Embracing Human Intelligence in an AI World with Jevon Wooden

John Marshall (00:32)
Alright.

Welcome to another episode of the present professional. Today we have a special guest with us. Jevon Wooden. Good time friend and long time overdue to have you on the show. So I’m so happy you’re here. But for those of you that don’t know Jevon yet, he’s the CEO and founder of Brightmind Consulting Group. He’s a dynamic speaker, certified coach and business consultant with expertise in empathetic leadership.

emotional intelligence and building workplace culture. A Bronze Star recipient and Army veteran, his insights and strategies have also been featured in entrepreneur Forbes, Inc. magazine and Fast Company. So it’s a pleasure to bring him on to the podcast today. And I’m excited for you all to experience just entering into one of our conversations here.

Jevon Wooden (01:27)
Hey, man, I’m so excited. Like you said, it is long overdue, John. So glad to be here, brother.

John Marshall (01:34)
Agreed, agreed. So today we were talking about topics to bring up and Jevon actually suggested the topic and it rang true for me immediately. So we want to talk a little bit about the importance of doubling down on human intelligence in the age we’re entering into of artificial intelligence.

When he brought that up. I was immediately, it was like, yep, that’s what we’re going to talk about. So if listeners, if you’ve been experiencing your introduction to utilizing this new technology, thinking about different ways that it’s infiltrating your life and your workplace, you’ve come to the right conversation.

So thank you again, Jevon, for suggesting that topic. And I just want to ask you right off the top, what was behind your immediate suggestion of that?

Jevon Wooden (02:26)
My pleasure.

Yeah, man. Well, there’s a few things. So the first part to that is I have a background in technology. I have a master’s in cybersecurity, all these things. My world was tech before I started Brightmind Consulting Group and went at this full time. And then the second component is, you know, when you go to a conference, what’s the topic you always see? AI, right? No matter what the organization is about, no matter what you’re going for, you get AI. Even people who are not experts on AI. Why?

because that is the thing that is pressing on everyone’s mind, on everyone’s agenda. The uncertainty and then the are really intersecting right now. So ⁓ I’m like, hey, why not just talk about what is on the forefront of everyone’s mind right

John Marshall (03:12)
Hmm.

intersection of opportunity and so many other things, fear, challenge, complexity, right? What to use it for. You know, it’s like when I think of those crossroads, it’s like a, almost a, a roundabout.

Jevon Wooden (03:22)
Absolutely.

That’s exactly what it’s like.

And if you’re in Houston, you know, a lot of people don’t know how to drive in a roundabout, right? And that’s what we are in this AI, HI type of, you know, roundabout that we’re on right now. And, you know, I see a lot of organizations, a lot of leaders just throwing out the term AI arbitrarily. They don’t even really understand what they’re saying. because like you said, John, there’s a lot of different use cases for AI, but if we are not careful.

John Marshall (03:40)
Exactly.

Jevon Wooden (04:02)
We make the assumption that AI can do everything. AI is, they say is self-learning and is able to understand and do all these other things, but it’s really pattern recognition at the end of the day. And if you don’t give it that pattern, it will not understand what’s happening. One of those patterns is context. You know, that’s why I think human intelligence is, I don’t think I know, human intelligence is even more important right now because we’re in a dangerous time where we’re trying to feed

John Marshall (04:06)
Mm-hmm.

Jevon Wooden (04:32)
AI everything and we’re trying to make it so it’s doing things that only humans can do at this time that we’re talking here, which is that contextual. The AI doesn’t know when I raise my hand, if I’m waving my hand to say hello, if I’m raising it because I want to ask a question, if I’m raising it to say stop, it can’t understand things like that right now. If I’m frowning, it doesn’t know I’m frowning because maybe you said something, if I’m sad, it cannot detect those types of things and that’s why we’re

we’re having issues. I’m seeing whole customer service teams get replaced by AI. Don’t we all hate those stupid call trees? Right? So that’s an example that we’re not quite there yet with AI and we need to really slow down on the adoption and a lot of situations where high touch, high human intelligence, emotional intelligence is necessary for end user experience and

not just the end user experience, but the greater good as an organization.

