Will your nonprofit survive – or thrive?

Lee Wochner:
Stuart, it’s great having you. I have to admit to being a big fan for some time now.

Stuart McFaul:
Thank you. It’s a pleasure being here.

Lee Wochner:
You and I first met, it was three or four years ago at a marketing meetup in New Orleans. And you and I spent the whole time traveling around New Orleans, enjoying every bit of New Orleans. And I just thought, I just got to spend more time with this guy. Super smart, really great, lots of fun.

Stuart McFaul:
Alright.

Stuart McFaul:
I felt exactly the same. And I think we closed down every bar in New Orleans that night. So it was a great way to get acquainted with each other and appreciate what we could bring out in each other. So thanks for that.

Lee Wochner:
So I know you’re a busy guy. I want to dive right in because you are someone I could talk to for hours and days. And we’ve got some crucial issues to discuss having to do with nonprofits and marketing and also the context of where we are. So let me start with this. We’re living in a period of enormous change socially, economically, politically, and all over the globe.

And so it can be very frightening and it’s a case of everything everywhere. Everything everywhere is happening seemingly all at the same time. And it’s a time where the rules you believed in on Friday sometimes feel like they’re gone on Tuesday and they no longer apply. They went right out the window. And expecting a return to the rules of Friday is perhaps not the best plan because Friday is over.

And that’s what I’m seeing. Is that what you’re seeing?

Stuart McFaul:
It’s definitely what I’m seeing. I’m actually, and it’s really interesting that you say everything everywhere because that’s actually one of the first things that I’m seeing is that it’s like that movie, Everything Everywhere All At Once. Some of it’s situational, how society’s been evolving, like all of a sudden there’s this AI boom that’s displacing workers. Some of it is manipulated.

such as politicians purposefully creating social confusion so that it’s impossible to focus on any single problem. So that’s one thing, the everywhere, everything everywhere all at once. The second thing is, is what I call the boiled frog syndrome. And I don’t know if you’ve, if you’ve ever heard the analogy that if you put a frog in hot water, he leaps out because he knows he’s being burned.

Lee Wochner:
Hmm

Stuart McFaul:
But if you put a frog in water that’s heated slowly, you could cook the frog and he’ll never realize that that’s actually happening. And that’s what’s been happening in society over the course of the last several years. There is a Soviet historian named Alexei Yurchak who coined a term for it and it’s called hyper normalization.

Lee Wochner:
Hmm.

Lee Wochner:
Hmm.

Stuart McFaul:
It’s where everyone in society knows the system isn’t working. They call it out and yet no one does anything about it. And so this is what happened in Soviet Russia. It’s what’s happened here. Actually, there’s a great documentary about this concept on YouTube and there was a recent article about hypernormalization in The Guardian. So I recommend just for context setting for people.

Lee Wochner:
Right.

Stuart McFaul:
It’s a great article to be able to read.

Lee Wochner:
Okay, so, and thank you for that. And you said last several years, and I would submit.

that these things have been coming on for about 25 years. I mean, when you look at the pace of change for my children, mean, my children are all young adults and they’ve grown up in a world of instability. mean, dot-com boom, dot-com bust, September 11, great recession, COVID, the political situation. I mean, it’s just never ending. And so I don’t know that for that generation, for generations younger than we are, there’s any trust in any sort of situation.

patient.

Stuart McFaul:
And I would say that’s very, and that’s particularly true of Gen Z. It’s one reason why they tend to be a little recessive in terms of how they interact with each other. I had an interesting realization the other day is that, you know, I continually hear the complaints about Gen Z. Gen Z, they’re always focused on their screens. They always have their heads down looking at that. And…

I realized that it’s not necessarily because they are trying to be anti-social. I’m wondering if it isn’t because they want to do this as a form of self-protection just because they’re being assailed from all sides. So I started looking at that in the context of people in general. And I think one reason why we have this screen fixation is that

We just are trying to shut things out and to have our own space where we can do our own thinking and feel safe.

