Guest: Ted Rubin Guest Title: SocialMarketing Strategist, Keynote Speaker, Acting CMO of Brand Innovators, Co-Founder of the recently launched PrevailingPath
Date: August 9th, 2017 Guest Company: Brand Innovators and PrevailingPatch
[Intro Music]
Debra Ruh: Hello, everyone. You’re listening to Human Potential at Work. I’m excited about the guest today. I’ve been a fan of his work for many years and I’ve actually learned quite a bit from him. So, Ted Rubin is joining us today, and Ted Rubin is considered a social media guru in my book, and he talks a lot about the return on employees, which I really like that topic. And he’s written some blogs recently. One is called Four Ways to Create Trust: The Key to Commerce, which I thought was a powerful blog title, and he also wrote one called Return on Employees: Social Media Empowered by Your Employees. So, Ted, welcome to the show.
Ted Rubin: Well, I’m excited to be here. Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to talk about these topics. I’m really interested in them. I do want to say one thing. I do like to stay away from that word guru because I don’t really consider myself, especially not a guru, but not a guru, not an expert. I’m just a guy with ideas who’s willing to talk about them and use them for myself and for people that I work with. So, I really try to get out there in the trenches, not just talk about things, but see how they actually work.
Debra Ruh: I agree. And that’s one reason why I love your voice. It’s very authentic and I think it’s a very … I think you have a very important voice right now in the marketplace and so I really am honored to have you on the program today. I also like that you talk from a perspective of a dad and I’ll use your terminology, a divorced dad as well. I was reading your blog that you wrote on Independence Day and I just found it very powerful.
Ted Rubin: Well, thank you very much. That’s a very, very important topic to me and a big part of who I am and I tried to share a lot about it. Number one is because, again, it’s something that’s such a big part of me, it’s hard not to. But, number two, just from everything that I’ve learned from it and I also believe that we live in a different time now. There used to be this very distinct separation between personal and business. Not only was it customary, but it was almost ordered as so. Like keep your personal life at home. Keep your business life separate and I think those two things have really emerged now. I think it has to do with an evolution of the workplace. I think it has to do with the changing times. I think it has to do with the platforms and the abilities we have now to connect and communicate and the fact that so many people work in so many different places that I actually believe that people want to know who you are as a person. And that doesn’t mean they’re evaluating you. It means they’re just understanding you a little better.
Debra Ruh: Well, and it’s showing your humanness and so I agree with you.
Ted Rubin: Absolutely. And I find, like I said, it’s just a big part of it. I get, I share a lot of my personal life. I share a lot about being a divorced dad, about fighting to keep my daughters in my life. I share a lot about being an uncle and all the things I do personally and what I find is I make more of a connection with senior executives and really just everyone I deal with through what I share personally and what I share from a business perspective. So, yes, I write a lot of things. I write about marketing. I write about social marketing. I write about relationships, and customer experience and empowering your employees. But truth be told, I would say the vast majority of times, when somebody says “Oh, my God. Ted it’s so great to meet you. I loved your post about your socks or I love how important being a dad is to you,” and I get this from the level, from a managerial level, or even just an employee level, all the way up to the C-suite. More CEO’s make a comment to me about something I did on a weekend or something I wrote about my kids or something I wrote about any of those kind of topics, and necessarily, oh, that was a great post you wrote about employee advocacy.
Debra Ruh: And it must be very good for you as well to really help you work through all of those, and just get through life, right? It must teach you a lot as well.
Ted Rubin: Absolutely. I talk a lot about being good to people and just being nice and I’ve been that way my whole life, [inaudible 00:04:39] now. I was taught it as a child. My dad was that guy. He was the guy that made me sweep the neighbor’s walks and shovel their snow when it snowed and we’d be driving on a street where we knew nobody and there’d be some garbage pails clearly with an address on them rolled out in the middle of the street and he’d stop the car and get out himself when I was younger and move them and obviously as I got older it was pushing me out the door and telling me to pick up those things. And when I was young, sometimes I understood it. Some of the times I’d say, “Dad, why are we doing that? They’re not even going to know.” He goes, “They don’t have to know.” First of all, you’re doing it a lot for yourself. It’s what he says it makes me feel good, and the truth is again, when I talk a lot about this be good to people and I wear the shirts when I travel and it certainly has changed the way people interact and engage with me.
