Michael Roderick: One Career Change From Thought Leadership

Michael Roderick is the CEO of Small Pond Enterprises, a company that helps thoughtful givers become thought leaders by making their brands referable, their messaging memorable, and their ideas unforgettable. Through Small Pond, Michael helps coaches and consultants create Referable Brands leading to more speaking opportunities, better clients, and more influence.

Michael began his career as a high school English teacher before producing theatrical productions Off-Broadway and later on Broadway. This combination of experience in the arts and entrepreneurship led to Michael starting an arts incubator program to teach more artists about building and growing their own businesses (PLAE). Eventually, he decided to develop a workshop on networking which grew into the full-time consulting practice that became Small Pond Enterprises.

Transcript provided by YouTube (unedited)

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[Music]
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welcome to the one away show presented by bw missions i am brian wish and i am
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your host and thanks so much for being here on this show i sit down with compelling entrepreneurs authors and rising leaders
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to talk through their most transformative relationships experiences and epiphanies
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curated with entrepreneurial leaders in mind we’ll dig into these finite moments in people’s lives and understand how
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they helped set their path forward michael roderick is the ceo of small
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pond enterprises a company that helps thoughtful givers become thought leaders by making their brands referable their
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message is memorable and their idea is unforgettable through smallpond michael helps coaches and consultants create
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referable brands leading to more speaking opportunities better clients and more influence michael began his career as a high
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school english teacher before producing theatrical productions off broadway and later on broadway this combination of
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experience in the arts and entrepreneurship led to michael starting in the arts incubator program to teach more artists about building and growing
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their businesses eventually he decided to develop a workshop on networking we screw into the full-time consulting practice that
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became small pond enterprises [Music]
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michael welcome to the one away show thanks very much for having me i’m excited to be here yeah absolutely it’s
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been great getting to know you and just a compassionate serving individual and uh
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have loved our conversation so let’s dive in uh what is uh the one away
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moment that you want to share with us today i want to share the the moment
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that i decided to leave teaching i decided to step away i was a high
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school english teacher and i had been doing it for i think about eight years or so
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and uh i left i left that profession serving uh in entirely and and relatively
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quickly it wasn’t like a full-on like i quit i’m walking out kind of scenario
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like i did uh i did take the time to sort of finish out my year and then i you know gave my
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notice over the summer the the way that i decided to uh to to approach it um but
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yeah i left uh i i left teaching entirely wow wow yeah sure that was a big decision
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for you and yes with a lot of unknowns crazy kind of departure and
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what’s next and all the fields what yeah tell us for those that don’t know you
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how did you get into teaching and what what inspired you to take that track in the first place
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yeah so um my mother uh was a kindergarten teacher and uh when i was very very young
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probably like five or six um she would invite me to
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come and help her at her classroom so at the end of the school year basically
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whenever it was sort of like you know clean up at the end of the you know at the end of school year kind of uh kind of things i
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would go to my mom’s classroom and i would help her and i would see her teach and i would
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help her clean and i would help her serve work with the other teachers i’d go to other teachers classrooms and
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clean up for them uh and i did that from probably age five
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to probably i was like 10 or 12 by the time i stopped going at the
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end of the um at the end of every year uh to like help my mom with school you know um and
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in many cases i went at the beginning of the year sort of helped her out so i had always had a had an interest in it just
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from that um but then as time kind of progressed as i
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got more into school myself i noticed that i like
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really just got along with my teachers like i was that kid who you know if you were on the
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if you were on the field trip and everybody was sitting with their friends i’d be the one sitting with the teacher
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and talking to them about like whatever we were doing next and sort of what was going on so i was i
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always just sort of had this fascination uh with with that world and it really carried
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over into uh into high school uh and then of course in a college where
