Discover the Hidden Forces That Drive Your Best Work With Chris Lema and MotivationCode

In the LMSCast episode, Chris Lema discusses the idea of motivation and explains that it is not an external factor that varies but rather an inherent component of an individual’s wiring.

Chris contends that people are constantly motivated when jobs or objectives fit with their innate wiring, challenging the conventional wisdom that views motivation as a resource that has to be replenished. He presents the MCode (Motivation Code), a program that examines an individual’s motivational wiring by analyzing their life tales.

People can better understand why certain experiences seem rewarding while others don’t by adjusting their job and surroundings to reflect what really motivates and excites them. He also discusses his work with CaboPress and his position as CEO of Motivation AI, highlighting the significance of comprehending motivation in both personal and professional circumstances.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Chris Lemma. I’ve known Chris for probably a decade or almost a decade. It’s been a very long time. Chris has done a lot of things. Currently he’s the CEO of motivation AI. You can find out about that at motivation code.

com. We’re going to be talking a lot about that today. Chris is also the founder of Cabo press. I believe I went six times. Which is awesome. And maybe we’ll talk a little bit about that. But first, Chris, welcome to the show. It’s great to be here. Awesome, man. Just to bookmark it in for the people out there watching and listening, what is motivation?

I find that an extremely interesting, just core concept. How do you think about it? Yeah, I know there’s a lot, but what is it at the highest level?

Chris Lema: Yeah, I think that’s a great question. I think the easiest way to think about it is like thinking about your eye color or your hair color your height. These are things that you did not control.

You were born and you did not do anything to manifest your eye color. You didn’t do anything to manifest your height. It’s just is what it is. And so I think of motivation, right? The characteristic of motivation as the way in which you’re wired and your DNA, you didn’t control your DNA and you don’t control per se, how you’re wired.

Most people tend to think about motivation in a completely different way. They think about it as gas in the gas tank. So you either have a lot of motivation or you have a little motivation. They don’t think about it as eye color. Cause you’re like I. I always have blue eyes or always have brown eyes and you’re like, and you always have motivation. But what you have is a certain kind of motivation. You’re wired for a particular kind of motivation. And and often when we find that I don’t feel motivated, when we use that phrase, I don’t, what we’re really saying is the things that are in front of me are not stimulating the part of me that is wired in a certain way.

So the things that are put in front of me. Are not aspirational. So therefore I’m not excited about it. And you’re like, you’re not excited about it. But if we took this and we changed it and we made it, so it was aspirational. We made it results driven, or we made it, performance and challenging base, then all of a sudden you’d be like, Ooh, I’m excited about it again.

And that means, okay we’ve locked in. The thing that you’re trying to get done in line with how you’re wired. So how you’re wired is as static as your eye color and your height and what have you. It is not fuel in a tank that has to be replenished. So when you see those means that are like motivation lasts a day, discipline lasts forever.

And you’re like no. Stop back up. You have motivation every day and you, we all know this is true, right? Because there have been times in every person’s life when you’re sitting at home on the couch in your pajamas or in your shorts and a t shirt or whatever. And someone comes in and goes, Hey, do you want to go out?

You want to leave the house? You want to leave the apartment? And we’re like, no. I don’t feel like it. I don’t feel like moving. I don’t feel like anything. And then they say the magic word, whatever it is that you love the most. I was thinking of going for ice cream or I thought I’d go to Disneyland or whatever it is.

And then all of a sudden you’re like, give me two minutes. I’ll be dressed. I’ll be ready. Like you were sitting on that couch and you were like, I have zero motivation. And then they put the right thing in front of you. And suddenly you’re Ooh, I can rally. I’m going to go in my room and I’m going to change.

I’m going to be ready, I’m going to go. The real trick is how have you lived this long and not known how you’re wired? How have you gone this long and not know what stirs you up? What motivates you? What gets you super Oh, I’m changed. I’m going, I’m changing and I’m ready to go. And that’s what the M code does is it analyze your stories.

It collects all this data, has you answer questions, and then it tells you, here’s how you are. Wired based on the stories you told us. So we’re not making anything up. It’s not that artificial choose between what would you do on a Friday night, go out with friends or stay at home and read a book.

Like those are all they’re fictitious. They’re abstract. They’re not. Your own story. So when we ask people to do that arbitrary choice between a and B. We’re going to get an arbitrary answer in the form of a report and codes different in that it’s looking at your own stories and it pulls it together.

Then it says, here’s how we think you’re wired or here’s some of the ways that we think you’re wired. Once people read it and put words to it and see it, then suddenly they’re like, Oh my gosh, that’s why I hated that job. That’s why I love that job. You’re like, yes, that’s exactly why.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I wonder if you can comment on, it seems like there’s a quote crisis of motivation in society. Like in YouTube, if I go to YouTube, sometimes I’m looking at trending videos and there’s a lot about how to get motivated and tell us about what’s going on in society or what and why is motivation important right now?

Why does it appear to be failing right now more than ever or we just more aware of it?

