March 30, 2026 – ReflexAI Sam Dorison and Leader in Me Sean Covey

0:04 Intro 1 : Broadcasting from am and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award winning school for startups radio where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk or passion.

0:24 Jim Beach : Jim Beach, hello everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for startups radio. I hope you’re having a great day, because I’ve got a great show for you. As a matter of fact, it is a first. We have a long version and a short version of the show today. The long version is on the website, and you can find it there. This is the short version. Both interviews were so good that I let them go on, and we kept going on, and so we had to cut them down to get them to fit into the radio 54 minute format. But there’s a hour and two minute or hour and three minute version on the website, and you’re going to want to hear from both of these guests in the long version, Sam dorison is the first guest. He is with Reflex AI. It is amazing. Ai, product that you’ve got to start using to test. I’m not gonna tell you about it yet. He also plays the quick 10, but that’s only in the bonus on the long version. All right, so you got to go. And then after that, we have Sean Covey of the seven habits, and his new book is Leader in Me, it’s an amazing system of schools that are teaching leadership skills as young as I think, set first graders. I mean, it’s amazingly young. And I think they have again. I’m not going to tell you how many, amazing number of schools in the their program Sean has been with us. I don’t know. I think three times now, four times maybe. And so soon he will get our famous green jacket that all of our five time guests get. So we’ll look forward to that presentation coming up soon. I hope anyway, have a great day. Enjoy the show. It’s a good one, and remember the long one is on the website. You

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2:56 Jim Beach : We are back in again. Thank you so very much for being with us today. Very excited to introduce another great entrepreneur. Please welcome Sam dorison to the show. He started off at McKenzie and then did four years at the Trevor Project, which is a great organization dedicated to suicide prevention and crisis interventions in the LGBTQ community. After that, he started his own business called reflex AI, and they have a really amazing premise, the idea that you can’t, I’m not. You’re gonna have to tell me, if this right, Sam, that you can do a conversation with the simulation and have a practice session and get Q and A and all of that. Did I get it right?

3:44 Sam Dorison : Sam, that seems right, right. Jim, we describe ourselves as the flight simulator for critical conversations within healthcare, but also across sales, customer success in any industry where conversations are a critical part of the mission and the value prop.

4:00 Jim Beach : All right, welcome to the show. Great. I love this idea. I’ve often said that you should do this. If you have to have a hard conversation, play it out, and now you have the technology to do it. Tell us about the tech.

4:12 Sam Dorison : Yeah, the tech on the back end is obviously very complicated, anchored in several different Gen AI models. My co founder, John Keller, and I have been doing Jedi since 2018 as far back as GPT, two models. So we’ve been doing this for a while. And I think the reality is realistic simulations is not just a back and forth where you answer questions, but it’s about the conversational dynamics of if you empathize Well, the simulation opens up if you ask questions in a judgmental way or in an assumption driven way, it’s less likely to give you the candid information you need to move the conversation forward, so it really needs to be anchored in what makes human conversation successful, and how do you translate that to the AI world fascinating.

4:54 Jim Beach : I had an AI attorney on the other day, and he pointed out that. Most of the engines are designed to make you feel good. If you ask it, is this a good paragraph? They go, Yeah, you know, they’re not going to give you harsh criticism, because then you won’t go back to that platform. Is that true? Do you find that to be true? And then how does that fit into what you’re doing at reflex? I think

5:19 Sam Dorison : It’s, I think it’s, I think it’s a great question. Jim, so in general, the chat bots out there, whether that’s open AI Gemini and from anthropic, they are solving for sustained engagement, and that means trending toward validation. We do not take that approach as we tailor models and have them in simulations, where if you do something wrong, if you ask the same question twice, the simulation will say, why’d you ask me that again, just like a real person would. And at the end of the conversation, you get feedback on how you did in that simulation. And it’s very candid. The feedback is direct. It’s really focused on, yes, here’s what you did well, here’s why that matters, here’s how you can continue to do that, but also, here’s something that you didn’t do well, here’s why it matters that you do it better, and here’s how you can do it better in the future. So it’s definitely not an off the shelf AI being kind of much more neutral and actionable and pragmatic, but for us, it’s really core to what we do.

6:17 Jim Beach : And what is the stereotypical conversation that you designed it for, that you thought it would be the number one conversation had.

6:29 Sam Dorison : It’s so interesting. So we started with critical conversations in healthcare. That was crisis line conversations, conversations with

6:39 Jim Beach : Sorry, you’re dying, you’re sick, you have cancer, exactly,

6:43 Sam Dorison : Exactly right? You know you’re having a mental health challenge in that moment and you’re calling a crisis line, or you just got a challenging diagnosis, and you’re calling a hospital to find the right specialist to see what we’ve seen that’s been so interesting, though, is it’s now being used across sectors, where we work with Cortland real estate to help train their real estate call centers. We work with organizations in the pharmaceutical space. We work with organizations in the education space. So what we found is, even though we started with the highest stakes conversations in health care, many other industries are telling us our conversations are high stakes too. We want to use your tools for our industries too. And our answer to that, of course, is, as a startup, is absolutely we are here for you as well.

7:26 Jim Beach : I must admit, I have been leaving a hospital and going through the checkout where, you know the parking pay area crying, and have the lady working there, going, what’s the matter? Can I help you? Are you okay? You know. So I can really relate to it, because I’ve got caught crying leaving the hospital for in my life. So I relate. That makes total sense. Yes. Okay, fantastic. I love this idea, and I do think it would be great for training anything, right, the bankers and the real estate agents, right? What about just the conversation I need to have with my wife or husband?

