The 'Inspire your Life' Podcast with Arthi Rabikrisson
The 'Inspire your Life' Podcast with Arthi Rabikrisson
S3 E6 Tasha Ten Spotlight: Matt Stone - There Is No Such Thing As Win-Lose
On Episode 6 of Season 3, Arthi is joined by one of the newest Tasha Ten members, Matt Stone. Matt shares his perspectives on why the concept of win-lose is a fallacy. Matt shares this through his experiences as a family law attorney which led him to understand that instead of win-lose as the options we are familiar with in any situation, in the long run it is typically either win-win or lose-lose.
Witnessing disruptive separations that were often highly adversarial brought to the fore many of Matt’s own unhealed matters around loss and separation, which began the process of healing and making some key decisions as a result, which Matt shares such as career change, advice seeking, and forging your own path over time.
Matt stresses the importance of intrapersonal self-awareness in order to assist ourselves and those around us towards a long term win-win for everyone and shares key insights on what internal and external self-awareness levers can be used.
Some wise words from Matt:
- “ if [you] continue in an activity that goes so against what [you] believe…eventually it is going to be a massive reckoning, because you have to stay in a delusional state about yourself in order to cope for a while, in a situation where you're misaligned with who you really are”
- “Just because you can, doesn't mean you should”
- “we need a sustainable way of relating to each other if we're going to have a sustainable environment to live in”
- “Life is progress not perfection”
Listen to the full episode for so much more insights and ideas offered by my wonderful guest.
About Matt Stone:
Matt is the CEO of BehavioralOS®, a global agency that provides leaders with a proven method developed by an MIT behavioural scientist for proliferating the two most important ingredients for any company’s success: trust and respect. Matt draws on broad experience over twenty-five years as a business development professional, entrepreneur, and former practising attorney. He brings a global perspective to all of his engagements, having spent over fifteen years of his life living in Europe and Asia. He is an irrepressible optimist who believes strongly that in the business of life: we all either win together, or we all lose together.
Connect with Matt in the following ways:
Do rate, write a review and share with others.
Share too, your own insights from your journey based on themes from the episode - what has worked or hasn't for you. We can all learn from each other.
Connect with host Arthi here:
Arthi Rabikrisson 0:15
Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Inspire Your Life podcast with me your host, Arthi Rabikrisson.
I believe we find inspiration all around us, especially from the stories that we all have in us. My aim with the inspire your life podcast is to bring some of those real stories to light. Stories of my guests that resonate with you and me. It's by listening to these stories that we can be inspired and motivate ourselves to overcome, find a new path and rise even higher than we thought possible.
Joining me on the show today is another one of my Tasha 10. Colleagues, a newer a member actually, Matt Stone, and we're going to be talking about there is no such thing as a win lose. I'm sure you're gonna be quite interested in this everyone. So Matt is the CEO of behavioral iOS, a global agency that provides leaders with a proven method developed by none other than an MIT behavioral scientists for perorating the two most important ingredients for any company's success, that being trust and respect. Matt draws on such a broad experience of over 25 years as a business development professional entrepreneur, and a former practicing attorney. He brings a global perspective to all of his engagements, having spent over 15 years of his life living in Europe and Asia. And Matt says he's an irrepressible optimist who believes strongly that in the business of life, we all either win together, or we all lose together, everyone, which is so interesting, because we often hear about the win lose situation, the Win Win, or the lose lose, as you're suggesting, Matt and with that, that it is such a pleasure to welcome you to the Inspire life podcast today.
Matt Stone 2:35
Oh, thank you so much. I'm delighted to be with you. I can't wait for this conversation
Arthi Rabikrisson 2:41
Oh, absolutely and I know you are under the weather Matt thank you so much for bringing it to our chat today. I so appreciate that. Now, I have just given everyone the very high level bio to you. Let's get to know Matt a little bit more. Tell us more.
