Resilient Employees: The Differentiator That Sets Thriving Companies Apart With Eric Thomas

 

There are companies that are actually thriving in this environment and here’s the discriminator: they have really resilient employees. But building a resilient company culture goes beyond talent. It touches on deeper things that we need to weather challenges in connecting, collaborating and being in harmony with the other players in the team as we all try to do our best in a virtual environment. Rodney Flowers devotes this episode to unpack this broad topic with Eric Thomas, a world-renowned entrepreneur, keynote speaker, author, educator, and pastor who has over 25 years of ministerial experience. This conversation is an eye-opener for organizations that in these trying times, it is not enough to focus on the bottom line; it is high time organizations think about how all their team players – from the C-suite right down to the rank and file – are managing and what should be done to empower them to collaborate towards success.

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Resilient Employees: The Differentiator That Sets Thriving Companies Apart With Eric Thomas

I have a very interesting individual with me. Mr. Eric Thomas is here with me. He is a consultant, a keynote speaker and a strategist. He is a highly influential entrepreneur with more than fifteen years of business experience as a life and business coach. In addition, Eric is a fervent pastor and keynote speaker with more than 25 years of ministerial experience. These multiple characteristics have opened doors to perform roles as a radio and TV host and special contributor for various articles. Eric has also served as the faith branding evangelist. We’re going to get into what that means but first, please help me welcome, Mr. Eric Thomas. Welcome to the show, Eric.

Thank you.

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I’m glad to have you on the show. We’re in this virtual environment. It seems that connectivity has been more of a challenge now with the internet and with platforms like Zoom being overloaded with consumers, doing their thing on the internet. Nevertheless, we’re here. Thank you for being here. Thank you for helping us deal with some of these challenges. I’m happy to have you on the show. We were talking about some of the things that are going on in the world as it relates to COVID, as it relates to an election year, all things included. As a consultant and a strategist, what is your perspective about some of these things that are going on in the world right now?

You alluded to it and you talked about some of the connectivity challenges. I realized from the perspective of a man who is very spiritual that I feel like that’s it. I feel like we were having challenges with being more connected, not through the internet, but connected as people. We’re disconnected even from spears and aspects of ourselves. When I do host shows myself, I was playing this word game. What are the words you never want to hear again? There are these narratives that are given to us. If we hear it a couple of times, we start saying it. We start disconnecting from the essence of who we truly are and our sense of purpose. We move into this ambiguity and bewilderment. It’s doing everything we know how to do. Our challenge now is to remain connected.

People are having a hard time with that right now more than ever. I was invited to speak for this company. I was doing a consultation with them to understand what they were looking for and address some of the challenges they were having. It was hard because I can’t go into the office. I can’t physically touch people. I see them over Zoom or virtual platform, but I can’t be with them. That’s hard for me. It’s challenging for me. My kids are going back to school. They’re in a virtual environment and they’re not there. Even that is challenging.

We live in a world where collaboration is key. Coming together is key to our progress forward and yet we’re faced with a situation where connecting is challenging. I was bringing out some of the necessary skillsets in order to move forward. I’m highlighting what’s required. You have to be a person that has the ability to connect with someone even when you’re not standing right next to them through some type of platform. You’ve got to have the skillset in order to reach them these days.

What you’re talking about is the number one skill everyone needs is people skills, and everyone’s a leader, John Maxwell says. We’re seeing breakthroughs in technology, finance and FinTech. We’re seeing these mergers of industries. It still seems like we’re starting to lose touch with individuality, cooperation and collaboration from a holistic perspective. As I said, there is someone in the consultation that they were talking about their culture. You create culture in the organizations and you put the right people in first. The second is to steward that. You have to work hard on establishing your culture. You have to work hard in developing people who know how to engage, interact, show empathy and sympathy, and all those things that contribute to the whole big picture of what we call success.

Let’s talk about that a little bit because companies are revamping and restructuring, not just from a physical standpoint. The culture that we had before may have been broken down and it may not even work in this environment just because of the physicality. The way that the structure has changed from a geographic standpoint or the footprint has changed. How do corporations incorporate cultures that work in nowaday’s environment?

