Continuous Improvement Personal Growth and Professional Success with Micah Ascando | E06

"Continuous Improvement: Personal Growth and Professional Success"

Gary: What I wanna do this morning is start off and just do a kind of a quick recap of last week's show. And the reason for that is, is that it seemed to generate some interest. I got a couple of emails during the course of the week that we are going to be talking about and responding to. And I think it's really important.

So our program last week was finding a job in a difficult economy. So if you have any questions or comments or anything related to that, please send us an email. But I really want to go back now and just take a quick recap of last week's show, and then we'll jump into the couple of emails that I received and talk about the issues and the problems that the people were having.

Last week as part of finding a job in a difficult economy, we started talking about the biggest challenges to finding a job. And a lot of that relates to your attitude when you're out looking for a job. So many people, when the economy is bad, they've been out there for a period of time, they've been looking, and they get discouraged , when they're not finding things.

And it's difficult because. No one wants to hire someone who has low self-confidence and shows it both verbally and non-verbally. So suggestions to, to deal with that are, first of all, pray about it. Ask God to help you through the process. Breathe, relax. See yourself as a calm and confident person.

And if you're struggling with discouragement or what to say, take some time before you go to the interview and practice in the mirror. Talk to yourself, practice answering questions. Think about questions that an interviewer may be asking you and rehearse your answers so that it's right on the tip of your tongue when you get there.

We also talked about people who are in a situation where they may be looking to change careers, either because you may not like what you're doing right now, or perhaps you can't find a job in the field that you've been working in for a number of years. And so you're looking for how you might transition into something where there may be is more of a demand for what you're doing.

And so we talked about. Doing a, like a core assessment of what are the core skills that have enabled you to be successful in the past. What other skills do you have that can be used to move you into perhaps a different career? So I think the example I used is that you might not currently be in a supervisory position, but if you've been involved in leadership in a local civic organization or your church maybe you've been a scout leader or something like that, maybe you've coached basketball.

Look at those kinds of skill sets. Also think about what is it that you're really passionate about? If you could be king or queen for a day, what kind of a job or career would you create for yourself? And the other thing, especially when it comes to interviewing for jobs that may be outside your area of expertise, are what are the gaps between where you are and where you want to be, and how can you get creative in filling those gaps.

Then we talked about other sources for finding jobs. A lot of people will go to CareerBuilder, they'll go to Monster, they'll look in the regular newspaper and things like that. But there's tons of other things that you can do to identify job opportunities. Use social media to your advantage, whether you're on LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter.

Start discussions out there. Let people know what you're interested in. Use your personal network, your family, your friends, your church affiliations, and don't be afraid to get out there. And as Lauren White was saying, she was our guest last week, do the ask. Be willing to get out there and ask about things.

Look at other networks. There are a number of business networking groups here in Connecticut who meet at least once a month, sometimes more often than that. Go to those meetings, talk to people, even go into regular business networks and become a member of those things because a lot of the people who are showing up there will either be decision makers for hiring people in businesses, or they know people who are, and they can give you some direction and also.

Don't forget professional business , associations engineering associations, human resource associations that you can get plugged into. Then we talked about getting people to meet with you about being persistently consistent finding the people you want to talk through doing things like searching their businesses on LinkedIn and reaching out to either the decision makers, the owners of the company, or finding people in their organization who may be able to make an introduction for you.

Call the company. Be creative in your phone calls, your emails and letters. And remember that your approach to them is not about what they can do for you. It's always gotta be about what you can do for them. Employers want people who can and are interested in adding value to their companies. And then we talked about the impact of your resume, that your resume needs to have a visual appeal to it.

It needs to be neatly done, and it really needs to highlight. The strengths that you have, your strengths and your accomplishments, and I shared a little bit about my resume. The way my resume has always been structured is that it gives the employer my title, my employment dates, a brief description of what the company does, a brief description of what my responsibilities were, but then the majority of it.

Was focused on what did I accomplish when I was working for that employer? Make sure your resume doesn't have any misspellings or run on sentences. As I already said, highlight your strengths and accomplishments and try to keep it to a maximum of two pages unless you're applying for a position in like medicine or academia where you really need to have more details.

Then we talked about the last two subjects were do's and don'ts for job interviews. How to present yourself properly, being prepared, have questions to ask being, engaged in the conversation. Do your homework about the company so you know something about 'em. And then always have a great attitude when you go in.

