The following transcript is provided by YouTube. Mistakes are present. To hear the podcast episode, click HERE.
[Music]
scaled up nation are you getting ready to take your certified water technologist examination do you wish you
just had a little bit of extra help to build your confidence so you can sign up
for the exam well nation i’ve heard you and i’ve got what you were asking for i
work each one of the 75 mock questions that you receive when you sign up to
take your certified water technologist designation i share with you the logic behind how i
get to certain answers and i show you how to set up each math equation go to
scaling up h2o.com forward slash cwt prep once again that’s scaling up
h2o.com forward slash cwt prep to get enrolled today
welcome to scaling up h20 a podcast where we scale up on knowledge so we don’t scale up our systems
nation i am coming to you live from the scaling up studios well as live as a
podcast can be and this is our fifth anniversary
five years of the scaling up h2o podcast wow by the way i’m trace blackmore i am
so incredibly proud to be the host of the best
the longest running the most amazing podcast dedicated to the industrial
water treatment industry and today we’re just going to celebrate the last five
years you’ve been listening to the scaling up podcast for five years and that just
blows my mind and i was thinking what could we do that’s a little bit
different today to celebrate our fifth anniversary or our fifth birthday i’m
not even sure what to call it i know we’ve been around for five years and then i got to thinking
a good friend of mine his name is scott slade and he is a radio personality here
in the atlanta area he’s been in broadcasting for over 50
years and he’s just shared so much knowledge with me on things that i can
do better with this show he helped me improve my studio told me what equipment
i needed help me set it up and the list goes on he has just been
incredible and by the way scott’s actually been on this podcast you probably didn’t even know that you heard
him but in 2020 when we were covering the awt virtual convention
he introduced the podcast on episode 158.
i think scott has the best voice in radio i urge you to listen to 158 so you will
agree with me so i’m gonna take something that scott does every morning
on his show and bring it to this show now the atlanta morning news is what he hosts
and every morning he does the top five things that you need to know so i’m going to do a little
spin on that for today’s fifth anniversary and i want to mention the
top five things in three different categories those categories
are going to be community guests and inspiring quotes i’m gonna list five
things that really came to mind when i was thinking about this show for you
today but before we go there here’s a brand new thinking on water with james
welcome to thinking on water with james the segment where we don’t give you the answers we give you the topics and
questions for you to think about drop by drop now let’s get to it in this week’s
episode we’re thinking about whether you can rely upon the tracer to determine product concentrations in your water
systems or are there other ways to confirm should you be regularly testing beyond
just tracers like ptsa can anything impact the tracer to make it an unreliable indicator of product
levels and performance how might time bioscience etc impact
tracer levels even if the tracer levels are correct what else may be happening in the water
system to impact other product ingredients take this week to think more about the tracers you use and learn more about
them be sure to follow hashtag tow22 and hashtag scalinguph2o share your
thoughts on each week’s thinking on water i’m james mcdonald and i look forward to learning more from you
five years ago i recorded episode one on my bluetooth headset and then sent it
off for approval on apple podcasts i just can’t believe that that was five
years ago and if you’re wondering why apple podcast because we’re just about
everywhere where you can consume podcasts i learned that that’s where you
needed to send a podcast off to get the most coverage
how did i learn that i spent an entire weekend
googling and youtubing i love that those nouns are now verbs i was scrubbing the
internet trying to figure out how to produce a podcast so i had to know
really what were all the behind the scenes that i needed to do to get the
podcast to you and there was a ton i needed some
equipment i needed some software i needed a website i needed a schedule i needed all of this
stuff and i found so much content online searching and i just put everything
together in a way that logically made sense to me and then i did what i do
i created procedures and that’s something that i do just to save
bandwidth in my head i will learn about a new topic as much as i can
and then i’ll write out procedures so i don’t have to relearn it every time i go
do it and here’s the cool thing about that because i had these procedures that
i would follow every time that i would do a podcast
when the podcast became successful enough and i was able to bring on people
to help me with that by the way thank you so much for the wonderful people that helped me with the scaling
up h2o podcast they don’t get enough limelight within this podcast so karin
drury you do an amazing job making sure that this podcast
is always getting better in quality and you took those procedures that i
originally made and you made them so much better you’re always looking for
the next thing to do you’re trying to figure out how we can find the next listener how we can keep everybody
engaged and the list goes on so thank you for helping me get this podcast to
five years and the other person i want to thank is margie daven margie you do
all of the back room work to make sure that things get loaded all of our social