Matt Stone 2:58
Oh, gosh. Well, in the beginning, I was actually born in the state of Oregon in the United States and the West, the Pacific Northwest in the United States. So if people aren't familiar think Seattle, kind of in between Seattle and San Francisco on the West Coast. Okay, lots of mountains. I was born there. My parents were really, really young. They were they kind of eloped at 19 and, you know, and had me a couple of years later. So I had very young parents. We were not economically well off. And my dad joined the army. Okay, we went into Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. That's where they train people to speak different languages. Okay, so he at the time, it was the end of the Cold War and he was learning Czech. And so that's when the adventures began, because as a young kid, I think I was four or five, when we first moved, we moved down to California to a place called Fort Ord California, which was it's now a shuttered military base, but it was a very large operation near Monterey. Okay. And that's when, you know, started the started the global adventures that have never ended. From there, we got transferred to Texas, and then Germany. And then back to Oregon, and then Kansas, and then back to Oregon. And so fast forward, I ended up with a history degree from the Robert D. Clarke Honors College at the University of Oregon. And I was in sales and I want to I was gonna go to law school, always. I mean, that was always the plan. But well, you know, I'm not ready to go yet. I want to go somewhere else that I haven't been. I have never been to Asia. So I kind of started doing some research and settled on teaching English in Japan. And hey, and there began the adult chapter of my global Global Affairs movement. So yeah, so that's, you know, set that off and I did end up ended up back in Silicon Valley working for Silicon Valley startup that my friend owned and then I went to law school in Hawaii, actually. And I had a family law practice in Oregon for a few years. Then I was back in Hawaii. So I've just done a lot of different. It's always been people related business development, growing building businesses. And yeah, and practicing practicing law for a bit too. So they're all They're all interwoven. Somehow they all intersect.
Arthi Rabikrisson 5:27
You know, I firmly believe that even with my own business, everyone sort of says, oh, Arthi these don't seem to make sense in terms of a value chain, but it makes sense to me absolutely, is I get what you're saying. And if anything Matt that diversity of experience, I mean, the whole sort of army, you know, kind of culture and environment that you were brought up in the traveling, and then you making that conscious decision about oh, actually want to go to a different place that I haven't been to before. All of that just adds to, I suppose the depth of what you bring to all of these opportunities that you work with, with, you know, startups with companies and all of that. So beautiful. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that with us. Now, let's get to the heart of it. Okay, so we're talking about, there's no such thing as a win lose. Okay, why? Why do we say that?
Matt Stone 6:18
Well, I'm going to actually draw us back to the intro, which is one of the things I learned, I didn't realize I was learning it early on moving around the world was every time we would land it was very unstable. It was unsettling. I mean, as a kid, you kind of want stability, actually. And so it wasn't all roses. I mean, it was very hard. So every time we moved, I had to reestablish friends and lose old ones and it was, you know, I'm a huge extrovert i I'm, you know, so it was very hard. But what I figured out was, what was in the beginning, largely a survival mechanism, although also natural to my personality. But what I learned thing was that in terms of surviving in a new place, you needed people. You needed relationships. And without those, you really, you really suffered, but you know, it really, it's win, lose, it's Win, win or lose, lose in that situation, too. Because if you go to a place where you're not accepted, people tend to do more poorly, they don't fit into the society, they are not a part of. So now they're separated from and destructive things happen, you know, and then we know that socio economically and statistically around the world. So yeah, all of these lessons, I didn't realize I was learning, but I learned that really early on. So it's always been about the people and different types of people make the world a better place. Diversity is great.
So yeah, so I think I've lost the thread a little bit. But the Win, win or lose, lose, I think, carry that forward, I became an attorney and I ended up and I didn't really choose this. I mean, I made a choice. But it wasn't like my plan was to become a family law attorney, I just kind of ended up. I went back to Oregon after law school, I passed the bar, and was interviewing for different jobs and the job that I got was in a family law practice. Now I've also come to learn that a lot of things in life that you think are random aren't. Yeah, that that we're being driven by forces deep inside of us that we may not even recognize, you know, our attraction to things. And in my case, so I ended up in this family law practice, and I was doing largely divorces and custody battles. We also did some civil litigation that was non family law related. I mean, I represented people in criminal court, I did civil insurance stuff. So I did a few other things, too. What I saw firsthand, in even more explicit sort of tangible terms, was this win, win, lose lose thing. And it was the people who came to me we're not in a collaborative mood, shall we say?
Arthi Rabikrisson 8:57
To put it lightly. Yes. Right.