John Marshall (05:30)
but in

I agree. that’s the feeling. And you know, when you’re operating in this right now, hyper fast moving marketplace and your competitors are cutting their costs by 25 % and adopting AI for their customer service teams or for different parts of their business that are just helping them become more efficient to compete. Then it’s, it’s almost like I find it challenging for

people

to take the, you know, the slow down to speed up advice when the external environment is reacting that much quicker. So, you know, what do you say to the leader that’s saying, but my competitors are doing all of this. Like, why should I slow down?

Jevon Wooden (06:17)
Yeah, and you said a word, react. If we are reacting, then we’re already in trouble.

If you have not thought about the consequences, you have not done tabletop exercises, you have not gone through what could, what that could lead to and experienced that and went through that process and that exercise, you’re already taking a dangerous step. And we see that all the time where people think first mover advantage, it means that if I wasn’t that first mover, I’m behind. First mover advantage is not always an advantage. First mover means that you just took the leap.

but now everyone else can learn and watch and see what happens with you. So there have been instances where that first mover tried to replace their whole call center with AI and they had to call people back because they’re like, okay, this thing is not saying what we needed to say. They’re not answering the right questions. They’re denigrating people because we didn’t think about that population. They can’t understand certain accents, all these different situations that are not really taken into account.

So when you move that quickly, you gotta ask yourself, am I willing to deal with all that may come with me moving that quickly? Or can I afford to sit back, watch and do some market research and analysis, really understand the technology before I implement the whole thing? You can implement small subsets of technology, right? You don’t have to go all or nothing. You can go at and and say, all right, we’re gonna try this place, get really good at this, and then we’ll go ahead and implement this piece.

John Marshall (07:33)
Mm-hmm.

Jevon Wooden (07:42)
And while you’re doing that, John, please tell your people why and how it impacts them. Be transparent in that way. That’s where we’re seeing a lot of the issues.

John Marshall (07:51)
I agree with that, the transparency side of things. you know, it’s, right now we’re talking about AI and replacing certain teams or replacing whole functions of teams, but really, you know, I think the first best use case is helping your teams spend more time doing the highest value activities, right?

Jevon Wooden (08:13)
Absolutely.

Yeah, argumentation.

John Marshall (08:14)
So if you have a sales

team that spends 20 % of their time in front of the customer, right? 80 % of their time, admin, Salesforce or CRM entries.

Right. Meetings, market reviews, all kinds of things that are doing that are taking them away from the customer. It’s like, you know, how can you implement AI and creative ways that are, you know, automatically taking their call reports and updating CRMs and updating the, you know, the reports that they would have to do. You know, that’s why I think your advice to slow down is the only way you can really see.

a process like that and say, you know, what are the pieces here where we could get back 80 % of our person’s time, even imagine even getting 30 % of your sales reps time in front of, you know, in front of the customer is huge. It can be a huge return on investment.

Jevon Wooden (09:12)
It is that is huge.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And that’s where I feel AI is right now is the augmentation. You know, we say artificial intelligence. I think it’s augmented intelligence. And if you put AI, the augmented intelligence and the human intelligence together, that’s the most powerful combination you can have. Because, you know, if you think that sales team example, the salesperson, they know a client.

deeper than any AI can know just from doing a digital download, right? They understand the situations, they understand sales cycles, they have institutional knowledge, they have intuition that the AI just can’t use. The use case that you said is the best one that I recommend right now is to make, okay, we have this thing, you’re doing all these admin tasks, these backend things, the mundane things that you don’t need to be spending your brain power and expertise on.

John Marshall (09:43)
Mm-hmm.

Jevon Wooden (10:05)
So how can we make it so AI can do those things? Fine. But even then we have to be careful, John, because we know AI still has hallucinations, it still makes things up, it still confuses things and terminology and stuff like that. So there has to be some type of key way. There has to be some quality assurance there still. someone, that should be another task. Like how can we ensure that what was downloaded and what was said is actually what was said, at least from the beginning of using that AI.

John Marshall (10:35)
Mm hmm. You know, you bring that up in QA. But, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time in my career doing QA on human activities.

