Blaine Oelkers

Jun 28, 2022

DESCRIPTION

How to Gain Clarity on What You Want Most with Blaine Oelkers

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, blaine, called, imagination, linkedin, results, started, habit, visualization, powerball, deep, big, week, tedx talk, grow rich, win, log, years, day, business

SPEAKERS

Blaine Oelkers, Megan Swan

TRANSCRIPT

Megan Swan 00:03

Welcome back to Energetically You I am chatting with Blaine today. He is an expert on all sorts of things that I love as well such as the power of visualization, the importance of gaining clarity on what you want most. And we're gonna talk about your brain's reticular activating system and love that subject to the power of imagination and a bunch of really practical tips. So, to give you an idea of Blaine key is a leading authority in personal implementation and consistency. He is America's only chief results officer, we're gonna dive into that story. I'm sure it's a good one. He's a habit master with documented streaks of 1460 days in a row and counting as a top LinkedIn connector. He has over 25,001st level connections. I believe that's getting close to the maximum I think it might be as high as 35,000 or 40. Well ask him I'm sure he knows. And one point 7,000,002nd level and says well, my goodness, 786 million 1000. That must be our gonna ask. He has a lot of LinkedIn connections is the point. He's a LinkedIn genius. Blaine graduated from Purdue University and Stanford University's Social Entrepreneurship Program. He's excited to share with us ways we can take control of our life by taking control of ourselves. So let's dive in. We're here again on energetically you I'm so excited to have a deep conversation with Blaine Oelkers. Welcome. How are you today, Blaine?

Blaine Oelkers 02:08

Megan, thank you for having me on. Honored to be here and just want to say thank you for putting this podcast together. You know, it's a lot of work to put these things together. And I just want to appreciate you for putting it together. And I hope we can add some value to the listeners lives today. And I'm excited to be here.

Megan Swan 02:27

Yeah, well, you have so many interesting zones of genius. So let's start off with Chief results. Officer, what is the story that you are the one and only How did you coined the term and tell us tell us the journey?

Blaine Oelkers 02:42

Yeah, yeah. So I had a few moments of dawning comprehension, as I like to call them kind of pivotal moments that kind of change your life. And so I was really lucky in college. I went to Purdue University in Indiana. And I was I've always been a little bit and maybe some of the listeners are too a seeker like a seeker of knowledge, how can I get better, what can I do, and I sent away for this audio cassette kind of dating myself that was this was back in the 80s. I sent this audio cassette tape with the abridged version of this book called Think and Grow Rich, it was actually read by Earl Nightingale who turned out to be kind of a mentor for me later, along with Jim Rohn. But, but in any case, so I got this and I, I really liked it. And then I bought the book. And so in college, I read this book Thinking grow rich now, riches, it could be like financial, but it was also riches of any kind of harmonious relationships, good health, like whatever you really desired. And it was a little bit of a formula to take your thoughts and turn them into reality. So realizing that later I called it something else I called it why Teva, what you think about you bring about, and so that really helped me to gain some success. It's kind of like the law of attraction with action, sort of like what you think about you bring about like, You got to, you got to kind of do something that helped the universe along, I think, but But anyway, I had some good success with that. And actually, I met my wife in at college, and we've been married 30 years now. So that's been successful. Relations. Thank you, and thank you. But this other moment, which led me to kind of becoming the chief results office this other moment of Dawn incomprehension was my son was one year old. And I was working a tech job. I was my degrees in computer science. And so I was working for this company. I had been away for four or five days, and I got back and my son Beau was kind of giving me the cold shoulder. I'm like, What is this? And I said, Beth, what's going on? Why is he give me the cold shoulder? And she said, Well, you were gone so long. He kind of forgot who you were. And I was just like, what I mean, that hit me like in the heart pretty, pretty bad that that night and as I went to bed, I realized both my parents worked. So I came home to an empty house many times and was kind of scared and anyway, I had all these these thoughts and I made what I call a clean Terrifying decision that night that I was going to work from home, like no matter what. So I had to get out of my own job, I had to find something, some way to work from home. So I ended up starting two businesses, and it took a year. But a year later, you know, I broke free from the job, and then I never had to go back again. So and that was like 28 years ago. So for me, what happened was, then I could kind of pursue what I really want in life. And I started a company called self fluence, which is the art and science of influencing yourself. So I'm kind of CLI my genius zone is personal implementation, how to help people kind of get themselves to do the right things that bring high value. And so I started doing that for a bunch of people and for, for mastermind groups, specifically mastermind groups of business owners, mostly, and they started calling me Chief results off saying, Oh, that's a cool title. And I, I feel like, hey, that's what God has wants me to do is to help people kind of take control of their lives by taking control of themselves and getting results. And so then I realized no one else had that. So I went to the US Patent Office, and you can get a trademark register the R with a circle, which that means means you mean business. It took like eight months, but I got that. So nobody else in America can use that term without kind of licensing it through me. So anyway, that's how I became America's only chief results officer. But my real thing is, how can I help people, you know, kind of take control of their lives by taking control of themselves. That's really what I like to help people with.

