James Pizzola on Using Data to Build Better Relationships

Welcome back to the Authority Is podcast, where we help you to grow your business, attract new opportunities, and outpace your competition. My name is George Wright III. I'm your host, and I've been partnering up with Valiant CEO Magazine to bring you the hottest entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and experts from around the world that are crushing it in business. Together, we're going to unpack strategies and tactics that they're using to become the authority in their field and my goal is to help to inspire and motivate you to do the same. So let's get right into it. Okay, welcome back. George Wright III here and I'm super excited today. We've got a gentleman with us today that we were able to feature in Valiant CEO Magazine. He's someone that is an innovator and his name is James Paizola. He's a visionary leader and he's the CEO of a new brand new mobile app we're going to talk about, Wright, with over 10 years of experience in business strategy, leadership, and project management. You know, he's got a real proven background for driving growth and innovation and success. But when you, you know, sort of combine that experience with his passion for improving relationships, this is what drove him to create this brand new app. And it's designed, we'll get into details here in a minute, but it's designed to help people navigate their relationships more effectively and make informed, data-driven decisions. And so he's gonna share with us not only his entrepreneurial journey, how he views authority and his insights, but also his ideas on relationships. So James, welcome to the show, man. Yeah, thanks, George. I very much appreciate being here. Yeah, this is exciting. And I know that we had a lot of conversations prior to the episode here. And so I get excited sometimes when I'm meeting innovators like yourself, because it's kind of a lonely journey when it comes to building a business. And our audience is all entrepreneurs, CEOs, business owners, and you've been successful in multiple ventures. So why don't you do me a favor? Give me kind of a backdrop for our listeners of your background. Like where do you come from? What's kind of your key skill set? And then we'll bridge over into how we're going in the direction you're going now. So give us kind of your background. Sure. Yeah. So like you said, I've been in the IT space for about 10 years now, working as a product owner, project manager, developing software products and mobile applications for the last 10 years. And I wanted to, well, let me put it this way. I've always had a passion for psychology also. And I wanted to take that passion and blend it with the skills that I have in the IT world and bring together something that so many people could benefit from. I mean, one of the things that I've noticed, especially since COVID, COVID was difficult on all of us, is I think relationships specifically have really been strained because you don't have that connection. Like going into an office, a lot of people are working from home now, or a lot of people are having just difficulties even getting out of the house because, all right, well, I work from home, I go to the grocery store, And then I come home, I sleep at home, you know, and so it's difficult to keep some of those connections alive. And so that's what I wanted to pursue is a way to enhance those relationships that people have. I love that. And I guess I would kind of note what really excited me about having you on the show is, you know, I'm a pretty analytical guy, too. You know, even though I teach and explore, you know, these concepts of personal development and things like that, I'm a pretty analytical guy. And I think a lot of people are as well. And so having that engineering, you know, specific detail type background, but now merging that with, quite honestly, that's why I started the Daily Mastermind is I wanted to merge personal development and mindset with business, right? How do you get your mind right so you can make a lot of money? I feel like you're doing that with relationships where you're saying, look, how do we really break this down, pick it apart and then and take the analytics around it to be to be better? Because at the end of the day, we just we all want to have a better life. Right. Like is it? And I guess I was going to say, did you. Was there an event in your life that kind of drove you to this new passion you have or was it simply an evolution of your business background? So that's a great question. And I appreciate you asking George, because, uh, like, like I mentioned, I've always been interested in, in why people do the things they do. Uh, I think most of us are always trying to, at least in the moment with the information that we have, make rational decisions that can become difficult when emotions are running high. And so the way I came up with this application and this idea is I was in a relationship, um, with a woman that I very, very much cared about. And I mean, I was in love with, um, we were together for, for a number of years. And then towards the end of the relationship, it was starting to get strained. I won't go into the reasons behind that, but it was just becoming a little bit more contentious, a little bit more difficult, a relationship for both of us. And it's starting to get to the point where I wanted to see if this was still a net positive relationship for me to be in. And as is the case with a lot of people who are in romantic relationships or even familial or platonic friendships, sometimes it's difficult to separate the emotions from the rational, logical thinking behind it. Because everybody, you