Get Over Yourself to Learn – Corey Tisdale, Entrepreneur, CEO

Paper Napkin Wisdom – Corey Tisdale
Corey Tisdale is, in his own words, a “crazy egotist with experience earned on the ecommerce battlefield.” He is the Owner of Eye Want Media and CEO of ShoppersChoice.com. In his very candid Paper Napkin Wisdom, Corey shares his story about an aspect of leadership he’s found particularly challenging.
Corey’s Paper Napkin reads: “I love the feeling of getting defensive because it’s the feeling I get right before I get over myself and learn something important.”
In previous Napkins, we’ve talked about the importance of communication and how vital it is that your team feels comfortable talking to you. Being defensive destroys that comfort level and it can make it hard for a team to trust you when they aren’t sure how their opinions or words are going to be taken.
A relationship with your team is like any relationship, you need a level of comfort and trust there and being defensive damages that. It’s a lesson Corey learned and reminds himself of daily. He talks about how being defensive and aggressive about the things that were important to him impacted the people around him and how he determined he needed to make a change. “I was like a terrible person with the best of intentions,” he says.
Learning to recognize when you’re being defensive or aggressive isn’t easy. Corey says that every time he thinks he’s conquered it he discovers a new level he hasn’t yet mastered or he realizes that he just hasn’t been paying enough attention. He notes that it’s important to remember that regardless of your intentions, if everyone around you is seeing the same kind of behavior from you, you must be exhibiting that behavior whether or not you want to admit it and it takes work to make yourself aware of you behavior and change it.
Corey says that for him, it comes down to communication. He says: “It’s not good enough that I said what I meant, […] part of being a good communicator is how close is your interpretations of what I said to my interpretation of what I said?” He says that if you tell someone what you want and they don’t understand and make a mistake, it’s easy to maintain your ego by blaming it on the other person’s misunderstanding. If that happens multiple times, it means you either have the wrong person in the wrong seat or you’re failing as a communicator.
Listening is important because through listening, you can get as much information as possible from someone and that gives you a basis to try and understand what’s going through their minds so that you can phrase what you want to say in a way that will make sense to them. When you can understand where a person is coming from, it’s easier not to be defensive because you can see the context around the information you’re being presented with.
Corey has found that being aware of his defensive nature and taking steps to get control of it has made his relationships with others much better. It isn’t easy to let ourselves be vulnerable when it comes to the things we’re really passionate about, but we can do ourselves damage if we’re so protective of those things that we make the people around us feel unable to discuss them with us. A new perspective, even one we don’t agree with, almost always has something to offer. What might we learn if we set our egos aside and really listen to what someone is sharing with us? How might we and our company grow?
Listen to the conversation with Corey here: