Leadership And Resilience – Jamie Mason Cohen

“Remember that every successful person you’ve heard about, read about, or know has been told before that they are not good enough or their work is subpar in some way.”

If you are someone who wants to lead and motivate a team of people within an organisation effectively, Jamie Mason Cohen is the go-to guy to look for. As a leadership development and resilience expert, Cohen uses a tool kit of unconventional virtual approaches to cultivate resilience through unique performance assessment, the science of positive psychology, and proven leadership strategies through an engaging and entertaining cinematic format.

Some of his interesting methodology for training corporate employees include ‘Saturday Night Leaders’ Framework, ‘Living Your Values’ 7-Step Process and Action Plan, the ultimate team alignment and appreciation session in ‘What Your Signature Says About You’, as well as his ‘Virtual Storytelling’ online training.

He is also a frequent media commentator on CNN, Forbes and The Morning Show. His TEDx talk on leadership has been viewed 2.2 million times. Furthermore, he is a ‘Dale Carnegie Business Training Award’ recipient and a certified leadership coach with ‘The Leadership Circle’.

As unrelatable, mundane and dry as his accomplishments may sound to someone not interested in such organisational matters, we surprisingly found an insightful life journey filled with anecdotes, life lessons and personal experiences.

EARLY LIFE 

Tell us more about your family background and share with us on what it was like growing up. 

I grew up in Toronto, Canada. My father was a lawyer, and my mother was an educator and regional manager of a large school board. I have a young sister, who became an educator, entrepreneur, and dance choreographer. The place I lived in was a safe, middle-class community where we attended public schools during the year and actively played competitive sports like baseball, hockey, and basketball.

I had parents who instilled in us the values of being kind to others, family first and an openness to creative goals. My grandparents were also an important part of my life growing up.  My grandmother, Gertrude, would come to our house regularly armed with her delicious soups and matzah balls.  The smell of her banana muffins would fill the house the moment she entered.

My grandparents were from Poland and Canada.  My grandmother, Gertrude, played an extraordinary influence on my life. She was always supportive and warm.  I used to confide in her about my fears and doubts, and she’d always have the right thing to say or just be there for me like a best friend.  

We had dogs as pets – a Shih-Tzu named Suki and then a bulldog named Wendel.  We also had a pet budgie bird named Fred.  Growing up with pets added an energy and playfulness to our days.  

In the summers, I often spent my time at the baseball park.  Toronto had a vibrant summer sports culture and I used to love going to the ballpark.  The smell of the fresh cut grass, the cloudless days, hearing the sounds of the bat hitting the ball and seeing multiple games going on in the different fields energized me to be a part of this community.

During December holiday seasons, we usually would take a family trip to Ft. Lauderdale Florida to visit our grandparents or resorts in Mexico or the Dominican Republic.  My dad was a master at finding good deals for us to travel.

How did your upbringing shape the person you are today? 

When I look back now as a father of two, I realize that one unique aspect that shaped my childhood was experiences.  My parents worked hard to create family experiences and to provide both my sister, Carly, and I with different types of opportunities to be in the world.  

We had an NHL hockey player named Luke Richardson, live in our home (billeting in our basement) for his first year in the league. Naturally, we became the envy of the other kids in the neighborhood and at school.

In my family, meeting people of different backgrounds was always encouraged. Canada is multicultural and my mother was ‘Head of English’ as a second language, overseeing about thirty adult learning schools. Not surprisingly, we were exposed to different cultures and met many people from all over the world who travelled to Canada as a result.

It includes trying different types of art and learning to play a variety of sports. Even though at the time I might not have appreciated taking art classes or the challenges of being on a sports team, I realize now that it instilled in me a love of the arts.  It also ingrained in me resilience in overcoming rejection, discipline and led me to live an interesting life.

I’ve also reinvented myself professionally many times as an adult and I believe that this exposure and gentle push to experiment with different skill sets and experiences led me to the different creative streams that make up my days today.   

