Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): We have a very special guest John Starling (Guest) who has a wealth of experience from the entrepreneurial world. And also in the company culture space with personal We’re excited to chat with him and thank you for being with us John.
John Starling (Guest): You’re welcome. I’m glad to be here.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): A little bit more about John Starling (Guest) is a veteran entrepreneur of more than 25 years having advised companies from startups to the Fortune 50 and growth strategy and advised and coached countless individuals. He is the founder of potentially a holistic being platform based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs which helps people and organizations Benchmark visualize Monitor and improve their well-being.
John Starling (Guest): That’s me.
John Starling (Guest):
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): So again getting started John we did a little research and…
John Starling (Guest): Geez, it’s been quite a life.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I know we met in Las Vegas at the HR conference there last month and…
John Starling (Guest): So yeah, I play country music. I got really lucky.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): had some great conversations.
John Starling (Guest): I was playing in bars in Baltimore and…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I heard from events from your team that you are also a country singer and…
John Starling (Guest): 2013-2014 then I moved to South Korea for the second time in my life back in 2014.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): you told me about the book that you had written. So tell us a little bit more just about you and…
John Starling (Guest): And kept playing over there and…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): and your life experience.
John Starling (Guest): played a big. Show just me and sojourn Kaya Park who was my backup singer over there? And we are unbeknownst to us. About seven million people live around Seoul. Yeah. Yeah, we look after the show. We look back, wave.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): wow.
John Starling (Guest): Goodbye to the crowd lookbook over our shoulder and there was a control booth which I didn’t even notice and it said live. So we got signed.
John Starling (Guest): We put out two albums. One of them I’ve taken down. The other one is up on iTunes It’s all under my full name John Patrick Starling and…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): that’s
John Starling (Guest): John Patrick starling.com and original country music I Play guitar playing harmonica, right the songs and our big claim to fame was we opened for Weezer at pennaport in 2015. So yeah, we had a nice run. The first album was really just sort of Bluegrass. It was a nine piece ring of Bluegrass rockabilly that kind of stuff the second album which is still up online. It’s just a beautiful album from the late 60s.
John Starling (Guest): Early 70s style country ballads called by the time this gets to Nashville.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): My God.
John Starling (Guest): It won’t matter. And then I also wrote a children’s book. It’s an illustrated rhyming children’s book for kids from about four to 104 because it’s one of those books So as you get older, it takes on more and more meaning and that’s called Flight of the Platypus, a story of self-discovery. And I wrote that when the economy was pretty bad. So I’ve kept it up online for free anybody can read it to their kids or for themselves at Flight of the platypus.com. So yeah, it’s a little bit about
John Starling (Guest): but thanks, it’s
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Wow, that’s funny. For
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Around that. I’m so glad we needed to add all that to your bio. That’s amazing. and …
John Starling (Guest): Yeah, yeah, yeah, there were seven million not 70…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I think more people should follow your example of just doing something,…
John Starling (Guest): if it was 70. Yeah, Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): you…
John Starling (Guest): But yeah,…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): taking action and…
John Starling (Guest): you have to do it without attachment,…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): seeing where it goes and…
John Starling (Guest): you make art…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): it …
John Starling (Guest): because you make art…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): if there’s seven million people watching and…
John Starling (Guest): because you make art, I’ve never really been one to do it with any in Buddhism they call it a gaining idea.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): next thing, you have some amazing opportunities, that’s incredibly special both on the same side and author said really really need so
John Starling (Guest): I don’t have any real ideas. Just do what I do, Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Closer. Yeah, Yeah. little big but
John Starling (Guest): So boy, I have been coached a lot over the years. From my very first …
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): So we’d love to hear a little bit more about potential and…
John Starling (Guest): I’ve always loved mentorship right in the military.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): what you’re doing there. And what kind of LED do you use?
John Starling (Guest): And when I was a carpenter after the service in my Summers when I was a teacher studying from other teachers.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): And about your goal of genuinely making being for all tell us a little bit about that.
