Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. On the podcast today, we have Michael Seaver. Michael, welcome.
Thank you so much Thomas for having me, I appreciate you.
I appreciate you too. Would you like to take a moment and tell the audience a bit about yourself and what you do?
Sure, yeah, thank you so much. So I was raised in a very, very small town in West Michigan in the United States and at age 23 moved to the state of Arizona where I currently reside. And in 2008, I started an MBA at the Thunderbird School of Global Management. And that set me down the path that I’m on now, which is serving as an executive coach. And so for the last 10 years I have worked with leaders across the globe on a variety of topics, from personal branding to their personal mission, to opening up lines of communication, to finding ways to operate in accordance with their motivators, to emotional intelligence. There’s so many things that I’ve been able to get into over the last 10 years that I feel very blessed and grateful for. So my background has been this kind of journey of really uplifting and supporting others in as many ways as I possibly could.
So today there have been many wonderful things that have happened more recently. Obviously, there’s been a lot of shifts and changes as a result of stay at home orders and things like that. But I feel so immensely grateful to be able to be in an executive coach, will be able to be a leadership consultant or to be able to be able to speak on stage is I’ll be maybe a little bit more virtually now. Um, and earlier this year just published a book. So maybe at some point our conversation, I’ll bring that up as well. No time like the present, Michael. Would you like to talk about the book briefly? Yeah, sure. Thank you Thomas. I’m glad the US. So the book – I’ll flash it up on the screen just so folks can see it – it’s called I know a practical guide for awakening to what’s within and finding work life integration. And the book was really a culmination of all of my experiences helping folks at various stages of transition? Right? So if someone’s feeling disengaged or someone’s not feeling clear about their life’s work. The book is a series of nine chapters and nine processes that someone could walk themselves through to get to the point of clarity. So the first three chapters are designed to help someone end and let go some old version of themselves.
So how do they process loss? How do they navigate fear? How do they do some emotional release? If you will. Second three chapters are a little bit more focused on uncovering what’s authentically them? What’s their personal mission? What are their core values? What makes them different or unique in the marketplace? And then I walk through in chapters five and 6, a little bit more about emotional intelligence. How can they communicate a little bit more effectively. Chapter six is about how do they really reform their identity? Right? How do they show up in the marketplace differently? And then chapter 789 or a move into how do you then contribute to something larger than yourself? How do you design a very engaged team? How do you work to be able to become a coach to others? And then figure out a way to contribute to their version of self-actualisation. So, the book has a lot of really personal stories from me. They have a lot of clients stories, a lot of research, a lot of processes to kind of help a person navigate from that point of disengagement or not feeling clear or wondering about their life to hopefully by the end of it after practicing some of those processes and looking into some of those pieces of research that they’ve gotten to a point of being pretty darn happy.
Would you say that the book helps with the question of I don’t know what to do with my life for that phrase. I completely agree. Yes. And I think that’s a struggle that many people go through, right? And I use gallop in their employee engagement statistics and research quite a bit. And on earth right now, across all, people working, only 36% of people working today like their job. And when you think about that and how that kind of matriculated into other areas of someone’s life, People are naturally quite a bit unhappy with the way that their jobs are going that trickles into other pieces of their life and they’re searching they’re searching for something more, they’re searching for their personal mission, they’re searching for purpose in Chapter four of the book really does focus in on that. And how did they uncover that for themselves? How do they understand their communication preferences? How do they understand what motivates them? How do they understand what their core values are? There’s even a 10 point Q and A inside that chapter to help a person see some patterns in their life to be able to say okay what was happening, why did this occur?
And then they also are given a chance to really talk about or think through what are their strengths, What are their areas of authority? So by intentionally walking them through a process where they have to learn really disparate pieces of information about themselves that they might not have. Otherwise it gives them a chance to say oh well I don’t have to continue to stay in this job that is really not fulfilling. Or maybe I want to start my own business or maybe I want to move to this new location or maybe I want to gain a new group of friends or pick up a new hobby And by going through some of those pieces in Chapter four, a person is going to get to a place of inner knowing that they would not have been before. Do you use this rationale, or this structure to help people in your coaching? Yeah, yeah. You know, so I have in my 1 to 1 executive coaching, it’s normally a six-month program where each month is a different focus area. And so this process that I just described definitely happens sometimes at the end of month one, most often at the beginning of months number two. And I really wanted to share my best examples, my best stories inside the book.
