Ep #72: Be a Mindsetter with William Greenwald

Welcome to the Brainfluence Podcast with Roger Dooley, author, speaker and educator on neuromarketing and the psychology of persuasion. Every week, we talk with thought leaders that will help you improve your influence with factual evidence and concrete research. Introducing your host, Roger Dooley.

Roger:        Welcome to the Brainfluence Podcast. I’m Roger Dooley and our guest this week has a title that I know our listeners are going to love. He’s the Chief Neuroleaderologist at the Windsor Leadership Group. He’s a specialist in the neuropsychology of leadership and team behavior. He already has two master’s degrees and is finishing his training in clinical psychology at Harvard. He’s also an expert on servant leadership. Our guest has co-authored a new book, Be a Mindsetter: The Essential Guide to Inspire, Influence, and Impact Others. Welcome to the show, William Greenwald.

William:      It’s an absolute pleasure to be here with you, so thank you for the invite and I’m excited to hang out with you for a little bit.

Roger:        Yeah, it’s exciting. I have to admit I’m fascinated by your title, William. Are you the world’s only neuroleaderologist?

William:      I’m not sure about that. It was either that or chief humor officer and I wasn’t sure which one to go with, but that was certainly inspired by Zappos who has to hold the world record for the craziest titles I’ve ever seen. When I first started, I left corporate after about 20 years. My wife said with all the risk you’re taking and the fun that you’re having maybe it’s time to give yourself a fun title. I took her sage advice and off we went and now I can have a lot of fun with it and it certainly brings some smiles which is what it’s meant to do.

Roger:        It’s a great title and is that on your business card, too, I assume?

William:      It was. In fact, I had two; the other says chief humor officer. It depends which….

Roger:        Oh, hey, there you go.

William:      It depends on how I feel.

Roger:        Great, you can even do it as a two-sided one depending on the reaction of the person, you can flip it one way or another. While we’re on the topic of neuroleadership it seems to me the field doesn’t get that much attention or respect even though it’s been around for a while. I guess, David Rock takes credit for using the term first, but to me neuroleadership is a very natural extension where companies are now doing neuromarketing and just about all the major brands are using it in one fashion or another to understand their consumers. At the same time they’re not really thinking about the fact that their team members are also humans who also need to be treated in a way that respects the way their brains work.

William:      That’s exactly right. I think it’s a very keen insight from a sense that … One thing I’ve always loved about brain science, I started when I was in third grade, right. That was my first paper I think my mother saved. It was the triune brain which back then that’s what it was called. We didn’t have technologies to say it or anything like that.

Roger:        There are still people who are trying to sell to the lizard brain, so it hasn’t gone away completely.

William:      Absolutely not and so I have always been a brain geek, but as my mother said she always thought I’d become a doctor, but clearly I learned pretty quick that the sight of blood doesn’t do well. It’s one of those things that I said, okay, what do I do if I don’t go into the medical field and I said let’s go into business like everybody else, but I never lost the love for the brain. I am so fascinated by it and I think for many of the reasons that you just stated in terms that one, it is humanistic and what’s really neat, I think, for me right now is having gone through … since I was in third grade, so 30 plus years of reading different things and keeping up on the trends and going through everything from dreamology to near death experience and what happens with the brain.

It’s fascinating now to see technology validate so many hypotheses and models that were laid out in the ‘70s which sometimes I think wow, that person just got lucky when they laid that model out because now we validated it right. Yet when you read some of their stuff I think it’s people like Peter Drucker, that so much of his writings and his philosophy, clearly being the father of management, for example, can now be validated through brain science by watching what happens in the brain and certain things happen.

It’s on one aspect really exciting to see brain science validate so much of what we know, but also I think it does lend itself to some challenges. I think one, sometimes it scares folks. When they hear the word brain they think that we’re going to be talking about structure more than function, right, and there’s a big difference. I don’t want to get into the structure part of it, but more the function and that, I think, is a goldmine for leaders in the space called neuroleadership, for example. That I almost think it’s a commonsense yet not common practice type of roadmap for leaders to go out and understand. It’s such a commonsense thing from a sense that you say, of course, we want to know how people work and yet we don’t always take that next step to say how do we really work.