John Starling (Guest): And when I started my first company back in 1999 a long time ago. I immediately hired a coach and I’ve hired a series of coaches over the decades that I’ve been doing this kind of work. I became a Management Consultant and business coach and then became a certified professional life coach towards the end of my Consulting career. and I got into that because
John Starling (Guest): the work that I was doing in strategic planning, honestly 50% of the time the plans were not implemented. And the reason is because human beings don’t like change. It’s really that simple. and so if you want people to embrace change you have to be in a coaching conversation in order to make them okay with the change that the plan represents for them and for their organizations and for their subordinates Etc. So that’s how I got into coaching. And along the way I set up a couple of youth programs. I set up a free MMA School in Baltimore back in 2010. It’s a mentoring program in martial arts school. So was a life coaching program.
John Starling (Guest): On a simple sort of have to be achievement model. work with the kids monthly. What do you want to have out of life? What are you doing to get it and then? Who are you being in the matter? Right? That’s the coaching part. So that was the core of the program, but the martial arts is what brought them in right and then they did volunteer work to pay the tuition. So they would pick up trash with me and the other teachers once a month and then they got their tuition for free. And then I set up a first of its kind girls Rec Soccer program in Korea with my daughter. because in Korea it was ride or die you either went to the Olympics or you didn’t get to play soccer if you’re a girl. So we changed that and when we left there was
John Starling (Guest): Hundreds and hundreds of girls playing both at her school and in the program that we set up at her school and…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Wow.
John Starling (Guest): then we set up a community program as well. So we left it better than we found it but somewhere along the line. I just sort of hit the wall.
John Starling (Guest): coaching is amazing because you get to work with people one-on-one. But it’s downfall and not just from an economic standpoint.
John Starling (Guest): But really more importantly just from a net effect standpoint. I went to my coach Bill Clark of Clark leadership, and I said, I want to have a bigger. Effect in my short time left on this planet. However long that is, I want to reach more people and I am very poor. I grew up under the poverty line until I was about 11 when my mother remarried. not a lot of resources. and I’ve done pretty well, so my goal with potential was to make coaching feedback mentorship personal growth accessible to people that otherwise couldn’t afford it. so back in
John Starling (Guest): I guess it was. five years ago.
John Starling (Guest): I went to my mentor and told him what I wanted and he gave me some encouragement and I can’t even remember specifically what it was but something that’s coaching something opens up in the conversation for you that you didn’t see before. and I think I was like, yeah, why not now, look quit talking about it and just do it and So what I did was I reverse engineered Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. into an online being assessment if you’re familiar with mesos hierarchy it needs and your listeners probably it’s really a seminal.
John Starling (Guest): Construct to look at what it is to be a human being regardless of your age or your gender your language. It’s been proven out pretty well over the last 81 years now since he first published his paper and psychology today called a theory of human motivation, which was the root of all this. and what he posited was that every human being has to Or has these five?
John Starling (Guest): Areas of there which are your Safety and Security your physiology in reverse order there. So is your physiology. This is the interesting thing. They’ve been put in order, but they actually weren’t in his paper it’s an interesting caveat there, but the way it came down to
John Starling (Guest): sort of in the common parlance is that there’s this triangle and in that triangle, you have to have your physiology squared away and your Safety and Security and then your sense of love and belonging and then your sense of esteem and then you get this little bit of self-actualization, And I remember back. My first year in college after the military being in Psych 101 and raising my hand and saying to the professor. Yeah, I don’t buy it, I get the needs but I don’t get this triangle thing. I think that they’re always in and around us and she agreed and she said that was sort of put onto Maslow but it wasn’t actually in the paper and he came back later and clarified too. No. No, it’s more of a I don’t want to misquote him but it’s more of sort of a rubric than it is, a ladder.
John Starling (Guest): But long story short reverse engineered that into an online well-being assessment that gives some feedback and observations to help you improve your And then teamed up with a friend of mine who has spent most of his adult life living off and in the Himalayas up with the Tibetan Monks there in the Himalayas up in Northern India.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Okay.
John Starling (Guest): And he developed a whole set of exercises and potential which is called actualize it which is personal growth exercises. So all this feedback and all these exercises are algorithmically tied to your scores. So you go on. It takes about three minutes. You take potential spits out a pie chart showing your current well-being.