Matt Stone 9:00
So I'm not, I'm not denigrating the choice to get divorced at all. But that's a choice that many people need to make for very good reason. So I am in no way judging anyone who's thinking about getting a divorce or has been divorced. That's not my point. The clients that I often saw, though, that will come to us were ones that wanted that, that were in a real fight. Because the people who weren't in a fight, didn't need to hire as many lawyers, they tended to, you know, they kind of worked it out and then got someone to sign it for them. But the work I was doing was more than adversarial. So the the wedge of divorce, divorce battles that I was in was the most the most contentious ones. And it was the ones where the people tended to have a mentality of win lose, rooted in deep fear, insecurity about money insecurity about a whole lot of stuff. And now you have this disruptive separation that you know, threatens all of the base instincts so the fight or flights kicking in and that's when people act their most, irrationally vicious towards each other.
Arthi Rabikrisson 10:05
I can just see.
Matt Stone 10:06
So in an effort out of hurt and pain and fear and resentment, now you're an instrument of that person, your job is to advocate for them. And what they're telling you is I want to destroy this person. And I have to say, I, at the time was not emotionally, I was intellectually capable of it. I was skilled you know, I was skilled in many ways. What I didn't realize was I didn't have the emotional maturity to handle that.
Arthi Rabikrisson 10:32
Well, you know, that's actually what I'm thinking about. Because if you're, especially when you're in this adversarial, as you said, sort of, you know, these meetings going on with deep emotion, you talked about fear and pain, and all of that. And here you are as this instrument, part of this, I mean, what did it do for you what, what was going on with you in this process as much as you're trying to separate it, but it's hard to right?
Matt Stone 10:53
Well, I wasn't good at separate. I mean, I have friends who are doing this now and the ones who are successful at it are the ones who really are able to have a healthy, they are in a place with themselves, that they can separate themselves emotionally from their clients, often their clients trauma and trauma responses and all the shame that's thrown in there. I mean, shame and trauma, my goodness, if we could get rid of those two things in the world, we wouldn't have leaders that, you know, murdered millions of people or had to control everything. Yeah. But in this case, I had some sort of personal and un, I don't want to say demons. I don't know that that really resonates with me, because it wasn't demonic. But it was like unhealed things in my life from right from the childhood that I had, which was full of opportunity to learn. But it also was very challenging. The divorce was very hard on me when my parents divorced. Yes, we were in Germany at the time and moved from Germany, to Oregon, and my dad stayed in Germany and so I lost my father, basically, at a young age, and I was traumatized over that. And so I had all of these things that I had been carrying inside of me. Feelings of abandonment, feelings of lots of things that I hadn't really confronted. My family law practice, really accelerated the confrontation of those things, because it triggered me in every in every way. I'm grateful for it now. But at the time, it was it was very, very painful loss.
Arthi Rabikrisson 12:23
Yeah, I can, I can only imagine. I can imagine, you know, as you said, you felt ill equipped at that time to be able to make that separation, because a lot of it touched home, right? You had gone through these experiences in a similar vein, around you know, divorce and things like that. So, okay, so I can I can picture this Matt is there, you're doing what you're doing on behalf of your clients but there's this deep self awareness of okay, I'm, I'm kind of coping and maybe not coping, but you're getting to learn more about what you're, you know, your childhood and how those things impacted you. What were some of those initial things that you started to look towards doing to help you become better equipped to deal with the emotional drain that these situations placed you in?
Matt Stone 13:09
Well, in that case, and I and I'm not prescribing this for everyone who's, you know, starting to get more self awareness around things they need to fix. But in my case, I knew at a certain point that I needed to stop doing the job, that it was not the right thing for me at that time. And that it didn't, it was not the song of my heart, even in a perfectly healed state. I knew deep down, this was not the song that my heart wants to sing. And if I continue in a, in an activity that goes so against what I was a belief, you know, kind of made to do that eventually is going to be a massive reckoning, because you have to stay in a delusional state about yourself in order to cope for a while, in a situation where you're misaligned with who you really are.
Arthi Rabikrisson 14:06
I quite like that, you have to be in a disillusioned. Yeah, that's quite, that's quite powerful.
