Different Is Not Worse: What Is Your Intention Imperative? With Mark Sanborn

You don’t have to have a title to be a leader! If you take care of the moments the moments become your life. If you daydream, choose to do it and don’t do it accidentally. Mark’s personal practice is to focus. Morning meditations and prayer and setting his intentions wherever you’re at, be there. His current read is The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. He highly recommends taking the time to slow down to the point of purposefulness.

Transcript

Welcome to the Everyday Mindfulness Show where we educate and inspire people to live fuller lives through mindful practices.

Let's get started with your host,

New York Times contributor,

Leadership advisor,

Sought after keynote speaker,

The author of the Amazon hot new release,

Everyday Mindfulness from chaos to calm in a crazy world,

She's smart,

Strong,

Sassy,

And a trendsetter in the field of mindful leadership.

Your host,

Holly Duckworth.

Welcome to another episode of the Everyday Mindfulness Show.

Today we have a powerful conversation planned for you with one of the most internationally renowned speakers.

I am so excited to introduce you to,

I'm going to jokingly call him my neighbor because we are just so close here in Colorado,

We can almost throw a rock at each other,

But yet we still come at you live from our offices.

I want to introduce you to Mark Sanborn and Mark Sanborn has like a whole alphabet soup after his name.

CSP,

That's a certified speaking professional,

CPAE hall of fame.

He has written nine books,

Including the one we're going to dive deep in today,

The Intention Imperative,

Three essential changes that will make you successful as a leader.

He is named number five,

Top leadership guru,

But you know,

For Mark,

It's never about being on the list.

It's really truly deeper than that.

It's about creating great leaders and helping people turn ordinary experiences into the extraordinary.

He sold more than 2 million books.

He's spoken in every state in the US in 16 countries,

But more importantly than that,

Mark Sanborn is an inspirational speaker,

An example of powerful and steady leadership as he commands respect and continues to inspire us all to explore the leader within us because he's also the author of The Fred Factor.

You don't have to have a title to be a leader.

Mark,

Thank you for saying yes to coming on the show.

Well,

Holly,

Thank you.

That was a very kind introduction.

I appreciate it.

It's great to be with you.

Well,

Everyday mindfulness.

This we define in its broadest sense,

The practice of being fully present in the moment.

And we are here in 2020 in a time of massive transformation and we don't need to get on to all the details of transformation.

People are living it.

There's 7.

7 billion people on the planet,

But I'm curious as we unpack this,

What does mindfulness mean to you?

This is a word that you're seeing more in books and certainly on grocery store shelves.

What's mindfulness mean to the international leader guru?

Well,

It's interesting because for years I had been talking a little bit about mindfulness and not really using that term.

In my book,

The Fred Factor,

I asked Fred Shay,

The focus of the book,

This ordinary postal carrier who did an extraordinary job,

You know,

Ask him what motivated him.

And one of the things that he talked about was that he didn't like to waste time,

That he had a hard time sitting through a movie because he always wanted to be,

You know,

Doing something constructive with his life.

And one of the things that I talked about as a result of what he told me was,

I said,

If I was going to summarize all my writing and speaking into a simple idea,

It would be this,

Fear nothing but to waste the present moment.

Because if you take care of the moments,

The moments become your life.

And that's what mindfulness is,

You know,

Because so many of us,

Myself included,

You know,

I never point the finger without accepting my own culpability.

We kind of sleepwalk through life,

You know,

We daydream.

And by the way,

I tell people,

If you daydream,

That's fine,

But choose to daydream,

Don't do it accidentally.

And when I am in front of an audience,

I say only half in jest,

If you're listening to me,

Don't let me trick you choose to listen to me.

Because when you accept that responsibility to be in the moment,

Really good things happen and you don't end the day going,

Wow,

What you know,

What happened?

Did anything important happen today?

Because you chose to focus on what was important and in my vernacular,

Make the ordinary extraordinary.

And this is in a world right now that's 24-7,

365,

Multiple languages,

Traditional media,

Social media,

Call in your friend.

So what do you have a mindfulness practice?

Or maybe you call it something else?

How do you continue to bring your back to that power of the present moment?

Yeah,

I like I like the word focus.

That's just familiar to me.

And you know,

A lot of these words that we use overlap.

