If you have been watching and learning from our series of great Training Unleashed podcasts – and we hope you have – we would like to tell you about something unusual! Today, we are reporting on a recent podcast in which Evan Hackel does not do the interviewing . . . he gets interviewed.

The podcast is part of the Strong Performance podcast series, hosted by an inspiring woman named Meredith Bell. Meredith is co-founder of Performance Support Systems in Hayes, Virginia.

We are excited to share these edited excerpts from their conversation.

Meredith: Welcome to the Strong Performance podcast. I’m your host, Meredith Bell, and I am passionate about having conversations with guests who will inspire and challenge you. I’m very excited to have Evan Hackel with me as my guest today. Evan Hackel, welcome to my show.

Evan: Fantastic to be here.

Meredith: Evan is on the cutting edge when it comes to the creation of mobile training platforms. Evan, can you tell us about your journey to the work you’re doing today with training and consulting?

Evan: My journey, which is really a journey of understanding the importance of Ingagement, started in my family business. I said, “We need a strategic plan.”

One thing I’ll say to every listener now is that plans make things happen, whether it’s in your life or business.

Meredith: This word Ingage is really a cornerstone of your work, and so I want to talk a little bit about why you spell it differently. Why is it Ingage with an “I” instead of Engage with an “E”?

Evan: I‘m defining it as a higher level of engagement.

Meredith: I’d love to know what are some of the key insights? You mentioned planning a minute ago. What was blocking progress in the organization you mentioned?

Evan: We had all these different parts of the organization and they all had their own goals. We started to ask, “Are we getting the perspectives of the people in the company? Do we really get their perspective when we talk to the team members in the company?”

If you get everyone’s perspective, you can see the whole picture. But worst case, if your organization is an echo chamber of senior management, you really have no idea what’s going on out there and you have a vision of things you can do that are not based in reality. I like to refer to this as “High-Level Dumb” because you’re in that echo chamber. Our goal in the company was to have 40 percent of those 800 people actively involved in some form of leadership and actively contributing. Ultimately, we is more powerful than me because when you build teamwork and success, it raises everyone’s boat.

Meredith: You have said that Millennials are the best workers who have ever entered the workforce and that Generation Z will only be better. Why do you say that?

Evan: What I love about the younger generations is they are lifelong learners. They’re totally committed to self-improvement. That’s what you want on your team.

Meredith: What kind of training have you found to be most effective at engaging younger people in learning?

Evan: Whenever I bring on a new hire, I always personally meet with them and review our vision and mission purpose statements and our strategic plan. And I really go into depth about what’s in the plan. The number one reason younger generations leave work is because they do not see personal growth and they do not feel they are getting tracked.

. . . And my last tip is that younger generations like to work for companies they feel great about. If you get right down to it, they want to feel that business is in fact doing something that makes the world a better place. So make sure you grab people and share that with your team, because that’s where the younger generations get really Ingaged.

About Meredith Bell

Meredith’s first career was in education, first as a teacher and then as an administrator. In 1982 she left public education to start a company of her own.

“My passion has always focused on helping people recognize and maximize their full potential,” Meredith says, “showing them how to become stronger for work and life. For several years I had a solo consulting and training practice, working with companies to develop the people side of their business. I worked with leaders and employees alike, teaching them how to communicate more effectively and deliver positive results.”

Then in 1990, Meredith co-founded Performance Support Systems (PSS), with Denny Coates and Paula Schlauch. After a few years, Meredith and her team created a new tool, called 20/20. It is a flexible survey system that has now been used by thousands of organizations and more than a million participants worldwide for traditional 360 feedback, team effectiveness, employee engagement and customer satisfaction surveys.

Meredith states that in the years of helping organizations transform their way of dealing with people, she and her team came to an important realization:

Neither feedback nor training can, by themselves, change behavior.

About Evan Hackel

Evan Hackel is a 35-year franchising veteran as both a franchisor and franchisee. He is CEO of Tortal Training, a leading training development company, and principal of Ingage Consulting. He is a speaker, hosts “Training Unleashed,” a podcast covering training for business, and author of Ingaging Leadership. To hire Evan as a speaker, visit evanspeaksfranchising.com. Follow @ehackel or call 781-820-7609. Why not have Evan Hackel address your group about franchising success?

In a recent Training Unleashed Podcast, Evan Hackel sat down and talked with Mark Pattison about becoming a champion.

There are people who have theories about becoming a champion, and there are people like Mark who has undisputedly done it in the realms of sport, mountaineering and business. The secrets he shared with Evan and our Training Unleashed family are grounded firmly in both his own story and in reality.

About Mark Pattison’s Many Successes

Mark is a former  wide receiver who played for four seasons in the National Football League for the Los Angeles Raiders, the Los Angeles Rams, and the New Orleans Saints. Before he turned pro, Mark played for the University of Washington in Seattle, where he learned life lessons about coaching.

