Brett Bartholomew
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Juliet: [0:04:29] Brett, welcome to The Ready State Podcast. We are very excited to have you.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:04:33] Juliet, I’m very happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Juliet: [0:04:36] And what’s also fun is I was just on your podcast and so it’s nice to have the tables turned and get to ask you some questions, especially because I think on the podcast we learned we have 500,000 things in common. So I’m really looking forward to chatting. 

Kelly: [0:04:49] And let me just jump in right here and say this happens to me a lot. I have talented, amazing friends who I interact personally and professionally, then they get to know you, and I get dropped.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:05:02] I sent you a carrier pigeon the other day.

Juliet: [0:05:06] Yeah, he’s like we’re still friends.

Kelly: [0:05:09] And it turns out that once people actually get to know Juliet, then they’re like, oh, Kelly was just like a vector. I was like a host. And that’s totally fine. I understand. You’re cooler.

Juliet: [0:05:15] I don’t know. I don’t know. People really love you, baby.

Kelly: [0:05:17] Well, let’s be honest.

Juliet: [0:05:19] Okay, so Brett, I would like to really get into all the amazing stuff you’re doing professionally, but to the extent that many in our audience aren’t familiar with who you are as a person, and I’m going to ask what Kelly will probably find to be a really annoying question, but tell us a little bit about your background before The Art of Coaching, which is how we all know you best.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:05:38] Sure. Yeah. Succinctly, I was a strength coach for 15 years, predominately working in professional sport and with military. Also worked in the collegiate side as well. Grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and through nearly losing my life at a young age, got very much into psychology, got very much into the human body, got very much into understanding power dynamics and just why we do the quirky things that we do. And that led to just kind of very superficial interest in coaching at the time, because I’m 18 at that moment. Ending up getting my master’s degree with a focus on motor learning and cueing, which took me down this whole rabbit hole even further regarding the impact of communication and what we do. And now I’m getting my doctorate in power dynamics related based communication. 

So really, the most significant part of my background that set my path was being hospitalized for a year of my life and just having this fascination about the body and social dynamics and what have you. And so I wrote a book in 2016 to fill a gap, kind of what you and Kelly have done with movement and so many other things I’ve been trying to do for communication and social interaction. I don’t really like the term soft skills, so I’ll just call them human skills. And thankfully, that book started to cross over with more corporations in tech, in finance, and what have you, and that led to me creating the company that my wife and I have now, The Art of Coaching. 

And the context of coaching is synonymous with leadership, right, this idea that any time you’re trying to orchestrate or guide or lead people in any kind of manner, that’s essentially what you’re doing. But we’ve just always been really tired of kind of this one size fits all leadership rah rah mantra out there, because at times I needed it in my life, when I needed real advice and how to deal with Machiavellian individuals or people who didn’t always want the best for you, believe it or not, just learning how to win friends and influence people didn’t always help. 

Juliet: [0:07:27] Well, I have to go way back at the beginning of that, and can you tell us more about, because I think when you were hospitalized for a year, you almost died.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:07:34] Yeah.

Juliet: [0:07:35] And can you tell us what happened and what was the circumstance?

Brett Bartholomew: [0:07:38] Sure. Yeah. I mean and when you frame this up in the context of there’s a great research article that talks about in 2015 alone, nearly $12 billion was lost due to poor communication in the healthcare system. And that was definitely something witnessed by me. So growing up I played sports my entire life and I had just transferred to a new high school, my parents were splitting up, I was probably about 14, 15 years old. A lot of my close friends, people that were in my predominate social circle almost my entire life started getting into drugs. Now, I don’t know if your audience can see me or not, and you can’t always judge a book by its cover, but I’m not really into meth or coke. And this is a lot of things that friends of mine at the time started to get into. And so when this social circle started to erode, I was trying to find other outlets. And going home at the time wasn’t a lot of fun because my parents at the time were arguing about joint custody. To give you context, I ended up staying with mom Monday, Wednesday, Friday; dad, Tuesday, Thursday; weekends we’d switch off. I think a lot of that is what led to my luggage fetish now because I’m always trying to figure out what do I need to take with me for mom’s, I’m going to have a heart attack if I don’t get all my toys. 

So basically, I filled that gap just working out and training for sport. I mean I’d work out after school, after dinner I’d go to the local wellness center, at night I would do pushups and sit-ups ad nauseum. I channeled a lot of what I know now is anxious energy into training. It helped clear my head. Little did I know that became a drug of its own. I started really focusing on the things that I could control, almost like what we saw during COVID, right? People hoarded toilet paper because of this zero-risk bias. It’s the lowest thing on the totem pole they can control. Well, for me as a teenager at that time, that was diet and exercise. And there wasn’t a lot of great resources. This was around the time that low fat and low carb were both en vogue, so I did like any great extremist, both. And so here I am, 15 years old, my basal metabolic rate is probably in the low 2,000s or at least high let’s say 1,800. But I’m eating Egg Beaters, fat free Kraft singles, and salads throughout the day.

Kelly: [0:09:38] Killing it.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:09:38] Yeah. I mean it’s not that I ever thought like, oh my God, I’m fat or whatever. It’s just I was trying to be this perfect individual and trying to live up to whatever the standard was that I read about, was lean, shredded, ripped. And what happened, I didn’t know anything. And anybody that’s dealt with any kind of depression or sometimes just anxiety-based melancholy, which I was definitely going through at that time, knows that you just start to become this machine. It’s not like I even looked in the mirror and realized this stuff. But I went from… I was only 130 pounds normally at that age, and I ended up getting down to about 93 at my lowest. 

And so one day I was running around the school, blacked out. Long story short, went to a doctor, he found that, hey, basically if this kid’s not hospitalized, his heart, kidney and liver are just going to go kaput. I mean my resting heartrate was in the high 30s, low 40s, and that wasn’t a good thing. So I kind of did some time in some inpatient or outpatient programs. And when I say one size fits all, Juliet, a lot of this stuff was here I was the only guy sitting in this what they would call like a day room, and you’d have to talk about food and are you scared of being fat and all this stuff. And if I said, well, no, I’m kind of dealing with another scenario, they’d say, well, you’re in denial. And then they’d recommend to a psychiatrist that you had to see that you just get dumped with antidepressants, right? It’s almost like that medical model ingest, inject, incise. Except people really love labels in medical world as well. And so that didn’t work for me. 

