How to Build Relationship that Transform Your Career with Mo Bunnell

Bart welcomes Mo Bunnell, founder of The Bunnell Idea Group, back to The Inspire Podcast to discuss his new book, Give to Growth. 

Mo highlights a fundamental truth: relationships are the foundation of long-term business success. But he also dives into the often overlooked aspect—how to effectively build these relationships. 

If you've ever felt too busy, hesitant, or worried about being a bother when it comes to building relationships, then Mo has the secret to overcoming these barriers. He outlines how to be intentional about who you want to connect with, how to get out of your own way and stop telling lies that hold you back, how to give in a way that removes mental roadblocks, helps others, and creates lasting, mutually beneficial relationships.

Mo's insights are valuable for anyone in business and in life who want to achieve success through meaningful partnerships.

Get a copy of Mo's book here: https://bunnellideagroup.com/givetogrow/

Show Notes

0:37 Show Intro
1:12 Welcoming Mo
2:48 Focus on high-end experts
3:16 Relationship skills
3:40 How to effectively teach sales to experts
3:55 People hate to be sold to, but they love to buy
4:07 Have people think of a time when the rep did a horrible job of selling
4:36 Describe a good sales experience
6:09 Is your new book an evolution of your ideas?
6:35 Who is Give to Grow (the book) for?
7:14 Is the desire for impact new?
9:00 The lies we tell ourselves
10:54 Lie #1 -- "I can't"
11:40 Lie #2 - "I don't know what to do"
12:05 Lie #3 - "I might do it wrong"
12:21 Lie #4 - "I'm too busy"
12:41 Lie #5 - "I'm afraid I'll look bad"
13:09 How to tell when it's a lie and when it's accurate?
17:08 All complex skills are learned and earned
17:32 The "yet" hack 
20:02 What kind of relationship success should we be trying to create?
20:31 Build relationship equity
20:58 Focus on the key 15 relationships in your life 
21:47 Isn't that too calculating?
22:47 Beginning of a relationship - need to solidify it
27:31 Give them a taste of working with you
28:16 Give to get at Humphrey Group
29:37 The Inspire Podcast is a give-to-get
30:37 How to approach it for non-transactional relationships
31:14 Fall in love with their problem
32:23 "Would it be helpful if I did ______ for you?"
34:10 Free training course - Give to Grow
35:38 Impact - 3 ways to have it
36:08 Proactivity and persistence are key 
36:35 3 different timeframes to think about
36:55 It's always your move and always a chance to be helpful
37:13 Weekly sprints
39:08 The Long Term Strategies
40:50 Where can people go to find out more?

Transcript 

Mo Bunnell: When we feel sold to, it's all those bad things in the ledger. We want to run—fight or flight kicks in. You want to punch the person in the face or get out. But when we're being helped, when we're being taught, when we're being guided like a Sherpa up the mountain, that's when the experience is wonderful. That's what we want to have from a mindset shift. We want people to think, "Hey, you're in control of this, and you're going to do these things the right way by being proactively helpful." If you do those things, this is not just something you can lean into, but something you can do with authenticity and really enjoy it.

Bart Egnal: Welcome to the Inspire podcast, where we examine what it takes to intentionally inspire. I'm your host, Bart Egnal, president and CEO of The Humphrey Group. And if you've ever asked yourself how you can develop an authentic leadership presence, or how you can tell stories that have people hanging off every word, well, then this podcast is for you. And it's not just for executives—this is a podcast for anyone who wants to influence and inspire others in their work, but also in their life. My guest on today's episode of the Inspire podcast is Mo Bunnell. And, Mo, you're a repeat offender. I think I had you on the show way back four or five years ago, so welcome back to the Inspire podcast.

Mo Bunnell: Bart, you inspired me to start my own podcast because I was one of the initial guests, and I'd always been thinking about it. Then I had so much fun with you. You were one of the reasons I thought, "Oh, I need to do what Bart's doing," which has happened many times in my life.

Bart Egnal: Well, and likewise, I'll play it back to you. We first met, oh my gosh, it must have been 15 or 20 years ago when Judith, our founder (and my mother), brought you in to do some sales training for us. I was just so impressed. We were a super small company back then—there were like five of us—and I was super impressed with the approach and methodology you taught us around building lasting relationships and bringing value. I mean, some of the terms we got from you, like "give to get," are still in the lexicon of The Humphrey Group today. So yeah, I'm super excited. You've got a new book we're here to talk about—it's called Give to Grow: Invest in Relationships to Build Your Business and Your Career. I wanted to have you on the show.