 

I don’t want to sound cliche, but it does start with clear and defined core values. We’re not human doings, we’re human beings. How we show up in life is how we show up in business. We all have to look introspected to see and evaluate to get into, “What are my core values?” When I go into the public square or to the marketplace, or when I’m working with an organization, whether as a consultant, as an employee, as a CEO or whatever capacity, if it’s a sports team or playing a part in a movie, it has to be a marriage. It has to be there.

I said this to one of my daughters who’s dating and considering the next step with this gentleman that when you start to bring two lives together, it has to be for a cause. That’s in that sacred text twice. If you don’t have a cause or your core values aren’t coming together, I promise it’s always going to be friction and fighting. The same is true in the corporate and business world, in medicine and technology. You start bringing people into these entities or these organizations. If those core values don’t line up, that culture is going to be toxic and dysfunctional.

It’s funny you say that because I’ve been talking about this ever since COVID hit. You mentioned sports when you’re in a game and the defense does something to you that knock you off your game. Your game plan isn’t working. What do you do? I believe you always go back to the basics and the basics are what you’re talking about. It’s your core values. It’s the essence of who you are. I’m excited that you brought that up for two reasons. One is for the purposes of developing culture in an organization but also, we’re dealing with a pandemic. The question is, how do we overcome this?

I want to address your response about core values because I believe that when you’re dealing with a challenge in life and we get developing culture, there are two things here. When you’re developing culture, you need to go, “That culture needs to be built with your core values.” We’re dealing with a pandemic here. A lot of people are asking, “How do we get over this? How do we overcome this?” I believe like in sports when your game plan isn’t working or the defense knocks you off course, what do you do? You go back to the basics. That’s what we or the corporations need to do now. That’s the starting point with everything as it relates to overcoming a challenge such as the one that’s in our environment.

In organizational strategy, it is not so much your tactics that you’re trying to employ that keeps the business from contracting and expanding. It is looking at the personality of the business. The business takes on the personalities of the top tier leadership, mid-tier management, and those who support that organization. We constantly need to have those self-awareness dialogues. There’s an organizational coaching now. We’re going through a self-awareness campaign. One of my roles is to evaluate the staff. Before I offer my evaluation, I allow them to evaluate themselves.

It is amazing that is such a challenge for a lot of people to stop for a moment and look beyond talent, and start to look at the essence of, why do I do what I do? Why do I say and think the way that I think and behave the way I behave? It starts to expose on a very transparent level what were the other dysfunctions in the organization, government, ministry, family or community. It requires a lot of pulling back the layers and being transparent and being honest with one’s self.

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How does this help the organization? I don’t see, at least for me, organizations where they have taken on this practice and dealing with these types of things. You have your leadership training and your leadership development. You have all those courses and trainings that you have to go to, but they don’t address awareness. They don’t address identity. All the things that are left to address on a personal level, not so much within the business. Based on what you’re saying, first of all, how does that help an organization move forward? How can organizations begin to implement these types of trainings or seminars or self-awareness activities to their employees without their employees feeling like this flighty or foo-foo, soft type of activities that they are pressing down our throats?

All healing, reconstruction and repair start with questions. There’s a dear friend in my life who says that people in the public square were asking, “How are you doing,” and keep walking without waiting to see, “You asked me how I’m doing. Let me tell you how I’m doing.” I think those are some questions that we should offer in the organization. That’s touchy for organizations especially the whirly ones because they’re in how we continue to grow, the bottom line. We’re looking at a profit instead of asking how is the CEO doing and how is the janitor doing? When I’m saying, “How you doing,” I mean physically, mentally, psychologically and spiritually, how are you?

Wherever your scope of faith is, asking those types of questions, and then pausing and allowing people to get that out. Why a lot of companies don’t do that is because it’s time-consuming. It takes away from those huddle meetings that are about quotas, sales, and budgets we need to be meeting. We start to see organizations suffer from organizational health issues because it’s not the bad strategy that they had. These people in the culture are not well. Wellness and self-awareness are necessary.

