You are listening to the “Rise Above Podcast," the only podcast on the planet with a mission to help you live a free and uncommon life. Here's your host, Greg Smith.
Greg Smith: 00:12 Yes, yes, yes. What's up everybody? Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Today you are listening to the Rise Above Podcast and I am your host, Greg Smith. And I believe, if you desire uncommon freedom in business and in life, it starts with creating a champion's mindset from within.
So, today's episode is kind of special, as you have noticed, if you're a longtime listener of mine. Consistency on the podcasts front has not been something, and I've admitted this many times, but it hasn't been something that I've been very good at. And I think part of it is it's a one way communication tool, and it also—I kind of joked about this with my podcast producer, who is on with me right now. What’s up, Jonathan? Say hello to the Rise Above listeners.
Jonathan Rivera: 01:00 What’s up, Rise Above listeners? Look, I'm doing this for you, I want you to know, because I know you miss Greg. So, I've actually grabbed him by the neck and told him, “You're recording today.”
Greg: 01:10 He legit did. And it's interesting because I was telling Jonathan not too long ago that typically the mechanic, you guys, many people, you have probably heard this that the mechanic typically has the worst car, or the shoe repairmen typically has the worst pair of shoes, and that's because we always put everybody else in front of us. It's easier to do somebody else's laundry than it is your own or their own dishes. And so, yes, Jonathan has strong-armed me and said, “Hey, man, just put me on. Let's schedule a time.”
My wife and four kids are in the basements. We have a first story and a second story home, and then a basement. I'm all the way up top in the second story, as far away as I can be from the basement entrance, and then they are all downstairs. So, God bless my wife for doing that, so we can record this today.
We didn't really have a super big plan for today, but it was interesting because we were talking about ratings and reviews. Really not taking offense, and I've talked about this before and…
Jonathan: 02:12 Can you? Come on, Greg. Can you really not take offense? I think here you're being silly.
Greg: 02:18 No, no, I think it's the way that you take it. There's actually a really good book called Bait of Satan, which helped me dramatically learn not to take offense, and I really do think I do a pretty good job of not taking offense, because, ultimately, I think, when somebody is offended, now here's the thing, if I'm taking offense to somebody, it's typically my own issue. It's typically not theirs. And if I'm the one that's offended and I'm thinking about it, thinking about, thinking about it, guess who's losing sleep? I am. Not the offended, right? I am. Not the offender. The offender is not losing sleep. It's the person who's choosing to be offended.
There's an old saying—somebody used to say like, Oh, I'm not going to stand here and take offense. And the pastor said, “Well, then where are you going to go? Where are you going to go and take your offense?” Right?
So, I think everybody does take offense and it’s easy, too. But, coming back to a really good book called Bait of Satan, I think being offended is a choice and I think you can choose to take offense or not take offense.
Now, in my opinion, if somebody is offended by me than I do—and, I don't know, it’s a weakness and a strength, in a way, in my eyes—I don't want to offend anybody really. I mean, I don't want to, and I want people to like me and I think most people want to be liked. But if I've done something that I don't know that I've done to offend you and you're offended, please just bring it up, you know what I mean? Because, oftentimes, it's a misunderstanding of the way I was perceived or maybe I said something I didn't even know I said it.
And so, this wasn't even what we were going to talk about, but clear lines of communication when you're choosing to be offended, I think, is really, really important. And I think it is a choice. I really do. You can choose to be offended by something or not. And, if somebody does something to offend you, you’ve got to realize that's their problem. You know what I mean? You can choose to wallow in that and make it your problem, too, or you can just choose to focus on what matters, which focusing on matters, on what matters, is what we were actually talking about.
Jonathan: 04:34 Yeah. But let's dive into that just a little bit deeper, because I understand what you're saying and I get it, and I'm also in my forties. I didn't get that one when I was in my twenties, okay? So, how do you get to that evolved state? Because knowing that's a choice is like, really, you're not an amoeba anymore. You're an evolved person. How do you figure that out?
Greg: 04:56 First off, I'm not in my twenties anymore, but I did learn it when I was in my twenties. I really believed that that book, specifically, for me, changed me. I can pull it right off the shelf and show you, but when you really learn everything is a choice, I mean, this is why I talk about mindset. I believe it goes within, right? Creating a champion's mindset from within, I believe that all things come from in between your ears. And so, how you choose to respond to something is your choice. Right?