8:12 Sam Dorison : 100% I mean, we use it internally in preparation for performance reviews. We use it in the interview. We use it to train interviewers to make sure that they’re interviewing candidates as effectively and on brand as possible. So wherever you’re thinking, wow, this conversation went better. It would have a meaningful impact on my happiness, my top line, my bottom line, my customer experience, my personal experience. We see all of those areas as in play for us, and it’s actually why we built the tool to be much more, much more configurable. A lot of power to the front end user is because we want them to be able to use the tool in their hands and for their particular context.

8:51 Jim Beach : I love it. I love it. All right, go back in time. How did you get the idea? How’d you get started? Give us some entrepreneurial history lessons.

9:01 Sam Dorison : Oh, God. I mean, we got started because we felt the pain that my co founder, John and I, we were overseeing a crisis line operation where we were trying to train not just 10s, but dozens and hundreds of people, and we were doing 1000s of manual role plays over and over again across our training team, and then we had to score them all and make sure our two dozen to three dozen trainers were evaluating things consistently, and our view was, there has to be a better way to do this. And this was in 2018 and we looked around and we didn’t find a better way. We found things like scheduling platforms to help us schedule our role plays more efficiently, or data transformation layers so that we could get the manual evaluations into Salesforce more effectively. And that’s not going to cut it. So we started building GPT two. We had a really exciting partnership with Google that’s been expanded since then, as we talk about Gemini tools, and we built what became the crisis conversation simulator in house at Trevor. And in 2021 landed on the time 100 best inventions of the year as the first gen AI. Use case on the time 100 so we started because we just felt the pain ourselves, and thought, God, there has to be a better way to do this. And that led us to the, ultimately, the foundation models that we use, and then the kind of product vision on top of it.

10:14 Jim Beach : Did you say Crisis Intervention Center? Yes, okay. Great line right there. I love that, all right. And then, how did you transfer out of GPT two and become totally standalone?

10:30 Sam Dorison : Yeah, absolutely so. When we launched the reflex platform in late 2022 early 2023 our core belief was you should not need an enormous engineering team to get the benefit of simulations. You should not need an enormous engineering team to configure this all for you. So we built the reflex AI platform on top of a wide range of models at the time, making sure that the platform was HIPAA compliant, stock two compliant, ISO compliant, GDPR compliant, itrust compliant, the list goes on and on, and then that the organizations, they had good admin permissions, they could set up the platforms, they could configure it. All of that, the models really became, really interestingly, became just one piece of the solution. And I think you’ve seen this more recently now with other AI tools across industries, where there’s a recognition that the model is important, but it’s really one piece everything else that’s been important in software and workflows, user experience, intuitive analytics, all of that is, if anything, more important than it’s ever been before.

11:31 Jim Beach : Every once in a while you see an article this AI platform told me to kill myself, you know, or I see a lot of articles like that, how do you put the guard rails in and test and make sure that the platform is not saying something like, yeah, you’re right. You should go kill yourself.

11:52 Sam Dorison : It’s such an important question, Jim, and for us, it’s about being really thoughtful about the use cases as well as the technical guardrails. So you’ll notice a lot of what we talked about was actually around simulation based training. And we also do AI quality assurance that will assess 100% of human interactions. We do not do AI chat bots talking to individuals in crisis directly. Because my view on this is, if I had a close friend or family member who was struggling with a mental health challenge. I would want them talking to a very, very well trained human. I would not want them talking to the current instantiation of llms and chatbots, no matter what the guardrails are around it. So we really focus on, how do you make sure that humans in these roles do their role, did their jobs as effectively and efficiently as possible. But those stories are real, and it’s an enormous challenge for consumer facing products.

12:50 Jim Beach : Okay, how do you if I’m on the bot and I say, you know, I’m blah, blah, blah, thinking about suicide, or I’m so depressed, or whatever, does it stop the conversation and say you need to go call what is it? 985, or 988988,

13:06 Unknown Speaker : Yeah. 988, yeah. It will, it will

13:09 Sam Dorison : Break character. And we, we do a lot of work making sure that the characters are realistic, that the simulations are presenting, but they will break character in those moments. They’ll also break character if you’re doing something inappropriate or

13:20 Jim Beach : Offensive as well. What about I’m real estate agent having an important conversation? Does it throw curve balls at you like they would do in real life? You know, all of a sudden the person gets mad. You know, a lot of those things happen in reality. Does it do things like that?

13:39 Sam Dorison : It does. And there’s a lot of different types of curve balls, and there’s two maybe that I think are particularly interesting. One is the predictable curve ball. And you can think about this of, if you quote a price above a certain number, the simulation is going to get really angry, because that price range, why did you bring this up to them? Right? So those are kind of if you do x, here’s the curve ball that’s coming. There’s the second set, though, which is, no matter what someone does in a conversation, throw them a curve ball. And it could be any of these five different types of curve balls that’s really important in training, because there is no perfect conversation. You can’t avoid landmines at all times. So sometimes what you really want is a simulation that is destined to escalate no matter how well you do, and that’s a really important component of training across a lot of industries. So for us, we’ve thought about different ways that curve balls can show up, right? It can be the unexpected situation that you stepped on, you stepped on the landmine and it blew up in your face, right? It could also though be, no matter what you do, something’s going to blow up no matter how perfect you are in that scenario, those are different types of curve balls, but we, in our experience, you need all of them to really train someone

14:47 Jim Beach : Well, all right, and back to the bread and butter. How does it tell me that I have cancer and that I’m going to die? I have pancreatic cancers? Got a six month survival?

