Episode 139 - Human Connection with Amy Daughters

[00:00:06] Speaker A: Welcome to the leadership window podcast with doctor patrick jenks each week through a social sector lens patrick interviews leaders and experts and puts us in touch with trends and tips for leading effectively patrick is a board certified executive coach a member of the forbes coaches council a best selling author award winning photographer and a professional speaker and now here's doctor patrick jenks. [00:00:30] Speaker B: Hey everyone welcome to episode one hundred and thirty nine of the leadership window glad to have you with us i've been looking forward to this conversation because my guest amy daughters today hits on a note that resonates so strongly with me that when we connected i was like yes yes this is different than a lot of the content we've had on the show before it's a little unique stay tuned with us she's got an amazing story and we're going to get behind a conversation about really just human connection but as amy has found it through her story and what she is finding with a particular sort of human connection that she has discovered and is using amy daughters is a keynote speaker she's a letter writer you're going to hear about that she's a sports journalist she's a satirist she's an author of dear dana that time i went crazy and wrote all five hundred and eighty of my facebook friends a handwritten letter and also the book you cannot mess this up a true story that never happened those are worth buying just for the titles honestly so we'll talk a little bit more about them but amy is convinced as i am that when human beings connect individually in a meaningful way that's where the magic happens in a way that that as she puts it nothing can separate them like a bad internet connection for example which hopefully we don't have today amy i'm just super excited i didn't say a lot in your intro i'm going to let you say more but thank you for connecting with us and for carving out time for the show i'm really excited about this conversation yeah. [00:02:20] Speaker C: Thank you patrick i'm thrilled to go innocent thrilled to be on here it's a niche topic so i really feel like when i connect somebody who sees some kind of merit in it it's very exciting to me so thank you for being one of those rare people. [00:02:32] Speaker B: Well and a lot of a lot of our listeners may have well seen you on the kelly clarkson show i should mention that because of this story it picked up her interest and great segment on the show and we'll talk about that we'll maybe give people a link or something to go see that if they want to see it if they missed it but amy tell us just kind of how would you sum up what you're on a mission to do and and how you came to this so i'm just going to turn it to you and let you kind of open up the the window into your soul a little bit about why this subject matter and this dynamic of human connection resonates with you and what it is you're trying to do with. [00:03:20] Speaker C: It right and i think it's important to preface it by this whole story started when i was minding my own business doing just doing my regular life and so i did not come into the story intentionally as the letter writing lady and i never intended to do any of this but this story and the way it played out transformed my life i realized that we have this little tool in our little human toolkits that we had all along that is so powerful and so impactful that now my mission is to share this story with as many audiences many individuals who will listen to me long enough to hear the story and so like i said i was minding my own business i'm a writer a freelance writer i'm a mom you know i'm a small business person basically as an author and i got on facebook one day very innocently thought of a girl who i used to work with at a summer camp thirty five years ago and i was like wait i wonder whatever happened to dana and so i look her up voila there she is so i friend her since it doesn't really require me to do anything else but hit a button and she accepts my friendship request and i don't really know patrick if she remembers me because we spent six weeks together in nineteen eighty six and all i really remember is we were both loud and thought we were funny and so we jived and had a great time at camp but i'd never gotten her head out of my mind so she accepts i do the seven minute scroll through her life and i look and right away i find out that this girl has overachieved in children she has five kids four girls one boy the youngest is the boy his name is parker and right away like post number three the kid's got cancer and he's at saint jude in memphis tennessee so it's serious and so as a human being as a mom and she's a stranger to me the kid is a stranger to me but as a person you feel it right away worst case scenario nobody wants to think about that so i start following along with these people's story you know she asked for people to pray i kind of do that but i'm totally in the background i don't hit like i don't hit comment because that's disingenuous this girl's fighting for this kid's life you know and so i watch i watch it go along and then he goes into remission this is really good news she's excited she does these great posts and i mean she's a wordsmith and she's very honest and direct and then he goes to remission i feel kind of relieved then the rest of the year plays out and the cancer comes back she does a long post we're going back to memphis i'm like wow this is just horrible so i sit down at my desk that next monday morning and innocent like i wasn't thinking about her i wasn't thinking about anything and it's like a bolt of lightning came and hit me right on the head and i was like here's what i'm going to do i'm going to start writing dana and her son parker supportive notes and sending them to the ronald mcdonald house in memphis tennessee now i haven't written anyone a letter patrick in like twenty five years probably you know rather than i i might send a thank you note like i grew up doing all that like a lot of us did but i it is not a regular thing for me i still have not had any direct contact with this woman i've never met the kid so really this story is kind of like layers of def con craziness so this is like we're defcon five i'm going to send this person who's struggling with cancer with her son i'm going to send them notes but i felt so committed i started doing it so once a week i had a writing