Chris Lema: So so I think it’s there’s several different streams that all come together one of which is we don’t try and connect these dots If you look at the number of creators that exist today compared to five years ago, compared to 10 years ago, and in the U S particularly, again, you don’t want to make this connection, but you can’t help, but go the cost of health insurance and being able to insure yourself independently. So there’s tons of people. 10 years ago, who didn’t do, didn’t even have, didn’t think about a side hustle and didn’t think about going independent and working on their own because they needed their health insurance.

They needed it for their family. So they stayed in a job. And the one overarching dynamic in a job is that you have a boss that tells you what to do. So you don’t have to, you don’t have to figure out what your day’s about, right? There are some jobs where they put your whole schedule of what you need to do in each minute of every day on your schedule, and you just obey.

And then whatever it is, several years ago, more people leaving independently today, more people than that, you have people who are figuring out on their own. But so rise a new problem. What happens when you’ve spent the last 10, 20, 30 years of your life, obeying someone else and doing what someone else tells you, and you’re doing the thing that they told you to do to be successful, whether or not it is the thing you need to do to be successful and whether or not they, at the end of the year, give you the benefit, the bonus, the whatever to say you were successful.

Regardless of all that you’ve been living in one modality, and then you come out to do your own thing and you realize. You’re the boss of yourself and potentially you’re a horrible boss, right? It turns out like you have a whole lot of negative self talk. You’re dousing your brain with negative chemicals because you’re sitting here telling yourself you suck at things.

You’re frustrated and you don’t really know what is the next step. So what’s the result of all that? You get to the end of day, you sit down and you go, I just don’t have the motivation. You’re like no. The issue isn’t motivation. The issue is you don’t have the skills. It turns out walking out of a job and going to build your own empire is not something you do on your own.

It’s not something you do without a plan. It’s not something, and every one of us who has done something like down the outside realizes this would have been a lot easier if I had a plan or if I had a structure, if I had a accountability, if I had partners, if all these things that would help it.

So I don’t think. The crisis is explicitly a motivation crisis. I think we use the term I’m not motivated as a way to reflect on the fact that I’m overwhelmed. I’m tired. And the truth is while that was happening, all the people that left the workforce left the companies in dire straits too, right?

When everyone left those companies now put more work on their existing employees. And didn’t give them more pay. As a result, they’re also getting burnt out. And what do you say when you’re getting burnt out? I’m just not motivated. So we use this phrase, right? But what we’re saying is inside organizations, we’re getting overworked, underpaid, and.

And frustrated by a boss that doesn’t listen to us and outside of work we’re doing our own thing and it turns out we’re not good to ourselves. There’s a lot of negative self talk. We do a lot of things that slowly create friction and stress in our lives. And as a result, we often say the same thing that people at work say, which is I’m just not motivated.

The truth is a better phrase I’m burnt out and I’m lost. And you can get help with both of those, but you got to start by acknowledging what the real issue is.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Let’s talk about motivation code. Yeah. What is it? Why was it created? And how is it different from a personality test like Myers Briggs?

I’m an introvert, extrovert, and so on.

Chris Lema: There are a bunch of really great personality assessments out there. Myers Briggs, Enneagram, DISC, StrengthFinder the list goes on and on. Gosh, one of my favorites is the Colby Index A and there’s so many good ones. Here’s what normally happens.

You take it. It says something surprising to you Ooh, it figured out this thing that I already know about myself, but now this thing knows to you, you love people, you rather be alone you are so excited and you’re an external processor and you interrupt other people when they’re talking, whatever it is, and you go, Oh my gosh.

But even if a personality assessment tells you that you step on other people’s toes by jumping, like you already know what they’re going to say, and then you finish their sentence and you interrupt them and you say the next thing, even if it tells you all that. More often than not, we read it, we go, Oh that’s cool.

That’s cool that you figured that out about me, but I already knew that. And then we move on. So my standard test is wait two weeks and after two weeks, find out if any of these personality assessments have changed your life and what you discover is. And the reason they don’t is because most of what they’re trying to do is solve the magic puzzle that says, we really saw you.

So they give you a name, they tell you what, you’re a panda or you’re green or you’re a dinosaur or you’re a, you’re an ENFP or whatever, whatever they do, they’re going to tell you something and you go, that’s But that’s where the, that’s where the magic ends.

And some of those are science backed and some of them are not science backed. And that’s just what that is. M code is sitting on top of SEMA, which is the science of motivated abilities and that science is now some 60 years old and the The assessment that we put online used to be a manual and there’s still people that do it manually, right?

They handwrite stuff and and the biographers that do that kind of work have been doing that forever. I learned about SEMA and those assessments in the year 2000. And at that point they were being used by Disney and NASA and Harvard, right? They were places where they were using them to look at hiring new employees putting them in, promoting into bigger senior roles, all that kind of good stuff.

And I wanted to use it myself. I couldn’t get access to it because it was only for big companies. Two and a half years ago, I bought all the SEMA related companies. So there were five companies. We bought them all. We merged them into one. That’s Motivations AI and I became the CEO of that company.

