Eleven years of live TV taught her to watch herself back, and not judge it

0:00Alli Come up with your headline in your head, at least, because you're probably going to use that in social media anyway. What's the headline? What's the news? What's the news? Is the news you're Alli Mang? No. OK, so what's the news? And that will get you to your thesis or the thesis will get you to your headline.

0:16Justin Thanks so much, Alli, for joining. I can't wait to kind of get into discussion here.

0:20Alli It's my pleasure, Justin. And I love how you thank you for inviting me.

0:24Justin OK, I want to even rewind to a little bit into your past, Because, I mean, one of the things we were chatting was you've done all these things which naturally lead into putting yourself out there, communicating on camera, podcasting. Was this the plan or did it just kind of develop into this space? Walk us through that timeline and how did you end up kind of here where you are today?

0:49Alli I think to say this, I've always been a self-starter. I've always been curious. I started as a competitive athlete, as a figure skater, which turned into also being a competitive swimmer and being around really high level people skating on their ice. Even though I wasn't at that level, I was skating on the ice of Olympic athletes, world athletes, champions, silver medalists.

1:22And what that platform did for me is make me more hungry and curious. And I watched how they dealt with their coaches. I watched when they fell and how they got up. And it was just so interesting. But I'm going to tell you, competitive, long distance runner, I've done half Ironmans and a number of marathons. I started as a palliative care nurse's assistant and I became the French braid expert.

1:47I have sold, I was an inside sales rep for a steel fabricating company. We sold anything from really small chain, like bicycle chain or even smaller, to mooring chain with aluminum plate, you know. I mean, unbelievable. And then I also, in my early days, started a company called Free Guard Zone Sportswear for the sport of curling. I just couldn't stand the way we had to stay in these outfits, these K-Way kind of sweaty things all weekend, which is what happens in a bonspiel.

2:17So I created my own line that was fashionable, that worked with your bodies and all that stuff. So all this to say, as a creator, as an entrepreneur, as someone who loves to find solutions to things that seem to be missing, that is me and even down to the French braid because nobody could do the French braid at this palliative care.

2:38And you know what? Everyone at every stage of life has the right to be dealt with dignity and feel like they are living their perfect moment. And really that's kind of what I stay in, stay in the present as much as possible. Keeps me out of trouble.

2:52Justin You're in these situations you find, a lot of times what I'm hearing is you kind of were curious. Maybe you're like, I can probably do something better or maybe there's an opportunity to do something and you would go out and do that. Was it natural for you to put yourself in a place where maybe you were on camera or the front of the brand, that type of thing, or did it come naturally?

3:19Was it scary? Were you following in the shoes of someone else? Like, you know, yeah, how did that happen?

3:25Alli When I was 19, I auditioned for a show at the Charlottetown Festival, which in our country is one of the largest national performing arts center. It's been around for decades and decades, home of Anne of Green Gables. And I auditioned for that and I also auditioned for another at the time of launching a place called Wonderland and it is the amusement park, et cetera, et cetera, that we have all over North America.

3:51I got both jobs, but my friend told me, "Take the Charlottetown. You're going to get your actor card, your equity card. You will be a professional and then we can get you an agent so then she can negotiate for you when you continue your career." So I chose that route, I'd always sang, but I'd never sang professionally. So again, thrown into a new environment, but performing and understanding how to connect and be genuine and understand that the only thing we have to work with is what we're looking at, at least you're looking at, and you can identify me as something.

4:28But if you can see our lives as, well, this is how I see it, everything we do in life right to today is the totality, and it's what you were saying, of everything that brought us to this moment, and I call that the game face. And game face, I know, is very sports-related, but it's not about a gesture or a look.

4:49It's about understanding that everything that brought me from yesterday, the mistakes, the the wins, the losses, the exciting moments, the surprises, brought me right here. And my thing about as people grow, as much as we need to talk about the past to establish, well, you know, for the next 15 minutes, let's be sure to listen to her because she knows, look at this resume, come, you know?

