Episode 17: How to Build Meaningful Connections with Paul Jones

Mike O'Neill:  Hello and welcome back to the Get Unstuck & On Target show. I'm Mike O'Neil with Bench Builders, and we're speaking with thought leaders to uncover tips to help you break down the barriers that are keeping you or your business stuck. Joining me today from Lehigh, Utah is Paul Jones. Paul is the founder of BridgWell and they help clients build their brands social network.

Welcome Paul.

Paul Jones: Hey, Mike, it's good to be on the show. Thanks for having me.

Mike O'Neill: Paul, I was looking forward to recording this. I have the advantage of that. I've already had a chance to interact with you because you spoke to the association of talent development and what you did and how you did it really impressed me.

And I'm looking forward to you sharing some of that with our listeners today. We talked about building networks and when I see the word social network, it means something to me that might be different than it means to you. How do you define the term social network?

Paul Jones: Well, you know, and that's a loaded question, right?

Because we live in a quote unquote, very social world. So we have, you know, I can get on my Facebook or my LinkedIn and I can look at my quote social network, but yeah,  what does a social network really mean? And for me, it really bottles down to,You know, this concept of taking your social network to a social net worth.

How do you get value from the relationships? The connections that you have and how can you create authentic connections, with those people inside of your network? It's, it's a question I think deserves a pause. There's a lot of social research on how big, of a personal social network you can have.

It's around a hundred to a hundred and fifty people. That's about how many people you can have a deep relationship with. So you kind of have to think, you know, who am I going to be building relationships with? Who do I need to be building relationships with? Relationships are the single best predictor of your career success.

So, you know, whether they matter or not at the end of the day, I hated this term growing up. It's not what you know, it's who you know, cause that just felt, I don't know, to me, it was always put in context with like the old boys club and you got to be a part of it and fit into it or whatever, but that saying has really morphed for me because.

Is it true? Yes, I do think it is true, but the way that you get to know people is the part that matters the most. And it's not just, you know, surface level necessarily. I mean, you don't have to have deep conversations or deep relationships with everybody, but being able to understand people's needs and try to connect them or try to solve those needs.

That to me is a network and network is something that's social network or social having social net worth is it's an active anticipatory experience. That involves you know, getting to know people.

Mike O'Neill: So why don't we set the context in place here? I know that thus far, we've been talking about social network almost more from an individual level.

Does your company work primarily with individuals or organizations?

Paul Jones: we actually work with brands and companies to build their social networks.

Mike O'Neill: So, would you like us to talk more about what you do with companies or would you prefer that we continue on the path of individuals and how you can enhance your social network?

Paul Jones: Well, you know, I think they're kind of one in the same really, With COVID, we are more isolated than we've ever been. Everyone is, and there's some good things that are coming out of that. I mean, all the reports are that productivity is up companies. Aren't having a problem seeing work increase.

 But the flip side of that, is that when people get more isolated, you see more mental illness, you see all kinds of breakdowns that start to occur and so connection or. Your social network becomes really, really valuable. And I think if you look at our roots as human beings, it goes back to the social aspect.

That's, what's made us so successful as a species is our ability to form tribes and, collaborate together to solve problems and issues. and so going back to BridgWell and what we do is for me, I, you know, it's funny as, This is a good example. When I have a birthday, my family thinks it's hilarious because, how many birthday parties have we been to?

Where you kind of go and you go through the motions and people open up presents, and then you blow out the candles and you have the cake, et cetera.  My family rolls their eyes because, during my birthdays, I will say, I'll stand up and say, today is my birthday. And before anyone leaves today, I want to hear about a favorite memory you have with me.

And the last person that goes has to sing the tune. And so everyone rolls their eyes because they're like, Oh yeah, Paul's doing his thing. But the idea behind it is. How can we gather better? How can we have, you know, here in a lot of birthdays, I've been to my whole life. You have all the loved, ones that you have in your life, at the show or at the, birthday party.

And, Where's the dialogue, where's the fun, nuanced dialogue that comes with all those different memories. So how do you unlock that? So how can you gather people together in a way that creates a really cool conversations, cool conversations with cool people. That was really the inspiration of BridgWell is, you know, think of like, Virtual events meets authentic conversations.