And in buying all those companies and pulling them all together, right? What we were saying is, hey, the science is important, but more than just the science is making it all available online. And once you make it available online, then more people can take it. So we now make it available to lots of different people, not just big corporations.

And the goal is not the magic trick. The goal is not, Oh, you finished taking the assessment. Here’s your report. Look, you’re a driver. You’re an achiever. And that’s it. The goal is all the applied science, right? How do you take that science and turn it into something that’s useful for you in your day to day two weeks from now, a month from now?

Six weeks from now. For a boss, it means helping the boss figure out how to create assignments for different people. Why are differently for an individual who is trying to figure out their work, right? It’s looking at, okay, how do you reshape the work you’re doing so that it aligns with your motivation for someone in sales, it’s, how do you look at your prospect and know which of these dimensions of motivation are they, and how to best.

Negotiate a deal with someone who’s a optimizer versus a driver, right? And so all of that becomes right. There is no right answer, wrong answer. There’s no good answer, bad answer. It’s just, look, there’s eight different dimensions of motivation. Let’s figure out who you are, who your employees are, who the people you interact with at work are, and let’s figure out the semantic bridge between who you are and who they are and how to get that language effective, right?

How to behave in a way that allows you To switch between different kinds of people, but deliver the same value to all of them, right? We’ve all had situations at work. Where like I had when I was at liquid web, I had two people and I think, them both, Jessica Frick was one of my product managers and Christine Trinos was another one of my product managers.

And both of them are amazing women. Both of them are absolutely incredible. Top notch eight plus players, but they’re also wired very differently. And so I was giving Jessica one set of jobs and I was giving Christine a different set of jobs. And one day Jessica calls me up and goes, what’s up? Hey, you gave Christina other job that you didn’t give me.

Are you not giving it to me? Because you don’t think I can handle it. And I’m like, what? So I said, Jessica, do you want to do that? She’s no, I would hate that job. That’s why I didn’t give it to you. I gave Christine the stuff that she would not only love, but she would excel at, and I gave you the stuff you would love and you would excel at.

Even if you have the same exact job title, I’m giving you different jobs so that you’re in your sweet spot. I’ve been doing that for decades. When we pull all this stuff together for M code, we were like, we can do this and make it available to every manager, right? We can make it so every manager knows how to do this way more effectively.

And every employee and every employer and every salesperson, all these people can. Be better at what they’re doing when they realize, Oh I need to interact with different people, different ways, because they’re wired differently. And I’m wired in a particular way.

Chris Badgett: So I took the M code and my strongest motivational dimensions are visionary driver and learner.

And so let’s say I was working for you. What kind of work would you give me? And what kind of work would you not give me?

Chris Lema: A visionary. When you think about your goal orientation, right? When you think about how you think about goals, a visionary is transformative. You want to talk about what is the transformation that’s going to happen.

A learner on the other hand is all about the knowledge driven mastery oriented goals, right? And a driver is results and ambition and Solving problems. So those are three different, those are three different things. And what we got to figure out is which is your strongest, right? And which is the thing that would, if I gave you a goal, right?

If you, if I wanted to give a goal to Chris, the driver, I would go, Hey, Chris, we got these issues. We got these and you’d be like issues. I love issues, I just want to stomp out these issues, right? I just want to, I want to close them out. And I want to check them off. I want to get them done. If I’m talking to Chris, the learner, I’d be like, I don’t know if you’ve heard about this new framework.

You’re like new framework. Where do I get access to the new framework? How can I learn everything I can learn from this new framework? How can I put it to use? Give me a project where I can put it to use. And if I talk to visionary, I’m like, listen, here’s what I want us to, here’s what I want us to do.

And if we do this, I think we can completely change the game. Oh, my God. Changing the game. I love that’s what I want. So you’re talking about, three different ways to shape the work based on those three. And so if I spent time with you, if I read through your entire M code report, I’d be like, okay, you When it comes to goal orientation, he’s more visionary than anything else.

When it comes to work style prop, preference, he’s probably more learner than he is driver, right? When it comes to interpersonal though, he’s more driver than he’s learner. So let’s do this. And so you’re going to start shaping how I give you assignments, how I work with you, how I give you feedback.

All of that changes based on who it is I’m talking to, and I won’t talk that way, even if I had the same bits of data to give them, I wouldn’t give it to someone who was an optimizer orchestrator. I wouldn’t give them the same thing as I would give you. And that’s what we’re, if you played basketball in the NBA and you could only dribble with your right hand, you would not play basketball in the NBA.

If you could dribble with your right hand and your left hand, you could maybe get to the NBA. But if you don’t have what we call handles, if you can’t bounce the ball between your leg and around your back and actually start moving your whole body one way and then pivot all the way to the other, if you can’t pivot and turn around, if you don’t have those skills, you don’t play that game.

And the reality is we have a whole bunch of managers and supervisors and bosses. Who can only dribble with the right hand. They grew up in homes where their mom told them, Hey, treat others the way you want to be treated. Since they’re right handed and they can only do the right hand, they expect the whole rest of the world to understand and interact with people that, that talk that way and work that way and do that way.