Jevon Wooden (10:46)
Yes. Yes.

John Marshall (10:47)
Right.

So, you know, I think, yes, I do think that’s still a necessary part of the process. But then, you know, ultimately we’re, we’re checking and double checking people’s work all the time, you know, until you build the trust to delegate the higher priority items to your people. Right. It takes time to build trust with the system. Like it does a person.

Jevon Wooden (11:01)
Yeah.

Absolutely.

But you know what’s interesting is people immediately trust AI. You notice that, right? There is no checks. So if you go online, you see all these AI posts, people don’t check it. They don’t tweak it to make it sound like them. They just take it as is. They take it as gospel, right? So we just have to make sure that we don’t say just because it’s a machine, it’s 100 % accurate. So we have to make sure that we’re just like we check the humans, we at least at least in the outset of the usage.

John Marshall (11:16)
Ugh.

I do.

you

Jevon Wooden (11:40)
we start doing some QA to ensure that we’re getting the outputs that we assume we’ll get. Because what do they say? When you assume, it don’t always go the way you want it to go, right? They use another word, but I’m trying to keep it PG.

John Marshall (11:48)
Yeah.

Hahaha

So.

leader or business owner that’s listening to this right now and thinking, you know, I do want to look at.

augmenting some of my team’s tasks, processes, or things. Where should they start when it comes to kind of doing an audit of their current business or their current teams activities and things like that? What would you recommend as the starting place for a leader to really get a lay of the land of what can be augmented for the biggest bang for their buck?

Jevon Wooden (12:26)
Yeah, and this is, it depends on the leaders goals. If your goal is to replace the people, then that takes a few of the options out, right? Because if you want to replace, you can’t ask them, you know, what their day in the life looks like and for them to document what they feel like AI can take.

You can’t ask them to go ahead and, you know, program the AI to ensure. But if you are not replacing them and you’re augmenting them, that’s where I would start, is to say, hey, you know, looking at your day in life, where do you feel like you can best utilize your skills and just offload some of this stuff to AI, right? Whether it’s drafting content, whatever it is. And they can kind of tell you like, hey, I love to keep this, I want to keep this. This is in between, there might, I don’t know if there’s technology out there for that yet.

Here’s where we know we can start. Let’s start with this section, take this and put it in AI. That’s the best place to me because it also allows people to know that they’re not in danger and then that they can upscale to kind of help program that and then that they’re also valued. So that’s where I would start if I can do that. If I cannot ask my people, because I’m looking to replace them with artificial intelligence instead of augment them, then you’re going to have to understand that role in that task and you’re probably going to have to ask the manager.

what does that role look like? Like what do they do on a daily basis? Do they track? Do they submit a report to kind of track? And if they don’t, can we ask them to start submitting their report over time so we can kind of understand what’s going on in that role and what they do on a daily basis and then see and just pick ourselves like what we think is needed from that role and can it be assigned to AI or not?

John Marshall (14:02)
Interesting. I’ve, I had a, I had a client that were fairly, fairly large global organization and he was essentially tasked at a 1200 person, essentially an AI integration that was worth about 1200 people in headcount.

And so you kind of, like you said, right, you know that there’s a reduction on the way. So how do you see what’s all, you know, what’s all unfolding within your organization? Right now this was a much larger scale, right. Then a lot of the, a lot of the times and a lot of the clients that I’m working with, but it was an interesting approach where he actually was, he was actually pretty transparent.

Jevon Wooden (14:30)
Mm-hmm.

you

John Marshall (14:52)
Right. and more led the way of saying, you know, this change is coming. Right. The technology is coming. So when it comes down to the savings or the additional revenue that we believe that this is bringing in, you can utilize the technology to amplify your productivity and the success and criticalness of your role.

Jevon Wooden (14:57)
Mm-hmm.

John Marshall (15:16)
in the same amount that it would be to reduce head count. So he almost made it, he almost made it a challenge for the group to, which I don’t know if I necessarily agree with the approach.

Jevon Wooden (15:29)
Mm-hmm.