Megan Swan 06:30

Yeah, I love that story. Well, we definitely have a lot in common. So let's talk specifically about the power of visualization and how you help people really, I'm sure there's like the visualization. But to your point, it comes with action as well, not just thinking and imagining.

Blaine Oelkers 06:55

Yeah, I think there. I mean, it starts with some type of clarity, right? And so So how do people kind of get clarity for what, what they want? Or how can they get clarity of maybe why they're here. And I find that when people kind of align with like a really deep, authentic clarity, that they feel really good about what they're doing, right? And so, and they would keep, you know, they really get excited there. There's not a lack of energy or excitement or enthusiasm for what they want to do. But how do you discover that stuff? It's not easy. But a lot of people who do things really well in life, that's what happened to them is they discovered sometimes at a very early age, but they discovered, you know what that thing was for them, like, what, why they're here. And so there's a few exercises we like to walk people through to try to figure some of that out. One I like is your 100 and 20th birthday party, right? So you, you imagine that you're attending your own, I used to be 100. But now with advances in science and all that stuff, we're going to 120. So you're at your 120th birthday party, you know, you got the lean muscle mass, you're got full mental capacity, you're doing great. But but you're sitting there and you're watching this party unfold, and people are coming up to the microphone there. And a lot of people are there. And they're saying stuff like what are your what does your family say about you? What does, you know, the people you work with, say about the community, and you're kind of living through this, this view of your life, you know, at this big party, right? And what music is playing and what was your favorite years, and you kind of taken all the sights, sounds, feelings, emotions of all the five senses there, and try to try to put that down on paper. Now sometimes you could just record yourself saying it right and then then have that transcribe, but but in in that visualization of that birthday party and living it, you're gonna you're gonna figure it out. And I'd also say, do it a couple times, like, like the first time it's not as in depth, but when you come back to it, it kind of gets richer and deeper. Right. So so that's one. The other one that I like to use is is the Powerball test. And so hopefully, you've heard of the Powerball lottery, which is this crazy, Big Lottery, it's hundreds of millions of dollars. And so the way that visualization works is that let's say you won the Powerball. So you had $500 million, you're the only winner. Now the government's going to take maybe they take half, but you still a couple 100 million. And what happens then is you party, you go, you do all the traveling, you see the world, you buy the mansions, you take care of all your friends, you get a new car for your chief results officer. I mean, you take care of all that stuff. And you do that for a year. Right? But after a year, you've been everywhere you want to be you bought all the stuff you want to buy, you still have $100 million in the bank, and you wake up a year later nothing to do. What would you do? And it's in that moment when I when I do this in like a big workshop. It's funny that more than 90% of the answers when people say It was that just in silence for a minute or two is, they all say, I would help people blank. Now the blank is different for everybody. But it comes back to when you have unlimited resources, there is like this deep, you know, seated thing inside of us to serve other people based on our own experiences. And that's typically where people will end up. It's in the service of other people. And so that's another great exercise. Because then you're, you know, that starts to unlock for you what it is you want to do. Now, maybe you're in a position, you can't do that full time. But you can start to add that into your life, and you're gonna feel really good. You know, when you do that, and my wife and I will often say, Does it pass the Powerball tests? Like, if I did win the Powerball last weekend, I would still be here with Megan doing this podcast, because I feel like this is why I'm supposed to this is what I'm supposed to be doing. Right. And so so that Powerball test is a big one. The last one, if you do have your own business, there's something called the Wall Street Journal, Article visualization where, where this when you actually write out like sometime in the future, three years, five years, the Wall Street Journal, or whatever magazine of choice, they do an article about you, and what's the headline. So you initially just write the headline, then if you want to go deeper, you write a sub headline, you can outline the article, and somebody will actually write the whole article about what are they saying about you? What did you do? How did you do it? And then kind of through reverse visualization, you can kind of move yourself all the way back to where you are today. And what are some of the action steps you need to take to start moving in that direction. So So anyway, that's the big, those are some mind expanding ways to just think about getting clarity, laser focus about what you want most, and?

