The Grant Williams Podcast Ep. 110 - Robert Glazer FULL EPISODE

**Grant Williams** (0:10)
Before we get going, here's the bit where I remind you that nothing we discussed should be considered as investment advice. This conversation is for informational and hopefully entertainment purposes only. So, while we hope you find it both informative and entertaining, please do your own research or speak to a financial advisor before putting a dime of your money into these crazy markets. And now, on with the show. Welcome, everybody, to another edition of The Grant Williams Podcast. Joining me this time out is author Robert Glazer. Robert's books on leadership, Elevate, Rethinking the Two Weeks Notice, and Friday Forward are all New York Times bestsellers. And this week, he's back with his latest work, The Compass Within, another terrific read which focuses on core values but does so in a unique way. And during what I found to be a fascinating and hugely inspiring conversation, you'll hear Robert and I discuss his core values course. And at the end of our conversation, I'll share a link with you which will enable you to download a free copy of that course if you order a copy of The Compass Within, which I feel sure you're going to want to do once you've heard what Robert has to say. So without further ado, here is my conversation with Robert Glazer.
Robert, thank you for doing this and joining me on the podcast. I'm thrilled to get the chance to talk to you about this phenomenal new book of yours.

**Robert Glazer** (1:33)
Thanks for having me, Grant.

**Grant Williams** (1:34)
When I read the book, the publisher sent me a PDF copy. It's fascinating, and it actually echoed with me and resonated with me through a lot of the things that I've actually been going through personally in the last couple of years. There's a ton of stuff I want to talk to you about, but perhaps before we get into the book and the journey of writing that, just give people a little bit of your background personally so we can understand how you came to be in the place of writers.

**Robert Glazer** (1:54)
Sure. I have this disease called serial entrepreneurialism, meaning I'm not very employable to other people. I've started a bunch of different businesses, the largest of which one is called Acceleration Partners. It's a global partner marketing firm. I'm the chair in that business, but I don't run it day to day. And as we were building that business, I tried to do a lot of things differently, and I learned a lot about myself and why I wanted to build the business and how I wanted the company to be different from places that I worked. And as part of my own leadership journey, I ended up tripping over this core values topic, figuring it out. It really started changing everything for me in the business and what I wanted to do. And we started training our leaders on it too. And when I saw the impact it had on other people, that was impetus to think about how I could spread that further in the world. But yeah, I've been building businesses for the last 20 years, a lot in the marketing space, and I ended up, because one of my core values is to find a better way and share it. A lot of the stuff we tried and tried to do better and figured out, I ended up open sourcing that and having a newsletter and people who followed my ideas around that.

**Grant Williams** (2:58)
So let's talk about The Compass Within, because it's something that came to you organically, and it really resonated to me as something you instinctively know, but you don't necessarily think about.

**Robert Glazer** (3:07)
It's a very good description.

**Grant Williams** (3:08)
I found it fascinating. I mean, I don't want to steal your thunder, so...

**Robert Glazer** (3:11)
No, and I think that describes how a lot of us, I think we understand core values when we get into danger zone. It feels there's some alarm system that goes off, but there's nothing that told us to stay away from the electric fence, or there's no sign there. So, as I mentioned back to my story, I went to this leadership training, it became very clear, and it was like, look, the first two days were pretty heavy around, like a big mirror, like, who are you and what do you value? But they didn't leave us with how to figure that out. So I spent three to six months being like, I'm a very values-driven person, I need to figure this out. The resources were terrible. I went around, they're like, keep keyword list, and I built a process that I thought I didn't have the terms at the time, kind of actionable core values. As I said, we turned it into a leadership training thing for up and coming leaders at our company. I was like, look, if you're going to lead, you're going to lead a line to these things. That's authentic leadership. And once I helped 10 classes of 10 do that, I was like, oh, this really helps people. And I wrote this book called Elevate, and I talked about this concept of spiritual capacity. And that spiritual capacity was really understanding your core values, your strengths, what you cared about, what you're good at. And people were like, this is great. I'm in on this. How do I figure out my core values? I mean, I have this training thing I did. I sent them some resources. So I ended up sitting down and turning that training program into a course. And 2,000 people took the course, and people are sending me notes all the time. I took this job instead, or it changed my life, or whatever. I was like, all right, I need to get this to more people. It'd be a great book. But honestly, I was like, I think it'd be a boring book. I'm not sure that people are gonna go read a book on values. I had this vision. I'm walking by in Barnes and Nobles, and I see a book on values or core values. I'm not gonna pick it up. So I'm a huge fan of Pat Lindsay Oni's work and Bob Berg and parables. And my daughter was challenging me around writing fiction. She's like, you only live in the nonfiction world. You read nonfiction, you write nonfiction. I was like, ah, this actually feels like if I could show it, it would be better. And look, it's interesting. You've read the book. A bunch of people have read it early in podcasts. Jamie, Jamie's just a mirror. He's very reflective for people, because I've had people be like, oh, my God, that so reminded me of this conversation with my partner or my job or my, you know, and he just acts as a mirror to bring this to us. And then obviously, the framework that underlies the book, I lay out explicitly in the last chapter in terms of how you can discover what I would say are actionable core values, not one word platitudes, but things that you could use to make decisions in your life and the hardest decisions as we talk about the big three in the book.