John Starling (Guest): And then it gives you feedback instantly and then it gives you exercises to do to improve it and then you can log back in. Any time and it starts to plot your being over time in a line graph. So we’ve sort of gamified being and it’s all free. My vision was to make it free for anybody in the world and it is free for individual users. and we have to have a business model to underwrite our good work in this world that we license to organizations and then they can use the dashboard feature to monitor the well-being of their people. So long long diatribe there. Sorry.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Not at all. I think that’s amazing and I just backtracking a little bit what you were saying about where you started from. You had so much potential that you were able to tap. And it sounds like you see that in so many people …
John Starling (Guest): Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): if you were able to come from below poverty to…
John Starling (Guest): Yeah, right. Yeah, people tell me that that’s my gift is that I have an ability to see what people can become I guess just…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): where you are now, then there’s so many people out there that can explore not only how much money they can earn but they’re potential with talents I mean our daughter she just finished her soccer season and…
John Starling (Guest): because I’ve seen it in myself now that at times has been accursed too…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): it’s just for fun,…
John Starling (Guest): because I had to learn
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): and I can’t imagine it…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): if her only option was to go all the way to the Olympics…
John Starling (Guest): From my mentor from Bill I had to learn the hard way on some bad hires over the years when I used to manage consulting firms.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): But Yeah.
John Starling (Guest): In accepting people for who they are. sometimes it’s a round Peg and a square hole and that’s what it is and no matter how much. I personally believe in human growth and transformation. as the old again back to the Buddhism And Buddhism they say you can’t polish a stone and…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts):
John Starling (Guest): make it into a diamond.
John Starling (Guest): It’s a stone. Sometimes that’s what
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah, yeah. Yep. What you said about change being so difficult for humans. That’s a theme that we’ve discussed many times and…
John Starling (Guest): Yeah, and I would add to that.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): in this podcast and…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): just what things we can implement that.
John Starling (Guest): That the reticence to change and…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Allow that change to move forward and…
John Starling (Guest): the pain and anguish and…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): it seems to always be back to like you said having the buy-in from those…
John Starling (Guest): gnashing of the teeth that goes with it is really bound up in one thing and that’s attachment.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): who really have the ability to implement that change and…
John Starling (Guest): That.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): having a coach I think is crucial to that.
John Starling (Guest): We’ve always done it this way. or we’re attached to. I spent three years of my life putting that EAP in but it doesn’t work. it’s got 17% adoption and for the 17% of your people that are using it. Nobody really knows. What parts of it are moving margins on which parts are that? It’s one of the things that potentially solves that you can use to measure the efficacy of your EAP. but the root of all that is attachment and if people can detach their ego from the outcome Everything works a lot better,
John Starling (Guest): Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Continually changing and implementing is how humans have gotten this far? and John I’m personally a pretty
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): big Enthusiast of Maslow’s hierarchy and his approach as well and those different needs that we have as humans we’re seeking for me the film and now there’s a measure of that that can be solved with monetary resources like physiological needs being able to afford food and shelter and clothing could be protected but then there’s other needs that are above that the belongingness and love and esteem needs that require, growth and human interaction with other people. So I loved it when I learned about potential and what you’re doing last month in Vegas. I was so excited for this conversation. I think a lot of our listeners here.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): We’ve got leaders Executives that are trying to find ways to prioritize their people…
John Starling (Guest): Yeah, that’s a great question. The business case is that what businesses measure performance? right So,…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): which is prioritizing profits.
John Starling (Guest): kpis mbos outcomes.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): So maybe speak to us from your perspective a little bit about the business stance.
John Starling (Guest): If your company runs on EOS,…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): What is the business case for caring about your people’s well-being?
John Starling (Guest): it’s rocks, balance score cards Six Sigma, there’s all these different ways of measuring progress in organizations. And what they’re trying to measure is performances rooted in being period full stop
John Starling (Guest): and that’s of the team level. That’s at the large group level that’s at the Enterprise level. So what’s really interesting and we just sort of fell into this market. We had no intention of developing an HR Tech Tool. We wanted to develop something that could be used around the world by individuals and then we moved into NGOs who are using the tool in developing countries through social workers to measure the efficacy of the programs that they’re putting in place. And like I said, gee that that is getting expensive. We have to have a business model to underwrite this. That’s how we got it to be an HR Tech Tool. But what we’ve learned in the short time that we’ve been in the commercial Market the last six months really.
