In the Press

Mark Lewis, host of Money, Mission and Meaning highlights Meredith's experience as the former Director of Internet Marketing for Sharper Image and the insight gained during her seven year spiritual journey including studying meditation at monasteries in the Kingdom of Bhutan.

Written Transcription:

The Living Green Inspiration: Three Outcomes to Turbo Charge Your Life

Our guest is Meredith Medland, founder of 3outcomes.com, an accountability consultant firm and who is also one of the top 100 podcasts on iTunes, her show is called Living Green: Effortless Ecology for Everyday People. So join us as we discuss the power of clarifying your outcomes in life and business to accelerate both the results you achieve and the joy you experience in the process of achieving them. But first, a few highlights from the show.

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“This is the greatest part for me still about being a podcaster, being involved in Internet marketing is because there is so much technology involved, there is a real opportunity as a marketer to understand what the message is that the technologist is really communicating to the consumer or to the user and so I get a sneak-peek at a lot of new things that are coming up”

“The second is being a member of the “Association for Downloadable Audio.” This is an association for podcasters and for advertising agencies and anyone involved in the new forms of media that are being downloaded and it is an association creating standards, that’s the second way.”

“Yeah, and I think that’s actually going to be a really exciting piece that’s going to allow people to merge and work together in ways that really allow everyone to get more of what they want.”

“Just to relax, I went on a Caribbean cruise, on a catamaran with a bunch of people that I didn’t know and they ended up being Buddhist and some were from Italy and we sent scuba diving and we did all sorts of fun stuff. It was absolutely extraordinary.”

“3outcomes is a process that I apply in the corporate world mostly around goal setting and accountability. So it’s a system and it facilitates a very simple process that brings teams together around a common set of goals while simultaneously creating individual accountability.”

[Music]

Mark Michael Lewis: So welcome Meredith, it’s a pleasure to have you on Money, Mission, and Meaning.

Meredith Medland: Indeed it is, it’s a vision come true.

Mark Michael Lewis: Yes. So to give our listeners little context and to get right into the heart of what you’re all about, you’ve been involved in Internet marketing for over a decade now and you were part of the inception of the Chicago Interactive Marketing Association or CIMA, in fact it was you and a couple of other people. You’ve specialized in analysis and studied the metrics of companies like Starbucks and 3Com and Visa and led creative initiatives to expand the Internet presence of companies such as Sharper Image and such, what is it about Internet that caught your attention and inspired you to focus your creative energies there?

Meredith Medland: I was selling media advertising, television advertising and it was for a company called Katz Media which is a television rep firm and it is based on audience points. There’s not a lot of creativity in it other than packages and around Easter, there was an opportunity to get involved with 24/7 media, which at the time was called Cats Millennium Marketing and it was just a very small arm of Katz Media that was selling banner advertising on a network basis for sites like cars.com and aolnetfind which was the big search engine at the time and it was a perfect fit for me because there was a lot of creative selling and really selling into the possibility of something and being a leader in something new and that just hooked me right away.

Mark Michael Lewis: Right, well and back then you were selling banner advertisements. That was right in the beginning, no one even had really understood what this thing was going to become yet. Did you have a sense for what was possible?

Meredith Medland: Oh, yes. This is the greatest part for me still about being a podcaster, being involved in Internet marketing is because there is so much technology involved, there is a real opportunity as a marketer to understand what the message is that the technologist is really communicating to the consumer or to the user, and so I get a sneak-peek at a lot of new things that are coming up, so whether that’s RFID chips or whatever it is coming up in the future, as a marketer, I get to be on the cusp of that.

Mark Michael Lewis: Right and the vision that you’ve had -- because that was back in the ‘90s, mid-90s, late ‘90s, how much of what you have expected has already come into existence and is more than you thought?

Meredith Medland: Almost all of it. The things that we used to speak about when we were selling in the late ‘90s and then I did marketing as well on the digital publishing environment for Chicago Tribune Media, we would speak about how video would integrate on to the web and we talk a little bit -- it wasn’t called “Behavioral Targeting’ then but we certainly talked about how we would be able to give advertising to the consumer in the environment that best suited them based on their travel habits on the web.
So all these kind of pie-in-the-sky things are now just part of the online advertising environment and it is just so exciting to see.

