How To Pitch To An Investor With Minnie Ingersoll
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
In the world of entrepreneurship, investing in people is crucial. Today, John Livesay interviews Minnie Ingersoll, the Co-founder of Shift Technologies Inc., host of LA Venture Podcast, and a Partner at TenOneTen Ventures. Minnie had an amazing career at Google and now works for a venture capital company in Los Angeles. She reveals how she looks at things and decide on which startup she’s going to fund. She also shares some insights on how you can keep going even in times when you don’t feel like it. Learn more about how you can pitch your ideas to an investor in this fascinating episode.
—
Listen to the podcast here
How To Pitch To An Investor With Minnie Ingersoll
Our guest is Minnie Ingersoll, who’s a partner at TenOneTen Ventures and the COO and Co-Founder of Shift. She’s also the host of her podcast called La Venture. Shift is an online marketplace for used cars. Minnie started her career as an early product manager at Google, where she founded the access team across functional product, policy, and engineering team that spun off Google Fiber. After more than a decade, she made her exit from Google to begin her entrepreneurial journey with Shift, a company she co-founded and scaled to over $100 million. She is a longtime Silicon Valley product leader and operations executive with experience building and scaling impact through elegant technical solutions and great teams. She’s moved back to Los Angeles after twenty-plus years in the Bay Area and we couldn’t be happier to have her on the show and in Southern California. Minnie, welcome to the show.
Thanks, John.
I would love you to tell us your own story of origin. You can go back to childhood, college, wherever you want, where you started thinking, “I like technology,” “I want to get into the startup world,” or when Google got on your radar. How did that happen?
I grew up in Southern California. I grew up in Pasadena. My parents are both academics and I was a nerdy kid but it was before it was cool to be nerdy. It was nerdy to be nerdy. I went to Stanford thinking I had studied math, but this is in the ‘90s. There was much going on in the computer science department. It was at the forefront of society and the changes that were happening. I studied computer science, which was a good move. In retrospect, I’m glad I did that. I joined a company in the IPO in March of 2000. Right before everything burst, so went to business school. We IPOed but weren’t profitable. That was a challenge.
I went to business school and I wanted to go back to startup life. I was sure after business school that I was not meant to be in the banking world or something. I was looking for a small startup. I ended up joining Google when they were 500 people. I thought it was huge at the time, but I joined when it was 500 and I stayed for several years. I stayed from 500 to 60,000 people. It was a crazy ride. The quick version of it is that’s how I got deep in Silicon Valley. It seems like a straight trajectory from Stanford computer science, but to me, it felt like a bumpy journey, but that’s how I got going before I started my own company.
What lessons did you learn watching Google grow from 500 to 60,000 to help people who want to scale like that? You’ve got growing pains, obviously.
I’ll give you the formula and you too can go to a $60,000 trillion company. There were many lessons. It sometimes depends when I zoom out and zoom in. The macro thing that a lot about is what our company’s role in society. That’s a challenge you have on your 60,000 or 100,000 people. I’m increasingly a believer that you have to build something that’s good in the world and you have to think about what’s best for the user. It’s become a trite expression but I do think that’s how you build things with long-term impact. It’s also one of the things that I look for now that I’m a VC.
[bctt tweet=”Are we making something good in society?” username=”John_Livesay”]
Fast-forwarding a bit, one of the things I look for is, “Are we building something good in society?” On the more practical side of things, I learned all sorts about operationally how do you hire well? How do you do 360-reviews well? How do you set up your HR department or OKRs? All of those things were valuable when I started my own company. I said, “I’m not going to try to think about how we should do OKRs, write snippets or do 360 reviews. Google had a whole infrastructure of people who analyze this and we’re going to copy from them.” That was on the tactical side, useful.
What are some of your insights? I know, as an investor, you’re always looking at the team. You got to see the importance of building a good team at Google scale and they have an in-depth process. I read once that it’s harder to get in Google than it is and Harvard, there are many people wanting to go in. Do you have any big picture tips for founders where they’re building a team or what you look for in a team?
I spend a ton of my time interviewing people both at Google and at Shift. Unfortunately, the biggest thing that I take away from that is that it takes a ton of time. Everyone says they want to build great teams and you should. It’s worth the investment, but realize that building great teams might be a third of your time or something. Think about that. It’s not an hour a day. It’s multiple hours every day to do it right. The other thing I believe is there’s no way of shortcutting the time but the time also needs to be spent upfront. There are times when you’re hiring twenty people like software developers and it’s all the same role but a lot of times, especially at a startup, you’re hiring twenty people into twenty different roles. Each role is a different role.
Having all of that alignment on what you’re looking for upfront and spending a lot of time more than you think identifying what success looks like in the role, and therefore what are the qualities that someone would have that would lead them to be successful in the role. Now, you know the qualities. You know what success looks like and thinking about what are the personas and going after identifying those people. A lot of times, in a startup, you’re being proactive, you’re not sorting through the resumes that come to you but you’re proactively seeking out the best engineering director for a company that meets your criteria. It’s someone who’s gone through hyper-growth that has a similar stage startup. It’s those things and going after those people proactively and relentlessly. There’s a lot of that that is all the upfront stuff.
I spoke at the Coca-Cola CMO Summit, which was connected to Google and Silicon Valley, who did the summit. The next day we went to Google because Google and Coca-Cola are extremely close and partnered together. One of the things that impressed me is the culture of Google. They said that they had someone come to speak about the importance of food and the quality of the food. “You feed the people you love,” was a line that was stuck with me. I thought, “What a great culture to create that you’re caring about the people enough to not only feed them free food, but we feed them quality food. The amount of time and effort that goes into feeding all those people around the world with different cultures and different needs.” That’s an interesting insight that it’s no longer a perk, but also part of a cultural mindset. Since we have you with your expertise there. Everyone’s heard KPI, Key Performance Indicators and OKR, Objective Key Results that Google uses. Are they the same or are there some differences for people to have in their heads?
I can’t say I’m the expert here. When I think about KPIs, I’m thinking about what are the key performance indicators that I need to measure on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis. There are different things and they’re usually measurable metrics. They might be things that you do want to measure on a daily basis but there may be things you want to measure on a monthly basis, but you don’t want to measure on a daily basis. Figuring all of that out is an amazing skill but you don’t want to measure things too much at times.
You don’t want to measure things too little, but you also don’t want to measure things too much and figuring out all of that structure. The KPI doesn’t encapsulate the objective. The key thing about an OKR, which is an objective and key results is it’s about tying those OKRs, the key results back to an objective. The objective might improve our users’ happiness or something. I don’t know if that’s a great example, but figuring out what the key results are to tie back there. That’s usually done on a quarterly basis. Whereas your KPIs might have KPI dashboards that are measuring things on an hourly basis.
Since you now have your own investment company, what is it that you look for? Are there specific industries that you’d to invest in? What are you looking for within those industries besides a great team and making as we said something good in the world?
Hiring The Right People: One of the goals in having a first meeting is to get to a second meeting.
Google stuff is interesting. For every VC, the thing that I have heard the most is you look for people to invest in people, product and markets. We’re no different from that. It’s interesting to dig deeper into all of those and think about what do those mean. When I’m looking at people for me, there are a variety of different things. The meta thing that runs throughout it is I want people to think for themselves. I’m going to tell you what I’m looking for but what I care about is people who are thinking for themselves and not trying to reverse engineer the VC.
I’ll tell you what I’m looking for. When people come to me and tell me, “Here’s my TAM SAM SOM slide.” The little bubbles. There’s a bubble here a bubble there. I can’t remember what SOM stands for. The Total Addressable Market I know is the TAM. If they come to me because they’ve been told that that’s what they’re expected to do and they put that slide up front, I want someone who looks me in the eye and explains to me why this is an amazing opportunity. What this is a big opportunity. That’s what the TAM SAM SOM is supposed to be. This is a big opportunity. Explaining to me how big the industries are in a way that’s educating me, that’s interesting like putting it on a bubble that’s not.
