PR Treu | Team Building Game

 

Even if you strongly desire to pivot into a new direction in your life, it’s often very difficult to do. This is especially the case when you’ve put so much time and effort into one thing. Just letting go and changing directions is not easy. Jason Treu is someone who knows this to be true. Realizing law school was not for him midway through his third year, Jason had an epiphany that led him to take a huge leap of faith and start building something that was more for him. Now, Jason is an executive coach, a bestselling author and the host of Executive Breakthrough Podcast. In this episode, Jason joins Adam Markel to talk about some of the pivots he made in his life and the lessons he learned. He also shares the breakthrough team-building game he launched called Cards Against Mundanity, which can fast track the building of trust, communication and openness within your team.

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Cards Against Mundanity: A Team Building Game To Create Extraordinary Teams Fast With Jason Treu

I am feeling blessed and thankful. I hope wherever you are, you are feeling thankful and that it doesn’t take a holiday to bring you to that realization that there are so many things that we can be flat-out grateful for. Even the things that are tough, there’s something that we can appreciate. Even if in the moment we can’t fully appreciate the value, there’s that old expression about everything happening for a reason. On some level, people say that but don’t always believe it. I tend to push back on that statement myself. It’s more that there’s value in everything that happens to us and we don’t always see it. Over time, we find that those things have helped us to serve in some way, in a way that maybe even we didn’t expect we could serve as a result of that thing, whatever that thing might’ve been. It can be divorced. It can be some other form of dissolution of a business or some other trauma that’s happened in our lives, disappointment, failure relationship or health or business or any of those things. The gentleman that I have the honor to interview on the show is no stranger to that.

We’re going to dive into some of his pivot tales from the crypt. His name is Jason Treu. He’s an executive coach who works with executives, managers and their teams to maximize their leadership potential and performance, build and execute their career blueprint. Something that we also think is very valuable to have a blueprint for your career and other areas of your life. Not everybody does. He’s the bestselling author of Social Wealth: How to Guide on Building Extraordinary Business Relationships. He was a featured speaker at the TEDx Wilmington event in 2017 where he debuted his breakthrough team-building game cards against mundanity. Finally, he is the host of Executive Breakthroughs Podcast, which brings game-changing CEOs, entrepreneurs and experts that share their breakthroughs and their breakdowns. Jason Treu, welcome to the show.

Thanks for me on the show and speaking to your fantastic tribe.

Jason, it’s a great bio. Our audience is pretty familiar with me asking this follow-up question. What’s not written in the bio there that you would love for people to know about you?

I got married on Halloween. That’s part of it. I have two stepdaughters, 13 and 16, and we got two dogs. We got one adopted. One we got as a puppy. I live in Dallas. I’m a Dallas Cowboys fan.

The person that you married, she had two kids from a prior marriage, I’m assuming?

Yes.

How about yourself?

None that I’m aware of.

I didn’t expect to ask you this, but was it a part of your plan to become a daddy? Did you want to eventually be a father?

You don’t think you ever set off to meet someone else and saying, “They have kids.” I would say the most important thing is the person. All the other things that go with it usually add more value than you ever thought to begin with when you’re on the search to begin to list in your head. That’s what happened. It’s a blessing. It’s not one that I had anticipated, but it’s one that’s been helpful and grateful for. It definitely makes my life significantly better than it would have on the other side of it and not having it happen.

I didn’t expect this would be the case, but that’s a great example and a lead into what we were going to talk about, which is the pivots in life because it may not have been expected, but it’s been a joy. It’s been a blessing to use your words. Maybe take us back to a prior time in your life and either the career side of the relationship side where there was a significant pivot. Something maybe that went wrong or whatever that inflection point looked like at the time where you weren’t clear that it was going to work out or clear that there would be some “silver lining” or blessing. Ultimately, there is something that comes out of it that you find beneficial to you. Take us back to any point in the past.