Megan Swan 12:12

Sorry, we are back.

Blaine Oelkers 12:26

no, I got through, I got through what I was going to talk about in the recording kept going. And then then when you dropped, then you dropped. And then it said recording stopped. And then you came back on and said recording starting again. So I think you I think you've got all that? I mean, say all right. Now did you use the video or just the audio part? is just the audio? Okay, then I went off to that. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so basically, I just kind of went through, I don't know where I lost you. But I went through these few exercises about visualization. And then I talked a little bit about thinking grow rich and and how the book talked about the you should really figure out what you want most Did you hear that? parter?

Megan Swan 13:04

I got the three things. But if you bought thinking Grow Rich up again, I didn't hear that.

Blaine Oelkers 13:10

Okay, so let's talk about after had some success, I bought one of the original 5000 copies. And when I did that, I opened it up. And it was different. It had some instructional pages. But the first page said, What do you want most and and basically, it said, Before you begin reading this book, spend a little time go into airplane mode, you know, it's not just for the airplane, get out away from distractions, maybe get into nature, and really figure out you know, what direction you want to go on? What do you want most and and kind of bring that to the reading of the book. So that's where that's where it all froze, and then I kind of stopped and I was waiting for you to say something and then then it went down.

Megan Swan 13:49

All right, well, we're back. So thank you for all that. And let's keep going. Hopefully, it's like a one. It's still raining. But

14:01

 No worries.

Megan Swan 14:02

Okay, so I really want if you don't mind for a moment to go back. And can you walk us through the process? Like, first of all, I absolutely love that you've been working from home for so long, like long before all of these trends to make it make it a lifestyle choice, right. But walk us through the process of you at that moment going from tech. I mean, did you initially just do your tech find a way to do your existing job from home? Or did you pivot immediately at that point to do something else from home?

Blaine Oelkers 14:38

Yeah, so a good question. So what I did is I did both at the same time now, that almost cost me my marriage, but we made it through. But it was a very crazy time because the job was like 60 hours a week. And I was into kind of technical sales for a computer company. But I had also done some contract programming where basically You're just there's no benefits involved, you're just paid a straight hourly rate to develop software code for computers and programs. And so I got together with a friend, and we started kind of an agency that would find the computer programmers jobs. And at that, at that time, you know, maybe they would make $40 an hour, but we would get paid 47 or $50 an hour, you know, and we would kind of make the split there. Now, we had a front the money to, they don't want to be paid every two weeks, and the contractor might not pay us for a month or two, or sometimes quarterly. But in any case, so that was one business, helping people get those those tech jobs, which we knew we knew how to do that, because we had done that ourselves. And then the other company I started was, was basically selling a health product. And just kind of did that aside, I really liked it. And, you know, just started selling that and was able to build, build that up at the same time. And so both those two businesses kind of got me going and got me free. And then I've just kind of stayed in, in helping people get results kind of ever since. So now I help a lot of organizations do it. And if I'm helping an organization, I just get a small little fee per member to help the members keep getting results. So that works out well. For me, it's not really time for dollars, then I also run super results days, which were kind of concentrate traded days of doneness, kind of get all get all the loose ends done in one day. So so that's kind of fun. And that's been a lot more fun with Zoom, to be honest. And then I just have programs designed to kind of for business owners to help make sure that they have accountability, they're getting results, and that they're winning. Like there's a really, there's an interesting ratio of like winning, to losing. And, and different things have different ratios. When I was teaching my kids tennis, that became the kind of the family sport, I realized that it was like 7030. So if the kids were winning more than 70% of time, like 90% of time, then they weren't learning anything, right. So I had to put them in a in a tournament where maybe they have to play up in age or something like that. But the opposite was was also true, if they were losing more than 30% 40% or 50%, they would lose interest. And they were like, they don't want to do it. They don't want to go to practice, they just want to kind of hide and get away from it. So there's a magic ratio there. For sports, I think it was 730. But for me, I like to win early win off and it's very energizing to me, like like done is the engine of more. So I'm at like a 9010 like I know if I'm winning all the time, then I'm obviously not stretching, I'm not growing, right. But I like to win nine out of 10 times and that 10th time that I don't win it, you know, it's some goal I didn't meet but but it was it was something that stretched me

