Reframing challenge through the lens of gratitude with Kristi Nelson

Speaker 1:

If you’re going to take the risk of running an agency, shouldn’t you get the benefits too? Welcome to Agency Management Institute’s Build a Better Agency Podcast, presented by White Label IQ. Tune in every week for insights on how small to mid size agencies are surviving and thriving in today’s market. We’ll show you how to make more money and keep more of what you make. We want to help you build an agency that is sustainable, scalable, and if you want down the road, sellable. With 25 plus years of experiences both an agency owner and agency consultant, please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Drew McLellan:

Hey, everybody. Drew McLellan here with another episode of Build A Better Agency. I am super glad you’re here. This is going to be absolutely awesome episode. I know they’re all awesome, but this one’s going to be bonus awesome, I think. I’m super excited to introduce you to my guest and to really hear what she has to say because I think it’s going to be important in a different way for us as agency owners and leaders. I’m excited to bring her to you and to allow all of us to just sit and learn from her.

Drew McLellan:

Before I do that, I do want to remind you that we’ve got our AE Bootcamps coming up. So we have an advance day bootcamp for people who are four years or more of experience in agency life. That’s going to be August 17th and 18th in Chicago. Then our regular AE bootcamp and that’s for people with less than four years of experience is going to be September 14th and 15th also in Chicago. So you can read all the details about what we’re going to cover on the website. So just head over to agencymanagementinstitute.com and under the “how we help” navigation tab, you’ll see workshops and you could read about both of the AE bootcamps there.

Drew McLellan:

I will tell you that we get rave reviews on those workshops from both the AEs and their bosses. So I am confident that we can help your AEs get even better and level up if you would like to send them our way. I promise we’ll take good care of them. All right, so let me tell you a little bit about our guest. So Kristi Nelson is a fascinating woman. She wrote a book called, “Wake Up Grateful.” As I think about everything we’ve gone through over the last year and I think about the uncertainty, the fear, the challenges, the difficulty in figuring out our next steps when it was very unclear where our next steps should be, I knew that Kristi was somebody who can help us get realigned.

Drew McLellan:

We are enough our of the pandemic that we can see blue skies ahead and many of you saw blue skies to the tail end of 2020. But even that, even when you had a good year and even if you’re having a good year now, I think sometimes the habit of worry and the habit of struggling for certainty and control, because let’s face it, we as agency owners and leaders, we like to control. I think that that can be actually exhausting.

Drew McLellan:

So Kristi’s premise is that we can literally wake up grateful every day and we can take nothing for granted and we can really celebrate things like uncertainty. I just thought she was the perfect guest for this season for all of us. I promise you, I’m as excited to learn from her as you are. So let’s get right to it and let’s dig into the conversation. Kristi, welcome to the podcast. I am so glad you’re here.

Kristi Nelson:

Not as glad as I am. I’m really grateful to be invited. Thank you, Drew.

Drew McLellan:

You bet. I think at the end of the day, the listeners are going to be the ones that are super grateful. We met through a mutual friend and I read your book, which I thought was brilliant. I have to admit I’m a bit of a gratitude grateful kind of guy. I think that should be a core thing that how we live our life and how we, the lens that we look through things. So I know that you and I are going to have a great conversation.

Drew McLellan:

I want to start with just tell everybody a little bit about why you wrote the book, what inspired you to write the book, and why do you think this message is important for business people.

Kristi Nelson:

I wrote the book as a cancer survivor who was not meant to be here really on so many levels to survive stage four cancer is pretty radically outlier-ish these days. And I was incredibly grateful to survive and also loss, that gratitude over and over again as I got back into the fast pace life with all of the future looking momentum and goals and ambition, and I would lose perspective over and over again honestly, swearing that I never would, right? So you get the second chance at life, you think that’s going to make you the happiest most grateful person in the world, and yet we also come to the pressures of every day and consumerism, and how things should be and all those things. So the pressures and the stresses.