John Marshall (15:29)
But

I thought it was just an interesting approach to put people’s feet to the fire to say like, Hey, you have a choice. Learn the technology and help yourself become more efficient and deliver more value. Right. Or, you know, there could be consequences coming down the line. Right.

Jevon Wooden (15:46)
Yeah,

yeah. the way I see that approach is, you know, we talked about the intersection between uncertainty and opportunity. For me, that generates too much uncertainty. And that’s the issue, because I don’t know if I, even if I do program this thing and I upscale and rescale and do all this other stuff, I don’t know if I’m going to be cut. So I don’t know what your standard is for staying.

John Marshall (15:59)
Agree.

Mm-hmm.

Jevon Wooden (16:10)
Or if there is a standard, how do I know we’re not just gonna all go once we get you where you’re trying to go? So that trust level is not there with that approach. And that’s why I say like, you really have to dynamic, you always should be transparent about what’s going on. And if you know that you’re going to get rid of them anyway, just save them the heartache of getting cut six months down the road if you already know that. Like start helping them get to that other place. Because I found that that

John Marshall (16:18)
I

Jevon Wooden (16:37)
People feel they will do what is necessary and you’ll have that down tick of course. Some people just be like, I’m out already. But then you have people who truly believe what you’re doing and say, okay, even though I know that I’m gonna be cut, I wanna be a part of this. And it makes their resume look good and you’re helping them with career services. You may give them a severance, all those different things. You just need to be able to support them in that way. But I just don’t want to generate a ton of uncertainty that is unnecessary.

John Marshall (16:45)
Mm-hmm.

Jevon Wooden (17:06)
by saying, hey, I’m gonna put my feet to the fire. That’s fear-based leadership, ⁓ and I just feel like that is not conducive to long-term success.

John Marshall (17:10)
Mm-hmm.

I agree. I thought it was an interesting approach that he kind of already had underway.

Jevon Wooden (17:20)
Yeah.

He was like, I’m gonna be Elon on this one.

John Marshall (17:25)
Right? So I was like, well,

you know, maybe there are some conversations that need to be had here. Right?

Jevon Wooden (17:31)
Yes, absolutely.

John Marshall (17:34)
But now, starting with the, so that’s, feel like the leader where they’re starting to start to have some of these conversations, get a lay of the land and what about, and I feel like as a small business owner myself and ourselves, we’re actively always finding places that we can leverage this technology, right? Because a head count can be an extremely costly part of our business, right?

Jevon Wooden (17:52)
Mm-hmm.

Absolutely.

John Marshall (18:02)
We’re always looking for places, but just kind of saying to, I’m curious about your advice to the small business owner as well. You know, someone that’s starting a business right now, or maybe even in the first five years of their business, right? What kind of audit should they be doing on their business? And maybe what’s one or two tools that you would recommend?

Jevon Wooden (18:26)
Yeah, I mean. This is, I look at it as a force multiplier. We used that word augmentation earlier, John, and that’s how I recommend any small business, large business, any of that, I recommend them to look like, okay, what do I need? Where do I feel like I’m lacking as an individual? as a business leader, whatever. I need someone, there’s a book, Traction, right, talks about have you, having this and someone else that’s opposite of you and stuff like that. if you can…

John Marshall (18:47)
yeah.

Jevon Wooden (18:50)
turn like use an agent, agentic, agency or something like that and you create them. And say, Hey, I’m this way. I want you to think this way and I want you to scrutinize some of my thought processes. So I have someone who can kind of be that angel on my shoulder, right? That voice of reason, because you know, maybe I’m impulsive or whatever it is. That’s how I want to program mine, right? That’s how I use mine. And then I also use it as a small business owner to say, okay, I need market research. I need marketing. I need to make sure my message is landing. So I want you to see things from certain.

whoever my target audience’s perspective. And that’s how I love to use this thing. John. And then I’ll say, hey, I’m writing this post, I’m writing this piece, I’m writing this training, tear it apart. Where are some of the gaps and the holes that aren’t flowing well? Because if you don’t do that, what’s going to happen is it’s going to agree with you on everything. Say you use ChatGPT or Gemini, it’s going to agree with you. Oh yeah, that is great. So you got to challenge it to challenge you.

