Leverage the Power of Differentiation with Patrick Kagan

In this episode of the Happy, Wealthy Show, host Neal welcomes guest Patrick Kagan, an expert on personal and professional mindset, sales, and culture. The discussion delves deep into the concept of differentiation as a strategy and mindset, and its importance in overcoming societal issues like anxiety and depression. Patrick highlights the significance of embracing differences in creating successful teams and businesses. He also shares insights into leadership, the power of human resources, and the emotional aspects of workplace culture. Neal and Patrick touch upon the importance of finding fulfillment beyond monetary wealth, and Patrick imparts wisdom for leaders to foster an environment that values creativity and emotional intelligence. The conversation offers valuable takeaways on how to turbocharge your life by understanding and utilizing differentiation and abundance.

patrick@pksolutionsgroup.com

www.pksolutionsgroup.com

https://ownitloveit1.odoo.com/

https://calendly.com/pksolutionsgroup/30min?month=2024-08

Transcript

Patrick Kagan: But when you look at outliers, you can look at our society and you can say, nine out of ten people suffer from anxiety or depression.

So you can examine those nine out of ten people, or you can look at the one, let's look at the outlier. Why isn't that person, Suffering from anxiety and depression. And you can really do well to learn about these outliers and understand that differentiation is a strategy. It is a mindset and being different is a strength.​

Neal Neo Phalora: Welcome to the happy, wealthy show. Today's guest is Patrick Kagan. Patrick and I had the fortune of being in the same audio room together. You know that feeling you get sometimes when somebody starts saying magical words and you're like, who is this? I heard a voice and I'm like, I've got to reach out to this guy and know more.

He is a maven of culture, sales, of personal and professional mindset. He's got a PK solutions group and a great book. We're going to really deep dive today in some of the genius that Patrick has. I'm hoping at the end of this podcast you walk away with some nuggets where you can turbocharge your life.

Patrick, welcome to the show. 

Patrick Kagan: Thanks for having me. Yeah. It was great to meet somebody in a meeting room on LinkedIn. I always encourage people participate in the rooms you're in. Cause you never know who you're going to meet. And I'm certainly glad we became fast friends. 

Neal Neo Phalora: Absolutely. So let's deep dive a little bit into what you do. If you could sum it up like what is your genius Patrick? What is it that you do for people? 

Patrick Kagan: I love that you call it my genius. Some people call it like, what's your superpower.

My main thing is, I think I'm always able to find a hope and in hope come solutions, and that's really the founding principle of my company, PK solutions group. We look for balance in both your personal and your professional life. We find there isn't any problem we can't find a solution for.

We do a lot of this through the power of examining your mindset. If we can create mind shifting, that's great. We do it through the power of creating differentiation awareness. We're all different. But the human nature is to assimilate so many times we ignore the power of differentiation.

That's what my books are about. And that's what a lot of my coaching is about. I focus on creating better outcomes for an individual person or for professional teams. Where I've been spending a lot of time and having a lot of success lately is in the area of sales and leadership. So the whole idea is you don't fail, you don't succeed. You just create outcomes and they either went as planned or more than likely they didn't go as planned. So we try to create something better down the road. My philosophy is different is better than best. So we're trying to look for difference and differentiation and create a better situation and never try to create a best situation because it doesn't exist.

Neal Neo Phalora: Different is better than best. That's really good. Let's deep dive into this idea of differentiation. We know the human brain and the way we as human beings like to focus, we like to put things into buckets. We need to classify everything. We want to find the sameness and likeness.

We have this attraction so that unfortunately those key differences that make us a great company, a great leader, a great father, a great spouse, they get whitewashed. How do we bring people back into this awareness of focus on differences in a way that's constructive, given, and I don't want to talk about this, but given our present, political landscape where those don't always seem to go that well. How do you do that? 