For me that’s a no brainer because I’m an absolute brain geek and I could certainly understand others that say yeah, I’m not sure it’s out there or if it’s validated enough. I think that is a challenge for our industry in the neuroleadership space that so much is written and even to this day stuff that comes out in magazines or newspaper articles. It really is just not based on evidence-based research and that is a challenge for us because I’m often questioning it in my own workshops. Questions about different myths or especially about learning, this idea of different pedagogical views of learning and how different things, kinetics and so forth really work to optimize learning. Sometimes it’s a tough message to share that half of the stuff we’re doing in corporate is not validated stuff. Directionally, sure, it makes sense and it may optimize a little bit, but it’s not near as validated as some may think.

I do think there’s so many people out there like Carol Dweck from Stanford who does a lot of mindset and David Rock, of course, that really came on the scene to introduce leaders to this concept of the brain. Matthew Lieberman, he’s one of my favorites on Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience which is SCAN for short, but if there’s anybody out there that’s interested in the social side of the brain he’s the fellow to go after. He’s at UCLA and his research now for seven or eight years has led so many insights to what we do today, I think, regarding how we interact with people and how we can optimize interactions with people. It’s individuals like that that really have held the doors open for people like me just to walk on through and hopefully contribute to this field that I love dearly.

Roger:        Right, I guess I feel like I’m in the same boat, too, where I’m translating work of the people that are doing heavy lifting into hopefully digestible and actionable advice. Talking about the Be a Mindsetter book, I found the format to be one of the more unusual ones for a business book. I guess I would describe it as splicing in little segments of an ongoing story of made up characters inside a brain that are having these interactions and disappearing and doing other things and mixing a little bit of that in with the more traditional science and then advice stemming from that science. Does that characterize it pretty well?

William:      It does and I appreciate you saying that and I’m smiling from ear to ear right now because that was clearly the intent going in. When my other two colleagues and I got together it really became very noticeable to all three of us at a very early stage in our collaborative relationship that we really wanted to create a book, a project, a piece of material that would advance the industry, add to things that are already out there, but in such a way that we could continue to bring levity and brevity to the topic and also in a way that adds more significance to others more than just the success of a book. Therefore, that realization really brought us down to a bifurcated approach to the book which is really more triangular in the sense that we got a lot of moving pieces. In some ways I love the fact that the feedback that we get is wow, this is really not traditional mainly because we weren’t inspired to write a traditional book.

Roger:        Whose idea was it, William? Did one of you propose it and then the others say

you want to do what or did it somehow just flow together?

William:      That’s a great question and I’d say the genius behind the whole idea was Michael and Michael had this idea, he had the methodology out there for years and …

Roger:        Just to interject here, your co-authors are Michael Gobran and Derek Roberts.

William:      That’s correct, thank you. Michael recognized earlier on that there was a need for this type of methodology and as he was out there really turning that model into an evidence-based approach, making sure that we take out the clunkiness and that it really does work, what he realized was that there needed to be some more know-how and how to behind it and hence that was the genesis for the book. When he brought the idea to Derek Roberts, for example, who then brought the idea to me, my value, right, was really to try to overlay some brain science to it. What we found is we each had our own magic touch and the collaboration was truly a blessing and magical in many ends.

I worked with many other authors who have co-written projects and they have shared some interesting tales about how that process works. I’m just blessed, the fact that we were able to get together every week. In fact, Michael is from Spain. He spends a lot of his time in Europe, but yet every week for almost a year we met face to face over the Internet and we dedicated time to the book. I think that was a testament to our collaboration. To your question though it was a very fluid process and sometimes for us the crazier the idea the better, so I may throw something out there that I think is just completely off the wall and they would sit back, reflect and say that’s awesome, let’s give it a shot.

Roger:        How’d your editor … Was it Penguin, was your publisher Penguin? How did your editor react?

William:      Actually, it was LID who’s the publisher.

Roger:        Sorry.

