Speaking and Communicating Podcast

People were complimenting one another, just being kind to one another all day long. And then at the end of the day, the teacher said, class, how do you feel about doing that? And the class was just perfect. They were just trying to be angels. Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host, Roberta Ndlela. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.
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Communication and soft skills are crucial in your career growth and leadership development. Whether you're about to speak in public, make presentations at work, pitch to investors or an entrepreneur looking to showcase your innovation to a wider audience, you'd be glad you joined us. By the end of this episode, log on to Apple and Spotify.
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Leave us a rating and a review and what you'd like for us to discuss on this podcast. Let's get communicating.
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In this episode, we will be talking to Paul Zolman, hailing all the way from Utah, who is the founder of Role of Love. If you have heard of the five love languages, in fact, if you haven't heard of them, you might be living under a rock, because everybody nowadays talks about the five love languages, every relationship discusses the five love languages. However, Paul is here to talk to us about
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his way of helping us practice the five love languages. He founded the role of love and the easy way to purposefully love every day. And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show. Hi, Paul. Hi, Roberta. Thank you for welcoming me to the show. Nice introduction. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you. You helped me put it together. So thank you. Welcome. And before we get into it, please introduce yourself.
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So I want to just kind of give you a 30,000 foot overview of just my life in a nutshell, introduce myself in that way. But I want to start way back at my grandfather. I had a grandfather that was back in the late 1800s, had lived in Indiana and he had nine children. After that ninth child was born, his wife passed away and he was so distraught that he decided to sell the farm
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relocate, sell all the equipment, everything. When they had the auction, he would say, and people would buy things, he'd say, would you like this child? And would you like this child? And would you like this child until all the children were given away except for one? So he took Benjamin with him, moved to Montana, married my grandmother, and had 10 more children, of which my father was number
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his grandfather passed away. So here you have 19 children that have abandonment issues. Regardless how it came to be, they've got abandonment issues. My father was born in 1922. So when he was 10 years old, it was 1932. The heat of the Great Depression. And so there's not only the abandonment issues, you've got economic issues, you've got financial problems, you've got all these problems.
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And those type of problems just kind of put a sad face on you or could create an angry disposition. My father couldn't continue to go to school. He graduated from eighth grade. So he became a truck driver. And so I was born there in Glendive, Montana, and he decided he was gonna move. So we moved to central Montana, Great Falls, Montana, and that's where I grew up. But growing up in a family like that, it was still pretty rough.
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I remember one time that, you know, my father probably wanted to be better than what he remembered his father being. But I remember just him being rough with me at times. And I'm a sandwich in between two girls. And so if I did anything to offend those two girls, I was in big trouble. He treated women very, very nicely. He treated my mother like she was a queen, took her out on a date every Friday night, every Friday night.
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did not ever miss. And I really appreciate, I love that example of my father. But the venue was the Maverick Bar. It was over alcohol. And my mother would disgorge how her week went. And he'd say how his week went. And if it was favorable for the children, it would be happy, happy weekend. But if it wasn't, we'd get the belt or we get spankings or we get something for what we've done.
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way earlier in the week, there was no connection of what we did to the punishment. So one time, I remember being black and blue for more than three weeks. I absolutely don't remember anything what I did to deserve to be black and blue for three weeks. It was just a hard situation. Abuse like that happened regularly. You could almost count on it. I learned to dread the weekends. You know how everybody looks forward to the weekend?
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We all do. Actually, we started on Friday. Yeah, yeah. On Friday, you're starting to celebrate because the weekends coming wasn't like that in my family, just because we didn't know how what how the severity of the punishment for what we had done during the week, how that was going to play out. So at age 17, I move out, just finished my junior year of high school, I move in with my brother who lives down in Salt Lake City, Utah, actually. And he
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got transferred with his job shortly thereafter to California. So I spent my senior year on the road, six months in Utah and then the last part in California. California schools were pretty far behind what Montana schools were. Utah was a little bit behind Montana, but California's way behind. And so all I did was just test out, took my GED, and then I worked for a while and then went to Japan for a couple of years. After all this, I still...