And your mom was wrong. It’s not treat everyone the way you want to be treated. It’s treat everyone the way they want to be treated. And once you get that and you understand that changes the game.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Can you clarify for me? There’s the strongest motivational dimensions, but then there’s like the top five motivations for me, that’s explore, develop, realize the vision, experience the ideal and meet the challenge.

So what are those motivations?

Chris Lema: Those are motivations. And if you go into your stacked rank list of your 32 motivations, you’ll see 32 motivations with those five at the top, and you’ll have others are at the bottom, you’ll see that the top. Let’s say about 10 are green and then the next 10 are like yellow.

And the last 10 are red. And the red doesn’t mean that you’re bad at them. It just means these aren’t the things that are going to wake you up. So these are all the very specific. So we took all your stories when you were giving them to us and we decoded your answers, mapped them, the stories, and found the elements that made it so that we could take this list of 32 motivations and put them in a stack rank and tell you, these are the things that really.

Light you up. They motivate you. They move you. So of course experience the ideal or realize vision, anything that is more visionary. You’re going to be because visionary is your is one of your top dimensions. You’re going to be like, yeah, that’s my jam. I love, I can see the future.

I can see what I want. And then I want to pursue it. I want everyone to pursue it, I see the vision. I want to chase it down. And so the eight dimensions are the handles that let you hold on to all those 32, if you had to memorize, the top 10 and in what order and what you’d be like, gosh that’s really hard.

And the truth is. They’re in different places, so it’s easier. Yes, you should read through all those top five and all that stuff and put it into practice in order for you to talk about it, in order for you to think about and interact with other people, having a dimension gives you that kind of overlay.

And so if I didn’t, if I didn’t know your scores or whatever, I’d be like I know visionary and learner. I know that because I’ve interacted with Chris and you can’t help communicate your visionariness and your learner ness. Also, I would tell you that, Hey it’s no shock. You’re in the job you’re in.

And it’s no shock. You’re in the industry you’re in, but it’s also no shock that you’re in the job you’re in. And so you’re a living embodiment that. That our assessment is correct because you’re like, Hey, if someone didn’t know the details of anything of your report or your life or whatever, and they’re like, he’s the CEO of a LMS product in a space where he’s trying to teach other people who are educators to educate well and effectively to the whole rest.

You’re like, sounds visionary and learner all day long. We’re not trying to play a magic game, right. And we’re, there’s no magic trick here.

And we’re just trying to go, let’s give you the vocabulary and let’s give you the understanding so that you can better lean into who you are and what you’re doing, but also you realize you’ve had employees at Lyft or LMS that aren’t you.

You’ve had employees that are not visionary. You’ve had employees that are not learners. So even when you go to give them a task, and you’re like, here, just, here’s this new thing, and you can learn it, and you do it, and then they’re like, my job sucks. And you’re like, how can your job sucks? I would’ve loved that.

That would’ve been my favorite task. That would’ve been awesome. I would’ve loved it. And then you discover, oh, they’re not me. They’re different. And what you need to do for that different person is give them a completely different assignment that lines up with them. And it turns out that most of the things we want done can be done a lot of different ways.

You, you used to work in mountains. You know that if someone says, I want to hike, pick a famous mountain, right? Kilimanjaro, whatever, right? I want it. That doesn’t say the full, that’s not the full sentence, right? That’s not the full story. Cause you’re like, wait, with Sherpas or without Sherpas, with oxygen, without oxygen on the East face, the West face, the North face, the South face, like there’s so much more than just, I want to climb that mountain.

And it doesn’t mean that there’s a right answer and a wrong answer. It just means, Hey, some people are for Sherpas. Some people prefer oxygen. And some don’t, some people want to go the easiest route switchbacks up and down. Other people are like, I’m going to hike the ice cliff all the way up.

And you’re like, Hey. Different people are motivational dimensions. Do that. They basically say there’s eight different ways to think about the world. And these are, you’re wired one of eight different ways. In fact, you’re likely wired one or two or three of eight different ways. And if you stay in that realm, you’re going to stay lit up, excited, happy.

That doesn’t mean that you won’t ever be frustrated, depressed. Or anxious it just means you’ll be in your sweet spot more often, right? And that’s what we educate on That’s what we’re trying to do.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about understanding. We’ve talked about understanding self and management and leadership and using these tools What about more laterally?

Let’s say A business partnership or a life partner or friends. Yeah. There’s that kind of thing that happens where sometimes opposites attract, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Maybe you should have some overlap, but then have some difference. Like how do you. How do you think about that horizontal relationship with the M code?

Chris Lema: I think there’s, I think there’s two or three things that you really want to get nailed. And that is you don’t want all of the same. So like on a

Chris Badgett: team

Chris Lema: just like on a team. So I was talking to a guy who was telling me about his onboarding sequence at his company.

And I said, let me guess, did you take the MCOT? He’s I did. I’m like, let me guess you’re a driver. He goes, you’re right. I am. I’m like, yep. And let me guess the people that succeed in your onboarding. All our drivers, they’re all very similar to you. He goes, yeah. I’m like, cause you’ve built an onboarding sequence.