Kristi Nelson:

So I wanted to figure out how to get perspective back again. That perspective of emerging from a huge wake up call like illness, a radical illness and many people have wake up calls in their lives. COVID has been a huge wake up call for people.

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely.

Kristi Nelson:

And how do we emerge from that as conscious as we can be and maintain perspective so that we don’t lose it and go back to this is the way things are supposed to be, this is the way things used to be, but actually be really thoughtful and intentional about having move forward.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, I think we’ve all experienced that. I think we experience it when our family or our friends experience a loss, I think people get super reflective and grateful and focus on blessings after they lose someone that they love. I think we saw it after 9/11. I think we are seeing it in COVID, but I think you’re right, in all of those cases, we very quickly, despite the profoundness of those circumstances. I mean, when you think about the pandemic and how profoundly it has impacted all of us personally professionally, you would think that would change us forever and yet maybe it doesn’t.

Drew McLellan:

So I can totally understand how even with something as severe as your illness that you’re so grateful to get back in the groove that sometimes the groove takes away what you learned from being out of the groove.

Kristi Nelson:

A hundred percent. Beautifully put. I think the ironic thing is, “Oh, I get to go back to how things used to be,” can take us really far away from how we truly want to be. I think that’s the distinction that’s so important to hold onto is how do we really want to be and to know that we have more in our power around shaping lives to reflect that then we often remember. So how do we keep perspective and those wake up calls, like I always say to people, “We notice when things go wrong all the time.” We have a gravitational call to the things that aren’t going right in our lives. Our attention just goes there like a magnet.

Kristi Nelson:

If you want to appreciate your capacities, break an arm or break a leg and have a cast on and then you get it off after six weeks and you say, “Oh my God, I am never going to take my arm for granted again,” and boom, give you back two days, maybe if you’re really evolved, but it comes back again. We take things for granted and that’s not our fault. We live in a society, which gives us every reason in the world to do that. So it teaches us, it surrounds us with all those messages of it should be different, it should be better, it should be newer, it should be faster. You should be different, focus outward.

Kristi Nelson:

So I think we are prey to those things and yet we can pull it back with perspective and that’s the thing that we got to earn ourselves over and over again is staying intentional, staying present, and working together I think so, having a community of people like this who belong to a sense of association, a sense of affiliation makes a huge difference when we can call each other forth in the best of ways. So I think that’s what you’re doing with your work and I’m honored to be part of it.

Drew McLellan:

Thank you. As I was reading the book and I was reading it through my own lens of course, and then my lens of what from this book am I going to pull out when I talk to Kristi to be valuable to the listeners, one of the things, one of the thoughts I had was one of the things that makes agency owners and leaders brilliant at their work, super successful, help clients every day is they’re a great problem solvers. So to be a great problem solver it means, and in fact, one of their greatest gifts is they’re problem spotters, right? So they can see where clients run into a brick wall or where something’s going to happen.

Drew McLellan:

So they’re constantly wired to find problems and solve them. And I thought, “Isn’t that interesting?” In fairness, I’m wired. That I own an agency, the work that I do with agency owners, with coaching and all that, I’m constantly anticipating what their problems are and trying to figure out how to help them maneuver those problems. I thought, “Gosh, does that get in the way of me spotting the good things?” I’m not out looking for all the great things that are happening, because they don’t need my help with those. But is that mindset, is that skill in essence actually blocking my ability and my listener’s ability to be as grateful as we could be?

Kristi Nelson:

What a great question.

Drew McLellan:

Thank you.

Kristi Nelson:

You’re welcome. It’s the first time I’ve been-

Drew McLellan:

I want to start with the big guns off the bat.