schedule at the time i was writing about college football and so i made her my sunday for monday i'd write the note on sunday i'd mail it on monday i didn't have stamps i had to figure all that out and so i just i do that for ten to fourteen weeks and i'm a human being so i'm sitting down thinking this is crazy you are nuts but i couldn't stop myself so after about fourteen weeks you could tell her facebook posts because we're still not having direct contact start to shift and the kid is not doing well and then unthinkably tragically this has nothing to do with me parker loses his battle with cancer at age fifteen total devastation and i didn't know what to do i sent a condolence card and i sat down at my desk on another monday morning i was like what do i do and i was like you know mini lightning bolt i'll just keep writing her because i didn't feel like i could just stop writing that felt like the wrong thing to do too like as a human being as like a crazy woman and so i so now i have to figure out where this woman actually lives like this is facebook so i was like oh i met her husband the summer before at camp he's an attorney so i just start sending the notes to his law office and that's that's crazy and i knew it was crazy but i was like i can't just leave her hanging so i just keep writing her every week i keep her on the sunday for monday schedule and it starts from a card and then you know i'm a writer so i start writing more and it becomes kind of a cathartic exercise for me because i'm looking at my life from the outside in as i'm introducing it to it and so i enjoyed that part but it was like four or five months of these letters i just kept sending them and every week i was like okay i probably need to stop because this is nuts and this is crazy and what good can this even do because she's lost her son so then lo and behold about five months into i go out to my mailbox and there's a ten page handwritten letter from this woman back to me and she writes about a bunch of stuff she tells me about her kids she writes about two pages about her grief and at the end of the letter she says this magical thing she says you know what i didn't know i was going to say any of that but i feel so good from just saying it and so this kicks off two years of me and this stranger basically communicating exclusively through the us mail we don't text each other we don't no phone calls we didn't even have each other's cell number for the first year probably no emails none of that and it creates this incredible vacuum which sounds so it is very obvious but it had a profound impact i believe on both of us so she's not sitting in front of me and i know she's not electronic connected to me i don't worry about like when she's going to read it because i don't even know when that's going to happen so i feel this freedom to say whatever it is i feel like i need to say because i don't know what how she's going to respond and she's operating in the same vacuum and i don't have to feel like i have to respond to the specific things she's saying about grief because she doesn't even know when i read it so we're honestly communicating in this very intimate way and these letters are crossing in the mail i'm looking at my life from the outside in she's doing the same thing so it's kind of cathartic and then we end up trusting each other because the letters we would say stuff like oh i've never told anybody this before but i know i can tell you stranger at the mailbox and we would tell each other things but the best part was i had no idea how she voted i had no idea what her socioeconomic level was or how she stood on any issue i knew she was a teacher but i didn't really know anything about anything else except for what she told me and so i didn't care about any of that all i knew is i cared about her not just because she lost her son because she had opened up about her whole life this was we would send pictures back and forth in the mail rather than post them on facebook and so after about eight months of you know these letters exchanging this pen pal thing i sat back and i was like you know if this much goodness and this much really life altering perspective changing could happen for me like what else what other untapped goodness is in this list of six hundred people who i'm friends with you know quote unquote friends with and so i was like you know what i should do i should go all world bananagrams i should try to write all of these people a handwritten letter so patrick this is when i went off the chain this is when things went awry i turned left at the intersection and i put everyone's name in a box i bought stationary i got a journal and i thought i'd get to like letter thirty but by the time i got to letter thirty i was like wait a second this is probably the most important thing i'm ever going to do in my life and so i spent eighteen magical like arduous like never ending months writing six hundred handwritten letters to every one of my facebook friends and i and i went from the girl who had written a letter in thirty years to the girl who can't shut up about. [00:11:18] Speaker B: It i have to pause for a logistical question here right and actually i have two one how did you know she was reading the letters that you were sending to the ronald mcdonald house how did you ever know she was even getting them i didn't and i. [00:11:35] Speaker C: I just felt like it was a support thing and that's the other thing about a handwritten note or letter is it's so non intrusive because you're not asking anybody for anything back and i didn't realize that at the time i just felt like i was doing what i was supposed to do yeah but. [00:11:49] Speaker B: She confirmed later on yeah she had gotten all those letters and or oh. [00:11:53] Speaker C: Yeah yeah you know we became best friends is the whole story so she ended up taking me to the ronald mcdonald house in memphis oh wow and like we toured around and the first thing she took me to patrick and i have never known she took me to the mailbox where the letters came and she said here's where it all. [00:12:08] Speaker B: Started wow well so that leads to my next question which is how did you find the mailing addresses of six hundred people on facebook i'm finding that i have a hard time with finding like with even clients finding even their business addresses i have to do research on it because no one puts their address in their email signatures anymore and that drives me crazy