0:01 okay good afternoon and welcome to the way to wow show i am your host kevin bemel and i'm broadcasting from beautiful los angeles california evidently at this moment we are the only place in the country that has under triple digit uh temperatures uh well i should say southern california indeed because my guest is is uh down in san diego um before we uh we we talked to greg though
0:38 um i wanted to uh actually you know you know what i didn't have a guest last week i was i was off last week so there's there's no one to remind you to go look at because there was no episode next week last week so let's go right into um talking to to greg um greg is a pretty new friend of mine um he is the founder of the center for respectful leadership and um when we met the first time um greg told
1:13 me quite a fascinating story of his journey to to where he is today and uh as soon as we got to that meeting i you know virtually grabbed him and said you know this this story is is incredibly inspiring um and i i think um a lot of people will um really benefit from from hearing um about greg's journey so so greg thank you so much for coming on the way you out people making money it is such a pleasure to be here thank you very much
1:49 for inviting me so you know typically i i ask my guests to start as far back in their journey as they're willing to go um you know maybe we don't have to start with you know the day you were born but um you know when you were you know a young guy growing up and and we were we were joking before the show started on long island when you're out on the island um what were your thoughts about what you wanted to do when you grew up
2:24 well it's a very powerful question because i like many young people didn't necessarily think very much about how my behavior was impacting other people and i was arrogant i was thought i was the best thing since sliced bread and i had a mouth on me in other words i was very good verbally whereas i was not that kind of
3:00 physical person who was intimidating but boy i knew how to use my words really well and i didn't hesitate and it was only until i started to interact in a situation which i never expected to be in did i realize how much the way i treated other people really does make a difference on how i'm going to be treated you see i was working in theater in new york city and i was a starving artist like many
3:37 other people and i wasn't treated very respectfully in the when i was auditioning or even working you know theater people we we have issues and i i fell into a job where i got approached by the head of a training program with the new york city police department who said greg i know you work in theater i know you're a professional we have a crazy idea that we could use actors to train police officers on how to
4:13 interact with members of the public who are what we call edps emotionally disturbed persons because traditionally what we've done is hit them over the head throw the cuffs on them and take them down to bellevue hospital and be done with them but that's not really the kind of outcome that we at the police department want when we are dealing with people who are schizophrenic or off their medications or are upset suicidal etc etc so me being young arrogant and brash i said sure i can do that and we put together a team of professional actors and we created these
4:50 scenarios based on actual things that had happened with police officers and we recreated them uh on site in various locations throughout new york city to train cops on how to deal with people like this and the program was enormously successful at first everybody thought oh this is going to be airy fairy and it's not going to be very effective oh my god well we hired really really good actors and it was far more effective than anybody thought it would be and we had
5:26 cops crying in the classroom because our actors were so good now and this was the first time that i saw my my talents and skills as a theater artist uh used in a way to make a profound difference in people's lives uh in in outside of a theater and and the other thing that smacked me right between the eyes is as i was growing up and and i think this is what you were alluding to i didn't have respect for police
6:01 officers i had no respect for police officers and the few times of the run-ins i had with them i was i behaved terribly and what i realized that police officers are treated disrespectfully every single day and i get that now that's not to say that they don't behave badly they do too they they're human beings they behave very badly in many many instances but at the end of the day i realized as a young man how important respect was in any relationship for it to be
6:37 effective as a relationship and that for me was the beginning of my career exploring and trying to understand and teach about the importance of respect and something we call respectful leadership so i'm gonna i'm gonna take a step back before we move on and and talking about your theater days so i i was not a professional in theater i did a lot of high school theater um but i'm a you know big fan of um especially musical theater so
7:12 there's a certain language i think that gets used so for example oftentimes an audition is called a cattle call or maybe that's just a hollywood thing and and the good point yes kids in the chorus are literally called the kids in the course even though they're adults so yes would you talk a little bit about how the environment of theater impacted you as a young man and and did it you know from the standpoint did it support what you later identified as being
7:47 um a um um let's say uh um a way that wasn't serving you in your behavior you know what i'm saying yes i do that's a wow what a great question so the the short answer is the theater like every other community has a pecking order has a hierarchy uh it was up until very recently and even still is male dominated uh to a certain degree now now what's interesting
8:23 is that in many ways the theater community is a haven for misfits people who don't fit well into normal society and who are different and unique which means it attracts uh people from the lgbtq community for example it attracts people who are uh how shall i put it more free spirited uh unwilling to uh stick in their swim lanes or or play by