Always be focused on turning negatives into positives, because sometimes interviewers will ask you difficult questions like, what's the greatest failure you've had in your career? Have you thought about that? Are you ready to say this is what happened, but this is what I learned from it, or This is how I benefited from it, and how I've been able to get beyond that, those sorts of things.

So that was the recap of last week. And I want to jump into the first email I got.

It was from Donna. And Donna says, hi Gary. Thanks for the show. I look forward to listening. I have boys who are now young men. They're in college and they need. Certain types of jobs, like in a clothing store, maybe working in a restaurant or a hardware store. What would you tell young people today who are looking for a job and get so discouraged?

Because instead of being able to walk into a place and fill out a job application, they're told to go online and fill out a 10 page application with questions that don't even relate to the position. If they don't have any experience in the field, they have no chance of getting a job. There just doesn't seem to be a real person they can talk to.

Donna. This is a common thing, and I've got several suggestions for you. First of all, if they can, and I don't know what part of the country they're in or where they're going to school or kind of what the demographics are, but if they can have them focus on small mom and pop businesses and not the larger chain businesses because when you are dealing with a mom and pop business, when you walk in the door, generally the person you're talking to is gonna be the owner or the owner's wife.

So you're talking one-on-one with the people who can make the decisions, who can evaluate you. They're used to doing this sort of thing, and you're not going through some impersonal human resource function at maybe a corporate headquarters who might be in New York, even though you live in Philadelphia.

Number two, have them check with the college admin office. A lot of times colleges will have people in the administration area who know of companies who are looking to hire people. They're used to having students who come in who need to supplement their income. So have them check with the admin office.

Also have them check bulletin boards in places where there would be listings for people who are interested in specifically hiring college students. Another thing they may do too if they go to the grocery store, I know a lot of the local grocery stores that we have here have bulletin boards where anybody can come in and do public postings about products that they're offering, services that they're offering, who they're looking to hire, that sort of thing.

So your your sons may be able to get some leads from doing that. And finally. One of the things I would talk about is how about starting their own business? It doesn't have to be anything that's capital intensive, but things like dog walking, car washing and detailing. Just have 'em grab a pad of paper and a pencil and sit down and get creative and think of things that they can do to add value in the community.

Just ask them to wander around and keep their eyes open for things that are going on, for any kind of unmet needs where they might say, you know what? There might be a way to make a few bucks doing this sort of stuff. Donna, thanks for your email. Thanks for being a loyal listener to the program and I hope that helps you.

The next email came in from Charlie. And Charlie said, I didn't get a chance to listen live to your show, but in listening to the podcast on SoundCloud, something that caught my attention is the requirement of having questions for the potential employer. I generally do not have questions, not at the interview.

It's not that I'm not interested, it's because I'm one who prefers to figure things out on my own. I don't think it's a good use of time to ask questions that I can most likely find out on my own. I don't like the feeling that I may be asking a question that makes the interviewer uncomfortable. Also, time is valuable and this is selfish thinking.

I know, but if they're not gonna hire me, why should I spend time investigating so many companies that won't hire me? I. And I wanna go back and there's more to Charlie's email, but I wanna go back to a couple of sentences here. That he wrote was, one is I don't like the feeling that I may be asking a question that makes the interviewer uncomfortable.

I get that and I would not go deliberately out of my way to ask difficult questions, but think about what you can learn in that process if you. Ask an interviewer a question and he or she doesn't know the answer to the question, what can you learn from their response to it? Because there's basically one of three responses that they can give you.

One is they can say, you know what? That's a really great question. I don't have an answer for it, but I'll either get it for you by the time you leave today, or I can see that your email address is on your resume. I'll email you an answer to that question, and that says that they're being proactive, that they're interested in what you have to say, and that they really wanna make sure that you get the information that you're asking for.

The second thing that they could do is to say, I don't know, and just stop there, say nothing more, and just let the issue drop. And the third thing that they can do is dance around the issue, give you the impression that they really don't know what they're talking about, but they're gonna try and make up some sort of an answer anyway.

So when you're thinking about things from the standpoint that part of the interview process is that you're interviewing them, what kind of a response would you want from somebody? Do you want somebody who's going to ignore you, not give you an answer or pretend to give you an answer that you know is probably not the right answer, or would you rather work for somebody who's gonna say, you know what?

That's a really great question. Let me get an answer for you so you can learn an awful lot from that. The second thing that you commented on that kind of got my attention is saying, but if they're not gonna hire me, why should I spend time investigating so many companies that won't hire me?

