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Today’s episode is really awesome. It’s with a friend of mine named Lyn Graft. He is the author of Start with Story. Now Lyn is one of the top experts in the world on storytelling for entrepreneurs. He is the founder of a company called Storytelling for Entrepreneurs, but even more than that, over the last 15 years, Lyn has filmed and captured the stories of over 500 of the world’s top entrepreneurs.

This includes the founders of LinkedIn, Starbucks, Dell, and Whole Foods. He has actually produced more than 800 videos focused on entrepreneurs and startups and he’s personally dedicated 20,000 hours to studying and practicing entrepreneurial storytelling—and it doesn’t stop there.

Lyn is the co-creator of CNBC’s American Made. He is of course a producer, but he is also a seasoned entrepreneur himself who’s founded multiple companies. This episode is so great for entrepreneurs because Lyn is going to teach you how to create the best story for your business.

See, Lyn believes that your founder story is the key to fueling your company’s success. I mean think of some of the biggest businesses and the most successful founders of today—they all have incredible stories. So this episode is going to be a guide for entrepreneurs to create the best story for their business. If you’re an entrepreneur and you’ve been told, “Hey you need a story,” this is the episode for you.

Get Lyn’s new book Start with Story on Amazon. Find out more at Storytelling for Entrepreneurs.

Lyn Graft: Me and my best friend started a company and we were raising capital. We had this artificial intelligence that sticks in all of these but twenty, right in the late 90s. We were frustrated trying to raise capital, and advisors were giving us all kinds of advice. We just couldn’t figure it out, we couldn’t get our pitch deck together, whatever.

It was a Monday night, and I was frustrated.

I remember there was a meeting that night. I decided I wasn’t going to go, but I’m like, “I will just get out of my apartment and go check it out.” They usually had a good speaker. I didn’t know who it was.

I get there, I arrived late, I don’t know who this person is. It’s a full auditorium, about 250 people here in Austin, and the guy walks up on the stage. I don’t know who he is, and he’s kind of short like me and he is older and he is a little bit balding and he brings up a duffel bag and he starts speaking.

I don’t know who he is, mind you, so he starts speaking and he pulls out a t-shirt out of the duffel bag and he talks about, “This is my first company. We had this amazing technology, we never could get it to work. That company failed.” He puts that down, grabs another t-shirt, “Second company, great technology, we got it to work, nobody cared.”

So we’re all just laughing…kept going through the sequence and he gets through to the 6th t-shirt.

And at this time, this is like six failures in a row. He gets to the 6th t-shirt, shows it to us, and every time he shows a t-shirt he is showing the front of the t-shirt so you see the name of the company. We didn’t recognized any of these names and he gets to the 6th one and he goes, “This is a great technology, great product, great market, great timing, great company, raised $20 million, and it failed. It was a lot of partnership and business timing, everything…but it just didn’t work out.”

And at this point everyone in the audience is going, “Wow!” and I’m like, “Who is this guy? He’s failed six times, he’s got to be somebody big.”

So he pulls out the last t-shirt number seven out of the duffel bag, pulls out the t-shirt and he hold it up and he goes, “This is the 7th company” and this time when he holds it up, he doesn’t hold the name of the company so I still don’t know who this guy is or why he’s famous and beat up. So he holds it up, “Great company, great idea, great technology, same team, and the funders that just backed this from the last company lost $20 million—they backed this fund.”

Turns around, and it is AOL.

At the time he launched it, it was the most successful internet company ever. Time-Warner ended up buying them, huge success. It was Marc Seriff, was the founder’s name. I went back home after that night and I was so pumped and I was like, “Man if he can do six figures, I can make this thing happen.”

We just have this infusion energy, a common best friend, and we just talked about it and were like, “Yeah!”

Long story short, we worked in the next two weeks on a pitch deck, ended up raising what became $100,000 from this angel investor, he raised and wrote a check for us, and it was one of those moments where the story invigorated me in a way that it’s hard to explain.

It is like this juice of adrenalin that flows that caught the goose bump moment from the story perspective. This was 20 years ago, and I still remember what he looked like, the duffel bag, the t-shirts.

The story is a little nebulous, but the feeling is what I remember. That is the essence of storytelling and that famous saying, “People may forget what you did for them but they’ll never forget how they made you feel.”

That is really the core of storytelling.

You Need a Story Charlie Hoehn: Can you lay out what are the problems that you see now with entrepreneurs?

Lyn Graft: So the jelly falls in a number of categories. If you’re an early entrepreneur, you don’t understand the power or you don’t have a story or you think you don’t need one. Those are the most common in the early stages. As you progress, people start telling you, “You need a story.” Ao it depends on where you’re at I think.

Charlie Hoehn: So this is common advice that VCs are giving entrepreneurs—you need a story?

Lyn Graft: All the time. VCs are a prime example because a lot of first time entrepreneurs, especially raising capital in the fast growth tech, don’t think they need a story. They think they need a great pitch deck and a great team and a great idea and a great concept—what they don’t understand, and I think with raising capital it is all a number’s game and those things that they’re very focused on and that’s true—but at the same time, these are people that you’re talking with.

These are not machines.

So when you pitch an idea, an investor deck, when they leave that night of course they are going to look at everything thinking about the slides and numbers, but they’re going to remember the story that you told. They are going to go back, and they are going to tell their spouse, their wife, their husband, their partners within the firm, other people, their friends, “Hey what do you think about this idea?” and they’re going to relate a story that you told them.

If you don’t have a good story, the probability that you are going to be remembered goes way down.

The story is really critical just from a memory standpoint.

Charlie Hoehn: Right, I remember reading it. It’s like eight times higher.

Lyn Graft: Yeah and so basically, I’ve researched this a lot. People remember something 20 times more, I have never been able to back that up but I have talked to neuroscientists and they’ve said, “If I tell you a fact or a piece of information, you activate one to two parts of the brain that interpret these analytics type things, but if I tell you a compelling story, I am going to trigger six to seven parts of the brain to become more active.

So that means all these chemicals start flying around the brain and you have a higher probability of remembering the story, simply because a lot of synapses are firing triggering chemicals in the brain, which causes you to remember more and feel what the story is about as opposed to just the facts and the figures.

It’s really super important from a founder standpoint, regardless of what stage you’re at, to have a great, compelling story. They’re going to remember you more.

This is what I tell founders all the time: the reason you tell a story is for emotional connection. That’s it. That is the core essence of what it comes down to.

If you can make a connection with somebody, it becomes personal.

It is no longer this third party type thing that is agnostic. It’s like you have reached them on an emotional level and now, hopefully you are going to convince them to listen to what you have to say and here what your value proposition is.

And then it is either going to matter to them or matter to someone they care about but those like those guys do a great job telling me nobody cares about your book. They care about what your book will do for them and that’s true with a startup and a product offering. Same exact thing, but when you incorporate a story with your product or service that has an emotional connection to the audience that you are talking with even if they don’t have that need themselves, they mean to somebody that does. Or they know there is a market potential that has a drastic need for everything.

So you are using that story as the bridge to get to that person you are talking with, this emotional bridge. Now, you have a relationship with them. It is the same reason that we buy from our friends who do business with our friends, is that it is personal. You make sure that I call you up, “Hey Charlie, can you give me a ride to the airport?”

If you don’t know me, you’re not going to give me a ride but if we have this personal relationship, if I ask you for a ride no way you’re going to give me a ride. Strangers won’t do it unless you’re Uber and I am paying you.

What is Story? Charlie Hoehn: So what are the types of stories that you recommend to entrepreneurs for them to start to figure out, “Okay this is framework we are going to use.”

Lyn Graft: Have you seen the South Park story framework?

It’s hilarious, you’ve got to look at it online. I can’t remember it exactly but it is like, “but if” or something it is like the super simple every South Park episode breaks down this particular formula. I can’t remember… “if, then”… I have to go back and look at it, but I remember reading about it.

Charlie Hoehn: One of my favorite episodes was when they had Mel Gibson, do you remember this? He is just like pooping everywhere. He’s just bouncing off the walls, he is just a nut and I just loved the line where they’re like, “Man, Mel Gibson is f***ing crazy but damn it, he knows story.”

Lyn Graft: 100% true of all the science. When I started speaking about storytelling and teaching it, you find very quickly that whenever you teach something, you have to learn it in depth. So I am sitting in there trying to learn.

I have been a producer for a while, and I figured out along the way. I had a natural gift for story so I have been able to wing it for a while and produce videos, but when I started getting on stage and talking about it and speaking about it and coaching, I had to go to another level.

So dove into the historical origin of stories, and I got to all these frameworks. Read The Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell and read a number of other things, and I got lost because they are using terms and phrases that—I was not an English major. I did not know what denouement was, or a lot of terms, or the shadow figure. It’s basically the ending climax.

See I can’t remember what it is from that standpoint. They’ll come back to me, but I was having a hard time trying to understand concepts and frameworks. The Hero’s Journey is 12 to 13 steps. That is a lot, and I got frustrated with myself.

Here’s a guy who does story for a living—so I literally just threw that out the window. I’m like, “I’m not going to do that. I am going to go back to the origin of what I learned just listening to the person hearing a great story and what was it for me,” and there was this magical moment that happened.

Over the course of while I am trying to figure this out, I went back and watched a lot of interviews and talked to successful founders asking how did you learn about story, blah-blah-blah—none of them had taken formal training in storytelling. They were not talking about the Hero’s Journey or The Shadow Figure or Gustav Freytag’s formula. It wasn’t their habit. I’m like, “Well what the hell?”

I was a little bit lost at that point.

I’m like, “If I am going to teach this, I need to have a framework or something so I can put it in the book.” It just hit me one time. I am listening to a person tell a story, and it reminded me of something that stuck out in my head. It was Howard Shultz, and he talked about how he had gone to Italy and it was a really amazing story, read his book. His first book was an amazing book about how Starbucks was built and what it came down to as simple as anything, it is an experience that has something of meaning related with your business.

So I will repeat that, it is an experience that has a meaning related to your business in one way, shape, or form and what I mean by that is it sounds so simplistic and duh but really, I started going back all these stories that made and everybody had some experience that happened to them that led to a triggering event in their life that set them down this path to create this amazing company and for Howard Schultz and Starbucks it was because he was walking the streets of Milan.

He was working for a coffee bean company in Seattle. He had gone to a conference in Milan, Italy, and in between going to the conference where he was staying he walked down the streets there and he got to see this coffee culture. At the time, we didn’t have a coffee culture in the United States. You had cafés and you had restaurants, but there weren’t any coffee bars except for a couple here and there. He’s like, “Wow” there’s this amazing place what he called “the third place.”

You had home, you had the office, you have this third place that everybody would go to, and that was this coffee bars. You would hear the baristas and the smell and aroma of just amazing coffee type things, and you hear all the espresso machines and the grinding of the beans and it was this romantic experience that he just lived right there in that moment.

When he relates the genesis of Starbucks, it was that moment.

When he went back to the United States, talked to his partners at the coffee bean company, he goes, “We need to open a coffee bar, and this is what I saw. It was the experience I had in Milan.” And that is what the core essence of the story is. It is an experience that has something of meaning that’s related to your business, and then you build your story around that and you can take whatever framework you want. But in essence, that is what it comes down to.

The Impact of Story Charlie Hoehn: Do you think that Howard Schultz was able to drive Starbucks on that story to whether it was to get funding, whether it was to expand, and did it allow him to relay that vision to everybody else quickly and be able to make that happen?

Lyn Graft: Let me give you an analogy. So computers existed before Steve Jobs happened. You had PCs that were there, and what Steve Jobs was able to do was he created a very different experience with technology. Just like computer thing, my iPhone here, I mean we’re surrounded by Apple products and the aesthetics and the user experience—everything around was really due to his vision and his ability to take everything that happened to him and craft something gorgeous and amazing that you want to use.

There were computers before that weren’t they? So somebody obviously would have come along and then another computer, there were coffee shops before Howard Schultz and there would have been coffee shops without Howard Schultz but he talks about very specific. I remember we were sitting in his headquarters filming him and Ingrid, my best friend was the host.

On camera host, I am the producer for the show we’re doing for CNBC, and it’s the question he always gets asked: why coffee? You could tell he gets asked this all the time just by the look on his face. He said, “You know I love coffee, but it could have been anything. It just what happened to me in that moment…What people need to understand is that Starbucks was never about coffee. Starbucks was about this experience.”

Everything surrounding what happened when you went into a Starbucks, from the names on the board that he chose, the sounds that you hear, the machines, the cups that they served it in, the smell and the types of coffee, everything was hand selected so that when you go into a Starbucks, it is an amazing experience. Also, it’s the same experience no matter where you are in the world. There are subtle differences now but almost all of them use the same experiential touch points.

When customers go there, they know exactly what to expect.

That’s why those Italian names were they were they were. They weren’t big-small-large. It was grande, lattes, mocha-mocha something along those lines, and when Starbucks launched, you knew you were in a Starbucks.

Nowadays, you can’t tell any coffee shop starts selling those same names, but it’s because his vision and his ability to relate that experience going back to story and his ability to articulate that experience and he told this flat out.

It’s what he used to raise money. It was what he used to raise capital for everyone within his company. There was so much he was able to do with that story that experience that he had in Italy, bringing that coffee culture to the United States was a massive undertaking, and he was able to do it. Now they have 30,000 stores around the world.

I mean it is default, defacto part of our lifestyle now.

What Makes a Storyteller Charlie Hoehn: You mentioned Apple and Steve Jobs and one of the things that always stood out to me about their journey was the fact that Steve Jobs went to Pixar and then came back to Apple, and after that Apple took off like a rocket. Pixar is arguably the best storytelling company on the planet.

I recall reading that Steve Jobs learned story from Pixar and brought that super power back to Apple and was able to launch products to new heights.

Lyn Graft: I don’t do a lot of research on Steve Jobs because everybody does, and also, he’s a once in a generation type of genius. I try not to spend a lot of time on folks like that from teaching others how to tell story, because you’ll never be Steve Jobs. There will never be another one like him. He is one of a kind, and his storytelling ability in the early days was always great if you like him.

If you didn’t like him, you hated him, but if you like him, you loved him.

I wouldn’t say that all the entrepreneurs I’ve filmed had always been a great story, but almost all of them learned to become good storytellers. If they wanted to stay at the helm of the company, almost 90 plus percent have developed the skillset to craft and weave a good story.

Elon Musk, a lot of people say he’s a great storyteller, and I would argue he is not. He stutters, he’s not the best communicator in the world.

But he is such a genius and he has such a vision and way to captivate you into what he’s doing. He appears to be a good storyteller, but just go back and watch the videos. He is an introvert type person.

I don’t really use him as an example because I have a difficult time learning from him, but at the same time, he is able to craft a vision that’s so big and so just moonshot style that it makes you in awe.

Charlie Hoehn: Of course. Mars shot.

Lyn Graft: Mars shot, yeah that is a great analogy. Mars shot. He is bigger than the moonshots—he’s the Mars shot.

Get Their Attention Charlie Hoehn: Yeah. So I am curious now—what makes for a great story?

Lyn Graft: There’s three things that your story has to do. Number one, you have to get their attention. If you don’t get your attention in the first part of your story, you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle the rest of the way.

These are going to flat out ignore you or you are going to fight just to get your attention back if you lost it. So it really has to grab the attention in the early stages, first and foremost.

Charlie Hoehn: So let’s pause there. How do you grab their attention?

Lyn Graft: It really depends on your style in which your story is. Some people tend to go right into a heartbreak wrenching moment, which is a great strategy to be very vulnerable, but when you’re vulnerable, that is almost a hacking way to get someone’s attention. You talk something about “I lost my job” or “I was fired for some reason” “I went to jail” and immediately, you are grabbing their attention because you are going to a place that’s a vulnerable state.

And vulnerability is a way to magically make that connection we talked about earlier because someone is just being transparent.

That is something that would be very personal, but at the same time, that is a way to quickly get someone’s attention. Another way to get someone’s attention is to do crazy outlandish things. So we were talking before the interview about Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary Vaynerchuk is one of the magicians at his.

He is loud, he is bombastic, he says very controversial things all the time. He cusses online, he dresses his own style. So there is another way that you can get someone attention just being out there.

Both of those require a certain type of personality, a level of confidence or comfort in yourself to be able to say that. So it is not always the best route but those are two very effective ways to grab someone’s attention right away.

Make a Connection Charlie Hoehn: So what about the so-what factor. Let us say we have gotten their attention.

Lyn Graft: So let me go back to the two points. So the second thing that you need to do is you need to make a connection. In one way, shape, or form, you have to be able to connect to your audience. You can do that right at the beginning to getting their attention or you could do that in the second stage.

So getting their attention, I mean making a connection is all about the essence of storytelling, which is figuring out a way to bridge to them emotionally.

And there are a number of ways to do that, again being vulnerable is one way to do that. The second, what you are really trying to do is figure out a way to make it meaningful to them.

I will give you an example of recently my dog, you have seen me talk about him. You have met him, Fetty G is his name. Fetty G is amazing, and he’s gotten up there in years. He’s 13 years old right now and he is one of the passions of my life. He has gotten arthritis.

Arthritis has progressively gotten worse, he has also got a heart condition, so he has just had heart failure on two episodes. I am always watching him like a ghost and before he had an episode in December where the arthritis took another lump, really just aggressively had trouble walking. He was shaking at night. I was really worried to come to vet. He told me what happened, and they told me and they gave me some medicine form.

A very aggressive treatment for the type of arthritis that he has, and he reacted really bad and I was like, “Oh my god what am I going to do?” he is already on three meds before this one. So I stopped doing it and I was just almost heart broken. I’m like, “What am I going to do? I can’t have him in pain” so I called my sister and she goes, “My dog had arthritis. What I do is I make my own bone broth and I feed him chicken and rice.”

I’m like, “What?”

She goes, “Oh yeah,” I said, “I knew I fed them chicken and rice. I thought that was a little bizarre, but you are making bone broth?” “Oh yeah,” she goes, and explained what she did.

I’m like, “Wait a minute, you spend 12 hours making bone broth once a month and then you freeze it up?” I’m like, “Holy crap” prior to that, I’m a healthy guy. I focus on nutrition on a regular basis. I eat really well. I make my own green macha latte every morning. I try to eat a lot of greens. I do intermittent fasting, a lot of things to really have a healthy lifestyle.

I’ve been around bone broth for years. People talk about it to me all the time. I go to this particular coffee shop, one of my favorites, Picnic, I’ve had it there. But you know, bone broth is cool—and I don’t buy it. It’s like eight bucks per drink. When my sister told me bone broth was a way to strengthen my dog and not have him take a medical treatment. You go from the bone and build its collagen, and it would help do a lot of things.

Instantly, overnight, bone broth is super important to me.

I am online, I am researching, and I am trying to figure out how can I buy it, how can I make it. My sister gave me a recipe, I spent that weekend learning and making my first batch of bone broth.

So there is an example of making a connection with someone, because before that, I couldn’t care less. But if you find a product or a service and an audience, it is really important. You don’t want to be selling ice to Eskimos. You want to find someone like me that has a condition or has something that they really care about that needs what you have to offer.

When you say that, “Hey, did you know that bone broth can help your dog or people in your family that have a hard time with arthritis?”—instant connection. You’re like, “Oh I’ve got a family member, they’ve been really struggling with it,” you know?

And the bone broth is an elixir for something like that. It is just an example of making the connection and getting over that so-what factor that you are talking about.

Call to Action Charlie Hoehn: That makes a ton of sense. Is there any more?

Lyn Graft: Well let’s get to the third point. So you get their attention and you want to make a connection. So now you get their attention, you’ve sucked them into your vortex so to speak, like this black hole. Now you’ve got to trigger a reaction.

You’ve got to make them want to do something that’s going to take an action in your favor, buy your product, download your PDF, call you on the phone, hire you guys to write a book, there’s got to be a reason that triggers some type of reaction.

That really is the so-what factor. There are a lot of infomercials, and they’re a perfect example of that. So they will start out with this – I just did this video on a before and after example. The plug for my video series startup for entrepreneurs for you guys, it is on YouTube and it is about before and after. The general premise of before and after is that you show photos or videos of what they were like before your product and then what they were like after.

So that is a way to quickly get someone’s attention. “Oh I want to lose weight,” “Oh I want a six pack abs,” or “I want a ninja blender that makes my smoothie in a minute versus everything else.”

So you are grabbing their attention, you explain all the benefits, you start sucking them in and at the end of the infomercial—what happens? “If you call now instead of paying four payments of $29.99, we’re going to give you one payment of $29.99, and if you call in the next 10 minutes, we’re going to give you two.”

So they just start layering on these reasons to cause you to take an action that is in favor in this particular case, as you are getting on the phone, you go online and you’re buying that product, subscribing to that service. The next thing you know, you got four ninjas showing up at your doorstep that you’ve got to be like, “What are you going to do with these ninjas? Who am I going to give it to? Charlie, do you need a ninja?”

So you’re wanting to have that last that closer, if you must, something that is going to trigger a reaction to do something in your favor and that is how those trifecta of a successful story are those three things.

Charlie Hoehn: All right, so state it once more, the trifecta.

Lyn Graft: You want to get their attention, number one. People ask me what is the most important part of the story, I always say the beginning getting their attention. Because if you don’t nothing else matters. You might be able to salvage it but it’s really hard.

Content, beginning or end, is usually the opinion or the disagreement, but I say it’s the beginning, attention. Number one is attention.

Two, make that connection. Make them care about whatever it is product or service or offering that you have that can benefit them or someone they care about.

Third and the final one is the trigger or reaction that cause them to take an action in your favor, whether that is buy product, subscribe for a service, come to a meeting, whatever. You got to have those three things.

Storytellers in Action Charlie Hoehn: So we have our three elements of the story nailed or in progress I should say. So always in progress, attention, connection, call to action.

Lyn Graft: Call to action, trigger reaction. The CTA is overly different. This is more you want to trigger something in their brain, in their heart to cause them to do something.

Charlie Hoehn: What is the best one you’ve seen of that? What is the most memorable one?

Lyn Graft: Most memorable, well the one that I always talk about is the P90X founder. P90X generates $400 million a year to this day.

So Tony’s ability to convince you that you need to spend 90 minutes to transform your body—and I think that is a long time, and it is a hard core thing. He met a famous infomercial person when he got started, and that’s one of the ones that I think anything in the infomercial category where it is not cheesy…it might seem like he’s in love with what you see, but that is how he is.

He’s got this great ability to captivate you.

I would have contend the number one person in my world that I study from natural standpoint that has that ability is Tony Robbins. I didn’t understand the power of Tony Robbins until I went to one of his events.

I have read his books, listened to his DVDs, watched him online, a lot of different things but his ability to get you to care and to take action when you are in the moment at his events is unsurpassed and some people don’t necessarily like his style but I loved it.

I remember specifically, I went to his UPW conference. It was the 40th in Dallas, and it is full on for four days, 16-17 hours a day, all day, incredibly challenging. He speaks about two full days that time, and he goes nonstop.

He gets on stage 10 to 12 hours without leaving the stage. No bathroom breaks, no food breaks, nothing. He drinks water constantly.

Charlie Hoehn: He just have a catheter, how does that work?

Lyn Graft: I don’t know, and I remember this, this is one of the most – there’s a lot of things that were great about that session. It was transformational for me because I was drinking the Kool-aid, I was full on.

I wanted to experience why he was so good.

The first day he’s speaking, he was probably three hours into it, four hours, I had to go to the bathroom and I was like, “I didn’t want to go to the bathroom” I didn’t want to miss a moment of what he was saying.

I didn’t want to leave that experience. I went running to the bathroom. It was a huge conference at the Dallas Convention Center and it was 5,000 people. I am running to the bathroom going there, and I am not the only one. There were people literally running from their seats to the bathroom and came right back. He didn’t leave the stage once.

He has this unique ability to connect with you on an emotional level to make you care about what he’s saying because it’s all he does.

He tells stories over it and over and over. His own personal story and experiences, personal stories, his client’s personal stories. Huge mega star type people such as Oprah and Bill Clinton and other people that he’s worked with, athletes, world leaders and then everything he went through.

He had an incredibly challenging childhood. He was beaten by his mother and raised by alcoholics. His father and father in law were really bad to him, and it required him to quit being the president in his school.

It required him to quit his first job that he ever got. He just had this really traumatic experience growing up, but his ability to relate all of those things that he went through to you so that you care and you can see yourself in those stories and how you can change your life and bring about massive transformation if you take on a certain principles, it was second to none.

It was like oh my god, I get why gospel leaders can cause people to do crazy things and he has that reverence about him. To make you want to change your own life.

Obviously this goes back to selling his products, going back to his events. They’re not cheap, but at the same time, I’ve recommend it to other people, and to this day they say it was one of the best events they have ever gone to and I still remember all four days and I incorporated it. After that event I have incorporated it into my life. There are a lot of things that he taught me and I still am doing that today.

Charlie Hoehn: So he’s the best storyteller that you know right now.

Lyn Graft: No, I will contend that Howard Schultz is the best storyteller I have ever been around just from the pure essence of taking one particular experience and relating that into the vision that he built, especially as it relates to entrepreneurship. His ability to take that vision and grow that idea that concept of this third place and turn it into one of the largest most well-known brands in the world is the pinnacle of entrepreneurial story telling.

Whereas Tony Robins, there isn’t anyone better at making you care about his stories and weaving that back into your own life so that you care about whatever you are growing and want to transform yourself and get on whatever Kool-aid he’s drinking.

Taking Existing Stories to the Next Level Charlie Hoehn: How do we get started in making a great story if we are already down the path? We have published a book, we have our company, how do we make sure our story is great and gets us to the next level?

Lyn Graft: Yeah, I mean it is always a little bit tougher for authors because they spend a lot of time amassing that amount of information, but at the same time, it works really well. I will tell you why.

When I started going out and getting my chops as a producer and a director, it was my responsibility a lot of times to come up with questions that the host would ask or that I would ask. I was not on camera talent, but I still asked the questions so that the host would ask him.

In order to develop questions, and it is almost when you develop a show for television for prime time or you are making a video for a website or for Dell or Microsoft, you pretty much need to know the story before you ever bust out the cameras. You are not doing it on the fly. Sometimes you are, but most of the time if it’s for prime time, you need to do your research.

I would build these dossiers on entrepreneurs.

I read their books, every article I could find, I listened to whatever to watch on social media that they are putting out there. Then I would amass it into a Word document and I would organize it into a chronological history of their life.

I am looking for specific life moments from childhood to primary and secondary education professional career, to the job, how they got started, and then up to where they are now. So I built these dossiers, sometimes 90 pages on a Word document and then I’d read them and then highlight it and then pick out the things that stuck to me. Things that are interesting to you as an individual or typically interesting to your audience.

That is how I would start, and that’s a similar process to what I recommend people doing when they get the story going from scratch.

You want to build this inventory of assets that is kind of a historical background. I call it the chronological history, or chrono history is my nickname for it.

And that chronological history takes you through those three stages, childhood, and early life of primary school and then college, right after that into professional career.

And then third phase is your first startup and how you got to where you are at, or maybe multiple startups. Those three phases, I recommend starting with that type of breakdown because you are able to see as a third party looking at your own life if it is written around storyboard or anything.

You are able to see those inflection points, and if you go back to what is my definition of a story as it pertains to an entrepreneur, it’s the experience that you had that has a direct meaning to what you are doing now as a business. What was that trigger event?

So if you look over your life, you can expand it out to a lot of things that led up to that, or there might be one particular moment, and then you start going from there and having that inventory of assets, that chrono history will start getting all the assets that you’re going to need to build your story.

And then you want to from the second step, after you have done that, you want to start going through and picking the best assets. The analogy I like to give is when you are cooking. When you want to make a great meal, great chefs will tell you it all starts with the ingredients. You don’t want a ton of ingredients, you just need the really good ones and you want to have a good set. You want to have some good cooking tools. You want to have some great spices.

You want to have all the necessary things right at your fingertips, so when it comes time to cook, you’re ready along those lines.

Building that chrono history is the first step.

Now you are cherry picking from that and you’re picking out the best items from that chrono history, just looking through, “Okay that’s good. I am highlighting it” I am marking next to it, and then you’re rolling that up and you’re like, “Here are the top ones from that” and that becomes the skeleton of your story as it relates to that experience.

That is that next level, and then you use a framework. It’s got three parts, beginning, middle and end, and then it has five components. In the beginning it’s where it starts, the trigger point, the backstory if you will. And then you have some moment that happens that sets you down the path. Something happened in your life. That is the beginning.

And then you get into the connection, the middle stage, where you are facing a bunch of challenges and your obstacles and everything along those lines. And then you get to a turning point. Something happened, maybe you came up with an “aha moment” after going through all of those obstacles or you came up with an idea or product that you are selling that is great.

And then you go with the ending, and the ending is all about getting back to triggering a reaction. How you bring it back and convince them to work with you.

You use that framework to organize all of those cherry picked assets that you’ve taken from your original chrono history and then you start assembling your stories. Those are the three primary exercise you get there. There is a lot more to it to make a great story, but if you do those three things, you are going to have a great foundation to create your story from.

Changed by Start with Story Charlie Hoehn: Can you share one or two of your of favorite, I don’t know success stories of people who came to you, you transformed their story and they went on to do what they wanted to do.

Lyn Graft: There is a number of people that I have helped over the years, and some I am not able to share but those are my favorite ones. There is an individual that she was really having a hard time getting her story out there, and it had to do with the fact that she was not comfortable sharing her story. She wanted to get people’s attention, they have to remember her, but at the same time, she didn’t want to share what made her story really interesting.

As I was referring to earlier, when something’s interesting. If you are talking to someone on a one on one level, a lot of times they are going to sweep stuff under the rug that they don’t want to talk about. You are like, “That’s it. That’s what I want to know about.” So I was coaching her through something like, “That’s what you got to do. You got to share that moment, you got to lead with that.”

That is going to get people’s attention.

That is going to help people connect with you. I gave her a story and I talked to her with Carley Roney, the founder of The Knot. Carley Roney, she’s got this amazing business, The Knot, the largest wedding online organizers where they do a $100 million public company.

When she first started with The Knot, she had four partners to try to figure out that idea. They are at a coffee shop in New York City and they came up with an idea when the internet had just taken off.

And she had just gotten married to her husband. The four of them said, “Oh you know what? You guys just got married, why don’t we do an online company to help people getting married?” and she said, “Oh no, no way am I going to do that” and they’re like, “Why?” “Because my wedding was a disaster.”

She said the wedding was held in the summer in New York City and one of the hottest on record summers at that time. They only had six weeks to plan it, they were a mixed race wedding. There wasn’t a lot of wedding planners that knew how to handle that type of thing and they didn’t have a big budget and they didn’t know New York City and it was a total disaster.

They were like, “Oh that’s too bad” or whatever. So she went home that night and she thought about it a lot and she goes, “You know, I don’t want women to go through what I went through.”

“I want to help women avoid the mistakes that happened to me on my wedding day.”

So she came back after a couple of days to her four partners and she said, “You know what? I think that is a good idea. Why don’t we create an online platform” because magazines were still big at the time.

The web was just getting going. She goes, “And help brides avoid the fate that happened to me and give them all the tools they need no matter where they’re at, how much time they have, what their budget is, whether they’re mixed raced or whatever—we are going to have everything.”

And that idea led to The Knot. Now, it is a $100 million company and it was all because she was willing to become vulnerable and share something very personal to her and she just flipped it. Instead of being embarrassed about it, she goes, “I want to help other women avoid what happened to me” and when she talks about that, she makes an instant connection with brides to be, because what is one of the most important days to a woman?

It’s the day they get married. And husbands as well.

So she’s able to instantly bridge that gap and make that connection with them when she tells that story, and that is the same thing that I talk to my friend. She’s done very well since she’s been able to come out with that story.

Connect with Lyn Graft Charlie Hoehn: Two final questions, the first is what is the best way for people to potentially either follow you or connect with you, say thanks for writing the book that sort of thing?

Lyn Graft: Definitely, so I’ve got a website called storytellingforentrepreneurs.com. I recommend going there. There is a video series that we launched on YouTube that shares a lot of the same things we’re talking about here. I try to break them down to two to six minute mini apps so that you could learn about a particular topic. We just launched it, we’re about five, six videos in and when you buy the book, let us know.

Use #startwithstory.

That is my big moniker. I am trying to push that as much as possible, because it does start with story.

I am so appreciative for Scribe. You guys gave me that name, and I love it. It just really speaks to what I always recommend with people because there’s a lot of things you don’t control when it comes to starting a company, but story is one of them. You get to create it, you get to massage it and manage it and it gives you the ability to control the narrative.

So go to storytellingforentrepreneurs.com. I am also Lyn Graft on Twitter and on Facebook, on Instagram…but mostly, Storytelling for Entrepreneurs is where you are going to find information about the book as well as the video series and a lot other content that we have coming out to support the basic principles.

Story is your MVA, your most valuable asset as an entrepreneur, and I want to give you everything you need to create, tell, and share your best story.

Charlie Hoehn: Nice and I will attest to that, you have a lot of cool stuff coming on that site.

Lyn Graft: Yeah, I’m psyched.

A Challenge for Listeners Charlie Hoehn: Give our listeners a challenge, what is the one thing they can do from Start with Story this week that will have a positive impact?

Lyn Graft: We’re all great critics, we really are. A lot of us don’t think we are, but you make decisions every single day about what news you consume, what you are going to wear, what path are you going to drive to work, what are you going buy or sell, who you talk to a lot of times. So we are always making decisions.

As you look at your own story, if you will, your own history, everything you’re doing, find the one thing that sticks out the most.

What is that one nugget or something that has happened to you that you’re always thinking about, either in a bad way or in a great way, that’s usually the extremes of what you’re at…or that people are always asking you about.

You’re going to find that your people around you, when you start yapping, you could just start vomiting out information.

There are certain things that people remember about you that it’s always going to be associated with what you’re doing. If you can find that kernel, that is usually a great starting point. Figure out that memorable moment, catastrophe that happened, something that won’t leave your mind.

Start there and just start building. Ultimately, you’ll find there’s a high probability that that’s going to make its way into your story. If you don’t have that, start looking for it in a very diligent way and do whatever that takes to make that happen.

Get Lyn’s new book Start with Story on Amazon. Find out more at Storytelling for Entrepreneurs.

Listen to more authors on the importance of story:

Free PR: Cameron Herold and Adrian Salamunovic

The Economics of Emotion: Kyle M.K.

The post Start with Story: Lyn Graft appeared first on Author Hour.

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Sebastiaan Hooft, the author of Redesign—one of the top 10 bestselling entrepreneurship books in the Netherlands—is a seasoned entrepreneur. He has founded 20 companies in 15 years and he’s actually considered one of the Netherland’s top 10 tech entrepreneurs. But his book is really about becoming a happy and healthy entrepreneur in addition to being successful. You see, Sebastian was the shining example of an entrepreneur who was working too much.

It destroyed his health, he nearly lost everything to a complete physical, mental and emotional breakdown. In this episode, he’s going to share his story and what he’s learned that might just save your life.

If you’re an entrepreneur who struggles with working too much and you know that it’s affecting your health, this is the episode for you.

Get Sebastiaan’s new book Redesign on Amazon.

Sebastiaan Hooft: The biggest struggle in my life has always been the balance between work and health. I’ve always been struggling with my weight, always been struggling with being tired, being a little bit sick, a little bit off and that always have been the biggest struggle in my life.

I always thoughts that I was someone with kind of a weak stamina or you know, someone who just got a cold really easily but in the whole process of redesigning my life, I found out that that actually was not true. I just did not know anything about physical health, emotional health and financial health.

The biggest challenge for me when I was redesigning my life, was to find out how to eat healthy, how to balance your emotions and also, how to find like a financial structure I felt happy with. That was the biggest struggle in my life.

It Almost Killed Me Charlie Hoehn: You even had a near death experience.

Sebastiaan Hooft: I still remember it clearly, it was on a hot summer day in 2019. I’d been an entrepreneur for 15 years, founded around 20 companies, people came to me for advice. Advice on how to start a company or how to grow a company, how to become a market leader in a couple of years.

I felt like superman because everything was going great.

We won all the awards we could win, I was listed on the Dutch rich lists, everything was going great.

I really thought I could do everything alone.

On that summer day, in 2019 when I woke up in the hospital, I truly was on my own. Everyone experiences that moment where that’s like before and after and maybe some of the listeners already experienced that moment or you know, some of them still have to experience it.

But I knew, that moment in the hospital, that was my moment. I was in the hospital for almost a year, like a serious burnout. I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t drink. Really to recover from a serious breakdown and when I started to redesign my life, I found out that actually when I was doing like really great as a business guy and entrepreneur, as an individual, I was doing really bad.

I wish I would have had at least my book, my own book, you know, in those days but also a network of people around me that would have kept me kind of sane.

Like a network of mentor, you know? That I would meetup regularly with and explain to them, what I was doing, why I was doing it and the results were, I never built such a network and I realized that the years after my recovery that I had to build such a network and still, you know, today, I have a network of mentors around me and I still grow as an individual every day. Using that mentor network.

Before and After Charlie Hoehn: Can you kind of paint the picture of what your life looked like both right before you went into the hospital and during recovery.

Sebastiaan Hooft: The experience after I felt like okay now, I’m running into a burnout. I can do it anymore. I always found somewhere the strength to go up. It happened to me many times that I thought, “Okay, this is the end. I cannot do it anymore.”

Somehow, the next morning, I took a hot shower and then made it through the day.

I was killing myself. I wouldn’t say suicidal. It was unintended, but in fact, I was destroying myself physically, emotionally. I worked like seven days a week. I got up at six in the morning, I went to work, worked all day, and around midnight, I would come home, get some sleep, then the next morning, shower, do the whole thing again. Seven days a week.

You don’t start off doing that. No one just opens the business thinking I’m going to work 24/7.

It’s kind of addictive, you know? Especially when your business grows. Your reward with the people around you, your employees, your suppliers, your partners. Everyone’s like, man, “You’re doing great, your business is growing, you’re making money…” You buy a sports car and go, “Man, you got a sports car, you’re doing amazing.”

You kind of believe in your own success. They will say it’s lonely at the top, but I felt really happy being lonely at the top. That was great. I could take every decision on my own and every decision I made turned out to be a success. Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What I did not see was that, from a business point of view, I was doing great but the people around me, my friends, my family, people that care for me in a personal level, after a few years, they abandoned me because I was not fun to be with.

Your friends don’t always want to hear about your business. Your family wants you around at Christmastime or on New Year’s Eve or on the weekends. I just did not do that anymore. I was really happy when my family went on a holiday, for two, three, four weeks because that gave me some more energy to go out and work.

Even when I took a holiday, I felt sick.

I’d book a holiday for like two weeks and on the plane, my body started aching, I got a serious infection in my tooth. I was like, miserable for one or two weeks. I wouldn’t be in the sun, I wouldn’t enjoy dinners, I wouldn’t enjoy the fun stuff you do when you’re on a holiday. I was just really happy to get back on the flight and to go back to work.

It grows on you, that’s not the way you are in the first day where you start a business, it just happens gradually over time. I always say that especially when you’re doing good, you need people around you that can keep you sane. You need a network of people that can assist you staying mentally, physically in good shape.

Charlie Hoehn: Did you find that among your peer group, that your routine of working all the time was sort of the norm or were you the odd one who was working all the time?

Sebastiaan Hooft: I made it the norm, that was the norm. It was only one individual in my life that was the norm and that was me. There was nothing else. At that time, I did not understand it. Now, looking back, I could see, that’s what happened.

I had years of thinking about writing a book about what happened. I travel the world, spoke to over 500 entrepreneurs about this—but when it actually happened, why I was doing that? I had no way of knowing that was actually happening to me.

Symptoms of Impending Burnout Charlie Hoehn: What are some symptoms that they ought to be aware of that they might be on that path?

Sebastiaan Hooft: What I can say is that there are a couple of red flags. I can start with a funny one. If you don’t know the name of the teacher of your kids, you’re in trouble. I talk to an entrepreneur today and his company was 10 times bigger than mine when he sold it. I told him too, “Well, I’m pretty ashamed. When I sold my business, I didn’t know the name of the teacher of my kids. “

He said, “Well, I can tell you that I didn’t know where the school of my kids was. The first time I sold my business, I wanted to pick up my kids from school and I was like, ‘Where’s the school?’”

Those are pretty obvious red flags. But a red flag is like, if you wake up in the morning and you don’t feel like you’re not going to work, that’s a pretty big red flag. That’s a sign that something is wrong.

When your family says, we’re going on a holiday without you, that’s a red flag. That’s a huge sign that something is wrong.

When your clothes don’t fit and you’re overweight, you can’t close the zipper of your jeans, that’s a red flag.

Red flags are really personal.

You have to develop your own red flags and awareness on how to develop your own red flags. It takes years to find out what are my personal red flags. For me, personal red flag is that I don’t set an alarm in the morning. I want to wake up whenever I want to wake up. When I wake up I always do like a check like, how do I feel? If I don’t feel happy, that’s a red flag for me.

But maybe for someone else, if you’re an early bird and you want to set an alarm at six AM and do stuff and you’re perfectly happy with it, maybe getting up early and doing some stuff you don’t like to rework you, to go out and later do the stuff you do…might not be a red flag.

Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, man, I’ll share a couple of red flags of my own, which were, am I dependent on using stimulants multiple times a day, am I drinking three to five cups of coffee every day, am I interacting with people almost exclusively through screens, that was a big red flag. Do I effectively work within an hour of waking up and within an hour of going to sleep…

Sebastiaan Hooft: That’s the most important, the red flags are there and if we talk to an entrepreneur, that’s like listening to this podcast, they all know the red flags. If they would be able to dial in, “Okay, give me your five reddest flags,” they will all have red flags. Are you aware of how to measure that you’re in the danger zone? In the crossroads of life and everything happens at once, your business is growing or either it’s not growing, your kids are going through a puberty, like your parents are getting old and might need some help. Your relationship is not really stable, maybe of like a girlfriend on the side, which takes a lot of attention…everything happens at once.

How do you measure that you’re in the danger zone? Even if you know what your red flags are, how do you keep measuring that you’re on track? That’s a big challenge. For everyone, the red flags are a bit different, and for everyone, the way they want to measure is also a bit different.

Like fitness apps, I hate them. I tried maybe 10 fitness apps, it doesn’t work for me. What works for me is to go to friends and say, “Hey, how much do you work out?” I ask the same question. To me, I go to the gym twice a week or three times a week. Two of my friends, they know that I expect from them to really ask the hard questions: “How much do you weigh, are you still going to the gym? Feeling physically fit?”

For me, a fitness app doesn’t work, but talking to people that care about me, it does work. But for my girlfriend, it works the other way around, she doesn’t want to discuss with friends her weight. No, she has this app made by TechnoGym. She goes to the gym, she measures everything. These are almost per second how much she works out, the weights, the length, the intensity…for her, the app works best.

The Entrepreneur’s Pyramid Charlie Hoehn: Let’s talk about the entrepreneur’s pyramid. In the first part of your book, you talk about learning to rebalance. What is the entrepreneur’s pyramid?

Sebastiaan Hooft: In the book, I have an awareness that not everyone is a work star entrepreneur. If you keep comparing yourself with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, maybe you would get disappointed really fast. If you look at the pyramid of entrepreneurship, the bottom layer are the people that are the dreamers, those are the people that dream of entrepreneurship but they never ever really go out and start a business. That’s okay, because it’s great to dream about entrepreneurship and it’s okay to keep thinking of ideas to do or gathering people around you that are entrepreneurs who can could help you start an enterprise.

It’s okay to do that, and it’s also okay to never ever start a business. If you enjoy it, just keep on doing that.

But the second group, the second layer, the starters, they need a lot of help. They need all the books, podcasts, YouTube…they need to learn how to do this.

They need a lot of knowledge on how to execute their dreams.

Then the third player, the experienced entrepreneurs, they’re the engine of our economy. It’s the SMB, those are the people that keep our economy running. They’re an important group because they have the experience and they can transfer knowledge to the starters and the dreamers.

For me, they’re a really important group.

Then the top layer, the rock star entrepreneurs, the heroes, the people that write books about how successful they are and what you can learn from that. They are great to get inspiration from and I would read all the books, you know, written by rock star entrepreneurs, you can lay your hands on but don’t have the ambition to start the next Tesla or AirBnb or Unilever or Coca-Cola because that’s really difficult.

Realistic Entrepreneurship Charlie Hoehn: It’s really hard to sacrifice a lot. I mean, I think about the quote from Elon Musk a lot where this young entrepreneur asked him, “What do you recommend? I want to start a business like yours, what do you recommend” and he just said totally, straight faced, “Starting a business is like swallowing glass and staring into the abyss. I wouldn’t wish it upon my enemy at times.”

Sebastiaan Hooft: Don’t try to be Elon Musk. Don’t go swallowing glass, just make it a happy, healthy, successful part of your life. From the first day, try to balance and make it fun. Make sure that you do all the things that made you happy.

If you want to be like Elon Musk, there’s only going to be a couple of rock star entrepreneurs in the world. I always give an example, there are 600,000 professional DJ’s worldwide, across the globe, 600,000. Only a hundred are in the top hundred. The DJ of hundred only has a hundred DJs. The chance of you starting a DJ producer career and end up in the DJ mag top hundred are really small.

It’s the average hourly fee of a magician in the US in $19. That’s what’s going to happen if you build a DJ producer career, you’re going to work your ass off, you’re going to produce music and play music for $20 per hour. That’s what’s going to happen to the most DJ producers.

Don’t try to be that top hundred guy and swallow glass.

Be happy, healthy and successful making $20 an hour.

When I’m on stage, I always like, there are two types of questions. Everyone’s like yeah, I want to be happy, healthy and successful and understand, you have to balance your life and there’s always a part of the audience that says, “Okay Sebastiaan but tell me your secret, how do I get rich, how do I get rich like you. You have the house on Ibiza, how do I get that?”

For some people, that’s a huge reward. They see the YouTube video of a rich entrepreneur, driving the Ferrari and they want that too. If you want the Ferrari, go for it, just work your ass off and go for it. If that makes you happy, do it.

But not all entrepreneurs have to become really rich.

You can be perfectly happy running a coffee bar, you can be perfectly happy running a factory with 10 employees. You can be perfectly happy with being the biggest retailer in your area of your city. Not everyone is going to start Amazon. A couple of people who listen to this podcast, they will turn out to be this rock star entrepreneurs in five, 10, 15 years, and I wish them all the best. But most of the listeners, they will work for an average fee of $20 per hour per section management.

Charlie Hoehn: It sounds like one of the biggest lessons that you learned was almost the spiritual one of enough. What is enough? Is that fair to say Sebastiaan?

Sebastiaan Hooft: You know I’ve had this sports car from it’s really easy to say yeah, it is not really important owning a sports car but if you have never owned a sports car, it can be really important. You really want one, and you want to own one. I accept that.

But still, I want to give the message to everyone in my book. When you read the book, there’s way more to life than the sports car and there’s way more in life than being the biggest retailer or the biggest whatever.

So if you go out there and hunt for inspiration, follow Elon Musk. Follow Richard Branson. Follow Bill Gates—but don’t be expect to become rich and famous as they are.

Facets of Sustainable Entrepreneurship Charlie Hoehn: Part two, the five facets of sustainable entrepreneurship, what is this section really all about?

Sebastiaan Hooft: When I got out of the hospital I knew my life was cut into before and then after. And then we went to after, I wasn’t going to run a fast growing business anymore. So I sold all my businesses and gave the profit to charity. I wanted to redesign my life, but how to do that? Basically, I have two questions.

The first question was, how could I have been so amazingly successful in the first part of my entrepreneurship? And the second question was, how could I have destroyed myself in the last part?

So I went out and traveled the world. I have visited 15 countries and I talked to about 500 entrepreneurs. Small entrepreneurs, mid-sized entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs running huge tech startups. I confronted them with these two questions, I had and some of them gave me 15 minutes of their time. For some of them, I spent a couple of days with their family and their business, talking about life.

I started noticing all entrepreneurs, it doesn’t matter what kind of business they run or what kind of country they live or what kind of continent they are on, it goes through all branches, it goes through all company sizes, it goes through culture: every entrepreneur balances his or her time over the same five facets.

I started working on this model at the university in the Netherlands and I named them “The Five Facets of Sustainable Entrepreneurship.”

And the first facet is the idea, that’s what someone does. The second facet is the team, it’s who you do it with. The third facet is the planning, your understanding of how to move your entrepreneurial life over a timeline. The fourth facet is your resources. It’s your understanding of what you have that makes you successful but also your understanding of what you’re missing and where to get it. And the fifth facet, you can guess it, was my Achilles heel: health. How do you measure how well you are doing?

So the five facets—idea, team, planning, resources, and health—they are living their own life now at universities, startup schools. In my book, on the internet, I ought to become a model for entrepreneurs on measuring how well and how balanced am I living my entrepreneurial life. So every time I talk to an entrepreneur and I want to check how are they doing like what’s keeping them busy, I always ask them about their idea, the people they work with, the team, where do you come from, where you can be at, where you’re going to, what are the things you are missing in your entrepreneurial life…If they tell me, “Yeah, I am doing great,” I always ask them, “How do you know? How do you know that you are doing great? Are you doing better than yesterday or are you thinking that tomorrow, you’re going to do less?”

How do you measure where you are? So I say it’s become a model of discussing an entrepreneurial life with other people.

Measuring Greatness Charlie Hoehn: Wow, I love that. I am going to steal that from you when people say I am great, I am going to respond like you did.

Sebastiaan Hooft: Oh most people are silent for a while and say, “Yeah, oh man I actually don’t know.” How do you measure that? And then they pull up their iPhone or android phone and show me their fitness app.

I had it happen today. So I said, “How do you know how well you are doing?” and he pulled up his fitness app. He’s over 50, and his fitness app said, “Your physical age is 39” he said, “Well I am doing great. I am physically fit.”

Yeah, so he was measuring. He has something to measure, and he was really strict. Every time he went to the gym, he connected his app to the devices. He works out on and they give him feedback but from an emotional perspective. He’s the kind of entrepreneur that does want a coach or a mentor or a psychologist talking to him every week or month or quarter, and from a financial perspective, he was doing great.

So that was really not the issue. He sold his business and he doesn’t have to work anymore, but at least he was measuring something. When I ask he is saying, “Good” but you know, what’s good? What do you describe good? Most people don’t know.