Kristi Nelson:

That’s the first time I’ve been asked that question and it’s really astute. So I think we’re all problem solvers in so many ways. I guess what I would say honestly Drew is that I think gratefulness and being grateful is a problem solution. It’s basically if we can apply looking through a great lens to the problems that we have in some ways and that’s not saying, “Oh, be thankful for everything that happens even the hardest stuff in the world.” But if we can see opportunities, if we can have that kind of opportunity lens that we’re looking through all the time, which is what is this problem really opening up as an opportunity rather than how do I shut this problem down in immedioso. So like, “Let’s get this problem out of the way.”

Kristi Nelson:

I think there’s actually often a lot of gifts that come forward. The most challenging things in the world often are the most generative things in the world for us in terms of teaching, in terms of wisdom. I remember somebody saying once, “Don’t try to deprive everyone you love of their difficulties and their pain, because if you look back on your own life, the most difficult things in the world are the things that taught you the most.” So how do we instead learn to be with each other and be with the difficulties in a way that seize and seizes opportunity rather than let’s just put duct tape all around this and just call it a day and wanting to put it behind us, because that’s not going to give us what we really want, which is what’s the learning in here?

Kristi Nelson:

What’s the teaching? What am I meant to extract from this? How do I get something, a gift out of this that I can carry forward for other people, for my future? It makes me think of a saying that I heard once, which is about, “A good hockey player follows the puck and a great hockey player gets in front of the puck.” He knows where the puck is going.

Drew McLellan:

That’s a Wayne Gretzky quote. Yeah.

Kristi Nelson:

Right, Wayne Gretzky quote. Okay. Good, okay. So that I have one sports quote to throw in here.

Drew McLellan:

There we go.

Kristi Nelson:

It’s probably my only one.

Drew McLellan:

Well, it’s a good one, yeah.

Kristi Nelson:

I think in terms of being strategic, I think business owners actually are not just looking for the problems to solve, they’re looking for the opportunities to fulfill. So that’s a different way of thinking about it too, which is okay, sometimes we see the problem and what we need to do is get out ahead of it in order to think just beyond it, where is this going? What’s the opportunity this offers us? And that’s a much more befriending way of dealing with difficulties as opposed to thinking that they’re all just huge problems that need to put put asunder.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, I think you’re right. I think it’s probably seeing it in a more holistic way. And you make a valid point. I guess everybody looks for and solves problems in their life, but I think as agency owners and leaders, that’s what we get paid to do. So we’re just so hardwired to do that. I think COVID, when COVID hit last March and businesses of all variety had all of a sudden stopped, pivot, changed the way they did work. In many cases in my world, my agency’s lost 50, 60, 70, 80% of their clients in a week and then had to figure out how to get around that and how to build, rebuild as they help the clients that they still had.

Drew McLellan:

So when you’re faced with big, when you’re faced with cancer, when you’re faced with a death of a loved one, when you’re faced with COVID messing with your business so badly, how do you frame that? How do you view that from a lens of gratitude when you’re almost drowning in the loss or the fear, or the unknown? I think that’s one of the things that COVID has been so brutal for all of us is the unknown. I still think a lot of people are saying, “Things are good in 2021, but dot, dot, dot.” They don’t know what that dot, dot, dot means, but they just have this sense of pending something, right?

Kristi Nelson:

Yeah. And what do we do with pending something?

Drew McLellan:

Right.

Kristi Nelson:

We go to pending doom.

Drew McLellan:

Right.

Kristi Nelson:

Right? So that’s just where our gravitational, our mindset goes. So here’s what I would say. So there’s a few questions within what you are asking and I think they’re all important. What you’re asking this last part is really critical, which is are devastating circumstances land us in a greater awareness of the uncertainty of the world?

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Kristi Nelson:

That’s one of the things they do is they really highlight that. One of the things that intrigues me a lot is that I think we live in a state of denial of uncertainty 99% of the time [crosstalk 00:15:34] until something happens.

Drew McLellan:

We’re type A people, right? We’d like all the control, please.

Kristi Nelson:

Yes, please.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Kristi Nelson:

Right. If I got it planned, it’s got to go just as I planned it, because I haven’t, forbid something comes in and surprises me and-

Drew McLellan:

I have a checklist. Yeah.

