Overcoming Mental Barriers: Unlocking Your Potential Through Self-Awareness

Free Agent Podcast with Meg Schmitz – Guest: Ted Santos, Owner of Turnaround Investment Partners

Meg Schmitz:
Hi everyone and welcome to or welcome back to the Free Agent podcast. My name is Meg Schmitz, your lovely hostess. If you’ve been here before or if you’re brand new, this conversation is all about free agency and I will go into storytelling of why I named it Free Agent Agent Podcast. Not right now, but there is a story behind that.

The topic here is really all about taking control over your financial future. The mission of my show is to share inspiring conversations with real people who took the leap into self employment, business ownership, sometimes franchising, but really to experience freedom. From corporate refugees and executives tired of the desk job to entrepreneurs and investors looking to share camaraderie and inspiration through their own business journey, my podcast shines a spotlight on real people who stepped into the unknown, took control over their destiny, and became their own boss.

Sometimes I depart from my regular routine. Not very often. But over the last six seasons, I’ve had about 150 guests. And today, Ted Santos is on. He and I don’t know each other very well, which makes for an interesting interview arrangement. But Ted sent me an email that I thought, wow, this is a disruptor. So as he and I spoke last week and got to know each other, I thought, absolutely, I need to have you on my podcast to talk about some of your really interesting techniques to help people achieve more. So, Ted, welcome to the podcast today.

Ted Santos:
Great. Thanks for having me. I look forward to this conversation. Getting to know you has been a pleasure, and I can only imagine the questions you’ll have for me. So I’m ready.

Meg:
Good. All right. So Ted is a lot of things. Ted is an author, but a leadership coach. I don’t know if you’d call yourself an executive coach, but you’re really. My takeaway from our conversation last week is that you’re an agent for change by making people get uncomfortable and then making decisions going forward based on. And uncertain, uncertain outcomes, but trusting the process of trying to disrupt typical routines and create new ways, you can explain it way better than I can. So talk about the work you do, and then we’ll go back in history and really get to the root of why you do what you do the way that you do it.

Ted:
Sure. So the short is disrupt or be disrupted. And if you do not disrupt your organization, your competition, the COVID, the economy, something will disrupt you. And so if you’re the CEO of a company and you are not intentionally creating problems, you should be fired or retrained immediately.

Meg:
And that’s what I found so interesting, is that you’re not a problem solver who is going to go in and create the band-aid like so many coaches try to do. You’re—yeah. So talk about your process.

Ted:
Right. So you often hear, oh, we don’t have company engagement. You know, how do we get our people engaged? And, you know, we’ll, as you said, we’ll talk later. But at a young age, I learned that people are resilient. People have more in them than they sometimes know how to pull out.

And oftentimes, chaos, disruption, breakdowns, problems will pull that out of people.

Ted:
So to paint the picture so everyone can see it. A guy like Steve Jobs was also very good at that. People say, ah, he had something special. There was this magic. He was different from everyone else. But Steve was great at disrupting people. Not just the marketplace—his people.

And so if you could imagine, he comes in and says, hey, I want you to build a little miniature device. And it has to sell for this kind of money. And I want it to have 1,000 songs on it. And people are like, are you smoking something? Like, 1,000 songs? Like, I have a Walkman, you know, it has a cassette in it, you know, or it plays the radio. Why? We’re fine. No, we’re gonna make it much smaller than that. It should just drop into your pocket. You won’t even know it’s there. Or you can pin it on a shirt. But I want 1,000 songs that you can have on this thing.

How do we make that? You know, we make these big, beautiful computers that all the ad agencies love. Why are we engaged in making listening devices? It makes no sense. But that’s a problem. And once people solve the problem that he created, you have a breakthrough. You have access to new markets, you have a whole new revenue stream.

And then he creates the next problem. Says, okay, now that we have this little device with 1,000 songs on it, make it a cell phone. It’s like, oh, you’ve gone too far. We’re making phones now?

So that’s a great example of how CEOs—John F. Kennedy declaring, we’ll go to the moon before the end of the decade. The founding fathers saying, we declare independence. We are our own country.