media goes out all the things that people recognize us for with reaching
out to the community with bringing them information that doesn’t just happen magically that happens because
you’re doing that so there are two people that are helping us bring you the
scaling up h2o podcast and that leads me back to that very
first weekend when i was learning about podcasts when i recorded that very first
show and today this is episode 247
and actually we have a little more than 247 episodes out there in the scaling up
universe why are we on episode 47 then if we have more well in the beginning i tried to be
creative with numbering and i was doing 0.1 and 0.2 because we covered a couple
of episodes on a certain topic i learned that you don’t need to be creative you need to be simple you need to find
things that were repeatable and people just understood what was going on
again i had five years to figure this out and i’m still figuring this out each and every time i come on the air with
you all that to say that five years ago scaling up h2o was born
what was also born was the scaling up nation and that brings us to the first
item that i want to talk about on those three things that i listed community i
know better than anyone how isolating our profession can be
long drives working in closed off areas with hardly any occupants running
through it while we’re running our tests while we’re diagnosing our systems it can be very
lonely i also know how hard it is to read that book that you want to read
while you’re driving while you’re working and you’re so busy working you don’t have time to read you don’t have
time to hone your skills to learn new things to learn new techniques
last week we talked about this very thing with jerry angeli and he talked about how he used to use books on tape
yes actual tapes cassette tapes so many people out there listening have
no idea what those are or if you’ve seen them you have never used them i can tell
you that this is how i used to prep for trips and i when i was in the field working with my dad i used to be out of
the house 70 of the month i spent so much time
driving around going to different territories spending time in hotel rooms
i would go to the library and i would check out books that i wanted to listen
to while i was driving well back then that’s where you got these things you got them from the
library you could only check out so many at a time and i remember
when that cassette tape clicked of the very last tape that was in the series
and then i didn’t have anybody to talk to of course they weren’t talking to me
they were kind of reading to me but that made me better it allowed me to learn
something it got me thinking on what was something that i could do with what i
was hearing and when that cassette would click because it was over and i didn’t have another one to load
i just remember feeling now what and i would turn to either radio
probably whatever was on the popular music at the time or i listened to talk
radio and folks that did nothing for me and i remember thinking i just wish that
i could magically make content appear well today
that’s what we have we’ve got a platform where we can go online we can consume as
much content on any topic that we can think of and it’s just there what an
amazing world that we live in now where we don’t have to go to the library we don’t have to check things out
there is just content waiting for us and hence that’s one of the main reasons
that i started the podcast i wanted to make sure that you didn’t have to suffer through
what i had to suffer through you had that information at your fingertips and
you could learn more about this amazing industry each and every week
by just driving to account to account now that’s one of the main reasons i
started the podcast but it wasn’t the only reason and it wasn’t the foundational reason that i started the
podcast i started the podcast because i wanted a
community i wanted people to come together
in an industry that people don’t normally come together in we compete
with each other so we can’t talk with each other but yet we’re the only people that understand what we are going
through if we tell this story to our spouse to our family to our friend about what we did it’s just a bunch of words
and they probably agree with us and sympathize with us but they truly don’t understand what it is that we do on a
daily basis so how do we get each other talking with each other well that’s when the scaling
up nation was born that was the amazing thing that happened
five years ago when this podcast first came on the air people started listening to this podcast
and they started talking to each other about this podcast
the scaling up nation is what i call you the listener and we’re all part of that
community and i am so amazed and humbled and honored and all the other words i
can’t think of that i get to be the tribe leader of the scaling up nation
our community well it didn’t take long for me to realize that there were people
within the scaling up nation community that wanted more they wanted stronger
relationships they wanted people to help them get to the next level how
did i realize this well the scaling up nation is never shy of telling me what
they want and as i would talk to scaling up nation members i kept hearing a
common theme and myself having been involved in a mastermind for years i had
always wanted to bring that concept to the water treatment community and then
the rising tide mastermind was born today we have well over 50 members in
five groups hey that’s another five how about that we also have others that
facilitate the meetings alongside with myself so we’re now a
community of facilitators within a community of members and there are just so many
amazing stories of how the rising tide mastermind members have gone further
