181: Ripples – Creating Practical Inspiration That Resonates with Paul Wesselmann
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Some 20 years ago, Paul Wesselmann began sending out a weekly inspirational newsletter called Ripples. Today, his weekly emails are read by over 30,000 subscribers each Monday morning. What made Ripples so appealing to so many, and what can we as leaders and influencers learn from its success? On this episode of The TalentGrow Show, Ripples founder, author and keynote speaker Paul Wesselmann joins me to discuss practical inspiration and how to frame your message in a way that will resonate with those you want to reach. Plus, discover the concept of “liminal space” and how it can help you as a leader! Tune in and be sure to share this episode with others in your network.
ABOUT PAUL WESSELMANN:
Paul Wesselmann is a writer, educator and speaker with a passion for empowering and uplifting others by unleashing ripples of positivity and growth. In 1999 he began sending out a weekly email with a couple of upbeat quotes and some thoughts to ponder for the week. 20 years later his Ripples emails have a loyal following with over 30,000 subscribers and many more who read them on social media. He recently released a book called "Ripples for Reflection: Weekly Inspirations for Unleashing Your Best Self.”
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:
· How Paul’s weekly newsletter, Ripples, got started, and what makes the content resonate with people (6:34)
· Halelly quotes a passage from Ripples and shares what makes it meaningful to her (10:32)
· How Paul addresses the challenge of talking about difficult topics in a way that doesn’t alienate people who need to hear them (12:55)
· Paul shares a mistake he made years ago, and discusses how he would have approached that situation differently now (hint: it’s an easy mistake for anyone to make when discussing a controversial subject like politics) (16:00)
· An overview of Paul’s philosophy of leadership, which he breaks down into reaching-out skills and reaching-in skills (20:24)
· What’s new and exciting on Paul’s horizon? Paul discusses “liminal space” and how grasping this concept can help you as a leader (22:10)
· Three questions that Paul asks when talking about changes and challenges (27:38)
· One specific action you can take to upgrade your leadership effectiveness (28:26)
RESOURCES:
· Get Paul’s book, Ripples for Reflection: Weekly Inspirations for Unleashing Your Best Self, on his website and subscribe to the Ripples newsletter
· Connect with Paul on LinkedIn and Twitter
· Read Halelly’s blog post referenced in this episode: Transparency in a networked world: Merging personas and removing veneers; Plus, learn how to Harness the power of your emotional intelligence! Using the 4-box matrix Halelly described.
Episode 181 Paul Wesselmann
Soundbite So often when we’re dealing with challenge and we’re dealing with change, there is a dance, a mix, a mélange of letting go, holding on and looking forward. Just like grief, this stuff is not linear and some days you’re ready to let go of lots of stuff and the other day you’re holding on and it’s really a mix of all three of those things.
Intro Welcome to the TalentGrow Show, where you can get actionable results-oriented insight and advice on how to take your leadership, communication and people skills to the next level and become the kind of leader people want to follow. And now, your host and leadership development strategist, Halelly Azulay.
Welcome back TalentGrowers to another episode of the TalentGrow Show. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow and TalentGrow is the company that I founded back in 2006 to develop leaders that people actually want to follow. TalentGrow sponsors this show so that it stays free for you every Tuesday. This week we have a fascinating guest. I had a really fun time talking to him before, during and after we recorded. We talked for a long time. Neat guy. I am so excited to share his insights with you, TalentGrowers. His name is Paul Wesselmann and he is also known as “the ripples guy” and you will learn why. We talk about his new book, Ripples for Reflection, and this newsletter that he started 20 years ago called The Ripples Newsletter and how he inspires people, how words make a really big difference, how to straddle this concept of being authentic and transparent while also not be pushing people away, and his leadership philosophy that he uses and the work he does as a fellow leadership developer. I can’t wait for you to listen to this conversation I had with Paul Wesselmann.
Let’s dig in.
