EPISODE 209 WITH TIM CROLL: FROM LIMITING BELIEFS TO EMPOWERED ACTION

Ready Yet?! Podcast Episode 209 with guest Tim Croll: From Limiting Beliefs to Empowered Action

Transcribed with Descript

Erin Marcus: All right. Welcome. Welcome to this episode of the Ready Yet podcast. We’re my guest today, Tim Kroll. We were just going through how are we going to stop talking and not make this a two hour conversation? It’s one of those things where you’re having a nice conversation and we’re like, you know what?

Erin Marcus: We should be recording this. So I can’t wait to get into this conversation with you about. This gap between what people believe and then their actual circumstances and how that is affecting us. But before we do that, give us just even a 1 liner introduction of who you are and what

Tim Croll: you do. Yeah, it’s interesting when you ask me that because I wear a couple of different hats and it’s just who are you?

Tim Croll: And what, you know,

Erin Marcus: like an esoteric.

Tim Croll: I know it’s like, it’s like there’s so many. So I just give you a couple examples. I mean, like, I was on a TV show with Lego masters, my partner, my son. So I was on there and when I’m in that arena. I’m a Lego master. When I’m at home, I’m a dad and I’m a husband. And when I’m in business, then it’s like, Oh, he’s a teacher.

Tim Croll: He’s a coach. So it’s, it’s really, sometimes it’s difficult, but at the, at the end of the day, it’s really, I want to make sure. At my heart that I’m, I’m impacting people and giving them those ability to be able to grow. So I would hope that’s what I become known for more so than any of the other titles or any other things is just somebody that can help through conversations and help individuals grow.

Erin Marcus: Love it. Absolutely love it. Yeah, right. We want to have an impact. So you’ve said the word Lego master a couple times. I. At my age, Legos as a kid weren’t the cool sets they are now. I’m very upset about that. That’s what it is. I’m personally very upset about that. Because they’re so amazing. And yet, here you are.

Erin Marcus: You took it into adulthood. You figured something out that I didn’t. Let’s just have the conversation. Like, seriously cool stuff they do.

Tim Croll: Well, and Lego has done incredible job of now adjusting and adapting. Their product not just for what we know of as the the toys that the kids play with But they’re finding and so there’s a couple of terms i’m going to use these real quick Just so the audience kind of knows it’s called an a fall which is an adult fan of lego If you go google it, you can look it up.

Tim Croll: You can find it. There’s also a thing called a lug That’s a lego user group and this is all for individuals that are adults that that That actually enjoy building with Lego, there’s also brick world, brick fair, brick show. There’s like all kinds of stuff across the country, the U. S., Canada, they even have them in Australia and over in the European states.

Tim Croll: There’s, they’re all, it’s all over the world. At the end of the day, though, this is what I find really interesting is how adapting how how Lego has adapted with the market and how much they’ve grown, not just within the fun, but within what they classify as the serious play methodology of teaching, and so they kind of combine these two things together where we have a lot of fun.

Tim Croll: And like you just mentioned, the Lego product that we grew up on was just blocks, and now it’s become more complicated, which is a good thing, because now we have the They call it the STEM teaching, the science and engineering, all that kind of stuff. And you can also use it as a creative outlet, which is amazing when you start thinking that just a little plastic block can be built in so many different ways.

Tim Croll: And the way that I applied is like, I’ve got like a wide, wide area of applying Lego just from the whole scenario. It’s

Erin Marcus: so true. And I think there’s definitely There’s just neuroscience and research talking about, especially as adults, and we start to learn differently. Oh, we do. But anything that taps back into your creativity and the example now wouldn’t work with Lego because it was a scent based tactic.

Erin Marcus: But when I write, when I write my books, not just my social posts, but when I write longer content, I was taught that the sense of smell, Is what is most related to memory and finding smells that tapped into the creativity of childhood. opens up creativity as an adult. And so when I am writing, you know, and I play with my hands and I’m, you know, walking around coming up with ideas, I use Play Doh.

