Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of the Stable Living Podcast. My name is Shane Jacob, your host, and I thank you for taking your time to be here with me today.
I've got an exceptional episode for you ahead. I may start that way. You know what? I have, I have a lot of exceptional episodes, but this one is truly exceptional, and it's also new.
Today I'm going to unveil a new idea, a new principle, a new way of doing things. It hasn't been done before. I mean, this is going to be all new. You're going to hear it here first from me. You may hear it a lot in the future as people adopt this over time and start using and practicing this principle more and more and more. But this is an original Shane Jacob Stable Living Podcast principle.
And the big deal here is this is an amazing life principle that works. I've been practicing it in life, and it's easy to apply, and it's a big deal.
So what I'm talking about today is The Worth Work Principle. Okay. The Worth Work Principle. Okay. Two things. I'm going to tell you exactly what that means, but in short, it means, here's the phrase:
Judge the work, protect the person.
That's what it means.
So I want to talk to leaders. Okay. And I want to talk to all leaders, but really, we're all leaders.
I know this because this applies to work. Okay. This applies to your organization, your company, whatever scope of leader that you are in. This applies to marriage, and this applies to all families. This applies to, it applies everywhere. Okay.
So one of the big problems that I see, and we see in corporations, face and companies, small companies, mom and pops, all businesses face a big problem. And that is, is that we are trying to make a profit, and we spend too much time managing people problems. Okay.
We can't get our work done because we're managing people problems because we're human beings. I mean, that's the way it's going to be, and that's the way it has been.
But what there's a lot of in groups of people, because when groups of people get together, hey, we don't always get along real well. So we have conflict, we have a high amount of defensiveness, we have hurt feelings, we have gossip that goes to litigation, and now the company's getting sued because of this and that, and everybody's getting triggered all the time, and it's just a damn disaster, and it's truly a waste of time, and it kills productivity, it kills profitability.
And here's the interesting thing about it. On the other end, it's not helping the people, you know, that are defensiveness, hurt feelings, and getting triggered. You know, it's not helpful for the trigger-ee or the defensive-ee, you know, the person who is feeling defensive or the person who is being, well, you choose what triggers you.
You're triggering yourself really when you hear something in the outside world, but that's not somebody else's fault. It's your thinking that's causing the feeling, but it kills productivity, and it kills relationships. Okay. It's good for nothing is what the bottom line is.
So after a long period of time and through experimentation, that is where I have developed, and today I'm unveiling The Worth Work Principle. Okay. And really, it's a simple idea with super powerful results. It's a very simple idea.
I talked about, yeah, I talked about the concept here on this podcast just recently with the separation of behavior and the individual, separating the person, the individual, from their behavior on how you judge what they're worth. Okay.
The problem of why we get so defensive, whether it's at work or at home or whatever, is really that we take everything personally.
Look, we go out in the world. This is happening. Okay. This is happening. It's happening to you right now, and it happens 24/7 to all of us automatically. We don't have to think about it. It's just happening, and it happens to us until we take an intentional, until we override our default. This is default, automatic default thinking. And here's what it is. Everything that I do and say, and everything that is done or said to me, my brain makes a meaning about what that means about myself, about my value, about what kind of a person I am.
Okay. Am I good at this? Do they like me? Do they think I'm deserving? Do they think I'm worthy? Do they think I'm good enough? Am I a good person?
I always go back to, what was that movie, The Peanut Butter Falcon, I love that show. And the star of the show, now I forgot his name, the guy that's escaping out of the state facility. And he looks up at the guy who blew up the boats, I forgot his name in the movie too.
But anyway, he looks up and he said, “Am I a good guy or a bad guy?”
And your brain is constantly, I mean, that was just such a, in that moment in that movie, I just thought, wow, what a truly open, I mean, we all think like that. We just don't say it out loud. And it's happening whether we're aware of it or not.
Our brain is actually, it was just a great, I thought it was a great moment in the movie, and to me, it had a lot of meaning.
But our brain is doing that. It is saying, “What does this mean about me? What does this mean about me? What, in my effort here, in the thing that I did, how well did I do? What did they think about how well I did or didn't do? And what does that mean about me?” Okay.