John Marshall (19:22)
Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Jevon Wooden (19:47)
And that’s how I like to use that. And then there’s stuff like, of course, perplexity and all that stuff, like search engines. I love that for research and just getting deeper, that deep analysis. love like there’s a bunch of like Gamma and all this other stuff for presentations. If you’re, find that you’re not good at PowerPoint. So some of those beautiful that AI, there’s a bunch of these tools that really can help to augment once again and make you a lot more efficient.

John Marshall (19:55)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jevon Wooden (20:15)
on things that you need to do. Pitch decks, presentations, your wording, your messaging, your content, your sales funnels. You mentioned making sure everything is connected. I still love Zapier because I can connect all my tools and make it seamless. No one knows what’s going on. Stuff like that, just making sure that you are optimizing your process flows and your user experience. That’s how I like to use it, and it’s optimizing my research.

where I’m not having to spend hours, I can spend like literally minutes, understand what my competitors are doing or what the hottest topics are. That’s how I would use it. And that’s how I recommend using it for everyone. Not to create for you, but to help you brainstorm and to help you fill those blind spots you may have.

John Marshall (21:00)
I couldn’t agree more. It’s definitely a thought partner for me as well. Right. You know, just even just through ideation design ideation, a whole bunch of different things that, that come up. Web page design ideation, different topics to discuss.  it’s always there to bounce ideas off of. And I agree with the scrutiny as well. I do the same thing. What, what am I missing here?

Jevon Wooden (21:04)
Yes. Yes.

Yes. Yeah, you have to, because it’s too nice, man. It’s like, yeah.

It’s like, yeah, that’s a great idea, Jevon. no it wasn’t. Like, what are you talking about? So I wanted to scrutinize and tear my stuff apart so I can be better, you know?

John Marshall (21:33)
Hahaha.

Right? Right. I think you, you summed it up. You summed it up really well, right? Getting, helping it, right? Your customer, your customer experience, your process flows and getting into the research. I feel like the human intelligence part of it, we almost have a, like a research trauma built into us in some way.

Jevon Wooden (22:01)
Hmm.

John Marshall (22:03)
You know, like, do the research reminds us of just, you know, cold days in the library.

Jevon Wooden (22:10)
Yeah, yeah, it’s too

much like work, So like, unless you enjoy that part, I mean, cool, but I love being able to say, hey, find me some things and then you can confirm, right? Trust will verify, you confirm that these are legit because you don’t want to be putting things out there that’s like, where did that come from? Then you don’t really have a source. But it’s just like things you will never find. Like for instance, I’m doing my doctorate right now. And like some of the readings that I’m inputting into my dissertation.

John Marshall (22:22)
Exactly.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jevon Wooden (22:38)
I probably

would have never found them because they’re not cited as heavily as some of the other works out there on the topic. So that’s the beauty of what we have at our fingertips and at our disposal right now, no matter what AI tools you want, right?

John Marshall (22:53)
I agree. I agree, man. I just finished up my masters in August and it was, thank you. Thank you. And I remember sitting there and together all of the research, right? And

Jevon Wooden (22:58)
Congratulations once again.

John Marshall (23:10)
AI was such a great tool in being able to, you’re right, discover some of these things that you would just would never see. And I was thinking about, you know, 50 years ago, you had to scour library and like if it wasn’t in your library, it had to be mailed to you or something. Like how did people do research?

Jevon Wooden (23:26)
⁓ man.

Yeah, salute to them. Salute to them

who had before all, imagine before a computer at all. Like, man, you had to literally hand write this stuff.

John Marshall (23:36)
It would,

it would be like your dissertation would take you the whole, the whole time, years. how, there just wouldn’t be enough things to research. But I mean, I guess maybe it was a smaller body of work itself, but even still, that’s just so much time and reading. Like, I don’t.

Jevon Wooden (23:46)
Yeah, I don’t know.

There’s no shortcuts in

John Marshall (24:03)
I don’t know. You’re right. You’re right.

