How to THRIVE by Turning Uncertainty to Competitive Advantage – In Just 7 Minutes with Meridith Elliot Powell

Resources/Links:

• Are you standing in the way of your success? Check The Thrive Indicator Quiz. Click here: https://meridithelliottpowell.com/wintquiz/

Summary

Have you thought of channeling your stress and anxiety into something productive?

How do you turn uncertainty that keeps you up at night into something that will make you sleep?

Are you ready to learn the strategies to make decisions during uncertain times based on your core values?

Meridith Elliott Powell was voted one Of the Top 15 Business Growth Experts to Watch, Top 41 Motivational Sales Speakers. She is passionate about helping her clients learn the secrets to turn uncertainty into a competitive advantage.

In this episode, Meredith shares how you can get unstuck, take action, and move forward in the face of uncertainty. She also talks about how you can now make use of your existing resources to get ready for any change that would take place.

Check out these episode highlights:

• 01:42 – Meridith’s ideal Client: My ideal clients are CEOs or C-suite professionals doing well looking to take their business to the next level.
• 01:50 – The problem she helps solve: One of the top three issues keeping CEOs and C-suite professionals up at night is uncertainty and change. And I help them turn that from something that keeps them up at night to something that helps them sleep.
• 02:56 – The symptoms of the problem that her clients experience: There are a couple of things, either they’re doing incredibly well, and they’re waiting for the ball to drop, they’re worried about when this shift is going to come that’s going to impact them negatively. Or if they have the flip, they’re really struggling, they’re right in the middle of uncertainty, and they don’t know what to do.
• 03:55 – Mistakes clients commit before seeing her: Number one, they ignore it. They wait for it to show up. The funny thing is that I think about uncertainty and changes; we know it’s coming. If you know changes are coming, why don’t you prepare for it? The second is they don’t get their teams ready for change.
• 04:50 – Meridith’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): It’s strategy number two, condition yourself for change.
• 05:43 – Meridith’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): Check out the Thrive Indicator Quiz, click here: valuespeaker.com
• 06:39 – Q: What is the most important and most shocking strategy that I have found out when researching and studying these companies that have been around and been through tragedies? A: Every company I researched for over 250 years has been making decisions the exact same way. They have been making decisions according to their core values. If that aligns with their core values, it’s the right decision for them. If it didn’t, they let it go.

Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode:

“Core values are powerful.” -Meredith Elliott Powell Click To Tweet

Transcript
(Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)

Tom Poland 00:10
Greetings everyone! And a very warm welcome to another edition of Marketing The Invisible. My name is Tom Poland beaming out to you from the sunny sunshine coast of Australia, joined today by Meredith Elliot Powell. Meredith, welcome back! It’s been five years since we met. How have you been?

Meridith Elliot Powell 0:26
It’s been an interesting five years, what do you say?

Tom Poland 0:29
I would say the last couple of years have been especially interesting, pandemics and elections and different bits and pieces…

Meridith Elliot Powell 0:36
Lockdowns and all those great things. Yeah.

Tom Poland 0:39
But it looks like you’re in the great outdoors there, right?

Meridith Elliot Powell 0:41
That is sort of, I live in Asheville, North Carolina, and I literally live in a log cabin.

Tom Poland 0:47
Yeah, it looks like it with your English set of dogs.

Meridith Elliot Powell 0:56
I’m trying to keep him out of this interview. So, I apologize if he appears.

Tom Poland 1:00
Not at all. Let’s celebrate diversity, including species.

Meridith Elliot Powell 1:03
Good.

Tom Poland 1:04
So, for those of you who don’t know Meredith, she has been voted one of the top 15 Business Growth Experts to watch, Top 41 Motivational Sales Speakers. She’s also incredibly passionate about helping her clients learn the kind of the…, if you like the-secrets-of-the-top-tips take answered, which often comes with anxiety and to channel that energy into competitive advantage. So, that brings up quite nicely to the title of this interview, which is how to thrive by turning uncertainty which we all live with almost every day, to over the last few years to competitive advantage. Meredith, your time starts now. Question number one is, who is your ideal client,

Meridith Elliot Powell 1:41
My ideal clients are CEOs or C-suite professionals doing well looking to take their business to the next level.

Tom Poland 1:49
Thank you for that. So, question two, what’s the big problem you solve? I guess it’s this whole thing around uncertainty. Can you elaborate a bit on that?

Meridith Elliot Powell 1:58
Yeah, absolutely. One of the top three issues keeping CEOs and C-suite professionals up at night is uncertainty and change. And I help them turn that from something that keeps them up at night to something that helps them sleep because they have a strategy; they have a plan to not only navigate it themselves but also help their teams navigate it successfully.

Tom Poland 2:19
Thank you for that. So, it’s a lot more than you mentioned, sleeping well at night, which is important, because that gives us the energy to have a productive day and be a nice person with family and friends. But you added a little bit there as well, which is around not just alleviating stress or anxiety or uncertainty but actually channeling that. And that’s what we’re going to explore a bit more focus on, turning that into something that’s a positive force. So, tell us about the symptoms. You’ve got these leaders and organizations, the C-suite execs and so on. What’s going on in their business or their life that they would think, yeah, I need to listen up to this.

