Transcript for this weeks message

Shane

Ladies and gentlemen welcome to this episode of The Horsemanship Journey. We are the leader in personal development for horse people, which in part that includes bringing you the top guests in human development. And today, true to form, we're proud to present Dr. Jeffrey McGee. Dr. McGee is the publisher of Leadership Magazine, a certified speaking professional, co-owner of WWDB-TV, and has been called one of today's leading leadership and marketing strategists. Jeff is the author of more than 32 books including The Trajectory Code, a powerful book that will help you learn how to change your decisions, your actions and directions to become part of the top 1% of high achievers. Dr. McGee, thank you so much for taking your time to join us today on The Horsemanship Journey.

Dr. Jeffrey Magee

Thank you very much, I appreciate it. Been looking forward to this, good to see you, Shane.

Shane

If you wouldn't mind just begin for people that you're new to people that might not have possibly been living under a rock or in a cave and haven't heard about you, tell us a little bit more about Jeff.

Dr. Jeffrey Magee

I appreciate it. The short and sweet of it is raised on a farm in Colorado, which I think affords someone a unique perspective on life when you're raised in rural America, raised in a farm. Came from a large family, escaped Colorado, as I sometimes say, I don't know if that's good or bad, to go to college on an athletic scholarship and journalism, which took me into Kansas City. I spent some time in broadcast news and print journalism, loved it, fascinated with it.

The real drive is a little bit around the theme of what we're here today to talk about, and that is looking at human equation from the perspective of success and accomplishment and achievement, which doesn't play too well in the world of journalism. It prefers to live where it's negative. So that was a crossroads for me in the 80s. I don't like the negative side. So left journalism. Went into sales and marketing, spent some time with Fortune 100 companies, evolved into my own company, evolved that into trending and development companies, evolved that into where I am today. So that's the quick full circle. And I now live at the time of this recording in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Shane

Right on. We appreciate you joining us. Could you begin, tell us what is the trajectory code? What is that all about?

Dr. Jeffrey Magee

Great question. So, in the 32 books I've written, I primarily have lived in sales, management and leadership. So, a lot of my work is in that space, both for graduate management textbooks and management, with several best sellers in management leadership. And along that path, working with one of my clients in Illinois, again, it's always, if you listen to your best customers, they'll tell you exactly where your next piece of business is gonna come from having a conversation.

And one of the models we use is a concept I created called trajectory code. If you think of a letter V as an example, the bottom of that V we'll call that the starting point. You have one trajectory line that goes to the left and one that goes to the right. The line that goes to the left, the short and simple of it is that's a finite line. I call that A B and that's derailment and failure. And the line that goes to the right is A C and that goes out into infinity and represents success. So we create language.

Anyway, one of the clients, she sat down at lunch with me and said, Dr. McGee, I want to share a quick story with you. We use this trajectory code model for planning and strategy and benchmarking and kind of graphing where we're going in life and setting goals. And I have two teenage boys their twins. One was going off on the wrong trajectory. So she's using my language. She's using this tool. And I sat down with my husband and we talked about the model. It made sense. We sat down as a family. We wrote down our letter C. C kind of is the goal. So what's our family values? What's our goals? What's important to us?

And so as a family wrote that down on a sheet of paper, put that piece of paper on the refrigerator in the kitchen with a magnet. And she started to get a little bit emotional at this point. She said it's changed every conversation in our, in our, in our house. You've saved our family. She said that we'd find ourselves at times talking to our kids about something that they were doing that was really going off on the wrong trajectory. And we would just stop talking. We point towards the kitchen. We all knew what that meant. She said, but the bigger aha was at times we'd be talking and our kids would point at the kitchen where that piece of paper was, what our goals were, and what's our values. So trajectory code is a model where you can start to see what it's all about.