All right TalentGrowers. This week I am excited to introduce you to Paul Wesselmann. He actually was referred to me by a long-time listener, Harry Mullin, and Harry sent me a note that said that Paul was speaking at his daughter’s college and that he led the inspiring talk about entering college life and happiness and said that he held all of the students and parents mesmerized for the entire 30 minutes and then he said, “The guy has skills. His lyrical reminder that we don’t need everything to be perfect in order to experience happiness, recalled for me the spirit of your podcast.” This is Harry speaking to me in his note. He said, “Perhaps he’d be someone to interview. He’s reliably upbeat and animated.” Well, TalentGrowers, then I said that’s a credible recommendation, let’s try it. Even though it took a few minutes to schedule Paul, he began to work with my assistant Jory and Jory never really comments about her interactions with anybody but she sent me a note and said, “Funny how you can feel the energy and enthusiasm and happiness in his emails. He has been such a joy to communicate with these past few weeks!”
Now Paul, I’m going to read your official bio, but I wanted to make sure you understood this is cool. You’re the real deal! Paul Wesselmann is a writer, educator and speaker with a passion for empowering and uplifting others by unleashing ripples of positivity and growth. In 1999, he began sending out a weekly email with a couple of upbeat quotes and some thoughts to ponder for the week. 20 years later, his ripples emails have a loyal following with over 30,000 subscribers and many more who read them on social media. He recently released a book – which he sent me, it’s awesome – it’s called Ripples for Reflection, weekly inspirations for unleashing your best self, which was edited by his partner Jamie Markle, and he sent me also these cute little postcards with quotes on them and little playing card-sized things with quotes on them and all kinds of cool stuff. Paul, welcome to the TalentGrow Show.
Thank you. I’m so excited to be here.
I’m really happy that you’re here as well, and before we get started talking about your book and your work, I always ask my guests to describe their professional journey briefly. Where did you start and how did you get to where you are today?
I’m so excited to be here. I must remember to get Harry’s email so we can send him a thank you note. That is just such a delight to know someone sitting in a stand with 10,000 people liked me enough to write you. That’s just awesome!
Talking about you behind your back but in nice ways!
Exactly. It’s so awesome. I fell in love in college with being a college student, being a resident assistant, campus program board chair, student activities and orientation, and found out my Dean of Students pulled me aside and said there’s a Master’s degree you can get and work with college students your whole life. I started off with a Master’s in Higher Ed, working on college campuses, and my two favorite parts of my job were student leadership development, where I was taking students to conferences to help them grow and often putting on sessions to help them think of themselves as leaders and how to grow in that direction, and also professional staff development, so helping my colleagues continue to grow their leadership supervision, management and personal development skills. I loved those parts of my job so much that I eventually made that my full-time job. It’s been for the last 20 years, going around. People find me from my speaking. Almost all of my work comes from people who actually see me speak somewhere. 20 years ago I started sending out a little email that I’m sure we’ll start talking about that accidentally sort of become my brand and made it really easy for me to stay in touch with people who have seen me speak. Now, every year, about 30 events or so I hang out with some college student groups still as part of my work. A third of my work is going into workplace environments and either the annual gathering of employees or a specific “let’s do some time management training” and then the last third of my work I association conferences. Whether it’s the Pennsylvanian Library Association or the Nebraska Health Care Association, next week Wisconsin Park and Rec Association, they’re getting together for their annual professional development and I’m there to pump them up and give them some things to think about.
That’s cool. How did you decide to send these emails? Where did that come from?
It’s just crazy. It started when I was just becoming self employed and I knew that marketing was going to be a part of my job, and I asked a friend of mine who is actually doing a lot of work in marketing, I said, “How do I market my business? Do I need billboards? Do I need direct mail? Do I need a TV commercial?” He said, “You’ve been doing this part-time for seven years. How have people been finding you?” I said I didn’t know, and that was a marketer to ask such a good question. You need to find out how people that are already hiring you are finding out about you. So the assignment was go make a list of everyone that has hired you in the last three years and if you don’t know how they found out about you, you call them and ask them. It took me several months to track that down. What surprised us both – he admitted he was surprised too – was it wasn’t the word of mouth. I would have guessed people heard about me from word of mouth. It really wasn’t people hearing about me from someone who saw me speak. It was people who saw me speak. Their tale was in a presentation at a professional development or on campus, and they either graduated and went out and did their thing or switched to another campus and said, “Hey, I saw this guy.” He said, “If that’s 87-percent of how people are finding you, you don’t need billboards. You don’t need TV. You don't need direct mail even. You just need to remind people you exist.”