Kristi Nelson:

Yeah, exactly. I have a to do list, nobody get in the way. So yeah, we can be dangerous. Those of us who are wired that way and Myers-Briggs J, just if you’re a completion person, it’s like, watch out. I think uncertainty though is a fascinating concept, because I get asked about this a lot and I have a book, a chapter in the book called, “Savoring uncertainty.” When people say like, “Okay, now wait a minute, that’s asking me to go way too far.” How can you say that, you could say that tolerating uncertainty where the modicum of comfort. So how do I savor uncertainty?

Kristi Nelson:

Part of what I love to invite people to remember is that we’re always living in uncertainty. It’s perpetual, it’s always been true. However we’ve gotten here, we have a hundred percent survival rate to date, anybody who’s listening to this, of surviving uncertainty. Life has been uncertainly every single moment we’ve been alive up until now and it’s going to be again, and we’ve been faced with it in a more acute and vivid depiction of itself let’s say in this past 15 months. It’s gotten itself really crystallized and made us not forget it. So it’s like it’s right in our face.

Kristi Nelson:

I think that how we deal with that is going to say a lot, which is can we be open to surprise? Can we be actually available to the fact that life is uncertain a lot and are we able to get in front of the puck? Are we able to see what the uncertainty might allow for, because there’s also gifts and uncertainty. The most incredible things in your life, the most amazing things in your life have definitely come out of uncertainty. Falling in love, a lot of those things, we don’t plan to the T a lot of the most incredible things in our lives. We also don’t plan the most difficult, but people just want to like, “Okay, I want to filter out everything difficult about uncertainty.”

Kristi Nelson:

But then if you plan your life just so and you got hypervigilant, you’re also going to filter out some of the most amazing things in the world too, some of the most extraordinary delight, joy, beauty, love, all those kinds of things. So I am always interested in what opens up for me if I say, “Okay, I’m going to befriend this uncertainty in a way.” And what does that expose me to? What does that create for me? Sometimes it creates incredible new alliances, new ways of thinking about things, new pathways through things, identifying new opportunities.

Kristi Nelson:

And one thing I will say for sure is that if the world was completely certain, there would be no way for you to interact with the future and shaping the future in any way. If everything was already all laid out and there was no uncertainty, your role and it would be absolutely moot. You could just say, “I’m just going to sit here and become a couch potato and do nothing,” but the truth is you have a role in shaping the future. You have a role in contributing to possibility. And all of that requires uncertainty, because that’s what you get to figure out now. We’re in this crazy place of figuring out how to move forward.

Kristi Nelson:

I’d say befriending uncertainty rather than be grudging uncertainty. How can befriended? Because it’s the truth and I think we’re going to do better if we can figure out how to make friends with it a little bit better.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. That’s so true. For a lot of the people listening, they have a staff, a team of people, and part of their role is to lead, to inspire, to coach. How would you recommend to them that they take this idea that you just outlined so beautifully? How do they show up as a leader to teach their team how to savor uncertainty? Because our world, one client calls and all of a sudden 20% of our revenue is gone, I have to lay people off or whatever it is. We’re at the end of a food chain in a lot of ways in our business.

Drew McLellan:

Sometimes that’s great, because we’re at the end of the food chain and we can make something cool happen, but sometimes it means bad things happen to our business that we didn’t have a lot of control over. So how do I as a leader help my people understand that A, that’s just part of the gig in life but B, it’s certainly part of the gig in our industry and to get comfortable in that? Because I think sometimes when people leave us, they leave because the uncertainty is so uncomfortable for them that they seek something that feels to them more stable or certain.

Kristi Nelson:

Yeah, they’re just going to a different place rather than uncertain future.

Drew McLellan:

Right. Absolutely.