You know, you can go on—Tom Watson Jr. saying, we’re going to make a mainframe. And he allotted X amount of dollars and X amount of time, and it went over the budget and time. And he said, I don’t care, I’ll put more money in it. And bang, there’s the mainframe. And it put them on a map in a very big way.

So, but it’s almost always a problem because people don’t know how to do it. There’s no blueprint for it. You know, how do you fly to the moon? And we can’t even prove it’s been done. How do we do that? The Wright brothers were creating an airplane. This is a huge problem to solve.

Meg:
Yeah.

Ted:
So people can—as a leader, you can create problems for the organization to solve. But as a person, you can create a problem for yourself. I mean, let’s, you know, I want to go to the gym, and I’ve never been. So that could be a problem initially, except the outcome—you can have this body in this level of health that you’ve never had in the past, but it requires some kind of commitment.

So for me, before, you know, I don’t come in and say there’s a problem you’re going to create, the first thing is to address what I say—that what you know hides what you don’t know.

So if you already know the Walkman is as good as it gets, and you know this is all we need—we have miniature listening devices already called a Walkman—you’ve already presupposed you don’t know how to do this other thing. We’re miniaturizing. Like, you know, where are we getting this?

I mean, Steve Jobs in 1983 came out with something called the Newton and failed. But really what it ended up being was this iPad is what it was. And people will say, well, it was ahead of its time. No, people probably couldn’t see the logic on why you would create a computer that goes into the palm of someone’s hand. Because in 1983, most people didn’t even have a computer on their desk at work. And surely most didn’t have a computer at home. So why are we putting it in the palm of their hands?

But once it’s in the office, everyone has the one on their desk. A lot of people have it at home. Okay. And the iPod itself was just a computer with a thousand songs on it. It was a computer.

So you’re—to miniaturize—perhaps even your vendors who make the micro semiconductors or microchips probably couldn’t see, like, the end of the tunnel. It didn’t make sense.

Meg:
Well, that’s typical human nature too. And that’s my training is in counseling. People won’t get out of their own way unless they have to get out of their own way.

There needs to be a pain point. Some say about people running a marathon—you’re either running towards something or you’re running away from something. But you’re not going to run a marathon if you’re a creature of habit and you’re comfortable, content where you are.

Right? How many people I work with, which is not my listening audience, who are quite comfortable where they are—say in the job market—then they get uncomfortable because now they’re falling out of the ivory tower and they’ve got to start over or find a new silo to go fit into. That’s not really who we’re talking about.

What we’re talking about is the forced need to change. But for you, it’s seeking out opportunities to make a substantial change. And that for you, as I learned last week, really comes from your upbringing and some significant events that shaped you as a young man. I’ll let you go as far back as you think it’s important.

Ted:
Okay, so before I say that, I work with people to address blind spots, mental barriers. There are beliefs that people have. I mean, you can go back when Copernicus said, hey, the Earth is not the center of the universe, and they didn’t buy that—they executed him. But people already knew the facts.

And so one of the beliefs that are like that, that we have now and people don’t question it, is—we hear people all the time say, change is hard.

And once you believe something, there’s a gentleman—Jean-Paul Sartre—said, once people believe something, they go out of their way to prove what they believe is right. So if people believe change is hard, and here you are, the leader in an organization or of a division, and you want to take on this breakthrough initiative, people will say, “Well, you know, boss, change is hard. So I don’t know how you expect us to do that. I’m only human.”

So when you can work with people and get them to unlearn belief systems that they inherited that have no validity—except we just bought into it—and it stifles growth. It shapes our actions.

So if you believe change is hard, your actions are going to be constrained or expressed in such a way to validate, “You see how hard it was to change? I just couldn’t do it.” But we had this ultimatum, or the competition did it, now we had to. Now we’re disrupted by the competition, and we see that it can be done.

So it’s sort of like when people believed the mile couldn’t be run under four minutes. And once Roger Bannister ran it in 1956, I think one other person ran it under four two weeks later—and he ran it a little faster than Roger.