How would you sum up your childhood?

Fortunate. Supportive. Creative. Full of unique and memorable experiences and moments.

 

JOURNEY 

Why did you choose to become a leadership development and resilience expert? 

The career advice I give myself as well as others is to find out what you’re good at, what you’re passionate about and what’s relevant to others to learn.  In my case, I was good at creating curriculum and teaching, I had a passion for learning about how to develop my own leadership and resilience attributes and researched that there was a growing niche to provide practical training that combined the two areas.   

I tested this hypothesis out in 2014, where I gave a TEDx Talk: ‘How to Spot a Leader in Their Handwriting’.  It was an unconventional way to look at leadership, but it’s garnered over 2 million views though probably 2.1 million of those views were by my mom 

The point is that if you are looking to reinvent your career, or develop a new professional path, you might want to start with those three questions, as I have done and have continued to do: 

1. What are my strengths?
2. What are my passions?
3. What is relevant to a specific audience who has problems in this area that I can help solve?

Then look for a topic or a combination of topics that answer all three of those questions.

Along the way, what were some hard decisions you faced and challenges you had to overcome?

I had to ask myself – what areas should I focus my attention on in developing my career?

There are hundreds of different paths or approaches a speaker or trainer can take in developing a talk or a training session.  At some point, I looked within more than I looked outward. I fully trusted my own cumulative decision-making processes and professional taste to boldly create what I thought was the best I could offer specific audiences in the corporate world.

It was also a challenge to start an uncertain, financially up-and-down career path with no contacts in a field that was much more abstract. Totally different from my prio career I had been in for 12 years – as a teacher. Being a teacher is relatively stable financially.

When you start a new path, with a young family at home, it’s a real challenge to not put too much pressure on yourself to succeed right away. I had to build self-imposed limits and boundaries as to how much I worked, because it started to feel like I was experiencing burn-out.

There was a constant push-pull between wanting to give my wife, Karen and our two kids, Koby and Maya my best energy versus the tension of moving from where I was starting out to where I wanted to get to.

Share with us some experiences/memories/stories that you think are significant to your journey so far. 

1998 – 2000: Working for Saturday Night Live Founder, Lorne Michaels, and the show in New York.

After cold calling Executive Producer, Lorne Michaels, twenty-five times over three months while living in my parents’ basement after graduating university, I got a call back from his assistant. I talked my way into an interview with Lorne several months later.

After meeting the late legendary comedian, Chris Farley, in the writer’s room while nervously waiting for my interview, he calmed me down by kindly asking me questions about my story. We shared a mutual contact – my former baseball coach – who was in a movie with him.  I then walked into my interview with Lorne Michaels feeling calm and self-assured and was offered an entry level job.   

The journey was the destination because my time in New York was brief but the experience of living and working in New York in one of the most renowned entertainment companies in the world was amazing. It planted the seeds that are coming to fruition now in my speaking career and in developing my own reality TV series for a Canadian network.

2008: Traveling to Siem Reap, Cambodia: I won a Canadian Ambassador of the Arts Grant from the Canadian Government to premiere my short film, ‘The Barber of Kigali’, based on a true story of a survivor in the Rwandan genocide, who was living in Canada at that time.  

It reinforced in my mind that the journey is the destination. I realized that I didn’t travel from Canada to Cambodia to show a short film. Rather it was to connect with people from a different culture, to contribute to a local school and to expand my view of the world.  

2014: On a professional level, my TEDx talk in Luxembourg was a pivotal moment where I knew that being on a global stage and moving people emotionally, adding value to their lives, was what I wanted to pursue.  

I didn’t know how but this was a powerful boost of inner confidence that I could rise to the challenge and strive to become one of the best in the world in this type of speaking and training.  

2018: Being on the same stage as a speaker with my childhood idol, Nando Parrado, was memorable.  After both our talks, he asked me if I wanted to have lunch with him.To sit down with him for a meal and hear him share his story of how he survived one of the most extraordinary plane crashes in history, made me feel grateful for being able to have such amazing encounters while I am still living.