than they ever thought they would and they got there faster than they ever
thought possible and you talk about a tight knit community that is all based
on trust and making each other better and making our industry better it is
just amazing what has happened within the rising tide mastermind when we went
to the association of water technologies convention last year we
got together and it was just the convention on steroids we had our group
we were able to divide and conquer and make sure that we saw all of the
different technical papers that we wanted to knowing that we could only see one at a time but then we got together
and a group of us would talk about what they got out of one presentation what somebody got out of another presentation
we then talked about what we were going to do with that how we were going to take that information and take what we
were doing to the next level and then we helped each other do those things
while we held each other accountable to do them it was just amazing so that is
definitely something that came out of this podcast that has given me and so
many others such a tight-knit community all around our industry
i know how important it is to belong and i remember being in the lunchroom as a
kid wondering if i was going to be invited to sit down next to someone on my very
first day in middle school i’m still that kid at heart i know you
are too and that’s why community is absolutely so important and when i get the
privilege of going to one of the events i just mentioned the association of water technologies
convention so maybe i’m speaking there or maybe i’m just attending so many of you come up and you let me
know what this community has meant to you i love the stories where you’ve
connected with somebody in your local community that does the same thing that
you do and now you are better for it or maybe you’ve joined another group
because you’ve heard about what we do in the rising tide mastermind and you share that with me
being part of something and having people help you get further faster and
caring about how you do things and what you do is oh so important life is short
so thank you scaling up h2o listeners of course i’m talking to the
scaling up nation you are the nation and thank you for the last five years
and hopefully the next five years where you are listening to this show so
that’s community those are five things that i could think of around community
so let’s move on to our guests and this is something that was so hard for me to
do we have had so many amazing guests i should have counted up all the guests that we’ve had
on the podcast and then that could have been one of our stats i could have shared with you but i didn’t do that so
i can’t share that with you what i did do is i went through
some of the guests that we had that wrote books that really meant something
to me books that allowed me to do something with either my personal life
or my professional life or how i coach other teams and other people these are
books that i use all the time and because i started a podcast
i had a reason to meet these people and to thank them for writing their books so
now what we’re going to do is we’re going to go through the top five i don’t know if they’re the top five but they’re the five that i can think of the first
one episode 29 airing in 2017 actually it aired in january of
2018. i recorded it in 2017. so the very first year that we had this podcast i
reached out to captain david markey that’s episode 29 and captain markay was
the first author that i asked to come on the show and honestly scaling up nation i fully
expected him to say no but i know nothing venture nothing gained if you
don’t ask you’re not going to get and if you’re gonna ask you might as well ask
big because somebody might say yes big so i asked david markey to come on the
scaling up h2o podcast and guess what he said yes
nation he wrote a book called turn the ship around and it is one of my favorite
leadership books the book is about how he instituted a leader leader command structure
instead of the normal leader follower structure that we have in the navy and
any service he figured instead of having one leader and
149 followers on his submarine he could have 150
leaders now the story is is he spent a year preparing to captain the uss
olympia which was one of the top performing submarines in the seventh
fleet and right at the last minute he got a change of orders and he was ordered to captain the uss
santa fe and the santa fe was the lowest performing ship in the seventh fleet so
him instituting that leader-leader command structure took the santa fe from
the lowest position to the top position what do i mean by that the stats are
amazing one of the things they look at is the re-enlistment rate so how many
people are actually re-upping their contracts to stay more time in the navy
originally before he took command that was the lowest rate of the entire seventh fleet it might have been in a
couple of fleets i think he shares in the book what he did with how he changed to a
leader-leader command structure he now had the highest re-enlistment
rate and the other thing that’s just amazing is seven of his officers became captains
and after talking with him and other people that i know that have served having won is an honor but to have seven
is just amazing his book is called turn the ship around
you can see all these things that he turned around but one of the most
amazing things was that ship received the highest
performance review in naval history just so many accolades because he was
making sure all of his people had ownership in whatever it was that they
did now one of my big heroes dr stephen r covey the author of the seven habits of
highly effective people he heard about all these amazing accomplishments and he