14:59 Sam Dorison : You. Yeah, if you’re if you’re a doctor or a nurse going through training, you have to practice having those conversations, right?

15:07 Jim Beach : And so I’m sorry to interrupt, but I understand that it won’t let me as a patient get on. All it does is not all, I don’t mean to say it like that. The feature is that it helps doctors get better at having that conversation. Does it have a conversation with a patient? So I just got told I have cancer. Exactly.

15:29 Sam Dorison : We don’t do the user facing patient talks to simulation directly. All right,

15:35 Jim Beach : That makes a lot of sense. So go back to answering the doctor question, what do you do? How do you help the doctor and the nurse get better at that?

15:42 Sam Dorison : Yeah, I’ll give you, I’ll give you a real example of this. So we’ve seen a lot recently around emerging topics in healthcare. This is nutrition and GLP ones. We see this in perimenopause and menopause treatment. We see this in mental health challenges, and a lot of clinicians were trained before. These were the primary topics that are emerging in some of these conversations. And you need to, A, be able to bring up these topics, non judgmentally and empathetically. B, you need to respond to what’s being said by the patient. So patients might be bringing up these types of treatments or or concerns for a wide variety of reasons, and the simulation needs to have different emotional and factual reasons for bringing it up that you actually have to understand, and then you have to respond to it and think about and describe an action plan that you develop with the patient. And all of those different steps, you can do quite well in a conversation, or you can do quite poorly in a conversation. And for us, the term that we use internally is conversation architecture, and it is that within a conversation there are different natural stages of these types of conversations. It’s different in a healthcare conversation than it is a real estate transaction, but these conversations do have a best practice flow to them, and individuals training in this space or upskilling themselves and their teams need to be able to perform within that conversation.

17:00 Jim Beach : Flow. Very interesting. I let you know a little bit about myself. The audience has probably heard this. I have lots of health issues. I’ve been to the hospital a lot. I’ve been told you have a 10% chance of living through the night. I’ve been told a lot of bad stuff. You look the worst one I ever heard was Sam, and I’d love to hear it if you have this in there. I went in for surgery on Friday. They got me totally prepped. You know, I was ready to take the Go To Sleep pill, and the anesthesiologist came in and said, You are too sick to operate on. We’re not doing it. Go home. I was like, What? What the f I’m too sick to operate. Those are words I’ve never heard before. I can’t No one’s ever said that in life before. If you’re sick, you operate on someone, right? You know what I was blown by, that

17:52 Sam Dorison : It’s and it’s interesting,

17:55 Sam Dorison : Because you’re not objecting to the message of it would be unsafe to do surgery today. You do want your doctor to communicate that message to you, and there are far better ways to communicate it than it sounds like the way that it was communicated to you,

18:09 Jim Beach : And he was out the door in under 30 seconds, right?

18:12 Sam Dorison : I mean, we see this. I mean, we’ve seen this where someone’s calling a hospital to cancel the appointment because their spouse passed away, right? And the first thing out of the care navigator, the call Center’s mouth is okay, what was their name and when was the appointment? Not even I’m really sorry to hear that, right? And those are the moments that matter, both because we care about them as humans, but also because healthcare is an industry based on brand, right? There’s a reason you see a lot of consolidation in this industry. There’s a reason you see a lot of brands extending their presence and those moments of human experience, ultimately, are brand moments, too, if you want to, if you really want to talk about in a consumer lens. So we should care about these moments. We should care about how we treat other people, but we should also care about those moments, because whether you know it or not, they’re gonna, they’re gonna impact the bottom line,

19:01 Jim Beach : Will it work? As far as I need to tell my kid off in a nice way because he got caught cheating, or I’m dumping you, we do parent, huh?

19:11 Sam Dorison : We do parent and fear support trainings, for sure, we do a lot of that work, excellent.

19:15 Jim Beach : And then I’m dumping you because you’re mean to me. Or does it do breakups?

19:22 Sam Dorison : You know, we’ve never done a breakup case study, but it could do it, but we’ve, because we do a lot of enterprise work, we’ve never, we’ve never had that particular situation pop up, as far as I know, just like the 1000s of situations our partners are using these tools for and 1000s of simulations. But see no reason why not? All right,

19:43 Jim Beach : Well, I’ll get on tonight, then figure out that conversation. Absolutely amazing. Sam, I love it, I love it, I love it. And sounds like you’ve executed the daylights out of it. So how do you make money? You have a partner. How do you make money?

19:58 Sam Dorison : You. Mean we make money fundamentally, because our simulation and QA platform is valuable to customers. And I know that sounds very generic, but what I mean by that is this, day after you sign with reflex, you can configure the entire simulation training platform for your teams, and the day after that, you don’t have to do all these manual role plays anymore, right? That you’re you’re avoiding manual time within 24 hours of when you start working with us. And on the quality assurance front, you’re also you’re not just avoiding manual time, but you’re also seeing better performance. So whether your metric is conversion rates shorter, average handle time higher, CSAT scores, you’re seeing those move within the first 30 days as well. So we make money as a SaaS subscription based model lots of different ways, whether that’s seeds, utilization, right outcomes, but fundamentally, we say to our customers, your lives will be easier and better using our tools than before you use them. And we’re not the cheapest thing out there, right? We’re not $1.99 a user. But you will say things like, and we actually heard this on a panel. We had a partner say you’d have to pry these tools out of my cold, dead hands, and fundamentally, that’s how we make money.