A couple months later I thought about a monthly newsletter. That was what a lot of my colleagues in the speaking world were doing and it seemed like a lot of work and a lot of printing. Some people were doing daily quotes and daily things back then, and that seemed like too much. I wasn’t excited about doing daily. I thought what about once a week? That feels about right. At the time, my speaking company was called Stone Soup Seminars, and I was working on promoting that brand and I wanted this little ripples newsletter. I wanted to be something that didn’t necessarily overtly market myself. I really just wanted people to remember I existed. So I was using inspirational quotes in my work a lot. I decided to commit to sharing a couple of quotes. Something to think about, my original goal, keep it under a minute to read, Mondays because Mondays are poppy, and yet under a minute because Mondays are busy. Absolutely free and with almost no direct mention. I would say, “This week I was in South Dakota,” but I wouldn’t say, “And if you want to hire me…” It was just two quotes and something to ponder. It just caught on. People agreed to help me find cool quotes. People told their friends about it and it just gradually grew. It wasn’t this explosive growth at all. It went from 75 people to a couple hundred. I had a couple of thousand the first year and it’s hovered around 30,000 for the past five years.
That’s really awesome. In my side gig, I teach new entrepreneurs how to build a successful consulting business with a new online course I just recently launched with my partner Elaine Biech, and we talk about marketing and so many people are just so scared about marketing. This is such a great story. It’s such a great reminder that marketing is about reminding people you exist by adding value and making them happy that they remembered you. Not, “Oh, there goes Paul again with the stupid emails.” And it works. Yay and kudos to you. Why do you think content like that resonates so well with people?
I do think there is something about the brevity that makes it easy for people to access. I’ve been hearing, our mutual friend Paul Smith who you’ve had on your podcast, he recently told me that he was contacted by someone to write a book – he’s written several books – and they were telling him that one of the really in things right now in publishing is publishing a book that can be read in under an hour. That’s just not what we were thinking 10 and 15 and 20 years ago, as far as what a good book is. I think the old way of measuring the value of a book is, “How many pages does it have? How many chapters?” Now it’s, “Can people get through this?”
So there are 52 weekly reflections in your book and each one contains a pebble, a boulder and a ponder. The pebble is a really short, I guess a really short quote, and the boulder is a little bit heavier of a quote and then the ponder is kind of like your riffing on the topic and adding value or connecting it to a context or something like that. We won’t have time to talk about each one, but I really like the one on page 14. It’s ripples number 870. Its title is Meaning. I thought maybe I’d read the pebble and the boulder and then a quote from your ponder, and maybe we could talk about this topic a little bit, what do you think?
That sounds awesome.
Pebble: “Most humans feel the transcendent temptation, the emotional drive to festoon the universe with large-scale meaning.” This is from Paul Kurtz, shared by Ryan in Arlington, TX. You printed who sent you the quote too.
Right, my agreement from the very beginning was, “I will keep doing this for free without marketing as long as you, ripples readers, help me find cool inspiration so I’m not the one having to do all the digging.” Ryan from Arlington, I happen to know him, he was a 15-year-old kid in a workshop I gave way, way a long time ago, I think in the mid 90s. He’s now all grown up and out of college. He had me come speak at his college, and he’s been a great quote submitter. That word festoon, that quote, I just love it so much.
