Episode 40: Lee Wells | Your Salt: Enhancing Connections in Business

Lee delves into the main topic of the podcast—"Salt," using it as a metaphor for personality and human interaction in business and relationships. He discusses the unique qualities of salt, its essential role in life, and parallels this with the importance of personality, interaction, and chemistry between individuals. Lee emphasizes that understanding and developing one's unique "salt" can significantly impact business success, leadership, and personal relationships. He shares personal anecdotes and encourages listeners to become more engaged and interesting in their interactions.

Transcript

 Welcome to the Ranch and Table Podcast, where we discuss all things related to our Texas Ranch and our ranch to table restaurant located in downtown Rockwall. I'm your host, Lee Wells. Welcome back to another episode, the Ranching Table Podcast. I. I am Lee Wells. I'm thankful for you today. I'm looking forward to getting into another topic and discuss some more business concepts and such.

But first of all, today's episode, once again, brought to you by Wells Cattle Company, burgers and Pies. We're downtown Rockwall and downtown Cattle mills. And so really grateful for all of our customers. Rock wall's growing all the time and so is cattle mills. The new truck down there is doing great.

We've got some new things that are gonna be coming out and cattle mills here. Some news of building and such coming soon. I can't talk about it yet, but it's things are in the works and so I'm excited about all that. Thank you for supporting us. If you haven't been by. Come on by, see us smash burgers out in cattle mills and our full menu in in Rockwall.

So we make burgers exclusively with meat from our ranch and cattle that we have there and process. So would love for you to come by and see us. If you have not, please make time to do it. And for the last few weeks we have been having a. Fundraiser on Saturday nights out in cattle mills for our volunteer fire department.

And this coming Saturday April the fifth is gonna be our last, our final concert. And we have food trucks, live music games for the kids. Just a lot of fun and we're raising money with. Donations and then percentages from the trucks as well as our silent auction items. And we may just make that not so silent auction this coming weekend and just go ahead and auction them off.

I don't know. We'll see how that goes. But opportunities for you to give back to community and help help our community do more than what they have been able to do before. Come out, see us. That's five to eight on Saturday the fifth, and it's gonna be a great time. It's been a great time for the last three weeks.

Bands great music, great food. This weekend, finalizing this deal, we have Johnny Lyons opening up at five to six and then Gracie York Band's gonna be there. Excited about that. Excited about having her and her band with us from six to eight. It's gonna be fun, and so come on, be a part of it. I'm going to get right into this podcast, and I have said this a few times lately and it seems to be true every time, but this is, might be a little different podcast than some of the others that, that I've done and.

That's just the nature of this podcast. I guess it's just the way that, that I guess the way my brain works or something, the way that things come to me or they're important to me this weekend or this week. And so I wanna share it with you. I been having this thought for several months.

Really. It's been one of those things that have stuck with me for a few months and. And as most of you may know I'm a preacher. And so I spoke about it a couple of weeks ago. I was invited to do a corporate retreat for management and ownership of a large company. And I spoke about it a little bit there, and so I just felt like it was fitting to bring it to the podcast and talk about it with you guys.

And again, this might seem a little different, but I'm gonna talk about a subject that I don't know that we talk about in business very much. I don't think we get into this very much in business, not from this angle. But I hope it'll help you. I hope it'll open up some thinking maybe some creative thought in your mind and help you a little bit.

It has helped me tremendously to understand this concept and the concept is. That of salt. Salt. The way I did my talk a few weeks ago for the corporate gig was I started out in the middle of the tables. I had a big table of salt. I went and bought all these containers. I. Put different kinds of salt in 'em.

All these shakers that I bought and put different kinds of salt, Himalayan pink salt, coarse and fine, and rock salt and just just any kind of salt that I could find. And I had a big display of salt in the middle of the room. And as I'm talking, I let up, 10, 15, 20 minutes of other.

Discussion points and building up to where I was going. But I ended up with this illustration of salt. And so I wanted to share with you some thoughts about salt and how it works in our life. And I believe what the parallel, the historic ancient parallel of salt and being salt really means.