Jonathan: 05:30 I call B.S. on you. Yeah, I call B.S. on you. Everything comes from between your ears. What about from your heart? Because what we're talking about is an emotional response versus a mental response. So, as the mental is evolved, but most people are living in the heart.
Greg: 05:46 For sure. Yeah, I guess you're talking about a logical way of looking at something versus an emotional way. Emotions. This is a John Wooden, famous coach for basketball, said that emotion is the enemy. He was talking about playing basketball, but this goes for many different things, where emotion can be the enemy.
I talk a lot about relationships. If you've listened to me for any amount of time, you know relationships are really important to me. And so, I think the key is, number one, if somebody is offensive toward you—as an example, if they want to give you a one-star review, right?—you have to look at the person and say, Do I have a relationship with that person and did I mean to offend them? Did I do it?
We joke in jujitsu all the time. I joke. It's kind of like my saying—we’ll be doing jujitsu and you're trying to kill each other to fake death. You're trying to choke each other, break your arms and all that stuff. And, every now and then, you're getting clocked in the face with a heel or a fist, or a head butt, and the guys, especially lower belts, they'll always be like, I'm so sorry. Like, a little white belt, you know?
As a white belt, you'd be like, Oh my God, I'm so sorry. Please don't kill me. That's what you're saying. I say, Hey, listen, you don't have to be sorry unless you meant it. And, if you meant it, you're probably not sorry, because you did it on purpose.
So, that's my philosophy of offending somebody. If you did it on purpose, then you're really not sorry for it. And so, therefore, I look at the person who you choose to take offense from. You can emotionally take offense, right? I mean, I think that's what you're saying that there is a trigger to just being offended, like, Oh my gosh. But then, I think you have to look at it logically and start rationalizing like, Should I be offended by that, and is that really my problem or is it actually their problem that they're now outputting on me?
And I think when you really step back, yes, emotionally you're going to be offended. “Do you choose to hold onto the offense?” is I guess really what we're drawing out of here? It’s that I choose not to hold onto offense because, frankly, it's going to eat you alive, and I don't have time for that.
And if I am taking any offense to something, guess what? I'm going to call you up and say, Jonathan, man, I don't really want to hold onto this because I know it's just going to fester for me, and I don't know if you meant it this way, but you had said this earlier, and so I just want to kind of talk about it. I mean, if you did mean it that way, cool, let's talk about it. But if you didn't, my apologies, because I've been sitting here and thinking about this for a couple of days now. Then it's over.
I mean, I don't know, my wife says, You're such an emotional person. And I am, but that's why I'll just talk. I don't want to fester up feelings, and then half the time the feelings are on false conditions.
Jonathan: 08:55 All these feelings. So, what was the topic? I can't even remember because it is something about them reviews. I took you way off-track.
Greg: 09:02 You did. I was telling you that all of my reviews—and, by the way, if you haven't reviewed my show and you listen to my show, please, I would love for you to review my show just right now. Boom. Five stars if you want to. If you like to give me one, give me one star.
I will tell you, though, that I only had one one-star for the first year and a half, and then I hadn't looked at my ratings forever and I pulled back up my ratings. I had a new five-star and the lady was nice enough to leave a comment, which I love it when people leave comments, good or bad. And she left a comment and I noticed, I was like, Wait a minute, I have another one-star. I was like, What the heck? Where did that come from?
And then I was genuinely hoping that I would see somebody actually like, Yeah, you suck and here's why, and they would give me feedback, and they didn’t. And so, I was like, Man, where did this one-star come from? And it was eating at me for a second. And then, I was like, Wait a minute. It doesn't matter. That person doesn't matter because they're not my people. It's just that they're not jiving my message and that's fine.
And so, I parlayed that into just the other night. I got feedback. I did a presentation for attorneys and it was really, really interesting. It was the Ohio Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, so it was a bunch of criminal defense lawyers.
And, man, I went into that meeting, by the way, and I'm just like, Hey, I'm Greg, nice to meet you. Man, I tried to say hi to every single person that morning and they just had the most mug faces. I mean, it was like you were in the court of law and I was like, Dude, I'm being judged by all these people and they didn’t even know I was a speaker yet, you know what I mean? They just thought I was another attorney in the room.
Anyways, I did the presentation. Presentation went phenomenal, in my opinion, for what it was. I got really great feedback from the leaders that were in the room. The guy, the new president, the past president, a couple of guys came up to me. I told the story on my Facebook Live where somebody actually even wants to hire me to come down to a masterminding event in Key West because he liked it so much.