It’s not objective and you don’t see the trends and sometimes you fool yourself and you want to feel great. If you don’t feel great, you want to feel great.

The entrepreneur spirit is also like, you’re an entrepreneur you want to do stuff. So I don’t want to see that at home, nagging about stuff. You want to go out and be this successful entrepreneur. So it is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sometimes you feel like, “Okay, I am kind of fooling myself.”

Charlie Hoehn: Is this still a daily practice for you? Is this something you still struggle with or has it become a lot better?

Sebastiaan Hooft: I am a really a bad student of my own book. I have to read my book every once in a while. The reason I could write this book is because I am really bad at it. Like everything in the book, everything people can learn from my book, that is where I did wrong. Still today, I make lots of mistakes.

So sometimes, I read my own book or sometimes I talk to people that have read my book that way, “Listen Sebastiaan, I read your book that you need to measure your physical health but you know, when I look at you, you are overweight. What’s happened?”

It confronts me with my own book, and I really love that because I think transparency is something I also advise. Transparency key is your ticket to success. Being transparent, being open, sharing information is the golden ticket to successful entrepreneurship.

Being Fully Transparent Charlie Hoehn: Could you explain that a bit more? I haven’t heard anybody say that before.

Sebastiaan Hooft: So being transparent means that you share information. So let’s say I am on the podcast and I say, “Well I am a bad student of my own book,” maybe someone that’s listening to the podcasts says, “Well I am really great at helping people staying mentally fit.”

They can send me an email and they can help me and say, “I know how to do this. You know I’ve got this app,” or methodology or whatever. “And Sebastiaan, I can learn you this and I am sure you will benefit from it.”

So if I am transparent about my failures and where my weak spots are on this podcast, I am sure that listeners will try and help me. But if I am this rock star entrepreneur and says, “No, no, no, I’ve built this model, I am really great at doing it, because I design the model, I can also practice it.” Listeners will think, “Okay, this guy already knows what he’s doing. I would not contact him because he is already on top of everything. He knows best.”

So being transparent about where I am, where I come from and where I am going, what my struggles are, it really helped me a lot. It is in conflict with my ego. My ego wants to say, “No, no I am sustainable and successful entrepreneur. Work with me and I will make you rich or read my book you will become happy because I am like a god. I am a rock star entrepreneur, I know better.”

My ego would love to say that, but I know.

I have learned that that is not really a sensible thing to do. It is better to be transparent and share information but sometimes, you will look weak and sometimes people will say, “Well that’s weird. This guy wrote a book on the five facets of sustainable entrepreneurship, and he is not always practicing what he is preaching” but that’s my weakness. If people are really good by nature to balance their life over all of these five facets, you don’t have to buy the book.

You already know, but 99% of the entrepreneurs I meet are having at least two of the five facets are something they struggle with. You know most people I meet started with health, overweight, not knowing, financially incapable of saying where they are. Most entrepreneurs I know really don’t know where they are from a financial perspective.

If you would say, “How much money are you making? How much debt do you have? How much money are you going to be making next year? How much money have you made last year?”

“When do you want to retire? How much money do you need to retire?”

They don’t know. They really don’t know. So health is something I see that a lot of people struggle with. Also planning, where do I come from, where am I currently, where am I going to—50% of entrepreneurs I have interviewed don’t really have a solid planning to know where they are. Of course they know where they came from. They don’t really have the awareness that it is important for people around them to understand this and they have no clue where they are going to. No clue, they just don’t do anything. No business planning, no life planning, no nothing.

Every morning they get up and they just go to work and that’s what they do.

Team wise, a lot of entrepreneurs I have spoken with have employees, they have business partners, but they don’t have a team of networks.

Most students I meet that want to start a business, they also don’t have a network of mentors. So that is where a team, there’s like this specific weak spot. I see a lot is not having a team of mentors around you. Mentors are people that you don’t pay for their knowledge. Mentors are people you attract who are being enthusiastic, asking them questions that remind them of their younger years. So let’s say you have a mentor who is really experienced in law.

And he is a partner of a really successful law firm and is 60 years old, almost into retirement. If you approach them as a young entrepreneur at 20 years, you start asking all of these difficult questions, these questions about the online or whatever, questions that really trigger him to help you. The questions will remind him of where he was or she was when they started a career and for free, because a mentor needs to work for free. They will help you. Maybe not every day, maybe once per month, twice per year, but for sure, if you ask the right questions they will help you. So a mentor is also not a consultant or a coach. You know you need them when something is wrong or you need to get something done, your mentor is there to assist you on a personal level.

When I am doing a workshop or talking about the book, the most quick win for everyone in the audience always is start building a network of mentors on the day where in the workshop. I urge people already, during the workshop stop listening to me and start building a network of mentors. It is the best thing than they’re doing it.

I hope, yeah. I always say during workshops and talks, you know grab your phones because somewhere in this talk or workshop, you want to go to LinkedIn and start finding mentors.

Connect with Sebastiaan Hooft Charlie Hoehn: What is the best way for our listeners to connect with you, to follow you, maybe even drop you a line and say, “Hey, thanks so much for sharing your story”?

Sebastiaan Hooft: It depends on the preference of the listener. If you are really cool with Twitter, send a tweet. If you are cool with LinkedIn, connect with me. Facebook, Instagram, We Chat, WhatsApp, your preferred channel, you just reach out. Follow my YouTube channel like everywhere. Your preferred channel. If I am missing a channel, send me a link and I will open it for you.

We are everywhere and I always respond to every request.

I am here to help you not fall into the pitfalls I’ve fallen in and if you want, please read the book, buy the book. If you have no money, I will send you a copy for free. I give them to everyone to learn about the five facets of sustainable entrepreneurship and I also want people to join me on the mission and share all the information that’s on my website. Share it with your friends, share it with other entrepreneurs.

It should be a movement, if you connected to everything you want to do just connect with me and we’ll make it happen.

Charlie Hoehn: My final question for you is to give our listeners a challenge. What is the one thing they can do from your book this week that will have a positive impact on their life?

Sebastiaan Hooft: Just think of your weakest spot in entrepreneurship. It can be anything. It can be legal, finance, sales, marketing, whatever. Your weakest spot. Go to a magazine that writes on this topic. So let us say your weakest spot is sales. Go to the best sales magazine you can find, find the most important name on the magazine, go to LinkedIn, type in this name and say you want to connect to this individual and ask them to be a mentor.

Start asking them stimulating questions and then connect to me, talk to me about the journey you went through, all the things that worked and did not work and I will help you build this network of mentors but you have to go out and find this first weak spot. Do something to find your first mentor and when we have done that, I will help you to build even a bigger, larger, more relevant network than you have today.

Get Sebastiaan’s new book Redesign on Amazon.

Listen to more authors on managing entrepreneurship:

Your Oxygen Mask First: Kevin Lawrence

The Evolved Executive: Heather Hanson Wickman

The post Redesign: Sebastiaan Hooft appeared first on Author Hour.

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Today’s episode is with Eliot Marshall, the author of The Gospel Of Fire. Eliot is a former professional MMA fighter, and he holds black belts in karate and Brazilian jiu jitsu. He even competed on Spike TV’s The Ultimate Fighter, which earned him a spot in the UFC.

But Eliot’s greatest opponent has actually been bouts of severe anxiety and depression, and that’s what this episode is about. In this episode, he shares his story of breaking down and learning to build himself back up.

If you’ve ever struggled with anxiety or depression, this is the episode for you. Just a quick note, there is some hard language in this episode, so if you’re listening around your kids or sensitive ears, I’d recommend throwing in your headphones or listening to this a little bit later.

Get Eliot’s new book The Gospel of Fire on Amazon.

Eliot Marshall: I’m retired from the UFC, so I achieved my goal of fighting in the UFC. No, I didn’t become the champion, but like literally the day after I retired, I was looking at the building to purchase for my Denver location. I had one move right to the next. For the next three or four years, it just went well. We opened two schools and they were my first two businesses and with my business partner.

Charlie Hoehn: You opened schools?

Eliot Marshall: Brazilian jiu jitsu and kick boxing…We opened these two 10,000 square foot facilities where we did a lot, and man, it went swimmingly. Life was good. I had two kids, I had a great wife, I had a great house, you know? I could do whatever I wanted. Not like private jet fucking money, not like that. But like what dinner do you want to have and whatever, it didn’t matter.

Then, I started getting this anxiety that I had previously in my life. I wasn’t sure where it was coming from. I was just waiting for everything to fall apart. My businesses or my wife or something, I don’t know. I didn’t know.

Then I fell apart waiting.

I had a massive, what I like to call, a mental breakdown that led to a spiritual awakening. What that mental breakdown consisted of was ratchet anxiety of just racked, no sleep for four days, maybe a couple of hours a night, but nothing where you can be like, “Yeah, I got some rest.”

When you’re tired, you just lose your mind. You think you’re losing your mind and then you’re tired, you’re having physical symptoms of losing your mind. It’s just this downward spiral. It’s awful.

I’m not very religious, I am spiritual. I believe that there’s something greater than me and then greater than all of us.

I don’t know that it cares about us or anything like that but I do think that hell comes for us. I don’t think it comes for us when we’re dead. I don’t know, I have no clue, you know? I like to say that hell comes for us when we’re alive. The devil comes to say hello. And the devil had me, the devil had his claws like his hooks in really deep in me, and he’s hard to get away from.

I was wretched, I was terrified.

My wife would make plans on Wednesday to do something on Friday or Saturday like normal adult people and I’d be like, “What the fuck are you doing babe?” I wouldn’t say this to her but I’d be like, “What are you doing?” I don’t know how I’m going to get to Saturday.

I wasn’t suicidal, I wasn’t going to kill myself.

Charlie Hoehn: You just wanted it to be over.

Eliot Marshall: No, I didn’t want it to be over. I didn’t know why I wasn’t going to get to Saturday but I had this impending feeling, I don’t know.

Life and Death Charlie Hoehn: You weren’t going to survive.

Eliot Marshall: I wasn’t going to survive, don’t ask me why I wasn’t going to. I wasn’t going to get into an accident, like none of that kind of stuff is going to happen. I just wasn’t going to be here on Saturday. Don’t ask me why, you know? Yeah, it was awful, man.

I was on the phone, I had a group of friends, one of them was my doctor and he’s my friend too, he’s not just my doctor, we’ve met years ago.

I called him on a Friday night, on the beginning of the worst day. The climax, I would call it, the climax of before I did anything to get better.

We took some steps that night.

He got me to take some sleeping pills and some Xanax and he called in some long term anti-anxiety medication for me. I had a plan, and the plan worked that night. I went to sleep. I thought I was going to be better and I wasn’t, you know? I was like, I slept, that’s all I needed to do was sleep, but that didn’t get me out.

That didn’t get me out because two days later, I took the pills again and I just freaked, lost it. I’m like, “I’m not going to sleep” and I did exactly that, I didn’t sleep, on all of this. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken sleeping pills or have you ever taken sleeping pills, Charlie?

Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I have.

Eliot Marshall: It put you out, right?

Charlie Hoehn: Yes.

Eliot Marshall: I took two and a whole milligram of Xanax and I stayed awake. It was rough.

I stayed on the phone for the next month, this is how it went, maybe more than that I would say. I stayed on the phone. I had three friends, Mike, Ian, and Will. I would call one of them each night when I was in the middle of losing my shit at 11:00 like 10 minutes after I took the sleeping pill and they would just talk to me.

Sometimes it would be all night that they stayed on the phone with me and sometimes I would fall out, you know? Just like them, their voice were like putting me out, I call it, they’d sing me a lullaby, you know?

I got some good friends, man. You know? That’s why the last chapter of my book is called Ride or Die. That’s just how it went and that’s how it went and it slowly got better, six months, a lot of work, a lot of dance with that motherfucking devil for a solid six to nine months. Every day.

Hidden Demons Charlie Hoehn: I think there’s a little less stigma now but what surprising to me and maybe surprising to other people is, you are a professional athlete.

Eliot Marshall: I got in the cage, man. I got in the cage and fought another man, right? Why am I crying on the phone to my friends?

Charlie Hoehn: You were still struggling with this mental demon, right?

Eliot Marshall: Yeah. I struggled with this devil for a long time. It started for me when my Baba, that’s my grandmother in Yiddish on my mom’s side, when she died, that was my first dance.

Charlie Hoehn: Was that the initial trauma that kind of started things off?

Eliot Marshall: Well, my girlfriend broke up with me, this girl that I thought I was in love with, right? My first real girlfriend. I was a whole host of things probably. That and then my Baba died and then all this happened within three months. Then here I am, boom.

We knew it was anxiety. This was in 2000. Whatever, it passed, as it always will, it always passes, your brain gets tired of it. But it came back a couple of times and what seemed to cure it though was fighting. I had something real. I had a real fucking reason now to be scared with fighting.

In my opinion, that’s why I didn’t become a champion. I never dealt with my demon.

I never dealt with this bastard over here.

It would hold me back. I always had fear, you know? What motivated me for fighting was fear. We know scientifically that fear is not the best way to be motivated or to motivate a person. The best way is with love and happiness. I was held back by this fear, but it also quieted the fear for a while—years.

Then, fighting ended. I had no outlet for this demon, I had no outlet for wanting to be tough and accepted and loved. I screamed about how tough I was in my life. It just wasn’t true, right? It wasn’t true.

I knew there was this thing, when you’re lying, you can only lie for so long before it crumbles.

I wasn’t lying like going on telling people lies, right? Who I was saying I was, was a lie.

Charlie Hoehn: Explain what you mean by that? Give me an example of a circumstance where you were as you were saying the thing, you felt it was a lie.

Eliot Marshall: I could fight, right? I was a good fighter and I would put this on. When somebody would be in a school and they would fuck up, they deserved a beating let’s say, right? They deserve to come in the school and they acted like an asshole or whatever it was, doesn’t happen very much. But every once in a while, it happens.

I led through intimidation and like I am the toughest guy in the room. I’m still very loud, I’m still like aggressive and that’s who I am naturally, but I try to mix that with this vulnerability now. Before, there was no vulnerability. There was just this hard exterior of I’m tough, I’m very tough, I’m the man.

I wouldn’t let people see that the inside, beyond the armor that I had on. Now I do.

I would say, that’s the difference. People know I’m tough, but if somebody comes in and things aren’t going well or an employee needs to be talked to, I tend to ask them, “Hey man, what’s going on?” Rather than be like, “Man, what the feck is wrong with you,” you know?

There’s something else going on. I used to have to be right all the time, and I don’t feel that way anymore, right? It’s very relative.

Finding a Softer Side Charlie Hoehn: What was that transition like for you after a lifetime of being more abrasive and more kind of confrontational?

Eliot Marshall: I had to do it because I was broken, man. The first time I screamed to somebody other than my wife. I think I have the chapter story of when I screamed to my wife before my fight in there, you know? I was teaching a class, it was that weekend after the pills didn’t work, that very first Monday, the medicine didn’t work, was losing my shit that Monday.

I had ended up on my sister in law’s couch crying, and then I went to work. I’m crying in the office with Ian, and this was before I had even called him, you know? In the middle of the night. It was just awful. I was like, “I’m going home man, I can’t teach.” And I look outside and there’s all this traffic because it’s rush hour.

I’m like, “Fuck that, I don’t want to have a breakdown in the car. Whatever, I’m going to go teach,” you know? I go out there and I teach the class. Ian said, “nobody could tell,” I don’t know if he’s being nice to me or whatever.

I was just trying to go through the motions.

Then I don’t know what came over me. I was like, you know what? You can’t be a pussy, Eliot. you always talk about being vulnerable and telling people to do it, but you’ve never done it. Here’s the time.

The whole school, it was going on, probably 150 people in there, got up on the cage wall and I told everyone I was struggling. I told everyone, you know, I’ve talked about it before but here I am. I guess I’ll have to figure this out. I’m okay, I’m not suicidal, I’m not like – none of that stuff, I’m not depressed, you know? There’s a difference. They’re sisters, you know? Depression and anxiety, maybe they’re cousins, but they’re not the same. I think you have a touch of depression when you have anxiety and you have a touch of anxiety when you have depression, I think?

Charlie Hoehn: I’ve heard it defined as depression is worrying about the past and anxiety is worrying about the future.

Eliot Marshall: Yes, I’m the future for sure. That’s a very good way to put it. I was not like man, “I’m going to kill myself.” You know, I was never there. I just told everybody, it was real quiet, nobody did anything afterwards. Ssome people just came and put their hand on me when we were walking down the mat or whatever. Said thanks.

I was like, man, I think this might be the way to do it. I think this might be the way to really fucking help people. It just made me start thinking.

As I was going through this hell, it just made me started thinking about how to do life the best you can. What I came to was you have to have a reason that you‘re doing life. What is your why? Why are you here, why do you exist?

I got to that, I existed for my kids. I have two little boys, and we think a lot about boys and raising children. I needed to be the best dad that they could possibly have…I just try to get up and show my kids what it looks like to be the best adult possible.

A New Man Charlie Hoehn: What does that look like now?

Eliot Marshall: That means, showing them love first of all, you have to show them love. That means showing my wife love and caring, you know? What does that look like? It looks like going to work because we have to work, you know? It looks like doing things together, it looks like teaching them that failure is good and amazing and hard but it’s what will make you great.

Giving them work, you know, giving them things to achieve and be bad at and then get good at. Simple things for kids, right? Let’s put the dishes away, guys, let’s take the trash out, these things used to be real hard for my kids, you know? Let’s cut the grass.

How much does it cost to pay someone to cut the grass—like 20 bucks, right? I mean, this is something I could easily afford and I used to. I decided that I’m not going to do it. I’m going to cut the grass until my kids can cut the grass and you know, because that’s what you do man, I saw my dad cutting grass and then you know, that’s a good experience for me, I wanted to cut grass because my dad cuts the grass.

My dad works hard, so I’m going to work hard.

Then my kid wanted to cut the grass, my oldest. He couldn’t. What kid can cut the grass the first, right? Can’t start the lawn mower, he’s all upset with himself, he can’t push the lawn mower straight.

You know what I said? “I understand man, I know you can’t cut the grass.” I didn’t lie to him. I didn’t lie to him and say he did a good job. I just told him, “No man, I know, it sucks, you can’t cut the grass right now, but we’ll get there.”

We just got to do it every day or every week. Now, he cuts other people’s grass, for two years now. He’s nine.

Charlie Hoehn: You’re being a dad, you’re showing them how to be men or grownups as well.

Eliot Marshall: Yeah, and be soft and love each other, I came up with six rules for me and my kids, not just my kids. Rule number one is you have to do jiu jitsu, and if you want I’ll explain them all. Number two is you have to swim. Rule number three is you have to look people in the eye, demand their respect and respect them back. Rule number four is if you’re scared then you have to do it. Rule number five is you make your money work for you, you don’t work for your money, and rule number six is we ride or die. If my brother goes down, then I’lI go down.

A Visible Change Charlie Hoehn: Has your wife noticed this transition you’ve made?

Eliot Marshall: I would say so. We can discuss and argue better now, you know? I don’t scream and need to be right. We all have our flaws and our weaknesses. Yeah, we just work a little better together. We work a little better together, and one of the nicest things I think she’s ever said to me was I started competing again in jiu jitsu, and I’m older.

I know I’m not going to be a world champion. I’m 38 years old, and a couple of years ago, the fight company out here sponsors a bunch of jiu jitsu fighters and they want to put on a tournament. I’m the head coach of our fight team out here and they sponsor actually, the best jiu jitsu guy in the whole world currently, and they wanted to do a super fight with me and him. Man, let me tell you what I’m not doing. I don’t train like a 25 year old like him, you know, he’s my size, he’s better than me, I went out there and raised a bunch of money to do this and I got my ass kicked.

We invited the whole neighborhood to come watch, and you know, it was a good event—$70,000 was raised for the event. My wife was like, I think this is the most proud I’ve ever been of you. Because you didn’t have to do this, you know? You knew you’re probably going to lose, you invited everyone and the day before my kids got lice, you know?

The night of the weigh-ins, my kids got lice.

Have you ever had lice in your house? It’s fucking brutal, man. My kids and my wife all had lice from school. You have to wash everything. The whole fucking house. For like two days, the day of the event, everything, I’m just doing laundry and washing and combing their hair over and over. It is a pain in the ass, you know?

She was like man, you didn’t make like – you just went about like a normal day, it wasn’t like this huge event and you just went out there and you did your thing and it was really amazing. That was nice, that was probably one of the nicest things she’s ever said.

The Gift of Anxiety Hoehn: Yeah, you know, as you were telling that story Elliot, it sort of dawned on me, one of the great gifts of going through anxiety and having this evolution of understanding, hey, I have to be vulnerable. I have to ask for help, I have to be softer. It’s the gift of anxiety. It allows you to have healthier relationships with other people.

Eliot Marshall: Yeah, you know, I am. I don’t know what it is. I am grateful every day for this demon. Every day I wake up and I say thank you. I talk to God, I call it. I meditate, and I’ll let you know, I don’t know what he or it is that I am thanking. I don’t really care and it doesn’t really matter to me, what I know is that I am thankful for everything that I have in my life. My kids, my wife, my problems, my students, everything because they make me better. They just 100% make me better. I am a better human being…And it’s a tough dance, right? It’s not an easy dance.

You can’t understand why this is happening. You can’t understand. It’s a feeling like no other, you know? You can’t understand why this is happening to you. You can’t see that it is going to go away. It’s impossible, and all you want is for it to go away and that one thing to go away, that’s the devil’s food, you know? That is what he eats on.

Yep, you’re in your mind all day, every day going, “Come on, go away from me. Go away from me, I need this to go” that’s his food and he just digs in deeper and deeper and deeper into your soul and then he does not leave you. He does not leave you when you are begging and when you are praying or whatever you pray to. When you are praying to that going, “Please man,” when it is your third night awake and you’re just like, “Please give me an hour, please God” whatever.

You know just let this pass for an hour, two hours, please—and then that’s his food, man. He is eating. He is eating good that night you know or whatever that is.

Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, there’s a great quote that, “That which you resist persists.”

Eliot Marshall: Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. You got to say hi to that devil and you got to say, “Not today motherfucker.” Today I’m going to do me. I am going to do Eliot to the best Eliot he can. Let’s go, let’s dance, how long do you want to stay? You think you’re going to get me? Not now, not today. You can stay here, we can do this together that’s cool. That’s cool, you can stay right on my shoulder, but today, I’m going to crush.

Lessons from Jiu Jitsu Charlie Hoehn: There is a chapter called, “How jiu jitsu saved my life” and particularly, I’m most interested in this chapter because I’d imagine that you and I came about to the same conclusion or the same method for saving our own lives.

Eliot Marshall: Everyone is fighting something—everybody you know? Everyone that walks this earth is fighting something and jiu jitsu teaches us how to fight.

What jiu jitsu teaches you at first is how to stay on the bottom of a man or a woman on top of you trying to strangle you and take your soul. They are trying to kill you, and at first, you can’t win. You have no clue how to win. First you just have to survive. You have to stay there, their arm around your neck, and you’ve got to stay real calm.

You are mounted. You can’t think about how did you get mounted, you can’t think about after you’re going to get out of the mount. They are on top of you sitting on your chest with their arm on your neck, and you’re going to go to sleep if you don’t get out.

So first you just have to survive.

You have to dance with the devil—he ain’t leaving.

After you dance with the devil, after you survived a little bit, now you can think about getting out. Now you can think about getting back to a spot where you’re a little safer. Okay I am out. Now once I’m out, all right how do I stay out, what defenses do I have to have to make sure that I don’t get back there again?

Then you build up your defenses of the mount again. So that if you do get back there then what do you do? Okay, I’ll get out better this time because I know how to not let the hand get on my neck. I might get mounted, but I know not to get the hand get on my neck.

And then once you learn all of these skills in jiu jitsu, you learn how to go on the attack, and then once you learn how to go on the attack, you can kill. You can start go taking souls. We do that with another human in jiu jitsu, and the beauty about it is we have to do it over and over again.

We get to die every day in jiu jitsu at first.

We tap like you took my soul. And then after you tap, you go again and you go again and then all of a sudden, “Oh okay I didn’t tap that round, nobody got me. All right, fuck yeah that was good!”

And then, “Oh man, I got to the mount this time. I didn’t win, I didn’t choke anybody out or arm bar them but I got there, okay” and now, here it comes again. Now, “Oh man now I am winning. Yes! I am winning. Oh shit, here’s somebody better than me. They are kicking my ass again.”

I call them nail skills, but there’s a hammer and there’s a nail, so how are my nail skills? Did my nail skills got better? Can I survive the mount better? All right, yeah I did.

He beat me up but it’s okay, I am still here. I am still fighting, I am still fighting. I’m still chasing him. I’m still getting after it, all right.

And this dance just keeps going, it never ends with jiu jitsu. You never come back, and it’s one of those things where people like to rest on their laurels a lot like, “Oh okay, I did that so I know it.” Man, I did nothing. I have to go accomplish today. If you want to have good skills at fighting, you know what? You have to practice them.

You can’t stop for 10 years and then think you’re still a badass. You are not a badass anymore man. You were a badass—that means past impression, right? You are not a badass. You have to practice this every single day. I hope to never get into another fight in my life, an actual fight. It’s the last thing that I will ever do. You could walk up to my wife and call her a bitch—as long as you don’t touch her, as long as you are not physically attacking her we’ll be good.

We’ll work this out with our words or I will just walk away.

I don’t need people to know how tough I am. I mean obviously I know how to defend myself because I practice every day.

That is how jiu jitsu saved my life, man. It taught me how to get mounted and how to have the devil strangling me with both hands and not give in.

Parenting in the Present Charlie Hoehn: Going back to the six rules that you have for your kids, I’d imagine that’s why that’s rule number one is that they have to learn that skill of fighting with the devil.

Eliot Marshall: Yeah, you are going to get beat up. There is nobody that comes into jiu jitsu on the first day and doesn’t get beat up. You can bring the biggest NFL, the strongest NFL player in and I have this little 18 year old, 19 year old Mexican kid that’s been training with me. If I tell him to die, he will fucking die. He fucking loves me, you know? We saved his life and he will beat the shit out of anybody that comes in off the street not knowing what they’re doing.

I don’t care how strong, how tough, because that’s just how it will go for them.

If you don’t know, it is like not knowing how to swim. I don’t care how athletic you are, if you can’t swim and I throw you in a pool, I don’t care how strong you are, you are drowning. That is what jiu jitsu is, so yeah, my kids have to know how to get beat up. I don’t want them to be successful at things right away.

I want them to struggle a little bit—struggle in the right way.

But don’t get me wrong, I am not like sadomasochistic with my kids. Have some fun but struggle, it is not easy. It is okay that it is not easy. I understand.

I have two kids, a nine year old and a five and a half year old. They are three and a half years apart and my five year old loves his brother like loves his brother. Whatever his brother is doing, he is doing. His brother, my nine year old Kannen and five year old Simon who loves sports and he’s a sweetheart of a kid, but he likes to compete.

Man, he’s got that competition thing like I have. I don’t know if Simon’s ever won anything because “Kannen, just let him catch the ball one time dude, please,” but now Simon can hang with Kannen.

Well Simon played his first organized game, he doesn’t ever win with Kannen but he played his first organized game, Saturday, a little five year old basketball game and look, most five year olds they can’t really run very well, right?

They for sure don’t dribble a basketball very well. Well Simon has been trying to keep up with Kannen his whole life and he can run and dribble at the same time because Kannen can. Kannen makes him play on a 10 foot net, which he can barely get the ball to. We have Kannen lower the basket, but this game was on six foot net. It is appropriate for five year olds, right? Simon crushed it. Simon absolutely crushed it and he was the man because of the struggle.

You could see it in his eyes, and the best part combines with my rule number six now is Kannen was standing there going, “Yes Simon! You’re the man Simon! You’re the man!” and Simon scored every point, you know? He’s like, “Who’s the man Simon? You’re the man!”

No matter how hard they are on each other, they understand that rule number six too. They have each other more than they have me and their mom.

They have each other.

It really touched my heart. I almost cried, you know? There were some other people there and they’re all like, “Damn, your kid’s really good!”

It wasn’t even that I was paying attention. I was happy that he was winning, because it was the first time that he got to do that really well. But the two of them together, the whole thing combined was really touching from my heart.

Charlie Hoehn: I don’t think there is a stronger testament to somebody’s journey than my kids are better off because of it.

Eliot Marshall: That is all that matters, and for me, look that’s what I got. I’m better because I wrote this book honestly. It made me go back through it.

Charlie Hoehn: What were you hoping would be the impact that this book has?

Eliot Marshall: I wanted one person to read my book and tell me that I helped them, because look, I don’t know if I am going to ruin this for you or if you are going to cut this out or you guys won’t like this, the book costs $25,000 or $30,000 whatever it is. I know I am not going to be a New York Times bestseller, right? But that nut is a hard nut to swallow. $30K for what? Like my ego, my what? What does that do? And even let’s say it brings out all these other opportunities, who knows?

You’ll never be able to really put an ROI on that number like a number to number, money to money. But if one person in their life would reach out to me even if it is on my death bed and say, “Hey man, I read your book and you changed my life” well, how much money would you give to make one person’s life better like that? That was in their dance with the devil and then somehow got out, you know? So if that happens once, one time, I’ll write 10 more books for that price.

Connect with Eliot Marshall Charlie Hoehn: What is the best way for our listeners to connect with you and potentially follow you if you want them to?

Eliot Marshall: Yeah, so my name on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook is Fire Marshall 205, my nickname was Eliot “The Fire” Marshall when I was fighting. I used to fight at a 205 pound weight class—not anymore. Don’t make fun of me for being fat but I am not 205 pounds. That was a lot of work.

So yeah, I’m most active on Instagram. I just really love this new path that I am on with my life.

I have a podcast, it’s called The Gospel Of Fire, it is on iTunes and it is everywhere you listen to podcasts, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, all that stuff.

I just don’t like where we are in the world with a lot of things, you know? I think we need to be a little bit more together. We need to get back to the village a little bit. The people in your life are your life. That’s what you’ve got. You don’t have any money. You know this is just some greed upon currency thing. Man, fuck that noise.

You need to do what you love in your life, and when you do what you love in your life the money will come. But you better really love it. You can’t fake love it, you know? I hope that as people hear me speak, they know that I am not some self-help motherfucker that’s like, “Oh yeah, do this and you’ll be happy.” No man, you know you’ve got to struggle and you’ve got to find what you love and you’ve got to find the why, and that ain’t easy.

That’s work. That is real, hard work, and then you got to take that work. To be honest, I think we raise kids like shit you know? We raise them terribly. We protect them, we want them to not struggle, we want their lives to be better than our lives. I agree with that. I just don’t agree with the method that we do it. The way you do it is you give them some things to accomplish. Let them see a score board where it says 30-2 not in their favor, you know?

That is good for us. That is okay. We’ve gone away from this because we’re so afraid that we put our children’s failures that we take them in as our own because of our past bullshit that we haven’t dealt with. Go deal with your bullshit and let’s raise our kids together with your neighbor and your neighbor’s neighbor.

Do it all as one.

You don’t have to agree everything everyone says, you know? We’re in this place where it’s like, “Oh man this guy said this one bad thing so fuck him.” Yeah, you tell me one person…I don’t agree with everything I say, you know? I say some dumb shit sometimes. But we don’t have room for this in our life.

I say if somebody messes up with one thing that they say or do and we just vilify them because it is what sells. It is what we like to do. You want to know why we like it? It is because we feel like shit. We feel like shit and we don’t go deal with it.

I know we’re getting a little tougher here and I have been soft maybe before. It is this double edge sword that we need to have a little bit, you know? It is a coin. There are two sides of it. You have the devil on one side and you have the angel on the other and you need them both to be balancing each other out.

A Challenge for Listeners Charlie Hoehn: What is the one thing that listeners can do from your book this week that will have a positive impact on their life?

Eliot Marshall: I have a chapter in my book that says, “All you have is now,” and that’s it. You don’t have anything else. I talk a little bit about religion and heaven and hell and stuff. No matter what you believe, none of us knows, you know? None of us knows what is coming for us when we die. It could be today, it could be tomorrow or it could be the next day. So we live our lives like we’re going to live forever—you are not. None of us are, and there’s no promise of anything afterwards.

There is no promise of a single thing.

So do this moment, this very, very moment the best you can and this takes practice. You have to practice, because you have to learn how to actually be in the moment. You have to learn what one moment looks like, and it’s hard. It’s hard work.

So let me tell you a little bit how to do it. Notice every time that your ass leaves a seat where you get off the ground or the chair. Not the second before or the second after and see how many you can get in one day.

See how many times you can notice the actual act of standing up. The reason why this is real hard is because we are always standing up for another reason. You are never standing up to stand up. You’re standing up to get a drink, to go to the bathroom, go to work, get in the car, clean up a mess, whatever it may be.

That’s the future, you know? You don’t have that right now. That’s the future—you are standing up for something in the future.

So our mind is always somewhere else. Try to be in the present. Try to notice literally the second you get up off the chair. That will put you in the present moment, it will teach you what one single moment looks like. Get up the best you can and then just take it from there. You’ll do every single moment the best you can, and when you fail, you’ll fail and you will understand that I am going to read a Teddy Roosevelt quote sitting in my office:

“It’s not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or what the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood. Who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and at worst, if he fails at least he fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

Live your life like that. Live your life daring as greatly as you can for something very, very important to you. It doesn’t have to be important for anybody else. Get after it because you dare greatly, and live today.

Get Eliot’s new book The Gospel of Fire on Amazon.

Listen to more authors who use sports for healing and growth:

Developing Youth Leadership Through Sport: Mark Mungal

Mindset for Mastery: Ryan Harris

The post The Gospel of Fire: Eliot Marshall appeared first on Author Hour.

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In this episode, Dr. Julie Lopez, author of Live Empowered, breaks down how to rewire your brain. Specifically, your implicit memory, which are the past experiences you can’t recall but that remains stored deep in your subconscious mind.

If you’ve ever noticed these invisible barriers that seem to hold you back from making desired changes, either in your business or in love or just in life, this is definitely the episode for you. These road blocks might seem like minor things or they might seem insurmountable. But with the approach that Dr. Julie Lopez specializes in, you can get past those roadblocks by hacking into the regions of your mind that influence your daily life.

This episode is really perfect for people who are super motivated and have tried different forms of therapy, they understand on an intellectual level what’s getting in their way but on a physical and emotional level, they’re not quite there yet. Without further ado, here is our conversation with Dr. Julie Lopez.

Get Julie’s new book Live Empowered on Amazon. Find out more at DoctorJulieLopez.com.

Dr. Julie Lopez: Twenty-five years ago, when I was fairly new to living on my own, I was cooking with oil and a grease fire started. Because I was pretty inexperienced, I threw water on this fire and the fire exploded and the kitchen caught on fire. In that moment, I was completely terrified, and I ran out of the house because I did not know what was going to happen, I kind of calmed down.

Went back in because the whole house hadn’t exploded, it was just the kitchen on fire. I went back in and I managed to mostly put the fire out, called the landlords, called my roommates and all that stuff. But for kind of a long time afterwards, when people—and one in particular, one teasing me when I was at the gym, kind of telling him about what had happened, in a good natured way, I was pretty cross with him. I lost my temper and actually it made me tear up a bit.

I was frustrated with that because I hadn’t died, the house hadn’t burned down, it was mildly inconvenient, we had to do some repairs. I was obviously through it, he meant nothing wrong by it but I was really reactive when he was being playful.

It was frustrating because of all the things I just mentioned, it didn’t make sense. It didn’t make logical sense to me, and I was being kind of mean.

One of the things that was really major for me, and this was during a time before I went back to school, I was working as an engineer but I had been in therapy. I told my therapist, I was frustrated.

He suggested I try something that sounded crazy to me.

It’s something that’s a brain based therapy, which I know very well now. This brain based therapy is called EMDR.

I tried it, and in one session, he did some kind of interesting things. I had to follow something with my eyes, and there wasn’t a lot of talking. But what did happen is that from that moment forward, from one session, I no longer had any other reactions to this fire I had been in that had really distressed me.

If someone teased me about it, I was actually fine. The things in my body that had been reacting, like the fear and my throat closing up and being agitated totally went away. I thought it was pretty cool because I have had many other times in my life where I’ve known something logically but could not perform physically because I was having a reaction.

That really was the beginning of my introduction to this whole world. That works with a different part of our brain that holds kind of data that tells our bodies how to act, and it’s stored in our unconscious called implicit memory. What’s been really cool about it is seeing with myself and with clients about how realities can really shift when you get to the brain center where the messaging is actually stored.

Charlie Hoehn: What is EMDR? What does that stand for?

Dr. Julie Lopez: It stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, which is why most people just call it EMDR. The founder Francine Shapiro when she developed it—it’s a whole theoretical orientation with eight different steps to it—but what it’s mostly done for is that it uses bilateral stimulation of the brain, the right and left side of your brain. It’s no longer just limited to the eyes, that’s what she used initially when she was doing her beginning research, but you can use sound.

So you can stimulate the brain on the right and left side simultaneously with sound, you can use a tactile like touch, there are these tappers. This is all done with equipment, but the touch actually goes from the right, left with this bilateral stimulation and it helps to open up neural pathways in your brain that control the messaging to the rest of your body.

Opening Up the Subconscious Charlie Hoehn: It stimulates your senses on both sides of your body and because of that, the pathways that may have been previously closed off start to open up again?

Dr. Julie Lopez: I don’t want to get too geeky because you know, the thing that I worked on really hard with my book was to be able to tell things in a very relatable way.

I actually had one of my early reviewers say, “Wow, I thought I was doing you a favor to do this kind of book review and read through it but I didn’t know it was going to be such a page turner,” and that meant a lot to me because he’s not a clinician. He’s actually a very successful international business person, and he said, “This was very easy for me to read, it was very relatable.”

Coincidentally the story I just told about, the terror that happened for me in the moment when the explosion happened and flames happened immediately, actually did ignite a very primitive part of my brain.

You’re going to die—let’s kick it into high gear to do what you need to do to get out of it.

It encoded a message in my brain and it basically said fire equals die, right? It’s very primitive. So when my friend was teasing me about the fire, I reacted like I was going to die and that he was making fun of my death moment. I didn’t think that at all. The frontal lobe of my brain did not think that but a different part of my system already had a different code in it.

For this particular one, most of the things that are stored in implicit memory happened with the hippocampus, and the amygdala is a part of the limbic system, which is what I was referring to. I feel like sometimes when I bring all these terms up that I lose people but if you want to talk about it and get specific.

Because the amygdala is part of your limbic system, and that’s what happened for me, but with implicit memory, obviously I remembered the fire, but there were other messages that weren’t in words that were telling my system what to do.

I go more into details in the book about implicit memory, there are three basic arms…It’s basically telling my heard to beat faster, my throat to close up, the tears, I would get teary with this guy and he’s like, “What is wrong with you?”

He didn’t say that but I could tell by the way he was talking to me. Plus I had been kind of mean and so the messaging to the rest of my body was telling the rest of my body to do other things, you know? You don’t consciously tell your eyes to well up with tears. They do because you have a sensation. Just like your limbic system, we’ve all heard the awesome stories when there’s a real threat to survival and people get extremely strong, well why is that?

They’re not that strong at that moment, but all the blood rushes to their limbs because a part of the brain kicks in and says, “Your friend’s going to die, they’re trapped under this car and you’re going to pick the car up.”

You could never do that without all of your adrenaline kicking in to do some pretty incredible things. We’re programmed to survive. We are telling our bodies to do that, our bodies do it naturally. I’m talking about how to very specifically recode our implicit memory to have it optimized for what we want in our present day life.

Hidden Memory Charlie Hoehn: I’m curious with the instance of the grease fire and your friend sort of playfully teasing you and getting the strong emotional reaction. Had you struggled with that reaction for years or had this been the first time you’d really encountered this emotional reaction that you had?

Dr. Julie Lopez: Have I ever felt sensitive about something, like someone could tease me about? Yes. I mean, typically, I joke around with people like sometimes, especially now, with my work where it’s super intense like a pretty much been able to roll with difficult things. This one tapped into kind of a life or death experience for me. It wasn’t that I’d had a history with it. It’s that you know, only the week prior, this thing had happened and got encoded in that moment.

Trauma encodes an image of the worst part of it.

If you’ve ever had something happen where you’re like just frozen. It happened 10 years ago, five years ago, you had to put your dog down or you lost a family member or you witnessed an accident or you were in an accident. Even though time has chronologically passed, some of those experiences can be frozen in our system and then we react off of them if they’re triggered.

He was triggering me by bringing it up and bringing it up in a way that is making light of something that to me was encoded as something really serious. Not in my frontal lobe, right? I didn’t even think, I was like yeah, I made it through no big deal. But the reaction right away was tapping into that life or death feeling I associated with it.

Varying Traumas Charlie Hoehn: What are some of the more common causes of these traumas that you see when you work with clients now? What are the common things that you’re helping people work through?

Dr. Julie Lopez: The book kind of has a nice array of different texts and examples. It’s very goal focused, it’s more present day focused. I might be working with someone who wants to be able to be more social and go out more…she came in because she had some social anxiety and she had struggled with anxiety for a lot of her life and tended to be a bit perfectionistic.

She came in and we kind of identified and broke down what her goals were and how we would actually measure that they changed.

This is the type of goal, underneath what was causing the anxiety was some very early distressing experiences. Experiences she did not remember but she had been told by her parents that had gone through before the age of two.

She had some trauma in her biological family, which caused her to have to be moved from her home. So she’d had some really rough beginnings and environments that were not ideal for like a little kid.

Again, she didn’t consciously remember it, and this is where the hippocampus comes in because it’s not fully formed till like you’re three or four. It doesn’t time stamp experiences and it doesn’t hold chronological memory.

I wouldn’t have even known this or gotten into it so much if we weren’t using a brain based approach which is nonverbal.

We did the processing and we changed the coding in her system.

The beautiful thing about doing this type of work is it’s usually not very long term. I only worked with her for about three months, not only did all of her anxiety go away, she didn’t like social environments because she felt like she couldn’t control what was going on and that she shouldn’t think this—but she felt like she might be in danger. So not only did all of her anxiety symptoms go down and she felt like around potentially making a safe when she was out and about, but she had had psoriasis. It is an inflammatory skin condition that had been medically treated for over 30 years, and it completely went away.

That was really cool because we’re one system but we tend to think of it separately like physical health, mental health, you know, these different aspects of wellbeing.

But it’s all integrated, so it was really cool. Frankly, she was like, “My dermatologist wants to talk to you, she cannot believe what she is seeing.” I am not a dermatologist and she did not come to me saying, “I want my psoriasis to go away,” but it did after we did the work. It was super cool.

Success with EMDR Charlie Hoehn: What kind of success rate do people tend to see with EMDR?

Dr. Julie Lopez: Well I couldn’t tell you the exact statistic. There has been a lot of research done on it. I can tell you for me with my clients it is very high, but part of that is that I am very careful about selecting the type of treatment that might be best for them and making sure that we don’t jump into the full protocol until they’re ready.

So some people come ready, and this is going to get pretty complicated pretty fast, but some people come ready. Some people might not be so ready for different reasons. They might have some pretty significant issues with trust, they might have lower resources around being able to shift from one emotion to the other, and all of these things when you are in a state where you’re going into the different parts of the brain can make it hard for someone to follow the process. Not because there’s something wrong with them. They just might need to build up some resources.

They’re not quite ready and because they’re not controlling what’s happening or this is just going to happen, then I won’t suggest it. I am very candid with my clients. I tell them what’s happening and we will work to build that until they’re ready.

Charlie Hoehn: So who is an ideal candidate for you?

Dr. Julie Lopez: Okay, so an ideal client for me honestly is someone that’s really motivated and typically maybe because of where I am in Washington DC or maybe because of some of the networks that because I have this big center and so certain people ask for me specifically, my ideal client is someone who is very motivated and they’re motivated because they’ve tried a bunch of other things and they’re really frustrated that they haven’t gotten the results they wanted.

Or they’re frustrated that they understand intellectually every aspect of what’s getting in their way with job performance or relationship struggles or what have you and they’re not making that progress that they want.

I love that because I think what really motivated me to write the book is the number of people that I have met in my personal and professional life who legitimately do not understand that at that moment—where they feel like they’re backed into a corner and there really are not other options. They have checked the check box of all the things that they need to try to move forward or to have success in what they want for their life, and they realize and they’ve come in contact with a whole other set of opportunities to make change and I love that. That’s the type of client I like.

Honestly, a lot of times these clients are learners.

They have come across this because they have researched it on the internet. Or they’re very motivated to have the life that they want to live.

So that is my favorite type of client, but to be honest, it’s so gratifying just to see people in the reality that they didn’t realize even existed, right? I do tell a lot of stories in the book about pretty drastic changes that happened for people, but it is the way they actually feel in their bodies.

Results and Healing Charlie Hoehn: Within three months is when you tend to deliver results with them, right?

Dr. Julie Lopez: It depends on the person. It’s been less than that, it’s been more than that. I actually had a client who was in a plane crash. It was a professional trip and she had to travel for work. She had a very prestigious job. She survived the crash, blacked out during the midst of it, had a pretty significant back injury but survived. She did her physical therapy for her back but could not get on a plane. She actually couldn’t really tolerate even being in an airport.

Because if she heard the sounds that had become encoded in this part of her brain and her implicit memory, she would have a full on panic attack and would be immobilized.

She had worked extremely hard to be where she was and her job required travel. So she was referred by another therapist as the best way to do the brain based work, and she was really working hard not to have to get on a plane. She would take a train across the country but some of her flights were international.

It was not sustainable.

I always do some preparatory sessions. I do a few follow ups just to get them into the groove of how to integrate the work that we have done but we only had maybe three sessions of the actual brain based work. She was fine to get on the plane no problem, and that is pretty awesome.

Now, this was an adult trauma, single incident. She had no significant family of origin kind of disappointment, neglect or any of that type of thing.

I do end up seeing a lot of clients who come from affluent families what the picture looks like is a white picket fence, mom and dad, everything like the way you see in a storybook but their actual childhood was one where they were pretty neglected. The parents were working, no one was around, didn’t really get a lot of their emotional needs met. So that is an interesting one. I am a trauma specialist but you see some of the same symptoms was something that society says it’s fine because it all looks fine on the outside but it is not actually really fine on the inside.

I really like working with those clients too because they’re puzzled or they often times feel like they’re broken, like there’s something wrong with them if they’re having struggles with relationships or having struggles with public speaking or things like that.

More about Live Empowered Charlie Hoehn: Is there anything else that you want to touch upon that they might get excited about and get them off the fence to go buy your book?

Dr. Julie Lopez: What I really am proud of is that there is a really nice appendix on the back. You asked me specifically about one of many types of brain based therapies and there are many types of body based therapies that also are effective at getting into some of those codes that are stored in implicit memory. There is a full appendix with lots of websites.

That is built to empower the reader to say, “Hey reader, things aren’t what they seem and there is a whole other world out there and let me empower you with a little bit of brain based anatomy.” So just to give the reader language and the ability to ask for what they want, in the conclusion there’s specific things to ask someone who provides one of these different types of modalities. The table is pretty expansive.

In one of my chapters I actually break down a methodology that I developed for people to discover what is actually coded in their implicit memory, which sounds pretty simple but it’s not because it’s in your unconscious.

So it is very hard to do on your own, but in one of these chapters it actually breaks down this four part methodology called packs, so that the reader can do this on their own. Not to recode it, but to actually identify what might be in there and it’s a wild process. Often times once they hear it and they sit with what the code might be, they’re like, “Wow, yeah that makes a lot of sense.” It’s not something typically that they would come up with on their own, because they’re sitting there going, “Why can’t I do this? Why is this not working out? Why do I still struggle with drugs or eating or avoidance?”

I work with a lot of people who want love in their life or want relationships, but they themselves sabotage it and they are very puzzled about why they would do that. Because if you ask them, “Do you want this?” They’re like, “Heck yeah, I totally want this.”

Yeah and so, that’s why the title ended up being Live Empowered, because many, many empowerment movements in our history begin with the idea of seeing what is not visible—the subtle things that keep us held back. So the whole book is designed to empower people.

Connect with Dr. Julie Lopez Charlie Hoehn: What is the best way for our listeners to connect with you, to follow you, to potentially even work with you?

Dr. Julie Lopez: So let’s see, well my center in Washington is www.vivapartnership.com, that’s Viva. More information about my speaking and training and this workshops that I do and facilitation can be found at doctorjulielopez.com.

I will tell you a personal favorite of mine, this isn’t necessarily helping any listener find me, but we recently developed a free online mental health resource called The Resilient Brain Project, and that is where you can find it. It is 100% free and it is built to empower the user through apps and blogs and information.

Here now information is scientific information, groups where they can connect and feel normal around struggles that they might be having and it’s also for allies like family and friends.

I am really proud of it.

It is a personal love offering project that I’d love to see getting out to the world because it is free.

I do retreats, not a lot of retreats. I get asked to come in and facilitate other people’s retreats and then I have an annual retreat in the dead of winter in Washington DC. It gets very cold, yesterday it was 12 degrees here, and in another week I’ll be heading out to the Caribbean. Off to an island with a group of women to work together for a week, I love it.

Charlie Hoehn: Excellent. What is the one thing listeners can do this week from your book that will have a positive impact on their lives?

Julie Lopez: So what I would say is to actually go to that site, The Resilient Brain Project, and take a look at one of the topics that you might struggle with right now because if you just look at one you will realize there was a way out of it.

Get Julie’s new book Live Empowered on Amazon. Find out more at DoctorJulieLopez.com.

Listen to more authors on healing from trauma:

The Game of Adversity: Nick DiNardo

Life As a Masterpiece: Cathy Christen

The post Live Empowered: Dr. Julie Lopez appeared first on Author Hour.

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Elizabeth Rose, author of Written In The Snow, is the youngest Canadian to conquer the seven summits. These are the mountains that are the highest peaks on each continent. Everest, Kilimanjaro—I don’t know all seven, but those are the two I know.

In this episode, Liz is going to share the stories and the lessons she learned that beyond just climbing, the lessons that served her and changed her life in every way. She was a young woman, 26 years old who felt a bit lost and directionless and her journey changed her world. If you’re a young woman or just a person who feels a bit aimless right now, this is the episode for you.