There’s always a lot of them. I would say probably one of the earliest ones as I went to law school and I was getting a Master’s in Communication at Syracuse. I had decided probably midway through my third year in law school. I didn’t want to do this and practice law. I talked to people that had been interviewing. I’m an extrovert. I made a lot of friends and they were like, “We’ll ask a softball question at the end.” At that point in my life, it’s a naive question but I thought an easy question to ask people was are you happy? I didn’t realize as I was asking these questions, especially during my second-year interviewing after probably 30 some people, that it was the hardest question I asked all of them to answer.

It was the longest for me to get the words out of my mouth and to answer back without feeling nervous and their eyes darting around or giving me an answer that sounds canned. When you get enough data points in your head that makes all the connections and you think to yourself, “What makes me think I can do something that they’re having a significant problem doing themselves? We’re all super talented individuals across the board doing something in law that I would want to do.” That led me to think that maybe there’s some alternative path that I could do. As you’re doing something like that, everyone around you thinks you’re crazy and tells you you’re crazy.

Logical reason doesn't take in a lot of the things that we do in our daily life. Share on X

You’d been going to school and putting yourself through proverbial hell to get there and to go out to Silicon Valley and to do something that’s pretty far away from where I’m at, I have to look for a job and do all that stuff that far is hard. It’s not like it is now. That was probably a huge leap of faith to have to go out there and do that, to start to build something through my own lens and not what other people would think that I should be doing or probably some of the opportunity was to swear my face. This was definitely outside the lines. Failure is probably pretty high. There were a lot of unknowns. I didn’t know anyone. I knew one person there.

You had me thinking about something too that I want to interject here. I saw this movie that was out called Avengers: End Game. Anybody that was a Marvel fan saw it when it first came out. I was a little late to the party on seeing this particular movie. What a great movie, and there is a part in it where there’s a conversation with the character, Thor and he’s getting advice from his mother. She’s deceased. It’s a moment where he’s going back in time and able to talk to her. She says to him something to the effect of it’s difficult to live into what other people think you should do. That’s almost an impossible task. The goal as far as she was concerned, giving advice to her son was to be who you’re meant to be.

To spend your time being who you are, that’s very different than trying to be something that you should be. The should be’s can be everything from you’re following in the footsteps of a father, mother, brother, sister, whoever it is. There are reasons. You and I are simpatico in some respects. You went to law school in your third year, which is late in the game for people that don’t know what we’re talking about here. You’ve gone to do your undergraduate degree and I don’t know whether you had student loans or not or whatever. You’ve got through four years. You get out. You take the LSAT, the law school admission test, and that’s not an easy exam.

It’s probably as difficult or more difficult than the SAT. You’d score well enough to get into a law school. You go through getting into law school and surviving the first year, in which the attrition rate for one L’s is very high. People that don’t make it through the first year because it’s brutal. The workload is brutal. The professors are brutal, the Socratic method is unusual and this tremendous competition within the class. You make it through year one. You make it through year two. You’re in your third year. Maybe you’re in your second year, you’re interviewing for your internship jobs, places where you get invited to be an intern at a law firm. In the Q and A where they’re interviewing you, they’re going to want you at their firm. You’re interviewing them to figure out which firm you might say yes to. You’re asking them a question at the end, which is, “Are you happy?” Did I get that right?

Yes.

It’s incredibly unusual. What’s great is at the time, it might’ve sounded like a pretty trite simple question to ask. I was a lawyer for eighteen years. I was following that path frankly because the idea of it had gotten into my head through a conversation I had with an older gentleman who was a nice man. I was a lifeguard at a local pool. He was very successful. He was a lawyer. My brother was thinking about going to law school. I had no direction at that point. I was a school teacher. I knew I wasn’t going to stay in that and I go to law school. I do the same thing as you. I get through first year, second year. We have two kids in law school, that was going on. I got through third year. Forget an internship, I had no offer for a job. I just said, “I’ll go out on my own and did that for eighteen years. Midway through eight, nine years in, I know in my heart this is not what I’m meant to be doing for the rest of my life. It’s not my calling. I feel like I’m selling out for the money. You asked this question and what you find for people as they’re answering it, honestly, and what they’re telling you is this is not a profession for happiness.