Who would scare the living dates off of optimizers, orchestrators, relators, influencers like they would be they would get the instructions of the onboarding and they’d be like, I’m out. I’m out. And and I go, the problem when you’ve assembled a whole group of. One kind in this particular case drivers love solving problems.

You know what happens when a group of drivers all finish all the problems? They make up new problems. That’s what they do. They make up problems to solve because that’s how they feel alive. So what do they do? They start going, oh, you know what, what could happen? This could happen. They start predicting what could happen, even though it hasn’t happened.

Then they’re like, we got to get everybody pay attention. And then we go chasing off to chase after a fake imaginary dragon that wasn’t really there. Because that’s their language. That’s how they work is overcoming and over, and surmounting the challenges that are in front of them. The same thing happens if you’re two drivers that are married or two, two visionaries married who’s doing the checkbook, right?

Who’s balancing the budget, right? They’re like, Oh, I see visions. I see visions too. And you’re like, Whoa, someone has to make sure the electricity gets paid. So I find that the, my number one rule is is make sure that you’re not all the same. You can’t try for all your partners are achievers and you’re an achiever or all your partners are orchestrators and you’re an orchestrator.

Like you just don’t want, you don’t want. Too much overage, right? It’s going to, it’s going to clash in its own way. The opposite things we don’t have tons of opposites in the list, but there are some, right? Like you could see an achiever and a orchestrator go head to head sometimes.

And so the ones that are more diametrically opposed, those are probably not perfect pairings for people, especially partners or in relationship, partly because you’re trying to constantly make the case for something that the other one just. It’s just not wired for. So for example, I’ve spent a lot of time in startups and it doesn’t mean I haven’t had stints in big corporate gigs but even in the corporate gig, I’m trying to carve out an entrepreneurial effort.

Why? Because if someone tells me these are the three meetings a day you have to go to, and this is the process for doing X, Y, and Z, and here’s how you check the list on all these boxes. And I’m like those are my lowest motivations. So if you look at your stack rank, you might have do it right somewhere in the middle, right?

My do it right is last. It doesn’t mean I want to do anything wrong. It just means the exactitude of making sure that I do it exactly per process is not ever going to motivate me. In fact, it will frustrate me. So when I worked at Liquid Web, a hosting company They had an hope, a whole process for how you book travel, a whole process.

They have used this corporate card. You run it on this corporate travel system. Then it, it’s automatically covered or whatever. And it was all designed so that employees didn’t have to part with their own money at any part of the process. But it was like, you had to change your password every two weeks.

The software didn’t carry all the airlines. It didn’t go to all the cities I wanted to go to. And so it was a pain in the butt. And I just was like, Nope. So what I do, I just started using my own credit card and booking my own travel. And at some point they were like, Hey, you haven’t turned in anything for this track.

I’m like, Oh yeah, I have expense reports. They’re like, when are you going to turn those in? I’m like, whatever. We got to almost the end of the year. They’re like, you have to, if you want to get paid, you have to. And I’m like, I don’t really care about getting paid. I just, I don’t. Like I would gladly lose a thousand dollars of my own personal money on airline tickets, then not lose a penny, but have to use that horrible system because a horrible system was just so broken for what I was doing.

Do it right is never going to be the top of my list. So if do it right, is your number one, right? If Chris Badgett is do it right. Number one, and Chris Lema is do it right. 32. Partnership is gonna be hard, right? Because you’re like, Hey, I want to do this partnership. Let’s just write out the terms of this agreement.

And let’s write out the commitments we’re each gonna make. And let’s write out everything that holds us accountable. Let’s make sure we have a checklist in here and let’s have a meeting where we can back you’re doing all these. And I’m like, partnerships are all about. Let’s make it work and let’s make some money together.

So why don’t we just put something in play? Let’s just run it, see how much money we make. Then we’ll go from there. You’re like no. I need to have everything right. You see how those things just don’t line up well. That’s where, whether you’re talking about spouses or business partners or anything else, in a peer network.

The most important thing is not so much the pairing, it’s understanding the other person, is being able to look and see, okay. They’re an optimizer. So they are process oriented. They’re focused on efficiency. How can I help them and serve them in this relationship? Even though that’s not my first rodeo, right?

It’s not my, it’s not my, it’s not my first, it’s not the thing that I would think about or pursue, right? They are detail oriented. I am high achieving. I care about getting the win and you care about getting all the I’s dotted and T’s crossed. And how do we find common ground? So that’s where M code really helps peer relationships.

Chris Badgett: Good news. We can partner because do it right is third from the bottom of my list. So that helped me understand what is it on the bottom of my list is be unique. Yeah. See, what does that mean? And

Chris Lema: beat and be unique is one of my top five.

So look at us on this screen right now, right? We’re both sitting in nice offices.