You know, our friendships and all of our relationships, our brain is constantly making, is constantly measuring everything that happens and making meaning about what that means about our value.
And that's why, if we live an unintentional life, we're just leaving it up to happen, chance of what we're going to believe about ourselves. We're just going to let our brain and all this input do whatever and have it mean whatever.
And here's the thing. The bad news about that is, is if you don't do anything about it, if you don't get some intentionality and purpose going on in your life, then you're going to be at the effect of, or you're going to just, you know, live and die, and whatever happened to you ended up being the way you were.
Because what you believe to be true about yourself has the biggest effect on the results in your lifetime. So you can take control of what you believe about yourself and not leave it up to the world or this circumstance or what somebody said or did or any of that. Okay?
And so that's belief creation. That's another day, but it's related to this. It's part of it. Okay?
So at work and in relationships, I do this. By the way, I don't know that you ever get to where nothing matters about your belief. But what you do is you take more and more control, I'm going to call it control, you take more and more responsibility.
You take more and more accountability, and you actually get more and more control over your belief system. You can choose what you want to believe about yourself rather than leaving it up to just whatever the hell happens to you.
But we don't, I don't know that we ever get fully to where we don't take into account anything anybody says. Okay.
For example, I still find myself sometimes, a lot of the time, I don't know what's a lot of Shane, I find I get defensive. Okay. So I'm not saying that I never get defensive anymore, because I do, and I have to stop, and I have to recognize how I'm feeling, and I have to stop, and I have to think, “Why am I thinking this? What am I making whatever happened mean about me?” Okay, because it's me. My thought is the one that's got me defensive, not what they did.
And so we get defensive sometimes as human beings, okay?
And at work, what happens most of the time, okay, nearly all the time, is when somebody comes along, our leader, our manager, or whoever's in charge, or the higher up, if there is a higher up comes, or whoever's directing us, whoever's responsible for the work, comes up and says, “Hey, Shane, what you're doing here is not working. I need you to change how you're doing it and do it like this.” Boom.
What happens most of the time when people hear messages like this or similar messages? Even if it's sugar-coated, even if I come to give you feedback and I did four compliments and then I say, if I approach it that way, “Hey, you're doing amazing. You did this great. You did that great. I'm so happy you're here. You're a star at this, so we're so grateful to have you. I need you to change this one little thing.”
And then they lay it on you, okay? This one little thing. If you can just make this little shift.
You see how we go about that? There's actually, you know, all these methods of going about giving feedback so that people don't get defensive. Okay. First of all, we can't control what they do, but we take feedback personally a lot of the time.
Back to my example: “Hey, Shane, I need you to do it differently.” Boom. My mind goes, “They think I suck. I'm not doing it right. I'm not a good person.”
You all, your mind can really take over and have lots of different thoughts. Just think of all the thoughts that I could have. And if I don't take control, if I'm not aware and start making my own choices about what to keep in and what to bring in and what to kick out of my, as far as thoughts go, that affects my belief about me. Okay. I get defensive, and then I'm not productive at work.
And this is the part that kills productivity in companies and small business and everything. Okay.
My brain automatically makes meaning about value as soon as somebody's trying to coach me, even teach me. Right? If they're just trying to say, “Hey, here's how we do things here, and this is training, well, geez, you don't think I know how to do that?” See what I'm saying? Already defensive. So much defensiveness in the world. Okay.
Because what it equals is I hear, here's what comes in my ear, “Hey, what you're doing isn't working well.” And what my meaning, my brain feeds to me, gives me back is, “Hey, Shane, you're not good enough.”
Okay. So the next thought that follows is I get angry, I get sad, I get kind of mad. And so that's called defensiveness. And so what do I do when I get mad and I get upset? What do I do? I start acting the way defensive people are acting. Okay.
I get defensive. I start making excuses. I start shutting down. I'm not going to listen to you. I start having resistance to what, I start arguing the point about how you want me to change. “Can't you see? Well, I was trained this way, and this is, and here's why I did this.”