I guess my question would be is why are you going into a job interview with the assumption that they're not gonna hire you? If you're doing that what kind of an attitude are you going to communicate to them? It may not necessarily be in the words that you say during the interview, but are you going to be confident?

Are you going to be pursuing the job opportunity? Are you gonna be expressing an appropriate amount of interest? Like I said, not just necessarily in the words that you say, but in your body language. So I would always go into every interview with the attitude of, they're gonna offer me this job. And my job is to figure out, do I wanna say yes when they do?

So that's how I would approach it. But continuing on with Charlie's email, he says those are just thoughts I have. I know I'm in the minority thinking like this and that the world is changing with HR departments and headhunters and recruiters that expect us to follow certain norms or rules when applying and being interviewed.

What happened to just being ourselves? I'm not gonna pretend to be something I'm not. And so Charlie, I think, I don't think there's anything wrong with being yourself, but I get the guess. The question I would ask, looking through or trying to look through the potential employer's eyes is, why would I wanna hire you if you haven't taken the time to learn something about my business?

And if you show no interest in my business by having at least a few questions for me I know it's difficult to balance personality with how you handle yourself in a job interview. I tend to be a little bit more bold, a little bit more straightforward because I want the employer to know that this is a two-way street.

He's interviewing me, but I'm interviewing him too. I'm not negative, but I do try to ask good quality questions because I think in doing so, that it gives people the impression that I have a good head on my shoulders. It gives them some ideas about how I think and how I'm going to approach my job if I work for them.

You may not agree and that's okay, but that's what's worked for me in the past. I guess what I'm saying is we all have to find a style, an approach that we're both comfortable with, and that produces some results. So I sent that kind of a response to Charlie and he responded and said I'm not disagreeing with your advice, nor am I trying to suggest you're wrong.

I think if someone has questions, then by all means they should ask, and I understand how it can give somebody an edge. My point is, why should I be penalized for an interview for not asking good questions? If I've been chosen for an interview, it should be because they think I can do the job. If I'm asking questions that can look like I'm not certain about myself or the position, or that I can't do some research for myself, I think we've moved into a dog and pony show arena.

We have to act a certain way, say certain things to get advanced. The headhunter recruiter industry has changed the landscape with a scientific formula to hire people. But what I see is good qualified people not getting hired because they don't play the game. Does that make sense? And yet others less qualified get hired because they ask questions.

How does that make any sense? I. It's maddening that the days of meeting the person you're working for and having them ask the questions are slowly going away. And companies have hiring departments whereby managers are stuck with whoever the HR person hires. I think that's all to insulate accountability.

I think first of all, Charlie, in response to that, that your major assumption that if you have been chosen for an interview, it should be because they think you can do the job. I think that assumption is incorrect. Just because you've been chosen for an interview is no indication of whether they think you can do the job or not.

Over the years, I've interviewed lots of people who looked fabulous on paper, but they weren't any good in person. So I think maybe a more accurate assessment of being invited to the interview is that they saw something in your background that interested them enough to want to talk to you. So the purpose of the interview from the employer's perspective is to find out if you've got what they're looking for, not just from an experience point of view, but are you a good fit for the company from the viewpoint of your personality?

Are you a fit with the overall company culture? Are you a fit from the standpoint of leadership style? The purpose of the interview, from your perspective is to determine, am I a good fit for the job and do I wanna work here? And if you can answer those questions positively. Then you have to sit back and say, okay, what is it that they're looking for and what do I need to do to sell myself?

Part of the sales process is asking intelligent questions to show interest and to let them know you've done your homework. Quite simply, I think it impresses people when you do and it concerns them when you don't. So take it what it's worth. But that's has been my experience over the past 20 or 30 years. As far as HR doing the hiring.

I don't know, maybe it's different in the field that you work in, but I have never ever seen that in all my years in business. Even in entry level positions, the department supervisor in my world anyway, has always been the final say on who gets hired and who doesn't. And if it's different in your field, in my opinion, that's just plain nuts.

Human resources has their role to play. They are not, and they never should be. The decision makers in the process. And if you find yourself in an interviewing situation where you're interviewed by people who are really far removed from the actual position and the person you would be reporting to, I'd be asking to meet with that individual.