But for 10 years I’ve been coaching folks hundreds and hundreds of people. And so I’ve been able to pick up patterns of what works with people, especially in today’s society and maybe in 10 years society will have shifted changed in the stuff that exists in this book is not going to be as relevant, but for the time being, I do use this every single day in my coaching regardless of where someone is on the planet, because there’s just there are just commonalities and similarities across people that we don’t often discuss or talk about openly in society. But I try to go back to the root cause and come back to these kind of five tools if you will, because they’re going to be applicable regardless of where someone is. Would you say that there’s a or what are some of the similarities for people who let’s say they’re struggling, what tend to be the similarities there? Yeah, I’ll answer this a couple of ways, and thanks for asking Thomas. The first thing that came to mind is the Center for Creative Leadership. One of their consultants, lady named Jennifer Deal wrote a book years ago called retiring the generation gap And in that, which through all of her research, she found that there are just there are 10 principles by which all humans are the same.
Not necessarily from the point of struggle, but just 10 principles in which all people are the same. And there are simple things like we all desire to be trusted or to be in a trusting relationship or we all desire to be respected or in respect filled relationship. She also talks about how no one on earth really likes change, especially when it’s bestowed upon us. Actually, we all do desired to have some sort of mentor or coach and we all really genuinely desire to learn in our own ways, right? So there are underlying things that exist across all people regardless. Now when it comes to struggle and being disengaged in kind of wondering where our life is meant to be or what we’re supposed to be doing. I’m a big believer in what I talked about in the book is this idea is that every human comes to earth with a unique earth school curriculum, right, Earth is just a place where we come to learn something now. What often happens is that in our younger years is that when our parents are acculturated us into where we were born and making sure that we can become a productive member of society. We get taken off our path or away from our lives mission. So the struggle that pops up is that we’ve been acculturated to believe one specific set of norms or beliefs or mores or attitudes, but in reality that’s not authentically who we are and so we struggle with basically trying to figure out who are we and what is our life’s work and what is our mission and what are we supposed to be doing on earth?
How are we supposed to help? And so many people come to earth very, very unique. They get acculturated to be kind of like everybody else and to be a part of the herd if you will and then they spend a lot of time in their life coming back to and shedding those old beliefs and norms and mores and then taking the time to uncover what really makes them. And it’s a very long journey. It’s a very hard journey. It’s a very difficult emotional journey because we are acculturated at such a young age to do something that’s not really aligned with who we are. So what makes you, you me specifically Thomas, So thank you the thing for me is my mission truly, truly is about unlocking human potential. And the reason why I suggest you say that is that in my younger years, having been raised on a farm in a very small town in west Michigan. The thing that I struggled with like tremendously was that my family operated in a very homogeneous manner and we had a landscaping lawn maintenance and snow ploughing business back in those days.
And so from age 12 until 24, that’s what I did. I worked in that environment. But in that context, I was always told to be a robot inside of the business and make the family money, but not necessarily do the things that were meaningful or interesting to me. And so in those younger years, I felt very suppressed. I felt very abandoned. I felt very not able to be myself. So what makes me is that thankfully when I was getting the degree at Thunderbird, I was given a career coach named pam and pam was able to give me a battery of assessments and asked me a series of questions that helped me uncover me. And so what makes me me is realising that for the 1st 28 years of my life I was enduring these challenges that I couldn’t really codify really make sense of. And then at age 29 I was able to overcome them. I was able to uncover what makes me authentic. I was able to release this idea of being a robot for somebody else. So now my life’s mission of course about unlocking your potential is that I have spent the last 11, 12, 13 years helping people become the most authentic versions of themselves.
So what I lacked in those younger years at age 28, 30 I uncovered and found a way to incorporate in my life and now my life’s work is about helping others do the exact same. Go from that place of being a robot, go from that place of being abandoned, go from that place of not being themselves into a place of living whatever life that is right, giving them a chance to be unequal in whatever way they want to be, right. So that’s why I called my podcast equal chance to be unequal is, it’s an opportunity for people to uncover what makes them different, right? Because that really does matter is that they show up authentically in the world, it gives them a chance to really in genuinely enjoy what they do. There is the topic of human potential. It’s that sort of acting in a way that’s congruent with who you are. I believe so, and I don’t think that enough people are given that opportunity or chance. And so each of us comes to earth with this curriculum if you will the things we need to do of a of a life’s mission of a purpose if you will. and so when we are acculturated to be a member of our family or a society that’s kind of stripped away, But thankfully we’re at this weird time in human history where we’re transitioning from what astrologists call the age of Pisces, which ended in 2012 into what is now referred to as the age of Aquarius.
And so when you think about this transition in this move, people are finally being given a chance to express themselves, to learn more about themselves Stay at home. Orders over the last 18 months have given people a chance to slow down and to change and to explore new habits and hobbies. And that has been a wonderful awakening, if you will, because now people are understanding the capacity of their own potential and they’re now looking at the world quite differently. And so that gives me a lot of joy to watch it happen now, don’t get me wrong, there are some tough things that are happening in society that are, that are not fun or nice, but I’m also seeing this grassroots uprising of people who are genuinely walking into their potential in ways that they might not have five years ago. Because it’s kind of like a concept in my mind, I’m very visual. Can you give me an example of, you know, maybe someone you worked with where human potential has been unlocked? Yeah, so gosh, I’ve helped so many people now, I have to call and call something into my mind.