Got put in an inpatient program where the day to day is you wake up at about 5 a.m., your blood’s drawn, you’re stripped naked, you’re put in a gown, you’re weighed. When we talk about one size fits all, literally your BMI is what determines everything else in your care. And I think we all know the history of the BMI. But then you’re not allowed to really choose anything that you eat. It’s based off that diabetic exchange system where you eat so many breads and fats and this and that. And about six of the eight hours a day you spent in this dayroom with Plexiglass window. So imagine Kelly’s there and Kelly’s fidgeting, right? He’d get a knock on the window as a warning. If you stood up and you just starting pacing because you had been sitting all day, you’d get another warning. If you were chewing gum or doing anything that could contribute to nonexercised thermogenesis, you would get a warning. After three warnings, you were either fed a Boost, some other kind of meal replacement, or you would be fed intravenously. So your day is filled with that. 

You can’t watch certain movies, anything, what have you. If you go to the bathroom, they have to accompany you. Everything’s measured. Everything. Everything. You can’t exercise. And so that was my life for a year. And not to mention the fact that the day that I left, there was a nurse there, and there was a lot of power dynamics there, they weren’t so much worried about the patients as much as they were just normal day to day gossip. And I’m standing there with both of my parents walking out of there and this 46-year-old nurse who I call Renee basically said that, “You’ll be back.” 

So I just knew through my experience there I didn’t want to waste anybody’s time, but so many other things had happened there. That’s not okay. There were people in that hospital that died because they didn’t get the treatment they needed. There was a woman who was 60 some odd years old, her husband cheated on her, developed an eating disorder to deal with some of those things. There was a Junior Olympic wrestler who lost a match and his father beat him and he used food and exercise as a control for that. And so it was my first real foray into… And we see the same thing with movement function in many ways, is there’s always such a more complex underlying issue. And with human beings, that is especially the case. It is the ultimate in complexity. Relationships are the ultimate in complexity. And I wanted to figure that out and that’s what took me into coaching.

Juliet: [0:13:10] Okay. I’m sure Kelly has a question. But I just have a comment. And when I’m listening to that story, I’m like, okay, I’m looking at your age and I’m thinking this must have been like the ’90s.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:13:19] Yep.

Juliet: [0:13:19] And it feels like we’re talking about like some crazy clinic in like 1898. I mean that’s an insane story.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:13:28] Yeah. And I was 14 at the time, I’m 35 now, so close, right? You know, early 2000s. But it was very much like Ignaz Semmelweis, right, the guy that’s the father of human hand hygiene. Guy ended up saying, hey, we’re not doing this, we’re not sterilizing appropriately, we might be cross contaminating and killing people. They had him committed to an insane asylum, gets beat by the guards, dies of septicemia. And so yes, it was crazy in the sense that… And if you look up this hospital to this day, I was showing my colleague Ali Kershner this, you still have people that are enduring this kind of treatment. And it’s just what you see. You see a lazy model of we can’t understand people or we don’t have the time to, so let’s use drugs, let’s use extreme treatment plans, let’s use this. And if they don’t fit this model or it doesn’t work, well, it’s their fault, they were noncompliant. They were noncompliant. And just because my story didn’t fit the rest of them, that’s how I was labeled. And by and large, that’s how you were treated.

Kelly: [0:14:20] When I first met Brett, I’d been following you, I loved what you were talking about, I respected you as a strength and conditioning coach and knew you professionally in that realm. The first time we met was in Indiana. Is that where we were?

Brett Bartholomew: [0:14:32] Would have been Indiana, yep.

Kelly: [0:14:33] And I saw you speak and then you actually had a proof copy of Art of Coaching.

Brett Bartholomew [0:14:38] A galley copy. The very first one.

Kelly: [0:14:39] The very first one. And for some reason, I said, “Look over there, there’s a Snickers.” And you said, “What’s that?” And I stole it. And you gave me your galley copy. And I started reading it on the way home and it was the first time I had ever heard you talk about this. And you had written this story down as the genesis of understanding why you were so passionate about communicating and about this interhuman dynamic. And I felt like, oh, so many pieces dropped into place for me. And I was really just, A, blown away by that piece, knowing how strong you are and robust you are, knowing what a talented coach you are. 

But also, for me, it really gave me leverage to understand exactly the hole in the world. I have had a ton of formal communication training as a physical therapist. And I had to record myself interviewing people, listen back. I had to videotape those things. I had to really watch and be very meta about my interactions. And of course, my mother’s a psychologist too. But you were the first person to take this on legitimately in our field, I feel like, which is the whole field is about behavior change, behavior modification and interpersonal relationships. And I just want to thank you for putting this out and being vulnerable in that book. When I read it on the way home, I think I was like live tweeting you, like oh my God, what, and then what. I read the whole book on the flight home from Indiana. 

Brett Bartholomew: [0:16:02] Yeah, well, and I appreciated that. You were one of the ones that really gave it a chance, right, in terms of you think globally, you and Juliet both do. I think the initial reaction from the book was aligned with almost that Semmelweis effect of there were people that were like, oh, now this person’s talking about communication, is that going to take away from our market share in training. And I’d have to remind people I have Mexican food tonight and eat Italian tomorrow, right? Me saying, hey, there’s this thing that’s incredibly complex that people have maybe touched on before but not in a super detailed way that we need to take another look at because we are seeing social atrophy, which we define in Art of Coaching as this degradation of context and depth social skills and communication abilities due to a lack of either interactive frequency, which we’ve seen during COVID, or for people that get in the routinized kind of aspect of their job, a lack of depth and breadth and refinement.

 I mean taking out the trash is a task. Social interaction is a skill. But I remember somebody one time tweeting, “Hey, I communicate every day, why do I need a book to tell me how to do this?” And I wrote back, “Hey, I wake up married to my wife every day, I kind of need to keep working on my marriage.” And just because it’s not tactical, which is what our field is so used to, I’m going to go and get this certification, I’m going to learn how to use this new tool or I have this new piece of sports science, therefore that is a skill and a point of differentiation. I mean communication, just because you can’t touch it, I mean this is stuff that gets people killed, it starts wars, it ends marriages, or it creates beautiful opportunities. It’s just amazing how we look at it and take it for granted, and you didn’t do that.

Kelly: [0:17:31] One of the things that Juliet and I believe strongly, we have always seen sport as a test kitchen, as a teaching hospital. And I would actually argue… I was just on a podcast or a presentation for a bunch of physical therapists yesterday kind of talking about the sort of performance side of physical therapy. And they were asking should physios be coaches. And I said yes because otherwise you don’t know what it takes to actually make a robust person.  You end up talking about sleep and motivation and safety and drive and all of the components, the messy, psycho-emotional components of working with humans. 