And salt is an amazing element. It is. It's fascinating. I know. We are very used to it. We all have it. We touch it, we use it. We season with it. It's part of, it's on probably every one of our tables or every restaurant we go to. It's something that we see all the time. But salt is amazing when you really break it down.

And I'm not gonna get real scientific with you just surface level, but even that is, is fascinating to think about what this one element. Can do and what the power of that one element is. And so salt is inexpensive. It's readily available but it's needed by every living thing on the planet. You have to have salt.

If you can go without water a few days, you can go without food for a few weeks. But if you cut all salt, every bit of salt outta your body, you can't live very long at all. Salt is part of our connectivity, our conductivity of our body. It helps conduct electricity in, in liquids.

It's when salt is applied, it creates a chemical change in whatever it's applied to. And salt makes things interesting. And so that's really where I'm going today with this thought is. Salt makes life interesting rather than bland. And salt in store sits unaffected. It just sits by itself. It's not corrosive necessarily.

It just sits there. But when it's applied, I. It activates, it immediately begins to go to work on whatever it is in contact with. And when it's dissolved and broken down and then absorbed into things, it really does affect, immediately affect that whatever it is that it's connecting with.

And SALT has a lot of characteristics to it and when it's applied, it creates this chemical change and it does something. Between all parties and that's where I want to talk to you about today is salt is about the interaction that happens when it's applied. And a lot of times in business and in relationships and in leadership a lot of times I think we miss this element that we are individuals, we are unique, we are.

What even the Bible calls salt and we're supposed to be salt. And when we talk about that, a lot of times it's just we glaze over it. We miss what that means and I've really started thinking about this in application of business. I believe that we are all uniquely made. We are all.

Interesting people, and some people are interesting in an outward way. Some people are interesting in a way. You have to get to know them more to understand. How interesting they are. Some people are interesting to other people who are not interesting to other people. It's a, there's this chemical reaction, this chemistry thing that happens.

I hope you're still with me. I hope I haven't left. You haven't left me yet, but there's this chemistry thing that happens in our relationships with each other, and I believe that can be boiled down to and talked about in. The subject of salt. So I want to give you a few things to think about today, if you will stay with me here a minute.

Homemade soup is amazing. It's one of those best meals on a cold day, but it's either bland or it's the most beautiful thing you've ever tasted. Same ingredients, but a lot of times the difference in the outcome is the salt amount that's used. And I know we all can relate to this. Without even belaboring the point, but when you use the right amount of salt, when you use the right amount of that element, it does its work on everything else that it's involved with, and it really brings the best out in those best ingredients.

And in a lot of times, without that salt, those best ingredients sit there. Unaffected. They sit there inactivated. The flavors are just dormant. They're not being part of the flavor profile. And when that happens, there's so much dismissed. And so when we start thinking about salt as our personality, or salt as who we are, what we're made to be, how we react, and how we respond to people that.

That chemical reaction, that chemistry if someone was dating, they either have chemistry or not. We've talked you've heard that every rom-com ever made talks about chemistry, but there's something to that. There is something to clicking with people and having a great time or being bored outta your mind with the.

With that person, and then somebody else can go on a date or go into dinner or whatever with that same person and hit it off. And that's what I'm talking about is our unique ability, our personality, how we interact and interface with others. It can really mean the difference in a successful business or not.

It can mean the difference in a successful leadership role or not. It can make the difference in a. Successful relationship or not, it can really have a lot to do with a marriage lasting or not. And those things that we find interesting draw us into conversation. They draw us into being interested in what that other person is interested in.

And so it goes far beyond relationships, as far as romantic relationships, and it really has a lot to do with. How the world sees you and how you see the world. And so being salt to me in this discussion means how we are connecting to people or how we connect to people or not. And physically, the how, like how why is it that if I sit down and have dinner with.

With a guy and we're talking about business and it's just all I can do to get through it. It is just, I'm bored. The tears, it's, I feel like I'm carrying the whole conversation. I feel like the guy's not into it either. And we're, and we probably don't do a business deal. And then on the other hand, I sit down to a business dinner with someone else.

And man, we're just talking from the very first moment. And man, it's just like one story after another. Before you know it, it's been two hours, three hours and time has just flown by. There's such a great friendship and comradery and chemistry, if you will. That's happening in that relationship or in that dinner, in that conversation.

