“We really believe in several fundamental premises. The first one is: happy people produce happy results. Our job is to take individuals, make them happy, proud, and inspired, period. If we do that, they will change the world.”
HG CEO Shir Nir joined the Forbes Books Podcast at the Annual Conscious Capitalism Conference to talk about a whole bunch of shi(f)t, specifically, what sets Handel Group and its method apart and one of its coaching gems,The Power of One. Listen to the full audio or read the abridged transcript to uncover where in your life you might be a little 2-faced…
Podcast Host: Welcome to an Encore podcast presentation from Forbes Books at forbesbooks.com. We’re here at the Conscious Capitalism 2019 annual conference in Phoenix, and I’m talking with Shir Nir. He’s the CEO and partner of Handel Group. Shir, I have been told confidentially that, among other things, I should ask you about how the Handel Group came to be and The Power of One.
So, tell me about how you came to work at Handel Group?
My journey with Handel Group began around 2004, when my two sisters-in-law started HG and wanted me to join them. At the time they were too small, so I helped them build the company by providing connections and clients for four years and then finally joined them in 2008.
I’ve been the CEO for the last six years. Basically, I do a lot of work with high-level executives, teams, and organizations. I focus on increased performance.
Podcast Host: I want you to talk a little bit about Handel Group and what you do and the place that you and your sisters-in-law have built the company to today, because that’s a remarkable success story.
Shir Nir: Absolutely. So Handel Group is a unique organization. First of all, we are probably the largest of any coaching company that I know of.
We really focus on five main areas: corporate coaching, life coaching, coaching in education facilities, sports coaching, and our coaching products, specifically our book Maybe It’s You and Inner.U, our online coaching course.
We really believe in several fundamental premises that we drive through everything that we do.
Podcast Host: Across all five of those verticals? They all share some fundamental principles?
Shir Nir: Absolutely. The first one is happy people produce happy results.
Podcast Host: That seems a little obvious.
Shir Nir: Yeah. Our job is to take individuals, make them happy, proud, and inspired, period. If we do that, they will change the world.
How do I do it? One way is to connect people to their dreams. People are not connected to their dreams. It’s not that they don’t have them, it’s just that they’re not connected to them.
If I ask you to tell me your dream in any area in your life, you probably will do a very lousy job describing your dream.
Podcast Host: Please don’t.
Shir Nir: Listen, for me, it was the same thing. I was in Florida the first time I did this, and my sister-in-law asked me, “Tell me your dreams.” I said, “It’s less work, more time off, more money, and more time to workout….” At the time I was an Ironman triathlete, so I really wanted to train more.
Podcast Host: See, I would have said three of those, but the fourth would have been the ability to eat more and gain less.
Shir Nir: That’s right too. Yeah, that would work too, so, you see, we don’t know our dreams.
Podcast Host: Yes, and so how do you achieve them if you don’t know?
Shir Nir: We get people to actually stop and think and create their dreams.
Podcast Host: This must be a heck of a shock though on the corporate side, because this is new thinking that everyone in the company should be thinking about their dreams and that the company will benefit from it. That’s not typical. I mean, it makes sense here at Conscious Capitalism, but the rest of the world, that’s not a common way to think.
Shir Nir: No, it’s not. But here’s what happens. If you make everybody in your company happy, proud, and inspired, guess what you get?
Podcast Host: A lot of great stuff.
Shir Nir: A lot of good results. Right? By the way, some people may choose to leave the company, because it’s not their dream, but that’s what you want.They weren’t happy. They weren’t happy in their job and they weren’t productive. The minute you make people happy, proud, inspired, it raises the entire performance of both the person and the whole organization. Companies experience breakthrough results.
Podcast Host: I was just going to say it raises the performance, I’m sure that’s 100% accurate, but I’m also speculating that it’s something much bigger than that. I mean, that’s a piece of something that’s much larger, and I don’t even know, maybe you know the words for it. I don’t even know what the words are, but I can feel what that would be like.