That leads to conflict, and it goes on and on and on.
The point is, is it's a miracle that companies, which are nothing more than organizations or nothing more than groups of people, can get anything done because we're human beings. Hey, we're all human beings trying to get through this together, and we care about what we think about ourselves. And so that's the way it rolls.
So now let's talk about the core principle. I'm going to talk about it and try to define it very clearly.
And that is, we've talked about this before, just in episode 99, go back and review, and that is separating behavior from the individual.
So over here, we have the person. Okay. We have the individual, the person. And over here, we have their behavior. We're going to call that the work, or it's what we're doing.
Okay. We have me over here, and I'm separate from what I'm doing.
What I'm doing is over here. This is all the things I do. And here's the thing about what I do. Okay. Sometimes I do things amazing. Woo! And sometimes not so much. Okay.
Sometimes I not only make mistakes, sometimes I do things wrong, bad, incomplete, on purpose. Okay. And, well, let me, I hate to say this, but you do too. Sometimes that's just the way we're human beings, and that is why it's okay. It's just that we're human beings. So that's the way that we do things.
Okay. What do they mean about each other? Nothing.
What I mean by that is nothing affects the value of your individual self, according to me and I believe according to God. Nothing is going to change the fact that you are 100% valuable to Him. And just your value is inherent.
That means you came with it. There's nothing you can do about it. Your brain can tell you your whole lifetime that you suck or you're great or whatever, but nothing is going to change your perfect value.
Okay. That's the belief that I have, and that's the belief I'm asking you to consider adopting in this idea of separation.
So when we come to The Worth Work Principle, okay, what this begins with is there's a couple of agreements that we get in the beginning.
And that is, is that in an organization, I ask, just like I do at organizations, including my company here, Jacob Livestock, our horse feed company, we get every person to agree, an agreement, we have an understanding that while you're at this company, while you're at work, we recommend this at home too, but while you're at work, we, everybody here is 100% as far as their value.
Not 101, not 99. Everybody is 100%, period. Nobody's lesser-than. I'm the owner of the company, and I'm not 101, and you're not 99 because you're right now out on a truck delivering hay to horses. Okay. That's not it. We're both the same.
Everybody has, every human being, nobody's more or less valuable than anybody else. Okay. We agree to that. Nobody is above or below. Okay. And we keep it that way.
The way that we roll here is we never do anything to suggest or judge or devalue the individual. Okay. Not that you could anyway, but we don't even talk that way.
As a matter of fact, we have a no-tolerance rule. The value is not on the table. We don't judge or discredit the individual. We have full respect for the person at all times.
What does that mean?
I don't say things like, you suck. You're lazy. You're this kind of person. You're that. You're not a very good learner. You're, these are all value judgments.
Okay. What we do is we hold the individual in high regard. The only thing that we discuss is the doing.
Okay. And the doing, hey, whether you did good or you did bad
Now listen, if you're going to work here or anywhere else, there's going to be, you’re going to have to meet a standard. Okay. You're going to probably need to show up. You're probably going to need to do your work at a certain standard. And you're probably going to need to work on improving that and this and that if you want to move up.
Work matters. What you do matters.
And just because you can do things wrong and nothing touches your value doesn't mean that you should do everything wrong. It's not, it doesn't absolve responsibility. It doesn't, it doesn't make, they're just separate. It's not that it doesn't matter.
Okay. Just very clear about that, because work matters, because if we don't do things well at my company, we're broke. We're bankrupt. We're not in business. You don't have a job anymore. Then the company is out of business, and it's pretty hard to feed your family if you're not working. Right.
So that's what we do. And that's why it's important. Okay.
But we judge the work, the job. Work can be, what you're doing can be done well or can need improvement, but we never judge the person. We never negatively judge the person.
That's the way we roll here. Ever. We have a zero tolerance for that, by the way.
Again, there's a sign on our office wall out in the hay yard, and it says, judge the work, protect the person. Okay. Because that's the way we roll it.
So here's what this looks like on the leader side. Here's kind of the implementation of how this works. Okay.