We both have nice camera gear. We’re both able to get on video and talk whenever, but only one of us is matching his shirt. To his hat. And the other one is certainly not right. You could interview a hundred guests and I’m guessing I’m the only one who’s wearing a shirt and a hat, the match. And I get up every morning and every morning, I hat and then the shirt that’s going to go with it. And then I start my day. Other people call that decision fatigue and they want to wear the same black t shirt all day, every day, because that’s what Steve Jobs did.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Chris Lema: That’s fine. And they don’t care that they’re wearing the same outfit every day, or even they don’t care if they get on a phone call like this, a video call, and let’s say there’s five people and all five are all tech bros, all wearing black t shirts and they all look identical and to them, they don’t care.

They’re like, Hey, let’s get on with the topic of our conversation. And for me, I’m like, Oh my God, did I miss the memo? Like, why are you all looking the same as a be uniquer? I have owned cars and often lease cars for about two years. Then when I start seeing the car that I’m driving everywhere around, I’m like time to turn this car in because I like having a car that’s unique that says, Hey, that must be Chris summer because that’s the only Bronco that’s cut up that way in Houston, right?

But if everyone had it, then I’d be like, Nah. So I was driving a Range Rover and I love my Range Rover, but then everyone was driving Range Rover. And then I was like, no, I gave it to my wife. She doesn’t have be unique. So she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care how many people have the same car she does.

And I do. So be unique is about, can you stand out? Can you be recognized for the things that, that make you different? You want to be, seen as separate and there’s a whole lot of people like most of the world that is like. Why would I care about that? Like, why would I care about that at all?

So for most people, be unique is towards the bottom, right? For most people, that’s just not a thing. And then for me it’s I don’t know, number two or number three. And you’re like, Whoa that’s a big deal for you. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, it is. I just, I don’t want to be the same as everybody else.

Chris Badgett: That’s really cool. And that feeds into my next question, which is, how do we, I feel like I got lucky, because I, traveled, went into lots of cultures, anthropology, studies, social science. I realized at a very young age that, man, people are different. Man, people have different ways of seeing and being in the world.

And that’s ultimately helped me in work and being a manager and just understanding people very different. And. Being productive. So I got lucky in that I had a background that kind of helped me undo or figure out those blind spots of how people are so different and almost all everybody is.

How does one, remove those blinders and just get a, get better able to do that. As you’re telling that story right there, I’m like, Oh man. If I send Chris a gift, like maybe it needs to match like the hat and the shirt, not just the shirt. And that would say a little more I understand you.

I see you. Yeah. But how do we learn to see the world like others and influence them, communicate with them and so on?

Chris Lema: The first thing is. My, my rough math says about a third of the population doesn’t care. A third of the population just doesn’t care at all about seeing others, like they’re just, they’re on a, they’re on a choose your own adventure game and they’re the only one playing the game and they got the remote control and they’re choosing left left.

And they just, nothing else matters. And nothing we do is going to fix that, right? You have a third of the world that just doesn’t get it. That’s not bad. It’s just an issue of exposure. If you’re living in a country where you have almost no diversity, everybody’s basically the same. You don’t even know to think in that way that, Oh, there might be somebody who thinks up is down and down is up.

And you’re like, what? It just doesn’t, go to a community where they all drive cars. I grew up in Southern California. There are whole neighborhoods of people that have never walked. Three blocks in their life, right? There are communities that don’t have sidewalks.

They’re like why what’s a sidewalk, right? Like their whole life is they got 16. They got keys to a car. They got in their car They drove a mile to their school, right? And you’re like, oh, it’s a mile. I can walk it and they’re like What are you talking about? There are lots of places where people have blind spots, but it’s environmental, it’s not personal.

In the first case, the first third, it’s a little bit personal because what they’re really saying is I don’t need anyone else. I don’t care about anyone else. I’m just doing my own thing. In the second group. It’s. Constraints based on the environment they’re in. They didn’t even know that something, and then you have the third group, which are people who didn’t know, but once they know their eyes are open, then they’re like, Oh my God, feed it more.

Give me more. I want to learn more. I want to learn how to be better here and there. My wife, you can’t go to, you can’t, and Melissa, you’ve met her. You can’t go to a dinner. With Melissa. If you’re hungry, right? Because when you sit down the table and here comes a waiter or waitress, Melissa is going to immediately be like, how do you pronounce your name?

Where are you from? What’s your family history? You’re like, I’m starving. I just wanted food. And now I have to wait for 30 minutes while Melissa. The waiter have their own little back and forth. But she wants I’m starving. every person to feel seen. She wants everybody to feel like, Hey, I know how to say your name.

I know where your family comes from. I know your story. She does that every meal we go to every restaurant we go to everything right. All she wants is more info. Once you start giving it to him, once you’re like. Hey, you know how this is how you do growth and development? And they go, yeah, I’m like, I do growth totally different.

What do you mean? Like I’m all about skill mastery, even if I’ve never done it. If I start doing it, I want to go, Oh, how do I get to expert mode? I want to, I’m going to, I’m going to, I’m going to do all the reps. I’m going to go over and over until I get it perfectly because I’m all about mastery. And she’s I just want knowledge.

I just want to, pull in more information. I want to read biographies and I’m like, what? No, I don’t care about all that. I just care about I want to be the best at doing it or the best in my peer group. And once she sees, Oh, we’re different. Then she can then start thinking about how to approach.