You’re singing my song. Tell a story that turns the numbers into a story.
For me, I’m interested when I’m being educated that engages me. I’m a little less of an entertain me storyteller as much as educate me. That’s interesting to me if you’re educating me but be authentic. Figure out what it is that is authentically why you believe this is a big market and tell me that story. Make me believe this is a big market but don’t put it on some TAM bubble because someone has told you to. That’s one of the big things. One of your goals of having a meeting is to have me want to have a second meeting. That’s not necessarily educating me on everything you’re doing.
There’s a personal connection. I sit on panels all the time and people come up. They’re eager and they stand in line and they have 1 to 2 minutes to make some elevator pitch. They try to cram everything it is about their businesses as if I’m going to remember it in 2 minutes. Their goal should be finding another time to sit down and discuss things. It’s making that personal connection. There are times that I’m not all that interested in the investment but I want to make an investment in the person. I genuinely want to be helpful.
Introductions are everything. It reminds me of someone asking somebody to marry them on a coffee date. You don’t jump in like that.
In terms of the people side of things, I’ll use an example, I’ve got three kids and they all go to the same daycare and I can see that the daycare doesn’t have any technology that’s serving them in terms of their CRM or their marketing tools. I’m a developer, I know how I can build a better system for the daycare versus someone who tells me, “I run ten daycare franchises. I built up my software myself for my own business. I know exactly what is needed. I’ve been creating this for myself and this is what I’m going to do with the rest of my life whether or not you give me money.”
There’s a subtle difference there or maybe not that subtle. I’m looking for someone who deeply knows the business that they are building and not only came up with the idea of observing the world. They had one poor experience and they decided to solve it but this is their life work. They run ten daycares. They’re going to be continuing to build software for daycares because that’s what they’re going to be doing, regardless of whether this venture gets funded. They’re going to keep at it for the rest of their lives because this is their business and their thing.
[bctt tweet=”Investors want someone who looks them in the eye and explains to them why investing in them is an amazing opportunity.” username=”John_Livesay”]
What you said reminds me of the difference between casually looking at something and going, “Maybe I can fix that,” versus, “I’m immersed in this. It’s my life and I’m on the inside. I’m working with lots of different people and this isn’t a casual observation but more of an immersive experience. My perspective is different as a founder from that difference.”
We like big markets but we were looking for someone who’s spent their career in that market and had a unique insight. Sometimes in terms of a pitch, it’s less a pitch and more of maybe it’s educating us on the market. I don’t mean that to be exploitative, “I’m taking the meeting so I can be educated.”
I look at anybody who’s invested trying to get an investor like you and one of the things I always tell people is, “Do your homework. Look at the other companies that this venture capitalist has invested in to try and see some through-line,” I’m going to take a stab, I would say, “It’s not rocket science but, company’s name, data science and Interviewing.io. I would imagine that you like to invest in things and not only have a big market but also have a lot of technology behind it from looking at your portfolio.” Would that be accurate?
Yes. I was giving you a piece of generic advice about how I like to think about a pitch. At TenOneTen we tend to invest in engineers turned entrepreneurs or companies with deep engineering DNA to them. Software and data being our focus as opposed to hardware. There are other difficult things. I also host a podcast where I interview VCs and I asked one of my VC friends what he likes to invest in and he said, “A company that he feels that he could run.” I thought that was an interesting lens. That probably takes it further. I don’t feel that I could run someone else’s company. I’m investing in early-stage so into seed-stage companies. Most of them don’t have them fully built out executive teams. A lot of times there’s gaps and things they’re still looking for advice on. I want to invest in companies that I feel that I have some expertise in. For us at TenOneTen, I have two partners. We all have built software and data companies and gone through that hyper-growth of building software companies. That’s what tends to be what we look for where we feel kindred.
What a fascination that you and your partners you’re immersed in this. You know this business you’ve and you’ve been in the trenches. As a speaker, when I can speak to an audience, which is typically salespeople whether they’re tech salespeople or whatever it is they happen to be selling. I’ve been in their shoes and I know what they’re going through, whether healthcare or technology. That sales, mindset and objections. That gives you completely different credibility than, “We would imagine what it would to be in your shoes as a software person or a data person.” You’re like, “All three of us have done it.” Which I find completely fascinating.
To your point also, one of the reasons I do a podcast, one of the things I love about your show is there is something about doing your homework, which is what you’re saying. When you listen or when you read people’s blog posts, it’s a much easier way to improve approach someone intelligently if you’ve done your homework on what their investment theses are. Things like podcasts and reading their Twitter wherever someone is active. Read all of that allows you to do a much better pitch.
The customization or comment on the posts you make all that good stuff, you also have wonderful insights into what it’s like to scale an idea and turn it into a series D company. For those who may not be familiar with that alphabet dollar amount, would you share with us? People who have a sense of seed may be up to a million and series A is $3 million to $4 million. People don’t hear that much about series D. What is D? Let’s answer that first and talk about what it takes to scale an idea to get to that level.
I’ve been located in the Bay Area and seed, A, and everything’s gotten bigger. TenOneTen we’re in LA, we invest across the country, but are the typical size round that we’re investing into as a $2 million seed. As are more 10 on 40 or something, meaning a $10 million raise on a $40 million pre-money valuation. At Shift we raised $3.2 million seed, we raised a $20 million A, a $50 million B, a $30 million C and $120 million, depends how you counted something D. It’s something like that. I’m not sure I did exactly right.
Hiring The Right People: Podcasting is an easier way to approach someone intelligently.
That’s helpful. Thank you.
I left after we’d raised about $100 million. It was after our seed. Hopefully, my math there adds up approximately correctly. Since then we raised this other $100 million-plus D. It’s the grand total of about $200 million raised.
The biggest difference is seed because you don’t have any real revenue. By the time you get to a series A, you’ve got revenue coming in the pitch is quite different. It’s no longer, “We think this will work, we have some proof of concept, but not a lot.” As they go up in dollar value, do the pitches change dramatically once you’ve got revenue coming in between A and B? Does it stay fairly consistent in terms of more and more proof?
It definitely changes. It’s different things that different investors will be looking at. Even now that most people are doing a pre-seed, even at seed, most of the companies we invest in have revenue. Even at seed. There are still different lenses. Do you know what the rule of 40 is? If I get it correctly, but it’s a balancing act between your speed of growth and your profitability. To some degree, later-stage investors will be looking for that balance. If you’re not profitable, that’s okay because there’s a story that can be why you’re not profitable because you are launching many new markets and expanding so quickly. Each market takes you eighteen months to get to profitability but there’s a repeatable model. People will be looking at different things. It doesn’t have to be profits, but it has to be rocket ship growth. There are a lot of people who are sophisticated about what metrics to expect in different industries in different models.
You talked about when you were with Google and other companies the importance of spending time getting the right team and interviewing them. Now as a venture capitalist, you’re competing with other venture capitalists because everyone has their brand like a company does, to get the right deals as opposed to necessarily to get the right, “Team,” is still connected to a team. Are there certain strategies and tactics that entrepreneurs can use and learn that you’re doing as a venture capitalist to get your name aware and get to be people’s first stop, if you will?
It’s challenging because I want entrepreneurs who are not spending their time necessarily only going to conferences, meetups and having their name known. There is some of that but I want people who are building businesses. It’s the same thing with VC. I want to be building my business and helping my companies. Doing a raise is a tricky thing where you want to be hot as it when you’re raising. Some of that does have to do with timing. You want people to be aware of you, but you don’t want them to be aware that you’re raising and that you get stale. Build a great business and everyone will want to invest is the answer. I do see people who have been raising for 6 and 8 months.