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i ended up studying it yeah no doubt well it’s neat that your mom maybe set the stage for you to kind of walk on
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yourself uh yeah and maybe let’s play a tribute tour before the show you told me that
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she passed away a couple years to cancer and yes i know that lost kind of loss is
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incredibly hard um yeah as you reflect right on your mother sounds like a very close person in your
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life what describe her as a teacher describe some of the life lessons you learned from watching her being in the classroom
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and absorbing just her and her element yeah so i think one of the the biggest
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ones was resilience um you know i watched my mother
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deal with everything from kindergartners being
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kind of horrible you know to her she had all these different you know all
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these different stories but there were there were kids who were very very cruel even at that age so like
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uh when she was pregnant with me she was handed a picture and it was this
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little stick figure of this woman with a big belly and then all of this red on the sidewalk
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uh and and the kid said to her no word of a lie this is your baby it fell out on the sidewalk those were kinds of uh
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i’m originally from rhode island and uh she was teaching in downtown providence which at the time uh that she was
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teaching there were a lot of challenges of you know in downtown providence it wasn’t always kind of the
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the place that it currently is and you know the thing that i kind of look back on is you know throughout all
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of that stuff and and not only was it your challenges with the kids but also sometimes challenges with parents and
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challenges with the different curriculums that started to you know come into play and expect a lot from
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kindergarten teachers that they hadn’t really ever learned before you know had to do
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she would just kind of push through it all right like she dealt with whatever it was and she just continued to
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do her work and always kept a a good sort of attitude you know about
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it and that’s something that has always kind of stuck with me is that you know as that element of you know when things are hard
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you have you have the choice uh that you can sort of complain about
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it and and you know be upset about it uh or you can keep moving like you can keep
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doing the work that you you know that that you need to do and then i’d say the other thing is
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you know my mom was always thinking about who else
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you know needed something right so like she would send me
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to other teachers classrooms who didn’t have a helper at the end of the day you know what i mean or the end of the year
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um and she would always just kind of be thinking about others and i think that’s something that
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has really you know made an impact on my life like i think i i have
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a sort of natural tendency to look at the world through the eyes of other
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people to sort of think about well what what does somebody else want like what are other people kind of looking for
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you know could use help with and i really do think a lot of that comes from my my time uh with my mother that’s
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amazing it sounds like a very very special woman who taught you
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so much and yeah the way i’m sure as a mom but as a teacher you
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know she’s always teaching you right um yeah so just a side note on that in a world that
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at least is called our western societies i’ve been thinking about those so uh at the center they think they’re at the
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center of the universe they don’t always realize the impact that their actions have on others and i can’t say i’m a
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saint at that i think i’m getting better uh but uh it’s neat that you learn that early and
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you see how you do that for others because of you know the gift she gave you so
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thanks for honoring her in the uh a very nice way thank you
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let’s go back to uh this moment so you talked about getting into teaching as a result of your mom i mean you kind of
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let that path forward what made you want to get out of teaching i actually very distinctly remember the
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the exact moment i had been thinking about sort of moving on for probably a while before this
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particular moment but i i live in new york city and and i was on the subway and i was reading this book
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that seth godin had put out at the time called linchpin and in this book he talks about the
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school system and he basically breaks down this idea that school was built to
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teach us how to be better factory workers that was the reason why we were in rows and that was the reasons why we
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were supposed to sort of like keep our head down and do the work that we needed to do and like you know it was really