William:      That’s okay, LID publishing and they were extremely receptive and we were lucky enough to be able to shop this around a little bit. There was a lot of traditional type publishing houses that I would say maybe questioned the approach often looking for a more traditional type of project. Yet we recognized we didn’t want to bend on our non-traditional status because we just enjoyed it so much. I’m glad we didn’t, I’m glad in so many cases we had the courage to stay the atypical route because mainly that’s what our brain thinks and I love that aspect of it.

I think having Michael’s genius, for example, was the fictional side. He really brought so much value to Sam, right; he is the father of Sam in the book. For those who haven’t read it you’ll see Sam is the main character. Sam has really taken a whole new life to those that have read it. In fact, it’s becoming, which we love, part of the vocabulary for many cultures where this book has been introduced. They talk about Sam now which for those that haven’t read it is just an acronym for simple, applicable, and memorable and that’s really the first step of creating that message and figuring out how best to deliver it.

Roger:        Right, but unlike most acronyms Sam is an actual character, too, in this case.

William:      He is and that’s why I say he breathes life into the model which is what I love about the fictional side. There’s that fictional aspect, it doesn’t always work for everybody and that’s okay, we get that and yet there’s another side that is the brain side. For those that are looking to validate the model with, okay, how does that really work and how does the brain really take a complex message and why does the brain really struggle with that? We try to overlay at a … Not at a deep level, right, but enough science for someone to say hey, that’s a really cool insight.

Then we also have that personal side, right, and that’s the completion of the triangle that in each step of the model we agreed that we were going to be vulnerable and the three of us as authors we were going to share. Certainly not what worked great because many of the stories are things that left us with yikes moments. Times that wow, what were we thinking trying to do that, it just didn’t work, but that’s also a testament to the fact that this is tough stuff, right.

If you think about this idea of communication and included with your expertise of mastering the space you know that it’s been out there for 30 or 40 years saying it’s the biggest challenge that most companies face. Yet after all of this research, all of the books written on it, all of the models that have been given to the market, we still struggle with communication. I think that’s just a testament. Not to the fact that we’re not very smart human beings, but rather this is tough stuff. Hopefully, this book adds to that feel of making communication a little bit easier.

Roger:        I’m sorry, are you getting royalties from Disney and Pixar on the concept of putting little characters inside a brain?

William:      Yeah.

Roger:        Have you seen the newest movie Inside Out?

William:      I have and that’s a funny story because, of course, that was released and being built the same time ours was. Of course, we had no idea about that, but we are Pixar fanatics. We only wished our main character was Sam because maybe there would be some type of resemblance there, but no, I love that concept.

Roger:        It was great, it was a really fun movie and surprisingly it wasn’t meant to be a science movie, of course, but there was a lot of stuff that was quite real in there, so I enjoyed it, too.

William:      It’s interesting you say that because a lot of my own mentors at Harvard University where I’m privileged to be associated with is many of them consult for Hollywood. Many of the top clinicians and the brain scientists and those that specialize in neuropsychology, they’re in there working with Hollywood screenwriters and directors to try to make it as real as possible. I don’t know for sure for Pixar, but I’m sure knowing the genius of Pixar they probably validated…..

Roger:        Oh, they did. Actually, Paul Ekman, the father of facial coding was their main consultant on that.

William:      Fantastic.

Roger:        Ekman had six emotions, but I think they eliminated one. I think fear and surprise were too similar to each other. They felt to develop in a separate character, so they did a little bit of combination, but yeah, it goes back to Ekman’s work. I thought the interesting parallel there, too, was certainly if there’s anybody that understands the emotion and facial expressions it’s a skilled animation artist because with a few lines they have to try and convey the emotion that the character’s experiencing. I thought the Ekman tie in was really pretty neat and going in both directions.

William:      Absolutely, I think that’s why Pixar is the leader, right, in this field I think because of their diligence and their ability to really make things come to life. I love the breathing life into their message and they clearly had a message they wanted to send in a fun way, right, in terms of what goes on in our brain. It’s hard not to watch that movie and just smile because we know we’ve all had those characters in our head, right. That’s the humanistic side that I talked about earlier. That’s why I love brain science. It’s just it’s so human and Pixar did a great job making that come to life.

