Joey Klein is the founder and CEO of Inner Matrix Systems, a personal mastery training system for high achievers. He is the author of “The Inner Matrix: Leveraging the Art & Science of Personal Mastery to Create Real Life Results.” He has been interviewed by Self Magazine, INC.com, Yahoo Finance and NBC. Klein has coached leaders from some of the world’s top companies, including IBM, Coca Cola and the World Health Organization.
We recently got the opportunity to interview Joey.
Joey, Thank you for talking with us. For someone who helps others achieve their personal best, every single day must be a satisfying day. However, tell me about your best days at work.
The best days at work are when I get to execute my art — personal development and transformational work — and make a difference in people’s lives, whether working one-on-one with people or with an audience. I like doing what I can to be able to see lives change. Those are definitely my best days.
Your clients come from different backgrounds and are generally high achievers. In your view, who are high achievers? Also, What does your training system focus on?
Our clients are high achievers, looking to get an edge inside what they do. A high achiever is anyone looking to do what they do in the best way they can, whether that’s an entrepreneur running a large organization, or a mom or dad wanting to master parenting in a particular way, and everything in between, from pro athletes to artists.
Our training system focuses on developing what drives our choices, decisions, and actions, which are our internal mechanisms, our emotional intelligence, and our thought strategies, etc. We train people to manage their inner game to perform at the level they want to achieve.
Helping others achieve their goals must be a great reward in itself. However, what was your biggest “aha” moment?
My biggest “aha” moment was when, after years of training people, I realized I couldn’t train people the same way I was trained. When I studied with my mentors, it was extremely intense. They were very direct and, what I would call, extreme high intensity. That level of intensity trained a resilience and capacity that supported me to create extraordinary outcomes for myself. When I started training people at the request of my mentors, I brought that same high level of intensity and expectations to the space. And when people opted out of training with me, I was dumbfounded. I didn’t understand why they didn’t show up for the training that would lead to the outcome they had named for themselves.
That type of training does not scale well. My mentors were training only a few people at a time at that level of intensity. It never occurred to me that there were so few of us because we were the only ones willing to show up for that type of training. I was trying to take the same intense regimen that worked in a small group of people willing to be up to it and have it work for hundreds of people at a time. And when you’re trying to build a company in that space — when you have a 10% retention reality — that’s not great. It doesn’t work out. What I realized is, although many of us are driven to be high achievers who want a better life, not everyone has the desire to be trained in an intense way. I learned to meet people where they are at and to give them the next step based on wherever they are in their own development. It was a game-changer.
This new way of training is much more enjoyable for me. I realized that few people are ready and willing for the type of training I had. But if you meet people where they are and nudge them along the way, they often learn how to drive at that all-out intensity.
What has been the most important part of your journey?
The most important part of my journey has been learning the difference between developing a high-capacity heart — in other words, cultivating my love of training people by developing their capacities — and the idea that this would easily translate to professional success.
I love training people and supporting them to develop themselves to create what they choose for themselves. However, this on its own does not create a business. Early on, as I developed my training system, I started studying business and realized I needed to develop a high level of capacity and aptitude for it if I really wanted to change lives and do what I love doing at scale. To have a large impact and influence the lives of thousands of people, there needs to be a structure in place.
The skillset and the aptitude necessary to build out business structures, team cultures, and operational systems that can deliver a product or a service at scale is the thing that makes impact possible. Taking on an intensive study of business, entrepreneurship, sales, marketing, and all of the logistics that make a business run, work, and grow is what makes the impact that we have today possible. Without that, we could still have an impact, but it wouldn’t be as big as what we’re after. And while there’s nothing wrong with an intimate impact, you’re only influencing the lives of 50 or 100 people as opposed to thousands or millions.
The training industry has seen a surge in so-called ‘experts’. But not everyone provides quality training. In that context, what risks is your company facing?