More importantly, it’s how it makes me feel. When you do something good for somebody else, you shouldn’t be waiting for what they do in return. And I’m not saying … What I like to say is do for others without expectation or anything directly in return. That doesn’t mean you don’t want a return. That return could be the good feeling you get. That return could be that Debra Ruh reaches out to you and says I’d love to have you on my show because I’ve heard all these things about you. That return could be in so many different ways. I’d like to say that a brand is what a business or person does. A reputation is what people remember and share.
Debra Ruh: Oh, good.
Ted Rubin: And to me, these things build your reputation. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten to work or I’ve gotten, somebody’s reached out to me, or somebody’s offered to do a favor, and I’ve never even met them, and they go, but we see everything you do for other people, so why wouldn’t we help you too?
Debra Ruh: Right. Right. I totally agree. Will you tell the audience a little bit about your work?
Ted Rubin: Okay. Well, I guess that really starts out a little bit about me. So, first of all, I’m 59. So, you don’t want to hear everything about me. The history is way too [inaudible 00:06:31]. I did a lot of different things. I was in the investment business. I helped build a few small companies when I was younger. But, the big change in my life that brought me into this pace was that I left, closed a business. I had moved to south Florida, got married, had some kids. I was very unhappy down there. I was looking for something new and I discovered the internet in 1997, and I started researching and amongst the many things I read, I read an article that was an interview of Seth Godin. And, this is before Seth was Seth. This was when Seth had just founded a company a couple years before called Yoyodyne.
He had been known … He built a rep for himself as a product marketing manager working for Atari as a wonder kind, but in a very limited space before people shared those things socially. And this article was just very intriguing. He was clearly brilliant. They were asking a lot of questions about this new thing called the internet. He had started a company called Yoyodyne, which was the first on-line direct marketing company and he was getting into a lot of all these things he’s been preaching since about how to market to people and how to gain their permission and how to talk to them about the right thing at the right time. And I read the article. At the end of it, the interviewer asked him if he had … he says, “Wow, this is a cool company. Do you have any job openings.” And he said, “No.” But I will always hire a smart person. That’s the way I build my company. And I wrote him a letter, yeah, a letter, with an enclosed resume, and at the time, like I said, I was looking for to move back to New York and I said … And he had also mentioned that he was selling something that no one had ever sold before.
So, he needed people that could sell something that they didn’t have experience in. And I said, “Look, I can sell anything, and I’m smart.” My wife at the time, who’s my ex, said to me why would you, like chastised me for, why would I try to get a job at someplace when there are no job openings. And a week later, I get a call from Yoyodyne. And I go up there, and I ended up going to work for Seth. I moved up there first without my family, so I had a wonderful opportunity because I had a lot of free time. I made the mistake of moving in with my in-laws for a few months waiting for my family to move. Don’t ever, ever move in with your in-laws, especially if they’re like the Costanzas and all they do is yell at each other. So, I’m not an early riser, but I believe everything happens for a reason, and because of that, I lefty their house before anybody woke up every morning, and I got to the Yoyodyne offices like between 6:00 and 6:30 am, and the only other person there was Seth.
Seth’s an early riser. And Seth was coming up with all these ideas and I was the guy sitting there that got to listen to all of them. And I was smart enough to shut my mouth and listen and Seth coined the term permission marketing while I was sitting there. He wrote the article for Fast Company magazine, which became his first bestseller. So, that was a real developmental thing for me. I was around Seth. I learned from Seth in the early days. When he had more time, he was building a company. He was appreciating the people that worked for him. In a special way because we were there trying to build this thing, and it’s really where I first started coming to this concept of return in relationship. I had known it inside, but listening to Seth talk and how ideas spread, his idea virus book, and how to get people’s permission and the way he would make us spend time with companies that we were trying to sell.
As desperate as we were for sales, he was annoyed sometimes if we came back from a first meeting with an order. He wanted us to know all about them. He wanted us to build a relationship. He wanted us to go beyond an agency relationship and get to know the people at the brands and if we did bring back an order right away, he’d ask us a lot of questions about the company to make sure that we understood what they needed, what they wanted, what they were looking to accomplish, and if we didn’t he wasn’t happy.
