Looking to scale your personal growth in pace with your company's success? Then you can't afford to miss our chat with Whitney Johnson, the CEO and co-founder of Disruption Advisors. Whitney's eclectic journey from a music major to a top-notch stock picker and entrepreneur is a testament to the potential of a growth mindset. She graces us with her wisdom on how she's helping people level up alongside their companies, through her revolutionary S-curve concept.
We then dive into the idea of balancing career, hobbies, family, and friends through S-curves. Whitney teaches us how to recognize our individual S-curves, optimizing them to gain the support we need in our lives. We also delve into the intriguing concept of 'the fever breaking', where we finally comprehend and communicate our value to the world.
Wrapping things up, Whitney shines a light on two powerful tools she uses to help people identify their strengths – CliftonStrengths and DISC assessments. She shares how these tools can enhance our understanding and empathy towards others, by understanding our own communication styles. Before we sign off, we explore the power of building and remixing our stories based on our strengths, a unique take on personal branding. Tune in to this compelling conversation to transform your personal and professional growth journey.
Looking to scale your personal growth in pace with your company's success? Then you can't afford to miss our chat with Whitney Johnson, the CEO and co-founder of Disruption Advisors. Whitney's eclectic journey from a music major to a top-notch stock picker and entrepreneur is a testament to the potential of a growth mindset. She graces us with her wisdom on how she's helping people level up alongside their companies, through her revolutionary S-curve concept.
We then dive into the idea of balancing career, hobbies, family, and friends through S-curves. Whitney teaches us how to recognize our individual S-curves, optimizing them to gain the support we need in our lives. We also delve into the intriguing concept of 'the fever breaking', where we finally comprehend and communicate our value to the world.
Wrapping things up, Whitney shines a light on two powerful tools she uses to help people identify their strengths – CliftonStrengths and DISC assessments. She shares how these tools can enhance our understanding and empathy towards others, by understanding our own communication styles. Before we sign off, we explore the power of building and remixing our stories based on our strengths, a unique take on personal branding. Tune in to this compelling conversation to transform your personal and professional growth journey.
Speaker 1:
I know you're gonna find it. You've gotta keep on at it. Hi everybody, this is Bob Goodwin and welcome to another episode of Career Club Live. I am super excited about our guest today, which we'll get to in just a moment, but first wanted to let you guys know that we've got some new free resources available on our site. This week we have a promotion on the three things that might be holding you back in your job search, where we cover attitude activities and the ask that you should be asking for when you're networking, and it may not be what you think, so please check that out at Career Club.
Speaker 1:
So, as I said, I'm very excited about our guest today. It is Whitney Johnson and she has quite the background, which I want to read some of it to you. Whitney is the CEO and co-founder of Disruption Advisors and is a world-class coach, globally recognized thought leader, keynote speaker and consultant, where she helps organizations operationalize a high growth mindset in their leaders and teams. We're going to talk about that quite a bit. She's also the host of a very popular podcast called Disrupt Yourself and she's the author of a number of bestsellers, including how to Build an A-Team, disrupt Yourself, dare, dream Do and, most recently Smart Growth how to Grow your People, to Grow your Company. With that Whitney welcome.
Speaker 2:
Bob, thank you, I'm delighted to be here.
Speaker 1:
No, it's so nice to have you, as it's our want, we do like to ask just a couple of icebreaker questions to get to know you as a human being first, before we get into that big brain of yours. So just very simply where were you born and raised? Where are you from?
Speaker 2:
I was actually born in Madrid, spain, because my parents were living over there for about a year, so that's always fun, because I've always thought I was Spanish, even though I'm completely not, and grew up in San Jose, california. I went to a high school called Leland High School. I lived there until I went to college. I went to college at Brigham Young University in Utah and then moved to New York right after I graduated and have lived in Boston and now live in Virginia.
Speaker 1:
Very cool. What was your major at BYU Music?