know, all the friends can say, oh, you know, this might not be good or this, you know, is this really worth it for you? I was looking for a way for myself to determine, is this a net, a net benefit in my life? Because a lot of people, especially if they're going through difficult relationships, oftentimes it's a roller coaster. Like, oh, it was great today. And it was, we got in this huge argument and you know, it's now it's down here. And then we made up and it was fantastic. It's a lot of this. Yeah. Right. So if you're, if you're doing the roller coaster, is that really more beneficial than kind of just having a more even keel time with, with the interactions that you have with this particular person, whether again, it's romantic or platonic or familial. So that's, that's kind of why I wanted to come up with this. And in putting these interactions into our app, for example, you'll start to get data and see trends of what is going on in the relationship. So not only can you look back and see with clarity, Hey, this is how I was feeling at this time. You can also see, all right, how is this relationship going over time? So you can make a decision on whether one is a good relationship to continue pursuing or two, and I think even more importantly, hopefully is you can see where there starts to be some issues and proactively correct them before they turn into such a negative downward spiral Man I love that I love that And I guess you know and I want to get into some details of how you guys were able to translate this into technical type terms But I guess as a foundation, it kind of makes me ask this question. Because I think, like anything else, relationships are essential in business, number one, but also in life. And if our goal is to create our business, they're number one priority, right? Like relationships have got to be the quality of your life is directly related to your relationship. But most of us probably would agree relationships are very ambiguous thing, like they're emotionally based, not logical and this and that. So the question I have is this, how do you measure that? And is it about measuring it or is it just about having indicators? And then is there really always going to be sort of these intangible pieces to it? And your goal is not to really identify everything, but really just to kind of give you a guidepost. So how do you measure that? And what have you seen that's effective. So there's a lot of nuances, as you know, with many different types of relationships. What our app does is it gives you the opportunity to record the various interactions that you have. And the way we rate how healthy these interactions are is when you're putting in, we went to the movies or we went out on a date or family reunion, what have you, you have the opportunity to select one, how significant the interaction was, and then also kind of give it a rating from one to 10. So let's say, you know, you went to the grocery store with your girlfriend or boyfriend or something like that, pretty minimal interaction, but you had a nice time. Maybe that's, you know, a low significance and, you know, we had a good time. So maybe it's a seven out of 10. And then now let's say you get into kind of a heated argument where it's, well, I want to live in this city and you want to live in this city. That might be a pretty critical, uh, significant conversation, for example. And if it didn't go well, maybe it was, you know, a three out of 10, but it'll give you the opportunity to kind of start looking at these interactions and seeing the trends of, okay, where are we aligning, where are we off and how do we correct those? Or if we're off enough on certain things, you know, maybe is this the right relationship for us? Or is this something that is benefiting both of us? I love that. It's so crazy that you say that because I've had some interviews just recently and been doing some work in some other areas. And for our listeners, I just want to kind of really double down and point out what you just said. First of all, I think everyone would agree relationships are one of our number one assets, the things that create our life, just like our thoughts, our relationships are going to create life. And I've talked a lot about the fact that what you focus on, number one, will get attention and grow. And number two, what you measure. So I think you just finally clicked it in for me. It's not about how it's measured and it's not about the detail of that. It's the fact that this allows you to focus on relationships and measure it. And Brennan Brouchard talks about this because he talks about performance, productivity, quality of life. And it's simply, he always tells people, it's simply a matter of rating your life every day. So you know if it's getting better or worse or if you're happy or unhappy. So that did, I appreciate you answering it that way because that closed the gap for me. The fact that you're helping people to focus on relationships, measure it and rate it really helps them to take it to the next level. So do you agree with that assessment of kind of just focus and rating and measuring to be able to make progress? I do, yeah. And the thing that I've found, at least in my own relationships, and I think a lot of people go through this also is, and this is why so many people go back to an ex-boyfriend or an ex-girlfriend, for example, is after a relationship has, has run its course or you've taken a break. At least for me, I noticed that I start to romanticize the good things and I start to forget about the bad things. Which I think is pretty typical for most people. And this will give you a way to look back on the interactions that you've had with this person