For me in the morning,

It's meditation and prayer as a person of faith and mindfulness is about intention and I think meditation and prayer share that same spiritual space.

But I also try very hard to,

You know,

The old Zen quote,

I'm sure you'd use a million times wherever you're at be there.

I ran across a book,

Our friend,

Glenna Salisbury,

Who's a long time and dear friend of mine,

Recommended a book to me.

And I thought the book was good,

But I thought the title was worth the price of admission.

And it's called The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.

And the reason that book really resonated with me is because I've spent probably most of my life up until now trying to squeeze in as much as possible,

You know,

To make the most of every moment.

But the danger is,

Is that in doing that,

You go from being focused to being hurried.

And I now actually use hurry as kind of a mental reminder to slow down,

To be more intentional,

You know,

To put a little more focus in what I'm doing instead of trying to,

You know,

Clip three things off my to do list before I leave the house in the morning.

And so this year,

I picked a good year,

By the way,

For the Elimination of Hurry with COVID-19.

I've really worked on not slowing down to the point of lethargy,

But slowing down to the point of purposefulness,

Where what I'm doing,

I'm really focused on.

And again,

It brings us back to,

You know,

Everyday mindfulness.

Mark,

As I was preparing for the interview,

I went to your website,

And I want to invite people to source that because you have an offer on your site right now.

People can get the digital download of the Concise Guide to what leaders think and do in leadership.

And did I get it right?

Think and do?

And it's about doing leadership.

And I think that's part of the call right now is how do we make that intersection of where human beings and human doings and intentional way and that that's certainly a great resource that folks can get from your website.

And it builds into this book,

The Intention Imperative,

Three essential changes that will make you successful today.

Now intention is also a word kind of like mindfulness.

That's a little weird.

What's intention mean to you?

The way this book came about is a few years ago,

I was working with four of my pals,

Joe Calloway,

Randy Pennington,

Larry Winget,

And Scott McCain,

And we called ourselves very originally the four friends.

It really started out as four 30 plus year friends who like to get together and occasionally drink bourbon.

But we did some business together and we were doing an event in Phoenix.

So we had probably 30 or 35 high level clients in the room.

And as we were discussing their challenges and their obstacles and opportunities,

It became clear to me that people really first and foremost in a leadership position struggled with clarity on what it was they were trying to do because we're so easily distracted.

We set out to do this,

But then we chase that.

And so I started to develop this idea that intentionality is a combination of consistent clarity and action.

It's being first crystal clear on what you want to do.

And frankly,

We often aren't,

You know,

We know kind of what we want to do.

You know,

We kind of flail around in the water and splash,

But we don't necessarily,

You know,

Swim,

Right?

And if you have clarity,

But you don't have consistent action,

Then that's abstract,

Right?

I mean,

It's like,

You know,

It's like knowing how to be nice,

But being a jerk.

So I coined this idea of being crystal clear,

And then taking consistent action in the world that is.

Now I'm glad I threw that in there because this book released pre-COVID.

And the world that is,

Is not the world that was.

And the big challenge that many leaders are going to have is getting new clarity.

They may be clear on their big objectives,

And they may still be very clear on their purpose.

But the consistent action they need to take is probably going to be at least a little,

If not a lot different.

And so you've got to re-examine and say,

For instance,

You know,

In our profession,

As speakers,

If I'm not going to stand in front of as many audiences,

And that was primarily how I distributed my expertise,

How can I continue to distribute my expertise and be reimbursed for it?

And that,

Of course,

Opens up things beyond the traditional writing and blogging to things like digital presentations.

As a matter of fact,

I started a small side business with Mark Camacho,

Who you know,

Holly,

And we are trying to help speakers answer the question,

How do we bring a big stage presence to digital streaming so that people don't feel like they're just necessarily staring at a zoom screen and looking at PowerPoint or keynote slides?

So that's the premise.

And that is to be crystal clear on what it is you're trying to accomplish and then taking consistent action that works in the world that is.

That's kind of the setup to the book.

And then the rest of the book talks about three things that your listeners may be wondering,

Are they still relevant post COVID?

And that is the shift from organization to culture,

From customer experience to customer emotion and from motivation to inspiration.

And so the good news is I looked at it very honestly in light of what's happened,

And those three imperatives are still valid.