Speaker 2:
Tell me more about that, yes, right, it's super logical that I majored in music and we're not talking about music on this show. Well, I started playing piano at a really young age. I still remember going to see Sound of Music and coming home and playing Do Re Mi on the piano. I loved it. I got to college and didn't really have a sense at that point in time of like you go to college and you figure out what you're going to do to make money, like that wasn't computing and my mom really wanted me to major in music and so I did. But when I graduated from college, had gotten married, my husband and I moved to New York. I realized, oh, I need to make money because he's in school, and that started my career of being a secretary on Wall Street and then working my way up.
Speaker 1:
No, and I remember you were Wall Street analysts, which maybe will take us to the next place, which is, do you mind, just kind of painting the picture a little bit of your career arc.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, absolutely so. As I said, I graduated in music, moved to New York right after college. I actually wanted to be a flight attendant, but they didn't hire me, and so looking for work I am a music major I don't really have very much confidence. I'm a woman, it's the late 80s and so my first job is as a secretary and for a retail stockbroker 1345 Avenue of the Americas, in case anybody cares and so I would go to work every day. And I'm working as a secretary, but I'm sitting across from a bunch of up-and-coming stockbrokers who are saying things like it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know this is a good stock investment. Or you know, throw down your pom-poms and get in your game.
Speaker 2:
And at first I'm very offended because I was a cheerleader in high school, but then had this big a-ha that I needed to throw down my pom-poms and so I started taking business courses at night accounting, finance, economics and that led to having a boss who also believed in me, being willing to promote me onto the professional track of being an investment banking analyst. So I did that for several years. Then my boss um, got fired, and they were going to fire me too, I think. But I was. I had strong performance reviews. I happened to be pregnant at the time, which was a little bit of job security, and so they moved me into equity research. I was absolutely disrupted, but it turns out this career move that I didn't want was a career maker for me.
Speaker 2:
I was very good as a stock picker, did that for close to 10 years, became award-winning and then disrupted myself of going out and becoming an entrepreneur. I had discovered Clayton Christensen's work. I just I tried a bunch of different things like let's produce a soccer show or a reality show about soccer in Latin America, kind of like American Idol. A bunch of things didn't work, but then eventually connected with Clay Christensen and started a fund with him and his son investing in disruptive innovation.
Speaker 2:
I did that for the better part of a decade, but then realized that what I really truly cared about was the momentum, not of stocks, but of people that I was interested not in how products and services disrupt, but how do people disrupt. And so in 2012, so about a decade ago now I went off on my own and started a company of. What has become today is disruption advisors, where we help you make sure or ensure that, as you're scaling, your people are growing as fast as the projected growth of your company, and we do that through our assessment and through high impact activities like coaching and off-sites. So that was my career trajectory in just a few short minutes.
Speaker 1:
No, I think that's awesome. I mean, obviously, career Club. What we're doing is helping people find a career that matters to them. Oftentimes that includes reinvention and, as you say, disrupting yourself, and I think that some of these non-linear ways that your career has progressed is very cool. It's also, I think, empowering you talked about, particularly for women, and that you can do what you want. I think that not being forced into a mold that somebody else told you this is what you should be doing, but what was of interest to you. I think you uncovered some latent talents that you had and then you developed some of them into world-class skill. I mean, all of that, I think, is super cool and a kind of inspiration that we like to bring to listeners and to our clients. So I'm loving your story.
Speaker 2:
Okay, well, so we can unpack it then maybe, if it's useful, that is exactly what we're going to do.
Speaker 1:
So I mentioned that you've got your most recent book out called Smart Growth, and it talks about the S-curve of learning. Can you first of all just sort of unpack S-curve and then what's?
Speaker 2:
the.