Erin Marcus: Cause that smell man, that is a nostalgic smell. And I will walk around with

Tim Croll: Play Doh. It’s interesting that you bring up the smells because the part that I see when I teach kids Or when I go into a corporate world and we do a Lego workshop, or when I’m trying to get a point across of whether it’s a strategy, a theory that we’ve had for 6000 years, when you can activate that.

Tim Croll: Hands on part of thinking, remembering you can really, truly now see how people are applying those strategies and theories to their life. And I feel like we’ve gone through and I mean, I want to be careful because I don’t want to totally knock the educational system. It’s been good, but unfortunately, okay, so we’ll just knock it.

Tim Croll: I mean, I, my sister was a memorizer. And when she grew up all the way through college, straight A all the way through, I was a C and D student. I did not memorize. I couldn’t do that. She was good at it. I was not. And so I was always very kinetic type learner where it was hands on, you show me something.

Tim Croll: Unfortunately, we’ve taken that memorization and we’ve put it into the workplace and then we train our employees or we train our departments, we train our managers and they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re trying to memorize all of these handbooks that are A thousand pages long or a hundred pages, whatever it is, they can’t remember that.

Tim Croll: They don’t know how to live that

Erin Marcus: out. And now we have tools that will just do it for you. I remember this was a long time ago and I don’t remember who it was. If it was like a Richard Branson or who it was and having this story about watching Jeopardy and the guy who won Jeopardy and like, Oh, wouldn’t you want to hire him?

Erin Marcus: And he’s like, no. No, because all he’s proven is that he can memorize facts, to your point, there’s no application, and now that we’re literally walking around with A phone that has access to all the information available in the freaking universe. Everywhere. Who

Tim Croll: cares? Yeah, you can look it up. You can look up everything.

Tim Croll: We, what we are missing, and, and this is, this is the way I term it, and it, this is going to sound harsh, but it, it really speaks to the point. We need to stop teaching monkeys to swim and fish to climb trees. And that’s what we’ve been doing for, I don’t know, several decades through our educational system.

Tim Croll: And it, and then we take the whole industrial age and we’ve been trying to teach people the same exact method. And that’s where I love Lego as a series play methodology of bringing in and saying, okay, we need to be able to teach people to train instead of micromanage. We need to teach our departments to be able to handle customer service things.

Tim Croll: So how do we do that? Well, here’s a script. If you read the script, it’s not personal. And all of a sudden it just becomes very mundane. So you have to have a way to be able to practically flesh out what that lesson is, what that strategy, what that theory, that all has to be able to come out. And then you have to be able to believe that you can actually accomplish it.

Tim Croll: And there’s like, I, I. I don’t know how long you want to talk about this, but this is like a passion because I love it. I love it. I was working. Okay, so here’s here’s the thing in the U. S. And I’ll share this part of it. We were last year. The health department asked me to come in and speak and we use the same philosophy and the biggest challenge that he has like we the public doesn’t trust us.

Tim Croll: Well, no kidding Sherlock. I mean, you start changing the goalposts multiple times. I’m not trying to say good or bad. I’m just saying what happens in philosophy if you change a goal post and say one day you have to wear a mask. Nope, no, now you don’t. Now you do. Now you don’t. And it’s all over the place.

Tim Croll: So you, you erode that trust, right? So they’re like, how do we build trust? How do we actually start to reestablish it? Well, It’s a shared experience. Well, how do you do a shared experience? Well, okay, let’s bring out the Lego. Let’s bring out this actual hand. This is a shared experience. And now we can have real conversations about why this individual, this party doesn’t trust the other party and what was going on in their heads.

Tim Croll: And the fact that, oh yeah, I can see that the goalposts were moving. Our area, the other thing

Erin Marcus: is, is you also end up with a. Benign neutral. I don’t even know what it’s

Tim Croll: a third party. You bring in you bring in a third party that takes the attention off of a direct. So if you’re ever having a confrontation, you always notice it’s very, very difficult for people to have eye contact during a confrontation.