Matt Stone 14:10
I mean, it's a denial. I mean, you know, it's a form of denial. So I, I knew that. I knew that and I, I knew I needed to change a whole bunch of things in my life. And so it started with, okay, get yourself out of this situation that is clearly not helping you emotionally even though I was able to do the job. That wasn't enough. Yeah. I and I talked to some other attorneys too. And I got some really great advice from an old timer, who I kind of confided him a little bit and he said, he says, Well, he says, Look, it's gonna take you, you know, this is in my first year, and I'm kind of a fast started a thing. So I was already I got to a certain level of competence pretty quickly, but you know, there's a reason why you pay a lawyer after 30 Who's got 30 years of experience more money because they They know what they it takes them a lot less time to, to, to figure out what to do. They really know their stuff. They're worth every penny Yeah. But he said, if you, you know, you'll get to a point where you've done this and you're competent. And so you're you're not coasting, but you're able to do it, but it's going to be harder and harder for you to get out. And I really, I really respected this man. He was, he had been doing it a long time. And I, I saw a man who, if he could rewind and do it all over again, probably wouldn't have chosen to stay in the practice, at least the type of practice, there's a lot of different types of law practice, yes. But in that kind of contentious practice, he looks just worn down by it. And anybody wasn't like depressed, per se, but he was just really honest with me. And I really took that on board. I really listened to him. And I and then I knew I knew, Okay, it's not what I was meant to be. and just because you can doesn't mean you should. Okay. Right.
Arthi Rabikrisson 16:01
So you So you were able to extricate yourself, or at least take a different path,
Matt Stone 16:05
In a sense,
Arthi Rabikrisson 16:06
In a sense, okay.
Matt Stone 16:07
In a sense,I knew that. At that time, although I didn't articulate it this way, that there really wasn't anything as win lose, that we're all winning together or losing together, that these warring parties that I was representing, were in a in a mutual self destruction mode, if they didn't try and at least appeal to saving both of them as a separate entity as separate entities. Yes. Looking to both them. So it causes it causes so much mutual destruction. And as the council in it, I was a party to that. So you know, that it also caused suffering in me. So, yeah, so that learning was was really strong then. And it's only now I see it in even clearer terms. Now that I'm a different type of work.
Arthi Rabikrisson 16:52
Of course, I'm sure you would have met. I mean, I'm just trying to picture it, actually, because you're, you're painting such a such an interesting picture for us here about that time in your life. And, you know, I can just think of, you know, these these couples, you know, they're, they're in a difficult situation. And each party is probably feeling like, maybe I'm not really winning, maybe I'm losing, you know, I wonder what level of self awareness, you kind of need to be able to know that we're in the situation, we can still build some level of trust and understanding and actually emerge, even better for it. Well, I mean, what did you find was happening, either for your clients or for yourself during that time in terms ?
Matt Stone 17:32
for the clients? I mean, look, the clients, most of the clients that we dealt with, because we were in the nastiest types of battles. There was low self awareness, and a lot of just toxic, you know, just undealt with things from their own childhood. I mean, it was not it was not the epitome of mental and psychological health. Yeah, unfortunately. So that was a big learning, like, you know, that's why I'm such a big fan of self awareness work, because we also have leaders in jobs who are leaving dead bodies behind because they lack self awareness and they're in a delusional state. And they're treating people in such a way that they are not fully aware of how, how much damage they're doing to other people, because they haven't dealt with their own stuff.
Arthi Rabikrisson 18:16
That is so true. That is so true. Okay. I mean, I actually see that as a massive blind spot, to be honest. You know, and as you said, it's because that work around self awareness hasn't been done. So, I mean, Matt, in your experience now, I mean, fast forward all the work you've been doing thus far? What are some of the things we can do then to assist people who have the sort of self awareness blind spot? Who are in that delusional space? As you're saying, How can we help them emerge from that?
Matt Stone 18:46
Well, the legal system creates accountability for people whose lack of self awareness leads them to commit crimes, for example. So we have that right. If deterrence, yes, our governments can create policies on a macro scale, that incentivize economically and in other ways, behavior that is fueled by and fuels, better self awareness, better interconnection, treating other, you know, the idea that we are interconnected, and that my behavior actually has an impact on other people. And it matters. Our companies, I believe, have a strong responsibility if they're going to go around talking about sustainability, and trust and equity,
Arthi Rabikrisson 19:29
Which is what we all talking about now.