It’s cool. Of course in case it hasn’t been painfully obvious, I’ll state it – the idea of pebble, boulders, they create ripples when you toss them into a pond. So the boulder: “Every experience that we have contains purpose and meaning. Each event, each person in our lives embodies an energetic fragment of our own psyche and soul.” This one is by Carolyn Myss, shared by Pete in Sedona, Arizona. And then you wrote about this for about three paragraphs or so and I’ll read the first two sentences in the last paragraph. “Because people tend to seek and/or create meaning from a variety of sources – religion, philosophy, science, literature, etc. – I’ll admit that at times I find it tricky to share a few ideas in a way that can be received by folks with a wide array of perspectives.” So, this resonates with me because I also struggle with that in the sense that I want to bring my own angle to things and I definitely have a specific lens through which I see, and things that I agree with and disagree with based on my philosophy, which is the link that connects me and Harry. We share philosophy. I want to be authentic and I want to be transparent, but I don’t want to alienate people unnecessarily. So, how have you faced this challenge of talking about tough things in a way that doesn’t alienate people who need to hear?
By messing up a lot and by having good intentions and by being curious and by being persistent. I think since the beginning, it has been my goal with my speaking work and also with this ripples newsletter to try to bring my authentic, best self to the work that I do in a way that allows people to leave a session or leave reading a ripples, maybe thinking new thoughts, seeing the world with some new perspective and not necessarily having a goal of changing them or changing their perspective. Maybe adding to it and maybe some of them will grow in a way that says, “Oh, I used to think that and now I’m seeing it differently because of something Paul said or did.” But that’s a lot to ask, especially from somebody who comes in and people see once. This isn’t a teaching course, this is a one-time thing for most of the people who see me speak. I would say early on in my career, it was fairly easy because while I’m a more left-leaning, I tend to be more liberal in my politics, I’m someone who I’ve always been around people with a variety of views and beliefs, and it was easy for me in the beginning to say, “This is how I look at the world and this is how I think about things. Some people think differently and this is where we’re trying to get to.” Even as a gay dude, early on when I was teaching diversity and inclusion on campuses, I would have student leaders come up and say, “We really believe in being open and diversity is important and we want all of our residents to feel comfortable, but as a Christian, I don’t feel comfortable with how my department is framing homosexuality. I see it as wrong and what do I do with that?” I think for a lot of people that would hear that, they would want to try to “fix” that person’s view and I just took a very different path and said, “I don’t think you have to give up your Christian values. I think what your school is asking, they’re saying this gay stuff is real, that you’ve got some of your classmates, some of the residents you’re serving, they’re not making this up. It is hard in our society to be gay, and you’re working at a campus that says we’re not going to discriminate. I think operating within that framework, I think it’s possible to take your Christian love and hold onto it fiercely and do the job you feel called to do.” For the most part, even with some issues around abortion and some of those really thorny and tricky issues, it used to be fairly easy for me to find that middle ground and know that it’s not my job to fix people. It’s my job to say, “This is how I look at the world. This is how some other people look at the world.” I will say that job has gotten harder in the last couple of years and I tried to frame some things in ripples newsletter. I lost several dozen subscribers and some of them were my biggest fans, after the 2016 election when I thought I was framing something in a fairly neutral way and I wasn’t. I totally see what they meant, and I worked hours and hours framing this as, “Hey, we’re all in this together. Let’s figure out how to move forward together.” But what I didn’t realize in my zeal is that I was saying “to get through this terrible, horrible thing.” And going back, I totally know how I would say it now. But I thought I couldn’t have done a better job. I love it when Oprah says – and I forget which one of her awesome mentors taught her – when you know better, you do better.
Okay, so I have to ask, even though I try to stay away from politics on this podcast always, always, but since this is such a concrete example and you say that you know what you would have done differently – would you share that with us? What would you say differently?
I think that one of the things I picked up that is actually a tactic my therapist taught me, that something more internally, whenever you find yourself being hard on yourself about something, the first thing to do is to thank yourself for that. You and I were talking a little bit before we hit record and you said something that you were struggling with and you said, “That’s my demon.” And there was a little voice inside me that said, “That actually isn’t your demon. It’s your friend that sometimes gets in your way of you doing your best work in certain situations.” But anytime she does that, the first thing to say is “thank you.” I think if I can go back and do that again, I would have spent more emotional labor setting up the issue as, “It’s clear that things are tough right now, given that we’re all at different places. How we get to where we need to do depends on us all willing to do some more sitting down, do some more listening.” I think that’s how I would phrase it. I would also tell you, I stepped back, on my social media posts – I got on Facebook very early. Some college students had created a fan club for the ripples emails, and they asked me to step in, and I assured them that Facebook was never going to last because MySpace was too well established. I’ll join their little book of faces blog as long as they understand this is a temporary thing. I was wrong, Halelly!