There's, it's just clicking and things are happening. I believe the difference is that. We are supposed to pay attention to how we come across to people our humor our take on life, our interesting factor, or the amount of interest that we can show forth into the world. You ever sat down and talked to someone?

And it's man, that guy knows a little bit about everything. He can talk about all kinds of topics intelligently. Man. I love finding people like that. I love finding people that I can sit down and maybe we can talk about cattle for a little bit and they, maybe they're not cattle ranchers but the grandfather was or they've got a brother that is, and they've just been interested in it and they.

They've done some research and they know something about the way cattle are fed out and what kinds of beef there are, whatever. There's just some interest in there and you can talk to that person or maybe they, you're talking about the interstate project out here in TxDOT and they have a little bit of a background and little understanding about, the way that roads are built and I don't know, just whatever the discussion might be, there's people who you can just carry on a conversation for hours with.

Because they're interesting because they're just the kind of people that are pretty open with who they are. Pretty talkative, pretty, pretty open. With what they let you in to and understand about them and the conversation. So the who you are I believe is part of that salt and part of that.

Who you really are. That personality, that integrity, that person that you are, has a lot to do with whether or not people will find you interesting enough to do business with or follow your leadership or want to have, go, have dinner with, or hang out at the lake together or go vacation with or whatever.

I think it's worthy of talking about that there's this other dimension outside of maybe our degree or our workplace or the kind of what town you're from. Those cut and dry facts about us. There's something else to us than just the hard facts that we can speak about our lives. And I believe that in between.

Is our salt. It's who we really are and it's how people really see us. And so your personality your sense of humor, your perspective on life, your values that you hold. This is a couple of elections that we've had in our country, I believe come back to a lot of our value systems and whether or not we align with certain values.

As other people or not. There's been a lot of people that have come together around certain values. There's been a lot of people that have come around together on, on the opposite side of those types of values. And so you can see where there's something else that pulls us together. There's something else that attracts us to people not, and not just romantically again, but even in our.

Our business life and in, in our business relationships and in our leadership the influence that we have in a community. There's something else there. There's. Some people might call it an X factor, somebody might call it charisma or there's other words for it that people might call this other part of us.

But I wanna call it salt because I believe that there's a lot of parallels that go together with it. And I'm gonna tell you a few of those and then I'll wrap up here in a second. But here's some questions. What do you have to offer outside of your degree? Outside of your experience on the subject of outside of maybe who your father was or what your upbringing was, what do you have to offer when you sit down and have that meeting?

Maybe you're selling a car, maybe you're selling a home. Maybe you're. Selling a piece of land, whatever it is, whatever the meeting that doesn't even matter. What matters is what kind of a meeting am I gonna have and what kind of interaction am I gonna have with this person? Is it gonna be interesting?

Is it gonna be compelling? Is it gonna be something that I would want to do again? And so if it is, that's a person that I probably am more inclined to do business with, if I'm bored to tears in the first five minutes. Holly, I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if I can, I don't know if I can talk to this guy for another 30 minutes.

And so that uniqueness, that personality, that thing that you have, I think we should develop. I think we should develop it. And how do you do that? One way that people develop that personality and that. That salt that X factor is, they study personalities for one. There's different types of personality studies you can look into if you've never looked into personality types.

And you're a business owner or leader. You work with people, you interact with people. You have to study personalities there, there are, depending on the models you look after and the models you study there are different types of persons in the world. There are, for instance, outgoing, we call 'em outgoing type people that are in some ways some I don't wanna get too deep into personality titles and types.

'cause if you haven't studied that, it won't make any sense. But there's one group of people that are really outgoing and they can just light up a room wherever they walk into and man, they're just laughing and they're cutting up and they're having a good time. The opposite of that person is more serious all the time, and they're not necessarily depressed, but they're just.

They don't see the sense in giggling and cutting up, and so they're just more serious and sometimes more studious and sometimes more reserved. And then there's maybe another group of people who are more timid and they're just more to themselves. And boy, they're not even, they don't even want to be in that room with people.