Get Elizabeth’s new book Written in Snow on Amazon. Find out more at LizRoseSummit.com.

Elizabeth Rose: I was fresh out of university, and I was so excited to go into the workforce and get my dream job. I had an awesome resume, I had really great connections, and I was just so excited for that next chapter of my life. I started looking for jobs, and about two months in, I felt completely defeated. I had no job offers and only a couple of interviews.

Everything wasn’t going as planned.

I really was down, and I felt the need to go accomplish something. I started searching on the internet for like a quick fix of something that will make me feel satisfied and accomplished.

I stumbled upon an adventure company, and one of their trips was to climb Kilimanjaro. The instant I saw it, I knew that this was the perfect fix. It was a short trip, so I could do the trip and then get straight back into the job search with a new motivation.

That’s kind of how my book started and how my adventure started.

Let’s Go for a Climb Charlie Hoehn: Wow. Okay, you started off climbing mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, what was that like? What was the journey going over there like?

Elizabeth Rose: My dad and I, I dragged him along, he decided he would come with me to share that experience. We had about three weeks’ notice to prep for the trip. Neither of us owned hiking boots and we were definitely not seasoned hikers.

We’d done a few local hikes, but we were just taking on something new. We’re both huge optimists and went in with a positive attitude. We’re relatively fit and so we thought we would be totally fine.

We didn’t really have a worry in the world.

Friends had warned us, “You guys, people train for a year to do that,” but we didn’t let that stop us. We were excited.

Charlie Hoehn: What was the experience like?

Elizabeth Rose: Yeah, from the get go, the days were a lot longer than we had anticipated, and it was a tough climb. They ranged from about five to seven hours, and summit day was over 12 hours.

We were not used to that at all, but we pushed.

On summit day, we were in like ankle high snow, trying to get up a super steep hill. It was a definite struggle, but we pushed each other and motivated each other to get through it and were super excited once we reached the top together.

Lessons from the Top Charlie Hoehn: What are the moments that kind of stand out for you on that first climb? Did you learn anything about yourself?

Elizabeth Rose: Yeah, it was just such a surreal feeling at the top and the experience of sharing it together was amazing and the big take away was trying new things, we had both never done anything like that before, and from there, it created my passion for climbing and adventures.

It was a huge turning point in my life.

Charlie Hoehn: Did you have any mishaps?

Elizabeth Rose: We forgot to wear sunscreen on summit day.

You’re up at such a high altitude that we weren’t thinking too clearly, and our guides forgot to mention it, so I ended up with third degree burns on my face. It was a rough week after.

My face hurt so much, it was like my skin was completely crusted over and ended up all falling off and oozing and it was terrible. I learned from that one.

As you were going down, you could tell who had already summitted by the look of their face.

Charlie Hoehn: Did you go straight from Africa back home or did you say, “let’s do another one?”

Elizabeth Rose: I had the motivation to do more but I had just landed a brand new job. I was excited for that part of my life as well. Then the job worked out where I had six months on and then two months off. I was already planning my next adventure for my two months off.

Back on the Ground Charlie Hoehn: What was your next adventure?

Elizabeth Rose: Next, I went to Everest base camp. I took my mom on that trip, and that is really the point or the time when I fell in love with the idea of climbing Everest. That’s where I learned what the seven summits were, there was a girl in my group who her aunt had done the seven summits. I looked them up and decided at that point that someday, I was going to climb them all too.

Charlie Hoehn: Why did it matter to you to climb the seven summits? I mean, you had done one really big summit, why did you want to do all seven?

Elizabeth Rose: I figured, I’ve already knocked one of them off the list and I had such a passion for exploring the world and climbing and hiking.

I thought it would be an amazing life goal to have.

Charlie Hoehn: Did you have any fears? I mean, the first mountain had taught you some harsh lessons, getting your face burned completely.

Elizabeth Rose: Yeah, I didn’t really look back. I learned from that mistake and definitely wouldn’t repeat it. I wasn’t really scared at all.

Everest Accomplished Charlie Hoehn: Your book has some incredible photos of you going through these climbs and what you experienced, but tell me some of your favorite stories in climbing mount Everest?

Elizabeth Rose: It wasn’t like a favorite enjoyable one, but going down Everest was like one of the scariest moments of my life. I got to the top and it had been engrained in my head that all the accidents and everything bad happens on the way down.

When I got to the top, I was super confident going up and then I actually have a video of me at the top being like, I have no idea how I’m going to get down, but hopefully in one piece.

I was terrified.

Fear kicked in, and the first section near the top, we had to rappel down. Basically your hand is your break on the rope. If I were to let go, I would literally be falling off of the highest mountain on earth. Anyways, at one point, I slipped and then that just like confirmed all my fear and I was in tears and I needed a second to catch my breath, we’re at 29,000 feet and I just needed to regroup. But everyone was going up and down on the same rope.

My Sherpa was like, “There’s no time for you to catch your breath, we need to keep moving now.”

I just had to pull it together, and my tears were making my oxygen mask slide off my face. Yeah, just such vivid memories. I had to stay mentally tough and keep going.

Charlie Hoehn: Was that your most vivid memory from Everest?

Elizabeth Rose: Yeah, definitely, that’s the one that really stuck to me. I mean, the view from the top of the world was absolute incredible as well. It was a bright blue sky, sunny day, and the top was covered in colorful prayer flags. You could just see all the Himalayas in the distance.

Fun fact is, the top of Everest is actually very small.

It’s about the size of an average dining room table, which most people don’t realize. There’s lots of areas where you can’t actually stand on there—it’s like one section where you can take a quick photo that’s safe to stand on.

Charlie Hoehn: Wow. Tell me, what was your training like before you did Everest, specifically?

Elizabeth Rose: Yeah, no. I had climbed Mount Aconcagua before Everest, and I actually, because of weather had to do that one twice. That was definitely great training. One of the best things for training that you can do is altitude train. Aconcagua was 22,000 feet. That was kind of the perfect training I could have done for Everest.

It was quite a short window that I knew that I was going to Everest. I had basically had three weeks after my Aconcagua clients. I got a climbing coach and a sports psychologist, got a personal trainer, and basically did everything that I could to get Everest ready.

Life after the Summits Charlie Hoehn: To have done the Seven Summits, you were 26 at the time when you completed them. How did this change you?

Elizabeth Rose: It taught me a lot about myself like to believe in myself and stay mentally tough. Now, going into life situations, if something seems stressful, I’m like, “I’ve done the seven summits, I can get through this.”

I use that reference a lot to help me apply to my everyday life of being able to get through difficult moments.

Charlie Hoehn: Do you remember the last time you thought that as you were going through something hard?

Elizabeth Rose: Yeah, even little things on a daily basis and like a really tough workout, I’m like, “Okay Liz, it’s only an hour workout, your summit day on Everest was 24 hours. Suck it up, you can do it.”

Charlie Hoehn: What do you think is possible for you now that the Seven Summits are done?

Elizabeth Rose: After the Seven Summits, I always wanted to write a book. This was my next big summit in itself, and it definitely had its challenges just like a mountain did. Now after the book, I’m not sure where my life will take me but I’m excited and ready for anything.

Connect with Elizabeth Rose Charlie Hoehn: Did you have a hope for your book?

Elizabeth Rose: Yeah, I mean, I hope to inspire other people, young girls, lost in life like I was. Any age really, and I want people to really take away from it to be able to set big goals.

I wasn’t some super star athlete climber before going into this. I found a new passion and set a goal and went for it. I think a lot of people are scared to start something new, but it has changed my life completely.

I hope other people do the same.

Charlie Hoehn: I imagine just by meeting people and then hearing your story that they themselves have changed as well. Do you have any instances of people who have been inspired by your journey?

Elizabeth Rose: Yeah, I definitely have some friends that have gone to Everest base camp or climbed Kilimanjaro after seeing all my pictures and hearing all my stories from those trips. Even non climbing, I want to inspire people to find their own summit. If your goal is to run a marathon or learn a new instrument to do something like that.

Just take on a challenge.

Charlie Hoehn: What is the best way for our listeners to follow you and what you do next and potentially get in touch with you?

Elizabeth Rose: I’m quite active on Instagram. My Instagram is @lizrose5 and I also have a website with lots of pictures and updates about my trips and that is lizrosesummit.com.

Charlie Hoehn: Excellent. All right, final question I have is, for you to give our listeners a challenge. What is the one thing they can apply to their life from your book this week that have a positive impact?

Elizabeth Rose: I would say, do something outside your comfort zone. You never know where passion might come from, so I challenge you this week to do one thing that you wouldn’t normally do.

Get Elizabeth’s new book Written in Snow on Amazon. Find out more at LizRoseSummit.com.

Listen to more authors on transformative physical challenges:

Riding Raw: Sue Hollis

When Sinners Like Me Come Home: Steele Kelly

The post Written in the Snow: Elizabeth Rose appeared first on Author Hour.

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EB-5 is also known as the Immigration Investor Visa Program. It allows American real estate developers to raise capital for projects from foreign investors who are seeking to come to the United States and relocate here permanently.

In the past few years, however, there’s been a lot of changes. There’s been a lack of clear regulations and a shortage of visas have made the EB-5 landscape really difficult to navigate, especially for Chinese investors. Because of that, it sent the EB-5 industry to alternative markets around the globe. That’s why Kevin Wright and Michael Fitzpatrick wrote their book, EB5 2.0, to guide stakeholders through the changes in the EB-5 process.

A bit of background on the coauthors; Kevin Wright is an economist and a consultant with the Finra Broker dealer, Baker Tilly Capital, and he previously founded Wright Johnson, which is one of the world’s largest EB-5 consulting companies. Michael Fitzpatrick is a partner and board member with Baker Tilly Virchou Crouse, which is the 13th largest CPA in consulting firm in the United states. In 2001, he co-led the formation of Baker Tilly Capital where he leads its EB-5 practice and has closed more than a billion dollars of specialized financing. If you hope to benefit from the EB-5 program, this is the episode for you.

Get Kevin and Michael’s new book EB5 2.0 on Amazon. Find out more at Baker Tilly.

Kevin Wright: Before working in the industry, I had never left the United States once in my life. I traveled around throughout the United States and thought I really understood diversity and how different people thought—until I started traveling for EB-5 and really seeing the world and working in 15-plus countries.

Really realizing that people in different places have different experiences, and they come up with radically different ideas and have different ways of doing things. Trying to figure all that out 15 different times, that was a huge challenge for me and an eye opening experience to understand that I don’t always do things the right way.

There are other ways to do things, and some of the times, I’m surprised that they’re vastly better than everything I’ve ever been taught or known. Just having your eyes open to different cultures in the whole world.

Surprises Abroad Charlie Hoehn: Do you remember a particular moment standing out as surprising you in that way?

Kevin Wright: I can remember landing in China for the first time and spending a couple of weeks there, thinking to myself that coming from where I started from in the first 25 years in my life in Michigan, things moved at a certain speed. Then moving to South Florida and spending a lot of time in California, I thought, “Okay, now I’m really exposed to a lot of different things and things are moving really quickly.”

Things change quick, and I’m in that kind of an environment.

After two weeks in China, realizing the entire world changes in that country and literally a month, almost every single month. Just understanding how fast the rest of the world is developing compared to our own.

We’re a developed place and things are kind of stable here. Never really understanding just how stable it is in the United States until that first trip to China and seeing how just the speed of everything.

When I was there one time, they built a 57 story building in 18 days.

That just seems absurd to me but that’s things that happen on a daily or monthly basis there. Or the idea of when I first got to China, communication was difficult, you had to get a local sim chip, you had to put it in your phone, you had to get a second phone. It was difficult because the rules and how you got that phone and whether you had a local ID and communication were so difficult.

Within three years, they had built what they call super apps. With We Chat and other things. Now when I go back there, they are so far advanced from anything else you see in the rest of the world. On one app on my phone, I communicate with people, I send them files, I pay for my food, I order a taxi, I do literally almost every single thing I need in life in a single app.

That’s something that doesn’t even exist here.

Charlie Hoehn: I want to transition a bit into the book itself, EB5 2.0. Michael, who would you say this book is really perfect for and who is it not for?

Michael Fitzpatrick: I would say that the book is ideal for a variety of spectrum of persons looking to raise capital in the EB-5 market. I think it’s a great primer for someone coming in to the industry and looking to either raise capital or for their own project or for others so that they can get the lay of the land as it currently is. Because things did change really on a dime when a US CIS released data announcing that the retrogression wait line for china was around 15 years long, which all but shut down capital raising, especially capital raising of any scale in China.

But I also think that the book is appropriate for veterans of the EB-5 industry as well. I think it’s a great coalition of where things have come from and where they’re going.

I think there’s also an underlying message of unity within the industry that doesn’t exist today. There is some differing factions about where the industry should go forward, and I think the book also offers some thoughts about how to bring things together within the industry itself.

What Is EB-5? Charlie Hoehn: For listeners at home who might be wondering, hey, what is this EB-5 thing? What’s the simple definition of it?

Michael Fitzpatrick: Yeah, the simple definition of EB-5 is, it’s an opportunity for foreign persons to make an investment in the United States. One of the main benefits of making that investment is permanent US residency for themselves, their spouse, and their minor aged children. It’s really a program that is similar to that offered in other countries, so it’s not unique to the United States to offer residency rights for making a qualified investment.

It’s what I call the triple win.

It brings capital into the United States at a low cost, which enables funding development in areas that are targeted by the government as in need of job creation. It creates jobs for US persons. Brings in foreign capital at affordable rates, and then it brings people to the United States on a faster track who come here with some wealth, knowledge, likely entrepreneurship that becomes tax paying persons.

It’s all done without costing tax payers any dollars. It’s really, I think a very beneficial program when properly implemented.

Charlie Hoehn: Just to be totally sure I’m understanding. I have a friend who is from Canada. He moved to the United States and created a company that now employs over 40 full time people. Would he fall into the EB-5 investor program?

Kevin Wright: He would, in general, your friend would have thought of this before he moved to America and set it all up in a way to make it work. So would be figuring it out retroactively, but yes, absolutely. That’s the way to do EB-5 for sure.

Today’s Market Charlie Hoehn: What is the state of the market today? What’s the state of China today?

Kevin Wright: Really in early 2017 it became apparent that the demand for the EB-5 program in China had been going so greatly for so long that the country began to retrogress, meaning that there was only a certain amount of visas available for people in China and that they had used up 15 years’ worth of them.

That really slowed demand dramatically by about 90%, almost overnight.

The industry then from that standpoint, moving forward over the last couple of years, has really moved to all new market places, opening up markets all over the globe—whereas in the past, people only focused on China.

Michael Fitzpatrick: That really led to the next section in part one, talking about the new world where the market is going to right now. The most notable countries being India, Vietnam, Brazil, and the dynamics within those markets, because they’re not the same as China.

The cultural differences really matter in terms of the type of investment and the structure of the investment that’s offered, and also the lack of infrastructure to market the investments.

In China, there was such a robust industry for marketing student visas in H1B visas that infrastructure took hold of the EB-5 opportunity as essentially another product line that they could add to their distribution channel of existing immigration type consulting services and that’s one of the reasons why that, combined with really the significant rise of wealth in the middle class in China, they all coincided at a time when the US economy went into the great recession in 2008, which sent developers looking for alternative capital overseas.

This sort of perfect storm came together that put China right to the forefront of the program, and it was so successful as Kevin noted that it sort of out kicked its coverage and is in a long retrogression waiting line which has now essentially shut down that market.

Opportunity for All Charlie Hoehn: What would you say to people who are trying to figure these stuff out on their own and track it? Are they going to be able to do that easily or not?

Michael Fitzpatrick: Well, to me, there are two sides of the coin. One is that as Michael was talking about, it used to be a very easy track to follow. You went to China, you worked with certain licensed agencies in China, and there was a very clear path to success.

Because of that, several groups became very large and very dominant in the industry. Now that China has fallen, and really, the other countries from a variety of places around the planet had picked up, the downside to it is, you really have to be very nimble and very quick to show up in a new culture, understand it quickly, develop relationships there, and really build from scratch an entire system that used to be readily accessible when you just landed in China.

The positive side to the coin is that has eliminated the advantages of large players.

So nowadays, almost anyone with proper resources and drive can show up in a new marketplace and really be a dominant player or make a niche for themselves in a variety of places.

We see people in certain regional centers or certain industry participants who are doing really well in South Africa, whereas they have no presence at all in Brazil or in Mexico, and the same thing for people in Mexico. They may have their niche there and they are doing really well. Whereas someone else who has a focus on India doesn’t even go to Mexico.

That’s really allowed some of the smaller players to rise up and has made the market a much more even playing field today.

Kevin Wright: I would agree, and what it also done is it’s enabled those groups, those upstart groups to focus more regionally and then therefore tailor the investment structures to the preferences of those regions where they can get a little bit more traction by offering the market what they are looking for.

Long-Term Renewal Charlie Hoehn: Let’s talk a bit about part two, attempts at long term renewal. What are some of the things that readers are going to get from this section of the book?

Michael Fitzpatrick: There’s two parts to the EB-5 law. There is a part of the law that’s permanent and then there’s a part of the law that is temporary subject to legislative renewal and the permanent part of the law allows an EB-5 investment to happen for $500,000 in a targeted area for creating 10 direct jobs. So these are jobs that you can actually count the people on the payroll. The temporary part of the law, which is what comes in and what we call a regional center is investments made through a certified regional center.

Similarly, it is a $500,000 investment in a targeted area but the regional center adds the capability of counting not only the direct jobs but what we call indirect and induced jobs and those are jobs that are calculated by an economist based on either the construction cost of the project or the projective revenue that it would generate after construction and the benefit of that is those jobs are deemed to have occurred if the project is build or if the project is generating projectile levels of revenue.

And you don’t have to count those people directly, and that actually adds some safety and security to how the jobs are measured by USAS.

There is more certainty, and that part of the law currently has expired and so the attempts of long term renewal are all about trying to, and by the way, 95% or more of the EB-5 capital raises are through this regional center concept. So that’s really at this point in time with the government shutdown has slowed the industry down to a near halt.

So these attempts at long term renewal are to actually make the regional center part of the law permanent.

There is a lot of debate internally within the industry and within congress on what’s the right way to do that and what is ultimately the legislative intent. The original legislative intent of the program.

Kevin Wright: The industry has been in somewhat of a short term renewal cycle whether it would be for one year or a few months at a time for several years now since about 2015, and our Congress and legislation has been slow to catch up and to update the program and make it permanent. A lot of that has been focused around how do we add more security to the program, more regulation? How do we take all of the things that were positives and some of the ones that are negatives and craft a permanent solution to the program?

I think the second section in the book does a good job of basically describing all of the different components that go into the thoughts of what will be in a permanent program and what types of regulations will be coming in the future that don’t exist today and why they’re there.

More About EB-5 Charlie Hoehn: For people who know EB-5 well, they’re in that world what’s going to surprise them about this book, what would you say?

Kevin Wright: I think that since people have left China and are now exploring different parts of the world then maybe some insights into the individual countries and what you’re going to find when you get there. It’s like I say, some people may be focusing on working in Vietnam and they have been focused there, there is a network of agents that help you to recruit investors there, whereas they may not have ventured into Brazil yet where that infrastructure doesn’t exists.

Really, what is the mindset of people in places like China or Asia? The main driver behind people investing through the EB-5 program is to help their children get a better education, whereas you enter Brazil and while that is still a significant driver, there is also a very strong driver of security and safety as that’s a very unsafe country. A lot of people choose the EB-5 path for the safety of it.

So every country has its own little niches and reasons why people go from one place to another. There is a good opportunity to get a basic understanding of what the underlining drivers are for many different countries across the globe.

Michael Fitzpatrick: I think one thing that I will also be a little refreshing, maybe a little surprising, in part two would be the candor with which we discuss the internal struggle within the industry constituents and trying to offer suggestions that will hopefully bring some alignment to the industry, which is still struggling with today.

Charlie Hoehn: Has there been anybody that comes to mind that’s been really positively impacted in some way by what they learned from you guys?

Kevin Wright: Well without naming anyone in particular, there are a couple of groups that come to mind that we worked with over time that, back when the Asian model was the definitive way to go, they were a little late to the game. Due to that they were already large players that were entrenched and it was very difficult to unseat them and to get a seat at the table, whereas today, you fast forward two years later and they completely switched focus.

Working in different countries and found their niche and they’re doing really, really well by understanding their niche market and focusing very much on those places. It’s at both directions—while we both discovered them together, their experience drives a lot of what is written in the book.

Connect with Michael and Kevin Charlie Hoehn: What is the best way for somebody listening to this episode to potentially connect with you or follow what you are doing?

Kevin Wright: Certainly our website, bakertillyeb5.com, lists all of our contact information and how to get a hold of us. I think we are all also available on various social media platforms from around the world now today, such as Whatsapp and We Chat and Instagram and all the rest of the social platforms. So there are a variety of ways to find us.

Michael Fitzpatrick: Yeah and we’re fairly prolific in terms of being on EB-5 panels and events. We’re fairly active in offering new articles and hosting our own investor seminars when we’re travelling abroad, marketing investment stories capital.

Charlie Hoehn: What is your vision for this book? Let’s say five years from now, what is the impact you’ll hope it will make?

Kevin Wright: I hope it helps some of the new entrance to the industry or people that haven’t really gotten out or really understood how to go into other marketplaces and how to seek investment. It gives them a place to start from and gets them into the market places in a variety of countries than in the end helps to create potentially thousands of jobs for Americans right here in America as well as helping the economy.

Michael Fitzpatrick: I think maybe a more aspirational hope on my end would be that we do get not only long term renewal of the program but also some restructuring on how the program is administered that would eradicate the problems it’s currently facing simply through administrative protocols that really have reduced a number of EB-5 visas that are allocated annually.

So for example, under the EB-5 program, there are 10,000 visas per year.

And there is a visa consumed for each investor, their spouse and their children. So say a family of four would consume four of those 10,000 visas whereas under other immigration programs administered through the USCIS like the H-1B visa program for foreign persons working in the United States under that program, which also has a cap, an annual cap on the number of visas, they only count the employee visa even though they grant spouse and children visas with that employee.

They don’t count those visas towards the cap.

So there is sort of an arbitrary difference in the way to similar programs are managed, and that arbitrary difference is incredibly material to the EB-5 space. That’s really what had triggered the long term waiting lines in China, so it’s a part of long term renewal and potentially some legislative overhaul that the program needs cleaning up that kind of a problem would free up the EB-5 space immediately.

And it would be a great inflow of capital to the United States to create jobs where they are needed the most.

A Challenge for Listeners Charlie Hoehn: What is one thing listeners can take away or implement from EB5 2.0 that will have a positive impact on their life?

Michael Fitzpatrick: Well I think for industry veterans who have a stake in this for the long term, I mean the challenge I would pose would be, if you can’t take a full step backward from looking at your own window, to at least take a step back and try and look through a broader window of the industry and in perpetuating it for the long term. Part of the problem that the industry is going through right now is that the stakeholders tend to look through a very myopic point of view.

The forest gets lost in the trees and we can’t get any headway on compromise that would be a long term solution, really for the benefit of everyone in the program.

Get Kevin and Michael’s new book EB5 2.0 on Amazon. Find out more at Baker Tilly.

Listen to more authors on thinking beyond barriers:

Go Glocal: Craig Maginness

Anything, Anywhere: Matthew Bertulli

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When it comes to discrimination in the workplace, we’ve come a long way as a society. There’s still one systemically ignored form of discrimination. It happens all the time and it affects everyone: Ageism.

Ageism is real. It’s widespread. It’s insidious.

Up until now, it’s mostly been hidden because of the low rate of reporting from people who get pushed out of their jobs when they reach a certain age. Patti Temple Rocks, the author of I’m Not Done, believes that with the largest demographic that America has ever seen, which is the baby boomers, we’re now experiencing age discrimination at work. it’s time for us to talk about this hurtful and bad for business practice.

In this episode, she takes us into a deep dive into ageism in the workplace, what it looks like, how it harms people and businesses and how business leaders can get on the right side of the issue. If you want to be part of a movement to stop this remnant of workplace discrimination, this is the episode for you.

Get Patti’s new book I’m Not Done on Amazon. Find out more at imnotdone.rocks.

Patti Temple Rocks: Frankly, like a lot of people, I’m not even sure I knew there was a thing called ageism, especially ageism in the workplace. I was in my late 40s, early 50s. I think I was in my late 40s and at a very high level in my career. I’d had great success and had a big job with a big company and was working for a woman who was the first woman to break through the glass ceiling.

She was great. She was a great boss, a great mentor, had actually become a good friend over the years and made me so happy to see her success. Then she brought me into the company, so I got to become part of the success.

I noticed over what seemed to be a relatively short period of time that all of a sudden, she wasn’t in some of the meetings or some of the discussions that she used to be.

It felt odd to be. It just didn’t really feel normal. People were a little bit dismissive. I would say, “Well, I can run it by her.” People were a little bit dismissive of that. It just didn’t sit right with me, but I had no idea what I was observing. It just didn’t feel good.

I happened to be at a cocktail reception that night with the CEO, her boss and my second-line boss, who I had a good relationship with. I just said, “You know what? I know you really value Angelina like I do. What’s going on? I can just tell that she’s not as valued as she used to be. What can I do to help her?”

That was my only motivation.

He looked at me and literally said, “Oh, Patti. This will be good for you. Can’t you see this? This will be good for you.”

I was taken aback—implying that if something happens to her, I would get her job. That’s odd. Then he went on to say, “I think she’s just tired. She’s been doing this a long time. I think she’s just tired.”

That was the absolute wrong word to use to describe this woman. I mean, I don’t think she’s to this day ever been tired a day in her life. She has nothing but energy and enthusiasm and drive and has spent her whole life that way. I knew that wasn’t really what was going on.

That was the first time that I thought, “What does that mean, tired? She thinks she’s old?” It was the first time that I thought this is a dismissive way to treat somebody—and why?

From that moment on, I think that my senses were just heightened. I was paying attention to things a little bit more. I heard things that I would’ve always taken that at face value, “but maybe that means something different.” I started to see others being treated, not just in that organization but in others, and friends and people I knew at the end of their career were made to feel a little bit less-than.

These were universally people who had enjoyed fabulously successful careers, or they wouldn’t have been at such high levels in their 50s. My first reaction, selfishly perhaps, was to make sure it didn’t happen to me. I thought that the answer to making sure that it didn’t happen to me would be to have a plan and, frankly, to beat anybody to the punch.

Before anybody might say, “Patti’s tired,” I would have decided, “Okay, I’m tired. I’m going to move on. I’m going to do something else.”

Charlie Hoehn: What I wonder about is is it really so bad if we reach a certain age and it’s like, “Hey, it’s time to retire.” I mean, isn’t that the narrative that were sold for so many years? What makes it so bad, and what were you afraid of really happening?

Patti Temple Rocks: It’s totally the narrative that we’ve been sold, and it’s been a narrative that for decades has even had some age ranges wrapped around it. I think what made me uncomfortable with it, and certainly what made my boss and friend uncomfortable with it, is it was not her choice.

It’s one thing if we have planned all along that I’m going to work till I get to this age and then I’m going to retire. It’s this active choice.

When you’re just pushed aside, or asked to buy into the narrative that you’re tired or you’re not relevant or something else like that before you feel that way, it’s crushing. It’s also demographically, it doesn’t make sense anymore, because that narrative that you described—that you reach a certain age and yay you get you retire—was when our life expectancy was much different.

People today are living much longer, and they’re living longer in healthy ways mentally and physically. Or not necessarily thinking that, “Okay, I’m ready for the gold watch at 55,” or even 60, because they still feel vital and vibrant. As a purely practical fact, many, many, many boomers—and that’s the generation that we’re talking about that’s reached this age, which is our largest generation ever—are also financially not ready for this.

If you’re pushed out either emotionally or physically in your 50s and you don’t have enough money saved, you’ve got a problem, because you’ve got healthcare to pay for and all sorts of other things.

Part of the reason that I feel this is a problem people need to talk about is because there are emotional and literal harms being caused to the people.

On the positive side of this, I think companies and organizations are just completely missing the boat about how to take better advantage of the wisdom and experience that comes from workers that are in their 50s and 60s.

Why We’re Cutting Experience Charlie Hoehn: What are their incentives to letting go of these people who are so experienced that they’ve effectively been training for decades to be stars at their job?

Patti Temple Rocks: Well, it’s almost always financial. The method of compensation is evolving and changing, which is one of the messages that I write about in my book. This shouldn’t be the excuse that it used to be.

For decades, salaries went up as people stayed on the job. It is in fact a true business reality that I’m not suggesting that we hide from it all, that oftentimes the more senior workers are also more highly compensated.

There is sometimes an incentive for an organization who could let go of a couple of senior people and hire twice as many people right out of school.

Of course, every organization should be hiring people right out of school. My message is that ageism slices both ways. I’m talking about it more on the older end of it, but this is not to say that young people are bad by any stretch, and every organization should have multiple generations.

A truly diverse workforce needs to include people from all ages.

I think this is becoming even more important.

As I said, as people are living longer; so if you’re marketing road bikes, 20 years ago you weren’t marketing them to 60-year-olds. Now 60-year-olds are buying really expensive road bikes because they’re going on cool bike trips.

Everything about the way we look at older people needs to change with the changing demographics, and as I said, the pure size of this particular population.

Charlie Hoehn: What are the damages that occur that they may not be seeing because they’re making these moves?

Patti Temple Rocks: I think there’s a couple. One just comes to mind a lot, there’s a famous quote from Mark Zuckerberg at an industry event. This was a few years back, but he literally said, “Young people are just smarter.”

I think there was this prevailing feeling that, especially in the tech world, you had all of these people that were coming up and had no boundaries to the way they were thinking. Again, there’s a lot of truth to that and that’s all good, but I found myself thinking a little bit and Facebook is finding themselves literally in the eye of the storm, that if you have an organization that is largely dominated by people in their 20s, 30s and 40s, you don’t have a whole lot of people who have lived through eyes of storms before.

When you do have people who have experienced it, it’s never the exact same thing, but people who have lived through transformations are better equipped to help lead and guide others through transformations.

I was talking to an older worker about this and I thought it was interesting. One digital—is the person digital is a classic ageist way of saying is this person young?

One of the interesting points that he made was he said, “I remember when our workplace made the transition to e-mail. It was a really big deal.” Today, nobody uses e-mail because it takes too long for people to respond sometimes. You’re really doing a great job with your clients if you have their cellphone so that you can do message them back and forth.

His point was anybody can learn the difference between sending an e-mail and sending a text. It’s helpful to have experience managing some of those cultural transitions in the workplace that some people who have weathered many storms are able to bring to a workplace. I do think that’s one of the things that people miss—if they don’t have an appropriate mix of all different age ranges in the workplace.

There’s lots of ways to look at whether it truly is a bottom line advantage to do that. One of the things that an HR person that I interviewed in my book talked about was that they had sometimes made the decision that someone took early retirement, or was encouraged to take early retirement. On paper, their job was very clear and specific, and they were supposed to do this. They would bring in somebody at much lower salary to do that job on paper.

The reality was, like all of us, the job that we end up doing is rarely exactly as it’s written on paper, and sometimes we do this and we do that and we do other things, because we’ve developed skills or expertise or like to do them.

This HR expert said, “Oftentimes, we will find that we think we can replace a more seasoned person with a more junior person, but really it ends up being pieces and parts of other people to really capture what we’re missing when that person exits the organization.”

One of the things that I learned through the course of writing this book and interviewing people is that the senior people who have been managed out—and a lot of people take a package, because they just don’t want to put up a fight. These people are not stupid. They are very aware that their salary was probably making them vulnerable in the event of any financial challenge to the company.

What none of them told me happened to them was an honest conversation about that, with the organization, or their boss. Most of them would be very willing to consider a different work situation that might benefit both the company and the person. Maybe it’s working part-time in a reduced salary. Maybe it’s moving into a different role, but again, recognizing that with that, might come the need to take a reduced salary. I’m not saying that I think that’s always the answer, but it rarely happens because everyone’s afraid to have that conversation.

Many of the senior people that I talk to, they would have been very open to that understanding and open to that.

For a lot of them, it’s just, “Look I’m not ready to completely do nothing. I love what I do. I’m good at what I do. I need the health insurance. I’d love to find a way to keep working.”

Very seldom does that conversation ever happen between the boss and the person that’s going to be impacted, or even more so, the organization at a broader level, where it feels safe and comfortable to have a conversation about what the end of one’s career might look and feel like.

Difficult Conversations Charlie Hoehn: Yeah. I can’t imagine that companies are extra gun-shy to have a conversation around that, if honesty could mean any chance of legal liability, right?

Patti Temple Rocks: For sure. I address that in the book as well. There is an understandable reticence and concern. Again, it doesn’t need to be there. If you want to have a conversation with me, let’s say and I’m at the end of my career. My salary might be a bit of an issue, but it’s really awkward and uncomfortable and you out of the blue say, “Well, how much longer do you want to work anyway?” Which happened to me.

I’m going to feel a little anxious and threatened. Is something going on that I don’t understand? My reviews have always been good. I feel pretty good about this. What’s really going on? It’s not going to then pave the way for a comfortable open and honest conversation.

If that same boss has had a conversation with me every single year about, “Hey, what are the next couple of years look like for you? What do you want to do? What do you want to learn? What do you want to contribute to the company?” Then that conversation when I’m 40, or 45, or 50, or 55 is always happening, so it’s not going to ever be that jarring to me.

I understand why people are nervous or uncomfortable about it, but if you approach it in a consistent way with employees of all ages, there’s nothing to worry about and you’re going to make the employee feel that they can trust you…to say, “I might want to stop working in the next X number of years.”

Right now, most people would never say that out loud, because they would be afraid that they would be deemed a short-term person and not given good opportunities and not necessarily given good bonus or whatever. People are keeping all that information inside.

If bosses are afraid to ask about it, no wonder there’s this huge disconnect.

I’m Not Done in Practice Charlie Hoehn: I’d love for you to share some of your – for a lack of a better word, your favorite stories that you gathered from the book, just so listeners can learn from them and experience what this is actually like.

Patti Temple Rocks: I interviewed dozens and ended up telling I think six or seven stories. What was interesting to me was that each had something unique that they brought to that.

One of them told me—he was one of the ones that talked about the lack of the honest conversation—“I know I’m a senior guy. All of a sudden, I wasn’t going into some of the meetings with the clients to present my own work. That felt weird. We were not having a great year financially, and so I knew that layoffs were going to happen, but I was just on pins and needles wondering if they were going to talk to me.”

He said, “It just feels like we’re a very disposable society.”

That was one of my takeaways from him. He’s like, “Let’s just try a newer version of the same thing and it might be cheaper.”

My takeaway from my conversation with him was a little bit about the disposable nature of human capital, which I don’t think is helpful.

It was interesting, because he had a great perspective, because I asked him. I said, “I don’t think this is just a women’s issue, but what do you think?” Obviously as a male, he wouldn’t say that it was completely a woman’s issue, and he said, “Well, let me put it this way. If they’re going through a reduction and they’re looking to lose some of the senior people and you’re African-American, they’re going to think twice. If you’re a woman, they’ll think at least once. If you’re a white male, they’re not even going to think.”

I thought that was a very fair analysis and point of view that he had. He felt again, that’s partly where the disposal part in it.

Diana on the other hand, one of the people that I talked to, definitely felt that it was a double whammy of being female and over 50. She was 59 when she lost her job, and she just felt there were more pressures on women to look the part and do certain things.

She was out to dinner with her boss and he said, “How old are you?” In her view, she said, “I just don’t think that ever would have been a conversation with one of my male counterparts.”

She definitely felt that the pressures on her as a female were a little bit different.

The one thing about any -ism for that matter, whether it’s ageism, or racism, or any of them is it’s a matter of how the person affected feels. Is it factual always? Not necessarily, but the way that she was made to feel was very much that as a woman over 50, there wasn’t really a good place for her.

She worked in the agency business, which is a very youthful organization.

Charlie Hoehn: How do we balance out—and I don’t think this is the majority of cases, but it’s always a minority in any instances like this I think, where you can’t control how a person reacts emotionally? Do you think that dynamic could potentially be at play in some cases here?

Patti Temple Rocks: I mean, of course. I think that that’s true – any time two humans interact with each other, one might react a different way than the other person would have wanted, or hoped, or intended that they would react.

We can never completely control that. I’ve got a whole couple of chapters that talk about this, but when it comes to some of the unconscious bias that exists in the workplace and the way that the snide comments, or certain things that are said, or again, it’s as simple as who’s invited into the room for parts of these conversations?

If all of a sudden, somebody who’s always been there and been part of it isn’t, it’s hard not to wonder what changed other than the fact that I just got a little bit older.

Certainly, there are people that I think overreact to anything. Anybody can overreact to anything, but I don’t think that this is a case systemically of people over 50 just overreacting to things. If anything, I think it’s been not talked about, it’s been undiscussed for so long, because nobody wants to talk about age.

It’s the big secret thing that you’re not supposed to talk about.

Shifting Tides Charlie Hoehn: Let’s say it’s been out one, two, five, ten years since the book came out—what do you hope are some of the shifts that are taking place in our society in the workplace?

Patti Temple Rocks: Well, I think ideally, we would have let go of some assumptions and stereotypes and unconscious bias that maybe have led to having a less diverse workplace, then would be ideal for a business. I mean, if you think about how far we’ve come – we’re not done, no pun intended, but I mean we still have race. There are plenty of people that could talk about issues that are affected by race in the workplace, or gender, but we are better.

I know, I’ve been in the workforce for close to 40 years. We are way better than we used to be.

I think, it’s because as business leaders, we opened our eyes and we were willing to say that perhaps we have some unconscious bias here and some things that are not okay. Let’s do training.

There’s been miles and miles of progress in a lot of diversity and inclusion training in the workplace. It just doesn’t, right now, address age as one of the factors that people should be talking about.

I love to challenge people when they say, “Well, it’s just different. It’s just different.” I’m like, “Well, I think it’s different because we haven’t really called people out on it.” A company I know recently needed to go through cost savings. Again, I’m not running away from the fact that a lot of times these are cost-driven types of decisions, but as part of their – one of the ways that they thought about restructuring the organization to save money, they thought we could make the organization flatter.

Of course, if you’re going to make an organization flatter and you take out your lowest level, you’re not going to save as much money, because those people aren’t paid as well. They took out one of their more senior levels across the board. Now when you do that, the odds are very high that when you take out—this happened to be called the directors—when you take out all of your directors, you are mostly impacting people in their late 40s, early 50s to early 60s, because it takes a certain amount of time and experience to get promoted into that level.

Financially, it probably makes a little bit of sense and it creates some opportunity for some young people. Substitute the director, also known as old people, with black [people] and that never happens. You don’t say, “We need to save some money in an organization. Let’s just get rid of all the African-Americans, because if we get rid of all the African-Americans, look at the salary they will save.” Or, “Let’s get rid of all the women.”

I think that we have come to a place in the workforce thankfully, where people would stand up and say, “Hell no. I don’t want to be that kind of company. We’re not that kind of company. We’re not going to do that.”

Yet when it happens more systemically to people who are perceived to be close to retirement age anyway, it’s just like, “Well, yeah. Good idea.”

All I’m trying to do is say that we, the people that are in this affected population should have a voice in when and how they end their careers.

By the way, that voice—you only have a right to exert that voice if you’re good at your job. This is not an entitlement thing. This is not a, “Okay, I’ve worked at the Ford plant for 35 years. If I just hang in there five more years, I’m going to get my gold watch and my pension. I’ll just keep showing up.”

In today’s hyper-competitive workforce, regardless of your age, you have to keep showing up, but you have to keep it good at what you do; you have to stay relevant and keep up with things and provide value to your organization.

If I thought for a second that this was about entitlement, I wouldn’t be doing it.

I have seen way too many very talented people with things to offer who have been made to feel, maybe to your point about sensitivity, maybe a little bit too sensitively. But I haven’t seen it being too sensitive very much. They just been made to feel that all of a sudden, I’m not as valuable as I used to be.

I think that’s a lost opportunity.

Charlie Hoehn: Well, I am glad that you’re going to be one of the people spearheading this, because I believe you’re right, that it’s going to be more and more so a conversation that we all need to have. We’re late, but better late than never.

Patti Temple Rocks: Yeah. I interviewed a couple of attorneys. One of the attorneys I talked to, Sue Ellen, talked about how practically impossible it is to really understand the numbers here, because it largely happens to people who are close to potentially retiring anyway. They’re closer anyway. They’re in their 50s or 60s, and so retirement for some might be right around the corner if they were of that age. It’s not as visible to the eye.

They’re also not as potentially willing to fight the fight.

If this happens, if someone is discriminated against in the workplace because of their gender or their color in their 40s, they’ve got a long career ahead of them, where they need to be able to work and make a good living. They’re going to fight. For a lot of people who are close to this, they just say, “Okay, fine. I’ll take the package and I’ll leave, because I just don’t – Maybe they’ll hire me later to consult, or I don’t want to be blackballed in the industry.” I’m going to have to go try to find another job.

The affected people sometimes are not standing up for themselves as much as they should be, and that’s also part of the problem.

Connect with Patti Temple Rocks Charlie Hoehn: How can our listeners reach out to you if they if they want to get involved in this broader societal conversation, or how can our listeners even just follow you and your journey?

Patti Temple Rocks: Sure. Well, I do have a website. It’s called imnotdone.rocks. I put on a blog about eight months ago, eight or nine months ago, where I just talked about my own story and how I ended up deciding I’m not done. I still wanted to keep working. That’s when I made the commitment to speak out about it.

I was blown away by the response from that.

A lot of people told me their stories and said, “Thank you for doing this. You’re on to something.” That was part of what motivated and inspired me to write the book. I want to keep hearing from people like that, because it fortifies me and it helps me to understand the issue and the depth of the issue.

To be clear, the audience for this book is our business leaders. This isn’t a self-help book about how to get your second career going, or I’m not necessarily even offering people who feel that they’ve been discriminated with, these are the things that you should do, although there’s a little bit of that in there.

This book really is a reflection of, quite honestly, my optimism as a human. I tend to believe that when people don’t know there’s a problem and then they find out there’s a problem, they will do something about it. I truly have faith that when business leaders realize, “Okay, we’ve got the biggest population that this country has ever seen, that is now in their 50s or 60s, they want to keep working. Do we know how to make that happen for them?”

A little bit of fear should get in the purview of these business leaders, because if everybody – just with the women’s movement, if everybody all of a sudden had a me-too moment about looking backwards at their career about whether they felt like they’d ever been treated in an ageist way and started to feel empowered to speak up about it, business would have a big problem.

My hope is that businesses will decide to learn from some of the positive examples that I talk about in my book, some very specific ways that with help from HR people and attorneys. I’m empowering HR and business people to talk to their employees about this, that they can create a truly inclusive workforce that includes people not just of all ages and sexual orientations and colors, but everything.

Diverse and inclusive needs to also represent a discussion about age.

Charlie Hoehn: Excellent. Well, the final question I have is to give our listeners a challenge—tell them to do something from your book this week that will have a positive impact on their lives, on their business, that sort of thing.

Patti Temple Rocks: Chapter three in my book is actually called “The Mirror Test.” It is very specific for how business leaders can hold a mirror up to themselves and their management team, to honestly take a look at whether their organization might be unconsciously behaving in some ageist ways?

There are big examples and there are little examples, but I think that every company will probably find themselves in a few of those.

For those organizations that find themselves in a lot of those, it’s time to think about making some systemic changes in how they are operating from a people standpoint, to make sure that they are not discriminating or behaving in an ageist way.

Get Patti’s new book I’m Not Done on Amazon. Find out more at imnotdone.rocks.

Listen to more authors on building workplace culture:

People-First Culture: Michel Falcon

The Evolved Executive: Heather Hanson Wickman

The post I’m Not Done: Patti Temple Rocks appeared first on Author Hour.

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Cameron Herold, co-author of Free PR, has been on the show before. He has an amazing story, but today, we’re going to talk about how he built and led a team that generated more than 5,200 media hits for his company during his six year period.

That’s right, over 5,200 media hits. It’s crazy.

These were not small mentions. He got mentioned on CNN, CNBC, the Oprah Winfrey Show, Dr. Phil, the Big Idea with Annie Doiche. He was in Fortune, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, huge publications. He’s going to teach you how he did it in this episode.

If you’re an entrepreneur and you want to be chased by the press without hiring a PR firm, this is definitely the episode for you. By the end of this episode, you’ll know how to build your own in house PR team, which will save you thousands of dollars a month and you’ll be able to score great media coverage for free with just a few easy steps. You’re going to be shocked how simple this is.

Get Cameron’s new book Free PR on Amazon. Find out more at COOAlliance.com.

Cameron Herold: I was a kid and my father owned a gas station in a Sudbury, Ontario, up in Canada, and he owned the gas station and then he owned a little automotive, electronic recycling company that he would rebuild car parts and stuff.

He was constantly in the press, he was constantly getting media coverage, and I remember when I was like eight or nine years old, I’m like, “Why does the newspaper write about you so much? How do they know about you?”

He kind of looked at me and said, “Well they don’t know about me. I just always call them and give them stories. I call them and tell them about what we’re doing.” That was it.

It really stuck with me at a very early age that my dad wasn’t as famous as everybody thought he was. My dad was just phoning the newspaper and they just talked about it. I got it. It really made sense to me.

Fast-forward from there to I was 19 years old, I was running my first company, I was in 2nd year university. I guess I might have been 20 years old, 2nd year university, and I had 12 full time employees.

I was running a house painting company, this was 1986, and I phoned the newspaper and I phoned the local TV station and they both covered me within a week. I was on a TV talk show.

A long segment on a TV talk show and then I was one of the first few pages of the city newspaper with a photo and an article about this house painting business I was running. I just learned at a very early age that the media always needs stories, and if you call them, they’re probably going to write about it because they’re not actually out covering famous people, they’re covering what’s in front of them.

Stop Overthinking Media Charlie Hoehn: Cameron, you work with a lot of entrepreneurs. How many of them actually know that it can be as simple as that?

Cameron Herold: Well, by the time I’m done with them, they all do. I passed it over their heads. Every entrepreneurial company I’ve ever met is working too hard. In fact, I think every company is working too hard, and they try to work harder and hire really smart people and use all these systems. In reality, this business is extraordinarily simple as is getting PR. PR is extraordinarily simple, you just pick up the phone and contact the journalist.

Charlie Hoehn: I remember you used an analogy that I really liked or metaphor of a fly bashing itself into the window over and over and not realizing that hey, if you just go a few inches over to the right, you can fly out the window.

Cameron Herold: Yeah, there’s two windows, right? They’re bashing their head on one window but if they just turn 90 degrees, the other window’s wide open, why don’t they just go out that one?

I think companies lose the forest for the trees. They don’t really see what’s happening and they just kind of work harder.

They’re saying wait, what will give me the highest ROI on my time, my money and my people? What will give me the most momentum, what would give me the most leverage? A lot of it is a minimum viable—people talked about the minimum viable product. I say it’s minimum viable everything.

Just call the media—who cares? you don’t need the perfect story crafted.

It’s kind of like when we were in high school or university and you want to go hit on the cute girl, that cute guy. You just walk up and you hit on them. You just talk to them.

You don’t practice it and rehearse and role play and script it all out.

You just go and start. Well, it’s the same with the media. Unfortunately, most companies just won’t pick up the phone, they’ll try to write the perfect press release or write a perfect news wire or figure out all the angles, or they just get busy with busy, instead of just picking up the phone and calling journalist who are all sitting at their desk today thinking about “what am I going to write about next?”

You Can’t Win Without PR Charlie Hoehn: What does it mean to not be able to get PR for these companies—I mean, is it really so bad?

Cameron Herold: Yeah, the problem’s not really marketing or sales related. There’s two problems. One is, most companies don’t know how to do this, so they assume they have to hire a PR firm. They assume the PR firm who has sold them really well that the PR firm has all these amazing relationships. The PR firm has none of those relationships. They might have a few.

But they don’t have enough relationships. When I built the PR team inside of a 1-800-GOT-JUNK, we landed 5,200 stories about our company in six years. There’s no way a PR firm can have that many relationships.

We built a six-person PR team from scratch that had no experience in PR, and we simply picked up the phone and called journalists.

I think a lot of companies are wasting time and wasting money and wasting their own internal resources of talking to these PR firms, and often spending $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 a month to have them on retainer to get a very little impact.

It would be much cheaper to hire a full time person for $4,500 a month or $4,000 a month—you could have a full time PR person who’s just pitching your company.

The second part of the problem that this is fixing is most people don’t believe advertising in marketing. We just get simply too much of it. We do still believe what’s in the media. You know, even though we’re hearing these stories about false media or what’s the term they’re using now? Fake news.

You know, the whole fake news thing is true. There is a lot of fake news, but people still believe what they read, they still believe what they hear.

You’d rather be covered by the press than not, and you certainly want to be covered by the press a lot more than your competitors would be.

Press Gets Results Charlie Hoehn: What did that translate to in terms of bottom line, in terms of building your brand? I mean, how significant was the impact of all that press?

Cameron Herold: Yeah, it wasn’t 5,000 stories, it was 5,200 stories. Don’t take those away from me.

You think about it. I could very safely say, 99% of companies or larger have never received 200 stories in their lifetime, let alone in five or six years. Most will never get five. Most companies won’t be covered five times in the media.

Here’s an interesting point: I left the company as the chief operating officer in May of 2007. That was right when Facebook was starting. Twitter I think was starting a year later. We had no social media to actually amplify—we couldn’t share any of our press on any social media feeds.

Imagine if we could have shared those 5,200 stories today and shared them five times on Facebook, five times on LinkedIn, five times on Twitter. Imagine if Dig or Reddit or StumbleUpon were in existence—we could have shared it on those sites.

There was nowhere for us to amplify it.

We literally leveraged the brand just off of those stories alone. We didn’t even email them to people. The real leverage came off of the fact that we were on Oprah, we were on Dr. Phil 17 times. We were in the newspapers, we were on the Dallas Morning News, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle. Name it—we were at New York Times, Wall Street Journal. They all covered us.

Many with half paid articles and photos covered us. The real credibility came from talking about it—from having our office filled with hundreds of mounted press photos and press articles all over our offices, filled with them. When potential franchisees walk through our office, those franchise prospects saw the press. When potential employees worked into our office, they were wowed by the press.