Tim Croll: If somebody’s really,

Erin Marcus: really upset. I grew up in Chicago. No, I’m kidding. No, but I mean,

Tim Croll: if you’re the one getting yelled at, you don’t want to stare at the guy, because then you get really, really angry. Or if you’re the one yelling, maybe you are having it. But my point is, most people, they avoid confrontation.

Tim Croll: They avoid being able to, because there’s that direct, like, you’re right in their face. Very few people have the ability to be in your face like that. It takes a strong, anyway.

Erin Marcus: Maybe it was the eye contact that caused the confrontation. I could be confusing.

Tim Croll: Maybe, but I found this with my kids, especially as I was talking to them.

Tim Croll: If I confronted them directly and said, why did you do this? They became very defensive. And they became very closed in and they wouldn’t share, share with me what was going on in their development, why they were thinking it through one way, or we’re not thinking it through another way. Or if they messed up, like, why did you mess up what was going on?

Tim Croll: Because it’s that, why that belief behind it. And if I bring in a third party, so if we, if we’re doing something together, now we can have a good solid conversation. So what were you thinking when this happened? What was going through your head when this happened? How did that make you feel? How did that, how did you react to that?

Tim Croll: Why were you reacting in that manner? But when I’ve got a neutral third party, it takes that direct confrontation, and now we can have a better conversation on how to train people or how to get them to grow. In their own personal development, rather than you were wrong, you need to correct it. And if you don’t shape up, then you’re out the door.

Erin Marcus: Absolutely. Absolutely. And then if you take this situation, right, this situation that we’ve not been taught how to handle those situations. Well, this, I absolutely agree with you. The education system does not create leaders in any way, shape or form. And

Tim Croll: now we go back. Can I pause you there? The education not only does not create leaders, punishes those that are naturally born leaders.

Tim Croll: Because they are the ones that are the rebels. They don’t follow the rules. They don’t typically fit inside of the mold. They actually punish those leaders. And it’s, it’s mind boggling to me that we don’t look at some of those. Rebellious or out of hand children. We don’t look at them and say, okay, what are the talents and how do we draw out their greatness?

Tim Croll: So, I mean, it’s all

Erin Marcus: happening. It, the system exists to handle mass. And volume, and it’s hard to handle exceptions when you’re dealing with mass and volume, and then we can go in the whole fact that the social structure as it currently is makes that even harder, but for those of us who eventually get out of the education system and get our heads out of our butts and decide to do something differently, and now you’re taking this, and on top of it, you’re layering this challenge that we mentioned when we started our conversation about What happens when there is a gap between what you believe is and what your circumstances are and how that causes challenges in the human experience?

Erin Marcus: And when you layer those things on top of each other, sometimes they say it’s a miracle any of us are pulling off anything.

Tim Croll: Oh my, yeah. So you kind of almost have to step back in a Like, let’s look at it from a perspective of how do we analyze our own persons? How do we grow as individuals, right? So we kind of have to take that step backwards and look at it and say, one of the one of the projects that I used to be able to kind of go through this with some of the clients that I work with is we break our lives up into 10 year segments.

Tim Croll: In those 10 year segments, it’s broken into three different parts. First of all, you write down all the circumstances that you remember that were key points or events that were key points. And then you just go through that. You write all those down in those 10 year segments. Underneath of that, you write down what belief that I formed because of that event.

Tim Croll: Then the third part is now where you have a coach or somebody else that you trust and you work through those beliefs And you say okay, is that belief a true or a false belief? So that’s the premise That’s the foundation off which we work. I’ll give you an example of that growing up I was in a home in an area where I was Told that I couldn’t tell anybody about my birthday.

Tim Croll: I couldn’t share about that. We couldn’t really have birthday parties now Nobody said birthdays are not important But the conclusion that I drew off of that was birthdays are not important fast forward to get married My first son comes along my wife goes spends 200 for a birthday party. I’m like, what the freak are you doing?

Tim Croll: Because birthdays aren’t important, right? So I had to look at that and I had to adjust and say, okay, is that a true belief or a false belief that I have developed over my lifetime? And we’ve got literally hundreds of these that we’ve done. So if, if I would not have, and we use that as the example, if I would not have allowed myself to look at that difference and then grow personally, to be able to close that gap between my belief level and the circumstances, I would have created a really serious contention between myself and my wife.