And when you start to do that, you start to build a community. So one people aren't feeling isolated anymore. Two, they're getting into real conversations. I mean, most of today, most events we go to we're passively listening to experience, you know, a keynote speaker, which they're giving us great information.

But where's the connection. I want to be able to connect with my peers. I want to be able to find out best practices what's working. What's not working all of this collaborative stuff. That I didn't feel like we had enough of, and then COVID hit and certainly we need more of that. And so our mission is to.

 Help people connect better. And this isolation, or we call it, people, or excuse me, connection desert and the people connection desert that we live in. My dad was actually a paranoid schizophrenic and that is a big reason why I started BridgWell because, you kn, he got to a point where he was so far gone, that there was really no coming back.

But I think that for most of us and I had a psychology professor that defined this the best way I've ever heard defined disorder, the best way I've ever heard. He said a disorder is when something gets in the way of you living a normal life. So taken in that context. I may not have a disorder, but do I have error?

Do I have thinking errors that I go about on my daily life doing? Yes, do I have all kinds of issues? I mean, I'm still functioning, but I have all these issues that if I could meet with my peers, be vulnerable and be authentic and talk to them about it. How much better off am I going to be? And so that was the idea is that, do I fundamentally believe that if my dad had been able to, so he got a schizophrenia as a result of going through a severe, traumatic event early in his childhood, that just was never resolved.

What if during, at some point in his life, he had been able to talk to other people. Not therapists, but other people that had gone through that same thing and said, and raised their hand and said, Hey, this is how I've dealt with it. This is how I got through with it. This is where I'm at, right?

So this creating space, you know, you can take that on a personal level, which is where we're what we're ultimately trying to solve, but you can also take that on a, on a business level too, you know, that's, what's so cool about business is. It's there's a lot of, personal wins or team wins that occur in business.

 You get to push yourself, you get to try things. Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn and it's those learnings that help you grow. And so I just thought getting people together to have. Authentic conversations is going to help people. One feel less isolated, two. It's going to increase innovation and three people are going to feel more connected.

And at the end of the day, you know, there's a lot of research on this. The more connected someone feels, the longitudinal study that was done, the longest longitudinal study on, human happiness ever. It's a men's study found that, how the depth of your relationships is. Really one of the best predictors of how happy you will be in your life.

So in business, especially we put on our armor, we put on this armor that we all are. We're always trying to show our best side. What if we were to come to the table and have a conversation about some of the challenges that we face and what happens then? Well, people start to open up and really cool stuff starts to come out of those conversations.

So we looked at all of this and we said, how can we. Create a virtual experience. That's going to get people to open up, have real conversations, and do it in a way that's  that could be a new value proposition for a brand. And so that's what we'll do is we'll come in with, you know, we'll come in and, help our clients or our brands build their community of, prospects.

And it's not to sell them. It's simply just to add another value proposition, which is I'm going to build this community so that I can stay inside of your orbit. But the way in which the community is facilitated is it's not, you know, a Slack channel. It's, not an invitation to a virtual conference it's conversations at the end of the day.

It's just having conversations, real, authentic conversations.

Mike O'Neill: So Paul, let's go down that path a little bit. And that is when I was introduced to you, essentially, strangers were participating and through your facilitation, you brought strangers together very quickly. And it was amazing. The degree of openness that resulted.

And I would characterize that true, authentic connections were made and everything was virtual. So we're talking about your clients and the value of bringing community together. Did I hear you correctly? It's not necessarily to sell more products or services, but to bring people together in a way, I think you said to keep folks in that same orbit did I hear that right?

Paul Jones: Yeah. So, the idea is that if we are living in a connection desert, then a new value proposition that a brand can provide to their prospects, to their customers, to their employees. Isn't a passive experience where you're hearing information, but where you're giving information and receiving information from your peers.

And so it's a really great way for brands to, like I said, stay in orbit with. Their prospective clients by providing our creating space for them to come together, gather, discuss challenges, connect and move forward. And some of the result of that is, you know, it's going to be. Sales for you, but it's not done in a way where, you know, your prospects are seeking you out.

