Podcast Episode 1: How To Sell An Idea | Ep 222

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Oh, that would have given Jim some good Yeah. Content. He's good. Sorry, Jim. You missed the good stuff this time. Jim, I got engaged. Yeah. That is the good news. Yeah. What's his name? I just feel I should know this. Isaac. Isaac. And what's the surname? Falk. Falk, f a u l k? L k. F a l k. F a l. That's a cool spelling. I that. Cool. It's just it has good shape. It's too up and too Oh. Too middle. Okay. Good good for topography. I didn't think about that but yeah. Four letter names are awesome. Especially if they start with the letter f. No. I'm just kidding. Wow. Jim didn't miss the good stuff. I think you did right on time. My I spent four days scanning documents. So, I'm scanning all these documents and it has people's names all over them. There's some very interesting names that you would not want to have. Oh. I'm I can't even say them. But they're hilarious. Every time I saw them, I'm , I go to Heidi. Our neighbors when we first moved to Arizona, their last name was Luna. And somehow the story came up one time about why that was, I don't know, something about their last name. And his name he grew up with was Dimplowitz. And she's I'm not taking that name. And he goes That's good, I'm tired of it too. So they just made up the name Luna. It was no one's name. They just made it up and they all took it. His mom was irritated because she had taken the name and she wished she'd taken Luna. She wished it had been done a generation before. She could have changed too. She could have. Wow. What a name. Yeah. That's crazy. Okay. I'm gonna But not bad. It's not a bad name. Just a My crazy high school, her name she had a hyphenated name. But her name was Carrie and her last name was Sidelfish. Oh. Because Sidel was the last name and Fish was the last name. But they I just remember Seidl Fish. That was kind of a weird name. That's a lot. Yeah. She probably got married and took a new one. Before we start, I think you should angle your body towards the camera and same for you. Just some This feels slightly? A little awkward. Okay. It might feel awkward but I don't think it'll look awkward. Okay. Is this enough? Slightly tilted? You guys. I feel she's looking at you guys. Nicole, you're completely out of sight unless I do this. You can do the fake look. The stage look? Yeah. So Look upstage. Nicole. That doesn't look weird at all, John. I'm being asked to look. Should we assume if Nicole's talking the camera's on her and then we can look and it doesn't matter because we're not in it? I just assume we don't think about the camera. Okay. But if I sit this, I haven't I can't not think about the camera because it feels it feels I'm boxing you out. Box out. Box out. What is said at a basketball game? All right. We're gonna get this party started. Ready? Yeah. Here's my first run through. Welcome back to ROTcast. Thank you guys for tuning in. On today's episode, we're gonna talk about a skill that's hard to master. But if you can, it'll take you very far in life. But before we get into it, we're gonna start with the version up. Oh, we should probably do version update too. Okay. Version update and we'll just do some updates. Take two. Welcome back to ROTcast. Thank you guys for tuning in. On today's episode, we're gonna talk about a skill that's hard to master, but will take you very far in life if you can. Before we get into it, let's start off with some updates. Yes. I think the biggest update is something I noticed on your finger. Oh, really? Wow. I got blinded there for a second. Did I dazzle you? Yes. That's the exact word that was going through my mind. Dazzled. This is the episode to tune into the YouTube What's the news? Oh, the news is that I just got engaged this past weekend. Well, Thank you so much. Yeah, very excited. We went up to Payson and the whole thing was a total surprise and he got me again when we came back down to Phoenix and all of our friends and family were waiting That's surprise so cool. It's hard to pull those surprises off these days. Oh, yeah. It definitely was. And I did not make it easy for him to say that. Alright. Well, congrats. Thank you. So version updates, we're in the process of nineteen four is out. So I would say everybody should be moving to that. There's a lot of great stuff in there. That's our AI feature. So you definitely wanna get into that. You definitely wanna read the documentation on how to get up to speed on that too because there's it's it's we've made it as easy as possible. But, , depending on where your familiarity with AI, , you probably wanna be looking at that. And we're in the process of just going through some more issues right now. I think what's really interesting is with the advent of AI, I think it's making it much more easier for people to turn in issues because the AI is doing it for them in many cases. In some ways, that's really, really great because we're getting better details, and sometimes we're getting some issues that , that's not really an issue. But because it's so easy to turn in a request or an issue, it's so we're navigating, this whole new world just everybody else. So right