They didn’t find fulfillment or they weren’t happy or they never had taken the time to think about it. There’s a lot of different things that it could be, but the end result is still the end result that you ask a simple question. I couldn’t answer it in a succinct way that was believable. It was almost as if no one had ever asked them that question before.

PR Treu | Team Building Game

Team Building Game: Teamwork and building great relationships inside and outside of an organization are something that people talk about but are never told how to do.

 

Even whether it mattered?

That’s the other part of it. To me, that was shocking because you’re dealing with super high caliber individuals who are smart and think through every possible scenario because that’s what you have to do in every single legal case. Logical reason doesn’t take in a lot of the things that we do in our daily life. That’s the reason why that question caught them off guard. It seemed like every person that I asked in some respect or another. It was a huge wake-up call at the time. I didn’t fully understand what that all meant. All I knew was that in life, I’ve learned to that date looking at things. It’s like Michael Jordan. The commentator says, “Who’s going to be the next Michael Jordan?”

The answer always is there won’t be one or maybe there will be one, but it’s overrated. It’s a stretch to think that any individual will do that until they’ve done that. My head was like, “Why do I think that I can do something?” All of these people couldn’t do it this time. The chances are extremely slim that I would be able to figure out what they don’t because I don’t even know what it is and I’m not down their path. I don’t have that experience. There was no way for me to be able to figure that out unless I do it and go down to carve out that niche. That’s not to say that there are the lawyers that are happy and they’re doing things. I know that there are, but the things I wanted to do, it seemed very slim.

You were applying logic and reason in that moment. You’re thinking critically about how it is you’re going to spend so much more of your time. It’s interesting too because so many people are in jobs or in a business. There’s a lot of entrepreneurs in this community as well as people who are in some form of career, mid-career thing, more in a traditional corporate job. Even with business owners and entrepreneurs, many people that I meet, they’ve got so much time, years, tons and tons of hours into something. It’s like they adopt the sunk cost mentality, which is something we address in the book I wrote, Pivot. It’s all about how it is that we sometimes will continue to do certain things because we believe you’ve got so much time invested in it that it would be such a tremendous waste to stop or change direction or pivot. You did. Here you are going into your third year or maybe it was after your third year, did you graduate from school? Did you leave school? What happened?

I graduated. I got my Master’s in Communications. I was doing this simultaneously, but at that point, there was no reason not to finish. That seemed like even a bigger way because there’s something about finishing things out. It also buys me time to try to figure out what is it what I do next because I didn’t have Plan B. I had never thought about Plan B. The problem with education is they spend so little on what do you do afterwards and preparing you. There are one or two people that sit in the career office and with hundreds of students, there’s no way they could possibly help you other than you going up there and figuring out the right questions to ask and driving them.

Those are advanced things to understand how to do, how to manage and how do you think through a non-legal career. There’s a lot more out there. The bar association has things, but there weren’t. Everyone around you is telling you that you’re crazy for doing this and you don’t have any other validation points to go fight through that. When people keep telling you that and you have doubts yourself. It’s a way different place to come from than feeling like, “I have someone who I’ve seen do this. I have so model to look through this. I didn’t have anything.” All I had was that what path ahead wouldn’t work. That’s not enough every day to keep when people keep saying these things and the doubts are laid and you don’t know what’s going on.

I didn’t find that out until I was working with other lawyers. That’s when I found it out was that my colleagues, the people that I was both working with inside the office I had as well as the people that I was working with collaboratively or even adversarially in opposition to one another in a case. I found that there were a lot of miserable people in that profession. It’s interesting because the part here that might be important for people is that if you are in fact in pivot or you’re contemplating it. Meaning you’re thinking about transitioning out of something and into something else. I feel like Jason has given us a wonderful lesson. It’s something that we language differently.

The problem with education is they spend so little on what you do afterwards and preparing you for it. Share on X

The idea of interviewing or meet with other people who are doing what you think you want to be doing and asking them, among other questions that you’d ask, why not end with that question? What a great question to end with, which is are you happy? Gauge their response. If you got ten people to sit down with and talk to you about the business they’re in or the job they’re in, through your normal course of interviewing them and getting feedback, you ask them at the end that question, “Are you happy?” Are they searching for an answer or are they fidgeting in their seat? Their eyes are darting around. You can tell pretty quickly whether or not that question caught them off guard.

