Speaking and Communicating Podcast

I can read in someone's face where their strengths are, but I also understand what will push their buttons. Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host, Roberta and Leila. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into. Communication and soft skills are crucial in your career growth and leadership development.
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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, 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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My guest today is an expert at reading faces. He is the author of the Game Changer. He's a coach and trainer and hails all the way from Down Under in Australia. Alan Stevens is founded the ChemFire Project and the We Together Initiative. And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show. Hi, Alan. Thank you very much for the invitation. Great to be here.
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How are you today? Thank you for being here and for accepting the invitation. I'm doing fantastic. How are things in Australia? Pretty good. We're heading out of our winter towards our summer. Right. It's the same as South Africa. They are also heading out of winter. So give us a little bit of your background. My business at the moment, I'm a profiling and communication specialist. It's all about helping people to build stronger relationships. I wasn't always very good at doing that. My background, I was born in Sydney quite a long time ago.
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From that point, I then moved from Sydney to Newcastle, which is about 160 kilometres north, working with our national telephone carrier back in those days. Very interesting time with them, 22 years, left them and worked in just about every industry you can think of since then. But my whole life has been working with people. So even though I've worked in a lot of different industries, you could say that my whole working life is about creating relationships because I always wanted better relationships myself.
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chase them for the first 50 years of my life, realize that there were better ways of doing things in the last 20 years, it's been a completely different direction, helping other people to build their relationships. It's helped me to build my relationships. When you say you realized how to do things differently, would you like to explain to us what those things were? As I said, I'd been married and divorced twice. And my second divorce back about 20 years ago really opened my eyes up.
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I was focusing on what I needed. I always thought that I would be complete if I had a relationship. You know, that's a lot of men, our whole focus, you know, it's about our manhood. You know, having children, showing that we are a complete man, which really I think I showed that I wasn't a complete man in doing that because a complete man is balanced in all areas. Being able to, you know, pick up a child and hold the child in the right way, to look after other people.
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It's all about being the best version of yourself and being the best version of yourself is in helping other people as well. We're all part of a community. And that's what I was taught growing up that my job was to be a provider, to go out and provide. And while I was doing that, quite often I didn't realize that while I was doing that, I wasn't around. I was physically and emotionally absent. Even when my first wife left and I had three sons to raise on my own and they were four, 11 and 12 at the time.
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I still was focused on bringing the resources in. When I look back, there's a lot I miss with my sons. Yes, I was around, but I wasn't fully around, not there fully emotionally. The most important thing we have in our life is the relationships that we create. Because in business, we talk about being business to business or business to customer. There is no such thing as a B2B relationship or a B2C relationship. They are all human to human.
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We may sell to customers and we may sell to other businesses, but the relationships are always human to human. If we do not connect with each other, we're never gonna get the chance to show how good our products and services are. And that's what I was always pushing, really hard to get the products and services across to the client and realizing I was missing a lot of sales because I wasn't fully understanding that you've got to build that relationship first. If people like you, they'll listen to you.
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If they trust you, then they'll buy from you. And the only way you get that know and like factor in place is by building a relationship with them. And then when you build the relationship, you can see whether you resonate with each other. And if you resonate with each other, you're always gonna be able to do business and do it into the future as well. And so when I realized that chasing relationships for myself was one way I've spent the first half of my life, where it really turned around for me is when I helped other people.
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with building relationships. So helping them to build relationships, I was naturally building relationships with them. The focus was on me and was on them. I know that Richard Branson, a whole lot of other people have said, take care of your employees and they'll take care of your business, your customers. That customers don't come first, your staff come first. Absolutely true. But what most people don't realize is that when you put your staff first, you're actually putting your customers first. Because when staff are happy,
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and they're the ones dealing with the customers, the customers are now happy. So the quickest way to make your customers happy and continue doing business with you is by having happy staff who are dealing with them. And that's what I've virtually done with my relationships because when I go out and help other people build relationships, I've naturally built my relationship at the same time. As I say, you can't light someone else's path without lighting your own. Mm-hmm. It's funny you talk about, because this B2B and B2C...
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terms, they fly all over, especially on LinkedIn. And we actually forget that it's not the business as you say, that has the relationship. It's the actual humans statistics say, I think now it's about 57% of marriages and in divorce with the lessons you learned from your two divorces, you said it's because you were focused on what you needed. What would you advise someone who's either thinking of getting married or.
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who is in a marriage and feels like, because a lot of the time people say, I'm no longer happy, I'm getting divorced. Yeah, well, what it usually comes down to is that, we went out and found a partner that we felt happy with, the person who attracted us, and not realizing that understanding that, this is where my profiling comes in, because our facial features tell us our personalities. If you think about, if you lift weights, you build muscles in your body. So if you did bicep curls, you're gonna build your biceps.