Let me just quickly introduce you to those who don't go way back with you or haven't listened to every single episode of the Inspire podcast and have made other mistakes in their life. You are the founder of Bunnell Idea Group (BIG). Your previous book, which we talked about, was The Snowball System. You run one of the leading sales training firms in the US, and you're joining us from Atlanta. Did that sum it up?

Mo Bunnell: You nailed it. We really focus on high-end experts to a large extent—high-end professionals, whether internal at a company or where internal relationships are important or external relationships. We're teaching those relationship-building skills that also grow a business or grow a book of business. This is something that gets me up in the morning because so many high-end experts are taught the craft of their core expertise—think of lawyers, consultants, and so on—but they're not taught the relationship skills. And that's where we come in. At some point in your career, the relationship skills are going to determine your success, and that's what we really love teaching people.

Bart Egnal: Yeah, and I think you're right. It's interesting that you talk more about relationship building than selling. Selling often gets a bad rep. How do you, first, from a mindset standpoint, help these high-end professionals think about building business, generating revenue—whatever you want to call it—in a way that's most effective?

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, well, a one-liner sums this up, and I can elaborate: People hate to be sold to, but they love to buy. I think that's really interesting—people hate to be sold to, but they love to buy. We have an exercise in our workshops where we have people think of a time when they were purchasing some type of product or service, and the person representing it did a horrible job. The experience was not good. We ask, "What did the person do exactly?" People will say things like, "They were pushy. I knew their product or service better than they did. They clearly had their best interest in mind. They didn't listen, they didn't follow up," things like that. Then we ask, "Think of a time when it went great. What did the person do? What were their behaviors? What were their moves?" And we'll hear things like, "Oh, well, they were helpful. They followed up. They guided me to a less expensive solution than I thought it would be. I learned while I was talking to them. I was better off. I realized I could have higher upside or potential or remove something that was an issue if I hired them."

So, when we feel sold to, it's all those bad things in the ledger. We want to run—fight or flight kicks in, you want to punch the person in the face or get out. But when we're being helped, when we're being taught, when we're being guided like a Sherpa up the mountain, that's when the experience is wonderful. That's what we want to have from a mindset shift. We want people to think, "Hey, you're in control of this, and you're going to do these things the right way by being proactively helpful." If you do those things, this is not just something you can lean into, but something you can do with authenticity and really enjoy it.

Bart Egnal: Yeah, and I think that's what struck me and my team all those years ago and certainly has paid great dividends for me—your approach to building that relationship and ultimately leading to sales. So, I was really fascinated when I saw your new book. And I'll just say, my first thought was, "Has Mo gone beyond sales to career and life advice?" There's a great line here in the jacket: "Great deals might make your year, but great relationships can make your career." Does this book represent an evolution? And if so, what is it?

Mo Bunnell: It does, and you're really savvy to see that because we still kept the language aligned with our core audience, which is professionals who need to grow relationships and a book of business, or an entrepreneur or CEO who needs to grow a business. That said, what's really in the pages is for anyone who wants to make a proactive and positive difference in the world—people who want to make an impact. That's who Give to Grow is for. And that might mean a CIO, a CHRO, or a C-level or SVP person inside a company—especially in a functional area, you're basically running a consulting firm. If you're the CFO, you're basically running a consulting firm for the rest of the business. You might look at development officers at large nonprofits, a founder, an entrepreneur. All these people are not just deepening relationships, but they're trying to have a big impact, and Give to Grow teaches people how to do that.

Bart Egnal: Do you think, Mo—you and I have been in this business for a long time—do you think the desire for impact is new or has intensified? What's your observation, and how did it impact your decision to write the book?

Mo Bunnell: This is why you're such a great interviewer. It's such a great question. My publisher asked me this about six months ago. He just asked a real profound question. He said, "What's the difference between when you started Bunnell Idea Group about 20 years ago and now?" I hadn't really thought about that, Bart. But as I reflected on it, I followed up with him the next day. I said, "20 years ago, our headline was, 'We can teach you how to grow the business,'"—basically sales for people who don't like sales. We can say business development, origination, whatever. We come up with code words for it. But that was 20 years ago. Now, what we talk about is, "You want to grow your business so that you can make an impact." And that's the headline now. It's almost like the growth part is secondary, and the impact is primary. And 20 years ago, we didn't really talk about impact at all. I think it's a huge trend in the world, and I do think it is.