21:07 Jim Beach : I think you should put that into the simulation. What happens if someone threatens you with my cold, dead hands? It depends how

21:15 Sam Dorison : You set up simulation. Do you want it to be understanding, or do you want it to be repulsed by that you’ll you can configure it either way.

21:23 Jim Beach : All right, so Caldwell Banker comes and they get a license for their entire company. I get that can singletons go on there just to talk about my personal problem. Is there a model price point for that?

21:36 Sam Dorison : Not currently. It’s something we think about for the future. Right now, we’re really focused on enterprise. And one of the pieces of the pieces of advice you always get as a founder is make sure you know who is your ICP. So for us, we’re focused on enterprise at the moment.

21:50 Jim Beach : All right, I gotta think there would be a model for single users as well.

21:56 Sam Dorison : I think they’re definitely there, definitely is there definitely would be. Let’s, let’s talk again in six months and see where we’re at. We’re moving pretty quickly. Well, I was

22:05 Jim Beach : Going to be the vice president of that division, is what I told. Was told, Oh, you’re submitting, oh, you’re

22:11 Sam Dorison : I don’t know who told you that, but if you’re submitting the application, well maybe we talk about that off the air.

22:17 Jim Beach : Let’s quit being facetious for a second. You are actively hiring and looking for people right now, I heard

22:24 Sam Dorison : We are we are always hiring. I’ve had the we’re hiring note and my LinkedIn since seven days after we started reflex, probably, and I’ve never taken it down. How big a

22:34 Jim Beach : Company is it now? What the number of employees, or however you measure yourself? Can you

22:40 Jim Beach : Share that? Yeah, for sure,

22:43 Sam Dorison : We’re our team’s a little over 50 people spread across four time zones, across all of the Americans.

22:50 Jim Beach : Did you raise VC money? Or have you? How did you how did the financial piece work out? We?

22:55 Sam Dorison : Did we? So we raised a seed round very soon after starting the company. Then raised a follow on round as well. I do fundamentally believe that companies should be self sustaining, so we do not. We have not done the enormous AI rounds that I think we see in the news. That’s very intentional, but we raised two rounds, about 10 million total in capital, and we are just jamming.

23:17 Jim Beach : All right. Are you cash flow positive yet we are, Wow, congratulations. You are doing everything right.

23:24 Unknown Speaker : Sam, yeah, we,

23:27 Sam Dorison : I will say we make mistakes every single day, and I certainly am hard a lot of those, but we try to make novel mistakes, and we try to make those novel mistakes, not big mistakes.

23:37 Jim Beach : That’s a great attitude. I like that. What kind of quality control checks Do you have? Do you look at every 10th conversation by hand?

23:50 Sam Dorison : So we look at a lot by hand, but I think unique,

23:53 Sam Dorison : One of our unique approaches to this is AI that’s based on principles, not just based on fact based. So what I mean by that is one way that you can assess your AI models is to say, hey, here’s examples of what’s gone wrong. Train on those and then identify those mistakes in other AI contexts, right? Or you can take a principles approach and say, hey, here are the types of mistakes that an AI can make. It can be too flat, it can be too aggressive, it can respond in ways that are inconsistent across the conversation. And here’s examples of those now find things, find examples that have gone wrong in alignment with those principles. So across what we do, we do a ton of QA. We experiment with this, both on certainly human QA, but also LLM as a judge, also model model versus model combat, for lack of a better term where you actually assess how did the models perform if you put multiple models in the same situation, do they come up with divergent suggestions or next steps? And any of those can flag components for our team. I will also say our top. Customers are one of the best QA resources we have. They are very discerning. So everywhere within the platform, there’s thumbs up, thumbs down, and flags where, if you’re not happy with the way that it gave feedback to this individual person on your team, you tell us, we’ll also tell you what we’re not sure, but our customers should have the ability to give us that positive and negative feedback on how they like the

25:20 Jim Beach : Tool and what about marketing? Since you’re going after big corporations and that model is it almost like account managers or something like that, I would say ads aren’t necessarily going to work if you’re going after big, big companies. What’s your marketing platform?

25:38 Sam Dorison : Yeah, we have a there’s no substitute for a kick ass sales team and a kick ass marketing team, so I think we check the box on both of those. I would also say I really define us as anti pushy, because what we found is, if now is not the right time for you to buy AI tools, whether because your organization’s going through other challenges, you have other priorities, there’s really nothing to be gained from us trying to push you to buy or start a pilot tomorrow. So a big thing for our team is we need to make customers aware that, hey, these tools exist. You don’t have to live the way that you used to live. And here’s the benefits that others in your space have seen. And it’s really some of the reasons we have amazing inbound and we have fantastic conversations based on that inbound traffic. It’s because we’re very clear about who we’re talking to when we’re online. We of course, think about geo SEO, right? Our ad campaigns, right? There are things that you just should not ignore because you’re doing your prospective customers and yourself a disservice. But there’s really different ways to do marketing, and for us, it’s about being clear about what the problems are that we solve and who we solve them for, and if that applies to you, you’re going to reach out. Is the reality if we

26:48 Jim Beach : Do it? Well, yes, Sam, a plus is all around. Love the idea, love the execution. Love the marketing, love the finance. Well done. I can’t think of anything that you’ve done poorly. It’s just Excellent, great job.