Lee Wochner:
Well, perhaps. in fairness, there’s also the truth that every generation complains about the ones after them, as though they are inept, clueless, and incapable. And I just don’t think that’s true. But they all, you I was reading a biography of an ancient Roman emperor recently, and of course, that generation was complaining about the generation after them. was ludicrous. So with all of this change going on,

Stuart McFaul:
You

Lee Wochner:
How are we expected to deal with that? I mean, when you think about humans, humans aren’t really wired for change. Our DNA is still better suited to avoiding the hyenas and the lion that would like to eat us. And so all of this change we’re faced with on a daily basis, and let’s enumerate some of them, changing ideas about how organizations and governments should work and how they should work together, how work-life is going to function with hybrid, fully remote.

part-time independent contractors, flex time, God knows what else, with artificial intelligence and whether or not you’re even going to have a job because of it. How are we expected to deal with all that? That’s a tsunami of change.

Stuart McFaul:
It is. It is. And the one thing I think that we can always be certain of is that there will be change. To try to forestall change or prevent change is naive. We can’t do that. One of the things that always fascinated me when I was in college, I studied political science. And I was fascinated with Plato’s succession of governments.

And that was, it was a series of various governmental structures that if you overlay that series over any period of history, it has remained true for centuries. And so we naturally migrate from one form of government to another form of government. And so what we’re experiencing right now, we have to take a step back and just say, you know what, this is part of the natural flow that we’re going.

Lee Wochner:
Hmm.

Stuart McFaul:
This is the way it has worked for centuries.

Lee Wochner:
Well, well, hang on. Aren’t you, aren’t you hyper normalizing this, the change in government? Aren’t you already doing that? I mean, I thought, correct me if I’m wrong. No.

Stuart McFaul:
Bye.

Stuart McFaul:
No, well, hypernormalizing is saying that you can’t do anything. What happens in the succession of governments is the acknowledgement that you have to do something, that there has to be change. And that actually ties into the point that I really want to get to, is that our only path really is taking action right now. In a hypernormalized world,

Lee Wochner:
That’s.

Stuart McFaul:
What you are called to do is to take action for yourselves, for your family and friends, for your communities. Think about it as concentric circles where we are demanded to take action.

Lee Wochner:
Well, that’s reassuring. And the reason that I and everybody at Counteractuity are so focused on nonprofits is as government steps back in some ways, as some pre-existing social structures fall apart, we’re going to need these nonprofits even more so. there’s a market opportunity for nonprofits to assume a greater role. And so my question would be,

How did they go about doing that? So let’s talk about planning for a minute, right? So you and I believe in planning and understanding things and what your best course is. And in this environment of rapid successive change, how can one do planning? how can a nonprofit do a marketing plan or a fundraising plan when Tuesday is not like Friday?

Stuart McFaul:
So I’m going to say something maybe a little controversial and it’s just me taking a step back after working with nonprofits for so long. And so the first thing that I would invite nonprofits today is looking at themselves differently as nonprofits. think nonprofit as a term can be really misleading.

Lee Wochner:
Mm-hmm.

Lee Wochner:
Hmm.

Stuart McFaul:
because I think it encourages some not to see themselves as a business. And the fact is, you are a business. And in fact, you’re a business that’s held up to higher levels of requirements for performance and scrutiny than most businesses. So I really invite nonprofits to think of themselves more as social impact organizations first and take nonprofit out of the vocabulary.

And realize that as a social impact organization, you’re being held up to a higher standard. When money’s tight, like it is now, people want to know that their money is being well invested and spent. So transparency, common sense budgeting, prioritizing, getting good advisors to help you are really critical. And so what I’ve invited

some of the non-profits that I’ve worked with that I think has been very helpful for them is to say, always try to be the grown-up in the room, both within your own organization and within the community that you’re trying to serve. In San Francisco, we’ve had several instances in the last few years of non-profits using money and relationships in kind of dodgy ways.

Lee Wochner:
Mmm.

Stuart McFaul:
including the organizations that provide the oversight themselves. So there should be no tolerance for that anywhere in the community. So standing up and saying, you know, we can do this in a better way, I think is the first step towards achieving the credibility that you’re looking for.