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Everything we feel inside, we express outwardly. So our physiology and neurology are linked. What we feel, we express. And so when you're concentrating and thinking and pulling expressions over and over again, you're working the same muscles in the same way, you create rigid and crevices on your face that give away how you like to think and process. So if I can see your face anywhere, I've got your personality, whether that be a photograph, whether it be on your Facebook page, your LinkedIn profiles or whatever. So...
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Once I realized that I went, okay, we also know that every trait we have has an upside and a downside. Right. The things that we love doing are where our strengths come in. So I can read in someone's face where their strengths are, but I also understand what will push their buttons. And so if I want to find a partner and one that I'm going to be with for a long time into the future, if I understand their upsides and downsides of their traits, but first of all, understand what it is I'm looking for,
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So I might be looking for somebody who's a bit more exciting, et cetera. Like I know when looking at you, I know this is a dramatic appreciation. So you can express yourself really well and therefore exciting when somebody's out with you. And so that has the upside of it. Now, at the same time, when you express yourself when you're stressed, that's going to come out as well. Where as someone like me who's got aesthetic appreciation, I disappear into my cave. Right. So if I know that, then I go, okay,
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If I know if you're stressed, then I know how to deal with that. I know how to talk to you because if I understand how to talk to you, I can help you get over whatever it is that you're stressing. You get happier and we're back together again. So I go with what excited me, which is say that one trait that is about the dramatic appreciation. I know that if you're stressed, this is where most men go wrong. We just don't want to deal with that. We want to fix the problem. And that's what we complain about all the time.
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And some women have the aesthetic appreciation. I'll just withdraw into their cave like I will. But the woman who's got the dramatic appreciation, what I'm going to say to her is, or even if it's a man, I'm going to say, look, I can see that you're upset. Is this something that you want me to fix or do you just want me to listen? Because asking that I've acknowledged that yes, there's something on your mind, but I want to help you in the best way I can. I just don't want to just fix it because I don't want to feel the pain that you're going through. I want to be able to know.
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Is it something you want me to fix? Now, if you say you want me to fix it, it's one of two things. Either it's something that you know I can fix, or I screwed up in the first place and you want me to fix that. But if you say, I just want you to listen, I know you just need to vent. And as I would say to anybody who's got the aesthetic appreciation, do you care about your partner? If they say yes, I say, well, then you don't need to take it on. You know that your partner just needs to vent. That's the way they need to communicate. Listen to it, don't try and fix it.
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And so they learn how to actually sit there in the other person's emotions without getting need to move away from this. Because we see it on Facebook every day. Somebody puts a comment up and next thing you know, everybody takes sides and the fight's on. Because nobody wants to feel the pain. And they'll take sides in their own emotions and things. For the aesthetic appreciation, if you're talking to your partner and the partner pulls back, goes into their cave all the time because they've got aesthetic appreciation, you have dramatic appreciation, you wanna know what's going on.
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but your partner needs to work on the problem as well. So if you know that the aesthetic appreciation when they're happy, they're laid back. And that might be somebody that you love to have as a partner, somebody who's laid back, who's easy going. But when they get stressed, they pull you back into their cave. So all you have to say to them is, look, I can see that you're stressed. Is it something to do with me? If they say no, is it something I can do to help you with? No, it's not. Okay, I know you need to work on this on your own. I'm gonna leave you alone to do that.
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But when you get it to where you can talk about it, can you come back and tell me because I care. So the partner goes, Oh, thank God. I'm no longer going to be nagged. I can work on my problem, but they haven't given up on me because they've said they want me to come back and tell me because they care. So now we're talking to each other's language. This is how we can then, first of all, know what sort of partner we want. Then when we find that partner, know how to talk to them. So whether it be finding a new partner or you have an existing partner, this is marriage 101.
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Once you learn these skills, you can forget about going to the marriage counselor because you won't need it. Because you'll always communicate and help each other understand when something goes wrong, what's going on with each of you. That's it. And your face has got, you know, about 68 different traits that are mostly in the face that I can see. And when you put that together, somebody walks past me in the street, the strongest trait is the most dominant, the next trait,
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will either moderate or enhance the first trait. So within about seven or eight traits, if somebody walks past me in the street, I can tell you their story. I can tell you their personality. I can tell you how to talk to that person where that person needs space. Like I know that when you meet people for the first time, you like a little bit of space. Now for some people, that might seem that you're not friendly because you stand back, but it's more that you're more discerning. You're the one who knows who's safe to be around and who's not safe to be around. The person who's got a set of affable traits,
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They're friendly with everybody, which is a great upside, but it's also the downside because they don't recognize the con artists. And so a combination of traits. So once you know how to read somebody, you can connect with them on that deep of soul level and build stronger relationships with them. How did you get started on face profiling? It all came about, well, back in the seventies, I started with body language when I was put in charge of a group of men who are all older than me.