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had what I would call residual anger from that upbringing. And Roberto, the easiest way to explain that is that I would look at someone and it might annoy me. Something that they were done or something they were doing might annoy me. I would have that annoyance and then I'd find another annoyance and then it's another annoyance, another annoyance, I'd be stacking these annoyances until I flashed. Then I became angry and then it'd be back down to square one.
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get annoyed, annoyed, annoyed, annoyed, and then flash. And so that was kind of the pattern that I had and I didn't notice that pattern for a very long time. In fact, at age 35, I still was blaming my father for all failed relationships, everything that socially or emotionally or anything like that that went wrong in my life. And I realized that as long as I got somebody to blame, I don't have to change. And then I realized...
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Oh, my father's been dead for seven years at age 35, and I'm still blaming him. It was a wake up call. So I thought, I gotta take responsibility for my life. So a while after that, I thought I was doing a lot better, a lot better, a lot better than one day as a family, we're reading scriptures. And my three-year-old's in my wife's lap and his hands are flailing like this, and all of a sudden he flips off and knocks her glasses.
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So they go flying onto the floor. Yeah. I just got upset. I slapped him. I felt so bad about just slapping that three-year-old that on my way to work, I called and reported myself to Department of Family Services. Well, nobody was there. It was early in the morning. Nobody was there on my way to work. So I left a message. From that message, I didn't hear anything, but I heard from my wife. She said,
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the human services came by, you can't come home, you can't see the children, you can't this and that. And so it was basically, I was at work, I was barred from my home and I couldn't do anything about it. They charged me with child abuse. They sentenced me, I pled guilty because I hit the child. I slapped him because of the behavior and then I removed him from the room. They charged me with the child abuse. They sentenced me 18 months probation and then
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Also anger management. Go to these anger management classes. I still have to travel 40 miles one way to the anger management class. I lived in a small town and then I have to pay for the class a full year. In this anger management class are guys that did not volunteer what they did like I did. They got caught. They absolutely got caught. So one guy I remember he had held his wife or his girlfriend up with her neck.
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her feet off the ground against the wall until she passed out. And then another guy just beat his wife severely and that she had a lot of problems with beating and a lot of injuries from that. Those were the guys I was in this class with. But I tried to put on my blinders all about that. I was in that class because they said this was the help that they were giving me. So I focused quite a bit on this.
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and they bring out this wheel of abuse. There's 13 or 14 different types of abuse and within those each category, they had examples of what that type of abuse would be. I realized that that time that I'd been trained in as a child, trained in several of those examples, maybe five or six different types of abuse that I've been trained in as a child, I thought I did not know that was abuse. I didn't know what I didn't know.
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And so once I realized it was abuse, then I had an opportunity to think, well, what would be the opposite of that? Just for example, and not saying this this wasn't on the abuse chart, but just for an example, take sarcasm sarcasm. You know, is it on the naughty side of the stick or is it on the nice side of the stick? Where does it fall on the spectrum? I would categorize kind of on the naughty side. It's funny sometimes sarcasm.
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can be funny, but sometimes it can be mean. Sometimes it can be demeaning. And so definitely not on the nice side. Listen, some people like it. So we're not judging it as such, but, and there's a spectrum to it as well, but it falls on this side of the spectrum for sure. That's exactly what I was going to, is that it taught me the spectrum. If I could figure out what the opposite was, then I'd understand the bad side of the spectrum.
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and the good side of the spectrum, and then be able to move and find out where did I fall on that spectrum? That's what was valuable about the anger management for me. I realized that, oh, I'm on this little naughty side of the spectrum in these areas. What's the opposite and where do I need to go? This actually ruined my marriage, my first marriage. The whole thing, the anger and the just flashes and that sort of thing was ruining my marriage. And so after 23 and a half years,
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my wife and I divorced. We had eight children ourselves. Just didn't work out. I was single and I was having this midlife crisis. I had the children. So when it was her weekend to have the children, I would go on what I call destination dates. I was living in Charleston, South Carolina at the time. And so I'd go to Daytona Beach or go to Jacksonville or go to Atlanta, Charlotte, North Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, New York City, Nashville.