That’s the blessing of asking behavioral-based questions. People normally aren’t asked them and especially if you ask them other questions, you can see the deviation in those confident answers about stuff. If you ask someone to stay on a question about what’s your strengths or what are your weaknesses, these are easy questions because people have thought through those. If you ask a question like, “When is the last time you’ve had a conflict with another team member or a team itself? Tell me about how you handled that, dealt with that and moved past that with those people.” They’d probably never been asked that question.

If they don’t have a truthful answer, they’re nervous or darting around, you know there’s a lot under the surface that they’re not telling you. They’re good at interviewing and they practice certain things but the other question. When you ask a question like that, you can tell because you can size the person up based on the information, data and experiences that they’ve shared with you to that point comparatively the ones that are behavioral-based, it give us a clue into the culture, the people, the values, what their purpose is, all the rest of those things, which end of the day are the critical aspects which are going to give you the most fulfillment out of your job and the most success.

It might not be a big change that we’re talking about here, but the Cards Against Mundanity, I want you to share what those are, what that is. I want to talk to you about your TEDx Wilmington experience. I feel called to find out a little more about that as well.

One of the things that I found with people is that teamwork and building great relationships inside and outside of an organization are something that people talk about, but they’re never told how to do it. They never put in place the right foundation or to build these relationships moving forward. That’s the problem. People talk about culture or people talk about how do you build trust with people, but they don’t get into the details of how do you get under the weeds with people. I started to do research for my TED Talk. I wanted to find a tool and something that I could do to go in that would help people accelerate trust and essentially skyrocket as fast as possible and get people to know each other and to understand what moves the needle in creating a great extraordinary team. What do they need to do?

As I was looking through some research, I found some research by Professor Arthur Aron and I was looking through the New York Times. I was reading this article about a woman falling in love. She went to a bar and asked her potential and then actual husband 36 questions. I was like, “That’s crazy.” I can’t believe it. I thought maybe it’s clickbait, but it was a study he did. What he did was he took grad students that were complete strangers, had them ask questions over 45 minutes and 30% of the people created the closest relationships in their lives. I thought that’s pretty amazing. How would that be possible? I wanted to test it out and eventually that’s what led to the game. Instead of doing it in individuals, I wanted to do it in groups. I wanted to test out the theory. If I could put teams together, how quickly could I build trust, teamwork and better communication and do something that could be done in minutes instead of probably five, ten, fifteen or twenty years or never in most instances?

What my theory was that when we vulnerably share our personal and professional experiences with other people in our group, we fast track trust, better communication, openness and everything that you’d want to build in an extremely high performing, fulfilled, committed team of people. That’s what is played out to be because more than 25,000 people that I know of and it’s more than that. I’ve done and played the game so far and people love to do it. When I do it in speaking, you’ll see people share almost anything and everything. The magic with doing it in this group is that compared to one-on-one, all you have to do is have one to two people that you can see yourself in.

PR Treu | Team Building Game

Team Building Game: When we share our personal and professional experiences with other people in our group, we fast track trust, better communication, openness, and everything you’d want to build in a high performing and committed team of people.

 

If you ask a question like, “What’s the most important lesson you learned in the past?” If light bulbs go in your head and everyone’s answering the same question, a couple of people, you feel close to that group of people. If you get through five or six of these very vulnerable questions, you’re talking about things that no one in your life knows at all. After doing this and speaking in front of tens of thousands of people, I always ask the question, “How many people have a coworker that could answer five or six of these questions and know your answers to it?” I’ll rarely get a hand raised. I’ll ask people, “Do have anyone in your life like that?” I still will barely get any hands raised.

Share with us what the rules of the game are and maybe some of our people where they are can go home or go into the office and get a couple of people around the break room table at lunch or something and have this experience. It involves some questions.