asked if he could come aboard the uss santa fe so you can hear in episode 29
me asking captain markay what it was like to meet dr covey so i urge you to
listen to that if you haven’t listened to that episode and if you haven’t heard in a while that’s just a really really
fun episode it was the first a-list author that i ever invited
on the podcast again if that’s a lesson that i learned and i want to share with
you ask big because you can get answered big and if you don’t ask you’re definitely
not going to get captain markay thank you for giving me that confidence for
saying yes to come on that show and i was so excited to interview you
and that then allowed me to have the confidence to ask some other authors on the show so another author was justin
rothmarsh he wrote a book called the machine that episode was episode 39 that
aired in may of 2018 now it’s a sales book but it’s different
than most of the sales books that are out there what justin did was he created a case
that since the sales department was invented it hasn’t changed at all and
when you look at something like manufacturing you see how lean it’s gotten how high performing
it’s gotten how efficient it has become and sales department not so much so he
compares those two and gives you some handles to make your
sales department more efficient and he does that by laying out his case in the
first part of the book and then telling you what to do in the second part of the book now if you worked with me as a
consultant you know that i’ve shared this book with you because if we’re ever talking about the sales department this
is the book that i send to you to read so when we get together we have a common
language that we can talk about and we can look at some very specific things to
make sales a lot more efficient i’ve had so many people tell me from this
interview that they read this book that they bought this book for people in their company and they realigned their
sales department it makes so much sense when you read it but he was the first
one that i ever read that laid it out it’s a great read it’s called the
machine and i urge you to listen to that interview again that was episode 39 a
real paradigm shift since we were talking about stephen covey in the earlier episode i mentioned with david
markey a paradigm shift on how we see and how we execute things in sales
now this next lady this next author has absolutely changed my life now let me explain
i know what the intent is behind everything that i say
but the people that hear me say it they have no idea what that intent is and a
lot of times because of how i speak and i speak the language of power and
control i come off very differently than what i’m trying to convey
i was misunderstood so much and it really hurt me i had so
much love and care that i wanted to share with people and a lot of times
when i would share those things it came off as if i was criticizing people or if
i was giving them a command i just wasn’t able to speak how my mind how my
heart was actually feeling then i was introduced to this author her
name is kathleen edelman and i’ve had her on the show twice for the first time
she was on episode 117 that aired in december of 2019
and we of course didn’t cover all the material with that so i brought her back for a continuation of that episode on
episode 179 and that was january of 2021.
nation i could have her back for a third fourth and fifth time there is so much
wealth and what she teaches i will never learn at all and there’s
just so much out there what she taught me was i am a red what the heck am i
talking about well there are four colors out there there’s red yellow blue
and green and what does that mean those are temperaments
she took something very difficult temperaments and made it so easy to
understand she taught me to understand what the four innate needs that i had as a red
and she taught me that when i don’t get those needs i don’t work from my
strengths i work from my weaknesses i didn’t know this i didn’t know why things weren’t
going the way that they needed to go why i was miscommunicating why i was
acting a certain way and by the way as a red when i don’t get one of those four
needs i respond with tone and volume of course that doesn’t help the situation
but here’s the thing she boiled all of these temperaments down so you know what your needs are by the way mine
are loyalty sense of control appreciation and credit for work i had
no idea until she taught me this but once i knew that it was amazing it
changed everything in every relationship that i have and what i realized was if
people didn’t give me one or all of those needs that i have
it wasn’t on them it was on me to choose what i did with that and i had the power
to make a conscious choice that i was going to work out of my strengths and
not out of my weaknesses which is where i go if i don’t get one of those needs
so maybe you are a red as well and that is speaking directly to you maybe you
are one of the other temperaments and you need to find out what your needs are
and what to do about that here’s the thing temperaments personality studies
they kind of sound like they’re the same but temperaments is the foundation it is the baseline it is how we are wired and
everything we do comes out of what our temperament is
we’re born with it we don’t have the ability to change it where personality
will change over our experiences and we learn that we can behave in a different
way and we’re going to get different results temperament doesn’t do that so it makes it the baseline to study but
the way kathleen puts it together it makes it so incredibly simple for you to
learn about yourself and then because you know about yourself just like they
say on an airplane you’ve got to put your oxygen mask on first if cabin
pressure should drop so you’re able to help the person