When I, or when the yard manager, or when anybody in a leadership or over that, that is for anybody that is training or teaching, really, it's almost all communications, a lot of the communications about how we do things.
When we're talking about I need you to change how you do it, I need you to start doing it this way, we're gonna implement a new this and that, or you're new and you're in training, and so I'm trying to give you information about how we're gonna do things here to improve our productivity, our profitability, and make us a better, more successful company, more successful being more profitable, is that we always protect the person.
When I come as the leader to you to explain how I need you to change, or you, let's just say you did horrible. “Hey, what you're doing is not, well, it's got to change.”
Here's what I begin with. I always begin, I preface it by saying, “Hey, I need to talk to you about some of the way, the way that we're, some of the things that you're doing. This is not about you individually. Remember, I just want to remind you of that. This is just about what you're doing. Okay. And we can fix that.”
And so we go and we talk about what the doing is. And guess what? When I preface it and say, “Hey, not about you personally, just about the doing over here.” The work like we do here, that little way that I preface that as the leader, as the manager, helps them remember.
Now remember, they've already agreed that we separate things here and that we protect the person. So when I remind them of that, guess what happens? To the degree that they bought in, their defenses are already down.
They're okay, “Yeah, sure, how can I do better? What can I do to make my performance better, to make the whole company work better, to make sure that I'm moving up in my career path and all of that?” And we do our best. It's not a perfect system, but this works very well because they're already set up to let their defenses down and focus on what we need to do.
So that's part of it. The leader always prefaces it with, “Just want to remind you, it's not about you. I hold you in perfect regard. I just want to talk about the doing.” And then we focus in on the doing.
The other part is, okay, then we can be direct about what needs to change, and then we can just stay on the behavior. We never say you're a kind of a person, or you're lazy, or you're not dependable.
What we say is, is you, you've called out three times, or you've been late X amount of times, and this is what's going to have to change, or this is going to be the consequence.
You know, and in the back of our mind is the leader's going, “Hey, I love you, this needs to change. I love you.” We don't usually say that to each other just for legal purposes, if you hear me, but we hold these people, we always give them full respect. We only talk about the doing.
Okay. So it's not you suck, you're not dependable, we can't count on you. It's none of that.
It is, “Hey, I have you, I hold you in high regard. We need to make this change, period, or suffer there's going to be a consequence.”
Okay. Now there's a lot of amazing leaders in this world. Millions, hundreds, thousands, I don't know how many there are, but a lot, probably millions. There are millions of good leaders in this world who care about the people that they're leading with all their heart, and they do their best.
And they go to these people, and they don't judge the individual. They just try to focus on the doing.
And you know what happens a lot of the time? The one receiving it still hears, he makes it mean, makes this feedback, makes this correction, makes this teaching mean something about them. Okay.
So with all we can do as leaders, whoever is the recipient of our leadership a lot of the time still makes meaning about what you're saying about their value.
Okay. So that's why it's both sides. This has to be a company-wide, or a relationship with me and my wife, or you in a relationship, in your marriage. It's everybody's on board. Okay.
So let's talk about the other side of this. The other side, the reverse side, is the people that hear.
So what we do is we ask, in the worth work principle, we ask the individuals, or all of us at all times, when somebody comes to us and we're the one that needs to be corrected, we need to change, or we're being trained, we say, what we are asking of you is to become more aware, more and more aware of how you feel.
And if you feel yourself shutting down, getting angry, getting upset, getting defensive, any of it, if you become aware, just notice that you're feeling this way. Ask yourself, am I making what is happening here mean something about me? The answer is going to be yes. And then attempt to separate it.
And you can also, so that's number one, we ask them to play a part with their own thinking and their own feeling. Okay.
Second of all, we also say, what we suggest is, if this doesn't happen easily for you, that you say to who's in the conversation, if you say to your manager, whoever's talking to you, “Hey, this is feeling a little bit like it's about me. Can we just, you know, focus on the work?” Okay.
And then that way, the leader has a chance to say, “Wait a minute, am I making this thing,” or he can reinforce the idea that, “Hey, I hold you in perfect high regard. I'm just, I just want you to know that we're only focusing on the work, and if I made it sound that way, I certainly didn't intend to.”