So in psychology, we use about a half a dozen formulas or models. One of them you're probably familiar with and a lot of your viewers would be, it's called the ABC model to human behavior. A stands for activating event, starting point. B stands for behavior. Activating events cause our behaviors to do whatever it is we do. That generates the C, C is consequence or outcome.

So I took the ABC model, plugged it into this V diagram. Again, A is our activating event starting points. A, B, B is gonna go off on a finite trajectory, derailment. If we could catch ourself, hence the title of the book you just read, the real secret to the formula, Shane, is nothing I've just said. That's the formula. The secret is the closer you are down here to where the V starts, right down here, the faster you can catch yourself and recognize if I do this, will take me towards failure or towards success. If you can realize, well, if I do this, it's gonna take me towards failure, I can recalibrate and be on to success trajectory. That's the 1% recalibration.

Successful people get their ego out of the way. Doesn't mean they lose their self-confidence because part of the horseman's journey really is a basis of four key elements. If anyone studies your own business and that is how we identify and unleash your own horsepower and give us the confidence so we can accomplish all those great things within us and around us. And that's what the 1% is all about, recalibrating to be successful. That's all that matters.

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Shane

So it sounds like what happens at the bottom of that V is a big deal.

Dr. Jeffrey Magee

Absolutely and recognizing it's like you know if I've written this go ahead.

Shane

No, you go finish.

Dr. Jeffrey Magee

So, again, let's say that you're in a business setting and you're writing an email. Well, that's at the bottom of this A. And before you hit send, let's say you save it in a draft folder, go get something to drink, walk around the office or go outside and come back and reread it and say, okay, now if I were to be the receiver of this, is it communicating really with what I'm trying to accomplish and with the impact or might I wanna edit this so I don't get in trouble? That's a simple little 1% recalibration before you hit send.

Again, leaving a voicemail. A lot of times the prompt always asks you, hey, do you want to hear what you've just recorded? Most people never re-listen to what they said. But if you were to do that and realize, wow, that sounds like a bunch of garbage, let me hit delete, re-record, 1% recalibration back to success. Again, how we look at things, taking a deep breath before you say things and do things as our parents would have told us growing up.

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Shane

You talk about this mental imprint, this TC DNA imprint. Tell us about that. What's all that? What are all those letters? What does that mean?

Dr. Jeffrey Magee

Yeah, great question. So again, you know parents have lots of phrases and sayings. If you peel them back, it's wisdom. And sometimes we call those wisdoms, adages or phrases. So there's one that a parent might talk about, birds of a feather flock together. I think most people can figure that out unless you flunked K-12. So again, if you hang out with a bunch of rock stars, it's gonna raise your performance. If you hang out with a bunch of complacent, mediocre people, then you're gonna have a life of mediocrity. If you hang out with a bunch of troublemakers, pretty good likelihood you're gonna get in trouble. So again, birds of a feather flock together. So when we talk about these mental imprints, again, it's recognizing how you were raised and not from a judgment or right, wrong, good, bad. You know, what successes and failures have you had? Not so that you can wallow in your own misery, but to recognize. So what are those social imprints?

You know, recently a friend of mine who's a motivational speaker, she talked about in essence, you know, what do you do to frame success and happiness. And so I responded back to her and said, it's kind of interesting. I use this one reference of a grocery store in the Netherlands that has a facial recognition system at the front door of the grocery store. So you and I live in Las Vegas at the time of this recording. So Albertsons and Smiths would be the two large grocery stores in our city. So again, for our viewers, think about, again, whether you're in small town America or a large city, think about a major grocery store.

Well, this grocery store in the Netherlands has a facial recognition camera at the front door and the door will not open until you smile. You have to smile and it has to register that smile before the door's open. And it has, you know, then a camera recording people as they come up and they're having this experience. And then there's another camera as they come through the doorway to see the experience, it completely re-changes their mindset.