and objectively see how you felt at the time without your memories being distorted by the emotions of, well, that was bad, but I'll push that to the side because I'm lonely without this person. Or, you know, I'm going to minimize this because is it really as bad as it was? you start to dismiss some of these some of these things that may have been detrimental to the relationship yeah in this way i think it takes the it takes the eyewitness account because a lot of times for example in court an eyewitness could be completely wrong or remember things differently yeah if you're looking back on exactly okay this is what i said this is how i felt this is you know how the trend of our relationship was going, I think it gives people more power to look at, all right, how can we actually make this better? And really that's, that's the goal. Yeah. Well, and, and I think just, you know, Michael Singer talks a lot about, um, stepping back and witnessing, you know, the motions of life, the things you're doing. I think that just becoming more aware of how you're dealing with relationships help you to handle them better. But I think you're right. I think memories over time, they get pretty creative. That's why people that struggle with, you know, big relationship breakups over time, the situation exacerbates or changes or whatever, because memory is a funny thing. So I like that tracking piece. So let me, how does the app work? Like what is, give me, just walk me through a little bit of like what I would do and who's a typical person you're talking to? Is this, I think everybody benefits from relationships, but for you individually, where's your passion? Well, who is it you're trying to help the most with this? So our, our application can really be used by anybody who feels that the relationships in their life are important. So ideally that would be most people. Uh, there are some people who just like to be that Sigma lone wolf, which like you said, I don't know. I think relationships, I agree with you. Relationships are the key foundation of life and without them, it makes life less enjoyable in my opinion. Yeah. But that's our, that's our key target audience is anybody that's in any type of relationship, which is really everybody. Everybody has a mom, you know, you may not talk to them still. It may be in a relationship. They have friends. That's who we're looking to benefit, which is a large portion of the population, I would say. But to answer your question about how the app works. So go to the app store, you download the app, and then you can put in your profile. So your information about you, and then you can start adding. the various different important relationships in your life. It's a very easy process. It takes 30 to 45 seconds to add a new relationship. And then once you go through an interaction, let's say you're going to the movies with a friend. Let's say you're going on a date with your girlfriend, your boyfriend. You like I said you can find family reunion with with somebody or you go to the beach or the mountains with your mom or your dad you can log that interaction in the app and and if you have a therapist so for example we take a romantic scenario if you're dating somebody or if you're you're married to somebody uh you can track these interactions and let's say things you know are starting to to become a little difficult in the the relationship. If you have a therapist, you can share this interaction history with your therapist, whether it's an individual therapist or couples counselor, marriage counselor. And what that does is that allows a trained third party to see the interactions that you're having and get a better sense of what the dynamics are so that they can better guide you on how to fix those things. Now it's just like with having, um, we were talking about fitness before we, we started recording, but if you go to the gym and track your workouts, you don't necessarily have to have a personal trainer, but the fitness tracker can still help you. Kind of the same way. Even if you don't have a therapist yourself, you can still use our application, see the insights, see the data, see the trends of how that relationship is going and still find it beneficial. If you happen to have a therapist, this gives them another tool to help you out even more, to guide you on the road to navigating some of these situations. Got it. Well, I think you're hitting it right on the head. And I think some of us, the older we get, I don't necessarily say the wiser we get, but I will tell you that the more experiences we get, and what happens is you lose your objectivity. So one of the things I've noticed, I'll give you my example on this is, you know, when you go, someone that goes through a relationship has a bad breakup and then they go through another one, have a bad breakup. Now they're almost more likely to have bad relationships because they're so untrusting. They're so, they have no faith, whatever. And this is something that can help them. I believe that when you, when you can add some strategic object, objectivity to relationships, it's key. Cause here we don't give up on the fact that we know the quality of our life is based on relationships. And I do believe impact is going to be coming down to that, but boy, life just beats you down. And not just your thoughts, but your experience and belief is that this is what happens. This kind of helps you to get outside that. So I really love that. What's motivated you to really do this? Because great concept, great idea, your programmer background, but you're very passionate about this right now. Do you feel that this is also something that you have kind of a mission to kind of go