27:06 Sam Dorison : Oh, I appreciate the validation.

27:09 Sam Dorison : And we, you know, we get

27:10 Sam Dorison : Back to work. I know, Jim, you sometimes done the fast follow 10 questions right at the end. I know we’re really close on time. Happy to hit a few of those if you want. Otherwise, we can call it a day, and just really appreciated the discussion and thanks for the questions.

27:25 Jim Beach : Sam, a plus is all around great, great job. And we’d love to talk to you again in the year and get an update. Thank you so much.

27:30 Sam Dorison : Awesome. Jim, great to talk to you. Thanks again, and

27:33 Jim Beach : We will be right back. You. You.

27:52 Intro 2 : Well, that’s a, that’s a, that’s a wonderful question, actually, Jim, oh my gosh, I love the opportunity to do this. Thank you, Jim, wow, that’s, that’s, that’s a great one. You know, that is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question. And I don’t have a great answer, great question.

28:07 Intro 2 : Oh, that is such a loaded question, and that’s actually a really good question. School for startups radio, we are back and again.

28:15 Jim Beach : Thank you so very much for being with us. I am very honored and excited to welcome a superstar back to the show. Please welcome Sean Covey back to the show. He’s been with us three times now, and each time we’ve had a different conversation. Today, we’re going to talk about a new book called The Leader in Me. Sean is a first number one Wall Street Journal author New York Times Best Selling sold over 10 million books, and we’re excited to welcome him back, one of the greatest leaders in education and thought leadership. Sean, how are you doing?

28:49 Sean Covey : Doing great, Jim, it’s good to be back on your show. Thanks so much for having me. So I don’t28:54 Jim Beach : Know if you know this, Sean, but I started my career in summer camps when I was 24 I started a summer camp company. We Wow, 89 locations. We started at MIT and Stanford and went to 89 locations across the globe teaching computers to kids. Obviously, we were at Stanford and MIT and I sold that business decades ago now, but I love anything that gives kids more skills than what the school system is doing. I love the fact that you’re in the school system. 8000 schools around the world, 70 countries. Tell us what the Leader in Me program teaches our 1415, 1617, year olds

29:37 Sean Covey : Sure, yeah. Well, the Leader in Me teaches is really K through 12 program. So it starts with five year olds all the way up to seniors in high school, and it basically teaches the vital leadership skills kids need for college career and life readiness, things you know, just basic skills, like showing up on time, valuing differences as. Setting goals, managing your time, getting along with other people. You know, adapting, being flexible and good communication skills. These are the skills that are increasingly vital in a knowledge worker society and our schools. You know, they can do a great job teaching reading, writing and math, which is very important. But in addition, unless you have these durable life skills, it’s, you know, you’re really going to be lacking. So that’s what it does. And it’s in we have this program in 8000 schools. It started with a school in Raleigh, North Carolina that was about to be shut down because they were doing so poorly public school, and the principal ran into my father teaching a seven habits course, Stephen R Covey, and she said, during a break, oh my gosh. Dr, Covey, these principles are perfect for my school. Can we do this inside of our school? And he said, Yeah, why not give it a try. Let me know how it goes. And so she developed kind of the first version of Leader in Me, which was teaching the seven habits, teaching other leadership skills, kind of a skills, leadership development framework. They became the number one magnet school in the country, and that’s where it started. That was ground zero, and now it’s an 8000 schools in 50 countries, and just beginning,

31:17 Jim Beach : Amazing, amazing. How does a school that’s not doing a great job with the math, English and other parts of the curriculum add even more into the curriculum and still get horrible math scores? I’m so down on the public school system right now, especially coming out of covid, huge decreases in the number of kids going into public school system. That’s a separate problem. How does add something new and not suffer?

31:46 Sean Covey : Well, it’s not really something new. They just there’s going to be doing what they’re already doing in a better way, okay? And unless you can really get the kids motivated and intrinsically from their own efforts and their own beliefs and such, nothing’s going to work. It’s really hard to move test scores, and you’re not going to do it just by getting a better curriculum. You’ve got to do it by combination of things. It starts with the adults in the school modeling really good behavior. This is why we’ll go into a school and we’ll say, if you want your kids to behave better, so they’ll have more time for learning. It starts with you, and we teach the adults The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and teach them how to get along better with each other and and through modeling, they can then teach the kids. So it starts with the adults in the school, and then you got to teach kids things like goal setting is so important. We do this with every school we work with. Is we go in and teach the school how to teach kids how to set goals. They every kid has an academic goal and a personal goal. Every semester, we teach them how to track them, how to develop scoreboards, how to have accountability. And you watch, you get a kid, you know, a third grader, is maybe struggling with school, and they get their own goal, and they have a little scoreboard they’re tracking, and they’re meeting with their accountability every Friday at at one o’clock to talk about how they’re doing on their scoreboard. It’s unbelievable what can happen. So we see great public schools. You know, they’re, I think public schools get a bad rap. There are some bad ones Absolutely, and as a whole, since covid, they’ve really taken a hit. However, there are also 1000s of really tremendous schools that have good systems, and we find that leader me is just an enhancer, right? It just, it makes a bad school good, and it makes a good school better, because it’s just a package of systems that that really helped kids understand their worth and potential. So anyway, those are just some thoughts.