People have never seen this much media.

We got leverage that way, we got credibility that way, we got excitement that way, and the more press that we got, the more the press would write about us.

Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, every single outlet that you listed, Oprah, New York Times, Wall Street Journal. These are the top dogs that everybody’s gunning for, it seems almost too good to be true to hear you say.

Cameron Herold: Well these were the actual print editions too. I personally, in the last three years have been in the physical print edition of Forbes magazine, the physical print edition of Fortune magazine, a physical print edition of Entrepreneur magazine, the physical print edition of Success magazine. Let alone the websites.

Plus, the number of newspapers. I’m talking about the leverage you get off of truly getting media in the actual print editions as well as online is powerful. It’s not really that hard to get. Every single one, you know, CNBC’s Squawk box. Name it, we were pretty much there.

I think the only major news outlet or outlet we did not get was we didn’t get on the Letterman show, and were trying to. We almost had Bud Nelman doing a ride along with one of our junk drivers and got sick and I canceled the episode and never rebooked it. Outside of that, we were pretty much everywhere.

Big Wins, Big Returns Charlie Hoehn: Tell me the story of your biggest get? What was the one that you really wanted and you finally landed it?

Cameron Herold: Well, Oprah for sure. Yeah, I mean, it was a long episode, it was a multiple minute episode, like probably a four or five minute episode on Oprah with multiple shots off our 1-800-GOT-JUNK trucks, the big blue and green trucks, multiple shots of our drivers, navigators wearing the big 1-800-GOT-JUNK shirts with huge names on the back.

Oprah mentioned 1-800-GOT-JUNK five or six times, the CEO Brian was on set and was on film on the show talking to her as part of the episode. Just crazy media coverage.

You know, Oprah was certainly the holy grail, yet we didn’t get much business from it in terms of selling franchises or making our franchises busy. Now, we’ve been able to talk about it for 16 years, which is pretty huge.

But I’d say the biggest piece that we got that really drove a revenue, we got a piece on CNBC Squawk box, which was around a six-and-a-half-minute episode. I actually had a similar one done on by CNN Money, which is about a three-and-a-half minute episode. The one on CNBC Squawk box was again showing our trucks, showing our drivers talking about franchises, talking about franchise fees, talking about the franchise program. I think we sold 15 or 16 franchises and the franchise fee and franchise territory fees were $40,000 each. We did about 700 thousand dollars in franchise sales because of that one piece.

Charlie Hoehn: Amazing. That right there, if you’d worked with a PR agency for instance, first of all, that piece would have never have come about but it would have more than covered every cost you ever had with a PR agency.

Cameron Herold: And then some.

I have another one. We landed in an associated press writer who wrote an article about us and we ended up in 220 newspapers on a one day period in seven countries. That’s really the holy grail I feel like.

Charlie Hoehn: When that happens, when associated press really ripples out globally.

Cameron Herold: With photo. It was powerful.

My cousin was actually traveling in Thailand at the time and he saw us in a Bangkok press and he sent me a note and he’s like, “Dude, what the–I just saw your name in a newspaper in Thailand, what the F are you doing? This is ridiculous.”

How Relevant is the Press, Really? Charlie Hoehn: I’d imagine, maybe some people are listening and they’re saying, “Cameron, even though this is all very impressive, that was back in the day, the media has changed so much now. What is it about media today?” Would you agree or disagree?

Cameron Herold: I have two media coverages this week, I was interviewed by two different podcasters on one hour episodes this week, and this is my third. Here’s three media outlets that are carrying me right now. That’s this week.

I appeared in a newspaper about 10 days ago, I appeared in a couple of people’s blog posts a couple of weeks ago.

Yeah, of course it still works, it totally works.

The media every day, every single journalist woke up this morning, sat down at their desk and thought, “What the heck am I going to write about today?”

Every photographer sat down and thought, “I wonder what good photos I could take today that will end up in whatever outlet?”

Our job is to pick up the phone and inspire them in a two minute conversation.

Just saying, “Hey, do you have two minutes? I think I have a good story for you.” They’re all going to say yes.

Charlie Hoehn: Is it really that simple to get on the phone with them? I mean, don’t many of them prefer email—and isn’t it hard to get their number?

Cameron Herold: It’s actually easier to get on the phone with them than ever before. Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s when I first started doing this, it was hard to get on the phone with them because there was a gatekeeper. You had to call the receptionist, no one had cellphones, there was no internet to find the information, there were no internet databases to get the information.

You actually had to phone the outlets and get the phone numbers to call the outlets, and then you would have to get through the receptionist and often leave a voicemail message or a physical mail message that didn’t have voice mail, most of them didn’t have voice mail.

That was really hard.

Nowadays, you can use outlets like media outlets or PR Newswire or Cision and these other databases. You can actually get all the journalists’ contact information.

Even if they say don’t phone me, the reality is nobody phones them. Nobody phones anybody anymore, so they’re going to pick up the phone if you call.

You’re not going to burn a relationship, because you don’t have the relationship in the first place.

They’re busy—they’ll forget about you in two weeks if they got upset. If you’re calling to do them a favor, if you phone and say, “Hey, do you have two minutes. I think I have a good story for you,” they’re going to say one of two things. Either, “Sure, what’s the story” or they’re going to say, “No, I’m really busy, I’m on a deadline.”

If they say they’re on a deadline, say “Great, how about I call you tomorrow or Tuesday?” If they say yes, you just give them the story, but the information’s all easily accessible. Even if you don’t want to pay the $1,500 a year for the databases, you can just look up that writer’s name or look up the outlet’s names and their contact information is often on Google.

Charlie Hoehn: My favorite type of advice is uncommon common sense. This I feel fits right into that category where it’s almost so simple and maybe even a little bit obvious that no one does it, because we overthink it.

Cameron Herold: Well, that’s what I mean about business in general—it’s why I’ve been coaching so many companies all over the world. That is why I started with the COOAlliance, it is why my books are selling so well. I see the simplicity in business and everyone else seems to be trying the hard way.

I see the window that’s open that you can fly. You can just turn and go out the open window. Meanwhile, everybody else is banging their head in the window trying harder, trying harder.

It is not because I am smarter, because I am not that smart. You work with Tucker Max, that guy is smart, right? I got 62% in high school, I got 62% in university, so I had to find the cheat sheets. I had to find the quick fixes. I had to find the shortcuts to everything.

I just think I learned how to see the shortcuts to everything now instead of the more complicated ways.

Know Where You’re Going Charlie Hoehn: A chapter that you have in the book is “know your audience to know your story.” Talk to me about this.

Cameron Herold: Yeah, well it is a pretty simple concept that Steven Covey popularized in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. One of the habits was begin with the end in mind.

If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there. That is a quote from one of my favorite characters now is the man behind the Cheshire Cat. I think most people just do things without actually pausing for a second to say, “Why am I doing it?”

So why are you doing PR? Are you doing it to raise your brand awareness? Are you doing it to give yourself more credibility? Are you doing it to drive culture inside of your company? Are you doing it to amplify your sales and marketing efforts? What I like to at least at minimum do is make sure that my PR strategy dovetails into our national and regional sales and any to the marketing messaging that we’re using.

It’s just really powerful to apply it and utilize it together as part of that mix, but most people don’t really think about it. They don’t try to tie it in or they don’t have the larger purpose.

Even when we were building 1-800-GOT-JUNK, I joined the company with 14 people at the head office when I got there, and when I left six and a half years later, we had 3,100 employees system wide. When I walked in, one of the first three things I wanted to do, the first one was raise prices. The second one was to really drive PR to leverage the brand, and third was to obsess about employee culture.

And if we did those three things, we’d win.

One of the reasons I wanted to get PR was I realized that for us to be in the press, no one else could get to press. If we were to the first to the press in every market, we would always be in the press. It would also drive our credibility. It would drive our company culture, it would help us through with recruiting. It would help us with our messaging—and we didn’t have the money to do advertising. So it is a lot cheaper than doing advertising.

That was the beginning with the end in mind.

Charlie Hoehn: How often do you see companies, entrepreneurs just mindlessly going after PR because that’s a thing that they think they need to do?

Cameron Herold: I would say much less. I think when people do cognizantly go after the media they at least have some reason for doing it. They’re thinking about it in some way—it may not be the right way. It may not be the most effective way. It may not be the most strategic way, but they are at least thinking about in some fashion. They are doing it for a reason. They do understand that they are going to get business from it.

Now most people also think that they are going to get more PR than they probably will, or more business from the press than they probably will. Just because you are covered in some newspaper like the Dallas Morning News doesn’t mean that people are going to beat a path to your door.

Media Lists 101 Charlie Hoehn: So let’s go on to the next part, which is compiling your media list. How do you go about this? Is it pretty straight forward or technical?

Cameron Herold: It’s pretty straight forward. I mean you find out who your customers are or what content your customers are devouring. So as long as you understand your customer habits or who your customer is, you understand where they spend their time and where they learn, where they absorb content and you try to target those.

Secondly, you might strategically think about what markets you are trying to move into and look at who is going to be able to hit that demographic, like a demographic profile.

Third, any outlets that you think you can get into the door with easier because momentum creates momentum, right? It’s not the perfect article, it’s just get a couple of articles in a newspaper that you can get PDFs of. You can get it online, so you can actually share it in all the social media.

It is just “get media,” and the more media you get, the more media will continue to write about you. So every article you get will lead to another article and lead to another article and lead to another article so just get started.

Charlie Hoehn: So I feel like this is a part that people don’t always fully think through. They tend to go for the biggest outlets or the ones that they really love that would mean a lot to them to be on but not necessarily where their audience is.

Cameron Herold: Yeah, exactly. That’s why again, you have to begin with the end in mind. Where are my customers? I mean it is irrelevant what I read, it’s what’s my customers devour. It is what my customers consume.

Quick Pitches Charlie Hoehn: So how do we make a simple pitch?

Cameron Herold: So when you think about what you’re covering, I want you to think about coming up with a story headline that is a very short story headline, just like the one sentence that might be the headline of the story. Then what are the five core points that make that story important to the reader or the viewer, right?

What core five points do you want them to hear or to read when they actually consume that content?

Charlie Hoehn: Why five?

Cameron Herold: That’s really all that the writer can consume.

So you are not writing the story for them. You are really saying, “Here is my story,” like the book Free PR, it is all around how to know how to craft angles and how to understand the audiences and how to pitch the writers and how to build an in house PR team and how to leverage the PR.

Those are five core points.

So there is enough for a writer to work around, right? To craft a story out of. Ask questions and talk to them about that.

Working Relationships Charlie Hoehn: That brings us to the next part, which is working with the journalist. What does that actually like beyond just giving them a call?

Cameron Herold: Journalists are more often analytical, amiable, thoughtful. They operate at a more conscientious speed, whereas I like having sales people to pitch PR because they can handle rejection. They’re good at cold calling, they are good at keeping track of their prospects and they don’t get turned away by rejection.

So when a sales person calls somebody, they can scare them off.

If you come in too strong with too much energy, you’re going to scare off the writers.

So it is really understanding the writer’s style, their behavioral traits first, respecting the writer’s time because they are busy and they’re often on deadlines. Then it is helping to give them a story to start with and then asking questions on listening. So that they can craft the story, they can craft the points into an angle.

You are helping them frame something, and if you sense that it is having a second story ready, you already got them on the phone and try story number two.

Charlie Hoehn: You also have a third section in the book, which you helped the reader master the interview process on TV, on podcast, in print and online, which is actually huge.

Cameron Herold: Not only can it butcher, it but also you won’t get the proper coverage you are looking for. So as an example, at your company office you should have big logos of your company name and art work that’s powerful and sections where either your phone number, URL are up on the walls. So that when the media comes, you can suggest those good places for photo shoots. You can stand there and talk to them and go, “This might be a good place for a photo.”

You just kind of, “Oh gee, shucks” your way into it.

They are never going to say to you, “Hey can you stand in front of your truck for a photo with the big logo” so the other one is just wearing corporate clothing that had a big logos on them, right? Or making sure that your office is completely clean.

We would have the most detail oriented people walk through our office and tell people to clean up—like tie your cables and get rid of garbage on the floor and Windex, or inside and outside of car windows.

You know, ArmorAll the tires of vehicles, just anything you can do so that everything presents to the very, very high level. No one is going to ask you to do that. You have to understand to do that on your own.

Then thirdly, create photo ops. When we had the Canadian bureau chief from associated press come to our office, we didn’t pick him up at the airport in a limousine. We didn’t have the CEO pick him up in a limousine.

We had one of our PR guys dress up as a truck driver and pick up the Canadian bureau chief in a 1-800-GOT-JUNK truck, but before he got them into the truck, he gave him a uniform to change into.

So now we have Tom Cohan, the Canadian bureau chief wearing a 1-800-GOT-JUNK outfit including the boots, right? And guess what they did? They didn’t drive to the office, they went into the junk removal job first—no writer is going to ask for that experience.

You have to understand what they are looking for and try to help them with their story.

That is why the story ended up in 220 newspapers, because we blew this guy’s mind. Everybody else would have the CEO pick him up at the airport.

Charlie Hoehn: You have to set the stage for them to happen.

Cameron Herold: Yeah, there’s really no such thing as investigative journalism anymore. I think that died in about the ‘50s or early ‘60s, where companies would actually send out journalists or writers to go out and uncover the news.

Maybe it went in as late as the ‘70s or ‘80s, but investigative journalism is just far too expensive, and now with social media and with the internet, journalists can actually find more content and more resources at a much faster pace than ever before.

But the reality is they are not out looking for it.

If you do what everybody else does or everybody else writes in newswire, writes a press release, emails it off. Now the journalist—or probably not even a journalist, usually the editor of the city desk—has 400 press releases to read through. They’re going to say no to 395 of them.

Why would you ever try to talk to somebody who is saying no 395 times a day versus picking up the phone and calling the journalist whose only other phone call is probably their mom calling to say hi.

You get through the clutter real fast.

Connect with Cameron Herold Charlie Hoehn: What is the best way for listeners to connect with you and follow you?

Cameron Herold: Over nachos. Although my weight is down 35 pounds maybe not nachos…

All of my books are on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes. If they can look up, I’ve done three books with Scribe, I’ve done Free PR, Meetings Suck and Vivid Vision. But all my books are on Amazon, and then also the COO Alliance is really my core internet property where we’re going to be running the only network of its kind in the world for the second-in-command, so that would be a great place for them to start as well.

Go to my press page on that website.

Just take a look at all the press around me, or Google my name. If you’re wondering if this is all true, just go to Google and then go to the news tab and type in my name, Cameron Herold. You’ll see so many news articles and you’ll realize this book is really powerful.

Charlie Hoehn: Wow. Yeah, it’s like a never ending scroll of press.

Cameron Herold: Don’t take my word for it.

Charlie Hoehn: The final question I have is for you to give our listeners a challenge, what is the one thing they can do from your book that will have a positive impact?

Cameron Herold: I would do it this, and exactly this: I would grab a post it note or a piece of paper, I would write down one story idea, something about your entrepreneurial journey or you overcoming adversity or your company culture or something.

It has to be like less of a sales pitch and more of a story about something—how did you decide to write your book. You know, how did a book come out of you? Whatever it’s going to be, and come up with five core bullet points.

Then pick up the phone and call three or four writers at your local newspaper and say “Hey, do you have two minutes? I think I have a good story for you,” and pitch them.

Just try the pitch. See how fast you’ll get through.

Get Cameron’s new book Free PR on Amazon. Find out more at COOAlliance.com.

Listen to more authors on growing your brand outside of the box:

The Economics of Emotion: Kyle M.K.

Words into Cash: Timothy Kim

The post Free PR: Cameron Herold and Adrian Salamunovic appeared first on Author Hour.

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Cameron Herold, co-author of Free PR, has been on the show before. He has an amazing story, but today, we’re going to talk about how he built and led a team that generated more than 5,200 media hits for his company during his six year period.

That’s right, over 5,200 media hits. It’s crazy.

These were not small mentions. He got mentioned on CNN, CNBC, the Oprah Winfrey Show, Dr. Phil, the Big Idea with Annie Doiche. He was in Fortune, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, huge publications. He’s going to teach you how he did it in this episode.

If you’re an entrepreneur and you want to be chased by the press without hiring a PR firm, this is definitely the episode for you. By the end of this episode, you’ll know how to build your own in house PR team, which will save you thousands of dollars a month and you’ll be able to score great media coverage for free with just a few easy steps. You’re going to be shocked how simple this is.

Get Cameron’s new book Free PR on Amazon. Find out more at COOAlliance.com.

Cameron Herold: I was a kid and my father owned a gas station in a Sudbury, Ontario, up in Canada, and he owned the gas station and then he owned a little automotive, electronic recycling company that he would rebuild car parts and stuff.

He was constantly in the press, he was constantly getting media coverage, and I remember when I was like eight or nine years old, I’m like, “Why does the newspaper write about you so much? How do they know about you?”

He kind of looked at me and said, “Well they don’t know about me. I just always call them and give them stories. I call them and tell them about what we’re doing.” That was it.

It really stuck with me at a very early age that my dad wasn’t as famous as everybody thought he was. My dad was just phoning the newspaper and they just talked about it. I got it. It really made sense to me.

Fast-forward from there to I was 19 years old, I was running my first company, I was in 2nd year university. I guess I might have been 20 years old, 2nd year university, and I had 12 full time employees.

I was running a house painting company, this was 1986, and I phoned the newspaper and I phoned the local TV station and they both covered me within a week. I was on a TV talk show.

A long segment on a TV talk show and then I was one of the first few pages of the city newspaper with a photo and an article about this house painting business I was running. I just learned at a very early age that the media always needs stories, and if you call them, they’re probably going to write about it because they’re not actually out covering famous people, they’re covering what’s in front of them.

Stop Overthinking Media Charlie Hoehn: Cameron, you work with a lot of entrepreneurs. How many of them actually know that it can be as simple as that?

Cameron Herold: Well, by the time I’m done with them, they all do. I passed it over their heads. Every entrepreneurial company I’ve ever met is working too hard. In fact, I think every company is working too hard, and they try to work harder and hire really smart people and use all these systems. In reality, this business is extraordinarily simple as is getting PR. PR is extraordinarily simple, you just pick up the phone and contact the journalist.

Charlie Hoehn: I remember you used an analogy that I really liked or metaphor of a fly bashing itself into the window over and over and not realizing that hey, if you just go a few inches over to the right, you can fly out the window.

Cameron Herold: Yeah, there’s two windows, right? They’re bashing their head on one window but if they just turn 90 degrees, the other window’s wide open, why don’t they just go out that one?

I think companies lose the forest for the trees. They don’t really see what’s happening and they just kind of work harder.

They’re saying wait, what will give me the highest ROI on my time, my money and my people? What will give me the most momentum, what would give me the most leverage? A lot of it is a minimum viable—people talked about the minimum viable product. I say it’s minimum viable everything.

Just call the media—who cares? you don’t need the perfect story crafted.

It’s kind of like when we were in high school or university and you want to go hit on the cute girl, that cute guy. You just walk up and you hit on them. You just talk to them.

You don’t practice it and rehearse and role play and script it all out.

You just go and start. Well, it’s the same with the media. Unfortunately, most companies just won’t pick up the phone, they’ll try to write the perfect press release or write a perfect news wire or figure out all the angles, or they just get busy with busy, instead of just picking up the phone and calling journalist who are all sitting at their desk today thinking about “what am I going to write about next?”

You Can’t Win Without PR Charlie Hoehn: What does it mean to not be able to get PR for these companies—I mean, is it really so bad?

Cameron Herold: Yeah, the problem’s not really marketing or sales related. There’s two problems. One is, most companies don’t know how to do this, so they assume they have to hire a PR firm. They assume the PR firm who has sold them really well that the PR firm has all these amazing relationships. The PR firm has none of those relationships. They might have a few.

But they don’t have enough relationships. When I built the PR team inside of a 1-800-GOT-JUNK, we landed 5,200 stories about our company in six years. There’s no way a PR firm can have that many relationships.

We built a six-person PR team from scratch that had no experience in PR, and we simply picked up the phone and called journalists.

I think a lot of companies are wasting time and wasting money and wasting their own internal resources of talking to these PR firms, and often spending $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 a month to have them on retainer to get a very little impact.

It would be much cheaper to hire a full time person for $4,500 a month or $4,000 a month—you could have a full time PR person who’s just pitching your company.

The second part of the problem that this is fixing is most people don’t believe advertising in marketing. We just get simply too much of it. We do still believe what’s in the media. You know, even though we’re hearing these stories about false media or what’s the term they’re using now? Fake news.

You know, the whole fake news thing is true. There is a lot of fake news, but people still believe what they read, they still believe what they hear.

You’d rather be covered by the press than not, and you certainly want to be covered by the press a lot more than your competitors would be.

Press Gets Results Charlie Hoehn: What did that translate to in terms of bottom line, in terms of building your brand? I mean, how significant was the impact of all that press?

Cameron Herold: Yeah, it wasn’t 5,000 stories, it was 5,200 stories. Don’t take those away from me.

You think about it. I could very safely say, 99% of companies or larger have never received 200 stories in their lifetime, let alone in five or six years. Most will never get five. Most companies won’t be covered five times in the media.

Here’s an interesting point: I left the company as the chief operating officer in May of 2007. That was right when Facebook was starting. Twitter I think was starting a year later. We had no social media to actually amplify—we couldn’t share any of our press on any social media feeds.

Imagine if we could have shared those 5,200 stories today and shared them five times on Facebook, five times on LinkedIn, five times on Twitter. Imagine if Dig or Reddit or StumbleUpon were in existence—we could have shared it on those sites.

There was nowhere for us to amplify it.

We literally leveraged the brand just off of those stories alone. We didn’t even email them to people. The real leverage came off of the fact that we were on Oprah, we were on Dr. Phil 17 times. We were in the newspapers, we were on the Dallas Morning News, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle. Name it—we were at New York Times, Wall Street Journal. They all covered us.

Many with half paid articles and photos covered us. The real credibility came from talking about it—from having our office filled with hundreds of mounted press photos and press articles all over our offices, filled with them. When potential franchisees walk through our office, those franchise prospects saw the press. When potential employees worked into our office, they were wowed by the press.

People have never seen this much media.

We got leverage that way, we got credibility that way, we got excitement that way, and the more press that we got, the more the press would write about us.

Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, every single outlet that you listed, Oprah, New York Times, Wall Street Journal. These are the top dogs that everybody’s gunning for, it seems almost too good to be true to hear you say.

Cameron Herold: Well these were the actual print editions too. I personally, in the last three years have been in the physical print edition of Forbes magazine, the physical print edition of Fortune magazine, a physical print edition of Entrepreneur magazine, the physical print edition of Success magazine. Let alone the websites.

Plus, the number of newspapers. I’m talking about the leverage you get off of truly getting media in the actual print editions as well as online is powerful. It’s not really that hard to get. Every single one, you know, CNBC’s Squawk box. Name it, we were pretty much there.

I think the only major news outlet or outlet we did not get was we didn’t get on the Letterman show, and were trying to. We almost had Bud Nelman doing a ride along with one of our junk drivers and got sick and I canceled the episode and never rebooked it. Outside of that, we were pretty much everywhere.

Big Wins, Big Returns Charlie Hoehn: Tell me the story of your biggest get? What was the one that you really wanted and you finally landed it?

Cameron Herold: Well, Oprah for sure. Yeah, I mean, it was a long episode, it was a multiple minute episode, like probably a four or five minute episode on Oprah with multiple shots off our 1-800-GOT-JUNK trucks, the big blue and green trucks, multiple shots of our drivers, navigators wearing the big 1-800-GOT-JUNK shirts with huge names on the back.

Oprah mentioned 1-800-GOT-JUNK five or six times, the CEO Brian was on set and was on film on the show talking to her as part of the episode. Just crazy media coverage.

You know, Oprah was certainly the holy grail, yet we didn’t get much business from it in terms of selling franchises or making our franchises busy. Now, we’ve been able to talk about it for 16 years, which is pretty huge.

But I’d say the biggest piece that we got that really drove a revenue, we got a piece on CNBC Squawk box, which was around a six-and-a-half-minute episode. I actually had a similar one done on by CNN Money, which is about a three-and-a-half minute episode. The one on CNBC Squawk box was again showing our trucks, showing our drivers talking about franchises, talking about franchise fees, talking about the franchise program. I think we sold 15 or 16 franchises and the franchise fee and franchise territory fees were $40,000 each. We did about 700 thousand dollars in franchise sales because of that one piece.

Charlie Hoehn: Amazing. That right there, if you’d worked with a PR agency for instance, first of all, that piece would have never have come about but it would have more than covered every cost you ever had with a PR agency.

Cameron Herold: And then some.

I have another one. We landed in an associated press writer who wrote an article about us and we ended up in 220 newspapers on a one day period in seven countries. That’s really the holy grail I feel like.

Charlie Hoehn: When that happens, when associated press really ripples out globally.

Cameron Herold: With photo. It was powerful.

My cousin was actually traveling in Thailand at the time and he saw us in a Bangkok press and he sent me a note and he’s like, “Dude, what the–I just saw your name in a newspaper in Thailand, what the F are you doing? This is ridiculous.”

How Relevant is the Press, Really? Charlie Hoehn: I’d imagine, maybe some people are listening and they’re saying, “Cameron, even though this is all very impressive, that was back in the day, the media has changed so much now. What is it about media today?” Would you agree or disagree?

Cameron Herold: I have two media coverages this week, I was interviewed by two different podcasters on one hour episodes this week, and this is my third. Here’s three media outlets that are carrying me right now. That’s this week.

I appeared in a newspaper about 10 days ago, I appeared in a couple of people’s blog posts a couple of weeks ago.

Yeah, of course it still works, it totally works.

The media every day, every single journalist woke up this morning, sat down at their desk and thought, “What the heck am I going to write about today?”

Every photographer sat down and thought, “I wonder what good photos I could take today that will end up in whatever outlet?”

Our job is to pick up the phone and inspire them in a two minute conversation.

Just saying, “Hey, do you have two minutes? I think I have a good story for you.” They’re all going to say yes.

Charlie Hoehn: Is it really that simple to get on the phone with them? I mean, don’t many of them prefer email—and isn’t it hard to get their number?

Cameron Herold: It’s actually easier to get on the phone with them than ever before. Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s when I first started doing this, it was hard to get on the phone with them because there was a gatekeeper. You had to call the receptionist, no one had cellphones, there was no internet to find the information, there were no internet databases to get the information.

You actually had to phone the outlets and get the phone numbers to call the outlets, and then you would have to get through the receptionist and often leave a voicemail message or a physical mail message that didn’t have voice mail, most of them didn’t have voice mail.

That was really hard.

Nowadays, you can use outlets like media outlets or PR Newswire or Cision and these other databases. You can actually get all the journalists’ contact information.

Even if they say don’t phone me, the reality is nobody phones them. Nobody phones anybody anymore, so they’re going to pick up the phone if you call.

You’re not going to burn a relationship, because you don’t have the relationship in the first place.

They’re busy—they’ll forget about you in two weeks if they got upset. If you’re calling to do them a favor, if you phone and say, “Hey, do you have two minutes. I think I have a good story for you,” they’re going to say one of two things. Either, “Sure, what’s the story” or they’re going to say, “No, I’m really busy, I’m on a deadline.”

If they say they’re on a deadline, say “Great, how about I call you tomorrow or Tuesday?” If they say yes, you just give them the story, but the information’s all easily accessible. Even if you don’t want to pay the $1,500 a year for the databases, you can just look up that writer’s name or look up the outlet’s names and their contact information is often on Google.

Charlie Hoehn: My favorite type of advice is uncommon common sense. This I feel fits right into that category where it’s almost so simple and maybe even a little bit obvious that no one does it, because we overthink it.

Cameron Herold: Well, that’s what I mean about business in general—it’s why I’ve been coaching so many companies all over the world. That is why I started with the COOAlliance, it is why my books are selling so well. I see the simplicity in business and everyone else seems to be trying the hard way.

I see the window that’s open that you can fly. You can just turn and go out the open window. Meanwhile, everybody else is banging their head in the window trying harder, trying harder.

It is not because I am smarter, because I am not that smart. You work with Tucker Max, that guy is smart, right? I got 62% in high school, I got 62% in university, so I had to find the cheat sheets. I had to find the quick fixes. I had to find the shortcuts to everything.

I just think I learned how to see the shortcuts to everything now instead of the more complicated ways.

Know Where You’re Going Charlie Hoehn: A chapter that you have in the book is “know your audience to know your story.” Talk to me about this.

Cameron Herold: Yeah, well it is a pretty simple concept that Steven Covey popularized in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. One of the habits was begin with the end in mind.

If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there. That is a quote from one of my favorite characters now is the man behind the Cheshire Cat. I think most people just do things without actually pausing for a second to say, “Why am I doing it?”

So why are you doing PR? Are you doing it to raise your brand awareness? Are you doing it to give yourself more credibility? Are you doing it to drive culture inside of your company? Are you doing it to amplify your sales and marketing efforts? What I like to at least at minimum do is make sure that my PR strategy dovetails into our national and regional sales and any to the marketing messaging that we’re using.

It’s just really powerful to apply it and utilize it together as part of that mix, but most people don’t really think about it. They don’t try to tie it in or they don’t have the larger purpose.

Even when we were building 1-800-GOT-JUNK, I joined the company with 14 people at the head office when I got there, and when I left six and a half years later, we had 3,100 employees system wide. When I walked in, one of the first three things I wanted to do, the first one was raise prices. The second one was to really drive PR to leverage the brand, and third was to obsess about employee culture.

And if we did those three things, we’d win.

One of the reasons I wanted to get PR was I realized that for us to be in the press, no one else could get to press. If we were to the first to the press in every market, we would always be in the press. It would also drive our credibility. It would drive our company culture, it would help us through with recruiting. It would help us with our messaging—and we didn’t have the money to do advertising. So it is a lot cheaper than doing advertising.

That was the beginning with the end in mind.

Charlie Hoehn: How often do you see companies, entrepreneurs just mindlessly going after PR because that’s a thing that they think they need to do?

Cameron Herold: I would say much less. I think when people do cognizantly go after the media they at least have some reason for doing it. They’re thinking about it in some way—it may not be the right way. It may not be the most effective way. It may not be the most strategic way, but they are at least thinking about in some fashion. They are doing it for a reason. They do understand that they are going to get business from it.

Now most people also think that they are going to get more PR than they probably will, or more business from the press than they probably will. Just because you are covered in some newspaper like the Dallas Morning News doesn’t mean that people are going to beat a path to your door.

Media Lists 101 Charlie Hoehn: So let’s go on to the next part, which is compiling your media list. How do you go about this? Is it pretty straight forward or technical?

Cameron Herold: It’s pretty straight forward. I mean you find out who your customers are or what content your customers are devouring. So as long as you understand your customer habits or who your customer is, you understand where they spend their time and where they learn, where they absorb content and you try to target those.

Secondly, you might strategically think about what markets you are trying to move into and look at who is going to be able to hit that demographic, like a demographic profile.

Third, any outlets that you think you can get into the door with easier because momentum creates momentum, right? It’s not the perfect article, it’s just get a couple of articles in a newspaper that you can get PDFs of. You can get it online, so you can actually share it in all the social media.

It is just “get media,” and the more media you get, the more media will continue to write about you. So every article you get will lead to another article and lead to another article and lead to another article so just get started.

Charlie Hoehn: So I feel like this is a part that people don’t always fully think through. They tend to go for the biggest outlets or the ones that they really love that would mean a lot to them to be on but not necessarily where their audience is.

Cameron Herold: Yeah, exactly. That’s why again, you have to begin with the end in mind. Where are my customers? I mean it is irrelevant what I read, it’s what’s my customers devour. It is what my customers consume.

Quick Pitches Charlie Hoehn: So how do we make a simple pitch?

Cameron Herold: So when you think about what you’re covering, I want you to think about coming up with a story headline that is a very short story headline, just like the one sentence that might be the headline of the story. Then what are the five core points that make that story important to the reader or the viewer, right?

What core five points do you want them to hear or to read when they actually consume that content?

Charlie Hoehn: Why five?

Cameron Herold: That’s really all that the writer can consume.

So you are not writing the story for them. You are really saying, “Here is my story,” like the book Free PR, it is all around how to know how to craft angles and how to understand the audiences and how to pitch the writers and how to build an in house PR team and how to leverage the PR.

Those are five core points.

So there is enough for a writer to work around, right? To craft a story out of. Ask questions and talk to them about that.

Working Relationships Charlie Hoehn: That brings us to the next part, which is working with the journalist. What does that actually like beyond just giving them a call?

Cameron Herold: Journalists are more often analytical, amiable, thoughtful. They operate at a more conscientious speed, whereas I like having sales people to pitch PR because they can handle rejection. They’re good at cold calling, they are good at keeping track of their prospects and they don’t get turned away by rejection.

So when a sales person calls somebody, they can scare them off.

If you come in too strong with too much energy, you’re going to scare off the writers.

So it is really understanding the writer’s style, their behavioral traits first, respecting the writer’s time because they are busy and they’re often on deadlines. Then it is helping to give them a story to start with and then asking questions on listening. So that they can craft the story, they can craft the points into an angle.

You are helping them frame something, and if you sense that it is having a second story ready, you already got them on the phone and try story number two.

Charlie Hoehn: You also have a third section in the book, which you helped the reader master the interview process on TV, on podcast, in print and online, which is actually huge.

Cameron Herold: Not only can it butcher, it but also you won’t get the proper coverage you are looking for. So as an example, at your company office you should have big logos of your company name and art work that’s powerful and sections where either your phone number, URL are up on the walls. So that when the media comes, you can suggest those good places for photo shoots. You can stand there and talk to them and go, “This might be a good place for a photo.”

You just kind of, “Oh gee, shucks” your way into it.

They are never going to say to you, “Hey can you stand in front of your truck for a photo with the big logo” so the other one is just wearing corporate clothing that had a big logos on them, right? Or making sure that your office is completely clean.

We would have the most detail oriented people walk through our office and tell people to clean up—like tie your cables and get rid of garbage on the floor and Windex, or inside and outside of car windows.

You know, ArmorAll the tires of vehicles, just anything you can do so that everything presents to the very, very high level. No one is going to ask you to do that. You have to understand to do that on your own.

Then thirdly, create photo ops. When we had the Canadian bureau chief from associated press come to our office, we didn’t pick him up at the airport in a limousine. We didn’t have the CEO pick him up in a limousine.

We had one of our PR guys dress up as a truck driver and pick up the Canadian bureau chief in a 1-800-GOT-JUNK truck, but before he got them into the truck, he gave him a uniform to change into.

So now we have Tom Cohan, the Canadian bureau chief wearing a 1-800-GOT-JUNK outfit including the boots, right? And guess what they did? They didn’t drive to the office, they went into the junk removal job first—no writer is going to ask for that experience.

You have to understand what they are looking for and try to help them with their story.

That is why the story ended up in 220 newspapers, because we blew this guy’s mind. Everybody else would have the CEO pick him up at the airport.

Charlie Hoehn: You have to set the stage for them to happen.

Cameron Herold: Yeah, there’s really no such thing as investigative journalism anymore. I think that died in about the ‘50s or early ‘60s, where companies would actually send out journalists or writers to go out and uncover the news.

Maybe it went in as late as the ‘70s or ‘80s, but investigative journalism is just far too expensive, and now with social media and with the internet, journalists can actually find more content and more resources at a much faster pace than ever before.

But the reality is they are not out looking for it.

If you do what everybody else does or everybody else writes in newswire, writes a press release, emails it off. Now the journalist—or probably not even a journalist, usually the editor of the city desk—has 400 press releases to read through. They’re going to say no to 395 of them.

Why would you ever try to talk to somebody who is saying no 395 times a day versus picking up the phone and calling the journalist whose only other phone call is probably their mom calling to say hi.

You get through the clutter real fast.

Connect with Cameron Herold Charlie Hoehn: What is the best way for listeners to connect with you and follow you?

Cameron Herold: Over nachos. Although my weight is down 35 pounds maybe not nachos…

All of my books are on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes. If they can look up, I’ve done three books with Scribe, I’ve done Free PR, Meetings Suck and Vivid Vision. But all my books are on Amazon, and then also the COO Alliance is really my core internet property where we’re going to be running the only network of its kind in the world for the second-in-command, so that would be a great place for them to start as well.

Go to my press page on that website.

Just take a look at all the press around me, or Google my name. If you’re wondering if this is all true, just go to Google and then go to the news tab and type in my name, Cameron Herold. You’ll see so many news articles and you’ll realize this book is really powerful.

Charlie Hoehn: Wow. Yeah, it’s like a never ending scroll of press.

Cameron Herold: Don’t take my word for it.

Charlie Hoehn: The final question I have is for you to give our listeners a challenge, what is the one thing they can do from your book that will have a positive impact?

Cameron Herold: I would do it this, and exactly this: I would grab a post it note or a piece of paper, I would write down one story idea, something about your entrepreneurial journey or you overcoming adversity or your company culture or something.

It has to be like less of a sales pitch and more of a story about something—how did you decide to write your book. You know, how did a book come out of you? Whatever it’s going to be, and come up with five core bullet points.

Then pick up the phone and call three or four writers at your local newspaper and say “Hey, do you have two minutes? I think I have a good story for you,” and pitch them.

Just try the pitch. See how fast you’ll get through.

Get Cameron’s new book Free PR on Amazon. Find out more at COOAlliance.com.

Listen to more authors on growing your brand outside of the box:

The Economics of Emotion: Kyle M.K.

Words into Cash: Timothy Kim

The post Free PR: Cameron Herold and Adrian Salamunovic appeared first on Author Hour.

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Today’s episode is with Kyle Racki, author of Free Trials (and Tribulations). Now, Kyle is the cofounder and CEO of Proposify, which is a SaaS company that currently serves more than 6,000 customers worldwide, and even though Kyle is a successful entrepreneur running this successful business, his book is about all the other stuff that comes with that as well.

He shares his full journey, and I mean full journey, from difficult beginnings to dealing with grief, divorce, and actually being shunned for abandoning a religion that he realized was a cult.

If you’re an entrepreneur and you know that running a company can be a lonely, stressful experience, this is the episode for you, because Kyle’s going to share how to build a business—even when life punches you in the mouth.

Get Kyle’s new book Free Trials (And Tribulations) on Amazon. Find out more at KyleRacki.com.

Kyle Racki: I remember about 10 years ago, I was running a small agency here in town where I live in Dartmouth, and my wife and I had just separated and it was a very messy breakup. Police were called, it was just extremely chaotic. I was living in this kind of rundown apartment because I had to basically pay for the house and I needed sort of to get out of the house, so I was just down the street from the agency that I was running.

The agency wasn’t doing incredibly well, and I remember at one point, my now ex-wife had come into the office when I wasn’t there and in front of my business partner and all the staff demanded to be paid for her, I think 1% of the company. She was basically trying to get money and they had to call the police and take her out of there.

These kind of things happened many times and it sort of brought to mind that idea of right now, entrepreneurship, we’re in a time where they’re almost more rock stars than actual rock stars, right?

You’ve got Jeff Bezos walking arm and arm with Grimes, having pics taken by the paparazzi, Gary Vaynerchuck on the streets getting selfies with fans. Elon Musk is like a fashion icon. You know, actually, I got that mixed around—sorry, it was Musk who was dating Grimes and Jeff Bezos who is the style icon. Either way, right? It’s like rock stars.

When I was a teenager growing up, I wanted to be an actual rock star. Like I wanted to go on tour with my band and all that kind of thing. Now these same teenagers want to be entrepreneurs, right? They want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or whoever.

We’re just living in a really interesting time right now, and I think what a lot of people forget is that much like an actual rock star, you have to go through years, decades even of a playing dive bars and having no money and sleeping out of your van to actually get to the point where you’re successful.

So that’s kind of what this book is really meant to encapsulate. The idea that even though it’s my story, it’s not really just me. It’s a reflection of the idea that you have to eat shit and get punched in the mouth countless times to come out on top as an entrepreneur.

It’s a combination of a personal memoir and an actual business book. There’s a story in there, it’s a little dark, a little depressing, got some humor thrown in there to lighten it up. But ultimately, it is a business book with some practical takeaways and strategies that people can implement for their own business.

Some of it is based on my successes, some of it is based on my failures, but they’ll get some practical takeaways.

Leaving before Doomsday Charlie Hoehn: Your book is broken down into part one, two and three. Part one is In the Beginning, part two is Armageddon, part three is Rebirth. Is Armageddon when you left the doomsday cult?

Kyle Racki: Yeah, absolutely. As you pointed out, the structure of the book is broken into kind of like a classical mythological tale of creation, destruction, and rebirth. That’s kind of the idea behind that structure and a little nod towards the major religious element in my life that shaped who I am but also kind of destroyed me. I came out of that.

Charlie Hoehn: Wow. Of all the things that you said, I had heard before except for the doomsday cult. So let’s dig into that story. What was that like?

Kyle Racki: Yeah, I mean, that’s a loaded topic but, you know, the funny thing is that I think that people would be surprised at what I described as being a doomsday cult. You know, we tend to think of like heaven’s gate and, you know, what was the one? Drinking the KoolAid, I forget what that cult.

People tend to think about those really like fringe groups that are very small that maybe a hundred people fall for, but this particular one has 8 million followers worldwide. They’re the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

So I was actually raised as a Jehovah’s Witness from babyhood. Grew up under that belief system. Most people don’t really know a lot about the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They kind of think of them as a benign group that goes around and kind of annoys you on Saturday morning when you’re trying to watch your cartoons, eat your cereal, you get a knock on the door, somebody’s pushing a Watchtower in your face. You tell them to go away.

So I think that’s what most people think of is being a pretty harmless group, but more and more these days, there’s actually a big movement from ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses who are now starting to shine a spotlight on the religion and a lot of the scandals related to child abuse that have been coming up.

There was a lot to unpack there, but essentially, I woke up one day basically gave myself permission to read literature that was written by ex-members, which is forbidden in the religion. You’re not allowed to read anything that’s not written by Jehovah’s witnesses that talks about Jehovah’s witnesses.

For that exact reason.

They call it the apostate material.

Essentially, they tell you that if you read anything that an ex-member has written, it’s going to poison your mind, Satan’s going to get in there and basically control you, and there’s this fear of apostates that’s baked in. I basically gave myself permission to read it and very quickly realized that yeah, I had been raised in a cult.

Charlie Hoehn: Wow. That was earth shattering in your mind. What happened to you next?

Kyle Racki: Yeah, it was obviously a very transformative year. Everything that I thought I believed or thought was true was completely shaken up. I think it’s around the middle chapter of the book in the Armageddon section where I basically talk about kind of that time that I realized what I was in and then the steps I took to get out of it, which included sending an email to my mother thinking that I could present her evidence.

Did not go well. Ultimately led to the second breakup with my wife because we had gotten back together a few times.

Charlie Hoehn: Was she a Jehovah’s Witness as well?

Kyle Racki: She was actually, yeah. She had been raised as well as a Jehovah’s Witness and then left in her teens and then had come back as an adult. So a couple of years after, she had gotten baptized as one, that’s when she and I met.

She’s 10 years older than me. We went through this period where we’re both very gung-ho, completely brainwashed members and very into it and it was our life. Then that started to kind of fade as time went on for various reasons, so when I actually presented it to her, she rejected it at first because of the mind control but ultimately she ended up leaving as well.

We’re not together anymore, but she’s still out.

The Story behind the Star Charlie Hoehn: Man, Kyle, I’ve got to say, I so appreciate you including that story in your book. What do you think young entrepreneurs, people who are just starting out in their journey, are missing by not getting this more human side, the full story of entrepreneurship?

Kyle Racki: I think we’re hearing a lot these days about what social media is doing to our brains and how when you’re looking at Instagram and Facebook and seeing people’s highlight reels, it makes people depressed because they feel like, “Wow, my life doesn’t match up to my friend’s lives.”

I think that to a large degree, we get that both on social media and just in general. We only really hear about the successful entrepreneurs. We don’t hear a lot about the failed ones, and those are much more plentiful than the successful ones. Specifically when you read TechCrunch and hear about unicorns and the Ubers and the Airbnbs. People tend to not look at those as being outliers, which they are. They kind of look at them as, “Wow, why haven’t I done that?” or “Why isn’t my businesses as successful as them?”

When you dig underneath the hood, you realize that for every Airbnb or Uber, there’s thousands of businesses that have failed along the way or some of them actually are doing well. They just kind of fly under the radar but really, the stories are very disparate. I’ve also found through research that depression is much higher among entrepreneurs than the general population. There’s a higher rate of depression and suicide and drug and alcohol addiction and I think probably a lot of that is because building a business is really hard and everybody has challenges in their lives.

Everybody has to deal with illness or deaths in the family or you know, issues with their relationships. Everybody deals with that, but then throw on top of that the burden of trying to provide for your employees, trying to make payroll, trying to make your customers happy, try not to lose your house in the midst of doing that, and it’s a recipe for disaster.

I think that more and more people are coming out and talking about their failures or their personal challenges or tragedies, it kind of makes you feel like you’re not alone, this is common, you’re not the weirdo.

I found that especially running an agency. I run a Software as a Service business now, but back when I was running an agency, which was my first business and ultimately a massive failure, in the local community of other agencies who you’re mostly competing against, it was sort of this thing…you go to a conference or an event where maybe somebody who runs a competing agency is at and you say to them, “Hey, how’s business?”

“Oh, it’s doing great, amazing work, we’re just slammed with work. We have no time for anymore. We’re just killing it,” and it sort of this puffing out your feathers because you don’t want that competing agency to think that, “Oh geez, I don’t know how am I going to make payroll. We had a client who is not paying their bill and another one the project is way over budget and we are losing money on it.”

Nobody ever tells that because they don’t want their competitors having any view that they are weak or they are failing.

Charlie Hoehn: I have seen it in the author world, right? Speaking with authors, I compare myself to a handful of authors who I know who have sold millions of copies of their books. And if I only look at them, I view myself as a not very good author. But they are in the 0.001% like literally in authors, they’re anomalies. I think the same thing goes with business.

Kyle Racki: Yeah, I talk about that in the book too, a lot—about imposter syndrome. It comes up again and again.

I actually started community college at a pretty young age because I graduated, just based on my age and when I was born, when I was 17. I’d started college and was really intimidated by the idea that I was there with older people in their 20s and 30s and 40s. So I felt like, “Wow, these are the people I am competing with for graphic design positions out there in the city?” Like, there is no way somebody is going to hire a kid like me to design their billboard or whatever.

Then of course eventually I got a job at 18 or 19, and I was like, “I can’t believe what are they doing? Why are they paying me for this to sit around and design things?” Then later becoming a freelancer and then becoming an agency owner and then a SaaS founder.

Basically, at every step of my journey I was like, “There is no way somebody is going to pay me to do this.” A lot of it comes down to imposter syndrome, even just writing this book. I’m like, “Wow, who is going to pay to read my words?” You know what I mean? It just is constant, and I don’t think it ever ends.

New Beginnings Charlie Hoehn: I want to talk about part three in Rebirth and the tides changing for you. Tell me a story from this section of the book where you started to come into a new life.

Kyle Racki: Yeah there’s a couple pivotal moments. At the time, I didn’t realize how significant they were, but in hindsight of course you realize how your life may have changed if you didn’t take that action.

One of them was December of 2013, we were in the midst of trying to sell off our agency business, which was failing and we were struggling to keep running. We had these buyers who were interested, but they were delaying the deal. Our lawyers were delaying it, and really, we should have just laid everybody off, filed for bankruptcy, screwed over our clients and our landlord and our debtors and all that kind of stuff.

It would have probably been the most practical approach, but we were trying to keep this thing floating just enough.

Just long enough to be able to sell it and get it into somebody else’s hands.

Proposify as a company, which is my software business, was really at the early startup stage. I was working with a developer on getting it out there but we didn’t have customers at the time, and amongst all of that I had just broken my toe because I kicked a dresser in anger.

I was still dealing with a lot of the post cult trauma syndrome, which is (believe it or not) a real thing.

So I was really in a bad place, and it was winter too so it was always dark and depressing. I was feeling pretty borderline suicidal. Then I just decided, “I need to get out there in the community or something and like go to an event and talk to other entrepreneurs.”

I noticed that this startup house, Volta, was putting on a pitch competition where you stand up for five minutes and pitch your startup and then you have judges who vote on it. So I ended up signing up for it and going to it and pitching, and what was really cool was I won the competition. So the judges voted for me to win it.

But then even more pivotal was the idea that there was investors in the audience, one of whom came up to me afterwards and basically said, “Hey, I knew we chatted a year ago and we didn’t think you guys are ready. We’re in now. We want you to pitch the board and get in. We’ll fund your venture.”

That was a game changer for us. So what ended up happening was in one month we literally sold our agency and raised a seed around for Proposify, which completely changed everything for us. If I hadn’t gotten out there to that event, maybe that wouldn’t have happened.

Life Today Charlie Hoehn: Awesome and now you are the CEO and cofounder of Proposify, of course, and what is life like for you today? Describe your typical week at Proposify.

Kyle Racki: We have a great team here. We’re just up about 65-person mark at the company. We have a very positive culture here at Proposify. A lot of new people because we have grown a lot in the last year.

A typical week is actually busy, but it is a good kind of busy. I am trying to make health more of a priority. So I’ll usually go to the gym before I come in, maybe come in around 10 or 11. I usually have a lot of meetings and calls and that kind of thing for the afternoon but really have a pretty good work-life balance.

I got remarried this past September to Christina. She had also come off a divorce in the last couple of years, so yeah, we found a lot in common there. I also have two sons. So I have Micah and Ty from my previous marriage. We are building a house right now, and things are great.

I am part of a coaching group with Dan Martell. I don’t know if maybe listeners have heard?

Charlie Hoehn: He is the founder of Clarity FM, which I am sure many listeners have used to book calls with experts on particular topics, specifically entrepreneurs.

Kyle Racki: He’s got his own really interesting story. He actually writes the forward for the book. So I am part of his coaching group, this thing called JFDI. There is about 10 of us in the group and we go to different cities. We were just in Boston last week, and the reason I brought that up is that he did something interesting with us to help us get to know each other better. We drew a timeline of basically our birth to now, and then we had to draw all the highest and the lowest points and talk about them to the group for 10 minutes.