So, that was my early days in digital. Again, it was when e-commerce was a catalog on-line, when new media was just old media in a new package. And it allowed to watch this evolution to what new media is today, the age of influence where anybody could build a brand, affect change and make a difference 24/7 without ever leaving a bedroom if they choose not to do so. I’m not advocating that, but I’m saying it’s possible. It also allows us like [inaudible 00:10:39] like to say, if you don’t like your job, if you know what to do, but you have to do it, you’ve still got as lot of hours at night, and you’ve got hours you can cut out of your sleep. And again, I’m not necessarily advocating that for every person, but the point is, it used to be you got home from work and you were done. Maybe you could call a few people. But now, you could be making connections, building a business, doing something on the side anytime.
So, to me that was just tremendous and from Yoyodyne, I went through a lot of web 1.0 and just a fast forward I ended up in a company called ELF Cosmetics in 2008. They had about $5 million in sales. They hit a wall. They had no marketing budget. They were using traditional word of mouth. I jumped them into the social space. We had tremendous success with it. It was all about women and mom’s and women … Look, we know women control purchases, women love to share. Social was breaking out. It was cosmetics and admit this, you can Debra, we’re here. You can admit to your audience that when you get a box of cosmetics in the mail, you become as little girl again.
Debra Ruh: Absolutely.
Ted Rubin: And you start [crosstalk 00:11:39] and I said cosmetics to Beth Comstock, one of the most powerful women in the country and I got back the same reply. “Oh, my God, Ted. This was so much fun. I was up all night trying on different stuff.” So, I was, in the early ages of social, I was at a company that had a fun product, that was a family owned business that was desperate to build awareness and sell the product. So, they let me do anything I ever wanted. And I got to experiment in the early days of social doing things that nobody else was doing and I became friends with guys like Jeffrey [Hazlett 00:12:10], who at the time was a progressive CMO with Kodak, jumping into social and Barry Judge, who was doing the same at Best Buy. And we would brainstorm and then at the end they go, oh, you go. You try it, because I could try anything.
So, I was lucky and I learned early on how important it is to experiment with these things, how easy it is to do, how you can go out and try anything. You shouldn’t be locked in on a calendar year and that’s what brought me in to where I am today. I progressed from ELF to a company called Open Sky that was doing peer to peer commerce. So, I got some great experience with that. I built their social following. When they pivoted and decided to sell celebrity recommended products, which they subsequently left and gone back to peer to peer, part of the deal was I got to take all the Twitter handles I built for them other than just their main one. I had been building this whole idea of Twitter syndication using multiple handles to get people to retweet and share content and basically build a marketing plan without a marketing budget.
I brought that to Collector Bias, whose board I was on and became a partner there. We were building content using user generated content, bloggers creating content at scale in storytelling format for brands and had a great few years there. They were acquired last year, so that was great, and now I am speaking and I MC events for a company called Brand Innovators and I work with a number of different startups helping facilitate introductions and build their brand awareness and I’ve been fortunate enough to do some influential work with major brands too. So, it’s all good and I hope that didn’t go too long, but there you have it.
Debra Ruh: Well, no, because it’s very interesting listening to the path unfold and I have … The thing I really like about following you on social media is the return on relationships because I love the story you said about your dad, because that’s always what I’ve tried to be as well, just to make a difference in the world even if nobody’s watching. And, I of course, am very … It’s very important to me that the community of people with disabilities be fully included. And I’m really been encouraging my community to get out on social media, form relationships, find your voice, engage with others. And I think one reason why I bring people on that I feel have a very important voice is because I want to make sure that they know who the leaders are out there and they can learn from as they find their own voices and they follow their purpose and passion. So, tell us more about the return on relationship, because I just think … And you have a hashtag that is very popular with your return on relationship, but I just think that’s such a very important part of your work.
Ted Rubin: Well, I appreciate you saying it and I would just like to simplify it for people a little bit as far as putting a description around it. So, I like to say return on relationship, which a lot of times, ROR, the shorthand is used and the hashtag I use and that’s a story onto itself, is RONR for return on relationship. But, simply put, it’s the value that’s accrued by a person or a brand due to nurturing our relationship. ROI is simple dollars and cents, easy to measure, easy to understand, but ROR is the value, I like to say both perceived and real that will accrue over time through connection, loyalty, recommendation and sharing. And it’s being used to define and educate companies and brands and people about the importance of creating authentic connection, interaction, and engagements. So, that’s a simple explanation. If you want to really simplify it, I like to say that ROI is about dollars and cents, and ROR is about people.