It's done in a way where, well, eventually they do seek you out, but it's done in a way where you're putting the relationship first and you're providing value first. And the value is that, Hey, even if you're not interested in my products, I have a community of people that can help you with your biggest challenges, whatever they are.

 And we're, you know, we're just a group that is willing to come to the table and have conversations.

Mike O'Neill: This has really intrigued me because what I understood you to say is that by bringing these folks together, you are given them an opportunity to connect in ways they probably would not connect.

And, the goal here is to strengthen relationships. First and those relationships may not just be, this is you and a customer. Could those relationships include others in the community?

Paul Jones: Absolutely. I mean, I think the first thing that you have to do when you want to build a community of connection is you have to define what the community is, who the community is for.

And a lot of times we don't think about that. What's the reason why we're going to get together. But when you spend some time really thinking about. Who is it that I want to gather? What kind of conversations as a result of gathering these people are going to come of this. You kind of take on this new approach or this new way of looking at things and doing things where.

You know, I call myself a people chemist, what happens when you mix these people together? What's going to result from that. What kind of conversations are going to happen? What kind of innovations going to come from it? You know, there's a lot of research on this as well. There's a whole bunch of different types of, social personas, if you will.

 Two of them that I find fascinating are, connectors and brokers. And this is defined in, Michael arena's book, adaptive space. But. These two characters are really interesting. So you probably know people like this, but connectors generally have deep relationships and brokers generally have a lot of surface relationships.

And when you look at the two at these two personas and the purpose that they serve inside of a social structure, it's really kind of interesting. A connector is someone that is going to be able to drive team initiatives. Forward because they understand the strengths and weaknesses of a team. They understand the overall team's needs.

 They understand where the entire team is at. And they have a really intimate knowledge of their social clicker, their social structure. So deeply connected inside of a social click. But then you have this character over here called the broker and the broker is somebody that. So where connectors are able to drive initiatives forward, brokers are able to bring innovation out.

And the reason why that happens is because. They have relationships across many different social cliques, right? So, they can take someone over here and someone over here and they can combine them and say, Hey, you two need to meet. And when you combine them, poof, you get this new idea, you get this new approach or whatever it might be.

And so without having. Opportunities for cross-pollination or bridges built between these social cliques. You don't see a lot of creativity, ideation, things like that coming out. And so being able to create space for that to occur is a true value for the, businesses can create. So we call, these brands that do this broker brands.

So rather than, you know, one individual doing this. The entire brand is doing it. And if you think about as a business, we have so many one-to-one relationships. It's a very centralized customer company, customer relationship, where you talk to one sales person, you get onboarded by one person, and then you go into the customer pool and, you're part of, you know, couple hundred other customers that are with one CSM.

So everything's going back up to the company. What if you were to decentralize that relationship and create this spider web of connections between your customers and between your leads and just. Create space for that to happen. What kind of innovation is going to come out of that? Well, we actually see that retention increases.

It's a, new value proposition for customers. They're going to be more loyal to you because they are part of a community of. Other fellow customers, their peers that are helping them out with all kinds of new business problems. And that's in our DNA as humans, you know, our DNA is to connect it's to have conversations.

 But it's not as easy as you would think. And that's where I think things have gone wrong in the past is networking up until now has been it's been very unstructured. But we don't do very well in a very unstructured environment. It's very hard for us as human beings to branch out of what we know the best example I have of this as I was before COVID last year, I was at a conference and we ran in, I was running late me and my business partner.

We came into the conference late and, there were only two seats in the back and it was all, everyone was seated in tables. So we went and sat in the back and, you know, we looked into tomorrow, we're not going to be late. So, anyway, we meet everyone at our table and, we go back the next day. we're about five minutes early.

So most of the most everyone was there and we walk in and I'm sure you could predict where everyone was sitting. At the same spots that they were sitting the day before we see a lot of times we're able to push ourselves out of the comfort zone, into the uncomfortable zone, but then we want to get as comfortable as quickly as possible.