I think that's a perfectly reasonable request. We're gonna jump into another subject about continuous improvement. Now, those of you who are listening, who are business owners, who work in in manufacturing companies, are probably somewhat familiar with the continuous improvement process. But a lot of people don't realize that continuous improvement works well in your personal life too.

And that's one of the things that I found from my years in Manufacturing manufacturing and business. There's so many things like continuous improvement that migrate over into our personal lives and some great tools that can be used there. And today we have a special guest that we prerecorded earlier this week.

His name is Micah Escano. Micah is an engineer. He's also a certified Six Sigma black belt. And he's an intellectual property attorney. He works with law firms and individual attorneys on the continuous improvement process. And as I said, we have several prerecorded segments.

We're going to share from a conversation I had with Micah earlier this week and going to help shed some light on the continuous improvement process, both from a business. A personal perspective. Our first segment we're going to be talking about getting people comfortable with the continuous improvement process.

So we're gonna jump over to the beginning of our conversation with Micah Escano. Micah and I had an opportunity to start getting to know each other probably about a year ago. And Micah comes from a really interesting background because, like me, he has a background in engineering.

But he went beyond that and got. A certification is a Six Sigma black belt. But then after he did that, he decided to go back to school, became an attorney with a focus on intellectual property. Micah, welcome to the Gary Smith Show. Great to have you with us today. Thanks for having me. I'm I'm really excited to be here today and hopefully we'll have some fun. Oh yeah, we'll have a, we'll have a lot of fun.

We're gonna talk about. Continuous improvement, both from a personal as well as a business perspective. But one of the first things I wanted to start off talking about, Micah, is that at least in my experience when I have been working, trying to introduce continuous improvement, whether it's to individual people that I'm coaching or to business organizations people I think sometimes see continuous improvement.

As a negative thing because it's something that frightens them because it really means change. So from your perspective in the work that you've done how do you put people at ease? How do you go about getting people to feel comfortable enough with the continuous improvement process in order to give them enough time for it to take hold?

Micha: Absolutely. One of the key things is deciding what you're actually going to change. A lot of people think it's change for change's sake. But if you really take a look at what you wanna change, oftentimes it's just getting rid of the things you don't like anyway. So if you're focused on all the negative things about a task or a job or a process, and you say no one liked these things anyway, and the goal is to get rid of these negative things who can argue with that?

Who wouldn't want the bad things, the bad part of a job to go away? So if you spin it and target the areas of improvement that will make their lives better. You'll get a lot of buy-in a lot faster.

Gary: Do you think too that some of the hesitancy to getting involved in the continuous improvement process also has to do with.

People being exposed to too much flavor of the month. Types of things where people have come in with lean, they've come in with Six Sigma, they've come in with whatever continuous improvement process may be the hype of the time and it comes in, they try and working on it and after several months it just fizzles.

So do you think some of it is that people are just sitting back and saying, you know what? It hasn't worked in the past. Everything that management has brought into the company just doesn't work. It burns out after a while. So if we ignore it long enough, this one will go away too.

Micha: You know what? That's absolutely true. A lot of businesses don't have a lot of commitment to any particular. Type of process improvement or continuous improvement. And it does come across as flavor of the month. One things you really need to show your employees, especially if you've had some failures or quick switching of kinds of improvement in the past, is that you're actually going to be committed this time that you actually have a six month plan of what you're gonna do.

Now, that doesn't mean you're gonna succeed, but if you don't have a plan for that and show them how they're a part of that plan, if you have that plan and have that commitment over the long term. You're gonna get a lot more buy-in versus, oh, it's just so and so coming in this month with this grand idea he read about on some vlog this morning.

You really need that buy-in through that commitment to both your employees, your coworkers, and the goal of making an improvement. Without that commitment, it's gonna fizzle out and your employees are gonna know it.

Gary: Yeah, and it's almost like sometimes I think that employees almost have a sixth sense about that sort of thing because they can almost tell from the start that management is either isn't really committed to it or maybe top management isn't.

But they're forcing it down on lower level managers. And so the lower level managers don't come into it with, like you're saying, the conviction and the commitment that they probably should have. Oh, good start to our conversation with Micah, and one of the key learnings I got out of this is that the continuous improvement involves getting rid of stuff that you don't want or you don't use.

That applies both in business as well as in your personal life. When you stop and think about improving, what are the things that, on a personal level, what are the things that you want to get rid of? What are the things that you'd really like to change that aren't producing results, that aren't producing fruit in your lives?

