#234 Abundance and Picking Positive with Kelly Bishop, Blood Centers of America

Kelly Bishop, I'm glad you're back on the podcast. And I don't have too many friends that I ask to come back. But you are nice and exceptional. You do what most people don't do.

What's that? You are, I started to write a LinkedIn post about you. And this is probably even better than a LinkedIn post. The title was, there's enough likes, subscribes, for everyone.

This story was going on to talk about how you believe in abundance. that you were genuinely happy for Terry and I, genuinely happy that you hired me to come present at this annual conference, that you are proud, genuinely proud of me. You heard me when we were creating this company from tears in a parking lot to this. And I'm so proud of you.

Thank you. But that is unique and exceptional. And it's not until we realize that we don't need to envy that we can give. I just learned that from you in interacting over the last couple of days.

Thank you for doing, you are doing that because you genuinely want people to be happy and succeed. And you have, I believe, an abundance mindset that why wouldn't I be happy for you? That's, that's unusual. Where does that come from, Kelly Bisham?

I think that comes from my parents, my mom, how I was raised, the people that I choose to surround myself with, people that make me feel good, that lift me, kind of give me that positive energy and that spirit to want to make others feel cared for, feel loved, helping lift them, straighten their crowns. It's all those things. Yeah, but what if people are mean? And what if people are backstabbing and they're cruel?

do you still do that stuff no but you don't do that and i try to and i try to i deal with it a lot with my kids because they're because your kids are mean and backstabbing no but they go through it they come home and they're upset or there's something that's posted or they're excluded but it's these things where they feel like they're being backstabbed or someone is sharing a secret that they they trusted them with there's all these things are happening and so it's trying to explain to them, first of all, it's like this still happens in our fifties.

Unfortunately, we still feel sometimes backstab that people who we thought we could trust and we can't actually trust. It's, it's life lessons. I think I feel like I'm also finally to that point where, you know what, if someone doesn't like me, then that's fine because I have a whole lot of other people that adore you, that love me and they care about me and they want to see me happy in all the aspects of my life. Are you able to identify those people quickly now that you're 35 years old?

At 35, I can absolutely identify those people. And what are the telltale signs? What are the signs? What are the giveaways?

I think they look me in the eye. And? They listen. In a good way.

In a good way. In a positive way. They make eye contact with me because for me, I'm a big eye contact person. And that is so important.

Hey, Bart, Bart, Bart. What? Oh, there you are. Oh, Bart doesn't care.

So eye contact to me is so important. And it tells me that someone truly cares that they're listening. Like what you're doing, you're nodding your head, you're shaking. You're not interrupting me to jump on something that's happened to you.

That I want to say. Got it. You're truly listening. And I think you learn to pick that up from people.

It's when you go into a room and it's not like, oh, hey, Bart. Oh, hey. And you're being ignored. That's the worst feeling.

And so I've gotten to the point where it's, you know what? people who treat me that way, who are my friends when I'm the only one in the room versus when there are maybe 10 people in the room and they want to look over my shoulder. Like, I don't need that energy. I don't need that in my world.

What Terry and I have noticed that maybe we would go out to dinner, to a dinner party, let's say, and there's 15, 16 people there. And when we are driving home, well, did you have fun? Yeah, it was nice. Yeah.

Who did you get to talk to? A, B, and see. And what did they ask you? What did they learn about you?

I don't think they asked a single question. I don't like that. I think it needs to be reciprocated. Now we have the tendency because we want to soak in everything that will rattle off questions like you're under interrogation.

Tell me about this and tell me about this. Tell me about this. But still there are people that are smart and kind enough to say, tell me about you. Tell me about you.

And that is special and that's unique. Today's presentation, what was the H word that we talked about? Humanality. Humanality.

Okay. Here's a quiz. What does it mean to you? I shared a definition, but you mentioned a bunch of the word that I used in a definition.

What does it mean to you? To me, it is treating someone with kindness, respect, being there to support someone in the good times and bad times. Because it's not just supporting someone when they're down or they need to talk. But I think it's asking questions of other people, truly understanding.

A quick example of this too, even. Someone was talking about, hey, it's important to celebrate people in public. But I kind of questioned them after and I said, but is it? Because what if they don't want to be celebrated in public?