And Juliet and I feel almost every day is the reason we are good at our jobs is we came out of a physical tradition where we had to learn to communicate and rely on each other and be vulnerable. And that is complete anathema to what we see traditionally in this kind of fitnessing rah rah strength and conditioning community. I mean I’m not surprised you’ve made the jump now from coaching, that’s cute, getting an athlete prepared to play in the NFL or the MMA to we can apply these same sets of tools that you learn in this field towards the rest of society. And really making that jump is the promise of sports and science.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:18:45] Well, and to that point, you see this kind of follow the leader thing happening where when we started doing this for other corporations and things like that, then more people wanted to take a second look in strength and conditioning and performance. Same thing when we used improv and situational role playing at our workshops now. We show the slides. We show where law firms are doing this because they have to understand, hey, and Juliet, you get this, there’s a shared narrative. There needs to be a shared narrative of figuring these things out. EMTs are always using forms of improvisation, right? It’s basically about using available resources in real time and divergent thinking to solve a problem. And it’s social decision making under uncertainty. And so we show all these other industries that are using this. 

But then, part of my doctorate, we asked people in semi-structured interviews, what is your understanding or definition of improv. And a lot of them just think comedy. And so you see that we’ve really got to do… And again, this is something you guys have done with The Ready State, the job to be done for us is rethinking and giving people the language they need to understand about the communication process. So something hopefully really tactical for your audience here. Generally, if somebody has an interaction that goes wrong, let’s just say something goes wrong at any level, there are eight key components that you’ve got to think about in communication. One, who are the people communicating. What research nerds like to say are the interlocuters, right? What’s their age, what’s their ethnicity, what’s their appearance? You need to give me context. Who are these people? 

Then there’s the message, right? What are we saying? That’s the content itself, the pattern of thought, the configuration of ideas. Then there’s the medium. Like right now we’re talking over a medium where it’s visual. I can see you, you can see me. However, if we’re having this conversation over email, that is a more context poor medium. So there’s more likely to be leaks. The person that breaks up with their boyfriend or their girlfriend, what have you, over text, right? Context poor medium. Then there’s the channel. So right now, the channel is what connects us with that medium. So the channel’s Wi-Fi, obviously. The code, which is a sign of shared meaning, symbolism. Like you’ve coached all over internationally. Certain terms are great in certain regions of the world, certain ones are not. Same thing with nonverbals. Noise. Is there intrusive sounds, is there something else, is there inner noise, is there chatter, feedback? And then of course context itself, which is identified as what’s this situation and circumstances where this occurred? 

So and I can send you guys a graphic if you want to throw it up. I just want something to be tactical for your audience. But what I found is when I’ve reengineered aspects of my life where I’ve failed as a communicator or I see other issues where people are like, hey, man, how do I build buy in, and I don’t know who these people are, I have to ask them about these things. It’s almost like their medical history, right? Like I have to say, you have to give me more details about these things. Otherwise, I’m not just prescribing you a tactic. This isn’t a question of what books do I read. What are you, the Cheshire cat, right? Help me out with this. So yeah, I mean you’re spot on. And I think the way you guys see this from a systems-based standpoint but also dynamic systems is critical and not very common.

Juliet: [0:21:40] Back to Conscious Coaching, your book, I have to let you know, I don’t know if you know this, but Kelly actually read your book on the airplane on the way home, and then as soon as it was available, he actually bought like 25 copies and would just hand it out to coaches.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:21:53] I didn’t know that. 

Juliet: [0:21:54] And he does that with one other book, Dune, which is his favorite book, and that’s it. It’s been those two books, right, because it’s so rare in our field that there’s something sort of like relatable, palatable, so applicable to everybody in our field. And I mean honestly, we’re obviously in this health and fitness business, but I mean we could hand this book to anyone in any field and it would be relevant to them. So anyway, kudos, amazing book. But what I wanted to ask because I nerd out on the business side, you self-published this book, which we have done and it’s really hard. So I just wanted to hear about that and what you did to make it so successful.

Kelly: [0:22:28] And you just went over some sort of little metric that I think is mind blowing for a self-published book.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:22:33] Yeah, well, I mean I appreciate that. It means a lot that you guys have done that too. The reason I had to go self-publish, and I ended up making a podcast for this on our own, mainly for catharsis because somebody will say, “Why didn’t you do this in your book? Why didn’t you do that? Why didn’t you have David Spade do the voiceover?” And you’re like, you don’t know how self-publishing works, right? I basically just had a literary agent tell me that nobody would care, didn’t understand strength and conditioning, thought the story of the hospital was going to be too much. We had gotten turned down. And I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So we’re just like, all right, we’re going to do this ourselves. I had no newsletter. I don’t even think I had a very large social media following. I mean it certainly didn’t even eclipse… I mean I wasn’t even at 20,000 followers or what have you. So the why was because we got turned down by about everybody. 

And then how we approached it was one of naiveite. I started teasing some things out. I’m a big hip hop fan. And so I think about when 50 Cent tells his story about when he started coming out at the time, let’s say you’re a rapper, well, you would press a mixtape and then you’d do hand to hand. It would be your mixtape at a bodega or what have you. Well, he stockpiled them. He stockpiled them and then flooded the market with them and then created kind of this industry wide thing that generated some noise. So I’m like, all right, I’ve got to do this guerilla style. I’m going to start teasing some things. I’m going to start talking about these things called archetypes in the book. I’m going to start teasing some other things and just showing little snippets. And I think maybe it was a combination of that and the fact that I had never really asked anything of my audience before. I mean I was working for companies that didn’t allow you to have a website. I had to go out on my own to release the book. Otherwise, companies that I had worked for said, hey, that’s our intellectual property, you know, if you create it here. So it was kind of I had to do it to escape. 

And then I just started getting, by including other people in, because I see the zero sum thing, as you guys know, in fitness and strength and conditioning, the fact that I wanted to include other people, every gender, every experience level, different parts of the country, to contribute to the book, you’re essentially creating corner boys, if we stay on The Wire vernacular, that they’re also going to help promote it. So I think my lack of a mailing list of anything else somehow worked for me. And then I know the book is no Pulitzer Prize winner, but I’d like to think that it was actually a decent book that got vulnerable. I mean there weren’t a lot of strength coaches around showing an aspect of their life that might be embarrassing, Juliet. Like I was embarrassed for 16 years to say, hey, I had this thing and I don’t really know how to talk about it because I know every strength coach is just supposed to be Superman, but I sucked at some things and I had a dark side. And here it is. And maybe that’s just what people needed. I don’t know. We’ll see how the next book does. So that’s how it all came about. Does that answer your question specifically enough?