I’m doing a study. I’ve been doing a lot of research on resilience. I’ve been studying companies that are thriving in this environment. There are companies that are thriving in this environment. Here’s the discriminator. They have resilient employees. That’s what I’m gleaning from the research that I’m doing. It’s funny that the companies that don’t spend time focusing on resilience within their employees to include all the things you mentioned, spirituality, wellbeing and all of those things.

 

Even when they’re meeting their quotas, it appears that they’re on top of their game and peak performance. The problem is when the defense strikes when the company gets knocked off balance, they have a very hard time to recover. The employees don’t know how to do that. As long as things are tracking towards the plan. We’re doing things in accordance with what we laid out and we’re meeting the objectives. As long as they’re walking that rope, but when life happens, they fold and they can’t rebound. We’re seeing it. It’s not many companies that are thriving right now. There are only a few that you can see if you do the research is because they have resilient employees.

I feel like this and maybe I’m wrong. Over time, I’ve seen this scenario that success reveals talent and skill, but challenges and chaos reveal character. When these corporations are doing well and again, they’ve done a great job and using their head hunters to attract top-tier talent, peak performers as you call them. When challenges come, especially those that are unexpected. There was no forecast for this. It shows up. It starts to reveal at the essence, the core of who you truly are. That’s not just in corporation. That’s in family, marriages and relationships, but we are talking about it as it relates to the marketplace. That’s the theme. It goes back to what I said. It’s time-consuming to make these kinds of investments. It’s also very expensive to take a time out and say, “Let’s have a retreat,” and pay for it. Let’s bring in those people who can speak to individuals in a holistic capacity. What is the investment? It’s an investment. Either you see it as an investment or you see it as a cost necessarily. Small businesses were starting to make these kinds of investments because they get hit the hardest when things like what’s happening in the globe right now. Small businesses are trying to grit it out and grit it through but they’re looking beyond what’s my marketing strategy.

I believe that talent isn’t always the answer to success. We’re living in a new era and talent isn’t the solution. You want resilient employees. You want individuals who can pretty much handle whatever is thrown at them, and provide some level of progress. It may not be “success” as it is defined now, but you’re looking for some level of progress. You’re looking for progress across the team. You look for everyone to provide that level of progress. In my definition, when you have a team of individuals and these individuals within the team are all progressing, that’s a success. You have a team and you got 3 or 4 star players, that’s not success because first of all, you leaving people behind. It’s not a holistic approach because we have to rely on collaboration and teamwork these days.

The risk is about a few years ago and they were trying to buy a team. You can’t buy solutions anymore. You can’t just hire a bunch of players because you feel they’re talented. They look good on paper and now you’re expecting for them to go and win the Super Bowl for you. That doesn’t work anymore because there is so much going on. On the field of adversity, there’s much opposition nowadays. It’s unpredictable that if you rely on my talent or a person’s talent, their skillset may not be the theme for the complete duration of your life cycle that is going to get you there.

There are going to be ebbs and flows. There are going to be different things that are thrown at you. If you’re relying on talent alone and not the adaptability, agility and the ability of this person to overcome and maybe perform at a high level in areas where he’s not so talented or unfamiliar. That requires a level of determination, grit, bounce-back ability and resilience. You’re bound to fail if you don’t have any in my opinion or your success is going to be limited.

It’s not just here in the West, but globally. The world is competitive. If you’re in a sales organization, you’re going to be awarded. You’re going to be brought upfront. Your name is going to be on the wall. You’re going to get that plaque for producing and having the most sales. In the entertainment industry, you have to be the best artist, producer and writer. In sports, you’ve got to run the fastest. You got to hit more balls out of the park. There aren’t any awards for wellness. There’s no one coming to the stage for that because that’s not always as equal.