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Then in the 80s, got involved with psychometric profiling, Myers, Briggs, DISC, Enneagrams, and other programs like that. I got accreditation in a number of them. In the 90s, I got involved in neuro-linguistic programming, NLP. Yes. In the early 2000s, I started, I brought all those together. I was working with a company that brought me in because they were a currency trading company. They taught people how to trade, and none of their students were making any money.
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And then, so I came in, I profiled the whole organization using Myers-Briggs and disc profiles. And I realized that people who were running the organization were all systems people, they weren't really people people. And so we trained them on how to deal with the people who were coming through the door, but then we profiled everybody before they did their courses and we use disc profiling and Myers-Briggs, the end result, when they'd finished their training, a lot of them were still losing money and they didn't match their personalities.
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And I realized I needed a better system of profiling because psychometric profiling, disk-myspeaks, they're all good in the moment. Because when we answer those questions, we answer them emotionally. And the way you answer it today might be different to the way you answer it tomorrow. That's right, yes. Or if you're having a good day or a bad day, yes, your answer is going to be different. And so with that, I needed a better way of doing it. A friend of mine was running a spiritual retreat.
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He's got a Buddhist temple on his property. He asked me to do a workshop using Myers Briggs. And so we got everybody together, they brought their spouses along and we did role playing with the different dichotomies like introverts, extroverts, here's a scenario. How would you handle this? All the introverts on one side of the room, the extroverts on the other, communication going on. And somebody at the end of that said to me, you ever looked at reading faces?
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Now, I think it was John Wootten out of UCLA who had said that the most important thing you'll ever learn is the next thing you learn after you think you know everything. And I think all of my life, I've been living by that principle even long before John had actually said it. And so I went, I want to know more about this. So this was up in the country where we had the retreat. By the time I'd driven home, I got onto Google, did my search and found Paul Ekman who did all the research on the micro expressions.
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since 1969 when he did his university degrees. And a lady by the name of Naomi Tickle, dear friend of mine now over in America, an English lady who taught the facial features. Neither of them were doing what the other one does. All the psychologists were looking at the face reading as being more of a phrenology. Well, phrenology is bumps on the head. Whereas I'm talking about the facial features, you know, the anatomy. At the same time, phrenology is about character, whether somebody be a serial killer.
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whether that'd be a trustworthy person. Whereas I'm talking about personality. So character is about what people are thinking and processing, whereas the personality is how they're thinking and processing. So two people who look very similar, one can be a saint, one could be a sinner. They'll both process in the same way. Like I like know that you like the overview. Some people are very analytical. They need to know all the information. So when you're trying to tell them a story with the overview, they're interrupting you in wanting more detail.
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So if you can recognise those things, then you can build stronger relationships. It's completely different. So if I've got two people who have got the analytical trait, they're gonna want a lot of information before they can make a decision. But the motives that's behind all of that are completely different depending on their character. This is why this stands alone from all those other systems. It's more accurate than Myers-Briggs disk and all of those because it's not affected by emotions.
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It brings into the epigenetics, the connection between the parents as well. It takes out the emotions of the moment. It takes out gender, age, culture. It takes out education levels. All of those things, by looking at someone's face, they don't have to say a single word. So they can speak a completely different language. I've still got their personality. One of my guilty pleasures is Australia's border security. And I'm always fascinated at airports on how they are actually able to pick
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that someone's face is not relaxed enough to just say, you know, I just have my luggage, I'm not carrying anything wrong into the country. So they read the faces differently from what you do because you're looking for the character trait. Yeah, well, they're using the last part of what I did because as I said, the facial features tell me the personality. That tells me, because I know where I am on the world scale, I recognize where the other person is. So that tells me how to interchange my language and how do I speak to them so I connect with them at their level.
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but then I use the body language and expressions, which those border control people are using to then read, did I read them right? Is there something emotionally going on and are they telling the truth? Where border control are mainly just using the body language and expressions, I'm also looking at the facial features as well. Where they look at the facial features, we'll just be looking at comparing it. Is this somebody who's on our watch list, for instance, because they recognize the face? Where I'm using the facial features to tell me the person's personality.