Lee Wochner:
So in an era when you can’t always trust what you’re hearing from Washington DC, in terms of market capability, what I’m hearing here is if nonprofits are the white knights, they will, which I think most of them are anyway. if you put on your best behavior constantly, you stand in stark relief. And you’re a place that more of the market, i.e. funders and…

agents of change can move to in response to we can’t trust what’s coming out of Washington DC.

Stuart McFaul:
Absolutely in a way it’s kind of like I’m going back to our theory and legend right now It’s kind of being you know the Knights of the Round Table the Knights of the Round Table had a code that they worked by and They all agreed to where they they all fought their separate battles. They each had their separate strengths But they all adhered to the same code and I think going and having the community Working to adhere to that same code

Lee Wochner:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McFaul:
being the grownups, having common sense responses, working with good advisors, being transparent, educating their teams in how to do this, that’s all steps towards creating better standards that will help, that will elevate the community as a whole, as well as organizations themselves.

Lee Wochner:
It’s interesting to me that you’re on about this because maybe there’s been a rash of this in San Francisco. I have to admit I have not seen this here elsewhere. I we have clients throughout California.

and New York and elsewhere. What I’m seeing is a lot of people with really good ideas making really important impacts and they’re just trying to adjust to the funding climate and the funding climate being we were awarded a grant but the money’s not going to come now or you know we thought this was happening now this isn’t happening and and I had a call yesterday with an important nonprofit and

Recently, they’ve laid off half their staff, as an example. And you and I are both aware of hundreds of nonprofits that have lost their government grants. And one of them said to me, well, we’re considering doing this thing, but we’re not sure we’re going to be getting our money from the EPA. That didn’t sound very good, etc, etc. And I mean, you can, you can be the best boy in school and clean the chalkboard and do all these other things. But when you…

Lee Wochner:
But again, to use my metaphor, when you woke up and it was Tuesday and no longer Friday, I’m not sure what you do about it because you were living in a Friday world where here’s how this all works. And now it’s Tuesday and it’s like, that doesn’t work that way anymore. And so my question would be, how would you advise a nonprofit or really any organization if right now they found themselves in trouble? What should they do? So again, you now realize, holy cow, we’re in trouble.

What should we do?

Stuart McFaul:
I think the thing is going back to what I said kind of at the beginning is that you’re a business first. And as a business, every business when it is faced with economic challenges, staff challenges, so on and so forth, you really have to make hard decisions. And you have to prioritize in the right way. So I would say put the business first.

because if you put the business first, the mission will follow. But your key is to keep the doors open and prioritize what you’re doing so that you can deliver in the most effective way that you possibly can. And this means at times making very, very difficult decisions.

Lee Wochner:
So the shorthand for that is hope is not a plan. Hope is not a plan, yeah. And you know, sure, we’ve all seen that, right? In small business or nonprofit or whatever, the good people who are just thinking if they hang on, and what you’re saying is when change arrives at your doorstep, you better recognize it’s coming in and you better do something about it.

Stuart McFaul:
Yes, well you don’t have a choice because you’re either going to respond properly or ineffectively and you’ll be harmed by that. there are some changes, I mean you use the term tsunami, there are some changes that are just simply so inevitable.

Lee Wochner:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McFaul:
that you have to figure out what is your survival strategy going to be? And again, this is about being the grownup in the room and making the very difficult decisions that might not make you popular, but will be able to help you survive.

Lee Wochner:
You and I have both been in a marketing consortium that preaches certain business precepts of here’s where your percentages of whatever should be. And we’ve both seen the people who pursue and follow those and they survive and thrive. And then we’ve both seen the ones who don’t and they suffer the fallout of hoping as a plan. And so what you’re saying is,

Nonprofits are businesses as well. They’d better know their fundamentals. Like here’s how much for sure we need to take in every month so that we hit payroll. And here’s how much we need in reserves. And if we don’t have these things, as an example, we’d better make changes.

Stuart McFaul:
That’s absolutely correct. I know a little bit later we’ll be talking a little bit about AI. And that’s actually where things like AI potentially could be very, very helpful to nonprofits to be able to help them do the forecasting more easily, to be able to anticipate some of the problems that they may run

Lee Wochner:
Mm-hmm.