And the same thing happens in business, as Micah said. Who if someone could come along and show you how you could make your job easier? By getting rid of a lot of the junk that you're doing that you don't really need to do, or by being better organized. So as an example, that the tools that you need for your job are right at your fingertips all the time.

You don't have to go looking for them. If the bottom line is that there's a benefit to you for doing that, why would you not want to pursue that approach? Also we talked about the flavor of the month thing both in personal and business experiences. I've seen so many times, let's take personal as an example where somebody will get a software package that maybe is something that they're going to use to help them get better organized.

And they start using it and they take all of the time to transfer their information into it and they start using it and they're using it for a couple of months and then all of a sudden they see this new glitzy software package out there that looks like it might be better for them. And so they invest a lot of time switching, and then six months down the road they find something else and they jump to that and they keep jumping from one thing to another.

But what we need to do is we need to learn to stick with things long enough. To give them a chance to succeed in our lives. Yeah, there may be some things out there that might be a little bit better, but you have to be honest with yourself and ask yourself, is it enough better to, A, make me go through all the effort to switch things and B, spend the money to purchase that new software package.

So that needs to be our approach to life. Give things a chance to work. There's a young gentleman who I've been coaching for a while now. And he has been working with an organization for about three years. He's doing well with them. The organization is going through some growing pains, and he's at a point now where he's saying gee, should I shift?

And he's been going back and forth with, no, I really wanna stay with it. No, I really want to do something else. And we had a conversation outside a restaurant the other day and I really put it on him and said, you know what? Stay with what you've got. If you haven't invested at least five years with this business stay with them.

Let them get through the growing pains because you've already produced some really great results. You don't want to give up on that and have to start over somewhere else. Build on the foundation that you have. Stay with it. So you need to show your commitment to the process. And if you're happen to be a business manager, you need to show that you're committed to it, so that your employees will see that that they will buy into it.

Because employee buy-in and the continuous improvement process is so very critical to whether the process is going to succeed or not. We're gonna jump into our second segment with with Micah now, where we're gonna talk about dovetailing personal and business continuous improvement. So let's hear what Micah has to say about that.

Let's talk too about especially on the kind of, I guess there's a dovetail, at least I see a dovetail, whether you're working on the personal side of your life. Or whether you're working on the business side. I know one of the, one of my favorite quotes from from Tony Robbins is he talks about can C-A-N-E-I continuous and never ending improvement.

And one of the things that he talks about there is he said, gee, what would you rather have? Would you rather have 20% improvement in a year? Or would you rather have one 10th of 1% improvement every day? And when you do the math on it, obviously the small incremental gains, the one 10th of 1% improvement far outweighs the 20% a year.

Not only from the standpoint that you get more. But it ingrains that culture that you're doing a little bit, and you're building on that. So it's almost like the compound interest thing. But when you look at it from a personal point of view, if I say, gee, I have some things in my life that I really want to improve upon and I really want to get on this continuous and never ending improvement journey where do you go about starting?

Where does the continuous improvement process begin for you?

Micha: Honestly, you gotta start where you are. It's really tempting to say, oh, someone else is so far ahead of me. I wanna be there really quick. But you really can't, like you said, it's tempting to have that large improvement, but the small incremental is so much more powerful.

And if you can't start where you are, when are you ever gonna start? We see the hard work of others and that could be a good motivator, but if we can't have the discipline to start incrementally, we'll, we're never gonna get that large result. We see other people have.

Gary: Okay. So when we think about that then, as you're starting out on this continuous improvement journey, what are the key elements of the continuous improvement process?

Is there a pattern that we can follow that says do this kind of step by step, walking through it and until you really get started?

Micha: Absolutely. One of my favorite acronyms is damake, it's D-M-A-I-C. First off, the D stands for define. So when we have a goal or we wanna improve something, let's define it.

What are we trying to improve? Let's define the problem or define the goal. Then we wanna be able to measure it so that M stands for measure. So let's say for example, in our personal lives, who of us can't lose a couple pounds, right? So we can weigh that, right? So if we measure what we are today, we're gonna know if we've lost weight or gained weight.

So we have something to measure or something to compare it to. So we define a problem and let's say it's weight loss. Okay, we defined it. We wanna lose weight, then we can measure that. Then over time, as we start figuring out what we're gonna do to work out, we can see if we're losing weight, we can analyze the data we're measuring.