9:00 the rules so by nature the theater is filled with very unique and strong individuals and you may have read recently there were some famous gurus who ran studios like gosh their names escaped me elise strasberg for example sure um you know big names in new york who only now it's publicly being said how abusive they were and the sexual
9:35 harassment then went on and and and the disrespect and treating actors like absolute worth throwaways um and and the musical theater you're right uh was was not good in fact um we we there's a pecking order even in the inside of the theater that the the so-called legitimate theater people the straight acting the the the dramatic folks looked down on the musical theater folks and quite frankly the musical theater folks really
10:10 didn't care and often thought that the s the so-called legit straight actors were a bunch of pretentious arrogant jerks who thought shakespeare was the end-all be-all and so at the end of the day that there was an enormous amount of disrespect on the flip side and this is a long-winded answer to your question but i i just think it's a wonderful question and i don't i don't get to talk about this very much on the flip side is it it's an extraordinary community
10:46 where where you can be really weird and really different and it's okay you are welcome you are a part of it as long as you show up on time you learn your lines you you hit your marks and and you don't you don't abuse other people to the point where you you can't do the work and when it becomes a tight-knit cast of people have worked together and struggled and sweated and bled and cried together uh you it is it's a family and it's an amazingly supportive family so
11:23 does that make sense there's kind of two sides to this coin i mean it's it's and that's absolutely my experience certainly in high school and community theater you know there's that the old song there's no business like show business right yeah and and i think anyone who's ever been in musical theater knows that song i believe it's from annie get your gun if i'm not mistaken right and and that's sort of the ideal that um theater people or or as my my very long-standing friend rick calls them carny folk yeah yeah which which is actually a subset
11:59 they that's the circus folk the carnival folks the folks who travel around with the circuses that's a completely different subset we we often called the musical theater people g gypsies right because they would move from town to town with with the show uh you went out on tour with a with a a broadway musical on a national tour you'd be gone six months to a year from town to town to town doing shows and you'd wake up in a hotel you wouldn't know where the hell you were so it it's whereas the so-called legit
12:35 folks they would do the show at one theater open it run for you know a few weeks or maybe a month or two and then it closes it's it's very rare on broadway for example to have a straight drama up run more than a few months uh if that but the musicals will go on and on and on because they're they're an attraction they're a tourist attraction right the theater is not you know straight straight drama is not so another aspect of that world that i i'd like to hear your thoughts about is you know you mentioned you know you you
13:11 you audition um it's it's a it can be a from my experience it totally strong process yes as well though you know you can get through several layers of the audition and you're you know it's it's like the old chorus line thing you know gosh i hope i get it i hope i get it right and then at the very last it's like nope you didn't get it and and now you know how do you pay the rent how do you you know buy food so there was also an aspect of of kind of instability of income so i'm wondering if you would talk about those absolutely uh you know it's a
13:47 running joke that that that 99 of actors are out of work at any given time and the ones who are working are looking for their next job so one of the wonderful things and this is the show about making money is theater people are very resourceful and realize you got to have not only one side hustle but hustle after hustle after hustle for me it was the restaurant industry i've worked in one capacity or another when i was younger in nine different restaurants in fact and everything from
14:23 dishwasher all the way to maitre d uh broiler man you name it i did the job uh and i even i even toured so i did it i got i worked my way through college that way and in in quite a few years after college and i i even joked at one point because i'm a writer by that's that's my nature i write all the time i was going to write a book called tales of restaurant horror uh but but uh anthony bourdain beat me to it and wrote a book called kitchen confidential and there it is so
14:58 um but but i hustled i hustled in every single job i could find temporary work the reason i was so successful in the restaurant industry is i i could be all pretentious and be you know i worked in some really high-end restaurants and so i'd wear the tux and i'd look handsome and young and and i i would flirt with the ladies and their husbands would tip me extra money i mean it was just a crazy crazy industry but you could walk away from a decent restaurant in one night with three or four hundred bucks and you know you can't make that anywhere else yeah
15:34 it's so so interesting i mean in in a way it was almost like you were playing the role of somebody working in a restaurant absolutely absolutely and and you know the best the best chefs not only are great chefs but they also come out on the floor and they take praise and they talk about their work and and they're and they're very uh eccentric and and you know they're putting on a show in addition to being an extraordinary chef yeah and i think it's it's important to note too that um you know i i think there's a tendency
16:09 to look down at you know the dishwasher in the restaurant or the bus man or whatever but yeah but i think that there's no there's nothing wrong with it's it's it's honorable work yes i i did it and you know what's interesting is uh i came from privilege my father was a writer he worked for the new york daily news for his entire career and so um i came from privilege we grew up in a household where we didn't want for anything and it was a beautiful home on the north shore of long island