Mark Michael Lewis: Yeah, it has been quite a journey so far and it is really just beginning. I think about what’s going to be happening. What are your personal thoughts for where the Internet’s going and how you are going to be able to play a part in making it something perhaps more beautiful, more humanly sustaining, and more human?

Meredith Medland: Thanks for asking that. There’s a few different ways that I see my involvement. The first is increasing the importance of independent media that’s still being a professional podcaster and bringing attention to a new way of giving the news. The second is being a member of the Association for Downloadable Media. This is an association for podcasters and for advertising agencies and anyone involved in the new forms of media that are being downloaded and it’s an association creating standards, that’s the second way.

Mark Michael Lewis: Yeah I think that’s actually going to be a really exciting piece that’s going to allow people to merge and work together in ways that really allow everyone to get more of what they want.

Meredith Medland: It’s really exciting and Susan Bratton is one of the founders of that association and she was also one of the founders of the IAB, which is the Internet Advertising Bureau which came up with the standards for online banner advertising. So her experience mixed with all the different parties involved who are all leaders, the person in charge of the iTunes environment for podcasters is there, I mean the list of people involved is quite exciting. The best part for me is this feels like what it felt like in about 1997 for me and except that now instead of being a young person wanting to play with the big players and thinking, “OK, I am going to create the Chicago Interactive Marketing Association with some of my friends so I can at least introduce the speakers.” [Laughs] Now it is, “Oh my goodness! I am aware of the fact that there are people -- right now I am working a company called Revenue Science and there are people at the office that are younger than me, and all of a sudden I am realizing, oh I have had 12 years of Internet marketing experience here, so it’s so awesome.”

Mark Michael Lewis: Right. Now you are one of the big dogs. That’s great. Is there a third thing that you were thinking about for the future?

Meredith Medland: The third thing is being really aware of the conversations that are happening both on the web, which I would call plugged-in and then being unplugged. So when I spend time in nature and naturally it parlays into my involvement with my show Living Green which is the name of the podcast that I do because it has me stay up-to-date on what’s really happening in behavioral targeting, what’s happening with ultra-portable devices, what do we do and what are the behaviors that are happening in Manhattan or in San Francisco or in Chicago around digital devices.

I have had experience at a telecom company in Santa Barbara called “Tempest Telecom.” I got to learn tons about WiMAX and what the impact of being always on is. So taking my experience as an Internet analyst, it’s natural for me to look at these trends and create a story. So at this time, I certainly have a few predictions that I write about on my blog, but I am listening and learning and keeping a close eye on what’s happening so that I can develop an opinion on issues as they rise.

Mark Michael Lewis: It’s certainly going to be creating a lot of cultural changes, this whole thing. To talk about the future that you are seeing, let’s go a little bit into your past. I know you were involved with the Internet advertising like you were talking about and after some impressive successes, you shifted your focus for a while and onto what more my costs become more spiritual pursuits about consciousness and the nature of human condition and happiness. Can you tell us a little bit about the transition from Internet marketing into self development that you went through?

Meredith Medland: Sure, definitely. Let’s see. Well, to make it quick and easy, there are tons of stories there but I will give you a couple of splashes. When I was working for Jupiter Media Matrix which is now called Jupiter Research, it was Jupiter Media at that time, then Jupiter Media Matrix, and now it is called Jupiter Research. I was fortunate enough to come and start before they went public and so during the time I was there, I got to be part of an IPO so that left some nice extra money in my pockets…

Mark Michael Lewis: Which is always nice.

Meredith Medland: Which is always nice, yes it is and I now thank you very much, I have to always give my profits to them and I had the opportunity to either stay on board or take a severance package with additional investing time and I had been thinking a lot about what was going in my life. I’d attended Burning Man for the first time and that opened up a whole new world for me. I thought, “OK. You know what I need to do? I need to take three months off.” Now it turned into a little bit longer than that, but what I did was first just to relax I went on a Caribbean cruise on a catamaran with a bunch of people that I didn’t know and they ended up being Buddhist and somewhere from Italy and we went scuba diving and we did all sorts of fun stuff. It was absolutely extraordinary and came back…

Mark Michael Lewis: Very nice.