I’m not saying one’s over the other. I’m saying, you said it. Mark Sanborn has a book called Talent is Not Enough. It is not enough. When we’re there and we’re only measuring performance, we have to compete against each other versus collaborate. We bring that because the metrics are important, the benchmarks. We want the organization to perform, but we also need these people to drop the culture, remove the culture to be at their optimal best. We don’t award mental health and wellbeing. Organizations need to consider that. I’m not in psychology, but I’ve been a pastor. When I used to say this as a lead pastor, I never said it to be an insult. I used to say this often is that most churches don’t need upright pews. They need the couches that layout. There are many smart, intelligent and gifted people who are broken in here. I was one of them. I was a broken leader. I worked hard at my skillset and anything that I was in, in ministry and business. In here, I was so broken and dysfunctional. I’ve learned to become functional in my dysfunction. More and more people are like that. That doesn’t turn out well. It never does.

I feel companies have a hard time measuring wellbeing. That’s an interesting question. How do you measure wellbeing? How do you determine progress?

I wish I could answer that. I’m willing to be the Guinea pig. You have another show with a psychologist. We have not laid out those metrics. We’d have to be careful even in that because we could become competitive. Where you are doing well, I might not be doing well, but that doesn’t mean that you’re better than me holistically. It has to start to be where when we measure it out, we see where people are. We have things like DISC assessments and other assessments out there, but we need deeper. Things get even deeper down to the core. What it will say to me is wherever I am, wherever my capacity lacks, wherever I’m insufficient, your strength taps in. Wherever you are lacking and I’m talking from that mental health position. It will strengthen and support you. That’s where cooperation and teamwork comes in.

That’s the data that’s missing. I feel like with that type of analysis, we will understand even more how to put people together and create high performing teams. If you have that level of data, for every person’s weakness or measure, you wouldn’t know where they need to be relative to someone else. His personality traits as well. Understanding who can work well with whom, and understanding the personality traits as it relates to different activities, different functions, and different levels of leadership. You don’t create organizations based on that type of data.

We’re looking at resumes, past experiences, and education levels. That has taken us a long way, but in the environment that we’re in now and where it looks like we’re going, that no longer is going to work. What you look like on paper is no longer sufficient. It’s how you perform in a dynamic and adverse climate that is continuously changing with different levels of opposition that could be attacking you at various times. That requires a level of adaptability and agility. A person that’s able to perform at a high level in that type of environment, that’s what I would classify in this environment as a star player.

That person may not have an education. They may not have “the degrees” and all of those things, but there’s something about them. It could be their past experience or the way they were brought up or what they’ve been exposed to. Maybe a level of awareness that they have. For me, it’s putting myself in that environment to gain that level of awareness or having an experience that forced me into that. To continue to pursue training and continuously raise my awareness. That doesn’t show up on paper. It’s not going to show up in my resume.

I was in a meeting. I had the opportunity to sit in on a coaching session in Idaho earlier in 2020 before the lockdown happened. You’re saying this and I’m thinking, small businesses and family businesses get this down. Looking at where the business was hurting in the analysis, they lack strategy, finesse and a lot of execution. We’re talking about a business that has been around well over 50 years, born into the second generation, getting ready to go into the third iteration. I was chatting with a coach like, “Let’s look at this.”

We talked to the owner of the business and he kept saying, “I want to take care of my people.” That’s all he kept saying. I said, “Yeah, but this is business.” We had a suggestion to him that, “You might want to get rid of your family.” He’s like, “I want to see how I can invest in my people as I’m investing in the strategy and incorporate that.” That coaching session, there was a template for that. When we went in our huddle to look at that, we thought, “Maybe someone needs to implement that. Maybe there’s an opportunity here in the marketplace to fill that gap with those things.” Small businesses are going to do well. They fear being eaten by the bigger guys, but one thing they do is they take care of their people. They don’t mind investing in their people. They’ll invest in their people before they invest in corporate strategy. They’ll do that first. They’re equally important.