I think that goes into it. It's understanding what truly makes people feel happy, feel positive, feel cared for. It's that emotional intelligence on steroids, your humanality. There it is.

Thank you. And as we were defining it also, it's the ability to make someone feel cared for, valued and seen not processed not managed not ignored There just so many components And so since we came up with that because from many of our customers we are hearing that things are too transactional, that it's all about processes. And it's about, you go into a restaurant, you heard me say this morning, you're greeted with, do you have a reservation? What happened to hello?

What happened to how are you? I'm glad you're here. So many of those things are gone. And it's a shame.

I'm happy that there's companies that now want to hire us even more because they want to make sure that they are inserting this humanality along the way. Why do you think humanality became ignored or kindness for a while became ignored? We just interviewed two incredible gentlemen with BCA, Blood Centers of America, members. and there was a term that he shared that Mike shared and it was generosity crisis.

So I'm curious to get your opinion. Now you are always well-evating experiences and you are always picking positive, but you have seen it as well that maybe people are not as kind as they were or as caring as they were or non-self-absorbed as they could be. Why do you think things have changed or at least people are bringing attention to it that we are so transactional and we can't win if we continue being just transactional? I'm glad to see that things are changing and that people are trying to take care of themselves and each other more.

I think it all goes back to the feels. How do you make people feel? How do people feel? In everything that we do, every industry, it's about making someone feel a certain way.

And I think that for when we think about work and the transactions that were happening, I think it's, it got out of control of bad managers because a manager isn't necessarily a leader. It takes, it takes a special person to be a true leader. A manager is that transactional person. And I think we are promoting too many people into management positions that aren't true leaders.

and those people I think are demanding not trusting not creating that humanality within their teams that then teams are suffering people are quitting people don't want to be there their work productivity goes down and so I I'm hoping then in a lot of industries there is that shift we're like wait a minute what's what's happening why aren't people happy what can we do differently we need to be listening we need to understand how they're feeling we need to be seeing people But that's all wishy-washy stuff.

That doesn't contribute to the bottom line, Kelly. Come on. That's pie in the sky. It does contribute to the bottom line.

Does it? You think it does? Yeah. You think engaged employees helps with profitability?

Absolutely. Do you think it helps with service excellence? Absolutely. Of course it does.

Do I think training? Do I think bringing in fantastic speakers that can rally the teams, make them feel good, and make them go back to their offices and say, you guys, I saw the speaker and here was the takeaway. We're all gonna do this activity. We're all gonna write, we're gonna unpack something from our invisible backpacks.

What you said this morning, I can't wait to go back and say, hey guys, we're gonna try this. Let's try it. And part of that class, when we say we'll teach you, that's what we're teaching them. And I can tell you more about it offline, but that's what we're trying to teach people.

So the element of transformative, not transactional, the element of kindness, the element of giving, not being selfish, the element of feeling cared for, making people feel cared for, valued, and seen. In fact, we have another quick example, a restaurant example in which I ordered soup and came out, looked great. But when I tasted it, tasted like water. And I advised the server, it's, I'm hungry.

I don't have time to get anything else. I do want soup. It's not ideal. It tastes like water, but I'm going to finish it.

If you need to charge me, charge me. She came back and she said, I tasted it and it tasted fine. It had enough salt in it. It's meant to be light.

It's very popular. Our chefs even said that it was a good batch. There were five things that she said to rebuke maybe how I felt and it made me, didn't make me feel valued at all. My opinion, my taste buds didn't matter.

I didn't feel seen, didn't feel heard, didn't feel appreciated. It was no humanality. Disappointing. I would not go back to that restaurant.

I wouldn't recommend that restaurant. Going full circle, engaged people that are treating people well are going to perform better at service and do their jobs better. That's going to lead to better guest satisfaction, client satisfaction, member satisfaction, and things are going to flow. You're going to spend more money and recommend and refer.

How are you applying humanality? And proud of you, and congratulations again for your role with Blood Centers of America. Thank you. You have an incredibly unique title, but I would like to, first of all, share again with the title, Senior Director, Organizational Experience.

Help me. experiential strategy and organizational engagement. Strategy, engagement, strategy and engagement is what I'm incredible. And I'm not aware of any other association that has that mindset to say, and it wasn't my understanding.