2021: Giving a live virtual training to physicians in 21 countries made me realize how grateful I was to serve, to teach, to connect with professionals all over the world. It also made me pause to appreciate how far my speaking journey has taken me over the past four years. 

ACHIEVEMENTS 

Which achievements are you most proud of and why?

2020/2021 Speaker of the Year Nomination (Meeting Planners International NY)

Starting from scratch and building a thriving keynote speaking and training career, working with leading clients like Sun Life Financial, Assante, Novo Nordisk, Canadian Public Relations Society, Broadway Video Entertainment, The Terry Fox Foundation, TEDx, Baker Tilly, and top speaking agencies around the world. 

TEDx Talk: How to Spot a Leader in Their Handwriting = over 2 million views

My goal was to give a TEDx talk to spread my message about the limitless possibilities that exist within us if only we take a moment to look in our handwriting and in ourselves.  It took two years of planning, visualizing and goal setting. This includes creating a vision board dedicated to bringing this goal to fruition.  

After winning a TED Education Award, I connected with an organizer for a TEDx event in Luxembourg. The talk was set in a castle, which gave me the confidence to pursue a speaking career.  

TED-Huffington Post International Educators Award

I applied for this award but totally forgot about it later on.  A few months later, I got an email, which I thought was a potential scam, saying that I was the only Canadian educator to win the award. I happened to be at a conference with a friend, a professor and former police detective focused on fraud!

He checked out the e-mail and concluded that it was real.  We called the TED offices in New York, and they verified that I did indeed win and was invited for an all-expenses paid trip to New Orleans to be honored for my work in creating innovative learning environments.

Wrote #1 Amazon best-selling book: LIVE FROM YOUR CLASS: Everything I Learned About Teaching, I Learned from Working at SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE

I wrote this book by getting up at 4:30 am every day for over a year before teaching and before my two kids (babies at the time) were up.  The book is about more than teaching, it’s about how to create learning environments in school and work that truly engage and inspire students and employees.  I’m very proud of this book as it is a culmination of my work as a teacher for 12 years and incorporates stories and experiences I had up to that point in the world of media and film. 

Dale Carnegie Public Speaking Award Winner

Winning this award while still in university at the Western, University in London, Ontario, Canada, made me believe that one day I would pursue a path that involved adding values to people’s lives through speaking professionally.

Granted Ambassador of the Arts Grant by the Canadian Government

I won a grant and acknowledgment by the Canadian government for a short film that I directed about an incident in the life of a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who immigrated to Canada. The grant was for me to represent Canada as a filmmaker in Cambodia for the Cambodian International Film Festival and to teach Cambodian children film-making skills 

Best Film Director, London, England based Film Festival for The Barber of Kigali

My short film about a Rwandan genocide survivor who meets his father’s murderer in Canada and must decide whether to kill him or walk away was inspired by true events. The film was accepted in 9 film festivals around the world from California to Cambodia to Boston to London England and gave me the chance to travel to several of them.

Cambodia was particularly memorable because I not only showed my film on the anniversary of The Killing Fields, but got to work with local children and teach them film-making skills. 

Website ranked #26th best leadership speaker & coach website by wpblogs.com

I’ve been working on my website for years so when a reputable website that reviews websites reviewed and ranked my website as one of the best on the internet in my speaking and group coaching niche, I was honoured. 

What do you think are the key ingredients to your success?

If you’re not invited to the party, throw your own party so that the right people will want to attend. 

In other words, be a magnet for opportunity by showing your value to others, working on your skillset and being so good at what you do that eventually the people who you want to connect with will show up in your life in unexpected ways. Instead of forcing your way through the front door where everyone is trying to get into, look for the side and back doors that others have overlooked.

Turning crisis into opportunity. 