it really does because i put mine in there because you never know right someone might want to send something but but how did you find six hundred mailing addresses i. [00:12:42] Speaker C: Mean you just and that and that's the number one logistic question i get from the i call it the facebook project so i'm a numbers girl so i had and when i say i had forty percent of the addresses i had access like let's say i was writing you and we have a mutual friend that i'm best friends with well i could ask that person or like my mom has an address book still i could ask her or i could text a friend of a friend or maybe i just had it because i had it the second option was what you said you have a work address that i can find especially if you're a school teacher that's easy you know because i know you work at abbott elementary well that's easy to figure out or i could do a little deeper dive like you said and find their corporate address or their but the last case scenario the desperation move was i would facebook message the person and at the very beginning that was awkward once the letter writing project became because i never publicized anything about the letters but people began to talk and by the end it was super easy to get people's address but as the process went through people obviously questioned why i would need their address but i probably got ninety seven percent of the addresses part of that's because of the momentum of the project and part of that's because when i told people they were going to get a letter they got excited but they wanted to know what the angle was and people were fascinated with the fact that there was no angle. [00:14:01] Speaker B: Yeah isn't that something like we're surprised that no i just want to connect i just want to want to write you a letter so keep going you write all of these what's the result of that i mean what kind of responses were you getting and you know do you have five hundred eighty pen pals now that you're trying to keep up with how does that work well. [00:14:21] Speaker C: I will say that i kept telling myself when i'm done with this i'm going to get off facebook i think everyone goes through that with social media now i'm going to get off but when i individually connected with five hundred eighty other human beings who i knew to differing degrees because my facebook list is very similar to everyone else's facebook list you know there's the girl you met at the wedding that's right there's your brother in law sister who you talk to for five minutes there's the girl you lived next to for ten years there's the guy you sat in a cubicle next to for for twelve years those people so i think my story of the letter writing is super relatable because it would have been very similar to if you would have written letters right and so it's it's very similar so what i did not understand i was doing the letters not i was trying to do something good i just thought this is a powerful thing that i experienced with dana what happens if i do it with everyone but the responses that i received how the letters made people feel seen and valued was so off the charts that it was like adrenaline that i could not stop myself from doing it well with. [00:15:25] Speaker B: Dana you had a reason up front right i mean there was an opening to that conversation with the person that you you know met at a wedding and you don't even know if they even remember who you are they just accepted your friend because it was polite what's the what is the premise of a letter that you write to them what do you put in a letter. [00:15:47] Speaker C: Like that right and that's and that's a great question and the letters began to have a framework only because if you're going to do something six hundred times you're going to create you're going to create a framework not because you're a genius you know or you're trying to be meaningful but they they i created a meaningful framework and it worked not i mean it worked well and it differed on how well i knew the person but i opened every letter by saying this is what i'm doing this is why i'm doing it it's a short paragraph dana and her son you know i started writing your letters you know blah blah blah i'm and and as i developed through the project that introduction changed and i would say i'm testing what relationship means in the world of social media you know and then i would say something like you know this is awkward and crazy and i get that my handwriting's bad and that's fine like say something funny and then the obvious thing you do is you the first thing you're going to think is like i got to figure out how i'm connected to this person so you get on their profile so i did this six hundred times i get on their profile i'm like oh patrick we went to high school together you know and i haven't talked to him in thirty years but then so i look at your profile i'm like oh my gosh patrick look what he's done you know look at this podcast look at his coaching and so the first thing i would say was like patrick you're a rock star like i'm really excited about the work you're doing and patrick over and over again i realized i did not though i could not understand who patrick jenks was through a facebook profile i'll tell you what over and over again i was like i'm related i mean i am associated with these rock stars and i didn't look at them as individuals i knew that you had done something like you were doing something like that but until i stopped and if it would have been you if you would have been my high school friend i would have gone and listened to ten minutes of your podcast because i would have been super interested and so the first thing i get to say is patrick you're a rocket rock star and then i might have seen something when i went through your profile something you were struggling with an award you had won maybe you'd lost a parent well then i have a chance to say hey man i'm sorry hey man congratulations hey man you know whatever and then since i still have a second page to fill really the best part was and the only reason i did it because i had another paragraph i needed i was like oh patrick like how how was patrick how did patrick impact my own story and i didn't really do that cognitively that's just what happened and i would look back and think oh patrick like we hung out at lunch every day for junior year you know and when my grandmother died patrick like coached me through that didn't even know he was the coach yet but he sat there