A stands for analyze, and then if we look at the process and go, I think we can improve it. I'm not really losing much weight as I want. Let's try changing something. And we can then improve what we're doing to lose weight. And then as we sphere what's works, the C stands for control. We can control it and keep doing those things at work and finding even more things after that keep working.

So we wanna define the problem, measure if we can analyze what we've measured, improve upon what we've f figured out by measuring it and analyzing it, and then control it to maintain that and continuously improve it going forward. But really you have to start with. Defining what the problem is. Defining what your goal is, if you can't define it or lay it out clearly.

You're not quite ready to start working on your continuous improvement yet.

Gary: That's really key and I appreciate that DMAIC process. That's that really is one of the major foundations of continuous improvement and it dovetails a lot with what I do as far as coaching because when you talk about, especially defining, you get into looking at the smart process where when you're setting goals for yourself, they have to be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-based.

So , it maybe takes the define and focuses it just a little bit that says, you're not only looking at defining the goal, but you're going to be specific in what you're trying to achieve. So it's not just a matter of using your example of weight. It's not just a matter of I wanna lose 20 pounds.

It's that I wanna lose 20 pounds in the next six months, and you put a date in there and then you, as you're saying, you have to be able to measure it. So you want to be able to create some sort of a chart, whether it's just a piece of paper hanging on your refrigerator, and every Monday morning when you get up, you weigh yourself and you record the number, and you find out if you're headed in the right direction or not.

It has to be achievable. So it has to be something. If I said I wanna lose a hundred pounds in the next 30 days, chances are that's not gonna happen. As a matter of fact, a number of years ago I was talking with a cardiologist because I had been in a situation where my primary care doctor had told me that I needed to lose 40 pounds and he wanted me to lose 40 pounds in six months.

And I was having my regular visit to the cardiologist and was talking with him about that. And he said let me ask you, do you think that's an achievable goal? Do you think you can lose 40 pounds in six months? And I said, no, absolutely not. He said, then you're not gonna do it. If you don't believe you can accomplish it, you're not going to accomplish it.

But he said, let me ask you a question. He said, could you lose a pound a month? And I said, yeah, anybody in the world can lose a pound a month. And he said, believe it or not, he said, you do that for four years and you've got your 40 pounds. But it's really interesting. He said, the real key to it is that you cannot consistently lose a pound a month unless you fundamentally change your lifestyle.

So he said it is achievable, but change is necessary in order for that to be able to happen. And he gave me some good stuff as to what I could work with. But as you were saying to really nail it down, define it and then go after it. So that really is the foundation of where things begin.

Micha: Absolutely. I definitely agree with you that if your goals in this are not realistic, you're not gonna hit them and you're just gonna be disappointed and frustrated at the end of the day. So it's, absolutely critical that they're realistic. You can set a high goal and reach for it be understanding that if you don't make it the first time, just keep going.

You're gonna get there. Just keep striving for it.

Gary: I think too that and I don't know if you'll agree with this or not, but it has a lot to do with people's personalities because some people will go out there and they'll set a goal that maybe is not it's not unrealistic, but it's definitely a stretch for them.

And if they don't make it, they'll look at it and be very positive and say, Hey I got 90% of the way there. That's great. Now let's go after the next 10%. But other people have issues where if they set a goal and they don't hit it, all of a sudden they think of themselves as failures and they get discouraged and they'll stop.

They won't keep going after things. And I think that plays into the continuous improvement process too. That sometimes maybe what we have to do is set more realistic goals and then celebrate the achievements along the way. The little targets that we hit, even though it may seem insignificant if we go after those things, that can be really important.

Micha: Absolutely. I think it really boils down to is how we perceive failure. Now I really think in a lot of our cultural ways, failure is the end all, be all. You could be at the Olympics, but if you get silver, you failed. You've only the second best in the entire world who wants that?

And we, it's really our response to that failure, which I think can really cripple us in life. So there are other cultures out there that take failure as a learning tool to become better and to learn from it and achieve more long term. But here in America, sometimes we see failure as something that should be avoided at all costs.

At the cost of risk, at the cost of learning, at the cost of making a difference. So in your example if you come up second best and you think, oh, I failed. I should just stop now. I think it's not bad to fail. It really just should be used as an opportunity to learn from it and become better.

Gary: Absolutely. I completely agree with that, and I think you're right. The other thing that I see happening in our culture today and I think Zig Ziglar was the one who nailed it right on the head when he said that failure is an event. Failure is not a person, and we tend to internalize things. And when we set a goal and we don't achieve it, we tend to look at ourselves as failures rather than looking at it and saying.