Bart Egnal: Especially as people switch careers. I read a piece yesterday that said employees increasingly look laterally, outside, versus upward. People don't just strive for the next promotion; they look at how they can expand their life and impact. I think it's really key. So, let's dive into the book because I think the most fascinating section to start with is the simply titled section two: The Lies, Lies, Lies. Okay, so what are the lies? How did you—how many of them are there, and why do we need to think about the lies we tell ourselves?

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, let me tell you how it came about.

Bart Egnal: Don't lie to me, Mo. Don't lie to me on this.

Mo Bunnell: I'll tell you the truth. I'll tell you the truth. You know, this was another prompt from my publisher. He's amazing. His name's Todd. He runs Bard Press—they only publish one book a year. So, like, I've been in lockstep with him for two years to bring this book to market. We know each other really well at this point. But he said, at some point throughout the process, like a year and a half ago, he said, "Hey, I totally get it. Now we're clear on the moves that will make people successful. But what gets in people's way? Why do people not succeed when they try to use your system?" And Bart, I had to look at him in the eyes and say, "I'm not sure." So, over hundreds of workshops—like you at The Humphrey Group—you do so many workshops. Same here—a couple dozen facilitators. We had every one of our facilitators for months ask people in every workshop. We were basically adding a research bolt-on to our normal work. We said, "Think of a time when you wanted to reach out to somebody, but you hesitated." Okay, everybody gets that. And then we said, "Write in the Zoom chat or we'll flip chart it if we're in person. Tell us exactly what you were thinking in your mind that caused you to hesitate." It was in the collection of hundreds—actually thousands—of verbatims. We kept going until we didn't hear anything new. Then we synthesized all those, and basically what we found—we didn't know what it would be—but we found five lies, barriers that are in everybody's mind that get in the way of impact.

Bart Egnal: Okay, what are they?

Mo Bunnell: Okay, so the five lies—and by the way, they go in order. You've got to topple lie number one to get to lie number two. So here are the five: The first one is, "I can't." These are direct verbatims. Let me just read some of these so your audience can really get their mind around what it is. There are things like, in the beginning of your career, "I can't do the whole thing. I can't do business development." These are exact verbatims. "I hate the idea of selling. I just like doing the work. I'm not good at reaching out. I'm not good at going to dinner. I can't build a book of business like Debbie did," stuff like that. Later in people's careers, they're very narrow, like, "I can't talk about our new offering," or, "I can't bring in the $20 million deals," or things like that.

Bart Egnal: Okay, so that's the first one. So it's a limiting belief.

Mo Bunnell: It's a limiting belief. All of these are. But that's the big one. If people get through that one, the second lie is, "I don't know what to do." "I don't have anything meaningful to share. I don't have an excuse to reach out. I'll wait till something happens. Someone else has a better relationship." Maybe we circle back and do the solutions later.

Bart Egnal: Should we keep rolling through the next three as well? Because I think then I've got some questions on these.

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, I'll speed it up. The third lie, if we get through the first lie, the third one is, "I know what to do at this point, but I might do it wrong." So verbatims: "I don't want to ask dumb questions. I'm afraid I won't know the answer. I'm not important enough to meet with them." If we get through that, the fourth lie—this one hits everybody at some point—is, "I'm too busy."

Bart Egnal: It's a mark of pride, right? "I'm too busy."

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, that's right. "We couldn't handle this even if they purchased it. This stuff takes too long," whatever. The fifth lie is the big one. If we get through all those four, this one is, "I'm afraid I'll look bad." And this is rooted in the fear of rejection. Direct verbatims: "I don't want to come across as salesy. I can't ask my friends for business. I'm intimidated by them. I'm not even sure they like me. They already use someone else. They're already spending a lot with us. They recently canceled on me." There's a million of them. But that one is about the fear of being rejected.

Bart Egnal: Okay, so I can really see how these become limiting beliefs and how you're right—all of them collectively can hold you back. So, a couple of thoughts came to mind when I read these, though. The first is, when is it a lie we're telling ourselves, and when is it accurate? For example, let's imagine you have someone who's like, "Look, I'm going to be a great salesperson, or I'm a lawyer, and I'm going to be able to build business and make partner." But then they get to, "I don't know what to do," and it's not a limiting belief—it's true. When we work with people who are looking to strengthen their communication and be able to do some of those things, they literally may not know what it takes to go out and build business. So, when is it a lie, and when is it not? For lack of a better term.