Megan Swan 17:42

a little bit. I like that analogy. So tell us a little bit more about our What's the timeline on when you became an expert on LinkedIn.

Blaine Oelkers 17:53

So So So LinkedIn, I, you know, my kind of ideal client is a business owner. And so for many years, I focused just in the Phoenix area. And so I figured out some techniques to grow my connections very quickly, in LinkedIn. And so you know, I started like everybody else with no connections. And first thing you want to do you want to get to 500. So then it says, like 500 Plus, like, then people kind of don't know, you know how, if you have under 500, it's very, you know, you can see it very easily. So you want to get to 500, but then yeah, then I wanted to get to 1000, then 5000, then 10,000, then 20,000 25,000, and basically found a way to connect with the right kind of people. And that's been really helpful for me. And whenever I need anything now, you know, I can kind of go to my LinkedIn network and find somebody that that doesn't like even like a local photographer, or a financial planner, or whatever. within my network, typically locally, I have somebody and the rapid connect method that I used was to do searches, but only in my own city, and only who's on my second level. So it's someone that there's only one person between me and them. And typically, all three of us live in the same city. So So I had a high, you know, kind of connect, right? Because if a lot of people say I don't know that person, I don't know that person. I don't know. Then LinkedIn kind of puts you in the LinkedIn jail, which I was putting on the LinkedIn jail for a little while a few times. But you know, it's, you know, you really want to try to do it, you know, as organically as soon as possible. But LinkedIn is great for kind of a professional network. It's one of the best.

Megan Swan 19:37

 Yeah, I like that. That strategy and that LinkedIn jail. It's funny. Let's talk a little bit about formulating an effective bring about statements.