5:14And it's like, it's wonderful and I'm grateful and I've worked for everything I have as everyone does. But what have you done for me today? Today is really the only thing we can talk about. So better that we pull all that past into this moment to really give your audience, you, something that they can munch on and go, oh, that's interesting.

5:39So that is always my hope when it comes to communication, no matter how I do it, in song or dance, podcast, books, et cetera, et cetera.

5:49Justin So Charlottetown is one of my favorite cities in Canada. Lovely, lovely place. Love the East Coast. But when I hear your story, it makes-- there's so much authenticity and genuineness, like oozing out, which is lovely. But we both work with leaders, entrepreneurs, professionals. And the situation that they're in feels a little bit different. Obviously, they're trying to be genuine and authentic and all these nice buzzwords.

6:18But they're entering it. I just started a company. I haven't really done any previous content brand work. And I need to take this-- this needs to take off. So I'm going to try posting more and building my brand because that will hopefully sell. And they're entering it from a very different place, very different timeline, very different expectations. And that's tricky.

6:40Like, how do you-- when you work with these people, how do you frame that? Because you kind of need to balance. It's good. Be authentic, but I also know that you need to make a certain amount of money. You need to get certain clients. You need to have certain real success metrics in order to survive kind of thing.

6:58So how do you balance all of those different things?

7:02Alli I've always thought of myself as kind of a science experiment because I stumble, I fail, and I learn every single time. But to answer that question, I created this when I was 16 years old, and I call it the contemplate and claim. And it's basically creating, people will say vision statement, mission statement, it's way beyond that, but it's your own personal state of the union, if you will.

7:32And the union, the idea of that is you, and it's this, you know, what is it? It starts with values. And so I will put them through an exercise that takes 35 minutes. And I will tell you, I have done it with 500 people in a group. I've done it one on one many, many, many, many times. And it's actually the whole experience is tied to my newest book, which is called Signal or Sentence.

7:57And it's actually about something I sat with a CEO. He was facing a hostile takeover and he had 45 days to do something about it. His team was big. His company was huge. And it was going to ruin not only his dreams to move forward, but it was going to ruin the lives of hundreds and thousands. He happened to be my father.

8:21And I was 16, and this is all documented. It was part of a Harvard Business Review in 1984 called Boxes and Bubbles, written by the then vice president. His name is David Hurst. And then he wrote a book about it called Crisis and Renewal. And it was all about how dad and the entire leadership team came together and instead of just dealing with the takeover, what are we gonna do?

8:47They completely switched it around. And that story has been MBA curriculum for the last 40 years. Anyway, I go back to what I started with. I was a kid. I wasn't really into religion or books or that kind of stuff, but I was really into words and the meaning of them, not the first meaning, the 12th meaning, the deeper roots of it.

9:12And that's what this is. And what it does is it creates your foundation of values. What you wanna know about yourself and what you want people to know. And I do this with young people. I've done it with teenagers, even younger people, people who are working with cancer or dealing with some real upsetting things. And what it does in 35 minutes is it brings you to the center of what really matters to you.

9:39And that ends up being the values. I have to say it's one of the greatest exercises. And I'm just-- I love doing it. I think I've now done it over 1,200 times with individuals and companies. And every time I go, I didn't know I could write this. I didn't know this was in me. And that's the point. We deal with our facility and with the different questions and the different environment created.

10:06That's the really important part. Then you can bring out things in people that they never even thought of. It's not mine, it's theirs. It's just the right question and the right environment which really talks to, you get the right people and the right people combinations together. That creates an environment of creativity, of feeling like they're standing on their own two feet, that they're being heard, seen and all of the things that's required.

10:31And that creates performance.

10:33Justin You know, you were chatting about understanding your personal values and how important that is for our communication. But let's say you're working with an entrepreneur who there's two sides, they need to understand themselves and their communication, but they also need to communicate their business values and what their business value. So there's two parts there, right? Ourselves and the business, and ideally you can bring them together in a really nice way, but that's tricky.