Okay. So that's how we do it. We work on constantly, constantly, we work on this ongoing. Okay.
Now, does that mean that nobody will ever get defensive again? Well, as the trust increases, defensiveness goes down and down and down.
And having these agreements upfront, and having people being willing to say, “Hey, this feels personal, can we separate it?” Okay. And having leaders preface that all of their feedback and all their training and all their correction and all their disciplinary, and everything, did you hear me? Even disciplinary, of course disciplinary, saying, preface it with, “Hey, I hold you in perfect regard. This isn't about you. This is not, this is just the doing, just the work.” Okay?
Most feedback, by the way, is just not about the person. Like I said, most leaders do, a lot of leaders do, an excellent job. They don't want to hurt the person. They're doing the best they can not to, but we don't have this framework and this understanding of The Worth Work Principle to be able to have it work most effectively.
So what they, a lot of times what can happen is, a good leader really caring about who this person is and how they feel, and they'll do their best to present what needs to change. And the person, a lot of times, will still, like I said, get hurt feelings, get defensive because the individual who's hearing it will make it mean something negative about their value.
This principle fixes that. This principle fixes that. This is a big deal.
I have had incredible, truly outstanding results at my company. And every place that this has been implemented so far, and you're going to see it implemented more and more and more.
And the sooner that you get on board, you know what changes? What's magical? Watch people in this company and in companies start to look at each other and really hold each other in high regard all the time, because they trust each other more and more and more over time.
And they're worried less about what other people think about their value. Okay?
So if they trust that we're sincere in this, they're more open, the workflow is better, they're more agreeable, people are more cooperative.
You want to talk about culture, you can have a slogan, you can say a bunch of stuff, and you can want it to be a certain way, but as you increase the trust by showing this, first of all, you need the framework. You need to get these agreements upfront and go about establishing how we do things and get people to agree.
But once that happens, it doesn't take very long for that trust to increase and increase and increase and increase. And it's really quite miraculous how well the change, magnificent change, from unproductivity and a lot of unhappy people to people that trust each other, and they work better together, and they're happier.
You know, it truly is a cultural change. People feel safe. You know, they feel safe. They feel because we protect the person.
People listen, they don't shut down. They improve faster. We have less conflict, less drama, more productivity. Okay. And much better culture. Okay.
People stop trying to protect their ego all the time. This is real culture change. Okay, it's not talk. It's not a slogan. This is actual behavior change. People appreciate it.
This is like I said, this is not just for companies. I'm talking about some company examples today. Apply this in your marriage.
You get the agreement upfront and present. You don't have to like everything the other one does. You don't have to agree with it or anything. It's not that that's right or wrong. They're not right or wrong. They're always 100% in value.
So you can do the same thing. You can approach your conversations in your family and in your marriage with your close relationships.
“Hey, I just want you to know, I hold you in perfect high regard. You know, this isn't about you. This isn't personal. You know, I love you. This thing we need to talk about because it's not working for me. We need to do a change.” Okay.
Remember, this all begins with you. The more and more that you believe that you can fully accept yourself, you can fully accept and even love unconditionally yourself and hold yourself in this high regard, the more that you can see others the same way.
It all begins one person at a time. So you can also take a look at yourself and say, “Hey, am I judging myself or my behavior?”
When you can look at yourself and say, “How am I feeling right now? Am I judging myself based on something I've done?” Well, wait a minute. Sometimes people do things well and sometimes they don't, but their value is non-negotiable. Remember that.
Okay. Most people, when we make mistakes or we do things wrong intentionally, that leads directly to a personal attack on ourselves.
What we can do when we recognize that this separation is not existing, we can fix the behavior and protect our own value. The same as I'm talking about in organizations.
This gets easier over time. Okay. As people begin to believe more and more that they have real value, as that belief increases, defensiveness goes down and people grow and progress. Okay.
Again, I'm going to say this one more time, at least one more time. Judge the work, protect the person. Okay. That's the motto.