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Kansas City, Phoenix, South Lake Arizona, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, and Cabo San Lucas. I went to all those places and had a date. Just, I called it destination dating. So when you go on a date, you have a great time, and it was just a lot of traveling. It was fun. I spent more than $10,000 doing that, but I just did not find love.
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wasn't exactly what I was looking for. So you can go look for love in all the wrong places. I'm about to ask, is there a particular reason you targeted doing this destination dating? Because a lot of the time, especially with dating apps, it's your local area. It sounds like you went literally throughout the US map. Is there a particular reason you chose that strategy for your dating options? It was a qualification type of thing that I was doing. And so I had my own
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choose somebody and I thought it was a great program that I had. You know, I thought it was King of the Hill because I developed this way that I would screen out people and really all the dates were really good dates. The development of a relationship wasn't present. I mean the dates were great. It was safe. Everything was perfect because of the criteria that I set up the filter that I'd set up for this whole dating experience. But just.
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was not developing relationships. So after all this, I ended up in Phoenix. I thought that the one that, person I was dating in Phoenix would be more interested. Soon as I moved there, it was over. It was just- Sorry. It wasn't working out. So stayed in Phoenix for about a year and a half. And my sister, we would have family reunion or something. She thought I was lonely. And so she decided, I'm gonna introduce you to my neighbor, kind of has a nice disposition.
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So we did the introduction, we started corresponding. I was just really not interested. I'd done the destination dating. I was in Phoenix, she was in St. George, Utah area and seven hour difference, did not wanna do destination dating again. Just did not work out. So I said, no, I don't think so. But she's a big sister and she said, oh, come on. And you gotta do what big sister says. So that's what I did. So after about four or five months, we developed a really good relationship.
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really good fact that we were thinking about marriage and I thought I want to introduce her to big brother. So we went north to visit with big brother. First thing that happened when I took her in is my sister-in-law pulled her aside and said, the only emotion that the Zollman family learned growing up is anger. At first I denied it, then it made me mad. Why would she say that? I mean, I understand she had been in the family for well, but why would that be the first thing she says to someone new?
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trained to come into the family. Exactly. And that's what's making me mad. And maybe I had been justified in being mad, but the whole idea that she said that we learned anger, and then I became mad, I connected those two right at that moment. Like I'd never connected it ever before. I thought, huh, she nailed it. I'm still kind of angry from, I've got residual anger from that childhood. And I thought,
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You know, if that's true and it was, I've got a perfect opportunity to change the whole feeling of the Zollman family, the whole way of people think about the Zollman family and to parlay something that would be more appropriate, more of a loving type thing. So I started reading the color codes, started learning about how people find out what their personality is so they can love a little bit more appropriately. That didn't connect so much with me. So I started reading the
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five love languages. I read the book four or five times. I'm telling you, Roberta, I did not get it. I did not. Seriously, Paul, everybody talks about it. Everybody talks about it. In every discussion, friendship, relationship, family. My long blog I just give just like it. Well, just as you said in the introduction, if you don't know the five love languages, you've been hiding under a rock. Where you been? Literally.
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And it's just that type of thing. But I didn't know them before that time. Even after reading the books four or five times, I could not spit out what the five love language, what they were. Okay. Let me ask you this, Paul, because it's just a list of five. And obviously there's more to it with each of the five. Are you saying you just didn't say, oh, I love words of affirmation if you meet someone, or is it the deeper meaning of what they mean in practical day to day terms?
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if you're with someone and you help them understand that you love words of affirmation. Roberta, let me answer your question and explain it this way. If you were just suddenly placed in China and you were trying to speak Chinese, you're not going to understand anything. No matter if they are succinct, they say the words precisely as the word is supposed to be said. Slowly, even if it's slow and you're still in China.