10:59So how do you advise for people to do that? Like know yourself, but you gotta know your business, And then you've got to find the threads that you can weave those two things together.

11:10Alli There's a few ways. I will say, know your audience. So that audience means not only your outside audience, your customers, your competitors, but also the inside audience, your company who's beside you. If you're at the leader or you're the person who's answering phones or whatever that may be. It doesn't matter. There's all this hierarchy in business, which I think I know flattening considerably which is amazing but we should be learning as much about the frontline people as much as the people who are in the back row that don't ever get seen it's important. I think my simple answer is my acronym DIET. I always say diet your way to success. But DIET stands for define.

11:56Define everything you know about your business. Now this goes certainly to leaders, they're going to do it every day. But your competitors, your product, your packaging, everything you can possibly imagine. And when people are asked of this, they go, "Are you kidding me? I'll just throw that into chat, ChatGPT." And no, no, no, no, no, no. It really needs to come from you. And no, it doesn't need to be an exhaustive list.

12:23But what will happen as you start to question and ask that, "Oh, all of a sudden you have this whole description of your business. That really ignites your passions, right? May not be a full list, but it's the list that at this moment when I'm asking you, it really helps. From that, I, the inspiration comes. Oh, wait, that'll help my marketing department. This is going to die.

12:50And you start to build this huge list based on diet. Define, inspire, execute, trust. And it goes in that order. And then it continues. I created it in my first book called Sold Out. And I told you about it earlier. Because for me, it helped me when lots of times, when all of a sudden I'm selling something that is within my category, I was in the home decor.

13:17And all of a sudden, one of the producers would say, "Listen, we need you to take a cut back and we need you all of a sudden to sell the pens, okay? The pens are, we're getting down and we just need to sell them out. So all of a sudden I'm adding this and I'm thinking, Oh gosh, I don't know.

13:34What do I say? Uh, because my, my, anyway, my whole thing is tell them, show them, prove it. So I was like, okay, the pen define, inspire, execute trust. So that's the same. Tell me, show me, prove it. Okay. So have you ever seen a pen that never runs out of ink? Okay. Well today I'm going to show you exactly how it works.

13:55and then you go into the nuances and oh, however you choose to define what makes it different, etc. And what that does is it inspires other people. They hear that. They hear and they go, "Oh, wait a minute. That's great." And so the more specific you can get to defining your own values, then what is your company? What does it do? The product, the packaging, all this stuff, the numbers, the credit, how it all comes together, the shipping, whatever choices you choose to look at the balance sheet, it will help you and your business be inspired to stay on point, to stay focused, but to allow them to also expand in their own creativity. So I'm going to get to the final two. Execute. If you've got Define and Inspiration already handled within your company, you've participated and now you've asked others to participate in this then they all feel like they're part of the game they're part of the center then they can start to execute okay so you know what you're gonna do with your messaging or your social media you know what you're gonna do with the credit and how you're gonna handle that one customer that hasn't paid yet okay now we know and if you don't let's go back to the beginning the dot define inspire execute and then we got to start trusting a little trust each other let's trust each other you got this? Did you not understand that?

15:16Well, let's have a quick chat. Let's make sure that it's in line with our goals, with our values, with our bottom line. Does that make sense?

15:26Justin It does. Yeah. And there's a lot of threads there that I was thinking, okay, this makes a lot of sense. Specificity, I think, is really important. I think a lot of times when I work with leaders, CEOs, maybe it's their thought or just where they go to naturally. They think they have to stay very high level. But I find that people actually connect with specific details.

15:52You're talking about the pen, and of course we know in branding it's good to relate the pen to the moment of signing a thing and signing your house or a contract. But people also like knowing how it was built, the decisions that went into it. It's a reason, I think, why the how it's built content strategy has been so effective.

16:16I mean, even to the point where Apple, I know for the recent Apple Music rebrand, they're showing exactly how their little logo was made, and it was literally like a room, and I don't know if you say it. It's pretty amazing. like through real water vibrations. And it's amazing because that association of knowing the specifics of the technology and the meaning and all, like that captivates us.