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structured so that we would get out of school and be like oh yes i i totally understand
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how to keep my head down and follow instructions and do what everybody you know asks me to do
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so we ended up becoming like really good factory workers and i remember reading about this
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and i had this moment because earlier that year i would have
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administrators and and other teachers tell me that the only thing that really
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mattered in terms of my work was how well these kids did on
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these different standardized tests right we were really evaluated by did our classes
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succeed or fail when it came to these standardized tests
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and it sort of gave me this moment where i was just like you know what i’m a factory worker unfortunately like
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this is not about how do these kids grow this is about how
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do we sort of move them through this mill of standardized testing and then get them out the door and and then
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they’re stuck like they’re wherever they are like they you know they never learn anything that’s useful to them they they
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only learn sort of how to answer these you know questions that in many cases
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down the line like very few people are ever going to ask them about right so i started had this moment where i was just
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like i’m a factory worker and i could spend the rest of my life in the factory
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like i i very like i was a successful teacher like i did get those kids through those tests and and my students
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love me and i i started in the english department as just a uh you know a sophomore english
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teacher and by the time i left i was the head of the english department i had had
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administrative roles in summer school like i had done a lot i was a successful
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teacher in that you know in that regard but ultimately it all came down to like i was going to
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do the exact same thing over and over and over again
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and it wasn’t ever going to change it wasn’t ever going to shift and when i had that moment
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i just like i don’t want this to be the rest of my life if it’s just this
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like repeat of just teaching over and over and over again in many cases the same exact you
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know the same exact things what kind of life is that that just doesn’t fit for me i had always been the
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type of the type of person who like looked at what’s new what’s next like what types you know i’d always been a
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creative person as a kid you know so i was like when i had that realization i
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was like you know what there’s something else like i i i have this ability to teach
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and there are other areas where i could bring this ability like there are other things that i could potentially you know
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do with this so i remember reading that and being like you know what i think this is going to be the year i think this is going to be
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the year that i move on and sure enough that year closed you know we kind of
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closed everything down you know got to the end of the year and then over the summer i you know it took
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a little bit more time to think about it but once we once we got towards the end of the summer and it was like okay we’re
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going to go back to school i was like i’m not going to do it just can’t and
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put in my put in my notice totally yeah it makes so much sense to kind of look
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look at the next 10 20 30 years of your life and say am i just
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gonna repeat this and like to all the teachers out there who do that thank you yeah god bless you but
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for you i think you know you realize there was maybe that wasn’t the area in life you belonged in and that you have a bigger
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impact elsewhere and you know you have to go what’s best for you and by the way the book by seth godin linchpin was so formative for
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me and colleagues and he seemed like he had a very similar impact on you uh and years ago
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so i’m thrilled that uh seth’s wise words made a difference in
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your you know path um yeah let’s talk about
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so you made the hard decision you left you left something you knew oh oh actually one question before we talk
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about what you did after how did your mom when when you left she
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she didn’t she wasn’t like upset but she was definitely worried she was definitely like well what are you gonna
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do now yeah like what’s your what’s your work going to be how are you going to live like
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you know she she definitely had a lot of questions you know about all of that um but
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she she was like you know well keep me up to speed like let me know how
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things you know how how things are going like she respected she respected my decision like she she
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understood um but she was certainly worried about what was i going to do now and what was my life you know what was