So again, here's what you can do. First of all, you can notice when you get defensive. You can ask, are you making what I did or what they're saying about me mean something about me? Okay.
And if it is, can separate it. You can say, hey, this is about what I did, not about who I am. Okay. And then I can respond differently. I can stay open. I can fix the behavior. I can focus on that because I'm not worried about what it means about me.
If you're the leader in this example, you can start every correction with the separation. “Hey, I want to make it clear that this is not about your individual self.” You can make it clear that you're making the separation upfront.
Okay. This helps. This helps. You can just, you can watch the results happen. It's really incredible.
That's why I'm so excited about The Worth Work Principle. Okay. This is not natural. Okay. This needs to be taught. This needs to be practiced. This needs to be repeated. It's not a quick overnight fix, and it's not going to happen naturally.
Okay. Again, I began with our default is constantly to have everything make meaning about ourselves.
Okay. When this principle sticks, everything in the relationship or everything in the organization or the group changes for the positive.
Okay. I'm going to give you one last quick example. Okay. And that is this.
There was a story in the Bible about a guy, a lady actually, and there's a group of people around this lady, and they were picking up a bunch of rocks, stones they call them, and what they were about to do is gather up all these rocks, and then they were going to chuck them at this lady until she died, okay.
And along came this guy, and he's like, “Hey, wait a minute, time out here, all right, hold please.” This guy, they called him Jesus.
And he said, “Wait a minute, you know, whoever's without fault, go ahead and chuck the first rock.” And of course, they just put the rocks down and they left because they all had faults, had sinned, because why? They were human beings.
Okay. Now what he did next, this Jesus guy, he said is important. Okay. Because that's the, this is the way that we want to operate.
And he turned to the lady, and he said something like, “Go your way and sin no more.” Okay. It's what he said.
Think about this. He didn't say, “Hey, adultery is fine. Don't worry about it. You can go ahead and keep doing that with no consequence.” He said no. He implied that it's wrong. Don't do this anymore.
Okay. What's he doing? He's judging the behavior. Okay. But what did he do? “Go your way and sin no more.” He protected the person.
Okay. This is not a new principle.
This is a foundational life principle. I've just packaged it up in a way that it's easy to understand, and I've tested it enough to know that it has exceptional results in small relationships and marriages and in larger groups and organizations and companies.
The Worth Work Principle is the deal. It is the culture of the future. And that is the model.
Okay, if you want help implementing this, if you want to, you know, this is simple, but it's not easy. It has to be taught. It has to be practiced and reinforced like what we talked about.
Most companies just try to fix culture, and they never even get to this place.
Okay. So what I do is I come into organizations, and I teach leaders how to implement this. I teach leaders how their company actually operates, how to implement it on both sides, okay?
Because this only works when the leaders of the company understand it, when everybody in the company understands it, and then it becomes a standard.
We all agree to it, and it becomes a standard, or a standard, the way we standard operate it, okay, or standard operating procedures.
So I do this in two ways. I deliver keynotes and speeches where I teach this principle clearly and powerfully, as you might imagine.
And I also do longer-term training with leadership teams. So this is where we take this from an idea to a way that your company actually runs. And then we work on the individual leaders and their own belief systems, and then how they implement this company-wide.
When this is done right, people stop taking things personally. Okay.
Communication, cooperation, everything improves immediately. Productivity goes up, and you spend a whole lot less time managing people and problems.
Okay. You get sued a lot less by people that are not, you know, meeting up to par with their work because they're always up to par with their value.
Okay. Like I said, this is not just for companies. This is if you're leading a family, if you're in a marriage or a close relationship, or you just want to apply this to yourself personally, this principle will change how you relate to yourself and how you relate to other people.
So if you want help implementing this, you can go to shanejacob.com. You can book a call with me, or you can get information on how we can work together, how we can work together for your company.
Even if you never work with me, do this, okay? Take this principle and use it. Use it in your own life and use it with whatever group of people. This will change your life if you actually apply it.
It's simple. It's not easy.
Remember, my friends, I appreciate you being with me. Remember, your value is non-negotiable. Stay with me.
You deserve it. And you can!
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