33:55 Jim Beach : I love that the idea that you could take a bad school and save it by inserting things like accountability, I love that. I was pretty sure that we outlawed accountability a couple of years ago. Did I not hear that?

34:13 Sean Covey : Yeah, yeah, no, you know, I think race to the top and some other programs there’s, there’s been some backlash. A lot of states now have grade systems, right? Well, the school gets a letter grade, like Texas and Florida do it, and that can be a strong motivator. You know, if you get a D grade and you’re a principal, you don’t want to have a D grade, right? And so I think, yeah, I think accountability is kind of a hit or hit or miss, depending upon the state or the district, and it’s something we need more of, for sure.

34:43 Jim Beach : Well, I’d like to start with our politicians. Do you have a program for them?

34:50 Sean Covey : Yeah, they could really use habit five. And I’ll seek first to understand, then to be understood. Because in politics, I don’t think you, you don’t see a lot of listen. Going on. Or typically, people or accountability, absolutely go

35:05 Jim Beach : Through the seven very quickly. Just for our neophytes, people like, yeah, need a refresher?

35:11 Sean Covey : Yeah, sure, yeah. Well, the seven habits, these are, you know, research based. This is my father, Stephen R Covey’s work over his whole life. He basically, after studying 200 years of people, cultures, literature, and, you know, teams and organizations, he derived these habits. And the habits are based on principles. And these are the habits that effective people and teams organizations have that are consistent. And so real quickly, the seven habits are 112, and three are called, these are private victory habits. So in a sense, it starts with you, and the premise is you can be effective with other people without first getting yourself in order. At least to some degree, you’ll have to be perfect. Of course, the habit one is called Be proactive. It means you’re in charge. You take initiative, and you’re not a victim. Habit two is beginning with the end. In mind, you have a clear blueprint of where you want to go with your life, with a relationship, with your job and so forth. You’re blueprinting all the time. Habit three is called put first things first, and it’s about managing your time, making sure that the most important things get the time and attention they deserve, and that that forms. If you can take charge of your life, know where you’re going, manage your time, you can win a private victory. You’re in charge of yourself. It’s you know, self victory, and that gives you the foundation to work well with other people, which is habits, four, five and six, and we call that the public victory. So succeeding with other people and and four is think win, win, excuse me. And it’s the idea that it’s a paradigm of life that says I can win and you can win, as opposed to win, lose, which is, I’m going to step on you, or lose, win, which is, have your way with me, everyone else does. Those are ineffective, and Win, win is the best paradigm towards approaching life. And then habit six is called synergize value differences. One plus one can equal three or five or 10, if you can learn to get along and run with people’s strengths and compensate for their weaknesses. And then habit seven is called sharpen the saw, and it surrounds all the habits. It’s about the idea that we have a body, heart, mind and spirit. There are four sides to us, and all four need constant nourishment and renewal. And if you burn yourself out. You’re no good to anybody. And so that’s the one that keeps everything alive, sharpen the saw. So those are the seven habits. In a

37:46 Jim Beach : Nutshell, I thought I missed number five. Four was win, win. What was

37:50 Sean Covey : Fine, yeah. Okay, yeah. So sorry, yeah. I skipped number five. Probably the most important one of all. It’s called seek, first to understand, then to be understood. So you think, win, win, and then you say, if I want to be effective with other people, I need to first understand them before I give my opinion. That’s the key to influence. To first be influenced before you know you share your point of view. So it’s the foundation for good communication.

38:18 Jim Beach : So when you interject this into a challenge school. Do the kids end up teaching the parents these skills? Or I’m concerned about parental involvement and the parents not being motivated enough and accountable?

38:37 Sean Covey : Yes, well, you would be amazed at how well these habits go down with children? I wrote years ago The Seven Habits of Highly Effective teens, so a teenage version of My Father’s Book, and I thought, yeah, I hope. I hope teenagers get this, and they caught on so fast, and they were actually better at these habits than adults, because they didn’t have a lot to unlearn, like adults do, but they got it. They understood them. And then we’ve gone down even lower. And we were teaching these habits now to kindergartners, and we’re teaching them actually to say, you know, be proactive and think when, when. But they can, they can learn these, these habits at a very young age. So inside of schools, we’ll go and we’ll teach the adults. Will say, We want you to model these habits, teach it to the kids. And yes, the kids, they resonate with these and they go home and they bring it to their parents, and they use it against their parents. They’ll say things like, Hey, Dad, you’re not being so proactive right now, are you? But we get so many letters from from parents saying, What have you done to my child? They came home and said, I got to put first things first, Mom, I’m gonna do my homework before I play. Or, hey, you know, to their brother, that’s not win, win. Let’s find, let’s find something that works for both of us. So yeah, that’s part of the program. Is the. Kids are only in school so long, right? So much of the learning still takes place at home, and so that’s what we do, is we will train schools on how to do this, and this, the schools will also train parents, and the kids will train the parents. That reinforces itself, and it works really well, and we’ve seen tremendous gains in school performance, academics and culture and behavior and graduation rates. We have a ton of research and data behind this, and we can it doesn’t matter what kind of school it is. You can take the most difficult challenge school they they practice these key principles, and get a system in place and start to believe in their kids. And any school can, can raise the bar.