you know and was nice to me or patrick and i like did blah blah blah whatever well then i get a chance to thank you or acknowledge some part you had in my life whether it's ten minutes like oh my god we killed it at that lady's wedding and we danced you know they almost threw us out of the women's bathroom i mean just a chance to say something perfect personal so you combine all that together you stick it in a letter and people receive it and before they even open the letter like all that goodness is going to be in there when they get in it and it's going to be handwritten so it's not going to be filtered they're going to see my personality my vulnerability they're going to see the fact that i not a great speller that my handwriting's crap you know but but they're going to have this magic moment at the mailbox and this is the key to the whole thing if what's inside the envelope is sincere and then you've handwritten it and it does not have to be a letter it can be a note but you're going to create this moment and this is what i learned over and over again the impact this can have and i had no idea they're going to stand at their mailbox or their inbox or however this works whatever context you want to put it they're going to hold it in their hands and first of all they're going to be holding in their hands something that you held in your hands that they meant you meant just for them super tactile super personal you know super meaningful and they're going to connect the dots here's what it took let's reverse roles now you sent a letter to me this is what patrick had to do for me to have this moment he had to go and find paper or card or whatever your vehicle was then he had to get an envelope wait where's my address does he even still have stamps then you had to seal it then you have to run across town and figure out where you mail it you had to make the effort to deliver it in some way and so i'm going to hold this in my hand before i've even read it and i'm like this is how much i matter to another human being and what i've learned patrick from this story because i've spoken to organizations i spoke to teams i spoke to inspirational groups is that there is an empirical value in every context of this practice of making someone feel value and the impact that can have in any personal context where there's a human relationship it's off the charts as you're. [00:20:23] Speaker B: Talking i'm thinking about so a lot of the work that i do is in the nonprofit sector and as you might imagine the vast majority of the nonprofit organizations i coach have to do some kind of fundraising and they have donors and they have some kind of donor relationship program where they first of all the letter if they are doing a direct mail campaign they're writing the solicitation letter and if they're any good they're writing a thank you letter or a follow up because we hadn't heard from you yet or whatever and then there's the whole thing around fundraising about you know seven touches throughout the year et cetera i and i'm i'm guilty of this back in the day when i was in organizational leadership you know you have hundreds if not thousands of donors they're in they're in a spreadsheet or a database you do a mail merge that creates eight hundred letters in a word document and you know everybody's got their block email address and you know dear dear miss daughters or dear amy or whatever whatever however that is and then this typed out nice font branded letterhead goes out and it's got actually in most cases a graphic signature it's not even a real signature and i remember this i picked this up from someone years ago where you would i would i would get handed the letters because one thing i did when i did this i said i want to at least sign them all i want to hand sign them all and then for those that i knew like if i knew you and you're one of our donors i would say you know i would write i would scratch out this is the old thing i would rather scratch out the dear miss daughters by hand and i'd write amy in there and then off to the side i'd say amy it was great to see you at the reception last week thanks for all you do for the organization p right with my say and i you know that and and but there were not that many of those because if i had eight hundred owners i didn't know all eight hundred of them and i'm just sitting here thinking what if we took you did it with six hundred people what if we wrote handwritten letters in fact i remember a time amy this will this will excite you united way in shreveport louisiana about nineteen ninety seven or eight somewhere in that neighborhood we had we were soliciting the physicians in our community asking the doctors to give to unite away and we had a hard time as many communities do getting doctors to support us because oftentimes people don't know this people think doctors are cheap they're not they are very generous they just have their many of them have literal missions around the world that they contribute to and medical societies have these big philanthropic efforts so we're trying to get them to donate to united way in our local community and what we ended up doing was hiring at that time that the medical society in shreveport had a wives auxiliary and not a spouse's auxiliary it was a wives auxiliary as if all the doctors are men right but the wives auxiliary co chairs stepped up and said we're going to hand write letters not to the doctors we're going to hand write letters to the auxiliary members asking them to donate giving skyrocketed that year people from all over the country were going how did you do this we're looking at the data from across the country and we see that the per capita and the average gift of physicians in your community is higher why it literally was because of a personal handwritten letter campaign that went beyond the standard template that you open up and you go oh they sent this to eight hundred other people it. [00:24:16] Speaker C: Was really powerful you just explained the entire that that's exactly that's exactly it and i think it's important to say that you know letter is a great word and i wrote letters they were two page letters you know but you can have the same impact in a two line note that's right or a car yeah as long as it's sincere and you know in a business context you know we want to be professional but if it's sincere and specific to that person even if you just say hey thanks for your support i think that's super proud but if