Shir Nir: We call it Time Warp. It could create a Time Warp in a company and increase their results and expedite the result.
Podcast Host: You’re also changing every life down to the individual level. All right, I want to ask you another thing. Tell me about the Power of One.
Shir Nir: The Power of One is one of the tools we’ve created and a very simple way to really impact your communication and the results you produce through your communication as executives and as people that are really at the top of an organization. We, as in executives, don’t work, we communicate, period, right? An executive’s job is communication, so the better communication skills you have, the better you can move and create results.
Podcast Host: I just heard a lot of people listening saying to themselves, “Oh crap.” I don’t think that’s what most people in those positions think is their job.
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Shir Nir: Right, but think about it, we are always communicating, Whether it’s an email, a text, a talk, a meeting, or writing documents…it’s all communication. It matters, and every word matters.
Not only does every word matter, but how you communicate those words matter. Your emotional integrity, your emotional state, and your spiritual state – like what you think – also communicates. People don’t understand that. They think communication is just words. Like if I simply say the words, it means I communicated it, but that’s not true.
We’ve developed a couple of very, very powerful tools in communication. One is called the Hard Conversation. It teaches how to have any conversation be completely successful for you. Even the ones that you’re afraid to have or the ones that you don’t want to have.
The second tool is called the Power of One.
You want to consider that as an individual you are constantly in different states. You can go from minute to minute between several states. That state, the state by which you are and you show up as impacts the way you communicate, okay? In life there’s also always a pecking order, unstated, but there is one, okay?
As a human being, you can either be a one or a two when you communicate. If I say a number one, what does it mean to you?
Podcast Host: Best. Top. Winner. Accountable.
Shir Nir: Author. If I am a one, it’s my world. The buck stops with me.
Or you can be in the state of a two. If I say a state of a two, what does it mean?
Podcast Host: Subservience. Passive. Secondary.
Shir Nir: There is a one, but I’m not it. I’m a two in this relationship.
Right? Okay, so there’s a one and there’s a two. The one is, you can actually describe the word for one is I am, I am it. I am. I am. I am. “I am” represents a one.
A number two is represented by I’m not. “Someone is, I’m not.”
So if you are a one, you can actually treat people in one of two ways. You can treat people like ones. I’m a one, you’re a one. I have respect for you, you have respect for me. Even if we don’t agree, you’re still a one and I’m a one. You have your opinion, I have my opinion and we’re just two ones talking to each other. That works always.
You can also treat people like a two. I’m a one and you’re a two and we know it, which means that you look down at people. Okay? That doesn’t work.
So let’s start with a good two. The good two is called an Authentic Two. What’s an Authentic Two, what’s a happy two? A happy two is, “I’m your assistant, I’ll do whatever you need me to. I don’t want to be a one in this area, please tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
For instance, I’m a complete two to my wife in the area of education. It’s her accountability, not mine. She’s a complete two to me in the area of finance or in the area of travel, right? When we needed to take my daughter on a college trip, I did not make the decision on what colleges we’re going to go to, that was my wife’s and daughter’s responsibility. However, I made the reservations because I am a one in the area of travel. Make sense?
When you’re a two, an Authentic Two, it’s okay to be a two. When you want to be a two, when you declare yourself a two, when you say, “I’m a two to you, you tell me what to do.” When you’re an authentic two, you still communicate one-to-one with people, make sense? It’s still a respectful and honest conversation that keeps both people powerful and communicating in a good way.
We would still call that one-to-one communication. Make sense?
On the other hand, you can be a Disgruntled Two. What’s a Disgruntled Two? A Disgruntled Two is a one that just basically went down to a two. Okay, so they can go down to a two for two reasons. One reason is because you made them into a two. You treated them like a two,, so they got disgruntled. Another way is they made themselves into a disgruntled two. They basically blamed you for making them into a two, but what happened is they just took themselves down. Both of those lead to being disgruntled, and when they’re disgruntled, guess what happened?
They make you into a two too, so now we’ve got a two-to-two conversation. A disempowered relationship. That’s called fighting, arguing, nasty.