And the thing that was fascinating to me was just how many people who are all successful entrepreneurs with SaaS businesses in the $5 to $10 million a year range and how almost every single one of them has had crazy horrible things happen to them in their life. From addiction to trauma to suicides of close people in their lives. Maybe that just speaks to the general population, but I do think that entrepreneurs experience that at a higher rate than probably most.

Reaching Out Charlie Hoehn: Did you have one main goal in mind when you were making this book?

Kyle Racki: I have wanted to write a book for a very long time, basically since I was a kid. I actually interviewed an author when I was I think 11 years old in grade six when they said, “What do you want to do one day?” and then you have to interview somebody who does that.

There was a local author named Leslie Choice who came in and took questions from an 11 year old. So actually it was a lifelong goal, kind of a personal milestone.

I also really enjoy creating things. I have been blogging and doing podcasts and stuff for the last few years. I like making music, and my dream is to actually one day make a movie. That is a big passion of mine.

So I just enjoy creating content and I enjoy sharing the lessons, the mistakes and the wins and so this was just another format for that was to tell the personal story but, again, talk about the actual takeaways, the business lessons.

So I think for people who read the latter part of the book, the part three of Rebirth is that is where you get into more like how do you generate demand through content, how do you grow through key performance indicators? You get into more the actual meat, the really practical stuff around building a business. So I wanted to share all of that.

Charlie Hoehn: Awesome. If you were going to make a movie this year, what would that movie be about?

Kyle Racki: Oh it would probably be some variation of this. Maybe the protagonist isn’t Kyle Racki, but there’d probably be a lot of similar things happening. I think you could probably point to any ad agency in the city you live in and I bet there is a TV show in it, you know? Because there’s just ridiculous characters who work at these places—and startups too, for sure.

Connect with Kyle Racki Charlie Hoehn: True. This has been awesome. My final two questions for you are what’s the best place for our listeners to follow you or potentially connect with you?

Kyle Racki: So if they want to, from a personal standpoint, check out my website, kyleracki.com. That’s basically where the blog and link to sign up to the book. You’ll get links there as soon as it launches.

If people want to check out my business it is proposify.com and basically we’re a SaaS product that helps sales teams write proposals faster and get faster sign off.

Charlie Hoehn: I’ll attest to Proposify being an awesome product. So it is definitely worth checking out if you write proposals. The final question is, give our listeners a challenge. What is the one thing that they can do from your book this week that will have a positive impact?

Kyle Racki: I think so often people underestimate themselves. So I talked about imposter syndrome. One thing I had once said to an entrepreneur who was talking to me about what he had planned for his business, I kind of felt like he was aiming really low. So I actually wrote a post about it called, Stop Aiming for the Trees, and that’s what I think a lot of us do. We go, “Well we can never aim for the moon or the stars.” Some people call it sandbagging, where you set your goal so low that it is just easy to achieve. You don’t really have to stretch yourself.

So I think as a challenge, what people could do is if you don’t have any goals for the next five years in terms of what do you want your ideal life to look like—I had written that down a number of years ago and then pulled it out. It was an Evernote file. I pulled it out recently and I was like, “Holy crap!” I actually knocked most of these things off.

It’s not like I went back and referred to it every day. It just sort of happened.

I think when you write down what your ideal life looks like, you’d be amazed at how that sticks in the back of your head and how you put in the work and you do the things that will get you there.

I’d actually challenge people to aim higher than they probably already are.

Get Kyle’s new book Free Trials (And Tribulations) on Amazon. Find out more at KyleRacki.com.

Listen to more authors on overcoming trials:

Struggle Well: Ken Falke and Josh Goldberg

The Game of Adversity: Nick DiNardo

The post Free Trials (And Tribulations): Kyle Racki appeared first on Author Hour.

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When it comes to discrimination in the workplace, we’ve come a long way as a society. There’s still one systemically ignored form of discrimination. It happens all the time and it affects everyone: Ageism.

Ageism is real. It’s widespread. It’s insidious.

Up until now, it’s mostly been hidden because of the low rate of reporting from people who get pushed out of their jobs when they reach a certain age. Patti Temple Rocks, the author of I’m Not Done, believes that with the largest demographic that America has ever seen, which is the baby boomers, we’re now experiencing age discrimination at work. it’s time for us to talk about this hurtful and bad for business practice.

In this episode, she takes us into a deep dive into ageism in the workplace, what it looks like, how it harms people and businesses and how business leaders can get on the right side of the issue. If you want to be part of a movement to stop this remnant of workplace discrimination, this is the episode for you.

Get Patti’s new book I’m Not Done on Amazon. Find out more at imnotdone.rocks.

Patti Temple Rocks: Frankly, like a lot of people, I’m not even sure I knew there was a thing called ageism, especially ageism in the workplace. I was in my late 40s, early 50s. I think I was in my late 40s and at a very high level in my career. I’d had great success and had a big job with a big company and was working for a woman who was the first woman to break through the glass ceiling.

She was great. She was a great boss, a great mentor, had actually become a good friend over the years and made me so happy to see her success. Then she brought me into the company, so I got to become part of the success.

I noticed over what seemed to be a relatively short period of time that all of a sudden, she wasn’t in some of the meetings or some of the discussions that she used to be.

It felt odd to be. It just didn’t really feel normal. People were a little bit dismissive. I would say, “Well, I can run it by her.” People were a little bit dismissive of that. It just didn’t sit right with me, but I had no idea what I was observing. It just didn’t feel good.

I happened to be at a cocktail reception that night with the CEO, her boss and my second-line boss, who I had a good relationship with. I just said, “You know what? I know you really value Angelina like I do. What’s going on? I can just tell that she’s not as valued as she used to be. What can I do to help her?”

That was my only motivation.

He looked at me and literally said, “Oh, Patti. This will be good for you. Can’t you see this? This will be good for you.”

I was taken aback—implying that if something happens to her, I would get her job. That’s odd. Then he went on to say, “I think she’s just tired. She’s been doing this a long time. I think she’s just tired.”

That was the absolute wrong word to use to describe this woman. I mean, I don’t think she’s to this day ever been tired a day in her life. She has nothing but energy and enthusiasm and drive and has spent her whole life that way. I knew that wasn’t really what was going on.

That was the first time that I thought, “What does that mean, tired? She thinks she’s old?” It was the first time that I thought this is a dismissive way to treat somebody—and why?

From that moment on, I think that my senses were just heightened. I was paying attention to things a little bit more. I heard things that I would’ve always taken that at face value, “but maybe that means something different.” I started to see others being treated, not just in that organization but in others, and friends and people I knew at the end of their career were made to feel a little bit less-than.

These were universally people who had enjoyed fabulously successful careers, or they wouldn’t have been at such high levels in their 50s. My first reaction, selfishly perhaps, was to make sure it didn’t happen to me. I thought that the answer to making sure that it didn’t happen to me would be to have a plan and, frankly, to beat anybody to the punch.

Before anybody might say, “Patti’s tired,” I would have decided, “Okay, I’m tired. I’m going to move on. I’m going to do something else.”

Charlie Hoehn: What I wonder about is is it really so bad if we reach a certain age and it’s like, “Hey, it’s time to retire.” I mean, isn’t that the narrative that were sold for so many years? What makes it so bad, and what were you afraid of really happening?

Patti Temple Rocks: It’s totally the narrative that we’ve been sold, and it’s been a narrative that for decades has even had some age ranges wrapped around it. I think what made me uncomfortable with it, and certainly what made my boss and friend uncomfortable with it, is it was not her choice.

It’s one thing if we have planned all along that I’m going to work till I get to this age and then I’m going to retire. It’s this active choice.

When you’re just pushed aside, or asked to buy into the narrative that you’re tired or you’re not relevant or something else like that before you feel that way, it’s crushing. It’s also demographically, it doesn’t make sense anymore, because that narrative that you described—that you reach a certain age and yay you get you retire—was when our life expectancy was much different.

People today are living much longer, and they’re living longer in healthy ways mentally and physically. Or not necessarily thinking that, “Okay, I’m ready for the gold watch at 55,” or even 60, because they still feel vital and vibrant. As a purely practical fact, many, many, many boomers—and that’s the generation that we’re talking about that’s reached this age, which is our largest generation ever—are also financially not ready for this.

If you’re pushed out either emotionally or physically in your 50s and you don’t have enough money saved, you’ve got a problem, because you’ve got healthcare to pay for and all sorts of other things.

Part of the reason that I feel this is a problem people need to talk about is because there are emotional and literal harms being caused to the people.

On the positive side of this, I think companies and organizations are just completely missing the boat about how to take better advantage of the wisdom and experience that comes from workers that are in their 50s and 60s.

Why We’re Cutting Experience Charlie Hoehn: What are their incentives to letting go of these people who are so experienced that they’ve effectively been training for decades to be stars at their job?

Patti Temple Rocks: Well, it’s almost always financial. The method of compensation is evolving and changing, which is one of the messages that I write about in my book. This shouldn’t be the excuse that it used to be.

For decades, salaries went up as people stayed on the job. It is in fact a true business reality that I’m not suggesting that we hide from it all, that oftentimes the more senior workers are also more highly compensated.

There is sometimes an incentive for an organization who could let go of a couple of senior people and hire twice as many people right out of school.

Of course, every organization should be hiring people right out of school. My message is that ageism slices both ways. I’m talking about it more on the older end of it, but this is not to say that young people are bad by any stretch, and every organization should have multiple generations.

A truly diverse workforce needs to include people from all ages.

I think this is becoming even more important.

As I said, as people are living longer; so if you’re marketing road bikes, 20 years ago you weren’t marketing them to 60-year-olds. Now 60-year-olds are buying really expensive road bikes because they’re going on cool bike trips.

Everything about the way we look at older people needs to change with the changing demographics, and as I said, the pure size of this particular population.

Charlie Hoehn: What are the damages that occur that they may not be seeing because they’re making these moves?

Patti Temple Rocks: I think there’s a couple. One just comes to mind a lot, there’s a famous quote from Mark Zuckerberg at an industry event. This was a few years back, but he literally said, “Young people are just smarter.”

I think there was this prevailing feeling that, especially in the tech world, you had all of these people that were coming up and had no boundaries to the way they were thinking. Again, there’s a lot of truth to that and that’s all good, but I found myself thinking a little bit and Facebook is finding themselves literally in the eye of the storm, that if you have an organization that is largely dominated by people in their 20s, 30s and 40s, you don’t have a whole lot of people who have lived through eyes of storms before.

When you do have people who have experienced it, it’s never the exact same thing, but people who have lived through transformations are better equipped to help lead and guide others through transformations.

I was talking to an older worker about this and I thought it was interesting. One digital—is the person digital is a classic ageist way of saying is this person young?

One of the interesting points that he made was he said, “I remember when our workplace made the transition to e-mail. It was a really big deal.” Today, nobody uses e-mail because it takes too long for people to respond sometimes. You’re really doing a great job with your clients if you have their cellphone so that you can do message them back and forth.

His point was anybody can learn the difference between sending an e-mail and sending a text. It’s helpful to have experience managing some of those cultural transitions in the workplace that some people who have weathered many storms are able to bring to a workplace. I do think that’s one of the things that people miss—if they don’t have an appropriate mix of all different age ranges in the workplace.

There’s lots of ways to look at whether it truly is a bottom line advantage to do that. One of the things that an HR person that I interviewed in my book talked about was that they had sometimes made the decision that someone took early retirement, or was encouraged to take early retirement. On paper, their job was very clear and specific, and they were supposed to do this. They would bring in somebody at much lower salary to do that job on paper.

The reality was, like all of us, the job that we end up doing is rarely exactly as it’s written on paper, and sometimes we do this and we do that and we do other things, because we’ve developed skills or expertise or like to do them.

This HR expert said, “Oftentimes, we will find that we think we can replace a more seasoned person with a more junior person, but really it ends up being pieces and parts of other people to really capture what we’re missing when that person exits the organization.”

One of the things that I learned through the course of writing this book and interviewing people is that the senior people who have been managed out—and a lot of people take a package, because they just don’t want to put up a fight. These people are not stupid. They are very aware that their salary was probably making them vulnerable in the event of any financial challenge to the company.

What none of them told me happened to them was an honest conversation about that, with the organization, or their boss. Most of them would be very willing to consider a different work situation that might benefit both the company and the person. Maybe it’s working part-time in a reduced salary. Maybe it’s moving into a different role, but again, recognizing that with that, might come the need to take a reduced salary. I’m not saying that I think that’s always the answer, but it rarely happens because everyone’s afraid to have that conversation.

Many of the senior people that I talk to, they would have been very open to that understanding and open to that.

For a lot of them, it’s just, “Look I’m not ready to completely do nothing. I love what I do. I’m good at what I do. I need the health insurance. I’d love to find a way to keep working.”

Very seldom does that conversation ever happen between the boss and the person that’s going to be impacted, or even more so, the organization at a broader level, where it feels safe and comfortable to have a conversation about what the end of one’s career might look and feel like.

Difficult Conversations Charlie Hoehn: Yeah. I can’t imagine that companies are extra gun-shy to have a conversation around that, if honesty could mean any chance of legal liability, right?

Patti Temple Rocks: For sure. I address that in the book as well. There is an understandable reticence and concern. Again, it doesn’t need to be there. If you want to have a conversation with me, let’s say and I’m at the end of my career. My salary might be a bit of an issue, but it’s really awkward and uncomfortable and you out of the blue say, “Well, how much longer do you want to work anyway?” Which happened to me.

I’m going to feel a little anxious and threatened. Is something going on that I don’t understand? My reviews have always been good. I feel pretty good about this. What’s really going on? It’s not going to then pave the way for a comfortable open and honest conversation.

If that same boss has had a conversation with me every single year about, “Hey, what are the next couple of years look like for you? What do you want to do? What do you want to learn? What do you want to contribute to the company?” Then that conversation when I’m 40, or 45, or 50, or 55 is always happening, so it’s not going to ever be that jarring to me.

I understand why people are nervous or uncomfortable about it, but if you approach it in a consistent way with employees of all ages, there’s nothing to worry about and you’re going to make the employee feel that they can trust you…to say, “I might want to stop working in the next X number of years.”

Right now, most people would never say that out loud, because they would be afraid that they would be deemed a short-term person and not given good opportunities and not necessarily given good bonus or whatever. People are keeping all that information inside.

If bosses are afraid to ask about it, no wonder there’s this huge disconnect.

I’m Not Done in Practice Charlie Hoehn: I’d love for you to share some of your – for a lack of a better word, your favorite stories that you gathered from the book, just so listeners can learn from them and experience what this is actually like.

Patti Temple Rocks: I interviewed dozens and ended up telling I think six or seven stories. What was interesting to me was that each had something unique that they brought to that.

One of them told me—he was one of the ones that talked about the lack of the honest conversation—“I know I’m a senior guy. All of a sudden, I wasn’t going into some of the meetings with the clients to present my own work. That felt weird. We were not having a great year financially, and so I knew that layoffs were going to happen, but I was just on pins and needles wondering if they were going to talk to me.”

He said, “It just feels like we’re a very disposable society.”

That was one of my takeaways from him. He’s like, “Let’s just try a newer version of the same thing and it might be cheaper.”

My takeaway from my conversation with him was a little bit about the disposable nature of human capital, which I don’t think is helpful.

It was interesting, because he had a great perspective, because I asked him. I said, “I don’t think this is just a women’s issue, but what do you think?” Obviously as a male, he wouldn’t say that it was completely a woman’s issue, and he said, “Well, let me put it this way. If they’re going through a reduction and they’re looking to lose some of the senior people and you’re African-American, they’re going to think twice. If you’re a woman, they’ll think at least once. If you’re a white male, they’re not even going to think.”

I thought that was a very fair analysis and point of view that he had. He felt again, that’s partly where the disposal part in it.

Diana on the other hand, one of the people that I talked to, definitely felt that it was a double whammy of being female and over 50. She was 59 when she lost her job, and she just felt there were more pressures on women to look the part and do certain things.

She was out to dinner with her boss and he said, “How old are you?” In her view, she said, “I just don’t think that ever would have been a conversation with one of my male counterparts.”

She definitely felt that the pressures on her as a female were a little bit different.

The one thing about any -ism for that matter, whether it’s ageism, or racism, or any of them is it’s a matter of how the person affected feels. Is it factual always? Not necessarily, but the way that she was made to feel was very much that as a woman over 50, there wasn’t really a good place for her.

She worked in the agency business, which is a very youthful organization.

Charlie Hoehn: How do we balance out—and I don’t think this is the majority of cases, but it’s always a minority in any instances like this I think, where you can’t control how a person reacts emotionally? Do you think that dynamic could potentially be at play in some cases here?

Patti Temple Rocks: I mean, of course. I think that that’s true – any time two humans interact with each other, one might react a different way than the other person would have wanted, or hoped, or intended that they would react.

We can never completely control that. I’ve got a whole couple of chapters that talk about this, but when it comes to some of the unconscious bias that exists in the workplace and the way that the snide comments, or certain things that are said, or again, it’s as simple as who’s invited into the room for parts of these conversations?

If all of a sudden, somebody who’s always been there and been part of it isn’t, it’s hard not to wonder what changed other than the fact that I just got a little bit older.

Certainly, there are people that I think overreact to anything. Anybody can overreact to anything, but I don’t think that this is a case systemically of people over 50 just overreacting to things. If anything, I think it’s been not talked about, it’s been undiscussed for so long, because nobody wants to talk about age.

It’s the big secret thing that you’re not supposed to talk about.

Shifting Tides Charlie Hoehn: Let’s say it’s been out one, two, five, ten years since the book came out—what do you hope are some of the shifts that are taking place in our society in the workplace?

Patti Temple Rocks: Well, I think ideally, we would have let go of some assumptions and stereotypes and unconscious bias that maybe have led to having a less diverse workplace, then would be ideal for a business. I mean, if you think about how far we’ve come – we’re not done, no pun intended, but I mean we still have race. There are plenty of people that could talk about issues that are affected by race in the workplace, or gender, but we are better.

I know, I’ve been in the workforce for close to 40 years. We are way better than we used to be.

I think, it’s because as business leaders, we opened our eyes and we were willing to say that perhaps we have some unconscious bias here and some things that are not okay. Let’s do training.

There’s been miles and miles of progress in a lot of diversity and inclusion training in the workplace. It just doesn’t, right now, address age as one of the factors that people should be talking about.

I love to challenge people when they say, “Well, it’s just different. It’s just different.” I’m like, “Well, I think it’s different because we haven’t really called people out on it.” A company I know recently needed to go through cost savings. Again, I’m not running away from the fact that a lot of times these are cost-driven types of decisions, but as part of their – one of the ways that they thought about restructuring the organization to save money, they thought we could make the organization flatter.

Of course, if you’re going to make an organization flatter and you take out your lowest level, you’re not going to save as much money, because those people aren’t paid as well. They took out one of their more senior levels across the board. Now when you do that, the odds are very high that when you take out—this happened to be called the directors—when you take out all of your directors, you are mostly impacting people in their late 40s, early 50s to early 60s, because it takes a certain amount of time and experience to get promoted into that level.

Financially, it probably makes a little bit of sense and it creates some opportunity for some young people. Substitute the director, also known as old people, with black [people] and that never happens. You don’t say, “We need to save some money in an organization. Let’s just get rid of all the African-Americans, because if we get rid of all the African-Americans, look at the salary they will save.” Or, “Let’s get rid of all the women.”

I think that we have come to a place in the workforce thankfully, where people would stand up and say, “Hell no. I don’t want to be that kind of company. We’re not that kind of company. We’re not going to do that.”

Yet when it happens more systemically to people who are perceived to be close to retirement age anyway, it’s just like, “Well, yeah. Good idea.”

All I’m trying to do is say that we, the people that are in this affected population should have a voice in when and how they end their careers.

By the way, that voice—you only have a right to exert that voice if you’re good at your job. This is not an entitlement thing. This is not a, “Okay, I’ve worked at the Ford plant for 35 years. If I just hang in there five more years, I’m going to get my gold watch and my pension. I’ll just keep showing up.”

In today’s hyper-competitive workforce, regardless of your age, you have to keep showing up, but you have to keep it good at what you do; you have to stay relevant and keep up with things and provide value to your organization.

If I thought for a second that this was about entitlement, I wouldn’t be doing it.

I have seen way too many very talented people with things to offer who have been made to feel, maybe to your point about sensitivity, maybe a little bit too sensitively. But I haven’t seen it being too sensitive very much. They just been made to feel that all of a sudden, I’m not as valuable as I used to be.

I think that’s a lost opportunity.

Charlie Hoehn: Well, I am glad that you’re going to be one of the people spearheading this, because I believe you’re right, that it’s going to be more and more so a conversation that we all need to have. We’re late, but better late than never.

Patti Temple Rocks: Yeah. I interviewed a couple of attorneys. One of the attorneys I talked to, Sue Ellen, talked about how practically impossible it is to really understand the numbers here, because it largely happens to people who are close to potentially retiring anyway. They’re closer anyway. They’re in their 50s or 60s, and so retirement for some might be right around the corner if they were of that age. It’s not as visible to the eye.

They’re also not as potentially willing to fight the fight.

If this happens, if someone is discriminated against in the workplace because of their gender or their color in their 40s, they’ve got a long career ahead of them, where they need to be able to work and make a good living. They’re going to fight. For a lot of people who are close to this, they just say, “Okay, fine. I’ll take the package and I’ll leave, because I just don’t – Maybe they’ll hire me later to consult, or I don’t want to be blackballed in the industry.” I’m going to have to go try to find another job.

The affected people sometimes are not standing up for themselves as much as they should be, and that’s also part of the problem.

Connect with Patti Temple Rocks Charlie Hoehn: How can our listeners reach out to you if they if they want to get involved in this broader societal conversation, or how can our listeners even just follow you and your journey?

Patti Temple Rocks: Sure. Well, I do have a website. It’s called imnotdone.rocks. I put on a blog about eight months ago, eight or nine months ago, where I just talked about my own story and how I ended up deciding I’m not done. I still wanted to keep working. That’s when I made the commitment to speak out about it.

I was blown away by the response from that.

A lot of people told me their stories and said, “Thank you for doing this. You’re on to something.” That was part of what motivated and inspired me to write the book. I want to keep hearing from people like that, because it fortifies me and it helps me to understand the issue and the depth of the issue.

To be clear, the audience for this book is our business leaders. This isn’t a self-help book about how to get your second career going, or I’m not necessarily even offering people who feel that they’ve been discriminated with, these are the things that you should do, although there’s a little bit of that in there.

This book really is a reflection of, quite honestly, my optimism as a human. I tend to believe that when people don’t know there’s a problem and then they find out there’s a problem, they will do something about it. I truly have faith that when business leaders realize, “Okay, we’ve got the biggest population that this country has ever seen, that is now in their 50s or 60s, they want to keep working. Do we know how to make that happen for them?”

A little bit of fear should get in the purview of these business leaders, because if everybody – just with the women’s movement, if everybody all of a sudden had a me-too moment about looking backwards at their career about whether they felt like they’d ever been treated in an ageist way and started to feel empowered to speak up about it, business would have a big problem.

My hope is that businesses will decide to learn from some of the positive examples that I talk about in my book, some very specific ways that with help from HR people and attorneys. I’m empowering HR and business people to talk to their employees about this, that they can create a truly inclusive workforce that includes people not just of all ages and sexual orientations and colors, but everything.

Diverse and inclusive needs to also represent a discussion about age.

Charlie Hoehn: Excellent. Well, the final question I have is to give our listeners a challenge—tell them to do something from your book this week that will have a positive impact on their lives, on their business, that sort of thing.

Patti Temple Rocks: Chapter three in my book is actually called “The Mirror Test.” It is very specific for how business leaders can hold a mirror up to themselves and their management team, to honestly take a look at whether their organization might be unconsciously behaving in some ageist ways?

There are big examples and there are little examples, but I think that every company will probably find themselves in a few of those.

For those organizations that find themselves in a lot of those, it’s time to think about making some systemic changes in how they are operating from a people standpoint, to make sure that they are not discriminating or behaving in an ageist way.

Get Patti’s new book I’m Not Done on Amazon. Find out more at imnotdone.rocks.

Listen to more authors on building workplace culture:

People-First Culture: Michel Falcon

The Evolved Executive: Heather Hanson Wickman

The post I’m Not Done: Patti Temple Rocks appeared first on Author Hour.

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Cameron Herold, co-author of Free PR, has been on the show before. He has an amazing story, but today, we’re going to talk about how he built and led a team that generated more than 5,200 media hits for his company during his six year period.

That’s right, over 5,200 media hits. It’s crazy.

These were not small mentions. He got mentioned on CNN, CNBC, the Oprah Winfrey Show, Dr. Phil, the Big Idea with Annie Doiche. He was in Fortune, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, huge publications. He’s going to teach you how he did it in this episode.

If you’re an entrepreneur and you want to be chased by the press without hiring a PR firm, this is definitely the episode for you. By the end of this episode, you’ll know how to build your own in house PR team, which will save you thousands of dollars a month and you’ll be able to score great media coverage for free with just a few easy steps. You’re going to be shocked how simple this is.

Get Cameron’s new book Free PR on Amazon. Find out more at COOAlliance.com.

Cameron Herold: I was a kid and my father owned a gas station in a Sudbury, Ontario, up in Canada, and he owned the gas station and then he owned a little automotive, electronic recycling company that he would rebuild car parts and stuff.

He was constantly in the press, he was constantly getting media coverage, and I remember when I was like eight or nine years old, I’m like, “Why does the newspaper write about you so much? How do they know about you?”

He kind of looked at me and said, “Well they don’t know about me. I just always call them and give them stories. I call them and tell them about what we’re doing.” That was it.

It really stuck with me at a very early age that my dad wasn’t as famous as everybody thought he was. My dad was just phoning the newspaper and they just talked about it. I got it. It really made sense to me.

Fast-forward from there to I was 19 years old, I was running my first company, I was in 2nd year university. I guess I might have been 20 years old, 2nd year university, and I had 12 full time employees.

I was running a house painting company, this was 1986, and I phoned the newspaper and I phoned the local TV station and they both covered me within a week. I was on a TV talk show.

A long segment on a TV talk show and then I was one of the first few pages of the city newspaper with a photo and an article about this house painting business I was running. I just learned at a very early age that the media always needs stories, and if you call them, they’re probably going to write about it because they’re not actually out covering famous people, they’re covering what’s in front of them.

Stop Overthinking Media Charlie Hoehn: Cameron, you work with a lot of entrepreneurs. How many of them actually know that it can be as simple as that?

Cameron Herold: Well, by the time I’m done with them, they all do. I passed it over their heads. Every entrepreneurial company I’ve ever met is working too hard. In fact, I think every company is working too hard, and they try to work harder and hire really smart people and use all these systems. In reality, this business is extraordinarily simple as is getting PR. PR is extraordinarily simple, you just pick up the phone and contact the journalist.

Charlie Hoehn: I remember you used an analogy that I really liked or metaphor of a fly bashing itself into the window over and over and not realizing that hey, if you just go a few inches over to the right, you can fly out the window.

Cameron Herold: Yeah, there’s two windows, right? They’re bashing their head on one window but if they just turn 90 degrees, the other window’s wide open, why don’t they just go out that one?

I think companies lose the forest for the trees. They don’t really see what’s happening and they just kind of work harder.

They’re saying wait, what will give me the highest ROI on my time, my money and my people? What will give me the most momentum, what would give me the most leverage? A lot of it is a minimum viable—people talked about the minimum viable product. I say it’s minimum viable everything.

Just call the media—who cares? you don’t need the perfect story crafted.

It’s kind of like when we were in high school or university and you want to go hit on the cute girl, that cute guy. You just walk up and you hit on them. You just talk to them.

You don’t practice it and rehearse and role play and script it all out.

You just go and start. Well, it’s the same with the media. Unfortunately, most companies just won’t pick up the phone, they’ll try to write the perfect press release or write a perfect news wire or figure out all the angles, or they just get busy with busy, instead of just picking up the phone and calling journalist who are all sitting at their desk today thinking about “what am I going to write about next?”

You Can’t Win Without PR Charlie Hoehn: What does it mean to not be able to get PR for these companies—I mean, is it really so bad?

Cameron Herold: Yeah, the problem’s not really marketing or sales related. There’s two problems. One is, most companies don’t know how to do this, so they assume they have to hire a PR firm. They assume the PR firm who has sold them really well that the PR firm has all these amazing relationships. The PR firm has none of those relationships. They might have a few.

But they don’t have enough relationships. When I built the PR team inside of a 1-800-GOT-JUNK, we landed 5,200 stories about our company in six years. There’s no way a PR firm can have that many relationships.

We built a six-person PR team from scratch that had no experience in PR, and we simply picked up the phone and called journalists.

I think a lot of companies are wasting time and wasting money and wasting their own internal resources of talking to these PR firms, and often spending $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 a month to have them on retainer to get a very little impact.

It would be much cheaper to hire a full time person for $4,500 a month or $4,000 a month—you could have a full time PR person who’s just pitching your company.

The second part of the problem that this is fixing is most people don’t believe advertising in marketing. We just get simply too much of it. We do still believe what’s in the media. You know, even though we’re hearing these stories about false media or what’s the term they’re using now? Fake news.

You know, the whole fake news thing is true. There is a lot of fake news, but people still believe what they read, they still believe what they hear.

You’d rather be covered by the press than not, and you certainly want to be covered by the press a lot more than your competitors would be.

Press Gets Results Charlie Hoehn: What did that translate to in terms of bottom line, in terms of building your brand? I mean, how significant was the impact of all that press?

Cameron Herold: Yeah, it wasn’t 5,000 stories, it was 5,200 stories. Don’t take those away from me.

You think about it. I could very safely say, 99% of companies or larger have never received 200 stories in their lifetime, let alone in five or six years. Most will never get five. Most companies won’t be covered five times in the media.

Here’s an interesting point: I left the company as the chief operating officer in May of 2007. That was right when Facebook was starting. Twitter I think was starting a year later. We had no social media to actually amplify—we couldn’t share any of our press on any social media feeds.

Imagine if we could have shared those 5,200 stories today and shared them five times on Facebook, five times on LinkedIn, five times on Twitter. Imagine if Dig or Reddit or StumbleUpon were in existence—we could have shared it on those sites.

There was nowhere for us to amplify it.

We literally leveraged the brand just off of those stories alone. We didn’t even email them to people. The real leverage came off of the fact that we were on Oprah, we were on Dr. Phil 17 times. We were in the newspapers, we were on the Dallas Morning News, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle. Name it—we were at New York Times, Wall Street Journal. They all covered us.

Many with half paid articles and photos covered us. The real credibility came from talking about it—from having our office filled with hundreds of mounted press photos and press articles all over our offices, filled with them. When potential franchisees walk through our office, those franchise prospects saw the press. When potential employees worked into our office, they were wowed by the press.

People have never seen this much media.

We got leverage that way, we got credibility that way, we got excitement that way, and the more press that we got, the more the press would write about us.

Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, every single outlet that you listed, Oprah, New York Times, Wall Street Journal. These are the top dogs that everybody’s gunning for, it seems almost too good to be true to hear you say.

Cameron Herold: Well these were the actual print editions too. I personally, in the last three years have been in the physical print edition of Forbes magazine, the physical print edition of Fortune magazine, a physical print edition of Entrepreneur magazine, the physical print edition of Success magazine. Let alone the websites.

Plus, the number of newspapers. I’m talking about the leverage you get off of truly getting media in the actual print editions as well as online is powerful. It’s not really that hard to get. Every single one, you know, CNBC’s Squawk box. Name it, we were pretty much there.

I think the only major news outlet or outlet we did not get was we didn’t get on the Letterman show, and were trying to. We almost had Bud Nelman doing a ride along with one of our junk drivers and got sick and I canceled the episode and never rebooked it. Outside of that, we were pretty much everywhere.

Big Wins, Big Returns Charlie Hoehn: Tell me the story of your biggest get? What was the one that you really wanted and you finally landed it?

Cameron Herold: Well, Oprah for sure. Yeah, I mean, it was a long episode, it was a multiple minute episode, like probably a four or five minute episode on Oprah with multiple shots off our 1-800-GOT-JUNK trucks, the big blue and green trucks, multiple shots of our drivers, navigators wearing the big 1-800-GOT-JUNK shirts with huge names on the back.

Oprah mentioned 1-800-GOT-JUNK five or six times, the CEO Brian was on set and was on film on the show talking to her as part of the episode. Just crazy media coverage.

You know, Oprah was certainly the holy grail, yet we didn’t get much business from it in terms of selling franchises or making our franchises busy. Now, we’ve been able to talk about it for 16 years, which is pretty huge.

But I’d say the biggest piece that we got that really drove a revenue, we got a piece on CNBC Squawk box, which was around a six-and-a-half-minute episode. I actually had a similar one done on by CNN Money, which is about a three-and-a-half minute episode. The one on CNBC Squawk box was again showing our trucks, showing our drivers talking about franchises, talking about franchise fees, talking about the franchise program. I think we sold 15 or 16 franchises and the franchise fee and franchise territory fees were $40,000 each. We did about 700 thousand dollars in franchise sales because of that one piece.

Charlie Hoehn: Amazing. That right there, if you’d worked with a PR agency for instance, first of all, that piece would have never have come about but it would have more than covered every cost you ever had with a PR agency.

Cameron Herold: And then some.

I have another one. We landed in an associated press writer who wrote an article about us and we ended up in 220 newspapers on a one day period in seven countries. That’s really the holy grail I feel like.

Charlie Hoehn: When that happens, when associated press really ripples out globally.

Cameron Herold: With photo. It was powerful.

My cousin was actually traveling in Thailand at the time and he saw us in a Bangkok press and he sent me a note and he’s like, “Dude, what the–I just saw your name in a newspaper in Thailand, what the F are you doing? This is ridiculous.”

How Relevant is the Press, Really? Charlie Hoehn: I’d imagine, maybe some people are listening and they’re saying, “Cameron, even though this is all very impressive, that was back in the day, the media has changed so much now. What is it about media today?” Would you agree or disagree?

Cameron Herold: I have two media coverages this week, I was interviewed by two different podcasters on one hour episodes this week, and this is my third. Here’s three media outlets that are carrying me right now. That’s this week.

I appeared in a newspaper about 10 days ago, I appeared in a couple of people’s blog posts a couple of weeks ago.

Yeah, of course it still works, it totally works.

The media every day, every single journalist woke up this morning, sat down at their desk and thought, “What the heck am I going to write about today?”

Every photographer sat down and thought, “I wonder what good photos I could take today that will end up in whatever outlet?”

Our job is to pick up the phone and inspire them in a two minute conversation.

Just saying, “Hey, do you have two minutes? I think I have a good story for you.” They’re all going to say yes.

Charlie Hoehn: Is it really that simple to get on the phone with them? I mean, don’t many of them prefer email—and isn’t it hard to get their number?

Cameron Herold: It’s actually easier to get on the phone with them than ever before. Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s when I first started doing this, it was hard to get on the phone with them because there was a gatekeeper. You had to call the receptionist, no one had cellphones, there was no internet to find the information, there were no internet databases to get the information.

You actually had to phone the outlets and get the phone numbers to call the outlets, and then you would have to get through the receptionist and often leave a voicemail message or a physical mail message that didn’t have voice mail, most of them didn’t have voice mail.

That was really hard.

Nowadays, you can use outlets like media outlets or PR Newswire or Cision and these other databases. You can actually get all the journalists’ contact information.

Even if they say don’t phone me, the reality is nobody phones them. Nobody phones anybody anymore, so they’re going to pick up the phone if you call.

You’re not going to burn a relationship, because you don’t have the relationship in the first place.

They’re busy—they’ll forget about you in two weeks if they got upset. If you’re calling to do them a favor, if you phone and say, “Hey, do you have two minutes. I think I have a good story for you,” they’re going to say one of two things. Either, “Sure, what’s the story” or they’re going to say, “No, I’m really busy, I’m on a deadline.”

If they say they’re on a deadline, say “Great, how about I call you tomorrow or Tuesday?” If they say yes, you just give them the story, but the information’s all easily accessible. Even if you don’t want to pay the $1,500 a year for the databases, you can just look up that writer’s name or look up the outlet’s names and their contact information is often on Google.

Charlie Hoehn: My favorite type of advice is uncommon common sense. This I feel fits right into that category where it’s almost so simple and maybe even a little bit obvious that no one does it, because we overthink it.

Cameron Herold: Well, that’s what I mean about business in general—it’s why I’ve been coaching so many companies all over the world. That is why I started with the COOAlliance, it is why my books are selling so well. I see the simplicity in business and everyone else seems to be trying the hard way.

I see the window that’s open that you can fly. You can just turn and go out the open window. Meanwhile, everybody else is banging their head in the window trying harder, trying harder.

It is not because I am smarter, because I am not that smart. You work with Tucker Max, that guy is smart, right? I got 62% in high school, I got 62% in university, so I had to find the cheat sheets. I had to find the quick fixes. I had to find the shortcuts to everything.

I just think I learned how to see the shortcuts to everything now instead of the more complicated ways.

Know Where You’re Going Charlie Hoehn: A chapter that you have in the book is “know your audience to know your story.” Talk to me about this.

Cameron Herold: Yeah, well it is a pretty simple concept that Steven Covey popularized in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. One of the habits was begin with the end in mind.

If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there. That is a quote from one of my favorite characters now is the man behind the Cheshire Cat. I think most people just do things without actually pausing for a second to say, “Why am I doing it?”

So why are you doing PR? Are you doing it to raise your brand awareness? Are you doing it to give yourself more credibility? Are you doing it to drive culture inside of your company? Are you doing it to amplify your sales and marketing efforts? What I like to at least at minimum do is make sure that my PR strategy dovetails into our national and regional sales and any to the marketing messaging that we’re using.

It’s just really powerful to apply it and utilize it together as part of that mix, but most people don’t really think about it. They don’t try to tie it in or they don’t have the larger purpose.

Even when we were building 1-800-GOT-JUNK, I joined the company with 14 people at the head office when I got there, and when I left six and a half years later, we had 3,100 employees system wide. When I walked in, one of the first three things I wanted to do, the first one was raise prices. The second one was to really drive PR to leverage the brand, and third was to obsess about employee culture.

And if we did those three things, we’d win.

One of the reasons I wanted to get PR was I realized that for us to be in the press, no one else could get to press. If we were to the first to the press in every market, we would always be in the press. It would also drive our credibility. It would drive our company culture, it would help us through with recruiting. It would help us with our messaging—and we didn’t have the money to do advertising. So it is a lot cheaper than doing advertising.

That was the beginning with the end in mind.

Charlie Hoehn: How often do you see companies, entrepreneurs just mindlessly going after PR because that’s a thing that they think they need to do?

Cameron Herold: I would say much less. I think when people do cognizantly go after the media they at least have some reason for doing it. They’re thinking about it in some way—it may not be the right way. It may not be the most effective way. It may not be the most strategic way, but they are at least thinking about in some fashion. They are doing it for a reason. They do understand that they are going to get business from it.

Now most people also think that they are going to get more PR than they probably will, or more business from the press than they probably will. Just because you are covered in some newspaper like the Dallas Morning News doesn’t mean that people are going to beat a path to your door.

Media Lists 101 Charlie Hoehn: So let’s go on to the next part, which is compiling your media list. How do you go about this? Is it pretty straight forward or technical?

Cameron Herold: It’s pretty straight forward. I mean you find out who your customers are or what content your customers are devouring. So as long as you understand your customer habits or who your customer is, you understand where they spend their time and where they learn, where they absorb content and you try to target those.

Secondly, you might strategically think about what markets you are trying to move into and look at who is going to be able to hit that demographic, like a demographic profile.

Third, any outlets that you think you can get into the door with easier because momentum creates momentum, right? It’s not the perfect article, it’s just get a couple of articles in a newspaper that you can get PDFs of. You can get it online, so you can actually share it in all the social media.

It is just “get media,” and the more media you get, the more media will continue to write about you. So every article you get will lead to another article and lead to another article and lead to another article so just get started.

Charlie Hoehn: So I feel like this is a part that people don’t always fully think through. They tend to go for the biggest outlets or the ones that they really love that would mean a lot to them to be on but not necessarily where their audience is.

Cameron Herold: Yeah, exactly. That’s why again, you have to begin with the end in mind. Where are my customers? I mean it is irrelevant what I read, it’s what’s my customers devour. It is what my customers consume.

Quick Pitches Charlie Hoehn: So how do we make a simple pitch?

Cameron Herold: So when you think about what you’re covering, I want you to think about coming up with a story headline that is a very short story headline, just like the one sentence that might be the headline of the story. Then what are the five core points that make that story important to the reader or the viewer, right?

What core five points do you want them to hear or to read when they actually consume that content?

Charlie Hoehn: Why five?

Cameron Herold: That’s really all that the writer can consume.

So you are not writing the story for them. You are really saying, “Here is my story,” like the book Free PR, it is all around how to know how to craft angles and how to understand the audiences and how to pitch the writers and how to build an in house PR team and how to leverage the PR.

Those are five core points.

So there is enough for a writer to work around, right? To craft a story out of. Ask questions and talk to them about that.

Working Relationships Charlie Hoehn: That brings us to the next part, which is working with the journalist. What does that actually like beyond just giving them a call?

Cameron Herold: Journalists are more often analytical, amiable, thoughtful. They operate at a more conscientious speed, whereas I like having sales people to pitch PR because they can handle rejection. They’re good at cold calling, they are good at keeping track of their prospects and they don’t get turned away by rejection.

So when a sales person calls somebody, they can scare them off.

If you come in too strong with too much energy, you’re going to scare off the writers.

So it is really understanding the writer’s style, their behavioral traits first, respecting the writer’s time because they are busy and they’re often on deadlines. Then it is helping to give them a story to start with and then asking questions on listening. So that they can craft the story, they can craft the points into an angle.

You are helping them frame something, and if you sense that it is having a second story ready, you already got them on the phone and try story number two.

Charlie Hoehn: You also have a third section in the book, which you helped the reader master the interview process on TV, on podcast, in print and online, which is actually huge.

Cameron Herold: Not only can it butcher, it but also you won’t get the proper coverage you are looking for. So as an example, at your company office you should have big logos of your company name and art work that’s powerful and sections where either your phone number, URL are up on the walls. So that when the media comes, you can suggest those good places for photo shoots. You can stand there and talk to them and go, “This might be a good place for a photo.”

You just kind of, “Oh gee, shucks” your way into it.

They are never going to say to you, “Hey can you stand in front of your truck for a photo with the big logo” so the other one is just wearing corporate clothing that had a big logos on them, right? Or making sure that your office is completely clean.

We would have the most detail oriented people walk through our office and tell people to clean up—like tie your cables and get rid of garbage on the floor and Windex, or inside and outside of car windows.

You know, ArmorAll the tires of vehicles, just anything you can do so that everything presents to the very, very high level. No one is going to ask you to do that. You have to understand to do that on your own.

Then thirdly, create photo ops. When we had the Canadian bureau chief from associated press come to our office, we didn’t pick him up at the airport in a limousine. We didn’t have the CEO pick him up in a limousine.

We had one of our PR guys dress up as a truck driver and pick up the Canadian bureau chief in a 1-800-GOT-JUNK truck, but before he got them into the truck, he gave him a uniform to change into.

So now we have Tom Cohan, the Canadian bureau chief wearing a 1-800-GOT-JUNK outfit including the boots, right? And guess what they did? They didn’t drive to the office, they went into the junk removal job first—no writer is going to ask for that experience.

You have to understand what they are looking for and try to help them with their story.

That is why the story ended up in 220 newspapers, because we blew this guy’s mind. Everybody else would have the CEO pick him up at the airport.

Charlie Hoehn: You have to set the stage for them to happen.

Cameron Herold: Yeah, there’s really no such thing as investigative journalism anymore. I think that died in about the ‘50s or early ‘60s, where companies would actually send out journalists or writers to go out and uncover the news.

Maybe it went in as late as the ‘70s or ‘80s, but investigative journalism is just far too expensive, and now with social media and with the internet, journalists can actually find more content and more resources at a much faster pace than ever before.

But the reality is they are not out looking for it.

If you do what everybody else does or everybody else writes in newswire, writes a press release, emails it off. Now the journalist—or probably not even a journalist, usually the editor of the city desk—has 400 press releases to read through. They’re going to say no to 395 of them.

Why would you ever try to talk to somebody who is saying no 395 times a day versus picking up the phone and calling the journalist whose only other phone call is probably their mom calling to say hi.

You get through the clutter real fast.

Connect with Cameron Herold Charlie Hoehn: What is the best way for listeners to connect with you and follow you?

Cameron Herold: Over nachos. Although my weight is down 35 pounds maybe not nachos…

All of my books are on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes. If they can look up, I’ve done three books with Scribe, I’ve done Free PR, Meetings Suck and Vivid Vision. But all my books are on Amazon, and then also the COO Alliance is really my core internet property where we’re going to be running the only network of its kind in the world for the second-in-command, so that would be a great place for them to start as well.

Go to my press page on that website.

Just take a look at all the press around me, or Google my name. If you’re wondering if this is all true, just go to Google and then go to the news tab and type in my name, Cameron Herold. You’ll see so many news articles and you’ll realize this book is really powerful.

Charlie Hoehn: Wow. Yeah, it’s like a never ending scroll of press.

Cameron Herold: Don’t take my word for it.

Charlie Hoehn: The final question I have is for you to give our listeners a challenge, what is the one thing they can do from your book that will have a positive impact?

Cameron Herold: I would do it this, and exactly this: I would grab a post it note or a piece of paper, I would write down one story idea, something about your entrepreneurial journey or you overcoming adversity or your company culture or something.

It has to be like less of a sales pitch and more of a story about something—how did you decide to write your book. You know, how did a book come out of you? Whatever it’s going to be, and come up with five core bullet points.

Then pick up the phone and call three or four writers at your local newspaper and say “Hey, do you have two minutes? I think I have a good story for you,” and pitch them.

Just try the pitch. See how fast you’ll get through.

Get Cameron’s new book Free PR on Amazon. Find out more at COOAlliance.com.

Listen to more authors on growing your brand outside of the box:

The Economics of Emotion: Kyle M.K.

Words into Cash: Timothy Kim

The post Free PR: Cameron Herold and Adrian Salamunovic appeared first on Author Hour.

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For most people, work feels like a treadmill where we have to sacrifice our personal lives and even our soul. Diana Wu David, author of Future Proof, believes that having the career that we want shouldn’t require us to lose ourselves. We all deserve a sustainable work environment, and now, we can have it. Diana’s book is about reinventing work in the age of acceleration.

Before she wrote the book, Diana was a strategist and an innovator and an entrepreneur. She was the founder of Sirona Capital and Sirona Labs. Her work was focused on transforming how executives work and she helped them prepare their companies to be more entrepreneurial and resilient and successful in this era of constant change.

In this episode, Diana’s going to share real life stories that will help you become more innovative in your career and your life so you can stay resilient and relevant and enjoy your life in an ever-changing global landscape.

Get Diana’s new book Future Proof on Amazon. Find out more at Diana Wu David.

Diana Wu David: I got a call when I was at the Financial Times, sitting at my desk. Really, I know that she had been going through some hard times, but she was always the one that had a lot of hutzpah and really was like, “Come on Diana. Get off your ass and do something, don’t wallow in it.”

Her husband called me and said that she had put a bag over her head and actually killed herself. It was so shocking and so devastating.

Really, it was something I had never spoken about it until I did the TED X talk. It happened a couple of years before, it’s not like that wakeup call that transforms your life. I love to be that proactive or even emotional but truly, it was like that what-matters-moment where I had spent the day before thinking, “My god, my kids have to be in music lessons. I mean, seems like everybody’s – instrument and they are not playing an instrument and maybe I should get on that and I don’t have time for that…” What everybody goes through.

If you don’t have kids then it’s like your own aspirations that are left unfulfilled.

I just thought, “Wow, this really doesn’t matter.” What if I’m pushing these kids to be the best that they can be for all the external markers…They’re not resilient enough to cope. You start to see that a lot around the world, where people are just supper ambitious and in pursuit of these external successes without the ability to bounce back. That was fundamentally the sort of a touchstone for me when things get crazy and was also a time when I was working eighty hours a week.

I was really obsessed about the security of my corporate job and security financially. I was prestigious and was traveling the world. I spent so much time in that, I was never investing time in making myself more resilient.

If I lost my job, I would have been a totally at a loss.

I spent a lot of time thinking about both my kids and local school kids and stuff, but I was never making myself Future Proof.

I wasn’t investing time in being more adaptable or having a broader skillset or even just being more resilient.

That’s my very personal story. Then I worked with incredible senior leaders, I set up this independent board training, and these guys were CEOs in major corporations and had started their own companies.

We were teaching them some fundamentals of how to be more effective in their boards or how to transition to those experiences or those obligations or those opportunities.

They would always say, “Diana, can I have a coffee with you? Can we talk about like some next steps?” and I thought, “My god, these people are like 10 times smarter than me, what on earth can I tell them?”

It made me realize that a lot of them were going through a version of this. These guys were looking out at a longer life. They had been incredibly successful.

They were sitting there looking at the next 30 years going, “How could I possibly do anything that will top what I have right now?”

How can I be in the world in a time when longevity means I’m going to have a hundred year life, but I’m not really sure what to do? And organizations haven’t kept up, the world hasn’t kept up with this experience this sort of collision of disruption and longevity that we see in the world.

Future Unfocused Charlie Hoehn: Can you kind of paint the picture a little bit for why it is such a challenging problem for people?

Diana Wu David: Yeah, I can totally relate to that feedback because I spent a lot of time in the equivalent of the inner city working with secondary school students. These are people who, in a big city of seven million people, will have come into my office and have never been on to the central business district. They’ve never been in a city full of skyscrapers, they have never been up the elevator to the 40th floor and sat in a boardroom talking to somebody who is really different than them.

I spent a lot of time on the future of work with people who I feel really don’t have access. Here we’re talking about people who, frankly, do. One of the things I feel is that it’s so important to capture this group of people and have them still engaged to contribute.

We have so many problems in our society that it would be a shame that people at age 60 were like okay, well, I don’t have a job so I’m going to just binge on Netflix.