John Starling (Guest): Pardon me, is that we think the market missed it? We think they just flattened it. They’re measuring things like satisfaction and engagement and all this crap, and all of that looks at any of these tools for measuring. And I will bet you lunch next time. I see Matt and you can bring your lovely wife with you. It’s rooted in But nobody’s measuring being. Gallop is probably the closest proxy but they measure the workplace when you go to work suddenly you have a completely different well-being than when at home as that’s why we say we measure holistic well-being.
John Starling (Guest): Right, like look,…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah.
John Starling (Guest): I’m good at compartmentalizing right, my wife’s even better. But the fact is I am the same human being when I’m at the office as when I’m home, everybody is right. If you’re a mother who has stage four cancer. Right
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Mm-hmm
John Starling (Guest): You don’t leave that at home so it’s an asinine way to look at the market, I’ll do respect to gallop because they’re the market leader, but they missed Pratipa Canon who’s our or Vice President of Partnerships. Pardon…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): You don’t leave that at home.
John Starling (Guest): She really nailed it. When we were at HR Tech, she’s like John, none of the companies measure the person’s relationship to the company. It’s all about the company. They’re not measuring the person the being of the person and also you’re right. And I remember I went to the Keynote. And the keynote put up this slide. I took a picture of it and it had four quadrants of being, right? And I came back to the booth that we had afterwards.
John Starling (Guest): And I showed pratipa I said We’re right in the middle of all this he had this for this four quadrant graph that showed the, four elements of being which I didn’t agree with in the first place even Gallop has five, but it’s not the same five that we measure. And he showed all the different R Tech tools. for each of the quadrants Right, and I’m like, yeah they missed it, too.
John Starling (Guest): Right, that’s great. My being with physiology lives separately, in a different tool than my financial well-being which for mezzle would fall under Safety and Security it’s crazy. So yeah, we think we’re on something.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): interesting
John Starling (Guest): We’ll see it’s good in the world. I wanted to tell you real quick about it a second ago, something you brought to mind when you were talking about money and all that kind of stuff, So interestingly, I think that this is up now at our LinkedIn. If not, it’ll be up in a couple days. But our tool was just used in India recently by an NGO. That went out and measured. tribal rural communities
John Starling (Guest): some of these folks are pretty educated, but what was really interesting was? the data showed and the graphics that you’ll see on LinkedIn and such will show you that the being of people with a bachelor’s versus a masters. It was pretty marginal growth. The people with the Masters had a little bit higher people with no education in that group or tribe as they refer to themselves they had
John Starling (Guest): really low physiology scores 10 out of 100 as I recall. and they’re self-actualization scores were maybe 20 or 30 out of 100. So anecdotally what that tells me is and again not my study. They just used our tool but what that tells me is that
John Starling (Guest): Their physiology living sustenance level is someone uneducated in India.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Okay.
John Starling (Guest): Their physiology is so bad probably from lack of nutrition and overwork that they can’t even entertain ideas like personal growth Etc. What was wild though that stood out to me immediately in the graphs and then I looked at quotes that looked at it more closely. It’s like, wow their sense of belonging is several points higher. Then the rest of the people in the group. Now it is because they have to work together to survive. So the things that we’re discovering through the use of this tool both in the corporate world and…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): yeah.
John Starling (Guest): for our work in the developing world is just stunning and in both cases, it’s giving people the ability to make more informed decisions
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts):
John Starling (Guest): in order to better deploy their resources so that to me is just enormous. It’s fundamentally changing the way ngos and npos look at themselves because now they can prove the efficacy of their programs and go back to their funders the following year and say hey, this is why you should fund us again. We use the tool to measure women who have been trafficked and who went into a healing and recovery program. We measured them before, during and after and the women had X percent gain in. Safety and Security belonging and self-esteem and that’s why you should fund us again next year. Right
John Starling (Guest): And what’s really powerful but one of the things I want to know there’s a couple of things started going on so much, but there’s a couple of things that if I could just snap my fingers. These are the things that I want to know. On the developing World side. I’ve been all around the world. Right and I’ve been to Cambodia three times and every time I go there I’m approached by children with distended bellies. Obviously, they have parasites and worms. With rickets right sometimes with polio. They’re still leprosy in Cambodia, so as westerners from a very wealthy country. We sort of have it in. I always hear that poor people don’t have much but they’re so happy. They’re so much happier than we are. Maybe
John Starling (Guest): Up until the point where you have worms and rickets. Right and…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah.