They get a stale feeling and I don’t necessarily think that’s a good thing but I do think that investors will start to question, “You’ve been raising for six months and no one else has invested. Am I the sucker who’s investing after everyone else has passed?” I hope we can maintain our independent thought and deals on the face of them. If an entrepreneur can go out and say, “Let me get you excited about what I’m building but I’m not raising it.” You can’t get in now. Here I am I’m not raising money but I’m building something incredible and I can get excited but I still have to be patient. Be patient for three months and get excited to be like, “I hope he comes back to me and wants to raise money from us.” It starts to be a little too much. Let’s play the game too hard but there’s some reality to it.
It’s almost like selling a house and getting multiple offers versus a house that’s been on the market a long time and no one’s making an offer. It’s either priced too high, not in a great location and there’s something wrong. I like this concept of starting relationships before you start to raise and not being in such a needy place. That’s where it all comes down to. I’m also curious to ask your perception of being a woman in a traditionally male world. How do you navigate that? How can anybody who might feel an outsider for one reason or another that doesn’t fit this traditional, we went to Stanford, but you’re not a man. There are lots of different variations on not being that. Whether it is race, religion, different schools, sexuality choices, all those different diversity things all have a commonality. How did you navigate that? How can that maybe help us?
[bctt tweet=”Build a great business and everyone will want to invest. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
It’s a tricky one. I have an insider background in terms of computer science. I wear hoodies myself. I do. There’s one aspect which is I can’t say enough, which is the thing for yourself aspect which is I don’t want people to feel that they have to know the system, figure out the system and worry, “I don’t know exactly what it is you want to hear from me because I wasn’t part of the system,” or something. Therefore, they try to be someone they’re not. There are people who think that if you’re not part of the system, you feel that you’re missing the secret formula to how to build the slide deck that gets you a million dollars versus building something incredible that you know is the incredible thing that you were meant to build. It’s an easy thing for me to say, which is, I have two pet peeves. I have many, but one is people who tell me I’m not technical enough. I don’t have a degree in computer science. My degree in computer science was before the internet existed. It was. We didn’t have email. There was no client-server interaction. We were building programs in Pascal that ran on computers not on the internet.
I remember those cards you had to type.
I wasn’t typing cards, but my point is there are no aspects of what I learned in school now. There were no blockchains, product management, and daily stand-ups. To be relevant in tech, you have to be constantly reinventing yourself and learning what’s new. Don’t feel that because you didn’t have a degree in computer science, you can’t understand someone said, “I don’t know what an API is?” You can figure it out. There are inputs and outputs. Similarly, I went to business school, so I can say this with people who told me, “I can’t build a forecast. I don’t know what a model is.” I didn’t go to business school or learn this. Let’s say you’re some smart technical person who can figure out what an Excel spreadsheet does it. Don’t feel that you’re missing something because you’re not.
We have to be empowered that you may not have this specific training but get somebody on your team who does or figure it out yourself.
I’ll go one step further. I didn’t learn that much in either of those schools so you miss out on that.
Are there any last thoughts, quotes or a book you want to leave us with?
I have all these quotes that all come from my mother.
Besides, “Clean your room?”
She would say, “Chop wood, carry water.” Chop wood, carry water comes back to another one of hers which is, “Show up, tell the truth, and hope for the best.” Both of those come from the aspects of you don’t always have to enjoy doing the thing that you’re doing and many times you don’t enjoy it. From the outside have this lovely career and people are like, “Isn’t Google the greatest place to work?” The truth is it sucked at times. At times, I didn’t want to get out of bed. In multiple times my life, I’ve not felt like it. Now, I love what I’m doing. I love where I am but that has come from having to get up and put one foot in front of the other. It’s eighteen different expressions all in one but there are times you have to keep going because it is better on the other side at times. I like to remind people you have to do the thing and tell the truth and hope for the best.
What a great way to end. Thanks to your mom for that great wisdom that gets passed down, which is what we all hope for in some shape or form is some legacy. Thanks for being a great guest.
Important Links
- Minnie Ingersoll
- Shift
- La Venture – Minnie Ingersoll Podcast
- Interviewing.io
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?
Click here to see how my friends at Podetize can help
Purchase John’s new book
John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
Share The Show
Did you enjoy the show? I’d love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review!
- Click this link
- Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork
- Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
- Click on ‘Write a Review’
Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!
Join The Successful Pitch community today:
- JohnLivesay.com
- John Livesay Facebook
- John Livesay Twitter
- John Livesay LinkedIn
- John Livesay YouTube
Take The Icky And Scary Out Of Sales With Hugh Liddle
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Sales has a bad reputation for being unpleasant while for those who do them, sales can be a terrifying task. Tackling those things in this episode through his book, Take the Icky and Scary Out of Sales, is guest Hugh Liddle. The sales wizard at Red Cap Sales Coaching and Elite Sales Academy, Hugh imparts to us his almost 50 years of experience in the field how we can create a brand that helps us stand out. He shares the right mental preparation you should be doing when having a sales conversation and gives his insights about why people buy based on what they want, not what they need. Allow Hugh Liddle to teach you how to become a great salesperson so you can sell with pride.
—
Listen to the podcast here
Take The Icky And Scary Out Of Sales With Hugh Liddle
Our guest is Hugh Liddle, who is the sales wizard at Red Cap Sales Coaching and Elite Sales Academy. We can learn to make selling easy, fun and profitable. He specializes in helping chiropractors and other service-oriented businesses dramatically increase their conversion ratios, sales, and revenues. Hugh’s sales training and coaching come from almost 50 years of in the field sales and sales management experience. You get real-life experience from his teaching, not something out of a textbook. He is the author of Take the Icky and Scary Out of Sales, which is available in paperback on Amazon. He’s also the radio talk show host of his show Sales Chalk Talk which is also available on iTunes. Hugh, welcome to the show.
John, it’s a pleasure to be here and thank you for that lovely introduction. You read it exactly the way I wrote it so that was good.
I always like to ask my guests to take us back to their own stories of origin. You can go back as far as you want. You can go back to where the red cap came from or something else that led you to your wonderful career.
I got out of the service out of the Air Force in 1970. I had 5 or 6 job offers and one of them was a sales job. I liked it the best because there was no ceiling on income. I thought I would laugh my way to the bank every week and everything is going to be great because I’m a good talker. What I found out is that there’s a lot more to it than being a good talker. It was a real process for me to learn what I needed to know in order to be successful. I’ve been selling for the last 50 years or so. Years ago, I decided it was time to start my own business and start teaching other people the things that helped me be successful after I learned them. Things have changed tremendously in selling over the years and especially in the last few years or so. There have been a lot of changes and I’ve never had so much fun in my life as I’ve had to teach other people how to sell.
The red cap is a fun story. I was in a networking group in Colorado when I first started my coaching business. I was going to people’s offices to coach and I wanted to have a little uniform so I had black slacks on a red or a black shirt with logos of opposing colors. I went to a networking meeting one day and there was a guy by the name of Santa George, who was another member there. Santa George who was a professional Santa Claus in season and a magician offseason. He was wearing a red cap and I thought that it would go great with my uniform. I said, “Santa George, where’d you get that hat?” He said, “At Estes Park, Colorado,” and I happened to be in Estes Park a little bit later that month.