Debra Ruh: Okay.
Ted Rubin: It’s about connecting. It’s about engaging. It’s about, like you said earlier, humanizing your brand. Again, it’s a very different world. I feel that commerce and connection has really come full circle. There was a time when I was young, and I’m talking growing up in the 60’s, where everything was local, right? You went to your local bakery, or local butcher, everybody knew each other and obviously even moreso before that when towns were even smaller. But, even I experienced that, and everybody knew your family. They recommended things to your mom. Even the supermarket guy would say, “Oh, Mrs. Rubin, we have a new chocolate cake and your boys will love it, and they were careful about that because they did know your family and they knew that Mrs. Rubin would be back Monday morning to say this cake sucked, maybe not in those words. But, oh, my God, my boys didn’t really like it. Maybe she [inaudible 00:16:39] us for her money back, but she certainly wouldn’t have been sharing her displeasure and sharing it with her friends and everything was personal and we believed that whatever we shared, people knew, and then we came into this world of mass merchandising, and new department stores, and new supermarkets and everyone thought they became anonymous, except we never were really anonymous because they’ve been tracking us since the 50’s.
American Express has more data probably than almost any company out there. They’ve been tracking you since the 50’s, every purchase, everything you did, everybody got into these glorious credit cards and they were giving away all the information. They joined clubs in the stores to get discounts. But again, we all know now that they were tracking your moves, looking at what you were doing, offering you different things. And women would go to the supermarket with their curlers on because they thought nobody would see them. It’s this huge place, who knows when everyone will be there. And what’s happened now is that we’ve come into this world where we are being tracked more than ever, but we recognize it and we know it and we’re okay with it, as long as we get value in return, just like the value we got back in the day, when [inaudible 00:17:42], or the baker, or the candlestick maker knew who we were and gave us things that we cared about because they knew we’d be back if we didn’t.
And now, we have that voice again, because you had it in your town. Nobody wanted to piss off somebody who was going to the PTA meetings and dropping off the kids at school and going to the little league games because everybody knew each other and now we’re back in that. Everybody knows each other. Anyone of us can share our displeasure and let the world know about it in the same way any woman can share their pleasure, right? And by the way, I come from the camp, a lot of people say, “Oh, people just complain on social media, [inaudible 00:18:15]. I don’t believe that. If you really look … Only because that’s what people start sharing or are gearing about or that’s what companies get upset about so you read about it in the papers or from journalists, but the truth be told, people are munch more apt to say good things. I really love my friend there, or really happy there and they go to helping people like they share good experiences as well, and sometimes people say people share too much good.
More and more to this social thing, it’s what you make of it. If you only are friends or follow people that only like the good stuff in their lives, well you’re going to know that because you know some of those people. But, if you follow people that are true friends and are sharing a lot more, there are plenty of people out there that share their ups, their downs, their heartache, and like you said earlier, I think you made a comment about that I get to share these things and it helps me. And it’s true because one thing I just left out of when I talked about my career, is that wrapped around that whole thing was this thing about being a dad and how important it was to me, and how much I love watching other dads, and how much I love watching kids and how important my nieces are to me and that kind of at thing. So, when you do these things, and when you have a hard time or you had a bad day, there are people out there all the time. You’re no longer stuck in your house by yourself calling your one friend who’s already sleeping, or isn’t home, or isn’t available.
Debra Ruh: Right, and I’ll tell you social isolation is very common in the community of people with disabilities too and certainly as we age many people become very socially isolated and so, I agree with you. Social media is what you make it.
Ted Rubin: I think with people with disabilities, it can be tremendous.
Debra Ruh: Yes.