So I’ll give you one example. So I worked with a gentleman who had started up a business, we’ll call them Tom. I talk about him in the book, so we’ll call them Tom And tom had built up what’s referred to as a third party marketing practice. And so what that is, is that when a mutual fund needed to find funders ,Tom knew where the money was, he knew people that he that we could find the money. So he was very readily connected into places around the world, London, New York City, Los Angeles, where he just knew people that had money and they wanted to make those types of investments. But it also happened that in his younger years he was the kind of accidental child, right? And so he was often overlooked by his brothers and sisters. He was often overlooked by his family and parents. And so as he navigated life, he always wanted to be heard in to be seen and to be liked or to receive lots of recognition because in those younger years he was not. So as he was doing a couple of big deals in New York City, they ended up celebrating via doing a couple lines of cocaine and then that turned into a process basically where he got addicted over a very long period of time and no one in his life knew that that was actually happening.
So because people were unaware that he was actually addicted to cocaine or that there was money going to it. he, he subconsciously knew that he needed support or help. So he hired me to help him and his business partner grow a few things in their business. Well, three months into the relationship that he and I were having through communications, coaching and getting him to the point of clarity about his business and what we’re going to work on a focus on. he called me at 5:31 in the morning and said, hey, I need to tell you the real reason why I hired you. And so then he alerted me that he had been addicted to cocaine for quite some time and he asked me to do two things. He said, I need you to save my business and I need you to save my marriage. And so I went into this mode over the next three months of kind of transitioning my time and focus with him to opening up more lines of communication with his business partner, to opening up lines of communication with his wife. And so he went from this place of being not really appreciated and recognised and overlooked often to then all of a sudden the way that he coped with that was to enjoy the high that came with the drug and so then we had to go through this process of figuring out a way to release this chemical dependency on that, which we did through medical help and also through seeing a therapist and I was working on the relationship with the business partner and his wife.
But the blessing through all of this was that he was able to recognise the connection between some of those hardships in his younger years to how he appreciated the joy of signing the deal and being addicted to him really thoroughly at a deep level getting to know himself and reconnecting with his wife and his two daughters in a way that he wouldn’t have otherwise. And so now the business has reformatted and tom is in a very different place emotionally, right? The business has reformatted into – he now teaches family offices how to do marketing and how to build relationships in the joy that I see from tom today versus who he was a couple of years ago is astronomically different. It’s because every single day he gets to do something that’s heavily aligned with healing his old emotional wounds, really genuinely helping people do something that he’s great at, right? He gets to teach them and pass it along. And now his business is thriving in a way that it wasn’t before. And so it’s really a set of challenges. We helped him overcome those challenges. He’s now helping people in a way that heals himself and contributes to the betterment of those offices and those people, it’s an applause moment, Michael, if we were on stage big, I mean there is um, incidentally I was like, that’s an awful lot of responsibility that was handed to you at 5:30 AM.
I’m not sure I would have taken the call at 5:30. But how did you feel about that? I promised myself years and years ago that I would be there for people in the moment of despair or in the moment when they needed them because I didn’t have that when I was a kid. And so it felt completely natural and normal for me to show up for him in those moments because I had promised myself decades ago that I would. And so it made me feel trusted. It made me feel respected. It made me feel like my contribution to the world was meaningful. And I’m up pretty early anyways being in Arizona, I’m up at four or 5:00 each morning most anytime anyways. So it wasn’t really a surprise. It did break my meditation, which wasn’t great, but I was already up. Well, well done to you. Thank you story. Yeah, thank you. How many people do you think kind of shall we say are doing what they quote unquote are supposed to be doing? And in terms of percentages, how many people do you think are not, I don’t know if there’s ever been research on that Thomas, but my, my intuition tells me that somewhere between Eight and 10% of people are actually really well aligned with their life’s mission.
So probably 90% plus or not. And that’s very disheartening for me, right? To kind of see as I navigate the conversations with folks in different places, is that the conversation is almost always the same, right? I tried to get them to celebrate their wins and I try to get them to talk about their accomplishments and there’s always a default answer. The default answer is almost always to celebrate something that their child had done, but they rarely talk about anything that they’ve accomplished. And so we’re in this environment where I think the vast majority of people working today are not happy with what it is that they do or where it is, that their life is going, they just did what everybody else did. And so my work in this life, right in unlocking human potential, is to take that eight or 10% of people who are genuinely unhappy. I’m sorry, who are genuinely happy and try to grow that number, right? Try to find a way to get them to spread their message in a meaningful way, so that more people feel that same way we got any thoughts on, shall we say the first few steps of living with purpose.