So again, what are the mental imprints? But a lot of people, what we do is it's like, we have this endless hard drive in our head where we keep recording and keep in instant memory recall all of the crap in our life. But we don't create a larger space for all of the positives, all of the opportunities, all of the greatness's we have, we've experienced, we've been blessed with. And so again, now back to another one of those adages, misery loves company. I mean, if all you see is negative, then guess what? All you see is negative. So I could go a lot more detailed, but I think that's the fun, easy answer for your question for our viewers today. Again, think about those mental imprints. Everyone can get into the competitive Olympics of bitching for a living. That is the sport in America today. And everyone can find a negative about anybody. How about reverse that dynamic and let's find something constructive and then leverage that.

Shane

Right on, very good, very good. Dr. McGee, talk about assuming ownership and the trajectory balance. I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about those ideas.

Dr. Jeffrey Magee

Great question. This morning I was working with one of my clients in North Carolina. They're about a six billion dollar agri-finance firm. I do a lot of work with lots of different businesses, but primarily I work with senior leaders and business owners and family business owners. I do a lot in the agri-space. So you talk about assuming ownership. This morning I was having a conversation with the director of HR and it was this exact conversation. Ownership is always the, I think the challenge of the time, you know, in personal conversations, spouses and parents are always looking at how do I, and there's always that gesture of the finger point, you know, how do I get, you know, you to take ownership of if it's a child, how do I get my child to do their chores or do their homework or take care of their things in the employment space? And how do I get people to be proactive? How do I get people to take ownership?

So what I recognize is that if you want to get people to take ownership, and there's lots of conversations, one, find out what someone's passionate about, we can play that conversation. Identify what someone's good at doing and set them up to be able to draw upon those strengths. Again, when you do the things you're good at doing, you have successes. We know success feeds our self-esteem and that feeds our emotion which feeds our motivation, which gets us excited to keep doing more. We can obviously talk about those elements, but where I really drilled into is again, motivation is not long lasting. Giving someone an atta boy is short. It's not long lasting. Go into these conventions and they bring in these high profile personalities that get everyone excited and they share a story and everyone's excited. And tomorrow morning, without fail, no one really remembers the message. But more importantly, tomorrow morning, no one really has anything that sticks with them that they can grab onto to be successful to take ownership of. So where I came at this is ownership comes down to five levels of accountability.

And if you want to get someone to take ownership, then create a framework upon which accountability is going to be present for someone to take ownership. So then the challenge always is, again, Shane, you're my boss and you own the company. How do I get McGee to take ownership? Well, there's five levels of ownership. Number one is self. If you can interview and do a better job at interviewing to find people that are self-motivated, to be self-accountable, to take ownership, then my God, everything becomes easier after that.

But again, sometimes, you know, I have crappy days. We're not motivated. We're exhausted. And we're going to say, you know, I'm going to take a pass on this one. So how do you help people to take ownership? I realize the secret of these five is actually number two. Number two is the word system. So there's five levels of ownership or five levels of accountability. Number one starts with self but number two is system. If you create systems by which people can grab on to, then they'll take more ownership and will have greater success.

The problem is, when you start to negotiate the systems away, all chaos kicks in. Again, I won't even get into politics here. It doesn't matter what your political views are, but if we have a law, and that law is the law of the land that says you must do something, that's an example of system. If we hold people accountable to that and people know there's going to be no debate on that, guess what? People will follow that number two law. But as soon as you start wavering on the law, debating the law, making exceptions to the law, the numbers one, three, four, and five all implode and you have chaos.

Ah, there's our easy example without getting specific. So one is self, two is gonna be system structure. For example, let's say you go to the grocery store. So let's stay with our grocery store example a minute ago. Well, there's times that you, I, and everyone else watching may go to the grocery store without a list, whether the list is in our phone or written down on a sheet of paper. Well, if you don't have a list, then you don't have a system. There's a good likelihood you may or may not get everything you actually went to the store to get. But if you go to the store where they list a system that helps to hold you accountable, number one, to taking ownership to make sure you get what the core items are you're there to get before you splurge and buy a bunch of junk.