Essentially, everyone answers the same question and you give them maybe one to two minutes. Usually, a few times people will go longer than the answer to the question. You keep going around. I tell people the magic amount is probably 6 to 8 questions. You can do it with one person, but your mileage can vary depending on how you connect with it. The more powerful thing as you do this in with three, four, five, six, probably up to ten or twelve people in a group and you’d ask them questions such as, “What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned in the past? If you had one person to thank for helping you become the person that you are, who was that person and what did they do? What’s your biggest blessing in disguise? What was it? What impact does it have?”

When you start going through a bunch of those questions, you can do fun ones like if you were a superhero, what would you want your superpower to be and why? You can go in a multitude of directions, but what that does is it gives people a significant insight into you and to everyone around you to understand your experiences, your histories, your heartbreaks, your breakdowns, pet peeves, all these other things. People end up telegraphing a lot to you that you can use when you’re working with them. It also opens a window to communicate better and have difficult hard conversations with them, which is where almost all the conflicts start are with people avoiding simple conversations that spiral into other things.

This is a trust-building, rapport building, transparency type exercise because you’re willing to be vulnerable or not. In either instance especially with a group, you’ll see it.

The thing about doing it in a group too is you have a lot of protection in the sense that if all these people hear an answer and you share it with other people, the group itself will ostracize you. I’ve gone back and all the people that have done it and I never heard anyone doing it. I’m sure that it would happen. One-on-one you don’t have that code because you have to say that. Even sometimes some people might share something with someone else when you’re doing it in a group. All these people heard all those answers that you’re getting and everyone else. There’s an implicit thing to keep it private and not to go and share and gossip about it. It looked like you’re betraying all the people, not just one person.

You debuted this game on your TEDx. One of the things that we talk about on this show is the stories that people share, the messages and the ideas that people want to share as part of their pivots in life. One of the great platforms for sharing those messages and those ideas is TED. The road to TEDx is something it’s pretty cool. It’s sometimes difficult for a lot of people or can’t be and sometimes it comes fairly easily. Share with me a little bit with our audience about what was the road to TED like for you? What was that experience like and what did you get out of it?

Start to build something through your own lens and not what other people think that you should be doing. Share on X

When I did it, I thought about it in a couple of ways. One that it’d be great branding experience for the business, but on top of that, I wanted it as something that I could use coming out of it. That required me to do more of the how-to speech because the problem in a lot of TEDx speeches and TED speeches is they are very high level, but they’re not practical. I wanted to give people some applications that they could leave and do something with. Also, it would give me something to do. By the time I finished it, I would have something to take out, execute and conduct rather than having to build it out. I had thought that through. I also thought through that I wanted to find a TEDx that had good videography.

I spent a lot of time trying to understand how many cameras the place had, all the rest of the logistics and dynamics. There are different levels of the TEDx, depending on the location and the place, the harder or easier to get in. I spent a lot of time researching and figuring out how to conduct this other than practicing and finding someone to help me with it. It was a considerable amount of time going through this whole process. I have thought this out before I had even started down the road what I need to do for the requirements for success and make this a worthwhile thing to do rather than just figuring it out as I was going down the road.

There are over 3,000 TEDx events around the world in a given year. It’s pretty competitive. You get a lot of people that we work with helping them to construct their talks and often even the process of getting on a stage. It’s important for people to know this. We had a client that had applied more than 50 times and landed her talk at the 55th or 56th application. Two weeks later, she got a second yes, which isn’t unusual. Jason, how many applications did you make before you got a yes?

I sent out about twenty almost all at once. I looked through them and did a spreadsheet. I picked a window of time that they would be in. I would get acceptances in some window of time and it makes sense. That helped me in the process, but I had to take a pretty wide net because I had no idea what I would get into and what would work and what didn’t. A lot of these places, by the time you apply, take many months to find out. I had done a lot of research as much as I could on a lot of these different events and length in my head and kept going in it. I ended up getting into a few of them. I had to make some decisions based on what I wanted to do.