For example, when Covid-19 hit, I looked for ways to serve pre-existing clients and created a new media project to help small-to-midsize businesses that wouldn’t have been possible in pre-covid.  

Working smart and working hard. 

I wrote working hard first because focusing on outputs instead of outcomes can make us feel like we’re working hard yet progressive can feel elusive. Focusing on what the outcomes I wanted and then reverse engineering what steps I need to take was helpful in making small yet substantial progress in achieving my goals.  

Showing up daily by working hard and being disciplined and consistent in focusing on the 1% that makes the biggest difference and then iterating along the way has been essential for my success. 

Surrounding myself with one close speaking buddy who I could learn from, and he could learn from me has been a revelation. 

The commonly repeated expression is that you are a reflection of, or your income is based on the five people who you surround yourself with.  I’ve come to the realization that 1 – 2 people is what you should be aiming for. 

I define and refine what it means to be successful.  

Success means different things to every person you know. My success starts with asking myself what my values are. Some of my core values are: long-term orientation (professional) and family first (personal).  I want to make sure that my daily decisions in service of my highest vision for my life are rooted in my values.  Then I know that the success I achieve is in alignment with who and what I value most.

Resilience.

I have continued to bounce back from rejection and continually put myself out there. This trait is key for anyone trying to become successful in their field. It is never about how you fall, how you get turned down, ignored or rejected – rather it’s about getting back up with confidence and taking one more step forward instead of giving up.

Throughout countless rejections and failures, I push through my sensitivity, my ego, my sadness and simply ask: what’s the best next step? And then I take that step, and continually adjust until I get closer to my goals.

It’s not always about setting goals.  

Some experts believe setting goals can be harmful to the spirit because when you reach a goal, it never seems enough.  I set goals but I also focus on the process, on positive habits like working at the same time each day, even if I don’t feel like doing the work, on constantly researching new concepts and ideas and taking action even when I don’t have all the answers.  

Share some successful case studies with us – people who have been successfully transformed under your guidance. 

 A med-tech entrepreneur in Canada was awarded first-round financing for his company, EasyLabs in an Amsterdam-based worldwide tech.start-up contest, with my help in creating a pitch for his product.   

One business owner took my advice on creating a plan to tell his company’s story through a purpose-based video, which has reinvigorated the organization and its direction. 

Based on my coaching suggestions on how to make his excellent talk even better for his audience, one of the top business speakers in Canada has credited my feedback with growing his business.  

`Dozens of people have reached out to thank me to say that my coaching, which includes a speed handwriting analysis session, has given them the courage to mend broken relationships, follow their goals, pursue previously out-of-reach dreams and to discover their strengths. 

One of Canada’s top parenting experts, Alyson Schafer said that three minutes with Jamie’s unique graphotherapy coaching process is better than 3 therapy sessions. 

What lies ahead in terms of your goals and ambitions? 

I’m a believer in not sharing your goals or ambitions publicly.  I believe that you should write down your goals and ambitions on paper regularly.  Then review those written goals daily.  Then take one small step each day towards that goal.  

My process on this point is supported by verified studies that show that when people put their energy into revealing their goals and ambitions before first putting their energy into putting them in motion, they can easily be derailed or discouraged from strangers, friends and even family.

I’m happy to share my goals and ambitions once they are about to be completed or launched to the world.  But until then, I’ll be busy working on them, not discussing them.  

A quote I love that further amplifies how I feel about the importance of writing down, visualizing, and taking action but not talking about your goals, here’s an excerpt from a famous American singer-songwriter, author and visual artist, Bob Dylan:

“DESTINY is a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does. The picture you have in your own mind of what you’re about WILL COME TRUE. It’s a kind of a thing you kind of have to keep to your own self, because it’s a fragile feeling, and you put it out there, then someone will kill it. It’s best to keep that all inside.”
― Bob Dylan, The Bob Dylan Scrapbook: 1956-1966

PERSONAL (LIFE) 

How does a typical day look like to you now? 