Roger:        Yeah. William, let’s talk a little bit about your book. What does it mean to be a mindsetter? What were you trying to accomplish with that title?

William:      That’s a great question and it’s one that we get asked a lot. At the end of the day one of the things that we know is that whether we’re a mom, whether we’re a dad, family member, leader in an organization, faith-based leader, it really doesn’t matter. It’s the ability to be able to craft and deliver a message in such a way that it generally serves to inspire, influence, and impact those that you’re serving. It really is a learned skill. It is tough to do. We know that because many of our own trainings and we say just think about all the trainings and workshops and keynotes you’ve been a part of and how many of them … You don’t even remember five minutes after you leave.

A big part of that is the science and memory and how do we lay the tracks in the beginning of a speech, for example, in such a way that we’re actually laying the memory tracks of our audience, so that there is a more accurate recall through more optimized storage via the way we’re telling the message or the way that we’re breathing life into the message. That really is the essence of the mindsetter feel that we believe it’s not about being a thought leader, it’s about being a mindsetter. It’s about making a difference in other’s lives and being able to do that through your message.

The reality is and, in fact, we were able to validate this very humbly when we launched our book in May. Just thousands of people that came up to us and our question to them was what is your message? It really threw a lot of people off in a good way and it really struck us how simple that question is and yet how powerful and visceral it was because when we asked … In fact, you’ll see this on our website where we’re humble to show all of these pictures of all of these people that visited us and we asked them to capture their message on this poster and this little card. They did and you can go on the website and see their messages.

These are messages that matter most to them and that is really personal and that is what I mean when we say we really wrote this book to bring significance, not success because when somebody can say, you know what, what’s really important to me is making sure that we don’t judge others. This world is full of too many people that judge and just stop judging others. That’s really important to them and the fact that we can get that on a card and now we can teach them to say that’s really important to you. How do you deliver that message in such a way that it inspires somebody to react to that and it influences their behavior. Imagine that, that we can actually deliver a message to influence behavior when we leave, that’s so hard to do.

Then at the end that it sustains father time, right. It doesn’t last just a week or two, that it breaks through the forgetting curve and it truly drives an impact for years and years to come. The great thing about that is there’s science behind it, we decode it. Those that have been successful we worked on the model. There’s science behind it on purpose because I don’t know how you can have a model like this without having science, for example, of memory, of being part of the book is focused on the brain science and memory and how memory works. Memory is an uncanny animal, right. It’s not housed in one part of the brain. You think of it as the London Tube, right. There’s many train stations coming into Grand Central Station and if one of those trains don’t make it to the station you actually have a false memory. That’s how easy it is to have a false memory. In fact, research tells us that we have many false memories.

Roger:        How do you craft a message that is memorable?

William:      Great question and the easiest and most simplistic response is that you have to make Sam fit for life. Now Sam fit for life is the acronym that builds the model and what we talk about first is Sam, right, so if somebody really has a message that they want to get out there and this could be a keynote, it could be a mom or dad looking a 16-year-old in the eye and saying, you know what, don’t drink and drive. It’s not good, right. We’re not just talking about corporate, but it could be any message.

The first thing we need to do is think about Sam which is you have to make your message simple, you have to make it applicable and applicable to that person, so that they know what that means to them. Then you have to make it memorable and often that is purposely driven through the just making it simple and applicable and a lot of science behind that to support the importance. One that I always love to share is that if we just think about the idea of being simple that is clearly commonsense, but absolutely not common practice in our communication styles.

Much of what I’ve done through my career I realize has been way too complex for people to digest. The reality is the reactions that we get from a neurophysiological perspective, when we hear a complex message that we don’t understand it drives anxiety, it drives stress, it drives almost in some cases a fight or flight mentality just like if we were walking in a dark alleyway and we see this dark shadow behind us. While physically we would want to run from danger because that’s what the brain is programmed to do from an evolutionary perspective. In this case from a message perspective if it’s too complex your brain is actually running while the audience member is sitting in the seat. He’s doing everything he can to block that message out because it’s trying to protect the person.