Charlie Hoehn: Haven’t a lot of them been sold on that as the dream? Instead of Netflix, maybe some of them think golf or hang out on the beach like retirement. The cease of work.

Diana Wu David: Yeah, I think that that’s the dream, and it’s kind of like a bait and switch from what I’ve seen. First of all, people are not taking time to slow down or enjoy their hobbies.

I think as you have experienced with people—even in my generation, I’m a gen Xer—we learned and went to university and then did our job and then we were promised the nirvana. But the reality is that very few people can do that for 30 years. Most people will spend maybe six months, maybe a year, reconnecting with the things that they like to do when they didn’t have to always be running around.

Then they get bored.

The reality is that they probably will live a lot longer. If they retire at 60, 30 years for themselves, they’ll be healthy. So they can work and a lot of them need to either because there’s just this sense of fear of that length of time.

You can say, great, I’m 60, I worked like 40 years, but is that going to pay for the next 30?

I think that’s something that at all levels, there’s a pride from work. There’s a financial necessity, There’s a pride, there’s an intellectual stimulation. I think that people really want to continue working in some capacity—maybe not 80 hours a week and flying all around, but they want to contribute.

We even did a survey when we set up the program for financial times for board directors, and we said, why do you do this? Is it intellectual stimulation, is it the money, what is it?

They said, we just feel like we’ve developed all this knowledge and we really want to give back. We want to have it be useful for the businesses or organizations or causes we care about, as in the next several decades.

What’s Coming? Charlie Hoehn: Can we get into this bit of the specifics of the future of work? Is this all stuff that we’ve heard of like the robots are coming and AI and whatnot? Is there more to it?

Diana Wu David: I think that what I wanted to do in terms of the first part of the book. You hear a lot of the threats of automation, headlines about how jobs will be lost. I have spent time working at a sort of governmental policy level on those issues, and I think that they’re important at that sort of policy level. An organizational level.

I think actually, a policy level is the most awareness because people are thinking about transition to things like basic income and those kind of things.

I think if you read the press then you’ve seen the headlines before. I wanted to make it salient to people who were kind of at the leadership level.

I wanted to make it personal.

Companies are just waking up. We’ve had the millennial conversation, and now, most organizations have not really thought about that. They haven’t thought about on a sort of company level, whether or not they would raise their retirement age.

They might not have thought about, “I can continue to have some of that talent,” you know? They’re really struggling with it, and people who are in senior positions are often thinking about the future of work from how can I protect my team, how can I protect my organization, how can I contribute to the community I’m in. Could I give better access to train or educate kids or how can I educate my own kids? These are the last people to think, “What does the future of work mean to me?”

It does mean that it’s not robots coming to automate the factory. That’s the biggest impact you’ll see and it makes the best headlines, but a lot of people are not thinking about, how will disruption change the way that I’m working or contributing. They’re also not thinking about it from an opportunistic point.

It was a revelation to me that after having like a running original sales team and having to deal with virtual teams, really worked so well for me when I had a portfolio career. Now, everything was on Google docs and Google calendars and we called in. I could be anywhere in the world and it really just worked.

I did set up my own fashion label, which was AI enabled, and I had 15 people working for me and no office.

Opportunities in the Future Charlie Hoehn: AI enabled fashion label?

Diana Wu David: Well, yes. It would scan you to tell you what your size was and then manufacture clothing specifically based on that. The AI sort of aspect would be learning all the time what it was you liked what it was you didn’t like, what might be better for you, etc.

There was a lot of technology behind it. It was an idea with a huge group of virtual workers coming together. The website done in Ukraine and a freelance PR person to do global PR. Those are the kind of things that I think that entrepreneurs know.

I really work with a lot of entrepreneurs, investment entrepreneurs. They’re like yeah, of course.

But people who have been in corporate entities have had less exposure.

There’s less opportunity to realize that if they are going to transition to something which is a little different, there are all these opportunities in the future to not do some of the things that can be automated. To collaborate so that you don’t have to do everything yourself.

I think that regardless of whether you’re going to stay and transition your team or your company to something that’s more Future Proof or you’re going to try and do it yourself, people need to know more about some of the elements that go on. It’s not that robots are coming and we’re all going to be out of work.

It’s much more like, the robots are coming. How can we work with machines to make this better? How can we do more, in addition to just transforming the company at scale or transforming your department.

Investing in You Charlie Hoehn: Now, people listening to this want to know how to be prepared for the future. How do they invest in themselves?

Diana Wu David: I spend time in the intellectual future of work world, and when I wrote the book, I was hoping to include something that you don’t see in the future of work conversation as much, which was the time that it requires to really think about what will make your life successful.

When you’re thinking about the future of work and you’re thinking about the perpetual reinvention that might require—experimenting and trying to put really disparate pieces together of your life and your experience over time. The thing that is the big anchor for me and for others that I spoke to was really the values that you would anchor your life and would be a through line in terms of your personal narrative. The sort of collaboration or the support network that you put in place, because I don’t live in the town that I grew up in and I don’t have a neighborhood where I’ve known the people I do now. I’ve moved quite a bit from my career and for the promise of adventure.

People don’t have those support networks.

That is an aspect of the future of work where we all have a job every two years and we have different projects and it is sort of the gig economy as well, where people really need to consciously think about where they’re going to have a network of support, a network of collaborators and what kind of things that they can do.

It’s really promised to be really exciting, but it is also volatile and uncertain. So that is the essence of that part of the book, and I feel like I couldn’t do it justice without really anchoring all of the innovation that I bring to people’s careers with some of the more fundamental aspects that in aid of acceleration often drop to the bottom of the list or we don’t even think about it at all because we’re not taught that in school.

Putting It into Practice Charlie Hoehn: In making this book, did you make changes to your own life? Did you get more clear on your own values perhaps?

Diana Wu David: I think that it was an opportunity. It was an opportunity to be inspired by the stories of other people who are making different choices. I could see in the people that I interviewed that they had decided to often make hard choices to either spend more time with their families or to pursue something that seemed crazy to most people and so in that sense you know I made changes, I think less maybe to the ideas that I had and more to the execution.

We all say that we want to be healthier, we want to spend more time with our family, but very few of us then spend our time that way. So that was a big change that I had to be constantly reminding myself of.

In some cases my children would say, “You know mom, you said that…”

One time I was booked to speak about the book. I was so excited writing a book and all of these ideas, and I was invited to speak in Singapore. I was on the phone going:

“Yeah, that would be great!” I could totally see these big internet companies were there, and I got a little carried away and I got off the phone and my son said, “Mom are you going to Singapore on my birthday?” and I was like, “Oh damn!”

The publically putting it out there that I am going to change my life and these are my priorities, that did change—and also it was exactly what I described in the book, as experimenting.

During my corporate career, that was going off to try other things, getting involved in other organizations, joining boards. I was joining the board of a robotics education company because I wanted to know more about how people were getting prepared for the future of work. Working with machines I think is incredibly important but those were experiments that I did and then tried to get feedback to then live my life, That is one of the things that really changed.

It is something I did in my corporate job as a corporate entrepreneur and as a non-corporate entrepreneur. The idea of defining a test and doing it and getting feedback and iterating and taking small bets. I did that much more consciously in my own life, and hopefully I can share with others.

Success with Future Proof Charlie Hoehn: What are some of your favorite stories or case studies from them particularly in part two, in cultivating the virtues for people to stay engaged and relevant. Do any stories come to mind?

Diana Wu David: Yeah, I think that one of my favorite stories in the book is Brian Tang, who I have known for some time. He started out as a lawyer at a white shoe law firm called Sullivan & Cromwell, and then he went to Silicon Valley during the dot com boom.

At the time that I met him, he was at a bank and heading up and trying to develop their Chinese investment banking joint venture. So the kind of person who you’re like, “Ray you’ve done it all, go golf.”

So he left his job at the bank to go set up Asia Capital Markets Institute because he really felt like conduct was one of the issues during the financial crisis and that he was dealing as a lawyer with regulation. He wanted to form a body whereby he can have more impact by as he put it, sort of leaving the aircraft carrier to herd the ships or to herd the aircraft carriers and really make a difference in that way.

He was like, “I have done the majority of the top IPOs in the last couple of years. So do I just want to keep doing this or do I want to try something else?”

He also set up on the side, he said to himself, “What do I want my kids to be looking at when they look at me? What would be a good role model for my children, and how can I spend more time with them?” So he started Technovation, which was cultivating maker mindsets in kids, including his own son.

That was something that I had the privilege of many years, so it wasn’t just writing the book. Even during the book, his involvement’s changed. He went from doing this thing where everybody thought he was crazy to then adding on this maker fair and everybody said, “You’re like a capital market legal guy. What are you doing starting a maker movement for kids?”

The interesting thing, over time, is that he plugged through the uncertainty.

He was doing things like the first rig tech hackathon in Hong Kong. Recently it’s all come together and he was appointed the founding director of the Universities Interdisciplinary Law Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship Program. So that to me is such a great story because it’s not like you go off and experiment and reinvent yourself in one moment. It is really this journey of thinking about the things that you’re already fantastic and all of the experience that you have had and then other things that you think are interesting.

A lot of people look out and go, “And then you are taking all of these small bets—does that add up to anything?”

I think that he is always been engaged and has had this fantastic growth and learning, but he is the only person who in my opinion, who could ever have that job and those are the jobs that I think are the jobs of the future. He’s definitely one that it is exactly that.

He was like, “How can I stay engaged? What is important to me? How can I stay relevant? I could do the same job and be paid well and probably do it incredibly well, but how can I be even more ambitious for myself in crafting my life on my terms?”

Maximizing Impact Charlie Hoehn: I would love for you to tell one more story from the third part of your book which is maximize the impact of your actions. I know the previous story fell a little bit into that category for sure but could you maybe tell another story from this section of the book?

Diana Wu David: I think that the last part of the book is really coming back to the environment that we live in and the deeper values you hold and where those two can intersect. I talk a lot about rebalancing a portfolio and redefining success in those chapters, because it is something that I think that it is not specific to people who are maybe embarking on an on core career.

It is something that everyone will have to be thinking about, because if what the future of work pundits say is true, we will spend more time having careers and transitions and then going onto a new job or project or career. Maximizing the impact is about also maximizing those moments of transition. To really think about not just what do I want to do, but what do I want? Is all the work that I am putting in here giving me the life that I want to look back on?

So that is really redefining. It is living your work in the context of your broader life as opposed to living the life within the context of your work, which is that there are so many more people who are wiser than me but that was what I had done for most of my life and frankly what I think I was taught to do.

Rebalance the portfolio is really an approach to get there.

So thinking about auditing doesn’t usually inspire a lot of people, but I talk a lot about an audit of relationships and time spent really reviewing that to see, “Is this what I said I wanted, and am I doing it?” in a nutshell. Most people find that maybe they aren’t.

Tim Ferriss famously looks back at the time that he spends. He’s really good at this, every year and says, “What did I do? What did I spent my time on? Let us look at the calendar.” Then he rigorously prunes it, much better than I could ever do, the things that are not really serving his definition of success or even his day to day sense of fulfillment.

So that is something that I think is really actionable and has been really successful and defines the people who are running around thinking, “Oh well, maybe I’ll do this, that and the other” versus the people who are really intentional about crafting a life where contribution and work is a part of it but really working on some of the other aspects and soft skills—skills that will allow them to be great people in addition to have a great career.

Connect with Diana Wu David Charlie Hoehn: I’ve got a few more questions for you Diana. The first question I have is what is the best way for our listeners to connect with you and follow you?

Diana Wu David: I think that they can go to the website at www.dianawudavid.com and I have a Future Proof checklist there, which is mercifully short because I have a very short attention span.

I’ve had a lot of people say, “Where do I start?” and I have a couple of questions that just allow you, 11 questions, go through to see where the gaps are. It is a pretty broad outlook and it goes through life, it goes through career, it goes through a lot of things.

And that allows you to think of where can I start, what is it that I want to work on now. Then of course, they can certainly feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn where I spend most of my social media time, or many of the other social medias. That is the one that I pay the most attention to.

Charlie Hoehn: Excellent and the final question is, give our listeners a 15 second challenge basically. What is the one thing they can do from your book this week that will have a positive impact on their life?

Diana Wu David: I think that they can ask themselves, if you lost your job or your industry today, what ideas do you have that could reinvent yourself to take steps and take steps towards making the connections or building the skills and trying things out there? So that is really, what could you do to reinvent yourself if all that what you have right now is no longer available?

For people who find that too daunting, it would really be to write down five things that nurture you. For me, it is going for a walk when things get really bad or going to have coffee with a friend. Very simple and just write them down and put them in your bathroom mirror. In addition to the full bore, ferocious ambition to do new things, you need to have the support that will help you go through a very uncertain process to get fantastic results.

Get Diana’s new book Future Proof on Amazon. Find out more at Diana Wu David.

Listen to more authors on professional resilience:

Reverse Engineer Your Future: Paul James

Pivot: Jody Ray

The post Future Proof: Diana Wu David appeared first on Author Hour.

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A lot of businesses today focus on data, numbers, and sales projections, but Kyle M.K., author of The Economics of Emotion, believes that finding success is more about understanding people and what drives your customers. Kyle learned this while he was working with and studying companies like Apple, Disney, The Ritz Carlton, and Starbucks.

What he observed was the potential of emotion.

He believes it is the number one untapped market is what people feel when they participate in an experience with your company. If you know your company might be losing customers because you’re making them upset and you want to create joy and actually keep them, this is the episode for you.

Get Kyle’s new book The Economics of Emotion on Amazon. Find out more at KyleMK.com.

Kyle M.K.: My career started at an Apple retail store. I was what they call a concierge, which is no longer a thing. Concierges were at the doors greeting people, they were checking people in for their appointments, and then they were answering the phones and in the back of the store.

It wasn’t my first job ever, but it was like my first job out of high school. I was trying to figure out how to play the game of professionalism. How do I grow in a company? I was very good at observing what made other people successful and trying to emulate that.

Apple teaches every single one of their retail employees is that the relationship is far more important than the product.

If you build a relationship, then the products and the purchases will come—but not to focus on doing a hard sell of an iPhone or of a MacBook or anything. Figure out what people do for a living and how technology could help them. It’s not necessarily like, “Have you thought about this? This has all this really great features.”

It’s more of like, “Well, have you thought about this, it has all these really great benefits for you,” right? The feature versus benefit argument.

I eventually became a trainer for Apple retail, where I got to kind of preach what I have been practicing and see these ‘aha’ moments in people. It seemed kind of obvious. Like yeah, you’re selling to a person so shouldn’t you focus on the person, not necessarily the product?

The product’s not going anywhere, but the person could.

It seemed obvious to me, but folks who were coming in from other jobs or like other backgrounds, it was very clearly a new concept for them.

A Lightbulb Moment Charlie Hoehn: Why was it a new concept for them?

Kyle M.K.: That’s a good question. I don’t know. I feel like there’s a lot of training. A lot of these folks are either coming out of college or from other jobs, and both of those places, you’re not really taught to focus on the individual who is consuming. You focus on the product that they are consuming.

If you go to school for civil engineering, you’re not thinking about the people on a bridge, you’re thinking about the bridge and how the bridge is structured, right?

You’re not really thinking about how the bridge will help alleviate stress when it comes to a commute or anything. Some of the best civil engineers will think of that, but that’s not what they teach. That goes with nearly every major that you could take in college outside of anthropology or any sort of human studies, right?

If you had to do sales somewhere else, like a Best Buy or something, which is common for Apple store employees, they never tell you to ask questions of the customer and see what the customer is really looking for, like if the customer comes in for an iPad but what they really need is a computer.

There’s no way to find that out unless you ask questions.

Places like Best Buy don’t consider the repercussions of selling the wrong product. They just focus on selling the product. When I was seeing this aha moments at Apple, it surprised me that most people were like wow, we don’t even have to like memorize all the features of a computer, we just have to talk to people?

It seemed like they were just like, how on earth does Apple function with that type of like mindset? I think they quickly found out, once they got on the floor, that this is actually brilliant. It takes a lot of stress off. None of them worked off of commission or anything.

Took a lot of stress off of them, and they’re like, if I don’t sell it, it’s just because that the product wasn’t right for that person or that I didn’t uncover a need by asking enough questions. It wasn’t because the product is bad or because they’re bad, it’s just because it just wasn’t right.

A lot of times, that was the minority of experiences that you would have as a retail employee, where someone would come in wanting to get a computer and then they would walk out with nothing. That rarely happened.

The product might change, they might have walked away with an iPad versus a computer or vice versa, but in most cases, when you focus on the person, it ends up working out for a sale—or more so for the relationship because they come back, they want to see you, they want to hear about your life now and you start to gain friends. They want to come to the Apple store for a Genius Bar appointment rather than doing it on the phone because they know that people in the store are super helpful and friendly.

Maybe they can see their friends there and they come in for training. Apple was really like the seed that was planted on how they manage stuff and then when I left Apple to go found what later turned into a lifestyle brand, we were writing this coffee table book for this lifestyle brand, and I was going around Texas and interviewing small business owners of all different types, about like, their story and their success story and you know, what makes them want to do stuff and nearly every single one of them just you know, was running into this problem, they’re like, “our market is so saturated” and we don’t know how to separate ourselves from the next person who makes bespoke necklaces or boots or jeans or you know, baseball bats…

It occurred to me that the employees at Apple who were going through training, it’s kind of a microcosm for all the people that exist in the business world.

They’re trying to separate themselves, and they’re putting so much effort into the design of their necklaces and the design of their jeans and stuff like that, but they’re not thinking about who are these people who are wearing the necklaces and wearing these jeans.

How do you want to make them feel?

Do you want them to be more comfortable in their own skin? Do you want them to be a little bit more bold when it comes to fashion, so you create more bold necklaces?

If you’re not planning on making someone feel something with your product, then why make it at all? Why make a complacent product? It doesn’t make sense. There was this like huge ‘aha’ moment for me, and hindsight’s 20/20. You look back on your life and you’re like wow, there’s this pattern or this through point that goes all the way through and says, there’s this one theme throughout your professional career. If you were to put it in a nice package, this is what it would look like.

The thing that motivates me the most and the thing that gets me excited when I talk to people and especially business owners that I’ve consulted for or just talk to in casual setting—the thing that I found that nobody really thinks of—is the biggest untapped market is how people feel when they participate in an experience. Whether that experience is a football game or a shopping experience or a movie even, no one really puts the experience of a customer first.

They don’t consider that their product of their new phone or is the product of their stadium or…what you’re trying to do is get someone to fall in love with you and be loyal to your company. If you’re not focused on that, then what are you focused on?

That’s the equation that you’re trying to solve for, but no one’s actually looking after the equals sign. They’re all focused on the equation.

Not Planning for the Future Charlie Hoehn: So they need to sell, but they’re focused on what they’re going to get rather than helping their customers fall in love with them by actually paying attention to what they’re going through. Is that fair to say?

Kyle M.K.: Yeah, it’s really funny, because what these companies are doing, they’re coming from a place of scarcity but really, it’s a place of fear. They don’t want to fail.

Even in the book, I explain that fear does this thing to you to where you might put so much effort into a single thing because of fear, but it’s all short term effort, right? Like you are so short sighted when it comes to fear that you’re missing the actual objective.

When a startup is in survival mode and they’re running out of cash, they’re going to start making really bold choices that are all short sighted. Nearly every decision is going to become short sighted when you’re running out of money, because they need to see profits sooner than later. They need to get in the black.

Whatever it is, they are like, we need to figure this out sooner than later and whatever it gets us there faster is better—but then, like a credit card, after you get funding or something, you start to realize, shit, I have to start paying off all of this debt, all of these shortsighted decisions that I made. I have to go back and undo all of it to make it a little bit more long term.

Yeah, these businesses who are not focusing on the person, not focus on the relationship, rather focusing solely on their product—obviously, you have to make a great product, but if you’re only focused on the product and nothing else, you’re living in this box, you have these terrible horse blinders. It’s such a short-sighted, fear-based response to sales and to business.

It’s just not the right way to go about product development or service development. Anything like that, it’s very short sighted.

The Right Kind of Mission Charlie Hoehn: It says in your book that you’ve worked with and studied not just apple but also companies like Disney, the Ritz Carlton, Starbucks—world class industry leaders. Did they impart you with the same lesson when you study them or were there other things that you learned about how to build a business that everyone will love?

Kyle M.K.: No, they definitely have the same foundation as like putting people first which is why I believe like they’re at the top of their respective industries.

If you take Ritz Carlton for example, their motto is “We are ladies and gentlemen, serving ladies and gentlemen,” right? It doesn’t say we have the cleanest floors and rooms and we provide the best service. It doesn’t talk about the service or the products that they’re contributing to society.

It talks about the people who are not only making the experience great but also the people who will take part in the experience—ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. It puts the employees on the same level as the professional guests or distinguished guests that they serve.

It very clearly states we care more about people than our product.

Disney is similar. Disney, their entire purpose statement is we create happiness, right? I think the full thing is we create happiness by providing the best in entertainment for people of all ages. But it says we create happiness, right? Six Flags, which is very similar to Disney World in the sense that they have a theme park and have a bunch of characters that they use, their mission is to surround the best rides in the world with entertainment from music and theater and film and television.

Nowhere in there does it express how they want their customers to feel at all. They’re just like, we have the best rides with the best entertainment and that’s it. We don’t care about your happiness, we just came up with a rollercoaster.

What Do You Want in Your Business? Kyle M.K.: I spoke with the president of Starbucks, and I was actually building an app for like retailers and coffee shops and hotels—I wanted them to be able to personalize a customer’s experience in real time and without having to impose on someone’s privacy. It’s like this huge project, and I ended up in front of the president of Starbucks.

It was an interesting conversation, because they’re trying to solve this problem. How do we make things more human-centric, right? Where we can recognize people as they come in and say, “Hey, it’s good to see you, how are the kids?” You know, that kind of stuff.

We had a really long conversation. I probably learned more about how Starbucks functions than me trying to sell him this app. I completely lost focus, I was like, “Tell me more about how you function.”

You go back and read about everything that Starbucks was built on and what they do, and their foundation is that they want to inspire and nurture the human spirit one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time. You’re like, damn.

Dunkin’ Donuts, I’m from the northeast. They are just like, you know, the mecca of all energy. Theirs is like, we want to make the freshest, most delicious cup of coffee with the freshest, most delicious donuts, quickly and courteously in a well merchandised store. And you’re like, compared to Starbucks where they want to inspire and nurture the human spirit—you’re like yeah, I’ll choose Starbucks over Dunkin’ Donuts 10 times out of 10, you know?

The only reason why I would choose Dunkin’ over Starbucks at that point, if what you’re trying to go for is like, I want a company to care about me, then the only reason why you would choose Dunkin’ is if they were closer or more convenient. But even that case, I know plenty of stories where people would rather travel further to a business that they like and are loyal to them to a more convenient location of a competitor.

Charlie Hoehn: Right. You know, what you’re describing and maybe this is a bit heavy but you know, the Starbucks versus Dunkin’ comparison is a good one because both of those are very successful businesses, right? Maybe this is a bit too woo, but I think about this stuff of like, we’re on a spiritual journey and we all are, for our companies, they are a reflection of where we are in that journey.

Do you want to push higher in your service or do you want to be more utilitarian and more focused on just the basics?

Kyle M.K.: If you’re a business and your goal is to have a delivery company that has like 100% or a high completion rate, let’s say you want to make sure that everything is delivered within 48 hours and that’s your whole purpose, then what happens when someone who has a better logistical mind than you finds a way to do it in 24 hours with a higher completion rate?

You just lost all of your customers.

If you’re a one selling point was that we deliver things in this amount of time at this level of success and then someone comes in and they’re like, actually, I’m better than that then like, you just lost all of your customers, there’s no reason why anyone would stay with you because you only sold them on these features of yours.

But if a delivery company comes along and says, we have the friendliest delivery people out and we want to make sure that every single package is handled with care because we know the reason why you’re receiving this is because the people who sent it to you care very much that you get it—then, any company that comes along after that says like hey, we’re going to deliver in 24 hours, people are going to be like yeah, you can deliver in 24 hours but it’s probably going to be trashed by the time it gets there.

You’re not going to take care of my product or take care of my package.

I’m going to stay with company A in that case. I want someone to like take care of it. You can just imagine someone throwing a box from one truck to another because they’re trying to do it as quickly as possible.

A Quick Look at Amazon Charlie Hoehn: The companies you’ve talked to have done a great job with emotion. How do you think Amazon is doing?

Kyle M.K.: Amazon is such a weird thing because it is probably the most consistent online retailer. I know what to expect when I order from Amazon versus if I ordered from a Walmart or a Target. I think that Amazon’s super power is very clearly logistics.

How do they get things to you as soon as possible?

My only trepidation when it comes to being a customer of Amazon is that they don’t really put people first, right? Although it’s a consistent experience and it’s very convenient, it’s very process based. They put a lot of focus on their process but very little focus on their people.

Up until recently, they obviously didn’t have a reasonable like minimum wage for the amount of hours that people were putting in. You just hear these stories—these are the people who were serving you and they’re being worked to the bone and don’t have another choice. It’s very difficult to find a job.

You start to think, well, the more I use Amazon, the harder those people need to work.

Not everybody is that conscious when they are buying things, I understand that. But it goes into the purpose of the business. I don’t actually have their purpose statement memorized, but I would imagine that it is close to we want high market share. We want to be able to have products that we can ship to people and all over multiple industries. We want to be able to ship appliances and books and we want to make movies now. We want to ship entertainment to people.

They just want to fill people’s homes with stuff, it seems.

I think their best product so far has been Alexa, the Echo, and that’s one of those things where they definitely put the customer experience of a digital assistant before the digital assistants. I mean obviously you’re thinking of making a product better. If you compare it to Siri—which I think is the worst digital assistant, which is hard to say being a former Apple person—when you ask Siri something, she’s super slow to respond. She doesn’t always understand what you are saying.

What did I say, it was a stupid query that I have, it was like, “On average how much is a dozen roses?” And she’s like, “Here’s the weather.” You’re like, “What?” Rather than saying, “I don’t know,” here’s a completely different thing.

I have a screenshot where she understood what I said. The dictation worked, but the assistant part didn’t. She just couldn’t get it. So that is like a small rabbit hole—but the thing about Alexa is that I’ve read that Jeff Bezos was so obsessed with the response time for Alexa that if someone asked the question, just like a human being, you shouldn’t need five seconds to process. You should be able to process while they’re talking and you should be able to get back to them as soon as they’re done, if not shortly after they are done.

Beginning Awareness of Emotion Charlie Hoehn: Can you give us an overview of these core emotions and a beginner’s guide to these emotions?

Kyle M.K.: Part two is all about the psychology behind emotions or as much as you can put to a small section of a book. And a lot of this information came from a very well-known psychologist named Dr. Paul Ekman, and he has written a bunch of books. He’s has a TV show based off of him. He was the main psychologist behind the Pixar movie Inside Out.

He just knows a lot about human communication, but mainly in emotion and facial expressions and body language.

He is like my Justin Timberlake, right? I aspire to meet him one day and go to his one of speaking gigs and get a shirt signed type of thing.

If you are to do a cover of a Justin Timberlake album, obviously it is not going to sound as good and it is not going to have as much heart, but I did the best that I possibly could without offending him. It was distilling down five core emotions that he thinks make up the rest of our emotional DNA—it’s joy, sadness, fear, anger and disgust. So it is the same emotions that you find in the Pixar movie Inside Out.

Then there is a sixth one that is the red-headed step child—it is surprised. Quickly going to that, you could think of surprise in the vowels. You have A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y. Surprise is the sometimes Y. So this whole part, he says here is how joy works, here is where joy exists from an evolutionary standpoint. Here is how to recognize joy, here is how to recognize joy in business.

Charlie Hoehn: So let me pause you there. I want to dive into joy specifically. Why does it exist from an evolutionary standpoint and how does it look in business?

Kyle M.K.: It exists to tell us when we’re in a safe environment, right? So it’s meant to make us feel safe and comfortable. When we feel joy, especially if someone makes us feel joy, we feel comfortable with them. That is why at least my wife will say, my way out of my league wife will say, “Well he’s funny.”

It’s because I make her laugh and I make her happy and that makes her feel safe.

So it is all about identifying who and want we want to be surrounded by.

Charlie Hoehn: Wow so I believe on the Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs safety, is at the very bottom. Is it a foundational one. So is it fair to say if you are not experiencing joy there is a possibility that you are not feeling safe?

Kyle M.K.: Yeah because if you were to break down the other core emotions like fear clearly is not safe, disgust is not safe, anger is not safe, and sadness, that is you are suffering. You are clearly not saf. So out of the five core emotions, yeah, joy is the only one that provides a strong feeling of safety.

Creating Joy in Business Charlie Hoehn: All right so let’s talk about joy in business then.

Kyle M.K.: It is surprising how rarely businesses will attempt to trigger joy directly. Obviously people are like, “If you have a happy customer then you’ll have a happy business.” But they don’t really design their product or service to trigger happiness.

They just want their product to work and to fit a need like, “I am thirsty.” Okay here is a Gatorade. You don’t really think about how happy someone is made. Coca-Cola thinks about how happy, and they push that a lot.

So joy in business is like when you get a coupon in your email that says, “Hey, happy birthday. Here’s a free drink from us from Starbucks.” That is them trying to attempt joy.

I feel that approach is kind of cold.

It would be better if you’d walk into the store and they’re be like, “Hey, happy birthday!”

But that’s them trying to trigger joy and say, “Hey, happy birthday! We want you to celebrate, here is a thing on us…Here is something that you don’t have to worry about to make your birthday less stressful,” or whatever. Give you less things to worry about, finances in this case.

Charlie Hoehn: Give us some examples of ways that you think would be good for them to trigger joy?

Kyle M.K.: Well for one they could put more people on the floor so when you are looking for something it doesn’t take 30 minutes. The thing is that I guess there’s two different ways to look at it. You can either positively trigger an emotion or negatively trigger an emotion.

What that means is when you positively trigger an emotion, you are trying to trigger a specific emotion. When you are negatively trying to trigger an emotion what you’re trying to do is reduce a certain emotion.

So having more people on the floor will reduce the frustration of having to find someone, you won’t feel angry. You may not feel joy. Maybe you are happy because you got in and out, but in the moment, you won’t feel joy that you found someone so easily—you’ll just feel relief that you didn’t have to go out and find someone, which is different.

From a BestBuy standpoint, When someone comes in, you know the thing that I hate is when someone comes up to you and says, “Hey, do you need help with anything?” And you’re like, “No, I am fine. I am just looking around.” And then not two seconds later a different person comes up and says, “Hey, do you need help with anything?” And you’re like, “No, I am fine,” and then four more people over the course of the next 10 minutes all come up and ask you the same thing.

If you are actually trying to help someone, then you should do it at the front of the door. You should wait at the front and say, “Hey, can I help you find anything?”

If someone is saying, “No I am just looking around,” then you say, “Okay, no problem. Well if you need somebody go to these places and that is where you’ll find them.”

We are not going to roam aimlessly throughout the store looking for people who need help. We’re going to tell you where we are and then if you need help from the get go, I am here to help and I am going to walk you through the store myself, right?

If someone who needs help comes in…get them help sooner than later.

If someone needs help they’re going to go to that front person and say, “Hey, where do I find that?” And that person is not going to be able to walk with them. So they are going to just point and be like, “Oh it is in the back of the right corner of the store.” And then they get over there and they find their product and now they have to go find someone to unlock the cage to get the product, and then the Best Buy employee doesn’t feel comfortable leaving it with you because you are going to, I don’t know, escape the store somehow with that product now.

So either they walk with you to the front—but not because they’re trying to be nice. It is just because they think you’re a criminal, or they just bring it up to the front themselves and they’re like, “Hey, you can just find this at the front.” It is a terrible experience all around. If you actually want to help people, you would stand at the front and say, “Hey, do you need help?” And you’d be like, “No I am just looking around.”

“Great, well if you need help this is where you find someone.”

Stories from The Economics of Emotion Charlie Hoehn: Are there any stories from the book that come to mind or case studies you want to share?

Kyle M.K.: So this is talking about design your product or your service, the customer facing thing that your business does for emotion, and the main part of that section talks about how to build a product that either negates the negative emotion or a promotes a positive one, right?

And when you think about your entire experience—let’s say the shopping experience of Lucky Jeans or the unboxing process of a new drone. Every little tiny design detail, whether you like it or not as a manufacturer or as a business, will trigger some sort of feeling, and this goes even to the website or your app that you use, right?

If your app is slow, you are going to frustrate people. If your unboxing process has so much tape and a bunch of styrofoam that gets everywhere, that’s going to frustrate people. But if it is super simple and smooth and easy to open and clean and not dirty you are going to negate all of this disgust. You are going to negate frustration.

If a product doesn’t have a full battery whenever you take it out of the box, you’re going to promote sadness. People aren’t going to feel good about that. They are going to be sad and frustrated at the same time because they can’t play with their new thing that they just bought.

If you are not thinking about the emotion or the emotional experience of the person who is buying into your product or service, then you’ve lost the game already. If that is not the first thing you’re thinking of, you have lost.

Charlie Hoehn: Totally and I want to give an example here because I’m so glad you brought up apps. It is really hard to retain users and one of the best apps that creates joy that I’ve seen is Wish.

If you haven’t checked out Wish, download Wish and go through their onboarding experience as a customer. They give you a free gift and mail it to you and this is their way of gathering your information, your shipping, and doing it in a way that creates joy rather than frustration, right?

Kyle M.K.: Yeah, that’s a perfect example. That is definitely a perfect example and a bunch of app companies are like, “How do we get all of this information to our app without making someone feel like their privacy is being compromised?” And that is the problem that I was trying to solve with my app years ago. It is like, “How do you make someone feel like their privacy isn’t going to be compromised or taken advantage of in order for them to get something that they want?” which is a personable experience with really great service.

Connect with Kyle M.K. Charlie Hoehn: I want to wrap up the episode with a couple final questions. The first question is, what’s the best way for our listeners to follow you and potentially connect with you?

Kyle M.K.: Yeah, well I have a monopoly online for everything that is Kyle M.K. related. If you go to kylemk.com, that’s where businesses can get a hold of me and see what services I offer. Anyone who just wants to follow me on any of the social media, just look up Kyle M.K.

Charlie Hoehn: Cool and the second question I have is what is one thing that our listeners can do from your book this week that will have a positive impact on their business? Give them a 15 second challenge.

Kyle M.K.: As a business owner, I would encourage other business owners to look at one aspect of their business. They could be internal or external. Just any aspect, and consider the emotion that it provokes and how it makes the customer or your employees feel.

I am willing to bet that nine times out of 10 when you do that with any portion of your business, you will think of an improvement right away.

Get Kyle’s new book The Economics of Emotion on Amazon. Find out more at KyleMK.com.

Listen to more authors on customer experience:

Marketing to Mindstates: Will Leach

Experience Thinking: Tedde van Gelderen

The post The Economics of Emotion: Kyle M.K. appeared first on Author Hour.

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Today is a special episode with Karen Brody. She’s the author of Open Her: Activate Seven Masculine Powers to Arouse Your Woman’s Love and Desire. We’re going to talk about masculinity, relationships, love, and how to connect with women better. How do you connect with your partners, how to connect on dates, everything?

Karen shares client stories as well—how these men have been able to repair their marriages that were hand balanced, that weren’t doing well. Karen is a relationship expert and coach who actually came to me by way of recommendation of one of our previous authors, Lorenzo Gomez. He loves Karen’s book and he basically convinced me that I had to interview her, and I’m so glad I did.

Without further ado, let’s talk with Karen Brody.

Get Karen’s new book Open Her on Amazon. Find out more at Karen Brody Coaching.

Karen Brody: I started doing my coaching for men about 15 years ago, and at that time, I was really inspired with a lot of ideas about what I could teach men about women. I thought if I could get really excited about women and who they are and what they want, I could make some real changes in the relationships between men and women.

What I started to notice in the first six months of coaching is I had a lot of failures. I didn’t want to tell my colleagues and friends about this but the truth was, the guys I was working with weren’t having a lot of success. One day, there was a client who I was working with who got really upset.

He said to me, “You know, I could do all the things you’re telling me to do, I could be the man you’re telling me to be, but ultimately, I think it’s not really going to matter because I’m just not going to be good enough for her.”

A lightbulb went off for me in that moment, and I knew. This is probably what’s happening for so many other guys that I’m working with. I decided to work with that theory and test it and see—is what guys need is to feel first empowered? I started working on that premise, and I started being this mirror for men to see themselves in a positive light.

I started talking about the power of masculinity and the beauty of it.

For me, having my own issues with men, it was tremendously healing. Then I started to see the results really take hold. I started to see these men feel like “Hey, I could be proud to be a man, proud to be masculine” and then the things I was teaching them about, how to be present with a woman, how to see her, how to celebrate her, all of the things that I talk about in my book, started to actually take place.

Charlie Hoehn: Wow, okay. After you started doing that, I’d imagine you start helping your clients get significantly better results?

Karen Brody: I did. Once men trusted me, that was the big thing. To come to a process oriented therapist, counselor, coach, whatever you might call yourself is intimidating for a lot of men, especially because it happens on the emotional level, and they don’t feel like they’re in a territory they can navigate very well.

When I would start by empowering men, they started to feel they could trust me and then they were open to hearing what I had to say.

Prior to that, it would be like “I know, I have to do all these things for women.” Once I really got that and it worked, then I knew I had this magic formula. I mean, not only did it work on men but it worked on me.

It helped me heal whatever judgments I had about men by seeing men in a whole new light. That’s when I knew I have to write a book about this. I really have something that actually functions to help men feel better and do better with women.

What Makes Open Her Different Charlie Hoehn: Tell me, what makes Open Her unique from all those other books that aren’t very good?

Karen Brody: Well, I think what makes it unique is that it first empowers men, it invites men to take a look at their masculinity in a new way and it invites men to celebrate being men. I can’t speak for all of these self-help books out there, but I can tell you that, if the approach is here are all the things you need to do for the woman that you love, men are exhausted by that.

They just feel like, “I can’t ever get it right, I’m operating in the dark, I don’t know how to make this woman happy. Now I have this whole list of things that I need to achieve in order to be successful with her.”

In a way, I was trying to mask that by inspiring men to do good for women. When I had to take that step back and really look at who men were, I started to see men are hurting, men are also confused. They often times don’t have the roadmap, they don’t know what to do with women.

That leaves them feeling somewhat inadequate.

Then, when they’re faced with a book that’s 10 chapters on all the things you need to do to make things better, they just don’t have the energy and they often want to give up. I love inspiring men and celebrating men, because ultimately, they want to do better for women and they want to do that deeper, dance in love with the woman that they care about.

How to Get Present Charlie Hoehn: You talk about being fully present and truly seeing the woman as somebody who thinks they’re doing that. What am I possibly missing?

Karen Brody: One of the basic things that I teach men that I think is the most difficult for them to get is how to see a woman as a woman. I had the same problem when I started coaching men. I wasn’t really seeing men as men, I was seeing men as inferior women. My clients, when I get to know them, will often admit that that’s how they see their lives as somehow inadequate as masculine beings. Learning how to see a woman as a woman.

Charlie Hoehn: Why do they see them that way?

Karen Brody: Because they look through the masculine lens. I think as much as men try to embrace women and women try to embrace men, we still look at the other sex as opposite, somehow different, weird, right? If they were to do things the way we do them, they would be more superior like we are.

I think as much as men want to see women as women, it’s women that are really challenging for them and they’re challenged by the differences. One of the things I teach men to do is to actually see her as a feminine being who is very different than you emotionally and sexually and who actually wants something from you that you have. Not something that you don’t have but something that you actually embody.

When men start to understand that, it’s like “Wow, I don’t have to change. I don’t have to jump through hundred hoops. The gifts that I have within me as a man just being who I am are what she’s actually craving.”

When she’s complaining, when she’s not pulling on your cord and all of those things, what she’s actually saying is, “Give me what I’ve wanted to get from you, give me the masculine gifts that you have within you.”

That’s what I talk about through seven archetypes are the gifts that each of these types can bring. When men get that, they’re like, “My god, I already have what she wants within me, I just need to activate that and share that with her.”

Masculine Archetypes Charlie Hoehn: Tell me about the archetypes. I know there’s the artist, what are all of them?

Karen Brody: Okay, there’s the artist, there’s the poet, the director, the warrior, the sage, the dark knight, and the lover. The two that men seem to identify with the most or most want to know more about are the director and the dark knight.

When they reach out to me for coaching, they say, “Tell me more about how I can be more of that director?”

I tell this story in the book that is one of the stories that is echoed back to me most by the people who read it. It’s interesting, because when I told this story, I thought, does this really fit? It’s a story of this gay friend of mine and who would go out like every couple of weeks, we go out to dinner, go to a show, or something like that. The struggle I would feel with him because he could not make a decision. The guy has no directionality, but I love him, right?

I would not date him—he’s gay, but no directionality whatsoever. If we go to a restaurant, he would ask the waiter, “What do you think I should order?” and then the waiter would say, “Well, try this or that” and he say, “Well, I don’t know, let me think about it,” and then he ask someone else, then he would ask me.

He wouldn’t cross the street without checking in with somebody.

After a few hours with him, what I talk about in the story is I would feel kind of tired and drained, and I didn’t know what it was at the time, when our friendship was new. But as I started to do this writing, it was like yeah, when you’re having to act in a directional way for a man consistently, it can be really exhausting for you as a woman.

You know, we can do it. I have a really strong directional side as a coach, as a writer and yet, if I’m in a partnership with a man and he’s not directional, that feels really exhausting to me.

A lot of men, they’ve lost it because they feel like, “I didn’t get it right with her, whatever I suggest, she doesn’t like it.” Men start to retreat. When they’re saying, “I want more of that,” what they’re saying to me is, “I used to be that guy, how can you help me reactivate him?”

Charlie Hoehn: Wow, Karen, I got to tell you, this is deeply resonating for me and I’m going to share a very quick story, hopefully my wife doesn’t give me a hard time for this. We’ve been married for a few years now, we’ve been together for over three years, and just recently, within the last couple of weeks, we went on a date.

I’m used to helping clients pick option A or B or AB or C, you know? I make things simple for them, that’s just my operating mode. On dates and stuff, sometimes I’ll find myself doing it with my wife. She finally confessed to me, she’s like, “You know, I don’t like having options. I just want to be taken through the experience and to not have to think so much.”

That was so freeing to hear actually, because it does create more work for me to ask, “Would you rather do A or B?”

Here I was, thinking I was doing her a favor, and she didn’t want it that way at all. I hear you on this, this is great.

Karen Brody: I love the conclusion of the story because, I thought what you were going to say was she would resist your leadership. Very few women admit, like your wife has admitted that they actually don’t want a lot of choices. But it’s true, we want to feel light and playful with our men, so the less we have to decide things, the better.

There’s a risk in saying that, because some men who are not in their power might think, “Oh you’re not a very powerful person” and that’s not it at all. It’s more that the feminine essence in us is most alive when we’re not having to direct in relationship to a man.

Now, if you’re with a group of women, it’s different. I would act very directional in a group of women. I tend to take over and lead.

Then a lot of my clients will say, you know, “I tried that with my wife, she resists my leadership, she is against anything I want to do.” That typically happens when over time, you haven’t been sensitive to what really works for her or you offer the lead now and then and she doesn’t trust it.

Because most of the time, you turn it over to her. She’s lost respect that you actually can be a man who can take her somewhere and do it flawlessly—well, flawlessly is strong. Do it well.

The Dark Knight and the Sage Charlie Hoehn: Okay, that’s a good overview of the director. Talk to me about some of these other archetypes. The dark knight, let’s go to him.

Karen Brody: The dark knight is all about freedom. The dark knight is unleashed in the sense that he doesn’t operate on other people’s approval. Naturally, the reason so many men want that is they feel tied to so many things in their lives. Maybe it’s the company they work for, maybe it’s their family, their wife.

They feel like they’re not able to operate from their own sense of what works for them and what their heart most deeply desires.

The dark knight represents the free, wild, motorcycle guy that women are just instinctually turned on by and they don’t even know why.

We lose it with this guy.

Because he’s his own agency, he answers to no one. Sexually, he can be the most potent archetype because he knows who he is and where he’s headed. I think a lot of men want his confidence sexually, to take a woman where he wants to take her, because one of the things he knows instinctually is that a woman wants to be opened.

A lot of men don’t get this, so what they do is they seek sexual permission. They’re always asking, “May I come in.” What the dark knight knows is, she wants to be taken, she wants to be opened into a place that she can’t get to on her own, and he somehow knows this instinctually.

It’s all about freedom with the dark knight. He’s always looking to, “How do I take my life to the next edge? How do I take my relationship and my sexual experience to the next edge?” Because he’s unpredictable and wild, he is able to maintain the attention of a woman.

Now, of course that has to be balanced off of the other archetypes like the sage. The sage brings integrity and trust. If the dark knight only has that sexy edge, that doesn’t feel safe to a woman. She needs to have it balanced off, feeling like he provides a safe space for her.

Who Needs Open Her Charlie Hoehn: Karen, I’m curious, is this book, did you have in mind men who are starting to date or people who have been in long term relationships, or all of the above?

Karen Brody: I knew that it would appeal more to married men because married men are more invested in what they’re doing, but I also knew that if single men got the principles of what women really wanted that it would make a huge difference in how they approached women and dated them.

Charlie Hoehn: With the people that you work with, what is their mindset typically? Are they in a good place or do you have to do some healing first in order to get them to come into their own?

Karen Brody: I’ll say something first about these pick up guys, because I have worked with a few of them. They don’t come to me often but occasionally they do and they feel battered by that whole experience and what happens is you’re right, they are still angry and they feel like “I went through this essentially what feels to me like brainwashing in order to become more appealing to women” and what they ultimately discovered is that while once in a while they had success.

Because the principles for how to pick up women actually work at the sexual level. They really do. It’s just like if a naked woman walks into a room you’re going to feel turned on even if you don’t want to be turned on by her—the same thing happens with some of the pickup techniques. The guy’s coming across as extremely confident, and he is directing you in a way that you’ve always craved and he’s bringing some of that dark knight energy.

You’re physically turned onto him, and you might sleep with him, but then most of those guys beyond that don’t know what to do with the woman. They certainly don’t know how to negotiate her at the emotional level or how to deal with any sexual resistance that might come up. Then they feel lost and angry and, “I keep knocking at this door and it won’t open.”

So the men who come to me, typically, are married.

Although a small percentage are single. The way they’re feeling is that, “I used to be this really powerful guy in my relationship. My woman used to respond to me in all of these positive ways, she used to smile when I came home, she wanted me sexually, and now, I’m just a thing in our lives. You know, I don’t get her attention, I am not a priority. She’s often saying no to me where it concerns lovemaking.”

For many of them, they haven’t had sex with their wives in years.

And they’re deeply hurt and they are wondering, “Can I do this for the rest of my life?”

So when they come to me, what they want is to understand the lay of the land, like, “Why is this happening? Why has she lost interest in me? How do I reclaim my power and start to negotiate her in ways that will again turn her on and get her excited about me?”

Reader Successes Charlie Hoehn: Your book has been out for four years now—what have been some of the testimonials you’ve heard. Some of the people who’ve used this book to make a change in their life?

Karen Brody: I would say that across the board there had been, I don’t know, many, many clients who felt like they took on all of the blame. So when things aren’t going well in their relationships and because of a lot of the self-help books out there that you were referring to, they were feeling like it is something I’m doing wrong and many of them carried that feeling around for years. So when they came to me they were really depressed and across the board, with so many of those, many experience being able to see what was theirs and what was their partner’s very clearly.

And being able to see the ways in which they gave their power away, how to then behave in ways that are actually powerful and that affected their woman in the right ways at the right level and to feel like they finally got a base of understanding for what works and what doesn’t work where so many of them were just living in the dark like, “Well yeah, you bring flowers, you say nice things, you try to be good in bed?”

Charlie Hoehn: Jewelry and flowers and chocolate right? Yeah.

Karen Brody: Yeah. You try to turn around sexually and just hope it works, and then when it doesn’t and she’s giving this negative feedback, a lot of men were just so confused. So just giving them that base was huge.

If you want an extreme story, I think of this one guy I worked with. We can just call him John, who was really, really challenging for me. He had zero masculinity you know? I felt extremely masculine in relationship to him.

So he had been marginalized by his wife for 15 years, even his daughters disrespected him, made fun of him in the house. He just came to think this was completely normal. So when he came to me for coaching I think what he thought was going to happen is I would just say, “Oh you know bring the flowers, sit down and have conversations with her” all the various things that other people offer.

I think first of all, we have to really get him to feel emotionally the anger that he had buried around being emasculated on so many levels on his life. He had just completely numbed himself out too. So one of the things I wanted him to do is to be able to just get angry and feel that angry and start to feel what he actually wanted.

He could not ever think about what he wanted.

It didn’t matter how many different ways I would ask him, because he had learned not to want anything. So I taught him how to feel what he was feeling, how to learn how to speak up and ask for what he wanted in a way that was masculine and directive and commanding.

Over time, it took about nine months. He was able to get his wife to go out on dates with him, get her to have meaningful conversations and ultimately, get her to be sexual with him again.

It was somewhat of a miracle, because she wouldn’t even entertain a conversation with him when we started.

Charlie Hoehn: Wow, that’s astounding.

Karen Brody: Yeah but that happens over time when a man keeps allowing the abuse because he actually teaches her, “That is okay, you can treat me like that.”

I think men are cultured to believe that they can’t feel, so they are forced to bury what they are feeling. It was critical that you express it. I think women are so often insensitive and I was the same way to how we would reject men particularly in marriages. How we just dismiss them out of hand sexually and when they come to us for affection and we don’t understand how critical this is to their sense of feeling welcome and feeling loved.

On top of that, we expect them to not express those feelings because if they do then they’re being babies, and then we exercise our full right to express our feelings at any time that we wish to.

Charlie Hoehn: I have all the respect in the world for people who want to help relationships to be better because they are not easy and they are not simple to figure out if you are doing it all on your own. You can’t even see what you are doing wrong.

Karen Brody: Exactly, you don’t have the whole picture and that’s why it helps to have that third party who sees things from altitude and they see the whole thing playing out and they can help you see yourself as a player in it and how you are contributing to it. I am amazed at how many men I work with who have been rejected for so many years and are not even angry and have a hard time expressing any feeling around that.