There is also the Goody-Two-Shoes. They are people that are a one, but they have created a system, a way to not deal with difficult issues. They don’t want to upset anybody, so they make you feel like they love you. They make you feel like you’re the one and they take themselves into a two to be subservient to you, faking that they are a one, faking the truth. You think they agree with you, but they don’t. They’re just saying the right thing to appease you.
We have clients, major CEOs that have created a system to become successful by becoming goody two shoes. The problem is you think they love you until you get fired one day, by HR, by the way, because they will never fire you. Make sense?
When that happens, it’s not productive. It’s a two-to-one conversation, an unproductive conversation.
The next kind of two is a Two To Yourself. When you are one at the office and then when you’re all by yourself, looking in the mirror, you’ll start being disgruntled with yourself, like, “I can’t believe you said that. Why did you say that? You always do that.” Your negative inner dialogue is making yourself into a two. That doesn’t work either, because you disempower yourself. Make sense?
You don’t know who you are. You don’t know that you’re actually a one. All those conversations don’t work. The only one that works is one-to-one, because nobody, no matter how poor, how rich, how beautiful, how ugly, how successful or unsuccessful, nobody is a two to anybody. As human beings, we are all ones. If we all hold ourselves to be ones and we all consistently communicate one-to-one, we will change the world. You can get any result you want.
Podcast Host: All the crap is out of the way. I want to know more about this. I think everybody listening wants to know more about this. Can we go to your website and subscribe to a course or something to find out more about this? You did a fine job of teasing us, but I know there’s more.
Shir Nir: Yeah, so we just launched Inner.U, which is our online coaching course. We have 12 modules in Inner.U. There, you can basically learn our entire method, The Handel Method®, without even talking to a person unless you want to. You can take the course over and over again and redesign your dreams to take yourself to the next level. I’ve redesigned my life several times over by now!
As people, we get triggered by a lot of things in life, and sometimes we get ourselves into a situation that is unmanageable, you don’t know how to get out of it. This course will help you throughout the process of getting unstuck, through communication and dealing with people in a way, and with yourself in a way that will help you fulfill your dreams.
Podcast Host: Beautiful. As I’ve been listening to you, especially talking about the Power of One, what occurred to me, my perception of the coaching world is that most coaches take things that are known and present them, but it’s not their work and there’s nothing wrong with that.
They’ve processed a lot of information. They’ve really become knowledgeable, they’ve worked hard. I’m not taking anything away from what they do, but it’s not their work. Maybe their presentation of a lot of other work is original, or original for them, or even personalized for the client. My perception of this conversation you and I have had is that what you’re doing at Handel Group is not other people’s work.
You’re so ahead of the curve that you’re now giving us things that we couldn’t get anywhere else, because you all mined it from where…I don’t know where it comes from, from the mind, from having this many people engaged and having these many observations, and that my perception is that this is completely original. You and your team invented it, is that accurate?
Shir Nir: That’s accurate, and we keep inventing it every day. We keep observing and creating new principles that enable us to take our clients to the next level at every given point in time. We have clients that have been working with us for 15 years straight, CEOs that have been working on a weekly basis, one hour a week, for 15 years. There’s always the next level.
Podcast Host: From a purely business perspective, this is one of the great benefits of scaling, right? You’ve scaled to a point now where you know more than anybody about what you do. You’re now using it to everybody’s advantage.
Shir Nir: Right, we continuously create, but this is completely our creation. It’s completely different.
Podcast Host: It’s not different to be different. It’s different because it is. Thank you for joining. He’s Shir Nir, he’s the CEO and partner of Handel Group, handelgroup.com. Thank you so much for joining us.
Shir Nir: You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.
P.S. Inner.U is a 12 session online course that gives you the tools to hack into your own life, hone your dreams, and have every last thing you want in the areas that matter most to you: CAREER, MONEY, LOVE, TIME, FAMILY, and HEALTH. Do this life thing better from wherever, whenever.