There’s a law, so again a reverse engineer that just says, okay, keep it simple, keep it to a one sentence. What’s that money line? If you were to take this keynote and just put in the title of your newspaper article what would it be? Make sure people understand it. After you make it Sam we talk about making it fit. There what we mean is this is where we start the quasi hand off between the person giving the message and what the receiver needs to do with it. Here we’re talking about the message and the application, the experience or the examples you use being focused, right, being able to provide a focused story, for example, a focused example of whatever the message is trying to distill.

We also know that we have to make sure that it is inspiring. We have to make sure that the brain and reward centers find it pleasurable because that’s what’s going to release the dopamine which then impacts the amygdala and it impacts the focus, right, which is the prefrontal cortex. It allows us to focus on the very content that we’re learning. Mostly it impacts the hippocampus which is the part that deals with memory and learning, so it optimizes memory storage and recall, accurate recall that is if we can leverage a message and make it inspiring. We talk about that in the last there for FIT, focus, inspiring and tangible. If we can’t touch what we’re hearing it’s really hard for us to get excited about it, so again it sounds like a captain obvious statement and yet we often miss that in our own messages. We forget to really bring the tangibility to it.

Roger:        If whatever you’re trying to communicate is more of an abstract concept, how do you make that tangible?

William:      That’s a great question. There’s many ways to do that and I think for most it can be done through meaningful connections to the message that you’re sending, right, so it’s being able to allow the audience to remember to take ownership of the information. This is where Sam … If I were to package this, Sam is about reducing your message. Making it fit is about relating your message, so when we talk about relating this is about the tangible, about allowing the recipient to take ownership of the message and now they have to do something with it. It’s not so much to listen. Now the messenger has done their job. The listener says, okay, I just heard you. Now what do I need to do that, how do I take accountability and ownership for that, how can I touch that?

Now the brain helps us do that mainly because of what we call the association centers in our brain which they’re always looking for patterns, right. They’re always looking for connections, so maybe it’s equivalent to that aha moment where you’re sitting in a training program and the speaker says something. You’re rattling around and you’re trying to make heads and tails of it and all of a sudden, boom, the lights go out and you say that’s it, that’s what they mean by that.

Now the presenter can help that by giving different examples and that’s why we talk a lot in the book about using different examples, so that it means different things to different people to ensure that we can optimize the patternmaking system in our brain, so that we can find those patterns. When the brain finds it then the theory is it pushes up to a level of consciousness. That’s exactly what we want and then when that happens it becomes tangible. It becomes something, okay, I can do this. I’m not going to get excited. I was already focused because the speaker allowed me to focus on it. I’m inspired and now that I know it’s tangible now I can actionize and mobilize this message that somebody wants me to hear and do something with.

I think that’s a really cool part of the model that’s often missed and the last piece, right, we’re talking about reduce, relate. The next one is about reflection and this is about life, so make Sam fit for life and life is an acronym for lively, interactive, familiar, and envisioning and really that’s all about reflection. If I am delivering a message, a keynote, a speech, a workshop, I want to make sure that after I deliver the message and after I help the audience relate to it, make it their own the last thing I want to do is come back and build some reflection techniques, build some reflection activities that allows the audience to really now make it their own.

Again there’s a lot of brain science that can help us do this, but by breathing life into the message as we say, right, we do that through exercises like … reflection exercises that we ensure are lively and interactive. We know that when we’re engaged, we’re up walking around, for example. It’s not just a sit at your table and think, but rather interactive with other people. That actually drives higher levels of conscious awareness when we do that, so the brain science supports the need for reflection in a lively and interactive matter.

Then the other is make it familiar, right, and that has a lot to do with going back to the fit, being able to find patterns, right, so making the message familiar, making it come to life for them a little bit more. The last is really about the envisioning piece. There’s a great field of study out there, mental brain science, and this idea of picturing something in your mind and visualization. What we know is that the brain doesn’t know what’s real and what’s not.