What’s astonishing, too, is that they stay in those marriages. I think it has a lot to do with sexual shame.

So one of my passions is to help men heal sexual shame, and when they do, they really step into a dignified, powerful sexuality that can hugely shift how the woman in their life relates to them.

If a man is coming from a place of shame even though he doesn’t have a big shame sign on his chest, she feels it and it triggers her shame and then the two of them are just in a state of not connecting sexually.

Connect with Karen Brody Charlie Hoehn: How can listeners connect with you?

Karen Brody: Well they can go to my website, karenbrodycoaching.com, and there I have a little book that is super potent. It is about 12 pages, but it is probably one of the most important books any man who is not getting the sex he wants could ever read, because it’s based on these three hidden mistakes I discovered over this 15 years that men make with women that essentially give their power away and make them not sexy.

I like to empower men to be as sexy as they want to be, and be as powerful. A lot of guys have told me that little book changed their lives.

I suggest that, and then there’s a contact form on my site where you can get in touch with me and we can set up a consultation for coaching.

Charlie Hoehn: If you could give our listeners a challenge, maybe one thing that they can do from your book, Open Her, this week that will make a positive impact in their lives and their relationships, what would it be?

Karen Brody: It would be to own your sexuality. I want to explain what I mean by that. There is a story in my book, Open Her, that happened for me just organically. I was trying to think of how do I explain to men in the book what it means to own your sexuality, because it is not the easiest thing to write.

It was at a dog park one day in Mill Valley, California, where I used to live and I used to like to go to it. I didn’t have a dog, but I like to watch the dog people because they are really fascinating, and this guy showed up with a really disobedient dog.

So the dog wasn’t trained, he was jumping on people, jumping on women, getting mud on them, humping other dogs, it was a male dog and just running around. When the guy walked away, this core group of dog owners started talking behind his back about how he needed to get a leash on that dog to get his dog under control.

At the same time, you notice this blonde guy across the way who had this perfectly behaved dog who came on command, who sat on command and he had this women who obviously went to the park often gathering around him like, “Oh look at your dog.” I remember the dog’s name was Honey, and everyone was impressed with Honey.

All of a sudden I saw, “Oh my god this is it!” this is the metaphor that I’ve needed to how to talk to men about getting their sex under their control. In other words, owning their sexuality.

When you don’t own it, your sexuality runs you.

When you’re in a relationship with a woman that you care about and she feels that she feels that as pressure and she starts to wave you off and say, “All you want is sex.” It is because your sex is pulling you around. It is driving.

So when men learn to get this under control, they learn how to manage the energy, and there are many books out there on how to do that. Mantak Chia has a terrific book on it.

But to get the energy under control, they learn how to balance it and manage it and then share it with a woman in a way that it actually feels good and sexy to her rather than like that thing is out of control and you are putting a lot of pressure on me.

So a man who owns his sexuality, you will recognize him because he is relaxed and he doesn’t seem to have this urgency like, “Oh I am turned on, I’ve got to do something behind it.”

He knows how to actually be with it and play in that energy and enjoy teasing that out with a woman. So my suggestion is if you read Open Her, you are going to hear a lot about how you can own that sexuality and really make a difference in how a woman or your woman actually relates to you sexually.

Get Karen’s new book Open Her on Amazon. Find out more at Karen Brody Coaching.

Listen to more authors on developing intimacy:

Open Wide: Melissa Ambrosini

Attention Pays: Neen James

The post Open Her: Karen Brody appeared first on Author Hour.

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This episode is about what we need to do when we’re hit with heartbreaking events, when we’re struck with crisis that leave us feeling like we’ve lost our purpose. They make us feel like we’re stuck in grieving. Dr. Jody Ray, the author of Pivot, talks about how he was able to successfully pivot when he went through some of the hardest things he’d gone through in his life.

We also talk about what it’s like to go through these dark seasons of our life where we’re struggling with depression or anxiety and what we need to do to help ourselves successfully get out. If you’re going through life struggle right now that seems like a dark and never ending valley, this is the episode you want to listen to.

Get Jody’s new book Pivot on Amazon. Find out more at Mt. Bethel.

Jody Ray: One day I hear the words I want a divorce…it really turned me for a loop. It was that moment, that season in my life that really caused me to start doing some soul searching.

I started questioning, “Is this what I’m supposed to be doing in my life? Is this where I’m supposed to be?” Questioning everything.

You know, they always say that crisis brings clarity, and that crisis helped me to start a journey to really develop some clarity in my life.

Who I was, the direction that I wanted to go, and where God was calling me to go more than anything. That was a huge moment, and it was a dark season for a time just not knowing and having to deal with some of the questions that I was asking myself. Through the advice of some friends and some close mentors, I really took some time to think through what am I supposed to be doing, where am I called to be.

This was in a time where financially and where I was and where our company’s going, it was like boom time. I mean, it was great. I was one of those people that I sort of planned out, this is where I want my life to be when I’m 30 and 35…

So I had calculated it that hey, at 42 years old, 45 at the latest, I’m retiring. I have the money that I need to go do all the things that I want to do, this life plan that I was on, this trajectory that I was working towards.

I was checking the boxes.

Every goal, I was making it. So I was pumped up and my ego was pretty pumped up too, which ended up being a huge negative. When all this happened, I just reevaluated every part of my life and made a decision to just quit my job.

I was at a meeting in the Bahamas at a place called Paradise Island with many colleagues and people in my industry at a convention. I’m sitting there and I’m having this conversation, speaking to this group of people, and in the back of my mind, I’m having this other conversation where I’m going, “This is not what I’m supposed to be doing with my life.”

I left that event and really went back up to my room in this very expensive hotel and got down on my knees beside my bed and just said, “You know, Lord, I don’t know what to do, but I’m going to quit following Jody’s plan and I’m going to follow your plan. For what, where I’m to go from here is all about the direction you’d have me to go.”

That ultimately led me to quit my job, go to seminary, and started on this journey of becoming a pastor.

Real big shift, life change and the great thing I would say is that I’m glad that god doesn’t tell us what tomorrow and the next day is going to bring because having known, if god would have said hey, this is all that’s going to happen in your life or this next few years. Shoot, I don’t know what I would have done. I think I’d have been too scared.

Hitting Rock Bottom Charlie Hoehn: So many people just don’t talk about how dark it can really get.  Can you share what that was like?

Jody Ray: Yeah, for me, I was this guy who really thought that I knew exactly what I wanted to do, I thought I had everything together. I really did, I thought I had it all together. When your foundation of who you think you are and the direction you think your life’s going and you’ve kind of developed this picture of what that’s going to look like—what you think is this real strong foundation and then when that foundation breaks and all of a sudden, you’re left in a season of where wow, none of that was really as important as I thought it was, or all these plans that I made….

Because I’m a person who really wanted to know and I’ve had plans and all of this was very important in my life—to have that foundation break, it was if something in me broke.

There was some depression there and anxiety and worry.

It was really over.

I’d been working so long and investing so much into this little life I had, and now none of that really meant anything. So it was a real tough time. There were times where I didn’t want to be around people.

I just kind of isolated myself. I went to work, went to the gym, and did some of those things. It was kind of a dark time.

It wasn’t dark in the sense that I was going to do something wrong. It was just really a self-evaluation. There were some other things that in my past that I hadn’t probably dealt with, and so it made all of that come to a head at once. It was pretty tough.

Reconnecting with a Plan Charlie Hoehn: How did you figure out what God’s plan was for you?

Jody Ray: I came from a very strong Christian home. My dad was a pastor, and when I was 16 years old, I really felt that God was kind of calling me into the ministry. I don’t know how to describe that at the foundation or base level, other than to say, if you’ve ever had this desire in your heart that you can’t really—it’s hard to describe those desires. I had this desire, somewhere in my heart I was supposed to do to be a minister or a pastor, shepherd people.

I didn’t want to really do that, so I just began to go Jody’s way. For the next 15 years or so, I was just doing what I wanted to do and what I thought would make me happy and what I thought would make me successful and all that.

Then, when that crisis moment came, it was like wow, here’s this thing again. It’s popping up in my life and I feel that sense of call that I had felt several times, even when I was a banker.

So as I began to lean into that, there were some people who just started sort of entered into my life during this particular season.

Business people or people who had strong faith, and they just begin to invest in me and as that process was happening. It just became very clear that I was supposed to take this big step in a completely new and different direction.

Looking Beyond the Hurt Charlie Hoehn: How can we embrace these moments when they’re so world changing and often terrifying? How do we lean in and actually embrace them?

Jody Ray: One of the things that I believe with all my heart is that we all have moments, we have great moments we remember—things like getting married, having our first child, graduating from college, writing a book and getting that book published, those are all these great moments we celebrate and are exciting.

We also have this other series of moments. Part of human existence is we’re going to feel the experience, full gamut. We have moments of divorce or death of a loved one or a loss of a job or whatever series of events that we have. What I see is embedded in those hard moments are great opportunities, and they’re great opportunities for transformation to take place. It’s something that we learned in the business world, that there is always an opportunity in the midst of a problem that we face or a struggle within our company, our organization, or a failure.

There’s an opportunity there.

You’re taught in the business world to begin to look for those opportunities. It’s the same thing that happens in our lives. So when we get into these places, it’s the most difficult thing that we can do, which is why I wrote the book. To begin to say, all right, I’m in this tough time, there’s been a crisis moment or a difficult moment or life changing moment that’s taking place.

So the book is all about helping—when we get in a tough moment, we focus on “This is bad. What am I going to do? My life’s over.” We focus on those kind of things. If we can begin to shift our thinking—and that’s not to demean the pain or anything like that—but we begin to say, “Okay, what can I learn from this? What do I need to own in this season that I’m in? What do I need to own and how I got here, and where do I want to be on the other side of this?”

What’s this new path where is God calling?

When we can begin to think through all of those pieces—when I begin to take ownership for my part in a problem, and then when I can begin to think beyond the present situation—that’s when pivot moments are created.

When you look at some of the people who have done great things in their lives, people who have accomplished great things, many of them can trace that great accomplishment or that great new trajectory or path that they were on to a moment that they entered a crisis that they had or a problem that they came into or a difficult time or season. It was from there that they were able to see clearly this new path.

That’s how I believe it works. I think embedded in every problem we face, sometimes I would even say that the bigger and the more difficult the season or the moment, the greater the opportunity is for that person or individual on the other side.

Re-Learning Faith Charlie Hoehn: Man, I could have used this conversation in your book when I was 15 years old, almost 17 years ago. My aunt Karen, she was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease or ALS. There is nothing harder than watching somebody you loved basically be tortured and suffer by her own decaying body. I remember a woman in the hospital room when I was watching her die said, “Well, this is all part of God’s plan.” Instead of ignoring maybe that comment, it really planted a seed of anger for me. I ran away from God for a long time because of that moment, because of that crisis. I’m really glad that you wrote this book because people who are going through that, they don’t often have people around them supporting them in an understanding way.

Jody Ray: Yeah, I hate when people say things like that person said to you. There are very few things that can get me or make me as mad as when I hear that. Because one, it’s a really bad sell of who God is. It’s a poor description that God has orchestrated every event of our lives—that it was his plan that my mom die from brain cancer when she was 44 years old or your aunt passing away—that all those were orchestrated.

I believe the scripture will tell this is that we are human beings and we live in a world that’s fallen where bad things happen to good people. But our faith leads us to a place called eternity, which is so awesome.

What I would say, again, this is in my book, is that God doesn’t cause bad things to happen to us but God can use some of the deepest, darkest, most painful moments in our lives. He can use those moments for his glory and our good.

He can propel us into understanding more about who he is.

I have this incredible compassion and love for people because of what I experienced, so my greatest desire and the reason that I wrote the book is that I want to help people who have faced or are facing or have a friend or a loved one or colleague or anybody like that who is experiencing a moment like you talked about or that I have talked about or any array of other difficult moments.

Just say, “Hey, this isn’t all there is.”

Even if you caused the moment, even if your dark season or moment is a mistake, one of the things that I say in the book is that mistakes are events and they’re not people.

Iif we can realize that, and that God didn’t throw us away then say, “Hey Charlie, you made this big mistake. You are no good to me anymore. You are done. I don’t have anything to do with you” wipe my hands, go a different direction.

Those are the moments where He embraces us the most.

His love is so incredibly big that it can encompass any of the mistakes we made, and he invites us in and then says, “Hey I got something more for you to do.” That’s what it’s all about to me and what the book is about.

What It Is to Pivot Charlie Hoehn: I know your book hasn’t been out long at the time of this recording but have you been able to share your wisdom with others and see them go through these transformations a little bit smoother?

Jody Ray: Absolutely. There are a number of stories, I have lots of stories in times where I have helped people or seen people work through their seasons. I’ve highlighted a number throughout the book, of people whether it was from an addiction or whether it was a job failure or whether it was from divorce or whatever that they’ve gone through…where they have these moments in which they came to the brink of crashing and burning themselves, or hitting rock bottom and begin to look for, “Where do I go from here? What do I do?”

I think the pivot moments of our lives can be the most profound, incredible moments that we’ll ever experience.

What I mean by that is I don’t want to experience the death of a loved one again. I don’t want to experience a divorce or a financial crisis. Those are events that I don’t ever want to deal with again, but those are the moments in which the greatest change can take place in us.

The greatest pivots can take place in us, and we’ll look back one day and celebrate.

It is crazy to say that we can celebrate a hard moment, a dark season or a heartbreaking moment. But we can. It is a weird celebration. I get that. But I can go, “Gosh, if it hadn’t been for this, I wouldn’t be where I am today, and although I don’t want to go back there, I am thankful for having walked through that.”

Moments are like seasons of the year. They have a start date and they have an end date. Winter is a season. It has a start date and spring comes. Life is like that. Life is a whole connection of seasons and moments.

So when you are in that dark place or you are in that difficult place, always recognize, “Yeah this is dark and this is hard right now and this is ugly and I am in a lot of pain,” but you are going to walk through it.

One of the 23rd Psalm where David is talking about walking through the valley of the shadow of death he said, “I will fear no evil for You are with me.” What I love about that is he said, “When I walk through it.” He didn’t say, “I’m going to stay there” he didn’t say that this is the end. He didn’t say that I am trapped. He said, “I’m going to walk through it.”

I think and believe that when we enter those moments—and we’re going to have times where we’re going to have heartbreak. We are going to have times when there’s going to be some grieving. There’s going to be times where there will be tears, all of those pieces are going to be a part of it. But we are always moving forward. We are always dealing with and processing grief and pain in the right way, but we are always moving forward to the other side.

When that season, that winter season ends and the spring comes out and the flowers began to grow and life begins to change, we can come out on the other side stronger and healthier and have a real clear vision for our future if we use those moments correctly.

Connect With Jody Ray Charlie Hoehn: I want to wrap up this episode with a couple final questions. The first one is what is the best way for our listeners to follow you and potentially get in touch with you?

Jody Ray: Well, social media is always a great way, whether that be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, those are always ways to connect with me. I’d love to have the listeners do that.

If you go to our church’s website, which is mtbethel.org, and there’s all kinds of ways to connect with me personally via email or whatever right there, and I am very accessible and love the opportunity to speak and talk with people.

There are also videos there and talks that I have given and things like that that they can view as well. Those are all great ways to connect with me.

Charlie Hoehn: Excellent and the final question I have for you is to give our listeners a challenge. What is the one thing they can do this week from your book that will have a positive impact?

Jody Ray: The one thing that they can do is when you find yourself in tough times or difficult seasons, our human nature is for us to retreat and pull away from people and that is the worst thing that you can do. It’s in these times where you need to force yourself to pick up your phone and call your friend. To be with the people that you love or to connect with a community.

I think it is a great time, if you are in a college, to connect to a collage ministry. Or maybe there’s a local congregation.

Instead of pulling away, resist that desire, which is very natural, to escape or to pull away from people. Really force yourself to connect. Because as humans, we are created for connection. Sometimes, or often times, when we are in a tough time we don’t want it. It is exactly what we need. It is like when you have a cold or something and you’re a kid and your mom was trying to stick that terrible tasting medicine down your throat.

You didn’t want to do it, you don’t want to do it, but it was the key to you getting better. That is the one thing that I would tell our listeners and your listeners to do right now—if they are in that place, just to connect with people. Connect with your friends, connect with your family or find a really good strong community to be a part of and connect with those.

Connect With Your Community Charlie Hoehn: I want to ask because people who are going through a dark season in their life tend to hear that and say, “Yeah, I know that already,” I’m going to push you to be even more tactical than saying reach out to your friends and family—what do they say?

Jody Ray: One of the things that I tell people is that it’s okay to not be okay. When I am connecting with my friends or family or this community I am talking about, it is okay to talk about that.

So if I am texting a friend of mine I am going, “Look I’m in a bad place” or “I am just really struggling right now. Is there any chance for us to grab some lunch or dinner?” or something like that.

If you have those kind of connections or people who are friends of yours, maybe you know somebody who’s connected to a community, a church community. You just say, “Hey, I’d like to go with you” or “Help me get connected in some way.” I think those are some of the ways that you can do that.

It is so vitally important to connect and to not retreat from our relationships.

Charlie Hoehn: Agreed wholeheartedly—and if you don’t mind, I want to add to this because this is something that is near and dear to me as well. I think it also matters who you reach out to. Reach out to somebody who will just listen and not judge you and won’t try to save you.

Jody Ray: That’s right.

Charlie Hoehn: The pain that we go through can help us transform into our greatest next phase in our life, but if you try and have someone save you, they will take that gift from you.

Jody Ray: That’s right, and for that person who for example may not have people that they love to hang out with but they may not have that person, I am real big on counseling and coaching. It is a part of my personal health, part of my life to this day, something I always stay connected to. These are people who listen to me but also—they’ll listen for a season, but there’s that time where they may help. Sometimes the way we look at a crisis or we look at a situation because we’re right in the middle of it, we don’t see it as clearly as those people around us who we can trust at some point can help us to visualize and to see clearly where we are and can help our thinking be healthy.

There’s a healthy way to grieve, and there’s an unhealthy way to grieve. There is a healthy way to process what you’re going through, and there are unhealthy ways. You really need people, whether that be a professional or people who you’re close to help you navigate that.

Charlie Hoehn: Absolutely, totally. Doing it the unhealthy way can leave you in that state indefinitely.

Jody Ray: It absolutely can. A lot of times, what we see in society today…we try to medicate the pain that we feel, and we do that through relationships, we do that through sexual things, we do that through substance abuse, and those are all the wrong ways.

Those only create more issues.

So if you can process grief and the difficulties that you’re going through in healthy ways, it makes that season shorter for you.

Get Jody’s new book Pivot on Amazon. Find out more at Mt. Bethel.

Listen to more authors on spiritual transformation:

Who Is Carter?: Matt Abbott

One Last Talk: Philip McKernan

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This episode is really for entrepreneurs, people running businesses, leaders who have it all together on the outside. They have their three year business plan, they’re channeling all their energy into it—but on the inside, everything’s starting to fall apart.

Your health is deteriorating, your partner might leave you, your relationship with your kids is becoming toxic. As a result, the business you’re working so hard on that you’re hyper focused on, is going to suffer because everything else is falling apart. Andrew Sillitoe, author of The 4 Keys, believes that if you want to achieve all your business goals, you need to stop neglecting the stuff that happens outside of work.

In this episode, Andrew shares what he’s learned along the way. He’s experienced this himself, and so have his clients. So if you want to bring your life back into balance and still do really well in your business or even better, this is definitely the episode for you.

Get Andrew’s new book The 4 Keys on Amazon.  

Andrew Sillitoe: I come from a family of bakers. I live in a small town called Tunridge Wells, which is about forty-five minutes Southeast of London. My grandfather actually had a bakery in North London as well. My dad took over the business, and I was always destined to be a baker myself. The whole family—I have two brothers, two sisters—we all worked in the bakery growing up. As far as I was concerned, I was always going to work in the bakery and take it over, but my dad, when I was 11, actually sold the business.

He was influenced by a so-called friend who said that the property market was booming and my dad should move into property and the bakery business was going to struggle because supermarkets were now baking bread onsite and it’s too competitive.

My dad sold the business, and to be fair to him, he made a lot of money in the property market and we had a wonderful big house, amazing holidays. We used to go to Marbella and have these incredible holidays—big hotels, there was always some sort of celebrity in the hotel or an athlete, I always remember.

As quickly as my father made his money, the financial crisis kicked in late ‘80s and he lost all of it—lost all the money, we ended up downsizing, and the classic cars were gone, the holidays stopped, his health deteriorated with that and never really made it back.

I remember one night I was watching a Rocky film. This was March 21st, 1993. I was 16 at the time. My dad came to the living room, he said, “Andrew, I’m going to bed, come and give your dad a hug.”

I knew he had a few beers. It was a Sunday evening. I said “No.” He actually asked me three times to have a hug.

He went off to bed, and that was the last time I saw him.

He died that night of a heart attack at age 48. He was young, and it obviously has always stuck with me. It’s had a profound impact on my life and my siblings.

I still to this day don’t really know if that was the catalyst for the industry that I moved into, because from quite a young age, I wanted to be some sort of consultant and or a coach. I work with businesses, and I think I always had this desire, this entrepreneurial spirit that I would have, if I’d had the bakery, it would have become something much bigger than it was. It would have evolved into something. There were lots of schools local and we had this amazing oven that would have cooked incredible pizzas and things like that.

I always had this desire to run a business.

Sports and Business Andrew Sillitoe: Things progressed. I ended up working in marketing, and I had a career playing roller hockey and coaching and had an amazing time in working in the ski industry. But then I got into corporate world and had some success in Yellow Pages where I was selling advertising. But ultimately, I was consulting with businesses.

I really enjoyed that time of consulting businesses. I started to get this desire to be a business coach, and then really, just by luck, I call it luck, I was approached by an old school friend of mine who was a COO at a performance improvement business who was working with some of the top companies—Vodaphone, Sky, some of the big corporates, O2, Barclay’s. He asked me if I’d come on board and start going into business and coaching business leaders.

Making the comparison between sports and business, I was going into these companies and talking about leadership, how to get great locker rooms spirit. I just really found my purpose and have never really looked back.

That was around 2007. I started coaching more, moved into some corporate roles, learning development roles, HR roles, and in 2012, started my own business, a consultancy business and immediately, found myself traveling to the US to the Middle East, coaching out there. So I was between Dubai and Jordan.

I had a young family as well. My daughter was a teenager then, from a previous relationship, and my wife become her step mom. They were very close, and then my wife and I had two children. What I found was that I was so immersed in growing the business that actually, whilst I was observing other business owners and business leaders struggling with their own health and managing their own relationships and growing businesses.

I found myself in the same situation. It really kind of blindsided me. I was also struggling with my health. We joke about it in my family, I suffer with gout, I don’t know if you’re familiar with gout, like a form of arthritis and we joke about the fact that my dad had it and it’s the only thing he left me.

I look at it as a blessing now—I think I’m a much healthier person because the way I managed it.

I noticed that my health was deteriorating. Along with that, my relationship started to suffer with my wife and started, “Hang on a second, this is a serious case of couple issues here, I’m recognizing that my clients are having health problems because they’re so focused on the business, their relationships become a dysfunctional, not just with their partners but with their children.”

I was having some pretty personal coaching conversations with my clients, and in the back of my mind, thinking, “I’m experienced in this as well.” I’d always talked about business, I always talked about mindset, and I always talked about body, having come from a sports background.

It was always a very enthusiastic about sports and making sure that we look after ourselves, I wasn’t always doing it in the best possible way. In fact, for the most part, I was training too hard.

Flipping the Script Andrew Sillitoe: I hadn’t really thought about the relationship. It always occurred to me the relationship when I was playing hockey, because often when the relationship was bad, my hockey game would suffer. It was always in the back of my mind, and I always had this idea that, working with business owners, if the relationships weren’t strong and your business was going to suffer.

I started sharing this idea, and I was experiencing life, and several people started to really connect with it. I was at a conference in Ibiza speaking. I just decided to share a very different message. Normally, I would have talked about leadership, talked about locker room spirit, how to create a high performance culture, and I said to them,

“Look, you’re all business owners and business leaders.

You’re here because you have huge ambition, you’re here to learn about how to grow a business. You probably told your partners about your three year plan and how it’s all going to come good and, you know, just hang in there…Here’s what’s going to happen, in three years’ time, your partner won’t be there, your health would have deteriorated, and the relationship will be dysfunctional.”

Kind of silenced the room a little bit but it also really got their attention.

“Here’s what I’d like to do, I’d like five volunteers to come and join me in a Mastermind. We’re all going to train together. We’re going to wake up early in the morning, we’re going to meditate—” These were gregarious business leaders. I was really taking a risk. I said, “We’re going to work out together, we’re going to start really planning, be proactive in our relationships. Let’s just see what happens over 90 days.”

We talked about the four keys: business, body, relationships, and mindset.

It’s very in its embryonic stages, going back to September 2017. I also had five volunteers and 10 hands went up. Later in the evening, several people came up to me and asked me about it and they’d like to join the group. We started this group, and in January 2018, a year ago, I setup a Whatsapp group with a few of us. I put a very rough and dirty online program together with this kind of this program.

The feedback was just great. I didn’t charge anybody for it, we’re just all in it together and supporting each other. Then I put a Facebook group together, and they were up to about 250 people. It’s just gone from there.

I just thought, well, let’s write the book, let’s just share some of my experience of working with business owners and also the case studies that we’re coming up with the Mastermind, which I share in the book.

What’s at Risk Charlie Hoehn: Can you really emphasize it, paint the picture of how bad things can get when you do neglect this stuff?

Andrew Sillitoe: Well, we’ve seen people lose their business, have a thriving business and they lose it, or at least it end up in a rut. They don’t want to be there, I’ve seen that a lot in SME business owners and business leaders in large organizations. But the things outside of the work environment have become so overwhelming that it becomes such a huge distraction that they can’t focus on the game, you know?

Their mind’s just not in it in the same way. Some are playing sports, you’re just distracted and you don’t want to be there. With that, performance starts to suffer, and very quickly, the business ends up in a rut and then in some cases, completely folds.

What’s interesting, for me, is that I noticed about a month into the program, my business psychologist kept coming on, which was where I would ask the group, “What sort of support do you want in the way of developing your business? Do you want tips? If I were to put a video together on how to with new clients or improve business process or leadership…” and so on.

The feedback was always the same from the group, “We don’t need it. What we’ve realized is that by going all in on our health and keeping our mindset in check and really being proactive in our relationships, the business is taking care of itself.”

That was really interesting for me. We focus so much on the business. When your relationships are thriving and you feel great and confident because you’re looking after our bodies and we’re taking time to have some headspace and think and slow life down a little bit, we turn up to work just so focused and ready and so much more productive that it all starts to feed into the performance at work. That’s been my experience.

Obviously, I’ve shared my experience with my father where he ultimately ended up in having a heart attack. It wasn’t just the business you know? He let his relationship suffer, and his health massively, he gained a lot of weight, and is very hard to turn that back, you know?

It’s not impossible, obviously. We work with a lot of business owners, and all my clients of telling how incredible results with weight loss and so on. I try to avoid the word balance—whilst I use the word balance, because it’s easy to understand about bringing balance back into our lives, but ultimately it’s not doing the work. One of our mantras, core values, is do the work—which is if you want a strong relationship, you have to do the work, you have to put some work into it.

Same with our bodies, same with our mindset, and same with our business.

What Really Matters Charlie Hoehn: Your readers, your clients are so focused on their business that they tend to neglect these things that they view as maybe trivial on the side—maybe they think I can cut corners on sleep or I don’t need to exercise, but as soon as they start taking care of that stuff, the business takes care of itself. Is that fairly accurate?

Andrew Sillitoe: Absolutely. Obviously, coming from a sports background, I’ve coached an insatiable level. I think that those parallels have come across. If we take care of the process or have some kind of consistency, results take care of themselves. If the behavior’s right, if we’re engaging in the right way in the locker room, we’re doing the right training, those small things add up in our personal lives—but they can also add up in a negative way.

You know, if we don’t take care of the relationships, all of a sudden these things start to build up and then we’re talking about human beings. Some of the things that I neglected over that time, I’m still building trust around it. It will take time.

We can do the good things, and we don’t do the right things—that builds up negativity and we lose trust and that can be a challenge to turn around. That is what I am seeing a lot with business owners that share that with me that they’ve done so much on their work, assuming that because I am making money and providing for the family that that’s enough.

The truth is, the family don’t really care about the Range Rover and the five bedroom house and the fancy holidays. What they want is time, and that’s what we have to be mindful of.

Relationships Change Everything Charlie Hoehn: What kind of transformations have you seen?

Andrew Sillitoe: So it is interesting because the transformations vary. Someone will come up to me and say, “You know what? My relationships are just perfect. The business is doing well, but I am really worried about my health. How can you help me with my health?”

That was coming up a lot, which is one of the reasons why I studied to be a health coach last year.

So we have seen some dramatic results where people have just dealt with some form of arthritis. Perhaps, they just suffer from inflammation, so it could be as simple as that, weight loss. One of my clients, Rob, he really turned his life around, and it’s actually quite emotional when I see him because he wants to introduce me to his wife. It’s had such an impact on his personal life.

I have a former England rugby player. He shares his story in the book. He talks about how he just literally turned his life around just by paying attention to his relationships.

It was him and his business partner and a few of the others that said, “Look if we can just go in all in our body, our health, our relationships, and mindset, our businesses are just taking care of themselves.”

We go into work ready, proactive, energized, and with no distractions.

I mean there is more to it than the actual program. Better relationships with daughters that they have not spoken to for a long time. And the daughters are in their 20s and now they’ve started to form better relationships that have lost their way.

It is interesting, the relationships one is the one that comes out a lot. Whether it is with a partner, their children…we have one where it his mother. He had no relationship with his mother and started to just pick up the phone.

Varying results, but quite dramatic in some cases.

Charlie Hoehn: So just to restate what the four keys are, can you say it one more time?

Andrew Sillitoe: Yeah, so business, body, relationships and mindset.

One Thing to Remember Charlie Hoehn: If you had to share one part of the book that you really want listeners to walk away from this episode with, what would you say you’d pick?

Andrew Sillitoe: So I think the biggest councilors for change is where people start to understand the patterns of their life that have shaped them and that are getting in their way and slowing them down.

It sounds a bit cliché, but you know it is just having a direction and so it’s interesting someone said to me the other day, “I really don’t believe in this vision boards. What’s the value in all of this? It is just a dream.”

The second part is to turn that vision into reality, and that’s where we get more pragmatic and start looking at 30 day, 60 day, 90 day targets so we can start to really accelerate this.

That is where the values come.

The third part of it is about how to live the vision, and that is around changing negative patterns and legacy. Having a really strong legacy that you essentially leave behind but not just financially but in a way values.

I think that where people have that aha moment is they realize that they can’t do what they have always done, and they keep doing what everybody has done because of some sort of behavioral pattern.

I don’t want to position myself as a guru. I’m a business psychologist, I understand psychology. My nativism with these things that they start to get perceived as a little bit wooly or fluffy, but what I’ve learned is that when people really start to understand what are the things that they’re doing that are working against their goal, their improvement goal from a behavioral perspective.

When they start to realize what assumptions they’re making at a subconscious level, it is a very subconscious level, what assumptions they are making if they were to do the exact opposite of these things and that might seem obvious but when someone starts to recognize that they are operating in one way and they realize that they identify what the exact opposite of that is to work in a different way which will lead them faster to their goal, that’s when the break comes on because they go, “Actually I am not sure if I want to do that.”

So they’ve got one eye on the vision, they got their 90 day game plan, they are really excited and they want to move forward—but they’ve got this break. I noticed this is not always working with elite sports teams. You have the conversation in the dressing room, everyone is brought in, they know what to do in the rink in practice and you see them doing the exact opposite.

You get everyone together and you say, “So what’s going on?…”

And everyone says, “Yes sir,” and they go out and do it and they do it wrong again.

When you see coaches lose their mind and start blowing their whistles and yelling at people because it just doesn’t make sense—there is this underlying resistance to changing because of some sort of fear. What I’ve recognized is when people identify that fear and they are close to that fear and they embrace that fear, it becomes very empowering.

That for me is where we send the most significant change—when people recognize that point that is actually holding them back.

They feel that as if they break free.

It doesn’t happen straight away. They have to practice it and work at it, and they will fall down and they’ll go back to their old ways. But then they will have another go at it through coaching. It is like building a muscle because there is some hard-wired pathways in the brain that are wanting to go back to the old habits, then creating some new ways of operating.

Turning the Ship Around Charlie Hoehn: Can you give an example of a fear that was rewritten?.

Andrew Sillitoe: Yeah, I guess there is one example. One case study that I share, which is quite common actually from a leadership perspective—I had a leader who was just maxed out working all the hours. Sixteen, seventeen hours.

This relationship become dysfunctional. He kept going on how he wanted to improve his work life balance, common stuff, and when we started to explore his objective—which is to free up more time—to recognize that you need to focus more time on strategy. Working on the business rather than in the business.

He had a good team, he had a good MD reporting in to him, a sales manager reporting in to him. Ultimately, it came down to letting go. Delegating more.

So we started looking at all the things that he was doing on a day to day basis that prevented him from delegating. So he would turn up to every meeting, for example. He would join every conference call.

If things weren’t moving quick enough, he would take control of it and start to work on the task himself and just ignore everybody. He’d say, “No I will just do it,” and that was causing some distrust in his people as well because he’d just do it.

So we put a two week test in place where he came up with all of it. I didn’t make any suggestions, I was just coasting through it really. He said to me he would not attend the conference call.

He would let the sales manager run the meetings and he wouldn’t attend any client meetings. To test it, because there’s a risk there, we let him be mindful of the risk but all his assumptions that the business would struggle as sales manager wasn’t up to it, his team wouldn’t succeed. If he didn’t go see clients, they wouldn’t engage with his sales managers…

They were just assumptions. None of them were true.

So a lot of it sometimes is particularly those scenarios is about letting go. Letting go of control and being mindful of ego, because ego was definitely the thing that was manifesting itself. Also what we recognized was happening across the four keys.

So what’s interesting is when we identify something like slowing someone down in one key, it is playing out in other keys as well because it is just a behavior. It was part of his personality to take control and take charge. He recognize that he was also playing on his relationship with his partner and his children. Just that he recognized it, and in a very subtle way with his friends— whether it was playing sports with his friends—that it was coming out often.

It was very empowering for him to let go of that and I think it was quite a 180 shift.

Connect With Andrew Sillitoe Charlie Hoehn: How can our listeners get in touch with you?

Andrew Sillitoe: Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Instagram, Andrew Sillitoe on Instagram if that’s a place that you’re interested, I am on Instagram. You can email me, I usually pick up an email so andrew@andrewsillitoe.com, @andrewsillitoe on Twitter. But LinkedIn is an area that I am going to be focusing more attention on and then putting out content.

I am quite excited about 2019, I am going to be putting some stuff out there.

Charlie Hoehn: Excellent and my final question is give our listeners a challenge. Let’s say you want them to do one thing from your book this week that will have a positive impact—what is that one thing?

Andrew Sillitoe: Well it depends on where the person is at. I am a strong believer that it is good to have a vision, it is good to know where we’re going, it is good to know what you want for yourself and what motivates you in that way. Whether it’s to make more money, to have more holidays with your family, to buy a nice car, whatever it is.

I think some of these even if they are materialistic, I am not a huge advocate of it.

I don’t think it is that necessarily that important. But there are some things in life that we should focus on that serve ourselves, but if we really want to thrive, it is getting very clear on how we serve others. That for me is the why.

It is what gets you out of bed every day and it could be as simple as how do I serve my family, how do I make sure that we’ve got some stability, certainty. How you serve your client, just have a very clear purpose of really asking why do I what I do.

I think that is really important for us all to establish.

There is a balance between serving yourselves and serving others.

From a practical perspective, I would just what can you do in the next week that is going to move your relationship forward? What can you do today that is going to move your relationship forward? What is that thing that is of low value to you, maybe doesn’t cost that much but it is of high value to your partner, something that they would really appreciate?

And often, we don’t recognize that that there is something that is of huge value to your partner but you might not recognize it. Just be proactive. What could you do in the next few days that could really make a difference in your relationship?

Get Andrew’s new book The 4 Keys on Amazon.

Listen to more authors on finding balance:

Balance is Power: Jim Klopman

Living on Purpose: Brandon Steiner

The post The 4 Keys: Andrew Sillitoe appeared first on Author Hour.

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Kip Boyle, the founder and CEO of Cyber Risk Opportunities and author of Fire Doesn’t Innovate, has worked with the US Federal Reserve Bank, Boeing, Visa, Intuit, Mitsubishi, DuPont, and many others, helping them with their cyber security. This episode is really about cyber security as it’s not just a technology problem, it’s a management opportunity. Kip is going to share how big of a problem this can actually be for any company, because cyber crime is just a part of doing business now.

No executive today can afford to ignore the damage that phishing and malware and malicious code can pose to their company’s future.

In fact, Kip even shares a story of how it’s literally shut down established businesses. You can’t afford to neglect your cyber security, and in this episode, Kip is going to lay out the few things that you can do to establish companywide habits of good cyber hygiene. His three phase approach that will help safeguard your business from cyber attacks.

Get Kip’s new book Fire Doesn’t Innovate on Amazon.

Kip Boyle: When I started working on cyber security, pretty quickly, I was interacting with what I call senior decision makers on the job, and what became obvious to me pretty quickly is that they really struggled, they really didn’t understand what cyber security was, they were really looking to me to help them figure that out—“What’s really going on here, Kip?”

At the same time, they were also very quick to challenge me, push back on me. If I would explain something to them and it didn’t make sense, they would be like, “That’s BS, that’s not the way it really works.”

I found that despite that, they had trouble setting priorities, and they had trouble talking a with other decision makers about cyber security. Yet they needed to continue to talk about it because they had an unlimited number of risks pressing down on them, and they had a limited budget.

I really got into that space, and I just kind of made it my mission to try to figure out how to help these people make these decisions. It’s really important decisions that they needed to make. I went out there and tried to figure out, what are other people doing?

Really, there are two extremes of approach. One approach is what I would call a fairly simplistic, high, medium, low method of figuring out what your cyber risks are, so I tried them.

The feedback that I got from the decision makers was, “Okay, you’ve just spent a lot of time and money on this, but I don’t think that you’ve really produced results that are a whole lot better than what I could have done on the back of an envelope drinking a beer,” which was really disappointing.

Charlie Hoehn: Probably felt a bit insulting.

Kip Boyle: Yeah, you know, taking my personal feelings aside, I did feel deflated, right? They were right, they were absolutely right. They were saying, you know, “Kip, you’re here and you’re on salary to help improve the quality of our decision making on cyber risk but you haven’t really helped.

You know, you’ve done a fancier version of what I can do for myself. The quality of the decision making really wasn’t that much better, but along the way, you spent a lot. You spent a lot of time, you spent a lot of energy, you spent a lot of money, and there’s just no business value there. You really have to up the game.

They weren’t being mean about it in any way shape or form, right? They weren’t, but they were right to demand better, they deserved better and so I went out to try to find better. That’s when I encountered what I would call the other extreme, which is a more mathematical based approach.

One that, rather than qualify the risk, actually tries to quantify the risk to use statistics and probability estimations to figure out what are the risks and what priority should we put them and how do we know how much money to spend on them, you know? Is there some way we can calculate the exposure? Can we say, well, here’s a vulnerability, and it’s worth $50,000 of exposure?

If you spend anything less than $50,000 to deal with it, you come out ahead, right?

There’s this huge appetite to translate all of this risk over into math.

People like certainty, and math seems certain.

I dove into that, and what I found was, decision makers are absolutely overwhelmed. The amount of mental energy that they needed to spend to understand all the jargon and all of the math, it was just overwhelming.

When I say decision makers, I’m talking about people who have multiple teams reporting to them and with people in different disciplines. Finance, operations, human resources, that sort of thing. Nobody else is bringing math puzzles like I was.

They’re like, you’re killing us here man, this is just way over the top, I don’t have time for this, it needs to be more simple. I appreciate what you’re doing, but this just isn’t doing it for me, you’re confusing me, you’re making it worse, you’re not making it better.

Okay, I’m dejected again, right?

Trial and Error Learning Charlie Hoehn: Right. I love that you’re starting off with the mistakes that you made early on.

Kip Boyle: You know, they’re not just my mistakes per se—and by the way, I’m not afraid of failure. I fail a lot, and I think failure is the best possible teacher that a human being can have. Emotionally, it’s very rough. Socially, it can be really difficult to deal with failure.

I was using off the shelf approaches, and they weren’t working.

I thought, “Oh my gosh, what are other people in my situation doing?” Guess what? They were all crashing and burning too.

We were all just sort of standing around saying, “My goodness, how can we do better than this?”

I was feeling frustrated, and I knew they were feeling frustrated, but I was motivated to do something about it. I thought it was just a fantastic little puzzle, and I really still felt like my decision makers deserved a good answer to the question that they were asking me to the point where if I couldn’t do it, I needed to change careers, I needed to get a different type of job because I could not face the idea that I was just going to sort of mill around in this horrible little space where none of the existing approaches and tools were really going to work. I just invented something.

In the beginning it was just a way to think about cyber risk. It really started with asking myself: What exactly is it that these decision makers want? What are they really looking for?

I isolated some stuff that had to be better than back of the envelope.

It couldn’t have the high, what I would call, cognitive costs of statistical estimations. It had to be somewhere in between. It had to be biased towards action because these people wanted to do something but they didn’t know what to do, it had to be biased towards action and they also had to be real business value. Like if they’re going to spend money on this, they’re going to want to know that it’s money well spent.

Not just because some dude or some gal who said a lot of jargony things was telling them that it was going to deliver business value. I also realized too that whatever we came up with, it had to meet decision makers where they were. The idea that I was going to get them to study up on something or attend a half day class, I mean, that was not going to happen.

Finally, I also realized that it needed to facilitate, to actually foster an ongoing conversation rather than a one-time conversation. I wanted executives to actually figure out how they could talk about it all the time just like they would constantly talk about sales. “How are the sales looking,” right? If sales weren’t looking that good, they could do things to improve the quality of leads or the number of leads, right?

There were things they could do and same with order fulfillment, right? How are we doing fulfilling orders? Things are slow, let’s buy an additional factory or let’s add a second shift, right? There’s things that they could do but there was nothing like that for cyber risk. Eventually what I came up with was what I call the Cyber Security Executive Toolkit.

It was a very simple workflow with some tools built to facilitate that workflow, and I used it on the job and it went really well. Then I used it with a bunch of paying customers and they really liked it, and we improved it as we went. Then eventually I launched a business based on it, and finally I wrote a book about it.

Charlie Hoehn: What did they really love about it?

Kip Boyle: Yeah, it was a better experience. Let me tell you something about decision makers, what I call decision makers, just from the title alone, right? You should understand where I’m going with this, but senior executives and, to a lesser extent, junior executives in organizations, they are decision making engines.

That’s their prime function, to make decisions. If you’re a junior member of their team, your job is to help them make decisions. To the extent that you can do that, then you’re making their job easier and better and you remember from the story that I told you a moment ago like I wasn’t really helping them with that. None of this regular grain, high, medium low, on the qualitative side. None of the statistics and all that stuff, none of that was helping them make better decisions.

Well, with this new approach, they were actually able to make decisions, which they found very satisfying. All the goodness of this approach really came from satisfying that core appetite that they had which is, “I want to make a decision about this.”

Charlie Hoehn: Got it. Okay, it sounds like Fire Doesn’t Innovate is really for those decision makers, right?

Kip Boyle: Yeah, that’s right, that’s exactly what it’s for. Now, the economics of my business really constrain who I can help. I wrote the book because I wanted to help more people than I could economically afford to help just within the confines of my business. If you think about the term decision maker, there’s another reason why I use the term a lot.

It’s because a decision maker can be, of course, a vice president or a director in an organization, but a decision maker can also be somebody who is lower in the hierarchy but who still faces cyber risk decisions every day, like how big of a password am I going to set on this website, you know? I just created an account, what am I going to do here?

Those little decisions make a big difference, as we can tell from studying all these news stories that are coming out about how a single phishing attack brings down an organization or causes hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. But there’s also a lot of cyber risk at home. I wanted people, parents, or heads of household to be thinking about cyber risks at home. So my book, especially in part one, it’s full of very practical things that they can do to protect their family.

Not Quite Fire Insurance Charlie Hoehn: Let’s get in to part one of your book where you really talk about the basics of cyber security. Why did you call it Fire Doesn’t Innovate?

Kip Boyle: You know, in the process of titling your book, there’s this brainstorming exercise that you do and I must have generated 75 potential titles and as I got through the first 25, it was pretty easy, I was just rattling them off and then got harder and harder. As I was getting close to the end of the list, I was like, I just started throwing stuff down and Fire Doesn’t Innovate was one of the things that I threw down.

I really wasn’t sure that that was really going to work but here we are, right? The reason why I threw it down is because I was giving a talk one time and was trying to explain to this audience of decision makers, it was like a public presentation that I was giving, and I was trying to help them understand why is cyber different than other risks that they face.

For some reason, we started talking about building catching on fire. Fire insurance and sprinkler systems and all that. I realized that that was the perfect metaphor to help people understand why cyber is different. That’s why that’s the title of my book, because I really wanted to hook people and get them to understand that it’s a big change in the way that you think.

Here’s what it comes down to: fire has been the same here on planet earth from the very beginning. It’s a mix of three ingredients. Heat, oxygen and fuel. If those three ingredients come together, you get fire. If you don’t want the fire anymore, you’ve got to remove one of those three ingredients. That’s why our buildings look the way they do, that’s why they’re built out of the materials that they’re built out of, why they have sprinkler systems, why we have fire hydrants and fire departments is because we understand how fire works.

We actually can buy fire insurance in the off chance that a fire goes crazy and we can’t control it, there’s one last line of defense. It’s really the insurance industry that has driven these requirements about what materials you use to build buildings. I think people expect cyber to be like that, which is to say, “Hey Kip, give me the checklist, tell me if I just do five things and dial them in really well, that I’m good, right? I don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

The unfortunate reality is that cyber is nothing like that. The people who are driving all of this cyber damage are constantly innovating how they attack us. Always innovating how they attack us. Either because the attacks don’t work anymore, because we find ways to defend ourselves or because the attacks worked great and they want them to work even better, right?

Why charge a $300 ransom for data when I could charge $1,500 or $20,000 or something like that? Why attack a grandmother’s computer and hold the pictures of her grandchildren hostage when I can attack a medical center and shut them down with the same level of effort by the way but charge them a ransom of $55,000, right?

I wanted people to understand that this is a completely different thing than you’ve ever encountered before.

Ransom Attacks Charlie Hoehn: Asking for an amount of money once the data is compromised, do you see that a lot?

Kip Boyle: It’s happening all the time, yeah, quite a bit actually. It’s a well proven form of automating crime on the internet, and it’s getting worse, not better. It literally is evolving in exactly the way that I just described it.

They started by attacking individual people and charging $200, $300 to get the payday for themselves, and then once they realized how easy it was, then they started going after large organizations.

It’s working. People are freaked out, and a lot of them pay the ransom.

Charlie Hoehn: Could you give an example?

Kip Boyle: Yeah. I’m going to tell you a story about a company that was not a customer of mine, and you can read about them on the internet. Everything I’m about to tell you is open source, there’s no confidential information in here.

In September of 2018, there was a company in Denver, Colorado and they were called the Timber Line Company, and there were about a hundred employees, they had a few hundred customers, they’re about five years old, they were backed by a private equity firm, right?

They were a legitimate business. People with money to invest put money into this firm because they believed that the company had future potential to grow.

What they did was, if you wanted your company’s logo on a pin or a T shirt or something like that or if you needed promotional materials created, they would do that. By all accounts, they were just doing just fine.

In about the middle of September 2018, all of a sudden, without any warning, they just shut down.

They posted on their Facebook page and on their website, “Gosh, we’re really sorry, but effective immediately, we’re not in business any longer.”

The reason was because they had been cyber attacked and ransomware had got on to their systems, and the damage was so substantial that they could not afford to recover from it. They went out of business. That’s just one example.

Charlie Hoehn: What comes up on their computer screen, what is the dawning realization that we have to shut down our business now?

Kip Boyle: There’s other types of cyber threats out there that don’t look or feel anything like this, but in the case of ransomware, it starts with an unexpected screen on your monitor that says something to the effect of, we’re really sorry but we’ve gone ahead and encrypted all your files. If you want them back, you’re going to need to send 1.25 bitcoins to this wallet.

Most people don’t even know what that means, right?

Where do I even get bitcoins and how do I send them to a digital wallet? Right away, your brain is seizing up because you don’t even understand the ransom note that you just got. From there, the next thing that you notice is that your computers don’t work anymore.

If you think about it, are there very many companies in the world, certainly in the developed world, that can operate without computers. In the case of Timber Line, they needed computers to design the materials, right? To get to bring the logos in and do the layout of how it was all going to look. They needed computers to control their printing presses and the different ways that they actually produced product, and they needed computers to schedule the pickup of the shipments, and so on and so forth.

The next thing you realize is that none of that works anymore.

Because you needed computers and those computers are now unavailable to you. Worse than the computers being unavailable, all of the data that you need, like your customer records, where do I ship this box, that’s unavailable as well.

If that goes on long enough, people who paid you money aren’t getting their orders, so now they’re getting unhappy and they’re calling you and they’re trying to find out where’s my stuff?

The vendors that you bought the raw materials from aren’t getting paid because you can’t access your bank accounts to pay them. Now they’re getting unhappy. Where’s our money? The new people who heard about you and what a great job you do are trying to place new orders, but they can’t because you don’t have a computer system that can receive new orders.

I think you can see where this is going—pretty quickly, your engine seizes up and stops working.

Now you’ve got to repair that engine and you’ve got to get it going again. Very quickly, the enormity of the work in front of you just becomes overwhelming and everything just falls apart.

It Can Happen to Anyone Charlie Hoehn: What is the biggest size company you’ve seen this happen to?

Kip Boyle: The big ones have made it into the headlines—the city of Atlanta was cyber attacked with ransomware and you can read about that online by just doing a web search on city of Atlanta ransomware. You can check out the new stories, you can read the different press releases that the city issued to help people understand what was happening to them and you can see the impact. People couldn’t pay their utility bills, they couldn’t renew their business licenses, there were just different city services that were just completely unavailable during this time.