after, whether it's impact in the world or is it just closer to home for you? Yeah, I do. I feel like it's- Excites you the most about this direction, I guess I'm wondering. Quite honestly, it's the ability to hopefully help people have genuinely better connections and relationships. I found myself, and again, I think we were talking a little bit before the show, I found myself over COVID really realizing how beneficial relationships were and how integral they are to our lives because a lot of people were stuck at home. They were isolated. If you were one of the lucky few that had another person there, fantastic. But if you didn't, it was a very lonely and isolating time. And it really got me thinking about the quality of the relationships that I have in my life and how I want to make sure that they are the best they can be. And that's, that's really the driver for me because again, coming off of a relationship that unfortunately didn't work out, which I've had to work through a lot of those issues mentally for, for a little bit now. And I think to myself, if there was something like this, would it have helped me or us even changed the course of, you know, getting off the path of, of being happy, um, as we did and get back on that path and not, not veer so far the left or the right, or, um, you know, getting away to the point that we unfortunately, you know, separated because the relationship didn't work out. And I want to address one other thing that you said, because this is something I am super excited about George and I can't wait until we're done developing it one of the most important relationships somebody can have is the relationship with themselves and I think as you mentioned you know a lot of these people go from one bad relationship to another oftentimes I think it's because a lot of people don't know themselves well enough to know what type of person they should be either going after or attracting into their life yeah and we're coming out and and this might be a spoiler because we haven't actually uh finished development yet but it's in the works but we're developing uh assessments within the app that will give you a better idea of the type of person that you are the type of relationship style that you have the type of interests that you're interested in so that you can go is this like is Is this like tying in like personality testing type of thing? Or is this specific to relationship or both? It's a little bit of both. It's personality style. We have one coming out on hobbies and interests. We have one that's coming out on, yeah, like I mentioned, relationship style. We're going to be integrating something called the big five personality test, which you may have heard of before, but that's going to give people a better gauge of, of what kind of, uh, personality they have. Uh, a really cool one. This is the first one that we're coming out with. Um, Carl, Carl Jung, a famous psychologist from the fifties developed this thing called the brand archetype. And I think that's where some people may have some, some troubles because if you're a particular type of person, you're going to get along well with this other type of person or this other type of person, but you may want to avoid or stay away from this type or this type. And I think that's where a lot of people aren't real familiar with who they are, even the homeless. And it's like, well, yeah, maybe that's the reason you're having difficulty in your relationships. You keep finding these people that don't fit your personality style. And even more so than that, It goes, it goes back to, um, even professionally, you know, if you're in a particular job and you just don't find fulfillment in it, well, this will also help you determine, okay, what actually is the right thing that I should be doing? Yeah. Cause that's a source of a lot of pain for a lot of people too. And if you feel better about what you're doing or who you're with or who you're spending your time with, that increases the quality of the relationships. I think throughout your entire life. Well, that's golden. You just hit it golden. It's the key foundation behind why I even do the Daily Mastermind. What I found, and people don't understand this, is I could go, you know, ultimately they want to make more money, have a better life, better lifestyle, things like this but it all starts in here And for many many years I been in business doing you doing hundreds of millions of dollars And then I met this whole personal development world And I realized that everything in your external world starts with your internal world. And so the relationship with yourself not only determines your philosophy and your filter that you apply to relationships, but it will also affect your relationships. So I think that's dynamite, starting with your personal relationship, moving to your external relationships. That's solid. I'm excited to see what you do there. And like anything else, it starts with assessing your relationship with yourself. And so how do you do that? Well, that's something that I think could be really powerful to have. Well, man, I love this topic. I think we could probably riff for a while, but I'm going to kind of pivot for just a minute here in the couple of minutes I've left because a lot of business owners listen to the show because they really want to see what it takes for them to structure themselves. And you and I have had these conversations about mindset as a CEO and things like that. But what do you think as a CEO and a business owner are the most important things are going to be instrumental for you to growing your business in the current market? Is there anything you could kind of add to that outside the