Nothing has changed about the imperatives.

Again,

Application can change,

But the imperatives are still accurate,

In my opinion.

I was thinking about this a little bit around this concept of emotions.

And you talk about that companies of the future deliver positive emotions for customers,

A positive customer experience different than probably a physical product.

And yet we're kind of living in a world right now where people aren't always able to grasp and put languaging around what they were feeling and what they may be feeling now.

Do you have any tips or thoughts for folks about how they can deliver positive emotions for customers in a world where our emotions are just as overwhelming sometimes as the world is?

Yeah,

I think we should focus on the kind of primary emotions.

I mean,

Emotions can be fleeting,

And if you get cut off in traffic,

You're going to walk into a retail establishment a little bit cranky.

But ultimately,

This establishment still wants to do one thing.

I say the one thing that hasn't changed post-COVID is customers want the same thing they want pre-COVID.

They want to be more successful.

Now what does more successful look like post-COVID?

Give you a great example.

I love to eat out.

We dine out a lot.

Before COVID,

We wanted really good food,

And we wanted good service and a nice ambiance.

Well,

COVID trumped all those things and asked the question,

How do I know I'm not going to get a disease from the handling and transportation of the food?

So the new design,

In the old days,

You focused on the customer's experience in the restaurant,

Which was important.

But what's more important is how do they feel about that experience?

And I was talking to a client who runs a large mall operation,

And I said,

You know,

I think people are,

And this was early on in this process,

I said,

I think people are really reticent to order because they don't know what the food handlers and preparers in the kitchen are doing.

And she said,

Oh,

You know,

I've been in these kitchens in this place that I work in.

It's like a clean room.

I mean,

They're wearing masks and gloves.

And it's amazing.

And I said to her,

I said,

Those restaurants need to post those pictures,

Because you can tell me the food is safe.

But if you show me that the preparation and the transportation is safe,

Then I feel secure.

That's the emotion,

Still want the good food,

I still want good value.

If there's whether it's at a table or a delivery service,

I still want service.

But now one of the primary emotions is security and safety.

So we've got to engineer around how do we make sure people feel secure.

And you know,

We're starting to see how restaurants are coming in terms of that.

Secure around secure,

Isn't it interesting,

Secure used to mean doors,

Doors,

Can I can I get in and I think it's still that but it's also this additional conversation.

Well let me just add one more thing,

Holly,

Because I'm kind of jump around.

I get too much caffeine first thing in the morning.

You know,

Colleges right now,

Boy,

There's the million dollar question.

So you're the and I have a good friend who's a president of a university.

And he's on the leading edge of this.

But High Point University,

Where Dr.

Nito Cobain is president,

They positioned themselves pre COVID as America's premier life skills university.

Now that to me was visionary.

And I'll tell you why.

If your university is based just on classroom instruction,

You can do that digitally.

You can sit behind a computer,

Watch the professor present,

Take your notes,

Take your test.

Those are developed in person.

Life skills are things like interviewing skills and leadership and communication.

So they have a differentiator now that says,

You can get your education online,

But your life skills need to be developed somewhere.

And of course,

They're very cognizant that they need to do it in a safe and secure environment.

But let's say you're just a traditional university.

Half your students aren't coming back,

Even if you make classes available.

Well,

What do you do?

Well the main thing the student's going to miss in their success equation at college is relationship,

Interaction,

People,

Connection.

So you think about a sales organization.

Why do you have a regional salesperson?

Well,

It's because all your customers don't come into Chicago to meet at the corporate headquarters.

You have regional representatives in the field to create that connection with your customers.

And that's one of the solutions I've been recommending to universities.

Develop many communities.

We can still meet safely in small groups.

So maybe you have a coordinator of the XYZ University,

And you have them in each of the major cities where you have students.

So if the student still chooses to work and learn online,

They won't miss out on that component of the connection.

So there's a lot of workarounds.

And I think the good news,

If there is any,

About COVID is it's making us work a little harder and re-examine our assumptions.

Mark,

It goes without saying that someone listening to this show will probably either have been furloughed or currently in a state of furlough or perhaps hopefully coming out of a state of furlough.

And I really appreciate this quote in one of your bios,

Which is,

Nobody can prevent you from choosing to be extraordinary in whatever you do.