People differently. So you got one third that doesn’t care. You got one third that doesn’t know. And you got one third that would love to know and be eager to get it. And so of course, my answer is go with the goers, go with the one third that want to learn and grow more and then expose the third that are like, I didn’t even know that was possible.

Or I didn’t even know that people could be wired differently. Some of those may move into the first camp and ignore the third camp, because no matter how much you talk to them, no matter how much you do, they’re just like, Yeah, whatever. And you’re just, it’s coming in one year and go out the other.

And that’s a waste of time. So you, and I’m not writing anyone off, but there’s just some people who are like, I don’t care how someone else is wired. I care about how I’m wired and what I do. And you’re like, okay. That is what that is.

Chris Badgett: Let’s contextualize it for a course creator or coach.

So like when it comes to content, like course content, lessons, videos, texts, PDS, whatever, there’s this learning style concept of visual auditory kinesthetic and all these things. And coaching I think of as you can just do coaching without courses, but it’s more human and dynamic and stuff like that.

It’s a support mechanism. So how can course creators and coaches use something like the M code to create better content and also better help their people when they fall down or get stuck?

Chris Lema: So that’s a great question. I think what you’re going to discover is for every person. So we mentioned at the top of the call, I run a conference called Cabo press.

This year we just did our 10th. I had everyone take the M code, right? You do the seating arrangements by the M code. I didn’t do seating. I didn’t do some arrangements, but it definitely influenced some of my lunch groups and it influenced some of our dinners. Here’s the thing you look at 60 people and I would say 80 percent of them, maybe higher, maybe 85 percent were all achievers and drivers, or at least they were an achiever or driver in their top three spots.

85 percent at least. We had two influencers, two learners, one relator, right? Does that mean that there are no relator entrepreneurs? No. It means that all my marketing and messaging, all my recruiting, all my communication targets, achievers, and drivers who are the C who are sitting in the CEO role of their agencies, product companies, and SAS companies.

That’s all it means is that the way in which I talk, the way in which I describe it, The way in which I invite the people that I’m inclined to invite are predominantly achievers and drivers. And they, and there’s a couple learners and a couple, influencers and maybe a relater, but if you look at that relater, the one relater that’s there I’ve done nothing to recruit them.

They have crossed every semantic bridge. And they have crossed every Delta between where they were and where I’m, they did all the work to get to me. They did all the heavy lifting because I was. Translating my stuff to achievers and drivers. And the same is true for course creators and coaches is that you’re going to discover that you work mostly with, you connect mostly with, you shape your messaging, mostly for two to four of our eight dimensions.

It doesn’t mean that for others. Are not going to come your way. It’s just, they’re going to do all the heavy lifting because you haven’t even spent time thinking about it. So when we think about resilience and adaptability, all the stuff that is like support oriented that you’re trying to get up an achiever is going to be goal focused.

A driver is going to be pressure filled, right? Resilient. They’re going to be like, Hey, I can persist in the midst of hard stuff. A learner is going to be intellectually agile. I’m flexible in my brain. I can pick up new things. And you’re going to go, yeah, these are the things that I like to do.

So you might think of, Hey, I’ve been doing one on one coaching, but I’m going to have this once a month group call where anybody can do whatever and support. And you go, okay, but this is for a certain group of people that want to feel connected with each other. That community part that all my stuff for achievers and drivers, there’s no community part, right?

You go to my conference at common press, you get these lunch groups, you get dinner groups. I’m not doing any of those things. I’m not delivering value in those moments, but I’ve crafted those moments So that people can connect with each other because that’s so important or 7 a. m. They go out and they work out.

And this time I did all three workouts, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, which was a huge deal, but it’s creating another sense of community. And there are certain people, relators and influencers who are like, I love this. I love that there’s this place where we connect. And you’re like, yes, I have to craft my offering.

To deliver value to different groups, even if I specifically focus in one realm. So what I would tell a coach, I would tell a a course creator. I say, first go take the M code and you can do it for 19 bucks, right? The light version gives you enough of what you need, but you can take it for 19 bucks and you go and you learn it.

And then as you’re working with your clients, your coaching clients, You there’s a gift. Once you go inside, right? There’s a gift option. You can buy it for your clients. So go buy it for your three coaching clients or your five coaching clients, Jennifer Bourne, who runs PPP, which is a whole community around running their digital agency.

She signed up for a subscription. And then she gave it to all her people, right? So 20 people could take it each month or 25 people could take it each month and she had them all take it so that she could know better who they were and she could then start shaping. It’s not just the content itself, though, that the language you use is going to likely be more aligned to one or two dimensions.

But then what are the other components of your offering that, Connect to something else, right? Influencers love having impact. If I give you a bunch of it’s all about me, it’s all about me, it’s all about me self discovery worksheets, eventually you’re going to be like, I’m tired of just navel gazing and looking at me all the time.