Ted Rubin: There’s so many opportunities to connect and link up with people that have the same challenges or maybe different challenges, but have challenges, and also to recognize that there’s so many more people with challenges than you realize, and when somebody … Again you say people only say good things, but when you open your soul, people tend to open themselves up back and I’ve met some incredible people with disabilities via social media. And it’s opened my eyes and I like that part. But, what I really like is the fact that this is an equalizer. This takes people and allows them to know and allows them to travel without traveling. It’s an equalizer economically. To a certain degree, obviously we are in the percentage of people that have access to these tools. And still not everybody does and that’s unfortunate, but I think we’re moving in that direction. But, it’s a great equalizer economically and physically, and emotionally.
Debra Ruh: I agree. I agree.
Ted Rubin: I’m sorry. I cut you off.
Debra Ruh: No, no, no, but that was a very important point that you brought up because often, we talk a lot about the human potential on this show and of course, I just am very … It’s very near and dear to my heart, the community of people with disabilities and I’m part of that community. But, it’s really about humanizing, once again, humanizing. So, I was listening to something I think on Super Soul Sunday the other day, and one of the guests made a comment that as opposed to nationality, they want to focus on humanity. And I just loved that term so much because it really … Social media allows us to connect with other humans, and I’ve had guests on that talked about humanizing your brand and how important that is and I thought it was an interesting comment you made that some of the CEO’s that you worked with, what resonates about your message is when you’re talking about who Ted is, who Ted is and your experience with your girls and your experiences with your divorce and life and things.
They liked that you are human and that’s a silly thing to say because we’re all human beings, but I think sometimes we hide from that and we try to pretend we’re … I know I was on a chat the other day, Access Chat, and we had Lolly Daskal on there and she just has a really beautiful voice. She’s really an amazing woman and as we were talking to her, we were talking about the imposter syndrome and she’s found about 99% of the people she’s ever talked to have that imposter syndrome, and I had written a tweet saying always have struggled with the imposter syndrome and who do you think you are. You’re a little girl from Florida, bla, bla, bla and somebody tweeted back and said, “Really? You sem so confident, Debra. I would never think that you had doubts,” and that just made me smile because that’s not true at all. I have a lot of doubts. I have a lot of fears. I have a lot of things that I struggle with, but I don’t let them get in the way ultimately. I push through them. It might be painful.
I had an experience with my daughter yesterday. Many of our listeners know that I have a daughter who’s 30 years old that was born with trisomy 21 or down syndrome and she’s [inaudible 00:23:32] delightful girl in so many ways. But, yesterday … She’s gotten in this habit of we’ll ask her to get ready to go somewhere and she’ll say, “Yeah, I will. I will,” procrastinate, procrastinate, and it’s starting to get very annoying. And so, what we decided to do was we’re going to warn her, we’re going to ask her, we’re going to engage with her, and if she keeps saying no, we’re just going to leave.
So, she’s in a safe situation, but yesterday we were going to dinner and my husband asked her four different times and she kept saying I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go. Well, she’s 30 years old. She’s safe at home. So, he left without her and let me tell you she couldn’t believe it. She called me up at work and she was hysterical. “He left me,” and so it’s sometimes walking your truth is tough. Sometimes your life is … Little things like that can be stressful. But at the same time, it is part of being human. So, when you talk about being a dad, it really speaks to me too. I often see dads really being discounted in a lot of ways in our society. I know some dads that like you, have really had to fight to stay involved in the lives of their children and I think we got as lot of work in society to do to make sure that dads are getting more of a equal break and really being involved in their children’s’ lives once they’re divorced and stuff. So, I’m really glad you talk about that so much. Why is that important to you to talk about?
Ted Rubin: Well, first of all, just to get back to what you said, maybe it’s because of what I’ve done. But, you have to make up your mind to do it. No matter how hard the situation is, there’s a lot of ways and look, I don’t see my daughters that much, but I do everything I can to stay in front of them. I stay present. I let them I’m always available. I go out of my way to see them in anyway I can and I also have changed my expectations. And don’t think I don’t have people I know that have said, “If I was you, I would have walked away, or I would have let it go, or I would have given up,” and a lot of dads do give up, and it’s not because … Look there were roadblocks. Face it. There are roadblocks in life.