[bctt tweet=”People buy based on what they want not what they need. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I went to a couple of shops with my wife to shop and found a stack of red hats. I bought some and started wearing them all the time. About a month after that, another member of the networking group asked me to have coffee and he’s a marketing guy. He said, “If you showed up at a meeting with a different colored hat or no hat at all, nobody would know who you are. You need to take that red cap and brand it.” We renamed the business Red Cap Sales Coaching and I’ve worn the red cap ever since then. My wife makes me take it off when I go to bed but that’s about the only time I don’t have the cap on.
I never realized what a powerful brand that was until I went to a Get Motivated Seminar in Denver. There were 25,000 people in the Pepsi Center. People came up to me during the breaks. People I knew and I didn’t know were there but they walked up to me and said, “We saw you right away when we came in all the way across the arena and we could pick you out immediately.” If the purpose of marketing is to be noticed and remembered, the red cap is a real winner. It’s been a great brand for me and the only challenge is when I go out to speak someplace, sometimes people come up to me and they don’t recognize me, they recognize the cap. I have no idea who that is or who they are. Sometimes that’s a bit awkward.
One of the key challenges everybody faces in sales is, how do I become memorable? Especially when they’re pitching against other people. Sometimes it’s within the same day and the buyers start to blur together. There’s nothing memorable about the person or what they’re saying and they go, “I guess we’re going to go with the best price.” You’ve got this red cap to make you stand out against all the other people that are talking about how to take the icky, as you say, out of sales. You talked about in your book, “What if I am a salesperson and people can learn to sell with pride.”
So many people that I talked to, whether they’re architects or lawyers, they know they need to sell. Lawyers, in particular, is a relatively new thing for the industry for the last 10 to 20 years. They now have to sell and not only to get referrals. Many people don’t want to consider themselves salespeople and yet they need to sell. How do you help people like that? What is your philosophy of selling that allows people who are doctors, nurses, MBAs, or didn’t go to school to be a salesperson and yet have to sell?
The truth of the matter is that everybody on the planet is in sales. Everybody sells every day. They don’t know that that’s what it is but that’s what’s going on. In fact, if you stop and think about it, when you were a baby, as soon as you came out of your mom’s tummy, you started selling. You gave those people an opportunity to take care of and love that little person that they created together. When you were hungry, you cried. When you were wet, you cried. They took care of those challenges and they picked you up and they loved you. They made sure you had everything that you needed.
We’ve been selling since we were little babies. If you’re married, have children, work for somebody, somebody works for you or have friends, you’re selling all the time. You’re simply having conversations with people. You’re asking them to participate in some things that are important to you. Sometimes they say yes, sometimes they say no, but you’re always selling. I have to tell you the story about my wife, Priscilla. She would be the first one to tell you, “I’m not a salesperson. I don’t like sales and I don’t like salespeople.” How about that? I’m a sales coach and my wife doesn’t like salespeople.
She’s got the icky attached to it, doesn’t she?
Take the Icky and Scary Out of Sales
Yes. She’s had the unfortunate problem of dealing with some icky salespeople in the past and that’s part of the reason she feels that way. My wife convinced me that it was a great idea to move from Colorado to Florida. I don’t like heat and humidity but she told me about all of the wonderful things that would happen when we moved to Florida. I wouldn’t have to drive in the snow anymore or shovel it. She’d make me a beautiful home down here and the weather would be nice. There would be green on your lawn and it would be awesome. She asked me for the sale. She said, “I’m moving to Florida. Do you want to go or not?” I said, “Yeah. I would like to go.” That is a good example of somebody who thinks they can’t sell and is awesome at it.
I love the assumptiveness of it, “I’m going.” There was no fear in asking that closing question there, was there?
Not a bit.
She also painted a picture of what your life would be like. She used storytelling a little bit about, “You won’t have to shovel snow. Imagine how great that’ll be.”
You asked me about my philosophy of selling and how I respond to people who said, “I don’t feel comfortable selling.” Here’s the philosophy. It’s not our job to get people to do what we want them to do. That’s not sales from my perspective anyway. Our job is to get people or help people do what they want to do. Selling is a process of asking people questions and finding out what they want. It doesn’t matter what they need. People don’t buy because of what they need. They buy because of what they want. They generally want a result of some kind. I always tell chiropractors that the only reason people are sitting in your office is that they want something in their lives that they don’t have yet. They do almost anything to get that thing or there’s something in their life that they don’t want at all and they do almost anything to get rid of it.
That’s true not only of chiropractors but of any type of business. Your customers or your clients have something that they want. It’s not necessarily even that they need it. In some cases, “I don’t need a new car. I’d like to have a new car. I want one.” If I went to talk to a car salesperson, they might talk to me about, “You need a new car.” My response would be, “I don’t need one because my car gets me where I want to go. It starts every morning, so I don’t need a new one. I’d like that new car smell, the new car look and I’d like the way it feels when I’m driving around. I’d like some of the new technology.” I want some things but I don’t need them. If we can find out what our prospects want and why they want it, sometimes you have to go a little deeper than I want this. Why do you want it?
Let’s talk about this in terms of chiropractors. Typically, I would assume most people go to a chiropractor because they want to get out of pain but they also need to get out of pain.
The chiropractors that I work with, most of them don’t treat symptoms anyway. They treat the underlying cause of the symptom so people can have optimal health where they function well, they feel good all the time, and they never anymore.
The difference would be, “I need to get out of pain now so I can turn my neck without pain, but I want to stay healthy. Therefore, that’s why I would keep coming even if I’m not in pain.”
[bctt tweet=”Be present with people to be successful. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
The want is more important than the need when it comes to the sales conversation.
You talk about that mindset is key to success. You have a chapter on it, Let’s Get Ready Preparing to Sell. What do you think is the right mental preparation you should be doing?
When you’re having a sales conversation, your focus needs to be 100% on the other person, what they think, feel, want, need, and their situation is, all of those things. The part of the middle of preparation is letting go of everything that’s been going on in your life before you show up to have that sales conversation. If you’re thinking about the disagreement that you had with your significant other before you left for work, that’s on your mind, that’s not where your focus needs to be. The focus needs to change. If you’re thinking about the stack of bills you have on your desk that you can’t pay and sales haven’t been that great this month, you’re thinking about that while having the conversation. One of my buddies who’s also a sales coach is Gene McNaughton and his favorite phrase is, “Your prospects can smell commission breath five miles away.”
I like that commission breath. I haven’t heard that before.
It’s absolutely true. Even if you’re thinking about after work, “I’ve got to go down and have a few with my friends down at the pub,” your focus is in the wrong place. Everybody that’s ever bought anything from a salesperson has had this experience at some point. The salesperson does a good job of explaining the product or service. It’s something that you want and the price point is okay. They ask you to buy and you get this feeling down in your gut, “There’s something wrong here. I don’t know what it is. I can’t put my finger on it, but I don’t feel comfortable. I’m going to tell him that I want to take a little while to think about it. I’ll call him if I decide I want to do it.” They’ll never call. What is almost always going on when that happens is the salesperson is focused on something besides helping the person get whatever they want. Their focus is someplace else. There’s an energy that passes between the salesperson and the prospect. If that energy isn’t clean, if they don’t feel like you want to help them and that you’re focused on their wants and their needs, they won’t buy from you.
It sounds like the fight or flight response has kicked in and it doesn’t feel safe. You don’t know why it doesn’t feel safe. Part of it is that person is not 100% present.
Sell With Pride: Selling really is a process of asking people questions and finding out what they want.