I care about looking out. I want to care about, serving my community. You better give them an assignment that goes in that direction because if they do, if you do this all the time and you’re thinking, but I love to be aware of myself and my stuff. And you’re like, yes, Mr. Lerner, but Mr.

Influencer wants to make an impact on the outside world. And if you don’t get him focused outside a little bit, he’s going to quit your program because he’s going to put you in a camp that says all you do is think about yourself. You don’t care about impact. So I’m going to go somewhere else. And you’re like, whoa, stop.

I totally care about impact. So how do I create. A component of my offering that really lights you up. Or if influencer is one of your main players, or if relators when your main players are optimized, when your main players, how do I change the language in my lesson? To hit them more. What you’ll discover is most of us when we’re course creating and we’re recording lessons, we’re just choosing illustrations that come to mind, top of head, right?

Or top of head when you were writing your script, if you write scripts all of those are just your defaults. So of course, all your stories are going to line up with things that would work for you. That doesn’t mean it worked for everyone else. So once we expose you to all eight dimensions and we teach you about it, of course, our goal is to help you be able to create content in different ways.

And we’ll show you, look, just doing this can shift. A driver article to be an influencer article or a learner article or what have you, right? Or you may go, oh, lesson one is really more driver oriented, but lesson two is all going to be about influencer and impact, right? And so you can weave different lessons in the course of a project so that everybody’s feeling connected to some assign.

Now I like lesson three and the other guy’s I like lesson four. And you’re like, of course you do, because you’re this and you’re that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Tell us how what somebody should do if they want to get M code for themselves and for their team. And once they get into it, how to best get the most value out of it.

Yeah.

Chris Lema: Okay. So number one, you go to motivation code. com and you buy the light version. If you want to spend 79 by the premium version, it’ll give you way more in the report. But if you’re just getting started and you want to try it. Buy the 19 one. It doesn’t stop you after you’ve gotten the report on the other end and then you get more excited.

It doesn’t stop you from upgrading that 19 paying the additional 60 bucks and getting the premium report accessible to you. Once you’ve done your report then you go to in the, my products, there’s a gift section and you buy. Let’s say your team is seven more people, you buy seven more lights and that’s 19 bucks a pop.

You buy the seven and then you go into, you get the link right for each one of these and you send it to each person and let them take it. And when they take it right, they’re going to be like, Oh my gosh, did you know that do you know that? So it’s super awesome. Yeah. Also we have in that same catalog, right?

So it’s all product led growth. It’s all inside the SAS. When you go into the, my products, just like you were able to buy the the light one or, the or the premium as a gift, you can also buy a 90 minute impact session. And If you have already bought the light and then you upgraded to the premium and you read the full premium report and you’re like, Oh my God, this is blowing my mind is amazing.

I want to talk with someone about this. I want to talk to a certified coach who can help me explore this and go deeper with it. Then you have the ability to buy a 90 minute impact session. And that is awesome. You will thank me forever for that 90 minutes because it’s phenomenal, but then you go, Hey, wait, my whole team took M code.

How do I get someone right? And a certified trainer, how do I get them involved in doing a team training and the team training is 3, 500 bucks, it’ll pull your whole team together. And and it will even create some dynamic slides that show you the nuances between your team, right?

Which becomes really enlightening. Now, I will say this. If you go the 19 route and you buy the 9 gift for your team, and then you buy the team one, you buy a team, it’s 3, 500, whatever. If you’re thinking about buying the 79 premium version, Don’t go that route instead go straight to the team edition Because the team edition when you pay the 3500 for the team session You’ll also be able to buy the premium report for 49 So you get a discount, right?

And so you’re like, yeah I’ll buy the team thing and what you get is a certified executive coach who meets with your whole team and covers not only a little bit of the inside work, but also covers the Outside and the cross connects, right? So it’ll show you, Hey, you have a team and this is what we’re seeing in your team.

And also here are some blind spots or some little issues, or here’s some predictive stories that might. I have literally walked into a room and said so let me guess you have an affiliate program and it’s not working well. And the CEO is looking at his executive team going, okay, who spilled the beans?

Who told him this? And I’m like no I I, no one, you can stop looking around, right? Just look at me. Nobody told me that you guys were struggling. You have an entire marketing department and they’re all this big. Motivational dimension instead of this, what I should have seen is this.

And this, what I saw was this, here’s how that manifests itself. This, and this are likely problems. And they’re like. Oh my God, that’s exact. I’m like, that’s what happens when your marketers are drivers, right? Like they’re just going to go off a checklist. You haven’t had a new item added to that checklist in forever.

And they’re like, yeah, you’re right. I go, because that’s not what they’re going to do. They’re not going to come up with new stuff. So you’re going to need an influencer or later. You’re going to need some of these other people to come in. And that’s how you get the most of it. It all starts at motivation code.

com. It starts with a 19 assessment, but it can be, you can buy a lot more and it’s all there ready to help you make most use of all this stuff.

Chris Badgett: Chris, this has been amazing. Thank you for coming on the show. This is such great work and it has such big potential for individuals and teams and really the world.

It’s very cool. Thank you. Thanks for coming on the show.

Chris Lema: Thank you for having me.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.