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how they're likely to behave and respond. So the moment that I'm talking to them, if they're not responding in response to what I've already read, I know something's going on. And then by asking questions, I can delve in deeper, very fast, and find out then are they telling the truth or not? So this enhances what border control do, because it gives you a stronger foundation to start with. So we've talked about how you use this in personal relationships. So if you are selling to a customer in your business,
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How do you use face profiling in order to increase your sales and to understand your customers better and to build those relationships for the long term? Well, soon as I look at somebody, I know whether they're focused on the value of things or whether they're focused on the service. So some people will pay through the nose. They get great service, they will give you all their money. It's got to have service, but it's got to have the value there. I'm not going to overpay for something. So as soon as you recognize that, you know, how do I actually start the conversation?
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If they are a big picture person, if I've got a lot of information to tell you because you want the overview, I'm gonna say to you, look, Roberta, there's a lot of information here. Straight away, they go, oh my God, this is gonna go on forever type thing. And I'd say, look, there is a lot of information here, but what I'm going to do is give you the overview. And then you can ask all the questions that you need to ask. But if there's something there that you haven't asked, something that's important, can I tell you that then? You know now we're having a conversation because an analytical person, they'll just go, blurt.
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They'll just bomb, bomb, bomb, they'll just give you so much information that you're going, hang on, how many times have you spoken to somebody and you give either switch top or you try to finish their sentences off and get them to finish their conversation. Yeah, in your mind you're going, are we gonna get to the point? That's it, whereas if I've said to you, look, I'm just gonna give the overview and then you ask the questions you wanna ask, you know we're in a conversation. And then if we get to the end of it, and I go, well, remember Roberta, I said that there might be something there that you hadn't asked that you need to know.
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That boring stuff we're there now. Is that okay if I tell you? Because now I've got your permission. You know, I haven't given you too much information. I've given you the information that you need to make a decision. Not the information that I needed to make a decision. Cause I'm not the one buying. Hopefully you're the one who's going to buy. So straight away, I know how to give that. You got a dry sense of humor as well. So if I'm talking to you, then we can be flipping. I know if I throw anything at you, you're going to be pretty quick and throwing it back at me as well. We can have a bit of a laugh there.
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I've got somebody who's got the opposite trait, they quite often take things personally. And so I know with them that I will then be very careful about how I joke, for instance. And I can also see that you're more of a sequential thinker. You like to see the structure of things, how things connect to each other. So that's why I love math. It's the logic. I like the structure, the logic, the fact that it has a system that I can follow and make logical sense out of it in my mind.
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For me, if I can follow the logic, I'm in. That's it, because if you were an objective thinker, you can bounce all over the place. I can throw a bit out here and you pull a bit from the previous thing. Oh, you can see how that works. The objective thinker is with the warriors, the ones who were leading the tribes, et cetera. They're the racing car drivers, the rally drivers. The sequential thinkers are the ones who are gymnasts. Learning procedures that have to be done in a certain way. You try and get an objective thinker who changes the way they're doing things on the parallel bars.
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They'll hang themselves up very quickly. Whereas the sequential thinker, is structured, will do it the same way. Now the Olympic gymnast quite often, and a lot of them are sequential thinkers. So we can see the sports and hobbies, young child that will suit them. When they get to school, we can see where their strengths and the downside of their traits are. So we know what things that they love doing. We can then guide them to the right careers. We've got them to the right careers. We put them into the right studies. So when they do their studies, they're enjoying the study.
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They go off to university, they're likely then to go on into that field. The only reason they'd leave an organization is because of bad management in the organization or it's a promotional opportunity by moving to another organization. But they'll stay in the same industry. How many people do you know who have done university degrees, two or three university degrees and still not working in any of those fields? Or even like any of those fields. Exactly. And let's face it, if we don't enjoy the work that we're doing.
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we need to be making a lot of money to pay for the medical bills because we're not happy. We're usually not healthy. But that's true though. Yeah. Jokes aside, speaking of school, I believe that you use this system as well with teachers and students. Would you like to explain how that works? Yeah. Well, one actually happened about six years, seven years ago. There were two young boys that I trained. One was 14 and one was 15.
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I was actually training the grandmother of the 15 year old and she asked if she would also train the boys as well. This is on my master course. And when I finished the master course, I asked each of them how they were using it. And the 15 year old said to me first of all, he said, look, he said, I'm profiling the other kids at school. I said, well, tell me about that. He said, I now know why they push my buttons. I know why they do the things that they do. And I said, and what's that done for? He said, it's given me tolerance.
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And so I realised at that point, I needed to get this into education and I needed to do a lot more work with kids as well. The 14 year old though, I couldn't use what he said at the time as advertising because when I asked him with the cheekiest smile on his face is on profile on the school teachers. And I went, how's that working for you? He said, oh, he said, I know which ones to pick and which ones to leave alone. I'm stirring a more than a stirred and before in my life. How productive young man.