Meredith Medland: …then went to Hawaii with a girlfriend and did a little more scuba diving and then I made the big plunge. I thought, “OK, I am going to go to India and do whatever the spiritual thing is that people do,” and instead I got the opportunity to go to Bhutan and I studied Tibetan Buddhism and ended up being overseas for three months. So that’s how the whole spiritual path got started was really with the monks in Bhutan, which is the only real Buddhist country left in the world. It’s a kingdom and their gross product is happiness.

Mark Michael Lewis: Yeah, that is such a great story about Bhutan and their gross happiness product. You were going to Bhutan, you learned a bunch of things, I know through the years that in addition to doing various consulting gigs, after that you studied and taught Yoga. You did study and taught self-development courses, you did an advance type of transformational body work and most recently you have been practicing the martial art of Hapkido and you are half way on your way to a black-belt at this point, is that right?

Meredith Medland: Yes, that’s right, level 2 the green and black belt.

Mark Michael Lewis: Level 2, excellent, and now you found a way to integrate these more conscious disciplines into a consulting practice. It’s a really a kind of no B.S. bottom line focus and combine that with your super-successful podcast about Living Green or How to Bring Green Attitudes and Practices in Your Daily Life, how does bringing those kind of soft skills, consciousness, awareness that you have been cultivating, how does bring that to a business context impact your ability effectively help people become more effective?

Meredith Medland: The most important thing I learned through the practice of living in my body was to take time to breathe and that time was first found on a Yoga Math, actually first found in a meditation practice, then on the Yoga Math and then in massage courses, then in books and literature and people in my life who were constantly in a practice of the breath and now I consistently breathe in the corporate environment, whether I am facilitating or just working at my laptop, I take deep breaths, occasionally I pause, and I listen for cues that are body and mind-related.

So another way to say that is I am listening to much more than verbal cues that are coming out of me in the work place. People’s bodies tell us a lot about what they are communicating. So, it is very, very easy for me to navigate the corporate world now because some of the base mind foundation that I learned during this spiritual journey enhances my ability to pay attention while I am working.

Mark Michael Lewis: And I can imagine that you can help people see inside themselves when they are not breathing and because you are breathing, you can see into more of what they are experiencing, resonate with them, and give them feedback and communicate with them in such way that they get in touch with their deeper truths, is that?

Meredith Medland: Exactly, yeah, and to be really clear, I definitely don’t go around the office telling people to breathe. So I am not doing a hippy-dippy let me be a Yoga teacher in the corporate environment and let’s all breathe together as much as I of course would love to do that.

Mark Michael Lewis: Wouldn’t that be fun!

Meredith Medland: Yeah that would be fun. I am actually not doing that, but it is really just taking a look at what’s going on me and my senses that in the late ‘90s it probably wasn’t doing that much. I was going really, really fast and now there’s so much more that can be done in a corporate environment when people come together and think about the outcomes that they want to create in a business meeting or whatever project is they are working on, or really, this will probably be the last piece of what I learned on this spiritual journey that I apply on a daily basis, is what is the person listening to me actually want to hear and how can I say it in a way that they can actually be clear about what I am saying.

Mark Michael Lewis: So they can actually hear you?

Meredith Medland: Yeah. There are a lot of words that get spoken in the corporate environment that are being spoken only for the person speaking.

Mark Michael Lewis: Right, and there’s a lot of words that are spoken out of the thought that they need to spoken, where when we can be really clear about what we are hearing and what we are saying. We can just say those things that really communicate what we need to communicate in order to build the partnerships we need to build. Does that fit for you?

Meredith Medland: Exactly and I call that precision language.

Mark Michael Lewis: Excellent, well, precision language, that’s good. How about if we -- we’re about to take a break for our sponsors. When we come back let’s get into a little bit about precision-language and how you use that with three outcomes so that my listeners can get some basic tools that they can use to start to create the kind of breakthrough results that you are getting. I am Mark Michael Lewis. I am speaking with Meredith Medland of 3outcomes.com and this is Money, Mission, and Meaning. We’ll be right back.

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Mark Michael Lewis: And we are back with Money, Mission, and Meaning. I am your host Mark Michael Lewis and we are speaking with Meredith Medland about the power of focus in creating thriving businesses and personal lives. So Meredith, let’s get right into your three outcomes work. What exactly is 3outcomes?