John Starling (Guest): you’re malnourished and you’re going out begging for money to give your father so he doesn’t beat you. Right. So where’s the line? That’s one of the things I want to discover with this tool. And then I have a daughter going off to college and one of the things I really want out of this tool. I want potential used in every college in the United States. And I want them to Benchmark the being of the students when they come in student faculty staff. Every year when people return to school and God forbid if there’s a mass shooting what you’re going to see is safety belonging security. They will go off a cliff that’s just common sense. The question is when
John Starling (Guest): Has been returned to the event benchmark. Same thing with a company…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts):
John Starling (Guest): if you have a workplace violence incident, which our country unfortunately is famous around the world for. There’s a workplace violence incident with everybody in that division. Etc they’re feeling of safety and security belonging is going to go. off of a cliff When has it returned to its original Benchmark and therefore when can the suite reasonably expect to remember performance? to return to normal that’s what those are the things that I want to know out of this tool and it’s going to take time, putting more lives on the system every day and we’ll see,
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I think kind of along those lines of being able to measure and see that correlation. I think you talked about how the market got it wrong in some areas. I think the HR world in the business world has a few other things wrong. For example, we talk about something called the lifecycle when someone’s hired and when they leave the company employee life cycle we’re not tracking when someone’s born and when they die, it’s actually employment.
John Starling (Guest): But yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Cycle we’re mapping the beginning and ending of the employment relationship to a company and…
John Starling (Guest): That’s yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I think talking about the wellness of these team members as part of that employment relationship definitely has a very obvious Roi as you talked about because when people are in a better State they do better work. I’m curious just kind of as a follow-up. I want to kind of play The Devil’s Advocate on one question here. You gave some incredible examples of…
John Starling (Guest): Sure.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): how tracking wellness and different use cases can be really powerful. However in the workplace setting
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): What right does the employer have to see some of that data that is anonymized if it is required that an employee opt out of participating…
John Starling (Guest): Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): if their company was participating in ongoing employment Wellness initiatives because obviously there’s value to the person knowing their own State and seeing that tract over time, but some people will say my employer’s big brother.
John Starling (Guest): Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I don’t want them knowing all this about me and…
John Starling (Guest): Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): all that kind of stuff and maybe they have the right to know how you perform at work. But as you said we’re holistic people, it’s not just how we are at work. So maybe talk to me a little bit about your opinion there of
John Starling (Guest): We’ve set it up. So the employee can opt in or out with a toggle button on their dashboard. So if they opt out then their data is still in the system. Anonymized and aggregated into a pie chart. So let’s say the company has 10,000 employees, right? You’re adopted somewhere in that pie chart, but it’s all anonymized and aggregated. if the employee wants counseling or coaching Etc the powers that be in the organization that have administrative rights if they want their being to be seen and you can imagine a female employee in a toxic work environment.
John Starling (Guest): A group of female employees and a toxic work environment may want Theirs to be seen. And therefore would turn it on now. quick aside. We’ve recently put in a new feature called being alerts. So for those people who have decided that they do want their information shared with their employer. They can negotiate with the employer or the employer can set where they can set a threshold that if they’re any element of their being dips below a certain numerical value. gets an alert in their dashboard so you can see where several people have it. And new leadership comes into an office and suddenly bells are going off.
John Starling (Guest): Okay, maybe this is just a honeymoon period ending but maybe it’s toxic leadership. You move that leader to another area if the same thing happens. You may have identified a toxic leader and could also be used for if you could set up an overall threshold on that at a certain point if the total population is going down or any cohort because you can build demographic cohorts inside of the system. Then that HR wants to know because maybe that’s a sign of quiet quitting or a mass resignation coming that could put a company under so it’s really valuable intelligence now.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): yeah.