So, you know, there are so many beliefs that we have. And back then they said it was humanly impossible to run the mile in less than four minutes. Right now the world record for the mile is 3 minutes and 43 seconds. They didn’t change the distance on the mile. You trained in a way that supported you running way faster than four minutes.

Meg:
Yeah.

Ted:
So at a young age, I was introduced to disruption. I was six years old. It was New Year’s Eve. My mother—and I’m the oldest—at that time there were only three, but there are four of us now, four children.

And so she takes her three children to her mother’s for New Year’s Eve, and all of her brothers, her siblings, are there, and other family members, and we have a great time. And it’s, who knows, four or five in the morning. So, you know, it’s pretty late. But I’m six years old, so I’m sleeping.

So before she goes home, she drops her brother off and his wife at home. And then we go home. And I’m sleeping, right, sitting right next to her in the front seat. And then I have my brother and sister next to us. And she said normally she would have put us in the back because that was a safety thing, but she figured, ah, 15-minute drive from my brother’s house to home—not a big deal.

Well, I wake up and the car is wrapped around a tree.

Meg:
Oh.

Ted:
And I’m just tall enough to look over the dashboard. And I watch my mother run home. And then in no time, here comes my father and his cousin. They carry us out, take us to the hospital.

And I, you know, broke my nose. I had to get stitches here. I had some huge gash on my knee. We all had to get stitches. Well, what I learned changed my life forever. Like, I could no longer see the world the same because I had seen, for my six years in life at that time, I had seen my mother run before I knew how she ran.

And when she got out the car and ran home, she didn’t limp, she didn’t crawl—she just ran home. And it was only about a hundred yards. We were literally about 100 yards from home. And at the hospital I learned she had two broken legs.

Meg:
Oh my goodness. That’s adrenaline.

Ted:
I think they now are finding that when you’re—they call it a flow state. Your frontal lobe shuts down. So all the rationale and logic that would have said, “I’m in pain and I can’t run” was like—it was not needed. The frontal lobe shuts down and you go.

This is the latest research they found—there’s a gentleman, Steven Kotler, he has a book The Rise of Superman, where they talk about getting in flow.

Meg:
And so, anyway—your Superwoman, super mom.

Ted:
So now at 6, you know, I’m thinking, okay, I saw that. And human beings have something in them that they just don’t know how to pull out.

So I’m on this journey to do that. And at 9, I start studying human behavior because I want to understand what is it that we have? How can I better understand it?

At 11 I start exercising. I want to build this body that can do great things. I’m 5’6”, I weighed 143 pounds in high school. I was dunking basketballs at 5’6”, and I played on the defensive line, which technically should be the biggest man on the field. But I trained to run with broken legs. That’s the way I trained, that’s the way I played.

I broke records in both football and track because I was always after something. Like, there’s something there.

Fast forward—I’m 21 and we lose both parents. And now I’m the oldest of four. And there’s still that mindset. You know, now I have to manage this situation, and I know there’s something in me. And I even have something that’s in my brother and sisters that—for us to work together.

You know, there’s really nothing—we can’t resolve our parents. They’re not coming back. So there’s a lot that we need to take care of. You know, my sisters were—they were 12 and 16. My brother was 19, so he was on a full ride football scholarship. So we take him off to college. My sisters are living with relatives.

But at some point I thought I could do a better job raising my sister. So I bought a home in Washington, D.C., and had her come live with me.

And so many of the things that I accomplished, and especially when I was asking my two sisters—12 and 16—to do things they didn’t know how to do, I knew that now, instead of it’s just me running with broken legs, like accomplishing things with that mindset, I now need to pull it out of them.

So, you know, I would ask them to do things that I knew they didn’t know how to do. I knew they were going to fail. So I never condemned them for failing. And they came back to say they failed. I asked a question. They went and tried again. And they failed and came back. I asked more questions. They failed again. They came back, and then eventually they accomplished it.

And so that’s what they would do. I would always ask them to do something. And eventually I could just ask them to do something and, you know, this neuroplasticity—they had developed a new way of thinking to solve problems.