Lee Wochner:
So let’s talk about sifting. So here’s one of my favorite metaphors in my life. I learned this in college, college biology. I was gonna fail college biology, by the way. And so I dropped and you had to take it to graduate. You had to pass to graduate. And then I committed myself and my grade point average numerically was 127.

because I really did every bit of extra whatever one could do. And so the professor said, you don’t have to take the final. Because even if you got a zero on the final, you’ve got an A. But so the biology, and then I took all the sciences, Stuart, because I fell in love with science. But I developed a can-do attitude rather than a I can’t do this attitude. So here’s the metaphor I found out about. In our systems, we have semi-permeable membranes, of course.

Stuart McFaul:
Wow.

Lee Wochner:
and semipermeable membranes let in nutrients and let out waste on a cellular level. And so I thought about that for 40 years now almost, 40 years I thought about semipermeable membranes. And so here’s my question for you. All of this change is arriving, huge change. And I tell my kids, it wasn’t like this when I was a kid. mean, this is radical change, good and bad, radical, radical change.

How can nonprofits, nonprofits are in the business of change. They want to affect a positive change. How can they look at the downside or look at all of this change and make sure that they’re welcoming in what might be useful, make something of it and repel what’s not useful?

Stuart McFaul:
think it’s really adopting the attitude that in every opportunity there is positive and negative. There’s always an upside, there’s always a downside. I think it’s easier if you feel threatened by what’s happening to look at the downside and say, what can we do? That’s human nature. But what I invite people to do all the time

is to say, and this is actually a little bit about the definition of what gratefulness is, it’s understanding that life is really yin and yang and that everything that’s given to us in terms of opportunity has an upside and a downside to it. So what I always ask people to do is to say, well, where’s the gift in the situation that you’re being given? So there’s always

There’s always an upside opportunity in any situation if you distance yourself enough from the problem to allow yourself to see it. So, whereas you may feel overwhelmed by what’s going on, your funding’s been taken away, you know, you’re going to have to downsize your staff. What’s the negative aspect is that you have to downsize your staff? Well,

Maybe in downsizing your staff, you’re getting rid of a poor performer in doing that. And then that’s actually allowing you to operate more effectively. Maybe in downsizing your budget, you’re going to have to take out programs that maybe haven’t been as effective for you or could be combined in other ways or could be executed in partnership with other similar organizations. So there are opportunities.

Lee Wochner:
Hmm.

Stuart McFaul:
that come up if you allow yourself to see what the potential upsides could be.

Lee Wochner:
Two cases in point. The one is during COVID, we bought out another agency and picked up business and we’re helping those nonprofits. I don’t believe in hunkering down on your marketing in particular when there’s a recession. think that’s everybody’s running one way, it’s good to run the other way and see what’s over there and if there’s an opportunity. That’s to your point.

And then, you know, when we look at the monumental change of the last 10 to 15 years, a lot of it unpleasant, let’s be frank, a lot of it unpleasant at the same time, case in point, 15 years ago, you and I wouldn’t have been able to have this video recording, let alone a podcast. This discussion would have cost thousands of dollars. Stuart, can you please fly down here or we’ll fly up there. We’re going to assemble the video crew. We’ve got a studio booked.

Lee Wochner:
etc etc loads of time lots of cash to make that happen yet here we are

Stuart McFaul:
I mean, this goes back to, you I always use the example of the Industrial Revolution. And when the Industrial Revolution came along, people thought it was going to be the death of society. And in some ways, it did kill various aspects of society, but it was to allow for evolution on other fronts.

So we’re going to see that same kind of thing happen in our society. We’re going to see the introduction of new ways of doing things, more effective ways of doing things, hopefully smarter ways of doing things that can benefit people. But there are going to be downsides to it too. We’re going to see changes. And right now, I think we as a society really aren’t acclimated.

to handling change very well, particularly if it’s coming from all sides and we’re not sure how to prioritize and so on and so forth, which is why I’m saying, you know, let’s focus on the things that we can affect, the things local to us, and then take those concentric circles out, but work that way. Work on what you can affect because that’s the thing that will probably most positively affect you.