It wasn't like we need someone to talk about strategy and engagement and to help with our members. It was like oh my gosh Kelly Bishop has been helping us with things She would be we need to insert more of this into our group And you are the perfect person Coming from a great experience as your company pick positive your belief and your philosophy. Phenomenal. So I'm so happy that you achieved this job and that they sought you out.

How are you inserting humanality, experience, and strategy into even this conference? I'm blown away by what you're doing. Would you mind bragging just for the last three minutes? Thank you.

This conference was definitely teamwork. It's helping, doing a lot of coaching with the meeting planner here behind the scenes because I want to help her succeed and get to her goal of being an incredible planner and understanding processes and what it takes and all the things. And she's doing phenomenal this conference. I'm so proud of her.

And yesterday during our pre-event meeting, we're going around the table introducing ourselves. And this is your show. You go. And she said to the hotel staff, she's, I just want to take a minute and thank Kelly for everything that she has taught me over the past three years to get me to this place where I'm the lead of this program.

Who doesn't? It was so special. So amazing. Yeah.

And so real. And just so real because she didn't have to do that. She could have just started telling about what our what our program is about, where our attendees come from, who they are. all the profiles instead she took a time out to publicly appreciate and share with the team because she had a program here two years ago so she wanted to share with the team how far she's come i mean it was just very touching because for me if i can help her win then i just want to it's and that is that abundance mindset that is i'm not envious i'm supportive i wish linkedin wouldn't have deleted my post because i have to write it all over again but i'm trying to remember the words to describe just as you share that scenario that you don't need to be in the spotlight.

You don't need to be in the spotlight. You don't need to be in the picture of donating the check. That's not you. I think you need a lot of confidence to be able to not necessarily need the credit or want the credit or get the credit.

Are you a confident person? Have you always been confident? I have my moments. I think I still have my moments of when I'm confident or not confident, but I feel like there was something that happened when you turned 50 and 35, sorry, 35.

And it's almost that, you know what? I am who I am and I'm proud of myself of who I am. So here I am. Love me, hate me, take me, don't take me, whatever it might be.

I feel confident in that sense. And I think over my career, if we talk about my career, there was definitely times when I was confident and times when I wasn't, but it was, everything was a learning experience. And I think it's how you take these learning opportunities to propel yourself forward. Because if we learn things every day and if we don't apply them, we're not learning.

We're not growing. So we have to apply these things. There's, there's been learnings from this, this program on site with the other team members and I've told them like, it's okay because it's never going to happen again, because you are always going to be, that's your thing. You're going to be on top of that's how we learn all of our things.

all the mistakes I had throughout my career, you do it one time and you make that mistake and you're like, that's never going to happen again. That's going to be like almost my hyper focus. So I think it's just important that people learn from their mistakes. Don't beat yourself up.

Certainly don't beat others up about it. Be there to support them, talk to them, pull them aside. Do you want to talk about what happened? We can walk through that.

Yeah, you're a great leader. You're a great contributor, but you're also a great leader because you've seen things and you know the pick positive way of being able to handle it two last questions so going back to your role with blood centers of america engagement experience strategy and i'm going to start in again humanality what other ways are you already contributing to the members and to the organization based on your creativity based on your ability to make people feel a certain way based on your engagement ideas.

I think what did I call you the other day? The chief strategist of experiential optimization or something like that. I love it. Which that was the title I tried to get, by the way.

But it's phenomenal. But for our listeners that are looking to add more strategy, more creativity, more well-evate, more pick positive, more of what you do, can you share just one thing? And I have 10 that you're already doing, but one thing with our listeners, that you're like, we could do this a little bit better. And this is how we want to approach it.

Can you share one thing? Sure. First, I want to take one step back and say, I think part of it is when you, when you're in an organization, it's almost don't, don't let yourself get boxed into something. Show people what you can do, come up with ideas, show people you're, you're willing to learn.

It might not be your, your wheelhouse or something that's on your resume, but maybe you have that passion, that desire, that creativity, where it just takes a conversation or being open and hopefully on the other end, the person listening to you, I didn't know you had that capability. That was one of the first things that when I started with the BCA, they knew I could do events. All right, you have this incredible global events background. You're creative.

You've worked all over the place, different people, different experiences. We don't know the rest of your capabilities. They don't know about me, but they don't. So I showed them my resume and they saw a little bit more, okay, now we get a little bit more, but we haven't seen them in action.