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my life going to look like so well on that note uh any mom would be worried but also like
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yeah uh at least a good mom uh what uh yeah what did you do next what how did you
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think about this transition progression in your life yeah so i had been doing a lot of work in the
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theater world um and i had sort of while i was still teaching i
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become pretty well known in sort of the theater the the theater space i was doing a lot of these like smaller
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productions and i basically had built a little
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side business doing what’s uh referred to as general management where basically like
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you handle all of the logistics for uh the smaller shows so there are these
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like 99 seat and under kinds of shows that happen in the city and there are
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people who they don’t want to do the paperwork they don’t want to be the producer they don’t
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want to handle all of the logistical elements of the work so they’re like i’ll hire you to do it
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um and sometimes they’ll hire you for like you know a couple thousand bucks or you know whatever the scenario was so i
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just kind of had to piece together you know some general management gigs uh during like festival season and those
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types of things to bring in a little bit of bring in a little bit of money um but during that time i had also started to
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learn a lot about entrepreneurship and you know going down the sir seth godin
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rabbit hole right reading a lot of his books having this like oh like
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you can you can make money from people buying your information and your ideas
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and your concepts so uh i very distinctly remember saying okay well what’s something i could teach
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people like what’s something i you know i already kind of recognized and i already understood uh and at the time
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i had gotten my first broadway credit pretty quickly so um i went from being a
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high school english teacher to a broadway producer in under two years
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so i had moved very very quickly sort of through that industry and i had a lot of people asking me like
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could i teach that kind of networking piece of things right they were like could you teach me how to build
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relationships can you teach me how to get people to write 40 and 50 and 100 000 checks like can you show me sort of
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how to do all of these things so i started experimenting with that aspect of being like yeah i’ll charge you you
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know a 100 bucks and come to this workshop and i’ll teach you everything i know i started to get some business from
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that and then sort of parse that together with all of the um with all the general management stuff
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that i was doing and doing raising the money on the broadway shows and sort of building you know
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all of that and i became really well known in that whole sort of connector space right where people were like oh
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you’re a great connector everybody you know wants to know you i was getting lots of introductions and
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while that was happening i had a friend introduced me to a founder of a startup
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and he basically after our meeting reached out to me and said
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you were in education this is an educational technology startup would you consider
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coming on and working for this tech company and i had no tech experience i knew
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nothing about sort of that you know side of things but i was like yeah i’ll give it a shot you know so i jumped in and i
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sort of helped the in the early stages of the building out of that of that company did some business development
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work with them and things like that and uh during that time they sent me to a really bad conference
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and i got back from this conference i was just like wow people don’t talk to each other at conferences and there’s like a lot of
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just like non-socialization that happens and i was so fascinated with
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relationship building and all those types of things so i remember very distinctly we had the end of the day
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kind of off at the at the startup because it was the end of the school year kind of for the it was like going
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into those like vacation times so like nobody was answering our calls so i reached out i sent like 15 emails to my
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friends and i said hey if i did a conference about connecting um would you
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want to do something with that like would you want to be on a panel would you want to have some kind of discussion around it and all of my friends came
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back and were like oh my god i would totally do this so in about 35 days from
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that uh because it was around november um it’s on i think it was like mid-december i started the first
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connector con which was uh conference for connectors uh where i brought them together from like all different uh all
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different industries and serve all different relationships and similar i get to the end of that