next to you well if you don’t understand yourself first if you can’t give yourself what you need there’s no way
that you’re going to be able to give the person that you’re speaking to what they need
so she teaches you how to help yourself first so you can give others what they
need and she teaches you how to recognize the needs in others and nation
this has changed everything i cannot thank kathleen enough for simplifying
this material in a way that i can use it and it has just been so powerful if you
have not listened to those episodes again episode 117 episode
179 she’s got a workbook she’s got a new children’s book out by the way so many
people after i share with them the i said this you heard that study by the way that’s what her book is called say i
wish i had this sooner for my kids one of my favorite chinese proverbs is
the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago the second best time is today
folks it is never too late to strengthen and repair relationships and this has
helped me more than anything do that very thing i am now a better me because
i understand me better and i just want to thank kathleen for helping me do that
and i hope having her on the podcast has helped you as well
the next author i want to bring up on the five things that i’m sharing with authors is one of my favorite books on
water it’s called the big thirst and why not i had all these amazing
people that have come on the podcast why not reach out to charles fishman and guess what he said
yes so i was able to ask him all of my
questions that i had about his book he is an incredible researcher and all of
the things that he researched i want to know how he knew to research it how he actually went about
collecting all of that research how he put it in a form where he could write about it but most importantly
i wanted to know the why behind why he wrote that book and we had an entire
conversation around why that’s one of my favorite questions to
ask authors is why did they write what they wrote what was the true meaning
behind it what was going on with them and what did they want to share with the
rest of the world what was the underlying foundation the underlying meaning to listen to that episode that
was episode 148 and that was in july of 2020
that leads me up to number five and that is chris mcchesney of the franklin covey
company episode 164 that originally aired in october of 2020. chris authored
a book called the four disciplines of execution this is an amazing book and by the way
the franklin covey company is the company that dr stephen r covey founded
and so much amazing material comes out of
franklin covey it’s all around self-improvement and business improvement so if you haven’t looked at
all the materials that they have i urge you to search franklin covey and just
see all the amazing content that they have i believe they even have a podcast
as well but one of the authors there chris mcchesney he wrote the four
disciplines of execution and if you’ve ever wondered how to rally a team how to
get people behind something how to make sure we’re keeping score properly and how to make sure that we get to where we
intended to get when we started this thing this is the book for you he
easily lays out so much incredibly difficult material makes it easy to
understand makes it easy for you to grab on and apply that to any team that you
are a part of it is an incredible book i urge you to read that and use that
within your teams it’s something that i use within my team and people i work
with all the time and i got the honor of having chris on this podcast and asking
him all things that i’ve always wondered what was the thing you left out in that
book what was the one key thing that you found when people were reading the book
that they wanted to know more of or they had difficulty with that you were able to smooth it out once you talk with them
all that information is on episode 164 and i just want to cap this section off
by saying if you don’t ask you won’t get
these people had no reason to come on the scaling up h2o podcast other than i
asked other than i wanted to share their whys behind why they wrote the book with
you i wanted to learn more about why they wrote the book about things that were in their books and i wanted to also
say thank you for the people that wrote those books because they really helped
me in all different areas of my life but if i didn’t ask that
would have never happened so never think that what you need is not important to
someone else that is very one-sided thinking and i want you to think that
you are giving somebody else the opportunity to pay something forward to give something back to help another
human being and if you don’t ask they’re not going to get the opportunity to do that so by all means you ask so moving
along in the categories that i mentioned and the top five things i was going to mention in each one of those categories
again we talked about community we just talked about some of the fantastic
guests and authors that we’ve had on this program i want to go ahead and wrap up today with five quotes that have
really inspired me that have really caused me to deeply think about
something or have allowed me to create something that i’ve created in
my life the podcast for one the mastermind the book that i’m working on
and so many other things that are going on in my life when i get a certain quote
i like to write it down because i use it to inspire me because life is hard i
know you know that and there’s so many things that are getting in the way of us
doing something else doing something different and sometimes these quotes help get me to that next level that help
get me out of that pit of despair of the day-to-day of all the issues that
come in in a job like ours this is a ladder that gets me out of that pit so here we go