Lee Wochner:
and we’re gonna be doing that in just a minute. We’re gonna take a short break here, but when we come back, Stuart and I are going to talk about how you can make the most of artificial intelligence and other cool new whizbang tools that I’m sure he’s aware of, and I’m not yet, and why you should stay hopeful. Stick around.

COMMERCIAL BREAK

Lee Wochner:
And we are back with technologist and inspirational changemaker Stuart McFaul. So Stuart, let’s talk about artificial intelligence. Is it gonna put everybody out of work?

Stuart McFaul:
short answer is no. I think there’s going to be a little bit of a stop gap for people. We’re seeing artificial intelligence really hitting like a tidal wave in a lot of ways and companies are right now in the process of kind of sorting out what is the impact that it’s going to make. So we are seeing some things in the short term. For example,

Gen Z hiring out of college, I was talking to a couple of recruiters this past week, is down about 60 % of what it typically is. So this means that Gen Z is being challenged in finding work, and particularly the critical work that allows them an entry path into the workforce. What I think is going to happen

is that Gen Z also has the opportunity to own the understanding of AI and bring that to the workforce. So it’s really going to be ultimately how we are combining our natural human skill sets with AI to create a better end product in the long run.

Lee Wochner:
So typewriters certainly put scribes out of business and sort of the printing press. And when I was a boy, I took typing in high school and I was a little young for high school anyway. And it led to my first job at age 14. The Atlantic City Press hired me to take classified. I know I talked my way into that job. They did not want to interview me. I wouldn’t give up. But I could type 86 words a minute flawlessly.

And they already used IBM Selectric IIs. That’s what I had, the self-correcting typewriter. And then the guy hiring me, Fred Findley. Thank you, Fred. Fred’s in the great beyond now. I miss him. But Fred said, but we’re going to be switching to computers. And I go, I have one at home. It’s fine. See, I was set for this and I was 14. And so what you’re saying is for Gen Z, they are artificial intelligence natives.

and they will find their way. Is that what you’re saying?

Stuart McFaul:
That’s absolutely true. you know, and I recall when we moved from typewriters to computers, I remember everybody thought that it was going to be the death of office work and that, you know, secretaries were going to go away and all this kind of stuff. And the fact is there was a certain amount of that, but it was an evolution into something else.

Lee Wochner:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McFaul:
And that’s what’s going to happen here. It’s not going to necessarily be a revolution that, you know, everything is going to be thrown out. It’s going to be an evolution into something else as a society.

Lee Wochner:
So let’s talk about your consulting practice. And I have to tell you, I saw your recent gobsmacking presentation when you and I were out of the country on business. I always learned something from your presentations and my first response is always, holy hell, what is this now? I mean, you just seem to know all of this stuff. And you’re very well connected.

I thought I was well connected and now I am because I know you see because I know you I’m well connected. How has artificial intelligence changed your consulting practice?

Stuart McFaul:
It’s changing it in some interesting ways. One is that I treat AI as a way to easily organize information for me so that I can move more quickly. I also use AI agents as advisors to me. what I do is that I create AI agents to basically say, okay, you’re my expert in this. And then I help

them, I gather the intelligence that I want them to reflect and then I use them to actually run product buy. So, you know, I’m coming up with a plan. I’ll say, okay, I need my marketing expert agent to come in and take a look at this and say, well, where are the holes in this? Where could this be done better? And it actually says things that are actually very, very smart and very, very interesting.

And it allows me to reform what it is that I’m doing. The other thing that it’s done for my consulting practice is that because I’m developing this facility, I have a lot of people saying, well, how are you using it? And how can I use it in what I’m doing? And this is the thing that I’m really enjoying right now is I’m discovering that sharing this information with other people

Lee Wochner:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McFaul:
is not only upping their game, but it’s giving me insights in how they use it as to how I can better use it. So it’s changing my practice significantly, but because the core philosophy of what I do is based on managing relationships, the role of me as the marketer doesn’t change.