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And I said, I'm having a ball. I said, well, how are your studies going? He said, oh, forget about that. He said, I'm having too much time just doing the teachers. So at the moment, I've got a project with my granddaughter. She started learning when she was 11. She's now 15 and we're putting together some flashcards, which would be a photograph on the front, the physical feature that we're looking at on the face as well on the back. It will have what that traits were, but what it means, how to read it and then how to talk to that person.
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If we can get those into the hands of the kids, then all of the kids will understand each other. And then I'll go back to the teachers and apologise to them and let them know what that 14 year old said, because I've created a problem for you. And if you don't learn, the kids gonna have it over you. But every teacher that I've trained who's then connected with the children, the lives of those children are completely changed. It was the very first one that I worked with, his mother, single mum, he was six years old with Asperger, after school's care didn't want him.
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He wouldn't even sit still for me. So she sent me some photographs. I profiled him from that, gave her a written report that she took to the school and the afterschools care, which gave him some advice on how to handle things. That was when he was six. They'd said he'd never amount to anything. He could never do presentations prior to the class at the age of seven, he was. And down the year and a half later, they let the psychologist go, didn't need him anymore, and with the doctor's approval, medication was off the table. No need for that at all. At the age of 11.
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He wanted to have a birthday party with all of his mates. She dreaded it at first because she thought, this is all the, if he was back in the normal part of the school, so it was a lot of boys. And she dreaded it, but she had it. And she said, it was just a noisy boys party. And she was glad that she had the party. At the age of 16, one of the girls at school had put a post up on the bulletin board that she'd been kicked out of home by her mother. She'd self-harmed, she was suicidal. Nobody took any notice except the young Jack.
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He went into overtour and said, look, you're coming to see mum. He rang his mother up and said, look, I'm bringing her over to talk. He stayed with them that night. The next day they got the right help. She was back with a mother with the right support around them because both needed support. So at the age of 16, stood taller than everybody else. And this is the boy they said would never amount to anything. At the age of 18, he's now an entrepreneur, which he never would have been if he'd been on medication. So we medicate, we overdiagnose so many kids with conditions. We medicate them.
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to fit them into the system. Whereas if we learned how to talk to them, we wouldn't need the medication and we wouldn't have so many stressed out kids and we wouldn't have the kids that are becoming suicidal or homicidal. That is amazing. This is why if you talk their language, they're going to listen because we listen to people that we like. The best way to get people to like us is to talk to them in their way that they like to be spoken to. You know, sometimes you would have
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parents trying to talk to their teenager and they simply cannot get through the teenager. They take them either to a therapist or a mediator. The mediator or the therapist says the exact same thing the parents have been saying at home, but it clicks this time. What was the game changer there? Well, because we've listened to people who are not our family more than we listen to our family. It's just the way we're wired.
27:16
Yeah, because somebody knew that starts telling you something and you scratch your head and you think, hang on, now I've been telling my kids that all the way through. And then Joe Bloggs turns around, walks through the door, you don't know him from a bar or so. And yeah, they listen to him. That was one of the things I realized that with my three sons, I never try and counsel them. I always get another man that I trust. This is why a man's role is to...
27:41
be the guide for their children, help the boys get to the level where they become men. But you have the other men around you, ones you trust. That those men will turn your sons into men. Mum's job was to nurture the boys, to get them to assert, you know, to give them love and everything else. Dad's job then was around about the age, we look at tribal times, from the age of seven to 14, was to get them ready for that, from that full on nurture from mum, to the tough love they were going to get from the other men. And it was the father and grandfather who were involved in that.
28:09
At the age of 14, the boys would be going through their initiations and write a passage into manhood. And they would learn from all the other men and they'd look at all the other men and go, right, I like that bit from that guy. Now I like that bit, but I don't like that bit. They created their own identity, uniquely different to everybody else. So they had value. A father's job is not to turn his son into a man, it's to get him ready for manhood. It's to get him to get other good men around him. So together, the boy then grows into manhood. And that's one of the reasons why I started the Campfire Project.
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When I was 50, I went through Aboriginal initiation from boyhood into manhood myself. And when I look back the previous 49 years before that, yeah, I was a boy all the way through. A lot of the stuff I didn't understand because difference between a boy and a man has got nothing to do with age. It's got to do with what we've learned and how we behave as we get older. There's a lot of boys out there who were in their seventies and eighties who have never learned to do the right thing.