After his NFL career, Mark turned to mountain climbing. In 2013, he began a goal to climb the the highest peaks on each of the seven continents, which mountaineers call the Seven Summits. And Mark, as you will discover in his talk with Evan, is not a person who fails to reach his objectives. He went on to successfully climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania in 2013 and 2017, Mount Elbrus in Russia in 2014, Mount Kosciuszko in Australia in 2015, the Aconcagua in Argentina in 2016, the Denali in Alaska in 2018, the Vinson Massif in the Antarctic in 2019, and Mount Everest in 2021.

Today Mark serves as SVP of Business Development for Sports Illustrated. As a philanthropist, his causes include the Epilepsy Foundation and Higher Ground, an organization that supports veterans. Mark hosts the Finding Your Summit Podcast, and we are thrilled that he spent a life-transforming half hour with our host Evan Hackel.

Excerpts from the Conversation Between Mark and Evan

If you are committed to becoming a champion in your life and your career, you won’t want to miss a minute of the conversation that Mark and Evan shared.

Here are some excerpts of their talk. 

Evan: How many people have climbed the Seven Summits?

Mark: Not a whole lot. You know, I think the total number over time is above 5,000. In terms of NFL players, there are only two of us!

Evan: This show is about training. And I understand you have a philosophy of training that has helped you in every aspect of your life. Why don’t we just start there and what that philosophy is?

Mark: I went to the University of Washington on a football scholarship and when I went there, I was not prepared in any way. I was completely overwhelmed. I really didn’t understand the roadmap to becoming successful. A Hall of Fame coach there, Don James, had taken a page out of the famous basketball coach from UCLA, John Wooden, and he adopted it as his own – the Pyramid of Success.

It helped me understand what it takes to become a champion in anything you do, whether it’s physical or in the business world. And that things don’t happen overnight. The pyramid of success has really helped me get to where I’ve been through the different things I’ve done.

Evan:  Please tell us more about what the pyramid is.

Mark: It’s a pyramid and there are 25 individual and team goals . . . And essentially, when you start talking about individual and team goals, you got to put yourself in a position for success. You’ve got to know the game. You have to know what you’re in for. You have to understand that it’s a daily grind.

All those little things lead to the bigger things and in terms of a team, you also have to learn how to integrate them into to a larger concept. When I was playing football, there were 11 guys on each side of the ball . . . We started off with 21 team members on Everest and only 10 of us made it. When we got down to that core 10, we had to really rely on each other for various things.

And in business, there’s no question that you can’t succeed if you don’t have people. We all have different core strengths. Success is like ascending a ladder, and it can take years.

The Seven Summits took me almost 10 years to achieve. The gaming company I founded, it took me years to start in 2001 and sell in 2008. So it was over a course of time. But competitive greatness at the end of the day means that you will love the process. And if you don’t love the process in business and sports and other things that we do in life, there are going to be obstacles. And if you don’t have a strong “why” on the reason you’re doing all these different things, you’ll quit.

Evan: Climbing Everest is certainly not a walk in the park. I know that at one point you were snow blind, so you essentially couldn’t see. You hadn’t eaten for three days. And you didn’t have supplemental oxygen. Can you talk about that?

Mark: Yeah, that’s almost right. I was snow blind in one eye, so out of one I could still see okay, but . . . climbing a hard enough feat on your best day. But when it turns out to be your worst day and you don’t have the energy, and all the energy that you do have is going towards . . .  why am I so blind?

And also, you’re trying to reach down and clip in because you’re tethered to the mountain. You’ve got fixed lines that are about 100 yards apart, and they’re anchored by screws and you’re constantly reaching down and slipping in and clipping out and clipping into the next one. And the problem with that is that because of these past expeditions, they haven’t taken those five other ropes off the father lines up the mountain. And so you’re looking at this, you know, and your depth perception is off. And are you clipping in to the right one? Because if you don’t clip in, the other ones are frayed and especially as you get higher on the mountain, it is straight down to Tibet and there’s no stopping.

And you’re stepping over dead bodies. There are a lot of negatives in terms of the supplemental oxygen. I ran out on my way down and my sherpa had left me. And so I had to go through this battle of trying to gasp for air. I was out [of oxygen] for 18 hours and I’m not an endurance athlete.

John Wooden said you need to be at your best when your best is required. And my breath was required on that particular day, but I was not at my best. You know, you’ve got to figure out a way to come up with the gumption to keep driving and the why of not quitting, and I’m going to do this and keep going.

It’s just too easy to quit and there are so many dead bodies up on Everest as you get to the top that, you know, I was looking around and it’s like, this is not the day that Mark dies.

Mark Would Like to Welcome All of You to Listen to his Finding Your Summit Podcast!

Be sure to become part of Mark’s Finding Your Summit podcast family. Mark interviews an amazing group of individuals who have achieved ultimate success in business, health, life . . . and more. You will want to be part of it!

Be sure to listen to all of this Training Unleashed Podcast. It can transform your life and your success!