John Starling (Guest): on the flip side if
John Starling (Guest): The company wants to override so we leave it up to the employee. But the company does have a master switch where they can override and say we need to see the being of everybody. That’s between the company and their legal counsel and the employees and if the employees have representation through a union like a pilot’s Union or something that’s for them to sort out. We give them the option that the company can see everything and that’s part of the contract or depending on and I’m going to use the word contract here with a small C a social contract of what the values contract is within the organization they can determine them. themselves doesn’t matter to us, but even if
John Starling (Guest): All 10,000 employees say no we don’t want the company. I have a friend who spent a lot of time in the food industry and fine dining and in corporate fine dining restaurants owned by Big Wall Street money basically and it’s a very adversarial relationship. They have a union and all this very adversarial relationship. in that particular case all the employees at a restaurant for example may not want their individual being shown but their aggregate being anonymized would be in the data visualizations that potential creates you can see where
John Starling (Guest): Some organizations may demand that we don’t have an airline yet as a client, but I could see where this would be an important data point for airline pilots. Right arm. We’ve s I’m a veteran and we’ve spoken to a group with the US Army that deals in force readiness. Right, so you can see where 101st and the 82nd both come off at deployments. This could be a very valuable data point as to who’s ready to deploy again, not the only data point but an important one.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Somebody use cases that I want to have even thought about those things. It’s amazing. And I just wanted to ask if you’ve had so much experience coaching Executives. Do you have anything that has just surprised you during that time?
John Starling (Guest): Outside of potential you mean right?
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah, yeah or Insight just what great.
John Starling (Guest): Yeah, a quick coaching so I could go on with potential. every once in a while. Somebody will hit me up and if I have time I’ll talk to him, but he usually refers to it now. as you are a woman. I will tell you that the
John Starling (Guest): the common thing that I saw across almost every successful. woman in business that I’ve coached is
John Starling (Guest): a desperate deep feeling of inadequacy that I am not enough. And that drives them to be super achievers.
John Starling (Guest): often our great strength is also our great weakness. It’s really tough. on these women going through life putting on a brave face
John Starling (Guest): presenting as strong and confident capable as they are. But when you get down to it often, the Genesis of it is insecurity. And feeling of inadequacy, much with me it’s not just women. we tend to overcompensate, for me. I was always a small kid. I didn’t finish growing until I probably ended my first year in the Air Force, right?
John Starling (Guest): but I was a small kid No, dad. Asthma all this kind of stuff and I went on later in life to carrying them 60 for machine gun for a living and got a couple of black belts and have worked as a private investigator and all kinds of craziness, it’s like all this tough guy stuff where does that come from? that comes from Fear Right, that’s fear-based. So it’s really interesting.
John Starling (Guest): they say that the reason you hire a top Management Consultant is to figure out what the real issue is. Because it’s never what’s presented right? We’re all masters of putting up some sort of artifice. The Japanese say that everyone has three faces: the face that you show. The face that you show your close friends and family in the face that you don’t show anybody. And where change really comes from is being able to be vulnerable to the point where you show that face to someone that you can trust whether that’s your pastor or your coach or dear dear friend who loves you enough to be objective. Right
John Starling (Guest): And that’s one of the reasons that that potential is powerful because it’s a place where you can be anonymous and authentic and get some objective feedback. There’s some interesting work going on with potential right now. where we’ve seen these ngos put in these programs and they Benchmark being of a tribe or a group of people or a group of students or whatever. And then they put in different types of programs and they see in the comparative because there’s comparative charts inside potentially who compare cohorts and you can compare over time and you see the growth and it’s like it is the growth because of the programs that the social workers have put in.
John Starling (Guest): Is it because of the feedback and exercises that we have in there? No, I don’t think so. We’re not ready to make that claim. That’s a purely reviewed study by outside psychologists at a later date. Right? Our tool has been validated for the reliability and validity of the assessment itself. It’s been through psychometric validation, but does our tool move marginal and No that not yet. Maybe someday. but I lost my train of thought for a second there.
John Starling (Guest): Help me out.
John Starling (Guest): Right, right. Yeah. Let me see if I can pick it up. Sorry about this.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah.
John Starling (Guest): This will be edited, Yeah, so give me one second. I think I can grab it and pick up where I left us.