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workshop i get to the end of that that conference and i had a bunch of people come up to me afterwards and say like
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can you do more of this stuff can you teach people more of this stuff um i was looking at the tech startup and
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i was looking at the aspect of like selling software and i was like i’m never gonna live my life selling
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software like i’m never gonna care enough about selling software as i do about relationships so i put in my
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notice there and you know again went off on my own to do this whole like entrepreneurial thing
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totally wow i mean so many different threads here to go back to what you’re talking about you know it’s like you
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were scrapping together all these different pieces of skills and relationships and expertise
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and you know it’s like how do you take that and put it all under one roof right your
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business development um and so like good for you for leaning into different experiences and
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like letting those just naturally guide you and maybe being present to the signals and
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uh taking on that natural role of a connector i mean tribes was a uh incredible book uh
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and kind of building your own tribe and helping others build theirs in the way right and so yeah i have to imagine when you finally were
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able to maybe take all the skills and then create connector con and put all your skills together i think in a way
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that you can do something really magical and special why do you think the connectors
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who were there and you invited came up if they were already so good at this themselves
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why do you think they came up to you after and said you should do more of this and how did you respond yeah i think it came down to
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i was teaching this in a very very different way than a lot of other people
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had been teaching it i think that was one element was that i had these frameworks that a lot of people
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had not necessarily thought as deeply about relationship building as sort of i
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as i had at the time right but the other thing that i think really
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was a major factor in people enjoying that experience was
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i looked at the fact that when i had gone to a conference it wasn’t a safe
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space and i didn’t feel like i could go up to anybody and have a conversation and i
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didn’t feel like people who were on a panel would you know talk to me and like i didn’t feel
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like i belonged and what i did with the conference
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was i established at the very beginning of the conference that this was a safe
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space and that if you decided to be here you were also agreeing to the fact that you
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would not shun anybody else who was there that you would talk to whoever came up
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to you about whatever you know and that you wouldn’t get into a click and that if you were somebody
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who was presenting or sitting on a panel you would go and sit in on other panels and go and hang out for the day and you
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would be there not as a celebrity but literally as a participant as well
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and i think that that aspect to sort of leveling the playing field was one of the major
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factors that really just like it attracted a lot more connectors because
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the challenge that connectors often have is people know that they know people and
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then they start to kind of treat it as like oh well can you introduce me to this famous person or you know whatever
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the scenario is right so like it starts to become this you know issue of like oh my god if
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somebody knows who i am or somebody knows my title they’re gonna ask me for a bunch of things
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so what i did with the conference was i got rid of that and i was basically like you know when you fill out the
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application to attend it’s like here’s your name here’s what you could use help with
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and that’s all that was on your name tag so you didn’t have what your title was
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like you didn’t have so you didn’t know if you were going up to somebody who owned a hedge fund or you were going up
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to somebody who was making drinks later so there was no dynamic of like
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how do i get in front of this person and even with the panels you know it was one of those things where it was like they
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weren’t acting like a celebrity right like they were just like yeah you can talk to me even if even though they had
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you know significant followings and and interests and and all sorts of different things so
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i think like that was the biggest factor was you know it came down to the thing that i just like
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i have a lot of problems with the idea of anybody feeling less than right like i i
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hate the concept of being like well you’re not as successful or you don’t know as many people or you don’t have