And yet some of these folks,

The rug has been pulled out from under them.

The vision of what their life would look like is going to be changing.

Do you have any thoughts,

Advice,

Questions,

Things that people in those situations can maybe ground or root in,

In this idea of,

You know,

Your life might be ordinary now,

But you can still,

No matter what,

Create an extraordinary experience without a title in whatever industry or organization you're in.

Well,

I think that,

You know,

We may be more challenged to do that,

But it's ultimately about taking whatever your circumstances are and making the most of them.

I think a lot of things we thought were important,

At least for me,

I can speak most assuredly from personal experience.

You know,

I've been in,

I've been in at home more days in a row than I have since I was 18 years old,

Because even in high school and college,

I was involved in some activities that had me traveling fairly regularly.

And at first,

You know,

Everybody was saying,

Oh,

You know,

Is my wife Darla,

Is she going to get tired of me,

Kick you out?

You know what I learned?

I kind of like being at home.

And I would not have,

I couldn't possibly have made that discovery without being at home.

You know,

It's kind of like,

If you say to somebody,

You know,

You ought to have kids.

If they don't have kids,

You know,

It means nothing,

Because until you have kids,

You don't understand what that experience is like.

So first,

I think the big mantra,

You know,

Is that different isn't worse.

Difference is different.

Now,

There are some aspects of different that you might not have signed up for,

But there are other aspects of difference that are actually pretty cool.

So I think you've got to become a little bit reflective and say,

You know,

What are the underlying values?

If everyone says connection is a value,

I've been just as connected,

Actually,

I've been more connected with my close friends,

Not in physical space,

But online than I was before COVID,

Because now I have a group of the same guys I mentioned earlier,

The five friends,

The bourbonaires,

We meet via zoom every afternoon on Friday for a bourbonaires happy hour to catch up and bring some bourbon and have some fun.

So even though,

You know,

We would get together a couple times a year,

Go to a city and have a big weekend,

We've actually spent more time connecting digitally.

So it makes you it forces you to say,

All right,

These are the cards,

Right?

You know,

And how can I play them in such a way that I can reconstruct things that are meaningful,

Fun and enjoyable for me,

And it takes work and I'm not going to downplay the pain,

Especially if you're unemployed.

Holy smokes,

You know,

Next to your health,

Your ability to pay the rent mortgage and put food on the table is very stressful if you can't do it.

But once you kind of deal with those big problems,

Then it's about getting creative and saying,

Okay,

I got a chance to try it again,

Start over in my business,

My social life,

My personal life,

And then accept the challenge of reinventing yourself,

Which is actually funny because it's the fourth principle of Fred factor,

You got to reinvent yourself every day,

Or at least regularly.

As we were prepping for the show,

We were talking about,

You know,

Your books,

You've got nine of them,

They,

You know,

Span more than 15 years.

Are all these concepts evergreen?

Some of them just take a little bit of massaging,

But that's just such a great example,

Again,

Of the principle of re-renewal,

Reinventing yourself every day becomes every week,

Every month.

This just happens to accelerate that for some folks who maybe were on that hamster wheel of experience.

But you have a tool on your website that I want to invite people to check out as well to this point of its daily,

Incremental,

Mindful experiences,

Mindful prayer,

Mindful visioning.

You call it the Extraordinary Living Journal.

Tell us a little bit about that so that if people are interested in looking at this,

How they can reinvent themselves every day,

They could get this tool and start even right now.

I designed my own journal.

I,

Over the years,

Have tried a lot of different systems and journals,

And there are a lot of good ones out there.

But I wanted one that was more congruent with my own work so that clients that liked what I did would have a place where they could apply it more readily.

And so I kind of combined,

I hope,

My best thinking into this two pages a day journal.

And by the way,

It's good timing because right now it's a BOGO,

Buy one,

Get one.

And it's a way to kind of combine journaling,

Goal setting,

Getting behind goals to examine your motives and your purposes.

It focuses on what are the important relationships in your life.

And the good news is you can spend as much or as little time as you want.

But I use it both to recount the good things that happened the day before,

Because I'm a big believer in what many have talked about,

Three good things.

No matter how bad the day was,

Find three good things that happened and reflect on them and you'll find out things weren't as bad as you thought.