you say thanks for your support and be specific about what that's what the donation or the support or whatever but it does not have to be and i think part of the problem with two elements of my story that that are kind of a hurdle is one i'm a writer what you don't have to be to do this and to the word letter it does not have to be letters the universe or whatever however you want to term it gave me this incredible story to share with the universe but that that doesn't mean it's the blueprint for how this works because i think a note and i've worked with a lot of groups and organizations and leaders and teams a note is just. [00:25:21] Speaker B: As effective especially professionally yeah again i think the key is the handwritten part. [00:25:28] Speaker C: Right and delivered in some way that takes an effort and i'm not saying it has to be mailed it has to be walked across the the office or you know there's different ways but they know you had to do something because everyone knows that everyone else is busy yeah especially leaders everyone knows and there's such a place for instantaneous communication we need it you know but there's they know you could have just sent an email they know you could have just sent a form letter they know we all are playing by the same rules but when you do when you take the extra effort to do this there is no gauge and i tell people this all the times i think you know other than giving someone one thousand dollars in cash you're going to have a hard time having more impact than this and the reason is that i've talked to so many people who have a personal story about how they saved a note that someone sent them whether it was a a client i mean or like a leader in an organization a co worker a somebody where they with you know a service provider you know in any context they'll hang these notes up and save them forever. [00:26:37] Speaker B: You i so absolutely correct so absolutely correct i've had people send me my coach and mentor and trainer in coaching for many years doctor jim smith sent me a his thing is gifts so he likes to mail gifts to people and out of the blue you know i've been an adjunct coach with him for a while but not you know not daily work working with him and out of the blue he knows that i'm a saint louis cardinals fan very avid saint louis cardinals fan and he knows who my favorite player of all time is and all of that i get a package on my door one day and it's from him and i thought oh this must be maybe it's a leadership new leadership manual or something he's putting out i open it up and he knew so this is he's this old school almost like harvey mckay you know swim the sharks without being eaten alive kind of guy if you've ever read that book you'll know what i'm talking about but he understood this personal connection and i opened it up he knew that i was going that next month to saint louis to a game i opened the box up and there's a note handwritten and it says patrick just thinking about you here's something for the big game and i open it up and it's a ted simmons jersey an official cardinals ted simmons jersey the right number the right name that's it hey i know you're going to the game i know you like the cardinals here's a gift now i know i'm not i'm not encouraging everybody send everybody a gift right but the idea was what hit me was not this is an amazing jersey i mean that hit me too it really was great but it's it was man he didn't have to do that like the effort he went to for that right but you're right i think you have almost the same impact with just a just a handwritten note that's man someone took the time to it came to my mailbox it is different it's different than a text or definitely different than an email we do that a lot we think we're really connecting hey here you know thanks for attending our reception or whatever man nothing like those handwritten notes. [00:28:48] Speaker C: No and even if you say something meaningful on email i mean i think that has way more pop than but but just just something like i've talked to people and we talk about a professional context like where do we go personal but it's so simple you don't have to get super personal but the most meaningful things i've heard from people is like when they lose a parent and someone from an organization let's say they work with an attorney or with an accountant and someone sends them or they're on their team or they're a donor and someone sends them a simple note and says dear patrick i am so sorry about your dad the team and i are thinking about you that's it sincerely amy sincerely amy daughters or whatever and that they're going to hold on to that for the rest of their life because there they are they just want to be seen people just want to be seen in all the great technology we have people don't feel seen and they don't feel valued and that's why employee engagement is in the dumpster fire that it's in is because people don't feel that and there is an empirical value and you know you can see it with the employee engagement numbers you can see it with client you know relationships and empathy markers there was a study done about the positive emotions that have the most influence on us customers loyalty and as a whole feeling valued appreciated and respected were at the top of the list it wasn't being happy or satisfied it was feeling valued that's right and appreciated that's right. [00:30:19] Speaker B: Tons of research out there on that there's also research about the presence of a screen in a meeting that just the presence of just your phone sitting in front of you right sends a message of you're not quite as important to me as this phone because if this goes off i'm picking it up up okay where we are in our conversation and so there was there's a study done about the measurement of empathy markers among college students with just the presence of a screen they just went down dramatically the the human connection part of that just just dropped dramatically so it really is about but we've become so lazy because of technology i mean amy we think we're doing something when every day if you log on to facebook and what any day actually but but you people who log on to facebook every day one of the first things you see is today's birthdays right and they'll show you hey all here's all the people who if they put their birthday into facebook here they have a birthday today and and for a while it was oh let me send them a facebook thing and you know happy