Jevon Wooden (24:03)
that way. And that’s the beauty of now. It’s like you think about it. You can synthesize all the materials that you’re receiving into what you really need it for. It’s like, think about all that wasted time of these great minds before us who had to do all these things manually that we can now say, hey, I’m going to just offload that part and use my brain processing power for creating and innovating and doing things a little bit differently.

One of my professors, says, her name is Vanessa Pachter, she talks about the knowledge tree and how on that tree, instead of trying to create a whole new tree or create a branch, you try to do this leaf. And the AI just helps us find the leaf that we’re looking to plant on that knowledge tree ⁓ so much easier. Because what do we see these days? We’re seeing some people get their dissertations challenged. you plagiarized, you did this, you did that. Well, how would I know?

John Marshall (24:46)
Hmm.

Jevon Wooden (24:56)
when I didn’t have nothing to reference, you know, I’m doing this thing manually right now. So it’s just like those types of things we may take for granted right now, but I feel like we also still have to leverage and tie into the fact that we still need to check. We still need to confirm. We still need to ensure that we’re adding value.

because I feel like a lot of people are just posting stuff they would never post about you and you know nothing about it but you’re posting about it, right? So we still need to make sure it’s authentic. Yeah, writing AI books, it’s like it’s really cheapening knowledge for me. And that’s, it’s hurtful for someone who loves knowledge, who loves to seek understanding and knowledge. So we really have to be great stewards of the technology if we’re talking about human intelligence and AI coming together.

John Marshall (25:24)
mean, even writing whole books, you know, it’s wild.

Jevon Wooden (25:44)
One of the things is making sure you’re being ethical and you’re being a great steward of these tools. Because if you’re not and you’re claiming you’re doing these things and it’s not you. people are going to notice. If I have a conversation with you and I’m like, you had a great post about agentic AI and how it’s impacting your organization. Tell me more about that. And you’re like, I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I made that post, right?

And you start to run into that more and more, right? You’re starting to see things like that. I mean, I’ve been to conferences and speakers are having their speeches created by, you know, the technologies and you can tell, because when they get off track, they fall, right? They falter. So it’s like, we have to really be cognizant of that and understand that whatever we’re doing with these tools, we need to understand it at a foundational fundamental level.

John Marshall (26:33)
I agree. And just shifting, that was a great segue into a little bit more focus on human intelligence here. And I think we’re in a great spot when it comes to being good stewards of AI, because I think the best questions hold

even so much more weight now. now that we have so much technology and different models to answer them, like the quality of asking the right questions is going to be more important than having the right information. Right. So I think even as coaches, like we’re in, you know, we’re in a, good place to be able to support that.

Jevon Wooden (27:12)
I agree. I will totally agree.

John Marshall (27:21)
But I think that that’s part of human intelligence is being able to understand the problem and ask the right questions for it to be solved. Because now you essentially have the ability to learn anything that you want basically for free. Right? So it’s about opening your mind to as many things as you can to be able to ask the right questions, to solve the problems that are meaningful to you.

Jevon Wooden (27:34)
Yes.

Absolutely.

John Marshall (27:48)
So I think it’s a good opportunity to give people purpose, you know?

Jevon Wooden (27:53)
I agree.

I wholeheartedly agree, they use the term prompt engineering. It’s like, if you can understand prompts, then you can literally find anything just for free. Now, the thing that I see people running into is, one, they don’t know what questions to ask. And then, two, it’s like they go down rabbit holes on information. It’s like, do I even need to know this right now? And then, again,

John Marshall (28:19)
I’m definitely a victim

of that sometimes. ⁓

Jevon Wooden (28:20)
Yeah, we all do it. It’s the human thing

because it’s like I’m curious. I want to find out what you know, what is thinking about this I just wrote this thing. What do you think? You know where and we’re starting to leverage that and and do it for things that we necessarily don’t need to do it for I’m hearing like I’ve been coaching  some young men or not even young just men some high achievers on emotionally intelligent communication in their relationships and

they have started to use chat GPT or Gemini or would it pick their to Claude for their text. So instead of just texting the person, they will put it in. I want to say this thing. I want to ask her if it’s a dinner, for example, and they’ll have chat GPT right there. I’m like, you know, that’s not a good look for you, right? Cause that person on the other end is reading that like, this is definitely chat GPT. And then when you get in front of you sound nothing like that.

