The Tight Five: Episode 7 – The Influencers

The Tight Five: Origin Stories from The Second Row

Now that I’ve done five full episodes of The Tight Five: Origin Stories from The Second Row, I wanted to share a collection of insights from a question that I asked everyone:

“What book, author or thinker has been a touchstone for you in your career?”

Ranging from Nelson Mandela to innovative leaders in mental health and technology to disruptive creative thinkers to farm to table community focused chefs in the English countryside, each of these leading thinkers have influenced each of our Tight Five subjects in their own unique way, ENJOY!

Tight Five: Origin Stories from The Second Row is a series of conversations with smart, thought-provoking folks who are doing great things in ‘The Front Row’ of work, mental health, marketing, service and technology and how they came to their personal and professional path in life.

The Tight Five: Episode 5 - Aaron Katz, Owner, Search Maven Marketing

There are so many search marketing thinkers that I follow, but I'd have to say probably at the top of the list would be Rand Fishkin. He's one of the original founders of Moz, which is an SEO management platform tool. Then he left Moz and started another company called Spark Toro which is an audience engagement tool for data and analytics. He's great.

I follow his musings online and he's usually pretty right about many of the challenges and changes within the marketing space and he wrote a really good book called, Lost & Founder. That was a pretty intense book about his journey building up Moz and then losing Moz essentially and what that was like to go through funding and then VC funding and all that, it's a good read.

The Tight Five: Episode 4 - Dan Gruenpeter, Executive Producer & Co-Owner, Bottle Tree Pictures

I think from a personal interest side, Simon Sebag Montefiore. Who has written a number of books on the Russian Revolution, Stalin, and Russian history. I just love documentaries and I'd like to think our business is going more into the documentary space, as 2023 has been a year that we've jumped into documentaries. We did one in South Africa, in Soweto, which was really a life changing experience personally and we've got a few others on the docket.

As a business leader, I'm going to have to say Steve Jobs. Being an immigrant myself and a real student of immigrant history and success stories. While he himself was not an immigrant, his parents were. I think to be able to enter into a world, being an immigrant is that you leave something behind and you’re immediately at a disadvantage, but it's something that works within immigrant souls that pushes them, that gives them a drive to succeed.

And then politically, I'd have to say Nelson Mandela. I mean as somebody that has suffered anxiety issues in the past, having to deal with them, people like Nelson Mandela put life into perspective. So, just in terms of leadership, somebody that dealt with the worst of the worst of humanity, can be so forgiving and actually lead from the top and create a group of followers. He would definitely be my political thinker of our time. I just look at him and I say, what am I suffering anxiety for!? I've really got no worries compared to what other people have gone through.

The Tight Five - Episode 3 - Patrick Ryan, Active & Connected Family Therapy

So, thinking about this, it’s not really a book, but more the place I mentioned earlier on. Wediko, my first job out of BC and they gave me a job after graduate school, which I mentioned earlier and the opportunity to work with some amazing people there. My first supervisor, Dr. Hugh Lightman, I only worked with him for a couple years, but he still makes an impact on how I think about children and families.

Dr. Harry Pared, with whom I had the opportunity to work with him for years. He is with me in almost every session as I do my clinical work to this day. Dr. Todd Rossi is another awesome clinician who really helps me think outside the box. Finally, Patty Freeze, who is in charge of finance, just their commitment to children and families and their commitment to making the organization work, really taught me the importance of caring for staff. The importance of families in making sure they are involved in the work.

And the importance of celebrating successes and so often when we're working with a kid and the family's really struggling, they have trouble recognizing the small things. But if we start celebrating those small things, we start getting momentum and we can really make some change.

The Tight Five: Episode 2 - Matthew Doyle, CastleHill Counseling & Consulting

There is a gentleman named William Madsen, a very talented psychologist based in Watertown, Massachusetts, who sadly passed away recently. I have been heavily influenced by his work over the past 15 years. His work is really about the importance of human connection. First and foremost, and then building out the technical aspects from there, but the key philosophy of staying curious with people, holding back from jumping into solutions prematurely. Getting into ‘the solution’ is our natural tendency, but it's not always the best step in that moment. What’s important is getting into the understanding of what is driving a dynamic for someone or an energy for someone or a or a mental health shift for someone, his work is amazing.

I also really like Dr. Ross Green, who created the collaborative problem-solving model. It's a model that is very popular within our practice. Is it just a tremendous way to support again the technical design of a really good action plan, but also the empathy that you need. Much like Madsen’s work, it's about staying in that empathic and curious mindset is one that we must be consciously aware of all the time and that's a big part of our supervision that happens every week.

The Tight Five: Episode 1 - Dr. Jason Frishman, JourneyMen

The writing of two men, Michael White and David Epstein, who are seen as sort of the founders of the narrative therapy world. There are lots of people who write about the narrative, perspective, and other fields, but in in the therapeutic world the two of them have several books, and I came into them before I was in my doctorate program, I was working on my masters and read even a bit in undergrad, and I went to many of their trainings in person. Michael White even used to call me the ‘Adventure Guy.’ His stuff was amazing, because so much of narrative therapy was born from a very different well, than many other therapeutic perspectives.

Another one is Hugh Fernley Whittell, and he was a chef in London, and he just quit because he just wasn't fast or clean enough for the restaurant business. He created a TV series that is all about him learning to garden and take care of livestock and make a living and he does amazing, beautiful, amazing cooking, everything from scratch.

His philosophy around cooking is very similar to mine, or I'd say mine is to his and he's been in many ways kind of a hero to me. If I had taken food, in the direction of a career, I'd want that to be the path, and as connected as that is, to the way that I see journeyman. To this day, if I am having a hard time emotionally, I pull up one of his old shows and just watch, it my way of getting grounded.