John Starling (Guest): So the tool measures yeah, we can’t reliably say that it measures progress in well-being. But what we’ve seen okay, here we go ready?
John Starling (Guest): but what we have seen is that there is progress. From when people were benchmarked at the beginning of the social program and at the end of the program. We don’t think that that progress is because of our exercises because in some cases the people haven’t done the exercises. They just did the assessment before and after the social programs were put in. Our modules are learning modules, feedback and all that can be turned on or off. But then the question is, So what changed is it that the social worker put in these programs? or Is it that for the first time in their life this person has seen their being visualized and saw that.
John Starling (Guest): Their self-actualization was poorly investigated. What is self-actualization? Right and brought their intent to it.
John Starling (Guest): That’s really interesting. Is it their program or is it? Simply bring your attention to something here to four. You hadn’t ever really engaged in it. So I think back to the uneducated portion of the population that I mentioned earlier, right? And I’m really looking forward to seeing the book ends. when they run by tensile again. Has there been movement there? Self-actualization because they’re aware of self-actualization and the fact that Yeah, I get some of that too. Yeah, I want to improve, I want to grow.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I think awareness breeds a lot of change in of itself and we’re so grateful for you John’s sharing all of your thoughts. So many reasons. Why going to the data from those surveys is so actionable and so helpful to organizations and individuals and we just want to thank you for your time with us today. And for those who are interested in checking out, pay attention will include a link to that website and…
John Starling (Guest): No, I’m just like I said just as a reminder, we’ve kept potential free for individuals and…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): you can do it for yourself or for your organization and…
John Starling (Guest): it’s the full version. When you go in instantly you’ll take the assessment.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): please scribe and anything you want to have.
John Starling (Guest): You’ll get your pie chart. You’ll get some feedback and then you just have to put in an email. We don’t correspond it to names for your safety or…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): moving
John Starling (Guest): security and either security and all that but that way when you log back in the next time it recognizes who you are and then you get the feature of plotting it out over time. But yeah, that’s what I said that is a hundred percent free. And as long as I own the company it will always be free. That’s why I started it and we’ve said we’ve had a couple people come kick tires about buying us. We’ve said yeah, that’s fine. But by our mission they go away very quickly.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): What? I think for everyone listening You are an HR leader. You’re an executive, you owe it to yourself to improve your own well-being and even if you just cared about the profitability of your own company, you owe it to the performance that you can have by improving your own wellbeing and…
John Starling (Guest): Yeah, no when I will not when I was coaching companies,…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): be more aware of that and For your team members, it’s important to have those conversations about…
John Starling (Guest): I would always tell them if you want to have a bigger company,…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): how they are and…
John Starling (Guest): which bigger could be people or…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): what you can do to support them and…
John Starling (Guest): revenue or…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): their growth.
John Starling (Guest): whatever. You want to have a bigger company have a bigger conversation inside of the company.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): So this is a great free resource.
John Starling (Guest): And that conversation starts with yourself, So there’s certain organizations that are high performing organizations where the leadership cares about well-being and is really focused on that and they see the results inside of the organization and some don’t what one of the questions that we get, which sort of jobs with that real quick is
John Starling (Guest): How often should we send out the assessment? And you can do it monthly, weekly , daily , and quarterly. Whatever doesn’t really matter, whatever your organization’s normal assessment or survey Paces tack it on with that, but the cool thing is potentials also unemployed benefit so just leave the door open because when somebody’s getting ready to go in, to the night shift at 11 PM, they might want to sit down and do a personal growth exercise or they come off of a hard shift or whatever. They may want to check in. So you just leave it on and you’ve got real time information, which is an EES. for lack of a better term, it’s an employee engagement system that word again for
John Starling (Guest): The administrators but It’s an employee experience system. It’s a supplemental benefit for the employees. So neat stuff
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): That makes perfect sense, and we really appreciate all of your insights today John and…
John Starling (Guest): Yeah, thank you guys. I’m grateful for you.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): for everybody listening make sure to subscribe and…
John Starling (Guest): You’re awesome. You’re doing good work in the world and…
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): leave a review of the podcast as well and…
John Starling (Guest): just keep it up.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): check out the link about high potential. So we’ll see you next time.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Thanks.