birthday facebook now has it where they've got the got these five or six different messages already all you have to do is click them you know right happy birthday with a with a you know a party favor and a cake icon and you just boom and and you sit and you just click it's it literally is one click for all six birthdays that are for that day and you're done and you feel like wow i just wish them a happy birthday and they probably get if they're like i get a ton of those on my birthday and they're cool they're cool but how lazy have we become where we can't even write we can't even type out happy birthday now we have to have it just in front of us where we just our thumb just touches it right and those. [00:32:04] Speaker C: Things make i mean all this you know well i say artificial intelligence that's not what that is but it kind of is but you know what it does is it takes emotional intelligence and every day it becomes more powerful every day the handwritten note every day the act outside of that realm makes it. [00:32:21] Speaker B: More powerful great point great point the more we go into that era the more powerful the handwritten or the human connection is yeah that's a that's a. [00:32:31] Speaker C: Really good point and another suggestion not suggestion but i will tell you another subsequent journey i went on which i think was even more powerful from the letters i mean the whole thing had such an impact on me that i realized the best version of myself was writing notes or letters or whatever you calling it so i so at the beginning when i stopped writing the letters i would write still write somebody a note every day which i do like it's same thing i encourage leaders or people human beings i keep a little notebook by my desk and it's categories like support thank you sympathy and every day i've already know who i'm going to target and you can do that in an organization you can do that four rungs down from you can do it with customers when you hear stuff that's going on in their life and then you have the context for what to write a note but one year two years ago i decided to write everyone a little birthday note handwritten birthday note and i will tell you patrick that had more impact than the letters did because there's something about about people being seen on their birthday that's more powerful and really an organization could do that handwritten you get a month in front you know what everybody's birthday is or you can figure it out get a month in front and it's going to be meaningful just by saying hey we really appreciate you happy birthday i know organizations send birthday cards but they're not handwritten because i get them no. [00:33:45] Speaker B: In fact there are companies and i used to use one of them that you can go online and type the message you want and design the front of the card and it will even do the mailing for you you right but that while it looks slick doesn't have quite the it's got more of a personal touch than not sending one right because it does come in the mail but and you know you customize it with your design but there's something about the handwritten part of it and. [00:34:13] Speaker C: It'S cheaper you know if you and you don't even have to it doesn't have to be a birthday card it could be a note that says happy birthday real big in your in your own handwriting yeah in your own handwriting that's what's happen to going gonna it's gonna tip people over the edge and so whatever you're trying to do in a relationship with another human being whether it's you know referrals or employee engagement or making people feel value to work for you or just in your own personal life you know a handwritten note will will the connection it bridges so many gaps that now separate us so. [00:34:46] Speaker B: Amy connect this with a bigger picture like zoom out just a little bit handwritten notes as a as a very specific connection point and method one of the things that anybody who knows me has heard me rail on this for since since twenty twenty really since COVID zoom is amazing microsoft teams and google meet and all the tech you know the the ability to be able to meet with teams all over the place amazing i love technology i'm a techie i've always kept up with it i'm a pretty robust user of ai in many different ways but i resist with my with everything within me virtual meetings when an in person meeting is feasible and doable i really resist it i have we have organizations where i will facilitate a board retreat treat and i'll often get asked hey you know i got a couple of board members that can't be there can they zoom in like well and literally have started saying no no if they miss it they miss it because it's distracting for the people in the room to have a hybrid meet where somebody's on a screen and somebody's not and had the activities that we do where we're telling story to each other or we're engaging with each other it just isn't the same and so i use it i use it a lot i have to and it's very powerful i'm coaching a team right now literally a team of twelve that lives all over the country from phoenix to seattle to saint louis to i mean they're all over the place and it's great to have the virtual technology but if i'm here in my home city of columbia boy it's so much better for a team meeting especially to just be done in person so my whole point is this idea of connection that you're you're touching on with the letter writing and the note writing the handwritten thing is there's a bigger picture to it and it's just human connection that is not that is as authentic and real as it can possibly be and virtual yes this is you and me literally talking i see your face on the screen and you see mine and this is real this is really us not avatar but still not the same it's not the same as if we were at starbucks having this like conversation it just isn't the same what have you found here a long story to leave this question what have you found in either the research or just the bigger picture about not just what letter writing does in the research but what human connection the importance of that and what we're losing as we go into more and more of the technology and the virtual and the ai. [00:37:36] Speaker C: And the shortcuts right i what i found from the no writing it's a great question is that we there is something that we don't just crave it as humans we don't just crave real connection in person connection human human connection we need fills something in us