I didn't achieve my target. Oh, reset it and keep going after it. So that, can be really powerful. I think if we learn to embrace those kinds of concepts and realize that failure is part of life. I've often told people I've managed in the past that if you're not failing at some level.

You're not doing your job because you're not pushing the envelope, you're not learning, you're not getting any better. And I think we all can learn potentially more from our failures than we can from our successes. And I think it was Tony Robbins who once said that. When people succeed, they party.

When they fail, they ponder. And that's what we want to be doing. We want to be learning from our failures. And I guess bottom line is if we learn from our failures, are they really failures? We've learned something that we don't want to do again. We've learned something that doesn't work and we shift gears and we find another approach to be able to do things.

So a great conversation here with Micah Escano talking about the continuous and never ending improvement process, but the key learnings here. Start where you are. Don't worry about where you're gonna be in the future. Start with where you are, with what you've got to work with. Also take the discipline to start working incrementally.

Whether you're building a Lego set or whether you might be working on a big puzzle. Nothing happens until the first piece is placed. And then once the first piece is in place, go to the second piece and so on. Another key thing that I think is important for us is to realize that.

We don't want to compare ourselves to where others are or to what they've achieved. The continuous improvement process is not about you competing against others. It's about you striving to achieve your personal best. So focus on the things that you can do. Don't be distracted by if you're in a weight class and you're trying to lose weight with some of your friends, don't be discouraged because the person next to you lost three more pounds this week than you did.

Don't let that derail you. Stay focused on playing your game. We talked about the DMAIC process, the whole idea of define, measure, analyze, improve, control, and how that relates to smart goals in the whole process. And I think the final thing that we want to drag out from our conversation with Micah is that failure is perfectly okay.

I often have told people in business that if you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough, you're not getting out there, you're not taking enough risk. A certain level of failure in our lives is appropriate because we learn from it and because we're stretching ourselves constantly, stretching ourselves to be better and better.

Part three of our conversation with Micah is talking about obstacles to successful implementation and sustaining of continuous improvement. So let's jump back into our conversation there and see what Micah has to say. Let's take a little bit different approach. Let's look at another subject here, and that is, what are the major obstacles in your mind to successful continuous improvement, not only implementation.

But in sustaining it as you get rolling,

Micha: absolutely. I think sustaining continuous improvement is one of the biggest issues to get it rolling. If you have a good plan you've gone through DMAIC, to define, measure, analyze, improve control you're on a good path, get some cultural buy-in by help making sure your employees.

See the plan, how it's gonna help them, how it's gonna help the company. Those are all things I think a lot of us can do. But the biggest issue is in that last letter of to make control. Control means essentially it's continuing to monitor that process. It's making sure you don't forget about what you've just done, but it's not sexy anymore.

When we have a big process improvement and we see how much we saved and how much we got better, it's easy to go, okay, we're done. And check out. We don't maintain it anymore. Back to that example of weight loss. Let's say you lose that a hundred pounds and you you're looking great.

You got a six pack and all that. If you say, okay, I've lost all this weight, and just stop working out, stop watching what you eat. Twinkies and Netflix become your life again. The weight, it's gonna come back. In anything that's exactly what's gonna happen. You gotta, you have to maintain it.

And even though it's not as exciting as starting the process improvement, you gotta have that in place where you check up on it. Those natural checkup points to say, am I maintaining it? Is it still going in the right direction? A surer acronym is PDCA Plan, do check Act. And it's a continuous circular thing of you make a plan, you do it.

You check it to make sure it's doing what you want, and then you act on what you've just found out, and it's the moment you find out, oh, you check up on it, and oh, I'm not where I want to be in life or in work or whatever I'm looking at. You need to act on it and take a look and see what you need to do.

Gary: Yeah, that's really true. And that again comes back to the whole thought process of how people approach things. Are the systems that we're using really dynamic? One of the guys that I know uses an example, he said when you have a plane and a plane is taking off, say from Los Angeles and it's flying to Hawaii, do you realize that plane.

Is off course 95% of the way, and that's why they have an autopilot. The autopilot is constantly triangulating the position of the plane and basically it's saying off course correct. Off course correct. Off course correct. And several hours later the plane lands right on a dime on the runway in Hawaii.

And when we look at that in our personal lives, we set a goal, we take action toward that goal. We monitor our progress and constantly ask ourselves the question, are the actions that I'm taking taking me closer to or further away from my goal? If they're taking you closer to your goal, then keep doing the same stuff.

