Jonathan (00:15):
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Juvohub podcast, your helping hand in property management education. This is Episode 71. I'm your host, Jonathan Saar and with me today is Mark Howell from Howl Creative Concepts. My good friend, how you doing today?

Mark (00:33):
I'm good, buddy. How you doing today?

Jonathan (00:35):
I'm all right. I feel confident.

Mark (00:39):
That's right. The name of the game today, confidence.

Jonathan (00:43):
Yeah. I feel confident, totally about it. And you know, I look forward to your, your thoughts. I mean, both of us are, I, you know, I would never ever say that we're old dudes, but we're a little older and I think we can really talk about this con just a nice tips today for everyone on building confidence, through all the changes that you know, you may be facing in your career. But why do you think it's so important? Maybe we just kick it off of that before we get into our objectives. Why do you think, why is it important? Why should we have confidence?

Mark (01:17):
Well, you know, for me, I think confidence is so much more than just a professional attribute. I think that your confidence affects who you are personally as well. If you have a low self-esteem or low confidence level, then it's going to affect not only your professional world, but your personal world also. And so confidence to me is just one of the stepping stones of becoming a better person in general. I think we all really love being around confident people and you know, and I'm not talking about people that have big egos, but that confidence to carry on a conversation or to feel confident in their decision making. I find that when people are not confident, you're constantly around someone questioning every decision, even where we're gonna go to dinner. So it's like, oh my gosh. But yeah,
It's frustrating. It's frustrating for the rest of us. I guess I should say honestly, is that, you know, my gosh, if we're not working on our conference level, you are probably frustrating the people around you.

Jonathan (02:27):
Absolutely. And I like how you separated students. This is not ego. It's just, you know, in, in many ways just being assertive and sure of yourself. So what are we gonna be focusing on today though? Mark? What are our objectives for today's episode?

Mark (02:41):
Yeah. So we're gonna focus on concentrate on your strengths instead of your weaknesses to boost your confidence. Why continuing education can be a huge confidence booster, love that, because look that's, what do you do when you don't feel confident about something, you research it, you make yourself more educated in the topic. And then how does patience with yourself increase self confidence? So love that because to me, I think self-awareness which is, you know, part of emotional intelligence is so key to your confidence, especially in your professional world, but also in your personal world.

Jonathan (03:27):
Yeah. Yeah. Very good. Yeah. Looking forward to getting some feedback from you and all of these, I like the first one, you know, the first objective you're concentrating on our strengths to boost our confidence, my confidence, you know, so what are my strengths, being able to just take a minute and understand what those strengths are and be okay with what I'm not strong at. I think they both go hand in hand, you know, not being so, oh, I wish I could be this because you may see that in someone else that you work with, but be okay with your, my strengths. Like, what am I strong at? You know, what are you strong at mark? And focusing on those, maybe writing them down now, what are my leadership qualities? What are my in person skill qualities? What are my organizational qualities? And kind of having that and, and writing it down can help impress it on your mind, like what those are. And then again, not to be like, oh yeah,

Mark (04:36):
Yeah,

Jonathan (04:37):
That's right. That's who I am. Not that, but just a self awareness of where your abilities are. Do you agree Mark or?

Mark (04:46):
I do. I've worked with many different types of levels of confidence professional people, meaning someone that is new to the professional world. And then I've worked with obviously people who have been in their roles as presidents or CEOs in leadership that obviously are very confident, almost sometimes a little too confident. And so I see the spectrum, what I think where I want to gear my next comments on would be someone that lacks confidence. Because I think that's what this, this should, should focus on is, you know, how, how do you concentrate on your strengths, right? And so if you don't know what your strengths are, Jonathan, I think your point was very valid. It is you sitting down and asking yourself, like, what is it that I'm good at? And that doesn't mean, you know, math, history, accounting, whatever, like it it's it's are you good at speaking to people?
Are you, what type of speaker are you if you've identified what it is that you're good at, then go with your strengths. I know for me, I love talking. I could talk all day long to people and I also love humor. So for me as a motivational speaker or trainer, my training is, is filled with comic relief. And you know, more about my personality. I don't try to be something that I know I'm not, because that is the first way to throw me off of my confidence game is to try to ask me to be something that I'm not. And so if you know what you are, then be who you are and own that, and don't let other people take that away from you. I have learned. And like you said, we're old dudes in this industry. I am old enough to know what I confident at, what I'm good at, and I don't need anyone telling me to change my, my way of doing it. I'm confident that I'm good at what I do. And though it has taken time for me to cultivate that I encourage people to do that. Exactly. That is to find out what you are. What, what do you love about what you do? Typically, what I find Jonathan is that when you find something that you love about your work, you will gravitate toward doing that. And that's what you truly become confident in. There has to be something that you love about your work.