Meredith Medland: 3outcomes is a process that I apply in the corporate world mostly around goal setting and accountability. So it’s a system, and it facilitates a very simple process that brings teams together around a common set of goals while simultaneously creating individual accountability.

Mark Michael Lewis: And you have described yourself as an accountability consultant. What’s the difference between that and let’s say just coaching?

Meredith Medland: Well, first for you or for your listeners, think about what coach means to you and what that conjures up. For me that’s inspiring and that might be some tears and some fears and a little go, go, go and that might be once-a-week for an hour and it’s a little loose of a structure for me but it’s kind of fun, not really therapy.

Now think about what accountability means and then add consulting to that. So what accountability means…

Mark Michael Lewis: That’s pretty straightforward.

Meredith Medland: Go ahead.

Mark Michael Lewis: I said that’s pretty straightforward.

Meredith Medland: [Laughs]. Yeah. It’s a different set of tools and it’s a different style of listening that I have for my clients or the businesses that I work with and because they are paying me to hold them accountable, both the rate that I charge and who I get to be in that process is someone who people are making commitments that they keep to. So, it is very dead-line oriented as if you had a presentation that you had to get up and do next Tuesday and you had to have the presentation ready next Tuesday, bottom line.

Mark Michael Lewis: You are the person that they want to have on their side to make sure that they do all the things they need to do in order to excel at.

Meredith Medland: Precisely, and I am the person that makes them accountable to the date, the time and the action that they’ve chosen.

Mark Michael Lewis: Excellent, and before the break we started talking about precision language, when you talk about three outcomes, do you actually have people come up with three things that they want to accomplish?

Meredith Medland: Exactly, and it’s not so much around the accomplishing, the getting things done, it’s creating three sentence structures which are the outcomes for an individual and then also for the team, so the whole team creates three and each individual has three that serve the company’s three, the core three and they include ways of being, so those are verbs like inspiring, or focused, or attentive, or creative. They include also a time-line in them, a time-frame; by this date, at this time, this many times per week and they include what I would call a meta-outcome which is if you did these things and you were being this way, you’d get this thing done, which in the corporate world is like all right, A +, you got it done, and what I put into it as an outcome is actually, if you got that thing done, what would that ultimately give to you? So the languaging is all based around that greater theme and that’s where the inspiration comes in. So the trick is, the whole accountability, it actually, naturally bursts within the person because they are reading and expressing their outcomes on a daily basis.

Mark Michael Lewis: It sounds like because you’re getting this very precise, you are using precision language with certain features to the outcomes that they’re creating, it allows you to actually have them be accountable because they actually know what it is they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and by when they’re doing it.

Meredith Medland: Exactly, in Hapkido we say, “Do what you’re doing while you’re doing it and know why you’re doing what you’re doing.”

Mark Michael Lewis: [Laughs] “Know why you’re doing it”, I like that. And it’s funny because as I hear that, I have two thoughts, one of them is oh how simple, it’s so basic, it’s like why would anyone need to know that, but as a coach, as a consultant myself, I know that that is the hardest thing to do. One of the reasons I appreciate you calling yourself an ‘accountability consultant’ is because in my experience, people think that it’s simple, they think that they already should be doing it, but when they really look at it, they are not, and very few people are. What’s your experience? What does giving people the opportunity to get clear about three outcomes and to be accountable to that, what does that actually create for them?

Meredith Medland: Well it creates difficulty at first, and then in the end it creates incredible self-confidence.

Mark Michael Lewis: Well let’s talk a little bit about both of those. What kind of difficulties do people tend to encounter when they get this precise about their outcomes?

Meredith Medland: First of all, most people have a very hard time generating their outcomes on their own. They’re like “Oh yeah, cool, I’ll write three outcomes” and when I ask them to get really precise about it, it gets fogged up, “But I have this, and I have this and I have this” and then we keep going back to how can you create three that are the upper-tier strategy, so that all the responsibilities that might be the daily parts of your job, fall under those three. Or if it’s in someone’s personal life, what are your three ‘no matter what you do’ and it’s really based around and there’s the whole twelve-step theory, I think one of their mantras is ‘less is more’ and that sounds like a really simple phrase but the people who I know who have the most success and are the happiest in their lives, and have the deepest intimacy and the shine in their eyes, are the people who are focused on very few things and know why they’re doing the things that they’re putting their energy into.

Mark Michael Lewis: Right, do few things and do them well.

Meredith Medland: Exactly, and the good news about that just for the people who might say well, “I’m a jack of all trades”, is I’m that too. I mean this the conversation that I’ve had with my father many times in my early 20s, he said “You need to focus on things,” and I’d be like “No I love tasting and running around and doing lots of neat things.” That’s OK, because those skills and those talents, if they’re being focused on the achievement of something very specific, may actually all line up.

Mark Michael Lewis: So it’s not necessarily that you have to give things up but when you create a focus of three things and you’re focused on those, it allows all of the various skills that you have to fall into line such as they can support one another rather than fighting against each other, is that?

Meredith Medland: Yeah, so a really easy example for most people is using the body. So if I know for the rest of my life, that eating well and doing physical activity and being involved in a group of people where I can meet and hug and say hello and feel a part of a community, those are key strategies for me. So the outcome pulls me into that, if it’s something related to body mechanics and body movement and even though on my path that’s weaved in and out of different body, physical fitness, whether that’s kick-boxing, or martial arts, or yoga, or dance, each segment of time that the outcome is made, it’s focused on the body, so it’s OK to try new things, that’s what’s so great about three months. Anybody, with the right focus, with the right language and the right intention can create three new things, put their focus on these three new things and achieve them at the end of three months.

Mark Michael Lewis: So that’s the other part of the three outcomes, it’s three outcomes in three months?

Meredith Medland: Exactly, there’s four quarters in a year, four seasons in a year and a three-month time-frame is enough to fairly reliably predict and count on where you’re going to be that you’re not moving, or changing, or doing all sorts of things and it makes it much easier to focus.

Mark Michael Lewis: OK, so three months it’s not too short, but it’s not so long that you lose focus?

Meredith Medland: And it’s perfect for the corporate world because it’s in alignment with their quarters.

Mark Michael Lewis: Right, and one of the things you were saying is that when you get clear about what your three outcomes are, if you’re in a business setting, it sounds like you get clear what the department, or what the company’s three outcomes are and how each person’s outcomes fit into the other, into the overall picture, so everyone knows what they can count on from everyone, is that?

Meredith Medland: That is the key and the magic and the inspiration for me and many of the companies that I’ve worked with where we’ve created the three outcomes together, it’s usually a two-day training session, sometimes it can be done in one day, depends on the size of the team. Everyone comes together to form those outcomes. First I meet with the executive board or the CEO on the side so of course there is a facilitator, I’ve information and I know where to guide the crew so that it’s in alignment with sort of the master vision, and they come together and create those, so everyone has had a piece of the language, a piece of the vision, and they’re all dialed in.

Then the next week everyone comes back and creates their own outcomes, but they support the outcomes that were created by the pack. So you’ve got this, you know in spirituality it’s called ‘collective consciousness’ or the ‘power of a group’ or ‘the wisdom of crowds’ there are just lots of explanations for why that energetically works out. For me, I try to leave most of those away unless we’re kind of on a show like today and just say you know it’s great.

Mark Michael Lewis: We will have a little bit more flexibility.

Meredith Medland: Yeah, we have a little more flexibility but one of the things that I am very careful of is if I’m in a corporate environment, it’s like put your outcomes up on the wall, let’s create our outcomes together as a team, and ‘you rah, rah’ you know what I mean?

Mark Michael Lewis: Right, because it is about results and one of the things I really appreciate about what you’re doing is you get specific and when you get specific, you can say yes or no. You can say I am on track or I am off track and it’s that corporate, that direct that bottom line focus, that allows people to partner, because when you really don’t know what the other person is doing, you’re really not clear what you’re doing because you’re in that fog, it’s really difficult to partner because you keep ending up trampling on each others’ feet. Now question; to shift a little bit, I know that in your podcast Living Green: Effortless Ecology for Everyday People, you actually use the three outcome idea with most of your guests. You actually ask them what their three outcomes are. How does all the things that we’ve been talking about, all of that come into your podcast such that it can be one of the Top 100, in June it was in the Top 100 on iTunes, right?

Meredith Medland: Yes it was.

Mark Michael Lewis: That makes it one of the most successful podcasts on earth which you know it’s kind of nice; what 85,000 plus podcasts on iTunes right now?