Mo Bunnell: You've hit on something quite deeply. The problem with these are twofold. One is, when we hear these tapes in our mind, we're the only ones who hear them. We hear them as irrefutable truths—like, they're 100% true. That's problem one—there's nobody to tell us, to slap us in the face and say, "Hey, why do you believe that?" But the second issue, to your point, is there is a seed or maybe a core truth underneath it, like with that lie, "I don't know what to do." And this is going to sound ridiculously simple, but there's a whole chapter on this that unpacks the nuance in a dozen different scenarios and things like that. But the solution for "I don't know what to do" is to ask them what to do. For example, we have an external role where that lawyer is trying to build business and make partner. It might be true in a moment that they're not sure what their client needs. But the right move isn't to not do anything—the right move is to schedule a call and say, "Hey, Jane, I just realized, as an assistant GC, we've known each other for a long time because we worked at that prior firm. You just went in-house. Could we schedule a quick call for me to hear your priorities? Because I would just like, over the next six or twelve months, to maybe—I've got this whole army of partners at our firm—I'm sure I could find a way to be helpful to you, but hearing your priorities will tell me the kind of things you want. Could we invest in each other that way?" The truth, to your point, is true—they don't know what to do. But what most people do is just stop.

Bart Egnal: Right.

Mo Bunnell: And actually, what we want to do is engage.

Bart Egnal: Right, and I think that's—you know, when I read these five, the first two, to your point, I think, could contain a germ of reality. "I can't because I've never been in that role," or, "I don't know what to do because no one's taught me, or there isn't the grace."

Mo Bunnell: Never done it before.

Bart Egnal: Right. So the key, you're saying, is to assess and say, "All right, well, then, I need to figure out how to do it." The third, fourth, and fifth lies—"I might do it wrong," "I'm too busy," "I'm going to look bad"—are more almost psychological excuses, right? That we protect ourselves from failure or feelings of inadequacy that we have to get through. So that's maybe a good segue. When you look at these five lies, which I think we've all told ourselves, and many of them resonate with me, how do we move past them?

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, well, first of all, I have to commend you because I didn't even see that pattern. So, I made it out between the first two and the last. You're good.

Bart Egnal: Hey, Mo, you're good. I might be wrong, but I might write you a more detailed response. But I'm too busy, and I don't really want to look bad. You're the expert here, so I love it.

Mo Bunnell: No, you're so good. You're always seeing things on, like, eight levels deep. Yeah, so, to get back to your question, the answer is different for each of them. I'll give you two examples: The first lie—"I can't"—is a big one. All the research shows every complex skill is both learned and earned. Dr. Anders Ericsson, the 10,000-hours rule guy, was a researcher for 30 years at Florida State studying this stuff, and he found every complex skill is both learned and earned. If we lean on Carol Dweck's research—the growth mindset guru—she says, "Whenever you find yourself saying, 'I can't do something,' just put one word on the end of that sentence: 'yet.'" I can't bring in the $20 million deals yet. I can't speak at conferences yet. And then you build a plan to slowly learn like you learned everything else.

So, that's the solution for that one. On the one that I think can hit people a lot—"I'm too busy"—the solution for that, to give you a second example, is totally different than adding the word "yet." It's to say, "Hey, the number one thing people are judging my value in the world by is how in demand I am." So, if I'm really busy, the move is not to say, "I can't do anything." The move is to actually convey that fact that you're in demand, and that earns you the right to be more brief. Maybe we desire to send a thousand-word email that describes how the regs are going to impact their industry if I'm the lawyer. But maybe we're slammed—we can't do that. Would we halt and stop? No, we want to pull it back to something we can do even if we're busy. What can we do in five minutes? Well, we could write a 50-word email that says, "Hey, really slammed right now because the new regs are creating demand for our whole department. I did want to let you know I'm still thinking about you. Really enjoyed meeting at the conference. I've got a lot of matters I'm cleaning up now, but would love to meet in about five weeks. Could we set something up?" Maybe that's 75 words or 100. It's short, but we could write that email in three minutes and shoot it off. Actually, we don’t halt because we're busy—we leverage the fact that we're busy, set up that meeting, and help our future self keep things moving forward. And it only took 180 seconds.