Speaker 1:
S-curve of learning.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. So, as I mentioned a moment ago, I discovered that I was more interested in the momentum of people than stocks, and then the theory of disruption, applying it to people, not just products and services. And so I started to have this tendency really of how do I take management theory and apply it to people. And so, when we were investing with Clayton and looking at how quickly innovations would be adopted, we were using something called the S-curve. That was popularized by Everett Rogers 50, 60 years ago and it's the adoption curve that people might be familiar with. And as we were using this S-curve or this adoption curve to say, you know, initially adoption is going to be really slow, but then it's going to accelerate, and then at some point you use saturation or reach saturation, I had this insight that we could also use the S-curve not only to look at how do groups change or adopt an innovation over time, but how do individuals change, how do we learn and how we grow. And, at its simplest, the way I think about using the S-curve for us as individuals is this there are three major parts. There's the launch point, so the base of the curve. There's the sweet spot, which is the steep sleek back of the curve. And then there's mastery, which is that top plateau of the curve, and the way we can use it in terms of growth and development is we say, when I start something new, for example, I start a new job I am at the launch point of the curve and what's going on for me emotionally here is I'm excited to be here. Usually, sometimes we get disrupted, but let's say we've chosen to be here, so there's a thrill. But because our brain is running a predictive model, it's making predictions. Most of them are inaccurate because we're doing something new, our dopamine drops, which is the chemical messenger of delight, and we have this experience of being discouraged, sometimes overwhelmed, frustrated, feel like an imposter, and we feel like we're not growing Interestingly. Mathematically we're growing very quickly. In fact we're growing the fastest at that launch point of the curve than anywhere else. But because it's not yet apparent, the experience that we're having is it feels like growth is very slow. So that's the launch point, which explains why it's difficult for most people to start something new. All right, so then there's the second part of the curve, which is the sweet spot, and this is the place where you're continuing to run that predictive model in your brain and your predictions are increasingly accurate, and so you have these emotional upside surprises your dopamine is spiking and there's a sense of exhilaration. So this is the place where, if you're on a new project or in a new role, you feel this sense of autonomy, like I know how to do this. You feel competent, you feel related or connected to the work that you're doing and the people that you're doing the work with. So that's the place where growth not only is fast, it feels fast, which is why it's very easy to keep going when you're in the sweet spot of the curve. Then the third part is mastery, and mastery is that top portion of the curve, the predictive model you've now predicted. It is correct, it is accurate. You've debugged the computer programming.
Speaker 2:
What happens here, though, is because you're no longer learning. Because you're not learning, you're not getting a lot of dopamine. There's this feeling inside of you that I've done what I came to do, and maybe there's even this feeling of there's more for me to do on this planet, and so now you have a bit of a dilemma, because, on the one hand, you like being on top of that curve. You've got it figured out. You're master of all you survey. You know how to do things here, but because your brain needs more dopamine, because learning is the oxygen of human growth, you and most of us make that decision. I'm going to walk into that dilemma and I'm going to find a way to jump to a new learning curve, or challenge myself such that I push myself back into the sweet spot of that curve. So you now have a way to describe what growth feels like. It's slow, and then it's fast, and then it's slow, and you can use this very simple visual framework whenever you take on something new to encapsulate that experience of what growth feels like.
Speaker 1:
Super helpful. So you use it in the context of like starting a new job as an example, but there's multiple facets in our lives, right, and I'm going to suspect that we find ourselves at different places on different curves. Can you talk just for a minute about the portfolio of S-curves that we might have for lives?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, as you just said, we're not. I mean, it's a fractal, right. You can say my life is an S-curve, and in fact it is, and you can say your career is an S-curve. But what you just raised, bob, is that if you think about it, we're on multiple curves at any given time. So you've got your work curve, you've got your hobby curve, you've got your family curve, you've got your friends curve, and so what you want to think about is how do I optimize my portfolio of S-curves? And what we usually think about is the standard bell curve distribution.
Speaker 2:
You probably can only do three to four curves really well at any given time. And if you're looking at it from like this, you want to have two curves where you're in the sweet spot. You want to have one where you feel like I'm in mastery, like I can stabilize myself I'm really good at this which allows you to then have the confidence to take on something new, where you feel like you don't know what you're doing. Where you can be challenged is if, for example, you've got four S-curves, you've taken on a new job, you've moved to a new city and you've just gotten married, or and you've just had a new child. That's okay.