I know that the if they were serious about it, they pick up the phone and call you right? But as a result of watching this, if someone was like, yeah, I really should implement something, what should they do? Yeah, yeah, it is a first and foremost, they have to make the conscious choice and decision to do it and like really make the commitment. And so throughout my, my coaching practice, I have made a number of mistakes in the last 10 years where I really wanted to help individuals and I kept trying and trying and trying, coming to myself and coming to this realisation that they genuinely didn’t want to be helped. And that was a really hard learning for me. And so I have become very clear in my conversations with people, especially on like a strategy call or a possible client call is for them to tell me the reasons why they want to change. So I would really encourage everybody watching or listening that you have to be very clear why you want to change, right? What is the pain that you’re enduring? What is this vision that you have for your future? How important is it that you actually navigate this right? That you actually do it because it’s not a smooth process at the beginning.
You have to end and let go of a lot of your beliefs and your attitudes and your patterns, sometimes you have to let go of jobs or people that you work with quite a bit, you know, there’s a lot of things that you have to shed. So step number one is definitely about getting clear about what it is that you’re going to do and why you’re going to do it because you need that underlying motivation to get through the very difficult moments consistently persistently. So after you’ve come to that place for yourself saying yes, I’m willing to do this and then you have to really take a very objective, unemotional assessment of your life. And so what I described earlier with those five tools, Thomas, is a great place to start because it helps you to see yourself pretty objectively. So once you have made this agreement with yourself, then you can get to this place of saying, well really who am I? So using those five tools to come up with, let’s say a personal mission statement or to know what your top five or six core values are or to know what your unique value proposition is in the world. So then this is where the hard part starts right is that you literally have to stop things in your life so you have to stop start and continue.
So what in your life, what habits, what people, what job things, what are those things in your life that do not align with your mission or your values or your unique value proposition And you have to stop those things and that might take two or three months. It takes a little bit for a person to kind of navigate away from that stuff. So they have to stop those things and then they got to take just a little bit of time to really think about what can I experiment with to start, right? Because as we navigate into this new versions of ourselves, we’re not going to get it right the first time. And so we have to experiment with a couple of things, we have to try a couple of things. And inside that is where you start to build clarity, you start to build confidence and you start to form this new identity of who you are. So number one really make that commitment to yourself, number to get very clear on your mission, your values what it is, that makes you different, then you’ve got to stop things in your life, right? Because you can’t stay at that place, it won’t allow you to grow or to develop. So after you’ve stopped and cut a few things out of your calendar now, it’s about what do I want to try or experiment with and after you’ve done some experimenting, some reflecting its some experiential learning that’s really helpful and if you ever get stuck really, it comes down to relationships who are those people around you?
Is there a coach? Is there any mentors, counsellors there, consultants, is there somebody there that can genuinely help you? So in the last couple of years there were sometimes where I tried to do some of these transitions for myself alone and that was a mistake that I made. And I always want to encourage people to not make that same mistake as to when you get to those tough points, reach out to somebody, have a conversation, get some outside counsel or idea because that’s the thing that’s going to give you the courage to go. Right. Humans are a very social species. So the more that we attempt to get people involved in our transitions, the safer and easier they’re going to be, what makes you say that it was a mistake for you Because I contemplated suicide. And so I got to a point in May of 2019 where for some reason I tried to navigate some pretty big personal and business transitions alone. And it led to a moment in my life where I was on my bedroom floor just At the point of not wanting to be on Earth anymore.
And I think had I had conversations in January, February March of 2019 with some of my friends and talked more openly about what I was experiencing. I wouldn’t have gotten to the point of wanting to commit suicide. And so that was the thing for me that was a mistake was that I didn’t. In those three or four months, I didn’t have meaningful conversations with my friends. Had I done that, I probably wouldn’t have gotten to the point of despair that I did. And so did I learn an awful lot through it. Absolutely Right. I learned a ton and I’m really grateful for those lessons learned. And I’ve passed those lessons learned on to others. And I even talk about that moment in the introduction of the book. Um, but I I wish I would have had the conversation so that I could have smoothed out the emotions instead of having them be so bad. I’m sorry to hear that you have to go through that. Yeah. What, what was it that that was particularly should we say straining? So in July of 2018, I left a six year romantic relationship and at the same time we were sending her daughter off to college. So in a very short period of time, the thing that I had known to be true for myself being in a relationship all of a sudden, almost overnight, those two women were no longer a part of my life, right?