Juliet: [0:25:17] Yeah, it does. And I think the point about not asking your audience for anything up to that point is a big one, right? I think that was part of the special sauce of Supple Leopard too, right? We had been putting out content and then we’re like, hey, here’s the culmination of that. And people were stoked, so.

Brett Bartholomew [0:25:31] Well, I think you guys put out thousands of hours of free content. And so it’s this idea of I don’t know anybody as prolific as you guys at this. And I feel like I let Kelly down because Kelly one time, you gave me advice. You were like, “You need to do kind of what we do, but for the communication stuff, on your page.” And I’m like, “We lack some of those resources right now. Not the resourcefulness, because I know you did everything from your garage and just basic phone. But we just find that right now, we feel like it’s a little tough to translate on that medium. But if you think about this, if you guys put up that much content, and it’s incredible, you helped me through some sticking points of my movement, imagine how incredible your paid stuff is, right? Imagine how high quality that is given how much you guys put into your free content. And people need to realize that. There is a reason you need to consider cost versus investment.

Kelly: [0:26:19] From a personal… One of the things I don’t think I ever told you is that I raced C2 on the national team. And my best friend Shane Sigle, the best man at our wedding, was my partner. And we were two young males who communicated, and he sat in front of me in the canoe, right, with his back to me. And imagine very difficult, you’re also 22, and your friend has his back to you, and you’re paddling together 300 days a year, sometimes twice a day. And we imploded our relationship. We absolutely just became enemies. Couldn’t talk, couldn’t… And it just got worse and worse and worse. And ultimately, it was a demise. And realizing now, he and I just went to Africa to paddle the Zambezi together, we’re still like besties, and we talk about how we were just abjectly poorly prepared and failed by the organization, that this did not set up and recognize. I mean there were tropes that you never make it with your first C2 partner, you know?

Juliet: [0:27:14] But also, just to interject, it wasn’t about their athletic ability or anything. They weren’t successful because they couldn’t communicate, right? I mean wouldn’t you say that, right?

Kelly: [0:27:23] Yeah. It was-

Juliet: [0:27:24] That was the reason they couldn’t be successful as a couple. 

Kelly: [0:27:28] Yeah, we were a couple. We should have been in therapy. We could’ve…. Just a hundred things. When I read this, I was like, oh man, this is my first falling on my face experience as an athlete where I couldn’t interact appropriately with the partner who is 100 percent geared in the same direction. I wonder how many times that happens in relationships. I can even speak to Juliet, just that I came out of a tradition, my family, where I had an absent father, mom’s a psychologist, and it took me a minute to realize that Juliet and I are on the same team, you know what I mean? I was like Juliet can see things that I can’t see, and she’s not trying to hold me down, she actually has my best interest. And I wonder how many times we just self-sabotage because you don’t have the tools or any formal education. You just stumble into it and you’re either good at it or you’re not, you know? There has to be more than that.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:28:20] Yeah. I mean without a doubt. What you’re talking about is when you consider the fact that communicators always fashion what they say and what they do on this ongoing basis in accordance with their goals or their agendas, right? People in general have agendas. Now agenda, just like the word power and manipulation, doesn’t necessarily mean that something’s negative or that somebody’s going to trying to get… It just means we all have wants and needs, right? We all have wants and needs and we’ve got to figure out how to get those things. 

And one term that we’ve started to familiarize our audience with is what you’re talking about is kind of micropolitics. If we think of micropolitics as things that go on in the governmental level, micropolitics is the kind of drama, I’m going to be lazy with my verbiage, that goes on interpersonally, right? And we see this, the most clear representation for most people of micropolitics or political still at this level happens at the workplace, right? It’s this ability to effectively understand people at work and what makes them tick, and then I’m trying to coincide what I do with that. It’s this chess game, this idea of game theory, of social decision making under uncertainty. And you’re right, we don’t get trained in it. Just like for some reason it’s a great idea in this country to get rid of sex education and physical education, it seems like. All right, so we’re not taught financial literacy, literacy of power dynamics and communication, we’re not supposed to move.

Kelly: [0:29:38] Good luck. 

Brett Bartholomew: [0:29:40] Right. We’re killing it. We’re doing a great job. I’ll leave it there or I’ll rant. But I want to make sure that… I mean I acknowledge that it is hard. And I think that it also hides in plain sight because people don’t realize that that’s where things break down. I mean when I say that poor communication has caused wars, that is not an embellishment. And yet people just think that like, when you ask them how do you rate as a communicator, one to ten, one being not that effective, ten being pretty effective, uh, I give myself an eight. Great. What method did you use to objectively evaluate that? They’re like ugh. And so that’s what we’re trying to change with some stuff that we’re building. 

Juliet: [0:30:17] So I know you’re doing some really interesting doctoral work, which you had mentioned earlier in this conversation. But can you tell us what that is, because I know that it’s cool and our people want to know about it.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:30:27] Yeah. Well, the easiest way to think of it is we’re looking at the role of improv in improving communication, but specifically in the area of power dynamics and how we navigate these things. So again, we’re not talking improv as in comedy. We’re talking about real life situational planning and iteration. So if we think of this umbrella of what I just mentioned, like micropolitics, the drama we deal with day to day within our interactions, there’s three branches of this. There’s power dynamics, which I’ll define. There’s influence. And then there’s actual persuasion. And a lot of times these terms are used like most things, we think intensity in strength training, we know that in strength and conditioning, that is relative to the load lifted. Yet a lot of the general public thinks that intensity is about how tired you are in a workout. So we’re trying to help people understand that these three abilities, along with an understanding of the differences between them, that’s the stuff that really helps with conducive fit, of saying, hey, I found myself in this situation, this is hard, either because of this other person or external constraints or what have you, or my own B.S., what tactics can I use to get out of that, and then aligning that situation and context with your awareness of that stuff, that’s what creates conducive fit. 