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when you do that, you now have men that women are looking for. Because how many women out there say that I can't find a good man? In my Zulu culture, when two people are about to get married, you not only have two people coming together, but we call it two families come together. Therefore, they arrange the dowry and everything. And what that is, is you have uncles, whether it's your dad's brothers, or if your dad doesn't have any brothers, he's going to have.
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men in the neighborhood who are close to the family. So you start having this tribe of men who are gonna bring you wisdom as a future husband. So that learning from other men, that's the similarity as well in my culture. Say to women, it's a matter of the husband might have gone for some reason or another, might have passed away, might have just left the home or whatever.
30:00
You need to have men around. You don't have to be in a relationship with them yourself, but you need to find the right men around who can then support your sons. Because, well, this is one of the things where a lot of people go wrong. We complain about our partners. We're telling our children that half of them is no good. And you're telling both the son and the daughter that it'll have a greater impact on the son that half of him is no good. So straight away, if you look at it, the most horrific crimes against women created by males, 80% of them are committed by boys that didn't have fathers.
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And so this is why it's crucial for men to be around. So I don't look at them as being bad. I just look at them as not had the opportunity to learn what it needed to be, to be the best version of themselves. So wherever we can bring groups together to help them become better versions of themselves, this always works. The Campfire project originally was a safe place for men to be able to come and tell their stories. The things that they've been through, they've never been able to share with anybody else before. But I had women in the group from day one.
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because I wanted women to hear how men could speak when they felt safe to do so. At the same time, I wanted the men to know that I weren't rushing off to a men's group feeling great like going to a motivational seminar and then going back home again and think of all worlds against me again and wait for the next motivational seminar or men's group. I wanted them to be able to come in where they were women as well. So I then brought them into panel discussions and we talked about pornography, drugs, alcohol, all of those different things. And...
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That was when the women started sending me personal messages. I was waiting for it and I was hoping for it. They said, we love these guys. We've never heard them talk so deeply about their emotions, nor so wisely about how to improve our society. Is there a way we can get involved? I said, yep, put your hands up. I'm waiting for you to interview you as well. So we interviewed the women. We brought them into the panel discussions. We talked about menstruation, menopause, does size matter in the bedroom? No subjects off the table. We've got a full range of genders, religions and cultures.
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We've had no bigotry, sexism or racism. Oldest person I've interviewed, 99 years old. His name was Ted Hughes. And so I advertised to everybody, I was doing a Ted Talk. Yes, Ted Hughes, Ted Talk. But then the youngest person to actually do an interview was my cohost son, who was nine years old when he interviewed his father. So nine to 99 years old. We've had over 600 hours of conversations. Men.
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raving about how great the women are, women doing the same thing about the men. These are the conversations that we have every day. This is what we wanna see in a larger society. So the Campfire Project, anybody can come in, tell their story, sit there in the background if they like. They tell their stories, they can join the panel discussions. If they happen to be a coach, by telling their story, they now got credibility, because we don't endorse anybody. And if they pick up a client, fantastic. If they're running an event,
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They can advertise that, but they've got to do their one-on-one first so people know who they are. Then I'm doing the same thing with bringing other groups in, people running their own community groups, men's groups, women's groups, get them to come in, get them to talk about their story, talk about their groups so that everybody hears about their groups. So we're advertising their groups as well, creating a wider community again. But getting them into panel discussions, my ulterior motive there is that anybody who's running a group is going to go through tough times.
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Who do they turn to when they're stressed? Well, if they got a peer support by knowing other group leaders from other organisations, they've got someone they can pick the phone up and ring and say, hey, I'm going through this at the moment. You got any advice? So they build connections. So now we have all these groups around the place connected almost like a web. Well, we need to net of connections between all of these different groups around the world. And this is how we make changes. We change our society into a much better one globally.
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something we always emphasize that people are looking for connection. And for some reason, I don't know where we went off the track of individualism. I don't need anybody. I want to be an island. And yet that is the very thing that makes people have stress and because they're not connected to anybody. Why are we doing the opposite of what we need?
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And yet we know that we need that, but that's not where we go. It's very simple. It comes back to our emotions in a personal relationship, a love relationship. You need to know that you contribute that you value that you have a place that you belong there. It's the same thing in the workplace. The only difference between a personal relationship, like your partner and the workplace is in the personal relationship, there's sex, there should be no sex in the workplace, but then when you look at it.
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Everybody is suffering or has suffered. Everybody wears a mask. Everybody pretends they're not wearing a mask. And everybody is a combination of how they've responded to every event that's happened in their life. So when you look at all of that, everybody has had tough times at some point. And the people who've pulled back and become hermits are because they've been hurt too often. So they pull back for protection. But they now put themselves in a place where they are disconnected. They don't belong. They don't feel that they contribute.