My old partner and her daughter. So then I was in this period of about a year where I wasn’t in a romantic relationship and I was really at the point of self-discovery. So I over invested time, December, January, February, a lot of part of 18 and early into 19 into trying some new things in my business and those things didn’t work. Right? So there were some things that I was experimenting with didn’t work. And so all of a sudden quite a bit of money, tens of thousands of dollars was quote unquote lost, right? There was no revenue coming back from those investments. And so it was the mix of separating from this really meaningful relationship, watching my step daughter go off to college and then experimenting with things inside the business that we’re not working. It felt like the world was kind of crashing down on me because the things that I was attempting to do weren’t working personally or professionally. And so it just became very, very heavy, very stressful, very straining for sure. Thank you for sharing. for the sake of others. what would you say to yourself in those moments if you could go back using what, you know now, what kind of how would you approach that person in that position?
So, you know, if there’s, you know, if a person is ever at that place for themselves emotionally or mentally, I would immediately pick up the phone and call someone that that you know that you could talk openly with, right? That’s really important. So if you happen to be at that place of despair for yourself, immediately pick up the phone and call two or 32 or three friends and see if you can meet with them in person to just be able to start sharing your emotions. So it’s absolutely critical that you share your emotions, right? So whatever those things are that exist in your heart, just start talking about them. Now, I’m a big believer that emotions are just energy in motion, right? So if we keep those emotions inside of her body, uh, it creates a very bad environment where we kind of can go into a downward spiral and that, that is not a great place to be now flip the script. And if I’m the person receiving the phone call, um, it’s really about listening as actively as possible. And what I mean by that is that we want to find patterns of information and what it is that the person is saying. And so by listening at a very deep level and just allowing them to say whatever it is that they need to say without any judgment whatsoever, right?
Even if we have our own perspective of the scenario of the situation, the goal is, is to just listen hardly without saying anything, but to search for patterns, right? And to find those pain points so that we can have the person talk about that stuff more, right? Because the more that they get it out, the more that they share those really hard moments, they’re better off that they’re going to be. So after they’ve had a good go of it and shared a lot of their emotions and whatever timeframe they need to let them know, right, that you’re going to be there for them. And so then it’s on that person to text them and to call them quite regularly because an influence that book by Robert, there’s something called the law of commitment or consistency. And so the more steadily that we communicate with a person, the more safe they’re going to feel, the more vulnerable they’re going to be able to be able to share themselves openly. So in the conversation, listen, don’t respond, don’t offer any judgment, but then make sure that in a very consistent basis every 24-48 hours that you’re texting them, reaching out to them, calling them to let them know that you’re there in the event that they need anything else.
Great answer. Thank you. Yeah, thank you as much as I like the personal stuff I always like to ask regarding if anyone has expertise on an employee engagement, I always like to ask about that topic. So if you got something that you’d like to share there. Yeah, thank you, Thomas that’s something that I get to do quite a bit. And so as my business has evolved over the last 10 years, it started out just resumé writing and linked in support and doing a couple of things with interview help. Then it became personal branding, then it was communications coaching, then it was executive coaching. The last couple of years have been really focused in on organisational change, in cultural change And it’s been a wonderful journey for me to be able to see some of these ideas that I have be implemented at scale inside of businesses. So employee engagement I gave a statistic earlier from Gallup that only 36% of the workforce genuinely likes their work. And I think they’re statistics are such that about 50, are what’s called, engaged.
I’m sorry, they’re called disengaged, but they’re, they’re just kind of, they’re doing the basics of their job description. But there’s another percentage somewhere between 15 and 18%. that is what’s called actively disengaged and they’re the ones that are really trying to make the business go bad or they’re trying to make problems occur within the business because they don’t want to be there. So the way that things I think are working out is that decades ago under folks like Jack Welch or Steve Jobs, you know, being an unemotional jerk and being in this kind of power position that was the way that teams were led, right? You were allowed to command and control your teams. But we’ve moved to this place in, in the world where we’re now about aligning and empowering. And part of that shift comes from October 2015 where the, the baby boomers and the folks from the gen X generation, we’re no longer the largest percentage of the workforce, right? So in October 2015, the millennials, those born basically after 1980 to about 1996 they were the ones that became the largest percentage of the workforce and the things that they desire from a relationship with their direct supervisor are radically different than the things that the baby boomers or gen X desire?
So we can no longer command in control. We have to move to what’s called aligning and empowering. And so I refer to this oftentimes as mass customisation, right? So if you want to engage your employees, you have to mass customised to that employee. So if you happen to be a supervisor and you’re looking at your team and saying, well how do I mass customise? Well this means that you have to sit down with each of your respective employees and you have to ask them very direct questions about their life’s mission. What are their communication preferences? How do they prefer to receive appreciation? What are the things that you do daily that motivates them or how do you get them to share their message of their lessons learned or how can you in a personal and professional context? How do you help them accomplish their goals or how do you help them live their core values on a more consistent day to day basis? So the thing about employee engagement is in Gallup also has something called a Q 12 Which our 12 questions that any supervisor can ask their direct reports that will help you to understand if they’re happy or not?