Wake-up: 5:30 am

530am – 8:00 am:  Drink lemon water. Walk 3 km. Meditate on my front porch. Coffee. Write down my goals, top 3 areas I will focus on that day and write down a daily gratitude practice.  I then help get my two kids, Koby, 9 and Maya, 8, ready for school or camp, with my wife, Karen. 

9:00 am – 1:00 pm: Do creative work on speeches or media projects 

1:00 pm – Workout (yoga stretches, weights, trampoline in the backyard, lunch

2:00 pm – 4:00 pm – Business tasks related to speaking, scheduled meetings

After 4:00 pm is more flexible with family time, hobbies like abstract painting, reading and watching Netflix! 

To you, what are the most important things in life?

My wife and kids are the most important thing in my life.  It’s most important to me to live a life that balances the priorities of health, happiness of my family with my greater purpose of positively impacting lives around the world. 

For my children and my wife, I want to live as long as possible in order to ensure that I provide them (in partnership with my wife, Karen) a healthy + loving home.

What’s worth mentioning on your life’s bucket list that you have not done? 

• There are many countries I want to travel to with my family including Rwanda, much of Europe, and South-east Asia. I lived for 8 months in Malaysia teaching at a university but I worked so much that I didn’t have a chance to visit surrounding countries. 
• Singapore is a country on my bucket list! I’ve heard it’s a flawless country in many ways – the city design, the people, the food and the sights.
• Professionally, I have a major bucket list media project in development. When it’s ready to launch to the world, I’ll let you know.
• I’d like to also do a world speaking tour in south-east Asia and Asia.
• Learn a martial art.
• Attend a meditation retreat (there are several on my list)
• Attend a World Cup game and F1 race in-person.
• Have my abstract art accepted and shown in an international gallery.
• Live in another country with my wife and two children for a period between 2 months and 1 year before they are 18 years old.
• Learn to speak another language.

Why do you do what you do? (What drives you everyday)

~ To progress by being a little better than I was yesterday

~ To be a ‘learn-it-all’ not a ‘know-it-all’

~ To be a role model for my kids and give them an example of a father who goes after his goals with intention and deliberate focus yet is always there and present for them.

~ Ultimately, I want to help and serve other people by helping them reach their professional and personal goals.

What are some things that many people don’t know about you? 

~ I stuttered as a child.

~ My mother, who did handwriting analysis as a hobby, saw traits in my handwriting that revealed the potential for me to become a writer and a speaker.  

~ I was skeptical but eventually it came true. I became a speaker and wrote a #1 Amazon best-selling book. 

What kind of legacy do you hope to leave behind? 

~ I want to be the best, most present and engaged father I can be to my children. So that they are equipped with life lessons and the belief in themselves, which I taught them with regards to being able to accomplish anything and overcome any adversity when they set their minds to it.

~ To become the best husband and partner I can be to my wife and help her achieve all of her dreams, both in our family and her own life goals

~ To be the friend to my friends that they could always count on, be vulnerable with and know that I always had their backs and believed in them.

~ To have added transformational value to people’s lives in my professional roles as a teacher, speaker, trainer, coach and media producer.

VIEWPOINTS 

In your opinion, what steps can individuals take to discover and fully realise their full potential and develop their talents?

1. Find out your strengths — what you’re naturally good at. This might be a subject in school that came easy to you or a skill that you were quick to pick up.

2. Find out what you love to do. What makes your heartbeat fast with anticipation, joy and delight when you do it? What makes time fly by because you are so engaged?

3. Research on accomplished individuals who have combined these two areas in a profession.

4. Take an online course (Coursera, for example) to see if you feel a spark inside during learning, even if it’s hard work and prove to be a steep learning curve.

5. If you do like it after doing some additional research, see if there is a market for this service or talent, then invest more time, schooling and coaching into taking steps in this direction.