Bart Egnal: So, what you're talking about with these ways to overcome these beliefs is all geared around relationships. And I do think, before we talk about, okay, you've moved past—you're starting to—and I think my takeaway is it's never like you move past all five and you're done. It's a constant iteration where a new one will pop up, and you have to push yourself forward. But the goal really is what you define as relationship success. And I like that you say relationship success is not random, and it's really what makes your career. So, just define for us as you're able to move past these lies that we tell ourselves. What kind of relationship success should you be trying to create?

Mo Bunnell: Oh, that's great. Well, if we hang everything off of what we talked about earlier, we're going to pull this thread through. If we hang everything off the idea that we desire to have more of an impact, what that means translated to relationships is we've built relationship equity. We've built goodwill. We've helped people in excess of how much they've helped us. They desire to help us more. Those levels of people are generally higher and can help us more as we help them more. So, as we think about relationships, the key things we want to do are: We want to have a—and I'm going to get super practical here—we want to have a list of the key ten or 15 relationships that are most important to our future success and continue to focus our efforts on those people. It'll change over time, but in general, as we're having more of an impact and desire to have even more impact, we can continue to ladder up to new and more influential people. Or, in some cases, people we can just help more, like a young nephew or somebody like that. But we generally want to be really focused, have our list of the key relationships, and continue to be proactively helpful to that group and build this equity with higher-level folks, with more scale. Over time, it just creates this—almost like an army of people that are cheering on your success.

Bart Egnal: Now, I have to say, Mo, listening to that, it sounds almost like calculating. You're doing this list, you're coming up with it, and you're saying, "Okay, these are the people who matter." Then, as you say, you move up, people help you advance your career, and then you're kind of purging them from the list, and you're identifying new ones. How do you balance not being mercenary and having these relationships that sustain you through your career with still upgrading or changing your list as your career and goals evolve?

Mo Bunnell: You got it. So, it's not about not helping other people, or, to say it another way, it's not about, "I'm not going to help Philippe because now I'm going to help Joe because Joe's higher level." It's not like that person in high school that dumps you at the locker because someone more popular walks by. That's not what we're talking about. Rather, what we're talking about is focus for short periods of time. Generally speaking, most people don't—and there's a bunch of research behind this—most people don't put enough effort in the beginning of a relationship to solidify it. For example, you meet somebody at a conference, and you follow up the day after the conference with one email suggesting you get together in the way you talked about in the hallway. Well, maybe they respond, maybe they don't. Most people quit after that. The research around newer relationships shows that not only does quality matter, but quantity matters too. You want a vacation effect. For example, if you went on a bicycling tour in France to a bunch of vineyards, and every night you biked to a new place, stayed at a vineyard, had dinner, and every day you're biking with the same person for a week, that is a super intense experience. If you talk to that person ten years later and hadn't caught up in between, they were coming to your town, you would move your schedule around to catch up with them.

Bart Egnal: I just got back from a week in Italy with twelve friends, riding around 1,000 km together. So yeah, you form those bonds. Totally. Great example.

Mo Bunnell: That was random. Sometimes you can—this is what happens with your instincts.

Bart Egnal: Well, you can feel it then. You can probably think of one person that maybe you didn't know well beforehand, but now you're bonded for life.

Mo Bunnell: Yeah. So, what the list of people does is it just says, "Hey, for this next month or quarter or whatever your time period is—it's rolling, it's not rigid—but who are the people I'm going to focus on?"

Bart Egnal: I see.

Mo Bunnell: And it's not to be dropping people.

Bart Egnal: Right. It's not like you're off the list. It's at this phase—who do I want to focus on? Maybe it's a new relationship I want to establish. Maybe it's someone where there's a connection, and we can do something together. But if someone you haven't spoken to for a year comes back, you're like, "Great, that's a strong relationship that can restart."

Mo Bunnell: You nailed it. The idea here is that a lot of business developers will have a list of opportunities. They're in a CRM, or they keep a handwritten list, or whatever. Very few have a list of relationships. And by just writing down—most of the people we've trained, about 50,000 people now—usually ten or 15 relationships is plenty. You don't need 50. If you don't have the list, what studies show is we tend to spend time with those we naturally come into contact with anyway. It's the other parents on our kid's traveling football team. It's the person whose office happens to randomly be next to you at work. It's who's staffed on the same projects you're on. Life will yank you away from the most important relationships and get your mind focused on proximity. And what this list does is it gets you focused on, "Yeah, somebody that I have the office next to might be important, they might not be. But who's my list of most important people? What ten or 15 people should be on that? And how can I revisit it frequently to make sure I'm adding value in their life?"