16:44 but i uh as a teenager my parents both my parents said to me you're gonna get a job and you're gonna we're not just gonna give you an allowance you're gonna have to work for that so the first job i had was mowing our lawn which is a very large law shortly i got i got fed up with that and i went to my first real job was dinner restaurant as a busboy i was 16 years old and and from there on i kept working in restaurants all the way through college so it is noble i also learned then yeah and i don't i i only i
17:20 only can look back on it in this perspective because you asked me about it but i learned that that everybody on the team is important they wouldn't be there if they didn't have an important role to play and if you disrespected a team member regardless of what they did well guess what they're not going to cooperate with you they're going to make your life and job that much more difficult so i learned early on that respect is actually great coinage for getting things done and people if you treat them with respect will go out of their way for you
17:56 whereas if you treat them with disrespect they'll just turn their back on you and they won't they won't lift a finger to help isn't that interesting it is and you know just to digress just a teeny bit i was talking to a couple of young men um day before yesterday i believe it was and they there were they were in a re they were working in a retail shop and they were having trouble with their um you know the the um register basically and and and they were getting very flustered because they thought it was taking too long and i said hey you know relax it's okay i mean
18:31 i'm not gonna you know god forbid i would jump all over you because you know your system is slow or whatever i mean you're you're a person just like you know and so we got me this conversation and one of the things i pointed out to them was if you're out on a date the best way to tell the character of the person you're with is to see how they treat not the waiter because you want something from the waiter but how they treat the bus man that's true you don't want anything from him right maybe water maybe right right and and so i think that when you talk about the
19:07 team in a restaurant i think we as guests in a restaurant in some ways ought to look at ourself as part of that team right right right if we want good service if we want a quality meal so you know join into the spirit of what all the people that especially right now where you know restaurants are so pressed for staff they're short staffed it's it's and it's hard work working in a restaurant at least a minute it really is it really is and and and the folks who do those uh those kitchen jobs
19:42 they're not getting tips now there is a movement afoot in many restaurants where they're saying okay we're gonna pay everyone a living wage and every member of staff except for maybe like the head chef will share in the tips of the evening and which which there's a part of me that goes right on right on and then there's a part of me that says well when i was working as a as a waiter i was dealing with customers with all sorts of issues and challenges and
20:18 behaviors and i was doing my utmost to please them and there was a part of me that said well why should the guy who's washing the dishes get a share of my tips when i work my butt off for that for that customer and i can understand how i had both perspectives but at the end of the day having having been that dishwasher having been that guy that the broiler they called it the broiler man i'm sure there are many broiler women um standing in front of that hot broiler and and
20:53 learning how to cook steaks just right that's a skill but you're not out on the floor but that's a skill you're standing there and figuring out and timing it all correctly that so why shouldn't that person share in the tips too so um my daughter's in my favorite restaurant i'll give it a plug it's the milky way over on pico boulevard here in los angeles if you have never been there folks go that's all i can tell you it's fantastic so they did institute that policy where they pull tips and everybody i think except for the manager
21:29 and the head chef share in that pool and what and and they always had great service but one of the things i noticed is especially when they're short-handed on the floor you know you'll even see one of the guys coming out from the back with his you know white jacket on um helping serve you know just you know pitching in to to make it go as smoothly as possible because they're all in it together yeah and i think i mean i i hear what you're saying i can hear both arguments too all i can say is in this particular restaurant it works really well and you know i was talking to a new uh a
22:05 waiter a couple of weeks ago it was his first day and he was saying he says you know if he's walking in here this is my first day and i feel like i'm walking into a family love it isn't it hopefully hopefully not a highly dysfunctional family hopefully right better than his real family oh so let's let's let's move on now you yes from you know you know kid mowing the lawn like so many of us did just to get your allowance i had the same experience you know um i think i got 25 cents for mowing the lawn and
22:40 that that was back in you know the 60s so yeah that but look that's what you got you know um my father housed me and fed me and clothed right i'm sure he heard the same thing um so then from there you know working in in theater in new york and then you got this this you know opportunity with the police department so you know the experience of working with people that you had formally formerly i should say let's say you know not had a lot of respect for right right talk to me if you will or talk to us if
23:15 you will how did that if it did how did that change you oh that's a great question i it changed me profoundly in that i i could now understand from a cop's point of view what life is like out there on the street now new york is a big city it's a tough city and it's the la i believe the largest police department in the country so it's got internal politics up the