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I grew up in an angry home, remember? I know the angry language. So the angry language has its own vocabulary. It has its own humor. It's a culture all by itself. Are you saying the reason you read it four or five times and it didn't make sense is because your family background, you did not recognize what Dr. Gary Chapman was talking about. Exactly. Ah.
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Because I'm just thinking of the five, listen, a lot of us will read it once and we recite the five like a poem and you just tell the person which one is the number one. So you are literally saying it did not stick because of where you came from. I get it. I couldn't recognize that as love. You know, I just didn't, I didn't see it. I didn't get it. And it was just very difficult for me. I'm a bad guesser, Roberta.
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That love language is, well, I'm supposed to guess what that person's love language is and then cater to that. No, you just ask them. This is how best dates sometimes. I don't know. But it sounds like that's how they usually go. You're like, so, you know, you talk about all the other stuff and then you go, what's your number one love language? And then you tell the person, oh, I like acts of service. So if this relationship lasts, you know, I would want you to take that. If you take out the trash, it's an act of service. If you.
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are exactly and then you ask them so now you know but here's the thing then the other love languages that were not mentioned so i mentioned my top one he mentions is top one it sounds to me like some things are intertwined the other three are not mentioned does that mean i now how understand how this person loves and how i'm supposed to love him so reberta i didn't understand the direction
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Or was it about them? And if it's about me, why would it be about me? Do I only see love coming my way? That didn't make any sense to me at all. And then if it's only about them, well, how do I get love? I mean, so in reality, I saw it as, well, there must be 10 love languages really, because it's what you send out. If you send out five love languages, then you should be able to receive five love languages. So there'd be...
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It's directional and the directions just mixed me up. I realized I don't have any control of what people send my way. Absolutely zero control. That is true, yes. I can't bid love to come my way. And so when I did the destination dating, you're looking for love, but you're looking for it to come your way. That didn't make any sense. Hence you tell the other person, oh, my name is Paul Zollman and my...
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top love language is ex-of-service or let's say it's gifts. So the next time I fly to Kentucky, you must have a gift for me. That's right. So hello, Roberta. My name is Paul Zollman. I like touch. When can we make an appointment? Oh, if you fly across the country, Paul, that's gonna be- It's just awkward. If you take the survey, hello, I'm gifts. Roberta, what do you have for me today? I mean, it's not about me. And I realized that.
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So I thought, you know what, I'm going to get a hold of Dr. Chapman and tell him my frustration a little bit. And I did. And I asked him, are you licensing those icons? Because I had a different idea. He said no, sent a letter back. And so I contacted my own attorney here in town. He's an intellectual property attorney that does copyrights, trademarks, that sort of thing. And he said that theory is not copyrightable. Application is.
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So I decided I'm gonna make my own icons and then I'm gonna make it a game. So what I did is I put the icons, I made it, put the icons on a die. Here you see service. Is that service? Those are the words. Words of affirmation, uh-huh. That's time, that's an hourglass. Gifts. And yes, physical touch. And then touch. Two hands touching, yes. Five love language, six sides on the dice. This one surprised me.
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So there's just two instructions. You roll the dice every day. That's the love language you give away all day that day. So I found- Give away meaning if you meet someone, you try to practice that? You're watching for the opportunity. It's not like you're forcing yourself on them. No, okay. So you're watching for opportunities to love. And so what I found Roberta, after rolling this for 30 days,
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It changed my mindset that I was focused on what's right about that person. What can I love about that person? No longer did I have that annoyance stacked on annoyance, stacked on annoyance. And then the flash, I didn't have that anymore. I didn't even have that disposition to do that because I was focused on what's right about people. When you focus what's wrong about people, then you become annoyed. Then you become more critical. Then you become more judgmental.
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wasn't even going there. I was focusing on what can I love about that person? And it changed my whole mindset. That whole focus now is how can I light that person up? What is there that is wonderful about that person that maybe they don't even know that I recognize it, I can see it and light them up, make their day. It's like that, go ahead and make my day. Go ahead, make my day. Clean the Clint Eastwood maybe. Go ahead and make my day.