Kristi Nelson:

Again, there’s the human instinct too. It’s just I’m going to shift, the grass is greener over there, so I’m going to go climb over that fence and then you go over and you know? My first thoughts are always about embodiment that as a leader are the call to us is always to embody anything it is that we want to inspire people, anything we want to inspire people about, we have to be in embodiment of it and we have to be pretty full proof around it, because people can smell it when we’re not real, when we’re not in that space ourselves.

Kristi Nelson:

So if you want to say to people, “You need to be more comfortable with uncertainty.” How are you showing up into that in your own life? And how are you modeling that? I think people are always looking in some level to leaders to be real, to be vulnerable, to show up and what I think is the most powerful thing is to acknowledge uncertainty. I think about the guy who, I forget his name, but the business that burned down and all he was doing fleece and he was in Massachusetts somewhere, and his whole mill burned down and how he took care of people.

Kristi Nelson:

People look to leaders who can deal with difficulty and uncertainty and stay connected to their hearts, stay real. It’s not about betraying your heart and going to your head and having to have just the right thing to say. I think it’s more about how to stay true to your heart and stay connected and relational in those spaces where you feel like, “Okay, now I’ve just gotta freeze the world for a year and figure out how I can bring my best self forward and be the leader I meant to be,” when what people are really looking for is in the middle of the hot soup, how are you stewing? How are you doing?

Kristi Nelson:

I think it’s about being real and authentic,. So embodiment is one thing. The next thing I would say is to say to people, model for people in the midst of all this uncertainty is a lot of possibility and a lot of opportunity. How are we as an agency collectively going to determine what those are? What’s the possibilities that are backening us right now? What are the opportunities that are offering themselves to us that we may be missing? If you’re not willing to shape shift, you’re going to possibly have troubles because adapting to changing circumstances are so critical for any organization and any leader.

Kristi Nelson:

I think calling everybody together, Lynne Twist who wrote The Soul Of Money, which is a great book, she says collaboration yields prosperity. So one of the things I think for leaders to do is really get off the top of the ladder and come down and join everybody on the floor or on the mid rung or something and invite everybody in and to say, “As we look at this collectively, let’s hold a space for trusting that some wisdom is going to come out of this and it’s up to us to figure that out, all of us collectively.” I’m not going to be your answer and no one person here is going to have an answer here, but the wisdom of the collective is going to generate something so awesome and extraordinarily new.

Kristi Nelson:

And we’re going to open into that space of not knowing and uncertainty and allow something to reveal itself that wouldn’t have otherwise. And that’s rich, and that’s creativity. Everything creative comes out of that space.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. We saw a lot of that in COVID where agencies had to pivot and reinvent themselves and start offering things that their clients really needed that they had been offered before like virtual events and things like that. And so you’re exactly right. I think we can make that shift if we have our head in the right place. I love what you said about leading with your heart. I’m a huge advocate of that and that when your people feel you first, then I think it’s easier for them to follow you.

Kristi Nelson:

A hundred percent.

Drew McLellan:

I think for a lot of business owners, I think that’s an adjunct to position, they think they have to know it all rather than they have to feel it all and they have to show those feelings. I think a lot of us are uncomfortable being super vulnerable in front of a lot of other people, but every great leader that I know has figured out a way to lead with their heart first.

Kristi Nelson:

If you want longevity in your teams and you want sustainable relationships, it’s not about having all the answers, it’s knowing how to ask the right questions, and knowing what asking the right questions is an indication of is humility and vulnerability and also needing other people. The last thing your team wants to feel is that you don’t need them and you’re trying to figure it all out on your own. That doesn’t inspire a sense of commitment internally. So draw on the wisdom and expect surprising things to come with a sense of trust and an invitation that’s really deep and sincere. I think there’s so much to be gained out of some of these difficult times.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, I agree. So you use the word “connections” a couple times. So I want to take a quick break, but when we come back, I want to talk about the notion in your book about cherishing connections, okay? All right, we’ll be right back everybody.