16:39So I think for leaders, you know, there's a couple lessons there is fine. Like don't be afraid to talk about very granular specific things. 'Cause it also brings a little bit of reality to what you're doing. And anyways, that's kind of like what stood out to me 'cause I experienced that so often. You know, we have a few more minutes and we're not going to do the work and the training you do with people justice, but because you do it, you've done this for so many years, like what are some standout tips, suggestions, things that you've seen are particularly effective.

17:16And I'm putting this towards maybe the leader, the entrepreneur who's, okay, I got to put myself out there a little bit more, I don't even know how to be comfortable doing this, to do it. I'm standing there in front of the camera. I can't remember everything. But are there a few things where you're like, don't be overwhelmed. Just kind of start by focusing on these few things. Has anything come to mind there for those individuals?

17:39Alli Tell me, show me, prove it. It's the greatest way to quick focus, even if you're going to do one line. What does that represent with what you want to talk about? You're introducing yourself? Well, you probably need to say, "Hi, my name is Alli Mang." There's number one, tell me. and maybe find another way to say that chase line and then you know show me well what do you want to show what are you talking about go back to your thesis i mean it really is a university go back to your thesis what's your motive why are you doing this post you don't have to make it crazy and you don't have to it's better just to to keep it simple i do threes a lot and the other thing I love doing is come up with your headline in your head at least because you're probably going to use that in social media anyway. What's the headline?

18:32What's the news? What's the news? Is the news you're Alli Mang? No. Okay so what's the news and that will get you to your thesis or the thesis will get you to your headline. Why are you bothering to take your time and oh my gosh I can't Oh, my ears! Why are you bothering? If you get that answer right, then that's a good start.

18:55And then you will fumble. And who cares? Sometimes the fumbling is fun. If you want to be perfect, well, it may take a little longer. Get anyone to help you that is interested in your best efforts. Never mind about younger, older, whoever is interested. And they'll watch for you. It's... Yeah! And I think the last thing here is to watch yourself. When I was in Shopping Channel, 11 years. I had a lot of great success.

19:20We had some flops, all of those things. No one's ever doing anything. If you're successful, you're never doing it on your own. You just can't. So, watch yourself, see what you liked about it and just clock it. Don't judge it, clock it and keep learning.

19:39Justin When someone asks a question, are you writing, you're recording a snippet for social media or you're on stage at a keynote and you get asked a question, you're not going to be able to cover the entirety of whatever that question is trying to get at. So take a second, think about what is the one thing, if it's a core idea, or maybe if it's something that's a listicle thing, like what are the three things, and give those and be okay kind of stopping there. Because ultimately, we're inundated with so much, If at the end of the day, I'm like, oh, I listened to Alli's answer, and that was the point.

20:17I got it. And if I'm curious, I'll continue to ask more, but at least I'm coming away remembering something about you or your business.

20:24Alli My second book was called Your First Moment Earns You More Moments. And that goes back to values and your foundation. And this will be my seventh book that I'm creating right now. And I had said earlier, Signal or Sentence. It's actually a method that I teach in it. And the subtitle then is how to surrender to win. So it's important that I love that you talk about growth and clocking and seeing how you're improving and your journey.

21:00I loved all of those words because you're, to me, you're dead on the money with that. And I think there are days though, you need to just go, it's not about letting go. surrender is not about oh I'll just let it all go and hope it it's actually giving over the actual root definition of surrender is to give over what was never yours to carry and that lightens the load all of a sudden from well if I just show up is that enough yeah you bet you bet and keep showing up mm-hmm

21:35Justin That's such a great way to end. So thank you so much, Alli, for joining. This is such a great discussion. And maybe we'll do it again sometime. But I think there's a lot of good nuggets. And hopefully someone listening to this can pull something that will help them in whatever way. Who knows what that would be.

21:51Alli I hope so too, Justin. Thank you so very much.