So, we went up and sat up in the front and you could tell there's like this. This unsaid rule that you can't once there's no scene in assignments, but once you've sat there, that's your spot, you know, and that's kind of how we are as humans. And, that's kinda how. Networking is it's a word I don't really like because it just, it brings up these, experiences that are so unstructured.

And so, what we need is, well, what I think we need is guided experiences. Something that is facilitated, right? So it's something that is going to help you. Prompt you connect you. You've got to be able to bring your extroverts back a little bit and bring your introverts forward a little bit. And when you don't create space for that to happen, someone's going to get talked over and someone else isn't going to be able to share or someone's going to disengage.

 And so that's why I think that facilitated process of connection is so important to branching out. Like you were saying, You know, we brought together strangers, that didn't know each other with the hope that by the end of it, they had new inroads with each other and had some cool conversations that, led to, you know, who knows where they'll lead, but they'll certainly lead to new opportunities.

Mike O'Neill: Now. If I had to try to explain what you just did, I would fail miserably. What I can say is I may not be able to explain what you did for our group. I can simply say it worked and what you've described. I'm just trying to imagine our listeners. Now these are folks who are leading businesses and they're trying to find.

How can they improve connections? How can they bring people together in a much more meaningful way? This has really been very interesting thus far. I would like to kind of go back to something that you said, a little bit earlier, and that is you mentioned that your motto is to end people, connection deserts.

And I had to think about that, but in people connection deserts, when you say deserts and you want to end that, tell me a little bit more about what if you fulfilled your mission as an organization and for your clients, what does that look like?

Paul Jones:  What it would look like is people coming into an experience where they feel like they can be.

Themselves, they can open up a little bit and they can, and by doing that, they're going to get into all kinds of, different conversations. And it's not information sharing so much as just life experience sharing. I'll give you a good example. I. So we moved to a new house here in Lehigh.

We're not that far from a grocery store. One of my favorite things to do is ride a bike to the grocery store just during the summers. It's super fun. So I was looking for this. I was looking for a bike, on the used, you know, equipment. Sites here in Utah, it's KSL, but I know elsewhere it's different.

And I found it this beautiful 1990 Raleigh bike. I mean, it had whitewashed wheels and it had the neon green, a water bottle holder, and it was just this beautiful bike and the guy wasn't asking very much for it. So I reached out, I'm like, Hey, I'm in love with your bike. I want to come buy this. So we said, okay, meet me out here.

So I went out to this neighborhood, he's 30 something and it's raining lightly raining, and he's got this bike in the back of his truck. He's like, Oh, Hey, it's over here. So he pulls the bike out and he's just talking me through. You could tell he loved this thing. And I'm like, I promise you, I will take care of this and love this because you did such an amazing job with this.

And he's like, Oh, thanks. And you could tell he had it, you know, For whatever reason, that compliment meant a lot to him. And I was like, so what are you doing out here? He's like, Oh, I'm putting flyers on people's doors. I've been doing that for like six years. And anyway, we got into this conversation and he was talking to me about, he said, you know, I struggle with ADHD and because of my ADHD, I can't have a girlfriend.

I can't hold down a job. I just can't be successful. And I don't think I'll ever be successful.

Mike O'Neill:  Hmm.

Paul Jones:  And I was like, Whoa, look, I need to connect you with some people because half the startups that I know are all founded by people with ADHD, a lot of the millionaires that I know all have ADHD and see that he just wasn't connected.

He wasn't connected in with his people to know that ADHD didn't have to define his life. Because, you know, when you're isolated, it's easy to think that, but when you're hanging out with other people who are successful and who have ADHD, it's, you can't say that to yourself because the proof is right in front of you.

So what do you do? You have to turn it into something that's different. And for him, he had never been able to be connected. And that I think about my dad too. Right. So that's the idea is that. We're in a very, we're in a very hyper connected world with all these likes and all these, you know, friends and whatnot.

But at the end of the day, we're more isolated. So to me, that is the people connection. Desert is when people don't out of our events all the time, people come out and they say, I didn't know, everyone else was struggling with the same thing I was struggling with. Well, we're not all that different. And when we're isolated.