Third, the third level of ownership and accountability then is gonna be in essence the customer. Who's the recipient of what you do in life? And that holds you accountable. Sometimes as a parent, again, you might want a waiver, but then you look at the child and you're like, no, I have. I have a responsibility to take care of the child. So there's your customer in the equation. So do you have a feedback loop in business where the customers can actually give you feedback to help to hold you accountable to your system sand improve your systems and make sure your systems are not antiquated so number one, your people know what to do.

The fourth level of accountability ownership then is peer. Do you create an environment by which the peers can help each other, hold each other accountable without making it an HR nightmare where someone's always tattle-telling on someone as to what it's gonna come off? That's not the game. I have vested ownership in you, Shane, my boss, to help you to be successful. So I might say something if I see you're about to do something that doesn't make sense for our company, that's out of alignment with our values, or I see a safety issue. I'm going to say something, you don't get hurt, and vice versa. And there's lots of businesses where you see these five levels of ownership in play, and that's why they're incredibly profitable.

And then the last level of accountability and ownership should be the boss. Now, you're a parent, you have a child between ages of zero, one, two, three. You're probably not going to be able to use the model the way I presented it, because number one, the child's not old enough yet to figure out some of these things they take ownership of, but usually around two, three, four, five, six, seven each year, there's more and more that we number five, the parent or the boss let go of because number one works. We teach the child systems so they know they can't, it can't do this because of the system. We do the same thing in business. So you asked a very powerful question, Shane, that's at the root of every thriving business, they have ownership happening at five levels. You can replace the word ownership with accountability at five levels. And that's why they're successful. But the secret to the form I realized is number two at home and at work, you create structure and systems of accountability that will motivate and cause people, allow people, drive people to take ownership at one. Three, four and five.

Shane

This is such a fascinating responsibility or ownership is just a massive, it's a big subject and it's a, that's fascinating because let me make sure I'm going to make sure I'm understanding what you're saying here. You're saying that if we want to instill, if we look at and say, we're only going to be able to get the desired result that I have if someone else in this project that we're working on or whatever it might be takes ownership of that. That's gonna be the most effective, most efficient way to do it. I need or am going to require someone to be responsible for this, and then these are the five ways basically to have accountability is how we basically get someone else, right? That's what you're saying, to have that ownership or take that responsibility.

Dr. Jeffrey Magee

That's exactly it. Exactly. And again, you know, if one person could do it, then your business would only need one employee. But most enterprises, most endeavors, most projects probably require more than one person or one subject matter expert. And so how do you draw upon the right people at the right time? And again, just to expand a little bit. You know, when you task someone to do a project or an activity, whether you call it task or delegate or empower, whatever word you use, that in and of itself also is a conversation.

Now, early on in life, I started to realize life is nothing but a series of formulas. And if you can figure out any endeavor you're going to do, what's the formula? And you know what to do and how to do and when to do it, then you can accelerate success. Again, whether we're talking, you know, from the theme and spirit of this program, riding a horse and putting a saddle on or, you know, moving cattle or sheep from one area to another or Adronomy of you know, how do I how do I prepare my field so I can plant to my field so I can weed and irrigate And grow my field so I can harvest my fields. Everything's a formula.

How do I cook something for dinner? There's a formula if you put the ingredients in a differing order. Sometimes it completely changes the outcome So in that I came back and realized if we want to accomplish again asking delegating tasking someone think of the word empowerment That's a formula if you're going to ask me to do something, there's certain ingredients. So it's like writing down the word empowerment, putting an equal sign next to it, and then start to jot down all of the other words that's a part of the formula.

For someone to be empowered, number one, they have to have the knowledge and skill and ability to do that which you're asking them to do. So that may be the deal breaker right there. You're asking someone to do something they have no clue about, well, you've got to train them and educate and get them a clue. So empowerment equals knowledge and education and ability. Plus, put a plus sign plus desire and want. I may be knowledgeable of what you want me to do, but if I don't have a desire to willingness to do it, then we're probably gonna have a crappy output or it's not gonna get done on time. Plus access, I mean, do I need to have access to resources or decision-making authority or people? Plus, so again, time.