Meredith Medland: Yeah, Top 100 at an 85,000.

Mark Michael Lewis: Well, congratulations and what is it about what you bring to that show that you think makes it so successful?

Meredith Medland: The listening that I give my guests.

Mark Michael Lewis: Can you say a little bit more about that?

Meredith Medland: Yes, when you ask questions and you’re really great at this too, so your listeners have experienced listening too, but when I ask questions of my guests that allow them to bring out their creativity, it’s amazing, the things that they tell me and one of the things that the whole concept of three outcomes does is, one, it creates safety because there is a time-frame, three outcomes in three months, OK, that’s completely digestible, that’s not necessarily, “ OK, what are your three outcomes for the rest of your life?” It’s just too much.

Mark Michael Lewis: Exactly, and don’t change them.

Meredith Medland: Exactly, and the other thing that it does for my listeners, is it enables them to be in service of my guests and often I give them that question in advance for the show, so that they have time to think about it and it really allows me as the interviewer to pull deeper into what their beliefs are, what their attitudes are and that’s what’s unique about the podcast is it’s not tips and tricks and how to be green better with here all the products and services that you can use, it’s distinguishing what are the attitudes of these guests and why are they doing what they’re doing and when you ask someone to create outcomes, it gives you a beautiful access point to what they’re thinking about.

Why do you want to do that? When I use the example of body and the importance of working out and eating well, if we wanted to, we could take a whole tangent under why that choice is there and what that means to me. There is a whole labyrinth to discover there. So in the domain of living green, or environmentalism when I am speaking to my guests, it’s so interesting to listen to their responses around this question.

Mark Michael Lewis: Right, because one of the things I am hearing is, it’s not just and to be fair, you do have some tips and tricks on how to be more green.

Meredith Medland: Oh sure.

Mark Michael Lewis: Yeah certainly, but I agree what you do is because you’re asking questions that actually engage your guests and you have on some guests that are some ‘movers and shakers’ in the green movement; when you do that you actually bring out the attitude such as the people who are listening not only get fish, but they learn how to fish, they learn how to approach the particular issues in their lives, such as they can begin to bring their own creativity and find their own ways of being more green.

Meredith Medland: Exactly, and you’ve said it precisely.

Mark Michael Lewis: OK, excellent, well we’re about to take another break, when we come back I want to talk a little bit about what it’s meant for you personally and your journey of coming full circle and bringing the consciousness and awareness and combining that with your marketing skills to really make an impact on where this whole Internet, global community is going. So I’m Mark Michael Lewis, this is ‘Money, Mission and Meaning’ and I’m speaking with Meredith Medland of threeoutcomes.com, we’ll be right back.

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Mark Michael Lewis: And we’re back with ‘Money, Mission and Meaning’, this is Mark Michael Lewis, I am speaking with Meredith Medland, so Meredith, you’ve enjoyed the business side of it, you got the participating in IPO, you got to go on adventures, investigate yourself, investigate more of the human condition and then bring it back in your show, Living Green, what’s one of your favorite pieces of what you get to bring from your guests that has you at the end of your show go “Yes, I am so glad I’m doing this, I’m so glad that I’m bringing this voice to the Internet where people can hear it.”

Meredith Medland: I love it when my guests tell me what’s working in their lives and they show me through stories and examples that spirit is alive and the earth is healing and things are getting better and better and better and life is working.

Mark Michael Lewis: Yeah, it’s such a great message because there is good reason to be concerned. I mean there are obviously some big things happening, but at the same time there’s a lot of good that’s being done and there’s a lot of progress that’s being made, so I appreciate that you bring that up. I’ll say one of the reasons I was excited to have you on this show and to introduce my listeners to you, this show is called ‘Money, Mission and Meaning’ and its purpose is to clear up what we might say is a mistake and the mistake is that we have to make a choice on the one hand between making money and on the other hand doing something that actually inspires us and gives us the sense of meaning, as if it’s some kind of like, either or choice where you do one or the other.

My experience in truth, it’s actually a both/and proposition. The more passion and joy to what you do, the more of your heart and soul that you bring, the better you get at it. The more effective you are and the more money and then social power you get to accumulate and build, in fact, I like to say that if you want to be truly extraordinary as a human being or a company, your most powerful choice is to tap into your genius and passion and be willing to risk, and you Meredith seem to have struck a really nice balance between those. How do you see that particular balance?