 The challenges that we face can look very big and daunting. But when you share that with other people and you realize they're trying to solve the same problem, and here's what they tried, boom, collaboration takes place and problem solving accelerates. And so that is how we end the people. Connection.

Desert is providing, bringing training facilitators, providing facilitated experiences where people can come to the table and have real conversations.

Mike O'Neill: Paul, I appreciate you said that your goal is to get participants to open up. I want to ask you to do the same thing and that is, would you be willing to share an example, whereas you found yourself personally stuck.

And what did you do to get unstuck?

Paul Jones: That is a good question. I feel like that happens every like four months or so, but the one that I'm thinking about is, So I had just started, at a startup.  I was out of college and I was in a sales role and, I was going to a conference in Seattle.

And I was flying United and for whatever you're laughing. Cause he might yeah. Yeah. Okay, go ahead. Yep. So I was flying United and you know, for whatever I flew United a lot because I was traveling back and forth from Utah to Omaha. And so I had all this background history with flying on a United flight and more so than any other, flight company or flight plane I've been on or plane company.

They love to use that thin veil between business and the main class area. So you get up on your flight and you're flying along. And then the waitress at the front with first-class, she puts that little curtain across and you can see through it. And so every time, like just, it bugged me so much, like w what is the purpose of this curtain?

You know I can hear through it. I can see through it. So the only purpose that curtain serves is, Hey, there is a difference between you and between me and you're not allowed up here. That's how I took it. Now. Some people are probably laughing at this. My wife laughs at this all the time. She's like, I can't believe you thought about this, but so I'm looking at this curtain and coming into Seattle, I'm like, okay, It's go time.

We gotta do some sales. I need to change my mindset. Cause I had gotten stuck where I hadn't quite figured out how to move myself to that next level. And it really is all about mindset. Right. And so I'm sitting next to a guy that just came back from Afghanistan and I look over at him and I'm like, Hey dude.

What do you think about that curtain up there? He's like, I don't know. And I'm like, I think it's a bunch of BS. He's like, yeah, yeah, it kind of is isn't it? I was like, yeah, here, hold this. So I give him my phone. I'm like record this. And so just for my own mind, I got up out of the chair, walked up, took that curtain, threw it to the side.

And just went and use the first class bathroom. And for me, I mean, that's a kind of a dumb story, but it was massive for my mental fitness. It was for my mindset because that curtain represented all the limitations I was putting on myself. And I think a lot of times we do, we put that limitation on ourselves.

We'd come up with excuses and so forth and just the physical, grabbing it and moving it off to the side helped me get into the right mindset of. Okay, going into this conference how can I really expand my capabilities and expand what I can do? And I think life is about doing that multiple times all the time.

Right. But that was the first time where I really was like, it just happened and it was mostly just out of anger, but then afterward I realized, Oh, that kind of helped me mentally get unstuck.

Mike O'Neill: I love that illustration and it kind of goes back to reinforce all too often. What gets us personally stuck are mental sheer curtains, and that by you just boldly going up and throwing that aside and going, using that bathroom, you.

Literally and figuratively just kind of separated that out. And I love that. Thank you for sharing that, example,

As we start out kind of winding down our time together, man, you have really packed so much into our conversation here, but I just want to make sure that the folks listening, have in their mind, what would you want to be the main takeaways that you have shared with us on this podcast?

What would they be?

Paul Jones: You know, I think we're in some very unique times. The book that I keep thinking about is the book by Spencer Johnson, called who moved my cheese. It's a very short book. But I think. The reality is right now, is that for a lot of us, the cheese has been moved and it's not coming back.

Meaning, the game has changed a little bit. And so how do we navigate this new world that we're living in? And how can we look at it from a perspective of excitement rather than foreboding? And so my, one of the key takeaways I would say is. If you, if you look at how you can provide value or where does value need.

To be provided. That's a great way to think differently about things. I was trying to start a company and, COVID hit a lot of other challenges came up. I was thinking about going and getting a job. And I thought, okay, if I have to go get a job, I need to provide value. What do I, what can I do to provide value?