AI can inform me in how management relationships should be, but it can’t be me. And so there’s always going to be the role for the human, at least in what I do.

Lee Wochner:
I had a meeting this morning with a nonprofit leader. She’s involved with an organization with 70 other nonprofits in her community. And one of the things she talked about was they are looking at, they all of them are looking at artificial intelligence very closely to supplement.

as an example, staff they can’t afford or staff that they had to let go or things they can’t do otherwise. And when I had asked you for some further background into your resume and such. It took you 39 seconds because you had perplexity AI write it. And I was like, damn, Stuart invested no time in this and perplexity wrote it. And then I you know, perplexity wrote it, I had to read it.

and find some things. What can artificial intelligence do for your average nonprofit organization? Can you give us some examples?

Stuart McFaul:
I think it will become an element of every job inside a nonprofit. Whether to inform you, advise you, guide you, execute the work for you, it will become part of the work that you do every day. Now, it may displace some positions. It may force others to be combined into new roles, new types of roles that have

new requirements. But there’s always going to be room for people. Social impact organizations are relationship first. So you can leverage AI to help focus on that. So I’ll give you some examples of ways in which you can use AI. So with one organization that I’m advising, we’re using AI to better understand our donors and our potential donors.

Lee Wochner:
Hmm.

Stuart McFaul:
not only understanding where our donors are coming from and why they might be donating money, but to also look at the communities that surround them and see who we could approach as potential donors. So AI is very, very helpful in that way. And that would be something that would be rather daunting within a small nonprofit to do with individuals. But AI allows you to do it at scale in a very, very good way.

Lee Wochner:
Is there a specific, I’m sorry, there, I’m sorry, I cut you off. Is there a specific platform that does that? Is there a specific AI tool that does that? Is it through their CRM? How does this work?

Stuart McFaul:
We’re all. Sorry.

Stuart McFaul:
So there are tools that can do that. I gotta tell you, the tools are, they’re evolving every day. And if you’re doing anything related to nonprofits, there is an online resource called There’s an AI for that, which I love.

Lee Wochner:
Mm-hmm.

Lee Wochner:
Yeah.

Stuart McFaul:
and it’s essentially a leaderboard of all the various AI solutions developed for different industries and different applications. And I, and I’m not kidding. I go in there once or twice a week and look at particular leaderboards and there’s always new players in there. So it is so fast changing and who the leaders are change very, very quickly as well. But that’s the first place that I would really recommend anybody in nonprofits to go and take a look at the type of solutions that you want to use. So, go ahead.

Lee Wochner:
We did an internal review of AI platforms to add to our suite here at Counterintuity, and the number each of us was asked to assess was 59—59 new tools to potentially add. And I didn’t have time to review 59 of these, let alone make full recommendations. And I’m sure there are thousands more to consider. I mean, how on earth is one to pick and choose from what are the best tools in this tool chest?

Stuart McFaul:
It’s so hard. So the last stat I heard is that there are 6,207 AI companies and—

Lee Wochner:
Wait, wait, I’m sorry—6,200 and, and now since you got to the end of the sentence, it’s 6,208.

Stuart McFaul:
Seven.

Stuart McFaul:
And that’s—or nine or 10. But the interesting thing about all of them is that—and this is very much similar to how it was at the beginning of the internet—is that there were a lot of very, very small, discreet companies that were doing very, very specific things. And that’s what a lot of these AI companies are doing right now. They’re not doing anything—most of them are not doing anything broad.

Lee Wochner:
You—

Stuart McFaul:
They’re doing something very, very specific. And so you need to look at them as cogs in a machine. And what’s going to happen is that there’s going to be consolidation in AI. And these cogs are going to come together and start building the machine that we ultimately will come to call general AI. So right now we have the big, I would say, multiple cog—

Lee Wochner:
Hmm.

Lee Wochner:
Hmm.

Stuart McFaul:
—machines that are out there like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Jasper—things that we can use to do multiple tasks. But then there are those tools that also allow us to go very, very deep. So whether we’re trying to create images or trying to build websites or trying to code—those deep ones are the ones that ultimately will probably be combined in various ways to create this AI machine that I’m talking about.