I do as well and there should be more emphasis on the people. That is evident in where we are because we all have a challenge in front of us. A lot of innovation and creativity can come from employees who do the work. I’m baffled how in a crisis like this, the leaders of organizations will get into the room and they’ll try to figure things out. They’re not the people that are doing the work on the front lines every single day. You’re not getting any input from those people, but they are excluded because they’re not “leaders.” They haven’t raised into the level to sit at the table and be in the room. However, they’re the ones that are doing the job every day. I feel that at times, especially if we invest in our people, that’s where the juice is. That’s where the answers and the solutions lie.

Every single day they know what gripes, what angles aren’t working, what is uncomfortable, where we could do this bigger, better or faster. If we don’t hear from them, if there’s not like bottoms-up communication vehicle, then we lose out on a lot of possible solutions and ways to do it better. In this environment, those are the people we need to ask especially. If we’re going to move fast, if we’re going to talk about speed, when I get to a solution quickly, I would say, “Your job is you have to do it every single day.” In an environment where there’s less connectivity and there are these platforms that we have to use. What do you know? What are some of your thoughts about how we could get to a place where we’re as efficient and productive, even if not more productive? What can we do?

You need to hear from them. If we had that setup and we were taking that approach more often, we can get to a place where we could have been utilizing this telework, this some type of environment that we’re in. We could have gotten to this place a whole lot sooner. It took a crisis in order for us to realize it. There are many people right now, they’re sitting at home saying, “We could have done this a long time ago.” I’ve been telling them. I’ve been having these same feelings. I could have done my job in this type of environment years ago, but the company will not. They were restricted. They didn’t think it was possible to work in this type of environment.

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There’s some benefit to being in this environment. There are some challenges to being in this environment. A lot of corporations are seeing a dip in their costs for overhead because employees aren’t coming into work, but yet they’re still productive. Now, they’re evaluating that. What do we want to do going forward? Is this something we want to maintain? What are our costs to do business in this environment? Is it cheaper? Are we as productive? I feel like you’re hearing from someone who’s on the front line and you’re working every day.

It’s important to have that communication open because a lot of information about how we operate on a daily basis can come forward that would make companies more efficient, and open to new ideas and new innovation. It doesn’t always have to start from the top down. The leaders thought of this new innovative process and we’re going to push it down. That’s good at times, but you need to hear what’s going on at the bottom. Have we thought this through and checked in with the people that do the work every day?

 

I am not one for much television especially reality television as I feel like most of it is scripted garbage. Undercover Boss had a theme to it that was awesome. They would allow these CEOs or presidents of C-Suites to come down into their organizations, and not just see what was dysfunctional in the processes and your systems. Let’s see what was going on in the lives of those people. You’ll remember, they’ll come and see, go undercover and go into their business. They’re looking at how things are working, but on those break times, having those opportunities to ask what’s going on in your life. You start to peel that onion back again and see what’s going on in the individual lives of these people who are working in their business.

In the end, there’s this miraculous transformation, this before and after, but then these C-Suite officers would make these investments. I don’t know why that show went off. You can only do so many undercovers series before people start wondering. You don’t even have to go undercover. CEOs and presidents should have to go undercover. They should come in, make evaluations and allow people to peel back the onion. In most cases, the individual wouldn’t say the systems stink from a perspective of an associate, a cashier, and a customer service rep. The technology that you think is banging, isn’t all that anyway.

You’re looking at me as a human, as a person. I’ve got things that’s going on in life. I can’t say it enough. How you show up in life is how you show up in business. It’s true wherever you are in the organization, whether you’re the founder, the CEO, you’re Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffett, or you’re the no-name janitor walking around with a bunch of keys on the side of your hip and scraping scum off the sidewalk. How they show up in life is how they show up in business. We need to start building out these health and wellness offices and suites in our organizations to embrace the challenges because it’s not all about fixing them.

I don’t know what we’re going to do, Rodney. We go and start trying to make an investment and making sure you’re on your path to health, whether that’s having a chaplain on the site. I know some companies have made investments in mental health programs where if you feel depressed or you feel suicidal, you could pick up the phone and call somebody. It’s always important to have somebody on site that’s coming through or come on those non-pay weeks to check the temperature and the pulse of your people. You’re checking the health and wellness of the organization.