That’s an intriguing concept to think about. If we are in the military, for example, and put … There are military members that drive army tanks. They can put them into a simulation and have them practice on it for six months and when they get to the real battlefield the brain doesn’t know whether it’s the real battlefield or the simulation. The habitual behavior that’s the nucleus circumference part of the brain takes over. That is one of the best parts about visualization. There’s a lot of stories with Michael Phelps, the swimmer. Much of his practice was done just sitting on the edge of his bed envisioning his stroke, making sure he’s reaching as far as he can.

There’s a lot of information to support the idea of visualization and the ability to envision success, for example. The ability to self-reflect through visioning techniques really helps at the end of the day. It makes the message come to life even more, right. It makes it tangible and it fits so well, no pun intended, with the other acronyms which is make Sam fit for life and that’s why at the end of the day that’s what really resonates. That’s our one sentence, right. It’s make Sam fit for life using the model which is built on the ability to reduce, relate, and then reflect and if you see the model, the very last piece is the reengagement, right. It’s being able to reflect, but then reengage over time, right, with patterns.

This has been out there for quite some time now, but again something that, for example, corporations still struggle with which is after a corporate event and corporate training program how do you re-engage participants in that? How do you keep the information alive, so that we can surpass that forgetting curve if you will. Also, we know that the best insight for brain science that I love in this book and that we were able to bring out is the fact that the harder we work to connect things from the past, the more we lay memory tracks in our long-term memory storage.

What that means is by bringing somebody back a week after we had them in a training program and say, okay, let’s self-reflect, what did we learn? What was the one piece that we learned about ‘x’? Now that can be seen as a struggle for the brain to go back in time and try to recall that, but the very art of going back and forcing the brain to do that, when they find the answer and when we re-give it to them it actually buries it a little bit further into the long-term memory banks. This whole idea of reengagement, it’s more than just trying to keep it alive and keep it in the front of people which by the way many of my clients think it’s just about keeping it in front of them, so they use it.

I’d say it’s quite the opposite. It’s really about using a scientific approach to ensure that whatever message, whatever training, whatever content we’re delivering to them gets optimized in memory storage and then memory recall with accuracy down the road and we do that with effort, that recall. Whether that’s a year later, a week later, or a day later is one of the best things we could to break through just that route memory. As we think of the college students, right, that just cram in one night. We know that we lose that information after the exam and that’s part of the problem with corporate training as well. We tend just to try to fit it all in, we squeeze it in, but without that reengagement.

Roger:        There’s really a follow-up. I think that we all do that. We go to a seminar or something and get inspired briefly, but pretty soon we’re back in the fray and most of is lost. There’s almost never any attempt to somehow reinforce that learning after the fact, it’s usually just an event. Just as a final question here, William, we both do speaking and training and that sort of thing. I’m wondering if you have a quick case study of perhaps a speaker or a trainer that you work with or perhaps even from your own experience, a message that you re-crafted using these principles. Let’s start off where perhaps it wasn’t really making an impression on the people who were hearing it, but with a few tweaks in each place it became much more effective.

William:      Yeah, that’s a great question and immediately I go to a personal example if that’s okay.

Roger:        Sure.

William:      I have four children ranging from 23 to 13, so all teenagers, even the 23 is still a teenager. Love him to death, but …

Roger:        At least the terrible twos are over.

William:      Yeah, right, now it’s just the terrible 23s, I guess. The idea for a parent to be able to bring back those legacy messages, those things that we really want to instill in our children. Again going to significance, not success, not that hey, dad’s really successful in business, but more that he made a difference and he was a great servant leader and so forth. That’s what I want my kids to really see, so part of it is always trying to sit them down, say let’s have a talk. Quite a few months ago I was trying to explain to a few of them about this whole … Especially with kids these days. There’s a lot of judgment that goes on. We place judgment really quick and whether it’s a statement, the way somebody looks.

Now we’re always trying to train the Abraham Lincoln, right. He says do not judge, we’re just like they would be under normal circumstances. I love that mindset. It is a mindset. The three … My mother, two colleagues, and myself, the three of us, we’d have this thing that we call mindset reset button, right, which is sometimes we all need that bam, mindset, reset just to get re-centered, refocused, realigned in that moment, so that we can see things a little bit differently. In this case I have my children sitting around a table and they didn’t seemed to be getting to it and then it hit me, right. Here I was not even using the model that I subscribed to with the ability to take a message and make it make Sam fit for life, right. I said, okay, mindset, reset here, what can I do?