23:52 wazoo i mean you name it it's it's a rough uh organization to be a part of not to mention having to police this extraordinarily diverse tough east coast city uh and back in the day when i was living there that we're talking the 1980s this the city was broke the infrastructure was in tatters uh we had crack wars crime was high murders you name it it was it was a tough time to live in new york city and a very tough time to be a cop so i saw
24:30 firsthand what it was like and actually became here's another surprise i decided to become an auxiliary police officer a volunteer cop and i worked parades i worked um uh the the new year's eve in times square uh i i got a uniform and i got some training and i was basically told to just stand around and keep your eyes open and if you saw anything that was even remotely uh illegal call a cop you're not a cop but
25:05 uh at the end of the day i i too was treated with disrespect by certain people even though i was an auxiliary cop so i so i got an understanding of what that was like and it really helped me understand how important respect was now if you flash forward to the work that i started doing then and one way or another continued to do uh i realized when uh and because now what i i work in is diversity equity and inclusion leadership development and so on and so forth
25:40 i realize now that when you're trying to teach people and train people adults about really loaded topics like diversity equity and inclusion if you don't handle them and the topic with respect it's going to go high high and right real fast and people will shut down and go to their corners so i have had to learn how to be extraordinarily respectful to everyone now it's something i also learned from my dad um who who always treated everyone he
26:18 met regardless of who they were with respect and he instilled that in me you are never better than anybody else and uh so i i was fortunate that my parents gave me that understanding but it was only when i was really trying to wade in there as a straight white guy in a world where straight white guys are considered by many people to be the problem to be the issue to be the enemy i had to wade in there and have conversations with people who saw me in that light
26:54 in a negative light in a way where they would at least be open to the possibility that i was allied with them and that i could be respectful about something that they felt i couldn't be respectful about and therefore surprise them and perhaps see them help them tear down some of the challenges they have and the biases they hold quite understandably so when you have four years 400 years of slavery
27:30 telling you and treating you like a lesser human being i do not blame any black american for being incredibly angry and i am constantly amazed at the generosity and the decency and respect that uh people of color treat especially white men uh after all that has happened in our culture uh and the same could be said of almost every minority group uh regardless so that's what i learned that that going
28:07 through life with blinders on and and not acknowledging your own biases and just being your arrogant unconscious self is very likely going to piss off quite a few people and is that how you want to live your life just being your unconscious arrogant self and pissing off a whole bunch of people or do you want to get along with people do you want to do good things in the world do you want to leave a positive impression and one of the people i am constantly quoting and it's kind of our
28:42 slogan and our mantra here at the center it comes from maya angelou and and when when she was quite a little far along in her career towards the end she was interviewed by a journalist who asked her said maya you have you've done so much you've met so many people what have you learned about people and it's a very famous quote and she says well i have learned that people will forget what you said and people will forget what you did but people will never forget how you made them feel and i want to live my life and i encourage
29:18 everyone to live their lives with that in mind so i want to dig into this um because if i mean as you noted at the beginning this show is about making money um i think we you know some people hear that and and they think oh so this is you know let's be cut cutthroat let's be you know whatever that means right right and and i i think that's exactly the opposite so one of the um slogans if you will that that i coined in in the book that i wrote several
29:54 years ago about for people transitioning from the military to civilian life is wealth comes from value delivered right so if we want to deliver value to another person right and this comes from i think it's zig ziglar who says um if if you want some everything you want in life somebody else already already controls there's got to be you've got to be able to create a relationship between you and the other person if if you're going to get some of that i
30:30 mean election i suppose unless you're going to be a criminal and you're right so setting that aside right so so the key skill for us to learn if we want to make money is how do we create relationships seems to me and and and you've touched on something that i believe is at the core um i have one friend who describes it as you know we want to treat all people decently i think that that maybe that's another way of looking at it so so i'm coming to the question now
31:05 how do we do that it seems like these days especially it's so easy to really just inadvertently say or do something that makes a person feel bad right um and and then you get a negative reaction coming to you right um and then and they're in there there starts the negative cycle so what how do we do that that's an excellent question and i'll tell you a quick story which is really indicative of of how people can get so triggered when we tell them you