So I didn’t really have to ask questions and I never told them how to do it. The Socratic approach helped them rethink how they solve problems or look at problems.

So then, now that I’m in a, you know, find myself in an executive position—a Chief Operating Officer—and when my people come to me and say, “I have a problem, what to do?” I became Socrates. I didn’t tell them what to do.

And eventually they stopped coming to me. Or they’d say, “I have a problem what should i do? I have a problem. I know you’re going to ask me these questions. I’ve already asked myself those questions, and I’m stuck.” And I’d ask another question. They’d say, “Ah, I didn’t think of that one.” And then eventually they stopped coming to me. They didn’t need me anymore because they could solve it.

They then say, “Hey, Ted, two weeks—we had a major problem. Almost lost the client. Partly our fault, partly client’s fault. Here’s how I solved it. The client loved how I solved it so well that they—the client—picked up the phone, called one of their clients, and sent them to us.”

So now my operations team is getting me new business.

Meg:
Referrals yeah.

Ted:
Right, right. Well, it wasn’t even a referral. They just came. They just said, “Hey, we were told we should use you.”

Meg:
It was a mandate.

Ted:
Yeah, “We should use you. What do we do here? How do we sign up?”

So what I saw—and I live here in Jersey, and I’m very close to New York City, like Hudson River. There was a bridge I could walk. So when 9/11 happened, I’m right here.

I lived in Acapulco, Mexico, for about two years. I was there when they had their worst hurricane in the history of the city. And I’ve seen how people come together to work. I saw it here with 9/11. I saw it in Mexico. I’ve seen it in other things.

And as I said, I started researching human behavior at a young age. Because when you hear about the woman who lifts the car for her child—like, logically, she knows she can’t do it, but under those circumstances, she did it.

So I saw people do incredible things in the face of chaotic chaos. Disruption. Things that would be normally unachievable. So how do you pull that out of people on purpose? And so—creating projects.

Meg:
Exactly my question. I’m so glad you’re asking it because I think in times of distress, people can do things that they don’t rationally—they can’t. Irrationally, they can’t conceive of it.

But you’ve led teams and you were telling me last week and I’ve led teams. And if they don’t buy in, or they don’t have that same. it’s not even the owner’s mentality, really, but there’s—it’s not like they’re born with it.

How do you help people tap into something that they never believed they had inside of them in the first place?

Ted:
So one is having people question many of their assumptions, their presuppositions. Another is looking at where their view of the world—where it started. Like the origination, the genesis of the way I see myself.

I want to think of a good example. So there are people who experienced something where, let’s say, they felt like they failed to—they were helpless or failed to be someone. Like, they were unable to accomplish something.

And so in that moment, they may have created a strategy in their mind to never have that feeling, that sensation again. So how do I, like, in the future, overcome—I never let that happen again. And that becomes sort of their superpower, except they end up with one gear. And that’s the only gear they have.

Meg:
So I’m thinking, for example, I’ve got a family member who is absolutely stuck at the age of 63—almost 64 years old—with a loop playing in the head that, “I’ll never be able to accomplish because my mother failed me, my father failed me,” all the same familiar opportunities that I grew up with.

And so he continues to embrace the victim mentality—that even though he’s achieved really great things, he thinks very little of himself. He’s got anger management issues.

So can you—can you weave a spell to help people who are that stuck or one-sided to become part of the solution?

Ted:
So there’s a woman I know, and at the time she was 45. And one day she asked me, “Why do I always have to be right?” And she had this anger stuff going on also.

And I said to her, “Well, when you were about five years old, you may have given the wrong answer.”

And she lit up—she sat up and said, “Oh, oh, oh. I know exactly when that happened. I was exactly five, and I was in the dentist’s office with my mom, sitting in the waiting room with other children and their mothers. And the dentist comes out, opens the door and says, ‘Hi children, who knows what this is?’”

And she was like, “I’m the first one. I got this one. Oh, oh, I know what it is.”