Matt Stone 19:31
All the buzzwords, right. Sustainability is about more than clean water for in perpetuity or clean air or, you know, it's much more than the environment. It's there's also a human environment that is totally interconnected with the outcome of the Earth's environment. So we need a sustainable way of relating to each other if we're going to have a sustainable environment to live in. Yeah. And and our companies have a responsibility in that if they're going to talk about sustainability to incentivize the types of leaders and promote the types of leaders who demonstrate a commitment to continual improvement. And at the heart of that is a self awareness practice. So to me, I don't care how smart somebody is, if they are, refuse to accept feedback, refuse to change, and treat people with contempt, essentially. That's not then to me. In the long run, they may winsome they may, they may create some gains short, short term, long term, that's not going to work that you're going to in the long term, cause more damage than then you will victories and but you know, not everybody cares about long term. So let's be clear headed about this. And we have certain things in our system that incentivize short term thinking, like shareholder value quarter by quarter, the American legal system, you know, my fiduciary duty as an executive and a corporation is first and foremost, to shareholder value. So, you know, those, those sorts of things, do create a misalignment with this, but I think we all know, from our experience as human beings that, that it matters, that great destruction can come from a short term, you know, short term, ignoring what's going on in front of us because we're getting some value out of it. All right.
Arthi Rabikrisson 21:22
Okay. No, I hear you. I absolutely hear you. And I mean, what I'm also hearing is, yes, there's the short termism in terms of what we're supposed to be doing, as you said, because we've got shareholder value and all of that to consider. But actually winning together in the long run makes a whole lot of sense. From, as you said, sustainability across the board, whether it's human planet, even profit. I mean, if you can look at it from a triple bottom line.
Matt Stone 21:47
Exactly, thank you for bringing that up. That's that's called Sustainable profits.
Arthi Rabikrisson 21:54
So all right, Matt, let's take it to the level of I am, I'm a leader. I'm working with my exec team, I'm understanding that perhaps I'm not leading this team well enough, but I want to try and potentially move away from a win lose towards a win win situation. What are some of these things that I need to be mindful of? So you already had mentioned? Like, if I'm not taking feedback, I don't want to change, if there is contempt, but what are those actual steps that a leader can take to kind of change that narrative?
Matt Stone 22:26
Hmm. Well, I do think it starts with cells. Right? Okay. So yes, that's the starting point. Yep. So the leader was my receptors, my filter, if my filter is corrupt, I can, I can look outwardly to figure out what I need to change in you. But if I don't see myself, then what I'm, what I'm doing is projecting myself onto you, instead of actually paying attention to who you really are. So it starts with what Tasha Urich would say, was internal self awareness, and figuring out, you know, where you're at on the internal self awareness, you know, spectrum in terms of not really a Spectrum Scale, I guess, you know, how internally self aware, do you really know what your values are? Are you living your values? Does your leadership style reflect what you want your values to be? At least to you? Now, we haven't dealt with what other people think, but really being grounded in that we can all get lost. And, you know, none of us are immune to that. We can all be jerks, I mean, my lord. But, but are we willing to look at that and treat life as progress, not perfection, but that we are responsible for continuing the progress. So starts with internal awareness values, and those sorts of things, right. And then it has to go to external self awareness, which is understanding how others are receiving my behavior, and then applying that. And then I've got the, the ability to get to learn and grow. Without that I don't have the ability to learn and grow.
Arthi Rabikrisson 23:57
Of course, of course, because I mean, without that, and I like that you are cementing that for us, it has to start from within, right as a leader, even if you're not leader, even just an individual, that level of groundedness as you're saying, of having that internal sort of value system and bringing that out, to then understand the perception that can be, you know, faced with that with everyone else in the environment. That is the key to then unlocking how we are actually then viewing and going about building out this Win Win sort of paradigm for everyone. Right? So it starts from inside moving outwards. Okay. So, you know, share some of your biggest lessons then to date about how do we win together some key advice that you really want our listeners to take away from today's episode.