The city had to consummate tens of millions of dollars in emergency contracts in order to get cyber experts and technology experts to come to the city and clean up this enormous mess. It took them a long time to recover.

There’s the city of Atlanta, several medical centers, Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in California had this happen to them, and there’s others. They have all reacted in different ways.

Some of them paid the ransom because they did what I would call a cold economic calculation that a $55,000 ransom is going to get them back in the business faster than a $10 million bill, which is what the City of Atlanta had last time I checked.

How it plays out can really vary, but one of the things that I’ll say about ransomware is you should never pay the ransom, even though the economics might tell you that you should pay it, you really shouldn’t. Here is why.

Every dollar that you spent paying ransom to get your data and your computers back is a vote for more ransomware attacks, and that means that you could get attacked again and that means that any of us could get attack because you are emboldening the criminals. I mean behind all of this malicious code and the stuff that actually causes all of this damage are people, and those people respond when they earn money they do more of their dirty little deeds. It is that simple.

Practice Good Hygeine Charlie Hoehn: So what do you mean by cyber hygiene?

Kip Boyle: Remember earlier on our conversation, I was telling you that I was giving a presentation to some decision makers and they were just really struggling to understand why is cyber different from fire, right? They were both threats, can’t I just buy some insurance?

I found that people also struggled to understand basic things like, “Everybody tells me I should do this with my password and do that with my password.”

Or they say, “Hey I should install these security updates but why? I mean what good does it do?”

I realized that it would really help them if they could relate it. So I was searching for another metaphor, and that is kind of where the cyber hygiene metaphor comes from. Here is what I am getting at. There’s these things that none of us have really ever seen with our naked eye called germs, and we know from about 200 years of human experience now that there are these little invisible things called germs.

When you get one of these things in your body it makes you sick and sometimes it’s just the flu and you get over and sometimes it is something really, really bad like typhoid fever that can kill you but it all starts from germs which nobody can see but even though we can’t see the germs, parents teach their children to wash their hands and parents ask their children to wash their hands multiple times a day and as grownups we do it too, right?

And we know when we should wash our hands, after using the bathroom and so on. Germs are so accepted as a source of trouble that we even have rules. Government imposed rules about when we make food for other people in a restaurant, we have to wash our hands, we have to wear gloves. When we are manufacturing food in a plant, people have to wear hairnets and they have to take all of these precautions with cleaning the equipment, and it is all about anti-germ, right? To keep people from getting sick.

If you can believe in something invisible like germs that you have never seen before and you can take all of this action, then I would say that take that brain space and put it into the cyber world.

What I am going to tell you is there’s these invisible digital cooties floating around the internet, and they’re looking for a host. They are looking for a computer to infect. So you need to get good cyber hygiene, just like you’ve got good personal hygiene.

You shower on a regular basis, you wash your hair, you go to the doctor once a year to get a checkup. You get a flu shot every year, you visit the dentist twice a year. So there are these hygienic habits that we’re into, and we need to do the same thing with our computing in order to make sure that we can reduce the risk that a digital germ is going to hurt.

Basics of Cyber Security Charlie Hoehn: Walk us through some of the basics that maybe we don’t know about.

Kip Boyle: Yeah, so there is a lot of things that you could choose to do. A lot of this goes back to what your personal risk appetite is. I talk about that in the book because everyone is going to have a different sense of how vulnerable they are.

Some people are going to be very risk averse, and they’re going to want to do a lot of things. Other people are going to feel like, “Hey I’m fine, I am just going to write my password down on this piece of paper and leave it on my desk.”

And we see this all the time, right? Everybody has a different sense of how vulnerable they are and how much risk they are willing to take on.

I am going to tell you a couple of things that I think everybody should do, no matter how risk averse you are or no matter how risk tolerant you are. One of the things that you should do is you should buy a high quality password manager and use it to its fullest potential.

Now remember in the earlier part of our conversation, I was telling you that decision makers were really interested in business value? A password manager has tons of business value. It has tons of personal value, right? And you touched on a little bit on already. Not only is it going to reduce the amount of technical risk in your life that somebody is going to guess your password and then as a result, they’re going to take over your bank account or they’re going to steal money from your brokerage account.

But it is going to make everything easier. This is one of those rare things where you get more security and you get more productive at the same time, because once you start using a password manager, you don’t ever have to be in the business of choosing passwords anymore. It will do that for you, and you don’t have to type them into your computer anymore, it will do it for you. It’s wonderful.

It is this wonderful, beautiful little combination of more security and more productivity.

I have heard people say this to me a lot, so I want to be totally clear about this: The key is you’ve got to choose a high quality password manager. You can’t just use any password manager that is available at your fingertips, because quite frankly most of them are junk. They seem to be doing the right thing, but under the hood, they are not doing the right thing at all despite the best intentions of the authors of a lot of these password managers, they do not get the details right.

I will give you one example. If you are saving passwords in your web browser, terrible idea. Very convenient, but terrible idea because if you visit the wrong website, the website can issue a command that you will never see to tell your web browser, “Hey, can I have all the passwords that you’ve cached?” And the web browser will go, “Okay here you go.” So it is not built for security, it is built purely for convenience.

Charlie Hoehn: So just to clarify on that, are you saying you need to disable stuff like Google Chrome browsers automated autofill password feature?

Kip Boyle: Yeah, exactly. That is a wonderful example of what I am saying. Don’t use that, it is very convenient, but it is not at all secure. That’s the problem, is that you get a false sense of security. You think you’re covered, but you are not. The only way you know that is you’ve got to pop the hood open and you got to look inside. Sometimes you can’t, right?

It may not be possible for you to look inside the Google Chrome or the Firefox auto password complete feature. You don’t really know what they’re doing.

So as a result, you have to deliberately seek out what I call a high password manager, one that says to you, “We do it right and we allow other people to check our work to make sure that we are doing it right.”

The two that I know that are very good about this, one of them is called 1Password, and the other one is called LastPass. Those two are what I call high quality password managers.

You will pay money for them, but you should be glad and cheerful about paying money to them because they are a wonderful—both of these companies are great. They have great teams of smart people standing behind the products. When the products are attacked or there is a vulnerability that is discovered, they leap into action immediately and fix it.

Think of the annual subscription fee as just getting your flu shot each winter.

It is not going to kill you, right? We’re not talking about a ton of money here, but you are going to get really great benefits in return.

Charlie Hoehn: Excellent and just on a personal aside, do you think it is worth switching from Dashlane to one of the two that you mentioned?

Kip Boyle: Well, what I can tell you as I have not evaluated Dashlane. So I can’t tell you whether I would say that it is a high quality password manager. It could be, but that’s what you’ve got to decide for yourself.

Am I using a high quality password manager? How can I know? Just answer the question for yourself, and if you feel like, “Yeah, Dashlane is doing the job for me and I am comfortable with the assurances that I have received from the company,” then I would say you are better off using Dashlane than nothing.

Phases of Risk Management Charlie Hoehn: You talk about the cyber risk management game plan, and you break it down into three phases. Could you just give an overview of what those three phases are?

Kip Boyle: Yeah you bet. So the cyber game plan is really good for people who are decision makers in organizations or if you work for decision maker and you know that that decision maker is concerned about cyber risk, then this is a great part of the book that you should be connecting with.

Let me give you a quick overview, and before I do, I want to say one other thing.

When you buy the book, there is a link inside here that you can use, and we’ve created a Google sheet where we have already pre-automated all these steps. Virtually all these steps are already on the internet ready for you to use. All you have to do is buy the book, check out the link. I think we’re going to ask you for your name and email address to get access to the workbook. That will get you subscribed to our newsletter, but after that point, the workbook is free. It’s yours, you can use it, change it, do whatever you want with it.

So the first phase is you want to discover your top cyber risks.

This all gets back to the thing that I said is about prioritization. You’ve got more risks than you know what to do with. Everybody does, every organization does and so it is key is that you’ve got to discover what’s top and that’s what the first phase is all about. The second phase is really all about answering the question, “Now what do I do about these top risks?”

And the book will walk you through a process of discovering what you need to do to go from, “Hey I am not doing a very good job of dealing with this top risk,” to, “Hey, if I make these changes and spend this money, then I am going to be in a much better place with respect to that risk.”

I can give you some examples, but I am going to keep this high level right now.

And then finally, because the nature of cyber is that it is always changing the first two phases are about what are my top risks and then what do I do about it but it is not the case that you can just say, “Great I am done.” I don’t have to worry about this anymore because I have implemented these steps.

So phase three is about maintenance and ongoing updates and making sure that you are staying up with the changes that are happening in the world outside of your four walls, things are changing all the time and so those are the three phases that I walk you through and we suggest that you do this on an annual basis. So in other words every year, go back to step one and start again because the world just changes too much to think that you can set it and forget it.

Working on Cyber Protection Charlie Hoehn: Could you tell a quick story about a company that you’ve helped with this and maybe the risk they would have faced had you not work with them?

Kip Boyle: I am going to tell you a story about my favorite customer. I can’t name them but I can tell you that they’re a professional basketball team. So imagine my delight in being able to work with them, right? Our customer there is actually the general council, in other words the senior lawyer. So we’re working with the general council of a professional basketball team and they knew that they needed to up their game.

So we started working with them, and as a result of working with them, they now have for example much better contracts with their vendors, right? We look at things on a holistic basis, cyber is not just about technology.

The fact that we use technology in our business is what creates cyber risk but managing cyber risk actually you have to do a lot more than just throw technology at that risk. You actually have to examine your people, your processes, and your management.

And that is where helped this basketball team do. That’s why they have better contracts now with their third party vendors.

If anybody has been paying attention, a lot of the data breaches that we read about in the newspapers and the stories that we see on TV are because in one organization gave a vendor of theirs access to sensitive information, and it was the vendor that fumbled the ball so to speak and caused the data breach.

One of the things that you need to do to have good organizational cyber hygiene is you need to have great contracts with those vendors so that you are clear with them like, “This is what I need you to do to protect everybody, and if you mess up, these are going to be the consequences.”

This basketball team now has much better cyber insurance. They understand what their policy covers and what it doesn’t cover. Cyber insurance is a real tough thing to buy these days.

There are a lot of options, but unlike automobile insurance, they are not comparable. You can’t just take two policies and put them next to each other and say, “This one costs less so it must be better.”

It is really hard to buy the right policy and to really know what you can get and a lot of these oversights in terms of insurance are being litigated. So there are companies that have spent a $150,000 for cyber liability policy. They go to file a claim, and the claim gets denied. They take the insurance company to the court and they lose, right?

We have done the due diligence with our customer.

They know exactly that they have now as far as cyber insurance. Their chief technology officer now has a prioritized cyber security roadmap that they can work from, and so now it’s completely clear to them where they should be spending their money on the technological improvements that they need to make.

Like having a high quality password manager or the different things that they need to do in order to prevent as much as possible bad stuff from happening. A couple other things that I will mention is they’re now have a much better conversation about cyber risk internally in the office. The executives actually now have an ongoing dialogue about where are they and what do they need to do next, and they have a score card that they actually look at.

And the other thing that I want to mention is that they’re actually having a much better conversation with the NBA. Because as a franchise, they are obligated to follow the rules that the NBA sets for them, and some of those rules have to do with cyber security and cyber risk, so now they are actually teaching the NBA a thing or two.

Connect With Kip Boyle Charlie Hoehn: What is the best way for listeners to get in touch with you or follow you?

Kip Boyle: Okay, so there’s a couple of things. Online, I am most active on LinkedIn. So you can find me easily there if you just type Kip Boyle in the search box. I think I am the only Kip Boyle in the whole world. So lucky for me it is pretty easy to find me there.

And on Twitter, my handle is @KipBoyle, so again you could find me there. I would also encourage you to check out the podcast that I am a co-host of, it is called, no surprise, The Cyber Risk Management Podcast.

And my co-host is a cyber-security attorney, and we are constantly talking about the different issues that decision makers are encountering as they try to thrive as cyber risk managers.

Charlie Hoehn: Excellent. My final question is, give a ten second challenge. What is the one thing that listeners can do this week from your book that will make a positive impact?

Kip Boyle: Sure, assuming that you’re already using a high quality password manager or maybe you are just not ready to tackle that yet, here is the thing that I want you to try to do: Avoid public WiFi. And here’s why. I want you to think of public WiFi as a municipal swimming pool, right? You have a swimming pool in your head right now, and you’re thinking about the city’s swimming pool, right? And the kids are running around the edge of the pool and they are jumping in and they are getting out.

And you are looking down into the pool, the water looks good—but is that water clean? How can you tell? Maybe it is, maybe that is a very, very well maintained pool with the proper chlorine levels and PH balances and it’s perfectly safe.

But maybe it’s not.

The problem is that unless you brought your test kit with you, you have no idea. So you are taking a risk every time you would get into a pool like that, and public WiFi is exactly the same. You never know if it is good or bad, and you have no way to test it. So my suggestion is just don’t do it.

And what’s the alternative, by the way? Your phone probably has a hot spot on it, your phone you should turn off the WiFi and just use your phone carrier mobile data, and that’s really what you should do. If you’ve got a laptop or a tablet or something like that then you can use your phone’s hotspot.

If you don’t have unlimited data, these days it’s actually pretty cheap to get unlimited data or at least a very high data allowance, so that’s my challenge for the listeners.

Get Kip’s new book Fire Doesn’t Innovate on Amazon.

Listen to more authors on cyber security:

Badass IT Support: Ben Brennan

Some People Are No Damn Good: Steve Albrecht

The post Fire Doesn’t Innovate: Kip Boyle appeared first on Author Hour.

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Running a successful company is the goal of every entrepreneur, but inevitably, we miss certain steps along the way. Dr. Satya Mitra is the author of The Five C’s, a handbook that will help you better serve your business, your clients and employees, and also your community.

Dr. Mitra has an amazing backstory that he starts this episode off with, where we talk about how he rose up from his childhood in rural India to becoming an influential business leader. If you’re somebody who has struggled with challenges and getting back up, this is definitely the episode for you, because Dr. Mitra shows how you can use these negative incidents in your life and turn them into positive outcomes.

Get Dr. Mitra’s new book The 5 C’s on Amazon. Find out more at DrSatyaMitra.com.

Dr. Satya Mitra: My life has been, from childhood very difficult. I grew up in adverse conditions. My mother passed away when I was three and then my father who was taking care of me just like a mother and father, although no one can replace a mother’s love, but he did his best. In the process, all being by himself.

He started becoming ill and gradually he started losing his eyesight and he became blind. Life became more and more difficult.

I have a sister who is quite older to me, and my brother who passed away who was even an older to my sister. My sister had gotten married at the age of 14, my brother used to live at a house that belonged to one of my mother’s old friends, who my mother at her deathbed had requested to take care of my brother. So that’s where my brother used to stay.

At home after my mother passed away, it was me and my father, and then my father became very sick, and he had to quit his job, which was a school teacher’s job at the age of 42, 43. He was retired because the background of his illness. Then we went to live with our family members and didn’t work out well. To make it short, we became homeless.

There were many days in our lives that we were just like vagabonds.

We traveled, we lived with the mercy of some friends, some days in their kitchen, some days in the veranda, some other days in some other friend’s house. Life went on, and certainly the challenges were surmounting, one over the other.

I don’t regret anything, because that made me a very strong person.

Early Life and Studies My father certainly was a big motivator in my life. He was a school teacher, and he gave me all the courage that was needed, all the inspiration there was needed. Many people came to help me, support me. I knew that I had to do the same thing one day when I got that opportunity to pay forward.

After, I finished my PHD, I would say because my brother supported me big time, helping me to get educated. He couldn’t go further in his education because we were very poor. My father didn’t have a job. Then my brother helped me when he became the first in a person to get a job after he finished his undergrad. He wanted me to go ahead and study as far as possible, a great brother. They all were very supportive, and then finally I finished my PHD back home and got an opportunity come to United States, which I had never dreamt that I would ever come here.

I came because of a kindness of a person who helped me get the ticket to come to America after I got the opportunity to do a post doctorate fellowship as a scientist.

I did my PHD in biochemistry in Louisville Kentucky Medical School. From there, I moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where I live now as a scientist in another company.

My father inspired me to become an entrepreneur, which I never thought I would be.

But then came family priest who we became discipled of, and he motivated me to really quit my science career and become a tax consultant and an investment adviser. From nowhere, overnight, I quit my science career and became tax consultant and investment adviser, which I had the knowledge of by taking calls just for my personal knowledge.

Then I turned it into an entrepreneurship, and that was a struggle because I had no clue how to run it. There was fear of being a failure, I had two little boys and my wife who supported me and we jumped into that venture thinking that my priest who blessed me to do this probably has envisioned that even if he’s throwing me in a ditch probably there are gold that I must be able to grab.

I moved on, sailed my own to become a tax consultant, investment adviser, and wealth management person—a financial planner, that’s what I do now.

Learn to Connect  There were many struggles to come up with how to really build this business and be successful. The calamities, the challenges of my childhood and life’s difficulties came back to me, trying to find positive things out of those.

I found out that when I came to this country one day, one person had asked me, “Hey, can you tell me if there is a John up here?” and I didn’t know where John meant, the slang behind it. I was thinking a name of a person but it was actually an emergency to go to a John, and I didn’t know that. When he figured I didn’t know it, he started yelling at one of my friends who rescued me saying that he doesn’t know what John means, he’s just new here and he started yelling, saying man, if he wants to live in this country, he better know what John means. He was so furious because I didn’t know that.

That stuck to my mind and I said that when I started this business, that I really need to know this country if I want to be an entrepreneur here. That’s where the concept of connect came in.

I wanted to connect with every possible sector in the community and know all different things going on here. Really fearlessly, I went and became a part of it. A lot of times, people would say some jokes that I wouldn’t understand because they were at that time American jokes, but I laughed when everybody laughed. Because I thought, “One day I’m going to understand it.”

Today, I am on the board of about 10 different organizations in this community and very well respected. People value me, people honor me and the leaders of this community have given me a very high regards. That has all happened because of the connection that I have made.

In my book, The Five C’s, the first one is connect. The power of connection is so much needed for any business owner, particularly those who are starting as an entrepreneur. That’s how the connect came in. Then as I started my business, I started becoming more professional and finding out how important it is to communicate with people.

Communicate, Create, Be Confident We wanted to be different, we brought in some novelty in our business. This all came because of thinking. My father always used to say that you have a brain inside your skull and that generates creativity—but only if we use it. Always echoed that in my mind, what my dad used to say. We became different in my business. We have 25 rules now in our office that everybody follows. Those are some of those creative steps that we have taken.

For example, if in our office, someone arrives in the bad winter time, we live in an area where the winter is so brutal. When they leave my office, within an hour, if it is a bad weather, my secretary has to call and say, “Did you reach home safe? Dr. Mitra wanted to know that. He was concerned about you.”

Nobody does that. No professional office will call back and say, “Hey, did you reach home safe?”

It carries so much weight.

The client sends me a post card saying, “I am at an awe that your secretary call me asking about how I reached home safe.”

When clients leave our office, our secretary must ask that do you need something for the road? Tea, coffee, juice, anything. No office does that. We became very creative in our operation because we wanted to make sure that we are different, when our clients leave our office, they leave thinking, what a great experience we have. That’s the different culture that we created.

I felt that it must be very important for us to be confident in what we do, that’s the other C. Be confident, you must have good knowledge, no matter what business you are in. You should know all the bells and whistles of that business so that any time anybody asks you any question, you should be ready to answer.

I mastered my subject, I read, I did all research.

I’m up to date all the time.

I do radio shows on taxes, on financial planning. I became a sort of like a confident person in a way that people drew a lot of confidence on me because of my knowledge.

Always Contribute The last C, which is contribute is the heart of my business must give back and that’s what my guru, the priest who changed my career, always said. If your business is successful, make sure you give it back to the community.

Today, we have opened a charitable organization foundation in Joy Guru Humanitarian Services through which we give back to the community. This is how the challenges that came in our lives, we turned it into something positive. My wife was brutally beaten in Brazil to the extent that she would have been killed. But we were fortunate we were alive, we came back and we opened a charitable school of self-defense in our community to protect all the women and girls in this area.

Community people think—these people are not only business owners doing good for themselves but they care for us.

That element is my message to everybody: you are successful to the extent only when you give back part of your success to the community and touch another life.

Those have been how the C’s came across.

We’re not limited that these are the only ways you can be successful, but I think these five C’s came with the struggle, with the difficulties in my life, which evolved into all these things to put it in my business.

The business started from a basement, where I had only an 8×10 area room.

My wife used to sit in front with a desk in the basement. That’s where it started, and today we’re on the 16th floor of the best building in town, very state of the art office.

I had a second office near Boston in a place called Burlington which had just closed recently, just to give my time to help people in the community with my foundation that my wife and I have created.

Our two sons now have graduated. They are on their own. One of them is an attorney in New York, the younger one is a standup comedian, travels all over the country and performs. So we thought, we’ll now dedicate our time to what our guru had asked us to do, the mission that he had asked us to fulfill—to help the community, give back to the community, use part of your success for them.

I say that you are truly successful, not only when you have all the wealth for yourself but you see that you’re distributing it to those who need it the most.

The 5 C’s in Everyday Life Charlie Hoehn: I’m curious for, let’s say the listener who is hearing this right now and thinking, “How can I start using these five C’s this week? To really make a positive impact on my life. Where do I begin?”

Dr. Satya Mitra: At the end of the day, it is you who has to inspire yourself.

I also say in my book that “YOU” stands for “your own usher.” YOU. I might talk to you, I might motivate you, I might inspire you, but when you go home, it is YOU who have to really lift yourself.

The way to do it is to talk to yourself. I talk to myself every day. I look at myself in the mirror before I leave my home, and I point out to myself in the mirror and say, “You can do it.”

That’s how I started my business and from day one through today, every day I look at myself in the mirror and I say, “You can do it.” That makes me so much powerful before I leave home. I step out of my home with that empowering message to myself that I can do it.

If he can do it, I can do it. My father used to say that it’s always easy to say I don’t have time, I can do it. don’t try to manage your time. Try to manage your desire.

You will find time. You will be able to do it.

So I suggest to everybody that clear the desire within yourself. If you have some enthusiasm to do something whether it’s with sports or it’s music or debating or writing a book or they’re in accounting or medicine, if you have the desire, tell yourself, I must get this done because I want to get it done, and I can do it because someone else can do it.

If you keep telling this to yourself, I think you will find that you will find in a way to get it done and not lagging behind, giving an excuse that no it is too much.

So it is how you really turn yourself up and talk to yourself and keep saying that I can do it and it happens. When you go beyond the line of duty to do something and express your desire, I think you’ll find a way to do it, and that’s what happened with me…

I wasn’t at all ready, but I had the faith in my guru. I had the knowledge of my subject, and I had the desire. It is a challenge—I wanted to take this challenge. People should be ready to take the challenge. I suggest to people don’t wait to be challenged. Challenge yourself.

When you challenge yourself and accept the challenge and say that, “I have the desire to do it. I will prove it to myself,” you will be able to.

You need to have a support from your partner.

If you don’t get that, things become difficult. Five C’s are one thing, but having someone supporting you every day in your life is so important to achieve success as well, and that is my wife. Every day I leave home early, at seven, come back at 1,1 doing all these things that I am involved in and my business. She has been so supportive for me to achieve the things that I want to achieve.

So all these bravos and kudos and standing ovations and things that I received, I bring home and say, “Honey it’s all for you.”

Without her, I don’t think I would have been able to move anywhere.

This book that I am writing, I might have been the author of this book, but the story that we have generated together during our married life makes her to be the true co-author of this book as well. She has been with me, strongly supporting everything that I have done.

She has worked with me, she has given her support. She has given me the love. Everything that I needed, which made me move with strength that I can do it and she has been the real person that has given me that courage to do good, achieve and be successful. So keep that in mind, it is important to have. A good family to achieve success as well.

Giving When It Hurts Charlie Hoehn: What do you say to somebody who might be thinking, “Gosh I feel like I don’t have much to give compared to these other folks that I compare myself to, who are doing so much better in life”?

Dr. Satya Mitra: It is all relative, whether you can give or you can’t give. It is all relative. It is a matter of having to reach hard. You have to have that.

I work as a tax consultant. I see so many different people from so many walks of life. I read so many stories, I see many people who are struggling to live their own life. In my book, I think there are a couple of stories.

One of them is the janitor. When I’d do their tax return, husband and wife used to make $30 grand, and they would give $5,000 to their church every year. Now one day I happen to ask them how do you do this and they say, “In my country, there are people who are so poor. My church sends money to them, and I always think that we make $25,000. At $25,000 I would have lived my life. But this $5,000…helps someone who doesn’t have anything.”

So people have to say that I have a responsibility to give. It is not something that I will give when I have. It will never get that time, because I have seen millionaires not willing to give anything because they think “I have worked hard to make this world and I want to cherish it myself.”

That is fine, that is a different philosophy. We also have to know or consider or believe that we have a responsibility for others so that we can bring a little balance and that is what the message that is in my book.

There is a story. Once there was a big leader in India, I have read the story somewhere, he wanted people to come and donate so that he can work with the freedom of the country from British.

And many people started making huge rows of people, lines of people came and started donating to him. He was sitting on the stage, his treasurer was sitting next to him, and people come and give a thousand rupees. Rupees is a denomination in India, 100 rupees, 10 rupees whatever they could. Again, he took that money, blessed that person, and gave that money to the treasurer. The next person comes, he takes the money, blesses him or her, and gives the money to the treasurer.

In the line there was an old lady. She was hardly able to walk. She had a stick, it was a branch of a tree as a support. She walked and walked and came to stage and gave Gandhi just a penny, and Gandhi took that penny, blessed that lady and held that penny to himself and the treasurer said, “Gandhi, you didn’t give that penny to me.” He said, “No because it is very special,” and she said, “How come that penny is special? People gave you 10,000 rupees, a thousand rupees, you gave everything to me and you didn’t give me the penny? How could the penny be so special?”

Gandhi said, “That is all she had.”

She gave everything she had for a good cause.

When you give in that way, hurting yourself, it is the true giving. So people have recognized that I could be a very successful entrepreneur. I did well, I wear the Italian suit and I have the Ferrari car and I really have so many properties and huge bank balance, but to me really it means nothing if you have not given a part of it for those who have no roof, who have no clothes, who have no food on their plate.

And there are people in this world who have a responsibility to take care. So if you get this inspiration inside you…no matter what you have, you can always give a small amount to make someone else’s life a little better.

Stories from Dr. Mitra’s Book Charlie Hoehn: That is a beautiful story. Are there other stories from your book, any particular favorites that we haven’t covered?

Dr. Satya Mitra: Well you know there are a lot of good stories of my life about my two sons. Giving is an important integral part of our business, of our life, and as they say the apple did not fall far from the tree. My younger son, when he started doing his comedy, the first year he participated in Boston Comedy Festival. That was the first time, he was a rookie and there were about 1,400 gigs that came in. The judges selected only 95 of them to come on the stage and compete.

There were many favorites to win that grand prize, and 14 out of that 95 competed every week in Boston. He won the whole thing as a rookie first year and he was given the $10,000 check as a grand prize winner.

He was the only winner, they don’t give any other second prize, third prize or anything. He went on the stage.

We were not even here. We were in India, we didn’t even know that he won this prize. He went on the stage and said to everyone that you know, we like to share the success of ours to the community.

That was the year of the Boston bombing, and he gave $5,000 right away to a fund to help the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing and he said, “I have another $5,000. There were 95 of us competed every day and I am the only one who got paid. Comedy is more fun when you share,” and he gave equally the other $5,000 to every other 94 friends.

He came home with only $49.50.

That makes me so proud.

You can really make a ripple effect when you give to others even in difficult situations. If you give that is the true giving and I suggest people to consider that that giving must be an integral part of our lives. Business owners, particularly entrepreneurs, are only successful when you sacrifice or share a part of your success to make your community a better place.

Charlie Hoehn: Truly a beautiful story and yeah, you must be so proud. That is really heartwarming.

Dr. Satya Mitra: I am. There are quite a few stories in the book, and I think hopefully people will recognize that what I have written in the book are all deeply coming from within my heart. My two sons are the ones, if I can pass it onto them and they can pass it on to their children I think that will be the real success of this book.

Nonetheless, certainly any other person reads this book and uses their business in their entrepreneurship and leadership role—I am not saying that these are the only things that bring success, but these could be key points that could add to their success story. I would be very happy to see someone use them and benefit from it, and that’s the main purpose of writing the book—to connect, communicate, create, be confident and contribute.

Connect with Dr. Mitra Charlie Hoehn: What is the best way for our listeners to potentially connect with you and thank you for the episode or even follow what you’re doing?

Dr. Satya Mitra: So certainly they can call my cellphone, 508-641-8441. The major reason of writing this book, besides giving tips or ideas to new entrepreneurs and startup business owners, was for me to get more opportunities to speak, motivate, and inspire. That is my main goal now in my life is to go out there and inspire people.

I do have the website, drsatyamitra.com, which is my speaking website. People can go in there and we have created this charitable foundation called Joy Guru Humanitarian Services.

So joyguru.org, is another website that people can go. They can connect me through that, and the proceeds of this book and the keynote speaking opportunity that I expect to get after this book is released and go and inspire people, the fees that I will be receiving from the book, from the speaking, the net proceeds after the expenses will all be poured into my charitable foundation.

Ultimately to go and do good things for the community. So it is not the money that I hold and rate for myself. I think I am doing all right with my current business that I have and my two sons and ourselves we donate any extra money that we generate into the foundation. My two sons have been donating every year plus we do some fund raising. Ultimately we want to build a Joy Guru International Humanitarian Center in our city to do all these activities to help homeless.

To help blind, to have the self-defense classes to bring in poor children and empower them with the good citizenships and to make sure that they become a good part of the community helping others. So I think we have big agenda ahead of us.

Our goal from this revenue from this book and speaking is to pour it back in our foundation to do good in the world. So they can connect with me through those websites or calling me, or my email is satya@thegurudex.com is my personal email address and they can also connect with me through that.

Charlie Hoehn: That’s great and my final question for you is give our listeners a challenge. Something simple that they can do this week from your book that will have a positive impact?

Dr. Satya Mitra: I would say don’t think that you can’t do it. Develop the desire in yourself that I can do it. I can do it.

Talk to yourself every day. Don’t back off thinking there are so many people who are failures. They can do this to turn every negative into positive. In everything that happens negative in your life, you will find something to do that will be a positive phenomenon.

Challenge yourself to be challenged, but don’t be afraid that you can do it.

Tell yourself, “I can do it. I can beat this challenge. I can prevail,” and I am sure you will.

Get Dr. Mitra’s new book The 5 C’s on Amazon. Find out more at DrSatyaMitra.com.

Listen to more authors on mindsets for life:

The Game of Adversity: Nick DiNardo

Positive Philosophy: Sanj Katyal

The post The 5 C’s: Dr. Satya Mitra appeared first on Author Hour.

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Dr. Emily Gutierrez and Jana Roso are the coauthors of The Parent’s Roadmap to Autism, and Jana is a registered nurse. They know that finding an effective treatment for autism can be a really complicated journey that’s filled with wrong turns and dead ends. In this episode, Emily and Jana suggest an alternate route that can lead to huge developmental gains for an autistic child.

Emily and Jana believe in a holistic biomedical approach, and it’s already helped countless children become more connected to the world around them. If you’re feeling helpless or hopeless or over-burdened, this is the episode for you. There is a new path that you can follow, and The Parent’s Roadmap to Autism will show you the way.

Get Emily and Jana’s new book The Parent’s Roadmap to Autism on Amazon. Find out more at Neuronutrition Associates.

Jana Roso: Throughout our book, we talk about gut health, and of course nutrition, and how you can manipulate your child’s diet to lower inflammation and improve their health. For me, I learned about all of that later in life when I came to college and had been battling GI issues my entire life, and quite a bit of anxiety.

On my own, I started to explore nutrition and the value of eating clean and avoiding a lot of processed foods in order to heal my own gut. Oftentimes when I’m talking with patients and their parents and hearing about their ongoing GI issues, which is oftentimes something that we’re dealing with in our autistic population, I feel that I can have a lot of sympathy to what they’re going through in that realm because I’ve been there myself. It’s not ever finished, right? Gut healing is ongoing, but yeah, I feel like I have fought that battle for quite some time.

Charlie Hoehn: What does it specifically mean to be on the gut highway?

Jana Roso: Well, the gut is the genesis of many autoimmune diseases and even the father of modern medicine, Hippocrates, will say all disease begins within the gut. We assimilate our environment from what we’re putting in our mouth to then what is being assimilated and then distributed throughout our body. Those inputs are very important and it’s something that we do, you know, six to eight times a day, not only with our food but with the microbes in our environment, the things that we’re exposed to.

Not everybody responds to the same inputs the same way.

Because somebody can be eating eggs and it’s a great source of protein and fat for them, high in choline, which is important for memory and learning—somebody else is eating eggs and it’s causing this inflammatory response which then is leading to chronic diarrhea and increased intestinal permeability or you know, kind of a leaky gut and then your immune system is up regulated. It’s nice to begin in the gut because it’s the genesis of really where disease typically begins.

Starting with a GPS Charlie Hoehn: You start off the book with the GPS, starting the GPS, what does this really mean?

Jana Roso: Yeah, you know, when we were thinking about writing this book and we wanted it to be relatable, we really liked this metaphor that we were using to get people onboard with each chapter and where we were taking them, kind of encompassing what we do with our patients here in the clinic.

Starting the GPS is essentially knowing where you’re at.

Everybody is at a different place on their journey, one parent comes in and their child might have already explored several avenues and maybe they altered their diet quite a bit and tried different supplementation. Then another family comes in and they might not even understand what medical treatment really encompasses.

It’s all about figuring out where you’re at on this journey, starting your car, where is your location, where are we headed, what have we done so far, and what is there left to try and talk about?

Emily Gutierrez: You know, sometimes you can be thrown the diagnosis of autism when really it’s actually something different. In our autistic population, we want to make sure that our patients have had kind of the big things ruled out. Doing a chromosomal micro-array which looks at chromosomal structure, getting proper diagnosing before you give the label of autism, because there are a lot of things that can look like autism but they’re not. They’re actually something else. Confirming that diagnosis is really important.

Charlie Hoehn: What are some examples of that when it gets misdiagnosed?

Emily Gutierrez: Gosh, it can be an autoimmune condition, it can be something like PANDAS or PANS that has overlapping symptoms that look similar. It could be even a genetic abnormality that hasn’t been detected.

Jana Roso: One of my patients came in and he’d been on the biomedical approach for many years, seeing it really good practitioner that was doing a good job with them that they showed minimal improvements with kind of all the biomedical treatment and biomedical means that we look at autism, not as a psychological disorder but more as a physiological systems imbalance disorder.

You know, we’re looking at different systems to see where the imbalances are, and then once you find those imbalances and correct them, often you’ll have an improvement and autistic symptoms.

For this kiddo, they’d done everything, seen some really good providers.

One thing they hadn’t done was a chromosomal micro array, and when we got his results back, he was missing a major cluster of genes. In fact, this kid has a rare genetic disorder that has the symptoms of autism but is not truly autism, it’s a rare genetic condition. It helps mitigate expectations for how much the child will progress developmentally.

The Gut Matters Charlie Hoehn: I seem to recall coming across a case study of somebody who is diagnosed with autism and it turned out, they had a ton of parasites, and as soon as those were removed, the improved dramatically. Does that sound accurate?

Jana Roso: Absolutely. You know, when a child is being evaluated for autism, you’re looking for certain symptoms. In a way, it can be a little bit—not limiting as to who you’re seeing and who is diagnosing, but you know, I’ve had children walk into my office and they’d been very verbal and very attentive and very playful and socially normal but have this label on them. Essentially, it’s an umbrella for all of these symptoms and what that means is why we dive into it. You know, what’s going on in the gut.

What does nutrition look like, what nutrient deficiencies are there, so all of these avenues that we’re investigating can lead to those symptoms that that child is having. That then becomes a diagnosis of autism.

Charlie Hoehn: I’d imagine many parents who come to you just worried out of their minds and wondering how they can help their child, they’re not aware of this, right?

Jana Roso: Yeah, we treat autism in our clinic, but we also treat everything chronic disease and all things that are functional medicine. We even have primary care patients. I’ve had patients that have come in here, and their children are on two to three different psychotropic medications, not seeing symptom improvement. They’re kind of at their wits end.

We’ve dived into their gut and it turned out either they had celiac disease or they had some type of severe intestinal inflammation, but the child had no symptoms. Maybe just a little constipation that was something that they’d always had. The psychiatrist typically doesn’t ask about your bowel movements, the neurologist typically doesn’t ask about what you’re eating or your bowel movements. I’m hopeful that that is starting to change in medicine, because all of your systems are connected.

The gut influences the brain just like the brain influences the gut, via the vagus nerve.

There’s always this cross talk that is happening. When you’re talking about anything that has any type of neuropsychiatric or neurocognitive effect, I think it’s a disservice not to really dive in and understand what’s happening within the microbiome or the gut.

Emily Gutierrez: You would be surprised at how many people are really well aligned with what’s going on with biomedical treatment and in tune because of how social media has blown up. It is rare that we have a family in that comes in that really doesn’t understand what we’re going to be talking about or what we’re going to be doing, because as soon as their child has received this diagnosis, they’re either online searching for answers or on a Facebook group or they’re talking with a friend who has been down this journey.

I would say it’s more rare to come across a family who really doesn’t understand what biomedical treatment might entail for their child.

Testing Gut Health Charlie Hoehn: When you say, really dive into the gut, what does that mean? What kind of test are you doing?

Jana Roso: Gosh, there are numerous amounts of tests but we often, you know, we’ll start, when you’re diving into the gut, the first step is really removal of inflammatory foods or any pathogens that can be inflammatory, so we will often do a food sensitivity panel, we can look at food allergies so that we can provide guidance to that family as to what should we be feeding our child and what should we not be feeding our child.

Then we often will utilize stool studies that look at different pathogens and look at different fungi and we’ll look for H. Pylori and even the composition of the beneficial versus the more dysbiotic or pathogenic bacteria in the gut, so it will give us an idea what is really growing in the gut, what should we put our focus in towards, and then we can even rule out autoimmune type of bacteria and might leave it out.

Emily Gutierrez: To simplify it, we take out what is not needed and put in what is needed. That’s really rebalancing the gut and that’s everything from what Jana said, foods, bacteria, the fungus or posterior, different bacteria that shouldn’t be there to replacing it with healing nutrients, healing foods, healing microorganisms.

That’s how we really focus on the gut and can utilize supplements to do that, we often utilize medications as well.

Jana Roso: It’s not an overnight process. We have to remind families that this is not a sprint, it is a marathon, and it sometimes has taken years for the gut to get to the state that it’s in now, and so now the process to heal the gut is going to take a while.

Removing the inflammatory items, foods, and then adding in healing supplements or other healing substances, it can just take time for the gut to turnover and to see improvements.

Take Time to Heal Charlie Hoehn: It takes years to get to the place that it’s in now, right? What is the typical healing time would you say if you had to ballpark it?

Emily Gutierrez: Well, I wouldn’t say it takes years. I think that the thing is, as you can see, are pretty immediate improvements once you utilize medications and start to change the diet. In fact, there’s literature that shows that we can start to really shift the microbial diversity in our gut with foods that can happen up to even just a few days later.

The trouble with kids on the spectrum are a lot of them are very picky.

Changing the parent’s approach to their child’s food and changing that kid’s palette, that I think can take a little bit more time. Healing the gut is something that you know, you start with like Jana said in the beginning is also ongoing. If you just go back to eating inflammatory foods and being exposed to different things and not taking care of yourself the way that you should be, you’re going to likely end up back in a place of inflammatory stress.

Jana Roso: Healing the gut can be ongoing. Once you have incorporated different supplements and changed your diet quite a bit, we can see some pretty drastic improvements in our patients. But as we see with them and as I know personally, you hit a roadblock every once in a while, let’s say you get really sick and you can’t avoid that antibiotic and so you’re on a medication temporarily and that kind of sets you back in the gut department and so there’s things like that that are going to happen, maybe you know, the holidays come around and we eat too much sugar. Our child kind of regresses a bit and we have to get back on track after that.

It’s an ongoing process.

But I think once you have the tools to know how you should be handling your body and what you should be eating and what you need to take to heal your gut, then you will end up on the right path after that.

Emily Gutierrez: What’s interesting about people and food is we equate food with health. Even sometimes, if we’re feeding our children food that isn’t healthy for them—for a parent to watch a child refuse to eat for a day, that takes a lot of strength for a parent to muscle through that. In my experience, I haven’t had a patient go more than a day without eating.

They do eventually get hungry enough, and they will eat. You got to try to just take the emotion out of it.

Here’s what we have to eat, if you don’t want to eat it, that’s all right, we’ll try again at the next scheduled meal or snack time.

You know, the more strong willed the child is, the longer they’re going to hold out and refuse.

But we can go a good 30 days without eating before we get into serious trouble. It’s water that we always need, and we can even go without water for a couple of days. It just takes a lot. It’s a battle of the wills. It’s a shift in a parent’s thinking that if my child eats something that is bad for them, it’s worse than them not eating at all while I shift their palette.

Jana Roso: That documentary has been really inspiring for a lot of our families who are having a hard time deciding that they’re going to drastically change their child’s diet, and a lot of times it comes down to that—if we want to make progress, if we want to see gains, then we really need to do something drastic with how they’re eating. I reference that documentary just to give the parents a lot of inspiration and courage to go in that direction.

Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, that brings me to another question that I’m curious about is, do you two ever use fasting as a tool to help the gut heal?

Emily Gutierrez: We definitely believe in the benefits of fasting to increase the brain growth hormone so we believe in it. It’s harder to ask a child to fast. I mean, if you wake up and you eat at seven and then you go to bed at seven and you don’t eat for 12 hours, that’s a 12 hour fast. It can be very helpful for adults.

I think it is more helpful in an older population, but for a kiddo that is growing and really needs a lot of nutrient support to lay down those tissues and bones, we just don’t use it as often at this time in our practice.

Success Stories Charlie Hoehn: Are there any great stories in the book that you’d like to share on this podcast?

Jana Roso: We see a little successes and little wins all the time, you know, it just depends on what the child is coming in with and what the situation is, we’ve had kids that have had chronic irritable bowels that have not been able to become potty-trained that, after a few months of treatment finally, out of diapers and they’re six years old. We’ve had patients that haven’t had any words, after a few months of treatment, they’re speaking.

We see improvement within all of our patients. It is the degree to the improvement varies from child to child.

We often leave the office as we’re you know, helping our patients check out and get to the front with you know, a lot of hope in our heart and tears in our eyes because things have gone so well.

The key to success with these children is adherence to a recommended plan of care. I think that a lot of times when you get into bio medicine, you can feel a little bit overwhelmed, because there’s no magic pill. We’re not going to say you’re going to take a fish oil and your child’s not going to be autistic again.

We’re going to recommend a dietary change, a lifestyle change, looking at your environment, to make sure there’s not toxic inputs. We might ask you to clean up the air quality in the house, looking at the water quality, that the kids are drinking. We might recommend different behavioral therapies, we might recommend not only fish oil but maybe probiotics for the gut or different ventilation or genetic support.

Often, there are multiple tasks for the parent to do.

It’s when the parent just follows the plan of care and is congruent with that that you see the best outcomes. I will say for those parents that just want to do everything except change their child’s diet, there’s likely going to be a stagnation in where the developmental process could lead.

Emily Gutierrez: I was thinking about the kiddos I followed up with this week and I have a couple of good stories. I followed up with an eight year old kiddo yesterday and his parents. I think we’ve been seeing him for maybe six to nine months and we really focused on diet change and gut health and supplementation of nutrients that he was lacking, and the mom said the greatest thing yesterday—she said that in his therapy, at his ABA place that he goes almost 40 hours a week.

They told her that he was the most rapidly progressing student that they had, that they were having to change his plan of care so rapidly to keep challenging him because he was progressing so much and he’s starting to use more words. He’s starting to look his parents in the eye and ask them for what he wants.

Even though that seems so minute, it is huge for this child and he’s going in the right direction, even as an eight year old. I was thrilled to hear that from them yesterday.

Charlie Hoehn: I can’t imagine a more rewarding line of work. I cannot fathom how personally rewarding this work must be to you two.

Emily Gutierrez: It’s really amazing to sit in here with the parents, and they become more than just a patient. You think about them on your days off, and you follow up with them via email or phone and you’re constantly wondering how this child’s doing. It’s much different from a primary care office or that doctor that you see once a year.

A lot of our families come in and their main goal is speech for their child.

There’s so many hurdles that we have to overcome that’s where we might see that come into play. I followed up again today with a different patient who is a lot younger, who is four years old. He was stimming a lot, pacing around the room when I saw him and just very anxious, very hyperactive, very high pitched screaming and yelling, just out of his skin.

At our follow up, mom reveals that he is so calm now and he’s able to sit still and he’s able to do some things that he wasn’t before.

There’s no stimming, there’s no pacing. We haven’t gotten to the point where he is verbalizing yet, but just seeing this child be able to sit still and be calm and sleep, not wake up in the middle of the night. I mean, these are some really big hurdles that we had that overcome. Now we can continue healing and aim for his speech to come next.

Vision for the Roadmap Charlie Hoehn: What is your ultimate hope and vision for this book?

Emily Gutierrez: Well, the one thing I think when Jana and I wrote this book, we thought, we don’t want to point the finger and say other providers are doing it wrong. I truly believe that those providers that are treating autism and neurologists and the pediatric psychiatrists, you know, the pediatricians, they’re doing the best they can with the knowledge that they have.

Our hope for this book was that we put that there is scientifically grounded knowledge that you can improve symptoms of autism by applying functional medicine to it. You know, taking a paradigm shift and instead of saying, “Okay, autism are these symptoms. Let’s put this child on an antipsychotic medication and put them in therapy,” which are the two biggest tools right now in allopathic medicine to treat autism.

If we can shift that to think, “Well what is causing the symptoms of autism? Why is there aggression, why is there a language delay, why is there stimming or OCD or hyperactivity?” when you can make that shift you could just see some tremendous improvements in all kinds of areas within the child.

I hope that the science is taken seriously, and then it’s a look of, “Okay, well maybe we can expand our view of how we’re treating autism to really have a more holistic approach.”

Jana Roso: In addition to that, I think another one of our goals was really to reach more people with knowledge of biomedical treatment. Emily and I, we’re limited in how many patients we can see every day, and parents are often limited in the funds that they have to spend on their child’s medical care.

With insurance not covering most functional medicine cost, it can get very expensive. So in order to bridge that gap, we thought that it would be wonderful to have this knowledge on paper for parents.

To be able to do what they can do for their child at home, and if it buys them time and then the ability to see a practitioner for one or two visits to guide them a little bit more than that is even better.

Emily Gutierrez: At the end of the book, we’ll say to our patients that we don’t want to leave you here. We want you to be able to take this a step further. So we have been creating some learning modules online that go over each chapter, like genetics and the gut and the immune system, and I teach through the major highlights in the chapters, then I review what supplements can be helpful. We are even offering some online labs where parents they don’t have to be a patient.

They can get labs, they can do a stool study on their own.

So each lab has an interpreted guide that comes with it. They will get a little bit of direction from the labs on how to interpret the results. So if they can’t afford to come and see us or because we are full and we’re months out or they live in a state that there is nobody that has a functional medicine or biomedical training, they can use these tools on their own to continue the journey and apply it more specifically to their child.

So I think that is one of the most heartbreaking things about our work is that we cannot reach enough kids. There are so many out there that need help and in fact, we will get in trouble even if we see kids that have Medicaid that have certain insurances. So everything has to be out of pocket, and there is a cost barrier there. I am hoping that as functional medicine gets more mainstream and adopted the insurance will start covering it and there will be greater access to care.

Charlie Hoehn: Another thing that you have in the book that I really like is you have kid friendly recipes. You have paleo pancakes, I think I saw kombucha popsicles and stuff to help that kids love. So I think that is such a practical thing to include. A really good resource.

Jana Roso: Yeah, the paleo pancakes are a favorite in our house. I hope that other people enjoy those. They are really easy, easy to make.

Work with Emily and Jana Charlie Hoehn: What is the best way for our listeners to get in touch with you?

Emily Gutierrez: They can go online and look at us. Our practice is called Neuronutrition Associates, and they can leave us an inquiry on our main page and they can leave us an email. They can call our office, they’ll go through a bit of a telephone tree to get to where they need to go but they can also call us.

Jana Roso: Yeah our number is 512-599-8850.

Charlie Hoehn: I’d love for you to give our listeners a challenge. What is the one thing they can do this week that will have a positive impact on their child’s life or their family?

Emily Gutierrez: That is a great question. I would say for me, it is I think it’s just good to take a step back and try to really understand where their child is. So what I mean by that is as we get so caught up in the busy-ness that we might not understand, “All right so we just had pizza dinner and then we had diarrhea two hours later” or the next day, “You know, the sleep was bad” or the stimming was worse. Take a step back and just really take in an evaluation.

When is your child having symptoms, when are the flares, what are the foods that are going in, what did the bowels look like? That could be a really important indicator. Just take a step back and be a detective and know where you’re at before you begin.

Jana Roso: I think for me, evaluating and trying to really think about what are the top stressors that are contributing to everyday life. As a parent, Emily and I both have kiddos, we understand that just having children can be stressful and so there is so many different aspects to life that cause stress and for parents having a child with special needs adds to that stress, so taking a step back and trying to find ways to decrease stress.

Do some deep breathing, meditate, try and get a good amount of sleep. In the grand scheme of things, even if you are eating the healthiest of diets and you are taking supplements, if your life is just consumed with stress, then that is going to add to or be on the top of inflammatory chain and compromise your gut microbiome even more than anything else.

Get Emily and Jana’s new book The Parent’s Roadmap to Autism on Amazon. Find out more at Neuronutrition Associates.

Listen to more authors on healthy families:

The Wellness Roadmap: Allan Misner

Eat in Peace to Live in Peace: Charlotte Kikel

The post The Parent’s Roadmap to Autism: Dr. Emily Gutierrez and Jana Roso appeared first on Author Hour.