Bart Egnal: Okay, so let's say you've got your list. You're saying, "Hey, at this phase of my life, these are the relationships I want to invest in for my career, my book of business today, my life." How do you go about actually building those relationships intentionally? And there was a chapter I'd love that if you could go into because I'm still using it. It's around giving—the 14th chapter. It's Give Them the Experience of Working with You. Tell me about that and how people can apply it because I always use "give to get" at The Humphrey Group. We let people experience our training, and then they want to do more. So, I'm interested in you talking about how that applies to relationships that may not be transactional in the same way—it may even be for your life.

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, for sure. This is one of my favorite chapters, and you saw the story in this chapter where Becky and I were quite young at the time. We've been married 32 years in two days. Early in our marriage, we were celebrating something—I can't remember what. Maybe I was passing an actuarial exam, or it was an anniversary. I think it was an anniversary. We were out with another couple, and we're at a more expensive restaurant than we deserved to be at the time because we were still paying off college loans and all kinds of stuff. And the sommelier comes up—I’m not even sure I knew what a sommelier was, but they came up, they had this big, fancy bottle of red, and they're talking about it, talking about it, and we're like, "We all looked at each other after the sommelier left, and we're like, we're not buying that." About five minutes later, he came with a taste for each of us, and we bought the bottle, and we bought a second bottle after that. And the idea of this Chapter 14—Give Them the Experience of Working with You—is saying, "How can you use your expertise to give them a taste of working with you and switch from talking about how you can be helpful to just rolling up your sleeves and being helpful?" It's so much more powerful, and it's safer for somebody to say yes to you, to hire you, or to say yes to the project, or for you to get promoted, or whatever, if they've experienced you helping them versus hearing about it. So maybe it's a good time to kick back to you and say, "We call that a gift to get." Like you said, it's a discreet offer of helpfulness that's boxed into a time period—almost like a free project or a free experience. How do you use it at The Humphrey Group? Because I think you've had great business success.

Bart Egnal: Yeah, no, it's been great. I think it's changed over time. It's really changed in the last five years. When I started, when we first met, all business was really done through relationships. I would go work with an executive, they would love what I’d do, and I'd say, "You've experienced this training. Why don't we train your team?" They'd say, "Great." And we’d train the team, and then there'd be more. Back then, the give to get, if you had a new client, was you'd go meet with them, you'd spend 15 minutes with them—basically give them a 15-minute coaching session so they could experience what it was like to work with you, or you’d demo the content. I remember we won a huge RFP with a Canadian bank, resulting in a game-changing, ongoing relationship for us. We beat out big competitors because we actually got one of the RFP team up and had her deliver a presentation and coached her and transformed her, and she was like, "Oh my God, this was incredible." That's how it's so cool. I would say that we still endeavor to do that, but it's tougher. Increasingly now, people—back to your point—people don't want to be sold. They want to buy. When buyers approach The Humphrey Group now, they know us already. They've researched us, and they really are kind of coming to you with an idea of what they want. So, part of it is the give to get often will occur without you even there. It's in things like this podcast, so you can listen to what it's like. Every year, every season, I bring members of our team on. So sometimes I'll send those episodes. We had an amazing interview this year with Ash K, one of our consultants who specializes in presence. I've sent her episode around to people who want to know what it would be like to work with her because she coaches me. We do webinars that we have hundreds of people attend, allowing them to experience working with The Humphrey Group. We write content. So, there are all sorts of ways that we give our intellectual capital and experiential learning away to people to help them assess and get comfortable with what we're going to do. So, that's definitely what the business context is. Now, I'm interested in what advice you'd give to people who are looking to create relationships where the person isn't a buyer. Let's say it's someone you believe in—the company you want to be at. You're early in your career, and there's a senior executive you'd like to mentor you. So they're one of your target relationships. What would you do to help them experience you that would inspire them to take you on as a mentor? Or another example that might be more compelling. I'd love your thoughts on that.