So when people talk about empowering or tasking, that's a formula itself and that's another element. If we wanna get people to become more successful thus tap into their horsepower to be greater and more successful. You know, what are they really good at doing? I'm a runner. That's what I, you know, I ran competitively for years, won lots of running competitions, but you know, at my age today, am I as competitive? No. I mean, I've got to be realistic with all these conversations as well. Try it on.

Shane

Very good, excellent. Jeff, you talked a little bita bout, I hear you say shift happens. You wanna talk about that? What's shift happens?

Dr. Jeffrey Magee (20:07.754)

I love that. So I'm finishing a book right now at the time of this recording. It's gonna be called Change Formational. And I'm playing off of the concept theory, words, and entire work product around change, as well as the same around the word transformation. So change is where the entire world lives. You and I are of age. We grew up in change. Change is never gonna be something that leaves our vocabulary because change is the natural evolutionary state of...

And then finish that statement any way you want. I mean, we're always changing just by medically, our health, our age, our look, businesses change, customers needs change, how the supply changes, the universe changes, how we manufacture changes, how we meet people's expectations change. So we spend a lot of time on dealing with change issues. And anyone that's fighting or resisting change is just clueless and the bus has already left the station, as they say. So you can have change advocates and agents.

But what I realized is that the more we play in the world of change, which may be completely acceptable for some of our viewers. The more you live in the world of change, at best you will be a healthy survivor. And that might be great for people. You'll be a healthy survivor. Transformation is where you rewrite the rules. Now everyone's playing catch up to you. Whenever you're playing in transformation, this is where you're gonna basically in essence set the rules that everyone else plays by. And here's where you thrive. So change, survive, transformation. thrive and when you can merge the two together and leverage those, change formational is when you win.

I have clients right now, a lot of businesses are going through mergers and you know again where we are here in this time of our of our life and coming out of COVID over the past several years, a lot of mergers are happening. Well in a merger that's change but it gives you the chance now to do some transformational things, a vague word, that you maybe didn't have the guts to do.

Again, now you have the opportunity to maybe rewrite your HR rules so that any of your low performing players you can find a way to get rid of them. And now that's good riddance. So when I say, you know, shift happens, it does. I mean, every day the rules are changing. I leave where I live. Excuse me. I leave where I live here in Vegas to drive somewhere. And the road yesterday was in perfect condition. Today it might have a construction signs, detours.

It happens. Shift is always happening. Some of that normally can count on all of a sudden. Now I can't count on them. Shift happens. The way that, you know, the way that a client may pay me, may change overnight, shift happens. Expectation shift happens. So realizing, you know, shift happens is another way of saying change happens. And anyone who's trying to resist change is just making their own life difficult. So the more you embrace it, but don't just embrace it, because that's what everyone else is doing. The more you learn how to make transformation happen in these moments. That's where you're going to start winning.

Shane

What a great concept. I mean, yeah, because I think that, I don't know, I guess a lot of times change can cause fear, you know. I think that maybe that's why we resist it. We just get just so comfortable with the way things are. And so it has this kind of fear response, which causes, then we don't do anything, right? And then we end up getting left behind. A good example, I think,

Dr. Jeffrey Magee

Thank you, sir. Absolutely.

Shane

As people reject technology as it changes, I kind of did that myself in the early 2000s. I didn't think that these new ways were something that we needed and I got left in the dust. So I hear you.