Tim Croll: And we would have had a lot of conflict around that because I believe birthdays are not she believes they are important And now we have a a point of contention where it could totally Wreck our marriage or it could potentially lead to something else. Well, and as

Erin Marcus: i’m listening to you describe that To me, that point of contention in an important relationship is not what you want.

Erin Marcus: But, even worse, if there’s no external voice to help you figure this out, and you’re left to only Your own voice in your own head. Now you don’t even stand a chance.

Tim Croll: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a really, really key element. And most of our, I would call it the American culture. It really, truly is more in the United States than I’ve seen anywhere else.

Tim Croll: It’s this John Wayne mentality that we pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and we don’t look for help. We don’t seek help. We don’t share when we, when we have challenges. Quite frankly, that’s one of the greatest false narratives. One of the greatest lies. That has been in our society for the last couple of probably 100 years.

Tim Croll: Well, and

Erin Marcus: I am, but what’s interesting to me as I, as I hear you say that what’s been interesting to me as I’ve gotten older, as I’ve had, I had a C suite corporate career. I had a 15 person small business. Now I have a more, what I call an entrepreneurial business and again, older marriages, relationships, families, different age groups.

Erin Marcus: Men have the, don’t ask for help. Fit problem much, much, much more than women until women become business owners. And as soon as women become business owners, they stop asking for help. It’s so interesting to me that in our personal lives, when you need a doctor, a lawyer, something for your baby, women ask everyone they know, who do you know who can help me?

Erin Marcus: And men don’t do that. No. And yet, as soon as women become business owners, They start to think they have to do everything for themselves.

Tim Croll: Yeah. Well, and it goes back to the culture and again, the false narrative or the belief system that we have, that if we show any sign of needing help, that’s a sign of weakness.

Tim Croll: Right. And if that sign, if that is a sign of weakness, then the conclusion is, if I am weak, then somebody is going to take advantage of me. Or

Erin Marcus: I’m not good at it. I mean, I think women are more collaborative in a In a family situation, so they don’t see it as a sign of weakness as part of their family, but they do see it as a lack of ability in their business.

Erin Marcus: Yeah,

Tim Croll: there’s so many beliefs and narratives that we could talk about because you’ve got basically what I would look at is four different levels of personal development. You’ve got a physical development, you’ve got your spiritual or what we would classify as emotional development, you’ve got social development, and then you’ve got your mental development.

Tim Croll: And in each one of those that you grow, you have to continue to level up, right? But what I find is that we have these What do you want to call them? False narratives, limiting beliefs whatever you want to define that as you stick yourself into that position and believe that that is all that you can do.

Tim Croll: This is all the value that I bring. This is all the worth that I have. And we start to hide all of those weaknesses. And that’s exactly what you’re talking about is we don’t ask for help because we’re hiding that because we don’t want somebody else to know that we’re not as valuable as we’re putting on a facade to have.

Tim Croll: And that’s where you get a lot of that falseness. And I think

Erin Marcus: it’s tricky, right? I think you’re absolutely correct in how you’re describing it, and yet it manifests, when it shows up in our behavior, it’s so more nuanced and insidious, which is why it stops us. Because if it was blatant, we’d be like, Screw that.

Erin Marcus: No. So it’s

Tim Croll: true. I think honestly, mentally, we know that it’s not correct, but in our hearts, we still believe it. And so that’s where the what a lot of people classify as a self sabotaging type activities start to come out because mentally, we know like, okay, I want to make this much money. I want to be able to have this kind of a family.

Tim Croll: I want to be able to have this kind of a travel. And so we some individuals will use that as a visual visualization, and if I visualize it enough, it will happen. Well, that’s not necessarily how that works. That doesn’t help.

Erin Marcus: You’ve got to do a few more things. It’s not complete. Do a few more things, yes.