And they’re really basic questions and you can find them on the web at any point time. But they’re really simple things like do I know what’s expected of me at work, Do I have an opportunity to do what I do best to how often am I receiving recognition? And praise does somewhat at my workplace seem to care about me as a person, you know, when it comes to big changes, do my opinions count? You know, does someone here seem to care about my growth and development? Or do I have a best friend at work? So there are these things that when we see these shifts and transitions in society, we’re moving to a place where supervisors must mass customised or get to know each of their respective employees at a very personal level because that’s the thing that’s actually going to motivate them to be engaged to be productive and to make the company much better in its own way. Great answer. Have you got any thoughts on why that change happened? So, you know, in an astrological sense, more ethereal sense, right? In 2012, Earth moved from the age of ISIS into the age of Aquarius.
Right, so from an astrology standpoint, it’s really just about this massive shift in energy. So, I’ll answer this two ways. Start with the energy piece and with this transition into the age of Aquarius, what has happened on earth and this is happening at scale as we can see today, just from all of the stuff that’s happening around the world is that we went from this place where we used to believe that politicians and celebrities and athletes that we were meant to emulate their lives, right? We were supposed to follow in their footsteps and what we’re moving to in this age of Aquarius and this is why I called the book I know is that we’re moving into a time in human history where we are being taught that we have all of the answers inside of us. Okay. And so we’re in this environment where we’re finding a way to pull the answers out of ourselves, right? So if we can sit in meditation, we can sit in prayer, we can have some time for reflection. We can go out into nature and just have some time for ourselves. We get to the point of being able to really thoroughly under step understand ourselves Now, a more kind of earthly your logical way to look at this is affluence.
Right? So back in, I’ll use America specifically back in 1929. The American economy was only $1 trillion dollars. Now in 2021, the American economy is $23 trillion. And so we’ve seen a lot of transitions from 1980 where we really started to shift to more of a global kind of market. If you will then in 2000, China joined the World Trade Organisation. And when you think about how back in 1995, the advent of the world wide web and how it shifted the way that we do business and so all of these things that have happened from the level of affluence growing to globalisation to the amount of money that’s in the system. It has moved people especially younger people away from the need to have to have safety and security from just making money, right? Because the safety and security at scale, not for everybody, but at scale is there? So there is no longer a need to have to work our butts off at the same job for our entire life to be able to create a retirement account.
Because the level of affluence across society again, for the most part is they’re so younger folks can transition from job to job, they can move and go get a degree later in life where they can start their family later in life, right? There’s all these little shifts that are occurring. So at the basis, right? In an astrological sense earth has transitioned into a new time of of consciousness are awakening, but in a more material sense, the level of Affluence has really driven younger generations to not have to worry about money. So they’re worried more about self-esteem, self-actualisation their personal mission. And so they want relationships with supervisors that are almost like coaches or mentors, right? Not someone who’s commanding, controlling them, but someone who genuinely cares about their development in a way that they’re getting feedback and advice and input regularly from them. That’s a massive transition that has happened basically just in the last 10 years. I mean it just reminds me of like supply and demand essentially. So an excess of supply means that perhaps they can be more choosy about where they, I want to spend their life essentially or their working life and therefore, you know, we’re employees need to change so or are changing perhaps and I agree Thomas they are, there’s what I’m seeing for the first time in a very long time.
Maybe you’re saying this in the UK to – is that consumers or employees, right? Those folks on the front lines or middle management, they have more power than the companies or the producers of goods and when you think about things like Amazon or things like yelp or things where we’re allowed to give a review, we now can see reviews from other people from left to Uber to Airbnb to the RB Oh there’s all these different tools where we have now decentralised the means of production. We have now decentralised the means of marketing. So we can contact and look up these reviews are people that are like us and see what it is that they see and what do they feel and how did what was their experience like? And so because information is no longer centralised, it’s been decentralised, we’re in this place where we can very rapidly look at an abundance of supply not only of money, but also ways to be able to do things and we can come back to ourselves and say, what is it that I genuinely want in which am I going to engage and why?