Dr. Jeffrey Magee

Hey, I'm with you, Shane. You know, this Internet thing, I wasn't sure it was going to catch on either a couple of decades back. And when I realized it was going to catch on, Jeff McGee dot com was already taken. So that's why now my website's Jeffrey McGee dot com. So my mom wins. The formal name wins. And there is. I mean, so you and I, it's fun. We can laugh with each other. But everyone watching today, there are things that we resist because we believe it's not going to catch on or it's going to go away or we can outlive it. And I would just encourage people to rethink that mindset because more often than not, you're not gonna be able to outlive change. That's why it's our reality. The conversation shouldn't even be around change anymore, it should be about transformation. Every time there's a change opportunity, how do I transform that? How do I take it to the next level?

You know, recently I was watching a show about Michael Jordan and his whole rise to his success. It was fascinating about his mom. His mom was who made him a billionaire. His mom was the one that looked at the change happening and my son, he's gonna be a great basketball player. Everyone wants him to sign with their shoe company, but it was one little kind of small guy on the block called Nike that was willing to go transformationally when mom said, no, Michael needs to get apiece of every shoe ever sold the rest of his life and the rest of this company. And no one would do that. And so it wasn't just change, they transformed the entire world today.

I mean, at the time of this recording, I think if you do a Google search, I mean, you know, Michael Jordan's making, you know, well over about three or $400 million a year today in royalties from Nike on a shoe. And he hasn't played basketball in 20 years. That's change formation. When you take a change opportunity, you massively lay down transformation. Now you rewrite the rules. Elon Musk, whether you love him or hate him, I tell people you should be studying him. He has changed formation. Every time he opens up his mouth, he blows up conventional wisdom and thinking.

So think about these people. You can go historically back to Henry Ford. I mean, his classic line was, you can have any color vehicle you want, as long as it's black, because it's all I'm creating. But he transformed the entire manufacturing rule to make a car more economical for anybody. So again, if you can make a horse faster, the car wouldn't have caught on. But guess what? You can only make a horse so fast. So change formation, that's where we're headed.

Shane

So powerful. Jeff, talk about change versus, excuse me, talk about smart versus safe.

Dr. Jeffrey Magee

You know, that's a great question. I appreciate, you know, smart versus safe. Smart decisions, safe decisions. Safe decisions are the easy ones to make because it keeps you out of trouble today. Safe decisions are easy to make because everyone will love you. Safe decisions are easy to make because it doesn't require you to bean adult. Safe decisions are easy to make because it doesn't require you to actually demonstrate you have any intellectual capacity, guts or brains, stamina or backbone.

So now let me break that down. Smart is what we're supposed to be doing as an adult. If our viewers, regardless of your political views, were just to take a step back, park your emotional political IQ and turn on your IQ. Listen to any newscast and watch the newscasters and anyone they are interviewing and that's a way to answer your own questions. Shane, listen to people. Are they making smart statements or are they making safe statements?

Most of the world's problems that our viewers are going to be living through in the next 10 years are going to be problems because no one right now is making a smart decision. They're all making safe decisions. Our long-term problems, all of us experience at home and in work typically happen because we didn't make a smart decision in the rearview mirror of life. We made a safe decision back there. It's safe to not stand up and tell people, you know what, you're being mean and rude. but people are mean and rude because no one is holding them accountable.

Smart decisions also require that you have the right people in the room to have the right conversations, no disrespect. But if voters truly looked at most of the people we elect to send to DC, if they owned a billion dollar business and they owned that company, most of the people we elect to send to DC, you would never hire to run your company. Most of the people we elect, you would probably not trust them to babysit your kids for three or four days with you not having any connectivity back to your house. So see, we make safe not smart. We vote because we're pressured to. We say things out loud because we're pressured to .We don't say things out loud because we're pressured to. We choose to bite our tongue because it's safe. So safe will win the day, smart will win the life. Smart gives you legacy. And we have a lot of things happening today because we made safe decisions in the past instead of smart decisions.

Shane

Right on. Sounds like smart takes courage. I was wondering if you could, how critical in your thoughts is, how critical is self-talk in winning?