So to be more clear, power and influence are related concepts, but they’re also distinct. If we think of power, if you guys think of power as the absolute capacity, and that determines capacity of an individual to influence the behavior of somebody else, right, which that’s what leadership is, influencing behavior, right? So power is almost like this potential. And there’s many ways that it manifests. You can have positional power. This is all research from two guys named French and Raven. Positional power would be like there’s legitimate power, like, hey, I’m the boss, I’m the director, I’m the president. There’s reward power. Hey Juliet, great job, here’s a bonus or some form of bribery, if we’re going to use it in a negative context. There’s coercive power, which that name kind of speaks for itself, right? There’s this protection racket. We have people that can protect you. You think of the old school mafia or a lot of what you see in academia really. And then there’s resource power. I control access to this, right? I own this land, I own this intellectual property, I own that. So those are like positional more formal bases of power.

Then there’s personal power. And one of the most popular is referent power. It’s like, hey, I like you. You’re my mentor, I don’t want to let you down. Hey, Kelly, you seem really relatable, right? We like you. There’s of course expert power where we perceive special abilities. It’s not related to a title, like legitimate power is just this person seems to be an expert at x, y, and zed. They don’t need a title to connote that, right? There’s someone that’s 18 years old that’s traveled the world 40 times, they don’t have a title that’s like I’m the designated world traveler by Frommers, right? But we know that they’re an expert in that. And then there’s connections, like who you know. All of that jargon is just to say based on what power bases you have, and everybody holds power, even the person that’s in the most disadvantaged position, that really decides like all right, now here’s how I can influence people.

For example, it’s hard for me to say, hey, let me use an exchange tactic. Kelly, I’ll give you x if you give me y. Well, I if don’t have that resource, if I’m promising something I don’t have, that’s poor resource power. So all in all, power is the capacity to create change. Influence is actually the tactics you leverage. And then persuasion occurs once you’ve actually achieved it. You cannot unsuccessfully persuade somebody. So I can’t be like, all right, that’s the actual outcome of it. So if you think of it as potential energy, right, kinetic energy, we’re actually using it with influence, and then did I decide it. So we put people in situations, and we say, “Hey, this is the situation, this is the type of power people are leveraging against you, work your way out of it.” And we videotape it and we iterate it, and we continue to kind of go into it and teach them in the moment. So I know that’s a lot of informational stuff there, but I wanted to give you kind of this all-encompassing idea of what we’re really trying to help people become more literate about.

Kelly: [0:34:35] I can’t wait to send my kids to this next workshop you have. And I can’t wait to go there so I can hold my own against Juliet. So I feel-

Juliet: [0:34:42] Good luck, baby. Good luck. Good luck to you.

Kelly: [0:34:42] I don’t feel… Normally, if you’re like we’re going to talk about communication and feelings, I’d be like I’m exhausted. But what I feel like is, man, I suck at this, and I’m going to get better at this, and I’m going to be able to take Juliet down.

Juliet: [0:34:54] Oh my God. I’m ready. I’m ready.

Kelly: [0:34:56] But then we’ll have a more successful relationship, baby.

Juliet: [0:35:00] Exactly. Okay, so speaking of power dynamics, you and I discussed this when I was on your podcast and I loved it, but I wanted to sort of turn it around on you a little bit. As you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, you own Art of Coaching with your wife. And I would love to know how you guys make that work, working together as a couple, what has been a struggle, what you’re working on, and whether there’s even an additional layer of pressure given that you run a company teaching people how to communicate. So do you both hold yourselves to some higher standards than the rest of us mortal humans when you are poor communicators?

Kelly: [0:35:36] That’s why you should’ve chose stretching, bro.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:35:38] I should’ve chose stretching, a hundred percent. Yes to all of those. So she came on board about a year and a half ago as our project manager. And she would tell you, right, I had to sign an agreement – she’s cool with me discussing all this – her not having, especially because we work remotely and it’s not like we have you guys down the street, right? So Liz doesn’t have somebody to really learn a lot of these things from, right? She had grown up in strength and conditioning as well. She did some administrative work for two really successful doctors in LA. Living in LA in general is a power dynamic. Doctorate. But so there were struggles in terms of I already had this thing kind of moving in a certain direction, and then she’d have to come on and learn. Well, patience they say is suffering disguised as a virtue for a reason. I’ve already been through so many kinds of contractors or what have you that I was ready for somebody to pick up the ball and keep going. 

So one area that I struggled a lot with was I would have this rushed communication style and try to get her to catch up as fast as possible. But as you guys know, right, as parents, let alone as folks that own a business yourself, people generally don’t change or learn until they’re thrown into that mess. You think about teenagers, we can tell them everything, we can give them all the stats, figures, and all that, what have you, until they’ve learned it, until they’ve metaphorically tasted their own blood, it’s not real to them. So Liz would kind of roll her eyes at me where I’d be like, “Hey, we’re going to launch this, and get ready, all these five things are going to happen that are bad.” And she’s like, “You’re negative, do do do do do.” Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. They all happen, right? They all happen. Our Facebook ad account gets suspended. Somebody throws a Molotov cocktail through our window. That one didn’t happen. But all this crazy stuff goes on. And she’s like, “Okay, I get why you’re so high strung now.” And I’m like, “Right.” And so we had to work through that where she’s had to take on some of my traits. She’s had to become more of a ball buster and be assertive. I’ve had to take on her traits. I know you guys don’t know her that well, but she’s this like lovely, affable, very calm, patient, grinding worker. She walks into a room, she’s very easy. But we had to kind of take on some of those traits.

And then to answer your final question, is there more pressure, for sure. I feel like there are plenty of people that would love to see some stuff happen in our marriage. Or we know people, my parents got divorced, now they’re getting back together. Well, we see people get divorced all the time. Well, her and I were to separate, I just feel like there’s people like, “Oh, Mr. Communication, right? Couldn’t figure it out.” Even if we said, well, hey, no, if that’s the decision we made, obviously we communicated well enough to figure out that this is a path appropriate for us. It’s the same thing if I would’ve taken some pro sport job and our team went 0 and 16, they’d be like, “So much for conscious coaching.” Somebody’s probably been a lifelong loyalist of your stuff. And guess what? Injuries happen. And so somebody’s probably like, “Oh, well, you follow The Ready State. Shouldn’t you be injury proof?” You’re just like those people need to get punched in the nose, but yes, you do feel that pressure, if I’m completely honest. Did that address everything that you had mentioned?

Juliet: [0:38:41] Yeah. I love hearing about it. I mean it is, it’s an evolving process, working with your spouse.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:38:48] Well, and I’ll give you some scoop I haven’t given elsewhere. The inside scoop brought to you by Toyota.