Patrick Kagan: Yeah. It's a great question., when you mentioned the word difference or differentiation, people often go towards the political landscape and, I was in the military and I was in the infantry frontline soldiering and what I learned very quickly was I never was concerned about the color of the other person's skin, their religious predispositions. I cared they could do their job and did a different job than me and we all made it through to our strategic outcome, our plan, where is it we're trying to go. So I learned in a situation that was hands on differences are strengths. that's a good thing. My responsibility in my life then becomes helping others see differences or strengths. And you're right, human nature is to assimilate. You think about your grade school days. You don't want to be the new kid in the school because you don't know anybody.

If you are the new kid in the school, you hide, right? And you try to figure out what everyone else is doing. You join a team. You all get a uniform, even in the military. We got a uniform, there's a uniform military code of justice, everything uniform, uniform, uniform. But when you look at outliers, you can look at our society and you can say, nine out of ten people suffer from anxiety or depression.

So you can examine those nine out of ten people, or you can look at the one, let's look at the outlier. Why isn't that person, Suffering from anxiety and depression. And you can really do well to learn about these outliers and understand that differentiation is a strategy. It is a mindset and being different is a strength.

I love like minded people, but not when I'm trying to problem solve. The bigger the problem, the more differences I want, the more challenging thought provoking conversations I want. Like minded people, when you are suffering from a problem and you seek out like minded people, you're going to find a bunch of people who like to lick your wounds with you.

When I coach people, I'm not there to lick their wounds. I am there to have a differing opinion. So when I hear people say things like, we've tried everything, I ask them, have you ever worked with me? If they say no, then you haven't tried everything because I have one more idea than the last person you work with. I bet you it's different and different is better than best. So it's a constant thing. People, if people say, okay, it's time to differentiate. We're going into a sales pitch. It's time to differentiate. Chances are you don't differentiate. Chances are you fall into patterns of familiarity. You go do a sales pitch from bad behaviors you've learned and you say the same thing as your competition.

So why do you expect you're going to have different results? My saying is insanity is not doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Insanity is knowing there's a different way. And choosing to do the same anyway. 

Neal Neo Phalora: Wow, let's explore that. I hope people just rewind that and hear what Patrick said, because that is gold right there.

Being a guy who works with people on scaling their wealth, where wealth is connection and fulfillment and many other things besides revenue. There is a secret sauce in there that we confuse the familiar for the fulfilling. We go back to what's familiar and have to understand that as spiritual beings in a meat suit, our meat suit is programmed to keep snapping back to a certain center.

And that in sales, in culture, in home environments, we keep returning to what we know. The unknown is scary. One of the things I feel like is the big change maker in cultures is creating safety for teams to go away from what's familiar, what's been done. I remember an experience early on in my corporate career where it was obvious, the process was so much better. It was a system upgrade. It was going to literally cut down on 40 steps of work. People brought out the torches. I was a young person in the department, and I'm like, what is going on? I realized how much people don't want change, they want the same, right? , this is a big topic. I'm sure you've encountered this, like, how do we, I don't want to say combat, but how do we, Create an opening here.

Patrick Kagan: Yeah. Well, you could say combat, you could say create an opening because we are at war with our own habits. I just had an individual person come to me and she said, I need to hire you because I need to stop getting the same job at a different employer. She was talking about repeating a pattern of finding basically an abusive situation.

It was an employer, it was a toxic environment. She could get those jobs, she can get them for more money. She kept ending up unfulfilled. You talked about fulfillment. I talk to people all the time and I say, let me make it really clear to you. I make a living by making my friends and my associates make a better living.

I will talk to you about abundance, not wealth. So you will make a better living, but that might mean you earn less money, but are more happy. You are more sustainable. I'm putting on two seminars coming up about work life balance. People are always like, I've got to get work life balance. I'm like, no, what you need is a life imbalance and work.

Nobody wants the balance. They've got this imbalance because they've made work the priority. They've used their title as defining who they are. They look around and compare themselves to other folks who are getting promoted. You're afraid to share creative ideas because someone might steal an idea. You mentioned something before about being uncomfortable and when people are uncomfortable, that's where creativity begins.

When you are trapped and there feels like there's no way out, you'll still find a way out, but you have to be willing to be creative. And if you have other people around you and you don't embrace how they might do something, you'll do it differently. You might get there. But it might take you 10 times longer.