Jonathan (07:11):
Absolutely. I love it, man. Nice, nice timeline. And you know, I think we live in a world where everything is under such scrutiny. There's very little objective approach to every, to a person's strengths. There's so much focus on where people are weak and that's just in the media all the time. And it can be difficult to kind of put that aside and make sure we leave the debates and the politics and all that type of thing out there. And make sure we, you know, aren't tearing ourselves down, cause it can easily, like you said, you can easily get, you know you know, wear ourselves down with negative thinking. So. Good, good, good. So this next objective I love is super simple continuing education even as you said, and you said it, I didn't want to say we were old dudes. I said there's like, there's a possibility that because we've been in around a little bit, but I didn't go down the, I didn't think I went down the old dude.

Mark (08:35):
I don't know. You know what I heard you call us old dudes. That's all I wanted.

Jonathan (08:39):
Okay. Okay. Well, I didn't want to, I hope that didn't weaken your confidence or my confidence. <Laugh> calling us an old dude too. But you know, even where we're at, you and I both love education, you know, I know both of us, we read, we do on blogs. We'll listen to podcasts. We'll do all kinds of things because we love education. There's always more to learn. We benefit from other people's experiences and their approach to things. So why is continuing education such a huge confidence booster? Why does it do that? What do you think?

Mark (09:16):
Well, look, I mean, just the word education alone kind of sums it up. If you are looking to gain more knowledge, it's in education. Let me go a little deeper here though. If I don't feel confident in a topic that is being discussed in a forum, whether that's with friends, family, or coworkers, business associates, then I usually typically try to stay a little more quiet on the subject because I don't want to seem uneducated. Plus if I'm not confident what I'm talking about, that's just gonna make me nervous and then people will recognize that I'm behaving differently. And so what I try to do so I can be more socially acceptable is to watch more of news that is about different types of, of things going on in the world, world news, but also familiarizing myself with the economy and, and politics though.
Whew, that's a subject I just stay away from altogether. But it's, it's about being a little more aware. Now, when I think about this, this comment, like why continuing education can be a confidence booster. Here's, what's so fascinating to me about most people that are in a leadership role or a boss of people. I don't know if you find this Jonathan, but when I'm working with some of my clients and I'll say, well, where are we with the leadership group? The C-suite oh, no, we're all good. We don't need anything. And I'm like, y'all are probably the people who need it most you know? But it's always that it's always the people at the top who are like, oh no, you can't teach me anything. And I'm like interesting because if you really truly unpack that statement, if you are not constantly learning, the world is changing, the world has changed in the last three years substantially.
I mean like, oh my goodness, has it ever changed so quickly? And if you are not willing to admit there is value there's education out there in every little piece of these sort of forums, then shame on you for not allowing yourself to be educated by others, especially maybe someone younger than you, because what I am learning is that's why I keep young people around me. You they're filled with information that I may never come across. And so I just find it very fascinating that sometimes we get to these places in our lives where we think we've learned enough. I did have somebody recently, I was going over some of the fundamentals, some training and fundamentals, and there were surprisingly a couple regionals and property managers on these calls that were more for more of the sales associates, but I got these emails later in the day from some of them that said, you know, thank you so much.
What an impactful way of looking at the times that we're in and the refresher, the word refresher kept coming up. And I thought interesting, you know, it's like, you might see that as a refresher, it really was to educate new people in our, in that role. But even you yourself as a regional or a leader of people, you gain some type of knowledge education by the quote unquote refresher. Because things have changed times have changed and we don't, we can't do what we did 10 years ago, the way that we would do it today, we just can't.