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But it's actually doing it in a positive way. That when you are helping people, uplifting them, or making their day for them, just having a positive moment in their day, they feel great, you feel great. They're gonna pass that around. They're gonna pass that on. In the contrast, if you send anger out and make their day a bad day, they're gonna also pass that bad day on. It's like the lunch line when you're a kid.
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They punch you in the shoulder and say, pass it on, pass it on. You're stopping that, but only you're passing on good. You're passing on love. That's a direction that you have control over. You don't have it control over it coming your way. When it does come your way though, after you've practiced giving away these five love languages, when it does come your way, you can recognize it. Most people can only recognize their primary love language because that's what they like.
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but they can say, oh, that's not my primary love language, but I see their loving on me and they can respond. It sounds amazing and life-changing Paul, but I'm about to ask you, cause we did mention earlier that you also want to know what comes back to you. So when you roll the dice, you're looking for opportunities to practice it, to give it. You no longer ask the question on, what are they giving me back? No, you're giving it.
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without any regard for that, Roberta, and that's true love. You're giving it without any expectation and you've got to do it that way. Because if you give it with expectation, as Dr. Chapman would say, if I'm physical touch and I give you physical touch, I'm expecting physical touch back. That's a transaction. But it's not my physical touch is not my top one. It comes to transaction is all I'm trying to say. Transactions are not love. It's- Just say that again.
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Transactions are not love. They really are not love. It's a transaction and it's almost like a business and it's almost objectifying. It's just not love. So you send the love out without any regard of any expectation of it coming back. But by doing that gives you the eyes. You have the eyes, you have the vision, you have the peripheral vision to see all flavors of love coming back to you, even if it's not your primary love.
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You can see it and you can respond appropriately. So be open to other forms of love other than, oh no, my number one is ex-observer. So anything else, it's almost like I'm deaf to it. I feel like, or blind to it, because I feel like with everybody just mentioning their top love language, it's almost like we are now training ourselves to be blind to everything else. My optic, right. Absolutely.
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It's different. And that was not the purpose of the book, at least from my understanding. It sounded to me like Dr. Chapman was helping us understand each other and communicate to each other that especially when you're in a relationship in a marriage before the book, we used to call it, hey, Paul, this is important to me. When you do this, it lights me up. When you do that, it hurts my feelings. And then you work through that. So we didn't have these five labels for each thing that you do exactly with your partner.
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So I don't know whether the positive impact it was supposed to have. We now having the opposite effect because we now focusing on, I told you I'm edge of service, why aren't you? You know what I mean? It's that whiny voice you're trying to avoid Roberta. And that's totally unintended. Well, I told you why, how to love me, why aren't you doing it? And it's just, you gotta get rid of that whiny voice. It comes unabated. When you're sending it out,
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it'll come back. It's almost like putting it into a piggy bank is how I like to describe it. Because you know that you've got that it's an investment you're making. It's going to come back. It's a boomerang, but it just takes a little longer to come back. We're talking about this spectrum contrast that with anger. You send anger out. Guess what you got immediate return on your investment. They're gonna be angry right back. Most people, some people are calmer and they'll they'll say, well, that's funny that you say that, you know, I'm not going to get angry
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They'll be as you say, I'm not going to participate. Exactly. And they're not participating. And then you've got a communication problem and they still got the problem. And so it's just better not to send anger up because it's coming right back to you or it'll come back in a different form. You want love to come back. So you've got to send it out. And no longer is it about you or me about what we want. It's about them. That's about lighting them and just starting that fire. I like to call people that follow this pattern.
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love starters, because if you had a group of dice like this and you put them on a table at a wedding instead of chocolates, put them on a table at the wedding at a loving event, you're exporting love. They're taking that dice home. They're going to roll the dice and then they're going to spread that to their circles of influence from that loving event. They eat the chocolate. The next day they're gained a pound. They're going to say, where in the heck do I get that extra?