31:41 have to treat others with respect i i was doing a keynote in las vegas about six months ago and it was about a thousand people and i noticed this guy at the back of the room and most people were sitting but he was standing and there's always some people standing but but this guy not only was he standing but he was kind of fidgeting he was kind of marching around he had his hands in his pockets his shoulders were hunched and you could just tell he was he was just annoyed and and he was watching me do my keynote
32:16 my speech so uh bless you so i i said i stopped because i had a hunch and i i just said sir you look really annoyed you're damn right i'm annoyed he just blew up in front of him everybody's a freaking snowflake these days everybody's gotta be politically correct i've gotta walk around on eggshells nobody ever treated me with respect when i was coming up through the ranks i had to earn it and this is bs is a it's a liberal plot to take over the i
32:52 mean he he just ranted and i'm i'm nodding and i'm nodding and i'm nodding and they're all everyone else is looking at me okay what is mr respect going to say now no finally he kind of ran out of steam and i said sir i hear you and i understand you know why because i've felt exactly like you have he's like you have and i said yes sir yes sir as i was coming up and building my business i thought
33:28 my goodness i can't say anything without somebody getting offended by me i am i this is so frustrating but i but then i had a good friend of mine who hit me i always talk about it this way he hit me up the side of the head with a velvet covered two by four and what he said to me he says says greg i love you my brother he's a wonderful man he says i love you brother but you gotta wake up there are two things that have happened in this world that if
34:03 you don't acknowledge that then you are going to continue to fail and have problems and come into conflict with other people and so what i said to this man i said here are the two things you need to remember first of all the world of work has changed radically since when you and i first started i said how long you've been doing what you've been doing since 40 years and nobody ever coddled me and i said i believe it you don't look like somebody who's who who could be cobbled and every everybody laughed at that one and
34:38 and i said i get that i get that now when i started i was given the i was given the worst work i was in a kitchen i was washing dishes and they would throw pots and pans at me and they treated me like dirt in the restaurant absolutely treated me like dirt but i realized over time that if i held on to that anger i was not going to get my job done so i just kept my head down and i kept going and eventually i got promoted i got better jobs and i thought okay that's the way the world works you've got to put up with that first and then and and
35:13 now my friend said to me that whole world is gone that world is gone our millennials and gen z's are the most educated generations in history they're about to represent 50 of all workers on the planet are going to be gen z's or millennials and they do not tolerate disrespect for one millisecond and you know and i said to this guy i said you know how i know that is i've got three millennial children and they do not fit the stereotype they are not slackers they are really hard working and and they want to achieve and
35:49 do great things in the world but if you treat them with respect they're going to go to heck with you i'm out of here and they can do that in today's workplace they can do that so the the the workers of today are completely different the second thing that's changed is our work environment he said the pandemic especially uh has changed everything uh we you know roughly one quarter of us are now working permanently from home i don't know about you but i am i mean occasionally i do go out yeah there you go uh so uh the world of work has changed
36:26 the environment has changed the workers have changed you've got to wake up to this and if you still operate under the old paradigms that people have got to pay their dues and just let disrespect roll off their back well you could you could operate that way but i'm telling you you're not going to keep your best and your brightest they're not going to stick around so it's your job sir i said i challenged him i said it's your job to adapt are you the ceo yes i am then it's your job to adapt that's why you get paid the big bucks it's not the responsibility of that gen z kid who just graduated college to adapt to you
37:02 you got to adapt to them if you value them and want to keep them and he got quiet and he kind of nodded and you know i could tell he didn't like it but he got it and so did the rest of the audience so and this is an interesting point because as as you were talking you you mentioned that this idea of paying dues yes and look i'm i'm a baby boomer so you know i paid my dues i do yeah postal service right shoving things in you know or no you couldn't put them in the mailbox you had to put them on the door or whatever right all that kind of really you know annoying work that you did to make some
37:38 money so it it from your perspective is it that um gen z and millennials don't want to pay their dues or are unwilling to pay their dues or is it that they want the dues they pay to be shall we say meaningful that's a great question i i think that's i think that's part of it i think because they are so educated and and knowledgeable and they come out of you know these days uh when you and i were growing up going to college
38:13 was an option although my parents said it's not an option for you but um you could you could have a decent career with a call a high school diploma you could have a decent career nowadays if you at least don't have a bachelor's degree but preferably a master's degree you're not going to get a decent job that pays you the kind of money that you want so these kids are getting highly educated and they're not stupid uh and so they come out into a work world where i know my kids do they remember the great recession of 2008 2010 you know that four-year period