Facebook rules the world at the moment!
Right. So it was always a work place for me and as more and more of my friends got on there I started thinking of it more as, “Hey, this is my personal page and over here is my business page,” but the reality of it is, most people that follow me there are following my personal profile, not my page. And of course when I post something on my personal profile, it reaches a lot more people unless I’m paying to promote something on my page. So I made a decision a couple of years ago, actually, to really scale back from sharing some of my personal political concerns and instead, keeping my finger on the pulse of what I think is important that we’re talking about and how we’re framing it, but absolutely suspending the temptation I have all the time to say, “Of course I’m right. And of course ‘they’ are wrong.”
Thank you for sharing that, and I’ll link to a blog I wrote a while back about the same thing, because really, I’ve been thinking about this for years. I don’t know if we’ve solved it here, necessarily, but I’m glad we’re able to share different perspectives on how to deal with it. Because it’s a real issue in the workplace, and you raised it in such a simple and elegant way. Which I think kind of speaks to the idea of why this resonates. You don’t have to beat people over the head with it. You give them a simple quote and some reflection on it, and then it gets them thinking, and maybe they go and talk to someone at work, “You know, I read this thing today and I wonder how do you do this or what do you do?” That’s huge value.
So when you’re not writing ripples you are developing leaders, right?
Yes.
Do you have a philosophy of leadership or a specific approach that you teach? What can TalentGrowers learn from you about being a better leader?
Awesome. I tend to, when I think really broadly, when somebody calls and says, “I want you to come speak at this leadership academy or we’re having this conference for leaders,” I tend to share briefly that I tend to divide leadership development into two skillsets – reaching out skills to help people be more effective at connecting with other people, and then reaching in skills to help people more consistently bring their best selves to school, to work, to their relationships, to life in general. And typically, what I do with leadership development depends on what the needs of the group are, but usually they fall in a little bit of connecting with people – whether it’s let’s talk about relationship, communication, let’s talk about diversity, inclusion, inequity – and then reaching in skills might be things like time management, creativity and innovation, those kinds of things.
I sometimes use language like “leading self and leading others.” It sounds like it’s very similar to that. And it also makes me think, I don’t know if when you do work with emotional intelligence, one of the things I think makes it much more intelligible to people is the matrix, the four-box that I think was created by Goldman but I know it was popularized by Talent Smart, and it’s got sort of what I see and what I do about myself and others. I like to think about it in that way and I think that helps. Your language is a good compliment or it reminds me of that. So what is new and exciting on your horizon these days, Paul? You’ve got the book, what’s going on?
I’m very blessed and lucky that every year, enough people call me that I get to go hang out with various groups. I’ll tell you, I’m thinking about something right now that I’ll toss out to you and I’m not sure how familiar – do you know the phrase “liminal space?”
Liminal? No. Teach me!
This is a fascinating concept that came up when I was talking about some transition I was in, and I was talking on social media, and somebody who I really respect and admire, her name is Patty Dye [?], she’s great in diversity and inclusion space and also in writing and creativity, and she commented on my post and said, “What you’re talking about is liminal space.” I immediately said, “I don’t know what it is, but Patty is talking about it!” I did a search on the term and it comes from I believe Latin for the world threshold. It’s this idea that there is a period of time when you’re going through a big change, a big loss, where things are not like they were but they’re not yet like they’re going to be. And I am working with a client right now who has asked me to come in and give a pep talk at their annual meeting and they’ve gone through a really big series of changes. It started about two years ago that the biggest changes were happening and they kind of were looking for somebody to help I think move some people along who were with the organization from the very beginning who they feel like, “Two years later, hurry up, let’s get through this. We’ve got to deal with this.” Got some people who are whining about this or crying about that. I was open to coming in and giving a 45-minute pep talk that included some content about change and dealing with difficulty, but as I was listening to these leaders I said, “I keep hearing this phrase, liminal space, and I think the old business name and the new business name and the old leadership and the new leadership, you’re feeling like there was a line drawn that was very specific. We gave some people some time to catch their breath but come on.” I’m not a change management expert and I can imagine if they’d brought somebody in specifically who helps organizations through change, they might have had a worksheet or a formula.