Jonathan (12:46):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And we can get into all kinds of like psychology of the brain and how we retain information. There's there's a, a pyramid out there just, I mean, and this, this will absolutely serve this point because I don't remember what the name of the pyramid is, but I was given education on it on how much we retain information, depending on whether we're just you know, doing an online course or we're doing it a workshop together, or, you know, there's all these different types. And then our retention changes depending on what that is. And even with the most engaging and one on one group session that you may have in an education environment, your retention is still maybe only 30 to 40% of what's going on in that particular educational event. Right. That's just the nature of our brain. So we get more confidence.
We will acquire more confidence. The more that we, as you mentioned avail ourselves to continuing education, we have to have it. It's just the way it is. And it just makes us feel better about the job that we're doing or something potentially that we are, are working towards. Maybe it's a goal of some sort in our career path that we're trying to attain. So yeah. Goal education, all about education. That's what Juvohub's all about. Right? Education. All right. So the last one, interesting objective here, patience and increasing our self confidence. So again, I'm going, I'm gonna use the old dude reference, you know, I think it takes, I think it takes time, you know, as a young person, I remember, boy, that's not a patience is never a young, an easy thing. You know, you're new in your career. You want everything right now and, and it's, and it's not there. And you're maybe even a little bit afraid to, to, to reach out in, in doing certain things in order to attain a goal along your career path. So it's, it's just not an overnight, it's not an overnight skill. It comes to me com you know, confidence comes with life application.

Mark (15:16):
Right?

Jonathan (15:17):
The more that you're subjected to an environment, the more that you're educated on a topic, the greater your confidence is going to be. And that only comes with time.

Mark (15:32):
That's right. Kick it

Jonathan (15:33):
To you, what you think.

Mark (15:35):
Yeah. Listen you know, when, when you think about, when I see the word patience, especially having patience with yourself in regards to this topic, it's also be patient and easy on yourself, trying to when you're building your confidence, you're not gonna know everything. And I think about the reasons we're not confident is the lack of knowledge, the lack of not knowing something that that's breaking my state of confidence, right? And so I need to be a little patient on myself. Like I'm not supposed to know everything that is not your job in this world. Never will be. You cannot possibly know everything. And so you have to ask yourself, what is it that you're trying to accomplish and set goals for yourself long term short term, but then, you know, try to hit those marks and be patient when you don't be patient also with the people around you, they may not be moving at the same pace that you want to move at.
And that can create a lack of confidence in others or in yourself. So for me, I like to say, I may not have all the answers, or I may flub up some things every now and then, and I try, I've learned to laugh it off and say, ah, you know what? You got me. I really don't know much about that topic. Or I don't know. I would love for you to educate me more on it. I found ways. So I can learn to be a little more patient with myself. And that I don't shake my own confidence if I find that there's a, something being talked about that I'm unaware of, then that's what I do. I say, you know what brain just be patient, like, let someone educate you on the subject, be willing to be open, to hear what they have to say, rather than trying to be a know itall I find that that sort of know itall in the room.
To me, it just screams lack of confidence. And I don't know why that is. Maybe there's some more emotional intelligence study there, but it's like, you don't always have to be talking and always have the answer. And what's that old statement when I have been teaching, and I've heard this several times from different clients, but there's always this one person in the back of the room that always raises their hand. That always has the answer. Oh, I always do that. Or, oh yeah, I've been doing that. Or if you're giving them advice or trying to teach them, and then later in the day at a break or the end of the day, somebody from management will walk up and say that's the same person that we just had to write up last week for not doing it, or they never do these things. And so I kind of giggle internally and I'm like, you don't have to be a know at all, then, you know, like have the patience to understand, like confidence comes with time. It comes with experience and trust me, you'll experience a lot in your roles.

Jonathan (18:22):
Yeah. Very good. That's awesome. Great takeaway. And I think just to kind of close that out, the more you open yourself up to opportunities, you know, you're gonna gain that experience, you know, so volunteer for your apartment association, volunteer for your local IM chapter, volunteer for some, any of the other property management genre that are out there. There's senior housing, student housing, where the list can go on and on there's opportunities out there besides what you do in your job that will give you education and you'll be able to experience the benefits of networking and so on.

Mark (19:04):
Absolutely.

Jonathan (19:06):
Awesome, man. Thank you so much. Great comments on that. Yeah, I feel, I feel very confident.

Mark (19:15):
This is.

Jonathan (19:16):
This a good podcast.

Mark (19:18):
Good.

Jonathan (19:20):
All right. Well that's episode 71. Thank you everyone for tuning into our show. Mark, how can our audience connect with you?

Mark (19:27):
Absolutely. Yes. I'm Mark Howell, H O W E L L on LinkedIn. Or you can reach out to me at my website, which is Howell creative concepts.com, but the Howell is spelled H O W L howlcreativeconcepts.com.

Jonathan (19:40):
Perfect. Perfect. And please connect with Juvohub on all of its social channels. We have our podcast, which you can find on any of your favorite podcast app. You can subscribe to our show hub or on YouTube or on Instagram. And we would love to hear back from you. If there's any topics you would like for us to discuss until next time class dismiss, take care, everyone.