now, we're in the middle of a major, , bug fix sprint. So but in other news and other updates, we always to do an AI update. And in the last two weeks, it's been a crazy time. The AI world has gone, , mad. We have some great new models. We have Fable five one, and then we have the new Astra model from OpenAI, which is pretty amazing. I think the one thing though, if you're not familiar with Astra that you need to keep in mind is there's really two types of feature releases with these models. Some are efficiency releases, which means, hey, we're gonna do the things that you've always been doing, but we're gonna do it better. And Astra is not an efficiency update. It's a feature update. So a lot of people are kind of complaining. It doesn't seem that much better , the previous models. But that's because it really wasn't meant to be. Instead, it has a whole bunch of new capabilities and its major new new unlock is computer use. And so its use of computers is crazy good. It's really meant to be more of a voice model. , we talk to it. You, of course, can use to use text, but it's really dialed in and tuned to be more talked to. And it's super good at three d. So everybody's, , having major mind bending experiments with, , Blender and Three. Js. So but I said, everything's crazy. ? Supposedly, OpenA has a a more advanced model internally that's solving these huge math problems. But even that, if you the story behind it is is kinda interesting. Claude was doing some of the same things, and they were actually, Claude was using some AI OpenAI models to to do some research around that. There's this big controversy whether OpenAI, , stole some of it through the through the logging of what they were doing. So there's a big, , online online feed about that. And there's this really disparate, , reports about how much of a of a unlock this was. , , they didn't really solve the full problem. They just proved one part of it. So this is just a bunch of craziness. You have also to AGI which is the point at which AI becomes self improving. Many people are saying we've already hit that, fairly reliable people. That said, everybody's definition of AGI is a little bit different. So, , it's gonna be a little bit weird. It is definitely getting a little weird. AGI is something people have been predicting for a long time. When will it come? What will it look ? It seems it's coming a little earlier than a lot of the predictions. And then what does that mean for , where we go from here? And at the same time, still fails at some fairly simple things. So, I don't know. It just I think AI anxiety is just gonna keep ratcheting up and, , we we serve a powerful god. So That's the key. We gotta keep that in mind and all this stuff is really amazing, but it's not as amazing as as as god and and his creation. Right. I mean, I'm working on a project right now where I have to, , go through 9,000 images and tell if they're rotated the right direction. And so, of course, AI could do that for me, but the token spend on that would be crazy because, , images are a ton of tokens. So I had it make me a quick little web app where I just go left, left, left, left, left, left, left, and to flip it. And I was , as I was doing them, , how amazing is the human brain? I'm not even thinking, I'm just reacting and I'm doing it so fast. And yet, , AI could do it but it would be slower and cost literally a thousand dollars. Yeah. And I did it in , , two and a half hours. Mind But it's it it was it was interesting because it just reminded me how amazing our brains are. Yeah. And I just love the fact that while all of this is so unknown to us and it feels the pace of unknown has really picked up, which is kinda hard for the human brain, it's not unknown to God. Yeah. All of this is part of the, , what he sees because he's outside of time and he cares for us. Mhmm. That's very encouraging. I love that. Okay. So do we run through all of your updates? I think so. That's great. Onto the bulk of the content. We're gonna talk about how to sell ideas. So, John, you used to think differently about what makes an idea successful. Can you tell us what changed? Yeah. I used to think that having an idea was the hard part and, , once you had your idea, you're , okay, this is pretty much done. But then I learned that it's actually selling an idea is the next phase. And, , sometimes that might sound trivial but it's not. It's almost half the battle of going through the creation of the idea. Because if you just have an idea, it's no good unless you can get it implemented. Otherwise, this is a waste of time and thought. But trying to get that idea across to other people is really where the challenge starts. Yeah. Okay. So, let's start with what doesn't work. Can you tell me how not to sell an idea? Yeah. And all these come from my personal experience. So, as much as this is against this is I I I used to think this way. Mhmm. So, and I as I work with others, I feel I can be reminded sometimes of of some of these lessons. So I think the first one would be , your idea doesn't warrant a captured audience. So said another way a little bit more, , roughly but I think more memorable is shut up and listen doesn't work. So sometimes