It’s important before you have the sales conversation to get your focus in the right place. I have a friend out in California who has an evergreen tree by his front door. He’s a great salesman. Every morning when he walks out of the house, he reaches out and taps the trunk of that tree. It’s an NLP thing. What it means to him is forget everything that’s gone on up until right now and focus on helping as many people as you can in the next eight hours. On the way back in the door, he taps the tree again. That’s his cue to forget everything that’s going on in the workday and focus on your family, resting, recreating and getting ready for the next day. I’ve had other salespeople that I’ve managed who actually had to sit in a room by themselves for 30 or 45 minutes to get themselves in the proper mindset to go out and sell. Most of us are between those two extremes. It’s not immediate. It’s not tapping the trunk of the tree and we’re ready to go. It’s not sitting around for 30 or 45 minutes to get ready. All of us need to go through that process before every sales conversation.
It’s some mindset or ritual, it sounds like it’s what you’re recommending. Hugh, do you feel that that’s the most important skill for a salesperson to develop? Is it being present or is it something else you recommend?
The answer to it is most people think that the most important skill that a salesperson needs to have is being able to talk, “She has the gift of gab. She could sell iceboxes to Eskimos. She’s great at talking. She’d be great at sales.” No, maybe not because the most important skill in selling is listening not only with our ears but with our minds and hearts. There’s more going on in a conversation than the words that are said. It’s the way the words are said, it’s the emotion behind what’s going on. I mentioned that there’s an energy that passes between a salesperson and a prospect. The salesperson has to be queued in to what that person is saying, how they’re saying it and what their body language is if they’re able to see them online or in person. The body language that’s going on, and the emotion that’s behind what those people are saying. If you can train yourself to listen carefully, if you can build that skill, people will feel appreciated. They’ll feel like you want to help them. They’ll buy from you if you’re a good listener. If you talk and talk, my wife would kick you out the door after about five minutes of that.
You and I are definitely on the same page about energy. When I was up for speaking engagements to speak to a sales team. The speaking agent called me back after they interviewed me and the other two speakers and they said, “Congrats. They picked you. They liked your energy.” People don’t realize that they liked your energy, enthusiasm and passion. It’s not the fact that you have a book. All those things got you into the final three. When it comes down to who do we want to spend time with? They feel good after hearing me talk and they assume that the audience is going to feel good. What you’re saying is so important. You talked in your book about how to not take rejection personally and not feel like you’re being pushy and aggressive. I’m guessing that’s one of the steps in the sales process you teach. I’m specifically interested in those two issues because many people do take rejection personally and feel pushy. Can you talk about how you help people with that?
First of all, it goes back to the mindset that you’re not trying to get people to do what you want them to do. You want to help them do what they want to do. That sets the tone as you go into the sales conversation. When you get to the point in the conversation, where you’ve asked questions and you know what they want and why they want it, you’ve explained to them that they can have what they want. They can have the result that they’re looking for. If they work with you, they can achieve that, they can have that result and you ask them for the sale. Your responsibility stops right there. If you’ve done all of the early steps in the sales process, you’ve done a great verbal agreement, asked good questions, done a good job of communicating value to them and you’ve asked them to buy, that’s the end for you. Unless an objection comes up, your job is to help them move past the obstacle that they’re seeing in their way to having your product or service.
[bctt tweet=”It’s our job as salespeople to get people do what we want them to do. Our job is to get people or help people do what they want to do. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I love what you said there because I want to underline that and take a moment and make sure everybody got that before we go on. Many salespeople are afraid to ask for the order because they fear rejection. You gave us great insight. This is your job. If you were getting on a plane to fly from LA to New York, and the pilot makes the announcement, “We’re now landing.” No one stands up and goes, “What? We’re landing?” It’s expected that it’s his job to land the plane. I say it’s our job as salespeople to land the plane, also known as asking for the sale. You’re not doing your job if you’re not doing that. That is crucial what you said, I love it.
If you think about not getting people to buy, but offering them the opportunity to take advantage of what you sell, you’re offering them an opportunity. When you ask for the sale and if you do it the way that I teach it, you give them three different options that they have available to them and ask them which one they think is the best fit for them. Once you ask that question, you shut up. You don’t say anything until they respond. Your responsibility has ended there when you ask for the sale because it’s up to them to make a decision.
Do they want this product or service and the result that it’s going to give them or do they not? Are they willing and able to invest the time, energy and money that it takes to take advantage of the service or the product or do they not? It’s their decision. If they say, “No, I’ve decided I don’t want to do this. It’s too much money and it takes too much time. I want to think about it. I’m not going to even think about or consider making a decision right now.” That’s not anything that you’ve done wrong. It doesn’t make you bad.
If somebody tells you, “No,” it doesn’t say anything at all about your value as a human being, the value of your company, your product or service. It says volumes about the prospect. For one reason or another, they’re not willing to do what it takes to take advantage of your product or service. If you can keep that mindset that you’re offering this to them and not attached to the outcome, there are loads of people who want my product or service. If this person says no, that’s not the end of the world, and it’s not the end of my business.
One of my favorite things about your book is you said, “Stop saying we’re closing the sale because it means that something is ending.” Talk about that. Do you think that’s the most difficult step in the sales process, is closing? If that’s not it, can you tell us what you think is?
I don’t think it’s the most difficult thing. In fact, the easiest thing is asking for the sale, if you’ve done the first four things right, built rapport, done a good verbal agreement, asked good questions, and communicated the value and result that they can have. If you’ve done that, asking for the sales is like falling off a log. It’s easy. The hardest part is probably answering objections effectively. That probably is the most difficult part. The only reason that it’s difficult because the science of it is having a script and knowing what to say when you get a particular objection.
Sell With Pride: Stop saying we’re closing the sale because it means something is ending.
There’s an art to it, though. The art to it is, which question am I going to ask first? How am I going to proceed through this chain of questions that I asked when I get money or time objection? I want to think about an objection or I need to talk to somebody first objection. How am I going to respond to that? There’s a science and an art to being able to do that. That’s the hardest part. The idea of asking for the sale and the reason I call it that instead of closing is because the relationship with your prospect starts at the point where they tell you, “Yes. I want to take advantage of your product or service or no, I don’t.”
It’s not the end of the process no matter what they say. If they say, “Yes,” you’re going to deliver the product or service and you’re going to follow up, going to upsell, and you’re going to do a lot of different things there. If they say, “No,” you still want to follow up and stay top of mind because no doesn’t necessarily mean never. It means not right now. If you stay top of mind when they are ready, they’ll come back to you to buy. They won’t go someplace else. That’s why I don’t call it the close. I call it the opening, the commencement or the beginning, one of those words.
Speaking of an offer and a close because you’ve been generous, you said that anyone who’s reading can get a free strategy session with you about determining whether the Red Cap Sales Coaching could help them. You don’t even charge people. Certainly, people can tell from talking to you, there’s no pressure because you come from such a place of energy, respect, and confidence that what you have to offer is valuable. You’re not trying to pressure anybody into doing anything they don’t want. I can speak firsthand about how friendly and fun you are to talk to. Do you have any last thoughts you want to leave us with about how we can continue to get rid of the icky and scary part of selling?
[bctt tweet=”The most important skill in selling is listening, not just with our ears, but with our minds and our hearts. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
First of all, I want to clarify that the conversation that you mentioned, isn’t a sales conversation. It gives the people who have the strategy session, the opportunity to talk about their business, their sales and ask questions and get some tips, ideas, and strategies that will help them. It is a strategy session and they’ll find out whether continuing coaching after that. There’s no charge, there’s absolutely no pressure at all and no obligation to do anything. It’s a fun and friendly conversation. To answer your last question, the biggest thing that is important in having success in selling is to have a great script for each step of the sales conversation. To memorize, practice and role-play it until it’s a part of you, a part of the way you talk. Somebody could call you up at 3:00 in the morning and wake you out of a dead sleep and say, “Have a sales conversation with me.” You wouldn’t even have to think about it. You go with it. Everybody who sells has a script because you’re going to say pretty much the same thing every time you talk to somebody. It’s a matter of whether your script is effective or whether it’s not. Get a good script.