Dr. Jeffrey Magee

Direct hit. It's absolutely huge and it starts in childhood. It starts when you decide to make a hard break and move from one zip code to a next because you've decided the zip code you're in is toxic. It's critically important when you are changing a job or a career. It's critically important in making any decision in life back to my trajectory code model. It's critically important in terms of that self-talk here to prepare yourself down a success trajectory.

So again, there's a lot of ways to speak to self-talk. Again, you know, what's the music you listen to? And if it's toxic and negative and condescending, then that's probably light bulbing up in your head a self-defeating negative self-talk. What's the TV shows you watch? What's the magazines you read or the books you read? Again, you know, Performance Magazine have been publishing for 33 years. And when I started it, I started with a vision and mission that one, every article is evergreen in nature. So that causes people to stop and think before they write. Every article is about performance, achievement, or success. It's Ford Momentum. We don't write anything that's about a current event. We don't do commentary. We don't go negative. So again, it's the old adage of, again, think about this one. Matter of fact, let me pose a question, Shane. Help me finish this adage. Garbage Inn.

Shane

Garbage out.

Dr. Jeffrey Magee

Bingo. So let's take that one as another way to challenge our self-talk. I'm gonna challenge that saying, garbage in, garbage out is actually an incorrect statement. Garbage in, garbage stays. So if you are surrounded by negative information, negative stimulus, if you're surrounded by teachers that are not giving you a great K-12 objective, thorough deep education, but giving you revisionist ideas, perspectives, agendas, and history, You've got garbage in, garbage out. No, garbage goes in, it stays in.

So now back to my self-talk, you wanna have more positive self-talk, you need to have X times more positive stimulants going inside you every day versus negative because we are surrounded by critical negative stimulation every day, think about it. People don't beep their horn in traffic to wave at you and smile and say, hey, I just wanted to say hi. They beep their horn, there's a negative. People don't cut you off to save you from getting in trouble. They cut you off and then give you probably a one finger symbol, which is not the head, you're number one, it's a different finger.

People don't, in essence, every day stop by your desk and give you less work, they give you more work. People don't talk behind your back in a positive way, typically in a negative way. Turn on any newscasts. This is why I left journalism. 99.9% of everyone on the news opens up their mouth, can do nothing but bitch and complain and go negative versus go positive. Or take ownership to some of the dumb things going around them.

So yeah, I could go off forever on this one. So again, positive self-talk is critically important. Now, let me give one asterisk to this before I shut up and you can go wherever you want to go next. It's also critically important for people to recognize the information they allow inside their head. The people that they allow inside your head. You need to look at their life resumes and make sure you don't have people that are being very disingenuous and they in of themselves are losers trying to bring you down because misery does love company.

Again, if I want to become more successful at something, I want to find someone who truly has accomplished it, not just knows how to talk about it. You know, again, at the time of our recording here, AI and chat GPT is becoming huge and it has the potential to do massive damage to the planet. I mean, you don't have to have much brain power to type into chat GPT, an idea that you want turned into great, you know, prose, a white paper, an article or a book, put it through a couple of gyrations. It gives you this phenomenal data. But are you really the subject matter expert on that topic? So again, we're all, you know, the whole world has become almost a, world of everyone wants the fastest route to success without ever having to do any of the work. Again, back to in essence, positive self-talk. You've got to make sure all of the resources around you are genuine legit, and you're getting information from people that have been there or you're about to get in deep trouble.

Shane

Super powerful, I appreciate that. That really resonates, you know, in the horse industry and the horse people. A lot of us, we know that horse people are people problems and we know that the relationship that we have with horses is just that it's a relationship and we know that relationships begin right here. So what you're saying is super powerful, fill your energy and your passion coming right through the internet. And so we so much appreciate these.

Dr. Jeffrey Magee

Thank you.

Shane

Your thoughts today. Jeff, just wondering if you, what you'd like to leave us with today, anything we missed or in this conversation or last thoughts today for The Horsemanship Journey.