Speaker 2:
But it's important to recognize that you probably are going to need extra support because you're doing a lot of new things at once. But by understanding that you've got this portfolio, you can do some load balancing of your S-curves and you can also get the support you need at the launch. Or if you've got three or four curves where you've been in the same city for 10 years, the same exact role for 10 years, nothing new is happening, you can say to yourself I probably need to take on something new so that I can continue to grow and develop as a human being, because and this goes to a foundational premise for me I believe that growth is our default setting. So if we're not putting ourselves in a situation where we can grow, then we're dying inside just a little, and none of us wants to die inside just a little.
Speaker 1:
No, and you talked about the dopamine and I mean there's true neurological things and physiological things that are happening inside of our brains. Too much becomes stress and I'm freaking out, right. Exactly, and I'm sort of in overload mode, which is not healthy. The other end of that spectrum would be on board like there's.
Speaker 1:
You know, I just like I don't know if I could ever retire Like that sounds very unattractive to me, like I would literally, I think, die of boredom and so continuing to be challenged, but not always by the same thing, and there's different things that we're challenging as we go. But if you're not being able to, probably use this in a second to the same way to disrupt yourself, and you know, dare, dream, do and things like that. But one thing there's big S curves and little S curves, I suppose right. And one of the things that we see with our clients and you've given me some new language to think about this with is when somebody comes into a job search, most people don't know what to do and it's frightening to them, they're confused, there's a lot of fear that goes into it, maybe even some shame. I can't even get into this S curve that I don't want to be a part of.
Speaker 1:
But when we start working with people and they start oh, there's a process, things start to settle down a little bit and they start to make, start to climb up that curve a little bit, and usually we find that going from launch to sweet spot is I know my message, I know what my value proposition is, I know how to communicate my value. One, because I believe it now. And two, I've got the words to express it to another human being and the way that they can understand it, the way I've been saying it, is that's when the fever breaks and they go from feeling sick to the way it is. When the fever breaks, it's just like I'll suddenly feel like a ton better, and that's when they're in that sweet spot.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I love that when you just describe, that is, when you have that clear messaging of here's what I do well and here's how I can help other people, help other employers. I love that metaphor of the fever breaking and this idea of as soon as that kicks in, you're in a position to go into hyper growth. You're in a position to go into the sweet spot of your job search because you know who you are, what you want to do, what you don't want to do, and that's where the acceleration takes place. I love that.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. And then the inverted S curve is when people get the order of operations wrong and they just want to be active and like I need to be doing something so I'm out meeting a lot of people. But the analogy I use is like airing bad TV commercials you bought a Super Bowl spot, so you're in front of a lot of people. The problem is your ad stocks and like you need to be off air until you get your ad right, and so when people get it flipped and they get it in the right order, that's when I start dealing with the timing, I think, but yeah.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that's interesting too, because and so to plug that back into the framework of the S curve of theirs at the launch point we do break it down into an explorer and a collector phase. And, to your point, one of the things that happens when you're at the launch point is because it is so uncomfortable, we want to move off that quickly, and so we can start scurrying around, and yet if we don't take the time to explore, to collect the data of like, is this the S curve I want to be on, meaning, I've got my message straight so that I'll get what I want. That's where quarter life crises come in. That's where midlife crises come in, because we took something that wasn't actually the best fit for us just to make the uncomfortable or that discomfort of uncertainty go away. And so it takes patience to be willing to stay at the launch point as long as we need to before we move into the sweet spot.
Speaker 1:
So the way we say that is sometimes you need to slow down, to hurry up yeah, love it. And the assessments and again, this is all we're on our own as curve of where these things kind of evolve. But introducing a couple of assessments because one of the things that we find in that discovery and assessment phase is people tend to have not been that self-reflective and even to the extent they are, they tend to lack the vocabulary, and so bringing in some validated third party assessment tools that help people get clarity but also give language to their value position is a big piece of the fever breaking and unlocking people from being kind of in that, stuck and don't feel like I'm making any progress, to being able to start to take off and move on to the next and fast and fun phase.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I have a question for you. I'm wondering do you find you mentioned not aware and I think we talk a lot about being not aware of our blind spots or our weaknesses or not wanting to see them but do you also find that people aren't aware of their strengths? Not really, or if they are sort of aware of them, they have at some level rejected their strengths, and so part of the work that you do with people is getting them to identify but also own and value what they do well.