Hugh, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your insights on how we can take the icky and scary out of selling.
John, thank you so much for having me on the call. It was fun.
Important Links
- Red Cap Sales Coaching
- Elite Sales Academy
- Take the Icky and Scary Out of Sales – Amazon
- Sales Chalk Talk
- iTunes – Sales Chalk Talk
- Bit.ly/wizard-strategy – Book in time for a free strategy session
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?
Click here to see how my friends at Podetize can help
Purchase John’s new book
John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
Share The Show
Did you enjoy the show? I’d love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review!
- Click this link
- Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork
- Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
- Click on ‘Write a Review’
Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!
Join The Successful Pitch community today:
- JohnLivesay.com
- John Livesay Facebook
- John Livesay Twitter
- John Livesay LinkedIn
- John Livesay YouTube
Recharge Your Mind Daily With Tom Cronin
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Believe it or not, meditation can actually save the world. In this eye-opening episode, John Livesay interviews Tom Cronin who is the author of The Portal. Founder of The Stillness Project, a global movement to inspire one billion people to sit in stillness daily, Tom is passionate about reducing stress and chaos in people’s lives. Learn how you can start to figure out ways to get new insights and recharge yourself at the same time through Tom’s meditation techniques.
—
Listen to the podcast here
Recharge Your Mind Daily With Tom Cronin
Our guest is Tom Cronin whom I heard speak in person and couldn’t wait to have him on the show. He has spent over 26 years in the financial markets as one of Sydney’s leading bond and swap brokers. He discovered meditation in the early stages of his career when the anxiety and chaos he was experiencing hit a crisis point and he completely transformed his world both personally and professionally. He’s the Founder of The Stillness Project, a global movement to inspire one billion people to sit in silence daily. Tom is passionate about reducing stress and chaos in people’s lives. He’s ongoing work in the transformational leadership in cultivating inner peace through meditation takes him around the world hosting retreats, mentoring, presenting keynote talks and teaching and creating the portal film book experience all of which are part of his commitment to the current planetary shift. Tom, welcome to the show.
It’s good to be here. Thanks for inviting me along, John.
You are welcome. I would love to take us back to your own story of origin. You can go back as far as you want. You can take us right to the places of the pressure the stress of being in the financial markets or you can take it further back if you want. When did you make a decision that you’re like, “I want to make a lot of money?” Had you had any exposure to any alternative concepts? Whatever you think is a good starting point to your journey would be of interest to me.
It’s funny how we end up in our journeys. I had no interest in finance and never shown any interest in it. Ironically, after school, I wanted to become a journalist and write articles for Time Magazine about capitalistic greed to save the world from the treacherous world of the banking system. I took a year off school backpacking around Europe and blew a lot of my money in Amsterdam. I was eighteen so use your imagination and I got back home. I had quite a few months to fill before my degree doing Journalism and I applied for a bunch of jobs in the paper. I was going to quit those jobs once it was time to go to university and once I got a bit of money in the bank.
Lo and behold, one of those jobs was on a massive trading room floor. I walked onto that floor and immediately felt the energy and I landed the job. Before long I got swept into the excitement, drama and the glamour of the trading room floor in the late ‘80s. This is when Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort started his career in 1987. I started my career in 1987 and it was the year we had Bud Fox and Gordon Gekko Wall Street film came out as The Bonfire of the Vanities was showing and Sherman McCoy. There was a lot of money greed world of finance came out in 1987. It was the start of a big fueling of a bonfire. I was quickly swept up into that world. I didn’t go end up doing my degree because I was making so much money. I was given a corporate Amex card, a fast corporate car and was told to go out and win the clients’ business. That was the start of the journey.
[bctt tweet=”Create a gap in your day to allow your own insights to happen. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
If Twitter existed, the hashtag would have been Greed Is Good.
Greed is good, lunch is for wimps. I became a fast, effective and efficient broker. I was good at what I did and rose the ranks quite quickly. Before long, you’re swept into that lifestyle. You’re doing lots of drugs, drinking late nights, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 in the morning, all-nighters with clients, big traders and big cowboys from investment banks. It was fun when you’re 18, 19, 20 but over time, what happens is this lifestyle gets ingrained and deeply embedded into your nervous system and your body. It starts showing up as a sign of wear and tear. My body before long started to show extreme signs of wear and tear, anxiety, depression, and insomnia. This accumulated over time until eventually, in about nine years into the career, it exacerbated to such a point that I started to have what was deemed a nervous breakdown at that particular point in time. Part of the problem was not everyone in the finance industry had a nervous breakdown. I put a lot of fuel on that fire.
Not only was I by day fast, yelling and screaming a lot is the nature of the job and we’re on a busy desk. By nighttime, I got deeply involved in a part of that culture that not everyone got involved in. There was a lot of cocaine, drinking and drugs. On weekends, when a lot of the brokers were playing rounds of golf, relaxing, sleeping and recovering, I got involved in the late ‘80s early ‘90s rave culture. I’ve been to a big warehouse party scene that was opening up in Sydney. It was like a new El Dorado. It was a new frontier for the club scene and I was enamored by this exciting world. My weekends were spending time in warehouse and recovery parties all weekend doing other things that go along with that. There was no break, rest and no ability for my body to recover. That’s why the symptoms started to exacerbate over time.
Would you say you were an adrenaline junkie? Since you were adrenaline high at work and on the weekends was another source of that.
Yes. I was doing a lot of research on it over time. I was looking at biochemistry and I had low dopamine as a result of that. You look for the highs where you can get that boost. It was drugs, drinking, partying, nightclubs, raves or anything that will give you that hit leads you to go back to get more. By seeking it in that environment means that when you’re not in that environment, you’ve got this massive so you need to go back for more. That’s where addiction starts to come in. That was definitely a big part of what was going on looking back in hindsight.
Interestingly, the shift came when I found meditation and the regulation of that biochemistry in my body, this beautiful regulated trickle effect of oxytocin and serotonin seeping into my bloodstream completely changed. It was an absolute game-changer for me and my ability to efficiently and effectively work in that environment. I worked another sixteen years in that career without doing all the addictions. It wasn’t like I became a perfect monk. That was certainly not the case. It meant that the craving and the yearning and those late nights and all the drugs that started to drop away quite quickly and the need to seek those big highs weren’t there.
Was it cold turkey like if someone’s got other addictions, they stopped drinking, doing drugs or sometimes go to rehab? Did you stop doing that from one meditation?
The drugs were quick. The yearning to have those experiences wasn’t there. What was happening with the meditation was profound. I couldn’t believe that I could feel this good quickly. A lot of the anxiety, depression and insomnia simply went away. That’s simply a scientific and biological process of getting your body out of an extreme sympathetic nervous system state because all day you’re in this sympathetic nervous system state response.
For those who don’t know what that means, would you define that for us?
If you think of the sympathetic nervous system and stress, it’s a stress response in the body for an extreme circumstance. If you’re facing a marauding tribe or a saber-toothed tiger, your body is a mechanism to preserve life. The number one priority in your body is to preserve life. Your body doesn’t realize that you’re in a nice highly paid job and it feels that you’re in a dangerous situation. The same symptoms start to prevail if you’re in a life and death or a stressful situation and you’re having that stress response in your body. Your biochemistry in the sympathetic nervous system state is a high level of cortisol, adrenaline, norepinephrine and a reduction of melatonin, serotonin and oxytocin. It’s a simple black and white or flips the switch type of scenario.
Recharging Your Mind: The number one priority in your body is to preserve life.
It’s a basic fight or flight.