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Oh, I want to run it off. Oh, and all of a sudden the wedding things, you know, they're looking down on weddings because they have the food, export the love. It's a, it's a better choice. And then I remember in one of your videos, you had a teacher who uses this in their classroom. I mean, we don't have to discuss how much some of the teachers are having trouble with children's behavior.
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but can you share that story with us, please? Absolutely. So this teacher thought that she'd start rolling the die at the beginning of the class day. And she said, class, this is what we're rolling. And it was, I believe it was words. People were complimenting one another, just being kind to one another all day long. And then at the end of the day, the teacher said, class, how do you feel about doing that type of thing? And the class was just perfect. They were just trying to be angels.
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as they are in the younger grades, I believe she was teaching third grade. They're angels and they just wanted to do whatever would help that person light up, whatever would uplift that person with words. They were just being kind all day long. Just think of this though, if they took the two seconds at the beginning of the day, even if it took a full minute to explain what they're doing that day for behavior, they take that minute at the beginning of the day,
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investment of time is going to bring huge returns. Everybody likes to make an investment where they put a tiny bit in, they get a huge amount back. This is one of those things they put a little bit in, they get a lot back and it works just for the relationship portion. Couple that with the reporting part of it. So I put together a journal, it's called the role of love journal. Inside the
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what you rolled, what opportunities you saw to love in that way, and then what you did about those opportunities. So at the end of the day, if the school in the classroom, and imagine this work best in K through six, just because they, you know, they're together all day long. So there's that reporting. They're with them at the beginning of the day, they're with them at the end of the day. So the child is thinking how they're going to love all day long.
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they've got this on the mind. And the way you keep it on the mind is make it a memory hook. A picture is a memory hook. If I send it to you, Roberta, that word elephant, you're not seeing in your mind, E-L-E-P-H-A-N-T. Not the swelling, immediately the picture. Yeah, you're seeing the picture. So that's why there's no words on this at all. It's supposed to be a memory hook, something that you'll remember all day long. The child then becomes responsible for themselves for their own behavior.
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they have to report it at the end of the day. They're gonna behave a lot better. I believe that this will tamp down a lot of the misbehavior that goes on in the classrooms across the nation. But we gotta start with them early. And if you train them early, then it's gonna be better. Hopefully they'll hold on to that good thing that they learned at school, that good behavior. I think that's a classic demonstration of the power of love, like you said.
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Small investment, but big returns. But if you love just a little bit, and here's the other thing about love. If you show an act of love, even if it's small, have you noticed how someone will remind you Paul, 20 years later that you did something kind for them and you have forgotten? Yeah, that's right. Oh, I've had that happen a lot. It's so easy to forget. And you thought that was kind? I didn't even.
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Think about it. It was just something I did. I had someone, we were in high school together. She found me on Facebook. She detailed the incident, went forward. How do you even after all these decades remember that? Because a little act of love, a little act of kindness, it's got huge returns. Absolutely. And that's the power of it.
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And the other thing I find is that in this generation of technology and social media and all that the kids are exposed to, I mean, YouTube is on all the time. This is not something they hear about more often, no? No, no, they don't hear about it very often. In fact, the media kind of dominates showing the negative part of life. And it's unfortunate because I think there's a whole lot of positive things going on. Roberta, I like to compare it to a magnifying glass.
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What a magnifying glass does is just make things bigger. Whatever you want to magnify, that's what you want to be bigger. So why would I look at Roberta's faults? Why would I want that to be bigger in my life? Why would I even enlarge that? Because guess what? That's another boomerang. If I'm critical of you, that's gonna come back to me. But on the contrast, if I'm loving of you, focus on those things that are good about Roberta or whoever.