The ability to say what do I really want and how do I think it’s going to apply best to them and just in that 30-second self-reflection I simply came out with one sentence. At the end of the day I just want you to remember a truism which is you will never feel tall making someone else feel small. At that moment I saw just kind of a gasp and they just sat back in their seats and their eyes wandered being trained on body language. I knew what they were doing which is they were self-reflecting a little bit, but what I realized is that it made it applicable to them. They could get that. They could get the fact that when you judge you’re putting somebody down and the reverse of that is what I really wanted them to know is how does it bounce back on you, the judger?

Then the realization that it’s never going to make you feel better, it’s never going to make you feel more advanced or taller when you’re judging somebody else and making them feel small. It worked, I know it worked because a week later my 13-year-old came back to me and out of nowhere he said dad, I just want to thank you. Now I have a lot of these speeches and they don’t come back and thank me very often, so I share that with experience and a grain of salt. He said something that really intrigued me. He said that he’s been watching more other kids and he realized how prevalent it was at their age group of just 13.

He used examples of a lunch table and before classes and in the hallways and he said it really opened my eyes up to what I would say how often it just becomes unconscious, part of our culture. It’s part of a corporate culture sometimes, that’s just what we do, but I think that’s probably the best example I could think of where my ability to say, okay, mindset, reset, let me just really think about this using the Sam principle, even the kids. It resonated, it worked and it’s a good example of how hard it is because even myself I didn’t again plan that appropriately which sometimes we have to continually step back and do.

Roger:        Right, it’s got a lot going for it, too. It certainly embodies the simplicity piece. You’ve got that metaphor. It makes it a little more physical with the tall and the small. You’ve got rhyme in there which we know is persuasive and memorable, so that was pretty good for an on the fly phrase.

William:      Yeah, some would say that would be a hope strategy. Just hope whatever come to mind is going to work and it did, so I think that’s half luck baked in, I guess.

Roger:        Great, let me remind our audience that we’re speaking with William Greenwald. He’s the co-author of Be A Mindsetter: The Essential Guide to Inspire, Influence, and Impact Others. If you’re looking for a short and a very accessible book and it’s really unique in some ways on how to craft a powerful message, be sure to check it out. William, where can people find you and your stuff online?

William:      Yeah, so they can go to Mindsetter.com. Mindsetter.com has more information about the book and about us as the authors and more information on the webinars and the training programs we offer. We built an entire platform, really a portfolio of offerings and to really try to breathe life into this into corporations. They can get all that information there or they can certainly look us up and contact me directly and I’d be glad to talk with anybody or share a little bit more information. We’re clearly excited about it and at the end of the day we truly hope it adds more significance in the life of others, not just success.

Roger:        Great, we will have links both to that site and the book in the Show notes page as well as a text version of this conversation and that will be at RogerDooley.com/podcast. William, thanks so much for being on the show.

William:      Absolutely, Roger, I just want to end with one thing. That this is … It may seem like a shameless plug for you, but I just want to acknowledge that …

Roger:        We always have time for shameless plugs.

William:      Yeah, right, but your book really revolutionized much what we think about marketing and while we think about marketing as marketing, there’s so much correlation to everything else we do, to leadership, to the way we run meetings. You can apply it to almost anything because we’re always selling something; we’re always trying to influence people. We’re trying to influence kids to stay off drugs. I’ve used different aspects of your book for just talking to my kids, so I just want to thank you for being in the forefront of that because when this book came out there wasn’t a lot of really good material out there as is I like to say that will allow leaders to leverage brain science to optimize their effectiveness and you were really in the forefront of that. It certainly has shaped us as authors, so I just want to take the time to thank you for that.

Roger:        Thank you, I really appreciate those kind words and with that we will say goodbye to the audience and thanks again for being on the show.

William:      Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Brainfluence Podcast. To continue the discussion and to find your own path to brainy success, please visit us at RogerDooley.com.