It’s like we got it. We got to be authentic man. Like if it’s sounding too good It’s a such thing as sounding too good. All right, so we sound too good. We got it We got to make sure it’s in our voice

John Marshall (29:11)
That’s wild.

But I think now that, you know, this, training that we specifically deliver and the things that we speak about the most, like helping people become more emotionally intelligent, develop better relationships, understand people better. Now, like these are all the differentiating skills in the workplace now. Right? Information is  becoming a commodity.

Jevon Wooden (29:40)
Absolutely.

Yeah.

It’s a commodity.

It’s a commodity. Absolutely. Look, we’re thinking the same thing. But it’s those, like you said, those who ask the best questions and those who look to understand on a deeper level. Connection. Connection is going to be the key. And as we’re in this age of technological advances, connection is the thing that we’re actually the most disconnected we’ve ever been right now.

John Marshall (29:47)
Right?

Jevon Wooden (30:09)
because we have so many different distractions, we’re not used to these face-to-face interactions anymore. Especially if you’ve come up during the COVID pandemic,  a lot of people are so disconnected and they really don’t know how to get past that surface level conversation, communication. Like I know tons of folks who are like, man, you know what? I don’t even know how to convey how I’m feeling anymore. I don’t know how to…

John Marshall (30:18)
Mm-hmm.

Jevon Wooden (30:35)
listen to other people without getting distracted and checking my phone anymore. It’s like all these little things, those are the people that are going to be the change makers that Steve Jobs once talked about in his talk. The change makers are going to be the ones that can tap in even more to the human elements and human components than they ever have. Those people who are able to train and be disciplined to listen, disciplined to understand and know what questions to ask a person.

disciplined enough to know how to convey their thoughts in a way that’s intelligent, understandable, and digestible. So that’s where I feel like there’s so much opportunity here for the human side of things, even in this age of AI.

John Marshall (31:18)
Well, I couldn’t agree more. The name of my business says the same thing.

Jevon Wooden (31:22)
Yes, exactly so you you if

anyone understands you understand

John Marshall (31:27)
I mean, but you, hit, you hit something. You said that really, really well. Now I’m just thinking of, know, the listener that’s sitting here right now that just heard that and says, you know, I want to, I need to make this an increased focus for me. Right. I need to start paying attention to these human elements, becoming more emotionally intelligent. Right.

being able to set myself up to be able to ask the right questions, to present myself well, to deliver better presentations. I mean, any human element that can start setting them apart professionally and personally, kind of ridding them of this really epidemic of loneliness, right?

Jevon Wooden (32:11)
Yeah.

John Marshall (32:11)
But I would just kind of keep it simple and say, you know, the first steps, someone listening to this that says, you know, I do want to, need to make it a point to learn more about emotional intelligence and start like incorporating some of this training and methodology into my life. What’s the first step that they should take.

Jevon Wooden (32:32)
Yeah, I think just saying that and deciding is the first step. Deciding to do something about it, but then you have to get deeper and do some introspection. Like what does that actually mean? What does that look like? Where do you feel like you’re lacking and there’s room for improvement and being more human, so to speak? You know, do you feel like you just don’t listen well? Do you feel like you always listen to respond? Are you feeling like when you communicate, you don’t make eye contact, you know, so you really have to take that deep dive into where those gaps and rooms for.

are for yourself and then find out some exercises that you can do. So for me, for example, if I’m coaching someone and they’re like, you know what, I don’t feel comfortable presenting. And now we gotta find out why. What’s the root cause of that? Why don’t you feel comfortable? And is it in all cases? Is it some instances? Is it certain person? So we really have to kind of get deeper into the aspects of being more human that we want to focus on and then.

John Marshall (33:21)
Mm-hmm.

Jevon Wooden (33:28)
Find the patterns. Just like AI, human intelligence is all about pattern recognition as well. So we gotta identify our self patterns, become self aware, and then make a plan on that. And of course, I’m gonna plug that a coach can really, really help you shine that mirror on yourself, right? Yeah.