here are the top five quotes that i’m going to share with you by james keller he said a candle loses
nothing by lighting another candle just think of that how many times has
somebody made you feel either good or bad and folks if you’re having a bad day it
is so easy to pass that feeling along to others and that doesn’t make you feel
any better it doesn’t make anybody else feel any better so imagine if you can
help somebody else if you could light somebody else’s candle that’s gonna help
you as much as it helps them and it costs you absolutely
nothing walt disney said if you can dream it you can do it and look at what he dreamed
and what he built and what continues to be built because
he had that dream so many times people are scared to dream because
they’re worried about the consequences of failure so many times people dream
and they don’t turn it into a plan to actually take action on it
to get it done that’s one of the things that we urge people to do in the rising tide
mastermind we’re always looking three years out in our future we’re trying to figure out what we can create not by
default but by really trying by really getting people behind us
and getting people to help us and pushing us to make that dream into a
reality the next quote is also around the mastermind and this is one of the
reasons that i joined the mastermind that i’ve been a member of for about 10 years now
you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with
jim ron said that just think about that the five people you spend the most time
with you by default become the average is that okay with you now i’m not
telling you to write off people in your relationship world but if you’re not
getting the results that you want maybe it’s because you’re not hanging out with
the people that will allow you to learn from them that will encourage you to do
more again that’s why we’re all members of the rising tide mastermind
the 50 plus members that have joined that we are all trying to make sure that
we’re hanging out with successful people that can teach us things and can push us
to the next level when i created the rising tide mastermind that was definitely one of the quotes that i was
thinking of here’s another one i’ve learned that people forget what you said
people will forget what you did but people will never forget
how you make them feel that was maya angelou that was a quote that somebody shared
with me i read it somewhere and wow how true is that you can say
things you can do things but when you look back you remember how people made you feel
how are you making the people feel that you are closest with when you have an interaction with somebody else it’s
great to say things it’s great to do things but after it’s all said and done
how are you leaving people to feel and is that the way you would want to feel
so it’s just a quote that i try to think of in every interaction what is the overall feeling that i’m
leaving people with and is that something that i’m proud of the last quote
is one that is from a transcendentalist so henry david thoreau
there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking
at the root that’s deep right let me read that again there are a thousand hacking at the
branches of evil to one who is striking at the root
there is so much that happens to us on a daily basis there’s so
much that we want to change there might be certain issues that are
going on in the world and we’re dealing with the static around those issues or
maybe it’s just some of the noise around one of the core issues of our life maybe
there’s something that we need to change in our life maybe it’s something with our health maybe it’s a certain habit
maybe it’s a way that we have been treating somebody maybe it’s a relationship that we want to repair so
many times we are dealing with the symptom and not the root cause that
quote always gets me to think about that we have the power as an individual
to make things better the fact that we’re talking about evil we can apply that to so many things but if we just
look at all the issues that we have in our lives are we truly doing something
that counts or are we just hacking at the branches of course those branches
are going to grow back we have to find the root cause and we need to deal with that
nation this has been a fun show i can’t believe that it has been five years that
you and i have been spending time with each other thank you for spending that
time with me i hope you enjoyed this look back at some of the top five things
that i wanted to share with you of course this was all in honor of my friend scott slade who every morning on
atlanta morning news he shares the top five things that we need to know about
our day so here are the five things that i wanted to share with you about this podcast
nation don’t worry we’re gonna have another brand new episode for you next week in the meantime i hope you catch up
on some of the episodes that i mentioned today maybe re-listen to some of those episodes because they meant so much to
me i learned a lot and i would absolutely love the next time you see me
to let me know something you learned from one of those interviews have a great week folks
[Music] scouting nation we have just started a
new group within the rising tide mastermind i am so amazed at how
successful and how well received the rising tide mastermind has been in our community and we are starting a new
waiting list for the next group if you want to get on this waiting list so you
can start with our next group go to scaling up h2o.com forward slash
mastermind to see if this is the right group for you and then after you and i have a brief conversation to make sure
the group fits for you and you fit for the group we can get you on that waiting
list i can’t wait to talk to you remember scaling up h2o.com forward slash mastermind
you