I was I was guilty in the earlier just saying , I've got an idea. You just need to hear it. , just sit there and listen to my idea. And that doesn't work because my idea doesn't warrant a captured audience, especially if it's a leadership. And I think we have this fallacy that thinking that leaders' time is the same as our time. That's a one to one relationship. But in truth, leaders have so much more things that are taking up their time and thoughts. They have so many more stakeholders. So if you take a leader when I worked at the church, when I first started working at the church, I think there were 65 people on staff. So I might think that I'm one sixty fifth of the leader's time. It's not true because he's got a million other stakeholders. He's got the elder board. He's got all the members and attendee. It's really probably 200 to one. And so if I have a good idea, it doesn't mean that he just needs to stop and just listen to my idea. There has to be a different way. That makes sense. I mean, we work so hard to protect your guys' time. Emily, do you have any others to throw in there? Yes, this is a good one. And I think it's kind of growing the frequency of this because of our easy use of AI. That's the idea of an idea manifesto. And by that I just mean an idea that's presented in a really big document or a significant number of words. It might be comprehensive, but it isn't comprehensible to someone who doesn't already have that familiarity. So you're kind of handing them homework. You're handing a big piece of writing that they'll have to wade through to find the most relevant points to answer the questions they would have about whether or not the idea is tenable. So while you need to understand how the plan could work or be implemented or might be needed, presenting all of that in a first kind of pitch for an idea is likely to get no progress on your idea because it's it takes again a leader's time to wade through all of that and you're kind of outsourcing your thinking at that point. With AI, it's easy to put in a minimal prompt, get a maximum output and if that's your final document, your idea may not make it. And when you read it, you're probably , oh, this reads so well. Right. This is exactly what I was thinking and it's forever big. Yep. Forever big. Yep. Definitely hard to work to work through. So That's great. What else do we have? I think this one again, I I have stories for this one. Misaligned strategies. , I think my ideas align with the organizational strategies when in truth, I don't fully understand the organizational strategies. Mhmm. So here's an example. When I went to work for CCV, I came out of the corporate world. I had a really good career in the corporate world. I had a lot of experience in ecommerce. I had a lot of experience with web technologies. I go to work for the church who has, , barely a website. And so a few months in, my team lead at the time was , hey, John, , come up with 10 ideas of what you think we should be doing for the Internet and then let's get a meeting with the senior pastor and we'll go over those 10 ideas. So I did. I had 10 great ideas. Every one of them got denied. And we had a strategy there. It was called win, train, send. Win disciples or win people to Christ, train disciples, and then send them out. And they're all, , solid. , well, win, train, or send. And what I didn't understand is that the organizational strategies, while we said win, train, send, it was really win, train, send. And all my ideas were train, send. And so, I had just given a whole bunch of not bad ideas but not ideas that were part of , hey, this is our mission. , this is what we do. And so what I had to go back to is I go back to those ideas and and re, , kinda sell them as the win component. And, , it's easy to hear that once I understood it and go, oh, well, those are still good ideas. Yeah. But only about two or three of them actually survived. So seven of them had to be left on the on the operating room table because they didn't align with with with the values and the missions. Another story kinda that too is later, , a few years later, I was doing as a director of communications and I was working on trying to put out graphics and marketing to our target which was 25 45 year old men. I was a 25 to 45 year old man. The senior pastor at the time was not. So I was getting frustrated while all my ideas were not hitting quote the target. And I was , wow, I just don't get this. So I did a whole bunch of research about how to find figure out and and define a target. And I asked the senior pastor , hey, I'm really missing in a lot of things. Can I just have three meetings where I unpack what the target is? And so we did that. We we created this very detailed persona down to who is this person? What's his name? What's his college background? What does he what magazines does he read? Which paper does he read? Does he read the paper? Is he an iPhone or Android? What car does his wife drive? What does he wear cologne? We got a persona so targeted and what it come to find out was he said twenty five to forty five year old man, was true. But he had a very tight persona in his head and every idea I was putting out would have met the needs or the interests of any twenty five to forty five man, but not this one. And so I didn't have an understanding of the target. And once we had that, we had much better hit ratio. It wasn't, , perfect, but it was much better because I didn't understand the the strategy. Now what someone could say, well, it should have been defined and I'm , that's my job. If I'm hitting if I'm missing the mark, it's my job to figure out how to aim correctly. It's not up to the leader to to well define everything so I can, , bullseye it every time. And I think misaligned strategies is is a big one. , not every idea is as it might be a good idea but it might not be good for that organization. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, I've feel I've had to learn this and I do continue learning this every day. But I, , help create content and a lot of that content needs to be refined and not just the copywriting, but also the ideas behind it. And everything has to tie back to a specific piece of resource or an article that we've already put out or, , something that we've, , have stamped our name behind so that it's trackable or traceable back to that resource. And someone could say, well, why did why did that why why couldn't we adjust the strategy to to match what my ideas were? I mean, sounds obvious now but I could have said, well, I don't this this targeted thing. But the the reality was it was having great success. Yes. And all we had to do is get what was inside the leader's mind onto paper so then we could better understand it and throw more bull's eyes. Yeah, that's great. Okay. Let's keep going. All right, how about this one? This is the concept of having non actionable ideas. So if I'm doing all high level thinking, even if I've put a lot of thinking into it, but it's all just kind of , oh, we should do this thing. And I present my idea in that manner. It's not actionable. And the leader is going to have a hard time stopping all the things that they're doing to take that forward on your behalf. So the other one I mentioned was outsourcing your thinking, presenting a lot of information. This is the opposite. This is presenting not enough information, and then outsourcing all the work. So for instance, if you're in the kids ministry, and you suddenly decide, gosh, we should offer a summer camp. And you're , hey, senior pastor, I've just decided that it would be great if we could offer a summer camp. It solves a lot of problems for kids. We've got a lot of kids in the congregation here. Wouldn't that be great? You may not be met with a lot of enthusiasm because what that does is unlock a significant amount of work. You haven't necessarily proven that your idea is one solving the right problem. I mean that you might be missing alignment in that case. And just that amount of work that would come from implementing something. Now it doesn't have to be that big of an idea. That same principle applies to smaller ideas. Yeah. It's easier to have ideas that provide work for other people than it is to provide work for you. It absolutely is. And it's kind of hard to know when you're the person generating the idea, where's that line? It might feel you've put a lot of thought into it. But if you haven't kind of if you can't outline the details about, , what might be involved, who has to be involved, how can I take this to a level that it's actionable, then your idea is probably a little underbaked? Mhmm. Yeah. Very true. Next one? So the next one I would say is treating your idea as my precious, kinda the Gollum effect where you you have this idea and it's you protect it and you put it out and then someone starts to riff off of it or it's , hey, about yeah, that's a good idea. But what if we did this? And you're , woah, woah, woah, woah, stop. You you can't change it. Just sit there and listen to my idea. Tell me how great it is. But I think when you've given out an idea, it should be an invite for collaboration. I know here in our organization, it's very much that. A lot of us have ideas, we go into these meetings with typically pretty small meetings and other people who are highly respected now are if you're not careful, it feels they're changing your idea or criticizing your idea and it I mean, honestly, feels hard to almost anybody who has the idea. I know that the three or four of us who who go into those meetings, we feel that it's , oh, don't change it. It's as good the way it is. But it always leaves better. That's that's the thing I always remind myself because in the tension in the moment, I'm , why can't we just do it the way I said? But at the end, at the end of the meeting, it's , yes, this is actually a much better idea because other people helped season the idea. But I think there's a tendency inside all of us to be , no, my precious. don't touch my idea. Just say yes and let's do it exactly the way I said. But oftentimes when we're in those meetings, I'm almost kind of embarrassed I didn't think of that other thing that that was made better by another person. That's good. So, hold your ideas open handedly. And even in that team I'm thinking about, we've all talked about that. It's , Oh, I was a little resistant in the beginning