So, yes, the point I’m trying to make is I’ve turned away from being a dad advocate. I just think there’s too many dads out there that are woe is me. It’s too hard. I’m put in the road blocks. The court systems aren’t fair and I don’t come from that camp. I come from the camp like hey, deal with your situation. It is what it is. And do everything you can to stay present. Change your expectations. I like to say, and I said it. I don’t know if you saw my video, The Dad That Doesn’t Quit. But it was about me, who I am. It was a great story told by a great storyteller named Jude Charles who helped me put it together. But one, of the points that most important to me, is that I’d like to say, and this has to do with a lot more than just being a dad is that no one can take away from me what I feel here, okay? No matter what happens, no matter what my ex did to change things, no matter how much time I might have lost, no matter how my daughters react to me now, it’s only I can take this away, and I will always have that. I will always have the memories, the caring. I will always be able to feel happy for them, even when I’m not involved.
So, I participate a lot vicariously from afar. My older daughter blocks me from social channels. I search for her on Google. I found a lot of stuff. I know that she has her first boyfriend now and she’s really happy and I see pictures of her smiling and I feel amazing inside even though I’m not getting to share it personally. I get to be happy that she’s happy and I just think a lot of it has to do … I like to say that attitude comes first. Perspective comes after that and then that all leads to mindset and it’s all about how you set your mind. And then, just to back up a second, because there was something that I wanted to say about a top group we’re talking about. When you mentioned about showing who you are as a person and the fact that I connect best with a lot of senior executives that way.
I just want people to realize that they’re are a lot more people viewing what you post than you think. It’s not just about how many friends you have. If you make it public, and this is a choice, but everything of mine is public. You don’t have to be my friend, or follow me to see my things, or me follow you. So, I can’t tell you how many people remark to me about things I’ve done in my life that have never liked one of my posts, have never commented, I’m not friends with them. I didn’t even know they existed socially in that world and I would tell you that the vast majority of senior executives that comment to me are people that I didn’t even know were following me or watching me.
Debra Ruh: Right.
Ted Rubin: Back with my younger daughter who I’m vising in D.C. next week, yay, I’m so excited, taking her to dinner and a baseball game and she’s down there doing an internship. And then I’m doing a meetup the night I get there with a whole bunch of Washington people thanks to Stan Reeser and Fred McClements, which I try to do everywhere I travel. But, the point I’m making is that when she was 16, I took her to Costa Rica, and it was the first trip of just her and I. Her older sister wasn’t coming and we learned how to surf. And I hired this … They have this photographer …. If you ever go, if you ever do these things, they have a photographer from Kelly’s Surf Shop that has the longest telephoto lens that you’ve ever seen. So, you pay her and your daughter doesn’t even know she’s taking the pictures, and you don’t even know. So, you don’t feel that I’m posing, I’m doing. Just from so far way she took all these pictures and she got this amazing shot of my daughter and I both getting up at the same time.
And I didn’t even realize, but the instructor kept trying to get us to go together because he knew that she was trying to get this picture. But, I would tell you right now that hundreds of senior executives have seen me around the country at meetings, at events, and they look at me and they go, “Hey, man, that picture of you and your daughter surfing, you got me on that one. Like, wow, what a great experience,” and like again, I used to talk about this a lot. I tell brands all the time for years now, probably since 2009 that way more people are checking out, experiencing and reading what you’re posting than you think are and you have to understand that, because most do what I call participate vicariously. They watch other things. They watch what you’re doing and they take away from that and by the way, they’re building a relationship with you that way.
Debra Ruh: Right.
Ted Rubin: Because if you post a lot right as you care about, and you have conversations … Watch the conversations. So, if Debra starts commenting on my post and we go back and forth, they’re reading that too because they commented. A lot of these people also don’t just comment about the photos, or what I wrote, they comment about oh, my God, what Debra said was amazing. She’s right on, and hundreds of senior executives have said things to me like that. And what it did for me … A lot of this happened after I left Collective Bias because I wasn’t seeing a lot of these people all the time and I had a little more time. I traveled with my daughter and it was just too positive of what I’ve been talking about for years about how many people participate without you even knowing it.
So, don’t think it’s just your followers. Don’t think it’s just your friends. If you leave it open, you will find out … If you engage and interact and post a lot of good, and by the way the content doesn’t have to be sophisticated. It doesn’t have to be … I have a friend from high school, and she’s known throughout everybody for all the crazy stuff she posts. She uses Snapchat and she uses filters and she takes pictures and she’s 59 years old and people were just getting a kick out off the fact that she’s just having so much fun with life and with these tools that she’s got a … I can’t tell you how many people I know don’t follow her, but I show up places, and they go, “Oh, my God, you know Cathy. She’s amazing.” So, just think about that. Stop worrying about how perfect your content is. It’s real … Just remember something that real … I hate to use this word, but real trumps perfect.