John Marshall (33:44)
Definitely, definitely. mean, a

coach is the best way to see yourself, right? They are, you’re hiring a person to see things in you that you don’t see in yourself, right? The same thing happens with, with my coach. You know, I leave the session like, wait a second, you know, I consider myself pretty self-aware.

Jevon Wooden (33:50)
Yeah.

That’s it. That’s it.

John Marshall (34:07)
And even still, like there’s always more things to learn and become aware of and then make different choices. Right? And I would also offer that, you know, being with more people that you want to be like, you know, who do you know that

Jevon Wooden (34:23)
Yes, yes.

John Marshall (34:27)
You say would have a higher emotional intelligence or does do a good job of getting up in front of the room and giving a presentation. Get to know them. spend time with them. set up a, even if it’s not a mentor mentee relationship, you know, just hang around people that have the skills that you want to learn more about. It’s just kind of a product of your environment kind of thing. Right.

Jevon Wooden (34:39)
absolutely.

Yeah.

And another thing, like when I was coming up, you know, I didn’t really have anyone that I looked to, like that I knew, but you can have virtual mentors. You can literally, again, because everything’s at your fingertips, find people who really inspire you to be better and look at the things that make you like gravitate towards them and see if you can adapt them to you, to your situations and make them yours. I recommend that 10 out of 10 times to everyone.

So, it’s really, I’m just gonna call it out and say there’s really no excuse to why you wouldn’t become a better you, if you’re willing to put in that.

John Marshall (35:21)
Mm-hmm.

I agree. I agree. There’s so much out there. Well, this has been, you know, this has been a great discussion. think we’ve, you know, covered all the way from points of where AI is infiltrating different workplaces and teams, how people can utilize it through to the most essential human elements that are going to set people apart in the workplace will really end in their personal lives. Right.

moving forward from here and support them to be able to leverage this technology better. Right. So what’s, what’s one closing, word of wisdom that you would offer to listeners and if not one word of wisdom, one resource that they could, that they should purchase, look at, read, review something that was supportive for you.

Jevon Wooden (35:57)
Absolutely.

For me, the word would be, again, tap into the beauty of being human.  don’t get so caught up in the wave that AI is going to be the key and savior to it all because none of this works without humanity. So that’s what I want people to really, really understand. And the fact that you can impact change, the change in the wave that’s coming, you can be a part of that.

Don’t let it happen to you, let it happen for you. So that’s what I would leave with them.

John Marshall (36:52)
Thank you, thank you. And how can they connect with you, Jevon?

Jevon Wooden (36:56)
Yeah, you can go to jevonwooden.com That’s JEVONWOODEN.com That way you can message me. You can connect with me on my socials. Check out my books and what I’m up to.

John Marshall (37:09)
Right. Beautiful. Yes. And the books too. Tell them about the books.

Jevon Wooden (37:15)
Yeah, so I have two books. One is Own Your Kingdom, How to Control Your Mindset So You Control Your Destiny. That’s very relevant right now because we’re talking about uncertainty and opportunity and everything. So gotta be in the right head space. And then the second book is called From Functional to Phenomenal, The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Transforming Your Leadership in Business. And it’s really talking about leveraging human connection to grow your personal brand and lead.

John Marshall (37:23)
Right? Exactly.

Beautiful, beautiful. Well, thank you for sharing that links to those and Jevon’s website will be in the show notes to Jevon I just want to know, deeply thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing this this time this conversation and also just you know being a you know, a friend Mentor collaborator, you know all the things that you’ve been to me over the years as well. Thank you for that

Jevon Wooden (38:03)
Man, man,

thank you. That means a lot to me, John. Glad I finally was able to get on the present professional. This means a lot to me. I mean, you are an outstanding, outstanding gentleman and father, brother. You’re just outstanding, man. I’m glad and honored to be a part of your journey.

John Marshall (38:22)
appreciate you man. listeners, thank you so much for tuning into the present professional. We will have more episodes coming along and you’ll be able to interact with Jevon, like I said, with the links in the show notes. I appreciate you being a part of the community. I will see you next time.

Jevon Wooden (38:23)
Yes, sir.