Matt Stone 24:44
Thanks. I think there's a few things that come to mind. One is patience, that we don't do any of this work overnight. You know, you don't know what your programming is, especially. A lot of our programming comes from when we were small children those experiences that defined our sense of self early on? Those are not you don't just get rid of those. In fact, I remember. I'm not a neuroscientist. I mean, I think everyone nowadays thinks of themselves as an armchair neuroscientist, and I try to remember that no, you're, you're a lawyer, you're a management consultant, you're an entrepreneur, you can, you know, but but you were not trained in neuroscience. So just, you know, know your place. Yes. But my understanding of it just is that, you know, we can't, we can't erase the code in our mind, someone explained to me like this one, you're not going to erase the tapes in your mind that tell you the self talk tapes about yourself, or rather, we're not going to erase them, you have to write new code over those, essentially, write new tapes. And in order to write those tapes to where the new tape the new idea, the new thought, I am good enough. I'm not threatened by you by other people. I'm not in danger by someone criticizing me that these things take sometimes a lifetime to write a new new script, new tape that becomes more dominant than the one that's not serving you or anyone else very well.
Yeah. So again, this is where self awareness always comes in. Because without self awareness, I don't even I have no ability to know what I need to change in the way that I think so, patience with yourself, and patience with the people around you. I mean, most people, this is an unscientific platitude and I try not to, it's hard, but I do believe based on my experience, that the majority of people I've encountered are actually good people, even if they're doing bad things. Okay. And by bad, I don't mean, murdering people, I mean, you know, just behaving in a way that I don't like, all right. Oftentimes, it's a misunderstanding, I don't understand, I can't interpret what they're doing. Or we have, you know, for whatever reason, it's like my, my wife like it, she'll do something that, you know, irritates me. And so often, she's very thoughtful, and she's a deep thinker, but she doesn't communicate the way that I do. And so if I'm patient with her, eventually I will figure out I will learn, I will allow her to communicate to me in a way that's meaningful for her, instead of trying to force her into my communication style, it will come out that I will see underneath the reason why she did something that really irritated me. And then suddenly I soften. You know, how that you have that experience where the grace comes in? Yes, yes, you have this whole construct of assumptions that are partially true, but they're not completely true, and you're missing the humanity underneath it. So patience gives me the room, to then tap into the humility, I need to be committed to our growth together,
Arthi Rabikrisson 27:51
Beautifully put.
Matt Stone 27:53
And that's really the combination, I need to pause. I need to be working on myself awareness and commit to humility, and humility is not humiliation, it is seeing yourself as equal to other people on a human level, not better or worse. And then, and then you can connect and learn. And then when when people are doing behaviors that are harmful and wrong, you have a place to stand on to communicate your, you know, your vision about that, or your opinion about that from a different place other than a, you know, resentment based reaction. And that's a very different place to come from, when you are resolved in something that is harmful behavior, and I don't accept it, you can continue doing it, but I'm not going to continue accepting it. That's a different that's just such a different place to be from then, than the shame based, you know, lizard, you know, tail wagging dog. lizard brain reaction. Yeah,
Arthi Rabikrisson 28:46
I love that you've made that distinction for us actually Matt. And you know, what's actually sitting with me is your comment about humility and how, I don't know why it's been almost equated to, if I'm humble, becoming a bit less than we're not on an even keel anymore. And I'm like, a step lower than you. And I don't know why that's happened. I mean, why Matt? Why why is that happening? I mean, humility, for me is almost that and its what you do that building of the trust, and that respect, is part of it. That's the way I see it.
Matt Stone 29:18
Yeah. Well, I mean, the meaning of words does change it, they do change over over the millennia, and you look at certain words, and how, how they're being used. And, and unfortunately, in a lot of cases, words lose their meaning because they get to mean, they become whatever the person wants them to mean. Yes. So that's why I like to define it so that you know, even if you if you go to a dictionary that defines it differently than the way I did, I'm telling you what it means to me. And I stand by that definition, and I think it's a helpful definition. So I'm not arguing whether or not I'm right about what that definition is, but is the meaning behind it. You kind of Can't argue with I mean, the idea that I'm that we are equal in value as human beings. If I stay in that I'm a worker among workers, you know that in my head won't get my ego so inflated that I start looking down on everyone. . And that's not a good place to be coming from that that does not that creates win lose, which leads to lose lose
Arthi Rabikrisson 30:20
That is just what I was thinking. That's what creates that imbalance. Yeah, yeah,
Matt Stone 30:25
I had a professor once one of my favorite professors from undergrad, she was my thesis, we had kind of a, it wasn't like a full doctoral thesis, but it was like a pretty robust undergraduate thesis, we had to write a book, essentially. And I did mine on a Chinese massacre in the US, the 36 people were murdered in the northwest, it was awful. It was horrible. And I argued that it was a race based murder, based on all the evidence in the context of the culture, that it was not just a robbery, the way the papers played it off. And I got empirical evidence and all of this. And in the process of that might my professor who was a history PhD, and a lawyer, and she's just so brilliant. And she said, you know, Matt, because you gotta think about the discrimination. Like when you have a law that says, black people, for example, can't ride on this car, they have to ride in the black car. Yeah, or, you know, non white car only? Well, the white people now have fewer places to sit. She flipped. And I was like, that's so simple and brilliant. When we exclude others, when we treat others as less than we separate and we make our world smaller and our options, fewer. And eventually, that is a lose, lose, if not immediately, eventually, that creates the kind of division and war and just things that are it degrades us all together. So I like to keep that in mind when I think about, you know, all of us together on this planet.