But if you seem to be diverging, if you seem to be getting off course, then stop and make some adjustments, and you keep making adjustments and monitoring, making adjustments and monitoring until you get to where you want to be. And ultimately, if you do that and just keep that dynamic process going on, you'll get to your goal.

So really some more good stuff from Micah there. The key for the whole thing of sustaining continuous improvement is the whole control. And as Micah said, a lot of times we lose control because control isn't sexy. It's not something that is exciting as when we started. Stop and think about the last time you tried to lose weight.

When you get in and you lose all that water weight in the first week or 10 days and you've dropped 10 pounds and you think, man, this is really great but then the process becomes more and more difficult because your body is going to lose the weight after that more slowly. But if you keep up with it, you eventually reach your goal, then what motivates you beyond that?

So you have to have a motivator that takes you beyond that goal and helps you control. And the whole thing that Micah was talking about too, about plan, do, check and act. Have a plan. Do it. Monitor your progress. Keep checking to see where you are and then be willing to act, be willing to make it a dynamic process.

Make the adjustments that you need to make in order to get to where you want to go. Our last segment with Micah, I want him to talk a little bit about what resources are available for those of you either personally or in business who would like to learn more about the continuous improvement process.

So let's jump to our final segment with Micah. What resources do you recommend for those people seeking to learn more about the continuous improvement process? Are there some things out there that are pretty basic that people can grab onto that'll give them the essentials that they need to get started?

Micha: That is a good question and one of the books I'd actually really recommend is the New Economics by W Edwards Deming. Deming was a Christian man who really influenced a lot of process improvement through Toyota and his writings. And he quotes scripture and it's a great book for a lot of parts of your life.

Some parts you might wanna skim, but it's a good book that I definitely recommend.

Gary: I'll tell you what, you probably know this. I'm a big fan of Dr. Deming. It's too bad that the the companies in the United States didn't pick up on his initial message and he had to go to Japan.

But he really has had a tremendous tremendous impact on the world. And was a really good man. Yeah, I would agree. I would agree with that. That's a good starting point for people. And the thing that's neat is that although Deming's philosophies were primarily oriented toward the manufacturing world, there's so much crossover there.

There's so much that you can use in your personal life to be able to better yourself and just amazing.

Micha: Absolutely. Truth is truth and what works in industry can work in your personal life, and people used to critique his ideas and say, oh, it's only good for manufacturing. It's only good for that industry.

You've seen his ideas and concepts end up in hospitals and more recently through work that I do in the legal industry. So his ideas and concepts are applicable everywhere.

Gary: Yeah. And that's what I found too in my coaching work and that sort of stuff. There's so much of the stuff that I have from years of manufacturing that just directly translates over.

And it's interesting because people look at you and it's like, how did you figure that stuff out? And if you worked in the manufacturing world, it's just common sense everyday stuff that we do. So it's really neat to see that and see how that works in the world. Micah, thank you so much for taking the time to be with me today. I really value our friendship and the fact that we've been able to get to know each other.

And looking forward to continuing to get to know you better and working with you as we go forward. Thanks again for being part of the show today.

Micha: Thanks Gary.

Gary: So that wraps our conversation with Micah. I really appreciate him being willing to come on. He's a great young man, , and I'm just glad that we're friends.

The book that he mentioned, the New Economics by Dr. Deming is a really neat. Book I highly recommend it. And there's also tons of other stuff out there on Dr. Deming that's available. He was a wonderful man. Never had the honor of meeting him personally, but over the years I've worked with a number of Dr. Deming's associates and he's just a really cool guy in the way he laid things out. Just so practical, so common sense. And as Micah was saying, there are just so many things that you can take and learn from people like Dr. Deming that will directly translate not only into your business life, but into your personal life. Some really neat concepts that you can grab onto that if you learn how to use them. That wraps up the the show on continuous improvement today. Next week we have a very special treat for you. We've got Martha, Marty. Cobb is going to be with us. I don't know if you've heard of her or not. Many of you have seen her video.

She's a Southwest Airlines flight attendant. Her safety check video went viral on the internet, had several million hits. And so in talking with her, I found out that she's a Christian and is really a very dynamic person. So we're going to have her on next week. We're gonna be talking about attitude and humor in the workplace.

So until then, may God bless you through this coming week. Live your life with passion.