because I didn't the way this was going but this is actually much better idea. Yeah. But that doesn't make it easy. It's good that you can acknowledge that. Emily back to you. Okay. This one is called the Beautiful Mind Syndrome. So you might have been turning an idea over in your head for a while, but you have to recognize that you have a unique context. You've gotten to the place you are through a certain pathway and it's created context for you. You might be imagining or creating only inside your own head a series of connections and context that make your idea seem so rich and so three-dimensional and it's really going to work. And it could be that you communicate your idea briefly and assume that other people listening to your idea understand those same connections. In some cases, the connections are real and some they might be more internal than external. And in every case, people aren't going to understand that unless you explain that to them. So you have to realize that when you're dropping an idea into a pot for someone else to approve or refine that they're probably context switching a mile a minute and your idea if it doesn't have enough of the connection and context provided with the idea doesn't make the sense that you think it does. So your perspective might be , this makes total sense to me. And someone else might be , I don't I don't get this. I feel a sorry. a recurring theme for this episode is having compassion for your listener. That's a great point. And I think I totally am so guilty of that of not connecting the dots for them. But it would save them time. It would help them better understand. I often think that everybody under already understands what I already know. Yes. the curse of knowledge, I guess. And I've not often been good at giving them context before I get started. This is one I've tripped on a lot too. And I think I kind of try to measure myself off of how many questions had to come back to me that I felt the answers were obvious. That's a good trigger for oh maybe I haven't provided enough of that upfront. Yeah. Used to work with someone who would literally come into your office, say some wild statement that with zero context and I would just yell , excuse me, aardvark. I have no idea what we're talking about. I have a I mean, it was almost humorous of how no context it was and they're asking , what do we do with this? I'm , what is this? Aardvark? I mean what? Yes. I think we've talked about on a previous podcast. We have something that our team uses called the action method. And part of the purpose of this is to help people present their ideas or their questions in a way that adds the context and connection that someone would need in a concise way to be able to make a quick decision even if context switching. And it's where you state the problem, you state a proposed solution and why you think that solution would work or maybe why it wouldn't work if that's applicable as well and then ask what they think. And that helps kind of eliminate some of those context and connection issues that are so easy to overlook. Because let's be honest, we're also doing a lot of context switching and sometimes we just think I didn't realize this would be missing when I handed it off. Didn't know someone couldn't understand that because we're moving so fast. Yeah. I think in the age of AI, the context switching is happening at lightning pace now because you usually have five AI Oh my gosh. Going. I'd also say the action method is great, but what's not super helpful is when you turn the action method into a recipe, a route. Therefore, I believe it's Fill in the blank. Yeah. It's , okay. I don't think we're doing the spirit of the action method here. I think we're just using the words and then putting Right. Slap in the middle. But it has been helpful in our organization when Yeah. It's just intended to make you stop and think and ask yourself the right questions that will help produce an idea surrounded by context. Yeah. Okay. So we have a few more. Yeah. So I think that the other one is when you think about your idea, it's often that you're thinking about the cost of the idea, but it's often that you're missing the the total cost of ownership. So implementing the idea is one thing, but keeping that idea moving and and going is another. So sometimes I think, well, it's not gonna be that hard to implement. Yeah. But then every week, we're gonna have to do this, this, this, and this, and that's gonna be someone else's role. And so I think just keeping that total cost of ownership in your mind of what what tension does this bring to the organization, whether it's true cost or just staff time or another thing on a checklist. Sometimes, , we say often around here, , the best part is no part. And so, yeah, that's a good idea but it's gonna add a lot of complexity to that system or additional cost in some way. And that's good to get other insights from because each of us individually has a portion of things that we understand. We very rarely understand the entire scope of the organization or ministry or context. So getting input from outside our little personal worlds is really helpful in knowing what that total cost might be. We may not