Kay:
Hey-yo Questers coming to you with another episode of the MQ here in Black History Month. We have one of our very favorite black leaders for you today. He just happens to be a dear friend, mentor, and business partner of ours. The one and only… I’ll say it like he says it, Joseph McClendon III. Joseph tells us, “It doesn’t matter much what you say, it only matters what you believe for your beliefs drive your actions.”
Shi:
Joseph, always so full of wisdom. We love to sit at the feet of this incredible person and learn as much as we can. If you’re not familiar with Joseph McClendon, this must be one of your very first episodes with us…
Kay:
We talk about him a lot.
Shi:
He is Tony Robbins right-hand man at the Unleash the Power Within and Date with Destiny and Mastery Series. He is a key player and trainer, and he’s been that for about 30 years. Coauthored a book with Tony, Unlimited Power of Black Choice, and does so much more. He’s a neuro-psychologist. He’s an ultimate performance specialist. He’s coached Olympians and celebrities and even royalty. Truly an incredible person and when an incredible person says something this profound, it’s wise of all of us to listen and really unpack it for what it is.
Kay:
Well, I think this really boils down to that old adage that actions speak louder than words. Shi, I think you put this best when oftentimes you’ve discussed this when we’re in a fight. I’m going to pull back the curtain on you guys. Behind the sisterhood here, where you’ll say, I can’t really hear your words because your body language is screaming so loud at me right now.
Shi:
Well, that’s that action piece, that communication piece. We all have had encounters with people throughout our lives that say one thing and do another. When they do another thing, what that really tells us is that their beliefs are really driving those actions, that their beliefs are not congruent with what they say. Now, speaking something into existence is important but if it’s not congruent with what you truly believe inside, then you’re going to get incongruent results. Ultimately your subconscious will bring you right back to what you really identify at your core.
Kay:
In the book, “Blink” written by Malcolm Gladwell he talks about a very interesting experiment that was done where people would sit down for an individual for a full hour over lunch and share lunch with an individual and afterward they would take a test and say how much they know that individual based off of the one hour that they sat down at the lunch. Now, he took the same people and the same people who sat down at lunch and he said, “Okay, now we’re going to take 15 minutes.” I actually think it was even only five minutes that they had them then walked through the person’s living space, their home, their apartment, wherever it was.
It turns out that you can find out more about someone, you can know someone better by spending just five minutes in their living space than you can from a one hour shared meal with them face to face. Because what we do inside our living space is a culmination of the actions that we take on a daily basis. So, whether it’s messy or neat or organized or clean, the design preferences, all of that stuff can tell us a lot more than just sitting down with somebody because those actions speak so much louder than the words.
Shi:
Fascinating. So interesting. The other piece of this quote here is that beliefs portion and beliefs are really something that you hold such a strong conviction for that you know it to be true for you and yourself. Now, we all have the belief that gravity works, but whether or not we believe it, it’s a law and it’s there in place. Human nature happens to be far more nuanced than that and so this is where beliefs become subjective and disagreed upon. It can be a lot harder to weed out something that is maybe disbelief or a belief that doesn’t serve us, as Joseph likes to say, “A non-empowering belief or un-resourceful belief.” When we really do that, when our actions demonstrate that we have an un-resourceful belief, that’s an opportunity for us to come forward and examine that so that we could do better with our actions.
Kay:
Exactly. So, wherever there are actions in your life that may scratch up against how you really want to be behaving, or maybe you find sometimes that words come out of your mouth, that doesn’t match up with actions that you actually take. I know this really hit Shila and me probably about three years ago now. If you’ve been a podcast listener of ours for a while, you’ve heard a lot of our transformation emotionally, spiritually, professionally in these last few years. But one of these things was finding that we were teaching our people how to be loving, teaching our associates how to be kind. We found areas in our own life where we weren’t employing those strategies and we were able to allow our actions to then align with our words in retrospect because we had the awareness that if we have places in our life where the actions and the words weren’t matching, that we needed to do a gut check and either figure out which one of those needed to change. So, as a reminder, Joseph McClendon III tells us, “It doesn’t matter much what you say, it only matters what you believe for your beliefs drive your actions.”
Shi:
Alright, we are going to do a #ThoughtfulThursday Quest today. Take 10 minutes to think about the beliefs you have and write them down. Remember, as our dear friend, Joseph says, “As I write, so I invite.” So, invite some new beliefs into your realm today. Out of all the beliefs that you write down, take the time to observe and rank them. Put a little number on the left-hand side, which of your beliefs empower or are resourceful for the actions towards becoming your best self and which ones are disempowering or un-resourceful that maybe could use some altercations. Are you ready?
Kay & Shi:
Let’s quest!