So that’s a massive transition that has occurred recently. It’s been a little bumpy, you don’t get me wrong, but it’s also been a huge blessing. I know that some of what we’ve discussed so far regarding. I mean, pretty much everything we’ve discussed is going to help with someone’s confidence, but part of your bio or your work, I suppose is helping people find that confidence. Have you got anything in addition that you’d like to add, which hasn’t already been covered regarding confidence? Yeah, thank you. It there’s one thing we did talk about this just a second ago about acculturation. but I want to reference something, a guy named Dr Bruce Lipton. And so he’s a neuroscientists that since 1971 has been studying cell biology and then kind of moved into neurochemistry and what’s kind of happening in the human brain. And so what he discovered is that when our brain’s neurons fire, there are five brain wave states, right? So the way that our neurons fire kind of occurs in five ways and his discoveries are such that from birth until age six, all humans are in what’s called the theta brain wave state, But after age six we move into the beta brainwave state.
And the reason why that little distinguish mint is important is that our confidence right is effectively coming out of what was happening from birth until age six. So when we’re in the theta brain wave state, it’s kind of like being in a hypnotic trance or right at the point of sleep. And the way that learning occurs in the fate of brainwave state is that everything that happens around us, the relationship we have with our family, with our community, the things we learned that church or school fill in the blank, all of those things are baked straight into our subconscious. And so when we get after age six and we’re starting to operate at the beta brainwave state, we are now making choices and decisions based on what we learned at those very early years. And so a person’s confidence is wholly based on what was, what did they see from their environment in those very early years. How confident were their parents? How confident were the people around them? What were the coping mechanisms that they learned for different types of emotion? Were they allowed to be themselves or were they not? So when we are walking into our more true self as time passes and progresses again we’re shedding some of those things that we might have learned and we’re kind of reprogramming our subconscious.
So for a person who’s really looking to walk in and to find that new level of confidence for themselves, we have to repetitive lee over an extended period of time, reprogram the subconscious, and that comes from learning experientially. And what I mean by that is that we all pretty much for the most part engage the five senses and so when we learn experiential, they were engaging one or more of the five senses and that triggers us to feel specific emotions and then as we’re feeling those emotions, it’s easy for us to reprogram what’s happening in our subconscious or to remember more of what it is that we learned or did. So through repetition through consistency, through learning experientially through feeling those emotions, we get to the point of the learning being solidified and that helps to reprogram the subconscious and kind of overwrite what it was that we might have learned in those younger years. So after you’ve done that, you can build more confidence by really authentically sharing your story, helping others and learning what their story is, whatever that is, right, the more we lead by example, the more we share a story with others and give them space to do the same confidence rises even more.
So we’re in this environment right now in earth where in those really younger years, we were acculturated and taught to do something, we were in the fatal brain wave state now we’re in the beta brainwave state and we now have the means and the opportunity to basically reprogram our subconscious, but it takes habits and daily commitment to be able to make that happen. So if you have that for yourself and you’re willing to learn experientially, try and make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, reflect on it, you can reprogram yourself really powerfully and move into a place of feeling confident that no matter what comes your way, you’re in a place of being able to solve it. Well it’s particularly I would say relevant for me because I have three Children under six. So you’re highlighting something which it’s very important to me, I have to start thinking about their self-esteem, that sort of yeah, good for you. Anyway, the last thing I wanted to ask you about is emotional intelligence, which may link in exactly to what I just said.
What have you got to share an emotional intelligence? Yeah, yeah, definitely. A link there Thomas and I first learned about emotional intelligence from a guy named Daniel Goleman in his book, which was called emotional intelligence and through his research in the late 80s and then throughout the 1990s, he was able to find that of a person’s success, right, their happiness, their success, their capacity to be meaningful contributor at work or at home. But basically 80% of that success came from their level of emotional intelligence. Only 20% came from their intellect or their IQ. And it was a really striking statistic to me because when you think about the frontline or kind of an entry level role inside of an organisation, your I Q. matters tremendously. But then, as you climb the ranks and you start managing more people or you start managing strategy. Your intellect matters less right? Your emotional intelligence, your capacity to persuade an influence matters immensely. But you know when you think about the traditional K through 12 system or university or college learning, emotional intelligence is not something that’s taught very often.
It’s not talked about. And there are five dimensions of a cue from self-awareness to self-regulation to motivation and those are the self-focused areas. But then when it comes to others right? The other two areas are social awareness and social regulation. And in my experience, coaching folks, especially in Westernised countries, is that there’s a big lack of capacity for self-regulation. They do not understand their emotions and they do not understand how to manage their emotions. So then that trickles down into social regulation which is our ability to manage relationships. So because we’re unaware of our own emotions we now cannot help others manage. There is that we don’t understand our impact on them. And so hopefully right, we’re moving to a time in human history where emotional intelligence has talked about just a little bit more. But right now it’s kind of a deficit because it’s only been about 30 years that we’ve really talked about it as a species openly. So hopefully in the next 10-20 years, it becomes much more commonplace. We can talk about these things that we can be much more aware of what impacts us and how we respond to it and then be aware of how we impact others.