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focus on those good things, that's going to enlarge. That person is going to say, oh, I didn't even recognize that myself that I was like that. That's one of those acts of kindness you're talking about. They'll remember that act of kindness of just recognizing something that's good about them. They'll remember it 20 years, 30 years from now. They'll repeat that. You want that legacy of love. That's how you want to be remembered. Instead of me being remembered being from an angry family,
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This is the way to change the tide, send the love up. Changing the Zollman legacy for sure. And then you call those who practice the role of love and the dice, you call them love starters. Why do you think we wait for the other person to be the love starter and we just sit and we say, you're gonna love me first, then I love you back. You're gonna be very lonely. You're gonna- It's not what I want, but-
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That's what we do sort of. It's absolutely what we do. No, no, you go first. No, you go first. Then I love you back once to show me that you love me first. We do this thing all the time. Absolutely. So there's nothing embarrassing about sending out love first. In fact, it's a whole lot better thing to do it, to send it out first and send it out all the time. Make that be the person that you are. That's what defines you. He reached out first. He did it or she did it. They did it first.
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have that define you rather than anything else. Don't be waiting for it. Then it sounds transactional, as you mentioned earlier, that, oh no, I'm waiting for them to do it first because then I'll invest when they've showed that they've invested and you keep playing this zigzag game. And that's why there's so much of a breakdown in relationships. What have you found with people that you've spread this to? So we've talked about the classroom, what about grownups?
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What changes have they realized in their lives doing this? So just like me, I created this when I was single. And it's interesting that it happened while I was single, because all of Dr. Chapman's book is about your significant other. I realized that if people only practice love to their significant other, it's a part time job. You're not around your significant other all day long. Right. So I go to work and I come back at work. I forgot about loving.
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And then I come back, oh, I'm still in work mode. I'm not loving yet. And then, oh, oh yeah, I'm loving now. You forget what job you're at. Avoid all that confusion. Do it consistently. And this is something that consistently will bring joy to you. You're rewarded now. You'll see them light up. You're rewarded when you make someone's day. You're rewarded right then. And you'll be rewarded down the road.
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and over and over and over. They'll recall that thing that happened 20 years ago, that kindness you sent out 20 years ago. You're stacking it up and you're just doing that without any expectation, but those are bonuses that are coming back and it will continue like that. Just focus on sending it out and it'll come to you. Gotta trust the process, absolutely trust it. What if someone is listening and they think, let's take words of information for instance, and they think,
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But Paul, disappointments happen. And you know, especially when you try to be kind and the person rejects the kind act, you are afraid to try it again. So if I give this person a compliment, they won't accept it or they'll say, no, that's not me. You know how some people are not very receptive to compliment because they don't believe that about themselves. So if anyone is listening and wondering if I'm supposed to practice this, should I be careful or think...
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What if they reject my compliment, my act of service? If they do, then find someone else that will accept it. It's just, and there's just so many people out there, so many people that are ready for love, so many people that are starving for love, that find someone that will accept it, and then that person will come around. They'll come around and maybe on a day that if words doesn't turn them on, if words doesn't light them up,
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then maybe it's gifts or maybe it's service. Something else will light them up. That's the only advice I'd give Roberta is that maybe you're giving compliments to that person and they're rejecting it. Find something else. Go on a different day when it's not words of affirmation that you're practicing. Go on a different day, do an act of service, give them a gift or just spend time with them. Maybe they just like to hang out. Do something different, find what lights them up.
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you and I guarantee that you will find that you'll find you'll find what really helps them feel loved then you'll have that connection but work with it because what most people send out after reading the five love languages is their own love language that they want back it's reciprocity that that they're looking for you're going to miss more times than you're going to hit you really are with this you're doing all five love languages you're going to hit
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someday at least you're gonna hit on what they like. Just keep trying. Don't think of it transactionally as you said earlier. So the cliffhanger Paul you left us with after your fiance was told that the only language your family speaks is anger. Did you stay and are you guys still together? It worked for a little while. We did get married then it fell apart for whatever reason. It was about only lasted about four years and it could have been me.
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most of what the back research that I was doing for the love languages and that research happened within that four-year period. So I myself was in transition. It really wasn't a great time for me to have a relationship knowing that I really was in still within that angry culture and I was trying to trying to get out. It was a difficult circumstance that way. I was in development of the new tool to help change mindset.