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this much you know all of those types of things so i was like i’m going to get rid of that and just give people the
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opportunity to be people and connect in that way and i think that’s what attracted folks wow
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so well first off thanks for sharing second off i love uh how you kind of
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removed a transaction barrier and letting people be seen at the same time
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because the first thought was hey how can i transact value this person
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because of their digital reputation or just because of their clout lastly just because you came on the show
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i’m going to ask you anxious to meet all the famous people at the conference oh of course yeah yeah
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no i’m i’m totally kidding i i like i so get that right with
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relationships you always have to question at least i try to um why someone
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is reaching out or why someone like what they want and like you can usually tell
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when it feels like in your soul or gut like really genuine and you can kind of
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even if something sounds a little genuine you can always tell if there’s something there’s something behind it and yeah i i remember i’ve had the
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experience a few times where it seems pure and then like six weeks later i’m like i was so right it wasn’t um
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anyways it’s what i’m getting at it’s so neat that you’ve created an environment
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that allowed people to just show up and
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be themselves and then clearly you know you said people came to you after and said let’s do it again because they
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probably felt seen heard in value and they weren’t thinking about what does this person want from me yeah
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yeah would be cool so given that you know i think you have deep expertise in
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what makes people tick in relationships and maybe interpersonal communication you know
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what would you say you know to a lot of people who listen to this show are younger and a little bit more
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ambitious and founders or you know high achievers but you know maybe they’re not they don’t have the wisdom that you have
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or years of experience not using you i promise just you know
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what would you say to someone in their mid-20s about how to go about building a
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long-term network that’s a great question so the first thing i’d say
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is that your impression of yourself is probably wrong when it comes to
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reaching out to higher level and sort of influential people so a lot of the time what tends
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to happen is if you’re younger and if you’re kind of just in the early stages of something
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your initial impression and the way that your brain’s going to kind of work is to think there’s no reason why this other
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person would have an interest in what i have to offer because they are so accomplished and because they are so
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successful and the fact of the matter is
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most of those people are actually very very interested in who the future is
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because they’re not going to be here for a lot of the future they know it they understand they understand that they are
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at a certain age and that their you know science has dictated that they will live a certain amount of time
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and after that they’re gonna have to figure out what else happens right
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and they may have kids of their own they may have you know uh younger uh connections they may have younger
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employees like there’s all these different elements where like they can learn as much from you
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as you can learn from them right so that would be the first thing
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is don’t get caught up in this dynamic
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that you don’t have value yet because you don’t have the experience
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it’s a very very dangerous place to be a very very dangerous place
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completely the second thing is what i like to refer to as the tennis
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novice versus the tennis pro so if a tennis novice misses a shot
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in many cases the game is over because the tennis novice is now in their head thinking about that shot that they
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missed thinking about what’s coming out thinking about how they might lose the game all of these different types of
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things and sure enough they often lose the game often things kind of fall apart for them and the
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reason for this is that the tennis novice is a slave to the product
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they only see the end result they only care about the
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end result and if they don’t get the end result if they don’t win if they don’t have that thing happen
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they’re crushed the tennis pro misses a shot and says okay
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missed a shot what can i learn from this where was i standing where’s the other guy standing and they’ll keep going and
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they’ll go through the game and they’ll keep paying attention to what worked and what didn’t they’ll be reflective about