Debra Ruh: Yes. I wrote that down.
Ted Rubin: Every time because real creates trust.
Debra Ruh: Right. Right. And I just want to say maybe one …There’s a lot of reasons why I really like your work, but I am a child of divorce and my mother made things absolutely impossible for my father. So, my father just gave up. He was one of the dads that gave up and he made no effort at all to see us because it was just impossible, and I get that. But, at the same time it really hurt my feelings and I re-engaged with my father when I was 35 years old and we don’t have a good relationship. I consider my stepfather, who raised me to be my father.
But, I always … And isn’t that typical we’re just going to look at it from our own perspective, but I always wished my dad had actually tried because after I was a certain age he could have reached out, but he just gave up and I understand sometimes people make it and my mother did. She made it very difficult. But anyways, so I walked that. So, that might be one reason why I just really am so glad when dads fight for the relationship with your children because we need you too. And you and I are about the same age, but I do … I just wanted to share that. But, I really appreciate your authentic voice and the power of your wisdom that you’re sharing and how would our viewers learn more about your work, Ted? How do they find you? I know how to find you, but how do they find you?
Ted Rubin: I’m going to tell you that in a second. I’m, just going to give you … There’s a quite from Dr. Seuss that I always tell my daughters. Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.
Debra Ruh: Oh, good quote.
Ted Rubin: And this is the greatest place to do that and also one last thing on the point of what you were saying. I’m so glad that you did find your dad, or re-connect with him. When I went through this and wrote a post after I won the rights to my daughters back, one blogger in particular, Sugar Jones, and about 10 others, wrote posts themselves about how they had lost their dads because of the same situation and a lot of them thought badly of their dads because they listened to all the stories and all they heard, and then it wasn’t until they were in their late 30’s or 40’s when they found out that their dads were driven way.
And by the way, this can happen on the other side of things too. So, more or less, the moral of the story is be open minded, realize that friendship and relationships, especially family, are really important. And as far as finding me, I’m incredibly easy to find. You can Google Ted Rubin. I’m about the first 10 pages. The only post I am not, is I am not the 978 year old Medal Award winner from [crosstalk 00:34:22]. So, that Ted Rubin is not me. His real name is actually HT Rubin, but people call him Ted. I’m @tedrubin on twitter. I’m @Tedrubin on Instagram. I’m tedrubin on Facebook. I’m easy to find on LinkedIn.
I’ll even make it simple for you guys. My email address is [email protected] and my phone number is 516-270-5511. I actually answer my phone, accept voice mails and return them. So, if you want to reach out, reach at anytime, and I’d be happy and love to engage with you and just remember something. Relationships are like muscle tissue, the more you engage them, the stronger and more valuable they become and community is what gives you power. You think on here everyone talks about networking, having a lot of connections, and a network does give you reach and it has a lot of value, but a community gives you power. So, always keep that in mind, and I think you’re building a community here.
Debra Ruh: And that’s powerful. Yeah. Thank you so much ted, and I really , really appreciate the time, and I appreciate you being on the program. You were very quick to say yes and I’m grateful for that and I really encourage any brands listening to definitely go out and find out more about how Ted can help you really tap into the RONR, very, very important about relationships. So, Ted, thank you for joining us today.
Ted Rubin: Thank you, Debra. I appreciate your reaching out, and I want to give one last shout out to Doug Forsett because I accepted from you before I even knew he was involved, but once I heard he was involved, then I knew you were the real deal. So, thank you very much, Doug.
Debra Ruh: Yeah. Yeah, Doug Forsett is such a blessing to me. He really is. So, thank you, Ted, for all of your work, really, really making a difference and your daughters are really blessed to have you as a dad.
You’ve been listening to Human Potential at Work with Debra Ruh. To learn more about Debra and how she can help your organization visit RuhGlobal.com. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode and you want to make sure that you don’t miss any future epsiodes, go to itunes and subscribe to Human Potential at Work. Thanks so much for listening and we’ll be back next week with a new episode.