Blaine Oelkers 19:54

Yeah. All right. So let's talk a little bit about this concept of why Teva will use Think about you bring it up. And so we talk about constructing a bring about statement. And I have a TEDx talk, right? Where I do talk about this concept of what you think about you bring about and how do you program yourself, kind of, for success, like once you decide what you want, what do you do, and one of the one of the, one of the things that has worked really well, for me personally, and for a lot of people who have come up to me, you know, sometimes it's a month later, sometimes it's years later, but they said, Hey, blame that one thing that you did, to have me focus on my bring about statement, that's, that really worked. And, and basically, when I talked about this in detail, my TEDx talk, but it's the idea of programming this thing called the reticular activating system, some people call it the RAS. And it's a little part of your brain in the back of your head. And it's kind of the executive secretary, and it decides what goes into your conscious mind. So right now, there's probably like 1000 things, your brain is running your blood and your blood pressure, and the you know, the pH of your blood and your circulation, your breathing, and it's hearing stuff, and it's seeing stuff. I mean, you would go crazy if you had to process all that in your conscious mind. So your subconscious minds run and all that stuff. But how do you determine what that Raz who's kind of has access to everything? How do you influence that to kind of hand you the right stuff, right, and example I give is my son, and everyone kind of can relate to this example, you get a new car. In this case, my son got an accurate TL, maroon color. And then for the next two or so weeks, I see this car everywhere, it pulls up right next to me, it's over there, it's over here. And I'm like, wait a second are all these people kind of conspiring against me, which was not the case. But it was the case that my grasp my reticular activating system, now was looking for those things, right. And so if you can program that Raz, you know, you can make things happen. I talked about, you know, when I bought the original book, Thinking, Grover, it's like one of the original copies, you know, it said, What do you want most, you know, and, and then, you know, so I started programming my rise to two I wanted my business at the time was worth maybe about $300,000, but I want to be worth a million dollars. And what was interesting is I was in a room, and then somebody talked about needing to sell their business. And I knew that I could be a good candidate to merge that business into mine. And that's how I ended up, you know, reaching my goal and maybe like five months instead of five years was again, because that razz was tuned in. So one easy way to program the RAS is to use your smartphone. And so the average person, somewhere between 60 and 160 times a day, you see your unlock screen. So what I had people do in my TED talk was actually take a picture, you know, of this card that I had them fill out with, with something they wanted to bring about in their life. And take a picture of that and make that the unlock screen. So now consciously, you see it. But after a few days, or maybe a week, that kind of your subconscious is seeing it all day long. You know, and it's programmed the RAS so so some people will put something just like they want to be more self confident. And they'll say, you know, Blaine, after two or three weeks, I was feeling more self confident. Other people will put kind of a bigger goal on there. One guy wanted to write a screenplay. And so two years later, he you called me up and says, Blaine, I'm changing my unlock screen. Finally, after two years, I wrote the screenplay, right? So, so big things and little things. But back to original question, you know, this bring about statement is what do you want to bring about, and you want to be as specific as possible, right? So you want, the more clear you can be, the easier it is for your mind and for the rest to feed you the right stuff. Right? So you're going to be tuning into the right station. So a level of detail, you know, by what time, you know, like right now, I started a new part of my business. And by November 15, I'm serving 334 business owners, right? So it's very specific, it's got a date, it's very, somebody would call it a SMART goal Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and with a timetable. Now I say smarter goals. I had an ER in the end, II meaning energizing, like it should be energizing, you know, you know for you and it needs to be recorded. So it can be recorded in your own voice or written down. I like to write mine down I have a daily kind of law. I have a daily day design sheet and every day I hand write there's some magic to handwriting especially if you even if you do it in cursive, it's even better but there's a magic to kind of writing that out every day and really pushing it on to the into your RAS but very specific and again, it should be energizing. You know for you and I tell people you know this what you think about you bring about start small All right, start with some small things. It's like going to the gym, let's let's build up a little bit like you might say, Hey, there's this new movie coming out, or, you know, the Academy Awards said Kota was the was the film that one and you want to see that movie? Let's bring that about. So I want to see this week by when do you want to see it? Who do you want to see it with? How could you see it, can you get it, you know, online, you know, and you'll, you'll start to just formulate a plan kind of naturally from that, you know, and bring that about, and then, you know, do some a little bigger than something a little bigger. But again, I like the the win early win off. And so you kind of gain some momentum, and some energy behind what you're doing. If you're failing a lot, you know, then kind of like we did in the tennis, you gotta nanosize you gotta make it smaller, or chunk it down to some small enough thing that you can win. Like I help people with, let's say this, I'm gonna extra start start a new exercise program. I'm gonna exercise 30 minutes a day. And then a week later, they exercise twice, like, Okay, well, that's too, you're losing too much. Let's drop it to 10 minutes. Now 10 minutes, maybe they can do that. If they can't do that, then I'll say, Look, do five, five push ups before you get in the shower, we're going to count that let's we got to get to winning, and then kind of kind of build up from there.

Megan Swan 26:13

Yeah, I totally agree with you on all those fronts. And I like your ER have smarter. Those are great. So let's talk a little bit about some of your personal daily documented streaks, like what are the things? I'm guessing maybe journaling? Or what you just mentioned is one of them. But was there anything else that for you? It's like a daily habit?