Drew McLellan:

Hey there, do you have an up-and-comer inside your agency whose become your right-hand person? How are you investing in them? Who are they surrounding themselves with and who are they learning from? You might be interested in taking a look at our key executive network. It’s built to help you groom the leaders in your agency. It’s designed to surround them with other AMI taught agency leaders and it’s facilitated by one of AMI’s top coaches, Craig Barnes. They meet twice a year and they stay connected in between meetings with calls, Zoom get togethers and email. AMI agency owner is one of the best professional development investments they’ve ever made. Head over to agencymanagementinstitute.com and look under the membership tab for key executive network. All right, let’s get back to the interview.

Drew McLellan:

All right. I am with Kristi Nelson, the author of Wake Up Grateful and we are talking about how we as business leaders can tap into that place of gratitude and gratefulness and how we can infuse that in our work and with our team. So right before the break, I had suggested that we talk about this idea of cherishing connections. Talk to us a little bit about what you meant by that phrase and what that looks like.

Kristi Nelson:

It’s like calling people for cherishing connections is a strong thing. It’s like savoring uncertainty, right? It’s like, okay, wow, that’s aspirational and it is. It’s important and yet it’s what’s going to get us everywhere is really deeply valuing the relationships and that collective intelligence and the resources that are available to us in our midst. So this is a heart-centered place. I talk in the chapter about cherishing connections about something called the grateful rule as opposed to the golden rule, which I think is super important. It is inspiring to a lot of people and also challenging to a lot of people, because the golden rule is something we learned really well when we’re kids and it’s supposed to take us out of narcissism, but it actually perpetuates it as adults.

Kristi Nelson:

So if you give the other person, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. So give the other person exactly what it is that you would need. It’s actually coming from such a self-interested perspective. So if you think about it, if I give you what I need, if I treat you exactly as I want to be treated, I don’t know anything about how you want to be treated. I don’t know anything about what you need. So the grateful rule is do unto others as they would have you do unto them, not do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That’s silly.

Kristi Nelson:

It’s like the love languages. You have no idea what’s meaningful to this person until you actually find out. So cherishing connections is deeply about listening actually and knowing that if you can reward people in the way that’s meaningful to them, you’re going to have such much richer relationship that you can draw from and so much more allegiance, and commitment. It’s interesting, because we have all kinds of assumptions that we operate from. One of them is that money is the most important thing.

Kristi Nelson:

So oh well, I’m going to give you a raise. Meanwhile, what the person is needing is something entirely other than a raise. The person is needing something entirely other than a raise and wants a different kind of recognition, wants to be included in a different way, that the money actually doesn’t matter, wants to feel valued or called out, or acknowledged in some way that money is never going to do. So if you value money and you assume that everybody else values money and you give everybody money, you may be spending more than you need to spend and also never hitting the target of getting your care and commitment to a staff person, to an employee, somebody on our team fully expressed and experienced, because it’s not working for them.

Kristi Nelson:

It’s like if you bring your wife home roses every single day and what she really wants is to go on a trip with you, but it’s like, “Oh my God, but I’ve been bringing you roses every day.” “Well, you never ask me whether I like roses or not.” That’s so simplistic, but it’s actually when we’re working with a team, it’s not a homogeneous team. There’s such diversity within our teams. So to really understand also too, what is it that’s going to make somebody stay? It could be their title. It could be differences and responsibilities. It could be as you know, time off versus money. It could be flexibility in schedules. It could be all these kinds of creative things, but unless you inquire, you’re never going to know.

Kristi Nelson:

So cherishing connections actually is interesting because it makes you a cherished connection. If you cherish the people in your midst and cherish those relationships, you will be cherished and that’s what you have to prove and show through your behavior and through your inquiry and your curiosity.

Drew McLellan:

How do you ask those questions? If I’m your employee, how would you find out from me what it is that I need or how I want to be recognized? What does that conversation look like?

Kristi Nelson:

Oh my gosh, this is so fun because I do this with my team. So Drew, I’m so happy to have this conversation with you because what I want you to know is I’m really inter