She answered, and he said, “Nope, that’s wrong.” And she said from that moment, she doesn’t even know what happened after that. All she could think was how stupid and embarrassing she was, and she would never let this happen again.

Guess what her profession was?

Meg:
Counseling.

Ted:
I thought you were about to say it—counselor. Like an attorney.

Meg:
Well, and that’s what I’m thinking. Someone who offers counsel. It could be an attorney, it could be…

Ted:
Yeah, yeah. So and a defense attorney.

So she would fight like an alley cat, even with the judge. Like, she was vicious. But she was like that all the time, because she never wanted to be wrong. So she—she had a firm. She had her own firm and she had other lawyers and support staff working, and she was angry all the time. Like, she just couldn’t be wrong about anything.

Meg:
Yeah.

Ted:
And it was because of something that happened at 5. And that was driving her. So as a defense attorney—that, shoot, that was great. You wanted her to defend you.

But as a leader in an enterprise, that was not that. So it was like she just had this one gear: just never be wrong. And I’ll fight.

Now, there is a flip side to that. If you put her in a situation where she absolutely had no idea what she was doing, she would revert to literally being a five-year-old.

And she would say, “Oh, my tummy hurts. I don’t feel good.”

Like, as soon as you start talking about something that she didn’t understand, that was her out. Because she couldn’t fight you on that. She didn’t know enough.

So she had two gears: one gear—I fight to be right. And even if I think I’m right, I’m going to fight. And even in her intimate relationships.

But if you take me way out somewhere and I know I can’t survive in that—“My tummy hurts. I don’t feel good.”

And I couldn’t believe—like, she was sitting at a table and there were other people at the table—and she sort of stretches out and says, “I don’t feel good. I need to eat. I’m hungry.”

And this is like this vicious criminal lawyer who’s acting like she’s five years old.

Meg:
So how do you help people? Because so many people are stuck. I think you and I talked last week about being the most healthy-up people there are.

Somehow we figured out how to get—and thank you, therapists, for all those years of assistance—because we all have. No one’s life is perfect. And some people will point maybe at you or me and say, “Oh, look at where you are now. You are entitled to that. That came naturally to you because you grew up with so many stressors and so many…” But it wasn’t that. And it’s the same with me.

You don’t have a rosy, positive, sunny attitude about getting up every day and taking on new challenges and making them work like I do—you and I both do—but most people don’t, because they’re hung up somewhere in here.

But for your, for example, your primary clientele—how do you help people like that become a positive, contributing member of the team and create these new solutions to advance?

Ted:
So it’s—as I said, people have blind spots. There are things that people believe about themselves. So the woman who believes that she always had to be right—once we could see, not only like—that day came to her immediately. That day is so clear in her mind. She could tell you if it was sunny out, what time of the year. She might even be able to tell you what she was wearing. That was 40 years ago. That’s how impactful certain events are.

And then from that moment, we shape to say, “I’ll never let that happen again.”

And so—this is kind of a crude way to say it—but it’s almost like that’s a part of your identity that you’re addicted to.

Meg:
Absolutely.

Ted:
So—so addiction. If you can’t even acknowledge that you’re drinking too much, it’s very difficult to do anything about it.

So once you can see—you have the distinction for what occurred, what was the genesis of thinking that way—now you can start to unlearn that and revert. So you’ve reverse engineered, “How did I get there?” Okay, and what are the outcomes?

One is I’ll fight everyone to be right. The other—if I can’t, I’ll revert to being, you know, a five-year-old with a tummy ache.

Meg:
Right. Right.

Ted:
So in the past, you never had a choice. You would just say, “This is the way I’ve always been and it is what it is.” And you haven’t always been that way—you just started being that way at the age of five in the dentist’s office.

So once you can see it, you now have a choice. So when you find yourself in a situation, you can choose: “Do I want to fight and be right like I’ve always done? Or do I want to ask questions and better understand and make sure I understand this situation?”

And if it’s something I don’t understand, instead of saying “My tummy hurts,” I can ask some questions to get me up to speed so I understand what’s going on.