What are your thoughts about making health and wellness programs part of the mandatory training for organizations because you don’t see that at all? It’s not mandatory.

It’s magical. That’s where the magic is going to be. That’s where we’re going to see organizations not just thrive in P&L, but even at a humanitarian, philanthropic level, which many organizations fail at. I’m not thinking you throw cash that you think of $1 million and that’s good. That’s significant. I’m talking about getting in the trenches with these people. If you’re building it out, it’s going to be some trial and error. You won’t get it right the first time. What we’ll start to see is health. The health of the organization in the organization will become an organism. It will last through times like these.

Do you think there’s a fear that if organizations invested in those types of programs, that people will see how wonderful they are and they would want to go pursue other things? They then have to start over with the next person.

I have a teaching that I call Overcoming Your BS. That BS is your Blind Spots. It’s hard to find those blind spots. You said it, Rodney, there are some people that don’t want their key players or influencers, or even support staff have their eyes open to what their true potentials are, who they are as a person, and what they can accomplish in the public square. The possibilities maybe is they may go seek for greener pastures and that’s not always wrong.

That is a fear. My thought about that is for every person that the organization needs if they decided to do something like this, they would have 4 or 5 other people knocking at their door to get in to gain that level of training because it’s not available anywhere. It’s very limited. People will want to come work for the organization, not only for monetary gain, a paycheck but to get the training. You’re going to have some people that pursue higher levels of work. There will be those people that stay that understand what the objective of the training is. They’re going to be willing to support and keep the organization going and private for those individuals to come in and be a part of it.

A CEO said this to me a few years ago and while he was okay with people leaving the organization, he says, “The way that we are designed, when people leave, it’s for 1 or 2 reasons. They’ve outgrown us and we want them to go, or we’ve outgrown them. It’s no longer a good fit.” When we start talking about core values, a piece to personal core values is loyalty. John Maxwell says, “People will always remember how you made them feel.” “You make me feel valuable. You make me feel like I’m making a contribution.” There is going to be that equal contribution, “You invested into me, I’m going to give back to you.”

It’s the Law of Exchange. It doesn’t have to be monetary always. They’re not going to always go seek greener pastures because there’s money. It’s either they’ve outgrown the organization or the organization had outgrown them. Those people will feel like, “I’m going to grow with this organization. I’m in it to win it, ups, downs, good and bad. I’m invested.” They’re going to continue to give you 100% of who they are, their talent and their skills.

Corporations look at the cost to train a person, get that person to a state of wellbeing where we say, “This is the type of person we want to create and build in the organization, and that return on investment.” It goes back to what we talked about before. That’s the data that’s missing. What is the ROI on that type of training? A lot of CEOs believe that it’s very low.

I’ve been in HR for a while and it’s more expensive to recruit than it is to retain. The investment should be there. For a top-tier organization at minimum, it costs about $2,000 to recruit someone. I’m not even talking top talent, CEO or manager. I’m just saying to bring in somebody with blood pressure and who’s breathing. You have a revolving door, where they’re coming in the front door going right back out the back door because you can’t retain them in 2 to 3 years or 3 to 6 months. You’re going to be spending on that. Making that one-time investment and doing something like the treat, their mental wellness check-ins, creating those templates. Adding those into your technologies, ROI is going to be greater on the retention than it will be in the recruitment.

I want to get to some of the questions that you and I were discussing. You had mentioned your story, which I thought was interesting, but we didn’t dive into too much. This is an election year. I noticed that you had aspired to be the president of the United States at one time, but you found it more effective to become a businessman. What’s the thought behind that was?