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the whole thing even if they lose the game they will go back and they will watch the game
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and they will think about it and they will and they will start to figure things out and they will continue to play they will
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continue to be a part of that world why because they are a student of the
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process as opposed to a slave slave to the product so the mistake
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that tons of people make when they do that outreach to somebody
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who impresses them is that they approach it from the tennis novice standpoint so if
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that person responds or doesn’t respond or says like hey kid you know stop
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annoying me or whatever they’re utterly crushed and they’re kind of done whereas
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if you look at whatever failure you get as new information and
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you’re basically just like tracking and paying attention to sort of figuring things out and you keep doing it
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you’re going to learn a ton about what works and what doesn’t and you’re gonna have instances where
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people do respond to you and get back in touch with you right and decide to talk to you but most
31:10
of the time that we don’t do that like most of the time we don’t take the the hail mary shot i
31:17
call this the extraordinary ask right there’s uh there’s a couple of different ways to think about asking and it spells
31:22
the word dime and basically you have the direct ask where basically you just sort of go in front of somebody and say like
31:28
will you do this thing for me and you know you ask them directly and that’s kind of how we’re always taught
31:33
to ask but it’s kind of the worst way to to ask somebody for something because we’re engaging the primitive part of the
31:39
brain like it’s like we put ourselves in fight or flight i’m feeling awkward you’re feeling awkward it doesn’t really
31:45
work that well the indirect ask is when we basically say like here’s this thing that i’m
31:50
trying to accomplish do you have any ideas and what i do is i take your brain out of fight or flight
31:57
and i bring it up into creativity i get you starting to think differently about how to solve the problem and then you
32:02
feel like a thought partner you feel like we’re working together so i’m actually more likely to get whatever it
32:08
is i’m asking for right then there’s the mutually beneficial which is where you take the time to show
32:15
the other person how they’re going to benefit from the experience of whatever it is that you’re asking for so you lay
32:22
out for them this is how we’re both going to benefit from this this is why i’m asking you about this yes i’m going
32:28
to get something but you’re going to get something too and then the final is the extraordinary
32:33
and the extraordinary ask is different from every other ask because the extraordinary ask is the ask that you
32:38
ask yourself it’s the one ask that is internal not
32:44
external and when you make an extraordinary ask what you do is you say who would i reach
32:49
out to who do i want to talk to who is my hail mary shot who i have already
32:55
assumed would never respond to me and then you make
33:00
that ask you reach out you take that hail mary shot and if you approach it
33:06
from the tennis novice stan from the tennis pro standpoint as opposed to the tennis novice
33:12
if you don’t hear back you don’t care you’re on to the next thing that you’re working on you’re on
33:18
to the next way you’re thinking about it if you do hear back you just created a relationship
33:24
that is with a higher level person that can become the benchmark for a
33:29
bunch of your other relationships so if you’re talking about long-term relationships and really building something solid for yourself
33:37
you want to get to know people who are at significantly higher levels who can give you the lay of the
33:44
land so like if you’re if you’re in your 20s you’re trying to figure out what do i do next i used to have this conversation all the
33:50
time with actors right because actors would tell me i want to go to broadway right i want to be on broadway and my my
33:56
question was always the same have you ever met a broadway performer
34:02
and very very few had and i said you need to sit down for coffee with a broadway performer and ask
34:09
them about their life and then decide if that’s the life that you want because it
34:14
is not the glamour that you see and that’s the thing we see we we think
34:20
we want things like we’re like oh i want to be a startup founder i want to be this i want to be that but how often do
34:26
we sit down with somebody who’s actually doing it and say oh that’s everything like do i want all of
34:33
that and be honest with ourselves it’s much much easier to sort of sit there and be like oh i want to be i want
34:40
to be whatever the impression is of of that person you you get you can go to any entrepreneur right now
34:46
and be like do you want to be elon musk and they’re like yeah yeah i want to be elon musk but my god i don’t
34:54
i would not want that amount of attention i would not want that amount
34:59
of just like craziness that’s happening around me all the time like no thank you
35:04
so i think like that’s the thing is that if you have things that you aspire to you really have to have conversations
35:11
with people who are doing those things to figure out is that actually what you want to do
35:16
so much there and they’re all incredible and just to sum it up if i we got it all
35:24
you never above or below someone make you know it’s all the older generation wants to hear
35:30
from the younger generation or there’s mutual value in any exchange make the hail mary pass
35:38
go for go for it go for it all tennis tennis novice
35:43
tennis pro and then if you make the hail mary shot you get in front of the right people figure out
35:49
what their life’s like do you really want it right yeah wow
35:55
some deep expertise michael um it’s like you’ve done this before or something so yeah a little bit let’s
36:02
let’s let’s this is what i find to be um a really interesting question as it
36:08
relates to relationships and something i’ve noticed with them myself significantly evolved in the last few
36:14
years i’m curious how you’d answer it so let me give you context and then let
36:19
me then i’ll show you a question okay i used to prepare so much for every call or meeting like i
36:26
was like preparation king i want like robotic to a to a point of over preparation
36:33
yeah for the years i’ve noticed whether it’s improv class or working on my presence or getting like therapy stuff