Meg:
So do you need to facilitate sort of an unraveling with an individual or a team? And then, as you said, identify the blind spots. Then you can really start to provoke those questions of, “Well, how can we do this differently? How can we do this better?”

So it sounds to me like you have to do some breaking down or dismantling of those thoughts so that that person or that team can start to, in a more healthy fashion, engage with themselves or with each other as a team in order to create—like you were saying—“Let’s take this itty bitty little idea and say, how do we throw a thousand songs in there?”

I imagine they had to get over some of their own preconceived notions that you were talking about.

Ted:
Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, as if we go back to the attorney that identity that has to be right and to avoid looking embarrassing, we’ll just say, “I have a tummy ache.” That mindset has many preconceived notion limitations built into it.

So if I don’t know about this, I can’t do it.

So imagine, you know, you’re Steve Jobs and you have someone like that on your staff and they have to work on this and they can’t be right about this because you’re asking them to put 1,000 songs on something. “How do you do this? My tummy aches. I can’t do it. I want to go home.”

Meg:
You’re out, next.

Ted:
I’m not doing this. You know, “You’re asking for too much.” And, you know, the ultimate way to get out of something is to say, “I’m only human. What do you expect from me? A thousand songs? That’s not humanly possible. I’m only human.”

Meg:
You know, kind of watching the time, and I want to make sure that we touch on your book.

Ted:
Okay.

Meg:
And it’s called Here’s Why You Can’t Find Love.

Ted:
Correct.

Meg:
How does this tie into the individuals or teams? What was the starting point for that book, and how does it help you as you’re working with some of these individuals?

Ted:
I’m just running through my mind, how much did we talk about this already?

So I wrote the book because divorce rate is over 50%. That can’t be healthy for any country. And, you know, for decades people have been asking me, “Why do you care about divorce rates? Like, why are you making, you’re always talking about—it needs to be handled and blah, blah, blah.”

So I could never tell people why. I just knew it was a problem in our society.

And so, you know, if you can’t make that relationship work between two people and then you go to work and maybe you’re not good at collaborating with people at work also. And if you are triggered by things in your divorce, you’re going to be triggered by the same thing at work. Just, the difference at work is you have what we call professional business etiquette. And you’re not allowed to behave in a certain way.

But at home, there are no, there’s no etiquette. There’s sky’s the limit. You can just do anything.

So then I found some numbers. There’s an organization called Life Innovations, and they said that corporate America is losing $300 billion every year to workplace productivity. Did we talk about that?

Meg:
No.

Ted:
Oh, okay. Perfect.

So why do you think corporate America is losing $300 billion every year in workplace productivity?

Meg:
Yeah, people are distracted, and they’re wound up in their own cycle in their head about how things ought to be done or how relationships happen. And they can’t really separate between personal and professional.

And so they carry the baggage from home into work. And that then prevents them from being highly productive and efficient because they’re still working through their own personal loop.

Ted:
That’s pretty good. And it’s, I would sum it all up in one word. You want to take a shot at that one word?

Meg:
No, I want you to tell me. 

Ted:
The suspense! The lack of productivity is because of divorce.

And so there’s another organization that found when people are going through divorce, their productivity at work drops by 50 to 75%.

So imagine, you have a percentage of your employees headed for a divorce, another percentage in the middle of it, and another that just came out of it. They’re distracted.

Meg:
And that is, there’s a gal I interviewed, I know her from Chicago, Karen Covy. And she helps people to get off the fence. She used to be an attorney not a divorce attorney.

Ted:
Okay.

Meg:
She never wanted to touch anything with divorce. After she retired from law, she realized how much she’d observed in the courtroom about human behavior.

Ted:
Right.

Meg:
And to your point, in some of these metrics—what Karen does is help people who are stuck in the loop of, “I can’t get a divorce, the kids are too young. I can’t get a divorce…” fill in the blank.

And all of the anxiety and the thoughts that get stuck in here—like Karen and I were talking about—when the voices in your head are louder than any stimuli coming from the outside, you’re never going to get it out of there, whether it’s positive or negative.

And this is what holds people up from full engagement and enjoyment is indecision.