38:52 where their friends lost uh their their homes their their parents lost their jobs and they realized that the old contract the so-called cradle-to-grave employment contract you go to work for ibm when you come out of college you work your way up you become a vp or something you eventually retire they give you a gold watch and a pension and you're done after 40 years that's gone that is gone they know that they are dispensable and that uh employers are hiring them for a specific task and then if things if they're not needed anymore or if things go south they'll get rid of
39:28 them overnight so they're not stupid our millennial children and they're thinking there's no loyalty to me why the hell should i be loyal to this company who's gonna you know and and all these titans of industry you know especially the the the the uh the bay area you know all these startups these these tech startups oh we'll we'll we'll we'll give you we'll give you shares we'll we'll make you part of the organization and you know well that that was handed out to a very select few everybody else got used and thrown away especially if the if the company was sold off or collapsed or or merged with
40:05 another firm so they know there's no loyalty left so their attitude is why should i pay my dues where i could go six months doing the worst possible job and then the next day the leadership says you're gone no so they're not stupid anymore back in the day when there was more loyalty from the employer yeah we paid our dues because we knew it was going to turn into something today it's not interesting interesting so i want to refocus now on your your personal career or your specific
40:40 career development so you were doing the training for the police how did you go from there to starting the center for respectful leadership i'll try to give you the short version okay uh as i as i mentioned new york was a really bad place to live during the 80s and that's when i was doing that work i got married at that time i married an actor and she and i decided we were going to live in the uk where i had visited and traveled and saw the best theater of my life and i said let's move over there
41:15 and see if we can make a go of it we lasted five years and we founded two companies one was a touring theater a professional theater company touring classic american drama throughout the british isles we actually made money doing that which is i know it sounds crazy in the us you don't really make money doing theater but in in the uk where they have a 500 a thousand year tradition of performing arts and and funding for the arts you can make you can get by and and we did quite well
41:53 the the other thing we did we started a school for performing arts for adults and uh so those two things actually generated a very good living for us so we had we had two companies we eventually left and moved back to new york where i took a job with a non-profit uh company that a training company that uses theater as a training tool backed what i was doing before and eventually i left there and moved to california and formed my own company using again theater as a training tool on on leadership and on
42:29 conflict resolution and diversity equity and inclusion and so one way or another i was able to use my art and skills to do training in in for corporations and and governments uh on the tough topics and eventually i really wanted to focus what i i've been searching for all my life which which was respect because again in theater people don't get a lot of respect it's from others who are not in the business and so i i decided with some help of my colleagues that i would uh create the center for respectful leadership after
43:05 writing this book uh the respectful leader so that was and that that happened about uh six seven years ago okay so talk talk if you would about writing a book because a lot of people you know are very interested in doing that um i'm i've had um i don't know if you know who suzanne woods fisher is she's a very prolific author and she's she's talked about that what i found though is different authors have different paths to you know writing that book so tell us about how you ended up doing that sure
43:40 well as i mentioned i i was i've been a writer my whole life my dad was a writer and i was i was successful as a playwright and a scriptwriter for film and television but mostly as a playwright mostly in the uk and uh so i was successful and i also worked i had a side hustle in the uk i was a journalist and i worked for bbc radio and i worked for another number of uk media houses such as uh scotsman publications uh the independent newspaper the the times of london and so on i was a freelancer and i got to cover
44:17 the fall of the berlin wall by the way and uh i and i had some really good editors so when i started as a journalist i was really new to i didn't really know what i was doing but i had good editors who would beat me up the side of the head and take my copy and turn it into good stuff and eventually i learned how to be a very good journalist and a good correspondent and feature writer i i graduated writing magazine features i i interviewed some very famous people and wrote feature articles about them so that was my journey to writing a book and one shortly after i moved out to california i was doing i
44:55 was doing a lot of training on human resource issues and a number of my clients said wow you've got some great tools and techniques can do have you written a book and i said no and they said well we'd love to have these in a book so my first book came out in 2002 it's called bad behavior people problems and sticky situations a toolbook for managers and team leaders and it sort of just coalesced all the tools that i had uh put together over the years and i brought that out myself before self-publishing was a thing and i i
45:30 bought a book called the self-publisher's handbook and i followed it to the letter and i brought my book out and what it did was uh it i decided to do it right after 9 11 happened and all my clients dried up so i thought okay now's the time to write the book and um the most important feature of the book writing process was me just keep going just keep going keep doing it no matter what and i made a commitment that uh by july of 2002 i would hold my first book in my hand