So leadership. Right? When you think about leading others or even being a dad, emotional intelligence matters immensely because everybody around us is picking up what it is that we’re feeling or doing. And there was a great piece that came out of MIT. And their management review and the author cigar bar said her research found that emotions are contagious and her research and all of the things that she did. She showed how when a when one person is feeling overly negative or overly positive somehow subconsciously or unconsciously others in the office or others in the area pick up that emotion and adjust their behaviour maybe without realising it. And so for us to spend the time to work on our emotional intelligence is enormously important because we kind of subconsciously assess those around us and if they’re feeling good or bad and then we behave in accordance or response to that. And so for you Thomas as you think about your three young kids which is awesome. Congratulations to you. It really does matter right. It thinks about how do you respond in those moments because they’re being acculturated to basically respond in the same way.
So EQ, although it’s only about 30 years old, it’s probably one of the most important things that we can do to become more persuasive or more influential or to really genuinely accomplish the things we desire to. So I got to stay positive basically is what you’re saying in many ways, yes or your goals, Michael. So when I think about the things that I really want to accomplish in the next, let’s say, 5 to 10 years, in a very personal sense, I want to slow down and, and I really want everybody to hear that really meaningfully is that since age 12 I’ve been going nonstop, right? I worked in the family business from age 12 until 24 was some hospitality, Got the NBA did the corporate thing For a couple of years and I’ve been running my business for the last 10 years and it’s been a lot and honestly, I feel tired and there are just things that I want to be able to do to slow down a little bit. So a goal that I have for the next couple of years is to transition more of my business to team members and let other people do more of the work and then to have a little bit more time for myself and if society is willing, I will travel more, I’ll play a little bit more golf, I’ll spend a little bit more time in nature, hiking and biking, but in a professional sense as those things are kind of happening for me personally, my intent is to coach a little less, but to train other coaches on how to coach, my methodology is in process.
And so after we published the book, I know I launched what’s referred to as the You and I know circle and it’s an executive roundtable, it’s coaching and it’s a reading club based on my book. And what I want to do is transition to allow for more people to lead their own version of that circle, no matter where they are on the planet. And so for me it would be slowing down a little bit, but it would also be me or someone on my team training more people to kind of spread the message because I really want people to be at that point of really knowing themselves and that they have the answers inside themselves. And so if I could slow down a little bit and transition some of the work to other members to help spread the message more broadly, that would be really helpful for me. I think some people actually find that by slowing down yourself, the business actually speeds up. So, um, you know, if you can make two or three or four more versions of you, then it means that you can take on that many, that much more work, but I’m interested to know how you get on with that.
So yeah, do keep me posted. Is there anything which you’d like to mention, which I haven’t asked you about, that you’d like to share with the audience. You know what? I think you posted this maybe 15, 16 months ago and you had a post on your website with regards to what does success mean to you? And you quoted Earl Nightingale in in the past and it was really that was really a profound and important for me because it was a good remembrance. you and I covered a lot of ground in our dialogue today Thomas, but I want to go back to that post because when I think about success, I don’t want people to think about success as being a financial thing or as being a status thing or as being I have more of this than the other person or I have this title or I have this authority, I don’t think that’s success at all. And what I really want people to take a quick step back is that success is really about the percentage of the day that you’re living your core values, like that’s it don’t make it more difficult to that, like, people try really hard to say that I have to achieve this goal and when I get to that goal, I’ll be happy.
No, be happy now, right? Be joyful in the things that you have today. And so, you know, we could talk at length about this Thomas at some other time, but I just really want people to not be striving for some external success. I want people to come back to the basics of their own life and really sit in the fact that a large percentage of the day, they’re living their core values and genuine loving life, having great relationships, having wonderful experiences, reflecting on the enormity of earth and all of the things that we get to do here. So forget about all the rest of that stuff. Success really isn’t about anything external. It’s just about the level of happiness that you have in your heart. And if you can focus on that, you’ve won the game and ending the episode with an earl Nightingale reference has got to be my favourite way to go. So it’s the best place for people to find you, Michael. Yeah, thanks Thomas. I’ve really enjoyed our time. The best place is my website. My full name is Michael Scott Seaver. So the website is michaelsseiver.com. So anybody can go to michaelseaver.com and snoop around lots of resources there. I’m relatively active on LinkedIn. So if you want to talk on LinkedIn, don’t be afraid to reach out. I post quite a bit on Instagram and Facebook. So also there a little bit, got quite a bit of content material on YouTube. So, if that’s interesting for, for you all, don’t be afraid to snoop around there, but that’s the central hub if you will is michaelsseaver.com.
Thank you very much for the information today. You’ve been great.
Thank you so much Thomas. I appreciate your time, man, truly.