Let me tell you why I made that transition and he passed away in 2019, it was Ross Perot. He ran in the year of Daddy Bush and Bill Clinton. In the middle of that was Ross Perot. Back then, I was into politics. Anything political, I was glued to the television. I had a newspaper. I saw this businessman who seems to be more coherent than any of these. I’ve got friends in politics. I lived in Tallahassee, our state capital for a long time. That is no pun on politicians. They are very brilliant people. He didn’t win the election. One of the reasons I aspired to be president is because as a child, you always want to find the highest paid job.

I remember my dearly departed mother asked me about that. She is like, “Why do you want to be president?” I said, “The president has to be the richest person in the world.” They’re grossly underpaid. When I would look in magazines like Time Magazine and they would name their most influential person of the year. It wasn’t always the president of any nation or the king of any kingdom. It was usually some influencer in business or entertainment. I thought, “That’s where the power lies.” I wanted to get in to learn business, make an influence and make an impact on the public square.

I’m glad you’ve made that choice. It’s a good segue to tell people about how they can find you in your business.

Our organization is Influence Me Institute. For those who may know something about me, it was formerly called iGroup, which meant impact. The key figures in the organization and I, at the end of 2019, we started looking at that word impact. We saw that it was becoming a buzzword. We thought, which one has more legacy impact or influence? We thought, “You can encounter me and make an impact on my life but if I’m influencing you, I’ll leave a legacy.” That’s the most important. We want to that. We want to leave a legacy. Influence-Me.org is the website. You’ll receive a free consultation. We give those consultations for about 30 minutes. I find that in my consultations, I usually go about 45 minutes to 1 hour, and not invoice people. I’m good at building rapport and trying to cover your needs. That’s where we are.

 

Eric, I want to say thank you for coming to the show. It’s been a good conversation. It’s one that’s going to progress and continue to be discussed. We’re moving into a new era in business, corporate business and entrepreneurship. These are all shifting. A lot of the ways of doing business, a lot of the strategies and the thought patterns around how we put plans in place, how we hire your people, the type of people that we’re looking for, how we evaluate people, all of that is changing as well. How do we do these things going forward? To think about it is you and I play a big role in that. CEOs of corporations are looking for answers and solutions. Now is the time for a lot of innovation and creativity, and voicing your thoughts and opinions about how we can do things better. What’s working and what’s not working. It’s a vital time right now.

We are the storytellers. We get to create our own narrative. Part of what we do is helping people find their voice and be confident in speaking it, expressing it, allowing people to experience it, and stop letting people give you the narrative and show your voice and own it.

We always ask our guests how can we consistently bounce back from adversity, dominate our challenges and win in the game of life. We want to hear your thoughts about that.

Adversity is a university. Click To Tweet

This would be my favorite part of the interview and I’ve enjoyed our time together. Embrace the challenges. Losses have lessons, learn from them and be willing to be available for the challenges and chaos. In a time like this, I would love to say that everything remained intact in my life, but it didn’t. I dealt with a lot of uncertainty, but I have gained so much more knowledge and wisdom from it. Embrace those challenges. When the challenges come, do not complain and whine. Be human, deal with your emotions, but turn those losses into lessons. Let life be your university.

Thanks again, Mr. Eric Thomas, for coming on the show.

Thank you so much.

—

There you have it, another successful episode of the show. Let life be your university. Isn’t that a thought? Is life your university? What are you learning from life? Are you pushing back on your class or course? Are you pushing back on your homework? You don’t want to get your homework done. Life will be teaching you a lesson. Life is a university. It is. We have to graduate. We all have the responsibility and the privilege to go through and get a good score, get a good grade. That’s something to think about. Until next time, peace and love.

Important Links:

• https://www.Influence-Me.org/
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/ericetthomas?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_profile_view_base_contact_details%3BBSGwdb5%2FRqC7XaPWpXT6fA%3D%3D
• IYWNetwork@gmail.com
• https://Twitter.com/eric_e_t_thomas
• http://RodneyFlowers.com/get-up-book/
• http://RodneyFlowers.com/essential-assertions-book/
• https://RodneyFlowers.us9.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=01f76a038256f77a6fbc93590&id=307d726734

About Mr. Eric Thomas

 

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