that can't be filled with anything else you know and i think the in person meeting you know is a lot like the letter because it requires sacrifice you have to go somewhere to have the meeting and then you're in the same reason room you can read each other you sit next to each other human need to sit next to another human being there's only so isolated we can be and i think it it you know that and there's been studies about this isolation social isolations which really covet ramped that up one hundred it gave us the opportunity like you said to do all these things it gave us an out and i read that isolation is is ten times or as powerful as is you know obesity or having alcohol use disorder you know and that's from a study from byu from this psycho i mean she's a i don't know psychologist i guess she's a doctorate in psychology but you know it's that dangerous to be that isolated and i think all it says it's the human we're still the human even though we have all these tools we're still basically a human you know where this this skin and bones emotion driven driven person that needs certain things from other people in order not just to flourish and to be successful but to survive you. [00:39:10] Speaker B: Know in one piece yeah yeah certainly to thrive but yeah i think i think you can make that case for the survival piece right right that connection. [00:39:20] Speaker C: You think about the hunters and gatherers they this is this is something in history they they you know work together to hunter and you know hunt and gather things but they hunt and gathered each other too and we've stopped doing that we don't we think we're doing it but none of this requires you think that's the thing about letter writing in person meetings is that it requires you to do something true human connection relationship requires sacrifice on the part of the of the participants it's a transaction that i know you care and i matter to you and you value me because you gave up something you didn't have to yeah and then if i in turn do that to you then like oh my gosh we matter to each other and that's more important than we give a credit for that's such. [00:40:03] Speaker B: A great point and it because everything is about relationship you know we've got a i've got a friend and colleague who's been on the show now a number of times names ron harvey and he you know he says it over and over and over nothing happens without a relationship nothing happens without a relationship well we think and i'll just get back on a soapbox here for a minute in the in the sector i work within and i think even in the corporate sector maybe even more more we treat software tools as the proxy for our relationship building efforts so i have a crm a customer relationship management software program let's get one of those and that will improve our relationships but it doesn't replace a relationship it just manages the contact you know data around it it it's not the actual relationship it can create some connection points but it doesn't replace the relationship and i've seen many organizations wonder why they don't have quite the relationships that other organizations do because gosh we're using salesforce you know we're capturing all this stuff it sends out automated stuff it even segments them by interest and we know this and we know that yeah but it doesn't replace a relationship and i think that has been as simple and elementary and even insulting to people's intelligence as that sounds it really is a mental block it seems like an institutional mental block about what those software programs are designed to do when i think we. [00:41:47] Speaker C: Think that technology can solve anything and i think we've seen in our lifetime this incredible advancement in technology and so surely surely it can surely it can replace and solve these things but you know what crm is it's just like social media it is not is a jump off point for real relationship with crm you are just degrees away and my story is a perfect example of this of real relationship because that's i took these electronic beings with these letters not i didn't mean to do it i was totally non intentional but i took these electronic beings and turned them into human beings by one simple act but crm gives you all the tools you need to write it note you know it's the jump off point just like facebook gave me that you know salesforce well if you really want to use salesforce figure out a way you know a blueprint that takes salesforce i'm not saying it has to be handwritten notes but something completely tactile like that you know use it as a jump off point for a real connection yeah. [00:42:48] Speaker B: Yeah boy what a great conversation what so what are you doing now you wrote you know okay i wrote i wrote letters to six hundred people on facebook what's the work now what do you describe yourself doing as it relates to that whole concept well it's unbelievable. [00:43:07] Speaker C: Because i thought i wrote a book about it and i did some podcasts when you write a book you do podcasts this was like three years ago i wrote this book or it came out i do not spend a week where i'm not on three podcasts talking about letter writing and that made me realize that here's this little human tool that we all have in our little human toolkits that applies i thought i had an inspirational story but now i'm a speaker i go around i run around and speak about it i speak to organizations who want to increase their employee engagement you know i speak to referral based businesses who want to you know really connect in this world of the intention economy with their with their customers in a way that honors who they are as as customer facing people or or donor based business and then i do inspirational speaking i do workshops in each of my keynotes everyone writes a note you know i'm on a mission and what i love about the work that i've found is i believe in it i'm so passionate about it and i thought i had an inspirational story patrick and what i realized is i have a human relation story i have a human relating story i have a tool that will benefit people in a heart and soul kind of way and you know even in business or in organizations and i realized the first group i had asked me to speak was a real estate group and i was like why do the real estate people want me and this guy was just a visionary he was like and now they do a notevember where they write a note to a customer every day in november every year