But I got all of the reviews back where they had to rate. There were five speakers that day and I was the first one first thing in the morning, Greg Smith, rah-rah, and they had to rate you one through five, and they’d rate the whole event. Then they’d rate each speaker and they would give feedback, and I’d get feedback.
And so, I went through and I was like, Oh, five. Nice. Yeah, four. Nice. Oh, three. Nice. Yeah, four, okay. Oh, one. I’m like, Crap, one. And then, I was like, Oh… Kept reading. More fours, threes, fives, and then another one, and then another one. I think there were three ones. I pulled it up on a spreadsheet. Yeah, I had three ones and one two. So, four out of the 17 that actually took time to fill out a review, gave me a two or a one. I'm like, Oh, crud.
One of them gave good feedback and it was just like, Hey, not my jam. Would have loved to have more attorney-specific education. Now, granted, though, on a side note, my presentation did get approved by the Ohio Supreme Court for continuing education credits. So that was a pretty big.
Jonathan: 12:18 Sweet.
Greg: 12:19 Yeah, I felt pretty cool about that because I had to go back and forth with them. But, anyways, here's my point. Out of those 17, I had 11. Eleven had given me a four or a five, and those were the ones that actually left feedback. And I noticed a tendency on many of them, many, I would say two of three that gave me a one, they gave everybody a one or two. They're just sour apples, like, Oh, this was a horrible day…huh, yeah. I'm like, okay, I can't… What am I going to do? Nobody pleased you that day, so I'm not worried.
But then, there was one that I did. I was like, full self-internalization here, I had a one and everybody else was a three and a five.
Jonathan: 13:06 Ouch.
Greg: 13:07 Yeah, I was like, dang, man, I was the one that that guy or girl hated for the day. But then—
Jonathan: 13:14 Did you go looking for them?
Greg: 13:16 I did. I wanted to be like, Where's your name on this sheet? I’m going to Google you.
Jonathan: 13:20 I'm going to change your mind.
Greg: 13:21 Yeah. No, I used to think like that, like, I'm going to make you like me. It's like, no, I'm just not going to worry about it. We humans are all different, you know? And that's what we were saying. I look at all the people with the fours and the fives, and I look at the people with the podcast reviews with the fours and the fives. I think, okay, those are my people. Those are my audience. How do I serve them better? What did they like? How do I give them more? Because they're going to become the super fans in the long run.
You're going to have haters, you know? I mean, Donald Trump has people who just absolutely fanatically love him and fanatically hate him. Hillary Clinton, fanatically love, fanatically hate.
And so, we were talking about this. Perry Marshall, one of the guys that I study with marketing and so forth, he has the Amazon 3.5 phenomenon chapter where he talks about how you have the majority of people that will vote one or the majority vote five or four, and, therefore, you end up with a 3.5 rating.
And so, I actually did the math on my attorney seminar. It comes out to 3.588.
Jonathan: 14.23 It was average.
Greg: 14:25 I'm like, Hey, man, I'm offending some people and I'm also making others love me. I guess I'm winning, you know?
Jonathan: 14:32 Isn't that better than having people that are indifferent?
Greg: 14:35 I think that's a hundred percent. And it was like Dan Kennedy said, if you're not offending somebody by noon, you're just not doing your job as a marketer. I think it was him though I’d have to look it up.
But, I mean, at the end of the day, if have a strong message and you're truly sharing what you actually believe in helping people, there are going to be people who don't agree with you. That's fine. That in its finest glory is what makes America America. It’s that you can actually have that without somebody imprisoning you or killing you, or suppressing you, like what has happened in many countries. It still happens today, suppression of thought.
So, that is what makes it amazing, but it's also something you have to be okay with as you're sharing a strong, bold message and your beliefs.
Jonathan: 15:27 Does it hurt, Greg? Does it still hurt to get those one-star reviews?
Greg: 15:32 I mean, if I had 50 of them…if I had 10, I'd probably be like, Oh my goodness, I'm going downhill. But, no, I got the majority of my listeners, you, listening right now, obviously jam on it. It's good stuff. I'm just trying to share from the heart. So, if I get more one-star reviews, I'll start wondering why so many people are one-star-reviewing me and why they're listening to me. But, that, I don’t know.
Jonathan: 15:57 Look, I think you’ve got good reviews. I'm positive. I've seen your work and I'm positive you don't get the things I get. I get comments on my videos and things like that. I hate this guy's face. I want to punch him and kill him. I bet you nobody’s saying that to you. And I'm like, okay, another day on Facebook.