And that thought by itself is what led to is part of the reason that led to the start of BridgWell, is realizing, wow. Businesses all over the place need to build their communities and they need these facilitated virtual experiences to help them do that. And so just thinking about value and then taking, and, this is the book, the Go-Giver fantastic book, but that's one of their Cardinal rules of stratospheric success is provide value first.

So rather than thinking what you need, think about what value you can provide and then just go and provide it and watch where the trail takes you. Cause it's an exciting adventurous path. The other thing that I would note is, especially during today, this, being able to. Feel gratitude for where we're at today.

I think that gratitude is something that is an art. It's not just saying thank you. it's a feeling that you get inside of you. That is one of the best ways I've found to get unstuck and into a place where, you're feeling energized again is really. Dig down and think about the gratitude that you're feeling, or feel gratitude for whatever it might be.

So like really dig down and feel that, and then the last one you'll get a kick out of this one is, become a conquerer of the useless.

So this is a phrase coined by Yvon Chouinard at Patagonia. And I didn't understand what he meant until recently. I read John fish's book time off, but a conquer of the useless.

So I grew up rock climbing and, river guiding and, skateboarding even. And. From the outside perspective, those activities are pretty useless. I mean, in what everyday circumstance do I need to learn how to rock climb, right? Or use my rock climbing skills or skateboarding or whatever it might be.

But what I found is that by still skating or still climbing are still doing river trips. This what looks like it's a pointless activity is an a, is a universe of knowledge and lessons and life lessons.  to give you an example, when I was growing up skateboarding, we would do these ollies, ollie is where your, board kind of jumps up.

So you push the back tail down and then you move your front foot forward. And that allows you to jump up. And so we would do is we would put the skateboard on it. We would lay a skateboard on its side, and then we would all go and ollie, you try to ollie over it and then once we all got the first skateboard, we'd stack a second skateboard on top of the first one, and we try to Ollie over that.

And next thing you know, I never got this good, but some of the people I was skating with could Ollie over like seven boards, eight boards. But what was so interesting about that is that, it didn't matter if it was board two, three, four, five, six, seven. If we were on board four, we were clearing it by a quarter of an inch, and then you put board five on there and you're clearing it by a quarter of an inch and board six, a quarter of an inch and seven.

And so that's, those are some of the lessons. I think that the. We have to give time for our ideas, our best ideas to marinade in our subconscious. And by doing these quote unquote useless activities, we're actually learning, like I was saying, we're, there's so many things that we can learn from just doing these things right.

And doing them gives us confidence when we go to try to. Be successful in our careers because we know, Hey, I know I can climb that route. What's the difference between this over here? And so that would be my last one is just become a conquer of the useless, joined the fray and, pick something and go and do it.

And  re-ignite that hobby that you liked so much.

Mike O'Neill: Paul, these are great takeaways. If folks want to reach out to you online, what's the best way to do that.

Paul Jones: LinkedIn, you can find me on LinkedIn. My email is also Paul@BridgWell.com that is bridge without an E on the end.

Mike O'Neill: So remember it's BridgWell bridge without an e on the end,

Paul Jones: Yes, this is the challenging thing about our name is we decided to drop the E's.

So B R I D G W E L L. Dot com

Mike O'Neill: One of your takeaways for us was to show gratitude. And I want to do that here. I want to say thank you for spending time with me today, sharing, the perspectives that you have and the freshness in which you go about sharing it. Thank you very much, Paul

Paul Jones: Mike, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be on your show and spending more time with you.

Mike O'Neill:  I also want to thank our listeners for joining us for this episode of Get Unstuck & On Target. We've lined up great thought leaders, just like Paul, that I'm sure you enjoy getting to know. We upload the latest episode every Thursday, and I hope you'll subscribe via Apple, Spotify, whatever your favorite platform is.

 But if you've been listening to my discussion with Paul and you're realizing that something's keeping you or your company stuck. Let's talk, visit unstuck.show to schedule a call. We'll explore. What's got you or your company stuck and what you can do to overcome it. So I want to thank you for joining us, and I hope you've picked up on some tips that will help you get unstuck and on target until next time.