Meredith Medland: Well, I think you’re right, you’re very accurate when you say that I’ve taken a lot of risks and some of them worked and some of them haven’t, but I have always gone with my -- no I shouldn’t say always, certainly there have been times when I haven’t gone with my internal intelligence but in the times that I have and the times I’ve actually given thought to it, good things have happened and the way I can answer your question in the most authentic and accurate way is in regard to the success of Living Green. Ready for me to tell you how it happened?

Mark Michael Lewis: Yeah.

Meredith Medland: So I haven’t told this story in a media interview yet so you get the first dibs on it.

Mark Michael Lewis: Ooh! You’re hearing it first before…

Meredith Medland: That’s right; well next Tuesday on another radio show, so they might get it second if they ask. So the way that Living Green came about was it was a side-line fun project for me to learn more about ecology. I have a history of living around Wisconsin and kind of growing up green but of course we didn’t call it green, we were just living green and that’s kind of how it is in the Mid-west and I’ve lived in a small town and we’ve lived on a lake so the point is that I wanted to learn all these things that were said in the ecology movement, particularly, because they parlay so well into spirituality and technology.

So I went on a journey of this investigation and I researched guests who I wanted to have on my show and it never occurred to me in the beginning that I would actually make money in the show or because it’s advertising supported so it is -- you know I do earn money because of it and I didn’t know what its success would be, all I knew was that what I had committed to was a 52-week series, that was going to be weekly, which meant I had a weekly deadline and I needed to spend four to six hours researching a guest, get the guest on the show and make sure that I was informed enough to actually ask them interesting things.

The key moment when things changed for me was I believe it was Episode 5, I was interviewing Suzanne Sterling, and we were doing the interview in person and I had the microphone between us and I’ve known Suzanne, I have always respected her and thought she was a pretty amazing woman, and wanted to connect more deeply with her, and I had this moment in the middle of the interview where I thought holy shit Meredith, you’re not getting paid for this, you have this dynamic phenomenal woman right in front of you and you can ask her absolutely anything that you want to. So it’s probably a good idea to ask something that you’re actually really interested in.

Mark Michael Lewis: [Laughs] I love this, do go on please.

Meredith Medland: That moment it was, I believe that show got uploaded maybe 10 days later, when I look at the ratings of my show, that’s the show that the little line in the excel sheet, started going really high up and I think what happened is I finally kind of gave it up. I don’t need to be the interviewer that’s “Oh and how are you doing and let’s have a great show” but it was really like “Oh this is so awesome, I finally have a platform, thank you so much Susan Bratton and Tim Bratton thank you so much ‘Personal Life Media’ --finally have a platform where I have some position of authority and now there is a certain amount of power because there is a listening audience who has begun to trust me and listen, but the reason that happened is because I ended up trusting myself and thought oh I see, I am going to actually put myself out on a line and say hey can you help me out, can you teach me about ecology? Can you tell me what you know?

One of the things that I ask most of my guests is what is the thing that you know that no one else knows and its fascinating to hear what these people tell me, so I feel so much gratitude for that and the point of the whole story is that it turned out to be one of the most successful things that I’ve ever done in a short amount of time with relatively no energy because the passion and the creativity and the hours of research and excitement and typing things up on my blog, occurred to me as having fun. But then it never showed up as like a job or a work, or a -- it never a someday, somehow, I was in the moment all the time doing what I was doing and I knew why I was doing it, so it’s still very exciting as you can tell, I do love my show, I love my guests and I love just the whole mix.

Mark Michael Lewis: It’s perfect and it’s why I wanted to have you on this show because it’s that effortlessness that comes when you are doing something that you really care about and you were doing something and you were doing it well. It’s not that you were slouching, you were doing fine and then there was a point where you just said you know what, I am just going to do it with my whole heart and soul, I am really going to put myself into what I’m doing and that’s when things started happening and that’s what Money, Mission and Meaning is really all about. If I were to summarize what I think it is that you’re doing, that’s so great and why I think that you’re really hitting an exponential curve in your success or your growth is that you’re integrating Money, Mission and Meaning together.