Some of them I hadn’t heard back from yet because they had not gone through the finalization of their application process because I had to take them in a window of time. I looked at opportunities that would start. I could speak from July until December. There were ones I had to make decisions on before I would get back to other people. Some of the people I contacted and said, “I’m worrying in your process, I have to make a decision.” That stuff I wanted to get in there and go forward from there.

You developed the game Cards Against Mundanity. That was developed as a way to test the game or introduce the game during the TED. Is that your plan?

I wanted to help people build great relationships with people and understand how to do that because I don’t think a lot of people know how to go about fundamentally building great teams and teamwork. For me, it was a way to help them and the game is a tool. It gets you into looking at what does an extraordinary team of high performers who’ve accomplished a lot look like, feel like, smell like, emotionally-connected, belonging, all those words that people use. When you do this, you’re in that moment because when you can get the evidence that you can do it and you could be there, it’s much easier to get people to buy into doing all the necessary things. This is not the whole step. It is one of them. It’s a one that’s overlooked because without having a strong foundation of high level of trust, the rest of it falls down. It’s like building a house on sand.

PR Treu | Team Building Game

Social Wealth: How to Build Extraordinary Relationships By Transforming the Way We Live, Love, Lead and Network

Most people skip over that because they assume, “We’ll figure that out down the road.” It’s like conflict resolution. What’s the problem? The problem is we have a trust problem first. If I don’t trust you, I’m not going to do anything else. Even in my conflict resolution things, the one thing that I tested early on that I was fortunate I did was to work on the trust problem, not the problem that they brought to me because I couldn’t even get to that point. That’s what most people do to conflict resolution. They go and ask people, interview them and try to find out all the things and they put everyone in a group. It takes so long to do step one.

I’m like, “No.” The only step is getting people together and stemming the distrust and opening a window where people reconsider trusting the people around them and saying to them, “Maybe there’s another version of this. Maybe I don’t have it right. Maybe I need to take a pause. Maybe I’m partly accountable and responsible for all the things that have been going on.” You open a window and you can do the other work. It doesn’t work the other way around, or it does but it’s super slow. It fails a lot because a lot of the times I’m brought in for conflict resolution because it’s not something that’s front and center on my business.

I’m not the first choice. I’m usually the second person brought in to solve the problem because the first problem, which is a larger company failed and they’re nowhere where they need to go. This has been a hard lesson for me to learn because I’ve had to go through this and do a lot of thinking on it. I wanted to share people how do you do on a data-driven way and how people think through this stuff rather than I’ll think a lot of the false narratives and stories people have made up about how to build great teams and what’s required of you to do that.

Social Wealth, the book, is that something that’s available on Amazon?

Yes.

Go to JasonTreu.com. You can get more information about the work he’s doing, working with teams and leadership or segments of organizations, managers, leaders and executives. This is fascinating stuff and I highly recommend people go out as well and watch the TEDx Talk. It’s TEDx Wilmington 2017. Do you remember what the name of the talk was? What’s the title?

It’s How To Get Coworkers To Like Each Other.

Without having a strong foundation and a high level of trust, the rest of the team falls down. Share on X

Jason, I always ask our guests about their personal rituals. I believe in the power of rituals, the many ways the quality of our lives are equal to the power to the quality of the rituals we create. That’s why they are so powerful. What’s one ritual that you have as part of your daily routine?

Every day I say three things I’m grateful for. When I wake up and it’s something that can take you ten seconds, maybe five. It’s important because it’s easy to look at the lack. There are a lot of times, even when I say those things, if you’re doing things, it’s hard to see it. As a practice that you begin to see how many things you have rather than the things that you don’t have, which is easy in the world we live in to do. It’s something simple that I like to do. I’ve run and I picked up running and running with people. It’s great to get out in nature because I try to listen without music most of the time so I can get rid of some of the noise and clutter that’s going around. Things like that I enjoy doing.

