PEARL LEMON INTERVIEWS:
Tamara Ghandour -
Go To Launch Street

Tamara Ghandour

At the forefront of human-centred innovation, the impact of Tamara Ghandour’s groundbreaking work can be seen in individuals and teams across the globe. Bringing together over two decades of business experience, neuroscience, brain mechanics, and behavioral psychology, Tamara created the first tools to truly make innovation tangible and accessible to all of us. When companies like Red Robin, Arrow Electronics, Army Research Labs, Schneider Electric and Disney want to develop innovative people and ideas, they call Tamara. She has run multi-million dollar businesses and launched a few of her own.

Check out Tamara’s: Website, LinkedIn

A Fireside Chat

I had the opportunity to have an amazing conversation with Tamara Ghandour at Go To Launch Street today. From talking about SEO for Reputation Management sites, Tamara agreed to a quick interview.

She took the time to talk to me and answer some questions so I could get to know her better and hear more about the things that have helped shape her business success to date – let’s get stuck into it!

What Is The Book (Or Books) You’ve Given Most As A Gift, And Why?

David Goggins – Can’t Hurt Me. It’s a personal journey finding accountability, mental toughness and hard work in order to own your life, whatever it is meant to look like for you, and elevate your game. Those things inside of you must be activated. I always keep 5 copies on hand to pass out.

What Purchase Of $100 Or Less Has Most Positively Impacted Your Life In The Last Six Months?

My weighted blanket. I don’t know the brand, there are several on Amazon. I can tell you it’s changed my game for the better. It’s cured my restless insomnia, and wow, are the naps amazing.

When You Feel Overwhelmed Or Unfocused, Or Have Lost Your Focus Temporarily, What Do You Do?

First, I make my bed. It gives me a sense of completion and motion before I even start my day. If I’m feeling really overwhelmed, I do two things: 1) meditate. I know, a little cliche, but it really is grounding. But, here’s the catch, I don’t meditate to an app or timer. I meditate until the moment where I get super restless, then I fight through it and meditate some more. Pushing through those moments is where the magic happens for me. Sometimes that’s at minute 7, and other times at minute 32. Often it happens a few times. 2) Organize my thoughts on paper by box-building. I create 5 boxes on a blank journal paper. Each box represents a priority. For example, one box is Online Academy, another is Inside LaunchStreet podcast, and a third is Service (who can I support). Then I put activities big and small in each box, and ta-dah, a clear plan emerges. The combo of meditation and box-building gets me back on track.

What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise?

I hear two big fat lies in my innovation work. #1 innovation has to be blue skies, disruptive, never been done before, or it doesn’t count. That’s total B.S. Some of the best and most break-through innovation is found when you just re-arrange the box you have. This advice makes people feel like innovation is out of reach, exhausting and going nowhere fast. It’s why so many innovation efforts fail. #2 Innovation is a magical gift bestowed on the select few. Not only does neuroscience prove this totally wrong (we all have the structures in our brain for innovation), but it’s also demoralizing to so many people. When we think some people can be innovators and some can’t, we put a select few up on a pedestal and then ignore the human potential of everyone else. It’s why I created the Innovation Quotient Edge (IQE) assessment that tells people their unique style of innovation. People needed to see that they’ve been laboring under a false belief that is sabotaging their natural abilities to innovate.

Question the rules

- Tamara Ghandour

In the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life?

In doing some self-work to improve my life and the life of my two teenage boys, I came to the hard realization that I had this massively limiting belief – I believed things had to be white-knuckle hard. Ouch! As you can imagine, this belief was why I was stuck where I was. I did a lot of work to flip the script and incorporate a new belief – I now believe life is easy and flows to you. It’s not to say I don’t work hard, I definitely do. It’s to say that I can release my white-knuckling that was actually blocking my energy and flow.

What Is One Of The Best Or Most Worthwhile Investments You’ve Ever Made?

Best investment I made was all the energy, time and massive dollars it took to build the IQE assessment from the ground up. It gave me the tool I needed to show people their innovation superpowers. It’s given tens of thousands of people across the globe the confidence, tools and mindset they need to be Everyday Innovators that innovate, influence and make an impact.

If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it — what would it say and why?

Question the rules, usually they are just someone else’s way of doing things, but they don’t have to be yours.

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favourite failure” of yours?

I think the only way you should look at failure is as a stepping stone to success. There’s the time a client paid me a quarter of a million dollars to reinvent baby care and then shut down all my team’s ideas. That taught me the art of communication for buy-in that led to great success later. There’s the time I launched a fitness tracking app long before iPhone were even a thing to only realize the importance of marketplace timing and the learning curve on bringing your ideas to life. I use this lesson daily. I could go on….

Tell Us About Your Business. What Does It Do And What Value Do You Add?

LaunchStreet is a pioneer in the human-centred innovation field, provides people with the confidence, tools and support to ignite innovation, influence others and make a massive impact. We do this through a range of online tools like the IQE assessment and online Academy, as well as speaking workshops and consulting.

Tell us about someone you admire and why you admire them?

I admire my dad the most. He’s been through it all in life, and no matter what always comes back swinging hard. I admire his vision, big heart, his drive and his unwillingness to let life dictate the terms of his life. My Abba (Hebrew for dad) always dictates the term.

What is a 'hack' you have for success that most people don't know about?

My most favorite hack right now is video emailing. Why type when you can send someone a video of you speaking directly to them. It creates a connection, and frankly, I’m a better speaker than writer.

Check Out Tamara's Company Profiles:

About Us

Pearl Lemon are an SEO, PPC, PR, and B2B lead-generation agency. We are based in London but service clients around the world.

We have taken the time to interview entrepreneurs and experts (like Tamara) in this new series.

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