And then I use it as a way to kind of plan my day.

So yes,

It's called the Extraordinary Living Journal and you can buy two for the price of one,

Which sounds like shameless promotion and perhaps it is.

But I think it's a great tool for people who like to journal and like to plan and who are mindful.

Mark,

It's not a shameless promotion when the interviewer asks you about it.

And you didn't ask me to ask you.

For the listeners,

That's just such a great resource right now.

We're kind of at the midpoint of the year that I saw a few people posting that they were literally going to shred their 2020 calendars because there was nothing on it now anyway.

So if that's you and you are in this place of rebooting your career or coming off of a furlough or into a new experience,

This is that time to reconstruct yourself.

And it doesn't have to be,

I think sometimes people think,

Oh my gosh,

I've got to spend weeks on it and months on it.

But it is those two to three minutes every single day connecting to that good within you,

That God within you,

The work that you're doing and then bringing that out.

We're all ordinary and we're all extraordinary and we all have gifts to share with the world.

Mark,

You have traveled the world.

Travel in the world now might be a little differently enabled for a couple of years.

And I think part of the ability to respond right now is people like us that get to see the world is bring those experiences of other countries back to the US so that we can share them for others who may not be able to jump on that plane to South Africa or China.

What's some surprise lesson or something you've learned from a more outside North America perspective that you could give back for those folks right now who maybe dreamed of traveling but won't be able to do it right away?

Well,

There's two things that have stuck with me going back 40 years ago when I started traveling internationally.

And the first is many places I travel know a great deal about where they live and a great deal about where they don't live,

Meaning about the United States,

Other countries,

Kind of the world at large.

And at the time,

And I think we've gotten better because of technology,

But at the time when I first started to travel,

I was amazed at how little I really knew about people that I occupy the planet with.

So I think now having a good perspective of how the world works,

What countries are involved in what relationships and strategies both geopolitically and economically and otherwise.

The other thing that's interesting is,

And I just had a conversation with someone from Eastern Europe recently,

And I said to him,

I said,

How was your experience of COVID-19 been?

And when he finished,

It could have been almost verbatim what I said about my experience.

And that just reminds you that despite the changes in location and nationality and upbringing,

That deep down inside,

We have very similar experiences of life.

And if we ever thought about that deeply,

It would help us be,

I think,

More accepting of others and would help others accept us more.

I think that there's a kind of a human condition regardless of where you live in the world.

We want to be healthy.

We want our families to be safe.

We want our kids to have opportunity.

And the good news is,

Is now we don't have to figure out how to do that just in a singular location that we have the expertise of the world to draw upon.

Mark,

Thank you so much for your yes to coming on the show and sharing your 40 years of experience traveling,

Speaking,

Nine books.

I want to make sure to also point out to the readers that in this time,

One of the piece of advice Mark gives us is that idea of the intention imperative,

Three essential changes that will make you a leader,

A successful leader today.

And one thing that I love about you,

Mark,

Is you never stop writing and you never stop sharing.

So I want to make sure people know,

Go to marksandborn.

Com and subscribe to the blog.

He's not missed a week.

Every week in May,

Every week in June.

This week,

Our future is leader's most important list.

I didn't talk about that on purpose because I want to invite people to go read that blog and utilize those principles,

Creating the extraordinary life that they've always dreamed possible in this time of powerful transformation.

Mark,

What's the best way for people to get to you and certainly as they're re-emerging,

Bring you to their companies.

Marksandborn.

Com is the easiest way to find me and it also connects anyone that's interested to both about 70 little short videos that are absolutely free as well as any of my social media posts.

So just that you can remember,

Marksandborn.

Com.

And we're going to make sure to get that in the show notes as well.

Mark,

Any last minute tips before we let you get back about your day?

No,

As many challenges as we faced,

And this is an upcoming blog,

We've been pretty problem focused.

We need to spend as much time focusing on our opportunities.

They're still out there.

They might be a little harder to find,

But they still exist.

Awesome.

Thank you,

Mark.

Remember mindful matters and so do you.

Thank you for joining us for today's show.

For more mindfulness every day,

Visit everydaymindfulnessshow.

Com and download the three day challenge and experience the ABCs of mindfulness.