even be able to understand it ourselves. Yeah. And I don't think I understood fully the total cost of time until we move from a church space, is I would say more of a budget based time allocation. , every year, you're given so many resources, and you try to get as much done in that time as you can to a hour based. Mhmm. , when you're on billables, it's so stressful because, , time is literally money. Right. And if you're gonna go do something else, it's , where's that money coming from? Yep. Because it's everything is billable. And I think it gets you hyper focused on time is money. Mhmm. And sometimes not always a healthy way. It's a it's a reality that you you can't change but sometimes we're so we have to be so efficient. It's , I'm sorry. There's no billable time for that. We can't do that. Whereas back in a budget based time allocation, there was a little bit more margin. When you when you live in that space, you don't feel there is. Yeah. But there's a lot more margin that, Okay, yeah, go ahead spend a few hours and get that done or training or education. It's , where's the billable for that? Yeah, you're right. It's sometimes time cost, sometimes cost cost. When I was a communication director at a church prior to being here, I remember at that time everybody wanted a blog. A few people wanted social media accounts for their ministries or their pet projects but everyone wanted a blog. And their idea was at that super high level idea category but they hadn't figured out how they would run it and no one was thinking about the maintenance of that. So we would ask them do you have a couple months worth of blog posts kind of in your pocket right now so you have the flexibility to have a time where your ministry is busy or you're on vacation. what does this look ? And usually that idea went no further. Yeah. When it came time to do the work, it dried up. It disappeared. Yep. So going off the idea manifesto, what else do you have to add there? Yeah, another concept is trying to sell too many ideas at once or back to back. And the reason that can be problematic for you is that usually your ideas that you're selling are to a small team or to a certain leader and you have a certain amount of trust capital within that you've been given over time that you've earned, right? And every time you put ideas you're kind of pulling something out of that , oh, this is my best idea. Oh, this is my best idea. There's a limited amount of attention that you can get through that trust relationship that you've built. And if every idea is presented as your best idea, none of them are. And it's hard to wade through. So you can start creating a blur in the mind of the person that you're trying to present your ideas to where it's , well, I don't even have time to read about all of your ideas or to hear a pitch about each of your ideas. There are so many. So what I would encourage people to do is not see every idea you have as your best idea, but to work on focusing in on the ones that are most actionable that solve the biggest problems that have the most forward likelihood because of their impact. And then do a little refinement. And I'm not saying throw away other ideas keep them, you should probably have some places you keep good ideas. And over time some of them may be more applicable than others based on the things happening around you and you'll have a good bank of ideas to pull from. But the ones you present, make sure those are your best and they're refined so they're, , easy for someone to say yes to. I that. Having a bank of ideas. I need to start that. Okay, Johnny, can you walk us through our last one? Yeah. I'm gonna take the last one, the last thing of not to do, and I'm gonna then morph it into the what to do. Great. Great. So, the last one is don't communicate from a stream of consciousness. No one this is the worst way to to sell your ideas. It's just to say, sit, listen, and I'm just gonna vomit out as it comes to me, the idea. So don't do that. Instead, leading to the first thing you should do is create an now later pitch. if you wanna sell your idea to anybody else, a peer or especially a leader, you better be able to boil that down into twenty seconds of why this is important. That doesn't mean that your whole idea has to be communicated in that twenty seconds but you better hook them in twenty seconds or you don't have a good idea. And I would say this sounds easy but it isn't. You need to put as much time into the communication and the strategy of how you're gonna sell your idea as you put into the idea. And this is where I went wrong. I thought I was done once I had a good idea but I was only about halfway done. Then I need just to figure out how do I communicate this? What is, , when is the right time? When am I going to find this person? What am I going to say? What's my elevator pitch? Just you see in the movies or or in TV shows when you're trying to sell that new.com idea, you only have a few seconds to sell it. And I would say if during that process of going that last 50% of communication, if at least half your ideas don't get stopped there, I don't think you're you're being intellectually honest with your ideas. Half your ideas should be , it's not bad but that's not what I'm gonna go with. Kind of what you were just saying Emily, every idea need is gonna get presented. But as you're going through that and you're attacking your idea and you're trying to figure out how to explain the benefits, if half your ideas don't get put into the parking lot Mhmm. I think you're not I think you're playing the golem here where every idea is your precious and needs to be heard. In reality, I think a lot of these what not to dos all kind of blend together. They overlap in Venn diagrams of this one kind of plays off of this one and probably most of us have a few that are just our normal MO and we need to really evaluate what that looks and focus in on what's gonna make this idea sellable. Yeah. And I think just even the way you open it. That's good point. I've been given big almost not quite manifestos but it's oh gosh. immediately, my my thought is, oh gosh, I have to read this. You don't wanna start with the other person thinking, gosh. Yeah. ? Right. That's It might just be more , hey, you said in the staff meeting the other day, I'm thinking back to this to where I worked at a church that this was a major initiative. I think there's a technology that would actually make your vision successful. Who doesn't wanna hear that? That someone wants to help make your vision successful. , that's a hook. That for sure is. Now the timer starts, you have twenty seconds to prove it and then you can have perhaps an hour later if your proof got the hook deep. Yep. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, the vision casting there is a key part. So, how could you sum all this up for our listeners? So, I think a good idea poorly communicated is a missed opportunity. There are so many good ideas that just never see a light of day because of the poor communication or the poor goal alignment. It might still be a good idea but because I didn't align it to the right goal, my 10 ideas, three of them were very good and got implemented but only because I aligned it to the right vision. I was selling it as helpful in this way and that wasn't interesting. But if I sparked the connection to this other goal that they really wanted is , Oh yeah, now I see how that could be and that let's do that. And it wasn't because anything about the idea is about how I aligned it with goals. But also too a bad idea communicated well is a landmine. That's a good point. I mean, there's a lot of bad ideas that get communicated very well and that costs time, money Mhmm. Resources. So, , you gotta be careful about that. But I think they're both dangerous in in different directions. Yeah. But I worry most about the good ideas that don't see the light of day because they weren't communicated well. That makes sense. And the frustration that comes from that. So I think it can be very discouraging. , no one wants to hear my ideas. Well, that would be my first alert that might say you maybe you're really good at maybe you're really poor at communicating ideas. It could be you have a leader who just doesn't care. But I leaders all have visions of what they want to see achieved and I think it's gonna be rare that you're coming to try to help make their vision true, they're gonna be , I don't wanna hear it. So I'd say if you feel discouraged because no one wants to hear your ideas, maybe it's because you were me and you weren't working on that second 50%. Yeah. I think that leads us, , into our next question. If I was to sell you on the idea of growing out your hair, the greasy ponytail, what actually happens after the pitch lands? Well, I think you need to work on your communication. But that was not very solvable, Nicole. It was not a good sell. That's okay. I think the community will back me up on this one. So, Okay. The idea for just the idea's sake. Okay. Well, I would encourage the community to go back and re listen to the podcast. Okay. Okay. And try to find the hook that will sell that idea or at least more time to hear the rest of the idea because I'm sure there's actually a really good idea behind the idea that you just said and I'm just not hearing it. I don't see how it's aligned to the vision and the values that I'm currently processing. I think perhaps we could hear from the community on what that hook could be in our chat channel. Yeah. Yeah. That would be excellent. I'm not sure we have alignment in our goals. But it's just really practicing, right? Practicing these, the community can Hey, that helps practice, just realize I will be going back in and putting points back as to which one You have might not achieved this. I see. You're looking at poor point number four here. This sounds a great exercise. Hey, I'm all for it. I have a sense of humor. It's not always funny to everybody. Yeah. That's true. Okay. So after the pitch lands, what happens? In this specific case or in general? Okay. Was , we still talking about that? , let's Let's bring it back for our churches. Well, I think if you land it well, you're gonna get more time. You may be that not in that right moment, but you'll get invited to say, okay, tell me more about this or go back to your desk and , hey, write me up a quick thing. And that's now not your time to