It might be 10 times less efficient than if you just listen to somebody who sees it differently than you. There's power in people. We talk about the department of human resources. I talked about the power of human resources. People are resources. 

Neal Neo Phalora: Wow. And harnessing that power, getting people into that zone is really big.

I think at the end of the day we're all playing it safe. You talk about this idea of trying to harness that power, but we're really afraid of looking bad, of failing. And we have this big ad like, failure is good. We need to fail fast, but let's just be honest. It's not really upheld. We still vilify it heavily, right? That we can't fail and that failure is not an option. We know anybody who's done great, whether it's Michael Jordan or Steve Jobs or whomever, they've failed so much to get to that place. How do we create that mindset it's okay to fail because we still are on this antiquated System that's reminiscent of grade school. Okay. What's your performance right? Well, you got a three this year You only get a meets and all those things, right? It's very archaic and that pushes people into mediocrity and pushes people away from taking big risks. So how do we change?

Patrick Kagan: You're hitting a lot of really good points. When you take away the idea of a grading system in an educational environment, it's amazing the amount of learning that goes on. And so, a couple of things, I think it's a lot of our programming. You and I talked about this in that LinkedIn meeting room.

The average person has about 70, 000 thoughts a day. Bear in mind, there's only about 84, 000 seconds per day. So you have about a thought every second. It's not things you're aware of. You are aware of everything you're thinking. You go crazy trying to keep track of things, trying to get anything done.

80 percent of those thoughts are negative thoughts. This is brain mapping they do, and they look at how your brain fires with something positive compared to negative. So they put neutral thoughts in the same category as negative. And out of those 80%, 95 percent are on repeat. We're conditioned with this idea of fail or we're a failure or not succeeding is not the opposite of failure, right?

It's a neutral thing. I think it's the wording and the programming we do and encountered our whole entire life. You have to go through a reprogramming and if it's a corporation, it starts with the leader, but the leader may take longer to get there. A mind is very malleable, but sometimes a new employee is more malleable than an executive who's been there for a long time, maybe built the company and this is how we did things right.

I think the whole idea of fail and succeed puts us into this either or, win or lose, hate or love scenario. I think if we change the word to outcomes, and this is what I spend time with folks understanding, you created an outcome. Now if you know there might be a different way and you choose to keep doing the same thing, you might end up at that same outcome.

Is that what you want? Maybe it is. I have a lot of folks who come to me and they're like, I get differentiation. I have to differentiate, but I want to make mid six figures. Okay. So we're going to work on some things that have to do with strategy, not tactics.

People get confused on that a little bit and to be completely tactical gets you in the wrong place most of the time. If we look at the outcomes that are being generated, then we say, now it's neither fail nor succeed. It is now what would be more optimal? What would be more ideal? I do a lot of work where I say to folks, tell me about your top five clients and they'll describe who they work with, what they bill them.

Then about a half an hour later, after a lot of discussion, a lot of interaction, I'll say, let's describe the characteristics of the types of people you think would be best to work with. And then we write those down and compare those characteristics to who you're doing business with. It's interesting how many of those clients fall off the list.

They spend a lot with me, but they're not the ideal types of people to work with. Meaning they might be disloyal. So you keep going back to them and you wonder why sales fluctuate. There's no loyalty. There's no appreciation. They do things the way they always do things. We're trying to create this whole world where instead of people saying, why should I do business with you, Neal or why should I embrace other people's differences to why haven't I always been doing business with you, Neal why haven't I always been embracing differences? We want to create the experience, which creates the emotion. Which creates the reflex down the road, good things happen when you do these different things.

Neal Neo Phalora: Wow, you said so many good things there, but I'd like to just go back to creating an experience and creating an emotion. This is the thing that used to drive me nuts in my corporate days. Once upon a time before I worked myself, I used to be in all the boardrooms with all the harumphs and the big rubrics analysis and all the EBITDAs.