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, that's a great one. Let's just run with it. I think the chapter that's one ahead of the one we were talking about—Giving Them an Experience of Working with You—is Chapter 13 in Give to Grow, and that's called Fall in Love with Their Problem. So often when we want something, we want to go in two guns a-blazing and pitch it. "I'm going to go in with my idea fully baked, and I'm going to ask Janine to be my mentor because I think that would be great for me." But the problem with that move is Janine's busy, and you're asking her to do more stuff, and she's probably already overwhelmed. It's more selfish, for lack of a better word. Another way to approach it that we find much more effective is before we offer the gift to get or before we offer the investment—the experience of working with us—is to fall in love with their problem. So, that's going to require a little time investment on their part. But if we can ask questions like, "What are your top priorities? What are you struggling with? What would you like to go better?" If we can really dig in and figure out the context of what they're trying to accomplish and what things could be better or what negatives need to be removed, then we can say, "How can we help?" We can find a way where our expertise aligns with what they want. There's an overlap. And then use this magical phrase: "Well, hey, would it be helpful if I did blank for you?" Maybe that means taking some oversight of a project off their plate. Maybe it means doing an analysis for something they've wanted to do for two years and never had the time, or the team never had the time. Maybe it's a brainstorming session. Whatever it is, if there's a way we can offer a "Would it be helpful if...?"—insert your gift to get here—now we're engaged. Now we've started with a gift instead of an ask, and we've built some reciprocity. They're going to get the experience of working with us, so we're putting the two chapters together here. And then after doing that, it's really easy to say, "Hey, can I get your advice on something?" Basically, they're ready to be your mentor at that point because they've fallen in love with you because you solved this big issue that they have. So, in other words, putting the two things together—falling in love with their problem and then offering a way to be helpful—that's the path to success almost every time.

Bart Egnal: I like that. Instead of going into "sell," whether it's "Hey, you should be my mentor," or "You should do this for me," go in and really fall in love with their problem. Fall in love with, "Hey, what's going on for you? How do I intersect with that?" And then it becomes a relationship. Really well said. Again, it creates value on both sides.

Mo Bunnell: Exactly. And if I can just go one step further down the path—I know you and I don't have time to go through the whole book.

Bart Egnal: No one would have to buy the book, Mo. They should buy the book.

Mo Bunnell: They should buy the book. Give to Grow is available everywhere books are sold. But we actually—I didn't even tell you this—along the lines of the idea of giving first, we created a free training course that's aligned with Give to Grow. It's a little better if you have the book, but we designed it from the beginning from an instructional design standpoint to stand on its own. So, if somebody wants to go deeper on "Fall in Love with Their Problem," for example, and learn exactly how to ask questions that get the attention of the other side and get them excited about sharing more—we actually map out practically how to ask these questions. And even in Give to Grow—the free course is at givetogrow.info.

Bart Egnal: We'll put a link to it in the show notes too.

Mo Bunnell: Oh, that'd be great—givetogrow.info. Then there's even a talk about being practical—we decoded the top 50 questions we've ever seen that are good to use in falling in love with their problem that are quite engaging. That's a free download, so all that's over at givetogrow.info. I just want to put a flag in that.

Bart Egnal: I think anyone should get the book. One of the neat things about the book is—and I can see with the instructional design background—I'm leafing through it right now. It's mostly like a book, but it's also like a workbook because there are sections in it where you have to really map out answers to the questions that you have, so the book prompts you. I think it's a great read and it's easy to read. Kudos. Okay, let's get to our last section, which is impact. We've talked about—I asked you why it's important to have—what's the link between growing relationships in life, and ultimately it is impact. So, you talk about impact in three time horizons: in the moment, short-term, long-term. Give us the overview. Why are you breaking it out in these? And how should we think about the three?

Mo Bunnell: Brilliant. And you know this, but to say it real clearly, each of those is a chapter in the book. So, as we think about this idea of having great impact, leaving a legacy, having the most positive influence over the most number of people in the deepest ways, what that takes is a tremendous amount of proactivity and persistence. The world is yanking us away from impact. The world is yanking us toward answering emails, being reactive, and not driving positive change. So, we've got to have the right mindset in three different arenas or timeframes. The first is succeeding in the moment. The idea there is, no matter what happens—good news, bad news, no news, no response—we've got to be able to keep pushing forward. One of the lines that people have really liked in that chapter is, "It's always your move, and it's always a chance to be helpful." We decode basically every type of news you can get—good, bad, or nothing—and how to think about it and how to keep moving forward and be helpful. So that's succeeding in the moment.

The second is succeeding in the short term. The idea here is having weekly sprints. What we found is that the two-time horizons that are really baked into humans are daily and weekly—daily because the sun goes up and the sun goes down, but weekly because by the time we're even in the lowest levels of school, we know—we might be six years old—we know what a Saturday morning feels like, we know what a Friday afternoon feels like, we know what a Monday morning feels like. So, we want to tap into that. And basically what you do there is you take 15 minutes once a week, and we show how to do this in the book. You take a look at your list of opportunities—anything other people need to say yes to. You take a look at your top relationships—we talked about that. Each one of those, you've already defined what the proper next step is that you can control. And then once a week, you take a look at those two lists and you choose three things you're going to do in the next week to move forward—either opportunities or relationships.