Tim Croll: Yeah, so, so the whole completeness of that is the ability to be able to take that and say, okay, I can visualize the future, but these are the actions that I need to do to be able to grow and change. And I need to act on those rather than just sit here and visualize and think that it’s all going to come.

Tim Croll: Through fruition because it’s not going to come that way.

Erin Marcus: I absolutely believe you though. I agree with you. I teach the way I teach this is right. There’s two parts. There’s the belief in the action. They both have to change. I don’t even care which comes first. Sometimes we talk ourselves into believing it so we can take the action.

Erin Marcus: Sometimes we, you know, take the action and act as if and do all the action until we believe it. It doesn’t matter which comes first, but you wiggle your way up, you wiggle your way up and when we try to, and it’s not that you can’t do it quickly. And it’s not that you can’t make leaps, but my God, when you try to skip steps on this, it does not

Tim Croll: stick.

Tim Croll: No, absolutely not. And that’s where too often we’ll go to an event. We’ll go to a conference, highly motivational type speaker thing going on. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that until you use that exclusively to bounce from high to high. And as you’re bouncing from high to high, you see those big highs and all of a sudden it just drops and you’re like, well, I’m just right back where I started.

Tim Croll: Well, that’s the, basically the waves of what’s going on. It’s like, okay, maybe I can’t believe, but no, your core belief is down here. So you’re going to say like, okay, yeah, I can grow this business. And then your core belief is like, no, I, I’m not. I’m not worthy of owning a business that’s doing a million dollars, 10 million, whatever.

Tim Croll: And so you, you kind of like, well, then you stopped act. You start to act back down here and those actions then affect the business, which then quote unquote self sabotage, but it’s literally the actions that you’re fleshing out and doing that’s bringing that back down to that lower level. And then you go get motivated, and then you start acting, and all of a sudden it starts going back up, and then it, then you stop, and it’s like, oh, guys, guys, it’s that combination of things.

Tim Croll: It’s just brutal,

Erin Marcus: and what I, you know, again, you wiggle your way up, and I like to think of it as I’ve learned what this is, the awareness. The key is in the awareness. That was the first step. I couldn’t change anything until I became aware of my behavior so I could observe, like, aware of this situation so I can become an observer of my behavior.

Erin Marcus: So my new approach, it’s not Lego so I have to think about this, but my new approach is my goal is to put bumpers in my gutters. Yep. So that the pendulum doesn’t swing too far. Like, there’s no straight line. This is the stock market, people. Over time, it goes up. But any given day, God only knows. There’s lots of margin.

Erin Marcus: There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of up and down in the process. But over time, it goes up. If you do the work. So my goal is to put bumpers in my gutters. So that the pen, because the pendulum’s gonna swing. If I can narrow how far it swings. It doesn’t hurt as much when it slams into me. Yeah, that’s my theory.

Tim Croll: Yeah, no, I think you’re absolutely right. And again, kind of tying in, people don’t always understand the beliefs. And I’m going to kind of go out on a limb here and say this. One of the biggest challenges that we have is we believe that there is the entire battle of how we operate solely rests on our actions.

Tim Croll: And that’s not really where the battle really truly takes place. The battle really kind of takes place back in the belief system. And a lot of that is not things that are conscious or out in the open. It’s a lot of times subconscious. And we fall back into those patterns of how to act and how to do things.

Tim Croll: And we’re like, no, I got to have more will, I’ve got to have more stronger will to be able to act this way. But then we get tired. And we get weary and then we get exhausted and our tanks become empty. And suddenly now we don’t have the will to act along that because we don’t believe we are that person.

Tim Croll: And if we don’t believe that we’re that person, then we’re not going to act like that person. And that’s where, like you said, you kind of shimmy your way up. And I like that analogy, but that battleground is truly in that belief system that you have, that you move and carry on throughout the rest of your life.

Tim Croll: And I have

Erin Marcus: to say in my personal experience, that was the, nothing shocked me more than the fact that that’s true because I, you know, I blue collar Chicago, very right. Like what’s real is what I can see. Period. Hard stop. Right. And then my corporate experience where this is, you’ll appreciate this, where I was highly, highly, highly successful.