Kelly: [0:38:51] By the way, if you’re listening to this and you’re one of our winners, Brett will record your voicemail. Just like Carl Kasell.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:38:58] You don’t want that. Where we had to be more conscious is just making sure that energy doesn’t spill over into other areas of our relationship because intimacy is really important, right? And you have to switch off from colleague mode at some point. And last night we went to see Hamilton live. It can be hard to date your spouse again when there’s so many opportunities around you, especially when everything’s communication. Our entire world is communication. I’ll see a street sign that’s got unclear language, and I’m like, “We need to use that as a slide.” Hard to turn that off. Keeping that romantic element is very critical for us because that’s the ultimate expression of communication. That’s the hardest thing.

Kelly: [0:39:35] I love it. You know one of the things that you spoke of, which I really think about a lot, is the need for context. You know, we’re seeing right now culturally there are a lot of businesses that are working remote. And the thing that is working for them is they’re coasting on the fumes of culture and interpersonal relationship. And we’re seeing people, I kind of prefer to be home. The thing about human beings are our brains need to be around other brains. Otherwise, it’s not a human. The brain does not work by itself. I mean if you watch that TV show, is it Alone, the thing that drives them out of the woods is they’re alone. They can’t take it anymore. They actually start to go insane. In doesn’t matter how successful they ae. In COVID, we’re seeing completely big shifts in how businesses are working. Are you guys, you and your wife and your team, are you picking up that there are changes now, that some of the processes is just naturally eroded because I don’t get to interact with my teammates every single day, or I don’t have to have a difficult conversation, or I can be snide on the email, or I have missed a lot of communication. Are you seeing that there’s a greater need now or are we just about to go off a cliff, or am I just making that up?

Brett Bartholomew: [0:40:51] Definitely a greater need. And it’s astute of you to ask that question in that context because there’s nothing too small for people to do to be more proactive with that. I mean it’s me, my wife, and our colleague Ai Kirshner as the full-time employees, right? We’re two employees short right now, and we’re hiring, and we have contractors and what have you, but think about the absurdity of what I’m about to tell you. We’re that small of a company and we’ve created an internal communication medium hierarchy, meaning let’s say there’s urgent, time sensitive, highly complex issues. We know that the first thing is, if possible, we need to have a face to face or it needs to be a direct phone call because those are the most context rich mediums. 

Second is Marco Polo because we can see each other and not everybody can have an iPhone, so Facetime. But we can see those expressions. And then Zoom, right, is great for that because then you can record it and then you can see each other. If it’s for daily teamwide communications, right, general, not necessarily urgent and what have you, but people need to stay up to date, we use a group WhatsApp. We don’t use Slack, mainly because WhatsApp allows you to do the voice notes, which again, when I can hear your voice and the tone and what have you, that’s more context rich. Second then would be Marco Polo and then Asana because that’s task based. Then we do team meetings. Obviously, everybody would prefer those things to be in person. But generally, we have to use Zoom and we record that. 

Now we do require that even though Ali lives in Palo Alto and we’re outside the perimeter of Atlanta, quarterly Ali’s got to make a trip out here or we’ve all got to go and meet somewhere in person. For business transactions, angry emails, contracts, what have you, oh you guys know, email, e stands for evidence, so email, which is one of the least context rich mediums. But it’s a great record for keeping, that goes there. And then productivity related and general, and this is the most important one, aside from the evidence stuff you need I think, is for that camaraderie because we don’t get that water cooler talk, what we started doing is doing staff office hours where people can just like, you can turn your Zoom on, there’s no formality to it, it’s totally low key. We’re all just working on something as if we’re in the same room together. And we’ve done stuff where Ali’s like, “Hey, I don’t even think you guys have seen my house. I’m going to take you on a walking tour of my house.”

 So we try to find these ways of how can we make sure that we’re not slowing down, that we’re keeping things personal and professional, and that we can kind of do this. Because we don’t have that centralized location and that’s tricky. So I think when people… The most useful thing they can do is say what’s the nature of the situation I’m in, how can we mitigate this from a personal and professional standpoint, and are there mediums that are more complementary to that. And I think we’re in a place now where we’re pretty fortunate enough to have that. Hopefully that gives some tactical information of how you can use media richness to enhance those kinds of communication strategies.

Kelly: [0:43:37] I love that.

Juliet: [0:43:37] You had me at Asana. Lisa laughed in the background because she knows that I’m obsessed with Asana.

Kelly: [0:43:44] One of our good friends was the CEO, he’s moved on to a different company, was the CEO of the big ad agency, and his policy at the ad agency was walk, call, click. The first order of business if you needed to see someone was to go actually face to face. Second, and we liked it because it just actually created a different dynamic; people had to move around.

Juliet: [0:44:02] We liked the movement part of it.

Kelly: [0:44:04] We were like, oh, this is great. But realizing now, man, I’m like Jim is a genius just because it really does… I think the entropy or the laziness, oh, let me tweet at you, you jerk face, it doesn’t cost anything. The lazy tribalism, laziness in terms of communication. People bring this up that the original texting on the phone was because Steve Jobs felt so uncomfortable in his interpersonal connections. And we do lose some of that. It’s interesting to watch my teenagers on Snapchat. And what they’re doing on Snapchat is taking a lot of quick messages or pictures of their faces. It’s like the kids intuitively know that having some representation of your noggin in the thing is letting someone know or communicating. It’s almost more powerful than, “What’s up? You up?” So-

Juliet: [0:45:01] So I have a question, which is sort of COVID related, and I think you would say it’s a communication thing. But one thing that has been really awkward for me and COVID is like the physical interaction when you meet and say hello to people but you can’t like physically communicate like shaking hands. Fist bumping feels weird. I’m kind of a hugger. But I think can’t really hug anymore in the office. That’s not really okay. 

Kelly: [0:45:27] I can’t hug-

Juliet: [0:45:30] Yeah. But you know what I mean? Like it’s created this thing where we used to have these understood societal ways of physical communication upon meeting someone or seeing someone, and all of that went out the window on COVID, and now we’re all doing these weird waves and not sure. And it creates this weird… I don’t know. I just wanted to see what you thought about that and whether you had the same experience.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:45:50] Yeah, well, one, what you’re speaking to is super relevant because there is a ton of research going on in terms of just COVID in general, looking at how message tailoring is done around what we should and should not be doing with COVID. I mean you think about the way we send our messaging about even, and there’s no political thing behind this, right, but rather people get vaccinated or not or this or that, could our messaging be better. Could our messaging of these things knowing that certain nations are more individualist, certain nations are more collectivist, and also looking at something about would we be more successful if we spoke to this thing as like an external… Well, we’ll save that. But yes, in terms of what you’re mentioning all contributes to social atrophy. We don’t even know what’s okay anymore. And if you think of these… We have these seven meta categories that we score on at our workshop and what you mentioned is a couple of them.