36:38
like i have like i actually try not to prepare all in a way that allows me to show up and
36:46
maybe let the most organic concern dip this process play out and yeah crazy um and i feel like it’s
36:52
more successful and i guess my my question to you is how would you tell someone if they were sitting down from
36:58
cough or coffee with that broadway performer they wanted to be like how would you prepare someone or not
37:05
prepare someone or how to have someone think about going into a conversation to make the
37:11
most out of it if it’s someone they’ve never met before and i find that question fascinating so how would you
37:17
answer it yeah i would say think of the most interesting questions you can
37:24
ask ask questions that get them to talk the mistake that most people make when they
37:31
meet somebody that they admire is that they they take the time to
37:37
research the person in some cases they take the time to really think about the person but they
37:42
take next to no time to think about what question they’re gonna ask yeah you know and and the thing is
37:49
you can get anything in life that you want
37:55
if you ask the right questions like 100 so the more thoughtful you are about
38:01
your questions the more opportunities you’re going to create for yourself people love
38:07
hearing a question that they haven’t heard before and you will instantly stand out
38:15
if you ask a question that they haven’t heard before or you ask it in such a way
38:20
that they’re like man i never thought about it that way you will just completely blow the person
38:27
away and you want to think about like what is something that you are genuinely curious
38:34
about in terms of their journey their world their pro you know their process
38:40
and pay attention to how do they interact like how do they respond to that
38:46
question do they lean in and say oh my god that that’s a great question do they step
38:52
back and say oh man i really wish you hadn’t asked me that that feels kind of personal and awkward you know and like
38:57
again pay attention right look at how are people having an experience in the moment one
39:04
of the one of the most powerful tools that we have at our disposal that is
39:10
highly highly underutilized is active listening and active listening
39:16
is when we are fully present with somebody when we’re talking to them we’re not in the
39:22
future we’re not in the past we’re not thinking about what we want to say next we’re not thinking about what we just
39:27
said we are just listening to them paying attention to them hearing every detail
39:35
about what it is that they have to say it is super hard to do because our brains do not want to stay on anything
39:41
for one for for a very long period of time we want to jump off to whatever the next thing is but if you hone your
39:48
skills of active listening you will ask better questions i
39:53
guarantee because most people miss the nuance most people miss the details and it’s the nuance and the details that
40:00
make for the best questions well said all around
40:06
you kind of agree more even if you don’t prep a ton still think about the things
40:12
that can be interesting to somebody else and things you can learn from and uh yeah
40:17
it takes takes uh i love what you said too about active listening and the nuances and details because you’re right
40:24
when you dig into those things you can draw out things that you never thought you could and maybe they’re sharing things for the
40:30
first time they never thought they would too so um well said mike we have a couple minutes left here i want to do a couple
40:37
uh hot seat questions rapid fire um and then we’re gonna we’re gonna
40:42
close out and we’re gonna tell people where to find you and give you a little snippet of you know share what you do today
40:48
how do you wanna be remembered by your daughters what do you want them to say about you when you’re gone daughters right
40:54
yes i’ve got yeah i’ve got two daughters um i want them to
41:00
feel um that i was always there for them no matter how busy i got no matter what
41:06
happened no matter what work came through i was always there for them
41:11
amazing your mom is watching over you today what
41:17
what do you think she’d say about your journey since she left the physical world
41:23
my mom was always one to say that she was proud whenever anything that i worked on like she came and saw my first
41:29
play when i put my first play up in new york and all those things so i would i would like
41:35
to believe uh she would say that she was proud of me love it
41:41
what’s one thing it’s like a burning desire of yours maybe internally that you haven’t
41:47
explored yet that you’ve always wanted to it’s interesting i have
41:53
always had a uh interest in writing a book um and
41:59
i am in the midst right now of developing a proposal uh you know for that you know for that purpose but it’s
42:05
been a long time thing where i’ve always kind of thought about it i’ve had people talk to me about it but i’ve never
42:11
actually done it um so so yeah i think that would be the thing that falls into that category
42:17
awesome i’m excited for you in your journey um thanks for all the incredible
42:23
expertise you shared with us today i would love for you to share one where to find you a little background on what you do i know we didn’t touch on maybe
42:29
your every career today but uh feel free to blurb yourself and where people can
42:35
uh find you sure um so the work that i do these days is i help thoughtful givers become
42:41
thought leaders so a lot of my work is around the messaging component of things i basically help entrepreneurs who are
42:49
trying to get their ideas out there in a bigger way i help them figure out how to make those ideas referable and sort of
42:55
get their get their stuff out there and you can find me i’m just at
43:01
smallpondenterprises.com is uh is my company and i also have a podcast
43:07
that you can check out called accesstoanyonepodcast.com i ask a lot of these types of
43:13
relationship oriented questions and things like that and then i’m pretty much all over the socials so you know
43:19
you can always ping me at any time and always happy to say hello awesome well thank you so much so
43:26
enjoyed it thanks for the vulnerability the the personal stories the expertise it was it was a delight
43:33
awesome thank you so much for having me i really appreciate it if you enjoyed this episode as much as i
43:39
did i hope you leave a review on the platform of your choice and share it with a friend who you think would find
43:45
it valuable if you’d like to receive a written newsletter and thought leadership head on over to bwmisions.com
43:53
[Music] and subscribe see you on the next show
43:59
[Music]

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This post was previously published on ARCBOUND.COM.

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The post Michael Roderick: One Career Change From Thought Leadership appeared first on The Good Men Project.