Dr. Jeffrey Magee

I love it. I lived in Bozeman, Montana for a couple of years and was part ownership in a large training company and provided CPE to CPAs and attorneys. And one of the things that was beautiful about Bozeman at the time is it was a one high school town. And I always made the comment, part of why they had such a great sense of community was it was a one high school town. So it had homecoming in downtown. It has, you know, Montana State University is there. As soon as the city becomes a two high school town, it will lose a lot of that magic and charm and subsequently that has in fact happened.

But with that, one of the things that was great about Bozeman was that I could leave where I lived and literally within five minutes, I could walk from my house and be on some sort of a high key trailhead that went in tons of directions. I could get in my car and within 10 minutes, I could be at the trailhead of tons of great hiking trails. In one of them though, took you around the outskirts of town, right back down in the downtown. And as it went through it, it went past and went through the primary cemetery.

And as you walk to that cemetery, it's a fascinating experience. People need to reflect on this in a positive way, not a sorrowful way, but go to a cemetery, just walk through and look at the headstones. Look at the artistry on some of the older headstones where they really carved into them versus today's it's a slab of granite or marble or cement. And there would be messaging on them about the person that rests there.

And there was a poem written a couple of years ago by a young lady. And I encourage all of our viewers here today, if you're not familiar with a poem called The Dash, the dash, you should download it and read it. And if you look at any one of those tombstones, it's not the date when someone arrived or the date when someone left. It's all important whether that that dash between those two dates is basically the same year or decades. What's important is that dash. What did the person do? How did they impact other people during that time? And I just love to look at some of those headstones, and I still do. So I use that as a backstory to answer your question.

What I would leave everyone with is a simple word, one word, legacy. What is your legacy? Every day we have no proof that we're gonna get tomorrow. We assume it's gonna be here, but we don't have any proof that we get tomorrow. So what's your legacy today? How do you touch and help other people? How can you uplift people? How can you challenge people? How can you better people? How can you enrich people? Knowing that there's a ton of charlatans on the planet. There's a lot of people that look better than you're ever going to look and they're better at self marketing than the other one. But they're very disingenuous because they maybe have one great message and they got one sentence to back it up. But they're, they're, they're snake oil sales.

So your legacy is genuineness. What do you do every day to enrich people and better people? And that is how I would leave today because that's how I look at every day. What's my legacy through the day? So today, my legacy is several fold, but one of them is this podcast that you've given me the honor to be on with you today for your followers and anyone else that when we post this live, I can drive my followers and social media customers to come and turn them on to not only this cast, but your other ones.

What's our legacy? Helping people to be better. And sometimes that might mean we have to make smart decisions versus safe. We have to hold people accountable to take ownership. We have to help them to have positive self-dialogue versus negative. Everything we talked about today. So legacy. What is your legacy?

Shane

Awesome. Dr. McGee, where do people, what's the best way to reach out to you and find out more about Dr. McGee?

Dr. Jeffrey Magee

Thank you, I appreciate that. Two simple answers, one, or I guess three simple answers. One is again, my name is my business website in the talent development world, so jeffreymagee.com. Second, again, the magazine we publish is called Professional Performance Magazine. Soprofessionalperformancemagazine.com. And again, the viewers of our program here today with you, if there's any copies, past issues, you'd like a digital copy of, we will gift that to you free. Just let me know that our paths crossed with Shane and The Horseman's Journey Studio. And then again, if we're not connected on LinkedIn, Dr. Jeff Speaks, Jeffrey McGee, follow me on LinkedIn because every day I post an evergreen thought, idea, video that is legacy building, how to help you to be better. So those are the three ways, JeffreyMagee.com,ProfessionalPerformanceMagazine.com and on LinkedIn. Thank you, Shane.

Shane

Awesome, thank you so much for your impact today on The Horsemanship Journey ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Jeffrey McGee

Dr. Jeffrey Magee

Thank you Shane.

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