Three fourths of every damn meeting would be, how are we going to generate the, how are we going to make the customer feel? How are we going to get emotion? How are we going to get them out of even keel, but everybody was predicated we're going to make this based on logic, but we know that even in sales, you're four times more likely to buy with an emotional connection that you buy an emotion, you justify with. logic 

We as adults, let me just call a spade a spade, we're very emotionally constipated. Things happen to us in our life and we decide we don't want to feel the bad, but we just unfeel everything. Then we feel very limited to create opportunity in our life, but we have to know at the end of the day everything is motivated by one thing, one thing only. We want to experience something. So this idea of emotional intelligence is overused, but I think, the Golden egg is how do we give people the practicum to get back into their emotional intelligence.

We have to give them practical stuff so they get embodied to experience it. That's what we experience it below the neck. So how do you do that with teams? 

Patrick Kagan: Yeah. You're so right because people go through their business life and their personal life and they try to do it with this logical lens.

We are literally a human bag of emotions. So anything you see, smell, hear, taste, touch, anything that happens, creates a memory inside your brain. That's where the logic happens. Your brain's job is simply to sort, and store. It stores that memory and it sorts and stores the emotion associated with that memory.

Use a negative example. You got bullied in grade school and it was frightening. It was a bad experience. And then you go through your life, you go past Grade school, you go to high school, you go to college, you get married, you go back to a class reunion as an adult in your forties or fifties.

And you see that bully guarantee those emotions come back. The memories come back. The bully may not even remember, or may choose not to remember they were the bully. But the one being bullied will never forget. It is a limitation. It's like the word forgiveness. People say, I have trouble forgiving.

And they're talking about the emotion. You slapped me. I felt the sting. Then you want me to forgive you. But I don't forget the sting. So I really might say, that's okay. My words, my logic, but my emotions are, not that way. It's not okay. I won't forget that sting. And so forgiveness is employing logic.

Let go of the emotion that controls your decisions based on that stimulus. It all goes back to emotion. Everything we do is emotional. When people say, I want to make more money, they're not telling me logically, I can't pay my bills. They're saying, I'm looking at Neo, look at the car he drives, look at the house he has, I want what he has, why does he have that and I don't have that?

All sorts of emotion. It is not, I'm struggling to make my bills, Pat, and how can you help me with that? It's never that . When people, if I were telling you to come work for my company, I wouldn't say, I want you to come work here because the pay is great, but the boss is the biggest asshole you've ever met and the work is horrible.

It's a grind. It's thankless, but we pay great. No, no, no. When I tell you to come work at my company, I talk to you about all these emotion provoking experiences. My boss understands my pain. My boss did this, my coworkers are this. We get to do this, we do that. And you'd say, great. By the way, what does it pay?

It's the last thing. Logic is always last. 

Neal Neo Phalora: It is always last. And workplace studies can show this over and over again. Do I have a friend at work, to have somebody I can confide in when I have a problem at work? Am I kept in the know, right? Do people like, let me know what's going on. And all of that trumps the actual monetary value, but somehow in our society, I don't know why we have to all individually learn that money does not create happiness. It creates a tremendous opportunity. It's an energetic, it's one of my favorite topics. Honestly, I'll tell you Patrick, I never wanted to talk about money because everybody talks about it.

We don't want to realize that everybody was talking about it wrong. I was like, Neal you have an obligation to talk about this because it's the easiest litmus on earth to understand. How we understand value, how we create value, how we exchange it, how can we let value go and how can we bring it back in to ourselves?

How do we feel about the story about what other people's told us about how value is created. All of these longstanding things . When I work with people on money, sometimes I have people break down and cry because they have tremendous shame around money and things, even if they're making money.

I've seen people have tremendous amount of shame on that. How does this idea, this emotion around exchange of value of money work into your sales process, like when you're trying to work with people. 

Patrick Kagan: Yeah. Well, and so I always take the approach that you went into sales cause you wanted to make a good living or you went into executive leadership cause you wanted to make a good living and you wanted to steer, affect other people.

Let's put those things over here. Let's acknowledge they exist. We live in an economic system. Money is important. If money weren't important, if we didn't have an economic system, you might find people doing other things, but you might find them doing the same thing. The idea of what fulfills you, what creates joy. Joy is different than a smile.