We’re in fight or flight but when we get out of fight or flight, which is exactly what happens when we’re in a meditation experience, we move out of the sympathetic and into the parasympathetic and the P for peace is the peace response. The peace response is part of what happens for the body to restore balance, recalibrate and optimize itself and recover from that extreme circumstance. It’s a beautiful design of the body because we’re designed to have optimal well-being that’s normality. Our systems are not designed for most people being happy and healthy. Most businesses are built on the premise that we’re unhappy and we’re unhealthy. If you look at where most of the world’s economies are flourishing are in the world being unhealthy and unhappy.
When you take a look at that because I vividly remember when people were allowed to smoke at the workplace. Even if they were to say, “No. You have to get out or go outside,” I was within the fast-paced world of media sales, I’d go back to the corporate headquarters in New York, and I’d see these people standing outside taking cigarette breaks in the freezing cold. I could not wrap my head around it. I understood it was an addiction but that was their idea of a break. You went from the stressful situation to the phones not stopping, emails and all the other endless voicemails at one point and now, it’s text messaging. It’s a constant on fight or flight, “Let’s take a break and have a cigarette.” It’s not the healthiest form of a break.
Finally, some big tech companies like Google and others are starting to say, “We’ve created a nap room or a mindfulness place.” It’s now starting in those kinds of companies, in particular, to be seen as you can’t go from one unhealthy activity like the martini lunch from the ‘60s or the Mad Men mindset, which is go all the time, is no longer something that people think they can keep doing to themselves. Let’s talk about that. The culture shift in companies big and small, from do whatever you have to do, ends justify the means, take red-eye, hit the ground running, don’t go to sleep, brag about how little sleep you get, take cigarettes and drinking and go to these conventions, burn yourself out of both ends. It’s because we work hard and we play hard. Do you see that starting to change at all?
Absolutely. These are smart companies. They’ve got big businesses to run. They need to report annually back to shareholders to continue to increase profits. That company isn’t a bottom line. It’s not a logo, share price, or a PA. It’s a bunch of people that walk in the front door every day. Those people are grappling with their personal relationships, financial, and health issues. That company knows, the smart ones anyway, that for them to optimize that company, they need to optimize the brains of the people that work in that company. They need to optimize the people that are working for that company because all of the ideas within that company come from someone’s brain. If we’re in the sympathetic nervous system, fight-flight stress response state, our brain and nervous system are severely compromised.
Our ability to be productive, happy, engaged and healthy, which means we’re not taking sick leave. It gets severely compromised if we’re not looking after our staff. This is a big shift that we’re starting to see with those progressive companies realizing that the bottom line is their people are producing the concepts, ideas, the creativity that makes the company flourish. We need to look after those people because they’re our assets. Mental health in Australia has been proven as a great report put out by PwC. It showed that poor mental health is costing Australian Business $11 billion a year. This is a small country. In America, it’s going to be gargantuan. For every dollar a company spends on improving and enhancing the mental health of a company, the return on that investment for general business is $2.30 and for small businesses in the mining sector, it’s up to $14.
Let’s define that. That’s a fascinating return on investment. Mental health, that phrase people go, “Is that going to see a therapist?” We’re talking about a lot of other things. Can you define what mental health means for you? What does $1 look like spent on mental health? Is it a meditation room? Is it a meditation class? What else could it be for a company?
[bctt tweet=”From stillness and silence comes peace and happiness. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
It’s a lot of things. It would come under things like providing yoga. It would come under providing meditation programs. It would come under allowing staff to take effective breaks that are sleep pods. It’s fantastic. Napping is an efficient use of time for companies and in increasing productivity. Think of humans like a phone and we have a battery. If we start to run out of charge, the phone becomes almost redundant. We need to keep rebooting our battery cells. For me, my rebooting prior to this podcast, we were driving for a few hours from Seattle to Bellingham. My director who we’re traveling with will take a meditation break where we’ll reboot our system. We have to go to a screening of the film and we have to do a Q&A and it’s going to go a bit late. We want to make sure that we’re vibrant, energized and clear. Meditation is an efficient way of getting a reboot to our battery cells so that we’re supercharged and ready for the next session.
I’m going to make that one of your tweets from the episode. I love that, “Reboot your mind battery like your cellphone.” People can understand the need for their cellphone. People get desperate when their cell phone starts to go down in batteries. You see everyone at the airport frantically looking to charge and yet there’s nothing anybody’s doing to recharge their own brain. That’s a fantastic analogy. Tom, I’m a big proponent of this and people ask me, “How do you always stay positive or you don’t seem to be stressed out?” I give keynote talks on how are you on for those moments like you’re describing what you need to go do at your screening. If I mentioned meditation, they go, “I don’t want to talk about that or I tried that but I can’t do it. Guided or unguided, I can’t sit still.” I had a conversation with someone and I said, “Have you heard of the monkey mind?” It never stops talking.
What advice do you have for people who say they literally tried it, don’t like it, can’t do it, or want to do it? Even a meditation tape, I feel such pain for people. I get that it’s hard to sit and quiet your mind but your company’s graciously not only having a book and a movie but actual guided meditation so it’s not just listening to music. What is the first thing people can do who maybe are open to it, tried it, hate it or can’t do it? It’s one more thing to beat yourself about, which is crazy.
This is the reason why these techniques have been around for 5,000 to 10,000 years. They’ve stood the test of time and that’s because they work. If they didn’t work, they simply would have been redundant. It’s a matter of finding the technique and teacher that works for you. You can go on an app and you can read and learn from a book but ideally, the most efficient and effective way is to learn with a teacher. They’re qualified in the art of training you into meditation. There are different forms of meditation. Some are a little bit more challenging and some are possibly harder to access than others. I did a lot of research into meditation. I wanted one that can get me deep quickly and it wasn’t going to take me three hours a day of trying to clear my chakras.
Recharging Your Mind: Meditation is a very efficient way of getting a reboot to our battery cells.
What I wanted to do is to transcend and to find a deep state of restfulness and that’s why I chose a particular style of meditation using particular mantras or sounds that would take my mind quite deeply. Also to allow me to get into a deep state within minutes. That’s a technique that I searched for. It comes under different names like primordial sound technique, or Vedic meditation or transcendental meditation, but they’re all using a particular sound or word that you repeat over inside your head silently that takes the mind deeper and deeper.
That’s an effective meditation but it’s not the only one. Other people like the Vipassana or Zen style meditation which is sitting and guided meditations. I do recommend to continue to look and search, there’s not just one. There are multiple forms of meditation. If you find a technique that you resonate with, there might be different teachers and some of you resonate more within that tradition than other ones. Some students love coming to me because of my background and some like going to another type of teacher in that tradition and that’s totally cool as well.
You wrote a book called The Portal: How Meditation Can Save the World. First of all, I’m fascinated that the subtitle of the book is saving the world as opposed to helping you be more productive or help save yourself or something like that. That alone tells me much about you, Tom, and your book, because a lot of people will go, “That’s a lofty goal. I don’t know if I need to buy a book to save the world. I want to make myself better.” Let’s start with that title and where that came from. How’d you come up with Portal? Did you get anybody else surprised that you’re talking about saving the world?
It is. What we didn’t want to provide was a manual because there are so many of them out there already. A step-by-step, that’s not what this is. This is a portal that represents two things. Firstly, it’s your own individual journey through the transitional point, which is what meditation is. It’s the pathway through to a place that already exists and that stillness and silence. Why we want to get some stillness and silence is on a physiological level, it transforms our body and our biochemistry. On a spiritual-mental level, it allows us to find a deep sense of peacefulness and contentedness that exists without that constant yearning, craving mind that is searching for more and more all the time.