And then there's the. The people who maybe are Type A is what we would call 'em, where they're gonna be organizing folks and they're gonna be making sure everything's running right. And so there's all kinds of people, right? And so the more you know about that, the better Off. There was a book for relationships called Love Languages of Five Love Languages.

Gary Chapman wrote several years ago now, and I wanna think that helped my marriage a lot to start looking at the different ways that people accept. Love and attraction and affection and all those things and ways that they don't. And there's usually a one and two predominance, and then there's a couple that just aren't interesting to them at all.

But in your relationships, understanding what. People like what they respond to, what they don't. Those are all things that I believe go in this conversation of personality, this X factor this, whether or not we get along, whether or not we are really connecting or not. And so to me if you're a business owner, if you're in leadership, if you're in sales and you got all these interactions, the more you know about.

People and talking to people and relating to people and connecting with people, the better you're gonna do at everything that you can do. And the more that we grow and learn and develop, the more adapt we become, the better we become at it, the the easier it all gets. And the best.

Of all relationships are usually people who wanna be around each other and they want to talk and they want to have something to laugh about or something to share. And so those are all pretty common things, but we don't talk about it very much. The correct chemistry that's produced by your leadership in your relationships.

It could be the biggest change. For someone else's life. That could be the one thing that you could be the catalyst in the way you connect with someone. You could take that leadership to another level just by connecting with them in the way that you have learned that they respond better and they talking about things that they are interested in or whatever.

I had a guy come up to me the other day, I hadn't talked about this in a long time, but he was talking about fly fishing. And he's talking about going out last weekend and fly fishing and maybe taking his son or something. And I said, man, you know what? I had a great time, good friend of mine took me fly fishing and we got to talk about fly fishing.

And I pulled up my phone, I showed him some of the rainbow trout that I caught that day up in Colorado, standing in a river. And man, just talking about how beautiful the water was and how those cliff mountains just going up beside you, the trees, the rock faces, and how tranquil it was. Man, we talked, I don't know, we talked 15 minutes about.

Where we had fly fished and he was just there for a burger. But I somehow, we found this common ground, and I wanna believe his life was enriched by that conversation. It brought joy into my life to talk to him about his experiences, taking his kids out, or teaching 'em how to fly fish. It was, had nothing to do with hamburgers, but somehow my ability to connect with him, his ability to connect with me.

Man, we could have stood there, we could have stood there longer, but it was raining on us. We could have stood there and talked for 30 minutes or an hour about fly fishing. I don't get to talk about fly fishing that often. I don't get to go fly fishing that often. But being able to have that and relate to him, man, it was a great day and I'm remembering that was earlier in the week.

I'm remembering that now. That was a fond memory of the week, simply letting that chemistry happen. I. Connecting with that person. Of course, he had his burgers and hopefully enjoyed and come back and all that, but a relationship continues to build and grow with those things that are in the middle of the position and where you are and what you're responsible for at that moment.

And there's this middle stuff that really. I think is the glue that pulls us together and holds us together. And and I call that salt. And maybe this podcast maybe not, maybe it's a waste of time, I don't know. But think about podcast is I'm talking to a camera by myself in a room. And I don't have any nodding of the heads.

I don't have any shaking. I don't have any confused looks, so I'm just talking to the camera as if we are all on the same page. Maybe you've already turned it off, I don't know. But I just believe that there's more to our relationships than the facts of our relationship. There's more to our relationship.

If I'm at the restaurant taking orders I did this yesterday for a while. There's more to my day than just punching a button on the cash register to make sure I get your burger in there the way you want it. There's more to that. I wanna, I want to cut up a little bit and I want to talk about your t-shirt.

That's. Insane. I can't believe you're, you would wear that. It's hilarious. I wanna talk about, the ball game and the hat that you're wearing for the sports teams in the, in March Madness and how your bracket went and am I into all that? Not really. I don't really have time to trace all that and keep up with it but I realize there's value in it.

If you're wearing that hat and you're wearing a t-shirt, that's hilarious. That I think is funny. More that's as just as important to me as getting your order put into the system so you can eat food and I can take your money and I can pay bills with that money and I can have success or not, or whatever.