Erin Marcus: Right. And then when you leave corporate and you don’t have that structure, you realize you were highly, highly, highly successful on a very narrow path that somebody else created. Yeah. Kind of like school, right? Kind of like school. I was not successful in school, by the way. But this realization that it was what I had to believe and think, not what I had to do, being the basis of my potential was one shocking is all get out but two Kind of empowering as well because when you realize you can actually do something about it

Tim Croll: That’s where I tie back to the whole serious play Because when you can truly see that you have the ability to create a model out of a couple of blocks The, the imagery that you can actually see on that.

Tim Croll: And it’s, it’s amazing too. When I give a group of individuals, a set, a Lego set or a Lego challenge or whatever it is, and then they create this massively cool thing. And then we actually relate that to the life. It’s now in a capsule of about an hour, two hours of a Lego workshop where it’s like, Oh, I can do this.

Tim Croll: Oh, I do have the ability and they can see that and they’re able to change their belief system of I’m not worthy or I will never and usually it’s like some kind of a covenant along those lines where they’re trying to protect themselves from that kind of a pain or disappointment and now they see that they can actually do it and then we tie the strategies and the theories back into the practical.

Tim Croll: This is how you do it and it just cements that right in and what

Erin Marcus: I really like about this concept of tying these things together. Is the, I think the problem I had and the reason I wasn’t able to move faster through this, the learnings of this situation was it was. 100 percent intangible. And I am a see it to believe it person.

Erin Marcus: Yes. Yes. And so if you’re gonna start drawing me graphs and grids about the subconscious and the conscious, it’s not that I didn’t believe them, but I had no way to visualize it. Yep. And so I couldn’t hold on

Tim Croll: to it. And that’s very, very common in kinetic type learners, which is the vast majority of the people out there.

Tim Croll: One of the biggest things that I have watched, there’s two, two big lessons that I learned in the Lego workshops. One is how to establish a basis of communication. So we’re talking the same language rather than different length. The second thing is really how we train others. We typically train others by getting them to memorize stuff, or we tell them once they should know it.

Tim Croll: That’s the whole culture that we live in. But when we start doing these workshops, I have watched Individuals that were used to micromanaging and I take away the micromanaging power that they have and suddenly they’re just like oh my goodness I’ve been doing this and frustrating All of my department because I teach this way or I manage this way because i’m micromanaging And it’s it’s like this aha moment that somebody else has been telling them over and over and over and over and over again So it’s not like i’m teaching them anything new.

Tim Croll: I’m just using a different Vehicle to get that concept across

Erin Marcus: I love it. I absolutely love it. So, okay, we’ll just do more episodes. That’s fine. It is what it is. How do people learn more? How do they get a hold of you to learn more about how you can help

Tim Croll: them? To be honest, all you got to do is go to Google and search my name, Tim Kroll, and you’re going to find more stuff than you’re ever going to want to know

Erin Marcus: about me.

Erin Marcus: Tim Kroll with a C. I imagine if you do Tim Kroll comma Lego. All sorts of things,

Tim Croll: all kinds of stuff. I mean, Fox is really good at marketing. And so they, they, my name is everywhere right now. I mean, IDBM or whatever, all that stuff, but to come to me directly is my website. And then again, it’s my name.

Tim Croll: So Tim Kroll, and it’s a C R not a K R but C R O L L. com. And you can pretty much find just about anything that you want right there. And then get in contact with me, send me an email, the whole nine yards.

Erin Marcus: Highly encourage it. I absolutely love it. I think this I hate to use the word hack because it implies that it’s easy and no big deal, but I really do think for people who have.

Erin Marcus: understood this, but really having a hard time really holding onto this concept and really honing it in, not to mention for leadership. I love this approach to this concept. So thank you for sharing your insights, your energy, your time, your values, all of it, your Legos. I got to go check out your, your stuff, buy some Legos.

Erin Marcus: It is what it is. Awesome. Thank you so much.

Tim Croll: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

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