Blaine Oelkers 26:37

Yeah, so habits, like when you're looking to get results habits is a big part a big part. And we're kind of creatures of habit, right. And so I have a thing that I can share right now with everybody. It's called the 21 second habits. So these are habits that you can create basically, any new habit in 21 seconds, not 21 day. So if they told you, it takes 21 days to create a new habit, somebody lied to you. I am sorry, I apologize. You don't need 21 days. And the thing like this company that that I'm powered by Sam powered by Sal fluence all the stuff, you don't need anything else like like everything's within reach, you already know how to do it, you're already a master at it. So let's say you wanted to create a new habit. Let me tell you, I'll tell you two different stories here. One is my wife, Beth, she used to have I'm glad this is past tense have almost daily migraines. And so when she went to the doctor for these migraine headaches, stuff wasn't working. And they said, Okay, you have to keep this headache walk. And the headache log was like pretty detailed, like, what did you eat? What was the weather? What do you think the triggers were, and all this stuff, and she could do it for a day or two, then she'd lose the log, she'd forget to do it. Then she'd have a migraine, I'd ask her where the log was bad move on my part, I learned quickly not to do that. But in the end, what we did is we realized something I realized that my wife something that my wife does that she's a habit master at was brushing her teeth twice a day, she never missed that ever. So we took the headache log, and we put the toothbrush and the toothpaste on top of the headache log with a pen. And so every morning and every night, she's does the dentist recommended two minutes of brushing, and she would fill out the log. And because and here's the first key to the 21 second habits, she linked it to a habit that she was already a master. Right? So she was a master. There's no willpower required for her to brush her teeth. And so she did it for like 90 days in a row went back to the doctors and things improved dramatically. Now she might have a migraine once every couple of months. It's very, very rare now so so cool. So cool. So that's that's part one is linking to something you're already haven't mastered. So I had the my longest documented streak is over four years. It's like 14 188 days, I think maybe today was. And there were two things I wanted to do every day, every morning actually. One is I had a Bible app, I wanted to jump in that. And the other thing was, I really I realized I wanted to take a mind shower every day. Now people take a physical shower, but I wanted to wash my mind and kind of take out the head trash every day. And I use an app called Headspace. There's a lot there's calm headspace Insight Timer. There's a lot of great apps for this. But But I wanted to do that every single day. And I thought to myself, Okay, what do I do every single day? Well, every single morning, what I do is I pick up my smartphone, right after I wake up sometimes the alarm is going off on the smartphone. So there's no willpower required for me to pick up my smartphone. So what he does, I moved all the apps off the first page. And I just put those two apps in there. And I said, Look, when I open my phone up, I can turn the alarm off, but then I'm not allowed to touch anything else in my phone until I do those two things. Now this is the second key to the 21 second habit one is you link it to something you're already habit matched. Right. But too as you surf the urge to want to do something like when I wake up and I look at my phone, like, I want to check my email, text messages from the kids, maybe I want to check, you know, stocks, what's going on in the world did any orders come in like I've already I'm so excited, I just really want to check what's going on, right. And so I serve that urge. And I make sure that I do those two habits, new habits first. And so that's the thing that those apps kind of log out log your streaks. And so now they're kind of fully fully documented. But those two things, link it to something you're already doing. And then serve some type of urge. Like the I was just working with an attorney, and she wanted to do I love next day planning, like I never let a day and without planning the next one. But she was like, not making a plan for the day. And it was kind of chaotic. I said, Look, you've at least have to make a little plan. I said, what's the first thing you do every morning? And you don't even think about it happens? You just have a cup of coffee? I see. Do you ever go morning without a coffee says no, I kind of a bad person without my coffee. And so I said, Good. Whenever you have coffee before you take the first sip of coffee, you have to start the daily plan. The daily list right now you can make it while you drink your coffee if you want. But but she served that urge for coffee to get the thing done. Right. So it's surfing the urge within linking to something that you're already a habit mastered? Does that make sense?