Greg: 16:16 I have not gotten to that point. I hope that I don't get to that point, no offense, but… I think if you say no offense, then it's kind of like, Hey, with all due respect we respect…
Jonathan: 16:27 With all due respect.
Greg: 16:28 Yeah, you just say whatever you want after you say, no offense, Jonathan, but I don’t want to get to that point. But it easily could happen with my mug, so I don’t know. But people are people, man, at the end of the day.
And that's also, I mean, you're advertising and stuff, too, and I kind of sit within a very specific group of people and I haven't… yeah, you're a step further than I am, in terms of putting yourself out publicly in front of a lot of people that don't know you. The majority of my listeners know me for years or personally, know me in person.
So, you’re going to have that stuff, man. Your content is great, too, and you know that. So, it’s serving the right person. The right person that jams on it, jams on it, and the wrong person says you have an ugly face.
Jonathan: 17:13 So, that's the lesson then. It’s I think what you started out with. I mean, if we're recapping here, it is separate the emotion and the logic. It's okay to be emotional and then let your logic takeover, because, I mean, we all have hearts. We all care. We want to be loved in life. That's a part of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But if you're going to put yourself out there, expect that then. Right? And be able to decipher whether… And I agree with you. I love the idea.
I'll tell you what happened to me recently because you and I were laughing about this. I said, if it weren't for bad reviews, I wouldn't have any on Amazon. And I got bad reviews on my book. I've sold 400 or 500 of these things, and I'll tell you what, I got one bad review and he made fun of me, which I can appreciate. If it's funny, I can appreciate it.
But he also said there was nothing actionable, and I thought what would make this easier is if I put a thing at the end of each chapter that had three action steps, because I do know the content is actionable, but people still need to be led further. So, I appreciate that he made fun of me and then told me how I could be better.
So, take criticism, right, if it's criticism that will help you, and do something about it.
Greg: 18:27 Yeah, which, you know what, that's the kind of guy that I like. If he's going to or if they're going to rate you bad, but they give you good feedback, that's awesome, because you're a champion because you took the feedback and you made it better. You made it better for the rest of the people. So, I think that's huge.
I mean, people, a lot of decisions are made with emotion and then they're justified with logic. And so, I think, if you can start making more decisions where emotional decisions aren't bad, but the emotional choice to be offended, I think you can logically pull it back and be like, Uh, is this me? Is this them? Are they displacing anger on me based upon their home life?
I mean, that's the other thing, too, man. I have a lot of compassion, I've learned over the years to take myself out of certain situations because I have, through the years of helping, coaching and mentoring so many people, you come to find out—I mean, I've been very blessed with a good home life growing up and, even though we weren't rich by any means, my parents were awesome. They were always engaged and all that stuff—there are so many other things that people are dealing with that you can just be the recipient of built-up issues, and sometimes you’ve just got to be like, Yeah, man. Actually, if you decipher, it's like, That’s not me.
Or you apologize for it and they still are offended—bye-bye.
So, that's what I’ve got for today. That's my episode.
Jonathan: 20:00 All right, I'm digging it. I'm digging it, and I will speak for all the other Rise Above listeners out there—we want you back again, Greg.
Greg: 20:10 I appreciate that and I appreciate—that's what's cool—having somebody in your corner that's like, Hey, man, you need to get out there. You need to do the next thing, and having a support system. And so, it is kind of weird to be like, Yeah, I'm going to have a co-host, but I always love chatting with you and we always get into some deep stuff.
So, if you liked this episode and you thought it was cool, I love feedback. I actually got feedback for my driving in the car with my microphone from a couple of people that I know closely. I take that feedback.
Jonathan: 20:39 What did they say?
Greg: 20:40 They had a good point I think.
Jonathan: 20:42 What? You’ve got mutters on there?
Greg: 20:44 Yeah, they did. They did. I think by extracting some of the audio, it sounded like dud-dud-dud-dud-dud-dud-dud-dud. And so, there was this little noise instead of consistent road feedback, so I've been a little hesitant to continue recording in my car.
But I do take the feedback. I love it, and I definitely want to continue adding value into your life as you are listening, because I can tell you that somebody's attention and time is one of the most valuable resources that there is. So, I am highly grateful to have you listening today. I hope that you enjoyed the show. If you did, drop a comment. Leave a review. But I can't wait to talk to you next week.
So, take care. God bless. Thanks again, Jonathan, for today. See you guys.
Jonathan: 21:25 Love it.
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