Meridith Elliot Powell 2:56
Yeah, and it’s such a good question because there are a couple of things, either they’re doing incredibly well and they’re waiting for the ball to drop, they’re worried about when this shift is going to come that’s going to negatively impact them, or they’re having the flip, they’re really struggling, they’re right in the middle of uncertainty, and they don’t know what to do. It’s really fascinating. I studied what happened to people in the middle of the pandemic; 75% of the people I interviewed got stuck. They wanted to take action; they wanted to do something, they wanted to move forward, that they didn’t know how. I wanted to solve that problem. So, that’s why we wrote the proven formula of what you need to do. We took the guesswork out of how to navigate uncertainty.

Tom Poland 3:36
Alright, and we will then come to some of the real oil on that in a moment, folks. So, question four is, I want to explore the common mistakes that these leaders make when they do have uncertainty. So that’s question four. They’re ambitious people. They want to deal with that. What are they doing that actually turns out to be a mistake in hindsight? Four and a half minutes left.

Meridith Elliot Powell 3:55
Number one, they ignore it. They wait for it to show up. The funny thing I think about uncertainty and changes, we know it’s coming. So, if you know changes coming, why don’t you prepare for it? The second is they don’t get their teams ready for change. We make change something that we dictate to people. What people want in the middle of uncertainty is they want control, the one thing they can’t have. So, we built strategies that help leaders proactively deal with change, and then help their teams feel empowered by change, rather than disempowered by change.

Tom Poland 4:29
And what I love about that is you’ve got a process, a proven path that people can follow, step one, step two, step three. Let’s look at one of those steps. Question five, three and a half minutes left and top tip, one action that some of these leaders could take, it’s not going to solve the whole problem. They might need you for that, but it might take them a step in the right direction.

Meridith Elliot Powell 4:50
Yeah, it’s strategy number two, condition yourself for change. There’s a great term from the US military called Embrace the Suck. Is it the realist or the pessimist that survive challenging times? It’s the realist that does. And we use a tool called Skeptic, where you look outside of your business to see the change coming in society, competition, economics, politics, technology, industry customers. By simply doing an external brainstorm, you can start to examine the shifts coming in the marketplace and ask yourself, what shifts do we need to be paying attention to now while you have resources and time to prepare.

Tom Poland 5:29
Right? Perfect. Thank you. So, question number six. And we’ve got three minutes left; I want to talk about somewhere people can go to get more about this, they can find out more, a free resource would be great. What have you got?

Meridith Elliot Powell 5:43
Yeah, well, number one, if you go to my website, valuespeaker.com, just valuespeaker.com/quiz, you’re going to take the Thrive Indicator Quiz, you’re going to see where you fall on the scale of uncertainty. And in that, you’re going to get the nine-step proven formula; you’re going to get step-by-step exactly what you need to do to thrive in an uncertain marketplace. My website is full of free tools and resources. I even did nine videos on the nine steps.

Tom Poland 6:12
Fantastic. So, what’s the website again, please?

Meridith Elliot Powell 6:15
It is valuespeaker.com. It is just the words, valuespeaker.com. You will find everything there.

Tom Poland 6:22
Value speaker.com. Thank you very much. And folks, look, do look for the quiz, because that’s going to give you a really good blueprint, not only where you’re at, but we need to get to and how you need to get there. Question number seven, we’ve got 95 seconds left. Meridith, what’s the one question I should have asked you but didn’t?

Meridith Elliot Powell 6:39
What is the most important and most shocking strategy that I have found out when doing the research and studying these companies that have been around and been through tragedies? The one that blew me away was the one I never saw coming is the biggest challenge you have in the face of uncertainty is how to make a decision. When you have no idea what the future holds, positive or negative, how do you know what top technology to invest in, whether to expand, whether to pull back, whether to do whatever? Every company I researched for over 250 years has been making decisions the exact same way. They have been making decisions according to their core values. If that aligns with their core values, it’s the right decision for them. If it didn’t, they let it go. Core values are powerful. They’re like a North Star that will carry you through any challenge, obstacle, or opportunity that you are facing, and they will carry you through it beautifully. I’m so obsessed with this, Tom, that I’m writing my next book about the power of core values as it relates to uncertainty.

Tom Poland 7:39
So, when you say that, it sounds easy. But when people make decisions based on core values, there’s often a big sacrifice they need to make. You know, we are just exiting Facebook because we do not believe their values are aligned with our core values. And that’s not a judgment of Facebook. It’s just there’s no alignment there. But there’s a cost to that. So, it’s fascinating. And I’ve heard similar reports before from massive research papers fascinating to me that something like core values can actually be like a beacon or a light that leads us to continue growth. Meridith, thank you so much for your time and your insights. It’s been a pleasure again.

Meridith Elliot Powell 8:14
Thank you. I really, really enjoyed it. Really appreciate the time.

Tom Poland 8:17
Cheers.

Tom Poland 08:18
Thanks for checking out our Marketing The Invisible podcast. If you like what we’re doing here please head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave us a review. It’s very much appreciated. And if you want to generate five fresh leads in just five hours then check out www.fivehourchallenge.com.