6. Get a coach to help you eliminate unnecessary mistakes in pursuit of your goal.  The key here is the coach should have been successful in this career recently, if not still doing it. Such a coach will also have valuable contacts that could potentially help you if they see that you’ve made progress and have the potential to excel.

7. Find an online or in-person peer group of other people who share the same interests in this field. You only need to find one other peer, with whom you can encourage each other and help each other along the way. 

What makes a good leader and how can one lead effectively? 

What makes a good leader is someone who creates a safe space for their team so that each team member feels heard, acknowledged, and understood. A good leader creates a space where their team feels that they have permission to make mistakes in order to grow.  A good leader ultimately has the goal, either expressed directly or in their actions, of making others better.  

A person can lead effectively by being a learn-it-all, not a know-it-all. I think the Head of Microsoft said something to that effect once.  Be accessible, show-up so that your team sees you on the front lines with them and not hiding in an office somewhere out of sight.  Be humble and open to new ideas from any member of your team.  

Focus on defining and bringing a purpose-led, value-driven vision into your leadership every single day.  Be the change that you want to see in your team.  Culture starts at the top, which means that everything that you do, say, and don’t do or don’t say, will be seen and interpreted by your team.  

When you have integrity – in which your actions match your words, you will build an unspoken trust and bond with your team that will not just make for a better work environment but a better world. 

To you, what does it mean to be resilient in the face of adversity? And how can people build up this quality in themselves? 

Being resilient in the face of adversity means to find strength in difficult moments or situations. It’s about how fast you bounce back from a temporary setback. You can build up this quality in yourself to truly grasp that in any situation, the one thing in your control is your attitude. 

I learned this from Victor Frankl, who wrote the book that influenced me most in my life called: ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’. Frankl overcame the most difficult imaginable situation, being in a Nazi concentration camp during World War Two. He reflected on what survivors had in common, based on his position as a leading psychiatrist .

Even though it was often luck that separated those who lived and those who were killed, the ones who lived (1 out of 28 to be exact), had an attitude that they wanted desperately to survive for another person, for a higher purpose – such as to finish their life’s work or to find purpose in their suffering.  

Each of these perspectives or attitudes to their predicaments gave them strength in the most extreme hardships.  As you go through your most challenging obstacles, you can ask yourself questions like:

• Who am I doing this for?
• What is a higher purpose that is essential that I carry on in pursuit of this goal?
• What meaning can I find in this challenge or setback that can make me even better?  

You can build up resilience by taking care of both your mind and body.  Some examples include: going on daily walks, doing yoga or practicing mindful meditation for just ten minutes a day. Those activities have been shown in a validated thirty-year study to build resilience in people who experienced trauma in their lives.

Open yourself up to the support of a friend.  A good friend who encourages you, who pulls you up from a failure, who believes in you even when you don’t believe in yourself can help you to see your worth in vulnerable moments.  

Cultivate a hobby that you do just for you. Make date days with yourself to allow yourself to get lost in an activity that challenges you and that makes you feel joy.  Hobbies have been shown to calm the mind, put you in a positive and creative state and help create balance between our professional and personal lives.

Take nothing personally. Be independent of the good or bad opinion of others – said Wayne Dyer.  Sometimes negative feedback or indifference relating to our plans by people we want approval from can derail our enthusiasm and focus on our goals. 

Remember that every successful person you’ve heard about, read about, or know has been told that they are not good enough or their work is subpar in some way. Don’t be defined by another person’s careless comments that reflect where they are and what their opinions are, not who you are and what you are capable of. I suggest listening to a podcast called, “We Regret to Inform You”. Each episode tells a story of a well-known personality who persevered through years of rejection and failure to become international successes.  

Finally, ask: What’s in my control and what’s not moving forward? Whatever happened in the past, is in the past. What you have control over is the present. What can you do right now to take a step forward towards your goal? The Serenity Prayer reads: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” 

If you internalise this quote and focus only on what is in your control to turn a moment of crisis into an opportunity to grow, you’ll be on your way to building resilience in your journey through life!