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everything was in development at the time and I was evolving myself. That and the still those flashes that were happening, they were still happening. That just ruined the first relationship, ruined that second relationship too. But subsequently I did get married. I am happily married. Thanks for that. Congratulations. Awesome. And one last question. Do you feel that the anger management classes you went to helped in dealing with the anger issues you had growing up? I felt
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that the anger management classes helped me identify anger that I didn't know was anger. And so by that identification, it helped me take responsibility. Because of ignorance, I could blame anyone else that it was their fault. But until I realized that, oh, I do that, oh, that's something that I need to start doing something different. It was beneficial in that way that it helped me recognize again, what I should not do.
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I was trained in things that I should not do from my childhood. So now I'm doing things that I should have done a long time ago. I feel like I have to catch up now, Roberta. I have to send more love out, a whole lot more love out, double it, just a double and triple scoop of love. Send it out now, just because I feel like I've missed all those years of loving. Now I've got to catch up. But you always got to start somewhere which you've already done. So thank you for that.
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for thank you for spreading the love and helping us spread the love. So where can we get these tools, the dice and the journal for the role of love so we can practice it? So I've got a set, you can buy the journal and the book and the die on my website or you can buy it individually, but they're all on the website called roleoflove.com, R-O-L-E of love. It's a play on words, R-O-L-L is outside of you. Nothing happens if it's really outside of you. R-O-L-E.
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changes you within. If part of your audience, since they're listening to this on a podcast, if they like listening to books, the only way to get it on a book, the audible version of it is on Amazon. So when you go to Amazon, don't type in role of love or love this love that because you're going to get a million ways to love. It's going to be a needle in the haystack. Type in my name. It'll come right up. Okay, role of love.com for the book, the diet.
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and the journal. And if you want audible type, call Zolman on Amazon for the book to come up as a top listing. Perfect. Excellent stuff. Paul, this has been very eye opening and a big paradigm shift, especially for those of us who say all of us have read the five live languages because you think, okay, it's going to better my relationship, but you've added a whole new spectrum to it. So thank you so much. And thank you for the
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product that you've created to help us spread the love. Thank you, Roberta. It's been a delight to be a guest. My pleasure. Thank you, Paul. Paul, would you say that when we grow, we evolve, we change, we like different things than we did 10 years ago, does that mean that even our love languages change? So we can't be stuck on one, top one? Well, as I mentioned, Roberta, I grew up in that angry atmosphere.
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any type of love or what I might have thought would be love would be if I wasn't being whacked, I wasn't being loved. And so physical touch actually became the primary love language for me. Of course, that showed up when I took the test. But now, after I know how to give it away and know what all the love languages look like, words are better for me. Just it's the words that really helped me really light me up. So yeah, absolutely. To answer your question, absolutely.
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they can change over time. Which means then it's good to look, you said to learn to perceive others by giving it, by being a love starter. Exactly. So you can look at it from an ancestral view. It's not something genetic that's passed on, but even the mindset, whatever the mindset is that our grandparents passed down to our parents, passed down to us, whatever that mindset was, for the most part, it's gonna be passed on until you stop the tradition, whether the tradition is bad or the tradition is good.
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until someone stops that tradition or refines that tradition. And that's where I'm at right now with what I've done. I've just kind of stopped in the tradition of the abuse, stopped the tradition of the anger, stopped those types of traditions. Break the generational pattern as they say. Yeah. Thank you, Paul. So you've given me three compliments or words of affirmation today, and I kept doing this each time. So when you do that, Roberta,
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It's like the yoga class. Every time you go to a yoga class, they do this and they say namaste. Namaste literally means the God in me sees the God in you, or the divine in me sees the divine in you. That's what this whole thing's about. Watching for those good parts of other people. And be a love starter because you see the divine in them. Absolutely. False soul man, everybody. Words of wisdom.
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Thank you for joining the Speaking and Communicating podcast once again. If you have a guest that you think would be a great fit for the show, please email me and my contact details are on the show notes. The Speaking and Communicating podcast is part of the Be Podcast Network, where there are many other podcasts that support you in being a better leader and becoming the change you want to see. To learn more about the Be Podcast Network,
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