40:40 Jim Beach : One of the things I learned at computer camp was the first day when the first hour when I announced all the rules, that’s a $5,000 computer you’re sitting next to. That’s why you can’t put a soda next to it, and if you pour a soda on it, you don’t get to play games. The next hour that the parents were ecstatic that we were generally stricter than them, and there was a huge synergy in all of it, because parents liked us being stricter. Parents liked us having really firm rules, and the kids were very, very good. We never had any discipline problems, except for that building. We broke down that was one of the staff. The kids were so good in our program, and the adults were shocked, I think. And yeah, it was just a huge part of it. I think discipline is important, and it can spread.

41:33 Sean Covey : Yeah, so you’re so true. And I think giving a $5,000 computer to a kid communicates to that kid as well that hey, we trust you obey the rules, and look what we’re trusting you with. And I think we underestimate our kids. I did when we brought this to schools. We started with elementary schools, and the first school that we saw that I told you about AB combs, Elementary in rolling North Carolina, they let the kids run the school, and it was phenomenal. You’d come in and 10 kids would greet you, instead of adults greeting you to give you a school tour. And then you go to an assembly, and the kids are doing all the AV, and the kids are doing all the speaking, and they’re doing all the announcements, the morning announcements, and they’re monitoring the playgrounds. And one of the features of the leader me school is we say, you know, you got 500 kids in school. I want 500 leadership responsibilities for the kids. Everyone gets one and find things that they’re good at and let them do it. So it’s amazing how kids will rise to the occasion to give them, again, some good guidelines. And say, You’re a leader, and you’re going to be in charge of morning announcements. You five. So want you to hear the guidelines we’re going to we’re here to help you, but you run them every morning. That’s kind of thing we do in these schools across the world, and it will just blow you away.

42:55 Jim Beach : When we were doing camps, we the first year, we only had 24 kids the first week. And so was thinking, you know, if I do an award ceremony, a final ceremony, and get out three awards, this entire ceremony is going to be eight minutes long, and the parents are not going to appreciate driving and getting out of work come see an eight minute long ceremony. So I said we owed every kid got a camp shirt. And who said, Okay, let’s just get the camp shirt in the ceremony at the end. And that makes it 24 minutes long now, and every kid gets an award. And so one of our kids the first week was the child of a Stanford professor who wrote a white paper on every kid gets an award, which, of course, has become bad in our society, it’s not all the time. Now, do you think every kid deserves an award?

43:47 Sean Covey : I think that giving kids a participation certificate is not a great thing, and I think that allowing kids to find their own gifts and talents and do things at a school they run is fabulous, you know. So I’m just making a distinction between those two. So, you know, the again, in the schools that we visit and we see what kids are doing is phenomenal to see every kid has gifts. And, you know, I’ve been in education now for a long time and seen 1000s of schools, and my conclusion is, every kid has genius, and every kid has gifts and talents. They’re just different. And sometimes we celebrate the academic child and we celebrate the athlete, but we don’t celebrate, you know, the child that is really good at making connections or really funny or a peacemaker. And there’s so many ways that kids can excel. And so I’m all for finding ways to help kids excel at what they’re good at, and then rewarding that, not just for showing up.

44:53 Jim Beach : You know, some of the kids that we had trouble with, you know, sometimes we would give the Laurel and Hardy award to the two kids that were just. As friendly with everybody, or two best friends. You know, you would come up with something the kid who was the best at going to bed at night, you’re going,

45:08 Sean Covey : Yeah, sure, that’s great.

45:11 Jim Beach : We couldn’t figure out we would go give them the Bill Gates award. And he just called, and He’s sorry he can’t be here today, but the Bill Gates award this year goes to Sean. We didn’t get that participation award kind of, in effect, it was, but we put a fancy name on every single one

45:27 Sean Covey : Of, yeah, sure, no, I think that’s great. I mean, right? Every kid needs to be affirmed. Kids get beat up enough in life by social media and by just being compared, that we need, we need more cheerleaders. We need more discipline, absolutely and accountability. I agree. And you know, when I when I go out and talk with principals and teachers, number one issue is like mental health, not only with the kids, but with the adults in the school. A lot of people are just struggling to keep up, to keep pace. Covid kind of exacerbated. Everything hasn’t fully recovered, it feels like but kids need more cheerleaders as well. You know, what

46:11 Jim Beach : Are your thoughts on social media by ages? When do you think a kid should be allowed on social media? When should they be allowed to post and have their own account? What are your thoughts on the ages? Yeah, well,

46:22 Sean Covey : I have a bunch of kids, and I I would do it differently, because I kind of grew up with it. Just, it just hit us right as parents right now, of teenagers, we didn’t have time to think about it. If I were to do it again, I would, I would not give them a smartphone until they’re 16. Seriously, there are lots of you can do a flip phone. You can do these gap phones. They look just like iPhones, that they don’t have the internet, they have music, and they have, you know, text and everything and photos. But I’d give them a phone like that, a dumb phone, until they’re 16, and then I would, I think it’s very important to monitor social media. Tons of data that says more social time you spend on social media, the more depressed you’ll be. The more accounts you have, the more depressed you’ll be. So I’d say we’re going to limit your social media. I do this with my teenage son. You get one hour a day for all social and also limiting the number of sites they have. If they have four accounts, make it three, or they have three, make it two or just one. So absolutely, you need to monitor it. You need to have your own guidelines, because we’re giving our kids a drug, and if we do it unsupervised, it’s not going to work. It’s really hard to do it when you know, if you already have, like a 17 year old, but start when they’re young, and they’ll just think, this is the plan. This is what people do.