relationship app itself? As a CEO, you've had some great success. What is it that you feel is key to day-to-day decisions and day-to-day productivity and results in growing your business? So I think it's twofold. And I'm going to steal this from two very well-known entrepreneurs that everybody knows that I certainly look up to in terms of how they have been able to do it. And the first one is Jeff Bezos, who I think says it best and his company exemplifies this, is trying to focus as much as possible on an excellent customer experience. Because if we can develop in a way that is taking care of the customer as much as possible and providing the most amount of value that we can possibly offer to our users, to our therapists, to people who use our app. I think that is going to do more for us than probably anything else that we could possibly do. Yeah. And beginning with the end in mind with that, in other words, this economy and this world we're living right now, everybody wants immediate gratification, immediate results. They're thinking about one and done. They're not thinking of long-term relationships, obviously, not to throw that in there, but relationships with their customer, because what they don't realize until they start to do a lot of business is it's a lot easier to keep a customer than to get a new one. And if you begin with a customer in mind, like you said, that's huge. That's awesome, man. What else? And well, and the value of that customer is so great over the course of time. If you're providing an experience they enjoy and they're receiving value out of. Yeah, I think it's one of the, if not the most important things you can do in business. And then the second thing- Well, and by the way, I just take, hold that thought for a second. It goes straight to our primary objective this year, which is building authority, meaning the way you build authority is to create those customer relationships of trust and credibility. And you have that by just selling products. You've got to be able to engage with the customer first. So that's a great tie-in. What was the second thing? Yeah, the second one is kind of comes from, well, not kind of comes from, it comes from Elon Musk and the way he is able to manage multiple, multi-billion dollar businesses. And the thing that I think he does well, that a lot of CEOs do not do, is what is the biggest problem or issue that our company is facing right now, I will be in charge of solving that. Little things, the rest of the team can handle. What's the biggest issue or biggest pain point that we are facing right now? That is what I'm going to attack. That is what I'm going to try and solve for our team because just by definition, whatever's the biggest roadblock, you're the big man on campus. The one that if anybody's going to do it, you're going to be doing it. It might involve talking to a team member or engineer about, okay, well, we're going to do this, fix this issue or bond or what have you. Or we need to reach out to these people for talking about whatever it happens to be. Or a person like yourself for marketing, which I'm very excited to be doing more business with you in the future. I think that's one of the most important things a CEO can do within the role of the chief executive is let me focus on the biggest bottleneck or the biggest problem and let me take responsibility for solving that or at least being involved in solving that. Yeah, I think that applies to whether you're a business owner, CEO, high achiever, entrepreneur. The day you learn that working on the business, not in the business is going to grow your business or your job or your career, you'll learn that. And I love how you put it, and that is solving the number one problem is the way to do that. So that as a CEO, I think I agree with you a thousand percent. Well, listen, this has been great spending some time with you. I think what we want to do for anyone that has interest in the relationship app and think, what's the best way for them to be able to try it out, check it out? Where do you send them? Yeah, so they can take a look at our website. It's rightmobileappco.com. So R-I-T-E mobileappco.com. That will give you the links to the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. And you can download our app there. And that will also give you all of the other information that you'd probably want to know about our application. And for all of our users and therapists, for the first 30 days, it will be free. We are a subscription-based company. So after the 30 days, we hope you're satisfied and continue with us. But we want to give at least a trial month so that you can try it out, see how it works for you, try and integrate it into your relationships and benefit from what we've developed. That's awesome. Yeah. What I'll do is I'll link those URLs and links in the show notes. So for those of you interested, really appreciate you having been here today. I think there's a lot of stuff to help people. Yeah. So listen, if you're listening to the show, go check out the app. most importantly of this episode, I want to double down on, I really want you guys to start to focus on your relationships. I tell you that, you know, we're all here because we want to create the life that we were meant to live, the one that we are, we deserve to live. And it's never too late to do that, but you've got to prioritize the things that are important and focus on those. So thanks for listening to the show. Make sure you hit us up on the Daily Mastermind on Facebook, Instagram, share this show, and I'll look forward to talking with you more tomorrow. Once again, my name is George Wright III, been here with James Paisola. Have an amazing day.