I try to talk to people about the idea that if money were what made you happy, then all you would need would be your paycheck twice a month. When people look at reward systems, if rewards follow the pay system, then you get twice a month to be happy, but most people get their paycheck and go, I hate my job.

I hate this. Hate is, it's a four letter word, and so is love. What would make you love this? If someone said, I don't really need to make as much money if I could have this, this, this and this, or if I had this one thing. So I have my two books, one is on differentiation and sales. One is on differentiation and leadership.

Both at the heart of them are about making a great living, but I never want in the books or in my. When I speak, talk about this being a get rich type of book. It's not get rich quick. Some people are quicker learners than others. That's power to them. So you'll make a great living. This is a great handbook for that, but it's built on the idea of abundance is a strategy.

Know what doesn't make you happy and don't do that. That's a simple concept. Figure out what your strengths are and do that more often during the day. And guess what? You're a happy person. And that concept of delegation, delegating is not dumping. So if you're my boss and you give me some data to analyze and I don't like to analyze data.

I don't like to even look at data. I'm gonna be frustrated I'm gonna try to do it because my boss gave it to me I'm gonna come back to you and then what happens is I'm in the land of I don't meet your expectations So expectations now are gone. So when I fail to meet your expectations, you're disappointed and I'm in this loop And then I'm like, doesn't matter what you pay me.

I have an experience and a memory and an emotion of disappointment. I don't like my job. I don't get to work on good things. And you just transpose that with you figure out through a strength analysis what is it I'm good at and like to do. And that's all you give me. Suddenly, not only am I happy, but when I talk to my friends, I talk about the culture and the environment and how great my boss is Gives me these things to work on.

My friends want to come work for you. So I solved this loop of unemployment and turnover. Has nothing to do with generations, generation X, millennials, all that stuff. Has nothing to do with COVID. Has to do with leadership and getting out of the habit of giving people garbage to work on and calling it delegation, calling it team building.

It's not, it's not.

Neal Neo Phalora: Yeah. That's so good. You mentioned that word leadership. It's something near and dear to me as well. I think leadership development is also really misconstrued . I know you have some really unique ideas on that, but so much of leadership is developing people in a way that's artificial to the actual environment that they're in. It's not really sustainable principles that let people be people, but also allow them to lead. Before I started this coaching gig, full time when I was in corporate, I ended up coaching so many of the C suite people because guess what? They were just as much in their crap as everybody else. Toxic work environment, addicted to porn, trouble at home, kids were on drugs. And of course the challenge is they were even more shadowed to talk because who are they going to confide in? I think leadership is one way in which, whether we're a solopreneur or a team of 300, that we can lead our lives more effectively, like drop some knowledge for us.

I know you have some stuff on this. 

Patrick Kagan: Yeah. Well, I mean you're a leader as long as they'll continue to follow. It's always what you do and it goes back to how you make them feel. When you do that, and again, the great lesson in the military has this chain of command, most of the time you're in charge based on years of service.

Doesn't mean you're a good leader, means you've been there longer than others. I was a young infantry soldier, and the whole next person up philosophy, right? Someone ahead of you, they drop. You have to know your chain of command. You have to know their job. You have to take over. In the infantry, many times you're moving through darkness and through heavy wooded areas.

There's a confusing battle that's happening. I can't even describe it doing it justice, but there's panic, there's fear, and I'm up in my squad, I didn't even know where the rest of my platoon is, which is a series of four different squads. I know where my squad is and I'm next person up and I know where we're supposed to go and I know that we're not supposed to get shot, so I'm going to lead us out of here.

With my confidence in what I knew and my confidence in other people and what they were capable of doing. We were able to not only get to our objective, but they were able to do things they didn't think they were capable of. So next time around, when someone says, do you see this rank on my shoulder? And they say, yeah, but Pat keeps me alive. I'm going to follow that. There's a difference we have to go through as coaches. Our obligation is to help leaders understand you don't demand respect, you command respect. And you do that with sometimes what you do more than what you say. Toxic cultures exist because leaders allow them to exist.