47:46 Jim Beach : You have four children, right?

47:49 Sean Covey : I have eight kids, eight. Okay,

47:51 Jim Beach : I thought, for some reason, I thought you had four. Yeah,

47:54 Sean Covey : Yeah. We should, maybe should have stopped at four. My oldest is in his mid 30s, and I have a teenager, a 17 year old senior at home, yeah, okay, I

48:04 Jim Beach : Have 30 down to seven.

48:08 Sean Covey : Oh, wow, yeah. So you got a big spread as well,

48:10 Jim Beach : Yes, but only four.

48:13 Sean Covey : So okay, what’s your experience been with kids in social media?

48:19 Jim Beach : None of them have well, the adults do. I have two adults now, so they do whatever they want, of course, but the two youngsters, I think, they get a phone at 13, and they’re allowed to look at social media. But my 16 year old doesn’t have an account to post with yet, so probably when he goes off to school, we’ll sure let him do whatever he wants in college. And I think the number one thing is your house just has to be able to do this. All screens face out, period. Don’t get a computer in your bedroom. The computers are in the room right next to the kitchen with all screens facing out.

49:06 Sean Covey : Couldn’t agree more. It’s really smart, yeah.

49:08 Jim Beach : So we can walk through the kitchen and see what the kids are doing with one look into the computer, I agree. Which is, yeah, I guess in most houses would have used it as the dining room, but we use it as the computer. Yeah.

49:21 Sean Covey : So, yeah, that’s really smart. It’s really smart what you’re doing. I think the big, big picture is there’s no one single right way, except the right way is you got to have a plan as a family, and if you don’t, if your kids just have unlimited access to whatever, whenever, that’s the problem, you’re going to have most likely to have challenges.

49:41 Jim Beach : The biggest problem is us, Mom and Dad, we have the teenager is very good at tennis, and all of the people that he competes against have tennis pages about their tennis career so that then get into better colleges. And we don’t have that for our son yet, and we’re feeling like, should we set up a page for him? Maybe we should do it. You know, again, the parents are the weak ones. I think

50:06 Sean Covey : I’d set up a page for him. If he’s that good, I’d set up a page for him.

50:10 Jim Beach : He’s that good, he’s already talking to college coaches and stuff like that.

50:15 Sean Covey : So, yeah, that’s great. That’s great.

50:18 Jim Beach : So expensive, though, good, great.

50:21 Sean Covey : I know could be the next Roger

50:22 Jim Beach : Federer, or I could be the next Boris Becker, broke, bankrupt, isn’t Boris Becker the one bankrupt? I’m not sure. I think he did. Yes. What about homeschool? Are you a homeschooler or traditional or something else private? What are your thoughts?

50:41 Sean Covey : Well, what’s happening with publics right now is the public enrollment is going down every year by about half a million kids, and they’re going to private schools, charter schools and homeschooling. Homeschool is the homeschooling is the fastest growing market. My kids have all been, have all gone to public schools, and some charter. But I think, I think homeschool used to be kind of out there, and now it’s becoming more mainstream. And I think, if you I think homeschool can be very good if you complement it with social because learning the social skills is all things considered, is more important than the academics. You got to have the academics, they’re both important. But if you had to choose which one, if they don’t have good skills with getting along with others and coping and managing that and dealing with with, you know, diverse personalities, you’re going to really struggle in life. So if you do homeschool, I just say, find ways of getting your kids in sports and extracurricular activities, or doing a dual program where you’re doing some things, you know, at home and some things at a school. It’s got to give your kids social experience. My father, Steven, used to I remember several times teachers saying to him, you know what your your kid is at reading at a fifth grade reading level is in third grade. You got to skip a year. And he’d say back to them, Why would I do that? Social Development is far more important than academic development. Socially, they’re at third grade,

52:22 Jim Beach : And yeah, I’m sorry to ask this, your father passed in a bicycle accident, didn’t he yeah

52:28 Sean Covey : About 14 years ago. He was 80, and he was Yeah, mountain biking just around his house and and hit the curb and hit his head and then died a few months later. So it was, got a great life, and so we’re, you know, no one has any regrets, and you know, he went a little younger than we hoped.

52:53 Jim Beach : Yes, give us your final word leadership skills.

52:57 Sean Covey : Having this inner core of good judgment and a moral core is increasingly important, where in a day where you won’t know what’s true or not right. So that’s that’s kind of a message I’m hoping

53:11 Jim Beach : To get through today. Fantastic. Thank you so much. URL you want to give out? Just go to Amazon to get the book.

53:18 Sean Covey : Yeah, and you can go to leader of me.org leader in me.org and learn about all we’re doing. And we’d love to get a day all 120,000 schools in America,

53:30 Jim Beach : Not just eight. Thank you so much with us, and we’d love to have you back.

53:35 Sean Covey : Okay, Jim, you have a great day. Thank you so much.

53:39 Jim Beach : We are out of time. I hope you had a great day and Oh, remember, the long version of both of these interviews is on the website, so go there to get the long version. Have a great day. Bye. Now go make a million dollars. You.