46:05 and i did and it worked uh and it really raised my credibility and that's why why i wrote it quite frankly not to make money you don't make money off of writing books but to raise my credibility and it did and it worked my second book i decided i wanted to go after a big dog and be published by a major publisher and that was the respectful leader and it was picked up by john wiley and sons the biggest publisher of uh business books in the world and it's a business fable and i got coaching from an expert in in writing and publishing books who said to me
46:42 he said okay you want to talk about respect that's what you care about he says you got to realize that ceos these days they don't have time to read big thick tomes the ones that we have on our shelves they want something they can read on a flight from la la to new york and back so i wrote a fable a business fable it's it's modeled after patrick valencione's book five dysfunctions of a team and it's it's an easy read you can read the whole thing including the explanation of the story in about two two and a half hours and and it uh wiley picked it up it won an award
47:20 from amazon the very first day of release it was named the best book of the month by the editors at amazon in the business book section and then a month later it became a bestseller on amazon in business books and then a year later it won a very prestigious award called the axiom business book awards um for best it won the gold medal for best uh best business fable so that was my journey and and you know to to your listeners who care about writing a book and i'm right now i'm literally writing my third book literally i just stopped
47:57 writing and got on this call with you um it's all about just keep going keep writing set yourself a deadline now the my deadline for this next book i have a a keynote to deliver on my topic called coaching for respect uh because i'm an executive coach in september of this year my book's got to be ready so i have this external deadline and uh this one's self-published i started at my own publishing company i don't want to deal with the big publishers anymore i've been down that road i'm a wily author that's done but
48:34 uh at the end of the day the the best advice i can give is don't stop keep writing even it's only 10 or 15 minutes every single day write something and it it will get done and make sure you set yourself a deadline i mean absolutely sage advice very similar to what stephen king talks about in his book on on writing yeah and he he would certainly know but so um i i we have we have just a few more minutes left and and there's been a question in in the back of my mind that that i
49:09 wanted to ask you and i'm glad we have the time so um you know you you mentioned how um uh you know millennials gen z you know they see that the company has no loyalty to them so they're not going to have loyalty to the company um i i can imagine that for um their employers um their behavior may be maybe um interpreted as being coming from a place of of
49:44 arrogance yes and from my own work both in the business world and also as a chaplain in the navy one of the things that i found is if we can come from a place of humility so then if someone says something to us that may seem insulting we can absorb that much more easily yes that if we're coming from a place of of arrogance um and so i i i wanted to get your thoughts about
50:19 that dynamic if you will because like you said you're you're sort of raising as the french say your reason for being is is to help people build mutual respect yes so i think there's something in that humility versus arrogance dance that human beings sometimes do and so i'm i'm gonna if i hope you don't mind i'm gonna sort of you know take the grenade pull the pin out put it in your lap you know okay all right i got it and i was that guy when i came out of college i was that extraordinarily arrogant in
50:56 your face human being who thought i walked on water there's no question and i it was a different time so i did understand about paying dues i did understand that in that time and i also understand why paying your dues no longer works for our millennial and gen z kids but the arrogance part of me really had to be beat out of me uh by my friends and my colleagues and people who had the courage to call me on
51:31 my stuff and so if if you are a leader in an organization and you have these young folks who strike you as arrogant and entitled the best thing you can do for them is sit down with them and coach them understand them treat them with respect and then when they feel like there's a level of trust between the two of you introduce the possibility how their
52:06 behavior their arrogance might actually not only negatively impact other people but impact them and what they want to do you know as much as we deride you remember sarah palin who's trying to make a comeback as much as we derided sarah palin for all of her quirky arrogant entitled behaviors she used to say something that i say now and maybe she's still saying that but
52:41 she used to say how's that working for you and so if i still develop as a coach with an arrogant entitled client a younger person who just is pushing back against being controlled who wants to do their own thing and and go go work from a mountaintop somewhere and come and go on their own schedule if i could sit down with them and get a level of trust with them and say is is your arrogance how is that working for you is it really bringing you what you want and if it is okay great
53:18 but if it isn't you might want to consider other pathways to collaborating to working together with other people now that's a process that takes time that takes coaching that takes patience and they say that once we reach our 60s they call it the age of wisdom and i kind of believe that's true i'm 62 now i only finally feel like i have that patience and i can do that coaching whereas even 10 years ago no if when i was in my early 50s i was
53:54 still building this business building this brand and i was out there so it was a long process and sometimes you got to fall flat on your face sometimes you have to let that millennial screw themselves up really badly and then go over pick them up dust them off a little bit and say you want to talk about what just happened there i'll help you process that but it it's not easy did that answer your question um yeah i i think it i think it did you know it it it's interesting um i'll be 62 um very soon