So we have communication in general, which is what people typically think of verbal, nonverbal. But it’s way deeper than that. Nonverbal, and you mentioned it, you’re a hugger, that’s haptics, right? That’s haptics. There’s physical touch. There’s proxemics. How much spacing do I have when I’m talking to somebody? There’s kinesis. That’s your typical view of nonverbal, right, these micro expressions, what am I doing with my face. There’s aesthetics, what we wear and how we wear it is even a form of communication. Then we have this negotiation meta category. That’s what influence tactics are we using, how much do we use self-disclosure and empathy. 

But aside from getting all into these, because I don’t want to assume you guys are that interested in that, it is something that, again, if we don’t practice this, if we don’t have some kind of reorientation strategy, I think people laugh at that. I think people think they really aren’t going to need it. But I mean you see it all the time. I mean people are awkward in general. I’m from the Midwest. I still kind of lose my shit when I hold open the door for somebody, which I’m happy to do, I don’t do that for a thank you, but it does weird me out when somebody doesn’t say thank you. And so I think just people not knowing what’s okay anymore because of overarching narratives that are going on with certain cultural things, because of COVID, because we’re out of practice, because we’re not self-aware. People don’t videotape their interactions. You say you’re good at communication? Great. Why? Just because the better than average effect? Because you think it’s something you should be good at so you rank yourself as highly skilled at it? So I think that the further we get away, Juliet, from even acknowledging the importance of those little things like the little micro interactions we have daily, the bigger systemic issues we have. Because this is an individual issue and a systemic issue, much like what you guys do with your nonprofit, much like what you guys do with your business. It is so big and it starts with individual movements and those smaller interactions. Did I understand your question correctly?

Kelly: [0:48:33] Yeah.

Juliet: [0:48:33] Yeah. Yes.

Kelly: [0:48:35] It reminds me of that sort of case study that when air conditioning was invented, we started to see change in the dynamics of the neighborhood because people didn’t sit on the deck to cool off in the evening and communicate.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:48:46] Great example.

Kelly: [0:48:46] They were able to stay inside. And suddenly we had changed the nature of what the neighborhood looked like and how neighbors interacted when they weren’t forced to.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:48:55] Well, and you’re on to something there. When part of our framework is there’s four key things meta wise that drives human behavior. There’s of course our drives. Are we driven to achieve, are we driven by a sense of security, right? We know loss aversion. Unity. Do we like being around other people? There’s these subconscious influencers of behavior. The other thing is environment. Environment is a tremendous dictator of behavior. And you guys think of what you do with the standup desks and what have you. And obviously if there’s stairs next to the escalator, I mean still a lot of people don’t take them, but they’re definitely more likely to, right? We can engineer an environment. Vegas is the best example of how they do casinos and what have you. There’s no windows, there’s no clocks. The floor is bright red because one of the most powerful human emotions is disgust. And imagine the spilled drinks and everything that’s happened there. So we have drives, environment. 

Then we have social factors. How are our friends behaving? What are people in our neighborhood doing, Kelly, as you just alluded to, right? There this idea as you hear about looting during Hurricane Katrina, oh my God, they must all be bad people. Uh uh. Time out. You can’t look at things black and white like that. We need to get back at being a gray area society of understanding that there’s complexity, social factors, how my friends act, how other people act. We are very much influenced by how other people behave. And then finally is timing. Everybody always talks about pathos, ethos, and logos with Aristotle. But there’s that other aspect, kairos. Everybody’s coachable. But just not on your time. And the timing of your message and all these things really matter. And so you hit on a huge one there with environment. That also contributes to social atrophy. 

Kelly: [0:50:29] Brett is one of the people who reaches out to me all the time, just like, “Hey, what’s going on?” And we get on the phone and this is what our conversations sound like, except we’re both like madmen. If you just dropped in, you’d be like, who are these guys.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:50:39] Leave me alone, I have Russell Brunson on line three. I’m like, all right, I’ll send you an emoji later, I don’t know what to do.

Juliet: [0:50:48] You know, I’m going to say this only because Lisa’s on here and she likes to make fun of me, but in all of these text, email communication forms, I’m kind of into the emoji and the exclamation point.

Kelly: [0:51:01] Gives context; more context.

Juliet: [0:51:02] I am sure people can easily make fun of me, including Lisa, who does. But I do it because I’m always like I want to make sure my tone… Like I feel like I can’t say what I’m trying to say with the right tone without having these external things which look kind of dumb and seem kind of like too poppy. But I just want to make sure that my tone has come across. So I don’t know.

Kelly: [0:51:22] Eggplant, eggplant, eggplant. 

Juliet: [0:51:24] Eggplant, eggplant, eggplant. 

Brett Bartholomew: [0:51:27] Well, what it is, they’re today’s hieroglyphs, you know?

Juliet: [0:51:28] Yeah. So that’s all. I don’t know. That was more like a therapy session for me.

Kelly: [0:51:31] You know what it makes me think of? 

Juliet: [0:51:32] Than anything else. There’s really no question.

Kelly: [0:51:32] You’re invited to come have Thanksgiving… Not Thanksgiving, Halloween, with us anytime. I’m playing to the back of the room.

Juliet: [0:51:41] Lisa’s like I’m editing that out.

Kelly: [0:51:42] So we have a huge Halloween party. And this year the theme is going to be The Expanse, which is one of my favorite sci-fi book series, fantasy series on… I forget what. Is it on Amazon? I’ve even gone so far as to become friends with the greatest character, who looks a little bit like you and is in Atlanta. And one of the things that happens, and I’ve thought about this a lot, is that they’re in space and they’ve grown up in space, and they’ve created a whole bunch of hand signs to go along with the language that they’re using because you can’t see all the context and all the facial features. And I feel like we almost need a secondary language to help us understand what’s happening so that you can know what people are thinking and seeing. I think we are doing a crap job of being better communicators right now. And I mean it’s something that Juliet and I talk about a lot. And you are really stepping into the hole. This thing that you’re working on is to me the most important thing that’s come out of strength and conditioning in a decade. That’s how important this is.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:52:47] Yeah, well, I mean I appreciate it. We’re trying to take it further than that, and hopefully the next book, which we’ve learned is going to be devoid of a lot of strength and conditioning language because it really… People will-

Kelly: [0:52:59] Let me clarify. I don’t mean that this is a strength and conditioning thing. But it’s come out of strength and conditioning.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:53:02] Oh no.