throw out everything you just heard and just do your and barf out your manifesto. That's again , Okay, I've gotten into the next room. I got to strategically think how am I gonna get this across in as few words as possible providing the right context and aligning it to the right values. So don't think once you get past the first door that that you're you're good to just stream a consciousness Yeah. Manifesto, go for it. And I think there's the the more you can just be humble and say, hey, this is actually in alignment with what you're talking about and what you what you want. I know you want this and I think this will help achieve that. And once you get that green light, just realize you're probably gonna have a period of collaboration and refinement that might feel a little bit a little tension. Mhmm. But what comes out is gonna be better. And I do think there's a recognition of God's diversity in in the way we're all wired. Some of us are wired to be idea people and it can be harder for them because they again, we see these things as our precious. And if I lose an idea, in an email or I forget where I put it, I will spend an hour trying to find that little lost sheep of an idea because it means so much to me. And so I think it's harder for for people in that boat because each one of them feels a precious thing. And I think that's what you have to acknowledge , hey, they're not bad ideas, but it's just not the right idea for this time and this point. Makes sense. Anything else to add before we close out this section? Yeah. Would say the one I struggle with is just having too many ideas and and then trying to present too many and trying to to work on too many. I'm constantly being told by God that, hey. Wait. Wait. Wait. Hold on. Aren't you supposed to be working on this? And they have all these ideas for AI harnesses and all kinds of fun stuff. And I think it's really needed and I would love to have it. But God's con almost daily is , okay, that's cool but you really should be working on this. Right? Someone else will go solve that. Don't worry. There's other people working on that. You're tasked to work on this. And I think just that guidance and just making sure that God's charting our calendars. Yeah. That makes sense. And John, in a lot of these you explained how you started in one place and and today are operating from another when it comes to ideas. So I think that gives hope to people that are saying, feel I'm stuck in all of these don't do idea categories. They can learn how to present their ideas better or how to, , what to do in order to make them go forward. So it doesn't have to be something you're born with. It is something you can develop. Yeah. And I would to say too, when I talked about finding that persona, that was a hard time because I felt I felt I was close to quitting because I didn't feel respected. I didn't feel people were listening. But then I I kinda realized, well, what? I think it might be me. I think it might be the way I'm understanding this. , obviously, this person who's, , telling me that I don't want these ideas, I don't these ideas, they're not trying to be mean. They just want success too. So that's when I started going in and researching, well, how do you define a persona? Because honestly, I'm missing this. , I'm a 25 to 45 year old male and these are ideas that I would . So therefore, something I must be not the target. And once we got that clarity, it was this moment. It was , okay, I now see your target. I'm nothing your target even though I have the same age. Mhmm. But now I now that I know what the target is, I can I can hit that target much more accurately? That makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of people probably would have quit and just been , well, they just I'm not respected. They don't care about ideas. Yeah. It's interesting that translates into respect. And it wasn't a disrespect at It was just a miscommunication. Mhmm. So I think if someone's feeling really stuck in any of these areas, maybe what they should do is try to change perspective and look for that opportunity to unlock something the way you're just describing because that could change everything. Yeah. And again, if you can make a leader more successful, there'll be a yes, yes, yes every time if you're if you're alignment with their goals. That's great. I'm gonna clip that. So before we close out, a couple of exciting announcements. First that we delayed the labored pricing when ticket prices will go up. So we extended that through September 14. So if any of our churches listening have invited people, now's the time to follow-up with them and make sure that they get registered. And then Gold Circle Awards. So for our community members on September 18, that's when submissions end. So if you want to be considered, if you want your project to be considered, you should try and get that in before then. And then lastly, if you haven't booked your hotel yet, you should definitely do that. Our final block is up at the Hyatt Place. This is our smallest and fastest filling block, so it's steadily filling up. So if you haven't yet, make sure to get your tickets and your hotel rooms. And we will see you on the next episode.