Arthi Rabikrisson 31:50
Yes, yes. Why make it smaller when we have this massive ability to actually make it much further than what we think I like that
Matt Stone 32:00
That's right. Applies in business too. Absolutely.
Arthi Rabikrisson 32:03
Absolutely. I hear you and that I've met, you've been sharing such beautiful insights with us taking us back to some of your experiences, and insights. I love it. Thank you so much for sharing on that. As we're coming to the end of our conversation today. Share with us, you know, what's in store next for you? What are you busy with at the moment that's exciting and invigorating you?
Matt Stone 32:25
Well, thanks for asking, yeah, I've got to two kinds of tracks that I'm really excited about. So my company is behavioral iOS, and we work with leadership teams on trust, and interpersonal communication, conflict resolution, really accelerating trust on team so they can get to the performance and get out of the people friction, right. And we have an exciting new assessment tool that I'm working on a really you know, it's a next version of, of one that we've used, but it's a, it's a newer design. So I'm really excited about that. I'm hoping it comes out this year. And I'm just it's just, it's unlike anything else on the market. And I'm super excited. Then the other side is I'm working on some new media projects, I'm not ready to announce anything yet. It's my own stuff, my own brand, and just more media presence around relationships for everybody, not just business. Kind of like the theme of this podcast in that inspiring people to learn to get over their fear to connect with other people so they can learn and grow and thrive together. So I'm working on some media ideas around that. And that's 2023. I mean, you know,
Arthi Rabikrisson 33:31
Well, it sounds exciting, diverse and exciting at the same time. So wishing you absolute success with both and I'll be keeping my ears peeled and eyes peeled for both of them when they do go out. so fabulous. Fabulous. We're wishing you great success with that, Matt. All right, let's as we roll out now in terms of the end of our conversation, I'd love it if you would share something that inspires you could be a poem, quote, a song lyric. But something Matt that just keeps you on this journey of your own self awareness, your own transformation, both professionally, professionally or personally. Yeah.
Matt Stone 34:08
All right. Well, I'm just gonna read the entirety of Warren Piece now. So just settled our idea. So there's a quote that I came across from the founder of my company who's who's unfortunately not with us anymore, and he was a dear dear friend. Yeah. But he used to use a quote in his slide decks and at the time when I first saw it, because I was still pretty steeped in traditional business thinking. I thought, Oh, that's a little bit soft for this. I have come to love this. Okay, so here, it's an unattributed quote, okay, my friend, if I could give you one thing, I would give you the ability to see yourself as others see you then you would realize what a truly special person you are. I wish more people could see how truly special they are. They do a lot more damage to other people and to themselves if they knew that
Arthi Rabikrisson 34:59
right That's so true. I mean, we often look in the mirror, but we don't see what's truly there, right? Because there's so many layers that cloud, what our own eyes see, compared to what somebody else sees. That's beautiful. Really, really beautiful. Matt, thank you so much for spending time with me today and for sharing all that you have in all that, you know. Really appreciate it. Thank you for your time.
Matt Stone 35:22
Well, thank you. It's been an absolute joy connecting with you today.
Arthi Rabikrisson 35:26
Wonderful. Take care, Matt. Bye.
Matt Stone 35:29
Bye bye.
Arthi Rabikrisson 35:37
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