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And so they make the situation worse for themselves. So in the Campfire project, what came out of that was a charity that we created. Three of us are directors on that. It's called the business of smiles. And what we do is we go out into the public, after floods and we have to COVID and other things, wearing a big smiley t-shirts, black t-shirt with a big yellow emoji on the front of it and smiley faces on them. And of course people can't help but grin at us. And we go up to people and we thank them for doing the best they could.
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They go, what are you talking about? And we go, well, you're raising your kids, who's a father with his children, for instance, are you doing the best you can? Are you making decisions around the information you have, the best decisions you can for your kids? They go, yes. I said, well, you're doing the best you can. We wanna thank you for that. And can I gift you a pair of socks? We hand them the pair of socks, and then we tell them the black dots represent the tough times we're gonna go through in our lives, the tough days, they're gonna come.
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But the yellow represents that there are more sunny days than there are dark days. It represents also the support you give others and others give you. Because when we have enough of that, enough of those sunny days, enough of the support, our dark days don't join up. That's why there's separate black dots on this thing. They're not one big black pair of socks. So our life doesn't turn into a gloomy one. So just remember that there's always people around you who support you and love you and care for you. And then...
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People usually break down and just tell us their stories, what's been happening to them in their lives. Wow. That is huge. And after the floods up in Lismore, one of the country towns, we did a run from one of the towns to another town, about 45 kilometres away, people working on their properties. We went to community groups and we handed out 2000 pairs of socks, started 2000 conversations on mental health. Wow. That was last October. Just before Christmas down in Melbourne.
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The place called Frankston had more lockdowns than anywhere else in the world during COVID. The attitudes down there, broken people left, right and center, leading up to the 12 days up to Christmas, we walked around in the streets and just kept on handing out socks, two and a half thousand pairs of socks. And started two and a half thousand conversations. For instance, one big guy, a security guard, chest out, standing up. He was massive compared to me. Went through that. In the moment, I told him the story of the socks.
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His whole posture just dropped and he broke down and told me how he lost his son and daughter that year. Oh no! Sorry, his wife and son that year were having that conversation. So this was the first opportunity for him to have somebody listen to him. And they're the sort of conversations we've had. Hence my question, like somebody going through that, wow, losing two of your closest people. So he hadn't spoken to anyone before that? No, because, you know, a really big guy and let's face it, and we were told.
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Be tough, suck it up, don't show your emotions. And we were damn good students. This is why the first 50 years of my life was such a disaster because I learned all those lessons really well and I lived them. Today, our younger boys are opening up more. They're able to deal with their emotions or able to talk about their emotions. Where their disadvantage is they haven't got men around them who can then guide them through that.
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I don't know how we got started on these norms of, you know, men don't show their emotions. It's only us who are emotional. And for some reason, whoever decided that men don't deserve to share their emotions, that's really insane. Now, one of the things you have is a three-step process for closing deals faster in a business. Would you like to explain those three to us? It comes down to the profiling things. It's always know yourself first of all.
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know the other person and then speak to them in the way that they need to be spoken to. If you talk the way that they need to be spoken to, you will get to the sale faster. Some people it's going to be very quick depending on their personality and other people will be slower, but it will take the time that it needs to take. It's not a matter of getting fast sales, it's a matter of getting the sales and getting the sales by building that like no one trusts our factor.
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And so that person feels that, yeah, you're the person that they really need to be doing the deal with. Right. The only way you can do that is connect with them at their level. By understanding them and talking to them in that way, we can get there much faster again. And again, as I said, the relationship is always human to human. Then you bring also the team loyalty aspect. If I'm in a team and we can read each other's faces, how does that strengthen the team loyalty? Well, it means that
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If I know how you like to be spoken to in the team, I'm going to talk to you in that way. So straight away, we have better communication. When we have better communication, we know that the other person understands us. It gives us that feeling inside that, hey, I'm valued, I contribute that I belong. We look at ourselves and we go, right, who do I hang around with? People like me. Yeah. People have similar interests, et cetera. That's great at school. And when we go out and socialize, but when I'm at work, I want people who are completely different to me.
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because teams are made up not of similarities but of differences. If I've got, these are the stuff I love doing, all the people I know around me, they love doing the same thing. So the stuff that I don't like doing but may need to be done, there's nobody around me who wants to do it. But if I've got somebody who's got a different personality to me, they will love the things that I hate. And so I can push that across the table to them and they go, thank you. So if I understand their personality, I know what...