What I said, “I think you’re in a liminal space.” They looked at me and I said, “I know, I don’t know the word either, but let’s Google it together.” And there is this quote from I believe Nancy Leven that says, “Honor the space that isn’t what used to be but isn’t yet what it will be.” For me, that just really resonated and I was thinking about how adolescence is a good example of a liminal space. A typical teenager absolutely does not feel like they’re a kid, but even they know they’re not quite a grown up in the way they will be. And even something like maybe an engagement. The idea that you’ve made a commitment, that you’re going to spend your forever with somebody, and you’re in the process of finalizing the details, there are ways in which you’re not quite married, it’s not quite a thing yet, but it’s not what it used to be. And I’m giving this speech in about a week and a half and what I love about my work is when I’m giving a short speech, I have a really good sense of I’m going to do this and this and I’m going to tell this story. Usually I try to leave this one little place in this speech where I can take a tangent and not go over on time, go somewhere that I didn’t know I was going to even 24 hours earlier, and I’ve been deep diving on this concept of liminal state, to think about what could I say to them that might help them honor the fact that even if they’ve moved on, some people have come into the organization in the time since the change started, and for them, everything is chill. Everything is cool. This is the way it is. For them to maybe be more respectful of the fact that the folks who have been here forever, they’re experiencing a loss. It might be useful to think about grieving and how if somebody’s goldfish died two years ago and they’re still mourning, a lot of people might think, “Oh my gosh, but can’t you move on?” But if somebody’s spouse died or somebody they’ve known for 20 years died, they would understand it even two years later. You’re not done grieving. And, I also think there are going to be some ways in which some of the people that are stuck in the transition, they haven’t given themselves some permission. There hasn’t been a funeral or a graduation or a retirement party for the way things were. I do teach in some of my other workshops that sometimes actually having ceremonies or thinking through and saying, “You know what? At some point you’re going to want to go to the old building we were in and have a moment.” We think it’s of course understandable that you might go to a graveyard or visit with somebody, and actually go have a transition for yourself. That’s something I’ve been thinking about. What do you think? Does that sound intriguing?
It is intriguing, and just what you described about the funeral. I’ve never thought about that before. I’m not familiar with whether it already exists or not for change management, but that makes sense! I like that. Maybe you can invent that!
I have a story that I tell in some of my presentations that are specifically on dealing with changes and challenges, and I won’t tell the long version of the story here in our brief time together, but I will tell you that the three questions that are at the end of that, that I often leave a group with, what is it time to let go of? What might be important to hold onto? And what could be useful to look forward to? I do think that so often when we’re dealing with challenge and we’re dealing with change, there is a dance, a mix, a mélange of letting go, holding on and looking forward. Just like grief, this stuff is not linear and some days you’re ready to let go of lots of stuff and the other day you’re holding on and it’s really a mix of all three of those things.
One specific action that TalentGrowers can take today, tomorrow, this week, that can help them upgrade their own leadership skills or whatever angle you want to take at this?