Speaker 1:
God bless you.
Speaker 1:
And yes, because we actually use Clifton strengths for that exact reason and to be able to identify what their strengths are, because a lot of times what we find is at least a couple of phenomenon. There's probably a few more, but is either. But that's just what I do. So I don't think it's anything special, it's just what I do. Yeah, but you're really good on the piano with me Like not everybody's good at this. You're really good at picking stocks Like not everybody's good at this, and so well, but it's just what I do.
Speaker 1:
I just go to work and that's not an uncommon thing. The more common thing is people's the way they usually say it, but I don't want to brag. I feel like I'm bragging and I don't want to brag, and so the way that we help them frame that then, is to be able to say something along the lines of you know, whitney I'm not sure if you're familiar with Clifton strength finders, and most people are, because it's got pretty high name recognition Right, I've owned through that, and one of the things that I learned about myself was you know, a big thing for me is connectedness and what that means is, and the way that's played out in my career is.
Speaker 2:
X. Oh, that's really good. Ok, so here are my five strengths. You know one of mine is we're later and so the way that this plays out in my career is X, y or Z, so they're able to give people. That's great, I love that and I bet that's a real unlock for people.
Speaker 1:
It's a huge unlock for people, because you know, when you're trying to demonstrate your value first of all to yourself again, you have to believe, you have to have the convictions in your own mind and heart of what it is that you do. That's what gives you the confidence to be able to do it in a way that's authentic, believable, without being obnoxious. And so we're going to talk about storytelling somewhere in all of this, because I want to get into that.
Speaker 1:
But when we're telling a story, think like in an interview. And you know well, at my company I was able to pick 10 of the 12 fastest growing stocks in this segment of the marketplace that I cover. That resulted in capital or market value, market cap increases of X. Ok, that's true. But that's kind of a two-dimensional way of viewing it. The third dimension is being able to bring in one of my personal qualities that I identified through CliftonStrengths was my strategic, and what that means is that I'm able to see things that are kind of loosely connected and it just sort of appears to me sooner than it tends to appear to other people. Since the stock market's a forward-looking instrument, that's a really helpful skill to have.
Speaker 2:
And so that's played out by ability to see more oh, bob, yeah. And what's great about that is you're giving people, the person, you're giving the person who's interviewing you a container to put what you've just shared with them about yourself in, and it doesn't feel like you're bragging, you're more of just identifying and sort of let's look at this thing out there and let me show this to you, and so I can say that's really I love that.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and thank you. And again, it's to your point. It's just a statement of fact. If we lived in San Diego, where the weather's pretty all the time well, you know I lived in San Diego it's like, well, no, it's 72. That's just a statement of fact, it is what it is. Yeah, and I'm not bragging about it, I'm just. You asked me what the weather was like. I told you it's 72. So we find that the ability to do the strengths and then to understand people's communication styles my own communication style and your preferred communication style are two really big unlocks to help people one know their story and then two to be able to communicate it in an empathetic way.
Speaker 2:
Are there assessments for the communication style that you're doing as well? Yeah, I know.
Speaker 1:
We've reversed the podcast interview session here. Yeah, we use. I'm curious, I'm sorry, we can keep going. No, we use disk.
Speaker 2:
Okay, got it, got it, got it Right.
Speaker 1:
And so.
Speaker 2:
So just work in communication and then Clifton for the strengths.
Speaker 1:
For the strengths, and then we kind of weave all that together with your actual accomplishments, contributions that you have made in different roles, to weave those into stories, and then you've got a portfolio of stories.
Speaker 1:
I think of it as like a playlist, and then you don't need 100 answers for 100 questions, you need about 10 or 12. And then the magic is knowing how to remix those tunes in a way that you want to hear it in a country beat, I want to hear it in a classic rock beat and somebody else wants to hear it in a hip hop beat. It's the same melody. This is being played differently, in a way that's contextualized to the opportunity and to the person that you're talking to.
Speaker 2:
Mmm, mmm. I love that. The musician in me loves that you change different beat Fantastic. It's so good.