What I mean by that is on the money dimension which has to do with external tangible reality and resources than what we actually do in the world part of alliance. Your work is all about real world at core results where people actually make progress towards their outcomes in a way that they can really tell the difference. So they wake up in the world that they inherit when they wake up as richer with more resources. So on the money and then on the mission dimension you help people get clear about the roles that they’re playing in the world.

Person, the vision, that half of their life, their body that are clear in their relationships, but when you are working with companies even more how each person gets their defined outcomes and then fits them together into the company so that the company can work together to achieve its company’s values. Then on the meaning level, or dimension, you’re helping people get clear about who they are and what they care about and helping them get a voice so they can speak it. In companies, I know you worked with what is the essential brand, what is this company really all about.

So the more they get clear on that, the more they can bring it into the mission, build the outcomes and then take the actions such that they create the money and it’s this integration of Money, Mission and Meaning that I think is the real art of 21st century business and it’s really making a difference. I like to talk about creating a game we all can win and I think that that’s really what you’re about, so I guess in closing, what I’d like to have you leave us with is what has it meant to you personally to have brought all of this together and to be making an impact on the world the way that you are? What’s it really about for you, what do you see as possible and how do you feel about what it is that you’re doing?

Meredith Medland: Well, what it means to me is that my spirit is alive and for anyone who is listening, whatever is your interpretation is of creativity, or energy, or spirituality, or endogenous, call it what you will, god, let’s call it, that it works to follow your faith and to follow your heart and there are real world disciplines associated with that and so if you have passion and you’re looking to create money in your life, make some actual real dollars and put it in a CD and play a money game and pretend that money is not there and put enough for what you’ve created, three months of safety. Then look at the next three months of your life, look at the three outcomes that you’d like to create and go get them. And I’m living proof that it’s true, that you can follow a vision, you can live in faith and you can create if you use precision language.

Mark Michael Lewis: Right, I want to say one of the things I appreciate about what you just said is that it’s not the either/or, it’s not that you visualize and manifest, it’s that you get clear about what it is you want, and then you take real action towards it. It’s the both/and, it’s the action and the attitude, the inspiration and the perspiration as the saying goes. Thank you Meredith for coming on this show and sharing yourself with my guests, and I look forward to hearing more of your shows; by the way if anyone wants to hear Meredith’s show, it’s ‘Living Green’ you can find it at personallifemedia.com and I’ll say a little bit more about how people can get in touch with you in just a minute. Thank you for coming on this show Meredith, is there anything you’d like to say before we sign off?

Meredith Medland: Well, I just want to say thank you so much Mark, it’s awesome being on your show and for your listeners, if you’re not quite sure of what your purpose is, just remember you can live in the ‘I don’t know’ and maybe one of your outcomes in the next three months is to find out what that is and to focus on that. So it’s OK if you don’t know what your mission is, it will come to you and sometimes that can be wonderfully had in the middle of the night, so remember that you can always ask for what you’re looking for and it can’t happen overnight.

Mark Michael Lewis: Excellent, thank you so much Meredith.

Meredith Medland: Thank you Mark it’s so awesome to participate in your show, thanks.

Mark Michael Lewis: So for more information on Meredith Medland, go to her website at 3outcomes.com that’s the number 3, then the word ‘outcomes’, no space in between them so just 3outcomes.com. Again, to hear Top 100 podcasts, go to personallifemedia.com and click on Living Green: Effortless Ecology for Everyday People. And for more information about me, Mark Michael Lewis, you can look the SEEINC, a beautiful future now, try to upgradeyourenergydrink.com, that’s upgradeyourenergydrink.com, all one word, or you can look at the philosophy and vision behind our company, our Money, Mission and Meaning, at agameweallcanwin.com, that’s ‘agameweallcanwin’, all one word .com.

For text and transcripts of this show and other shows on the Personal Life Media Network, please visit our website at personallifemedia.com, there’s a lot of great podcasts on there. I’m your host Mark Michael Lewis, CEO of Smart Energy Enterprises, SEEINC, a beautiful future now. That brings us to the end of our show, thanks for listening and join us next week on Money, Mission, and Meaning: Passion at Work, Purpose at Play, where we explore how we can integrate our personal values and professional skills to create pleasure and profit in the business of life.

For bio and show information visit www.meredithmedland.com.

For more information email info@3outcomes.com or call 805.636.8182.