The Portal is the process of transcending or going into the journey of meditation but it also represents the transitional point for humanity. We’re on a macro level, transitioning from a state of ignorance, suffering, chaos and confusion through to an awakened period of time for humanity. In Vedic philosophy, it’s called Satya Yuga, which is an era of time where there is collectively a society that’s generally healthy and happy. A lot of things have to change when we get to that point. A lot of systems have to change.
[bctt tweet=”Recharge your mind battery like you do your cell phone battery. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
Let’s talk about mass consciousness in the state of fear. When 9/11 happened here in the States, it was constantly broadcasting planes crashing into the buildings over and over again. People don’t realize watching how it’s addictive. The fear of what’s next, “Are we next? What about the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco? Is this building safe?” Unless you consciously choose to go into a portal, where things are peaceful and calm and not at that effect, to me, it’s almost the difference between staying up in the storm on a sea or going under the water. The analogy I also think might be useful and I’d love your opinion if these are useful. If you’re taking off in an airplane and it is stormy, whether it’s snow or rain and you get high enough, you get above all of that. That becomes another portal analogy for me.
That’s a beautiful one.
I think to myself, you described when I heard you speak, and you’re such a good speaker. If anyone’s looking for a speaker, I want to recommend you personally. Where do good ideas come from? Where do insights come from? You describe this wonderful place of peacefulness, calm, insights, innovation and creativity. We’re not going through the portal to get there and we’re staying, if you will, above the sea where it’s stormy and thinking some great ideas are going to come from that. I want to have you expound on that a little bit from what I heard you talk about because that imagery resonated with me.
I was doing a talk at a company. I was taking them through what their standard day would look like. Instead of mirroring back to them roughly what their day might look like. They ensure that their day wakes up and they get on their phone and quickly scroll through their news feeds, get on the bus or the train going to work, go through their emails, go through possibly watching videos on YouTube, get to work, do their emails, and have meetings. They take a lunch break, catch up on their social media, which they haven’t seen for the last few hours. They’ll go back to work and go through some more meetings and some emails and some documents and things like that. On the way home, they’re going through their news feeds. When they get home, they’re watching the TV watching the news, Master Chef and The Bachelor. They might do a final little wrap on their social media before bed. If they’ve got a little bit of time, they might pick up a book and read a book.
If you look at what’s happening in through that entire day, their mind is digesting other people’s words and thoughts. What happens is there are no open windows for their mind to have some level of accessing a field of creative possibility. They might get inspired by some of those podcasts, books or videos that they’ve watched and all of those Instagram posts that effectively had none of their own insights and a-ha moments. There are no gaps in the day. The interesting thing is we’re doing this time and time again day in and day out where 85% of our thoughts are regurgitating recycled thoughts of the day before, which are 85% to 95% of other people’s thoughts. It’s because there are not enough gaps in the day to have any of our own thoughts anyway. Most of those thoughts when we do have them is, “I wonder if I’m going to have a Caesar salad or whether I’m going to have a chicken pizza for lunch.”
Recharging Your Mind: In order for the world to be healthy and happy, we have to be healthy and happy.
It’s fear-based, “Is my marriage ending? Am I going to go broke? Will I be homeless?” If you keep having those fear thoughts and you’re in a loop or if you can’t believe somebody said something that made me mad. Now I’m mad as if it happened and it happened last week. You’re triggered all the time and you’re walking around angry. That’s where I’m thrilled that someone like you is on the planet because if you step back and think how many people are angry behind the wheel of a car, on the subway and at an airport. If no one is meditating or getting out of this anger loop, no wonder everyone’s rude and pushy.
I had a woman on a podcast asked me to speak about the emotional poverty we have on the planet. I said to her, “We need to pause this there because we actually don’t have emotional poverty.” She was thinking that having emotional expression is a healthy thing, but it’s not. What we want to do is transcend even that. It’s okay if we’re having an emotional response that’s authentic and relevant to that particular experience. What we also as well as want to explore is being in the next level of our own evolution where we’re not completely reactive because emotions are reactive to situations. We’re constantly reacting to situations, where that is making me feel this.
We’re not in our own state of autonomy where we’re able to observe those circumstances from the space of compassion, from love, from unconditional love, and from a state of acceptance. I’m moved into action to create change but I’m not having a rapid deterioration in my feeling body as a result of what’s happening in the world around me. That gives us autonomy but it also gives us a power that allows us to move forward in a much more autonomous state where I’m able to be proactive in creating something that’s going to contribute to the improvement of society and my own well-being. As opposed to constantly deteriorating my own state, because other things around me are making me feel that way.
To try and sum up what you’ve said, if we create a gap in our mind and in our day even where we can get quiet and listen to some of our own internal insights. We break that loop of fear, anger, resentment and reaction in a much faster way, which gives us some power and freedom.
We do it daily. We have a daily meditation practice and that is a technique that allows us to sit, withdraw from the world of sense, story and drama to go into a state of stillness and silence. That stillness and silence are dynamic. It’s not empty, it’s dynamic. It’s the field of all infinite possibilities. We use that analogy the phone doesn’t have the internet in it. The internet is around and the phone is on the internet just as we sit within the field of all possibilities. Most of us don’t know how to access that field. When we go into stillness of silence, we now quiet the mind and the mind is open to tuning in to all possibilities. Everything that’s been designed and created by man and woman, suited by humankind was cognized out of the creative intention, possibility and the intention to manifest that. It’s a phone, pen, a brochure, the chair we’re sitting on, it’s the car you’re driving in. It all had a possibility and was in the field of possibility. It took someone to manage to cognize it and turn it into a manifested reality.
Which came first, your movie, The Portal or your book?
The film was first and in the making of the film, we interviewed 9 people, 6 stories and 3 futurists and we took extracts of those interviews, compile them and edited them into a book format. The director and I added extra components to that.
What’s the website for people to go to find out about the film, the book? There will be some other things coming up here including some meditation apps or even the way to hire you to speak or work with you one-on-one if I’m understanding correctly.
[bctt tweet=”The portal is the process of transcending into the journey of meditation, but also represents the transitional point for humanity. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
EnterThePortal.com is all about the film, the book and the online programs and TomCronin.com is for booking for speaking, retreats and coaching.
Tom, this has been wonderful to hear from you again, to get to ask you some specific questions and your overall energy. You can tell that you are walking your talk. Any last thoughts you want to leave us with?
It’s easy for us without social media and news to think the worst is happening in the world. That’s what does sell media but there are some phenomenal exciting things happening in the world as well. We are in the process of transformation. The mere fact alone that we can have a podcast like this beam it out to people all over the world and talk about positive progressive things, it shows that progress is happening and change is happening. To get excited about what lies ahead for humanity. It is complex. There are some major challenges facing us but as we talked about in the film, we all have something wonderful to contribute to the world. Realizing, expressing and sharing that is part of what makes this world a beautiful and colorful place. Beyond where we’re at if we have a vision for what life looks like on an enlightened planet is an exciting world where people are healthy and happy. It’s phenomenal.
In order for the world to be healthy and happy, we have to be healthy and happy.
That’s it. That’s the starting point.
Thanks again, Tom. The book is called The Portal, the movie is The Portal, TomCronin.com and EnterThePortal.com.
It’s good to be here. Thanks for reading.
Important Links
- The Portal: How Meditation Can Save the World
- The Stillness Project
- https://EnterThePortal.com/
- TomCronin.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?
Click here to see how my friends at Podetize can help
Purchase John’s new book
John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
Share The Show
Did you enjoy the show? I’d love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review!
- Click this link
- Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork
- Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
- Click on ‘Write a Review’
Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!
Join The Successful Pitch community today:
- JohnLivesay.com
- John Livesay Facebook
- John Livesay Twitter
- John Livesay LinkedIn
- John Livesay YouTube