If a leader doesn't allow that to exist, guess what, it won't. It's worse for people if you just ignore. I just did something on what's the cost of ignoring a problem. And quantifying the cost logically. I said, now, emotionally, what's the cost with Neo sits out there in that cubicle and knows you allow this to go on, knows you look the other way when this person comes in later, that person leaves early, but expect him to be there, nine to five or whatever.

What's the cost? Well, Neo's going to get disgruntled and frustrated and leave. Not only that, your five star review for other people, you just ruined any sort Staffing versus hiring approach. You'll be a leader who has to hire out of panic versus staff, where Neil says, I want you to meet my brother in law want you meet my cousin, want you meet my neighbor, he's just like me, I've told him all about our culture, not he's looking for a job and we're hiring.

You create the staffing for me through this positive experience. It all happens because a leader has expectations, has standards, does not allow toxicity to become the way it is. And talks to people and says, I'm going to have you do this. Here's why it's important to the company. Here's why it's important to me.

Here's my perception of why it's important to you. I want to hear what you think about why it's important to you to accomplish that and also, why it's important if you don't, because ultimately you're going to be the one doing it. I know where we're supposed to go, but you're going to know how we get there.

That's leadership. And we don't have a lot of that. We have a lot of leaders who I'm the leader. I command, I demand respect. I tell you I'm in charge. I have this title. I walk into the boardroom late. And I pontificate, or I didn't read all the notes for the week. So now I say, bring me up to speed.

Shame on you leader. You should have come here up to speed that you had challenging thoughts for us to dig into and go run back and do some great things for you. Too much wasted time on position and power and titles. So leaders lead, managers look at numbers and process. And that's emotion and logic right there.

Neal Neo Phalora: So good. That was such a good answer. I hope people listen to that back. There's so much wisdom in that. As we wrap up here, Patrick, I want to give you a chance to tell people how they can work with you, find out more about you. I always like to ask a couple surprise questions at the end.

So, what is a great, Sunday afternoon for Patrick. What does that look like? 

Patrick Kagan: Well, it depends if it's the fall, it could be watching my Chicago bears, although they haven't been a team to watch lately. But a Sunday afternoon for me might be starting my barbecue early in the morning, slow cooking something, and then spending time with my wife and my children and my grandchildren, and just enjoying. That's to me, abundance.

That's wealth. I couldn't put a price tag on that. So that's a good Sunday afternoon for me

Neal Neo Phalora: I love it. I love it. That's really good. From where you're at now, tell your 20 year old self, something. A 30 second something, right? What would tell 20 year old Patrick?

Patrick Kagan: I tell 20 year old Patrick, probably three things. One is don't keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. If there's a different way don't choose to do the same. I tell 20 year old Patrick to be patient. That the whole world is within you and it's around you, so it's not that it's coming to you.

Pay attention. It's already there. And I think the last thing I would tell myself is probably, again, focus on what is abundance to you now, because back then I think I was thinking wealth. I was thinking six figures and how quick can I get there and who else is making that kind of money?

And none of that matters. None of that really. And when you get there, it's still not enough. 

Neal Neo Phalora: Yes. It's only enough when you are. I'm so glad we connected brother. I love every time you open your mouth, you always have something really amazing to shift the room with. It's a real pleasure and I know you work with high performance team, high performance individuals, like somebody's listening to this and they're like, man, I need a little more Kagan effect in my life, right?

Yeah. How they find you. 

Patrick Kagan: Yeah. So you can connect with me on LinkedIn, you know, Patrick Kagan, K-A-G-A-N. You can go to my website, pk solutions group.com. My Calendly link is right there at LinkedIn. I've got a button that says set some time up on my calendar. Connect and see if what I say makes sense in your world.

Neal Neo Phalora: Awesome. Awesome, brother. Well, thank you. Thank you for being on the happy, wealthy show where the best part of wealth is absolutely being happy. Appreciate your brother. 

Patrick Kagan: Thank you.