And this is why you really want to stay on top of what’s going on in the space. There’s “There’s An AI for That” as a resource. There’s another one called “The Rundown AI,” which also gives you a sense of who the leading players are. It also has a university that actually can help educate you in AI and how AI can be used.

Lee Wochner:
When you talk about this big master AI, isn’t that called Skynet from the Terminator movies? I mean, this is exactly what people are worried about, Stuart—Skynet. And you’re like, it’s all going to be combined into Skynet.

Stuart McFaul:
Well, you know, I’ll be honest—I personally am a little concerned about that because what I do see right now in the United States is the evolution of AI without guardrails. In the UK and in Europe, you’re starting to see guardrails being built around AI. I think that’s going to—I think that needs to happen fairly soon because I do fear that there will be some irresponsible use of AI out—

Lee Wochner:
Mm-hmm.

Lee Wochner:
Okay, so to go back to my example of IBM Selectric II and then home computers and laptops and such, right? And now we have AI. What would you say to people who haven’t adopted any of the new AI tools yet or who don’t want to? What would you say to them?

Stuart McFaul:
Yeah, so there’s an old expression: lead, follow, or get out of the way. And in this case, I think this applies. You need to ask yourself, where do I want to be in that sequence? Do I want to lead? Do I want to follow? And if not, just get out of the way—and, in my opinion, be prepared to be run over to a certain degree.

Lee Wochner:
Yeah, fair enough. It’s hard to stand in the way of technology. So I want to switch gears for—we got a few minutes left. I’m gonna switch gears and address the feeling of overwhelm. There’s just a lot to feel overwhelmed by. And we know that a lot of people are feeling very stressed. And I know that you’ve worked with, as an example, the organization Grateful Living, which helps people live meaningful lives through gratitude. Can you talk a little bit about that work?

Stuart McFaul:
Yeah, I think the thing that Grateful Living, which is at Grateful.org, has taught me—and this was really a revelation for me, and I referred to this a little bit earlier—is that the real spirit of gratefulness is understanding that life is always a mixture of yin and yang. It’s always good and bad. And for you to be able to appreciate that, in the moment when you feel something bad is happening—for you to ask yourself, “Well, where’s the gift in this situation?”

So I’ll give you an example: my best friend’s mother passed away the week before last, and I flew to Boston for the funeral. And it would have been, I think, very, very sad if we had just focused on the loss. But what we did is that we focused on the gift that she gave everyone—the humor, raising a great family, the fact that when she passed, she passed peacefully in her sleep. There were a lot of positives that happened related to that, which helped balance a very, very sad situation and made people actually appreciate the richness of her life and what she gave to others.

So that’s the thing that I ask people in everyday life—when you’re feeling stressed out, when you’re feeling like, “My gosh, this is too much”—take a beat and ask yourself, “Is there a gift in this moment that I can appreciate?” And if so, elevate that and use that to balance what you’re dealing with.

Lee Wochner:
What makes you feel hopeful these days?

Stuart McFaul:
Sometimes not a lot. I think the fact that when I acknowledge that right now we are all in the same boat, the best question that we can ask of each other every day is, “How can I help you? How can I be here for you?” Because in asking that question, it invites the natural response of others to say to you, “How can we be here for you as well?” And when you’re creating an environment where there is that ongoing sense of mutual support, I think you can’t help but feel hope.

Lee Wochner:
Is there any further advice you’d like to share with listeners?

Stuart McFaul:
I just say at these times: be kind to yourself and understanding of others. That’s where I think it starts. And if you use that as your baseline philosophy, I think that will take you a long way.

Lee Wochner:
Stuart, what’s the best way for people to connect with you?

Stuart McFaul:
They can contact me at Stuart, s-t-u-a-r-t, at StuartMcFaul.com.

Lee Wochner:
Awesome. Stuart, thank you so much. It’s been an absolute pleasure, and I look forward to closing down another city with you sometime soon.

Stuart McFaul:
It’ll be a blast. I would love that.

Stuart McFaul:
Thank you.