Ted:
That’s part of it. But I’d like to mitigate the whole divorce problem.

So my book was written because often people marry someone who’s not compatible with them.

You know, we’re taught to believe, “Well, I know myself.”

But when I talked about the woman who was an attorney, she couldn’t tell me the reason she has to be right is because of that event that happened in the dentist’s office.

So this is something she didn’t even know she didn’t know about herself even though it happened to her. And when she asked me, “Why do I always have to be right?” I—you know, maybe I knew her for a year at the time. How would I know it’s something that happened at around the age of five?

But I, you know I didn’t know what the event was—but I assumed. I have seen enough people to know that certain things happen about around a certain age range.

Meg:
Yeah.

Ted:
And so we are not educated. Maybe things like psychology and neuroscience should be part of our high school education so people can better understand themselves.

And that makes it easier to choose a spouse who’s compatible with you, not someone who has things in common with you for this part of your life.

Because then you grow out of the things that you have in common. And now it seems like this is the wrong person.

The other part is, you know, when you look at conflict resolution, the secret to conflict resolution is, the conflict almost never has anything to do with the situation or the person. It’s what the conflict reminds you of.

And it’s unresolved conflicts that you have that you really kind of project out on the other person.

So if you don’t know how to resolve that conflict within yourself, you’re fighting other people all the time.

And that’s at work. You don’t even have to be in a divorce. You can be a single person who’s, you know, walking around with their sword, cutting heads off all day long because you’re not good at resolving your own conflicts so you’re taking it out on other people.

So that’s one of those things that’s built into my work. It’s not conflict resolution, but when you can distinguish, “I have to be right and fight. This has been happening since five. And I can see when it happens. I now have a choice.”

Do I want to keep behaving and operating this way? And, you know, I can see the impact it has on other people.

Because this woman—the employees—the receptionist said when the owning attorney, the managing partner, would get off the elevator, the receptionist said, “I could tell by the way she was walking that she was going to be angry, and this was going to be a bad day for us all.”

So her job as the receptionist was to watch her get off the elevator and then be Paul Revere and tell everyone, “We’re in trouble. This is bad. Run for the hills.”

So they would then be unproductive because, you know, they were hiding from her.

Meg:
Yeah.

Ted:
And so—but—or, “She’s in a good mood. It’s going to be a great day.”

So that you don’t want your organization operating like that.

Meg:
No. You were also telling me a story last week about when you were a young man and you were in a job and you saw a superior who you thought you could do the job better. And he said, “Okay, give it a whirl.” And you did.

And so just going back in time for you, Ted, you were exposed to so many interesting situations that now learning more about you and how you get people to get past the stuck five-year-old mode and recognize that what you’re doing or who you are is not facilitating or if it’s your own business then you’ve got to get out of your own way or you need to make those changes.

And so that’s where when I got that first email from you and I thought, “Oh, dismiss. I only curate my own guests.” I read your email. I thought, no this is captivating.

This is really a great way to turn that energy around. You were telling me too on our last phone call about your sisters and how impressionable they were at that point, but really needing you not to tell them how to do it but to enable them to take care of themselves without your mom or your dad.

Ted:
Right.

Meg:
You were really helping them to become future leaders and self-sufficient by letting them make their own mistakes. That’s just been a great, beautiful story to get to know you and how all this has evolved.

Ted:
Thank you.

Meg:
So we’re going to talk about—I’m going to put in the show notes the title of your book and we’ve got some other links that we will put in the show notes.

Thank you so much for making the time today. We were both having a little bit of technical issues and so hopefully the recording—the audio—comes out great and everybody gets a whole lot out of this.

But thank you for taking the time today to join me, Ted Santos, and I can’t wait to get this episode to launch.

Ted:
Thanks for having me. This was a great conversation. I love your questions and my commitment is always that people get value and that they can walk away with something that changes their life forever.

Meg:
Well, your storytelling is great and I think that’s really what resonates with people—is that we’ve all walked through fire at some point. We’ve all had challenges.

And so your anecdotal stories were spot on and very helpful. So thanks again.