With the money that you gave me, it's more than that. It's that glue in between and I believe that's what we're calling SALT today. Personalities are a God-given gift. It's what makes you uniquely you. There's a saying that says, only you can say it the way you say it, and that just lends itself to this understanding that we're all gonna say things different.

We're all gonna do things a little different. We're all gonna respond a little different, but it's okay. That's the uniqueness of who we are and what makes us unique and what makes us special. And makes us fun to be around. So let's develop that. Let's pay attention to this is the point of this podcast today.

Let's start paying attention to the in-between stuff. Let's start paying attention to what we call the small talk. Let's start paying attention to the stuff that, that we get excited talking about, or we need to work on getting excited about for someone else. Who are you affecting today? Not with the facts of the case, not with the facts of today, not with the facts of your job description, but who are you affecting as you go through your day?

Who are you helping have a better day by being the flavor and being the salt, and being the interesting part, perhaps, of their day. And I think that's really what I think we're put on this earth to do. Yeah. We gotta make money. Yeah. I gotta get your order right? Yeah. I gotta serve you a good burger or whatever it is that I'm doing today for you.

I got to do a good job at that. Of course I do. But I also need to make it interesting. I need to make it fun. I need to make it enjoyable. I need to make it memorable that you would come back and do that again and that's really what I wanted to share with you is your uniqueness of your personality.

It should be developed, it should be better today than it was five years ago. Your people skills should be improving every day. You should be more approachable than ever before. Those are the kinds of things that we're talking about. Only you can be you. And so be that, be the best version of yourself you can be every day.

Salt again is flavor. It's even in the best ingredients. They have to have salt, and then salt makes you thirsty. Now that's a funny one because it's true, but what I mean by that is you ever had someone that you just look forward to being around again. You just, you hung out with them. Maybe you're at dinner and you hung out with them one evening and you couples got together and I don't know, you saw each other at the restaurant, pulled the table over, had a good time and you're just kinda looking forward to that happening again.

You're like, Hey man, we need to do that again. That was fun. I enjoyed that. And they're like, yeah man, that was great. That was a great night. We should do that. Y'all clicked. It was fun. It was. It was. It made you thirsty to do it again and to be part of that. Again, that's your salt. That's what invites back for another drink.

That's what brings them back into your life again. To quench that, that thirst of hanging out and having a good time and having those relationships. And then finally, we know salt preserves. Everybody knows that salt preserves, salt's, what preserves meat salt pork and bacon and ham.

All that's, salt cured salt preserves. And I believe it's your salt that preserves your relationships as well. The better we get at that in-between stuff, the better we get at preserving long-term relationships. When we have that middle stuff, it ends up being more important than the factual stuff, and that's the emotional connection that we share with people.

And in this day I'm gonna I'm wrapping up. I'm wrapping up. Okay, so hang on with me for a couple minutes. In this day of technology, cell phones earbuds, we are getting more and more disconnected. Everyone, even in our family, everyone's got their laptops, everyone's got their devices, everyone's got their spot.

They in the house. The kids have their games time or their. Their their phones in their hands, and we, if we're not careful, we'll get so disconnected that we'll lose the emotional connection that we have with each other. And I believe more than ever in, in business leadership at home wherever.

We're human beings. Wherever we are interfacing with people, we gotta be careful not to lose our relationships. And salt is what preserves it. That in-between flavor, personality, interesting part of us, is what brings all of that back together and keeps it going year after year for a generation, for a lifetime.

And hey, thanks for letting me get that off my chest. Hopefully some of that made sense. I don't know, I just get in here and get to talking and I don't know if I have lost you or not, but that's not the easiest topic to talk about, but hopefully it made enough sense to where we can take this home and start really thinking about it over the next few weeks anyway, this episode's brought to you.

Wells our burgers and cattle mills and in Rockwall. And if you have time, you want to come out, see us this Saturday on in downtown cattle mills for our final concert of our concert series. Give some money to the fire department. It'll be a good time. That's gonna be from. Five o'clock to eight o'clock on Saturday evening, and then of course we're open 11 to eight on the truck, 11 to nine in the restaurant most days of the week.

Check our Google for that and always close on Sunday for sure. And thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. I appreciate your time. I'm Lee Wells on the Ranch and Table podcast. Until next time. We say adios very well.