Let me say, first of all, it’s been such a delight to spend this time with you. I feel like I’m talking to a celebrity because I’ve been listening to your podcast for several months now on my morning walks and I absolutely love how you consistently start the episode with a “briefly tell me about your professional journey. How did you get to here?” And then you end with one specific action, and I really respect that you respect that so much. I honestly think one of the things that I could most say to someone is to find the one thing for you. Developing a practice of what is a specific action that you can take on a regular basis, and actually saying, “This is the thing?” A few years ago I had developed a little practice before every speech of closing my eyes and taking three deep breaths and thinking, “Here now, here now, here now,” as a way to be present before I speak. And I’d never told anyone about it, it was a little private ritual. I started a couple of speeches and forgot to do it – and I was still good, because I'm amazing [laughter] – and I could tell I wasn’t on. The second time it happened it was a group of school counselors and I stopped the speech and I told them about the little “here now, here now, here now,” and I ended up noticing that when I taught it to them and did it, and they did it too. Not only was I more present, but they were. The evaluations came back, and some of them when they were asked, “What’s the thing you’ll remember most from either your time from Paul or the overall conference?” they just wrote, “Here now.” I started incorporating that into almost all of my speeches. I share that not as the thing I want people to hold onto, but that ended up being a small thing that I do now, dozens – I would say sometimes 100 times – in a day. I’ve had the little sticker I made up that has “here now” on it in front of my desk so that several times, when I was nervous at the start of this call and different times, I just did “here now.” For people to find their thing. One little thing you can do. I think it’s a gift you’re giving every time that people listen to your podcast.
Great suggestion. I love it. So you gave an abstract suggestion and a concrete example, which is what we love. And it gives everybody the freedom to use the idea that you suggested in a way that meets their needs.
Yes!
Nice. People are going to want to hear more from you, so they probably want to sign up for your newsletter and we’ll link to your book and where should they follow you? Online? On social media? What are the best places?
Absolutely. If people search “ripples guy” and I’m @ripplesguy on just about every social media and TheRipplesBook.com. It links right to the product page, but unleashripples.com is where people can sign up for the weekly newsletters. I do want to give a quick shout out to my partner Jamie. He took the awesome task in 2019 of reading all 1,070 issues of Ripples that I created over the last 20 years and selected the 52 that were in the book. I am not kidding to say when people read it, they might think, “Paul wrote this.” While I wrote the pages, I promise this would not exist if it wasn’t for Jamie. The ones he selected, I did not read this – I haven’t told anyone this – I didn’t read this until it was off to print. I was so afraid my insecurity would step in and that I would stop it from going to print because I get that people like reading the emails, but I can’t imagine people reading this in book form! I trusted him that much and I cried when I read the book because of the order that he put them in and the ones that he selected.
How fortunate you are to have someone that has both the skills and your full trust like that to work with and partner with! Congratulations on that. And congratulations on the book. I know we were waiting to have this conversation until the book was out, so that we can share it with people. That’s smart and makes total sense, so thank you. Thanks for sharing time with the TalentGrowers and your insights and I think they’re going to love listening to it. Appreciate you!
Thank you. It was a joy and I will tell you that as you and I talked about, this is the first time I’ve actually committed to being on a podcast. I generally decline these interviews, and you were right that you did make it fun and you did make it easy. I do want to say you’re living the idea of putting small things out there that have an ongoing impact, and it really is a pleasure to share time and space with you today.
Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
Wrapping it up All right TalentGrowers. That’s it for another episode of the TalentGrow Show. I really enjoyed interviewing Paul and I hope you will take action based on our conversation and let me know how it went and what did you think and how did it work and what else do you want to learn about? I always want to know and I would love to keep the conversation going. When you share, every episode or any episode or this episode with even one other person, it helps us to create bigger ripples, if I may borrow Paul’s term. Make an impact. We’re already creating this content here and my intention is to impact as many people as possible. You can help make that happen with one tiny little action. If you would, just forward this to someone and share it with them and that would mean a lot to me. That’s how we grow. Thank you for listening to another episode of the TalentGrow Show. I am Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow, the company that sponsors the TalentGrow Show and the company that I founded in 2006 to develop leaders that people want to follow. I appreciate you and until the next time, make today great.
Thanks for listening to the TalentGrow Show, where we help you develop your talent to become the kind of leader that people want to follow. For more information, visit TalentGrow.com.
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Intro/outro music: "Why-Y" by Esta
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