I will often read sometimes or listen to podcasts. Other things like that can put me in a better state as I’m going through my day than just getting up and going into work mode. I find those days are usually the harder ones I have to power through. Sometimes you have to do that. You don’t have the time if you have to get up super early in the morning and go and do something. Having rituals that work for you and get you into a state that’s helpful for you is important to figure out and to figure out what those triggers are. If you’re in a place that’s not great, what can you do proactively to help yourself within fifteen or thirty seconds? That can be like a rubber band snapping your wrist and hitting you, shaking you out of it. I would encourage people to find something they can do super quick that they can do in their own head or out loud or something that doesn’t require technology on a piece because you may not have that all the time or may not work.

We talk a lot about resilience. Most of this resilience keynote speaking I do to organizations is on the topic of resilience. Often, they are incremental changes that we have to make or that we can choose to make and be as little ten seconds. It’s funny enough because the TED Talk that I gave was called Doing This for Ten Seconds Can Change Your Life. I’m happy to know somebody talking about how even that simple ten-second timeframe where you adjust something. Sometimes it’s a physical adjustment and sometimes it’s a mental or an emotional adjustment. Sometimes it’s more than that in the nature of something even spiritual. It does create this ability to balance back and creates this resilience, this flexibility or this agility to deal with the pivots in life.

Jason, I’ve enjoyed having you on the show. As I always do at the end of the show, I remind everybody and myself of the waking ritual that I’ve used for more than ten years. It is a ten-second practice. First and foremost, to wake up. Jason, you woke up. I woke up. When we went to bed, that wasn’t a guarantee. There was no written contract that we were going to get to wake up. That ten seconds in the morning for me usually looks like the recognition that I’ve woken up. That’s step one. I recognize I am awake physically and mentally. I immediately recognize that there’s something to be grateful for. I don’t have to search far and wide for it because I know that when I’m taking that first waking breath of the day that there are people in that same moment who are taking their last breath of life.

That makes that moment special. It doesn’t mean the sun is going to shine all day. It doesn’t mean everything is going to go my way. It could be quite the contrary, but in that moment, I do realize there’s something very special and even sacred about that moment. I declare something out loud because you can do a lot in ten seconds. You can shift many things. One of the fastest ways to shift ourselves physiologically, mentally and emotionally is to say something out loud, to hear our own words out loud. The four words that I use to begin the day are “I love my life.” Jason, I asked you that question. Do you love your life?

I love my life.

You asked those lawyers way back when you said you’re happy and they were bouncing all over the place to try and figure out how to answer that question. Can you imagine if you’d said to them, “Do you love your life?”

They may have jumped out the window literally or figuratively. I do think that probably would have startled them. That question seemed like for many of them, no one had ever asked them, which is like we talked about, it’s crazy. I agree with you. Saying it out loud when you can is more helpful than keeping it in your head for any of these things. Sometimes you don’t have that option. If you can, it’s definitely preferential to do it even if you can’t say it loud.

Thank you so much for being a guest in the show. I’d love to get your comments and feedback. You can follow us, subscribe to the show. I love that. I love to get your feedback. You can join us on our Facebook page. StartMyPivot.com and get to the front door of that page as well. Either way, I appreciate your time. I feel very grateful that you’re a part of this community. Thanks.

 

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About Jason Treu

PR Treu | Team Building GameJason Treu is a Chief People Officer and leadership and teamwork expert. He helps leaders, managers and HR professionals build unstoppable cultures and teams with unbreakable connections, extreme scrappiness and the courage to tackle seemingly impossible goals. He provides coaching, workshops, keynote speaking, conflict resolution, and other training services.

He spent 15+ years in leadership positions working with industry-changers such as Steve Jobs, Reed Hastings (Netflix CEO), and Mark Cuban.

He’s the best-selling author of Social Wealth, that’s sold more than 60,000 copies. His 2017 TEDxWilmington talk was on “How to Get CoWorkers to Like Each Other.”

More than 25,000 managers and employees are using his culture and team building game Cards Against Mundanity to increase trust, communication, and teamwork. It’s being used at Amazon, Southwest Airlines, Ernst & Young, Google, Gillette, Microsoft, Oracle, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Worldwide Express, CareHere, Oklahoma City Thunder (NBA team), Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Novartis, Merck, Intel, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and many others.