and i it's just like this trail of like good stuff behind this story and i get to be the advocate out in front being the letter writer right letter writing lady well i wish you great. [00:44:53] Speaker B: Thing yeah i wish you'd get more excited about it if you if only you could just infuse a little energy into what you're doing boy who wouldn't imagine what could happen i mean seriously amy this i hear your excitement as if this just came to you today and so it's it obviously has deep deep meaning and i appreciate it tell us real quickly about the other book so we've talked about dear dana the other one is you cannot mess this up a true story that never happened. [00:45:18] Speaker C: Yeah that's my humorous time travel book where i wrote myself i you know as a writer you always have an idea for a story well my idea was like i'm going to write myself back to my own childhood and it's going to be hilarious like i'm gonna go to nineteen seventy eight and so basically the premise is i go back to my hometown of houston for a meeting and on the plane i get transported back in time and this time travel guide takes me to my suburban home and drops me off and says it's thanksgiving in nineteen seventy eight you have thirty six hours inside the walls they think you're a distant cousin from ohio and you have to survive thirty six hours your parents are the same age as you your brother and sister are twelve and eight and your ten year old self and your grandparents are going to be in there and so i go in thinking i'm going to write this hilarious story and it is funny but it turns out that i had to re remember all my memories because i was looking at my memories as a forty something year old woman and here's this ten year old kid screwing it up all up not her fault i saw my parents as contemporaries and it absolutely was a catharsis it's funny it's relatable i mean i'm really proud of that book just because well i'm proud of it that it even. [00:46:30] Speaker B: Got published so that is very cool that is very cool i don't have that one i have the dear dane i'm gonna have to get that other one that sounds great amy a week ago on and on and on about this and i know you've got plenty of other things to say about it i'm gonna encourage people to get the book reach out to you i love what you just said about speaking engagements and working with employee engagement and any the of that because i think it could be truly inspiring for people in really an endless number of sectors and genres and life journeys so i really do appreciate that to wrap the show i have two questions for you two questions i ask all my guests because i love the stories the first one is who comes to mind immediately for you as a leader in your life maybe even someone that doesn't know you it can be that but a leader in your life who's had profound impact on your view of leadership and why. [00:47:29] Speaker C: That person right and that would be the first person who comes to mind is my father who is deceased but my dad was well first of all he taught me that you know the way to be a leader is not to have everyone see you as not the leader but as the boss you know like you you know you take care of people and they only see you as that when they when you have absolutely have to have that role but my dad did such a great job he was a straight man like as an engineer you know like he was the he was a reliable guy who would do balance his checkbook and do all the stuff everybody expect him to do but he had this twist to him like he would come up with a crazy idea and he wouldn't just talk about it he would do it so he never sat us down and said hey if you ever come up with something like that's a little bit nuts then just go with it but i watched him do that over and over again there were some key things that he did that i had the confidence at several intersections in my life where i was like now what i'm going to do this you know and dad like i said he never told me that you know implicitly but the way he lived i'll live the rest of my life that way and leave nothing on the table like he did because he was never afraid to step outside the box and do something and his legacy is me and my brother and sister in that way wow. [00:48:42] Speaker B: What a tribute that's powerful last question and i'm i don't know i might have a hint into this already but i'm going to let you see say it you might surprise me you're at the top of a mountain with a giant megaphone and all the leaders of the world are at the base of the mountain ready to hear the amy daughters fifteen second soundbite on leadership you're there to tell them the most important thing for all of them to keep in mind as leaders what are you. [00:49:11] Speaker C: Telling them why say leaders you know we live in a world where everybody thinks there's a blueprint for how we're supposed to do this but but in inside of each one of you including myself there's a great idea that if we only believed it just long enough to take one bold step forward we. [00:49:28] Speaker B: Would change the whole world wow one just we think about one step i love that you don't have to take all the steps at once in fact you can't take all steps at once. [00:49:41] Speaker C: One bold step towards your idea that no one else has and let's see. [00:49:46] Speaker B: What happens i love it amy thank you so much i really do appreciate the energy the authenticity you've inspired me to take a look at some of my habits and how can i increase personal connection i preach it am i practicing it to the level that i can what i love about it is it's simple stuff this is not hard to do it's just carving out some bandwidth for it it and realizing that it's of great value it's worth carving it out so thank you i want to encourage everybody to go to amy daughters dot com daughters like sons and daughters a m y daughters dot com and learn more about her you'll see more about the books there's a clip of the kelly clarkson segment on amy's website so you can get all of that there we'll have the link on our podcast episode page as well and go go find out who you need to make some personal connection with either in person or with some kind of handwritten note i hope this has inspired you to some sort of action even if it is that one little step amy thank you so much i really appreciate it great time thank you patrick. [00:50:55] Speaker C: I enjoyed every minute of it all. [00:50:57] Speaker B: Right folks see you next time lead sam.