54:32 i think uh uh two or three weeks right the new 52 and and um lately people have been uh commenting on what they see as my sort of extraordinary patience and i have never been a patient guy right um yeah you know i hear this and i'm thinking like who you talking to yeah right yeah but what i have noticed is somehow i've gotten i think i've gone to a point in life where i i see the value of patients and and
55:10 what it and what it will do not just for me but for my daughter for my friends for my you know business associates etc um just for people i meet on the street or or someone i'm you know interacting with in a retail store yes right it's it's it's an amazing uh tool to have in our toolbox and and i would add not to interrupt you i'm sorry i would add you have pro very likely over the course of your career developed a high level of compassion and emotional intelligence and an understanding of where other people are coming from and and and
55:45 giving people the benefit of the doubt that maybe they're upset because something awful is going on uh i used to think when people cut me off on the freeway i used to curse at them and want to drive up next to them and flip them a finger and all that kind of stuff and i realized well who's who's that helping how's that working for me my blood pressure would go through the work i drive all tense and upset so now i give everybody the benefit of the doubt and i kind of tell myself a little joke as as they go rushing by me and cut me off i say oh there goes somebody who needs to take a poop they gotta take a poop so
56:21 they're gonna and i crack myself up it's stupid it's like a dad joke but it works it gets me from being all tense and angry at them to kind of having a laugh about it and it's okay you know you gotta you gotta pick and choose your battles as you get older you don't have the energy to fight every single battle anymore you got to choose the important ones very very very true very true i gosh there's there's so much more i would love to talk to you about and unfortunately our time is up so you ask the best darn questions you ask
56:56 the best questions well thank you i mean you know my goal in these is in these shows is is to you know provide a forum for my guests to really be able to kind of dig out from inside of them things that will impact other people really like we say in the edition the kishkas you know kind of like inside us well you you grew up on long island so yeah i know yeah maybe a time or two right yeah um and and and really you know you were you were so authentic in in sharing your story and and i i
57:31 deeply appreciate that i know that the viewers are are going to connect with that as well the time just zoomed by so um you know well we definitely need to keep in touch and uh you know as your work continues to develop i want to have you come back on the show and you know hear the new the new ideas that you're working with but before i go i've got i've got three things to do and the first one is i see on the wall behind you what looks like a certificate of an award of some kind like a medal i'm just curious what that is that is the that is the award that my book received uh it
58:09 there's a sticker on my book but that medal is actually the the award that's the gold medal that's the wcc gold medal axiom business books it's a gold medal they actually send you a gold medal in a beautiful box and uh it's a big deal they have a whole launch in new york city all the publishers get together and there's a big press conference and so on and photos and all it's it's a big deal so i thought you know what um i'm proud of this award that i'm proud of this book it's a fun read it's a good read so i
58:45 figured i'm gonna display it prominently on my wall tell us the name of the book one more time because i'm gonna put a link on in the show notes to the book so people it's it's called the respectful leader seven ways to influence without intimidation it's this is the hardback version this is the original version it's now if if if you want to buy it if your readers want to buy it uh please you'll find it on amazon barnes and noble but buy the uh paperback version which is the newer updated version this is the old version so i'll get a link to the paperback version so people will can click through
59:20 to that i'll put a link to your website so if people want to um learn more about you work they can and also i imagine there's a way they can contact you through your website yes as well so if you have any any questions or would like to engage you to speak or do a training they'll be able to do so absolutely with two more tasks to do uh real quickly one is to let you know my guest next week is steve braham steve bram is the co-founder and president of george smith partners it's the largest real estate financing company
59:57 i think on the west coast i don't think it's in the entire country um steve has literally financed tens of billions of dollars in in real estate finance and i i and you might think that a guy like that is going to suffer from arrogance you know what when i was teaching at ucla extension real estate and i would ask steve to come talk to the class if these were just brand new people in the business he would come down anytime that i would ask him to meet with the with these you know brand new people to real estate help them learn help them understand he
60:33 was always available to take their phone calls he is one of the most humble people i know and i think you're going to get a tremendous amount out of hearing steve speak so please do join us next next wednesday 12 30 pacific time 3 30 east coast time and then one hour going in on each side as we move into the interior of the country and so i just have one more task to do well first of all i want to greg ward i want to thank you again for coming on the show thank you amazing guest and so let me sign off the way i usually
61:08 do which was reminding you all about my dear friend marie who uh is up in heaven now and marie darling you are still my bell greg thank you so much all of you kevin for joining us we'll see you next week