And so now it's anytime I can do something, I'm trying to put it in action. I trying to push push my needle to push their needle as well where they like oh no idea but you can do this So to answer your question one thing that I doing here at this conference that totally different is I thought up of this 60 seconds at BCA. Let's walk the trade show floor. My colleague and I walking it, we created questions that were specific because it's our first time.

Maybe I was a little bit tightly, maybe I boxed ourselves in. Too prescriptive. Yes, too prescriptive about it, but we're trying to be free flow while we're down there. So it's almost like training wheels that we have on with our little cards, but there are questions around leadership, partnership, membership, innovation, and even challenges and strategy.

What are the, what, what needs to be solved in the next three years within this industry? So it's questions like that. And we're taking around asking them. And when the past hour and a half, we have 20 interviews done, Wow.

Which it's, it's been amazing and great. And it's kind of then also going back and being like, Hey, look what we've created. Look what our work is. So that was kind of like a little brain, brain idea of mine.

Hey, it may work and it may not. So let's see what happens because it's all about engaging people. You are asking them and then you're listening. Just ask, share simply and listen.

That's exactly what you're doing on a different scale. Thank you for introducing me to two other BCA members, and it was Mike and Benjamin. Together, I learned that there is such a shortage of blood supply. And so Mike and Benjamin were talking about this generosity crisis.

We began to try to talk about people are so affected by digital things, and they're distracted by digital things, and they get immediate gratification from digital things. going to a blood center and spending 40 minutes and donating your time and everything else, it takes time. It takes time. Maybe people aren't doing it, but then we're brainstorming together and thinking about how can you share more stories about the impact of doing it, that when you get it done, it's simple to do.

It's easy to do. It's 40 minutes to do, But the impact is you can change a person's life. And here, here's a book of stories of, ooh, this seven-year-old was playing soccer, got injured and needed more blood. And so the team got together, all the parents, and they then gave blood to support this seven-year-old girl.

That could be a story. But if I hear that, I'm like, I don't have a seven-year-old anymore. They're older now. But could I donate blood?

and see who it's helping? Yes, absolutely. We could do that. So what you are doing is so powerful and I love it.

You're asking people that are in it right now, what do you think? And you're paying attention and you're soaking in all their ideas. And I know with your talent that you're going to be able to help overcome this generosity crisis. So you're going to be sharing good stories that's coming from your heart.

Last question. You do a lot of things that most people don't do. and the first episode that I had interviewed you years ago, very, very clear. Today, it's even another reinforcement about what do you do?

And I'm learning more again about why you're doing it. But if you had to fill in the blank for other people, what would you say most people don't blank? I would almost say most people don't stop and listen. Stop and look.

stop and ask yes stop there you go stop stop and ask like you okay is there anything i can do for you the other day i was in the store and it was a young girl maybe like a teenager older teenage girl but she was on her knees in a store bawling and she was on her cell phone right it's now the world the way it is you never know what's really going on but but i did approach her and I didn't touch her but I was kind of like excuse are you okay can I do anything for you and she just kind of looked at me and so I just kind of took my cue as like maybe I'm gonna back away but I felt and then I saw her get up and kind of walk around the store and she was still crying and so I kind of went over to again and I was like just want you to know like I'm here I'm here I'm here yeah yeah that's special and everyone can do that we have to get out of our own heads We have to probably get off of our phones at a certain point and start looking up so we can notice, anticipate, and over-deliver.

Off our phones. Yeah, we can release to rise. We can pause to plan. So while we were waiting to do this beautiful, late Los Angeles area, top of an incredible hotel, I finally stopped.

And I said, it's nice to stop. It is nice to stop. and we looked at the cars and we were wondering, where are they traveling? And Terry said, you know what?

If one in three people are going to be affected by a blood bank crisis that we don't have enough blood, one out of three, then that car should donate and that car should donate and that car should donate. We took that time. My takeaway from you, most people don't just pause, look up, pay attention to others, listen and contribute where you can. All right.

Kelly, if people want to learn more about BCA, Blood Centers of America. They go to my LinkedIn and find it there because I have it in my profile. Kelly Bishop, K-E-L-L-Y-B-I-S-H-O-P. Phenomenal human being.

I'm so proud to know you and thrilled that we will remain friends forever. Thank you. Thank you for being on the show. Thank you for being dear friends.

Absolutely.