There’s a great documentary out on Netflix right now called the Social Dilemma, which talks about how people don’t know what real information is anymore. Often, it’s “fake news,” so to speak. The internet gives us more access to each other than we’ve ever had before. But, because anybody can engage these platforms or put information out on them, the public is having a harder and harder time distinguishing between a quality product or service as opposed to a non-quality product or service.
When it comes to the arena that we play in, which is training emotional intelligence and thought strategy techniques, we are in the space of optimizing human performance from an internal reality. There are so many people inside the coaching or “training industry” who present well but simply do not know what they’re doing. They may have taken a weekend course to learn skills to train or coach someone, but they have never actually executed with real people or have real outcomes to leverage. Competing with this — making the distinction of how we’re qualified and why we’re different from this inundation of people simply hanging their shingle out and calling themselves personal development experts — is one of the biggest challenges that we constantly work with. We always invite our clients to engage “healthy skepticism” when engaging our training or any others. Engage the training and really lean in, and if you are able to see outcomes that you’ve named for yourself begin to happen, then continue.
We’re not the only great training company out there; there are others. But there are many out there who are not only going to miss the mark but are probably going to cause negative effects as opposed to positive ones. The unique part about IMS is that we’re a proven training system that is not reliant on a one-off experience or individual but a process designed to create self-reliance.
What would you do with unlimited resources?
There are two things I would do. Number one, I would look to market at scale. Many companies that win out don’t win because they have the best product or service out there. They win out because they’re in front of everybody regularly, and they have the resources to do that. There are lots of fast food companies that aren’t in existence today because they make quality food; they exist because they’re in front of everybody. Their marketing is really present. So, letting everybody know that we’re simply available would be a game-changer.
The second thing, because I don’t only want to make money — although that needs to be what every business does — I would put those resources towards education and support to anyone willing to engage. I think everybody deserves to have access to education and developmental support if they’re willing to engage it. Many people in the world would love to have access to education and training to develop themselves to live a better life, but they simply don’t have access to it.
When was the last time you totally lost yourself in doing something?
I think this is the way I strive to live every day. If I’m at work and we’re in a strategy session, I lose myself in it. I don’t know what time it is. Thirty minutes could go by, or three hours could go by. I regularly have to have somebody let me know it’s time to go on to the next thing because I’m fully engaged with whatever I’m doing. If I’m surfing in the ocean, nothing else exists. Because nothing else can exist. I love to do activities where it demands that I am not anywhere else because I find that’s where I find the greatest fulfillment. I think we tend to find the greatest fulfillment when we are fully present with what we’re doing.
Most of the discomfort and suffering that we experience is often related to being somewhere else. We are not present with life as it’s happening right in front of us. We’re usually focused on the past or focused on the future. Either on something that we don’t want to happen or avoiding something that has happened and wishing that we had something that isn’t there anymore. I think I strive to live that way where I lose myself in whatever I’m doing at the time.
Apart from training individuals and groups realize their true potential, what else do you love?
My favorite thing is being in nature. That can be skiing in the winter, mountain biking in the summer, and hiking in the woods. Anything active going on in nature, I’m all in. And making time to be with my girlfriend is also on top of the list. She loves going to nice restaurants, or even Netflix at home is always great.
How do you feel you make a difference in the world?
The biggest way I make a difference is by giving people access to naming the life they want to live as opposed to the life they feel is available for them. Giving people access to the belief and the ability to name the life they want, but then following that up with how to bridge the gap from where they are in life to where they want to go. That, in my mind, is the transformational journey.
Creating a paradigm shift is the way I think we create the biggest service. We offer the greatest benefit to people by showing them how to create a paradigm shift where we can look at our reality half a degree differently. That gives us the ability to see what’s necessary within ourselves and our environment and to go from where we are to where we’d like to go. Often, the answers are right in front of us; we have the information within us. It’s usually a small adjustment but a necessary one that needs to happen to change perspective, giving us access to possibility.