Kelly: [0:53:04] This is the transference of what we’re learning in sport and human performance as a way of actually transforming society. This is, let me just be clear everyone, follow The Art of Coaching, check out what Brett’s talking about, it will transform how you interact with your family and teams and friends. 

Brett Bartholomew: [0:53:21] Yeah. Well, I appreciate that. And one other thing that you said that you and Juliet both alluded to that was genius there, and Juliet, you need to hear this because I don’t want you to edit out the emoji thing. They are nonverbal cues with rich emotional signals, right? And so like nerd talk, right, they talk about the semantic function of an emoji is that they’re able to help people understand the meaning of a message in a more concise way. And conciseness is one more smaller category under that verbal piece that people have to be scored on. 

And by the way, that’s also contextual, right, because two guys talking shit in Southie, an academic might not be like, “Oh yeah, you guys are good communicators.” But they’re not going to consider that academic, no matter how fanciful the word choice, as a great communicator, because it’s all context laden. And it goes into what you said as well, Kelly, there are all these nuances into how we express things. But again, I just urge people to consider, nobody’s saying you’re broken, nobody’s saying that you’re this incomplete version of yourself. Nobody’s trying to guilt you into anything. We’re just saying that literally you can’t compete at the highest level of what you do if you don’t communicate well. And I use the term compete loosely. I’m saying you should just be competitive with yourself to want to be better as a communicator. It steers relationships and relationships steer everything else. I mean how many people were there in history that were brilliant, brilliant, but because of lack of a social and emotional intelligence, were worthless? And so those things never changed the world. I shouldn’t say they’re worthless. They never changed the world. 

And it’s just I think it’s time, and I hope it’s time for people to take a different look at this because I think we have talked about this in ways, and I want to honor those other authors. But we just have to get over this idea of whether it’s that or power dynamics or manipulation and influence, these things are not bad, they’re not Machiavellian, it’s just we don’t know how to do them well. If there’s ever a time in human history that we need to learn it, when there’s more polarization, more politicization than ever, more a lack of self-awareness than ever, it’s now. So I appreciate you guys even giving me a chance to express that and not treating me or my work like I’m some kind of peon, just being like, hey, this is special.

Kelly: [0:55:30] Wait, wait. Did you know that we were cruising towards a giant pandemic and hyper politicization? I mean you really are at the right place at the right time.

Juliet: [0:55:39] So you have mentioned your upcoming book. Obviously, that’s very big and we know a massive amount of work. But in addition to that, what else are you looking forward to? What’s next? What’s next for you, Art of Coaching, your team? What are you looking forward to?

Brett Bartholomew: [0:55:52] I think when we created these workshops, it was pre-pandemic. And so the pandemic slowed those down, obviously, because the world closed down. We just ran I think our 17th or 18th one, not including in services we’ll do for businesses or what have you. And so we’ll wrap up the first kind of round of iterations of level one here in December. And then working on level two, right, this idea of we have to meet the market where it’s at. So it’s unfortunate where there’s so much content that we wanted it to be a three-day event, but we had to fit level one into two days because one, we’re selling people something they think they’re already good at. We’re also selling something that it’s pretty hard. And we have to try to do that in a weekend because we know few people can get away from work. 

It’s not like, Kelly, when I worked for Athletes’ Performance, where people would spend four days out there, no problem, because they could work out, they could sit hot tub, cold tub, they’re in Phoenix, right? They love doing those things. We’re not allowing people to do the thing that they love to do most at these workshops, which is work out. You’ve got to create that euphoric moment through something else. So level two, we’re ready to sink our teeth into that. 

The book, I’m seven chapters into it. Of course, when it goes out is not just my call. It depends on does a publisher pick it up, are they going to delay it, are they going to try to neuter it, finding the right fit there. But I think just continuing to revamp experiential learning because that’s one thing we didn’t have the time to get into and hopefully we covered enough that people got value. But a key part of this is in lieu of there not being skills training on this in schools, we’ve got to change post COVID the way that we do con ed and professional development in general. I mean this stuff isn’t experiential. You’ve got to get up and learn and interact with material and fail and review it and then have some kind of abstract conceptualization of what would I do differently. 

If you and Kelly came, right, what you would see is we’d put you in a role playing exercise, you’d evaluate yourself to account for egocentric bias, which we all have. Your peers would evaluate you on some aspect of these 21 meta and sub categories. And then they get together in groups, because you might have somebody that’s like, “Well, I give Kelly a one on this and it doesn’t matter for the context of this discussion.” Somebody else might say, “Well, I gave a three.” And if one person’s from one part of the world, another person’s from another part of the world, these discussions of how they interpret and perceive successful interaction create not a perfect score because that’s not what we want. It’s not like, oh, you get a 21, you’re a perfect communicator. It’s the perceptual gap. If you always think you’re ones and everybody else is telling you you’re twos and threes or vice versa, that shows you something to be aware of. 

But having these tough discussions and these drop zone based interactions that are very tactical and then going back and refining and saying, Kelly, now try this tactic. Juliet, why don’t you try leveraging this power base. Now we’re going to shrink the time. Now we’re going to do it like an Oklahoma drill where we’re going to circle around, go in and try to fire Kelly up in 15 different ways within this context, and let’s see people how they do under heat. But I just think that the days of large massive auditorium classroom based instruction for con ed, it’ll always be there because there’s too much money to be made. But I think people are going to realize that that’s not really the way to go. You’ve got to be more hands on for these skills that are going to lead us into an uncertain future.

Kelly: [0:58:59] Amen. And that’s actually a perfect place to wrap it up.

Juliet: [0:59:03] So tell us where people can find you on the interwebs and otherwise.

Brett Bartholomew: [0:59:07] Artofcoaching.com. Not the, right? Just artofcoaching.com. I’ve learned to give that instead of my name because people, they’re like, “Bartholomew, what the hell”? Or @coach_brettb. But artofcoaching.com is the easiest thing you can do. The book, my first book Conscious Coaching, available worldwide on Amazon. And thank you guys again for giving me the time. We’re just a small business kind of trying to get to the next tier, and you guys have been a huge inspiration for that. So I appreciate you.

Juliet: [0:59:34] Thanks Brett.

Kelly: [0:59:35] You are great. Thanks, boy.

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