice there's a dynamic to conversation, and you can stir the pot anytime. Yeah. And if all you ever see are movers and opposers, then what you need to see more of are followers, which means there's times to just shut your mouth and follow. We don't have to fight everything like follow. And then there's other times that you need to bystand.

But the bystander has to bring in new value add data. And once you do that, then it becomes a really cool, you know, team. Yeah, it is. that's definitely fascinating. And just thinking through, you know, just scenarios and things that have been a part of and meetings and things that have gone a little sideways. And it's like, okay, I see all the players here.

Yeah. Isn't it funny? And by the way, some of your biggest deals that you're losing might be because you're the mover trying to get the deal done, but there's an opposer that has to pay the bill. Yeah. And if you don't introduce a follower, so what you could do to change the dynamic immediately is follow their lead. Like, they want to see a cheaper house.

All right. Let's go check out a cheaper house. Yeah. And then go show them the nastiest, cheapest house on earth. And then when they go there, they'll see it. And you know what I mean? Or be a bystander and be like, hey, Jim, I noticed that we've gone through four houses today. And every one of them, you seem really hesitant.

You don't seem like, you don't seem like you're really into buying a house. then recognize the emotion. You seem a little distant. Tell me what's going on and then get real. Yeah. And so now you've kind of bystood, you notice. By the way, there's a great quote that says, one cannot not communicate.

You're always communicating. So if you're always communicating, then we have to start bystanding enough to watch it. And when it's happening, then recognize it. And then explore it. And the minute you do that, you're going to get way more data, way more data than just moving, moving, moving. You know, I've been on the Headspace app for a long time. And that's one of the, you know, it's more of a mindfulness practice.

And that's one of the very first exercises that they talk about is just being able to sit back like you're watching, watching the train go by. Yeah. And, you know, I tend to do it like at the airport. right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Watch, right. You love that. But it's, it's doing that in your own mind.

Uh-huh. Get back and kind of watch. Yeah. Watch what's going on. You know, Matt, a lot of, you know, I just, I have this belief you can't truly effectively lead someone until you can lead yourself first. And I know a lot of the things that we've talked about, um, in the conversation so far has been more about really helping yourself become, become better.

And you're, you're definitely helping. others lead others better. And like I said, we have a lot of great leaders that tune in and check out the podcast. What are some couple things that they could be working on to be to be better, more effective leaders, leading, you know, their families, leading their organizations moving into, moving into the future. Yeah. Great question. One of the, it's funny, because I, I create content every week for my own, my own, my own, groups and then I create it for a television thing I do every week. But one of the things I'm talking about this week, it literally comes from this very question.

But it's leaders, see, there's so much data that we already have. And the data is already available to us. But what I've just found is a lot of us, we're not learning in the moment. We're not, we're not letting things unfold. What we do as leaders is we tend to create our agenda and then we push our agenda into the world. But one of the things that I think a leader has to do is, is go and be in the moment enough to go with the flow of the moment and go where it will naturally go, but then add your special gifts, your special abilities. And there's a great tool that I love. I'm a big positive psychologist kind of guy and have studied a ton of it.

But if you go to a website called Authentic Happiness.org, there's an assessment you can take called the VIA character strengths assessment. Now, this isn't a personality test. This isn't a leadership test. What the principle is simply is that everyone is born with strength. They're already born with virtues intact that are pretty phenomenal. And Marty Seligman, who's the great author and researcher on happiness, he basically is one of the creators of this instrument. And what he did is he took all of the character strengths that everyone has talked about for millennia,

these virtues that we're all born with. And he went in and academically validated as an independent variable each of the 20th. 24 strengths and has proven that each of these 24 strengths build happiness, create healthier, more successful people. But most of us don't even know what we are, what our strengths are. We kind of know what our personality traits are. We might know what our Myers-Briggs is. We might know our Enagram. None of these are actually necessarily rooted in character strengths. They're all rooted in personality traits, traits, strengths, different things. The character strength is different, though. So one of the number one things I would do as a leader to be able to

manage the flow of stuff in real time is I'd learn your strengths. My number one strength, John, and I, by the way, I knew it when I was 10, is social intelligence. I just read people really well. My second strength is spirituality. I have a connection to a higher power and purpose, and it's a big part of my life. My third strength, by the way, that's not religiosity. I'm not really, it's not religious, I'm spiritual. I can feel power and more power and that helps with mindfulness. My third strength is perspective and wisdom. My fourth strength is creativity. I never do anything the same way twice. I should. It'd be easier, but I can't. My fifth strength is love of learning. And my sixth strength is fun, playfulness, and humor. So I know what my six strengths are. Now here's the coolest thing.

The research shows when you live from your strength and you spend 10 plus hours a week in your strengths, you are happiest. You're in the top 95 or the top five percentile of happy people when you use your strengths 10 plus hours a week. But very few people do. And so number one leadership skill I would do is I'd learn my strengths. When I walk into a room, no matter what's going on, I know it. my strengths are. And I know what I know I so by the way, my lowest strength, my 24th strength is

self-regulation. So keeping time, staying on time, hard for me, way hard for me. So I have to have people around me knocking on the doors and telling me where to go. But I don't, I don't, if I move my 24th strength up, it won't make me better and it won't make me happier. But when I master my top six strengths or my top 10, no one can compete with you. Oh, that's powerful. You know what I mean? And what you've done is you've put your fingerprint on it because those are your gifts. So any leader on earth, if you want to be able to handle the crazy chaos flow of life,

you've got to know your strengths. That's your universal track for you. I love that. I think that is the perfect way to wrap up this incredible conversation. I knew it was going to be powerful for me. and I know it's going to be definitely powerful that everybody is able to tune in and listen to this. And Matt, I can't thank you enough. I know they can just Google you.

You pop up everywhere. Dr. Matt Townsend, you know, definitely guys connect, plug into Matt stuff. It's so powerful. Like I said, it's been an honor to be able to work with you. And I know we're going to continue to keep working for a lot more. into the future. So awesome. Thank you again, bud.

You're a bad man. Thank you. All right. See you. Thanks for listening to the CoachCode podcast. This is John Kitchens. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Let's keep making it happen.

And I'll see you on the next one.