Megan Swan 31:22

Yeah, no, those are all such tactile advice. I love it. I love all of how many of your tips and tricks are really integrated into the reality of how digital we are. In your cell phones. Brilliant. So let's talk quickly about imagination. Before, before we wrap it up, I want to be respectful of your time. But you've given us so much already. I'm curious your thoughts on the importance of how to keep imagination alive? And how and why.

Blaine Oelkers 32:03

Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, I think was Albert Einstein talked about imagination, and the difference between knowledge and imagination. And he said something like, you know, knowledge is all we know, you know, right now, but imagination is all we'll ever know. It's like, totally expansive, you know, and they're, in thinking Grow Rich, he's got a whole chapter on imagination, which he calls the workshop of the mind. And if you keep a healthy imagination going, you're never stuck, right? Because you can come up with another idea or a new idea or a different way to look at right. So I think it's important to kind of foster that, that imagination. And, and I like to do it both in you know, a practical ways, but then also in intuitive ways. Right? So, so figuring out, how do you, you know, how do you keep your imagination, you know, fresh and, you know, expansive, you know, and so a couple different ways that I like to use. One is I do like to use other people, right. So when you you mastermind with someone else, I think that's really helpful, especially on an imagination front. For example, you know, if you and I were working on a project, you know, you might come up with five ideas on your own, and I come up with five. But if we come together, if you hear my five, and I hear your five, we might come up with another 1020 or 30 ideas, right? So one plus one doesn't equal two equals three, four, or five. So I think the power of the collective genius is really powerful. In regards to imagination, also, you know, getting quiet and kind of tap, tapping into whatever you believe spiritually, I think there is, you know, there's a vibrational energy world out there, that has a lot of creativity to it. The arts, I think, are very creative. So for me, you know, when I'm doing kind of deep work, or deep focus, there's certain type of music that I listened to, I find that to be really, really helpful. And then I also, you know, just like you said earlier, I like technology. And so you can go online, and you can go to random number generator, or you can just type that in. And what it does is there's this website, it's all about random, I might need random.org, but they have generators of anything, I can generate numbers, but what I use in some of our brainstorming sessions, it can generate nouns, like you can say, just give me five random nouns, you know, give you like, elephant, son, zoo, you know what those but when you see those nouns, that you know, your neurons are connected to other neurons, that that bring in some real creative ideas. So there's ways to even use technology to kind of jumpstart you can say, give me a random sentence. Give me a random paragraph. But But anyway, there's a lot of power now in technology, but I think keeping yourself creative, surrounding yourself with other people that you kind of can harmoniously beaker Created with not everybody, you know, you know, is helpful in your creativity. But But picking those people and associating with them I think is really helpful. And it opens up the possibilities. You know, that's that's what I like is you're never stuck. When you when you can just come up with a new plan, one plan doesn't work. Come up with a new one use your imagination.

Megan Swan 35:23

Oh, I'm so glad I asked. Well, you've given us so much value, Blaine. Thank you. And I can see why you have so many connections on LinkedIn, you're just such a genuine giving person and tell us how can people connect with you? Where do you want to direct them if they want to reach out? Besides LinkedIn, of course,

Blaine Oelkers 35:43

you can find me on LinkedIn have the easiest one is just to get a copy of my TEDx Talk is Blaine tedx.com. So be lainetdx.com. You can opt in there, get my TEDx talk, then you'll you'll get to know me get some of my articles. And then you know, if there's any way I can serve you, I'm happy to do it.

Megan Swan 36:03

Amazing. I'll link that up in the show notes. And anything else you want to leave with our listeners Any parting last?

Blaine Oelkers 36:12

Well, I mean, two things I said at the top, you know, thank you for putting this together. And I do think Megan, that your show, you're putting it on the internet, you know, it will have kind of a results ripple. And I bet you someone not yet born will get some benefit from one of these shows that might be 20 years from now, it might be 30 years from now, but someone will will get benefit from this. So I appreciate you having me on. And I will end with this the bad news. The bad news is Time flies the good news. You're the pilot. So pilot that next day well and it'll turn into a good week, which will be a good month, which will be a good year, which will be

Megan Swan 36:52

Well, thank you so much for everything and I look forward to connecting with you more in the future. Thanks. Have a good evening. Thanks.