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can I give them that are going to make them more productive and happier in what they're doing. And if it's something I don't want to do myself, that's a bonus because I got rid of it and they've taken it on and they've- And it got done. Right. That's how I got this in the 70s, team of older men on my side, because I learned to work out what were the things that they loved to do and what were the things they didn't like to do. And all of a sudden, when I took redundancy here, 22 years later,
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Half of the staff want to resign and come and work with me. We had the highest performance in Australia in the, because we're in the computer links. Our customers loved us and my staff were really happy. It was a trifecta. There's a difference between a leader and a manager and a leader's job by rights is to make themselves redundant. And by raising other people up to do what they're doing in their position at the moment, and hopefully do it better than ever done it before.
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So therefore not having ego about what they've done. Because if you don't, if you own your own business, you can't go and work on your business because you're still stuck working in it. At the same time, if you're an executive in an organization, if you're indispensable in the role you're in, because you've held everybody else down, the manager will never see the abilities you have for you to be promoted in the first place. Yeah, because you must be kept there. You're the only one who can get things done. They must keep you in the same position, yes.
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I get my self-worth from the fact that the people I've helped raise up into new positions to become better versions of themselves. I take that as an acknowledgement of my value. I'm not a servant leader. I hate the term servant leader. I'm a serving leader. It does get past our ideas. We can't be a servant and a leader at the same time. A servant takes directions, but you can be a serving leader. You serve your team, but not be a servant in the process.
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because if you're a servant, your team can't respect you. That's a big one, because a lot of leaders, some of the things we feel are counterproductive to them leading is the fact that they think those are the things that bring them the respect from their team. That's it. So you have a free personality quiz on your website. You say that it's different from the Myers-Briggs and the disc. What's the one thing that's different?
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Well, with Myers-Briggs and all of those processes, you're asking questions. So it depends on the emotions the person's feeling at the time. It depends on how they interpret the questions of being asked, their education level, their cultural backgrounds. All of those things will come into play. If they're not feeling happy, they're gonna answer in a certain way. When I start to do those questionnaires, especially if there's 90 questions in there, for instance, my personality at the beginning of the profile is one thing, but it's...
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By the time I get to the end, I'm getting pretty fed up with the whole thing and I can feel my emotions completely changed. Whereas with the facial profiling, you know, I just look at someone's face and I've got their personality. They could be happy, they could be sad. It doesn't matter. Their facial features don't change overnight. They change over time, which gives me a history of their nurture traits, how they have changed, what their life has been like over a period of time. So I've got their first photograph of years ago and I've got their later photograph.
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I understand their personalities. I understand what they've been through as well. So I know what their life has been like. And this correlates to others. I got a friend of mine over in Switzerland who works with the palm prints. Not as in reading fortune from them, but the prints themselves on each of the fingers and the lines, he does personalities from those. He showed me the hands, he talked about the personality of these hands. I've looked at the faces and I could see exactly the same traits in the faces.
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So he and I are now doing some work on what's the correlation between these. We're now also looking at, well, my prince, my ex-wife's prince, the mother of my sons, and their fingerprints to get an idea of what's the epigenetics, the impact of parents on their children as well. All of those things come into it. So there's a lot in there that we're actually looking at covering. So there's a lot of new developments in that that are going on. Mm-hmm.
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We look forward to staying updated on that. But in the meantime, I will put the details of your quiz on the show notes. And please tell us all your website details so that we can find more information on face profiling and everything we've talked about today. That'd be my pleasure. But the first way people can find me is my name, Alanstevens.com.au, and it's Alan with one L. My family wasn't rich enough for two Ls.
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and StevenswithaV and.com.au for Australia. So find me on Facebook, you'll find me on LinkedIn as well, but I'll give you all those links to put in your show notes. Excellent stuff. Thank you so much, Alan. Do you have any last words for anyone who's listening on how they can improve their relationship? Just remember that the more that you're able to understand your partner, understand why they do the things that they do, the more then you can build a strong relationship with them. And having conversations.
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Learning how to speak to your partner is the most important thing. Getting away from the emotions that are happening at the moment and look at, well, how can I actually turn this around? To know your own personality, to understand theirs, and then change the way that you like to be spoken to to match the way that they do, then you'll have that relationship and you can solve any problem. Words of wisdom from Alan Stevens all the way from Australia, the author of The Game Changer, Coach and Trainer.
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founder of the CampFire Project and the We Together Initiative, who helps you strengthen the relationships in both your personal life and your business. Alan, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for sharing all your expertise and knowledge with us. We really appreciate you being here today. Thanks very much, Roberta. Appreciate it. 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,
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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, go to BePodcastNetwork.com. Don't forget to subscribe, leave us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify, and stay tuned.
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for more episodes to come.