Bart Egnal: Your MITs—is that how you refer to them? The most important things?

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, MITs, you remember from the class. So, you pick three a week, and it doesn't seem like that much, but you're grabbing the steering wheel, you're in control. It's 150 proactive, high-impact things over a year—1,500 over a decade. The people that are always doing those things have tremendous success.

Bart Egnal: I love it. And then I personally love level three, the long-term, and some of the concepts there. As someone who's really sought to go from being individual to building a business and growing at scale, a lot in here resonates. In particular, taking bets, sizing the bets, going for the ones that are going to pay off. But I think just from a mindset standpoint, what I love about the book is that in that chapter—in those chapters on succeeding in the moment, succeeding in the short term, and succeeding in the long term—it acknowledges that whether you're building one deal, a relationship for one deal, or something for life, you're going to have setbacks. You're going to hear "no" or you're going to hear nothing, to your point. And just the mindset around, "Be grateful, view it as an opportunity, learn from it, and keep going." It really is sustaining that focus on relationships that I took away from that ultimately compounds into success. So, that really stuck with me.

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you. And each of those timeframes—whether it's the moment, the weekly, the long-term, or the whole arc of your career—to your point, we've got to hold all three of those things in our hands at the same time. If we do that, we're always moving forward in a way that's going to have great impact. We've changed from being reactive to proactive, from low value to high value, from feeling like we're blowing in the winds of life to feeling like we're in control of our life. And I think there's almost like a psychological fulfillment and happiness that are underneath those three things if we can really do each of the three well.

Bart Egnal: And that's why I think your book is kind of the next evolution—success in relationships, success in life, more happiness. Give to Grow—I love it. Love the book. Mo, I know you've mentioned already, and we'll link to the free training. Talk a bit about what else people can get. I know you produce a lot of great content. You have some good experiences for people. What would you recommend for those whose interest is piqued by our conversation today?

Mo Bunnell: Yeah, well, by far the most important—I would say if people liked this, they should sign up for that free course at givetogrow.info. That's easily the priority. Again, it works whether you've bought the book or not. It's sort of a no-brainer to sign up. It includes almost 50 different downloads—all kinds of practical things that we couldn't even fit in the book. Videos of me training on these ideas—really powerful, not even just for yourself, but to share with the whole team. The other thing I might mention for leaders—now, this is a different thing—but for leaders who want to scale a growth mindset across an entire team, we developed a similar course but for that role. So, that's at winning-more.com. You have to put the dash. Who doesn't want to win more, right? So, winning-more.com. You do have to put the dash in there, or you'll end up on this betting site. But winning-more, it's got this download that tells exactly how we drive change at scale—it gives all the secret sauce. And that's a pretty cool way to pair with Give to Grow, where Give to Grow teaches individuals how to do all the things we talked about, obviously, but winning-more teaches how to drive that at scale across an entire team or organization.

Bart Egnal: Two great resources, Mo. Thanks for writing this book—it's awesome. Congratulations, and I look forward to having you back on the pod for a third conversation when you write your next book.

Mo Bunnell: I love it. Give me a couple of years. Well, Bart, it's so fun because what I love about working with you is you're such a darn great communicator, and obviously, it's what you teach people, so it makes sense. But the way that you see things three or four levels deep, the way that you're crisp with your words—everything's short and sharp—it's just a joy to be around.

Bart Egnal: Well, I appreciate you, Mo. You've made a big impact in my career and life with your work and continue to do so. So, thanks so much for coming on the pod, and I wish you nothing but success with the launch of this book.

Mo Bunnell: Thanks for having me.

Bart Egnal: I hope you enjoyed that episode of the Inspire Podcast and the conversation that I had with our guest. Hopefully, you left with some really practical, tangible tools and tips that you can use to be more consistently inspirational. If you're enjoying the pod, I'll ask you a favor—please rate and review it. I love the comments, appreciate the reviews, and the visibility allows others to discover the pod. It's really how word of mouth has spread the Inspire Podcast to so many listeners and helped us keep making this great content. Stay tuned—we'll be back in two weeks with another inspiring conversation. Thanks so much for listening—go forth and inspire.